Sentinels: Lion Heart

by Doranna Durgin

  A whole lot easier if you’d been returning triumphant…

  Well, he wasn’t. He’d deal with it. He navigated the hairpin curves down Snowbowl Road, expertly riding the familiar swooping asphalt to the narrow turnoff that shortcutted briefly across the side of the mountain to his own remote section of the woods. A rumble from the mountain, so quiet all day, caught his attention. That’s all it was, a rumble, but he turned his efforts to his shields—knowing better than to monitor the power on the go. Not this power. Not anymore.

  Maybe it was time to turn this over to a brevis team. A collection of experts who could figure out what was going on here. Or, if they had their heads on straight, they’d work with him to do it. But he knew better than to count on—

  Another ripple. He shored up his shields, reminded himself that he couldn’t let his thoughts wander and keep them strong—others could, sure enough, but Joe and his shields…Better be glad you’ve got me around, boy-o, Dean would say to him, and flash up his rock-solid shields without a second thought.

  Right. Because a man who could ride power needed them so often. “Ha,” he said out loud. Not unless he and Dean had been on the hunt.

  Almost home…and there was Mrs. Rosado’s scarf, hanging off the mailbox. He pulled in the driveway, barely turning off the engine before he was out the door, out of the cool car air-conditioning and into the height of the day’s heat, unrelieved by clouds. But he stopped in surprise when she opened the front door and came out to him, carrying a covered baking pan. “Coffee cake,” she said. “An old family recipe. Lots of cinnamon, pecans…It’ll go nicely with that coffee of yours.”

  He took it as she thrust it at him. “It smells wonderful,” he said, baffled. “But what—?”

  “It was an excuse,” she said, giving him a once-over of much scrutiny. “I wanted to see you. And now that I have, I want to know what’s going on. Have you seen a doctor? Are you well? What are you not telling me?”

  “I—” he said, and then stopped himself, taking another look at her expression. Not one he was used to seeing…but one he knew better than to fight. “That obvious, huh?”

  “To one who knows you.” Freed of the coffee cake, she crossed her arms and waited, a short and determined person with many years of experience.

  Joe shook his head. “Now I understand what Leandro meant. He said there were times when no wise man would defy you.”

  She looked startled, then pleased. And then she narrowed her eyes at him. “Nice try. Do I look distracted?”

  Joe sighed. “It’s…” he said, and then, “There’s…” and finally, “It’s hard to explain. I think that cold—”

  She made an air-escaping pfft noise and waved her hand.

  He met her eyes, so dark within wrinkled lids, and held her gaze a moment. “I’m trying to stop something from happening,” he said. “It’s not something I can talk about. But the circumstances…they’re complicated. Difficult.” He looked over toward his house, seeing it in his mind’s eye, seeing Lyn there. Reminding himself that she’d come here to condemn him, feeling again his first glimpse of her, the impact of absorbing the essence of her…craving her.

  Reminding himself that a glimpse of what it meant in return had scared her right back into herself. Away from him.

  Quite suddenly, Mrs. Rosado put a hand on his chest—age-spotted, a knuckle or two swollen with arthritis, but the fine shape of the fingers still readily apparent even if they weren’t quite steady. Her voice was steady enough, though. “This is what you need to listen to,” she said. “Right here. And this is when you need to be strong enough to do it. If it was easy, my Leandro always said, then it doesn’t mean as much to us when we get it. And then we don’t fight hard enough to keep it.”

  “Leandro,” Joe said, and grinned suddenly. “Wise man, that Leandro. Bet he knew a good coffee cake when he saw it, too.”

  “You can be sure of that.” Mrs. Rosado quite suddenly stood on her toes and kissed his cheek, her skin papery-old against his, and then stepped away, back to brusque. “And you remember, Joe Ryan—you can’t take care of the rest of us unless you take care of yourself.”

  Huh.

