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He turned to look at her, unhurried, hand resting on the gear shift between them. “That’s why you’re here.”
She snorted, a wholly human sound. “So, what—so I can submit to you?”
He shook his head. “So you can figure out that’s not what this is about.” And he kept his voice matter-of-fact but couldn’t help the impact of her words. Too independent. Not just struggling to form pack bonds, but resisting them with everything she had. What was Brevis thinking?
She lifted a lip of derision at his words and crossed her arms over her chest. The feed-store front light hit the end of its timer cycle, plunging them into darkness.
But Lannie had a Sentinel’s blue-tinged night vision, and he saw her perfectly. Knew her hair to be brown unto black, and drawn into a shiny fall of a ponytail. Saw her upswept eyes to be equally brown unto black, and snapping mad beneath brows that might ordinarily be softly angled, but now just frowned. A thick ruffle of bangs scattered over her forehead, offsetting features that could have looked at home under a high-society do...if it weren’t for her rugged work clothes and the matter-of-fact prowl beneath her movements, an innately graceful glimpse of her other.
She tipped her head at him in annoyed impatience, quite possibly not aware of his scrutiny or how well he could see her. But he felt nothing except what he’d perceived in this woman before he’d even quite seen her: a throb of hurt and anger and fear, somehow striking deeply into his own soul and spiking a very personal, protective response. In spite of knowing better.
It’s not real. It never was. It’s not personal.
It was just who he was. That quick connection, that ability to spin it into something more permanent.
Even when it wasn’t right for either of them.
She gave him a wary glance. “Did you say something?”
He turned the key. “Not yet.”
He drove her on winding roads to the other side of the small town, where the ElkNAntlers Bar & Grill scented the area with barbecue and sizzling steak. He waited for Holly at the front of the truck, and then waited again inside the entrance, giving her time to absorb the ambience—families scattered around tables, a bar off to the side, and antlers...
Everywhere. Mulies, elk and pronghorn—antlers high, antlers low, and the occasional full cape head mount. And, naturally, a few token jackalopes scattered over the bar.
The owners, Jack and Barbara, had been aiming for quirky humor. Lannie thought of it more as Dr. Seuss.
Barbara waved at them from where she unloaded a tray of glasses at the bar, raising her voice over the mixed early-evening crowd. “Hi, Lannie. Find yourself a spot.”
Holly gave the interior one final skeptical look and chose a table from afar. He wasn’t surprised when she led him to a corner, and he wasn’t surprised when her limber, graceful movement only reinforced his initial impression of her other. Her clothes might have been rugged, but the bright thermal top hugged a lean, curvy figure, and khaki pants followed the roll of her hips to perfection. Sturdy ankle-high boots should have looked clunky, but instead only reinforced the confident precision with which she placed her feet.
Something inside him tightened.
But his response to her wasn’t real. However intensely he felt her presence as the pack bond formed between them, the effect would fade when she moved on to her true place in the Sentinels. It always did.
But that didn’t mean it wouldn’t complicate things along the way. Or that he didn’t still need time to deal with how it so recently had.
She slipped into her chair and picked up the plastic-coated menu, glancing at Lannie only long enough to reassure herself that he had, in fact, followed.
Barbara appeared at their table to slap down a complimentary basket of jerky chips. “Welcome to the ElkNAntlers,” she said. “Need a rundown of the menu, or are you good here?”
“I’m fine,” Holly said. Her smile changed her face, bringing stern lines into beauty; it quite suddenly caught Lannie’s breath. Dammit. “And I’ll take whatever you suggest from the barbecue side of the menu.”
“Smart woman,” Barbara said, collecting the menu and glancing at Lannie. “You?”
“Whatever you bring her.” Lannie lifted a wry shoulder. “It’s not like I haven’t had it all.”
Barbara grinned, tucked her pencil behind her ear, and took Lannie’s menu, too. “I’ll surprise you, then.” She nodded to someone behind Lannie as she left, and a young man appeared to pour them each a generous glass of ice water.
“Drink it,” Lannie advised as Holly simply eyed hers. “The desert and the altitude will get you if you don’t stay wet.” He drank half of his in one go, knowing he’d done himself no good turns out by the well pump house, and waited until she’d done the same. “Exactly why are you here, Holly Faulkes?”
She looked at him as though he might just be a little bit insane. “Because I didn’t hide well enough or run fast enough, youbetcha.” When he didn’t rise to that, she asked, “Who’s Jody? And why is she a problem now?”
He stiffened. He hadn’t thought she’d catch it through the undertone so quickly when she had so much adjustment to do on her own account. He certainly hadn’t expected her to parry with it. Or to recognize just how it affected him.
Too little time, too much resistance. Both Holly and Jody were without the concept of teamwork that made Sentinel field operations viable—and if Holly had both Jody’s arrogant certainty that her way was the right way, and Jody’s willingness to make such choices outside the team framework, then Holly also lacked the most basic foundation of what it meant to be Sentinel in the first place. And Holly had spent her life in extreme independence.
Not teamwork. Not the faintest suggestion of it.
