Taken By The Tigerlord: a sexy tiger shifter paranormal psychic space opera action romance (Space Shifter Chronicles Book 2)

by Kara Lockharte

  “Excuse me?”

  “This simulacrum of a forest is an abomination. Nothing lives here. Nothing dies here. There is no life cycle. Just…eternity unchanged.”

  I looked around, trying to see how one could ever be afraid of these sun-dappled books. “The Ealen built it to be one of the most beautiful places in the universe.”

  “There is no beauty if there is no life.”

  I didn’t know how long we walked. The qurl took me deeper into the archives than I had ever been before, into areas that had originally been forbidden to me as a trainee. I had once thought that upon completing my training I would take some time to explore the places that I had been barred from going into. But I only had had a matter of hours after I had passed my final test when word came that the Infoist on Tranquility had passed, and that a replacement was needed as soon as possible.

  And then we came to a wall of dull tarnished metal.

  The qurl stopped before the wall and began chasing its tail, a sign that it had completed its task.

  “This isn’t what we were looking for,” I said to it.

  It looked at me, and I could almost see the algorithms sliding behind those glassy eyes.

  And then it took off into the undergrowth and disappeared.

  I stood up slowly. Something must have been malfunctioning in that particular Searcher.

  “So is there a secret passage here or something?” said Kai.

  I leaned against the wall, peering at the vambrace on my forearm. “Secret passages? You’ve been watching too many saga vids. There are no such things as – “

  I fell backwards into the dark doorway that opened up behind me.

  Kai’s arm shot out, wrapped around my wrist, and caught me from falling. The data vambrace on my arm cracked as he pulled me toward him.

  “You were saying?”

  I tried to tap on my vambrace, but it was slow to respond, flickering and glowing dim. “This is probably on a map somewhere but I don’t have access to it at the moment.” I shrugged and peered into the darkness. It smelled of metal, machinery, and ozone, like the deeper engine rooms of the station.

  Now I was the one who was beginning to feel a sense of foreboding. A chill went through me. Kai was infecting me with his paranoia. “There should be some terminal within,” I said stepping on the threshold of the doorway.

  Kai put a hand on my shoulder. “Wait. It doesn’t smell right.”

  I brushed his hand away, exasperated. “There are no monsters waiting to leap out at you. As you said, this isn’t a real jungle. It’s the Library. I grew up here.”

  I ducked inward, let my eyes adjust to the darkness, wondering why the motion sensor lights weren’t working. Above me was a corner, I suddenly saw it: two vivid blue eyes glaring at me in the darkness.

  It gave off a rattling hiss.

  I waved my arms around trying to get the lights to turn on, and finally they did, flickering on almost sullenly.

  A mix of metal and matted fur, hung from the ceiling with a prehensile metal tail. Gleaming sharp claws extended from furred black paws. Though it had a feline cast to its shape, the metallic raptor’s beak and extended feathered gray wings made it known that this was no ordinary cat.

  “Momo?” Shock hit me. I knew her, but not as she was now, a mess of ferality and broken code.

  Momo hissed at us, a forked blue tongue flickering out.

  Kai yanked me back.

  I tried to struggle out of his hold but there was no way he was letting me go. “What are you doing?”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “You’re not going near that thing, are you?”

  “That thing is something I made.”

  He released his hold on me, a wary suspicion in his eyes.

  And that’s when I realized that I had just confirmed that I was everything he hated about the Ealen.

  I turned away so that he couldn’t see the tears in my eyes.

  “Momo,” I said, reaching out toward the thing. “Momo, it’s me.”

  She froze. I could almost see the code running through her systems, recognizing my voice. I added more input. “Don’t you remember me?”

  Blue eyes blinked. Then she jumped backed, and hissed again, her fur and wings swelling up to appear almost twice her size.

  “Momo, what happened to you?”

  “You programmed a bio-based AI,” Kai said, his tone carefully guarded. “You used Ealen technology to shape life according to your whims.”

  That statement was precisely why the tigers and the wolves hated their Ealen creators.

  A stubborn anger swelled up in me. This was who I was. And he, in a few hours, wouldn’t matter anymore. “Momo was my graduation project,” I said defensively. “She is among the last of her kind. The last nine members of the Gryphonali came to the Library, seeking refuge. Seven of them gave permission for their bodies to be cultivated and studied, and perhaps given new life. Momo was one of them.”

  “Momo,” he said. “A cute name given to a pet in lieu of a dead language. Do you even know what her real name was?”

  “Fyaalis Yfan Myomoa,” I said quietly, adding the formal series of whistling clicks that denoted her title.

  The gryphonali went still, fur settling, wings folding. She walked toward me slowly, sharp claws clacking on the floor.

  I reached a hand out, let her examine my hand.

  Then she drew her feet beneath her, bowed her head and settled into a resting pose at my feet.

  I put my hand on her head, rubbing behind her tufted ears.

  There, there was the switch.

  Broken, sick code projected above the gryphonali. Some kind of worm had infested her programming, deprived her of speech functions and some higher level thinking processes. Yet, the wall of memories I had built for her remained unbreached.

