Rebel:. Zoe Archer

herself, and went about the business of being alive. In time, living no longer was an effort of titanic proportions. Birthdays passed. She turned thirty-three last May. She went forward.

      Now she rode through the low mountain pass leading to her homestead, glancing about her. Gold-glimmering mountains rose out of the morning mist that seeped up from the evergreen woods. In the scrub, animals returned to their burrows after their nighttime forays for food. Thrushes sang to each other. And nowhere could be heard the sounds of human habitation.

      Being out in the expanse helped. In this wild place, every day she fought to survive. No room or time to huddle into herself. Self-pity opened the door to disaster. She pushed herself ahead and had done so for four years. She would continue to do so until she stopped appearing at the trading post, and some curious trapper or dutiful Mountie made the trip out to her cabin to find what remained of her. But her loss wouldn’t matter, because she had been careful, very careful, to form no attachments.

      Something shifted in her peripheral vision. Astrid swiftly took up the rifle slung over her shoulder, then lowered the gun when she saw it was only a fox trotting home from a nocturnal hunt. A beautiful creature, sleek and red, all economy and motion. The animal barely sent her a glance—it had too little exposure to man to see her as a threat—before darting into the brush to seek its den.

      “A wise choice.” Astrid chuckled to herself. Thoughts of her own secluded homestead, as comfortable as a place could be well away from civilization, had her urging her horse on. She’d spent the night sleeping on pine needles with her rifle cradled in her arms. Her bed at home offered better rest.

      Her solitary bed.

      Against her will, her thoughts turned back to the man she’d met at the trading post yesterday. Nathan Lesperance. Just thinking his name sent a shiver of heat and awareness through her. There were men in these mountains who were bigger and brawnier, but the raw masculinity of Lesperance’s lean and muscular body, even underneath his heavy traveling clothes, hit her at once with the strength of a hot avalanche. A striking man, with high cheekbones, aquiline nose, and full mouth, his skin the color of cinnamon, sculptural in his virile beauty. Hair and eyes as black as mystery. Her own body, so long used to its seclusion, thrummed into wakefulness, stirred by the male splendor of him. Even the sound of his deep, smoky voice enthralled.

      An attorney from genteel Victoria. She never would have believed it. Not because he was Native, but because she sensed it at once, the elemental wildness in him, barely contained, glittering in the jet of his eyes.

      There had been something else, too, a kinship. She felt instantly that he knew her, knew her innermost self—the hurt, the anger, and, yes, even the fire that burned in her deepest recesses, the fire for life itself. That fire had brought her to the Blades, made her love her work with them. To seize the world with both hands and never let go. She’d tamped it down after Michael’s death. But it never truly extinguished. Lesperance, somehow, had seen it. He’d done the impossible, piercing the fortifications she had raised. No one, not even her closest friends or her family, had been able to do that in all this time. She could not fully understand how Lesperance managed it, only that he had.

      He had looked into her. Not merely seen her hunger for living, but felt it, too. She saw that at once. He recognized it in her. Two creatures, meeting by chance, staring at each other warily. And with reluctant longing.

      Yet it wasn’t only that immediate connection she had felt when meeting Lesperance. There was magic surrounding him.

      Astrid wondered whether Lesperance even knew how magic hovered over him, how it surrounded him like a lover, leaving patterns of nearly visible energy in his wake. She didn’t think he was conscious of it. Nothing in his manner suggested anything of the sort. Nathan Lesperance, incredibly, was utterly unaware that he was a magical being. Not metaphorical magic, but true magic.

      She knew, however. Astrid had spent more than ten years surrounded by magic of almost every form. Some of it benevolent, such as the Healing Mists of Ho Hsien-Ku, some of it dark, such as the Javanese serpent king Naga Pahoda, though most magic was neither good nor evil. It simply was. And Astrid recognized it, particularly when sharing a very small space, as the Mounties’ office had been.

      If Nathan Lesperance’s fierce attractiveness and unwanted understanding did not drive Astrid from the trading post, back to the shelter of her solitary homestead, then the magic enveloping him certainly would. She wanted nothing more to do with magic. It had cost her love once before, and she would not allow it to hurt her again.

      But something had changed. She’d felt it, not so long ago. Magic existed like a shining web over the world, binding it together with filaments of energy. Being near magic for many years had made her especially sensitive to it. When she returned from Africa, that sensitivity had grown even more acute. She had tried to block it out, especially when she left England, but it never truly went away.

      Only a few weeks earlier, Astrid had been out tending to her horse when a deep, rending sensation tore through her, sending her to her knees. She’d knelt in the dirt, choking, shaking, until she’d gained her strength again and tottered inside. Eventually the pain subsided, but not the sense of looming catastrophe. Something had shaken and split the magical web. A force greater than anyone had ever known. And to release it meant doom.

      What was it? The Blades had to know how to avert the disaster. They would fight against it, as they always did. But without her.

      A memory flitted through her mind. Months earlier, she’d had a dream and it had stayed with her vividly. She dreamt of her Compass, of the Blades, and heard someone calling her, calling her home. Astrid had dismissed the dream as a vestige of homesickness, which reared up now and again, especially after she’d been alone for so long.

      The jingle of her horse’s bridle snapped her attention back to the present. She cursed herself for drifting. A moment’s distraction could easily lead to death out here. Stumbling between a bear sow and her cub. Crossing paths with vicious whiskey runners. A thousand ways to die. So when her awareness suddenly prickled once again, Astrid did not dismiss it.

      A rustle, and movement behind her. Astrid swung her horse around, taking up her rifle, to confront whoever or whatever was there.

      She blinked, hardly believing what she saw. A man walked through tall grasses lining the pass trail. He walked with steady but dazed steps, hardly aware of his surroundings. He was completely naked.

      “Lesperance?”

      Astrid turned her horse on the trail and urged it closer. Dear God, it was Lesperance. She decocked her rifle and slung it back over her shoulder.

      He didn’t seem to hear her, so she said again, coming nearer, “Mr. Lesperance?” She could see now, only ten feet away, that cuts, scrapes, and bruises covered his body. His very nude, extremely well-formed body. She snapped her eyes to his face before they could trail lower than his navel. “What happened to you?”

      His gaze, dark and blank, regarded her with a removed curiosity, as if she was a little bird perched on a windowsill. He stopped walking and stared at her.

      Astrid dismounted at once, pulling a blanket from her pack. Within moments, she wrapped it around his waist, took his large hand in hers, and coaxed his fingers to hold the blanket closed. Then she pulled off her coat and draped it over his shoulders. Despite the fact that the coat was quite large on Astrid, it barely covered his shoulders, and the sleeves stuck out like wings. In other circumstances, he would have looked comical. But there was nothing faintly amusing about this situation.

      Magic still buzzed around him, though somewhat dimmer than before.

      “Where are your clothes? How did you get here? Are you badly hurt?”

      None of her questions penetrated the fog enveloping him. She bent closer to examine his wounds. Some of the cuts were deep, as though made by knives, and rope abrasions circled his wrists. Bruises shadowed his knees and knuckles. Blood had dried in the corners of his mouth. Nothing looked serious, but out in the wilderness, even the most minor injury held the potential for disaster. And, without clothing, not even a Native inured to the changeable