I should take the human.
::Ruger,:: she said, hardly daring to put words—even private words—to the thought. ::I don’t know if I can take the change. It doesn’t feel...
right.
::
::Do it,:: he said instantly. ::Do it
now.
::
::But the amulet—::
::Must still be working at you.
Do it!
::
She hesitated, thinking of their confined quarters and mixing energies—but Ruger swung his massive head to her shoulder and closed his jaws down with the slightest shake, just enough pressure to rattle her into action.
She reached for the human, a spurt of panicked response. The energies rose around and within her, pushing at her like an unfulfilled yawn—and just as quickly faltered. Panic sliced through her chest.
The amulet.
He’d been right; her previous discomfort had come from the change going wrong and now she couldn’t manage it at all. She was bear and she was stuck and she was going to lose herself—
::
Reach
for it,:: Ruger told her, pushing at her. ::Hang on to it!:: He flooded her with images and impressions—his first glimpse of her at the Celtic fair, his instant interest. Her expression as she hesitated in the town house doorway—her eyes gone dark, her lips slightly parted—her invitation clear. The heat of his response, the speed with which he roused—the moment he’d curled his fingers around her hips and the shock of pleasure as they came together.
::Mari,::
he said, sending her remembered hurt and fury, a hint of her expression gone stubborn, a perfect memory of the set of her shoulders...the perfect memory of her face, flushed with pleasure and asleep against his arm, bottom gloriously round against his thighs. ::Mari Bear,
reach
for it!::
Reach for it.
It was the human who’d embraced Ruger, who gloried in his strength and the chance to be her uninhibited self. The human who’d thrown herself open to the glory of being just who she was, with just the man she wanted.
The human who’d fallen so very hard for that man and all his strengths that she’d scared herself into doing one challenging thing after another just to see how he’d react.
Reach for it,
the energies rising hard and fast, tangling with emotion and flaring brightly against the rock, whirling and changing and splashing against Ruger, her very human form falling against him just as hard.
“Mariska,” he said, as changed as she. His arms closed around her shoulders, pulling her in close to his bare chest, stroking down her spine.
Naturally she burst into tears. Embarrassing tears, full of weakness and defeat.
He only held her closer. “There,” he said, as if the rain didn’t surround them, glancing off rock and scattering drops into a hard and swirling mist.
“Mariska.”
After a few moments of stupid crying, she pulled herself together for a deep if tremulous breath and held her hand out into the spray, gathering enough water to swipe over her burning face. “Now I guess you’ve seen it all.”
He grunted, deep in his chest; she felt more than heard it, and felt the shrug in it. “You train hard, you run hard...you cry hard.” He still held her close, pushing back hair that had become disarrayed to clear her cheeks for a nuzzle of a kiss. “You love hard, too.”
She managed a wry expression. “You noticed.”
“Noticed,”
he said, and kissed her again, the distinct gentleness of a big man, “would be an understatement.”
“About that.” She couldn’t bring herself to pull away and look at him—not to meet his gaze and not to lose his touch. “I didn’t mean to be so pushy about everything. I didn’t mean to—”
“Yes, you did,” he said, and this time the sound in his chest was a hint of laughter. “That’s the whole point. You are fearsomely, awesomely
you.
”
She shivered, tucking herself in just a little smaller. “You say that like it’s a
good
thing.”
“It gets to my temper,” he admitted. “But I’m beginning to think I like that.”
She thought on it a minute, thunder filling the silence around them. “It makes you angry.”
“It makes me
alive,
” he corrected her. She shivered again; this time he joined her.
“Your back,” she said, realizing it. “You don’t even have a shirt. I think we lost the bag—”
“It’s not far. Hold on.” And to her astonishment, he left her there, bolting out into the weather. She squinted out into the driving rain, hugging herself tightly, the storm-cold air a slap against her wet skin. In moments Ruger was back, bag in hand—but he didn’t dive back into the shelter. He worked with quick, deliberate movements, yanking things from the bag, doing something beside the outcrop—fumbling a little in the wet and cold until he quite suddenly joined her again, soaked and shivering, and still without the shirt.
