Lynx Destiny (30 page)

Loving you back.

But he did, eventually, lift his head. And she didn’t stop him.

“Drive down to Alamogordo,” he said. “Find a place for the gun. Under stone, under asphalt. Call for help. The Sentinels are looking. It won’t take long.”

“How long,” she asked him, “will be too long?”

He only shook his head, lifting his shoulder in a hint of a shrug.

“What,” she asked him, feeling the scrape of her own voice in her throat, “are you going to do?”

His smile was more a lift of lip than a curve of mouth; his eyes held a dark, dry humor. “Be myself,” he said and left her there.

Chapter 27

R
egan found herself back in her car, utterly unprepared to drive away from Cloudview—struggling with the impulse to turn around and find Kai.

But this was his world. His people, whether he claimed them or not. His
life.

What did she know of any of it, except what she saw of it through him?

So she did as he asked. She stuck the gun inside the armrest console and started up her little SUV, wheeling it around in the darkness and knowing that Kai headed in the opposite direction on foot—being seen at the final hours of the Apple Blossom Festival. And being himself. Not the lynx—she knew better than that. But not quite as anyone here had ever seen him before, either.

She drove the steep, winding road out of town, past the arching canyon trestle, and then past the vista parking, both hands clutching the wheel and her speed a little reckless for both the road and the circumstances. She made herself slow down, becoming more thoughtful. Already looking for that spot in her mind that meant “reaching out,” and finding it through memories of Kai—of looking for him, of her desperate, emotional efforts to understand herself and what she felt and what she could do.

At the time she’d taken that final step—
reaching, looking—
it had all seemed the hardest thing she had ever done. Now those memories came tinged with a sweet flavor, a satisfaction. She’d found what she’d needed—she’d found him, and she’d found herself.

Now she could find these Sentinels and bring them back to Kai before it was too late.

Beware...

Her foot eased off the gas before she even realized it, her shoulders stiffening.

That subtle hum of thought came not from around her, but from behind her. Not in response to her own initial attempts to send out to the Sentinels, but a totally unexpected thing.

BEWARE!

She cursed, holding herself together until she could ride the outside edge of the looming hairpin curve to the rugged canyon road it held. She pulled across the delta of that road entry, breathing hard. “What is your
problem?
” she snapped back at the land. “You’re going to get me killed, and then where will Kai be?”

Flashes of music, flashes of danger.
Not so much tasting of Kai as they did of Cloudview itself, of unsuspecting laughter so familiar as to go back to her childhood, the tang of elk jerky on her tongue, the gentle hum of an electric wheelchair in movement, a broad, round face with its pug nose and wide smile.

Mary.
And Bill. And with them, Phillip.

“No,” she said, a baffled protest into the silence of the car. “How does that do Arshun any good at all? They have nothing to do with this. They
know
nothing.” Not even Phillip. Not really.

But Kai cared about them.

And she saw darkness all around them.

* * *

Kai walked the long stretch of Cloudview’s single main street, avoiding the streetlamps simply because of his comfort with the night. The occasional family-packed car swept past, slowing at the sight of him...slowing a little more to take him in, then accelerating onward.

Good. The more people who saw him, the better chance he had to keep Arshun’s focus here in Cloudview.

He made it past the long string of home-grown shops fronting the road to the left, and the more recent, impersonal services on the other side—gas station, water co-op, post office. The music from the park swelled and then faded into applause; the festival lighting grew to take over the night sky.

Someone here might know how to find Arshun in his Realtor guise, even if the man hadn’t joined the cheery little festival activities. And if Kai looked hard enough, then Arshun would know he was here.

He encountered small groups walking in the opposite direction, bumping shoulders and laughing a little too loudly, carrying the scent of alcohol. They didn’t spot him until he was nearly past—their laughter broke off into startled silence, eyes unanimously wide as they took in his clothing, his bare feet...the nature of his movement.

Then they burst back into laughter, staggering along their way.

