Vampire Instinct (17 page)

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Authors: Joey W Hill

Tags: #Vampires, #Horror, #Paranormal, #General, #Romance, #Fantasy, #Erotic Fiction, #Erotica, #Fiction, #Occult & Supernatural

BOOK: Vampire Instinct
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Was he suggesting that she might be staying? That he might consider—
“Not even close to that yet,” he said shortly. “But part of it is proving to me you have sense enough to take care of yourself. I have over a hundred cats here, and now six fledglings that need attention in various ways. I don’t have time for my staff to need my nursemaiding, physically or emotionally. But back to the original point, that’s the kind of pragmatic feeling the fledglings need aimed at them. No coddling, no pity.”
He pulled into an open gravel area then. From Kohana’s description, she realized they were at the vast maze of habitats for the cats that weren’t able to go onto the open preserve, or not yet ready for it. In their discussion of the fledglings, she’d forgotten they were coming here first. She’d have to bite back her impatience.
Mal switched off the Jeep and closed a hand over her elbow before she could get out. “Part of it is keeping your focus where I tell you to keep it. This is an orientation, not a tour. It’s to teach you things that are important for your safety as well as my staff’s. If you mess up because you haven’t paid attention, they’re the ones who risk themselves to get you out of harm’s way. You said you want to work, to be a help. Well, if that’s the case, you need to understand the operation and rules around here. The better you demonstrate your understanding of that, the more likely it is you’ll have more freedom to move around the island.”
He knew what kind of carrot to dangle in front of her, for certain. Still, his reasoning was sound, so she nodded, making a monumental effort to push the fledglings out of her mind, at least for now.
This area was a sprawling compound of wire enclosures. There was no artificial lighting, because Malachi could see at night, and second marks could see in the darkness passably well, no worse than the gray hours of dusk. The lack of man-made light made it seem an even wilder place, the enclosed cats calling out, everything from low rumbles to huffing chuffs of breath or sudden shrieks. Things she’d heard last night had seemed close, but these noises were far more pronounced. Remembering the pictures, the sizes of some of the cats, she felt a moment of trepidation, but a sliver of amusement from the vampire at her side disrupted it.
There is nothing here that’s more dangerous than a fledgling vampire. And you want to cuddle those like kittens.
She pressed her lips together.
Bloody galah.
“Not
bastard
? I would have thought that would be the first that came to your mind.” He lifted his brow. “Not sure what
galah
means.”
She thought Lady Constance’s education had driven such vernacular out of her head. While she could blame Dev’s influence for letting it come so readily to her mind, it apparently took Mal to bring it to the forefront.
“
Bastard
is an affectionate term in Oz,” she said stiffly. “If someone is your mate, you might call him a right bastard. It’s one mostly used by men.”
“Hmm. Chumani uses
arrogant prick
. She also claims it’s a term of affection.” He gestured ahead of them, ignoring her startled glance. “This whole section is for our new cats, where we evaluate their condition or get them back into shape. It’s also for our cats that can never return to the wild and wouldn’t be safe if we let them roam the island with the ones that are being rehabilitated. On the western end of the island is a large running area, separated from the open preserve. Once or twice a month, we take different groups from here to spend a night out there, really stretch their legs. I camp out with them to make sure they come to no harm.”
He surprised her when he came around and offered her a hand out. His long fingers were warm and strong, and though the contact was brief, when he released her, his palm slid along her forearm, his other hand touching her back to guide her.
Fortunately, she was distracted from that by something going on at one of the nearer fences. She’d met Tokala yesterday, a tall, handsome Indian with a thick braid that fell to his waist. He had a WWII battalion tattoo on his biceps, which told her he’d been a soldier, like Dev. Now the tall man had his arm raised above his head. On the other side of the fence, a tiger had his paws against the mesh, stretching up toward the hand.
