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 to have waited in Sonoita for orders, for a team. Waited until too late. Just as his brother had.
He folded his whiskers back tight with disdain, crouched down close to the earth and dismissed the Sentinels from his thoughts. He closed his eyes, opened his nose and rediscovered the trail. The woman. The dark quest he’d been following before he’d indulged himself.
No. It’s part of the job. Of protecting this territory. Not just from the evil that menaced it, the Atrum Core, but from the mundane things as well. The man would think twice before returning here, embroidering the story of his brush with death until his friends ceased to truly believe him—but they, too, might also think twice the next time they went four-wheeling on protected lands.
And the man might have seen a flash of black, might have felt the brush of fur and whisker and massive paw…but nothing more. For all he knew, he’d been nailed by a desert Bigfoot.
Not a huge, sleek and healthy black jaguar with startling blue eyes and a man’s thoughts.
Meghan saw him coming. She knew him instantly for what he was; her mother had taught her that much before she’d died. Vigilia. Sentinel. Those who had failed her mother. Those who had sent her out to die alone.
Another couple of steps and it hit her in a literal gasp of realization—his other nature.
…a fine young man who takes the jaguar.
Jaguar. In every step, emanating from his very being…as clear to Meghan as if he’d stalked up to her in form, just as her mother’s coyote had always glimmered clearly to Meghan’s younger eyes.
The horse knew what he was, too, and she barely managed to secure the side rein snap before he leaped away, pulling from her grasp to gallop in panicked circles at the outside edge of the training pen. Around and around, flashing repeatedly between her and the approaching man, tail clamped tight and ears back, side reins flapping.
She walked toward the man from within the pen, her stomach already churning. Never mind the way he moved—fluidly, each step deliberate and yet barely contained. Never mind his expression—so alert, so intense—or the very direct way he approached her. She could have closed her eyes and still known him as Sentinel. As a jaguar.
That was one of her mother’s legacies. The connections, whether she wanted them or not.
He was close now, close enough to see that his eyes weren’t black at all, but a deep, startling blue. Close enough so the terrified gelding fled to the opposite side of the pipe panel round pen, snorting and grunting his fear.
She slipped between the metal rails and straightened as he came to a stop. She didn’t give him time to speak. “I know what you are. Who you are.” She felt it in every fiber of her being, a strange reverberation that raised the hair on her arms. “You’re not welcome here.”
He lifted his chin ever so slightly. Instead of resentment or disappointment, interest flickered in those eyes. “You think you know what I am.”
She fought the urge to take a step back. Nothing but cold metal pipe behind her. “I