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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.
