Tiger Bound (26 page)

And Katie bit him back.

* * *

Katie stirred beneath Maks’s weight. She had the impression they’d been there for more than a few moments, collapsed together...wrung out and sated. But more than a few moments was time enough to worry, given what Maks had just been through. She thought she’d brought him through it—she thought he wouldn’t have found his release if he hadn’t, with or without her, managed the intensity of this initiation.

But she wasn’t making assumptions. Who knew what happened when a man’s body had been left half-completed in that process of cleansing its channels of power? Years of stabilizing in that uninitiated state, years of failing to trigger the complete process simply because once the body had been fooled, it took more than an accidental alignment of two compatible Sentinels.

It took finding someone who connected on all levels...and who understood.

And it had taken a healer to keep him alive.

Maybe one day she would tell him how close he’d come. One day, when the thought of it no longer terrified her.

And after she’d made certain he had, in fact, survived—here in the woods with his weight pressing her into the pine needles and a bee buzzing thoughtfully at the spread of her hair against the ground. He hadn’t moved a muscle, and she had the sudden, overwhelming fear that maybe he wasn’t even breathing, maybe she’d failed to save him after all—

And then he licked the curve where her shoulder turned into her neck, there where he’d so thoroughly bitten her. The caress sent a happy chill down her spine. She ran her hands over his back, lingering at his backside and reaching around to touch and fondle until his muscles bunched beneath her and he twitched and hardened within her. Her body gave a satisfied sigh of its own, relaxing to the fullness of the sensation, and they locked together for long, silent moments of
being
with one another—feeling the connection with exquisite detail—each flicker of movement, each slow, rolling shudder of delight.

Finally, Maks propped up on his elbows to look down at her, thrusting gently once he was there.

“Oh,” she said. “I mean, seriously? After that, you’re going to—
oh!
”

“Oh,” he said solemnly. “Yes, I think so.”

She moved with him, slow and quiet, letting her legs relax, letting her hands roam along his body to feel muscle tense and release, discovering just where her touch made him hesitate or catch his breath. “And here I was, just hoping you were okay.”

“I’m okay,” he told her—and then tipped his head, a gleam coming into his eye. “You were there. Didn’t you notice?”

“Ha,” she muttered, “ha.” And then murmured a low hum of pleased contentment, as he used one strong arm to position her hips, tipping her up so he could fill her more deeply and still, the long, slow strokes. “Mmm, yes.”

After a moment, as his breathing quickened and she’d thoroughly bitten her lip, she said, “We should talk, though. There could be some big changes—”

“Talk,” Maks said, “later.”

“But we don’t know...we should be sure...we should—”

He hitched her hips up a little higher yet, raising up on his knees just enough to—

“Oh!” she said again.
“Oh!”
And her fingers dug into his backside as she wiggled to take him deeper yet, increasing the pace of their movement, watching his face as his eyes closed and his nostrils flared and his mouth tightened until she, too, closed her eyes and panted and clutched at him again.

Maks slid his hand between them, brushing his thumb against her in the perfect counterpoint to the rising sensations between them. Just like that, she lost control; she grabbed the rhythm and took him with her right over to the edge.

The next time she opened her eyes, she found him watching, the faintest of smiles on that beautiful face...and one brow ever so slightly raised.

“You’re kidding,” she said.

He shrugged.

“Maybe we should take a moment,” she said, though she had to stifle a smile. Maks, full of energy...healed. And like all Sentinels, quick to recover, even in this. “Seriously. That was a huge energy shift...a tremendous change for your body. Maybe I could sit—?”

One hand slid beneath her shoulder, another beneath her hips, and suddenly he was on his knees and she sat astride. He brushed pine needles from her hair, but she wasn’t paying any particular attention—not any longer.

She was looking at the startling beauty of the shield around them both, one that glimmered bright through her healer’s eyes. Faintly blue, marbled with coruscating light, a dome of energy through which the sun beat in moderated fashion and the rustle of bird and tree came muted. “Maks!” she said. “That’s—that’s beautiful!”

His expression told her that he’d noticed it long before she had—but that he’d expected it no more than she.

