on a half-hour ski lift ride to the top of the tall peak, with nothing to do but contemplate the broad strength of the shoulders that had so easily pulled Ryan into the chair…Lyn thought of the sudden change of his presence when he’d focused himself on the girl’s lift chair, gone for it and caught it as resoundingly as prey in powerful cougar paws.
To think, only moments ago she’d been wondering if really he had the grit to go dark.
She laughed out loud, and if the man in the seat ahead with the girl clinging around his neck heard her, he gave no sign.
The topside lift wrangler waited for them as the chairs glided toward the turnaround, radio raised to his ear, face tense and determined. Gusts flapped at his jeans and windbreaker; Lyn drew Ryan’s coat closer as that same wind buffeted her. Ryan hadn’t been exaggerating; high summer had turned sharply to fall.
Abruptly, the chairs slowed in pace, giving Ryan a luxury of time to flip the safety bar up and disembark. The girl clung tightly as he half carried her away from the chair’s path, one arm wrapped around her waist.
Lyn fumbled with the unfamiliar bar as she, too, reached the summit, ducking away and to the side as the lift wrangler’s radio drizzled static in response to his short comment. The chairs sped up again, and Lyn glanced down the long swooping lines of the cables in surprise; she’d expected them to call an all-stop until things were sorted out. But it didn’t take her sharp vision long to pick out the cluster of occupied chairs heading their way in double time—E.M.T.s, officials.
She didn’t plan to be here.
Ryan apparently felt the same; he’d transferred the teenager to the lift operator and now headed for the narrow trail leading uphill.
“Hey,” the lift wrangler said, tangled up in the girl, “you can’t go…They’ll want to talk to you—”
Ryan spun briefly around to face him. “Go where?” he asked, wry enough to make the kid laugh.
Lyn took note. Not a lie, but misleading? Oh, yeah. Because she and Ryan had an entire extinct volcano over which to range—eighteen thousand acres of fragile, extreme Kachina Peaks Wilderness area above the more accessible trails.
On the other hand…
Don’t over analyze. Of course he’d misled the kid. Of course he’d do whatever low-key thing it took to keep them out of any official reports of the incident, just as she was prepared to do the same. And it didn’t take as much as one might think. Already she could imagine the reaction to the description of Joe Ryan leaping to catch hold of that lift chair and pull the girl to safety. Skepticism, if not outright disbelief. Chalking it up to a natural inclination to exaggerate.
Such skepticism served the Sentinels well.
Ryan moved effortlessly up the tricky trail, maneuvering its short, zigzagging sections with ease. Lyn followed, custom-made boots finding purchase in spite of rolling cinders over rock-hard dirt.
She’d thought he’d just keep going—get them out of sight and head into the woods. But instead, when the trail widened out to a viewing area perched at the edge of a rock outcrop, he hesitated. He wandered to the fenced edge, looking not at the drop before him but out at the reforming thunderheads of the waning afternoon. Lyn realized, then, with a startling snap of awareness—this was the very spot his dossier picture had been taken.
Yes, he knew this place.
He might even consider it his, in some ways.
He’d be wrong.
She wandered over to the token handrail. Ponderosas speared up at her from the plunging slope below; off to the side and farther down, ski resort personnel bustled around the teenager. Scattered groups of tourists appeared in the distant chairs on the lift. Good. With more people up here, their own absence would be less noticeable.
But while she tried to focus her thoughts on the power surges of the area, on the consequences of such surges, on her need to prove Joe Ryan a Sentinel gone dark, the gentle gusty wind snatched at her thoughts; the scent of sun-warmed pine beguiled her nose. The thin air slipped in and out of her lungs without leaving much impact, and her peripheral vision seemed ever so sparkly around the edges. Her fingers curled around the upper rail of the brown pipe fencing; she took a deep breath.
“Give it a few minutes,” Ryan said, giving her a quick, sharp glance before he returned his attention to the panorama before them. “You’ll adjust.”
More so than the average tourist—an advantage of her robust shifter form, and one she’d gladly take. Plenty of travelers found the seven-thousand-foot altitude at the base challenging enough; Lyn hadn’t even considered it until this moment. She took another deep breath, suddenly overwhelmed by the very alien nature of the landscape—from the volcanic rock formations around them to the distinct sections of forest and high desert prairie spread out below and the slash of the Grand Canyon far to the northwest…this place smelled different, it sounded different…it even tasted different, pressing in around her with clear, rarefied air and the unique trace of those creatures who dared to live at this cold, dry twelve thousand feet.
Perhaps that’s why she nearly missed it. Another rumble of power, a mere bass hiss of presence, tasting of Ryan and of deep green wild…Lyn found herself closing her eyes, leaning into it as she might a pleasant breeze on a hot day.
Her eyes snapped open, riveting to him in accusation—but the words she gathered to fling at him died on her lips. He stood braced against the rail, a frown drawing his brows, nostrils flared with the impact of that faint surge…or with effort, she wasn’t sure. Even as she watched, eyes narrowed, he lifted his head—a little jerk of determination there—and turned to her.
And then she couldn’t help it. Then the words burst out. “Don’t tell me you didn’t feel that. Don’t tell me you didn’t taste yourself in that surge!”
For an instant, he looked nothing more than nonplussed. And then his frustration snapped back at her. “No! It’s not—I—” A quick step, another, and he’d closed the distance between them, by then under better control. “Tell me, Lyn Maines…did you recognize your voice the first time you heard yourself recorded?”
She blinked. “I…” Flashed back to that day, two children playing with an off-limits answering machine, her brother leading the way into trouble even then. The laughter at how they sounded, their insistence—that really is you!
She didn’t get a chance to voice her answer; he turned away from her again, looking back out over the vista. It truly didn’t matter—they both knew her answer. And so the question became…did he not know why his trace was tangled with the surges? Or had he simply not realized it would be detectible?
Voices muttered up from below as the next wave of tourists grew closer, the Snowbowl management and emergency personnel in discussion with the lift operator. “They’ll be looking for us,” Ryan said, but it came as an afterthought, an aside to whatever else ran through his mind.
Lyn said, “If the Core siphons the energy of this place…if they store it in their amulets, if they use it against us…if they use it against the rest of the world—”
He didn’t turn on her, but she got the impression it was only through strength of will. “Then this ancient place will change forever,” he said, his voice low. “Irrevocably. The people who revere it, who draw their