“What?” she asked.
“Water,” he told her. “There’s a small pool in the rock—I tore up the shirt to wick water into the bottle.”
“That shirt was for
you,
” she told him with some asperity. “You should take the bear before you get any more chilled. Besides, I have every intention of sheltering with you if you do.”
“I can’t be the bear right now.”
The ferocity of the storm eased up; rain pattered more gently around them, no longer spraying them with water. Mariska looked askance at him, perfectly aware that she wasn’t going to like whatever he had to say.
A smile settled at the corner of his mouth in response—an acknowledgment. “I do my best healing work as the human.”
She snorted. “You’re not doing any healing work at all, as I recall. Or have you forgotten what happens when you so much as try?”
He grumbled at her, a sound distinct from the rain that seemed to surround her in their enclosed space. In the wake of it, he rubbed thumb and forefinger over his eyes—and when he looked out at her again, his expression was more weary than she’d seen. “I’d be a fool to have forgotten. But I’m no less stubborn than you. And I need you in this—finding Forakkes, putting an end to his plans or at least to his cone of silence. I can’t do it alone.”
“There’s no point—” But she sputtered to a stop when he put a finger over her lower lip.
“Mari,” he said, “I don’t have to be a healer to see that you’re getting worse. All I have to do is care.”
Instantly, tears prickled her eyes. “That’s not fair,” she said. “Don’t you dare make me cry again!”
He lifted his shoulders in a hint of a shrug.
She withdrew from him, pressing herself back against the rock. “All right, then. Yes. Obviously. This amulet thing isn’t going away. I don’t know if I can take the bear again, and I’d be stupid to try unless I knew for sure I could get back to the human, too. After what just happened and all.”
He made a generalized noise of agreement.
“But there’s no point in risking you, too! You’re already hurt—”
“And I can work on that, too, if you help me.”
She gave him a suspicious glance. “What do you mean,
if I help you?
”
“I mean that you’re right,” he told her. “Every time I reach for a healing, I run into a roadblock that hits back.”
“If that’s what you call bleeding from your damned ears and taking a dive,” she muttered.
“It hits back,” he said distinctly,
“hard.”
She said nothing.
For the first time, he looked somewhat abashed. “The problem is, I don’t see it coming.”
She couldn’t help her incredulous reaction. “Ton of bricks, meet Ruger? You don’t see that coming?”
He could have growled back at her; he merely looked bemused. “Healing doesn’t leave room for multitasking.”
Mariska shivered. The sun slipped out through a big splash of blue sky and sparked over the wet ridge, and she longed to go lie in its warmth and bask the afternoon away, letting it bake out the chill in her bones that had nothing to do with the weather and everything to do with the amulet damage...with the circumstances. “What do you want to do?”
“I
want,
” he said, “to hold you until this whole mess passes, because I’m a selfish bastard. But since that doesn’t seem likely to help our friends or to stop Forakkes from wreaking havoc, I’d appreciate it if you would stand watch for me.”
“Stand watch,” she repeated, by way of question.
“Give me a nudge if things seem to be getting out of control.” He lifted a single brow at her. “A
nudge,
I said.”
“But...how does that accomplish anything? You start healing...I stop you. Neither of us is any better off—and maybe we’re worse.”
“Maybe,” he agreed. “But maybe I can learn where the line is. Maybe if I do, I can keep from crossing it—and maybe I can do a little bit of good from there. Enough to keep us going.”
“Huh.” Mariska shoved herself past the emotion—past the conflicting impulses to protect Ruger from himself and the urge to let him take over. To let him take her pain away. She tried to think logically about it all instead.
Because he was right—she was a mess, and getting worse. He was right that their friends needed help.
And he was right that neither of them could do this alone.
Chapter 16
R
uger saw it happen—the understanding in Mariska’s expression, and the change from resistant conflict to...
Resignation.
Maybe even a little bit of hope.
