Tiger Bound (24 page)

“Maks,” she said, full of concern, and of course he was lost to her, and none of the reality of it mattered one little bit.

“I want you,” he told her, though he was pretty sure she already knew what he wanted. “I want you in a way I’ve never wanted anyone. It does these things to me...I don’t understand. I can’t—” He broke off, shook his head—dared a glance at her and then looked down at his hands. Could feel the claws there, waiting in another form. Could feel himself, so close to something so big, something so out of control—

I don’t know how to keep you safe.

Something that scared the hell out of him.

He thought she’d understood—but she couldn’t have, not when she crawled right over the bed to reach him. Her hands came as a cool balm when she placed them along either side of his jaw. They didn’t stay still long; she stroked through the hair over one ear, a light and infinitely pleasurable touch that tightened the skin down his nape and all the way down his spine. Her calm breathed into him.

The sensations swirled up in him as if he’d never conquered them at all—the fugue, closing in to make his skin pound and his heart race and his vision double; the surge of desire, a straight shot down his spine, curling and twisting and tightening. The first hint of hot pain, grabbing his breath. He reached for her wrist, stilling her hand. “I can’t—”

“Neither could I,” she told him. “I went looking, just now, and I didn’t find any answers—all I found was you. It makes me wonder if all I ever saw was you.” Her expression sobered; she made no attempt to disengage her wrist. “You with the Core, you with your mother...you in darkness. You and that creature—although I can’t say for sure if that was about what happened yesterday or if it’s still to come. You...and me.”

His gaze shot to her face. She found herself beyond blushing. “Even in the car, the day I first brought you here. You felt it, I’m pretty sure.”

Mutely, he nodded.

“The thing is, as much as it’s always been you...it’s something darker, as well. It’s not all
about
you. And that’s the part I still can’t figure out. Because when I reach out, I find...” She shook her head, took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and admitted it again.
“You.”

Regret flashed through him—second guesses. If he’d been straight about his condition, Nick never would have sent him here—and then maybe Katie could have seen further—seen
past
him—to figure out her visions. If he’d never come here, she would be safe—in the care of someone who wasn’t compromised or hauled back to brevis. Even if his inner hackles rose at the first possibility and he knew she would have hated the second.

“Stop it,” she said, simply enough. “Whatever you’re thinking, it’s wrong. You’re the one who said it, Maks. Whatever is,
is.
Let it be. Whatever’s happening to you...let it be. It’s the only way we’ll figure it out.”

He stiffened in resistance.
I can’t—

Maybe she’d gotten
too
good at perceiving his mind’s voice. She said, “You may have to.” She looked up at him, full of thought. Maks flinched under the scrutiny of it—of the perceptiveness there.

“Listen, Maks. You were born in captivity. You took the tiger younger than anyone knew was possible. And when you escaped, you survived as the tiger until you found those first runaways in the woods and made them yours.”

He remembered that day. How they’d been so terrified of him, thirteen-year-old twins escaped from an abusive home and on the run from the petty thefts they’d committed to survive. How he’d lost touch with the spoken word, but still coaxed them into trust with persistence and gestures and his own abiding intent to protect them. He’d been bigger than the twins by then—still lanky, shoulders already showing promise.

“And you gathered more children, until after several years, the Sentinels realized what was going on, and they came and got you.”

A day of terror, that—of facing his first Sentinel, a man well-grown into his lynx and strong-hearted enough to face an adolescent tiger without escalating the situation, even when the tiger struck out in fear. A man who had hidden his surprise at Maks’s youthful human form...a man who had told Maks,
I’m taking you home.

“But they never figured out who your mother was.”

“No.” It still hurt, after all these years—a ragged, forever pain, watching his mother die—never knowing, in retrospect, her story.

Katie said gently, “Didn’t that strike you as strange?”

He jerked away from his memories to look at her, guileless and gentle, and inside him something swelled, reaching...

He pushed it back. Ruthlessly.

