Two of the women answered that it was a stranger, they didn’t know, and the guards opened fire, their guns spouting bullets. Meiling had to cover her mouth to keep from crying out. She should have known the guards had been instructed to murder the women if there was any kind of trouble. Frankie had all but told Gedeon they were expendable. That meant the teens and younger children in the huts were as well. The men “training them” had to have heard those shots.
Meiling realized it was going to be a massacre. Gedeon realized it as well. With one incredible leap he was on the porch in the doorway, his gun blazing, and then he was running for the forest, his speed a blur. She saw him shed his jacket on the run. She was fast, but there was no way she could possibly keep up with him. She did stop to pick up his jacket, folding it over her arm as she sped after him, leaping over fallen tree trunks and avoiding tall termite hills.
She spotted his shirt in a tangle of brush off the trail. He was cutting through the jungle, well off the trail. She followed, using as much speed as possible. She was used to sprints, not steady long runs. She found his trousers on a low branch and beneath it his loafers.
She knew leopards. Shifters. They were all bad. Not just bad. She had thought they were the worst kind of evil on the planet, until she had begun tracking Frankie and his brother, Miguel. The brothers weren’t shifters and knew nothing of them. They came from a family of criminals, making their money running drugs and spending it like water when all around them were incredibly poor people. They cared nothing for those living in abject poverty. They seemed to care for nothing but themselves.
The moment she saw Gedeon, she knew he was leopard.There was no mistaking them once you’d seen one. She’d never seen one quite so fast in human form. She couldn’t imagine what he would be like in leopard form. She was shocked that he’d cared enough about the women to try to save them. One man—even a shifter— against so many didn’t seem good odds.
As a rule, when seen or caught in the wild, the Amur male leopard weighed between 71 and 110 pounds and the female weighed between 55 and 94. Meiling had seen shifters with leopards weighing far more than that. It didn’t seem to slow their leopards down at all. Gedeon was built in the way of shifters, with roped muscles, a dense chest, narrow hips leading to muscled thighs. He was astonishingly fast. Meiling was certain he couldn’t be an Amur leopard, not when he had empathy for the women being treated in such appalling ways.
She kept running, but by the time she reached the second cabin, she found only death. The leopard had come too late to save the teens from the guards. They had been murdered the moment their trainers heard gunfire and couldn’t raise anyone on their phones to instruct them otherwise. Despite the trainers having the advantage of knowing someone or something was coming for them, despite them having the advantage of numbers, the leopard had torn them to shreds. All of them. Then he was gone, rushing for the next cabin, leaving no one behind to sneak up on him while he was doing his best to save the children.
Meiling stopped in the heavy brush some thirty feet away from the third cabin. One of the patrolling guards lay dying another ten feet from her. The leopard hadn’t delivered the kill bite to him in his effort to get to the children. Now, Gedeon knelt on the porch, one hand covering his face, weeping. Bodies of the men the leopard had killed were scattered around him in various stages of dying.
Meiling knew the children had been murdered, just as the women and teens had been. Gedeon had found themalready dead. She found her eyes blurring as well. She had hoped. Prayed to the universe she no longer believed in. What was wrong with these men that they could kill so easily? She brushed at the wetness in her eyes, and when she did, she caught movement.
The guard. The one Gedeon’s leopard hadn’t finished off. He was dying. There was no way for him to live, not with the vicious wounds that had ripped open his body. She could see those gashes had been inflicted on the run. The leopard had ensured the guard couldn’t walk or come after him. He’d struck brutally and continued onward. But the guard was up to something. He was attempting to pull something off his belt with his very shaky hands.
Meiling had to really study what it was he was trying to get to. She didn’t know much about bombs at all, but she had read about them once and looked at diagrams. There was a description of remote detonators, and that looked suspiciously like one.
Not thinking, clutching Gedeon’s clothes, she raised her voice as she turned to run. She had no idea where the bomb was, or even if there was one. “Bomb. Run. Get out of there. Run.”
It stood to reason that, after murdering the women and children, they’d blow up the evidence. Maybe the bomb was a string of bombs that ran along the path of the cabins. Meiling ran away from the path. She caught a glimpse of Gedeon’s head coming up sharply as she looked back to see if he was heeding her warning.
For one terrible moment their eyes met. His burned a terrible gold as he shifted on the run.On the run.Coming straight toward her. He was huge. The biggest leopard she’d ever seen in her life. His fur was thick, almost creamy white on his belly and legs, with deep gold over the cream on his back and head. Black rosettes were large and widely spaced over his entire body, and those eyes burned brightly and focused as he ran.
She didn’t look back but ran for her life. She knew he was coming for her. He couldn’t leave witnesses. He was Amur. Deadly.Bratya.They murdered their women. The world thought they were nearly extinct from loss of habitat or poaching, but she knew the shifters had murdered their own kind. Now that they were down to so few, were they horrified at what they’d done? Were they looking for their women in an effort to rectify the situation? No, they were still murdering them.
