Tiger in the Hot Zone (Shifter Agents Book 4)

by Lauren Esker

  Cold, impassive, the man with the gun took aim again.

  And then the propane tank blew.

  ***

  Peri bounced around in the backseat of Matteo's car like a cat's play toy as they bounded over the ruts in the logging road. It couldn't have been the safehouse. Cho was wrong. It had been something else, somewhere else ...

  "There," Cho said to Matteo, pointing to the turnoff for the back driveway. The fire lit up the whole area, tree trunks standing like dark slashes against the yellow glare of the flames.

  Matteo jolted over the uneven surface of the driveway and then suddenly braked so hard that Peri was thrown forward and bashed her face on the seat in front of her. "What—" she managed as Matteo threw the car into reverse and began backing up almost as fast as he'd been driving forward. And then she saw what, as Cho let out a choked curse.

  The house was going up like a Roman candle, and the propane tank behind the house was a torch, shooting flames twenty or thirty feet. Just as Peri had time to take that in, it blew up.

  It was unreal, like a special effect out of a movie. Instead of exploding in flames, as she would have expected, it vanished in a tremendous cloud of smoke. The shock wave hit them a second later, rocking the car along with a burst of sound that rattled Peri's teeth. An instant after that, debris tore through the woods in all directions. Cho's parked car flipped over on its side, and it took Peri a moment to realize that it hadn't been knocked over by the blast; a piece of the ruptured tank had ripped into its side and flung it over. Small pieces of hot metal rattled off their windshield like pieces of gravel.

  The house began to collapse.

  Peri threw her door open and leaped out. At least she wasn't the only person who was mad enough to run toward a burning house. Cho was doing the same thing.

  "Noah—"

  The house folded in on itself like a collapsing Jenga construct. Clouds of black smoke boiled up into the night sky, and Peri choked when the first of those billowed across her. It seared her lungs and stank of burning plastic. The heat of the flames was so intense the skin of her face felt like it was sunburning. Noah couldn't have survived. Bassi and Zach were certainly dead.

  "They blew it up," she cried. Tears ran down her cheeks, which she told herself were from the smoke and not for any other reason. "Those bastards blew it up."

  Which meant they were here, and they would still be after her. If they found out she wasn't dead—

  She stumbled into the fender of Noah's car. Despite its proximity to the scorching heat, it seemed to be (so far) intact, though the paint on the house side was blistering. Half mad with fear and grief, Peri fumbled with the Camaro's door and found it unlocked. She fell into the driver's seat.

  She had no idea how to hotwire a car—some part of her panic-crazed brain seemed to think she'd be able to figure it out—but it turned out she didn't have to. Noah's clothes were neatly piled on the passenger seat, with his keys and gun on top. Right now she was too rattled to even try to understand what that meant. All she knew was that she had keys and a car. The engine revved with a satisfying roar.

  Matteo's car was blocking the back driveway, and Peri was in no mood to wait for him to move it. She struggled briefly with the pedals—she knew how to drive stick, but she wasn't used to it, and normally when she drove, she operated both the brake and accelerator with her left foot rather than trying to manage with her insensate right one. However, she managed to get it into reverse and slewed backward through the mess of the backyard, veering around Cho's totaled car and Cho herself, who was yelling something at her that Peri chose to ignore. She drove around the side of the house, veering around the flaming pieces of debris raining out of the sky.

  —and then she slammed on the brakes, accidentally stalling the engine; she fumbled to restarted it. A massive SUV blocked the front driveway, engine running, headlights on—a dead ringer for the one that had almost carried her off back in Seattle. In the lurid pool of light between its headlights and the flames, a man with a hunting rifle was stalking a—tiger?

  Peri stared, unable to believe her eyes. The tiger was injured, dragging itself along with two legs. The man cranked the rifle's bolt action and fired, the deafening blast of the rifle muffled by the overwhelming roar of the fire. The tiger jerked.

