Nick drew a breath and knocked on the door frame. He couldn’t hear over the music, but Ian’s lips formed a short, sharp response as he grabbed the remote by his thigh and cut the music. “You’d better be here to release me.”
“Ha,” Nick said, “and ha. Sorry, Ian. We’re not taking these amulet workings for granted these days.”
Ian snorted with impatience. “Who’s to know better than I? This was the same thing that took Treviño down—only Maks stopped it before it really got started, and Katie pretty nearly put me back together on the spot. She’s a quiet powerhouse, that one is.” Ian cocked his head. “But you knew that, didn’t you?”
“So much for my poker face.” Nick crossed his arms, leaning his shoulders against the door frame. “Let’s say I knew there was more there than she’s shown us. But it’s her choice.”
“She’s not going to have a choice now,” Ian said, tossing the well-chewed pencil onto the desk. “Whatever’s going on, it’s come to her. And you’ve bloody well hung her out there to dry.”
“Not so much,” Nick said, offering an expression that would have spoken volumes to anyone who was paying attention. But Ian was too caught up in his own restlessness and frustration, not completely aware that some of that itch came from what his body still struggled to shed. “I just talked to the local Core drozhar.”
That got Ian’s attention. “Our friendly new local Core precinct prince? Did he spin some lie about being a good little enemy?”
Nick laughed, short as it was. “Close. But you know the man sounded just frustrated enough. Wanted me to clear out my people so he can go in and clean up.”
Ian’s response was as succinct as his reaction to Nick’s knock at the door.
“I said something similar.” Nick’s grim smile reflected the satisfaction of the moment. “After Core D’oíche, their cred is nonexistent. Thanks to them, we’ve very nearly been revealed to those who would hunt us all, if they knew of us.”
“Or cage us, or kill us, or use us,” Ian muttered.
All of that.
Ian shifted the pages on his lap, a restless movement. “Okay, then. The Core sucks but they’re not going to mess with us, Katie and Maks are still out there on their own. Why am I still here?”
“They won’t be on their own for long,” Nick said. “Lyn Maines will have a crew up there by midday tomorrow—Treviño will join them as soon as possible. Meanwhile, I need to know if you can identify this. No one else in the lab could do it.” He held out the phone, thumbed the display and moved closer to the bed with it.
Ian, being Ian, took the phone from Nick’s hand, cocking his head at it. “No effing wonder. Who took this picture, and with what?”
“Maks took it,” Nick said dryly.
“Well, that explains it.” Ian angled the screen this way and that, hunting the best light. “Pestilence,” he muttered, flipping over a piece of paper to grab his pencil and sketch a few strong, confident lines that suddenly turned into a pattern of knots.
“Pestilence,” Nick repeated, angling himself for a better look at the sketch.
“More or less. Think of it as bad mojo. A drawing of illness.”
“A friend’s dog apparently swallowed it.”
“Ah,” Ian said in instant understanding. “The dog, I presume, is now dying of whatever would have killed it somewhat later in its lifetime anyway.”
“An internal gangrene,” Nick said. “The animal apparently has a habit of eating...anything.”
“That sounds about right.” Ian paused, a time during which he might well have been grinding his teeth. “Let me out of here, Nick. They can use me.”
“As I said, there’ll be a team there before end of day tomorrow,” Nick repeated, more patiently than he might have under other circumstances. Cultivating driven brilliance meant dealing with driven brilliance. “And your assignment, until medical clears you, is to keep your leopard ass in this bed.”
Ian stiffened, one hand reaching unconsciously for the laptop in a protective gesture—as if Nick might take it in an attempt to force him to rest. A gesture that did, of course, completely reveal his intent to do anything but rest.
“Pointless,” Nick muttered. “It is absolutely pointless to be brevis consul when no one listens to you anyway.” And then, more loudly, “Yes, you can keep the toys. And you can work remotely—as long as I don’t hear from medical that it’s a problem.”
From the way Ian narrowed his eyes, Nick doubted very much that anyone would be so bold as to suggest the work was a problem.
Already Ian had looked back to Nick’s phone. “Maks took this, hmm?” This time his reaction wasn’t to the photo itself, but the implications of Maks Altán voluntarily using such technology. One more glance at the image, and Ian handed it back to Nick. “Told you he had fallen for this one. First crush, isn’t it?”
“Something like that.” Not that Nick had been at Southwest when Maks had been brought in, but he knew his people. And he knew that when he’d arrived only a handful of years earlier, Maks had been presented as their most reliable personal bodyguard—a man who didn’t know how to play and who rarely offered anything of himself other than loyalty.
“He shouldn’t be out there alone, then.” Ian’s expression went distant, as if seeing those things he’d left behind in Pine Bluffs. When he looked back to Nick, his gaze had turned sharp. “He’s in over his head, Nick. Best you tell him to lay damned low.”
“Maks is more than people make him out to be,” Nick said mildly, aware that Ian spoke from concern and not censure. Who in brevis didn’t like Maks? He’d even won over prickly, confused Marlee—the inadvertent traitor who still lived under a house arrest. “But he’s been told to lay damned low all the same. See to it that you do the same.”
