Lynx Destiny (26 page)

Note to us: avoid the Delgado place.

Not that the guy was done—he gave the disturbed ground cover a significant look, and another to Regan’s disheveled hair, her dirty jacket. “Though you might want to keep your eyes out, you and nature boy,” he said. “It wouldn’t pay to get too distracted out here.” He eyed Kai. “You’re the one they were all talking about, in town. They seem to think a lot of you. Just one more freak in the woods, if you ask me.”

Kai’s growl vibrated against Regan’s side, not quite audible...not quite truly human. Definitely not steady.

She pressed herself against him, making of herself a soothing presence. After a hesitation, he squeezed his hand at the back of her neck, subsiding. “Maybe,” he told the poachers. “But I’m a freak who’s welcome here.”

It couldn’t have made any sense to them. But then, neither could the unease that inexplicably assailed them, seeping into their minds, through their bones, through the soul of them, sending them shying away in spite of their intent on capturing—on
killing—
the unique, wounded creature they’d come after.

Regan held her ground as they left, absorbing more and more of Kai’s weight—until they’d gone far enough and she’d taken all she could, and Kai slid down beside her to land with a jarring
thump
on the uneven ground, releasing an involuntary grunt.

She knelt beside him, letting him tip forward to rest his head on her shoulder, stroking along his back...giving him time.

And knowing they didn’t have much of it.

Chapter 24

K
ai lost his way long before they reached Regan’s home, losing himself in pieces to give way to the lynx...to the darkness. Claws scraping, teeth bared, ears flat...the energies of the change roiled against his soul.

Her hand slipped into his, her lips whispering against his ear—words he could no longer understand, but the meaning clear regardless. Encouragement. Understanding. Support he could no longer do without.

She guided him, inexorably drawing him onward, using touch to impress her own strength into him—her determination, her new belief in herself...in him.
I’m here,
she whispered to him through the land.

She had learned so fast. But he still felt himself giving way to the growl within.

“Kai,” she said firmly, no longer whispering. “
Kai.
Whatever they’ve done, you’ve got to fight it harder than this.”

Spongy darkness seeping into his soul—stripping away humanity, turning the lynx wild and just a little bit stupid.

Capable fingers gripped his jaw. “Don’t you dare,” she snapped at him, though there might have been a hint of a sob at the back of her throat. “You pull yourself together!”

He lifted a lip, pushing back in ire more feral than human.

“Think again, buster,” she snapped right back at him, still with that edge of a sob. When her cheek brushed his, it was wet—and the prelude to warm lips on his, kissing him hard. He groaned in protest as it brought him back to a greater awareness of the battle—of what he had to lose, and what he had to win.

“Good,”
she said fiercely. “And I’m
sorry—
”

Which made no sense until she jammed a thumb against his shoulder near the injury. He roared up in the sudden deliberate agony of it, feeling not darkness but jagged, hot lightning.

“I’m sorry!” she cried. “I’m
sorry!
” And then did it again.

He twisted away from her, came up spitting mad and crouched on all fours, ready to strike back and to do it hard—and then blinked, vision clearing, to find himself looking at Regan’s tearstained face. Tearstained and pale and exhausted, her pink day pack sitting off to the side, the porch boards beneath his toes and hands, and Bob sitting back against the rail to regard them both with dignified uncertainty.

She must have seen the sanity return to his eyes; she threw herself at him with a single stifled sob, held him tightly and then released him. “Quick,” she said. “I need to understand how to help.”

“Get it
out,
” he said instantly, his voice so ragged the words barely came together. And then, as she struggled to hide her horror at the thought, he recognized how much he was asking, and said, “Call Phillip,” instead. Wearily, he rolled back to sit on one hip. “Call Phillip.”

That, she scrambled to do—fumbling at the lock, slamming the screen door behind her and leaving the interior door open so he could hear her flipping through the phone book, hear her dial the old phone—hear her frantic message to Phillip’s voice mail. Then she barely hung up before she lifted the handset to dial again.

