Kitabı oku: «Sentinels: Lion Heart», sayfa 4

Chapter 6

Joe prowled in from the early morning sunshine on the roof, stretching hugely. He flicked his ears, resigning himself to the end of solitude.

Not that he’d found much solace in the night. Not with the echoes of the faintly twisted power from the top of the world still churning through his body…not with everything he’d learned the day before still tumbling through his mind. For it was clear now—while he’d been thick and slow with that cold, his territory had been invaded.

And the people who should have had his back now blamed him. This woman—the tightly wound tracker with precision in her movement and precision in her features—she blamed him, too. Had come to find proof, but made up her mind before she even got here.

The feel of what she’d done to him—unwittingly, unknowingly—out there on the mountain…it, too, had followed him through the night, tingling along awakened nerves to leave him restless and wakeful. Even the solace of the roof had not lured him into better-late-than-never sleep.

But it meant he was awake when Lyn Maines left the casita for an early-morning walk around the house, stretching her legs and yawning, her hair tumbled loose around her face and her neat travel outfit from the day before replaced by crop cargo pants and some sort of shirred top that had made him want to lean closer for a better look.

He hadn’t done it. He knew better than to provide any movement for her eye to latch on to. Only after she returned to the casita did he pad down from the roof, hopping lightly to the second-story porch and through the warded sliding-glass door…from there, straight to unclothed human form and then straight to the shower, the casual habits of a man who lived alone in a wild spot of land.

When he finally emerged onto the front porch, jeans and a loose-weave pullover blotting up the leftover dampness, he found her sitting on the porch bench seat, her hair now drawn back into a tidy clip. She looked up at him with a wary expectation, and he said, “Breakfast?”

And that was how she ended up cooking in his kitchen. Not because he couldn’t—he’d already started the coffee and gathered bacon, eggs and appropriate pans—but because she seemed so uncomfortable just sitting there that he asked if she’d rather. And that left him free to deal with the paws batting at the lower cabinets, where the little black shorthair waited.

“Because I haven’t fed you in a week, maybe two,” he murmured, hitting the pantry up for cat kibble. They were indoor cats, other than the escape artist of a brown tabby; special wards contained them when he left the upstairs door open a crack so the cougar could return. But this little black shorthair still managed to find trouble. This morning, rather than eating, she fussed and shook her front paw with a frantic need.

Lyn looked up from the bacon as she repositioned it in the pan. “Is she okay?”

As if this little scene was truly a domestically cozy moment, with two companionable people sharing a good-morning breakfast, the paper turned to the comics section and the scent of frying cholesterol in the air. Right.

He scooped the little cat up and murmured sweet nothings in her ear until she purred and barely noticed as he deftly rolled a particularly nasty goat’s head sticker out from between the pads. “She’s fine,” he said, rubbing lightly at that spot just between her eyes. “It must have come in on my shoe.”

“I hate those things,” Lyn said, vehemently enough to take him by surprise—to amuse him. She’d actually let something of herself peek out that time. And though she withdrew almost immediately, her eyes lingered on his fingers as they stroked the sleek black head and crumpled back delicate shell-pink ears to make the black cat purr.

“As it happens,” Joe said, a murmur to fool the cat into thinking he was talking to her, and indeed she purred more loudly in response, “I actually like my bacon a little burned.”

Lyn’s eyes widened; her nostrils flared slightly, taking in the same sharp odor he’d already noticed. Her lips formed a silent curse, and she whirled to tend to the fry pan.

Joe smiled at the cat, bringing that purring creature up so they could briefly butt faces. Distractable, Lyn was—focused in, and therefore not aware of the larger world. He’d already seen some of that up on the mountain, and could well understand why she didn’t work without a partner.

It did surprise him that brevis would have sent her without one. They trusted him to some extent, then—albeit probably only to maintain his supposed cover. And whatever they thought of him, he wouldn’t let her down. Not this dark-eyed ocelot with her fierce drive to clean up the Sentinels, not even if she didn’t realize they were on the same side.

Damned if he was going to let the Core get away with messing with this mountain.

The cat made an abrupt decision to be done with purring and face-butting, possibly inspired by the clatter of eggs being dished out. Lyn moved assertively in the unfamiliar kitchen, looking right at home as she finished up the meal.

“Juice?” he asked her, heading for the refrigerator to do at least that much.

She glanced at him, flicking the gas burner off. “Milk?” she said, a hopeful note in her voice.

