Lynx Destiny (10 page)

Now the horse stretched his neck, playing against the bit, and she gave him a pat of apology on a shoulder damp with sweat. “Sorry,” she told him. “I didn’t know it would be so warm today.”

She’d already tied her jacket off behind the saddle to ride in shirtsleeves, her morning gloves stuffed in the pockets. She’d brought a snack and water in the saddlebags, and—on impulse—the gun Kai had left at her house. Not that it would do more than make her feel better to have it, no matter how she’d familiarized herself with its workings. Not only was it tucked away in the saddlebags, but she’d only ever handled long guns—the .22, the 12-gauge, the occasional thirty-aught.

And still, she’d brought it. A sign of just how spooked she’d grown in the past week.

She wasn’t sure who or what she expected to find, only that she no longer assumed there would be nothing. And that if someone had taken advantage of her father’s injury to establish activity in these woods—whether on their property, bordering neighbors or the surrounding national forest—she wanted to know about it.

She wanted it stopped.

So far she’d seen nothing here of concern, in spite of her compulsion to look. She waited for the downhill road to level out and let the mustang canter and, as she felt the sturdy strength of the horse beneath her and the breeze against her face, she wondered what it would be like to run with Kai—and she wondered again at the ongoing silence of the land, its juxtaposition with Kai’s days of absence.

Not that he owed her anything. But she’d thought...

She thought there’d been connection. And promise.

Maybe he’d simply realized that this was no longer her home. Maybe he hadn’t been willing to give of himself to a fling.

“I don’t see why it has to be so complicated,” she complained to the horse, turning him aside to enter the woods and reach the snow seep where she could water him. After a few moments of brisk walking on the game trail she swung out of the saddle to trail a rein behind her, letting the horse snuffle against her back as she approached the changing foliage of the damp area.

But there she stopped short.

Tracks.

Unfamiliar tracks, at that.
Big cat?
She put her hand beside one, found it narrower than the track.
Big
some
thing.
But the toes weren’t quite right—the spread between the outside toe and its neighbor, the murky nature of the track edges. She’d seen mountain lion tracks aplenty, and they pressed into the ground clear and firm. Bobcat tracks did the same—and they weren’t nearly this large.

She sat back, baffled.
What?
What other wildcat even lived in these woods?

The mustang nudged her shoulder, and she swatted idly in his direction. “Hold on. I’m committing these tracks to my outstanding visual memory.” And she did, sliding into her artist’s headspace...feeling the memory sink in.

Greeting welcome...

“Stop it!” she cried, coming to her feet in a fury—and then had to manage the mustang who so wisely wanted to spook away from the crazy woman. “Stay out!”

The woods fell into silence. The mustang snorted on her neck. Regan took a deep breath, led him around to the other side of the seep so they wouldn’t sully the mystery tracks, and used a rock to scrape at the damp dirt while water filled the hole. She stood aside, her movements stiff and tense, and the mustang fluttered his nostrils, double-checking for danger before he dipped his head to sip water.

Regan moved along his side, rein draped over her elbow, and jerked on the buckle of the saddlebags to grab her water bottle, drinking deeply before briskly screwing the top closed. She touched the gun as she replaced the bottle, and her fingers lingered there. After a moment, she left it. False security was worse than no security.

But she left the saddlebag flap loosely fastened.

The mustang lifted his head, water beading his lips and whiskers—and before she saw it coming, slyly cranked his nose around to swipe down her sleeve, leaving a damp and dirt-streaked trail. “Great,” she told him. “A horse who thinks he has a sense of humor. Does my father let you get away with that one?”

The horse wrinkled his nostrils and flicked his ears, pretending to think.

“You got me once,” she said. “Next time I’ll know.” She checked his girth and mounted up, picking their way back out of the woods to stop short at the edge of the road—and only in afterthought realizing the hesitation had been a mutual decision, she and this trail-wise little horse.

Something had changed.

Except...

