Warriors of Poseidon 04 - Atlantis Unmasked

women—”
     
    “To hell with that,” Grace cut him off. “Michelle, you should—”
     
    “Already on it,” Michelle said cheerfully, stepping out of her shoes. “Bet you didn‟t know Louboutin made a pair of stilettos like this.” She scooped up her shoes and pressed something on the insides of each with her thumbs. Four-inch blades snapped out of the heels, glittering with deadly silvery light.
     
    “Good thing those damn rookies are gone,” Sam drawled, cool as the ice floating in a Georgia mint julep. “They‟d just get in the way. Shifters or vamps?”
     
    “Both, maybe, but definitely shifters. At least ten on this side alone,” Alexios said, glaring at Grace. “I know you‟re a good fighter, but you don‟t have your bow, and I don‟t want you caught up close and deadly with a few hundred pounds of shifter. Get the hells out of here and take Michelle and her little toys with you.”
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    “When hell freezes over is when I‟ll run away like a little girl and leave you to face those attackers alone,” Grace said, glaring right back at him.
     
    Alexios growled a threat, but it came out in jumbled-up English and Atlantean, and then it was too late, anyway, too late, because the first wave of them came over the walls, fangs and claws bared. Panthers. They were panthers, but they weren‟t all in full panther form but an obscene hybrid of panther and human, and just when he had time to wonder how big cats had climbed a thirty-foot stone wall, the first one hit him hard.
     
    Alexios went down, smashed onto his back, but his dagger was swinging up, all of his power behind it, and it drove into the panther‟s stomach and ripped a path through its entrails, drenching Alexios in guts and blood and rank stench. He heard shots—the Glock firing round after round; thank Poseidon for Sam.
     
    Alexios shoved the panther off him and rolled. In seconds, he was up and going after the next one, scanning for Grace. She‟d been backed into a corner by a huge black panther that was snarling and batting at her but not yet ready to brave Grace‟s long silver knife.
     
    Everything in Alexios pushed at him, hard, to turn to mist, go to Grace, and fly with her clear off the roof to safety, only then coming back to rejoin the fight. But if he did, if he left Michelle and Sam and they died, any feeling Grace might have for him would die with them.
     
    He stayed. He fought.
     
    Sam continued to fire his gun to deadly effect, and now Michelle had a gun, too. Sam must have had a backup. Two more of the panthers, these a tawny reddish brown, leapt in tandem for Alexios‟s head while another came in low and hot toward his legs.
     
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    “I am not in the mood to have my nuts bit off by a panther,” Alexios shouted. He leapt up to meet the two coming by air, but he transformed during his leap so that the panthers passed harmlessly through his mist form and crashed into their companion on the ground. Sam and Michelle fired shots steadily, and first one, then the second, then all three panthers lay dead.
     
    Once again in corporeal form, he landed on the edge of the wall and scanned its rock face and the grounds below for any further attackers. They needed to know what they were dealing with. Now.
     
    All clear, at least on this side of the fort. No time to worry about the other sides, though.
    He spun around as the snarling and eerie high-pitched screams of panthers filled the air, almost drowning out the worst possible sound in the world: the recruits, all loud laughter and drunken singing, were arriving back at the fort.
     
    Another scream, this one behind him, and Alexios whirled around to find Grace standing over the body of the black panther, calmly pulling her knife out of its throat. Or maybe not so calmly, he realized, as light flashed from the blade when her hand trembled.
     
    “They‟re going after the rookies,” Sam yelled, and Alexios turned again, this time to realize that only five of the panthers lay dead or dying and the rest were flowing down the stairs toward the courtyard in a silent wave of lethal purpose.
     
    The shouting and screaming started before Alexios had made it three paces toward the stairs, and he didn‟t wait to see if Sam followed before transforming into mist again so he could put himself between the attackers and their woefully inexperienced and