“That’s Shira,” Mal said. “Tokala’s doing what’s called operant training with him. We need to do cursory physical exams periodically to make sure everything’s fine. So we teach them that maneuver, reaching up toward the top of the enclosure, so we can do a visual check of the belly and genital regions, verify the skin and fur look healthy and his weight looks good. We make sure there are no signs of stress, like over-grooming or tail biting.”
“How do you help him, if he is stressed?”
“Various things. If we think he’s truly sick, we bring in the vet from the mainland, though Chumani has pretty good training as a technician. Sometimes he just needs more stimulation. We do enrichment activities, which is a fancy term for giving them different toys and stimuli. Cardboard boxes, dead tree limbs, water pools for the tigers since they love to swim.” He nodded toward a water hole in Shira’s large enclosure. “At Easter, we paint eggs and let them roll them around and play. They eat them raw. It’s fun for the staff, too.”
“Easter eggs?” She was intrigued at the thought. “Is it fun for
you
?”
Mal grunted. “We compete to see who can decorate the prettiest egg before the cats mash them. Bidzil usually wins, but I’ve come in second a couple times.”
She blinked at the remarkable statement, then looked back toward the cage as Tokala gave another command. The tiger dropped down to all four massive paws. The man put what appeared to be raw meat in a smaller cage attached to the enclosure and then pulled a lever, giving Shira access to that cage to retrieve his reward.
“We limit direct contact between humans and the cats,” Mal said. “When he was merely an adolescent, Shira could have broken a toddler’s neck with a playful swipe of his paw. These are wild animals, even if they’ve never been outside of captivity, and we want to maintain that as much as possible. If contact is encouraged, it also encourages the natural human tendency to treat them like pets. Then someone gets badly hurt.”
Since she wanted to get closer and see the tiger, Mal showed her the single-strand wire that was the three-foot barrier between the fence and all visitors or those not working with the creatures. The fine stripes along the tiger’s flanks and sides were like that pelt in Mal’s bedroom, and it made her think of Thomas’s book. There’d been a photograph of a tiger running through a jungle, light playing over those stripes.
“So he can never be free?” she asked softly.
“He was bred to be a white tiger for movies and entertainment, which didn’t pan out, because white tigers are mutations; they’re almost nonexistent in their native environment, and when they happen, the mothers kill them pretty quickly. She can’t hide the cub from predators, so he endangers the other cubs, and even if he grew up, he couldn’t conceal himself to hunt effectively. Because they wanted a white tiger, and he wasn’t, they didn’t know what to do with him. He was kept in a small carrier when he was young. They kept him in it for too long, didn’t give him proper nutrition or exercise, so his back legs never strengthened as they should. He enjoys our nights at the open preserve here, though, and he’s happy.”
“You know that for certain.”
He shrugged. “I’m simply assuming.”
“You don’t do that.” She considered him. “You’ve marked him. I didn’t know that was even possible. How did you do it?”
She saw a gratifying flash of surprise at her intuition, then he rewarded it with an image in her head. It unfolded as vividly as her dream in his bed. Mal had spent hours interacting with the tiger on the western area, letting him learn who and what Mal was, and letting Shira have a freedom he’d never had before. When the tiger finally sank down for a rest, obviously tired but like a child at the fair, still too amazed with his new surroundings to sleep, Mal squatted behind him. As he laid a hand on the mighty flank, the tiger made a loud moaning noise. Even in the midst of the memory, it made Elisa smile, because it was as if he were talking to Mal. At length, when the tiger laid his head down on the ground, Mal bent. He gave the mark through the shoulder as the tiger made another moaning noise. A brief sip, and the tiger was panting, eyes glazed and staring straight ahead as if somewhat entranced.
When Mal drew back, his hand sliding away, the tiger stayed on his side, eyes closing in a nap, but it didn’t last long. Within minutes, a swarm of nighttime moths caught his attention and the beast was up again, chasing them through the grass. Since it was Mal’s viewpoint, she couldn’t see him, but she imagined that crimson gaze that came upon vampires when they took blood dying away to dark brown again. As he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, a slight smile crossed his lips.
