“Well, they’re not just ‘tiny evil things,’
you know,” Lamia told him.
“Damn spooky plant,” Elan added.
And then the warm darkness swallowed me
whole, taking me on a faraway journey.
The warm darkness faded. I found myself
surrounded by soothing fabrics, light and comforting as feathers
and clouds. I slid my hands against the soft texture and, gently,
opened my eyes. Above me a beautiful sky glazed with hues of orange
and red spread across glass ceiling panels. It was breathtaking, as
if the day was welcoming me with open arms. The sun was rising
slowly, casting a soft light over my face and the white cloud
covering my body.
The room was unfamiliar. A stylish blue couch
and a huge black plasma screen sat on the other side of the
spacious room, with modern cube-shaped shelves dotting the white
walls. A criss-crossed metallic screen as high as the ceiling
separated the bed from the sitting area, and a small indoor garden
encircled by glass walls stood in one corner. It was an amazing
room, something you would have seen on the pages of Architectural
Digest.
I turned my head to the side and my heart
swelled. Tristan was seated on a blue bean bag next to the low
platform bed, looking at me with a warm, melting smile. I raised my
body, trying to reach him, but a whirling sensation struck me.
“You need to rest,” he said, pushing me down
softly against the pillow.
“I can’t sleep anymore,” I said. I realized
my voice sounded normal again. God, it was good to have it
back.
“Is the light bothering you?” He looked at
the translucent ceiling. “I can take you to another room if you
want to.”
“No, I love this room, and that,”—I looked up
at the sunrise above—“is my favorite part.”
He smiled. “Mine, too.”
“Is this your room?”
He nodded.
“Wow, and I thought I had a cool
ceiling.”
“You have. It’s beautiful.”
“Yours is a lot better, though. I mean, you
can see real stars at night, setting suns and sunrises at
dawn—nature in its full splendor. What else can you ask for?”
The smile playing around his lips suddenly
flattened and his soft eyes dulled to a dim gray. The air between
us felt heavy, as if every molecule was loaded with expectation. He
crossed his arms and looked at the floor.
“Tristan?”
“I'm sorry,” he whispered, pain flickering in
his voice.
Distant voices flashed into my mind, echoing
the surreal images of a faraway nightmare. “Did all of that really
happen?” I wondered, struggling to define what was real and what
wasn’t.
He nodded
Trying to lighten things, I said the first
thing that came to my mind. “Well, there goes my ‘never talk to
strangers’ lesson.”
He looked up and grabbed my hand, then knelt
down beside the bed. He didn’t say anything, but I could see his
eyes were troubled.
Before insisting he shouldn’t feel bad about
it, a more important thought gleamed in my mind. “Is he…is Gavran
dead?” I asked.
He paused for a moment, lowering his eyes.
“He escaped,” he sighed, squeezing my hand. It wasn’t the answer I
was expecting. “At first, we were only fighting five Insurgents,
they were going down pretty fast and…I wanted to get you away as
quickly as possible from that purgatory. I wasn’t thinking of
anything else but that. But as fast as they went down, new
Insurgents came out. I couldn’t tell there were more. Their scent
eluded our noses.
“Then my father found himself surrounded by
three of them—I suppose they were protecting Gavran since he was
wounded. So I lunged at them, leaving Gavran for later,” he said
with regret. “I never thought he would be able to run with both
legs broken…or maybe someone helped him, I don’t know.” He shook
his head and continued. “When I saw he left, I dashed over to get
you. Just the image of you alone somewhere in the woods and him
finding you again…” He stroked my face tenderly. “My feet burst
into the fastest run I've ever made. Then I found out a tree was
the big problem. They seem to have an issue with you.” With his
fingertip, he traced something on my forehead. The skin was really
sensitive there.
“Yeah, since I dodged them at Ski Apache,
they’ve been trying to squash me,” I teased, raising my hand to
touch that side of my forehead. “Oww!” I jerked my fingers
away.
“Be careful,” he grabbed my hand. “You hit a
tree when I dropped you.”
I arched my eyebrows. “Oww…”
“Don’t do any motions with your
forehead.”
