Savage Hunger

Chapter 15

His senses on high alert, sniffing the air and listening for any movement, Connor walked with Kat onto the screened porch. He had a bad feeling about the men looking for Kat and didn’t like where this seemed to be headed.

Then to his astonishment, Maya roared. What the hell? She was supposed to be watching from the lookout post with the rifle aimed and ready.

He knew her unexpected behavior meant that the men they had heard talking in the jungle were dangerous. Maya must have overheard more of their conversation and changed tactics.

“Kat, can you shift?” he asked quietly.

She would be safer as a jaguar, he thought. She could climb high into a tree and stay hidden in the canopy while he and Maya took care of the men.

She shook her head, her expression schooled.

“Stay here, then.”

“I can shoot. You know I was in the Army. I had rifle and handgun training. I even qualified as a sharpshooter. I can shoot.”

He knew she must be able to, though he had not seen her actually kill anyone.

“I don’t want them to know where you are or even be able to get close to you.” His heart was pounding furiously, and he realized he didn’t want her anywhere near the men. He could see losing her in a shower of bullets. Yes, he and his sister healed more quickly than humans and could survive injuries a human might not be able to. Although if they bled out too fast, their healing genetics wouldn’t have time to take care of the wounds. But what if that part of the genetic change hadn’t taken effect for Kat? What if she wasn’t exactly like them?

“I can’t shift,” she said, her voice urgent, hushed.

He wasn’t sure if she meant she truly couldn’t or she wouldn’t, although he suspected she didn’t have the ability to shift at will like he and his sister could. Hopefully, with time, she would.

“Come on.” He took her to a vine-covered tree trunk that looked as though it was part of the vegetation, a naturally occurring fallen trunk high up in the canopy that butted up against their primitively made lookout post.

It was a heavily concealed spot high in the trees that easily hid the viewer from sight, perfect for observing unwelcome visitors while staying camouflaged from view. He stood with her there now, not wanting to leave her but having no other choice. He didn’t want her to see what he might have to do to the men, and he had to hurry and join Maya before she got herself into a dangerous bind.

He would judge the men while listening to their conversation and learning what they had in mind. If they turned out to be a danger to Kat or his sister or himself, he would take care of them.

Maya was already stalking the men, listening and waiting for him to join her. That’s what her roaring was all about. He hoped she wouldn’t act until he was there to watch her back.

“Maya’s out there,” he warned Kat, as if getting permission from her to take his leave.

Kat looked determined to see this through and scooped up the rifle lying where Maya had left it on the wooden floor of the small lookout platform. Maya’s clothes were sitting in a pile in one corner where she had shifted.

“Go,” Kat urgently whispered. “I’ll be all right. I’ve done this before. Protect Maya.”

Her raw concern for Maya touched him. If he’d had any doubts before about Kat’s loyalty to him and Maya, he now knew Kat was truly one of them. Part of their little jaguar-shifter team.

He cupped her face quickly, kissed her, and hugged her, wanting to hold her forever and protect her from the evils of the world. Beyond a doubt, he knew she would be his. He might have a time convincing her they were meant to be together, but he would do whatever it took.

Then he released her. He was out of his clothes in no time, feeling Kat’s eyes on him the whole time, and then he shifted into his jaguar coat. After giving her one last lingering look, feeling torn by needing to keep both Maya and his sister safe and not being able to be in two places at once, he leaped onto the tree branch above Kat. She gazed up at him and gave him a slight nod, telling him she would be okay.

No matter how much he wanted to believe it would be so, he had his doubts. Anything could go wrong in the rain forest. All he had to do was think back to that day a year ago when Kat had nearly died.

He leaped to another branch and then another, the adrenaline speeding through his blood, propelling him to seek out Maya and the men and determine what they intended to do next.

He didn’t want to kill them if he didn’t have to. But if he needed to kill to save Maya or Kat’s life, or even his own, he would have no qualms about doing it.

Maya had been following the men, who were still a distance from the hut. They were walking along one of the paths that Maya and Connor had made, so the trek wasn’t all that difficult for them. She counted five men, all dark haired and bearded, unwashed and armed to the teeth.

“I still don’t know why the hell you left her behind in the jungle, Manuel,” one of the men said in Spanish.

Manuel. The man Kat said had been her guide.

“I told you. I was trying to lead Juan’s men away from her. If he’d found her, he would have ransomed her. You wouldn’t have been able to turn her over to Gonzales, who would have been most generous with all of us. I was doing what I thought you wanted.”

“Then later you couldn’t find her, damn you. By now she’s sure to be dead. If we can find her body, we can give it to Gonzales to prove she’s dead, but he won’t like it. He had plans for the woman.”

