Sentinels: Jaguar Night

She might have answered, had that awareness not shattered into a stuttering fugue of pained disorientation. She clutched Luka’s thick white mane, struggling to control the connection, to keep from drowning in the intensity of those shared impressions.

Nothing had prepared her for this…not her mother, not her mother’s death. Not her guardian aunt’s uninterest in the shape-shifter skills that touched their lives. Not even this man’s sudden presence in her life two days earlier.

Jaguar.

I’m supposed to hate you.

Maybe she did. Maybe that’s what had created the strength of the thread between them. The clarity. And even the tears running unchecked down her face as she absorbed the smallest fraction of his experience.

Beware, Meghan…

“I’m coming,” she told him, out loud into the night. His protest beat against her—but only for a moment before pain swept him away. Setting her own jaw, she shifted to follow the sensations; Luka willingly took the next chance to turn uphill, scrabbling between a batch of tightly bunched oaks, his big unshod feet biting into the scrabble-rock hillside. She balanced lightly over his withers, giving him freedom to move. Soon enough they’d reach the high ponderosa pines, leaving Luka more space—at least until they hit the canyon that divided her land from Coronado National Forest.

But as they reached the pines, as the feel of the Sentinel began to fade—weakening—she found herself turning directly toward that canyon, leveling off their progress. Luka moved out strongly beneath her, as if he knew where he was going—and suddenly, so did Meghan.

The old homestead.

The first homestead took advantage of the canyon stream, the one funneling cold snowmelt down the side of the hill; it was tucked into the small natural clearing beside the stream, using a backdrop of pines and oak and the occasional creosote bush, with cedars creeping up the side of the hill. But even so, it was now only a wreck of disintegrating structures, barely enough for emergency shelter in the case of a sudden storm.

His thought, surfacing randomly against hers before sliding away again. I thought it was here. I thought…

Meghan stiffened in the saddle, causing Luka to hesitate for the very first time. It. Her mother had been dealing with an it—one she never would identify, not even in the most generic terms. An it that had killed her—if not directly, because of the Atrum Core’s obsession with the thing.

Meghan had thought it destroyed. She’d thought it gone. And yet the jaguar had come back to hunt it?

For the first time, she truly hesitated. Luka, not quite willing to stop his energetic process, nonetheless scaled back to a cadenced, high-kneed trot. The trail unfurled before them in the light of the rising moon—coming on full, it was enough to light their way in these well-spaced pines. Enough, if she let him, for Luka to flow forward into a collected canter, perfectly balanced to avoid ruts and suddenly jutting rocks alike.

Sudden regret found her on a breeze. His regret—and yearning and need and a deep, bitter underlayer of…

Failure. Loneliness.

Meghan settled deep in the saddle, giving Luka the faintest lift of thigh and seat bone to release him into the canter.

I know where you are. And I’m still coming.

Failure. He’d come to put an end to this once and for all…to secure the indestructible manuscript where it would never be found. He’d come to involve the daughter, as his brother had involved the mother. But he’d meant to keep her safe…not writhe out his life on the dirt floor of an ancient home while the daughter was left to take the heat.

Like his brother.

Jaguar fur, scattered over the towering desert landscape. Gold and black rosettes, a claw…a whisker. No more. Because the brevis regional consul had delayed backup with scrying and warding and—

Whatever. Too late.

They’d be too late for Meghan, too.

Your brother? The thought had a light touch, gentle…and unfamiliar.

Hearthstone bruised shoulder and spine as his body jerked uncontrollably against it, twisting so tightly he couldn’t find room to breathe. The world dimmed even further, and still he recoiled inwardly in the alarm of no longer being alone. His lips drew back in a snarl and his whiskers quivered, and even blinded by pain and his body’s jerking dance, his slapping paw found its target, claws clogged with dirt and blood but still able to pierce skin.

He hadn’t expected to feel the pain of it, sharp and wounding; he froze. Only for an instant, and then the poisons took him away, the world fading away to thin nothingness. He barely felt the light touch on his head, around his muzzle—confident fingers lifting that frozen snarl and smearing his gums with a paste imbued with the feather-touch of incantations.

