Sentinels: Alpha Rising

“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.

“I’m hungry,” Lannie told Holly. “Grab your meal and your beer and we’ll eat somewhere else.”

By then the gang was headed their way. Lannie took the step in front of Holly and felt more than saw as she slid off the stool to stand at his shoulder.

“Look who we found.” The lead guy came to a stop, his expression just a little too bright, his bruises from earlier in the day blooming puffy and dramatic. “The idiot who showed up in the middle of nowhere to mess with our business.”

Lannie kept his voice even and his hands low. “Out in the middle of nowhere happens to have been my property. And the old man you beat up happens to be my friend.”

The man offered him a nasty smile. “You should have thought of this moment before you butted in.”

“There were five of you and one of me, and I’m still standing. This time there are only four of you. Is this really something you want everyone to see?” He didn’t, at the moment, feel the aches. He didn’t feel the wound on his side. And he didn’t hold the alpha inside.

“Let’s just go.” Holly’s low voice held disgust rather than fear. “You were right. We can eat somewhere else.”

A camera flashed from behind Lannie, highlighting the man—tall, muscle-bound and graced with a graying blond beard that crawled unmanaged down his throat to his chest. His friends started as the flash went off again, and Barbara made a satisfied noise in her throat. “Got ’em. Now you scoot, Lannie. If they wanted to take a poke at you in my place, they should’ve been faster about it.”

“Yes’m,” Lannie said, easing a step aside without taking his eyes off the men. This would be the moment, if they—

The big guy in front went for it, dropping his shoulder for driving punch that would have caught Lannie pretty much where the knife had.

Lannie whipped the serving tray up between them, bracing it against the sharp impact; hot pain tore at his side. As the man cried out and grabbed his injured hand, Lannie yanked the tray up and cracked it in half over his head.

The man dropped like a rock. Lannie held the other three with his eye, waiting that extra beat. When they exchanged an uncertain glance, he dropped the tray halves on top of their fallen friend.

Barbara had more than a camera; she had a short bat, and she tapped it meaningfully against her palm. “We done here, boys?”

That could have been it. That should have been it. But the fallen man surged upward with offended fury and Lannie snarled it back at him, grabbing the bat from Barbara—

Heavy glass thudded dully against a hard head. The man collapsed in a moaning heap.

Holly looked ruefully at her beer bottle—upended and now empty. She placed the bottle carefully upright on the bar. “Maybe we can get those dinners to go?”

Chapter 3

Awesome. A bar fight.

Holly sat on her suitcase in the bed of Lannie’s pickup, a take-out container balanced on her knees, a new beer at her feet and anger tempered only by the weight of fatigue. She’d done no more than catnap since the Sentinels had snatched her from her home, and right now it didn’t seem to matter that the food was good, the incredible expanse of night sky was filled with diamond-sharp stars and the companionship was currently undemanding.

Because it didn’t change anything. She’d lost a life she’d fought hard to have, and one she loved. She could be furious or she could grieve, but right now this dull, exhausted anger suited her just fine.

“You suck,” she told Lannie, who sat on a hay bale beside her.

“Yeah,” he said, and took a pull on his own beer. “Maybe.”

“Will you ever let me go?” she asked him, making no attempt to hide her frustration.

“Me?” He tipped his head back to watch the stars as if considering—but flinched at the stretch, his hand going to his side where blood had dried earlier in the evening. “Yes.”

“But not them,” Holly said, hearing his unspoken words.

Lannie put aside his empty takeout container and rested his elbows on his knees. “Never entirely. It doesn’t mean you won’t end up back where you were, or where you want to be.”

She made a derisive sound in her throat. “Sure. As long as I’m not too valuable so you people aren’t willing to let me go. And supposing that the Atrum Core stays hands-off.”

Lannie pushed a thumb at the knot of discomfort between his brows, a gesture her unusually sensitive eyes saw just fine. Maybe he had a headache. Good.

