Lynx Destiny (29 page)

Kai made a noncommittal noise, bracing to protect his shoulder as they went over a pothole. Behind the driver’s seat, Regan’s purse burst into song.

“My phone,” she said. “Normally I’d just let it go to voice mail, but considering...do you mind?”

He gave her a blank look, and only belatedly realized she not only wanted him to rummage for the phone, but to answer it.

In some things, he was more worldly than anyone else could be, in the most basic sense of the word.

In others, he didn’t have a clue.

She must have realized it, for she pulled over in a wide spot in the ill-defined boardwalk asphalt area and reached back to lug the purse into her lap, flipping up a side pocket to pluck the phone out. By then it had stopped ringing.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t really think much about phones.”

“You don’t say.” She flipped the thing open with casual efficiency and pressed one of the buttons. “No biggie. I’ll call them back.” Though she frowned at the display. “I’m not familiar with the number.”

“You can’t know them all,” Kai said, which only seemed sensible.

She laughed. “No. In fact, I can’t.” She pushed a keypad and put the phone to her ear. “Hi, this is Regan Adler. Someone at this number just tried to reach me?” And then, in the slanting light from a distant parking lamp, her brows went up. “Kai? Sure. He’s right here.”

She handed over the phone. “It’s for you.”

Kai regarded the phone with some hesitation, all the feral certainty of his lynx fled in the face of social caution.

Besides, he might break the thing.

She picked up his hand and pressed the phone into it, putting it to his ear and biting her lip on a smile when he narrowed his eyes in lynx annoyance.

Just like that, his annoyance vanished—completely obliterated by what had just happened. How naturally he’d displayed the part of himself he’d always worked so hard to obscure from others. How naturally she’d reacted. How accepting.

For her, he suddenly realized, he would probably do anything. Including talk on a cell phone.

Even if he did hold it somewhat away from his ear. “This is Kai.”

Phillip’s voice, distorted as it was by the device, nonetheless carried unmistakable relief. “You’re all right.”

“Phillip,” Kai said with that same relief, catching Regan’s eye to see her share it, eyes wide and pleased. “Are you well?”

“I will be,” Phillip said. “But they told me—they
implied—
that they’d hurt you.”

Country music played in the background, tickling Kai with resonance. On an impulse, he cracked the car door—that same music filtered in from the distant park. He said, “They did hurt me. They meant to kill me. They
didn’t.
”

Phillip’s breath gusted unevenly through the phone. “Do you understand what this is about? Any of it?”

Kai glanced at Regan, who unclipped her seat belt and leaned across the seat divider to put her head next to his, her hand on his to tip the phone slightly. “Regan is here,” he told Phillip, because he thought that was polite.

“Phillip,” Regan said. “Are you here?”

“In the capable care of Mary and Bill,” he said. “Kai, do you—?”

“Yes,” Kai said. “I have some understanding. Not all. There is a man named Arshun—”

“The Realtor,” Phillip said in surprised recognition.

“He is here to acquire certain resources.”

Phillip snorted. “I know
evasive
when I hear it, son.”

“I’m sorry,” Kai said, by which he meant “that’s as much as I can say.” An experienced field Sentinel might do better—might have an entire list of ways to respond without lying and without telling the whole truth. Kai wasn’t experienced...and he was hardly Sentinel at that. Just Kai Faulkes, a man who lived alone and who took the lynx.

Phillip sighed into the phone. “Doesn’t matter. I know enough. No one in this town is prepared for a man of his kind—not the sheriff, not the people. Not me, when it came to it.”

Kai heard the self-censure in Phillip’s voice and hated it. How could any single man have been prepared for a Core posse?

But Phillip considered himself one of those who protected.

Like Kai.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “They were after the gun.”

“They didn’t get it,” Phillip told him. “But aside from the fact that I’ve been looking for you for days, dammit, that’s one of the reasons I called Regan. I hoped—”

“I’m with her,” Kai said, and since Phillip had called Regan’s phone and knew Regan was listening, he thought Phillip would also understand what those words truly meant.
She is mine.
“We’re doing this together.”