“I told you…trees are coming after me.” And
we were living amid them, jeez. Perhaps it was their revenge
against me for living in a big tomb of mutilated trees.
He chuckled. “I'm ready to fight a forest, a
jungle, or the entire Amazon for you.”
“Really?”
He kissed my hand. “Really.”
My body turned to jelly. I could sense my
heart beating under Tristan’s kiss. “Why did you drop me?” I
asked.
“I'm really sorry for that, too.” He looked
at me with pain in his eyes. “One of them came out of nowhere and
pushed me—not smelling them is more problematic than I
thought.”
“How did you find me then if you couldn’t
smell Gavran?”
“Your scent,” he explained. “I can’t smell
them, but I can smell you. It’s branded in my nose.”
“Oh,” I said. I forgot I had a scent.
And
it was branded in him
. “Tristan…what happened to me yesterday?
What did Gavran do to me?”
“Belladonna poisoning. He gave you those
berries to weaken you so he could…
play
with you,” he said,
troubled, fisting his hands. “A few centuries ago, deadly
nightshade used to be given to women to weaken them for a man’s
pleasure. Witches were the clandestine providers, and they were, in
fact, the ones who named this plant ‘Belladonna’ because of its
use. Insurgents have been using this for quite some time. That’s
why we always keep some antidote with us.”
So that’s what he gave me. Deadly
nightshade.
“Next time, please make sure you don’t eat
those berries.”
“That’s the thing,” I said. “I didn’t do it
on purpose, exactly. I don’t like berries. When he offered them to
me I said no, but then he…did something with my mind and I ended up
eating them.”
“A Controller,” Tristan frowned, deep in
thought. “I haven’t heard of one since Burgot.”
The name instantly rang a bell. It was one of
the cases in the book. He’d eaten children and raped women. “A
Controller?”
“He has the power to control human minds to
put them under his orders—it’s one of the gnome’s spirit powers. I
guess he’s one of the few that has unfolded it.”
“Why the berries, then? If he had this
mind-controlling power, he didn’t need to use them.”
“Maybe he didn’t want to use his power.
Mind-control requires the whole focus of a mind to be effective,
and if he wanted to…you know…belladonna poisoning can be a huge
help. He gave it to you to make things easier.”
Bastard. Those Insurgents had died for a
self-seeking bastard. “How many were there? How many
Insurgents?”
“We killed eight.”
“Eight?” I said astonished. If I would’ve
known there were so many, I would've probably died from a panic
attack. “Is everyone okay? Are you hurt?”
“We’re fine,” he smiled.
“Your back!” I remembered the thick blood
snaking down his skin. “He stabbed you with his nails!”
“I heal fast.”
“No way. Let me see.”
Still smiling, he shook his head and sat down
on the edge of the bed. He pulled his shirt over his head,
displaying ripples of lean muscle. I swallowed, not sure if it was
because of his breathtaking body or because of the five small
pinkish scars that stretched over his skin. Amazing. The wounds
were completely healed. It looked as if they’d been there
forever.
“Shifters heal fast,” he explained as I
traced the pink scars with my fingertips. “Our biologic process of
wound repair is faster than a human’s—which reminds me.” He
suddenly stood up and grabbed a glass of water from the nightstand,
along with two pills. “You need to take these. One will help you
heal. The other is for the pain.”
I grabbed them, almost spilling water on the
bed when I saw how low his jeans rode his hips, and became aware of
the prickly soreness in my back. I’d forgotten I even had them
there. They hadn’t hurt last night on the sofa, but they certainly
did now.
“Where are you going?” I asked, as he walked
around the bed. The muscles in his back moving under his skin.
Oh those muscles…
“It’s time to put a new bandage on your
wounds.” He stopped by the corner of the bed and put on his shirt
again. “I'm going to call Lamia.”
Lamia?
I blushed in embarrassment.
“Tristan,” I called. He turned around before
opening the door. “Could you be the one to do it, please?” Lamia
was still a stranger to me, and showing my naked back to her made
me feel ill at ease. With Tristan however, it didn’t. At least, not
as much.
“Are you sure?” he said, a bit tense.
I nodded.
“All right,” he said, uncertain. “Then just
take, um, take your shirt off while I get the things, okay?” He
opened the door to leave.
