Savage Hunger

Chapter 23

“I’m fine,” Kat said to Connor, but she didn’t feel fine at all, and from the expression of disbelief on his face, he knew it, too.

Kat felt sick to her stomach, not just because the man she had tried to take down on her last mission was out to get her again, but because she had now endangered Maya and Connor. They didn’t seem to be worried about that prospect. Just about her. And that made her feel worse.

These men were ruthless. How could she have let this happen?

Was this Wade Patterson’s doing? Was he working with Gonzales? The FBI profile on Gonzales said he didn’t like to lose. That he would go to considerable extremes to punish those who angered him. But she hadn’t thought she would be a prime target.

However, when she had been rescued, he had lost the control he had over her fate. And she had infiltrated his camp, so she supposed that could be enough to count her as one of the bigger targets.

What if the Army psychiatrist was in on it? What if he had suggested she go to the jungle to relive the experiences because he was in Gonzales’s back pocket? And Wade Patterson was to encourage her to return to the Amazon, too, except he would give a location that Gonzales knew about.

She shook her head at herself. The doctor had said she might feel that everyone was out to get her. Wasn’t this the ultimate paranoia? When she believed the man who had taken an oath to help her was out to get her, too?

She was torn between being glad Connor and his sister wanted to stick by her side to protect her and wanting to push them far away from her so they wouldn’t be in any danger. Neither Maya nor Connor seemed to want to let her go her own way, but Kat couldn’t do this to them. They didn’t deserve it.

After taking a bus to the city and locating a rental car, Kat balked at going any further with Maya and Connor. She intended to get hold of one of her points of contact in the Army, let him know what was going on, and then hope a team would arrive in time to take Gonzales out. But she had to leave Maya and Connor and do this on her own, hoping to God she wouldn’t shift at the worst time. She could get together with Maya and Connor again after this was all through. “If we split up…”

Maya’s jaw dropped and she frowned, then quickly looked at Connor and said, “No,” at the same time he did.

Their expressions were unyielding as Connor took Kat’s arm, made her get into the passenger side of the compact black rental car, and shut her door for her. Then he tossed their backpacks in the trunk.

Her passport and credit card were both in a zippered side pocket in her backpack, and she couldn’t go anywhere without them.

“We stay together,” Connor said as he slid into the driver’s seat, while Maya climbed into the backseat. He locked the doors.

“If we split up…” Kat said again, hoping she could convince him that her plan was reasonable. She really thought that the military could handle Gonzales and his men better than two jaguar-shifters and one ex-Army officer who couldn’t control her jaguar half.

Connor shook his head. “Hell, Maya, she’s as stubborn as you.”

“We have to stay together, Kat,” Maya said in a consoling way. “We can’t do this any other way.”

“You’re not safe with me,” Kat reasoned. “They’ll kill you. They’ll kill me also, but I’m sure Gonzales will first draw my death out for his own pleasure, just because I helped get so many of his men killed.”

“You’re not safe without us,” Connor said. “They’re not going to get the upper hand. Like Maya said, we stay together. As pure jaguars, we wouldn’t hunt in packs, but we’re not pure jaguars so we stick together.” He gave her a dark look. “We’ll do whatever it takes, Kat, to keep you safe. You’re part of the family now. We’re not giving you up.”

Kat let out her breath in a huff. These men meant business. She and Connor and Maya had gotten lucky earlier when they encountered Manuel and the others in the jungle and the hunters had stepped in to help them. She wasn’t sure they would get that lucky again.

“They have guns and lots of them. They’re brutal.”

“We know how to deal with them.” Connor tightened his hands around the steering wheel. “They’ll never know what hit them.”

But Kat didn’t want to rely on that. “I need to contact someone in the Army so they can handle him and his men. If I just call them—”

“No,” both Connor and Maya said.

Connor continued, “Your men barely got you out of the situation alive the last time. You’re not going to be their bait again. That’s exactly what you’d be. We’re not going to allow it.”

But she was bait no matter what she did, whether she went on her own, stuck it out with Maya and Connor watching her back, or asked the Army to do so. She knew now Gonzales wasn’t going to let her go.

He had contacts everywhere. Had he had her watched for the past year, waiting to see what would happen? Where she would go? When she would be within his striking distance again?

She sank into the passenger’s seat, resigned to the fact that Connor and Maya wouldn’t let her do this on her own, yet unable to let go of the notion that she had gotten them into this potentially deadly mess.

“Tell me everything you know about this Gonzales,” Connor said.

Kat didn’t say anything right away as they drove south to Bogotá on the winding roads edged by steep cliffs. She was glad she wasn’t afraid of heights.

She thought about Gonzales and his men. All that she knew was classified. But in truth, what did she really know? Only what the top echelon had fed her as the truth, and now she wasn’t certain how much of it was true. Except that he was one of the bad guys.

“Gonzales is a leader of a drug cartel. He’s contracted hits on several DEA bigwigs, and the Army finally got involved by sending in a special undercover unit.”

“You and your team,” Connor said.

“Me. I played the perfect naive tourist who ends up at a bar his men were known to frequent. The head shed had tried all kinds of different attempts at locating him but was never successful. So someone came up with the idea of an American college-age girl who had tons of money, was estranged from her fiancé, and decided to get away from high society and visit the Amazon on a whim.

“The plan was that the word would be sent to one of Gonzales’s operatives, and once Gonzales learned of it, he would want to take me hostage. The powers that be thought it was a way for one of us to infiltrate one of Gonzales’s camps, with the idea that he would eventually visit the camp to see the proverbial golden goose.

