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

by Kara Lockharte

“He is only an anchor on your destiny.” said Annatu. “You will be freed.”

  I lunged for the sphere, while Kai leapt toward her, but it was as if we had lost control of our limbs. Both of us crashed to the floor. My sides were hurting, my muscles aching as the laughter strangled my throat.

  Kai had been right. And I had brought him to this.

  A sphere floated above me and hissed a white gas in my face.

  Annatu’s voice echoed in my head.

  “Relax and be well.”

  And then I stopped laughing and it went dark.

  Chapter Fourteen

  My head felt as if a gorani bull in its prime was charging at the insides of it. I opened my eyes, and my vision was blurred. A male voice echoed in the distance.

  “The Stargazer feline is too valuable a genetic specimen to lose in this time of conflict.”

  Kai.

  Cold panic filled me, more terrifying than any other fear I had ever had. A flash of sharp blades and roomfuls of circuitry, wires and blood barged into my mind.

  I knew what they were capable of doing to “genetic specimens.”

  The thought of losing Kai…No, no, it was not going to happen. I would not let it happen. This was all my fault. I was going to get Kai out of here.

  “Agreed,” another voice said, metallic from the speaker of a sphere. “I have use for his DNA.”

  “It’s not like you’ll need the whole body.”

  “No,” said the metal voice. “Just parts of it.”

  I blinked as fast as I could, trying to clear my vision. It was as if there were weights on my eyelids, trying to keep them closed.

  Darkness pooled around me, threatening to pull me into its warm undertow. But I kept flailing, trying to keep my head high.

  I tried to speak, but my mouth felt like it was full of grit. All I could manage was a beast-like sound. “Kaaaa…”

  In my mind, I seized on to his name like an anchor.

  I had to get Kai out of here.

  “It’s wearing off,” said a voice.

  “Let it.”

  Annatu’s voice. I would have known it anywhere. Anger fueled my struggles and I opened my eyes to the glare of the light around me. To my surprise, they had simply left me slumped on a metal chair. Eight round silver spheres hovered around me, each the size of my head.

  I tried to stand up.

  Two spheres pressed into me, their surprisingly heavy weight forcing me back. One deposited itself in my lap with a cold warning hum, the prelude to being shocked into submission.

  I remained still. In moments it flew up again, and resumed the same pattern of orbit. I was in a strange lab of a room. There were medical monitors on the walls, panels that indicated where medical supplies were stored, even a motionless surgery-bot in the corner.

  But the table next to me had metal restraints.

  My gaze flickered downward to the heavy-looking, ancient chains that wrapped around me.

  A cold fist of confusion punched me in the stomach.

  A door slid open and Annatu stepped through. I tightened my grip on the armrest of my chair. She glanced at a nearby sphere, probably displaying my vitals, monitoring my spike in heartbeat.

  “I am sorry that you were subjected to that. We determined that it would be the best course of action.”

  Had the functionaries of the Library hurt him? Conviction settled cold and sure in my soul. If they had, I would tear this place apart. Literally. I kept my voice cool and even. “Where is he?”

  She reached forward to brush the curly hair surrounding my face like a cloud. “Contained. In his true form.”

  “His true form?” I repeated dumbly.

  She stopped before the wall and swiped. It went transparent becoming a screen, revealing a massive white tiger, even larger than what Kai had turned himself into. Two tusk-like front teeth protruded downward from his jaws. Claws the size of daggers gouged holes into the floor.

  “That’s not Kai,” I said. “I know what he looks like in his tiger form.”

  Annatu shook her head. “Then you truly don’t know him at all.”

  My mind flashed back to the momentary thing he had become when killing zombie Rish.

  I looked at the beast. Massive jaws that could snap a human in half opened, roaring silently on the screen.

  Blood dripped from his mouth. The carcass of some kind of bovine was sprawled across the floor.

  With a sinking, horrified feeling, I knew Annatu’s words were true.

  The monster tiger that was Kai saw the sphere which held the camera that was trained on it.

  His mouth stretched into a wide bloody grimace and then the screen went dark.

  There were stories of shifters who had a third, more primitive form. The stories always said that they were even stronger and faster than the first form. But they were always insane.

  “We have a method of controlling the shape of a shifter. I wasn’t quite sure it would work on him, but it seems to be working just fine for now.”

  If Kai wasn’t out of his mind, he would be now. Forcing a shifter to remain in one shape drove them crazy. Everyone in the universe knew that much. So much so, it was almost a stereotype; shifters who couldn’t be trusted because they had stayed in their animal form for too long, losing touch with their intelligence, their memories, their humanity.

  Annatu’s voice was so calm. “Shifters lead such fleeting lives. In time, you will forget about him.”

  I struggled trying to find the words to respond but my throat felt as parched as burnt paper.

  I looked at Annatu, really looked at her. The Ealen were said to have been luminous beings, immortal perfection in human form.

  But history often became legend, becoming myths of impossibility.

  I looked at Annatu, the faint age lines that had remained unchanged in all the years I had known her. And yet, I could still see how once she had been beautiful.

