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“Stay with the tiger, Marie. This won’t take long,” Ethan promised. Every instinct he had demanded he stay with her, but honor and tradition forced him to finish it.
“You demanded an alpha challenge,” he called out to Travis, who was clearly preparing to run away. “Now that we’re back to even odds, you’ve got one.”
Travis stopped and stared at him, suspicion twisting his face. “It’s a trick. Why would you agree to the challenge after this?”
Ethan stripped off his shirt. “Because those ancient traditions you corrupted actually mean something to me.”
“Fool! All that stupid honor. Fallon always said it would get you killed,” Travis taunted him, circling around, looking for an opening.
“We’ll see, won’t we?” Ethan waited for the challenger’s leap and followed it, shifting in midair, as Travis did the same. They were well-matched, he observed with a coldly detached corner of his mind. But then he didn’t have time to think anything else, because the battle was on.
Marie watched, awestruck, as the two mighty cats met in a resounding clash of sound and fury. Ethan’s tawny panther was slightly longer than Travis’s red cat, but they were closely comparable in breadth and muscle. Terror for Ethan paralyzed her even with the tiger preventing her from moving.
She gasped as the two panthers rolled over and over across the circle, biting with deadly fangs and tearing with lethal claws, until both of them were bloodied and torn. Travis smashed a paw across Ethan’s face, and Marie’s legs moved as if to take her to them, but she found her way blocked by a quarter ton of snarling tiger. For a moment, her heart leapt into her throat, but Jack looked up at her out of the tiger’s eyes, and she calmed.
Somehow the sounds of fighting from outside the circle didn’t register with her enough even to make her fear stray bullets. Every ounce of her consciousness was fixed on the life-or-death battle taking place in the circle before her.
The red panther screamed again and managed to escape from underneath his golden foe, and Travis started running, trying to escape. Ethan chased him down and pounced, and again the battle was joined as the two tried to literally rip each others’ throats out. Claws flashed silver and ivory in the moonlight, and blood stained the cats’ fur with black shadows.
Marie raised her hands to call water again, unable to stand idly by and watch Ethan die, but the tiger butted against her legs with its huge head. As much as she hated to acknowledge it, she understood what Jack was trying to tell her. For her to interfere would be just as wrong as it had been for Travis’s villains to do the same.
“But he’d better finish this quickly, Jack, or I’m going to do what I can. I’m past caring about ancient rules,” she said, not knowing if the tiger could even hear or understand her. Every slice of claw or fang in Ethan’s flesh screamed pain in her own.
The red cat gathered itself for a mighty leap and landed on Ethan’s back. The golden panther fought madly, twisting and bucking to get his deadly enemy off his back, but Travis sank his fangs into the side of Ethan’s neck, and Ethan crashed to the ground, hard.
Marie screamed as Ethan fell, but before she could move, the golden cat rolled his body over with a jerking motion and ripped his neck out of Travis’s mouth. Then Ethan reared back on his hind legs and smashed a mighty paw across Travis’s neck, ripping his throat out. The gushing spurt of arterial blood seemed to draw attention to itself by its very silence, and the sounds of battle around the circle slowly faded away to nothing.
Travis fell to the ground, obviously dead. As he fell, he slowly shifted back to his human shape. Ethan, still in cat form, stood near the body, head hung low, panting heavily.
Marie shoved past the tiger and ran to Ethan, falling to the ground in front of him. The cat raised its head, and Ethan stared out at her through its eyes.
“Now I may finally offer assistance,” she said, and she put her hands on him and called to the Goddess. As the healing warmth spread through her hands and into his body, she watched as the vicious wounds in his sides healed. The silvery blue light of her Gift combined with the golden shimmer of his shape-shift, and he returned to human form.
For several frozen seconds, kneeling on the ground in the middle of the blood-scented darkness, Marie tumbled over the edge of conscious reality and into Ethan’s soul. Images from his life rushed through her, and she felt his anguish at Fallon’s death and his self-loathing at having failed to protect so many of his pride from the vampires and from Travis. She gasped as the window to his deepest emotions opened up to her, and the strongest image she encountered was her own face.
She fell back as the healing ended, staring at him in shock. His own expression mirrored hers. “I saw your soul, Marie,” he said in a hushed tone. “I fell into your soul.”
Then he seemed to snap out of a trance and leapt to his feet, pulling her with him, while he scanned the circle for further danger. Jack, again in human form, and William, sporting a bloody scratch down the side of his face but otherwise apparently unharmed, strolled up to them.
“Report,” Ethan snapped out, staring at his second-in-command.
“We kicked their asses,” William drawled. “I’ll give you a full report tomorrow, but we’re going to turn these lawbreakers over to the reps from the other prides.”
Jack nodded in agreement. “They claim they had no idea what Travis was planning, which is probably true. Anyway, if they take Travis’s goons off our hands, there can never be any suspicion of unfair dealing on your part.”
Ethan considered their words, then nodded. “Fine. Casualties?”
“Nothing but a few scratches on our side,” William said. “Nothing, at least, that the change didn’t heal.”
“If I can be of service, I have some skill with healing,” Marie offered.
“Nope. You’re done doing anything but resting, ocean girl,” Ethan said, all the arrogant command back in his tone.
Marie bristled and started to argue, but he bent down and put an arm under her knees and the other one around her shoulders and scooped her up against his chest. “Please,” he murmured, for her ears alone. “I need you.”
“Well, since you put it that way,” she said, putting her arms around his neck, “how can I refuse?”
TWELVE
