Jaguar Night (25 page)

But Jenny knew. Jenny, who read the horses so well, had no trouble with Dolan’s grief and anger, simmering
so close to the surface. “No,” she whispered, stopping just out of reach. “What…what happened?” And to Dolan’s utter astonishment, she then flung herself at him. He drew himself back, ready to fend her off—but she only threw her arms around his neck and wailed.

And by that, Anica knew. Her face paled; she bit her lip, hard, and looked away, mouth working anyway, tears spilling down her cheeks. Dolan surprised himself then, lifting an arm in invitation so then there were three of them.

Only for a moment. Then Anica drew Jenny away, patting her back in a soothing, mindless gesture while her own bright eyes pinned Dolan. “When Luka came back without her…” She stopped, took a breath and retreated into the anger that seemed to serve her as well as it did Dolan. “They came for her because of you, didn’t they? That man this morning…he hated you. He
wanted
you.
You
brought them here. This is—” And she bit her lip again, heedless of the bright smear of blood she’d already created there.

Dolan opened his mouth to respond—and nothing came out. No words could make it past the tight band of pain in his chest and throat—pain that had somehow eased slightly when the three of them had been huddled together.
This
was what Meghan had been so desperate to protect. This was what he’d been missing for so many years he’d forgotten what it was like.

So he wasn’t about to lie to them. He worked his jaw, hunting composure, and said, “Yes. I underestimated him. He came because of me. He found Meghan because of me. He took her on the trail, and I couldn’t get there in time.”

“So you just let them go?” Anica cried. It wasn’t fair, the look on her face said she knew it wasn’t fair, but she lashed out anyway. Hurting. He understood that.

“The man who was here…Gausto. He was using forbidden techniques…even the Core doesn’t allow them. Or didn’t. I’m not sure which it is right now—he’s capable of defying the Core and thinking he’ll get away way it.” Dangerously close to babbling. He drew his thoughts back together. “I wasn’t ready for that kind of power. He…”

“He hurt you,” Jenny said, stepping back from Anica, her fair complexion splotched, her nose pinked.

Dolan hesitated, then nodded. “I tried—I
tried
—” And found he had to jerk himself away from them, unable to even say the words, and unable to face their grief and accusations, no matter how fair.
Make it count.
He stalked into the house and straight to the phone, dialing the number Carter had given him.

The phone barely rung before Carter barked a response. “What?”

“Meghan is dead.” Dolan said it coldly, the only way to get the words out at all. Anica and Jenny entered the house, coming up to wait behind him—to listen. What the hell? They deserved to know whatever came of this call.

Carter muttered an expletive, moved the phone from his mouth just enough to tell the rest of the team before returning to demand, “You’re sure?”

Dolan laughed, no humor whatsoever, and let it stand as an answer. “I want them. Have you got a location?”

Carter should have said,
It’s not about what you want.
But he didn’t. He hesitated, and he said, “Gausto tangled
the trail. Lyn is just about through it.” A rustle of material as he shifted; Dolan got the impression he was checking on Lyn’s progress. “I don’t think anyone else would have had a chance of getting through.”

Right. Carter being careful to cover his ass now that they’d lost a civilian—and one of their own, at that, long abandoned. Dolan said, “I want in on it. I want to recover her.”

“What makes you think—”

“You’re still going to go after evidence of what Gausto is doing,” Dolan interrupted. “You’re probably going to play nice about Gausto, because you don’t want to rock the cold war into a hot war.”
As almost happened when Tiberon Gausto died at my teeth.
“But you’re going in, and I want to be there.”

“Treviño—” This time Carter cut himself off, obviously hunting words. Dolan already knew what they’d be—hedge words about Dolan’s track record of working with a group, shuffle-footing over his less-than-optimal physical status. All true enough.

Dolan just didn’t care.

Make it count.

“I found the book,” he said, and left the threat unsaid.
I’ll tell you where it is
after
I’m in on this raid.

Carter said, “Son of a
bitch
—!”

“Where are you?”

“Son of a
—”

Dolan exploded into a shout.
“Where?”

