Now she tipped her head just a little more, looking up for permission to speak. He made her wait for it—of course he made her wait—and then gestured assent, pleased with his own benevolence. She said, “I found him.” She used the words carefully; he had made it clear he found her natural way of speaking displeasing.
Nick Carter, she thought, had not minded at all.
“But you did not bring him back.” Gausto flicked invisible lint from his knee. “Finding him is no great accomplishment, little Jet. Did I not provide you with the details of where he would be, and train you in the exact route, the correct clandestine approach? Finding him was nothing. But I also gave you amulets to use on him. My dear wolf-child, all you had to do was take him aside and trigger the amulet as you’ve been trained.” He regarded her with disdain at the corners of his mouth. “You will try again tomorrow. And the next day, if necessary. But Jet—mark this well. For each day you fail, one of your pack members will pay the price.”
After an instant’s spike of alarm, she schooled herself. As long as he still wanted Carter, her packmates would not die. Because if she truly failed—if she died in the attempt or she died at Gausto’s impatient hands—he would need them to start again. And her pack was not such a very large pack that he could afford to discard any one of them.
Not until he’d given up on Carter.
And still, she couldn’t stop herself from saying, too quickly, “I have him.”
Gausto snorted, most genteelly. He must be in a mood. He was far from genteel when it suited him. “My dear, don’t insult me. The cameras would have shown him to me when you arrived.” His eyes narrowed. “But you’re smarter than that. Explain yourself.”
She straightened, watching to make sure it didn’t displease him—but he’d forgotten about such subtleties. He often did. It only proved to Jet that he was far less civilized than he pretended to be—but the same could be said about any of the humans she’d met here. “I found him. I used the amulet.”
Gausto’s expression swapped out triumph with a frown. “Then why have you not brought him to me?”
“I had questions,” Jet told him, and thought it reasonable.
“Questions?” Gausto repeated, his tone instantly telling her he thought no such thing. “It is not your place to have questions, Jet. It is not your place to think. You do as you’re told, when you’re told, how you’re told.”
“But if I understand, I do it better.” She tipped her head, looked at him in cublike question…she’d learned early that he interpreted this as an eagerness to please. “Yes?”
It did indeed settle him, if only infinitesimally. She took the moment. “I don’t understand your world,” she told him. “He is alpha, your Nick Carter. Is this how it is done, the challenge? From behind?”
Gausto sucked in a sudden breath; Jet knew she’d misspoken badly, but had no idea how—sometimes it seemed to her that the truth was not his truth. His lips thinned. He reached for her, and she forced herself to be still, not to react—not to cringe or lift her lip or retreat, all hard-learned lessons—as he grasped the short, romp-fluffed hair at the back of her head, digging his fingers in to pull hard. “Nick Carter,” he said, “has committed crimes against my people. He is alpha to nothing of mine, do you understand that?”
Jet understood that Nick Carter knew alpha where Gausto knew bullying. She understood on a level so deep it needed no words. She understood that where Gausto held sway over her through dint of his cruelty and advantages in this human world, through his ability and willingness to manipulate her and change the very essence of what she was, Nick Carter had connected to her with heart, with the things he had chosen not to do as well as those things he had done. He had run with her; they had forged an afternoon together with the instinctive, spirit-deep communication of creatures who could not lie about their souls.
He had not bullied her. He had not snarled her into submission. He had not gone beyond fairness to coercion.
Maybe that’s why, somehow, she had left a piece of herself behind with him, felled by that amulet right along with him.
If Gausto noticed her distraction, he didn’t indicate it. “Nick Carter is a criminal and he must be stopped. And unless you don’t care anything about protecting your own people, that’s all you need to know.”
But Jet already knew much, much more.
He’d almost made it. Had almost bolted up out of reach, out of range.
He’d thought she might be so many different things…from undeclared field agent to outright rogue—until there at the end, when her shift had gone so differently, he began to realize she might be something else altogether.
But he’d never thought she could be Core.
