Read Online Jaguar Night by Doranna Durgin - Free Book Online Page B

couldn’t disagree. Not with the way things had turned out—the two of them, now tiedby blood and incantation and a night of fighting death, and neither of them worth anything but trouble to each other.
    Unless he could do what he’d intended from the start. Unless he could get her help—get her insight into what her mother had done with the Liber Nex all those years earlier. “Meg…”
    “No. Meghan.” She turned away from the window; she turned away from him. “I’ll protect this ranch,” she informed him, on her way out the door. “And I’ll do it my way. Because I already know where your Sentinel ways lead.”
    Space. A chance to take a deep breath. They both needed it.
    Dolan let her go.
    As hard as it was to think with Meghan’s influence thrumming through his veins, as desperate as he was to find the Liber Nex, Meghan, too, struggled. Until the night before, she’d known only that the Sentinels had abandoned her mother…had let her die. And after all this time, she’d obviously thought herself completely free of Sentinel influence. Of the Core.
    No, he shouldn’t have come here.
    But if it meant finding the manuscript…
    Yeah, he’d do it again.
    The front screen slammed shut. He made his uncertain way to the bathroom, and to the kitchen after that, skipping past a cozy-looking living room with deep leather couches and bookshelf-lined walls.
    In the kitchen, the ceiling fan turned lazily overhead, doing little to dispel the warmth in this southernexposureroom. The deep overhang of the porch shadowed the two big windows of the southern wall; the others were wide open to the sun.
    Dolan helped himself to more ice water, listening to the bark of a dog off by the barn, the rumble of a diesel pickup, the clang of a gate. A sudden spate of whinnying confirmed the arrival of the new horse, and Meghan was no doubt dealing with it.
    Just as well. He had a phone call to make.
    He found a couple of half-made sandwiches on the counter, lunch meat and thinly sliced cheese, and he took one for himself, sticking the other in a baggie for Meghan’s return. So damned domestic he could hardly stand it, rambling around in her kitchen as though he might actually be welcome there.
    You’re not paying attention, he thought at her. Not if you still think I’m Sentinel in anything but name.
    He hadn’t been, not since losing his brother. He’d wanted out altogether…not an option, not for a powerful jaguar. So he did things his way…and he got away with it, precisely because he took the jaguar. Because he was good, and effective, and he made things happen.
    But they were always waiting for him to stumble. To find a way to rein him in.
    Or to try.
    And that meant he had a phone call to make. Follow procedure…shift the problem back to the consul’s shoulders. The man had been in position too long…his complacency and self-assurance had turned from asset to liability. You could go down with this one, Dolan thought at him.
    He just didn’t want to go down alongside the man. And he quite suddenly didn’t want Meghan to go down alongside the man, either.
    He helped himself to a shower, rinsed out his shirt and left a towel hanging around his shoulders. By then his brief burst of functionality had waned, and he promptly fell back to sleep before he could use the phone.
    Fell asleep, and fell into nightmares—or maybe just memories. Even in the midst of them, he wasn’t sure. Jared’s death would always be a little of both—receiving his final message via the Vigilia adveho, the frantic rush to find help for Margery Lawrence, Dolan’s own decision to bolt from their Sonoita home and out into the nighttime desert, cross-country on a dirt bike that could cover ground with more speed than his adolescent jaguar form.
    He remembered the disbelieving anguish the most. His brother’s Sentinel cohorts descending upon him, stopping him. Taking him down from the bike— It’s too late, you can’t do anything and You’ll