Alterant (Belador #2)(43)

“Show me,” she told him.

“Hold still for a minute. I think I can finish drawing the saliva out of your leg now that I’m getting stronger. The rest is up to you.”

Once the burning from the saliva eased, he stopped whispering his chant and walked to the bank. He sat on the ground, dripping water everywhere, and lowered her carefully to his lap.

She stared in awe at the amazing change when he flexed his damaged arm, where new skin had begun skimming over the once exposed muscle.

Tristan said, “I know it hurts, but you need to straighten out your leg.”

She nodded, then sucked up her courage and slowly stretched out her leg, gritting her teeth and shaking with the effort. The bananas she’d eaten wanted to join the party, but she kept her mouth shut until her throat cleared. “Now what?”

“You know how to release your inner Alterant, right?”

“I’ve been forbidden from shifting.” That was a safe answer. She was not telling him anything he could use against her at some point.

“I don’t mean to change all the way to your beast state,” Tristan qualified.

She gave him a look that suggested the demon saliva had reached his brain.

His eyebrows climbed his forehead. “How many times have you shifted?”

Once, all the way, but she wouldn’t share that experience with anyone except Tzader and Quinn, since they were the only ones who knew. And she’d risked shifting that one time only to save all three of their lives. Those two Beladors would take her secret to their deathbeds.

She answered, “I just told you I’m not allowed to shift.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “You don’t know squat about being an Alterant, do you?”

“How am I supposed to know anything when the only person who might be able to tell me a few things won’t?” she snapped.

“I can’t help it if Brina kept us apart.”

“We’re together now,” she pointed out.

He could have asked her for anything in trade at that moment and she would have been hard-pressed not to hand it over in exchange for her leg.

But he didn’t try to barter, which surprised her almost as much as his not shifting into a beast earlier.

He explained, “I had a lot of time to experiment while stuck out here. I found stages of change from minor altering all the way to full beast state, but there’s an initial phase of tapping power you can use and still not change into a beast.”

If she said she wasn’t curious she’d be lying. “How do I tap into that power?”

“You call up the Alterant beast slowly and feel the power seep into your blood and muscles and bone, stopping it short of the physical change from human to beast. If you do that, you can cure damn near anything. How do you think I survived living here? I was bitten by a fer-de-lance.”

“What’s that?”

“A huge pit viper with upper and lower fangs. The venom can kill within minutes of striking its prey.”

She glanced around, now adding giant snakes to the list of nasties to watch out for. Should she trust anything Tristan was telling her, especially about tapping her inner Alterant?

He hadn’t walked her into sunlight, and he hadn’t taken advantage of her incapacitated position. Oddly enough, she wasn’t freaking out about being held by him, which could be due solely to the shock of a crushed knee, almost dying and low blood pressure.

Opening her senses, she searched Tristan for some emotion, anything that might hint at his motive for trying to get her to risk changing into a beast.

Tristan hadn’t survived all this time by being stupid. He would use any edge he could get in their alliance.

The minute she opened up to him a flood of reaction hit her. Spurts of anger . . . and frustration . . . that was understandable. He wouldn’t have gotten over being furious at her . . . but . . . that wasn’t all of it.

His central emotion came clear all at once.

Anger and frustration emerged from a ball of worry.

About her? Yes. Concern over her leg and her pain. Why would he care about a woman who had sent him back to prison?

“Evalle, the longer you wait the more difficult it will be to repair your knee.” The grim set of his mouth said he meant that the longer she waited the more painful the repair would be. “If you’re vacillating over trusting me, keep in mind I have nothing to gain by healing you and plenty to lose.”

With her gut and her empathic side in unison, she could only hope he was right about her doing this without shifting. “Tell me what to do.”

“Close your eyes and think about the center of your body. It’s a volcano that can erupt and destroy everything or just bubble up and pour streams of lava down the sides. That’s what you’re going to do with your power.”

She listened to the cadence of his voice and focused on calling forth the power deep inside her.

Her beast roused.

She panicked and shut down the call, opening her eyes. “I can’t do it. I’ll change.”

“So I’m that much better than you at being an Alterant?”

That just pissed her off. She didn’t care if anyone heard her curse mentally. She clamped her eyelids shut and slowed her breathing. He started talking again.

She withdrew inside herself until she could feel the bubble of energy within her body.