Nothing had changed.

No clouds between her and the sun to make things suddenly seem darker. No sudden change of humidity to make the details of the woods suddenly sharper
.

Except the mustang was leery, too.

Doesn’t mean anything.
The mustang was an alert little horse, primed by his early years in the wild. He’d certainly react to her tension.

Beware...

“Shut up!” she said more fiercely than she meant to. As the mustang stepped onto the road, he snorted challenge—a resounding blast of alarm and suspicion. She felt the spring in his step, patted his neck with a hand that pretended to be casual.
Just...one step at a time...

The woods groaned; they shifted with a grinding, wrenching sound that reverberated deeply within her. The tree trunks gleamed dark and sinister; the scent of corruption suddenly misted around the roan’s hooves in a sticky fog and crawled up along Regan’s leg. She made a noise deep in her throat—unthinking, gut-level fear. The horse bunched up beneath her, dynamite barely contained.

Something belched nearby, a sucking expulsion in growly bass.

Regan broke. The horse broke.

Even in the depths of her fear, she knew to channel the mustang’s reaction
forward,
and she quivered her calves against his sides, releasing him with her seat, raising the ends of the reins—

There was no need to touch him with leather. He burst into an explosive gallop, charging up the slope with a speed that slapped air against her face, in no way under control.

Then again, neither was she.

She crouched over his neck, one stirrup lost and banging against his side, her hands and reins and his mane all a wicked tangle in her grip.
“Go,”
she sobbed at him, barely able to breathe in terror released.
“Go, go, GO!”

The hill grew steeper; the horse barely slacked his pace. They ran together, leaving a growl of dark laughter in the air—and although Regan didn’t see the driveway entrance, the horse did, leaning tightly into the curve to lunge upward.

Regan choked on new fear—on the barely rational thought that slipped into her mindless flight.
Never run a horse toward the barn.
Not only because it was bad training and dangerous habit, but—

Because the horse had to
stop.

And sometimes they didn’t. Or sometimes they skidded to a halt at the last moment, and the
rider
didn’t.

Regan wrestled with the reins, unable to disentangle fingers from that black mane and finally, wildly, shifting her grip up close to the bit, clamping one hand against the foamed neck and lifting high with the other, working against the thrust of the horse’s jaw on the bit.

The roan flung his head against the pressure, jerking at her—but his gallop stuttered, and as he released his jaw and softened his neck, they fell into a jarring trot. From there the horse stumbled and seemed to realize how blown he was. He staggered to a dazed stop.

Regan all but fell out of the saddle, fumbling at the paddock gate with shaking hands and blurred vision, tears spilling out onto her cheeks—the fear still clinging to her, and the strangeness, and the deep terror at knowing just how quickly she’d lost herself.

She pulled the horse into the pipe-panel corral and slammed the latch home, making it only that far before she put her back to the nearest panel junction and slid down to sit there, trembling with tears and leftover panic. And she reached blindly, instinctively, for comfort, aching for strength to lean on.

To make it stop.

* * *

Kai froze in midstep, one broad paw reaching, the angular slopes of pine and aspen marching down before him.
Something was wrong...

Something dark, something corruptive, something
Regan.

The trickle burst into a flood, twisting sensations of ugliness and pain washing through all his senses— pressing him to the ground with his ears flat and his stub tail lashing, eyes squinting closed against it.

Kai had never tasted Core in these rare heights and he had never tasted it so strongly at all. He reeled from it, from its implications—from the returning throb of it in his lynx’s foreleg, where the tainted bullet had left him so slow to heal.

The burst of sensation faded, trailing away into a lingering sickness—and above it rose that voice he’d heard first.

Regan.

She probably didn’t mean to cry out to him—full of tremulous fear, of gasping panic...a wild golden spirit fluttering against the onslaught of Core workings. But she had. One deep, strong thread of longing, thrumming through the land with all the clear, healthy connection of one born to it.
Hold me. Help me. Oh, please help me—

His ears flicked; he found himself on his feet, oriented unerringly toward her call. The forest stretched out between them, full of rugged terrain and secret places and no physical way to get from here to there without hours on the run.

