Fated in Stone, page 8
CHAPTER NINE
Ben stared at the back of her passenger seat wondering how exactly to say he didn’t want to go anywhere but with her. He couldn’t say it that way. Elle had dealt with enough for one night. She didn’t need a stranger announcing he intended to stay with her wherever she went from now on.
Even he was having some trouble with that idea.
Not that he didn’t want to spend more time with his Nam-tar, earn her trust, earn her acceptance. Convince her to stay with him. But… There was so much, and everything had happened so suddenly, and he was still adjusting to the fact that she was here. Right in front of him.
And he may well have fucked everything up already.
By leaping through her. By not leaping back through her. They were linked now. He had no idea what that had done to either of them. Or how it would affect them going forward. And he wasn’t going to get answers to those questions right away because she was right. He had to let his wolf out so he could finish healing. The bullet had been pushed forward enough to be wedged in muscle and not too near his heart or lungs, but still there. And it hurt like hell. Plus, the injury was slowing him down. He couldn’t afford that right now.
He had to go after the geneticist and the grinluk. After losing the lab, and any records that could have made clear what was happening, he couldn’t let the geneticist get away this time. This was the only one they’d identified that didn’t want to be working with the monsters. Or at least hadn’t started out wanting to work with the monsters. Ben was pretty sure Gabe Arron would tell them everything. So long as they could get him away from his captors.
Which was something Elle wanted to do, too. She’d come to find Arron. To extricate him from his kidnappers. They had a similar goal.
So…so they could work together. That would give him time. Time to broach…everything else. Time to get to know her, and more importantly, for her to get to know him. Time to earn her trust.
And time to find out if that leap through her had fucked up any hope of breaking his curse.
She was frowning at him, her gaze unfocused. It was probably too dark inside the car for her to see him clearly, but his night vision was excellent so he saw her every expression. And right now, she looked hesitant. Maybe a little awkward. Was it strange he found the awkward comforting and also adorable?
Since she was his Nam-tar, he supposed it wasn’t strange.
“Before I leap,” he said, trying to get the suggestion out without sounding too desperate to stay with her, “before I can’t discuss this for a while… You were here tonight to rescue the geneticist, to get Professor Arron away from his captors.”
“I was.” Her eyes narrowed. “And you were here to stop…whatever it is they were doing.”
“As well as extricate the professor. He can explain exactly what was happening, and I need that information. Especially since we had to burn down the house.”
A fire that had been put out by a sudden downpour of rain. Given the participation of at least one sided-Water Elemental in all this, he didn’t trust that rain for a minute. But no Elemental had leapt from the puddles to kill them, so he couldn’t be sure if the rain was the work of an Elemental purposefully getting involved or just a coincidence. Another something he had to look into but couldn’t now when he still had to finish healing the gunshot wound. And a Nam-tar to convince to work with him.
“I was thinking,” she said, hesitating. “I was thinking we might…might work together. We have the same goal—get Professor Arron away from his captors. Working together would… Well, it would keep us from getting in each other’s way.” She tried to smile, even though the expression looked more uncomfortable than natural.
“I was thinking the same thing,” he said. “That working together would be more efficient and we should do that.” Did that sound too eager? He was trying not to sound too eager. But the fact that they’d both been on the same page left him more relieved than he would have expected. So relieved he lifted his hand to reach for her before he checked the motion.
She considered him a stranger, and really, outside of being his Nam-tar, he didn’t know her either. Reaching out to take her hand or brush his fingers along her shoulder was not the sort of gesture that would earn her trust right now.
But her smile, her little release of breath, the way her shoulders relaxed, and the way she said, “Yeah. Exactly. Good. That would be good.” left him feeling weirdly light and excited.
“I need to heal first,” he said, “but I should be fine by the morning. We can pick up the trail then.” Easier said than done, but he’d worry about that tomorrow.
“Are you…do you have a hotel room somewhere nearby, or do you live near here or…?”
Her pale cheeks darkened with a blush that made him want to smile. He didn’t. But he wanted to. “I’ve been camping while I hunted for the professor, so I don’t have a hotel room or anything.” And he really didn’t want to camp out with so many puddles nearby which could bring out dangerous Water Elementals. But if he had to, they could camp and his wolf could keep watch overnight. The wolf wouldn’t need to sleep while his body healed.
“I have a motel room,” she said, slowly, again hesitating over her words. She wasn’t looking at him as she spoke, her gaze on the divider between the front seats. “It’s about an hour away. Obviously, since everything is about an hour away from here. But it’s a private place for you to heal. Clean and dry at least.”
She forced another smile but all he saw was the darkening color in her cheeks again. Not brushing his fingers across her blush took a concerted effort.
“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, having a stranger in your room,” he said, which was true. They didn’t know each other and she had no idea that they were destined for each other. To her, he was just a man she’d encountered in a strange situation who could do strange things. She had every reason to run screaming away from him. The fact that she wasn’t, that she wanted to work with him, was offering her motel room as a place for them to rest was…
Amazing. Filled him with hope. And filled him with worry all at once.
