She let out a low growl as she picked it up, through the chaotically rolling wall of sound: the faint crunch of heavy boots taking slow, deliberate steps on the carpet of dead leaves and pine needles, and the rhythm of calm, controlled breathing, muffled by the thick balaclavas the troops wore. A waft of the fake pine scent trickled in a lazy current along the currents of air from the north, and, in a weaker concentration, from the east. The passage north-east was still open by a thin margin, but the soldiers were closing in fast, and tightening the net of their formation.
Snarling and fuelled by a boost of adrenalin, Njinga veered sharply to the east, almost throwing Jun off her back. He clung fast with the tenacity of a barnacle, though, his muscles and joints aflame with pain, but his will stronger than the agony.
William too caught a whiff of the hunting spray and knew right away what it meant. Following Njinga’s scent, which was as vividly clear to him in his tiger form as the sight of her, plain as day, would have been in his human form, he too surged off to the east, running at full tilt and clearing, in a spectacular leap that had Chloe’s stomach feeling as if it were lurching up the back of her throat for a terrifying second or two, a deep thirty-foot-wide gulley.
The Huntsmen had not yet detected their fleeing quarry, but they would soon enough; the beastwalkers knew that their enemies would surely have brought with them the most sophisticated technological equipment, from which there could be no hiding.
Then the first shot rang out.
William did not know whether it had been fired by a Huntsman or one of the teens, but the sharp crack of it resounding through the trees spurred urgent speed into his steps and potency into his burning muscles, tired lungs and aching joints. Seconds later, there was a burst of M-16 fire, coming from around a mile behind William and Chloe.
‘Oh my God!’ she screamed, her left hand almost ripping a chunk out of William’s ruff with her death grip. ‘No, they’re on us, oh my God, oh my fuckin’ God!’
The M-16 fire was answered by a deep chattering of AK-47 fire; someone from the beastwalkers’ group was shooting back. Since the firing was not accompanied by the frenetic and thunderous hammering of Zakaria’s M60, William guessed that it was Lightning Bird and Daekwon who had run into the Huntsmen, which was bad news; since the two of them were already so far behind William, with Zakaria and Paola even further behind them, there was a very real possibility that Zakaria and Paola could be completely cut off and surrounded.
There was no time to pause and worry, and no time to turn around either, though. For the moment, it was every beastwalker for themselves, at least until they reached the temporary refuge of the north-eastern peak.
‘If you see any hint of a soldier, lass, you let rip with that AK,’ William said to Chloe, communicating to her via her mind. ‘Don’t give the bastards the chance to shoot, you do it first.’
‘I’ll literally blast the fuck outta ‘em,’ she growled, the wind whipping through her hair as William coursed through the long shadows and blasted across patches of golden, late afternoon light. The old Chloe of Eisenhower High’s Environmental Club in New York City would never have imagined she’d be saying such a thing, given how fiercely passionate her loathing of guns and weaponry was … but then again, the old Chloe could never have guessed that she’d be fleeing on the back of a weretiger from the ruthless troops of a secret global cabal.
A few hundred yards behind William and Chloe, Lightning Bird and Daekwon were engaged in a skirmish with two Huntsmen troops, who were around fifty yards from them. Lightning Bird was zipping between trees, while atop his enormous shoulders Daekwon, aflame with the raging adrenalin of combat, was firing fully automatic bursts in the soldiers’ direction as they dashed from cover to cover. Although Daekwon was a decent enough shot while standing, there was no way he could achieve any kind of accuracy from the bear’s rolling shoulders, and the bursts of fire from his AK-47 only served to force the Huntsmen to duck behind cover whenever he fired.
The two soldiers quickly realised, though, that the teen’s shots were flying far off the mark, and that they would not have to duck the next time the bear and his rider ran out from behind a tree.
One of them, the taller of the two, growled in a gravelly voice to his companion, his words muffled slightly by the black balaclava that covered his head.
‘Next time the fuckers make a run for it, you take the boy. I’ll cut the bear down. Take your time and aim good; the kid’s shots ain’t going nowhere near us.’
‘Fuckin’ A,’ the other soldier grunted, slapping a fresh ammunition clip into his M-16.
Once more Lightning Bird and Daekwon, who howled out a guttural roar of wordless wrath and vengeful defiance, charged out from behind the pillar-like trunk behind which they’d been taking shelter, making for the cover of the next large tree. Daekwon dug his knees into Lightning Bird’s flanks as they ran and unleashed another burst of wrathful but hopelessly inaccurate fire in the direction of the Huntsmen troops – but this time the pair of burly soldiers did not drop and flatten themselves to the ground to take cover. Instead, each man calmly rolled into a kneeling position, pressed the butt of his M-16 into his shoulder, and took careful aim at his target,
