Sentinels: Jaguar Night
Doranna Durgin
Powerful and passionate protector of the land…Come nightfall Dolan prowls the Southwest as a shape-shifting Sentinel, a formidable creature destined to protect the world from darkness. By day, this intensely gorgeous man needs the intuition and spirit of innocent Meghan to find redemption. Her mother died protecting a magical manuscript that the Sentinels’ dark counterparts would do anything to recover.With an unbreakable will and all-consuming passion, only Dolan possesses the strength to save Meghan. But is she strong enough to tame his inner beast?
Dolan’s eyes narrowed as he drank in the rising power of what lay between them…
He let it swell within him instead of fighting it, until it verged on intoxication.
Below him, Meghan drew her sweatshirt together with one hand and shoved her hair back with the other, poised for flight. Suddenly vulnerable–and yet unable to keep from leaning towards him ever so slightly.
It was his undoing.
He leaped from the rock, invoking the shift along the way–riding the flash and crackle of the change and landing human.
And damned ready to face this thing between them.
“Meghan,” he said, and his voice came out as more of a growl. He rode the pounding demands in his body, the ache of being so close and yet not touching her. Until she lifted her face slightly, leaning into what lay between them. She took a deep breath; she let it out on a single, quiet, “Yes.”
He hesitated an instant longer–just long enough to be sure of what she’d said.
Doranna Durgin spent her childhood filling notebooks, first with stories and art, and then with novels. After obtaining a degree in wildlife illustration and environmental education, she spent a number of years deep in the Appalachian Mountains. When she emerged, it was as a writer who found herself irrevocably tied to the natural world and its creatures–and with a new touchstone to the rugged spirit that helped settle the area, which she instils in her characters.
Doranna’s first fantasy novel received the 1995 Compton Crook/Stephen Tall award for the best first book in the fantasy, science fiction and horror genres; she now has fifteen novels of eclectic genres on the shelves. Most recently she’s leaped gleefully into the world of action romance. When she’s not writing, Doranna builds web pages, wanders around outside with a camera and works with horses and dogs. You can find a complete list of her titles at www.doranna.net, along with scoops about new projects, a lot of silly photos and a link to her SFF Net newsgroup.
Sentinels:
Jaguar Night
BY
Doranna Durgin
MILLS & BOON
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk/)
Dedicated, of course, to the critters in my life–
Jean-Luc, Cheysuli Jean-Luc Picardigan
OJP NAP OJC NAC, CGC
Belle, Cheysuli’s Silver Belle
CD RE MXP3 PAX EAC EJC, CGC
Connery, Ch Cedar Ridge DoubleOSeven
CD RE MX MXJ EAC EJC, CGC
and Kacey, Xtacee Carbon Unit, CGC, who was still
with me when I wrote this book, and Strider the
WonderHound, who was there when it all started.
But especially to Duncan the Lipizzan, aka Pluto
Gladys, who has resisted critical injury, extreme
distance and lengthy separation to always fulfil the
task of keeping me humble.
And with thanks to Tashya Wilson and Tara Gavin,
for giving me a chance at all this fun!
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u0a2e7ffe-11dd-5a8e-948d-f0b2886980aa)
Excerpt (#ud7a2918e-bb6e-583f-b544-175493d3ab0f)
About The Author (#u1be01b2e-4e2a-5902-aed3-73669ac94f8b)
Title Page (#u02f5b682-9ea0-582e-b893-ec3559d4810d)
Dedication (#u46544a81-b7c9-517c-84a7-f8c10ee126e7)
Prologue (#u6874a4bb-a8c3-5a64-b91c-73deb410cac7)
Chapter 1 (#u6f7922f1-7725-5b22-896e-e1233c14ee71)
Chapter 2 (#ue0ddf31f-045b-574a-932d-0bf3affaee20)
Chapter 3 (#u8303a075-bb2f-5a47-99a6-cd7ebff5a77d)
Chapter 4 (#ub8f76a20-5990-5acd-80d4-2e43549bfa8c)
Chapter 5 (#ue372b5ec-f697-5e07-b0b0-75e92c3e3bcb)
Chapter 6 (#ud6c72111-5387-5f26-b277-a3dc7d2f362d)
Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Preview (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
Meghan crossed her arms over her flat ten-year-old’s chest and gave her mother a defiant stare. “You never listen!”
Her mother smiled. Her mother always smiled. Sometimes her smile hinted at a joke not yet discovered by anyone else…sometimes it was a cleverness she’d seen in the world. Sometimes it was just because. Thus was the coyote shape-shifter—hard to pin down, cheerfully unpredictable.
Tonight, that smile broke Meghan’s young heart. “The animals are worried! Listen to them!”
“Ah, my sensitive girl…connected with us all.” Margery Lawrence sat right where she was, cross-legged there on the ranch-house porch, and pulled Meghan’s resisting body into her arms. Lanky, coltish Meghan didn’t quite fit there any longer, but her mother appeared not to notice. Her mother ran a hand along Meghan’s hair, smoothing…petting.
Meghan wasn’t fooled. She didn’t relax into the embrace. “You shouldn’t go,” she muttered. It sounded sullen even to her own ears.
“Meggie,” her mother said, making the word a caress. “I won’t be alone. There’s someone coming to help, a fine young man who takes the jaguar when he shifts. He’ll watch for me.”
The demand burst out of her. “Then why doesn’t he do all of it? Why make you go out?”
Her mother laughed in genuine amusement. “Because he’s big and brawny, but he’s not half so clever as this nimble coyote…and he’s got no nose for the tricky things. Besides, he doesn’t know this land the way I do. The way you do.”
But Meghan sat, stiff and resistant and still unable to keep her lip from quivering.
Her mother pressed a quick kiss to her forehead. “I might not really be one of them, Meggie, but I don’t need the Sentinels to tell me how important this is. Neither do you. The animals wouldn’t feel it, otherwise—or the land. Or even you, for that matter. So the fine young man will meet me here, and we’ll go take care of things. And then the animals won’t feel this way to you any longer, and neither will the land.”
More words burst out, even though she knew better. “But it’s not fair! They don’t pay any attention to you at all, not until they want something! They don’t even think you’re good enough to be one of them, but they still—”
“Shhh,” her mother said, a firmness in her voice. “You know that’s not true. It’s my decision to stay apart from them, as much as is allowed. This…this is something I have to do. It’s my legacy…and in some ways, on some day, it’ll be yours. Now give me a kiss and a hug, and let’s make sure the dogs are put up and won’t bother our jaguar visitor.”
But the jaguar never came.
And Margery Lawrence left anyway.
Chapter 1
Dolan knew where to find her—or at least, how. Her scent was all over this mountainous “sky island” territory, the fat junipers and sage and high ground. The hint of her ancient Vigilia nature tingled beneath, along with the sharp smell of the occasional pine.
The daughter. The one who’d grown up apart from them…who barely realized what she was. If anyone could help, it was her. Meghan Lawrence. Child of a Sentinel who’d died for the cause.
A woman who’d long ago rejected them all, just as they’d rejected her.
On the eastern horizon, menace loomed in a long, hazy cloud that had no business in this southwestern spring sky—the Atrum Core, keeping track of this area, their dark presence a constant itch between his shoulder blades. For all he knew, they and their twisted prince sought the very same trail he now followed.
He’d have to get there first.
Nearby, an ATV crawled clumsily over fragile soil, chewing up plant life. Dolan veered off in annoyance, a silent snarl on his lips. The rider—oblivious beneath a helmet—crept forward in jerks and stops, challenged by the rugged nature of the protected ground. This, too, was why Dolan was here. Sentinel of the earth in all ways.
He eased back down to ghost along behind and above the man, taking up a loose-limbed trot. Biding his time. Controlling the thrill of the hunt that made his ears flatten, his head sink lower. This wasn’t the hunt. This was the job. His life.
And so when the time was right, when the ground slanted sharply away but not too sharply, when the creosote and scrub oaks offered uphill cover, Dolan coiled himself on powerful legs and freed his eversimmering anger, leaping to smack the ATV rider right off his machine and tumbling down the slope.
He almost couldn’t control the impulse to follow the hunt, the kill, the satisfaction, strong jaws crunching bone; he took his ire out on the machine instead, shredding the plastic and cables and vulnerable exposed guts. Even as the rider lifted his head, Dolan whirled and bounded into the brush, surging with instincts and impulses that wanted to stay. To kill.
A mile away he stopped, crouching into the wispy grasses and rough ground, panting. Leaving the man behind to return to his own forbidden quest.
He wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to have waited in Sonoita for orders, for a team. Waited until too late. Just as his brother had.
He folded his whiskers back tight with disdain, crouched down close to the earth and dismissed the Sentinels from his thoughts. He closed his eyes, opened his nose and rediscovered the trail. The woman. The dark quest he’d been following before he’d indulged himself.
No. It’s part of the job. Of protecting this territory. Not just from the evil that menaced it, the Atrum Core, but from the mundane things as well. The man would think twice before returning here, embroidering the story of his brush with death until his friends ceased to truly believe him—but they, too, might also think twice the next time they went four-wheeling on protected lands.
And the man might have seen a flash of black, might have felt the brush of fur and whisker and massive paw…but nothing more. For all he knew, he’d been nailed by a desert Bigfoot.
Not a huge, sleek and healthy black jaguar with startling blue eyes and a man’s thoughts.
Meghan saw him coming. She knew him instantly for what he was; her mother had taught her that much before she’d died. Vigilia. Sentinel. Those who had failed her mother. Those who had sent her out to die alone.
Another couple of steps and it hit her in a literal gasp of realization—his other nature.
…a fine young man who takes the jaguar.
Jaguar. In every step, emanating from his very being…as clear to Meghan as if he’d stalked up to her in form, just as her mother’s coyote had always glimmered clearly to Meghan’s younger eyes.
The horse knew what he was, too, and she barely managed to secure the side rein snap before he leaped away, pulling from her grasp to gallop in panicked circles at the outside edge of the training pen. Around and around, flashing repeatedly between her and the approaching man, tail clamped tight and ears back, side reins flapping.
She walked toward the man from within the pen, her stomach already churning. Never mind the way he moved—fluidly, each step deliberate and yet barely contained. Never mind his expression—so alert, so intense—or the very direct way he approached her. She could have closed her eyes and still known him as Sentinel. As a jaguar.
