Kodiak Chained Read online

  Mariska lay warm in his arms, her bottom snug against his groin, her hair splayed over her face and his arm—thick and black and scattered, her bangs askew. Her cheeks held a flush, barely evident beneath the nutty tones of her skin or the naturally dark sootiness of her eyelids.

  His body responded to her, of course—a deep, aching pull, both sweet and merciless. Waking this way, finding her with him this way...it couldn’t have felt more right.

  He had no idea what the hell he was doing.

  He couldn’t trust her. He didn’t doubt her sincerity; he doubted her judgment. He didn’t doubt her intent; he doubted her inexperience—with teamwork, with deep fieldwork, with this level of Core perfidy.

  Eduard Forakkes was no minion. And Mariska wasn’t here on her own, a single bodyguard working with a single principle.

  But she was here, and her judgment and her inexperience left the team vulnerable. Never mind her clear determination to fulfill her role here.

  But she was here, and she had the power to ruin him. Whether she meant it or not.

  And still he bent to wake her with a brush of his cheek against hers—one final moment of selfishness, indulging in that which he couldn’t afford. “One day,” he said, when she opened sleepy eyes, “I will wake up in a bed again.” And he stood with her in his arms, turning to redeposit her on the couch. By then she was fully awake, her body gone from relaxed to tense—but remaining quiet as he settled her down, careful not to interfere.

  “Gotta shower,” he said, and didn’t mention it would be another cold one.

  He had the feeling she knew.

  When he emerged, she was brushing her teeth at the sink, and she grabbed up her toiletries bag—the no-nonsense clutch of a woman used to travel—and disappeared into the bathroom.

  Ruger brewed a stinging peppermint tea, grabbing a handful of the jerky to head out to the porch. Harrison stood behind Sandy on the porch of the other cabin, his arms linked around her waist in a gesture that was both comforting and possessive. He heard snatches of Sandy’s distress that Jack would have to wait for a recovery team—and the recovery team was waiting for them to finish with the installation.

  He yanked off a bite of the jerky and chewed, satisfied to grind his teeth over it.

  Mariska joined him there, scented with mild cucumber soap and shampoo, her wet hair drawn back into its braid. She drew breath to say something, but hesitated on it.

  “Hey,” Ruger said, offering her a piece of jerky. “None of that. Unless you’re mad at me. If you are, then just hit me and have it over with.”

  That surprised her. “Hit you?” she said, taking the jerky and taking a much smaller bite than he had. “Why would I hit you? I’m a big girl, Ruger. If some part of me hadn’t wanted what happened last night, I would have stopped it. I just don’t know where it leaves us.”

  Ruger didn’t respond right away. When she reached for his tea, he absently handed it over, watching her mouth as she sipped—the movement of curved lips, just plump enough, a natural dark red in complement to her skin tones.

  She raised her eyebrows at him.

  He grabbed at the thoughts he’d been gathering. “It leaves us in this middle of this assignment, for starters. Just maybe, it leaves us back where we started.”

  “Taking advantage of the moment,” Mariska said, not quite looking at him. “Like that first night.”

  Ruger was the one who had to look away. That wasn’t what he’d felt after that first night with her. He’d felt the start of something then. He’d wanted it. “The moment,” he said out loud, as casually as he could. He didn’t believe it—not of himself. He knew himself too well—knew he’d been too hurt by her, and that meant he’d already gone past the moment.

  But they had to get through this assignment somehow. If that meant pretending a friends-with-potential-benefits relationship, he could do it. Sentinels as a whole had perfected that particular byplay, just as Sandy and Harrison had done.

  “Right,” Mariska said, returning his tea, her dark eyes holding a sadness he hadn’t expected. “And thank you. I know you’ve got every reason to make things harder for me.”

  “Under the circumstances, that would make me a dick,” Ruger said. “I try to avoid being a dick.”

  She snorted faint laughter, and he grinned back down at her, and thought maybe he’d get through the day after all.

