Sentinels: Lion Heart

by Doranna Durgin

  These were his mountains, his turf. He could damned well find the Core here.

  Especially now that I know to look. No thanks to brevis for that. Even if Carter had sent him a heads-up gone astray, he might well have followed through instead of making a black mark. Doesn’t answer e-mail. Must be going dark. Yeah, right.

  Except…okay, maybe Joe had gotten a little jaded. Maybe he’d gotten a little less than communicative. Maybe he’d fallen into the habit of taking care of things here and letting brevis deal with his silence.

  Dammit.

  He’d expected to hear her coming, but she’d ditched the sandals and come out barefoot, her feet and arms both bare in the fast-warming day. He hadn’t realized she had that snug shirt on beneath the incongruous pink sweater, its rich brown bringing out the warmth in her eyes; it both enticed and frustrated him, with the clever crisscross wrappings of the material—and that, he realized, was exactly what it was supposed to do.

  Men, he thought, using Lyn’s voice in his head. So easily manipulated. And grinned at himself.

  She gave him a suspicious look, as if she might know what he was thinking and didn’t want to know at the same time. “Ready?”

  “Sure,” he said, as amiable as he’d been way back at the beginning of this conversation. “What am I doing?”

  “Making sure rocks don’t fall out of the sky and land on my head,” she told him dryly.

  “Ah. Right. Backup. I’ll stand around and look capable, then.” He leaned straight-armed against the house, beyond casual. And yeah, he saw a little smile lurking at the corners of her mouth.

  “I checked the porch already,” she said, her expression sliding back into work face. “The obvious place. Nothing there. But here…” She glanced into the woods, her target the faint trail made by a certain cougar’s regular trek past the house. Lyn gestured at it. “They already knew who you are—what you are—of course. So they knew what to look for.” She offered him a pointed little smile. “Then again, so do I.”

  She crouched down again—and this time the faint play of flickering blue lightning gave him warning. And though Joe tried hard—really hard—to watch, to see that wondrous moment of the human taking the ocelot, his eyes gave way against the intensity of the ethereal light. Only a blink, but a blink at just the right moment and then there she was, petite and feline with the most amazingly long rudder of a tail, rich dark-rimmed rosettes chaining down her back against a gray desert cat background.

  She twitched her tail, extended her claws briefly into the thin soil—finding the ground, he would have said—and then got right to work, closing her eyes and tipping her head much as the human would have done. But now her whiskers sprang out from her muzzle, quivering as she lowered her head to inspect every particle of soil, every pine needle, every old oak leaf. Another step and she repeated the process, the intensity of her concentration a wonder to see. Joe found himself crouching, watching her—watching every twitch of her ear, every nuance of her whiskers, every ruffle of her fur. She crossed into the gravel moat around the house—not quite mulch, it nonetheless kept moisture in and served as a base for the sparse natural landscaping—and she checked the other side. Without opening her eyes, she then turned around to come at it from the other direction.

  He’d become consumed enough with watching her that he forgot they had a goal at all—until her eyes sprang open, her whiskers stiffened and her tail slightly puffed. “Whoa,” he said. “You’re kidding.”

  Out came her claws on one paw; as deftly as though they were fingers, she maneuvered individual pieces of landscaping gravel. When he crouched down to help, she mrrled at him and batted at his hand, and he quickly withdrew it. “By your command, princess,” he told her, amused, and then laughed as she threatened him with a spread-open paw. But soon enough she’d found what she wanted, neatly uncovering a small, darkened bronze disk.

  Joe’s amusement vanished, flashing to anger. They were here. The Core had been here at his home, and they’d planted this thing in his path, and it had done who knows what—to him, to this mountain. Tied them together, somehow. And now it sat, dark and used and corrupt, offending everything it touched. He reached for it, unthinking, wanting it out of there—wanting it gone from his home.

