Cosmic Catalyst (Shamans & Shifters Space Opera Book 2)

by Jenny Schwartz

  Laura blinked.

  Thor didn’t hesitate. “You consider him a friend, as does Vulf. Ahab is welcome at our table.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Trent.” Ahab raised the volume on the communicator.

  Amusement flowed through my bond with Vulf.

  I asked belatedly.

 

  Part of the family. I urged.

  Vulf smiled down at me. “Welcome to the family, Ahab.”

  Laura glanced at him, startled, and Edith stared, wide-eyed between my communicator and Vulf. But Thor nodded once, like a man who understood and accepted something important. In this instance, it was the fact that for Vulf and me Ahab was a friend as valued as family.

  “Family. But you keep that communication line secure, Ahab, understood?” Thor ordered.

  “Absolutely, Mr. Trent.”

  “Good,” Thor rumbled. “Because I understand how Cyrus put two and two together from Vulf’s and my abrupt departure from the Conclave to guess that Jaya was here—in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a spy in the meeting on San Juan reporting Jaya’s unannounced departure. It’s the man’s job and I respect his dedication. He serves all of Corsairs, and he serves us well. But I will not have him eavesdropping on my family.” For the taciturn Thor, that was quite a speech.

  We nodded, and Ahab gave his verbal assent.

  “I’ll grill steak and corn,” Thor said. Apparently, the previous discussion was closed. The issue now was dinner.

  “Warm pasta salad?” The rising intonation of Laura’s voice made it a question.

  Edith gave her a one-armed hug. “Sounds good, Mom. I’ll peel the tomatoes.”

  “How can I help?” I wanted to be part of things.

  Laura was already filling a large pot with water. “We’ll need basil from the garden and mushrooms. Vulf?”

  He clasped my hand and grinned at me. “Let me show you the cellar.”

  “Leave Ahab here,” Laura said. “He doesn’t need to see what you two get up to in the dark.” Her grin was a lot like her son’s.

  Ahab’s laughter spilled from the communicator.

  I propped it against a fruit bowl filled with red and green apples and golden pears that sat at one end of the kitchen counter. “Be good, Ahab,” I teased.

  Chapter 4

  Vulf collected a basket for the mushrooms from a high shelf in the kitchen and a paring knife from a drawer. We picked the basil first. The herb garden was well-laid out, but not regimented. The herbs seemed happy, bursting with the vigor of spring. The basil was sweet and spicy and left its lingering scent on my fingers. Vulf kissed me in between the rosemary and the angelica. Then he kissed me with utter abandon in the cellar that had been dug beneath a storage shed. Who knew that the musty aroma of mushrooms was an aphrodisiac?

  I’m kidding. All Vulf and I needed was each other.

  But we were under a time constraint. We couldn’t let everyone’s dinner wait on us making love.

  The simple meal was delicious, and special in that everything except the pasta had been grown on the farm and stored through the year. While we ate, Vulf and his parents summarized events at the Conclave over the last week and a half. It had taken Vulf nearly that long to travel from Naidoc to Corsairs since he’d traveled with the Capricorn, and the pirates’ cruiser was far slower than the Orion, a mLa’an designed and built starship.

  “Basically, the Conclave is excited that others might be able to shift, as I do, from human to robot wolf—or whatever animal—and back.” Vulf paused for a bite of steak. “They had me demonstrate the shift multiple times and had our doctors and engineers study me. There were a lot of grumbles, but they understood that the Academy had a claim on you as a shaman.”

  I nodded. “When you messaged me you passed on their request that I come here to Corsairs and attempt to initiate other shifters’ shifts. I’m here, now, and I’m willing to try.”

  “Do you think you can?” Laura asked.

  “I volunteer!” Edith shouted over her mom’s cautious question.

  Edith sat opposite Vulf at the table.

  Laura sat opposite me, and I saw her worried expression.

  “I’m fairly confident that the worst result is that the shift doesn’t happen,” I said. “I watched the way sha energy moved around and through Vulf when he shifted on the Orion. I don’t see any risk of someone becoming stuck midway through a shift.”