“I didn’t think it would take me that long to get away from Juan’s men. I was afraid they suspected I worked for you and Gonzales. When I returned for her—”

“Yeah, what? Two days later?”

“I couldn’t get back. But one of the local villagers swore he saw a man carrying her to the falls in the area. Kathleen had to be the woman, from the description the boy gave of her.”

Hell, Maya thought to herself. She had been guarding the falls in her cat form while Connor was helping Kat to wash, but she had never seen anyone watching them. When had it happened?

“The same villager who said that a jaguar god lived near there? That the god had found a new mate?” The hefty man shook his head.

A shiver stole up Maya’s spine. These men thought that a jaguar god existed? Had the natives actually seen Maya or Connor shape-shift? This was so not good. She and her brother could hold their own against these men, but Kat could be in real danger.

Movement in the jungle was constant—lizards scurrying across branches, monkeys swinging into nearby trees, birds taking flight, but the large spotted cat that sifted in and out of shadows like a feral predator on the hunt caught Maya’s eye. Connor leaped to a branch opposite the tree she was in, acknowledging her with a slight bow of his head. Then his ears perked and his gaze focused on the men.

“What if what they say is true? That a jaguar god lives here? Hunts here? Kills here? What if she’s with him? What if he has taken her for his own woman? That would explain why she’s still alive,” Manuel said.

Hmm, Maya thought. A jaguar god and a goddess, too. In fact, there are two of us now. She gave a big cat’s version of a smile.

“You sound like you’ve been getting into our stash,” the one who seemed to be in charge said.

“Yeah, but we heard its distant roar late last night all over the damned place. He could be here, watching us now.”

“And he will die if he shows his spotted hide here.”

Manuel looked nervously about, but he didn’t see either Connor or Maya sitting high above them in their jaguar forms, watching them and ready to strike when they had the advantage, if Connor decided it was necessary.

“Besides, didn’t you say he lives in a hut on stilts? Why would a jaguar god live in a man-made dwelling? A crummy hut?”

Manuel slashed at a vine with his machete. “He’s a man sometimes. I told you. He was carrying the woman to the falls.”

“Maybe we can ransom him, too. Surely someone would pay good money for a god,” the man said, sounding as though he was making fun of Manuel.

Connor was ready to take the men out because they intended to turn Kat over to Gonzales, and Connor and Maya couldn’t get Kat to safety quickly. He motioned to Maya to go after the last man, who was trailing way behind on the path and would soon be out of sight of the other men. Was he afraid to keep up and face what Manuel feared? A jaguar god?

And what had the villagers really seen? Either Maya or him shape-shifting at some time or another? As careful as they had been and as thick as the foliage was, screening them from long-distance viewing, he hadn’t thought anybody had ever seen them. He supposed being a jaguar god would be all right as long as the villagers kept it to themselves and the word didn’t spread. But the word already seemed to have spread, at least to these men.

What would happen next? If anyone in the scientific community believed there was any truth to the rumors, Connor could imagine teams of biologists descending on the area to search for the jaguar god. Forget Bigfoot or werewolves. Here, they could have the real thing. Not the stuff of myths or legends, but a true jaguar-shifter.

As far as Connor knew, the big cat-shifter genes had been passed on from generation to generation and had been part of ancient cultures. The problem was that too few jaguars existed, and wherever the jaguar-shifters were, they were too elusive to band together and help each other. Besides, communicating with each other didn’t seem to come naturally to their kind.

Maya leaped from her branch to another and continued to move through the canopy until she could come up behind the last man in the group.

He couldn’t see what she was going to do next, but he was ready to target the next man who fell behind. Connor had sent Maya after the one who was farthest from the group so she wouldn’t have to face several if any of the men sounded an alarm.

As if nothing was amiss, Connor moved through the trees, getting closer to his prey as the primal need to hunt raced through his blood. He prepared to jump from the tree, stalk the man, and pounce.

Maya had smelled the wretched man long before she attacked him and witnessed the array of weapons on him—the belts of bullets, the rifle, the guns, the long wicked knives, and the machete. He smelled of weed and sweat and fear.

He was falling farther and farther back from the others. She assumed that he hoped the other men would encounter the jaguar god first and take it down before he had to deal with it, if such a creature existed. And if things didn’t work out for the other men and the jaguar god came out on top? The man she was stalking would vanish into the thick rain forest, pretending he had never been with these thugs. Then he’d hotfoot it out of there and tell the world what he had witnessed.

The moisture from the ground was rising into the steamy atmosphere like primordial mist as it always did in late morning, forming clouds that filled the sky high above the canopy. Thunder booming in the distance warned of an impending storm.

