Читать книгу Sentinels: Lion Heart - Doranna Durgin - Страница 13

Joe took another deep breath. What the hell had she done? That centering thing of hers, but something else, too—something that had grabbed him and folded him in and damn well caressed him from the inside out, touching nerves he hadn’t even known he’d had.

And she clearly didn’t have a clue.

At least, not to judge from those big, brown eyes aimed his way, puzzled and a little concerned—but more suspicious than not. So Joe took one last deep breath and counted himself glad for clothes, and he turned himself brusque and matter-of-fact. He tightened all those feelings down into his clenched fist and allowed himself that small crutch while the rest of him went on. “We can’t stay this way long,” he said, certain the cold wind already bit into her as it did into him. He stood, held out a hand and pulled her to her feet.

She tucked a strand of wavy hair behind her ear and gestured at the area. “How did you know?”

He shrugged. “I guessed.” He pointed back at the little spring. “Believe it or not, that one’s not on any maps—none of the trails go anywhere near it. I call it the top of the world. It’s a place where…” He hesitated, narrowed his eyes slightly—and decided maybe not. Not when she’d already decided he had a thing for power. So instead he asked, “What’s it like? The traces? What do they feel like?”

She looked taken aback, as she well might. It was a personal question, in its way. Probably too personal, and probably she wouldn’t answer, but—

“It depends,” she said, wrapping her arms around herself—cold at that. Her eyes still watered slightly from her sneezing and she hadn’t quite recaptured all her hair; a wavy tendril from her temple fluttered in the breeze. Reluctantly, she added, “They come as smells, mainly, but also as…inner sensations. The sneezing…the amulets are particularly pungent, in all ways. Corrupt. Like sticking your nose into a liquefying corpse.”

He recoiled. “Tell me I don’t do that to you,” he said, the words out of his mouth before he thought them through.

She reacted much the same. “God, no,” she said. “You’re—” and then she caught herself. “No, not at all. Don’t worry about it.”

All right. Yeah. He changed directions again, back to where he’d been. “What I feel,” he said, “is too big to fit inside me. Like being inside a slow wind that goes right through your skin. Sometimes it gets gusty and fussy, but unless someone’s messing with it—” like lately “—it’s pretty steady. Feels different, depending on the source. It’s…”

And there he ran out of words, for how could he explain the thrill of riding power, of having it fill him and pass on through, leaving the taste of wherever it had come from and where it had been along the way? Like jumping off a high cliff and soaring on thermals and bounding downhill and flinging himself wide open to all the possibilities of what might be, all at the same time—

Mistake, boy-o. She’d seen something in his expression…something, perhaps, of the words he hadn’t said. Her eyes narrowed. And so, totally lame, he pointed to the rock formation over the spring. “It’s a natural channel…easy to monitor the area from here.”

“Right there,” she said flatly, and then repeated words that somehow now seemed childish. “At the top of the world.”

He suddenly felt exposed, scraped raw right down into a silly, insignificant core. Hardest thing he’d done in a long time, meeting her gaze just then. But he did it, and he said, “Yes.” And he gritted his teeth together a moment or two, clenching jaw muscles he hadn’t had occasion to use in such a fashion since the days of pain and loss—his sister, his partner, his life—and then managed to add more casually, “Once you caught trace on the Weatherford Trail, I figured our Core friends had headed this way. They just didn’t know the straightest route to get here. They probably circled in on it…had some kind of detection device.”

“Fabron Gausto,” she murmured, and shivered, rubbing her upper arms. Maybe the cold, maybe the thought of the Core’s local sept prince.

And then he realized she wasn’t just referring to the influence of the local Core when she named the man. She meant Fabron Gausto.

She meant here.

Right then she looked at him, and said, “He’s been here, all right,” a pronouncement filled with both satisfaction and trepidation.

“Hold on,” he said, and his temper suddenly felt hot within him, a rare thing for a man who’d become so resigned to so very much. “You expected to find him? You knew that son of a bitch Core prince would be here? And no one’s told me? Warned me? Done so much as dropped sly damned knowing hints?”

Her hands stilled on her arms; she looked back at him, nonplussed. “Of course we—” she started, and stopped to frown. “Didn’t you—?” And then gave a giant shiver and hugged herself anew.

The cold wind cut just as sharply through Joe’s shirt, tugging at his hair, gusting away the last remnants of the startling sensations she’d roused. He badly needed to take the cougar, and even more badly, she needed to take back the ocelot. To bask in the sharp intensity of the high altitude sun, buffered from the wind by thick coats.