  Some of the eager excitement drained from Edith’s expression. “You mean, half-human, half-robot? Like a cyborg?”

  “Nothing quite so neat.” I didn’t want her thinking that a half-shift would be cool. “Nairo Bloodstone, one of the research shamans at the Academy, is a healer. He raised the issue of complications. His advice is that if anything goes wrong, if I have even a hint of resistance in the flow of sha energy, I should reverse it. I won’t push a shift, not without other shamans to provide emergency back-up.”

  “Which you don’t have on Corsairs,” Vulf said thoughtfully. “Are there shamans you would trust with this?”

  “A few friends. Nairo, but he’s busy. Healers are.” Which was a lame excuse. I set down the corn cob I’d been gnawing on. My fingers were salty and buttery. I wiped them on a serviette, concentrating exaggeratedly on the task. “I’m afraid that if I invite my friends here, to help me, there might be negative consequences for them in the interstellar human community.” I looked up and met everyone’s eyes. “I don’t want to—I won’t—put them in danger or jeopardize their standing with the Academy.”

  Surprisingly, it was Ahab who answered my statement. “Vulf shares your protective inclinations. I’ve observed before that he will risk his death to protect those he loves. As a result, I have considered the issue of protecting a person’s kinfolk.”

  I stared at the communicator propped against a cookie jar at the end of the table.

  Ahab continued in his clear voice. “If your kin are children or otherwise legally dependent on you, by which I mean that the laws of Galaxy Proper define them as unable to exercise mature judgement, then a person may unilaterally take action to protect those kin. However, if the kin are mature adults…”

  “They have the right and ability to decide for themselves,” Vulf concluded. “Ahab and I have had this debate before. I would rather protect those I love, but Ahab has gradually argued me to the point where I can theoretically acknowledge that independent adults have the right to choose to risk themselves.” He took a deep breath. “As I do.”

  Laura smiled at him sympathetically, but with rueful humor. “It’s hard, isn’t it? Wait till you become a parent.” Then her face lit up and she looked at me.

  “Mom!” Vulf said in instant protest.

  Edith laughed.

  I blushed. That Laura would delight in being a grandmother was obvious.

  Vulf bought the conversation sternly back to the question of shifting. “Jaya, the Conclave repeatedly raised the question of why I shifted into an inorganic form. Obviously, if my initial shift had been into the form of a normal wolf then in the current conditions of Earth’s nuclear winter I’d be incredibly sick or dead, but it’s safe to shift into an organic wolf now, and I still change into a robot wolf.”

  “It’s puzzled the research shamans at the Academy. For you specifically, Vulf, the logical explanation is that the flow of sha energy that guides your shift has locked into a pattern that produces the robot wolf. It’s like when a shaman terraforms a planet by locking sha energy into new patterns that sustain life on that planet. The sha energy around and in you recognizes the pattern to shift between your human and robot wolf forms.” I hesitated. I could add this bit silently via telepathy, but perhaps his family needed to hear it. “Your wolf seems satisfied to have a robot body, so I wouldn’t want to risk his health by interfering with your sha energy.”

  “Do you speak to Vulf’s wolf?” Surprise and awe made Edith’s
voice an half-octave higher.

  Vulf squeezed my thigh beneath the table. “Jaya saw my wolf in my eyes before I shifted. He recognized her as my mate very early. For him, she’s everything. I agree.”

  For a man who didn’t consider himself romantic, he was making my heart overflow. Everything I felt for him was in his name.

  His answering love surged through our mate bond.

  “Haven’t you told them already?” I asked, shocked into speech.

  He shook his head, moving his hand from my thigh to rest his arm on the back of my chair. We’d finished eating and were just sitting around.

  “I think I can guess.” Laura looked happy. She stood, preparatory to clearing the table. For an instant she rested her hand on Thor’s broad shoulder. “You’re telepathing.”

  Edith squealed. “That is so cool.” Then she sighed. “I want to find my mate.”

  “Time enough for that,” Thor said gruffly, adding, when I’d have risen to help clean up. “Finish your story on how you explain Vulf’s robot wolf form.” He got up and helped Laura clear the table, while Edith topped up everyone’s cup of tea.