And he hadn’t realized it would shred something deep within him to have it so. He didn’t know her; he hadn’t done anything more than let his guard down for an uncharacteristic lupine romp. Or so he’d thought.
He knew better now.
Too late for that.
Barely conscious enough for the thought, gasping under the weight of the triggered amulet and the poison of it in his system, he nonetheless found it hard to reconcile the betrayal with her subsequent flight, leaving him tucked away here in the wild strip of growth protecting the outlying fairground fields from the desert.
Hard to think at all.
The amulet, triggered, hung around his neck with a stench he couldn’t avoid—corruption and coppery astringency and sharp acrid wisps of power—sickening him. His human form could have grasped the amulet and wrapped his hands around it and if he suffered for it, he could still break it. Unique, this skill in action. A mere handful of field Sentinels had seen it in use; fewer yet within Brevis Regional. She couldn’t have known. Coincidence. Luck. But it left him no less trapped. No less sickened.
And getting sicker.
He hadn’t realized it at first. Gone down hard and fast, the proverbial ton of bricks, darkness not only closing in on him but clenching down tight. He’d woken already panting, tongue lolling onto the scant, gritty leaf cover, to find her crouching over him—back to her human, clothed, and the pure wolfish scent of her cutting cleanly through the amulet stench. “I don’t want this,” she’d said, resting her hand in his thick ruff, black hair painted heavily with silver. And she’d opened her mouth to say something else, but after a hesitation, rose silently to angle out of the trees.
Moments later, a powerful motorcycle engine roared to life, settling to a growl…moving away at uncertain low speed on the off-road terrain and then abruptly smoothing out, shifting up in pitch, and winding up for asphalt…fading quickly into the distance.
The silence sat most heavily on him in that moment—the realization. Only Fabron Gausto would break the rules of the uneasy Sentinel-Core detente so completely—and only Fabron Gausto had little to lose, and everything to gain.
Gausto had already deeply embarrassed his Core Septs Prince, using forbidden blood workings on Meghan Lawrence and Dolan Treviño this past spring. But he’d been released for Core justice, for even the brevis regional adjutant—the consul’s executive officer—didn’t take the fate of a Core drozhar into his hands. Not with relations between the Core and the Sentinels already teetering.
Not with Brevis Regional Southwest so vulnerable, with field ops gone subtly wrong and bad luck plaguing them, and confidence in the ageing consul wavering.
Nick didn’t think Dane Berger—consul, Sentinel, and javelina boar—was in on the deeply buried conspiracy, but his willful blindness had allowed things to get this far. Far enough that his original adjutant had been killed and Nick, after only a year in his place, could see the growing danger.
But not well enough.
Gausto, in trying to redeem himself, had then sent a Core team to the San Francisco Peaks in northern Arizona, Joe Ryan’s high desert turf. And if Nick had initially targeted Ryan as the cause of the area’s problems and sent Lyn Maines to investigate…well, maybe it was the best thing he could have done after all
. Now the Peaks were secure, and Gausto…
Gausto must be desperate. Enough for an all-or-nothing bid. Nick could all but hear that flat, arrogant voice in his head, inveigling the septs prince. Leave me my life, and I’ll give you Nick Carter. And then, because neither he nor the Core could be tied to any such operation, he’d found someone else to do it.
Someone wolf.
Pure feral grace.
Something wrenched inside him. He thought at first it came from the amulet, but a sudden flash of whiskey gold eyes, of laughing invitation—of the perfect flirtatiousness every wolf knew with her partner, pure and unfettered—and the twist of pain sent him thrashing in the underbrush.
Not just the amulet. The amulet’s working, reacting to the energies within him. That deeply, she’d reached him.
Sonuvadamnedbitch.
He took the battle inward, eyes unfocused and halfclosed, the heat of the day reaching him even in this protected shade but the panting gone beyond mere heat. It ate at him, this amulet. Wormed around deep inside his body and chewed away at the foundation of him. Worse than maybe she’d thought—or Gausto, for that matter. Because Nick was pretty sure Gausto wanted him alive.
For Gausto liked to play.
