“I’ll make it easy for you.” I raised my arm up toward his face.

He turned away and tried to ignore me.

“So much for the famous nose of the werewolves; I guess that reputation is all talk, too,” I said, and unthreaded the extra magazine holders from my belt and laid the extra ammo in with the guns.

“What’s that supposed to mean, too? You don’t know me, or my reputation.”

“You are an arrogant, bragging blowhard, who refused to take the sniff challenge. What kind of weak-ass wereanimal can’t tell another person’s flavor of beast by scent?”

“Wolf!” He snarled it into my face.

I laughed at him as the energy prickled along my skin. My wolf stood up, shaking her pale fur inside me. “A big bad wolf would know what I am; you don’t, so you aren’t a big bad wolf.”

“You’re a rat like all the other short Hispanic chickies from L.A.”

I gave the unpleasant smile again. “Since chickie can be slang for prostitute, don’t ever call any of the female guards that again.”

“Or what? What will you do if I call you all chickie?”

“You didn’t really listen to what I said, did you, puppy?”

“Don’t call me that.” He snarled it in my face, and it got him close enough to smell me. He stopped and the anger began to fade a little. “The gunk is tigers, more than one kind, but you”—he sniffed along my hair and face—“you smell like wolf, but you can’t be.”

“Why can’t I be?” I asked.

“I’ve been here almost two months, and I’ve never seen you at any of the get-togethers.”

“My schedule’s a little full, makes it hard to be everywhere.”

The room had gone quiet a while ago, but Ricky hadn’t noticed. His powers of observation sucked. I hoped he fought well, because if he didn’t he was just good-looking muscle that at best was cannon fodder, and at worst was going to get someone else hurt, because he wouldn’t be up to the job. Had Richard picked him? If so, I was going to ask Rafael if he could help the wolves pick their new recruits from now on, because this one looked good, but he wasn’t.

Micah reached out to me, just a barest brush of energy, and my leopard raised its head and sniffed the air. “Now you smell like leopard, but that’s not possible,” Ricky said.

“What’s not possible, puppy?”

“Stop calling me that!” His anger was so ready to spill up and over him, and his wolf came right with it.

“Make me, puppy,” I said.

“What?”

“Ricky . . .” someone said, taking pity on him at last.

“Make me stop calling you puppy; prove to me that you’re the big bad wolf.”

“Bitch!”

“Sticks and stones, puppy, sticks and stones.”

“What are you fucking talking about?”

I moved closer to him, drawn by the heat of his anger and the musk of his wolf, but it was the anger I wanted. I was hungry, and his anger sat on my tongue bittersweet like super-dark chocolate; it’s sweet, but there’s that undertone of bitterness that can become its own addiction.

“Here puppy, puppy, puppy,” I whispered from inches away. I was too close for him to swing at me, sex close. He was so angry it was like a fire that I could warm my hands over, such rage, just because I’d pricked his ego. I was provoking him, because I needed to feed and I had other options besides sex now.

I caught movement, as some of the others, including Peppy, started to move forward to intercede as the big man menaced me. I said, “Everyone back off, this is just puppy and me, isn’t it, puppy?”

He yelled, “STOP CALLING ME THAT!” And he moved, too fast for even me to follow. His hands were around my upper arms, picking me up, feet dangling, as he slammed me against the lockers. But I was ready for it, and my head didn’t slam back into them, which would have stunned me, and my back had had worse done to it. I wrapped as much of my small hands around his arms as I could, but it wasn’t to keep him from slamming me again; it was to get skin-to-skin contact. The moment I touched him, I fed. All that anger, all that rage, that red haze that could have pounded me against the lockers until I broke, was mine to drink down from his skin to mine.

He looked confused, and then he began to collapse as his knees buckled. I was set back on my feet as he sat down heavily on the benches in front of the lockers. His hands dropped to his lap, as if he had lost strength in his arms. His face was soft and confused. The heat of his wolf was gone, siphoned away with his anger. Oh, he was still a werewolf, but he wouldn’t be able to shapeshift until he recovered a little more of himself; until then it was almost like being human. Some of the guards I did trust had been working with me in private, discovering the limits of this new ability to feed on anger by touching someone. I could drain from a distance, too, but it wasn’t as powerful or as satisfying a feeding.

“What did . . . what did you . . . do to me?” he asked, and he couldn’t quite make his eyes focus on me, or much of anything.

I felt so much better. “I fed on your anger.”

“What . . . are you?”

“Wrong question, Ricky,” I said.

“What?” He was still fighting to focus his eyes, his hands limp at his sides.

“It’s not what am I. It’s who am I?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m Anita Blake.”

“Oh, fuck,” he said, softly, trying hard to look at me without his gaze wandering to the side.

“You’re lucky, I’ve gotten better at eating anger; when I first started doing it I took people’s memories, so it was like being rolled by a real vampire, but you remember everything that just happened, don’t you, puppy?”

“Don’t . . . call me that.” He managed to focus his eyes.

“Then prove to me that you’re more wolf than puppy. The next time I ask you what make and model a gun is, I’ll expect you to know. Don’t ever wave your junk in the face of any of the female guards again, unless you know, absolutely know, they want you to do it. Don’t ever call any of your fellow guards chickie, or whore, ever again. Just because a woman thinks you’re a horse’s ass doesn’t mean she’s a whore; it just means she sees through your bullshit.”

“I didn’t know who you were,” he said, but the anger was already back.

“Anger, back so soon, puppy, maybe I’ll just make you my bitch for feeding on rage.”

His eyes showed fear for a minute; that scared him.

“Oh, you don’t like that idea at all, do you?”

“No,” he said, and there was a little bit of snarl to the word.

“Then learn your guns, respect your fellow guards regardless of gender, and don’t be a sleazebag about the women you’re fucking.”

“Anything else . . . ma’am?”

“Yeah, be careful who you piss off here; not everyone is as nice as I am.”

That made his eyes widen and that flash of fear return. He buried it under the anger again, but it was in there, behind the bravado and the macho posturing.

I shut my locker, gathered up a towel, and headed into the showers. The men cleared the way for me with silence, or “Ma’am.” There were other men, nude or in towels, in the doorway to the showers; apparently we’d had more of an audience than I’d realized. That was okay; I didn’t have a problem with all the men now, nude or clothed. I’d been scary and that was what they’d remember, not that I was small and a woman. Peppy followed behind me, smiling. Girls rule; boys drool.