Ruger coughed amusement—one moment doing it as human, the next as a sharp sound from the back of a bear’s throat. He headed straight up the slope, more nimble than any creature of a grizzly’s size had the right to be.
She expected to be trailing him at some distance when she finally crested the ridge herself—she expected him to be on the scent and ambling forward at a stiff pace. The rain had beat the scent into the ground, stirring soil and scant humus into a mix of rich odors. The trail might be obscured and it had definitely aged, but it nonetheless lingered.
But five hundred yards ahead, Ruger quartered over the ridge. When she reached him, he’d made no further progress at all.
Worse than that—when she reached him, rather than turning to her with his mind-voice, he instead took back the human. Whatever else he had to say, she knew what that meant—the trail was so utterly lost as to be unrecoverable.
“Dammit,” she said. “If I could take the bear to help—”
“Don’t,” he said sharply.
She showed him her teeth.
“It wouldn’t make any difference.” He scrubbed his hand through his hair, leaving it in rakish disarray. “The trail was here...and now it’s not.”
That stopped her short. “Do you think he knows we’re out here?”
He sent her a wry expression. “He’s not subtle. I think we’d know if he suspected we were this close. He probably put this working up when Maks found the first facility.” He put his back to a nearby tree, scratching his shoulder where the long slashing wound had been; his tone turned rueful. “There’s a reason the Core generally keeps its amulet masters away from direct action.”
“Too much power,” Mariska murmured. “Even the Core knows better than to turn them loose with power and the authority to wield it.”
“Too much power,” Ruger agreed, but he didn’t seem entirely dismayed.
Mariska narrowed her eyes, not hiding her suspicion. “What’re you thinking?”
Ruger grinned. “I’m thinking that he’s not a nice guy.” Mariska sent him a tell me something new look, but it didn’t have any impact. “I’m thinking that wherever he is, something is probably hurting.”
He said it as though it had significance. She shook her head. “I don’t follow.”
“I do.” He took a few swift steps to close the distance between them, taking her arms to look down into her eyes. “I can. Follow, I mean. It’s still foggy, but I can target that hurt. I can take us to it.”
She couldn’t hide her surprise. “From here?”
He slid his hands up to her shoulders, brushing one thumb over a collarbone and then up her neck to caress her cheek while he cupped the side of her head. She stood still, absolutely still—floored by the power of that touch and the flood of warm response in her belly, down her spine.
Dammit, she’d only meant to sleep with him that evening she’d hunted him in the park. She’d only meant to enjoy him, to experience his strength and to revel in her own without—for once—worrying about the reaction.
It hadn’t ever occurred to her that he would revel in her in return—or that it would matter so much, so quickly.
He bent his head to her mouth, kissing her with a gentle thoroughness, and when he moved away, that thumb now caressing the side of her mouth, she mourned it. And she almost missed it when he said, “Yes, from here. But I need your help.”
She wanted to hit him for having such power over her. She wanted to kiss him again and never stop. She wanted them safe and away from here, going in any other direction but this one. In the end she didn’t move at all. She said, “What do you need?”
He hesitated; she thought he was finding the words hard to say. “I need you to watch for me.”
That brought a frown. Not because she couldn’t or wouldn’t or even would think twice about it at all, but because it wasn’t anything she hadn’t already been doing. “Of course I will.”
He shook his head; dappled sunlight slid over the rich texture of his hair, finger-combed into a scruffy shape that didn’t begin to defeat the underlying curl. She kept herself from touching it. Barely. He said, “Not like before. This isn’t healing; I won’t go out on you. But it’s...” He hesitated again, his mouth briefly flattening. “It’s vulnerable.”
Ah. The bear who could take care of himself, needing help. Truly needing it.
“Of course I will,” she repeated, more quietly this time. With understanding. And then, in a rare moment of restraint, not saying again that this was why she had come, why she had asked to come—and why she had believed all along that he shouldn’t bear the brunt of double duty in the field. Be the bear; take care of himself. Be the healer; take care of others.
But not both at once.
* * *
Ruger moved blindly through the trees, following the faintest awareness of distress. A small collection of distresses, in truth—hunger and aching and the sensation of being closed in coming so strongly that it bordered on pain.
He’d taken far too long to pick up on the emanations of need—far longer than they had time for, and far longer than he should have. But once he found them, he clung to them with tenacity, moving through the forest with unseeing eyes and Mariska’s hand lightly touching his back as his guide.
I’m here, it said.
On occasion, she applied guiding pressure—avoiding a low branch or rough ground—and when they broke off to dip down between ridges, she pulled him close with an arm around his waist, wrapping him in a combination of strength and curves.
Through the thick veil of interference that had become his world as a healer, the faint sensations led him on.
Until Mariska stopped him, hooking her fingers through the waistband of his jeans to tug gently until he emerged from the meditative state he’d taken, dazed and blinking and with no idea where they were.
“Here,” she said, rummaging in the bag and handing him the water bottle. “Drink.”
He took the bottle without thinking, tipping it up for a few deep swallows and then letting her gently reclaim it—finding it as hard to come away from the tracking as it had been to dig that deep in the first place.
