A quick flurry of blows—fierce, efficient, effective—and they fell back, stunned not just by the impact but also by Lannie’s unexpected participation in a fight that had started out as five men kicking around what seemed to be easy prey. The men hesitated—suddenly wary, not willing to come back at him and not quite able to run.
Human submission. Or as close as they could be in this moment.
Fury still gripped Lannie, swelling against every breath. He eased back one step, then another—and there he held his ground, breathing hard but still perfectly ready.
The men got the message. They assessed themselves and their injuries, spat a few frustrated curses and bent to haul up their faltering friends. Lannie stood silent, letting them limp away—even if they did so with many a backward glance, not trusting Lannie to stand down when he’d gained such advantage.
But that was what a true alpha did.
Later, he’d find out who these men were and why they’d thought themselves safe not just to trespass, but to claim this space as their own. Most likely they’d come for a bro party involving six-packs and fisticuffs, but Lannie wouldn’t assume. Not with the recent threats—and losses—the Sentinels had taken lately.
For now 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 p
hone 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, unfamiliar dissonance.
He took it as a rebuke. It was bad timing to interrupt pack song in the wake of such disturbance, and he knew it. He swallowed away the unease of it, settling into his own skin. Felt the aches of being there, and settled into that, too, accepting and dismissing them.
The dissonance slowly faded.
Finally, then, he reached for his larger pack sense, the one that made him ready for the outside world and whatever Brevis might ask from him. The bigger picture—the one that would ride him hard.
More so, in the wake of Jody. In the wake of her death. In the wake of all their deaths.
One more breath, deep and quiet, and then...he was no longer just plain Lannie. He no longer hummed to the tune of his own small pack but had set them—temporarily—aside, so existing pack song wouldn’t interfere with the formation of whatever was to come.
He was the unentangled alpha that Brevis had come to see.
* * *
Babysitters.
Holly Faulkes wanted to spit the words at them—the man and the woman who’d brought her to this tiny New Mexico town of Descanso. They’d driven an hour through the desert mountains, pulling her away from her family during a still-heated discussion about her past, her present and her future—and all so she could wait in this cool, shadowed feed store with its cluttered shelves and dry dust, its thick scent of hay and oats and molasses and leather.
Sentinel babysitters.
As if she hadn’t even been part of the recent Cloudview conversation, sitting beside her parents in silence—all of them tense, all of them terse. As good as prisoners in the old town hotel.
And as if she hadn’t just missed meeting her brother Kai for the very first time since childhood, hearing of his feral beauty and of the lynx that peered out from under his skin at every turn, but being whisked away from both Cloudview and her parents before the Sentinels could call Kai in from the mountains.
Sentinels. If not exactly the enemy, also not her friends. Not considering she’d hidden from them since she’d been born, sheltered first by her family and then by deliberate, active choice. God, she didn’t want to be here. And at twenty-four years old, it should have stayed her choice.
“Are you all right?” The woman eyed her. Her name was Mariska, and she was far too knowing for Holly’s taste. Far closer to bodyguard than escort, with a short sturdy form both rounded and strong—not to mention a sharp gaze that gave away more than Holly was probably supposed to see. So did her complexion, a distinctly beautiful brown shade that might have come from south India but instead came from the bear within her.
“You’re kidding, eh?” Holly said. “No, I’m not all right. Why can’t you people just leave us alone? Leave me alone?”
Mariska transferred her gaze to Holly’s hands, where they chafed against her arms in spite of the distinct heat still overlaying the fading summer day.
“Being here makes my skin crawl,” Holly told the woman, which was only the blunt truth. She’d felt it before, this sensation...on her Upper Michigan home turf, when she first started a restoration on an old clogged water feature. But nothing like this. One final squeeze of her upper arms and she let her hands fall. “You have no right to do this to me.”
But she’d always known they would. Just as she’d known that her parents would pay the price for hiding their family to protect Kai.
“Maybe we don’t,” Mariska said. “But we hope you’ll come to understand.” She lifted her chin at Jason, the tall man who served as her partner; they exchanged commentary in a silent but very real conversation, the likes of which Holly had previously seen only between her parents. Jason raised his phone, hitting the redial button. Again. Trying to reach the man they’d called Lannie with a strange mix of familiarity and deference.
“If you’re trying to reach him, why don’t you just talk to him?” Holly gestured between them in reference to the silent exchange they’d just had, only peripherally aware that the crawling sensation in her blood had eased.
“Lannie prefers that we don’t.” The woman gave her a wry look, one that said she had chosen her words diplomatically. “Besides, not all of us do that.”
