Jaguar warriors

A soft lamp carried by a slender figure in a white garment came toward us down the long row of columns.
It proved to be a woman dressed in an outfit almost exactly like Susan's. She was tall, young, and lovely, with the dark red-brown skin of the native Maya, with their long features and dark eyes. Three others accompanied her - men, and obviously warriors all, wearing the skins of jaguars over their shoulders and otherwise clad only in loincloths and heavy tattoos. Two of them carried swords made of wood and sharpened chips of obsidian. The other carried a drum that rolled off a steady beat.
I thought there was something familiar about the features of the three men, but then I realized that they weren't personally familiar to me. It was the subtle tension of their bodies, the hints of power that hung about them like a very faint perfume.
They reminded me quite strongly of Susan and Martin. Half vampires. Presumably just as dangerous as Susan and Martin, if not more so.

Changes Chapter 42, Page 452


At the base of the pyramid, and therefore most numerous, were the jaguar warriors we had already seen. They were all men, all appealing, all layered with the lean, swift muscle of a panther. They all wore jaguar skins. Many of them bore traditional weapons. Many more wore swords, some of them of modern make, the best of which were superior in every physical sense to the weapons manufactured in the past. Most of them also carried a Kalashnikov - again, the most modern versions of the weapons, made of steel and polymer, the finest of which were also readily superior to the weapons of earlier manufacture.
The next level up were all women, garbed in ritual clothing as Alamaya had been, but covered in tattoos, much as the jaguar warriors were. They, too, had that same subtle edge to them that uggested greater-than-mortal capability.
Hell's bells. If the numbers were the same on every side of the pyramid, and I had no reason to believe that they were not, then I was looking at nearly a thousand of the jaguar warriors and priestesses. I am a dangerous man - but no one man is that dangerous. I was abruptly glad that we hadn't tried a rope-a-dope or a forward charge. We'd have been swamped by sheer numbers, almost regardless of the plan.
Numbers matter.
That fact sucks, but that makes it no less true. No matter how just your cause, if you're outnumbered two to one by a comparable force, you're gonna have to be real creative to pull out a victory. Ask the Germans who fought on either front of World War II. German tankers would often complain that they would take out ten Allied tanks for every tank they lost - but the Allies always seemed to have tank number eleven ready to go.
I was looking at an impossible numerical disadvantage, and I did not at all like the way it felt to realize that truth.
And I was only on the second tier of the pyramid.
Vampires occupied the next several levels. None of them were in their monstrous form, but they didn't have to be. They weren't going all out on their disguises, and the all-black coloration of their eyes proclaimed their inhumanity with eloquence. Among the vampires, gender seemed to have no particular recognition. Two more levels were filled with fully vampire jaguar warriors, male and female alike, and the next two with vampire priests and priestesses. Above them came what I presumed to be the Red Court's version of the nobility - individual vampires, male and female, who clearly stood with their own retinues. They tended to wear more and more gold and have fewer and fewer tattoos the higher up the pyramid they went.

Changes Chapter 43, Page 456-458