Tiger Bound (20 page)

“You shouldn’t be up here alone,” Treviño said bluntly.

Katie’s grip tightened. Maks squeezed her hand in return. “He means he doesn’t want to go back and leave us.”

Her relief trickled through him.

“It means I’m a bastard for going,” Treviño said, studying them both. “But, hell, there’s dumping going on in the Chiricahuas and the earth is fu—” He glanced at Katie and moderated his tone, a courtesy he afforded few. “The earth is bleeding out.”

Katie spoke quietly from behind Maks’s shoulder. “I’m glad you could come at all.”

Treviño met Maks’s gaze head-on. “Maks will keep you safe,” he said, but he didn’t look away until Maks lifted his head slightly, telling Treviño all the things he was looking to know.

Yes, she’s mine now.

Yes, I can do this.

Yes, I
will
do this.

Katie stood quietly, watching. Seeing the exchange but, Maks thought, not quite understanding it. Wary and thoughtful and so damned brave.

Treviño spoke as if that exchange hadn’t occurred at all. “Things should quiet down a little now. I wouldn’t be surprised to find the Septs Prince has put a price on this rogue’s head. The Core can’t pretend they’re playing nice as long as the fool is stirring up so much trouble.”

“We’re on guard, now,” Katie said, her light touch landing at the center of Maks’s back, easing down to rest at his waistband. “They’ve lost their advantage.”

Treviño glanced at Maks again. “They never had an advantage, Katie Rae Maddox. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

Katie said, “There’s a lot I’m figuring out. Tell Nick...”

“You’d be surprised what Nick already knows,” Treviño said, a wry half smile on striking, hard features—the black jaguar in his harsh beauty, not a bit of his edge diminished since he’d taken Meghan Lawrence to his own. “Look for a couple of solid secondaries tomorrow, Maks.”

Maks, already wary at the thought of more Sentinels intruding on Katie’s space, made his ruffled tiger settle.

Treviño saw it...let it go without remark. “You did good,” he said to Katie. “Don’t sell yourself short.”

Katie didn’t move from the shelter of Maks’s shoulder. “I know what I am, Mr. Treviño.”

Treviño grinned—feral, that expression. “You’re in the field, now, Katie. It’s more a question of what you’ll become.”

* * *

Katie didn’t miss the significance of Treviño’s words. She didn’t miss the significance of the glance he sent Maks as he left, either. A warning, that look.
Don’t be stupid
and
watch your back
rolled into one.

Understanding, in that final flick of a gaze at Katie.

And then he was gone and Katie let out a breath she hadn’t known she was keeping to herself. “Dolan Treviño,” she said.

“Yes,” Maks agreed.

“Southwest’s bad boy,” she said.

“Yes,” Maks agreed.

“You’ve worked with
him,
too.”

“Yes,” Maks told her.

She shook her head. Maks, she was beginning to see, had been there in the shadows all along—all the big operations reported in brevis e-bulletins. Sanitized of detail, they listed only the results and the lead field operatives.

But not the quiet, dependable tiger on whom they’d always counted.

He gave her a questioning look, and she smiled, rueful and small. “Brevis is coming,” she said. “I’d best have something to tell them. It’s past time I went vision-seeking, don’t you think?”

“We,”
Maks told her, and held out his hand again. They headed for Katie’s car in the surreal peacefulness of deep night. For all the power and fury so recently expended here, the incident had been oddly unremarkable from the outside. Two powerful Sentinels, locked in a furious but silent battle, Katie’s quiet healing...the rescue team, coming in fast and quiet, and gone the same way.

Deceptive as it might be, the night felt safe.

Until Maks hesitated at the car, and his troubled nature brushed against her awareness—Maks, speaking without words.

“What is it?”

He didn’t respond right away—not out loud. Katie watched him, trying to reconcile his uncertainty with the strength standing before her.

He said, “I always thought that...the thing that happens with me...”

He stopped, looking away, and she understood then that it was about more than hunting for the right words. It was about getting through them.

“Maks—” she said, thinking he didn’t owe her this—not explanations, not excuses.

