Tiger Bound (5 page)

Katie fought the impulse to take the deer and flee—dog-size and rabbit-fast, her tusks no more than a sharp-edged hint but enough to take some humans aback.
Not with a tiger in the yard.
What had she even been thinking, to follow Maks so closely?

The man squirmed beneath that paw; the tiger’s lips lifted in a silent snarl of warning. He lifted his head to look at Katie—directly at Katie—and she felt an unexpected trickle of comprehension.

He wanted her to do the talking. To be the human.

She took a deep breath, hunting for the mantle of implacability she’d cultivated so assiduously during her training years.
You don’t frighten me. This situation doesn’t frighten me.

She stepped out into the scattered pines and high prairie grasses.

But she’d taken only that single step when daylight flared into a sickly green light, a soundless explosion of corrupted Core amulet energy. She cried out, covering her eyes—ducking, as if it could do any good. Or as if it mattered at all at this distance—close enough to hear the tiger grunt, flinging itself aside to land crumpled, stunned—and human.

Amulet ambush.
Just like the one in Flagstaff that had wounded Maks’s team, had sent him so deeply into a coma for so many weeks—

Please, let it not be that bad.

The intruder scrambled away, tossing aside the used amulet and jerking out a small gun from concealed carry—pointing it straight at Maks and pulling the trigger without hesitation in a sharp, short report. Maks’s body gave a little jerk.

Katie gasped—and then she was running, her legs swifter than she’d ever meant them to be, bringing her so close, so fast—close enough to see the startled expression on the man’s face, to see the gun as he brought it to bear on her. She froze, staring back, forgetting to breathe entirely—seeing his body tense, seeing his intent, his finger on the trigger.

But the man didn’t shoot her. He cursed, looking from her to Maks, and then he snarled in frustration—right before he bolted for the woods, his gait hampered by a new and definite limp.

He didn’t shoot me.

He didn’t—

Katie shook herself free from the shock of it and ran to Maks’s twisted form. She laid a tentative hand on his shoulder—feeling instant relief at the life throbbing beneath her healer’s hand. The Core working hadn’t been profound—the lingering stench of its energies told her that much—and the bullet hadn’t been instantly mortal. And that meant, given a Sentinel’s amazing constitution, it likely wouldn’t be.

Or so she thought, until she saw the steady pulse of arterial blood soaking the flannel shirt above his elbow.
It shouldn’t be this way.
Not with a Sentinel’s body, normally so fast to address such critical injuries.

But when she reached to stanch the wound, Maks snatched her hand in mid-reach. He rumbled deeply in a tiger’s warning, the snarl turning handsome features harsh, his gaze never focusing on her at all—nothing but wounded instinct, defensive and striking out. Her hand twisted back most cruelly in his grip; she bit her lip on a cry of pain.

Prey knew better than to make a sound of the wounded while in a predator’s grip.

After a frozen moment still punctuated by that tiger’s warning, she used the warm slickness of his own blood against him, twisting within his grip until her hand popped free.

He rolled over, hands clutching at his head, the rumble turned to nothing more than a man’s low groan.

“Ohh, no,” she breathed. “Get back here.” Even a Sentinel would fail to recover from bleeding out. But the amulet injury, no matter how mild, came first.
Had
to, with this man who was still recovering from the last ambush, or she could lose him before she even started. To judge by his vague and distant gaze, she had little time indeed.

Katie pulled his hands away from his head—oh, his blood everywhere—and replaced them with her own, fingers threading into the hair above his ears. “Maks,” she said, her voice low and barely quavering at all, her resentments and disappointments forgotten. “Look at me.”

Not that he could, with his focus dazed and shifting, a wrenching panic creeping in behind the wild green. The flutter of it bloomed to life between them, a stab in Katie’s own chest—his confusion, his instinctive urge to fling himself into the tiger and run from this threat. And then his fear when that, too, slipped away from him.

But Katie held him tightly. She slipped into the lightest of trances, grounding herself with his gaze—sliding into the same state from which she worked every day and then further, drawing on the healing potential that lived mostly untapped within her. Beyond the comfort for easing muscle, for generating the subtle knit of flesh that a vet might mistake for an exceptionally successful rehab. A deeper connection, reaching beyond body to soul.

