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Something moved in the dark: a bulk of muscle and razor-sharp teeth and claws. The green embers breathed to life again. Higher, Tean thought. Coming out of her den. He tried to run through what he knew—what little he knew—but it felt like sand pouring between his fingers. In the wild, a tiger wouldn’t attack them, not like this. But this cat had been caged, perhaps for her whole life, and who knew what had been done to her, or what she might do if given the opportunity.
Jem’s breathing accelerated, but he nodded in response to Tean’s directions. His hand tightened around the improvised sap.
“I’ll distract her—” Tean began, which was one of the stupidest things he’d said in his whole life, but he was saying it for Jem, so it was ok.
And then the sound of the engine reached them. It was throaty, almost growly, and it seemed to be moving toward them. A moment later, headlights flicked on, bouncing toward the enclosure across the uneven ground.
“What the fuck is that?” Quinn asked.
“Hey,” Rod shouted. “Hey!”
“Quinn?” the older guy with the goatee—Dusty, Tean thought Rod had called him—said.
“What the fuck is that?” Quinn asked again.
“Stop!” Rod shouted, waving at the oncoming headlights.
A truck, Tean thought. And coming straight at them at approximately forty miles an hour.
“Motherfucker,” Quinn said. He fired with the gun in his off-hand, and a moment later, Dusty followed suit. Colin hunkered down, and he seemed to have forgotten his own gun. The thunder of the shots drowned out the sound of the engine. The truck was nothing more than the headlights and an impression of movement: a mass of steel and fiberglass rushing out of the dark. Like the tiger, a distant part of Tean thought. Like we made our own tiger.
Glass cracked. The truck’s wheels tore up the grass, threw clouds of dirt into the air, kicked up rocks that pinged against the hog panels. All of it seemed to be happening far away, like Tean was watching it on a movie screen.
Jem yanked him down, and a heartbeat later, the truck hit the side of the enclosure about ten yards away from them. The truck—Tean glimpsed the Mid-Missouri Cat Sanctuary logo on the door—plowed through the hog panel, humped over a tree stump, and crashed against one of the concrete platforms. The tires continued to spin, kicking up clouds of dirt as the truck tried to move forward.
Up the hill, two more sets of headlights sprang to life, and in the haze of the crossing beams, Tean could trace the outline of two vehicles. The trucks themselves were junkers, and he didn’t recognize them, but he could barely make out Emery and John-Henry behind the open doors in firing stances. He couldn’t see who was in the second car, but it didn’t take him long to figure out who it belonged to.
“We’re here!” There was no mistaking that voice. Or, for that matter, what appeared to be a rainbow unicorn shirt as Shaw poked his head out of the passenger window. He waved at Jem and Tean. “We’re rescuing you!”
“You have got to be kidding me,” Jem muttered.
“Drop the guns,” John-Henry ordered from the Mustang. “Show me your hands!”
Rod and the other men traded looks. They didn’t seem convinced.
“What the fuck took you so long?” Emery asked. “You were supposed to intercept them.”
“The window lock was being a bitch.” North’s messy thatch of blond gleamed in the ambient light. “Next time, you can steal the trucks.”
“Next time, use your own fucking car instead of worrying it might get scratched.”
“Suck my ass, it’s custom paint.”
“Who the fuck are you people?” Rod screamed.
“We’re their friends,” Shaw said.
North and Emery opened their mouths simultaneously, like they might argue the point. Then something passed across their faces, and they stopped. Tean sat up. That ancient part of him was awake now, gathering and responding to sensory data the way it had been bred to do, the part that had kept humans alive in jungles and on the savannah and under the peaks of mountains.
In the darkness, something moved. And then Sita, a thousand pounds of fur and teeth and muscle, hurtled out of the enclosure.
23
Clear of the hog panels, the tiger bounded once, her body compressing as she gathered force, and then she leaped on Dusty. The man had time to scream before her jaws closed around his head. Her teeth tore into his neck, and blood, black in the night, fountained into the air. It made a soft patter as the drops hit the dry earth and were soaked up by the dust, while the dying man’s feet beat a tattoo against the packed soil. The cat jerked her head once, and bone snapped. Dusty’s feet went still.
“Fuck me,” Jem said, and he wondered from a distance if he had just wet himself.
“The dart gun!” Rod screamed. “Get the dart gun!”
