Chapter 885: Columbian Poachers In The Amazon [Bonus - ]

Chapter 885: Columbian Poachers In The Amazon [Bonus Chapter]

Kara blinked.

“The what?”

Aki turned around slowly.

“The… Forest Mother?”

Across the clearing, Lara rolled her jade eyes so hard it was audible.

“I hate that name,” she said flatly. “It makes me sound like a grandmother…”

“You’re older than my great-grandmother’s great-grandmother,” Da Silva shot back without looking at her. “So the name fits.”

“And you’ve gotten old, Valeria,” Lara replied, just as flatly, looking her up and down. “Look at you… Grey hairs in that ponytail, wrinkles around your eyes too… Last time I saw you, you were a skinny little thing with a broken nose, trying to wrestle my caimans for fun… Now you’re the president and you look tired.”

Da Silva’s jaw tightened.

“I’m forty-two, you don’t need to rub it in…”

“Exactly,” Lara said. “Old.”

Leona coughed into her fist very suddenly, and Maya stared straight ahead with her lips pressed together so hard they’d gone white.

Aki looked back and forth between them, wide-eyed.

“You… know each other?”

Da Silva let out a long-suffering breath through her nose, and the soldiers behind her shuffled half a step backward, as if putting distance between themselves and the naked woman might somehow protect them.

“Everyone in Amazonia knows of her, little bird,” Da Silva said. “Though very few people have ever actually seen her.”

She nodded toward Lara, who was inspecting her own fingernails with total boredom.

“She’s the protector of this forest… She’s lived in it for a very long time, longer than anyone can remember… She’s one of the only humans who actually lives in the deep jungle, and the beasts here answer to her.”

“I’m centuries old though I can’t exactly tell you the number,” Lara said, without looking up. “After all, I stopped counting…”

“She’s strong,” Da Silva added quietly. “Very strong… On the same level as the World Council.”

Aki’s eyes went very wide.

She turned and stared at Lara, then at Kara, and Kara gave her the smallest nod.

’Fucking hell, I said the same thing,’ Kara thought.

“Then…” Aki said slowly, stepping closer, “why isn’t she known? If someone this strong exists, the whole world should know her name… The Council should have tried to recruit her… Father should have tried. Why have I never heard of you?”

Lara finally lifted her head.

She looked at Aki for a long moment with those sharp jade eyes, and her lazy, bored expression shifted into something that was almost thoughtful.

“Because I don’t care about any of you, little thing,” she said simply. “Your Council, your kings, your little wars and your borders and your tournaments… None of it interests me.”

She swept her staff in a slow lazy arc toward the towering trees around them.

“This forest is mine. The beasts in it are mine. As long as the World Council doesn’t stick its nose into my forest, I don’t stick my nose into its business… We have an understanding. They leave me alone, and I let them keep breathing.”

The whole riverbank was quiet.

“…That’s quite terrifying,” Aki said faintly.

“Thank you,” Lara said.

Aki edged a little closer to Kara and lowered her voice to a whisper behind her hand.

“Kara… she’s World Council level, and she just lives in a forest with no clothes on and wrestles crocodiles for fun?”

“Apparently,” Kara whispered back, sounding far too entertained by the whole idea. “Honestly, it’s a pretty good life, when you think about it.”

“She also bit your ear, Kara,” Aki hissed, her cheeks puffing up as the memory came rushing back. “While she was sitting on you. I’m going to need to talk to you about that later, and I mean properly, not with you laughing your way out of it.”

“I had a feeling you might,” Kara murmured, and wisely decided that this was not the moment to smile.

Then her jade eyes slid past Aki and landed on Kara, and stayed there.

Her lips curved slowly.

“Although,” she purred, “I might be developing an interest…”

She started walking toward Kara.

It was a slow swaying walk, her bare feet silent on the moss and her gold beads clicking softly, and every Amazonian soldier on the riverbank suddenly found something extremely important to stare at in the trees.

She stopped barely a foot away from Kara, so close that Kara had to tilt her chin up to meet her eyes, and she looked down at her with a smile that was far too knowing.

