Gausto stalked the room, his temper boiling big enough to fill the entire space—a phone at his ear and a snap in his voice. Orders, demands…setting things to right. Sending out hunters. The words settled in through her ears and sifted out to make sense in her head. We can’t have anyone wondering how a damned pack of wolves came out of nowhere. Take care of them!
And then she realized she wasn’t alone, and she forgot that she was caged. Nick. Her mouth opened; her voice and tongue and lips wouldn’t quite form the word. She responded with instinct, dropping to nudge him—and remembered again that she had no muzzle, no scenting nose…and withdrew.
Nick. She’d meant to save him. To drag him out of this place over her back, if she had to. But she hadn’t known that one of Gausto’s people, upon finding the coat she’d dropped, would know which amulet controlled her. Or how to use it.
Nick. He sprawled against the far bars of the cage, limp where they’d flung him—askew and boneless, muscle relaxed and tendon not so much as twitching. A trickle of sweat ran down his temple above a face paled in shock; that wayward forelock splashed over his brow. Blood soaked his broadcloth shirt and puddled over the concrete floor.
Gausto knew how to hurt. Those barbed tranquilizers, close range…this one had gone deeply into Nick. Had been yanked with a careless hand.
On hands and knees, she made her way to him, ignoring those outside. She knew from experience…they would do what they would. Until they approached this prison again, they were of no consequence to her.
“Nick,” she said, and this time her voice worked. She touched his arm, his hair, his face. Almost made it. Her pack free, the amulet in her possession…missing only the badly needed information about the stealth workings. “I’m sorry.” She tried to feel of him—inwardly, that sense of his thoughts that had struck her without warning since they’d come together that morning—and found nothing. Gone, when Gausto had yanked away the deepest part of her being.
Weak. Without her strength, without her heart. Only what she had learned of herself in her brief time of freedom with this man. For he’d been hers from the moment he accepted her invitation at the fairgrounds—the moment they’d shed human skin and human manners and flung themselves into the wolf and into the desert. Deeper than the amulet she’d triggered on him, deeper than her unwilling alliance with the Core, deep enough so that he hid her from his own people.
Mine.
She laid her head on his arm and watched Gausto through slitted eyes—and realized then that some part of her hadn’t yet given up. Some foolish, leftover defiance remained. Her three sisters still needed freedom. And if she couldn’t stop Gausto outright, maybe she could—somehow—slow him down.
Nick shifted; she raised her head. “Be careful,” she said, barely a murmur—not for Gausto’s ears. “You are hurt.”
Pale green eyes showed dazed through half-raised lids; he rolled to his side with a surprised grunt of pain, uncoordinated at best.
“Drugs,” she said, close to his ear. “Be still. They wear off.” He quieted under her hand, his breathing hitching with his internal struggle. Jet crouched beside him…not just being, but being with him.
Gausto hardly spared them a glance. Supervising the speedy restoration of his work space, exchanging a few pointed words with his assistant, exchanging a few even more pointed words with one of the men who had accosted Jet in the desert—a man now taking the blame for letting them in. The man snuck a glare at Jet within her prison; Jet lifted her head and showed her teeth in a feral smile.
Nick took a sudden deep breath, and all his vulnerability somehow went with it. He stilled; he pulled away from her without moving at all. No longer sharing himself with her. In that single moment, Jet went from being with him and being part of something back to…
Just being, after all.
She made a small sound of protest.
He pushed himself upright, moving as though he’d never been drugged at all, or as though bright blood didn’t well freshly against his shirt. Insouciant, sitting against the stout bars of their prison. “Gausto,” he said, and his voice was clear and loud, and those pale green eyes were clear and bright, and they hadn’t once looked at Jet.
Gausto broke away from berating his staff. “Carter. How nice to see you functional.”
Nick smiled in a way that Jet recognized as threat. A show of teeth. “Hard to kill, aren’t we?”
“If you think that was my intent, you were mistaken, though I admit a certain carelessness.” Gausto moved closer, gesturing vaguely at the bloody floor. “But then, I know the punishment your kind can absorb. In fact, you went down more easily than I expected.”
