She nodded, a quick little surprised motion. “Yes,” she said. “It’s just so... It was...”
“Beautiful,” he whispered, and kissed her again—briefly, before he laid his head on her chest, letting the weight of it settle slowly. She lifted her own head just enough to kiss the disarray of his silvered hair, and found his hand to interlace her fingers again. He briefly returned the touch with a squeeze of his own, and just that gently, relaxed into sleep. Still covering her, still keeping her warm.
Ana found his discarded jacket with her free hand, tossing it over his back with an awkward flick of her wrist and tugging it into place. Covering them both, and smiling into leftover tears as she let his presence lull her away into sleep beneath him.
* * *
Ian woke with a start, rolling away from Ana to land in a crouch—face lifted to the breeze, the night a sharp wash of blue-tinted detail around him and his hands flexing against the ground, phantom claws deployed.
The leopard awake.
Slowly, he relaxed—understanding that there was no danger, no enemy on approach. It was only that the leopard, so repressed, so sickened, had come back to him in such a tidal surge of awareness.
Ana stirred within the gentle hollow of ground where they’d sheltered, still buried beneath his recently acquired jacket. They’d made love, they’d slept, they’d woken to disarray and satiated kisses, and they’d eaten...and then he’d acknowledged the inevitable.
It wouldn’t have done his friends any good if he’d made it off the mountain in record time only to falter upon reaching the retreat. Especially if the Core was already there.
Waiting.
Not just for him. For Ana.
And he was far, far too close to that point of exhaustion.
So they’d slept again, one jacket beneath them and one above, Ana’s gently heavy breathing lulling him back to sleep.
It had almost sounded like purring.
“Ian?” Her voice came sleepy from the hollow; material rustled as she pushed the jacket away from her face. “Ian—?”
“I’m here,” he said, keeping his voice low only out of respect for the night. “Go back to sleep.”
She made a disgruntled sound, and the rustling subsided. Ian stood, uncoiling to his full height. Aware of the leopard as he couldn’t ever remember being.
Ana. She’d done what she did best, quieting him. Giving him the room to heal—and now, to feel the depth of what he’d always been. An Ian Scott that he’d never truly known, with his world too full of thought and motion and intent.
A quiet breeze slipped over his arms; he felt the chill of it for the first time since...
Since he’d first been affected by the kitchen amulet.
He stood a moment, still in the way only the leopard could be—in a way he’d never truly allowed of himself. Absorbing the understanding of how deeply—and how quickly—those amulets had affected him. Absorbing, too, the perfidy of such a subtle attack. He was the primary AmTech of this region, and if he hadn’t felt the insidious nature of the damage being done, how would anyone?
Ana was right. Right to insist that they stop here, right to insist that they rest, that he heal. Because more important than the need to save those people he loved so fiercely was the need to convey the secret of the silent amulets as quickly and widely as possible. If he stupidly sacrificed himself along the way, that would never happen. No one would even know he’d solved the riddle—or that it was even possible.
Another breeze slipped over his arms, riffling his hair and evoking a shiver. The leopard pushed at him, whiskers bristling, the skin over his shoulders twitching. Ian glanced back at the small quiescent lump that was Ana under the jackets and then back out into the clarity of the night, stepping out into the silence of it—bounding out into the silence of it—and reaching for the leopard as he moved.
Coiled power, the graceful snap of a long tail, broad paws quiet against the earth, breeze a mere ruffle of fur, hunger growling in the emptiness of a body chewing through resources to heal.
Ian went hunting.
* * *
Lerche cursed the sling that bit into his neck, and he cursed the raking claws of the working still crawling through his system—one of those from the case Ian Scott had triggered en masse.
Lerche hadn’t known him to be capable of any such thing. Hadn’t known any of them to be capable of such a thing. And even if he’d known...
It wouldn’t have occurred to him that any sane man would do it. Not when too many of the powerful workings were constructed to target the nearest Sentinel—unlike the workings that Scott had very clearly managed to direct away from himself and away from Ana. Across the household and onto Lerche and his men, so many of whom had been badly injured or died outright.
He hadn’t had so many to waste. And now he hadn’t heard back from the three posse members he’d sent into the mountain, readily following the silent amulet he’d had embedded in Ana before this operation.
She’d gone to bed without it. She’d woken with it. And she’d never known the difference.
Too bad the tiny silent blanks were so precious. Lerche could foresee a day when all his people carried such trackers, instead of just those who most needed to run silent.
But not until—unless—he got things under control before the regional drozhar ran out of patience. The entire Southwest had undoubtedly felt the ripple from the mass amulet release—including the Tucson Sentinels. Brevis reinforcements would already be on the way.
They’d be too late for those at the retreat. He was confident of the deadly web he’d woven there—silent amulets, triggered in unison to enclose the retreat and trap the occupants within its effects. If they weren’t dead, they were dying. Brevis couldn’t get here in time—because there was no in time. Until the working faded or the amulets were destroyed, any and all who entered that retreat would die, leaving the Sentinels only the need to clean up after them, bereft of evidence and hushing events to protect their own clandestine nature.