But not until she explained why brevis regional, the Southwest office to which he reported, on which he depended for updates on the millennia-long clash between the Atrum Core and the Sentinels, had failed to mention their intel on Gausto’s location.

For although the simmering conflict between the Core and the Sentinels rarely exploded even on the most local of levels, Fabron Gausto had recently changed all that. A regional septs drozhar going against his own Continental septs prince, his own advisors, and the wisdom of every generation since the two organizations were both founded from the same family—by two brothers with the same Gaul mother, but fathers from two different nations—Gausto had broken rules that hadn’t been challenged for hundreds of years.

Early enough, the Druidic-born brother and the Roman-born brother had realized that whatever their clashes, their survival lay in their clandestine nature. Never mind that the Roman-born brother, finding himself completely without the inborn ability to manipulate earthly powers—including his Druidic brother’s amazing faculty for taking the form of a wild boar—turned early to darker, cruder options, justifying his actions as necessary to police any unsavory act his brother might commit. And never mind that the Druidic brother quickly set about refining his abilities, and set upon his descendants the obligation to continue his work. Vigilia, the Sentinels had been called back then—and, wisely keeping the strong, prepotent nature of their lineage to themselves, they thrived and grew and expanded…they spread across the continents, learning, growing…becoming sentinels of the earth.

The Atrum Core had taken their name from the Vigilia…Dark to the Core, they’d been called, and then Dark Core for short. It wasn’t supposed to be a compliment. No one ever expected them to take the name for their own. And while the Core ran itself on stolen power, half monarchy and half dictatorship, broken down into regional septs, the Sentinels had a more developed structure—more democratic.

Or so they liked to say. And so Joe had used to believe.

He’d given her too much time. She said, “You were told. Just as you were specifically asked to deliver your most recent report—the one that’s so late—and never did. That looked really good for you, by the way.”

“I—what?” Now it was his turn to stand and stare, until the next gust of wind hit him and he turned his back to it; he didn’t miss the way she angled around to use him as a wind break. Too cold, too high, too remote, with rain building up again in a little western thunderhead that might or might not dump on the mountain before it dissipated into evening darkness. No, humans didn’t belong up here. “Hell, it’s late…it’s always late. What’s the big deal?”

Dean used to rag him about that…his casual disrespect for paperwork. “You’re gonna get nailed, boy-o,” he’d said, more than once dropping forms on Joe’s desk or leaving sticky notes on his monitor. And with Dean around, the paperwork had, somehow, always gotten done on time.

Not so much since Dean’s death—nor since Joe had been both officially cleared of and unofficially convicted of causing it.

Lyn Maines snorted; it turned into half a sneeze, left her eyes watering as she said, “The big deal is that Nick requested it—he needed it to assess this situation. When he didn’t get it, all we could do was guess what’s been happening up here.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Maybe you’ve gone dark…maybe not. But letting down brevis because you just don’t care enough to do your job—?”

Joe recoiled as if she’d hit him. Hell, she had hit him. He’d never not cared, he’d never given this job—this life—less than everything he had. Being a little slow with the reports was one thing…ignoring a direct request for information, something else entirely. Lives depended on fulfilling such requests. “I never—” he said.

But suddenly it had the same old familiar feel to it. Not me. I didn’t do it. There’s been a mistake. And so he turned from her, quite abruptly taking the cougar—a quick, hard transition that found him already bounding back up to the top of the spring upon completion—and this time, if she’d had anything left to say, he was the one who wasn’t listening.

Lyn thought she’d never get warm again.

She took another sip of coffee from the simple machine in Joe Ryan’s barely detached casita—nothing like the home-ground beans from his own kitchen, just your basic Mr. Coffee and grounds from a can. Still, she was grateful for it, even with the bitter aftertaste going down.

Rather like her entire day. Definite bitter aftertaste there.

She hadn’t expected to end up here, in this little studio structure so common to Southwest homes—open kitchenette, full bath and a daybed. He’d offered it to her when they’d emerged from the Snowbowl woods at his car, and she couldn’t decide if he was trying to prove he had nothing to hide or if he just didn’t care. His words told her nothing; his eyes held dark secrets and a bruised soul.

Someone else might think it a sign of his innocence, that hurt. She found it less than convincing. The most dangerous were those whose hearts went dark because they felt justified…felt the world owed them something.

But when she curled up on the daybed in the cool night air beside the open window—when she wrapped herself in an old quilt that smelled faintly of Joe Ryan’s natural scent and vibrated even more faintly with his trace—she couldn’t help but regret her convictions.

