Sentinels: Lion Heart

by Doranna Durgin

  Ruger nodded. “That can work,” he said. “Shea and I can go out with you, maybe even Michael, our amulet expert. Lyn will have her backup. Maks takes the tiger, so he’s muscle, too, when it comes to that. Annorah will stay here, work communications hub. Stay in touch with Nick via IM—”

  “I don’t think so,” Joe said dryly. He tipped a thumb at the casita. “She can stay there. She wants to talk to Nick, she can give him a call. Or if she’s that good at comms, she can do it that way.”

  “I’m that good,” Annorah snapped. “But it’s a stupid waste of energy when you can provide access right here in your—”

  “In my office,” Joe finished for her. “In my house. Where I don’t trust you.”

  “Joe—” Ruger started, with all the makings of placation behind that single word.

  “No.” He said it with decisive finality, and not without rancor. “Of all of you, she’s the one I trust least. She has fears about me, and no field experience to put them into context. She hasn’t learned the difference between pushing and crossing lines. She scared the hell out of my cats and then she put them outside.” He glared at Ruger, spared a glance for Annorah’s shocked and even somewhat hurt expression, and shook his head—too aware that his vision grayed at the edges from the tainted power they hadn’t even noticed yet, but needing, if nothing else, to make this point. “She will not be in my home while I’m gone.”

  Ruger raised his hands, heading for placation—but his words weren’t quite there. “About that,” he said. “I think we need to talk.”

  Ah, he was going to pull rank. Or something. Joe ignored it. “Where’s Lyn?” he asked. She was the one who understood about the power—who understood how he’d need to deal with it if it surged high. She would have felt it by now, he knew—she’d become sensitized in the past days, and more alert. “I need to talk to Lyn.” He hunted her from where he stood—the sound of her, the sense of her. His internal focus narrowed, driven by a sleet of pain. Shield from it, and miss the subtleties of what’s happening…of what’s about to happen—

  There she was. Distant. Concerned. Her voice raising in question. “Are they inside? I need to talk to Ryan….”

  Ruger’s bass obliterated those faint words without care. “You know as well as I do—we’ve got the authority to turn this place into a temporary ops base. Your situation is too damned precarious for you to give us crap about working here. If you’re as eager to settle things here as you say, you’ll—Whoa. Hey, man, you’ve got a nosebleed going there.”

  Lyn’s voice, a little louder. “You figure out the amulet. There’s power coming in, and I need to make sure—”

  “Ryan,” Ruger said. “Joe. You with us?”

  “Don’t trust him, Ruger—don’t get too close.” Annorah sounded distant, far beyond Joe’s concern just then. Lyn was coming. She’d hold them back, buffer him while he sorted out this power wave. She’d—

  His head lifted; his eyes half-closed, rolling back slightly. Good God. There it came, bearing down on them, a huge flash flood of power coming directly for this house—as if drawn by the Sentinels…or maybe just by Joe himself. They’d feel that one, all right—it would flatten them, flatten anyone with a connection to power. Lyn. It would blast her from the inside out…it could even kill her, as exquisitely sensitive to trace as she was.

  “Ryan—” And if Ruger’s voice held concern, it also held warning.

  No time for that. The power tumbled down for them, a massive roiling and angry mess of damaging eruption, faster than any real flash flood could ever travel. Joe gathered himself, pulling power from within, and pulling it from all around them.

  “Ruger!” Shea said sharply. He felt it, then—felt something, anyway.

  Annorah, too. “He’s pulling power, Ruger—! You saw what he can do!”

  Ruger’s voice rumbled closer. “Ryan! Don’t!”

  “Ryan!” Lyn’s voice, clear and cutting over it all—the washed-out gray of his vision, the endless shards of pain, the immensity of effort to focus, to gather himself—to aim at that flash flood and split it asunder, wedging himself and his power into place against the rushing onslaught. Extending himself, feeling it roar around him, pressing against him. Locking his knees when they wobbled, clenching his fists, clenching his jaw, clenching his whole body—

  Only when Lyn’s voice turned to dismay did he falter. “Ryan, no! What are you doing?”