“You’re shorter like this…” Lara murmured.

Kara’s eyes narrowed in warning.

“I like the other one better,” Lara went on with her gaze drifting slowly down Kara’s suit as if she could see straight through it. “The tall one… With the arms… Both of them… and everything else.”

“Lara,” Kara said pleasantly, through her teeth, holding her gaze with a look that promised a very serious conversation, “you and I are going to have a talk later… Privately and somewhere far away from everyone else’s ears.”

“Oh, I’d like that very much, handsome,” Lara purred, completely missing the threat or more likely ignoring it on purpose.

Da Silva’s head turned so fast her ponytail whipped.

“…Handsome?”

Lara smiled at her while Kara smiled at her too though neither of them said a word.

Da Silva looked from one to the other with her eyes narrowing, a strange irritated heat crawling up her neck that she refused to put a name to, and she found herself standing a little straighter with her hand resting on the hilt of her saber.

’Why is she standing so close to her?’ Da Silva thought, her jaw tight. ’Why is she calling her handsome?’

Aki, meanwhile, had quietly placed herself directly between Kara and Lara, glaring up at the much taller woman with every ounce of royal authority she possessed.

Lara looked down at her, amused.

“Little thing,” she said, “you’re blocking my view.”

“That’s the plan…” Aki said.

Kara decided it was time to change the subject before someone set the jungle on fire.

“So,” she said loudly, “about the poacher thing. You attacked us for a reason. Want to explain?”

That got Lara’s attention.

The amusement drained out of her face, and when she turned her head toward the river, her jade eyes had gone hard and cold.

“The crocodile you were about to kill,” she said, “is a river matriarch… She’s the oldest of her bloodline in this whole basin, and she’s guarding a nest upstream. She attacked your princess because the princess walked too close to her water… and because her mate was taken six days ago.”

The riverbank went quiet.

“Taken? The mate was taken?” Aki blinked.

“Taken,” Lara said. “Netted, drugged and dragged off in the middle of the night by men in grey armor with machines that fly without sound. They’ve been coming into my forest for two months now. They take the rare ones… the strongest, the oldest, the last of their kind. Every time I get there, they’re already gone and their machines hide them from me.”

Her grip tightened on her staff until the wood creaked. “When I saw a stranger with a spear of water about to kill my matriarch, I assumed they were back.”

“So you threw us into your Domain to find out the truth?” Kara said.

“I threw you into my Domain to crush you,” Lara corrected. “Finding out the truth was a side effect… but you’re pretty lucky I stopped.”

Da Silva stepped forward, her expression hardening into the cold focus of a military commander.

“She’s right about the poachers,” she said grimly. “We’ve been tracking them for weeks. They’re a Columbian syndicate… well-funded, well-equipped and very, very careful… Cloaking drones, mana-dampening nets, stasis cages, armored transports that can hide from our satellites. Every time we close in, they vanish.”

Her jaw clenched. “I’ve lost two patrols to them already. Well they’re wounded, not dead but they’re making a fool of my country in my own backyard.”

“Columbia,” Aki repeated quietly, and her blue eyes darkened. “Those are President Vanderbilt’s people.”

“Most likely,” Da Silva said. “Though proving it is another matter.”

Kara stretched her one arm over her head with a long, lazy yawn, and every eye on the riverbank turned to her.

“Well,” she said cheerfully, “I’m bored, and we’ve got time before the convoy leaves… Want some help?”

Da Silva stared at her.

“You… want to hunt poachers,” she said slowly, as if she couldn’t quite believe the words. “With us… For fun?”

“I want to hunt Columbians,” Kara corrected her, with the bright, cheerful smile of someone choosing a restaurant. “For fun… There’s a difference, Valeria. Poachers are a job but Columbians are a hobby.”

She was going to bully anything that had to do with Vanderbilt, that much was certain.

“I’m helping too,” Aki said firmly, stepping up beside her and folding her arms with every ounce of royal authority she had, mud and all.

Da Silva blinked at her.

