He didn’t turn. “Hi, Kara.”
How he’d known it was me, I couldn’t guess. My perfume, maybe, carried on the wind, or maybe the light fall of my footsteps, probably very different from Michael’s. Or maybe he had super-attuned senses, half-alien warrior that he was. I wasn’t brave enough to ask.
Instead, I stopped a few paces away from him and said, “I think you’ve found the one cool spot in Sedona.”
A lift of the shoulders. I saw that he held a smooth black stone in one hand, as if he’d been contemplating chucking it across the quick-moving waters. Oak Creek never ran dry, even at this time of year, although its level was far lower than it would be in the spring, or after the first snowfall up on the San Francisco Peaks in Flagstaff.
He set the rock down and spoke, still without looking a