  * * *

  They approached the installation with caution—knowing Forakkes was still here somewhere, still lurking with intent. Maks had known it, too—he’d been tiger when they parked at the old Williams place and skirted the back corner of Katie’s property with the ATVs. Tiger, moving with a limp and occasional lurch, but tiger nonetheless glowering and on patrol.

  Quiet as the ATVs were, Ruger and Mariska withheld conversation—but her arms tightened around his torso as they rode past Maks, understanding the implications.

  Maks, too, was on high alert.

  They disembarked to the side of the trail and tossed the camo netting over the ATVs; Ian went ahead, casting for amulet sign, and Mariska followed in his wake.

  But where Ian moved steadily forward, Mariska stopped, her expression uncertain. Ruger moved up beside her, questioning her with a glance—and then not truly needing her explanation, not as he drew on the bear, and the scent of Core visitors hit his nose.

  “Do you—?” Mariska asked, and stopped as she saw his head lifted in concentration. “Oh, good. I wasn’t sure—”

  Ruger snorted. “Yes, you were. You just didn’t want to say it. The hell with that, little bear. Just because things haven’t gone as planned doesn’t mean you don’t know your job.”

  Her eyes widened slightly; she chewed her lip, then let it go. “Okay. The problem is, I don’t scent them from any particular direction. It’s as though they were everywhere. At least three of them. And it’s all muddled up with—”

  “Skunk,” Ruger said flatly.

  Sandy had come up on their heels. “I’m not getting any of it but the skunk.”

  “Take your coyote and you would,” Ruger said, without concern. None of them had human senses as acute as those of their other forms, even if they were still better than any mundane human could expect. But in either form, a bear’s sense of smell was second to none. He looked down at Mariska. “Once we get settled inside, I think you and I should take a look around. Bearishly speaking.”

  “I think one of us should,” she responded, her tone pointed.

  Sandy help up her hands in a gesture of peaceful retreat. “This one’s all yours, Mariska.”

  Mariska looked straight at Ruger, and he wasn’t sure if the apology in her eyes made things better or worse. “You said I knew my job. Well, this is my job. Yours is inside, figuring out what’s going on with those animals.”

  “We know what’s going on with those animals,” he growled.

  “We don’t,” she shot back at him. “We know what’s happened to them. We don’t know why. And now that Forakkes has slagged the hard drives, those animals are all we have to work with.”

  “Then we’re screwed,” Ruger told her. “I can’t read that man’s mind, and I’m sure not going to do it while I’m worried about the security of this place.”

  “Then you’ll have to deal with it, won’t you? Because the security of this place isn’t why you’re here.”

  “Little bear—”

  She raised her lip in a human snarl, her legs braced, her hands fisted at her sides, color on her cheeks. He met it with eyes narrowing, head tipped in warning—for long moments they faced off, Ruger’s temper rising to an intensity he rarely allowed simply because it was so. Damned. Hard...

  ...to think straight.

  “Fine,” she said, so matter-of-factly it threw him completely off balance. She took a step back from him and reached into her bag, pulling out the satellite phone while he struggled to regain his equilibrium. “I’ll see what Nick thinks.”

  It slapped his temper down fast enough—
left him stunned all over again. “That’s what you want to do? Make good at my expense again?”

  “No,” she snapped. “It’s what you’re forcing me to do because you don’t truly respect my skills, no matter what you said. Would you argue with Ian about amulets? Would you argue with Sandy about wards?”

  He floundered in defensiveness, knowing only that he’d done it again—left himself far too open to this hurt. “It’s not the same, little bear.” He used the words deliberately this time, offering a moment of his own bared teeth. “I don’t do wards or amulets. I damned well know how to watch my own back.”

  “It’s not why you’re here. And dammit, I don’t know that you do. Look at all the chances you take with healing—God, Ruger, you could have killed yourself trying to heal Jack!”

  “I wasn’t trying to heal him,” Ruger said, dropping his voice into its deep lower register, a human growl. “I was just trying to help him survive.”

