Sentinels: Lion Heart Read online

  And indeed, her eyes flew open, confused and resentful. “Hey!”

  “Hush,” he said, not without understanding. He understood all too well—she’d been in deep, and had no idea why he’d pulled her off the track, or why he now propelled her along the sidewalk.

  She resisted him; she said, “I was on to something!” and she didn’t do it quietly, still lost in her tracking daze.

  “Yes, hon,” he muttered, “you surely were. But unless you want them on to us, we need to move along. We can regroup once we’re—”

  A door opened behind them; men’s voices filtered out. Joe muttered, “Damn,” and tightened his hold on Lyn’s waist. He had no trouble, even in this pool of sidewalk darkness, seeing her eyes widen with warning as he pulled her in. He did it anyway, tugging her up against him, their knees interlacing.

  “Don’t you dare—” she said, even as he cupped the side of her face, looking down on her. Behind them, the voices raised, alert and territorial.

  “Shh,” he said quietly, bending so their faces were a whisper away, tipping his head to keep his suddenly annoying hat out of the way. She trembled; he felt it from the gentle hold at her neck to the firmer grip at the small of her back.

  “Don’t you—” she warned, though this time she whispered it.

  What? React to her? Too late for that, boy-o. But he gave his head the slightest shake. “Trust,” he said. “You don’t want it? I won’t do it. This is enough for appearances.” Her breath warmed his chin. “Besides, do you really think if I did the cliché thing and kissed you, I’d have any chance of keeping track of that guy?”

  That guy being the man standing in the open hotel doorway, just visible in the corner of Joe’s vision, squinting suspiciously into the night. But unlike Joe and Lyn, he couldn’t see with anything other than the hotel’s lighting, spread out over sidewalk and parking lot but leaving great pools of darkness such as this one. They were nothing more than a couple cozying up in the dark, murmuring to one another.

  Lyn’s fingers, once clenching his jacket to push him away, now just gripped the material as if to steady herself.

  “Just a couple of gropers,” the man turned back to the room to say, tones he might well have expected to go unheard. He muttered, “Get a room,” before the hotel door closed.

  Joe eased his hold on Lyn.

  But he didn’t let go.

  She looked up at him and where he expected recrimination, she gave him only a troubled gaze. “I was going for the hotel room, wasn’t I?”

  Oh, as if he could help it. He brushed his thumb against the side of her face—the softness of it, there along her wide cheekbone beneath that sooty eye. “You were.”

  She shuddered, but this time it was acknowledgment of what she’d almost done, of how close they’d come. Two unprepared Sentinels, blundering into a drozhar’s nest. If they’d gone down, brevis would have been none the wiser—clueless as to the Core location, clueless as to why their team disappeared. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  So tempting, that lower lip and its hint of a quiver. Definitely a quiver that needed to be kissed away, and his body tensed with the need to do it. Somehow, he didn’t; somehow he lifted his head just enough to kiss her forehead instead, and damned if he didn’t think maybe she leaned into him just the slightest bit. “You’re welcome,” he said. “Now. What’s next so we can get those bastards?”

  Lyn held the phone perhaps a little too tightly, there in the little guesthouse with darkness closing around her—all the lights off, her night vision perfectly adjusted to the postmidnight moon and starlight. She relaxed her fingers and said, cleanly and distinctly, “It’s premature to send in the team. If you spook Gausto’s people to a fallback position, we’ll have to track them down all over again.”

  Nick Carter shook his head. Oh, she might have been nearly the length of the big southwestern state away from him, but she could see it anyway, right along with that dark hoarfrost hair defying its expensive style and the serious nature of his pale green eyes. “I don’t like it,” he said. If she’d woken him with this late-night phone call, he showed no sign of it. “You’ve got no one for backup.”

  “I’ve got Ryan,” she heard herself saying, with surprising sincerity.

  “Maybe you two fooled them tonight, maybe you didn’t,” Nick said. “Either way, tracking them now is a far cry from hunting trace on the mountain. You’re too vulnerable.”

