Her Panthera Protectors Read online

  Her Panthera Protectors

  A Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance

  Laura Wylde

  © Copyright 2018 by CWG Publishers - All rights reserved.

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  More from Laura

  Chapter 1

  Kayla

  I felt like we had been walking forever. The thermal imaging that we had taken during a fly-over was showing a large mass, or something around here, and I still hadn't seen it. I felt like I had been walking in this jungle for days. Everything looked the same, but I was still no closer to finding what I was supposed to find.

  I took my GPS out and checked the coordinates again. It didn't make any sense to me why I hadn't found the buildings yet. It looked to be one large building that had multiple underground rooms. I had gotten so excited when I saw it in the imaging. It looked like another lost city of the Mayans, Incans, or the Aztecs. It could have been one of many old civilizations. No one knew of anything here, so I was hoping for it to be a first discovery.

  My funding would stop if I didn't find it soon. I had been tromping through the forest for several days now, and I knew if I didn't find something soon, I was going to have to go home with my tail in between my legs. It was literally the last thing that I wanted to do. Especially knowing that I was so close. I just knew I was. This was the break that I had been waiting for. I knew it.

  My companions were about as tired as I was, but they didn't have the same drive as I did. I had been a digger and an assistant a long time ago. It was thrilling, but at the same time, it was mind numbing. It was different when I was in Egypt, because everything was flat, and it was easier to see. Here it was hot, wet, and everything was the same. The tall trees and forest canopy blotted out the sun most of the time, but I could still feel the effects of it, and I knew everybody else could too.

  I looked at Alice next to me, and she looked like she was going to pass out. I saw myself in her a lot, especially when I first got out of college and I was trying to make a name for myself. Five years later, I still hadn’t made a name for myself yet, but at least now I was running things, instead of following behind somebody, hoping for the best. That is what she was doing, that is what they were all doing, and I could tell that we all needed a break.

  “Why don't we stop here for a little bit? We can drink some water, have some lunch, and then keep going. I'm going to look at the GPS a little better and see if something's going on. It should be here. That's what the GPS and the thermal imaging says. But the way that this vegetation has taken over everything, it is easy to see that it could be covered.”

  Everybody was happy with a little bit of a break, and Alice smiled at me in the biggest way possible. I could tell that she wanted a break; we all did.

  There weren't that many people with me, not at the beginning stages. It had taken us almost three days to even get here, and two of those days were spent going in circles because we got lost.

  We were in the middle of Brazil, and now that we were close, I was starting to get anxious. I worried that this was all going to be for nothing, and we weren't going to find the ruins. I didn’t know how much longer we could look and not find it. We were going to have to go out of the woods in the next couple of days because we were running out of supplies. This was supposed to be a search-and-seek mission, but it was just a lot of searching at this point.

  Alice came and sat down next to me and asked me how I was doing.

  “I'm doing fine, Alice. How are you doing? Not exactly what you thought of when you were in school, huh?”

  She kind of shook her head to agree.

  “No, not at all really. I guess that's a good thing though because this is real life. It is really easy to read all the books and to read about all the people who have found such wonderful things, but it is something different altogether when you are here doing it yourself. I can't believe that I am here really. I hope you find everything you were looking for out here, Kayla, and we all get to see something new.”

  “I hope so too, Alice. I have a good feeling about it, but we have to find it first.”

  Alice agreed, and she started to pull out a couple of wrapped sandwiches that she had brought with her. She was one of the best supplied here, and I could tell that while she wasn't used to this, I had a feeling that she had done a lot of camping in her days. Being outside and all of this was half of the reason that I wanted to be an archaeologist to begin with. It was of course the love of history and the joy of the hunt as well, but I never wanted to have a job where I had to stay indoors behind a desk all day. I wanted to be outside, under the sun, with the wind blowing in my hair. While I was frustrated at the moment, there was nowhere else I'd rather be.

  Everyone else sat down and started to eat their lunches. Everybody had a different variety of things, but there were several of them who were pulling out ration bars that I had brought out in the beginning. They were like me, not at all like Alice. It was hard to really prepare for a trip that was extended, not to mention that we had to carry everything on our backs, so that dissuaded us in a lot of ways from bringing extras. I knew that if we didn't find something soon, we were going to have to go back. It wasn't a point of finding it, or frustration, it was just going to be the point where there was going to be no supplies left for us.

