Terry Spear - [Shifter 02] by Jaguar Fever Read Free Book Online

was the bottle hitting and you ducking too late.”
    “The guy wielding it was that redheaded guy.”
    She stiffened. She hadn’t liked Bill Bettinger from the beginning.
    “He didn’t like that my brother was protecting my interests,” Wade added.
    She harrumphed. “If only he knew the real situation. We’ve only just met. Now that I know that there are others of our kind nearby, I can make some more shifter friends.”
    David winced as she applied more pressure to
his wound.
    “Here I thought we were nearly old friends, me watching your back in the Amazon…” Wade reminded her.
    “Just my back,” she said.
    He cast a wicked smile over the backseat that
said otherwise.
    “So what’s going on in Belize, and how do you know my cousins?” she asked.
    Wade turned onto another road. “The reason I know your cousins is that we belong to the Service.”
    She considered David’s jagged wound and was relieved to see his healing genetics were beginning to take hold. The bleeding had nearly stopped. “You mean you work for one of the branches of the military, like Candy said?”
    “Not exactly. We’ve done a number of extractions over the years, but we’re not part of the government.”
    “Extractions of what?”
    “People. Shifters like ourselves who get into trouble. City cats who aren’t prepared to face the dangers in the jungle. The Service is more like our own special government, a body that was started years ago to police jaguar shifters and attempt to protect our jaguar cousins who don’t shape-shift. We’re in service to the organization, so cryptically we’re in the Service.”
    “Jaguar police force,” she said. No wonder Wade had been so good at tracking Kat and her brother when they were in the rainforest—he was a first-class act.
    Then what about Wade was true? Maya frowned. “You aren’t a respectable businessman in Pensacola, Florida—a computer programmer during the day and a game-design hobbyist at night?”
    He shook his head.
    “Your cover?”
    “I would have told Kat eventually, but not in an email. We were supposed to hook up.”
    “But you really do live in Pensacola?”
    “Yes.”
    “You had pictures of yourself on Facebook, Twitter, and a number of other networking sites. That’s how I recognized you. So that was all you.”
    “Yeah.”
    She asked David, “What do you do for a living? Are you with this agency, too?”
    “Yeah. But it’s not called the Agency.”
    “Four main branches exist,” Wade explained. “The Enforcers, who police shifters, ensuring everyone abides by some rules. The Guardians, who protect our people, secrets, and real jaguars. The Avengers, who take out the trash. They go after the hard-core criminals that we have no hope of rehabilitating. Then there’s the Special Forces unit that David and I belong to. Your cousins, also. I saw them on a mission in South America. Another extraction.”
    “How come Connor and I never knew about any
of this?”
    “Your parents—”
    “Mother,” Maya corrected. Except for donating the sperm, her father hadn’t taken part in their lives.
    “Your mother, then, must have kept you isolated from our kind and stuck to the old ways. My father was like that, too. Not until David and I began raising hell on our own did we learn about the Service.”
    “What about your mom?”
    He shook his head. “She died when my brother and I were sixteen. A man involved in the exotic-animals markets trade killed her. She’d fought him tooth and claw, attempting to free herself. We guessed he thought she wasn’t worth the battle and terminated her.”
    “I’m so sorry, Wade.”
    “Yeah, well, Dad was in his own world then. Without his heavy hand, David and I cut loose. We got into trouble and learned all about the Service. We were lucky that one of the Enforcers thought we
were salvageable.”
    She shook her head. “I can’t imagine you did anything that bad.”
    “Don’t tell her all the stuff we did, and I