  “I want another day.” Firm but implacable. “I want to see if I can pick up fresh trace from their room tomorrow. Or I might start at Elden Pueblo.”

  “Elden Pueblo?”

  “A hunch.”

  “Yours?” Nick asked dryly. “Or Ryan’s?”

  “I don’t think it’s misdirection.” Lyn glanced through the single main window at the big house, as if she might find Ryan watching…listening. Or he might well have taken the cougar this night, wandering silently within earshot…patrolling the land in spite of drained resources.

  Not so drained that he couldn’t pull off that moment at the hotel.

  Right. As if she wanted to think of that, with Nick Carter on the other end of the phone line. Not the feel of Ryan’s hand spanning the small of her back, not the flooding warmth of her response.

  No. Definitely not.

  She cleared her throat. “This is his turf, Nick. He wouldn’t be much of a Sentinel if he didn’t have some sense of it.”

  After a short silence, he said, “No. He wouldn’t.”

  She moved on. “We’re going to need an amulet specialist. And whoever you send, make sure they’re strong on shielding. This place is unstable as hell.”

  Nick said grimly, “You aren’t kidding. No one here has seen anything like it. The words powder keg have been tossed around…and not lightly.”

  “I was right,” she breathed, struck anew by the frisson of fear that had first shivered down her spine at the Skybowl overlook. “They’ve unbalanced things to the point where this place could blow.”

  “That’s one way to put it.” A gentle brush of sound gave away his movement; the faint clicking of dog nails on tile followed. “Has your mountain wrangler said anything about it?”

  Lyn smiled to herself. Mountain wrangler. Ryan would like that, she thought, even though Nick’s tone had been just a little too sardonic for complete sincerity. “I think he’s too close to have realized. These power surges are taking a lot out of him.”

  She could hear Nick’s frown in his brief silence. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  It sure screws with motive if we want to pin this on him. But she didn’t say it out loud; Nick could follow that train of thought well enough. “It’s probably because his trace is tied to the surges somehow. And I’ve already told you about his reaction to the museum artifact. Whatever’s going on here, it’s complicated.”

  “You’ll track it out,” Nick said. “That’s one reason we were willing to send you.”

  “That and you knew I’d do my best to pin him down.” She was surprised to hear a touch of bitterness in her words…maybe even self-blame.

  As was Nick. “Lyn?”

  She held her breath, then blurted the words out. “I’m just not sure it was fair to him.” She looked again out the window, finding the dim light in Ryan’s loft. “You know how I feel about Sentinels gone dark—about anyone gone dark. You know about my brother. I might be the best tracker you could have sent, but the best investigator? I’m practically jury and judge rolled into one, and you know it.”

  “Do I?” He let the question hang a moment. “You’ll do the right thing, Lyn. That’s part of the package. You demand no less from yourself than you do from others.”

  She made an indistinct grumbling noise, and—cowardly—skipped a direct response. “Listen, Ryan’s already been affected by the surges, even if he’s not admitting it. You’d better make sure the team has someone who can do extended shielding, because he can’t do it while he’s working. I covered his ass so far, but if I’m go
ing to be tracking—”

  “What do you mean, he can’t—?” The words came in surprised demand.

  “Oh, don’t tell me it comes as a surprise. He and Dean had a teamwork thing—Dean covered his ass in the field. He has decent shields in general, but he can’t do it while he’s handling power, and right now that matters. And I can’t do it if you want me on trace.”

  “Damn sure I’ll want you on trace,” Nick mused. “So Dean was his cover all this time.”

  “Just like I need backup when I trail,” she said. “Think about it.” She certainly had been. Moving from place to place, assignment to assignment…it meant she worked with many different partners. But now and then she found one she trusted so utterly, meshed with so well, she couldn’t help but rue the change when she moved on.

  She couldn’t imagine killing such a partner. And one she’d grown up with? Trained with?

  Ryan had cause, she reminded herself. At the time, he’d been trying to save his sister’s life.

