Sentinels: Lion Heart

by Doranna Durgin

  Silence. He thought maybe she’d stopped breathing, but then he heard her, fast and shallow; he heard her swallow hard.

  “Do you know how lucky we are,” he asked, tightening his grip hard, “that no one else in the way of that power was a sensitive?” And that it dissipated before it reached populated areas…that they’d been this remote to start with.

  That Joe himself had absorbed this much of it.

  She’d thought she was his jailer. She damned well might think differently now. Not that it truly mattered. Not when Lyn was out there without him. But even with Shea to shield them, to ward them…none of them could sense the power coming. If it surged in flash flood mode…

  They’d go down before they even knew it was on the way.

  “Stay off my back,” he told Annorah, his voice strained. He released her arm, but neither of them moved otherwise, not for a long, silent moment. And then she breathed out the merest sigh, a shaky sound. He eased back, lost in his red-tinged world where the coffee gurgled to completion and the power played newly along his senses in unexpected skittery caresses, constant frissons between his shoulders.

  Where she went after that, he didn’t know, didn’t care. His thoughts went to Lyn…to the hurt at her willingness to leave him behind, to the understanding that she’d had no choice. But mostly to the awareness that she was out there without a warning system, in a world gone awry with power.

  Out there without him.

  The last time Lyn stood in this pool of darkness, she’d been in Joe Ryan’s arms. Oh, true, she’d been threatening to take his head off if he followed through with that you-must-be-kidding kiss—but he hadn’t. And he’d never intended to, as much as she’d seen the hunger in his eyes.

  Honest, that Joe Ryan. Honest then, honest now…honest in Vegas. She couldn’t believe anything else, not any longer. Not after what she’d seen. She’d prove it, too, with her suspicions about those on the list Nick had sent that afternoon.

  So now the Sentinels had failed Ryan once…failed him twice. She couldn’t help but reach for him, even knowing she lacked the skill to break through her own mind’s silence. I’m sorry, she thought at him. If I’d had any idea, I never would have left them in the house. I would have watched your back.

  Michael stood at the doorway of Gausto’s hotel room, one hand held to the door, fingers splayed—not quite touching. His head bowed in concentration, he was for the moment vulnerable in the light. Early-evening darkness covered the rest of them—Lyn and Maks farther down the sidewalk, Ruger lingering against the tree-lined parking lot, Shea by the corner of the building.

  Michael shook his head, took a step back. He lifted his head and said quietly, “There’s something going on here. I can’t quite get a handle on it.”

  “Core blood magic?” Maks said, standing close behind Lyn. He, too, had been in the Sonoita house; he had seen the terrible power of the blood magic Gausto had put into play—forbidden power he’d used so horribly against Meghan Lawrence and Dolan Treviño.

  Michael waited for a couple leaving the adjoining restaurant to reach their vehicle, the doors closing them off from any hint of the conversation. “Blood magic needs someone to draw on it.”

  From the parking lot, Ruger said quietly, “We took the ancient workings before sending him on his way.”

  “That’s why he’s here, isn’t it?” Lyn said, the scowl clear in her voice. “He can’t let the septs prince catch up with him until he’s offset that whole disaster.” There in Sonoita, letting the man go had made sense—between his use of blood magic, forbidden by both the Sentinels and the Core, and his failure to secure the Liber Nex manuscript, it had seemed a certainty that his unforgiving septs prince would deal with him in short, merciless order.

  They’d clearly underestimated the devious layers of Gausto’s game-playing mind.

  Ruger said, “We won’t let him go a second time.”

  Lyn discovered that, to her surprise, she’d grown bloodthirsty. But the Core and the Sentinels danced in too precarious a balance to do anything but capture Gausto and turn him over to his own septs prince—the Core prince of princes. Unless, she thought—a touch too fiercely—he happened to get in the way of his own mishandled machinations of the mountain’s power.

