“Then you shouldn’t have waited,” Dolan growled. “You damned well should have come out here without her. If you had, then Meghan would have had protection. You’d have your hands on the book right now.”
Carter regarded him for a long moment. “You may well be right. Things at brevis are…complicated right now. Not entirely secure. Your Meghan…may have paid the price.”
Your Meghan. As obvious as that, was it?
Good. Then they’d know how far he’d go to find her. To save her.
Lyn Maines hesitated as she closed in on them, regarding Dolan with wary interest. “What is that?”
“I don’t know,” Carter admitted. “I was hoping you’d seen it before.”
And Dolan suddenly knew. “Gausto. He had a vial of my blood.”
Maines moved in closer, still wary; she closed her eyes and shivered visibly, but when she looked at him again, her deep brown eyes didn’t flinch from whatever she saw. “Blood,” she said. “Yes. And corruption. Very dark.”
“They killed a man. With a touch.” Dolan scrubbed a hand over his eyes, dropped it to look directly at Carter. “They’re changing the rules, Carter. If Gausto has this blood stuff, then so do the others. Of course,” he added, “the guy who did it promptly keeled over.”
“Sceleratus vis.” A big, bearded, shaggy-haired bear of a man joined them.
“Ruger,” Carter supplied for Dolan. “Our healer.”
“Blood violence, blood force…” the man murmured. Bear, all right. He looked at Carter, dark bushy brows drawn together. “Ancient stuff, draws power from the blood of the ones doing the workings, or the ones being worked upon. Even the Core forbade it back then. I guess they couldn’t bring themselves to throw out their crib notes.”
Dolan noted dryly, “I got the impression that Gausto was overstepping himself. He’d planned to kill me with it, not let me go to spread the word that the Core has it.”
A moment of silence passed between them, a stark, mutual awareness that the stakes had risen considerably. Then Carter cleared his throat and asked Ruger, “Can you clean it out?”
Ruger crouched beside Dolan, large and looming; Dolan couldn’t help but tense—and then Carter offered the faintest of nods. Reassurance? Unexpected enough to get Dolan’s attention. And then the big healer made a sound deep in his throat—annoyed—and asked, “What’s behind it?”
“Years ago, Gausto’s brother decided to play with me before he killed me,” Dolan said shortly. It was enough; they all knew Tiberon Gausto had died at Dolan’s hands. Pretty much everyone knew that bit of history. “They must think ahead…Gausto used my blood today, and these came back.”
Ruger looked up at Carter. “I can clean it out,” he said. “I can set a healing on it. But it’ll take a while—it’s through his whole system. That run we tracked up the mountain didn’t help any.”
Dolan set his chin, felt his anger go hot. Ruger held up a hand. “Whoa, whoa,” he said. “Speaking objectively there. You didn’t do anything I wouldn’t have done.” But he paused, stroked his short beard and admitted, “Well, no. I’m not exactly made for running. Doubt I would have made it halfway up here.”
“How long?” Carter asked.
“Too long,” Dolan answered for him, orienting himself on the shadows, realizing he’d lost at least an hour. “You need to find Meghan. She’s the only one who can give us the Liber Nex.” Also the strict truth. “And unless you get there soon, Gausto is going to figure that out first.”
Ruger cleaned out his system, cleaned off his wound and left him with rations. The big man carried an essentials-stuffed pack in both of his forms, including those things he’d enhanced just as Meghan enhanced her herbs.
While Dolan contemplated protein bars and herbal glop tea, the team decided to split up. Carter and Ruger would return to the ranch, hoping for enough of a welcome to more thoroughly investigate the area, hoping the county coroner had not yet made it out there to remove the farrier’s body. And then they’d pick up the team’s vehicle and meet Lyn and her companion—the muscle of the crew, a man of streaky, rusty hair and golden-tinged skin who could only take a tiger—wherever Meghan’s trail and the road crossed.
Likely the Core was lurking somewhere in Sonoita…but they couldn’t assume it.
Dolan’s job was to rest another hour or two, and then return to the ranch—to watch over it in the unlikely case the Core should return.
