Lynx Destiny (22 page)

Phillip smiled faintly. “I’ll see how Kai feels about it.”

Kathleen scooped up the cloth bag of groceries. “That would be so great.” She glanced at Regan again, hesitating only briefly on her way out. “It was good to see you again, Regan. Maybe I’ll run into you at the festival this weekend.”

Regan murmured something she hoped was appropriate, waiting to hear Kathleen’s steps on the access ramp before she said, “Huh. Not in a talking mood, I guess.”

Mary snorted. “Don’t know what else you expected, the way you’ve given her the cold shoulder since you two were girls.” When Regan sent her a startled glance, Mary put up a placating hand. “Not that anyone blames you, of course, given what happened with your mother. But you must know she never would have told your secrets if she’d known what would happen—”

Regan shook her head. “I feel like I should go back to bed and start this day all over again. Nothing quite makes sense. My mother left—that was no secret, was it?”

Bill made something of a choking noise, and Mary’s mouth fell open. Finally, she drew herself up and said, “No. No, I guess it wasn’t.”

Regan drew an exasperated breath. “This is a strangest day.”

“There’s something in the air,” Phillip agreed, watching her more closely than she expected.

“Go home, do the chores and go to bed,” Mary said by way of her own agreement. She snorted again. “And if you ever figure out what this day was all about, let me know.”

Regan left without the jerky she apparently already had, and was headed down the stairs when the door opened and closed behind her. She glanced back to find that Phillip had followed her, already reaching to gather his tools. But something about his expression stopped her.

“I’m worried about Kai,” he said. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen him?”

“Kai,” Regan repeated, trying to make the word mean something. It didn’t, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to care. “No, I haven’t,” she said, instead of asking, and then raised an arm to wave as Matt Arshun drove his classy little sedan down the street, slowing for the wide, marked pedestrian crossing. Matt waved back, expression unreadable from inside the tinted windows.

“That looked like—” Phillip cut himself short, looking over at her. “Are you all right, Regan?”

Once more in this day, she found herself vaguely surprised. “Of course,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“No reason,” Phillip murmured, but he watched her with a gaze that suddenly seemed too knowing, and maybe even a little invasive. “If you do see Kai, let him know I’m looking, will you?”

“Sure,” Regan said, heading for her vehicle.

And then promptly forgot about all of it.

* * *

Who are you?

The voice pierced Kai’s thoughts with startling clarity, jerking him into awareness and back into pain. Bob lay pressed against his side, ears pulled forward in worry. Outside this crude little overhang, daylight faded and the cold sank down on them.

Or should have. Kai had the vaguest awareness that he lay against warm earth, a little hollow of deliberate welcome.

Who are you? Where are you?

And Kai thought stupidly that he was here, and that he lay poisoned by the Core working trapped in his body—and when he tried to push his thoughts back out in response, they grew sticky and entrapped by that poison. The tarry nature of it infiltrated his body, taking with it heat and sickness. Keeping him from healing, while his own nature wouldn’t quite let him die.

Trapped,
he thought at the voice in his head.
Here and trapped.

And they were barely human thoughts at all, because the poison wrapped itself through his mind as well as his body.

My name is Annorah,
said the voice—distinctly feminine in tone, and it couldn’t seem to decide if it was annoyed or concerned.
I’m at Southwest Brevis. I heard your call—but we don’t know you and we can’t find you.

Kai twitched as water dropped against his cheek, barely needing human thought to know the wrongness of it. No water ran down the rock close over his head—not on this dry spring evening with no clouds overhead. No water
could.

Yet there it was again. It was the merest effort to shift his head to the side, to open his mouth...to take the first drop and realize just how intense his thirst had become. Blood lost, fluids lost...the high dry air, pulling water from his body.

Getting nothing,
said Annorah’s voice in his head, as if she hadn’t bothered to disconnect before turning aside to address someone else.
Everyone else is on silence protocol.... I’d hear it if anyone answered....

