Lynx Destiny (23 page)

Whatever Bob had found might still be alive. It might be in pain.

* * *

The lynx hunted. Doubly wounded, unsteady, knowing only instinct and need, it padded down toward easier prey. Domestic daytime prey.

A chicken wandered the edges of a garden plot of covered spring greens, too early to find much in the way of insects, but nonetheless pleased with itself, clucking softly and ruffling russet feathers in the sunshine.

One weak leap, one squawk, one wild flap of wing...hot sweet blood pulsed into the lynx’s mouth.

A human shout followed it back into the woods.

* * *

Driven by irritable restlessness and persistent, jarring pieces of memory, Regan took again to the woods—searching for she didn’t know what. She left behind her painting, voice mail to her father and the faint guilt of her failure to return the most recent calls from that nice Matt Arshun.

On the first day of walking the land, she found an area of trampled undergrowth and patches of dried blood—on the ground, smeared down a granddaddy ponderosa, splashed on low leaves. She found drag marks, too, and spent no little amount of time hunkered down with the rifle over her knees, trying to understand how an event of this obvious magnitude had occurred so close to the cabin without drawing her notice.

On the second day, she found further signs of trespass on their land—a careless cigarette butt, instantly raising her ire—it was the most inexcusable carelessness, here on a land that caught fire so readily.

On the third day, a week after she’d woken on her couch with dim memories of a fall in the woods and the bruises to prove it, she stayed home—and the hunters found
her.

With her father in prep for surgery and her hand never far from the phone, she’d tucked her feet up on the couch to balance a sketch pad on her knees and doodle idle, pointless notes for her
Bats Are All That!
contract work.

Not that her father wasn’t doing well—in fact, better than expected after the doctors had made their inexplicably delayed discovery of the damage to his neck. And not that she didn’t have enough to do, between the delivery date on the sketches and what seemed like an inevitably pending sale on the cabin.

She just couldn’t seem to keep her thoughts together. The half-finished painting in the loft again called to her, fueled by her hiking. She stubbornly resisted it, telling herself she had other obligations and pretending not to know that she’d spooked herself with the intensity of the grip it had on her.

The land itself still drew her, full of secrets and unexplained drama. And the town drew her, too—tugging at her with the ongoing impulse to go talk to Mary. If Mary didn’t know what was going on in this area, no one did.

But that didn’t explain her equal impulse to go talk to Phillip Seamans, a man she had just met and wasn’t even sure she liked.

The cat stretched at her side, extending his front legs stiff and straight, claws pricking at air.
Nothing stretches like a cat.

Except for Kai.

What the—?
Where had that thought even come from?

Bob’s barking interrupted her efforts to pluck apart her tangled thoughts; he drifted back to the porch along the way. She glanced out the window to see three men hesitating at the curve of the driveway, each of them toting a hunting rifle—one of which had the pistol grip and a high-capacity magazine of an assault weapon.

Charming.

She put the sketchbook aside and joined Bob on the porch. Sometime during recent days, she’d gained the privilege to rest a hand on his head. When she did, he leaned against her leg.

She wasn’t quite sure when all that had happened, either.

The men moved forward when they saw her, but she didn’t let them come too close. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I need you to stay back there. Is there something I can do for you?”

“Sure,” said one of the men. He was a sturdy man, looking decently fit and prepared to hike around the high woods in his tan shirt and woodlands camo pants. His hair curled around his ears beneath a gimme cap, while the other two either had their hair scraped high and tight beneath similar caps, or were lacking it altogether. “We just came to get permission to hike around this area.”

Right. With their rifles.

Regan tipped her head toward the woods. “Seems to me you’ve already been doing that.” She gave one man a meaningful look—along with the cigarette pack in his front shirt pocket. At their blank expressions, she added, “Cigarette butt.”

To judge from the chagrin on the one man’s face, she’d guessed right, indeed. But the man with the pistol grip rifle didn’t care. “You can’t expect us to know when we cross property lines if they’re not marked.”

Regan smiled a little to herself, thinking of a ride on the mustang, an encounter in the woods—

No, wait.
What?

She shook off the moment and told the man, “The lines are marked, if you’re looking. And I do expect you to know that nothing’s in season right now.”

“Lady,” said the man with the least available hair, his nose a bulbous thing and his lips too thin beneath it, “we’ve got a right to protect ourselves.”

She laughed. “If you’re that concerned, get out of the woods.”

“Haven’t you heard?” The man with hair shifted his cap back on his forehead. “Something’s gone rogue out there. Staying out of the woods is no guarantee—it’s coming out to hunt. The tracks look like a big cat, but the sightings look like—”

Lynx.
She knew it without knowing how.
Of course, Lynx.

“Bigfoot?” she suggested, since he hadn’t finished his sentence. Not that she blamed him. Canadian lynx in the Sacramento Mountains... Bigfoot would have been a better bet.

The man with the nose scowled at her. “It’s no joking matter. This thing is taking chickens—”

“Oh,” she said, more drily than the desert spring air.
“Chickens.”

“We’ve got a right to protect our property.”

But his tone put a growl in Bob’s throat. Regan struggled to keep her reaction appropriate, her voice appropriate—and to understand the strength of her reaction in the first place. For it wasn’t just ire at poachers on the prowl; it was a fury that went beyond. It was
personal.

She managed to say, “I very much doubt you’re from around here at all, but even if you are...
No, you don’t.
If you have a problem with Bigfoot, then call the Forest Service. But you absolutely don’t have the right to hunt off your land, or permission to be on mine. And you can bet the rangers will be looking for you now.”