  She had to be hallucinating from stress. There weren't tigers in Washington. Maybe someone in the neighborhood had been keeping a tiger as a roadside attraction or something—

  Then she glimpsed the man's face as he turned her way, swinging the rifle from the tiger to the Camaro. The parallel scars across his face triggered a rush of panic that left her empty-headed. This man wasn't here for tiger hunting, he was here for Peri hunting.

  Her foot slipped off the clutch. The car lurched forward and stalled again.

  As Peri cranked the key and restarted the engine, she saw, behind Scar Face, an even more impossible scene playing out. The tiger started to pick itself up, fell down again, and seemed to fold in on itself. The striped fur became dark skin, and it wasn't a tiger at all, but Noah lying naked, painted in the fire's glow.

  Peri threw the car into gear and it leaped forward. Unable to believe her own boldness, she skidded to a halt between Scar Face and Noah, and leaned across the passenger seat to fling the door open. Acrid smoke rolled into the car. "Get in!" she yelled at him.

  Scar Face pointed the rifle at the driver's side window. Peri screamed and ducked. The rifle blast echoed off the trees and an explosion of glass showered her shoulders and hair.

  Noah—and it was Noah, not a hallucination or a stress delusion—heaved himself into the passenger seat through sheer willpower. "Go," he rasped.

  The passenger door was still open, his feet hanging out, but with Scar Face racking another shell, Peri didn't have to be told twice. She roared forward, the Camaro's powerful acceleration a novel but welcome experience compared to the cheap clunkers she was used to driving. As she tore around the Yukon, she glimpsed the face of someone inside, staring at her through the window. Dr. Bassi? Then she was out of the driveway and slewing through a wide turn on the highway.

  "Which way?" she yelled at Noah, who was struggling to hoist his feet out of the road into the seat. She couldn't remember which way they'd come from. Had it been a right turn into the driveway, or a left?

  Noah didn't answer. His head lolled sideways and she realized he'd passed out.

  "God, God, God," she whimpered, though she wasn't sure if it was a curse, a prayer, or merely something to do with her mouth to keep from screaming. She leaned over Noah to slam the passenger door and, for good measure, popped down the door lock, not that it would do much good when there was no driver's-side window. She could feel little crunchy bits of glass rasping against her skin all down her right side.

  Headlights stabbed across the road. The SUV was pulling out of the driveway behind them.

  It no longer mattered if she went the right way or not. The way the car was pointed was the way she had to go. Peri tore away, cursing under her breath as her artificial foot kept sliding on the accelerator whenever she had to shift gears, causing the engine to rev and the car to lurch as it slid into each subsequent gear.

  But once they reached the top gear, oh, the car handled like a dream. The speedometer inched up—seventy, eighty, ninety. They seemed to float around the turns, gripping the winding road in a way no car she'd ever driven had been able to do.

  They blew through the small town where they'd bought the groceries, nothing but a cluster of lights, a few closed businesses, and a stop sign Peri didn't even slow down for. There was no one else on the highway, except for an occasional trucker going the other way—one of them honked at her as she raced past him at a crazy speed—and the headlights she could see in the rear-view mirror whenever she dared take her eyes off the road.

  If they catch us, they're going to kill us.

  But they were receding behind her, vanishing every time she whipped around a turn, only to reappear smaller yet. So
mething the size of the Yukon wasn't built for drag racing against a muscle car like the Camaro. But it was still there, still behind them on the long straight stretches. Peri's hair lashed her face in the wind filling the Camaro's cab, especially on the turns. She squinted against it and grimly held her foot down on the accelerator, ignoring the panicky part of herself that kept telling her she was driving much too fast for a small country highway at night. She was going to hit a deer, she was going to wipe out on a turn and go off the road, she was going to die.

  But death behind them was a sure thing. Death ahead was merely a gamble.

  "What are you?" she yelled at Noah, barely able to hear herself over the wind roaring through the open window. "What's going on?"

