Savage Hunger (19 page)

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.

Chapter 16

The waiting was killing her as Kat watched from the lookout post. Every movement—a butterfly settling on a leaf nearby, a monkey scrambling through a tree, a lizard raising its nose in the air—caught her attention, though she attempted to remain rigidly focused on the path that led to the hut.

She heard the men slogging through muddy water, figured they must be on a path she hadn’t walked before, and listened to see if she could hear any sound that would indicate Connor or Maya was near. That was why every little thing in the trees distracted her. She kept thinking she might see either of them appear as a jaguar, watching her from a tree branch and protecting her, as she was ready to protect them, just as if they were members of her special Army team.

She couldn’t make out how many men there were, other than the one who had been talking and Manuel. She still couldn’t believe Manuel had planned to hand her over to men who would ransom her, or worse. But she was American, a woman, and had been all alone. He had asked her a million questions while they hiked through the jungle, and she had thought that in his smiling, friendly way, he had just been interested in her Florida roots. But it hadn’t been that at all. He had been trying to learn just how valuable she might be.

How well connected.