I REARED UP on my knees as Quicksilver backed in, growling aggressively, forelegs down, teeth bared. I'd kneecap anyone busting in on our reverse S &M moment too.

I frowned at the single large shadow that swallowed the threshold before the one who cast it had even entered.

And then I saw who it was. Grizelle!

"What are you doing?" she demanded, her green eyes looking black in the meager lamplight. "What. Are. You. Doing?" she repeated, stalking toward the bed on its raised step.

Quicksilver danced in front of her, poised to leap for her long black throat five feet off the floor.

"I'll eviscerate your dog if you don't call him off," she threatened, lifting a formidably nailed hand.

"Quick! Back." I eyed Grizelle again. "And you get out of here. This is a private sickroom. What. Are. You. Doing. Here?" I parroted her with matching fury and venom.

She took a long stride forward to brace one leg on the riser and peer at Ric in the bed. I leaned over him to block her view but she was tall enough to see what she wanted to.

"So," she said. "It is you! You must stop your bizarre healing ritual."

"No. Why would I?"

"For every scar you diminish on your lover my master lies flayed below, his back laced with bloody stripes that keep appearing out of nowhere. I knew you must have something to do with it."

Stunned, I tried to piece the two bizarre scenes together. For every whip scar I kissed away, Snow received a fresh slash in the same position on his own albino back?

Truly creepy. Impossible notions ran through my mind involving Quicksilver's healing tongue and my accepting Snow's Brimstone Kiss and converting it into a Resurrection Kiss. Now maybe a Retribution Kiss had boomeranged on its dispenser?

"You must stop now!" Grizelle shouted.

For a moment, memories of my humiliating moments standing half-naked and defenseless in front of Snow burned hot in my chest and throat, an attack of emotional heartburn.

Yes! My anger against Snow almost choked me. The bastard deserved to writhe under the lash. Better him than Ric. I'd make that choice forever and ever, amen!

Then the horror of what was happening on some floor above us hit me. No creature deserved to feel all at once what El Demonio had meted out to Ric over years of abuse. I pictured Snow's skin as white and firm as Michelangelo's David, reproduced at Caesars Palace. I shuddered to imagine the violation, pain, and wounds it had absorbed already.

Grizelle had backed off the riser toward the door.

"The damage is mostly done," she said bitterly. "You have caused my master trouble since you came to this city and now you have made him suffer beyond belief."

I stood statue-still on the riser, glancing back at Ric. Only a few of the horrible scar ridges remained. Could I stop just short of completion without undoing all I'd accomplished?

Wasn't there a fairy tale? A girl's seven brothers had been bespelled into swans, so she spent years weaving shirts from punishing nettles to reclaim their proper form.

Her fingers bled from the task but she didn't quite make the deadline. As she threw the nettle garments on her swan-brothers' backs, one shirt was missing an arm. One brother would wear a swan wing for an arm for all his life.

The moral? Leaving any small part of a magical task undone could have irreversible consequences. I couldn't leave Ric half-healed, still unconscious. He might never wake up but remain suspended between the pain of the past and the pleasure of the present.

I couldn't risk it.

"No," I told Grizelle. "I'm sorry, but I can't stop now."

Grizelle stopped, turned, and stood even taller in her disbelief.

"It's only a few strokes more." I sounded lame even to myself.

"My master's back is in bleeding shreds already."

"He raised a medieval dragon from its ashes. He must have some magic to overcome this."

"Not for himself."

I shook my head. "I can't stop now."

"You will."

As Quicksilver circled stealthily around behind her, I watched Grizelle shape-shift so fast that in one blink she was her human self and the next she had stretched long and low into full Big Cat form, six hundred pounds and nine feet long.

She roared, making the walls vibrate. The carnivore stink of hot tiger's breath alone almost drove me off my feet.

Her front fangs looked longer than scissor blades and her open maw as high as a human torso was wide. I'd seen enough domestic cats chasing birds to realize she was hunched to attack. One bound would do for both me and Ric.

I clasped my hands together in front of me, not praying, but calling the silver familiar to war. Would a thing made of Snow's hair defend me now? Desert him?

Twin chains sped down my arms to my palms. Achilles was in the familiar's magical mix now.

I held the most fully realized form of the silver familiar yet-a shining sword blade-in my conjoined hands.

As Grizelle's enormous white-and-black-striped, furred body sprang into the air, Quicksilver attacked her rear flank and was lofted upward by his teeth.

My mind flashed options. First I should strike for a huge gorgeous green eye, then the throat if I missed that. If she still bounded over me I'd have one last chance to rip out the belly. What a shame... for one of us.

I braced myself at the foot of the bed feeling her shadow fall over me.

At that instant, the Big Cat's huge body twisted and flailed in the air, falling back to the carpeting and struggling there. It was as if an invisible leash had jerked her back.

She half-shifted into human form as she writhed on the floor, snarling between any words she could get out.

"Fool!" She shook a rear leg and Quicksilver fell off, still watchful.

I saw blood seeping onto the rug from her left hip, but she disregarded it.

"I didn't call this off," she said in a human voice still too rough and tigerish to reassure me. "Remember that. You will pay."

She shifted back to tiger form, watching me with suspicious lowered head, then turned and stalked out, blood staining the white fur on her left flank.

I sighed and sat on the end of the bed, lowering the sword that seemed glued to my hands. It softened into twin serpents and migrated up my forearms to become upper-arm bracelets.

Quick sat down, tilted his head quizzically, and whimpered at the bed.

I turned my head over my shoulder. Ric slept on, the flat dunes of his back gleaming silver with scar tissue in the lamplight. I eyed the ugly ridges still remaining.

"My job," I told Quicksilver. I doubted even his proven healing tongue could outdo mine after the Brimstone Kiss.

He trotted away to stand guard outside the double doors Grizelle had broken. That dog never walked, just trotted or ran flat out. And after a tiger attack, he still had the stones to take up a position between it and me should Grizelle's tiger self desire any reruns.

My relieved mind oddly at peace, I crawled back up on the bed to run a forefinger along one of the seven remaining welts.

I'd been going to tell Quicksilver, "My job, my pleasure," but knowing every erased welt here would reappear as pain elsewhere made me lose my appetite for the pleasure part.

I made quick work of it, letting Ric's satisfied murmurs override the whimpers of my conscience.

Last, I brought my trembling lips to the bandage covering the wide and deep neck wound the vampires had made. Through the gauze mesh, I tasted blood, careful not to siphon any up.

This was one old scar Ric could never hide and didn't want to. It was also his oldest erotic zone. Having missed out on the forbidden thrill of high school hickies, my loving lips had made this site an "instant on" zone and didn't I feel guilty about that now.

If my Brimstone Kissed lips could "cure" this most vicious and lethal wound, the only remaining sign of Ric's being vampire bait...

A migraine headache from Hell assailed me with disturbingly mixed mental images and emotional sensations. I felt and saw my lips on Ric and Snow and then vampire lips on Ric in such fast succession that waves of love and hate, passion and compassion, sexual and blood lust made me shake as if being electrocuted.

The reaction's speed had jerked me away from Ric before he could be contaminated by more than a sleeping murmur of reaction.

Some places even healing intentions couldn't go.

I glanced again at the silver tracery of his back scars. He now bore a beautiful ghost tattoo and I was drained into a stupor.

I curled up next to him and went to sleep.