I am only a dog. I am only chewing.
Ciobaka’s paw-hand closed around the key.
Chapter 21
Mariska flexed her hands; she ran them down her body. She searched herself for aches and pains and that debilitating sense of imbalance she’d carried for days now—and then, free of it all, she scrambled out of their little hollow and dared to reach for the bear along the way.
Mariska Banks, who takes the bear.
And she did, surging into her bear with accustomed ease. When Ruger emerged to unfold to his full height, she charged for him, as delighted to see him stand his ground as she was to leap at him. She reached for the human just in time to wrap herself around him, ankles hooking at his hips and arms around his neck.
“Feeling better?” he asked, just enough of a dry tone to make her laugh; his hands quite naturally cupped her bottom, supporting her. She kissed him by way of answer, and then, feeling the strain on his side, slipped away to her own two feet.
“No headache!” she said. “No lead feet! Now, let’s see you.” She turned him around to the sunlight, running her hand over his back. The peppered little wounds were nothing more than pink spots and scabs, some of them hard to see around the dried blood. She glanced overhead, hoping for more rain, but the afternoon thunderheads weren’t voluminous or dark enough to be promising.
Her inspection grew more tender at the site where he’d been impaled. That wound was far from closed; it even still trickled a pale glisten of fluid—probably from her rough treatment of moments earlier. “Sorry about that,” she said, running a hand down the ridged muscling of his side and abdomen.
His skin twitched beneath her fingers. “Worth it,” he said, but he put his hand over hers, pulling her attention from his injury to his eyes. “Mari,” he said. “You were right. You’ve been right all along. And you were the only one who had the strength to say it and make me hear it.”
“Bear to bear,” she told him, stunned at the pleasure his words gave her, at the warmth of them in her chest.
He shook his head. “Mariska to Ruger.” And this time, when he framed her head with his hands and bent to kiss her, she knew what was coming—she knew it would be less celebratory than it was tender, and less fierce and needy than it was giving. Than it was asking.
She answered in kind, opening of herself to kiss him long and deep—and most of all, aware. He couldn’t quite seem to let go of the moment—ending one kiss to begin another, this one full of regret at the inevitable moment when they would stop being two people in the woods—two lovers in the woods...two people who loved one another in the woods...
To start hunting again.
“Ready to go find some bad guys?” she asked. It surprised her anew when he held her tight, taking her up in his arms in a way that must have caused him no little pain. Then he took a deep breath, his chest expanding against her—the hitch in his breath so obvious with her head resting against him—and kissed the top of her head before he stepped back.
“Bad guys,” he agreed. “Though it would be good to find water along the way. I lost a lot of blood—even forced healing won’t replace it if I can’t stay hydrated.”
“Healer talk,” she said. “So sexy.” He snorted as she added, “With all the rain we had the night before, we’ll find something pooled up somewhere. Maybe even a temporary creek.”
“Take the bear,” he suggested. “And we’ll circle around the long way back to Forakkes, down into the low spots.”
As the bear, she’d smell the water long before they ever found anything, even if it was only a surface pool on rock or tree. She agreed by stepping back to make room, still delighted to find her bear with little more than a twist of thought, the change energies swirling bright and strong around her.
“Show-off,” Ruger said, and had the audacity to tug her furry ear. She curled a lip at him and loped on out ahead.
So it was that she smelled the water before he saw any sign of it, some forty-five minutes later, and led them down to the trough of land where the ground was still damp—more mud than water, but still oozing slightly.
“Dig us out a little hole, will you?” he asked, removing the gear bag from his shoulder with a care that told her she might feel like her old self, but he was still faking it. She pretended not to notice and did as asked.
By then he’d pulled out the well-used remainder of his shirt; he pushed it into the hole and up against the mud. The seepage started immediately, and Ruger sat on the slope nearby, digging his heels in downhill. “It’s a good place to take a rest while this fills.”
She gave him a critical look, and he met it steadily. “It is what it is,” he said.