  She didn’t understand. It was coming too fast, still too distant. She wouldn’t hold them back. She wouldn’t buffer…wouldn’t shield. Not from the very real physical confrontation now threatening the inner world he saved…not from the Sentinels who were supposed to be of his own.

  “Ruger!” Annorah cried, panic in her voice. “If you don’t, I will—!”

  “Joe,” Ruger said, a warning far from Joe’s conscious thought. If he stood aside to face them, they would go down. The hell with them. Lyn would go down.

  Lyn cried, “Ruger, please—”

  It was all the warning he had. And he did the only thing he could. He jammed all his intention, all his ability, all his pain-ripped concentration, on driving into that flood, on splitting it farther and wider, on splitting it irrevocably…

  “Ruger, no—God, Joe, stop scaring them! Just stop it! There’s no reason for thi—” Her voice broke off, and when it came back it held a thin, sharp note. “Oh my God. Shields, people, shields!”

  “I told you,” Annorah snarled, dim in Joe’s awareness, and metal worked against metal right before a sharp popping explosive sound and sharp explosive pain and what have you done, little fool?

  “Annorah!” Ruger shouted, with the frustration of someone who knows he’s too late. And then, with the sounds of a struggle, “No, Lyn—leave him. We don’t know—”

  “I know,” Lyn said, panting, that struggle evident in her voice. “Let me go!”

  And quite suddenly Joe couldn’t quite concentrate any longer. He slipped away from his wedge of power; he watched it wash away in the flood, watched the flood reshape itself, reclaiming some of its former path. His numbed fingers groped over his chest…found the tranquilizer dart. His vision returned just in time to fade again. One knee quite suddenly went out from under him—the other followed. There he wavered for a moment, finding Lyn’s desperate face, finding her arm secure in Ruger’s grip in spite of the way she reached for him.

  And then, as he flopped to his side in the pine needles and cinder gravel and packed dirt, his hands still twitching with his attempt to take back control and his inner sight completely blinded, she turned on Ruger. “He’s not shielded—I told you—”

  Ruger snapped, “Shea!” and Annorah suddenly cried out and Lyn repeated desperately, accusingly, “I told you!” And the world came crashing down and it landed on Joe Ryan.

  Chapter 17

  L yn found herself huddled against Ruger’s astonishing size. She’d come to trust him in Sonoita—seen him treat Dolan Treviño with compassion before anyone else understood the truth of what drove the man.

  But he hadn’t stopped this from happening. And now he and the rest of the team crouched together, finally understanding what had come down upon them if not how or why, everyone’s shields at full and Shea’s layered over all—while Lyn and Lyn alone reached out to cover Ryan. Teeth gritted, panting slightly with the effort, she still managed to demand of Ruger, “Help him.”

  Not that she blamed them for not seeing it coming. She almost hadn’t seen it herself.

  She should have. She should have known—should have been able to read Ryan’s posture, his strained features gone sharp and a little bit hollow. She shouldn’t have given so much weight to Annorah’s fear, to Ruger’s wariness. “Help him!” she repeated, crawling away from the protective huddle.

  Ruger easily caught an arm around her waist. “Shea.”

  “It’ll thin what’s around us,” Shea said.

  “We’re all holding shields,” Lyn said. “Ryan has nothing!” Not strictly t
rue. He had her. But against this? God, what if this was more than just a surge—

  “Ruger,” Annorah whispered, voicing that exact thought. “This isn’t it, is it? This isn’t—”

  Ruger snorted—but gently, not disturbing anyone’s concentration. “None of us has shields enough for this mountain if it really blows.”

  “Got him,” Shea said after a moment; Lyn sagged with relief. And there they waited, listening to each other breathe—Ruger slow and deep, Annorah agitated, Shea barely discernible at all, so deep was his concentration. Lyn’s breath hitching on emotion, her eyes fastened on the lone crumpled figure of a Sentinel tranked and left to face this tsunami of power on his own.

