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A welcome invitation…
“My place?” she asked.
Sweet cinnamon bear, full of humor and fire and strength. “Any place you like,” he said, rumbling low.
She didn’t respond as she headed toward the parking lot, a ragged asphalt patch crammed full of cars in what had become true dusk. She looked over her shoulder, found him watching her and smiled—and she didn’t wait. Not playing games, just matter-of-fact check yes or no.
Ruger took a deep breath of the night air, found it scented with leftover heat and sage and creosote. It tasted like anticipation. The hair on his nape bristled, a tingle on his skin.
He followed her.
About the Author
DORANNA DURGIN spent her childhood filling notebooks first with stories and art, and then with novels. After obtaining a degree in wildlife illustration and environmental education, she spent a number of years deep in the Appalachian Mountains. When she emerged, it was as a writer who found herself irrevocably tied to the natural world and its creatures—and with a new touchstone to the rugged spirit that helped settle the area and which she instills in her characters.
Doranna’s first fantasy novel received the 1995 Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Award for best first book in the fantasy, science-fiction and horror genres; she now has fifteen novels of eclectic genres, including paranormal romance, on the shelves. When she’s not writing, Doranna builds webpages, enjoys photography and works with horses and dogs. You can find a complete list of her titles at www.doranna.net.
Sentinels: Kodiak Chained
Doranna Durgin
This book is unquestionably dedicated not only to those people who were involved in making it happen, but to those special people who MADE it happen: the readers who let me know how much they wanted to see a book for Ruger.
Chapter 1
If a bear…
Like Ruger hadn’t heard all the jokes. Bear, woods, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But he wasn’t alone. From where he stood among a small patch of trees, he’d looked down on the unexpected plaids and bagpipes and sporrans and kneesocks, smelled the scents of whisky and wool in the cooling air, and heard a pipe-and-drum band squalling up into full sound over all.
And he’d looked down on this woman.
If a bear finds another bear in the park during a Celtic festival, does anyone notice?
He sure did. And so did she.
She stood outside the whisky-tasting tent with its miniscule cups of tasting whisky. If any of the humans standing near her had a clue, they would have treated her with more respect. They wouldn’t have casually bumped into her on the way to the open tent flap—or failed to see the strength in her short houri form, the beauty of nut-brown skin and black hair and smoky eyes.
She smiled faintly at Ruger and lifted her tiny plastic cup of honey-gold liquid in a quiet salute. Ruger lifted his chin in a subtle salute to the lady bear and eased back into the trees of the hill—not quite ready to give up his woods, thin as they might be.
If a bear…
Especially a Sentinel shifter bear looking for quiet the night before a field assignment in the continuing fight against the Atrum Core. One trying to pretend that he wasn’t quite himself, still recovering from what hadn’t killed him, but had maybe killed who he was and had always been.
Healer.
Never mind the Atrum Core ambush that had put Ruger out of action for months. The bite of Flagstaff’s night air, their team gathered in the hotel parking lot where the Atrum Core had been seen, Maks’ hand pushing against the hotel door, their tracker’s cry of warning—
The astonishing flash of stinking, corrupted Core energy blooming from the room to take the team down.
Ruger’s bruises had healed long before he’d woken from the induced coma. And theoretically, his singed senses were, in fact, recovered.
Theoretically. He could sit up here on the crest, thin, gritty soil beneath the seat of his jeans, and he could feel the accumulated ills and ails of the festivities below. He just couldn’t do anything about them.
A woman on chemotherapy, smiling brightly to a friend. And there, a middle-aged man whose lungs sat heavy in his chest, and on the far side of the festival, amidst children clustered at a game under the mercury lights, was a youngster with sickness lurking in his bones. Ruger couldn’t see him—even a Sentinel’s night vision had its limits—but he could feel it well enough.
On a normal night, he could ease the man’s breathing, offer the woman energy, and—
No, the child was what he was.
On a normal night…
Ruger closed his eyes, absorbing the taste and feel of the ailments and knowing—knowing—he could help. Knowing that if he channeled the healing energies that had once come so readily to him, he could…
Soothe…
Ease…
Mend…
He reached, and found nothing. He reached deeper, and found only a deeper nothing, a profound and echoing inner darkness.
Deeper—
The pain came on with the inexorable nature of a gripping vise, increasing to sharp retribution in an indefinable instant. Ruger grunted with the impact, momentarily stunned by it.
And then he was sitting up on the crest of the hill, startled by the sensation of warmth trickling from his nose and into his mustache.
Again.
He pulled a bandanna from his back pocket and wiped away the blood, sitting still in the dusk until he was sure the nosebleed had stopped.
Not so much the healer after all.
Well. He was still warrior. And he was still bear. And Nick Carter, Sentinel Southwest Brevis consul, still counted on that fact—counted on it enough that he’d pulled Ruger back into the field.
Not that he or Nick had much choice—not when mere weeks after the hotel ambush, the entirety of Southwest Brevis had been crippled in the aftermath of Core D’oíche. Ruger wasn’t the only one who didn’t know how much of himself he’d recover but who had things to do in the meantime. He could still offer his knowledge—and, unique among healers, he could damned well watch his own back.
And he needed to prove it. To his teammates, to himself.
Ruger got to his feet, shadowing through the woods quietly enough to startle those at the edges of it when he emerged. There, just down the hill… the lady bear still waited. Too much of a coincidence to believe, much too enticing to ignore. A bear in the swirling midst of the Celtic fair, tossing back what remained of her whisky, throat moving with her swallow.
She spotted him immediately and pitched the sample cup into the trash, moving away from the side of the tent to come his way—and scooping two more samples from the table beside the tent as she did. So many of the bear shifters were exceptionally tall, on the burly side—plenty of hair, rugged features. Ruger not as much as some, despite his Kodiak nature when he took his bear. Little black bear, he thought suddenly, and knew it true of her—the