Tiger Bound

by Doranna Durgin

  At least, until he walked through the door. And then suddenly he was the tiger again, gone on the hunt with his gaze piercing and the strength bristling from his body.

  He’d gained something from their moments in the hotel, Katie could see that clearly enough. A certain confidence—a certain awareness of himself. As if identifying the correct nature of his injury had somehow lessened his conflict over the event.

  Or maybe it was more than that. In all of their short, intense time together, she’d not yet seen him project the silent, unmistakable menace that infused his posture as he took another step into the shop. His head went up, his shoulders stiffened. On the hunt.

  “Well, well.” That voice was as familiar as it was unwelcome. “Look who’s come out to play with the common folk.”

  Katie stopped short as the door jingled shut behind her. Akins. He straddled a chair at one of the tables, a plain small cup of coffee before him and an abandoned coffee sitting across from him, along with a small plate where sticky frosting lingered. “Maks,” Katie said. “Let’s not be here. It’s too early in the day for this.”

  “By all means, run away,” Akins said. “Wouldn’t want to face a conversation about what you’ve been up to.” Half of the little shop’s patrons gave Katie a curious glance, and the other half burrowed more deeply into their reading, texting and private conversations, unwilling to take part in the unpleasantry.

  She reached out to touch Maks’s arm—and realized instantly that Maks wasn’t hearing her at all. He’d focused entirely into the finely honed creature of his other: hunter, protector...untamed.

  Akins eyed her from over his coffee, and his expression was entirely too smug. “’Course, if you run off without even a token denial, some folks might start to think there’s truth to the whispers around here.”

  Katie gave him a startled look, her attention too divided to produce the disdain his remarks deserved.

  “Oh, you know,” he said, and waved the coffee cup in a vague gesture that made her think it was empty. “Animals that die after you’ve handled them. Animals that get sick. You didn’t think that word would spread so fast?”

  Marie’s dog. And how could she deny the cat, or the dog from months earlier, wracked in pain and ready to go? She hadn’t actively released him, at that...only showed him the option existed, when his owner was clinging so hard as to keep him past his time.

  The instant of doubt must have flickered on her face; Akins pounced with a mean triumph. “And then there’s last night. The things you touch don’t do well, do they?”

  She cast a glance at Maks, a panic rising in her throat. No one knows about last night. They can’t possibly.

  But Maks didn’t so much as look at her. Maks had turned into someone she hadn’t seen before—someone to whom she would never leave herself vulnerable in healing, would never share a bed in exhausted sleep. He circled the table, his eyes both feral and distant, as if he tasted something she couldn’t quite perceive—as if he quartered in on that scent.

  Akins’s grin turned nasty. “Haven’t you heard about last night, Katie Rae?”

  “I told you, you’re not welcome to call me that.” She kept her voice low in the hopes of hiding its faint tremble; by now half the coffee shop listened in undisguised interest.

  “Not much left of your neighbor,” Akins observed, words that reached Katie without yet making sense. “It’s really kinda surprising you didn’t know that. Or, you know, maybe you knew all along, and that’s why you laid low.” He glanced at Maks’s bare feet, brows raised. “Or laid something.”

  Unexpected temper fired through Katie’s nerves. She slapped the cup from Akins’s hand with a speed she rarely revealed. “You,” she said, and this time her voice was low for entirely different reasons, “need to learn manners. And you need to figure out that nothing you say about me will ever change the things you’ve done.”

  Akins’s superiority, his amusement, vanished into the rising color of his face, his flushed neck. He stood so quickly that the chair went skidding; several customers shifted away in alarm, and one older lady abandoned her coffee to exit the shop.

  “Hey!” the barista said, her tone full of no-nonsense. “Roger Akins, it’s time for you to leave.”

  Akins didn’t seem to hear; he lurched for Katie.

  “Hey,” said the barista, and this time she stepped out from behind the counter with a fire extinguisher in her hand.

