Page 52 of Handcuffed to the Bear

“Yeah. That’s good strategic thinking. If they find you, turn around and run back to me as fast as you can.”

“But that’ll lead them straight to you.”

Jack smiled grimly. “So they’ll run right into a pissed-off grizzly bear. Sound like a bad plan to you?”

“Well, when you put it that way ...”

“Lions are ambush predators. Remember that. Be very careful.”

“I will,” she said.

She took a deep breath, then lunged forward and kissed him, hard and sudden. Their kisses in the cave had been gentle, exploring the newness of each other’s mouths. This, though—she took his mouth with a confidence she’d never known, biting his lip and drawing it between her teeth, kissing him until both of them were breathless.

“For luck,” she explained, pulling away.

Then, before he could speak, she shifted, folding herself smoothly into her lynx body.

This time she took a moment longer to orient herself with her changed senses than she usually did after shifting. Things looked different, smelled different,feltdifferent as a lynx. The forest that seemed like little more than samey green wallpaper to her as a human was a sudden wonderland of scent and sound to her lynx senses. And the navigation that had seemed so challenging to her human mind was a cakewalk for the lynx. She could run in a straight line all day if she had to.

Before Jack could change his mind and try to stop her, she bounded off down the mountainside.

They were past the worst of the climb now, over the unstable scree slopes and bare cliffsides that they’d spent much of the afternoon navigating. And the forest posed no problems at all for her lynx body. She glided like a smoke shadow through brambles and over beds of pine needles that would have torn up her human feet.

Rabbit and squirrel trails through the forest understory made her mouth water. Surely there was time for alittlehunting ...

But, no. She had a job to do. She was a lynx on a mission.

It was lion smell that alerted her as she approached the Fallons’ base camp. Her ears twitching, whiskers bristling, she slowed to a trot and then a slow prowl, sniffing every twig and leaf. Lots of it here, but older, before the rain.

And now she caught whiffs of woodsmoke, trailing low on the wet breeze. Other things too: diesel, paint, cooking smells, garbage. A low drumming sound puzzled her, and she stood still for several minutes, feeling it through the pads of her paws, until she realized it was the deep thumping of a generator.

There was another smell, too, one that had been growing stronger for long enough that she’d almost stopped noticing. It was the wet, mud-and-metal smell of the sea.

Casey glanced behind her, where her passage had bent leaves and parted grass slightly, marking her backtrail by sight as well as scent. If she had to run, she’d need to go in a hurry.

Then she crouched low and prowled forward.

By the time the trees began to open up, she was almost on her belly. She lay flat in the grass and peered ahead. She had come upon the edge of the helipad. The helicopter was parked in a circle of flattened grass, lashed down with a couple of long cables moored to concrete blocks. A narrow, rutted road led away into the trees, the sort that was made by four-wheeled ATVs rather than cars.

There was no sign of movement. No fresh smells of either lion or human. She heard no voices.

Casey ghosted along at the edge of the clearing. She did not step on the road, but stayed beside it in the trees. Every tiny rustle of her paws made her tense. She paused often to look back, partly to check her escape route, and partly because of paranoia about having the Fallons sneak up on her from behind.

Lions are ambush predators.

Comforting, Jack. Thanks so much.

Open space was visible ahead through the trunks of the trees. The thumping of the generator was louder now, the smell of woodsmoke stronger. Casey slowed to a crawl.

The trees opened up into a field of stumps. Wildflowers and meadow weeds grew in masses among them, drooping their heads under their burdens of water. Casey risked standing to see over the tops of the tangle of meadow foliage. She could see the dark, wet backs of several small wooden buildings, some ways distant.

She didn’t need a background in military strategy to understand that the Fallons had cleared around their base camp to make sure no one could sneak up on them.

Suspicious bastards.

Okay, now what? She’d found the place, but she didn’t know much more than she had when she left Jack. The only thing she knew for sure now was that it wouldn’t be easy getting to the dock and the boat without being seen. She still didn’t know if anyone was home, or what other advantages the Fallons might have brought with them. Guns? There had been that flash from the hills, as of binoculars or a rifle scope ...

An icy chill went through her. She could outrun a lion, she thought, but she couldn’t outrun a bullet.

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