Carpathian 21 - Dark Peril

A lot of swearing. Muttering. She narrowed her vision, peering through the leaves to survey the rocks. From that angle, she couldn’t see a body. They had to have moved it, or perhaps the body had come off the rocks into the water and had been swept downstream. Evidently that was the conclusion the two men had come to.

    “You should have hauled her up onto the bank, Kevin,” one complained.

    She recognized the speaker. She’d wounded him. She’d hoped she’d done a better job, but he was walking on his own now.

    “I was too busy hauling your ass back to the lab to stop the bleeding. You would have died out here if I hadn’t, Brad,” Kevin snapped.

    The jaguar-men were famous for their ugly tempers. Neither wanted to follow the river for miles in the hopes of finding the body, but they had no choice. It was a law they all lived by, to destroy all evidence of their species. The two men stood looking down over the bank, and then spat, almost simultaneously, their disgust evident. Solange bit her lip hard, furious that they would show such disrespect to the woman they had so brutally used—the woman they’d driven to suicide. She put the rifle to her shoulder, took a breath, finger on the trigger, and put Kevin squarely in her sights.

    There was always that moment when she wondered if she could do this—if she would hesitate and alert them to her presence, allowing them to kill her first. She’d never be taken alive. She’d rescued too many women and seen close-up what they did to their victims, and would never allow herself to fall into their hands. Jasmine, her cousin, had been taken by these same men. Solange detested them. They deserved to die. Every one of them had committed murder, killing men, women and children. Yet . . . She felt that horrible moment stretch out in front of her. Could she do this again? How much of herself would she lose regardless of whether it was justice? The cost of taking lives had gone so high she was no longer certain that she was willing to pay.

    She squeezed the trigger. Kevin jerked, and the sound of the shot reverberated through the forest as the body slowly crumpled, a hole blossoming in the back of his head. Brad twisted around, leaping into the air as he tried to locate the source of the sound even as she squeezed off the second shot. The bullet caught him in his shoulder, spinning him as he began his fall from the cliff’s edge to the raging river below. He shifted in midair, frantically trying to tear at his clothes as he plummeted into the roaring water.

    Bile churned in her stomach, rising to her throat as she wiped sweat from her face. The second man would probably live, but he would be out of commission for a while. She’d have to hunt him later. And she could never stake out another body again; they’d be waiting for her. Already she was automatically putting weapons in the proper place for a descent, trembling the entire time but moving out of pure experience and reflex. She had to move fast and get out of the area. Brodrick traveled with a group of fighters and she wasn’t in any shape to fend them off. Sound traveled at night and they would have heard the gunshots.

    A bird shrieked. She leapt from the branch, hand outstretched, catching at the thick, woody liana vines hanging from all the trees and swinging hard, using her forward momentum to drive her across to the next vine. Her arms were nearly yanked out of their sockets as she hurled her body across open space toward the next tree. She managed to pull herself onto a branch, shifting her weight to give herself the best leap toward the vines hanging between the next two trees.

    She glanced over her shoulder as she jumped, and saw the huge black jaguar running along the branches of the tree she’d vacated. Her heart slammed hard in her chest, her breath exploding out of her lungs. Brodrick the Terrible. For a moment she was a terrified child again. The eight-year-old girl with her family dead around her and the man, larger than life, staring at her with flat, dead eyes, driving the point of his knife into her skin to try to provoke her cat into revealing itself.

    Don’t panic, she chided herself, forcing her brain to work as she moved between the trees. She changed her course subtly, always one step ahead of that fierce, angry cat. He was too heavy to use the vines, forced to run along the branches. Her advantage was the air, and she went for the trees without interlocking branches, forcing