On the Hunt (Sentinel Wars #3.5)(53)
Author: Gena Showalter

She nodded. "Okay." But she clearly wasn’t. Her body trembled. Her mouth worked, but nothing came out as a tear broke free.

The sight twisted something tight inside him, which was a surprise.

On two continents’ worth of war, he’d watched lovers grieve, family weep for family, friend for friend. He had sympathized, supported, done his best to avenge the deaths or prevent more killing. But he’d never before felt another person’s tears as his own. Not this way.

"Don’t cry. Please." He reached for her, but she scooted up on the bed and wrapped her arms around her knees.

Her face was pale, her eyes dark and wide, and her voice broke when she said, "Those things.

Jesus, they’re real. They . . ." She dragged in a ragged, shallow breath. "The hair. And the smell.

And . . . Holy shit. Holy, holy shit." She stared at the bandage on her arm.

"Breathe," he said, pulling himself up so he was sitting next to her, both of them leaning back against the wall. His arm just grazed hers as she rocked. "Just keep breathing."

Sometimes that was the only thing to do. Keep going. Keep breathing. He’d figured that out the hard way.

Eventually, she started breathing more deeply, matching her rhythm to his, leaning on him a little, her skin warming against his. Finally, she let out a long, shuddering sigh, and said, "So . . . tell me about the bat-demons, chan camazotz."

Chan camazotz. An honorable title in the old trading language of the ancient Maya, bestowed by modern-day descendants who didn’t—couldn’t—understand the irony.

"How do you feel?" he asked, stalling.

She nodded, accepting the evasion. "Woozy. Scared. Freaked-out."

"Don’t blame you." He levered himself off the bed. "Let me get you some water."

"Wait. My team. The temple . . ."

"Javier and the others are fine." He paused. "But the temple is gone. I’m sorry." War demands sacrifice, he thought, hating that the quote was so accurate, and that he couldn’t get the damned writs out of his head no matter how many years he lived in the human world.

She lifted her hand to the locket she wore at her throat, in a habitual comfort-seeking gesture he wasn’t even sure she was aware of. "Gone," she repeated tonelessly.

When she said nothing more, he headed for the kitchen. By the time he returned with a couple of water-filled tumblers, her color was better, her expression less haunted. He handed her one of the glasses and sat back down on the mattress, this time facing her. "Drink. you’ll want to flush the rest of the drug out of your system."

That was a guess. He’d never seen anyone come around so quickly. Maybe the large number of zotz coming through the barrier had somehow diluted their individual potencies. Or perhaps the zotz that attacked her had already used up its venom out hunting.

Granted, there was a different, more complicated explanation, one that involved accelerated healing and strength, but that would’ve been the answer in another time and place. Not here and now. And not Natalie. No way.

She lifted the glass with a hand that still trembled faintly. But her voice was steady when she said, "Okay, JT. No bullshit. What are they? What’s going on? And why are you really here? Is it because of them?"

He had told her the sanitized life story he’d told most of the locals and all of the outsiders who had passed through over the years: that he had finished his second tour of duty, made some money during the dotcom boom, and wandered until he found someplace he wanted to stay.

Which was all true. What he hadn’t told her was why he’d been forced to put down roots in this particular chunk of forest.

He couldn’t tell her all of it now, either. "I didn’t come here because of the zotz, but yeah, they’re why I stayed. They were . . ." He didn’t like to remember it, even now. "Rez’s people didn’t have the weapons or training to handle them. They were trying to fight the zotz on their own, and losing." He paused. "I’m a soldier. That’s all I know how to be."

Which was the truth, thanks to an educational system that had been "perfected" over thousands of years but didn’t do dick to prepare a kid like him for life in the outside world. He’d thought escaping from the training compound would be the hardest part, but he’d been wrong. Acclimating had been an equal bitch, and he’d never really managed to integrate all the way.

"So I stayed here," he continued. "And I became chan camazotz."

Her eyes were glued to his face. It was pitch-black outside, and the bedside lamp cast a warm yellow glow that bronzed her pale skin. Her dark hair had fallen from its ponytail. With it hanging down, her bangs cut straight across, and her thick lashes outlining her eyes like kohl, she could have come straight from a tomb painting, an Egyptian princess. A priestess.

Don’t go there.

"Demons . . ." she said softly, almost to herself, still touching the locket.

"They’re not demons," he said firmly, doing damage control by trotting out the second layer of his prepared story, which he’d never used before because nobody had ever gotten close enough for him to need it. "There’s no such thing. The camazotz are an evolutionary relic, an archaic species that should have died out a long time ago, but somehow managed to keep going in this one little section of rain forest."

"Okay." She nodded. "All right.That makes more sense than demons arising from the underworld." But something changed in her expression, almost as if she knew he was lying . . . or she was lying to him in return. "What I don’t get is why you’re hunting them by yourself."

"What’s the alternative? Call in the scientific community to ‘study’ them?" He emphasized the word with finger quotes. "No, thanks. Next thing I know, the f**kers are a protected species with a growing population, and the village is being moved again." He’d seen too many forced relocations to allow that to happen unless Rez and his people wanted to go, which they adamantly didn’t. And he sure as hell wasn’t leaving; nor was he letting a bunch of eggheads get in there and start experimenting on the ‘ zotz. Especially not this close to the zero date.

The secrecy, too, was programmed into his genetic code.

"They need to be exterminated," he said, "not studied."

She nodded slowly, her eyes going shadowed. "So what happens now?"

The question hung in the air, taking on meaning beyond the words.

JT slugged back his water, stalling while his desire to get her the hell out of harm’s way jammed up against other, far more selfish needs. He’d partway blown his cover by admitting that he’d lied about not being into her. But he couldn’t blow the rest of it, not even for her.