“I don’t,” Holly muttered. Because she didn’t need it and she didn’t want it. She had no intention of letting someone else in her head—
It’s not real.
No way.
“What did you say?” Holly asked, a wary tone that drew Mariska’s surprised glance. Her glance would have turned into a question, had not a ringing phone pealed from the back of the store.
Jason made an exasperated face. “You might have picked up instead of just coming in,” he muttered, slipping his phone away—but he sounded more relieved than he might have.
Holly looked at him in surprise, understanding. “You weren’t sure he’d come.”
“Oh,” Jason said drily, “we were pretty sure he’d come. We just aren’t sure—”
“Shut up,” Mariska said, sharp and hasty, her gaze probing the back of the store.
It’s not real.
Holly spotted the new arrival against a backdrop of hanging bridle work and lead ropes, and understood immediately that this man owned this place.
That he owned any place in which he chanced to stand.
It wasn’t his strength, and it wasn’t the quiet but inexorable gaze he turned on her companions. It wasn’t even the first shock of his striking appearance—clean features with even lines, strong brows and nose and jaw, a sensual curve of lower lip and eyes blue enough to show from across the store. His hair was longer than stylish these days, layered and curling with damp around the edges.
No, it was more than all that.
“Oh, turn it off,” Mariska said.
Something changed—Holly didn’t even quite know what. Only that he was suddenly just a man in a casual blue plaid shirt yoked over the shoulder, half-buttoned and hanging out over jeans and boots, a heavy oval belt buckle evident beneath.
Cowboy, Holly thought, and found herself surprised by that. For the first time, she noticed not only bruises, but fresh bruises. A little smear of blood on a freshly washed cheek, a stain coming through the side of the shirt. An odd look on his face as he watched her, something both startled and somehow just as wary as she was—and then that, too, faded.
“That’s better,” Mariska grumbled, but the words held grudging respect. She exchanged a glance with Holly that was nothing to do with their individual reasons for being here and everything to do with a dry, shared appreciation for what they’d seen—a recognition that Holly had seen it, too.
The man rolled one sleeve and then the other, joining them with a loose walk that also somehow spoke of strength. “A little warning might have been nice,” he said, a quiet voice with steel behind it.
Jason held up the phone. “We called.”
“Did you?” the man said flatly. He eyed Holly with enough intent to startle her—as if he assessed her on a level deeper than she could even perceive.
She suddenly wished she wasn’t still wearing well-worn work gear—tough slim-fit khakis over work boots and a long-tailed berry-colored shirt. Her hair was still yanked back into the same ponytail high at the back of her head, and it was a wonder her gloves weren’t jammed into her back pocket instead of in her overnighter.
She released a breath when the man turned away from her.
> Jason scowled, eyes narrowing, and Mariska stepped on whatever he was about to say. “Look, Lannie, this all happened fast, and we’re making it up as we go. There’s no cell reception between here and Cloudview—and we did call as soon as we could get through. If we’d been able to talk to you—”
Silently, she meant. Even Holly understood that much. But Mariska had said it. Lannie prefers that we don’t.
Lannie didn’t raise his voice...somehow he didn’t need to. “You aren’t supposed to be reaching out to me at all.”
“No, sir,” Jason said, just a little bit miserable. “The Jody thing. I know. But that wasn’t your fault, and we—” And then he stopped, apparently thinking better of the whole thing—and who wouldn’t, from the quick, hard pale-eyed look Lannie gave him?
Holly found herself smiling a little. After hours in the care of these two, unable to so much as use a toilet without an escort, it was gratifying to see the tables turned. Even if she did wonder about the Jody thing.
But Lannie didn’t linger on the moment. He ran a hand through his damp hair, carelessly raking it back into some semblance of order. “You want coffee?”
“Holly drinks tea, if you have it,” Mariska said, apparently well-briefed on all things Holly. “So do I.”
Jason looked as though he’d drink whatever Lannie put before him.
They joined Lannie in a tiny nook in the back hallway, which had a coffeemaker and electric teakettle, a diminutive refrigerator, a sink and half a box of donuts sitting on an upended fifty-gallon drum. Lannie reached for the teakettle plug...and hesitated there, leaning heavily on the counter.
As if for that moment, the counter was the only thing holding him up.
Holly shot a startled look at Mariska and Jason, finding them involved in some sort of mostly silent but definitely emphatic disagreement. By the time she looked again at Lannie, the teakettle was firing up and Lannie had pulled a bowl stuffed with tea bags from the narrow, open-faced cabinet above the sink—right next to the big green tin of Bag Balm, some half-used horse wormer and an open bag of castration bands.
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