The energy of it came through her in gentle waves, insinuating itself into the rhythm of her breathing.

Maks jerked away from her—or tried. He twisted uneasily; he closed his eyes and turned his head aside—or tried. But she held onto him with a strength well beyond the physical.

Breathing. Touching. Connecting...

His rumbled warnings faded, his breathing quite suddenly synched to hers.

Touching. Connecting. Understanding...

Wanting.

He blinked a few times, hard and fast, his eyes widening—and then he was looking at her again. Looking
back
at her.

The lingering buzz of connection should have faded instantly away; it didn’t. She floundered, decided to fake it...and when she smiled at him, he frowned in such befuddlement that she couldn’t help but laugh just a little. “There,” she said. “You’re back. Now just lie still a moment.”

He had no intention of it; she saw it in his eyes, and caught him just in time—a firm hand on his shoulder when he would have come upright. “You’ve been hurt,” she told him, a commanding, if understanding, tone. “And you’re not healing properly.
Lie still.
”

For the merest instant, he allowed it. And then alarm—the full awareness of where they were and what had happened—crossed his features. He rolled away from Katie, lightning quick—coming to his knees to search for the intruder, full of fierce and fury.

“He’s gone, but—”

Katie bit off her words as another kind of surprise passed over Maks’s face, waiting in both resignation and impatience. His eyes rolled back, his body went limp...he folded back to the ground with a boneless grace.

She glared down at his unconscious form and finished what she’d started. “
But
you’ve lost a lot of blood, so you’d better just...lie...
still.
”

* * *

Maks opened his eyes to an ultra-blue sky overhead, the upper branches from the wide-spread pines just barely intruding on his peripheral vision. His head rang with a strange and distant ache, his arm hurt like hell and an unfamiliar, comforting presence lingered in his mind, echoing through his body like an intimate touch.

Katie sat cross-legged beside him, matter-of-factly wiping her hands on a red-blotched towel. A rusty stain brushed one cheek, and her doubled-up ponytail ends had largely escaped to cascade over her shoulder, shiny and straight and in complete disarray. She dropped the bloody towel into a metal mixing bowl and picked up several others to toss in on top of it. Only when she leaned over Maks to reach for some wayward item did he clear his throat.

She jumped, snatching up yet another soaked towel as she jerked away.

“What?” he asked, although it didn’t come out very clearly.

She didn’t have any trouble understanding him. “A Core soldier,” she said. “He had an energy-blast amulet. It hit you pretty hard, but you’re okay now. And when were you going to tell me that you don’t heal like a Sentinel should? I mean, yes, more than
human
normal, which is why you’re still in my backyard and your bullet is in my mixing bowl.” She lifted a smaller metal bowl, shifting it so the bullet rolled. “But not enough to stop that arterial bleed on its own. Enough to recover from the blood loss, I hope, because getting you a transfusion would be a bitch.”

Maks closed his eyes, considering the circumstances—remembering what he could of recent moments.
A blast of energy, painful and bright, insinuating itself into the very fissures of a damaged soul. The sense of retreat—the despair of familiar wounds.

And then...
breathing.

Breathing, imposed over his...calm and anchoring...intimate. Healing. Bringing him back.

Some sense of it still lurked within him. Some sense of her
.

He absorbed it all in silence, and then let out a deep breath to admit, “I didn’t know. Not about the healing.” When she frowned, her elbow on her knee and her gaze steady on his, he added, “No one thought to shoot me and see.”

She scoffed, flicking a hand out to lightly smack his shoulder—and then, looking a bit startled at herself, said, “Well, the bullet’s out, and I’ve protected you from infection, but...we need to keep an eye on how fast you heal. We need to know what you’re dealing with.”

Had
they known? The Sentinel medics? Had they even suspected?

Then again, Maks had been well on his way to being perfectly recovered on the day they cut him loose. Only afterward had the fugues crept back in.

