Sentinels: Leopard Enchanted Read online

  “All right,” Ana said faintly. “What can I do to help?”

  Fernie didn’t hesitate. “If this illness stays to pattern, we don’t have much time before it’s hard to be smart about this. I have some people to call. You check around the grounds—don’t forget the fountain courtyard or the garden area outside the walls. And don’t assume he’ll be on his feet.” Fernie shook her head, making a sound of disapproving dismay. “That boy is always putting his hands on things he shouldn’t.”

  Amulets, Ana wanted to say—but didn’t. She couldn’t give that much of herself away, even if Fernie had already overheard her compromising words. “He has a keen curiosity,” she agreed, and headed out of the room...but then couldn’t stop herself. She turned, finding Fernie scowling around the room with a stern eye—one that stayed stern as it found Ana. “Why aren’t you angry with me? Or showing me the door?”

  Fernie snorted faintly. “That could come. But right now, whatever’s going on, you’re still Ian’s girl and you’ve still been good for him. I’ll let him make his own decisions.”

  Ana wanted to lift her chin, wanted to be proud and to be confident in herself and what she’d done. If the Sentinels didn’t want Core attention, they needed to practice self-control, and to quit taking advantage of their abilities at the expense of others.

  Instead she could only stand in confusion, wondering at the sensations of acceptance even from this woman who so clearly knew Ana was more than she’d begun to say. Floundering in this nurturing atmosphere, where Ian had set aside his personal needs to take care of those beneath him in Sentinel hierarchy, and where Fernie’s affection for her guests permeated this place like a physical embrace.

  In the end Ana simply said, “Thank you,” and went on, out into the yard to look for Ian.

  * * *

  At first Lerche had resented the number of silent amulets necessary to manage this endeavor—from the simplest tracking amulet used on Ana and on Scott’s motorcycle to the complex layering in the amulets she had planted.

  There’d been no choice—not with Ian Scott as their target. Intel on Southwest Brevis had identified the man as the only one capable of breaking the silence of those amulets, and he would most certainly detect anything not completely silenced, just as he’d detected the faint whisper from the feeble working used to discern whether Ana had triggered the second amulet.

  But the expense was paying off. Even if Lerche hadn’t gathered much information—the foolish woman had planted the first amulet in the retreat kitchen, of all places, and the second was full of so many muffled noises that it must have malfunctioned in that respect—Ian Scott was clearly sick. Clearly not thinking quite right any longer.

  Not to have taken the motorcycle out into the mountains so early in the day, leaving Ana behind and leaving the Sentinel light-bloods worried and looking for him. Or so Budian reported, his phone pickup muffled with what must have been gloves. The man had moved in upon Scott’s departure, confirming that the Sentinel had gone alone.

  “Excellent work,” he told Budian, thinking of Ian Scott—alone, sick and vulnerable. The one man who could bring them down—and the one man who could tell them how close he’d already come. “We’ll take advantage of this opportunity. Find Scott on the trails and bring him to me.”

  Budian sounded cold—as well he might, after a stakeout in one of these stupidly cold desert mountain nights. “On the trails? He could be in his beast form.”

  Lerche dismissed the possibility with the ease of a man who wouldn’t actually be on those trails. “Not with the amulet working on him to this extent. Ana said it was in his bedroom. Such concentrated exposure on a full field Sentinel will have resulted in profound effects by now.”

  “I’ll send men to look for him,” Budian said. “But it’s a big mountain.”

  “Don’t look,” Lerche told him. “Find.”

  He cut Budian’s response short with a swipe at his phone, and tossed the device onto his desk. Soon Ian Scott would be his—and then dead—and the only threat to the silent amulets would be eliminated.

  It would be a good day.

  * * *

  Ana found no sign of Ian at the retreat, but the cool morning air refreshed her—clearing her thoughts, invigorating her body. The aspirin kicked in, and the granola sat well in her stomach.

  She returned to the house to find that Fernie hadn’t been as lucky. The older woman stood at the dining room table, a large map spread out before her and her own breakfast untouched to the side.

  “Come out to the porch,” Ana said. “It’s a beautiful day, and you’ve been stuck inside since I met Ian.”

  Fernie regarded her for a moment, then nodded. “There’s truth to that,” she allowed, and gathered up the map. Ana picked up the cereal bowl and muffin, just in case, and brought it along.

  Fernie sat in the porch chair with an undisguised weariness, opening the map on her lap. “Oh, Ian,” she said, looking at it. “What are you up to?”

  Ana set the bowl on a tiny round patio table, glancing at the map in belated recognition. “That’s a trail map.”

  “Indeed it is.” Fernie smoothed it. “Ian’s not here, where he should be. And he’s not himself—he’s done well with this bug of ours, but you’ve seen it—when it hits him, it hits hard.”

  “It seems to,” Ana agreed.

  Fernie gave her the most perceptive of looks. “Ian is special, as you likely well know.”

  Ana gave her a surprised look, wondering if this was a direct allusion to Ian’s field Sentinel nature. To his other. And if it was some sort of test to see how Ana reacted—if she knew.