As fast as that, the rigor eased, his long and powerful body sagging back to dirt and hearthstone. And when the world darkened, it was as if he fell into himself, deeply into himself…back into the life of his beating heart and panting lungs and even that deep growl of feeble protest stuck in his throat.

And then, somewhere along the way, he fell into her. Meghan. Slip-sliding from one thought to another, from his to hers and back again. Through it all echoed his anguished backdrop of warning—Atrum Core…Atrum Core…’ ware. Meghan, Atrum Core…

They’d come back if they knew she was here. They’d come back if they thought she’d become involved…if they thought she’d shed her noncombatant’s role to join the Sentinels outright.

If they thought, as he’d thought, that she could help to find the Liber Nex.

’Ware, Meghan…

And then he lost himself to darkness, to sweet scents and blessed lassitude and the enfolding blanket of determination that he would not, after all, lose himself to the Core.

And Meghan followed him down to the darkness.

You shouldn’t go…don’t go—! Sweet little girl voice, gone reedy and thin with desperation, the recognition of futility.

The world skipped around memory turned into reality. Long coltish legs crossed on the bed, covers over her head…herbs pungent in their pinched little piles, arrayed directly on the sheets around her bare legs. Breathe deep. Take them in, like Mama says. Transform them. Empower them. They didn’t quite have meaning, those words, but by God she tried. She built wards and she built warnings and she built safety.

Or she thought she did.

But she felt it happen. She felt the death…the loss. Mama! Don’t go, Mama! Don’t—

A whisper of goodbye, a scant caress of love—

You said there’d be help! You said there’d be a jaguar! You said—

Gone.

Scattered herbs, sheets damp from sobbing, heart broken forever. Little girl betrayed. By the—

Jaguar.

Older brother. Strong, golden, black rosettes rippling with the movement of bone and muscle beneath. Jared, who could do anything. Jared, confident in running point for the Sentinels, in assessing a situation, in doing what had to be done until the entire team arrived. Jared, steeped deep in Sentinel lore, Sentinel responsibility…utter faith in teammates.

Jared. Brother, father and mother in one package, enough years between them to make it work. Enough years before them to anticipate working together. Sentinels.

“Sure, it’s dangerous—it’s the damned Liber Nex, Dolan. But I won’t be alone. Working point, yeah, but the team will be there. Making sure we’re clear without drawing attention our way.”

Jared.

Not coming back.

What do you mean, he didn’t make it? What do you mean, you weren’t there in time? What do you mean, he’s—

Dead.

No jaguar. No Sentinels. Just Margery Lawrence, left on her own and now—

Dead.

Echoing wails, bitter, bitter grief, wrenching loneliness…resentment.

And childhood resolve, not quite as young and untouched as it had been only days earlier. I’ll rebuild my own family. My chosen family.

And the Sentinels will have nothing of me. Not—

—ever.

They’d let him die. The Sentinels had tangled themselves in some dumb-ass protocol and they’d delayed and they’d left him out there to die.

Jared. His last thoughts had been for that woman, a single mother, a joyful coyote with no real place in fieldwork, no training, just heart. His last thoughts—

Bitter, bitter grief. Choking fury…

A young man’s resolve. I will never trust them. I will be one of them, but not theirs. Not truly. Not ever.

For Jared, he would save the ones he could. Hard and independent and…

Rogue.

Chapter 4

Meghan sat back against the long-dead fireplace in dazed exhaustion, beyond thought. Beyond decisionmaking or reaction or feeling.

She stared through dawn light at the huge black cat sprawled on dirt and rock before her, instantly reconnected to the memories they’d shared. His memories, her memories…all the same now. She pressed a hand to the base of her throat where that hard ball of grief welled up so suddenly, so deeply.

Perhaps not beyond feeling after all.

Her arm protested the movement; she stretched it out, shoving back torn sleeves for a good look. Punctured, smeared with dried blood, swelling. She’d cleaned the wounds and covered them with an herbal paste—preserved with warding, enhanced with personal power—that would have them pink and closed by the time she made it home. After last night, Margery Lawrence felt…closer, somehow.

