Carpathian 21 - Dark Peril

three little girls. One of the men used a shotgun, and Rachel lay broken and bleeding in the doorway of her house. The men trampled her body while they pulled the screaming girls from inside.

    There was so much blood. So much. It ran red and then black and shiny when the moon came out. Someone started a fire, burning their homes and gardens to the ground around them. Phin turned his head and looked directly at her as one of the jaguar-men thrust a knife into his kidney. They stared at one another, his mouth open in a silent scream, matching her mouth. Her captor threw her on the ground beside Phin’s crumpling body and she watched in horror as the life drained out of his eyes.

    Her stepfather fought valiantly, trying to protect her mother. She lost track of the stab wounds in his chest and back. A great big man cut his throat, ending the fight, and her mother was dragged from the house by the same man, the blood of her husband covering his hands. He hit her mother repeatedly in the face and shoved her at the men before going to each body to make sure no man or male child remained alive. And then he turned toward the girls.

    Inside the jaguar, her heart pounded, and she tasted fear and the beginnings of rage. Rage. She reached for it. Needed it. Tried desperately to let it pool inside her as the horrible man caught her thick mane of hair and dragged her across the blood and into the house where they brought each of the young girls.

    They must have scouted the small village because the men went looking for Audrey, Juliette and Jasmine.
    Thankfully, the three were gone, off getting supplies, hiking to the river to meet the supply boat when the attackers had struck. Their attackers were jaguar-men—shapeshifters looking for women who could still shift into animal form. So many had done as her mother had done, found a human man who would stay and love them—raise a family with them. But that had weakened the shapeshifter species, and now fewer and fewer females could provide a shifter. Some of the men, led by a rare black jaguar, had begun forcing the women into servitude, essentially using them as breeders. Any children not capable of shifting were purged.

    Solange Sangria stared down at the ground soaked with the blood of her ancestors—and the blood of her family. She could only return here in the form of the jaguar, unable to face the loss in human form. She could weep, with the rain soaking her face and her heart shredded, remembering looking into the eyes of that great black beast, great yellow-green eyes weighing her worth. Her father— Brodrick the Terrible . The man who had forcefully mated her mother because of her pure blood and then, when she escaped, had relentlessly hunted her. He had finally found her and slaughtered her husband and sons and the rest of those residing in their small village, children of parents he deemed unfit to walk the earth.

    She would forever remember that unblinking stare. Cold. Ruthless. A man who should have loved her as his daughter, but who only saw her worth if she could successfully breed a shapeshifter.

    The girls had been tied down and then the torture began. One by one. The girls were forced to watch as each was slashed with small cuts and then larger ones, over and over, in an effort to provoke a jaguar into emerging to protect the child. One by one, when no cat emerged, in front of the others, the leader—her father—declared them worthless. The girl was murdered and her body thrown out of the house into the clearing with the others.

    Then it was her turn—the last girl. The man who had sired her worked on her meticulously, using a large blade, his icy fury growing as he tried to provoke her cat into revealing itself. The pain was excruciating.
    He slashed her legs until she bled, until her mother pleaded and struggled and finally shifted into the form of a female jaguar only to be knocked out and restrained by the men. They’d taken her mother away, leaving Solange facing her steely eyed, merciless father. He was called Brodrick the Terrible for a reason.

    He had spent hours torturing her, certain she could shift, as both her mother and he were from the most powerful line of jaguar-men. A lineage revered by the others. She had steadfastly hidden her cat from him, obeying her mother, knowing her father was evil. To survive the pain she had filled her young mind with childish thoughts of revenge. She lay for hours—days. The nights and days ran together,