Chapter 43
Chapter Forty-Three
The tiger exploded from the underbrush. He launched at the Headhunters in a ferocious orange blur, crossing twenty feet in a single bound, spanning the distance to his prey in under a second. An arcing missile of death.
Screaming, Cobb spun and fired a wild burst of shots. In his sheer panic, the gun veered wide. He had no time to correct his aim. The tiger was on him.
Vlad collided with his target at full speed. His claws extended. Jaws gaping.
Man and beast went down together. A writhing ball of teeth and fangs and vulnerable exposed flesh.
The tiger struck Cobb in the side of the head with a paw like a sledgehammer. The man’s skull snapped back. The blow might’ve broken his neck.
In the next instant, Vlad plunged his fangs into Cobb’s throat and crushed his jugular.
Cobb’s scream was abruptly truncated. He gurgled. His mouth hung open strangely. His hands fluttered uselessly. His eyes rolled wild and frantic. His blood gushed in a torrent, drenching the bent and matted ferns beneath him.
Mere seconds had passed. Three, perhaps four. Everyone stood frozen in shock and terror.
Including Raven. Even Shadow, standing guard over Luna, went stiff-legged, half turned toward this new insidious threat.
They watched in horror as Cobb’s face contorted into a grotesque caricature. Blood burbled like a fountain from his lips, from his opened throat. The guttural sounds faint in the drumming rain.
The tiger rose to his full height. He cut an astonishing figure, terrible in his enormous size, his immense strength, his dreadful beauty.
The vibrant burnt orange of his coat, the thick snowy white fur of his broad chest and belly, the rich oiled black of the bands striping his sleek back.
A quarter ton of coiled muscle and sinew.
Vlad’s muscular shoulders rippled as he stood over Cobb’s body. His yellow eyes narrowed to slits. His ears flattened against his skull. He bared his fangs. His four-inch claws were unsheathed and razor-sharp.
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. Something wrong.
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.