Jaguar Night (6 page)

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.

Luka stopped his tree-grazing to regard Dolan with a wary eye, pulling himself up with a high and warning neck. “Not
now,
” Meghan muttered. But still, she gave the horse a moment to accept Dolan’s nature. Dolan leaned heavily on shoulders made strong from ranch work and training—and she would have borne it easily had not another shiver run down her back, following each leg all the way down to the soles of her feet, to her toes. And the flush that followed, and the empty ache, building inside her chest.

Maybe just what she deserved for running out into the middle of a Sentinel/Atrum Core squabble.

But surely it hadn’t been
catching.
And she’d felt Dolan’s pain; she’d felt it clearly. This wasn’t painful…wasn’t even truly uncomfortable. Just…unusual.

Dolan’s arm tightened around her shoulders—for-bearance, she thought, as Luka offered a stretch of his neck, a disgruntled but accepting snort. Dolan reached out to the saddle, steadying himself that way. She would have bent to lace her fingers together into a “leg up” for him, but his hand fell on her arm, sending tingles of warmth and demand through the limb. Her jaw dropped; she looked down to his hand in disbelief.

Quite suddenly that hand moved to the back of her neck, half cradling her head. He pulled her to him—right up against him, her head tipped back and that ache nearly exploding inside her, separate pinwhirls of energy making her light-headed and joyous and terrified all at once. She gasped, fighting it, and his hand tight
ened behind her head, fingers catching in her hair. And when he asked, again,
“What did you do?”
this time there was a growl to it.

Except when she found his eyes, she found shadowed desperation.

What
had
she done?

She realized her lower lip trembled; she put fingers on it to still it, and the uncontrollable swell of emotions suddenly infuriated her as well. She tore away from him, losing half her ponytail but freeing her head, and she channeled all her fear into defiance. “I don’t
know,
” she said. “And I don’t
care.
It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just the aftereffects of—”

Of mingled blood and mingled memories and mingled pasts…

“It doesn’t mean anything,” she repeated, but her voice had lost its defiance. “It’ll fade.”

“You think so?” Hoarse and full of pain, those words. “Because I’m not so sure, Meghan Lawrence. I think there’s more to you than you know. I think there’s more to what’s between us than you’ll admit. And I don’t think this is
going away.”

The absurdity of his words put her back on solid ground…dampened the pinwheels. “Get real,” she said. “There isn’t anything
between us.
I met you once, three days ago.”

“I know,” he agreed, and when she tried to look away she found her gaze flickering back to his despite herself. Still full of that dark desperation, purest, deepest blue flaring bright in the rising sun of a desert sky. “It happens that way with some of us. But this…this is beyond.” He closed his eyes, sucked in a breath.

He released her. “Some of
us?”
she said, stepping back. “I’m not
us
—and you know it.”

He didn’t open his eyes. “You’ve got the blood, whether you want it or not.”

And the ache, which had intensified now that she no longer touched him, intensified and swelled in protest, but now…faded.

And like that, she shook it off. She took another step back, clinging to the absurdity of it all. Shape-shifters, coming into her life these fifteen years later. Her enhanced herbs and old wards and a night with a black jaguar trying not to die…and now she stood, flushed and unsettled, by Luka’s head.

She straightened. She pulled the overstretched hair band free; she gathered her hair up and scraped it back into containment. “I think,” she said, pulling the band into place again, “that you’d better get into that saddle on your own.”

Chapter 5

D
olan managed it somehow, crawling into the saddle with all the grace of a bread pudding.

She might hope the connection between them would fade. He wasn’t expecting it.

Hell, he didn’t even want it.

She admonished him not to touch the reins, which she’d clipped to the saddle’s grab strap. And she didn’t bother with the halter rope, tied in a loop around the horse’s neck. “He’ll follow me,” she said simply, and he did.

A man whom most horses wouldn’t approach didn’t get much time in the saddle. A man who could take the jaguar had little use for it in the first place. He clutched the flat swell of the pommel, and half the time he wished for a horn to grab and half the time, as he slumped and bobbed, he was grateful for the lack of it.

As they hesitated before the lip of a steep slope, she
advised him to lean back, but halfway down the slope she stopped them and adjusted his legs with the confident touch of an instructor—except she just as quickly snatched her hands away, glaring at him. “Figure it out,” she said, and resumed her sliding, sideways progress down the rocky slope.

He didn’t need to guess at her discomfort. He’d felt it, too, the moment she’d touched him. A flow of energy, something greedy and demanding…wanting more.
He’d
wanted more.

Luka followed Meghan in mincing steps, and Dolan did his best simply to stay out of the animal’s way until they reached the bottom.

But
bottom
was a relative term…it simply meant the narrow trail now wound sideways along the slope. Meghan stopped again, patting Luka’s sweat-soaked shoulder—for although ambient temperatures were still modestly cool, the high-altitude sun stabbed down hard.

Meghan hesitated, looking down the vista below them—the tiny dots of the ranch house and barn, the swell of the hill from which he’d once watched for her. She glanced back at him. “God, you’re a mess,” she muttered. “Maybe I
should
have left you…” But she didn’t finish that thought. She took an audible breath and reached for him, steadying him; straightening him. She wound his fingers firmly around the grab strap. He knew she felt the surge of energy there—her hand tightened briefly around his. Not consoling, not reaching out, but a white-knuckled attempt to push through it.

“There,” she said, and her voice was hardly steady. “We’re almost there.” Then she looked down the hill again and gave a short laugh. “Well, maybe not. But the
hardest parts are over.” Her hand, free of Dolan’s, trailed down the horse’s neck. Luka turned his head and tilted it just so, and Meghan gave a little laugh. “I don’t have any. Get us back home again and I promise you a bucketful of carrots.”

