Sentinels: Lion Heart

by Doranna Durgin

  “Ah,” Shea said. “The noxious superbrew.”

  Ruger muttered, “It’s going to take more than that.”

  It brought a chill to Lyn’s spine, there in the heat of the summer day. She looked away long enough to find Annorah, to catch her eye and to command without apology. “Go inside and find a towel—dampen it.”

  Annorah did not argue. And Maks said, “I’m going to do a circuit. There could be fallout.”

  “I’ll come with you.” Michael showed no interest in returning to the amulet that had so intrigued him before the surge; Lyn caught his eye, stricken, checking to see if she read him right…that the surge would have obliterated what clues had been left to find. He gave her the slightest of shrugs—an apology—and headed out after the other man. Moments later the woods relinquished a brief flicker of flashing electric blue, barely visible against the daylight.

  Annorah came out with a kitchen towel, warm and damp, and handed it over with impersonal distance. Ruger didn’t appear to notice her—but he spoke nonetheless, startling her. “Annorah. Take my laptop. Hook it up to Ryan’s router. Nick is waiting to hear from us. See what you can learn about brevis’s take on this surge.”

  “All right.” Annorah straightened, as composed as if she hadn’t just faced the man she’d injured so badly.

  “Annorah,” Ruger added, catching her as she stepped away, waiting until she stopped, still without ever looking at her. “Don’t touch anything else. Don’t look at anything else. Don’t snoop into anything else.”

  “All right,” she said, more subdued at that.

  “And leave that trank pistol here with me.”

  Annorah hesitated; she looked at Lyn and looked at Ryan and finally looked at Ruger again. Then she pulled the little pistol from the front pocket of her tunic and set it quietly on the ground. With another glance at Ryan—a more uncertain one this time—she hurried away.

  Lyn glared after her—but only for a moment. Later for that. For now…there was Ryan. The blood ran down the side of his face, mingling with the dark tracings at his hairline; she wiped at it, and the corners of the mouth she had so recently kissed—just last night—and she realized she had also done this very thing just the night before, and she wondered how much one body could take, Sentinel or no.

  And that’s when Ruger shook his head. “There’s too much,” he said. “I don’t have the resources…”

  “No,” Lyn said fiercely. “We do not take down our own and leave them in the path of danger and then give up on them!”

  Ruger shifted from his inner vision to look at her—to glare at her, his eyes a remarkable gold-brown at this close distance. “No one’s giving up. But—”

  No buts. “Ryan,” Lyn said, pressing the damp towel against his face. “Ryan, Ruger needs something to work with. He needs resources. Power. You can do that, can’t you?”

  “Lyn, he’s nowhere near conscious. And he’s better off for it. The most merciful thing—”

  As if she was going to listen to that. Not when it could make the difference—and not when Ruger didn’t know. Didn’t believe. Didn’t trust.

  As Lyn finally did.

  She leaned over him, leaned close—close enough so their lips just barely touched. She reached out to him—that sublime textured taste of him, the baritone hum faltering now, the sensual vibrations muted—and drew him into herself. She filled every nook, every cranny, reveled in what somehow was this time less arousing and more completing, and let it reverberate back out to him. Then she whispered to his lips, “Ryan. Ruger needs energy to heal you.”

  So many things all at once, then—his eyes, half opening to stare blindly in her direction, and then his body stiffening, jerking against the agony of internal damage everywhere, anywhere. The muscles on his neck corded; his breath grunted out, turned to a long groan.

  “What I said,” Ruger muttered. “More merciful—”

  “Ryan,” Lyn said, struggling to get the words out through the stranglehold of emotion in her throat, “Ruger can help you. But he needs power.”

  “It’s not an Internet shopping cart, Lyn,” Ruger said, though his hands never stopped moving, never stopped assessing. “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “You don’t know him.” She held him as he twisted against her, his breath harsh and panting, fresh trickles of blood replacing the ones she’d so recently wiped away. One of her tears joined it, escaped despite her best efforts to blink it back. “You don’t know what he can do. Ryan, listen. Ruger needs—”

  That was all she got out before Ruger, too, stiffened. Before he swore copiously and creatively, yet never hesitating to work with the new power he suddenly had. He went in fast and deep, his trace thickening perceptibly—musky to her taste, a sharp burr to her inner sense, underlaid with a vibration so low in tone as to be nearly subsonic.

