Lynx Destiny (15 page)

“They didn’t bother you?” the man asked, prodding, his attention back on Regan.

“No,” she said, and thought it truth enough. They’d very much bothered her...but not, as it happened, just now. And talking about
them
would have meant talking about Kai, and the woods, and things that didn’t feel completely like hers to tell.

Besides, she didn’t know this man—and she let that show, too.

He responded with immediate chagrin. “Manners,” he said. “My name is Phillip Seamans. I own the Tae Kwon Do dojang. I’ve been here since before you left, but I don’t expect you remember me...or it.”

She heard what he meant her to hear. He knew of her; he knew of her family’s loss. “Regan Adler,” she said anyway. And then, reluctant words she couldn’t keep herself from saying, “You know Kai, then?”

“Since I got here,” Phillip said. “Although I only saw him once in those early years. His father, now...there was a man with things on his mind.”

“Kai grew up here?” Regan tried to fathom it—tried to imagine Kai as a boy, living so nearby...and she’d known nothing of it.

Then again, she’d been preoccupied at that point. Too busy watching Gwen Adler fall apart.

“Kai’s got plenty on his mind from the looks of it,” Mary said, meaning in her voice—and in the glance she aimed at Regan. “Did you see how worn down he looked today?”

“Excuse me?” Regan said, rising to that occasion. “You think I’ve been gone so long I don’t remember those
looks?
I haven’t seen him for days. And from what I’ve seen, he can take care of himself just fine.”

But she hadn’t meant to blurt out such revealing words, and she shut her mouth on any more of them.

Mary stuffed the doughnut into a tiny white bag and rolled the crinkly top down with brusque movements, handing it over the counter. “I did tell you, Regan—don’t mess with that boy.”

“Boy!” she said, and gave Mary an incredulous look. Had Mary seen Kai lately?

Or maybe just not in those leggings.

Bill gave her an affectionate look. “Mary’s been keeping an eye out for too many years, maybe. Truth is, he probably doesn’t need that help anymore.”

“He’s a wild thing,” Mary grumbled. “And like most wild things, civilization is the thing that will end up hurting him.”

Phillip cleared his throat. “He wasn’t himself today, I’ll say that much. But I think we can safely look to those men for the real reason. I might just have a word with Jaime Nez.”

“It’s hard to imagine what the sheriff can do,” Regan murmured, thinking again of the strangeness of it all—and only afterward realizing that her words made little sense without that context. She managed to add lamely, “After all, they’re only hanging around. Along with that Realtor who won’t get off my back.”

Phillip shifted his grip on the hammer. “You’ve seen them before?”

The doughnut bag crinkled in Regan’s grip; she pushed cash over the register counter and figured change couldn’t come fast enough. This man was far too astute...and Regan was far too distracted.

This, she realized, was a conversation to be having with Kai. Whom she’d effectively chased off, and hadn’t seen since. But who, in the end, was the only one she could truly tell about seeing the dry-pool musclemen with Matt Arshun—and the only one who would truly understand what it meant.

The only one who already seemed to understand the things she didn’t want to talk about at all.

Chapter 14

K
ai did the forms Phillip had taught him, focusing on the details—the exact level of his clenched fist, the smooth, accurate motion of arms and legs, the balance of his body. He moved on to his own forms, the spin and tuck and roll that came so naturally.

Phillip had helped him integrate the two, giving him discipline without destroying flexibility—understanding, even at the start, that Kai would fade back into the woods to follow his own instincts before ever suborning them to things entirely human.

Even if he’d never understood why.

Alone in the studio, he focused on the slap of the mat, the sharp exhalations of his own breath, the sensation of muscles at work.

He no longer felt the influence of the gun and its bullets, secured as they were in Phillip’s floor safe. He no longer felt the lingering, muted whisperings of Core activity in the woods—a thing so subtle that he hadn’t recognized its presence until he’d encountered its absence.