She said, “How many Sentinels go missing, unrecorded? How many women of childbearing age?”

He shook his head, floundering, a pounding in his ears.

“Because they were looking in the wrong generation, tiger mine.” She moved closer, twining her fingers in his. He growled, deep in his chest, and she only laid her free hand against his chest. “Because brevis might have
guessed
at your age, but they didn’t get it right. How could they? No one else has ever changed so young. No one else has spent their childhood hiding as their other. Maks,” she said, her voice going low.
“How long does it take for a tiger cub to grow up?”

And he only looked at her. Only looked, while the truth of his life lay out before him for the first time, and the impact of it swirled into the sensations already battering at him.

“You may have
looked
fifteen at your initiation, but you weren’t. Not in years.”

“Then...” He couldn’t quite say it out loud. Because initiation did more than bring out a Sentinel’s full potential...it balanced him, clearing pathways for the mature energies. It made order of an undisciplined connection to the earth.

But only when the body was ready.

As if she’d followed his thoughts, she said gently, “I don’t think your initiation took. I don’t think your body had yet reconciled your chronological age with your physical age.”

He frowned at her, trying to think past the ongoing battle for control, the reaching sensation that filled him beyond full and still ached for more. “But I’ve been with others since. Surely, if it hadn’t happened that first time...”

She shook her head. “
Something
took—something partial. It had to have, or they would have known. Haven’t you ever felt an initiation? It’s unmistakable. More children are conceived on initiation nights than all the other nights put together.” She smiled, a little bit rueful.

Initiated, but not initiated. All this time.

“Initiation does more than bring out the potential of a young Sentinel,” Katie said, and yes, she was damned close now, hands on his shoulders, moving down his arms, tracing his collarbones. “Because it does that by clearing certain channels of energies. Without that, we can’t be balanced. We aren’t quite whole...or stable.”

He struggled to absorb the implications of that statement.
Initiated, but not initiated.
“Then...Flagstaff...”

“Until then, you were managing,” she said. “But I think the energy surges there—
before
the hotel—knocked you out of balance. Then, once you were released into full activity again, the imbalance got worse.”

He only frowned at her. It made sense to a point. But this—
this
—between the two of them...

She must have felt it—that resistance to the idea. It didn’t seem to bother her.

Not judging by how close she’d come to him now, and the whisper of her breath against his jaw as she just barely nipped skin, sending shards of sensation through his body and making it—

So very hard—

To think...

She said, “I know you’ve been with other Sentinels...”

“Often enough,” he managed.

“But you haven’t been with
me.
”

His hands landed on her upper arms, tugging her in close. He went for her neck, so slender and thin-skinned, the life pulsing close to the surface and her vulnerable nape right there. She didn’t stiffen; she didn’t fear. She clung to him, and the sensation of
reaching
crowded him from the inside out, filling him beyond endurance. The pain followed on its heels, but not enough to deter him. Not now.

Her words were a different story, muffled as they were. “Let me help, Maks.”

He froze. “I’m not your patient. I’m not your
project.
”

He wasn’t prepared for her self-deprecating laughter. “Like I haven’t wanted you since the start. Like I haven’t already pretty much imploded in your arms, right there on my porch. Have mercy, Maks!”

Right there on the porch. Hot and wild and rocketing her straight to completion, the feedback between them taking him so close...before the pain hit.

“Katie,” he said, his mouth brushing her neck with the words. “Katie Rae.”

“Yes,” she told him, shuddering with the words. “
Please,
Maks.”

Yes.
Every part of him wanted her, inside and out. He wanted the connection, the sensations, the completion. Sweet, brave Katie Rae—he’d known her,
seen
her, since that moment her vision had pulled them together in her car. It had only taken him a while to recognize what he’d learned of her in that moment—from her compassion to her courage.

The rush of understanding surged through him, bigger than he was; the tiger sprang free, roaring through his being. He gasped with the enormity of it, losing track of the house, the room, the doorway—of everything that wasn’t him and wasn’t Katie.

