there with the wilds of the high desert reflected in his eyes.
Then she would have had the distance she needed, and not had to create it with her own frank, hard words.
Take a breath. Do this right. Stop the power drains, nail the dark Sentinel. So she said simply, “I wanted to stretch my legs.”
At that understandable truth, he relaxed slightly. When he spoke, she couldn’t read his voice at first, or his expression. “Thirteen tribes revere this mountain,” he said, looking up the incline where aspens now mingled with the pines. “Not so much these lower slopes, but the Peaks. The Navajo call them Dook’o’oslííd—Shining on Top—for the snow pack. The Hopi Katsinas live there. The Havasupai used to live on the northwest slopes.” She heard it, then. Anger. Not at her, this time. At…
The situation. Because what had been wasn’t any longer.
It startled her. She hadn’t expected the depth of his feelings. She held her silence, simply keeping up with him for a moment, watching the whimsical roll of cinders beneath her soft, laced black-leather flats. This trail was more suited to the ocelot than to her travel outfit.
He slowed without comment, just enough to ease her way. It gave her the breath to say, as neutrally as possible, “Are we still talking about the power surges?”
He glanced at her, his dusky hazel eyes an exact match for those of his cougar self. “The Tucson office should have known better than to give you a Caucasianonly assessment of this area.”
“Should have,” she repeated in agreement. “Didn’t. There was some rush.” An understatement. For all the relief over the victory near Sonoita, it had been a close thing—Dolan Treviño’s victory more than anything. No, the consul did not take this particular drozhar lightly.
“There’s been a power struggle in place on this mountain for years,” he said. “The tribes didn’t want the Snowbowl ski area built. It was. Now they don’t want recycled wastewater used to create artificial snow…but the courts are stomping all over the American Indian Religious Freedom Act.” His tone made it obvious where he stood on the matter. How he felt about this land.
Maybe how he felt about the power here. Wanting it. But she didn’t go so far as to say those words out loud. “Maybe I don’t yet understand the nuances of the situation—”
He gave a short laugh, turning from a short, steep section of barely a trail to offer his hand; she took it without thinking. “Of course you don’t. How can any of us? How can white man’s courts make judgments on the validity of religions they can’t possibly understand?”
She topped the rocky section and released his hand…or thought she had. She could still feel it, warm and calloused, against hers. She shook out her fingers. “You feel strongly about it, for someone who can’t possibly understand.”
Something flashed in his eyes, darkened them. “I understand being stomped on.”
Point to him. Supposing he hadn’t deserved being stomped on. Supposing he didn’t deserve it again. Way to play the wounded innocent.
Except if she’d been that easy, the brevis consul office wouldn’t have sent her. “Still not getting your point here, with the local interest story.”
“The point,” he said, as easily as if he hadn’t just thrown such intensity at her, “is that if you listen to the mountain, you’ll know that there’s just as much power in those ancient religions as the tribes believe there to be. It’s what drives this place.” He glanced up at the sky gone suddenly, truly threatening, and increased his pace. “I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the push to expand Snowbowl has escalated. The Atrum Core knows what’s here. They want it—they’re probably looking for a way to convert it. And they’re stirring things up on one front to obscure what they’ve been doing on another.”
Lyn pulled a suede ribbon from her pocket and tied back her hair, feeling it gone curly with the humidity of the building storm. “Apparently the Atrum Core isn’t the only one with a reason to go after that power. Or didn’t you think we’d notice your trace on the power fluctuations?”
He stopped short, one hand on the huge granite rock beside their path. “No,” he said, just as surprised as she’d meant him to be. Full of reaction, a swell of power she felt against her skin as if it were heat added to the storm. “It’s not—they’re twisting—”
And then, as if he realized he’d said too much even in those incomplete thoughts, he shut down, his jaw working, the defined nature of his lower lip going hard for a moment.
For it was the same excuse he’d used in Las Vegas over the body of his dead partner. They’re framing me. I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me.
Except it had been.
The Sentinels had enough proof to believe it…and not enough to pronounce judgment. Not through Sentinel Justice, not through the mundane justice system which had released him. So the Sentinels—wary of him, yet unwilling to waste his remarkable ability to monitor and manipulate subtle power flows—had sent him here, where the brooding power of the Peaks kept things stable.
Or used to.
“Storm’s coming in,” he said shortly, turning away from her. “I’m going cougar to beat it home—the strikes come down thick around here.” Everything about his body language suggested that she could stay human and get soaked if she wanted. The scathing look he threw over his shoulder confirmed it. Scathing and…something else. Something dark and powerful and warning. She blinked as the impact hit home, sending her a literal step backward.
“If you’re going to walk,” he informed her, his voice gone flat, “then be prepared to duck the lightning.”
Whoa. Way too late for that.
Chapter 2
They ran through the rugged terrain, four legs and fur, easing downslope. He loped along with rangy strides that made Lyn hunt vertical shortcuts. Lightning flickered above them in regular strokes; thunder shook the pines.
A sudden sweep of wind roared through the trees; Lyn flattened her ears, crouching against it. He tipped his head in a gesture she interpreted as encouragement and she squirted forward in an unhappy slink of a run, already ducking against anticipated rain and the next crash of thunder. Thin, dry soil beneath her paws, thick pine-needle patches, abrasive cinders…this was rugged terrain, with rough, unpredictable rocky outcrops that changed the nature of the ground with little warning.
The cougar hesitated at the lip of one of these, looking down over a shallow swale of land. On the slope opposite them sat the back of a log house with a second-story porch cradled in the center and a variety of roof levels. With her ocelot’s washed-out color vision, Lyn spotted his small SUV beside the house and her green rental car behind it.
Just in time. Intense, double-pronged lightning stabbed the sky not far from them, teamed with an instantaneous explosion of thunder. The cougar sprang into motion. Lyn followed at top speed, hyperaware of the large raindrops splatting off her head and back. Another strobing flash of lightning, another explosion of thunder so loud it rattled her body, and then the rain swept in for real and she was running blind, depending on her surefooted nature and the flickering black tail tip before her.
Together