And meanwhile…she didn’t understand it, but that blood…his blood…his saliva…they’d all mixed, somewhere along the way.

Made a difference. A connection.

Luka whickered. Hungry, no doubt, and thirsty…he’d waited, accepting the other side of the crumbling old house as his stall. She’d removed his tack and trickled water into the collapsible water bucket, but he needed more.

She wasn’t ready to leave the jaguar. Not yet.

Dolan. She knew his name now. She wasn’t ready to leave Dolan Treviño.

The darkness lifted, steadily brightening into a typical morning here on the Santa Rita sky islands. Crisp and bitter cold at night, the clear sky quickly turned from star-spattered ink to coral-rimmed cerulean and then to a blue so sharp it almost hurt to look at it. Even here, tucked away in the trees and shadows, the day warmed fast enough for Meghan to ease off her quilted, oversized vest.

Meghan regarded the jaguar for a long moment from her slumped seat at the hearth. His ribs rose and fell in a steady rhythm, and the growing light picked out the faintest dapples of the rosette patterns within black fur.

His tail twitched; a paw flipped and went still. Meghan crawled back over to him to rest her hand on his side, his shoulder—feeling for the spasms from the night before. She still had no idea what had happened—what had poisoned him so badly, or how it had gotten into his system. She’d only treated the symptoms—red clover, valerian, magnesium powder, all tied to infusions of power for efficacy—and she’d been lucky when it worked.

He’d been lucky.

Dolan Treviño, and not his brother Jared after all. Jared, golden and vibrant and dedicated…and every bit as dead as Meghan’s mother. Killed on his way to her.

Meghan wondered again if he’d sent out a warning, just as Dolan had warned her. If her mother had known that last night…and gone out anyway, making sure she wasn’t at home when the Atrum Core came after her. Came after the Liber Nex.

A forbidden book of the dead. An instruction manual for corrupt, death-based, power-wielding techniques, long-buried and long-forbidden. Great. And that’s what Dolan was looking for now? That’s what he thought her mother had handled?

His tail flicked again. A dream, maybe…or maybe a memory. His broad brow furrowed. “I’m sorry,” she said, drawn back into their moments of sharing that which she’d learned of him. Of his brother. “I didn’t know. But I still don’t want anything to do with this.” She hadn’t grown up with it, not the way he had—and until now she’d had no idea of the deeply instilled obligations the shifters felt. Even Dolan, who blamed the brevis regional consul for his brother’s death, still found a way to serve their cause. To remain Sentinel.

Well, Meghan had never been Sentinel. And her mother, tied to the Sentinels only by the virtue of her shape-shifter nature, had never been meant for field duty.

Jaguar fur lay warm beneath Meghan’s hand, and she felt the massive weight of him as though somehow he lay on her hand and not the other way around. Glossy fur slid between her fingers—and then suddenly the lax muscle stiffened. Meghan felt rather than saw an impending flicker of blue light, and then it was too late to snatch her hand away, to leap away—

He changed, fur to smooth skin to leather-clad human, and there lay her hand through it all, flickering in the light and for the briefest instant literally a part of Dolan Treviño.

And, oh, God, she hurt and she couldn’t see and she had two hearts, beating hard and fast, and four lungs, gasping for air, and nerves that sizzled and popped and ached to be every bit as connected as that one hand on that one shoulder—

She cried out, in fear and astonishment and denial, and the sound came from his mouth. And then the blue light slammed them apart with chastising whips of energy and Meghan quite suddenly lay at the hearth, sobbing for breath and barely able to lift her head to find Dolan coming up to his hands and knees, to his feet, and then down again, full length on the floor.

He looked just as she felt…stripped away, seared by another’s soul. When he lifted his head he cried, “What did you do?” in a voice ragged and barely audible.

She heard him anyway. She heard him clearly.

She heard him within.

“What did you do?” He demanded it again, his voice hardly any steadier. Off to the side, a horse snorted in alarm and annoyance. Meghan looked as wild as Dolan felt, sprawled in front of the hearth with the look of someone who might just bolt.