  There was no answer. She couldn't get more than brief glimpses of him; the interior of the car was dark except for the glow of the lights on the old-fashioned dashboard gauges, and she had to keep both of her hands on the steering wheel to maintain control.

  He could have died. He could still die. The tiger had been barely dragging itself along.

  The tiger.

  Noah.

  He's a ... a weretiger?

  She'd spent her adult life trying to prove or debunk various conspiracy theories. Now it looked like she'd gotten caught in the middle of one. Shapeshifting humans and secret organizations and bombs in safehouses—and all she wanted to do was go back to her ordinary life, when the worst thing she had to worry about was paying the rent on time and having creepers send her lewd messages on Twitter.

  She went into a sharp turn too fast, blowing past the "45 MPH" warning sign, and barely managed to stay on the road by cranking the steering wheel with all her strength. Her artificial foot slipped off the brake as she desperately tried to slow down and she had to fumble to find the pedals again. Her whole body was shaking, teeth clicking together, hands trembling on the wheel.

  I can't keep driving like this. I'm going to lose control and kill us both.

  The Camaro's high beams showed her a sign for a four-way crossroads coming up ahead. She slammed on the brakes, making the car shudder, and veered into the turn.

  The road she was on now was smaller and narrower. In all likelihood it would peter out in a tangle of houses somewhere back in the hills. There was nowhere to run to. If only she could stop and think.

  She shot past a mailbox marking a rural driveway. This gave her a desperate idea straight out of various action movies she'd watched. But maybe it would work.

  When the next mailbox appeared in her high beams, she braked hard and turned into the driveway. The Camaro jolted and scraped over ruts. As soon as they were a few yards off the road, Peri killed the headlights and then the engine.

  For the first minute or two, all she could do was sit in the driver's seat and tremble. She thought she might throw up, but the feeling slowly passed, and she was able to straighten up and look over her shoulder. There were no headlights, nothing but darkness. She couldn't hear anything. The other vehicle hadn't turned down this road. She wondered how long it would take them to realize they'd overshot and come back to look for her.

  One thing at a time.

  She opened the driver's door and stepped out to brush the glass out of her hair and T-shirt, eyes squinched shut to avoid getting glass in them as she shook it out of her dyed floof. Luckily her jacket was durable and had taken the worst of it.

  "Noah?" she asked quietly through the open door.

  No answer.

  Peri got back in and turned on the overhead light, leaving the driver's door open so she could hear any approaching vehicles. At her first sight of Noah, she gasped in dismay. He looked absolutely terrible. One side of his body—face, shoulder, and rib cage—was nothing but road rash, and the other side was cut, burned, and abraded. Blood glistened on his chest and abdomen, soaking into the pile of clothes he was lying on. When she leaned close to feel for a pulse, she could smell his scorched hair.

  But his pulse was strong, though fast, and he was taking light shallow breaths through parted lips. She expected him to be cool to the touch, naked and injured as he was, but instead he felt hot, almost feverish.

  "I have to take you to a hospital," Peri whispered, touching his face gently.

  Or should she? Could tiger-men go to the regular hospital, or would they take him away to vivisect him or something?

  Had she really seen him turn from a tiger into a man?

  Peri's native paranoia warred with practicality. Paranoia won. She knew what she'd seen. She trusted her own eyes. And although she didn't want to believe in the reality of weretigers, she did believe that there was more going on in the world than the public knew about, and it now appeared the government really was covering it up. Everything that had happened to her in the last two days was proof of it.

  Also, in spite of all the blood and abrasions, Noah didn't seem to be as terribly hurt as she'd feared. The blood must be coming from somewhere, but nothing was pumping or spurting. Under all the gore, she couldn't find the actual wounds.

  She put his seat as far down as it would go, then struggled to get him into a more comfortable position and pull the wad of blood-soaked clothing out from under his (very naked) backside. A sudden clunk from somewhere between the seats made her jump, her nerves still on edge. Oh right. His gun. It had slipped out of the pile of clothing; she'd forgotten about it. Now it dangled from the bundle of clothing by the straps of the shoulder holster.