Keep looking.
That voice came to him as a curious echo through Annorah, a male timbre and definite bite of command.
You’re sure it was Sentinel?

Sentinel,
said Annorah.
But not like anything I’ve heard before.

Another drop of water fell into his mouth, imbued with the taste of soil and sap, and then the next—falling a little more quickly this time.

Keep looking,
said the man again.
We don’t leave our own out there to die.

Might be too late.
Her words came as a dull surprise, knowing she was probably right. That if the earth hadn’t come forth to warm him, if the water hadn’t even now come forth to renew him...

That even so, it might be too late.

Regan,
he thought—and found strength in that thought, the piercing quality of fear and need.

He’d killed two of the men from the Core. But he hadn’t killed them all. And that meant Regan was alone with them.

Wait!
Annorah said, and fell so silent that he almost held his breath with her.

Almost. If he’d had breath to hold. If the taste of blood didn’t live in his throat, the fire of poison didn’t coat his veins, the breath didn’t rasp in his own ears.

No, never mind. I thought I heard...
A pause, a mental sigh.
I’ll keep looking.
And then, more clearly,
My name is Annorah. I’m at Southwest Brevis. I heard your call—but we don’t know you and we can’t find you. If you can, send us a location call....

Kai sank into the dark earth, his mouth just barely open to catch a few drops of water, and he thought only,
Regan....

* * *

Regan faced the evening with a trepidation she didn’t quite understand. She paced through the house, running her fingers along the smooth log walls, dusting the stone mantel surrounding the woodstove pipe, fussing with the fire itself. She admired the bathroom her mother had tiled, spent long moments with her head tipped up to the pot shelf that held what was left of her mother’s life—her pottery, pieces all charmingly hand shaped and splashed with bright glaze.

Of course she ended up in the loft, the area that had once been shared with her mother and had then simply been entirely hers.

She decided to recognize her mood as a completely reasonable nostalgia at the impending sale of this place, and ended up in front of her easel—personal photos and references scattered around her, a gesso-prepped canvas before her, and the warm, familiar scent of linseed oil with the sharp note of brush cleaner cutting through.

She found herself sketching in broad strokes of a dark forest, sunlight slashing off to the side...

The lynx peering through.

When she finally crawled off to bed, she’d flushed her head of nostalgia and regret and barely left the meditative daze of her painting at all. She pulled off the oversize men’s shirt that served as her painting smock and tugged her jeans off and otherwise slept in the shirt of the day, tumbling into...

The brush of fur, the twitch of whisker...the solemn gaze of a Sentinel in the green depths of the woods...

She tumbled into dreams. There, those solemn feline eyes insisted on looking back at her, deep blue instead of the pale green of a true lynx. There, she saw shuttered lashes—and felt the brush not of fur, but a man’s touch. She instantly yearned for it, stretching into it; she welcomed warm breath against her skin, and the press of lips and hint of teeth. She arched to meet silky skin and crisp hair, and opened her legs to invite hard, thick sensation—feeling herself stretched and reveling in it, whimpering in the request for more, for the fulfillment of hard thrusting and strong hands holding her just where she needed to be.

So quickly, pleasure tightened close within her, building between them, so sweet that she cried it out loud, imploring him for release—so strong that he gasped with each thrust, a helplessly guttural sound building to explosiveness right along with her. Together they tangled and clawed and ached and cried out; together they strained. Together they reached completion, going rigid against each other to tremble and pulse in the white lightning of pleasure.

But he had barely gasped out his climax, his hands still tight at her hips and fingers pressing into soft flesh, when he jerked his head up and rolled away. And though she could
feel
him—knowing the familiar solidity of a torso hard with muscle, thighs long and strong, shoulders broad—she couldn’t
see
him. Only glimpses—the clarity of his eyes, the strong line of a cheek, the straight line of nose and flare of a well-defined nostril—but never the whole.

