Tempted by the Jaguar #2: Revelation (Riverford Shifters)

by Cristina Rayne

  “There will be, once you shift,” Hunter said with a grin.

  “Right. I forgot jaguars can see really good in the dark. How much of this is your territory?” Kylie asked.

  “About twenty square miles.”

  “Really? So much?”

  “It hasn’t always been mine. Some of it belongs to my family.”

  “That’s right. You did mention a brother before.”

  When the hand gripping her own tensed, Kylie hastily added, “Sorry. You don’t have to say anything else about him if you don’t want.”

  Hunter was quiet for a long moment as they walked farther into the trees, before he sighed and squeezed her hand. “When we know each other a little better, then I’ll tell you about him sometime.”

  “Okay,” was all she could think to reply.

  She couldn’t help but wonder if his brother was even still alive. Of course, a falling out could often be equally as painful, especially if they had been extremely close.

  Grasping for something to distract him for the melancholia that had fallen over him, Kylie asked, “How much farther is the cave you mentioned?”

  Hunter flashed her a grateful smile. “Not much farther. That it’s so close to the forest’s edge is the reason I use it to store my clothes while I’m shifted. It’s so small that it’s not good for much else. Oh, and before I forget, once you’re shifted, be on the lookout for humans. Sometimes one or two’ll wander pretty deep into the forest and just happen to catch a glimpse of us while we’re shifted. That’s why there’re so many stories of people seeing jaguars around here when there haven’t been any of the non-shifter variety living in the wild here in Texas for decades.”

  “Not just jaguars, but I’ve heard stories of ‘black panther’ sightings all over the state, too,” Kylie said with a nod.

  Hunter laughed. “Yeah, about that, I don’t know if you’ve ever met Ed Betancourt—he’s a plumber—but all those sightings come courtesy of his cousin Charlie who lives in California. Charlie’s jaguar is melanistic, and he enjoys popping up on unsuspecting people while on his runs. He’s proud to have added to the local legends of several states.”

  “Yeah, it’s all fun and games until someone shoots him,” Kylie replied dryly.

  “Oh, they already have,” Hunter said, not looking particularly concerned. “We don’t have any melanistics in our clan, but we do have someone whose jaguar is an albino with blue eyes. I’ll introduce you to him sometime. Like Charlie, he enjoys showing himself off, though he’s nowhere near as obnoxious about it.”

  “Speaking of, I hope everyone I was supposed to meet yesterday isn’t too irritated that we never showed.”

  “Kylie—I hate to break it to you, but I think every shifter in Riverford has heard about you unleashing the full potency of your charms in Southern Glacier by now.”

  “College on Monday is going to be sheer torture, isn’t it?” she moaned. “I hate being the center of attention on the best of days, and now I have to worry about people snickering behind my back. Only two days as a shifter and I’ve already managed to make myself a laughingstock!”

  Hunter rubbed a thumb soothingly over her hand. “You know, I never did ask you what you’re studying.”

  “Premed like my dad. I was thinking of doing something in genetics, developing gene therapies for all those nasty genetic disorders.”

  Hunter suddenly stopped cold. “Genetics is often a career path lion shifters choose,” he said slowly. “In fact, most of the top geneticists in the world are lion shifters. They’re also really big in pharmaceuticals. Going into that kind of field—well, let’s just say it tends to make the clans really suspicious.”

  Yes, I know. Kylie had gotten exactly the kind of response she had hoped for. Unfortunately, the timing of his question sucked. This was hardly the place or the time to try to dig more information out of him, especially when he said that they were supposed to be patrolling for Sniffers and trespassing gator shifters. Yet…

  He may now be her lover, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to be relentless in pursuing any and everything he knew about the lion clans. Damn. She would just have to get what she could now and find a way to bring the subject up later on tonight.

  She had made her choice last night when she had taken Hunter’s face into her hands and crossed the line that shouldn’t have been crossed, and that meant leaving Riverford was no longer an option. She couldn’t afford to falter now that she had so much more to lose.