He cut her off with a sharp shake of his head. “This is important, Katie Rae. We thought everything started with the ambush. But now...after what just happened in there...I think it started before.”

She lifted her head with a little jerk, understanding those implications immediately. If brevis had been treating the wrong cause, they could easily have failed to find the right cure.

He said, “There was a power surge. On the Peaks.”

She knew something of that from the bulletins. Described only as a deep surge precipitated by the Core’s interference with the natural wellspring of energies within the San Francisco Peaks, it had nearly killed Joe Ryan—and it was then that Annorah had been pulled as a field operative, although no one seemed to know why. “I know of it.”

“That’s when,” he said, his certainty growing even as he told her of it. “That’s when it started. I thought—” There it came, the tension in his shoulders and jaw, the deep breath he took before he continued. “I thought I had shielded carelessly at the hotel. But now...”

She finished it for him. “Now you think you were already broken.”

He nodded, short and tight.

“That’s good,” she told him, and smiled at his surprise. “Seriously, Maks. Brevis couldn’t help because they were starting in the wrong place. But if we know the
right
place...” She smiled at him, a spontaneous thing of hope—of expectation.
We can do this. I can help
you,
too.

He didn’t smile back; he was too troubled for that. But he lifted one hand to trace the line of her cheek, and then—a move so spontaneous she didn’t see it coming—he leaned down and kissed her. Gentle, thorough...warming the space between them, warming Katie right down to her toes—a sweetness filling her from the center out.

Sweet enough, gentle enough, so only as they broke apart and Maks touched her lip with his thumb, lingering there, did she realize what else had happened with that kiss.

Katie Rae Maddox, possessed by a tiger.

* * *

Probably they should have gone straight home.

But
probably
didn’t take into account Katie’s need to decompress, the sun rising in the early-morning sky to announce the day, or the lure of the town’s one and only gourmet coffee shop. It could be, Katie had to admit to herself, that the pastries were the real reason for her detour here on the way home.

Maks, while patient, still seemed somewhat bemused at the whole coffee obsession scene.

At least, until he walked through the door. And then suddenly he was the tiger again, gone on the hunt with his gaze piercing and the strength bristling from his body.

He’d gained something from their moments in the hotel, Katie could see that clearly enough. A certain confidence—a certain awareness of himself. As if identifying the correct nature of his injury had somehow lessened his conflict over the event.

Or maybe it was more than that. In all of their short, intense time together, she’d not yet seen him project the silent, unmistakable menace that infused his posture as he took another step into the shop. His head went up, his shoulders stiffened.
On the hunt.

“Well, well.” That voice was as familiar as it was unwelcome. “Look who’s come out to play with the common folk.”

Katie stopped short as the door jingled shut behind her.
Akins.
He straddled a chair at one of the tables, a plain small cup of coffee before him and an abandoned coffee sitting across from him, along with a small plate where sticky frosting lingered. “Maks,” Katie said. “Let’s not be here. It’s too early in the day for this.”

“By all means, run away,” Akins said. “Wouldn’t want to face a conversation about what you’ve been up to.” Half of the little shop’s patrons gave Katie a curious glance, and the other half burrowed more deeply into their reading, texting and private conversations, unwilling to take part in the unpleasantry.

She reached out to touch Maks’s arm—and realized instantly that Maks wasn’t hearing her at all. He’d focused entirely into the finely honed creature of his other: hunter, protector...untamed.

Akins eyed her from over his coffee, and his expression was entirely too smug. “’Course, if you run off without even a token denial, some folks might start to think there’s truth to the whispers around here.”

Katie gave him a startled look, her attention too divided to produce the disdain his remarks deserved.

“Oh, you know,” he said, and waved the coffee cup in a vague gesture that made her think it was empty. “Animals that die after you’ve handled them. Animals that get sick. You didn’t think that word would spread so fast?”

Marie’s dog.
And how could she deny the cat, or the dog from months earlier, wracked in pain and ready to go? She hadn’t actively released him, at that...only showed him the option existed, when his owner was clinging so hard as to keep him past his time.

The instant of doubt must have flickered on her face; Akins pounced with a mean triumph. “And then there’s last night. The things you touch don’t do well, do they?”