That was one of her mother’s legacies. The connections, whether she wanted them or not.
He was close now, close enough to see that his eyes weren’t black at all, but a deep, startling blue. Close enough so the terrified gelding fled to the opposite side of the pipe panel round pen, snorting and grunting his fear.
She slipped between the metal rails and straightened as he came to a stop. She didn’t give him time to speak. “I know what you are. Who you are.” She felt it in every fiber of her being, a strange reverberation that raised the hair on her arms. “You’re not welcome here.”
He lifted his chin ever so slightly. Instead of resentment or disappointment, interest flickered in those eyes. “You think you know what I am.”
She fought the urge to take a step back. Nothing but cold metal pipe behind her. “I know enough.” She wouldn’t make the mistake of listening to Sentinel words—to Sentinel requests. Especially not from this man.
He eased closer, off to the side, as though looking at her from a slightly different angle would somehow improve his perception of her. “I didn’t know your mother.” The morning light flashed against his eyes, bringing out their clarity; it skipped along the angles of his cheek and jaw and got lost in the gloss of thick black hair. All black, so wrong for this climate…black jeans, black leather biker jacket. “But I know of her. We all do.”
She snorted. It wasn’t delicate. “Right, because she was your patsy. She let you talk her into dangers she shouldn’t even have been near.”
At that he shook his head, short and almost imperceptible. “Not I.”
“As if it matters,” she said, bitterness leaking through along with disbelief. The noises of the ranch folded in around her—horses calling to each other in reaction to the gelding’s fear; human voices raised as they queried each other, pausing in chores. They were her family now, the people who worked rescue with her. And they didn’t need this interference any more than she did. “You know what? I’m busy. And you’re scaring the hell out of this horse. Go away, Sentinel.”
“He’ll get used to me,” the man said absently. “They do.” He shifted again, still watching her. Still giving her that shivery feeling, the same one she’d felt all morning. He’d probably been watching her that long. Abruptly, he crouched, resting his elbows on his knees to look up at her. Damned well settling in. “I haven’t yet done what I’ve come for.”
“You probably think it’s important, too.” Something to do with saving the world. With asking too much, just as they’d asked too much of her mother—whatever it had been. Some vital mission. Something impossible that her kind, life-loving mother had no chance to survive. “But I won’t. So, seriously. Go away now.” With someone else, she might have hidden her irritation, taken the blunt edge out of her voice. But this man…
She felt as though she already knew him. As though he made no attempt to hide any of himself from her, and as though she had no need to hide herself in return, not even to soften that bluntness.
And so when he started, “The Atrum Core—” she didn’t let him finish. She knew the Atrum Core organization held the bad guys; it seemed as though she’d always known. They were ancient power mongers, sucking energy from the land to use for themselves, never heeding the cost to the earth or individuals. She didn’t need to be told again, and she especially didn’t need to hear what he wanted her to do to fight them. The Atrum Core had been out of her mother’s league; they were far, far out of hers. She held up her hand, and he stopped. He didn’t like it, but he gave her that much—here on her own land, her own turf.
“I,” she said, each word distinct, “do not care. Do you really think there’s more to it than the little incestuous battles between the Sentinels and the Core? Do you think it matters to the rest of the world? Because if so, you need to get out more often.”
She expected to make him angry, to set those eyes flashing. She expected a retort…she’d even hoped to send him stomping off in reaction. But he only watched her for a long moment, hands relaxed.
She didn’t expect him to say, so quietly, “Your mother was not a patsy. She was a hero.”
Unexpected tears prickled at her eyes and nose; her throat tightened. Ten years old she’d been when her mother died. Ten. And she still didn’t know what had happened that night. Only that her mother had been wearily satisfied with what she’d accomplished—and then she’d gone off to lead the Core astray. Alone. “Yeah, well, guess what. I’m not. Not a patsy, not a hero. Your people are users and liars, and they’re not getting both of us.”
His hands tightened briefly into fists, then opened again, a deliberate effort. He stood, abruptly enough so she stiffened in response. “You’re right. They can be both of those things.” He looked at her as though she weren’t wearing old jeans and scarred boots and plenty of barn dirt, her dark hair escaping from its sun-streaked ponytail in spite of the ball cap she wore. He looked long enough that she suddenly wondered what he saw. He added, “But I’m not.”
Not like that. Sure.
Her throat hadn’t loosened yet. Her words came out hoarse and a little desperate even to her own ears, though every bit as intent as they’d been the first time. “I want you to go.”
He eased back a step; in some odd way it seemed like advance instead of retreat. He lifted his chin slightly, acknowledging her words. “Leaving now,” he said, “would waste your mother’s sacrifice. You don’t give her enough credit…Neither did we. But I’m beginning to understand just what happened here fifteen years ago. I thought you would want to know, too…to help preserve what she accomplished.”
She barely had time to process that this man knew what she didn’t—knew what her mother had done, and why she’d died. And then, quite suddenly, he was looking at her from beneath a lowered brow, the kind of look that seemed charming on Clooney and yet downright dark on this man. “I’ll go,” he said, forestalling the deep breath she nearly took to repeat the demand. “But I’m not leaving. I’m not done here, Meg.”
“Meghan,” she said. “Not Meg. Not Meggie. Not anymore.”
He acknowledged that with the slightest tip of his head. “Meghan. Before I go, I need to warn you—”
“The Atrum Core,” she said. “Yeah, yeah.”
He moved so quickly she didn’t realize until too late that he had trapped her against the round pen pipe panels. Just suddenly…he was there, taller than she’d thought and closing her in an intimate cage, his hands gripping the top pipe on either side of her shoulders. There was a growl low in his throat; her whole body clenched in response to it—a fear and flight response, as well as the recognition of what he was. “Don’t,” he said, and stopped, closing his eyes to take a deep breath. Control. In that moment she heard nothing but the galloping pace of her own heartbeat, loud enough so surely he must hear it, too. He released his breath through flared nostrils and opened his eyes to pin her with his gaze, direct and inescapable. “Don’t take them so lightly,” he said. “You may not count yourself as one of us, but you can be sure that they do. That Fabron Gausto does. If he finds you here, death will be the least of what your people will suffer.”
She didn’t have time for a response before he tore himself away, heading back to the ridge that rose up to the south of the ranch buildings. Even if she’d found the words, she wouldn’t have shouted them at his back. She stood, shell-shocked, right where he’d left her, staring dumbly after him with just enough presence of mind to realize she was trembling.
He stopped his ground-eating pace and turned to look back at her, so deliberately she thought he might even return. But instead a sudden strobe of intense blue light scattered and fractured, startling her eyes. She blinked, and that was all the longer it took for him to change. To become other.
Knowing it was one thing. Seeing it was another. One moment a man, the next…black and low and lithe, staring back at her with intelligence. Jaguar. As she’d thought…only deep, dappled black, not gold and rosette. The jaguar once native to this area, stronger and heavier of bone than a leopard, imbued with power. He hesitated there, tail held low and twitching, as if waiting for Meghan’s response.
But Meghan stood transfixed, pinned by both memories and unwilling awe. Behind her, the gelding stamped a foot and snorted, a high blast of alarm that would carry across the whole ranch. The black jaguar turned and bounded away, effortlessly scaling steep ground into the cover of juniper, oak and pine.
And Meghan sagged against the metal pipe behind her, cursing his presence here—cursing the Sentinels, cursing the Atrum Core…cursing the jaguar who’d finally shown up. Hearing his words echo in her mind.
You may not count yourself as one of us, but you can be sure that they do.
Chapter 2
Dolan surprised himself by returning to the slopes above the Lawrence ranch. He’d let the jaguar have the night, submersing most of his humanity until sunrise. He hadn’t expected to find himself here come dawn, with the hard glint of light skipping over the tops of the opposite ridge. He squeezed cat eyes closed against it—and opened the eyes of a man. Colors brighter but not quite as crisp, movements dulled from sharp clarity to mere smears.
Below, the ranch spread out in a series of outbuildings, paddocks and a main house with a satellite casita. Still sleeping, all of them. Even the horses were silent, slouching in the sunshine to shake the chill of the high desert night.
He wondered if his brother had made it this far.
Leave it alone. You’ll never know.
He shouldn’t have come back. He could do nothing more than draw attention to her, and he’d seen how unprepared she was, how resistant to warning—how reactive to his very presence. But here he was, sitting on the crest of a ridge with his legs crossed and his hands relaxed on his knees, watching for the movement he already knew as hers.
He’d come here the day before, too. Fool. Lured by nothing more profound than her very presence, the tangible self she’d imbued into this land along with her love of it—just as her mother had. Lured by the hope that she might change her mind, if he could find the right moment to approach again. More fool yet.
He’d known her just as surely as she’d known him. He hadn’t needed the research, the driver’s license photo from sources that didn’t know they’d been tapped, the old online yearbook from her high school. Glossy dark hair, wiry form with a scarcity of curves, a narrowchinned foxy face and almond eyes, so heavily lashed as to look sooty. He’d known her, all right. And he’d—
He lifted his shoulders, tensed, and let them drop—literally shrugging away the memory of his unexpected response to her, the ache he could still feel.
Or trying to.
Best not to go down there again in any event. He didn’t have the time to convince her to delve through painful memories in hunt of the tiniest clue. He definitely didn’t have the time to sort out his response to her—a stupid, foolish response from someone who had every reason to know better.
He’d have to hope that the remains of the fading wards on this land were strong enough. They’d already failed in the untamed areas, but here, right around the heart of the ranch, they held. “You’re on your own, Meghan Lawrence,” he murmured out loud, and then wondered whom he was trying to convince.
Knowing the answer just made him mad.
He came to his feet in one swift motion, turning his back on the sharpening sunlight. Too bad it couldn’t burn away the persistent ethereal haze of the Atrum Core’s presence—he knew he’d see it out there again once the sun rose high enough, hovering over the spring dust devils of the lower grasslands. They wanted what he wanted, and they wanted it badly: the indestructible Liber Nex. They’d wanted the ancient manuscript since they lost it, back when the Spanish conquistadors were foolish enough to use its recipes and wisdom against a new land, stealing ancient native strengths, twisting power they hadn’t understood.