Up on that mountain, they had run together. They had worked together. They had created a partnership where, for isolated moments, it hadn’t mattered who she was or why she was here, or who he was and what he’d done. Even after he’d turned away from her, he hadn’t gone far—only to the top of the spring, where he’d basked, eyes half-closed, immersing himself.

There, while she felt nothing more than the distressing tingle of amulets, Joe Ryan sat at the top of the world and sifted vast natural flows of power.

Even thinking about it, here in the casita with only a single dim light to disturb the night, she shivered slightly—and she couldn’t blame it on the cold this time. He not only felt those waves, not only rode them…he could, in subtle ways, manage them. Manipulate them.

The good a man like that might have done the Sentinels…might have done the world…

And the harm he might yet do, with those soulbruised eyes hiding the secrets of his inner world.

Lyn shivered again.

She threw aside the quilt, dumped the coffee down the sink and stalked to her tidy little backpack purse to grab her cell phone.

Brevis regional, she knew, would be waiting.

More specifically, Nick Carter—adjutant to the brevis regional counsel—would be waiting. Not that the brevis consul—a man named Dane Berger who’d become just a little too reclusive these past several years—was ever inclined to make day-to-day phone calls and communications, but sometimes Lyn got the impression—

No. Pondering her suspicions that Nick Carter now silently ran Southwest brevis regional was not the thing to do right now. He had an uncanny knack for plucking unspoken thoughts from her—and everyone else’s—head.

So for a long moment, while the cell phone warmed in her hand, Lyn thought of what she’d learned on the mountain that day. The confirmed presence of Fabron Gausto—no doubt completely bypassing the will of his septs prince. And he still had his sept posse, loyal in spite of his spectacular failure in Tucson. Didn’t have any choice at this point, Lyn imagined—no other Core sept would take them in.

She’d found more there, while Joe Ryan sat on the top of the world and absorbed the power flows. She’d found the disgusting trace of discharged amulets—powerful amulets, and a number of them. And Ryan, once they’d gone human again, had allowed that there was a ripple in the power flowing through that area, but couldn’t suggest its cause or meaning.

Unlike Ryan, she reported as expected. And that meant flipping the cell phone open and hitting the autodial that went straight to Nick Carter’s direct line.

“Carter,” he said, with noises in the background that made her believe he was at home—baying and carrying on, most boisterous.

“Is blood being shed?” she asked, amused, before stopping to think.

“Lyn,” he said, after a pause in which he’d obviously sorted out her voice. “Hounds and their toys…” Then his voice changed, hitting a businesslike note. “You’re in place?”

“I’m in his guest cabin.”

“He invited you?” Surprise there, enough to make Lyn wonder. “Does he know—?”

“That I’m not exactly his advocate? He picked up on that right away.” A flush of regret took her by surprise. Even full of suspicions and deep-seated determination to clear out the dark Sentinels, she’d seen a hint of something other than jaded resignation on Ryan’s face. Something that might have even been hurt, quickly covered.

So he’s wounded to be under suspicion again. Doesn’t mean he’s innocent.

“Lyn,” Nick said, and she could hear the hesitation in his voice and envision it in his pale green eyes. He was a wild one, that Nick Carter, a wolf wrapped in civility and manners, hoarfrost hair neatly trimmed, a lean, coiled power in his movements. Lyn suspected that his constrained manner was the only way he kept himself from startling people with his quickness, with the glimpse of the untamed showing through.

She’d never had a problem with keeping the ocelot tucked away—keeping that aspect of herself well behaved, covered with a tidy veneer of what society expected. She didn’t lean on her Sentinel nature, as did some; she didn’t need to. She was tenacious; she clung to lessons learned young. And she damned well knew what that hesitation of Nick’s meant. “You knew who I was when you sent me here,” she said. “I’ll get the job done, Nick.”

“I’m not concerned about your dedication,” he said dryly. He must have gone through a door; the noise of the dogs abruptly diminished. “Nor your ability. So don’t even go there.”

“What then? I’ve hardly had a chance to get started.”

“Your focus,” he said bluntly. “We need answers—whether or not they fit your personal mission.”

“You’re the one who thought he’d gone dark in the first place!” she blurted out, too surprised to be circumspect.

“And I still do. But even so, I need someone who can look for what’s actually there, and not for what you want to be there.”

For a long breath, she couldn’t say anything. She walked up to the casita’s large window, looking through the darkness at the house beside her, and the drop of the mountain beyond that. No blinding nighttime lighting for this property—nothing to interfere with the rich scatter of stars overhead. Only the most muted of lights from the second-floor loft area to indicate Ryan was still in there at all.

