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allowing the drops to wash the tears from her muzzle. It did no good to weep for the past. She couldn’t change what had happened; she could only try to prevent others from feeling her pain and loss.
    As she looked down on the ruins, the laughter of the children turned to screams as men poured from the jungle, and with them, great cats, claws rending and tearing, ripping out the throats of the boys. Adam and Avery were caught in the middle of the cornfield. The three of them were playing hide-and-seek and suddenly the great jaguar-men were surrounding them. They bashed in the heads of her brothers without mercy, spilling brains and blood on the ground and trampling the cornfield. She tried to run, but she was snatched up by one of the great brutes and taken into the clearing where Phin and her father fought, back-to-back, trying to prevent the men from dragging her mother from the house.
    A sob welled up, a strangled wail the throat of the jaguar couldn’t quite handle. She panted, her face to the sky, tears burning, mingling with the drops of the rain. Adam and Avery were gone from her, brutally thrown aside, their bodies tossed like garbage. She remembered the dizzying ride as she was tucked under an arm and rushed through the field, the corn hitting her face, blood spatter everywhere. She saw a man with a machete kill Benet and then the four boys behind his fallen body, even the youngest: little Jake, who was only two. Rachel fought them back using a gun, firing at the men to keep them away from the three little girls. One of the men used a shotgun, and Rachel lay broken and bleeding in the doorway of her house. The men trampled her body while they pulled the screaming girls from inside.
    There was so much blood. So much. It ran red and then black and shiny when the moon came out. Someone started a fire, burning their homes and gardens to the ground around them. Phin turned his head and looked directly at her as one of the jaguar-men thrust a knife into his kidney. They stared at one another, his mouth open in a silent scream, matching her mouth. Her captor threw her on the ground beside Phin’s crumpling body and she watched in horror as the life drained out of his eyes.
    Her stepfather fought valiantly, trying to protect her mother. She lost track of the stab wounds in his chest and back. A great big man cut his throat, ending the fight, and her mother was dragged from the house by the same man, the blood of her husband covering his hands. He hit her mother repeatedly in the face and shoved her at the men before going to each body to make sure no man or male child remained alive. And then he turned toward the girls.
    Inside the jaguar, her heart pounded, and she tasted fear and the beginnings of rage. Rage. She reached for it. Needed it. Tried desperately to let it pool inside her as the horrible man caught her thick mane of hair and dragged her across the blood and into the house where they brought each of the young girls.
    They must have scouted the small village because the men went looking for Audrey, Juliette and Jasmine. Thankfully, the three were gone, off getting supplies, hiking to the river to meet the supply boat when the attackers had struck. Their attackers were jaguar-men—shapeshifters looking for women who could still shift into animal form. So many had done as her mother had done, found a human man who would stay and love them—raise a family with them. But that had weakened the shapeshifter species, and now fewer and fewer females could provide a shifter. Some of the men, led by a rare black jaguar, had begun forcing the women into servitude, essentially using them as breeders. Any children not capable of shifting were purged.
    Solange Sangria stared down at the ground soaked with the blood of her ancestors—and the blood of her family. She could only return here in the form of the jaguar, unable to face the loss in human form. She could weep, with the rain soaking her face and her heart shredded,