How alive it made him.
How important it was that this deep connection with his leopard had been restored.
By Ana.
But she wasn’t ready to hear any of that, and he wasn’t ready to be the human without letting the leopard shine through. He turned and padded away, leading her in such a deliberate manner that she understood they were close.
Just as well. Faint dawn and Sentinel sight painted deep shadows of fatigue beneath her eyes and hollows beneath her cheeks. He knew he’d look no better when he returned to the human—visibly gaunt in the wake of the extensive healing, worn by the pain and circumstances.
Not that he was complaining. Not even to himself. He didn’t want to think too deeply on the state he’d been in, or what he’d have done without Ana’s help.
The trail at this point was a narrow thing of marginal footing, but when they reached it, Ana released a huge sigh of relief. Ian turned to give her a cat grin, his rump perched ridiculously high on the slope and his paws braced below, jaw dropped just the slightest bit. But it only made her hesitate, one hand on a bracing tree.
When he moved out she waited for a decent distance between them before she followed.
As soon as he judged it light enough for her human sight to follow the emerging trail on her own, he slipped off to parallel it. The track widened; another trail merged into it and drew them around in a flattening loop toward the parking area. Ian drifted to shortcut the loop, stealing a few more moments with the leopard as the trees thinned and the bunch grass rose up, studded with juniper and hiding the oddball prickly pear.
Ana’s unexpected voice drifted to him on a level parallel to his, out on the far part of the loop. Ian hesitated, ears swiveling, the rest of him frozen so as not to generate his own noise.
He couldn’t hear the words...he didn’t like the tone. Not just a greeting to an unlikely dawn hiker. Not a conversation with herself.
The rumble of a male voice cinched it. Demanding. Rude.
Ian swerved in that direction, trotting with purpose and long, loose strides. Not sprinting yet—the snow leopard didn’t have a lot of sprint, and he’d save it. But pushing hard, with several hundred yards between them.
Until Ana cried out. “Ian!”
Then he ran, legs pumping, claws digging into earth—bounding over brush and dodging trees, ears flattened and tail counterbalancing even the most improbable leap.
He felt nothing of Core. Nothing of lurking amulets or the stinging taste of a working in progress. A crude, ping of wild energy returned no hint of a silent amulet.
Ana cried out again, this time in anger—in obvious struggle. She was brave enough, his Ana, and had struggled her way through an emotional and physical ordeal that would have left others a weeping mess. They’d made her strong, always holding victories and successes just out of her reach, creating a world for her in which just keep trying was the only option.
But she wasn’t big enough, or strong enough, or trained enough, to overcome Core posse.
Ian bounded in without a hint of stealth, getting his first glimpse of them—Ana hampered by the oversize jacket and pack, not one but two men grabbing at her. Not yet trying to hurt her, not being the least gentle...
They must have waited here, taking a chance on the location. This was the closest egress from the mountain, barring one that would return them to the mansion. It was familiar, the one from which they’d taken Ian the first time.
Where they’d gotten the men, Ian didn’t know. But he’d screwed up. He’d thought them safe. He’d thought to steal a few more moments as the leopard.
He’d left Ana alone.
Now there was no stealth—not with Ana’s struggles fueling his fury. If the men had no amulets, then they had conventional weapons, and Ian could only bear down on them hard and fast, kicking it up into that burst of a killing sprint. Taking them by surprise, simply because they’d never trained against such an opponent before.
They weren’t as unprepared as all that. One of them shouted alarm; the other flung Ana away and snatched at his side—not quite fast enough with a gun as Ian leaped with claws extended, slapping the man in a quick series of swiping blows.
The gun went off, plucking a trail of fire along Ian’s upper arm—and with it came an equally fiery rain of whipping blows across his back. He turned a snarl on the second man and his tactical baton, snagging the thing in one paw even as he came to rest on the man screaming beneath him.
The fallen man flailed, and Ian turned on him with the fiercest of snarls, all his teeth in the man’s face—freezing him in gut-level terror.
Ana’s scream came not in fear but in warning—no time to form words, just her own human cry to beware. Ian looked up to find that the second man had a gun, too, and now he had a shot, with his partner flat on the ground and out of the way.
Ana launched herself at him, arm raised, a blade glinting briefly in the barely risen sun. The man thought to shove her carelessly away and then jerked in surprise as she struck, whirling around to bat her down with a cruel blow.
By the time he turned back to Ian, he found himself face-to-face with an enraged snow leopard—one already inside the line of his gun, ears flat to his skull and teeth bared in the clearest of threats.
The man froze, instantly opening both hands so the gun sat only loosely in his palm, his finger off the trigger.
Ana scrambled back up to hands and knees, lurching beneath the pack and making her way to the other man—wrenching his gun away and backing off to the sweet spot where she was out of his reach but still close enough to call point-blank.
Under Ian’s glare, his captive eased his own gun to the ground and stepped away. Ian batted the thing toward Ana.
She gathered it, too, breathless and wild-eyed, a smear of blood trickling from her nose and the split of her puffing lip. “This one looks pretty bad, Ian.”
