Sentinels: Wolf Hunt

Chapter 2

“Bring him in, Jet.”

Fabron Gausto had said those words with confidence. No doubt he’d fully expected Jet to obey.

He had every reason to.

Confused by the changes in her life, by the changes in her body, Jet had accepted the things done to her at Gausto’s hand…so that she might survive them, as so many had not done. And when he held the rest of her pack hostage to her good behavior and sent her out to take down the enemy—one, he’d said, who would see her coming and yet never truly see her at all—she’d had every intention of doing just that.

But he’d been wrong. Nick Carter had truly seen her. He’d recognized the wild in her; he’d seen her nature.

He’d seen her heart.

And she’d seen his.

The feelings were strange to her—they came differently than they had before Gausto had forever altered her. Sweet and hard and twisting, more complex…conflicting desires, conflicting needs. She didn’t know how to reconcile them…what to do with them.

She knew only that she needed time to understand them.

And so instead of bundling the stricken wolf into an unwieldy package on the back of her sleek, growly Triumph Tiger motorcycle, alone, she’d ridden the thirty-one miles north to Oro Valley much more quickly than she should—speeding and ducking and dodging through traffic, nipping at the heels of larger vehicles and sprinting on by, close enough to catch the hint of unease in the other drivers’ expressions.

Also against directions, that aggressive riding—but if Gausto had expected anything else, it only proved that he’d learned less about her world than she had about his.

This route, she’d practiced extensively, though she knew few others. She peeled off I10 and onto Route 77 without second thought, skimming west of the Santa Catalinas and through Oro Valley, up to the foothills of the Tortolinas. She left bike, helmet and leather biking jacket in the sprawling driveway of the desert estate, parked in the shadows of stately, groomed saguaro that looked no happier, leashed by civilization, than she. Past the unobtrusive guards with a lift of her lip they pretended not to see; past the entry landscaping cameras that showed of her approach.

Gausto knew, then, that she came alone.

He waited for her.

Past the public entrance to the house, the big double front doors of rustic wood enclosed by decorative steel privacy screening, and around the side to the entrance. Unlike the front half of the house, this hallway was narrow and dim, unexposed to exterior light; it led to rooms with no windows and no escape.

Jet had reason to know.

It led, too, to the far workroom, a deep place of murky memories and illness and brethren trapped and dead.

But today Jet went to none of those places. She went instead to the tiny vestibule of a room that was hers alone—flat off-white walls with token but classic southwest texture, a plain overhead fixture with a dim bulb, a tiny rectangular window near the ceiling. To her furniture, her cot, a small trunk of clothes and the chair where Gausto would be sitting.

He was.

Never taken unaware, that was Gausto.

He sat with his legs crossed and his hands quiet in his lap, but Jet was not complacent of him. Not this man, with his precisely tailored suit, his silver flashing jewelry, black hair drawn back in a tight tail at his neck. And dark eyes—cold, flat eyes. He didn’t wear amulets as so many did here; Jet had heard enough to understand that somehow, he was protected. Fully, completely protected from any workings anyone might try on him.

She was human enough to feel bitter envy at this fact, and wolf enough not to show it.

“Jet,” he said, using her name with flat authority. Well he might; he’d given it to her.

And she did as she’d learned; she showed him submission. The form was her own—down to one knee, hands quietly on the other, body twisted ever so slightly aside in token exposure, head tipped just as subtly to show her throat. Always a careful balance, there—she’d seen those flat eyes of his go alive at the sight of her tender flesh, and she thought that even in his fully human existence, he felt the flicker of impulse to go for her throat.

Especially when he was angered.

Slowly, she went down to one knee. Slowly, she gave him her vulnerability. Her very caution seemed to please him.

“You failed,” Gausto said. “I’m surprised. Perhaps I didn’t explain the stakes carefully enough? Another demonstration—” He stopped as Jet stiffened, and smirked slightly in the satisfaction of it.

She wanted to tear his throat out.

And she could have done it, could have shifted and been on him before he so much as moved from the chair. His blood would have splashed across these walls, his mysterious ward of protection of no use against her teeth and speed.

But she didn’t. Not with the scent wrapped around this house, ever reminding her…her pack, trapped beneath, some already dead at Gausto’s hand, the rest awaiting salvation only Jet could provide.

It should have been enough. It would have been enough. But Gausto had also promised her something else again.

Freedom.

For Jet, freedom had turned complicated and elusive—much more complicated than the simple return of a pack to the distant mountains from which it had come. For among them, Jet was no longer fully wolf…nor completely human. She was Gausto’s prize tool, his thing. That he would even contemplate releasing her…

He must want Nick Carter very much.

