No Safe Haven: A Last Sanctuary Novel

by Kyla Stone

  Run! Raven’s brain screamed. This was her chance. But she couldn’t run, she couldn’t leave the wolves in the hands of the Headhunters, not when they had come back for her, had put themselves in harm’s way.

  The wolves had made her pack. They’d made her family.

  She had to do something. She had to help them.

  Time slowed. Raven felt every frantic beat of her heart, every ragged breath. She crawled in the slick, wet grass, desperately searching for Ryker’s long, serrated hunting knife.

  Rain pelted her exposed head. Frigid water dripped down her neck, sliding cold, seeking fingers beneath her jacket. The world was gray and unrecognizable, blurred by the raindrops clinging to her eyelashes.

  There. A glint of steel.

  She seized the knife in both hands and reared up on her knees. She scanned the chaos of the clearing. Shadow was holding his own against Cerberus, springing in and galloping aside, leaping and snarling and biting.

  Cerberus fired several times but couldn’t aim fast enough. Shadow was a black ghost, dissolving in the rain, untouched, before reappearing to plunge in and tear a gash in Cerberus’s arm, snatch a bite from his leg.

  Only a few yards away, Ryker wrestled Luna. He was still on his back, Luna crouched over him, snarling and snapping.

  Scorpio and Oman circled them both, firing warning shots with their rifles. Luna ignored them in her single-minded pursuit. She was ferocious, unrelenting, determined to down her prey.

  Ryker managed to wrench free from Luna’s jaws. He cradled his left arm close to his chest, his jacket sleeve shredded, the flesh beneath pulpy and leaking dark red blood.

  The smell was faint, so faint it took her an instant to recognize it. The hairs on the back of Raven’s neck stood on end. It was unmistakable—the sickly-sweet smell of buttered popcorn.

  Hope surged through her.

  “Luna!” she shouted.

  With his right hand, Ryker jerked his handgun from its holster and punched at Luna’s face and muzzle as she repeatedly lunged for his throat.

  Ryker twisted the gun and fired.

  Raven screamed.

  She staggered to her feet and took a step toward him, knife handle slipping in her trembling, rain-soaked fingers. Her ankle buckled. Pain speared up her leg. She stumbled, forced herself back up.

  Thunder boomed overhead, cracking the sky into jagged pieces.

  Ryker fired again.

  Luna slumped across his chest.

  “Get up!” Raven cried. “Get up!”

  Luna’s muscled, sinewy body twitched, her great chest heaving once, twice. Her regal head sagged as she let out a single low moan and went still. The rain pelted the wolf’s thick white fur.

  Luna was dead.

  Raven sank to her knees, bereft. No cry escaped her lips. She was silent, her pain and grief clenched tight as a fist inside her.

  She watched in numb disbelief as Ryker shoved the dead wolf off himself and clambered to his feet. He kicked the limp body savagely, mercilessly, again and again, cursing.

  Raven felt flayed, every nerve ending exposed. A sick terror filled her. She was falling, falling, falling into a chasm with no bottom.

  “Stop,” she whispered in a strangled voice. “Stop it.”

  Ryker heard her. He spun, rain sluicing down his sharp face. He clenched and unclenched the fingers of his tattered left arm. His eyes glinted. Rage contorted his features—rage and scorn and a twisted, sadistic anticipation. “You.”

  The roar was loud as a great crack of thunder, trembling the ground beneath their feet.

  Raven had no time to think, to feel, to form anything but a single distraught thought—tiger.

  41

  The tiger exploded from the underbrush. He launched at the Headhunters in a ferocious orange blur, flying twenty feet in a single bound, spanning the distance between himself and his prey in under two seconds. An air-born, arcing missile of death.

  Oman spun and fired a burst of several shots. But in his panic, the gun veered wildly. He had no time to correct his aim. The tiger was on him.

  Vlad collided with his target at full speed, claws extended, jaws gaping. Man and beast went down together.

  The tiger raised his sledgehammer paw and struck Oman in the side of the head. The man’s skull snapped back. The blow might have broken his neck. There was no way to know, for in an instant Vlad plunged his fangs into the Headhunter’s throat and crushed his jugular.

