no shoes?”
This was why he hadn’t wanted to take the human, or to approach her—why he rarely spoke to others at all. What was right for them? What was normal? At least when he slipped into the Cloudview general store, they knew him. He thought they liked him. Outsiders even occasionally hired him as a guide, which was money enough for his scant needs.
So he responded in the way that so often worked— ignoring the question and the implications that he might just be crazy, and pretending to ignore the glint of jeweled fire nestled at her belly button. “Let me help you find the horse.”
She laughed shortly. “He’s probably back at the hay feeder by now. I just hope he doesn’t step on a rein along the way.”
“Then let me walk you back to safety.”
“I’m safe enough,” she said pointedly, and reached a hand for the small sheath on her hip, a weapon of some sort.
But she had no idea. She couldn’t possibly, this woman who didn’t know what he was and yet had still somehow heard him through the land.
This woman who had no idea the Atrum Core recently lingered nearby, encroaching on her world in the wake of increasing activity along the edges of it. Playing with their workings and amulets up here where it was easy to hide, searching for illicit advantage and power, searching for a foothold against all that was right with the world.
Maybe even searching for him.
“Let me walk you home,” he said again. He put some voice behind it this time, letting it resonate in the land between them. Her eyes widened just enough so he knew she’d felt it, if not identified it.
She put her hand back on the sheath...a message. “Let’s go, then,” she said, even as she eyed him with obvious doubt. “It’s a long way back, and I’m getting hungry.”
But she wouldn’t have turned her back to him if she’d truly understood what he was.
* * *
What Regan hadn’t said was “No shirt and no water and Daniel Boone pants and that body?” But it had been a close thing. And in the moments during which this man led the way back to her home—obviously familiar with the land between here and there—she watched not her own path but the expanse of his shoulders, the fine taper of his back and the unique nature of his movement. There lay a primal strength behind his completely unselfconscious grace, and it drew her eye whether she willed it or not.
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,