  “Wait one minute. I’ll put the dishwasher on,” Laura said. “Then we’ll go through to the dining room. I lit the fire while the pasta cooked.”

  The spring night was cool enough that the cheerful blaze in the hearth was welcome. I propped Ahab’s communicator—it seemed more his than mine, now; his window to the world—against a cushion on a spare armchair before sitting beside Vulf on a sofa.

  Edith took the other end of the sofa, kicking off her boots and curling her legs under her.

  Laura and Thor had their own armchairs.

  It was good to rest against Vulf. Being alone with him, making love, would be the best. But this was good, too. I stared into the flames that burned steadily. “Before humanity was forced to evacuate Earth, some people believed it had a spirit being. Others simply saw the Earth and all that inhabited it as a powerfully concentrated ecosystem. Both named their perception ‘Gaia’. I wonder if the truth was somewhere between the two ideas, and that Earth’s sha energy is particularly vital, sufficiently so that it enabled shamanic talent to evolve in some humans and a shifter talent in others.”

  I sighed. “I’ve known that I was a half-shifter ever since a blood test in childhood, so I’ve researched your—our—history and traditions. Both shamans and shifters are statistically insignificant aberrations in the human population. But both could arguably be considered guardians of Earth. And this is where my thinking verges on the metaphysical and the Academy would dismiss it for irrationality.”

  “We won’t.” Vulf tucked me even closer.

  “All right.” I took a deep breath. “Since the Evacuation, shifters haven’t been able to shift. The shamans who looked into the issue a few generations ago couldn’t see any tangle in the flow of sha energy in and through you. I read the research notes in the Academy archives. They concluded that there was simply something mysteriously altered in you by leaving Earth, and they moved on to other, more solvable, mysteries. I don’t believe it was well done of them, but…”

  “They had other issues. Establishing humanity in the galaxy was not an easy task,” Laura said.

  I smiled at her, grateful for her forgiveness of my predecessors. “My hypothesis is that both shamans and shifters evolved to protect Earth. Both traditions emphasized a connection to the natural world. We felt it more deeply and so protected it more fiercely. When we left Earth, shamanic talent seemed to surge, but it had to to protect humanity and cement our place in Galaxy Proper. Urgency compelled us to hold onto our talent and to stretch it.”

  The Trent family, my family, watched me intently.

  “I had a lot of time alone on San Juan to think about this,” I said. “When Vulf needed to shift into a wolf to protect me, his mate, even if he wasn’t consciously thinking of shifting, he and I knew that he wouldn’t survive exposure to Earth’s nuclear winter. As my grandfather forced him out of the starship to die, Vulf tried with his most basic, powerful instincts to survive and to save me, and my shamanic talent reached out to him at the same time, slamming sha energy wildly into him. I think that sha energy, which was far more than shamans usually handle, careened through the broken sha patterns of his shift and instantaneously reforged him into something that would answer his and my intense need for his survival. An inorganic, robot wolf.”

  “The sha energy saved Vulf?” Edith’s forehead wrinkled in a confused frown.

  I shook my head. “Sha energy isn’t sentient, but shamans sometimes act so impulsively, working on instinct, that it seems as if the sha energy anticipates our wishes. That can make talking clearly about it difficult. To speak as plainly as I can, I don’t think that the sha energy on Earth, this ancient idea of Gaia, was or is, sentient. However, I do think that Vulf’s shift was a gift of Gaia. Patterns of sha energy that flow in and through shifters were forged on Earth, and had the greatest chance of being re-shaped there.”

  “And now that the sha energy pattern has changed for me, can you or other shamans replicate it for other shifters?” Vulf asked.

  I stared at him, feeling the weight of hope and expectation, my own as much as those watching me. I wanted to be accepted by the shifters, even valued. “I don’t know.”

  Vulf’s cabin was just inside the woods at the eastern edge of his parents’ fields. We cut across the fields, walking easily in the clear moonlight, the sky bright with stars. The air was cool and Laura had insisted I borrow her jacket to wear over my utility suit. My pocket dimension ought to hold one of my coats, but I liked wearing her jacket. I appreciated the caring it represented.