He said, “You’re Sentinel, Holly. Having a connection to the whole is part of that, and that’s all you’re here to find. Where you fit in the whole is up to you. But until things settle out, you’re not safe at home.”

She laughed outright. “Safe? Are you even listening to yourself? How safe is your friend Aldo? How safe was it to be in that tavern with you this evening?” She set her beer down with a clunk of heavy glass against the truck bed lining. “If you weren’t what you are, we wouldn’t be eating dinner out here in the bed of a truck.”

He didn’t reply right away; she chose to believe it was because he had no defense. When he did speak, it was only to say, “Well. It’s an awfully pretty night.”

She made a derisive sound.

“Don’t get stars this clear from the ground in Michigan,” he said. “Don’t get them without mosquitoes, either.”

“Maybe I like mosquitoes!” she snapped at him, which was so patently ridiculous that she was glad when he didn’t respond. After a round of silence, the breeze rustling through piñons behind them, she sighed. “God, I need a shower. I don’t even know where I’m sleeping tonight.”

“My place,” Lannie said—and offered the faintest of smiles in the darkness in response to her scowl. “I’ll sleep somewhere else, and tomorrow we’ll sort things out. I didn’t have much notice.”

“Yeah,” Holly said. “I gathered that. I feel so welcome, eh?”

He straightened. “No,” he said, his hand pressed back to his side but his voice taking on that note of command she’d heard there before. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” she meant to demand, but he stepped on the words.

“Don’t think of yourself that way. Don’t think of me that way. Unprepared isn’t the same as unwilling or unwelcoming.”

She didn’t even have to see him to know. Or to feel. He was doing it again. If she looked, she’d find him more than. She’d find herself drawn to him in spite of the fact that she didn’t want to be here in the first place. Just as he’d done to her in the tavern, right there in front of everyone—looking at her so steadily from those dark-rimmed pale eyes, somehow drawing her in and waking the impulse to go to him—to smooth the lines from his brow and kiss the faint lingering bruises on his face, and even to trace her tongue over the luxury of his mouth.

She found her voice, strained as it was. “Stop. Doing. That.”

But he didn’t stop. He even looked as though he might reach out to her. She tensed in anticipation of that touch, wanting it, already responding to it—

Holly reached for all the strength she’d ever had—all the personal sense of self she’d developed young and hard in a life of hiding who she really was, her family split beyond repair. Independent. Capable. Without need for any Sentinel identity. Somehow, she made her voice cutting. “Really? This is your plan? To use Sentinel mojo to seduce me until I can’t think straight? You want to tell me how that’s any different than slipping me some drug?”

He drew in a sharp breath, and for that moment she wished she couldn’t see so well at night after all. Not his startled expression, and not the way her words had hit him like a cruel blow.

It was almost enough to make her wonder if she’d gotten it wrong.

But not quite.

* * *

Lannie faced the morning without enthusiasm, standing not so much behind the farm store counter as draped over it, his head resting on his forearm and buzzing like the inside of a sonic toothbrush.

He wanted to blame Holly.

Pack song was a touchy thing. To be so abruptly disengaged from his home pack, to encounter such resistance from his new pack...

He wanted to blame her but couldn’t. No more than he could blame her for the residual stiffness in his ribs and shoulders, or the half-healed wound on his side.

He wasn’t so certain about the suddenly uncontrollable nature of his mojo. She’d called him on that the night before, but...

He would have said he wasn’t tapping into his alpha at all.

He would have said she’d somehow done it to him.

Except it didn’t work that way, and the situation left him uneasy and half-aroused and extra wary about doing the right thing for her—about whether he even could, given the circumstances. It left him without much sleep, a buzzing head, and a semitruckload of hay on the way in.