But Jet, in spite of her own best efforts, was not as biddable as she was meant to be.

Now she tipped her head just a little more, looking up for permission to speak. He made her wait for it—of course he made her wait—and then gestured assent, pleased with his own benevolence. She said, “I found him.” She used the words carefully; he had made it clear he found her natural way of speaking displeasing.

Nick Carter, she thought, had not minded at all.

“But you did not bring him back.” Gausto flicked invisible lint from his knee. “Finding him is no great accomplishment, little Jet. Did I not provide you with the details of where he would be, and train you in the exact route, the correct clandestine approach? Finding him was nothing. But I also gave you amulets to use on him. My dear wolf-child, all you had to do was take him aside and trigger the amulet as you’ve been trained.” He regarded her with disdain at the corners of his mouth. “You will try again tomorrow. And the next day, if necessary. But Jet—mark this well. For each day you fail, one of your pack members will pay the price.”

After an instant’s spike of alarm, she schooled herself. As long as he still wanted Carter, her packmates would not die. Because if she truly failed—if she died in the attempt or she died at Gausto’s impatient hands—he would need them to start again. And her pack was not such a very large pack that he could afford to discard any one of them.

Not until he’d given up on Carter.

And still, she couldn’t stop herself from saying, too quickly, “I have him.”

Gausto snorted, most genteelly. He must be in a mood. He was far from genteel when it suited him. “My dear, don’t insult me. The cameras would have shown him to me when you arrived.” His eyes narrowed. “But you’re smarter than that. Explain yourself.”

She straightened, watching to make sure it didn’t displease him—but he’d forgotten about such subtleties. He often did. It only proved to Jet that he was far less civilized than he pretended to be—but the same could be said about any of the humans she’d met here. “I found him. I used the amulet.”

Gausto’s expression swapped out triumph with a frown. “Then why have you not brought him to me?”

“I had questions,” Jet told him, and thought it reasonable.

“Questions?” Gausto repeated, his tone instantly telling her he thought no such thing. “It is not your place to have questions, Jet. It is not your place to think. You do as you’re told, when you’re told, how you’re told.”

“But if I understand, I do it better.” She tipped her head, looked at him in cublike question…she’d learned early that he interpreted this as an eagerness to please. “Yes?”

It did indeed settle him, if only infinitesimally. She took the moment. “I don’t understand your world,” she told him. “He is alpha, your Nick Carter. Is this how it is done, the challenge? From behind?”

Gausto sucked in a sudden breath; Jet knew she’d misspoken badly, but had no idea how—sometimes it seemed to her that the truth was not his truth. His lips thinned. He reached for her, and she forced herself to be still, not to react—not to cringe or lift her lip or retreat, all hard-learned lessons—as he grasped the short, romp-fluffed hair at the back of her head, digging his fingers in to pull hard. “Nick Carter,” he said, “has committed crimes against my people. He is alpha to nothing of mine, do you understand that?”

Jet understood that Nick Carter knew alpha where Gausto knew bullying. She understood on a level so deep it needed no words. She understood that where Gausto held sway over her through dint of his cruelty and advantages in this human world, through his ability and willingness to manipulate her and change the very essence of what she was, Nick Carter had connected to her with heart, with the things he had chosen not to do as well as those things he had done. He had run with her; they had forged an afternoon together with the instinctive, spirit-deep communication of creatures who could not lie about their souls.

He had not bullied her. He had not snarled her into submission. He had not gone beyond fairness to coercion.

Maybe that’s why, somehow, she had left a piece of herself behind with him, felled by that amulet right along with him.

If Gausto noticed her distraction, he didn’t indicate it. “Nick Carter is a criminal and he must be stopped. And unless you don’t care anything about protecting your own people, that’s all you need to know.”

But Jet already knew much, much more.

He’d almost made it. Had almost bolted up out of reach, out of range.

He’d thought she might be so many different things…from undeclared field agent to outright rogue—until there at the end, when her shift had gone so differently, he began to realize she might be something else altogether.

But he’d never thought she could be Core.

And he hadn’t realized it would shred something deep within him to have it so. He didn’t know her; he hadn’t done anything more than let his guard down for an uncharacteristic lupine romp. Or so he’d thought.

He knew better now.

Too late for that.

Barely conscious enough for the thought, gasping under the weight of the triggered amulet and the poison of it in his system, he nonetheless found it hard to reconcile the betrayal with her subsequent flight, leaving him tucked away here in the wild strip of growth protecting the outlying fairground fields from the desert.

