Savage Hunger (22 page)

Maya sighed. “We can’t fly home this time, can we?”

They always flew home. Even at that, a flight would be between eighteen and twenty-four hours. He worried that Kat might not be able to control shifting for that many hours or even sit in airports waiting for the next flight out. But going by boat would take forever. “If we took a flight, we’d go from Santa Marta with a stop in Bogotá, Colombia, then on to Houston. That’s where our SUV is,” he said.

“You don’t come here all the time, do you? Just a couple of times a year, right?” Kat asked. She sounded worried. Like she would have to risk doing this a lot with them.

He smiled. “We live near lakes and national forests or state forests in eastern Texas and enjoy visiting them in the middle of the night when we need to. We just come down here a couple of times a year to be one with the jungle like the jaguars are. But until we sort things out with your abilities, we’ll stay closer to home.”

“We can’t fly, can we?” Kat asked, looking as though she thought that was a really bad idea but still wished they could do it. The sooner they could get home, the better.

Connor took a deep breath. “Maybe we could charter a boat. I don’t see any other way around this. We’ve never had a problem with flying, but if you had to shift, I doubt you could do so in one of the lavatories. They’re pretty small. And then what if you weren’t able to shift back for several hours? We’d be in trouble.” He could just envision poor Kat, her tail in the commode, her paws up on the sink, fighting the urge to growl or roar in her distress, and the flight attendants pounding on the door when the line for the other bathroom grew too long.

“Maybe we could travel cross-country,” Maya said. “I know it can be dangerous…”

“And take forever,” Connor reminded her with a hard look. Though he wouldn’t have wanted Maya to turn Kat at any time, he wished she had done so at their home. Not here.

Maya let out her breath hard. “All right, so we have to charter a boat.”

Smugglers and pirates could be a problem, and Maya became deathly ill in a rocking boat.

“Or… what if we could take a short flight to somewhere north of here, maybe Belize or Costa Rica, stop, maybe stay overnight, then take another short flight the next day?” Kat said.

Connor shook his head. “We’ve done that. Even with the extra stops, it was still seven hours for one flight.”

“Cancún?” Maya asked, sounding hopeful.

That was where they had planned on going originally before Maya messed up their plans by scratching Kat.

“We checked the schedules. It’s about nine hours if we can get a flight out. And then it’s another six hours if we could still get the one flight to Houston after that,” Maya said.

“I’m all for it, if we can make some stops like that,” Kat said. “Though who knows if I can make it even that long on a flight. Then again, I might not change again until the next full moon.”

Connor and Maya shared looks. Shifting had nothing to do with the full moon. That was werewolf lore. The problem was not having any idea when Kat might have the uncontrollable urge to shift.

Much later that night, after traveling for miles in the jungle, they set up hammocks in a tree. Early the next morning, they began the long journey all over again. They saw another tribe in the Amazon while they were trekking through it, but like the one that had adopted them, this one just watched them, half-hidden in the shadowed foliage and not making any effort to greet or deter them. Connor hoped word had not spread to the farthest outreaches about the jaguar god and his harem.

They had traveled for miles already, and Kat was keeping up with the steady pace. He assumed that was in part because she’d had to be physically fit while in the military. But even so, he could tell she was weary by the way her shoulders slumped, and she was breathing too hard.

“Kat,” he said, catching up to her. “Let me take your bag.” He had already offered several times, but this time he wasn’t going to be dissuaded.

She looked up at him, her face tired. “No. We always carry our own weight in the military.”

“You’ve been sick,” he said firmly. “Let me take your bag.” This time he was insistent.

Maya had stopped and was watching them.

Kat sighed and handed over her backpack. “At the risk of sounding like a whiney child bored with traveling, will we be stopping soon?”

He smiled. “You have been anything but. Another two hours, though I believe Maya had an idea.”

Maya’s expression brightened. “We can stop and swim with the pink dolphins?”

