A thought struck me, and I gripped his shirt. Today he’d dressed as I had, in a utility suit. His was gray. My pocket dimension had lacked any other type of clean clothes. If I stayed on Corsairs, I’d need to go shopping. For now, I wore a dark blue utility suit, my black boots and a terrible case of the jitters. “Vulf, do you know who my father is?”
A hint of frustration mixed with regret showed in his eyes and tightened his jaw. The emotions flowed through out mate bond, too. “Mom refused to tell me. She says it’s your father’s right…she wouldn’t hide his identity from me if she thought it would hurt you.” Love and certainty replaced his regret at being unable to provide me with my father’s name.
“I should meet him.”
Vulf didn’t move.
I released my grip on his shirt, smoothed it and hugged him. “I will meet my father.”
He relaxed and returned the hug. He believed it was the right choice, but he’d tried not to influence my decision. He was a good man and an excellent mate. We walked on, hand in hand.
A couple of people worked in the fields. One carried a bucket, the other a hoe or something similar, balanced against his shoulder. They glanced in our direction and waved.
“Cousins,” Vulf said. “You’ll meet them later.”
“I thought this was your parents’ homestead?”
“It is. But it’s more than a farm. Mom and Dad run it as a haven. Family members who spend their time in space are welcome here to reconnect with nature. My cabin isn’t the only one scattered around. There are five others, and we’ll build another one for Edith when she’s ready. At the moment, she likes to spend her leave under Mom and Dad’s roof, being spoiled.”
I smiled at that. “They spoil you, too.” I’d seen the way Laura positioned the cookie jar near him.
He grinned.
A car was parked at the front of the house, low-slung, red and with a design that screamed “speed”.
Vulf whistled softly. “A Jekyll Flame. Your dad has expensive tastes in cars.”
Internal shudders started up deep inside me. The nearer I got to meeting my father, the more I felt like vomiting.
Vulf put an arm around my waist and basically carried me up the porch steps. “Come on. If you feel this bad, the faster this is done, the better.”
He didn’t have to answer the door.
Thor opened it for him. They’d been waiting for us.
Vulf pushed me inside, but kept an arm around my waist, his chest a solid support behind me when I balked.
A man as tall as Thor, but a fraction older, with grey beginning to streak his black hair stood near the dining table gripping the back of a chair. His green eyes were startlingly vivid in a lean, strong-boned face. “Jaya.”
The top of the chair broke under his grip. The sharp crack echoed through the room.
I ignored it. “Are you…am I…?”
“I’m your father, Rick Jekyll.” He tossed the broken top rail of the chair onto the table without looking away from me. “I’m a weretiger. I’m sorry.” His voice deepened and hoarsened. “If I’d known you existed I would have been your father. I want to be now.” He stopped abruptly; this stranger, whose blood flowed in my veins.
Half of my DNA was from him. What more he might be to me than a biological connection I didn’t know, but the intensity in his eyes meant that I mattered to him. The glowing green of his eyes was his tiger, looking out at me.
“Sonya never told me about you,” Rick whispered. The words were a plea for understanding, for forgiveness.
Sonya had been my mother. “She died when I was three. I only learned her name a few weeks ago.”
“You look like her. Brown eyes to melt a man’s heart. Your soul is in your eyes.” He took a shaking breath. “You’re taller than Sonya. More serious. She smiled a lot.”
Vulf’s arm remained around my waist, holding me up, and I clutched onto it. “Why did you leave her?”
“We were never together.” If it bothered Rick that he had an audience for his confession, it didn’t show, and he didn’t hesitate in his answers; despite the woman who stood near him, a woman his age and likely his partner.
I’d spared the woman one glance, taking in her blonde hair and expensive elegance, then my gaze locked on my father.
