by Lora Leigh
Before she could answer, Jack was there next to them. “I’m guessing you have some unfinished business over there. I’ll watch out for your woman.”
In an instant, Jack shimmered into his tiger shape and curved his giant form around Marie.
“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
A week later
Marie awoke slowly to the smell of coffee and stretched luxuriously before she opened her eyes. She sat up and looked around Ethan’s bedroom, pleased anew at the changes to the formerly stark and barren space. She’d cajoled and teased her panther into painting and hanging light fixtures, though he’d left the shopping to her and Kat. Now warmth and color filled the space, and it was a retreat that they’d enjoyed for many hours of the night and even occasionally during the afternoon, after they made their daily trip to Dr. Herman to visit the now nearly healed panther.
Since she’d heard five days earlier from Alaric that he and Bastien were safe but still on the trail of Lord Justice, she’d been able to relax and enjoy this respite from worry. She’d firmly placed to the side any thoughts of what would happen between herself and Ethan when she had to return to Atlantis.
The door opened, and the coffee smell that had woken her entered the room in the form of a tray carried by a very sexy alpha male panther. “Good morning, ocean girl. I thought you might need some caffeine, after you kept me up all night.”
“I kept you up? Whose idea was it to try out every item of furniture?” She tried to sound indignant, but it came out as sleepy satisfaction. How the man could be so deliciously edible even in simple jeans and a white shirt was beyond comprehension. She tried not to think about how she must look, with her bed-tangled hair.
He placed the tray on the bedside table and leaned over to kiss h
er, then sat back, the smile fading from his face. “This is it, then.”
A sudden lump formed in her stomach. “Yes, this is it. Alaric arrives to transport me back to Atlantis this night. So we have several hours.”
He swore under his breath. “I don’t want several hours with you. I want several years. Several lifetimes, even.”
She caught her bottom lip in her teeth, then sighed. “I feel the same way about you. I never thought—you are the alpha, and Kat warned me—”
He interrupted her. “Kat warned you because of the way I was before I met you. But now I could never touch another woman, Marie.” He took her hands in his. “You’ve touched my soul, ocean girl. I don’t know how it happened, or even how it happened so fast, but there it is. I don’t know how I’m going to let you go.”
“The soul-meld takes whomever it will, Ethan, as you know. But free will reigns over all. You are…You may seek another if my absence—”
He cut her words short, his golden gaze burning into her as he frowned. “I don’t ever want to hear you say anything like that again. Whether you’re in my bed or thousands of miles away, you’re still mine. Don’t even think about forgetting that.”
She tried to smile. “Still such a surly kitten, mi amare. I thought I’d tamed some of that arrogance by now.”
“Never tamed,” he said, his voice husky. “But always yours.”
She felt the tears spill over her eyelashes. “But I must leave. My duties…I cannot abandon the temple, even if some part of me might wish it.”
He pulled her into his arms. “And as much as I might want to, I would never ask you to abandon your responsibilities. If anyone can understand responsibility, it’s me. But somehow it helps to know that some part of you thinks about it. For me.”
They’d discussed the matter frequently enough, and sometimes with Kat, too, that they both knew how unlikely it was that Poseidon would ever allow him entrance into Atlantis. Perhaps at some time in the future. Certainly not now.
“I offer you my vow, Ethan of Florida,” she said, putting all of her love for him into her gaze. “We will find a way.”
“We will find a way,” he repeated. “I offer you my vow, as well. I love you, ocean girl. Remember that every time you look at that ring.”
She glanced down at the flawless diamond on her left hand, a symbol of a promise, he’d said when he’d offered it the night before. A tingle of curiosity made her wonder how it would resonate with the gems in the temple and what song Erin could sing from it. Surely such a beautiful gem, which held the promise of unending love, could sing powerful healing.
“You’ve got your scholar face on again,” he said. “What’s percolating inside that beautiful head?”
As his laughter rumbled in his chest against her cheek, she looked up to find his golden eyes filled with heat. Shimmering silvery blue light began to sparkle and swirl around her, and she fell back onto the bed, pulling him down with her.
“We have all day, my beautiful, fierce panther,” she said, lifting her face for his kiss. “Can you think of any way we might spend it?”
He kissed her with leisurely skill and tenderness until she gasped for breath beneath him. “Oh, I’ve got an idea or two,” he drawled. Then he cast a glance up at the ceiling. “Do you think I should get an umbrella?”
