Lynx Destiny (6 page)

The voice of the land stirred uneasily in his mind, as aware of the incursion as he, in its way.

Now they will come for me.

And they would. But they still didn’t truly know what he was—that they couldn’t hide from him, no matter how quietly they moved. That the merest whisper of a Core working would reverberate through his senses, alerting him.

If they knew, they would never suffer him to live, no matter that the ostensible détente between the two factions forbade such killing.

Kai left the dry pool to wend his way home, slipping into the subterranean structure he called home. More than a bunker, less than a house, it backed up to a tight cave system into which he rarely ventured. Once it had housed his family; now it was his alone—a strange dwelling of pioneer ways and modern innovations, of human needs and lynx habits.

So he walked barefoot past the scuffed hollow near the entrance where he napped when
a lynx, and onto the barely raised wood-plank floor, grabbing a pair of clean jeans from a molded, military-grade footlocker and a plain dark blue T-shirt to layer over them. He stuffed socks into a pair of lightweight Merrell hiking boots and snagged a thin khaki jacket with a slim fit and an urban look to layer over the T-shirt.

Camouflage for a lynx in the human world.

After dressing, he walked still barefoot to the road, satchel over his shoulder, and struck out along the narrow shoulder until Greg Harris pulled his old pickup over to offer a ride.

It hadn’t always been like that. He’d walked the full distance to town many a time—but they’d grown used to him here and trusted him; they’d understood him to be safe if strange. Whether they saw him as a rugged individual or a crazy hermit, he wasn’t sure.... He suspected a little of both. And if they’d made a game of trying to figure out exactly where he lived, it was a gentle game that meant no harm. He was far from the only recluse in this area.

Greg Harris made small talk about his sheep and his orchards, offered the obligatory comments about the weather, the upcoming Apple Blossom Festival and the likelihood of a good season after the winter’s snowpack, then dropped Kai off in the center of Cloudview. With tourist season around the corner and a beautiful spring day of bright sky and brisk air, the entire town seemed to be out putting a shine on windows, trimming back brush and fixing the little things that always gave way before winter ended.

Kai had come into Cloudview for the library, another half mile and one steep hill away. But if he didn’t stop by the general store—an eclectic collection of goods housed inside an old barn—then they’d give him affectionate grief the next time he did.

“Kai!” said the stout woman behind the cash register, all gray frizzy curls and stumpy features in a padded face. “Hey, you guys! Kai crawled out of the woods today!”

“How’s business?” he asked her, having learned the safest ways not to talk about himself.

She snorted, waving a pudgy hand in a broad gesture. “What you’d expect this time of year. We should get ’em in soon, though. The valleys are already heating up. Hey, we just got in a big batch of that dried fruit you like.”

He held out his satchel in query. Mary Wells knew his ways—and she knew the question.

She nodded. “Fill it up then, Mr. Granola. We’ll get your tab started.”

He grinned at her. “The hunters kept me busy. I’ll pay my way.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “You just be sure to keep some set aside. You can’t live day-to-day forever.”

Mary’s husband, Bill, made a throat-grumbling noise from where he and his wheelchair currently occupied the back corner of the store, a lap desk spread with papers and a calculator. “Don’t mother the man to death!”

“Someone needs to,” she said with sharp asperity. “Especially if he’s going to go around bleeding through his jacket like that.”

But for the cant of his numb legs beneath the desk, Bill looked the part of a hale mountain man—more so than Kai ever had. Grizzled hair, grizzled beard in need of shaping, grizzled voice and hardworking hands. He gave Kai his own sharp look, then relaxed. “Long way from the heart,” he said. “Ain’t that the truth, son?”

Kai twisted his arm for a look, surprised. As he’d told Regan, Sentinels healed quickly as a matter of course—far too quickly to pass off as normal. He’d accepted her bandaging in part so he could leave it in place, obscuring the fact that he no longer needed it at all. Now, looking at the spreading stain, he admitted, “I wasn’t expecting that.”

“Pull that jacket off,” Mary said. “Leave it with me while you’re in town and I’ll get it clean. Otherwise you’ll be too long getting around to it, and a perfectly good jacket will go to ruin.”