  “You are Ealen,” I said.

  She waved her hand. The spheres orbiting me stopped and floated back. Limbs ached as I stood up.

  “I’ve been around for too long,” she said, quietly. “They said our descendants would live on. But I’ve watched too many of my descendants live the lives of speck worms. Blinking in and out of existence, overcome by inferior genetics.”

  She looked at me. “I’m tired of outliving my children. I’m tired of being alone. Though the fraction of you that is non-Ealen overwhelms that which is. Even so, you are the last of my line, many, many, many times removed.”

  I don’t know why that revelation didn’t shock me. It was rather stating a truth that I had somehow always known.

  “With your mother, she always knew what she was, what she was meant to do. After she vanished and we found you, I knew I would not make the same mistakes.”

  “That’s why you hid my heritage from me,” I said, slowly realizing her logic. “You hid what the true purpose of the Library was.”

  She smiled a beatific smile as if I was a child who had just written her first word. “Yes. You had to be prepared for a proper understanding.”

  I stood up, my muscles and joints screaming from disuse, and walked over to her slowly. The screen flickered back on, and we saw the massive white saber-toothed tiger digging huge gashes into the wall. I stood next to her, watching the screen. “I understand, grandmother,” I said in classical Ealen, as she had taught me.

  She looked at me, and in that moment I saw Annatu, truly saw her. Forged by loss and sorrow, she was someone who had lost everything she cared about over and over again.

  In short, she was me. Or the me that I could see myself becoming.

  “Annatu actually means ‘grandmother’ in one of the many dead languages of the Ealen.” Her laugh was a harsh thing. “They call us Ealen now, as if we were one people, but we were not.”

  I took her hand and squeezed it but she seemed unaware, her gaze at the screen, yet focused on something only she could see. Her voice took on a faraway quality, as
if she were speaking from the other side of time. “The Library is doing momentous things. We are making a new universe, where death has no place. I want you to be a part of it, working by my side. It’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

  She knew. She had always known.

  “I would have given anything for this opportunity,” I said.

  She shook her head, smiled at me. “I knew you would make the right decision,” she said. “That’s what I told the Circle.”

  I rubbed my thumb to my forefinger, feeling a buttonlike disc between my fingers. I couldn’t even remember taking it off my sleeves. I pondered the path I was about to choose. I would live with regrets for the rest of my life.

  But I wouldn’t live otherwise.

  I tried to pull her into a hug. It was awkward because Annatu resisted at first, and then she realized what I was trying to do. She gave me a funny little nervous laugh as I patted her on the shoulder.

  I released her and stepped back.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Confusion, then incredulity as the fine mesh exploded from the disc on her shoulder. In seconds it encased her in a cocoon. I could hear her fury, so hot it seemed as if it were going to burn through the threads from her screams of anger alone. But those discs were designed for the giant salamander birds of Mazolin who could ignite into flames at will.

  I could hear her muffled voice in the cocoon. “You will die, Seria!”

  I stopped. It wasn’t a cry for revenge, rather the horrified sob of someone who actually cared.

  I dropped to my knees, my hand outstretched to the cocoon, tears filling my eyes. I felt a strange hollowness within my chest.

  Even now, I could remember sitting on the other side of a roughly-hewn stone table, a sand storm roaring outside the tent on Kjarn, and taking her hand as she told me I had been chosen.

  She had taken me from Kjarn, where I surely would have died, and given me another life.

  She was my grandmother.

  I touched the strands of the cocoon and it rocked back and forth as the filament threads thickened, silencing her cries.

  “I love you,” I said, slowly, knowing she would never be able to hear.

  After a moment, the cocoon stopped rocking, as the threads secreted a dose of tranquilizer.

  I looked up at the blank wall, imagining Kai watching me with those golden eyes, then back at the cocoon.

  It would hold her for at least an hour. Barely enough time for me to get Kai and get out of here.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again and left.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Once I found a terminal in the next room, it didn’t take me long to find Kai. Annatu had been so sure of my conversion she had already given me access to nearly everything.

  And a few months ago, I would have taken her offer in a heartbeat.

  A bubble of multicolored code floated around me. I had hacked the spheres and taken control. Seven spheres now hovered outside my code bubble, protecting and ready to alert me in case of more dangers. One I sent to guard Annatu and emit a vambrace-disrupting signal that would keep her from calling for help. It wouldn’t last forever, but at least it would keep her in that cocoon.

  I found the location of Kai and his cell. Thankfully, he wasn’t guarded by anyone alive, just more spheres. Those, I could take care of.

  In the cameras networked all over the station, I found a computer vambrace left unguarded while its owner was asleep. I dispatched a sphere to retrieve it. If we were to escape, I had to have constant access to the systems. Otherwise, we’d just be running blind.

  I dispatched another sphere to retrieve more essentials, another to get Momo and yet another to check on the status of the ship. According to the manifests, our ship was still docked in the same place, and no occupants had disembarked. A visitation, whatever that meant, had been scheduled but I easily changed that.