If he was. She didn’t think for a moment that her presence would stop him from ranging out. She should be keeping track of him, not losing herself in this conversation, familiar dismay lumping in the pit of her stomach. “You went digging,” she said. “That part of my background is supposed to be off the record.”

“Your brother—”

“Has nothing to do with this!” Except—“No, I take it back. He opened my eyes. He taught me important lessons. And do you really want this phone call to be about me? Because I don’t.”

“Do you have news already?”

“Don’t sound so surprised.” Her turn to be dry. “We went to the top of the world today, as it happens.” And she summarized their ascent and discovery of the trace. “But it could have been a throwaway.” A gift to make her think he was cooperating. “If so, he lost nothing of real value by revealing that spot…I couldn’t track them from there. Something about what they’d done with the amulets obliterated all but those first traces.”

But even as Nick absorbed her words, she realized the things she’d left out—the way Ryan had reacted to her flawed shielding technique, the way he’d reacted to the power surges…how in some odd way, they seemed to hurt and not help him. Things she’d usually report and wasn’t quite certain why she hadn’t.

Because I’m not sure yet. Not sure what she was seeing, or if she’d really even seen those things at all. She needed more time…

But Nick, knowing none of it, was still thinking of the words she had said. “So the Core is there. Then it’s not likely Ryan is doing this on his own. Too much coincidence, for them to show up along with the power surges, even with Ryan’s trace clinging to them.”

“He was surprised about that, by the way,” she observed. “It struck me as completely genuine. Which doesn’t mean he isn’t involved—only that he didn’t know his trace would show up, and didn’t recognize it when it did.” But that wasn’t the only thing that had surprised him this day, and she had to add, “He said he hadn’t heard from brevis regional regarding the Core’s suspected presence here.”

“Not quite the same as claiming he didn’t know they were there.” His voice was dark and certain.

She wouldn’t, she realized, want this man on her trail. “He also says he never got a message asking him to expedite that late report.”

They both sat on a beat of silence, and then she said, “I think you need to follow up on it, Nick.”

Surprise, there. “You believe him?”

“I think,” she said carefully, “that we should be ready to counter that claim if it isn’t true.”

He made a noise she couldn’t quite interpret. “You know,” he said, startling her with the same words she’d only just thought about him, “I wouldn’t want you on my trail.” But she heard the grin in his voice, and he added, “I’ll look into it. And you—be careful. I can have a full team out there within two hours, day or night—it’s not your job to confront the Core, or even to corner Ryan. Just get us close enough so we can get the drop on them.”

Right. That had been the point all along—coming in with a team too soon would tip off the Core, and spook Ryan into dropping whatever he was up to.

Supposing he still could. Lyn couldn’t help but wonder if he even had control any longer—if he’d choose to continue with a process that was affecting him as this one obviously did.

On the other hand, maybe he’d been telling the truth. Maybe he had gotten a bug, and it was messing with his Sentinel skills. It happened.

“Anything else going on?” Nick asked her, interrupting what she suddenly realized had become a long silence.

“No,” she said. “Sorry. Just thinking through it all. Same team, do you think?”

“You make the progression sound like a foregone conclusion.” His voice still held amusement. “Some of the same people, if it comes to that. I doubt I can tear Dolan away from Encontrados and Megan…she might be a natural with those wards, but she’s not ready for the field.”

Lyn wouldn’t expect it; it hadn’t been long enough since Dolan, the Southwest’s rogue Sentinel, had found Megan, bringing her back to the Sentinel fold after so many erroneous years of neglect. “And Dolan?” she asked. “Did he ever come in?”

“You mean did you talk him out of his grudges long enough to see that we need him?” Nick let out a breath. “He came in. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s thinking about it. Not for too long, I hope. I need Sentinels I can count on.”

Lyn heard what those words really meant. I need Sentinels who will stand with me when things get rough around here.

“I’ll be there,” she reminded him. For as much as she hunted those gone dark, she could well recognize a man leading the way for those who didn’t.

“I know,” he said. “But we’ll need…”

“More,” she finished for him, and couldn’t help a fleeting acknowledgment that Ryan’s strength, his solidity—his depth, even—could have made him valuable to Nick. Could have.

“And Lyn,” Nick said, his voice hitting a warning note, “keep in mind that there’s a third possibility when it comes to the things Ryan said he never heard from us. Because he could be telling the truth, and still be dark. There’s more than one tangle in play here.”

“Got it covered,” she told him. “Untangling trails is what I do.”