The man with the nose shifted the grip on his rifle, looking as if he’d prefer to be shifting his grip on Regan. “I get it,” he said. “You’re one of
those.
A righteous, tree-hugging
bitch.
”

She stood straighter. “You want to go there? Then yes. I
am.
And this is my land, and
that—
” she waved a hand to indicate the sprawl of rugged earth around them “—belongs to the creature that you hunt.” Struck by thought, she held up one finger. “Hold on a moment—”

That took them by surprise, and though she half expected them to stomp away while she ducked back into the house and grabbed up her cell phone, they still stood there, uncertain, when she returned. She held the phone up just long enough to snap a quick photo.

The rudest of them cursed and turned away from the house, jerking his head at the others in an indication they should follow. The man who’d first spoken, the one who must be playing the good-poacher role, looked back at her. “Listen, lady—”

“Regan,” she said. “Regan Adler. In case you want to resent me by name.”

“Listen,” he said. “You might want to rethink this. We know it’s here on this slope. We’ve tracked it here.”

“Good,” she said—though her heart pounded at his words, striking fear not at the presence of the lynx, but for its safety. “If it’s here, then it’s safe.”

* * *

But she didn’t waste any time after the men left. She transferred the photos to her laptop, plugged into the satellite internet access and uploaded the images to a photo site. Just as quickly, she called both the sheriff and the local ranger station, identifying the men as active hunters on both private and national forestland. Someone in town would know who they were and where they were staying. They’d find themselves facing trouble sooner than they expected.

If maybe not soon enough.

What if they’re not the only ones?

If the word had spread about a lynx siting in this area, they wouldn’t be.

Find it. Find it first.

How absurd was that?

But she found herself changing clothes, grabbing her day pack...leaving her work behind and planning to be back before any reasonable expectation of word of her father’s surgery.

Out on the porch, Bob sat at stiff attention, his gaze riveted to the driveway. As Regan caught a brief glimpse of a newly familiar sedan through the pines, Bob escalated into a growl, already more riled by the approaching car than he had been by the three hunters.

Arshun.
Coming to discuss the offer on the property.

Irritation flickered through her, coming as a surprise. Arshun had been understanding of her father’s situation...gently persistent in his pursuit of the property, offering what seemed more than a fair price. She had no reason for the resentment suddenly sitting hard in her stomach.

But she trusted Bob. And she had nothing to tell Arshun, not with her father in surgery—and after that, recovery.

She hesitated, locked the front door for the first time in what was likely a decade and slipped around the side of the house as the car curved up the driveway, getting the back door on the way by. Bob left the porch to stalk along at her side—another surprise—but drifted away to sit by the paddock as Regan climbed on up into the woods, not truly caring if Arshun spotted her. The irritation flared again, surprising in its strength.

She chose her path without thinking, first walking the game trail along the side of the mountain and then breaking away to climb upward, looking for and readily finding the high point her mother had called her favorite—a slab of towering, fractured limestone studded with amazingly persistent little oaks and clear enough at the top to sit, dig into her pack for water and ponder the land before her.

Welcome...

“Hello,” she said out loud, without truly noticing that her impulsive acknowledgment came in response to the infinitely quiet sensation of greeting. “How strange to think that I’ll miss you, after all this time of being away. I should have come back sooner.”

Welcome...

“I just needed some time away,” she told the woods. “To come to grips with losing Mom to you.” She frowned, not certain why she’d even said that. “I mean, with losing her at all.” For what did an accident down in Las Cruces have to do with these woods?

Those hunters had rattled her more than she’d thought.

Find him...

They’d rattled the hell out of her if she even thought she could track down a lynx in this forest. She was no hunter, no tracker.

Help you...

She made a face, fingers pushing against her brow...full of impulses and certainty and not understanding any of them. No longer truly able to resist them. She stuffed the water back into the pack, impatient with herself

Her fingers brushed thin, crinkly foil.

She pulled the condom wrapper from the pack with nothing less than astonishment. An
open
wrapper. A little more frantic digging revealed a baggie with a used condom, some used tissues.

“I must be losing my mind,” she said, too stunned to do anything but stare at the things in her hands— understanding immediately what they meant.

She’d not only been with someone, but she’d been with him in the woods.
Leave no trace.
She’d cleaned up after them, come home...and completely, immediately forgotten it. Forgotten
him.

But her body remembered. Even now it tingled, flooding with warmth in some places, with tight anticipation in others. And her body had certainly remembered those two days earlier, when she’d woken pleasantly sore and still half aroused, remembering when she’d dreamed of—

Kai...

Honest, deep blue eyes and gentle hands and wild strength, the line of torso and hip—not on paper, but hard muscle beneath her touch, surging passion beneath her body—

She sucked in a breath, dropping the baggie as if it could sting her—and maybe it could. Maybe it
had.

Find him...

For the first time she realized that the stinging impulse came from outside of her, imposed upon her instead of generated by her. She lifted her head, casting a wild glance over the woods—the intensity of big bright sky, impossibly blue; the majestic nature of pines spearing into it, carpeting the abrupt and sometimes jagged land and making way only for the thrust of limestone and bare cliff.

Find him...

It was distinct now, recognizable, and so profoundly insane that she shouted back at it.

“Stop it!
Stop it!
Get out of my
head!
”

Her words rang out over the land and faded into silence—long silence, until finally a scrub jay ventured to scold her, and a small flock of pine siskins resumed their chaotically breathy twitter.

And then, quiet but insistent, the sensation in her mind. The
knowing
in her soul....
Find him...

She’d come out into these woods to find a lynx. A wounded lynx.

Or...

Maybe to find a feral man named Kai who had touched her, loved her, made her body sing...and then somehow been forgotten.

“If I’m going to find anyone,” she told the sky, “maybe it ought to be
me.
”

The sky gave her no argument.

Regan jammed the telltale trash back into her pack, slipped it on over her light jacket and headed down the hill to pick up the game trail, circling back around to the dry pool.