::If we have time, why don’t you—::
He shook his head before she finished. “There’s a fine line beyond which healing yourself becomes counterproductive. It doesn’t come free.” The quirk of his mouth turned wry. “Besides, we might need some of that later.”
She offered him a little bearish hum of agreement and snuffled aimlessly at the base of the nearest tree. But Ruger’s head had come up to alert, his eyes searching; he rose to his feet, tracking slightly uphill of the spot that had gotten his attention. Mariska inhaled, but the wind was against her and she got nothing.
Out of the following silence came a weakened voice, one that sounded far too much like a child. “’Ite ’oo.”
Mariska did more than stop in her tracks; she recoiled, instantly aware of how vulnerable they’d been in those previous few moments.
::Ruger?::
“’Ite ’oo!” the child said, more urgently.
Bite you?
By then Ruger stood above the nearest cluster of young pines and scrub oak, his mouth flat in a grim line. ::Take back the human,:: he told her. ::Come on over.::
::But—:: She’d be seen. And one of their strictest tenets—shared with the Core—was that they not be seen in the act of the inexplicable.
But he didn’t need to say anything more—not when the bushes spoke again. “Grrrr!” they said, vocalizing rather than growling—though the sound mixed with an actual snarl, one only an animal could make. “Grrr!”
There was no making sense of that—not from here. Mariska reached for the change.
“Beast!” the creature accused her, its pronunciation labored. “Grrr!”
“It’s a dog,” she said, looking down at it in surprise. A dingy, red-ochre dog with long legs, a brush tail and prick ears—no particular breeding behind this one, just pure survival in tough circumstances taking on a primal form. “Isn’t it? Unless someone brought in a dingo...”
“Dog, I think,” Ruger said. “And badly hurt.”
“Grrr,” said the dog, its ears flattened and its eyes rolling wild. It raised its lips in a dramatic snarl that was as much deliberate communication as fearful reaction.
Ruger looked down on it and said, more matter-of-factly than Mariska would have thought possible, “Would you like help?”
The dog watched them with eyes gleaming, gone still in thought—still enough so Mariska could see the twist of its front leg, the blood gleaming on its haunch and smeared along its face.
After a moment, its tail gave a faint wag, only the tip of it moving—a hopefulness that made her sadder than she could have imagined. ::As if we didn’t already know Forakkes was a monster!::
“He’p?” the dog said, its voice very small.
“Yes.” Ruger lowered himself to the ground with a flexibility surprising in a man of his size. “You’re hurt. I can help with that.” He glanced at Mariska, an unspoken request that struck warmth in her chest—that he’d so completely accepted, finally, the need for protection while he worked healing. That he’d so readily reach out to her for it.
She didn’t have a chance to respond out loud, but maybe he’d read it in the way her head had lifted, or the way her eyes widened with pleasure, or even—yes, the smile still lingered at the corners of her mouth.
The dog said, “A-yes, ’oo he�
��p?” and its hope mixed with wary disbelief.
“I can take the pain away,” Ruger said. “I can start your healing. You wouldn’t yet be whole. But maybe you can help us in return.”
The dog squinted his eyes in suspicion.
“Never mind,” Ruger said, and sent a private aside to Mariska. ::Screw that. Who knows what this dog has been through already.::
::Just help him,:: she agreed.
“Do you have a name?” Ruger asked the dog.
The dog lifted his head with a defiant pride. “Tcheow,” he said, forming the word with exquisite care. “Tcheowbaka. Ciobaka.” He wagged his tail a little more boldly. “He’p?”
Mariska found herself standing watch while Ruger took the dog in his lap and slipped easily into the healing trance he’d so recently rediscovered, his big hands soothing the animal with a gentle stroke and ear rub while he was at it. The dog, at first tense and once going so far as to close his teeth around Ruger’s hand, gave a final whine of surrender, shifted to quick, anxious licking, and then—finally—relaxed.
* * *
Ciobaka had not thought of it. Feral before he was a creature of Ehwoord’s, then accustomed only to the cage and sharp adversarial exchanges and the constant change of his body and his status...
