Tiger Bound (12 page)

She caught her own thoughts and blinked, surprised at herself. Gentleness, in the predator who had so overwhelmed her just the day before?

A glance at Mike told her he wasn’t seeing
gentle.
That in his own way, he recognized the tiger. So she said, “Mike, this is Maks Altán, a friend of the family. He’s helping me with my firebreak.”

Mike’s face cleared somewhat, though his expression remained wary. “It’s about time you had that taken care of. This all you need today?”

And then the day stopped smiling. Katie’s first warning came through Maks—his faint smile, gone, his relaxed posture becoming focused. This was the Maks who had first frightened her, and who now ignited all her tightly keyed senses.

When Roger Akins sauntered around an endcap of fly traps, she could only meet him with disbelief. “Roger,” she said. “For a man who doesn’t like my company, you certainly do seem to find me.”

He offered an insincere open-handed gesture of innocence. “Just shopping,” he said. “Picking up some dog food, like plenty of other people on a nice summer day.” He glanced at Maks, a gratuitous disdain briefly crossing his features, and then looked at Katie’s purchases. “Is that all for you today, Katie Rae? Or maybe you need to pick up some drugs, maybe some woo-woo herbal stuff? Maybe some little potion of mercy? Or is it all in your touch?”

“No call for that, Roger,” Mike said, scooping the purchases out of sight into Katie’s reusable bag without ringing them up. A spare, sun-leathered woman with a horse halter in her hand came from the back of the store and stopped short at the sight of their tense little cluster.

Akins snorted. “People ought to know,” he said, unrelenting. “They ought to find a way to put her out of business.”

“They’d need to base their concerns on facts, first,” Katie said, coolly enough.
Just like I’ll get the facts that convict you. Sooner or later.

Akins eyed Maks. “Aren’t
you
quiet today,” he said. “Isn’t it about time for you to threaten me? Again?”

Katie was surprised to see Maks’s mild amusement. “Katie Rae,” he said, in the rough-edged voice that made something quiet bloom within her, “doesn’t need my help to deal with you.”

Maks, man of few words, sometimes knew just the right ones to use. Katie ducked her head and bit her lip on a smile.

So many of the Sentinels assumed that the deer meant weakness. Sometimes, Katie herself did just that. But somewhere in the last twenty-four hours, she’d started to challenge that thinking. It seemed Maks had always known.

Mike thrust the shopping bag at her. “Here you are, Katie.”

She cast him a grateful look. “I’ll bring you a list and settle up,” she said, tucking her wallet away into her old leather shoulder bag.

“Can’t take the heat, Katie Rae?” Akins crossed his arms, shooting Maks a look of growing confidence.

Katie ignored him. “Ready to clear some ground?” she asked, and Maks tipped his head at the entrance. If he had been thrown by her cover story, there was no sign of it. He looked like a man ready to clear ground.

But when Katie turned for the door, Akins grabbed for her with a snarl. “Don’t you turn your back on—”

But by then, Katie, swift reflexes and long legs, was out of his reach.

And by then, Maks had clamped a hand on Akins’s shoulder. No more than that, and Akins jerked around, his fisted hand rising for a sucker punch.

“Hey!” Katie shouted—but Akins didn’t heed it and Maks didn’t need it. He met the punch with the palm of his hand, stopping it short...holding it there. His fingers closed over Akins’s, squeezing. A hint of a growl filled the air and Katie didn’t know if she heard it or felt it or just
knew
it.

“Aw, hell,” Mike muttered.

Akins swallowed visibly, his arm trembling with effort—until he realized that he couldn’t finish the blow, couldn’t wrench himself free, and couldn’t begin to save face. He quit trying and Maks instantly released him—but not from his scrutiny. His eyes narrowed, his upper lip just starting to lift—it was still a human expression, and still unmistakable.

Akins cleared his throat. He took a step back, then two more. “Don’t really like the company you keep, Mike. I guess I’ll shop elsewhere from now on.”

Mike lowered his voice just enough to pretend it came under his breath. “I guess you’d better.”

As Akins cleared the entrance, the woman with the halter hooked the crown piece over her elbow and applauded politely. “That man needs to be muzzled.” From behind her, a weathered man with a battered cowboy hat and bowed legs cleared his throat, a meaningful sound. “Pfft.” The woman dismissed him. “After forty years, it’s far too late to be hushing me now.”

