Jaguar Night (12 page)

He groaned, heartfelt and beyond all restraint, and she gasped at the mutual pleasure reverberating between them, starting its climb while they quivered and held on to each other and then quite suddenly neither of them could stand it any longer—they moved, and they cried out together, and again and again and—

The world came to an end, a loud and tangled and bursting end, pinwheeling through them both, back and forth and back again, until it finally eased off into echoes of itself and Dolan found himself sitting on his heels and Meghan sitting on
him,
still joined tightly but no longer clinging and clutching and demanding. Just breathing, the both of them, panting against each other. Her hair moved and fell, tickling him; eventually he stirred himself to gently move it away.

But where he stayed relaxed, Meghan grew tense; where he reveled in satisfied completeness—perfectly happy to follow his instincts and desires to this moment, to wait until late to sort out the unexpected tenderness he felt, the expected reluctance to separate from her in any way—Meghan grew distant without even moving. Her forehead still rested against his shoulder as she said, “What’s…what
is
that?”

And unlike the moment at the homestead where their touch had ignited something between them and her reaction had been accusation and annoyance, this time he heard a thread of fear. He felt it in her as she lifted
her head, pushing back far enough to look him in the eye—or as close as she could get in this darkness—while he could see her perfectly—and see that same thread of fear on her face, strong eyebrows raised, eyes widened, pupils huge. She searched his face in the darkness, but even in daylight he had no answers—

Ah. Unless he did at that. Unless he, fool, had underestimated the effect of Sentinel initiation. Sentinel blood with blood, releasing any hidden potential…

With a young Dolan, it had made little difference. Dolan’s jaguar had roared upon him full strength in early adolescence, and initiation hadn’t done anything to change that. But for a woman never encouraged to use her skill in the first place…a woman who hadn’t pushed her boundaries, even if she’d never take another shape…

Dolan winced.

She must have felt it in him. Maybe in the flicker of tension through his arms, maybe because it suddenly seemed evident that they’d never again be able to hide anything from each other. She stiff-armed away from him, slipping through his grasp and finding her own feet—and as much as he wanted to close his arms around her and keep her here, still close, still
together,
he let her go.

She didn’t bother to straighten her clothing; the sleep boxers rode crooked and her sweatshirt had slipped off her shoulders entirely, but she didn’t care or notice. This he knew; this he didn’t have to guess.

It did create an odd inward echo at that.

Her voice, when it came, was low and strained. “What
is
this?” Her stare was direct; he began to wonder just what she could see after all.
“What is this?”

He hesitated, and then he stood, tucking himself away and then resisting the urge to gently and—there it was again—
tenderly
replace her sweatshirt over her shoulders against the chill of the night. And then he just plain hesitated, so suddenly aware that he’d made a mistake. Possibly a big mistake. By not being certain…by not pursuing it…by not bringing himself to deal with it earlier, when he’d been so focused on dealing with the manuscript…

“Don’t even try to tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“No,” he said, more abruptly than he’d intended. “I think…” He closed his eyes, resigned himself. “I mentioned this earlier. Sort of. Almost.” He’d alluded to it, that’s all. And she hadn’t been interested, and he’d accepted that. His attention had been elsewhere, too.

Her fear was still there…but anger came on strong. “Then you not only know what it is…you
knew it would happen.”

Oh, fuck. He was in trouble. Real trouble.

Chapter 11

M
eghan stumbled on her swift way home, catching herself only because she’d fallen uphill and there really wasn’t far to go. She slapped away Dolan’s hand and he withdrew it. Had to give him credit, he knew when he wasn’t wanted.
I don’t
want
to give him credit.
Here she was, body still throbbing from their encounter—their
lovemaking
—and she didn’t want him touching her, she didn’t want him
close
enough to touch her.

Lovemaking.
Meghan’s few casual trysts in the past had been more about groping her way through the loss of virginity, about wanting to care about someone but discovering that she really didn’t…about wanting a relationship in her life and learning it didn’t work that way. And this time…

This time it had been very much different.

