to be concerned. “You must be Frank’s daughter.”
It wasn’t an introduction; it wasn’t a reason for visiting this remote little home without the courtesy of a call.
Beware...
Right, she thought back at that insidious little voice. Because I needed your help to tell me that.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “My father isn’t here. If you’d like to leave your contact information, I’ll let him know you stopped by.”
“Regan,” he said as if it wasn’t a guess. “Frank said I might find you here. Is that dog safe?”
“How did you say you knew my father?” Because if you’d been here before, you’d be familiar with the dog. You’d know he won’t let you on this porch unless I tell him to stand down. Once it had been the entire yard—but like her father, the dog had aged.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t say.” He didn’t look sorry. He looked aggrieved that she hadn’t simply welcomed him inside. “I’m with Primary Pine Realty. My name is Matt Arshun.” He pulled a business card from his inside suit pocket, holding it out between his first and second fingers. “Your father contacted me about listing this property.”
The shock of it made her chest feel empty; she found herself momentarily speechless. She hadn’t wanted to come back to this place—but she hadn’t realized until that moment how much it was still part of her. Deep in her mind she heard a wail of denial...and she didn’t think it was hers.
I am not my mother.
She caught a flash of satisfaction on the man’s face, as if she’d told him something he hadn’t been sure of until this moment. “I was hoping to take a look around.”
She shook her head; hidden by her crossed arms, her nails bit briefly into her palms. “I wish you’d called first. You could have saved yourself a trip. This isn’t a convenient time.”
“When should I come back?”
Never. But she managed to not say it out loud. “Leave your card in the delivery box at the end of the drive,” she told him. “I’ll call you when I’m ready.”
He’d been ready to hand her the card. He gave the glowering dog between them a second glance and shifted his weight back. “I was hoping to move on this property,” he said. “Vacation property in the high country has only a seasonal interest.”
“Leave your card,” she told him again. “Or don’t, if the delay is a problem for you. It’s all the same to me.”
“Maybe you should call your father,” Arshun said, tipping the card between his two fingers and finally dropping it to the porch. She stood behind the dog until Arshun got into his luxury car, slamming the door even as he started the powerful engine. There wasn’t much gravel left on the driveway surface, but he managed to spit some out behind his wheels anyway.
Bob the Dog looked over his shoulder at her, his tail wagging faintly in question. Part cattle dog, part Labrador, part huge...a good friend to her father, and still unfamiliar to Regan. She patted his broad head. “Good boy,” she said, and her legs suddenly felt just a little bit wobbly. She sat down beside him, letting her feet hang over the edge of the porch. He didn’t lick her or demand attention; he just was—a stolid old dog sitting beside her.
It would have been presumptuous to lean on him, in his aloof dignity. She settled for leaving her hand on his back.
She’d call her father; she’d find out about the Realtor, and her father’s intentions. But that was the least of her wobbly reaction—and he couldn’t truly tell her what she needed to know.
For if her father could offer her answers about the whispers, if he could offer reassurance...she never would have left this place. And if he’d had any true idea how deeply the land and its whispers gripped her, how insidiously it threaded its way back into her being, he never would have asked her back.
She had an unbidden flash of an image in her mind—Kai, moving through the woods. Kai in his rough deerskin leggings and barefoot confidences, his quietly primal intensity, his sinuous strength.
And she suddenly thought he was the one who might understand.
* * *
She has no idea.
Kai sat on an outcrop between Regan’s land and his own territory, scowling inside. She has no idea.
Then again, neither did he. Not really. He’d never dealt directly with the Core; he only knew of them—just as he knew of the Sentinels and their Southwest Brevis to which he might well have belonged as a full-blooded field Sentinel. Within the past year he’d felt several periods of activity—a swell of Core workings affecting distant Sentinels and reaching him even here; a cry of grief that had resonated through the land, fading by the time he recovered from it well enough to go looking for clues. A thing of weeping and nightmare intensity that had left remarkably little trace but had left him increasingly wary.
The Core had changed the game somehow, and even in his isolation, Kai knew it.
He knew more of their mutual history: that the Sentinels had started two thousand years earlier with a single druid, a man who had channeled earth energies into the discovery of his inner self. His animal form.
The druid’s half brother—a man sired by a Roman soldier, utterly without power—began an immediate quest for ways to control his sibling. That quest had been fueled by fear and jealousy...and these millennia later, had resulted in two worldwide organizations locked in an endless cold war. The Sentinels protected the land, as they always had—just as Kai did. The Atrum Core coated their activities in a righteous manifesto—keep the Sentinels in check—and used it to justify stolen power and corrupted energies. The need for secrecy kept both factions running silent, but lately...
Lately Kai had felt the Core pushing at his world. More activity from their workings, more touches of their presence. His lynx had become uneasy; his human knew to listen.
For they were here.
His family had brought him to this high, remote place because of his innate ability to detect even the faintest Core workings and presence. They’d hidden him here, trained him here...kept him apart from both Sentinels and Core.
That sensitivity was the reason they had finally left him here, drawing away the danger while he plunged into a life alone, always remembering their words. One day...
One day, you’ll be the one who can make the difference. Until then, they can’t know of you.
Kai had been satisfied with his life. By guiding people through these forests, he made sure they treated the land properly along the way. He knew which elk herds needed to be thinned; he knew where the coyote population had tipped out of balance. He knew where people were stupid enough to leave food out for bears, and how to discourage them.
Here, where the world still ran high and wild, he kept things right.
But maybe that wasn’t enough any longer.
If the Core had any true clue of him—of what he could do, or that he was unique in his ability to do it—its minions wouldn’t be tramping so freely on his chosen turf. He’d stayed silent, circling