So he didn’t answer her. He couldn’t answer her. Not with the voices of Jody’s team still riding him, the memories of their deaths ripping through his lingering pack link.
He tried to ease the strain in his voice and only half succeeded. “Talk to me. They brought you here for a reason. A good one.”
“That’s right. Because Brevis only bothers you with the important things.” She shrugged. “Didn’t Mariska give you my file?”
“This is the story the way you’d tell it, not them.”
She sat back in the chair to regard him. “It’s not much of a story. My brother needed to hide from you and the Core. When he was fifteen, we left him stashed up near Cloudview and we went to hide in other places so we couldn’t be used against him.”
“How old were you?”
“Not very old. Eight? Nine, maybe?” She shrugged. “What’s it matter? Old enough to know that if you people had been willing to leave him alone, our lives would have been so much different. I wouldn’t have a brother I don’t even know...my mother wouldn’t have cried so much...and I wouldn’t be here now, when my life is somewhere else entirely.”
Another challenge that he didn’t take.
After a narrow-eyed interlude, she shrugged and filled the silence. “Things changed. This spring, he came out of hiding to save his turf from the Core—and to save the rest of you from what the Core had planned. He’s a good man, my brother. Maybe I’ll get the chance to know him now.” Another dark look, aimed his way. “Supposing the rest of you let me.”
Lannie could figure out the remainder of the story. “Once your brother was out in the open, Brevis realized you existed, too.” And the Sentinels didn’t allow strongbloods to roam unconnected. Such individuals had too much potential to create havoc...and Brevis had too much need of them.
He gave her a sharp glance, suddenly understanding. “Kai Faulkes,” he said. “Your brother.” The long-hidden, barely tamed Sentinel who took the Lynx as his other and who had almost single-handedly undermined the Core’s infiltration of his high mountain paradise.
“Kai Faulkes,” she said, her pride coming through in the lift of her chin.
And then the Sentinels had found her, sent a strike team and extracted her from her life. For her own protection, but not without self-interest.
Right now she probably saw only the self-interest.
“Look,” she said, spearing him with a direct gaze. “This isn’t my world. Your fights aren’t my fights. I have no training. My folks could never take the forms of their others, and I never even tried. I don’t know what I’d turn out to be and I don’t care.”
He wondered if she saw the irony of it. Kai Faulkes was a Sentinel’s Sentinel. He lived his other to the fullest in the absence of Brevis; he lived their mission of protection as naturally as breathing.
Holly didn’t even know what her other was.
“Don’t you get it?” She gestured impatiently at his failure to react. “You made me this way. Now it is what it is, and you can’t change that. I’m not one of you and I never will be.”
He straightened, frozen in the act of unwrapping his silverware, suddenly understanding the unspoken piece. Should have read that file. “You haven’t been initiated, have you?”
She made that small, catlike noise of offense in her throat again. “That’s none of your business!”
Of course she hadn’t. She’d been so young when her family separated, going from inconspicuous to deeply underground.
But initiation changed everything. She wouldn’t truly know who she was, or what she was, until she had that first adult connection with another Sentinel—careful, skilled intimacy, bringing her powers to fruition.
No wonder she’d never truly felt the itch to reach out to her other in spite of its expression in her movement, her mannerisms and even her expressions.
“Stop staring,” she told him, mouth flattening in annoyance. Ears flattening, head tipped just so. “And stop doing that thing.”
“That thing,” he repeated without inflection.
“Yes, that thing.” She leaned over the table, creating such privacy as was possible in the tavern. “What you were doing in the store, and Mariska told you to turn it off. That. Stop it.”
Ah. The alpha. When he’d put his unexpected visitors on notice.
But he couldn’t turn it off because he hadn’t turned it on. Whatever she saw came from her own perceptions of his basic Sentinel nature as much as his presentation. No doubt she had other perceptions she wasn’t used to managing outside her normal life, and she’d probably adjusted to a certain element of heightened sight and scent, but this...
This would be new. And different. And she’d been thrust in the middle of it.
He found himself reaching for her pack song. Through pack song, he could understand her, assess her, support her—
But an unexpected, unprecedented crackle of mental static snapped through his mind. What the hell? Surely she wasn’t resisting him; she didn’t know enough to do it. Surely he could get at least a hint of her—a single note, a thread of inner melody...
An orchestra.
Her music flooded him, waking the alpha after all. His pack sense rose to absorb and receive and, just maybe, drown in the rich complexity she offered. He watched her eyes widen and then narrow, and a thread of anger gained clarity in her song.
She half rose from her chair, elbows on the table as she closed some of the distance between them. “Stop it,” she said, but there was no force behind those breathless words. She took a visible breath, a flush bringing out the color on her cheeks, dark eyes and dark hair contrasting against otherwise fair skin.
Not that stopping it was an option, even if he tried. Not with the glory of all she was coming at him, unfiltered and unfettered.
Her voice gained hard strength. “Fine,” she said. “Be an asshole. Your friend can bring my dinner over to the bar, because that’s where I’ll be sitting. Without you.”