The amulet. It had affected him. Jet had known it, had seen it in him—even if he had waved it off. She opened her mouth—and Nick cut her off. Didn’t look at her, didn’t acknowledge her, simply…spoke right over her.
“It’s been an off kind of day,” he admitted. “But you know…” he shrugged. “I’m feeling much better now. And I won’t be alone here for long.”
Gausto smiled. “You may allow yourself to think that, if it sustains you. But I have dampers in place around this property—so of course you haven’t made contact with your brevis. No one knows where you are. In fact, I believe they just barely know you were alive as of this morning.”
Jet glowered at him, but Nick only lifted a shoulder, apparently without concern. Even though he’d been right. A leak within brevis; a strong one. Trust no one.
“Truly,” Gausto said, “this whole show of yours was pretty much pointless.” His ruddy anger had faded; satisfaction took its place. He glanced at Jet with a lidded and proprietary gaze. “I still have a few pets to play with, if I even need them.” He nodded at the nearest cage—took a few stilted steps closer to the distorted creature within, his hand caressing the bars. “This man failed me early this morning—Jet no doubt recognizes him. His active resistance to the working was a significant error on his part—he need not have turned out this way. But he is the still first non-Sentinel human to turn wolf.”
Jet hadn’t recognized him…but she did now. There, in the mass of wolf haunches and gray fur and limp tail and a distorted face that wasn’t one thing or the other, she found hands. Familiar hands. Wounded hand, wounded wrist. She recoiled.
Nick’s attention wandered to the sight, wandered away. Disinterested. Distinctly unimpressed. “Congratulations.”
Gausto ignored the slight. He stroked a thoughtful thumb over his lower lip, nodding. “You, of course, have gained nothing. A few wolves freed? They won’t last the week. But you’ve lost your freedom, and soon enough you’ll wish you had lost your life. Your new bitch—” was that hurt, briefly shadowing his eyes? “—already wishes the same for herself, I believe.”
Nick’s dismissive glance evoked a deep, twisting pain within Jet—a wound that threatened to topple her, bereft as she was of wolf and self. He propped up one casual knee, resting his arm on it. “She had nothing to do with this. She’s nothing more than what you said. A tool.” His smile came dark, along with another little shrug. Jet’s astonishment burst out in a little growl. And when Nick raised an eyebrow at it, she realized suddenly…was he laughing at her? Or was it pure condescension?
Gausto’s lips thinned…but only for an instant; he abruptly shook his head. “She came back for you, Carter—hadn’t you noticed?”
Nick snorted; a wince flashed across his features, barely perceptible. Gausto didn’t seem to notice at all; he turned briefly away to receive a murmured report from the woman, nodding shortly to her. Nick said, “She’s a wild animal, Gausto. She just reacted. Or did you think yourself such a Pygmalion that you’d created a perfect thinking woman?” He snorted again; sweat had gathered at his temple. “You’re an arrogant son of a bitch, I’ll give you that much. No, she didn’t have any idea I was using her to get into this place.”
Gausto’s eyes narrowed; he gave Jet a good long look. Jet—impotently human, aching and hollow and empty
and listening to her new and chosen pack disown her to the enemy—growled back.
Nick snorted again in response; it seemed to leave him breathless, but then in the next instant he was as strong as he’d ever been—strong enough to worry Gausto like a wolf worries prey. “Good God, look at her. She doesn’t care that she’s stark naked, or that your men ogle her at every opportunity. Or you, in case you thought I hadn’t noticed. But she’s just an animal.” His fingers worked the small wood buttons of his dark broadcloth shirt; he jerked it off his arms and wadded it into a bundle and threw it not to Jet, but at her.
She let it fall to the floor. She saw the involuntary flutter of muscle and pain and she saw his face pale and she knew, as well as she knew anything, that he was indeed hurt, he was somehow covering what the drugs had done, what the deeply impaled barbed dart had done…what the amulet had done. But for that moment, the silent cry of concern flailing around inside her went numb. For the moment, without moving, she withdrew; she became only herself again.
She’d been wrong to worry about losing him.
He’d never been hers.