Hard to think at all.

The amulet, triggered, hung around his neck with a stench he couldn’t avoid—corruption and coppery astringency and sharp acrid wisps of power—sickening him. His human form could have grasped the amulet and wrapped his hands around it and if he suffered for it, he could still break it. Unique, this skill in action. A mere handful of field Sentinels had seen it in use; fewer yet within Brevis Regional. She couldn’t have known. Coincidence. Luck. But it left him no less trapped. No less sickened.

And getting sicker.

He hadn’t realized it at first. Gone down hard and fast, the proverbial ton of bricks, darkness not only closing in on him but clenching down tight. He’d woken already panting, tongue lolling onto the scant, gritty leaf cover, to find her crouching over him—back to her human, clothed, and the pure wolfish scent of her cutting cleanly through the amulet stench. “I don’t want this,” she’d said, resting her hand in his thick ruff, black hair painted heavily with silver. And she’d opened her mouth to say something else, but after a hesitation, rose silently to angle out of the trees.

Moments later, a powerful motorcycle engine roared to life, settling to a growl…moving away at uncertain low speed on the off-road terrain and then abruptly smoothing out, shifting up in pitch, and winding up for asphalt…fading quickly into the distance.

The silence sat most heavily on him in that moment—the realization. Only Fabron Gausto would break the rules of the uneasy Sentinel-Core detente so completely—and only Fabron Gausto had little to lose, and everything to gain.

Gausto had already deeply embarrassed his Core Septs Prince, using forbidden blood workings on Meghan Lawrence and Dolan Treviño this past spring. But he’d been released for Core justice, for even the brevis regional adjutant—the consul’s executive officer—didn’t take the fate of a Core drozhar into his hands. Not with relations between the Core and the Sentinels already teetering.

Not with Brevis Regional Southwest so vulnerable, with field ops gone subtly wrong and bad luck plaguing them, and confidence in the ageing consul wavering.

Nick didn’t think Dane Berger—consul, Sentinel, and javelina boar—was in on the deeply buried conspiracy, but his willful blindness had allowed things to get this far. Far enough that his original adjutant had been killed and Nick, after only a year in his place, could see the growing danger.

But not well enough.

Gausto, in trying to redeem himself, had then sent a Core team to the San Francisco Peaks in northern Arizona, Joe Ryan’s high desert turf. And if Nick had initially targeted Ryan as the cause of the area’s problems and sent Lyn Maines to investigate…well, maybe it was the best thing he could have done after all. Now the Peaks were secure, and Gausto…

Gausto must be desperate. Enough for an all-or-nothing bid. Nick could all but hear that flat, arrogant voice in his head, inveigling the septs prince. Leave me my life, and I’ll give you Nick Carter. And then, because neither he nor the Core could be tied to any such operation, he’d found someone else to do it.

Someone wolf.

Pure feral grace.

Something wrenched inside him. He thought at first it came from the amulet, but a sudden flash of whiskey gold eyes, of laughing invitation—of the perfect flirtatiousness every wolf knew with her partner, pure and unfettered—and the twist of pain sent him thrashing in the underbrush.

Not just the amulet. The amulet’s working, reacting to the energies within him. That deeply, she’d reached him.

Sonuvadamnedbitch.

He took the battle inward, eyes unfocused and halfclosed, the heat of the day reaching him even in this protected shade but the panting gone beyond mere heat. It ate at him, this amulet. Wormed around deep inside his body and chewed away at the foundation of him. Worse than maybe she’d thought—or Gausto, for that matter. Because Nick was pretty sure Gausto wanted him alive.

For Gausto liked to play.

He cleared the murk from his mind, shoving away whiskey gold and edgy movement, a flash of black…he focused on his inner voice, gathering it, channeling it—pulling together a wordless adveho, sent straight to Annorah at brevis—their communications star still intensely determined to prove herself with perfection after her misjudgment during the Peaks incident. Not coincidentally, the single brevis-based operative currently in his small circle of trust.

But the adveho, the call for help that no Sentinel would ignore, went nowhere.

His focus faded; his awareness of the details around him faded, too. The scents, the sounds, the active fairgrounds so very close and yet way too far away to do him any good…

Didn’t mean he wouldn’t try. One inch at a time, rolled on his chest, head too heavy to lift. Paws, pushing against dirt and weeds…slipping, losing strength…hind legs splayed out behind like a puppy on ice. Barely budging the weight of him. But still…budging.

Try again.

And again.

Gausto wouldn’t get him without a fight. And if it meant fighting those whiskey gold eyes and pure feral grace…

So be it.