Tiger Bound (6 page)

She’d left them for her solitude; he gambled for the freedom to hunt. Nothing alike, and yet not so very different at all.

Before she could react out loud, he added, “I’ll call them. This—” he nodded to the back of the house “—is bigger than anyone thought. But until they do send someone else...I
will
take care of you.”

She didn’t throw angry words back at him—especially not the all-too-easy
like just now?

Truth was, he had protected her just fine. That she’d looked down the barrel of a gun was her own fault.

So she let the whole thing go. “But listen to me about that arm, okay? Maybe I’m no Ruger—” Ruger, the ultimate brevis healer—he took the bear, he took care of others and he took care of himself “—but I’m a healer. I’ve had training, I’ve worked in the field. I’m here because I choose to be apart from brevis, not because I couldn’t pass muster.” She made a little face. “I’m a little surprised they didn’t call me in after
Core D’oíche.
”

He shrugged, a one-shoulder gesture. “Many of those who were untouched...they chose to leave untouched. Doing their same work. It—” He made an impatient gesture—an encompassing movement, and she had a sudden impression of strength and wholeness.

“Kept us as a foundation?” she guessed.

He looked at her in surprise, as if he hadn’t expected her to understand, and nodded.

“I warned them, you know,” she told him, unable to hide the tinge of bitterness in her voice. “A month before it happened. But ‘the bogeyman is going to get us’ isn’t much of a starting place. I can still feel that...the darkness from that vision.” She buffed her arms in spite of the day’s warmth. “But compared to what the field agents have been through—and before that, you and Ruger—”

“And Michael,” he said, looking away from her with an expression gone tight. “And Shea. Because I opened that door.”

She tried to hide her surprise—that Maks had been with the legendary Ruger when he’d been injured, that Maks considered himself responsible for what had befallen them all. That he’d so quietly taken up such an important role, and so silently borne it. “Your field file is need-to-know about a lot of things like that,” she said. “Are...are the others recovered?”

“Still trying,” he said. “Like so many of us.” He nodded at the house. “Our friend dropped something.”

A blatant change of subject. Katie let him have it. She was too busy absorbing the fact that Maks had been on that Flagstaff team. Too busy realizing what it said about his nature—about his place in the Sentinels.

Brevis may have sent her a wounded tiger. But they hadn’t sent her just
any
wounded tiger.

And watching him from behind, she saw clearly what he was—
all
of what he was: a big man of perfect proportions, his shirt soaked with blood and his arm tucked to his side, his stride powerful and at the same time not quite steady. His tiger strong and close to the surface—and yet his energies damaged.

Strength in need.

Ohh, Katie. What have you gotten tangled in?

She caught up with him, easy strides that bore little resemblance to her deer’s delicate movement. Not for the first time, she wished herself born into a shape of more nobility than a Chinese water deer—an elk, a strong whitetail, even a mule deer. She ran her tongue over her teeth, feeling the sharp bite of those slightly elongated canines. At least her deer had a little token set of tusks.

She overtook him, jamming her first-aid supplies under the rail of the side porch to meet him near the window, moving nimbly among the unused flowerpots that lined the back of the house. The same pots that had, no doubt, tripped up their intruder in the first place. She crouched at the window, poking among the sparse grasses—and recoiling at the sight of something black and oily, a sheen of unearthly metal.

She started to reach out, but Maks moved faster than she’d thought possible and caught her arm, pulling her back. She squeaked a protest—she’d hardly been about to touch the thing. Before she could say as much, he gentled his hold; by the time his fingers left her arm, it felt more like a caress.

“Amulet,” she said grimly. Of course, an amulet—what else did the Core do but leave their little missives of evil? Amulets that eavesdropped, or that induced slow, subtle malaise...those that disrupted wards, disrupted talents. But they had to be triggered first...and surely this man hadn’t had the time to do that? Not if he was still holding it when they found him? She shook her head. “I haven’t seen one of these since training. What—?”

He shook his head. “No idea.” He reached for the nearest flowerpot, flipped it upside down in one big hand, and plopped it down right over the metal.

