hot within him, a rare thing for a man who’d become so resigned to so very much. “You expected to find him? You knew that son of a bitch Core prince would be here? And no one’s told me? Warned me? Done so much as dropped sly damned knowing hints?”
Her hands stilled on her arms; she looked back at him, nonplussed. “Of course we—” she started, and stopped to frown. “Didn’t you—?” And then gave a giant shiver and hugged herself anew.
The cold wind cut just as sharply through Joe’s shirt, tugging at his hair, gusting away the last remnants of the startling sensations she’d roused. He badly needed to take the cougar, and even more badly, she needed to take back the ocelot. To bask in the sharp intensity of the high altitude sun, buffered from the wind by thick coats.
But not until she explained why brevis regional, the Southwest office to which he reported, on which he depended for updates on the millennia-long clash between the Atrum Core and the Sentinels, had failed to mention their intel on Gausto’s location.
For although the simmering conflict between the Core and the Sentinels rarely exploded even on the most local of levels, Fabron Gausto had recently changed all that. A regional septs drozhar going against his own Continental septs prince, his own advisors, and the wisdom of every generation since the two organizations were both founded from the same family—by two brothers with the same Gaul mother, but fathers from two different nations—Gausto had broken rules that hadn’t been challenged for hundreds of years.
Early enough, the Druidic-born brother and the Roman-born brother had realized that whatever their clashes, their survival lay in their clandestine nature. Never mind that the Roman-born brother, finding himself completely without the inborn ability to manipulate earthly powers—including his Druidic brother’s amazing faculty for taking the form of a wild boar—turned early to darker, cruder options, justifying his actions as necessary to police any unsavory act his brother might commit. And never mind that the Druidic brother quickly set about refining his abilities, and set upon his descendants the obligation to continue his work. Vigilia, the Sentinels had been called back then—and, wisely keeping the strong, prepotent nature of their lineage to themselves, they thrived and grew and expanded…they spread across the continents, learning, growing…becoming sentinels of the earth.
The Atrum Core had taken their name from the Vigilia…Dark to the Core, they’d been called, and then Dark Core for short. It wasn’t supposed to be a compliment. No one ever expected them to take the name for their own. And while the Core ran itself on stolen power, half monarchy and half dictatorship, broken down into regional septs, the Sentinels had a more developed structure—more democratic.
Or so they liked to say. And so Joe had used to believe.
He’d given her too much time. She said, “You were told. Just as you were specifically asked to deliver your most recent report—the one that’s so late—and never did. That looked really good for you, by the way.”
“I—what?” Now it was his turn to stand and stare, until the next gust of wind hit him and he turned his back to it; he didn’t miss the way she angled around to use him as a wind break. Too cold, too high, too remote, with rain building up again in a little western thunderhead that might or might not dump on the mountain before it dissipated into evening darkness. No, humans didn’t belong up here. “Hell, it’s late…it’s always late. What’s the big deal?”
Dean used to rag him about that…his casual disrespect for paperwork. “You’re gonna get nailed, boy-o,” he’d said, more than once dropping forms on Joe’s desk or leaving sticky notes on his monitor. And with Dean around, the paperwork had, somehow, always gotten done on time.
Not so much since Dean’s death—nor since Joe had been both officially cleared of and unofficially convicted of causing it.
Lyn Maines snorted; it turned into half a sneeze, left her eyes watering as she said, “The big deal is that Nick requested it—he needed it to assess this situation. When he didn’t get it, all we could do was guess what’s been happening up here.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Maybe you’ve gone dark…maybe not. But letting down brevis because you just don’t care enough to do your job—?”
Joe recoiled as if she’d hit him. Hell, she had hit him. He’d never not cared, he’d never given this job—this life—less than everything he had. Being a little slow with the reports was one thing…ignoring a direct request for information, something else entirely. Lives depended on fulfilling such requests. “I never—” he said.
But suddenly it had the same old familiar feel to it. Not me. I didn’t do it. There’s been a mistake. And so he turned from her, quite abruptly taking the cougar—a quick, hard transition that found him already bounding back up to the top of the spring upon completion—and this time, if she’d had anything left to say, he was the one who wasn’t listening.
Lyn thought she’d never get warm again.
She took another sip of coffee from the simple machine in Joe Ryan’s barely detached casita—nothing like the home-ground beans from his own kitchen, just your basic Mr. Coffee and grounds from a can. Still, she was grateful for it, even with the bitter aftertaste going down.
Rather like her entire day. Definite bitter aftertaste there.
She hadn’t expected to end up here, in this little studio structure so common to Southwest homes—open kitchenette, full bath and a daybed. He’d offered it to her when they’d emerged from the Snowbowl woods at his car, and she couldn’t decide if he was trying to prove he had nothing to hide or if he just didn’t care. His words told her nothing; his eyes held dark secrets and a bruised soul.
Someone else might think it a sign of his innocence, that hurt. She found it less than convincing. The most dangerous were those whose hearts went dark because they felt justified…felt the world owed them something.
But when she curled up on the daybed in the cool night air beside the open window—when she wrapped herself in an old quilt that smelled faintly of Joe Ryan’s natural scent and vibrated even more faintly with his trace—she couldn’t help but regret her convictions.
Up on that mountain, they had run together. They had worked together. They had created a partnership where, for isolated moments, it hadn’t mattered who she was or why she was here, or who he was and what he’d done. Even after he’d turned away from her, he hadn’t gone far—only to the top of the spring, where he’d basked, eyes half-closed, immersing himself.
There, while she felt nothing more than the distressing tingle of amulets, Joe Ryan sat at the top of the world and sifted vast natural flows of power.
Even thinking about it, here in the casita with only a single dim light to disturb the night, she shivered slightly—and she couldn’t blame it on the cold this time. He not only felt those waves, not only rode them…he could, in subtle ways, manage them. Manipulate them.
The good a man like that might have done the Sentinels…might have done the world…
And the harm he might yet do, with those soulbruised eyes hiding the secrets of his inner world.
Lyn shivered again.
She threw aside the quilt, dumped the coffee down the sink and stalked to her tidy little backpack purse to grab her cell phone.
Brevis regional, she knew, would be waiting.
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