“You’ll be a stone statue, right?” she said with a little shrug. “So long as the wolf isn’t going to attack me, I think we’ll be safe enough.”
“The wolf would never hurt you,” he said with deep sincerity. The wolf knew what she meant to them. What she was to them. The wolf would be more likely to crawl into her lap looking for attention than attack.
“Okay. Good to know.” She nodded, her gaze dancing around the car’s interior. “I’d… I know I’m a stranger and in no position to ask, but I’d really love an explanation for…all of this. For you. For the wolf.”
“I’ll tell you everything,” he said, again with full sincerity. She needed to know everything anyway. She had to choose to stay in his world with him. And to make that choice, she had to know everything. Eventually.
“Thank you.” She smiled again, but this one was more natural. “Not really used to people trusting me with information.”
And that was something he wanted to know more about. “We’ll be working together. It’s important you understand what I am and what I can do.”
She sat quietly with that for a moment, then pulled in a deep breath. “Okay. If you want to do the stone thing while we’re driving, that’d probably be good. But I’m not going to be able to carry a stone statue into my motel room. The room is on the second floor. How often can you do the stone thing?”
“As often as I need to,” he said. “We can return to this body long enough to get up the stairs.”
“Does all this moving back and forth make the healing more difficult?”
“I heal fast anyway. Faster than…you would. But not as fast as when the wolf and I are out of this body.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I have so many questions.”
“I know. We’ll get to them soon.”
She faced forward and started the car, turning the heating on and up, sighing as the hot air hit her. He’d forgotten how cold she must be after the soaking. Damn, he should have had her running the heater this whole time.
“Would you be able to… I don’t know, belt your body in place or something? I don’t want to worry about the statue falling back there and breaking. Can you break like that?”
“I’ll wrap the lap belt around me,” he said to reassure her more than for his own safety. The stone statue could absolutely be broken, and if it shattered, that would kill him, but he wasn’t worried about tumbling off the seat onto the car floor. Still, to make her happy, he’d do whatever it took.
He considered just sitting up and shaping himself so casual passersby on the highway wouldn’t notice the person in the backseat was a statue and not a person. It was dark enough they could get away with it. And he could leap back into the body before they got to the motel parking lot.
“Tell me when we’re almost there,” he said as she pulled the car forward, putting it gently back onto the dirt road. She’d parked with the car pointing the direction she’d want to drive, instead of leaving it in a way that would require her turning it around on the narrow road. Had she done that on purpose? Thought about that ahead of time?
Given her multi-tool knife, the penlight, and her wax-wrapped matches, he was pretty certain she’d positioned the car purposefully. She seemed to be ready for most contingencies. Even down to the gear in her trunk, the blankets and water, the rolled-up tent, a bag he suspected had emergency rations in it. Was she always like this or was this just something she’d done while trying to rescue Arron?
He had a lot of things to explain to her, a lot about his world she needed to know, but what surprised him—and it probably shouldn’t have—was just how fascinated he was, how much he wanted to know, how many questions he had for her.
Those questions had to remain unasked for the moment, though. He settled himself into the seat, belted in, leaving the chest strap off, and positioned himself so his back was half to the side window.
Then he made the leap.
CHAPTER TEN
The drive back to her motel wasn’t quite as nerve-wracking as she’d anticipated, but still wasn’t a comfortable hour-long ride. The wolf remained curled up on the backseat just behind her. Which probably should have made her edgy and nervous. She had a wolf in her fucking car! But this particular wolf didn’t trigger her fight or flight instincts. He was comforting. Like having a dog in the back. A rather large dog. With some impressively sharp teeth. But that was the weirdly comforting part.
She could see the statue that was Ben’s body in her rearview mirror, if she glanced back just right. That was scarier than the wolf. She wasn’t sure why. He’d huddled against the window in a way that probably made him look like a sleeping passenger to any casual observers. But for reasons surpassing logic, he seemed vulnerable to her like that. Stone and marble could break, shatter. Would that kill him? If they got into a car accident, would he have escaped a gunshot wound and monsters, only to have his physical human body destroyed? And if that happened, did that mean he just stayed a wolf?
So so many questions.
The highway was busy, and the road was slick after the downpour, but they still made good time. As she pulled off the highway, she said, “We’ll be coming into the parking lot in five minutes. I don’t know if you want to get back into your body now or not, but it might be a good idea. There’ll be more light once we get to the motel.”
The tree lined slip road they were on wasn’t lit. Only her headlights provided any illumination. There weren’t even any other cars around. The motel was a beacon of light up ahead, but for the next few minutes they had complete darkness to work with.
She didn’t watch to see him leap back into his body. For some reason, even though she’d seen him do it already, the process felt…intimate. Private. Like getting dressed or something. She wasn’t entirely sure why she felt that way. He didn’t seem to care. But she still felt like she should afford him some privacy as the wolf went back into his body.