That particular expedition had consequently destroyed itself, leaving the Liber Nex on its own among the land’s own people, obscure and mostly forgotten, but recognized as an object of great evil by those with the vision to see. The most recent rumors of its existence—from the eighteen hundreds—placed it in northern Mexico. And nearly twenty years earlier, talk of it had revived, making its way into the Sentinel archives on nothing more than the whispers of hope growing in the Atrum Core. Whispers grown loud enough to act on, however belated. Fifteen years ago.
Dolan didn’t have any trouble believing the Liber Nex had made its way just north of the border. Or that it had even somehow been found during the mess of an operation that followed. Found and hidden again, by someone who didn’t live to tell of it.
Such a person would have to be tricky of mind…would have to enjoy puzzles. Not necessarily a powerful Sentinel, not necessarily even a proficient one. Just good at mind mazes, and good of heart.
Just like the coyote shifter who had once lived on this land.
And the Atrum Core had finally figured it out, first chasing the whispers, then infiltrating Sentinel intelligence, and now, finally, racing Sentinel reaction.
Well. Racing Dolan.
As far as he knew, the brevis regional consul still debated over the best team to send, no doubt cursing his willingness to act without them. His brother had taught him that—not to count on them. He’d learned it again when the local Core drozhar had gotten his hands on Dolan, and the Sentinels had assumed Dolan dead…leaving him to escape while they pondered the most politic response to the situation.
Hard lessons, well learned.
Dolan’s gaze flicked to the horizon. There was the haze again, thicker than ever, right where it had been during the two days Dolan had hunted the manuscript. Margery Lawrence had died on this land; the manuscript couldn’t be far if she’d truly been the last to hide it.
And Meghan Lawrence might know of it, and yet he was supposed to sit in Sonoita and wait as the Core closed in, led by Fabron Gausto…a man with a grudge.
He wished truly that he believed Meghan knew of the manuscript, though he feared she didn’t. But he did believe she knew her mother’s ways better than any of them, and that she might hold latent, buried clues to the manuscript’s location. He took a sudden deep breath, beset by the urge to return to the ranch, to talk to her…to convince her. But there was no time for that, so instead he let that breath go in a harsh gust, giving the ranch one last lingering look before he turned away. “Be careful, Meghan Lawrence.”
And Meghan Lawrence lifted her face to the still air of the morning, standing in the eastern doorway with the sun streaming over her hair and face, warming the huge old flannel shirt she’d thrown on over her skimpy night tank top. Cold desert nights, welcome dawn. A faint contact brushed over her skin, as subtle as the sunlight—but it tingled over her entire body, including the skin well hidden in flannel. Without thinking, she followed impulse; she ran out into the hard-packed dirt and dust of the yard, bare feet a stupidity in this climate of things that bit and stung and pricked. She couldn’t have said why she searched the steep slab of ground west of the ranch, but search it she did.
And far up the slope, gliding upward with power unhindered by the steep, rocky ground, she saw the sinuous black shape of a big cat.
She wanted to say good riddance or get lost or don’t come back. She wasn’t sure why she instead murmured, “Be careful, you.” Or why she stood bare-legged in the yard watching for a black form long since gone, her fingers clutching the flannel shirt closed and Jenny’s dog investigating her toes.
“Meg, you all right?”
Meghan looked at Jenny in surprise, then down at the rubber currycomb and stiff rice-bristle brush in her hands. The horse cross-tied before her—a sweet little mare still regaining her health after her former owner nearly neglected her to death—had obvious swirls of curry pattern in her shedding spring coat, not yet brushed smooth. It was a task Meghan should have finished half an hour earlier…if she hadn’t been staring at the oddly hazy nature of the eastern horizon.
That tingle between her shoulder blades…she wasn’t sure, any longer, that her Sentinel visitor had caused it. The Atrum Core uses many forms, her mother had once said, patiently teaching a young girl what feeble wards she could muster, what faint healing skills. They are just people, but they do things that would horrify you and me.
It had been too much for her at six or eight or ten, but now that she was twenty-five, those words lived deep within.
And warned her.
Meghan gave Jenny a little smile, full of sheepish chagrin for a job half finished and hiding thoughts she could never share. “Woolgathering,” she admitted.
“More than that.” Fair Jenny had a knack for seeing through those little white lies, even the ones people told themselves. She also had the knack of seeing through to the heart of a horse, and she took charge of their problem rescues. Now she leaned against the aisle rail of the openair mare motel, crossing her arms. “You haven’t been yourself since yesterday morning. Not since Starling lost his wits in the round pen. Something’s got you shook-up.”
Everyone at the rescue ranch knew when someone rattled up that long rutted driveway, and no one had; she could hardly say a visitor had rattled her. Meghan went for a half-truth. “Got a call from an old friend of my mother’s.”
Not hardly. The man who’d let her mother face the Atrum Core alone.
Jenny winced in sympathy. “Stirred things up, I’ll bet.” But as she gave the mare a pat and pushed away from the stall panel, she added, “It’s more, though. There’s something…else.” She shrugged. “Won’t pry. As long as you’re dealing.”
“I’m dealing.” Meghan rubbed a cheek against her upper arm to dislodge flyaway winter horse hair; her hands were already covered in it. “Listen, you and Chris gonna be here this afternoon to take in the drop-off? I want to get a good start with this one—I think we’ve got potential for a therapy horse in the turnaround.”
“Nice change of subject,” Jenny said, and then she let it go. “Chris has something at home.” Their teenaged young man currently playing jack-of-all-trades had nothing if not a turbulent home life. “Anica will be here.” Anica did the on-site nursing work and had been with Meghan the longest. Rescue work…it tended to burn people out. Meghan was grateful to have Jenny and Anica and Chris, not to mention their fund-raising wizards and the rotating volunteers who handled the necessary physical work involved with the rescue operation. Jenny and Anica both lived on the ranch, and plenty of others had overnighter kits set aside for the unexpected need.
Jenny had also been here long enough to know when to walk away from unanswered questions. She left Meghan to her grooming and her thoughts with nothing more than a parting invitation to talk if she wanted. Meghan returned to the currycomb with a vengeance, and the mare leaned happily into her hand. Stirred things up. That much was the truth. Stirred up her grief and her resentment and her anger, and brought out in the open the things she’d always tried to forget about her life.
That her mother wasn’t like other mothers. That she had shifted her form. That along with her wicked sense of humor and gentle smile, she also occasionally wore fur.
That a man had changed to a black jaguar before her eyes, bringing that world rushing back to collide with her own. A fine young man who takes the jaguar…
Could he even be the same man who should have met her mother that night? Was he old enough? Certainty became less so as logic crept in. But then, she wasn’t a big believer in coincidence.
She thought about their confrontation, about the moments he’d backed her against the corral. How she’d felt every inch of her body—the skin tightening down her back, the unexpected tremor in her legs, the very air on her face. Her skills were modest, would always be modest—and yet still she’d felt the power in him. She’d known then that he was a predator, but…also a protector, as her mother had been.
Too bad she didn’t trust him.
Dolan found the land’s abandoned old homestead in late afternoon, layered in so many wards that he wasn’t the least surprised it had taken him two days, or that he’d been through this very area three times before noticing the old buildings. At least a century old, crumbling adobe and exposed wood framing, ocotillo cactus skeletons still lingering atop the porch to create scattered shade…Prickly pear clung to the corners of the buildings, struggling in this altitude. A lean-to shed for animals surrounded by the drunken remains of a corral, the tiny home, a chicken house, an outhouse and a shed that was now merely a trace of a foundation in the dirt.
He stood in the center of the yard for a long moment, on human feet with human senses attuned to the wards that had once been installed over this place. Layers and mazes and switchbacks, all set by a mind he admired anew. A natural trickster, one who could not only worry over the ends of a puzzle until it unraveled, but who could create her own. Her daughter might indeed have unraveled it all faster than he, but only if it wouldn’t have taken too long to convince her to try. Now he searched the patterns of the wards, having long ago realized that there was no single bright spot, no obviously protected area—and he finally saw what he was looking for.
Surely it won’t be this easy. Not a bright spot, woven into the threads of protections and the occasional glow of obscuring aura, but a blank spot. A don’t-look-at-me spot. He opened his eyes and superimposed his inner ward vision over his outer, and found himself facing the old house. Right through the open, damaged wall to what remained of the old fireplace.
In the chimney of the old fireplace.
Not quite as tricky as he’d expected—not the location, not the process of navigating those ward lines. At least, not until he realized what she’d done by using the old homestead, for anyone who did happen to notice the lingering wards would think nothing of them. Many older dwellings still carried protections, especially in an area where they might be needed fast. Violent monsoon storms, cold desert nights at even colder altitudes…as wrecked as it was, this place was still shelter. Still worth protecting.
Dolan slipped through the warding on the house, leaving it as intact as he could—out of respect, and out of the need to keep things quiet. The Core was hovering too closely as it was. He thought briefly about waiting, of bringing Meghan Lawrence back here to take part in what had surely been her mother’s greatest victory and greatest sacrifice…
Then again, maybe not such a good idea. He’d stop for a quick visit on the way out, letting her know her mother’s legacy. She deserved that, and he…
Maybe he just needed to prove he could walk away again.
He flattened his ears in annoyance. Oh, maybe they were currently human ears and maybe they didn’t truly flatten, but he felt it all the same, and knew it reflected on his face—annoyance at his own inability to let go of the woman who’d wanted nothing to do with him or his quest or his blood. Sentinel blood, like her own…but running too thick to dismiss.
Dolan glanced at the sky, at the sun about to go down, and shrugged off his distractions, a literal twitch of shoulder. He’d come here for a reason, and one reason only—and if Meghan Lawrence thanked him for anything, it would be that he achieved his goal fast enough to prevent the official team from descending on the area. So he quit hesitating in the doorway and crossed the threshold, hyperaware of the fresh breezes stirred by his entrance. Not physical breezes, but metaphysical disturbances just waiting for him to take a wrong step, to prove he didn’t belong.
He didn’t really want to find out what a trickster would do in retribution to a trespasser.