“Okay,” she said. “We can do this.”
He couldn’t help but laugh out loud. She huddled shivering before him, skin pebbled and toasty complexion paled in a way that only highlighted the unnatural flush high along the strong bones of her face. He felt every inch of the slice along his back, every cut and scrape of their escape.
But together, they possessed such an accumulation of stubborn determination, it was hard to imagine anything but success.
“Just
nudge,
” he reminded her, and settled to sit cross-legged with his back to the rock and the slope spreading down before him. Overhead, the next round of rapidly shifting clouds rumbled a distinct warning; the rain wasn’t done with them.
“Go slow,” she warned him. “So I have the chance.”
In answer, he held out his hand. She took it, her fingers wrapping without hesitation around his. “Is it easier this way?”
“A little,” he told her. “Mostly I just want to hold your hand.”
She might have smacked him then; he saw it in the press of her lips, the spark of her eye. But in the end she squeezed his fingers—and maybe there was even a hint of a smile.
Ruger closed his eyes, shutting out the world. He took a moment of indulgence to feel the nuances of her hand in his—the faint pressure of strong, short nails against his skin, the calluses on the knuckles and edge of her palm, the rough skin of a recent scrape. Her fingers twitched with passing restlessness, and that made him smile, too.
From there he slid not to healing, but to awareness. He started with the sharp pull on his back—feeling it as a healer would, and practicing the balance of perceiving without acting.
Harder than he’d thought, that balance.
Harder yet when he sought out Mariska—
deep aches, gripping chill, insistent wrongness
—and especially at the ice pick of a headache clamped down in her head.
Generalized healing.
That’s what he needed. Nothing fancy; nothing too targeted. Nothing that would eliminate the amulet working from her system, and just enough to spill over to his back.
Just enough to help.
He groped for the energies, struggling for balance—struggling to push his way through the thick wall of dead energy—but without shoving. Without falling into lifelong habits of
reaching.
It used to come with such ease, this energy did. It used to flow like silk, not mud. It used to wash around the wounded like a cool balm. Now he grappled with sticky energy sludge, making little headway until in his impatience he
yanked
—
He startled wildly at the stinging slap against his face, his head hitting the rock behind him. “Son of a
bitch!
”
Mariska knelt before him, facing uphill with her knees nearly touching his, annoyance at war with grim concern. “You should have saved some of that shirt for your face.”
“Nudge!”
he told her, at a loss for words.
She rose up on her knees, pulling the hem of her shirt high and wiping it beneath his nose; when she sat back she displayed the stain to him. “I did
nudge,
” she told him. “I nudged the hell out of you, and it didn’t help. What did you
do?
”
He swore, and couldn’t keep the sheepish note from his voice.
“You got impatient,” she said, and rolled her eyes. And then she rolled a knuckle against his chest. “That’s a
nudge,
” she said—and then added, “Don’t you growl at me.”
Only then did he feel the residual vibration of that grumble in his chest. But by then she was stroking the spot she’d just knuckled, and his thoughts tangled on the sensation. He reached for her waist and tugged her closer, uncrossing his legs to make way for her.
“It was worth a try,” she said. She didn’t tug easily—not with her knees pressing into the ground—but she inched forward between his thighs and hardly seemed to notice it. “We’ll just have to—”
“We’re not done yet.”
Not by a long shot.
Her waist curved beneath his hands, tidy and defined; he smoothed his hands up her torso until his thumbs rested just under her breasts. As if they belonged there—as if he had the right to touch her so casually.
Then again, the bear knew what he wanted. And so did he.
“What do you mean, not done yet?” She leaned closer, and the flush on her cheeks, the brightness of her eyes—they no longer came of fever.
He grinned. “How do you feel?”
“Just because you have your hands where you have your hands doesn’t mean I’m going to forget—” But she stopped short, her mouth still open. She looked down on herself—at his hands, at her own; she put the inside of her wrist to her forehead. “Better!” she said in surprise. “Definitely better. But you didn’t—
How—?
”