Читать книгу Sentinels: Lion Heart - Doranna Durgin - Страница 11

Agassiz Peak. Lyn squinted upward into a bright sky; the rising mountain filled half of it. It didn’t look like all that much from here.

Ryan gave her a look. “You haven’t really seen it yet.”

Had she said that out loud? She couldn’t be certain. Standing here at the modest ski lodge and gift shop, the tortuously winding drive up Schultz Pass behind them and nothing but pines and bare volcanic cinder slopes up ahead, she’d let something of herself get lost in the thrumming of the mountain. No wonder the Atrum Core wanted this place. No wonder Ryan wanted it.

Although, as she left the solid-plank porch of the lower lodge and stepped out onto sparse native grasses, it occurred to her that he already had it, just by living here.

No. Wrong thinking. He was what he was; she couldn’t forget it. If he’d once made his trade-offs for his sister’s life, now he made them simply for power. For that desperate attempt to balance his life. It wasn’t as though he had anything to lose.

After all, he’d already lost his sister even after he’d paid her bills with blood money.

He came up behind her. His solidity made her feel weightless, as though she stayed grounded only because he stood behind her. Over her shoulder, he gestured toward an open space and its ski lift—the barely green grass of a natural meadow, sloping sharply upward and lined by woods. “Hart Prairie,” he said. “We can access a number of trails right here. But there are too many people for shifting, and you’re not dressed for hiking.”

At least she was dry, her wet clothes barely more than a memory in the resurging heat. As was he, in a basic T-shirt and jeans, a black leather vest completing the look in a way that should have been pathetically poser but instead looked perfectly natural. He looked up the slope, and even then she could have sworn he was drinking in the view. Drinking in the feel of the power, too—although it felt stable to her limited perception, and reassuring…like being held in the palm of some giant being.

He gave the slightest of nods as two hikers emerged from the trees. “We’ll take the Skyride. Half an hour and we’re there.”

She didn’t mind following his lead. Following blind…that was another thing. “And then?”

He grinned. “Then we see what we can see. And hope it doesn’t brew up another storm.” He offered his jacket—a lined canvas work jacket, strictly nonkosher when it came to shifting. “It’ll be a lot colder up there.”

“No, thanks,” she said. The last thing she needed—to be surrounded by the scent of him.

He opened his mouth as though to say something—some argument, no doubt—and closed it again, offering a shrug instead. In this light, his hazel eyes looked distinctly green, and the short black edging at his nape and temple stood out sharply from tawny hair.

Nothing about his demeanor made her think of someone who could kill his boyhood friend and Sentinel partner. Nothing about his stance. A big guy, a strong guy, an exceptionally charismatic guy…but not edgy. Not that gritty.

He turned abruptly away from the prairie ski area bunny slopes and headed across the parking lot with assured strides. She caught up in short order, and soon enough caught a glimpse of another ski lift—this one moving steadily, chairs filled with people pointing out the sights to one another.

“From the top, you can see the Grand Canyon.”

“I’m not here to see the Grand Canyon.”

He gave her a sharp look. “I think maybe you are.” He veered toward the upper of the two lodges, bought them both lift tickets, and returned with the conversation still on his tongue. “Thing is, you have to look. You have to see.”

“I’ve already seen more than you want me to,” she said, a deliberate and sharp reminder of her twofold purpose here.

He caught her gaze with a flash of green and held it. Quietly, he said, “If you think I’ve forgotten, you’d be very much mistaken.” And then he left her behind, heading directly for the mechanical clank of the lift.

They’d almost reached it when his long stride faltered. An instant later, she felt it—felt the surge of him and the turbulent rapids of power that followed, saw him stumble—and then they both froze at a shriek of fear from the ski lift.

They hadn’t been the only ones to feel the disruption—to react to it. A teenaged girl in skimpy shorts dangled from the lift behind a half-engaged safety bar, crop top riding high with her entanglement. Even as they watched, one of her flip-flops fell to the rocky grass below.

