Max grinned, and Gio nearly fell off his fence rail. First of all, he had never seen her do it before, not like that, wide and bright. Second, she had dimples, and it turned out that the soft contrast of dimples with her hard-edged mercenary persona hit him with a sucker punch straight under the ribs made out of hold-her-now-and-never-let-go feelings.
Based on how things had gone in her office earlier, he had a feeling that even trying to do so would make her run away forever. And now that he'd had his vision of the jaguar, he knew exactly what it would look like. But if she was aware of his concerns, it didn't show. She looked wild and happy.
"Want to see my tools?" Max asked, still smiling.
"More than anything," Gio said.
The dimple didn't go away.
* * *
It was impressive and perhaps a bit scary how much gear Max had managed to pick up on three days' notice.
"More like two days," Max said when he mentioned it out loud. "I had to drive here, you know. Some of us can'tteleport." After a moment, laying out the burlap sacks so she could spread her things without getting them dusty, she added, "To be honest, I had a lot of this in a storage container already. I'm holding on to the rest of your money for future expenses."
She had a roll of fine steel cable and two pairs of sturdy-looking handcuffs, a roll of desert camo netting, spring-loaded traps, and a jumble of assorted other items like tools and pieces of scrap lumber.
There were also guns.
"We agreed—" Gio began.
"I agreed to capture him alive, and I will, or at least I'll try. This is a tranquilizer rifle." She laid a hand on it. "The tricky thing is not knowing whether to tranq him like a shifter or a human. We can metabolize a lot more of any drug than a human, you know. Because of that, the first shot might not work if we set it up for human tolerance, and we don't want him to magic us flat while we're trying to hit him with another dart. But a shifter-strength dose will kill a human. Then I had a fantastic idea. Do you know how wildlife biologists catch giraffes?"
"No," Gio said, fascinated not with the equipment spread on the coarse fabric of the bags, but with her. She was in her element and full of bright energy, her eyes sparkling and her hands dancing through the air as she explained.
"Giraffes are notoriously hard to tranquilize because they get hit with a dart and just start running, and their legs are like ten feet long, so either they end up two miles away when they finally keel over, or they fall hard enough to break their neck. Or both. So here's how biologists do it: they fire a dart at them that's loaded with a lethal dose of narcotics, and the giraffe falls over immediately and has a heart attack, and then they run up and shoot them full of Narcan."
"....What," Gio said.
"It is completely true, look it up. The thing about narcotics is that we have really good narcotic rescue drugs, so it turns out if you want something to go down fast and hard, and don't mind if it has a really bad headache afterwards and wakes up fast, this is absolutely a thing you can do." She waggled another dart at him. "I also have ketamine if you want to go for the traditional solution."
"You're terrifying," Gio said, by which he meant,You're amazing.
* * *
They spent the afternoon setting up their trap, dragging things into position, kicking dust over wires, arguing about the exact firing distance of the tranq darts. Max had a rifle for herself and a long-barreled tranquilizer pistol for him that looked like a BB gun. After they got the gear in place, she took him out back of the hut and made him practice.
The tranq guns, she explained,wereBB guns, in effect. They were air guns loaded with darts instead of BBs or other relatively harmless childhood ammo.
"You load the dart and then pump the gun to arm it," she explained, demonstrating. "You'll get one shot at a time, and then you'll have to load another dart. Each dart is technically a syringe loaded with the drug. I have some empty ones to practice with. Well, technically they're loaded with water so the weight is correct."
She had him practice loading and arming both the guns, rifle and pistol, and firing at a cardboard target nailed to the fence. It fluttered in the wind and Gio complained about that, but Max pointed out that it wasn't like their target would be staying still, either.
"I think maybe I'll put you on the cables," Max said, as his tenth or twelfth dart sailed past the target into the gathering dusk.
"Not to worry you, but I just thought of something." Gio spoke while he went to retrieve the darts, feeling like he was littering this pristine place. "There's still going to be the portal and everyone on the other side to deal with."
"Oh boy, do I ever have a solution for that," Max said. "You got kind of stroppy about the guns, so I decided not to show you the grenades."
"Max—"
"Tear gas," she said. "Not fragmentation. And a flashbang or two. They'll be closing that portal in record time if a few of those get lobbed through."
"You know," Gio said, "I'm starting to wish we'd had you along for every run-in we've had with these people."
It was too dark by now to continue target practice. Max lit a battery-powered lantern in the cabin and heated some stew on the Sterno stove, which burned with a clear blue flame. Gio was fascinated. He had served a term of military service as a young man—it was compulsory at the time in Italy—but otherwise his experience of travel generally involved hotels. Even during his time on the run, he had been keeping up a certain basic standard of motel life. However, now that Max was involved, he found himself suddenly intrigued.
"How does it work?" he asked her.
