Tiger Bound

by Doranna Durgin

  He shook his head. “No idea.” He reached for the nearest flowerpot, flipped it upside down in one big hand, and plopped it down right over the metal.

  Katie snorted a startled laugh. “Don’t tell me that makes it safe.”

  “No,” he said reasonably. “But it will keep your cat from walking on it.”

  She reached out to almost touch the red clay pot, then let her fingers fall away. She felt as though she should be able to perceive something—some tingle of warning, some miasma of evil. “I wonder what it’s meant to do.”

  He scowled. “It’s theirs; that’s enough. And it lacks...scent.” His jaw briefly hardened. “Like the one in Flagstaff. And those found at Fabron Gausto’s workshop.”

  “You were there, too?” It startled her all over again.

  His grin took her just as much by surprise—it was fierce and full of memory. “I wasn’t cleared for it,” he said. “I went. Nick needed us.”

  Nick Carter, he meant—the Southwest Brevis consul. And us—that meant the small team that had infiltrated Gausto’s home, the Sentinels who had saved Carter and who had kept Core D’oíche from being worse than it might have been.

  No. Not just any wounded tiger.

  * * *

  Eduard Forrakes ran his hand over the array of silent amulet blanks on the worktable before him, waiting for one of them to speak to him—the faint warmth that meant it was ready for impression.

  Fabron Gausto had once scorned Eduard’s insistence that he could discern the ripeness of any given blank. But then, Gausto was dead, wasn’t he? Too arrogant to listen to Eduard’s advice, even as he took credit for Eduard’s accomplishments.

  “Yes,” he murmured. “It’s good to be king.” And then smiled at his own faint self-mockery even as he selected an amulet blank.

  Once he’d impressed a working upon the amulet, its unadorned leather thong would be knotted so as to identify it; the dull and crudely stamped metal would acquire its own particular sheen. It would become a thing of beauty...and a thing of power. With such a blank, he had once created the working that had located Dolan Treviño in the Sky Islands of southern Arizona; he had penetrated the troublesome Sentinel’s wards. He had left a surprise for the nosy Sentinel team in Flagstaff, and still resented the fact that they hadn’t been killed outright. He had, for a short time, taken down the man who was now Southwest Brevis consul. He had even created the woman Jet, once known as only wolf.

  And he had created the working that changed Fabron Gausto into a creature greater than any Sentinel, more werewolf than wolf—and if Gausto hadn’t been so arrogant, Eduard would now be experimenting to perfect the stability of that working, rather than trying to recreate it from scratch. Or to recreate his own personal stash of preservation workings—those that had given him the extended vigor and youth to pursue his craft to such perfection.

  A commotion in what passed for a hallway broke his concentration. Suddenly, Eduard again became aware of his crude surroundings: the arching Quonset structure and its permanent underground chill, the always-inadequate lighting, the workspace walls that stopped well short of the high central ceiling.

  The prefab nature of the buried building and its contents annoyed him in all ways—always just a little bit flimsy, far too much metal and not nearly enough well-waxed wood. For Eduard was the master of an ancient craft, and it was a craft that deserved the finest circumstances, the best materials—and, by damn, a coffeemaker that didn’t come from the dollar store.

  He didn’t turn around as he finished his thoughts out loud. “It deserves the courtesy of subordinates who knock.”

  Silence followed that statement...perhaps a moment of dawning regret. Eduard turned to see who had intruded on his work. “Guyrasi,” he said, turning the name into a disapproving statement.

  Guyrasi took a step through the doorway into this, the largest enclosure within the buried Quonset. This was the entire back third of it, in fact, an area that had served as breeding-stock quarters years earlier.

  Eduard said softly, “Have you a problem?”

  He’d learned that from Gausto—the effectiveness of a soft voice when there was cold cruelty behind it.

  Guyrasi made a token attempt to straighten himself. “She was supposed to be detained! That civilian of yours was supposed to keep her away from the house!”

  Eduard gave the man a cool stare. “In this posse,” he said, “those who wish to survive don’t make excuses.”