Kai found himself smiling grimly in the wake of them. They’d seen what he’d hidden from these people for so long, even if they wouldn’t quite remember it in the morning. And this night, they wouldn’t be the first.

He moved through the edges of the milling crowd—threading the closing vendor booths and the small family clusters singing along with the country favorites, toddlers draped over their shoulders and young children drooping at their sides.

The singing invariably stopped as he passed, and that was okay, too.

“Kai?”

He almost didn’t recognize her—a tidy woman not so much older than he was, her short brown hair clipped loosely back, her expression startled as she turned and found him beside her, her blazer and slacks casual but smart. And then he caught the scent of her and the scent of old books and abruptly felt stupid.
Miss Laura.
Of course, Laura from the library.

“It
is
you,” she said, dropping her voice to a normal volume as the music fell briefly silent and the lead singer offered the crowd some patter while the others changed instruments. “Why—” But she stopped herself, looked him up and down and smiled. “Of course,” she said. “This is the real you, isn’t it? Not the face you show the rest of us.”

“This is me,” he agreed, unaccountably relieved at her easy acceptance. “I thought I would find Mary and Bill here...and Phillip.”

“They were here,” she agreed. “But they might have left early—Phillip probably shouldn’t have tried to make it out tonight, even if he is in Bill’s old push wheelchair.” She shook her head in dismay. “Terrible thing, what happened—and to Phillip of all of us!”

Because of me.
Because, unlike a true Sentinel, he had no real idea what he was doing, or who he was dealing with.

“I’m looking for a man named Matt Arshun,” he said. “Do you know of him?”

She wrinkled her nose in reservation. “I know of him,” she said. “Don’t think much of him—he acts like a man who can buy his way into town.”

“If you see Bill or Mary, let them know I’m here. If you see Arshun—”

He’d forgotten to keep his reaction to the man hidden; he’d forgotten to keep the lynx fully sheathed. Her mouth never quite closed on her words unfinished, her expression faintly stunned. She nodded so faintly he doubted she knew she’d done it. “You’re worried,” she said, coming to conclusions. “I’ll look for them.”

And he didn’t bother to hide himself now, not when it was too late, and not when it would stick in her mind, driving her to seek out Mary, or to ask about Arshun. She saw it in him clearly enough, reflecting it with the uncertainty in her eyes. He left her that way, making no effort to smooth over what he’d done.

It was what he’d come for after all.

* * *

A car swept by where Regan sat blocking the canyon turnoff; then another.

She tried reaching out to him...found him. Just the hint of his presence, strong but faintly uneasy...out of his element. Determined. Carrying that undertone of the lynx.

And with no sense that he could perceive her, or that he’d made any effort to respond. Still blinded by the working that lingered in his blood, after too many days of sitting hard in his flesh.

It crossed her mind to wonder if he’d ever be whole again, and she bit her lip on the sorrow of that thought—the very real understanding, as no one else could understand, what a tragedy it would be for him if not.

For her, should it ever happen to her.

This thing she’d feared for so long, that she’d evaded for so long...had suddenly now become an irrevocably important part of her.

Just like Kai.

And Arshun was there, at the festival—not only aware of Kai, but waiting for him. Setting the stage to make him choose between his friends and himself.

The man who didn’t call himself Sentinel, but who lived the ideals of one.

“Better than
you,
” she said out loud, bitter words spoken to the unaware team now theoretically closing in on them. “You should have been looking out for this area. And you should have been the kind of people Kai’s family felt safe with.”

Or her family, for that matter. Whoever it had been, back in the family tree, who’d given her this faint tracing of Sentinel blood, and more than a little connection to this land. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel, hard enough to hurt. “You people
suck.
”

And when she said it, she sent it out. A message by land, sent with all the fervent emotion behind it—rippling on through the trees and stone and precious underground layers of water.

She felt the startled reverberation as it slammed home nearby. As someone
heard.
And she heard it well enough in return—
Who?

Not a query so much as a demand, and one that felt strangely entitled, at that. As if she didn’t have a right to be there at all.

