Daughter of Destiny (11 page)

“Kai? You okay?” Jake watched her touch her furrowed brow, her eyes unfocused.

“Uh…yeah, I am. I tried to get in touch with that energy and it knocked me for a loop. I almost fell out of the saddle. I'll be okay. Just give me a minute….”

Jake moved Rocket closer, until his leg touched hers. “My two cents' worth is that this phenomenon only happens here in the Red Center, and the Aborigines know how to access it and use it. We don't. We're not trained for it.”

“I sure would love to have Grams see this,” Kai muttered. She pulled a digital camera out of a pocket of her vest. “I'm going to catch it on film. When we get back, we'll tell her about this…” And she rapidly took five photos.

“I wonder if it will come out on film.”

She laughed briefly. “I don't know.” She tucked the camera back into her vest pocket. Looking over at Jake, she said, “Are you ready to walk between the worlds with me?”

Grinning, he answered, “Yeah, in a heartbeat. I can't think of anyone else I'd want to do it with.”

“What a glutton for punishment you are, Carter.”

“Maybe…” He nudged Rocket forward with his heels and the camel began its downward stroll to the desert floor below.

To Kai's amazement, not more than twenty minutes had passed before the purple hue faded into what she would call a normal dawn—where golden light arced up from beneath the horizon.
Twenty minutes.
Her mind whirled with questions as they rode along in companionable silence. Was it a twenty-minute opening that occurred daily? Coober hadn't said the purple dawn happened every day. Kai was looking forward to seeing if it would happen tomorrow morning, as well.

“There's Uluru,” Jake said, pointing off to their right. The huge dome of the mountain was silhouetted against the growing light.

“She's magnificent,” Kai murmured. “Grams would say she was the chief mountain spirit of this region. She's the only rock around of that size.”

“There's something so peaceful about watching Uluru come out of the darkness and slowly materialize before us,” Jake agreed quietly. “She's magical.”

“So, you believe the mountain is a she, too?” Kai was beginning to realize Jake was far more confident in his feeling assessment of energy than her. She felt comfortable being instructed by him in such things and was more than willing to learn from him.

“Feels like it to me. How about you?”

Kai shrugged helplessly.

“My mother taught me to open my heart and send a stream of green color into whatever I wanted to ‘feel,'” Jake stated. “She told me that all things in nature are either male, female or androgynous. Try it. See what you sense.”

Mouth quirking, Kai muttered, “You got a lot more training in this than I did.” And right now, she was glad of it. Jake could be her eyes and ears on the more spiritual vistas of this trip. He was more than that, she acknowledged. He, too, flew a combat aircraft, and was a crack shot just as she was. In so many ways, Jake complemented her. And without his knowledge of the camels, she'd be at a loss over how to reach Kalduke. No, Morgan Trayhern's order that all teams consist of a man and a woman was seeming more and more intelligent. She'd make sure on her return that she apologized to Morgan and Mike Houston. They were right.

“I'm sure your Grams wanted to share this stuff with you, but you really didn't want to hear it,” Jake said.

Kai gave a muffled laugh. “That's the truth! Okay,” she sighed, “I'll try it….” And she closed her eyes and shifted her consciousness down to her heart. Imagining a beautiful apple-green stream flowing out of it, she sent the ribbon of color toward Uluru in her mind. As she saw it connect and
flow around the red sandstone mountain, she felt suddenly suffused with incredibly nurturing warmth and love.

Shocked by the sensations, Kai opened her eyes. Her heart was pounding in her chest, and she felt a wave of soothing, cool energy wrap around her, lingering like a mother holding her child in her arms. Blinking, Kai looked toward the dark shape of Uluru in the distance.

“What happened?”

Giving Jake a disgruntled look, Kai said, “I don't know….”

“Describe it to me.” He noted the confused look on Kai's face, the way she frowned and rubbed her chest above her heart.