  Oman writhed, gurgling, struggling to breathe, eyes rolling wildly. Black-red lifeblood gushed into the wet grass.

  His face twisted, an ugly, guttural gasp spitting out, blood bubbling from his lips. For a moment, he clawed weakly at the tiger’s furred chest, then went suddenly limp.

  Everyone in the clearing froze, shocked, terrified, awe-struck. Even Shadow stiffened, turning toward the new, more dangerous threat.

  Vlad cut an astonishing figure, awful in his enormous size and power, a quarter ton of coiled muscle and sinew. In the rain, the burnt orange of his coat was even more brilliant, the shaggy white fur of his chest and belly shining, the bands striping his broad back a rich, oily black.

  Vlad stood over Oman’s body, his muscular shoulders rippling, his every movement imbued with stunning grace and terrible beauty. He still favored his bloody paw, but it had hardly hampered him.

  His yellow eyes narrowed to slits, his ears flattened against his skull. He bared his fangs, every one of his four-inch claws unsheathed, razor-sharp.

  “Shoot him!” Ryker cried, raising his rifle.

  No sooner had he spoken than Vlad swung his great head, his gaze riveted on Ryker. It happened with a terrible, slow-motion vividness.

  With a snarl of fury, Vlad sprang.

  Airborne, he arced fifteen feet through the rain.

  Cerberus was closest, he had the best vantage point, the best chance at taking the shot. Maybe he was frozen in fear, or maybe he chose to do nothing, to watch—whatever the reason, he did not pull the trigger.

  The tiger pounced on Ryker. He slashed the man in the face with a savage swipe of his claws, knocked him to the ground, seized his head in his enormous jaws, and shook him like a rag doll.

  There was a terrible wrenching sound, a sickening crunch of bone caving in on itself. Vlad shattered Ryker’s skull.

  The tiger crouched over the dying man, tail lashing, back arched as he roared, great head swinging back and forth, ready and seeking his next prey.

  As long as it was a Headhunter with a gun, Raven could still escape. Luna was gone, but Shadow wasn’t. Raven wasn’t.

  And then she saw it. In the frantic blur of the attack, in the gray of the rain and the chaos of the clearing, she’d missed it. Vlad was slobbering. He was bloody from the kill, but this was something else—something wrong. His jowls dripped with red-streaked foam. The fur of his chest and forelegs was matted with it.

  He stared straight at Raven with fixed yellow eyes, pupils slitted, unblinking. His jaws hung weirdly, hinging open and closed, almost as if he had no control over it.

  The realization jolted through her. Vlad had consumed Gomez’s diseased flesh.

  Vlad was infected.

  He was no longer himself. The virus had infiltrated his body, his mind, taking command. His diseased brain sought to bite and infect everything within sight.

  And she was his next target.

  Five hundred pounds of apex predator sprang at Raven.

  42

  The world stopped. Rain droplets froze in midair. The chaos of screaming and shouting went dim, as if Raven were trapped underwater. Everything went blurry—everything except the tiger.

  Vlad surged toward her, a streak of orange and black fury. She had three seconds, if she was lucky. She raised the knife—how useless it was, how little it would do—and whistled. One long note. Two short ones.

  Ten feet from her, powerful hind legs already crouched for a final spring, the tiger hesitated.

  Did he recognize her whistle? Deep
in his diseased predator’s brain, did some part of him remember an affinity for a vulnerable human? Whatever the reason, he paused.

  And in that liquid, suspended moment, Cerberus shot him.

  The bullet struck Vlad’s hindquarters. With a roar of pained outrage, the tiger spun and hurled himself at Cerberus instead.

  Raven couldn’t waste a second. This was what she’d planned for, the distraction she so desperately needed. She started to run.

  “Shadow!” she screamed. “Go!”

  Shadow had abandoned his attack on Cerberus and now stood over Luna’s body, nudging her neck with his muzzle and whining softly.

  Raven staggered in the slick grass, waved her bound hands at him. “Go!”

  He flicked his ears toward her. He shook his head, as if coming out of a fugue. He seemed to understand what she meant, what she was asking him to do, because he bolted across the clearing.