So he offered his respect and his caution, and he slowly progressed to the interior of the crumbling house, the single main room with its sleeping and cooking alcoves and the hand-formed fireplace still in nearperfect condition. He crouched beside it, hesitating long enough to check for traps and black widow spiders alike, finding neither. Just that blank space that had drawn him here, alluring…close enough to success to send tension zinging down his spine.
As dusk fell around him, he reached into the chimney and felt around until his fingers came to rest on crackling paper.
Yes. With care, he eased the manuscript free. It felt right in his hand—the expected size, the expected heft—if at the same time without the presence he’d expected. The weightiness.
He withdrew it from the chimney and set it on the hearth, a paper-wrapped package thoroughly secured with duct tape. More duct tape showing than paper, dammit. The stuff would be hell to cut through, even after all this time. He reached into his treated back pocket for his folding Buck knife—and that’s when he realized.
Not dusk, this darkness. Not yet.
Atrum Core. Here. Now. In spite of his personal wards. Coming for the one thing he could never let them have.
The haze once restricted to the horizon now abruptly descended around him, saturating the air with an oily stench. He threw himself down on the manuscript, pulling the threads of his wards tighter even as he sent the most piercing Vigilia adveho call he could—the 911 incantation of a Sentinel in deepest jeopardy. By then he realized the haze wasn’t mist, wasn’t droplets of any sort, but had turned into infinitesimal insects, gnats almost too small to see—and that as they settled on the skin exposed at his wrists, they sank right into his damn skin, making it twitch with the sudden burning fire of their passage.
Can’t be good. He instantly gave over to the jaguar, trading inadequate clothing for thick black fur, still crouched over the manuscript, ears flattened closed and eyes tightly closed, his nose tucked down between his front legs and his tail curled tightly to his side. Expose nothing—and never stop reaching for those wards—
Abruptly, the stench eased. The fiery burn beneath his skin eased, fading to an ache. The dusk—true dusk—enfolded him in silence. Dolan didn’t move, not at first—he finished reinforcing his wards, not allowing himself to wonder why the Core had retreated when they—face it—they’d had the complete advantage. The Vigilia adveho hadn’t yet even reached its target; the ward reinforcement hadn’t been finished. His dappled black jaguar fur wouldn’t have kept the invading gnats away forever, and the fire of them had been enough to fragment his concentration. And yet…
Gone. All of it.
Dolan slowly raised his head, a growl slipping out. He flexed his claws into the stone hearth—claws sharp enough to tear through duct tape as easily as a knife. He didn’t waste any time tackling the manuscript wrapping, beset with the sudden urgency to see the thing, to touch it directly—to feel it. Beset with the sudden premonition that it—
That it wasn’t the manuscript at all.
Dolan growled again—couldn’t stop it, or stop from lashing his tail. Decoy. Paper encased in leather—a fancy journal of some sort, filled with the scripted details of daily life. The Core must have realized it, and they had promptly quit the field.
He’d been lucky in a backward kind of way—the Core shouldn’t have been able to find him, shouldn’t have been able to reach him…but they had, and only this decoy had saved him from that bafflingly successful attack.
But it left him with no manuscript and a cold trail.
And it left him with the need to return to Meghan Lawrence, to see if she could lend insight to his search. It left him with a biting inner self-scorn, knowing he’d underestimated Fabron Gausto and the regional Core.
A twinge shot through one front leg, involuntarily flexing his claws into the journal’s leather binding; he stared at it without immediate comprehension. A spasm flickered across his ribs; he grunted in surprise, hissing as a contraction twisted his back leg hard enough to kick out across the dirt floor beyond the hearth.
And then he knew.
The Atrum Core had left not in retreat, but because they’d already done what they’d come for. Another twist of muscle down his back, a grunt of pain from deep within, tinged with annoyance and—
—yes, desperation.
They’d waited for his distraction and they’d somehow infiltrated his defenses, instilling sly dark poisons and now—
—fire traced down his back—now Meghan would be on her own—a dry jaguar cough, wrenched from a body twisting around itself—and the real manuscript was still out there for the taking—consciousness fading, making way for the fire and—
Failure. Agonizing death and failure.
But he still held the threads of the unfinished call, and he redirected it to a closer target, to the one he least wanted to endanger and most wanted to help.
Meghan. Sentinel unblooded. Daughter of the trickster.
Hope of the Vigilia.
And the one face he wanted to see.
Meghan stiffened. Echoes of pain shot through her body, trying to twist her—trying to take over. Without thinking, she whirled to face the eastern horizon, which was darkened by dusk…but no longer by the strange haze of the past few days, the one she’d first thought was an atmospheric oddity and then smoke from a distant fire and then pretended not to notice at all.
“Meghan!” Jenny ran down the aisle of the opensided barn to reach her, hands closing over her upper arms to turn her, to look her in the eye. “Meghan—?”
Meghan had to blink a few times before she truly saw her friend—before she realized she’d dropped an entire bucket of oats and psyllium, leaving the hungry gelding in the end stall pawing in frustration. “I have to go,” she said, and the words sounded as if they came from someone else’s mouth.
“You—” Jenny dropped her arms, took a step back. “You what?”
“Have to go.” Meghan spoke more briskly, her mind racing ahead—choosing a horse, listing supplies…preparing.
She’d felt the pain. She knew who it was, if not why. She knew he was alone on her land.
She knew she had to go…
If not why.
Chapter 3
Meghan ignored Jenny’s hovering presence as she grabbed saddle, bridle and the saddlebags set aside for trail emergencies. A quick side trip to the house and her bedroom, and a low storage bin bumped out from beneath her bed and across the braided rug to yield her mother’s lore box with its precious herbs and powders.
Meghan dashed back to the barn, nearly colliding with Jenny at the threshold. Jenny did a double take, her gaze settling on the box tucked under Meghan’s arm. Wooden, carved with loving but basic skills by an adolescent Margery Lawrence…the most meaningful thing Meghan had left of her mother.
“I’m okay,” Meghan said, knowing how very much circumstances indicated otherwise. “But my mother…she may have left something undone. And I have a feeling—” She broke off. How she hated that phrase; how she usually avoided it. How she’d been teased as a girl in school—
But this was Jenny, and her face cleared. Or nearly cleared. “All right,” she said. “But is it safe?”
Meghan hesitated long enough to shrug. Safe? Not in the least. That somehow didn’t, at the moment, seem relevant. “Grab Luka for me?” she asked Jenny, and pulled a floppy camp bag from the small tack room opposite the saddles.
“Luka,” Jenny echoed. “You’re going into rough country?” But her feet were already moving for the gelding’s stall.
Because Luka would get her there. Wise, once mistreated into a man-killer, the aging gelding had finally found a rider who understood his mighty Lipizzan spirit. He still suffered no fool gladly, but he’d given his heart to Meghan—and now his sure feet and still-powerful body would take her anywhere.
A mount she might well need, since she had no idea just where she’d end up. She only knew she’d follow—
Wrenching pain, fracturing thoughts…
And a sudden brief clarity, a presence so clear that it arrowed right through her. Danger, it said, and Atrum Core and ’Ware, Meghan Lawrence and then more faintly, an entirely different tone behind it, something yearning, Meghan…
Meghan blinked. She scrambled to her feet, having found herself on her knees in the aisle—and just in time, for here came Jenny with Luka, and in what possible way could she explain her reaction, explain why she still had to go?
Still reeling from the touch of him—the dark presence, the faint, sharp spice, the hint of something deep, untapped—she wondered quite suddenly if the jaguar had touched her mother like this. If he’d warned her.
If she’d gone anyway, as Meghan intended to do.
“You’re sure?” Jenny asked, dropping Luka’s lead rope beside the gear; it was as good as tying him. But she didn’t wait for an answer; she said, “Let me grab you a couple of jackets, then.” Because the temperature would drop fast on a crystal-clear night like this one; already Meghan’s sweatshirt didn’t seem quite enough to keep the goose bumps away.
Or maybe that was the lingering touch of his presence in her soul.
She shut him out as best she could, just so she could think. She quickly saddled Luka, stroking his noble baroque nose when he turned to inquire of her hurry, but swiftly turning to tighten the girth on the lightweight synthetic Aussie saddle, adding a breastplate, strapping the bulging saddlebags in place…and turning to find Jenny proffering not only an armful of easily layered jackets, but pommel bags stuffed with trail food. She gave Meghan a quirky little smile and said, “I had a feeling.”
Meghan gave her a quick hug while Jenny still had her hands full, and then pulled on a Windbreaker and vest and strapped the remaining two jackets over the sleeping bag. “That’s why I choose my family.”
“Oh, pshaw,” Jenny said airily, but her eyes had a glint in the sallow mercury light of the barn aisle. She double-checked the straps and girth as Meghan slipped a practical trail halter bridle over a head almost too dignified to carry so much. Luka chomped the bit and waited patiently, nothing like the mount he’d be once Meghan swung her leg over the saddle.
“I’ve got my cell phone,” Meghan said, though she knew she wouldn’t use it even if she managed a rare connection. There was no way she’d lure her unsuspecting chosen family into the thick of this mess. They knew of her feelings, of her connections…in truth, there was a little of it in all of them, that common thread that drew them here. But they had no idea her long-dead mother had shifted to a coyote any time or place that pleased her. They had no idea such organizations as the Sentinels and the Atrum Core even existed.
And if Meghan had anything to say about it, they never would.
Once mounted, Luka transformed—no longer a stocky, aging gray-to-white gelding, but a creature of movement and air, dancing his way out of the ranch yard and heading toward familiar trails. Meghan allowed him to pick up a power trot, propelling them along the steady incline of a trail. He stretched into the generous rein she offered, arching his neck like a young stallion, and took them up into the darkness.
As the trail turned twisty and tricky, Meghan gave him his head and turned inward, bracing herself, and cautiously opened the connection she’d shuttered away. Sensations flooded in, swamping her. She reeled in the saddle, dimly aware that Luka deftly shifted beneath her, balancing her again. Black fur and clawed dirt and burning lungs and the fiery agony of spasming muscles and again, that briefest instant of awareness—this time with a hint of puzzlement, as though he perceived her approach. Meghan?
She might have answered, had that awareness not shattered into a stuttering fugue of pained disorientation. She clutched Luka’s thick white mane, struggling to control the connection, to keep from drowning in the intensity of those shared impressions.