  A polite tone in her mind startled her out of the thought, but it was nothing more than Annorah’s incoming message signal. Lyn growled and Maks’s hand landed briefly on her shoulder; she cleared her throat, embarrassed at that instinctive reaction. Whatever Annorah had done at the house, she was now merely doing her job—and a conversation that Annorah created was one that Lyn could very well join.

  Progress? Annorah asked, a broadcast to the group.

  At the hotel, Ruger said shortly. Working on it. What’s up?

  Annorah’s hesitation reached them all, and Lyn found herself impressed. Few could broadcast such subtleties to casual acquaintances, never mind to a group. Ryan says now he can pick up the power trace even without a surge. He wants to follow it.

  “What do you mean?” Ruger demanded it right out loud.

  After what happened this afternoon…he says it changed— She stopped, as if interrupted, and came back with, sensitized his perception. He says he can follow the disturbance to its root—

  He can’t see. The interjection came from Shea, blunt and impatient.

  Lyn suddenly knew exactly why Annorah had contacted them. He wants us to come back. He thinks we can stop them faster his way.

  He’s got a point, if he’s right, Michael said. We can sort Gausto out later.

  Maks made a disgruntled noise. That’s the thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.

  Well, not exactly. They hadn’t expected to have to “sort Gausto out” at all. They’d thought his own would get there first.

  “We’re here,” Ruger said, an eerie echo in her ears and mind both. “When we get back, we’ll organize a tracer party.”

  Ryan could well be in on this conversation, Lyn knew. That he wasn’t—that he was speaking through Annorah instead of as one of the group—told her how he felt about them. How he felt about himself. Outsider.

  It’s quiet now, he says. It’s safe. Later, who knows.

  “Annorah, this isn’t science fiction. We can’t beam to and fro as we please.” Ruger tugged at his beard and abruptly silenced his outer voice—he, too, had noticed the approaching couple, fumbling with their keys and hauling luggage. Late check-ins. Look, if we were there, we’d follow through. But we’re not, and we need to finish this. If we can get inside this hotel room, we might well find a whole lot of answers.

  Silent amulets, Lyn added, in spite of herself. Disappearing trace. Things they’d need to understand for the future. “Look,” she said out loud as the arriving couple closed their room door behind them, “we’ve got two cars. We could split up—”

  “If anyone on this team was disposable, you wouldn’t be here in the first place,” Ruger said shortly.

  Ryan isn’t disposable, she thought at him, and you left him behind easily enough. But it wasn’t a group communication, not instigated and maintained by Annorah, and so the words went nowhere.

  “Tell him we’ll be back as soon as we can,” Ruger said. “Tell him I get it.”

  And Lyn thought no, you don’t. She thought she did, after watching Ryan at work, sifting through the faint streams and breezes of power. For him to have initiated this contact through Annorah—she who had struck him down—the change must be profound. If he’d been able to perceive faint streams far below the threshold of anything anyone else here could even imagine, what could he do now?

  Follow it while it was safe.

  While it wouldn’t trap him in that gray place. While it wouldn’t turn into a scourge that came down upon them all. While they could deal with Gausto and his gimmicks and tricks from a position of strength.

  While they could save the mountain.

  “Lyn,” Ruger said, the single word an admonishment.

 
; She faced him across the parking lot, from her dark pool to his shadowed tree, both of them able to see perfectly well through the night. “You’re wrong,” she said. “Oh, I’m here, and I’ll do this thing—but you’re wrong. Ryan’s given you a chance to make right everything that happened today, and you just missed it.”

  In the silence that followed her statement, no one disputed her words. And finally, Annorah, faint and regretful, said, I’ll let him know.

  After another silent moment, Shea said, “Right. Back to the hotel room, then.”

  Michael stepped up to the door and went back to work and Lyn couldn’t help but turn away, into the darkness that would be no camouflage against the Sentinel vision around her. Maks stepped away, offering her at least the pretense of privacy.

  Deep breaths, that’s what she needed. Because even if she didn’t agree, even if she wanted with all her heart to run back to the mountainside and stand by Ryan’s side, right now she was here, and she was part of this team. And she was worse than no good if she couldn’t put her heart into that, too.

