Tiger Bound (28 page)

Not Maks. He crouched silently at the edge of their outcrop, picking up the creature’s approach with his ears as well as his inner senses. Its path had been as direct as possible across this rugged terrain, its goal clear. He sent one more thought Katie’s way—warning, and a reminder that they’d moved so quickly, so intently, that no one at brevis knew they’d moved at all.

She sent him affirmation, moving back slightly so he could see her, even while remaining hidden from below, and tempered her thought with fierce command.
::I can take care of myself. You watch your own back.::

That, he didn’t answer. He’d already reached down deep, hunting for that same, earth-centered feeling he’d discovered in the aftermath of initiation—drawing on it to shape the same profound shielding effect. A shield for each of them, impervious to any workings the Core rogue might launch, to any amulets the creature’s handler might invoke. His claws extruded into the ground, rooting him there...rooting the shields.

::Maks,::
she said, as the shields took on strength and substance
, ::do you hea—::

And she was gone—her thoughts, so clear to him, vanished behind the strength of what he had wrought.

His tail lashed with the surprise of it—and then he had no time to think about it at all as the huge javelina trotted out into the sparsely wooded space below, its flat human eyes taking in the scene with eerie alacrity, its fleshy snout twitching. It came to a halt, huge and grizzled, the pungent stench of it filling the air. When it lifted its head, it was to look straight up at Maks.

Maks growled with low feeling, a rumbling warning. By the time the creature’s handler made his noisier way toward the little bowl of pines, the mutant javelina had aligned itself to face the outcrop—and in those eerie eyes, in that twitch of a nose, Maks thought he saw unwelcome awareness—and a realignment of position toward Katie’s position.

The javelina’s acute sense of smell...

No doubt this monster had it in spades.

Maks didn’t think; he acted. While the tiger crouched, quivering with the need to attack, Maks dug in and held back, drawing on the roots he’d established—yanking hard against resistance, knowing only that he needed
more,
that Katie needed to be completely invisible to this thing.

Something gave way—within him, beneath him, staggering him with the suddenness of it. In body, he crouched even lower, legs spread to steady; in mind and energy, he tumbled into a geyser of hot power; it gushed free to splash and form where he’d aimed it—
Katie
—and just as abruptly faded away.

Before he even shook his thoughts clear, the javelina barked a challenge—a gleeful sound, its front feet stamping hard against the needle-padded ground, its demeanor eager.

And then he saw Katie, bathed in a watercolor effect that he didn’t at first understand—not until he realized he had wrought for her shields so strong that they obscured the detail of her. Shields so strong, they cut off not only access to her mind-voice, but to her physical presence.

She looked at him through the intervening leaves, her face pale, her expression wary—the deer, startled into fright, and quite nearly into flight. Unable to bespeak him, unwilling to reveal herself to the creature, she instead showed him exactly what he’d done—reaching to push against the trunk of the closest substantial tree.

But her hand never quite touched the bark, and the energy flared between wood and flesh, building to brightness at the pressure point.

Physical shields. Shields the Sentinels had never been able to develop, no matter how they studied and tried.

The javelina barked another challenge—more eager than before, a note of triumph in a sound that should have been nothing more than dumb threat. A note of laughter.

And Maks realized he no longer had any shields at all.

It made instant sense. The shields he had created for Katie were so profound, so impossibly,
physically
present...there was nothing left for a second, separate shield.

To judge by her expression, her gestures, Katie realized it, too. Her mouth might have been clamped tight on the words that would give her position away to handler as well as to beast, but her face was eloquent enough.

Maks had no choice—he couldn’t leave himself unshielded to an enemy who had shown himself to be exceptionally clever with amulets and workings. Still braced against the earth, he backed off on the energies he drew from it, damping down slowly until the distinct lurch of balance told him he’d gone far enough—and when he looked, he found her as before—protected, but not by the impossible. Impervious to workings, but not physical assault.

Then no one gets that close.

The javelina made a disgusted sound, a snort and stamp, and Maks understood that, too—his own shields had shifted back into place.

