Savage Hunger

Chapter 17

Relieved that they had had no more difficulties during the night, they planned to leave early the next morning after they packed their backpacks and dressed for the long trek. Kat was quiet, subdued, and Connor wasn’t sure what was bothering her. Well, besides the fact that Maya had turned her into a jaguar-shifter, men had tried to take her hostage, she’d had to kill one of them, and they still faced the difficult task of getting her back to the States without any further difficulties.

“Anything wrong?” Connor asked for the third time that morning.

She shook her head, but he knew better. He still assumed her concerns had something to do with the man she had killed. The man she had thought highly of. But probably she was also worried about the trek ahead of them. Would she make it to the States before she had the urge to shift again?

Or maybe she was worried about another hostage-taking situation.

He ran his hand reassuringly over her arm. “We’ll be all right.” He meant it, although he wasn’t sure how much trouble they would get into before they truly were all right. But together, the three of them would make the best of their situation. “He would have taken you hostage, Kat. You had no choice.”

Maya had been quietly listening to them. He had hoped maybe she would speak to Kat and see what the problem was, but although they were both women, they weren’t alike. Not when Maya and he had been born shifters. He figured Maya didn’t know what to say to Kat to ease her mind, any more than he did.

“We’ll make it, Kat.” He pulled her into his embrace, but gently, worried she might still be a little sore from her fall the day before, although she had seemed fine when they made love last night.

She squeezed him hard and looked up at him with the determination to see this through. “I’m no longer sore. I won’t break.”

But she seemed fragile to him, despite her strong words.

“You’re just worried about what will happen.”

“What if I shift? I can just envision being the Incredible Hulk, tearing out of my clothes to change, but instead of bright green skin, I’d have gold fur with black spots and very big teeth.”

“And you’d be beautiful.”

She snorted.

“You would be. You were.”

She sighed. “But what if it happens?”

“If we’re in the jungle, no problem. We’ll hide our packs in the trees and join you up there to sleep a while until you shift back.”

“And if I do it at a border crossing?”

“You won’t. Think positively.” He wanted to tell her to think like a human, but he had no idea what had triggered the shift in her the first time around.

“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.

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?”