“Sure, plenty of it.” He poured her a serving, set it on the marble counter with a decided clink of glass on stone, and went back for his favorite mix of tropical juices.

As his hand closed around the carton, it hit.

Not a bad one, just sudden—his hand spasmed around flimsy cardboard…for an instant he lost awareness, swamped in the harsh atonal power, a slow, thick ooze filling his lungs so his vision grayed and prickles of pain and weakness raked him from inside.

Lyn pushed in beside him, prying the carton from his hand, muttering a curse. But by then Joe had control—or at least partial control—pushing away the power so he could fumble for shields.

But Lyn had no hesitation, and no fumbling. She reached for that same centered place she’d created up at Snowbowl—he felt it build around them, gliding into place like a balm. And then his head snapped up and he sucked in his breath, because she’d gone that one step further—done that which breezed through him from within, caressing those very nerves that had been scraped with pain only a moment earlier. The contrast shocked him, wobbling his knees, and he snatched at the edge of the sink for support. In her smudge-lined eyes he saw reflected shock; she stiffened, jerking slightly. And then she narrowed her eyes, and the connection slammed closed.

He lost his knees entirely, falling back against the cabinets beneath the sink, breath grunting from his body and mixed up with an inarticulate, involuntary noise of protest.

That, too, startled her—she looked as though she wanted to skitter away, putting distance between them. But she stood straight and still, and after a moment she let out a long sigh of breath.

“Well, damn,” Joe grumbled, trying to ignore the incredible emptiness she’d left behind. There was no graceful way up from here, jammed back against the cabinets with his bare feet propped too close and his knees askew at chin level. “No offense, but whatever you’re doing…I think it needs practice.”

“I could say the same for you,” she responded tersely—but she stepped forward to brace herself and extend a hand. A small hand, but he didn’t make the mistake of supposing it lacked strength. She was, after all, Sentinel.

He took the hand and he took the strength she loaned him, and soon enough he was back on his feet, looking down at her again. He said, “Shielding…not my best thing.”

“No,” she agreed.

That stung a little. “Hey—it’s my job to keep track of what’s going on around here. You think I can do that if I fling up shields at every opportunity? When I was in Nevada, Dean—” He stopped. He didn’t want to talk about Dean Seacrest with her. He didn’t even want to bring it up. Not knowing she thought him guilty of Dean’s death.

Well, hell, maybe he was. But not in the way they thought. So he cleared his throat and said, “I was in better practice then.” Back when he hadn’t been isolated, when he’d had more cause to shield, and more tightly defined duties. Now it was all his, a lightly populated area considered so stable that one Sentinel could handle it.

At least, one Sentinel of Joe’s skills. Because, let’s face it, there weren’t many. And he had plenty of reason to rue it these days, when it seemed brevis consul and his posse had decided they couldn’t quite trust what a man of such skills could—or would—do. Even when they didn’t know it all.

But Lyn’s brows had quirked up. “That makes sense,” she said. “Although you should put in some practice.”

He couldn’t help but hope as he settled back against the edge of the sink. “So now you believe me?” That he’d have reason to shield, that he was as much a victim of what was happening here as anyone.

She gave him the driest of expressions; the hope died. “I’m riding a line,” she told him, blunt as she had been when she first approached him in the woods below. “For all I know, you started this thing and now it’s out of hand—or the Core went their own way and left you hanging.”

“Whoa.” He couldn’t help it; he shook off the words—physically, literally. “That’s a hell of a way to go through life. Thinking like that.” He thought about it; still didn’t like it. “I’ll stick with my way, thanks. But you’re right about the practice. I’ll get to work on that.” As if they’d been discussing the weather, he turned back to his partially crunched carton of juice and unscrewed the little plastic cap on the side. “Hope you like your eggs cold. I think that’s how we’re going to get them.”

“Eggs cold, bacon burned. Just as it should be.” She said it with such deadpan perfection that he jerked around to look at her and caught the barest glimpse of a smile tweaking the corner of her mouth as she turned away to take the plates to the small round table in the tree-dappled sunlight of the breakfast nook.

His answering grin came in spite of himself. Because whether he liked it or not, whether she knew it or not, his heart was right out there for her to see, as it had always been.

It was just a matter of how hard she crunched it before she was through.

Chapter 7

They’d eaten breakfast in what amounted to silence, until Joe put his plate on the tile floor and grabbed the now-cool fry pan from the stove to put beside it, making the rolling baritone purr that brought the cats running from four different corners of the house.

