Sentinels: Wolf Hunt

by Doranna Durgin

  “No!” Jet snapped at Gausto, her hands on Nick’s arm, touching his shoulders, his torso…lying flat against the constant bloody seepage just below his ribs as if she could heal him with that touch. “You give us this! You have everything else you want!”

  Gausto snarled. He hovered far too close…but he held back.

  Nick found Jet’s face—found all the worry he’d felt, his fierce protective dominant bitch. He dragged her close for a hard kiss, readily ignoring the sounds of surprise in the background. She returned it, matching his intensity—drawing back only when he grew breathless. He coughed against his arm and then staring briefly, stupidly, at the blood sprayed across his skin.

  Jet saw. Jet knew. He caught that whiskey gaze of hers and held on hard and tight, even as he spoke to the team. “He’s stalling,” Nick said, a raw voice in a powerless throat. “He’s expecting help. Son-of-a-bitch is just enjoying himself until then. Don’t play it, Jet. Don’t give away your life—” And coughed again, holding his side as if he could hold himself together, while Jet held her hands over his and nudged his face with a dozen little kisses.

  “If I cannot have you,” she said, “then I must have the choice that lets you live.”

  Too late, Nick thought, and then winced and knew the mistake, for instantly Jet grew fierce, and she bit the line of his jaw.

  “No!” she said. “It is not! I’m doing this thing, and then you live!”

  “Heart—” And had to double up over the ripping sensation deep within.

  Ryan’s voice rose over the sound. “No worries,” he said, that matter-of-fact manner that only a fool took for lack of intent. Ryan, at least, had a plan.

  Nick glared anyway. “Don’t let this happen,” he rasped. He’ll take her and leave you surrounded by Core! He projected the thought, out of breath—Lyn was deaf to it but Joe stiffened and Maks snarled gently and Dolan Treviño came running up the hallway from behind, paws slapping the carpet, thunderous intent charging along with him and oh yes, they understood now. Core incoming. Black jaguar and now ocelot and cougar, splitting up to take the room—to surround them.

  Gausto’s nerve failed him. He snatched Jet’s chains with careless teeth, directly over Nick—and Nick found strength he hadn’t known he’d had left. He exploded upward, launching in under Gausto’s head. Jet’s shifting energy washed through him; her snarl followed. His fingers clawed through a harsh, greasy coat and Gausto flung his head, swinging Jet against Nick like a weapon but too late—

  Nick’s hand closed around hot-cold metal. He found the energy resonance; he matched it. He poured what little he had left of himself into the amulet—a sudden, piercing blast until it flared beneath his hand and crumbled away into dust.

  Nick fell away; Jet landed beside him. She shifted back to long limbs and black hair and strong, exotic features—and if she had a quickly swelling bruise beside her eye, the blood now smeared alongside her nose and mouth wasn’t hers at all. She took one look at Nick and one look at Gausto—looming over them, pinned in place by swelling energies—and scrabbled back, dragging at Nick—frantic and for the first time sobbing with it. Her leg failed her and she fell heavily, and suddenly Lyn’s hands at Nick’s arms dragged him back with swift care, and Joe Ryan at Jet’s side—and a jaguar standing guard to their retreat, black-on-black rosettes gleaming subtly in the stark overhead lighting.

  Lyn, gasping with effort, said, “No amulet—he’ll revert,” while Marlee Cerrosa, whatever the hell she was doing there, said, “How the hell did he do that?” and Ryan, grim and intent, said, “Who the hell cares—we can plow through backup but we’re going to be carrying a dead man if we don’t do it now.”

  To which Jet snarled, turning on him—and then cut off cold.

  For Gausto fell heavily, keening a high, thin shriek and twisting, twisting, black energy spiraling around him. His cry crescendoed to a scream, loud and agonized; he caught Nick’s gaze, his flat, piggish eye bulging in terror. The dark energy sucked in around him, obscuring him, tightening down hard—an imperfect working, thrashing itself to death in reversal until—

  Implosion.

  And then there was nothing. No Gausto. No wolf.

