Sentinels: Jaguar Night Page 7

  “Once he’s moving around and gets a little muscle on him, that stocking up won’t be a problem,” Anica added. “Don’t expect to do endurance trails on him…but I think the therapeutic-riding folks will be eager to have him.”

  Jenny rubbed her arms again, giving Meghan a wry, self-aware little smile. Anica turned to her with a canny expression that let Meghan know the subject under examination was no longer the horse.

  Now it was Meghan herself.

  “How’s your visitor?” Anica asked. “I can’t believe I let you talk me out of calling the EMTs this morning. I can’t believe you poured him into your guest bed.”

  “He’s better,” Meghan heard herself say. “He’ll be okay.” Casual, as if she’d really just found a lost hiker on the trail. As if she’d somehow randomly bolted out into the night to do so.

  “He’s already okay,” Jenny said, widening her eyes suggestively. But she quickly grew serious. “He’s dark, though, Meghan. Be careful.”

  “It’s too late for that,” Anica snorted. “He’s in the guest bed. And don’t tell me there’s not something going on. Not when you rush out of here onto a night trail and come back with someone else in Luka’s saddle. And what happened to your arm? Did you really think we wouldn’t notice?”

  “You want to know what I noticed?” Jenny asked, not giving Meghan time to do so much as stutter a response. “I noticed that since you heard from your mother’s friend, things haven’t been right. Every time you think no one’s around, you’ve got your listening face on.” And she briefly demonstrated, tipping her head back, closing her eyes. “That’s something you do only around the anniversary of your mother’s death. But in the last three days? All the time.”

  “That’s true.” Anica crossed her arms beneath her breasts, a move that emphasized her well-endowed nature. When men came to the ranch, they looked at Anica, not at Meghan.

  Except Dolan. He’d come for her; he’d never so much as glanced around for the others. “That was Dolan, three days ago,” Meghan muttered. “And he wasn’t my mother’s friend. I misunderstood that part. He knew someone who…knew her.” Boy, did that sound lame!

  Lame enough so Jenny, gentle Jenny, snorted loudly. The horse lifted his head, swinging it around to eye her with his first real curiosity since arrival.

  “Look,” Meghan said, drifting out into the sunshine to lean her elbows over the stall run—ostensibly to see if the horse had enough curiosity to check her out, but mostly just to move. To give her body some thinking space. And to move her arm away from Anica, which was ultimately futile but might buy some time. “You know I was young when my mother was killed…I don’t know a lot about it.” More than I’m telling. “You know the people involved were never caught—not much chance of that, with the authorities calling it an accident. But the thing is…” Yeah, just go for it. “I think those people are back.”

  That got their attention. Anica’s brows rose, dark wings against an olive complexion. Jenny, strawberry redhead and prone to flushing, instead went pale, stark against the shaded barn exterior.

  Meghan cleared her throat. “And the thing is…I’m not really sure how safe it is to be here. I’m doing my best to keep it that way, but…I thought you should know that.”

  Anica nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “I just wish we hadn’t had to drag it out of you.”

  Guilt flashed over into defensiveness. “Oh, come on—it’s not like I’ve had a lot of time to think about it—or that there’s even a whole lot to say. Dolan has some concerns, that’s all. He went to check them out. He got lost and messed up, and now he’s here to recover. I’m sure once he feels better, we’ll get some answers. Get this all sorted out.” Sure of it? Maybe not. But hopeful.

  Anica shook her head, her short, black hair stirring in a rising breeze. “That still doesn’t explain what’s between you and this guy. You know, the one you just met? Give me a break, I could practically smell the secrets between you. And did you see the way he looks at you? Even half-conscious, Meghan, my dear, he thinks you’re his. Don’t ask me how that works in this day and age, especially when you’re the one rescuing his sorry ass from trails he shouldn’t have been hiking unprepared. But damned if that’s not what I saw.”