  “Are you trying to tell me that studying genetics is—what? Taboo?” Kylie demanded with as much outrage as she could muster.

  He sighed and looked at her with dismay. “Taboo doesn’t even begin to describe it. It’s as good as announcing yourself as a lion supporter.”

  “Well, there goes that career out the window,” Kylie spat. “It’s a good thing I’m still just a sophomore and aren’t very far along into the core curriculum yet. At least tell me that other medical fields are okay, or I think I might just start spitting fire!”

  “Just stay away from genetics and pharmacology and you’ll be good. Leave the fire spitting to the dragon shifters.”

  “Wait—what? Dragon shifters!” Kylie exclaimed in genuine shock. There’s no way there could be—her parents would have definitely told—

  “Dammit! You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?” she accused just as he exploded in laughter.

  Hunter pulled her against his chest and planted a firm kiss on her lips. “The look on your face was priceless. The closest we come to dragons are the komodo shifters, though if I had to pick a clan other than jaguar, I wouldn’t have minded being born the mythological type of dragon shifter.”

  Kylie scowled. “I’m so glad my ignorance amuses you. We’ll see how much you’re laughing tonight when I go stay at my dad’s instead of your place.”

  “Maybe I should call you my little firecat instead of hellcat,” he said with a grin, not looking concerned at all by her threat.

  “And maybe I should just knee you in the—”

  Kylie abruptly turned her head sharply to the right and scented the air a split-second before Hunter did the same, her jaguar senses going into full warning mode. As the wind had slightly shifted, three new smells had entered her sphere of awareness all at once. She had smelled all of them before, one just last night coming from Hunter’s tiger friend Maxim’s security guards. Another was an acrid smell that tickled her memory but wasn’t immediately evident. However the last—there was no mistaking that coppery scent.

  Blood.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The look in Hunter’s eyes was one hundred percent jaguar, deadly and inhuman, as he stared off into the darkness of the forest in the direction where the stench of blood was strongest. A low, menacing growl rose from his throat, and it took everything Kylie had in her to keep herself from growling, too. Something told her it would just set Hunter even more on edge. If there was danger, she didn’t want him getting hurt over some shifter instinct to protect his female.

  “It’s a male wolf shifter,” he said, his lips pressing together tightly into a hard line, “about a couple hundred yards deeper.”

  He turned to look down at her, and the threat in his eyes softened to something that just looked troubled. “Damn it—I need to go check things out, but I can’t let you go back to the apartment alone. You can smell it, can’t you? The blood? The fear?”

  Kylie suddenly stilled. An image of the sick bastard that had attacked her covered in blood from her claws flashed into her mind. It was no wonder that the acrid smell was familiar. She had smelled enough fear that horrible night to last her a lifetime.

  Her heart sped up. “Is he alone?” she asked softly, taking a deeper whiff of the air.

  It smelled like only one individual’s scent, but she was still too new to her shifter nature to trust her judgment just yet.

  Hunter glanced back into the forest, before he fixed her with an even more troubled look. “I don’t smell any
scent other than the wolf’s and my own territory markings, but…” He released her and grabbed her right hand tightly. “Come on. Stay at my back, and no matter what happens, if I tell you to shift and run, you do it.”

  “What’s going on, Hunter?” Kylie demanded as they hurried towards the wolf.

  “Ignoring the fact that a wolf entered my territory without permission, there’s no way someone that’s lost the amount of blood I smell could have come this far alone without help,” Hunter replied darkly, “so unless he came out here to commit suicide, he had to have been either dumped in here to die or he was injured here. Hate to say it, but I’m hoping it’s a suicide.”

  “What! Why?” Kylie exclaimed, completely taken aback.

  Hunter glanced over his shoulder at her. “Because if someone else entered this forest with him, then they managed to completely mask their scent. Hell, even rocks have a scent. Only someone wearing a hazmat suit can do that, and I don’t imagine that type of protective gear is something you’d readily find outside of a lab or a Prepper’s doomsday bunker. Remember what I told you about the lions? That they were geneticists?”

