Cheetah Wild by Doranna Durgin

Author:Doranna Durgin [Durgin, Doranna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781459295209
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2009-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

The park night closed around them. Tayla’s initiation still vibrated around Mark, making his skin tingle, bringing him to a clarity of awareness he’d forgotten he possessed at all. Night vision acute and bright, washed with a tinge of blue; every sound brushing his ears with meaning.

But Mark had always worked best on following a given trace, not plucking it out of thin air. And the park carried a plethora of hints and variations and teases—people of power who’d been through, people with so little power they didn’t know they had it and people of Sentinel-level skills, cultivated and private. Mark felt it as a swamp, immersing him, patting up against him…but only Tayla’s trace stood out as an individual sensation, mingling with his own. She moved several yards away in the darkness, well off the trail and behind a cluster of pond-side trees, crouching over something; he found himself seized with sharp frustration—that he couldn’t change, that he couldn’t track the individual trace scents to their sources….

That he couldn’t take the lead. Protect her.

“Dead cat,” she murmured. Silent communication would have been better, but not everyone took naturally to it. Mark didn’t; he knew from reading her file that Tayla didn’t, either.

He hoped they’d have the chance to grow into it.

But since they didn’t have it, he eased closer, his back to her and the better part of his attention probing the park around them. “Long dead?”

“Fresh dead.” She stood, twitching her shoulders in a disdainful feline gesture. “And it stinks.”

“Core?”

“Core.” She shifted uneasily. “Looks drained dry. About that vision of yours—”

“No cats,” he said. “But…fingers.” Reaching, grabbing, sinking into gold-furred flesh…

“Does that even make sense?”

“No,” he admitted freely. “I’d guess the fingers as Core workings. So be careful.” He didn’t say workings aimed at you. She knew the dangers here.

Something fluttered in his mind. Suddenly, intrusively. Tayla stiffened; Mark backed a step to her, putting them both in a defensive position. “Monitio,” he murmured. Monitio, the Sentinel-warning broadcast, silent to everyone else and red alert to anyone with a Sentinel’s inner ears. It didn’t matter that neither he nor Tayla could initiate private conversations; they’d always hear a monitio.

And this one had plenty to say.

“Oh, for—” Tayla’s voice held annoyance and disgust some moments later, breaking in over the end signal of the monitio. “That idiot!”

“We’re scouts, not bodyguards,” Mark growled. That they weren’t ready—that they hadn’t had nearly enough time to inspect and secure the area—he didn’t need to say at all. And even if the bodyguards were racing in, bringing Carter and Ruger and Maks—a tiger-shifter on loan from Tucson—they’d still be coming in cold.

Because the informant was already on the way. Plans changed to avoid detection.

“The Core is flushing him out,” Tayla murmured. “They know someone’s talking, and they’re pushing him to expose himself so they can make a play for him.”

“And he’s falling for it.”

“This afternoon,” Tayla said, and something in her voice made him turn to look, seeing the miserable flash of her eye in the dark night as easily as if it were day.

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