  Vulf strode along in planetside-wear of raw cotton shirt and dark wool trousers with a sheepskin vest for warmth.

  There were things I hadn’t shared with Vulf’s parents and sister that I had to tell him, but not tonight. Finally, we were alone and I wanted to stop thinking and just feel. So I let the night scents of the land and its gentle sha energy envelop me, while I focused on the man who held my hand and strode so assuredly beside me. My mate.

  At the edge of the woods, I shaped a tiny ribbon of sha energy to bob before us as a softly glowing white light. On Earth, the abundant sha energy had occasionally formed these lights naturally. They’d been called wanderlights, and had terrified and intrigued those who’d seen them. There’d been legends of people who’d followed them, never to be heard of again, or else returning to their families, changed.

  My wanderlight hovered sedately in front of us, allowing me to see where I trod, although Vulf, with his sharper shifter senses, could have safely navigated the woods without it.

  His cabin sat in a small clearing. I sent the wanderlight in a playful whirl around it so that I could see the cabin—and tripped because I was too busy gawking to pay attention to my footing.

  Vulf caught me, laughed and lifted me completely into his arms. “I’ll carry you over the threshold.”

  I forgot my curiosity about the cabin. With his face so close and us apart for too long, kissing him was much more important.

  Somehow he maneuvered us through the narrow doorway, and then, a second doorway into a bedroom with a large, unmade bed. He dropped me onto it and followed me down, and we made love with the scorching, desperate need for one another that we’d suppressed through dinner.

  Later we made love again, our touches lingering and learning what made us shiver with pleasure, surrender with joy or simply go wild. To make love while the person you loved telepathed your name in a frenzy of passion overwhelmed everything. It was sensuality unleashed. It broke me even as it healed me, and I knew I was his; just as I felt his bond to me. This was the shifters’ mate bond at its rawest and truest.

  “Awake?” Vulf’s voice was husky with sleep and other things.

  “Mmm.” I cuddled close, hiding my face in his shoulder, willing for him to tease me awake.

  “Jaya.” He w
rapped me up in his arms, almost as if he sought to protect me.

  I woke properly, the beginnings of alarm driving away thoughts of early morning lovemaking. Sunshine, pale with the early light of dawn, streamed in the open window.

  “Mom messaged me,” Vulf said.

  I’d switched off my communicator last night before leaving his parents’ house, but he’d merely muted his. Evidently, he’d woken and checked it. I blinked sleep from my eyes and focused on his expression.

  Concern and determination darkened the blue of his eyes. “Your father’s here.”

  Chapter 5

  “I can’t do this.” Halfway to Thor and Laura’s house, I stopped.

  Vulf turned and faced me. He cupped the back of my neck, beneath the fall of my ponytail, his hand warm and steady; the same way he regarded me. “You can do this. You’re strong. But if you don’t want to do this, we leave. You don’t have to meet your father.” His thumb caressed the sensitive skin at the top of my spinal cord.

  Birds sang in the hedgerows and trees, the fading end of the dawn chorus. The river was a placid blue with a silver shimmer to the ripples as a barge sailed past.

  “I didn’t think he’d be so eager to meet me,” I confessed. “You and your family tried to prepare me for how important family is to shifters…I didn’t get it. I thought maybe he’d message me.”

  “If you’d be more comfortable making contact that way, I’ll tell him,” Vulf said. There was no judgement in his gaze, only concern and a determination to make things right for me.

  “He must have dropped everything to come here and meet me. How did he know where I was?”

  “Your father would have worked it out as Cyrus did, adding up my sudden departure from the Conclave yesterday and the fact that we’re mate bonded.” Vulf wrapped his arms around me and drew me into his warmth. “In the world of Corsairs and shifter clans, your father is actually putting your well-being above all else. He could have set a meeting with you anywhere. Instead, he’s come as a guest to my parents’ home, to our clan’s land. He wants you to have all the support of family and home.”