Kodiak Chained by Doranna Durgin Page B

Mariska was here. And he was the one who could make it easier on both of them, or harder for everyone.
    It made him cranky.
    Cranky enough so he hardly noticed that Ian’s team had completed their sweep of the area, declared it undisturbed, and now waved them down to the entrance. Mariska made an offhand noise in her throat, a thoughtful little bear-hum, and Ruger pulled his attention back to the moment at hand to follow her in.
    But the moment he entered the facility, he stopped short, wrinkling his nose. “I thought you warded those animals,” he told Sandy.
    “I did!” Her expression of distaste said it clearly enough—she smelled the decay, too. Nothing so profound that a purely human nose would have detected it, but distinct to Sentinel senses. Ruger headed straight for the creatures Mariska had dispatched the day before—specimens, now—but before he’d even reached them, he realized he’d gone past the source of the odor.
    Mariska had come to the same conclusion—turning slowly in one place, hunting the source of this new dismay. “They were all good when we left last night,” she said. “They had food and water and—”
    “Over here.” Ruger found it—the beakless bird, motionless in the shavings below its perch. He pulled the cage from the shelf with brusque, no-nonsense urgency and placed it on one of the area’s worktables. The lid came off easily.
    Mariska bent to watch as he scooped it out from the cage, the slight frown of her headache turning into something more profound. “What the hell? Ruger, it doesn’t have a...a face. ”
    Ian stood back far enough to stay out of the way, close enough to be in on the conversation. “Didn’t we know that?”
    “No—I mean—” Rattled, she took a step back; Ruger reoriented the stiff little body in his hand. “Before, it didn’t have a beak, but it had a weird little flat face. Now—”
    Nothing.
    No beak. No eyes. No nostrils and no mouth. Just a round, closed little head covered in fine iridescent blue feathers, faint indentations indicating where those features would have been located.
    Nothing at all.
    * * *
    Ciobaka curled up in the far corner of his cage, past his toilet area and into the dim section where the overhead daylight didn’t quite reach. He hid his nose under the tip of his brushy tail and left his ears flat against his skull.
    “Still sulking?” Ehwoord asked, but not in the voice that suggested he wanted a response. “Failure merits punishment, Ciobaka. Tarras understands that.”
    The day before, they’d gone out to find one of Ehwoord’s pack members dead outside the other buried structure. This morning Tarras had looked distinctly pale; he didn’t quite stand erect as he moved about his chores.
    Ciobaka knew that what had happened wasn’t his fault. He knew that being unable to enter the other installation because its securities had failed wasn’t his fault, either.
    “Fortunately, Yovan was successful in restoring the camera network.” Ehwoord adjusted his huge monitor, no doubt still obsessing over the flat, grainy moving images on it. “I’ll continue my work from here—in fact, I already have. I believe our friends are just now beginning to understand.”
    “Is that—” Tarras hesitated, obviously looking for better words than Is that smart?
    Ehwoord didn’t give him a chance. “Careful,” he said softly, and Tarras turned away.
    Ciobaka turned away, too. Biding his time.

Chapter 9
    R uger looked at the deformed bird with sick disbelief—unable to voice any cogent remark, unable to come to any conclusions. Just frozen there in that horror.
    Mariska’s hand came to rest on his arm. She gently removed the bird from his hands, adding it to the other specimens, and Sandy stepped up to apply the preservation warding. Only then did he look down at his hands, finding them fisted and shaking with tension. “When I find him...”
    “When we find him,” Mariska said. She swiped the bangs away from her