“I was an engineer in the fleet then. The pirate fleet, I mean. When we stopped at Faust, I’d catch up with Sonya. She was a singer at a bar on that fringe planet. I didn’t have a woman in every port. I wasn’t Sonya’s mate, I wasn’t her everything, but I was loyal to her. Then one day she sent me a message. In it she said simply that she had someone else. She asked that I stay away from the bar and her so that the new relationship had a chance.” His voice was raggedy with a snarl. “I thought she meant she had a new man, but now I can guess that she meant you. You were the someone else and she kept you from me.”
“Rick.” The unnamed woman put a hand on his back.
He closed his eyes, his breathing deepening as he brought himself under control.
“I’m Maggie Jekyll, Rick’s mate,” she said. “I am very pleased to meet you, Jaya. Rick and I don’t have children and learning of your existence has brought up a lot of emotions.”
For shifters, children were everything, and if Rick and Maggie hadn’t been able to have children, I had a sense from how much Celine, my foster mother had loved me before her death, how important I’d have been to them.
“Hi, Maggie,” I said softly. “This is Vulf, my mate.”
She and Vulf exchanged greetings.
Rick opened his eyes to briefly acknowledge Vulf before his gaze returned to me.
Maggie ventured onto the difficult ground that he was avoiding. “The rest of Sonya’s message was to tell Rick to go find his mate. He did, three years later. Me. But if he’d have known she was pregnant, he’d have married Sonya. He’d have been there for you, Jaya.” At the price of Maggie and Rick finding each other.
From my own experience of my mate bond with Vulf, I knew how much they would have lost if he had stayed with Sonya.
Rick clasped Maggie’s hand. “I don’t know if Sonya truly wanted me to experience the mate bond or if she simply wanted you all to herself. But that is the past and we can’t ask her.”
“Perhaps it was a combination of reasons,” Laura suggested. “Come and sit down.” My mother-in-law urged everyone back to the table.
Vulf sat next to me.
Edith instantly slid into the empty seat on my other side. She gripped my hand and gave it a sisterly squeeze of encouragement.
My fingers must have frozen her. I was cold with shock and emotional trauma.
Laura served hot coffee and sweet pastries.
Rick didn’t eat. He stared at me from across the table.
“Does it matter to you that my mate is a wolf?” I asked.
He shook his head, not simply in negation, but as if shaking himself into alertness. “No. I’m happy that you found your mate. I am grateful that his family care for you as their own.”
“Jaya is ours,” Thor said.
I glanced at him as he sat at the head of the massive table. From the corner of my eye I saw Rick’s fist clench on the edge of the table.
“Thank you for agreeing to meet Rick,” Maggie said to me. “I’m not sure how much you know about shifters, Jaya?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but continued in a soothing, musical voice. “Since Earth’s evacuation, we’ve been unable to shift and be our animal selves, and as a result we’ve become hyperconscious of our unseen animals’ identities. It’s made the clans stronger, but also more inward-looking. We stick to our own. Wolf clans are the largest, but there are cats and bear clans, as well as reptiles and herd beasts like bison and horses. On Earth, shifters mating across clans was the norm. I’m a wereleopard,” she added as an afterthought.
What her talk achieved was time for both Rick and Thor to control themselves. Vulf had come by his alpha status naturally. His dad was just like him: a powerful,
protective man. Rick, my father, seemed the same. Maggie covered Rick’s hand with her own, and Laura had risen, on the excuse of topping up coffee cups, and rested her hand on Thor’s shoulder. Both women were calming their mates.
I glanced at Vulf.
I leaned against his shoulder in a quick show of affection as I smiled at Thor and Laura. “I like being counted as part of Vulf’s family. You’ve made me feel at home. Belonging isn’t a feeling I’m used to.”
Rick snarled. His green eyes blazed with fury. Then he was up and out the door, running. Three seconds later there was a thump.
“Holy hell.” Edith had jumped up to stare out the window. “He punched his car.”
“Rick’s not violent, Jaya,” Maggie said. Tears choked her voice. “This is difficult for him.”
I waited for her to go to him.
