* * *
Mariska gasped at the same time Ian swore; Sandy made a strangled noise.
And Ruger only stared, his grim expression making his features hard, his jaw so tense she expected to hear his teeth grinding.
“You can’t fix this,” she said, keeping her voice low. “You’re not here to do the impossible.” He didn’t respond; he didn’t look away from the unsteady little vole. Thank God it didn’t seem to be in pain. “Forakkes is up to something—Katie’s visions told us that much. The only way we’re going to stop it is to figure out what it is.
That’s
why you’re here.”
His mouth thinned briefly; something indefinable changed—a shift of his body, the degree of tension. Mariska heard Ian release a breath.
Jeckle screamed.
Mariska whirled to him; only in that instant did she absorb what she’d heard the instant before—the quiet
snick,
the
shoosh
of a sliding metal mechanism. And still she couldn’t make sense of him, sprawled across the floor of the office area, entangled in something...blood spreading across the hard-packed dirt floor.
Heckle was the first to reach his friend, cursing a steady stream. “Jack,” he said, a desperation already edging his voice. “What the hell have you done?”
By then Mariska was there, fully able to see the scimitar-like blade impaling Jeckle’s torso, and the gap in the solid metal desk from which it had come. Fully able to see the stunned expression on Jeckle’s face—the look in his eyes as his blood poured out and his breath came impossibly short.
Ruger pushed past her. She made a grab for his arm; his shirt slipped through her fingers. “Ruger, no—” Only afterward she realized she’d been trying to spare him the impossible.
Sentinels didn’t die easily. But they died.
Heckle looked up from where Jeckle’s hand had closed convulsively around his. “Do something,” he demanded. “Dammit,
do
something!”
Sandy drew in a breath; Ian wasn’t as subtle. “Harrison,” he said, and shook his head, his tone one of finality. He nodded at Jeckle, his meaning clear.
Tend your friend while you can.
Heckle sent Ian a glare; he sent Mariska a glare. He all but growled at Ruger, some lurking light-blood instinct coming to the fore. He turned back to Jack and said, “You dumbass.”
“Didn’t—” Jeckle said, his body trembling convulsively around the sleek metal.
“Just be still,” Heckle said as Ruger knelt on the other side of the downed man, big, competent hands already at work—shifting clothing, gently touching wrist, chest, neck. “Sentinels are harder than this to take down.”
No, they aren’t.
Mariska swallowed hard. And Jeckle wasn’t a fully blooded field Sentinel; he not only didn’t take another form, he didn’t even come close enough to guess which form might have lurked beneath his humanity.
Jeckle shook his head with vehemence—more than Mariska would have thought possible—and turned to Ruger.
“No,”
he said, struggling for air. “
Listen.
Didn’t
touch
anything.”
Mariska got it first—looking at the tools scattered on the floor around them, at the angle at which Jeckle lay. He’d said he was coming after the hard drives. He’d come toward the desk with tools in hand. He’d touched nothing. There’d been no evidence of Core workings. And yet the computer tower now sizzled and smoked, the scent of hot metal in the air.
“They have eyes on us,” she said, her voice low and horrified.
Jeckle caught her eye with an expression of gratitude, his body relaxing around the blade...his breath easing out in one impossibly long sigh.
Heckle swore.
Only then did Mariska realize what Ruger was doing. As before—as with her—not even thinking about it, but reaching out. Looking to heal, where he no longer could, blood trickling from his nose, a thin stream of it from his ear, his face gone pale—
She hit him, a fast backhand slap to his upper arm—knowing it would take just that to save him from himself. “Stop it,” she said, fierce with her concern. He didn’t even rock with the blow. “Ruger!” She hit him again, this time closing her fist.
::Ruger!::
“Ah, hell.” Ian stepped in—or would have, crowding the already tight space, but Mariska didn’t wait for him. She grabbed Ruger’s shoulder, jerking him around and winding up for a good hearty slap, and then another—until suddenly he looked at her with startled eyes.
But only until they rolled back in his head, and he fell with enough impact to declare again his solid size.
Ian muttered a string of curses, his voice rising along the way until his precise, furious diction became completely comprehensible. “—ing son of a
bitch.
