Lynx Destiny (9 page)

“Like this,”
she said, “means that I’m feeling overwhelmed. There’s a difference between kissing a guy I’ve only recently met and...what just happened. How
much
it happened.”

He watched her with a quiet intensity that made her want to squirm away—even as her body cried,
Yes! That’s what I want!
He asked, with more caution than she expected, “Is that good or bad?”

“It means I don’t know what to do.” She shook her head, climbing to her feet. “You are a strange man, Kai Faulkes.”

He lifted one shoulder in what looked like concession, still sitting—more comfortably now, she thought—as he drew his knees up, hung his arms around them and looked up at her. “About yesterday,” he said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

Yesterday. At the library, when she’d been so busy enjoying being with him that his prying had felt like a slap. “It was nosy.”

“Maybe. But it’s important.”

She gave him a cross look. It seemed altogether unfair that this gorgeous and entirely out-of-place man could stir her up so when she had so many other things to think about. “I don’t see how it could possibly be
important.
”

“Because it’s still with you. Because there is a thing between the two of us, and I want—” He shook his head, looking at a frustrated loss for words.

She knew the feeling. “That’s no excuse.”

He didn’t argue it. “You felt it, too, just now.”

Yes. She had.

Much as she wanted to deny it, as much as it frightened her, she had. And there he was, watching her...and understanding. Comfortable with it, comfortable with himself. Comfortable
here.

Not out of place at all. More
in
place than anyone she’d ever known. Including herself.

Regan knew she should run from this man. She knew he wouldn’t stop pushing. Or asking.

She knew she didn’t want to answer.

Only moments since that kiss—that
encounter
—and she sat back up on the roots, looking over the dry pool. Looking at Kai.

He crouched, one knee to the ground and his fingers pushed against the silty, packed soil, just as he’d knelt beside her—
around
her—but in a different location.
Triangulating.

What and how—
that,
she didn’t want to know. She let herself watch, and let her mind roam.

He remained motionless—his eyes closed and head slightly tilted—for so long that when he finally stood, she came to sharp attention. He took three certain steps into the rock-strewn detritus and bent to prod the ground.

When he straightened, turning to her, he held a small lump between his thumb and forefinger, his distaste palpable as he displayed it for her. She squinted. “What—?”

“The reason I kept bleeding,” he said.

The bullet.
She said carefully, “That’s what bullets
do.
Make people bleed.”

A few long strides and he stood below her—reaching up for her hand and to tuck the bullet away there, closing her fingers around it. “Do you feel it?”

She gave him a look. “Of course I feel it.” Cool hard metal, a misshapen lump that could have been lethal.

“No,” he said, looking up at her with meaning in his gaze, one she couldn’t comprehend. Just clear, dark blue eyes searching hers. “Do you
feel
it?
Hear
it?”

She understood, then—knew he alluded to that sensation of being swallowed by someone else’s thoughts. She opened her hand; the spent bullet tipped off her fingers to hit the ground, rolling down between his bare feet. “No,” she said. “It’s a
bullet.
”

Disappointment flickered in his eyes—not that she’d failed to feel anything, but that she’d rejected the chance to try. As if she
wanted
to invite the madness. He plucked the bullet from between long-dead twigs and pine needles. “It is more. Much more.”

She opened her mouth, not quite sure what to say. Wanting to tell him to stop pushing, wanting to ask him what was going on. But in the end she asked him nothing.

The problem was—he might tell her.

Chapter 8

“D
ad, it’s me.” Regan rolled her eyes at her father’s gruff voice mail message, but not too hard. He’d had eyes in the back of his head when she’d been young and he could no doubt still perceive an eye roll across the miles and over the state line into Texas.

El Paso, it turned out, not only held her uncle’s home—it had a fantastic physical therapy facility. And if there was one thing she and her father both understood, it was the critical nature of his recovery from injury. In order for him to continue his life here—alone—he had to put himself back together right. Better than right.

He’d been twenty-five when she was born. Now she was pushing thirty and he was still a man in his prime, but this was no place for a man—or woman—who couldn’t hold his own against winter snow, the woodstove, or the long hike off the mountain if the truck didn’t start.

Somewhere along the way, her father had discovered cell phones and voice mail. But he still clearly wasn’t entirely comfortable with either. “Leave a message!” he’d barked as a recording, making his dare.

Regan just might have rolled her eyes after all. “Everything’s fine here, so stop worrying. I’m going to guess everything’s fine there, too, but if I don’t hear back from you I’m going to call Uncle Cal and we’re going to talk about you behind your back. Your choice. Meanwhile, I need to know if you’ve talked to a Realtor named Matt Arshun. I found his card on your desk, but surely if you were thinking of selling this place, you’d mention it to me?”

If only as a kind of blackmail to get her back down here, very much as this trip to Texas had been.

“Call me,” she added quickly before the voice mail cut her off. “Love you!”

He’d pretend not to hear that. He’d never quite forgiven her for leaving.
You can paint anywhere,
he’d told her.
What happened to your mother won’t happen to you.

After her mother had died, her father had finally stopped asking. But never stopped wanting.

Regan supposed that if she’d moved back home—had done so for good—then maybe her father could convince himself that he was right all along. That he hadn’t waited too long to get her mother help.

That this mountain had nothing to do with her mother’s death after all.

Regan might have been convinced, too. If only she couldn’t hear the whispers in her head.

