Tiger Bound

by Doranna Durgin

  But Maks cursed, an unexpected snarl, and she followed his gaze to the windshield—gasping, fumbling her keys, as she saw the bloody trail of prints smearing down to where the cat sat on the windshield, claiming the car with all his usual nonchalance, the ragged stump of his tail attempting to curve around a floppy hind leg that looked to be held on by skin alone.

  * * *

  Maks drove.

  Crammed into her small car, grimly cursing the mechanics of it, he followed her distracted directions to the vet clinic. Katie held the cat wrapped in a towel on her lap, crying and healing him at the same time.

  Maks didn’t need to be told that she couldn’t begin to save what the cat had lost, but he felt what she did for the little animal, sending him strength, easing his pain, supporting his body against shock and blood loss.

  Just as Katie didn’t need to be told what had done this to her independent companion. But when she came out of the clinic afterward, biting her lip, her eyes red and her nose and cheeks pink, she marched up to where Maks sat against the hood of the car and demanded, “Why?”

  It wasn’t something Maks wanted to say. “The creature was playing,” he said. “And it was giving warning.”

  “Killing my neighbor wasn’t enough?”

  “That,” said Maks, “was frustration. The warning was probably meant for me.”

  For a long moment she simply stood before him, one leg lifted slightly...the deer wanting to run. But she didn’t, even as a tear spilled over and down her cheek. Maks said, “Katie,” and opened his hands to her, and she came into his arms and let him wrap himself around her, holding her close right there in the parking lot where anyone who saw the blood and the tears would know everything they needed to know.

  When she drew a huge breath and let it out slowly, and then another, he took the luxury of letting his fingers sift through her hair, pulling it from the elastic band to scrape it away from her face with gentle fingers.

  His words weren’t as gentle. They couldn’t be. “In the coffee shop,” he said, and when she drew another breath, sharper this time, he knew she understood—in the shop, when he’d gone on the hunt. “Before we entered, there was a man with Akins. I know this man.”

  Her voice didn’t quite make it above a whisper. “And he knows you.”

  Maks nodded, his head against the side of hers; she pulled back to look at him. “He saw you, didn’t he? He saw us coming through the front window, and headed out the back.”

  “Yes.” Maks thought back to that cruel, bitter scent—the memories that flooded back to him, the feelings that engulfed him.

  Just that fast, her eyes widened; she absorbed the sense of it, the fury and the pain and the loss, and she knew. “From back then,” she said, voice still ragged but full of certainty. “He was part of what happened to you.”

  “Yes.” One of those who had engineered his mother’s kidnapping, the breeding program that only she had survived long-term, the endless hunt for Maks after his escape—right up until the Sentinels had found him and his little ragged band of runaways and swept through the area, taking down what Core they could find. “More than that. At Gausto’s workshop on Core D’oíche, just as we broke in...I thought I scented...” He shook his head. So much chaos, so many smells in that horrifying cellar workshop—the death and gore and creatures distorted, infected and dying...the acrid corruption of Core workings, burning his nose.

  Yet for that one moment, he thought he’d scented his past.

  * * *

  Katie understood.

  She understood that Maks’s expression, grim and predatorial, frightened her—not for her own sake, but for his.

  She understood that the game had changed. The Core wanted something from her; the Core was coming after Maks...and the Core was incubating something new and horrible. And somehow, Roger Akins was involved—sitting there in the coffee shop with the man who had come from Maks’s past to invade his present. To invade her present.

  And she understood that she’d done little to help figure it all out—that her visions so far consisted of murky warnings and dire but detail-free mutterings.

  Such thoughts followed her home from the clinic, which she left with the reassuring murmurs of the staff in her ears and the promise of a call as soon as the yellow cat was out of surgery—and there, she discovered something else.

  The good people of Pine Bluff understood things, too.

  Oh, not that they had the details, or knew she harbored a tiger in her house, or knew that the creature in their forest was a Core construct, wicked of eye and distorted of nature. But they knew something.