Nothing had prepared her for this…not her mother, not her mother’s death. Not her guardian aunt’s uninterest in the shape-shifter skills that touched their lives. Not even this man’s sudden presence in her life two days earlier.
Jaguar.
I’m supposed to hate you.
Maybe she did. Maybe that’s what had created the strength of the thread between them. The clarity. And even the tears running unchecked down her face as she absorbed the smallest fraction of his experience.
Beware, Meghan…
“I’m coming,” she told him, out loud into the night. His protest beat against her—but only for a moment before pain swept him away. Setting her own jaw, she shifted to follow the sensations; Luka willingly took the next chance to turn uphill, scrabbling between a batch of tightly bunched oaks, his big unshod feet biting into the scrabble-rock hillside. She balanced lightly over his withers, giving him freedom to move. Soon enough they’d reach the high ponderosa pines, leaving Luka more space—at least until they hit the canyon that divided her land from Coronado National Forest.
But as they reached the pines, as the feel of the Sentinel began to fade—weakening—she found herself turning directly toward that canyon, leveling off their progress. Luka moved out strongly beneath her, as if he knew where he was going—and suddenly, so did Meghan.
The old homestead.
The first homestead took advantage of the canyon stream, the one funneling cold snowmelt down the side of the hill; it was tucked into the small natural clearing beside the stream, using a backdrop of pines and oak and the occasional creosote bush, with cedars creeping up the side of the hill. But even so, it was now only a wreck of disintegrating structures, barely enough for emergency shelter in the case of a sudden storm.
His thought, surfacing randomly against hers before sliding away again. I thought it was here. I thought…
Meghan stiffened in the saddle, causing Luka to hesitate for the very first time. It. Her mother had been dealing with an it—one she never would identify, not even in the most generic terms. An it that had killed her—if not directly, because of the Atrum Core’s obsession with the thing.
Meghan had thought it destroyed. She’d thought it gone. And yet the jaguar had come back to hunt it?
For the first time, she truly hesitated. Luka, not quite willing to stop his energetic process, nonetheless scaled back to a cadenced, high-kneed trot. The trail unfurled before them in the light of the rising moon—coming on full, it was enough to light their way in these well-spaced pines. Enough, if she let him, for Luka to flow forward into a collected canter, perfectly balanced to avoid ruts and suddenly jutting rocks alike.
Sudden regret found her on a breeze. His regret—and yearning and need and a deep, bitter underlayer of…
Failure. Loneliness.
Meghan settled deep in the saddle, giving Luka the faintest lift of thigh and seat bone to release him into the canter.
I know where you are. And I’m still coming.
Failure. He’d come to put an end to this once and for all…to secure the indestructible manuscript where it would never be found. He’d come to involve the daughter, as his brother had involved the mother. But he’d meant to keep her safe…not writhe out his life on the dirt floor of an ancient home while the daughter was left to take the heat.
Like his brother.
Jaguar fur, scattered over the towering desert landscape. Gold and black rosettes, a claw…a whisker. No more. Because the brevis regional consul had delayed backup with scrying and warding and—
Whatever. Too late.
They’d be too late for Meghan, too.
Your brother? The thought had a light touch, gentle…and unfamiliar.
Hearthstone bruised shoulder and spine as his body jerked uncontrollably against it, twisting so tightly he couldn’t find room to breathe. The world dimmed even further, and still he recoiled inwardly in the alarm of no longer being alone. His lips drew back in a snarl and his whiskers quivered, and even blinded by pain and his body’s jerking dance, his slapping paw found its target, claws clogged with dirt and blood but still able to pierce skin.
He hadn’t expected to feel the pain of it, sharp and wounding; he froze. Only for an instant, and then the poisons took him away, the world fading away to thin nothingness. He barely felt the light touch on his head, around his muzzle—confident fingers lifting that frozen snarl and smearing his gums with a paste imbued with the feather-touch of incantations.
As fast as that, the rigor eased, his long and powerful body sagging back to dirt and hearthstone. And when the world darkened, it was as if he fell into himself, deeply into himself…back into the life of his beating heart and panting lungs and even that deep growl of feeble protest stuck in his throat.
And then, somewhere along the way, he fell into her. Meghan. Slip-sliding from one thought to another, from his to hers and back again. Through it all echoed his anguished backdrop of warning—Atrum Core…Atrum Core…’ ware. Meghan, Atrum Core…
They’d come back if they knew she was here. They’d come back if they thought she’d become involved…if they thought she’d shed her noncombatant’s role to join the Sentinels outright.
If they thought, as he’d thought, that she could help to find the Liber Nex.
’Ware, Meghan…
And then he lost himself to darkness, to sweet scents and blessed lassitude and the enfolding blanket of determination that he would not, after all, lose himself to the Core.
And Meghan followed him down to the darkness.
You shouldn’t go…don’t go—! Sweet little girl voice, gone reedy and thin with desperation, the recognition of futility.
The world skipped around memory turned into reality. Long coltish legs crossed on the bed, covers over her head…herbs pungent in their pinched little piles, arrayed directly on the sheets around her bare legs. Breathe deep. Take them in, like Mama says. Transform them. Empower them. They didn’t quite have meaning, those words, but by God she tried. She built wards and she built warnings and she built safety.
Or she thought she did.
But she felt it happen. She felt the death…the loss. Mama! Don’t go, Mama! Don’t—
A whisper of goodbye, a scant caress of love—
You said there’d be help! You said there’d be a jaguar! You said—
Gone.
Scattered herbs, sheets damp from sobbing, heart broken forever. Little girl betrayed. By the—
Jaguar.
Older brother. Strong, golden, black rosettes rippling with the movement of bone and muscle beneath. Jared, who could do anything. Jared, confident in running point for the Sentinels, in assessing a situation, in doing what had to be done until the entire team arrived. Jared, steeped deep in Sentinel lore, Sentinel responsibility…utter faith in teammates.
Jared. Brother, father and mother in one package, enough years between them to make it work. Enough years before them to anticipate working together. Sentinels.
“Sure, it’s dangerous—it’s the damned Liber Nex, Dolan. But I won’t be alone. Working point, yeah, but the team will be there. Making sure we’re clear without drawing attention our way.”
Jared.
Not coming back.
What do you mean, he didn’t make it? What do you mean, you weren’t there in time? What do you mean, he’s—
Dead.
No jaguar. No Sentinels. Just Margery Lawrence, left on her own and now—
Dead.
Echoing wails, bitter, bitter grief, wrenching loneliness…resentment.
And childhood resolve, not quite as young and untouched as it had been only days earlier. I’ll rebuild my own family. My chosen family.
And the Sentinels will have nothing of me. Not—
—ever.
They’d let him die. The Sentinels had tangled themselves in some dumb-ass protocol and they’d delayed and they’d left him out there to die.
Jared. His last thoughts had been for that woman, a single mother, a joyful coyote with no real place in fieldwork, no training, just heart. His last thoughts—
Bitter, bitter grief. Choking fury…
A young man’s resolve. I will never trust them. I will be one of them, but not theirs. Not truly. Not ever.
For Jared, he would save the ones he could. Hard and independent and…
Rogue.
Chapter 4
Meghan sat back against the long-dead fireplace in dazed exhaustion, beyond thought. Beyond decisionmaking or reaction or feeling.
She stared through dawn light at the huge black cat sprawled on dirt and rock before her, instantly reconnected to the memories they’d shared. His memories, her memories…all the same now. She pressed a hand to the base of her throat where that hard ball of grief welled up so suddenly, so deeply.
Perhaps not beyond feeling after all.
Her arm protested the movement; she stretched it out, shoving back torn sleeves for a good look. Punctured, smeared with dried blood, swelling. She’d cleaned the wounds and covered them with an herbal paste—preserved with warding, enhanced with personal power—that would have them pink and closed by the time she made it home. After last night, Margery Lawrence felt…closer, somehow.
And meanwhile…she didn’t understand it, but that blood…his blood…his saliva…they’d all mixed, somewhere along the way.
Made a difference. A connection.
Luka whickered. Hungry, no doubt, and thirsty…he’d waited, accepting the other side of the crumbling old house as his stall. She’d removed his tack and trickled water into the collapsible water bucket, but he needed more.
She wasn’t ready to leave the jaguar. Not yet.
Dolan. She knew his name now. She wasn’t ready to leave Dolan Treviño.
The darkness lifted, steadily brightening into a typical morning here on the Santa Rita sky islands. Crisp and bitter cold at night, the clear sky quickly turned from star-spattered ink to coral-rimmed cerulean and then to a blue so sharp it almost hurt to look at it. Even here, tucked away in the trees and shadows, the day warmed fast enough for Meghan to ease off her quilted, oversized vest.
Meghan regarded the jaguar for a long moment from her slumped seat at the hearth. His ribs rose and fell in a steady rhythm, and the growing light picked out the faintest dapples of the rosette patterns within black fur.
His tail twitched; a paw flipped and went still. Meghan crawled back over to him to rest her hand on his side, his shoulder—feeling for the spasms from the night before. She still had no idea what had happened—what had poisoned him so badly, or how it had gotten into his system. She’d only treated the symptoms—red clover, valerian, magnesium powder, all tied to infusions of power for efficacy—and she’d been lucky when it worked.
He’d been lucky.
Dolan Treviño, and not his brother Jared after all. Jared, golden and vibrant and dedicated…and every bit as dead as Meghan’s mother. Killed on his way to her.
Meghan wondered again if he’d sent out a warning, just as Dolan had warned her. If her mother had known that last night…and gone out anyway, making sure she wasn’t at home when the Atrum Core came after her. Came after the Liber Nex.
A forbidden book of the dead. An instruction manual for corrupt, death-based, power-wielding techniques, long-buried and long-forbidden. Great. And that’s what Dolan was looking for now? That’s what he thought her mother had handled?
His tail flicked again. A dream, maybe…or maybe a memory. His broad brow furrowed. “I’m sorry,” she said, drawn back into their moments of sharing that which she’d learned of him. Of his brother. “I didn’t know. But I still don’t want anything to do with this.” She hadn’t grown up with it, not the way he had—and until now she’d had no idea of the deeply instilled obligations the shifters felt. Even Dolan, who blamed the brevis regional consul for his brother’s death, still found a way to serve their cause. To remain Sentinel.
