Sentinels: Jaguar Night

by Doranna Durgin

  Not to mention he was damned thirsty.

  He sat for a moment, checking his stability, taking in the details of this room. An old room, nothing quite in true any longer, everything worn around the edges…comfortable. It smelled of Meghan, gingery, and while at first he accepted the effect as a natural for her house, his gaze finally landed on the rocking chair in the corner. He realized that the bundle of light knit cotton throw was actually a bundle of Meghan beneath the cotton throw.

  He watched her sleep for a moment, getting his bearings. The bedside clock said it was early afternoon; they’d only been here a few hours.

  She’d said it would take time. Not a few hours, but time.

  He quashed the flare of impatience and reached for the bedside pitcher—slowly, deliberately, taking none of his muscles for granted—to pour himself a full glass. He downed it in a few deep gulps, his eyes still on Meghan. She hadn’t stirred. Exhausted…and with good reason.

  He wondered about her arm. No cat’s claws made a wound to be so casually dismissed—too prone to infection, regardless of size. He should check…

  And still his body urged him to return to sleep, a deep escape from pain. He found the glass still in his hand—and then he misjudged the distance to the serving tray. The tumbler clunked awkwardly into place.

  Meghan’s eyes opened at once. “You’re awake,” she said, voice a little creaky. “How are you?”

  “I was wondering the same of you.” He flung the quilt back and dropped his legs over the side of the bed, relieved to find himself still fully clothed. “Your arm?”

  She pushed the light throw down; she wore a bright coral tank top under a white, gauzy tunic, spaghetti straps barely visible. His gaze got hung up on the strong, graceful lines of her neck and the sweep of her collarbones; she pushed up the tunic sleeve and held her arm out for inspection, turning it this way and that.

  What he saw got his attention, all right. “That can’t be the same wound.”

  Her face held the smallest of smiles. “My mother’s herbs drove off the Core poison,” she said. “You think they can’t deal with a couple of scratches?” But she shifted so the window light hit her skin, and he saw the remains of the bruising, the clean red puncture marks. “It’s still sore,” she admitted. “But give it another day.” She slid the tunic sleeve back into place. “There’s a reason I don’t use those herbs for everyday injuries.”

  So she thought like a Sentinel, even if she didn’t want to. Low profile. “It would draw a lot of attention if you healed overnight from every bump and bruise.”

  She brushed a self-conscious hand down the front of the tunic. “Bad enough they’ll wonder why I’m in town clothes with a horse coming in any time now.” But of course a plain T-shirt or tank top would have revealed the wounds—and her healing rate.

  She gathered the throw and draped it over the back of the rocker as she went to the window, looking over the back edge of the property, the intense blue sky filling the window. Light shone through the gauze tunic so the tank top outlined her spare shape in clear silhouette—strong shoulders, the nip of her waist, the flare of her hips and a tight, toned bottom.

  Dolan scrubbed a hand over his face. It still felt like someone else’s hand, not quite doing his bidding, tingling painfully in every joint. “I didn’t mean to take your bed.”

  She turned, startled, a three-quarter view he found just as arresting. “This? This is the guest room.”

  Which would explain why it held so little of her personality. And yet…he gave the chair a pointed look.

  She turned away again. “I headed for my room, and somehow I ended up here instead. I just felt…I just…”

  “There’s something,” he said, realizing it himself as he watched her stiff back.

  “From last night,” she said, barely audible—but her resentment was clear enough.

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t think he needed to. It was obvious enough to both of them. He turned to other matters from the night. “The Core came in on a sending mist,” he said. His hand clenched into a fist—and that, too, felt like someone else’s doing. “I don’t know how. They shouldn’t have been able to find me. And what they did with that mist…I’ve never seen anything like that before. The Core has some new toys. I need to warn—”

  Her back stiffened even more; her head snapped around. Her hair, of course, had loosened in its ponytail, and strands of hair fell at the sides of her face. Dolan felt a barely perceptible thrill of alarm…and he didn’t think it was coming from within. No, it came from her.

