Lynx Destiny (21 page)

“And so you won’t.” Arshun nodded at Marat, who dug into his pocket and withdrew, of all things, one of those chunky metal medallions, this one on a long thong of tightly braided leather. It shone with the same oily gleam as those at the dry pool, looking both ancient and heavily handled.

“It’s silent,” Marat assured Arshun.

“Kai knew,” Regan said, realizing it—not understanding any of it. Except suddenly she did—knowing how Kai heard this land. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? You didn’t think anyone would know you were here—what you were up to. And he did. He
does.
”

“Not any longer,” Arshun said. He tucked the handkerchief away and accepted the amulet. “And the reason we’ve had this conversation is that although you won’t remember, some part of you will still
know.
” He stepped closer—close enough to brush up against her knee and take her chin in an unpleasant grip between smooth fingers. “Some deep part of you will still understand that unless you welcome us, your father dies. Your heart will know that your lover
is
dead, and that you are, in fact, utterly alone here.”

No.
Kai wasn’t dead...he
wouldn’t
be. She would have heard it through the land if it was true. And she wouldn’t be alone, not truly—not as long as the voices whispered into her mind, reminding her of what had happened here, warning her...beckoning her to places of safety.

Arshun must have read something in her eyes—her defiance, her determination. He smiled tightly.
Cruelly.
“Yes,” he said, taking her fisted hand to pry the fingers open and push the medallion into her hand—a thing of biting and startling cold. “You won’t even have your secret little connection to count on. You are,” he said, patting her hand closed around the metal,
“alone.”

* * *

Regan opened her eyes to find herself on the couch, the cat sitting directly in her line of sight with his implacable stare fastened to hers. She sat, startled at the stiffness and bruises...and only vaguely remembered taking a tumble in the woods.

She looked down at herself to discover clean clothes, a couple of colorfully whimsical Band-Aids sprinkled across her hand...a quilt wrapped around her shoulders, and a sprinkling of unfamiliar silver-and-buff hairs across the couch. “Wow,” she said to the cat. “I must have taken a good one.” Just to be sure, she felt around her head...found no soreness, just the fat numb feeling of her puffy lower lip. “Huh.”

But beneath her puzzlement, she felt a disquiet...an uneasiness. The feeling of something missing.

Something important.

Chapter 19

K
ai made it as far as the nearest shelter, a copse of Gambel oak obscuring an undercut of land. Rough, inadequate...and a welcomed relief. His calf burned, a wound made by Arshun’s untainted bullet—no longer bleeding, already healing with the preternatural speed of a Sentinel body under extreme duress.

He’d pay for that healing with days of intense hunger and cramping—if he lived through it.

If he could pull himself together long enough to
think
and survive at all.

His chest throbbed, full of heat and Core poisons, the stink of it filling him from the inside out. It tore at his thoughts, his strength...his sanity.

He reached for the lynx without much thinking, hunting relief—hunting the strength of his other. The form he’d been taking since childhood, as natural to him as this broken human body.

He reached, and found nothing. Only the pain and the poison.

Kai pressed up against the cool earth of the shadowed shelter, tipping his head back against the uneven crumble of it. Wanting to curl up on his side, knowing his impossible, ragged breathing would only get worse, and so instead sitting upright, arms wrapped around his torso to hold the pain in.

He was Sentinel. He could do this.

But could Regan?

* * *

Kai realized he’d passed out only as he jerked awake, broken rib grating up high under his collarbone.

Not alone.

He sank his fingers into short black fur, dropped his head against a strong shoulder. Bigger than his lynx, sturdier...

Smelling distinctly of dog.

Bob gave an undertone whine, barely breaking into sound.

Kai found himself unable to muster words. But he offered a brief and raspy hum, the hint of his lynx’s rich purr. Bob took his for the companionable welcome it was, and slumped more firmly against Kai—sharing their warmth and grief. And if Kai still couldn’t think past the pain and the poison, for the moment he didn’t truly have to.

His father had tried to warn him.
Do what you have to do.
Agony shuddered through his chest, a spurt of warmth and wrongness. He’d seen this coming. He just hadn’t understood it.