His ostensible job.
But it was make-work as much as anything else; he’d been more or less dismissed from the mission. Too battered, too involved…blah, blah, blah. Dolan hardly listened as Carter made his excuses; his mind was on the book, on his intention to stay right here and watch over it…to once again attempt the wards. With his system tainted by the sceleratus vis, he hadn’t had the faintest chance of success the first time he’d approached the thing. But if Meghan had unwittingly imbued the wards with her connection to him, and with his system cleaned thanks to Ruger…just maybe…
In the background, Lyn Maines circled the yard, her head tipped in a listening posture—an ingrained gesture. At one point she stopped, frowning…taking a step back, a step to the side…trying to define what she’d discerned. Damn, she knew her stuff…that book was as good as invisible. Meghan’s efforts had done nothing to interfere with the original camouflage.
He had the first hint of why the team had wanted her, if not why they’d waited for her. If they’d been here…
Then the Core never would have come. Never would have driven Meghan to the desperate measure of doublewarding the book—to the very desperate measure of unwittingly warding it with her life.
He found Carter staring at him, eyes ever so slightly narrowed. “So you’re good with that?” he said flatly. “With staying here.”
That grabbed Dolan’s attention, as Ruger taped a pricey surgical dressing over his side. He stared back with offended ire. “Hell no, I’m not okay with staying here! But there’s no fucking way not to stay here without holding up Meghan’s rescue, is there?”
“Ah,” Carter said. “There’s the mouth that tells me you’re really with us. No, indeed, Treviño, there’s no fucking way not to stay here without holding us up. Get down to the farm when you can; we’ve got a satellite cell phone in the vehicle. We’ll update you and decide how to proceed from there.” No such things as phones or radios when a Sentinel was afoot…They didn’t survive shifting, even within prepared containers.
Besides, Dolan didn’t need a phone to hear the unspoken. We’ll update you was just polite-speak for the truth of things. They’d left him dangling out here on his own; they’d left Meghan dangling. And now that he was truly involved—now that he had personal stakes he’d never even imagined—they expected him to back down and play second-line support.
Something within his chest went hard and cold; he swallowed it down, trying to keep it from Carter—from Ruger, who raised an eyebrow and shared a meaningful glance with Carter.
In the background, Lyn Maines gestured to her partner—the bodyguard, the one who kept watch while she lost herself in the tracking—and headed down the path. Human, but Dolan doubted they’d stay that way long. Ruger had already scooped up his pack, preparing himself for the change. Carter looked down on Dolan, hands on hips, head cocked ever so slightly in what could be interpreted as a challenge. “Meghan is our first priority, Treviño.”
Right. Because they thought she could give them the book. If they knew the thing sat fifty feet away…he could easily imagine them leaving her to die so the aeternus wards would release. Or going in to extract her but careless of her fate, knowing they’d have the book either way.
But the book was safe enough here, whether or not they knew about it. If Lyn Maines, tracker so extraordinaire as to hold up this entire mission, hadn’t found it under her nose…then it was safe. And that made it Meghan’s turn to be safe. To be their first priority.
“Not,” Dolan said, catching and holding Carter’s challen
ge, never mind that he still sat weakly against the old hitching post, side throbbing and body overused, “the same way she’s my first priority.”
He expected some sort of admonishment, some reminder of his duty. And instead Carter simply said, “I know,” and turned away to take the wolf.
Fabron Gausto removed the second amulet from Meghan’s neck. It wasn’t quite the first thing he removed; first he had one of the men cut Meghan’s jeans away from her leg. She initially thought it was some unexpected mercy—the tough jeans were cutting into her swollen limb—but soon enough she understood it was so he could examine the injury, pondering how it fit into his own plans.
But shortly after, he removed the amulet. And by then she had an understanding of the way he thought—that he wanted her to reach for Dolan; wanted Dolan to understand exactly what she was going through.
And so she didn’t.
Shivering, having seen enough of her own leg to shudder at the blue-black blotching and spreading wash of purple, she relaxed her head back onto the hard cot. God, she felt naked. With that cold, flat black gaze looking at her, she felt more than naked.