  Michael shook his head. “It reads clean,” he said, and Maks moved up beside him, an impatient gesture. “They’ve cleared out. No amulets, no nasties waiting.”

  Shea eased in from the corner. “Let’s have a look at the place anyway.”

  “Should I—?” Lyn asked.

  Ruger, too, moved in from the parking lot; even Maks left Lyn’s side to move up on the door. Ruger said, “I think we can assume there’s trace from whatever they were doing. That’s one thing housekeeping will never take care of.”

  Michael snorted. “We won’t muddy it,” he assured her. He’d pulled an electronic card gizmo from inside his thoroughly pocketed leather jacket and had the thin card inserted into the door’s card reader; it only took a moment for the gizmo’s blinking light to glow solid green. By then the others had moved up, leaving Lyn in her puddle of darkness—knowing her strengths, biding her time.

  Until Michael put his hand on the latch, and a brief but intense stench filled Lyn’s senses. “Michael—”

  Michael, too, hesitated, cocking his head slightly. But Maks’s hand was already flat against the door, already pushing it open—and though he jerked his head to look at Lyn, the push was in motion and Lyn cried, “Michael—!” as warning to them all, instinctively flinging herself down to the sidewalk.

  For an instant, the night was silent—for an instant, she had the chance to think about her stinging palms and bruised knees, hard cinders rolling beneath her.

  For an instant.

  And then the darkness exploded in compressed power, lighting up her mind in a green flare so repugnant, so piercing…mental napalm with flying shrapnel, it blew through the men at the door, singeing up along Lyn’s leg. She cried out in the pain and shock of it, turning her face away, her mind filled with a shriek that came partly from the explosion, partly from the combined mental outcry of her team. As soon as she dared, she looked back—knowing that anyone watching would have seen nothing.

  Nothing but a small group of men dropping in their tracks.

  Power tickled at him, called to him…both taunted and enticed him. He drew on it to keep moving, fumbling through the night woods with a cougar’s sensitive whiskers and several years of intensive patrolling to keep him out of trouble.

  “I’m supposed to stop you,” Annorah had said, once it became clear the others weren’t going to respond—that they expected him to sit and wait and fidget as it became more clear by the moment that the day had sensitized him to the even faintest whisper of power flow.

  “You’re supposed to do what’s right,” he told her darkly.

  To his surprise, she laughed—short and a little bitter, definitely tinged with self-recriminations. “No one’s put it in quite those terms before.”

  “Doing what’s right can get you in trouble,” he noted.

  “Did you?” she asked, astutely enough. She sat at his dining room table, a heavy table of interlaced woods that Leandro had made shortly before he’d died. She no longer prickled with the need to take him down.

  “Do what’s right? You tell me. My partner and I had a business where we took care of people. Little things, big things…huge things. Dean took a gig relocating someone who crossed a Vegas crime boss—new identity, new life. I was running a cover job. The client made it out safely…Dean didn’t.”

  “That’s why he was killed?” In the murk of his vision, Annorah drew back, aghast. “Why didn’t you just tell us?”

  Joe snorted. “At first? It never occurred to me that the Sentinels could think I would kill Dean. Under any circumstances.”

  “But later—”

  “It was the right thing,” he said, his tone gentling at her confusion. “Compromising the operation after the fact would only have betrayed Dean’s memory, and ruined the lives of the people he died to save. No, brevis never needs to know. If they can’t believe in me, then…that’s the price I pay for not being there when Dean needed me.”

  “It sounds to me like your job was specifically to be elsewhere,” she said, brisk now, as though that could cover the slight wobble in her voice. When he didn’t respond—not that he could, with the grip of it all in his throat now—she added, “Anyway, it doesn’t seem to have changed anything. However things played out earlier today…you had a part, too.”

  “I did what was right,” he said. “What I needed to. That hasn’t changed.”

  “But—”

  “I do what’s right, when it comes down to being a guardian.” He gentled his tone, hoping she could hear him this time. “Those are the decisions a field agent faces.”

