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annoy him. That it would undermine him—and it would do so in front of his team. But her reasons for doing it? Still sound. Still important. “For both brevis and Ruger.”
    “And for you.”
    Mariska felt her eyes narrow. “You were right at the head of the line when they handed out blunt, weren’t you?”
    “I don’t know what that means,” Jet said. “And I don’t think it matters. The thing that matters is how Ruger looked when he saw you in Nick’s office.”
    “Don’t tell me you think he should be working this without protection.” Righteous indignation lent a snap to her voice. “Maks just barely survived what he fought up there— Maks, your own best bodyguard. Ruger is a healer. Just because he’s a bear doesn’t mean he should go up there alone.”
    “Pack is best,” Jet said, agreeing so readily that it took Mariska by surprise. “But you didn’t have to hurt him to do this, and you did. How does that make you the best person to watch his back?”
    “I—” Mariska’s certainty fled, leaving her floundering and frustrated. “I’m only doing my job.”
    Jet looked at her with something akin to scorn. The sting of it tightened Mariska’s throat in a combination of familiar bitterness and old despair. “Pack,” Jet said, “is everything. Until you come from that place, you cannot do your job at all.”
    “That’s not fair,” Mariska muttered—but she did it to Jet’s retreating back, seeing in her tall, lithe form everything that she wasn’t; seeing in her graceful movement everything she had wanted to be.
    No, she told herself. What she wanted to be was seen for herself, accepted for herself, valued for herself...given the chance to prove herself.
    She’d thought this was it. She’d thought Ruger might understand; she’d thought she could be of important value to this team.
    But now she’d seen that look on Ruger’s face; she’d heard his fierce need to support his friends and his beleaguered brevis...she understood that she’d taken that chance from him.
    And now she’d watched them discuss things she’d only before read about. Now she’d seen the grim expression in Ian Scott’s eyes when he spoke of the amulets, and the concern on Sandy’s face. She’d seen them all trying to be matter-of-fact about circumstances that were so obviously grave, and she’d seen them reacting to a seer’s visions that she’d so readily shrugged off after reading about Katie Maddox’s lightweight history.
    Mariska looked at Jet’s retreating form, and for the second time that morning, swallowed back the fear that she’d been terribly, terribly wrong.
    * * *
    Ruger tossed his gear in the back of his assigned short-bed pickup truck, grateful that brevis motor pool hadn’t tried to cram him into the hybrid BMW SUV that had put that brief, slightly manic grin on Ian’s face.
    Grateful, too, that after they’d dumped their gear into the pickup, his two amulet flunkies had trailed Ian over to that vehicle, along with Sandra and Jet. At least, he was grateful until he did the math, and jerked his head up to see Mariska hoisting her own gear into the back of the truck...with no seats left in the BMW.
    “Yeahhh,” he said. And, “No. Trade out with Sandy.”
    Mariska cast a meaningful glance over her shoulder to where Ian had already put the car in gear and peeled out—too quickly—into Tucson’s rising midday traffic. “I was hoping we could talk.”
    “I was hoping we wouldn’t,” Ruger told her, yanking the door open and adjusting the driver’s seat back as far as it would go without even trying to get in first.
    “Don’t you think we should?” She stood solidly in the other doorway, the sun glinting so brightly off her dark hair as to be painful, nothing even hinting of hesitance in her manner. Lady bear, and everything about her was still just what he wanted. His body knew it, his brain knew it, his heart knew it, and damn, it made him mad. So close...
    “Look,” he