Kai clamped his hand around his arm, digging fingers in deep to keep his thoughts straight. He’d never learned the
adveho—
he’d known only that it was a Sentinel-wide cry for help, a Mayday of piercing effect. No Sentinel would ignore it; most Sentinels could hear it.

He had no idea how to send such a thing.

“There’s no point,” his father had told him. “The help it might bring would end up killing you in the long run— Southwest Brevis would learn of you, and no field Sentinel with your strength is allowed to run outside brevis. They wouldn’t mean to cause you harm, but they won’t understand. Not in time. And the Core...”

The Core had already found him—likely thought they’d killed him in spite of all strictures against what they were doing here. Workings against the mundane population, manipulation of unwitting families—a sniper’s shot through the woods and the slap of impact.

The Sentinels could do no worse than that, should he reach them.

And they could save Regan.

Kai didn’t know the
adveho.
But he knew the land. He knew how to talk to it...and talk
through
it.

He threaded an arm around Bob’s shoulders, shivering, and thought he imagined a hint of warmth from the ground at his back—made no sense of it, and couldn’t spare it the effort. Not when he had to pour himself into the land, pushing out a shout of despair and demand.
Help us!

He was Sentinel. Surely he could do this.

Hang on, Regan.

* * *

“Yes,” Regan said into the phone to the Realtor named Matt Arshun. “Of course. I’ll check with my father, but I’m sure he’ll be interested.”

Not that he didn’t still love this place. But it didn’t seem likely he’d be returning to it—even if the surgery went as well as it possibly could. He’d enjoyed El Paso, it seemed.

“I’ll let you know. Thanks for your call, Mr. Arshun,” she said, and settled the handset slowly back into the cradle.

Not that she, too, wouldn’t miss this place. But her home was in Colorado now, and had been for a decade.

She bent to give the cat an absent scratch and winced, trying once more to remember just how she’d bruised herself. Sure they weren’t still coming up from her fall off the spooked mustang. That was over and done with—or should have been.

It was too easy to lose track of the days in these woods.

But a fall from the horse didn’t explain the exquisitely sensitive tenderness between her legs. She climbed the loft stairs slowly, hyperaware of that sensitivity—of how alive her body felt, and how oddly...sated. Had she dreamed...?

The mirror showed her a split lip, a cheek with a few tiny cuts, a bruise beside her eye. It showed her a faint red mark on her neck, nipples that looked as tender as they felt and a puzzled look staring back out at her.

Some of what she felt might be explained by the imminence of a particularly strong period.
If
she was due.

What day was it again?

She hunted up her favorite old T-shirt, couldn’t find it—unexpected, given that she was only working with a suitcase of clothes, not a full wardrobe—and pulled on the red bandanna print instead. In the bathroom, she looked more closely at the cuts on her face—tiny as they were, they seemed fresh—and then forgot to care until she ran across a blotch of blood in the soft crease of her elbow.

Not her blood, as near as she could tell. And there had been a considerable splash of it, mostly rubbed away but not entirely.

But once she finished washing it off, it didn’t seem important. She brushed out her hair, pulled it back in a bouncy ponytail and returned to the loft to stare in surprise at the unfinished painting there.

Not only that she didn’t recall starting it, but...

The way it called to her. The glimmer of the lynx’s eye, the sensation of wild freedom and green life and reaching connection.

“Dammit, Dad,” she muttered. “Did you lace those cookies with pot?” It wasn’t as if he’d never done it before, when the memories of her mother grew strong.

Regan found herself surprised at the dim nature of her own memories. Could it be—
could it?—
that she was finally starting to heal from her mother’s casual abandonment?

Her sketch pad sat askew on top of her toolbox; she picked it up, flipping through pages of wild things, mere lines of suggestion and eyes peering from darkness and then, abruptly, the unmistakable impression of a man’s side, from muscle-strapped shoulder and torso to the intimate line of hip and flank, strong obliques and the long stroke of a strong thigh.

She found her fingers running over the page...stopping there as if she could perceive the flesh beneath flat paper, her body responding.

“Wow,” she breathed, and resolutely put the sketch pad aside. “Girl, you need a date. Or
some
thing.”

