Jaguar Night (23 page)

The Sentinel team.
Finally.
If they’d only been here a few hours earlier…

But they hadn’t been. And now, if they knew the
Liber Nex
sat just a few yards away, they’d spend all their time trying to break the wards and none of it looking for Meghan.

Light, impersonal hands went over his limbs, his bare torso. “You’re a damned hell of a mess, Treviño,” said the one who’d roused him.

“Carter?” Or at least, that’s what he meant to say. It came out a gravelly croak, laced with astonishment even so.

“That’s right.” No mistaking that dry tone. “We’ll lay a healing on you, but it’ll take time to kick in. Most important thing is to get those wounds cleansed. They’re…I’ve not encountered anything like them.
Tainted.
That position looks as uncomfortable as hell. Ready to sit up?”

Given the twisted way he’d landed and then apparently stiffened into place, Dolan was more than ready. He hadn’t expected to need help; he hadn’t expected the patient strength in Carter’s assistance. He discovered he wasn’t far from an old hitching post and leaned against it, gladly taking the water Carter crouched to offer him.

He wanted to gulp it down; he knew better. He took a few slow swallows and finally had enough presence of mind to glare at the man. “Where the hell have you been? Do you have any idea—”

“Some,” Carter interrupted. He regarded Dolan with serious pale green eyes, arms loose and relaxed over his knees, his expression grim for a face that usually absorbed its emotions. Sable hoarfrost hair spoke of his timber wolf nature; so did the way he moved as he uncoiled to look out over the homestead, his attention on the woman who still stood, alert, eyes closed…hunting. “We trailed you in from the ranch, once we got past that Anica woman. Messy there, very messy—Core sign everywhere, none of it making much sense. The wards…those are fresh, damned well done. We found the amulet on the trail…followed you here. You want to fill us in?”

Cut to the chase. “Meghan found the book. But they took her before she could show me.” Well, that was truth enough, literally speaking. Carter took it in and swallowed it, his eyes closing as the implications of it hit home.

The Core had the only person who knew where the book was.

He turned to the woman as three other team members moved back into the yard. “Lyn,” Carter said, and when she looked at him, a tip of his head was enough to call her over. “This is Lyn Maines. She’s our tracker.”

Not a big woman—tidy in form, tidy in her practical appearance. Dark hair tied back, wide jaw, pointed chin, and a distinct smudging of natural color on the outside edges of her eyes. Feline of some sort, he was certain.

And he was just as certain that this was the woman who’d held them up. It was worth an unfriendly glare of blame.

Carter wasn’t slow to notice. “Lyn is the best,” he said. “She was on trail in Europe. Circumstances, Treviño. She couldn’t be in two places at once.”

“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 challenge, 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.