“What are we doing?” Regan asked.

“Listening,” Kai told her. “Shh,” he said, close to her ear and barely putting sound behind the words. “To learn.” He stroked her hand with his thumb again.

Regan’s hand jerked beneath his.

“Shh,” he said again, coming back to himself. “You’re safe. You’re …” His voice trailed off; he seemed suddenly aware that his head had tipped forward against hers, that her pale gold hair tickled his face and the beguiling scent of it tickled his nose. His hand had slipped around her waist to press across her stomach, and he was suddenly aware of the flutter in her breathing. “Regan,” he murmured, and nuzzled behind her ear.

“Not safe at all,” she whispered. And she turned in his arms, her hand coming up to cup his cheek; he leaned into it as she leaned in to him, her mouth closing in on his.

DORANNA DURGIN spent her childhood filling notebooks first with stories and art, and then with novels. After obtaining a degree in wild-life illustration and environmental education, she spent a number of years deep in the Appalachian Mountains. When she emerged, it was as a writer irrevocably tied to the natural world and its creatures.

Doranna received the 1995 Compton Crook/Stephen Tall Award for best first book in the fantasy, science-fiction and horror genres; she now has over fifteen novels spanning an array of eclectic genres, including paranormal romance, on the shelves. When she’s not writing, Doranna builds web pages, enjoys photography and works with horses and dogs. You can find a complete list of her titles at www.doranna.net.

Sentinels:

Lynx Destiny

Doranna Durgin

www.millsandboon.co.uk

This book is for sweet Belle Cardigan Corgi: PACH Cheysuli’s Silver Belle, CD RE MXP5 MXPS MJP6 MJPS PAX2 XFP EAC EJC CGC. Run fast, run clean and take all my love with you.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Excerpt

Chapter 1

You may have driven my mother mad, but you won’t do it to me.

Regan Adler gazed out at the intensely rugged vista of the Sacramento Mountains—vast slopes of ponderosa pine, towering cliffs and deep blue sky, all nearly nine thousand feet high. It should have been inspiring; it should have been invigorating.

Regan scowled out over that beauty. “Don’t you dare talk back to me,” she muttered at it.

The land said nothing back. After a moment, her sturdy blue roan gelding snorted impatience, and Regan released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. The gelding’s winter hair curled damply under her hand as she patted his neck; he’d shed out in another month or so, but the April noonday sun already beat down hard, and they’d covered only half the generous acreage attached to the Adler family cabin.

For now, Regan Adler focused on getting reacquainted with this place to which she’d vowed she’d never return.

“Yeah,” she said, when the horse snorted again, bobbing his head in suggestion. “It’s not your fault that Dad’s away, is it?” Or that Regan was trapped here, caretaking the place for some unknown length of time while her father recuperated from a back injury with his brother in El Paso. Although he was still a man in his prime, 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.

Another shift of her weight, and the horse moved forward again, placing his feet carefully in spite of the spirit in his movement. She’d already come to appreciate this canny little mustang and his responsive nature; his good judgment left her free to hunt the boundary markers on a land that hardly seemed changed since she’d been here last.

The horse snorted again, but it held a different sound; it came with a head raised and small ears pricked forward. Regan sat deliberately still in the saddle, quiet and balanced and waiting.

Plenty of bear up in these parts. Plenty of tree trunks and shadows and juts of land to hide a bear even nearby.

“Shh,” Regan said softly as the horse trembled briefly beneath her. “It’s not exactly safe to go bolting off through the woods, either.”

Neither ear swiveled back to acknowledge her. Not good. “I was thinking admiring thoughts about you a moment ago,” she told the horse, laying one hand on that sweaty neck—feeling the tension there. “I’m trusting you to keep me safe.”

Safe...

The word eased through her mind, an unwelcome susurrus in her thoughts. Oh, just perfect.

Safe...

“I heard you the first time,” she snapped. “Stay out of my head!”

Even silent, the whisper crawled across her skin.

Regan gritted her teeth. You may have driven my mother mad, but you won’t get me.

And the horse exploded into bucking beneath her.

* * *

Kai hadn’t meant to intrude. He hadn’t meant to alert the horse, never mind spook it.

The woman had been sitting the blue roan with a comfortable grace, well mounted on the compact creature. The sun beat down on a battered straw cowboy hat, glinting off the amazing pale gold of her hair as it trailed down her back in a single braid. She stayed quiet when the horse detected Kai, alarmed at the unfamiliar lynx-and-human mix of scents; she’d scanned the woods, as aware as the horse—and as aware as Kai—of the dangers that lurked in this natural beauty.

And Kai responded instinctively, as he did nearly everything. He imbued his thoughts into the land, making it an offering...a reassurance. An intent to stay silent and unseen, here where he tracked the other recent intruders in this place.

He hadn’t expected her to hear the ripple of his message so clearly.

He really hadn’t expected her to react so strongly.

It put the horse over the edge into bucking, right there on the slant of the earth, a tangle of deadwood to one side and a tight, scrubby cluster of knee-high oak to the other. Not wild bucking, but without footing and without space.

Kai didn’t expect it when the woman came off, either.

The horse didn’t hesitate for an instant. Reins flying, stirrup leathers flapping, it whirled and bolted away.

But the woman didn’t move.

Kai crouched to the earth, appalled...his broad lynx paws spread over humus and twig, his claws flexing momentarily deep, and his concern rippling out as loudly as his reassurance a moment earlier.

Her voice rose from amidst the scrub oak. “I’m fine,” she said, with sharp annoyance. “Now butt out.” The words slapped back at him through the land, a light smack of retribution, and Kai crouched even lower, his ears slanting back and his mouth opened to a silent snarl of protest...and surprise.

He pulled back into himself and did the only thing he could—the thing he’d wanted to avoid in the first place. He reached for the human within himself—stretching out into his shoulders, straightening long legs. He put noise into his feet so she would hear him coming with his human stride, and moved through the woods as though he had no habitual cause for silence—and as he reached her, he pretended he hadn’t heard her earlier words, or felt that stinging slap. “Are you all right?”

His voice came out rough with disuse, a voice with a rasp at the best of times. She seemed to understand him regardless, though she didn’t respond directly, and she didn’t yet get up. She lay tangled in the oak, one bent knee upright and casual. “He was sure there was a bear. You must be it.”

“Lynx,” he responded, before he could think not to, and winced.

She gave him a sharp look from the corner of her eye, but she did as so many others in the outside world did—she ignored that which didn’t make sense. “You know, if you weren’t trespassing, you might not have spooked my horse.”

“I didn’t expect you to fall,” he admitted. “But I’m not trespassing.”

“The hell you aren’t.” That brought her upright, indignation on her face. “And I didn’t fall. I bailed.” She had the fair skin to go with her bright hair, her face flushed from her fall and her ire. “It didn’t seem like the place to go mano a mano with the mustang. Especially not when he was right. There was something creeping around out there.” She fixed him with a blaming glare, her eyes a pale blue in the sun, before she snatched her straw hat from the brush and crammed it back over her head.

Kai rose to that glare in ways he hadn’t expected—a notch of his own temper, the hint of a growl in his throat as he nodded over her shoulder. “The boundary is behind you. Frank knew this.”

“My father?” Something crossed her features, then—a brief inner conflict revealed and dismissed. “He’s not here. But I know our land.” She climbed to her feet, brushing off her jeans—twisting to check her posterior and in the process revealing a glimpse of toned belly and the wink of a stone in her navel.

The shiny flicker woke the cat in him—but more so, the man in him, laying over his protective nature with a new alertness.

She gave him an odd look—and then another, clearly taking him in for the first time. “Seriously?” she said. “You’re out in the middle of nowhere with no shirt and no water and Daniel Boone pants and no shoes?”

This was why he hadn’t wanted to take the human, or to approach her—why he rarely spoke to others at all. What was right for them? What was normal? At least when he slipped into the Cloudview general store, they knew him. He thought they liked him. Outsiders even occasionally hired him as a guide, which was money enough for his scant needs.

So he responded in the way that so often worked— ignoring the question and the implications that he might just be crazy, and pretending to ignore the glint of jeweled fire nestled at her belly button. “Let me help you find the horse.”

She laughed shortly. “He’s probably back at the hay feeder by now. I just hope he doesn’t step on a rein along the way.”

“Then let me walk you back to safety.”

“I’m safe enough,” she said pointedly, and reached a hand for the small sheath on her hip, a weapon of some sort.

But she had no idea. She couldn’t possibly, this woman who didn’t know what he was and yet had still somehow heard him through the land.

This woman who had no idea the Atrum Core recently lingered nearby, encroaching on her world in the wake of increasing activity along the edges of it. Playing with their workings and amulets up here where it was easy to hide, searching for illicit advantage and power, searching for a foothold against all that was right with the world.

Maybe even searching for him.

“Let me walk you home,” he said again. He put some voice behind it this time, letting it resonate in the land between them. Her eyes widened just enough so he knew she’d felt it, if not identified it.

She put her hand back on the sheath...a message. “Let’s go, then,” she said, even as she eyed him with obvious doubt. “It’s a long way back, and I’m getting hungry.”

But she wouldn’t have turned her back to him if she’d truly understood what he was.

* * *

What Regan hadn’t said was “No shirt and no water and Daniel Boone pants and that body?” But it had been a close thing. And in the moments during which this man led the way back to her home—obviously familiar with the land between here and there—she watched not her own path but the expanse of his shoulders, the fine taper of his back and the unique nature of his movement. There lay a primal strength behind his completely unselfconscious grace, and it drew her eye whether she willed it or not.

She spotted the boundary line on the way back in, chagrined to realize he’d been right—she’d wandered over into Lincoln National Forest. But he said nothing, and it felt natural enough to walk in silence.

