“What are you goin’ to do?” she asked. For the first time he could hear fear in her voice and it tore at his heart. Damn them all, they were going to die today for this.
“You don’ want her hurt, come out by yourself,” Armande challenged.
Saria caught his arm. “Don’ even think about it. They know I would never stay silent if they killed you.”
“They’ll get their chance at me. You start crawling forward and when you get to that heavier brush, break to your right. There’s plenty of the cover unless they get crazy and spray the area with bullets. Give me a minute before you decide to shoot anyone. I’m going to shift and go after them.”
“They’ll kill you, Drake, and you know it. That’s what they want. They can explain the killing of a leopard, but not a human being. They’re goading you into shifting.”
His leopard roared with fury, determined to remove the threat to his mate, uncaring about human life. The three men had dared to fire a weapon near Saria—they deservyouath. He felt the familiar ache in his bones, the convulsing of muscles.
“No.” Saria turned under him, onto her back, throwing both arms around him, holding on tightly, as if she could somehow hold off the fur slithering beneath his skin and the teeth filling his mouth. His shirt ripped with the ropes of muscles banding over his body. She refused to let go, even when hot breath blasted her throat. She closed her eyes, refusing to look at his face changing, but she never once let go.
There was a moment when he wasn’t certain he could stop his leopard. Stiletto-sharp claws burst through his fingers and it was all he could do to bury them into the soft earth on either side of her head while he breathed his leopard into submission.
Her hands framed his face. There were tears swimming in her eyes when she opened them. He knew she was staring into eyes pure leopard.
“Please, Drake,” she whispered. “Don’ do what they want. Stay with me. We can fight them off.”
He had no choice. Not if she was going to cry. The real knife to a man’s heart was his woman’s tears. He bent his head and kissed them away gently. “Let’s go then. Crawl out of here, stay low and don’t move brush.”
They were both soaked from the wet ground and she shivered a little, still holding him tightly.
Behind them was an explosion of sound, a wild roaring growl and the sound of a man’s high-pitched scream of terror.
9
SARIA went still, lying beneath Drake in inches of water and mud, looking up at him with terrified eyes. The noises emanating from the groves of trees around them were horrifying. It sounded as if a thousand leopards were fighting over prey. The birds took to the air again, the sounds of their cries mingling with the ferocious growls and snarls rising in volume. Branches cracked and the brush trembled as heavy bodies slammed into them.
Drake rolled off Saria and reached to help her up. She took a better grip on her rifle, dropping behind him as he took the lead, working his way back toward the sounds of the battle. He opened his shirt in preparation for the change. Soaked and covered in mud, they ran through the brush, batting at spider webs as they wound their way along a narrow trail, avoiding sink holes and quicksand until they came to the grove of evergreen trees.
Five men, all heavily armed, surrounded two golden leopards and a huge black one. Drake drew his weapon, but Saria pushed the gun down.
“Don’ shoot. That’s Elie Jeanmard and four of my brothers,” she whispered, her voice trembling a little. “The black leopard is my oldest brother, Remy. I saw him once like that.”
Drake rocked back on his heels. He had expected to have to take on her brothers, but not all together.
Clothing was strewn around the ground, ripped and shredded. From the scent, Drake knew the two golden leopards had to be Armande and Robert. They had shed their clothes quickly, to keep from being attacked in human form by the ferocious black leopard. Remy had burst out of the trees and rushed them, giving them little time to shift before he hit Armande, driving him backward ">
Fur rained down and blood splashed across the reeds. As fast as the two golden leopards rose, out of sheer desperation for survival, the black leopard relentlessly knocked them down again, his movements fast, twisting in midair, using his flexible, accordionlike spine, and savagely raking the sides and bellies of both cats.
The two leopards had no chance to coordinate their defense against him. Remy attacked them with such ferocity that Drake suspected the bloodlust of his leopard was out of control. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to kill them both. The injuries both golden leopards had already sustained would take a long time to heal—and Remy was far from finished.
A black leopard was rare in the wild and even rarer among shifters. In shifters, as a general rule, they were bigger and stronger and in this case, faster. Remy moved with lightning speed, punishing the other two leopards, refusing to accept any sign of submission, forcing them to have to rise to protect themselves even when it was clear they wanted to call a halt to the punishment.
More than once each leopard signaled its submission to the enraged male, but he was having none of it, walking away, prowling back and forth, kicking leaves and dirt toward the two fallen leopards with a furious swipe of his paw and then leaping on them again and again, raking and clawing mercilessly.
No one made a move to help the two hapless leopards. Drake knew it was more than punishment. Remy Boudreaux was furious. Drake understood, even if no one else did. Personally, he would have killed both the bastards. They dared to shoot a gun at Saria Boudreaux. Remy and his brothers had been in pursuit and they heard the shot Armande fired toward Drake and Saria.
Saria’s oldest brother was a hell of a fighter, one of the best he’d seen, and for a man to be that experienced, he had to have traveled as a shifter outside the Louisiana bayou. Drake wouldn’t have been surprised to learn Remy had served on his own teams in the rain forest. Remy Boudreaux should be the leader of the lair, not Amos Jeanmard, Drake decided. He struck the right note of terror into the hearts of those watching. It was impossible to tell if he would stop before it was too late, but the others didn’t seem terribly concerned.
Drake studied Elie Jeanmard, standing passively as he watched the leopards fight. Scent told Drake the man had been Drake’s first challenger the night before and the third man pursuing him on the Mercier property. He watched the severe beating with a grim face, but made no move to stop it. This was Amos Jeanmard’s son and if Drake was right and Jeanmard was the leader of the Louisiana lair, Elie didn’t want any part of leadership. It was understandable. Elie had seen his father do his duty to the lair, but he’d been unhappy, and most likely his mother had been as well. Still, when he realized Armande and Robert were hunting Drake and Saria, he hadn’t looked the other way, he sent for Saria’s brothers.
“Uh oh,” Saria whispered softly. “Maybe you’d better get behind me, instead of the other way around.” She made a move to sidle around him, to protect him.
Drake caught her arm in a steel grip, holding her in place. His body partially blocked hers from the battlefield. One by one her brothers shifted their gazes from Remy and the torn and bloody leopards to Drake. He could feel the tension stretching out like a thin wire, until even the black leopard noticed and slowly turned his head. Red eyes fixed on Drake. The black leopard went low to the ground in the freeze-frame stalk of his kind.
“You won’t find me easy prey like those two,” Drake said, calmly peeling off his shirt. He flexed his shoulders to loosen his muscles as he kicked off his shoes. “Wouldn’t be a fair fight, Boudreaux. You’re tired and I’m still fresh. I could kick your ass anyway, but if you insist on making a fool of yourself in front of those two dirt bags, I’ll oblige.”