“Maks,” she said, a little too patiently—by which he knew his thoughts were still wandering and unfocused. “It’s important. Tell me you’re going to cooperate on this.”

He said, “Yes. The healing. I’ll let you know.”

She snorted, a feminine sound. “I think I’d best keep an eye on it myself.”

A complete contradiction, Katie Maddox. One moment timid, the next bursting out with matter-of-fact confidence. And even on the heels of the thought, she startled him again, frowning. “He didn’t shoot me,” she said, as if it puzzled her.

Shoot her?
The Core agent? But Maks had left her in a safe place—at the house, at a distance. He sat up—if slowly, leaning hard on his good arm; the lingering weakness didn’t soften his voice. “What do you mean,
shoot
you?”

She flushed, wiping her hands against the sparse and stemmy grass. “I wasn’t thinking,” she said. “When he triggered that amulet, I ran in to—well, I don’t know what I was going to do. But I was here—and he
wanted
to shoot me, he really did. But he didn’t do it.”

Maks had no words for that. For what she’d done—for his horror at it. But she saw it on his face, clear enough.

“I wasn’t
thinking,
” she repeated, defensiveness creeping into her voice. “And I’m okay. I just—it seemed strange. Why
not
pull the trigger? And what was he doing here in the first place?”

That, indeed, was a most excellent question. “We’ll find out,” he told her, and untangled his legs to stand.

“Oh—hold on...” Katie reached back to grope at the ground, impossibly graceful in that awkward position. When she straightened, she’d retrieved a scarf—a decorative thing, long and narrow and awash with artfully smeary green. “You’ll want a sling, I think—at least until we can see how fast you’ll heal.”

And broadcast the weakness? He shook his head. “I’ll be careful.”

Her hand tightened around the scarf, knuckles just white enough to give away her frustration. “Maks,” she said, and the next words seemed to get stuck for a moment. But not forever, though she had to look away from him. “I thought I was going to lose you. Just so you know.”

He drew in the sweet scent of her, tasting the sharp lingering edge of her fear—and he wanted to say,
I’ll protect you, Katie Maddox,
even though it made no sense inside this conversation at all.

So, instead, he simply rose to his feet, a sharp grunt escaping him at the fiery pain twisting down his arm.

“Oh,” Katie said, so casually. “Didn’t I mention? I’m pretty sure the median nerve took some damage. Probably lots of inflammation there. A sling might help, though.” She let the scarf dangle from her hand. “You know...like this one?”

Maks stared at her a moment, and then gave a snort of helpless laughter. No, Katie the deer wasn’t nearly as timid as she thought she was. He tucked his thumb into his waistband to keep the arm still, and held out the other to pull her to her feet.

She reached for it, gave him a knowing flash of a glance, and changed her mind to stand smoothly on her own.

He knew it then—she, too, had felt all of that which had passed between them. And she was either more frightened by it than Maks...or else she was smarter.

Probably both.

Chapter 4

D
idn’t he just look like hell, Katie thought as she gathered her impromptu surgical supplies with sharp movements. She tucked the little medical field kit under her arm, pretending she wasn’t affected by Maks’s pale, strained face—or that she wasn’t wondering how brevis could even send her this man so clearly still wounded from his previous battle.

But maybe she didn’t pretend all that well. Because he hesitated, jaw tensed, and he looked away from her before he managed to say, “Don’t tell them.”

“Don’t—?” she said, stopping short, and not quite understanding.

“Brevis.” The words were hard to say, to judge by the strain in his voice. “Don’t tell them how it is.”

She gave a short laugh. “If I did, would they send someone else?”

He met her gaze with a direct if reluctant look, the turmoil still evident. “Not right away.”

Not that she hadn’t done that herself—downplaying her ability to discern the visions and what they meant, finding subtle ways to prod people into action if action was necessary—which it rarely was. Distancing herself from the skepticism she’d simply rather not fight.

Then, obviously uneasy, he added, “But it would change things for me.”

She got it, quite suddenly—brevis didn’t have any idea how affected he was. And if they found out, it
would
change everything for him. They’d call him in from the field, they’d call him back into medical...they’d take the tiger from the wild green—from the freedom and the action.