She stopped them when she glimpsed solar panels gleaming in the sun—her family’s cabin, as self-sufficient and tucked away as any house could be in this modern world. “I’m home,” she said. “It wasn’t necessary to come with me, but I appreciate the gesture.”

He studied her a moment. “I don’t know what that means.”

She almost laughed—until she realized he’d meant it. Then she floundered, glancing toward the snug cabin in which she’d grown up—the careful combination of old-time sensibility and modern tech, so far off the grid and so self-sustaining. “It means I still don’t think you needed to come with me, but I understand that you meant well by it. And now I would like to be left alone.”

“Ah.” He flashed her an unexpected grin, all Black Irish coloring with dark hair and deep blue eyes and features cut with hard precision, an unexpected smudge of kohl around his eyes. “That, I understand.”

He moved away, bare feet confident on the spring-damp ground with its unique and primitive mix of fern and desert thistles, and she felt an instant of regret—but she still took a step back when he turned again, not so much wary of him as aware of him.

“My name is Kai,” he said. “Call me if you need me again. Because you have been away too long, Regan Adler—or you would know why I needed to walk you here.”

And what was that supposed to mean? She frowned, and she would have asked him—but he’d taken her dismissive words to heart and he had the long casual strides to act on them. By the time she might have opened her mouth, he was into the woods and gone, and she was left awash with conflicting impulses—and with the sudden realization that he’d called her by name, when she’d never given it to him at all.

And then she stared into the apparently empty woods just a little bit longer, her eyes catching on a flicker of there-and-gone-again light—tumbling blue-white shards of energy that made no sense in this day of bright sky and clear spring sunshine overhead.

Safe...

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said out loud. “There wasn’t anything safe about him. Not a single damned thing.”

No one had anything to say about that.

* * *

By the time she’d located the mustang grabbing hay from the wrong side of the paddock’s corral panels, unsaddled him and groomed him and inspected both horse and tack for damage, Regan’s stomach growled with ferocity and she ached with stiffening bruises.

She’d told Kai the truth—she’d bailed from the sturdy little horse. Bailing was better than waiting for him to hit a tree or catch a hoof in the uneven ground, and it was better than falling—it meant controlling the circumstances...controlling the landing.

But there had still been a landing out there on the side of the mountain. Ow.

She finally slipped in through the tiny mudroom and through the kitchen to the bright splash of sunshine in the great room, thinking about the big homemade cookies her father had left in the freezer. But when she saw through the picture windows to where the mountain fell away from the front of the house, she didn’t withhold her groan at the unfamiliar car sitting behind her father’s old pickup.

Her father’s cat responded with a flick of his tail from his sprawling perch in the sunny bay window; outside, her father’s old dog waited for his master’s return, maintaining his station on the worn wooden porch.

She took her cue from the dog, who would have greeted a friend. A glance showed her the shotgun leaning quietly in the corner closest to the door; she left it there as she headed outside, but she kept it in mind.

The people here on this mountain were good people. But she wasn’t expecting anyone, and the man exiting the car hardly had the look of a local. Not with the expensive cut and perfect fall of his suit coat and slacks, or the heavy silver at his ear and wrist—or the affectation of his tightly slicked back hair and the short gather of it at the nape of his neck.

Bob the Dog regarded the man’s approach with disapproval, his tail stiff, his gaze flat and staring—and a little growl rising in his throat.

Maybe it was the dog’s reaction that made Regan cross her arms as she waited on the porch, a less than friendly demeanor. Maybe it was the little whisper of unease she felt, not knowing if it came as an irrational little inheritance from her mother or her own common sense.

Maybe it was Kai’s words—You’ve been away too long—or his insistence on walking her home.

Maybe she was just cranky, and not expecting company.

The man smiled, stopping a few feet before the open porch, his eye on the dog even as he pretended not to be concerned. “You must be Frank’s daughter.”

It wasn’t an introduction; it wasn’t a reason for visiting this remote little home without the courtesy of a call.

Beware...

Right, she thought back at that insidious little voice. Because I needed your help to tell me that.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “My father isn’t here. If you’d like to leave your contact information, I’ll let him know you stopped by.”

“Regan,” he said as if it wasn’t a guess. “Frank said I might find you here. Is that dog safe?”

“How did you say you knew my father?” Because if you’d been here before, you’d be familiar with the dog. You’d know he won’t let you on this porch unless I tell him to stand down. Once it had been the entire yard—but like her father, the dog had aged.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t say.” He didn’t look sorry. He looked aggrieved that she hadn’t simply welcomed him inside. “I’m with Primary Pine Realty. My name is Matt Arshun.” He pulled a business card from his inside suit pocket, holding it out between his first and second fingers. “Your father contacted me about listing this property.”

The shock of it made her chest feel empty; she found herself momentarily speechless. She hadn’t wanted to come back to this place—but she hadn’t realized until that moment how much it was still part of her. Deep in her mind she heard a wail of denial...and she didn’t think it was hers.

I am not my mother.

She caught a flash of satisfaction on the man’s face, as if she’d told him something he hadn’t been sure of until this moment. “I was hoping to take a look around.”

She shook her head; hidden by her crossed arms, her nails bit briefly into her palms. “I wish you’d called first. You could have saved yourself a trip. This isn’t a convenient time.”

“When should I come back?”

Never. But she managed to not say it out loud. “Leave your card in the delivery box at the end of the drive,” she told him. “I’ll call you when I’m ready.”

He’d been ready to hand her the card. He gave the glowering dog between them a second glance and shifted his weight back. “I was hoping to move on this property,” he said. “Vacation property in the high country has only a seasonal interest.”

“Leave your card,” she told him again. “Or don’t, if the delay is a problem for you. It’s all the same to me.”

“Maybe you should call your father,” Arshun said, tipping the card between his two fingers and finally dropping it to the porch. She stood behind the dog until Arshun got into his luxury car, slamming the door even as he started the powerful engine. There wasn’t much gravel left on the driveway surface, but he managed to spit some out behind his wheels anyway.

Bob the Dog looked over his shoulder at her, his tail wagging faintly in question. Part cattle dog, part Labrador, part huge...a good friend to her father, and still unfamiliar to Regan. She patted his broad head. “Good boy,” she said, and her legs suddenly felt just a little bit wobbly. She sat down beside him, letting her feet hang over the edge of the porch. He didn’t lick her or demand attention; he just was—a stolid old dog sitting beside her.

It would have been presumptuous to lean on him, in his aloof dignity. She settled for leaving her hand on his back.

She’d call her father; she’d find out about the Realtor, and her father’s intentions. But that was the least of her wobbly reaction—and he couldn’t truly tell her what she needed to know.

For if her father could offer her answers about the whispers, if he could offer reassurance...she never would have left this place. And if he’d had any true idea how deeply the land and its whispers gripped her, how insidiously it threaded its way back into her being, he never would have asked her back.

She had an unbidden flash of an image in her mind—Kai, moving through the woods. Kai in his rough deerskin leggings and barefoot confidences, his quietly primal intensity, his sinuous strength.

And she suddenly thought he was the one who might understand.

* * *

She has no idea.

Kai sat on an outcrop between Regan’s land and his own territory, scowling inside. She has no idea.

Then again, neither did he. Not really. He’d never dealt directly with the Core; he only knew of them—just as he knew of the Sentinels and their Southwest Brevis to which he might well have belonged as a full-blooded field Sentinel. Within the past year he’d felt several periods of activity—a swell of Core workings affecting distant Sentinels and reaching him even here; a cry of grief that had resonated through the land, fading by the time he recovered from it well enough to go looking for clues. A thing of weeping and nightmare intensity that had left remarkably little trace but had left him increasingly wary.

The Core had changed the game somehow, and even in his isolation, Kai knew it.

He knew more of their mutual history: that the Sentinels had started two thousand years earlier with a single druid, a man who had channeled earth energies into the discovery of his inner self. His animal form.

The druid’s half brother—a man sired by a Roman soldier, utterly without power—began an immediate quest for ways to control his sibling. That quest had been fueled by fear and jealousy...and these millennia later, had resulted in two worldwide organizations locked in an endless cold war. The Sentinels protected the land, as they always had—just as Kai did. The Atrum Core coated their activities in a righteous manifesto—keep the Sentinels in check—and used it to justify stolen power and corrupted energies. The need for secrecy kept both factions running silent, but lately...

Lately Kai had felt the Core pushing at his world. More activity from their workings, more touches of their presence. His lynx had become uneasy; his human knew to listen.

For they were here.

His family had brought him to this high, remote place because of his innate ability to detect even the faintest Core workings and presence. They’d hidden him here, trained him here...kept him apart from both Sentinels and Core.

That sensitivity was the reason they had finally left him here, drawing away the danger while he plunged into a life alone, always remembering their words. One day...

One day, you’ll be the one who can make the difference. Until then, they can’t know of you.

Kai had been satisfied with his life. By guiding people through these forests, he made sure they treated the land properly along the way. He knew which elk herds needed to be thinned; he knew where the coyote population had tipped out of balance. He knew where people were stupid enough to leave food out for bears, and how to discourage them.

Here, where the world still ran high and wild, he kept things right.

But maybe that wasn’t enough any longer.

If the Core had any true clue of him—of what he could do, or that he was unique in his ability to do it—its minions wouldn’t be tramping so freely on his chosen turf. He’d stayed silent, circling quietly around their insidious invasion—seeking to understand what they were doing in a way that no one else could. Once he did, it would be time to reach out to the Sentinel regional headquarters at Southwest Brevis. To let them know, finally, that he was here...and so was the Core.

But then Regan Adler had come back to the Adler cabin.