He had not known that hands could be gentle at the same time they were strong. Or that a man of power could touch him and leave him more like himself instead of less.
He had never cared for Ehwoord, but Ehwoord had been his dominant, and that meant certain things. It meant Ciobaka accorded him respect; it meant Ehwoord did, in some ways, look after him.
But a true dominant had benevolence. And in the end, Ehwoord had none of that. He had made Ciobaka less, and not more.
And in the very end, he had intended to hurt Ciobaka. To kill him.
Ciobaka remembered the moment he had closed his paw-hand around the key...the moment he had unlocked and slipped away from the cage. He remembered finding the amulet that controlled his pain and snatching it up by the knotted cord. And then there had been shouting and gunfire and slamming impact, his teeth sinking into flesh and blood on his tongue.
He didn’t remember exactly how he’d escaped that place. More shouting, a scrambling, lame dash for the door, his thumb-claw scrabbling to grasp his way to freedom. He’d found himself in the forest, thirsty and broken and heading painfully for the scent of water.
He’d found this man, with his hands that made him more.
* * *
Ruger gave the dog the space to stand up and shake off and absorb what had happened to him.
Truth be told, Ruger needed time to absorb what had happened to him. To wallow in it, if he had to admit it.
He was a healer again.
Pure, clean, healing flow, nudged to the places where it would do the most good—following his vision for what should be instead of what was. Following knowledge borne both of study and instinct to restore flesh and bone.
Not that it had come instantly, or easily. He’d floundered at first. But—
Mariska. She stood nearby, as alert as any Sentinel could be—scanning the area with her sight, her hearing, her energies...
And so he’d let go of the need to do the same, and felt the sweet rush of the thing he was born to do.
As the dog sat to scratch and then contemplate his foot, Ruger walked over to Mariska and wrapped his arms around her, filling himself with her as he held her tightly and lifted her right off her feet. Her laugh came muffled between them, and when he set her down he took her head between his hands and kissed her—not just deeply, but as if he had every right to leave her breathless.
“You’re welcome,” she said, laughing slightly in that breathlessness, her hands against his chest and fingers scraping through the crisp hair in the best possible way. She looked a little dazed while she was at it, and drew breath on words she didn’t quite say—putting them aside to search his gaze. “Ruger,” she said, watching his pale brown gaze grow darker, his expression just a tad fiercer. “Ruger...”
“Yeah,” he told her. Understanding her...affirming her. Yes. This is more than just the moment.
This is just maybe forever.
The sloppy sound of a lapping tongue broke their connection; as one, they turned to the newly constructed water hole. Mariska’s arm slipped around Ruger’s hips for one more squeeze before she eased away, just as familiar with his bottom as he’d been with her mouth.
Ciobaka looked up, backing away with ears flicking uncertainly from upright to flat again. Ruger scrounged the water bottle from the gear bag, filling it as he could with a second, smaller piece of cloth over the top as a double filter—and then taking a moment to push a quick flash of energy through it, cleansing it. “We need to find Forakkes,” he said to the dog, handing the bottle to Mariska. Ciobaka didn’t respond, and he added, “That’s Eduard. Will you show us?”
“T’ras dehd,” Ciobaka said, a whine behind the words. He looked off into the woods, his nose lifting into the breeze and his nostrils twitching, and Mariska handed the water back with a warning that it tasted like mud. Ruger drank, watching the dog, waiting...
They could backtrack the dog if necessary. But it would be so much swifter to follow him straight to Forakkes’ little shop of horrors...and he might yet do it. Ruger suspected the animal simply needed time to assimilate all that had happened.
In fact, Ciobaka rose, shook off and trotted to the spot where they’d found him. He came back dragging an amulet with his thumb-like dewclaw, and dropped it in front of Ruger, nudging it farther with his nose when Ruger didn’t pick it up. “’Akes hurr,” he announced. “Kill it.”
“Makes hurt,” Mariska said, turning to Ruger. “Like what they did to Jet at first? Implanted her with one half of an amulet set and tortured her with the other?”