  But Maks wasn’t as preoccupied as he’d seemed. He moved—faster than Katie, faster than anyone had any right to expect. His hand clamped down on the back of Akins’s neck, squeezing tightly. Akins stiffened in surprise, his eyes wide with pain—Katie could all but hear the crunch of compressed tissue.

  A tiger’s killing grip.

  Maks leaned close to Akins’s ear, and said, “No.”

  Akins gurgled a protest. Maks shook him slightly, instantly silencing him. “No.”

  Slowly, carefully, Akins raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. Maks cut a glance at Katie, who understood well enough—a request to move to the side, no longer between Akins and the door. No longer within Akins’s easy reach.

  Katie eased away. Maks gave Akins an abrupt shove; the man stumbled forward a few steps and stopped, turning a resentful gaze on Katie.

  “And, might I add,” the barista said, with more scorn than fear. “Stay out.”

  Akins snarled a last, nasty word at her and left, shoving chairs aside with crude violence. One teetered and fell in his wake, and then he was gone.

  The remaining customers applauded with quiet decorum, and bent their heads together to exchange murmurs, not realizing how clearly their secretive body language gave them away—that it was Katie they talked about, as much as Akins.

  Katie told the barista, “I’m sorry. I didn’t help.”

  “He was being an asshole,” the woman said. “From what I’ve seen, he’s addicted to it. Now. You want some coffee? You and your friend? He could have his free if he can teach me that Vulcan neck pinch.”

  Katie glanced at Maks—already distracted again...on his hunt. “I think,” she said, smiling slightly, “that you just have to be Maks.” She ordered her coffee, and for Maks, on an impulse, frozen hot chocolate.

  She tipped heavily.

  She found Maks prowling by the back exit at the end of the short restroom hallway, and presented him with the imprinted paper cup; he took it without looking. “What’s going on?” she asked, keeping her voice low enough that he could pretend not to hear if he didn’t want to.

  She wasn’t expecting the answer, or his direct stare, coming back so quickly from whatever preoccupied him here. “You tell me.”

  “I—” she said, and flushed. Be the seer, he meant. “Not here.”

  He only watched her.

  “I mean,” she said, “I will. But not here.”

  After a moment, he seemed to accept those words; he took a sip of the slushy drink she’d brought him, and his eyebrows went up.

  Then he shook his head, his bafflement clear enough. “There’s a scent here,” he said. “A taste. Bitter hot metal...”

  She frowned; she might have asked. Instead, that taste flooded her mouth, obscuring the lingering flavor of rich coffee, filling her nose as much as tingling off her tongue. She flailed in it—found herself suddenly afloat in invasive darkness, in damp memories of dim, foul places—the briefest glimpse of a woman’s face, faintly familiar, the sound of emotional agony. The grunt of a man taking a hard blow resolving into torn curtains of wild green.

  She blinked, and found herself looking into that same green—the watercolor clarity of Maks’s eyes. He’d plucked the drink from her hand as she sagged against the wall.

  She cleared her throat, glancing somewhat furtively in the direction of the shop floor.

  “No one came,” he told her. “No one heard.” And he didn’t ask, but he wanted to know—she saw that in his eyes, too.

  “I don’t know,” she told him, her voi
ce low. “I could taste what you described...I know people were being hurt, people were in despair. I don’t know why...”

  The look on his face struck her with unexpected dread, plucking at something in her chest. “You know,” she said, bringing it down to a whisper. “You know what I’m seeing. You were part of it, once.”

  He shook his head. She didn’t know if it meant no, I don’t or simply not here. She knew she wouldn’t get any immediate answers, either way. “Let’s go home,” she said—and pretended not to notice his reluctant glance at the exit and the hunt that drew him.

  * * *

  They might even have made it, if they hadn’t met a cluster of people in the steep little parking lot, gathered at the tailgate of one of the newly parked SUVs and inadvertently blocking Katie’s car.

