Page 102 of The Last Sanctuary

With shaking hands, one of the Headhunters raised his rifle. “Shoot it!”

The tiger swung his great head. His intent gaze riveted on the man and that hated rifle. It happened so fast. One second to the next.

With an enraged snarl, Vlad sprang.

Airborne, he arced fifteen feet through the rain.

Vaughn attempted to track the tiger with his gun, but the beast was too quick. He fired a few impotent rounds that struck the trees somewhere above their heads.

The tiger pounced on his victim. With a single savage swipe of his paw, he slashed the man in the face. The blow knocked the Headhunter to the ground and stripped the rifle from his useless hands.

Vlad seized the man’s head in his enormous jaws. He shook the Headhunter like a rag doll. Then he bit down.

A terrible tearing sound echoed through the clearing. A sickening crunch of bone cracking, breaking, the skull caving in on itself. Vlad’s jaws crushed the man’s cranium. The man didn’t even scream. In an instant, it was over.

The tiger crouched over the body. His tail lashed. His back arched. His great head swung back and forth, seeking his next prey. Something thick and dark dripped from his jowls. Then he roared.

Chaos erupted. Shaken from their shocked stupor, the Headhunters burst into motion. They fled for the supposed safety of the trees.

Vaughn shouted directions to his men, screaming at them to regroup and hunt the tiger down. His men ran, too scared to face down a five-hundred-pound monster.

Raven had to run, too. Get Shadow and flee. If Vlad went after the Headhunters, she could escape?—

A sinister growl stopped her in her tracks.

The tiger had moved from the Headhunter’s body. He stalked toward Raven. Only ten yards away, his belly low, slinking closer.

Terror clamped her throat. She stood absolutely still. A thousand times, she’d been this close to Vlad, but always with a fence between them.

Now, there was nothing but ferns, rain, and empty air.

The whittling knife lay snug in her pocket. Damien’s pistol was nearby, the rifle further away, the knife somewhere in the ferns. She didn’t make a move for them, didn’t want to activate the tiger’s prey response. A knife would do little against a tiger, anyway.

“I’m not your enemy,” she whispered. “Remember?”

Vlad stared straight at Raven with fixed yellow eyes, his pupils slitted, unblinking. His jaws hung strangely, hinging open and closed, in a way she’d never seen before.

But then, she’d never seen him crush a man’s skull with his teeth before, either.

Even through her terror, something niggled at the back of her brain. Something was off. Somethingwrong.

In the frantic seconds of the attack, in the blur of the rain, she’d missed it: a thick, yellowish slobber clung to the tiger’s black lips. His jowls dripped with red-streaked foam. The yellowed slurry of blood, pus, and foamy slobber matted his furred throat, chest, his forelegs.

The realization jolted through her like a lightning strike. Vlad had killed and eaten Gomez. Gomez was sick. Vlad had consumed diseased flesh.

The tiger was no longer a tiger. No longer a captive beast nor a wild one. Not if the virus had infiltrated his body. His diseased brain would seek to bite and infect everything within sight. Including her.

The tiger was infected.

And she was his next target.

Chapter Forty-Four

Five hundred pounds of apex predator sprang at Raven.

The world stopped spinning. Rain droplets froze in midair. The chaos of screaming and shouting went dim. It was as if Raven were trapped underwater. Everything went distant and blurry, everything except the tiger.

Vlad bounded toward her. A streak of orange and black terror with claws. She had a single second. She did the only thing she could. She whistled. One long note. Two short ones.