After donning his own pack, he belted it at the waist. His head bent, he said, “I don’t like anomalies.”
“I don’t either.” She looked at the shadowed forest ahead of them. “In my experience, there’s almost always an explanation. And it’s hardly ever a good one.”
TWELVE 
Quentin rubbed his face. It felt like his life was full of too many goddamn anomalies. So many of them centered on the sexy, frenzy-inducing female who stood beside him.
His modern mind kept snagging on the concept of her identity. Part of him kept insisting she was masculine, but then he would look at her, really look at her, and realize that she was feminine in a way he had never known before—strong, confident, and completely devoid of the mannerisms and characteristics that popular culture defined as femininity.
She wasn’t ruled by fear of defying conventions. As far as he could determine, she wasn’t ruled by fear in any form, and all her emotions were painted in primary colors. At times it seemed primitive, even exasperating, but it was always colorful and exhilarating.
When she loved someone, she would do so completely and passionately, no reservations or qualifications, or the kind of emotional blackmail that said “I will love you if you will only do this, or be that.”
What would it be like to be loved with that kind of … purity?
He looked at her and experienced a sense of freedom, a previously unnamed, unidentified emotion. Something inside of him had cut loose, the wild, dangerous part of him he usually kept under such strict control. It felt like it ran unfettered.
Usually the only time he felt this way was when he had turned into the panther and took to an uninhabited area so that he could roam without concern of running into humans or other creatures. Where that wild part of him was going and what it would do when it got there, he didn’t know.
He forced himself away from useless reverie and concentrated on the tasks at hand.
“All right,” he said. “I think we should keep moving. We don’t have any shelter here, and we do have a lot of shadowy places where any number of anomalies can hide.”
“Agreed,” she said. “We should keep going until we find shelter, break out of the forest, or until morning comes.”
Without any further discussion, he headed off the bridge and away from the path, into the forest. Rather to his surprise, she allowed him to take the lead without argument. They moved quietly through the underbrush. Even though they hadn’t been attacked, all of his senses remained on high alert. He didn’t like the number of unanswered questions they had accumulated.
He guessed that the coastal scene they had seen earlier was as much as twenty to twenty-five miles away from the cliff house. Moving carefully through the dark as they were, they wouldn’t reach that before morning. He was starting to get tired, which meant Aryal had to be getting tired too. Instinct drove him now, and he didn’t think it would be a good thing to go into the city without getting some rest first.
He said as much to Aryal telepathically.
Makes sense, she said simply.
He waited but she didn’t say anything more. It was another one of those anomalies that he had begun to accumulate. They weren’t arguing nearly as much as they should have been. Since she could pull an argument out of thin air, that probably meant she was plotting something, but his whack-job radar wasn’t going off, so he doubted his own conclusion.
It was interesting to experience her as an asset, as opposed to a drain or an outright danger. He could acknowledge that her skill set made her useful in her sentinel position in investigations, but that was an intellectual observation. Now he was actually experiencing what it was like to work with her as a partner, and she was every bit as good as he would have expected any of the other sentinels to be—fast, sharp, relevant and logical.
He liked what he saw of Aryal as a working partner. He respected it, respected her. That was another anomaly.
Of course so far they hadn’t really had to interact much with other people. And they did pretty much kick the shit out of each other already. He grinned.
Time became a formless thing that passed uncounted in the shadows. He sank into his animal awareness, feeling the muscles of his body work while he noted the details of his surroundings. It wouldn’t do to relax and slip into carelessness. He watched the more intense shadows, looking for anything that seemed especially dark and that moved differently than any of the leafy fronds or tree limbs that swayed in the breeze.
When he finally came up to another tree line, the change was so abrupt it surprised him. He stopped before breaking out of the underbrush, and Aryal brushed his back before she stopped too.
They had come upon a meadow with long, coarse grasses that looked tall enough to come up to their chests. That meadow could disguise a lot. He glanced at the sky that was beginning to lighten in one direction. Okay, he was calling that direction east. Dawn was not that far away. It was still too dark to see much beyond what was close in front of them, but he guessed that, as long as they had hiked, they had reached the other side of the forest and were now probably a few miles away from the coast.
“I don’t think we’re going to get any better place to stop before we reach the coast,” he said. “And I don’t want to get there without having had some rest first.”
“We should camp here,” she said. “And take watches. That way we’ll both get some sleep.”
“Works for me.”
Aryal lost a coin toss, which meant Quentin could rest first. He ate a protein bar quickly to stave off the worst of any hunger pains. It didn’t have enough calories to satisfy him, especially after the expenditure of energy over the last two days, but it would be enough to let him take a nap.
He stretched out underneath a tree to catch any shade it might give after the sun came up, and he used his pack as a pillow. Aryal stood nearby, leaning back against another tree with her arms crossed and one booted heel hiked up on the trunk. She didn’t face either the meadow or the forest, but positioned herself at an angle so that she could look easily in either direction.
She looked comfortable, capable, and alert enough to stand guard all day.
He watched her surreptitiously from under lowered eyelids as she tore open a protein bar and took a bite. She had tied her hair back with a piece of leather, but a few fine strands fell forward on the clean line of her forehead. The T-shirt she had worn underneath her sweater was a plain white cotton tank top. It hugged the long slim line of her torso, highlighting her high, slight breasts and the twin peaks of her nipples.
His body clenched with hunger. He thought of how her breasts felt in his hands, the softness giving way under his touch, how her nipple tasted in his mouth.
Unbidden, what she had said yesterday played through his mind again.
If you do anything to actively try to hurt any of the people I care about—that’s when I will come after you, and I won’t stop until I hurt you bad, or you end up dead, or maybe even both those things. That’s my bottom line.
It really was quite simple.
From everything he had heard, harpies rarely gave anybody a second chance at anything. If you got on their shit list, you usually stayed there forever. She really might not care about his smuggling past, but he also realized what a huge concession she had made when she let go of her investigation. There wouldn’t be any more chances after that.
If she ever found out what he had done to Dragos and Pia last year, he had no doubt what would happen. It would be open war again, and this time the hostilities between them wouldn’t stop until one of them was dead.