“What if they search for us?”
“All they’ll find are body parts. There were several frozen hikers in the caverns.”
I recalled the shadowy image of bodies hovering at the edge of the light as we’d hurried toward the exit.
“This place is dangerous if you aren’t careful.” Phoebe turned her back on the mountain, and her face took on a gleam of anticipation as she looked forward.
I wanted to as well, but first, I had to make certain of something. Taking Dylan’s hand, I drew him away from my mother.
“You don’t have to stay here,” I said.
“Did the cold freeze your brain? You think I’d walk away from you?” His face gentled. “From our child?”
“You didn’t ask for this.”
“Neither did you.”
“Living in an icebound wasteland village isn’t what you wanted out of your life, Dylan. You wanted to help people.”
“If what your mother says is true, I’ve found the best possible place on earth to use my skills. The werewolves might be put off for a while by the explosion and the avalanche, but they’ll be back. People here will need someone like me.”
I took a deep breath and said what was in my heart. “I need you.”
A shadow passed over his face. “For the baby?”
“For me. I don’t know how it happened or when, but I fell in love with you.”
“It probably happened at the exact same moment I fell in love with you.” He smiled. “Like magic.”
And speaking of magic…
“I’m descended from wolves, Dylan. Can you deal with that?”
He entwined our fingers, rubbing his thumb over my palm. “You’re wolf, not werewolf. You’ll never be a werewolf, Carly. That’s a comfort to me.”
After everything we’d been through, it was a comfort to me, too.
“They’ve come to welcome us,” my mother said.
People had materialized from Lord knows where. Tall, short, young, old, men, women, white, brown, red, they trailed across the frozen land in our direction.
“I still think we should help the world fight the werewolves,” I said.
“We will.” Phoebe lifted her arm and greeted the others. “In that group are some of the most brilliant scientists on earth. They came here to work in peace and not be hounded by anyone. We can be safe while we find the cure; then we can release it to the world. Someday we can go back.”
The hope of returning to a land without so much ice and snow flooded me with relief. I was thrilled to have found my mother, ecstatic to have found Dylan, but the thought of Manhattan being lost to me forever had been a dark blot on an otherwise stellar future. It was a fact of life—sometimes a girl just needed to shop.
“You think of everything, don’t you?” I asked.
“That’s what mothers do.” Her eyes met mine. “Ready?”
In answer, I reached for Dylan with my right hand, for my mother with my left, and together we walked into the chill twilight of a whole new world.
Crazy
for The Cat
Caridad Piñeiro
This story is dedicated to Celsina and Peter
for all your support, understanding, and laughter.
Prologue
T he stillness of death replaced the noises of the night.
Gone were the chirps of the tree frogs and the chatter of the small monkeys in the nearby jungle. Even the low slap of the water against the dock near the river seemed more muted.
Victor Chavez raised his head from the field notebook where he had been writing intently, describing the plant the tribal shaman had showed him a few days before. Carefully packed inside his duffel were a number of slides and specimens from the unusual vegetation, materials he and his colleague, Jessica Morales, would test when he returned to New Jersey.
New Jersey, the Garden State, but the night in Jersey’s farmlands was never as quiet as it was here in the Amazon rain forest…
It’s too quiet, he thought.
He rose from the hand-hewn desk and crept to the square hole cut into the wooden wall, which served as a window in his modest hut. He pulled aside the light canvas shade that had been closing it off.
As he stood at the opening, Victor wondered what it was that had created such a dearth of noise in the rain forest outside. Peering through the crude window, he thought he saw something shifting through the underbrush close to the edge of the village.
A man? he wondered, searching the shadows, where he again caught a glimpse of a shape—definitely something human. Dark and large. For a moment, the silhouette seemed familiar, but only for a moment, as the underbrush stirred again, and instead of a man, a large black jaguar came into view.
For days, Victor had felt the presence of the cat, had thought he had seen the animal stalking him. Now here it was, right out in the open, seemingly without fear.
The black jaguar was magnificent, one of the biggest he had ever seen. Moonlight bathed the animal as it moved farther out from the jungle. Beneath the glistening midnight black of its fur, he could barely make out the distinctive darker rosette patterns of a regular jaguar.
The black cat’s thick muscles bunched, elegant and lethal as it moved, but not away from the huts as he expected. It stalked closer and closer to the village, as if with a purpose.
Cold fear seized Victor when he made eye contact with the animal. An eerily human gaze locked with his, and in that second, he knew the cat was coming for him.
He rushed back to the center of the hut, searching wildly for anything he could use as a weapon. He was a scientist and not a hunter. Ill equipped to fend off a black jaguar, he thought as he grabbed the chair from his desk, thinking he could use it to keep the animal at bay until help came.
He heard rustling outside, then the jaguar flew through the crude window opening and landed before him. Victor screamed. He called out repeatedly for help as he jabbed at the black cat, but with one swipe of its massive paw, the cat ripped the chair from his hands. The jaguar lunged at him, landing solidly on his chest and knocking him to the ground.