  The best she could do was not react at all. After a moment, Fernie said, “Things affect him differently—illnesses, medicines, even something as simple as caffeine. We can’t assume he’s thinking clearly right now. But when he’s troubled...” She tapped the map. “This is where he goes.”

  Ana touched the map. “We were planning to hike today.”

  “Were you?” Fernie gave her a sharp look. “He was going to share this with you?”

  “I didn’t think of it like that,” Ana admitted.

  “You should have.”

  Fernie’s short words sat on silence for a moment, and then Ana admitted, “I was worried, though, because of that mountain lion attack last week. The man who died.” Worried because it reminded her that Ian had killed someone, she meant, even if Fernie didn’t know it.

  “What?” Fernie sat up straighter. Her eyes had brightened, and her expression looked livelier. “When? Where?”

  Ana tapped the map. “Right here. Just over a week ago.”

  “No,” Fernie said with some assertion. “I would have heard. Someone misspoke. Or they were telling tales.”

  “No, I—” Ana hesitated, her finger lingering on the map. The trail where she’d first seen Ian. The trail where she’d seen him change. It occurred to her that she’d never seen any news stories of the attack, no headlines in the paper.

  Fernie saw her uncertainty. “Honey, when there’s a lion attack around here, everyone knows. I don’t know who told you that, but they were telling stories.”

  Ana couldn’t quite fathom it. Why would Lerche tell her such a thing if it wasn’t true? Why even bother, when it would have been so easy to double-check?

  Except he’d known she wouldn’t question him. That she’d believe him utterly, as she always had—and that in believing, she would not only be wary of Ian, she’d believe even more deeply in the task to which he’d set her.

  What other lies has he told?

  She pressed her fingers over her closed lids, searching for a way out of the confusion—in the end, she found nothing but the need to focus on Ian. His safety. “Okay,” she said, releasing the rest of it for the moment. “Never mind that, then. What do we do about Ian?
”

  “I’m waiting for a call back from our company,” Fernie said. “I want some help up here. It’s one thing for us to get a passing virus, but this thing is holding on. And if Ian is reacting so strongly to it, it could mean there’s something else going on.” She didn’t make any offer to explain her thinking. “Meanwhile, either he’s gone out to clear his head and he’ll be back, or he’s too sick to get back and we should look for him.”

  “Me,” Ana said. “I should look for him.”

  Fernie gave her a look. A reminder that she’d overheard too much of that last phone call from Lerche, even if there’d been nothing directly incriminating said. A reminder that Ana wasn’t one of them, even if she wasn’t truly supposed to know the significance of that fact.

  Ana made a noise of frustration. “At least point out his favorite trails, if you know them—I can check the trailheads for his motorcycle. If we do need to go looking—or to send someone—then we’ll know where to start.”

  Fernie took the deepest of breaths, glancing back into the house...quite visibly considering her options. At last, she nodded. “There’s sense to that,” she said, and shifted the map so Ana could see it more easily. “Here. Check this one. If he’s not here, check the overlook parking—there are a handful of trailheads there, and some go directly to a wilderness area.” Then she tapped the first spot, an assertive gesture. “But this is his favorite.”

  Of course it was. It was the trail where she’d first seen him. The one where her own people had first set him up for an encounter to reveal the depth of his true nature to her.

  The one where he might or might not have killed an innocent man.

  * * *

  Ian wasn’t sure how he’d made it to the trail. He had only an impression of those early morning hours—his vision bleary, his head a muddle, and his entire being driven by a singular need to find surcease in the wilds of the mountain.

  Given that his lab wasn’t available. Or the basement in the echoingly empty bachelor pad of his house, surrounded by earth and as deeply calm as his complicated world ever got. His den.

  But here he’d found himself—not as the snow leopard, which surprised him. As plain old human, crouched by the side of the trail.

  Only after he’d blinked a few times and oriented himself did he realize where he’d taken himself in that muddle. And only then did he realize he was growling softly in the back of his very human throat, a rolling commentary on his situation as a whole.

  Now he still crouched here, not quite warm enough, accepting the fact that he wouldn’t figure out his exact location until he found familiar features along the trail. For now he knew only that he faced west. And that he’d gone high.

  Ian stood, hopping down to the trail—a single-footing thing that wound along the side of the slope, uphill on one side and downhill on the other. Little room for misstep there. He placed his feet carefully, drawing on his snow leopard—or trying to. That part of himself was obscured and hard to reach.

  It was an unfamiliar feeling. The snow leopard was always there.

  Always filling the heart of him.

  But now his feet felt leaden...his senses dull. The part of him that seemed ever imminent—ready to burst right through his skin, full of energy and loud with life—

  It simply wasn’t.

  The lack of it made him place his steps with extra care, as if they belonged to someone else. It made the world seem dull and distant around him, not quite as vibrant. As if he walked through it but not in it.

  The moments passed, one step after the other, a painstaking effort to navigate a mountain he’d all but owned until this point. Until suddenly he stopped, a rebellion of sorts. He took a deep breath, then another a deeper breath and closed his eyes to inhale the pine-sharp air, the cool hints of juniper and the distinct scent of fall—oak leaves browning, the ground cover still faintly damp from the most recent of the area’s brief but intense fall rains.

