Panting, I leaned over, my hands on my knees and my elbows locked to support me, as I tried to figure out what was going on. The words made no sense. I didn’t recognize the female. Nobody should even be here. Was I confused? Was the adrenaline shooting through my veins messing with my head? Had Swirly decided to return?
“If Owen doesn’t get here, Seth will kill me!”
I shot up and stood perfectly straight, frozen in place. Only the Daemoni called him Seth.
Chapter 15
A string of profanity flew out of Tristan’s mouth. He didn’t need to hear the female’s thoughts. He knew she was there. His nostrils flared. His eyes sparked. He crouched in front of me, in a protective stance. I didn’t know if my mind put up some kind of wall to block her thoughts out of fear, if her mind went blank or if she’d disappeared, but the female’s thoughts fell silent.
I opened my mouth to ask what happened to Owen, then clamped it shut when an unfamiliar scent wafted below my nose, the odd mixture of honey, mesquite and dirt. Then I saw movement in the brush about ten yards away and froze. The top of a sapling wavered. Something snapped, the sound of a thick branch breaking under a heavy weight. Then a face appeared next to the rough bark of a palm tree. My heart sputtered. I blinked several times. The figure wasn’t human. It wasn’t even an animal that belonged on this continent, except in a zoo.
Large, yellow cat eyes stared back at us, framed with black and white stripes. A long, orangish-tan nose ended in a rounded muzzle with whiskers poking out of the sides. Round, black ears, pointed backward, twitched and then rotated forward. The huge feline head dipped down, but the eyes never ceased their careful watch on us. An orange paw as big as my head moved forward. Tristan soared at it.
“Tristan! That’s a freaking tiger!” I shrieked.
He landed on the big beast’s back and his arms wrapped around it. They rolled twice and stopped with Tristan on top. His muscles bulged as he squeezed the barrel chest. The cat struggled under him. Long claws dug into the dirt. Its tail whipped side to side. Lips pulled back, revealing curved fangs as long and nearly as thick as my index finger. But the tiger never growled or lashed out at Tristan.
“Tristan, wait!” Owen yelled from right behind me and I spun on him in surprise. I hadn’t even noticed his return, too worried about Tristan. His blond hair stuck out everywhere and black smudges marked his face. A slash in his jeans gaped open just above his knee.
I turned back to Tristan and the beast, just in time to see the big cat begin to shrink. The orange, black and white fur appeared to retract into its skin. The limbs narrowed and transformed. The claws became fingers. Tristan jumped to his feet, landing fifteen feet away, his palm faced toward the morphing shape.
“Easy, Tristan,” Owen said, taking a few steps toward them. “It’s okay. She’s with me.”
The figure became a naked woman, long and lean, thin but with well-defined muscles. She lay on her stomach, her long, dark hair shrouding her face. Bruises covered her body—some new, probably from Tristan, but others a greenish-gray. She didn’t move and for a moment I thought she was dead. But it was Tristan holding her still with his paralyzing power.
Tristan kept his hand toward her, even as Owen rushed to her side. He pulled his shirt off, knelt beside her and lay his shirt over her, trying to tuck it in under her.
“What do you mean, she’s with you?” Tristan growled. “She’s a fucking Daemoni!”
The woman whimpered.
“Can you at least let her sit up?” Owen asked.
Tristan’s eyes blazed, but he must have let up. The woman rolled into a sitting position and tucked herself into a protective ball. She slowly lifted her head to look up at us and I recognized the young woman’s face. Her brown eyes were full of the same fear I’d seen in them the other night in Key West, when the vampires were threatening her. But then she froze and I assumed Tristan paralyzed her again. Her head twitched, as if she’d tried to move but couldn’t against Tristan’s power.
“She wants to convert,” Owen said. “She doesn’t want to be one of them.”
Another growl rumbled in Tristan’s chest.
“Please help me,” she whispered, her eyes pleading with us.
“It’s a trick, Owen!” Tristan barked. “What the hell are you thinking?”
“No,” she said, her eyes looking wild with protest. “Please. I don’t want to be them. I never did. What they did to me…I hate that life. You have to know, of all people.”
Tristan’s hand never moved, but his eyes exploded in flames. “Of all people, I know the trick of pretending to want to change.”
“And you did want to change, Tristan,” Owen reminded him.
“She’s not me!”
Owen stood to his full height, only a couple of inches shorter than Tristan. His eyes looked hard as sapphires as he glared at his best friend. “You’re not the only one who hates that life. We’ve converted many who never wanted to be like them, but were forced against their wills.”
They stared at each other, as if in a stand-off. I couldn’t take my eyes off of the woman. Her stringy hair draped around a dirt-smudged face. Her high cheekbones and angular jaw might have given the impression of strength at any other time, but right now she looked scared and weak. Actually, she looked downright pitiful. I could hardly believe that just a minute ago she’d been a deadly beast.
“This is what we’re supposed to do,” Owen finally said to Tristan, breaking the silence. “This is part of being Amadis. It’s our obligation to help her, to save her soul.”
“It’s not what we do, Owen!” Tristan bellowed, making me jump and pulling my attention away from the girl. “Not you or me. That’s what Rina and Sophia and some of the others do. Not us! We can’t do it! And you’re putting Alexis’s life on the line. Your job is to protect Alexis!”
Owen’s eyes darted to me, to the woman and then back to Tristan. “She’s been here since yesterday morning. She’s had plenty of opportunity if she wanted to do anything.”
Tristan’s eyes narrowed as he leaned toward Owen. “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull here, but I would have sensed her.”
“I had her under a separate shield, blocked from you. But I couldn’t guarantee both shields would hold while I was gone, so I put her under this one right before I left.”
Tristan responded with a long growl deep in his chest. His anger frightened me. If he lost control, he might do something he would regret later. He had every right to be angry with Owen, of course. This Were’s presence could have posed a danger to us…if she weren’t so damn pathetic looking.
Tristan rocked back on his heels.
“You could have warned us,” he finally said to Owen, anger still in his voice but not as heated as it had been. “I still think it’s a trap.”
“He’ll never believe me. Night’s coming. They’ll come looking for me. I’d rather him kill me than go back to them.”
I continued watching the young woman as she trembled on the ground, Owen’s light blue shirt fluttering around her. Her eyes turned to me and focused on mine. She seemed to plead with me for understanding.
“Tristan, I think she might be for real,” I said quietly.
“Yes! She’ll do it! She can change me!”
“Alexis—”
I held my hand up to stop him and tried to indicate with a lift of my eyebrow that I heard more than our spoken words. I wanted nothing more than to block out this woman’s thoughts. I was already tired of people entering my brain, with no way to control it. I didn’t know why some thoughts were so loud and clear and others were annoying hums and buzzes. I really wished it would all go away, that I could at least turn the ruckus off at will. But I couldn’t. And this woman didn’t know I could read her mind. She wouldn’t be trying to get to me through telepathic lies. Her thoughts were real.
“Please help me,” she whispered, her eyes still holding mine. “Please say she believes me. Please, please, please!”
