Lynx Destiny (28 page)

He shrugged. “Some do more, some do less. There are healers and protectors and communicators with their own skills. The thing I do...what no one else can do...”

But he hesitated, and not as if giving up a great secret, but with the reluctance of one who’d so long felt alone. If he told her this thing, and she didn’t understand, he would be more alone than ever.

She didn’t have to guess. She
knew.

And she remembered well giving up her own secret to her own one best friend and having it rejected.

She turned within his arms, just enough to glimpse his face—the way he’d shuttered it. “Look at me,” she said. “Look at what I do.” She gestured at the canvas, at herself—out the window at the woods. “Look at
us.
Do you really think I’m
not
going to get it?”

He made a sound in his throat and kissed the top of her head. “I
hear
them,” he finally admitted. “I
taste
them. I know them, no matter how they hide from others.”

She studied his face, seeing the echo of distaste there—the stain of what their presence did to him. “Just you?”

“They would kill me for it. And the Sentinels would use me for it. Here, I’m just myself...doing what I’m supposed to be doing.” A bitter edge crept into his voice. “What I was born for.”

“What, you think I’m going to judge you for that?”

His arms tightened around her. “I think some would. Because I don’t go to the Sentinels and offer myself to them against the Core.”

She made a derisive humph
.
“I’m not sure I like either of them. And it sounds like they get along fine without you, while here...” She took a breath of the pine-scented air drifting in through the window. “This place thrives
because
of you.”

But his silence told her it wasn’t quite that simple. “What?” she asked warily.

“Things change,” he said, resting his cheek against her hair—inhaling the scent of it, not the least bit self-conscious about his pleasure in it; his erection shifted against her. “When my family left, they did it for me—and for them. They had to protect my sister, so the Core didn’t try to use her against us to get at me. They had to protect me.”

“You were less conspicuous alone,” she guessed, and felt him nod.

“We hoped—” He broke off, hunting for words, and she understood him to be far less casual about his family’s departure than he tried to sound. “We hoped we would meet again. But we had no contact.”

Nothing. She winced, feeling the pain of that. “What about that letter you had—?”

He’d gone so still, she knew she’d asked the right question. “My father wanted me to know that the Core has a new kind of working, a thing so hard to...
taste...
that they consider it undetectable. That mostly, they’re right.”

She got it. Right away, she got it. “But you can.” A little thrill of fear stifled the pleasure of being in his arms, against his chest, tucked in with his cheek against her head. “Just like with the gun and the bullets. So they need you. The Sentinels need what you can do.”

He didn’t respond right away—and then, his words at first seemed oblique. “A while ago,” he said, “maybe a year or so...I woke from a dream. A
nightmare.
A thing so full of death and grief that I knew it meant something...and I never knew what.” He released a breath, long and slow...stirring her hair. “Now with my father’s letter...I think it was real. I think...they died, that night. That yes, now they need me.”

She pulled away from his grasp, twisting so she could regard him more fully—feeling the new tension where her hands rested against his chest, seeing his expression gone shuttered.

“Can you do that?” she asked him bluntly enough. “If you feel the whisper of the Core here in Cloudview when there are only a handful of bullies pushing a few workings around, what would it do to you to be out in the middle of it all? Surrounded by Sentinels and Core and
humanity?
”

He shook his head, not meeting her eyes.

It was answer enough.

“There has to be another way,” she said fiercely, feeling the sudden threat to everything she’d just found with him, the things she’d just found in herself that might well be unbearable without him. And no more unbearable to contemplate the way the outside world would crush a wild spirit, a lynx inside a man who lived for his forest. Who she suddenly hoped would live for
her.
“Kai, there
has
to be!”

But he didn’t look at her.

He didn’t look at her at all.

* * *

“The Sentinels are looking for me now,” Kai told her eventually—after she’d showered, and made him a lunch of deliberately runny eggs and crisp bacon. She’d diced some fruit into a yogurt and teased one of the bacon slices from his plate on her way by.