No, not her. Not the woman who’d stuck with him through this past night. Even now, her expression quickly sharpened. She looked at him; she looked at her hand. It gave him time to think, to realize how every bone and muscle burned and ached, to understand that the memories sitting so freshly in his mind weren’t all his. Weren’t all—

She’d been just a kid. She’d never known that his brother had died for the cause, trying to reach her mother. Her guardian, her father’s sister, hadn’t been a shifter, hadn’t been Sentinel at all…and the Sentinels—as ultrasecretive, ultracautious as any clandestine organization over two thousand years old—hadn’t told her a thing. They’d cut Meghan loose, knowing she wasn’t a shifter and sacrificing what skills she did have—what she might have been nurtured into. More fools, they. She’d saved his life. What she might have done if fully trained…

“I’m sorry,” he said, and his voice felt rough-edged in his throat. “If I’d realized they cut you off…I’d have told you what happened myself.”

“Doesn’t matter.” She tucked back a loose strand of hair, tightening an espresso ponytail gone loose and sloppy, her expression turning her sharp features yet sharper. “The Sentinels let them both die. And you’re still with them?”

Dolan managed to push himself upright, leaning back against the wall with one leg propped up before him. “You don’t leave the Sentinels. Not if you’re a shifter.”

“Nice,” she said, prompt and sharp. “They take lessons from the mob?”

Dolan laughed. Not loudly, not long, but as amused as he could be with his body still tasting an Atrum Core death. “Didn’t your mother teach you anything about us?”

Meghan stiffened. “She taught me what she felt was important.” She absently rubbed her arm, but stopped with a wince, pulling her hand away. At his frown, she held out her arm, displaying the ripped sleeves. “You weren’t a grateful patient. At least not at the start.”

“I—” Vaguely, he remembered it. Damn. “You’d best get it cleaned. Is it—” But he couldn’t quite bring himself to ask herself if he’d hurt her badly.

“It’s fine.” She’d gone brusque on him, more like the woman he’d met several days earlier—if not altogether convincing, there at the corners of her eyes. There, he saw lingering grief, lingering puzzlement. She stood, slapping off dusty jeans more vigorously with one hand than the other. “I’ll take care of it. First I’ve got to see to Luka. Since you’re all right for a few moments?”

Luka. “Your horse,” he realized. “He’s done well with me.”

“Luka has a noble soul,” she said, simply enough so it almost hid her great affection. “But he needs water. Rest, and I’ll be back in a moment—and then you can tell me just what happened here. Before I got here.”

He’d damn well warned her away, that’s what. Warned her about the Core. Not called her here. A sudden spike of annoyance made it through his pain. “And you can tell me why you ignored my warning—”

She laughed—short, no humor to it at all. And then she walked over to the horse—a luminous gray with great dark eyes and the baroque head from every old European statue Dolan had ever seen. He greeted Meghan with a gentle bump of his nose, and the halter lead rope between them was merely a token as she led him out of the house.

He was still absorbing the fact that she hadn’t answered him when he fell asleep.

When he opened his eyes, it was to find her saddling the horse outside the house while the animal nibbled at last year’s dry grasses and stripped the new leaves from a nearby ash. Sunlight played along her bare arms as she gave the horse a last stroke beneath his heavy mane, highlighting toned, lightly tanned muscle. She wore a T-shirt; the jackets were tied around her waist, an absurd tangle of sleeves obscuring her lower body. Her arm glistened with salve, and as she returned to the house, he winced at the bruising around the puncture wounds. Widely spaced, made by a huge feline paw. His.

“You shouldn’t have been here,” he said. “I warned you—”

She laughed again. “Right. And what was I supposed to do about that? If the Core wants me, it probably gets me. But you know…they could have had me any time in the past fifteen years. It’s not like anyone was watching out for me.”

“They were here,” Dolan said, and his emotional hackles rose just thinking of it. “Last night. You would have played straight into their hands.”

She shrugged. “You were the one who called me.”

“I did no such—” But he stopped, and thought twice. He’d warned her. He’d meant to warn her…hadn’t he? Surely he hadn’t transmitted any of his…

Right. His dying man’s desire to see the face that had haunted him for days.

There wasn’t any way to finish what he’d started to say, so he left it at that. He said, “So you came out to help the Sentinel?”