  I could not erase the ravages of the worm, nor could I heal what was broken; that would take time as well as Momo’s own defensive mechanisms. But I could set her systems back on the right path to rebuilding herself.

  I don’t know how long I struggled with her code, but when I finished, false twilight had begun to fall, draping a subdued silence over everything. All the while, Kai stood behind me, watching me. Though he said nothing, I could feel his presence burning behind me. Though he might hate me now, it did nothing to quench the bond between us.

  At last I rested, and when Momo looked at me, it was with the fierce intelligence I remembered.

  “Seria,” she said, her wings fluttering. “You shouldn’t be here. They’re going to kill you.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Clearly my efforts to heal a mad gryphonali weren’t as successful as I had hoped.

  “Momo, you’re safe. I’ve upgraded and recoded your immune system. It will take some time but you will recover from the virus.”

  Wings spread. “You don’t understand. They have plans for you.”

  I rubbed my forehead, deciding to try a different tactic. “Do you know where we are?”

  Momo cocked her head at me in a bird-like gesture. “The Great Library, Level 17, in Quadrant C9283.” Suddenly she turned to Kai, scanning him with ruthless efficiency. “Tigerlord,” said the gryphon. “Are you here of your own free will?”

  “Seria and I are wed.”

  I turned to glare at him.

  He shrugged at me as if daring me to challenge the truth of the matter.

  Momo reared, clucking her head. “Then you are in even worse danger than I thought.”

  “Momo —“”

  “Hush child. I understand. It is a harsh thing to believe of the people who cared for you.” Momo looked at Kai. “But knowing what I know, I know why your people cling to the memories of what was done to you by the Ealen and avoid this place.” Momo turned back to me. “You still shouldn’t have come here.”

  The doorway from which we came sealed with an unexpected quickness. Another opening, more jagged porthole than proper doorway revealed itself behind the gryphon.

&nb
sp; The gryphon suddenly turned and disappeared into the tunnel.

  “Wait!”

  When had Momo learned to control the nanite blocks? The station had been fashioned out of some nano-based block like material, which legends said, was able to move and shape itself like water according to Ealen desires. It was a technology that had been long lost to us, like one of those stories that I had always thought were simply another fable about the Ealen. Some stories were true: they had created life and branched off parts of humanity into lines of shape shifters, they had shaped and terraformed planets to their desires, and had created portals through space for the most mundane of reasons.

  But they were not gods.

  They were advanced makers and manipulators of technologies that we had yet to understand.

  I checked my vambrace once more, still cracked and useless. A cursory glance revealed no terminal within the strange room we were in. Without a terminal, there was no other way of making an exit from this room, other than following the gryphon or gouging out a wall.

  Kai frowned. “You manipulated her code, as if she were nothing but another program.”

  I blinked, so focused on trying to figure out the problem before us that I had forgotten who he was: a shifter, who carried all the anti-Ealen prejudices of his culture.

  Kai’s words were an accusation, perhaps a condemnation. I had confirmed that I was what shifters feared: someone who meddled with the life and design of others.

  Let him be disgusted with me. I would not hide what I was. “We’re all programs of sorts.”

  “Do all Infoists know how to do what you do?”

  “No,” I said. “I did well in my classes and they pulled me aside for specialized training.”

  “Making alien cyborgs.”

  “The Library only accepts volunteers, and those that they accept are always near death.”

  Kai’s voice became unnaturally calm, the stillness that belied a storm to come. “How many cyborgs has the Library made?”

  “I don’t know. They are not required to remain here.”

  “But the only place in the universe who know how to deal with their ills are here, making it likely for them to remain nearby.”

  “Yes,” I said. He still saw conspiracies behind every shelf. Nothing would change that.

  I couldn’t change anything between us.

  I turned my back to him; I needed to make space between us. I headed for the tunnel more because it was the most expedient way away from him than out of any real desire to follow Momo.

  I turned briefly, saw Kai following us in silence, motion-sensored lights flickering on at our approach, then off after we passed. The gryphonalis led us, up and down, around curled twisted steps until I could not tell where we were anymore.

  And then rather abruptly we were led to a wall with no seam.

  “Before I let you in,” said Momo. “You must promise me silence, no matter what happens.”

  We both nodded, following along. Once she showed us what she felt she needed to show us, we would be on our way.

  The door opened. We were on a small metal walkway high above a massive chamber. It was largely quiet, save for a low-level hum of android bots attending to the needs of the giant archive. It smelled of sterile recycled air.

  I gulped, gripping on to Kai’s solid arm as we crept out.

  He looked down at me, surprise in his face at my fear of heights. He raised his eyebrow, his voice barely audible. “Didn’t I find you trying to jump off a balcony a few days ago?”

  “My robe isn’t a flight suit,” I emphatically tried to whisper.

  I quickly gestured to my robe, trying to point out that it wasn’t a flight suit, and then resumed clinging.

  Far below us, a male body was laid out on a table. It was long dead by the color of it. Prison sigils covered his forearms with his crimes: larceny, murder, rape.

