Tempted by the Jaguar #2: Revelation (Riverford Shifters) (7 page)

The eastern horizon had barely begun to
lighten as Hunter and Kylie walked hand-in-hand into the forest behind Hunter’s
apartment complex.

“When you said a morning run, I was
expecting a bit more light,” Kylie teased with a yawn.

Although she had already witnessed the
incredible healing speed of a shifter body, Kylie was still impressed that even
the teeth marks in her shoulder were gone, replaced by a faint purple bruise
that would probably disappear completely by the afternoon. They had been able
to enjoy a bit of bed play before getting ready to head out into the forest.

Without Kylie’s pheromones to enflame him
beyond reason, Hunter had opted for a more leisurely rhythm that was less
urgency and more worship that had Kylie screaming nonetheless. Even now, her
nipples still felt a bit sore from the attentions of his talented mouth.

“There will be, once you shift,” Hunter
said with a grin.

“Right. I forgot jaguars can see really
good in the dark. How much of this is your territory?” Kylie asked.

“About twenty square miles.”

“Really? So much?”

“It hasn’t always been mine. Some of it
belongs to my family.”

“That’s right. You did mention a brother
before.”

When the hand gripping her own tensed,
Kylie hastily added, “Sorry. You don’t have to say anything else about him if
you don’t want.”

Hunter was quiet for a long moment as
they walked farther into the trees, before he sighed and squeezed her hand.
“When we know each other a little better, then I’ll tell you about him
sometime.”

“Okay,” was all she could think to
reply.

She couldn’t help but wonder if his
brother was even still alive. Of course, a falling out could often be equally
as painful, especially if they had been extremely close.

Grasping for something to distract him
for the melancholia that had fallen over him, Kylie asked, “How much farther is
the cave you mentioned?”

Hunter flashed her a grateful smile. “Not
much farther. That it’s so close to the forest’s edge is the reason I use it to
store my clothes while I’m shifted. It’s so small that it’s not good for much
else. Oh, and before I forget, once you’re shifted, be on the lookout for
humans. Sometimes one or two’ll wander pretty deep into the forest and just
happen to catch a glimpse of us while we’re shifted. That’s why there’re so
many stories of people seeing jaguars around here when there haven’t been any of
the non-shifter variety living in the wild here in Texas for decades.”

“Not just jaguars, but I’ve heard
stories of ‘black panther’ sightings all over the state, too,” Kylie said with
a nod.

Hunter laughed. “Yeah, about that, I
don’t know if you’ve ever met Ed Betancourt—he’s a plumber—but all those sightings
come courtesy of his cousin Charlie who lives in California. Charlie’s jaguar
is melanistic, and he enjoys popping up on unsuspecting people while on his
runs. He’s proud to have added to the local legends of several states.”

“Yeah, it’s all fun and games until
someone shoots him,” Kylie replied dryly.

“Oh, they already have,” Hunter said,
not looking particularly concerned. “We don’t have any melanistics in our clan,
but we do have someone whose jaguar is an albino with blue eyes. I’ll introduce
you to him sometime. Like Charlie, he enjoys showing himself off, though he’s
nowhere near as obnoxious about it.”

“Speaking of, I hope everyone I was
supposed to meet yesterday isn’t too irritated that we never showed.”

“Kylie—I hate to break it to you, but I
think
every
shifter in Riverford has heard about you unleashing the full
potency of your charms in Southern Glacier by now.”

“College on Monday is going to be sheer
torture, isn’t it?” she moaned. “I hate being the center of attention on the
best of days, and now I have to worry about people snickering behind my back.
Only two days as a shifter and I’ve already managed to make myself a
laughingstock!”

Hunter rubbed a thumb soothingly over
her hand. “You know, I never did ask you what you’re studying.”

“Premed like my dad. I was thinking of
doing something in genetics, developing gene therapies for all those nasty
genetic disorders.”

Hunter suddenly stopped cold. “Genetics
is often a career path lion shifters choose,” he said slowly. “In fact, most of
the top geneticists in the world are lion shifters. They’re also really big in pharmaceuticals.
Going into that kind of field—well, let’s just say it tends to make the clans
really suspicious.”

Yes, I know.
Kylie had gotten exactly the kind of response she had
hoped for. Unfortunately, the timing of his question sucked. This was hardly
the place or the time to try to dig more information out of him, especially
when he said that they were supposed to be patrolling for Sniffers and trespassing
gator shifters. Yet…

He may now be her lover, but that didn’t
mean she wasn’t going to be relentless in pursuing any and everything he knew
about the lion clans. Damn. She would just have to get what she could now and
find a way to bring the subject up later on tonight.

She had made her choice last night when
she had taken Hunter’s face into her hands and crossed the line that shouldn’t
have been crossed, and that meant leaving Riverford was no longer an option.
She couldn’t afford to falter now that she had so much more to lose.

