Tiger Bound (21 page)

She frowned; she might have asked. Instead, that taste flooded her mouth, obscuring the lingering flavor of rich coffee, filling her nose as much as tingling off her tongue. She flailed in it—found herself suddenly afloat in invasive darkness, in damp memories of dim, foul places—the briefest glimpse of a woman’s face, faintly familiar, the sound of emotional agony. The grunt of a man taking a hard blow resolving into torn curtains of wild green.

She blinked, and found herself looking into that same green—the watercolor clarity of Maks’s eyes. He’d plucked the drink from her hand as she sagged against the wall.

She cleared her throat, glancing somewhat furtively in the direction of the shop floor.

“No one came,” he told her. “No one heard.” And he didn’t ask, but he wanted to know—she saw that in his eyes, too.

“I don’t know,” she told him, her voice low. “I could taste what you described...I know people were being hurt, people were in despair. I don’t know why...”

The look on his face struck her with unexpected dread, plucking at something in her chest. “You
know,
” she said, bringing it down to a whisper. “You know what I’m seeing. You were part of it, once.”

He shook his head. She didn’t know if it meant
no, I don’t
or simply
not here.
She knew she wouldn’t get any immediate answers, either way. “Let’s go home,” she said—and pretended not to notice his reluctant glance at the exit and the hunt that drew him.

* * *

They might even have made it, if they hadn’t met a cluster of people in the steep little parking lot, gathered at the tailgate of one of the newly parked SUVs and inadvertently blocking Katie’s car.

Maks didn’t think twice—reading the high emotions of the group, reading their expressions and body language—as Katie stopped, he stepped forward and sideways, putting himself in front of her so cleanly that she didn’t at first realize it—and then she did, and her hand touched his arm in an unconscious gesture. Not only seeking reassurance, but connecting them.

The parking lot slanted hard toward the main road, leaving little room for graceful evasion. Especially not when someone in the gathering—eight or nine people, all looking shaken and sounding strident—did a double-take and said, “Hey, aren’t you the neighbor?”

Akins had made a reference to
neighbor,
too. And while Maks knew better than to respond, already eyeing his best option to make an opening to the car, Katie had all the wrong instincts for a moment like this.

Hers were herd instincts, healer’s instincts—to reach out, to become part of...to help. And so she asked, “Whose neighbor? What’s happened?”

“As if you don’t know,” muttered another man. “I don’t care if your house
is
a quarter-mile down the road—there’s no way you didn’t hear him screaming.”

“What?” Katie’s tone rose a notch. “Larry? You mean Larry Williams? What happened?”

“Akins said she would play innocent.” A third man—a big man—pushing away from the back of the SUV and eyeing Maks as if he was pretty sure he could take him.

“I’m not
playing
anything,” Katie said, and took a step closer. Maks still stood angled before her, not quite facing the group, but she was by no means hidden—all tall and slender strong grace, the courage finding its way back out no matter what she thought of herself.

Courage, but not stupidity. When Maks shifted ever so slightly to draw a line on her progress, she ceded it to him.

The only woman of the bunch stepped forward and tipped her head at Katie. “Williams is dead,” she said. “He didn’t show up at early shooting practice, so we went looking—”

“We found him, all right,” the third man said, crossing his beefy arms over an impressive chest. “Shredded to pieces.”

Katie looked at the woman; she nodded. “Blood everywhere. Looks like it took him a while to die, too.”

Katie closed her eyes, the natural flush of her cheeks fading. “The crea—”
Creature
, she’d started to say. But Maks shifted into her before she could finish.

Maybe not quite soon enough.

“There, you see?” the second man gathered up the other two with his gaze, while those further away, still having their own conversations, hesitated at the changing pitch of the conversation. “She knows something.”

Maks could feel Katie’s fatigue, could see it in her face. And they had things to do before she could rest—property lines to be secured, house wards to strengthen...a discussion to have.
In the shop...a scent...a taste...bitter hot metal...

Katie shot him a glance—not just checking in, but reading him—seeing his impatience. She told the men, “I’d like to get to my car, please.”