Lyn added her plate to the offerings and said, deadpan, “Tell me you put them in the dishwasher afterward.”

He only raised his eyebrows at her, very much wouldn’t you like to know. But as he swiped a hand down the tortie’s silky back, he stood and put himself into a more businesslike mode. “I’d like to go to the museum today.”

He’d taken her by surprise. “Why the museum?”

He pondered the best answer. Because you so clearly don’t really have a clue just didn’t seem like the way to go. He said, “When we talked yesterday, it was pretty clear that brevis is approaching the situation from a streamlined point of view. I think you need the bigger picture.”

She made a little ffft of sound that suited the ocelot perfectly. “Streamlined. That’s diplomatic. You mean narrow-minded.”

“A little too focused,” he admitted, though that was as far as he’d go.

She seemed to sense that; she let it drop. And she said, “Tracking is tracking…I don’t really need any picture at all. But in this case…”

“You need to interpret what you find,” Joe said. “It’s not just about the end of the trail this time.”

“No,” she agreed. “It’s not.” She narrowed her eyes. “Let’s go, then.”

And so he found himself on the road, his legs bent to fit the front seat of the Ford Focus hatchback rental in which Lyn looked perfectly at home—even if she had no idea where she was going as she drove them down off the lower sweep of the mountain and toward Fort Valley Road, which, when they hit it, would take them either into town or out to the Grand Canyon. “Head south,” he told her. “Toward town.”

She found a gap in the traffic and neatly inserted the Focus across traffic, a swift left-hand turn, and she was barely getting them up to speed when he said, “Okay, there—on the right. See it?”

“That’s a museum?” Her disbelief showed clear as she pulled into the small parking lot and chose a spot that looked directly at the rustic stone structure tucked in among the pines.

He grinned. “Yup. It’s got research projects, displays, collections…it’s even got a campus. But this is the building we care about today. The exhibits.” And after that, he said little; he let the museum and the exhibits speak for themselves. Twelve thousand years of history, all but the last few hundred years accomplished without the benefit of eminent domain—from the disappearing Anasazi populations to the distinct nations remaining in the Four Corners area: Navajo, Hopi, Paiute, and Havasupai…never mind the rest of Arizona. Busy place, this territory had been.

A sudden series of trembly little power fluctuation aftershocks rattled his teeth as she stopped before an image of the Peaks; he threw up the shields he’d had waiting, and missed what she said as ragged power scraped through that protection. He braced himself against it, reinforcing the shields, stopping to think through what should have been automatic.

Yeah, not a good time to be down on the basics.

“Got it?” she asked him, and this time she was looking at him, those smudge-edged brown eyes seeing far too much.

Bad enough to have fallen into such bad habits, here where he rode power as naturally as he breathed. Worse to be repeatedly caught out at it. He nodded at the displays as if it hadn’t happened at all. “You see what I mean? About this place? We’re not the only ones keeping an eye on this mountain. We’re probably not the only ones who know it’s sick. It’s arrogant to think we are.”

“We’re probably the only ones who know exactly why it’s sick,” she said, with some asperity. “The Core is our responsibility, and you know it. They wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for us.”

“That’s one way to look at it.” He moved aside to the next exhibit, a timeline laid over images of ancient high desert starting with the Hohokam in 300 B.C. and tracing through a millennium and more of complex Anasazi and Pueblo societies, with a period of Sinagua farming near the Peaks and even the eruption of Sunset Crater not far north of Flagstaff. Complex, complete, successful societies in a rugged and challenging desert terrain, with the Peaks an oasis of life and spiritual support. “I can’t help but think it’s more complicated than that.”

She shook her head. “It’s not. Don’t make it that way.”

He shot her an exasperated look, knowing she wouldn’t understand. “I don’t have to make it that way. It just is. Everything is, whether you want to believe it or not. The world is made of interlocking layers, not separate units. You think you can just excise the parts you don’t like, without regard to the rest? Well, guess what—it doesn’t work that way.”

Lyn took a step back, obviously more startled than affronted. “Wow,” she said. “Where’d that come from?”

He snorted. “Do you even have to ask? Or have you forgotten that you’re here to take me down? If I want to see this mountain saved, I don’t have any particular choice but to help you.” He’d thought he’d been resigned…that he’d reconciled with the inevitable—knowing he’d do his best to keep the Peaks safe, but it likely wouldn’t save him in the end.

Apparently he’d been wrong.

