When the pain and disorientation faded enough that he could take in his surroundings, he stood up and took a look around.
The resemblance to the Wild West was even stronger in reality. He was standing on a ridge of rock looking down on the exact view in Max's photo, a worn fence and rolling hills leading to distant-blued mountains. There were a few gnarled trees in low spots, and a splash or two of green that he supposed marked a waterway, but for the most part the rocky landscape was the color of a lion's back, a tawny golden beige, with almost nothing growing on it.
Turning, he saw an old cabin, made of logs weathered to gray. There was a dusty Jeep parked in front of it.
Max emerged from the cabin's open doorway with a rifle slung over her shoulder. She looked cool and competent, like an apocalypse survivor emerging from her campsite.
"Where," she said, "in the absoluteholy heckdid you come from?"
"I—give me a minute." He was still trying not to be sick. When he could straighten up all the way, Gio explained, "Like our target, I can travel instantaneously, or something akin to it. I don't do it often because it's unpleasant, but it's useful in an emergency."
Max gazed at him with her hard-to-read dark eyes. Gio tried to stand straight and not look like he was still queasy and weak. There was some part of him that wished he could truly surprise her, that anything he did could evoke all the shades of meaning and wonder that he had read in her eyes in those first minutes in her office—before he had thoroughly alienated her for reasons that still puzzled him.
"Well, aren't you full of surprises," she said after a moment. "Come on over to the ranch."
Gio accompanied her to the cabin. The door sagged on worn leather hinges. Inside, there was no furniture except a tumbledown stone fireplace that looked like a safety hazard. Max had set up a tidy little campsite with two sleeping bags, a crate of canned goods with a Sterno camp stove sitting on top of it, a jug of water, and assorted other equipment.
"How did you know about this place?" Gio asked.
"I know a lot of places like this. I like to come out to the desert and run with my beast, where no one will see me."
She said it matter-of-factly, but Gio once again sensed that deep sadness underneath, the great well of unhappiness that made him want to take her in his arms and smooth down her hair and soothe all her hurts away.
She was, as always, fairly unapproachable for that sort of thing. Her hair was done up in a short braid and pinned to the back of her head, with wispy strands escaping around her face. She wore a dusty T-shirt, a camo jacket tied around her waist, and loose, practical canvas trousers.
"What do you turn into?" Gio asked abruptly, overwhelmed by curiosity.
"Jaguar," Max said without visible emotion.
But he realized that he knew. He knew even before she said it. He had a sudden, intense image of a powerful, loping spotted cat. Its fur was dusty, and it was tired, but it ran on and on, as if driven by something internal that wouldn't let it rest. Its eyes were Max's eyes, movie-star beautiful and sad.
Gio felt an incredible kinship with it. He, too, knew what it was like to run and run, driven onward with no chance to rest.
"Do you want to sit down and have some coffee?" Max asked. "I was just about to make some." She had relaxed a little, smiling a lopsided smile that sat beautifully on her wide, expressive mouth.
"Are there chairs?"
"I brought a couple of camp chairs, but there's a perfectly good fence rail out back."
The fence was weathered so smooth that the wood was gray and free of splinters. They perched on it in a dry, dusty wind, and sipped from tin mugs. Gio was normally a connoisseur of coffee, but he found Max's boiled camp coffee surprisingly pleasant. It was the atmosphere, he thought. There had been a time when he had rejected all but the finest espresso made from freshly ground beans, sipped peacefully in his library while he read his books.
Now he sat with Maxine on a fence rail, drank his cowboy coffee, and he found himself warming to the making of plans as she laid out her ideas in her husky, sexy voice. He wondered what she would sound like speaking Italian. She would have a beautiful accent, he suspected.
"When he opens his portals, it's near you but not on top of you, right?" Max said.
"Yes, there's usually some distance. Actually ... it's generally enough distance to give him a chance to spring an ambush." Gio had never really thought this through before. "I don't know if it's just that his targeting is bad, or if he knows exactly where I am and is choosing to come in a short distance away. I suppose it's not impossible that he could be spying on me magically."
"Is that possible? Magical surveillance?"
"I've read of some people being able to scry long-distance, in pieces of crystal or bowls of water."
"That's a thing?"
"It's only theoretical," Gio said. "But we can't rule it out."
"Oh, great. So he might be able to check for a trap beforehand." She blew a straggling strand of hair off her nose. It curled like a comma. "Okay, since you just got here, that means we're in our grace period before he can track you. We'd better act as if he'll be able to surveil us beforehand, since we don't know for sure, so any traps we set need to be hidden. Luckily," she added, "I'm a paranoid beyotch and I already do all of that."
Gio thought about the pile of supplies in the cabin. "What do you have with you?"