The closest responded with an expression that wasn’t quite a sneer—but it came close, and his meaning was clear enough. He opened his mouth, but before he could speak the woman slapped out with the back of her hand, a solid thump against his ribs that he didn’t even seem to notice. “Oh, my God,” she said in disbelief. “Are you really about to say ‘make me’? Just because you’re bigger than everyone else?”

The man crooked an eyebrow at Maks.

Yes, bigger. Yes, broader. Yes, meaner.

But not tiger.

Maks growled.

Or maybe he didn’t, not literally. Maybe there’d been no actual sound. But somehow it hung in the air between them, startling the group, yanking surprise from the woman, wary expressions from the men...and from the biggest of them, all the mean turned to surprise.

“Really,” Katie said gently, “I’d think you would want us
on
your side.”

The rest of the group had already made that decision, easing back to the tight space between the vehicles. The big man didn’t have to move, but he shifted toward the tailgate all the same, giving then room to pass.

Katie walked through the space like a queen claiming her own, and Maks paced her—his attention on the big guy, on the abashed crew between the cars—not taking them for granted. Katie barely hesitated as she again told the woman, “Please. Be careful.”

The woman gave her the driest of looks. “Somehow, I think I’d better say the same to you.”

Chapter 15

T
he day’s sharp, early sunshine broke through the sheltering trees along Katie’s dirt road. She eased off the accelerator as they approached a wide, sparsely graveled crossroad, and with a glance at Maks, made her decision, taking them off the single lane road that led to her house and around the corner.

“Your neighbor lives this way,” he guessed.

“It was coming after me,” she said tightly, not looking at him this time, full of certainty. “You know it was. But I wasn’t there, so...” She braked to a gentle stop as the house came into view—an old wood-siding house in need of paint, the roofline distinctly uneven. Crime scene tape wrapped around the porch; the door was sealed. A homemade doghouse sat inside a fenced kennel area, but there was no sign of the German shepherd to whom Katie had occasionally spoken.
Please be safe. Please be with a friend.

“Katie,” Maks said, his voice a rumble that filled the little car until she gave him a startled glance. “Even if it had wanted you, what happened isn’t your fault.”

His words didn’t stop the guilt enveloping her. “Even
if?
”

He didn’t look entirely comfortable. “Katie,” he said, using her name again as if it gave him some place to start. “It came for me.”

She arched an eyebrow at him, knowing her response was entirely unfair. “Oh, so now it’s all about you?”

“This,”
he said, affirming it. “
This
was about me.”

Something about the regret in his voice—the anger underlying it—made her look twice. He was, after all, the one who had seen the creature. Fought it.

“Because of yesterday?”

He nodded, his gaze on hers. “They know who I am.”

“That it was a Sentinel, you mean.” She said it without question, certain enough of the answer.

He shook his head. “That it was me.”
The one who got away.

The sense of his unspoken meaning came through so clearly, she had to hesitate, assuring herself that she hadn’t actually heard the words.

Maybe it shouldn’t have mattered so much to her that she could perceive such things of him...but it did. Because she didn’t know if it spoke of Maks or of her own skills—or of
them.

She felt so very much like a deer at the moment. Circumstances piling up on her, turning frightening...bringing to the forefront the fact that she was simply not a brave creature, after all.

She made herself take a deep breath and stay in the moment. “We shouldn’t have come,” she said. “We already knew what we had to know.”

“We can go,” Maks said. “I’ll come back later.”

As tiger, he meant. Hunting traces that human eyes—and noses—would miss.

Not that he’d missed much back at that coffee shop, human or not. As she started the car again, she looked over to the take-out cup in his hand—empty of its frozen hot chocolate, white fracture lines running through the brown logo where his grip had grown tight during the encounter outside the shop.

“What was it you saw at the coffee shop?” she asked, wheeling a tight circle away from the house and then quickly cutting right toward her own driveway. A lone cyclist approached them from behind, faster on two wheels on this road than they could be on four. Katie quickly rolled down her window and when the cyclist wished her a good morning, said, “Be careful out there today. You’re alone, and a man was killed here this morning. Horribly.”

She wanted to say,
You’re alone, and there’s a massive rampaging mutant javelina out there.