”
“What the hell?” Heckle demanded, disentangling his hand from Jeckle’s with a care that belied his expression.
“Be
quiet,
” Mariska snapped. She wanted to stay there beside Ruger, her hand resting on his chest to feel the steady rise and fall of his breath, her attention focused on the rugged lines of his face, she wanted to wipe away the blood and reassure herself that the trickle had stopped.
But she sat back from him, pushing herself to her feet.
“What the hell,
be quiet?
” Heckle said, his voice rising.
::She’s right,:: Ian said, loudly enough to make Mariska wince—but it got Heckle’s attention. ::They can see us—maybe even hear us.::
Mariska headed straight for her gear bag. This had been her assignment this morning—checking this installation for networks and electronic incursions—and instead she’d let herself get distracted.
Heckle stood to glare at her, his hands fisted by his sides, his fury palpable. ::You should have—::
::Stop it,:: Ian said sharply. ::Yes, she should have. And Jack should have waited for an all clear before heading for such a critical area. This is Core turf, dammit, and we need to act like it!::
Sandy’s mind-voice was softer than her physical voice, and much less certain. ::Forakkes can see us,:: she sent, still trying to fathom it. ::He triggered that attack remotely. He took out the hard drives...::
Ian said nothing, waiting for Mariska—and Mariska pulled out her full-range wireless camera detector and paced down the center of the cavernous installation.
It only took a moment before the scanner slowed, tightening in on an exact frequency—and then another moment to pick up the feed, duplicating it on the diminutive screen in the handheld. Mariska found herself looking down the length of the installation—Ian’s lean form, Heckle’s lingering fury and grief, Sandy off to the side and Mariska’s own short, sturdy self standing closest, studying the device in her hand. “Here,” Mariska said, and traded the scanner for a smaller device as Ian came up behind her. And there it was, blinking back at her as she peered through the small viewfinder—the tiny red flashing light of a networked camera.
She held the detector up, carefully maintaining its orientation, and Ian muttered, “Got it.”
Way too high to reach.
::We’ll have to find the point-to-point wireless bridge,:: Sandy said. ::If we even can. And I doubt we came equipped to jam that— Oh.::
For Mariska went to the gear bag, pulled out the first small, hefty item she came to, and whipped it at the camera with pinpoint accuracy.
“Okay,” Ian said, returning the detector, the corner of his mouth lifted in a hint of the dry humor that so suited him. “So much for that one. But if there’s one, there’s more. Find them.”
Mariska glanced over at Jack—and over at Ruger, who hadn’t yet stirred.
“Find them,” Ian repeated, but he gentled his voice. “And then we start thinking this thing through from the top.”
Mariska went to work.
* * *
Ruger’s arm hurt. So did his face, stinging along the newly exposed surface where maybe he shouldn’t have shaved his beard after all. He grumbled to himself, bearish sounds of dissatisfaction.
“Ruger.” That single word held relief and maybe a little bit of something else. Sorrow.
He cracked his eyes open to find he was leaning against the office partition with Mariska kneeling beside him. He gave her a bleary and suspicious look. “You hit me.”
“I did,” she said promptly, and still the sorrow hid behind her eyes. “Don’t make me do it again.”
He remembered, then—how natural it had been to respond to the crisis by sinking into that healing trance. He couldn’t remember what had happened then, but he could guess. The skin of his upper lip felt cool and scrubbed; his neck itched beneath his ear, and when he touched it, his fingers came away damp with almost-dried blood. “Hell,” he said. “Maybe I do need protection. From
myself.
”
“Maybe you do,” she told him, but she looked no less sad. “Ruger, I’m really sorry. I feel like I keep saying that, but...this is different. I get it now. Watching you work—”
“
Try
to work,” he said, and couldn’t hide that bitterness.
“Watching you,” she repeated. “Seeing what you’ve lost...” She shook her head, dark-chocolate eyes full of regret. “And I came in and yanked the rest of it away.”
“Don’t,”
he said, more harshly than he meant to—simply because she hit too close to home, and he couldn’t deal with it. Not here, in the middle of an active operation, the team all around them and Jack dead not far away. He pushed back at the twist of pain in his throat.
She took a breath, almost said something...sat back on her heels. “I can’t fix all that now. I can only do the job I was sent here to do.” She made a face, sent him a slantwise look. “And I
will
stop you the next time you do something like that.”