  The ocelot snarled a soprano warning, no less fierce for its register, and leaped at him—only twenty-five pounds of her, but all the force of her strong hind legs slamming directly into his chest, claws retracted, but those sharp feline teeth right in his face, her blue-green eyes glinting close and fierce. As he thumped onto his back, breath whooshing from his lungs, he jerked his head sharply aside—already warned by the flicker of changing light. Sure enough he lost what was left of his breath as her weight multiplied, human knees in his stomach and human hands against his shoulders.

  Kindly, she let her knees slide to either side, straddling him to take the weight off his stomach. He grabbed at her wrists—not trying to remove them so much as trying to slow the action while he hunted air.

  “What were you thinking?” Her voice snapped with anger.

  He choked on his first attempt at words, tried again—looking at her, finding her eyes brown again and deeply furious…not to mention frightened. “Dead amulet,” he said, going for shorthand. “Wanted it gone.”

  Her eyes narrowed; she leaned closer. “Who says it’s dead?” And when that had registered—his grip relaxing on her wrists, his surprise obvious—she pulled her hands away from his shoulders, sat back and crossed her arms. She looked quite at home there, he thought, with his knees rising behind her to act as a brace should she want it. She said, “We’re not making assumptions about any of the amulets the Core is using in this little conspiracy of theirs. They’ve done something…changed something.” She gestured at the disturbed pile of gravel and its occupant. “I should have been able to detect that one the moment I set foot on this property, whether it was spent or new. And it looks spent, but that doesn’t mean anything anymore. The one thing we know is that it was meant for you, and that means that you are the one person who needs to keep his hands—and paws—off it!”

  Joe coughed, breathing more easily now that she’d shifted her weight back. He glanced toward the amulet and grimaced. “Point made,” he told her. “It’s all yours. Just get it out of there, huh?”

  Her expression softened with understanding; she put a hand to his chest, fingers splayed…a gentle gesture. So was it his fault he responded to her, tensing beneath her, shifting ever so slightly? By the way her eyes widened, by the way her own body tensed—an entirely different kind of tension, at that—by the way she rapidly pushed off him and climbed to her feet, it would seem so.

  “Ow,” he muttered, and sat—and decided to stay there a moment and recover from the whole thing.

  She said, “The Save the Peaks riders come in from Gray Mountain today. At Elden Pueblo. And the tainted artifact at the museum was from Elden Pueblo…Ryan?”

  He shook his thoughts free from the mountain—or tried to. He couldn’t stop his gaze from returning to it, or the slight shake of his head. “I need to find it,” he said. “That’s the root of it, up there somewhere.”

  She turned on him. “Don’t even think of backtracking that power again—”

  Joe snorted. “Hell, no. I’m going to go up there and find the Core.”

  “We tried that.”

  He found he could get to his feet. “For one afternoon. And we found signs of them. But we looked your way. I intend to look my way.”

  “And we can do that,” she said, and for all her words tried to sound reasonable, her voice had grown tense. “But the riders come in this afternoon, and that could be an opportunity.”

  “Or a distraction from what we really need to do.”

  How swift her invisible ocelot fur was to ruffle, how quickly her ears went back. A reaction to more than just a simple disagreement…a reaction to something within her.

  And then he remembered that moment of fear he’d seen, and he
realized…a reaction to something between them. And he realized, too, he could quite likely ease things by shrugging, by getting his battered old Elden Pueblo handout, and by reaching out to locate the riders and time their arrival. They always came surrounded by their own spiritual strength, easy to find.

  Except he needed to find the root of that power. It tugged at him, taunted him…a sandstorm from the inside out, ever reminding him of the danger the Core posed here. Who knew when they would trigger a cataclysm? Powder keg, brevis had said, and now it sang through Joe’s veins, sizzling danger and urgency.

  “Elden,” he said carefully, “might be linked to all this somehow, but you haven’t been there, so you wouldn’t know…It’s only a couple of hundred yards from Highway 89.” Too public, too well traveled to be a keystone site for the Core. “It might help us put the pieces together, but it’s there any time we want to check it out.”