The lift wrangler was already on it, easing the cable to a stop—but so was Ryan. From easygoing to distinctly feral, from stumbling to smooth, poetic movement. He sprinted past the gasping crowd, past the lift wrangler and his incoherent yell of protest, and up the hill with no slack in his powerful sprint.

There’s no way. That chair had to be twice his height. Had to be—

That’s when she realized she was running, too, right behind him, scooping up the jacket he’d dropped and ready to…

What? Even drawing on an ocelot’s strength, she couldn’t reach that lift…

And then she stuttered to a halt in amazement as Ryan sprang from the ground, every bit of big-cat strength in play, latching on to the footrest while the car swung in reaction. There he hung a distinct moment while he spoke to the terrified girl.

Lyn wouldn’t have thought he could do it, not so smoothly—not without jarring the girl from her precarious perch. But he did. He swiftly pulled himself up, swung a leg up to hook around the seat, and slithered into a position from which he could haul the girl into the chair, flailing in fear until the moment she flung her arms around him.

He jerked the safety bar down; the wild edges of her sobs trickled unevenly down to Lyn, to the crowd. The silence exploded into relief and wonder and excited conversation. Did you see—? How did he—?

Lyn whirled around to jump into the next chair. The lift wrangler cried a knee-jerk protest and then he gave up and nudged the cable back up to speed, reaching for the radio at his side.

Lyn engaged her own safety bar, and then—already aware of the rising breeze and dropping temperatures as the lift swooped her up over the trees—tucked Ryan’s jacket around her shoulders.

Alone on a half-hour ski lift ride to the top of the tall peak, with nothing to do but contemplate the broad strength of the shoulders that had so easily pulled Ryan into the chair…Lyn thought of the sudden change of his presence when he’d focused himself on the girl’s lift chair, gone for it and caught it as resoundingly as prey in powerful cougar paws.

To think, only moments ago she’d been wondering if really he had the grit to go dark.

She laughed out loud, and if the man in the seat ahead with the girl clinging around his neck heard her, he gave no sign.

The topside lift wrangler waited for them as the chairs glided toward the turnaround, radio raised to his ear, face tense and determined. Gusts flapped at his jeans and windbreaker; Lyn drew Ryan’s coat closer as that same wind buffeted her. Ryan hadn’t been exaggerating; high summer had turned sharply to fall.

Abruptly, the chairs slowed in pace, giving Ryan a luxury of time to flip the safety bar up and disembark. The girl clung tightly as he half carried her away from the chair’s path, one arm wrapped around her waist.

Lyn fumbled with the unfamiliar bar as she, too, reached the summit, ducking away and to the side as the lift wrangler’s radio drizzled static in response to his short comment. The chairs sped up again, and Lyn glanced down the long swooping lines of the cables in surprise; she’d expected them to call an all-stop until things were sorted out. But it didn’t take her sharp vision long to pick out the cluster of occupied chairs heading their way in double time—E.M.T.s, officials.

She didn’t plan to be here.

Ryan apparently felt the same; he’d transferred the teenager to the lift operator and now headed for the narrow trail leading uphill.

“Hey,” the lift wrangler said, tangled up in the girl, “you can’t go…They’ll want to talk to you—”

Ryan spun briefly around to face him. “Go where?” he asked, wry enough to make the kid laugh.

Lyn took note. Not a lie, but misleading? Oh, yeah. Because she and Ryan had an entire extinct volcano over which to range—eighteen thousand acres of fragile, extreme Kachina Peaks Wilderness area above the more accessible trails.

On the other hand…

Don’t over analyze. Of course he’d misled the kid. Of course he’d do whatever low-key thing it took to keep them out of any official reports of the incident, just as she was prepared to do the same. And it didn’t take as much as one might think. Already she could imagine the reaction to the description of Joe Ryan leaping to catch hold of that lift chair and pull the girl to safety. Skepticism, if not outright disbelief. Chalking it up to a natural inclination to exaggerate.

Such skepticism served the Sentinels well.

