She cleared her throat and leaned back in her chair. “Hello? Can I help you?”
Not that she wanted to deal with Lyn Maines, Carter’s tracker friend, or Joe Ryan—the very Sentinel who’d very nearly destroyed the balance of the San Francisco Peaks. And Lyn—when she’d first gotten here, when she was helping Carter find the Liber Nex manuscript out on Encontrados Ranch where Dolan Treviño had gotten tangled up with coyote’s daughter Meghan Lawrence…
Then, she’d had her head on straight. Then, she’d been dedicated to keeping the Sentinels honest. But Joe Ryan had turned her somehow, and now she was no better than all the rest. Using illicit power to take advantage of those who didn’t have it.
“This place overwhelms me,” Lyn murmured now. “All the trace…” She and Ryan came around the doorway, a few matter-of-fact steps while Marlee dredged up a smile of greeting and kept it there—until Lyn stopped short, startled.
Ryan reacted with the wary responsiveness that told Marlee he knew the meaning of the expression on Lyn’s face, and she struggled to maintain her own composure, realizing instantly that the pictures she’d seen of Ryan conveyed nothing of the man himself. Mountain lion shifter, he was easily a foot taller than Lyn, maybe more. Where neat, petite Lyn barely showed her ocelot—just a certain smudgy look at the outer edges of large eyes that the average person would take for makeup—Ryan pretty much oozed his cougar. Tawny hair gone short and dark at the nape and temples, a solid, muscular presence, fresh scars still healing—a powerful man used to wielding power.
Marlee kept her smile where it was. “If you’re looking for Nick, he’s not here. I think he’s out in the field today.”
“This morning, maybe,” Lyn said, sounding distracted. Overwhelmed by trace, she’d said. “He’d have called if he was delayed.”
Ryan’s hand lingered at her waist. “Things aren’t always like that in the field.”
“That’s what I’ve heard,” Marlee agreed, adding a little laugh. She thought it convinced them, and relaxed a little. They didn’t, after all, have any idea she’d been sitting here thinking about planting a virus in Carter’s private system.
Her computer dinged at her, a cheerful little instant message notification. Like Pavlov’s dog, she glanced at it—and froze. Just for an instant, seeing the screen name there. FG347. Acprince. So subtle. And lately, not nearly enough care. Too pushy, too cavalier with her security, too assured of her compliance. She was no puppet, doing his bidding unquestioned. She was no traitor.
She only wanted to make sure the Sentinels didn’t grow too cocky.
Done? Gausto asked her in his IM.
She hit the space bar with a casual thumb and then the return, barely glancing at the keyboard. An empty reply—a message of her own. Back off. I’ll let you know.
Maybe it was time to see if she could work with someone else as contact. Fabron Gausto made her feel…
Dirty.
“You’re busy,” Lyn said. “Sorry about that. We just thought we’d look around rather than disturb the whole building by having Annorah page him.”
Right. Annorah. Carter’s pet communications Sentinel. Another whom Carter seemed determined to keep on active duty regardless of her behavior in the field. Marlee wondered that Lyn could even say the woman’s name so calmly, given Ryan’s injuries at the time. True, she hadn’t meant for the consequences to be as grim as they’d turned out…
But that was the problem, wasn’t it? Sentinels interfering, and thinking oops was reaction enough when things went wrong.
“No problem,” Marlee said. “His system’s been a little hinky lately, so it’s possible he tried to mail you an update and it just didn’t reach you.” Ooh, nice one. Lay the groundwork there for when the virus took Carter’s communications down.
“So, listen, if you see him…” Lyn said, and let the words trail off. Ryan had gone silent, contemplating Marlee in a way that made her itchy. Sentinels. They were all like that.
“No problem,” Marlee said. “You’ll be here for the afternoon?”
“A while,” Lyn agreed. She nudged Ryan with her hip. “Let’s check with his admin. Nick might have set him to digging up information on the clerk who—” she glanced at Marlee and didn’t finish the sentence. “Anyway, it’s worth a try.”
“You done here?” he asked.
“Everything I need,” she told him, which made little sense. Marlee waited for them to turn around, and then frowned fiercely at their backs.
They’d hardly gone when her computer dinged at her again.
When?
Admit it. More than just annoying and pushy. These days, Gausto downright scared her.
Jet pushed the Triumph into the tree line, just enough to obscure it—here, on the desert side of the buffer zone, where she’d done as directed and cut the barbed range fencing to approach from this angle. She toed the kickstand down and gave the sleek leather seat an absent pat of appreciation.
Gausto had bought this bike expressly for her, and try as she might to treat it with the same disdain she applied to everything human he forced upon her, she couldn’t help that since her awakening to nonborn human, this one thing had restored to her the fleeting taste of running wild. Powerful on the road, quick with speed, sleekly responsive to the lean of her body…it floundered a little in this brief foray off-road, but she loved it no less for that.
So she patted it and she left it, jogging silently through the man-made belt of wooded overgrowth to where she’d left Carter—unharmed but incapacitated, and no doubt cursing her.
But Nick Carter was gone.
Instant panic assailed her. He can’t be gone. For she’d seen the results of this amulet—Gausto had shown her, using one of his own men, so she’d know what to expect. So she’d trust him.
Never that.
But she trusted the consistency of the amulet, and Nick Carter should be here. The same as tranked and bound. Gausto would blame her if he had escaped. And worse—as she stood there, staring at the place he’d been, the flattened foliage and scuffed sandy soil—worse—
She wouldn’t see him again.
That made her stop. Made her frown. For it wasn’t part of her world, that bereft feeling. He wasn’t part of her world.
Or he hadn’t been.
But now…
Now he was.
She gave a little shake—a stress-release shake, flowing through her neck and shoulders—and she put herself back in her wolf-thoughts. Letting her primal self take over, even in this form.
Her primal self saw clearly past the emotions and found the trail. Bent twigs, disturbed soil, crushed leaves in this place where so much was spiny and waxy and hard to damage at all. Her nose scented it; her eyes saw it.
And more. There was sickness here…a certain raw flavor of effort and distress.
It was a trail she could follow. But she did it with care, not assuming anything in this strange place with its many people, so close. One slow step at a time, confirming the sights, the sounds—checking out of this shadowed buffer zone and into the bright sunshine full of dogs and huge white tent canopies and people and noise, a loudspeaker announcing in the background about Sporting Group and Ring Five.
Busy people. No one looked at her, or noted her slow movement among the trees. And so she tracked.
Not that it took long.
He hadn’t gone far.
He