“What the effing hell is your problem, Jacques?” The Core handler bent to prop his hands against his knees, breathing hard. The man had
minion
written all over him, in spite of his classic complexion, his hair drawn back into a tight, short club at his nape and one ear and several fingers adorned in heavy silver—all the signs of an active posse member. “Keep your tusks to yourself until we reach the girl. Forrakes is damned serious about that, and I’ll be fucked if I’m going to take the blame for your games again.”

The creature snorted, a scornful noise, and tossed his head in a scooping gesture that needed no interpretation.

“Keep that to yourself, too,” the man muttered, straightening to brush off his black T-shirt. “If he ever figures out you’re as smart as you are mean, he’s going to kill us both.”

Not words said lightly. And words said by a man with no clue that they were no longer alone.

Maks rolled a growl up his throat, settling into a couchant position, front paws flexing to dig claws into the ground. The man jerked his head up—locating Maks, spitting out a string of startled curses—and then turned a furious glare on the creature. It snorted in such a way that made its disdain obvious.

But when it slanted a sly glance back at Maks, its expression was nothing but threat and promise.

Chapter 20

“H
e’s got a gun, Maks—you know he’s got a gun.” Katie pressed up behind her tree, frantic for Maks to hear her—and certain he wouldn’t.

He’d know, though. He’d been in the thick of things with the Core in Europe. He’d been in Flagstaff, he’d been in Tucson. The Sentinel battle lines.

Surely he’d know the man had a gun, no matter that he couldn’t see the lump of it at the man’s back.

Just as surely he’d heard the dogs approaching...knew they were close.

Why, then, did he narrow those green tiger eyes and lift his lips in a whisker-bristling snarl, focused only on the creature below?

She thought about speaking out loud; she thought about tossing a pebble to get his attention, and pointing at the man in a ludicrous game of charades. She even gathered the pebble in her hand, feeling the faint frisson of energy in her shields as she tightened her fingers around it. Marveling at it, and at what Maks had done only moments earlier.

No one made physical shields.
No one.

But she relaxed her hand, dropping the pebble and leaning against the rough, deeply scaled bark of the tree.

He hadn’t brought her here so she could expose herself to the enemy, making his job all that much harder. She’d trusted him to take care of her...and he’d trusted her to let him do it.

“Maks Altán, I believe,” the man below said, and this was not, could not be, the man whom Maks had scented in the coffee shop, the man who had been part of his early life. This man was too young, too much a foot soldier. Too blatantly eager to have made his way to the upper levels of the Core hierarchy and its pervasive
Survivor
-like society. “You’ve saved me a lot of trouble by showing up here.” Unbelievably, he put a companionable hand on the beast’s shoulder, impervious to the thing’s obvious disdain. “You’re going to make us look very good, indeed.”

She got the impression that he had a pressing need to look very good indeed. The tension in his body, the fact that he’d been sent out here by himself, on foot, with only this beast at his side—it spoke volumes. The fact that Maks focused his attention on the beast and not the man...that spoke volumes, too.

She looked down at him, this man who had come for her, and at the monstrously huge creature that accompanied him—the jutting curve of its tusk, the gleam of malice in its eye, the quick movement of its feet as it settled itself before Maks, more nimble than any creature its size should ever be.

Lord, it stunk—the normal javelina musk mixed with bitter Core energies and a hint of the corrupt putrefaction behind any Core working.

But normal javelina had poor eyesight. This one...

This one was looking straight at her.

* * *

For an instant, chaos swirled around Maks—new awareness, new power, new sensations. The local hunters moved in, splitting up as the dogs grew increasingly agitated. The distant figures moved closer on their dirt bikes; the creature’s companion tried to look menacing and only came off as a man with too much to prove.

The creature looked straight at Katie, having found her with eyes and nose no less preternaturally sharp than Maks’s. It took a step in her direction—tossing its head until it slung slaver onto its companion, and if it couldn’t reach her, it could still endanger her—simply by revealing her presence.

Maks shoved all the rest of it out of his mind and leaped. The man stumbled back, cursing in a human snarl; the javelina sprang forward.

