“We could,” he agreed. “And we could stumble around messing up the track, being cold and exhausted and in no shape to do anything when we actually find Forakkes. Because we
will
find Forakkes, and we
will
stop him.”
She sighed in a hum that vibrated down his neck. “Because we’re just that stubborn.”
“Because we’re a team,” he told her, shifting his hands and rocking ever so slightly beneath her. But then he admitted, “And because we’re stubborn.”
“We should try the phone once this passes.” She scraped her teeth over his shoulder. “
If
it passes.”
“Stupid of us to have taken the weather for granted just because we’ve been working underground. This system must have been building for days—it could easily cycle through the evening.” So matter-of-fact, his words, while his breath stuttered slightly along the way.
Mariska made a noise of surprise at the new surge of warmth between them. “You?”
“Us,” he told her, and let air out through his teeth. “God, Mari, I never want to let go of you. I never want to
not
hold you this way. You...you’re...”
Perfect.
She wasn’t sure if he said it out loud, or if she imagined it. She only knew that here, in the middle of the rain-pounded forest, with their enemy ahead and their friends behind them, she rocked gently over him and reveled in the slide of flesh on flesh and the sensation of his quiet touch where they came together, the slowly building wonder of it and the understanding that they did this to one another, they did it
for
one another...
And it was perfect.
* * *
“You still make me furious,” Mariska told him, as if she wasn’t snuggled up in the aftermath of the latest rumbling storm, looking out into the fading daylight.
Ruger pulled her closer, running a hand from her shoulder to the dip of her waist to her hip, where he let it rest on smooth, warm skin. “Want to fight?” he inquired mildly, knowing neither of them had the energy or the mood for it.
Rain or no rain, the itch to pick up Forakkes’ trail worried at them both. The impulse to return to the collapsed installation pricked at him just the same. But they still couldn’t track under these conditions, and it was much better to rest until morning and start anew than to battle fatigue and the weather—only to end up in enemy territory frayed to exhaustion.
He’d tried to reach Harrison; he’d tried to reach Ian and Sandy. He’d called for Annorah...and he hadn’t even bothered with the
adveho,
the brevis-wide cry for help that would mobilize every Sentinel within hearing.
There wasn’t any point. Not with the dull, dead working that covered this area, trapping his efforts within.
Mariska shivered and tucked her head against his shoulder. They’d withdrawn up into the scant shelter, no longer sprawling in spent passion, but curling up into the angles of rock and ground to avoid the worst of the rain. “No fighting just at the moment,” she said. “But don’t get complacent.”
“No chance.”
She spoke with a sudden vehemence that startled him. “I just wish—”
Hindsight wasn’t a friend to either of them on this day. “Don’t,” he told her. “It’s not our nature to make things easy. And we don’t know that anything would have turned out differently.” He tipped his head back against rock and breathed in the scent of her—a woman well-loved, the hint of bear beneath. “Besides, you and I had an understanding to reach. That can’t be rushed—and it damned well makes
this
mean more.”
“Hmmph,” she said. “Maybe I was going to say, ‘I wish my clothes were dry enough to put on.’”
He snorted. “No doubt.”
He’d never quite removed his jeans; he wore them now, if only haphazardly buttoned. Mariska’s clothes, wet and tossed aside, had picked up enough grit so she’d declined to put them on until she could shake them out first. But they’d drained the water bottle dry and set it out to refill, and they’d split an energy bar, and as the third cloudburst cycled through, Ruger had practiced another healing—finishing the work on his own minor cut, giving Mariska a breather from the amulet working.
He’d also cleaned up after another nosebleed, still struggling to find and keep his balance in the sludge—and still unable to do it without Mariska’s help.
“At this rate,” he said, starting right in the middle of that conversation, “instead of being the only brevis healer who can take care of himself in the field, I’ll end up just another bear riding herd on the one who can do the healing.”
Mariska growled and bit his shoulder, following his conversational leap with no problem at all. “There’s no such thing as
just another bear,
and even if there was, you wouldn’t be one.” She breathed on the spot she’d bitten...and then bit it again, more lightly this time. “Besides, maybe it’s about time you had someone watching your back. Maybe you can’t always do both.”
