“I never wanted the hoard,” Darla declared out loud. The wedding guests were all watching the battle raptly and ignoring the scene on the dais, many of them backing away with their chairs to avoid being caught up in it. “That was all you ever wanted. But I don’t care about the money.”
“You’ll care about it when you’re living in a ditch with the old people,” Jubilee threatened, only marginally more quietly.
The retirement home. Darla quavered. Without her inheritance…
She steeled herself. She’d figure something out. Plenty of people managed harder things without the piles of money she’d grown up on.
But first… she concentrated on the fight with a sinking heart.
The leopard was obviously badly outclassed by the bear — out-muscled, out-clawed, and the giant bear had clearly been in battle before. Breck led him on a merry chase, able to slip under his big, heavy swings and out-maneuver his charges, but there was nothing he could do to attack in return. His claws were useless against the thick fur and heavy hide of a bear.
His luck dodging finally gave out as Eugene struck him with a heavy paw.
Darla heard a scream she wasn’t sure was hers.
Chapter 40
Wrench’s words rang in Breck’s mind as he dodged another swing of Eugene’s giant paw.
I’m gunna die, he thought, scrambling to the side of a charge and flanking the bear. If sparring with Tex had taught him one thing about bears, it was that they turned slowly. They charged forward surprisingly fast, and were brutally strong, but they cornered like the old resort van.
He was more outraged than afraid, despite his grim appraisal of the situation. Eugene had given his word.
And Breck had been dumb enough — or desperate enough, or hopeful enough — to believe it.
Even knowing it was useless, Breck tried to swipe at the bear’s flank with claws fully outstretched.
As Tex had warned, he barely got through to skin; he drew blood, but not enough to do anything more than irritate Eugene, who turned to the best of his ability and charged as Breck darted around him again.
His only real hope was to tire the bear out, to wear him down, then get his jaws in somewhere critical. He went over the vulnerable places they had covered in practice — under the neck, crushing the windpipe or severing an artery... or his eyes. The list was painfully short.
And he had to do it without getting caught in a death-grip himself, or getting hit with one of Eugene’s giant swinging paws, and he had to do it fast enough that Eugene couldn’t get his jaws around one of the many, many vulnerable places on Breck.
The bracelet was not helping.
It was heavy and distracting, and kept catching Breck off-guard with its weight.
And every time it spun on his leg, Breck found himself thinking about the terror and longing in Darla’s face as Liam snapped it onto him.
But what he should be thinking about was the bear facing him down, clearly growing more irate by the moment for his inability to put a quick end to the lithe leopard.
A paw the size of his head with claws like wicked knives sailed overhead as he ducked, and he darted in to claw at Eugene’s nose, mindful of Wrench’s advice.
Eugene gave a roar of pain, and before Breck could retreat, struck him with his other massive paw.
Breck tumbled, end over end, as guests shrieked and scrambled back, and knew that the claws had drawn blood. He didn’t have time to figure out where his pain was coming from; Eugene was facing him, and already surging forward into a charge.
His leopard drove him back to his feet, but there was no time to flank the oncoming beast, so he dashed straight at it, ignoring every bit of the sparring advice he had gotten.
At the last moment, he sprang, not at the bear, but over it, and his choice was so unexpected that Eugene’s ponderous head lifted and snapped at him too late.
He landed on the bear’s back, and dug in with all of his claws.
Eugene bucked and shook, trying to dislodge him, and Breck crouched closer and dug in harder. The bear snapped and tried to twist his head back to bite at him, but his neck was too short to reach.
With a sudden surge of hope, Breck swapped ends, as only a cat in a narrow space can, and pounced forward for Eugene’s face, raking claws into the sensitive nose from behind and drawing them towards his vulnerable eyes.
As he dug into Eugene’s face, he realized that he had forgotten one key thing.