“Already here,” Ian told him, his sardonic bite back in full.
Nick gave him a raised eyebrow that could only be considered unconvinced, and tucked his phone away into his inside suit coat pocket as he left the room.
He’d barely cleared the room when the thick distortions of a shredded guitar solo blasted to life. Nick ducked his head on a smile, and went to see if he could make the impossible happen. Lay damned low, Maks. Help is on the way.
* * *
Katie’s visions had stymied her, but she found herself slipping easily into her connection to Maks. He could have been in the living room, he could have been beside her—he could have been back in Tucson. It didn’t matter. To her, he was right there.
Warmth and solid strength and implacable power couched in a gentle touch...
Her body reacted as though she could feel it all—that touch, the press of him against her, the burst of response in them both. She released a deep breath, long and slow...savoring it all before she reached out to what she knew of him, the trickles of past...the pieces of his story. Absorbing it, reveling in it...seeking truth through it.
The bedroom door slammed open.
Katie startled up off the bed, rolling to land, limbs akimbo, between the bed and the wall, then scrambling to press herself up against the window, her mind in a panic—Did the Core get past Maks? Is he okay—
But it wasn’t the Core, at that.
It was Maks.
And he definitely, definitely wasn’t okay.
Not when he stood in her damaged doorway, one hand clutching either side of the frame as if it was the only thing keeping him on that side of it. Not when he breathed as though he’d just bolted miles through the forest to reach her, his eyes wild and dark, just a flash of green around the pupils. Energy pulsed around him, palpable to Katie’s healing senses—full of dissonance, battering at her even from there, full of fever-pitch arousal.
If he tried for words, he failed—but his entire expression was a plea, and she understood it instantly. What have you done? What are you doing?
“Maks,” she whispered—having no more words than he did, appalled by what she’d done—what she’d woken in him.
Except...
Look at it, Katie Rae. The response to you. What it’s done. What it always does. Maks, touched by her quiet strokes of emotion and sensation, and then battered by how his body reacted to them. The energies, tugging at him—an escalation of the very state in which she’d first seen him at the bus stop.
Not integrated. Not with his emotions, not with himself. His energies clashed with one another, fighting for dominance...fighting for clarity. Completely out of his control.
“Katie,” he said, grinding the words out loud this time, his fingers biting into the door frame. “What are you doing?”
“Loving you,” she whispered, and knew it for truth as soon as the words came out. She pushed herself away from the wall as he trembled visibly in response to her words, her presence...her healing touch, reaching out to him again from where she stood...trying to sooth. But he responded with a jerk, a swirl of that baffling dissonance, the tension of it bringing out every strong line of his face, every bit of wild that a man who shared himself with a tiger could have.
A thrum of fear ran through her. What if she’d woken something that neither of them understood? That neither of them could control? Pure determination kept her from pressing back against the wall; pure survival instinct kept her voice calm, her mind racing. For when she tried to pull back on the touch she’d shared, however inadvertently, he lifted his head with tight protest—the tiger snarling behind it, too battered to think straight.
Just like every time she touched him—roused him. Every time he responded to her. This tiger who’d spent his youth imprisoned, on the run, and devoted to the protection of others—and who’d come only late to the learning that every other Sentinel received from birth.
Dissonant energies, lack of balance, a certain lack of awareness...
“Maks,” she said, taking a step forward—enough to reach the bed, where she placed one knee as if she might just keep walking right over it. “Did brevis see to your initiation? Have you—”
Have you been with other Sentinels before?
His eyes widened faintly; he seemed to grab at the words as a lifeline, and took a deep, shuddering breath, reaching inward for—
There. He jerked again, losing all that breath in a grunt of pain—holding himself straight, arms braced, and panting until he got past the moment, able to lift his head with a complexity of expression Katie simply could decipher. Desire, barely banked; pain, barely withstood. Pleading...for understanding, maybe. For help.
His words were ragged but honest. “Yes,” he said. “They said they thought going tiger early had unbalanced me. They said initiation might help.”
She swallowed. “And did it?”
The conversation seemed to give him a focus; he gave her a faintly thoughtful look. “They...” He shook his head, trying to hang on to words. “They thought it would change me. It didn’t. They said...” Another deep breath, and now he allowed himself to lean against the door frame. “They said it was like that, sometimes.”
“Sometimes,” she murmured. Initiation was an unpredictable thing. It didn’t matter how many times a Sentinel had experienced the act of sex...it only mattered the first time it happened with another Sentinel. That moment came of planning, consulting with family and the young Sentinel...and with the candidates who might be assigned for what was a very personal rite.
Sometimes the initiated youth came out of the experience essentially as he or she had gone in. And sometimes new strengths emerged—new talents. Before initiation, Katie hadn’t been identified as a seer.
Before initiation, Maks had apparently already pretty much been Maks.
He seemed to struggle with something—words or pain or feelings. After a moment, he said, “They thought that my life had already brought out my skills.”