  Akins’s efforts to taint her reputation...the cat’s death in her hands...and now, Rowdy’s sudden illness. Not to mention the gruesome death of the reclusive and somewhat paranoid man who’d lived beside her.

  “No, don’t worry about it,” she told the kennel club events coordinator who’d called as she’d stepped in the door. “I understand. Maybe another time.” And then she ran through a quick sequence of voice mail messages, all saying essentially the same thing—“just can’t make it to my appointment.”

  “Well,” she said, putting the phone aside to find Maks watching her, silent and aware. “I’m busy today anyway.”

  “Resting,” he suggested, with a glance at the stairs that led to her bedroom.

  She immediately shook her head. “I’m done with sitting around, waiting for inspiration to strike or for brevis to run up and take care of things. Unless I can offer some direction, there’s not much for a team to do, anyway. So I need to go hunting.”

  She might have imagined the hint of a smile around his eyes. She didn’t imagine it at all when he leaned over to press a kiss on her mouth, sweet and gentle and far too brief. She found herself unconsciously following as he moved back, and missing his touch when they separated.

  When had that happened?

  He said, “I have perimeters to do. Then I’ll do my own hunting.”

  She bit her lip. She didn’t mean to; now, if ever, she wanted to be full of strength. “Should you?” she asked. “After yesterday...after the day before...” She touched his cheek, where the faint scar still lingered...but wouldn’t, for much longer.

  “Whatever is, is,” he said. “But the injuries...you took care of that.”

  “I only jump-started you.” But she’d done it in spades, free to use her healing openly for the first time in so many years—surprised, in retrospect, at how effective she’d been. Just as she’d helped Ian. “You should take it easy.”

  “I’m done sitting around,” he said.

  She bristled in indignation for him. “Hardly that,” she told him, straightening, her hands finding their way to her hips. “You’ve been—” But she saw the humor in his eyes, and stopped, and gave a rueful shake of her head. “Okay, okay. I get it. Yes, I’ve been doing more than sitting around, too. But seriously...I’m just too wired to rest right now.”

  “Then come out with me,” he said, simply enough, and tipped his head at the security screen. He barely waited for her hesitation before he added, “Not the woods. The yard perimeter.”

  Sunshine and fresh air and silence, after a night of chaos and the early-morning hours of frantic worry. Balm to a deer’s soul. A warmth blossomed in her chest that had nothing to do with the sensual heat he so easily sparked to life.

  She gestured at the door. “I don’t understand this perimeter thing of yours,” she said as she followed him out. “It’s not a warding; it’s not really a shield. It’s not something I realized any of us could do.”

  For once, it felt good to say it that way...us. As if including herself as a Sentinel suddenly made a lot more sense when Maks was there with her.

  “No one really understands it,” he said, a little wry self-awareness there. “I don’t think about it much. It just—”

  “Is,” she finished for him.

  “It won’t stop a Core working,” he told her. “But I’ll know if anything or anyone cr
osses the line.” That it wouldn’t physically stop someone—or some thing—from approaching was something Katie already knew. No one’s shields did that.

  She walked with him as he moved along his perimeter, and while Maks stepped in careful concentration, Katie relaxed enough to enjoy the newly blooming wildflowers—gumweed and asters and penstemon gone to riot. As they circled around the side of the house nearest the road, she thought to say, embarrassed, “Watch your step here. This is where clients let their dogs stretch their legs. They’re supposed to pick up, but not everyone is good about it. Although Marie was the last one out this way and she’s pretty—”

  Good, she’d been about to say, until it struck her again that Marie had last been here to strike out in her anguish over her dog’s sudden illness.

  Maks didn’t respond—not to the warning or to Katie’s sudden pensiveness—but he did stop short, eyeing the grass with interest, and focused on something shiny.

  Like her deer, Katie had a much easier time seeing motion than she did unmoving detail; she held back, letting Maks take a step, then another—and then his curiosity turned to something more grim, and he knelt to pick up a stick and poke at something until suddenly Katie could see it in the grasses, black and knotted and leather.

