Then it coiled, striking at Maks like a snake. It flowed around Maks’s shields, seeking weakness—battering against him. Barely visible through the dark swarm, Ian rolled weakly to his knees and then slumped back against the wall, a splay of graceful limbs that still spoke of the cat within. His voice was a hoarse rasp. “Damned fool!”
Maks couldn’t disagree. But he couldn’t hold shields for both of them—not and keep both of them safe. These shields, he could hold—until help arrived, until the working faded.
Or he could have, had the faint, familiar haze of fugue not crept in around the edges, softening the steel of the shields...giving the nits a weak area on which to concentrate.
“Fool!” Ian said again, spitting it a little more strongly this time, but still unable to do much as push away from the wall.
Maks curled his whiskers back in defiance. This is what I do. It was who he was.
It was who he had to be.
He dug in deep, past the fugue to the discipline of what he’d always known—keeping himself invisible to the Core; keeping himself silent in all ways. Living at the edges of an organization that had to continue believing he had perished with his injured mother...living the only place he knew, the only way he knew. He dug into the memories of those days, the simplicity and focus of that single need.
Shields above all else.
Silence. Above. All. Else.
Slowly, the shielding firmed. Through the fugue, through the haze, through the distant roar in his ears.
And then Katie was there, an indistinct figure clutching the doorway and gasping at what she saw.
“Don’t,” Ian rasped at her. “Don’t interfere. I don’t know what the hell he’s doing—”
Silence. Above. All. Else.
Shields...
The dissonance crashed in on him like a wave, and Maks curled around the core of what he was, what he’d always been...what he had to be. And then only the roar of the fugue remained—and the shields, snapping tight between Maks and the world.
* * *
Katie ran to the open doorway, her promise to stay in the car broken without second thought once she felt the struggle within the hotel room. But here she hovered on the threshold—unable to help Ian without disturbing Maks, caught in an endless conflict between the need to do and the potential to make it all worse as the working buzzed around Maks in a swarm of lethal corruption, battering against him, chewing at him.... He crouched with utter stillness, a giant form gone silent.
Her inability to sense him was the most frightening thing of all.
She could have wept with relief as the working lost its ferocity. The oily swarm dissipated...barely noticeable at first and then quite suddenly...half of the energy nits fell, enervated; half of them simply faded away.
Ian swore at the sight. “What the—” He glanced at her from a face tight and strained and let the phrase go unfinished.
“What happened?” Katie eased into the room, moving sideways to stay as far from Maks as possible and yet still reach Ian. Her deer, so sensible, flung her a constant litany of advice. Run! Run! Run!
“What didn’t,” Ian said, dry even without any strength behind his words, his head still lolling back against the wall. “They wanted that amulet nullified, I can tell you that much.”
Katie could only stare at him. “Why didn’t you just give it to them?”
He smiled at her, weak as it was, with a definite hint of self-mockery. “Because if they wanted it that badly, then it must be worth keeping.” But when her eyebrows shot up, he rolled his eyes and admitted, “Because I just did it. And then I was stuck.” His leg twitched, the muscles jerking; he hissed through his teeth, and then his arm did it, too. “This is the same working that almost got Dolan Treviño at the beginning of the year. This amulet scientist was working with Gausto. It fits, considering the silent nature of the amulet at your place.”
Katie threw a glance at Maks, found him motionless and his shields hard; when she reached out to him, gently prodding him with a healing thought, she had the sense of sliding over ice. She grabbed the arching back of an upholstered chair to steady herself.
“Whoa,” Ian said, though his voice caught on his own misery, and his face reflected the strain.
“I’m fine.” She stood on her own two solid feet, eyeing him with conflicting needs. “May I approach?”
Ian snorted dark laughter through clenched teeth. “You surely may, little deer.”
Katie took a breath and went to him—but only a step or two, because then it hit her—a hot tug, right down deep to her soul and enclosing her heart, snagging her with a ferocity that could only be—
Tiger.
* * *
Silence. Above. All. Else.
It felt familiar to Maks, this place—and not only from those early days when such silence had saved his life from the Core, shields beyond shields—so young he hardly even knew what he was doing.
No, more recent than that. It had the encompassing feel of the space he’d occupied for so long after the Flagstaff ambush. Comforting, safe...no one could reach him. No one could even see him, not even with a seeking eye.
Shields so deep, so strong, they could just as easily become a trap.
Had become a trap.
Not this time.
This time, he had an anchor. He had the warm, sweet energy of Katie Rae Maddox—and he drew it in, letting it trigger something hot and fierce and angry. He rode that surge, punching through his own shields and clawing outward, reaching—
He half expected the resulting slash of pain, and he grabbed that, too—riding it back out where he belonged and so suddenly aware that this, too—in its most raw, its most elemental—held a taste of puzzling familiarity.
But he had no time to think about it—he had only holding on, clawing out—
And bursting right back into his skin.
* * *
Maks exploded into silent light—a shimmering conflagration of energies, expanding and contracting from tiger to man—a man who flung himself up, the wild still in his eyes, the ferocity of attack still imminent.
