Jet, too, was an outsider. She knew what that felt like. She could give Mariska time; she would give them both space.
Besides, the more she stayed out of things, the more anyone watching the team would think them complete as they were.
Chapter 8
R
uger opened his eyes unto the birdsong of early morning and found himself still on the couch.
Not that he’d intended it. He’d watched Mariska make her way up the stairs—everything about her rounded and strong, dark hair dragged back into a French braid that brushed her shoulders, teasing him with a glimpse of breast and strong cheekbone before she disappeared into the loft—and he’d thought to wait until the effect of their...
conversation...
faded before he moved from the couch.
It had taken longer than expected. And eventually he’d fallen asleep, and now he found himself blinking awake to classic morning wood and the sight of Mariska leaning back against the stair railing, her arms crossed and her brow raised.
He rubbed his fingers over his eyes, pressing a little harder than he probably should have, and swore.
“Good morning to you, too,” Mariska said, and something in her voice alerted him. He dropped his hand to look at her more closely, and to see the little furrow between her brows just barely visible behind her bangs.
“You okay?”
“Do those cures of yours come with a hangover?” she asked, clearly having decided not to query his sleeping arrangements.
He centered himself in his damaged healing space and felt it from her—the lingering headache, the touch of malaise. He pulled back just in time, stopping himself from any attempt to soothe her.
Dammit.
She must have seen it—she shook her head with emphasis. “Uh-uh,” she said. “None of that. I just need coffee. Something tall and strong and with plenty of sugar in it.”
“Whatever you’re feeling isn’t from the restorative,” Ruger said. “More likely it’s from the hit you took in the first place. Be more careful today, huh?”
“You think?” she asked crossly.
“You don’t have to go,” Ruger told her. “If you’re not well, it would be best to stay here and recover.”
The look she sent him was eloquent answer enough, dark temper behind brown eyes. He held up his hands in a gesture of defeat. “Hey,” he told her. “Believe it or not, it’s my job to look out for the health of the team. When it comes to field fitness, I’ve got last word out here.”
She narrowed her eyes, understanding that not-so-subtle threat. “You wouldn’t.”
He stood from the couch, stiffer than he liked from the night on old springs and old stuffing. “I would,” he told her, not rising to her temper. “If I felt it was absolutely necessary. But today...it’s up to you.”
“Even though you’d rather not have me at your back.” She didn’t quite believe him, that was clear enough. Her voice was flat, her mouth was flat, and for the moment her brewing anger overrode the discomfort showing on her brow.
“That’s personal,” he said. “Totally different thing.”
She deflated, rubbing her forehead. “Damn.” She sighed. “If you’re going to be reasonable about it...”
“Professional,” he said. Except for the part of him that still felt the betrayal, and the part of him that didn’t want her on the team at all—and the part of him that wanted her back on his lap.
Right now.
A bear of conflict. Never a good thing.
“There’s jerky in my pack,” he said. “That’ll help until we get to breakfast.”
She snorted. “Is it going to taste like that drink you gave me?”
“It’s going to taste salty and pretty damned hot,” he said. “Annorah makes it.”
He saw in her expression the moment she let herself think of the tang of tough meat and spices, the salt on her tongue...a certain longing, and all the primal bear showing through. He lost every bit of ground he’d gained—distancing himself from the state in which he’d woken.
Great.
Apparently his body had plenty to say about Mariska, and had no compunction about ignoring his better judgment, or even giving him a break. He reached to the end of the couch and snagged his backpack, tossing it her way even as he headed for the bathroom. “Chow down. I’ll need ten minutes for a shower.”
Or half an hour.
But no cold shower would be long enough.
* * *
“Nick wants us to grab those computer hard drives,” Ian announced over breakfast—a diner just short of fast food where they piled on the protein and fruit. Ruger dug in as heartily as any of them, but it took a scowl at Mariska to make her reach for anything but the raspberries on the fruit plate. Ian eyed her and went on without comment. “We’ll also set up our satellite connection today—while we’re at it, we’ll see if there are any networks active in the area.”
