But what did he plan to do that was important enough for him to weigh saving his power for later?
She could ask him questions once they got out of here. Saving her leg came first, and he was still healing. “What are you doing to fix yourself?”
“If you really don’t know how to heal yourself, we need to get busy. The longer that saliva is in your system the harder it is to draw out.”
If she hadn’t seen the repair to his arm with her own eyes, she wouldn’t have believed him. “So how does this work?”
“I’ll show you.”
Wasn’t that what Storm had said when she’d asked how the tracking majik worked?
Why couldn’t men just give a straight answer once in a while? She didn’t like the idea of trying something unknown, but she couldn’t walk out of here.
“Show me,” she told him.
“Hold still for a minute. I think I can finish drawing the saliva out of your leg now that I’m getting stronger. The rest is up to you.”
Once the burning from the saliva eased, he stopped whispering his chant and walked to the bank. He sat on the ground, dripping water everywhere, and lowered her carefully to his lap.
She stared in awe at the amazing change when he flexed his damaged arm, where new skin had begun skimming over the once exposed muscle.
Tristan said, “I know it hurts, but you need to straighten out your leg.”
She nodded, then sucked up her courage and slowly stretched out her leg, gritting her teeth and shaking with the effort. The bananas she’d eaten wanted to join the party, but she kept her mouth shut until her throat cleared. “Now what?”
“You know how to release your inner Alterant, right?”
“I’ve been forbidden from shifting.” That was a safe answer. She was not telling him anything he could use against her at some point.
“I don’t mean to change all the way to your beast state,” Tristan qualified.
She gave him a look that suggested the demon saliva had reached his brain.
His eyebrows climbed his forehead. “How many times have you shifted?”
Once, all the way, but she wouldn’t share that experience with anyone except Tzader and Quinn, since they were the only ones who knew. And she’d risked shifting that one time only to save all three of their lives. Those two Beladors would take her secret to their deathbeds.
She answered, “I just told you I’m not allowed to shift.”
He shook his head in disbelief. “You don’t know squat about being an Alterant, do you?”
“How am I supposed to know anything when the only person who might be able to tell me a few things won’t?” she snapped.
“I can’t help it if Brina kept us apart.”
“We’re together now,” she pointed out.
He could have asked her for anything in trade at that moment and she would have been hard-pressed not to hand it over in exchange for her leg.
But he didn’t try to barter, which surprised her almost as much as his not shifting into a beast earlier.
He explained, “I had a lot of time to experiment while stuck out here. I found stages of change from minor altering all the way to full beast state, but there’s an initial phase of tapping power you can use and still not change into a beast.”
If she said she wasn’t curious she’d be lying. “How do I tap into that power?”
“You call up the Alterant beast slowly and feel the power seep into your blood and muscles and bone, stopping it short of the physical change from human to beast. If you do that, you can cure damn near anything. How do you think I survived living here? I was bitten by a fer-de-lance.”
“What’s that?”