  Shadow raced past her backpack, dodged the boulders, then paused between the trees, looking back over his shoulder. Waiting for her.

  She fixed her gaze on her pack and hobbled toward it, pushing out everything else—Vlad’s roars, the shouts and howls of the Headhunters, the blasts of the guns. She sucked in her breath with every stab of pain in her ankle. She stumbled, drenching her pant legs, smears of mud crusting her legs, rain pelting her face.

  Ryker’s hunting knife slipped from her fingers. She scrambled for it for a frantic second, searching in the long grass. There was no time. She had to go.

  She dragged herself to her feet, wincing.

  Behind her echoed the roars and screams and gunshots. She hobbled faster. She had maybe a minute to escape, if she was lucky.

  She tripped over a rock she should’ve seen and went down hard, barely getting her arms in front of her to protect her face. Her body struck wet ground, squelching as she struggled in the muddied grass. Spasms of pain ripped through her ribs, her ankle. Her vision went blurry.

  Someone seized her arm and yanked her to her feet.

  Terror spiked through her. She reared back, about to head-butt him, rip out a chunk of his cheek with her teeth, whatever she needed to do—

  “Raven!” Damien cried. His face was ashen, his eyes wide and horror-stricken. “Let me help you!”

  She nodded, too numb and terrified to argue. “My pack. The gun.”

  He leaned down, seized the straps in one hand, and hauled it to his shoulder. He slipped the rifle strap over her shoulder and across her chest. With his other hand, he took her elbow and helped her shuffle haltingly to the edge of the clearing.

  Damien paused several feet inside the treeline. He shot a nervous look across the clearing. She followed his gaze.

  Cerberus, Scorpio, and several others were backing Vlad against a boulder. Vlad was snarling, ears laid flat, back arched. Blood-flecked foam dribbled from his jaws. His hindleg and left foreleg both hung uselessly, his flank matted with great streaks of scarlet.

  Vlad attempted a lunge. Cerberus and Scorpio fired at his paws, driving him back. Vlad howled, his right foreleg collapsing beneath him.

  Raven stopped breathing, waiting for the kill shot. It didn’t come.

  The Headhunters laughed and jeered. They were shooting at the tiger’s legs on purpose. Injuring him, but not killing him. They were torturing him.

  Vlad screamed in agony. Guilt ripped through her. She’d done this. She’d brought the Headhunters to Vlad. She tried to tell herself she’d had no choice—but she had made the choice. The choice to risk Vlad’s life to save hers, Shadow’s, and Luna’s.

  She had hoped the tiger would take the Headhunters by surprise, attacking a few of them while she escaped. She’d hoped Vlad would escape too, vanishing deep into the forest.

  She’d never wanted him to die, to suffer. But she had still taken that risk.

  She hadn’t known he was already infected. That knowledge didn’t ease her guilt, her grief. She had loved that tiger, and now he was dying.

  “Your hands,” Damien said, forcing her back into the moment. She couldn’t do anything to help Vlad now. If she didn’t hurry, his death would be for nothing.

  She held out her bound wrists. “Can you do something about this?”

  “I don’t have a knife—”

  “In my pocket. My whittling knife.”

  Damien shoved his hand deep into her cargo pocket and pulled out the knife. She stiffened, ignoring the water dripping from his hair onto her neck, the feel of his fingers sliding against her hip, the closeness of him.

  He sliced through her bindings in a few quick, powerful strokes. She gestured for her pack and he helped slide it over her shoulders. He pulled out her hoverboard and handed it to her.

  She activated it with trembling fingers. Her whole body was shaking.

  “Here.” Damien pulled something out of his pocket. An auto-injector in a plastic sleeve. He ripped off the plastic. “Cerberus told me to bring an extra stim in case yours wore off and you passed out on us. It’ll buy you a few more hours. That’s all I can give you.”

  She nodded gratefully as he yanked up her sleeve and injected it into her left arm. “Thank—thank you.”

  A gunshot exploded. Then another. Vlad roared in pain and rage.

  Raven flinched.

