Free Lynx Destiny by Doranna Durgin

some part of him did. For he’d dressed not only in breechclout and leggings—the all-natural materials that would shift with him if he took the lynx—but had also covered his torso with the loose, long-tailed cotton shirt sewn to pioneer patterns and belted with flat, plain leather. He approached the dry pool as a gliding lynx, but Regan—when she finally realized he was there—found only the fully clothed human.
    She wore work jeans that fit loosely enough for active movement and yet somehow rode across her hips in the perfect spot to draw his eye—to make his heart beat just a little bit faster, before he even knew he’d responded to the sight of her at all. Her shirt was red again—red with a field of tiny blue flowers—and it only brought out the bright gold of her braid, the pleasant flush of exertion across fair skin. In her hand she held not the walking stick, but a shotgun.
    “Kai,” she said, as if seeing him here had been inevitable.
    As maybe it had. Given her deep connection to this land, whether she understood and acknowledged it or not.
    She said, “You left that handgun at my place.”
    “I have no use for it.” He’d carried it as far as her house and left it there with the vague thought that it was a thing of the human world; it did not belong in his. Now, if he couldn’t find what he needed here, he might ask to see it again.
    She sat on the throne of roots that had served her so well the day before and looked down on the dry pool, laying the shotgun across her knees. “I guess I had to come make sure they hadn’t come back. Or to clean up after their mess if they had.”
    “You would have felt it if they’d come back,” he told her, easing around the base of the pool until the butt of the shotgun, not the muzzle, pointed his way.
    She didn’t fail to notice. “Nothing in the chamber,” she said. “You think my dad let me grow up with a long gun in the house, and no gun safety?”
    “I think every gun is loaded,” Kai said—not speaking from the perspective of a Sentinel who’d been shot by a Core minion the day before, or from that of a human who’d also been taught gun safety on the way to adulthood, but from the perspective of a lynx who never assumed on the safety of his skin in the woods.
    But Regan winced, and he knew she’d taken it the obvious way. The day before way. “How’s your arm?”
    “Healing,” he said. He crouched by the side of the dry pool, letting his splayed fingers push through crackling leaves to feel the faint dampness below—moisture left from the spring melt. He let his awareness filter outward, a whisper of a question.
    He pretended not to notice when Regan stiffened, lifting her head—searching for what she’d heard without quite understanding from where it came.
    “Here,” he murmured, and lifted his head in invitation.
    She frowned, not quite certain. He gestured again, and she set the shotgun aside, sliding off the roots to land at the edge of the dry pool.
    Kai beckoned her closer and nodded at his hand. “Like this.”
    She crouched beside him, slowly imitating his reach for the land—stiff and wary and closed away.
    Not from him—Kai understood that right away. From fear of hearing again that faint whisper.
    But it wasn’t something to fear. It was something to celebrate. It was something to breathe in and exhale and feel alive about.
    He eased closer, his arm reaching out beside hers, his hand covering hers, his fingers gently reaching between hers to touch the ground. “Easy,” he said. “Quiet.” He brushed his thumb over her hand, soothing her.
    “What—” she said, her voice at normal volume—and then cut herself off, chagrined. When she spoke again, she did so quietly. “What are we doing?”
    “Listening,” he told her.
    “Why? To what?”
    “Shh,” he said, close to her ear and barely putting sound behind the words. “To learn.”
    “I don’t—”
    “Shh. Learn.” He stroked her hand with his thumb