  “If I had been given time—” But the man stopped as Eduard dipped a hand into one of the many amulet-filled pockets in his custom black lab coat, and when he spoke again it was with more discretion. “I located the house without difficulty. I was securing the amulet when your target arrived home with a man.” He took a deep breath and met Eduard’s gaze with, at last, the appropriate awareness of his failure and its potential consequences. “The amulet is live, but I was unable to conceal it before they came after me.”

  “They?” Eduard absorbed the man’s disheveled appearance, fondling an amulet within his biggest pocket in subtle threat. “The man was another Sentinel.”

  Guyrasi nodded once, making of it the slightest bow of acknowledgment. “He took the shape of a tiger—a Siberian.”

  A Siberian tiger. There had been a Siberian at Gausto’s compound raid, too. Eduard didn’t recall that he’d done much.

  Of course, Eduard had wisely departed before those events had played themselves out. He’d left his work and his home; he’d lost the woman he’d loved. He was here to succeed where Gausto had failed. Regardless of what Gausto’s superiors said about laying low in the wake of Gausto’s embarrassing failures in the cold war between the Core and the Sentinels.

  When Eduard didn’t respond directly, the man filled the silence. “I handled him,” Guyrasi said, bravado mixed in with his confession. “I stunned and shot him. He’s badly hurt, if not dead.” Guyrasi shifted uneasily. “Will the amulet work if not placed directly against the house?”

  It had been one of Eduard’s more subtle workings, and a lovely execution at that—carefully impressed into a blank amulet with the perfect structure to hold it. Had it been properly located, it would have gradually brought Katie Maddox under Eduard’s influence. As it was...

  “Perhaps,” Eduard said. “If it goes undetected. I’ll know soon enough.” His partnered amulet would tell him what he needed to know. “Now, have yourself tended.”

  The man drew himself upright, his annoyance turned to determination—and, if he was smart, to gratitude for a potential second chance. By then, Eduard barely saw him.

  He saw instead the unsuspecting face of Katie Maddox, working on the stray dog Eduard had taken from the Apache reservation—easing its old injury.

  Of course, she’d had no idea who Eduard was, dressed in his cheap tourist’s clothes and unflattering glasses, his hair mussed and a subtle, silent working washing out its black color and his robust complexion. She’d had no idea he wanted the dog whole for his experiments. She certainly had no idea what had befallen it upon its return to the Quonset, tucked away so neatly in the old Sitgreaves Forest logging area. In return, he had no idea exactly what she’d done to help it—but he knew it had fared the best of any experimental subject so far, and he knew he wanted—he needed—to reproduce the effect with his other subjects.

  And that meant Katie Maddox would be his.

  Chapter 5

  Maks emerged from the house—showered and in a clean shirt, his thumb tucked into the worn belt of his jeans to support his raggedly throbbing arm—to find Katie waiting for him on the porch. Whether it was her habit to sit in the old rocking chair tucked into the corner or whether she simply didn’t feel quite comfortable sharing her home with him, he wasn’t sure.

  “I’ll call brevis,” he said. “If I can use your phone.”

  She looked at him in surprise. Her eyes had a red-rimmed look to them, but she seemed calm enough. “Don’t you have a cell phone?”

  He shrugg
ed, hurting and irritable and not in the mood for any of it. “I just don’t like them.” Among other things, all of which he could use if pressed, and none of which he used when not. Cell phones. Radios. Computers.

  Cars.

  Impossible to explain, without going places he had no intention of going.

  “We barely have reception here, anyway,” Katie said, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. “Of course you can use the phone. Do you think they’ll...I mean, will they listen? Really listen?”

  He heard her unspoken concerns; he understood them. Will they take it seriously? Will they take me seriously?

  The difference was, he had never truly cared.

  But Katie cared. Her eyes said as much. Her fingers, picking at the fray of her shorts, said it too. Maks lost his irritability; he forgot, for the moment, the stabbing pain of his arm. He felt, instead, the sudden wash of impulse to comfort her—to protect her.

