now.”
“Oh,” Katie said—still breathless, but no longer quite sounding frightened. “Okay, then.” But then she hesitated, looking up at Ruger as if she saw him for the first time—reaching to touch his face with a sympathetic empathy that took Mariska by surprise. “Healer,” she murmured. “I’m sorry.”
Mariska fought a shock of envy at the way he received Katie’s touch, accepting both it and the sentiment she offered. He set Katie gently on her feet, relinquishing her to Maks.
Katie held tightly to Maks’ hand. “Just like before,” she said, her gaze still a little distant. “This foreseeing has always been about more than Maks’ presence here… that was just part of it. The first part. But… there’s a foreboding… there’s terrible grief, there’s—” She stopped and shook her head. “Can I try to show you, please? My seeings have never translated well to words.”
“Can you do that?” one of Ian’s assistants asked. Mariska hadn’t seen them at the meeting, hadn’t ridden with them in the tidy little BMW SUV, and now, with some resignation, simply thought of them as Heckle and Jeckle.
“I can try,” Katie told him. “But I need hands.” She extended hers, and Maks put his over it. Ruger, too, and that left Mariska and Ian and Sandy, exchanging glances with a mutual reluctance but finally adding their hands to the physical nexus along with Heckle and Jeckle.
“Ready?” Katie murmured. “Here it comes…”
But Mariska wasn’t ready.
The wild, yipping howl of a bereft wild dog, the wash of a vile stench, tasting foul in her throat. A hollow huffing sound, followed by a clacking, the surge of fear… a tremendous explosion. 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. Crumpled up and discarded, and a nation of grief splashing in to wash it all away—
Ian swore under his breath, jerking his hand from beneath Mariska’s and sending her tumbling back to reality. Tumbling back in reality, as she struggled to reorient and found herself steadied by a pair of familiar hands—familiar and big, and a touch her body knew instantly.
Not until she’d blinked and recovered her equilibrium did he step away, leaving an ache where his warmth had been.
“You see,” Maks said, glancing at Katie. “You see why it matters.”
“Yes,” Ian said, and his words sounded a little strangled. “Whatever that was, it sure as hell matters.”
“That sound,” said Heckle—short, bandy-muscled, and not strong enough of Sentinel blood to take the change. He cupped his hands over his mouth to imitate what words couldn’t quite convey. A hollow huffing sound, a clacking…
“What was that?” Jeckle asked, but not as if he expected to get an answer. Like Heckle, he likely saw little of fieldwork, but he was a solid sort, old enough to have a wealth of experience behind him.
Mariska exchanged a glance with Ruger, looking for and finding the wince of awareness that told her he’d recognized it, too. “Bear,” she said finally. “Frightened black bear, with teeth and breath.”
Heckle gave her a skeptical look. “What frightens a bear?”
Ruger said flatly, “Not much,” and Mariska realized she was chafing her upper arms, chilled to the bone in the rising warmth of the late-summer day.
“Great,” Ian said. “Now the bears are spooked.”
“Good,” Katie said, her tone unexpectedly practical. “You should be.”
Ruger made a rumbling noise; Mariska thought it might have been dark humor. Katie shot him a look. “And maybe you’ll all be careful.” She shivered, giving the woods a wary look.
“The boundaries are up,” Maks told her. “I’ll know if anyone approaches while we’re gone.” He sent a look Ruger’s way that Mariska interpreted as a warning. And once I take you in, you’re on your own.
Chapter 4
The ATVs moved along in eerie silence, and the old logging road unrolled in uneven waves until it slipped along the side of a more significant ridge. By then they’d hit their first Core-imposed obstacle, the thick layers of determent workings that filled Mariska first with the impulse to turn aside and then a rising anxiety.
But Maks led them steadily forward, and the effect faded. Eventually, Maks took them off the trail to a little hollow, and they huddled the machines together and cut the engines. By the time Mariska dismounted and grabbed her gear bag, Maks had already snagged the waiting camo net and flipped it over the ATVs.
Heckle and Jeckle were the last to get out of his way, fumbling their heavily padded amulet storage bags. Maks gave the net a final flip and it settled into place. Rather than heading down the road, he circled aside to move slantwise along the slope of the mild ridge they’d just passed by, his limp more pronounced with the marginal footing—a cautious approach.
“I thought this bunker was abandoned,” Mariska said, keeping her voice low as a matter of course with the assumption that someone—anyone—might be in these woods close enough to hear.
Maks looked back at her with some surprise, leading them upward. “This is Core.”
“He means,” Ruger added, “we don’t take anything for granted.”
Mariska gave herself a little kick. Of course not. She simply wasn’t in step with this team yet.
Wouldn’t be, if she didn’t stop second-guessing her own decisions.
Maks took them over the crest of the ridge. “I don’t know if anyone remains,” he told them, a note of apology there. “The scents are strong enough. But I didn’t go in.”
Ian’s voice held some hint of exasperation. “I should hope not. We’ll need to sweep for amulets before we so much as touch the damned door. Tell me you knew that.”
“I knew that,” Maks said, mild in response. Like Nick, Mariska thought—with enough confidence so he had no need to bristle back. But let someone threaten Katie…
She wondered, quite suddenly, what it would be like to have someone at her back so fiercely. Not because she needed it. Just because of what it would feel like.
Maks led them around the jagged stump of a fallen pine and tipped his head at the cut of ground breaking way before them, though there was no structure evident. “There,” he said, and crouched—started to, at least, until the one leg buckled, and he put his knee on the ground with the compensatory grace inherent in all the big cat Sentinels. “The bunker.”
The ground dipped halfway down the ridge and rose even higher on the other side; otherwise, it was unremarkable. Just a rocky little swale covered in stubby, twisted scrub oak and the ancient skeleton of another fallen tree.
But Mariska wasn’t going to be the first one to say there wasn’t anything there. Instead, she moved into position beside Ruger, turning her senses to their surroundings—even if that meant no more than noting the pine siskins
