The moment she saw Gedeon, she knew he was leopard. There was no mistaking them once you’d seen one. She’d never seen one quite so fast in human form. She couldn’t imagine what he would be like in leopard form. She was shocked that he’d cared enough about the women to try to save them. One man—even a shifter— against so many didn’t seem good odds.
As a rule, when seen or caught in the wild, the Amur male leopard weighed between 71 and 110 pounds and the female weighed between 55 and 94. Meiling had seen shifters with leopards weighing far more than that. It didn’t seem to slow their leopards down at all. Gedeon was built in the way of shifters, with roped muscles, a dense chest, narrow hips leading to muscled thighs. He was astonishingly fast. Meiling was certain he couldn’t be an Amur leopard, not when he had empathy for the women being treated in such appalling ways.
She kept running, but by the time she reached the second cabin, she found only death. The leopard had come too late to save the teens from the guards. They had been murdered the moment their trainers heard gunfire and couldn’t raise anyone on their phones to instruct them otherwise. Despite the trainers having the advantage of knowing someone or something was coming for them, despite them having the advantage of numbers, the leopard had torn them to shreds. All of them. Then he was gone, rushing for the next cabin, leaving no one behind to sneak up on him while he was doing his best to save the children.
Meiling stopped in the heavy brush some thirty feet away from the third cabin. One of the patrolling guards lay dying another ten feet from her. The leopard hadn’t delivered the kill bite to him in his effort to get to the children. Now, Gedeon knelt on the porch, one hand covering his face, weeping. Bodies of the men the leopard had killed were scattered around him in various stages of dying.
Meiling knew the children had been murdered, just as the women and teens had been. Gedeon had found them already dead. She found her eyes blurring as well. She had hoped. Prayed to the universe she no longer believed in. What was wrong with these men that they could kill so easily? She brushed at the wetness in her eyes, and when she did, she caught movement.
The guard. The one Gedeon’s leopard hadn’t finished off. He was dying. There was no way for him to live, not with the vicious wounds that had ripped open his body. She could see those gashes had been inflicted on the run. The leopard had ensured the guard couldn’t walk or come after him. He’d struck brutally and continued onward. But the guard was up to something. He was attempting to pull something off his belt with his very shaky hands.
Meiling had to really study what it was he was trying to get to. She didn’t know much about bombs at all, but she had read about them once and looked at diagrams. There was a description of remote detonators, and that looked suspiciously like one.
Not thinking, clutching Gedeon’s clothes, she raised her voice as she turned to run. She had no idea where the bomb was, or even if there was one. “Bomb. Run. Get out of there. Run.”
It stood to reason that, after murdering the women and children, they’d blow up the evidence. Maybe the bomb was a string of bombs that ran along the path of the cabins. Meiling ran away from the path. She caught a glimpse of Gedeon’s head coming up sharply as she looked back to see if he was heeding her warning.
For one terrible moment their eyes met. His burned a terrible gold as he shifted on the run. On the run. Coming straight toward her. He was huge. The biggest leopard she’d ever seen in her life. His fur was thick, almost creamy white on his belly and legs, with deep gold over the cream on his back and head. Black rosettes were large and widely spaced over his entire body, and those eyes burned brightly and focused as he ran.
She didn’t look back but ran for her life. She knew he was coming for her. He couldn’t leave witnesses. He was Amur. Deadly. Bratya. They murdered their women. The world thought they were nearly extinct from loss of habitat or poaching, but she knew the shifters had murdered their own kind. Now that they were down to so few, were they horrified at what they’d done? Were they looking for their women in an effort to rectify the situation? No, they were still murdering them.
She ran as fast as she was capable of running, leaping over every obstacle in her path. She was grateful for the fifty-foot start, but she knew it wasn’t nearly enough. Then the world blew up. She was picked up as if she weighed no more than a feather and thrown through the air into the relative protection of the heavier brush. She landed right in the middle of thick leaves cushioning her fall. She lay covering her eyes against the flash after flash and thundering blasts that shook the earth.