“The river’s only a couple of miles from here. We can swim for a while, get something to eat, and continue on our way. That will give us a much-needed break.”

Kat’s spine straightened, and she even gave him an elusive smile. “What are we waiting for?”

Chapter 18

When Connor, Maya, and Kat reached the river, Kat began pulling off her shirt and boots and pants, eager to swim, to cool off a bit, and to wash off some of the sweat. Under the broad canopy in the thick of the jungle, the temperature was around eighty degrees and muggy without a breeze. Out in the sun, it was closer to one hundred, but a humid breeze swept across the river. Kat’s wary gaze examined the jungle. They had company, she thought uneasily.

She sensed more than saw that they were being watched. Were her jaguar senses making her more aware of her surroundings? She wasn’t sure.

“I don’t think we’re alone,” she said to Maya and Connor as she waded into the river. She was wearing just her leopard bra and panties, but they looked enough like a bikini bathing suit that she felt comfortable in them even if they had an audience. As long as they weren’t being watched by drug runners.

“You’re right, Kat,” Maya said. “I’m sure they’re hunters from another tribe. They’ve been following us for miles, ever since we left the other tribe’s territory.”

“Do you think they know about us?” Kat asked. She knew the jaguar-shifters had to remain a secret to society in general, and she didn’t feel comfortable that some tribes in the Amazon knew what they were. The information could prove disastrous in the wrong hands if anyone believed the natives’ tales.

She wasn’t at ease with what she was, either. Concern about having a sudden urge to shift had plagued her all day. Nothing had come of it, but she still had been anxious. What if this group of natives didn’t know about Kat, Connor, and Maya’s jaguar-shifter traits but all of a sudden saw Kat ditching her clothes and turning into a jaguar?

Would they revere her or want to kill her? And Maya and Connor, too?

She also couldn’t get used to the way her senses were so attuned. It was unnerving to be hearing so many more sounds than she could before, seeing the slightest movements that she wouldn’t have noticed before, and smelling the jungle in a new way. The jungle was even richer than she had noticed earlier—full of scents she couldn’t even begin to recognize, but she figured Maya and Connor could. They had been coming here for a long time as shifters, and they had learned from birth how to identify odors that her human nose couldn’t yet.

Connor had already stripped to a pair of boxers and joined Kat in the river. He ran his hand over her arm in a soothing caress. “I’m not sure if they realize what we are. Maybe like the others, they do know what we are like. Or they’re just curious about who we are and why we’re traveling through their land. We don’t have a guide, and we’re not hunting or gathering information or doing anything except moving through their territory, so they have to wonder what we’re up to.”

Wearing just a black bra and bikini panties, Maya joined them, then swam deeper into the river.

Kat knew that the freshwater dolphins swam there, but so did the piranha. She tried not to think of that. People didn’t get bitten by them all that often, she didn’t think, and she wasn’t bleeding anywhere, so she felt she should be safe enough. Even tourists were taken on excursions to swim with the Amazon River dolphins. She had seen numerous pictures of gray-haired grandmas floating with orange preservers strapped around their chests while reaching out to pet the pink dolphins, their noses up in the air as if delighted to see the human tourists.

Kat felt a soft-skinned dolphin glide close enough to brush up against her as if in greeting, and she grinned. They were beautiful and huge. And amazingly pink. Not all of them, though. Some were gray with a pink belly, or pink with a mottling of gray on top. The four she glimpsed rising out of the water and then diving back in were much bigger than she had imagined them to be. These were freshwater dolphins, not like the ones at the shows she had seen. But actually being in the water with them was both exhilarating and intimidating.

Connor stuck close to Kat as if she might need his rescue at any moment. She loved the way he was so protective of her and of Maya, too. He knew his sister’s capabilities better than he did Kat’s, so he seemed more concerned about Kat than she thought warranted. Except for the sickness, she normally was extremely capable on her own.