Even if one of them had apparently been expecting the aftermath.

This.

This, with the world blooming before her in an odd black-and-white view, a silver cast over all. With her normal sense of the world and its creatures—the same one that allowed her to crash through rattlesnake territory in sneakers even when the cold hadn’t made the snakes sluggish—blown all out of proportion, reeling through her mind with such invasive force as to hinder, not help, her progress through the juniper and cedar woods.

And so she stumbled again, and this time Dolan did snag her arm—and this time she lashed out at him, not caring that she fell on her ass against the steep ground. “How
could
you!” she snarled at him, even more frustrated when she utterly failed to connect; he evaded her easily. “All this time, you knew…you probably
wanted
this, so you could
use
me—” And she kicked out at the ground in the fury of the thought, scattering gritty dirt in his direction.

His denial whiplashed back to her on a level she wished she’d never experienced. Stupid people, those who wanted to be so close as to read their lovers’ minds. Stupid,
stupid
people!

“I didn’t,” he said, and she felt his chagrin, too. “I should have…Look, I knew you probably hadn’t been initiated, but I wasn’t thinking about it. It’s not why I’m
here.”

“Initiated,”
she said bitterly. “Is that what it’s called? Turning my head inside out? Making my body into some rutting—”

“No!” he snapped, and she felt his true anger, too.
“That’s not what that was. You
know
that’s not what we did. There was
choice
—”

“Not about this!” she snapped back. “I shouldn’t have trusted you.”

She hadn’t expected her bitter words to sink in—to
hurt.
For his voice to turn raw. “No, dammit!” He closed in on her, ignoring her fisted hands. “That’s not how it was. That’s not
who I am.”
He pushed in closer, way too close, his cheek briefly bumping hers; she leaned back into the steepness of the ground as he put an arm on either side of her. Bitter juniper scents clung around them, mixing with the scuffed-up dirt, strong in the higher humidity of the night. “That’s not how it was,” he whispered into her lips, low words with the same impact as a shout.

They breathed there for a moment, sensations swirling around them—surging and breaking against her until she didn’t know if she wanted to ravage him or run from him or simply curl into a ball and put her hands against her ears to shut it all out. Abruptly overwhelmed, she twisted away—still beneath him, but no longer facing him. Half curled into that tempting fetal ball.

He dropped to the ground behind her, propped on one elbow—and nearly upright at that, on this odd patch of ground of theirs. His hand came to rest on her shoulder, then moved to stroke back her hair. “No wonder you can’t keep it in that ponytail of yours,” he said. “Too damned fine…” And she realized then that he comforted himself as much as her, soothing his fingers in the silk of her hair. When he spoke again, his resulting calm rested against her, softening her edges. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed,” he said.
“When I have a goal, it fills my head. But not this time. Not since I met you. To have been unable to walk away…”

“Since when?” He’d walked away after they met, and now he’d been itching to walk away for days.

He sounded surprised. “Since I spoke to you at the round pen.”

“You
left,”
she pointed out.

His low laugh tickled her ear. She found herself relaxing against him. A stick poked her leg; before she could think to do it, he brushed it away, and then returned his attention to her hair—running it through his fingers, letting it fall against her neck…stroking it back over her ear. “I went somewhere else,” he admitted. “But I never really
left.
Or do you really think I just randomly reached out to you after the Atrum Core got me?”

She said nothing. She let the words rest against her along with his calm.

“I knew you probably hadn’t been initiated. It just wasn’t…” His hand stopped moving her hair. “Relevant,” he said finally.

She blinked into what should have been darkness and no longer was. “And
initiation?”

“Hell,” he muttered under his breath, startling her. His brief peacefulness evaporated. “I just realized…Carter…if they find out…”

They’re going to find out.
She could read that belief, clear as anything.
“Tell me.”

“They must have assumed there wasn’t much potential going untapped. But now—
sonofabitch.”

He would have shoved off to his feet out of the pure need to move, but she twisted around and caught his
arm.
“Dolan.”
And she wasn’t about to let go. Not until she understood.

