Kaiden

by Vivienne Savage

  She gave the queen a quizzical look. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “In light of the many recent betrayals, I find myself in need of a new prime agent. Please do me the honor.”

  Nisrine caught her breath. Her lungs didn’t want to cooperate, and her fingers felt numb from the excitement. It was a position all agents aspired to reach but few attained, because the monarchy only ever held one at a time. Joaquin had been that one.

  “Would I have to leave the Jemison?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Yes,” she blurted, managing to keep her seat. “I mean, I’d be honored, Your Majesty. Thank you. I won’t let you down.”

  The queen smiled. “I know you won’t. Now, there’s one more thing I would like to ask of both of you.”

  Kaiden cocked a brow. “What would that be, Your Majesty?”

  “Cate,” she said with a smile on her bruised face. “My closest friends call me Cate.”

  The crew of the Jemison greeted Nisrine and Kaiden with a heroes’ welcome, but the atmosphere at their celebratory party was rife with tension between the sides of the loyal marines who served with Ethan in the conflict and the ones who abandoned ship after the Jemison’s illegal launch.

  Nisrine whispered to him that the atmosphere felt like a warzone ready to detonate. True to his word, their commodore held no hard feelings against the ones who left, but the same couldn’t be said for everyone else. Some crewmen returned to find themselves alienated from their social circles.

  Kaiden bore them no ill will for it, either. The choice had been a hard one, and he hoped he was never put in the same position.

  Once the revelry ended, he made his way to the medical wing. Xander had been absent during the festivities, but he’d sent a message through Jem requesting Kaiden join him in his office.

  “Hello, Lieutenant Commander Lockhart,” O’Reilly greeted him, a big grin on his face. “The doctor is in his new office waiting for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  At the end of the hall, beyond the second-to-last door, he found Doctor Vargas’s office. The one that had once belonged to Doctor Oshiro. The aging doctor planned to retire at the end of the year and as his protégé, Xander would be assuming his role as Chief Medical Officer.

  “Xander?”

  “Come on in,” a voice answered through the door.

  Kaiden let himself inside to find Xander behind the desk peering at research material projected by Jem’s hologram interface.

  “You wanted to talk?”

  “Well, yeah, and welcome you back to the ship. Get over here.” Xander rose from his seat, crossed from behind the desk, and embraced Kaiden. “It’s good to have you back safe and sound.”

  Kaiden hugged him back, realizing how much it felt like hugging his brother. “It’s good to be back, Xander. Thanks. Now, what’s happening?”

  “I’ve been given access to everything seized by the UNE. Thousands of files and I’ve barely scraped the surface of them.”

  “If you’d like help, I’m willing.”

  “I might take you up on it later. The British Army has conducted raids on facilities connected to Scarot’s accomplices and rescued dozens of other survivors. A few of us will be leaving the Jemison within the week to provide our surgical expertise and help with their recoveries. Like you, they’ll need rehabilitation before they can return to their lives. The Lexar have even offered to loan one of their menders.”

  “They’ll be in good hands, at least. But I get the sense that isn’t what you wanted to talk about.”

  “You’re right. Come take a look.” He retook his seat at the desk and pulled a few files up in holographic mode. “I’ve been given access to a decade of illegal research material and studies, including detailed diagrams and notes about you. I think, given time, that we can reverse some of what’s been done to your brain. Restore your original psionic powers perhaps.”

  Kaiden considered the offer, and for a split second, he saw himself as normal again, saw it so clearly in his head it could have been real. He could once again be a man with above-average psychic powers. He’d recover the twin link with his brother.

  “No.”

  “No?” Xander’s voice rose an octave, and he blinked.

  “Maybe there was a time a year ago when I’d have jumped at the offer, but these past few weeks have given me a new understanding. This is who I am now, and I’m happy with me. This body, and all they’ve done to it, is mine. Wouldn’t change it for anything.”

  A wide grin spread across his friend’s face. “You have no idea how pleased I am to hear that.”

  It had only taken two years to see strength where he’d once seen flaws and scars. When Kaiden looked at himself in the mirror, he didn’t see a monster designed as a weapon—he saw a hero.

  And a hero had to love himself for who he was.

  Other Books by Vivienne

  Fairy Tale Retellings

  Beauty and the Beast

  Red and the Wolf

  Goldilocks and the Bear

  Belle and the Pirate

  Zarina and the Djinn

  Rapunzel and the Griffin Prince

  Reverse Harem Romance

  Three Greek gods, one reincarnated modern goddess

  Divine Ambrosia

  Paranormal University

  Magic school has never been this exciting. Or hot.

  The Hidden Court

  Dragons

  Loved by the Dragon

  Smitten: Dawn of the Dragons #2

  Crush on a Dragon: Dawn of the Dragons #3

  God of Mischief: Dawn of the Dragons #4

  Military Shifters

  Hot and Wild military alphas

  The Right to Bear Arms (Book #1)

  Let Us Prey (Book #2)

  The Purr-fect Soldier (Book #3)

  Old Dog New Tricks (Book #4)

  Texas Pride (Book #5)

  Impractical Magic

  Impractical Magic

  Better Than Hex (Impractical Magic #2)

  Blood Heiress

  Blood Kissed

  Werewolves of San Antonio

  Training the Alpha

  Mythological Creatures

  Making Waves

  Epic Fantasy by Dominique Kristine

  Shadows for a Princess

  A princess who would rather die than wed. A warrior priest who would rather kill than see her harmed. A kingdom of shadows and treachery that threatens them both...