Shark’s eyes. That’s what they were. No intense blue gaze here; no warm, laughing amber coyote eyes.
She closed her eyes, conjured up those coyote eyes. Conjured up the renewed closeness she’d felt to her mother since her initiation, her new awareness of the many facets of her mother’s world. Enclosed in that warmth, she remembered Dolan—standing before her on that first day, her anger and her fear of him—and her hindsight awareness that along with history she’d been reacting to the very instant attraction between them, the virility she’d seen in his every move and the way her body answered to it.
He’d never thought beyond his own response, she understood that now. His life had not left him room for such things as a future. What a shock it must have been to recognize love.
She’d felt it, that shock—she clung to it now. She’d opened something between them that night at the homestead; they’d sealed it that night beneath the ranch. In the space of a week, they’d found each other, learned each other and loved each other.
Whatever happened here, she had that.
Because she knew what was going to happen here. She couldn’t yet anticipate the agony of what Gausto would do to her, but she knew she wouldn’t be good with it. She knew he’d play with her and torture her and get what he wanted, and then he’d kill her in the way that would most hurt Dolan.
Inevitable, that death. And yet it would also free her clumsy but irrevocable iron wards on the Liber Nex—she knew the truth of that from Dolan’s dismay, from the internal cry of pain and denial he’d tried to hide from her.
So. Best she be the one to choose, instead of giving that power to Fabron Gausto. Best to make that her gift to Dolan—to the world.
Her mother had done it. So could she.
Dolan rested for as long as it took to eat, until the sun declared it to be mid- to late afternoon. Already Ruger’s help had made a difference; he ached, but only in the way he should after such a run. His side no longer bled. His Sentinel strength and healing had kicked in, no longer squelched by the taint of what now had a name. Sceleratus vis.
But he still couldn’t do Meghan any good, not as he was. Let Lyn Maines find her while he recovered, and then he’d be there. As fast as it took, he’d be there.
And meanwhile—if Meghan wasn’t rescued…wasn’t killed…if they turned her, God forbid…then the Sentinels would need access to the book. They’d need to move it. Worst case, this old homestead would hold a Sentinel/Core showdown—shattering the area, shattering their illusions of secrecy. And then they’d be fighting not only each other, but the various governments who couldn’t risk the existence of two such powerful groups. Or worse…who wanted to study them.
Life was suddenly already a lot more complex than it had been a week ago.
“Stop it.” He said it out loud, realizing that his heart had snagged on Meghan’s fate in a frisson of tightening fear. “I won’t let that happen.” And as long as Carter thought Meghan held the only key to the book, he wouldn’t let it happen, either.
So Dolan took one last savage bite of the jerky Ruger had provided, chewing the tough substance with quick efficiency and washing it down with a foul infusion, a favorite of Sentinel healers. It hit his stomach with a pleasant warmth, spreading out into a tingling along his limbs, and he set the container aside to approach the outhouse.
Sitting cross-legged before it, he took a scant moment to appreciate Margery Lawrence again—her clever, wry humor, her skill. With no backup, no chance to plan ahead, she’d nonetheless hidden the book so efficiently that it had taken her daughter—initiated, attuned to this land, welcomed by the wards—to find it. Without Meghan, the book would as yet be sitting undiscovered in a crude abandoned toilet.
On the other hand, if the Sentinels had not set Meghan aside, they’d have had this book years ago. Meghan…trained early, initiated when the time was right…she’d have been looking for the book all along. She’d have known what to do when she found it. She wouldn’t have panicked and tied her life to it.
You don’t know that. The sudden thought startled him. If the Sentinels had taken Meghan in for training, she might well have not been here to learn this land. Or the Core would have reckoned her important in light of the brief activity here when she was a child, and gone after her much earlier.
So do what you do so damned well. Concentrate on what to do now. Not the past, not the future.