  And now I had to go get Kai. My arms fell to my sides, and I stepped back from the terminal. The code around me vanished.

  Without a vambrace to interface me into the network, I had to trust that the spheres I had set in motion would do my bidding.

  No choice but to leap.

  I took a deep breath and began moving toward the quadrant where Kai’s cell was located. This station had been my home, but there had been many sections that were barred to us students. No surprise that Kai would be locked up in one of them.

  Three spheres trailed behind me obediently as I tried to stride confidently, quickly, without looking as if I were running, but it was hard when my heart was pounding so fast I could almost hear my heartbeat in my head.

  Spheres trailed other trainees, other Infoists, robed in various colors, signifying their rank, some bubbled in deep concentration working on floating code as they walked. Others were intent on their own hushed conversations, spheres and small AIs trailing in their wake. There was a strange sense of intensity in the halls, as if something were about to happen, but no one was sure what.

  I jumped when someone touched me on the elbow. I spun, wishing I had some weapon on my hands, belatedly remembering that I had not directed the spheres around me for protection, cursing the fact that without a vambrace or access to a terminal, it was too late to change anything.

  A yellow-robed trainee looked pale, his eyes trained on the grey Infoist robe I wore. “Do you know what’s going on?”

  I looked around and realized that I was one of the highest-ranking Infoists in these hallways.

  “No. Did something happen?”

  “Haven’t you heard? Quadrant 10 is dark, and sealed off. No one seems to know why.”

  I frowned. In ancient times, parts of the station could seal themselves off, disengage and travel independently. But that hadn’t happened in living memory.

  I remembered Annatu. At least, any memory of living humans.

  I shook my head.

  He glanced at my arm, the one with a cracked vambrace.

  I tried to stay cool and calm. “They don’t make these like they used to.”

  I was relieved when he turned and headed on his way. I couldn’t stomach the idea of hurting a hapless trainee.

  It seemed as if it took forever for me to reach the section where they held Kai. I rode the mass shuttle transports, clinging to commuting poles in a tired, weary crowd. There were technicians, agriculturalists, doctors, botanists, all mingled with trainees and other Infoists. As the car zoomed through a dark tunnel, I realized there were more people on this station than on the entirety of Tranquility. The stations of the Library were its own little bubble of a world, where the Infoists and Librarians were forces for good against the scary uncivilized dark universe.

  Or at least that’s what I had thought.

  No wonder I had not seen Annatu for what she was.

  I closed my eyes, clinging to the pole as the car swayed around me. All this time, all I had wanted to do was to go back to a home, any home and stay there away from machinations of shifter politics.

  But it was like Dr. Silver said. Once you left, you could never truly go back.

  Nor, I realized, did I want to anymore.

  I rode the shuttle to the end of the line. Only a few others trudged off with me, intent on their own paths.

  I kept following the map I had memorized, the one the spheres had shown to me to an endless white corridor. This was a newer section of the station, without the twining engineered plants and AI assistant bot-animals. As I drew nearer, spheres flew out to meet me. The ones under my control intercepted their path, kissing them with an enslavement code that overwrote their previous orders. In moments, they were mine.

  I couldn’t say the same for the cage that Kai was in. I patted the walls, swiping for a screen, any terminal, anything that would grant me access to the code that was the lifeblood in this place.

  But there was nothing.

  I grimaced, recognizing the security measure in place. Cage access and control were limited strictly to those who had the vambraces with the
proper security credentials.

  There was no terminal here to grant me access.

  I heard a muffled roar.

  A sphere hovered in front of me. I could see my reflection in its shiny surface.

  They were such a part of life in the Library I had completely forgotten about the spheres. Though they weren’t true AIs, they were connected to the network. More importantly, they could project a user interface for diagnostics, so long as you had a vambrace to access it.

  Well, then, I would have to make my own access.

  I grabbed a sphere, poked at the code that began floating across the surface at my touch. I opened up the back code and used the sphere’s connection to the network to hack an opening. Security bots would sense the brute force entry. I would only have a limited amount of time.

  Moments passed, but I soon found the outlines of a door into his cage. No views into the cage were accessible; he had apparently destroyed them all.

  There was no way of knowing what state he was in before opening the cage door.

  I didn’t know what to do. I skimmed the ancient reports I found on similarly caged shifters. In this state, they would attack and destroy anyone and anything they encountered.

  One article suggested letting the shifter adjust to one’s scent.

  I opened air vents in the wall between his cage and the room I was in.

  A furious snarl was suddenly cut off.

  Silence.

  Then the sound of heavy breathing.

  “Kai, It’s –”

  The monster’s roar was so loud I swear I could feel the ground underneath me shake, even though I knew it was impossible. It was a monstrous sound designed to induce fear, and it worked, by the stars it worked. Chills shivered through me.

  What if he was too far gone?

  No, it couldn’t come to this, not here, not now.

  I gripped the sphere more firmly in my hand, digging into this quadrant’s recently created files. There were so, so many of them. “Kai, it’s me,” I said, searching for him. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. All the keywords I entered kept failing. Nothing found. Nothing found. Nothing found.