Silence. She had stopped moving, but her hand still rested on Jafar’s ears, the fur beginning to bristle, the leopard unappreciative of Dustin’s tone.
“Where did you go, you stupid bitch?” Dustin called, impatience returning. “You wouldn’t have gone into the cages. You’re not brave enough for that, no, you’re still scared of them, your own damn cats. Or did you get brave tonight?”
He was passing through the fences close to her, and he began dragging the handle of the flashlight across them, metal on metal, a loud rattling sound. Jafar heard it and growled in Audrey’s face. Peeled his lips back and even in the dark they were so close that she could see those teeth, the ones that tore through meat so easily.
“Calm down, honey,” she whispered, barely audible. “Calm down.”
Dustin banged against another fence, this one closer, and the leopard growled again. The next fence he hit belonged to the leopard’s enclosure. He was at the gate.
“Were you brave enough to go in with your favorite?” he said, voice lower and musing, as if he found the idea plausible. She was glad she’d fastened the lock.
She’d been crawling, though. Not leaving footprints. Just a messy trail through the very same snow that Jafar had trampled over himself.
The flashlight beam caught the corner of the cat’s shelter. Dustin was trying to angle it so that he could see inside. The light caught the back half of the cat, illuminating the long tail and spotted hindquarters, but not finding Audrey. She’d gone far enough back that it could not reach her.
Dustin banged on the fence again, and Jafar let out the loudest and angriest growl yet. Audrey lifted her hand to her mouth and bit down on the side of it.
“Where are you, Jafar? Come out here. Come out and see me.”
The shelter was too narrow to allow the cat to turn around, but he was angry about the noise, and Audrey could sense that he wanted out. When he moved toward her, she felt a rush of fear, his massive paws and their deadly claws brushing over her thighs. He was pressed against her for a moment, the length of him sliding by, and then he slunk around the corner and emerged through the other end of the little house, outside again, snarling.
“Hiding out?” Dustin said. “Scared, big boy?”
There was another rattle against the fence, but this one was different from the others. Not done just to make noise. He was, Audrey realized with rising panic, working with the lock. Opening the gate.
Then Dustin spoke again, and she realized that he was not coming in at all. He had a very different idea, one that reduced her temporary terror but replaced it swiftly with another one.
“Come on out,” Dustin said. “I’ll tell you something—they don’t like you down at that fire. They don’t like any of you. So step on out, Jafar, and get the hell away from our ridge.”
“You need to go,” Dustin said, “and the lighthouse needs to go. Then things will be back to the way he prefers them.”
Audrey heard the sound of the gate being pushed open, and then the flashlight moved away and Dustin was at another gate, another lock.
He was opening them all. He was releasing the cats.
48
THEY BANGED OFF THE PAVED county road and onto the gravel of Blade Ridge so hard and fast that the back end of the truck jitterbugged to the left, and Roy reached out and put a hand on Shipley’s arm.
“Slow down, damn it. You forget what happened to you out here before?”
“All right.”
Shipley let off the accelerator and they slowed to what, after the pace of their wild ride, seemed like a tractor’s crawl. Roy stared ahead, thinking of blue torches dancing through the woods, thinking of his parents out here on a wintry night just like this. He wondered how soon they realized they’d missed the turn. Early, he suspected. His father would have realized it early. And he would have continued on down the road because he was looking for a safe place to turn his beloved small-block V-8 Chevy around. Or because he’d been following the blue light, enraptured, as so many seemed to be.
“If we don’t see Kimble’s car,” Roy asked, “do we still go in? Do we try to talk to Audrey Clark?”
“I want her away from that kid,” Shipley said, and then he pounded the brake all the way to the floor, the truck sliding to a stop in the snow and the gravel, and said, “Holy shit.”
There was a lion standing in the road. Majestic and with a full mane, his enormous head swung toward them, studying them, eyes aglitter in the headlight beams.
“They’re out,” Shipley whispered. “Why are they out?”
Roy had no answer. It couldn’t be good, though.
A shadow moved ahead and to the left, and they both turned toward it. Visible for an instant, then receding, was the orange-and-black-striped side of a tiger.
“Mr. Darmus,” Shipley said, “you want to tell me what in the hell we’re supposed to do about this?”
“Call for help,” Roy said. “It’s too late to be worried about protecting Kimble. Maybe too late to worry about Audrey Clark. We’re going to need a lot of people out here.”
“Yeah,” Shipley said softly, foot still on the brake, his eyes still locked onto those of the lion, which had not turned away. The animal lifted its head and roared then, a sustained bellow that made the steel and fiberglass shell around them seem suddenly insubstantial.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Roy said. “I’m afraid it’s too late for them. It’s not for us.”
Before Shipley could agree or disagree, a figure appeared at the far end of the road, walking out of the trees near Wyatt’s lighthouse, down toward the gates of the preserve. For a moment, Roy thought of Vesey, and wondered where his torch was.
Then he recognized him, almost simultaneously with Shipley.
It was Kevin Kimble.
He’d remained in the water for a few moments, until he was certain that what he was most aware of was the cold and not the pain. There was no pain. The ghost was gone and the blue light was gone but he knew that they were not really departed, that they remained very close.
At the top of the ridge, it occurred to him that he had not been aware that he had started to climb. Had not been aware of leaving the water. His body was whole and healed; he felt stronger, in fact, than he had in many years, stronger than he had since the day his back was pierced by a nine-millimeter bullet.
He was bothered by the way he had been compelled to move, the way he had emerged from the rocks and climbed to the top without decision or conscious thought, a man on the move with destination and motivation unknown.
And the torch was in him now. It would travel with him for all of his days.
That was just fine. Kimble would not feel the weight of the burden long. He had promised balance, he had promised to take a life, and he intended to very soon.
He’d returned to kill Dustin Hall.
There was a shotgun in his cruiser, and his cruiser remained at the lighthouse. He walked through the trees, staying well to the north of the road, away from the preserve, reminding himself to walk in the path that was illuminated by the invisible beams from the lighthouse, reminding himself that if he recalled the lessons of the dead, he could see this night through to dawn. Down below, he could see a flashlight beam and hear Hall shouting, and he