“Hey, boss!” Faith said cheerfully, buckling her work chaps around her waist with the legs still swinging free as she strode from the back to slap her gloves against the counter. Her piercings glimmered, an incongruous counterpoint to the cap crammed over her black hair. “I should have another go at that coffee before the hay gets here, right?”

“God, no,” he said, working hard to inject just the right matter-of-fact note into his voice, just the right alacrity into his movement as he raised his head, turning a deliberately discerning eye her way. “The overflow area ready for unloading?”

He knew it wasn’t. So did she. “Javi’s not here yet,” she said, which started off sounding like an excuse and ended with a quick shift to determination. “I’ll go get started while I’m waiting.”

You do that. He waited until she headed out the front door, setting the bells to jingling and trailing one of the several store cats in her wake.

Hay delivery meant shifting old stock, sweeping out corners...disturbing mice. The cats always knew.

So did the wolf. The wolf also knew when Holly entered the store from the back—and it rose to greet her, humming with a possessive intensity.

Lannie didn’t ever remember pushing the wolf away. Hadn’t ever needed to.

He did it now.

Holly stood beside the closest shelving endcap, her expression faintly wary and definitely uncertain. She made no attempt to hide her scrutiny of him; her gaze traveled from his features to his shoulder and quickly checked out his side, where no stain would show simply because he’d grown impatient and slapped on gauze with Bag Balm and far too much duct tape.

He eyed her back, easily able to see the tension riding in her shoulders. She wore no makeup to hide the lingering bruises of fatigue under her eyes, and glossy hair spilled from a high ponytail, a style that highlighted the clarity of her features and her large, impossibly rich brown eyes. She wore the same khaki pants from the day before and a no-nonsense polo shirt quite clearly tailored for a lean feminine form. The embroidery on her left shoulder read Holly Springs in a bold but elegant font interwoven with leaves, and beneath that in plainer text, a simple Holly Faulkes.

It told him a lot. It told him the kind of life she led—hardworking and active, and tied to the natural world. More Sentinel than she thought. It told him she truly hadn’t had much time to pack. And it told him that whatever life of hiding her family had chosen, they hadn’t considered their names to have been a risk. They’d somehow never been in official Sentinel roles.

It meant that her parents had never had the confidence and familiarity to turn to Brevis in the first place. And there was no telling what misinformation they’d given Holly along the way.

Or failed to give her.

She said, “I ate your sausage and oatmeal. I hope you expected that.”

His stomach grumbled. But he knew better than to start the day with the pastry treats Faith left around—not with the wolf prowling so close to the surface, itching for a hunt.

The wolf grew surly on carbs.

Holly gave him an uncertain look; only then did he realize he hadn’t said so much as good morning. Too lost in the static of his thoughts...and in his wolf’s response to her. It’s not real, he reminded himself, and said, “I hope you found everything you needed.”

“Actually, I need a number of things,” she said, her eye wandering to and clearly catching on Horace, the full-size fiberglass horse model at the front of the store. She visibly shook off the sight of Horace’s current dress mode—makeup applied to mirror Faith’s—and returned to her thoughts with determination. “Depends on how long I’m going to be here—here, at your place, and here, in New Mexico.”

He lifted one shoulder. “Couldn’t tell you.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. Surely you don’t want to continue sleeping wherever you clearly didn’t actually sleep last night.”

So much for any impression of invincibility. He said only, “I was perfectly comfortable.” Probably she wasn’t ready to hear that the wolf slept where he would, and that last night’s barn had been a luxury.

“Well, I’m not comfortable here, so if you can manage to give me some idea of how long this whole thing will take, I’d appreciate that.”

The answer was only the same. Lannie didn’t repeat himself.

She looked like a woman hanging on to her temper by a very thin margin. She spoke with a snappy precision he knew to remember. “Fine. I need clothes. I need more than the three ounces of shampoo that were in my travel kit. I need feminine products. And I want a bike. Do you want details, or do you just want to hand over your credit card?”

Lannie said, “A bike?”