  “The riders come in today.” She was set to stubborn, all right, mired in her own private struggle. Last night…

  Maybe it had meant something to her.

  The thought cheered him. But it didn’t change his mind. “Both then.”

  “Split up?” It seemed to shock her; she pulled into herself, walling herself up.

  “I know you’re used to working with someone,” he said, not without understanding. But hell, if she was this conflicted about what had happened between them, maybe they were better off working separately. “But it’s a public place. The riders will be coming in from the north after their overnight—it’s a thirty-mile ride, more or less. They follow 89 down, but when they get close to the mountain they’ll peel off into the foothills of Elden. Gorgeous country there, mainly wild. Anyway, they use the Elden Pueblo parking area as a pickup point. If you’re at the dig, you’ll be in the obvious position to watch them come in. No one’ll even know you’re sniffing for trace.”

  “But—”

  “It’s a safe place, Lyn. Or you can come with me, and we’ll check out Elden tomorrow.” He didn’t mention that he’d get more ground covered without her. Not a smart move, not just then. “Maybe by then your Sentinel team will be here with their amulet enlightenment.”

  He saw her annoyance; he knew damned well exactly which expression the ocelot would have been wearing, and how far he would have kept himself from her claws. But if she’d ever mistaken his amiability to mean he’d give up when it mattered, or if she’d thought easygoing meant he didn’t take a stand when there was a stand to take…

  Then she’d misjudged him completely.

  She looked as though she might just be thinking the same. In fact, she looked at him quite closely, with a distinct scrutiny, one she made no attempt to disguise—and then she shook her head. “Something Mrs. Rosado said,” she told him, in response to his obvious awareness. “But I’m not sure I see it.”

  Lyn’s tail lashed up a storm.

  It might not actually be there, in her human form. But she felt it nonetheless—the annoyance, the anger, and the very real physical sensation of the tail lashing back and forth, the ears flattened, the eyes narrowed…

  Okay, that last one she was actually doing. Standing there with the Elden Pueblo archeological site at her back, not quite joining the scattering of people slightly downhill from her as they waited for the approaching riders, she’d let her eyes narrow into an ocelot’s angry glare, and she’d let her very human arms cross beneath her breasts in that age-old defensive-aggressive stance.

  No wonder no one had approached her with friendly words.

  She turned around to face the Sinagua village ruins—a complex conglomeration of tumbledown walls that outlined living and storage areas, all surrounded by widely spaced Ponderosa pines and long grasses. Here, with as much privacy as she was going to get, she closed her eyes, taking a cleansing breath. Letting it go.

  Or trying to.

  She’d been surprised to find the lee side of the mountains so different in nature—more sparsely wooded, with scooped-out high desert plains between the rising asymmetries of volcanic cinder cones below the embracing slopes of Mount Elden. She’d come early enough to walk the several miles of Fat Man’s Loop from the Elden Pueblo parking lot—running some of them as the ocelot to burn off emotion and then finding herself grateful for the frozen sports drink Ryan had tucked into her car before he’d left on his own trek that morning. Even the forested sides of Elden were more open, more sprawling, than the land north of the Peaks. Not that it didn’t have its rugged features; she’d amused herself for some moments by crouching atop jutting vertical rocks while several hikers tried without success to gain control of their unleashed dogs, which leaped haplessly against the rock she’d scaled so easily. The hikers finally gave up and leashed the animals as they should have been in the first place. Ryan would have been both amused and pleased.

  Ryan. What the hell was he thinking, splitting them up like this? He was the one who’d suggested Elden Pueblo in the first place; he was the one who liked to meet this ride.

  She tried to decide if she’d feel better or worse if she had managed to find Core trace out here. Truth was, she’d found nothing…but for the first time in her life, she didn’t trust it. Because this group…they’d covered their tracks more thoroughly than any sect she’d encountered.

