Leopard's Run (Leopard People 10)

“We weren’t living together. My parents were very … private. I don’t know the right way to put it. It was the two of them. They loved me, but they liked to be alone together. Maybe it was from living so long apart from the world. In any case, they encouraged me to go out on my own when I turned eighteen. I didn’t go very far, but I loved having freedom. I checked in with them every week or so, or they found me and did the same. We were like that for a couple of years.”

“So, you lived close to them. In a town?”

She nodded. “Hence my barista skills. I got a job in a little café similar to the Small Sweet Shoppe, although it was more coffee than pastries. That was where Evangeline and I worked together. Sometimes my shifts didn’t give me much time off, and I was a little surprised they didn’t come to see me after two weeks. We had never gone that long. The first two days I had off in a row, I went up to their cabin.”

She dropped her hand, and he saw her swallow hard. Her small teeth bit into her lip and she shook her head. “They were in pieces. Tortured, it looked like. Whoever did it was sadistic. I could barely tell who they were.”

She dropped her gaze from his, but not before he saw the sheen of tears. That hurt. An actual pain. He couldn’t stop himself. He pulled her right into his arms and held her against him. She held herself stiff. Resistant. He almost released her but then her body melted into his. Her skin was hot, probably from the bout with her leopard’s heat she’d wrestled with in her sleep.

She smelled good. Her hair. Her skin. He resisted tasting her and found he was a little resentful that his leopard had. He pulled her onto his lap and rocked her gently, trying to give her comfort when he knew there was none to be had. How could there be?

“Who could have done that to them?” She pulled back enough to look up at him. “It doesn’t make sense. I knew they were leopard. I didn’t think I was, because I didn’t feel her. I hoped, of course, but my mother explained it wasn’t always passed on. I knew they were. Dad was a ferocious fighter. What could possibly defeat two leopards and then tear them to pieces like that?”

He had a bad feeling he knew. “Could they have seen something they shouldn’t have? Did they talk to you about where they came from? Two leopards don’t just appear out of nowhere. They had to have come from a lair.”

Ashe all but crawled off his lap. He let her, because she didn’t know she already belonged to him and he wasn’t going to add to the mess she was already trying to comprehend. She swept back the tendrils of hair falling wildly around her face and once more took up her position in the middle of the bed.

“I don’t know where they were from. Neither ever told me.”

Her eyes hadn’t quite met his and there was something in her voice … Not a lie exactly. A deception? He wasn’t certain. “Did you ever see them in leopard form?”

She nodded. “Of course. Often.”

“Describe what they looked like.”

She smiled at the memory. “My father’s leopard was interesting. That golden color was only along his spine, the rest of his coat was grayish-white in color with very widely spaced rosettes. I thought he was beautiful and unique.”

She was describing an Arabian leopard. They were very rare. Their numbers had fallen below a hundred. Below fifty. Now, one had been killed.

“Your mother? What did she look like?”

“She was beautiful. Truly beautiful. Her coat was very thick and the ring around her rosettes was very thick. She was distinctive, even though she had a pale coat as well. Not like my father’s but still not the gold color you think of when you describe a leopard.”

He couldn’t be certain without seeing her mother in leopard form, but it almost sounded like an Amur leopard. He was very familiar with the Amur leopard. He was one. He turned the information over and over in his mind. He had heard stories of an incident …“How old was your mother when she gave birth to you?”

“She was very young when she had me. A teenager. Barely sixteen.”

He couldn’t sit there on that bed. He got up quickly, all flowing muscle, hot energy needing to go somewhere. Needing to do something. “Did your father keep a diary? A journal? Was there anything at all that might be a record of your parents meeting? Their life together?”

He talked too fast. Asked too many questions. She looked at him as if he’d grown two heads.