  It left her alone with Ryan, helpless to do anything but stroke his face and croon, kissing his temple and the strong angle of his cheek. His breathing came ragged; his torso trembled with tension. She wasn’t even sure he knew she was there…at least, not until his hand crept up, hunting hers. She took it, then, though her eyes widened with the desperation behind his grip. But she held it close; she tightened her hold on him through her shields, knowing he’d feel that embrace if he could feel anything at all.

  It might have gone on forever, there in the hot afternoon sun. It went on long enough for Maks and Michael to return; they sat on the porch bench. It went on long enough for Annorah to reemerge from the house and sit beside them, while Shea sat on the ground and dozed against the house. Lyn stroked back the dark, short hairs at Ryan’s temple and realized they were naturally short—that the same went for the hair behind his ears and at his nape, and that his brows were more like that short dark hair than the tawny strands so wont to scatter over his forehead. She realized that the strength of his hand went right through to his fingers, that even his blunt-cut nails reflected the cougar with their sturdy thickness. She understood, then, that his body held strength she hadn’t yet imagined, beyond the lean muscle and sinew all flowing so gracefully one to another, long legs to defined flanks to flexible torso broadening to those straight shoulders. Because then, finally, Ruger lifted his head—and although his eyes were dazed with fatigue and sweat glistened on his skin, his face held hope. It held expectation.

  “Tell me,” she said, and though it was meant to be a demand, it came out in a whisper.

  He nodded, sitting back to swipe a forearm over his brow. “Yeah,” he told her. “It’s good. Still needs some clean-up healing, the sort his body needs to do on its own—but it’s good.” He shook his head. “Good holy hell, woman. Do you know what he did? Do you have any idea how impossible that was, a dying man plucking out power and handing it over all nice and neat? Any man handing over power like that? Brevis had no idea, I can tell you that much. This is one Sentinel who’s never been used to full potential. Nick is going to shit bricks when I—”

  “No!” Lyn lifted her head, horrified. “You can’t tell him!”

  It took him by surprise. “Lyn, he has to know.”

  She shook her head, more emphatically than she’d intended. “They’ll never leave him alone. And if they decide they don’t trust him? Think about it, Ruger. He’s known what he could do. Yet he took what brevis dished out, he lived by their rules, he was still living by their rules when we came crashing in to blame him all over again.”

  “You don’t know that he wasn’t involved in that Vegas thing,” Ruger pointed out.

  “I do,” she said, and realized she believed it. “I do, and I’m working on proving it. And meanwhile, he deserves the benefit of the doubt. Say something, and you ruin the rest of his life. Wait, and…all you’ve done is wait. For now.” She hesitated—saw the doubt on his face. “Please,” she said. “You know I like Nick. I trust him. But this…” She shook her head again, glancing over at the team at the bench. “No one needs to know this. Not yet. Please.”

  Ruger
looked away. “Damn,” he grumbled, and she knew she’d at least bought some time.

  Ryan took a sudden deep breath, and Lyn realized what she hadn’t before—that his body had relaxed, that while small spasms of pain sometimes took him, he no longer trembled with it. His color, once pale beneath the natural tan-to-gold hue, flushed to normal. “Hell,” he said, half rolling over to sit up and getting only that far before falling back—Lyn caught him, and held him perhaps a little more tightly than she might have. “Now that was a wild ride.” He frowned. “I’m not even sure what…” He stopped, shook his head; a hand went to his chest. “Did that—did she shoot me?”

  “Trank,” Ruger said matter-of-factly.

  “Son of a bitch,” Ryan muttered. “She let the cats out and she shot me? She is so out of here.”

  “I’ve got the trank pistol,” Ruger told him. “But she stays, because she’s what we have.”

