Sentinels: Lynx Destiny (Harlequin Nocturne) Read online

  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.