Katie snorted a startled laugh. “Don’t tell me that makes it safe.”

“No,” he said reasonably. “But it will keep your cat from walking on it.”

She reached out to almost touch the red clay pot, then let her fingers fall away. She felt as though she should be able to perceive something—some tingle of warning, some miasma of evil. “I wonder what it’s meant to do.”

He scowled. “It’s theirs; that’s enough. And it lacks...scent.” His jaw briefly hardened. “Like the one in Flagstaff. And those found at Fabron Gausto’s workshop.”

“You were
there,
too?” It startled her all over again.

His grin took her just as much by surprise—it was fierce and full of memory. “I wasn’t cleared for it,” he said. “I went. Nick needed us.”

Nick Carter, he meant—the Southwest Brevis consul. And
us
—that meant the small team that had infiltrated Gausto’s home, the Sentinels who had saved Carter and who had kept
Core D’oíche
from being worse than it might have been.

No. Not just any wounded tiger.

* * *

Eduard Forrakes ran his hand over the array of silent amulet blanks on the worktable before him, waiting for one of them to speak to him—the faint warmth that meant it was ready for impression.

Fabron Gausto had once scorned Eduard’s insistence that he could discern the ripeness of any given blank. But then, Gausto was dead, wasn’t he? Too arrogant to listen to Eduard’s advice, even as he took credit for Eduard’s accomplishments.

“Yes,” he murmured. “It’s good to be king.” And then smiled at his own faint self-mockery even as he selected an amulet blank.

Once he’d impressed a working upon the amulet, its unadorned leather thong would be knotted so as to identify it; the dull and crudely stamped metal would acquire its own particular sheen. It would become a thing of beauty...and a thing of power. With such a blank, he had once created the working that had located Dolan Treviño in the Sky Islands of southern Arizona; he had penetrated the troublesome Sentinel’s wards. He had left a surprise for the nosy Sentinel team in Flagstaff, and still resented the fact that they hadn’t been killed outright. He had, for a short time, taken down the man who was now Southwest Brevis consul. He had even created the woman Jet, once known as only wolf.

And he had created the working that changed Fabron Gausto into a creature greater than any Sentinel, more werewolf than wolf—and if Gausto hadn’t been so arrogant, Eduard would now be experimenting to perfect the stability of that working, rather than trying to recreate it from scratch. Or to recreate his own personal stash of preservation workings—those that had given him the extended vigor and youth to pursue his craft to such perfection.

A commotion in what passed for a hallway broke his concentration. Suddenly, Eduard again became aware of his crude surroundings: the arching Quonset structure and its permanent underground chill, the always-inadequate lighting, the workspace walls that stopped well short of the high central ceiling.

The prefab nature of the buried building and its contents annoyed him in all ways—always just a little bit flimsy, far too much metal and not nearly enough well-waxed wood. For Eduard was the master of an ancient craft, and it was a craft that deserved the finest circumstances, the best materials—and, by damn, a coffeemaker that didn’t come from the dollar store.

He didn’t turn around as he finished his thoughts out loud. “It deserves the courtesy of subordinates who
knock.
”

Silence followed that statement...perhaps a moment of dawning regret. Eduard turned to see who had intruded on his work. “Guyrasi,” he said, turning the name into a disapproving statement.

Guyrasi took a step through the doorway into this, the largest enclosure within the buried Quonset. This was the entire back third of it, in fact, an area that had served as breeding-stock quarters years earlier.

Eduard said softly, “Have you a problem?”

He’d learned that from Gausto—the effectiveness of a soft voice when there was cold cruelty behind it.

Guyrasi made a token attempt to straighten himself. “She was supposed to be detained! That civilian of yours was supposed to keep her away from the house!”

Eduard gave the man a cool stare. “In this posse,” he said, “those who wish to survive don’t make excuses.”

“If I had been given time—” But the man stopped as Eduard dipped a hand into one of the many amulet-filled pockets in his custom black lab coat, and when he spoke again it was with more discretion. “I located the house without difficulty. I was securing the amulet when your target arrived home with a man.” He took a deep breath and met Eduard’s gaze with, at last, the appropriate awareness of his failure and its potential consequences. “The amulet is live, but I was unable to conceal it before they came after me.”