His heart slipped out one final, yearning want, and he stopped that, too. He closed his eyes and slipped into ward view, instantly oriented on the now-familiar lines protecting the book. The fine illusionary webbing beneath, the strong bold tangle of Meghan’s death ward. Aeternus.
He’d never break it directly—and he might not recover if he tried. But when he’d been here before, it had responded to him. If in some way Meghan had made him part of this…if only enough to whisper around the edges…
He might have a chance. If he made himself part of what it was, instead of battering against it.
Problem was, Dolan was no Margery Lawrence; when it came to that, he wasn’t even an untrained Meghan Lawrence. His strength lay in the wards, but more in tracing them than in manipulating them, just as reading and speaking a foreign language were two different skills.
He took a deep breath, settled himself. Gave a moment’s attention to the outside world, taking in the scents and sounds of it…heard nothing of concern. Returned fully to the wards, closing in slowly…watching for the response he’d seen earlier, and very well aware that the entire construction might be sensitized by that earlier, illconsidered encroachment. A stupid decision, based on desperation. Stupid—and yet he fought the impulse to do it again, driven by need.
But he couldn’t afford another wipeout. He had to be ready to spring into action when the team found Meghan.
So…another breath. Deeper, slower. He struggled his way back into the same frame of mind from which he’d always worked—detached passion, the determination to get it done without the emotional stakes. He eased closer…closer…
The big, fat lines of energy sat unapproachable. Unbreachable. Unresponsive.
Dolan backed off, fighting frustration, a surge of impatience that made him twitch and straighten, fighting himself. Get a grip, Treviño. This is about more than Meghan. And still, at the very thought of her name, his chest tightened so tightly he nearly cried out with it, wanting to leap up from this place and find her himself, to free her and hold her and to look at their future. Together.
He startled to attention at a flicker of change, looked directly…looked hard. Saw nothing.
No. It was there. Barely, but—
He’d been thinking about Meghan, that’s what. He’d lost his detached nature and slipped into the pure emotion of the situation.
Meghan. He thought of the look on her face when he’d approached the corral, the annoyance, the nar
roweyed defiance he’d come to recognize as a sign of her own determination—the need to keep her made family safe, to keep Encontrados safe. Her reverence of beloved childhood memories of her mother, butting up against the reality of it—her mother hadn’t been the only one to die that night. Another Sentinel had died, trying to keep her safe. And back to the essence of Meghan herself, the feel of her touch in ward view, the feel of her touch in life. The complex nature of her passions, once she’d accepted him into her life, into her body.
Meghan.
And the ward lines surged; they softened at the edges, growing hazy with a still-solid core.
Detached passion…there was nothing of it in his relationship with Meghan. And nothing about it that would serve his attempts to bypass the ward. To make himself part of it, he’d have to be in that place where he felt it all. The frisson of promise, the ecstasy of completion, the privilege of touching heart and soul and body.
Meghan. The wards softened to him…invited him. And though he was so full of what lived between them that he could only grope a fumbling, uncertain step at a time, he nonetheless took a deep breath and took that first step.
Big brave Sentinel, terrified by a little emotional truth.
And then real terror came rushing in to slap him hard—terror from without, from Meghan herself. Dolan reeled away from the wards and staggered hard under another swooping blow; his hands clenched into fists as—
Pain and terror and dread and—
A scream rent the air, silent in all but his head; Dolan swayed with the shock of it, with the impact of what she felt—
Meghan!
His shout came as reflex; she was beyond hearing.
Pain and terror and agony and—
She screamed again, catching Dolan up so tightly that he cried out in tandem, head thrown back and his voice raggedly echoing in the trees—and suddenly he was there, sharing not memories but the crystal clarity of life. Cool biting air in his nose, agony ripping through one leg and despair—defeat—ripping through his mind. He arched back against new pain, the slice of sharp, heavy metal into skin, gently and lovingly following the curve of a rib; he choked on the acrid taste of bile in his throat. A camp cot shifted beneath him even as someone crouched beside it—cold, flat kohl-rimmed eyes inspecting his own handiwork, mouth set in satisfaction with just a little quiver of excitement.
Sentinels: Jaguar Night Page 18