It took her a moment, but then the peals of her laughter rang through the room.
Together, she silently vowed, they would refuse to be daunted, no matter what peril the future might hold. Love and laughter would help them to surmount any obstacles. The shape-shifter had found his lady, and she had finally come home.
SEA CROSSING
Virginia Kantra
For Kristen
I am a man upon the land;
I am a selchie on the sea
and when I’m far frae ev’ry strand,
my dwelling is in Sule Skerry.
—Traditional Orkney ballad
ONE
He had not come.
Emma March drew a quick, relieved breath. Or as much of a breath as she could manage. The steerage passengers squeezed together against the ship’s rail. Like so many sardines in a tin, she thought with a flash of humor. The stink of wool and unwashed bodies mingled with the reek of the harbor, overwhelming the salt breeze running up the river from the sea.
On the Liverpool dock, a ragamuffin gang of boys whistled and waved their caps at the departing ship. A gray-haired matron sank into the stout, supporting arms of her companion like a tragic music hall heroine. Emma almost smiled. And then she glimpsed a gentleman’s tall hat and cane descending the straight stone steps, and her heart knocked uncomfortably against her ribs. Her breath caught in panic.
Paul.
She squeezed her eyes shut. Against her closed lids, an image burned: Sir Paul Burrage, adjusting his gray top hat in the cloakroom’s spotted mirror.
Tumbled among the students’ boots and umbrellas, Emma had watched him, stricken, her body aching and her heart sore.
His gaze had met hers in the glass. “The first time is always a disappointment, I hear.” He’d turned to her then, flicking a careless finger down her cheek. “Next time will be better, I promise you.”
She had slapped his hand away. “Next time? Do you think I would marry you now?”
“Marry?” Paul had stared at her, stunned.
And then he’d thrown back his handsome head and laughed. “Good God, I never intended to marry you.”
Standing at the ship’s rail, Emma trembled with rage and a deep, remembered shame.
She forced her eyes open to search the crowds again.
But the gentleman in the hat was not Paul Burrage. He had not followed her.
She was glad.
Paul would not hesitate to denounce her to the steamship line’s recruiting agent. The papers she had signed in return for her passage to Canada stipulated that she was of “strong constitution and good character.” And her character was ruined, as Paul knew very well. He had ruined her. The bastard.
He was a governor of the school. She was merely a teacher. Had been a teacher. If he exposed her, if she were thrown off the ship by an irate matron, what choice would she have but to do as he demanded and become his mistress?
She shuddered again.
The large woman beside her turned with a sympathetic smile. “Cold, ducks?”
Oh, dear. Emma ducked her head. She was less in control of her emotions than she thought.
“I—yes, a little.”
The woman pursed her lips at Emma’s educated accent, but her expression remained friendly. “It’s this wind, I ’spect.”
“Yes,” Emma agreed gratefully.
The woman continued to regard her with eyes black as currants in her pale, doughy face. “Mary Jenkins,” she announced. “That’s Mr. Jenkins with the children over there.”
Emma glanced at the harassed-looking man in the brown coat pulling a boy down from the rail. She smiled. “Emma March.”
Mrs. Jenkins nodded and waited. For the rest of the introduction, no doubt.
There was none. There was no one, Emma thought bleakly. Most of the steerage passengers were farmers and their families, lured across the Atlantic by the promise of homesteads in the Canadian west. But Emma was alone.
Her heart twisted. She had not expected her family to come and see her off. Hadn’t her father told her she was dead to them now? And her mother would never defy him to make the journey from their farm on the coast of North Devon. Six years ago, Emma’s determination to remain at Miss Hallsey’s School for Girls as a junior teacher rather than return to her family’s farm had created a deep and permanent rift with her parents. Her father always said education would be the ruin of her.
How humiliating to accept that he was right.
Emma drew a steadying breath.
“I am going into service,” she explained.
“Ah.” Mary nodded. “Well, plenty of opportunities where we’re going, eh? Pretty puss li
ke you.”
Emma’s smile froze. She knew her looks attracted attention. Her hair was too red to escape notice, Paul had told her. Her mouth was too wide, her bosom too generous to seem completely respectable. But…
Plenty of opportunities? Bitterness assailed her. Dear God, she had left work she loved and the only people she cared for to travel three thousand miles across the Atlantic as an indentured servant.
