TWENTY-FOUR
Evalle couldn’t believe what had just happened. She was positive that woman standing in this park a minute ago with the Ngak Stone was human.
How could that be?
The roar of fury coming at her meant someone else was just as surprised and didn’t like surprises.
The man Vyan had called Tristan strode arrogantly across the open stretch of turf toward her, splashing puddles of water. He flung strikes of blue hot energy up against the field of power she struggled to hold in place against his onslaught.
What was this guy? And why did she feel a buzz in the air? If he was a sorcerer, he’d have dealt with Vyan and pulled the woman to him, so this Tristan had no majik ability.
Maybe. No absolutes in her world, not when the being was unidentified.
Evalle stood a better chance in battling this guy one-to-one rather than just holding up a field of energy. With the rain now coming down in sheets across the park she might have an advantage with her speed and agility.
She shoved a wall of power at Tristan that knocked him backward and gave her a chance to come around into a fighting stance. “Just what is a Tristan?”
“The last thing you’ll see alive,” he told her in a voice promising pain as a prequel to death. Then he attacked, rushing at her with arms raised to slam her.
She kinetically hooked her hands around him and fell backward, using his momentum to toss him over her head, high into the air and crashing down onto the end of the footbridge.
Sen would have to deal with the wrecked bridge.
Tristan rolled to his feet, unfazed. He called out, “Get over here.”
“Does that work with other women?” Evalle quipped. “Not so much with me.”
“Wasn’t talking to you.” He lifted his chin, and she realized he was talking to someone else when he said, “Get her.”
Evalle swung around just as two hideous half-human-half-ghoul forms flew at her. Things that looked like the demented ghoulish thing Storm had followed.
She slammed her boot heel against the ground, and blades shot out from the sides. Waiting until the ghouls were close enough to catch, she swept her arm wide from side to side. The wave of kinetic energy she dragged across the ghouls knocked one into the other, tumbling them into a pile of writhing arms and legs.
A part of her registered that these had to be old Nightstalkers she’d probably spoken with in the past, so she didn’t use her blades to cut their throats. Once she’d dealt with this Tristan character she’d have to call Sen before these two ghouls revived.
Facing Tristan again, she found him sitting casually on the edge of the footbridge railing, one foot propped on a crossbeam, as if waiting on someone to hand him a beer. “What have you been doing to Nightstalkers?”
He didn’t say a word.
She took a step toward him and a spike of pain shot into the back of her calf. Evalle fell to her knees. She looked over her shoulder to see one of the ghouls dragging himself toward her with a long fingernail sticking from his finger like a sharpened blade.
Her sympathy for the insanely half-dead flew out the window.
“You shouldn’t have done that.” She shoved up to her feet, took two steps and cut his head off with a kick of her boots. Turning to the second one, she warned, “Move and I’ll quarter you.”
The other poor thing quivered and backed up into a ball of fear, huddling against the downpour.
When she wheeled around to Tristan this time, she wanted blood. “You’re mine.”
“I’ve never been one to disappoint a lady.” He jumped down from his perch, gripped his hands as if he had an invisible bat and swung at her.
Her leg throbbed, but she waited until the last minute to dive sideways and roll.
His blast of power disintegrated the remaining ghoul into tiny microscopic pieces the rain dispersed. That had probably been his true target for his first time at bat.
She raced at him from the side before he got to take a second swing.
He spun, using his kinetics to block, but she wasn’t a standard-model Belador he could take down with the usual kinetics. At least, not when she was one hundred percent. She’d make him pay for the ghoul cutting her leg.
When she was close to him, she swung around on her good leg and used the bad one to punch through his wall of power.
Didn’t happen.
She bounced back as if hitting a wall of stone, landing on her injured leg.
What in the heck was this guy? Evalle sucked in a breath and raised her head to get back up.
His body slammed her back into the mud and held her there. He didn’t tower over her, but he did have her by four inches and more muscle.
She was on her back, staring up at him. A scream buried deep in her mind came roaring up. She clenched her teeth to keep from letting it out. The memory of being held down and brutalized raced forward with the burgeoning scream, threatening to blind her with panic.
The bastard on top of her was at least winded, chest heaving with a labored breath. “Now we can talk.”
“Get. Off. Now.” She could only speak in short bursts or the terror would break free.
Never show an enemy a weakness.
Never let a man hurt her again.
Never let one live who did.
This one weighed as much as her couch, but she’d shifted and terrorized the one who had raped her at fifteen and could do worse now.
She shook with the need to shift into a stronger being and protect herself. Blood slammed against the walls of her skin. Her brain tried to warn her to calm down, but the fifteen-year-old who’d screamed in pain burst from the black hole she’d been hiding in all these years.
“Last. Chance,” she panted, scrambling for each breath.
“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 fuck 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.