And then the pain slashed through him, leaving him only a glimpse of Katie’s startled face—flushed cheeks and kissed lips and wide eyes. He wrenched himself aside from her, agony in his chest—but not from the pain. He could handle the pain.

But not the loss of control.

Maks, the strong one. Maks the protector. Maks, so close to his tiger that he’d lived an accelerated childhood in his tiger’s skin.

Maks, who didn’t dare release his tiger on the woman he loved.

* * *

Katie stood in her bedroom doorway, rumpled and kissed and aroused beyond measure, flushed with the overflow of energies as much as from Maks’s hands on her body and her hands on his—and suddenly alone.

Just one brief glimpse of the wild, naked desperation on Maks’s face, that’s all she’d had—and then he was gone.

And she knew just why. She’d felt it, a near-subliminal impression of fear and understanding—her connection with Maks obscured by sensation but wholly, vibrantly alive.

Fear.

For her, and what he might do to her. For what he might turn into. Fear for his own sanity, in the clash of fugue and pain and desire.

Tiger, fleeing from himself.

But if she was right...

Maks, without complete initiation, would only destroy himself from the inside out. Energies turning on themselves, talents blocked and unrealized, a body tearing itself apart.

It wasn’t a chance she could ever take.

As ever, the deer was swift.
She ran down the stairs in his wake, her shirt rumpled and half-unbuttoned, and out into the daylight of her porch.

He hadn’t even hesitated. Halfway across her yard, barefoot, flannel shirt flapping open—she caught only a glimpse before the achingly bright swirl of energy formed around him and the tiger emerged on the exposed open ground beside her house.

So many times she’d demurred from running the woods with him; so many times, she’d felt that flicker of self-protective unease. This time, she flung herself into the deer—small but infinitely quick, a reddish-brown blur of movement across the scattered bunchgrass and needle-covered ground.

Powerful as he was, he wasn’t built for a lengthy sprint. Eventually, she’d catch him.

Eventually, she did.

Far into the rugged woods, he’d stopped—the pines closing thickly around him, a rough thrust of granite blocking his progress and nurturing a stand of smaller trees—twisty little Gambel oaks and bushy mountain mahogany with a burst of low spreading fleabane off to the side.

He stood in the midst of it, spraddle-legged, panting with head low and eyes dazed.

And Katie, because she’d felt his fears, did what she had to do. One step after the other, slender legs and vulnerable neck, she moved closer to him. She knew when he’d spotted her by the cessation of his panting—and knew it again when he raised that massive head to look at her.

If she was wrong...

One swipe of a paw. One crunch of those jaws...

But she wasn’t wrong. She’d been in his memories; she’d been in his
life.
She knew what formed him, as well or better than he could understand it himself.

I’m not wrong.

And still it took all her courage for that next step...and then the next. And then she was there at his shoulder, her petite black nose nuzzling into the fur of his ruff.

The tiger groaned, a deep and wrenching sound, and threw himself away from her—taking the change, blue-and-white strobing light obscuring the very moment he became Maks. He staggered to his feet until he met the thick trunk of the closest ponderosa and braced himself against it, head bowed.

Katie stepped after him, moving right through the change as he had done, the air gentle against her legs where she’d leaped right out of her yoga pants during the change. Just as the deer had done—just as barefoot as he—she took one deliberate step after another, all too aware of the tension in his back and shoulders, the muscles standing out in relief.

His skin was hot with the energy, damp with effort, the muscle hard beneath her tentative fingers.

“You can’t go on like this,” she said quietly—so matter-of-fact in voice and word when she wanted only to run—or to wrap herself around him. “
We
can’t go on like this.”

He gulped air, shuddering faintly beneath her touch.

“Whatever’s happening with the Core, we have to fix this—we can’t deal with them until we do.” Her voice grew a little more fierce. “Not just for you, Maks. For
me.
”