“Come and find me,” she told the unknown, putting a snarl into it. A lynx snarl, the essence of what she’d come to feel from Kai.

And then she wheeled the SUV around in a tight, reckless U-turn and headed back up the mountain. Back to Kai.

Chapter 28

T
he park sat at the far edge of Cloudview’s narrow ribbon of level ground. Behind it rose a sloped area threaded with narrow gravel lanes and vacation cottage clusters, all studded with mature pines and mossy-green undergrowth.

Kai stood on the bank just above the park and swept his gaze over the very human assembly of sound and motion, conversation and light and shiny things.

It wasn’t a big park, but it had its dark corners. They weren’t places Bill would go for any casual reason, not in the chair. But it was time to check them—to turn this excursion of
being seen
into a hunt.

Kai headed back down the bank with purpose, skirting the edges of the festival lights if not quite the dispersing crowd. Slipping into who he was, what he was—not whole, with his shoulder damp and throbbing, but whole enough for this. His leg, bearing his weight with only an ache of complaint.

He spotted the empty wheelchair just as Miss Laura also reached it—and just as three men came on him from the side, casual and joking and falling into startled silence as they recognized him...and he, them.

They’d dressed in jeans and Western-styled button-downs for the festival, their heads bare and—until that moment—their expressions congenial. At the sight of him they stopped short, but it didn’t take long for the nominal leader to snort and gesture with the oversize plastic drink cup in his hand. “You really
do
think you’re Grizzly Adams.”

“Gentlemen,” Miss Laura said by way of protest, frowning at them.

“My name is Kai Faulkes,” Kai told him, grim from his discovery and in no mood to deal gently with these men. “Do you know anything about this?”

“What? No,” the man said, more or less automatically, and then looked down at the wheelchair and said, “I mean,
no.
About what?”

“Look,” said the youngest of them, jamming his hands into his front pockets and giving Kai a wary look. “We don’t want any trouble. Your girlfriend has that photo, and we know it. So whatever your deal is—”

The third guy interrupted. “Don’t get your panties in a twist, Randy. He’s already run into someone tougher than he thinks he is.” He nodded at Kai’s shoulder, where enough blood had soaked through the bandage to feel chilled against his skin.

Too much activity too soon. As if he’d had a choice. But he ignored the third man, responding directly only to the other two. “Have you seen the man who was using this?”

Their leader shrugged. “Earlier this evening, sure. Hard to miss that crew—the fat lady and the crippled guy from the store, and the guy in this chair. Beat to hell, he was. I heard there was a break-in at his place. I guess he wasn’t as good with his kung fu as he thought he was, eh?”

“Gentlemen,” Laura said again, drawing herself up. They had the grace to look abashed—but Kai was focused in on the hunt, shifting his attention to the youngest of them with question in his gaze.

“No, man,” the guy said and glanced at the chair. “Hard to imagine he walked away from this thing. He looked pretty messed up.”

“If you see him—”

“Yeah, yeah,” the third guy said. “We’ll tell him you’re looking. Sure we will.”

“If you see him,” Kai said, a tone so flatly implacable that the guy stepped back, hands raised in exaggerated innocence, “
help
him. And if you won’t help him, get someone who will.”

Laura said, “He can’t be far. He could hardly walk.”

“Yeah, good luck with that,” the leader said.

Laura put a hand on Kai’s arm—it was enough to restrain him, but not to keep him from bristling. “It’s a very small town,” she told the men. “I hope you’re planning to leave tomorrow, because I doubt you’ll find service here after tonight.”

The man snorted and lobbed his half-full cup into the nearest of the festival trash cans. The others followed him out of the park, although the youngest of them looked over his shoulder. “Hey,” he said to his friends, undoubtedly thinking himself out of earshot, “isn’t Kai the name of the hotshot hunt guide? The one Martin Sperry said he’d book for us this fall?”

“We’ll find someone else,” the leader of them muttered.