Jaguar Night by Doranna Durgin Page A

on the wards. Margery Lawrence, it was clear, had been a pure wizard with the lines and webs of protection. Then again, it wasonly to be expected from the woman who had created the decoy at the old homestead.
    But maybe, while he looked for weak spots and planned the necessary steps to shore up defenses…If he could absorb the nature of this work, if he could take it into himself, then maybe he could find the manuscript when he once again prowled these hills as the jaguar.
    So he walked the ward lines by feel; he slipped into ward view to study them, and then when he was able to visualize them, he sat in the shadows and traced them with his mind. Along the ground, through the air…a three-dimensional web of protective energies, largely untouched by time. Tangled and tight around the ranch yard, akin to personal wards and capable of keeping out amulets and Core workings. Loose grids around the ranch acreage, more of a warning system than anything else. That Meghan had been able to manipulate them at all only confirmed that the Sentinels had made a serious judgment error in cutting her free—leaving her uneducated, leaving the Sentinels without her services.
    Not that he didn’t think she was better off without the Sentinel yoke. But what she might have been…
    That, he rued.
    No doubt she didn’t even know that the initiation process would take what she already had and mature it, enhancing her current skills, bringing new ones to the fore. But Dolan…
    Dolan didn’t want to be the one to explain that process to her.
    He’d hoped he’d find something in her mother’s things—not only clues to the manuscript’s location, but any reference to Sentinel rites that he might point out toMeghan. Let her learn these things from her mother, if she hadn’t already done so. He’d even gotten permission to look through the storage tubs under her bed, although she’d pulled them out into the guest room rather than let him in her own room, and conspicuously made herself absent—not quite abandoning the house, but hiding away in the small room that served as the office.
    He’d found nothing in the tubs, though. A respectful sifting of the contents netted him the same box she’d had at the homestead and several batches of paper. He found Margery’s birth certificate, a lone letter from a man who must have been Meghan’s father, a few early scrawlings done by Meghan herself and several notebooks that couldn’t quite be called diaries but which nonetheless held Margery’s dreams and plans and hopes—carefully envisioned improvements to the ranch, some of which had been carried out; scratched notes on the history of the place. Wish lists. Books she wanted to read, movies she wanted to see, inexpert sketches of plants she wanted to identify. There was one sketch of a grinning coyote, a rough few lines that somehow perfectly captured the creature’s essence.
    No casual name-dropping of the Liber Nex. No commentary about the Sentinels whatsoever. If Margery had kept any written record, any notes, any hints, about the Sentinels and her involuntary association with them, she hadn’t kept them where they’d been found.
    Yet.
    With Margery’s things returned to Meghan’s room—left respectfully just inside the door, to be precise—Dolan had returned to prowling the land. Two days intohis recovery, the jaguar lurked just beneath the surface, testing his control—which, it seemed, was distinctly lacking. So Dolan stalked the land until he tired himself, the ache seeping back into his bones, and then he dared to return to the house and to sit on the small, flat mattress of the guest bed and stare at the wireless phone in his hand, wondering if there was any point in calling brevis regional, wondering if the growing sensations within—a low vibration within his very bones, a warmth flushing across his skin—spoke of recovery or some lurking problem.
    Either way, it was time to push harder. To go back out on the land and find