  Maks didn’t think twice—reading the high emotions of the group, reading their expressions and body language—as Katie stopped, he stepped forward and sideways, putting himself in front of her so cleanly that she didn’t at first realize it—and then she did, and her hand touched his arm in an unconscious gesture. Not only seeking reassurance, but connecting them.

  The parking lot slanted hard toward the main road, leaving little room for graceful evasion. Especially not when someone in the gathering—eight or nine people, all looking shaken and sounding strident—did a double-take and said, “Hey, aren’t you the neighbor?”

  Akins had made a reference to neighbor, too. And while Maks knew better than to respond, already eyeing his best option to make an opening to the car, Katie had all the wrong instincts for a moment like this.

  Hers were herd instincts, healer’s instincts—to reach out, to become part of...to help. And so she asked, “Whose neighbor? What’s happened?”

  “As if you don’t know,” muttered another man. “I don’t care if your house is a quarter-mile down the road—there’s no way you didn’t hear him screaming.”

  “What?” Katie’s tone rose a notch. “Larry? You mean Larry Williams? What happened?”

  “Akins said she would play innocent.” A third man—a big man—pushing away from the back of the SUV and eyeing Maks as if he was pretty sure he could take him.

  “I’m not playing anything,” Katie said, and took a step closer. Maks still stood angled before her, not quite facing the group, but she was by no means hidden—all tall and slender strong grace, the courage finding its way back out no matter what she thought of herself.

  Courage, but not stupidity. When Maks shifted ever so slightly to draw a line on her progress, she ceded it to him.

  The only woman of the bunch stepped forward and tipped her head at Katie. “Williams is dead,” she said. “He didn’t show up at early shooting practice, so we went looking—”

  “We found him, all right,” the third man said, crossing his beefy arms over an impressive chest. “Shredded to pieces.”

  Katie looked at the woman; she nodded. “Blood everywhere. Looks like it took him a while to die, too.”

  Katie closed her eyes, the natural flush of her cheeks fading. “The crea—” Creature, she’d started to say. But Maks shifted into her before she could finish.

  Maybe not quite soon enough.

  “There, you see?” the second man gathered up the other two with his gaze, while those further away, still having their own conversations, hesitated at the changing pitch of the conversation. “She knows something.”

  Maks could feel Katie’s fatigue, could see it in her face. And they had things to do before she could rest—property lines to be secured, house wards to strengthen...a discussion to have. In the shop...a scent...a taste...bitter hot metal...

  Katie shot him a glance—not just checking in, but reading him—seeing his impatience. She told the men, “I’d like to get to my car, please.”

  The closest responded with an expression that wasn’t quite a sneer—but it came close, and his meaning was clear enough. He opened his mouth, but before he could speak the woman slapped out with the back of her hand, a solid thump against his ribs that he didn’t even seem to notice. “Oh, my God,” she said in disbelief. “Are you really about to say ‘make me’? Just because you’re bigger than everyone else?”

  The man crooked an eyebrow at Maks.

  Yes, bigger. Yes, broader. Yes, meaner.

  But not tiger.

  Maks growled.

  Or maybe he didn’t, not literally. Maybe there’d been no actual sound. But somehow it hung in the air between them, startling the group, yanking surprise from the woman, wary expressions from the men...and from the biggest of them, all the mean turned to surprise.

  “Really,” Katie said gently, “I’d think you would want us on your side.”

  The rest of the group had already made that decision, easing back to the tight space between the vehicles. The big man didn’t have to move, but he shifted toward the tailgate all the same, giving then room to pass.

  Katie walked through the space like a queen claiming her own, and Maks paced her—his attention on the big guy, on the abashed crew between the cars—not taking them for granted. Katie barely hesitated as she again told the woman, “Please. Be careful.”

  The woman gave her the driest of looks. “Somehow, I think I’d better say the same to you.”

  Chapter 15

  The day’s sharp, early sunshine broke through the sheltering trees along Katie’s dirt road. She eased off the accelerator as they approached a wide, sparsely graveled crossroad, and with a glance at Maks, made her decision, taking them off the single lane road that led to her house and around the corner.

