"Sometimes twice a night," he said. "How much do you eat on those nights? Real food, I mean."
I tried to think, and finally had to say, "Sometimes nothing."
"It would be interesting if you kept a food diary to see if there was a correlation between starving your human body and the other hungers rising."
"You talk like you know this already," I said.
"Haven't you noticed that lycanthropes cook and eat?"
I shrugged. "I don't know." I thought about it. Richard cooked, and had always been either taking me out to dinner or wanting to cook for me. Micah cooked, though Nathaniel did more of it. We usually had a house full of wereleopards for at least one meal a day.
"You mean there's a reason that all the lycanthrope men I've dated have been domestically talented?"
He nodded. "We need to eat a nice balanced diet, heavy on protein. It helps keep the beast at bay."
I glanced at him, and in the near dark of the streetlights, he was mostly in shadow. His lavender shirt was the palest thing about him. "Why didn't someone mention this to me before?"
"We've been treating you like you're mostly human, Anita. But what I saw today..." He seemed to be searching for words. Finally he said, "If I didn't know that you were human and couldn't slip your skin and be a leopard for real, I'd think you were one of us. The way you felt, the way you fought, the way you smelled, everything was shapeshifter. You did not come off like a human. Turn into the parking lot here," he said.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because we need to talk."
I did not like the sound of that, but I turned in to the strip mall that had Culpeppers at one end. I parked in the first space I found, which was far away from any restaurant. Most of the stores were dark and closed. When I turned off the engine, the world was suddenly very quiet. The traffic on Olive was still snarling by, and in the distance was music from one of the restaurants, but inside the Jeep it was quiet. That silence that you get inside cars after dark. With one switch of a key, the space inside a car becomes private, intimate.
I turned to face him, having to work against the seat belt, but I wasn't comfortable taking if off until I was ready to get out of a car. "So, talk," I said, and my voice sounded almost normal.
He turned in his seat as far as his seat belt would allow. He knew my thing about seat belts. He faced me, putting one knee up to prop himself against the center panel. "We've been treating you like you're human, and now I'm wondering if we were right."
"You mean I'm going to shift because I'm in a new triumvirate?"
He shook his head, and his long braid slid across his lap like a heavy pet. "Maybe what happened with that has made it worse, but I think one of the reasons you haven't been able to get a handle on the ardeur is because you've been taking almost all your advice from a vampire. He doesn't need to eat, Anita. There is only blood lust and the ardeur for Jean-Claude, that's it. A lycanthrope doesn't stop being human. You still have to eat like a person, you just add the hunger of the beast, but you don't lose a hunger, you just add on to it."
I thought about it. "So you mean that since I'm already fighting off normal hunger pangs, that it makes it harder to fight the ardeur?"
He nodded, and his hair slid across his lap again, as if the braid were moving closer to me. "Yes."
I thought about it, and it seemed utterly logical. "Okay, say you're right, what do I do? I'm still running late tonight. I'm usually running late."
"Tonight we go through a drive-up. You get something easy to eat behind the wheel, and I get a salad."
I frowned at him. "A salad, why? Most drive-up salads suck."
"I have to eat before I go on tonight."
"So you'll be able to control your beast better," I said.
"Yes."
"But why a salad? I thought you needed protein."
"If you were going to take off all your clothes in front of strangers, you'd get a salad, too."
"One burger a few hours before you go on won't make you gain weight."
"No, but it might make me bloat."
"I thought only girls did that."
"Nope."
"So you're eating a salad so you'll look good tonight," I said.
He nodded, and his hair slithered over the edge of his leg and across the gear shift. I had this horrible urge to touch that heavy band of hair. A little voice in my head said, Why not? After what we'd done this afternoon, what's a little hair touching. Logical, but logic didn't have much to do with how I acted around Nathaniel.
I clasped my hands together in my lap to keep from touching him, then felt silly. What the hell was I doing anymore? I reached out to that heavy curl of hair and pet it, like it was more intimate to him than it was. The hair was soft and warm. I petted his hair while I talked. "The beast isn't conflicted about anything, is it?"
"No," he said, and his voice was both loud and soft in the quiet dark.
I began to pull his braid, gently up from around his body where the end had slid. "It's not just the hunger for flesh and blood that you fight, is it?"
"No," he said.
I got to the end of his braid and spilled it into my hands. "I thought that the hunger was the beast. That desire to chase and feed; I thought that was all of it."
"And now?" he asked.
I stroked the tip of his braid across my palm, and just that made me shiver. My voice was shaky when I said, "Richard always talked about his beast like it was all his baser impulses, you know, lust, sloth, the traditional sins, but to sin implies a knowledge of good and evil. There was no good or evil, there was nothing like normal thought. I hadn't really understood how all my thoughts are based on things. I'm always thinking about how one thing affects another. The consequences of your actions." I lifted more of his braid in my arms, and it was like holding a snake, a soft, thick serpent. I gathered his hair into my arms and let myself cuddle it against my body. I was about at the limit for the seat belt, and I wanted to be closer to him. The seat belt stayed.
I hugged an armful of his braid to my chest as I said, "I stopped thinking about the Browns' grief, their dead son. It wasn't that I chose to ignore it. I wasn't being callous, it just never entered my mind. It was just that they hurt me, and I got mad, but mad translated directly to food. If I killed them and ate them, then they couldn't hurt me anymore, and I was hungry." I met his eyes on that last word.
Some trick of reflected light made his eyes shine for a moment, like the eyes of a cat in a flashlight's beam. He turned his head, and it was gone, his eyes lost in shadow again. The turn of his head tugged on his hair, and I had a second to decide whether I would let it go, or keep it. I kept it, and it put a strain down the line of his hair, a strain like pulling on a rope, and knowing it was tied tight.
His voice was a little breathy when he said, "You're always hungry when you first change shape, especially if you're new at it."
"How do you keep from tearing into the crowd at the club?" I asked, and my voice was a little shaky, too.
He leaned back away from me, and it made the pull on his hair tighter, harder. "By channeling the hunger into sex instead of food. You don't eat your mate. If you can f**k it, it's not food." His voice was lower, not deeper exactly, but lower.
"So how did I not eat anybody? I wasn't thinking about sex with the Browns."
"At first you are just the hunger, but after a few full moons, you can think, but you don't think like a person. You think like your animal. A few more full moons after that and you can choose to think like yourself in animal form."
"Choose?" I said, and began to pull him toward me, using his braid like a rope, but this rope was attached to his skull, and he didn't come easily. He began to pull against me, and I knew that it had to hurt just a little.
His voice was low and soft. "Some people enjoy the purity of the animal. Like you said, no conflicts, no inner struggles. Just decide what you want and do it."
"Undo your seat belt," I said.
He undid his seat belt.
I pulled him to me with his hair tangled around my arms, like you'd coil a rope or a strings of lights. "Does anyone use the animal for a patsy, you know, crime? A lot of what keeps some people good is their conscience. The beast doesn't have one of those."