Ian didn’t look away from his own captive. Pretty bad was likely an understatement. Sharp claws, soft neck. The man hadn’t understood his fate before Ian had snarled him into compliance, but Ian thought he’d figure it out very soon.
This other man, though...
Ian gave him a hard eye, took a step in his direction. A stalking, deliberate step, head lowering.
“Hey,” the man said. “Hey.”
“Try sitting down,” Ana suggested, a little starch coming back into her voice. Grim starch, as she, too, realized the likely fate of the man before her, but starch nonetheless. “In fact, try cuffing yourself with whatever you were going to use on me.”
Irate nastiness bubbled out. “You watch yourself, bitch. When Lerche gets his hands on—”
Ian snarled. All teeth, all narrowed eyes, lowering over his shoulders. Taking another step.
“Okay, okay! Whatever!” The man sat as if his legs had gone out from beneath him, which might well have been the case. “Godammit, she stabbed me!”
Oh? Ian cast a glance over at Ana, a twitch of whisker. Good for you.
Her expression in return didn’t give him any warm fuzzies. A grim thing, her mouth flat and her eyes looking trapped rather than relieved.
Ian stalked an unhappy, grumbling path around the surviving Core posse member, flicking his tail in the man’s face as a reminder. The man cursed again, digging into his pockets—freezing just for a moment as he started to withdraw his hand and discovered himself under intense feline scrutiny. “Handcuffs,” he said, snarling the word. “Just like you said.”
Ian sat. Watching. The man snapped the cuffs into place and held them up for inspection. “Okay? You happy now? You just going to let Levv die, or are you going to let me call someone?”
Ana’s voice sounded remote. “Unless you’re hiding an amulet with a miracle working on it, it’s too late for your friend.” She sat back on her bottom, legs lo
osely crossed and the gun in her hand as if she couldn’t quite remember how to hold it.
Because, Ian knew, she’d been through just. Too. Much.
And he wasn’t helping.
He moved to the edge of the trail, making sure the gunshot hadn’t attracted the attention of an early morning hiker. The surviving man glared and Ana cast him a distracted glance, but they were alone in their little tableau, and Ian stepped into the human—straightening and reaching for that place within himself. The one that stood tall and sharp-eyed and still full of the leopard.
Full of concern for the woman who would never be anything but beloved, no matter what she could or couldn’t cope with in the end. “Ana?”
“I’m okay,” she said, and then laughed, a short sound with dark notes to it. “I mean, relatively speaking, right?”
Ian cursed—silently, sharply—and got to work. Gathering the gun, finding the knife that Ana had dropped, stuffing them into the backpack she’d also dropped. He checked the man’s cuffs, ratcheting them down tight without concern for the man’s sneer or the implied threat behind it.
It meant only that he and his buddy weren’t the only ones looking for Ian and Ana, and it was information that Ian was glad to have. He stood and stepped away. “Who drove?”
The man’s sneer only grew stronger, turning an ill-defined face into something ugly.
“Whatever,” Ian said. “If I cut your jacket off to empty the pockets, you’re going to get cold fast. If your pants come off, you’ll be hanging in that breeze. Maybe you’ll have a phone to call for help, maybe not.”
The sneer shifted to narrowed eyes and a mean resentment, but the man’s eyes cut to his partner.
Ian moved around to the other side of the dead man where he could keep an eye on the living, and patted the man’s front pockets. “This is how it starts,” he told Ana, keeping his eyes on their captive. “He goes back to the Core and talks up the way I overpowered him with my animal nature. How his gun was of no use. How I slaughtered his partner.” He risked a glance at her, catching her gaze only for an instant—big and brown and shattered. “I mean, my God! I stopped him from killing me! What is this world coming to?”
“Us,” she said, no strength behind her voice. “You stopped him from killing us.” But she scooted back slightly, leaving the gun behind. “But...look at his throat, Ian. Look at his throat.”
Ian didn’t need to. He hadn’t used his teeth—hadn’t bitten through spine or taken a suffocating hold on the man’s throat. He simply hadn’t put the man’s safety above his own, risking himself to make sure he pulled those blows.
“I know what happened to his neck,” he said, grunting as he rolled the man up to one hip for a better angle into his pocket. The keys came to hand fairly quickly, and he retrieved and reseated them firmly in his grip. “Was it less civilized to use claws in defense than it was for him to shoot me in the first place?”
That got her sharp attention. “Did he— Oh, Ian! Your arm!”
Just a flesh wound. Bleeding freely, hurting badly, through the bulk of his biceps and out again. “Yeah,” he said. “But never mind. I’ll heal, right? That’s what makes it okay to hurt us and hurt us and hurt us, isn’t it? Ask Lerche what he thinks about it, why don’t you?”
She sucked in a breath and stared at him as if she’d never seen him before.
Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe he’d protected her from the impact of Lerche’s actions. From the impact of the Core on the Sentinels.
Maybe he wouldn’t do it any longer.
He grabbed the back of the man’s jacket and dragged him off the trail and into the trees—damned if that didn’t hurt, too, or if a wash of light-headed sweat didn’t flush across his brow and prickle down his back while he was at it. Too much accumulated insult at that, even if this one had made the leopard nothing but mad. Without the amulet working at him, without the clutter of extra chaos in his thoughts, that clear connection to his most basic self remained strong.
