The leopard stretched out his paws and raked deep into the earth. Night settled in, bringing the sounds of insects and owls hunting prey. He lay quiet, listening to the endless cycle of life, knowing he couldn’t give Emma up. She was supposed to need him. The children were supposed to need him. He could accept that and he’d be an incredible partner, seeing to everything for them, but he didn’t want to feel that attachment himself. He couldn’t have that.
He argued with himself for hours before he finally knew he had no choice. He couldn’t risk turning himself over to something as cruel and bad-tempered as his enemies. Their blood ran in his veins. Their leopards may not have emerged fully, as his had, but the traits were bred into them and they lacked the control he had learned over the years. He had managed to turn the leopard from Drake, even in the midst of its enraged madness, and he would not give it even a small amount of control. He wouldn’t risk losing Emma and the children—or himself.
Jake emerged from the woods barefoot, shirtless and still buttoning the jeans Drake and Joshua had thoughtfully left hanging in the branch of a tree for him. Drake sat out in the rain, in the bed of the pickup, and as Jake approached, his head went up, alert, and he immediately jumped down. In spite of his leg injury, he still moved with a fluid grace that often caught Jake off guard.
“Are you all right? I thought about sending Joshua to find you, but . . .” Drake trailed off.
Jake shrugged his shoulders. “You thought I might try to tear him to pieces.”
Drake’s answering smile was faint. “Something like that.”
Jake shook his head as he approached his friend. Drake’s shirt was slashed to ribbons and there were bloodstains on his chest. “Are you hurt?”
Shame burned through Jake. He prided himself on his control, but he’d barely managed to stop the beast as it attacked Drake. He was grateful he hadn’t attempted to turn himself over to the leopard. Drake and Joshua were from different bloodlines, they clearly didn’t have the madness that ran in his veins.
“Just a few scratches,” Drake answered casually. “I’ve had far worse playing around with friends in leopard form.”
Jake stretched his tired muscles. The rain had slowed to a fine drizzle. “I’m sorry, Drake. I could have hurt you.”
Drake sent him another small grin. “I knew you wouldn’t.”
“Then you knew more than I did. Where’s Joshua?”
The grin widened. “Sleeping like a baby. He wasn’t worried about you.”
“He does a good job of pretending,” Jake said. “He worries. Why do you suppose he left the rain forest? He isn’t all that happy here, but he doesn’t want to go back.”
“Joshua is Joshua. He doesn’t share much about his life. Whatever happened must have been bad or he never would have left. No one leaves because they want to.”
“You did,” Jake pointed out.
“I couldn’t stay in the forest without letting my leopard run, and I can’t shift. It became . . . difficult.”
“Did the doctors try grafting your own bone?”
Drake nodded. “It didn’t work. I didn’t understand the entire process, but some of us have the ability to regenerate bones and others don’t. I apparently don’t.”
“Did you try using someone else’s bone?”
“Like a cadaver?” Drake made a face. “We incinerate our dead immediately. It’s the only way for our species to survive, to keep our existence secret. And it doesn’t make much sense that if I can’t use a piece of my bone, then someone else’s would work, now does it?”
“They can do all sorts of things now, Drake. You just have to find the right man.” Jake opened the door to the pickup and paused to look around.
He owned everything for miles. He’d patiently acquired acre after acre, adding on to the land his great-grandfather had given him until he had a sanctuary. He’d turned miles of that into a shaded, wooded area for his leopard. He had built a cattle empire. Step by step, patiently. And he had slowly begun drilling for the oil he knew was on other tracts of land he’d inherited. Recently he had acquired several large pieces of property he was certain concealed natural gas just waiting to be developed. Looking at Drake—his friend—the one person who had stood for him, he realized that all of his accomplishments stacked up to very little. Billions of dollars maybe, but the money was a tool for him. And he knew what he had to do with it.
Drake needed a solution. In comparison to his friend’s problem, the years Jake had put into his plan to take down his enemies seemed a waste when a man as good as Drake was suffering.
Jake cleared his throat. He found it strange to think about another person, to worry about them. Emma’s influence. She was doing something to him with her presence that he couldn’t quite understand, but he knew she had changed him somehow in the brief two years she’d lived in his home. He didn’t know when the change had occurred, but he knew Drake was more important than any revenge possible.
Jake pulled open the door. “Do you want me to drive?”
Drake shook his head. “I’ve got it. Just shove Joshua over.”
Jake gave the other man a good-natured push and Joshua lifted his head and growled a warning. “Get in the back,” Jake said. “You can sleep there.”
Joshua snarled but complied, curling up to go back to sleep even before Jake slid into the passenger side. “Who did your surgery? Are there doctors in your village?”
“We have one doctor for our people, but no specialist like I needed, and my bones won’t graft and shift.”