Chapter 18
Marlee followed them through the executive office floor. Not all of them—Meghan and Treviño headed to the ops department to gather up gear for what they intended to be a strafingly sudden strike.
“Nick appointed me in his stead,” Lyn had said. “And he said trust no one. So hell, no, we’re not going through any channels. I don’t even want the gear requisitions on paper.”
Marlee must have stared in surprise, for Lyn gave her a wry little smile, plenty of self-awareness in her expression. “Didn’t expect it of someone as rule-bound as I am?”
Marlee had tried to find a response, only to be waved off. “Never mind,” Lyn had told her. “Neither did I. But here we are.” And then she’d led the way to find Anthony—and the closer they got to his office, the more Lyn’s expression flickered. Until at last, outside his office, Ryan and Max at her back and Marlee along simply because they didn’t have anything else to do with her, she sneezed.
Ryan shot her a sympathetic look as she wiped beneath her eyes, and then she stepped up to the door and gave it a matter-of-fact series of raps.
Anthony’s muffled response came with irritation; after a minute, he opened the door, already talking. “It took you long enough,” he said. “I don’t know why you can’t fix the phones centrally—” and then he realized he wasn’t talking to tech support at all. His expression flickered with poorly concealed disdain, and then he smiled. “Ms. Maines,” he said. “Mr. Ryan.” And he nodded at Maks, who stood back slightly. If he saw Marlee, hanging back in the hallway, he showed no sign of it. “How can I help you? The consul’s schedule is full for the day—”
“Is he in on it?” Maks interrupted—so congenial that even Marlee missed his meaning at first—until she realized that Maks had simply gone right for the throat.
If Anthony understood it, he pretended not to. “Excuse me?”
Lyn turned impatient. “Dane Berger,” she said. “The consul. Boar, Sentinel…leader. Is he in on whatever you’ve got going with Gausto?”
Anthony opened his mouth, the protest already clear in his frown. And then he did see Marlee, and his lips thinned, and a faint flush rode his cheeks and neck. “Marlee, Marlee, Marlee. What have you been up to?”
“The thing is,” Marlee heard herself say, “I’m not entirely sure any longer.” She stepped closer. “I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought I was ensuring balance. But now I don’t think that’s what was happening at all. All the little things I did, over the years…they were much more than I thought, weren’t they?”
“You flatter yourself,” Anthony said, the curl of a sneer on his lips.
But the other three were looking at her, startled. Lyn voiced it for them. “Over the years?”
“The e-mails I should have gotten from Carter,” Ryan said, realizing it—warming to it. “And Dean—don’t tell me you had anything to do with my partner’s death in Vegas.”
“No,” she said. “Nonono, I would never—just little things. I mean, I thought.”
“Dolan’s monitio,” Lyn said suddenly. “The one he sent when the Core attacked him on Meghan’s land.”
Panic fluttered in Marlee’s throat. “No, I swear, that wasn’t me! I wouldn’t interfere with a monitio even if I could—” not with the Sentinel’s silent Mayday, rarely heard and always critical “—and I can’t!”
Maybe the truth of it was there in her voice. They turned from her back to Anthony; the man gave a sullen shrug, slim shoulders beneath a designer brand shirt. Perfectly turned out, perfectly capable of presenting just the obsequious, overgroomed image that kept the consul—that kept any of them—from taking him too seriously. “Dean Seacrest covered for your shortcomings all your life, Ryan. I guess he paid for it.”
Ryan didn’t give any warning. From Mr. Affable to strength and power and threat, all in a single breath. And in the next—
“Joe,” Lyn snapped, putting herself between the two men. “He probably knows about the clerk who sold Dean out.”
Marlee got the impression they were the only words that might have mattered. Ryan pulled himself up—took a deliberate step back. But he didn’t take his hard gaze off Anthony…and Anthony, finally, began to squirm.
“You didn’t do it for the balance at all, did you?” Marlee realized. Not if he was, somehow, blocking monitios. “You did it for what you thought you could get out of it.”
“Of course he did,” Lyn said. “Didn’t you?”
“No—I—no!”
