Lynx Destiny (25 page)

She laughed. “Finally,” she said. “
Finally,
I know what that sound reminds me of. That’s your man-purr, isn’t it?”

The look he gave her shifted into skepticism. “Man-purr.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “And Kai Faulkes, I have a mind to find out just how many ways I can make you purr.”

She kissed him again, quick and assertive, and then sat back on her heels to regard him, leaving him her hand—and his connection to the land. “But first, you need help. This tunic has to come off.” She eyed the blood-soaked material with disgust. “And we need to get back to my place—”

A new, stunned look crossed her face. “Oh, my God. While it still
is
my place. My
father’s
place. What have those people done to him?”

Kai frowned. Hard enough to think through cloying Core workings, through pain...but what—?

She shook her head, a decisive motion. “Arshun,” she said, “took me back to the house after you got away, made noises and threats.... I’m not supposed to remember the details, just how much it matters. He’ll kill us if we don’t give him that land, that’s what it amounts to. Starting with my father—starting by
crippling
him. In his surgery—” She looked at him, despair in her eyes. “It’s happening today.
Now.
”

“No,” he said, firmly enough to belie the new shivers of pain that swept through him; she gave him a startled look. “Your father is fine. Arshun thinks things are in hand.”

She nodded slowly. “They
were,
” she said. “My father gave him verbal acceptance of the offer yesterday. They must have done something to him, like they did to me...” She looked at him, understanding shining in her eyes. “What they did, it wasn’t strong enough. It wasn’t stronger than what we already had—”

“Shh,” he said, because it was the only thing he had to say. He gave her hand the slightest of tugs, and she came to him; he eased over onto his back to welcome her, wrapping one arm around to hold tight while she lay over his chest and clung to him, her face buried against his neck but her weight carefully shifted away from his wound. “Shh,” he said, and clung to her in return, knowing that neither of them quite understood what had happened to their lives, but that there was only one way to make it through.

Together.

* * *

Regan pulled back and wiped her eyes and tried to regain her balance. “Where,” she said as matter-of-factly as she could, “is your knife?”

He looked at her without understanding, his eyes shadowed in the darkness and shadowed by pain, and she thought they probably had a very limited time to accomplish what had to be done.

And then it would be too late, with Kai lost to whatever had been done to him.

So she marched on with what had to be done, hoping the rest of it would eventually make better sense. “Your knife, to cut that shirt away,” she told him. “It’s ruined anyway, and I don’t think you’ll be very happy if we tug it off.”

Understanding flickered over features gone hollow. He nodded at the stout little chest of drawers, and she reluctantly disentangled her fingers from his, seeing instantly how his expression turned bleaker without the connection her touch seemed to offer.

My mother wasn’t crazy, and neither am I.

Well-meaning people had killed her mother. She knew better than to ever let it happen to her.

Or to ever let her father know what he’d so unwittingly helped to do.

She readily found the knife, and—helping herself to the dresser and its scant contents—also found another shirt. Emboldened, she rummaged in the pantry area and discovered a salve redolent of juniper and sage; then she found a clean, full bucket of water and helped herself to it.

Beware...

She placed the bucket beside the bed, scowling at the land. She supposed it was a bit much to expect detailed messages or profundities, but a
hint....

Kai made an inquiring noise; she picked up the knife in one hand and placed her other over his forearm just long enough for him to understand.

And Kai, who knew the land better than she, said, “Someone’s coming.” And at her raised brow, added, “Not necessarily friendly.”

Panic flushed through her chest. “I didn’t hide my tracks—I didn’t even think of it. I don’t even know
how.
”

“Hurry,” he said, though he looked unutterably weary. “We must be out there. Making
new
tracks.”

“Stomping all over the old.” Regan put the knife under the tunic and sliced upward, away from his skin and careful of the point. Glad, in a way, for the need to work swiftly, because otherwise she would have hesitated and fumbled and made it harder for both of them. “Tell them I came here to meet up with you and hike out. I’m making reference sketches, and you had some places to show me.”