I swallowed the pills and took a big gulp of
water. I hated pills, yuck. The aftertaste was so bitter and
pungent. I moved to the edge of the bed and took the unfamiliar
gray tee off of me.
Whose clothes are these?
I wondered. And
who’d changed me?
The answers were obvious. Lamia. How
embarrassing…
I covered my chest with the tee and a minute
later Tristan glided through the room. He had a white box and
scissors. He was staring at me nervously. “Okay,” he sighed and sat
down next to me, putting the medical stuff on the bed. “Could you
please turn around?”
“Yeah,” I said, doing as told. “It won’t
hurt, right?”
“I hope not,” he answered, brushing away my
hair from my back, the touch of his soft fingers sending goose
bumps all over me. “I’ll do my best, I promise.” He gently pulled
off the bandage from my skin. I didn’t feel any prickly pulling,
just the warmth of his soothing hands on me.
“How bad do they look?” I grimaced.
“It’s only a few stitches. They don’t look
that bad,” he said softly, pressing lightly some sort of wet wipe
over the wounds. “Besides, nothing could look bad on your
skin.”
My stomach tingled. His long fingers caressed
my naked shoulder, comforting me from the pain the cleansing
might’ve been bringing. But I wasn’t paying attention to the
wounds, or to breathing, only to the delicious friction his touch
brought.
“Does it hurt?” he sighed.
“No,” I said with my eyes closed, focused on
his fingers moving slowly over my skin. “You’ve done this
before.”
I felt him smile. “Through time you learn a
lot of things, especially on the medical side. We try to avoid
hospitals as much as we can.” He took back the wipe and paused. He
was looking at me differently, I could sense it. The intensity of
his stare sent a chill down my spine. He traced my backbone with
his fingertip, slowly, softly. “Vince is right,” he added in a low
voice. “Women bodies are too beautiful to transform into something
that horrible.”
I cleared my throat. “I wouldn’t call
horrible what you are.”
His finger stopped. “Didn’t I scare you?”
“No.”
“But…we’re an aberration, Kalista, a bad
result of a wrong alchemy.” He dropped his hands. “I love the
exhilaration of the Shifter world, the adrenaline. But I know how
we look to humans, what we are to humans.”
“An aberration? What happened to women being
vessels to your race?”
“They were, but not anymore. Not since the
Covenant.” He sighed. “There is a reason why it is there, a barrier
between our world and yours, Kalista. Humans are afraid of us, and
I can understand why—just look at what this Gavran did to you,” he
said, upset. “I really wanted to kill him, so much.”
“Tristan…” I turned my head to look at him,
afraid this conversation was taking us on shaky ground, a ground
where his father objected to our relationship, where both of our
worlds objected to us being together.
He let his face fall. “I wished you hadn’t
been through any of this. I don’t want to be the trigger of your
nightmares, and I don’t want you to deal with that image in your
mind.”
The enemy wasn’t the only reason, then. He
was afraid of scaring me away, of changing the perception I had of
him. “There’s nothing to deal with. I want you for what you are,
and that’s part of what you are. I take the whole package.”
He shook his head and cut a piece of bandage.
“You’re not looking at things the way they really are.”
I looked at him. “I am looking. And I don’t
agree with you. At all.”
He remained silent for a few heartbeats. “Are
you mad?” he said with an irresistibly sweet voice.
A little. “I just can’t understand why—I
mean, haven’t you seen how cool that skin of yours is?”
“Haven’t you seen yours?” he said, dodging my
question.
I was about to protest when his fingertips
slid down my waist and hips, slowly and soft. He traced the curve
up and down, exploring, admiring. I closed my eyes, giving a great
effort to control my breathing. His hands slithered around the
crook of my arms, covering them with the warm silk of his skin as I
felt every section of my skin bristle in delight. He leaned over to
kiss the back of my neck and whispered, “Ta peau c’est un
rêve.”
Have I said how romantic he sounded when he
spoke French? How delightful his accent was? How every word dripped
poetic tales? ‘Your skin is a dream’ might’ve sounded beautiful in
English, but in French…I was about to pass out in his arms.