She ran as fast as she was capable of running, leaping over every obstacle in her path. She was grateful for the fifty-foot start, but she knew it wasn’t nearly enough. Then the world blew up. She was picked up as if she weighed no more than a feather and thrown through the air into the relative protection of the heavier brush. She landed right in the middle of thick leaves cushioning her fall. She lay covering her eyes against the flash after flash and thundering blasts that shook the earth.
She’d been right about the string of bombs that ran beneath the ground connecting the cabins. Frankie and his crew had buried enough explosives to level the buildings and cover their operation so anyone coming to try to find evidence would have to sift through jungle and ash to find anything.
Meiling waited with her hands over her head, heart pounding, realizing she still clutched Gedeon’s clothes. The material helped to shield her from falling debris. She lay very still until the ground ceased trembling and the jungle was completely quiet. There was no sound. No insects. No birds. Nothing moved or voiced an opinion. Like her, everything was too shocked to protest.
Eventually, she realized she had to make certain Gedeon’s leopard wasn’t creeping up on her, about to leap on her and rip her to shreds any moment. She forced herself to lift her head cautiously. When nothing happened, she shook off the leaves and small branches and sat up, takingstock of her body to make sure nothing was broken. She probably had a few bruises, but she’d been lucky. All the charges had been behind her.
Her body shook as if she had tremors that were uncontrollable. There was no fixing that, so she just accepted it, as she did anything she couldn’t change, and looked around her. The cabin was gone. Flattened. No, it was a hole in the ground. The forest around it was gone, the trees lying in piles of rubble and leaves everywhere. It looked like a war zone.
She started to turn away when she caught movement under one of the stacks of leaves and branches. It was a human leg and arm moving, the arm trying to throw the branch off the leg. She heard the curse. The groan. The branch settled back over the leg. The man cursed again, and she heard the raw pain in his voice.
Gedeon. Meiling closed her eyes. Naturally he would live through it. He was a leopard and probably had more than nine lives. If she helped him, he would most certainly reward her by killing her. He was Amur. What else would he do? If she didn’t help him, she would forever remember him taking on all those horrid men to free the women. She would never get the sight of him kneeling on the porch weeping from her mind. The latter two things didn’t fit with him being Amur leopard. Now she was the one cursing.
She made her way back to him, picking her way through the debris. “I’ve got a gun, and if you make one wrong move, I’m going to shoot you right through the heart. Do you understand? If you just behave, I’ll move the branch, leave you your clothes and you can go on your way.” Meiling made certain she didn’t speak until she could do so without the slightest tremor in her voice. She was still shaking like a leaf, but he couldn’t see her—at least she hoped he couldn’t.
There was a small silence and then she heard him sigh.“Lady, get the hell out of here while you can. I’m blind. My leg is broken. The branch is too heavy for you to lift, and I can’t help you with my leg like this. I’m naked, by the way. If you did manage to get me free, I got a good look at you and I weigh three times your weight. How are you going to get me out of here? On your back? That’s ludicrous. No doubt there are men on their way right now to see what the hell happened to their moneymaking operation, and you don’t want to be here when they get here. If by some miracle you did manage to save my life and I regained my eyesight and didn’t die of infection, I’d have to hunt you down, which I’m very good at, and kill you because I don’t leave witnesses. On top of everything else, my cat hates everybody and I’m pretty damned weak right now and I might not be able to hold him back. So get out of here.”
“You really aren’t telling me anything new other than the eye thing and broken leg. If you aren’t going to be useful, less talking, please. I’ve got to figure this out fast.” She put his clothes down and considered the branch. It was large, but it was mostly the angle that was going to give her trouble. If she dropped it on his leg a second time after she picked it up, it was going to cause considerably more damage.
She was strong, and unfortunately, the moment she showed him just how strong she actually was, he would guess she was more than she seemed. That meant the moment she could, she would have to run. She’d planned on doing so anyhow, but that knowledge would double his incentive for coming after her.
She caught ahold of the end of the branch, lifted and maneuvered it off his leg, closing her ears to the sound of his hastily cut off groan. The branch was cracked in several places and made horrid creaking and cracking noises, threatening to break into several large pieces, the offshoots shivering, throwing twigs and leaves raining down.She didn’t hesitate at all but kept the thick branch moving until it was completely away from Gedeon’s body. When she dropped it to the ground, it did break into pieces.
For the first time, she allowed herself to look at the man’s face to see if he was telling her the truth. His gorgeous jade-green eyes were definitely damaged in some way. Hastily, she tore a strip from his shirt, soaked it in the water from her backpack and slowly approached him.
“I’m going to tie this around your eyes. It’s all I’ve got at the moment to help. Then I’ll stabilize your leg to move you.”
“Why aren’t you afraid of my leopard?”