Something about the day before, about working with her at the top of the world…at the top of his world…

He’d liked that. He wanted more of it. More than he’d get if he let them take him down…again.

Her eyes widened; the light from the exhibit glanced against them, illuminating shades of brown and darker brown and specks of black. “If you’re innocent—”

He snorted, making an effort to lower his voice here in this quiet building with its respectful echoes of the past. “You forget. I already know better than that.”

“Ryan—” she said, and gave up, just shook her head.

“You know,” he said, “I used to see things that way, too. Simple. We are what we are—we do what we have to. Hell, I grew up groomed for it. Because what does any teenage boy think, right? That I could be one of the best. And I already had my partner, too—grew up with him, trained with him. Just as I’d always planned, in my perfect little world. And for a while, it even looked like maybe it was just that simple.” He pinned her with a look, and she took another step back—not frightened or wary, just claiming that distance. “For a while,” he repeated. And then Dean had been killed.

He didn’t want to talk about Dean at all. Not to her. “What do you think?” he asked, abruptly enough that she’d know the subject had been changed.

And she did, but she clearly didn’t follow. “About…?”

“Brevis,” he said shortly. “What’s happening there? It’s not all nice and neat and simple, I can tell you that much. You know as well as I do that I didn’t get those messages. Or is admitting that too close to admitting you might be wrong that I’ve gone dark?”

“I asked Nick to look into it.”

“Nick.” Joe looked away—looked back to the timeline without seeing it. Definite hard-ass, that one. Like Lyn, he’d made up his mind about Joe’s guilt before they’d even met—truly believed that Joe would take out his lifelong friend and partner to pay off his half sister’s marrow transplant bills. That he’d allied with one of Vegas’s most influential crime lords to do it.

Because that’s so very me. So very something I would do.

“He’ll check it out,” she insisted.

“Sure, so he can find some way to prove me wrong.” He knew from the way her expression shut down that he’d guessed that one right. “Given the way things have been going down there, maybe I should just give national a call.”

The notion clearly alarmed her. “National doesn’t interfere with the brevis regions.”

“Not with the day-to-day stuff,” he agreed. “They sure as hell have an interest in whether things are running straight. And don’t tell me they don’t care about something as big as the Peaks.”

“You’re right, but—” She stopped, shook her head. “Not yet. It’d just blow things wide open down there, and no one’s ready for that. It would ruin the consul…and possibly Nick.”

“I’m supposed to care?” He leaned against the narrow wall space between display windows, and crossed his arms. “I’m going dark, remember?”

She bit her lip, clearly standing on the edge of words not quite said.

“Either you believe me and expect the right things from me,” he said, “or you don’t, and you can’t.”

Ryan’s words stood in the silence for a good long time. Long enough for Lyn’s ocelet’s hearing to realize there was a group of excited schoolchildren in the building, no doubt lingering in the special therizinosaur exhibit. Long enough for him to shift away from the wall, raise a dark eyebrow at her and watch her with a question in eyes that currently sparked more green than hazel.

No. More like a dare.

I came up here for a reason, she told herself, looking for the conviction that had come so readily in that Tucson conference room. Even if conviction clashed, somehow, with Ryan’s instant action to save the young woman at the Snowbowl Skylift, or with his gentle handling of cats he claimed weren’t actually his, or even with the expression on his face as he watched the high desert from the Skylift overlook. Not to mention what she’d felt from him only this morning in the kitchen, the caress of texture and sensation when she’d so suddenly faced the impulse to fling herself completely open to him. And though she’d panicked, cutting him off so suddenly that she’d pretty much taken him down the rest of the way, in retrospect…

Some part of her still craved more.

And so she thought of all those things, and she looked at the dare in his eyes, and she hesitated.

But only until self-recrimination curdled in her throat. Because how many times had she wanted to believe better of her brother? How many times had she let hope push away truth?

He must have seen it in her, dammit. Too perceptive by far. That question in his eyes died out; his expression went flat. “Okay, then,” he said. “Watch yourself, Lyn Maines.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Was that a threat?”

He snorted. “Of course not. Me, I’ll do just what I think is right. But you…best not set any expectations on what that might be. I’m not living up to your expectations, or Dane’s, or Nick’s. Just my own. And you’ve told me what you think of that, so…best watch yourself.”

She frowned, crossed her arms over the snug shirring of her shirt, and supposed he was right at that. “This is the strangest conversation I’ve had in…ever.”