“Something to that,” Mike told the man, with enough respect to say he knew the woman well. “Let me ring that halter up. You need any feed today?”

And while the men did their best to discuss beet pulp pellets and compressed hay, the woman turned an appreciative eye to Maks. “It’s just as well you’re not alone out there,” she told Katie. “What with that creature on the loose.”

“Creature?” Katie repeated, but she knew what was coming. Marie had spoken of it the day before—half joking, half believing, before Katie had been taken by her vision.

“Creature,” the woman repeated, while her husband assumed an expression of practiced tolerance. She poked him. “Watch yourself, mister. John Baird saw it, and John is hardly a man given to flights of fancy. He even asked me to look up
chupacabra
on the internet. Kind of a giant dog...or boar...but he swore it rose right up on its hind legs like a bear.”

“I’ve heard about that thing,” Mike said, punching register buttons. “Took a goat right out of the Tsosies’ back yard.”

“Coyotes’ll do that,” the husband said, a blandly unconvinced offering.

“Coyotes,” said his wife, “don’t unfasten gates. Why, it’s as bad as when those wild children were running around just west of here all those years back.” She gave her husband a peremptory poke.

Katie realized that Maks had moved up behind her—a big presence, warm and still and practically vibrating with...

She didn’t know what. Not curiosity; he was too intense for mere curiosity. Not scorn at the legend.
Watchfulness
. Wariness. The energy of it washed against her. Without thinking, she eased back a step and put a hand on his arm.

“You don’t hear much about them these days,” she observed—as much for Maks’s interest as her own—for she knew the stories. More like urban legends in the rugged mountains than anything else. The woman shrugged, handing Mike a twenty-dollar bill and snagging the halter up off the counter. “I can tell you this—buncha people came in, back then. Quiet, but they made an impression. After they left...” She shrugged. “No more sightings or thefts.”

“So,” her husband said, in a flat tone of patent disbelief that sounded as if it was a token cover for affection. “A secret team came in to grab up the wild children.”

“Oh,
you,
” the woman said, and poked him again. “We got enough homeless folk camping out in the woods. What’s so hard to believe about a bunch of kids ganging together?”

Mike said, rather unexpectedly, “I heard they were runaways. Except there were—” He hesitated, finding Maks’s gaze on him—full bore intensity, with something new added. Katie recognized it as a dare, and one that made no sense at that.

Mike didn’t seem inclined to take it. “Nah,” he said. “Buncha foolishness. This creature’ll be more of the same.”

Katie rested a surreptitious hand on Maks’s wrist, not surprised to find it tense. The healer in her instantly reached out, sending a soothing tendril of energy.

Maks glanced at her with confusion, as if he could feel the energy but couldn’t quite figure it out. And then he seemed to recognize his own stance, his intensity...his distinctly powerful demeanor.

Just like that, it was gone. Katie found herself looking twice—but there was no mistake; everything about him had dialed down a notch. Even Mike relaxed, although he seemed baffled about what had just happened.

Katie wasn’t baffled. She’d seen the tiger, bright and clear. What she hadn’t expected to see was Maks’s ability to shed it. It seemed he protected others even from himself.

Katie lifted the shopping bag at Mike. “I’ll catch up with you later on these things,” she said, and followed Maks from the store. He stopped once he was out in the full sunshine of the parking lot, lifting his face to the warmth.

Katie felt more than saw the depth of the breath he took—the deliberate shedding of the moment. Sunshine struck the gleam of white at his temples; it washed over the line of his cheekbones, the strength of his brow, sparked a gleam of green from his eyes. And though he deliberately quashed the simmering tiger, his pure physical presence—shoulders that broad and legs that long and a torso that tight and lean—could not be downplayed. Not in the least.

Katie swallowed, and flushed. And then she quite unexpectedly heard the echo of the woman’s words in her mind.
Buncha people. Quiet, but they made an impression.
She saw again Maks’s reaction to the words.

“They were us, weren’t they?” she asked abruptly. “And those runaways were real. Did you help bring them out?”