“When I connected with Uluru, I felt an immediate response from her. Warmth, like a wonderful blanket, encircled me. I mean…I
felt
it, Jake. And then a cooling, soft sensation came next, making me feel so peaceful. It was
real.
It wasn't my imagination….”

“What else?” He saw Kai shake her head, a mystified expression on her face.

“Well…love, I guess. I felt like I was a little child again and my mom was rocking me in her arms. It was such a strong, powerful feeling….”

“Uluru likes you.”

She stared at Jake's stoic profile as he rode next to her. “What?”

“Mountains are like people, you know? Each mountain has a spirit. They like some two-leggeds, and others they don't. When you connected energetically to Uluru, her response was to send you her love.” He smiled. “See? You
called her a ‘her,' too. She is female. Now you know how you can tell.”

“I thought it was my imagination,” Kai grumped. She was relieved that Jake knew what gender the mountain was.

“Where does imagination end or begin? You know, in physics right now, quantum theory scientists are calling what you just experienced the realm of the imaginal world. They've shown that molecules do respond to us when we imagine something…so imagination may not be a figment, after all. It is connected to our real world in some magical way. So what you imagine can be just as real as you touching your skin with your fingers, Kai.”

Giving him a flat look, she stated, “You're sounding more and more like a medicine person every moment.”

Jake reached down, pulled his water bottle from the pack and took a swig. After wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he screwed the cap back on. “I was interested in what my mother did, and I hung out a lot with her. In the end, my desire to fly was stronger than following the medicine path, but I did listen….” He smiled wolfishly. “That's probably why Major Houston chose me for this mission, Kai.”

“It was a good choice. Maybe between us we can find the crystal mask.”

Jake watched as the horizon grew brighter and brighter. “So, I'm not just baggage on this trip?” he teased.

Kai managed a humble smile. “Far from it, Carter. And you know it.”

“Guilty as charged,” he chuckled. With the growing light, Jake could see the plants around them in more de
tail. The camels were walking at a good, swift pace and he was amazed at how they avoided the nasty hooks on the tops of the spinifex grass that proliferated in clumps as far as the eye could see. Glancing at Kai, he said, “After the sun rises, we're going to wish it were dark again. Coober said it will be a hundred thirty degrees out here today, no problem. As a matter of fact, they've had temperatures reach a hundred and forty or fifty, too.”

“We'll have to endure it.”

“And we're going to have to stay alert for feral camels,” Jake warned. “Coober said there are plenty of roving herds between Uluru and Kalduke. Every bull has his own territory, and we'll never know where one ends and another begins….”

“Until it's too late,” Kai added. Grimly, she looked around. The silence was now broken by the trilling songs of birds. Flocks of black-and-white zebra finches rose from the desert floor, flitting up to land in the trees and shrubs. A pair of orange-and-green mulga parrots flashed by overhead. “For a desert, this place is really alive with animals and birds.”

“Coober said it was.” As they passed a yellow flowering waxy wattle bush, a group of button quail exploded from it, startling the camels. The birds hurried skyward in a flurry of beating wings.

“Was the Middle East desert like this one?”

“No, vastly different. There was a lot less vegetation. The sand was a gold color, too, not red like this.”

“I've never seen sand this hue.”

Jake nodded. “It has a high iron content, that's why it's so red.” As the dawn brightened and the sun's rays were
minutes away from flooding the desert plain, he said, “This place feels sacred to women. Red sand. Red dirt. Uluru is red. There's no doubt in me that this is feminine energy at its finest.”

Kai gave him a slight smile. “I feel right at home.” And she did.

“When we reach Kalduke, it will be interesting to see if we can find this elder woman, Ooranye.”

“I really don't know if she'll be there or if she's a figment of my imagination.”

Jake reached down and patted Rocket's flank. The camel flicked his ears appreciatively. “Remember, imagination is now considered the realm of what's possible.”

