Primal Touch

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  Other books by Amber Jacobs

  Nights of Silk and Sapphire

  Chapter 1

  Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

  In the forests of the night;

  What immortal hand or eye

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

  —“The Tyger” by William Blake

  Jagged shadows twisted wraithlike through the jungle undergrowth, flickered between the trees and grasses, and formed a body for a pair of ice-blue eyes that gleamed in the darkness with feral intensity. She moved soundlessly along invisible trails, avoiding twigs and surface roots with uncanny ease, leaving not a trace of passage in the moist earth. From time to time she would pause, lift her face, and take several rapid breaths through her nose. The air was thick and humid. So little breeze stirred the dense undergrowth, she was able to detect distinct scents of sweat, leather, and gun oil lingering in the heavy air. Dappled shafts of sunlight filtering through the canopy reflected off pearly white teeth as her upper lip curled back in a snarl, the rumbling purr that followed almost subliminal.

  She had stalked her prey for many hours, and the stress was starting to wear on her aching muscles. She would need to select a good striking position soon, before her energy flagged, but she had learned the merits of caution and patience a long time ago.

  Prowling carefully around a shallow gully, body held close to the ground, she listened to the unaccustomed sounds of the men who had foolishly wandered into her hunting grounds. There were three of them, moving through the jungle in a loose single file. The high-caliber guns they carried and the weathered clothes they wore marked them as her enemy: poachers.

  She picked her way forward, realizing the men were following an old, well-worn animal trail. Leaping over the broad, moss-covered trunk of a fallen tree, she risked a burst of speed to take up a position ahead of their path. There she crouched, studying the approaching trio through narrowed eyes, sharpening her focus as the moment approached.

  With three-to-one odds, she would need to strike hard and fast before the poachers could recover and move to defend themselves. There wouldn’t be a second chance.

  David Tow swatted fiercely at a fly and scowled at his companions. “How much farther, Jaz? We’ve been walking for hours.”

  The man in the lead glanced back with a smirk, taking a greater amount of pleasure in his irritation than Dave felt was polite. “What’s the matter, Dave? A few insects too much for you?”

  “Damn straight. I can’t breathe in this place without swallowing a bloody bug.”

  “Be another hour, at least, until we reach Corbin’s camp,” said Jaz, swinging his machete in lazy strokes to help clear the thicker branches from their path. “And that’s if he hasn’t moved on.”

  “Moved on?” The third hunter, Tae, wiped his sweating brow angrily. Where Jaz was tall and rangy, Tae was short and wiry, his skin gleaming like burnished brass in the humid air. He had left his home in China—a country where it was growing increasingly difficult to make a living in the poaching game—to join this expedition, and Dave could see he didn’t like to think he’d come all this way for nothing. “What d’ya mean, ‘moved on,’ Jaz? He knows we’re coming, right? Why would he clear out?”

  Jaz shrugged. “Jack Corbin don’t like to wait around. If he finds a trail, he’s gonna take after it, whether we’re there or not. So pick your feet up, boys, and hope we aren’t too late.”

  Leaving off their grumbling, the two men followed in silence for long minutes. Dave eyed the jungle nervously, listening to the strange, alien cries of unseen animals. Even in the still air, the dense foliage seemed to be constantly in motion, giving the eerie impression that invisible creatures lurked behind every shadow. “This place gives me the creeps, Tae,” he muttered.

  Tae shrugged, unconcerned. “You never hunted in India before, huh?”

  “Nope, mostly in Africa. You know, elephants and stuff. Bigger game, bigger target. It’s a lot more open than this. You can see what’s coming.”

  Tae grinned. “Hunting tigers and leopards ain’t like that,” he said. “You just gotta be real careful and hope they don’t find you before you find them.”

  Dave shivered and clutched his rifle tighter, his eyes wide as he scanned the jungle undergrowth. “I got a bad feeling about this gig,” he said in a loud whisper. “I’ve been hearing things about India the last few years.”

