know of it, and yet he was supposed to sit in Sonoita and wait as the Core closed in, led by Fabron Gausto…a man with a grudge.
He wished truly that he believed Meghan knew of the manuscript, though he feared she didn’t. But he did believe she knew her mother’s ways better than any of them, and that she might hold latent, buried clues to the manuscript’s location. He took a sudden deep breath, beset by the urge to return to the ranch, to talk to her…to convince her. But there was no time for that, so instead he let that breath go in a harsh gust, giving the ranch one last lingering look before he turned away. “Be careful, Meghan Lawrence.”
And Meghan Lawrence lifted her face to the still air of the morning, standing in the eastern doorway with the sun streaming over her hair and face, warming the huge old flannel shirt she’d thrown on over her skimpy night tank top. Cold desert nights, welcome dawn. A faint contact brushed over her skin, as subtle as the sunlight—but it tingled over her entire body, including the skin well hidden in flannel. Without thinking, she followed impulse; she ran out into the hard-packed dirt and dust of the yard, bare feet a stupidity in this climate of things that bit and stung and pricked. She couldn’t have said why she searched the steep slab of ground west of the ranch, but search it she did.
And far up the slope, gliding upward with power unhindered by the steep, rocky ground, she saw the sinuous black shape of a big cat.
She wanted to say good riddance or get lost or don’t come back. She wasn’t sure why she instead murmured, “Be careful, you.” Or why she stood bare-legged in the yard watching for a black form long since gone, her fingers clutching the flannel shirt closed and Jenny’s dog investigating her toes.
“Meg, you all right?”
Meghan looked at Jenny in surprise, then down at the rubber currycomb and stiff rice-bristle brush in her hands. The horse cross-tied before her—a sweet little mare still regaining her health after her former owner nearly neglected her to death—had obvious swirls of curry pattern in her shedding spring coat, not yet brushed smooth. It was a task Meghan should have finished half an hour earlier…if she hadn’t been staring at the oddly hazy nature of the eastern horizon.
That tingle between her shoulder blades…she wasn’t sure, any longer, that her Sentinel visitor had caused it. The Atrum Core uses many forms, her mother had once said, patiently teaching a young girl what feeble wards she could muster, what faint healing skills. They are just people, but they do things that would horrify you and me.
It had been too much for her at six or eight or ten, but now that she was twenty-five, those words lived deep within.
And warned her.
Meghan gave Jenny a little smile, full of sheepish chagrin for a job half finished and hiding thoughts she could never share. “Woolgathering,” she admitted.
“More than that.” Fair Jenny had a knack for seeing through those little white lies, even the ones people told themselves. She also had the knack of seeing through to the heart of a horse, and she took charge of their problem rescues. Now she leaned against the aisle rail of the openair mare motel, crossing her arms. “You haven’t been yourself since yesterday morning. Not since Starling lost his wits in the round pen. Something’s got you shook-up.”
Everyone at the rescue ranch knew when someone rattled up that long rutted driveway, and no one had; she could hardly say a visitor had rattled her. Meghan went for a half-truth. “Got a call from an old friend of my mother’s.”
Not hardly. The man who’d let her mother face the Atrum Core alone.
Jenny winced in sympathy. “Stirred things up, I’ll bet.” But as she gave the mare a pat and pushed away from the stall panel, she added, “It’s more, though. There’s something…else.” She shrugged. “Won’t pry. As long as you’re dealing.”
“I’m dealing.” Meghan rubbed a cheek against her upper arm to dislodge flyaway winter horse hair; her hands were already covered in it. “Listen, you and Chris gonna be here this afternoon to take in the drop-off? I want to get a good start with this one—I think we’ve got potential for a therapy horse in the turnaround.”
“Nice change of subject,” Jenny said, and then she let it go. “Chris has something at home.” Their teenaged young man currently playing jack-of-all-trades had nothing if not a turbulent home life. “Anica will be here.” Anica did the on-site nursing work and had been with Meghan the longest. Rescue work…it tended to burn people out. Meghan was grateful to have Jenny and Anica and Chris, not to mention their fund-raising wizards and the rotating volunteers who handled the necessary physical work involved with the rescue operation. Jenny and Anica both lived on the ranch, and plenty of others had overnighter kits set aside for the unexpected need.
Jenny had also been here long enough to know when to walk away from unanswered questions. She left Meghan to her grooming and her thoughts with nothing more than a parting invitation to talk if she wanted. Meghan returned to the currycomb with a vengeance, and the mare leaned happily into her hand. Stirred things up. That much was the truth. Stirred up her grief and her resentment and her anger, and brought out in the open the things she’d always tried to forget about her life.
That her mother wasn’t like other mothers. That she had shifted her form. That along with her wicked sense of humor and gentle smile, she also occasionally wore fur.
That a man had changed to a black jaguar before her eyes, bringing that world rushing back to collide with her own. A fine young man who takes the jaguar…
Could he even be the same man who should have met her mother that night? Was he old enough? Certainty became less so as logic crept in. But then, she wasn’t a big believer in coincidence.
She thought about their confrontation, about the moments he’d backed her against the corral. How she’d felt every inch of her body—the skin tightening down her back, the unexpected tremor in her legs, the very air on her face. Her skills were modest, would always be modest—and yet still she’d felt the power in him. She’d known then that he was a predator, but…also a protector, as her mother had been.
Too bad she didn’t trust him.
Dolan found the land’s abandoned old homestead in late afternoon, layered in so many wards that he wasn’t the least surprised it had taken him two days, or that he’d been through this very area three times before noticing the old buildings. At least a century old, crumbling adobe and exposed wood framing, ocotillo cactus skeletons still lingering atop the porch to create scattered shade…Prickly pear clung to the corners of the buildings, struggling in this altitude. A lean-to shed for animals surrounded by the drunken remains of a corral, the tiny home, a chicken house, an outhouse and a shed that was now merely a trace of a foundation in the dirt.
He stood in the center of the yard for a long moment, on human feet with human senses attuned to the wards that had once been installed over this place. Layers and mazes and switchbacks, all set by a mind he admired anew. A natural trickster, one who could not only worry over the ends of a puzzle until it unraveled, but who could create her own. Her daughter might indeed have unraveled it all faster than he, but only if it wouldn’t have taken too long to convince her to try. Now he searched the patterns of the wards, having long ago realized that there was no single bright spot, no obviously protected area—and he finally saw what he was looking for.
Surely it won’t be this easy. Not a bright spot, woven into the threads of protections and the occasional glow of obscuring aura, but a blank spot. A don’t-look-at-me spot. He opened his eyes and superimposed his inner ward vision over his