  An amulet cord.

  Confusion warred with the cold clenching sensation in her stomach. “I don’t understand. There’s no amulet?”

  In answer, he nudged the stick into the grass until he could lift it with the cord hanging limp from the end—two ragged ends, and no amulet. Katie felt nothing from it—no acrid corruption, no malaise—and still no inclination whatsoever to touch it. The deer was smarter than that, and so was Katie.

  “Why would the Core leave a cord here with no amulet?”

  Maks took his gaze from the thing long enough to give her a meaningful glance. “They wouldn’t.”

  Katie frowned. “Then where—”

  Except where was suddenly obvious.

  One great big goofy dog with a penchant for swallowing rocks and the occasional child’s toy.

  “Marie’s dog,” she said, filled with horror at the thought, and unable to deny the obvious reality of it. “That poor animal! No wonder he got so sick so fast, even though he was healing beautifully from his surgery.” And no wonder she hadn’t felt it when she’d treated him. When he’d been on her table, he hadn’t been sick at all. “Surely they can find it—surely they can remove it!”

  But she knew better even as she said it. No doubt they’d already taken X-rays; either the amulet had done its damage on the way through, or it had, in the way of these evil things, integrated itself into the dog’s body, leaving nothing to remove.

  “Maybe,” she said, trying again, “I can still help him.”

  If she dared. Because what if the dog died, and Marie blamed her anew? If everyone knew? Katie gave the side yard a startled and distrustful look. “We don’t know that it was the only one.”

  “We’ll look,” he said. “I should have done it sooner.”

  Her own vehemence startled her. “As if you’ve even had the chance. It wouldn’t have helped Marie’s Rowdy, anyway—you were flat out when he got here. You didn’t have a chance!”

  The look he shot her held flat disagreement, but he said only, “We’ll ward a bucket for this. Someone at brevis will know what the knotting means.”

  “Brevis,” she said, breathing the word out. “We have to call them. They have to know about my neighbor—”

  “They know.” Maks straightened, breaking his perimeter to place the knotted cord on a rock where it would be easy to find again. He glanced her way to discover her patent uncertainty, and said it again. “They know, Katie.”

  Well, she supposed they would. A police scanner or two, an ear already perked to this corner of the region. “They don’t know about my cat!” she blurted out, not really meaning to—feeling absurd as soon as she’d said it.

  The look on Maks’s face didn’t make her feel absurd at all. “They will.”

  “They will,” she agreed. “Because this time, I’m going to call them. Enough is enough.” She crossed her arms, scowling down at the cord. “And I’ll have something to tell them when I do it. Finish up here, Maks—I don’t want to go seeing without someone on watch.”

  He did a double-take and gave her the sliest hint of a smile. She marched up to him and launched a quick poke in the chest, her finger giving way before hard muscle. “You like it when the deer gets pushy?” she said. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

  She didn’t expect him to spread his arms slightly in a nonverbal mea culpa, or for his smile to spread something unmistakable. She didn’t expect to find herself smiling back, flushed with the pleasure of having this man enjoy her—deer and human, healer and seer. Struck by impulse, giving way entirely before it, she threw herself across the scant distance between them, giving him a fierce hug.

  He staggered back an exaggerated step, just a hint of laughter rumbling in his chest; his hands rested against her back, warm and strong. “What?” he asked, and the laughter was still there in his throat.

  “Just because,” she told him—didn’t have any other answer than that, and didn’t care. “Just because.”

  He held her that way a long moment, his breath tickling the top of her ear, his heart thudding comfortably against her chest. She became aware of the strength rippling beneath her hands—the way it lay waiting, completely and comfortably silent so the deer might feel welcome. One hand stroked down her spine, brushing all the way to the very base of it—holding them together so she could clearly feel the tension in his body change—and clearly feel his response to her.