  “Me too.” Tae’s expression hardened. “But I’m not gonna let a few rumors and ghost stories keep me from hunting the white gold that’s out here.”

  “Damn straight,” Jaz put in, dropping back to listen to the conversation. “You know how much we stand to make from this hunt, Dave? Hell, the money’s spicy enough for Jack to get involved, and he don’t waste his time on bullshit.” He grinned wolfishly. “When we walk out of this jungle, we’re gonna be rich men.”

  “That’s if we walk out of here, Jaz,” Dave said. “From what I hear, lots of guys like us aren’t getting to be that lucky.” He slapped at another flying insect, feeling sweat trickle down his spine. “You hear about the team that came out here three years back? Right in this same park, too, and hunting the same damn thing as we are.”

  Tae’s face grew very still, and he nodded. “I heard the bodies were so ripped apart the rangers didn’t even know for sure if they were human. Had to get some medical guy out from Delhi just to figure out all the pieces.”

  “Bah.” Jaz waved his hand dismissively. “Amateurs. So they made a mistake and got shredded, big deal. All I know is, there’s a helluva good chance there’s a white tiger out here, and I want a piece of it. If you babies want to back out, go ahead. But remember, a chance like this only comes along once in a lifetime.” So saying, the tall hunter stalked off, taking the forward position and eventually vanishing behind a curtain of lush greenery.

  Tae and Dave exchanged glances. “He’s right, you know,” Tae said after a moment. “Poaching’s a dangerous game, any way you cut it. Word hasn’t got out about this yet, but when it does, every idiot out there is gonna want to take his shot. We got here first. We got Jack frickin’ Corbin leading the hunt. This is too good to pass up.”

  “Yeah, I guess. Still…” Dave pulled the butt of his rifle into his shoulder. “I’m not letting some freaky tiger-ghost take me out.”

  “That’s the spirit.” Tae grinned and slapped his companion heartily on the back. “Now, you guard the rear, and I’ll run the flanks, okay?”

  Dave nodded. “Be careful,” he warned. “There’s rangers out here too, don’t forget.”

  “I won’t.” Tae waved and then disappeared off the practically nonexistent trail, leaving Dave alone.

  He scanned the jungle nervously, remembering some of the horror stories he’d heard before coming here. India wasn’t the same hunting ground it had once been, he’d heard. Since the government had implemented the so-called “Project Tiger” back in ’73, things had started getting tougher, but in recent years, they had gotten worse still. The Chinese were now almost militant about clamping down on poaching and were urging their neighbors to do the same. But the lure of hunting the great white tiger had called Dave away from the African savanna. He could only hope that the wild rumors of mysterious jungle terrors—the so-called “Indian Menace”—were nothing more than exaggerations intended to scare away the gullible. Patting his rifle reassuringly, he managed a weak smile.

  “You won’t be sneaking up on me, whatever you—”

  It happened so suddenly, Dave didn’t even have time to squeak. A t
remendous force crashed into him from behind, knocking him to the forest floor and pinning him down. Dave struggled, winded from the impact, trying to flip himself over and call a warning even as the adrenaline surged through his blood. He felt a large, warm body pressing him down, smelled the strong animal musk of sweat, then something crushed his head into the moist earth, and stars flashed behind his eyes as his air supply was cut off. He desperately scrambled about for a weapon, but he’d lost his rifle in the fall. He tried to yell, then felt something burn across his shoulder. Panic engulfed him, and his struggles grew more frantic as the burning flared into searing agony.

  Something was clawing at his back and shoulders!

  With supreme effort, Dave managed to turn his head a fraction, just enough to dimly make out the light-orange stripes with shadowy dark lines that colored his attacker. Before he could draw breath to scream, however, something curved and sharp hooked itself under his throat and tore upward. Dave managed a strangled croak, which turned into a shallow gurgle. His vision dimmed, then faded into black.

  “Dave?”