“We'll find out soon enough, Carter. So far everything I've been dreaming about has come true—much to my amazement.”

“If she's there, I really want to find out about this purple dawn thing. I'm fascinated by it.”

“Makes two of us, but we can't forget our real objective—the crystal mask.”

Jake looked around at the awakening desert. The sand ridges reminded him of waves on an ocean. “My gut tells me that some Aboriginal people live in a magical out-of-time place, and my bet is she'll know where the crystal mask is hidden.”

“Let's just get through this first day, shall we? Between worry over hormone-driven bulls coming out of nowhere, and this murderous heat, I've got my hands full just surviving in the present.”

Laughing, Jake agreed. “By the time we stop after dark,
we'll be so tired we won't be able to put two coherent sentences together….”

 

Kai gratefully sipped the strong billy tea. She sat as far away from the small fire as she could. Fire was necessary to boil the water and cook their food, but it was throwing off heat she didn't want after a day spent in the blast furnace of the desert. Tiredness made her thinking groggy. Jake had just come back from hobbling the two camels so that they could forage on the grass around them before they hunkered down for the night.

“Gawd, it's hot,” Kai griped, watching as he sat down cross-legged on the sand nearby.

“Coober warned us,” he said, pouring the tea from the old copper teakettle sitting on the wire grate across the fire. Jake looked around. The sky was dark now, the stars like huge, glittering globules, so close that he swore he could reach out and wrap his fingers around one of them. Sipping the fortifying tea, he looked over his tin cup at Kai. Her face showed her exhaustion. The temperature gauge on the saddle had registered one hundred and thirty-five degrees at midday.

They'd finally found a grove of wattle trees to provide enough shade to wait out the hottest hours. Then they'd remounted the camels and continued their trek north until dark. They sky had been bright and clear all day, with nary a cloud to provide shade overhead.

Rubbing her arm, Kai hated the feel of grit on her skin. No matter what she did to protect it, it was coated with the fine sand. “What I'd give for a cold shower right now….”

“Makes two of us.” Jake set his cup down and opened the saddlebags. “I'm glad Coober suggested we bring along kangaroo jerky as a protein source. I wouldn't want to cook anything over that fire.”

“Roger that.” Kai reached out and took a huge piece of the dried kangaroo meat, which resembled a piece of fried bacon in shape and color. Chewing on the salty meat, she muttered, “Tastes a little like a cross between beef and chicken.”

Jake took a bite and chewed it a long time before swallowing. “Know what the Aussies call kangaroos?”

“I can hardly wait for you to tell me.”

“Desert rats. Can you believe that? I guess they do a lot of damage all over the country eating crops, and people hate having them around.”

“Humph.” Kai eyed the jerky. “I think they're beautiful.”

“I liked seeing them off and on today. I didn't know they were out here.”

“We saw a lot of wildlife today. More than I expected.” Kai watched the play of firelight across Jake's strong face. She was struck by the tenderness in his gaze when he glanced at her. Her heart responded and she tried to ignore it. Jake had been considerate and sensitive toward her throughout the day. Kai found herself wanting to trust him once more, as she had when they were childhood playmates. Could she, with her heart so badly scarred?

Though she hadn't told Jake yet, she had suffered heartbreak more than once after leaving the res. Ted was an F-14 Tomcat pilot in another Navy squadron, and she'd loved him. Yet he'd walked away from her, deciding he
couldn't handle her brazen independence. Surprised now that her heart was responding to another man at all, Kai wondered if she was truly healing from the past. She must be.

Jake leaned back on his saddle, his head resting in the center. He gazed up at the canopy of stars. “This is an incredible place,” he murmured softly. “It sort of reminds me of when we were kids sitting in our safe place.” Slanting a glance to where she sat with her legs crossed, Jake said, “Remember that place we used to meet? That old gray-skinned beech tree that sat halfway up Raccoon Mountain? We had a nice slope to sit on beneath the trunk and branches.”