She reverberated through her land, whether she knew it or not.... She reverberated through him. She had an awareness that wouldn’t allow her to go unnoticed by the Core—or for them to go unnoticed by her. She had a vibrancy and determination, bouncing up from the ground to challenge him while the sturdy little horse bolted away—perfectly aware that she faced something not quite tame. And she had no idea how dangerous it would be to interfere with him...with the Core.

Yes, Regan Adler changed everything.

For one thing, she had already changed him.

Chapter 2

The day after she ran into the mysterious Kai, Regan stuffed her pockets full of surveyor’s tape, added a water bottle to her belt, jammed her feet into her riding sneakers and headed out to walk woods full of spring warblers and morning song, stout walking stick in hand.

He’d been right, Kai had. She’d been over the boundary of their acreage. And if she didn’t know where those lines ran, then she needed to find out—especially if the word had gotten out to real estate agents that her father might sell.

After all, she needed to know just where she could kick them off the land. At least until she confirmed what Matt Arshun had said—and so far, all she’d found was a business card identical to the one he’d given her, tucked away in her father’s desk.

Arshun was, she thought, overstating his case.

She poked the walking stick in between some downhill roots and used it to steady her descent, heading for the first boundary tree. A rare dew soaked her high-top riding sneakers, adding to the chill of the morning.

Rae...

“You must be kidding,” she muttered, more incredulous than she liked. Ten years away from the cabin, illustrating Southwest specialty guidebooks and selling fanciful little paintings on the side, and she’d lived in blessed silence. But less than a week after her return, that silence had broken. And not with the little nudges and intuitions she’d denied having as a child—denied hard, in the wake of her mother’s breakdown—but with actual whispers.

Less than a week after her return. But even then, she’d had silence until the previous day.

Until Kai.

As if that made any sense at all. She steadied herself on the rugged bark of a ponderosa, scraping through the prickly, hollylike leaves of a scrub oak. Kai. A man who knew the land—better than she did at this point. A man who dressed the part—who surely had resources nearby, to have come out bare-chested and without a canteen. Barefooted.

Primal.

And she’d first heard those whispers only moments before her horse dumped her—I bailed, dammit!—and then he’d appeared, full of apology.

Since when did the savvy little mustang spook at a man in the woods?

Too many questions.

Rae...

God, was that her mother’s voice, using her childhood pet name? Whispering into her head? Or had this place simply stolen so much from her mother that now it sounded like her?

“You can’t have my life,” she told it, a snarl of defiance—and didn’t know if she was talking to the land, or to herself. To whatever had started inside her that would slowly erode her sense of self until she didn’t know where she started or where she ended.

Beware...

Regan stopped, cocking her head to the sudden change. That had certainly not come from within—that sense of alarm and foreboding. It hadn’t been part of her morning so far at all, no matter the unsettled nature of her ruminations.

She turned from it, just as she had turned from the affectionate greeting—she did what she’d always done in these unsettled moments, reaching out to the artist within herself. Her practiced eye found the beauty in the stark lines of a fallen tree, the sharp shadows of the morning and the contrast of the orange-brown pine bark against the ferns splashed across the rugged slope. She picked out shape and detail, and her hand twitched, reflexively reaching for watercolors, for oils...for a smear of pastel in a wild, expressive movement.

By the time she saw the boundary tree, she’d almost forgotten why she’d come out here in the first place.

But as she pulled the flutter of stretchy, orange tape from her pocket, ready to take another wrap around the tree, the warning sensation hit her again. Stronger.

BEWARE...

She didn’t snap back at it this time, or wonder at it or even resent it. She simply reeled in it, alarm twisting the pit of her stomach, and her fingers tightening over the tape.

It didn’t matter that it wasn’t her alarm. It was still real. And it felt like...

A cry for help.

* * *

Beware...

The whisper of warning slapped within Kai, reverberating...and bounced back out to the land. With it came a twist of pain, and a still unfamiliar but unmistakable taint.

The Atrum Core.

After a moment there came a faint echo of awareness—one that would have been imminently welcome had it not been for the Core presence. Regan Adler, not far away.

Kai moved out as lynx, broad paws stepping through dew, a luxury in the desert. Ration your lynx, his family had often told him. Keep your balance.

But that had been long years earlier, before his family had left him here to survive with a home carved out of the mountains, a bank account rarely touched and the weepy enjoinder that neither the Core nor the Sentinels could ever know what he could do. What he was.

If the Sentinels knew, the Core would know. And if the Core knew, they would stop at nothing to kill him.

That didn’t mean Kai would let them slink in here to poison the land. He moved through the shadows of the morning, staying on the cool north slope where the vegetation ran thicker, the dew lingered longer and the ground sank beneath his feet. The sickening vapor of Core workings swirled around them all, skimming the ground like a living fog. Kai lifted his lips in a silent snarl, flattening whiskers—cursing, as he could while lynx. The ugly energy held no structure, no directive, and Kai could discern no purpose behind it.

But by the time he’d circled along the slope and curved into the sparser cover of the southeast exposure, he had a good idea where it came from. He planned his steps accordingly—and his temper rose with each.

They weren’t quite over the boundary and onto Adler land. But they were close. They’d found the spot where the dry creek spilled out near the dirt Forest Service access road; like many before them, they’d followed that rocky path uphill to the spot where it spread wide—where rainwater and snowmelt sometimes pooled and where Kai himself often slaked his thirst as both human and lynx.

Kai had been patrolling that spot for years. Careful hikers—those who packed out what they brought in—he left alone. Careless hikers...

One way or another they didn’t stay.

Kai didn’t plan for the Core to stay.

He found them arrayed around the dry pool, the ground scuffed around them and rocks carelessly overturned. There were three of them—the first of the Core he’d ever seen. He watched them for some moments, paws spread wide over the ground, short tail restless—lashing as it could.

It surprised him that they were so recognizable. Big, beefy men, one of them in a suit with an expensive sheen and fall of cloth, the other two in serviceable black slacks and dark gray short-sleeved shirts under identical black jackets. They all bore silver at their ears, silver on their wrists and fingers, and dark olive skin tones that owed nothing to the sun. The suited man had his dark hair pulled back in a short club at his nape; the other two wore utilitarian styles, long enough to lick at their ears and collars.

And while the suited man watched, the others were hard at work. Two large metal cases lay by the side of the dry pool, open to reveal padded, sectioned interiors. One case still held its original contents—gleaming piles of dark metal, glinting dully in the uneven trickle of light through the overhead pines. Kai narrowed his eyes, finding it painful to focus on those metal disks for reasons he couldn’t discern; his lynx’s vision preferred motion to stillness and muted colors into smears of similarity, but never had it simply slid away from an object under examination.

He quit trying and focused on what they were doing, instead.

Not that it made any more sense. Loose piles of the metal disks sat one off to the side in the dry pool, and Kai couldn’t see so much as feel it steaming with the same dark and desultory emissions that now crept over the land.

The men gave it a wide berth, murmuring to one another as they moved efficiently around a second pile, placing additional disks to make four enclosing corners while the suited man uttered short directives.

Kai growled into the morning. Deep in his chest. Deep in his heart. The suited man’s head jerked up; he’d heard it. He heard it again when the land picked up the sound, rolling it along the slopes and down the dry creek bed. The other two heard it as well, stopping their work to look around.

The suited man spoke sharply to them, his manner peremptory. But as they returned to work, he also pulled out a gun, scanning the woods above and around them.

Kai growled again. He imbued it with threat and intent and sent it out through the living forest, letting the trees thrum with it.

You are not welcome here.

The two men stood, backing away from their work to join the third in searching the woods—and distracting him in the process. Kai took advantage to slink closer, paws spread wide and silent on the ground, long legs coiled beneath him.

“There aren’t supposed to be any Sentinels in this area!” one of the men argued. He was stouter than the other and held himself with stiff awareness that they weren’t alone—and a wariness of the woods that bespoke his utter lack of familiarity. “That’s why we’re here.”

The suited man offered no sympathy. “And that’s exactly why we’ll stay. Now finish cleansing those amulets—we need the blanks.”

Cleansing those amulets... Core pollution. The very equivalent of dumping toxic waste.

“It’s a trick of the terrain!” the suited man snapped at the extended hesitation from his minions. “Sound carries out here. Now get back to work!”

Kai’s tufted ear twitched with satisfaction and no little derision. Sound did carry in these woods—but it carried uphill, not down. If these men knew no better than that, it didn’t matter that they were three to his one. He could deal with them as he had to.

Never had he taken on a human before—never had he used his quick strength to overcome another. But he’d spent a lifetime on the hunt...on his own, whether fighting off aggressive, hungry coyotes or bringing down his own prey. And he’d spent a lifetime studying human disciplines—running the miles to the tiny town of Cloudview and its tiny Tae Kwon Do dojang, where the students accepted him even if they didn’t quite know what to do with someone they clearly thought of as a modern-day mountain man.

But Kai enjoyed the run, and he enjoyed the discipline—and besides, he had to return his library books.

All these men had to know of him was that he would—and could—stop them. Core minions, his father had called such men, with a wry twist of his mouth that told Kai he might well be disrespectful of them, but he was nonetheless wary.

Kai let his growl roll across the land, a twist of threatening yowl in the undertones. Not quite big cat...but big enough. He didn’t want them here...the land didn’t want them here. Surely, together they could—

Concern. Resistance. Intent.

But that wasn’t the land whispering to him now. It was Regan.

He’d grown too used to the undertones of the voice she didn’t seem to know she had...he’d let her grow near without paying heed.

And she had no idea who these men were. If they had active amulets, they could sicken her and she wouldn’t even know what was happening.

If they were looking for trouble, they could do worse.

They hadn’t yet seen her, but she wasn’t far. Her bandanna-print shirt flashed brightly between the tree trunks; her walking stick seemed a token thing.