  At the age of twenty-eight, Princess Ysolde Westbrook is a spinster duchess, the adopted daughter of Hindera's eccentric monarch. Commoners love their benevolent leader, but the kingdom's gentry take offense to the outsider among them. Amid noble plots and demands for her to marry a local aristocrat, an assassination attempt places her life in peril--if she will not have one of them for a husband, they would sooner see her dead.

  Finding allies in strangers with powerful gifts and even darker secrets, Ysolde must learn what it means to lead and find her own inner strengths. Whether or not she survives the tangled web of treason will determine the fate of her duchy, the royal family, and the kingdom she loves.

  The Hidden Court by Vivienne Savage

  A gray, overcast sky stretched above me, an endless blanket of dark clouds heralding the approaching storm. Ten minutes away from home, I hurried without an umbrella down the sidewalk while leaving my first job for the last time.

  In less than seven days, I’d be entering one of the world’s only magical universities to spend the next four years of my life learning to become a topnotch faerie godmother. Lucky me.

  As I reached the street corner, the first speckles of rain kissed my cheeks, and cool, storm-scented wind whipped an abandoned newspaper down the vacant road. While it was hell on my hair, the pleasant mist made an improvement over the usual oppressive humidity.

  “Hey, Skylar, wait up!” Mindi called from behind me.

  My best friend of eleven years trotted into view when I twisted arou
nd. Her freckled face flushed red from her jog to catch up, so I paused and let her regain her spent breath.

  “You still want to hit up the movies tonight?” she asked.

  “In this weather? Like there’s anywhere else to go. Dad said I could borrow his car, so I’ll pick you up around five.”

  “Sounds go—ood!” Her sneaker sole skidded over the wet sidewalk, her toe struck the jagged edge of a loose concrete chunk, and Mindi pitched forward. Before she could tumble into the street and catch the cement with her face, I grabbed her by the shoulders.

  A jolt shot through my fingers, zipping down each nerve like a magical telegraph to my brain.

  Precognition wasn’t my specialty—it was actually my weakest fae talent—but when I touched my friend, a vision of the future flashed through me. I saw the doctor she had the potential to become, the lives she would save, and an overwhelming branch of positive outcomes like ripples across a vast ocean.

  It vanished, a mere soap bubble of possibility, and before my eyes, Mindi’s fate tore itself from its predetermined track into the hungry jaws of a vampire. I jerked my hand back.

  “You okay?” she asked, like I was the one who almost kissed sidewalk.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  Far from it. My bestie was doomed to die in a grimy alley behind the town’s only pizzeria.

  Hot tears stung my eyes, but they couldn’t wash away the knowledge of what awaited the girl who used to share her lunches with me at school, shriek over horror movies with me during sleepovers, and enviously brush my hair any time she had the chance. For years, she’d thought Mom let me color it, ignorant to the truth that the teal, violet, wine, and gold streaks in my black hair were my natural colors. I hadn’t told her until I was a teenager that I was a faerie, because humans usually treated us different once they found out.

  Through it all, Mindi had accepted me.

  It wasn’t fair.

  In eighteen years, I’d only had the occasional vision, usually manifested as nightmares or a keen sense of intuition—common for faeries, but far from impressive when the most powerful of my ancestors could see every human probability strand in a great, arcing tapestry of fortune.

  But I was only a half-fae, the spawn of two other half-breeds rejected by their magical ancestors. I had no extraordinary gifts of foresight or clairvoyance—until now. The vision was the clearest to ever flit across my sight, but not yet etched in stone. Especially if I did something about it.

  I couldn’t tell her. According to some of my parents’ old textbooks, numero uno of dealing with prophetic visions prohibited telling the subject, and the consequences were murky at best. I could make things a thousand times worse.

  “I still can’t believe you’re going to Illinois for college,” she said, oblivious to my internal struggles. “And in a week. Summer isn’t even over. Why does magic school have to be so far away?”

  “Cause that’s where the fae own a whole crap-ton of land. They have acres dedicated for the university. God, I’m not going that far. You act like I’m leaving for Hogwarts.” Unable to shake the vision, I forced out a laugh. It barely trembled past my lips.

  “You may as well be going to the UK—or any other fictional setting for that matter. I won’t be able to hang with you. So, since you’re leaving and Jerome is headed off on a last-minute vacation, I’m thinking of taking over his shift at Hot Slices. They’re posting the job opening tomorrow, but his boss is giving me first dibs to come fill out an application. I’m gonna head over now.”

  “You shouldn’t,” I blurted. “It’s a crap place to work. Remember how Jake rage quit a month ago?” Her ex-boyfriend hadn’t lasted three months at Hot Slices.