  Cold eyes framed by darkness and death snapped up at the sound of someone crashing through the jungle. A low growl rumbled from deep within her throat as the one they’d called Tae appeared, his rifle shouldered. He stopped, frozen, when his wide hazel eyes settled on her.

  “Dear God!”

  Her upper lip curled back in a snarl, baring her teeth as she crouched low over her kill. She watched the tip of his rifle waver, then dip, as the poacher stood in hypnotized shock, too dazed to fire. She sprang before he had a chance to recover his senses, rushing forward with a feral growl. Only when her bloodied claws lashed out with the speed of a striking cobra did his finger clench desperately at the trigger.

  The gunshot startled the birds in the canopy above, its sharp report echoed by quickly silenced screams.

  “Jesus Christ!”

  Ashley Richards covered her mouth, her dark eyes wide as she stared at the two mauled bodies lying on the forest floor. Grady Neilson, her friend and colleague, offered a comforting pat on the back and tried to urge her away from the grisly scene. Ashley shook off his hand and took a step closer. She spared a quick glance behind her to where Simon Reynolds was comforting his shocked assistant, before turning back to study their bloody discovery.

  One man’s body lay face down on the forest floor, his rifle a few feet away. Great tears in the back of his shirt revealed a series of deep, bloody gouges. From the amount of blood soaking the earth around his neck, it was obvious his throat had been torn out, and the churned dirt around him gave testimony to his desperate struggles before death. A second body lay nearby, similarly mauled.

  Ashley studied the two bodies and the bloodstained ground around them, taking a careful step closer. “What the hell happened here?”

  Despite the gory scene, Ashley felt only a flutter of queasiness, as she knelt to get a better angle to study the closest body. Her work often took her to remote and wild regions of the world, and she’d seen her share of animal attacks. It took a lot to turn her stomach.

  “Uh…Ash?”

  Ashley glanced over her shoulder to where Grady stood. “Hmm?”

  Grady lifted an eyebrow and looked pointedly to the camera she held—the camera which was somehow focusing on the dead man’s torn throat.

  “Not a good time,” Grady said quietly.

  “Oh…right.” Ashley blushed, regarding her hands with a stern, slightly puzzled look; they had an unfortunate habit of doing this.

  Grady did a bad job of hiding his smile as she lowered the camera. Ashley’s first instinct upon encountering anything new or interesting had always been to take a photograph, and it took a conscious effort on her part to restrain the compulsion. Sometimes taking a photo crossed cultural boundaries, sometimes it was simply inappropriate, and other times it could be hazardous. Grady still liked to remind her of the time she’d stood in the path of an oncoming elephant stampede, oblivious to the danger while snapping away merrily. Though he rarely argued with her about how reckless she could sometimes be, Grady had had some choice words for her after he’d rushed in and pulled her back to safety.

  That fearlessness, driven by her innate and insatiable curiosity, made Ashley a difficult, yet colorful, friend to have around.

  It also made her one of the best wildlife photographers in the business.

  The two of them had been in India for eight weeks now, and were about to wrap up their assignment, when rumors filtered down from the Parks department that a white tiger was sighted in the Bandhavgarh National Park. Unwilling to pass up such a remarkable opportunity, Ashley had used her considerable charm to convince a reluctant Grady to delay their return to the United States. Joining Simon and his assistant Grace—two scientists who were tagging and monitoring the Bengal tiger population in the area—the group had set out into the jungle, accompanied by their Indian guide and tracker, Tarun.

  No sooner had base camp been established than the sound of a gunshot echoed from the forest depths. Tarun had rushed to investigate. Though he warned the group to remain at camp, Ashley insisted on going with him, and the others had joined her, their curiosity piqued.

  None of them had expected the carnage they found.

  Ashley looked up from her study of the dead man as Tarun appeared from the undergrowth. The guide was a tall, muscular man, given to wearing open-necked shirts and cargo pants.

  Ashley raised a blonde eyebrow questioningly at his dark expression.