Sandy bit a sausage in half. “Sounds like we should have someone from tech support up here with us.”
Ruger shook his head. “They’re all light-bloods, strictly in-house work. The few who aren’t are out on assignment already.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Ian shrugged. “Any one of us can take out hard drives or find an active network. We don’t have to hack it—we just need to know it’s there.”
“Right,” Mariska agreed. “If there’s anything within range out there, it’s going to be Core. Do you want me to tackle the hard drives?”
Ian gave her another hard once-over—seeing what Ruger saw, perhaps—her subdued nature and lackluster expression. “If you don’t mind, I’d really rather have you run another security sweep of the installation.”
She frowned. “Amulets? But I—”
Ian grinned. “Amulets, no. I’ll do that—outdoors and in. I don’t want to take any chances after yesterday. I’m just asking for regular security stuff.”
Relief brightened Mariska’s expression. “Sure,” she said. “First thing.”
Good. Ruger didn’t need her crowding his every move. He didn’t need her there at all.
Just keep telling yourself that.
Through breakfast, through the ride into the woods...that was exactly what he did. Even as he stood waiting for Ian and his team to inspect the site for new amulets.
But it didn’t quite offset the rise of the sensible inner voice suggesting that while he didn’t in fact need someone watching his back, Mariska
was
here. And he was the one who could make it easier on both of them, or harder for everyone.
It made him cranky.
Cranky enough so he hardly noticed that Ian’s team had completed their sweep of the area, declared it undisturbed, and now waved them down to the entrance. Mariska made an offhand noise in her throat, a thoughtful little bear-hum, and Ruger pulled his attention back to the moment at hand to follow her in.
But the moment he entered the facility, he stopped short, wrinkling his nose. “I thought you warded those animals,” he told Sandy.
“I did!” Her expression of distaste said it clearly enough—she smelled the decay, too. Nothing so profound that a purely human nose would have detected it, but distinct to Sentinel senses. Ruger headed straight for the creatures Mariska had dispatched the day before—specimens, now—but before he’d even reached them, he realized he’d gone past the source of the odor.
Mariska had come to the same conclusion—turning slowly in one place, hunting the source of this new dismay. “They were all good when we left last night,” she said. “They had food and water and—”
“Over here.” Ruger found it—the beakless bird, motionless in the shavings below its perch. He pulled the cage from the shelf with brusque, no-nonsense urgency and placed it on one of the area’s worktables. The lid came off easily.
Mariska bent to watch as he scooped it out from the cage, the slight frown of her headache turning into something more profound. “What the hell? Ruger, it doesn’t have a...a
face.
”
Ian stood back far enough to stay out of the way, close enough to be in on the conversation. “Didn’t we know that?”
“No—I mean—” Rattled, she took a step back; Ruger reoriented the stiff little body in his hand. “Before, it didn’t have a beak, but it had a weird little flat face. Now—”
Nothing.
No beak. No eyes. No nostrils and no mouth. Just a round, closed little head covered in fine iridescent blue feathers, faint indentations indicating where those features would have been located.
Nothing at all.
* * *
Ciobaka curled up in the far corner of his cage, past his toilet area and into the dim section where the overhead daylight didn’t quite reach. He hid his nose under the tip of his brushy tail and left his ears flat against his skull.
“Still sulking?” Ehwoord asked, but not in the voice that suggested he wanted a response. “Failure merits punishment, Ciobaka. Tarras understands that.”
The day before, they’d gone out to find one of Ehwoord’s pack members dead outside the other buried structure. This morning Tarras had looked distinctly pale; he didn’t quite stand erect as he moved about his chores.
Ciobaka knew that what had happened wasn’t his fault. He knew that being unable to enter the other installation because its securities had failed wasn’t his fault, either.
“Fortunately, Yovan was successful in restoring the camera network.” Ehwoord adjusted his huge monitor, no doubt still obsessing over the flat, grainy moving images on it. “I’ll continue my work from here—in fact, I already have. I believe our friends are just now beginning to understand.”
“Is that—” Tarras hesitated, obviously looking for better words than
Is that smart?