Ah, hell.
That hit hard, even as he knew she hadn’t meant it to. He sat up away from her, earning a startled glance as he grabbed up the damp gear bag and rummaged through it for her phone, movements brusque and purposeful.
“Hey,” she said, in the voice that meant she wasn’t going to back off just because he’d reacted to her words. “Maybe you
can’t.
”
“I
obviously
can’t,” he said, coming up with the phone. “I’m going to try the ridge while we’ve got a break in the storms.”
“Ruger—”
But he’d left the overhang for the cool air of the mountains after a storm, his departure nothing more than flight—even if he didn’t quite know why.
He took the phone to the ridge, tracing their steps back a quarter mile to hunt connectivity. “Can you hear me now?” he muttered, holding the phone up and finding, again, that it had given up completely.
Zero bars.
He turned it off again, thought ruefully of the buried sat phone, and headed back down the slope.
Mariska greeted him with pine needles all over her feet. She’d clearly been out and back, and now sat with her arms wrapped around her updrawn knees—goose bumps over the pale brown of her skin, her hair pulled from its French braid to spread thickly over her shoulders, her body chilling.
Ruger dropped the phone back into the bag as she said, “Ruger—”
He interrupted her with a wordless sound—a neutral thing of the bear. Before she could say otherwise, he sat beside her and drew her back into his arms—saying nothing, still unable to explain, and to some extent simply not wanting to try. He guided them down to spoon on the slope.
“But,” she said, and then,
“Oh!”
—for he reached for the bear, surrounding them in a whirl of fierce blue-white intent. The energies engulfed him, swirling around and through her in a pleasant, intimate tickle.
When they faded, she lay snug within the embrace of the bear, and he warmed her with his fur and his body heat and his heart.
* * *
Jet curled up under the cabin porch, just as pleased to be tucked up under her wolf’s tail as she would to be inside the cabin beneath a quilt. The latest storm cell raged around her, misting her with droplets; they glistened over her coat, bringing her the scent of fresh, damp earth.
The cabin remained dark above her. Empty.
And while Jet didn’t mind being alone, she cared very much that her friends weren’t where they were supposed to be. That they’d gone off into Core territory that morning and not come back.
And that no one had reached out to her, calling on the phone they’d left behind on the porch. Unlike the others, she couldn’t hear Annorah; she couldn’t send an
adveho
and she couldn’t reach out to her friends.
Maybe they were simply later than usual. Maybe the storm had delayed them—or they were waiting it out, underground where they couldn’t use any of the phones. Maybe they’d be back after the rain passed.
Maybe.
She’d give them a little more time, and then she’d go hunting, too.
* * *
Curiosity lured Ciobaka from his corner.
He hadn’t forgotten and he hadn’t forgiven. He watched Ehwoord with a hard, direct eye—the one that spoke so clearly and yet so few of the humans seemed to understand.
Not that they paid any attention. Too much activity, too many loud-pitched voices and sharp responses. A new scent permeated their cave-like human den, a thing of burnt and acrid stringency that had followed Ehwoord’s people home.
He’d thought it a bad thing at first, but the people were not punished, and Ehwoord, for all he tried to maintain his cold demeanor, moved with excitement. He had even put aside his morning pastry and coffee to take a report—they still sat at the corner of his large worktable.
Ciobaka thought he might eat that pastry if Ehwoord had rejected it. He sat and flexed the stubby thumbs that had replaced his dewclaws, yearning to try them on a hunt. What rabbit would have a chance? Could he pounce and pin and bite and
hold?
“Fud,” he said softly.
“You should have stayed to finish them off,” Ehwoord said to the one called Yovan. Tarras had not been in charge of this activity, although he’d expected it; he still held his face and his shoulders with a stiffness that spoke of resentment.
The machine that powered the lights in this place stuttered; no one had told Ciobaka of the rain overhead, but he didn’t need the machine or the dim light from the overhead tubes to know of it; he ached to be out in that sweet scent, scrubbing his shoulders into the dirt and laughing up into the sky.
