Sentinels: Alpha Rising

Of course she hadn’t. She’d been so young when her family separated, going from inconspicuous to deeply underground.

But initiation changed everything. She wouldn’t truly know who she was, or what she was, until she had that first adult connection with another Sentinel—careful, skilled intimacy, bringing her powers to fruition.

No wonder she’d never truly felt the itch to reach out to her other in spite of its expression in her movement, her mannerisms and even her expressions.

“Stop staring,” she told him, mouth flattening in annoyance. Ears flattening, head tipped just so. “And stop doing that thing.”

“That thing,” he repeated without inflection.

“Yes, that thing.” She leaned over the table, creating such privacy as was possible in the tavern. “What you were doing in the store, and Mariska told you to turn it off. That. Stop it.”

Ah. The alpha. When he’d put his unexpected visitors on notice.

But he couldn’t turn it off because he hadn’t turned it on. Whatever she saw came from her own perceptions of his basic Sentinel nature as much as his presentation. No doubt she had other perceptions she wasn’t used to managing outside her normal life, and she’d probably adjusted to a certain element of heightened sight and scent, but this...

This would be new. And different. And she’d been thrust in the middle of it.

He found himself reaching for her pack song. Through pack song, he could understand her, assess her, support her—

But an unexpected, unprecedented crackle of mental static snapped through his mind. What the hell? Surely she wasn’t resisting him; she didn’t know enough to do it. Surely he could get at least a hint of her—a single note, a thread of inner melody...

An orchestra.

Her music flooded him, waking the alpha after all. His pack sense rose to absorb and receive and, just maybe, drown in the rich complexity she offered. He watched her eyes widen and then narrow, and a thread of anger gained clarity in her song.

She half rose from her chair, elbows on the table as she closed some of the distance between them. “Stop it,” she said, but there was no force behind those breathless words. She took a visible breath, a flush bringing out the color on her cheeks, dark eyes and dark hair contrasting against otherwise fair skin.

Not that stopping it was an option, even if he tried. Not with the glory of all she was coming at him, unfiltered and unfettered.

Her voice gained hard strength. “Fine,” she said. “Be an asshole. Your friend can bring my dinner over to the bar, because that’s where I’ll be sitting. Without you.”

She didn’t storm away. She didn’t have to. She made her point with the rolling precision of her stride, the hard line of her jaw...the straightness of her back.

Whoa.

Lannie could do nothing but stare after her, only beginning to understand that she’d done to him as much as he’d done to her—and she had no idea.

Maybe because it wasn’t her fault. Maybe it was the pack mojo gone wild. Maybe—

Barbara slid between tables to deposit his meal in front of him, whisking Holly’s abandoned napkin out of the way to do the same for her. “Now, when she gets back from the ladies’, you be sure to tell her I’ll swap this out if it’s not to her liking.”

Lannie wasn’t quite ready to trust his voice; he nodded at the bar, where Holly had taken a spot apart from the rest and hitched her hip up over the bar stool, already reaching for the nearby dish of pistachios.

Her back was still stiff enough to tell the tale.

Barbara’s brow rose in surprise. “Never thought I’d see that day,” she told him, and reclaimed Holly’s deep-dish plate of shredded elk over crisped sweet potato medallions. She slipped in to place the plate beside Holly, her words clear enough to Lannie’s wolf. “Here you go, honey. You want a beer to go with that?”

Holly nodded, and Lannie jerked his attention to the casual approach of the slender man who took a seat in Holly’s empty chair.

This time when Lannie drew on his alpha, he did it deliberately. He eyed the man without welcome and without apology.

The man met his gaze without rising to that challenge. Faint concern lived in the lines gathering at his brow. “I know I’m intruding,” he said. “Hear me out. We have a common interest.”

Lannie gave the man a sharper look. He’d dressed out of Cabela’s outfitter catalog for the evening—high country fisherman casual, all fresh from the package—and while he hadn’t quite shaved down his balding head, he’d come close enough for dignity. His watch was high quality without being ostentatious; his single ring was black onyx in a masculine setting and his ears went unadorned.

No particular threat there. But on this night when Lannie had taken responsibility for Kai Faulkes’s vulnerable, wayward sister, he didn’t much like coincidences. “How many of your conversations start out this way and still end well?”

“I’m interrupting,” the man said, a touch of car salesman in his demeanor. “I understand that. But I need to talk to you about what happened earlier this evening.”

Lannie kept his stare flat. “Earlier this evening I closed down my store, met a friend for dinner and came here. You’re sitting in her seat.”

Earlier this evening, he’d taken a knife between the ribs and still put five men down...and then walked away from it.

But this man couldn’t know that unless he’d been part of it somehow.

“I’m not doing this well,” the man said. “I’m more than aware that under other circumstances, we not only wouldn’t be companionable, we wouldn’t even speak—”

And then a cluster of casually raucous men moved to the bar, and Lannie saw their faces.

Familiar faces. Battered faces. Only four of them, because the fifth apparently hadn’t recovered from the consequences of sticking a knife into Lannie.

And there was Holly, sitting alone and upset, and completely unaware.

Lannie didn’t much like coincidences.

“You should have talked faster.” He rose from his chair with the wolf coming out strong, already silent in movement. “Your friends tipped your hand.” He hesitated, briefly, to loom over the smaller man. “Whatever you want...this was a mistake.”

“You misunderstand,” the man said, drawing back—but at Lannie’s expression, his protests died back into annoyance. After a final hesitation, he rose from his seat and strode for the exit. Lannie might have grabbed his arm—might have demanded an explanation—but Holly came first. He headed for the bar.

Barbara crossed his path with empty serving tray in hand and caught sight of his expression, freezing there a moment. “Lannie?” But then she saw the men, and muttered a curse. “I see them. But this is a family place, Lannie.” He passed her by, snagging the tray from her unsuspecting grip along the way. She let him have it but still followed him. “Lannie!”

Lannie moved in beside Holly. She made a startled sound and sent a glare his way.

“Right,” he said. “You’re pissed at me. I get it. Let’s go.”

“I’m eating.” She turned away from him and forked up some sauce-smeared sweet potato.

“Lannie,” Barbara said from behind, “what—”

“These guys are not our friends.” Lannie caught Holly’s gaze, nodding at the little gang. They hadn’t spotted him yet, but they’d be looking. They were just having fun along the way.

“I see them.” She took a swig of her own bottled beer, and her Upper Peninsula accent came out strong. “They’re rude. Big wha. I run my own crews, Mr. Stewart—you think I haven’t handled rude before?”

“Holly.” Lannie took the beer from her, set it on the bar, and ignored her fully justified glare of astonishment. “These guys are not our friends.” It didn’t matter that Lannie got no sense of Core from them; he wasn’t sensitive to that particular stench in the first place. They’d already attacked his pack, and they’d attacked him. They were the enemy, and he needed to get Holly out of here, and he told her so with his expression and with his eyes and with every bit of the alpha within.

Holly’s eyes widened; she closed her mouth on whatever she’d been about to say and cast a more thoughtful glance at the men, three of whom were giving the bartender grief while the fourth caught sight of Lannie and stiffened, his expression darkening.

“Uh-oh,” said Barbara from behind him, and hastened away.