“Yes. I bike. Therefore I need a bike.”

“There’s a bike shop in Cloudview,” he said. A bike shop, good hunting territory, and...Holly’s brother. Seeing him—realizing that she could see him—might go a long way toward settling her resentment.

And seeing him immersed in his Sentinel nature might go a long way to helping her accept her own.

“Cloudview?” Holly crossed her arms under her breasts, emphasizing both toned arms and modest but perfectly formed curves; Lannie found himself standing straighter. “What’s the catch?”

Faith opened the front entry just long enough to sing out over the bells. “Hay’s here early! Javi’s late!”

Lannie allowed a faint grimace. “That,” he said, “is the catch. Twenty tons of hay to unload first.”

Holly didn’t hesitate. “Then I’ll go get my gloves and help.”

Lannie did hesitate. She hadn’t come here to heave two-string orchard grass.

“Look,” she said. “I work for a living. I’ll go insane all that much faster if you don’t give me something to do while I’m waiting for whatever magical things you people want to see happen.”

Magical. Yeah, something like that.

He reached under the counter for the stack of mismatched work gloves and dropped them on the glass. “See if anything here fits.”

Holly quickly selected snug gloves of leather and stretchy backing—one an alarming pink, one blue—and tugged them on, flexing her fingers to settle them.

Lannie led the way to the barn overflow, filling his lungs with a deep, surreptitious breath and letting it out slowly—letting the restless wolf fill his skin, trying to appease the other in him until he had that time to hunt.

Holly wasn’t far off his shoulder. She muttered a faintly singsong “Stop that...” and startled the wolf away.

Lannie barely stopped himself startling, too.

You weren’t supposed to see it.

All in all, Holly Faulkes was far more Sentinel than she knew.

* * *

Javi arrived only a few moments into the unloading, allowing Lannie to step back and inspect the bales, approve the load and meet up with the trucker to handle paperwork.

“New hand, eh?” The man moved efficiently to wind and stash the webbing straps that had secured the semitruck’s load, and then came to stand beside Lannie as he scrawled his signature without bothering to prop the clipboard against the truck. “Have to say I approve.”

Lannie gave him a hard glance. The man was twice Holly’s age, his admiration frank but at a distance. Lannie’s initial irrational irritation faded; he glanced up to where she worked the truck—strong and confident and more graceful than thou while she was at it, braced in perfect balance over the hay bales. She’d already figured out the rhythm of the work, the perfect combination of leverage and muscle to make the bales sail down in quiet arcs to a thumping impact. Her face had flushed pleasantly with the exertion, and from the looks of it, she was only just getting warmed up.

In the end, Lannie said only, “She’d eat you alive.”

“You, too, buddy,” the man said, affably enough. “Best watch yourself, if it’s like that.”

It wasn’t like that. She was his job, and his response to her was no more real than ever in the opening stages of creating pack. But that wouldn’t keep him from responding, and it wouldn’t keep him from watching her. Appreciating her.

Beautiful, he thought—and then drew a hard breath when she jerked to a stop, turning to stare down at him.

Best watch yourself, Lannie Stewart.

He handed over the paperwork and put himself back to work. The familiar rhythm of it warmed stiff muscles and tugged as much against the duct tape as it did against his healing side. For long moments, he let go of his thoughts, giving over to the muted conversation of familiar teamwork, the occasional grunt of effort, Faith’s giggles in the background when she lost her grip on a bale and it went pinwheeling off into the yard. When the truck sat empty and swept, the driver pulled away to leave them to the stacking...and eventually that was done, too, and Holly stood beside Lannie looking flushed but relaxed, mismatched gloves tucked away in a back pocket.

Her song trickled through to him, complex and self-confident and, at the moment, devoid of the resentful edge.

“Three hours,” Faith said. “Not our best time, but decent.”

“Thanks to Holly,” said Javi, his eye already gone worshipful when it turned to Holly.