No doubt words that would have had the cyclist running, all right. But not from the right thing.

As it was, he stopped, threw a look over his shoulder, and frowned. “Are you saying the guy is out in the woods?”

Close enough.
That wordless impression came from Maks, who leaned forward just enough so the man could see him. “Yes.”

“Maybe you could spread the word,” Katie said—although she had the feeling that when the man got back to town, he’d find “the word” already there waiting for him.

The cyclist grumbled—but he turned his bike without dismounting and pedaled back toward the paved road, lifting a hand of thanks on the way.

Katie let out a breath of relief as she drove the short remaining distance to her driveway. “He won’t be the first. No matter how the word spreads. And we can’t stop them all.”

“Call brevis,” Maks said.

She cut the engine, casting him a surprised look as she pulled the keys from the ignition.

He hesitated, looking out into the woods and then returning his gaze to her. “The one behind this knows he has little time. Now he’ll push. Maybe make mistakes. Even more so, after I—” But he frowned, and stopped there.

“After?”
she said, hearing the familiar light thump as the yellow cat jumped up to scale the back hatch, a bit of a scramble as he made it to the roof, pattering unevenly overhead. “Come on, Maks, don’t—”

But Maks cursed, an unexpected snarl, and she followed his gaze to the windshield—gasping, fumbling her keys, as she saw the bloody trail of prints smearing down to where the cat sat on the windshield, claiming the car with all his usual nonchalance, the ragged stump of his tail attempting to curve around a floppy hind leg that looked to be held on by skin alone.

* * *

Maks drove.

Crammed into her small car, grimly cursing the mechanics of it, he followed her distracted directions to the vet clinic. Katie held the cat wrapped in a towel on her lap, crying and healing him at the same time.

Maks didn’t need to be told that she couldn’t begin to save what the cat had lost, but he felt what she did for the little animal, sending him strength, easing his pain, supporting his body against shock and blood loss.

Just as Katie didn’t need to be told what had done this to her independent companion. But when she came out of the clinic afterward, biting her lip, her eyes red and her nose and cheeks pink, she marched up to where Maks sat against the hood of the car and demanded,
“Why?”

It wasn’t something Maks wanted to say. “The creature was playing,” he said. “And it was giving warning.”

“Killing my neighbor wasn’t enough?”

“That,” said Maks, “was frustration. The warning was probably meant for me.”

For a long moment she simply stood before him, one leg lifted slightly...the deer wanting to run. But she didn’t, even as a tear spilled over and down her cheek. Maks said, “Katie,” and opened his hands to her, and she came into his arms and let him wrap himself around her, holding her close right there in the parking lot where anyone who saw the blood and the tears would know everything they needed to know.

When she drew a huge breath and let it out slowly, and then another, he took the luxury of letting his fingers sift through her hair, pulling it from the elastic band to scrape it away from her face with gentle fingers.

His words weren’t as gentle. They couldn’t be. “In the coffee shop,” he said, and when she drew another breath, sharper this time, he knew she understood—in the shop, when he’d gone on the hunt. “Before we entered, there was a man with Akins. I know this man.”

Her voice didn’t quite make it above a whisper. “And he knows you.”

Maks nodded, his head against the side of hers; she pulled back to look at him. “He saw you, didn’t he? He saw us coming through the front window, and headed out the back.”

“Yes.” Maks thought back to that cruel, bitter scent—the memories that flooded back to him, the feelings that engulfed him.

Just that fast, her eyes widened; she absorbed the sense of it, the fury and the pain and the loss, and she
knew.
“From back then,” she said, voice still ragged but full of certainty. “He was part of what happened to you.”

“Yes.” One of those who had engineered his mother’s kidnapping, the breeding program that only she had survived long-term, the endless hunt for Maks after his escape—right up until the Sentinels had found him and his little ragged band of runaways and swept through the area, taking down what Core they could find. “More than that. At Gausto’s workshop on
Core D’oíche,
just as we broke in...I thought I scented...” He shook his head. So much chaos, so many smells in that horrifying cellar workshop—the death and gore and creatures distorted, infected and dying...the acrid corruption of Core workings, burning his nose.