  “I almost forgot,” she said. “I think they were here. Or not them, but…something. I just happened to…look.” She glanced at him, a question on her face—seeing if that was enough, if he understood.

  He understood, all right. He understood that she used her skills on a daily level in ways she didn’t even think about. “There was a…” She shrugged. “A grody spot. I’ve never seen anything like it. It came right through my mother’s wards, too—good strong ones.”

  “And?” he demanded.

  She laughed, but it had a hint of darkness in it. “You think I’d have come back for a nap if that thing was still heading toward us? I slammed it between two ward lines.”

  “You did what?” His explosion startled her—and then her eyes narrowed, her sharp jaw going hard. “You think they’re not going to be just a little bit curious about who obliterated their little toy? You think they won’t come looking? You should have led it astray, weakened it slowly—let them think their damn probe failed!”

  “I shouldn’t have brought you back here!” she said, just as vehement as he’d been. “The probe wouldn’t have mattered if you weren’t here. And you shouldn’t have come in the first place!”

  Astonishingly, he couldn’t disagree. Not with the way things had turned out—the two of them, now tied by blood and incantation and a night of fighting death, and neither of them worth anything but trouble to each other.

  Unless he could do what he’d intended from the start. Unless he could get her help—get her insight into what her mother had done with the Liber Nex all those years earlier. “Meg…”

  “No. Meghan.” She turned away from the window; she turned away from him. “I’ll protect this ranch,” she informed him, on her way out the door. “And I’ll do it my way. Because I already know where your Sentinel ways lead.”

  Space. A chance to take a deep breath. They both needed it.

  Dolan let her go.

  As hard as it was to think with Meghan’s influence thrumming through his veins, as desperate as he was to find the Liber Nex, Meghan, too, struggled. Until the night before, she’d known only that the Sentinels had abandoned her mother…had let her die. And after all this time, she’d obviously thought herself completely free of Sentinel influence. Of the Core.

  No, he shouldn’t have come here.

  But if it meant finding the manuscript…

  Yeah, he’d do it again.

  The front screen slammed shut. He made his uncertain way to the bathroom, and to the kitchen after that, skipping past a cozy-looking living room with deep leather couches and bookshelf-lined walls.

  In the kitchen, the ceiling fan turned lazily overhead, doing little to dispel the warmth in this southernexposure room. The deep overhang of the porch shadowed the two big windows of the southern wall; the others were wide open to the sun.

  Dolan helped himself to more ice water, listening to the bark of a dog off by the barn, the rumble of a diesel pickup, the clang of a gate. A sudden spate of whinnying confirmed the arrival of the new horse, and Meghan was no doubt dealing with it.

  Just as well. He had a phone call to make.

  He found a couple of half-made sandwiches on the counter, lunch meat and thinly sliced cheese, and he took one for himself, sticking the other in a baggie for Meghan’s return. So damned domestic he could hardly stand it, rambling around in her kitchen as though he might actually be welcome there.

  Yo
u’re not paying attention, he thought at her. Not if you still think I’m Sentinel in anything but name.

  He hadn’t been, not since losing his brother. He’d wanted out altogether…not an option, not for a powerful jaguar. So he did things his way…and he got away with it, precisely because he took the jaguar. Because he was good, and effective, and he made things happen.

  But they were always waiting for him to stumble. To find a way to rein him in.

  Or to try.

  And that meant he had a phone call to make. Follow procedure…shift the problem back to the consul’s shoulders. The man had been in position too long…his complacency and self-assurance had turned from asset to liability. You could go down with this one, Dolan thought at him.

  He just didn’t want to go down alongside the man. And he quite suddenly didn’t want Meghan to go down alongside the man, either.

  He helped himself to a shower, rinsed out his shirt and left a towel hanging around his shoulders. By then his brief burst of functionality had waned, and he promptly fell back to sleep before he could use the phone.

