Jaguar Night (24 page)

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 narroweyed 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.

A flash of realization—of recognition—filled him. An opportunity seized, a decision made. Not his own, but so intertwined that he understood instantly and it didn’t matter that he said, “No, oh,
no, Meghan, don’t
—”

Pain and terror and dread and
—

He twitched as she twisted her body away from the man, straining against the invisible bonds that held Meghan’s wrists, not his. And he cried protest as she reversed herself, flinging her body toward the one who hurt her, wrenching every muscle to unbalance the narrow cot, to tip it over onto Fabron Gausto.

Sharp metal bit deep, deeper…she fell on the substantial knife, every bit of energy she had focused on that blade, on the strangely painless passage through her midriff and down into her body, down to the pulse of the massive vessel traveling down from her heart.

He felt that
wrongness.
Strength gushed away from him; he crumpled to his side, gasping for air that didn’t seem to be enough. His breathing turned harsh, rapid…a vicarious last-ditch effort to live. For
her
to live.

Pain and terror and sudden peace and complete awareness and faint tendrils of love reaching out to wrap themselves around her
—

And the ward abruptly faded away.

Chapter 21

D
olan still breathed. On a deep level, he didn’t believe it; each breath came as a surprise.

Her death clung to him, spiraled around him…absorbed him.

Her death, her choice.
She’d taken that power from Gausto, reclaimed it. A sacrifice in the face of the inevitable, to keep the book from the Core and return control of it to the Sentinels.

Dolan pushed himself off the ground, heedless of pale clinging dirt and pebbles. He scrubbed his face, wiping away tears and sweat, and he stared bleakly at the catalog in the outhouse. Margery’s wards still cocooned it, the illusion and protection as fine as ever.

But no trace remained of Meghan’s outer wards.

The
Liber Nex.
Power beyond imagining in that book. It would take so little to sweep through the finesse
of Margery’s wards and reach that illicit power. To reach
out
with that power, destroying Fabron Gausto and his sickened clan—those who had already crossed the line with their blood power.

Pulling his feet beneath him, Dolan took a few crouching steps toward the book—not quite ready to stand up yet, but unable to be still. To resist the lure of that power.

That revenge.

That’s what it had always been about, wasn’t it? The revenge? Revenge he’d once gotten with the death of Tiberon Gausto, and yet somehow it hadn’t changed a thing. It hadn’t changed a thing, and yet Dolan had soldiered on, pretending it was just always about doing the job in the first place. Pretending not to notice that the hollow spot inside hadn’t gone away. And now…Meghan…

But revenge on a large scale…putting a stop to the Core once and for all…

Even through its illusion, the book called to him. He’d touched it once. He’d opened that connection between them and now it reached straight to him. Inching closer without even realizing, he responded to its reflection of his inner landscape—the anger and hatred and a grief so unbearable he couldn’t yet even completely feel it. Just the shock of it, the waves of it lapping his soul, were already too much. Gausto needed to pay.

And with a startled blink, Dolan absorbed the book’s knowledge of how to wipe out those who had taken Meghan, those who had participated in her death.
I can put a stop to this right now.
And the only regret that accompanied that thought was the regret that he couldn’t reach out to the Core entire.

But if you can’t,
said some entirely practical voice within him,
then they’ll come back down on the Sentinels with no holds barred.
The simmering underground conflict would be exposed to the world, just as if the Core had taken control of the book in the first place.

He slowly sank down to the ground, sitting back against his heels. The call of the book snapped away, leaving him bemused—caught up by the renewed clarity of the world around him. Stellar jays scolded him from high in the pines; the sharp scent of the pines warmed by the sun tickled his nose. The antiseptic Ruger had used lingered around him; the bandage itself, a transparent dressing that showed neat rows of butterfly bandages beneath, pulled at his skin.

Meghan had given of herself so the book wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands.

Meghan had given of herself.
Dolan closed his eyes, felt the sting of tears and the true honest grief, unfettered by fantasies of revenge.

He couldn’t let the wrong hands be
his.

Dolan left the book behind. He glared at it, he accepted one more time that he couldn’t carry it as the jaguar, that to move it at all was only to draw attention to it…and he left it behind.

The sooner he reached the ranch and the phone there, the better. It didn’t matter that he was still reeling with loss, could barely move for the crush of it. What mattered was making that loss count.

Make it count.

Ruger had intended for him to rest for several more hours, to let the healing make significant progress
before he took the jaguar and lost the bandages by default. So much for that. Dolan stretched into the waiting jaguar with a relief he hadn’t expected, testing strength and limb and finding Ruger’s work solid. Not full, rippling strength…not the jaguar who oozed personal power and a certain confidence he not only wouldn’t be stopped, but he
couldn’t
be stopped.

But he’d take it.

He cut across the trails, heading overland and down the mountain to Encontrados. For the sake of those who had already been so badly shaken up, he took his human self outside the ranch yard and, wary for anything out of place, stalked into the yard on two feet instead of four.

Jenny’s dog skittered across the yard in front of him, barking near to hysterical; he shied off into the shadows of the casita porch to bark from what he considered safety. By then Jenny had stuck her head out the door and Anica came out of the barn, running to him with such speed that she couldn’t quite stop as she reached him. He caught her up and settled her back on her feet, earning a wary response…and a surprised one. She apparently hadn’t expected the consideration—or the gentle strength behind it.

“What’s going on?” she demanded. “What was that all about? We played nice, we told the coroner we thought Larry had had a heart attack, we sent everyone else home, we didn’t call the cops when your
people
showed up. But now I damned well want answers! And where’s Meg—” She stopped, gaze searching his face, even as Jenny approached.