But as she stepped out in front, she hesitated, and said somberly, “It’s never really going to be the same, is it?”

“No,” he said, hating the weakness in his voice, the vulnerability it exposed. But she deserved an answer…she deserved the truth. “You know too much now.”

“I’ve
seen
too much,” she said, and glanced back at him—no recrimination there now, just sad awareness. “I’ll have to lie to my people. My chosen family. Or not answer them. Either way, they’ll know something’s wrong. And changed.”

“Don’t think about the big picture,” he said. “Screw the future. Think about getting down this hill. I know I am.”

She gave a short laugh. “I’ll bet. But you know…if you didn’t find what you came for…if the Core didn’t get it from you…then this has really all just begun.”

And here he’d thought she’d been so deeply in denial that she hadn’t been paying attention.
Wrong.
He reeled slightly in the saddle, caught himself and met her eyes one last time before she turned and led them back down the hill. “Yes,” he said. “It’s really all just begun.”

“Meghan!” Anica ran from the casita at top speed, slowing only when Luka made himself tall in warning, raised neck and pricked, intense ears. A small, dark and well-rounded whirlwind of a vet tech who’d burned out of city life, Anica now focused all her considerable
energies toward healing the rescued animals of Encontrados Ranch—and sometimes the people.

Not this one, Meghan thought. Anica would quickly pick up on Dolan’s unusual nature. Not everyone who came to this ranch had their own quirks and sensitivities…but those who stayed? Yeah. They all found this place to be a haven, and some had stayed in this chosen family that Meghan found herself building.

“We were worried to death!” Anica said, running to meet them. “What were you doing out all night? What happened to your arm? You should have taken a cell phone!”

Meghan shook her head. “No reception that high, you know that. I ran into someone in trouble, that’s all. We couldn’t travel in the dark. And I’m fine.”

Anica said flatly, “You ran into someone in trouble.” She held her hand up in a dramatic gesture, her faint Latino accent coming out a little more strongly. “No. Wait. Don’t tell me. You had a
feeling.”

Here came the evasions. “This is Dolan. Think altitude sickness. And unless I’m mistaken, he’s about to fall off the horse.”

“Right.” Anica stood to the side, giving Dolan the once-over. Dolan, in his black leather biker jacket and his black jeans and booted feet, whisker-shadowed jaw and pain-shadowed eyes, barely sitting in the saddle at all. “A tourist.”

Meghan swallowed back her new fears, knowing there was little she could do or say at this point; either Anica would accept Meghan’s new understanding of her world, or she wouldn’t. Just another way that Dolan’s appearance had intruded on her life.

She led the horse toward the porch, with Dolan dipping and swaying over Luka’s withers. One hand was still clamped around the grab strap; the other had found Luka’s mane halfway up his neck. His eyes were clenched as tightly shut as his grip. “Dolan,” she said, reaching to touch him—and then thinking better of it.

“He’s really out of it,” Anica said. “Maybe we should call 911.”

“He asked me not to,” Meghan said. She knew well enough that Dolan would prefer to stay out of the system—that the Sentinels would be coming for him. And that conventional medicine would be of little help anyway. But at the look on Anica’s face, she added, “Don’t worry—if he doesn’t perk up with some liquids, we’ll call.”

“Okay, then,” Anica said, tugging Dolan’s foot from the stirrup. She went on to untie the jackets and saddlebags, pulling them off Luka’s rump to splat carelessly against the dusty yard. “You ready?”

Oh, no. Not for the touching. “Come on, Dolan. We’re home.”

But when he looked at her, she wasn’t the least bit sure he actually saw her—or anything, for that matter. There was no focus or recognition in those blue, blue eyes. Dammit. “Hold on,” she said to Anica when the other woman would have shoved his leg over Luka’s patient rump. Another deep breath; she flexed her hand, reaching out to his calf…hesitating with her hand close enough to feel the warmth of him.

“Meghan?”

Right. Best get on with it. Gently, she let her hand settle onto his leg. At first she felt only muscle beneath
denim, lax with the herbal incantations she’d put into his system, warm and yielding. And then it started—a thrumming through her body, an aching awareness—awareness that this time pooled in sensitive places she’d very much rather not have respond to him at all.

Anica gave her a strange look over the saddlebags, and Meghan did what she hadn’t even thought to do, but which suddenly felt altogether too natural after a night of swapping memories. She focused her thoughts and snapped
Dolan!
without ever opening her mouth.

He started slightly, looking at her with a confounded expression. Anica abruptly shoved his leg over Luka’s rump and Dolan’s eyes widened—and over he went, taking Meghan down with him in a tangle of arms and legs and the disgruntled snarl of a jaguar in the background of Meghan’s mind.

“Take care of Luka?” Meghan asked Anica, straightening Dolan’s legs on the bed of the creaky-floored little box of a guest room and starting in on the leather laces of his boots.

Anica hesitated, still aware she hadn’t been given all the answers here, aware that Meghan was giving off a muddle of mixed signals, and nodded shortly. “Call out if you need anything. I’ll give Luka a good rubdown and get the quarantine stall ready for our newcomer. You’ll be out?”

“That’s the plan,” Meghan said, doing her best to keep the
grim
out of her voice.

Anica hesitated in the doorway as if she might say something. When she finally murmured, “Call for help if you need it,” Meghan knew those weren’t the words
that had lingered on the tip of her tongue. Those words would have been something more like
What’s up with you, woman?