  Fell asleep, and fell into nightmares—or maybe just memories. Even in the midst of them, he wasn’t sure. Jared’s death would always be a little of both—receiving his final message via the Vigilia adveho, the frantic rush to find help for Margery Lawrence, Dolan’s own decision to bolt from their Sonoita home and out into the nighttime desert, cross-country on a dirt bike that could cover ground with more speed than his adolescent jaguar form.

  He remembered the disbelieving anguish the most. His brother’s Sentinel cohorts descending upon him, stopping him. Taking him down from the bike—It’s too late, you can’t do anything and You’ll die out there, you idiot! and Hold him, hold him—and the physical agony as he fought them, grief and fury and determination, and yet unable to change a single whisker because of the wards they dropped on him—

  It’s too late, you can’t do anything. You’ll die out there, you idiot! Hold him, hold him—

  He woke with a shout, his body caught up in the past. He fell back, rolling over to groan into the pillow. The scrape of damaged nerve and tendon in his shoulder—dislocated those fifteen years ago in his fierce, feral fight to escape and reach his brother’s side—faded to the leftover damage of the Atrum Core’s poison.

  Already the grip of that poison had eased. He felt for the jaguar…and though he felt only a faint stirring, a flood of relief, warm and overwhelming, washed through his chest and filled his throat. A sudden gust of breath against the pillow, a sharp, reflexive inhalation—he forced himself to move past it. The jaguar was there, waiting. Not if, but when. It was enough, for now.

  He rolled over and found that the shadows in the house had changed, their edges gone soft. Sunset, and a long southwestern dusk.

  No sign of Meghan.

  Carefully, he sat. He rotated the once-injured shoulder—habit now, to keep it loose—and he downed water gone lukewarm as he pulled the phone into his grip, dialing a long-memorized number. Sometimes the voice on the other end was familiar, sometimes not. But it always changed when the receptionist du jour realized who had called.

  The troublemaker. The rogue.

  And, not coincidentally, the Sentinel they sent out on all the impossible fieldwork, simply because he kept coming back alive.

  This voice, as it happened, was one he knew. The consul’s recently assigned adjutant. “Carter. It’s Treviño. I need to talk to—”

  “Talk to me,” Carter said. An abrupt, efficient man was Nick Carter—he’d probably outlast the consul. Their styles clashed hard enough for visible sparks.

  “I need Dane.” The consul, dammit. Straight to the top this time. “Unless he handed over leadership of the Liber Nex field team to you sometime in the past several days.”

  “Nations could rise and fall between your check-ins. The team is minus a crucial member, so is waiting for results from another lead.”

  “Results? I’ve got results—”

  “Which we could have taken into account had you bothered to report them.”

  Deep breath. “First opportunity.” The man knew well enough there was no cell phone reception out here. Not to mention that cell phones were incredibly unreliable around Sentinels in general. He gritted his teeth and added, “I need the team out here.”

  Since keep them the hell away from me was Dolan’s classic reaction to field-team involvement, he wasn’t surprised at Carter’s momentary silence—or his question. “The Lawrence girl yielded clues?” Carter demanded.

  “The Lawrence woman. And no. But I’m still convinced she will.”

  “We can’t send an entire team out without more—”

  Dolan didn’t even wait for it. “The Atrum Core is convinced, too.”

  Carter’s hesitation was so short that Dolan almost missed it. “Are you certain?”

  Ah. No wonder he’d been left dangling after his call for help. “Didn’t get my message, I take it.”

  “We’ve heard nothing.” Definitely wary now—but not of Dolan. Of events.

  “I sent an adveho.” Dolan didn’t hide his pointed response. There were people who should have been listening, who were always listening, who knew which teams were in the field and which were likely to encounter the most trouble.

  “And yet, here you are.” Carter, too, let the message come through in his voice. The adveho was only to be used under the most dire circumstances. Life or death.

  Dolan laughed, the sound filled with pain. “No thanks to brevis regional. Let’s just say that Meghan Lawrence isn’t entirely what we expected. The consul should never have cut her off as he did—damned waste of talent.”

  “Are you still in the field?”