“Wish I could say I haven’t been through it before,” he told her flatly, and turned away, moving past the timeline to a protected display of Sinagua artifacts from Elden Pueblo—potsherds, bone tools, wood arrows, rock tools and a handful of items from other cultures indicative of Sinagua trade patterns.

But Lyn stopped there, and her nostrils flared at the sudden acrid bite of trace lingering in the air. He quickly dropped the resentment so clearly carried in his shoulders to flick a careful gaze around the room, and she said, “These Sinagua…”

“Si-nah-wah,” he murmured in correction of her hard G, as if that were important now—except she realized that to him, it was. It was all part of respecting the mountain, and how did that fit in to labeling him the man who would steal from it?

She drew a breath, and the stench of amulet corruption focused her. “Is there anything particularly significant about their relationship to the Peaks? More than the other tribes?”

“They lived at the base of the mountain,” he said promptly. “Elden Pueblo is partially open to the public, if you want to go there. There are trails that lead up into the Elden Summit—although Elden isn’t actually one of the Peaks. The Havasupai lived on the northwestern slope for a time—that’s this side of the mountain—so they were actually closer to the heart of the power, at least as we’re concerned about it. But they were also in the Canyon area, and that’s where their land is today.”

Her gaze landed on the display built into the wall just beyond him—her eyebrows shot up, her mouth opened on words she no longer bothered to say. She nodded at the display, and found new words. “Or maybe that’s all just too complicated, and it’s about what’s within reach.” For the projectile points there were wired to the display right out where they could be touched for the ooh and ahh factor.

He made a noise in his throat, something surprised—a noise that might have come from a startled cougar, in truth. Before she realized his intent, he reached for those knapped-stone points, his fingers brushing carelessly over contaminated obsidian—but only for an instant. He snatched them back, a snarl in his throat. Astonishment took his features, and then pain, and by then she squinted against the flash of electric-blue lightning, pulsing and tangling around him. And even as she struggled to understand how the amulet-contaminated artifact had created this struggling, painful transformation, the blur of light and motion dumped him out on the floor, panting, dazed—and fully cougar. He sprawled out across linoleum, his claws digging in as if he might otherwise spin away.

She gave a quick glance toward the wide entry to this exhibit area, unable to help the panic icing her veins. “Good God, Ryan, take back the human! Right now!”

But the cougar only stared dumbly at her. A thin trickle of blood came from one nostril of his rough, black-edged nose; his ears were neither alert nor reactive—just slack—while the rest of him clung to the floor, awkward and ungainly.

Another glance at the doorway, a quick tip of her head—no footsteps running, no voices raised. She went down to her knees, right up close and personal, her hand hovering—indecisive, but only for a moment. She took his massive big cat head between her hands, all too aware of what those teeth could do to her if he was truly as confused as he seemed. Her fingers sank into short, thick fur; she forced herself to relax. “Ryan, now.”

A drop of blood spatted on the floor. She forced herself to take a breath, then another. “Ryan,” she said, more quietly now, “you need to find yourself. Take back the human.” Another deep breath. “Joe,” she said, and he blinked. His claws flexed, scraping tile. His tail twitched. His tongue, pink and raspy, tasted of his own blood at his nose.

“Yes,” she said, stroking the side of his head, her fingers curving over the strong bone of his temple and down along his neck. “Come on, Ryan. Take back the human—” before anyone freaking sees us, but she didn’t say that part out loud. Didn’t push, just looked into those familiar eyes and tried to connect, to draw him out. “Come on,” she muttered, more to herself than him, because if he didn’t respond soon she would have to try the centering move, really truly bring him in, and she didn’t know at all how that would work out—

His gaze sharpened; his body tensed. It was all the warning she got, and then the light of change flickered all around her—smooth and fast this time, so she quite suddenly found herself holding the man, her hand in his hair, his eyes wide and hell, yes, frightened, and the blood still running from his nose. Just that fast, he broke contact, rolling to his feet with the smooth power she’d come to take for granted in him, turning away to duck his head and wipe roughly at his upper lip.

Lyn rose to her feet more slowly, brushing at her pants—straightening just in time to turn toward approaching footsteps—the museum docent who looked in on them with restrained disapproval and said, “There’s no photography allowed within the museum.”

Camera flash. He’d thought he’d seen camera flash. And Lyn had no intention of disabusing him of that notion. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We didn’t pay enough attention. It won’t happen again.” And she looked at Ryan’s back, the incongruous tremble of his broad shoulders, the blood drops on the floor and the deep scoring across the linoleum.

It had better not.