Carpathian 21 - Dark Peril

a branch, high up beneath an umbrella of thick leaves. She stayed very still.

    They will be hungry. Shift and hide, get to safety. It is unsafe to communicate this way. Any surge in power will alert them.

    Her tail twitched in annoyance. Did he think she wasn’t aware of what to do? She wasn’t stupid. Manolito and Riordan had taught her, Juliette and Jasmine how to kill a vampire should the need arise. Lately, in the last several weeks, their training had saved her life numerous times. She was a warrior first. Always. She didn’t take the chance of responding because she knew her Carpathian was right, and the undead might feel the surge in power it took to communicate telepathically. It probably could be done without them knowing, but she wasn’t experienced enough and Solange never took unnecessary chances.

    She kept her head on her paws and pushed everything from her mind as the bats wheeled and dipped in the air, some consuming flying insects while others settled on the fruit in the trees. She could see others crawling along the ground in search of warm prey. She remained very still, even keeping the tip of her tail still until, slowly, the bats moved on to new territory. Only then did she rise and stretch with a cat’s languid manner.

    She had a job. She’d set a trap and she knew Brodrick and his men would fall into it. They would never be expecting her to return. By now they would know she was wounded. They would think themselves safe from her. And Brodrick had formed an uneasy alliance with the vampires. The undead could control the minds of the jaguars with diluted blood and even pure blood, but certainly not a royal. As long as Brodrick got what he wanted from the vampires, he would continue to have a relationship with them. It was a pact made in hell as far as she was concerned. Brodrick was set on a path of destroying any jaguar unable to shift. The vampires had vowed to help him reach his goal so he was fine with helping them.

    The huge laboratory built by the human society—a group of people dedicated to hunting and killing vampires—was used supposedly just for research, but she’d been inside and knew the building was used for much more nefarious purposes. Enemies were held and tortured there. Jaguar-women were often taken there to be used by Brodrick and his men. But the real purpose for the building was much more bizarre.
    She’d seen the banks of computers. Vampires didn’t have the ability to sit for hours at a computer compiling data, but both humans and jaguar-men could do so, and the vampires needed them to carry out the task of building a database of psychic women around the world for them.

    Brodrick’s men seemed to handle most of the details, and she was certain they were compiling a hit list of people—particularly women—who carried the jaguar blood. She hadn’t been able to confirm that, but she often lay in the branches of the trees for hours watching over the facility—a terrible risk certainly, yet one she hoped would yield even a single piece of important information.

    Certain now that the vampires had moved on through in search of blood, Solange began to make her way back toward the bluff overlooking the river where the woman, Annabelle, had thrown herself onto the rocks below rather than be recaptured by the men who hunted her. She tried to push the face of the desperate woman from her mind. Solange had shifted and called to her, exposed herself in order to stop her, but Annabelle had been so desperate, she refused to take a risk when the men began firing guns at Solange.

    The jaguar shook its head. The dead often rose up to taunt her. Sometimes she thought she might drown in their screams, in the terrible cruelty done to them. Solange knew human trafficking had become a major problem in other places, but here, in her world, it had been going on for centuries, thanks to the leaders of her people. Women were objects, nothing more. Vessels and possessions. The men had such entitlement, believing themselves above all laws, even the laws of common decency. The women were put there simply to serve their brutish sexual needs and give them children.

    Solange padded softly along the labyrinth of interlocking branches forming the arboreal highway. The animals and birds, still cowed by the passing of evil, simply shivered as she moved past them toward her destination. She went fast—she’d covered many miles throughout the day to get to the site of her childhood