Tense, taut silence followed, and then the murmur of commentary in the background. A gust of a breeze blew across the phone, followed by Carter’s breath. “Just picked up Casa Arroyo.” Barely a pause, and then he
came back again, just as demanding as Dolan. “And Treviño, if you screw this up—”

Dolan laughed. “It’s already screwed up, Carter. Didn’t you notice? It was screwed up the moment you didn’t back me up. The only unexpected thing is that I’m still alive to hold you to it.” And he hung up.

“Dolan—” Anica started.

He didn’t trust himself to turn around and he didn’t let her finish. Hand still on the phone, closed around it with white-knuckle tension, he said, “I need a vehicle. And a shirt. That one I was wearing before.”

“You want one of our cars?” Anica said flatly.

“And a shirt.” He drew a deep breath, finally turned to face them. Jenny was still blotchy and pale, but she watched him with an avid interest, with some faint hope—unlike Anica’s hard, lingering judgment. He told them, “I’m going to get her. And to stop them, as much as can be done.”

Anica watched him for a moment, her face unreadable, her gaze flicking from his expression to his exposed wounds and then finally to Jenny…who gave the slightest of nods. Anica looked back to him, no less judgment in her eyes and maybe a little bit more of warning. “I hope you can drive a stick.”

This can’t be right.

Even the presence of that dim, confused thought wasn’t right. The presence of
any
thought.

“Yes, yes.” An impatient voice prodded her. “Not what you expected, is it?”

That self-satisfied comment brought the world back in a rush, and brought awareness along with it. Meg
han’s eyes flew open; she sat up. She sat up on the same damned cot in the same damned basement, with the same damned man sitting beside her, that same cruel expression on his face.

Along with something else. Smugness, definitely. But he seemed pale as well…and as though he sat because possibly he couldn’t stand.

And then she realized she wasn’t restrained any longer. She realized that her leg only throbbed lightly, and that the damp spot of blood on her snug tank top was cold. She stuck her finger through the hole the big knife had left in the ribbed material, stretched it out to discover no corresponding hole in her skin. She couldn’t believe it; she drew the shirt up to expose the flat, toned abdomen beneath, finding nothing but faint, dried blood smears. Nothing where he’d cut her, nothing where she’d thrown herself on his knife.

“I could say you played into my hands,” Gausto told her, crossing his ankle atop his knee and leaning back to regard her, “but the truth is, I had hoped to play longer. For Treviño’s sake.”

Dolan.
Instantly, Meghan reached for him.
I’m here,
she wanted to tell him, and
what happened to the book?
and
are you all right?
And she remembered with crystal clarity those last moments, the entanglement between them, his horrified understanding of what she’d done…

“You’re trying to reach him,” Gausto guessed, head slightly tipped as he watched her. “You won’t. I’ve taken that from you.”

She couldn’t quite comprehend it. She couldn’t comprehend any of it. She looked down at herself again, and then to Gausto. “
I was dead.”

He nodded. “You were dead.” He eyed her with respect, if with lingering annoyance. “I didn’t think you’d have it in you. The Sentinels, after all, have had no chance to brainwash you.”

“Imagine that,” Meghan said. “Just little ol’ me, making my own decisions.” She smoothed her shirt, examining her uncovered leg. No longer grotesquely swollen, it still bore a rainbow of bruises…but none of the cuts Gausto had made when he’d first started in on her, wanting to see if she could feel such cuts beyond what the limb had already endured.

She could, of course.

“Unfortunately, the injury to your leg was too established to heal completely,” Gausto said, but he said it without compassion—he said it with the annoyance of a man who has not accomplished perfection. “But the cuts…the internal bleeding and the blood loss itself…all are resolved.”

She’d been dead. Now she wasn’t. “What did you do?”

“Not much gratitude in your tone, my lady.” He raised an eyebrow. “And you
are
mine, to bid as I wish. You can no longer contact your lover, you no longer have the least influence over your destiny.”