“Mary!” she said. “Thank goodness. Is Phillip there? Do you know where he is? I
really
need to—” She cut off for a moment, and then said faintly, “What? My God—is he okay?” More silence, and then, with subdued relief, “Thank goodness. Did they catch...?” And finally, slowly, “No...no, never mind. Obviously, it can wait. Thanks.... No...no, I’m fine. I’ll see you soon, I’m sure.”

He wasn’t expecting to hear the phone dial one more time—or to hear her greet her uncle, murmuring words that came with relief. “Give Dad my love,” she added. “And please, this is so important—don’t let him talk to the Realtor, that Arshun fellow? I can’t go into details, not now...but the guy is running something on us. I know Dad trusts him, but...please, just don’t let it happen. Tell Arshun that Dad’s sleeping, or that he’s out in physical therapy, or
whatever.
” And finally, “I know, I know. Blame it on me when the time comes. Okay? Thanks.... Love you, too!”

And finally, the handset hit the cradle, and Regan emerged from the house—no less pale or bedraggled, a glass of water in each hand. She crouched gracefully beside him and thrust one at him, even as she tipped the other to her mouth.

He needed no urging. He downed the entire thing with water spilling over the sides and down his neck and leaned against the porch rails as he returned it to her.

She said briefly, “Someone broke into Phillip’s place and he caught them at it. He’ll be okay—he’s coming home from the hospital tomorrow. And he did them some damage—all the blood there wasn’t his—but there were two of them.”

“Arshun’s people,” he said shortly. “New reinforcements.”

She nodded. “That’s what I thought, though I can’t imagine why they would bother Phillip. Of all the people in that little town, they went to the one who knows how to defend himself?”

“He has the gun,” Kai said simply, struck with the sudden understanding of it.

She looked at him blankly a moment, and then her gaze shifted to his shoulder and back again. “With the poisoned bullets.”

“The ones that carry workings,” he said, by way of agreement. “Do you know if they got it?”

“They never made it past the gym area,” she said. “If it was somewhere else, then...no. Not yet.”

Not yet.

Because the Core would keep trying.

And so would they.

He caught her gaze more strongly, found her pale blue eyes rimmed faintly with red, bruised with fatigue. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I know,” she told him—understanding in her face, as well as renewed determination. “And I’ll do my best.”

* * *

Needle-nose pliers. Shish-kebab skewer. The sharpest of cuticle scissors. Turkey baster. Alcohol and boiling water.

She’d done her best.

And so had he, lying across the old kitchen table with his feet propped on a chair, his hand curled around the edge of the table and gripping hard.

“What if it’s close to a nerve?” she’d asked, stepping back to rinse her hands and recharge the cloth she used to damp the sweat off his face, even in this cool kitchen. “Or a blood vessel?” After all, she’d taken anatomy for her life drawing work, even if she’d gone on to focus on things that stung—or leaped or crawled. She knew well enough how much structure was crammed into that area. “What if I break a clot loose and it goes to your lung?”

And he looked up at her and laughed, though it had come with bleak eyes and between rapid and strained breathing. “If it stays,” he said, “it kills me, and then the Core destroys the soul of this place. It destroys you. If you take me to a hospital, they will kill me. But if you take it out, it will hurt me and then I heal.”

“Because you’re Sentinel,” she whispered, not quite able to say, “Because you’re also a lynx and you do impossible things.”

He nodded, but she’d seen the hesitation in his eyes and bought him time by trailing the cloth down the side of his face and neck. By then he’d settled his hand around the solid curve of her hip bone, a touch both comforting and intimate. “If it happens,” he said, not taking his gaze from hers, “if there is bleeding or if the poison is too deep already, then it will not be a thing you have done. It will be a thing we could not stop.”

And so she used her makeshift probe and her clumsy faux forceps, and she found the damned bullet buried just deep enough to cause its havoc, and she gripped its blunt, misshapen metal and tugged it past broken, grating rib and she wished to hell and back that he would just pass out like a classic Western hero.