Kai hesitated, glancing out into the sunshine of the crisp day.

“Better do as she says, son,” Bill advised him. “That sun will keep you warm until you’re ready to go back to your woods. And you
are
going to the library, I take it?”

Kai set the satchel on worn floorboards and shrugged out of the jacket, handing it over with an obedience that, to judge by Bill’s sly look, fooled no one.

Mary eyed the red bandanna. “Someone did a nice job for you.”

“Regan,” Kai said, and Mary’s eyebrows shot up. Kai added, “Regan Adler.”

“That’s right,” Bill said, snapping his fingers a few times as if scaring up memory. “Frank headed into Texas for some big therapy work on his back—he’s staying with his brother. He said something about his daughter coming back.... I’d forgotten all about it. Surprised she’d have anything to do with the place.”

Kai quit frowning at the stained bandanna. “Why?”

Bill opened his mouth to reply, but Mary cut him off with a brisk cluck of her tongue. “That’s Regan’s business, you old busybody. She’ll tell him if she feels like it.” She aimed admonishment toward Kai. “And
you—
you have her look at that arm again, won’t you?”

“I guess I’d better,” he admitted. The gauze had been all cotton; the bandanna had been all cotton. That meant both had been preserved during the change to lynx and back—just as with the buckskin leggings and breechclout, and just exactly why he wore them. But the wound should have stopped bleeding long ago. Maybe he’d done something to it while he was in his lynx form.

The lynx tended to get caught up in other things while on the move.

“Oh!” Mary said, apparently satisfied on that score. “We got a letter for you!”

“A
what?
” Kai said, unable to help himself.

“Sure, a couple of weeks ago.” She glanced up from her rummaging under the counter and gave him a pointed look. “You should come in more often, Kai.”

“That’s right,” Bill grunted, making a notation on his papers. “Whether you need to or not. Just so Mary knows you’re all right.”

Quick as that, Mary turned and gave him a faux slap. “Wasn’t me that was asking after him a couple days ago,” she said, and Bill met Kai’s gaze and shrugged, a “What’re you gonna do?” expression behind Mary’s back as she bent to look deeper on the shelves. “Here we go,” she said, and straightened with a business-size envelope in hand. “Probably one of your happy hunters, don’t you think?”

The hunters usually came to him through Martin Sperry—who handled the finances, checked the permits and vetted the hunters—but sometimes they did try to bypass Martin in hopes of lower rates.

Kai reached for the letter and stiffened.

He knew those stark block letters. He’d always know those stark block letters.

His father.

After fifteen long years? After making it so clear that they could never—
would
never—connect again?

Not after the Core had found Aeron Faulkes those years earlier—not when he’d barely been able to shake them before returning home to gather up his wife, Lily, and his young daughter, and to say goodbye to his son—a day they’d all known was coming. “Kai?” Mary gestured with the letter, concern on her face.

He shook off his reaction and took the envelope. “You’re probably right,” he said, unconvincing even to his own ears. “A hunter.” He scooped up his satchel and tucked it over his shoulder. “I’ll look for the dried fruit. Thank you.”

Mary exchanged a glance with Bill, who hadn’t bothered to hide his concern. But she said only, “Don’t forget to come back for your jacket after the library.”

“No,” Kai said, the letter stuffed into his back pocket only through the dint of greatest willpower. “I won’t.”

His father. His family.

And the Core, back in his world.

* * *

Regan tossed the washcloth in the laundry and ran a quick load, hanging it out to dry and watching the blue roan pretend to have antics over the mild flap of cloth in the breeze. She pondered the garden—should she plant? Would she be here long enough? Would her father be back?—and pulled out her easel, setting it precisely in the best light in her small bedroom studio space.

And then she gave up pretending that the morning hadn’t happened, that she hadn’t attacked a man with her walking stick, that Kai hadn’t been skimmed by a bullet or that her hands weren’t still shaking now and then. She stood by the living-room window to look out at Bob, dozing in the sun, and spoke to the old cat.

“I could head down the hill and take in a movie,” she told the cat, who didn’t care. “I could drive out and get some touristy pistachio products.”

The cat made squinty eyes at her.

