«What?» Dali wrinkled her nose at me.
«This fellow ripped off his skin and started roaring and waving his four arms around the first
chance he got. The axe fighter remained in his human form. Why?»
Dali put her cup down. «Well, you're assuming the axe fighter isn't human. But even if he is a
rakshasa, he might not have wanted to change shape. You said they are posing as humans. He
would blow his cover.»
«He was beaten to a pulp,» Jim said. «Trust me, he would've changed. It's the matter of the
survival instinct taking over.»
All these facts tried to coalesce in my head. I could almost grasp it. «Perhaps he couldn't change
shape. Maybe something kept him from changing. Kind of like something is keeping Derek from
shifting. An object. A spell. Something that suppresses the magic.»
Jim caught on. «Something that would also fool the m-scanner into reading them as human.»
Dali kicked off her shoes and began pulling off her shirt. «I'll have to shift. I'm more sensitive to
magic in my animal shape and my sense of smell is better.»
I looked to the floor. The shapeshifters mostly fell into two camps: some were very modest, and
some would strip in the middle of the Market Highway without a moment's thought. Apparently
Dali was of the second category.
A deep, low rumble of a large cat rolled through my apartment, a cascade of sound bouncing off
my skin. I looked up.
A white tiger stood in my living room. Glowing as if sculpted of fresh snow, she looked at me
with ice-blue eyes, enormous, otherworldly, like some eternal spirit of the North, taiga, and winter
hunt. Long stripes outlined her fluid shape with coal black. More than a mere animal, more than a
lycanthrope in the beast form, she was majestic. I couldn't even breathe.
And then she sneezed. And sneezed again, blinking, and when she raised her head again, I
realized that only one glacial eye looked straight at me. The other stared off to the side. The tiger
spirit went cross-eyed like a Siamese cat.
The tigress raised one paw, looked quizzically at it, put it down, and rumbled low in the throat, a
befuddled expression on her big face.
«Yes, those are your paws,» Jim said patiently.
At the sound of his voice, the tigress backpedaled, stumbled over the four-armed body, and sat
on it in the most undignified manner.
«You're sitting on the evidence,» Jim said.
The tigress leapt up and spun around, nearly taking me off my feet with her butt. A snarl ripped
from her mouth.
«Yes, there is a dead creature in the room. Lie down, Dali, and relax. It will come to you.»
The tigress settled on the floor, peering at the bodies with open suspicion.
«She has short-term memory loss after the shift,» Jim murmured. «It will wear off in a minute.
The cross-eyed thing will go away, too. Some cats react that way to stress.»
«Does she get aggressive?» The last thing I needed was to get raked over hot coals because I
used excessive force to subdue a raging cross-eyed weretigress with temporary amnesia.
Jim's face took on an odd expression, so unusual on his hard mug that it took me a moment to
diagnose it as embarrassment. «No. She gags on raw meat and blood.»
«What?»
«She won't bite or scratch or she'll vomit. She's a vegetarian.»
Oh boy. «But when she's in beast form . . .»
He shook his head. «She eats grass. Don't ask.»
Dali rose and sniffed the four-armed body. She began at his feet, her flat feline muzzle trailing a
mere quarter inch above the skin. The dark nose scanned the long toes of the left foot, tipped with
sharp claws, and slid up, along the shin to the knee. Dali paused there, licked the hard pane of the
kneecap, and moved up along the thigh. She stopped at the crotch, shifted to the right, and repeated
the same thorough scent search with the right leg.
It took her a full five minutes to complete her survey.
«Anything?» I asked.
Dali shook her magnificent head. Damn it. We were back to dying Derek lying in a vat of liquid.
«Alright.» Jim nodded. «Change back. I thought of something else to ask.»
The tigress nodded. Her white pelt stretched, quivered, but remained on her body.
«Dali?» Jim's voice was calm and measured.
The white fur crawled and snapped back into a tiger. Glacial-blue eyes stared at me, and in their
crystal depth, I saw panic.
The tigress ran.
She dashed around the room, trampling the bodies. Her furry shoulder brushed the tall, tulip-
shaped lamp. The lamp went flying and exploded against the floor in a shower of glass. Dali
rampaged over the shards and collided with the LCD display on the wall. The large metal frame slid