When she cried out for him, she had no name on her lips. And when he responded, it was with a rasping snarl of warning—his touch trailing across her belly, his leg briefly entwined with hers.

And then he was gone.

Regan scrambled after him—

And woke on her knees in the bed, reaching out, fingers stretched for what she’d lost.

Slowly, she sank back onto the bed, her body still throbbing with its very real climax and very real pleasure. In the darkness, she looked over toward the easel—the faintest gleam of wet paint in the moonlight, the vision that had captured her evening, and somehow captured a part of her.

And she had no idea why.

Chapter 21

K
ai jerked from pleasure straight into agony, snarling up out of the earth to pant in confusion, hands already reaching for claws—all reaction, no thought, and what was left of his humanity still lingering with Regan.

He didn’t wonder for an instant if it had been real. He knew it. More than a dream, more than wishful yearning. He didn’t need the fast fading throb of his climax to know it.

Regan.
Still there, in spite of the Core. Still reaching out to him—if only in her sleep.

He pushed out through the land, hunting her—hunting for any sign of her. But beyond this little nurturing shelter—the dog still warming him, the Core still closed dark around him—the clarity of his thought quickly made way for threads of cloying poison.

He snarled back at it.
Regan, I won’t lose you!

But he did. And as he fell back, surrendering thought to the grip of twisting pain, he lost not just Regan.

He lost another piece of himself.

Another voice intruded—the woman who called herself Annorah. She sounded tired, but still determined— renewed, as if she’d caught some hint of him.
Who are you? Where are you? We want to help!

Who are you...? Where are you...?

In a sudden panic, he realized he had no answers. He just
was.
He was agony and grief and hunger, no grasp on the past, no grasp on the future.

Who,
she said, an echo into his darkness.
Who. ARE. YOU?

Something snapped, from lynx to human to darkness to the final clarity of a sharply snarled response—one with claws behind it, and a slash of anger.
I DON’T KNOW!

And he didn’t.

He searched for himself in a poisoned darkness, gathering a final thrust of energy to reach for the thing that had never failed him.
Lynx.

The dark bulk of an aging canine shape scooted away with a yelp as Kai unfurled fingers into claws. He lifted his head to open angry feline eyes and flattened tasseled feline ears, snarling his way into the other half of himself.

And when he stood as unsteady lynx, the night unfurled before him, sharply delineated in the faint blue tint of a Sentinel’s preternatural night vision—a hint of moonlight carried within his eyes.

The big black merle dog stood nearby, offering an uncertain wag of his tail. The lynx twitched a stubby tail, flicking ears forward...took a staggering step to bump his head against the dog’s shoulder and offer the briefest purr, a deep and scraping sound.

And then he limped off to find himself something to eat.

Alone.

Chapter 22

R
egan greeted the morning with horse chores, but she was surprised when she discovered her father’s old dog standing at the corner of the house, his tail wagging with a grave uncertainty she’d not seen in him before.

“Bob!” she said. And then, in discovery,
“Bob!”
Dried blood crusted his fur—his shoulder, his side, down his front leg. Dread hit her stomach, and she quickly knelt beside him, searching beneath the fur and watching for any sign of a flinch.

He gave her arm a solemn lick and his tail wagged gravely onward—and soon enough she realized that the blood lay entirely
over
his hair, failing to penetrate his soft, dense undercoat.

But the dread didn’t diminish. “Where have you been?” she asked him, as if he might even answer. And, without thinking, added, “Who have you been with?”

Snarling cries, a grunt of pain, a glimpse of wild eyes and swift, twisting action—

Regan pressed fingers against her forehead and her world wobbled briefly around her, a cry of earth and sky and rending pain. She sucked in a breath, feeling as though she’d forgotten something important...and then feeling the distinct sensation of memory skitter away.

She climbed to her feet without any particular grace, grasping for a practical next move. And because she didn’t have one, she did what her father would have done. She went into the house and grabbed up the little .22 rifle, heading out into the land.