Fatal Strike (McClouds & Friends #10)(2)

He pulled off his boots. He needed monkey toes to climb that big bastard, but he’d make do with what God gave him. He studied the big overhang, the stretch where basaltic lava had formed long, crystalline striations, as if a huge beast had clawed violently downward. There were cracks and crannies, maybe big enough for fingertips, maybe not. He cataloged them all. His eyes were sharper than before Spruce Ridge, and his memory, too. Sharp, like all of him. Sharp like broken glass.

To counteract that dubious advantage, his headache throbbed nastily. A lingering hangover from Spruce Ridge, plus the effects of sleep deprivation. He was so damn ambivalent about sleep ever since those crazy erotic dream trysts with the ghost girl had started up.

Each night, the dream began with her creeping through a big mechanical wall. A big, steam-punk style thing, full of monstrous gears turning, ax-shaped pendulums swinging, a confusion of parts in constant motion, but somehow, she found hidden, Lara-shaped openings and slithered through them. Sinuous, practiced, like some sort of sexy pole dancer. A choreography she knew without thinking.

He forced the memory down, and squinted at the Fork, which towered against the dawn sky. Lara was a dangerous ghost. If he shorted out and lost the shield partway up, he was meat.

Not that he was afraid of death. He wasn’t, since Spruce Ridge. Rudd had driven him to a place where death was his friend. He’d never be afraid of it again. Even so, he wasn’t going looking for death. A guy had to give a shit, to plan his own suicide. Who had the energy.

His shield was solid, after some deep breathing. Okay. Good to go. He flexed his hands. The pine needles beneath his bare feet were fuzzed with frost, but his feet weren’t cold at all. His body seemed to be regulating temperature better than it used to. He focused his mind to a diamond sharp point . . .

. . . it washed over him, mixing into the data feed. Cougar.

Where? He looked around, neck prickling, keeping his mind blank to make space for the flash flood of sensory info. That was another souvenir from Spruce Ridge. Harold Rudd had mindf*cked Miles into a coma with his coercive psychic powers a few months ago. He’d survived the encounter—barely. But when he woke up, his brain was wired all wrong. He existed in a state of constant sensory overload. The world blared at him from all sides—no filters, no rest, no down time.

It knocked him flat. He’d hiked out here to the ass end of nowhere to try to jerry-rig himself back into functionality again. To learn how to at least fake normal. Not that he’d been so very normal before, but hey, everything was relative.

Oddly enough, the sensory overload had gotten somewhat better since the ghost girl started making her conjugal visits to his mental fortress. Surprise, surprise, life improved when a guy started getting laid. Even if it was only in the privacy of his own mind.

The animal was watching him from that stand of trees. How did he know the cougar was a she? By smell? Like he’d ever sniffed a cougar to determine its sex. Still, the summation of infinitesimal bits of information, each individually too small to perceive on its own, swirled up like a pixelated cloud in his mind, focusing into a potent, predatory her. Near-invisible in the trees, eyes gleaming with inscrutable feline calm. Her tail swished when she sensed him watching.

He stared, awestruck. He loved seeing the animals. These were the moments he was trolling for. Fleeting instants when his hyper-sensitivity was actually a gift, not just a huge pain in the ass.

Neither wanted to move until the other one did, but Miles finally surrendered, lifting his hands. “I’m not breakfast,” he told her.

Her tail swished. Her gaze was unwavering.

Miles took a swig of his water, stowed the flask and gave her a respectful nod. “Later, then,” he told her, and began his climb.

Long. Slow. Nearly impossible. Silence and solitude helped focus him, and so did muscle-bulging, sweat-dripping, eye-popping effort. Dangling a millimeter away from death for hours at a time was genuinely restful to him. If he kept the shield strong.

Strange, how he’d originally created the shield to protect himself from Rudd and his pet telepath, Anabel, for all the good it had done him. They hadn’t been able to read his mind, but Rudd had ground him into hamburger anyway. He’d made that wall to keep attackers out, but what he’d ultimately created was a bunker to keep his own self in.

Whatever it took. Since he woke up from the coma, he’d been faced with two possible modes of existence. Mode One: a shaking, sobbing nightmare of screaming stress flashbacks, reliving Rudd’s torture. Big barrel of laughs, that one. Mode Two: keep that mind shield up, constantly. It clamped down on the stress flashbacks. It also flatlined him emotionally.

Mode Two won, whatever the price. Cowering in a fortress worked for him. It was a no-brainer.

It changed him, though, to the vocal dismay of his family and friends. Nobody liked chill, flatlined Miles. He was too cold for them. No fun anymore. Tough shit. He was done rolling around like a puppy, panting for everyone’s approval. Anyone who cherished strong opinions about his coping mechanisms could go get stuffed.

Nothing moved him. Not maternal guilt, not the scolding of his friends; Aaro, Sean, or various other components of the McCloud crowd, an opinionated group if there ever was one. To a man, they considered Miles to be their own personal creation, and as such, their personal property, too. It took a traumatic brain injury to jolt him free of that.

He’d always wondered how those McCloud guys, most notably Davy, Connor, and Kev, managed their strong, silent routines. Now he understood. They had shields in their heads, just like him.