Heart's Lair Read Online Free PDF

called out to the soldiers behind her, "but I felt a presence over here."
    From his hiding place, Karic saw her gesture in his general vicinity. His heart slammed into his gut. She had led them to him, without one shred of remorse or one moment of hesitation. An impotent rage grew in him. She was a mindless, cold-blooded Bellatorian, just like all the restand he was at her mercy.
    She paused a few meters from him, a look of puzzlement wrinkling her brow. She was searching for him through the tumult of the storm, seeking to penetrate his protective aura. For a fleeting moment, Karic' thought his deception had prevailed. Then a triumphant light flared in her eyes. She looked directly at him through the dense shrubbery.
    Determined deep blue eyes collided with glittering green ones, and a battle of wills ensued. Both knew what the other wanted. Neither gave way. Yet all the while Liane never revealed his presence. There seemed to be something holding her back, a strange reluctance.
    It would be so simple, Liane knew, to raise her hand and point to his hiding place. But she also realized the inevitable consequences of that action, and that knowledge filled her with loathing. Necator had given specific instructions to kill the Cat Man. The soldiers planned to turn the search canus on him. Bound and wounded as he was, Karic wouldn't stand a chance. She shook aside the disconcerting realization that she'd come to think of the Cat Man as Karic. It only added to her confusion, and confusion, at that moment, seemed the very least of her problems.
    Liane stood on the precipice of a fateful decision. If she turned from him and led the trackers away, she also would be turning her back on everything that she'd been raised to revere. But what was loyalty and blind obedience to saving a life? And the value of human life was as innate to the Sententian part of her, as blind obedience was to the Bellatorian part.
    With a sigh dredged from deep within her, Liane turned to the soldiers. "I was mistaken. I led you on a false track."
    She motioned back the way they had come. "Let us return to the spot where I first felt his presence. Perhaps I can pick up his aura again from there."
    The voices faded as Liane led them away. Karic lay there for a long while, not daring to move or believe they wouldn't return, not daring to believe that Liane not only hadn't betrayed him but had deliberately chosen to deceive her own people in order to save his life.
    That knowledge kept the pain at bay for a time. Perhaps it was the cold, seeping into his very bones as the sol waned, that finally stirred him to awareness. Perhaps it was his wound or the myriad of other insults inflicted upon his body. Whatever it was, Karic found he was no stronger after his rest than he had been before it and even more miserable.
    He was going to die here, for he needed food, shelter and his wound tended, and he was powerless to obtain them. The thought angered him. Never in his life had he been so helpless. Karic knew Liane didn't dare come back, nor did he want her to. She'd risked far too much for him as it was. It was up to him now.
    The thought fueled his resolve. Suddenly, more than anything, Karic didn't want Liane's brave sacrifice to be in vain. Heedless to the gnawing torment of his leg he drove his body forward, his progress heartbreakingly slow. Time passed, the center of his existence revolving around the forward movement of abraded shoulders and tormented legs, until Karic ceased to remember any life before this moment. After a while, reflex rather than reason stimulated the progress of his body.

    She found him lying on the forest floor only a few meters beyond the thicket, his feeble attempts at crawling spasming his body in an odd, rhythmic fashion. Liane stared down at Karic, so moved by his heroic determination she almost wept. Then her practiced instincts as a healer took over.
    Her glance swung to the raw, gaping wound at the back of his thigh, and she winced.