“Good,” Phillip said. “But be careful. I think they’re going to go after that gun again. I don’t understand its importance, but—”

“The safe,” Regan said, interjecting herself into the conversation with an apologetic glance at Kai. “How do we get in?”

Without hesitation, Phillip rattled off a string of numbers. Regan closed her eyes, lashes heavily shadowing her cheeks in the strongly oblique lighting from the streetlamp, her lips moving as she repeated them.

“I didn’t know,” Kai said into the phone, feeling it so inadequate. “When I left the gun with you, I didn’t know they would come for it. I just knew it needed to be closed away.”

“They didn’t leave in one piece,” Phillip said, his grim tone a contrast with the cheerful music in the background. “But I think there are more of them...and you had better be careful.”

“More than careful,” Kai said. “I will be myself.”

And Phillip, even not knowing all the truths of that statement, chuckled. “Then
they
had better watch their step. Take care of it—and come talk to me when you can.”

“We will,” Regan said, making it into
we
with deliberate words as she added the conventional words of goodbye and took the phone from Kai, flipping it closed as she sat back in the driver’s seat to regard him with a certain resignation. “Well,” she said. “We came to hunt. I guess now we know where to start.”

* * *

They left Regan’s vehicle where she’d pulled it over, a blatant use of nonparking space, and walked to Phillip’s building. They might have run, if Kai had felt up to it. But after a few jogging steps, he’d fallen back to a long-strided walk, clamping his arm to his side. And they’d gotten here soon enough at that pace.

It had taken Kai only moments to duck back into the darkness of the office, seeing as clearly as he ever did and moving in silence. When he came out, he carried the gun. More than that, he gave it to her.

Regan stared at it with a mix of dread and revulsion, seeing more than just a black metal weapon, feeling more than just the weight of it in her hand—knowing it for a thing of death.

Kai left her with it to pace the room, barely a hitch in his stride; Regan followed him with her gaze, taking in the damaged interior of the dojang.

There wasn’t much here to break, but Arshun’s men had left their mark. Photographs knocked from the walls, blood smeared across white-painted block, the door half-off its hinges and closed only in a token fashion. Kai moved through it in evident frustration, his expression intent and his head slightly tipped and his movement infused with stalking grace.

Until he looked at her with that frustration and shook his head. “The bullet is out,” he said. “But the working lingers. I can’t
hear—
” He shook his head again. “
Hear
isn’t the right word.
Sense.
I should be able to sense them. To
know
them—or to track them.”

“If I was better at this...” She made a face, filled with inadequacy, and with the sudden folly of having believed she could help him at all.

That stopped him short. “No,” he said. “We each have our own skills. This is different from being able to touch the land.” He looked at the gun with some disdain. “Another could shield these workings from detection, even by the Core—I can’t. Another could deactivate the workings—I can’t. We work with what we have.”

“Then what?” She held the gun out. “Carry it around until they find us?”

He grinned a fierce expression at her, and she suddenly realized that was exactly his intent. He stood a little taller, a little straighter...the gleam of a blue eye in shadow, the lynx brimming out from beneath.

“Okay,” she said, just a little breathlessly. “That’s one way to run a hunt.”

He took a step toward her; it did nothing to dispel the aura of the
other
he’d suddenly brought into the room with him. “In most ways,” he said, “I’m not Sentinel at all. Their concerns aren’t my concerns. But in other ways—”

“No,” she said, her voice low with the wondering realization of it. “You’re
more
Sentinel than any of them. Because you’re here on your own...just doing what you were born to do.”

Understanding widened his eyes. “Protect this place.”

He didn’t add “at all costs.” But then, he’d already proved that.

And Regan found herself saying, “But not alone.”

He startled her by stalking right up to her—close enough to push the gun up against her body, where she imagined that the cold metal had a burn to it. “Yes,” he told her, the rasp in his voice gone hard. “Alone.”

Her temper spiked in an instant, and she forgot to be in awe of his strength and his beauty and even his nature. “If you think I’m just going to stand by and...”

He shook his head, an impatient gesture, though Regan had pretty much sputtered herself out of words on her own.

