Doranna Durgin - Sentinels - Alpha Rising

“We’ll sort it out,” Lannie said, lifting his hand to assess the bleeding. Dammit, this was one of his favorite shirts.

“Let me help,” Aldo said. “You know I have some healing.”

“So do we all,” Lannie told him, already feeling the burn of his blood as the Sentinel in him took hold; the bleeding would stop and the wound would seal. And then it would leave him to grouch and ouch, wisely not spending resources on a wound that no longer posed a threat.

Aldo ran a hand over thick, grizzled hair cut short, tucking his stubby joint into the pocket of a shirt that had seen better days even before its recent misadventure. “You know what I mean.”

“It’s fine,” Lannie said. A vibration against his butt cheek signaled cell phone voice mail. “Let’s get back to the store. Faith is worried.”

Aldo squinted at him, cautiously pleased. “She tell you that, or you just picked up on it...?”

Lannie made an amused sound in his throat. “Do you think she had to tell me?” Not when he was enough of an alpha to take a stand when necessary, to back down when appropriate, to remain in the background unless needed. And to have a singular skill for building teams and pack connections, even among the mundane humans who had no sense or knowledge of his other .

It was a skill so deeply ingrained that he’d learned to factor it into every part of his life—the depth of his friendships, the instant flare of his attractions, the strength of his anger.

“Yeah, you just picked up on it with your pack mojo,” Aldo concluded, and rightly so. Faith’s rising concern had come through in an undertone, the taste of anxiety with the faint whisper of identity that belonged to the young woman named Faith.

They struck out across the land of transitional high prairie, where ponderosa pine mingled with cedar and oaks and the land came studded with cactus and every other kind of prickly little scrub plant. The undulating slopes took them down to the feed-store lot with its storage barn, back corrals and low, no-nonsense storefront building.

An unfamiliar car sat in the lot out front of the otherwise bare lot, and Lannie thought again about that unexpected phone call, his annoyance rising. Sabbatical from Brevis duty means leave me alone .

Faith bolted out the store’s back door, all goth eyes and piercings. “It’s Brevis,” she said in unwitting confirmation, a little walleyed along the way—and so thin of Sentinel blood that no one knew just what her other might have been. A little bit rebellious, a little bit damaged, a whole lot of runaway just barely now of age.

She had no idea that Brevis—the regional Sentinel headquarters—had once quietly nudged her in Lannie’s direction. She was one of his now. Home pack.

“What are they doing here?” she demanded. “I’m not going back in there. Do you think they can tell I’m—that I was —oh, for butt’s sake. Look at you. What did you get him into, Aldo?”

“Nothing!” Aldo protested, trying to sound righteously indignant and not quite pulling it off. Hard to, with the scent of pot still following him around. “It wasn’t my fault.”

“It wasn’t his fault,” Lannie told her, and she closed her mouth on a response sure to have been stinging, regarding him uncertainly. “I’m fine,” he said. “Why don’t you help Aldo clean up in the barn. The Brevis folks can cool their heels a moment.” Because Brevis or not, this was his turf. They didn’t get to upset his people.

Especially when they hadn’t warned him of their arrival in the first place.

Especially when they shouldn’t have even been here. Not after how things had gone down with the last group he’d pulled into pack status. Too little time, too many challenges...and one damaged individual who had fooled them all.

He headed for the barn, where the stairs along the outside led up to a section of finished loft. Before he reached the top step, he’d peeled off the shirt and wiped himself down with it, heading straight to the bathroom to slap an adhesive strip over the now-barely-oozing wound.

The bruises were what they were; he didn’t so much as glance in the distorted old medicine-cabinet mirror before heading out to the half-walled bedroom area to hunt up a fresh shirt, tugging it on with care.

The phone rang again. He let the ringtones cut the air while he stood quietly in the rugged old barn loft...eyes closed, recent encounter pushed away...muting the underlying home pack song in favor of the Sentinel whole. Shutting himself away from his own people, in spite of their upset, to prepare himself for whatever Brevis had come to ask of him.

For a strange, brief moment, the home song resisted his touch. It spun around him in a dizzying whirl, closing in like a warder’s web and throbbing with an ugly, unfamiliar dissonance.

He took it as a rebuke. It was bad timing to interrupt pack song in the wake of such disturbance, and he knew it. He swallowed away the unease of it, settling into his own skin. Felt the aches of being there, and settled into that, too, accepting and dismissing them.

The dissonance slowly faded.

Finally, then, he reached for his larger pack sense, the one that made him ready for the outside world and whatever Brevis might ask from him. The bigger picture—the one that would ride him hard.

More so, in the wake of Jody. In the wake of her death. In the wake of all their deaths.

One more breath, deep and quiet, and then...he was no longer just plain Lannie. He no longer hummed to the tune of his own small pack but had set them—temporarily—aside, so existing pack song wouldn’t interfere with the formation of whatever was to come.

He was the unentangled alpha that Brevis had come to see.

* * *

Babysitters.

Holly Faulkes wanted to spit the words at them—the man and the woman who’d brought her to this tiny New Mexico town of Descanso. They’d driven an hour through the desert mountains, pulling her away from her family during a still-heated discussion about her past, her present and her future—and all so she could wait in this cool, shadowed feed store with its cluttered shelves and dry dust, its thick scent of hay and oats and molasses and leather.

Sentinel babysitters.

As if she hadn’t even been part of the recent Cloudview conversation, sitting beside her parents in silence—all of them tense, all of them terse. As good as prisoners in the old town hotel.

And as if she hadn’t just missed meeting her brother Kai for the very first time since childhood, hearing of his feral beauty and of the lynx that peered out from under his skin at every turn, but being whisked away from both Cloudview and her parents before the Sentinels could call Kai in from the mountains.

Sentinels. If not exactly the enemy, also not her friends. Not considering she’d hidden from them since she’d been born, sheltered first by her family and then by deliberate, active choice. God, she didn’t want to be here. And at twenty-four years old, it should have stayed her choice.

“Are you all right?” The woman eyed her. Her name was Mariska, and she was far too knowing for Holly’s taste. Far closer to bodyguard than escort , with a short sturdy form both rounded and strong—not to mention a sharp gaze that gave away more than Holly was probably supposed to see. So did her complexion, a distinctly beautiful brown shade that might have come from south India but instead came from the bear within her.

“You’re kidding, eh?” Holly said. “ No , I’m not all right. Why can’t you people just leave us alone? Leave me alone?”