Tucked away on the floor between his knees, the amulet’s crumpled bag hardly looked worth all the trouble.
“Quickly,” Ian said, as if he wasn’t bent nearly in half. “Back in the bucket—the quarantine wards will kick in when the lid connects—”
Maks just looked at him, as if the words meant nothing at all.
“Maks!” Katie said it sharply, full of fear for him—and then flooding with relief when his gaze instantly snapped to hers. She understood it then—he simply hadn’t made it all the way back to words. Not with his ears, not with his mouth.
She took her chances, reaching out to him with the same intent he’d sometimes offered her. The amulet, the bucket...and then the words, short and simple. “Put the amulet in the bucket. Now.”
Maks scooped up the bag, plunking it in the hardware bucket and slapping on the lid. Only then did she glance at Ian, to say under her breath, “Not that I understand why.”
Ian let slip another sardonic sound. “The bag,” he said, his words jerky, “protects us from it. But it doesn’t silence—ah! Damn!”
Katie breathed a harsher word and rushed to him, sparing only an instant to see Maks climb to his feet—to brush himself off, look at his hands as if they might belong to someone else, and then shake off the moment to join them.
“I’ll watch,” he told Katie, as if none of that had even happened.
It was all she needed. She knelt on the shredded carpet, opened and closed her hands a few times, and prepared to heal her second Sentinel in so many days.
Chapter 14
Maks stood watch over the deep-night parking lot, pushing out his boundaries, extending his senses...and fighting the distraction of sudden new understanding.
The Flagstaff amulet hadn’t injured him. It was Maks himself who’d locked down a shield so profound there’d been no reaching him—and no reaching out.
That his connection to Katie Rae had been his salvation...
That didn’t surprise him one little bit.
With his thoughts so absorbed, the moments passed swiftly. He heard the brevis helicopter on approach, the distant thump-thump-thump of the blades as it descended, grabbing a distant open space for its clandestine landing pad. He was ready when the chopper’s team quietly approached; he acknowledged them with a silent nod, standing to the side of the broken hotel door as Ian batted away assistance to make it to his unsteady feet.
By then Katie had once again quietly put Maks between herself and the brevis contingent: a co-pilot acting as medic, and Dolan Treviño—a Sentinel whose daunting, dark presence had intimidated more than one field operative along the way.
Until not so very long ago, he’d been called rogue.
Maks thought Treviño was never that. Maks thought Treviño had seen very clearly that Southwest Brevis, before Nick Carter’s recent ascent to consul, had been a region in trouble.
No wonder Katie had little trust.
“You’ve taken care of the worst of it,” the medic said, looking over his shoulder to where he thought Katie would be hovering over her patient, and doing a surprised double-take until he found her on the other side of Maks. “More than I could have done—you’ve got a delicate touch.”
“Not much scope,” Katie said, her voice an apologetic murmur.
“Doesn’t matter,” the man said. “The right touch in the right spot beats brute force any time. Ian was lucky. You circumvented a lot of damage here.”
“Yee-ah,” Ian said, dark humor threaded through his voice. “Where the hell is the chopper?”
“Landed at the elementary school,” the co-pilot said. “About a mile from here. You sure you don’t want—”
Ian interrupted him with a silent snarl. “Let’s just go.” And he made his own way, one uncertain step after the other, through the door to the parking lot. The co-pilot shrugged at Treviño, who lifted a shoulder in return. After a moment, Ian’s voice filtered back to them. “Where the hell is the bloody damned school?”
“Cranky,” Treviño decided, rare amusement in his eyes. He raised his voice. “Turn left. Unless you want some help?”
Ian’s crude mutter left no doubt as to his disposition on that account; he turned left and wobbled toward the road.
The co-pilot lifted his hands in a gesture of what’re you gonna do and hastened afterward, leaving Treviño to hook a grip though the bucket handle as if it didn’t hold the amulet equivalent of dynamite. “You’re not coming in,” he said to Maks, as if he knew the answer and had to say it anyway.
Katie’s hand crept into Maks’s; Treviño’s eyes were far too sharp to miss it. His gaze went to Maks, all sharp sapphire and full of knowing. Maks offered the faintest shake of his head; it was enough.
“You shouldn’t be up here alone,” Treviño said bluntly.
Katie’s grip tightened. Maks squeezed her hand in return. “He means he doesn’t want to go back and leave us.”
Her relief trickled through him.
“It means I’m a bastard for going,” Treviño said, studying them both. “But, hell, there’s dumping going on in the Chiricahuas and the earth is fu—” He glanced at Katie and moderated his tone, a courtesy he afforded few. “The earth is bleeding out.”
Katie spoke quietly from behind Maks’s shoulder. “I’m glad you could come at all.”
Treviño met Maks’s gaze head-on. “Maks will keep you safe,” he said, but he didn’t look away until Maks lifted his head slightly, telling Treviño all the things he was looking to know.
Yes, she’s mine now.
Yes, I can do this.
Yes, I will do this.
Katie stood quietly, watching. Seeing the exchange but, Maks thought, not quite understanding it. Wary and thoughtful and so damned brave.
