Jaguar Night by Doranna Durgin

“Yeah,” she said. “I just wish we hadn’t had to drag it out of you.”
    Guilt flashed over into defensiveness. “Oh, come on—it’s not like I’ve had a lot of time to think about it—or that there’s even a whole lot to say. Dolan has some concerns, that’s all. He went to check them out. He got lost and messed up, and now he’s here to recover. I’m sure once he feels better, we’ll get some answers. Get this all sorted out.” Sure of it? Maybe not. But hopeful.
    Anica shook her head, her short, black hair stirring in a rising breeze. “That still doesn’t explain what’s between you and this guy. You know, the one you just met? Give me a break, I could practically smell the secrets between you. And did you see the way he looks at you? Even half-conscious, Meghan, my dear, he thinks you’re his. Don’t ask me how that works in this day and age, especially when you’re the one rescuinghis sorry ass from trails he shouldn’t have been hiking unprepared. But damned if that’s not what I saw.”
    Anica’s language. Always frank, always a little earthy. Just like Anica herself. It didn’t mean anything, not like when Jenny worked herself up to cursing. But Anica’s words …those did. They made Meghan hot and uncomfortable, forced into looking at things she’d been trying very hard to avoid. She pushed away from the pipe corral, where the horse now lipped at a single stem of hay without any real intent. She said, “I don’t have any more I can tell you right now. Dolan will check into some things when he can, I know that much. If you’re not comfortable staying—”
    “Oh, right.” Jenny, that time, was as emphatic as she ever got. “Because the animals on this ranch will feed themselves, and train themselves and care for themselves. Have you looked at the volunteer roster lately, how many of us it takes? As if we’re going anywhere because some incredibly hot guy shows up on your doorstep spouting doom. Me, I’m sticking around. I’ve got work to do.”
    Anica turned to Meghan, the same determined look on her face, one raised eyebrow adding a touch of sardonic get real to the unspoken commentary.
    Meghan felt the unexpected prickle of tears and blinked against it, sunlight momentarily fracturing her vision into a dozen watery reflections. “Looks like I chose my family well.”
    Over the next few days, Dolan lurked around Encontrados. Not quite welcome, not the least bit understood, he stayed away from the various volunteers,mucking out stalls and paddocks and feeding the animals. He knew how to go unseen, even when his movement was hampered by lingering aches and unreliable muscles.
    But it was getting better. Meghan had been right.
    He avoided Meghan, too. Not because he wanted to…but because he wanted not to. And because without his full faculties, he couldn’t sort out either his feelings or his reactions. So he lurked on Encontrados and he constantly tested his improving connection with the jaguar and with himself.
    And in the meantime, he found the wards. He walked them, tracing lines in the dirt, avoiding the prickly pear cactus that appeared only randomly at this elevation, following the cottonwoods marking the steep seasonal stream—bone dry in the stark regional spring, but still lined by water-loving, desert-tough vegetation.
    Wards were his strength, a skill that he’d shared, however distantly, with Meghan’s mother. A skill that would have sent him into that desert to help the woman handle the Liber Nex, had he been but a few years older.
    And then, instead of his brother, he would have died with her.
    Dolan shook off the flattened-ears feeling, the impulse to growl to himself. That such impulses crawled so close to the surface told him both that the jaguar was returning and that he wasn’t up to full strength. Shape-shifters who could not control their otherness were not tolerated.
    Dolan turned aside thoughts of his brother, of Meghan’s mother, and concentrated