  She met Damien’s gaze. Rain plastered his hair to his forehead and dripped down his face. It softened his features. He was still sharply handsome, all hard angles, but he looked younger, almost vulnerable.

  She felt a pull, deep inside her. He had tried to do the right thing in spite of his circumstances. He could have just looked out for himself. He should have, but he didn’t.

  She was still alive because of him. She said the words before she could let herself stop them. “Come with us.”

  The briefest of smiles creased his mouth—grim, but genuine. It brightened his whole face. Then it darkened, a sad twist to his lips. “Thank you, but no, I can’t.”

  “You aren’t like them. You don’t belong with them.”

  He shook his head, his mouth pressed into a thin line. His gaze darted toward the clearing again. “I owe Cerberus my life. I can’t just—”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “He’s family. He protected me.”

  “You’re afraid.”

  He blinked. “Maybe. Yes.”

  “Come anyway.”

  His jaw tightened. “There’s no time. You need to go. Where are you headed? North?”

  For a second, she hesitated, her instinct to lie, to protect herself. But this boy had just saved her—again. He wasn’t the enemy. He was a friend. Someone she could trust. Needed to trust. She nodded mutely.

  “I’ll tell them you went a different direction. I’ll cover for you.” His eyes darkened, flashing with something she couldn’t quite read—doubt, regret, longing. “That’s the best I can do.”

  Another gunshot. Vlad gave a horrible, deep-throated whimper. Raven longed to clap her hands over her ears to shut out the awful sounds, to sink to her knees in the mud in grief for this magnificent creature as he died.

  But she couldn’t. She couldn’t spare a moment, a second, for Vlad—or for Luna. Not now.

  Deeper in the woods, Shadow whined impatiently.

  It wouldn’t be long before Cerberus turned his attention back on her, seeking revenge for the death of his men. He was a man of his word. She didn’t doubt he would hunt her down if he could find her.

  She had to make sure he didn’t find her. Or Shadow. Not ever.

  Vlad let out another agonized whimper.

  “Will you give him mercy?” she asked. “Please.”

  “I will,” Damien promised.

  “You should leave them,” she said. “When you’re strong enough, brave enough.”

  The muscle in his cheek jumped. “Maybe someday I will.”

  Raven grasped Damien’s hand—his palm warm and rough against her own, despite the rain. His fingers tightened over hers.

  For a moment, they were connected, sparks of
electricity shooting up her arm, fizzing in her belly. For a moment, she longed to hold on, to never let go.

  He’d made his choice. And she’d made hers.

  She pulled away, climbed onto her hoverboard, and fled for her life.

  43

  For the next night and day, Raven and Shadow fled. They did not stop to eat. They did not stop to drink. They ran on, and on, and on, terror and grief chasing at their heels.

  She did not think of the cabin. She did not think of Haven. She did not think of her father or the animals, alive and dead. She shut it all out of her mind before the weight of it crushed her.

  She thought only of escape, of staying alive for one more minute, one more hour, one more day.

  The thunder stopped, the rain ceased, the towering storm clouds rolled back. But the sky remained stubbornly dark and gray, as if the heavens were in mourning with them.

  She rode her hoverboard for hours and hours, every muscle in her body aching and bruised. Shadow ran with her, loping a few dozen yards ahead or behind, disappearing for an hour or more, patrolling, scouting, always alert for danger.

  The woods were grim and dark and wild. Stinging branches slapped her face. The air was dense and close. She felt it like an expelled breath on the back of her neck.

  She was hopelessly lost. But still, she kept going.

  Sometime near twilight, Shadow appeared and halted ten yards in front of her. She tilted back her right heel to halt the board. “What is it, boy?”

  His tail drooped, his head bent. He’d looked like that since Luna’s death—depressed, grieving.

  He whined and loped off through the trees to the west, a right turn from the direction they’d been headed for the last sixteen hours. The shadows were deepening as night fell. She could hardly see him anymore.

  He did his over-the-shoulder look, beckoning her to follow. She did.

  After about half a mile, he led her to a tiny clearing in the center of a ring of spruce trees. A sheer rock face towered about forty feet above her head. A narrow crevice opened at its base, leading to a small cave just large enough for them both.