  As a rural kid, Peri had grown up around guns and had gotten a little practice hunting small game with a .22 rifle before she went to live with her mom in Boise as a teenager. All of that was a long time ago, and she'd never even fired a handgun. But she was up against a guy with a hunting rifle. She wasn't about to turn down a potential advantage. She put the gun and holster on the driver's seat for herself, then shrugged out of her jacket and covered Noah's torso with it. His bloody jacket went over his lap.

  "Sorry," she murmured, brushing an unbloodied part of his shoulder with the back of her hand. "That's the best I can do for you right now."

  She got out of the car to put the shoulder holster on over her T-shirt. This time, she could hear some sort of engine. There was a car coming. She couldn't tell if it was on the main highway or this side road, but the engine noise was getting louder.

  Ohgod ohgod. She took a deep breath. Showtime.

  She gave up trying to adjust the straps—with the holster adjusted for someone much larger, the gun dangled around her hip—and got back in the car. Her hands shook as she turned off the overhead light and locked the doors. The shattered driver's window was still open to the night, and now she could clearly hear a vehicle approaching fast on the winding road.

  Now that it was too late, she couldn't stop thinking of things she could have done to make them less likely to see her. The Camaro's taillights would reflect their headlights. She should've gotten farther off the road, or covered up the taillights with branches. Nothing to do about it now.

  She dropped one hand to the gearshift, moving it into reverse. Getting ready.

  Headlights appeared on the slice of the road visible in her rear-view mirror, and then the vehicle blazed past, its lights and engine receding in the distance. Something large, but she couldn't tell if it was the same SUV or not. It could just be someone who lived up here coming back from the local bar. Which meant she might not have managed to get behind their pursuers; she could still meet Scar Face and his rifle on the road—

  No time for maybes. The other vehicle's engine had faded to the edge of hearing again, muffled by the trees and the winding road. Peri started the Camaro, backed out to the road, and turned the other way.

  She thought about calling for help. She still had her phone. But somehow Scar Face had found the safehouse, which meant the SCB wasn't able to protect her; it might be compromised. Cho was working with that Matteo guy, and Peri didn't trust his reassurances in the slightest.

  She couldn't go back to her apartment. She couldn't stay here.

&n
bsp; "I don't know what to do," Peri whispered to herself as she stopped at the crossroads. She had to decide. Back toward town, or up into the mountains?

  There was only one place that she could think to go. Under most circumstances, she would never have gone there again. But from a threat like this, it was probably the safest place in the state of Washington.

  She turned away from Seattle, toward the mountains.

  After driving for a little while without meeting any other headlights, she pulled off on a trucker pullout and pawed through Noah's glove compartment until—bingo!—she found a Washington map. This also gave her a chance to check on Noah. He was still breathing okay, still warm to the touch. He turned into her hand when she touched his neck to check for a pulse. Peri tried to squash the warm feeling that welled up inside her.

  She examined the map under the dome light until she was reasonably sure of her route, and turned out onto the highway, driving into the dark mountains.

  ***

  Peri drove for hours down hilly, rural highways. The sight of another pair of headlights, whether coming up in front of her or appearing in her rear-view mirror, made her clutch the steering wheel as her whole body tensed up. Every time, the headlights passed without incident, and her heart rate slowly settled down.

  Night air through the shattered window riffled her hair and chilled her in the T-shirt until she was shivering.

  She wondered what would happen if a trooper pulled her over. She didn't look forward to trying to explain the bleeding, naked federal agent in the passenger seat.

  What am I doing? I should just take him to a hospital, and call the police ...

  But she'd tried doing things the right way, the legal way. She'd let the SCB protect her. Now she was on the run, with most of her belongings that hadn't been stolen lost in a house fire.