  He touched his chest, right where her hand had rested. Huh. He gave her another grin, hefted the coffee cake in salute, and set it in the passenger seat of the SUV as he slid in behind the wheel. Almost home, then, and it could just be that a little afternoon coffee and cake would trump his plans for dinner. A little decadence in the cool space of the house, ceiling fans drying the sweat of the day…

  The SUV parked beside Lyn’s hatchback rental took him completely by surprise. He pulled in beside it and sat there a moment, listening to the engine tick. His shields had slipped; he shored them up—and then felt so blind that he immediately dropped them completely, letting his senses sweep over his home, over the surrounding land.

  They’d hidden themselves well. He found Lyn—shielded or not, he would always find Lyn. And he found small eddies of activity—new wards, tiny riffs of power. Activity…In his house?

  He’d gotten out of his hybrid before he even realized it, the coffee cake forgotten, the door left ajar while he stood there with his hands fisted, his temper rising. In his house. Doing what, rifling through his computer in search of evidence? Sniffing every corner in search of Core trace? Frightening the cats?

  Temper, boy-o. Maybe someone had to use the bathroom. Maybe they were thirsty. Maybe Lyn had invited them in, not realizing—as he had not quite realized—how very strongly he would react to brevis intruders.

  They had judged him. They had judged him without a trial after Dean’s death, they had yanked him from what was left of his life…they had left him here, thinking him harmless in such a stable, deeply anchored place as the Peaks. And now the Peaks had turned on them, and they were looking for someone to blame and they were in his house.

  He left the car, ignoring the distant voice of inquiry that might have been Lyn calling his name from around the corner. He blew through the front door, solid wood slamming back. And there they were. Someone in the kitchen—indeed, getting a drink. A shadow of someone in the hallway toward his office. Someone upstairs in his loft, his damned bedroom.

  He didn’t mean for the change to loom, for the blue charge to flicker in the edges of his vision or for the snarl of the cougar to echo in his mind, surging to break free. They froze, the three forms—one he could see, one he could discern by shadow, and one he could hear upstairs. For a long moment he said nothing, simply because he couldn’t—the words stuck in a throat that couldn’t decide whether to stay human. And then he growled, “You are not welcome here.”

  The Sentinel upstairs eased to the half wall of the loft, revealing herself—and, by her glance toward the hallway, revealing the nominal leader of this particular group. The man at the refrigerator turned just enough, opened his hands just enough, to make a no-harm-meant gesture.

  Joe growled, deep in his throat. Completely and totally unconvinced.

  From the hallway, the final individual emerged—a huge man, bearded, with a worn backpack hanging from one big hand and a laptop dwarfed by the other. He put the laptop on the center island of the kitchen, dropped the backpack beside it and turned to Joe—such casually slow movements, so offhandedly careful. He said, “Lyn thought we wouldn’t want to waste any—”

  “Not welcome,” Joe repeated, his voice dropping another note or two, the fury so strong he could barely think past it. A brevis team in Flagstaff, he’d come to terms with. He’d prepared for. But not here. Not taking over his home.

  “Okay, got that,” the man said easily. “It’s a misunderstanding, bro. We’ll sort it out.”

  “Ruger,” the woman said, a protesting note in that single word.

  “Hey, it’s his house.” Ruger lifted his massive shoulders in a shrug. Bear, Joe realized dimly, taking a deep and deliberate breath. Three-on-one odds, he’d take…but a bear weighted those odds considerably.

  They’re on your side, bo
y-o.

  Looking up at the woman, he didn’t believe it. Looking at the man by the refrigerator, the one still standing in such an obvious, carefully neutral position, he didn’t believe it. Of the man Ruger…He’s only doing what it takes to defuse the situation. No, no trust there, either.

  Ruger said, “I’m the healer. Shea is shields. Annorah is wards and communications, and she’s coming downstairs now.”

  “But I’m in the middle of—”

  “Now,” Ruger said, ever so pleasantly.

  Watching her descend the staircase—a curvy woman without the feel of full-field Sentinel but instead the look of stubborn bureaucrat with her mind made up—Joe’s thoughts rattled, hollow in his own mind. This woman was here for him, as much as Lyn had been here for him at the start. And the man behind Ruger—a lightweight, that man, probably a coyote. His gaze went back to Ruger, locked there.

  “The cats,” he said, but stiffened—aware then of a certain questing power, a probe into his very nature. The most insidious form of invasion.