  Kylie felt her blood run cold. “You think—how sure are you that it’s them?”

  “All I can say is that the lions have breached other shifter territories using hazmats before,” he replied grimly.

  Kylie squeezed his hand in alarm. “Then that means they could still be in your territory somewhere!”

  Her eyes darted nervously to the vast gulf of trees that surrounded them. The sun had risen a little bit farther over the horizon, but it was still too dark for her human eyes to see any detail beyond basic shapes.

  “Or we could both be jumping at shadows,” he added with a small, self-deprecating smile.

  The snap of a twig had Hunter suddenly crouching down into a defensive stance in front of her with a hiss. The sound was so cliché, that for a moment, Kylie had to struggle not to start giggling like a loon. Then movement in the far-off gloom caught her eye, and she instantly lost all desire to laugh, to even breathe.

  For an endless moment, all Kylie could hear was the thumping of her racing heart and the rattling of tree branches in the wind as she stared hard into the trees. The rest of the forest had gone unnaturally silent.

  Here there be predators…

  Then she heard it, a faint, high-pitched whine like that of a dog on its last breath. Unconsciously, Kylie leaned forward and squinted in the direction of that sound before recoiling as her nose was abruptly inundated with the metallic smell of blood a split-second before a reddish, tawny-colored wolf head popped out from behind the large trunk of a tree only a few feet away. Kylie let out a short cry of startlement, and back-peddled a couple of steps before she saw the wolf head suddenly collapse onto its side.

  Without a word, Hunter straightened, and Kylie found herself being tugged by the hand behind him as her lover hurried over to the fallen animal. She could hear the wolf’s labored breathing before they had even reached him.

  When the wolf’s entire body came into view, Kylie let out another cry, but this time it was one of horror. Even in the barely-there light of early morning, Kylie could clearly see all the blood without her nose practically screaming it into her brain. The fur of his back and legs was so matted with blood that the wolf almost appeared as though he had been partially skinned.

  “My God…”

  Bile rose to Kylie’s throat as she let go of Hunter’s hand and dropped to her knees beside the poor creature, wanting to help him with everything in her being but unsure how or even if he could be helped at this point.

  The wolf’s eyes were closed tightly, its muzzle a rictus of unimaginable pain. He was still breathing, but the ragged breaths were now almost inaudible.

  “What can we do?” Kylie asked faintly as Hunter knelt down beside her. With that much blood, it was dangerous for her to get any nearer.

  “I’ll call Needles, but…” He trailed off, but he didn’t need to finish.

  Hunter dug out his cell phone from his front pocket while Kylie placed a hand gently onto the wolf’s head in a gesture of comfort. It was one of the few uninjured places on his mutilated body. She wanted to let him know that at least he wasn’t alone, that someone was horrified at what had been done to him.

  This close, the smell of blood was so strong it was nauseating. In order to distract herself from it, Kylie tried focusing on Hunter’s voice as he spoke urgently into his phone, but it was as though the smell had permanently stained the inside of her nostrils. She imagined she would now smell it for days.

  “He dragged himself.”

  Kylie jumped at the sudden declaration at her ear before she turned slightly to look at the place Hunter pointed towards. A trail of blood, disturbed dead leaves, and squashed grass led through the trees straight to the pitiful body before her.

  Kylie swallowed thickly. “That he even managed to move at all is mindboggling. There’s so much blood, I can’t even tell how he’s injured!”

  “We need to try to get him to wake up,” Hunter said. “He needs to shift back into his human form to have any hope of surviving long enough for Needles and his crew to get here.”

  The poor guy had probably passed out from the pain. It seemed cruel to have to wake him, but Kylie just nodded and bent down to his ear. However, before Kylie could say a word, the wolf’s muscles seemed to ripple all at once, causing her to flinch back with her heart suddenly in her throat. He let out a pained howl before he began to rapidly shift back into a man.

