Chains of Ice (11 page)

He didn’t know why he watched her every day . . . except that he couldn’t seem to stop. He couldn’t believe she was for real. He scrutinized her, waiting for her to yell, to swear, to complain about the rough conditions or the boredom so much a part of a wildlife observer’s job.

Instead, when she thought no one was watching, she skipped through the forest. She sang songs from movies like
The Sound of Music
and
Annie
, and she sang like she believed them. She watched an eagle fly, spread her arms and pretended to soar on the breeze. When the wind blew, she closed her eyes, lifted her face to the sun—and he would have sworn she was silently worshiping the day, the place, the joy.

She seemed almost frantic to absorb the essence of the mountains and the woods.

He hated that.

Because he wanted her, and everything she did made him want her more. He craved her the way a drowning man craved oxygen.

He couldn’t have her. Because what he felt when he looked at her was a passionate fascination, a longing and a need.

He didn’t dare yield to that depth of feeling.

He didn’t dare lose control. The last time he’d lost control, death had followed.

Today, he’d been ready to turn away from her forever.

Then she’d crawled off her platform and hung out over that hundred-foot drop to take pictures.

My God. He hadn’t felt that desperation since . . . well, just since. He’d jumped off the boulder at the top of the cliff and made it down to her almost in time to catch her as she fell. Almost. Using his power had been instinctive, a brief burst that caught and deposited her without thought or finesse.

Stupid woman.
She didn’t even realize what she’d done to him.

She’d made him use a power he had barely acknowledged for the last two years. Then she’d thanked him. She’d
touched
him. She’d followed him being perky and grateful and cheerful, like a creature who believed in the goodness of mankind. In
his
goodness.

So that was why he was taking the girl to Mama Cat’s den. He wanted her to have what she wanted, to take her pictures and see her glimpse of the wildness . . . and then go away. That way, he would never have to see her again.

But . . . what the hell? The girl wasn’t behind him.

He knew she wasn’t, because when she was close, she was talking.

He stopped, turned.

She stood where he had left her, staring at him, her golden brown eyes wide and heartbreakingly innocent.

Ah, to be so young again . . .

“How old are you?” he asked.

“Twenty-four.”

“You look younger.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty.”

She said nothing.

“Aren’t you going to tell me I look older?” he asked.

“I can’t tell. You’re so hairy I can barely see your face.”

He gave a bark of laughter. “You sound like my drill sergeant.” He laughed again, then stopped, surprised at himself. Where had that brief spark of humor come from? “Are you coming with me?” he asked.

She blinked, and her long lashes fanned the air.

He half expected to feel a breeze.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Is there really a lynx, or are you really crazy?”

So it had finally sunk in for her. She had realized she was alone with the yeti. “I’m definitely crazy. But yes, there’s a lynx.” He waited, sure she would turn back now.

Instead, she said, “Okay, as long as I know the score,” and started toward him.

He didn’t really believe he was crazy.

But she sure as hell was.

He didn’t wait. He strode off toward the riverbank.

Before he knew it, she was on his heels. “Brandon would laugh if he knew how thoroughly he had scared me with his stories of the yeti.”

“Sure.” John remembered Brandon from last year. Short, loud, obnoxious, without interest in the animals unless he could torment them.

John had not been happy to see Brandon return.

Genny was still chatting. “About the lynx—there are babies, too, right?”

“Yes. Two.”

“That is just too cool.” She sounded like an eighties teenager at a Michael Jackson concert. “I would do anything to see those kittens.”

Anything?
He clamped down on the thought before he could take it any further.

“Probably I shouldn’t be doing this,” she said conversationally. “Maybe you’re taking me into the woods to slaughter me.”

“Maybe.” He fought the urge to grin.

“On the other hand, if you were going to kill me, why not simply let me fall?”

Remembering the things he’d seen during his missions at war and with the Chosen, his face settled into its normal, grim cast. “You really are a babe in arms, aren’t you?”

She answered too quickly. “You mean a fool.”

Her small, acrid bitterness caught him by surprise. So this seemingly sunny girl had suffered at least a few disappointments. “Who calls you a fool?”

“My father. He doesn’t admire my constant chirping about saving the world one creature at a time.”

