Page 55 of The Last Sanctuary
Twisting, she scanned the park again. Still no lights, no human noises, no Headhunters. It was 3 a.m. No one was out searching for her.
Whoever Damien truly was, he’d kept his word. He hadn’t betrayed her.
She whistled one long note, two short. The signal for food. Vlad rose languidly, leaped from his rock, and stalked to his chamber. How long would it take him to figure out the service door was open?
She didn’t have long to wait. Within seconds, Vlad sauntered out of the service door like he was embarking on a regular evening stroll. He raised his great head and stared straight up at her. Their gazes locked.
He was magnificent. He was absolutely terrifying.
She stopped breathing. Adrenaline spiked through her veins. Every hair on her body prickled. From the park side, the roof of the tiger house was only ten feet from the ground. A tiger could leap twelve feet straight up from a dead standstill.
If he wanted to, Vlad could be on her in less than three seconds. No tranquilizer dart in the world took effect that fast.
He shook his huge head and sniffed the air. His tail twitched, as if deciding how hungry he was. As if he, too, was considering just how far he could jump for his dinner.
“You know me,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm. “Who else gives you your favorite jerky snacks? Who else hangs out with you for hours atop your tiger house? I’ve told you my deepest, darkest, most embarrassing secrets. That alone means you owe me. Besides, I’m scrawny. I’d barely serve as a snack, while several delicious Headhunter jerkwads would taste fabulous to a tiger. You don’t want to eat me. You like me. Youknowme.”
His ears pricked. He was listening to her. He gave a loud chuff, turned, and stalked along the path as if he owned it.
The enormous tiger vanished into the fog like a specter in the night.
Raven couldn’t shake the disconcerting feeling that twisted her stomach. She’d either saved them all or made the gravest error of her life.
Chapter Twenty-Three
After Vlad was gone, Raven slipped from the tiger house and headed toward the grassy fenced enclosure at the center of Haven, where the flamingos preened in the pond. She’d forgotten about the flamingos and needed to release them, too, as well as the peacocks.
The fog drifted and slithered around her legs. It was impossibly sluggish, an opaque white haze. She knew every loose flagstone in every path of Haven by heart. Yet in the misty darkness, the wildlife sanctuary took on an eerie otherworldliness that prickled the hairs on the back of her neck.
Walking through the fog gave her the strange sensation of sinking into a strange world, into a deep, impenetrable substance, alien and unknown.
A scuffling sound came from behind her.
She swung around, peering into the fog. To her right, the reptile house loomed. To her left rose the snack shack. A birch tree stood beside it, its leaves almost gone, bare branches raking the sky.
If someone was out prowling the park and had a light, they’d turned it off. She could see nothing amiss, could hear nothingout of place, other than the bonobos calling to each other from the roof of the snack shack.
She turned back and kept walking, her footfalls muffled.
She stilled. Her heart jolted in her chest. Had she heard another footfall, just after hers?
She spun around again, searching the fog to the left, then the right. She couldn’t see more than fifteen feet in any direction. Distance was impossible to measure. The world outside her circle of visibility might have vanished entirely, and she wouldn’t know. She listened for sounds, heard only her own ragged breathing.
She’d never escape at this rate. She had to get moving. She couldn’t let her fear of the unseen control her, damn it.
Raven braced herself, straightened her shoulders. She tucked her tranq gun in her waistband and grasped her hunting rifle, shifting it into both hands. Her finger curled around the trigger. She resumed walking.
Something dropped to the ground directly in front of her.
Alarm flared through her body. Raven resisted the urge to leap back in terror. She clamped her mouth shut to keep from screaming and raised the rifle.
A blurred shape leered out of the murky shadows. A bonobo materialized. It hooted at her. It jumped in glee. Its lips peeled back from its teeth as it smiled. Its licorice-black eyes glittered eagerly up at her.
Relieved, she lowered the rifle. Her hands trembled from the adrenaline.
“Gizmo,” she said. “You about gave me a heart attack, and I about shot you in your smug little face. Go terrorize someone else, would you?”
Gizmo reached out his leathery fingers and took her hand. For a moment, he clasped her fingers gently in his. Startled, for a moment she didn’t move.