Or something.

Fine. A trip into town would help. She’d check out an audio book from the library, see if Mary had any more jerky, grab a treat for Bob...wherever he was.

She’d get herself out of this place. It was time to let go.

Chapter 20

T
he woman at the post office greeted Regan with a distracted smile; the guy behind the counter at the gas station convenience store fumbled her change and scooped it up with a distant smile.

Maybe it’s not just me.

It seemed as if the entire town of Cloudview walked through the day listening for some forgotten music.

At the general store, Mary looked at her with some surprise. “What happened to your face?”

Regan waved a dismissive hand. “It looks worse than it is.” And then, before Mary could narrow her eyes and ask for details, she said, “Anyway, I just wanted to see if Bill had any of that great elk jerky hidden away in the freezer.”

“You walked out of here with a big sack of jerky just the other day. Don’t tell me you’ve gone through that already!”

“I did?” Regan looked down at herself as if she’d find answers there, raising her voice slightly to speak over the sound of Phillip Seamans and his drill on the boardwalk, still finessing his repairs. “I feel like an idiot. I guess I’ve got too much on my mind.” Even if she couldn’t quite think of what it was.

Mary sent an understanding look her way. “How’s Frank?”

Regan felt the puzzlement of it all over again. “He needs surgery, they say. I offered to go be with him, but Uncle Cal is handling things just fine. And then...I guess he’s going to stay there.”

“What?” Bill exclaimed from the nearby aisle in which he’d been pricing items. He wheeled out to give Regan a disbelieving stare. “That doesn’t sound like Frank Adler!”

No, it didn’t.... Did it?

But Regan shrugged. “I’m going to wrap things up here and head down to Texas, I guess—my uncle’s going to be in over his head with the surgery. I’ll just have to start on the next contract while I’m there.” She’d renegotiated the deadline, so she still had time. But sooner or later she’d have to get back to her studio....

“What do you mean, ‘wrap things up here’?” Mary said, alarm in her voice. Phillip eased over and lurked in the doorway. Odd.

Regan shrugged. “We’ve had an offer on the place. I guess Dad wants to sell.”

“The hell you say!” Bill blurted out, wheeling up to her. “Just like that?”

Just like that.

Mary looked equally aghast—even a little pale. “What about his dog? The horse?”

Regan frowned. “Bob’s old.... I don’t know. I’m sure we can find a good place for the horse. Maybe with one of the hunting lodges. I had thought to ask...”

Ask who?

Phillip crossed his arms. “Surely you weren’t thinking of asking Kai to deal with them.”

“No,” Regan said, startled. “Kai?”

Phillip’s eyes narrowed and, although he didn’t move, he suddenly seemed less casual than he’d been. “Have you
seen—
” he started, but Mary’s mutter stopped him.

“Oh, Lordy,” she said. “Just what this day needs.” But then she put a smile on her round face and moved toward the cash register. “Hey, Kathleen—got everything you need?”

Kathleen.
Regan couldn’t fathom the curious jolt she felt at the sight of the woman—a childhood friend not seen for years, her features matured, her childhood plumpness grown to generous adult curves, her expression...

Wary?

“Kathleen,” she said. “It’s been a long time.”

Kathleen looked startled as she set her produce and milk on the counter, almost as if she felt she was interrupting something. “Yes,” she said, a strange bit of hope in her expression. “A very long time.”

Mary spoke with what seemed like determined cheer as she rang up the purchases; it matched the expression on her face. “And how are those boys of yours, Kathleen? Enjoying Phillip’s classes, I hope?”

Kathleen’s face lit up. “Oh, Phillip—I’m glad you’re here. I wanted to tell you how much the boys enjoyed it when Kai stopped by the other day. You know, if there’s any way you two could be talked into putting on another demo—”

Phillip glanced Regan’s way, shifting as though he suddenly wished he hadn’t lingered at the door. “Such things aren’t for entertainment.”

“No, of course not.” Kathleen flicked a glance at Regan as she handed Mary a twenty, not one Regan could interpret. “But it certainly is inspiring. They started asking for extra practice after the last time.”