After a couple of hours of trying to catch Tristan every time she’d chase a glimpse of him moving through the jungle, she finally lost him for good. She ended up wandering back into the original clearing where they’d talked.
The bananas he’d left had been hung on a broken branch since she’d last seen them. As a peace offering?
Maybe that meant hewouldcome back.
In the meantime, she was still hungry and reached for the only food in sight.
Monkeys chattered and shook the trees overhead, drawing her gaze up and up. The noise increased, but they didn’t seem upset. They were just making a racket.
When soft footsteps raced toward her, she realized too late why the monkeys were raising a ruckus.
Evalle yanked her arm down and turned to meet her opponent, but not fast enough to get out of the way.
Tristan raced forward, grabbed her against him and leaped airborne for fifteen feet, propelled like a human missile. He yelled a curse. They hit the ground as one big thud in a tangle of arms and legs.
Her chin bounced down, up and back down again.
She saw stars, lots of them.
Breathing hard and still dazed, she pushed up and squinted to clear her vision in order to figure out what had happened. Then it registered how she’d ended up sprawled on the ground.
She turned back around and looked down. Not the ground.
Her hands pressed against a wall of chest muscles.
Tristan lay beneath her, unconscious after taking the brunt of their landing.
She could live with that.
Wait a minute.
She glanced around again.No, please, no.
But there stood the tree that had been half in and half out of the spellbound walls.
Based on the proximity of that tree, Tristan’s prone body had crashed on the wrong side of the invisible enclosure.
Another Alterant had escaped.
TWELVE
Evalle scrambled up from where she’d landed astride Tristan. This capped a crappy day so far.
He hadn’t roused yet from hitting the ground so hard.
Good. She needed a minute to think. Blood and adrenaline pulsed through her veins with enough force to send a rocket into space.
That would have come in handy if she’d been able to strap Tristan to the rocket. She had to get him back inside the spellbound cage even if doing that a second time twisted her gut. The Tribunal would not show mercy on him if they found out he’d escaped.
Using her kinetics to carry him back inside might kill both of them the minute her power crossed the barrier. And what if he came to in the middle of her moving him?
Having him wake up on this side would be worse.
Holding her hands out toward him, she drew on her kinetic ability and lifted his body. Tristan’s entire length hung limp in the air. When she had him a few feet from the barrier to his prison, she tried to throw him back inside the cage with a hard shove.
He smacked the wall of invisible energy and bounced backwards, landing on the ground.
Oops . . . my bad.She cringed at the painful sound that slid from his throat.