“Are you trying to tell me that studying
genetics is—what?
Taboo
?” Kylie demanded with as much outrage as she
could muster.

He sighed and looked at her with dismay.
“Taboo doesn’t even begin to describe it. It’s as good as announcing yourself
as a lion supporter.”

“Well, there goes that career out the
window,” Kylie spat. “It’s a good thing I’m still just a sophomore and aren’t
very far along into the core curriculum yet. At least tell me that other
medical fields are okay, or I think I might just start spitting fire!”

“Just stay away from genetics and
pharmacology and you’ll be good. Leave the fire spitting to the dragon
shifters.”

“Wait—what?
Dragon shifters
!”
Kylie exclaimed in genuine shock. There’s no way there could be—her parents
would have definitely told—

“Dammit! You’re pulling my leg, aren’t
you?” she accused just as he exploded in laughter.

Hunter pulled her against his chest and
planted a firm kiss on her lips. “The look on your face was priceless. The
closest we come to dragons are the komodo shifters, though if I had to pick a
clan other than jaguar, I wouldn’t have minded being born the mythological type
of dragon shifter.”

Kylie scowled. “I’m so glad my ignorance
amuses you. We’ll see how much you’re laughing tonight when I go stay at my
dad’s instead of your place.”

“Maybe I should call you my little
firecat instead of hellcat,” he said with a grin, not looking concerned at all
by her threat.

“And maybe I should just knee you in
the—”

Kylie abruptly turned her head sharply
to the right and scented the air a split-second before Hunter did the same, her
jaguar senses going into full warning mode. As the wind had slightly shifted, three
new smells had entered her sphere of awareness all at once. She had smelled all
of them before, one just last night coming from Hunter’s tiger friend Maxim’s
security guards. Another was an acrid smell that tickled her memory but wasn’t
immediately evident. However the last—there was no mistaking
that
coppery scent.

Blood.

The look in Hunter’s eyes was one hundred
percent jaguar, deadly and inhuman, as he stared off into the darkness of the
forest in the direction where the stench of blood was strongest. A low,
menacing growl rose from his throat, and it took everything Kylie had in her to
keep herself from growling, too. Something told her it would just set Hunter
even more on edge. If there was danger, she didn’t want him getting hurt over
some shifter instinct to protect his female.

“It’s a male wolf shifter,” he said, his
lips pressing together tightly into a hard line, “about a couple hundred yards
deeper.”

He turned to look down at her, and the
threat in his eyes softened to something that just looked troubled. “Damn it—I
need to go check things out, but I can’t let you go back to the apartment
alone. You can smell it, can’t you? The blood? The fear?”

Kylie suddenly stilled. An image of the
sick bastard that had attacked her covered in blood from her claws flashed into
her mind. It was no wonder that the acrid smell was familiar. She had smelled
enough fear that horrible night to last her a lifetime.

Her heart sped up. “Is he alone?” she
asked softly, taking a deeper whiff of the air.

It smelled like only one individual’s
scent, but she was still too new to her shifter nature to trust her judgment
just yet.

Hunter glanced back into the forest,
before he fixed her with an even more troubled look. “I don’t smell any scent
other than the wolf’s and my own territory markings, but…” He released her and
grabbed her right hand tightly. “Come on. Stay at my back, and no matter what
happens, if I tell you to shift and run,
you do it
.”

“What’s going on, Hunter?” Kylie
demanded as they hurried towards the wolf.

“Ignoring the fact that a wolf entered
my territory without permission, there’s no way someone that’s lost the amount
of blood I smell could have come this far alone without help,” Hunter replied
darkly, “so unless he came out here to commit suicide, he had to have been
either dumped in here to die or he was injured here. Hate to say it, but I’m
hoping it’s a suicide.”

“What!
Why
?” Kylie exclaimed,
completely taken aback.

Hunter glanced over his shoulder at her.
“Because if someone else entered this forest with him, then they managed to
completely
mask their scent
. Hell, even rocks have a scent. Only someone wearing a
hazmat suit can do that, and I don’t imagine that type of protective gear is
something you’d readily find outside of a lab or a Prepper’s doomsday bunker. Remember
what I told you about the lions? That they were geneticists?”

Kylie felt her blood run cold. “You
think—how sure are you that it’s them?”

“All I can say is that the lions have
breached other shifter territories using hazmats before,” he replied grimly.

Kylie squeezed his hand in alarm. “Then
that means they could still be in your territory somewhere!”

Her eyes darted nervously to the vast
gulf of trees that surrounded them. The sun had risen a little bit farther over
the horizon, but it was still too dark for her human eyes to see any detail
beyond basic shapes.

“Or we could both be jumping at
shadows,” he added with a small, self-deprecating smile.

The snap of a twig had Hunter suddenly
crouching down into a defensive stance in front of her with a hiss. The sound
was so cliché, that for a moment, Kylie had to struggle not to start giggling
like a loon. Then movement in the far-off gloom caught her eye, and she
instantly lost all desire to laugh, to even
breathe
.

