“I can’t quit thinking about Manuel, either. He seemed so nice and then…”
Maya harrumphed. “He wasn’t nice, Kat. Nice guys don’t come into the jungle armed to the teeth, intent on taking a woman hostage for ransom.”
“I know but… I’ve never shot anyone when I wasn’t on a combat mission. I close my eyes and still see the blood spreading across his shirt.”
“Before or after we heard a ton of shots fired?” Maya reminded her.
“Have you had to kill men like this before?”
“Yes,” Connor said. “They’re a plague on mankind. Rule of the jungle. Eat before you’re eaten. Come on, let’s get on our…”
They heard movement below, and all three of them headed for the window. Flowers encircled the hut, and a tapir, freshly killed and cooked, with pineapples and plantains surrounding it, was laid out on umbrella-sized palm fronds, a peace offering of sorts, it appeared.
“Do you think the natives believe they offended you?” Kat asked quietly.
There was no sign of any of the hunters, but he suspected they watched, waited, and were hopeful that the jaguar people would accept their offering.
“It appears to be so,” Connor said, so surprised that he couldn’t believe it.
“Should we invite them? Like at a Thanksgiving feast?” Maya asked.
Connor rubbed Kat’s arm. “What do you want to do, Kat?”
“What if another one of them tells someone else like Manuel that we exist?”
“We’re still leaving the area.”
She nodded. “Then let’s invite them. Maybe the gesture will give them some peace of mind, and they did come to our aid yesterday.”
“If they appease a jaguar god and his goddesses, that will give the tribe power,” Maya said.
Connor chuckled softly. “No one said anything about jaguar goddesses.”
“No one had to,” Kat said. “Maya’s perfectly right.”
He shook his head. He could see where this was going. Kat and Maya would always gang up on him. Not that he couldn’t handle it. He smiled darkly.
They descended the steps and crossed to the small clearing where the feast was spread out. Kat sat down before the cooked tapir.
Connor brought out a knife and motioned to the jungle, then to the feast. “Come, join us,” he said in Spanish. “Eat with us. Share the feast.”
“Tell them the jaguar god and his goddesses have spoken,” Maya said.
He chuckled and carved off a slice of meat for Kat, then Maya.
“You can laugh all you want, Connor, but goddesses galore exist in South American lore. Not only did the Mayan culture worship the jaguar god of terrestrial fire, but it’s said that the jaguar goddess of midwifery and war might have been his spouse,” Maya said, her chin tilted up.
Even though they half watched to see if anyone would, no one ventured forth from the jungle.
Kat ate a slice of pineapple. “I agree. We’re just as important as any jaguar god.” She whispered to Connor and Maya, “Why don’t they join us?”
Connor cut off another slice of meat. “Most likely they’re afraid. Maybe they think we might still be angry. They’ve never made direct contact with us before. We’ve seen them on occasion, but they have always quickly disappeared as if they believed we’d be angry if we saw them watching us.”
Movement in the vegetation to their right made them all look that way.
An elderly man headed toward them, speaking in some unknown tongue. His gnarled hands were outstretched as if coming in peace and to show he had no weapons at his disposal. Connor was about to stand but thought better of it, afraid that towering over the slightly built man might intimidate him. Instead, he waved to the food and made a motion telling the old man to eat with them. “Sit and eat.”
The man stared him in the eye as if judging Connor’s sincerity, then nodded several times and sat cross-legged before the beast.
Connor handed him the knife. The old man hesitated, then smiled a little. Connor was offering his only weapon. But the old man probably knew that if Connor had felt threatened, all he would have to do was shift. Of course, all the man and his people would have to do was bring out their blowguns.
After the man chewed on a bite of the tapir for several minutes, he glanced back at the woods and motioned for others to join them. Several men came out of the woods and walked toward them, and Connor attempted not to show how much it bothered him that these people knew about them. He was still worried that the natives might take some action against them, and he feared for Kat’s safety the most because she couldn’t shift. Although if the men wanted to take them down with poisoned blow darts, he wasn’t sure their shifter genetics could counter the poison quickly enough to keep it from killing them before they could race off to escape.
But the men sat down and began to eat the meal, nodding and speaking softly to themselves as if they normally shared a meal with a jaguar god. The older man offered Connor a flask to drink from, but he declined and handed it back to the man.
“The drink might be drugged,” he warned Maya and Kat.
“They want to harm us or take us hostage? Is this like the Trojan horse offering?” Kat asked, sounding surprised.
Connor shook his head. “I venture it’s more likely that they want us to feel good and stay. Having a jaguar god—”
“And goddesses,” Maya interrupted.
Connor smiled. “…in residence could improve their status.”
“Improve their fishing, crops, livestock, their living,” Kat said. “Oh yeah, and the first big drought, the first failed crop, the first cow that drops dead, we’d be the ones responsible.”
“That’s true. And it’s another reason we’re leaving. I’ll tell them we’re leaving but we’ll be back, just like we’ve done in the past. I think they’ve watched us for years, Maya. But with Kat joining us, they believe we might be expanding our jaguar clan. Maybe they wanted us to know that was fine with them. I don’t want them to try and keep us here, and I’m afraid that’s what they’ll have in mind.”
After another hour of visiting, Connor stood and everyone else did, too. He told them that he, Maya, and Kat intended to leave and asked the villagers to watch over their home. He suspected now that the villagers had been doing so for years because no one had ever disturbed it while they were away for months at a time.
The elder blessed them, hoping they would be most fertile. He knew Maya understood him as she quickly looked at Kat. Kat didn’t understand, but the look Maya gave her made her suspect something important had been said.
“Come on,” Connor said. “We need to get moving if we’re to make any headway today.”
They thought that was going to be it—the men would take the leftovers back to their village—but instead the men picked up their staffs and began to disperse through the jungle. They were hidden from view, but Connor assumed the men were escorting them safely as far as they could go.
Connor took up the rear, Kat in between, and Maya led the way. He heard some noise behind him and turned to see women from the village carrying away the remaining tapir and other food that hadn’t been eaten. He was glad it wouldn’t go to waste.
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.