“Could check out the garden center.”

The cat yawned and stretched hugely—suddenly a long, flexible thing with claws extruded at almost every appendage. At great risk, she gave its belly an admiring pat. “Nothing stretches like a cat,” she said. “Nice job, there.” She couldn’t help but join it, stretching out some of the lingering shivers of the morning, regretting that she’d agreed not to call the police...thinking it not too late.

Her gaze fell on her father’s desk—on the business cards she’d left out, side by side.
Matt Arshun.

She’d almost forgotten.

Not that she had any intention of calling him. But she’d certainly check him out. She had the feeling he’d be back—and she didn’t want to be caught flat-footed a second time.

She tossed a light jacket into the passenger seat of her bright yellow FJ Cruiser—nothing but four-wheel drive for this area—and headed into town.

Their dirt road took a curving path down to the heavily graveled dirt connector, which took her past the occasional driveway to tucked-away summer homes. A couple of miles out she hit the asphalt, a winding road that ran the edge of this slope face, and which quickly took her into town.

The road had changed since her last visit here, years earlier. More guardrails...mesh screening to the inside of the curves where the rock loomed high and close, and always threatened to trickle down on the unwary. And Cloudview, as she grew closer, held an obvious little cluster of new conveniences—a single mega gas station almost obscuring the old block mechanic’s garage, a mini movie rental place tucked in behind and new improvements to the long, narrow park where the summer festivals squatted, one after the other, during the tourist season.

But the town was essentially what it had always been—a long, narrow crossroads built on sheep farming, orchards and hunting, with topologically terraced layers of activity. Along the south street front the original old buildings—heavy log and overhung raised porches, most of them connecting—hosted Realtors and banks and artisans. Rising up on the next level behind them, vacation cabins pushed back into the rising ground, tucked in behind trees and perched on sharp angles. Twisty stairs, stone-paved paths, and wraparound porches ruled the day...and the decades.

The north side of the street held a layer of more practical things—the elementary school, a bank, a handful of brick and block construction. A steep walk and long, narrow parking lot behind it, the long boardwalk of original buildings offered a historic hotel, an ice cream shop...a hangout for cyclists and climbers.

Home.

The murmur behind her thoughts—the one that wasn’t hers—stayed silent. Regan breathed a sigh of relief and pulled the Cruiser over in front of the general store, where the parking lot hardly bothered to differentiate itself from the road.

Her footsteps echoed hollowly on the boardwalk; the door jingled wildly in her wake.

“Regan Adler,” said a voice familiar across years. “How about that?” And there was Bill, with more gray in his beard and a little more belly in his lap, his ubiquitous clipboard in hand and a pencil stuck not behind his ear, but in his beard. On the other side of the shelves, a toddler burbled laughter and ran with flat, slapping feet across the boards at the murmur of a maternal command.

“How about that?” Regan agreed. Another glance and she found the old cash register counter—and Mary behind it, fussing with a sign for some sort of festival, the lifeblood of the town, those festivals. “Mary. How are you?”

“’Bout the same as I was when you left in such a hurry,” Mary told her. “Didn’t anyone tell you that going away to school included coming back home now and then to do your laundry?”

Regan sighed. “Found a launderette,” she said as neutrally as possible, and realized quite suddenly that if this old family friend brought up her mother, she’d simply turn around and walk out.

Bill must have seen it in her. “Well,” he said, preempting Mary’s next and obvious words, “we missed you.”

“Thanks,” Regan told him. “I missed you, too.” And she had—she always had. She’d just known better than to come back.

Home...
said the murmur in her head, and she winced.

Mary chortled. “Still getting used to the altitude, eh?”

“Boulder is high,” Regan admitted, “but it’s not nearly like this. What I want now is some of that elk jerky I can only get
here.
You still making it?”

Bill’s expression brightened. “Yes, ma’am! Let me get some for you.”

Mary leaned on the counter, her round face watching Bill with satisfaction. “Don’t suppose you could have made him much happier, remembering that jerky. But don’t tell me—you’re really looking for Kai. You’ll find him at the library.” She turned aside, grabbing up the khaki jacket draped over the chair behind her. “You can return this to him, if you’d like.”