Pain seared through Victor’s shoulder and neck as the animal bit him. Deep, sharp fangs easily pierced skin and muscle. His screams turned to a sickening gurgle and a hiss leaking from his ravaged throat.
The cat wasn’t done.
With a shake of its immense head, the jaguar jerked Victor back and forth, as if playing with him. It tossed him aside, then sauntered away from him and roared with delight, even as the cries of the villagers indicated they were on their way.
Eyesight fading as his life bled from him, Victor met the cat’s knowing gaze, saw the glee there. Human glee and satisfaction. A rumble came from the black jaguar’s mouth, almost like laughter.
The animal approached him again, its breath hot against his face. Midnight-black fur soft as it brushed his cheek a second before the cat took Victor’s head into its large mouth.
Victor tried to scream again, the sound echoing only in his brain as the black jaguar delivered its killing bite, crushing his skull as if it were a papier-mâché piñata.
Chapter 1
One month later
T hick vines crept along the jungle floor, creating a tangle from which ferns and other low-lying ground cover sprouted. Irregular shapes beneath hinted at fallen trees and branches overrun by vegetation, slowly rotting in the heat and humidity of the Amazon rain forest.
The air sat heavily on all the creatures within the rain forest’s embrace. Their chirps and calls created a cacophony of sound and fury until the animals sensed its approach. The rain forest fell silent at once.
The massive black cat slinked through the underbrush, sure-footed and eager for the hunt. Strong muscles shifted beneath ebony fur as it moved along. The cat’s mouth hung open, pink tongue swiping away at the remnants of an earlier meal. A soft snuffle erupted from its nostrils as it sought the scent of another animal.
Or maybe of a human.
With a loud snar
l, the animal launched itself toward its prey…
Jessica Morales bolted upright in bed, the dream so real she had almost imagined herself in the rain forest watching the approach of the magnificent black panther.
She corrected herself: not a black panther, a black jaguar. The gene for melanism was dominant amongst the South American cats, creating jaguars that had coats ranging from the more familiar black and gold fur to animals that could appear almost entirely black. She had discovered this while doing research to try to make sense of Victor’s death a month earlier. She also learned that jaguars were the only cats big enough to kill a human being.
Lying back against her pillows, Jessica considered that her colleague and former lover had described the black jaguar quite well in the field notebook that had recently been returned to their employer. After determining that Victor’s death had been an unfortunate accident, the Brazilian authorities had forwarded Victor’s duffel bag with the enclosed notebook to his family, who had in turn sent it to the pharmaceutical company where she and Victor had worked together.
The bloodstains on the bag and the protective leather cover of the field notebook taunted her about not having gone with Victor on this assignment. Instead, as the company’s top ethnobotanist and pharmacologist, she’d had to remain in New Jersey to present a seminar to a group of prospective investors.
Maybe if she had been with Victor, he wouldn’t have been killed…
But maybe not, Jessica thought, recalling the details Victor had jotted in the notebook about the immense size of the black jaguar he had seen while out on a specimen-collecting trip with a local shaman and guide from one of the tribes along the Rio Galvardo. Victor had not worried about the animal since his guide had been armed, but after having the animal follow him for a few days, Victor had gotten spooked. His fear had conveyed itself to her as she read through his notes, trying to understand his seemingly inexplicable death.
A series of normal entries in his field journal had deteriorated into an increasing number of anxious notations about the almost constant presence of the large cat and Victor’s troubling encounters with logging-crew members who were cutting down trees in the areas close to the tribal reservation.
One of the last records in the notebook had been Victor’s description of a native plant responsible for some nearly miraculous healing he had witnessed when the shaman had placed the crushed leaves on the wounds suffered by a few of the villagers after a violent encounter with the loggers.
Wide awake and more alert than anyone should be at three in the morning, Jessica decided that trying to return to sleep was futile. Based on what was in Victor’s notebook, she had begun a simple trial, treating a series of cultures with a diluted titration of the suspension from the test tube in Victor’s bloodstained duffel.
If the plant’s properties were as strong as Victor had noted, she should have results by now.
Rising, she quickly showered, dressed, and made the short drive from her riverfront condo in New Brunswick to her nearby office and lab facilities. Her mother despaired that Jessica’s proximity to work would forever rob her of any grandchildren.
Maybe that wasn’t far from the truth.
With thirty barely two years away, Jessica’s personal relationships with men had been few and far between, usually because of the demands of her job. Her visits to her family home were always difficult, because her mother inevitably hounded her about settling down and having kids. In the back of Jessica’s mind was the constant awareness that if her sister were still alive, her mami would probably already have grandchildren.
But her older sister, Rachel, had died many years earlier from an infection that no available antibiotic had been able to stop. Jessica had been just sixteen at the time, her sister twenty. She had sat by Rachel’s bedside, waiting for a miracle as the infection ravaged her sister’s body.