“Is that what he calls it? Chirping?” Clearly, her father was an asshole.

“Dad’s not so bad.” She defended him in a knee-jerk reaction. “He’s had disappointments in his life.”

“Who hasn’t?”

“At least
he
isn’t a hermit.”

John’s mouth twitched again. Another grin at her lively spirit—a grin that faded as he remembered. “It’s safer this way.”

“Why is it safer?”

“It just is.”

John’s cabin had been an abandoned building when he arrived in Rasputye.

For years, a hermit had lived there. The villagers had called the old guy the Mad German, because he was foreign and possessed a gift like John’s—odd, otherworldly, and destructive.

The German had built his cabin with his own hands, and John knew why he had chosen that site.

All the hut’s windows faced north. Every day, when the sun rose, it first touched the glistening rock towers of the Seven Devils. The Mad German’s daughter told John they didn’t know what had happened to the hermit.

John knew. The German had finally surrendered to the crossroads’ beckoning. He’d gone to the Seven Devils, to the middle Devil, and done what the gifted had done for centuries. John only hoped the hermit had lived through the transition from this world to that.

John had bought the cabin from the daughter. He cleaned out the one-room hut, fixed the thatching, put new glass in the windows, filled the cracks with mud, and packed straw weighted with stones around the base of the walls. He had moved in, and every day that first winter, John stared at the Seven Devils, studied them, wondered if the stories were true—if somewhere in there was the gate to the
rasputye
.

No one in Rasputye had expected him to survive, because at first they didn’t recognize the gaunt, stern-faced, shaggy American. But he
had
survived the winter. He had survived the spring. He had walked into town in the summer, and by then, they had all known who he was—because the first of the letters had arrived.

The people of Rasputye had been afraid, and they were feeling guilty . . . as they should have been. Never during his lousy childhood had any of them interceded on his behalf.

Now they hated him for merely being there, the living proof of their failure, their fears and their greed.

If he tried to explain that, Genny would never understand.

How odd that she had known he was watching her. Did she possess that small, extrasensory knowledge some ordinary humans enjoyed, or was she gifted, too?

John would have protested that God could not be so cruel.

But he already knew that wasn’t true. God was cruel beyond all conception. God tormented a man, broke his heart and his will, and then sent someone like Genny to dangle hope like a diamond on a platinum chain.

No. No, John refused to hope.

Yet Genny said she felt his sorrow.

What did she mean? He didn’t feel sorrow, and even if he did . . .

“Are you an empath?” he asked.

“What?” She sounded sincerely confused.

He stopped in the path in front of her, two steps farther down. That put them eye to eye, and he stared at her, compelling her to tell him the truth. “I asked if you were an empath. Do you routinely feel what other people feel?”

Her gaze fell away from his. “I try to be empathetic, if that’s what you mean.”

Was she being evasive? He couldn’t tell.

Perhaps it wasn’t she who should be cautious here. Perhaps she presented more danger to him than he to her.

“John . . .” She put her hands on his shoulders.

He stiffened, so sensitive and so unaccustomed to the touch of another human that her touch was almost painful.

“Listen,” she said, “I need to tell you something.”

Maybe it wasn’t his own pain he felt. Maybe it was hers. Or maybe he saw it—those big golden brown eyes were filled with the weariness of a woman who had seen far too much anguish in her life.

He cupped her chin in his hand, smoothed his thumb across her lips.

Her face was innocent. Her mouth was not. It was made for kissing . . . and more carnal pleasures.

Her lips parted. Her breath swirled in his palm. He leaned close, closed his eyes and inhaled her scent: harsh soap, orange lotion, the fresh scent of loam and crushed pine needles—and beneath it all, the scent of a woman at the peak of her glory.

Did this woman even realize the power she held? What heights of foolishness to which she could drive him?

“John?” Her lips moved against his thumb. Her voice was cautious. “Are you okay?”

He opened his eyes.

She looked apprehensive.

Perhaps in his time alone, he had lost the finer points of polite behavior. As he recalled, a man didn’t sniff a woman within an hour of meeting her.

He dropped his hand.

“John, listen, I wanted to tell you—”

He didn’t want to listen. He wanted to lay her down in the forest and taste her mouth, her breasts, the sweet cleft between her legs, until she was wet with climax, until he was so deep inside her he would die of bliss.