  Don’t go there right now. She cleared her throat. “What about the missing requests Ryan should have received?”

  She wouldn’t have heard the frustration if she hadn’t been listening for it; wouldn’t have heard the weary undertone. “Double-backs and stream breaks,” he said, putting it into her own tracking jargon. “We can’t find any record of notification to Ryan—or anyone else in northern Arizona—of our concerns about Core activity, although my directive to send them is in my own records. My request for expedition of Ryan’s latest monthly report…” He hesitated, and Lyn again heard the grim frustration there. “It’s on my system as sent. It’s not on our main server.”

  She understood the implications immediately, and swore softly. “That means someone with tech skills and access.”

  “Or with enough skills to have gained the access.”

  “Or it’s just system glitches,” Lyn said. “Gremlins in the works.”

  “Brevis Southwest,” Nick said with distinct grimness, “does not have gremlins.”

  No. Of course not.

  She checked the window again…discovered Ryan’s loft light still on. Either he’d found a hell of a good book or he was out checking the land when he ought to have been grabbing sleep.

  She could say the same for herself. And as if perceiving her distraction, Nick said, “I’ll keep you posted.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” she said. “Because as it stands, I’m not certain I’m receiving all my communications, either. And, Nick…” She took a breath, then took the plunge. “I’d like a roster of Sentinels assigned to the Henderson/Vegas area at the time of Dean Seacrest’s death. Because if Ryan didn’t do it…well, it takes a lot to kill a field Sentinel, especially up close and dirty.”

  Sounding wary, Nick said, “We got alibis for the other local Sentinels for just that reason.”

  “Doesn’t mean someone wasn’t in on it.” She hated to say it—winced to say it. “Especially one of the logistics people, who wouldn’t have any physical advantage, but might have useful inside info.”

  Nick released a gust of breath—not quite a sigh, not quite acquiescence. “All right,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do. But don’t get too distracted. After Gausto’s failure in Sonoita, he’s going to be more dangerous than ever…more desperate. He’s already jeopardizing long-term Core plans with his presence there.”

  “Mmm,” she said. “That whole business of letting him go, leaving him to face his septs prince…doesn’t seem to have worked out so well for us.”

  “No choice,” Nick said, and that weary tone was back. “The official peace between us is uneasy enough…If we were to kill a local prince—”

  “Another local prince,” Lyn noted, since Dolan Treviño had already killed Tiberon Gausto in the very incident that stamped him rogue. Justified, given the torture he’d been undergoing at the time. But it had destabilized an area already rocked by the indulgent, power-hungry Gausto brothers.

  “Exactly the reason we had no leeway in Sonoita.”

  “And now?”

  “I’ve made some calls.” It was as much as he’d say, she knew. After all, the Core didn’t want exposure any more than the Sentinels did.

  She thanked him; she flipped the phone closed and pondered it in the darkness, realizing anew that nothing she’d seen of Ryan, of his personal records, of his past, had convinced her he’d gone dark.

  Nothing had yet convinced her of his innocence, either, but just because she’d arrived here so eager to sink her teeth into a dark Sentinel didn’t mean he didn’t deserve due process.

  Especially if he hadn’t gotten it in Vegas.

  She sighed; she stretched and dropped the phone on the couch and scrubbed her hands through hair that was still scruffed-up big hair, catching her fingers on tangles.

  Grumbling, twisted, distorting rolling power, torquing as it came, splinters of angry shrapnel full of Ryan’s trace—

  Her head snapped up; her fingers tore through a tangle unheeded. It didn’t take Sentinel ears to hear the yowl of anguish through the open window—to know the cougar was nearby, unshielded, and hit hard by the power he was so used to riding.

  The house. She sprinted away from the couch, threw the door open and ran to the house—totally stymied to find the door locked. “Ryan!” She pounded against that solid wood in futility, and kicked it for good measure as she spun around to put her back to it, hands splayed against its solidity, head tipped back to breathe in…

  His trace.