  The woman. Communications, hell.

  He didn’t think twice, but gathered a quick surge of power, that which sifted constantly through him simply because of who he was. He hit her with it—hit her hard enough to knock her on her ass right in the middle of her so casual descent down the curving stairs. Didn’t hurt her—didn’t mean to hurt her.

  But shocked her, yes—her eyes gone wide, her body stiffened, waiting for a follow-up blow. But Joe had no such intentions—and if he had, the shields that sprang up between them wouldn’t have stopped it. Foundation power slammed shields just as hard as it did flesh, and she clearly knew it. So did the coyote Shea, to judge by the quick step he took, by the warning in his voice. “Ruger—”

  But Ruger didn’t move. He said calmly, “Annorah, that probe was a wee bit rash. One might even say rude.”

  And Joe, as if he hadn’t just effortlessly flung around the kind of power that Annorah had obviously never even seen and Shea knew well enough to regard with profound concern and even Ruger acknowledged with a lift of craggy brow, said again, “The cats. Where are the cats?”

  Ruger tipped his head. “Haven’t come across them.”

  Joe looked at Annorah. Straight at Annorah. Because the cats would have retreated to the bedroom, knowing that strangers never went upstairs. And flustered, she said, “Two of them were at the sliding doors—I put them ou—”

  Out. But she stopped with a wince at Joe’s expression.

  “Then go find them,” he said flatly. He looked at the coyote; he looked at Ruger. “Outside.” He turned on his heel, leaving the door open behind him, and stalked out into the yard—token landscaping, token parking and surrounding forest—the cougar still flickering around his edges.

  They came. The woman with her bruised ass and bruised dignity, the man without his water and Ruger with his backpack and his laptop, both of which he left on the porch bench. As the door closed behind him, he said, “Best find the kitties, Annorah.” His genial voice didn’t hide the nature of the order.

  Joe rubbed his hands down his face, instantly easing down a notch now that they were all outside. “She’ll only scare them deeper into the woods,” he said. “I’ll put out food when we’re done here.”

  “Lyn can track them,” Annorah said, hesitant.

  He turned on them. “What the hell were you thinking? Did you think I would welcome you? Do you think I’m that stupid?” He caught Annorah’s gaze—blond hair of the bed-head sort, big blue eyes, skin of amazing clarity; it showed her high emotion, staining her throat and cheeks. And she looked away. “Don’t even tell me you’ve been assigned to field investigations before.”

  “I have,” she snapped.

  But Ruger laughed quietly, genuinely amused. “Give him that one, Annorah.” To Joe, he said, “She works out of brevis with communications. Given what we’re dealing with…the shielding, the power disruptions—we wanted a nexus here in the field.”

  “I’m not a radio,” she said, but she looked away, and she sounded both sullen and embarrassed. “And there was something going on up there. Can’t call it warding—almost like a power groove. But that’s not my thing—it’s just close enough so I can get a feel for it. We need a power wrangler out here.”

  Ruger laughed again. “We’ve got one, Annorah.”

  “She means one she can trust,” Joe said darkly. “All you had to do was ask, Annorah. I do a lot of power riding off the roof out there. Damn straight there’s a groove. I put it there.”

  Stubbornly, she shook her head. “It doesn’t feel right.”

  “Ah,” he said. “So you are an expert.”

  Ruger ignored them. “We’ve got an amulet master with us, as well. And backup for Lyn, a man she’s worked with before.”

  Damn, that stung. It shouldn’t have—Joe was never meant to be backup, had his own thing to do. But ow, yes, it did. But he said nothing, and Ruger added, “Lyn said you had Internet access in your office. Nick is waiting on instant message, wants an initial assessment. And he should have some of the information Lyn asked for.”

  “Yeah?” Joe said. “Like who diverted the communication that should have come my way? Or hey, how about the fact that no one’s found any connection between me and the Core boys yet? Oh, wait—never mind. That’s no problem. You’ll just manufacture some if you really want it.”

  “Hey!” Annorah said, sounding truly stung. And she blurted, “No one thought you were connected to the Core, not at first. We thought—”

  A look from Ruger stopped her, but not before Joe got it. He laughed short and hard. “Right, I know. You thought I was just off on my own thing. Power wrangler gone wild.”