“Consul probably put him up to it,” Ryan observed, confusing Marlee—the consul had nothing to gain from working with the Core; they could offer him no more power than he’d already enjoyed these past years. “There’s no way he could pull off half of what’s gone on here.” He exchanged a glance with Maks, a nod. “Yeah. We need to find Berger.”
Anthony snorted. “That doddering old man? For years I’ve—” his voice cut off as Ryan exchanged a grin with Lyn. Berger, cleared. Anthony’s mouth twisted on an unvoiced curse; he glared at Marlee. “You bitch,” he said. “You’ll pay for this.”
And Marlee said, “I know.”
Nick closed his eyes as they came and took Jet away. Affecting boredom, hiding weakness. Still trying to control his breathing—taking everything he had to keep his hand from creeping over to grasp his arm, easing the ache in the muscle behind. Below his shoulder, high in the lats—he’d been lucky. Lots of flesh to tear, lots of blood to bleed…no joint to destroy.
Of course, Gausto wasn’t through with him yet.
Nor with Jet, to judge by the collar he now secured around her neck. She stood before him with her head up, her shoulders back—wearing Nick’s bloodied shirt in a gesture that felt more like defiance than acquiescence. Wearing it in spite of me, to be clothed at all. It had been his intent—and his great relief when she’d slipped it on.
Light chains dangled from the collar—token chains, too short for control, but long enough to hit her chest as she moved. Amulets shone dully, clinking against the links. And in spite of her brave posture, there was something missing from her presence—some powerful, crucial piece.
Satisfied, Gausto caressed her jaw—a strangely lingering touch—and stepped back. He said, “Jet, my most excellent pet. I need to know what you saw at Carter’s home. What you learned.”
Nick thought of the phone numbers she’d so instantly memorized—and what else she’d so casually had access to—and closed his eyes. If she wanted to, she could slash Sentinel security wide-open. Maybe not such a good idea, alienating her.
Just trying to keep you safe, Heart.
But he knew she couldn’t hear him. Not any longer.
“Jet,” Gausto said at her continued silence. “Little bitch. You know how this goes. You know I’ll get what I want. You can either have what you want, too, or you can pay the price of resisting me.” He eyed her. “Or di
dn’t you realize that I can give it all back? You can be yourself again.”
Jet regarded him with steady dignity, there with the shirttails of his bloody shirt just barely covering her ass; her athlete’s legs looked impossibly long and lean as they emerged beneath. “Show me.”
Gausto looked over at his assistant and lifted his chin slightly. The smaller man clutched possessively at the lab coat of many pockets, although the pocket contents were now mainly spread out over the exam table. The woman who’d been tending him shot Gausto an annoyed look, but she stepped back with submissive body language and said nothing. And while the chaos continued around them—shouting and slamming doors from outside the room, the clatter of industrial pail and mop, even some hammering—the man went unerringly to the correct amulet, and touching it with two reverent fingers—
And suddenly Jet seemed just a little taller. Just a little more proud. Strength filled her in visible measure, and she looked at Gausto with defiance boiling unto fury.
Nick felt it from her. Not the clear, pure sharing he might get from another Sentinel who had opened to him, but something deeper…something more profound. As much a part of him as he’d ever been a part of himself. And if he felt her…
Jet! he said, surprised by how hard it was. Her back might have stiffened faintly; he tried again. Heart—
But then Gausto said, “You see?” gestured to the lab assistant, and the man again touched the amulet, dull stamped metal turned malignant with workings, and Jet doubled over with a cry.
But she didn’t fall, and she didn’t cry out. She slowly straightened, and if she was again less than she had been that moment earlier, she was still magnificent.
Nick had no idea if she’d heard him. She hadn’t so much as twitched at the sound of him.
“Unfortunately for you, my pet,” Gausto said, “you’ve never been able to hide what you’re thinking. Not from me. Remember that. Vasilisa will escort you to your room now, and see to it that you clothe yourself. You will ponder your offenses there—and wait for this conversation to continue. And Jet—” He smiled thinly at her, “Don’t underestimate her. You will behave yourself, or she will punish you. And I believe she holds a grudge.”
Sentinels: Wolf Hunt Page 17