Or maybe she was just uncomfortable with the process. It wasn’t like anything she’d ever even heard of before.
By the time they reached the motel parking lot, Ben was back in his body, back to flesh and bone. She let out her breath slowly, keeping her eyes on the half full lot, the two-story building with only a handful of lights behind closed curtains. The swimming pool area was empty—too cold for swimming anyway this time of night—and there weren’t any people moving around the lot. The small office on the first floor under the stairs was lit, but no one was currently at the desk that she could see. There was a gas station and a chain diner on the other side of the motel, neither of which looked busy. The trees surrounding the lot blocked the slip road, but didn’t do much to cushion against the noise from the highway.
Not that she minded. She actually found noise soothing. The years living in the deep woods with her father had been full of silence, nature sounds, the occasional sound of gunfire. But lots and lots of silence. So…yeah, she didn’t mind noise now.
What she didn’t want at the moment was witnesses. She didn’t think anyone would pay much attention to a woman walking a shirtless man up to her room at a highway motel, but she didn’t want people to see them even in passing. Just in case. More of the paranoia she’d spent years learning and couldn’t quite shake. The less people knew about her business, the better off she’d be.
“You ready?” she asked when she was sure there was no one to casually spot them heading into the motel.
“Ready,” he said.
His voice was quiet and a little rough, the sound in the dark tickling along her nerves, raising the hair on the back of her neck. She couldn’t decide if that reaction was fear or…something else. So she decided not to think about it too closely.
“How’s your wound?” She glanced at him in the rearview mirror, briefly, long enough to catch his eyes, but not long enough to study him.
“Healing. I’ll need to leap one more time, probably overnight.” He said the last almost like a question.
“Not planning on going anywhere tonight anyway,” she said.
She could pick up the direction Professor Arron had been taken in the morning. She didn’t think his captors would kill him in the next few days. They’d gone through too much trouble to get him out. If they’d intended on killing him, they could have left his body as they made their own escape. She’d seen no sign of the professor or his suitcase of marble notebooks when she’d searched the house. Whatever experiments they’d been doing, they wanted to keep the professor working on them. They’d take him to another lab, another safehouse. She just had to find the new one. And she could pick that trail up in the morning. When she and Ben were both rested. And he was no longer sporting a gunshot wound to the chest.
The fact that he’d not only survived that, but had fought off monsters and helped her blow up a house afterward was…
She wasn’t sure what it was. That was another of those many questions she had for him.
“Let’s go. The coast is clear for the moment.”
She popped open the trunk and stuffed the blankets back with the rest of her gear. She’d refold and organize everything in the morning. She took the sleeping bag, though, and another couple of bottles of water plus her first aid case.
When she closed the trunk, Ben was standing next to the car, just out of sight, staying carefully in the shadows thrown by one of the large pines lining the edge of the lot. “That’s a big first aid kit,” he commented, though his gaze was scanning his surroundings.
“Never know when you might need something,” she said. Her standard answer.
“My family keeps kits like that everywhere,” he said. “Same reason.”
Her curiosity raised its head, but she pushed it down again. Later. Later, Elle. “Do you need help getting up the stairs?” He hadn’t needed much help walking or moving or, hell, fighting up to now. But she didn’t want to make assumptions. Adrenaline could do amazing things, and push people well past their normal capabilities. But that usually came with a price when the adrenaline faded.
“I’ll be good.”
They made it up the concrete stairs to the second floor and to her room halfway down the open walkway without encountering anyone. Without anyone seeing them she hoped. She let Ben into the small, serviceable room. Then she set up her portable travel lock on the door, flipped the bolt, set the chain, and shoved a chair under the door handle. Finally, she peaked out the window to ensure no one had followed them or was hanging around just outside or by their car in the parking lot. Once she was certain no one had paid any attention to them, she pulled the curtain fully closed over the front window, blocking the bright light from the walkway.
When she faced the room again, Ben had his brows raised in question. She shrugged. “Can’t be too careful.”
He didn’t comment and she didn’t justify her actions any further. There were some instilled paranoias that actually did serve her well as an adult.
The reality of the small room hit, though, when she looked around for a place for Ben to sit. She had been focused on getting here, getting them somewhere safe where he could heal and they could regroup. But she’d gotten a small room—she made decent money finding people for other people, but she kept to a tight budget, mostly out of habit—and it only had a single, queen-sized bed. There was a chair, but it was yellow plastic, and currently blocking her door. The narrow, wooden desk with open-sided cabinets that doubled as storage was not wide enough to pretend it could be a bed. And the floor was a linoleum faux wood with no cushioning or rugs, which made for easy cleaning but wasn’t going to suit anyone for sleeping.
Since Ben was going to be a stone statue soon, she supposed that single bed didn’t matter much. It was large enough for her to sleep next to a stone statue. And the wolf probably didn’t care about sleeping on a hard floor. Although, if he did, she could toss him the pillow that a stone statue wasn’t going to need.