Ehwoord didn’t give him a chance. “Careful,” he said softly, and Tarras turned away.
Ciobaka turned away, too. Biding his time.
Chapter 9
R
uger looked at the deformed bird with sick disbelief—unable to voice any cogent remark, unable to come to any conclusions. Just frozen there in that horror.
Mariska’s hand came to rest on his arm. She gently removed the bird from his hands, adding it to the other specimens, and Sandy stepped up to apply the preservation warding. Only then did he look down at his hands, finding them fisted and shaking with tension. “When I find him...”
“When
we
find him,” Mariska said. She swiped the bangs away from her eyes and rubbed her forehead with two fingers, her eyes closed.
Ruger turned back to the installation as a whole, looking it over as if he might see some sign of Eduard Forakkes right here and now. “I thought this place was warded,” he said. “I thought it was supposed to be
secure.
”
“It
is,
” Sandy protested before Ian could do it. “Inside and out.”
Mariska looked at the shelves, full of Frankencreatures. “We should check the rest of them. Maybe whatever Forakkes did here, it’s still in progress.”
“Ongoing mutations?” Ruger shook his head. “Surely we would have seen some sign of it yesterday.”
“We had other concerns,” she reminded him. “We may have been here for a while, but we weren’t keeping that kind of eye on them. Who would? It’s not something any nominally sane person would even look for.”
The rage rumbled deep and hot, a counterpoint to the ongoing, subtle tug of arousal she invoked in him.
“When I find him...”
“We,” she said automatically, and headed for the shelves.
“Breakfast seems to have been a big
fail,
” he said. “Let me do something for that headache.”
She shot him a wary glance. “But you can’t—”
Brief amusement lightened his mood. “Over-the-counter analgesic,” he told her, a smile twitching at his mouth; it turned into a genuine grin at her palpable relief. “Did you really think I spent all my time wielding mystic healing powers? Hell, woman, I trained for this. I even throw a pretty neat stitch.”
“Sorry,” she muttered. “An aspirin would be nice. Maybe two.”
“Maybe two,” he agreed, and headed for the field kit. “But don’t feel obliged to make me prove the stitches.” He unzipped the canvas kit and poked through bandages and blood clotting sponges, antiseptic and sterile packaging—as ever, doing a silent inventory check on the way by. His fingers closed over a two-pack of aspirin, and he tugged it from its mesh pocket—and then froze, caught in astonishment at the faint scent of Core corruption.
“Ruger—” Mariska said, as Sandy came to abrupt attention and Ian cursed resoundingly. “You’d better— Oh,
hell
—”
She didn’t need to say anything else; she was already backing away from one of the cages, her expression not one of fear, but of horror.
“Ian,” Ruger snarled, “get this facility fucking
secure.
”
“It fucking
is,
” Ian snarled back, but frustration laced his tone.
“It
is,
” Sandy said, closing her eyes and adopting the peculiarly alert posture of a Sentinel in ward view. “I can’t see a damned thing!”
“Don’t tell me this is some
new
silent working,” Jack said, annoyance mixing with the alarm in his voice. “Hell. I don’t even want to know. I’m going to go after those hard drives while we still can.”
“Ruger—”
Mariska said, but by then Ruger was there, and he pressed the aspirin into her hand just to get it out of his own as he tugged the affected cage out away from the others—a medium rodent cage containing a vole with bird’s feet.
He’d gotten there just in time. The little creature emitted an astonishingly loud squeak and fell over, thrashing wildly; Ruger set the cage on the worktable and crouched before it, trying to see amid the flurry of wood chips and limbs—until finally it lay still, its tiny chest heaving.
“It’s still alive,” Mariska whispered, bending over right there beside him.
He didn’t respond right away—too intent, and not quite willing to allow that the moment was over. But the vole righted itself, tottering, and gave itself a quicksilver shake.
“Well?” Ian demanded—too impatient to stay quiet, for all that he’d held back to be out of the way.
Ruger shook his head. “I’ll be damned if I know—”
And then he saw it. That the vole no longer struggled to maneuver on bird’s feet, but that it tottered around on no feet at all.