“Grrr,” said the dog, which Ruger took as affirmation.
He bent to pick up the amulet and admitted, “I don’t know how. But I’ll keep it with our things until we reach the man who can deal with it.” Ian. Please still be alive. He looked at Ciobaka. “His name is Ian, and he needs help that we can’t give him until we stop Eduard. Will you show us?”
“Show ’oo,” Ciobaka said, and trotted away, still limping profoundly but without hesitation.
Ruger gulped down the remainder of the water—tastes like mud, but so sweet—and tossed it back to Mariska, who refilled it as quickly as possible before she reclaimed the ever-useful remainder of the shirt. By then the dog stood waiting near the closest crest.
“’Oo hurr, too,” he said, as Ruger took an awkward step on approach and recovered even more awkwardly. “Ehwoord?”
“Yes,” Ruger said, gone grim at this reminder that he wasn’t yet what he should be—that he wouldn’t be. “But now we’re going to stop him.”
Chapter 22
The first time the dog hesitated, Mariska tucked the gear bag behind a tree. There was no point in getting that amulet any closer to Forakkes—and no point in bringing the bag along. Not until they figured out how to rig a weapon from the battered scraps of a shirt, a water bottle and the wrappers of the food they’d eaten.
The second time the dog hesitated, they crouched down to assess the land before them. The scent of shattered pine hung in the air; she would have known they were close even had the uneven dip of ground before them not looked familiar.
“See ’oo,” the dog muttered, his brushy tail dropped low between his hocks.
“The cameras,” Ruger said, glancing up in the trees as if he could spot them without the equipment they’d left buried in the old facility. “There’s not much we can do about them.”
“Then when we move, we’ll have to do it fast,” Mariska said decisively. “And maybe not so much through the door.” When Ruger glanced back at her, she smiled toothily. “I bet this place uses those solar tubes, too. They’re too narrow for us, but I’m pretty sure a grizzly can tear right through that roof once we find it.”
“Helluva drop,” Ruger said, but it was observation and not argument, and he turned to Ciobaka. “How about it? Sunlight coming through tubes in the ceiling?”
“Ayeah.” But Ciobaka sat and gave his front foot a few quick licks.
“You don’t have to come any further,” Ruger told him. “But I hope you’ll wait for us. We’ll see that the amulet is destroyed...and we’ll give you a place to finish healing—a place where it’s safe to be yourself. If you go off on your own, you’ll have to hide yourself.”
“Hurr,” the dog muttered to himself, the faint hint of snarl on his muzzle.
“Yes,” Mariska told him. “People will probably hurt you if they discover the changes Eduard made to you. It’s stupid, but they’ll be frightened. It’s the same for us. It’s why Eduard and his people come after us.”
Ciobaka gazed at them with wise almond-shaped eyes and trod silently to the nearest tree. He curled up in a small red-ochre ball and tucked his nose over his tail, watching them—watching as Ruger stepped over to touch his head between those big scoop ears. “If we don’t come out of that place, there will be others like us who come looking,” he said. “It might take a couple of days—but they’ll help you, if you let them.”
Ciobaka squeezed his eyes closed and stayed that way, and Ruger gave his neck a final rub, glancing at Mariska. ::When I find Forakkes...:: he growled silently, leaving the threat unfinished.
::When we find Forakkes,:: she corrected him, and gave him that toothy grin again. ::By the time I hit the ground in that bunker, I’ll be bear. And this time, I’ll be warded and shielded and not fighting his damned amulet.::
::And you won’t be alone.::
No. She wouldn’t be alone.
Once they moved, they did it swiftly—assuming that Forakkes had eyes on them, and that if he hadn’t already noticed them, he’d do so imminently.
But finding the solar tubes was easier said than done. Stout, dull little plastic domes only fourteen inches in diameter, they blended with the forest floor, obscured by brush and shadow. Mariska and Ruger quartered the area in a quick pattern with no success, until Mariska sent him a shrug. ::Well, maybe we’ll bring them out to us after all.::
Kodiak Chained Page 21