  “He didn’t deserve that,” she said, her voice small, trembling with the tension of her body. She took a breath, steadying herself—and Annorah erupted, incredulous.

  “Are you insane? You’re the one who warned us! God, he just about went into a trance right in front of us, calling this down!”

  Lyn took Ruger completely by surprise, a twist and a lunge, a swift grab at Annorah with an ocelot’s speed—faster than the bear, faster than Annorah’s human reflexes. Still on the ground, on her elbows with her fists wrapped up in the soft material of Annorah’s simple boat-necked shirt, jerking the other woman in close. “You,” she said, “are an idiot. This is killing him. Do you get it now? He couldn’t call that power down on us without calling it down on him—and it hits him a whole hell of a lot harder than it would hit any one of us!”

  Annorah, already pale, shrank back from her—and had nowhere to go, not with the four men crowding in around them, all crouched down low in an instinctive duck-and-gather-against-the-storm reaction. And now it raged outside them, outside all these layers of shields.

  “It better be enough,” Lyn said through her teeth. “You’d just better hope it’s enough.”

  Ruger’s hand landed on her shoulder, tightening in warning. But Maks shook his head. “Hell, Ruger, you think it’s a small thing, one of us takes another down like this?”

  The strain of the shielding showing in the muscles of his jaw and down his neck, Shea said, “Could be she was mistaken. That’s not a chance we could take.”

  Lyn shoved Annorah away from her, exaggerating the release, her fingers splayed wide. “You think? Or did you happen to notice that things didn’t get bad until you tranked him out?”

  Disbelief wrote large across Annorah’s face—and then she shut down, shaking her head. “I was too late, that’s all. It could have been worse.”

  But at Lyn’s back, Ruger rumbled in what could have been interest—or could have been disbelief. “You’re saying he was holding it back?”

  “I’m saying he felt it coming long before you even imagined it.” Lyn looked at Annorah as she said it. “I’m saying that he not only protected you, you have no idea what he went through to do it. This corrupted power is poison to him!”

  Annorah only shook her head again. “And you believe him?”

  Lyn growled deep in her throat, lost for words—her mind filled with the sight of Ryan sagged against the rental car after exposing himself to save the family at the gas station, at his dazed struggle after the contact with the museum artifact…to his lost expression out on the deck, when he’d gotten trapped away from himself.

  Michael saved her the trouble. “Just offhand,” he said, “I think she believes him.”

  Lyn finally found her words. “I’d rather work with him than you,” she told the woman. “Anytime. He’s pushed himself to the limit to cover my ass…repeatedly. But you’d take down one of your own rather than risk your own fears.”

  Something in that got through to the woman; she twisted away.

  “Doesn’t really matter now,” Ruger said. When Lyn glared at him, he shook his head. “It matters, but…it’s been done. There’s no undoing it. When this fades—”

  “Soon,” said Shea, no longer looking so strained. “Now, if we want. It’d be unpleasant, but not unmanageable.”

  “A moment,” Ruger said. “But even if he comes out of that trank a happy team player…Lyn, it’s not going to happen. He’s out of this one.”

  “What?” She let him turn her with the hand that had never left her shoulder. “Why? Ruger, he’s the only one we’ve got who can manage this kind of power—”

  “And maybe we need that, and maybe we don’t. If we tackle this from the Core end of things, we’ve got enough team. But even if we didn’t…do you really think we can trust him, after this? If you were him, would you trust us?”

  Lyn closed her eyes—first to think about it, and then in defeat. “No,” she said. “If I was him, I’d tell you to fuck off. But you have to understand—” How to explain his dedication to this mountain? To its widely varied peoples? “He should be able to answer that question himself.” If he’s able.

  Ruger gave an abbreviated shake of his head. “There’s too much at stake.”

  She put a hand on his wrist where his hand still lingered on her shoulder. “Just ask him. He’ll tell you, one way or the other.”

  “Oh, right,” Annorah snorted.

  Ruger tipped his head at her. “That’s it exactly. It’s not a matter of whether he’s trustworthy. Not anymore. It’s a matter of whether enough of us trust him. Given more time, we’d work it out. But this is just a taste of what will happen if we don’t stop Gausto’s clueless stooges from tapping this mountain.”