She looked, for that moment, a wild thing—just as at home in the woods as he was. The shadows muted the bright gold of her pale hair; she moved easily down the rugged hill, barely touching the trees for balance on the way past. And for that moment, Kai was lost in her—her presence, her free movement, her resonance on the land.

But only for that moment. For the corruption of new Core poison crept out along the land, and Regan came on. And Kai couldn’t stop her without giving himself away to the Core—not as lynx, not as human. They knew Sentinel as well as he knew Core, even on first sight.

If he gave himself away as Sentinel, it would be the beginning of his end.

Chapter 3

Regan couldn’t believe it. Not on any count.

I did not just follow impulse and voices in my head to find these men.

She hadn’t. Because if she had...

It didn’t bear thinking about.

And what were they doing anyway?

Not burning, although her eyes stung as if smoke hung in the air. But it was something more than mere littering, even if it made no visual sense.

Nor did that undertone of a deep feline growl, something she heard not with her ears at all.

She adjusted her grip on the walking stick—a stout, twisting maple stick, polished by time and handling—and stuck her chin in the air, coming on out of the woods as if she owned them.

Even if she knew better than to get close.

“This is national forest,” she told them, speaking before they’d even noticed her. Whatever they did with their inexplicable piles of crude metal disks, it demanded most of their attention. The remainder of it had gone to scowling up at the dry creek bed.

As if maybe they, too, had heard that threat of a growl.

“Mind your own business.” The man in the suit gestured at the others to continue, pocketing something she hadn’t quite seen. Dark hair, olive skin tones, silver at his ears, and an expensive suit altogether incongruous to his presence in the woods... He looked unexpectedly familiar.

The other two...

What had she been thinking, to brace these men alone?

For the other two were pure muscle, a matching set. And they held twin expressions of scorn while they were at it.

She stayed uphill, standing on a jut of root and rock at the base of a massive ponderosa. Not within reach, as she slipped a hand into her backpack pocket and closed her hand around her phone.

Not that she was likely to have any signal bars in this area. She certainly didn’t have them in the cabin.

“I am minding my business,” she said. “This land belongs to everyone. It’s not yours to spoil.”

The growl sounded not so much in her ears as in her chest, the rumble of it vibrating within her.

Beware...

Right. As if she didn’t already know.

The man in the suit gave her all of his attention for the first time. With some exasperation he said, “Are we going to have a problem here?”

“Marat, do you want—?” one of the muscle twins asked.

But the suited man shook his head. “I’m sure we can come to a quieter understanding,” he said.

She understood, then. They might not care about her, but they did care about being caught. Although, since they’d have plenty of time to get away from this place, maybe they cared just as much about having official attention drawn to whatever strange thing they’d done—them with their ominous disks, inexplicable glyphs digging into tarnished bronze.

She pulled out the phone.

Marat’s expression darkened. “You stupid cunt,” he said, his crude language a shocking contrast to his urbane appearance but not to the malice on his face.

“Take your garbage and go,” she suggested, but her voice didn’t come out quite right—it lacked any ringing strength, mostly because she’d forgotten how to breathe. She’d expected thoughtlessness, not malevolence—and she knew she’d made a big mistake. That these woods, these roads, this town...it had changed more than she’d ever expected.

Kai was right. She’d been away too long.

“Seriously,” she said, trying to hide her uncertainty in a conciliatory tone. “It’s not a big deal. There’s a bear-safe garbage bin just down the—”

“If we’d wanted a bear-safe bin,” Marat said, cruel anger licking his words, “we’d have found one in the first place. Hantz, find a memory wiper. Aeli, grab her.”

Memory wiper? What the—?

One of the muscle twins regarded the open case with dismay. “But these are all damaged workings, or we wouldn’t be—”

“Do it!” Marat snapped, and the other muscle twin unlimbered himself to move.

Beware them!

“Don’t you dare—!” Regan said, the words a gasp of combined fear and outrage as she stepped back up the hill. “Don’t you—!” She stabbed at the phone pad. “Nine-one-one!”

The suited man only looked at her with scorn. “Reception,” he said, a single-word response that called her bluff. Deep in her mind the world growled. If the men heard it, they showed no sign.

The one called Aeli strode across the dry pool—and instead of scrambling back up the hill, she stood fast, struggling to take it all in. Because how could they really care so much about old metal disks? How did any of this make sense?

So she couldn’t quite believe it, and her hesitation left her perfectly positioned to see the strobing flash and flicker of light from the woods behind the men, to feel the burst of relief that certainly wasn’t hers.

And then Kai emerged from those woods.

He ran hard and barefoot, not in those Daniel Boone pants but in a damned breechclout and leggings, his torso bare to the morning spring and gleaming with health, muscles flowing.

Her astonishment must have warned the men. The muscle twins turned; Marat jerked around, his hand dipping into his pocket to pull out that which he’d slipped away upon her approach.

“Gun!” Regan cried wildly, gripping the walking stick like a bat, unable to reach Aeli from her perch. “He’s got a gun!”

Not that it slowed Kai for an instant, even as the gun went off—a thin, sharp report that barely echoed against the slopes. He ducked the incoming blow from Hantz and left the man staggering to regain his balance; rather than charging around to grab Marat’s gun, he somehow flipped his body around and slammed his heel into the man’s chest. Another bullet dug into the thin, hard dirt of the dry pool; Marat sprawled on his back, and the gun went flying.

Kai landed in a crouch—impossibly upright if on all fours, and already facing Hantz again.

“No!” Regan cried again as Aeli jerked around to take Kai from behind. She threw the useless phone aside and slid off her platform of rock and root, surfing the slope down to the dry pool with the walking stick in hand.

Aeli reached for Kai’s vulnerable back—a move of brute force, to yank him away and toss him down—but suddenly Kai wasn’t there any longer. He dropped down to a crouch and along the way his leg whipped out, his low shin catching Hantz just above the knee. Hantz shouted in pain as the leg gave way—and Kai twisted like a cat, back in a crouch and facing Aeli, ready to drive up from below.

But Regan had reached Aeli, too, and she’d found her temper somewhere along the way. “I said no!” she cried and slammed the walking stick down across the meat of his shoulder, close to the base of his neck. Kai leaped out of the way as Aeli fell—and when he landed and rolled, he came up with the gun in hand.

“Sentinel!” Marat spat at him.

“No,” Kai told him, crouching easily, one knee on the ground and the gun not pointing at anything in particular. Regan backed uneasily away, the stick still held like a bat, aware that Kai hadn’t truly needed her and that she might, in fact, just get in his way. “Just myself. But this is my home, and this is my friend. I won’t let you get hurt, either.”

The man narrowed his eyes and climbed to his feet, dusting himself off. “There were rumors of a family here many years ago,” he said, and gestured peremptorily at the muscle twins—a command to stand down, not that either of them had actually regained their feet. “But not for some time. Just as we became interested in them, it seems they left.”

Kai said nothing.

The man smiled grimly at him. “We always wondered why a family would stay apart that way. And why Southwest Brevis allowed them to do it.”

Kai said nothing. Nor did he move. For the first time Regan realized he’d been shot—that blood sheeted along the outside of his arm.

Finally, the man said softly, “My name is Marat. Remember it. You’ll be needing it in the near future.” He jerked his head at his muscle twins, who hauled themselves upright. Hantz limped; Aeli seemed dazed. But they gathered the metal disks and returned them to their partitioned and padded cases, while Marat stood off to the side and Kai waited, still silent.

Regan tried to pretend she wasn’t there at all.

Marat lingered as the men headed unsteadily down the narrow cut of the dry creek leading out from the pool. He eyed Kai with a deliberate gaze, taking in his remarkable nature, making obvious note of the breechclout and leggings and even of his preternaturally quiet strength in waiting. “It would have been better for you,” he said, “if you had not interfered.”

Kai still said nothing. Regan understood it to be not reticence, but that Kai had already said what he’d had to say.

Then Marat looked at her, and she flinched from it, suddenly exposed. She and her stick. He said, “It would have been better for you, too. What lies between us is nothing of yours.”

Her hands tightened around the stick. “I’m here because you were dumping on the forest.” It had been more than that, she was sure of it—but let him think she hadn’t heard that cry of pain in her head. She certainly wished she hadn’t. She wished herself sane and sound and sequestered back at the cabin, her paintbrush smearing deep color across canvas. “Maybe you shouldn’t have been doing that.”

He smiled, and it wasn’t at all nice. “Oh, no,” he said. “I’m delighted at the results of this day so far. And to think, it’s just getting started.”

Only after he’d left did Regan let herself truly breathe again. She wanted to stagger back to the bank she’d slid down and sit against it, waiting out the shakes—but there was Kai.

He rose. If the encounter had affected him, it didn’t show. Nor could she read his expression, though it made her shiver. “You’re hurt,” she said, and then wanted to smack her forehead. Just in case you didn’t know.

“It’s nothing,” he told her, and looked at the gun in his hand as if he wasn’t quite sure how it had gotten there and definitely didn’t know what to do with it. “I heal fast.”

She looked at the dark gouge of the wound and the generous flow of the blood and something in her temper snapped. “It’s not nothing,” she said sharply. “It’s not even close to nothing! And what was that all about—all that stuff about your family and Sentinels and what lies between us—”

Kai said nothing—but he grinned, suddenly and completely, and damned if it didn’t snatch her breath away.

Damned if it didn’t snap her straight from irate to furious.

“It’s not funny! It’s not—”

He took a step closer and she lost her words—she lost her glare, too, her eyes widening with belated understanding. By the time he cupped one hand behind her neck and bent to kiss her, she’d pretty much lost everything but the sense of him standing so close. Clean sweat and strength and the sweet tang of blood—it surrounded her. His mouth was warm and firm on hers, and his hand full of gentle strength behind her head, her body full of quickly rising heat. Somewhere in the back of her mind, the deepest of purrs resonated with satisfaction.

