Then maybe he would get rid of whatever poison she had injected into his system.
His hands fisted as he remembered the feel of that taut, tight body of hers pinning him against the warehouse door. Nobody had ever pinned him, aroused him, and then laughed in his face before. He owed her for that. Hard and raw.
Her life was one eternal rampage. Maybe it was time someone turned the tables on her and went after her with the same kind of relentlessness with which she went after the entire world.
And maybe it was past time that someone took that harpy down a peg or two, and showed her who was boss.
SEVEN 
By the time Aryal finally parked the car in a gravel parking lot at a deserted campsite, it was late afternoon and clouds obscured the nearby mountain peaks. Tantalizing hints of land magic had begun to tickle at her senses for the last half hour or so of the drive. She longed to take flight and hunt for the elusive feeling, soar over the mountain range and kick her feet in the thick clouds.
The day had warmed enough to melt the patchy snow at the lower altitudes, but sunset came early in March in the Czech Republic, and the temperature was already falling again. When she opened the car door, the damp chill air was like a cold, wet washcloth slapping her in the face. The fresh air smelled wonderful, and it felt good and bracing, but it wasn’t enough to cool the heat pouring through her body.
Grateful to be out of the confinement of the car at last, she stretched her aching back. Instantly an image of Quentin stretching in the car flashed in her mind. He looked like a great, lazy cat as he did it, his blue eyes vivid in his tanned face. He smelled like virility and feline Wyr. The scent got up her nose and made her crazy. Her Wyr side wanted to claw at him. Hell, her human side wanted to claw at him too.
Gods, this had turned into a long trip already, and they were only on the first day. And she had lost her only comfort, the conviction that everybody would be better off if she just committed a quiet, itsy-bitsy little murder.
Aryal flew by her instincts, and every instinct had screamed for so long that Quentin was a dangerous man. And he was dangerous. Not many creatures could get her down on the ground with their hands around her throat.
Had she let that skew her perspective? Is that why she had pursued him so relentlessly? After all, a dangerous man would make an exceedingly dangerous criminal.
But he had been telling the truth earlier, and so had she—she really didn’t care about the smuggling he had done. If she pushed it and continued to squander her time digging into his past, maybe she could get enough evidence to kick him out of his sentinel position, but what would it cost her?
He was already well liked, and he was Pia’s special friend. And Aryal had taken sober note of not only Dragos’s words, but of Grym’s as well, along with the cold assessing way that Graydon had looked at her when she had gone to talk to him in the cafeteria. She had already used up all of her considerable free rein with not only Dragos, but with almost everybody else too. She was riding high on everyone’s annoyance radar and low on tolerance. Nobody’s first impulse was going to be to give her any slack.
So she spent the drive doing something she rarely did, which was considering the possible consequences of her actions. The exercise hurt her brain and offended her nature. But the bottom line was, all that effort and upheaval would be to pin him for crimes that she didn’t give a shit about anyway. Gah, if only he had been a spy, or involved in some super secret assassination plot against Dragos or somebody else she loved!
At least she didn’t have to give up her hate on him. She just had to give up the whole “hunting for an act of God to squash him like a bug so she could innocently present his crushed and lifeless body to Dragos” plan.
She had to admit, that did make life a lot simpler.
And besides, giving up on the plan was one thing. She could still hurt him a whole lot if he gave her any reason to. She cheered at the thought.
They were going to have to leave the car, maybe for some time, so she had parked in an unobtrusive spot underneath some trees for whatever shelter that might offer from the elements. As she looked around, she noted that the campsite had permanent metal grills for cooking. Probably small animals had built nests in half of them. She preferred setting up her own fire ring.
It was early to stop for the day, but there was also no reason to wreck themselves. This land was beautiful, but it would not be friendly terrain in mid-March, and it was not like they could push hard, finish their assignment and go home early. And Dragos had already said they couldn’t show up again in New York before two weeks were up.
They’d already had a sleepless night and a transcontinental flight, and Aryal had eaten only one full meal since yesterday. Granted it was a big meal, but her body was telling her that it was ready for another one.
Quentin had exited the car too. He studied the scene with one arm resting on the car roof. Lifting his head, he scented the breeze. He said, “There are wolves in these mountains.”
Sentinel or no, a large enough pack of any kind of predator could bring one of them down, but the wolves weren’t really a threat to either her or Quentin. Any wolves would sense that they were the more dangerous predators and normally give them a wide berth. A wild pack would have to have an overriding reason to attack them.
She could also take to the air and leave behind any confrontation, and if Quentin couldn’t outrun them, he could go to high ground, maybe climb a tree, and wait them out. The weather wasn’t bitter enough to turn any wild pack desperate enough to tree him for days until he became desperate enough to take them on.
But wolves could become a nuisance, especially when they cooked food, so they would still need to stay wary. She said briskly, “We should set up camp.”
He tilted his head from side to side, stretching his neck muscles. “All right. I did the bulk of the work this morning, so I’m going to take off and see if I can hunt down some fresh game for supper. You can set up camp.”
“Hey!” she exclaimed. Hunting was the fun chore.
He didn’t stay to argue with her. Instead he shapeshifted into a massive black panther and after one expressive glance at her, he glided away. She made a face, looked around at the deepening dusk and set to work.
She was tempted to erect just one tent and claim it, but if he came back with fresh meat, she wanted some, so she set up a proper camp with a tarp strung between two trees in case of rain or snow, and the two dome tents set on more tarps on opposite sides of a ringed campfire. Modern materials made camping a breeze. The dome tents were light, portable, and erected within five minutes.
Not only had Quentin bought sleeping bags, but he also had picked up thin insulating pads that would protect them from the bitter chill of the ground. They weren’t as comfortable as air mattresses, but they weren’t as heavy and bulky either. Everything he had bought was top of the line and lightweight for serious, long-distance hiking.
The most time-intensive thing was gathering wood for a campfire. She worked on that quickly, and after she had gathered deadwood from the immediate area, she jogged around the larger campsite to see if anybody had left wood behind from the previous season.
She was in luck and found a couple of armloads. She hauled them back to camp, started the fire, and opened the bottle of twenty-six-year-old scotch she had found in one of the bags in the car. As she took her first pull from the bottle, the black panther slipped out of the gathering darkness, two winter hares in his mouth.