  Ruger swapped that look to Joe. “How the hell many of us do you think can shove power around on a whim like you just did?”

  Joe gave him a grim little grin. “It wasn’t a whim.”

  But Shea looked grim in return, and Annorah simply looked away, unable to meet his gaze at all—and that’s when he realized. He’d scared them. They hadn’t expected that—not of him, maybe not of anyone. It surprised him; made him take a step back, a step down.

  Because if they were truly concerned about what he could do, they weren’t going to react rationally to anything he did do. They’d react….

  Well, like Annorah.

  The humor took him suddenly, dark as it was, and wrung another laugh out of him. When Ruger gave him an inquiring eye, he could only shake his head. “It’s your own fault,” he said. “You judged me. You put me here. Problem solved, you thought. Maybe you should have paid more attention in the first place.” He shook his head again. “Tell you what I think—get over it. We’ve got a situation here, and it’s not going to wait for you to deal. It’s also not going to wait while you examine my house for molecules of evidence. You want to know what I think?” He didn’t wait to see if they did or not. “Get a handle on this thing. Get a handle on the Core—round them up or chase them off or whatever current policy is. Then you can worry about whether or not it’s all my fault.”

  Ruger dipped his head to scratch above one ear, casting Joe a rueful look from there. “Lyn said you were direct.”

  “Yeah,” Joe said. “I am.” A shallow ripple of power lapped at him—distraction and warning. A glance at the others told him that none of them had felt it; they were as deeply immersed in their current dilemma—namely, him—as ever. “Look,” Joe said. “Lyn’s got some ideas about what’s next. So do I. Now that you’re here, maybe we can split up—” He hated the words as they came from his mouth. They felt like defeat—like the first step of never being alone with Lyn again, of never having the moments for which he’d been heading home.

  No. Denial kicked up, loud and strong. He’d do what it took to have those moments. During this crisis, after it…beyond. Certainty settled somewhere in his chest, solid and strong. Something within him relaxed; he took a deep breath.

  Ruger nodded, moving ahead in his own thoughts. “It
’s possible,” he said. “Lyn said you’d need someone to work with—I don’t completely understand. Something about the tainted power.”

  “The problem is, my shields suck,” Joe said, and saw the surprise at his blunt words reflected on all their faces. “Look, protecting myself from power isn’t one of my concerns. I’m a screen, it’s the wind. Get it? It just passes through. When I was working outside of Vegas and we ran into a…situation, Dean covered me. Out here, there’s been nothing. It’s not an active position, which is exactly why brevis put me here.”

  “Direct,” Ruger said, straight-faced, “may have been an understatement.”

  Another series of power ripples riffed through Joe…his breath caught on the faint raking pain of it, stuttering his thoughts. But he caught himself, said, “The situation seems to call for it. Unless the words powder keg were carelessly used.”

  Annorah’s stubborn bureaucrat expression returned. “They were not. I drafted the initial assessment for dissemination. Nick approved it.”

  Joe lifted his gaze to the mountain, well aware of the leading edge of more than a mere ripple, of power building to a wave. “I wouldn’t dispute it. We’ve got to stop these surges…and then if we’re lucky, we can restore balance enough so the mountain will take it from there.”

  Ruger crossed his arms over his barrel chest—a hard, big man made for T-shirts or flannel shirts and rugged jeans, and who knew better than to fight it. “So you want to split up, to send Lyn on the trail of the Core from one direction, while you hunt them from another.”

  “More or less. What I really want is to find their power anchor. They’re not Sentinel. They can’t just reach for it. They’ve got a hook somewhere, sunk into the source. How they’ve hidden it so well…that’s another thing again.” He settled his feet into a wider stance, swaying slightly with the building flow of power—not daring to back-trace it to see if it built further or if it simply ebbed away. It scraped at his nerves, already long raw. And the others still didn’t feel it at all—Shea was lost in watching Ruger, waiting for some reaction; Annorah watched Joe himself, her eyes narrowing with some unknown suspicion.