When he took a distinct bite at her lower lip and withdrew, she followed—until she realized suddenly that her lungs burned for air. She pulled back to fill them deeply, staring at him with utter loss to define what had just happened here—from the moment she’d found herself drawn to this dry pool, to the moment she’d so completely given herself to the touch of a stranger.

A stranger who had just fought off three goons and a gun, taking them down with a casual, violent competence. Taking them down with remorseless intent, his every move one of feral potency.

A stranger who stared back at her from a darkened blue gaze and now looked every bit as stunned as she felt.

Chapter 4

The fight had left him less staggered. Being shot had left him less staggered.

Kai Faulkes, thirty years old and never been kissed.

Never like that.

He made himself step back, made his expression rueful and his body still. Because he’d never known such want, and he’d never taken such liberties, and he didn’t begin to trust himself not to take more. He knew not to trust himself—not to trust the lynx that rode so close to the surface.

He’d been warned hard enough.

Regan touched her mouth, her cheeks full of flush, her brows drawn together in a faint frown. “I—” she started, while he was still far from able to find words. “You—” She started again, and then shook her head, impatient with her own struggle. Then she shook herself off, pushing a wayward strand of gold away from her face. “Later,” she said. “I’ll deal with that kiss later. Right now, I’ve got too many questions.”

For this, he met her gaze without flinching; he found words. “I might not answer them.”

“We’ll see about that.” But she scowled suddenly and turned to glare up the hill. “Will you just be quiet?”

He hadn’t heard it—not with his body still immersed in the feel of soft hair beneath his hand and soft lips beneath his mouth—but he understood. She’d heard some mutter from the land, some reverberation of what had happened here. And she not only didn’t understand...it distressed her.

She turned back to him with the conflict of it on her features. “Oh—damn! I didn’t mean you.”

“It’s all right.” But he left it at that, because he didn’t know how to explain his own connections, his own nature, to the first person who might possibly understand.

It wasn’t something he’d ever done before.

Guard yourself. Guard others against who you are.

Lessons once impressed hard on a vulnerable youth soon to be on his own.

Her obvious chagrin at reacting to the land passed, submerged in everything else that had happened here. “That needs care,” she said, latching onto the most obvious need—looking at where the Core bullet had furrowed along the curve of his biceps.

But the arm would wait; it would heal faster than she could imagine. Other things wouldn’t wait at all. For he needed to sweep through this area and make sure Marat had truly gone. No matter what his family had told him about staying out of sight—about what the Core would do if they ever learned of him.

They cannot suffer you to live, his father had said, his arm around his mother’s shoulders, his younger sister, Holly, lingering at his mother’s side, sniffling and confused—their things packed as they prepared to leave him. Never forget.

He hadn’t forgotten. But he was the only one here. The only one who knew the Core had finally infiltrated this remote and pristine area.

“Kai,” Regan said, aiming a pale blue gaze his way with intent, regaining some of her composure—but not without the hint of remaining uncertainty.

Self-retribution slapped home. This woman wasn’t Sentinel; she wasn’t lynx. She wasn’t born to be a protector. She’d been threatened and she’d fought back—but that didn’t mean she wasn’t still frightened.

She didn’t need to walk back to the cabin alone.

She lifted one honey-gold brow, striking a note of asperity. “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re bleeding everywhere.”

It would stop soon. He’d been hot, his system in high gear from the change. Already he’d cooled down, his injury throbbing sharply. Healing quickly didn’t mean not hurting.

Sometimes, he thought, it meant the opposite.

“I’ll come,” he told her. “But first I need to make sure they haven’t left anything behind.”

She climbed up the slope just far enough to reach the root and rock upon which she’d originally taken her stand and sat there, long legs thrust over the side, heels digging into the dirt.

“All right, then,” she said, grasping for an equanimity she couldn’t quite pull off. “But if you faint from blood loss, I’m going to find my phone—” she glanced around, already looking “—and find a signal and call for help. That’ll mean cops and an ambulance ride down the mountain to Alamogordo and the nearest hospital. And somehow I get the feeling that’s exactly what you’re trying to avoid.”

And Kai said nothing. Because Regan Adler saw—and heard—a lot more than she wanted to admit.

Even to herself.

* * *

Regan rested the walking stick against the porch railing, breathing a sigh of relief to realize she’d regained her internal balance on the way home. She was here—she was safe. The encounter in the woods was already fading, tinged with the absurdity of it all, diminished by the physical memory of Kai’s touch still tingling at her mouth, at her nape, at every single spot he’d so much as breathed on.

“So,” she said, as if it had been a casual hike on an average day, “what’s with the breechclout anyway?”

She turned to look at Kai and discovered him no longer just behind her. Discovered him, in fact, at the edge of the woods—waiting in patience and silence, as seemed to be his norm.

Discovered, too, that Bob the Dog had risen to his feet, his hackles a stiff brush down his spine and over his rump. Since when did Bob have hackles on his rump? And though he stared at Kai as he might assess any intruder, she saw no true challenge there—just concern and puzzlement. “What’s up with you?”

His low tail wagged once in acknowledgment, but he didn’t look at her. He didn’t turn his massive head from Kai’s direction, his nostrils twitching as he lifted his head slightly, hunting scent.

“It’s fine,” Kai said. “He’s figuring me out.”

“What’s there to figure? Bob, he’s a guest. Deal with it.”

Kai shook his head. “He’s probably scented me around. He needs to put the pieces together.”

Suddenly Regan understood. “Good grief—Bob, you’re afraid of him!” The hackles weren’t a threat...they were a sign of fear.

“Cautious,” Kai said, by way of both agreement and correction. And he sat, cross-legged, in the straggly grass of the clearing.

Regan reached for the door. “You two figure things out. I’ll be back in a moment.” She headed inside—and though she hadn’t locked the door that morning anymore than they ever locked the door in this remote place, she wondered if that had been a mistake.

She found herself glancing around the cozy living area, checking that the shotgun leaned where she’d left it, that the papers on her father’s desk had gone undisturbed, that the catchall drawers in the little dresser hadn’t been left ajar. And she thought not of the morning as she did it, but of the Realtor from the day before.

Huh.

It didn’t stop her from moving briskly through the house to the bathroom, where she rummaged through the built-in cabinet for first-aid supplies. She pushed aside the earthy ceramic teapot and set bottles and bandages on the tiny, wooden kitchen table before she went to the sink, washing up while she peered out the biggest window in the back of the house to spot the horse in the paddock.

He heard her and called out a suggestion of carrots, completely unconcerned with the oddities this day had wrought so far. Regan toweled her hands dry with a smile and returned to the porch.

She found Bob half in Kai’s lap, leaning that big head against Kai’s bare chest and...

Crooning.

Kai rubbed the dog’s ear with an expert hand, eliciting a moan of canine delight. “Either they love me or they won’t get near me.”

“Well,” she muttered, “he loves that old cat, too.”

And Kai smiled and patted the dog. He pushed to his feet, replete in his breechclout and buckskins, and stood there looking more wild and more masculine than Regan would have thought possible.

Mine...

She started at that—the insidious murmur in her head, offering not just the intrusive, but the unexpected. How did that make sense?

No more sense than the way he’d kissed her—or the way she’d kissed him back, this man she barely knew. Or that she’d responded to his touch as if she’d been waiting for it.

“Regan?”

She spoke a little more abruptly than she’d meant to. “Come inside. Let’s get you cleaned up.” And led the way.

He entered more warily than she expected, hesitating at the door just long enough so she looked back with impatience—and then, once inside, looking as though he might just step out again. His gaze flicked around the room to absorb the homey space, the unpretentious and utilitarian nature of her father’s small desk, the little chest of drawers, the couch and the small television. His expression lit up at the sight of the bookshelves that held not only books, but her mother’s ceramics, and the stark, engaging nature of his features reminded her all over again that he’d reached for her in the woods.

She squirmed away from the thought. She wasn’t ready for that honesty. She still had too many things to hide. From him...from herself.

“In the kitchen,” she told him, and watched while he again hesitated in the doorway, his gaze skimming the appliances, lingering at the window and finally landing on the barely big-enough-for-one table. There’d been more activity here during her childhood—a busy kitchen, cozy with the scents of homemade bread and baking casseroles, freshly washed canning jars gleaming in neat rows on the table....

When her mother was still alive.

Regan pulled ice water from the refrigerator and poured them tall mugs—also from her mother’s pottery throwing wheel—without asking if he wanted it. This might be a high desert with melting snowpack and tall trees and even dew, but it was still the desert. One offered water; one drank it.

Kai took the mug without hesitation, his throat moving and water gleaming at the corner of his mouth. Regan sipped, her gaze drawn again to the play of muscle over his chest and arms, still amazed at the definition there, the casually loose rest of his belt over hips and obliques. Up close—and with the time to think about it—she could see that the breechclout was of a soft, woven cloth, darker brown than the leggings and carefully edged. Buckskin leggings tied off to the belt, leaving a generous portion of his thighs free to the air.

Right.

“Seriously,” she said, clearing her throat as she turned away to the sink. She ran water over a clean washcloth and wrung it out. “What’s with the getup?”

“I didn’t expect to see anyone today.” Kai set the mug aside on the table, wiping the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand.

She gestured at the old wooden chair, trying to decide if he’d been deliberately evasive or simply offered the best truth he had. He sat, unaccountably awkward for a moment, and rested his elbow on the table to offer her access to the arm.

“Right,” she said. “But, you know...why ever?”

He sat silent for a moment, while she smoothed the cloth over the dried blood, dribbling water over the deep gouge in his biceps to soften the clotted areas. Finally, he shrugged. “It suits me.”

Yes. Yes, it suits you very well indeed.