  “Don’t worry,” Lyn said. “She takes a step wrong, I’ll shred her.” Good God, she even meant that, her voice fierce and edged with a little growl. Just like an untamed teenager, feeling Sentinel strength for the first time. She might have blushed—but Ryan was grinning. Ryan liked it. “You fool,” she muttered, and bent down to kiss him—to kiss him long and hard, so fast caught up in it that Ruger had to clear his throat to get her attention again. She lifted her head and glared at the interruption, at which he laughed out loud.

  “Okay,” he said. “I get it. But we’ve got Core to find and tie up into little knots.”

  “Yeah, let’s talk about that going after the Core thing,” Ryan said. “Because I still think the key is up on the mountain. And I’m kinda wondering how long this thing with my eyes will last.”

  Lyn drew back to look at him—to look at clear, beautiful dusky hazel eyes, open to the sunshine…and not quite looking at her.

  Not quite looking at anything.

  She shot Ruger a glare, full of accusation. Ruger himself started, and took Ryan’s head between his hands, dropping into a quick but obvious inner sight and coming out of it with a sigh of equally obvious relief. “Can’t tell you that, exactly,” he said. “But it’ll clear. You bled everywhere, man. Some places clear faster than others. Eyes aren’t one of the fast ones.”

  Ryan stared off into his murky view of not quite anything. “Fix it?” he suggested.

  Ruger snorted, clapping him on the leg. “You don’t half want, do you? Sorry, man. This one is what it is. I saved your sight and your life. Let’s stick with that. And here—you’re going to want some of this restorative…” He reached for his backpack.

  The team on the bench came immediately to life. “No, Ryan, don’t do it!” “Run while you can!” “Save yourself!”

  Ruger cast them an annoyed look. “He doesn’t have to—I’ve already done that. But I’ve got a new formula I need to try out on a few volunteers, if I should hear of any.”

  Immediate silence.

  “Impressive,” Ryan noted. “But seriously, the eyes—”

  Maybe Lyn was the only one to notice the little furrow of worry between his brows, or the extra tension flaring his nostrils. Or maybe not, because Ruger said, “They’ll get better. Now come on. Let’s talk about grabbing us up some Core.”

  Chapter 18

  J oe stood on the deck with dusk all around him and shook a cat treat can, calling out with a short, deep purr—or as close as he could get, here in this human form. Maybe this was what it was like for most people come dusk and nighttime, this diffuse and murky vision, everything ill-defined and sometimes barely there at all.

  Though he doubted any normal person saw through the dark bloodred hue now tinging his vision.

  They’ll get better.

  Okay. When? Because Joe had things to do.

  Or maybe not.

  Maybe he’d been left behind in poorly disguised house arrest that would probably have disintegrated into handcuffs had it not been for these eyes of his.

  Even by Lyn.

  He shook the treats, called out into the woods. “C’mon, cats! You think I don’t know you’re right there?” But his coaxing tone belied his words, and he added another little purr right there at the end. After that he was silent, listening…hoping for the rustle of movement.

  Utter silence.

  On the other hand, that meant the birds were in hiding, too. Yeah, the cats were out there all right. He scattered a few treats across the deck and made his way back inside, setting the can just inside the door and feeling his way to the stairs.

  Not that he blamed Ruger for this mess. The man had been exhausted, even with the trickle of power Joe had fed him. No, Joe knew who to blame.

  She with the trank gun. She with the attitude. She with no field experience and too much fear and no damned business being anywhere near this mountain. Son of a bitch.

  She who now played the role of jailer.

  Annorah kept her silence, but he heard her moving around—keeping track of him, never quite letting him out of sight. But this was his home. He headed down the stairs with an easy step, one that defied the remaining fatigue and the aches threading through his body, the occasional jolt of lingering pain. They’ll get better. At the bottom of the stairs he hesitated…not through uncertainty, but struck again by the feel of Lyn’s hands on his face, in his hair, on his chest. Her tears on his skin. Her desperation in his ears. All things to which he had clung only an hour or so earlier.