* * *

Kai sat at the top of the ridge, well over nine thousand feet high...not quite the high point in the Sacramento range, but close to it. He crossed his legs on his blocky limestone perch and turned his face to the sun, soaking in the warmth—still uneasily sensitive from what Regan had stirred in him earlier.

From here he could see the world.
His
world. From here, the air was clear, without scent of Core or even of human. Cloudview lay tucked away several ridges over; those few who lived between were so ensconced beneath the trees as to be invisible. Off to the northeast, the Mescalero Apache reservation resonated with its own unique energy—a boundary Kai respected too well to breach, even from a distance.

He once again ran his fingers over the stiff paper of his father’s letter.

Yes, Kai, it’s me.
It was the first line in his father’s letter, as if Aeron Faulkes had anticipated Kai’s disbelief—the thick natural paper beneath his fingers, the firm press of the pen into flax fibers, the lingering scent of his family, as if Aeron had had them each hold this letter in turn before sending it. Kai as human could barely perceive it—but the lynx had had no trouble.

I’ve had a friend mail this.
We live nowhere near the postmark. Neither does our friend.

That much came as no surprise. He’d noticed the postmark, but had immediately discarded the notion that his family—his mother, who also took the lynx; his father, who showed his wolf strongly even if he didn’t take the change; his sister, Holly, who hadn’t been old enough to know, but whose black hair and blue eyes and playful nature had mirrored Kai’s at that age—had somehow ended up in the heart of Detroit.

I hope you’re well, son. I can’t tell you how much we miss you.

And Kai put the letter aside again, blinking fiercely into the sun—wishing he had as much skill with distance and time and interpersonal connection as he did with the land. Trying to make it so, with that moment of welling grief and intensity of purpose.

I love you, too.

Unlike Regan, he hadn’t chosen to separate from the only family he knew. And now, in his prime, he felt the weight of unfulfilled responsibility. The need to keep his mother safe, his father supported...his sister free of attention her beauty would bring.

Not that he even knew what she looked like anymore. Or that he wasn’t aware of the irony of their situation—that just as he was safer here, on his own, they were safer without him.

I wouldn’t break our silence without good reason, so let me just say that we’re all well.

Of course he wouldn’t say more. If the letter had been intercepted...every detail would be a clue.

We still live apart, but that doesn’t mean I don’t hear things. You need to know that the others have developed something new.

He had no trouble interpreting those words. His family hadn’t officially joined with the Sentinels of their brevis region, but his father must have a contact. Risky enough at that. And
the
others
could only refer to the Atrum Core.

They consider their development to be virtually undetectable. Silent.

And this was the reason his father had broken silence. This one sentence, impregnated with so much meaning.

The Core had a new weapon—something important enough to make them bold. Bold enough so they were branching out, pushing boundaries...moving into new territory. Willing to push around the civilians they encountered in the process, in direct defiance of the single directive shared by both Core and Sentinels—
don’t be seen; don’t risk exposure.

And the new weapon was something the Sentinels couldn’t find. Not readily. After millennia of tracking Core activity by the distinct stench of their unnatural workings, the effluvia they left behind...when it came to this development, the Sentinels were blind.

The Core would stop at nothing to keep them that way.

But Kai wasn’t blind. And when it came to the Core, Kai would never be blind.

He was the one who could detect whatever the Core had created—the
only
one. The one who could make the difference.

His father didn’t say as much. But this letter...this letter was giving him a choice. This letter was giving him permission.

Do what you have to do. We support you, whatever the consequences.

Including those to his family.

Kai folded the letter, tucking it carefully inside the envelope. He already knew the rest of it by heart—the brief sign-off, the faint dab of his mother’s airy perfume, the spot where his sister had touched the corner. They’d all reached out to him in ways only the lynx would know. When he turned back to the sun, he felt the dry trail of a tear down his cheek and knew this had been as hard for them as it was for him.

Do what you have to do.

How could he even know what had to be done, isolated as he was? Tucked away from the Sentinels and from the Core, protecting his land in the most quiet of ways.

But with the sun on his face, he considered the uproar from the year past—the evidence that the Core was pushing its boundaries, breaking through the ongoing détente to act against the Sentinels.

Exactly what they’d done, he didn’t know. But they’d created a turmoil of activity so extensive, so far-reaching, that it had reached him even here, along with the wave of Sentinel grief that had followed. It had left him gasping and wrung out and without answers—and at the time, had only convinced him that he could never venture down into the more populated parts of the world, where underlying Core activity would simply poison him as a matter of course.

He’d felt, too, the impulse to respond, to stop the Core as he could...to
help.
But by the time he’d been well enough to think rationally about it, the noise had faded. He’d had no other clues, no information...and he tucked it away to ponder until something came along to make it make sense.

One day, you’ll be the one who can make the difference.

His father’s parting words, resonating in his memory more strongly than ever.

The others have developed something new.

It made sense now—what he had felt then, what he felt now.

Do what you have to do.

It made far, far too much sense.

Chapter 9

R
egan had been here a bare week and already the mountains had changed around her, reaching for true spring—though they’d been silent around her for days. Ever since she’d last seen Kai, and while she waited for her father to return her call.

Tomorrow, she’d start to worry. Today, she’d just call them both typical men, not quite tuned in to the passage of time after so many years alone.

But while she waited to hear back from her father, while she struggled to understand her response to the absent Kai, while she realized there were things—and people—about her life here that she had indeed missed, Regan needed activity. So she’d taken the mustang along the dirt road to hunt for signs of egress.