He eyed her, absorbing the curiosity she couldn’t hide, ignoring the press of washcloth over raw flesh to soften dried blood. “You have questions.”

“I definitely have questions.” She pulled the cloth away, and this time he winced. “Ugh,” she said, looking at the ugliness of the wound.

“I heal quickly,” he told her again, but she saw a certain tension in his jaw, and she moved more quickly— flushing the wound, disinfecting it...slathering it with antibiotic ointment.

Rather than wrap an absurd amount of tape over the gauze pads she pressed over the ointment, she produced a faded red bandanna and snugged it around his arm, tying off the corners in a tight and tiny knot. “There,” she said, sitting down opposite him, and didn’t think she imagined his relief.

He might feel differently once she’d fired off her questions.

And she had plenty. “Who were those men? How did you know them? What did Marat mean when he talked about your family? Where is your family? Where do you live? What do you do?”

The gauze packaging sat between them, crumpled and crisp. He rolled the pieces in his fingers, tumbled them onto the table like dice, and flicked them absently from one hand to the other and back again. “I thought,” he said, glancing up at her and then back to the packaging, “you might ask why I kissed you like that.”

She flushed, an instant reaction—not flustered, not regret, but pure visceral reaction. It put a certain amount of self-aware humor into her words. “I’m pretty sure I know why you kissed me like that.” She put a hand over his, stopping the motion—surprising him, as if he hadn’t quite realized he’d been playing with the crackling paper in the first place. “I’ll go so far as to say that if we keep running into each other, it’s probably going to happen again.”

The look he gave her then—all his attention, all his intensity—pretty much melted her to the chair. She managed to say, “But that doesn’t answer any of my questions.”

He held her gaze just as captive as she still held his hand. “I don’t know those men. I do know what they were doing. I live nearby. I don’t do—I am. But people hire me to guide them. Hikers and sometimes hunters. Bow hunters.”

Regan jerked her hand away and sat back, crossing her arms. “That’s the biggest bunch of nonanswers I’ve ever heard.”

It didn’t seem to ruffle him. “Why have you come back?” he asked. “Where has your father gone? What do you do? What happened to your family years ago, and what drove you away from this place? Who are you talking to when you hold your head just so and look far away in your eyes?”

Bull’s-eye. The questions hit harder than she expected they could—maybe because of her instant impulse to respond to this complete stranger with whom she’d fought, who she’d kissed, and whose bloody arm she’d just tended. I left because my mother went mad here and I thought it was happening to me. And now that I’m back, I’m pretty sure that it is.

Wisdom overrode impulse. She huffed out a breath, and chose the only easy answer. “I paint,” she said. “I draw. I illustrate regional wildlife guides and publications.” She looked at her hands and abruptly stood to scoop up the detritus of her first-aid work, including the scraps with which he’d been playing. “Okay, I get it. Sometimes the big picture is too big. But those men...” She shook her head, rinsing the washcloth at the sink and watching the red tint of the water swirl down the drain. “I guess I’ll call the cops. Or the rangers. Or both.”

He stood with a scrape of chair, coming up behind her at the sink. For an instant she held her breath, waiting to feel his hands on her waist or shoulders. And then tried to squash her disappointment when it didn’t happen— because really, what was she thinking?

This man was dangerous in all ways. It struck her anew, clear in her mind’s eye—how he’d moved, how he’d fought—not just capable, but entirely amazing, using his body with a stunning effectiveness. Moving like she hadn’t known any man—any human—could. Not in real life.

Somehow she wasn’t surprised when he responded to her intent to report the men with a simple, “I wish you wouldn’t.” Not when he’d already declined help for a wound that would have sent her mewling to the closest urgent care center.

She realized the water still trickled over her hands and twisted the faucet with annoyed force—one did not waste water here. “Those men are dangerous,” she said sharply. “They threatened me, and they meant it. And they shot at you! Over a little bit of trash!”

“They shot at me because they fear me,” Kai said, and added in a low afterthought, “As they should.” Then, as she took a breath to argue, his hand finally settled on her shoulder. “The police will find nothing in that spot. They will find nothing of those men anywhere.” His hand squeezed gently. She supposed it was reassurance.

She didn’t feel reassurance.

Or if she did, it was entirely tangled up in other things.

Fear. Disbelief. Response. And somewhere, a whisper deep in her mind—one that came from without, and purred with possession and pride.

The whisper believed in this man.

Regan had no idea if that was a good thing.

Kai said, “They will not return to that spot. And they will not come here.”

She turned to him. She should have known he wouldn’t step away—that he still stood just that close to her, although his hand trailed down her arm to catch her hand. “And how, exactly, can you be so sure of that?”

He toyed briefly with her fingers, tracing them, running his thumb across her knuckles—touching her, until she suddenly realized he played with them just as he’d played with the crumpled paper—naturally and utterly without awareness. Her bemusement at it left her completely unprepared for his words.

“Because,” he said, “now they will come for me.”

Chapter 5

Regan hadn’t been convinced.

Kai knew as much, moving along the mountain on broad paws—pausing to inspect the dry pool, his head reeling with the intensity of the energies that had been released there, corrupting the ground, the air...the very essence of the land.

He knew she was right, too, about calling the police. From her point of view, it was the only response to dangerous and inexplicable behavior; he could still hear the impact of her incredulous words. They shot at you!

They had. But worse, they’d gone for her, too. Rather than quietly disengaging and returning to do their work another day, the men had defied the one single principle shared by both Sentinels and Core—that above all, they would bring no outside attention to themselves.

Not that he truly called himself Sentinel. He had not lied to them about that. He might have the blood, but he had no affiliation. No connections. No way even to get in touch.

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.”

Regan stood rooted. “Kai?” she said stupidly.

“Of course, Kai. Nice job you did on his arm, but it’s not holding. I don’t suppose he was willing to visit the clinic.”

“No,” Regan said numbly, aware that this conversation, like so many others since she’d returned home, had gotten completely away from her.

Mary smiled, a knowing thing. “Thought not. I’m surprised he sat still long enough for you to get that bandanna on him.”

“You know him well?” It was an inane thing to say, but her mouth had done it for her.

“As well as anyone.” Mary gestured with the jacket, and this time Regan took it. “He’s a special one. Not a crazy old coot in the making, just...takes things on his own terms. Always seems to be where we need him to be when things come up.”

Regan felt the dampness of the jacket and realized that Mary had washed it for him. She realized, too, that Mary’s words held an underlying message. Warning?

“Regan,” Mary said, casting an eye to the back of the store where Bill would emerge, his homemade elk jerky in hand, “you staying?”

That, too, seemed to have a message behind it, but Regan could only respond to the words themselves. “As long as my father needs me to,” she said. “But I hadn’t planned to stay beyond that.” I have another home now. A life. My work.

Mary nodded shortly, her wiry curls bobbing. “I thought not. Not after the way you ran from this place.” Regan winced, but Mary paid no mind. “Take care with Kai Faulkes, Regan.”

Regan took a step closer, suddenly aware that she didn’t want the toddler’s mom hearing this conversation, either. “But he’s perfectly...” Safe, she was going to say, and then thought better of it. If there was one thing Kai Faulkes wasn’t, it was perfectly safe. Instead, she said, “I trust him,” and that felt right. Solid.

It came with a purr in her mind, and she squelched the impulse to swat at it—swatting empty air would not help this conversation.

Mary raised a meaningful eyebrow. “As well you can,” she said. “But you won’t change him. We know better than to try, those of us who have been here all along. No good will coming of trying—not for you, and not for him.”

Regan understood, then. Mary wasn’t worried about Regan and her safety—Mary was worried for Kai. She shook her head in befuddled protest. “I only just met him—”

And Mary snorted. “He wears your favor.”

“The bandanna?” Regan could only stare at her. “Mary, that’s just the only thing I had on hand, and he was bleeding—”

“He still is,” Mary said shortly. “But you can bet he’d have lost that thing as soon as he was out of your sight if he didn’t want it there.”

Regan couldn’t process it—not what Mary was saying, and not all the things she wasn’t. Finally, she threw her hands in the air. “I honestly don’t know what to say.”

“Of course you don’t,” Mary told her matter-of-factly. “But it’ll all make sense eventually.” Then she lifted her chin, looking behind Regan—and Regan knew that she’d find Bill wheeling up the aisle behind her. “Anything else we can grab for you today?”

Regan took a deep breath, reordering her thoughts. “As a matter of fact...” She dug Arshun’s business card from her back pocket. “You heard of this fellow? Or the office?”

Mary glanced at it, shook her head and handed the card over the counter to Bill, who stretched to trade it off with a gallon-size zipper bag of jerky. As he shook his head, Mary slapped her hand down on the newspapers stacked up on the counter and thumbed one off the top for Regan. “Check in here,” she said. “If they’re trying to pick up business in this area, there’ll be an ad.” She gave Regan a wry and knowing look. “Along with all the others.”

Bill grunted. “If your dad is trying to sell the cabin, he’d best go with someone who’s been here awhile.” But there was a question layered beneath his advice, and concern.

“As far as I know, he’s not,” Regan reassured him. “But I’ll give him a call tonight.”

“And let us know,” Mary said firmly.

“And let you know,” Regan repeated dutifully, and then couldn’t help but smile. For all she’d run from this place, there had been things to miss, too.

“Fine. Now go off and find Kai. From the look on his face when he left, he might just need someone’s ear to bend. Either way, he definitely needs that jacket. Soon as the sun starts down, it’s going to chill up out there.”

“The library?”

Bill grunted again. “Or Phillip’s dojo thing, or with Martin Sperry if he’s in town, or off doing something, somewhere, that needs to be done. But the library is always your first bet. If he’s not still there, Miss Laura will know where he’s gone.”

