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…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.