Katie bit kiss-swollen lips on a smile. “Of course,” she said. “Of course this was what was waiting for you. The world’s most beautiful shield.” She reached out to it, let her fingertips brush through it; a frisson of energy—clear, bright, strong—shivered over her. “What else, for the man who endlessly seeks to protect?”

“I protect,” Maks said, “what I love.”

And this time, when he moved within her, Katie threw her arms around him and went along for the ride—and this time, when she felt his teeth at her neck, she knew it for what it was.

* * *

“Can’t,” Katie groaned, “believe we did that.”

Maks’s shirt was a loss...torn off in his earlier struggles. Katie’s pants were still on her porch, her underwear now a torn and misshapen scrap.

At least she still had her shirt.

And she wasn’t the least bit worried by their failure to use protection. Sentinel nature kept them healthy, and a healer who couldn’t prevent her own conception wasn’t much of a healer at all.

But she had needles in her knees and hair, she had no pants, she had no underwear, she was perceptively tender throughout, and they were how far from home?

Maks, suspiciously straight-faced for a man not prone to deception, observed, “We’re staying safe. And out of trouble.” He glanced at the shield. “And silent. That, too, I do.”

Katie just snorted softly. “Very glib,” she said, “for a man of few words.”

She wasn’t surprised to feel his humor or his wordless affection. But as much as she wanted to stay in this little circle of safety, reveling in what they’d accomplished and who they’d become together, she found herself struck by restlessness—knowing the Sentinel team was on its way, knowing the Core still hunted her.

As if he understood, Maks rose to his feet—rebuttoned and brushed off, his hair scraped into place with his fingers. The entire effect was arresting enough to make her breath catch all over again—the gleam of the shield’s subtly altered light against his skin, the dusting of course hair across his chest and trailing to casually low jeans, the powerful ease with which he held himself.

His arm still bore bruised and raw flesh, but between her early efforts and his own renewed body, it had healed beyond even a Sentinel’s normal progress.

And it certainly had not faltered as he had held his weight from her.

Katie sighed and stood, swiping away pine needles and ruing her lost hairband, fighting a fleeting return of uncertainty—what to tell the team, how to interpret her seeings—but only until Maks took her hand and took her chin and kissed her, just the right balance of sweet and possessive.

Okay, then.

Katie smiled back up at him, prepared to take the deer, and
the world spun away in clashing abstract colors, a dark and turbulent storm—the splash of warm blood across her face, the raw, hot smell of it, cloying in her mouth.

Hands at her waist, hands at her back, a hard, warm body taking her weight.

Wild green eyes, the snarl of a tiger enraged, the flash of golden orange and white and brown, claws scraping her vision. A pungent scent, a barking cough, a swirl of action—a woman’s cry of grief, familiar and haunting. And then an entire chorus of grief, animal skins fluttering to the ground like sodden laundry. Wolf and bear, panther and boar, wildcat and stoat and...deer. Diminutive little deer, crumpled up and discarded, and a nation of grief splashing in to wash it all away—

“Ssh,” Maks said, a rumble in her ear, the vibration of it passing through to her body as she pressed up against him. “Ssh, Katie Rae.”

And then an entire chorus of grief, animal skins fluttering to the ground like sodden laundry...

Only then did she realize she sobbed against him—not subdued little public sobs, but big choking wails. She realized she bore none of her own weight, but that Maks had pulled her to him with such effective strength that he cradled her upright.

“Tell me,” he said, quiet but inexorable, and she instantly loved him for not making a fuss about the sobs—for accepting them and for assuming she could pull herself from the vision and go on.

For understanding that the moment held more importance than the sensitive nature of one certain deer.

Although such emotion was not, she quickly realized, as easy to turn off as a faucet. So she spoke through the gulping breaths, needing him to know—to share the burden. “There was blood, and you—and violence, and such a strong smell, and it was so— Oh, Maks, the sadness, I don’t even know how to say the sadness, and there were skins—Sentinels, empty Sentinels and darkness—”

“Ssh,” he said again, as her words stuttered out to a few belated gulping sobs. As she took her own weight again, he stroked a soothing hand down her back. “It’s not usually like this?”