  “And still you bled from your ears,” Mariska said, and the tremor in her voice sounded like fear. “You passed out, and you didn’t exactly bounce right back, either. What am I supposed to think, Ruger? That this is your very best judgment? That you’ve adjusted to what happened to you? It doesn’t look that way from here!” She displayed the phone, holding it out in a neutral position—her meaning clear enough. Your choice.

  He straightened, stiff with the impact of her words, and stared at her with a gaze that should have melted whatever chill thing she was made of. She met it without flinching.

  “Put the phone away,” he said, and left her there to do it as he headed for the installation.

  * * *

  Mariska made her way through the door and down the tunnel in solitude, finding a comfort in the scent of dirt and the enclosing walls. Damned stubborn man. Damned stupid man. She tried to think of a way that encounter might have gone better...and couldn’t.

  Then again, it couldn’t have gone worse.

  She couldn’t quite bring herself to enter the installation. Not yet. Not when the others had likely heard almost every word of that encounter.

  Not when she wished she could be more certain that she’d been right to pull out the nuclear option, brandishing the sat phone with its connection to Nick Carter. The look on Ruger’s face...the hurt, the fury...

  The murmur of voices within reassured her; the team was going about its business. She admired the smooth efficiency of their exchanges, the ease with which they fell to work with one another.

  She’d thought to find that for herself here. One of the team.

  Then maybe it would have been good not to start by undermining the one they all love. The one she had only belatedly—far too late at that—realized that she could love, too.

  The quiet commentary stuttered short on a sharp sound, the voice deep and surprised. Ruger.

  Mariska forged forward into the installation with her heart suddenly pounding, seeing it differently than she had the day before. No longer a benign space with secrets to uncover, but a space of lurking dangers and arcane threats. But even before she emerged to assess the situation visually, she’d absorbed the lack of fear in the air, the less than desperate response. She found Sandy and the amulet specialists converging on Ruger, who stood—unharmed, his scowl evident from the set of his shoulders—in front of the cage shelves.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, merging into the group as Sandy and Heckle caught up to Ian.

  “They’re dead,” Ian said, disbelief in his voice.

  “All of them,” Ruger said, his anger barely suppressed. “He killed them all.”

  Mariska understood immediately. “We took away his eyes. That made them of no use to him.”

  “Wrong,” Sandy said, her mouth tight with disgust. “He used them, all right. To make an impact on us.”

  Mariska wouldn’t have thought of it. But Sandy was the one who liked knots and puzzles and wards, her clever coyote mind always at work. The moment she said the words, Mariska knew the truth of them. “That man is a monster.”

  “Of that, we can be assured.” Ian looked at the carnage of little bodies. “But he’s arrogant, too, and we can use that. Sooner or later.”

  Ruger glanced over at Ian with enough intensity in his expression to stop Mariska short—to fill her with both respect and an instant, longing ache. “We’ll use it,” he promised. Only as an afterthought did he send a quick look Mariska’s way. “When you’re done outside, I could use some help. Someone to take notes.”

  “My shorthand is nonexistent,” she told him, keeping her voice as steady as she could—as casual as she could. “But I’ll be glad to help.” She took a breath. “I’d like a group consensus on this, though—the way the trail is muddled up out there—”

  “And the skunk,” Sandy added, wrinkling her nose to rearrange her freckles.

  Mariska made a face in response. “It’s obvious they did it on purpose. Even as the bear, I won’t be able to sort things out in short order. Would you rather I spent the time unraveling what they’ve done, or do you want me to secure the immediate area and come back for this?”

  “The question is whether they’re just trying to tie us in knots—use you up that way—or if they’re hiding something.” Sandy looked over at Ian. “I think it would be best not to get caught up in their game. To just secure the area with extra care. Do one pass with your hands and your tech, and the other with your bear and your nose.”

  “That should cover it,” Ian agreed.

  Mariska didn’t want to glance over at Ruger—to see how he felt about it, or about her—but her eyes did just that.