Treviño spoke as if that exchange hadn’t occurred at all. “Things should quiet down a little now. I wouldn’t be surprised to find the Septs Prince has put a price on this rogue’s head. The Core can’t pretend they’re playing nice as long as the fool is stirring up so much trouble.”
“We’re on guard, now,” Katie said, her light touch landing at the center of Maks’s back, easing down to rest at his waistband. “They’ve lost their advantage.”
Treviño glanced at Maks again. “They never had an advantage, Katie Rae Maddox. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”
Katie said, “There’s a lot I’m figuring out. Tell Nick...”
“You’d be surprised what Nick already knows,” Treviño said, a wry half smile on striking, hard features—the black jaguar in his harsh beauty, not a bit of his edge diminished since he’d taken Meghan Lawrence to his own. “Look for a couple of solid secondaries tomorrow, Maks.”
Maks, already wary at the thought of more Sentinels intruding on Katie’s space, made his ruffled tiger settle.
Treviño saw it...let it go without remark. “You did good,” he said to Katie. “Don’t sell yourself short.”
Katie didn’t move from the shelter of Maks’s shoulder. “I know what I am, Mr. Treviño.”
Treviño grinned—feral, that expression. “You’re in the field, now, Katie. It’s more a question of what you’ll become.”
* * *
Katie didn’t miss the significance of Treviño’s words. She didn’t miss the significance of the glance he sent Maks as he left, either. A warning, that look. Don’t be stupid and watch your back rolled into one.
Understanding, in that final flick of a gaze at Katie.
And then he was gone and Katie let out a breath she hadn’t known she was keeping to herself. “Dolan Treviño,” she said.
“Yes,” Maks agreed.
“Southwest’s bad boy,” she said.
“Yes,” Maks agreed.
“You’ve worked with him, too.”
“Yes,” Maks told her.
She shook her head. Maks, she was beginning to see, had been there in the shadows all along—all the big operations reported in brevis e-bulletins. Sanitized of detail, they listed only the results and the lead field operatives.
But not the quiet, dependable tiger on whom they’d always counted.
He gave her a questioning look, and she smiled, rueful and small. “Brevis is coming,” she said. “I’d best have something to tell them. It’s past time I went vision-seeking, don’t you think?”
“We,” Maks told her, and held out his hand again. They headed for Katie’s car in the surreal peacefulness of deep night. For all the power and fury so recently expended here, the incident had been oddly unremarkable from the outside. Two powerful Sentinels, locked in a furious but silent battle, Katie’s quiet healing...the rescue team, coming in fast and quiet, and gone the same way.
Deceptive as it might be, the night felt safe.
Until Maks hesitated at the car, and his troubled nature brushed against her awareness—Maks, speaking without words.
“What is it?”
He didn’t respond right away—not out loud. Katie watched him, trying to reconcile his uncertainty with the strength standing before her.
He said, “I always thought that...the thing that happens with me...”
He stopped, looking away, and she understood then that it was about more than hunting for the right words. It was about getting through them.
“Maks—” she said, thinking he didn’t owe her this—not explanations, not excuses.
He cut her off with a sharp shake of his head. “This is important, Katie Rae. We thought everything started with the ambush. But now...after what just happened in there...I think it started before.”
She lifted her head with a li
ttle jerk, understanding those implications immediately. If brevis had been treating the wrong cause, they could easily have failed to find the right cure.
He said, “There was a power surge. On the Peaks.”
She knew something of that from the bulletins. Described only as a deep surge precipitated by the Core’s interference with the natural wellspring of energies within the San Francisco Peaks, it had nearly killed Joe Ryan—and it was then that Annorah had been pulled as a field operative, although no one seemed to know why. “I know of it.”
“That’s when,” he said, his certainty growing even as he told her of it. “That’s when it started. I thought—” There it came, the tension in his shoulders and jaw, the deep breath he took before he continued. “I thought I had shielded carelessly at the hotel. But now...”
She finished it for him. “Now you think you were already broken.”
He nodded, short and tight.
“That’s good,” she told him, and smiled at his surprise. “Seriously, Maks. Brevis couldn’t help because they were starting in the wrong place. But if we know the right place...” She smiled at him, a spontaneous thing of hope—of expectation. We can do this. I can help you, too.
He didn’t smile back; he was too troubled for that. But he lifted one hand to trace the line of her cheek, and then—a move so spontaneous she didn’t see it coming—he leaned down and kissed her. Gentle, thorough...warming the space between them, warming Katie right down to her toes—a sweetness filling her from the center out.
Sweet enough, gentle enough, so only as they broke apart and Maks touched her lip with his thumb, lingering there, did she realize what else had happened with that kiss.
Katie Rae Maddox, possessed by a tiger.
* * *
Probably they should have gone straight home.
But probably didn’t take into account Katie’s need to decompress, the sun rising in the early-morning sky to announce the day, or the lure of the town’s one and only gourmet coffee shop. It could be, Katie had to admit to herself, that the pastries were the real reason for her detour here on the way home.
Maks, while patient, still seemed somewhat bemused at the whole coffee obsession scene.
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