She didn’t storm away. She didn’t have to. She made her point with the rolling precision of her stride, the hard line of her jaw...the straightness of her back.
Whoa.
Lannie could do nothing but stare after her, only beginning to understand that she’d done to him as much as he’d done to her—and she had no idea.
Maybe because it wasn’t her fault. Maybe it was the pack mojo gone wild. Maybe—
Barbara slid between tables to deposit his meal in front of him, whisking Holly’s abandoned napkin out of the way to do the same for her. “Now, when she gets back from the ladies’, you be sure to tell her I’ll swap this out if it’s not to her liking.”
Lannie wasn’t quite ready to trust his voice; he nodded at the bar, where Holly had taken a spot apart from the rest and hitched her hip up over the bar stool, already reaching for the nearby dish of pistachios.
Her back was still stiff enough to tell the tale.
Barbara’s brow rose in surprise. “Never thought I’d see that day,” she told him, and reclaimed Holly’s deep-dish plate of shredded elk over crisped sweet potato medallions. She slipped in to place the plate beside Holly, her words clear enough to Lannie’s wolf. “Here you go, honey. You want a beer to go with that?”
Holly nodded, and Lannie jerked his attention to the casual approach of the slender man who took a seat in Holly’s empty chair.
This time when Lannie drew on his alpha, he did it deliberately. He eyed the man without welcome and without apology.
The man met his gaze without rising to that challenge. Faint concern lived in the lines gathering at his brow. “I know I’m intruding,” he said. “Hear me out. We have a common interest.”
Lannie gave the man a sharper look. He’d dressed out of Cabela’s outfitter catalog for the evening—high country fisherman casual, all fresh from the package—and while he hadn’t quite shaved down his balding head, he’d come close enough for dignity. His watch was high quality without being ostentatious; his single ring was black onyx in a masculine setting and his ears went unadorned.
No particular threat there. But on this night when Lannie had taken responsibility for Kai Faulkes’s vulnerable, wayward sister, he didn’t much like coincidences. “How many of your conversations start out this way and still end well?”
“I’m interrupting,” the man said, a touch of car salesman in his demeanor. “I understand that. But I need to talk to you about what happened earlier this evening.”
Lannie kept his stare flat. “Earlier this evening I closed down my store, met a friend for dinner and came here. You’re sitting in her seat.”
Earlier this evening, he’d taken a knife between the ribs and still put five men down...and then walked away from it.
But this man couldn’t know that unless he’d been part of it somehow.
“I’m not doing this well,” the man said. “I’m more than aware that under other circumstances, we not only wouldn’t be companionable, we wouldn’t even speak—”
And then a cluster of casually raucous men moved to the bar, and Lannie saw their faces.
Familiar faces. Battered faces. Only four of them, because the fifth apparently hadn’t recovered from the consequences of sticking a knife into Lannie.
And there was Holly, sitting alone and upset, and completely unaware.
Lannie didn’t much like coincidences.
“You should have talked faster.” He rose from his chair with the wolf coming out strong, already silent in movement. “Your friends tipped your hand.” He hesitated, briefly, to loom over the smaller man. “Whatever you want...this was a mistake.”
“You misunderstand,” the man said, drawing back—but at Lannie’s expression, his protests died back into annoyance. After a final hesitation, he rose from his seat and strode for the exit. Lannie might have grabbed his arm—might have demanded an explanation—but Holly came first. He headed for the bar.
Barbara crossed his path with empty serving tray in hand and caught sight of his expression, freezing there a moment. “Lannie?” But then she saw the men, and muttered a curse. “I see them. But this is a family place, Lannie.” He passed her by, snagging the tray from her unsuspecting grip along the way. She let him have it but still followed him. “Lannie!”
Lannie moved in beside Holly. She made a startled sound and sent a glare his way.
“Right,” he said. “You’re pissed at me. I get it. Let’s go.”
“I’m eating.” She turned away from him and forked up some sauce-smeared sweet potato.
“Lannie,” Barbara said from behind, “what—”
“These guys are not our friends.” Lannie caught Holly’s gaze, nodding at the little gang. They hadn’t spotted him yet, but they’d be looking. They were just having fun along the way.
“I see them.” She took a swig of her own bottled beer, and her Upper Peninsula accent came out strong. “They’re rude. Big wha. I run my own crews, Mr. Stewart—you think I haven’t handled rude before?”
“Holly.” Lannie took the beer from her, set it on the bar, and ignored her fully justified glare of astonishment. “These guys are not our friends.” It didn’t matter that Lannie got no sense of Core from them; he wasn’t sensitive to that particular stench in the first place. They’d already attacked his pack, and they’d attacked him. They were the enemy, and he needed to get Holly out of here, and he told her so with his expression and with his eyes and with every bit of the alpha within.
Holly’s eyes widened; she closed her mouth on whatever she’d been about to say and cast a more thoughtful glance at the men, three of whom were giving the bartender grief while the fourth caught sight of Lannie and stiffened, his expression darkening.
“Uh-oh,” said Barbara from behind him, and hastened away.