Just as Lerche now cleaned up after his own, whipping up the few men left to him. By the time the drozhar arrived, there’d be no one to contradict his story.
And it was a good story.
Ian Scott gone mad in the wake of Ana’s assignment gone awry, Ana gone rogue and misusing amulets in an attempt to succeed in her own small assignment.
Of course Ian Scott had then come after Ana, tearing through the mansion with no regard to Core lives...and he had triggered the final amulet attack before fleeing into the hills, dragging Ana with him. There they’d both no doubt expired.
Things were well in hand. Lerche could be reasonably certain that Scott hadn’t completed his work with the silent amulets, or he would have detected them on Ana long before Lerche ever had a chance to take him prisoner. Those results alone would justify his initial operation—the one he’d put on the record with the drozhar—and the Sentinels and Ana would take the blame for the rest.
Lerche resisted the urge to scratch his healing arm, and instead reached for his new phone—sliding it open and scrolling down the contacts to the men who ought to have returned from the mountain by now. They should certainly be within an area of reception.
“Answer, damn you,” he muttered, glaring at the phone.
No one did.
Chapter 15
Ana saw Ian leave.
She saw him change.
And she froze with fear beneath the bundle of jackets, understanding for the very first time—truly understanding—what Ian was.
He was gorgeous. He was power and danger and primal energy.
He was beast.
Just as Lerche had always said. Just as she’d always believed, but as she’d not truly been able to comprehend.
Who could?
She’d made love wi
th this man. She’d declared herself to him. She’d opened her heart to him.
And he was more dangerous than she ever could have imagined.
“I’m done now,” she whispered into the night. “No more hard stuff, universe. It’s somebody else’s turn.”
Intense gut-level fear, it seemed, was every bit as strong as any trust.
She pushed herself up from the ground, rising slowly to pull the jacket on and zip it up; the temperatures had fallen to their usual remarkable degree, and she had no intention of getting cold all over again.
After she found herself a bush, she hunted up hat and scarf from one of the backpacks, covering her ears and neck and then stuffing her hands in a pair of scavenged gloves. They flopped off her hands like clown fingers, and she laughed darkly into the night as she put both hands in one glove, salvaging warmth.
Waiting. Unable to sleep, knowing that he was out there. That the leopard was out there.
Snow leopard. A glimmer of pale spotted white as he prowled away, an amazing length of tail, small ears tucked tight to a beautiful feline head. Not the biggest of the cats, which suited him. He wasn’t a brawny man, after all. He was all lean frame and muscle, broad shoulders and coiled movement.
Ana pulled the arms of the bottom coat up into her lap, making it into as much of a robe as she could, and huddled into the results.
Waiting. Watching for that glimmer of pale movement. Listening for the rustle of a big padded foot against the ground.
And therefore nearly missing him when he did return, walking upright and quite humanly in the darkness. His nearness startled her all over again and she sprang to her feet, tripping over the bottom coat and recovering herself.
“Thought you were asleep,” he said, his voice low and conversational.
“I had to use a bush,” she told him. “I...saw you leaving.”
“Ah.” His voice held understanding. She couldn’t read his face.
She suspected he could very easily read hers. Sentinel night vision was a well-known thing—a combination of human and nocturnal physiology, with their earth powers thrown in. Clear, bright and detailed.
He didn’t try to come any closer. “You gave me back the leopard, you know.”
She didn’t know. In fact, she didn’t understand at all.
“I haven’t been able to find myself since that first amulet started working on the retreat.” He shook his head, a motion she could see in the rising moonlight. “To be fair, it’s been a very long time since I could cut through the overlapping thoughts in my head to let the whole of the leopard through.”
Ana struggled to absorb the meaning behind his words—hearing in his voice a reverence, a relief, that she found distinctly hard to comprehend. “It’s that important to you?”
Ian laughed outright. “Is breathing important? Is living?”
She didn’t quite know how to answer.
“Yes,” he said, more quietly now—beginning to realize that her hesitation came not just from a failure to understand, but from her own reaction to the leopard. “It’s that important. I’m sorry if I frightened you. I’ll never hurt you, Ana. Never.”
She discovered she’d wrapped her arms around her stomach, holding herself tight. “When I first saw you on that trail with the cougar...”
He’d been beautiful. He’d been charging into a fight with a creature significantly larger than he was, and even in her fear of the power he held, she still remembered most vividly the bittersweet desire to have someone who cared enough for her to do the same.
But now he waited, and she made herself ask. “I wondered then...how much of yourself do you retain when you’re leopard? How much of your humanity?”
His silence let her know the question came as something of a blow. His lingering distance told her the same. “What has the Core told you, Ana? That we’re all beasts? That when we take the change we become the worst of both worlds? All the ugliness of humanity, all the ferocity of the animal? Killing machines?”