He ate standing up, too restless to do otherwise. Looking out the kitchen window to the horse at his hay, staring up the mountain...pacing briefly into the small living room and back out again, and trying to imagine what it would be like in a city full of indoor places and concrete and asphalt between him and the land.

Regan tried for patience, but he saw the strain of it in her brusque movements and occasional gleam in her eye. And if he wanted to sweep her up and hold her close and assure her that all would be well...

Well, he couldn’t.

So he watched the flush on her cheeks and neck, the gleam of gold hair spilling out from a high ponytail and remembered the lurking temper in her. He reminded himself of her mettle, coming back through the working that had shuttered her memories—and facing down all her fears in the doing of it.

“They’ll probably find me,” he told her, coming back into the kitchen with his empty plate and trickling just enough water over it to soak the leftover egg. “When I was in the woods...when I was hurt—”

“You
are
hurt,” she said, enough of an edge to her voice that he ducked his head for a brief smile. She was fighting back now—against the preternatural circumstances that had so stunned her not long before. He instantly loved her for it.

Besides, she was right. They’d checked the wound, found it healing fast and well...
Sentinel.
But not healed. Not yet right. “When I thought I would die alone, then,” he said, correcting himself, “I reached out to them. They have someone who heard. So they’re looking.”

She jabbed her spoon into her yogurt mix. “The real question, then,” she said, “is whether they’ll get here in time to help with Arshun’s little gang.”

“Posse,” Kai said. “They call the small units ‘posses,’ the ones who attach to a particular leader.”

“My dad should be safe for the moment,” she said, nodding at the posse remark without commenting. “He signed a power of attorney before the surgery—and Uncle Cal has agreed to stall Arshun if he calls anyway. Besides, Arshun doesn’t have any reason to worry about his little scheme. Whatever he did to mess with Dad’s head—” She glanced sideways at him, her fury at the thought of Arshun’s attacks on her father simmering close to the surface. “Let’s just say Dad doesn’t have the same incentive to overcome it.”

Kai shook his head. “And if others get in their way? Phillip is already in the hospital. What about the sheriff? Or even those poachers?”

“Mary and Bill,” Regan said, her hands pressed flat on the table as if she could push the horror of it away. “They know everything in this town.” She looked at him in sudden stark misery at the sudden weight of responsibility—at the potential consequences for her friends. “What we do now matters, doesn’t it? More than just whether Dad and I lose this place. It matters to everyone here, whether they know it or not. And either way...what happens here changes your life.
Forever.
”

“Forever,” he agreed, and felt walls closing in around him.
Between them.

“What about me?” she asked. “Do we find out who I am in all this? How I even begin to do what I do? Or my mother?”

Kai hesitated on these particular words, knowing she still wanted the truth—and that she’d know if she didn’t get it. “Your mother,” he said, “is one of the reasons the Sentinels are so careful about their own. She is why the first lesson we learn with maturity is how to keep our seed from taking.”

Her eyes widened. “You think I’m—” She shook her head in exaggerated denial. “No, no, no. Look.” She lifted her fingers from the table. “Just plain old regular person. These hands are never anything but hands.”

He left the restlessness of the window and came to her, taking those hands. “Not everyone shows what they would be if they can’t take the change. Sometimes the blood is remote. How many people do you know with extra intuition, or a special way with animals?”

“I don’t
want
to be one of them,” she said fiercely. “I don’t want any part of them and their secret war and what they’ve done to your family because of it—what they’ve done to
you.
You should have been able to live here without hiding yourself!”

He tried to imagine that—his family comfortably interactive with the town, his sister, Holly, going through school there...a background of dating and sports teams and all of them working with the local forest rangers instead of working around them.

“I think I might still be in this life,” he said, glancing out the window again. “I think maybe this is who I am.”

“But you wouldn’t be alone,” she told him. “And you would have had a choice.”