  Right. Before they’d left him here. With Annorah. Not because they didn’t need him, and not because a power wrangler needed eyes to go to work. But because Ruger had seen too much, knew too much. Because they didn’t trust him.

  With Annorah, who had killed Mrs. Rosado.

  He found that he’d sat on the bottom step somewhere in the middle of those thoughts, his forearms resting over his knees and his head tipped. Without his clear vision, the whispers and rustles of power seemed louder…or maybe it was just his imagination. Maybe it was simply his attention going undivided.

  I could have helped, dammit.

  Instead, Lyn was out there without him, guarded by a man who was doing nothing more than his job. Not that he had any reason to doubt Maks. But no one would watch Lyn’s back better than Joe.

  He pushed to his feet, caught the brief sensation of movement against his calf, and leaned down just in time to snag himself a cat. A pretty little tortie girl, to judge by the soft nature of her fur and the slight heft of her body. “Hey, you,” he said, and lifted her up to face level to present himself for greeting. She rubbed her face against his chin, and then just as abruptly changed her mind and nipped him. He laughed and set her lightly on the tile, heading to the kitchen.

  There he did a quick inspection of the counters—it was no good assuming things were as he’d left them—but found them clear. At that he began the comforting ritual of making coffee, barely hesitating even though the coffeemaker was a mere gleam of a sleek shape and the cabinet interiors proved to be nothing more than dark mysteries. Almost meditative, it was.

  But not so engrossing that he wasn’t completely aware when Annorah came up beside him, watching his every move, as if he needed to be supervised in his own kitchen. She no longer had the trank, he knew that. But she had something—something she thought gave her the edge, a false confidence.

  She’d not been working with field Sentinels long if she harbored such illusions.

  He left the coffeemaker to hiss and gurgle to itself; he turned to the island counter, to rest his elbows there. To wait. After a moment she let out a long breath she probably had no idea was so perfectly audible and turned to go. He didn’t see it; he didn’t have to. He struck, all the speed of his cougar, driven by anger. Driven, even, by a cat’s penchant for play. Not a nice kind of play. He snatched her wrist; he pulled her back. He felt the clench of her hand and slid his own up to it, where he wrested away a stun gun. Little fool. Classic Sentinel defense against the Core for urban encounters—quiet, nonlethal, and it didn’t leave dead bodies s
cattered around. But even enhanced by their field ops techs, it was never meant for use against their own.

  For good reason. It never had a chance.

  She cried out as he jerked her closer, tossing the stun gun away on the counter. He growled under his breath, his lip lifting ever so slightly. A warning. And he said, as it struck him anew, “You killed her. You killed my friend.”

  She tried to break away—but he quickly felt the defeat in her. “I didn’t know.”

  Because she’d taken Joe down, and he’d lost his power wedge, and the power surge hadn’t been split quite enough, hadn’t diverged widely enough. While the bulk of it had missed his sturdy log home, one wing had swept directly over Mrs. Rosado’s house.

  She had been human, not Sentinel. But she had been a modest sensitive. And she had been aged and vulnerable.

  And she had died.

  Michael had reluctantly reported it as they’d regrouped in the late afternoon; they’d found her in the yard with the little dog when they’d done their circuit of the area. In the background, he’d heard Lyn gasp, her soft, “Oh, no,” genuine and grief-tinged. Ruger had cursed, with equal feeling. And Michael…he started to describe how the dog was protecting his mistress, and couldn’t finish.

  Annorah had said nothing, even as she made arrangements to notify authorities and distant next of kin. It hadn’t been good enough then, and it wasn’t good enough now.

  “That’s the way it is, out here in the field,” he told her, his voice gravelly with both grief and anger. “You did more than take me down—you did more than nearly kill me. Jury, judge, and nearly my executioner—all on your first time out. Good for you, eh? But this isn’t just between us, Annorah—this isn’t just a Sentinel thing. That’s the whole fucking point. We guard this earth against what our enemies do to it. We protect those who know nothing about the forces in play between us. And if you forget that, and you somehow think it’s about you in the moment, then you damned well end up killing wonderful old ladies you should have died to save.”