“I can damned well walk out of here,” Meghan said, lifting her stiff leg over the side of the cot and standing up, testing it—and walking for the exit with much more assertion than she felt, as if she had no worries that the leg might not hold her, that Gausto’s men weren’t on the other side of that arching doorway, waiting to stop her. But stiff as it was, the leg didn’t buckle, and no one appeared to stop her, and a spark of hope dared to bloom—

“In fact,” Gausto said, and sounded bored, “you can’t. I bid you stay.”

And she stopped. She didn’t think about it, she didn’t see it coming—she just stopped. Halfway to freedom and she stood, feet planted, swaying slightly, trying to understand.

“Why don’t you sit back down?” Gausto said. “You don’t seem to be fully recovered yet.”

Without being the least bit sure if it was her own choice—or somehow
his
—Meghan returned to the cot. Slowly, careful of her leg, she sat at the edge of it, shifting backward slightly when it threatened to tip.

“Ah, yes, must secure that,” Gausto said. “It’s been inconvenient enough already.”

Meghan found she could barely speak, that her words came out hoarse and thick.
“What did you do?”

“What I’d meant to do all along. You died, I brought you back. I made you mine in the process. You’ll do as I say…and won’t do those things I forbid. We’ll have a nice discussion about the situation with the
Liber Nex
—with the difference being that now, of course, you’re too valuable to damage. You’re the only one of your kind.”

The only one of
what
kind?

But Meghan didn’t ask it out loud. She didn’t want to know. She looked at her hands; she turned them over and clenched them. She closed her eyes, awash with the knowledge that Dolan thought her dead—make that
still
dead—and that he still grieved for her, still blamed himself for it.

A man’s murmur from the exit barely caught her attention—not at first. But as Gausto impatiently indicated the man should speak, the tone of the conversation brought her out of her internal floundering with the unimaginable.

“I’m telling you, the sept’s prince has figured out we’re using the
sceleratus vis,
” the man said. “He wants to talk to you…his people aren’t taking my excuses any longer.” He lowered his voice. “If we can’t put them off, and they come out here…one look at her…we’ve got to get rid of her!”

“No!” Gausto’s controlled tones rose sharply; he spoke as if she wasn’t even there. “She is my finest achievement…and once I prove what we can accomplish when we unfetter ourselves, the sept’s people will forget their foolish restrictions and see only the success. If anyone knows where the
Liber Nex
is—if anyone holds so much as a clue—it is this woman. That we can use her to take down Treviño makes her all the more important.”

Greatly daring, the man said, “I’m not sure Treviño matters to anyone but you. He’s only one man.”

“A man who constantly interferes with our efforts in this territory!”

Now Meghan opened her eyes, looking for confirmation that Gausto was as close to losing control as he sounded. She found him flushed, his eyes wild—and as if he felt her gaze, he visibly reined himself in. He said to his lackey, “Continue to stall them. Meghan and I are going to have a discussion, and then the only issue will be just how much strength we gain by providing the Core with that manuscript. Until then, you will do as your
drozhar
says.”

The man shot a quick and skittering glance at Meghan, and as he nodded respectfully to Gausto and turned away, she realized belatedly that he’d been afraid of her.

She wasn’t sure, but she thought she was afraid of herself, too.

Chapter 22

C
arter glared out the window of the SUV as it rolled down, sleek performance on a sleek vehicle. “Where’s the book?”

Dolan had no intention of answering that one. He looked down the road, where Lyn stood on the shoulder and appeared to be admiring the rugged ridges-and-grassland scenery half a mountain and a thousand feet below Encontrados—but the tension of her stance told him she was hard at work. “She just about got this?”

“She’s got it,” Carter said sourly. “She’s just being thorough, as long as we had to wait for you. Tell me you left the information somewhere, in case you don’t come back from this.”

Dolan gave him a fierce grin. “Better make sure I come back from this.”

Carter narrowed his eyes ever so slightly, putting the pale green irises in shadow. “Lyn will ride with you.”

Dolan looked at him a long moment, processing this unexpected offering. For an offering it was—a guarantee, of sorts, that they wouldn’t play games with him on the road, or try to delay or ditch him. None of which they had any reason to do…but he’d learned well not to trust his own people, lessons ground into granite pain this past day.
Things are complicated,
Carter had said, acknowledging the price Meghan had paid for Sentinel delays.