Poison Tree

“Heard what?” She inched as he reached toward the wound, which had started to scab in places but was still seeping blood in others. “How badly are you hurt?”

“Not too bad,” she said. “If you have bandages—”

“I have better,” he replied, gently brushing his ngertips over the edges of the wound.

The lingering aura of restone told him why the injury wasn’t worse: restone drained vampiric power and wasn’t too good for shapeshifters, but it was less dangerous for humans than pure steel would be. The witch power embedded in the stone had helped her body staunch the bleeding.

Alysia stayed tensed, but she didn’t pull away again as he focused his power on the way her esh had been cut and gently nudged it back into its proper form. If it hadn’t been on her face, he might have stopped as soon as the wound was closed, but he didn’t want to leave a scar, so he put a little extra power into erasing all evidence of the blade.

Alysia wasn’t vain, but scars drew attention. They looked suspicious.

Plus, he didn’t want to leave a mark on her face. But he knew she would accept the rst explanation more than the second one. “Anything else?” he asked.

“Some bruised ribs,” she answered, “but that’s all. It could have been a lot worse. There’s a number up for my capture, apparently.”

“Since when?” he asked. He had checked all three guild boards before meeting Alysia that morning, to con rm that there wasn’t anything up about an attack on SingleEarth. He would have noticed a posting calling for Alysia’s abduction.

“Since about an hour ago, according to Ben,” she said. “It even included my location.

Someone probably called him because he was already there.”

“Ben the computer guy?” Christian asked. He had looked the geek in the eye and hadn’t seen or sensed a thing. Of course, he hadn’t spent a lot of time at Crimson since Alysia left —he had watched their Challenge because he wanted to know who Adam’s successor would be, but he hadn’t even competed—so it was possible Ben was a recent member of that guild.

“He did this to you?”

“No, he’s the one who gave me the heads-up. He doesn’t do live captures,” she answered.

The explanation wasn’t hard to believe; a lot of the mercenaries in Bruja would happily kill someone but had no interest in the inconvenience of a living prisoner. Especially in

Crimson, it was rare to find someone interested in accepting a job for a capture.

Still, there were enough people who would go for a well-paying capture that it would be a good idea to move on as soon as possible. Christian had speci cally chosen his current location so that Alysia could find him. If she could, so could others.

He reached forward again, intending to check on her ribs, but Alysia flinched again.

“One of Maya’s grunts gave me the new decorations,” she said, not meeting his gaze.

“Unless she’s changed her ways and is giving her boys free will these days, that means more of them will show up soon. I have my rank-weapons, but no good way to carry most of them. Plus, I’m out of shape. I’ve had two people get the drop on me in less than an hour, and I think I got rescued by a nine-year-old.”

Normally Christian would have laughed and asked for the rest of that story, but Alysia’s jovial tone was too forced.

He hadn’t been a Triste the last time they had hunted together, so it was possible that the chaotic splash of emotions in her aura was normal for her when she was amped up for a ght, but he doubted it. One thing he knew for sure was that there were streaks of pain in there as well, pulsing in time with her breathing.

“Do you want me to check the ribs?” he asked.

Alysia paused, regarding him warily as she asked, “How much power do you burn with that kind of healing?”

“Not enough to compromise my ability to fight if we get in trouble,” he answered.

She didn’t answer immediately, and in the silence, the truth hit him. Alysia had left before he started training. The kind of ground rules they had set in the old days didn’t address situations in which one of them was potentially prey for the other.

“If I ever feed on you,” Christian assured her, “it will be because I need to in order to keep us alive, and I will make very sure you know about it. You trust me more than is normally healthy in our profession, but if I violated that trust by feeding on you, I have absolutely no doubt you would do everything in your power to kill me. Am I right?”

“Yeah.” She cautiously prodded her ribs, her gaze distant. “Nothing’s cracked. I’ll be ne, if I can gure out who’s o ering a half-million dollars to kidnap me. It seems unlikely they just want to throw a surprise party.”

It has been two years, he reminded himself. They were both pretending no time had passed, but Alysia’s aura held the twisted shine of panic or even shock. Even if he had read her correctly earlier, even if she did miss Bruja—and, hopefully, him—she wasn’t here of her own free will. She was here because she had nowhere else to go.

But she trusts me enough to come here, to let me know I could earn a lot of quick cash for bringing her in, and to admit that she probably wouldn’t be able to defend herself. She had trusted him enough to let her guard down the instant she recognized him that morning at

SingleEarth, too. That meant something, right?

“Let’s move while we talk,” he said. “We can go by the house, get you better equipped, and then I can look up the posting against you.”

Alysia nodded. “Lead the way.”

“Could it be someone at SingleEarth who has it in for you?” Christian asked as he set a hand to the door and focused his power, checking the hall for any sign of movement. “Or did anyone else know where you were?”

“I take it you haven’t started watching the news in my absence,” Alysia remarked, following as he stepped through the door.

Her hand once again drifted to her cheek. Did it feel strange? He probably should have asked before healing it. But he wouldn’t have asked before helping her with a bandage.

This was no di erent, really. Except that it obviously was, to her, and despite his assurances, Alysia had put plenty of space between them.

“What was on the news?” he asked.

“Me. And it was national, so the list of people who potentially know where I am isn’t short.”

They both instinctively quieted as they reached the parking lot. The snow had stopped, and there were people milling about, but it wasn’t the possibility of being overheard that made Christian tense. They were too exposed.

“We can leave my car,” Alysia said. “It doesn’t have anything in it except a completely legal registration under the surname I’m using at SingleEarth.”

“Good.”

They didn’t speak much more until they had both climbed into his car, a nondescript four-wheel drive—the only two things he much cared about when shopping for a vehicle—

and Christian brought them out of town and onto what passed for a highway in this backwater spot.

“Question,” Alysia said as they left behind most signs of civilization. “Bruja allows contracts against anyone, for any reason, except guild leaders. There’s no reason I can think of that someone would want me this badly, but what about you? A capture is up close and has a high likelihood of complications compared to a kill, and much as I hate to admit it, there are a lot of people in Bruja who could have predicted I would go to you in this kind of situation. Do you think someone could be hoping you might get caught in the cross fire?”

The suggestion was not beyond the realm of possibility. Even if Christian hadn’t been a guild leader, most people would not have wanted to cross Pandora by directly targeting her most recent student. On the other hand, those same people would know that a Triste was hard to kill and was unlikely to fall accidentally during a job with another purpose.

“It’s—”

The silver SUV cut into his eld of vision and forced him to swing left. He heard Alysia yelp an expletive just