Chapter 30

Her flesh was bruised and torn all over from tripping and falling in the brush. She had stopped blacking out, but her head wasn’t throbbing anymore. Pain had been replaced by fullness, and it felt like she was experiencing the world through a thick layer of fog. She knew enough about the human brain to know that both sensations were more concerning than pain.

A scream pierced the deceptive calm of the forest. A man’s scream.

She huddled up in a ball and covered her ears, but it wasn’t enough to drown out the shrieks of agony that followed.

As suddenly as the screams had begun, they stopped. She knew what that meant. If she did somehow survive to tell her story, she doubted that the park rangers would find a trace of the man with the golden fangs.

It was a joke to think she would survive, and she knew it. The beast would surely find her; it was only a matter of time. A bloodthirsty creature that size wouldn’t be satisfied by a single meal.

The question wasn’