  “He ate more pizza than he sold. Do you really think he was right to storm out because he lost his privileges to eat on the job?”

  I blew a wisp of dark hair from my face then groaned as the skies unleashed a misty bounty of rain. My ironed waves were ruined in seconds and reduced to a mass of springy curls. “Well, no,” I admitted.

  “It’s a decent job.”

  “What about Samantha? She burned her wrist real bad because those idiots never clean the floor, and she slipped on grease while pulling a pizza out.”

  “Yeah, she’s going to have a scar from that.” The resolve in Mindi’s voice wavered. “I’ll just be careful, I guess.”

  I hooked an arm around her shoulders and wove a mild Persuasion spell. Stronger faeries didn’t require physical contact, but I did. “Girl, you can do so much better than serving pizza to hungover drunks and rowdy football players. What about all that talk about volunteering at the vet?”

  “Volunteering won’t move me closer to saving up for a car. As great as it would be to gain some experience, I need to earn funds now.”

  “True, but a recommendation letter from Doc Taylor will look great on your Johns Hopkins application next year.”

  The spell backfired royally. Instead of taking my advice, she went on the defensive and shrugged off my arm. Her easygoing smile faded, and a scowl popped onto her face. “Why does it matter to you where I’ll work when you’ll be gone a thousand miles away? You have a free ride. A scholarship because you’re different.”

  I stiffened. She’d never brought it up before. Never uttered anything but warm acceptance. “Min—”

  “I have to go. Let’s forget the movie tonight. I can’t afford it anyway.”

  “I was gonna pay.”

  As Mindi rushed away through the rain, her voice carried back to me on the misty wind. “Don’t bother.”

  Crap. I’d really messed up. If I couldn’t sway her away, then I could at least get someone else who could.

  After sidestepping beneath the green awning of a thrift shop, I fished my phone from my purse and dialed the emergency hotline all paranormal beings knew by heart. For dilemmas of the mortal variety, Americans called 9-1-1, but people seeking paranormal solutions dialed 7-7-7 to solve life-or-death situations. In ten minutes or less, some wizard would appear to blow Mindi’s vamp into blood-scented dust.

  A recorded message warned that I’d contacted them during a period of high call volume but was welcome to try my call again later or remain on hold. When I phoned my mother, it went straight to voice mail as it often did when she was on the job.

  Trying the house didn’t work either. Although Dad was probably home in bed, he worked nights with his godchildren and usually ignored the phone when trying to rest.

  I tilted my head back toward the sky and closed my eyes. “Now what?”

  What the hell would my parents do in a situation like this?

  I could call the police, but they’d turn it into a bloodbath. As part of the Pact of 1977, mortals technically couldn’t intervene with paranormal affairs unless directly confronted by a threat—which meant most human law enforcement instigated a fight straight off.

  Under normal circumstances, local police officers couldn’t investigate supernatural disturbances, and our special agents, the sentinels, couldn’t put their noses into human law enforcement without an agreement.

  And then there were situations that brought the two factions together, when it behooved both sides to involve each other in a case, but that was rare and hadn’t happened in years since a warlock took a human cult under mind control and sent them into banks with explosives while he reaped the rewards.

  As the first rolling rumble of thunder boomed overhead, inspiration struck me. If I couldn’t persuade my friend to avoid the pizzeria, maybe I could talk her hunter out of his dinner plans and convince him it wasn’t worth having a death on his soul.

  Most vampires weren’t the jerks modern horror movies made them out to be. They didn’t cut a bloody, serial-killer swath through unsuspecting, isolated towns in Alaska or stalk high school girls a century their junior.

  They didn’t sparkle, and they had reflections. That nonsense about crossing holy ground? Absolute BS. Don’t wave a crucifix at a vampire unless you want him to shove it up you
r butt. Of course, most of those rules flew out the window once they succumbed to their thirst.

  Whenever supernatural creatures underwent the Change, they became a malevolent being called a darkling. In the case of a vampire, they transformed into nosferatu—foul, undead blood drinkers that smelled like rot and sickness.

  I was positive this guy wasn’t a nossie yet, but he was probably inching his way down the alignment spectrum toward the irreversible path of evil that would forever stain his soul with corruption. That’s where the myths came from.

  I shuddered, the hairs raising on my arms and skin alight with static.

  A quick glance up and down the sidewalk guaranteed I was alone, so I pulled the shadows around myself like a cloak and weaved the rain into an Inconspicuous glamour. The mist made an ideal disguise and hid me from mortal eyes.

  I took every shortcut I knew through town as rain splattered around my ankles and the wind howled through trees bending beneath the onslaught. With luck on my side I’d arrive in time to chastise the vamp and be ready to salvage our girls’ night out before Mindi was through with her interview.

  And if I couldn’t talk him out of it, I could handle him. His impression felt young and hungry, not experienced and capable. A couple sparks of a Sunlight spell would chase him into hiding.

  The subtle drizzle evolved into a downpour as I reached the narrow alley behind the pizzeria. A light by the back door flickered and buzzed, staying off more than it was on.

  I frowned. The atmosphere couldn’t appear more ominous, like the Hollywood set of a slasher flick.