Jaguar Night Read Online Free Page A

entrance. Not physical breezes, but metaphysical disturbances just waiting for him to take a wrong step, to prove he didn’t belong.
    He didn’t really want to find out what a trickster would do in retribution to a trespasser.
    So he offered his respect and his caution, and he slowly progressed to the interior of the crumbling house, the single main room with its sleeping and cooking alcoves and the hand-formed fireplace still in nearperfect condition. He crouched beside it, hesitating long enough to check for traps and black widow spiders alike, finding neither. Just that blank space that had drawn him here, alluring…close enough to success to send tension zinging down his spine.
    As dusk fell around him, he reached into the chimney and felt around until his fingers came to rest on crackling paper.
    Yes. With care, he eased the manuscript free. It felt right in his hand—the expected size, the expected heft—if at the same time without the presence he’d expected. The weightiness.
    He withdrew it from the chimney and set it on the hearth, a paper-wrapped package thoroughly secured with duct tape. More duct tape showing than paper, dammit. The stuff would be hell to cut through, even after all this time. He reached into his treated back pocket for his folding Buck knife—and that’s when he realized.
    Not dusk, this darkness. Not yet.
    Atrum Core. Here. Now. In spite of his personal wards. Coming for the one thing he could never let them have.
    The haze once restricted to the horizon now abruptly descended around him, saturating the air with an oily stench. He threw himself down on the manuscript, pulling the threads of his wards tighter even as he sent the most piercing Vigilia adveho call he could—the 911incantation of a Sentinel in deepest jeopardy. By then he realized the haze wasn’t mist, wasn’t droplets of any sort, but had turned into infinitesimal insects, gnats almost too small to see—and that as they settled on the skin exposed at his wrists, they sank right into his damn skin, making it twitch with the sudden burning fire of their passage.
    Can’t be good. He instantly gave over to the jaguar, trading inadequate clothing for thick black fur, still crouched over the manuscript, ears flattened closed and eyes tightly closed, his nose tucked down between his front legs and his tail curled tightly to his side. Expose nothing — and never stop reaching for those wards —
    Abruptly, the stench eased. The fiery burn beneath his skin eased, fading to an ache. The dusk—true dusk—enfolded him in silence. Dolan didn’t move, not at first—he finished reinforcing his wards, not allowing himself to wonder why the Core had retreated when they—face it—they’d had the complete advantage. The Vigilia adveho hadn’t yet even reached its target; the ward reinforcement hadn’t been finished. His dappled black jaguar fur wouldn’t have kept the invading gnats away forever, and the fire of them had been enough to fragment his concentration. And yet…
    Gone. All of it.
    Dolan slowly raised his head, a growl slipping out. He flexed his claws into the stone hearth—claws sharp enough to tear through duct tape as easily as a knife. He didn’t waste any time tackling the manuscript wrapping, beset with the sudden urgency to see the thing, to touch it directly—to feel it. Beset with the sudden premonition that it—
    That it wasn’t the manuscript at all.
    Dolan growled again—couldn’t stop it, or stop from lashing his tail. Decoy. Paper encased in leather—a fancy journal of some sort, filled with the scripted details of daily life. The Core must have realized it, and they had promptly quit the field.
    He’d been lucky in a backward kind of way—the Core shouldn’t have been able to find him, shouldn’t have been able to reach him…but they had, and only this decoy had saved him from that bafflingly successful attack.
    But it left him with no manuscript and a cold trail.
    And it left him with