In his bid to evade me, Lucian ended up right beside her.
She must not have understood theno touchingagreement—or, to her panther thinking, it doesn’t apply to her—because she nudges her head against the palm of his hand.
It’s the sort of gesture she would give me to show solidarity.
He flinches at her sudden touch and his hand flicks past her nose. It’s the same hand he used to wipe the sweat from his face and his fingers leave a smear across her nose.
Her tongue darts out, and she quickly licks the moisture away.
But then she suddenly freezes.
I pause, half-turned to the keeper, peering back at the female panther. “Anarchy?”
She inhales a sharp breath that sounds like a hiss.
Then she lets it out with a blood-curdling shriek.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Anarchy!” My cry mixes with Lucian’s shout as he leaps away from the female panther.
“What the fuck?” he cries.
She turns on him, her teeth bared and claws slashing the space where he was standing a moment before.
He leaps up onto the table, even though she could easily follow him up there, and wildly searches around—probably for higher ground, given that his focus lands briefly on the tops of the cupboards against the wall to his right and then flies to the open space above the refrigerator on his left.
All three of the male panthers have startled at Anarchy’s scream and are hunched low to the ground, as if they aren’t sure whether or not to leap forward or stay put.
When I first met these panthers, they were the vicious predators I expected them to be, but I knew from that very first moment that Anarchy was in charge. The most vicious of them all. The one who calls the shots.
Why the fuck she’s suddenly intent on taking a chunk out of Lucian is a mystery I intend to solve—once I ensure she doesn’t succeed.
I put the full force of my wolf’s growl into my voice. “Anarchy, stop!”
She barely reacts to my cry. Barely glances in my direction. But the quick look she gives me is enough for me to assess her intentions. Her lips are drawn back from her teeth and her nose is wrinkled with threat, a clear indication that her predatory instincts are controlling her choices.
I won’t be able to break through to her.
She won’t be able to listen to me.
I try to step in front of the other panthers. “No, stop!”
They don’t listen to me until Anarchy spins and snarls at them, a harsh sound that I interpret all too well:Lucian is hers.
Her brief pause to snap at her brothers gives me a heartbeat to react.
My first thought is to fully shift into my wolf form and tackle her, but it will call forth my wings, too, and they’ll be a huge liability in this already small space. When we fought an angel after escaping from the prison, Anarchy proved just how efficiently she can take down a creature with wings.
My second option has already stepped up to my side. “Diavolo!”
His hands have lifted toward Anarchy. Energy sizzles around him, crackling in the air so close beside me that the hairs on my arms stand on end.
Sapphire light shoots across his crown-shaped ring and out from his fingertips.
It’s his illusion magic. He’s used it on the panthers several times before, multiple times to turn them into Doberman Pinschers, and once to turn them into fluffy, little puppies. I’d love to say they were harmless in that form, but their teeth were sharp enough to bite off fingers.
His light bursts across the distance and smacks into Anarchy’s back, flooding her form.
