Read Jaguar Night for Free Online Page B

amused as he could be with his body still tasting an Atrum Core death. “Didn’t your mother teach you anything about us?”
    Meghan stiffened. “She taught me what she felt was important.” She absently rubbed her arm, but stopped with a wince, pulling her hand away. At his frown, she held out her arm, displaying the ripped sleeves. “You weren’t a grateful patient. At least not at the start.”
    “I—” Vaguely, he remembered it. Damn. “You’d best get it cleaned. Is it—” But he couldn’t quite bring himself to ask herself if he’d hurt her badly.
    “It’s fine.” She’d gone brusque on him, more like the woman he’d met several days earlier—if not altogether convincing, there at the corners of her eyes. There, he saw lingering grief, lingering puzzlement. She stood, slapping off dusty jeans more vigorously with one hand than the other. “I’ll take care of it. First I’ve got to see to Luka. Since you’re all right for a few moments?”
    Luka. “Your horse,” he realized. “He’s done well with me.”
    “Luka has a noble soul,” she said, simply enough so it almost hid her great affection. “But he needs water. Rest, and I’ll be back in a moment—and then you can tell me just what happened here. Before I got here.”
    He’d damn well warned her away, that’s what. Warned her about the Core. Not called her here. A sudden spike of annoyance made it through his pain. “And you can tell me why you ignored my warning—”
    She laughed—short, no humor to it at all. And then she walked over to the horse—a luminous gray with great dark eyes and the baroque head from every old European statue Dolan had ever seen. He greeted Meghan with a gentle bump of his nose, and the halter lead rope between them was merely a token as she led him out of the house.
    He was still absorbing the fact that she hadn’t answered him when he fell asleep.
    When he opened his eyes, it was to find her saddling the horse outside the house while the animal nibbled at last year’s dry grasses and stripped the new leaves from a nearby ash. Sunlight played along her bare arms as she gave the horse a last stroke beneath his heavy mane, highlighting toned, lightly tanned muscle. She wore a T-shirt; the jackets were tied around her waist, an absurd tangle of sleeves obscuring her lower body. Her arm glistened with salve, and as she returned to the house, he winced at the bruising around the puncture wounds. Widely spaced, made by a huge feline paw. His.
    “You shouldn’t have been here,” he said. “I warned you—”
    She laughed again. “Right. And what was I supposed to do about that? If the Core wants me, it probably gets me. But you know…they could have had me any time in the past fifteen years. It’s not like anyone was watching out for me.”
    “They were here, ” Dolan said, and his emotional hackles rose just thinking of it. “Last night. You would have played straight into their hands.”
    She shrugged. “You were the one who called me.”
    “I did no such—” But he stopped, and thought twice. He’d warned her. He’d meant to warn her…hadn’t he? Surely he hadn’t transmitted any of his…
    Right. His dying man’s desire to see the face that had haunted him for days.
    There wasn’t any way to finish what he’d started tosay, so he left it at that. He said, “So you came out to help the Sentinel?”
    Her lingering humor dropped away; her chin lifted slightly. Sharp features; sharp-eyed glance. “I came out to help you.” She sat quite suddenly on the hearth, a rise so short that she had to cant her knees together. Her voice was quiet with both wonderment and horror as she asked again, “How did they do that to you?”
    Dolan looked away; his jaw clenched. “I don’t know,” he said. “They shouldn’t have…” He took a deep breath and found the fortitude, somehow, to look her directly in the eye while admitting to the failure. “I dropped my guard. The Core got in.