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With a grumbling kind of purr, the panther put its mouth around McNabb’s neck and lifted the kitten up by his scruff. Well, hell.
The Scot dangled from the panther’s mouth like a naughty kitten with his feet hanging down and his shoulders up around his folded ears.
Talk about a sight Yordan would remember for the rest of his life. It was downright hysterical until he realized the panther was taking the kitten back to its lair or den or wherever mamma cats took their kittens.
Too bad this cat was a lake monster. Its home might very well be under the freezing water. That was not going to work for The Folded-Eared Scot. But what the hell was Yordan going to do about it? And what the fuck was McNabb doing? Was he in pain? Was he trying to wriggle free?
It looked like The Scot was swinging back and forth, harder and harder. Enough to make the panther slow down as she tried to fight his momentum.
Weird.
And then Yordan watched the cleverest use of insta-shift he’d ever seen in action. Right at the moment of farthest arc, the kitten was covered in the golden glow of a shift. McNabb was shifting back to human with all the change in weight and dimension that entailed.
It never would have worked for Yordan. He took too long to change. But the insta-shift meant that the panther was abruptly carrying the weight of a full-grown man, who looped an arm around the creature’s neck rather than go flying back out into the half-frozen lake.
The panther toppled sideways onto the sand with its neck stretched out from the pull of McNabb’s human weight. And bam, there was a perfect target for Yordan and any puppy within reach.
Perfect, if one ignored the fact that The Scot’s back was ripped open by the creature’s teeth. McNabb’s kitten scruff had become human flesh. God willing, it had been McNabb’s back and not his neck.
Either way, Yordan couldn’t deal with it now. He took the opportunity McNabb had sacrificed his back for and attacked.
Success.
He ripped out the monster’s neck, and just as the creature’s lifeblood began to drain away, the thing splintered into a thousand pinpoints of light and disappeared.
Gone. Back into the lore that created it.
In its place lay The Scot, who was a bloody, shivering mess.
Marsha got there before Yordan did. He needed to shift back to human before he could help. And honestly, he was supposed to stay wolf just in case the lake decided to throw a third monster at them.
But the discipline was hard. McNabb was on the ground with blood staining the sand like sick ink, and there was nothing a wolf could do to stop it.
Yordan made room for Marsha, splitting his attention between watching the surrounding area and seeing if The Scot was in his death throes.
“Are you all right?” Marsha gasped. “What do you need?”
The Scot opened his mouth to answer, but no sound came out. Instead, there was the telltale shimmer as he turned back into a kitten in all his bedraggled, floppy-eared glory.
“Meow.”
Never had a kitten sounded more disgruntled with his life. A single, short meow as it sat there and pouted. Apparently, he couldn’t shift back to human yet. Insta-shifts often had a lag time between changes. That meant The Scot had to stay kitten for what was going to feel like a humiliatingly long amount of time.
Fortunately, the kitten looked fine. The Scot would live. And Yordan knew just what to do. No stranger to humiliating antics, he padded over and gently, carefully picked up his boss’s boss by the scruff of his neck and carried him back to base camp.
And if he drooled a bit on the kitten head, then who could complain? Wolves weren’t exactly neat when carrying itty-bitty, fluffball kitties.
CHAPTER 10
Warm Kitty, Soft Kitty, Little Ball of Fur
Kit didn’t mind the drool. It was a lot better than the kitty litter and catnip jokes that he knew were coming. And frankly, it would be deeply painful to receive that kind of humiliation from Yordan, so he delayed it as long as possible by remaining feline.
It helped that he’d shifted far more than usual today, not to mention the icy swim. He doubted he had the stamina to shift, despite the magic gummy.
Truthfully, he was more worried about Yordan. He could smell the blood dripping from his wound, and he was deeply afraid for the man.
He needn’t have worried. Yordan was responsible enough to see everyone got safely back to base camp before making the gut-wrenching shift back to human. Lord, Kit didn’t know how lycanthropic wolves willingly went through that much pain. He watched every bone-grinding second as the man turned from wounded wolf to healthy man.