  She wanted to think it was because they’d done their homework after the Sonoita incident and realized who they’d have on their trail, but the timeline wasn’t right. Assuming the visit by the two Core strangers was part of it, it had all been ready to go the moment Gausto called for it. It had certainly been in play before they realized a tracker of Lyn’s status might be in the area, given how she was flown in at the last moment to go hunting the ancient Liber Nex manuscript and ended up tracking down a sect nest and the captive Megan Lawrence instead.

  The whole thing was a backup plan to rule the world, no doubt, since Gausto’s plot to combine forbidden blood workings and the long-proscribed incantations in the Liber Nex had come to one great big fat failure. But Lyn had had backup there, backup who had stayed with her—

  “Not fair,” she reminded herself in a mutter, and took another deep, long breath. Ryan hadn’t been assigned here as her backup; if anything, he had seniority. It was his turf; he was the one who knew how to read the nuances of the area.

  Then why did he turn away from this incredibly obvious opportunity?

  Oh, fickle ocelot. Only a day earlier, she’d put her faith in him. In more than just his integrity, but in his heart. Her deep, greedy need to be with a heart so true; her sudden conviction that she’d found one.

  Maybe she’d just seen what she wanted to see, after all this time of needing.

  Another deep breath, and she walked the perimeter of the largest building cluster, eyeing the foundational footprint of room upon room in the communal structure. From here, that tainted museum projectile point had come. And the Core had seen fit to use it—to place some clumsy node device on it, when everywhere else they’d used stealth. Because they hadn’t had the stealth until after they’d gotten started? Because they’d been lazy? Because they hadn’t thought it would matter, there in the museum?

  Ryan might have some thoughts on it all. If he were here.

  She had an image of him, then—padding along the crest of a ridge, high alpine lichens and delicate plants beneath big platter paws, lean cougar’s head lifted to the chill breeze of the rarified air, eyes mere slits against the brightest of sunlight—and expression intense and serene at the same time. Doing what he was meant to do.

  Here. You should be here.

  Not that she’d found anything to justify her own insistence. This second stroll around the village revealed no more than the first. She might as well have gone with Ryan, might as well have waited for him to come along as the backup she so badly needed, even if her confidence in him had taken a sudden shaking.

  She found she’d hidden her face in her hands, bitten her lip, made the kind of inarticulate noise of frustration one tried to
avoid in public…wondering if it wasn’t her confidence in herself that hadn’t taken the shaking. The confidence in her ability to assess the man in the first place.

  But no one saw her; no one heard. No one cared. Because a swell of excited chatter rose from those gathered slightly below her, arrayed just beyond a tiny parking lot now filled with pickups and horse trailers that were festooned with everything from professionally made Save the Peaks Coalition banners to homemade sheets and markers. The pickups held hay and huge five-gallon water containers; the trailers had tie straps already waiting for tired horses. But not, she knew, until the participants and their supporters ended the event with a Navajo prayer, just as it had begun. That, she’d thought, was the part that Ryan would have found irresistible, with its power drawn from the very area he shepherded, yet so separate from his own.

  “There!” The exclamation was low but clear, and Lyn spun around to find everyone’s attention focused northward. Her predator’s eyes saw the movement quickly enough—just a flash of brown between the trees, and then the swish of a tail, and suddenly an entire horse came into view, a sturdy little buckskin. Soon enough half a dozen horses appeared, single file on the narrow trail—all seasoned trail horses on a loose rein, their riders bedecked in random traditional pieces: an old-timey shirt among the jeans, incredible heirloom turquoise pieces on both the men and the women, hand-crafted silver everywhere, and a few fancy dress western shirts in the mix. Western hats were a given—no one rode in this summer sun without them.

  Lyn found herself content to watch in the shade, hunkered down without even realizing she’d taken that age-old watch-and-wait posture. A flurry of activity followed the arrival—family members greeting one another, offering cool drinks, checking the horses—but all in all, quickly assembling for a quiet in which one melodious voice rose, chanting. Lyn quite suddenly felt like the outsider she was, and couldn’t help the urge to take a step back—just as the newspaper reporter and photographer below were now doing. But she quietly held her ground. Ryan no doubt would have felt very much at home here.