  “But…” Lyn’s voice fell to a whisper. She looked over Annorah’s head to Shea, who nodded, and to Michael, who shrugged reluctant assent. To Maks, who couldn’t meet her eyes. She didn’t bother to look at Annorah at all. “That’s not right. It’s not fair.”

  “Not to Ryan.” Ruger agreed more readily than she ever thought he would, tightening his hand on her shoulder in a manner that was meant to be comforting.

  She shook it off, sat on hard dirt and grinding cinders and wrapped her arms around her knees. “I couldn’t understand how someone so basically generous and honest could be so cynical about brevis. I guess now I do.”

  “Lyn,” Ruger said, and his attempt to speak gently merely lowered his voice to a rumbly undertone. “We’ll make sure it doesn’t get out of control when it comes to debrief. But we have to work with what we’ve got…however we got here.” He glanced at Annorah. “You won’t be in the field again on this one, Annorah.”

  She took it like a slap, and Lyn should have felt some satisfaction at it—at the “But—” Annorah couldn’t help but say.

  Ruger stopped her. “What’s in play is in play. You’re a big piece of that.”

  She should have taken some satisfaction in it. But all she could do was look outside their safe little group to the rangy, limply twisted form of the man who could ride power…and who had been taken down in its path by his own.

  And still Shea shook his head, and still Ruger kept a tight hand on her shoulder, as if he sensed that she would bolt out from under the shields at the first opportunity. Out of desperation, Lyn reached for Ryan with her inner voice. Ryan. Ryan.

  Nothing. No response whatsoever. Not so much as the stray tickle at the back of her thoughts, just the dull sound of thoughts going nowhere. Dammit. After a lifetime of being perfectly comfortable alone in her own mind, she suddenly couldn’t bear it? “Ryan!” she called, giving in to that futile urge. “Ryan, please—!” Please what? She didn’t even know. She gathered herself…

  “Lyn,” Ruger murmured.

  “No!” She turned on him, fierce and fed up. “Shea has shields out that far. I have shields out that far. If it’s enough for him, it’s more than enough for me.”

  Ruger exchanged a glance with Shea; Shea gave a little shrug. Ruger’s grip eased and Lyn scrambled away, never quite making it to her feet.

  “Ryan,” she breathed, hands hovering for a moment, not quite sure where to touch, how to touch. Gently, she turned him, bringing him back to rest across her knees—and gasped. Blood from his nose, blood from his mouth, blood
from his ears…Oh, God, blood from the corners of his eyes, and he stiffened under her hands, his breath faltering with pain. And when he cracked his eyes open, the whites, too, were bloodred….

  “Ruger!” Her horror put command in her voice, and damned if he didn’t respond to it—albeit after the faintest of hesitations. He loped on over and knelt across from her, cursing softly. She glared. “I told you,” she said. “I told you all.”

  “Quiet,” he said, brusque if not unkind. “Let me look.”

  She’d seen this before—seen him work his own wonders, as he had with Dolan Treviño in the highlands of Sonoita. But this time, she didn’t like his frown—didn’t like the look on his face at all. “He’s bleeding everywhere,” Ruger said, and not quite matter-of-factly any longer. “What the hell was he doing, standing up in front of this?”

  “Stopping it,” she said bitterly. “Turning it. And if your precious communications expert had let him finish, it wouldn’t have done this. He would have turned it away from us all.”

  He spared her a quick glance, one hand resting on Ryan’s shoulder, one over the center of his chest. “You’re assuming.”

  “No,” she said, her voice tight but her hands ever gentle as she held him. “I’m believing. I’m trusting. I might be too late in that…but I’m doing it.”

  From the remaining huddle, Shea called, “It’s passing—I’m dropping the extra shields. Hold your own and you’ll be fine. I’ll keep ’em on Ryan.”

  “Good,” Ruger said, not looking away from whatever his inner sight showed him; his hand moved from Ryan’s chest to his solar plexus. “Bring my bag, will you?”