Kai twitched at the slide of cool metal along his torso. “Do you have sketching things?”

She laughed shortly, cutting through to the tunic neck and then along the sleeves, peeling the material away so he lay on top of it—and without pausing, worked the sharp blade through the cleanest section at the bottom to make herself a rag. “I
always
have sketching things.” She dipped the rag into water and offered him an apologetic look. “This is going to be cold.”

He growled under his breath as the wet cloth hit skin, a sound she’d heard before and that now suddenly made so much more sense. His skin pebbled as she washed the dried blood streaking his chest and side, staining the light pattern of coarse, silvered hair; his breath hitched as she washed around the wound itself, a simple but ugly hole, as if someone had taken a slightly misshapen paper punch to smooth skin.

I heal quickly,
he’d told her once.

Not this time. No doubt only his preternaturally fast healing had kept him alive at all.

He took a ragged breath, coming out of his self-imposed trance to follow her gaze. “It won’t truly heal until the bullet comes out.”

And she realized with a sudden shock that he would never allow her to take him to Alamogordo to the hospital. With just as much surprise she realized, too, that she understood perfectly. For if the medical system had so badly failed her mother, who lived outside the norm in only that one, distinctive way, what would it do to Kai? Discover and exploit him? Or simply kill him with misguided kindness because he wasn’t what they expected?

“First things first,” she heard herself say, reaching for the pungent salve and spreading it gently around the wound—and using more of the torn tunic as a patch, letting the salve serve as an adhesive. It had to stay only until they could reach her father’s cabin—there, she’d have extensive first-aid supplies and food. And the people who had done this to him—to
them—
would have no idea that she’d remembered herself...or that she’d found Kai, and he still lived. They had no reason to think things weren’t going exactly as planned.

Just as quickly, she tended the wound in his calf— almost healed, that one, living up to all his previous allusions to his own unbelievable nature. “Let’s head off whoever’s skulking around out there. Can you sit?”

With help, he did, allowing her to ease the clean shirt over his arm, taking over to manage the rest of it himself in quick, rough motions. He took the knife and shoved it into the sheath hanging from his belt, and by then Regan had planted herself slightly to the side, bracing herself—offering her bent arm as a solid support in case he needed it to rise.

He did, giving her cause to startle all over again at the solid weight of him—realizing again the deceptive nature of his movement, his gravity-defying twists and grace when in confrontation with Arshun and his men.

But now when he stood he wavered, and she quickly moved up beside him, steadying him.

Beware...

He felt the warning come through her and nodded at her pack. “Your things.”

She grabbed the pack on the way out, settling it over her shoulders as they emerged and hesitating there while Kai reached up one-handed and tugged a swath of camouflage netting down over the door. A few steps into the woods she looked back and did a double take. “If I didn’t know it was there...”

He gave her a short, grim smile with satisfaction in it—and confidence. Of course. He’d been living this way for a long, long time. The smile fell away as he noticed her face—a little scabby, full of faded bruises...the lingering signs of a violent assault she still barely remembered those days earlier. He reached over to touch her and didn’t quite, fingers hovering over the healing insults. His jaw hardened as he turned away.

He led her from the entry and limped up to the aged remnants of a fallen tree. There he sat, buckskins and breechclout and tunic over bare feet, looking much as he had when she’d first seen him—an integral part of these woods.

But wounded. Hurting. Defying all probability to be sitting there in the first place. Surely, whoever came would see it in him.

He nodded out at the area just below them. “Walk circles,” he said. “Over your incoming tracks. Roll on the ground.”

“Roll—?” But she did as he asked, first walking ever-bigger circles and figure eights, then dropping to the ground. As she climbed to her feet, brushing away crisp brown oak leaves and pine needles, the sound of their approaching intruders reached her ears—a mutter of male voices in conversation, the faint crackle of a broken twig.