  Three figures, one all too familiar to me, stood around the table.

  Annatu, my mentor, the closest person I had ever had to a mother, clamped restraints on the dead body.

  “We need to speed things up,” said one of the men.

  Mechanical arms extended from the ceiling, jabbing needles into various points of the body. A blue liquid filled the syringe, into the needles.

  “Our numbers are not enough,” agreed another man.

  “Let’s see how this fares,” said Annatu.

  Blue liquid was injected into the body. Several moments passed. I could hear nothing but the sound of my own breath. Kai was silent as stone behind me, his eyes focused and fierce.

  The body arched on the table.

  It was such a surprise I nearly fell off the scaffold, but Kai reached out, clamped on my wrist, and pulled me back to balance.

  The mouth of the body was open as if it were screaming, its eyes and nose bleeding. It fought at its restraints, which seemed as if they were barely holding on.

  What the —

  The three below cheered as if something momentous had been achieved.

  But all I could see, was how they had brought the dead back to life.

  They had created one of the undead.

  I shook my head. There had to be another explanation. The Library — Annatu — She would not be involved in such a thing.

  I ran back to the chamber where we had first met Momo. The Library had saved me. It had made me human again. It had nurtured me, taught me, and made me strong.

  And yet…

  I knelt, my face in my hands.

  Feathers brushed against me.

  I lowered my hands. “What was that?”

  “The truth,” said Momo. “They are making undead.”

  “To what ends?”

  “I don’t know. I tried to find out. And then they infected me. I hid. And then you found me.”

  “Of all the places you could have gone in this station. How is it that you knew where I was going to be?”

  “The same way I knew my fate, myself, my mind had to be placed into Ealen hands when I realized I would be the last of my kind.”

  “You see the future,” said Kai.

  Her back wings fluttered, rippling as if a breeze ruffled through them, the equivalent of a gryphon nod. “I have seen your role in this, Seria.”

  “And what is my role?”

  “To find and wake the Dragonlords.”

  A giggle of hysteria escaped from me. Perhaps it was true what Kai had said. I couldn’t fight fate.

  Momo coughed. A data ball flew from her beak and landed on the floor in front of me, rolling to a complete stop.

  “Their location is within. Take it and go.”

  “And leave you here?”

  “My fate is here.”

  “Momo —“

  “You have done for me what you could. Now go. You don’t have much time.”

  “I still don’t understand. Why would they do such a thing?”

  “Knowledge is life,” she said, repeating the Library’s motto. “And there is no greater knowledge than that of conquering death. The things they have brought back…are not sentient in the same way they once were, if at all. They are more mindless machines acting as a simulacrum of the living.”

  I shuddered. The resources that had to have been used. My eyes widened. Did they make the undead forces that were currently on Altai and Alzar-4? But there were so many of them. The Library couldn’t have produced them all, not if each one was created so slowly.

  The Lost Ealen Army. They weren’t just coming. They were already here.

  Goosebumps prickled my skin. I couldn't leave, especially not now. I had to get to the end of this, not to mention the original reason why I was here.

  "You know I can't leave," I said quietly.

  Momo scratched her tufted ears with a front paw, the human equivalent of a shifter letting out a deep sigh. "You found out about your mother,” she said with a knowing glance.

  An annoyed weariness settled around my neck like a dull weight. "Am I the only one who d
idn't know?"

  "If I had known I would have told you. It is because I found out their plans for you that I began reconfiguring my own systems.”

  I hadn’t known she was even capable of transcending her programming. But the cold acceptance gave way to hot anger. All this time the woman I trusted for as long as I could remember had known of my mother. She had held the identity of my mother back from me, even as she had seen me submitting my blood tests, searching the archives and networks for any trace that might give me knowledge of my identity.

  “And what are their plans for me?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t see that.” The gryphon looked away. "I know you must confront Annatu. Watch her as if she were a sand sarthin, for she is the kind that pretends to be one thing and is not. She will strike you when you least expect it.”

  Suddenly the gryphonalis froze, as if hearing a sound that we could not. Fur and feathers puffed, making her seem at least twice as big as she actually was. “Annatu is coming. With spheres.”

  The floating spheres were a common feature of the Library. Each about the size of a large hand, they largely acted as research assistants and messengers. Few knew that they could be also deadly weapons that could disable, even kill on command.

  It bothered me that I worried about the spheres. Had it come to that?

  And then I thought of how so many had sought to control my fate.

  The gryphonali flexed her claws, digging deep gouges into the floor. Annatu had told me to change them. But I hadn’t. Gryphons were predators, and to rob them of their claws seemed wrong. And now she was using them in a way I never imagined gryphonali could. "How did you figure out the Ealen ability to manipulate these walls?"

  Momo turned, ignoring my question. I followed her through another opening and found ourselves back in the jungled chamber. Full darkness had taken over the sky and the stars were out, or at least the simulation of such. Every night, the constellations over a different planet were chosen. As students, we were assigned to memorize constellation maps as punishment, a way to exercise our memory.

  I opened my eyes wide, looking upward. I didn’t recognize the constellations of tonight’s stars.