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“And that doesn’t?”
“It hurts more,” he said pointedly.
Holly rested hesitant fingers on his side; he twitched against it, swearing inwardly as the wolf reared up and took interest. Warm fingers, gentle touch...for an instant, it was the only thing he could feel. At least, until the rest of his body figured it out and responded.
Well, the wolf was alive. And so was the man. And Holly’s touch reached them both.
“It’s ugly,” Holly said, her fingertips pressing lightly around his ribs as she assessed the cut. “Really irritated. Until it does heal, you ought to quit taking yourself for granted.”
He frowned at the countertop. “Ow!”
“Like I said.” She dabbed ointment along the edges of the wound.
His hands bore down on the counter, as much irritation as bullet biting. “It shouldn’t be that—ow!” He jerked away, turning a glare of impatience on her.
“Uh-huh. Whatever. Stop growling.”
By dint of will, he did, and he held himself still while she pinched the edges of the wound and placed a generous row of butterfly bandages. By the time she finished—by the time she stretched her arms around him to wind the self-sticking elastic around his torso—that pain was a thing of the past, and her touch was again the only thing of the present—light, skimming his flesh with authority, patting the whole arrangement into place. Lingering, while her scent permeated the air around him—his shampoo and her own personal perfume, mingled into something that felt so very much like possession.
She stood, fumbling the bandage onto the counter—hesitating, when she might have been stepping away, her face flushed. She visibly hunted for words, her teeth lingering on her lower lip before she found them. “I don’t know how long that’ll last, but...try to take it easy?”
He barely heard her. From behind the static, a sweet melody flowed, winding through Lannie like the vines winding along his window. He leaned into it, breathing it deeply into his body, his eyes closing as he absorbed that brief purity.
When he opened them again and found her so very close, so visibly trembling, he had nothing to say—nothing he could say. Not when enthralled in such a deep thrum of underlying need. Mine. A singular thought, threading through sensation. Mine. Not as alpha, not as Sentinel. Just as man.
Mine.
Holly’s eyes opened wide; she stood taller and straighter, and her nostrils flared. “I am not yours.” She looked right back up at him, her pupils grown big within a narrow ring of darkening brown. She might even have stood on her toes, leaning into him physically just as he’d breathed in the song of her. “I am not Sentinel and I am not yours, and nothing you can do will change that.”
The song stuttered back to static, staggering him as much as the connection had done. Holly slapped the remainder of the elastic bandage on the tiny breakfast bar and turned on her heel, going down the steps with the same authority with which she’d come up.
And Lannie stood there with his side aching from her touch and aching for it, and knew she was exactly right.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_105a6717-156d-56e0-836a-9d2ee72a84c5)
Lannie snagged Holly’s file from the cupboard nook where he’d stashed it and went to his thinking spot—or at least the thinking spot he used while in human form.
He sat beside the mule paddock, leaning against the join of two metal corral panels and propping his knees up to serve as a desk for Holly’s file. He’d pulled on a worn chambray shirt, rolled up the sleeves and left the tails hanging out. Not customer-worthy and not concerned about it even if the store had another hour to go before closing. Everyone knew better than to bother him when he went to sit with the mules.
Everyone except Aldo.
The old man approached with a sideways sort of step, not quite looking at Lannie, a giant plastic travel mug in hand.
“Hey, Lannie,” he said.
Lannie blew out a sigh. “Hey, Aldo.”
“Brought you iced tea.”
“Did you, now.”
Another few steps and Aldo held the mug out. He looked his usual borderline disreputable, his thinning gray hair drawn back in a braid, his red-checkered shirt only half buttoned, and his jeans a size too large and hunting for a place to settle on skinny hips.
Lannie took the mug—although when he lifted it for a gulp, he stopped long enough to ask, “You didn’t put peyote in this, right?”
Aldo affected an offended expression. “Wouldn’t do that to you, Lannie-boy.” Although when Lannie raised a skeptical brow, the old man added, “Least, not without telling you. And this time I’m telling you not.”
The tea went down cold and crisp, and Lannie set the offering aside. “What’s on your mind, old man?”
Aldo looked around, not half as surreptitiously as he likely thought. “That Holly girl gone?”
“Up the hill,” Lannie told him, perfectly aware of the thin thread of Holly’s presence. “Using your spot, I believe. Let her be.”