  Nick spat blood. He panted into the silence, harsh and shallow. Jet came to his side, her hands on his body—soothing, touching, owning. Desperation, there, and plea. He found her gaze again—hunted for reassurance. Gausto is gone. Brevis is secure again. You’re safe, and you’re free. Your pack will be safe and free.

  Instead he found himself frowning. “Why is your hair wet?” he asked, and then his eyes rolled back in his head and that was that.

  Chapter 19

  Nick hadn’t expected to hear Maks’s voice.

  To be truthful, he hadn’t expected to hear any voice at all. He struggled, trying to put meaning to the rumbling undertones, and realized he’d been hearing conversations all along. Light voices, prodding him. More serious voices, hushed and concerned. Boisterous voices, luring him. And Jet’s voice, Jet alone…sweet voice, singing to him. Calling him.

  But never more than snatches of words, because words were still too hard.

  Until now.

  Maks must have been sitting beside him. The voice held lazy tiger in the sun, power coiled within, waiting and ready…restrained. “Today,” he said. “Or tomorrow. He’ll open his eyes and start ordering us around—as if he’s still the only one who can hold brevis together.”

  “That’s the way it’s been,” Ryan said—an uncommon amount of understanding for a man who had once nearly been ruined by Nick’s belief that he had been suborned by Gausto’s machinations. “Might take him a while to get out of the habit.”

  “We’ll take care of it,” Maks said. Simple words, for a man who habitually said little and who had said even less since his profound injuries in Flagstaff. Simple but confident. Strong again.

  Ready for the field, Nick thought, and then found himself struck by sudden amusement at the assessment. Maybe he’d open his eyes and start ordering them around at that.

  His eyelids, however, rested with absurd gravity over his eyes.

  Ryan must have been pacing. Missing his mountains, no doubt…restless to return to home turf and his power wrangling. How long—?

  Nick’s amusement faded. He had no idea. How long?

  “It’s going to take the Top of the World to deal with the stench of that working,” Ryan was saying. The Top of the World…his own private little power-surfing perch at the height of the San Francisco Peaks. When he spoke again, his voice came from another part of the room. Restless, all right. “Jet…she’s a different taste altogether. What Gausto put her through—” anger, there, just a quick shot of it “—but as clean as they come. Just different. Where is she, anyway?”

  “Hey,” Lyn said, from the room’s doorway. Critical care section of the brevis medical center—a place Nick knew all too well from the worrying side of the equation. “She’s out on her walk therapy. Marlee’s showing her around.”

  Doubt rumbled in Maks’s chest—no real words behind it. Lyn’s response came closer. “It’s actually part of her rehab. She’s made remarkable strides, considering the way the Core has interfered with her—since childhood, dammit. We should be protecting our children better than that.”

  “You can’t find them all,” Ryan murmured, although her quest to root out dark Sentinels hadn’t diminished in the least since their time in Flagstaff.

  “I can try,” Lyn said, acerbic in response—but she added, “whether we’ll ever be able to trust Marlee with brevis again remains to be seen, but she doesn’t get out of here until we’re satisfied she’s stable. And anyway, she likes Jet.”

  “Nick’s not going to like it,” Ryan pointed out.

  “Hey, until he’s more than incoherent mumbles again, I’m the boss.” Breezy, that. Too breezy. Incoherent mumbles, my wolf ass!

  “—ass!” he said out loud. Not with much coherence.

  He managed to open his eyes for the u
nfocused sight of three Sentinels taken completely by surprise, all converging at bedside and babbling at him until Lyn managed to shoot a silencing glare at the men. “Nick,” she said. “Do you need anything? What did you say?”

  Answers to the first question also seemed likely to involve the word ass or possibly hell damned ow sonofabitch, so he skipped it. “How the hell am I waking up alive?”

  Ryan grinned—a satisfied expression. “We beat feet before the Core backup arrived—you were right, he’d signaled ‘em. Treviño grabbed that motorcycle—turned out to be Jet’s—and ran interference for us…we might have broken a few speed limits getting here.”

  “Damned mess,” Maks said.