Maks had barely landed when he leaped out again, all the strength of his powerful haunches driving him into the beast with the bone-jarring slam of two heavy bodies.

They rolled across leaf and pine needle litter while Maks closed massive jaws around the beast’s shoulder, ducking in under those tusks. His body took the brunt of sharp hooves as he curled his hind feet up, hunting for purchase to deliver a disemboweling thrust.

They slammed up against a tree and Maks sprang away, out of reach of the deadly tusks. The creature scrambled to its ungainly feet, legs absurdly delicate for its bulk but well protected by the length of those tusks.

He gave it no time to recover, but leaped again, angling for its back and a grip on its stout, short neck—and then he twisted wildly aside as it whirled to meet him with head tilted and tusks foremost.

A canine bellow split the surreal silence of their battle, and as Maks tumbled aside and back to his feet, three huge white dogs charged into the space. They surged around the Core handler to charge at the creature, blithely harrying it as they would any peccary—expert teamwork at haunch and neck and shoulder, trying to close jaws over flesh that was simply too bulky to offer a grip. One dog latched on to a hock, only to be kicked away; another lost its footing near the beast’s head and instantly flew through the air, blood spraying behind it.

Humans thundered onto the scene an instant later, and by then Maks had invoked the change to human form, too deeply conditioned to reveal himself to the hunting party.

At the sight of the dogs—one crumpled against the outcrop, another against a pine, and the third hanging from the jaws of the creature—the foremost hunter cursed shortly and brought his rifle to his shoulder, with no apparent awareness that the Core handler stood off to the side, or that Maks was only barely outside of his sights.

The man managed a single shot before the Core handler shot him in the back.

A third hunter hung back—the big guy from the parking lot, shouldering his rifle with quick efficiency to fire a quick round into the creature. The sharp report echoed around the mountainside and kicked hard against the man’s shoulder, but the impact barely staggered the creature. The handler took a shot at the hunter, missed—and lost his chance, for the hunter flung himself back behind the largest of pines, his curse hanging in the air.

Maks, the protector. Maks, stuck as human, as frail as any of them against a creature of such size. Maks, watching men die...

He picked up a sizable rock, the same as any human; he flung it with the strength and accuracy of no human. It bounced off the creature’s rump, bringing the thing spinning around, eyes narrowed with hatred and jaws dripping bloody slaver.

* * *

Oh, my God, what are you doing? What are you doing?
Katie dug her fingers into the bark of the pine that hid her, anchoring herself—wanting nothing more than to scream out at Maks—to
stop
him.

He stood at the edge of the small, lightly forested area beneath the outcrop, a second rock in hand, the challenge clear in his expression, his stance, his intent.

Or so Katie thought. But that second rock didn’t bounce off the creature’s tough, grizzled coat at all—it hit the Core handler’s thigh like a bullet, taking the man down in a cry of agony.

The creature roared in offense, a thunderous squealing battle cry. It flashed tusk and eye in fury, charging straight at Maks.

“Look out, man!” The hunter’s cry echoed and so did the shots from his rifle, a quick one-two that did nothing to stop the creature. One shot sprayed bark from a tree behind the creature; the other must have hit it in the haunch—but its stumble was only momentary.

Deer rifles,
Katie realized. Deer rifles on an animal worthy of a big-game double rifle. And a creature so thick, so muscled, so
quick...
“Maks,” she breathed, unable to hold back at least that much, even as another rifle shot cracked through the air, this one kicking up dirt. The Core handler snapped off a careless shot, driving the hunter back.

But Katie should have known Maks would be just that quick, bare feet bounding effortlessly over pine needles and granite as he scooped up another of the outcrop’s fist-sized rocks and whipped it at the creature’s head, hitting it hard between the eyes. The thing stopped short, pawing awkwardly at its head with a sharp hoof, and by then Maks was rearmed—but running out of space against the outcrop. When the creature charged, he sprinted to the side, running lightly along the outcrop—cat-like in his progress across nearly vertical rock, tiger-like in his power. The creature instantly reoriented—Katie held her breath, seeing then that Maks had the perfect vantage from which to fire another rock right down on its head, directly at its eye.