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