Lynx Destiny (16 page)

That the whispers could purr.

It jarred her from the serenity of what she was doing, and turned her back into a woman at the end of the day, surrounded by books and paper, her tackle box of an art kit gaping open beside the chair and night fully fallen around her.

“I wasn’t done yet,” she said to the darkness outside the window, knowing that she’d have to get the woodstove going if she didn’t want to shiver half the night, that Bob hadn’t been fed and the mustang should be checked before she went to bed even if a full slow feeder would keep him supplied for days.

With reluctance she put the pencil down, but she couldn’t stop from flipping through the pages of what she’d done. “What is
that
supposed to be?” she muttered at the sight of a languid line that stroked across the paper, and snorted at herself—until she suddenly remembered doing it, seeing suddenly the line of Kai’s side, his torso flowing into hip and along the join of his leg where muscle shifted, so casually beautiful. And here...a tassled ear above the eye of a lynx, smeared with the natural kohl of its coloration...looking wise. Looking right into her soul.

She touched it with her finger, tracing around the outside of it...feeling a kind of reverence for the mood that had gripped her and what had emerged. Allowing herself to quit fearing and to relax into vulnerability.

But the whispers ground down into a moan, a taste of ugliness and merest hint of a word.

Beware...

And the lynx eye transformed before her, whirling down into a tight pinprick and exploding back out into dripping ugliness, skin sagging from flesh and bone peeking through. Thorny vines wound around an exposed eye socket and reached out from the page to circle her fingers. “No,” Regan moaned. “No, no, no....”

But when she jerked her hand back, the vines came, too. And when she flung the sketch pad away, it skimmed across the room to land faceup, and the vines had unspooled between them—tightening around her hand and arm, pricking her...flowing up and around to bind her torso and crawl into her hair and poke at her lips and tickle into her nose.

She clamped her mouth shut on her terror and clawed at herself, ripping her shirt and her skin, shrieking deep in her throat and knowing she couldn’t let it out—tripping and stumbling and sending the cat streaking away down the stairs.
Kai!
she cried inside, and didn’t even know why—except that as she fell to her knees, it seemed the only safe retreat, there inside the insanity of her own mind.
Kai!
She crumpled into a ball and tucked herself tight, feeling the vines braid and weave around her...capturing her.

Kai...

The whispers were right there with her. But instead of warning, they brought the sudden memory of flesh against flesh on a hillside, of rocketing pleasure and gasping response. Of Kai’s touch, strong fingers gone gentle...of his
presence.

Abruptly, she found herself alone in the loft, curled into a tight ball on the floor. Her pencils lay scattered, the tackle box overturned...the sketchbook in the corner, the pages gently fluttering. When she pushed herself upright, she discovered her hands whole, unpierced by thorns. The damage to her shirt was only that which she’d caused; the damage to her skin only that from her flailing.

A new panic arose, stronger than any outside fear. Her mother had never been like this.
Never.
Never violent, never so completely lost to hallucination.

I have to go.
Now.

But first she had to find Kai.

He owed her answers...and she owed him a warning.

Chapter 15

R
egan found herself outside the cabin with her breath puffing cold into the frigid spring night. Her day pack hung over one shoulder simply because this high-woods girl didn’t walk out unprepared into the darkness.

That the pack hung ready by the back door had helped. Because she’d hardly been in a position to start from scratch, with her mind so fully wrapped and tangled around what she was about to do.

Terrified.

She hadn’t meant to send that thought out into the night, but maybe she had. Because the night answered.

Safe...

“Oh, you must be kidding!” she snapped at it. “Did you not see what just happened? You are breaking my
brain.
”

Or the whispers weren’t the problem at all. Maybe it was just her brain.

There was only one way to find out.

And only one way to find
him.

Unless she was truly crazy after all, and not just being driven there.

“Kai?” she said, the word hesitant and uncertain against the backdrop of silence.

And only the silence came in response. She faltered then, understanding what it would take—that rather than running from the whispers, she would have to speak to them. That if she was to warn Kai at all—about Arshun’s involvement with those at the dry pool, and about their presence in town, and about the new poisons swirling through the land—she would have to stop running from being her mother...

She would have to become her mother. And she didn’t know if she would ever come back.

The light from her red LED flashlight careened eerily through the trees before her. At first she followed the southward game path, heading in the general direction of the area where she’d first seen Kai. “I’m coming,” she muttered, knowing only the night would hear. But she had to gather her nerve for that final, necessary step: reaching back out to the voice that had spoken to her. And through it, hunting for echoes of Kai.

Kai?

Safe,
purred the land.

“Yeah,” she muttered, her heart pounding ridiculously hard, “we’ve had that discussion.” But nothing had reared up to slap her, and the forest remained stable around her. She took a deep breath and tried again...less tentatively this time. Trying not to think about what it would mean if this actually worked—about her, about her mother, about the nature of the world she seemed to live in but no one else saw.
Kai. I need to talk to you.

After a moment of utter silence, she snorted quietly to herself. As if she’d truly thought to get a response of some sort. She might as well just bellow into the peaceful night.

?...

The flashlight spurted through her suddenly clenched grip, falling to the ground and turning itself off. She made no attempt to retrieve it, standing frozen in the darkness.

She could pretend that had been her imagination, that sleepy, wordless query. She could pretend it had been wishful thinking. She could pretend—

But she knew. Deep inside, where she didn’t have to justify it to anyone else, where she didn’t have to explain...

She
knew.

Kai?

And the land spoke to her.