She squirted water in her mouth and swished it around, watching him as she swallowed. “You okay?”
Maybe it was because he was still half in that healer’s awareness; maybe he would have noticed anyway—that in such a short time, the skin around her eyes had gone from rich to bruised, her face an underlying gray beneath the brown tones.
He shook away the remaining daze. “Are you?”
She shook her head with impatience, denying the question—but stopped herself, looking away. Beautiful lips of a wide mouth, even when pressed together for a moment before she spoke. “It’s not good,” she said. “We’d better find them today if we’re going to do something about it.”
Alarm spiked through his thoughts—the instant understanding of how bad it had gotten in order for her to admit it affected her at all.
Unless she’s accepting you. Trusting you. Allowing vulnerability.
“Let me help,” he said, and made it a request.
Maybe because of it, she turned rueful instead of fierce. “Not yet. Let’s know what we’re up against, if we can. I may need to take the bear—”
“No,” he said, refusing the sacrifice out of hand—knowing that even if she managed it, she’d never manage to change back. Or survive the attempt.
She gave him a steady look. “I may need to take the bear,” she repeated. “And if I do, I’ll want to be tanked up on healing before I do.”
“No,” he said, more implacably.
“You don’t know what we’ll be up against.” She remained steady...implacable. “Has Forakkes got a whole posse there? Are they dedicated? Or is he working with a few minions who haven’t managed to break free of him?”
“Or they’re so tainted by him that they can’t,” Ruger added, sensible in spite of himself—in spite of his fears for her.
“The
Septs Prince can’t be happy with him,” Mariska said. “Never mind the new regional drozhar—who’s probably taking a lot of grief from the rest of them. The Core knows as well as we do that if our quiet little war gets loud, they’ll suffer as much as we do. Either way, these guys are probably desperate to succeed. That makes them dangerous. And that means we might need not one bear, but two.”
“Dammit,” Ruger muttered. He ground his teeth together briefly and, without forethought, grabbed her arm to pull her close. “We don’t need to stage a coup. We don’t need to wipe Forakkes off the face of the earth. We just need to disrupt him—to buy some time.”
“So he can get away again?” she said, looking at him with surprise. “Is that what you want?”
“They used rocket-propelled grenades,” he told her. “You can be certain they have guns—we know they have amulets. And we don’t have anything but our personal wards and shields. They won’t stop bullets and they might or might not stop an amulet working.”
“It all depends on the working. I know.” Her face held a weariness that said she did indeed know just that. “Our best option is stealth. Find their air vents and block them. Lure them out one or two at a time. Lurk where we can pick off their sentries.”
He relaxed, if only by degree. “You’ve been thinking about this.”
“I’ve had time.”
Right. Because he’d hardly been a conversationalist while she’d been guiding him through the forest. “Okay,” he said, accepting it. She gave his hand a pointed look; he released her arm. “We’ll do it your way. We’ll pick our time for a final healing. Unless this thing goes too far.”
She met his gaze, then, looking up with less defiance and more resignation. “I think we can pretty much guarantee it’s going to go too far. I know Ian said the working would probably fade, but we’ve pretty consistently underestimated the awfulness of Eduard Forakkes. So if we can’t stop it, it’s not your fault.”
He’d been trying not to think of that possibility—and now he found himself unprepared for his reaction—the fierce denial, the heavy guilt...the wrench of what it would cost to lose her.
“Shut up,” he told her, taking her recent words and trading the sharp tone she’d used for something no less intense but infinitely more gentle. “Just shut up.”
“Make me,” she suggested, a hint of her usual spark showing in her eyes.
He wrapped his arms around her, bringing them together for a crushing kiss, not waiting for permission. She didn’t wait, either—she dropped her hand to cup him in a bold caress, one that made him instantly hard. He pushed into her hand, and felt her smile beneath his lips; he pulled away to pin her with an aggrieved expression.
She laughed—though the spark was back in her eye, and a bit of color on her cheek. “Remember that, the next time you think you should go macho on me.”
“I didn’t think I went macho,” he said, stalking far enough away from her to regain control. “I did go macho on you. And it made you shut up, too.”
“Whatever you say, dear.”
He couldn’t help a double take—still aggrieved, still aroused so profoundly that shifting himself didn’t ease it...he wanted nothing more than to throw them both down to the ground and take her until both their eyes crossed.
Mariska laughed out loud. “Later,” she said, and sent him mind-voice shorthand—quick glimpses of shifting bodies and frantic hands and heavy breathing, heavy moans.
He groaned.
Later, she’d said.
He’d damned well make sure they had a later, then.
* * *
Ruger came out of his tracking daze with a lurch and a stumble and no idea how much time had passed since Mariska had stopped him for their break. He straightened to find he’d tripped over nothing physical at all—and that the energies he’d been following had turned dark and cold, a void of imperceptibility.
“What’s wrong?” Mariska’s arm tightened around his hips, her touch both practical and as unselfconscious as only a lover could be. “We haven’t gone far—maybe a quarter mile.”
Ruger kept his voice low, pulling himself back into focus as quickly as he could—scanning the rugged area around them without much success, not quite there yet. “They’re gone.”