“You’d probably better.” It should have been the end of the conversation—Ruger with his thoughts still dazed, Mariska with the headache that obviously wouldn’t quit, Ian and what remained of his team muttering in the background. But neither of them moved, and after a moment, Ruger reached out to put a hand over hers.
After a moment, she sighed, and turned her hand over beneath his so their fingers intertwined.
For a few minutes, that was enough.
Finally, Ruger glanced over to the dark, damp spot where the dirt had soaked up Jack’s blood.
“Sandy put a stasis warding on him,” Mariska said, and pushed a finger against the bridge of her nose, clearly pulling herself back to the matters at hand. “We were being watched. I’ve disabled the cameras—”
A snort from Ian let them know just how illusory their personal privacy had been. “She means to say that she
obliterated
the cameras.”
“—and we’re jamming the network, too—at least until we can find the tech. That’s how they got Jeck—I mean, Jack.”
“Watching through the cameras,” Ruger said, as if he didn’t believe it. “Manually triggering the blade.”
“Freaking
Raiders of the Lost Ark,
” Ian grumbled from the amulet area.
“I don’t know what he hoped to accomplish,” Mariska said, a hard expression taking over her features—not an expression any smart man would want to face. “He hasn’t stopped us. And who would even use such a barbaric thing? He already had the hard drives wired—they’re smoked. Useless.”
“He was making a point,” Ruger said darkly. “And he was making us hesitate.”
“Damned right,” Ian came up behind Mariska. “Mariska got nailed yesterday. We lost Jack today. The hard drives are gone. Have we even been here twenty-four hours? We’ve totally underestimated this man.”
“Overestimated him,” Ruger muttered. “We gave him too much credit for being human. We should have known, once we saw those animals...”
“I want to grab what we can and get out of here as soon as we can,” Ian said. “We’ll analyze what we gather back at brevis, and we’ll blow the hell out of this place. No more playing on Forakkes’ home ground.”
Mariska climbed to her feet, holding her hand out for Ruger. “You’re okay?”
“Hungover,” Ruger said, and at Ian’s skeptical expression, closed his eyes long enough to do a quick internal review. He did, at least, have that much skill left. “Seriously. I’ll be fine.” He accepted Mariska’s hand; he accepted her strength. In the warmth of her hand against his, he felt a fleeting echo of their bodies tangled and pounding; her eyes widened slightly, and she pulled her hand away as he came to his feet.
Ian shook his head and muttered something, and went back to the amulet section. “I’ll be the rest of the morning packing up these blanks,” he said. “Mariska, would you take your gear outside? Make sure we’re not being watched out there?”
“Of course,” Mariska said—but she gave Ruger an uncertain glance. “I’d prefer it if Ruger came with me, if that’s okay. I’d rather have someone at my back if I’m going to be concentrating on techie tricks.”
Ian merely looked at Ruger, waiting.
And Ruger straightened, watching Mariska with narrowed eyes—examining her expression for any sign of pity, condescension or manipulative overtones. ::I’m not for sale,:: he said, a private voice that went to her alone.
::I’m not buying you,:: she said without hesitation. ::I have a helluva headache and I don’t want to have to split my attention.::
“Sure,” Ruger told Ian, who waited so patiently that it couldn’t have been more obvious he knew there’d been a private exchange. “Whatever’s happening with the animals, we clearly can’t stop it. I’ll take stock when we get back inside.” He looked over to that end of the installation and shook his head. “I just hope we can figure out what he’s up to before we run into those workings in the field.”
But Katie Maddox’s shared vision whispered urgency, and so far they didn’t have a clue.
Chapter 10
W
e don’t know anything. Not nearly enough.
Mariska stood outside the cabin with the day of work behind her, letting the cool night air wash over her face. Dinner sat uneasily in her stomach; her skin felt tight and warm.
If she hadn’t been Sentinel, she’d have said she was coming down with something. But she was...and Sentinels didn’t. They didn’t get colds or the flu; they didn’t carry viruses and they weren’t vulnerable to bacteria. The same preternaturally robust nature that allowed them to heal swiftly from near-fatal wounds also protected them from common—and uncommon—ailments.