“It doesn’t hurt,” she assured, when she caught Elijah examining her throat as she came up beside him.

Elijah fell into step with them, taking up a position on the other side of Conner so that the long, powerful body of the cat was between them. He moved easily, with that same fluid motion Conner had, as if he flowed over the ground in silence.

“The kid needs another beating,” Elijah hissed.

The cat made a rumbling sound of agreement deep in his throat, and Isabeau smiled. “I don’t think either one of you is very far from your cat.”

“Law of the jungle,” Elijah said as if that explained everything.

And to them it did, she realized. Another bit of information. Their lives were not more complicated because of their leopards, they were less so. They saw the world in black and white rather than in shades of gray. They did what it took to get a nasty job done, and if that meant seducing a woman to save children, so be it.

Why her heart squeezed painfully in her chest she didn’t know. The thought of Conner touching—kissing—holding another woman made her feel sick. And she’d brought him here to do just that.

“I guess I don’t understand these clear lines you all have drawn out for yourselves. Who determines what’s right and what’s wrong?” she asked.

The leopard nudged her thigh again, brushing close to her, and she felt her own reaction, the leaping of her senses toward him, a reaching she couldn’t prevent, as it happened too fast, too automatically. The least little touch of man or beast and she reacted with hope, with need, with an almost obsessive response.

Elijah shot her a look. “Are we talking about Jeremiah? Or Conner?”

“Both. All of you.”

“Talk to Conner,” Elijah advised. “He’s more knowledgeable of our ways than I am. I came to the clan late. And everyone makes mistakes, Isabeau. You. Me. Conner. Your father. My father. We all do.”

She kept pace with the leopard, looking straight ahead. Water splashed from the sloped hills into a narrow stream-bed. They walked over the rocks and continued wading through the water toward the other side where the bank was less steep. Isabeau felt a pang of uneasiness and then deep inside, her cat stirred, shuddering awake.

Something tugged at her ankle from behind and then she was down and the water closed over her head. Almost immediately she was tumbled over and over, as if in a washing machine, rolling while something wrapped tightly around her, holding her in strong, steel-like coils. She heard herself screaming in her head, but she had the presence of mind not to open her mouth beneath the water.

Her arm, where her wound was, burned and throbbed. Her left wrist, trapped in the thick coils, felt as if it might burst from the pressure. She tried not to struggle, telling herself Elijah and Conner would both come to her aid and not to panic. The snake rolled her over and she felt the cool night on her face. She gulped air, drawing a deep breath before it rolled her over again. Her face scraped along the rocks as it took her down along the bottom.

Elijah leapt over the leopard, a knife in his fist. Conner exploded beside him, roaring a challenge, whirling around and sinking his teeth deep into the writhing coils, holding the snake, preventing it from taking its prey into deeper water. The green anaconda was large, close to four hundred pounds of solid muscle, and it was hungry, determined not to lose its prey. The head was close to Isabeau’s head, the fangs dangerously near her neck. It didn’t have a fatal bite, or venom, but it would anchor itself there and hold her until it could constrict and suffocate her.

Elijah tried to move around the churning water to get to the head, but the snake continued to thrash and roll, keeping the water roiling, preventing the man from doing more than angering it by slashing at the coils of thick muscle as he moved around the constantly writhing snake. The cat gripped the tail of the anaconda in its mouth and began a steady backward pull toward the bank in an effort to drag the snake to shallow water to keep Isabeau from drowning.

The snake was quite large and obviously female by its size. She was dark green with dark oval spots decorating her scales up and down her back. Along her sides were the telltale ochre spots of the anaconda. Her head was large and narrow, running straight into the thick, muscular neck, so it was difficult to tell where the two separated, especially in the churning water. The eyes and nostrils set on top of its head allowed it to breathe while mostly submerged. At home in the water, it was using its adeptness to its advantage, fighting the pull of the relentless leopard.

As Conner took two more steps back, gripping more of the snake to get more leverage, Elijah circled to the front, reaching below the surface of the water and dragging Isabeau and the snake out so she could draw in another breath. Unfortunately, as she gasped, her lungs burning for air, the snake constricted tighter.

“Conner, hold the damn thing,” Elijah snarled, his teeth snapping together in frustration.

Time seemed to slow down for Isabeau. She could hear the leopard snarling, but her pulse was hammering loud in her ears. Her lungs felt starved for air and fear was a vile taste in her mouth. Every instinct she had told her to fight, to struggle, but she forced herself to stay calm, refusing to give in to the panic that threatened to reduce her to a screaming, mindless victim.

In her mind she chanted Conner’s name. She knew the instant he shifted—or maybe her cat knew. She couldn’t see him, and she could still hear the growls rumbling, reverberating through the water, but she knew he was using the combined strength of man and leopard to drag the snake onto the embankment.