The Ridge(20)

That was the first and last cat Wesley ever shot.

It was while they were preparing the body for transport back home that they found the cubs. The lion had led them on a merry chase away from the den at first—a wise instinct, carrying the threat away from those she loved—but in the end she’d decided to go back, maybe hoping to take refuge, maybe thinking she needed to stand and fight, but more likely confident that she’d lost the dogs in the river.

She hadn’t.

There were two cubs in the den, and Bill Harrington told Wesley that they would not survive on their own and should be put down fast and painlessly. Wesley, feeling tremendous shame, had refused, and Bill had relented. They took the cubs back down and called the state to come get them. That same night a screaming blizzard blew in, and it was four days before someone with the state arrived to inspect the cubs. By then one had died in Wesley’s arms; the other was alive. He’d bottle-fed it, slept with it, never left it. Those four days shaped a life.

He never hunted cats again. He tracked them, but with only a camera in his hands. After high school he worked with a group in California that studied the cougar populations. From that he met a woman who was headed to Africa to work with lions. He spent two years there. Then it was South America for jaguars, then back to the States to work for the USDA as an investigator on cases where tigers were being raised and slaughtered for their pelts, then on to one private preserve, then to another and another.

He’d spent far more time around cougars, lions, tigers, cheetahs, and ocelots than he had around people. The only people he knew well, in fact, were cat people. Big cats were his world, his life. He knew them well.

And he knew this: the cats at Audrey Clark’s rescue preserve did not like their new grounds.

Wesley lived at the preserve. He’d joined them years earlier, when David was getting it started, and he’d expected it would be a temporary gig. But they were wonderful people, the Clarks, and their mission—providing rescue, then homes and safety and pleasure, for abused exotic cats—was one he believed in deeply. So Wes had stayed, living on the grounds in a well-equipped trailer and surrounded by cats that he loved as family, happy both because he knew he was needed and because he liked the idea of the planned expansion at Blade Ridge.

Liked it until tonight, at least, when a cacophony of roars, hisses, and screams broke out just as he was about to get some sleep.

He’d never heard them all join in like this. Sometimes the tigers would excite the lions and most of those groups would get to roaring—a sound that seemed to make the very earth upon which you stood tremble—but as Wesley grabbed a flashlight and stepped out of the trailer, they were all going. He could even hear the low hisses from Tina, a serval, the smallest of African cats, whose cage was very close to the trailer door. He shone his light down at her and saw that she was standing with her back arched and tail stiff, staring away from him, out toward the road. Out toward the lighthouse. But it was dark and nobody had come down the road, so what in the hell…

He saw it then. A strange blue light was working its way around the face of the lighthouse. Every cat in the preserve was staring it down, and they usually didn’t give a damn about light.

“Hello?” Wesley shouted. He wasn’t a large man, but working with cats for years had taught him how to use a mighty large voice when he needed it. “Who’s there?”

No response came, and the light didn’t stop moving. It just bobbed around the outside of the lighthouse, and Wesley stared at it in fascination. The thing was no ordinary light, and that went beyond the blue color. It had the flickering, undulating motion of a flame. Yes, that’s exactly what it looked like—a blue torch.

It drifted around the hilltop and disappeared and for a moment Wes relaxed. Then he noticed that the cats had not. Every single animal was upright and pressed to the fence, watching and snarling. Wes stared at them, truly at a loss, and then looked back just in time to see the blue light reappear at the top of the lighthouse.

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered. Whoever was out there had gotten inside. But Wyatt French was dead, the police had told him that, and he knew for a fact that the last officer on the scene had left hours before.

The torch reflected off the glass and filled the lighthouse with an ethereal blue glow. Wesley suddenly felt both exposed and frightened, and he clicked his own flashlight off and stepped back into the shadows, close to Tina’s cage, the serval still making those low, warning hisses.

After a time the blue light vanished again, then appeared outside the lighthouse, and the cats went wild. The roar of a tiger could always make a newcomer tremble, but Wesley couldn’t remember the last time the sounds had made him uneasy. The cats were enraged, and it was at this blue light.