Damned strong.
Damned fine.
And nothing to apologize for.
He returned to find Ana standing off to the side, their captive still sitting sullenly in the middle of the trail. He wasn’t into explanations; he hooked a hand under the man’s arm and hauled upward, adding enough of a pinch in that tender spot to inspire compliance. From there he led the man to his partner and pushed him down into a sprawling sit. “Phone?”
The man gave him a wary look but only a momentary hesitation. Lessons learned. “Inside jacket pocket.”
Ian tugged the jacket forward, unzipped and searched first one side and then the other—impersonal and efficient and finding the thing. But when the man grabbed for it, Ian held it just out of reach, just as efficiently thumbing the battery free. The man’s protest died on his lips when Ian tossed the battery at his feet and then hurled the phone into the trees. “Have at it,” he said, and left the man there.
Ana greeted him with a baffled stare. “What did you—?”
“He’ll be a while finding the pieces of his phone,” Ian said shortly. “It’ll buy us some time.” She stared into the trees, frowning, and he sighed. “No, Ana, I didn’t kill him, though I have no idea how badly you might have hurt him with that not inconsiderable knife blade. But we need to get moving. I’m tired of bleeding, and I’d like to try to save my friends now.”
She startled just a little, looking down at her own hands and the blood there. “I did stab him,” she said, her voice low. “I don’t think it went very deep.”
“Doesn’t matter if it did,” Ian said. “Unless you want to buy into the Core mind games and call yourself the monster because you didn’t want to die.”
Her head snapped up. “That’s not fair.”
“Yeah,” he told her. “It is. Come or stay, Ana. Your choice.”
He really hoped she would come as he headed for the parking lot, scooping up the fallen pack on the way. He didn’t think getting behind the wheel of a car was his best choice just now. Especially not as the stench of the car and its considerable amulet presence made its impact on his senses.
No wonder they’d been so clean. They’d divested themselves of workings before setting out. Smarter than the last two, or maybe they’d just learned their lesson.
Or just maybe they knew more of what they were about. It made him wish he’d lingered to question the survivor. If Lerche had called in reinforcements...if those reinforcements were of a better caliber posse...
Just what they needed, if the regional drozhar had gotten involved.
He reached the car, a ubiquitous pale SUV, and unlocked it with a click of the key fob. He yanked a back door open without much care and tossed the pack inside, only then hesitating to take stock of Ana.
“I’m coming,” she said, from only a few steps away. “I’m seeing this through.”
It held no promises, and it gave him little comfort. But it was something.
Chapter 16
“What do you mean,” Lerche said, annunciating each word with precision, “they got away?”
Budian’s voice didn’t hold the respect it should have. “Not from me,” he said. “I’m still keeping an eye on the retreat—not for long, though. Someone’s got to go clean up after Stephan’s mess in the mountain, and there aren’t many of us left. In case you hadn’t noticed.”
Lerche stood too quickly from his massive desk, bumping the backs of his knees against the sturdy chair as light-headedness struck. But only briefly, and he was already on his way to the balcony, throwing the door open to scowl over the rolling foothills that fell away into the city. “If this posse had performed adequately, none of this would have happened!”
“Sure,” Budian said without the convincing note he should have injected. “But things are looking good here. Not a peep from inside the retreat, and no si
gn that the amulet field has so much as a glitch. Plus, I hear that Tucson’s on the way, so I figured you’d want to focus on wrapping things up here.”
“Tucson?” Lerche said the word with a sharp alarm he hadn’t meant to display. Not to Budian—not to anyone. “The drozhar himself?”
“Grapevine,” Budian said as if it was completely acceptable for the man to have received such news before Lerche. “But about Stephan. He’s cuffed out by the trail, and Levv is dead. Scott took their car, and you can bet he’s on his way to the retreat. Not only that, Scott and Dikau must have taken down the first team—they wore our jackets and had our packs. Hell, Dikau stabbed Stephan with one of our issued weapons.”
“Ana stabbed him?” No. No. Ana was his. His to command, his to use, his to own. Pathetic little bitch, her Sentinel contamination too light to be of any experimental use and too heavy to make her of use within the posse.
Ian Scott couldn’t have her. The Sentinels couldn’t have her. She was Lerche’s to spare or to use or to put out of her misery. His misery. His fist clenched within the sling, his other hand tightening around the cell phone.
“You want me to deal with Stephan and Levv?” Budian said, left too long in silence. “I mean, I can stay here, but I figure you want that scene sterilized before anyone from Tucson—”
“Go,” Lerche said, hearing his own voice as if from a distance—a veil of disbelief, and a veil of growing fury. Ana had betrayed him. She’d thought she could break free from him, and she should have already paid the price for that. Instead she dared to work against him—wounding his man, siding with the Sentinel AmTech. Who even knew how many secrets she would betray along the way?
Not that she’d ever known anything of import to begin with. But even one word was too much. Her very presence was too much, and would confirm things the Sentinels might only suspect.
Sentinels: Leopard Enchanted (Harlequin Nocturne) Page 22