this staged encounter to justify their need for action.
Ana’s new assignment.
She’d long begged for this opportunity, a mission that would prove her worthy of more than her usual personal assistant work for Hollender Lerche, her supervisor since she’d been transferred to active Core duty at the tender age of thirteen.
Ian Scott bounded a few effortless steps uphill to clear a scattering of hard-edged rocks embedded in the trail, and she drew a deep, sharp breath—holding it, all unaware, until her lungs ached. He was beautiful in an uncivilized way, muscle and lean form perfectly evident under a casual shirt and the dark gray cargo pants riding low on his hips, shaping the strong curve of his bottom.
He was the enemy.
The team leader murmured into his field mike, “You’re on.” She didn’t know his name. It didn’t matter; she hadn’t expected the courtesy of an introduction. All that mattered was what came next.
The mountain lion, barely caged just down the trail from their position.
The animal had been caged for days, starved and prodded into a frenzy. The hiker was one of their own, a man familiar to Ana who was working off a disgraceful failure—and he was already scented with blood and mountain lion urine.
Ana wasn’t sure he knew it, though.
The mountain lion knew.
Freed, the beast didn’t hesitate. It charged onto the trail in a snarling blur of tawny motion, claws already reaching to bat the man down.
The big cat screamed and the man screamed with it—a bloodcurdling thing with all the authenticity the team could have wanted. Convincing, because the man hadn’t known these details of his work.
“Here we go,” murmured the team leader. “Watch the bastard.”
Ana watched, all right. Scott didn’t hesitate. He sprinted forward as man, all coiled strength and energy, and then leaped—a dive, as if he intended to take cover in the scrub of the pine-shaded mountainside.
Instead he dove into a blinding roil of lightning and sharded energy, and when he emerged from the thick of it he landed on the two massive front paws of a snow leopard. Lush white fur splashed with black spots, staggering blue eyes, a thick length of tail—Ana held her breath again. He leaped forward almost before he’d fully found his feet in that form—smaller than the mountain lion but never hesitating.
Ana’s handlers had said that the Sentinels looked for any excuse to unleash their violent natures.
He blindsided the mountain lion, latching on with claws and teeth so the two animals rolled off the hiker and right down the steep slope, spitting and snarling and breaking brush along the way. Fierce growls rose from below, and the mountain lion’s angry scream split the air.
Ana strained forward as if she’d be able to see; the team leader’s hand closed around her arm in a harsh and warning grip. She wanted to tell him she wasn’t so stupid as to risk their cover, but she bit her lip and kept her words inside. She couldn’t afford to be blamed for anything that went wrong, even an errant whisper—no matter that this man had already broken their silence.
The hiker rolled to his feet, stunned and unsteady—and marked with fresh blood, but remarkably unharmed in the wake of Scott’s swift reaction. He staggered on up the trail to rendezvous with the other half of the Core team, where they’d dig in out of sight until Ian Scott had moved on, protected with the same silent amulets that hid this camo blind.
The conflict below broke away into a few hissing spits, and then the sound of running retreat—and the quieter sounds of one of the animals returning, his footfalls more deliberate and almost silent. Ana watched the trail, waiting to see which of the big cats would emerge.
Not that there was any doubt. The mountain lion had been weakened, and Ian Scott was more than animal and more than human. Utterly beast, too dangerous to live unfettered.
The leader’s hand closed more tightly around Ana’s arm. “The team will finish recording. He’ll be looking for trouble when he gets back up here.”
She resisted his pull. “This is why I’m here,” she said. “To see this. To see him. So I know what I’m up against.” It was, in fact, the purpose behind this entire operation, although the footage would also be used to study the enemy in a way they’d never accomplished before. “I’m safe, as long as we’re quiet.” None of the Sentinels could detect the perfected silent amulets—not even Ian Scott, the Sentinel bane of many an amulet working.
The man made no effort to soften his derision—at her, at the Sentinel. “You’ve seen enough to know he’s not human—he’s nowhere near human. And we can’t risk you. We don’t have the time to start over with this op.”
Because they didn’t have another woman in place to fill her role. Not because she mattered, personally. It shouldn’t still sting, after all these years.
But it did.
So Ana allowed herself to be led away, doglegging back to pick up the trail in the direction from which the Sentinel had come. Eventually the team leader released her arm, and she forbore to rub away the marks his fingers had made.
She’d wanted to see Ian Scott again. She’d wanted to see more closely the look in his eye when he took himself back to human—to get a glimpse of what lay beneath. Without it, her mind’s eye showed only his instant understanding of the mountain lion’s attack, and his instant response to it. Efficient ferocity. And somehow, she could think only of the warm flush of her reaction, and the fact that if she’d been that hiker, she would have wanted someone coming to her rescue, too.
But then the team took her back to the Santa Fe mansion that served as the local Core installation, and she learned that Ian Scott had returned to the trail and bounded after the Core hiker with only one thing in mind.
To finish what the mountain lion had started.
“‘Take a vacation,’ he said,” Ian Scott grumbled, lifting free weights as he sat out in the gorgeous landscaping of the gorgeous Santa Fe property under the gorgeous blue skies in the gorgeous fall weather. “‘You’ll like it,’ he said.”
“You could like it.” The woman’s voice from the patio sounded anything but repentant for her eavesdropping.
Ian found her standing on the porch with her arms folded over her motherly shape, her expression a mix of affection and exasperation.
His own face held nothing but exasperation, he was certain of it. “He took away my team. My computer. My tablet. My lab!”
“Pfft.” She made the noise with no sympathy at all. Her name was Fernie, and she ruled this retreat with nothing so overt as an iron fist. An iron spoon, perhaps. With cookie batter on it. “That’s what happens when you work yourself sick.”
Ian’s grumble grew closer to a growl. “Field Sentinels,” he said distinctly, “don’t get sick. And I wasn’t.” He hefted the dumbbell for a quick set of curls, proving the point.