He turned on his heel. He adjusted himself—his stupid fantasies were causing him pain and havoc—and started down the hill.

“Wait!” Gravel showered down on the path like a dirt waterfall.

Yeah, she was following.

They reached the last drop before the river and the view opened up. Genny slipped. She skidded as she tried to stop herself from going over the edge. She grabbed at branches, then slammed into his back hard enough to make both of them go,
“Oof!”

She wrapped her arms around him, pressed herself against him, and everywhere her body rested, he would swear the leather melted under the heat of their bodies.

Damn it to hell
. He’d just gotten his erection under control and now it was back, bigger and better than ever.

Silly woman—she was oblivious.

She held him in her arms long enough to catch her breath, then peeled herself away and stepped out from behind him. She looked down at the river rushing past the rocks five feet below them, then out at the wide channel it had made during its years of wandering along the flat at the edge of the cliff. “Wow.”

She looked up and over at the trees that grew like a fringe of bangs on the tall, rocky face, and located the platform that she had used for observation every day since she’d arrived. “My God.” She clutched his arm. “That would have been a long way to fall. I could have . . . have . . . died . . .” Her voice wobbled on the last two words, and she sat down hard, as if she’d suddenly realized how close she’d come to a bloody, painful demise.

Ducking her head, she sniffled.

Suddenly, he remembered one reason why he had become a hermit.

Because he sucked at personal relationships.

“Are you crying?” He sounded horrified. Was horrified.

“No . . .” Out of her coat pocket, she retrieved one of those little flowered packs of tissues, pulled one tissue out and used it.

“Because I don’t know what you do back in the U.S., but out here in the Ural Mountains, we don’t cry.”

“I hold a business degree.”

“
You
do?” What moron career guidance counselor had suggested this softhearted, outdoorsy girl go to business school?

“Graduated from NYU. That’s why I don’t cry.” She sobbed, then held her breath as if she had the hiccups instead of a legitimate reason to cry. “In business, that’s a weakness I can’t afford to show.”

“Who the hell told you that?” Like he didn’t know.

She sobbed harder—a summer storm that struck out of the blue and left him feeling weak, alarmed, and helpless. At the same time, she held her hand over her mouth, struggling to stop.

“Business school. What kind of business?” He wasn’t just asking to distract her. He was curious.

She took a long breath. “Br-brokerage account man-management.” She hiccupped, took her hands away from her face, and took another long breath. “When I get back to New York, I’ve got to start my job with CFG. B-but to tell you the truth”—her voice was wavering again—“I’m not very good at the k-kind of business that makes a profit regardless . . . regardless of the consequences.”

“No. Really?”

She didn’t seem to sense the sarcasm, just looked down at her hands, loose and upturned in her lap. In a cold, steady voice, she said, “On the other hand, I succeeded in killing most of my ideals in graduate school. I suppose I can kill the rest of them in pursuit of wealth.” Then her hands came up to her face again, and she cried so pitifully she sounded as if she’d never cried before.

How the hell did Genesis Valente manage to turn him on one minute and break his heart the next? He didn’t need this kind of crap.

“Son. Of. A. Bitch.” Which was about as polite a curse as he could think of right now. “Look. I lied. Lots of people cry up here.”

She raised her face from her hands. Her nose was red, her skin blotchy, and she looked like a kid who had dropped her ice cream in the sand. “Do
y-you
?”

“Do I what? Cry?
No
.” He didn’t care enough about anything to cry. “But I’m crazy, remember?”

“Yeah. I know.” She nodded emphatically. Tears flew. “I really do.”

He paced away, wanted to run.

He hated this whole scene; hated himself for getting involved, hated that he couldn’t stand to leave her like this.

Not that John liked it when a girl cried, but with Genny he quickly discovered he hated more that she was stifling her sobs as if she was embarrassed by her emotions. Or maybe she struggled because she didn’t want to make him uncomfortable. In his experience—not that he’d had a lot of experience with crying women—it was better if they let it all out.

He came back to her.

She had pulled her knees up to her chest and put her head on them, hiding herself away.

Someone had really done a number on her.

“Shit.” In the bravest gesture of a roughneck life, John sat down beside Genny and put his arm around her.