Page 152 of Empire of Shadows

“This was not a cat,” he concluded firmly.

“Then what the devil was it?” Dawson demanded. He was half-hiding behind Jacobs’ two nervous-looking guards.

“I cannot say,” Velegas concluded as he pulled aside the man’s shirt to study the wounds in his shoulders.

In the greater glow of the lamp, Ellie could see the injuries too. They looked as though they had been torn by thick claws.

A silence followed, heavy with unspoken dread. Jacobs broke it.

“Where is his partner?” He looked impatiently back at the blank stares that answered him. “These men patrol in pairs.”

Ellie thought of the odd sound she had heard a moment before. Following an uncomfortable instinct, she turned and pressed through the thick green leaves toward it.

In the clearing on the other side, another man lay on the ground. His face was gruesomely injured.

Blood soaked his shirt around another pair of those terrible puncture wounds which marked the center of his chest.

He blinked up at the intrusion of the light. His eyes rolled toward her as he took in another gurgling breath.

Adam moved quickly to the man’s side and dropped to his knees. He yanked his shirt over his head, stuffing it at the wounds on the victim’s chest.

Ellie swallowed thickly.

“I think he’s punctured a lung. I can…” Her voice caught. “I can hear it.”

Jacobs and the others joined them, forming a ragged circle around the fallen man—Ramos, Ellie thought as she looked down at him. She had heard someone in the camp call him Ramos.

His eyes fixed on Adam.

“Salió de… la noche,” he rasped. He blinked, and his eyes focused as though he was just realizing who he was speaking to. “Out of the night,” he repeated, choking the words out in English twisted by pain.

“What did?” Adam demanded, his voice low and urgent.

Ramos coughed. A spray of blood splattered across Adam’s chest and face. He flinched back from it as Ellie took a step forward, propelled by the need to help—to dosomething… even though it was abundantly clear that there was nothing any of them could do.

“El ángel de la muerte,” Ramos rasped.

The words ended on a desperate, choking pull for air. Ramos’s limbs twitched.

It looked as though he were drowning… and then it was over.

Adam reached down and gently closed the dead man’s eyes.

Dawson’s face glistened with nervous sweat in the lamplight.

“What did he say?” he demanded. “What did this?”

“He said it was the angel of death,” Adam replied.

He stood. His tanned chest was speckled with Ramos’s blood. His gaze locked onto Ellie across the fallen man’s body.

She could read the lines written in it clearly enough.

Escape might have been an option for them before—but not anymore. Not when something was hunting in this forest… something big enough to bring two armed men to the ground.

Something that looked very much to Ellie as though it had somehow attacked from above.

She thought of the odd noise she had heard a few moments before as an impossible breeze had brushed the back of her neck.

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