Aldo only nodded, somewhat more sagely than often. But he was coyote; he had a nose for knots and implications, and he knew as well as any that Lannie wouldn’t leave Holly completely off leash. Not yet. “Already bringing her into yourself, then?”
Firm if not unkind, Lannie said, “It’s not your business.”
Maybe a little more firmly than usual.
Aldo only smiled, a thing often not to be trusted. “You’re okay, then.”
Lannie looked the old man straight in the eye—only the faintest hint of threat in his eye, at the edge of his lip. Gone alpha, because with Aldo there was no giving ground. Not when questioned about pack matters.
Aldo offered instant sulk, which was also as it should be. “Just asking, just asking.”
Lannie waited another moment and said, “Good tea, Aldo. Thanks.”
Aldo straightened some. “Sure,” he said. And then, very carefully, “It’s just that if...well, if you weren’t...I mean, I would want to know. Just in case.”
Lannie didn’t even know what to do with that, so he did nothing—his thoughts already tugging back to Holly, and the very thin file at his disposal—the first pages of which had been all about her brother Kai and his extreme sensitivity to the land, and to all traces of Core magic. Unlike any other known Sentinel, Kai could instantly, reliably, perceive the presence of the new silent Atrum Core workings.
Lannie wasn’t certain that Lily and Aeron Faulkes had chosen the best course by bringing their small family to this area. The Core princes and posses preferred their comforts and amenities; they preferred hiding within clusters of humanity. And unlike Sentinels, so many of whom gravitated toward the land, those in the Atrum Core were related by blood line and activity but not by nature. They had no others; they had no sense of the Earth and no ability to navigate its unseen ways.
They never heard Lannie’s song.
He looked up, realized Aldo was still waiting, and said, “Something else?”
Aldo fished in one baggy jeans pocket and pulled out Lannie’s phone—last seen in Holly’s possession as she headed out for her errands. “This was ringing in the truck.”
Lannie scowled at it. This was not a place he brought the phone. “And it couldn’t have waited?”
Aldo shrugged, radiating inoffensiveness—which only meant that he’d done something he likely shouldn’t have. “She called Regan Adler. Regan Adler called back.”
“Give me that,” Lannie growled, holding out his hand. “Go help Faith prep the store for closing, and I’ll put you on the clock for a couple hours.”
Aldo brightened, handing the phone over with a new energy. Brevis covered Aldo’s basic needs, but picking up sporadic hours at the feed store added a tiny bit of luxury to his spare life. Sporadic because that was all Aldo had ever been, and because in these past weeks he’d only become more so. “Appreciate that, Lannie.”
“So will I, if you keep Faith’s mind on her work. Brevis spooks her, you know that.” Not so much as it used to, but Aldo would take it to heart. “Git, then.”
Aldo hustled back to the barn, though not without turning back to offer, “Want me to put hay by the door for those mules?”
Lannie lifted his head in thanks, already absorbed again by the contents of the folder, by the phone in his hand...by the deep tug from his wolf. Find her. He pushed against the bridge of his nose, hunting focus, and reached for the folder. But the next page turned out to be a scant recitation of Holly’s circumstances—her tidy little cottage house in Upper Michigan, the sketchy notes of an upbringing that emphasized her independent nature, her steadfastly non-Sentinel lifestyle
He thought of Jody. He couldn’t help but think of Jody. The woman had been raised Sentinel, but without humility. She’d never been exposed to the consequences of her reckless ways, but had been protected from them. Her full-blooded nature and brilliance with stealth had put her in the field; her inability to mesh with her team had put the team in his hands...with only a few short days to integrate them before they’d gone south to deal with an exotics smuggling ring.
He’d done his best. He’d connected instantly with her—he’d felt her brilliance, her bright spark of life. And maybe she’d understood at that...
But she hadn’t had time to live it. To practice it. And she’d gone out in the field and gotten them all killed.
He’d felt that, too.
And now here was Holly. Yanked from her home, from her life, from her very way of being. There was no telling how enmeshed she’d been in her surrounding territory, if she was anything like her brother—whether she knew it or not.
Her occasionally palpable resentment...
He deserved it. They all did. And if she had any idea she was working with an alpha still reeling from failure and its resulting disaster...
He picked up the phone.
* * *
Holly found herself back up at the well house for the second time that day, only this time she turned around to glare down at the amazing vista and think at it with loud, angry clarity. I am not yours!
That wasn’t quite enough, so she did it out loud, too. “I am not yours!”
Her words rang loudly in the evergreen-studded landscape, and she should have felt just a little bit silly.