Ryan moved effortlessly up the tricky trail, maneuvering its short, zigzagging sections with ease. Lyn followed, custom-made boots finding purchase in spite of rolling cinders over rock-hard dirt.

She’d thought he’d just keep going—get them out of sight and head into the woods. But instead, when the trail widened out to a viewing area perched at the edge of a rock outcrop, he hesitated. He wandered to the fenced edge, looking not at the drop before him but out at the reforming thunderheads of the waning afternoon. Lyn realized, then, with a startling snap of awareness—this was the very spot his dossier picture had been taken.

Yes, he knew this place.

He might even consider it his, in some ways.

He’d be wrong.

She wandered over to the token handrail. Ponderosas speared up at her from the plunging slope below; off to the side and farther down, ski resort personnel bustled around the teenager. Scattered groups of tourists appeared in the distant chairs on the lift. Good. With more people up here, their own absence would be less noticeable.

But while she tried to focus her thoughts on the power surges of the area, on the consequences of such surges, on her need to prove Joe Ryan a Sentinel gone dark, the gentle gusty wind snatched at her thoughts; the scent of sun-warmed pine beguiled her nose. The thin air slipped in and out of her lungs without leaving much impact, and her peripheral vision seemed ever so sparkly around the edges. Her fingers curled around the upper rail of the brown pipe fencing; she took a deep breath.

“Give it a few minutes,” Ryan said, giving her a quick, sharp glance before he returned his attention to the panorama before them. “You’ll adjust.”

More so than the average tourist—an advantage of her robust shifter form, and one she’d gladly take. Plenty of travelers found the seven-thousand-foot altitude at the base challenging enough; Lyn hadn’t even considered it until this moment. She took another deep breath, suddenly overwhelmed by the very alien nature of the landscape—from the volcanic rock formations around them to the distinct sections of forest and high desert prairie spread out below and the slash of the Grand Canyon far to the northwest…this place smelled different, it sounded different…it even tasted different, pressing in around her with clear, rarefied air and the unique trace of those creatures who dared to live at this cold, dry twelve thousand feet.

Perhaps that’s why she nearly missed it. Another rumble of power, a mere bass hiss of presence, tasting of Ryan and of deep green wild…Lyn found herself closing her eyes, leaning into it as she might a pleasant breeze on a hot day.

Her eyes snapped open, riveting to him in accusation—but the words she gathered to fling at him died on her lips. He stood braced against the rail, a frown drawing his brows, nostrils flared with the impact of that faint surge…or with effort, she wasn’t sure. Even as she watched, eyes narrowed, he lifted his head—a little jerk of determination there—and turned to her.

And then she couldn’t help it. Then the words burst out. “Don’t tell me you didn’t feel that. Don’t tell me you didn’t taste yourself in that surge!”

For an instant, he looked nothing more than nonplussed. And then his frustration snapped back at her. “No! It’s not—I—” A quick step, another, and he’d closed the distance between them, by then under better control. “Tell me, Lyn Maines…did you recognize your voice the first time you heard yourself recorded?”

She blinked. “I…” Flashed back to that day, two children playing with an off-limits answering machine, her brother leading the way into trouble even then. The laughter at how they sounded, their insistence—that really is you!

She didn’t get a chance to voice her answer; he turned away from her again, looking back out over the vista. It truly didn’t matter—they both knew her answer. And so the question became…did he not know why his trace was tangled with the surges? Or had he simply not realized it would be detectible?

Voices muttered up from below as the next wave of tourists grew closer, the Snowbowl management and emergency personnel in discussion with the lift operator. “They’ll be looking for us,” Ryan said, but it came as an afterthought, an aside to whatever else ran through his mind.

Lyn said, “If the Core siphons the energy of this place…if they store it in their amulets, if they use it against us…if they use it against the rest of the world—”

He didn’t turn on her, but she got the impression it was only through strength of will. “Then this ancient place will change forever,” he said, his voice low. “Irrevocably. The people who revere it, who draw their spiritual strength from it…those nations would never recover. There’s no telling what would happen to the delicate ecosystem up here.”

