Page 172 of Tiger's Quest
“That sounds good.”
“Okay. But something with action. None of your musical stuff.”
I laughed. “Action, huh? Something tells me you’d likeIndiana Jones.”
He put an arm around my waist and helped me over to the indoor theater.
I didn’t see Ren again until late that evening. He was sitting on the veranda watching the moon. I paused, wondering if he wanted to be alone; then decided if he did, he could always ask me to leave.
When I slid open the door and stepped outside, he tilted his head but didn’t move.
“Am I bothering you?” I asked.
“No. Would you like to sit down?”
“Okay.”
He rose and politely helped me sit down across from him. I studied Ren’s face. His bruises were almost gone, and his hair had been washed and cut. He was dressed in casual designer clothes, but his feet were bare. I gasped when I saw them. They were still purple and distended, which meant they’d been terribly hurt.
“What did he do to your feet?”
His eyes followed my gaze and he shrugged. “He broke them over and over until they felt like swollen bean bags.”
“Oh,” I said uneasily. “May I see your hands?”
He held out his hands, and I took them gently in mine and studied them carefully. His golden skin was unmarred, and his fingers were long and straight. Nails that had been torn and bloodied earlier were now healthy and filled in. I turned his hands over and looked at the palms. Except for a gash on the inside of his arm ending at his wrist, they looked undamaged. A normal person who’d had their hands broken in so many places would likely have lost the use of them. At the very least, the repaired knuckles would have been swollen and inflexible.
Tracing the gash lightly, I asked, “What about this?”
“This is from an experiment when he tried to drain all the blood out of my body to see if I’d survive. The good news is that I did. He was rather put out about getting his clothes all bloody though.”
He pulled his hands out of mine abruptly and stretched out both arms along the back of the love seat.
“Ren, I—”
He held up a hand. “You don’t need to apologize to me, Kelsey. It’s not your fault. Kadam explained the whole thing to me.”
“He did? What did he say?”
“He told me that Lokesh was actually after you, that he wanted Kishan’s amulet that you now wear, and that if I hadn’t stayed behind to fight, he would have gotten all three of us.”
“I see.”
He leaned forward. “I’m glad that he took me instead of you. You would have been killed in a horrible way. Nobody deserves to die like that. Better me or Kishan being captured than you.”
“Yes, you were very chivalrous.”
He shrugged and looked at the pool lights.
“Ren, what did he . . . do to you?”
He turned back to me and lowered his gaze to my swollen ankle. “May I?”
I nodded.
He lifted my leg gently and placed it on his lap. He touched the purple bruises lightly and tucked a pillow under it.
“I’m sorry you’ve been injured. It’s unfortunate that you don’t heal quickly like we do.”