“Initiation,” he said, all but vibrating with the need to move—to shift and snarl off some frustration and concern. “It’s not that complicated. Anyone with Sentinel blood—whether you take the shift or not—has two levels of potential. One before you’re initiated by another Sentinel, and one after.”

“Initiated. That’s a dull Sentinel term for
mindblowing sex,
or what?”

He flashed a quick grin at her—unexpected, given his mood, and it struck a place deep within her, the part that still hummed with his presence inside her. “Not necessarily. At sixteen, that’s what I
thought
it was, but it turns out I was wrong. The thing is, some of us have all our skills right there on the surface; the initiation doesn’t make a lot of difference. And some of us run deep. That would be you. And because brevis regional assumed you didn’t have enough of the blood to have that power lurking, they dismissed you. Cut you loose.”

“Cut their losses,” Meghan said bitterly, not quite ready to address the changes within herself. To ask him about them…or even ask for help with them. As if she could just pretend nothing had changed at all, and maybe it would go away. “It’s just as well. They’d have gotten nothing from me. They still won’t.”

“When they take you in young,” Dolan said dryly, “there’s not much choice. You’re one of them, and they don’t easily let go of their own. Their secrecy depends on keeping us all trained and leashed and following their cabalistic little rules.”

“Well, they’re not getting me now.” Meghan let her
hand slide from his arm, and straightened herself out to head up the hill. “They blew it when they blew it.”

Dolan took her hand, helped her find her footing and then released her to cut diagonally across the slope to the faint game trail. “I suspect your mother had something to do with that. She obscured you, somehow. No doubt it’s in these wards somewhere. Your mother and her wards…” He shook his head.

It was Meghan’s turn to grin. “No one outtricked my mother. She had this special little smile…” She trailed off, because it had been a long time since she even thought of that smile and yet there it suddenly was, evoking the same happiness it had given her as a child.

Good God, in rejecting the Sentinels, had she somehow hidden her mother away, too? Had she lost what she might have had of that energetic, loving woman?

It didn’t bear thinking about.

Right now, what bore thought was the shower she would take when she reached home. She automatically reached for Dolan’s hand even as it dropped toward hers, and allowed him to pull her up over a rough spot. Allowed him, hell—some part of her reveled in his strength. Her mother had been like that, too—stronger than she looked. Stronger than she possibly could have been, in her wiry way.

But Dolan faltered, looking up toward the ranch—not so far now. And Meghan felt it an instant later—
heard
it, inside herself. A silent, wounded cry of pain—a cry for help. Wards shattered, land attacked—and beyond the edge of their very steep horizon, an ugly yellow-orange glow. It had the same
feel
as the grody spot Meghan had discovered not so very long ago—only
this afternoon, as surreal as that seemed. The same malevolent intent.

“The ranch,” she breathed.
Jenny. Anica.

Dolan dropped her hand, lunged a few steps uphill and hesitated, looking back at her.

“Go!” she cried at him.
“Go help them!”

And he did. The shift sent crackling blue sheet lightning into the darkness and then he raced swiftly, silently away.

For the first time since her mother’s death, Meghan wished that she, too, could take the coyote. But that much hadn’t changed. Her vision, her perceptions and possibly other things she hadn’t found yet—but not that. There was no coyote lurking in Meghan.

So, being merely human, she ran. She clawed her way uphill, her breath coming sharp and rasping by the time she hit the gentler slope just behind the house and ran a diagonal up to the ranch flat itself. And there she stood, gaping, trying to orient herself—to turn what she saw into pieces that made sense. To turn what she heard into something coherent.

A woman shouting, sheep bleating, a woman’s scream, an animal’s cries overlaid in surreally inhuman tones. Flames burning the air, a dust devil of fire whirling through the yard, sparks shooting out from everything it touched
—
dirt and stone and pipe corral and the sudden
whoosh
of a small outbuilding bursting entirely into flame. A horse bellowed in outrage; the pounding, solid hoofbeats of a warhorse charging into the yard where it
—