Well, Meghan had never been Sentinel. And her mother, tied to the Sentinels only by the virtue of her shape-shifter nature, had never been meant for field duty.
Jaguar fur lay warm beneath Meghan’s hand, and she felt the massive weight of him as though somehow he lay on her hand and not the other way around. Glossy fur slid between her fingers—and then suddenly the lax muscle stiffened. Meghan felt rather than saw an impending flicker of blue light, and then it was too late to snatch her hand away, to leap away—
He changed, fur to smooth skin to leather-clad human, and there lay her hand through it all, flickering in the light and for the briefest instant literally a part of Dolan Treviño.
And, oh, God, she hurt and she couldn’t see and she had two hearts, beating hard and fast, and four lungs, gasping for air, and nerves that sizzled and popped and ached to be every bit as connected as that one hand on that one shoulder—
She cried out, in fear and astonishment and denial, and the sound came from his mouth. And then the blue light slammed them apart with chastising whips of energy and Meghan quite suddenly lay at the hearth, sobbing for breath and barely able to lift her head to find Dolan coming up to his hands and knees, to his feet, and then down again, full length on the floor.
He looked just as she felt…stripped away, seared by another’s soul. When he lifted his head he cried, “What did you do?” in a voice ragged and barely audible.
She heard him anyway. She heard him clearly.
She heard him within.
“What did you do?” He demanded it again, his voice hardly any steadier. Off to the side, a horse snorted in alarm and annoyance. Meghan looked as wild as Dolan felt, sprawled in front of the hearth with the look of someone who might just bolt.
No, not her. Not the woman who’d stuck with him through this past night. Even now, her expression quickly sharpened. She looked at him; she looked at her hand. It gave him time to think, to realize how every bone and muscle burned and ached, to understand that the memories sitting so freshly in his mind weren’t all his. Weren’t all—
She’d been just a kid. She’d never known that his brother had died for the cause, trying to reach her mother. Her guardian, her father’s sister, hadn’t been a shifter, hadn’t been Sentinel at all…and the Sentinels—as ultrasecretive, ultracautious as any clandestine organization over two thousand years old—hadn’t told her a thing. They’d cut Meghan loose, knowing she wasn’t a shifter and sacrificing what skills she did have—what she might have been nurtured into. More fools, they. She’d saved his life. What she might have done if fully trained…
“I’m sorry,” he said, and his voice felt rough-edged in his throat. “If I’d realized they cut you off…I’d have told you what happened myself.”
“Doesn’t matter.” She tucked back a loose strand of hair, tightening an espresso ponytail gone loose and sloppy, her expression turning her sharp features yet sharper. “The Sentinels let them both die. And you’re still with them?”
Dolan managed to push himself upright, leaning back against the wall with one leg propped up before him. “You don’t leave the Sentinels. Not if you’re a shifter.”
“Nice,” she said, prompt and sharp. “They take lessons from the mob?”
Dolan laughed. Not loudly, not long, but as amused as he could be with his body still tasting an Atrum Core death. “Didn’t your mother teach you anything about us?”
Meghan stiffened. “She taught me what she felt was important.” She absently rubbed her arm, but stopped with a wince, pulling her hand away. At his frown, she held out her arm, displaying the ripped sleeves. “You weren’t a grateful patient. At least not at the start.”
“I—” Vaguely, he remembered it. Damn. “You’d best get it cleaned. Is it—” But he couldn’t quite bring himself to ask herself if he’d hurt her badly.
“It’s fine.” She’d gone brusque on him, more like the woman he’d met several days earlier—if not altogether convincing, there at the corners of her eyes. There, he saw lingering grief, lingering puzzlement. She stood, slapping off dusty jeans more vigorously with one hand than the other. “I’ll take care of it. First I’ve got to see to Luka. Since you’re all right for a few moments?”
Luka. “Your horse,” he realized. “He’s done well with me.”
“Luka has a noble soul,” she said, simply enough so it almost hid her great affection. “But he needs water. Rest, and I’ll be back in a moment—and then you can tell me just what happened here. Before I got here.”
He’d damn well warned her away, that’s what. Warned her about the Core. Not called her here. A sudden spike of annoyance made it through his pain. “And you can tell me why you ignored my warning—”
She laughed—short, no humor to it at all. And then she walked over to the horse—a luminous gray with great dark eyes and the baroque head from every old European statue Dolan had ever seen. He greeted Meghan with a gentle bump of his nose, and the halter lead rope between them was merely a token as she led him out of the house.
He was still absorbing the fact that she hadn’t answered him when he fell asleep.
When he opened his eyes, it was to find her saddling the horse outside the house while the animal nibbled at last year’s dry grasses and stripped the new leaves from a nearby ash. Sunlight played along her bare arms as she gave the horse a last stroke beneath his heavy mane, highlighting toned, lightly tanned muscle. She wore a T-shirt; the jackets were tied around her waist, an absurd tangle of sleeves obscuring her lower body. Her arm glistened with salve, and as she returned to the house, he winced at the bruising around the puncture wounds. Widely spaced, made by a huge feline paw. His.
“You shouldn’t have been here,” he said. “I warned you—”
She laughed again. “Right. And what was I supposed to do about that? If the Core wants me, it probably gets me. But you know…they could have had me any time in the past fifteen years. It’s not like anyone was watching out for me.”
“They were here,” Dolan said, and his emotional hackles rose just thinking of it. “Last night. You would have played straight into their hands.”
She shrugged. “You were the one who called me.”
“I did no such—” But he stopped, and thought twice. He’d warned her. He’d meant to warn her…hadn’t he? Surely he hadn’t transmitted any of his…
Right. His dying man’s desire to see the face that had haunted him for days.
There wasn’t any way to finish what he’d started to say, so he left it at that. He said, “So you came out to help the Sentinel?”
Her lingering humor dropped away; her chin lifted slightly. Sharp features; sharp-eyed glance. “I came out to help you.” She sat quite suddenly on the hearth, a rise so short that she had to cant her knees together. Her voice was quiet with both wonderment and horror as she asked again, “How did they do that to you?”
Dolan looked away; his jaw clenched. “I don’t know,” he said. “They shouldn’t have…” He took a deep breath and found the fortitude, somehow, to look her directly in the eye while admitting to the failure. “I dropped my guard. The Core got in. Isn’t that enough?”
She tucked that wayward strand of hair behind her ear again. “I suppose it is. Now, do you think you can get on this horse?”
He blinked. He hadn’t been expecting the concession—not from a woman who’d been so fiery, so opposed to him from the start. He wasn’t sure what it meant—what she was really thinking. And so he was cautious when he said, “Brevis regional will be here in a couple of days.”
“I can’t stay out here that long,” she said, quite sensibly. “And if you think I’m leaving you, think again. I know exactly what I gave you last night, and how long it’s going to take to get over it. I doubt you can even take the jaguar.”
And boy, wouldn’t he love to prove her wrong! Except when he reached for the jaguar, just for the feel of the jaguar, he found a deadness he’d never experienced before. An emptiness. He fought a sudden stab of panic.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’ll wear off. But until then, you need a place to stay.”
And bring her more deeply into this mess, with the local Core, under Fabron Gausto’s rule, more aggressive than he’d ever suspected? “I’ll be fine here,” he said. “They think I’m dead.”
“Then there won’t be any problem with having you at the ranch.” She stood, stretching. Two of the three jackets slipped off; the T-shirt pulled high to expose a tight, smooth line of skin. “Look,” she said, bending to scoop up the jackets. She rolled them lengthwise and shot him a direct, spearing look. “I’ve got a horse coming in this afternoon. I need to be there. Can we just do this thing?” As if she didn’t have circles under her eyes and a certain grim determination to her movement.
And every moment he argued with her was a moment she wouldn’t be on her way home. He nodded; it took her by surprise much as her own recent concession had startled him, and she relaxed visibly.
There were already saddlebags resting over the horse’s loins; she tied the jackets over them and returned to the house, giving the floor and hearth area a careful inspection. “Can’t have the slightest bit of the herb stuff left out,” she said. “It’d kill anything smaller than a dog, with the whammy I put on it.”
Whammy. Oh, yeah. The Sentinels would just love that.
Meghan pushed away the exhaustion of the night, the turmoil of the morning, the fears for the future—even the odd feeling in her bones. She focused on her hands, where they tightened the girth one more time for the rugged ride home with a rider who wasn’t likely to keep his balance. “Have mercy on him, Luka,” she murmured as Dolan finally made it to his feet, wobbled there a moment and pretended to have found his strength.
She would have believed it, too, if she didn’t know what he’d been through this past night—or if she hadn’t seen him in full strength only days ago, full of prowl and power in either form. He made it to the gaping doorway and leaned there, and somehow made it look casual. She knew better than that, too.
“I’m not sure about the wards,” he said. “I thought I left them strong…but the Core followed me in without much trouble. I—”
“Can’t see them,” she said, only belatedly realizing she’d not only finished his sentence, but to judge by the startled look on his face, done it accurately. Or was that expression more properly called a glower? “I’ll come back later and see what needs to be done.” Not that the homestead often found use, but it still deserved some respect and protection. “I can do wards, but…not right now.” She ran a hand down Luka’s shoulder. “We’re ready when you are.”
He wasn’t. And he wasn’t going to be. She saw the flicker of despair on his face, there and gone again, right back to the tough-guy glower. For a scant moment, she wondered if it might not actually be best to leave him here. But even if the Core thought him dead, they might figure out they were wrong. And besides…she simply didn’t want to leave him behind.
Not that she wouldn’t have enough explaining to do when she got back.
She dropped the halter lead and went to him, where he pretended to stand in the doorway, and slipped in under his arm. “Oof,” she said, under her breath. And then shrugged off the shiver that ran down her back.
Luka stopped his tree-grazing to regard Dolan with a wary eye, pulling himself up with a high and warning neck. “Not now,” Meghan muttered. But still, she gave the horse a moment to accept Dolan’s nature. Dolan leaned heavily on shoulders made strong from ranch work and training—and she would have borne it easily had not another shiver run down her back, following each leg all the way down to the soles of her feet, to her toes. And the flush that followed, and the empty ache, building inside her chest.
