smuggling ring.
He’d done his best. He’d connected instantly with her—he’d felt her brilliance, her bright spark of life. And maybe she’d understood at that...
But she hadn’t had time to live it. To practice it. And she’d gone out in the field and gotten them all killed.
He’d felt that, too.
And now here was Holly. Yanked from her home, from her life, from her very way of being. There was no telling how enmeshed she’d been in her surrounding territory, if she was anything like her brother—whether she knew it or not.
Her occasionally palpable resentment...
He deserved it. They all did. And if she had any idea she was working with an alpha still reeling from failure and its resulting disaster...
He picked up the phone.
* * *
Holly found herself back up at the well house for the second time that day, only this time she turned around to glare down at the amazing vista and think at it with loud, angry clarity. I am not yours!
That wasn’t quite enough, so she did it out loud, too. “I am not yours!”
Her words rang loudly in the evergreen-studded landscape, and she should have felt just a little bit silly.
She didn’t. And she hoped someone was listening.
Even if no one answered.
“Bother,” she grumbled, and sat on the crest of that final hill to look down on it all. A massive canine paw print was pressed into the dirt at her side, and she stared at it for a good long while.
Wolf? Boy, wouldn’t that explain a lot.
If her family had stayed within a brevis, would she know what her other was? Would she have tried to take it? Would she be initiated, and secure in her Sentinel abilities?
“The big question is, do I care?” She slapped her hand over the paw print, obliterating it, and propped her chin in her hand, looking out over Lannie Stewart’s land. Maybe it wasn’t the thick green woods in which she felt so at home...but if she quit trying to see it through Michigan-colored glasses, the undulating land did have its own beauty. This morning the sky had been crystal clear, bluer than blue and bigger than big. This early evening it was still big enough, but giant, towering clouds shifted across the sky, brilliant white above and glowering bruised blues below and scudding distinct shadows across the ground.
Holly lifted her face not to the sun, but to those clouds—drawn to the majestic purity of them. Without thinking, she stood again—stretching herself tall, arms reaching high and fingers spread wide, every bit of her body yearning to touch those stormy clouds.
She didn’t. She couldn’t. She came off her toes in a huff of disgust, not even sure what she’d been thinking.
Nothing. She hadn’t been thinking anything. She’d just been doing, one woman alone on the hillside and completely out of her own place in the world.
She sat again, this time more slowly. Rather than reach for the sky, she pressed her hands flat to the ground and closed her eyes—looking for something, anything, that might be familiar. She pushed her own awareness, seeking...
Home.
Or some sense of it.
Instead she felt an ugly, distinct sense of rejection. The barrier wasn’t a slap so much as an inexorable refusal to allow her to become part of where she was. It left her sitting perched on the earth, her eyes closed and her teeth biting her lip on the sudden certainty that she might just come flying free of the ground altogether.
She withdrew back inside herself, wrapping her arms around her torso and suddenly shivered—glancing up to find herself in the deep shadow of one of those clouds.
Her breathing slowed; her pounding heart eased. She sat, one woman alone on the hillside, yearning for something she couldn’t define, and listening, listening for even the faintest hint of inexplicable song.
* * *
“Lannie who?”
The woman’s voice at Lannie’s ear sounded puzzled, and he didn’t blame her. No one seemed quite to know what was going on around here.
“Lannie Stewart,” he said, eyeing the sky and pondering the potential for monsoon rain. “I’m in Descanso. Kai’s sister Holly is staying with me for integration work.”
“Ah,” Regan Adler said, wisdom replacing confusion. “The enforced indoctrination.”
He didn’t quite know what to say to that, so he didn’t.
“Sorry,” she said. “Maybe that wasn’t fair. But Holly didn’t even have a chance to see her brother before your people whisked her away. And does she even know her parents have been taken to Brevis?”
Careful, careful. “Her parents made their choices,” Lannie said. “Not that I don’t understand them. But choices have consequences.”
“None of that was Holly’s fault,” Regan said. “But she’s the one paying the price, don’t you think?”
“More than she should,” Lannie agreed. One of the mules came up behind him, reaching through the corral pipe to inspect Lannie’s hair; he reached up to tug on the creature’s chin, and mulish contentment rolled over him. “We’re coming to Cloudview tomorrow to get Holly a bike.”
Silence greeted that pronouncement, if only for a moment. “I thought it wasn’t safe.”
“It’s not safe for Holly to be on her own,” Lannie said. “She isn’t.”
Regan bristled audibly. “You know, we’ve done fine without you so far.”
“Right,” Lannie said, failing to rise to her anger one little bit. “And now you don’t have to.” He let the words settle. “More importantly, Holly doesn’t have to. She has a lot to learn, Regan. I think it would help if she could see you and Kai. If you’re not up for that, I’ll handle it.”
“I have no problem with Holly,” Regan said instantly. “Damn you.”
Lannie laughed. “We’ll call once we have the bike.”
“Fine,” Regan said. “You tell her I’ll be glad to give her perspective. Use those words.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lannie said, without any sign of meekness. He grinned as he ended the call, struck by Regan’s assertively defensive response to Holly’s needs—struck by the similar strengths in the two women.
He reached over his head to give the hovering mule another chin tug. “I think I just might live to regret this.”
When the mule snorted on him, he took it as agreement.
* * *
Lannie was waiting for her when she came down the hill—the folder tucked away, the