He pulled her up from the chair—and when she didn’t resist, right into his arms. She felt right there, so snug against him he could perceive every line of her body. He ran his hand down alongside her side, letting it span across her ribs, her waist—letting it come to rest just over the rounded curve of her bottom. Not intimate so much as possessive.

She turned her cheek against his chest and rocked slightly within his arms, seeking and sharing the same comfort. Her hair tickled his nose, and he reveled in it. But he told her, “They need never know of you. But...you might find help in them. I have always known what I am—and what I’m for. My family was steeped in it...they gave me what I needed. You have nothing.”

“I have you,” she said, back to her fierce voice, muffled as it was. She pushed back away from him, eyes gleaming again. “Don’t I?”

“Yes,” he said without hesitation, giving her fierceness right back to her—all the surge of the wild within him—making it a dare to the world that would try to come between them. “You do.”

Chapter 26

T
hey planned to check Phillip’s for the gun, and they planned to check the town for the Core, taking advantage of the cover of the Apple Blossom Festival. But they did neither in the broad light of day, much as Kai chafed and Regan fretted.

In the end Kai helped Regan with such mundane things as late-afternoon chores. Regan made a particular point of refilling the mustang’s slow feeder and a second water trough—the one from which Bob could drink. She left the dog with an entire wild turkey, pulled from the bottom of the freezer and waiting for just such an occasion, and latched the door ajar so that cat could come in and out.

Because neither of them truly knew what would happen next.

She took a phone call from her uncle Cal—reassurance that her father was recovering well enough and that her uncle had easily put Arshun off, and with the truth at that. The anesthesia had hit her father hard, and it would be days before he could address mundane matters.

“They did that one to themselves,” Regan had told Kai as she hung up the phone. “However they made this all happen...he wouldn’t be
recovering
if they hadn’t done something he needed to recover
from.
Damn them anyway!”

“My father often said,” he told her, “that they had too much liking for intrigue. For manipulating events.”

“Yeah,” she muttered. “Well, they can manipulate this.” For she’d pulled out her father’s plinker .22 rifle and left it beside the door with her purse, an incongruous pair.

For Kai and Regan weren’t waiting, not for a minute. For while the Core darkness still threaded through Kai’s soul, disabling his ability to use his unique perception of them, the Core had a tendency to leave other trails. And soon enough, the Sentinels would be here. They were close. They were looking.

When they got here, Kai would be ready.

He looked at Regan—also ready, also done with having things happen
to
her and the ones she loved, and ready to turn the tables. He warned her, “A hunt can last for days.”

“Doesn’t matter.” She’d dressed in jeans and the red bandanna shirt, a light trail jacket over it all and her ponytail spilling gold over her shoulder. “We’ve got days. But I don’t think it will. I think they’re at the festival, trying in Arshun’s oily way to become part of the town. I think they’ll take one look at you and give the game away.”

Because he lived. Because one look at his expression would let them know that the game had changed.

“Also,” she added, and not without a possessive pride, “even if they’re not there, they’ll know you’re hunting them soon enough.” She eyed him, the faintest smile at her mouth. “Or did you really think you could walk into town like that and
not
have the instant attention of every woman there?”

His leggings. His breechclout. The tunic, long enough for complete modesty but not so long as to obscure the rugged nature of the rest of it. Tough bare feet, about to tread as confidently in town as they did here in the woods.

He’d never brought this part of himself to town. They’d seen, until now, only what he’d wanted them to see.

She’d been right earlier. Whatever happened after this, it would change his life forever.

Maybe it was time.

* * *

“Parking,” Regan muttered, while Kai shifted uncomfortably in the front seat of the small SUV, flinching as Regan wheeled a tight turn past the boardwalk.

The Apple Blossom Festival had filled the town to bursting with cars nosing out of every spot, decorations fluttering and a clear pattern of foot traffic heading for the long, narrow park at the end of town. The faintest hint of music filtered into the car—no recognizable notes, just a hint of the bass and rhythm. “All that worry about whether we’ll find them or whether the Sentinels will find us, and I should have been worried about the parking.”