Chapter 28: Where the Wild Things Are…
The beast growled. The motion parted its gargantuan mouth and revealed canines that were poised to sink into soft flesh and viscera before it would hit the hardness of the bone and that too would give in and crush with an uneven jaggedness under the piercing force. The thought was jarring and she crouched in stillness as she held its gaze. Its loud breathing was measured and even, at odds with the deathly gleam in its eye and the spittle oozing out of its mouth in anticipation.
She closed her eyes for a moment, just enough to take a deep breath without the face of the striped beast looming in her vision, and in the next blink of an eye, she sprang up and ran. There was only a flash of a beat before she heard the whoosh of air as the beast jumped off the rock where it had been perching back on its hind legs waiting for her to make just this move. What was the thrill of the catch without this chase… and now it had begun…
She ran without looking back or stopping… the time for both had run out…
While her stamina may have been a poor match for the beast, she was nimble and light as a sprite and the tiger skin around her hips and chest was tightly bound, neither loose nor long to snag on twigs or shrubs to slow her down.
The beast had been stalking her for five days now; so patiently, she thought… to drive up her agitation and its excitement…
She knew the jungle like the back of her hand and her path now was not straight. The beast's bulk had to slow it down, although from the sound of it, it didn't seem so.
She imagined that it was gaining on her… she imagined that she was now faster… she imagined that her feet would lift her up and up… until she could fly…
She headed straight for a tree and at the last moment jerked to a sharp left … she heard the immediate growl behind her and imagined that she had made the beast mad…
The thudding of her heart merged in and out of rhythm with the pounding of the beast's paws behind her… she felt as if she was plowing through air, diving headlong into a crash landing…
And then there it was… The mist... it was spreading up and around…
She knew it would be denser fog farther down…
The gushing force of the water was deafening at this distance and she knew that it was close to a 120 feet drop, which was about eighty more than what anyone had willingly attempted to plunge into...
But there was an 800 pound mammoth of a white tiger charging at her from behind…
Stopping had never been an option, she had known…
And so she sped up until her feet flew up and off the solid ground and into the mist…
"Vidya…"
She paused in the rapid strokes of her pen, startled at the unexpected sound of her name.
She shut her journal quickly as a knock sounded, a gentle tap that repeated three times.
She closed her eyes and sighed; she did not want to see him just now, she did not want to go to their room… she just wanted to be alone…
She had been doing precisely what he had told her not to do, wandering the house at night. Except, she was not wandering, not really… she had found one of the guest bedrooms with a window that faced the west side that no one used and had locked herself inside… not wanting to run the risk of meeting the true monster of the night.
Who she should have feared was the one at the door…
The White Tiger…
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Edited by sridevi27 - 14 years ago
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