  I listened to all of the animals in the rainforest, and it sounded like a melody that I’d never
heard before. I wanted to believe that they were playing it for us, and we were lucky enough to hear it. I wanted to think that maybe we were the first people in hundreds of years who had heard the same sounds. I liked being where no one had been in a long time, and this was one of those moments.

  After a time, everyone was finished, and they were starting to get restless again. I had to remind myself that I wasn’t the only one who was looking for the ruins. We were all here for the same reason, to find something cool in the middle of nowhere.

  “All right, guys, let's get going. Let's keep our eyes open, okay?”

  Everyone agreed, and after looking at the GPS, I figured that we could go a little further north to see if the thermal imaging was right. I had gotten sidetracked a couple of times, and it took me away from where I'm supposed to go. Now I was determined to see it through, whatever I had to go through to get there.

  We had gone another twenty or thirty minutes before I stopped to look at the GPS again. We were so close to the exact coordinates, and I looked to my left a little bit to see if I could see anything. The trees seemed to get a little bit thicker up ahead, and I told everybody to get their machetes out. It was time to go towards the harder areas. We weren't going to be able to walk uninhibited like we had before.

  A couple of the guys moved up ahead of me and started to chop through the heavy branches and large vines that seemed to wrap around one area in particular. I couldn't see what was past it, so it gave me this tiny, little spring of hope that this was where we were supposed to be. I really wanted this to be the place. If it wasn't, by the end of the day, we would be heading out of the forest, and I didn't want to give up yet. I still had this feeling inside of me that we were going to find something truly magnificent. I was convinced.

  I heard Chris holler up ahead, and the two men started to move a little faster. They had gotten a bit ahead of me because I was more in my head than I should have been, and I could hear very clearly that they had found something. It was music to my ears, but I still told myself to calm down. This could be it or it could be nothing. I wouldn't know until I saw it for myself.

  Chris and Tim started hacking a little faster, and I was right behind them, waiting for them to clear the way. They were here for the heavy lifting and such, more a guy’s thing than anything else, and I was thankful for them now. They got through the vines and branches far more quickly than I ever would have been able to.

  “I think you need to see this, Doc.”

  It wasn't a time for me to tell them not to call me that. I really hated it, didn't feel like I was a doctor at all, and both men refused to call me anything else. If I wasn't so excited, I would explain to them very slowly again that they could just call me Kayla.

  But right now, I wasn't worried about that. They could call me whatever they wanted if it meant that we had found what we were looking for. I hadn't tromped through these woods for days just to come back empty handed. I wanted results, and I gasped for a moment when I finally saw what was behind all of the cover. We had found what we were looking for. Finally.

  I had just made a couple of calls to a few people who were still back at the hotels. I don't want to bring twenty people out here if I wasn't able to find the place. It would have been a waste of time, and it would've been harder to move around to find the temple. The saying was, if you wanted to move fast, go alone. I couldn't exactly do that, but now I needed more people out here, with more supplies.

  I gave them the coordinates, and I just sat down on a rock for a while. The rock that I was sitting on most likely was part of a large staircase that went to a very large building. This was what the thermal imaging had picked up, and it was certainly at one time a very great house or place of worship for an old civilization. I liked to imagine the people who had been here so long ago, and I loved the idea that I was sitting in the midst of it. There was just something about it that I was never going to get over. It was the thrill of the hunt, and I had found my treasure chest.

  Looking back at the ruins, I knew now that the next step was to find out what was in the treasure chest. I've been so geeked out that we hadn't even gone in yet because we were still trying to make sure that it would be safe to do so. I wanted to contact the people back in the town, and I wanted to get them here.

  There was also the fact that I had to talk to my funders, so that they could get the proper permits. Right now, I couldn't do excavation to find out what I needed to. Right now, all I could do was look around and wait for them to go through the proper channels.

  Alice was close, and I motioned her over.

  “Do you want to take a look inside?”

