Tiger Bound Read Online Free Page A

doesn’t make me think you’re the right one to deal with this. With me. ”
    He tried not to feel the sting of that—the accusation.
    Or the truth of it.
    Although maybe not for the reasons she thought it.
    She must have seen it anyway. She bit her lip, a single canine briefly peeking out, and looked down at her hands, fingers brushing over the calluses. “I’m sorry. But you must see it. You’re a tiger. And me, I’m...” She shrugged, hands tightening around each other as she looked out her side window. “I’m a deer. A Chinese water deer. I’m what you might eat for lunch, if I wasn’t—”
    She didn’t have to say the words; he knew what she was. Sentinel. Borderline seer. Most times human.
    Her mouth took on a tight set. “I told myself I wouldn’t get my hopes up. I knew they wouldn’t take me seriously—and they didn’t. They sent a man who’s barely off medical. Who’s going to spend all his effort fighting the instincts we all have.”
    He made a noise of protest, wanting to say that he was off medical and that he’d gotten his instincts well tamed long ago—
    Except he’d already come to the same conclusion about his assignment here and he knew better about his field status.
    She didn’t notice the protest, too wound up in her own words. “Instincts I’ve had my fill of already, or I wouldn’t be way out here trying not to get visions and using my healing on people’s dogs! ”
    Deer. Small, dog-size deer, at that. What had it been like for her, growing up among young predators? Jostling her, crowding her, making comments and insinuations...
    Maks couldn’t guess. He hadn’t had the chance to be among them at all.
    “Katie,” he said, trying again—and earned a sharp glance for invoking her name. “Maybe you’re right.” That slowed her down, all right. “Maybe I’m all they had to send. Things are bad there since—”
    Core D’oíche. The night that death and destruction had unfolded throughout the Southwest region at the hands of the Atrum Core—only a month ago at that. Maks had been barely recovered enough from the earlier Flagstaff attack to do his part.
    And Katie, gentle healer with seer’s eyes, had been so spared by that night that she didn’t truly understand. Had she even dreamed it, marginal seer that she was?
    He shook his head. He took a breath. “I’m all they could spare,” he repeated firmly. “But it doesn’t matter.”
    She narrowed her eyes at him, darkening the cinnamon with shadow.
    “I know this area. I know it, in ways you can’t—” He stopped, closed his eyes. Drew breath—the pines, the cedar, the blur of time and memory. Tried again. “This is my place, these woods. I can keep you safe while you figure out the things you’ve seen.”
    She watched him with eyes that remained unconvinced. She watched him as a creature on the edge of flight—emotional, if not literal. Far too aware that he skirted the edge of things that mattered deeply, but unable to interpret his emotions. And not knowing, after all, how seldom he came to such truths with others.
    Maks grumbled—disgruntled, wordless again. It often happened that way; always had. He’d spent too much of his life without words at all.
    A flicker of movement reflected in the passenger side-view mirror—Maks focused on it, found a man in a garish orange-and-lime shirt hesitating behind them on the road, one leg bracing his mountain bike. Found him, and reacted to him.
    Just as Katie reacted to Maks, recognizing instantly that his inner timbre had changed—moving away from him and up against her door. “I told you...people use this road.”
    Maks kept his gaze on the mirror. “Do you know this man?”
    She shrugged. “Lots of people ride here. My neighbor—Williams—he comes this way all the time.”
    He glanced away from the man just long enough to find her gaze—the faint annoyance there, the fears. He felt his own annoyance rise to meet it.
    “I don’t have any special