  Of course, his trace. It filled her senses, that deep, textured sensation, almost to the point where she couldn’t discern where it waxed and waned.

  But not quite. Because this was what she did. And so she pushed off the door and headed into the confusing backwash flows of power around the house and its wards, trotting through the swirling eddies with assurance—until a groan took her ears and she emerged from the trace, discovering herself at the back of the house, puzzled and alone in the dark. Here, she and Ryan had raced for shelter the day they’d met—barely less than two days earlier. Here, they’d tumbled into the shelter of the overhanging second-story deck, where he’d offered up cat laughter at the exhilaration of it all—and, she suddenly realized, planted that first seed of doubt in her heart about his guilt.

  And here, she’d seen the first signs of his difficulty with the power surges.

  But he was not here now.

  Except somehow he was. She closed her eyes, raised her head and listened. She reached for him, even as another wave of power jerked through the night.

  That’s when she heard it. There, from above—from the deck that had once sheltered them. The one that led to the sliding doors of his bedroom, and to the reinforced section of roof where the cougar kept watch over his domain. A tortured noise, not human or animal, purely wrenched from one who was both.

  The roof. He was on the roof. He’d been checking the mountain, dammit, even if it meant leaving himself open to this agony.

  She couldn’t get into the house—not the usual way. Maybe as the ocelot, but…She stared up at the deck and she narrowed her eyes and she thought of how he’d reached that far-overhead chairlift at Skybowl, how impossible it had seemed and yet how easily he’d done it. Reaching for the Sentinel within, that’s what it took—reaching without changing, finding that strength and power. And it wasn’t anything she’d done, not since she was a teen in training. A tracker used other strengths; a tracker was too valuable to put in dire positions.

  And yet there was that deck, and there was that man in his pain, and damned if she didn’t do it, reaching deep and tapping Sentinel strength—a crouch, a leap, and her fingers found purchase; she twisted in flight, lithe ocelot in human form soaring over the sturdy railing and crouching just long enough to get her bearings.

  But she had to go higher still, easily finding the reinforced footpath the man had made for the cougar—scrambling, this time, to the juncture of two roof slopes where he’d covered a platform in
shingling, blending it in.

  There he lay, but no longer cougar. He rode the platform on hands and knees, cradling his head on his forearms. Starlight painted his back and torso, shadowed the strong, sculpted form of shoulders and biceps. He wore nothing more than shorts, ragged cut-offs that did more to emphasize the lines of his body than to hide them.

  Lyn’s heart pounded—to have made it up here, to have found him, to realize how serious his danger, disoriented here at the top of a potential three-story fall. Instinctively, she reached out to him with her shields, extending the protection that had been so successful in the past—and then, just in time, jerked them back. Three stories up. Not the time to stagger them both with the uncommon reverberation of that connection. So instead she closed those shields down tight, and she held out a hand. “Ryan,” she said. “Time to get off this roof.”

  She might as well have been speaking in tongues. She crouched, beckoned—put some command in her voice. Tried again. “Let’s go, Ryan. Time to head inside. Shake it off, now, and come inside.”

  Shake it off. He did just that, a shudder passing visibly from his shoulders down his spine, and then, after the longest of hesitations, he said, “Lyn?”

  “You were up here as the cougar,” she told him, keeping the calm in her voice. “We had a surge. It’s messing with you, and now you’ve got to get down before there are aftershocks.”

  “Get down,” he said, more than a little blankly. And then, “I’m on the roof? I lost control on the roof?”

  “Yes. Now let’s go. Can you? I don’t want to touch you—”

  “The shield reaction,” he said, his voice much clearer, his head raising. “Go. I’ll be right behind you.”

  “Are you—”

  “Go,” he said. “I’ll make it. But I don’t want to come down on top of you.”

  And she could see why, as she waited by the half-open sliding-glass doors and he descended from the roof in confident, familiar moves, only to abruptly lose strength halfway down. He tumbled to the decking.