Of the Core, Kai knew little more than what his parents had taught him—that their workings drew upon the earth, sapping energies and spitting back the twisted remnants of those same energies.
Poison.
Poison to the earth, to the unwitting humans who shared it, and to the Sentinels. Most of all to Kai, who not only had the ability to perceive the merest whisper of such workings—the miasma of the Core’s very presence—but who found them so hard to bear.

Temporary freedom from the subliminal taint of Core activity made its renewed presence all the more evident to Kai when he emerged from Phillip’s dojang—a faint taste at the back of his throat, a light pressure against his skin. All things he’d felt prior to interrupting the amulet dump at the dry pool, but simply not recognized.

I will find you,
he thought at the Core, hesitating outside the dojang to lift his face to those invisible currents, sensing the direction and strength of them.
You will not touch this land.

Or Regan.

He caught a ride back toward the wild lands that held his home, disembarking—as he always did—nowhere near the game trails of that place.

This time, he headed straight for Frank Adler’s land.

Already the air here felt cleaner than before he had removed the gun, clearer—absolving itself of the taint. Kai pulled the satchel off his shoulder, shedding his clothing and packing it away to tuck behind a clutter of rocks—his trappings of civilization, none of which would take the change with him. He stood naked and unfettered in the trees, stretching into a grand yawn...shaking off the feel of asphalt from beneath his feet.

When he bounded forward, it was as lynx—the brilliance of the energies from the change still coruscating in his wake. In this form, he moved swift and silent, running the boundaries of the property—noting Regan’s new tree tags, stretching up on his hind legs to leave marks of his own, the late-afternoon shadows falling long around him where the sun sliced through the trees.

Because the Core had been here. Not active, but...here. Here more than anywhere else, making themselves familiar with the several hundred acres of the Adler property...and pushing in close to the house.

Regan might hear the land, but evidently she didn’t have any particular sense of the Core. Kai found their scent, their footprints...and up on an outcrop with a perfect view of the cabin, he found the lens cap for a camera.

He hesitated there, looking down at the cabin. He knew it for what it was—a remarkably independent dwelling, here where no maps truly traced the roads. Solar panels lined the roof, soaking up the sun even in winter; the woodstove warmed the house without help from the gathered electricity. The well pumped into a vast cistern buried into the hill, and the horse drank from the same rainwater collection that watered the garden beneath greenhouse panels.

From here he could see the barn, see the horse, see the spot on the hill where he and Regan had very nearly coupled
.

He tried to tell himself that the depth of his response to her came simply because he found her beautiful, the bright gold swirl of her hair and the strong active nature of her body, the perfect curve of her breast in his hand and the wink of the jewel at her navel.

But he’d found other women beautiful—the hikers he’d guided in the off-season, the women in the hunting parties and the tourists traipsing through the general store. Some of those women had features more beautiful than Regan, bodies more lush—and they had offered of themselves to him, obviously enough so there was no mistaking their invitation.

No. It was simply Regan. He didn’t know why, and he didn’t know if that was because he knew so little of the outside world—of
women—
in general, or if men simply never knew such things.

He yawned hugely under the weight of the thoughts, eyes squeezed shut and ears flattened. He resettled his tongue in his mouth, working his jaws...lips resting over long canines and sharp, carnassial teeth.
Lynx.

She would never know.
Could
never know.

But he could still protect her. Whether she knew it...whether she wanted it.

Sentinel and lynx, both.

* * *

The morning after her drive downhill and her encounters in town, Regan found her mystery footprints right at the edge of the yard.

“Suddenly this place is Grand Central Station?” she asked Bob, who had left his porch vigil to lean against her leg with a low and solemn wag. Even the old cat was out today, sunning himself in the driveway—although neither animal appeared particularly concerned about the tracks Regan was so very certain had to be lynx.

She found herself not particularly concerned, either. If there was truly a lynx in this area, however it had gotten here, it needed all the help it could get. She found her mind’s eye wandering, putting together images of a mountain forest painted in shadows and sunlight, a lynx just barely emerging to be picked out in those edges of light.

