He’d told me a few years ago that he wanted to see which of us was better. He wasn’t sure anymore, and it was a fantasy of his to have us hunt each other, so we could settle the debate once and for all. When he first told me, I’d been convinced I’d be the one that would die; now I wasn’t so sure, maybe I would win. Maybe I could call Donna and the kids and tell them . . . Tell them what? That their family was destroyed because Edward and I had had the ultimate guy moment and I was the better man?

“So you think the killers enjoyed the kill?” My voice was as empty and neutral as any I had, just two killers talking shop over someone else’s kill.

“I think they might have enjoyed the killing. There’s no way to tell when a killer is this controlled,” he said.

“How does any of this help us catch them?”

He shook his head and looked back at the biggest part of the body. “I don’t know.” He sounded tired again.

I looked down at the body. There was still enough of his chest and stomach left to show that he’d had muscle tone. He’d hit the gym, and it had done him no good at all. He would be another clanless tiger, a survivor of an attack rather than one born into a family group. The Harlequin were killing only the clanless right now, because they were searching for certain tigers. They were searching for gold tigers. A bloodline supposedly destroyed during the reign of the First Emperor of China, but hidden in secret by some of the Harlequin. Hidden from the other Harlequin and from the Mother of All Darkness; the fact that they’d managed to hide them from her when she was at the height of her powers said just how good the Harlequin were at subterfuge. They would have run the world’s best witness protection program ever.

We’d hoped they’d stop slaughtering the clanless tigers when the gold tigers made their public debut to the other tiger clans, but though we’d made it public that we had all colors of the tigers with us in St. Louis, the Harlequin were still hunting and killing the weretigers. It seemed so pointless.