She did not see opportunities. Only exile.
Emma gave herself a mental shake. Better to scrub floors than earn her living on her back as Paul had offered. She had made her choice, driven as it was by panic, pride, and desperation. She could not afford the luxury of regret.
“You are very kind,” she said. Surely the woman meant her remarks kindly.
The woman clucked. “And nobody, no sweethearts, to see you off?”
“No,” Emma said firmly. “No one.”
Her throat ached. No one at all.
The brown river rushed between the ship and the shore. The deck shuddered and surged underfoot. She watched—she felt—everything she had known sliding away to starboard. The great clock tower, the Custom House’s dome, the spires of St. Nicholas’s and St. Peter’s, all the familiar landmarks disappearing forever because Paul had been a villain and she, a trusting fool.
Emma swallowed the lump in her throat. She would not give in to tears. She would not. She had wasted tears enough.
She caught herself straining for one last glimpse of the school, as if she could see beyond the bustling dock and busy streets to pick out one tiled rooftop among hundreds of other tiled rooftops in the city. Ridiculous. And yet…There was the promenade where she walked sometimes at the head of her girls, a line of bobbing baby ducks in blue wool uniforms.
The wind kicked up. Among the squawking, darting kittiwakes, a gannet soared, its wide wings flashing in the sunlight. The gray ocean rolled over the brown waters of the river, the waves adorned with foam like dirty lace.
An aching sense of loss weighted her chest.
A solitary seal heaved its head above the choppy water, braving the harbor traffic all around. Emma caught her breath. The massive dark body wore a thick band of scars like a necklace. The seal stood a moment against the wash, regarding the ship with dark, clear eyes, almost as if it marked Emma’s passage. Emma stared back, wondering at the seal’s boldness. Oddly comforted by its presence. As a girl walking along the cliffs of North Devon, she used to watch the seals hauled out on the rocky shore. But she had never seen one here before.
Just as suddenly, the great, sleek body disappeared. Disappointed, Emma squinted a long time at the moving water, willing the seal to surface.
When she looked again toward shore, the city and all the remnants of her past life had slipped away.
The wind blew from the west, retarding the ship’s passage. The engines labored through long, heavy swells. After five days at sea, the ship was barely midway through the voyage, and most passengers had lost their stomach for adventure…and everything else.
The stench belowdecks was terrible.
Emma braced fourteen-year-old Alice Gardner in her bunk as the girl retched violently into a bucket. The child had been separated from her family and quartered aft with eleven other single women under the watchful eye of Matron. It should have reminded Emma comfortingly of school, but with so many seasick and bedridden, the area between decks felt more like one giant infirmary.
At least Emma had some experience nursing pupils. Alice was the same age as many of her students. Emma wiped the girl’s face with a damp handkerchief, murmuring some soothing nonsense. She was grateful for something to do, for the opportunity to feel needed. She could not teach. That did not mean she could not be useful.
Matron—jealous, perhaps, of her own authority or suspicious of the color of Emma’s hair—had initially spurned her offers of help. But the surgeon’s time was taken up almost entirely with the twenty-six first-class passengers, and as conditions deteriorated in steerage, Matron relied more and more on Emma to help her with the younger girls.
After several days, Emma struggled simply to keep her eyes open. She moved through a viscous fog of exhaustion. Her arms and legs felt weighted. Her stomach felt like lead.
The cabin pitched and tossed.
Alice shrieked and wept.
Up and down, up and down, the creaking ship rode the crests in time with the angry sea.
Up and—
A crack like thunder exploded from the hold, slapping Emma from her stupor. The ship shuddered, suspended, and then plunged.
The bucket slopped. Her stomach lurched. She grabbed the rail to avoid being tumbled to the floor.
Nineteen-year-old Cora Poole, in the bunk above, began to cry. “We’re going to die. We’re all going to die.”
“I wish I was dead,” another girl groaned.
Foreboding tightened Emma’s chest. The roar of the engines still shook the air and vibrated the walls all around. But something was different. Something was…wrong. The ship lolled and rolled, no longer fighting the waves.
Emma clung to the bunk with sweaty palms, her heart tripping in her chest. She was almost as close to hysterics as her charges.
As if bursting into tears ever did anyone any good.