Her lingering humor dropped away; her chin lifted slightly. Sharp features; sharp-eyed glance. “I came out to help you.” She sat quite suddenly on the hearth, a rise so short that she had to cant her knees together. Her voice was quiet with both wonderment and horror as she asked again, “How did they do that to you?”

Dolan looked away; his jaw clenched. “I don’t know,” he said. “They shouldn’t have…” He took a deep breath and found the fortitude, somehow, to look her directly in the eye while admitting to the failure. “I dropped my guard. The Core got in. Isn’t that enough?”

She tucked that wayward strand of hair behind her ear again. “I suppose it is. Now, do you think you can get on this horse?”

He blinked. He hadn’t been expecting the concession—not from a woman who’d been so fiery, so opposed to him from the start. He wasn’t sure what it meant—what she was really thinking. And so he was cautious when he said, “Brevis regional will be here in a couple of days.”

“I can’t stay out here that long,” she said, quite sensibly. “And if you think I’m leaving you, think again. I know exactly what I gave you last night, and how long it’s going to take to get over it. I doubt you can even take the jaguar.”

And boy, wouldn’t he love to prove her wrong! Except when he reached for the jaguar, just for the feel of the jaguar, he found a deadness he’d never experienced before. An emptiness. He fought a sudden stab of panic.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’ll wear off. But until then, you need a place to stay.”

And bring her more deeply into this mess, with the local Core, under Fabron Gausto’s rule, more aggressive than he’d ever suspected? “I’ll be fine here,” he said. “They think I’m dead.”

“Then there won’t be any problem with having you at the ranch.” She stood, stretching. Two of the three jackets slipped off; the T-shirt pulled high to expose a tight, smooth line of skin. “Look,” she said, bending to scoop up the jackets. She rolled them lengthwise and shot him a direct, spearing look. “I’ve got a horse coming in this afternoon. I need to be there. Can we just do this thing?” As if she didn’t have circles under her eyes and a certain grim determination to her movement.

And every moment he argued with her was a moment she wouldn’t be on her way home. He nodded; it took her by surprise much as her own recent concession had startled him, and she relaxed visibly.

There were already saddlebags resting over the horse’s loins; she tied the jackets over them and returned to the house, giving the floor and hearth area a careful inspection. “Can’t have the slightest bit of the herb stuff left out,” she said. “It’d kill anything smaller than a dog, with the whammy I put on it.”

Whammy. Oh, yeah. The Sentinels would just love that.

Meghan pushed away the exhaustion of the night, the turmoil of the morning, the fears for the future—even the odd feeling in her bones. She focused on her hands, where they tightened the girth one more time for the rugged ride home with a rider who wasn’t likely to keep his balance. “Have mercy on him, Luka,” she murmured as Dolan finally made it to his feet, wobbled there a moment and pretended to have found his strength.

She would have believed it, too, if she didn’t know what he’d been through this past night—or if she hadn’t seen him in full strength only days ago, full of prowl and power in either form. He made it to the gaping doorway and leaned there, and somehow made it look casual. She knew better than that, too.

“I’m not sure about the wards,” he said. “I thought I left them strong…but the Core followed me in without much trouble. I—”

“Can’t see them,” she said, only belatedly realizing she’d not only finished his sentence, but to judge by the startled look on his face, done it accurately. Or was that expression more properly called a glower? “I’ll come back later and see what needs to be done.” Not that the homestead often found use, but it still deserved some respect and protection. “I can do wards, but…not right now.” She ran a hand down Luka’s shoulder. “We’re ready when you are.”

He wasn’t. And he wasn’t going to be. She saw the flicker of despair on his face, there and gone again, right back to the tough-guy glower. For a scant moment, she wondered if it might not actually be best to leave him here. But even if the Core thought him dead, they might figure out they were wrong. And besides…she simply didn’t want to leave him behind.

Not that she wouldn’t have enough explaining to do when she got back.

She dropped the halter lead and went to him, where he pretended to stand in the doorway, and slipped in under his arm. “Oof,” she said, under her breath. And then shrugged off the shiver that ran down her back.