Page 67 of The Last Sanctuary

“Like I told you,” Damien said. “As soon as I went to help Rex, she took off. I didn’t see anything. It was dark and foggy as hell. You know that as well as I do.” He sounded frustrated and defensive.

Raven’s heart squeezed. Damien was putting himself on the line for her. How long would they believe him? How much danger was he really in?

“I found blood on a leaf forty yards back.” Dekker’s voice was low and furious, sharp-edged as a knife. “My brother’s blood.”

“We’ll keep looking,” Vaughn said. “We won’t stop until we have her.”

“What about the zoo animals?” said a voice she didn’t recognize. “She released them all.”

“Scorpio already got one of the foxes,” Vaughn said. “We want these pelts. We need to get them now, before they scatter. It’s hunting season, boys.”

“And the tiger?” Damien asked, a hint of unease in his tone. “The bears?”

Vaughn snorted in derision. “We have semi-automatic weapons. They’re stupid caged beasts trained to bask on fake rocks all day. It’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel. Only a hell of a lot more fun.”

“Just get me that damn girl,” Dekker said.

“You’re angry,” Vaughn said. “You want blood for Rex. He was one of us. I swear to you, he will not go unavenged. I’ll give you that blood! We’ll bathe this rotten forest in blood. Every single beast, we bring it down. For Rex!”

Several Headhunters growled their agreement.

“Find the girl,” Dekker ordered. “Kill everything that moves.”

Raven waited, hardly breathing, every muscle tensed. Eventually, Headhunters broke off and headed deeper into the woods to hunt.

Her stomach roiled. Outrage boiled through her veins at the thought of Shadow and Luna being hunted like rats. And Zephyr, Vlad, Suki, and the rest.

Vaughn was right. The sanctuary’s animals had spent most of their lives in captivity. They didn’t know to fear humans. Kodiak would lumber right up to their outstretched guns if they offered him food. So would Loki and the foxes. Even grumpy Electra was a sucker for a treat.

She hadn’t freed the animals so the Headhunters could hunt them down and brutalize them. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t. Besides, if she were infected, death was coming for her anyway. She wasn’t going to take it lying down. No way in hell.

She rose to her feet, wincing as her muscles ached in protest. She tightened her grip on the rifle. A steely determination settled in her gut. The fear was there, but so was an unwavering sense of purpose, of conviction. She knew what she had to do.

The Headhunters weren’t the only human predators in these woods.

Raven was a hunter, too.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Raven went on the hunt.

The chilly air stung her exposed cheeks. Her hands were red and chapped. She shivered as she caked her face and hands with dirt and smeared the bottom of her boots with red clay and mashed leaves and twigs into the mud to mar her footprints.

She strapped the rifle across her chest with the sling, adjusted her pouch of ammunition, and rechecked the tranq gun, still tucked into her waistband. The second tranquilizer gun was tucked into her backpack. She kept the whittling knife folded in her pocket.

While she worked, she remained alert to the sounds of the woods, to the intruders who had so savagely invaded her sanctuary.

Every few minutes, gunshots shattered the early morning air. The Headhunters were loud. They stumbled and thrashed through the underbrush. The men shouted to each other through the trees, followed by therat-a-tatof semi-automatic weapons.

If they were pursuing wild creatures, they would never have found them. But the captive animals were confused, anxious,and frightened. The alien scents and strange sounds were alarming and disorienting.

They wandered through a foreign land they no longer recalled, frantically searching for a familiar sense of safety that eluded them.

One by one, the Headhunters began to pick them off.

The retort of another rifle cracked. Raven cringed. Another shot. Another animal she loved was being chased down. With every boom and crack of a gun, her heart broke a little more.

This wasn’t hunting.