Standing next to her own dead prey, Maya looked over at Kat, smiled in a jaguar’s way, then joined her. She listened to the man’s heart, but Kat had already done so. His head was turned at an odd angle, and she seemed to have broken his neck with the weight of her body. She didn’t think that was a jaguar’s way to kill its prey, but she was just learning after all.
She would have to practice jumping to learn how high and how far she could go to hit her intended target spot on.
They heard someone else rustling through the brush, and Kat knew the man or men would soon find the two dead men and raise the alarm. Maya quickly moved into the trees, making enough noise to draw the man’s attention, even though the cats normally moved silently. Kat waited for the man to follow her, to see if he was friend or foe. He didn’t call out, though.
Then she saw him trying to move quietly through the jungle, but he just wasn’t able. Maya was still making noise but hidden in the brush. Kat leaped onto an overhead branch, thinking she might do a better job taking him down in a jaguar way if she pounced from a branch rather than leaping from the ground.
She jumped down on top of him and landed on his head like the other, but this man cried out before he was silenced. When he fell to the ground, she thought she had killed him in the same way as the first man. Maybe that would be her special technique, since she couldn’t seem to master any other in quick order.
The man’s cry brought others running, though. Great! How many were there?
Then the oddest thing happened. Men were shouting to their fallen comrade, fallen dead comrade, tromping at a rapid pace to reach him, but they never arrived. Maya rejoined her, urging her to take cover. Kat hadn’t quite gotten the notion that they ambushed and stalked rather than facing their foe in a frontal assault. That’s how she had been trained in the Army. She would have to practice with Maya and Connor, like they probably did when they were cubs, tackling and taking each other down in an ambush.
She had a lot to learn. She jumped into a tree, and Maya leaped onto the same branch beside her. She licked Kat’s face, saying in a jaguar-shifter’s way that she had done all right.
They heard no one coming, and Kat felt antsy, wanting to look for Connor, to make sure he was all right. She kept telling herself that no gunshots had been fired, so the only way one of the men could have wounded Connor was if he’d drawn a knife. But she didn’t think anyone would be foolish enough to chance fighting a jaguar with a puny knife.
Then Connor materialized out of the ferns, saw her and Maya in the tree, and grunted. It was time to get on their way. All the bad men were dead. What would Gonzales think about that? This time he would know for sure his men had come across Kat and died at the hands of her and her companions. But he would probably wonder how that had happened. No bullets fired. No knife wounds. Only two women and one man to fight off all his men. And all his men were dead.
They returned to the tree where their backpacks rested, and Connor climbed and shifted. He tossed down Maya and Kat’s bags, then proceeded to get dressed.
Maya shifted also and dressed. Kat just stood there, panting as a jaguar, wishing she could shift, too, and get dressed.
She groaned, waiting for Connor and Maya to join her, and then they all ran back to their rental car. Kat smelled the scent of the male jaguar that had followed them before. She glanced at Connor. He didn’t look happy.
When they were in the car and on the road, Maya pulled some clothes out of Kat’s bag and tossed them to the backseat for Kat when she managed to turn back into a human. She might have gotten away with being a jaguar in a small village, but she didn’t imagine she could do so in the city of Bogotá.
“How did Kat do?” Connor asked.
Maya smiled at her brother. “She’s a great hunter. And you know what? She has a new technique we could learn from.”
Kat stared at her in disbelief. Maya thought her “technique” was worth sharing?
“Oh?” He cast a look back over his shoulder at Kat, his eyes sparkling with amusement and pride.
“Yep. Works like a charm. Without fail. But I’ll let her tell you about it later.”
Three hours later, Kat finally had the urge to shift. What had taken her so long? At least she was glad she had been a help to Maya and Connor with Gonzales’s thugs. But she was glad to be in her human form again, able to communicate, too. Maya had dozed off in the front passenger seat, and Connor was staring at the road, half-asleep himself, she thought.
“Connor,” she said quietly, not wanting to startle him and cause an accident.
He glanced back at her, his expression one of relief.
“Yeah, I’m back.” She pulled her hair back into a ponytail. “Are we almost there?” She thought they were because more urban sprawl existed now as they grew closer to the city.
“Half an hour. We’ll get a room, and then it’ll be another four hours before we check in for our midnight flight.”
“I’m not interested in him,” Kat said.
Connor nodded. “I know. But it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t want you.”
“Did you see him? How do you know he doesn’t want Maya and not me?”
“I saw him. If looks could kill, he would have eaten me alive. But instead, he acted as a part of our jaguar team and took out two of the men, while I brought down the other two. I might actually have liked him if it wasn’t for the fact that he wants you.”
“But what if he might be right for Maya?”
Connor’s dark look made her think he knew what he was talking about. She sighed. “All right. But you have to know he means nothing to me.”
But Connor still didn’t look really sure of himself, and that surprised her, considering how much he always seemed in charge. Cats were fickle, she reminded herself. Maybe he thought she’d be like one of his parents, loving and then leaving him far behind.
When they arrived in the city, they stayed at a classy hotel close to El Dorado International Airport. Connor paid for a suite with an adjoining room that Maya could have. That would give them all privacy and easy access in case they had any more trouble. They all ordered room service, ate fried cheese arepas and shish kebabs and then a dessert of crema de arroz, sweet rice with milk and coconut, in Maya’s room. Then Connor and Kat left Maya to shower and rest up until their late-night flight.
But Connor had other plans for Kat. He took her down to the lobby, which was brilliantly lit with floral-shaped chandeliers, expansive eggshell tile floors, and white marble walls. Pine and bleach cleaners filled his nostrils as he walked Kat past a winding marble staircase leading to a bar that overlooked an Olympic-sized pool, the aqua water inviting.
The place was ultra-elegant, but he preferred the jungle—the plants, the earthy and sweet floral fragrances, and the closed-in leafy cover—to this stark white openness with hard floors and pungent cleanser smells that left him feeling vulnerable and exposed.
Attempting to shake off the feeling that they were being watched, he led Kat to a bank of computers near the massive floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the pool so they could use the hotel’s pay-by-the-minute Internet service. Connor paid for the service, then motioned Kat to the chair while he pulled up another. “Let me see your emails from this Wade Patterson.”
Sighing, Kat signed on to the Internet to show Connor her emails, and after an hour of researching and showing Connor all that she had said she knew about Wade, Kat received an email from him.