Jaguar Night (8 page)

“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.

You’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

T
he 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.”

“Once he’s moving around and gets a little muscle on him, that stocking up won’t be a problem,” Anica added. “Don’t expect to do endurance trails on him…but I think the therapeutic-riding folks will be eager to have him.”

Jenny rubbed her arms again, giving Meghan a wry, self-aware little smile. Anica turned to her with a canny expression that let Meghan know the subject under examination was no longer the horse.

Now it was Meghan herself.

“How’s your visitor?” Anica asked. “I can’t believe I let you talk me out of calling the EMTs this morning. I can’t
believe
you poured him into your guest bed.”

“He’s better,” Meghan heard herself say. “He’ll be okay.” Casual, as if she’d really just found a lost hiker on the trail. As if she’d somehow randomly bolted out into the night to do so.

“He’s already
okay,
” Jenny said, widening her eyes suggestively. But she quickly grew serious. “He’s dark, though, Meghan. Be careful.”

“It’s too late for that,” Anica snorted. “He’s
in the guest bed.
And don’t tell me there’s not something going on. Not when you rush out of here onto a night trail and come back with someone else in Luka’s saddle. And what happened to your arm? Did you really think we wouldn’t notice?”