Tiger Bound (29 page)

Instead, he jerked his head up to look at her, narrow-eyed—no, not
at
her, just to the side of her, and even as she flinched away with shock that he had betrayed her position, she realized that wasn’t it at all.

I’m not alone.

She froze against the tree, making herself deer-still...deer quiet. She caught a glimpse of movement from the corner of her eye—

Another shot rang out, this one from below—
the handler!
—she couldn’t help but flinch, and then to gasp as Maks jerked, his expression gone startled, the wild eye of an animal wounded. Only for an instant, as blood bloomed low along his side—and an instant was all he had, for the creature was upon him.

And still Maks twisted aside, slamming the rock down between the creature’s eyes, rolling...leaping up again to latch on at the side of the its neck like the tiger he was—with one very human hand snagging the stubby javelina ear, using it to cling tight while the other hammered the rock against face and eye and even tusk. The creature screamed in protest, blood streaming—

Movement, from the corner of her eye...

Core. A Core posse member, dressed in his woodlands camo T-shirt and pants, oblivious to her presence as he took stance with his semiautomatic pistol, one hand steadied over the other, the aim deliberate and confident.

Maks.

Katie shrieked, an inexperienced battle cry, and dove for the man—Sentinel in strength, deer in agile speed, woman protecting her own.

The man went down before her, and her advantage faltered, giving way to expertise as she scrambled to take possession of the gun. She ended up tussling in her own defense, rolling through prickly scrub oak, jamming up against a tree with her teeth bared and her feet kicking out at him, lightning-swift strikes while she scrabbled for the gun in the pine needles.

He snatched at a leg, lost it, snatched again—got it, fingers gripping tightly around her ankle as he braced himself and yanked her away from the tree. She bumped over the ground—and felt herself astonishingly airborne as he whiplashed them around to launch her over the outcrop, the gun clattering right out with her.

Airborne all too briefly, before the ground came up to meet her.

* * *

A tusk broke beneath the rock in Maks’s hand; his breath came in panting gulps as his flank quivered in growing pain and heat. His leg gave way, muscles too shocked to function. But the creature still stood spraddle-legged beside him, a thing of massive muscle and unnatural strength stunned into brief acquiescence.

In the growing tunnel vision of his determination, he heard the shriek above him; he heard the scramble. He heard, too, that one of the hunters had gotten the drop on the Core handler, shouting a demand of surrender.

Only when Katie’s slender form twisted through the air did he understand the shriek, the scuffle from above. Only as she landed, crying out with the impact, did he see the black shape of the gun clatter down after her and understand what she’d done...why she’d done it.

His own shields had kept her from warning him any other way. And now she was down in the thick of it, the bullets flying and his strength compromised and the Core handler desperate—

He clung to the side of the creature’s neck, gore splattering his hand and the rock it held, sweat stinging his vision into a blur, hot blood running down his side—and he knew he couldn’t protect her. Not like this.

Reaching down to the root of his newly channeled power came more easily now, and he did it now without second thought—pulling his strength from that place, spinning it into a shield...forming the shield around Katie. Already she tried to rise, hunched over the injuries from the fall, but her ankle instantly gave way beneath her.

The shields buffered her fall. At first she was too panicked, too deep in the deer to notice—or to hear the cry of one of the hunters urging her to stay down. She flailed back up to her feet and went down again—but this time, she realized the shields had changed. This time, she pushed away the panic of a crippled prey animal and flung her head up to look at him, her hair a flow of cinnamon-sparked movement in the sun. This time, she caught his eye—and he didn’t need to hear her with ears or mind to read the expression on her face.
Oh, my God, Maks, what have you done?

Because he couldn’t protect her with these new physical shields and still protect himself with any shields at all.

It didn’t matter. He told her as much, clinging to his stunned opponent with a slipping grip—he fought brute strength, and needed no shields. It didn’t matter, because she was everything, and protecting her was what he
was.

His leg quivered beneath him; the hunters shouted at him. Or he thought they did, wanting him away from the thing so they could take it down—but for that instant, he had eyes and ears only for Katie Rae Maddox, waiting to see that she understood. Needing to know it.