  “Your neighbor lives this way,” he guessed.

  “It was coming after me,” she said tightly, not looking at him this time, full of certainty. “You know it was. But I wasn’t there, so...” She braked to a gentle stop as the house came into view—an old wood-siding house in need of paint, the roofline distinctly uneven. Crime scene tape wrapped around the porch; the door was sealed. A homemade doghouse sat inside a fenced kennel area, but there was no sign of the German shepherd to whom Katie had occasionally spoken. Please be safe. Please be with a friend.

  “Katie,” Maks said, his voice a rumble that filled the little car until she gave him a startled glance. “Even if it had wanted you, what happened isn’t your fault.”

  His words didn’t stop the guilt enveloping her. “Even if?”

  He didn’t look entirely comfortable. “Katie,” he said, using her name again as if it gave him some place to start. “It came for me.”

  She arched an eyebrow at him, knowing her response was entirely unfair. “Oh, so now it’s all about you?”

  “This,” he said, affirming it. “This was about me.”

  Something about the regret in his voice—the anger underlying it—made her look twice. He was, after all, the one who had seen the creature. Fought it.

  “Because of yesterday?”

  He nodded, his gaze on hers. “They know who I am.”

  “That it was a Sentinel, you mean.” She said it without question, certain enough of the answer.

  He shook his head. “That it was me.” The one who got away.

  The sense of his unspoken meaning came through so clearly, she had to hesitate, assuring herself that she hadn’t actually heard the words.

  Maybe it shouldn’t have mattered so much to her that she could perceive such things of him...but it did. Because she didn’t know if it spoke of Maks or of her own skills—or of them.

  She felt so very much like a deer at the moment. Circumstances piling up on her, turning frightening...bringing to the forefront the fact that she was simply not a brave creature, after all.

  She made herself take a deep breath and stay in the moment. “We shouldn’t have come,” she said. “We already knew what we had to know.”

  “We can go,” Maks said. “I’ll come back later.”

  As tiger, he meant. Hunting traces that human eyes—and noses—would miss.

  Not that he’d missed much back at
that coffee shop, human or not. As she started the car again, she looked over to the take-out cup in his hand—empty of its frozen hot chocolate, white fracture lines running through the brown logo where his grip had grown tight during the encounter outside the shop.

  “What was it you saw at the coffee shop?” she asked, wheeling a tight circle away from the house and then quickly cutting right toward her own driveway. A lone cyclist approached them from behind, faster on two wheels on this road than they could be on four. Katie quickly rolled down her window and when the cyclist wished her a good morning, said, “Be careful out there today. You’re alone, and a man was killed here this morning. Horribly.”

  She wanted to say, You’re alone, and there’s a massive rampaging mutant javelina out there.

  No doubt words that would have had the cyclist running, all right. But not from the right thing.

  As it was, he stopped, threw a look over his shoulder, and frowned. “Are you saying the guy is out in the woods?”

  Close enough. That wordless impression came from Maks, who leaned forward just enough so the man could see him. “Yes.”

  “Maybe you could spread the word,” Katie said—although she had the feeling that when the man got back to town, he’d find “the word” already there waiting for him.

  The cyclist grumbled—but he turned his bike without dismounting and pedaled back toward the paved road, lifting a hand of thanks on the way.

  Katie let out a breath of relief as she drove the short remaining distance to her driveway. “He won’t be the first. No matter how the word spreads. And we can’t stop them all.”

  “Call brevis,” Maks said.

  She cut the engine, casting him a surprised look as she pulled the keys from the ignition.

  He hesitated, looking out into the woods and then returning his gaze to her. “The one behind this knows he has little time. Now he’ll push. Maybe make mistakes. Even more so, after I—” But he frowned, and stopped there.

  “After?” she said, hearing the familiar light thump as the yellow cat jumped up to scale the back hatch, a bit of a scramble as he made it to the roof, pattering unevenly overhead. “Come on, Maks, don’t—”