He put his whiskers to the ground—gently brushing the flaking rock of his perch, hunting detail that was slow to come...sending out his own message. Wordless reassurance, understanding, a calming subliminal and raspy purr.

After a moment, he thought her internal trembling eased. He shook himself off and started down the mountain.
I’m coming, Regan.

No lynx was a long-distance sprinter.

But Kai ran.

Chapter 10

R
egan eventually pulled herself together...or as together as she was going to get. She jerked the mustang’s girth loose and flung the saddle over the top pipe of the corral panel, saddlebags and all—perfectly aware that she was babbling and helpless to stop herself.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she told the horse, excruciatingly aware of his steaming body, his soaking and foaming coat. She pulled the bridle off his lowered head, easing it past his teeth and tossing it over the saddle. “I am so sorry.”

She should walk him dry; she should sponge his flanks and shoulders and towel him off. Instead, she grabbed the cooler from the barn, shook off the dust with a motion that was more jerky than it was effective, and slung it over him, tying it under his neck and fastening a stretchy surcingle around his body. “I’m sorry—”

Only when she reached the gate did she realize she had no idea what she still ran from, or what she ran
to.
Her stomach roiled; emotion filled her to stretching, too big to hold within mere flesh—the sensation of the woods closing around her, of the stench curling around her feet and legs. And then, when she’d thought herself safe—at home, curled up outside the paddock with the woods blessedly quiescent around her—the crystal clarity of a new voice had reached out to touch her.

It didn’t matter that the voice had held comfort, or that it had held compassion, or even that it felt familiar. Because it shouldn’t have been there at all.

She stumbled for the house and promptly fell over Bob the Dog. To judge by his heavy panting, he’d paced them along the driveway, a burst of speed and effort no longer familiar to his aging bones. Now he looked to her for explanation and she had none.

“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I’m sorry. I can’t stay. I’ll find someone to take care of you. Maybe Kai—”

Bob stopped looking at her and looked at the house instead, his panting stopped to listen. She heard it then—the phone. She ran to answer it, slamming through the screen—expecting only one call, knowing so few people who even had this number. She grabbed the handset of the ancient rotary phone fast enough to fumble it. “Dad?
Dad?
Where have you been!”

The hesitation alone told her how frantic she sounded—made her realize, suddenly, that this might not be her father at all.

In fact, a smooth voice said, “Having second thoughts about staying there?” and she realized it was Matt Arshun—and before she even thought about it, she slammed the phone down, hard enough to rattle the fanciful little table on which it sat.

When it rang again, she almost didn’t pick it up. But after days of waiting to hear from her father...

“Hello?” Her voice came out thick and teary...and cautious.

“Rae?” Her father sounded wary in return—and more protective than she expected. “What’s wrong?”

“Dad!” she said, and it was all she could do to keep from bursting into tears all over again. She recognized the wavering adrenaline. So instead of asking after him or mentioning Arshun, she blurted out, “What happened to Mom?”

His silence held a different kind of wariness before he said, “What’s going on?”

It wasn’t an answer. But then, she didn’t expect to get an answer without a fight. Not after all this time.

“Mom,” she said, a little steadier. She hooked her fingers behind the handset cradle and plunked the phone on the kitchen table, nudging the chair out with her foot so she could sit. “What happened to her?”

“You know what happened to her. Rae, you know I hate this cell phone. I’d rather not talk about this now.”

“Then maybe you should have talked about it earlier,” she shot back at him—then covered her mouth in surprise at herself, making a strangled noise of dismay. She’d never braced him about this before—never much braced him about anything. After her mother had died, the house had turned into a quiet, somber place—and her father a quiet, somber man. They’d lived here together, but not truly
together.

And then Regan had left. As soon as she could.