Maybe just what she deserved for running out into the middle of a Sentinel/Atrum Core squabble.
But surely it hadn’t been catching. And she’d felt Dolan’s pain; she’d felt it clearly. This wasn’t painful…wasn’t even truly uncomfortable. Just…unusual.
Dolan’s arm tightened around her shoulders—for-bearance, she thought, as Luka offered a stretch of his neck, a disgruntled but accepting snort. Dolan reached out to the saddle, steadying himself that way. She would have bent to lace her fingers together into a “leg up” for him, but his hand fell on her arm, sending tingles of warmth and demand through the limb. Her jaw dropped; she looked down to his hand in disbelief.
Quite suddenly that hand moved to the back of her neck, half cradling her head. He pulled her to him—right up against him, her head tipped back and that ache nearly exploding inside her, separate pinwhirls of energy making her light-headed and joyous and terrified all at once. She gasped, fighting it, and his hand tightened behind her head, fingers catching in her hair. And when he asked, again, “What did you do?” this time there was a growl to it.
Except when she found his eyes, she found shadowed desperation.
What had she done?
She realized her lower lip trembled; she put fingers on it to still it, and the uncontrollable swell of emotions suddenly infuriated her as well. She tore away from him, losing half her ponytail but freeing her head, and she channeled all her fear into defiance. “I don’t know,” she said. “And I don’t care. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just the aftereffects of—”
Of mingled blood and mingled memories and mingled pasts…
“It doesn’t mean anything,” she repeated, but her voice had lost its defiance. “It’ll fade.”
“You think so?” Hoarse and full of pain, those words. “Because I’m not so sure, Meghan Lawrence. I think there’s more to you than you know. I think there’s more to what’s between us than you’ll admit. And I don’t think this is going away.”
The absurdity of his words put her back on solid ground…dampened the pinwheels. “Get real,” she said. “There isn’t anything between us. I met you once, three days ago.”
“I know,” he agreed, and when she tried to look away she found her gaze flickering back to his despite herself. Still full of that dark desperation, purest, deepest blue flaring bright in the rising sun of a desert sky. “It happens that way with some of us. But this…this is beyond.” He closed his eyes, sucked in a breath.
He released her. “Some of us?” she said, stepping back. “I’m not us—and you know it.”
He didn’t open his eyes. “You’ve got the blood, whether you want it or not.”
And the ache, which had intensified now that she no longer touched him, intensified and swelled in protest, but now…faded.
And like that, she shook it off. She took another step back, clinging to the absurdity of it all. Shape-shifters, coming into her life these fifteen years later. Her enhanced herbs and old wards and a night with a black jaguar trying not to die…and now she stood, flushed and unsettled, by Luka’s head.
She straightened. She pulled the overstretched hair band free; she gathered her hair up and scraped it back into containment. “I think,” she said, pulling the band into place again, “that you’d better get into that saddle on your own.”
Chapter 5
Dolan managed it somehow, crawling into the saddle with all the grace of a bread pudding.
She might hope the connection between them would fade. He wasn’t expecting it.
Hell, he didn’t even want it.
She admonished him not to touch the reins, which she’d clipped to the saddle’s grab strap. And she didn’t bother with the halter rope, tied in a loop around the horse’s neck. “He’ll follow me,” she said simply, and he did.
A man whom most horses wouldn’t approach didn’t get much time in the saddle. A man who could take the jaguar had little use for it in the first place. He clutched the flat swell of the pommel, and half the time he wished for a horn to grab and half the time, as he slumped and bobbed, he was grateful for the lack of it.
As they hesitated before the lip of a steep slope, she advised him to lean back, but halfway down the slope she stopped them and adjusted his legs with the confident touch of an instructor—except she just as quickly snatched her hands away, glaring at him. “Figure it out,” she said, and resumed her sliding, sideways progress down the rocky slope.
He didn’t need to guess at her discomfort. He’d felt it, too, the moment she’d touched him. A flow of energy, something greedy and demanding…wanting more. He’d wanted more.
Luka followed Meghan in mincing steps, and Dolan did his best simply to stay out of the animal’s way until they reached the bottom.
But bottom was a relative term…it simply meant the narrow trail now wound sideways along the slope. Meghan stopped again, patting Luka’s sweat-soaked shoulder—for although ambient temperatures were still modestly cool, the high-altitude sun stabbed down hard.
Meghan hesitated, looking down the vista below them—the tiny dots of the ranch house and barn, the swell of the hill from which he’d once watched for her. She glanced back at him. “God, you’re a mess,” she muttered. “Maybe I should have left you…” But she didn’t finish that thought. She took an audible breath and reached for him, steadying him; straightening him. She wound his fingers firmly around the grab strap. He knew she felt the surge of energy there—her hand tightened briefly around his. Not consoling, not reaching out, but a white-knuckled attempt to push through it.
“There,” she said, and her voice was hardly steady. “We’re almost there.” Then she looked down the hill again and gave a short laugh. “Well, maybe not. But the hardest parts are over.” Her hand, free of Dolan’s, trailed down the horse’s neck. Luka turned his head and tilted it just so, and Meghan gave a little laugh. “I don’t have any. Get us back home again and I promise you a bucketful of carrots.”
But as she stepped out in front, she hesitated, and said somberly, “It’s never really going to be the same, is it?”
“No,” he said, hating the weakness in his voice, the vulnerability it exposed. But she deserved an answer…she deserved the truth. “You know too much now.”
“I’ve seen too much,” she said, and glanced back at him—no recrimination there now, just sad awareness. “I’ll have to lie to my people. My chosen family. Or not answer them. Either way, they’ll know something’s wrong. And changed.”
“Don’t think about the big picture,” he said. “Screw the future. Think about getting down this hill. I know I am.”
She gave a short laugh. “I’ll bet. But you know…if you didn’t find what you came for…if the Core didn’t get it from you…then this has really all just begun.”
And here he’d thought she’d been so deeply in denial that she hadn’t been paying attention. Wrong. He reeled slightly in the saddle, caught himself and met her eyes one last time before she turned and led them back down the hill. “Yes,” he said. “It’s really all just begun.”
“Meghan!” Anica ran from the casita at top speed, slowing only when Luka made himself tall in warning, raised neck and pricked, intense ears. A small, dark and well-rounded whirlwind of a vet tech who’d burned out of city life, Anica now focused all her considerable energies toward healing the rescued animals of Encontrados Ranch—and sometimes the people.
Not this one, Meghan thought. Anica would quickly pick up on Dolan’s unusual nature. Not everyone who came to this ranch had their own quirks and sensitivities…but those who stayed? Yeah. They all found this place to be a haven, and some had stayed in this chosen family that Meghan found herself building.
“We were worried to death!” Anica said, running to meet them. “What were you doing out all night? What happened to your arm? You should have taken a cell phone!”
Meghan shook her head. “No reception that high, you know that. I ran into someone in trouble, that’s all. We couldn’t travel in the dark. And I’m fine.”
Anica said flatly, “You ran into someone in trouble.” She held her hand up in a dramatic gesture, her faint Latino accent coming out a little more strongly. “No. Wait. Don’t tell me. You had a feeling.”
Here came the evasions. “This is Dolan. Think altitude sickness. And unless I’m mistaken, he’s about to fall off the horse.”
“Right.” Anica stood to the side, giving Dolan the once-over. Dolan, in his black leather biker jacket and his black jeans and booted feet, whisker-shadowed jaw and pain-shadowed eyes, barely sitting in the saddle at all. “A tourist.”
Meghan swallowed back her new fears, knowing there was little she could do or say at this point; either Anica would accept Meghan’s new understanding of her world, or she wouldn’t. Just another way that Dolan’s appearance had intruded on her life.
She led the horse toward the porch, with Dolan dipping and swaying over Luka’s withers. One hand was still clamped around the grab strap; the other had found Luka’s mane halfway up his neck. His eyes were clenched as tightly shut as his grip. “Dolan,” she said, reaching to touch him—and then thinking better of it.
“He’s really out of it,” Anica said. “Maybe we should call 911.”
“He asked me not to,” Meghan said. She knew well enough that Dolan would prefer to stay out of the system—that the Sentinels would be coming for him. And that conventional medicine would be of little help anyway. But at the look on Anica’s face, she added, “Don’t worry—if he doesn’t perk up with some liquids, we’ll call.”
“Okay, then,” Anica said, tugging Dolan’s foot from the stirrup. She went on to untie the jackets and saddlebags, pulling them off Luka’s rump to splat carelessly against the dusty yard. “You ready?”
Oh, no. Not for the touching. “Come on, Dolan. We’re home.”
But when he looked at her, she wasn’t the least bit sure he actually saw her—or anything, for that matter. There was no focus or recognition in those blue, blue eyes. Dammit. “Hold on,” she said to Anica when the other woman would have shoved his leg over Luka’s patient rump. Another deep breath; she flexed her hand, reaching out to his calf…hesitating with her hand close enough to feel the warmth of him.
“Meghan?”
Right. Best get on with it. Gently, she let her hand settle onto his leg. At first she felt only muscle beneath denim, lax with the herbal incantations she’d put into his system, warm and yielding. And then it started—a thrumming through her body, an aching awareness—awareness that this time pooled in sensitive places she’d very much rather not have respond to him at all.
Anica gave her a strange look over the saddlebags, and Meghan did what she hadn’t even thought to do, but which suddenly felt altogether too natural after a night of swapping memories. She focused her thoughts and snapped Dolan! without ever opening her mouth.
He started slightly, looking at her with a confounded expression. Anica abruptly shoved his leg over Luka’s rump and Dolan’s eyes widened—and over he went, taking Meghan down with him in a tangle of arms and legs and the disgruntled snarl of a jaguar in the background of Meghan’s mind.
“Take care of Luka?” Meghan asked Anica, straightening Dolan’s legs on the bed of the creaky-floored little box of a guest room and starting in on the leather laces of his boots.
Anica hesitated, still aware she hadn’t been given all the answers here, aware that Meghan was giving off a muddle of mixed signals, and nodded shortly. “Call out if you need anything. I’ll give Luka a good rubdown and get the quarantine stall ready for our newcomer. You’ll be out?”
“That’s the plan,” Meghan said, doing her best to keep the grim out of her voice.