She climbed back up to reach Kai—startled when he took her arm and tugged her down, but going with it. Even more startled when he hooked his hand around her neck and drew her in for a kiss, but going with that, too—so easily sinking into the moment of it, his lips warm and firm on hers, moving with an assurance they’d not quite had when they’d first done this.

By the time he drew back, he’d brought color back to his pale face and a flush to hers, and while his breathing hitched in a way it shouldn’t, her own chest rose and fell with betraying rapidity—and when she looked up into the woods, she found the three poachers watching from only fifty yards away.

Watching...and smirking.

She shot Kai a look; he lifted one shoulder without apology. “There is much I don’t truly know about the world,” he murmured. “But I know what gets a man’s attention. They won’t think too hard about your sketchbook now.”

“I might just hit you,” she told him. “At some better time.”

But she knew she wouldn’t, and so did he. And it wasn’t hard to jump to her feet in an embarrassed way and go instantly on the offensive.

The poacher with the most attitude beat her to it. “Now we know why you wanted these woods to yourself.”

“This is national forestland,” she told him, pretending he hadn’t been watching her enthusiastic embrace, then spoiling the effect by brushing futilely at the needles on her light jacket. “You don’t belong here with those guns. I warned you—”

“Yeah, yeah,” said the man, propping the butt of his rifle against his thigh. “And you took a picture.”

“I already sent it to Jaime Nez.” She took a step back, bumping up against Kai. He rested a hand at her lower back.

“Who has nothing better to do than to rush out here and search the woods for us?” The man snorted. “It’s a sleepy little town, I know—but these are big woods.”

Kai stood, and then the hand at her waist served as subtle support. “But it has only so many places to pull off the road,” he said. “And the rangers here know them all.”

The poacher in the back resettled his hat, impatience on his features. “We haven’t tracked anything but the girl since we started looking.”

Quiet land...quiet creatures...

Regan understood, with a flash of surprise, that the land had listened to the events of the day—had listened through Regan. Had soothed and quieted its own creatures, sheltering them from the dangers wrought by Core interference.

Trying to...

“We saw those tracks down by the seep,” said the smallest of them, protest in his voice.

Kai’s weight wobbled against her, stabilized; he suppressed a faint grunt of pain.

“And nothing since, and he’s goddammed right about the rangers. If they start looking, it won’t take them long to find the truck. Doesn’t matter how far we went up that crummy little access road.”

Kai put his hand on the back of her neck—skin on skin. It felt cooler than it should have, weighing heavily upon her, even while seeming a casual touch, and it made her intensely aware of his struggle to hide his pain. She leaned into him, not quite understanding his purpose—not until she felt the push of sensation. Uneasiness and anxiety, the ominous impression of darkness and shifting branches, lurking dangers.

Kai said, “You don’t belong here.” But he was looking at Regan, and suddenly she understood.
This, too, is something I can do.

She could be a conduit in the other direction. From Kai to the land—instructing it, guiding it. A subtle
no trespassing
sign that these men would never hear clearly enough to question consciously, but to which they would nonetheless respond.

She caught the thread of it, reaching out to the land as she had done not so long before while sitting high on her favorite outcrop. She added her own concern, her anxieties, and steeled herself for the vulnerability of being so open—the sense of grief that came from nowhere, the awareness that her mother had deserved to understand this connection, too.

That they were not victims, but were in fact shepherds of this unique and lingering patch of true wilderness.

Even if it didn’t come without cost.

That emotion, too, went out across the land, combining into a slow ripple of
leave this place
that had its effect.

The smallest poacher swiped a hand over his face, looking out around them. A visible decision crossed the features of the youngest poacher, the one who’d already been the most aware of the lines they all crossed. The most aggressive of them frowned, took a step back...and looked up to find the high sun through the pines.

“Eh,” he said. “Whatever this thing is, it’s holed up by now. Besides, it’s been eating chickens, and I don’t see any of those here. We’ll see if the Delgado orchard wants us to stake their place out. It’s been there twice already...it’ll be back.”