  Not that it made sense, to have it hit him so hard. This is what he did, what he was, what he’d always been. The one who protected the cast-outs, the runaways, the unwanted, two legs or four—always on the lookout for those who hunted him, and those who had hunted the mother who’d died for his freedom.

  The Core.

  And so he made his voice matter-of-fact; he protected her from what he didn’t understand. “They’ll want to know about the amulet,” he said. “The Core hasn’t been active in this area since—”

  No. He wasn’t even going to open that door.

  “It’s been a while.” She’d relaxed a little, following his lead.

  “I don’t think they’ll send anyone else here,” Maks told her, bluntly enough. “But we should be able to send the amulet to brevis.”

  She nodded. “I’d like to know what it was supposed to do.”

  “I’ll call them,” he said again. And then, because she’d said she had a client coming and he hadn’t yet scouted the area, he looked out to the craggy ridge of pines rising around her home.

  It must have shown on his face. Not just the need to scout these woods, but the yearning for them. She came to her feet. “Where—?” And then, understanding, shook her head most decisively. “Oh, no. Not yet.”

  “I won’t be long,” he said. “You’ll only be alone until your client comes.”

  “I’ve been alone plenty,” she snapped at him, with perhaps more vehemence than she meant, because then she hesitated. “You really need to rest—we need to give your body a chance to build on the healing. Besides, I do my work in a room off the kitchen, and the couch is...” she eyed him up and down “...almost big enough.”

  He looked out to the woods, breathing of them.

  “Maks,” she said gently. “You can’t use that arm yet, man or tiger. And you lost a lot of blood.”

  Maybe because she said it as though she understood—as though she regretted—he took a step back. But he didn’t look away from the pines, or from the forest rising into rugged ridge-and-swale beyond.

  She moved up beside him. “Later,” she said. “We’ll set wards, and you can go.” And then, with an understanding that sent warmth through his chest, she said, “You grew up here, you said. It means a lot to you.”

  “It was...” He shook his head, looked down to her. “Everything.” All he’d known. A life lived fast and lean...and free.

  “Were you born in this area?” she asked. “Do you still have family here?”

  Father, unknown. Mother, buried in a shallow, unmarked grave. Birthplace...

  Foul. Something to escape.

  And he had. So now he said merely, “It was a long time ago.”

  She laid a hand on his arm—so lightly, so gently. “Come inside. Let me get you the phone and show you the couch.”

  He met her gaze, and felt the healing of her. He didn’t even think about it—he reached out to touch her hair, her jaw...rested a thumb lightly on her chin. No matter that it quickly fell away; she felt what he did, that swell of something meeting between them. Her eyes widened even as his narrowed.

  For that instant, if only in his mind, nothing separated them at all. For that instant, he suddenly had this woman in his arms—and there, in his mind, she responded to him with a fervent enthusiasm. He felt the heat of it, the sweetness of it—and, startlingly, a rising stab of pain, far too easy to ignore for the rest of it.

  When the moment passed, they were man and woman on the porch, deer and tiger, watching each other with the complete, stunned awareness of what just hadn’t quite happened.

  * * *

  “She needs someone else.” Maks’s voice reached Nick with an unusual edge, the phone lines between them doing nothing to dull it. “Someone who isn’t me.”

  Nick’s response held the weight of responsibility, and the aftermath of Core D’oíche. “I know what I’m asking of you,” he said. “And of her. But you’re the best available agent for the job.”

  Maks’s hesitation meant nothing in particular; the man chose his words carefully, and he chose few of them at all. “Then someone else should become available.”

  “Let me rephrase that,” Nick told him, even as he propped the phone on his shoulder to type a few quick keystrokes into his desktop computer, pulling Maks’s file up to sprawl across the luxuriously large monitor. “Because nothing’s changed. You know that area. You can protect her. You can do—there—what no one else can.”

  Another hesitation. When Maks spoke, it sounded as if the words cost him. “It might be too soon.”