Yovan said what he’d already said more times than Ciobaka had toes. “Nothing could have survived what we did to that place. Even the entrance tunnel caved in.” And then he added, also again, “We wanted to be where we could be of the most assistance to you.”
The human equivalent of licking the lips of a superior in the pack. Obsequious, just a little beseeching—except the humans tried to pretend it wasn’t. Not as honest with their words as any dog would be with his body.
Ehwoord glanced overhead at the dim tube light, smoothing a palm over his hair. It was less gray this day, his lips were a bit less thin and his face a bit less lined—yet his expressions and emotions were just a little bit more jagged. “It’s too late to go back out,” he said. “But we won’t take them for granted. Tomorrow I want to run the first field tests on the new working—if there are survivors, we’ll use them. And I don’t want any annoying interruptions in the meantime.”
Tarras, out of favor as he was, dared to speak up. “If there are survivors, they can’t get out. Not with the tunnel closed off. And they can’t call out—not with anything they’ve got.”
“I made sure of that,” Ehwoord said, offering his disdain to the man—and then tipping his head to say with far too much meaning, “I know how to handle the things that annoy me.”
Tarras took a step back—a step closer to Ciobaka’s cage. Ciobaka waited for Ehwoord to turn back to his work—stroking the amulets with a touch more suited to flesh and blood. He stuck his leg between the bars, stretching...snagging Tarras’ shirt with his hand-paw. “Owwwt,” he said softly. “We. Owwt.”
Tarras turned on him, but Tarras’ surprise—his
fear
—didn’t quite shape his face to a scowl before Ciobaka saw it. “I’ll feed you when it’s time for it,” he snapped, as if Ciobaka had said something else altogether. More of human dishonesty with words, saying one thing when he meant another. “Go chew a bone!”
But Ciobaka knew the reactive nature of a false dominant when he saw it. And he knew from Tarras’ face that they both needed to find a way out of this place before Ehwoord became annoyed again.
Chapter 18
M
ariska woke to a world still damp, the scents of the forest rising thickly around them as the sun warmed tree and rock. She discovered herself stiff and sore from the attack on the underground facility, wonderfully sated from the previous evening, and still warm from a bear’s embrace.
She and Ruger went their separate ways into the woods, and Mariska returned to shake her clothes free of grit and ants, donning them in the distinct chill of the morning. “Do you suppose Maks is wondering about us?”
::Not likely.:: Ruger’s response came tinted with the bear, claws scraping wood somewhere below her.
She understood immediately. “Oh, you’re not!” Mock horror filled her voice. “Some poor black bear will find your Alaskan grizzly marks on his turf and never be the same.”
::As it should be,:: Ruger said, full of satisfaction. A rustle, a flickering light showing pale in the light of the morning sun, and his very human voice replaced the one his bear had projected at her. “What about you, Mariska Bear? Going to be the same?”
“Don’t get cocky,” she muttered, tugging her shirt straight and turning to find him there—painted with sunlight, legs long and shoulders broad and stance easy on the uncertain footing. He grinned at her, and she scowled back. “About Maks—”
He shook his head. “Little chance of help from that quarter. There’s no reason for him to be concerned just because we might have overnighted at the facility. We haven’t checked in with them since the day we first came out here.”
“He’s not on active status,” Mariska said, reluctant in her agreement. “I don’t suppose he’s likely to leave Katie just to see what we’re up to.”
“Not under the circumstances.”
Pregnancy sometimes made the men crazier than it made the women, Mariska thought. But she couldn’t disagree. “Jet might stir up some help. She knows we should have come back last night.”
“She might. But we don’t know. We
can’t
know.” Ruger scooped up the bag and tossed it to her with an easy ripple of muscle. “We were on our own yesterday. We’re still on our own.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Mariska said, fitting the bag over her shoulder, hating the unspoken assumption that she wouldn’t be taking the bear. Hating that it was right...and hating that she could still feel the amulet’s effect on her, a deep wrongness she could only pretend to ignore. “We’ve got to find Forakkes and stuff his amulets up his—”
Ruger coughed amusement—one moment doing it as human, the next as a sharp sound from the back of a bear’s throat. He headed straight up the slope, more nimble than any creature of a grizzly’s size had the right to be.