  She got the biggest grin on her face. The smile that she had was from ear to ear almost. I had to return the gesture because that was exactly how I felt too. I really wanted to stay here forever, to look everything over, but it was time to move inside and see what we found in the place that I was quickly thinking of as the temple. I don't know why I was so nervous, but I just had this feeling in my gut that this was going to change my life forever.

  We started into the building, and I was immediately surprised at how pristine the inside was. The outside had things growing on it, and vines covered what I knew would be beautiful stone work; the inside didn't have any of that. It was actually clean in here, and it was almost too perfect. That eerie feeling that I had before was back, but I really didn't know why.

  Because there was no damage, I could see carvings in the stone very clearly. I'm sure that there was just as many outside, but in here, I could see everything.

  This was the whole reason I was here, and the carvings and the stone would tell me who had been here before. It was most likely one of the three civilizations that were known in South America, but I didn't know which one yet. The problem was that very quickly I realized that what I was looking at in front of me wasn't from any of the three known ancient civilizations that were big enough to make something like this.

  “I don't know who did this, Alice. I have never seen anything like this before. Come here and take a look.”

  Chapter 2

  Javier

  I felt a bullet whiz by my head, and I knew that they were getting closer. The poachers were getting smart, and they were coming out in bigger groups. They had small vehicles that were made to whip around through the rainforest, and even though we were all in our true forms, we were not getting too far ahead of them.

  “We have to go towards the temple. It will slow them down and it’s dense through there. The vehicles won’t make it through at that speed.”

  Damien was closest to me, and he agreed with a nod of his head and a look in his eyes. He was my oldest friend and companion. Sometimes I thought that we didn’t even need to talk to get our point across. It came in handy over the years when situations like the one we were in arose.

  The poachers were getting closer, and I was starting to get tired. It felt like we had been running for a long time. Too long. I needed to change soon or I was going to anyways. I had to have energy and power to stay this way, and it was getting harder. We were close to home, and we needed to get down under the ground so that this would stop.

  We had been running so long that even Eben had run out of juice. I had thought it impossible, but I could see it in his eyes. Tyler was still going, but we were all tired. It was time to end this because the last thing that we needed was bullets in us or dead bodies that were attacked in the jungle. It would bring more people with guns into the Amazon and we didn’t want it. We were close to Panthera, and that was the best way to go. No one knew we were there, and we hadn’t been found in thousands of years. It wasn’t going to start now.

  I heard more shots and waited to hear them buzz past my ears as they had done before. This time a bullet didn’t pass me but went through me. I felt it go into my shoulder, and the weight of it hitting me threw me off a little bit. I was moving too fast, and it knocked me down. I couldn’t stay down long though, not with the poachers on me. They weren’t
letting up, and I could hear them cheering behind me, happy to see that they had hit one of us.

  Getting back up, I started running again, but I was losing it. I was also losing my shape as well. I knew that I was about to switch back, and I went behind the densest brush that I could find. Damien and Tyler came to rest beside me, while Eben started off faster. Moments ago, he had been so tired, but now he was going faster than ever to get the poachers away from us. It was done to give me room to breathe, and I was very thankful for that.

  The vehicles were getting into denser forest and were made to slow down. Eben was going to take them to a place that was full of boulders and low lying branches and vines. He was going to take them out, one by one, and it would all look like accidents. Those poachers were going to leave the Amazon convinced that they had been outsmarted by a cat.

  “We need to get you back to Panthera. You’re bleeding a lot. You can’t run like that.”

  I wanted to tell them that I was fine, and I would get it done, but I really couldn’t. I wasn’t going to be able to maintain form enough to even do that. It sounded bad, but I was feeling strength pour out of me. I needed the healing aura of the temple.

  “We are going to get you back, Javi. You’re going to be okay, man. We have all been shot many times.”

  “I know, Damien, but it is getting old.”

  All of this was getting old. Why did we have to run from lesser beings? It was easy to pick off one or two of them. Men go missing in the Amazon all of the time, but now they came in groups of fifteen and twenty of them. We could take them down, guns and all, but there would be an investigation and we didn’t need heat. So instead, we took a bullet every now and then, playing cat and mouse with them until they left.