Alterant (Belador #2)(46)
“Letting him out of his cage and allowing him to touch you are crimes.” The fierce edge in his voice had a ring of possessiveness.
The steamy air between them shuddered with awareness.
She’d consider how she felt about that later when she didn’t have to find a way back to another continent. “I didn’t let him out, not intentionally.” She was not going into detail about how Tristan had grabbed her and lunged through the invisible barrier. “Tristan had agreed to help me.”
Storm made a sound that couldn’t have been construed as flattering. “Help you do what? Practice for a wet T-shirt contest?”
Out of a knee-jerk reaction, she looked down to see her soaked shirt clinging to her breasts. Her nipples puckered. She crossed her arms over the damning mammaries and glared at him.
She refused to feel guilty about any of this. “Demons attacked us. One of them ripped up his arm.” That didn’t faze Storm, whose eyes still narrowed with dark thoughts. She added, “And they crushed my knee. Tristan carried me here with his only good arm so we could wash the demons’ saliva out of our wounds.”
The swift change in Storm’s face from anger to concern trimmed the edge off her irritation, but his face closed down again just as fast. He eyed her leg suspiciously. “Doesn’t look crushed.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. When you walked up, he was showing me how to heal myself.”
“What exactly did Dr. Tristan show you?”
Sarcasm did nothing to improve her mood. She should be getting frostbite from his cool reserve, but Storm didn’t seem as angry as before.
She huffed out a long breath and tried once more to clear up Storm’s misconception. “Tristan has more experience than me at being an Alterant and knows how to control the change to his beast. He taught me how to tap levels of power before shifting so I could heal safely.”
Feet apart and arms crossed, Storm might as well have had a Not Sold sign hanging from his neck. “So you shifted.”
“No, of course not. That’s the great part. I only drew on my Alterant powers.” She couldn’t get past his stony exterior. Or that suspicious glint in his eyes. “What’s with you? Ten minutes ago I faced losing my leg . . . and probably my life. Never mind.”
She took an angry sidestep and grimaced at the pain still streaking up her leg.
Concern broke through his hard gaze. “Your leg was really crushed?”
“Yes.”
Storm squatted down, studying her exposed knee and bloody jeans where claws had clearly ripped open the material. He lifted shredded flaps of material aside and touched the swollen skin gently until she hissed. “How bad is it?”
“Tolerable, but it’s healing by the minute.” She avoided putting more weight on her leg, and shrugged. “It’s sore, but I can walk through the pain.”
His shoulders relaxed when he stood. He lifted his fingers to her face. “I don’t like seeing you hurt.”
Her heart squirmed under the look he gave her, as if he wanted to maim anyone who harmed her. “I need to get moving to figure out where Tristan went. How’d you find me?”
He scanned around them while he answered. “I had some help. I gave it an hour once I left you around midnight, then I contacted Nicole and asked her to locate the amulet.”
Evalle hadn’t wanted to involve Nicole, especially since Nicole’s life partner, Red, didn’t like Evalle and hadn’t been happy about Evalle bringing Storm in jaguar form around Nicole two nights ago. “You woke up Red? She’ll give Nicole grief over this.”
Storm’s gaze stopped wandering around and met Evalle’s. “I’d have dragged Sen out of bed to find you if I’d thought I could make him tell me anything.”
How was she supposed to hold onto any anger when he said things like that? “But Nicole only put a temporary invisibility spell on this amulet when we borrowed it. I don’t understand.”
“I put a protection spell on the amulet the last time I saw you.”
That’s why the thing had been warming and glowing right before something had attacked her. Storm had been trying to protect her from a distance. “But how did Nicole determine where I was this quickly?”
“She used a scrying bowl to narrow the location of the amulet to this region, and I had access to a private jet.”
Who did he know with a private jet? But she didn’t want to waste time by interrupting.
Storm shrugged, saying, “I grew up in Chile and roamed all over this country. Once I got here it was just a matter of tracking you by the majik I used on . . .”
When his voice drifted off, his lips tightened into a frown of remorse.
But she’d caught his slip, which reminded her that she had a serious beef with him. “Speaking of the majik that changed my aura—what’d you do? It’s gold!”
He heaved a sigh. “I don’t know.”
“Wrong answer. Fix it.”
“Not sure I can, but you don’t have time for that right now anyhow if you intend to find Tristan. I’m assuming you had some plan in mind while traipsing around with him.”
That blasted Tristan.
Sure, he’d patched up her leg, but he could have teleported the whole time they’d been together. If he’d spirited them away from the demons, she wouldn’t have suffered a crushed knee.