  “He means,” Lyn said dryly, “that your spleen is gone, your lung was collapsed, your diaphragm punctured…and of course your liver is bruised and there are ribs broken everywhere. You didn’t have a whole lot of blood left, either. You might get out of that bed in a week or so, just because you’re Sentinel. Truth is…no one’s sure how you survived—except that maybe a certain someone didn’t want you to die.”

  “Me,” Jet said, there in the doorway as if she’d quite suddenly appeared. Nick saw it in the eyes of his Sentinels, then—the recognition of what she was, the core of her wolf striking a wild note that echoed amongst them. Wolf who just happened to look human at the moment; human who would always be wolf.

  “Heart,” he said, and they moved aside for her—and if she came into the room with a slightly uneven gait, that’s all it was. The healers had done well for her.

  Just the sight of her did well for him.

  She came straight to the bed, usurping the spot by his side—owning it. She wore scrubs, but he already knew her body too well—the slouchy loose garments did nothing to hide it from him. Something hummed between them; she smiled at him, whiskey gold eyes wise and warm and as always just a little bit untamed, and it startled him to realize…this is what we have. This is what it would be like when they weren’t desperate and hunted and wounded unto death. An undertone of connection, pleasure responding to pleasure and building into—

  He couldn’t even imagine. Didn’t want to imagine, with an audience. But Jet knew, and she picked up his hand and took it to her mouth for a small wicked bite of greeting. “Gausto is dead,” she informed him.

  “The amulet,” he said, hunting his memory for the sterling bright recollection of closing his hand around it, destroying it. “That working should simply have reversed when the amulet was destroyed.”

  “It was flawed,” Lyn told him, her glance taking in Marlee as she, too, appeared in the doorway—much more hesitant than Jet, but relaxing slightly as no one turned on her. “Joe felt it…I felt it. Deeply flawed. Far more complex than they gave it credit for. And since when have you been able to do that?”

  Nick looked straight at her—the woman he’d taken into his trust as his second—and he said, “Do what?”

  She narrowed her eyes—definite undertones of we’ll talk later. But when she spoke, she told him, “The Septs Prince has made noises, but they’re token. Gausto was way too far over the line. They can’t even whine that we have the stealth amulet blanks…we’re making headway on studying those.”

  “And no more of your people are dying,” Jet informed him. Nick glanced at Lyn, who closed her eyes briefly and held up three fingers. Three. That’s what Gausto had cost them this time. But no more. Jet caught the byplay—Jet caught everything—but she touched his face and drew his attention back to her eyes, and the fierce wisdom there. “My pack is healing and then they will go home. And Marlee is showing me everything about your world, the things Gausto never let me see.”

  And then they will go home. Nick lost his focus for an instant, drawn away by sharp and sudden understanding. By fear. And then they will…

  Jet. Wolf in being. Wild in soul. Beyond what he could ever know, and the one woman who set him free to fully be who and what he was meant to be.

  And then they will…

  Jet turned those eyes on him, more fierce than ever. “They go home. I am no longer what they are. I may not be what you are—”

  “Oh, who is,” Marlee muttered, reaching out to tug Lyn’s hand and pull her away, drawing Ryan and Maks in their wake.

  Out the door they went, closing it behind them—so no one was there when Jet sat on the bed, or when she bent over Nick to put those wise, wild eyes so close to his.

  Without her pack, now. Caught between two worlds. She who had shown him what it was like to strip away the complications and find the heart of himself.

  “Jet,” he said, his voice breaking on it—searching for words when he didn’t really need them. She knew. Heart.

  She knew as she touched his face; she knew as she settled more firmly beside him and she knew as she drew his hand to her chest and splayed it flat over her heart, her sweet voice husky-lilted with the music of the wilds. “Not what I was, not anymore. Not what you are, ever. But together—”

  “What we are,” he said.

  And knew it to be true.

  All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.

  All Rights Reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises II B.V./S.à.r.l. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the prior consent of the publisher in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  First published in Great Britain 2010

  Harlequin Mills & Boon Limited,

  Eton House, 18-24 Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey TW9 1SR

  © Doranna Durgin 2010

  ISBN: 978-1-408-91708-4