He cleared the murk from his mind, shoving away whiskey gold and edgy movement, a flash of black…he focused on his inner voice, gathering it, channeling it—pulling together a wordless adveho, sent straight to Annorah at brevis—their communications star still intensely determined to prove herself with perfection after her misjudgment during the Peaks incident. Not coincidentally, the single brevis-based operative currently in his small circle of trust.
But the adveho, the call for help that no Sentinel would ignore, went nowhere.
His focus faded; his awareness of the details around him faded, too. The scents, the sounds, the active fairgrounds so very close and yet way too far away to do him any good…
Didn’t mean he wouldn’t try. One inch at a time, rolled on his chest, head too heavy to lift. Paws, pushing against dirt and weeds…slipping, losing strength…hind legs splayed out behind like a puppy on ice. Barely budging the weight of him. But still…budging.
Try again.
And again.
Gausto wouldn’t get him without a fight. And if it meant fighting those whiskey gold eyes and pure feral grace…
So be it.
Try. Again.
Chapter 3
Jet washed her face in the tiny bathroom down the hall from her own room. It calmed her. She liked the sensation, and the soap, and the lotions—even the very basic scentless hand lotion provided in this bathroom. She liked shampoo and conditioner and flinging her head back from the faucet to send water droplets flying from her hair.
It didn’t make sense, that. She was wolf, and wolf needed none of those things. But she liked them nonetheless.
She had this time because Gausto was fielding a phone call—one he thought she couldn’t overhear. He’d never bothered to test her hearing; Jet thought he had guessed it was more acute than any born human’s but simply didn’t think it mattered to know how much.
His mistake. For Jet was a made thing, might be a temporarily controlled thing…but she wasn’t truly bound to him, not by blood nor pack nor heart.
And she knew what it was to be wild. More, she wanted it back.
Gausto had that tone in his voice, now. The deference. Only one man brought that out in him—his Septs Prince.
Gausto’s was a pack of many localized packs, Jet had decided. Gausto ruled one of the local packs…but just barely. He’d made too many mistakes, shown too many weaknesses, and now the alpha of all the packs combined was displeased with him.
And no wonder. Gausto still considered his mistakes to be bold strikes against Core prey, worth the risk and worth the failure. But Jet knew the difference—and she could see it in the eyes of his men. The occasional flares of doubt, the fears that Gausto would lead them to disaster.
Wolf packs were not so very different. They were simply less forgiving.
And so she not only heard his phone call, she understood the byplay of it. Leaning over the sink to peer at her face in the small mirror and search for any sign of the wolf, she quite absently absorbed Gausto’s words.
“He’s as good as contained.” Gausto’s trouser legs brushed against one another with the faintest susurrus of cloth against cloth; his footsteps sounded slightly gritty against the thin floor covering as he paced. “That amulet was developed specifically for him.” A pause. “I still don’t know how he’s evaded so many of our more subtle amulet attacks over the past year. But once I get him here, I’ll find out.”
The eyes, Jet decided. Still wolf there. But not the face—features too refined, jaw a little too sharp. The nose was good—a strong nose, even a hint of a bump at the bridge. And the mouth…it was not wolf at all, but she liked it. She touched her lower lip with hesitant fingers, prodding the fullness of it, feeling the pliability.
Unaccountably, thinking of Nick Carter. Of how well she knew him, through those moments with his wolf. Of how the thrill of it still lingered with her…and how the cold hard dread of what she’d done still sank deep.
“Later this afternoon,” Gausto said, his voice still carrying that oily note, the one that came through when he thought he was smarter than everyone else but didn’t dare say so to the Septs Prince. “No, not at all—we’re completely covered. If anything, given my agent, they’re going to think it was one of their own.”
Nick Carter, Jet thought, had the wolf in him—right there on the surface, visible for all to see even if they didn’t recognize it. His hair, for one thing. True hoarfrost, dark hair brushed with gray…not just black and white hairs intermingled, as she’d seen in some of the Core guards and the one woman who’d tended her through the early transition.
