Chapter 12
Prologue
Meghan crossed her arms over her flat ten-year-old’s chest and gave her mother a defiant stare. “You never listen!”
Her mother smiled. Her mother always smiled. Sometimes her smile hinted at a joke not yet discovered by anyone else…sometimes it was a cleverness she’d seen in the world. Sometimes it was just because. Thus was the coyote shape-shifter—hard to pin down, cheerfully unpredictable.
Tonight, that smile broke Meghan’s young heart. “The animals are worried! Listen to them!”
“Ah, my sensitive girl…connected with us all.” Margery Lawrence sat right where she was, cross-legged there on the ranch-house porch, and pulled Meghan’s resisting body into her arms. Lanky, coltish Meghan didn’t quite fit there any longer, but her mother appeared not to notice. Her mother ran a hand along Meghan’s hair, smoothing…petting.
Meghan wasn’t fooled. She didn’t relax into the embrace. “You shouldn’t go,” she muttered. It sounded sullen even to her own ears.
“Meggie,” her mother said, making the word a caress. “I won’t be alone. There’s someone coming to help, a fine young man who takes the jaguar when he shifts. He’ll watch for me.”
The demand burst out of her. “Then why doesn’t he do all of it? Why make you go out?”
Her mother laughed in genuine amusement. “Because he’s big and brawny, but he’s not half so clever as this nimble coyote…and he’s got no nose for the tricky things. Besides, he doesn’t know this land the way I do. The way you do.”
But Meghan sat, stiff and resistant and still unable to keep her lip from quivering.
Her mother pressed a quick kiss to her forehead. “I might not really be one of them, Meggie, but I don’t need the Sentinels to tell me how important this is. Neither do you. The animals wouldn’t feel it, otherwise—or the land. Or even you, for that matter. So the fine young man will meet me here, and we’ll go take care of things. And then the animals won’t feel this way to you any longer, and neither will the land.”
More words burst out, even though she knew better. “But it’s not fair! They don’t pay any attention to you at all, not until they want something! They don’t even think you’re good enough to be one of them, but they still—”
“Shhh,” her mother said, a firmness in her voice. “You know that’s not true. It’s my decision to stay apart from them, as much as is allowed. This…this is something I have to do. It’s my legacy…and in some ways, on some day, it’ll be yours. Now give me a kiss and a hug, and let’s make sure the dogs are put up and won’t bother our jaguar visitor.”
But the jaguar never came.
And Margery Lawrence left anyway.
Chapter 1
Dolan knew where to find her—or at least, how. Her scent was all over this mountainous “sky island” territory, the fat junipers and sage and high ground. The hint of her ancient Vigilia nature tingled beneath, along with the sharp smell of the occasional pine.
The daughter. The one who’d grown up apart from them…who barely realized what she was. If anyone could help, it was her. Meghan Lawrence. Child of a Sentinel who’d died for the cause.
A woman who’d long ago rejected them all, just as they’d rejected her.
On the eastern horizon, menace loomed in a long, hazy cloud that had no business in this southwestern spring sky—the Atrum Core, keeping track of this area, their dark presence a constant itch between his shoulder blades. For all he knew, they and their twisted prince sought the very same trail he now followed.
He’d have to get there first.
Nearby, an ATV crawled clumsily over fragile soil, chewing up plant life. Dolan veered off in annoyance, a silent snarl on his lips. The rider—oblivious beneath a helmet—crept forward in jerks and stops, challenged by the rugged nature of the protected ground. This, too, was why Dolan was here. Sentinel of the earth in all ways.
He eased back down to ghost along behind and above the man, taking up a loose-limbed trot. Biding his time. Controlling the thrill of the hunt that made his ears flatten, his head sink lower. This wasn’t the hunt. This was the job. His life.
And so when the time was right, when the ground slanted sharply away but not too sharply, when the creosote and scrub oaks offered uphill cover, Dolan coiled himself on powerful legs and freed his eversimmering anger, leaping to smack the ATV rider right off his machine and tumbling down the slope.
He almost couldn’t control the impulse to follow the hunt, the kill, the satisfaction, strong jaws crunching bone; he took his ire out on the machine instead, shredding the plastic and cables and vulnerable exposed guts. Even as the rider lifted his head, Dolan whirled and bounded into the brush, surging with instincts and impulses that wanted to stay. To kill.
A mile away he stopped, crouching into the wispy grasses and rough ground, panting. Leaving the man behind to return to his own forbidden quest.
He wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed
