Lynx Destiny (24 page)

She gave up on thinking. She just walked the woods, as her mother had always walked the woods—as they had sometimes done together.

Her mother had always known just when to stop, to pull behind the cover of a big corrugated ponderosa trunk and point quietly at browsing elk or a passing mule deer. More than once, a bear...more than once, a mountain lion. And once, just once, a pair of mountain lion cubs, playing with clumsy fervor outside their den.

“How do you always
know?
” Regan had asked, her childhood self just barely able to manage the terrain.

“The land tells me,” her mother had said, quite simply. Quite happily. With no idea of what was to come of it—

No. Wait.
Her mother had died in a car accident, far from home. Nothing to do with—

Her friend Kathleen, crying—braces glinting, youthful teen face distorted with emotion. I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I never would have said anything if I’d thought this would happen!

Her father, full of conflicting grief and guilt. She was trying to come home...back to the land....

Dark blue eyes and heady presence, a voice with a lurking rasp, body with a primal strength and unexpected grace. Cherish what you can hear.

She stood stiff and still, battered within...memories fluttering to the surface and sinking away again. Her body relived its own memories—the throes of a struggle, of fighting and losing the battle to escape as cruel hands dragged her away. She heard again a final, sharp gunshot—

Felt again the land cry out in dismay—

Heard the echoing cry of a wounded animal.

Kai.

Yes...

“I don’t understand,” she said out loud, and her voice sounded broken.

Trust...

Right. As if she could trust anything right now.

But her body told her the truth of it all. It had been well loved...and it had been bruised and manhandled. It had warm, sensual memories, and it had bruises she couldn’t explain. Just as she couldn’t make sense of the blood in the woods or Bob’s growling resentment of a man who hadn’t been anything but solicitous—but to whom Regan, too, had quite suddenly developed an aversion.

She laughed out loud, a short and bitter sound. “What,” she said, to no one at all, “have I got to lose?”

Things went easier after that. She quit thinking so hard—she quit thinking at all. She strode out along the whisper-thin game trail, watching her feet, listening to the faint crunch of needles, the rustle of wind up high in the trees...and to the small, murmuring voice in her head.

That voice, those impulses...they took her further than she’d been before, and left her with the uncertainty of how and when she’d return. Fortunately, the horse had days of hay and water and Bob was well-fed. When her own stomach growled, she ignored it.

For the land suddenly dumped her out at the mouth of a cave, a thing so well hidden she couldn’t believe she’d found it at all.

She slipped in past the aspen stand of an old burn, and behind the screen of brush and vine. There she faced a narrow slot in a rock, finding deeply within it a completely incongruous wooden door—not a square door, but one cut in rough angles that matched the rock...and one left completely ajar in its mortar-sealed frame. She pushed past the open door to slide sideways through an unevenly narrow passage and came through into...
a home.

The cave had a low wooden floor and simple, sturdy furnishings, a wardrobe incongruous against one slanting wall, a pantry cupboard nearby, a minimalist camp stove set off in one corner and a basin and pitcher sitting on an old-fashioned washstand beside it. Diffuse light scattered through the space, startlingly effective but still dim to her eyes, its source not immediately obvious.

It took a few moments before she saw the bed tucked against the wall—only a low mattress, sitting on a set of storage drawers. Blankets lay over it, a generously rumpled mess.

From the middle of that nest, a lynx regarded her with unblinking eyes.

It knew the moment she saw it, growling a deep threat that curled up into a brief yowl and lift of lip and whiskers, ears slanted back in anger but not fear.

“Oh,” she said weakly. “Hey, there. Sorry I bothered you.”

Her mind caught on the reality of it, logic and sanity warring with what lay before her. With the worn nature of the floor, the established nature of the furnishings, and the slap of truth—this hillside home had been here across the years, and she’d known nothing of it. Her mother had known nothing of it. And she’d found it now only because she’d—

Because she’d been led here.

The lynx shifted—big for its kind and glorious, its mottled buff-and-silver fur still thick with winter, dried blood gone black high on chest and leg. It growled again, a lingering sound that came as a definite threat.

Regan took a step back, feeling for the exit. “Okay, then,” she said, her voice as quietly steady as she could manage. “You hang out here in your Batcave. I’ll just... I’ll leave, shall I?”

She’d done what she’d come for, and more than she ever expected to. She’d found the lynx. And now she could report this location to the rangers who would set live traps—they’d care for the creature and return it to an area where its mere inexplicable existence wouldn’t turn it into a target.

After all, someone had already shot it.

The lynx shifted to face her more squarely as she backed away, its eyes flashing blue.

Blue.

Blue as in her dream, blue as on her canvas, blue instead of pale, wise green.

“Kai?” she said, and instantly felt infinitely stupid, connecting this animal to a man she couldn’t even remember knowing, except—

A bite of cold night air slipping through blankets, the warmth of a man’s arms, the wild strength of him—

She looked at the nest of blankets and felt the blood rush from her face and her knees stuttered out from beneath her, leaving her leaning against uneven rock and even then just barely on her feet.

She would never forget those blankets. Not as she’d seen them in the light of rising dawn, luxuriously soft and patterned in a wash of earth tones and what she’d noticed then and simply never understood—a scattering of silvery hairs.

She still didn’t understand. But the lynx looked at her with an inscrutable interest as she slid a halting path down the wall to sit there looking at it.

“Kai?” she said again.

When had her world changed so it made more sense to call this animal by a man’s name than to assume any of the other wildly improbable possibilities? That a man named Kai lived in this woodlands bunker, or that he lived here with a lynx that didn’t belong anywhere near this area but still had never before been spotted, that the lynx had been wounded at the same time the man had gone missing, his friends worried and asking...

That she would call the lynx by the man’s name.

“Kai,” she said more firmly.

The lynx responded with a feline sound she couldn’t quite interpret. It might have been threat or warning.... It might have been confusion. Either way, its eyes had gone narrow. It made an aborted movement, thought better of it, sinking back against pain with ears flicked back and whiskers bristling.

At the foot of the bed sat a satchel. Regan closed her eyes with a strangled sound, seeing in her mind’s eye that same satchel—on the ground beside a man at the library. A man standing relaxed and yet not, a face of masculine beauty and a flashing glance with the same heat she’d felt in her dreams.

Trust...

The concept pressed in around her as a warm sensation—surrounding her as the cave surrounded her. And it spoke not only to her.

The lynx’s ears flipped forward, then back again. When it snarled into a quick hiss, she thought it reacted not to her at all...but to what they’d both heard.

She got to her knees...inched closer to the bed. Knew her insanity and did it anyway. Watched the lynx...watched the lynx watching back. Slow but steady, no longer truly fearing...

Until her fingers sank into a fur more luxurious than any shared blanket.

She looked at the lynx, astonished at herself. The lynx looked back, as if just as surprised. No longer
it
in her mind, but
him—
recognizing the masculinity in beautiful feline features, in the large and rugged build of the animal.

In the acknowledgment that filtered back to her on the whisper through the land.

“Kai,” she whispered without really knowing what she was saying at all.

Chapter 23

T
he lynx poised, stunned in his own confusion.

Kai had wanted to strike out at her; he didn’t. He’d wanted to growl and hiss at her; he didn’t.

He just watched her approach, and then he watched her touch him.

“Kai,” she said, her human voice and human words meaningless in his world.
“Kai,”
she said again, touching him somewhere inside his mind, a place so recently gone dark and smothered and confused.

He flicked an ear, absorbing the invitation without responding to it—except that there was a purr rising in his throat, deep and raspy. He squeezed his eyes closed on it, floating in the mix of pain and pleasure—the hot throb of his wound, radiating darkness; the gentle knead of her fingers in his fur.

He might just have floated away on it if the memories hadn’t risen between them, twining with the clear, cool green taste of the land.

Touching her, her human skin beneath his human hand, all silky smooth curves, all softness, all heat and responsive warmth.

A startled sound escaped her, her fingers stilling along his neck just as his purr cut off into silence.

Her hands eager down his human back, grasping at his buttocks, stroking his shoulders and tunneling through his hair. Her warmth surrounding him in all ways. Their pleasure, their gasps, their wild shouts—

“Kai!” she cried, and this time with recognition—with meaning.

The woods around them, the fiery impact of a bullet, the world of pain and confusion and fighting back, the lynx pushing hard at him and Core poison spreading fast and deep...

The Core. Enemy, invader...destroyer. Even from that wound, he should have healed. For he was—

“Sentinel,” she said out loud, a certainty without true comprehension.

Fighting back—fighting hard. Killing men, when he had never wanted to take such life. Her cries against his ears, the sound of her struggle—her sudden silence. Another gunshot, laced with pain but not poison—

He blinked, found his claws extruded and puncturing the mattress...found her bent over him, crying against his neck.

“I forgot you,” she said, choking on the words. “How could I? How could I just go on with my tiny little world!”

His impulse to soothe her came through in a brief and ragged noise that couldn’t be called a purr. Impatience gripped him, twisting something within him, and he reached for his voice, suddenly remembering that he had one. That the
human
had one.

He closed his eyes against flashing blue-and-silver energies, coruscating light and flickering shards of intensity. His lynx’s yowl turned to a shout. Regan cried out and flung herself away, her forearm up to block her eyes.

Kai found himself tangled in blankets, folded over with white-laced fire coursing through his wounds, his chest, his arm. Darkness still pressed in on him, and all around him lay...
silence.
He gasped against it, shivering.

“I can’t believe...” Regan’s voice reached him in a whisper as she rose as far as her knees beside the raised mattress.

He didn’t need her to fill in those words.
I can’t believe what I just saw. I can’t believe what’s happening. I can’t believe what you ARE—

But she said, “I can’t believe I could ever forget you.”

She moved slowly, gently, giving him the benefit of being the wild thing he was—but not hesitating as she touched his cheek, wiped the edge of his damp lashes and bent to kiss him. Firm, sweet connection.

She knew him now, whatever the Core had done to her. She knew him, she’d come for him and she’d found him.

Kai hadn’t meant to let a groan slip out with his relief or to shiver against her.

“Shh,” she said, easing back. “We’ll figure this out. Together. It’s okay if it doesn’t make sense right now.”

“I can’t hear anymore,” he said, little more than a whisper, and then realized he’d made little sense.

Except she understood anyway. “I can,” she said, and rested her hand on his. “Listen through me.”

He forgot to breathe in the relief of it, the wash of the woods through his mind, the taste of green and growing, the heavy weight of rock and earth. She stayed with him there for a long moment, waiting for him to relax, to slump against the comforting familiarity.

When she finally spoke, she kept her voice low. “There’s so much I don’t understand,” she said. “So much I think...maybe I never will. But I know this.” She took a deep breath. “I’m not crazy. My mother wasn’t crazy. What happened to her—”

Kai grabbed her hand, stopping her—filling in his own words for hers. “Is what will happen to me, now
. Alone.
”

She shook her head in quick denial. “No. Not you. You...you’re so much more than she was. Than
I
am.”

He squeezed her fingers. “To
me.
This Core working...” He closed his eyes in the desperation of it and tried again, seeing her utter lack of comprehension. “This injury. The people who did it, and who want your land. Call them the Core. The injury holds a working—”

“It’s okay,” she interrupted him. “If there’s one thing I get, it’s that I have no idea what’s going on—not in the details. You’re hurt, and I have to help you. I
need
to help you.” She bent to touch his forehead with hers. “I need you.”

“Regan,” he said, and found he’d been in the darkness too long, still the grip of the lynx over his mind and his words. In the end he simply pushed gently back against her forehead with his, a soft head bump with a faint rasp in his throat.