Ann Gimpel by Earth's Requiem (Earth Reclaimed) Page B

her arm around Rune and willed them out of there.
    The wolf did something while they were en route. It felt as if he pushed himself inside her body, merging with her. It made things easier, so she didn’t fight the sensation. But it was so unusual that it took her breath away. It was like she looked through two sets of eyes and heard through two sets of ears, her common world overlaid by the wolf’s enhanced senses. She’d expected the journey to be dull, but it filled with unexpected wonders. Scents bombarded her. She smelled growing things and wild horses and bees at work. The scent of honey was so thick, it almost coated her tongue. An eagle’s hunting cry came out of nowhere, followed by a pack of wolves howling.
    When they tumbled out on a rocky hillside, she blinked several times, trying for a return of her normal perspective.
    Rune stood next to her, tail twitching and head turning from side to side as his nostrils flared. “I am going hunting,” he announced and took off at a lope.
    Aislinn was hungry, too. Reaching out with magic—or trying to—she understood that she was far too depleted to do much of anything that way. “Unless a mouse happens to run over my foot and I’m lucky enough to catch it, guess I’m out of luck,” she groused.
    “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. Find water for us,” drifted back to her.
    Good advice. Opening her senses, she sought the tang that meant water. It would have been easier with magic, but it wasn’t impossible without it. Nevada wasn’t as dry as it looked. Once her mother had checked out, Aislinn had spent several weeks wandering from one miner’s shack to another, trying to find a place to shelve her grief. There had still been cars and gasoline to power them then, so it had been relatively easy to leave Salt Lake—and to return. Tara hadn’t seemed to understand that Jacob was dead. She’d talked to him all the time. And she’d reverted to Gaelic, stopped bathing, and almost stopped eating. It had been as if Aislinn hadn’t even existed anymore. In fact, when she’d returned after a month of knocking around Nevada, Colorado, and Utah, her mother had just looked blankly at her. Aislinn had wondered if her mother even realized she’d been gone.
    Water. She wrenched herself back to the present. A spring was just over the next ridge. Either that, or an artesian well. Trusting that the wolf could find her, she started for it, stumbling over rocks littering a talus field. Maybe she might have just enough magic to help her pick a path… No go. She stubbed a toe, cursed, gave it up, and used her eyes.
    The spring was exactly where she’d sensed it. It wasn’t much, a trickle oozing upward out of moss-coated ground. She’d just eased herself down next to the slick, algae-coated rocks when she spied Rune walking toward her. His mouth bulged with two fat rabbits.
    She dug a small circle around the water to encourage it to pool and lurched back to her feet. “Nice!” she exclaimed. “Dinner.” Gathering sage, she piled it between rocks. When she had a respectable heap, she lit it with a thought. Fire was the first magic and by far the easiest. Aislinn waited for the blaze to die down so she could cook over it.
    She picked up a rabbit and looked quizzically at the wolf. “One of these is yours.”
    “I can get more.”
    “No,” she insisted. “Eat one of these. If we’re both still hungry, you can hunt for more.”
    The wolf snatched up the smaller of the two rabbits and hauled it a few feet away. She heard the crunch of bones breaking. Gutting her rabbit with the dirk that always hung from her waist, she tossed the entrails Rune’s way. Once she’d skinned the carcass, she threaded the meat onto thick pieces of scrub oak and warmed them over her fire. Not caring that the meat wasn’t fully cooked, she ate as soon as blood stopped dripping from it, sighing as the succulent flesh burst on her tongue. Sometimes, she thought she could taste the desert