  The wounds on his back had become more visible as the fur was replaced with skin. Wide, gaping lines of sliced open skin and muscle were pulled wider open until she could have laid her entire arm lengthwise within some of them, only to be stretched out in the next second into slices the width of a pencil and as long as the length of his back from shoulder to just shy of his butt. As he shifted, the wolf shifter’s howls of agony gradually turned into the screams of a man.

  The entire process had happened in less than a minute, but it was one of the most horrifying things Kylie had ever seen, and as she had often found herself in the ER many an evening to see Paul, she’d seen a damn lot—including wounds very similar to this.

  “Those are claw marks, aren’t they?” Kylie exclaimed. “His entire back is shredded just like a guy I once saw in the ER that was attacked by a leopard he was keeping illegally as a pet inside his house.”

  “Yes,” the wolf shifter answered hoarsely.

  Her eyes instantly flew back down to bleeding man’s face and met a pair of pale, pain-filled eyes.

  “Don’t try to talk,” she said firmly. “Hunter’s called for help. Just stay still and save your strength.”

  “Hunter!” The wolf abruptly grabbed Hunter’s arm, making Kylie yelp in surprise. “Thank God I found you!” he slurred. “My mate! You have to save my mate—please! He said you could help us—all of us!”

  “Whoa, slow down, buddy. What the hell happened to you?” Hunter demanded. “Who said I could help you?”

  “Your brother,” he gasped, and then promptly passed out.

  “His brother?” Kylie echoed, turning questionably to Hunter—and gasped.

  Hunter looked for all the world like he had just been kicked in the face by a horse.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “Hunter?” Kylie said hesitantly, reaching out a hand to him, but unsure if she should touch him.

  At the sound of her voice, utter shock quickly turned to a frenzy of activity as Hunter yanked off his fleece jacket, followed by the long-sleeved Henley he wore, leaving his chest bare. He then proceeded to tear it apart at the seams before handing her the back piece.

  “We need to try to stop the bleeding,” he said, his voice thick with urgency. “Even if he screams, don’t stop putting pressure on the wounds.”

  Kylie wanted to question him about the wolf’s words. It was obvious that just mentioning his brother had shaken Hunter to the core. Instead, she just nodded, folded th
e fabric into a makeshift compress, and silently set about to carefully apply pressure to the worst of the gaping slashes on the wolf shifter’s lower back that were still oozing blood. There were so many of them that it looked as though a monster cat had decided to use his back as a scratching post. She had no idea how he was still alive.

  The entire time, her heart was racing in a new fear. She was too close to the blood, dangerously close. It was quickly soaking through the layers she had folded into the cotton fabric, but thankfully had yet to penetrate the outside layer. The wounded man wasn’t human, so if so much as a drop got on her skin…

  “The lions did this,” she stated, not daring to take her eyes off her hands.

  For a long, uncomfortable moment, Hunter didn’t answer. Kylie could almost physically feel the gears in his head turning as he considered her words.

  “The fact that he mentioned my brother guarantees it,” Hunter said finally, the reluctance still evident in his tone.

  Startled, Kylie chanced a glance at him and was surprised to see him staring intently into the trees towards the south with his teeth clenched as if he was seconds away from snarling. She instantly stiffened, wondering if he had seen or heard something just now. She couldn’t smell anything but blood and more blood, and to a lesser extent, the scent of wolf and jaguar.

  “Hunter, wha—”

  Without warning, Hunter shoved her shoulder hard with both hands, sending her tumbling, as a large, golden mass landed directly onto his back from somewhere above. A blood-curdling roar shattered the silence behind her, and Kylie froze in the middle of trying to right herself for a couple of heartbeats before an answering growl rose from her throat.

  Fueled by a surge of adrenaline, Kylie rolled and scrambled to her knees. She raised her head in enough time to see a cougar—no, a lioness—go flying as Hunter, pinned flat on his back and dangerously close to having his throat ripped out, shoved her off him with a brutal upward kick of his heavy boots to her midsection. She was horrified to see a deep, double gash in his forearm as though the lioness had bit down and tried to tear a chunk out of the muscle. He also had a few shallow slashes across his chest where he had been clawed.