  He wasn’t looking at her at all. He kept his gaze on the cages, on the animals within the cages.

  She almost wished he had his beard again. Then she wouldn’t have been able to see the hard muscle of his jaw or his throat move when he swallowed. And she wouldn’t have realized, with blinding clarity, just how much she’d hurt him. Again. She almost opened her mouth on the sudden, overwhelming impulse to suggest that he come out with her. The two of them would work faster, would provide twice the coverage...and it wouldn’t be the same as if he’d been insisting, judgment-blind.

  But the moment passed, and she didn’t have the courage after all. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she told them, and figured she didn’t hide her misery any better than Ruger had. But there was a monster out there, killing animals, working up to kill the Sentinels—and she was here to stop him.

  Chapter 12

  Mariska emerged into the woods with some relief, grateful she’d worn shifting clothes today. White clouds already tumbled together in a gathering storm, carrying in the next monsoon front. She set her water bottle and detector tech off to the side of the entry and took her bear, right then and there.

  Oh, to be bear—full of strength, more nimble than she ever got credit for, her senses sharper than anyone ever assumed. Sight and scent and hearing, the strong swipe of a claw, the sprinting speed to rival any creature. She stretched hugely, yawned a great noisy yawn to shed stress and ambled straight to the nearest tree just to see how high she could mark it. High. Satisfyingly high, little black bear. For the first time since she’d triggered the amulet on herself, her headache faded; her skin no longer felt tightly hot.

  She shook off with a flap of glossy pelt and headed out, stretching her legs—not trying to follow any given scent, but making note of them all...the tracks she crossed, the scent in the air, the skunk obscuring all. Nothing stood out; she found only the aimless, crisscrossing patterns of several men, calculated to confuse and annoy.

  She shed the comfortable skin of her bear to grab the detection gear, but didn’t expect to find anything. None of the men had hesitated long enough to do anything, perhaps not realizing she could detect as much from the scent pools. They’d simply been on the move.

  Only when she finished did she realize that the headache had returned, that her joints felt strangely rusty. Maybe that was why she had the growing urge to be back in
side with the others. It was with relief that she met Sandy’s friendly greeting upon entering the facility. “All clear?”

  “Looks like they were just messing with us,” Mariska said. “A whole lot of tromping around to do nothing and go nowhere.” She stowed her gear. “The clouds are building—I think we’ll get a good storm this afternoon.”

  “Any rain is good rain,” Sandy said, the automatic response of a desert dweller. She nodded at Ruger, who had laid most of the little creatures out in rows on the worktable. Ian and Harrison were sequestered off in the amulet section, packing the amulets into sturdy, sectioned cases. “I’ve been helping Ruger, but Ian will need me to help ward those cases when they’re full. I’d swap with you if we could.”

  The kind thought cheered Mariska considerably. “Thanks. I’m sure we’ll manage.”

  “It’ll be fine,” Sandy said, lowering her voice to a confidential level. “Don’t you back off, either. Just because this is hard for him doesn’t mean you’re not right.”

  Mariska found herself floundering for words—and by then Sandy had left her with a meaningful look and a sauntering gait, joining up with the amulet team. She smiled to herself—just a flicker of warmth at that camaraderie—and then headed to the grim scene at the end of the cavernous building.

  Ruger handed her a thick, padded spiral-bound notebook, the paper smooth and narrow-lined. It was with some surprise she realized it was a journal—a healer’s professional journal. While she didn’t feel comfortable flipping through it under his scrutiny, she got glimpses of the contents as she hunted the next clean page—a bold, clear hand scribing case notes, surprisingly accurate and simple sketches of plants and notes about their unusual effects on Sentinel bodies, field notes on amulet injuries, Sentinel healing tendencies...and the occasional disgruntled editorial remark.

  She felt as though she was holding Ruger in her hand.

  If only she’d had the chance to read these notes before they’d met, maybe she wouldn’t have blundered so hard. If only she had the chance to read them now...then she’d be able to carry him with her wherever she went, no matter how things went between them in these next days.