Page 57 of Hybrid Heroics

I doubted I could keep a charade of tolerance up for very long. The vampire had the patience of a saint. I only had patience when I was hunting.

We had been waiting over twenty-four hours for Sloane to wake up, and already I’d maxed out my limit for how patient I could be.

But she knew this was going to happen.

She knew more than she could tell us.

That was why our argument had gone the way it did. She wanted to make me understand that there was no way around fighting an army when it came to Alric—an army of untold numbers. And she wanted to make sure we didn’t backtrack.

Had we not come to the druids’ realm, we may have lost some of our allies when we needed them. I could imagine the disasters this curse would cause in the heat of a battle when it spread by touch.

Who couldn’t contract it? We had no idea.

I doubted she knew about the curse itself.

No.

She took all the information we had collected and pieced it together in her mosaic until she could guess what Alric would do next. Him infiltrating her mind wasn’t something she could have predicted, because that was a power well beyond his scope. But we should have considered him making bigger moves when he had so much magic at his fingertips.

How much magic was that?

Again, we had no idea.

I was hoping Sloane would come back with some answers, though I wasn’t holding my breath. If she hadn’t had time to digest them, then there wasn’t anything she could tell us.

That meant we needed to be at our best when she woke up, because the moment she was awake, Alric would come looking for us—her. I wasn’t going to let her meet him head-on by herself.

None of us would.

Truthfully, I felt like I had something to prove. She asked me why I was with her... And I had thought about that way too much in the last few days.

Even if the Fates gave me another option for a mate, I wouldn’t want anyone else.

Sloane was complex, intelligent, dangerous... I enjoyed talking to her as much as sitting in the silence with her. I loved her humor, the way her lips parted just slightly when she winked, and the way she argued that she didn’t care when it was clear she did.

She was a collector of the broken and bad.

And I didn’t want anyone else to own me.

Just her.

“Stone,” Palmer shouted, excitement littering his tone. “Where are—”

“Shhh,” York hissed. “People are fucking sleeping.”

“Right,” he whispered, keeping quiet. “Stone. Brood later. Outside now.”

I leaned my head against the dining-room window before shoving off to follow his voice. Something had the mage keyed up. I found him fidgeting with the buttons on his shirt as he bounced on his toes.

“No.” I shook my head when he turned to grin at me. “Whatever it is, the answer is no. I’ve seen that look too many times before. It always leads us to bad beer or bullshit.”

“Just listen,” Briggs rumbled.

The mage gave us a stern glare. “I’m not explaining everything. Just know that we’re training.”

“Now?” York inquired. “It’s like five in the morning.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” Palmer remarked. “Were you sleeping?”