he watched until they were truly away, loaded up on their four-wheelers and bouncing away through the dusk as if they belonged on this remote and rutted dirt road. But this was Lannie’s own property on the outskirts of the tiny high-country town of Descanso, New Mexico, even if the road itself defined the easement to the old community well house behind him.
Behind that hid the old man who had once again come out here to smoke his occasional joint—this time, apparently, also looking like tempting prey. Or maybe his whimsical coyote nature had once again gotten the better of him, and he’d approached and aggravated the men in some way.
Not that it made any difference, with five against one, youth against age. But the old man knew better.
“Aldo,” Lannie said, warning in his voice. He pressed a hand against his side, feeling the hot blood of a wound still fresh enough that it hadn’t quite pulsed up to pain.
The injury didn’t worry him. Not when he was Sentinel, and belonged to an ancient line of people whose connection to the earth gave them more than just strength and healing and a variety of power-fueled skills. His heritage meant he carried within him the shape of his other—his wolf. His exceptionally strong blood meant that unlike most of his ilk, he could also take the shape of that other.
Alpha wolf.
So no, the injuries and the pain didn’t worry him—but they damn well annoyed the hell out of him.
The thick scent of pot stung the air. Lannie said, “Aldo.”
The old man came out from behind the well house, carefully pinching off his joint. “They made me anxious,” he said, and kept his gaze averted.
Aldo had never been alpha of anything. But until lately, he’d been irrepressible, with a cackle of laughter and a strong side of levity. Now he bore his own bruises, and a vague expression of guilt. “I didn’t do anything, Lannie. This has always been an okay place for me.”
A safe place, on feed-store land. Lannie’s cell rang, a no-nonsense tone cutting through the falling darkness—a rare connection up on this mountainside. Lannie didn’t even look as he silenced the call and shoved the phone back into his pocket. “It is an okay place for you.”
Or it should have been, and now Lannie’s temper rode high on a flare of hot pain and swelling bruises. If Aldo’s recent alarm hadn’t slapped through the pack connection and drawn him out here into the fading heat of dusk, the old man would have gone down under that knife. Aldo was a strong sixty, but he was still sixty.
“We’ll sort it out,” Lannie said, lifting his hand to assess the bleeding. Dammit, this was one of his favorite shirts.
“Let me help,” Aldo said. “You know I have some healing.”
“So do we all,” Lannie told him, already feeling the burn of his blood as the Sentinel in him took hold; the bleeding would stop and the wound would seal. And then it would leave him to grouch and ouch, wisely not spending resources on a wound that no longer posed a threat.
Aldo ran a hand over thick, grizzled hair cut short, tucking his stubby joint into the pocket of a shirt that had seen better days even before its recent misadventure. “You know what I mean.”
“It’s fine,” Lannie said. A vibration against his butt cheek signaled cell phone voice mail. “Let’s get back to the store. Faith is worried.”
Aldo squinted at him, cautiously pleased. “She tell you that, or you just picked up on it...?”
Lannie made an amused sound in his throat. “Do you think she had to tell me?” Not when he was enough of an alpha to take a stand when necessary, to back down when appropriate, to remain in the background unless needed. And to have a singular skill for building teams and pack connections, even among the mundane humans who had no sense or knowledge of his other.
It was a skill so deeply ingrained that he’d learned to factor it into every part of his life—the depth of his friendships, the instant flare of his attractions, the strength of his anger.
“Yeah, you just picked up on it with your pack mojo,” Aldo concluded, and rightly so. Faith’s rising concern had come through in an undertone, the taste of anxiety with the faint whisper of identity that belonged to the young woman named Faith.
They struck out across the land of transitional high prairie, where ponderosa pine mingled with cedar and oaks and the land came studded with cactus and every other kind of prickly little scrub plant. The undulating slopes took them down to the feed-store lot with its storage barn, back corrals and low, no-nonsense storefront building.
An unfamiliar car sat in the lot out front of the otherwise bare lot, and Lannie thought again about that unexpected phone call, his annoyance rising. Sabbatical from Brevis duty means leave me alone.
Faith bolted out the store’s back door, all goth eyes and piercings. “It’s Brevis,” she said in unwitting confirmation, a little walleyed along the way—and so thin of Sentinel blood that no one knew just what her other might have been. A little bit rebellious, a little bit damaged, a whole lot of runaway just barely now of age.
She had no idea that Brevis—the regional Sentinel headquarters—had once quietly nudged her in Lannie’s direction. She was one of his now. Home pack.
“What are they doing here?” she demanded. “I’m not going back in there. Do you think they can tell I’m—that I was—oh, for butt’s sake. Look at you. What did you get him into, Aldo?”
“Nothing!” Aldo protested, trying to sound righteously indignant and not quite pulling it off. Hard to, with the scent of pot still following him around. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“It wasn’t his fault,” Lannie told her, and she closed her mouth on a response sure to have been stinging, regarding him uncertainly. “I’m fine,” he said. “Why don’t you help Aldo clean up in the barn. The Brevis folks can cool their heels a moment.” Because Brevis or not, this was his turf. They didn’t get to upset his people.
Especially when they hadn’t warned him of their arrival in the first place.
Especially when they shouldn’t have even been here. Not after how things had gone down with the last group he’d pulled into pack status. Too little time, too many challenges...and one damaged individual who had fooled them all.
He headed for the barn, where the stairs along the outside led up to a section of finished loft. Before he reached the top step, he’d peeled off the shirt and wiped himself down with it, heading straight to the bathroom to slap an adhesive strip over the now-barely-oozing wound.
The bruises were what they were; he didn’t so much as glance in the distorted old medicine-cabinet mirror before heading out to the half-walled bedroom area to hunt up a fresh shirt, tugging it on with care.
The phone rang again. He let the ringtones cut the air while he stood quietly in the rugged old barn loft...eyes closed, recent encounter pushed away...muting the underlying home pack song in favor of the Sentinel whole. Shutting himself away from his own people, in spite of their upset, to prepare himself for whatever Brevis had come to ask of him.
For a strange, brief moment, the home song resisted his touch. It spun around him in a dizzying whirl, closing in like a warder’s web and throbbing with an ugly,