“Little bird, these people are dangerous. They’ve…”

“They’re taking the forest’s animals,” Aki said, and her small hands curled into fists at her sides. “The rare ones… The last ones… There was a beetle back there with a shell that changed color in the light, Valeria. Do you know how many of those are probably left in the world? What if they took him next?”

Her eyes narrowed.

“I’m helping too and you can’t tell me anything otherwise.”

Kara looked down at her with deep fondness.

’She’s going to war over a beetle,’ she thought. ’Aki is really cute…’

Across the clearing, Lara watched the little princess with her head tilted, and something that looked almost like approval flickered across her face.

Da Silva looked at Kara, she looked at Aki and she even looked at Lara, who’d already turned away from all of them to face the deep green darkness of the forest.

Lara lifted her staff.

The green gem at its tip began to glow then brighter, pulsing in a deep rhythm like a heartbeat.

Her jade eyes slid half-closed, and all around them, the jungle seemed to hold its breath as the insects went quiet, the birds went quiet, and even the river seemed to slow.

For a long moment, Lara stood perfectly still, listening to something none of them could hear then her eyes snapped open, blazing.

“They’re moving tonight,” Lara said. “I can feel them…”

…

Forty miles to the west, deep in a stretch of flooded forest where no road had ever been built and no Amazonian patrol had ever set foot, the jungle hummed with machines.

From above, there was nothing to see.

The canopy looked whole and undisturbed, an endless rolling sea of green broken only by the occasional flash of a macaw but beneath it, hidden under a shimmering dome of refracted light projected by a ring of silent hovering drones, sat a camp.

It was clean, quiet and very expensive.

Prefabricated shelters of matte-grey composite stood in neat rows on raised platforms above the flooded ground.

Armored hover-trucks idled on their magnetic pads with their engines whispering, their cargo beds stacked with long white stasis cages that glowed faintly blue from within.

A portable command module sat at the center, its walls lined with screens showing thermal maps, satellite feeds and the silent rotating outlines of patrol routes that belonged to the Amazonian military.

Every few seconds, one of the drones overhead flickered and adjusted, bending light and sound and mana signatures around the camp like water around a stone.

Inside the command module, a man in grey tactical armor leaned back in his chair with his boots up on the console and a cup of black coffee in his hand.

His name was Carver Briggs, and he was very good at his job.

He was a big, broad-shouldered man in his fifties with a shaved head, a neat silver beard and the comfortable air of someone who’d done this a hundred times and been caught exactly zero of them.

A thin data-tablet rested on his knee, glowing with the latest message from Columbia.

“Three more days,” He said, scrolling lazily through it. “Buyer’s getting impatient…”

Across the module, a younger man with a buzz cut and a tactical rifle propped against his chair looked up from his screen.

“He’s been impatient since the start, boss… Rich guys always are and I hate that about them.”

“Rich guys pay,” Briggs said, and took a long sip of his coffee. “And this one’s paying more than all the others combined.”

He tapped the tablet, and a hologram flickered to life above the console.

It was an animal.

It was a jaguar, or something that had once been a jaguar, sleek and powerful and nearly twice the size of any natural cat, with a coat the color of midnight.

Running from the top of its skull down the length of its spine was a long thick mane of fur that glowed softly in the dark, scattered with tiny pinpricks of silver light that shifted and drifted like stars, as though someone had poured a piece of the night sky down its back.

The young man whistled low.

“…That’s the Starmane?”

“That’s the Starmane,” Briggs said. “It’s a Crossbred monster-cat… There might be five of them left in the whole basin, maybe fewer and our drones picked up a pregnant female two nights ago, holed up in a den near the old river bend.”

He smiled faintly. “Two for the price of one… Mother and cubs of course.”

“Who’s the buyer?”

“Some billionaire across the ocean who wants the rarest pet on the planet sitting in a glass enclosure in his mansion,” Briggs said with a shrug. “Doesn’t matter who… What matters is the number.”

He tapped the tablet again, and a figure flashed up beneath the hologram.

The young man’s eyes went wide.

“…That’s real?”

“That’s real,” Briggs said. “And the company needs every credit of it…”