But he didn’t. He kept his gaze riveted to her face and his hand slipped down for a bruising grip on her thigh, losing himself in her as best he could while his eyes widened and teared, and the mouth that kissed her so well lifted lips in defiance and showed her the distinct nature of his canines, just ever so slightly defined beyond the norm. And finally, when she’d pulled the ugly thing out and dropped it beside him,
finally
his lids fluttered and his eyes rolled back.

She wanted to let her knees go and plop down into the remaining chair, put her head against his shoulder and cry big hearty stress tears. She thought she probably should.

On the other hand, she also thought she should get moving while he wasn’t really there to feel it, so instead of that big hearty cry, she gently wiped down his face, kissed him right on his beautiful mouth and pulled out the cuticle scissors to trim and neaten the edges of the skin before she filled the turkey baster with the saline eye rinse from the barn and irrigated the wound.

That got him stirring, as she thought it might. She moved quickly now, cleaning things up, liberally smearing on the triple antibiotic from the barn, taping down a thin sanitary napkin in lieu of bandaging. By the time he groaned and muttered a rare, weary curse, she’d taken to sponging down his chest and arms. “Let me,” she said when he pushed vaguely at her. “You’ll feel better, and it’s calming me.”

So he subsided, and she continued her work, running the damp cloth over the amazing structure of his torso, muscles defined and wrapped around broad shoulders down to lean hips, layered over the gentle rise and fall of his chest. She removed the last traces of blood, wiping down the hard curve of deltoid into biceps and then down his forearm to each finger.

When she set the cloth aside, he sighed deeply and opened fully cognizant eyes, bright behind their faint natural-kohl lining. “Thank you.”

“Just being selfish,” she told him.

“Loving,” he said, correcting her. “Being loving.”

It startled her, hearing that word out loud.

Then again, what else had driven her to find him, to batter through the web Arshun had put over her thoughts? To stand up on a rock along the mountainside and throw herself to her instinct instead of running from it?

To face, finally, that from which she’d run all her life?

“Maybe,” she told him. “Maybe so.”

* * *

Kai leaned on Regan not on his way out to the couch, but up the stairs to her loft, with the thick scent of linseed in the air and canvas and easel set up at the congruence of skylight and window, shelves of books and art supplies lining the walls with a dusty hint of permanence in diffuse evening light.

Only one corner spoke purely of bedroom, such as Kai understood it from his mildly curious study of the world beyond his own. A sturdy chest of drawers painted bright yellow with pine-green accents, a bed of wrought iron and piled-on covers, and a closet plunked in against the wall with yet more shelves built up the side of it—these containing a score of carefully placed pottery pieces, all glazed in earth tones with a lacy agate effect.

He had little time to notice anything else, with the heat and darkness still pounding through his shoulder and the renewed taste of blood in his throat where she had, indeed, disturbed fragile tissues.

But beneath that—beneath his certain knowledge that he needed to take to that bed before he simply fell on it—there rose a stinging warmth of a different kind, one he welcomed: his Sentinel nature, finally coming to the fore, and finally channeling his considerable connection to the earth’s energies. Finally, it would overcome the wound that had tried so hard to kill him...and it would do so with a speed that would likely alarm Regan all over again.

She helped him sit rather than fall, flipped a quilt out to cover him, and then quite casually tugged off her own dirty jeans, giving him a glimpse of the tiny glinting jewel at her belly button and more than a glimpse of skimpy, high-cut underwear in bright jade-green.

She laughed ever so faintly at his expression—a little bit surprised, a whole lot yearning. “We have a lot to talk about,” she said. “Like who these Core people are and what they’re really about, and how they did what they did to me, and how to protect my father from them,
and
how we’re going to get them out of here. And, like, why your eyelids are marked and the hair on your chest is...well, like your...”

“Fur,” he murmured.

“Fur,” she said as firmly as he thought she probably could. “But then why your eyes are blue and your hair is black.”

He laughed shortly, barely with the energy to put sound behind it. It hurt anyway, his hand going involuntarily to his shoulder as she settled carefully into the bed beside him, tucking her legs up and under the quilt. She made a dismayed sound in her throat, something not quite a tsk of disapproval, and leaned on her elbow to stroke her fingers through his hair, a blatantly crooning sort of gesture. Comfort.