She cast a glance at Maks, a panic rising in her throat.
No one knows about last night. They can’t possibly.

But Maks didn’t so much as look at her. Maks had turned into someone she hadn’t seen before—someone to whom she would never leave herself vulnerable in healing, would never share a bed in exhausted sleep. He circled the table, his eyes both feral and distant, as if he tasted something she couldn’t quite perceive—as if he quartered in on that scent.

Akins’s grin turned nasty. “Haven’t you heard about last night, Katie Rae?”

“I told you, you’re not welcome to call me that.” She kept her voice low in the hopes of hiding its faint tremble; by now half the coffee shop listened in undisguised interest.

“Not much left of your neighbor,” Akins observed, words that reached Katie without yet making sense. “It’s really kinda surprising you didn’t know that. Or, you know, maybe you knew all along, and that’s why you laid low.” He glanced at Maks’s bare feet, brows raised. “Or laid
something.
”

Unexpected temper fired through Katie’s nerves. She slapped the cup from Akins’s hand with a speed she rarely revealed. “You,” she said, and this time her voice was low for entirely different reasons, “need to learn manners. And you need to figure out that nothing you say about me will
ever
change the things you’ve done.”

Akins’s superiority, his amusement, vanished into the rising color of his face, his flushed neck. He stood so quickly that the chair went skidding; several customers shifted away in alarm, and one older lady abandoned her coffee to exit the shop.

“Hey!” the barista said, her tone full of no-nonsense. “Roger Akins, it’s time for you to leave.”

Akins didn’t seem to hear; he lurched for Katie.

“Hey,”
said the barista, and this time she stepped out from behind the counter with a fire extinguisher in her hand.

But Maks wasn’t as preoccupied as he’d seemed. He moved—faster than Katie, faster than anyone had any right to expect. His hand clamped down on the back of Akins’s neck, squeezing tightly. Akins stiffened in surprise, his eyes wide with pain—Katie could all but hear the crunch of compressed tissue.

A tiger’s killing grip.

Maks leaned close to Akins’s ear, and said,
“No.”

Akins gurgled a protest. Maks shook him slightly, instantly silencing him.
“No.”

Slowly, carefully, Akins raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. Maks cut a glance at Katie, who understood well enough—a request to move to the side, no longer between Akins and the door. No longer within Akins’s easy reach.

Katie eased away. Maks gave Akins an abrupt shove; the man stumbled forward a few steps and stopped, turning a resentful gaze on Katie.

“And, might I add,” the barista said, with more scorn than fear. “Stay out.”

Akins snarled a last, nasty word at her and left, shoving chairs aside with crude violence. One teetered and fell in his wake, and then he was gone.

The remaining customers applauded with quiet decorum, and bent their heads together to exchange murmurs, not realizing how clearly their secretive body language gave them away—that it was Katie they talked about, as much as Akins.

Katie told the barista, “I’m sorry. I didn’t help.”

“He was being an asshole,” the woman said. “From what I’ve seen, he’s addicted to it. Now. You want some coffee? You and your friend? He could have his free if he can teach me that Vulcan neck pinch.”

Katie glanced at Maks—already distracted again...on his hunt. “I think,” she said, smiling slightly, “that you just have to be Maks.” She ordered her coffee, and for Maks, on an impulse, frozen hot chocolate.

She tipped heavily.

She found Maks prowling by the back exit at the end of the short restroom hallway, and presented him with the imprinted paper cup; he took it without looking. “What’s going on?” she asked, keeping her voice low enough that he could pretend not to hear if he didn’t want to.

She wasn’t expecting the answer, or his direct stare, coming back so quickly from whatever preoccupied him here. “You tell me.”

“I—” she said, and flushed.
Be the seer,
he meant. “Not
here.
”

He only watched her.

“I mean,” she said, “I
will.
But not here.”

After a moment, he seemed to accept those words; he took a sip of the slushy drink she’d brought him, and his eyebrows went up.

Then he shook his head, his bafflement clear enough. “There’s a scent here,” he said. “A taste. Bitter hot metal...”