She also found the second set of tracks. As fresh as the lynx tracks if not fresher, the imprints of those massive hiking boots were still drying into hardness along the damp edge of the woods where the dew lingered.

She tried to imagine Kai in shoes, and recalled with crystal clarity the library, where he’d looked—almost—like anyone she might meet in town. His feet had borne hiking boots, all right—but they’d been lightweight and low profile.

She suspected he’d ditched them as soon as he’d thought no one would remark upon it. How crazy was that, to go barefoot in these woods?
Barefoot down from the peak.
As if the average hiker made it to the top of this range at all, never mind in bare feet—never mind to come running down the whole way at the signs of her distress that he shouldn’t have been able to perceive at all.

It was all part of the big picture of her decision to go. Men who shouldn’t be on this land...that was one thing. But the land itself, invading her mind...
Kai,
and his preternatural ability to use the land to reach her...

Concepts to which she couldn’t even put words, and to which she really didn’t want to.

“I’m leaving,” she told Bob, who merely wagged his tail another few beats, still leaning his great shoulder against her. She’d meant to say something about her departure to Mary and Bill—to look for someone who might watch this place.

Maybe it was too hard to admit it out loud—that she would leave this place when her father needed her here. Especially with someone prowling around so invasively.

As if she didn’t know exactly who. Whatever his reason, Arshun wanted this place. He and those men.

Kai...

“I don’t need your help!” she snapped at that insidious whisper, and then muttered an apology when Bob’s ears flattened in concern. She ran a hand over his big head. “You’re one of the reasons I’m leaving.”

Although she couldn’t blame the whispers for expressing what she’d already managed to think of on her own.

If anyone could make her feel safe here, it would be Kai.

Then again, if anyone could make her feel
unsafe...
it was the man who heard what she did, and apparently embraced it. The man who spent his time in the woods like some modern-day Grizzly Adams, guiding hunters and hikers on some irregular and highly sought-after basis. The man who had healed from a bullet wound in an impossibly complete and swift fashion.

The man to whom she responded in such a swift and primal way that she hardly knew herself. And that was hardly what she needed, when what she knew of herself was unraveling all on its own.

No doubt that’s why she had come back from Alamogordo with those extra steaks and with a packet of condoms.

Kai...

“Let’s go inside, cat,” she told the lounging feline. “I have to call Dad—maybe he knows someone who can stay here.”

The cat rolled to his other side, stretching hugely—his whiskers rippling and claws spread into extrusion, his whole body full of satisfaction.

“Nothing stretches like a cat,” she told him, and led the way back to the cabin.

* * *

But the whispers wouldn’t leave her alone. Not in the loft, working at the rough-edged painting of the woods and surprised to find it finished, to see that the rough edges were part of it. Not in the kitchen, where the new faucet cartridge installed just as it was supposed to. Not over a solitary dinner, or the phone call she didn’t quite make.

Leave. Stay.

And the whispers curling around in her mind....
Kai...safe...beware...
A confusing contradiction of thoughts and feelings, all imbued with a kind of longing.

She sat curled in the overstuffed chair of her loft, bathed in the natural light of the specialized fixtures she’d been given in the early days of her art, when her mother was still there to nurture such things. Sketching out drafts of a new painting between random, quick impressions of the tracks she’d seen...pulling out her old reference books to make quick studies of a lynx in motion and surprised to find how much of those images drew not on learning, but from something inside herself.

Something trying to find freedom through her art.

Because the work wasn’t for someone else’s project— illustrating someone else’s words, or making clear someone else’s treatise—she let herself go. She submerged herself, sketching from one page onto another, shifting from quick detail to sweeping strokes, and when the purr surrounded her, she didn’t even at first realize it. It seemed an extension of her own pleasure, this sensation of just being what she’d always been meant to be. Only when she stopped to switch to a softer pencil did she realize the sensation came from without as much as within.