“The early changing,” Katie said. “The boundaries you can set, the silence you can take. Your skills as a protector.”
Maks nodded. He looked at his hands, as if surprised to find he’d let go of the door frame. He swallowed hard, and this time she knew—could see the conflict on his features—that emotion was what gripped him now. “I don’t understand what’s happening. I don’t know what to do about it. And I don’t know how to keep you safe.” He looked away from her, his jaw working, his words strained. “From me.”
Chapter 17
Another shudder ran through Maks, leaving his body torn between sensations—great desire, great confusion, great pain. His mind was torn between understandings—knowing he wanted, knowing he couldn’t have, knowing that in the middle of it all he was still broken in some critical way.
He couldn’t bring himself to look at her again. Not that face that was purely Katie. Not her sweet nature, or her compassion, or the very strong courage running throughout.
Because you can’t have her, Maks.
Not when the very thought of it roused such a tumult—the fugue mixed with the inevitable shards of pain.
At first that pain had taken him purely by surprise—until he’d learned it could clear his head. It also served as a warning: no matter what he wanted or how he wanted or what he felt when Katie reached for him, he couldn’t have it.
“Maks,” she said, full of concern, and of course he was lost to her, and none of the reality of it mattered one little bit.
“I want you,” he told her, though he was pretty sure she already knew what he wanted. “I want you in a way I’ve never wanted anyone. It does these things to me...I don’t understand. I can’t—” He broke off, shook his head—dared a glance at her and then looked down at his hands. Could feel the claws there, waiting in another form. Could feel himself, so close to something so big, something so out of control—
I don’t know how to keep you safe.
Something that scared the hell out of him.
He thought she’d understood—but she couldn’t have, not when she crawled right over the bed to reach him. Her hands came as a cool balm when she placed them along either side of his jaw. They didn’t stay still long; she stroked through the hair over one ear, a light and infinitely pleasurable touch that tightened the skin down his nape and all the way down his spine. Her calm breathed into him.
The sensations swirled up in him as if he’d never conquered them at all—the fugue, closing in to make his skin pound and his heart race and his vision double; the surge of desire, a straight shot down his spine, curling and twisting and tightening. The first hint of hot pain, grabbing his breath. He reached for her wrist, stilling her hand. “I can’t—”
“Neither could I,” she told him. “I went looking, just now, and I didn’t find any answers—all I found was you. It makes me wonder if all I ever saw was you.” Her expression sobered; she made no attempt to disengage her wrist. “You with the Core, you with your mother...you in darkness. You and that creature—although I can’t say for sure if that was about what happened yesterday or if it’s still to come. You...and me.”
His gaze shot to her face. She found herself beyond blushing. “Even in the car, the day I first brought you here. You felt it, I’m pretty sure.”
Mutely, he nodded.
“The thing is, as much as it’s always been you...it’s something darker, as well. It’s not all about you. And that’s the part I still can’t figure out. Because when I reach out, I find...” She shook her head, took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and admitted it again. “You.”
Regret flashed through him—second guesses. If he’d been straight about his condition, Nick never would have sent him here—and then maybe Katie could have seen further—seen past him—to figure out her visions. If he’d never come here, she would be safe—in the care of someone who wasn’t compromised or hauled back to brevis. Even if his inner hackles rose at the first possibility and he knew she would have hated the second.
“Stop it,” she said, simply enough. “Whatever you’re thinking, it’s wrong. You’re the one who said it, Maks. Whatever is, is. Let it be. Whatever’s happening to you...let it be. It’s the only way we’ll
figure it out.”
He stiffened in resistance. I can’t—
Maybe she’d gotten too good at perceiving his mind’s voice. She said, “You may have to.” She looked up at him, full of thought. Maks flinched under the scrutiny of it—of the perceptiveness there.
“Listen, Maks. You were born in captivity. You took the tiger younger than anyone knew was possible. And when you escaped, you survived as the tiger until you found those first runaways in the woods and made them yours.”
He remembered that day. How they’d been so terrified of him, thirteen-year-old twins escaped from an abusive home and on the run from the petty thefts they’d committed to survive. How he’d lost touch with the spoken word, but still coaxed them into trust with persistence and gestures and his own abiding intent to protect them. He’d been bigger than the twins by then—still lanky, shoulders already showing promise.
“And you gathered more children, until after several years, the Sentinels realized what was going on, and they came and got you.”
A day of terror, that—of facing his first Sentinel, a man well-grown into his lynx and strong-hearted enough to face an adolescent tiger without escalating the situation, even when the tiger struck out in fear. A man who had hidden his surprise at Maks’s youthful human form...a man who had told Maks, I’m taking you home.
“But they never figured out who your mother was.”
“No.” It still hurt, after all these years—a ragged, forever pain, watching his mother die—never knowing, in retrospect, her story.
Katie said gently, “Didn’t that strike you as strange?”
He jerked away from his memories to look at her, guileless and gentle, and inside him something swelled, reaching...
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