“Yeah,” Faith said, older and wiser by not very many years, her back propped against the towering stack of hay and out of the sun. “You don’t wanna go there. Just say thanks again.”

“Right,” Javi said, blushing beneath the olive tones of his skin. “Thanks, Miss Holly.”

Holly seemed bemused to find herself back in a conversation—and a normal one, at that. “I was glad for it,” she said. “I needed to get the travel kinks out.” She brushed hay from her shirt and reaching for the neckerchief Javi had given her shortly after his arrival—a hesitant offering, gratefully received, and now full of enough hay to have proven its worth.

“Oh, no,” Javi said, backing away a step just in case. “You keep it. You’ll need one of those around here.”

Holly’s smile made Lannie straighten. Once again he found himself pushing back the wolf, the little growl in his mind that said mine.

Maybe so. But too strong or too fast with this one, and he’d lose her altogether. If it had been easier than this, Brevis wouldn’t have brought her so precipitously to his doorstep.

“Drink something,” he told Faith and Javi—and Holly, for that matter. “Bottled water in the fridge.”

“Cool,” said Faith. “Hey, Javi, I got some power powder to try in it. It’ll turn your mouth blue.”

“No, no,” Javi said, following her anyway. “Mi madre would whip my behind if I come home with a blue mouth.”

“She would not.” Faith’s words floated back over her shoulder as she rounded the corner of the barn overflow, and Lannie knew that Javi’s mouth didn’t stand a chance. So did Holly, to judge by the amusement lighting her expression—though that faded when she looked his way.

“You, too,” he said. “Especially you.”

She dusted at the hay on her legs. “And then?” When he only looked at her, she said, “Then what? We’re going to Cloudview, I know. But I’m here for a reason. Do we have team-building games to play, or do I have homework, or are you going to put me on a shelf while you do other things?” Before he’d had time to truly consider that, she added, “One thing they should have warned you—I like to keep busy.”

“I can arrange for another load of hay,” Lannie said, deceptively mild.

“Sure,” she said, just as evenly.

“What’s next specifically,” he told her, “is that we dust the hay out of our hair and get something to drink. Then I’d like to take a few moments to sniff around the well house—you can come or not, as you please.”

He wasn’t sure if sniffing around qualified as busy or boring, and in truth he wasn’t sure he wanted her along. He’d just as soon take the wolf for this particular task, and he didn’t think she was ready for that yet. When it came to that, he didn’t think he was ready for it. Not to ride the edge of the most primal part of himself while she was nearby.

“And then Cloudview,” she said. “I know. But after that. I don’t get the sense that you have any sort of plan when it comes to me.”

Lannie stood taller in a stretch, rotating one shoulder slightly. “I tend to play it by ear.”

“Awesome,” Holly said flatly. She pushed away from the hay bales. “Since we have such a good plan, we might as well get to it.” She headed for the front of the overflow area—a tall, three-sided pole structure—and turned in the direction of the store, striding across the ground like she owned it.

Lannie watched the languid roll of her hips and wanted to follow. The wolf watched the casual strength in her and growled, chafing, wanting to follow.

Lannie made them both wait, and settle, and swallow back the wanting. Only then did he allow his feet to move, strangely distant from the earth and from the new pack song he already ached to call his own.

* * *

Holly avoided a flat, shrunken prickly pear, her thighs aching from the distinctly uphill hike. Lannie Stewart moved with assurance, familiar with the terrain and taking his own strength for granted. When he stopped and checked back for her, she knew for certain it was only for her sake, and not because he found himself winded.

But Holly was glad to suck in air. She was fit—she was damned fit—but she’d already helped unload twenty tons of hay and she was fit at sea level.

He nodded up ahead, and she belatedly saw the upper half and roof of a wood structure that looked more like a community pit toilet than any official well house, clearly placed just beyond the crest of this slope. “I’d like to take a look around before we add more footprints to the area.”