  “I’m out of commission. Could be a couple days, could be a week. We need backup—they’ve already sent a probe looking for her.”

  “Or for you. Gausto wants you, and you know it.”

  “She found the probe,” Dolan said, as if Carter hadn’t spoken. “She destroyed it. She’s completely untrained, and she destroyed a Core probe.”

  “Sounds as though maybe we should have a talk with her.”

  “I don’t think so. The Sentinels screwed up when they let her go…you can’t fix it now.” Emphatic, a little too much so. But he couldn’t tone it down. “She doesn’t want anything to do with you.” She doesn’t want me, for that matter.

  “Has she been initiated?”

  “The Sentinels gave up the right to ask that question,” Dolan said, as cold as cold. She hadn’t been, of course…she probably didn’t even know what it meant.

  Carter cleared his throat. “You don’t sound a hundred percent objective, Treviño.”

  Dolan had to stop himself from shouting. “Damned right I’m not objective. You knew I wouldn’t be. My brother died here, on this same mission—and you never cleaned up after it. So now here I am, doing the job for you. No, I’m sure as hell not objective.” Maybe his voice had risen nearly to a shout…maybe it just sounded that way in his head.

  Pointed silence filled the line between them before Carter said, “In point of fact, I wasn’t on the rolls fifteen years ago. And you, my friend…if you’re going to do any good—if you want to keep yourself and the Lawrence woman alive—you need to get over the blame game and focus on current events.”

  Dolan kept his snort to himself. Not as hard as it should have been…he felt his energy fading. Dammit. But he hadn’t expected anything better from Carter—the consul’s man, shrugging off responsibility for an event in which he had no investment. Typical. “Backup,” he said, returning to the matter at hand, finding some fitting sarcasm. “Now.”

  “I’ll pass along the word—the irony of it will help.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dolan Treviño wants the Sentinels to step in. To quote you—more or less—get over it.”

  Carter’s amusement came through clearly enough, although it faded quickly with his next words. “They’ve shuffled the team. The right people aren’t
all local—and they aren’t all here yet.”

  “Screw the right team,” Dolan snarled. “Just get someone—” the room went dark and sparkly at the same time; he pulled it back into focus through sheer will “—out here!”

  The unexpected happened. Carter said, “You okay?” and almost sounded as if he cared.

  “No,” Dolan snapped at him. Or meant to; he wasn’t sure how it came out. “I’m not. And Meghan Lawrence won’t be, either, if you don’t get someone out here to back me up.”

  Maybe he hung up the phone; maybe he dropped it. He figured Carter would get the point either way.

  Chapter 7

  The new horse should have been trotting around the small run off his quarantine stall, head high and tail flagged, snorting and calling and investigating his new digs. Instead he clung to the corner, head hanging, giving his generous portion of Bermuda hay a dispirited snuffle.

  “We had him down for Bermuda, right?” Meghan frowned at the dusty bay, frowning especially at the stocked-up fluid in both hind legs, at the jutting hipbones, the prominent spine. She leaned against the shaded barn and watched, determined not to think of the Atrum Core the Sentinels, the wards and the grody spot. And Dolan?

  No. Not thinking about him at all—flat out in the bedroom, and still able to set her teeth on edge with the intensity of his purpose, that slight feel of him a sandpaper-rough presence floating against the borders of her mind and body.

  Everyone else, quite appropriately, was thinking only of the horse. “I’ve got the vet coming out tomorrow to float his teeth,” Anica said. “I think that’ll help. I’ll soak him up some hay pellets. It’s too rich to give him much, but it’ll get him started…I’ll portion it out.”

  “Amazing how fast they can go downhill.” Jenny rubbed her arms as if they were cold. “Those people…they signed him over and then dithered two damned weeks over the arrangements.”

  Meghan touched her shoulder. Jenny cursing meant she’d let the situation get to her, and she knew it; she took Meghan’s concern with a quick, bitter smile. “He’ll be okay,” she said. “He’s still the same horse we evaluated.”