For now, she felt rejuvenated. Clean, refreshed, loving the water as she always had. And as she stroked the good-natured dolphins, she was thrilled they had stopped to swim and play.

“A male,” Connor said as she ran her hand over an even bigger dolphin.

“But females are usually bigger.”

Connor shook his head. “Not among these dolphins. The males are bigger and are more likely to be all pink.”

Maya swam on her back and said, “Some call them
botos
. Did you know that some claim they have supernatural powers? An Amazon legend states that a sexy man seduces a girl, gets her pregnant, and then returns to the river in the morning to become a boto again. Some believe that it is bad luck to kill one. Some believe that the spirits of drowned souls enter the boto’s body.”

“I wonder what they would say about us,” Kat said, watching the dolphins swim near, then disappear again underneath the dark water.

Maya smiled. “I believe they’re already making up tales. Connor has his own harem.”

“Which,” Connor said to his sister, “if it keeps you out of trouble with the men, suits me fine. Not that you’re part of my harem, but just that the locals think so.”

Maya grew thoughtful. “Do you think the other male jaguar we heard was a shifter or just a regular jaguar?”

“It’s hard to tell,” Connor said, although from the odd expression on his face, Kat wondered if he really did know but wasn’t committing himself. “I hadn’t been leaving a scent around the area like I normally do to let other beasts know that I’ve claimed the territory, what with Kat having been so ill. So it could have been either.”

Kat hadn’t thought about it much, but now she realized that Maya must want to check the other jaguar out. She’d said they hadn’t been able to locate any other jaguar-shifters. What if the guy was one, and Maya and he hit it off? She could have a mate without having to bite anyone to make it happen.

“Do you want to locate him and determine if he is?” Kat asked Maya. She figured that Connor didn’t want to look for the male jaguar, or he would have suggested it already. Was he worried
Kat
might be interested in the other male jaguar if he was a shifter?

Connor drew in a deep breath as he stood near Kat. “He’s stalking us.”

Kat’s mouth opened, but she didn’t say anything. He was following them and Connor knew? She glanced at Maya. His sister sighed. “At least we’re pretty sure he is.”

“As a jaguar?” Kat asked, amazed at the news.

Why hadn’t she seen any sign of him? She knew they were being followed, but she couldn’t say exactly what had alerted her. Maybe that sometimes a flock of parrots would shoot heavenward into the canopy some distance in the jungle, or that monkeys would titter and squawk at each other in warning, alerting the others of trouble. She had believed they were being followed by the native people who lived here, not by anyone who might wish to take them hostage. The thought that more of Manuel’s kind might be around still bothered her, but she figured anyone else like him would have made a move by now.

She had thought Connor was pushing them through the jungle so relentlessly to get them somewhere safe as soon as possible. But now she wondered if it was because he worried about another jaguar—or jaguar-shifter.

“A jaguar’s been following us,” both Maya and Connor said at once. Apparently they didn’t know for sure if he was a shifter. If he was running around as a man, they probably wouldn’t have thought he was a shifter.

Kat looked at the trees lining the banks of the river. “You’ve seen him?”

“In a tree, two hours ago,” Maya said.

“How did I miss him? Why didn’t you tell me?” When neither answered her right away, Kat asked, “Is he trying to figure out our relationships?” She assumed Connor didn’t want her thinking he was so controlling that he wouldn’t let her get to know another shifter.

“I’m sure of it, if he’s a shifter,” Maya said rather wistfully.

Connor had a harem, so who was with whom? Were both the females his? Like a regular jaguar who claimed a couple of females or more within his territory?

Kat hadn’t had a real family. Not one that had looked out for her. And she had never had a man care for her to such an extent, someone who was willing to take care of an unknown woman alone in the jungle who hadn’t been the best of company. She had been sickly, looking like death warmed over, so he was probably figuring she couldn’t have been very bright to be there in the first place.