  Anica’s language. Always frank, always a little earthy. Just like Anica herself. It didn’t mean anything, not like when Jenny worked herself up to cursing. But Anica’s words…those did. They made Meghan hot and uncomfortable, forced into looking at things she’d been trying very hard to avoid. She pushed away from the pipe corral, where the horse now lipped at a single stem of hay without any real intent. She said, “I don’t have any more I can tell you right now. Dolan will check into some things when he can, I know that much. If you’re not comfortable staying—”

  “Oh, right.” Jenny, that time, was as emphatic as she ever got. “Because the animals on this ranch will feed themselves, and train themselves and care for themselves. Have you looked at the volunteer roster lately, how many of us it takes? As if we’re going anywhere because some incredibly hot guy shows up on your doorstep spouting doom. Me, I’m sticking around. I’ve got work to do.”

  Anica turned to Meghan, the same determined look on her face, one raised eyebrow adding a touch of sardonic get real to the unspoken commentary.

  Meghan felt the unexpected prickle of tears and blinked against it, sunlight momentarily fracturing her vision into a dozen watery reflections. “Looks like I chose my family well.”

  Over the next few days, Dolan lurked around Encontrados. Not quite welcome, not the least bit understood, he stayed away from the various volunteers, mucking out stalls and paddocks and feeding the animals. He knew how to go unseen, even when his movement was hampered by lingering aches and unreliable muscles.

  But it was getting better. Meghan had been right.

  He avoided Meghan, too. Not because he wanted to…but because he wanted not to. And because without his full faculties, he couldn’t sort out either his feelings or his reactions. So he lurked on Encontrados and he constantly tested his improving connection with the jaguar and with himself.

  And in the meantime, he found the wards. He walked them, tracing lines in the dirt, avoiding the prickly pear cactus that appeared only randomly at this elevation, following the cottonwoods marking the steep seasonal stream—bone dry in the stark regional spring, but still lined by water-loving, desert-tough vegetation.

  Wards were his strength, a skill that he’d shared, however distantly, with Meghan’s mother. A skill that would have sent him into that desert to help the woman handle the Liber Nex, had he been but a few years older.

  And then, instead of his brother, he would have died with her.

  Dolan shook off the flattened-ears feeling, the impulse to growl to himself. That such impulses crawled so close to the surface told him both that the jaguar was returning and that he wasn’t up to full strength. Shape-shifters who could not control their otherness were not tolerated.

  Dolan turned aside thoughts of his brother, of Meghan’s mother, and concentrated on the wards. Margery Lawrence, it was clear, had been a pure wizard with the lines and webs of protection. Then again, it was only to be expected from the woman who had created the decoy at the old homestead.

  But maybe, while he looked for weak spots and planned the necessary steps to shore up defenses…If he could absorb the nature of this work, if he could take it into himself, then maybe he could find the manuscript when he once again prowled these hills as the jaguar.

  So he walked the ward lines by feel; he slipped into ward view to study them, and then when he was able to visualize them, he sat in the shadows and traced them with his mind. Along the ground, through the air…a three-dimensional web of protective energies, largely untouched by time. Tangled and tight around the ranch yard, akin to personal wards and capable of keeping out amulets and Core workings. Loose grids around the ranch acreage, more of a warning system than anything else. That Meghan had been able to manipulate them at al
l only confirmed that the Sentinels had made a serious judgment error in cutting her free—leaving her uneducated, leaving the Sentinels without her services.

  Not that he didn’t think she was better off without the Sentinel yoke. But what she might have been…

  That, he rued.

  No doubt she didn’t even know that the initiation process would take what she already had and mature it, enhancing her current skills, bringing new ones to the fore. But Dolan…

  Dolan didn’t want to be the one to explain that process to her.

  He’d hoped he’d find something in her mother’s things—not only clues to the manuscript’s location, but any reference to Sentinel rites that he might point out to Meghan. Let her learn these things from her mother, if she hadn’t already done so. He’d even gotten permission to look through the storage tubs under her bed, although she’d pulled them out into the guest room rather than let him in her own room, and conspicuously made herself absent—not quite abandoning the house, but hiding away in the small room that served as the office.