  Inside, the snow leopard roused into clarity—irritable, demanding and tail twitching.

  Ian released a gusting sigh, settling back into his skin. Not fully himself, but able to see it from where he was.

  Just that quickly, he knew his exact location—which trail and which section of the trail. His favorite. And the very same trail on which he’d saved a man from a mountain lion, only to find him gone upon return.

  The man had then supposedly been killed, although Ian had heard nothing of it—and no lion kill would go un-sensationalized by the local media. Make sense of that, why don’t you?

  Another fifteen minutes of walking brought him to that very spot, as his mind grew increasingly clearer, and the hint of a bounce returned to his step. As if the very act of hiking in this place had pushed back the virus.

  Or the not-virus.

  For the illness gripping the retreat had seemed like a virus, but now—today, waking up in this place—Ian thought there was very little chance of it.

  He’d seen Fernie recover and fade not in the natural wax and wane of such things, but just the same as he’d seen himself recover and fade.

  Depending on where he was.

  The first headache had faded after a few hours at Ana’s. The next surge of malaise came the following morning after he’d cleaned up the retreat and taken trays to the others, and it had faded after he’d gone out to search the grounds—and faded even more thoroughly after an afternoon at the museum, leaving him alone until after he and Ana had quite thoroughly made love. After which it had descended again harder than ever—this time to include Ana.

  In other words, as he spent time inside the retreat.

  And there was Fernie, recovering inside her little casita and but fading each time she came out to tend the others—none of whom who seemed as affected as either he or Fernie, but who had more consistently sequestered themselves under the direction of Fernie and Ruger.

  None of the others at the retreat were as strong-blooded as Ian, or as affected as he was when he did go down. For them, malaise. For Ian, blinding headaches, muffled thoughts and a delirious blackout that had brought him to this place, only to clear once he’d spent time here.

  Not illness.

  Amulet.

  But if it was a silent one, he’d never find it—not by prowling the yard, and not by searching the house. And if it wasn’t silent, he would have found it already. Frigging silents.

  The only way to find the things was to solve the very riddle he’d been sent here to forget.

  And he needed to do it without his lab—the place where he could isolate and deconstruct amulet elements.

  Ian jammed his hands in his jacket pockets, searching...

  Finding. The silent amulet he’d been carrying around. He crouched there, in the middle of the trail in the middle of the day, no one else within sight or earshot, and focused on the thing—for what must have been the millionth time—willing himself to be able to perceive it. Shifting up and down the long scale of energies he’d long ago learned to visualize and target, hunting any small sign of—

  His head jerked up, eyes narrowed, nostrils flaring. Core corruption.

  But not from the amulet in his hand. And not fresh. Not even particularly strong—just an afterthought of presence. The big cat in him flared whiskers, rising to interest—responding to a beckoning call he hadn’t had a chance to notice the last time he’d been here, simply because he’d never gotten quite this far.

  Not just a call, but a challenge.

  He felt the solid undertone of a growl in his chest before he even realized his response to that call. Territory. Invasion. Defend!

  With effort, he shook off the urge to take his other, to bound along this trail until he found an interloper—a leap and pounce and satisfying crush of jaw—

  “Down, boy,” he muttered at himself.

 
It was time for a different kind of hunt.

  He rose to pace the trail, a slow and careful progress—hunting overturned ground matter, disturbed needles...exposed dirt.

  Finding the solid trace of an amulet working. Following it. And then finding the small overlook, well-hidden, with the three equidistant gouges that could only be a tripod of some sort. There, he picked up a snagged section of someone’s gillie suit. And, leaving that spot, he backtracked to the exact spot where he’d seen the mountain lion attack what had seemed to be a hapless hiker.

  Had seemed to be.

  Here, even though still muted by illness, his snow leopard bristled so strongly that Ian backed swiftly away.

  It didn’t matter. He didn’t need to be on top of the site to see the lingering gouges in the earth.

  And he didn’t need to stick his AmTech nose in it to understand the setup. The lion had been a plant, lured here and excited into attack. And someone from the Core had watched—perhaps even filmed it, to judge by those tripod marks. Probably filmed his response to it.

  If anyone had killed that man, it had been the Core.

  What the hell?

  What sense did this even make?

  “None,” he decided out loud. “Absolutely no sense at all.”

  Okay, Scott. Yours is not to wonder why. Yours is to figure out the whole damned silent amulet thing.

  So he’d take this information back to brevis, fully aware that he’d never have found it at all if he hadn’t been searching out Core energies—hunting any hint of the silent amulet right there in his hand. If he hadn’t been so...

  Receptive.

  He stumbled over the thought.

  Receptive.

  Because a receiver was a passive thing. A thing that waited for energy to come to it.

  His thoughts scattered, reminding him just how recently he’d not been particularly lucid at all. Warning him not to take any of it for granted. Unsettling him enough so he hunkered down beside the disturbed trail, getting closer to the earth...hunting balance. Finding it elusive—and finding himself, the man with the overactive mind and the endless energy, without the means to work through it.