Laura, the librarian. She’d been a vibrant young woman a decade ago, pouring over art and illustration books with an awkward teenager who couldn’t wait to get out of this town.

Mary shoved the jerky an inch toward Regan, bringing her out of the past. “Now, take this, and welcome back. You can pay for the next batch.” And then, when Regan blinked against the sudden sting of tears, startled into emotion by the gesture, Mary smiled. “Welcome home, girl. Maybe you’ll stay a bit, eh?”

Chapter 6

Regan found the library as it had been a decade earlier—terraced up from the street, bordered by massive local boulders, and set apart from the smattering of homes by its redbrick and white trim.

Kai sat on one of the boulders, legs crossed, a book in his lap and an envelope in his hand. Pensive and looking out over the town below them. She was surprised to see him in jeans—in shoes—and to find that glorious torso tucked away into a dark blue T-shirt. And though she thought at first that he was too immersed in his ponderings to notice her presence, she should have known better. As soon as she was close enough for casual conversation, he glanced her way, the smudge of darkness around his eyes making his deep blue eyes sharp and...

Don’t stare, Regan.

But she thought herself a lost cause.

And she thought again that he wasn’t the kind of man who would smear kohl along his lids, and that somehow, in spite of his otherwise tanned but fair skin, that smoky effect was natural.

She thought she’d probably never quite figure him out.

Then she noticed the book in his lap. “Things that Sting,” she said. “You’re checking me out.”

“The library has internet,” he said, as if that explained it all. In a way, it did. A simple search on her name would turn up her website, her gallery affiliations, her bibliography. Her paintings.

She sat beside him, touching a finger to the glossy pages of the book. He’d been studying a full-page image in the middle-school book, a depiction of a cool desert morning with every possible stinging insect slyly inserted to be found by curious young eyes. Rich earth colors, subtle shifts of color, the luxurious smears of blues and reds so often hidden away in a desertscape, so seldom seen. And each creature, perched on cholla or hidden beside rock or climbing a pale prickly pear flower, subtly limned to make the search easier.

She remembered painting this one—remembered what had been going on in her life at the moment, just as she always did. The ex-boyfriend who’d just learned she wouldn’t tolerate the emergence of his inner bully, the caress of wood flute piping in her ear while she wielded the brush, the pleasure of signing the contract to do the work...the faint feeling of familiar isolation as she buried herself in it.

She remembered feeling young and free and just beginning to believe she would escape what had happened to her mother after all. Realizing that it hadn’t followed her north to Colorado.

“Why painting?” Kai said, shifting the book slightly to share with her.

She took a sharp breath, pulling herself out of those past moments. “Why do I paint?” she asked him. “Or why use paintings instead of photographs?”

“The first is who you are,” Kai said, startlingly sure of himself. “I mean instead of photographs.”

Safe ground. “Because of its illustrative nature.” She flipped to the next page, an Arizona giant hairy scorpion. “It would be hard to take a photo that shows the setae—those bristly hairs along the legs and tail—this clearly. And because we wanted to show the differences between this scorpion and the bark scorpion, I chose some key spots to exaggerate them. Not to be misleading, but to make it more obvious what to look for.”

Kai ran his finger over the printed image—a big, bulky scorpion with a dark body and blunt head, stiff individual hairs bristling along its appendages. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

She started slightly. “That’s not what I expect to hear when people look at this one.”

He glanced at her. “The care you put into it makes it beautiful. It shows respect.”

She hugged her arms, surprised at the tingle that ran along her shoulders and spine. “I think...that’s one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said about my work. Thank you.”

“You’re cold?” He set the book aside, tugged his jacket from her grasp and shook it out to put over her shoulders. “Now I know how you found me.”

“I haven’t been gone so long that I don’t still know the gossip hub for this town,” Regan agreed. She pulled another of her father’s bandannas from the jacket pocket, unrolling it to pick out a piece of thick, spiced jerky and offering it to him.

He grinned and took it, biting off a chunk with efficiency. Regan had to work harder on hers, and for a moment they simply savored the burst of flavor, the spring air growing cooler as the low sun settled farther, the quiet steps on the library walk behind them and the squeak and scuff of the door.

When Regan swallowed, she said, “There was a Realtor out nosing around the house yesterday.”

“He bothered you?” Kai went still in a way that felt more dangerous than quiet.

“Not like that,” Regan said hastily, divining his thoughts from that expression. “But yes. Just a feeling...thought I’d see what I could learn about him.”

Kai’s silence was as good as a question.

“Nothing so far. But I’m just getting started. I’m afraid I’ll have to bother my dad about it.”

“Say hello to him for me.” Kai closed the Things that Sting book and smoothed a hand over the protected cover.

Regan couldn’t hide her jolt of surprise. “You really know my dad?”

Kai grinned. “Frank? Yes. Do you think you’re the only one who walks out into the woods from your home?”

Regan wanted to blurt “Yes!” because when she’d left this place, Frank had done most of his appreciating from the porch with a young Bob. And before that, her mother had walked the land. And Regan herself, but less so as her mother grew ill, and—

Kai closed his eyes, and for the moment his face was full of pain. His breath caught, his body stilled—for an instant, he was everything that was quiet, his striking face turned slightly to the mountain, his body beneath its camouflage of blue T-shirt and jeans a thing of wild beauty.

For a dumbstruck instant, she stared. And as she opened her mouth for a concerned question, she heard it. Deep inside her head, nearly subliminal...the faintest ponderous moan, a sound that carried all the weight of the world.

She closed her mouth on her question. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. And Kai now looked at her as if nothing had happened at all—as if the extra cast of pale strain around his eyes was only an effect of the light.

And while she tried to discern if he’d been in discomfort from his arm or if he’d felt what she’d felt—sooner and deeper, for this man who lived in the land that spoke to her—he asked her, “What happened to your mother, Regan?”

In an intuitive rush, she understood too many things. That her father had never answered this question for Kai, if indeed Kai had asked it. That Kai had come here not to look at Things that Sting, but to check the news archives for background information.

She didn’t quite get up, but the space between them had grown less companionable and more like the stiffness of strangers.

“Look it up,” she told him shortly. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

“I’m here because this is a place that I come.” Kai set the book aside and lifted his arms in a startling stretch, one that took her by surprise both because of its casual nature in the middle of a conversation suddenly turned tense, and because of its utter unself-conscious completeness. His chest expanded; his shirt lifted, revealing a narrow line of unexpectedly pale, crisp hair. When he finally lowered his arms and tugged his shirt back into place, he looked at her. “And I got distracted by your paintings.”

Somewhat savagely, she stuffed her father’s bandanna back into the jacket pocket. “What does it matter what happened to my mother?”

Kai made as though to lean back on his arms, winced, and stayed as he’d been. “It matters to you,” he observed. “Maybe it matters to others.”

She snorted and abruptly got to her feet, shedding his jacket along the way and holding it out to him. “That’s no answer at all.”

“It’s an honest answer,” he told her, scooping up the book and rising in one fluid motion that somehow didn’t involve uncrossing his legs until he was already up. “It’s just not the one you wanted to hear.”

She found herself full of glare and bereft of words—of sensible words. So she held her silence and held the jacket out to him again.

“Just a minute,” he said as if she wasn’t angry at all. Perfectly civilized, this version of Kai Faulkes, as he jogged to the library, briefly disappeared inside and reemerged to join her again. “No ID,” he said upon returning. “No library card. Sometimes Miss Laura uses her own card for me, but I try not to ask too often.”

The enigma of Kai. She told herself she didn’t care, and tried to believe it. She had a righteous anger, by golly, and she wasn’t through with it.

“Take the damned jacket,” she said, holding it out a third time. “I’ve got work to do at home. I need to go.” She’d intended to stay longer—to nose around further. To reacquaint herself with the town and look harder for Arshun’s realty offices. But now she thought she’d call her father first.

Her father, who had known of Kai and not warned her.

Kai might have taken the garment, if he hadn’t stumbled—if he hadn’t nearly gone down, no warning of it on his face and none of his usual lethal grace in his staggering attempt to catch himself.

Regan caught him instead—a quick step, a shift of her hip against his, and it was enough so he found himself again, looking vague and baffled beneath the strain. Before he could object, she reached across his body and took his wrist, tugging enough to turn him—to see what she hadn’t noticed until now. “This should have stopped bleeding hours ago.”

He looked down on it. “Yes,” he said distantly. “But it’s not that bad.”

She glared at him. “One stupid man thing after another. You’re losing all the points you earned this morning, Kai Faulkes. Did you or did you not almost just pass out?”

He seemed to come back to himself. “Stupid man thing?” he said, and not without humor.

“Don’t even try to change the subject. Yes, stupid man thing—refusing to see a doctor, checking me out behind my back, pretending you’re not really hurt.”

“Regan,” he said, “just because a bullet made that scrape doesn’t—” But he stopped, and his gaze jerked back out to the mountain—back toward home. For the briefest moment his jaw tightened; his nostrils flared. When he spoke, it sounded like more of an effort to keep his voice even, and she would have given anything to understand where his thoughts had gone. “That doesn’t make it worse than it really is.”

With reluctance, she had to concede that point. It had been a deep gouge and ugly, but she’d done as much to herself in childhood falling out of a tree. She released his arm—noting with some absent part of her mind that he’d given it to her without resistance, that he’d allowed her to keep it.

She thought perhaps that particular surrender had been a gift on his part.

Now she didn’t wait for him to take the damned jacket—she pressed it into his hand. “Fine,” she said. “But humor me. Don’t drive yourself home—let me take you.”

“I walked,” he informed her. “And Greg Harris picked me up on the way.”

She wanted to give herself a head slap. “Of course you walked,” she muttered, and then glared at him more directly. “And now you’re going to ride back with me.”