* * *

Kai slept wrapped in fleece and comfort and bare skin, nested in his low bed with only Regan’s bandanna around his fully healed arm. He’d fallen into dreams of darkness laced with exhaustion, shifting against the gentle confines of the blankets—until the dreams themselves shifted, and became Regan. Became the scent of her, all warmth and gentle fragrance. Became the flashing gold of soft hair, tumbling free after a shower. Became the touch of her inner self that she didn’t even know she offered—and became the touch of her hand.

Kai?

Even in sleep, he reached back to her, open to her presence. His breath quickened; his fingers twitched.

Kai?

He welcomed her, responded to her, groaned in the happiness at the feel of her—

And woke with startled surprise to the still quiet of the night—tangled in blankets, soaking in the aroused state of his body and the understanding that he’d not just wakened to his dreams, but he had
been
awakened.

Kai?

The tentative whisper came like an afterthought in his own mind, recognizable only by the dint of his years alone with the land—with its echoes and its connections.

Never had anyone deliberately reached him this way.
Regan.
Not an unknowing ripple of need or a flailing, fearful shout, but an uncertain and brave query into a world that had done nothing but frighten her until now.

For of course it was Regan. Her touch, filtering into his dreams. Her essence, flavoring his sleeping thoughts.

Still half-asleep and reveling in the intersection of their worlds, he reached back to her. Nothing so bold as a greeting...merely the soft sigh of a welcome.

It wouldn’t do to scare her now.

She searched for him, he understood that much. And he understood the strength it must have taken for her so much as try. How frightened she’d been by what she’d experienced here, and how he himself had frightened her simply because of who and what he was.

He’d stayed away from her for a reason.

But now she searched for him, and if he didn’t quite understand why, or what had driven her to overcome her fears, he didn’t quite care at the moment.

Kai?

Yes,
he thought back at her, a little more strongly than before.
Here.
He rose from the mattress, two of the blankets wrapped sloppily around his shoulders. He slipped through the slash of an entry and out into the night, where the chill air bit at his ankles and seeped into his feet.

He didn’t go far. Just far enough to protect his home, even from Regan.

For she was close now, the red flash of her light slashing against the trees, her progress steady after crossing the many acres between her home and his. Whatever her purpose, she’d given herself to it.

He held himself still, waiting—absorbing her through her subtle, inexpert connection to the land and breathing in of her essence...offering his own back to her.

She might not recognize it, subtle as it was. Or she might—

“Kai!” As intensely as she spoke his name, she kept her voice low—in deference to the night. Her light flashed briefly over his chest, rose to his face—never went as far as his eyes before shifting away. “Oh, God, Kai, I must be crazy—”

He had no words to take away the breathless distress in her voice, this woman trying to bridge two worlds. He merely opened his arms, and when she dropped her pack and stepped into them, he closed the blankets around them both.

Her hands were cold against his ribs and her cheek was cold against his shoulder; she carried the subtle taint of the Core. He gave her warmth and waited.

“I have to leave,” she told him, holding him yet a little tighter. “But I had to come here first. How backward is that?”

He made a noise in his chest. It was the best he could do—the only words in his mouth would have asked her to stay, and he thought if he did that she would push away from him and run. Or if he had reached to her through the land instead of merely inviting the essence of it around them, a wash of cleaner energies to brush away the remnants of the Core.

They stood until she stopped shaking and he grew more and more aware of the soft press of her breasts, the fine grace of her spine, the tuck of her waist and the curve of her hips. He tried desperately to think of other things, to remember the control he’d been taught and practiced, but as she relaxed, her fingers no longer quite clutching along his ribs, he collected tension.

She said, something of surprise in her voice, “You’re
naked.
”

“I was sleeping,” he said.

She lifted her head to regard him, a gesture he could see clearly through a darkness that was hardly dark for him at all. Not with Sentinel eyes.

“Of course you were sleeping,” she said, and loosened her hold on him. “You must be freezing.”

He made another noise in his chest, something of desperation and humor combined. If she hadn’t been wrapped in her coat, she would have known better. “Not really.”

She closed her eyes, and something shifted in her expression—an awareness of him...and maybe of herself. She smiled ever so faintly and stepped back within the circle of his arms—just far enough to unzip her coat and shrug it off her shoulders, revealing the tear in her shirt. The soft skin above one breast showed through; the ripped neckline folded over the other.

“Regan,” he said, and heard in his voice not just concern, but warning. “The cold—”

“I’m pretty sure you’ll keep me warm.” She shifted aside an errant fold of blanket, brushing her hand across his hip, then down into a bold caress. He jerked against her touch, and then he was the one who trembled. “Yeah,” she said. “Pretty sure I’ve got that right.”

“Regan,”
he said, somewhat desperately—remembering the hillside behind the Adler cabin, remembering how he’d frightened her—his healing arm, his reach for her through the land. His ferocity and strength, just as he’d been warned. “I’m still who I was. Before. On the hill.”

“That’s okay,” she told him. “I’m
not.
” She looked up at him, searching his features in the darkness and no doubt able to see very little in the absence of her flashlight. No doubt assuming the same of him. Her mouth opened...closed again. Not saying something.

She pressed her cheek against his chest and held him suddenly very close. “Before I go,” she said, not quite making sense. “It won’t be enough, but I can’t
not
want you as much as I do.”

His breath gusted out over her hair; he wanted to stroke it, to feel the sensation of gold. He wanted to run his hands over her soft skin and clamp them over her hips and feel her movement around him. He
wanted,
in a way he never had—in the way he knew he should beware. He knew he should reach for control, or warn her or tear himself away and put distance between them.

He knew just as certainly that he’d do none of that, just as he could say nothing of reassurance or desire. But he didn’t have enough practice with words and he’d already gone beyond them.

Regan didn’t seem to need them or want them. She tugged at him, pulling him not closer—as if that was possible—but downward, so they went to their knees together.