Elisa swallowed. The memory had taken over her mind so clearly it had unbalanced her, such that she was leaning against Mal’s side. He clasped her waist, keeping her steady until she lifted her head and looked up into his face. It was entirely intimate, as close as two people would be before they kissed, and she jerked back, taking a couple unsteady steps that brought her up against that dividing wire and would have had her falling over it if he didn’t close the gap again, steadying her further.
“I’m fine.” She pushed away, putting more space between them. “Well, that was something, wasn’t it?” She brushed at her hair, straightened her shirt. “So that means you can talk to them, and they to you.”
“No. Vampires aren’t anymore capable of understanding animal language than humans. But it does give me the sense of their state of mind, which supplements the operant training, and helps build trust between me and them. Since I have a different scent from a human, there’s less risk in me having more direct interaction with both the rehabilitating cats as well as these.”
Shira gave her a brief glance, whuffed and backed out of the smaller cage, taking his piece of meat with him.
“I guess he doesn’t think much of me.”
Mal made a noncommittal noise. “Don’t be offended. Cats don’t like to meet your eyes.”
She noted the top of the enclosure was open, though it appeared there was a strand of electrified fencing at the top. “Aren’t you worried about him getting out?”
“No. Tigers aren’t climbers, unless extremely provoked. Now, others . . .” He pointed out another enclosure, this time one that was screened at the top. She was just in time to see a medium-sized cat with tawny pelt and long ears with black markings and tufts dart out of a nest of foliage and rocks. The feline leaped dramatically in the air, catching a flying pigeon in her paws.
“Wow.” Elisa blinked as the cat vanished back into the undergrowth.
“That’s a caracal,” Mal said. “And there’s her mate up there. Watch—he’s going to get another.”
Elisa drew in a breath, catching his arm unconsciously as the cat launched himself off the rock, knocking another bird right out of the air. Locking his jaws around it, he carried the creature back to the rock formation that served as his cave. “Oh my. He’s so fast.”
“They used to train caracals in India to do that for show. They’d release pigeons in the ring with them and take bets on how many they could knock down.”
He pointed to a chute system that had been rigged to their enclosure. “Since these two are being rehabilitated for eventual release, we send the birds and small rodents down through the chute.”
She looked at the mesh fencing. “Aren’t the holes big enough for their prey to escape?”
“Sometimes. That’s part of it. We’re training them to watch and be ready, just as they’d have to do in the wild. When they first get here, if they’re malnourished or ill, as they often are, we give them meat, however much they need to get them back in good health. The amount of cats we have here consume about three hundred pounds a day. We get in whole slabs of cow ribs from a supplier on the mainland that ships to us once every couple weeks. We breed rabbits and mice in the compound, as well as the birds. We start with dead rodents, humanely killed, to introduce them to whole prey, and then move them on to live ones. Once they’re out on the preserve, we’ve of course populated it with a variety of animals they hunt for food, big and small.”
Taking her arm, he guided her onward. Maybe he hadn’t intended to take her through more than one or two habitats, but she was so enthralled with all of it, his willingness to tell her more seemed to expand with her enthusiasm.
“Do any zoos ever offer to take them off your hands? So you could have room for others?”
“They did at first, but we turned them down. They’re not all bad, but the primary purpose of a zoo is entertaining humans. That’s how they raise money. They take animals bred or captured specifically for their facility. An animal may live a longer, less dangerous life in a zoo, but that’s like saying human children are better off being locked in their rooms all their lives.”
“Well, they seem happy here.” She studied a bobcat lying on her side, washing. “That’s something, right?”
“Yes.” She sensed a hesitation, as if he was considering his next words carefully. “There’s another vital reason I mark the cats, Elisa. It tells me who can never find any contentment here, the ones who are too damaged and we have to let go. End their suffering.”

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