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  His mind’s eye flashed an image of Tayla, her beautiful face fierce, her hand a claw…going for a man’s throat. In the background, she yowled. She rose up against the shield as though it were a scratching post, sparks flying—and though it instantly threw her back, she came at it again just as fast, spitting feline curses.

  For Mark didn’t stumble back from the dog. He didn’t retreat or lose his balance or give way. He snarled back, a wordless challenge, and he stepped into the dog’s leap, and he disarmed the suddenly slavering creature the only way he could—he jammed his forearm across its mouth.

  Cheetah yowling dog snarling crunch of bone—

  He didn’t feel it, not at first—not as anything other than the intense flare of wrongness that would turn to agony within moments. He drove forward, taking the animal off guard just long enough to claw a hold on to its windpipe, there at that vulnerable spot just beneath its jaws. Claw and dig in, driving the animal to the ground where he could bring his weight to bear.

  Its snarl took on a panicked quality—it flailed to spit his arm out and turn on the other, scraping at him with long, blunt claws. His shirt ripped; his skin ripped; his vision narrowed down to that hand around that throat, utter determination to close the kill. He drove the dog down, down—using his own broken arm as the lever and he had it, he nearly had it, when together they tripped into Ruger and tumbled down in a heap.

  Carter gasped a curse, and then he gasped, “You’ll kill yourself, Tayla, no—!” And by then the dog had flipped wildly out of Mark’s grasp, flinging its jaws free of Mark’s broken arm and turning a wicked eye gone gleaming red on Mark’s throat.

  Going for it.

  Mark thrust out a desperate hand, scrabbling for any kind of hold at the dog’s neck, at the side of its face—clutching jowl and skin, fingers slipping—“Tayla!” Carter groaned, as much of a shout as he could make. “No—“

  “A little help here—“ Mark grunted, one arm useless, the other in a losing battle. His hand slipped across slick blood—his own, smeared everywhere—abruptly caught in a rolled leather collar, hidden in fur, and latched on. The dog roared in his face and Mark roared back, biceps straining, muscles standing out in stark relief. He fought for the leverage to flip himself up and over, couldn’t find it…his vision strained to gray at the edges. One of the dog’s flailing feet caught his broken arm, grinding bone…he felt it from the pit of his stomach all the way up behind his eyes, a sickening tunnel effect of damage.

  “Tayla!” Carter croaked, and then Andrey cried out, high and frightened. Energy spat and raced around them, sparking and popping and defining the shield in a visible tracery of light that crescendoed into spatter and sizzle and quite suddenly blinked out.

  Instant overwhelming Core trace assaulted Mark’s mind, disorienting him—only a moment, but a moment long enough. His grip slipped; the dog lunged forward. Mark wrenched himself aside, buying seconds—

  That golden blur of fur and spots slammed into the dog, teeth grabbing hold—ripping the dog’s collar from Mark’s grip entirely. She didn’t fling herself into battle; she latched on and she held on, sinking down over not an enemy, but prey. Suffocating him, as the big cats did…as Mark had tried to do.

  Mark dove right back in, snarling a string of fervent curses as his arm moved, trying to tuck it close but not slowing for it—scrabbling at the dog’s blood-soaked neck, twisting the collar around until he found the tags and so much more than the tags.

  “Here,” Carter said hoarsely, and Mark fumbled the collar buckle with one hand while Tayla held the dog down—no heavier than it was but armed with a veracity of spirit the dog could not match; it screamed, now, a high-pitched sound of terror that told Mark she was not, after all, killing it.

  He threw the collar to Carter, who scraped it up from the ground and closed a shaking hand around the amulet-charged dog tags, bringing up a surge of energy that turned into a pop as Carter grimaced and flung his reddened and blistered hand wide, scattering the ashed remnants of the metal.

  The taste of trace around the dog instantly faded, leaving it no more than an ordinary frightened dog; it squalled in Tayla’s jaws until Carter crawled over, pulled his belt free and leashed it up. Tayla instantly released it, bounding the short distance to where Mark now slowly rolled over onto his back to look up at the pale Phoenix night sky, washed out by city lights and the blood pounding in his head.

  “Ruger,” Carter said, dragging himself to his feet. “Pull yourself together. We’ve got wounded. Andrey—let’s talk. Quickly. And Tayla—“ this as whiskers brushed Mark’s cheek, and rough sandpaper dabbed his face in the form of a pink tongue “—we’ve got Core on foot by the pond, running for it. Take them down.”

  The splash had been good to Tayla’s ears.

  Had they really thought she wouldn’t catch up to them? Or that they would be able to hit her fleet form in the dark with small-caliber weapons fire?

  If they’d thought she would be so perfectly delighted to bowl them both over into the pond, they probably would have moved farther from the edge of it.

  They’d sputtered up from the water without further amulets to defend themselves—they’d put all their hopes in the dog’s unexpectedly undetectable amulets, guiding it into position with another subtle Core working. Too bad for them it hadn’t worked…even if the Sentinels had yet to understand how those amulets had slipped through or why no one had been able to sense them.

  She dropped a glass in the sink of Mark Burton’s compact apartment at the edge of the city, where it shattered. “Damn,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “It’ll get better,” he said. He meant her hands, which had gone numb in her battle with the Core shield and now only slowly improved, two days afterward.

  Mark was still waiting for slowly improved. Pins and plates and screws held his arm together; his eyes still had a dazed, drugged look.

  But Tayla saw what she’d seen that night—his expression as he’d understood her meaning from beyond silence and form and a Core shield; his expression as he’d decided to act on her belief. The dog.

  Not just a talking point for one woman’s confidence issues, after all.

  “You believed me,” she said out of the blue—dumping glass shards into the trash and getting another for Mark’s ice water.

  “Get used to it, wild thing.” Sprawled in the corner of the couch, one leg propped on a coffee table and his arm resting on a pillow across his stomach, Mark nonetheless lifted his other arm…invitation. “I was wrong. I can deal with that.”

  She put the water on the coffee table, slipping in under his arm—feeling the zing of lingering initiation between them. “Is that something you’d say if you weren’t taking those painkillers?”

  “I hope so. Of course, Carter was wrong, too.”

  “Wrong, what?”

  He ran his fingers along a few strands of her hair, tugging gently. “I have to tell you?”

  “You were right about me,” she said. “Both of you. About what I needed. About who I needed.”

  “Maybe,” he said. Lion in repose, and if he couldn’t take the form, maybe he didn’t need to. “He also told us this was all too important to let personalities and feelings rule. If I’d listened to that, I wouldn’t have backed you when he ordered me off that dog.”

  Tayla gave a little start. “He did say that.” And then she smiled at him, running a hand down his side, nuzzling his cheek…licking, without warning, his ear. “It’s a shame, then, isn’t it? Because letting feelings rule…that’s exactly what I intend to do.”

  Mark hissed on an intake of breath as her tongue traced his ear and her hand wandered to the waist of his shorts. “Right,” he said, murmuring the words as his eyes closed. “I’ll back you on that.” And after another long few moments, he smiled into her kiss and managed, “Wild thing.”

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  ISBN: 978-1-4268-3324-3

  Wild Thing

  Copyright © 2009 by Doranna Durgin

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