For a moment, he didn’t react at all—or at least not outwardly. After that moment, when he lowered his face from the sun and turned to look at her, a tiger looked out from those eyes.

She swallowed again, determined to keep talking in spite of that gaze. “Who better to track down refugees in a rugged area like this? And it
would
be a great place for a batch of runaways to make a go of it. All the vacation cabins, all the seasonal visitors...” She shook her head. “City kids run to the streets when home isn’t safe. Maybe, for a little while, the White Mountains gave our runaways a place to go, too.”

Maks waited until she was done, and confirmed simply, “I was there.”

She already knew him well enough to hear the rough quality of his voice over those few words. A job like that would make an impression on a young agent.

“You don’t like to talk about it,” she said.

His expression turned fierce, his words hard and sudden. “They deserve privacy,” he said. “They deserve to go on with their lives. They can’t do that if people think they’re something to track down, to find and interview and put on display.”

She met that green gaze with all the courage she had, feeling the prickle of the protective tiger roused. She managed to say, “Then it’s a good thing brevis handled it so quietly.”

A muscle in his jaw twitched. After another long moment, he rubbed a hand across the back of his neck, tipping his head in a quiet stretch. Then he said, “Let’s go work your firebreak.”

“I didn’t mean—” To put him on the spot. To ask any more of him than he was already giving.

His quiet grin was back. “No help for it. Small town.”

Right. And someone was bound to talk if her firebreak guy didn’t actually work on the firebreak. “But your arm—”

“You can do all the heavy work,” he assured her. When she scowled and poked him, he grinned, caught her hand, moving faster than she’d expected.

And then there in the sunshine, the grin suddenly faded altogether as he stilled, staring at her—catching her gaze, catching her breath.

She wasn’t lost in a vision; she wasn’t plunging into a healing. It was just Katie and Maks, in a quiet sun-dappled parking lot, the trees rising up behind them. That she wanted so badly for him to close the distance between them...it couldn’t be blamed on anything or anyone else but her.

Oh, little deer. Watch your step with this one.

Because being with Maks—being
near
Maks—would awaken things she’d never wanted to know about herself.

Chapter 9

“M
aks Altán,” Akins said, as if it was some sort of triumph.

Eduard didn’t respond right away, his fingers curled lightly around the tiny espresso cup and a sticky, heavily iced bear claw teasing his nose with its sweet scent.
Maks Altán.
Of course. He’d survived. That
had
been him, taking point at the raid of Gausto’s desert mansion not so long ago.

Not that there were so many Siberian shifters around to choose from. Plenty of wolves, variations on medium to large cats, a smattering of less usual predators, even fewer omnivores and grazers...

Fewer yet of the world’s biggest cat. And who else would the Sentinels send into this area if they suspected trouble?

“I said—”

“Yes,” Eduard interrupted. “It doesn’t change anything, does it? Knowing his name?”

“You wanted to know.” Akins’s mouth grew sullen. As before, he straddled the back of his chair, but today his bravado looked a little thin. “They said he’s there to clear a firebreak for her, but that’s crap, right? I think they’re doing some vertical jogging, you know?”

Now,
that
was interesting, just from a scientific point of view. His little water deer and the great tiger?

“Besides,” Akins added with a smug and cocky look, “I did what you wanted. I messed with her head. By the time I’m done with her, she won’t know if she’s coming or going.”

“And Altán?”

There. The smug, cocky look disappeared. “What, did you expect me to start a brawl right there in the farm store? I have to live in this place, you know.”

Eduard hid his amusement. “I gather you had a confrontation.” That was worth a precise, fork-cut piece of the bear claw. “And that you walked away.”

Akins scowled. “I prodded him a little. I figured you’d want to know his mettle.”

“His mettle,” Eduard said, “is a given.”

Akins shrugged it off, reverting to arrogance. “Doesn’t matter. The Maddox bitch was upset, that was plain enough. And I got another dig at her reputation. You swear by the time this is over, she’ll be screwed?”

“You’ll get what you need,” Eduard told him.
You just won’t live to enjoy it.

Just as Maks Altán would have to be handled before Katie could be taken, Akins would die shortly after Katie disappeared. Very shortly after. A car accident, perhaps. After which—with help from a few well-placed words—people would blame Akins for Katie’s disappearance.