Because six hundred pounds of raging Core monstrosity wasn’t something a wounded tiger could take on.

And the monstrosity knew it. It roared to life beneath Maks, one side of its head battered to pulp and the other still full of fury. Instead of trying to toss Maks away, it reared up, suddenly wrenching itself around to slam Maks against the rock base of the outcrop. Maks saw it coming, twisted in midair to take the impact with bent legs...and the weak leg slipped out from beneath him, skidding down the rock and leaving him vulnerable to the impact.

As quick as that, the beast was upon him, tipping its ruined head to clamp down on his shoulder—tusks shattering his collarbone, slicing through flesh and out again. Maks froze in the shock of it, stunned into instant, cold, clear knowledge of a mortal wound.

Gunfire rang out, spattering the rock over his head; the hunters cursed in disbelief. The dark, bitter taste of a Core working told Maks what the hunters couldn’t possibly understand.

The Core rogue was here. Here, and armed in his own insidious way, protecting his creature with workings that spoiled human aim and human intent.

As a man, Maks would die. His shields around Katie would die. The hunters would all die, and Katie...the rogue would have Katie.

As a man.

He reached for the change. Not painless, this time, as the energies surged through his body, changing torn muscle, reforming broken bone. The hunters’ curses of shocked surprise came to him as though from a great distance; the creature reared back, understanding its great danger.

The tiger now raged beneath him—still shot, still wounded, but possessed of great, raking claws, possessed of massive teeth and powerful jaws.

Freed, Maks rolled to his feet and launched himself at the creature in one swift move, clamping his jaws at the base of its skull..

The creature staggered under his weight, equal to its own.

The creature renewed its efforts, clattering across the rocky base of the outcrop, aiming to swipe Maks against stone, against tree—

Gunfire rang out, a meaningless assault with the hunters under sway of the Core working—except the creature jerked with it. Its handler cried out in fury and threat; another shot abruptly silenced his voice, even as several more slammed into the creature, their combined effect finally bringing it to a stop.

Maks braced himself, digging in again, finding purchase—shifting his hold, shifting his body,
wrenching—

A dull, resounding
snap
of bone resonated through his jaws. The creature shuddered once, made a sound of astonishment, and toppled over, pinning Maks.

For a moment, he didn’t care. He cared only about catching his breath, feeling his pains, reaching for the internal flows of power that would start healing, hoping it could even be done in time.

And then he opened his eyes, and found Katie on her knees in the rocks, her attacker’s gun still gripped tightly in both hands and her face strained and determined—the healer turned killer, and stunned by her own actions.

A lone hunter knelt beside the beast’s dead handler with grim regret—only a moment, before he called out to his friends, hastening to see to them, too, and completely unaware that the dead handler hadn’t been the only human enemy here.

Up above, a Core posse member lingered on the edge of the outcrop, his hands empty of weapons but his expression meanly satisfied all the same. Not far away, Roger Akins regarded the dead creature with stunned disbelief and resentment, and then turned to Maks—the tiger—with a highly calculating eye.

And not far from Akins stood the Core rogue.

Not so imposing at that—a short man, with a complexion paler than most Core, his black hair neatly trimmed instead of caught in a queue, his ears and fingers free of the usual heavy silver. His clothing, however, was black...right down to an old-fashioned morning coat festooned with neat pockets.
An amulet specialist. A man who could make silent, subtle amulets and seed them into Katie’s life, who could send targeted workings after Ian.
And his features...

They were far too familiar; they hadn’t aged at all. Not the years they should have, since Maks had escaped, since he’d lived as a fugitive...since he’d been reclaimed by the Sentinels. But recognition hit Maks hard. His curse came out as a snarl, whiskers bristling and ears flattened, his intent obvious.

If he hadn’t been trapped. If he hadn’t grown even shorter of breath, a rasping sound in his throat and the hard taste of blood on his tongue, an odd sparkling at the edge of his vision. If his body hadn’t been battered into numbness, the pain only now beginning to take hold.