And his eyes—not just the pale green color, but the nature of his gaze itself—steady, self-knowing. Alpha eyes. But more than all that, the way he moved, all that strength and smooth power, the impression that he always knew where he was and where everyone else was, always knew just where and how to place himself to keep the advantage. She wondered if she, too, showed the wolf in her movement.
They had to see it, she decided. The other humanborn. They just didn’t know what it was.
“Security has scrubbed this place clean,” Gausto was reassuring his prince. “I’ve got a table waiting for Carter. He’s going to talk like he’s never talked before.” Jet looked away from the mirror, startled, toward the sound of Gausto’s voice. Toward the meanness that had come into it. “Before this day is over, he’s going to understand just how much I owe him.”
Jet froze there, the towel still in her hand, the dread drilling deeper. She didn’t understand all the implications of those words, but she didn’t have to—she understood his intent.
She understood for the first time that to get what he wanted, Gausto used not only threats and punishment, he used untruths. That Gausto intended not to force postponed negotiations as he’d told Jet, but that he intended to acquire information. That he intended to do it with pain…and that he looked forward to inflicting that pain.
More than that. He yearned to do it.
And he was using her to make it happen.
Marlee pondered her options. Log sheet up on her monitor screen, an Apache phrase book open on her desk—idle background reading—and the phone headset hooked over one ear. “No, seriously,” she told the field Sentinel calling in from the home. “Check to see if it’s plugged in.” And then she waited past the annoyance, the denial, the sudden silence—all the while thinking about delivery options for the virus Gausto had ordered her to insert into Nick Carter’s computer—if only they knew—and just about convinced she’d need a hand delivery. Finally she heard the sheepish acknowledgment that the Sentinel’s monitor plug had indeed wiggled loose.
“You’re welcome,” she said, keeping her voice to strict customer service cheer. She knew she was better than
this. Underutilized, underappreciated. But if she was going to stay here—if she was going to stay above suspicion—then she had to use the team spirit that ran through this office like a braid of loyalty.
Loyalty to Nick Carter, of course.
The virus. Yes, it would take a hand delivery. And she’d do it today, while Carter was out at the fairgrounds pretending he was still a field Sentinel after all.
She pulled off the headset and picked up the thumbnail drive beside her keyboard, turning it thoughtfully in her hand. No big deal to create a work order for a nonexistent problem, head for Carter’s office, and infect his machine while she was “assessing” it.
“Did you really just ask me if I had the right day?” The voice was pleasant alto and just barely familiar, and at the moment it had a touch of tooth. It also wasn’t far from Marlee’s cube, there in the entry aisle of the IT section.
Something about the responding voice made Marlee want to lean into the sound of it, soaking up…something. Power. Security. Grounding. She closed her eyes against the impulse and shuddered. Sentinels. They had a sway over people that no one else could imagine. Just like Carter, trying to cover up the truth of what he was with GQ haircuts and GQ suits and still managing to suck the air out of Marlee’s lungs anytime he walked into a room.
Now this one said, with just the right surprise, “Me, imply that you had our appointment mixed up? I don’t think so. Don’t think I’d do that.”
“Nick was supposed to be here,” the woman said. “Today. Now. It’s time to get this Vegas thing sorted out. You were set up and it’s time everyone knew it.”
He snorted. “That’s not what you said not so long ago.”
She didn’t back down an inch. “Just be glad I’m on your side now.”
“That’s the truth.” His reply was somewhat fervent, and they’d said enough, then—Marlee knew exactly who they were.
She cleared her throat and leaned back in her chair. “Hello? Can I help you?”
Not that she wanted to deal with Lyn Maines, Carter’s tracker friend, or Joe Ryan—the very Sentinel who’d very nearly destroyed the balance of the San Francisco Peaks. And Lyn—when she’d first gotten here, when she was helping Carter find the Liber Nex manuscript out on Encontrados Ranch where Dolan Treviño had gotten tangled up with coyote’s daughter Meghan Lawrence…
Sentinels: Wolf Hunt Page 3