  After a silence, she said, “I’m not likely to get another chance at that sort of decision.” She took a deep breath and made an ostentatious rustle of paperwork. “Whatever. I’m busy here. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t interrupt me for a while.”

  And so he didn’t. He left from the sliding door in his bedroom, the one already cracked in hopes that the two wayward cats would return on their own, still warded on the inside to keep the other two in. He left in silence, so she would be able to say she hadn’t heard him—although it would fool no one, not when she was supposed to be actively watching him.

  Still. They did what they had to.

  He’d run the first mile or so, the trail completely familiar beneath big platter paws, his mind’s eye in complete certainty of his course. Slowly, then, the pull of the power and the trail had diverged, until he couldn’t resist any longer—even though going off-trail slowed him considerably.

  Surely his eyes were improving. Surely he’d gotten a crisp edge there in the corner of his vision, ever so briefly. Surely he’d be able to charge back into speed soon.

  He skirted a blot of darkness that memory labeled a jutting formation of rough cinder rock, clawing up the steep slope beside it—and there at the top, paused, looking back down the mountain into featureless darkness. Not sure why, one foot poised to take that next step, and yet—

  Sudden power blossomed before him, distinct and distant—not only an impact in his mind, but a sharp, unusual yellow-green in his hindered vision. Shards and sharp edges and dagger spikes, unnaturally contained and unnaturally released and yet…the faintest taste of familiarity.

  That’s mountain power, boy-o. Energy that had started out within the Peaks.

  Energy stolen by the Core.

  He found himself crouching up there on his high perch, ears flattened, tail lashing. If they’d wondered what Gausto intended to do with some of his stolen power…

  Lyn! It didn’t matter that he knew she couldn’t hear, knew she wouldn’t answer. LYN! He realized dimly that he’d turned around, that he now poised ready to plunge back down the mountain, all the way back into town if necessary—

  Right, boy-o. Blind cougar headed down into the thick of Flagstaff. That’ll turn out really well for everyone.

  And still he stood there, on the brink of it, while the sickly yellow-green faded i
nto nothing but an afterimage and the hint of power from above resumed its tug on him. Because…

  Lyn…

  Had she been there? Had she been affected? Hurt? Even—

  No. He wouldn’t think of it.

  He took a step closer to the juncture of rock and slope. To the way back down.

  God, Lyn—

  His tail lashed. The power tugged at him. Power important enough to draw him out of the house without backup. Power significant enough to bring him up here with his eyesight still elusive and unreliable. And his own words, words he’d said so easily, so recently—you’re supposed to do what’s right.

  And after all this time, after all this pain, he was supposed to choose between what was right for him and what was right for this mountain?

  He snarled there, crouched on the rock. His claws dug in, breaking off crumbling chunks of the friable volcanic formation; his tail lashed hard enough to smack carelessly into that same rock from behind. Into that dark night he snarled the very agony of decision—not indecision, because the answer was clear enough even to one partially blinded cat. He turned in sudden fury, attacking the tree beside him—shredding the bark, sending chips of green wood flying.

  And then he turned and flung himself into the night.

  Uphill.

  Chapter 19

  T his is what they can do with some of that new power. This, without even really trying.

  Lyn scrambled to her feet, running for them—breathless even before she started to move. “Ruger! Maks!” She reached them, found them sprawled like dolls, hesitated to touch them. “Shea! Michael! C’mon—one of you—come on!” The corruption lingered here, as cutting as acid—but more as a memory of the amulet’s effect than the amulet itself, and even that much faded fast. Dammit, right before her senses the trace was disappearing—

  Later. Clearly, the Core was covering their tracks in some new way. For now, only her team mattered. Michael had fallen within the room; Lyn stood at the threshold and hunted any sign of active trace. She found nothing; she took a deep breath and looked again, even as she bent to shake Maks. “Come on, come on—I can’t drag you all back to the cars—” For they had to get out of public sight, even if it was only to lick their wounds. She had to rouse them enough for that, somehow. Back to the cars and close this door behind them, with no one the wiser.