He hesitated, standing there atop one of the library terracing boulders as though it had been made for his personal use. Regan slid down from the one on which she’d been standing, and held out her hand for him to follow. He said, “This would be another stupid man thing.”

She couldn’t help the smile that twitched the corner of her mouth. “Right. If you don’t come.”

He sighed in another obvious surrender, and joined her on the road—no sidewalks here—and even gently slid his hand into hers, so they walked together toward the old hotel and its boardwalk shops. And if once she thought he faltered—and if shortly after that she felt that deep, grating perception of something else’s pain, neither of them spoke of it.

At least, not out loud.

You can’t have me, Regan told that voice in her head. You will never, ever have me!

Even if it meant forever leaving behind this world that had once been hers.

Chapter 7

Kai woke the next morning with the feel of Regan’s hand lingering in his and his head full of cotton. His arm ached sharply, which still took him by surprise. But after drawing water from the hand-bored well at the back of the dugout and scrubbing himself down, he flipped the hair out of his eyes and looked at the inflamed wound. Significant injuries healed preternaturally fast—but only to a point. Such healing exacted its own price, and his body knew when it wasn’t worth the trade-off.

Like now.

He glopped on the herbal unguent—prickly pear, sage, and juniper in bear grease and jojoba—that he’d learned to make in his family’s first days here, and wrapped the arm with cotton, tying it off with split ends and the help of his teeth. After that came Regan’s second bandanna, the one she’d left in his jacket.

Simply because he wanted to wear it. And because he thought she’d like to see it.

Not that he had any true clue what women liked or wanted. Only instinct, and a day with the lady Sentinel who had brought him through initiation at the age of fifteen.

You’re strong, she’d said. You’re unrelentingly lynx. You really need more time than this to learn control or you’ll end up hurting someone. Be careful. Never forget.

As if he could.

And then she’d left...and shortly after that, his family had followed.

His gaze strayed to his father’s unopened letter. Some small part of him cursed himself as a coward, but the lynx knew differently. The lynx lived in a world where things came in their own time—where Kai did what was necessary, when it was necessary.

Yesterday, ghosting along the mountain ridge from Regan’s driveway, he’d been distracted and ill. He’d slipped into this home, shed his clothes and rolled up in the nest of a bed to sleep hard and right on through the night.

This morning, the home set to rights and a breakfast of dried fruit behind him, he’d go see if he could make sense of what had happened the day before—heading for the dry pool with the letter tucked away for a later moment.

He should have known Regan would be there and on the same mission.

Maybe some part of him did. For he’d dressed not only in breechclout and leggings—the all-natural materials that would shift with him if he took the lynx—but had also covered his torso with the loose, long-tailed cotton shirt sewn to pioneer patterns and belted with flat, plain leather. He approached the dry pool as a gliding lynx, but Regan—when she finally realized he was there—found only the fully clothed human.

She wore work jeans that fit loosely enough for active movement and yet somehow rode across her hips in the perfect spot to draw his eye—to make his heart beat just a little bit faster, before he even knew he’d responded to the sight of her at all. Her shirt was red again—red with a field of tiny blue flowers—and it only brought out the bright gold of her braid, the pleasant flush of exertion across fair skin. In her hand she held not the walking stick, but a shotgun.

“Kai,” she said, as if seeing him here had been inevitable.

As maybe it had. Given her deep connection to this land, whether she understood and acknowledged it or not.

She said, “You left that handgun at my place.”

“I have no use for it.” He’d carried it as far as her house and left it there with the vague thought that it was a thing of the human world; it did not belong in his. Now, if he couldn’t find what he needed here, he might ask to see it again.

She sat on the throne of roots that had served her so well the day before and looked down on the dry pool, laying the shotgun across her knees. “I guess I had to come make sure they hadn’t come back. Or to clean up after their mess if they had.”

“You would have felt it if they’d come back,” he told her, easing around the base of the pool until the butt of the shotgun, not the muzzle, pointed his way.

She didn’t fail to notice. “Nothing in the chamber,” she said. “You think my dad let me grow up with a long gun in the house, and no gun safety?”

“I think every gun is loaded,” Kai said—not speaking from the perspective of a Sentinel who’d been shot by a Core minion the day before, or from that of a human who’d also been taught gun safety on the way to adulthood, but from the perspective of a lynx who never assumed on the safety of his skin in the woods.

But Regan winced, and he knew she’d taken it the obvious way. The day before way. “How’s your arm?”

“Healing,” he said. He crouched by the side of the dry pool, letting his splayed fingers push through crackling leaves to feel the faint dampness below—moisture left from the spring melt. He let his awareness filter outward, a whisper of a question.

He pretended not to notice when Regan stiffened, lifting her head—searching for what she’d heard without quite understanding from where it came.

“Here,” he murmured, and lifted his head in invitation.

She frowned, not quite certain. He gestured again, and she set the shotgun aside, sliding off the roots to land at the edge of the dry pool.

Kai beckoned her closer and nodded at his hand. “Like this.”

She crouched beside him, slowly imitating his reach for the land—stiff and wary and closed away.

Not from him—Kai understood that right away. From fear of hearing again that faint whisper.

But it wasn’t something to fear. It was something to celebrate. It was something to breathe in and exhale and feel alive about.

He eased closer, his arm reaching out beside hers, his hand covering hers, his fingers gently reaching between hers to touch the ground. “Easy,” he said. “Quiet.” He brushed his thumb over her hand, soothing her.

“What—” she said, her voice at normal volume—and then cut herself off, chagrined. When she spoke again, she did so quietly. “What are we doing?”

“Listening,” he told her.

“Why? To what?”

“Shh,” he said, close to her ear and barely putting sound behind the words. “To learn.”

“I don’t—”

“Shh. Learn.” He stroked her hand with his thumb again, and went back to the land.

Gentle burble of precious water soaking deep, feeding roots, damping ground. Hints of icy cold below, the touch of warmth above. The great, thrumming heartbeat of networked life, scampering little nails...the crunch of a seed, the hull left behind...

And the dark blot of the spot that felt nothing at all. Cold metal, a whiff of corruption—

Hurts...

Regan’s hand jerked beneath his.

“Shh,” he said, coming back to himself. “You’re safe. You’re...” He trailed off, suddenly aware that his head tipped forward against hers, that her pale gold hair tickled his face and the beguiling scent of it tickled his nose. His hand had slipped around her waist to press across her stomach, now suddenly aware of the flutter in her breathing. “Regan,” he murmured and nuzzled behind her ear.

“Not,” she whispered, freezing under his touch. “Not safe at all.” And she turned in his arms, her hand coming up to cup his cheek. He leaned into it as she leaned into him, mouth closing in on his.

Instantly, he tugged her closer, bringing them together so she suddenly straddled his thigh; she gasped into his mouth and twined her fingers through his hair, holding him so she could tilt her head to touch his lips with her tongue, a flirt that led to ferocity and his shudder of response.

He hadn’t planned to tuck one hand under the firm muscle of her bottom and tip her so she could have received him, but his body made that choice for him. He hadn’t planned to tumble over on his back so she sprawled across him—but she made that choice for him, levering him over and freeing herself to roam her touch across his chest and down his ribs and right down to rest where he strained for her. He pushed against her, and his eyes rolled back as sweet, fiery warmth gathered deep within him, beckoning a growl from his throat.

He flipped them around, his hand cushioning her head before it could hit the ground. He stalked her from there, showing tooth and showing prowl and showing the power of the lynx. Her eyes widened and her hands stilled, and suddenly they were two people aware of themselves again, breath gusting against each other’s faces and bodies trembling.

“Oh,” Regan said, as taken aback as Kai felt. “My.”

Remorse hit him—and concern. The sudden awareness that he’d let the lynx in—that he’d been just exactly what he could never be.

But she wouldn’t understand that, either—so he made himself grin, easing back to give her space as he struggled with the fact that in spite of the remorse, in spite of the concern...there was no regret. Only a kind of glory in how much he’d wanted this woman.

He couldn’t reconcile the two.

Regan gave her shirt a futile tug, twisting it back into place. “This is the part where I say I’m not this kind of girl,” she told him, brushing a stick from her hair. “And that I’ve never done this before.”

“This?”

She looked slightly taken aback. “You’re not following the script. Now you say ‘Yeah, yeah, we shouldn’t have done that.’”

He removed a final twig, caught just behind her ear. “Why would I do that?”

Because he didn’t regret a moment of it. What he’d let slip through to her, yes. What they’d done, no.

After a moment, she snorted gently. “Right,” she said. “Why would you? Truth is, I’ve done this plenty. But never just like this.”

Kai wasn’t sure how to untangle that one. “I don’t really understand.”

He understood one thing well enough: never—ever—had he felt what Regan brought out in him. Not as a teen; not in his early years alone. Not when brazen female tourists brushed against him on the town boardwalk, or when the hunters’ lonely wives opened their blouses down one more button.

Not when the Sentinel woman quietly hired for his initiation took him for the first time, unlocking all that was lynx within him—and then stayed for days, teaching him control, teaching him responsibility...teaching him how to please. Mia, staying for an extra several days to do the impossible—trying to show him everything she thought an isolated youth should know about being a man, and about being a man with a Sentinel’s strength.

But not how to love. Now he sat with Regan in the dry pool and caught his breath, his body stuck in relentless and unfamiliar turmoil. This was response; this was pure physical yearning. It was beyond anything he’d learned with that fleeting encounter.

It just possibly was everything she’d ever warned him against.

* * *

Of course Kai didn’t understand. Of course Regan would have to spell it out.

Or else pretend she hadn’t heard him.

But looking at Kai’s lightly furrowed brow, she could hardly do that to him. And still trembling as she was from his touch, she could hardly do it to herself.

“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.

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