Water from a nearby tributary had overflowed its banks, and the water on the path came to halfway up the man’s calves. He sloshed along, the mud sucking at his black boots and gripping them as he struggled to pull one foot out and then the other, his progress slow. He looked warily about, a bearded man with hard, black eyes and the smell of blood on his person. He had killed or injured people and drawn blood; his clothes reeked of it.

Maya could tell from the way he moved that he wasn’t injured, so she knew it wasn’t his blood. Besides, the blood smelled like it had come from at least three different people.

He kept looking around like an owl, his head twisting back and forth, searching for the jaguar god, she suspected. But she was the goddess of the equation. Connor would take out the man in front of him.

This man wasn’t even keeping the guy in front of him in view, although he could hear the men talking up ahead. She suspected that made him feel confident he wasn’t getting too far behind.

Suddenly, he tripped over a tree root in the muck and fell to his hands and knees in the muddy water, cursing out loud. That’s when she saw the tattoos on his bare shoulder, identifying him as one of the members of a southern drug cartel.

Well, one less now.

She leaped from the tree closest to the path and pounced on him. Pushing his whole body into the water and mud, she kept him buried. He fought to get out from under the weight of her jaguar form, trying to get air. She remained in place, jostling her position a little to keep him under. Until he ceased to struggle. She waited a moment to be sure he was dead. Nothing. Not a flutter of activity.

He was finished.

With her teeth, she grabbed his belt of bullets and dragged his body out of the water. She hoped she could get him to the river—where he would add to the cycle of life by feeding the piranhas once they smelled the blood on his clothes mixing with the river water—without being caught doing it. All his weaponry would eventually fall to the muddy river bottom, with no one knowing anything about it. And none of it would be used against another living soul. He would never torture or kill another human being.

She just had to make sure no one spied her dragging him to the river.

That’s what she was thinking when she caught sight of a native boy, maybe twelve or thirteen, scrawny, with wide, dark eyes and carrying a bow and arrows, tipped most likely with the poison of one of the deadly poisonous frogs that lived in Amazonia.

He was out hunting, and now he had seen her out hunting, too.

Connor heard the splash on the path behind him, followed by cursing, although what was happening was out of his view because of the dense foliage and the way the path twisted and turned through the trees. The man in front of him hadn’t heard the splash, or he might have called out to see what had happened to his comrade who had been following him. Like the other man, he was slowing his already slow-as-a-snail pace as he slogged through the muddy water.

Connor twisted his head to the side, thinking he heard the faint sound of Spanish music. But then he realized the man he was stalking was wearing small earbuds, the cord attached to each hanging down into a pocket as he listened to music. Dumb move. In the jungle, a man needed all the senses. Sure, it was noisy and the jungle sounds never seemed to quit, so a man might think that nothing would change to alert him that something was wrong anyway.

But a flight of macaws took off, and the observant person would have heard them take wing, looked up, and realized why. A jaguar had been spotted.

Or the splash in the water might have been noted, and if the man had been all that concerned, he would have gone back to find a female jaguar hauling his friend off to be dinner for a bunch of hungry piranha. Just where this man was bound to end up.

The tattoos on the man’s arms indicated that he was part of a gang, and he was armed as if ready to fight in a war, not just take a woman hostage. A shrunken head dangled from a chain at his left pocket, and smears of blood mottled his shirtsleeves.

The man had serious issues. But before long, he wouldn’t have them anymore.

He began singing the Spanish words to the song and nodding his head to the beat while trudging through the water at a slower pace. His eyes were on his boots when Connor took him out.

The man would never know what hit him as he went from walking along with a tune in his head to being buried in water with a 250-pound cat pressing his body into the mud. He choked on the water and mud, writhing to get free, but he would never be able to budge the jaguar.

Connor was too heavy, too muscled, too powerful, too determined—a jaguar god. He shook his head at the notion, which was bound to get them into trouble if the villagers shared what they thought they had seen with the rest of the world. Yet he hated to give up his and Maya’s jaguar retreat in the Amazon.

He left the dead man floating in the muddy water, eager to stalk the next man before the last three reached Kat. This one would stay put until Maya could return for him and dispose of him in the same manner as the first. Even though he and Maya could use their powerful bite to eliminate the threat at once, it was better if they could terminate the men in a way that didn’t make the local populace believe that jaguars were responsible for the men’s deaths.

What would happen then? Possibly hunters would descend on the area and attempt to destroy the jaguars that had a taste for human blood. Even if the jaguars didn’t eat the men, they would most likely be considered man-eaters. He and Maya, and now Kat, couldn’t afford that kind of trouble.

He hadn’t moved very far when he heard muffled shots ring out from the direction of the hut.

Kathleen.

His blood on fire, Connor bolted in her direction.