“They?” Eduard absorbed the man’s disheveled appearance, fondling an amulet within his biggest pocket in subtle threat. “The man was another Sentinel.”

Guyrasi nodded once, making of it the slightest bow of acknowledgment. “He took the shape of a tiger—a Siberian.”

A Siberian tiger. There had been a Siberian at Gausto’s compound raid, too. Eduard didn’t recall that he’d done much.

Of course, Eduard had wisely departed before those events had played themselves out. He’d left his work and his home; he’d lost the woman he’d loved. He was here to succeed where Gausto had failed. Regardless of what Gausto’s superiors said about laying low in the wake of Gausto’s embarrassing failures in the cold war between the Core and the Sentinels.

When Eduard didn’t respond directly, the man filled the silence. “I handled him,” Guyrasi said, bravado mixed in with his confession. “I stunned and shot him. He’s badly hurt, if not dead.” Guyrasi shifted uneasily. “Will the amulet work if not placed directly against the house?”

It had been one of Eduard’s more subtle workings, and a lovely execution at that—carefully impressed into a blank amulet with the perfect structure to hold it. Had it been properly located, it would have gradually brought Katie Maddox under Eduard’s influence. As it was...

“Perhaps,” Eduard said. “If it goes undetected. I’ll know soon enough.” His partnered amulet would tell him what he needed to know. “Now, have yourself tended.”

The man drew himself upright, his annoyance turned to determination—and, if he was smart, to gratitude for a potential second chance. By then, Eduard barely saw him.

He saw instead the unsuspecting face of Katie Maddox, working on the stray dog Eduard had taken from the Apache reservation—easing its old injury.

Of course, she’d had no idea who Eduard was, dressed in his cheap tourist’s clothes and unflattering glasses, his hair mussed and a subtle, silent working washing out its black color and his robust complexion. She’d had no idea he wanted the dog whole for his experiments. She certainly had no idea what had befallen it upon its return to the Quonset, tucked away so neatly in the old Sitgreaves Forest logging area. In return,
he
had no idea exactly what she’d done to help it—but he knew it had fared the best of any experimental subject so far, and he knew he wanted—he
needed
—to reproduce the effect with his other subjects.

And that meant Katie Maddox would be his.

Chapter 5

M
aks emerged from the house—showered and in a clean shirt, his thumb tucked into the worn belt of his jeans to support his raggedly throbbing arm—to find Katie waiting for him on the porch. Whether it was her habit to sit in the old rocking chair tucked into the corner or whether she simply didn’t feel quite comfortable sharing her home with him, he wasn’t sure.

“I’ll call brevis,” he said. “If I can use your phone.”

She looked at him in surprise. Her eyes had a red-rimmed look to them, but she seemed calm enough. “Don’t you have a cell phone?”

He shrugged, hurting and irritable and not in the mood for any of it. “I just don’t like them.” Among other things, all of which he could use if pressed, and none of which he used when not. Cell phones. Radios. Computers.

Cars.

Impossible to explain, without going places he had no intention of going.

“We barely have reception here, anyway,” Katie said, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. “Of course you can use the phone. Do you think they’ll...I mean, will they listen? Really listen?”

He heard her unspoken concerns; he understood them.
Will they take it seriously? Will they take me seriously?

The difference was, he had never truly cared.

But Katie cared. Her eyes said as much. Her fingers, picking at the fray of her shorts, said it too. Maks lost his irritability; he forgot, for the moment, the stabbing pain of his arm. He felt, instead, the sudden wash of impulse to comfort her—to protect her.

Not that it made sense, to have it hit him so hard. This is what he did, what he was, what he’d always been. The one who protected the cast-outs, the runaways, the unwanted, two legs or four—always on the lookout for those who hunted him, and those who had hunted the mother who’d died for his freedom.

The Core.

And so he made his voice matter-of-fact; he protected her from what he didn’t understand. “They’ll want to know about the amulet,” he said. “The Core hasn’t been active in this area since—”

No. He wasn’t even going to open that door.