Sentinels: Alpha Rising

“This was happening when I got here,” Holly said, sounding so certain that Lannie lifted his head to look at her in surprise. “Oh, yes,” she said, seeing it. “Last night. Right in front of me.”

“You were watching me.” It warmed something inside him, which shouldn’t have mattered but did.

Holly made an exasperated sound. “Of course I was watching you. Under the circumstances, I’d have been an idiot if I’d done anything else, eh?”

He remembered to feel his own exasperation. He thought he’d hidden those moments of disorientation. Mariska wouldn’t have hesitated to call him out if she’d noticed anything wrong.

“Lannie!” Aldo’s whiskery voice carried uphill far too well. “No, no—this isn’t supposed to happen!”

Lannie rubbed his hands over his face. His legs were his own again; his mind was clear, and his soul carried his own faint inner song. “Awesome,” he muttered, deliberately echoing Holly’s flat tone.

“Yeah, now I know you’re not right,” Faith told him.

Aldo reached them and knelt down to put a hand on Lannie’s knee. “You okay, son? Ah, this is all my fault—”

“Aldo.” Lannie said it firmly. “Yesterday was not your fault. I don’t care what you said to them. There’s no reason good enough for five guys to beat up on a sixty-year-old man.”

“Seemed funny at the time,” Aldo said, looking somewhat bereft.

No doubt it had.

Lannie sighed and regained his feet. He took a brief but ruthless check of himself and found nothing amiss—except for the dent in his pride.

Alpha wasn’t bully, or overbearing. But alpha did mean strength.

His strength was smarting.

Holly kept pace with him as they headed downhill. “Look,” she said, brushing off the seat of her pants as they walked. “I’d really like to grab some things from the closest big-box store.”

“Ruidoso,” Faith told her, slipping it in between Holly’s words.

“And I’d really like to have time to rest this afternoon. And,” she said, giving Lannie a sharp eye, “I don’t really want to be in a car with you behind the wheel right now.”

He squelched that little bit of sting. “Cloudview will be there tomorrow.”

“Good.” She nodded, more or less to herself; her ponytail swung to land gently over her shoulder. Lannie should have been prepared at the spark of amusement showing in her eye, but as they reached the back of the store, she managed to take him by surprise. Again.

“Keys,” she said, and held out her hand—adding, when he only stared at her, “Ruidoso. Truck.”

And then she smiled.

* * *

Holly made off with more than the truck keys; she pulled a local map off the Internet, acquired Lannie’s credit card and his cell phone and escaped the feed store without an escort.

Not that she needed one. Lannie could no doubt find her anywhere now that he’d taken her in. He kept track of his people, that was obvious enough.

And like it or not, she was one of his people now. At least in his mind.

On the way out to Ruidoso—forty minutes of curving, challenging roads with the faint background buzz of disorientation in her head—she spent no little time wondering how she would have reacted to the man if he’d simply walked into her office looking for a consultation on a water feature. If there’d been no preestablished baggage between them.

The thought woke things in her that she would rather have left sleeping. Hot-and-bothered things that left her shifting uncomfortably in the truck’s otherwise comfortable seat. Because never mind his muscled build and strong shoulders and perfectly lean cowboy hips. Or even his eyes—Good God, those eyes.

There was that something more about him. The charisma. The way he stood even when he wasn’t pouring on the attitude. The way his other showed, even when he didn’t know it—and even when she didn’t yet know what other form he took.

The way he cared about his people.

He’s still your jailer.

He was still a complicit part of the team that now kept her away from her own life.

Remembering that should have cooled her blood somewhat. Should have. Holly distracted herself by pulling off the road long enough to call her brother—not at a phone that would reach him directly, because no phone ever did. But she dialed the number for Regan Adler, her brother’s love—and soon enough, his spouse.

“Hey,” she said into the machine that resided in a small but personable cabin home deep at the edge of Kai’s woods. “This is Holly. Hello to Kai, but this message is for Regan. We might be coming your way tomorrow. If you have time, I’d like to meet up.” Regan might be self-employed, providing lush and slyly quirky illustrations for nature guides of all sorts along with her own painting, but Holly knew better than to take her time for granted. Had been there, and had that done to her. “I know we don’t know each other, but I’m hoping you can give me some perspective on this situation.”

This situation. What a plethora of Sentinel sins that phrase encompassed.

“Anyway,” Holly added hastily, “I hope you’ll call. PS—this is Lannie Stewart’s phone.”

The rest of the drive went quickly, and once she reached the store she pulled her hastily scribbled list from her pocket and went to work with the focused intensity that had made her business successful, happy to hand over Lannie’s card to buy a few reusable shopping totes with her goods, and toss the whole kit and caboodle into the bed of the truck behind the straw bale.

On the way back, the phone warbled a basic faux phone ring. Holly thought only of her message to Regan, and pulled the phone from the seat divider to accept the call.

“Holly?”

Holly’s breath caught on the decision to hang up. “Just listen,” Faith said, and her words were low and hasty—in the end, intriguing Holly just enough to stay on the call.

She found a wide spot by the side of the road to pull over. “I’m here.”

“Look,” Faith said. “I don’t really know what’s going on with you being here. I know what Lannie does for Brevis, so we do get people here sometimes, or he goes somewhere else, but there’s something different about this. About him.”

“You still trying to blame it on me?” Holly said. “Because as far as I’m concerned, you can take your Sentinels and—”

Faith’s heartfelt and indelicate noise in response did more to get Holly’s attention than anything else could have. “Look, I’m such a light blood that only someone like Lannie can even tell I’m Sentinel. They’re not my people—I ran from them a long time ago.”

“They let you go?” Holly asked, a flicker of hope in her voice.

After a hesitation and a number of muffled sounds, Faith replied. “Light blood,” she reminded Holly. “But listen. This is about Lannie. Something’s not right. And since he had to pull out of his home pack in order to deal with you—”

“He what?”

“God, don’t you know anything?”

Anger made its way to Holly’s throat, tightening it. “No more than I’ve been told.”

“Then ask Lannie. He’ll tell you as much as he can. But look, what I’m doing is asking you to keep an eye on him, okay? Because we can’t. Not the way we’re used to.”

Responses jumbled through her mind—the bitter awareness that she couldn’t ask for information when she didn’t even know enough to frame the right questions. The rising curiosity about Lannie and his home pack and his Sentinel other and what he did with it—or what had happened with the Jody thing. The cold hard fear of realizing anew that her life was totally out of her own control.