Anica hesitated in the doorway as if she might say something. When she finally murmured, “Call for help if you need it,” Meghan knew those weren’t the words that had lingered on the tip of her tongue. Those words would have been something more like What’s up with you, woman?
Just as well Anica hadn’t asked. Meghan had no answers.
She finished pulling off Dolan’s boots and did her best to straighten the twisted leather jacket; then she grabbed a quilt off the foot of the iron bed frame and spread it over him, here in the cool interior of the house. All the while, her blood thrummed and heated, and she had a weird duplicity of perception, as though she felt Dolan’s vague impression of the moment along with her own.
And even though she tried to busy her mind with such practical matters, she found herself lingering at the side of the narrow bed, watching the little flickers of movement in his face. At the moment she should have walked away, she instead crouched by the bed and watched her hand touch his cheek, trembling along the contours of his brow and the dark hair at his temple.
Not all of the shifters reflected their other form. Her mother hadn’t. Her mother had looked like Meghan, all dark hair and dark eyes and sharp jaw in clean, exacting features. The coyote showed only in her laughing eyes. But Dolan…Dolan somehow looked exactly like what he was. Blue eyes, holding all the shadowed power of his past. Black, sleek hair, falling across his forehead just a tad too long. But mostly it was in the way he moved, the way he held himself…and now all the sinuous power hidden beneath the incantations she’d fed into his system with her herbs.
Her fingertips tingled. Her body throbbed. She touched his jaw; she ran the backs of her fingers along the stubble there. She let herself feel what came from him.
Longing and need and…
He growled, deep in his throat; he tensed, a quiver passing through his arms and torso. She held her breath, startled as arousal reverberated through her, uncertain if it was him or her or both of them. She closed her eyes; bit her lip. She had the sudden, startling revelation that if she stayed here with him, if she kept the contact between them, she would quiver herself right into an orgasm, right here beside the bed with both of them fully clothed and barely touching and barely knowing each other at that.
She wrenched herself away, so hard that she lost her balance and tipped over to land on her butt. After that, she didn’t linger. She climbed to her feet and marched out to the kitchen with long, deliberate strides, pulling chipped ice through the refrigerator door and grabbing a spoon. She returned to the bedroom and made short work of spooning a few chips into his mouth. And when the plastic tumbler was half-empty, she left it on the bedside table and marched herself off to the shower, shedding filthy clothes along the way.
A nice, cool shower. She might even be tempted to call it cold.
Chapter 6
Meghan strode out into the yard with purpose. Jenny’s dog, a mixed cattle dog—all pricked ears and foxy face, mottled blue coat and short, stout tail—circled her with excitement, barking at the sudden energy and movement in the yard. Meghan hushed her with a gesture and stood in the center of the packed-dirt hub of the ranch, reassuring herself that some things were still normal.
The main house. All one floor, it had started small and grown over the generations. It had belonged to her mother’s family…although Meghan knew little of them. Only her mother had manifested the coyote, after her grandmother’s long-lost Sentinel lover had ended the happily-ever-after story of the ranch. Until then, generations of Lawrence ranchers had raised horses, grazed cattle and escorted tourists around the mountain ranges that formed the inviting sky islands of southern Arizona. And then came Meghan’s grandmother, who’d had Margery Lawrence and never married when her Sentinel lover didn’t return for her. Margery followed Meghan’s grandmother’s path and loved a man who died before Meghan was even born.
So here she was, raised by her mother and then by her aunt, who hadn’t taken to the Southwest and had moved back East as soon as Meghan came of age.
And so Meghan had decided to choose her own family.
The ranch house, tiny casita—Jenny’s and Anica’s—and storage shed made up the yard. There, where the cleared flatland elongated to a point, lived the smaller livestock, all damaged or behaviorally problematic or simply in need of hospice care.
The horses took up most of the space, occupying a long mare motel with covered, open-sided stalls, paddock runs, several communal paddocks and even a separate quarantine area. This generation, Encontrados was purely a rescue ranch, funded by donations, investments, volunteers and a grant or two. Never enough to get comfortable, but…
Successful.
And those who helped her run it…they were her people now.
People she intended to keep safe from Dolan Treviño and whatever trouble he’d brought with him.
She headed for the three-stall quarantine barn, the ranch barn, made of sturdy timbers and thick planking from rough-sawn wood. A detour through the mare motel showed her Luka, groomed, relaxed and happily munching on hay. One of a kind, her dangerous Lipizzan gelding turned indispensable ranch horse.
Inside the quarantine barn, Meghan found a wideopen stall filled with fresh, deep wood shavings and a welcoming flake of hay already shoved into the hay rack. The cool, dim light of the little barn made her realize how warm the day had grown. It might still be spring out there, but it was looking real hard at summer.
There was no sign of Jenny or Anica, but Jenny’s dog had darted back toward the casita—Jenny, at least, was there. And all looked to be ready here, so…
It gave Meghan a moment to realize how tired she was. Bone-tired, after a night of no sleep, wrestling with the effects of a mysterious Atrum Core poisoning and sometimes wrestling with the jaguar himself. And fit as she was, the hike back to the ranch had been a long one. If she was lucky, she’d grab a nap before the new horse arrived—an event that could occur any minute now, or late in the afternoon. With a volunteer at the wheel, she wasn’t inclined to nag.
She emerged from the barn, cast another thoughtful look around the place…felt another surge of protectiveness.
I shouldn’t have brought him here.
He’d said the Core thought him dead. He’d argued it, even.
She hoped he was right. But she didn’t think the only threat to Encontrados came from the Core. The Sentinels, too, knew how to focus on a goal…and how to sacrifice others along the way.
It made her realize just how very much she’d been taking the ranch’s safety for granted. It had been so many years since her mother’s death…so many years since she’d seen even a hint of Sentinel or Atrum Core activity.
Well, you’ve seen it now.
So she stood in the doorway to the barn, and she listened. She closed her eyes and tipped her head back, falling into unconscious habit. Sometimes she listened to a horse, sometimes to the land, sometimes to the true mood of those around her…sometimes she just listened to see what was there.
And this time she heard something.
It was small and slippery and whispery, a harsh and discordant sound. She tipped her head, followed it.
It moved.
From the outer edge of the property toward the center, it eased between strong wards. As if in response to having been noticed, its movements increased in speed; Meghan felt a hint of malevolence, and fury swelled within her. How dare anyone send such an incantation sneaking around her ranch? Trespassing, unwelcome…malignant.
She wasn’t a prodigy when it came to wards, not like her mother. She didn’t have the power. Still, she knew enough to find the nearest ward lines, to grasp those shadowed glow lines in her mind’s eye and slam them together over that dark blot of unwelcome presence.
A sizzle; a pop. The presence vanished. The ward lines wavered, momentarily diminished—but they were tied strongly to the land, and the thin spots soon flowed back into balance.
Meghan let out a long, deep breath, finding herself with a small grim smile of satisfaction. “No trespassing,” she murmured to the world at large, and went to take her nap.
Dolan opened his eyes to an unfamiliar room. His body continued the low-key background thrumming he now associated with Meghan, but was still plenty weak, muscles full of burning pain and lassitude. Unfamiliar panic surged within him—concern that Meghan, barely schooled and unpracticed, had truly done him harm. Had somehow locked him away from the jaguar permanently.
It’s been only half a day. She said it would take time.
He smelled the water by the bedside and took solace. If he could smell the water, then the jaguar still lurked.
Not to mention he was damned thirsty.
He sat for a moment, checking his stability, taking in the details of this room. An old room, nothing quite in true any longer, everything worn around the edges…comfortable. It smelled of Meghan, gingery, and while at first he accepted the effect as a natural for her house, his gaze finally landed on the rocking chair in the corner. He realized that the bundle of light knit cotton throw was actually a bundle of Meghan beneath the cotton throw.
He watched her sleep for a moment, getting his bearings. The bedside clock said it was early afternoon; they’d only been here a few hours.
She’d said it would take time. Not a few hours, but time.
He quashed the flare of impatience and reached for the bedside pitcher—slowly, deliberately, taking none of his muscles for granted—to pour himself a full glass. He downed it in a few deep gulps, his eyes still on Meghan. She hadn’t stirred. Exhausted…and with good reason.
He wondered about her arm. No cat’s claws made a wound to be so casually dismissed—too prone to infection, regardless of size. He should check…
And still his body urged him to return to sleep, a deep escape from pain. He found the glass still in his hand—and then he misjudged the distance to the serving tray. The tumbler clunked awkwardly into place.
Meghan’s eyes opened at once. “You’re awake,” she said, voice a little creaky. “How are you?”
“I was wondering the same of you.” He flung the quilt back and dropped his legs over the side of the bed, relieved to find himself still fully clothed. “Your arm?”
She pushed the light throw down; she wore a bright coral tank top under a white, gauzy tunic, spaghetti straps barely visible. His gaze got hung up on the strong, graceful lines of her neck and the sweep of her collarbones; she pushed up the tunic sleeve and held her arm out for inspection, turning it this way and that.
What he saw got his attention, all right. “That can’t be the same wound.”
Her face held the smallest of smiles. “My mother’s herbs drove off the Core poison,” she said. “You think they can’t deal with a couple of scratches?” But she shifted so the window light hit her skin, and he saw the remains of the bruising, the clean red puncture marks. “It’s still sore,” she admitted. “But give it another day.” She slid the tunic sleeve back into place. “There’s a reason I don’t use those herbs for everyday injuries.”
So she thought like a Sentinel, even if she didn’t want to. Low profile. “It would draw a lot of attention if you healed overnight from every bump and bruise.”
She brushed a self-conscious hand down the front of the tunic. “Bad enough they’ll wonder why I’m in town clothes with a horse coming in any time now.” But of course a plain T-shirt or tank top would have revealed the wounds—and her healing rate.
She gathered the throw and draped it over the back of the rocker as she went to the window, looking over the back edge of the property, the intense blue sky filling the window. Light shone through the gauze tunic so the tank top outlined her spare shape in clear silhouette—strong shoulders, the nip of her waist, the flare of her hips and a tight, toned bottom.
Dolan scrubbed a hand over his face. It still felt like someone else’s hand, not quite doing his bidding, tingling painfully in every joint. “I didn’t mean to take your bed.”
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