  He’d found nothing in the tubs, though. A respectful sifting of the contents netted him the same box she’d had at the homestead and several batches of paper. He found Margery’s birth certificate, a lone letter from a man who must have been Meghan’s father, a few early scrawlings done by Meghan herself and several notebooks that couldn’t quite be called diaries but which nonetheless held Margery’s dreams and plans and hopes—carefully envisioned improvements to the ranch, some of which had been carried out; scratched notes on the history of the place. Wish lists. Books she wanted to read, movies she wanted to see, inexpert sketches of plants she wanted to identify. There was one sketch of a grinning coyote, a rough few lines that somehow perfectly captured the creature’s essence.

  No casual name-dropping of the Liber Nex. No commentary about the Sentinels whatsoever. If Margery had kept any written record, any notes, any hints, about the Sentinels and her involuntary association with them, she hadn’t kept them where they’d been found.

  Yet.

  With Margery’s things returned to Meghan’s room—left respectfully just inside the door, to be precise—Dolan had returned to prowling the land. Two days into his recovery, the jaguar lurked just beneath the surface, testing his control—which, it seemed, was distinctly lacking. So Dolan stalked the land until he tired himself, the ache seeping back into his bones, and then he dared to return to the house and to sit on the small, flat mattress of the guest bed and stare at the wireless phone in his hand, wondering if there was any point in calling brevis regional, wondering if the growing sensations within—a low vibration within his very bones, a warmth flushing across his skin—spoke of recovery or some lurking problem.

  Either way, it was time to push harder. To go back out on the land and find that manuscript, hoping that his new familiarity with Margery’s warding touch would be the piece he’d been missing. To go native, and leave this ranch alone.

  Running footsteps slapped the dirt outside; the dog barked once, sharply, and then silenced. Meghan smacked the screen door open and came charging into the house, her face flushed and her hair contained only because she still wore her ball cap, a pale denim thing with Boss Mare embroidered on the front. She also wore a snug T-shirt with cutoff sleeves revealing a completely healed arm. By then Dolan stood in the doorway of his appropriated little room—but he stepped hastily aside as she barreled right on through. Spare, wiry, all lean muscle and bristling energy, she somehow managed to pull herself to a stop—a graceful one at that—and spin on the heel of her paddock boot to face him. “I found another one!”

  He took a step closer to her and stopped, brought up short by the hum of response in his weary body. “Another—?”

  She made an impatient gesture, pulling her Boss Mare cap off to tug her hair back into submission. “A spot! A probe.”

  Instant alarm spread false strength through his body; it almost covered up his reaction to her presence.

  Almost.

  He turned to the window, looking out as though he needed his eyes and not his mind’s eye to see the ward lines—lines he knew well by now. The back of the property spread out before him, the ground falling away in a slope of thick junipers and cedars and clumps of greasewood—but already he searched the layers of the world that most people couldn’t begin to perceive. He felt the bright presence of Meghan beside him, and looked farther—to the sizzling lines of energy encircling this area, woven in neat patterns in some areas and tangled spasms in others—but all deliberate, all as Margery Lawrence had intended it to be.

  But that, there…

  A malignant blot of gray, its edges pixilated with sharp vibration. What had Meghan said?

  A grody spot.

  What she’d seen had been less directed than this. Less deliberate. A shout into the darkness, just to see if someone answered. But when she’d crushed the probe, she’d inadvertently shouted right back at them, and now…this.

  Her voice came close in his ear, close enough to startle him out of his ward vision. Close and demanding; the faint scent of cocoa butter and sweet sunscreen came along with it. “Well?”

  “I see it,” he said, but he didn’t look at her. He looked out over the property, the bright and innocent sky. He saw it, all right—but he couldn’t do anything about it. Not as he was. The false strength drained away; one knee abruptly went loose, popping out from beneath him.