She didn’t. And she hoped someone was listening.
Even if no one answered.
“Bother,” she grumbled, and sat on the crest of that final hill to look down on it all. A massive canine paw print was pressed into the dirt at her side, and she stared at it for a good long while.
Wolf? Boy, wouldn’t that explain a lot.
If her family had stayed within a brevis, would she know what her other was? Would she have tried to take it? Would she be initiated, and secure in her Sentinel abilities?
“The big question is, do I care?” She slapped her hand over the paw print, obliterating it, and propped her chin in her hand, looking out over Lannie Stewart’s land. Maybe it wasn’t the thick green woods in which she felt so at home...but if she quit trying to see it through Michigan-colored glasses, the undulating land did have its own beauty. This morning the sky had been crystal clear, bluer than blue and bigger than big. This early evening it was still big enough, but giant, towering clouds shifted across the sky, brilliant white above and glowering bruised blues below and scudding distinct shadows across the ground.
Holly lifted her face not to the sun, but to those clouds—drawn to the majestic purity of them. Without thinking, she stood again—stretching herself tall, arms reaching high and fingers spread wide, every bit of her body yearning to touch those stormy clouds.
She didn’t. She couldn’t. She came off her toes in a huff of disgust, not even sure what she’d been thinking.
Nothing. She hadn’t been thinking anything. She’d just been doing, one woman alone on the hillside and completely out of her own place in the world.
She sat again, this time more slowly. Rather than reach for the sky, she pressed her hands flat to the ground and closed her eyes—looking for something, anything, that might be familiar. She pushed her own awareness, seeking...
Home.
Or some sense of it.
Instead she felt an ugly, distinct sense of rejection. The barrier wasn’t a slap so much as an inexorable refusal to allow her to become part of where she was. It left her sitting perched on the earth, her eyes closed and her teeth biting her lip on the sudden certainty that she might just come flying free of the ground altogether.
She withdrew back inside herself, wrapping her arms around her torso and suddenly shivered—glancing up to find herself in the deep shadow of one of those clouds.
Her breathing slowed; her pounding heart eased. She sat, one woman alone on the hillside, yearning for something she couldn’t define, and listening, listening for even the faintest hint of inexplicable song.
* * *
“Lannie who?”
The woman’s voice at Lannie’s ear sounded puzzled, and he didn’t blame her. No one seemed quite to know what was going on around here.
“Lannie Stewart,” he said, eyeing the sky and pondering the potential for monsoon rain. “I’m in Descanso. Kai’s sister Holly is staying with me for integration work.”
“Ah,” Regan Adler said, wisdom replacing confusion. “The enforced indoctrination.”
He didn’t quite know what to say to that, so he didn’t.
“Sorry,” she said. “Maybe that wasn’t fair. But Holly didn’t even have a chance to see her brother before your people whisked her away. And does she even know her parents have been taken to Brevis?”
Careful, careful. “Her parents made their choices,” Lannie said. “Not that I don’t understand them. But choices have consequences.”
“None of that was Holly’s fault,” Regan said. “But she’s the one paying the price, don’t you think?”
“More than she should,” Lannie agreed. One of the mules came up behind him, reaching through the corral pipe to inspect Lannie’s hair; he reached up to tug on the creature’s chin, and mulish contentment rolled over him. “We’re coming to Cloudview tomorrow to get Holly a bike.”
Silence greeted that pronouncement, if only for a moment. “I thought it wasn’t safe.”
“It’s not safe for Holly to be on her own,” Lannie said. “She isn’t.”
Regan bristled audibly. “You know, we’ve done fine without you so far.”
“Right,” Lannie said, failing to rise to her anger one little bit. “And now you don’t have to.” He let the words settle. “More importantly, Holly doesn’t have to. She has a lot to learn, Regan. I think it would help if she could see you and Kai. If you’re not up for that, I’ll handle it.”
“I have no problem with Holly,” Regan said instantly. “Damn you.”
Lannie laughed. “We’ll call once we have the bike.”
“Fine,” Regan said. “You tell her I’ll be glad to give her perspective. Use those words.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lannie said, without any sign of meekness. He grinned as he ended the call, struck by Regan’s assertively defensive response to Holly’s needs—struck by the similar strengths in the two women.
He reached over his head to give the hovering mule another chin tug. “I think I just might live to regret this.”
When the mule snorted on him, he took it as agreement.
* * *