It took all her strength to stick to her truths. She wanted to say no, never mind, I’m just being silly. She wanted to find some appeasing response that would take the tension from his posture and make everything feel all right, even if it meant burying her fear.
She had learned well how to stay safe in her world.
But Ian had always been truthful with her. And he was teaching her that the only true way to be safe was to be honest with him—and with herself. So she said, “Yes. That’s exactly what I learned.”
Not from her family, in those early years when she’d learned what it did feel like to be loved. But after.
Ian’s bitter, self-aware tone took her by surprise. “God, they suck.”
And then he startled her again. “You need to figure it out, Ana. What you see against what you’ve been told. What you’ve experienced with me against the words of a culture that showed you how to live in disrespect and fear.”
“I...” She started talking because it seemed necessary, and trailed away because she wasn’t even sure what to say. Finally she managed, “I know. I just don’t know how.”
He took a step closer. A challenge of sorts—knowing he’d frightened her and now daring her to get past it as he finally answered her earlier question. “When I take the leopard, it makes me more than either of us. Everything that’s me, free to glory in everything that’s leopard. But the leopard doesn’t control me. The leopard is me.”
Ana took a step back. Not from fear—for this was Ian, the man who had held her and loved her and risked his life for her. Just because she needed...
Space.
Because at some point, that one more thing had simply become too much to process, in too little time.
He didn’t pursue her. But he didn’t back down, either. “We use who we are to keep this world safe from those who would harm it. We patrol wilderness areas, we find toxic dump sites, we work in zoos and parks. If we’re not supposed to embrace who we are while we’re at it?” He snorted. “Pardon me, but fuck that.”
Embrace who we are.
It’s what Lerche had tried to take from her, too. Pushing and squeezing and molding her to the understanding that what she was could never be enough. That she needed, somehow, to be somebody else.
“Whatever,” Ian said as if it hadn’t mattered at all. But it had, and she knew it. It mattered very much. And still she was all jumbled inside. Unable to offer him the responses he needed—not and be honest.
Ian cut her silence short by stepping up to pull the packs together. “Time to move out,” he said, rummaging and discarding. “I think we can get this stuff into one pack, if we use the jacket pockets.” He held out a handful of energy bars, and she belatedly stepped forward to take them, stuffing them into all the nooks and crannies of the jacket. He flattened the trash from the MREs and layered it into the bottom of the pack, offering her the final dinner along the way. “Here. You need it.”
“So do you,” she protested, finding herself with words again.
He gave her a glance that she couldn’t read in the darkness, moonlight or no. “I’ve eaten.”
The leopard had eaten, he meant. She swallowed hard and refused to think about it—and took the dinner, tearing it open to initiate the heating process and meanwhile tucking its little side packets into her pockets with the energy bars.
He zipped and buckled and hefted the pack. “It’s good,” he said. “We’ll tie the jacket to it. I’m afraid you’ll have to carry the second pack, too, but it’s light.”
“Why—” she started and stopped, looking for better words than why do you have to be the leopard?
“You can stay here if you want,” he told her, reminding her of their earlier conversation. “Or go your own way.”
“That’s not what I meant.” She drew on that new courage an
d stood her ground. “I can carry the packs, and I will. I’m only trying to understand.”
He handed her the full pack. “Because the leopard can see better, hear better and move better. And if we run into trouble, I’m in a better position to do something about it.”
“Okay,” she said.
He gave her a sharp look that she felt even through the darkness. “And because I’ve missed it. I want it.” He took a step closer, close enough so she could see his features and see the gleam in his eyes, and the yearning. “Because I need it. I’m not ashamed of that. Pretty much the opposite, in fact.”
With that he turned her around to help her with the pack, and tied the jacket on it, and stepped away. Not just one step, but half a dozen—where he hesitated only long enough to say, “I won’t let you get lost,” before he spun into a silent blue-white explosion of energy and strobing light, and emerged from it as leopard.
Beautiful, graceful, deadly leopard.
* * *
Ian quartered the terrain before Ana, clearing it not only of a prowling bobcat but confirming the absence of human presence now that they neared the trail he’d been targeting. Never out of her sight long enough so that she felt alone, never so close as to frighten her.
When a small gathering of coyotes lowered their heads and trotted away with a collective sneer, he knew two things—that dawn was close, and the trail was closer. Coyotes packed up near the base of the range, skimming that intersection between humanity and the wild where rabbits, squirrels and small house pets kept them fed and entertained.
Ana greeted his return with less apprehension and more relief. He sat before her, long pluming tail wrapped around his feet, wishing he could explain how magnificent it was to prowl inside this other skin, soaking up scents and sounds that the human never noticed. How exhilarating to give way to the instinctive impulses of the leopard—from the leap that clapped broad paws over a mouse only to sit and twitch whiskers as it scurried away to the sudden dash across open ground, tail flipping along behind in the glory of muscles in play, bunch and leap and pounce and then oh, did I do that?
Sentinels: Leopard Enchanted (Harlequin Nocturne) Page 21