She stiffened slightly. “Dead?”
“No, just...gone.” He managed his bearings—finding the sun, getting some sense of their orientation, seeing that they stood in a dip between two sharp crests, and seeing that the logging road cut up close behind them as it wound along the base of that crest, nothing more than two strips of dirt barely rutting the ground. Dread crept along the base of his spine.
“Cone of silence?” Mariska guessed. She shifted uneasily, checking over her shoulder.
“Something like that.” He nodded at the road; his feet itched to take it. “We were right. There’s the logging road—the long way out.”
“The easier way. Maybe we should—” She stopped herself from finishing, rubbing the heel of her hand over one eye. “I was going to say we should take it. But that doesn’t make any sense. Nothing’s changed—this is still what we need to do. Forakkes wouldn’t have taken out the other installation if he wasn’t ready to move...we’ve got to stop him. There’s no time to hike out of here.”
“It’d take us a day,” Ruger said, shifting uneasily, still halfway to heading for the road regardless, the impulse so strong it made him frown.
“We don’t have a day.” Mariska looked up at him, rueful again. “I don’t have a day. You’d end up carrying me.” And still, she shuddered against him, her dread palpable. “I just don’t know...I don’t know we can do this—”
He turned to her, suddenly enough that she drew herself up with wary eyes. It didn’t stop him from taking her shoulders, or even from pulling her aside, finding a massive ponderosa trunk as cover. “It’s a working,” he said, the certainty of it breaking through the dread. “Remember Maks’ report? He ran into one when he first found signs of the Core in this area. No hiker would ever come through that gap and into this area to stumble over what’s here. And it is here, somewhere. We’re close, Mari, very close.”
She frowned with resistance, caught up in the dread and unable to break free, to see that it wasn’t her own. He gave her a little shake—a patronizing thing, diminutizing her.
She didn’t bother with a slap or a kick to his shin or a good stomp on his foot. She drove her fist into his stomach, a swift, sharp blow for which he wished he’d been more ready. “Son of a—” He bent over himself, a hand pressing beneath his ribs.
Mariska blinked, more surprised, if possible, than he was. “Ruger! I didn’t mean— Dammit! What did you do that for?”
“For that,” he said, a little wheeze behind his voice as he straightened. “The dread working. To get you back to yourself.”
“I’m right here. I—” She stopped, considering—looking around as if this little patch of forest now appeared entirely different to her. “Oh,” she said, wincing. “I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. “We’ve done enough sorries,” he said. “Are you good now?”
“I can still feel it,” she told him, and annoyance crept into her voice—at Forakkes, at herself, at the situation. “But it doesn’t have a grip on me anymore.” Her expression hardened. “That bastard.”
He grinned at her, not feeling much like a healer at all. “Time to let him know how we feel about it.”
She tipped her head at him, wary in an entirely different way. Strands of her braid had come loose again, curving around her face in a perfection of disarray; in spite of the pallor behind her color and the faint wrinkle of her brow he’d come to recognize as a sign that her head ached, she looked herself—alert and ready to go. She asked, “What are you thinking?”
Mine.
The internal response came unbidden—the most honest, most personal answer to her question. You are mine. He swallowed it back. “I’m thinking we should just knock on the door.”
She looked around the area in the most meaningful way—trees and bush and rugged ground, rocks sporadically scraping to the surface, and all under a bright blue sky with only a hint of building cloud. “Door,” she said flatly.
“Cameras,” he said, feeling almost cheerful about it. “You can bet they’re here. Somewhere. Got wards up?”
Weariness briefly haunted her eyes; she shook it off. “Give me a minute. I never was much good at knitting.”
Shields came easy to many—but they required a constant energy drain, and for some, constant attention. Wards came in knots and lines of energy, a woven pattern of protection that, once placed, held until dismissed. But not everyone could set them, and fewer yet could set them well.
Ruger took her hand, and said, “Me, neither. But we need to be ready. We’re right here. If we make him impatient enough, he’ll send out his posse.”
“You hope,” she said darkly, but closed her eyes and bit her lip, her hand twitching in his in an unconscious echo of the ward she wove.
Ruger watched her—the sweep of black lashes against her cheek, the furrow of concentration in her brow, the faint flare of nostril in her straight, long nose. He watched her too long, in a moment not made for such indulgences, until he finally forced himself to look away and inward, pulling energy together for his own wards.
* * *
Ciobaka lifted his lips in a squint-eyed grin as Tarras approached Ehwoord’s work area and hesitated beside his little jail. Small cages lined the back of the table; the middle cage held a small, flailing creature that had once been a giant tiger salamander and now wasn’t anything much at all.
Ciobaka lifted one paw to show Tarras, flexing his thumb-claw to display the newly sharp, poisoned nail at the end. “Hurt ’oo.”
Tarras spared him a scathing glance. “You stupid creature,” he said, his voice low. “Don’t you see what he’s doing? Don’t you know that you’ll be next?”
Ciobaka’s paw fell limp, dangling on the upraised leg so that now he only looked the supplicant. “Naht!”
Kodiak Chained Page 18