Feeling useless, Jessica had tried to comfort Rachel by reminding her of all the fun times they’d had as children. The trips down the shore and amusements along the boardwalk, the surrey ride during which they had pedaled furiously to catch up to a cute group of boys.
Rachel had smiled at that recollection, but moments later, with a last gasping breath, she had passed away.
Jessica had made a promise to Rachel that day that she would dedicate her life to keeping others from suffering the same fate. More than a dozen years later, she had let nothing get in the way of keeping that promise. Not the many years to obtain her various degrees, the late nights in the lab, or the time spent away from her mother and father as she traveled the world in search of other cures.
Her many journeys had resulted in a treatment that was now the subject of a new drug application being evaluated by the FDA. Maybe her drug would save the life of someone else’s sister and, if not that drug, maybe one of the other medicines she was hoping to discover and develop.
As she wheeled her hybrid SUV into the parking lot of the pharmaceutical house where she worked, Jessica remembered fondly how Victor had been with her during her many journeys to discover new medicines in some of the world’s most unique and sometimes endangered ecosystems.
In her office, her gaze settled on some of the photos she had taken during those trips. One was of her hiking up a mountain in the Himalayas, beside another one of her and Victor standing close to blazing-hot lava fields in Costa Rica. They had been lovers then but had ended the relationship shortly thereafter, once they had realized that the most they could be was friends with benefits.
She picked up the photo and tenderly ran her hand across Victor’s handsome, smiling face. A dimple peeked from one cheek, and the boyish grin reached up into dark brown eyes glittering with merriment. She would miss his gentle ways and his sense of humor and daring, a daring she had shared with him and which she wouldn’t set aside even now. She believed strongly that her adventures made a difference, even if they brought with them the possibility of death.
Jessica hoped that the results from her simple trial would at least demonstrate that Victor’s death hadn’t been in vain, that the plant Victor had brought back from the jungle could save people’s lives.
Flashing her security badge against various doors granted her access to her lab. The cultures she had treated were in a clean room, and she went through the required process of suiting up and making sure she was sterile before entering. At the bench to one side of the room rested the half-dozen petri dishes to which she had administered the plant titration.
She walked over, pulled up a stool, and prepared the first slide. Beneath the magnification of the microscope, the results were clear: no bacterial organisms remained.
Repeating the procedure for each of the five remaining petri dishes, the trial yielded the same result, even for the last dish, which had contained a rather antibiotic-resistant strain of staphylococcus.
One similar to the infection that had killed her sister.
After leaving the clean room and returning to her office, Jessica recorded her observations and results in her lab book. She had to make the arrangements for getting herself to Brazil soon. Victor had clearly found something of great importance, and judging from the notes in his field journal, the habitat for the plant was in danger from the encroachment of the loggers.
Jessica didn’t want to wait too long and risk losing the seeming miracle drug that had cost Victor his life. In addition, in two weeks’ time, she was scheduled to speak before the company’s shareholders at their annual meeting. Her boss would not appreciate her skipping out on the command performance, so her trip to the Amazon would have to be a quick one.
As soon as possible, she intended to contact Javier Dias da Costa, Victor’s guide at the tribal reservation. Dias da Costa was one of the few guides permitted at the reservation and, according to comments in Victor’s journal, none too pleased that the tribal elders had allowed strangers into their midst.
Jessica didn’t know why he disdained foreigners, and she didn’t much care. She had made a promise to Rac
hel years ago, and now she silently made another to Victor.
Your death will not be in vain, mi amigo, she whispered as she lovingly ran her hand over the bloodstained duffel bag resting on her desktop.
Javier Dias da Costa paced in front of the dock like a jungle cat imprisoned in a cage, restlessly shifting back and forth, back and forth, along the cement wharf as he waited for the americana louca who had woken him out of his first pleasant slumber in more than a month. She had called him using his private cell-phone number in the wee hours of the morning, demanding that he take her upriver to the reservation. He hadn’t been able to rest well since finding the remains of the annoying Americana’s colleague.
Even now, the images were fresh in his brain, but that wasn’t what kept him awake.
Guilt refused to let his mind rest.
Guilt and concern that the killing wouldn’t end.
He stopped and searched the wharf for any signs of the woman, hoping she would change her mind and decide not to follow her colleague. Javier already had enough problems. The loggers, led by an ex-tribe member, Armando Ruiz, were a violent, troublesome bunch.
The last thing he needed in the mix was this obviously irrational and selfish American scientist, who called people in the early hours of the morning to say she would be arriving any day. No “Are you available?” or “Are you even interested?” Instead, he had gotten a call on his private number, demanding that he take her to the tribal shaman.
Not that the shaman would object, Javier thought.
When he had gone upriver to tell the tribal elders of the americana’s demand, the shaman, his uncle Antonio, had been eager for the americana to finish what her colleague had begun. His tio hoped that the discovery of the healing plant would finally give the court reason to enforce its orders that Armando cease logging. An order he and his loggers were blatantly ignoring. Javier, however, suspected that Armando would not stop until he had completed his quest for revenge against the tribe, and Javier’s family in particular.
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