  “I’ll send someone up for the amulet,” Nick said, knowing there wasn’t anyone immediately available. His thoughts wandered to Meghan Lawrence, who knew nothing of amulets but who could weave a ward stronger than any Atrum Core working. Or Ian, who had been walking around the AmSpec lab gaunt and obsessed since they’d acquired a cache of the undetectable new “silent” amulets. Yes...Ian. “I’ll pull Ian out of the lab.”

  Maks made a disgruntled sound, no doubt aware of just how long that might take. And then his silence became more uncomfortable, until it burst back into words. “This is bigger than you expected me to find—more aggressive. I shouldn’t be the one. There’s something—”

  “Wrong,” Nick finished, as gently as he could, eyeing the file contents. “Something wrong with you. That’s what you haven’t been telling us, isn’t it?”

  It was clear enough, if you read between the lines of Maks’s clearance interview—conducted by a medic too reliant on test results and not discerning enough of subtleties.

  Then again, Maks could stymie anyone. And when he chose not to talk, why...that was just Maks.

  After a silence, Maks said, “I thought if I went active, it would help.”

  Dammit, if Maks was even having this conversation—

  Not good. And Nick couldn’t afford to lose another field Sentinel. He couldn’t afford to lose Maks, so often taken for granted because of his silence—a man who blended into any team, and who protected them all with a focus no other could match.

  Nick cleared the file from the screen. “If you’re in trouble, we’ll pull you. Katie can come in for a while.”

  “She—” Maks didn’t finish the sentence. It didn’t matter—Nick knew of Katie Maddox and her reluctance to be near other Sentinels, never mind an entire brevis of them. Maks made a noise that Nick couldn’t then interpret. “No, we’re not in trouble. She just needs better—a whole team.”

  And Nick knew, with the intuition that had gotten him this far, he knew that Maks was lying. “Maks,” he said, a warning. “Talk to me.”

  And Maks said simply, “I’m here.” It meant a plethora of things, but Nick understood the most important of them. Maks heard him; Maks chose, for the first time in his active field duty career, to do as so many of these headstrong Sentinels did on a regular basis—to push back. And when he added, “I believe her,” Nick knew something else, as well.

  Maks, in his silence, had seen something that the rest of them were missing. The little deer had, somehow, gotten through
to the tiger.

  “Send someone for the amulet,” Maks said, and hung up.

  Nick found himself giving the dead phone a resigned and contemplative look.

  Maks in defiance. And the Core—or at least an individual within the Core—was evidently now targeting a healer of no dramatic talent, a seer of questionable skill.

  Or not so questionable. There had been too many signs that Katie Maddox downplayed her abilities. She’d been one of few to tender warnings about Core D’oíche, and if she’d had few details, she’d been genuinely distressed that she couldn’t offer more—desperate to offer more.

  “I believe her, too, Maks,” he told the dead phone line, and then reached within his mind for the polite ping that would catch Annorah’s attention and subsequently let Ian know he was wanted in the consul’s office.

  But I’m not so sure I believe you.

  Chapter 6

  Maks dozed more than slept, with one leg propped on the padded couch arm, one leg dragging off the side, a pillow under his shoulders and his fingers curled through his belt to keep his sore arm in place.

  He was aware when Katie’s client arrived at the front door, speaking of recently missing livestock and a glimpse of something huge in the woods. He absorbed it when that excited tone lowered to talk about Akins and his sly commentary about Katie. “He uses the word Kevorkian,” she said, nearly whispering. “And angel of death.”

  He was aware, too, when Katie eased through the room with a big dog of quietly goofy nature; he knew when the dog’s owner stopped and whispered, in a manner she probably thought to be quiet, “Katie Maddox! What have you got sleeping on your couch, and did you bring enough to share?”

  “A friend,” Katie had murmured, humor in her voice. “He’s helping me clear out a firebreak.”

  “I could use a firebreak,” the woman said, somewhat wistfully. But her voice changed as she said, “Is that—on his shirt, is that blood?”