  In an instant, she closed the short remaining distance between them, her hand closing on his arm, strong and supportive. He caught himself, looked at her in surprise, knowing she’d forgotten—

  The sizzle, the hum, the tight snap of connection, the ache, the want, want, want…

  She cried out, jerking away to put quick distance between them. She looked down at herself in disbelief—at tight nipples so obvious through the T-shirt, at her trembling hands. She ran those hands down her torso—a strong, lean torso, the faint ripple of muscle beneath the material making her tense reaction all the more obvious—and then lifted her head to glare at him. “Stop it. Just stop it.”

  He laughed; he held out his own hands. There, too, was the tremble of reaction. His button-fly jeans held back an erection of painful intensity; his legs held him up only because he couldn’t, wouldn’t allow himself to falter again before her. “What makes you think I can do anything about it?”

  “You’re the Sentinel here,” she pointed out, crossing her arms over her chest and making no attempt to be casual about her need to cover herself. He doubted he’d see her in that shirt again.

  Damned shame, really.

  “That means only that I’m good at taking the jaguar,” he informed her. “I have a modest skill with wards; I can see the occasional reflective aura or two. Whatever you did the other night, whatever you created between us…that was way out of my league. There’s nothing I can do about it. I don’t know that there’s anything anyone can do about it.”

  She glared at him. “Then there’s obviously only one thing to do. You have to move. Away. Far away.”

  “What I have to do,” he told her, forcing his voice into temperate understanding, “is deal with this new probe. It’s not like the other. That one was looking around…this one is looking for trouble.”

  “Here?” She straightened, dropping her arms. “My people are in danger?”

  He gave a short nod. “Probably. Hard to tell exactly what something like this is set to do until it does it.”

  “Then deal with it! You didn’t like my way of doing things—you do it.”

  “Your way of doing things would be just fine at the moment,” he told her, looking back into his mind’s eye, finding the probe and its slow, slow process through the wards—wards that recognized it as the danger it was, and wouldn’t let it pass so quietly as the first probe. “Except this particular grody spot would flare back on you and quite possibly burn you out.”

  She rubbed the arm that had been injured. “Burn me out,” she repeated flatly.
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  He glanced at her, pulling himself from ward vision. “Yes,” he said. “Might just be those skills your mother gave you that you think no one else notices. Might be your whole mind.”

  She merely stared, as though she didn’t believe him. Or more likely, couldn’t take it in. “Then fix it,” she finally said. “Whatever it takes. Fix it.”

  “Funny you should put it that way.” He took a step toward her; she took an equal step back. “Whatever it takes. Because the problem is, those herbs of yours haven’t left me alone yet. So I can’t fix it. Not alone.”

  Her eyes flared wide a moment, but quickly narrowed down. He was coming to know that look—the distrust. The wariness. But when he took another step forward, she held her ground. The strength. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t do it alone. I need your—” Strength.

  A moment passed, during which she scrutinized his features with such intensity that he began to wonder just what she saw—what she could see. Finally, quietly, she said, “You’re serious. If I want to keep this place safe…”

  She let her words trail off, but he knew well enough what she meant, and he nodded. “Soon,” he said. “There’ll be a point at which I can’t make this work even with your help.”

  She took a deep breath; she squared shoulders lean from work, feminine in line. Strongly drawn collarbones, graceful neck, that dark nut-brown hair spilling over her nape—he almost reached for her, almost ran his knuckles along those lines. But he caught himself, and—oblivious of his impulse—she nodded. “Okay. We fix it together.”

  Chapter 8

  We fix it together.

  As if it were that simple. Meghan shuddered, down deep inside where she hoped Dolan couldn’t see it but pretty much expected he could. She’d known for days that her only chance to deal with this situation, to protect the ranch and her friends, was to keep her head. To avoid getting sucked up in the emotions that swirled around matters of her mother’s death—or the emotions that swirled around Dolan.