  And just as quickly, she could feel the pain that speared through him. In response to her, always in response to her. As if she’d broken something when she’d done that first deep healing, there on the front porch.

  She eased back from him. “Oh, Maks,” she said, the conflict strong in her voice. “What have we done?”

  “What was right for that moment,” he said, and his voice held no conflict at all. Nor was his touch hesitant, as he released her to cup her face, briefly search her eyes, and then bring them together in a kiss of the sweetest intensity, mouth gentle, tongue a mere tease, a soft bite on her lower lip as he pulled away. “We’ll figure it out.”

  Katie found herself holding her breath on that comment—and letting it go with a sigh, relief and satisfaction and worry all bundled up into one. “Okay,” she said. “Do what needs to be done here. I’m going to call the vet, and then let’s go hunting. The seer’s way.”

  He bit her lip again, a little more smartly this time, and stepped back from her, silent. Not that she needed words.

  With Maks, she was beginning to understand that the best moments came without them.

  Chapter 16

  Katie stared out her bedroom window into the bright afternoon and fought the ragged edges of panic.

  Not the panic of a deer on the run, not the panic of things impending.

  No. The panic of a seer who couldn’t see.

  This, then, was the price of so many years of squelching her abilities—limiting herself to peeks and vague hints.

  She’d been so sure that if she sat herself down in calm silence, amid the familiar scents and comforts of her own bedroom and knowing that Maks stood watch for her in the living room below, she’d be able to reach out to the seeing part of herself.

  Boy, had she been wrong.

  But if she couldn’t reach out to those visions, then she’d simply sit here quietly with herself and ponder what they already knew.

  They knew her visions had sent her dread and violence and darkness, each on a level she hadn’t experienced before...except once, leading up to Core D’oíche. She knew they involved Maks—those glimpses of his eyes, in ferocity and pain. That he faced some undefined battle, she could pretty well figure.

  But she thought he’d already figured all that out. The creature had to be stopped...the
Core agent had to be stopped. Who else to do it but Maks, whether or not he should be out in the field at all?

  Maybe he’s better.

  That hopeful thought came unbidden, and she scowled it down. Wishful thinking.

  But if not better, then different. That, she thought was true. Things were changing for him—because he was here, and because they had touched one another.

  After that, what she knew started to get mixed up. Maks might think the attack at her neighbor’s was all about him, but Katie knew better. The visions had started before he got here...the amulets had been planted even as he arrived. No, Maks’s presence had served as a catalyst, not an instigating factor.

  Akins, too, had started in on her before Maks’s arrival...and now he had half the town convinced that she’d gone angel-of-mercy on her clients...with just enough truth mixed in to be convincing. And Marie’s dog...

  And Akins was also now somehow associated with the Core rogue who had once held a young Maks prisoner. It had been less than a decade since the children—since Maks had been discovered; surely the children hadn’t been on their own for long. Just long enough for the rumors to start flying. And before that—

  She frowned, trying to make sense of what she’d seen of Maks’s escape. He’d been so young...three? And already turning tiger. And now he was...what? Maybe thirty? Not a youth, but fully mature, his features with the hard, beautiful edge of a man in his prime.

  And yet, he’d said he’d been a teen when they picked him up.

  She just couldn’t make it come together.

  Katie closed her eyes and reached out not just to her visions, but also to Maks.

  * * *

  Nick Carter hesitated in the doorway of the private room, unnoticed, phone tucked in his hand. Gleaming steel and linoleum, pleasant beige walls and a full choice of music, large-screen television. Southwest Brevis medical not only kept its facilities up-to-date, it also kept them comfortable.

  Ian Scott had the music turned up to something angry, guitar licks shredding through the room in an audible extension of his mood. He wore a classic hospital gown over black ninja bottoms, and he’d kicked the covers of his bed into a tangle. A laptop sat on the swing-arm table over the bed and notes sprawled across his lap, pencil tapping against them. His hair—a moderate length of spiky silver-gray that would do David Bowie proud—was in greater disarray than usual.