“Not standing, no.” He wrapped his hand over hers on the gun. “Making sure this goes to the right people. The ones who are already looking for me.”

She looked stupidly at the gun—at its undefined parts and side buttons, hint of protruding sights and low-profile hammer. “Kai, no—”

“Go meet them,” he said. “Away from this place. Hide this along the way if you can—deep in concrete or metal. Arshun didn’t come to this place because he could tell it was here—he came because he realized it was where
I
would go. I should have known—”

But Regan was stuck on what he asked of her. “Kai,
no—
”

He squeezed his hand over hers, hard enough so the gun’s metal features pressed into her skin. “The gun itself doesn’t matter so much,” he told her, inexorable. “The bullets do. They carry the silent workings—small amulets. I don’t know how—my father told me they require a certain kind of metal.”

“Like we saw at the dry pool,” she said numbly, drawn into the conversation in spite of her turmoil.

“So this is new. This is something the Sentinels need to know, so they can learn how to defend against them.”

“Fine.” She pulled her hand from his, and the gun with it. “Then come with me. We can meet them together. And they don’t get the gun until they make sure Arshun is gone from Cloudview.”

Regret speared through his expression. He closed his eyes, shuttering it—and opened them to a distant sort of determination. “We have no idea how close the Sentinels are...and once Arshun realizes you’re gone with the gun, his people will come after you. Unless I distract them.”

She stared at him with more dread than she’d thought she could feel. “Then I should stay! They’re not threatened by me—they don’t even know I’ve remembered the truth about them. I can run to them, tell them you’ve gone all scary rogue—that’s what they believe about Sentinels in the first place, isn’t it?” Her voice went up in pitch with her desperation—and with the refusal in Kai’s expression, the lift of his chin and the implacable nature of his stance. “I can promise them the gun, take them out into the woods...get us lost!”

He shook his head. “You have no protection from their workings. Once they realize...they’ll make you one of theirs again.”

“They won’t, because I’m ready for them,” she said fiercely. “Even if they do, you’ll get me back again. I’m no
threat
to them, that’s the point! But you—”

He turned on her, pushing her back a step with his presence alone. “Can’t do what you can do!”

Stunned by the pain she felt in those words, she stood unresisting as he closed on her, threading his fingers through her hair at the nape and pulling her close for a kiss that consumed her with its ferocity. Nothing gentle about it, the way his mouth worked against hers, full of passion as much emotional as physical—full of the lynx, with nip and clash and play. And even while her body flared to life beneath it, her chest clenched in a reactive sorrow, something deeper than conscious thought and understanding.

He pulled away, kissed her brow and her cheek and then wrapped her close—no longer protecting his injury as he held her, his face buried against the side of her neck...drawing her up so her toes just touched the floor.

And then he let her go, and stepped away—
turning
away. “I can’t call the Sentinels to me,” he said, and his voice held the low rasp she suddenly recognized as lynx. “Not anymore.”

“What makes you think I can?” she demanded, still reeling and still just as determined.

He sent her a crooked sort of grin, not quite turning back to her. “Because you have,” he said. “How do you think you drove the poachers away?”

She moved around to face him, glaring. “
We
did that.”

“And now you know how.” He looked down at her, and his expression reflected the same sorrow still lurking hot and tight inside her. “But you always did. You just didn’t know what you were doing. When you found my home... It’s all the same.”

“It’s
not!
” she snapped at him, so suddenly angry she didn’t even know what to do with herself, from one high emotion to the other, all centered around
Kai.
“It’s not the same at all! I wasn’t doing any of that on purpose! I was only
loving—
”

She clapped a hand over her mouth with a startled sound.

Loving you.

Because, of course, she did.

He swept her up again, held her close—just held her this time, his breathing a broken-sounding rasp in his chest. This time when he would have stepped back, she stopped him—snagging his tunic, the gun still between them, to capture him for a kiss. Her own kind of ferocity, gentler than his but just as insistent—and he didn’t hesitate to offer her the same. Offering her, if not words, a response so heartfelt it felt tangible.