Sentinels: Alpha Rising

“I’m hungry,” Lannie told Holly. “Grab your meal and your beer and we’ll eat somewhere else.”

By then the gang was headed their way. Lannie took the step in front of Holly and felt more than saw as she slid off the stool to stand at his shoulder.

“Look who we found.” The lead guy came to a stop, his expression just a little too bright, his bruises from earlier in the day blooming puffy and dramatic. “The idiot who showed up in the middle of nowhere to mess with our business.”

Lannie kept his voice even and his hands low. “Out in the middle of nowhere happens to have been my property. And the old man you beat up happens to be my friend.”

The man offered him a nasty smile. “You should have thought of this moment before you butted in.”

“There were five of you and one of me, and I’m still standing. This time there are only four of you. Is this really something you want everyone to see?” He didn’t, at the moment, feel the aches. He didn’t feel the wound on his side. And he didn’t hold the alpha inside.

“Let’s just go.” Holly’s low voice held disgust rather than fear. “You were right. We can eat somewhere else.”

A camera flashed from behind Lannie, highlighting the man—tall, muscle-bound and graced with a graying blond beard that crawled unmanaged down his throat to his chest. His friends started as the flash went off again, and Barbara made a satisfied noise in her throat. “Got ’em. Now you scoot, Lannie. If they wanted to take a poke at you in my place, they should’ve been faster about it.”

“Yes’m,” Lannie said, easing a step aside without taking his eyes off the men. This would be the moment, if they—

The big guy in front went for it, dropping his shoulder for driving punch that would have caught Lannie pretty much where the knife had.

Lannie whipped the serving tray up between them, bracing it against the sharp impact; hot pain tore at his side. As the man cried out and grabbed his injured hand, Lannie yanked the tray up and cracked it in half over his head.

The man dropped like a rock. Lannie held the other three with his eye, waiting that extra beat. When they exchanged an uncertain glance, he dropped the tray halves on top of their fallen friend.

Barbara had more than a camera; she had a short bat, and she tapped it meaningfully against her palm. “We done here, boys?”

That could have been it. That should have been it. But the fallen man surged upward with offended fury and Lannie snarled it back at him, grabbing the bat from Barbara—

Heavy glass thudded dully against a hard head. The man collapsed in a moaning heap.

Holly looked ruefully at her beer bottle—upended and now empty. She placed the bottle carefully upright on the bar. “Maybe we can get those dinners to go?”

Chapter 3 (#ulink_e240d49e-0d01-59cb-92e0-a66fa2c579ba)

Awesome. A bar fight.

Holly sat on her suitcase in the bed of Lannie’s pickup, a take-out container balanced on her knees, a new beer at her feet and anger tempered only by the weight of fatigue. She’d done no more than catnap since the Sentinels had snatched her from her home, and right now it didn’t seem to matter that the food was good, the incredible expanse of night sky was filled with diamond-sharp stars and the companionship was currently undemanding.

Because it didn’t change anything. She’d lost a life she’d fought hard to have, and one she loved. She could be furious or she could grieve, but right now this dull, exhausted anger suited her just fine.

“You suck,” she told Lannie, who sat on a hay bale beside her.

“Yeah,” he said, and took a pull on his own beer. “Maybe.”

“Will you ever let me go?” she asked him, making no attempt to hide her frustration.

“Me?” He tipped his head back to watch the stars as if considering—but flinched at the stretch, his hand going to his side where blood had dried earlier in the evening. “Yes.”

“But not them,” Holly said, hearing his unspoken words.

Lannie put aside his empty takeout container and rested his elbows on his knees. “Never entirely. It doesn’t mean you won’t end up back where you were, or where you want to be.”

She made a derisive sound in her throat. “Sure. As long as I’m not too valuable so you people aren’t willing to let me go. And supposing that the Atrum Core stays hands-off.”

Lannie pushed a thumb at the knot of discomfort between his brows, a gesture her unusually sensitive eyes saw just fine. Maybe he had a headache. Good.

He said, “You’re Sentinel, Holly. Having a connection to the whole is part of that, and that’s all you’re here to find. Where you fit in the whole is up to you. But until things settle out, you’re not safe at home.”

She laughed outright. “Safe? Are you even listening to yourself? How safe is your friend Aldo? How safe was it to be in that tavern with you this evening?” She set her beer down with a clunk of heavy glass against the truck bed lining. “If you weren’t what you are, we wouldn’t be eating dinner out here in the bed of a truck.”

He didn’t reply right away; she chose to believe it was because he had no defense. When he did speak, it was only to say, “Well. It’s an awfully pretty night.”

She made a derisive sound.

“Don’t get stars this clear from the ground in Michigan,” he said. “Don’t get them without mosquitoes, either.”

“Maybe I like mosquitoes!” she snapped at him, which was so patently ridiculous that she was glad when he didn’t respond. After a round of silence, the breeze rustling through piñons behind them, she sighed. “God, I need a shower. I don’t even know where I’m sleeping tonight.”

“My place,” Lannie said—and offered the faintest of smiles in the darkness in response to her scowl. “I’ll sleep somewhere else, and tomorrow we’ll sort things out. I didn’t have much notice.”

“Yeah,” Holly said. “I gathered that. I feel so welcome, eh?”

He straightened. “No,” he said, his hand pressed back to his side but his voice taking on that note of command she’d heard there before. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” she meant to demand, but he stepped on the words.

“Don’t think of yourself that way. Don’t think of me that way. Unprepared isn’t the same as unwilling or unwelcoming.”

She didn’t even have to see him to know. Or to feel. He was doing it again. If she looked, she’d find him more than. She’d find herself drawn to him in spite of the fact that she didn’t want to be here in the first place. Just as he’d done to her in the tavern, right there in front of everyone—looking at her so steadily from those dark-rimmed pale eyes, somehow drawing her in and waking the impulse to go to him—to smooth the lines from his brow and kiss the faint lingering bruises on his face, and even to trace her tongue over the luxury of his mouth.

She found her voice, strained as it was. “Stop. Doing. That.”

But he didn’t stop. He even looked as though he might reach out to her. She tensed in anticipation of that touch, wanting it, already responding to it—

Holly reached for all the strength she’d ever had—all the personal sense of self she’d developed young and hard in a life of hiding who she really was, her family split beyond repair. Independent. Capable. Without need for any Sentinel identity. Somehow, she made her voice cutting. “Really? This is your plan? To use Sentinel mojo to seduce me until I can’t think straight? You want to tell me how that’s any different than slipping me some drug?”

He drew in a sharp breath, and for that moment she wished she couldn’t see so well at night after all. Not his startled expression, and not the way her words had hit him like a cruel blow.

It was almost enough to make her wonder if she’d gotten it wrong.

But not quite.

* * *

Lannie faced the morning without enthusiasm, standing not so much behind the farm store counter as draped over it, his head resting on his forearm and buzzing like the inside of a sonic toothbrush.

He wanted to blame Holly.

Pack song was a touchy thing. To be so abruptly disengaged from his home pack, to encounter such resistance from his new pack...