For an endless moment, all Kylie could
hear was the thumping of her racing heart and the rattling of tree branches in
the wind as she stared hard into the trees. The rest of the forest had gone
unnaturally silent.

Here there be predators…

Then she heard it, a faint, high-pitched
whine like that of a dog on its last breath. Unconsciously, Kylie leaned
forward and squinted in the direction of that sound before recoiling as her
nose was abruptly inundated with the metallic smell of blood a split-second
before a reddish, tawny-colored wolf head popped out from behind the large
trunk of a tree only a few feet away. Kylie let out a short cry of startlement,
and back-peddled a couple of steps before she saw the wolf head suddenly
collapse onto its side.

Without a word, Hunter straightened, and
Kylie found herself being tugged by the hand behind him as her lover hurried over
to the fallen animal. She could hear the wolf’s labored breathing before they
had even reached him.

When the wolf’s entire body came into
view, Kylie let out another cry, but this time it was one of horror. Even in
the barely-there light of early morning, Kylie could clearly see all the blood
without her nose practically screaming it into her brain. The fur of his back
and legs was so matted with blood that the wolf almost appeared as though he
had been partially skinned.

“My God…”

Bile rose to Kylie’s throat as she let
go of Hunter’s hand and dropped to her knees beside the poor creature, wanting
to help him with everything in her being but unsure how or even if he
could
be helped at this point.

The wolf’s eyes were closed tightly, its
muzzle a rictus of unimaginable pain. He was still breathing, but the ragged
breaths were now almost inaudible.

“What can we do?” Kylie asked faintly as
Hunter knelt down beside her. With that much blood, it was dangerous for her to
get any nearer.

“I’ll call Needles, but…” He trailed
off, but he didn’t need to finish.

Hunter dug out his cell phone from his
front pocket while Kylie placed a hand gently onto the wolf’s head in a gesture
of comfort. It was one of the few uninjured places on his mutilated body. She
wanted to let him know that at least he wasn’t alone, that someone was
horrified at what had been done to him.

This close, the smell of blood was so
strong it was nauseating. In order to distract herself from it, Kylie tried
focusing on Hunter’s voice as he spoke urgently into his phone, but it was as
though the smell had permanently stained the inside of her nostrils. She
imagined she would now smell it for days.

“He dragged himself.”

Kylie jumped at the sudden declaration
at her ear before she turned slightly to look at the place Hunter pointed
towards. A trail of blood, disturbed dead leaves, and squashed grass led
through the trees straight to the pitiful body before her.

Kylie swallowed thickly. “That he even
managed to move at all is mindboggling. There’s so much blood, I can’t even
tell how he’s injured!”

“We need to try to get him to wake up,”
Hunter said. “He needs to shift back into his human form to have any hope of
surviving long enough for Needles and his crew to get here.”

The poor guy had probably passed out
from the pain. It seemed cruel to have to wake him, but Kylie just nodded and
bent down to his ear. However, before Kylie could say a word, the wolf’s
muscles seemed to ripple all at once, causing her to flinch back with her heart
suddenly in her throat. He let out a pained howl before he began to rapidly
shift back into a man.

The wounds on his back had become more
visible as the fur was replaced with skin. Wide, gaping lines of sliced open
skin and muscle were pulled wider open until she could have laid her entire arm
lengthwise within some of them, only to be stretched out in the next second
into slices the width of a pencil and as long as the length of his back from
shoulder to just shy of his butt. As he shifted, the wolf shifter’s howls of
agony gradually turned into the screams of a man.

The entire process had happened in less
than a minute, but it was one of the most horrifying things Kylie had ever
seen, and as she had often found herself in the ER many an evening to see Paul,
she’d seen a damn lot—including wounds very similar to this.

“Those are claw marks, aren’t they?”
Kylie exclaimed. “His entire back is shredded just like a guy I once saw in the
ER that was attacked by a leopard he was keeping illegally as a pet inside his
house.”

“Yes,” the wolf shifter answered
hoarsely.

Her eyes instantly flew back down to
bleeding man’s face and met a pair of pale, pain-filled eyes.

“Don’t try to talk,” she said firmly.
“Hunter’s called for help. Just stay still and save your strength.”

“Hunter!” The wolf abruptly grabbed
Hunter’s arm, making Kylie yelp in surprise. “Thank God I found you!” he
slurred. “My mate! You have to save my mate—
please
! He said you could
help us—all of us!”

“Whoa, slow down, buddy. What the hell
happened to you?” Hunter demanded. “Who said I could help you?”

“Your brother,” he gasped, and then
promptly passed out.

“His brother?” Kylie echoed, turning
questionably to Hunter—and gasped.

Hunter looked for all the world like he
had just been kicked in the face by a horse.