LITMIR.BIZ

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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 quietly around their insidious invasion—seeking to understand what they were doing in a way that no one else could. Once he did, it would be time to reach out to the Sentinel regional headquarters at Southwest Brevis. To let them know, finally, that he was here...and so was the Core.

      But then Regan Adler had come back to the Adler cabin.

      She reverberated through her land, whether she knew it or not.... She reverberated through him. She had an awareness that wouldn’t allow her to go unnoticed by the Core—or for them to go unnoticed by her. She had a vibrancy and determination, bouncing up from the ground to challenge him while the sturdy little horse bolted away—perfectly aware that she faced something not quite tame. And she had no idea how dangerous it would be to interfere with him...with the Core.

      Yes, Regan Adler changed everything.

      For one thing, she had already changed him.

      Chapter 2

      The day after she ran into the mysterious Kai, Regan stuffed her pockets full of surveyor’s tape, added a water bottle to her belt, jammed her feet into her riding sneakers and headed out to walk woods full of spring warblers and morning song, stout walking stick in hand.

      He’d been right, Kai had. She’d been over the boundary of their acreage. And if she didn’t know where those lines ran, then she needed to find out—especially if the word had gotten out to real estate agents that her father might sell.

      After all, she needed to know just where she could kick them off the land. At least until she confirmed what Matt Arshun had said—and so far, all she’d found was a business card identical to the one he’d given her, tucked away in her father’s desk.

      Arshun was, she thought, overstating his case.

      She poked the walking stick in between some downhill roots and used it to steady her descent, heading for the first boundary tree. A rare dew soaked her high-top riding sneakers, adding to the chill of the morning.

      Rae...

      “You must be kidding,” she muttered, more incredulous than she liked. Ten years away from the cabin, illustrating Southwest specialty guidebooks and selling fanciful little paintings on the side, and she’d lived in blessed silence. But less than a week after her return, that silence had broken. And not with the little nudges and intuitions she’d denied having as a child—denied hard, in the wake of her mother’s breakdown—but with actual whispers.

      Less than a week after her return. But even then, she’d had silence until the previous day.

      Until Kai.

      As if that made any sense at all. She steadied herself on the rugged bark of a ponderosa, scraping through the prickly, hollylike leaves of a scrub oak. Kai. A man who knew the land—better than she did at this point. A man who dressed the part—who surely had resources nearby, to have come out bare-chested and without a canteen. Barefooted.

      Primal.

      And she’d first heard those whispers only moments before her horse dumped her—I bailed, dammit!—and then he’d appeared, full of apology.

      Since when did the savvy little mustang spook at a man in the woods?

      Too many questions.

      Rae...

      God, was that her mother’s voice, using her childhood pet name? Whispering into her head? Or had this place simply stolen so much from her mother that now it sounded like her?

      “You can’t have my life,” she told it, a snarl of defiance—and didn’t know if she was talking to the land, or to herself. To whatever had started inside her that would slowly erode her sense of self until she didn’t know where she started or where she ended.

      Beware...

      Regan stopped, cocking her head to the sudden change. That had certainly not come from within—that sense of alarm and foreboding. It hadn’t been part of her morning so far at all, no matter the unsettled nature of her ruminations.

      She turned from it, just as she had turned from the affectionate greeting—she did what she’d always done in these unsettled moments, reaching out to the artist within herself. Her practiced eye found the beauty in the stark lines of a fallen tree, the sharp shadows of the morning and the contrast of the orange-brown pine bark against the ferns splashed across the rugged slope. She picked out shape and detail, and her hand twitched, reflexively reaching for watercolors, for oils...for a smear of pastel in a wild, expressive movement.

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