“My team was closely monitoring my movements the whole time I was at the bar. As soon as I sent them the signal, they would know I was in. We got lucky. If you can call it that. I ended up in the camp where Gonzales was actually staying. Then I fed the coordinates to my team. You know what happened after that.”

No one spoke for some time, then Maya said, “Okay, so you came here because Wade Patterson offered you an opportunity to meet up with Connor, maybe to document jaguars in the rain forest, and… your doctor intimated that revisiting a jungle could help you to cope with your night terrors. But didn’t you worry you might run into Gonzales’s men somewhere in the rain forest? Or that you might end up seeing the beast himself?”

“No. My identity was completely changed for the mission. I’m no longer in the military, just a tourist. I don’t even look the same.”

Maya frowned at Kat. “Are you sure the Army isn’t behind all this? Maybe encouraging you to return to the jungle? Maybe Wade Patterson is an American operative, and the whole plan was to use you as bait again, except without your knowledge this time,” Maya said, sounding suspicious.

“I’ve considered it,” Kat said drily. “I don’t know how long the military is supposed to work with a soldier experiencing night terrors and flashbacks. I figured it would have been longer than the time they worked with me. But the next thing I knew, they were medically discharging me.”

Instinctually, Connor had a really bad feeling about this. He wondered if maybe the Army was using Kat to do their dirty work. If she hadn’t been a jaguar-shifter like she was now, he would have gone to the papers with the story once he got her to safety. But as it was, they had to keep a low profile.

What would the Army think of her if they learned she had shifter abilities? They’d probably use her however they could in more covert operations. If they weren’t able to have her killed off the first time, why not the next time or sometime after that?

“We’ll get a hotel this evening that has Internet access,” Connor said. “I want to see everything you have on this Wade Patterson.” Connor was sure his expression was as dark as his mood when Kat cast an anxious look at him. She didn’t know just how primal he could be when one of his own was threatened.

Connor and his sister and Kat had traveled for several hours when they got off the main highway to get gas, but when they tried to return to the highway, the road back had been closed off. At once, Kat felt ill at ease. Reluctantly, Connor pulled the rental car onto a smaller road and headed south. He and Maya were both quiet, and she assumed they didn’t like the turn of events any more than she did.

Another detour took them down a dirt road through a jungle landscape, the vegetation encroaching on the road and making it feel as though they were driving through a tunnel of green, the trees and vines towering overhead and blocking out the hot sun.

Kat was feeling corralled as if they were cattle being herded to market. She realized she wasn’t too far off the mark when they came around a bend in the road and found a truck barricading it.

Wearing camouflage fatigues and armed with automatic rifles, several men motioned for Connor to stop the car, making Kat’s blood run cold. She didn’t recognize any of them, but they all looked like Gonzales’s men to her.

“Are they Gonzales’s men?” Maya asked.

“I don’t know,” Kat said, her voice strained, her skin clammy. She didn’t normally have panic attacks, but she was having one big time now.

“Could just be rebels or another bunch of drug runners. Hold on,” Connor warned.

He twisted the car off onto an even narrower dirt road, slamming into a couple of branches and scratching the car. “They’ll try to follow us, but we’ll ditch the car for the time being and melt into the jungle.”

He and Maya could vanish into the thick foliage as jaguars, sure. Their black rosettes and golden pelts blended in with the shadows of the forest. But Kat? The only way she was melting was into a puddle of nerves, and that wasn’t going to help her hide at all.

Connor pulled the rental vehicle off the road and into the thick tropical vegetation. They all shoved at the doors to make enough of an opening to squeeze out of the car. “Go, Maya. Take Kat. I’ll get our bags and the rifle,” he said, his voice commanding, low, rushed.

“You can’t get them all,” Maya said, hurrying to the trunk.

He jerked the bags out, and Maya took hers and Kat grabbed her own. Then the three sprinted deeper into the jungle.

“What now?” Kat asked, wishing she was armed to the teeth.

Connor motioned to a great climbing tree covered in vines and broad leaves and bromeliads. They climbed high into the tree, secured their backpacks on different branches, and covered the bags with vegetation to ensure they couldn’t be seen from the ground.

Connor’s expression was dark as he furrowed his brow at Kat. He said to her, “I’m leaving the rifle with you for your protection. Maya and I will shift and scout around. Stay hidden in the foliage. Don’t make a move unless you absolutely have to.”

Kat didn’t like being left alone in the jungle with the enemy surrounding them. She didn’t like that Maya and Connor would face down armed men, either, but she knew that’s what they intended to do. She wanted to assist them, but her jaguar self wouldn’t be much help. Shooting an armed target who was out for blood was one thing. She had been trained to do that. Biting a man to death… she shuddered at the disagreeable image that brought to mind.

Kat took a deep breath to settle her nerves. She felt like bait, sitting in the tree with the rifle ready as Maya and Connor removed their clothes, tucked them into their bags, and shifted. Both gave her a last look in farewell before they leaped for the forest floor.

Then they melted like a couple of jaguar wraiths, slipping unseen into the jungle.

And Kat was alone again in the jungle.

No, not alone. She heard the men moving toward the rental car in the distance and hoped they wouldn’t shoot out its tires or disable it any other way. Even if Connor and Maya and Kat did get the upper hand with these men, how would they get to Bogotá if the men had disabled their rental car?