It took her a moment, during which she scrubbed her face against her shoulder—and then she understood. “The visions, you mean?” She looked up at him, blinking, and he gently wiped his thumb under her eyes, one then the other—a gesture so absently tender that she nearly started crying all over again. “Usually? No. I should say, never. I don’t know—”
Why,
she’d been about to say. Except she looked around herself, and knew. Maks’s arms around her, Maks’s shield rippling gently around them, Maks’s touch still echoing within her body. “I’m safe,” she said, the wondering tone evident even to herself. “I’m
safe.
”

Maks frowned, puzzlement in the expression.

Katie didn’t bother to say what was now so obvious to her. All those years of absorbing intimidation and insinuation and subtle harassment...it wasn’t only the deer who’d fled those things, never quite escaping them. It was the seer she’d buried so deeply. She took a deep breath, straightened, and wrapped her arms around Maks in a way that this time gave as much as it took. “I’m safe,” she said. “You’ve made me safe, and for the first time, I truly
saw.
” Though she frowned in the wake of that statement. “Not that I understand a bit of it.”

“It was a warning,” Maks said. “That’s enough.” He lifted his head, looking out over the woods with his eyes slitted in a particularly feline expression, tasting the air as he let the shields fall away to a bright spatter of sunshine through the trees. His attention shifted outward; for a long moment, he stood that way...still and focused.

When he took a deep breath and let it out in a long, slow exhalation, Katie knew he was back. “Where did you go?” she asked. “What did you do?”

His expression changed—pleased and open, the hint of a grin. “The boundary,” he said, and removed his arm from her shoulders to gesture an enlarging circle, echoing it with his unique wordless mind-voice so she quite suddenly understood.

“You enlarged it?”

“I spread it,” he agreed. “Now, I watch these woods.”

She eyed the woods in appreciation—she eyed him with appreciation, while she was at it. “You gained more than just those shields, then.”

“More than the shields,” he agreed. “Now, be the deer, Katie Rae. Take us home.”

* * *

Katie as deer hesitated on the edge of her yard, checking for hikers along the trail, visitors along the drive, and intruders around the house. Then she bounded through to the house, slender legs navigating the stairs with such grace that Maks suspected she took advantage of her solitude to run the deer on moonlit nights.

Maks followed, barefooted, torso bare to the light breeze and strong mountain sunshine. He strode easily across that same ground—his senses aware and extended, sweeping around the house and through the woods in a buffer zone he hadn’t even imagined but which now came naturally—his boundary zone, spread wide—monitoring not only the edge of the enclosed territory, but also a broad band of territory inside it. It tickled constantly at his attention, draining constantly at his resources—not a defense without cost.

But with a Core rogue after Katie?

Maks would pay the price.

Chapter 19

Y
ou,
Eduard thought as he spoke to Akins over the phone beneath the canopy of mighty pines,
will not be alive much longer.

The thought allowed him to keep his voice even as he put one foot to the ground, stabilizing his dirt bike just outside the hidden primary structure—although his phone casing made a faint crackling sound from stresses he hadn’t meant to apply to it.

It could be time to adjust the self-maintenance workings. He’d found it so, over the years—as he’d gotten more efficient, more effective, his personal amulets had become ever more subtle. And now that he’d developed the silent blanks, he doubted anyone could even detect the workings any longer; only those who knew his age and his medical records had any idea.

It pleased him that so few had any notion. And being pleased calmed him, so it was easier when he said, “The beast is not for you. Let Altán take it on alone—though you may feel free to cheer his death when he does.”

Not that Eduard would leave anything to chance; he’d help the beast as necessary. He was on his way to Katie Maddox’s home even now—heading overland through the forest with his escort. They rode electric trail bikes—silent machines, clandestine on the trails where no such vehicles were allowed.

He had no doubt that Altán would show. Even as a youngster, he’d had an uncanny awareness of any trespass in his woods. Now that he was protecting Katie Maddox, Altán would never tolerate the presence of the beast on his turf.