Tropical Tiger Spy (Shifting Sands Resort 1)

Tony did fling himself at the cage then, roaring in anger and shifting as he leaped.

Beehag only laughed as he walked away, and flipped the switch on his control one last time to deliver blistering jolts of pain into the snarling tiger.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Amber writhed in counterpoint to Tony, snapping at the air as she kept herself from bolting by instinct back to the terrible zoo.

When it stopped, she lay panting for a long moment, anger clouding her vision as much as the echo of Tony's pain.

More guards were spilling out of the house, taking cover behind a waist-high wall that had appeared merely decorative, but now seemed very cleverly defensible. Several had moved out along the walls, looking poised to close in on the gate if the interlopers moved out onto the lawn.

Scarlet and her staff hung back, not entirely willing to leave the partial cover that the van provided or abandon their escape route. The staff, most of them unarmed, looked nervous, but Scarlet appeared unruffled, in her tidy business skirt and heels. The dragon roared and snapped its big wings, but Amber thought it didn't look as intimidating once the shock of it had passed.

These new guards did not appear to be of the same easily-cowed stripe as the first ones, and Amber could hear them talking among themselves as weapons were passed out.

“These will turn 'em human, even the dragon,” one assured another. “Aim for the bits between the scales. Beehag wants them all tranqed because he's not sure what they are, especially the red-haired bitch.”

Amber had a sinking feeling in her heart; the resort staff, plucky as they appeared, was no match for the uniformed, armored task force that faced them. There was little she could do, even behind the lines of the enemy. She was astonished by how many guards had boiled out of the estate–there must be two or three dozen men. Knowing that the guns they held were tranquilizers didn't make it any easier to take them out.

It was too bad she couldn't free the inhabitants of the zoo to fight with them.

As soon as the idea occurred to Amber, she was in motion, scrambling quietly back over the roof to the back of the house. If everyone was here, distracted by Scarlet's invasion, then there couldn't be more than a token guard back at the security room–where the locks to the cages must all be controlled.

She leaped easily down to the ground using a plumeria tree by the back door. To her frustration, it was locked. In human form, uncomfortably naked, she paced, trying to come up with som

e new plan, any shred of an idea.

She flitted back into cat form at the sound of officious footsteps and hid in the shadow of a big planter by the door.

Beehag.

He was smiling confidently and tapping a black box in his hands. With a lazy swipe, he used his keycard to open the door with a whir and a click.

Why wouldn't he be confident, Amber thought despairingly. He knew he had all the advantages.

Still, she wasn't going to give up yet. She held her breath, and darted in at his heels, as quiet as a whisper and as nothing more than a shadow behind him. She followed him down the corridor until they came to a closed door. Alistair swiped his card, and then put his thumb on a small screen by the security panel. The door whirred and opened with a little pop.

Amber followed him, barely getting her tail swished in behind her before the door closed with a hiss and a click. She knew she couldn't have made it in undetected if Beehag hadn't been so distracted.

One wall was a panel of screens, showing all the parts of the compound. Animals paced in dozens of cages, looking clearly agitated; they must know that something momentous was happening. Amber's eyes went immediately to search for Tony, and found several cages of tigers, one pure white and black, and two the more common orange and white and black. More screens showed the front lawn, and it was to these screens that Alistair immediately went.

Behind him, Amber's attention swung to the opposite wall, where a rack of weapons hung. She couldn't tell if they were real guns or tranquilizers, but it didn't matter to her now.

Quietly as she could, she shifted to human, standing up slowly and reaching for one of the rifles.

“Fools!” Beehag said mockingly, making her freeze in place.

But he was only talking to the guard who sat there, and the figures on the screen. A quick glance showed that Scarlet had moved away from the van and was speaking to guards, her hands up in a position of surrender. There was no sound from the screen, but Amber thought that her posture had more defiance than yield to it. She released the safety on the gun before taking it down, and a fortunate shift of a chair covered the sound.

As she suspected, actually releasing the gun was noisier, and both the guard and Alistair turned in alarm to face her as she swung it down, turned and aimed at them.

Their moment of shock gave her a chance to release a dart directly into the guard's neck, and she was gratified to see him crumple almost at once.

Alistair had an odd look of alarm and amusement, and Amber half-wished she had picked a gun with real bullets so she could wipe that smug expression off his face forever.

He put his hands up slowly. “What a clever little kitty you are,” he said with an odd twist of his lips. “How did you get the resort staff mobilized? I was hoping to milk them as a source for my collection for much longer, but I knew they'd become a problem eventually. Your friend Tony just hastened that end, nosing around like he was. What I couldn't have hoped for was a chance to capture them all–I had thought they would all have to go down in the terribly unfortunate fire that I've already arranged.”

Finger twitching on the trigger, Amber paused. “Fire?” she said.