“And you?” she said, words that slipped out before she could think better of them. She tightened his jacket around her, realized suddenly that it was his, and pretended that it didn’t matter. “If you siphon energy?”

He laughed—a short, bitter sound. “They think I’m that good, do they?” He gestured out over the slopes—hard red-brown cinders cropping up in dramatic patches between the pines, while above them the trees stunted down and gave way to lichens and scrub. “Look at it! Can’t you feel it, lurking here, as big as the world? What would I do with it all?”

She shrugged, determined to be unaffected by his passion for this area. “Personal glory? A little something to make up for what you’ve lost?”

No laughter this time, but he grinned, and turned so the gusts lifted the hair from his forehead as he looked back at her. “Don’t you think it’s all just a little bit bigger than I am?”

“Well,” she said, taken aback at both the grin and the matter-of-fact nature of the response, “I do. But people who break rules usually think they’re the exception.”

He nodded. “Okay,” he said, and turned to her, leaning his hips against the top pipe rail with an insouciance she could not have mustered, not with the fatal nature of the drop behind him. He nodded again, catching her eyes. The sharp shadows thrown by his own features turned his dusky hazel gaze to something darker. “Okay,” he repeated. “That’s good. You think like that.”

She must have registered her surprise. He grinned again. “Thinking like that will find the truth. That’s fine by me. That’s not the same as already having made up your mind, and coming here with some old grudge already in hand.”

Lyn’s jaw dropped; she groped for words. Her temper filled the void. “How dare you even suggest—”

He cut her off with a snort of a laugh. “What have I got to lose?”

And that stopped her temper cold, floundering; she was unable to do anything but search his eyes. From below came filtered conversation—clear to any Sentinel, if not the average person. The lift wrangler said, “They’ve got to come down soon.”

“We should go,” Ryan said, dropping her gaze. He pushed away from the railing and then quite suddenly froze, and the hint of natural burnished color in his face paled away. His step faltered to the point that she reached for him—and that’s when she felt it herself, another angry aftershock of power, whispering through her veins and briefly clouding her head. Only the merest of grumbles, but here, so close to the source…

An instant of panic skittered down her spine, fluttered in her chest. So much power, and we’re sitting right on top of it…

What if she hadn’t even thought of the worst of the possibilities? What if brevis regional had missed it, too? Because…what if whoever had disturbed the mountain hadn’t done it right?

If the area had been unbalanced, destabilized…it could be on the verge of an eruption such as the world had never seen. Not magma, but pure power…

Take a breath. She did just that. Get a grip. Not quite as easily done. She took another breath, deeper…slower. She gathered her own energy, what little grasp she had of it. She was no Joe Ryan, to perceive and impose himself on the world’s deepest powers, but she could damn well control her own. She pulled it into herself, found it tainted with her fears, and hunted the inner note that had always cleared away such things…a silent hum. It grounded her…centered her.

And when she opened her eyes, she found him there—right there—his hand reaching for the side of her face, his expression equal parts intensity and wonder. “How…?” he said. And, “I thought you were a tracker…”

“I am,” she said, the calm lingering; she didn’t so much as blink to find him so close, though she couldn’t help but lift her chin slightly.

He shook his head. “Whatever. Damned fine job of…” He shook his head again. “It wasn’t shielding, or even just centering. Nicely done.”

She shrugged. “Are you all right? You looked—”

He waved off the rest of the question. “I had a bug earlier this week. I’m fine.” But he glanced down slope and took her arm, escorting her back to the trail and moving a little too quickly for her comfort.

She shook his hand free. “Where now?” she asked, and she lowered her voice in deference to those who were looking for them. She and Ryan were vulnerable now—silhouetted against bare rock and sky until the trail rounded the next hump of ground.

He looked back at her, ready to offer a hand if she needed it. “Following my feet,” he said. “You’ve seen for yourself…they pretty much lead me to trouble. Today, I’m counting on it.”