  “There’s another one not far down the track,” Tarun reported calmly in his heavy Hindi accent. “Looks like he tried to make a run for it. Made it about thirty paces before he was taken down.” Hands on his hips, Tarun scowled at the torn bodies, then at the ground around them.

  “What killed them?” asked Grady, the slight quaver in his voice giving lie to his outward calm.

  “A tiger?” Ashley guessed.

  Tarun shook his head. “I doubt it. Tigers don’t kill like this, and they typically avoid humans.”

  “Looks like a big cat of some kind. I mean, look at those claw marks.” Ashley pointed at the bodies. “What else could it be?”

  “Tigers don’t slit their prey’s throat,” Tarun argued, “not so cleanly. And they leave tracks. I can’t find a single trace of whatever did this—no scent markings, no prints, nothing.” He shook his head, clearly more upset by the lack of tracks than by the bodies themselves.

  “What should we do?” asked Simon timidly. The prematurely balding, middle-aged zoologist looked at the bloody remains for a second, then hastily averted his gaze. “We can’t just leave them here, can we?”

  “No.” Tarun sighed. “Ashley, could you and Grady go find some good-sized branches? I’ll get the rope from the packs and we can make a set of litters. We’ll drag them back to camp, call the rangers, and get them to come deal with this.”

  Ashley frowned. “Are you sure we should move them? Won’t someone want to investigate the scene of the crime? Look for evidence?”

  Tarun gestured to the ground. “No one will find anything here,” he said. “Look around. There’s no evidence, no tracks, and frankly, I doubt the rangers or the police will bother investigating this at all. They’ve got better things to do with their time.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Grady.

  “Look at these guys.” Tarun pointed to the rifle one man still clutched in his bloody hand. “What do you think they were doing out here with guns like that? They’re poachers. Probably here to kill the same tiger you people came for.” He shook his head and spat angrily on the ground. “We take them back to camp and turn them over to the authorities. Where it goes from there is none of our business.”

  Ashley glared at the dark man for long moments, not entirely happy with how casually he was treating the incident. Then she smiled a little coldly and said, “Fine,” grabbed Grad
y by the arm, and pulled him away to look for suitably strong branches to make a litter.

  Nearly five hours later, Ashley watched from her fallen-log seat as Tarun shook hands with a uniformed ranger and exchanged a few quiet words. It had taken over two hours to drag the bodies back to their base, even with all five of them putting in an effort, and it was now dark. A quick radio call had alerted the proper authorities, who immediately sent out a Jeep team to relieve them of their charges. Although Ashley didn’t speak Hindi, from the tone of the conversation shared by Tarun and the head ranger, it seemed the uniformed man wanted to deal with everything as quickly and quietly as possible.

  As their visitors left, Tarun strode over to the others. Taking his seat beside the small campfire, he offered the group a grim smile.

  “Well, that’s that,” he said simply.

  Ashley struggled to keep her expression neutral. “So they’ll look into it, right?”

  Tarun shrugged. “Maybe. But like I said, a couple of poachers won’t warrant much interest.” He paused a long time, then continued in an ominous-sounding tone. “Besides, they know they won’t find anything. From what the head ranger told me, they’ve been seeing this sort of thing a lot the past few years.”

  Grady leaned closer. “What sort of thing?”

  “Poachers turning up dead in the jungle, ripped to pieces.” Tarun pulled a toothpick from his pocket and chewed it thoughtfully. The look on his face was the same one Ashley remembered seeing her father wear when he told ghost stories during family camping trips. “Not just here, either. Up in the Himalayan mountains, and on the grasslands, something’s hunting them down, then disappearing. It leaves no trace except the dead.”

  Grace’s eyes were as wide as saucers, and she stared at him in terror. “What is it?”

  Tarun shrugged and sighed dramatically. “No one can tell for sure. But some of the more superstitious elders are spreading rumors about a spirit at work.” He eyed his attentive audience. “They say the goddess Durga has sent the great tiger she rides down here to protect its children.”