If he hadn’t been the human when those tusks had pierced him.

“I want the tiger,” Akins said. “You can have the girl.”

“Can I?” the Core rogue mused, nursing some secret humor. Neither appeared to notice—or care—that Katie could hear them or that she still had the gun. She froze, there on her knees, her gaze flicking between the two men and settling on Maks, his silent name on her lips.
What have you done, Maks?
mixed with
what should I do?
—and her healer’s need to rush to him.

Her lover’s need to rush to him.

Maks stared steadily back, ignoring the struggle to think, to breathe, to hang on to the grit of determination.
Stay put,
he told her, using the only voice he had—the expression in his eyes.
Stay separate...stay away.
Because for the moment, even if a very short moment, she was safe. And if the hunters moved in again, maybe she wouldn’t even be alone.

But the lone hunter to witness the outcome of the fight was still with his friends—having obviously absorbed the fact that the creature was dead, that the inexplicable tiger was trapped...that Roger Akins stood there with rifle ready. In the hunter’s world, the tiger had come from nowhere; Maks the man had fled, or already lay dead out of sight.

“Roger,” Katie said, her voice low and strained, the shielded air shimmering faintly around her—the shields Maks couldn’t drop as long as she stood alone. “Roger, come away from him. You don’t know who he is—you don’t know what he’ll do—”

Akins sneered at her. “It’s too late to play nice,” he told her. “You lose. And you can damned well bet I’m going to gloat about it.”

“Later,” the Core rogue murmured, gazing at the creature, brow drawn in concentration.

“Come
on,
Eddie. The creature was supposed to be mine. The least you can do is let me kill your fucking tiger.” He propped a rifle in the crook of his arm. “Let me take it down while those pussy hunters are off crying over themselves because something shot back for a change. That was the deal—I get my reputation back.”

Eddie.
Maks’s memory snagged on it.
Not quite right. Ed...

No. It was
Eduard...

Eduard seemed to find humor in Akins’s words. “You were seen fighting the beast,” he said, unconcerned and moving closer. “That should be enough for your reputation.” He moved another step closer to the creature, his hand reaching into a pocket.

Maks gave him a silent whisker-tipping snarl, anchoring claws in thin soil to haul himself out from beneath the creature—to try. Scrabbling with all his strength, weakened by the shattered collarbone...he sank splayed claws into the nearest small tree and only succeeded in uprooting it.

He gained an inch, maybe two. His blood splattered the rocks; his breath rasped in his throat. The pain blazed up to rip right through him, telling him for sure what he’d until now only guessed—that only his Sentinel nature still kept him alive at all.

“Oh, hell,” Akins said with some disgust, as if Maks wasn’t there at all—as if he wouldn’t have torn them apart before he went down for good, had he gotten loose. “Just
fighting
it isn’t the same. No good, Eddie.”

Eduard’s eyes glinted, a sudden hard obsidian. “Then, yes. You may shoot the fucking tiger.
When
I’m done with him.” And Katie’s expression changed, too, the pleading gone, her grip shifting on the gun...her stance shifting to something more balanced, there where her injured ankle kept her on her knees.

“It’s not the same,” Akins muttered, but even in his obstinacy it was clear that he, too, had seen that look—that he respected it.

“No,” Eduard said, with such little interest that it was plain how very much he simply didn’t care. “It’s not.”

Akins stood back slightly at that, not missing the disdain of the words, or—belatedly—the distinct threat threading through Eduard’s manner.

Eduard pulled an amulet from his pocket, then another. He strode to his creature, barely sparing Maks’s panted snarl of greeting a glance, one of the amulets tucked into the palm of his hand. That the creature dwarfed him didn’t seem to bother him at all, and as Akins looked on in obvious impatience, Eduard upended his hand above the coarse, grizzled hair of the creature’s side, and the amulet snapped to it like a magnet. The creature jerked in response, quivering; the movement tickled a cough up from Maks’s lungs and then instant, blinding pain and suddenly he couldn’t get enough air, just couldn’t—