Blood Trinity (Belador #1)(81)

“What you going to do?” He shoved his hips against her and she lost all conscious thought.

“This, you bastard!” Cartilage broke free in her arms. Her neck snapped with the first sign of shifting. She let a roar out and kinetically tossed him up and backward fifty feet. He hit the footbridge for the second time tonight, taking down another chunk of it.

Tristan gained his feet and shook his head. His shoulders bunched when he yanked his neck, popping a few muscles of his own. “What the f*ck are you?”

That broke through the haze of adrenaline spike and wave of terror to make her look at her hands, where her wrists had split the cuffs of her jacket. Oh, God, oh, God. She had to get her beast under control.

All of a sudden, her sunglasses flew off her face.

Evalle looked up and flicked her hand at him without a second thought, slapping the glasses off his face.

Glowing green eyes swirled like molten stones.

Green eyes unlike anything she’d ever seen before … except in her bathroom mirror.

“Alterant?” He said the word with disbelief packed full of deadly suspicion.





TWENTY-FIVE




“Alterant?” Evalle echoed back at the man called Tristan, just as much in shock.

Here was a man with the unusual physical strength and luminous green eyes of an Alterant.

“Where’d you come from?” Tristan asked, stepping away from the damaged footbridge that made Piedmont Park look like a small war zone.

“Why? You putting together an Alterant reunion website?” Evalle wasn’t telling someone with his powers anything about herself, but she had to keep him talking. Find out anything she could about the first of her kind she’d ever met.

“Vyan said you were Belador. Why’d he think that?” Tristan took a couple of steps forward.

“Stop right there.” Surprisingly, he did. “I am a Belador.”

“They don’t take Alterants into the tribe.”

Scarcely a few minutes had passed, but every second of holding his attention became more precarious. Where was Storm? Why couldn’t she reach Tzader or anyone else telepathically? Was that strange buzzing she could almost hear a cloaking spell? Had someone placed a spell over the park that prevented her from communicating with anyone?

Did that mean he had majik ability, or was he working with a witch? “I’m proof the Beladors take Alterants into the tribe. I’ll ask if they’re taking applications.”

“Brina took one look at me five years ago and stuck me in a jungle in a spellbound cage.”

Five years. Almost as long as she’d been a Belador. “You escaped? When?”

“Yesterday.”

“How?”

“Like I’m going to tell you so you can tell the rest of the Beladors?” His eyes brightened with a thought. “Wait a minute. You’re Evalle.”

Worry scattered along her nerves. How did he know that? For once, shock had stolen her voice. She held quiet rather than confirm or deny.

“I heard about an Alterant called Evalle. A female Alterant. I didn’t believe it was true.”

Few in Atlanta’s hidden world of the strange and supernatural did. She’d caught something speculative running along beside his words, a soft sound that harbored dark thoughts.

“This changes everything,” he muttered.

She didn’t like the sound of that either, since change would probably not be for the good in her case. “What’d you do to those two Nightstalkers?”

“Gave them what they wanted.”

She should hammer him into the ground. “If you knew to make deals to shake with them you had to know what would happen when you shook hands for a long time. Those old ghouls never hurt anyone. How could you turn them into something evil and dangerous? Into some hideous halflings?”

“I have my reasons, but I’m not telling a snitch who talks to Beladors.”

This worthless dog was not going to insult her. “I am a Belador.”

“An Alterant? You’re living in a dream world. They may let you hang around with them and use you for grunt work, but they don’t think you’re one of them.”

She kept a mask of indifference in place so he couldn’t see how deeply his words cut. She believed she was Belador even if the majority of the tribe didn’t. But this was the first time she’d ever met another Alterant. The first chance to ask some questions and maybe shed some light on where they came from, but she’d have to give Tristan a reason to talk to her. Also, the more she found out about him and how he had gotten here, the better chance she’d have to find the Ngak Stone that had disappeared with the woman and Vyan.

Tristan was clearly after the same thing as Vyan, but maybe not for the same reason.

She gave the let’s-work-together-for-the-greater-good tactic a shot. “I’m trying to help Alterants so we won’t have to be locked up or destroyed, but I haven’t been able to find out any information on them, and I know very little about my own background. Where did you grow up? Who were your parents? Where were you when you were caught?”

Tristan headed toward her again, talking as he moved, but she stood her ground, since he wasn’t acting aggressive. “You’re free to run around. Why would you care about helping any other Alterants? You don’t have any worries.”