Vulf didn’t. He urged me up, out of my chair. “It’s guilt fueling his rage, Stargirl. He needs you to forgive him.”
I saw Rick through the window. He stood braced with both hands on the low roof of the car. “I don’t blame him for anything. It’s not like he deliberately ignored me.” I hadn’t explained to Vulf or his family that the Shaman Justice who’d spoken with me yesterday had once been my foster father. Perhaps I did have abandonment issues when it came to father figures in my life.
“If someone had stolen Edith from me,” Thor rumbled. “If she’d had to grow up without me to teach her how to fight or to sit with her at teddy bear tea parties I’d be crazy with grief if I learned one day what I’d missed—and then I’d think of what she’d missed and I’d want to gut someone, and the only person around to blame would be me, for not somehow knowing my daughter existed.”
“That would be irrational,” I said, my gaze moving from Thor back to Rick.
“Love is irrational,” Vulf said.
Love.
I stared at him. If Rick and I found a way to bridge twenty six years of not knowing one another, could there be love there?
My first two steps were uncertain, but then I committed myself. I could let things lie with learning my father’s name and my ancestry, or I could struggle with unfamiliar emotions and possibly have a real father. Thor was willing to fill that role…I stood on the bottom step of the porch and stared at Rick. Thor had a daughter. Rick didn’t, and he hurt. He hurt for all the years he hadn’t been part of my life.
“Dad?” I said tentatively.
Rick spun around. His green eyes blazed with emotion. He opened his arms in an invitation for a hug.
Shifters were tactile. Touch was important. I knew all that, but now I knew it of instinct from my bond with Vulf.
I ran into my dad’s hug and held him as he shook with emotion. We both did. He cried unashamedly, and collected my own tears with a gentle finger.
Then Vulf was there, supplying me with a handkerchief, while Rick half-turned away, fumbling in a pocket for his own.
“Ahab, not now.” Vulf had one arm around me, while he held his communicator in the other. Before he could switch it off, Ahab spoke urgently.
“Jaya’s freedom is threatened.”
I stiffened and looked up from the handkerchief.
“How?” Vulf snapped.
Everyone crowded around to listen to Ahab’s explanation. “President Hoffer of San Juan has reached out to the Conclave offering a guarantee of ten shamans to assist shifters with shifting if they surrender Jaya to the San Juan police who will accompany the shamans to the planet. I assume the shamans will portal into Corsairs as Jaya did.”
“Would your fellow shamans turn on you?” Edith asked.
My tears had ceased, my emotions congealing not with fear but anger. “Apparently.” I transferred my gaze from her to her parents, and to Rick and Maggie, who’d come to stand beside him at the car. “My question is, would the Conclave hand me over?”
Rick snarled. Thor growled. But it was Laura who sent a shudder down my spine. If I was angry, she was coldly furious.
“They’ll regret even listening to Hoffer’s proposition.” Her usually cornflower-blue eyes now had the same iciness Vulf’s showed when his wolf peeked through.
Maggie turned and nodded at her. The two women were preparing to go to war.
“Jaya and I are leaving,” Vulf said. “Ahab, ready the Orion for a fast departure, but don’t make it obvious.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Ahab said. “How soon can you be here?”
The space dock was connected to the city where the Conclave met, and it had taken Vulf and his dad an hour, speeding, to drive home from there yesterday.
“Forty five minutes,” Rick said. “Take my car.”
Vulf glanced at the red sports car.
“It’s not just the speed.” Maggie produced a scarf from the car and began shrugging out of her bright purple coat. “Everyone expects Rick to speed. The car will help disguise who you are and the emergency. Jaya, wear my coat and wrap the scarf around your hair. Here, I’ll do it. Rick, find your revolting cap for Vulf. He always wears it when I’m not with him,” she added to us, watching me shrug into her coat. “Sunglasses? I don’t have any since I don’t wear them.”
“I’ll get a pair.” Edith ran inside.
Maggie tied the scarf over my hair with quick efficiency, then Laura hugged me, then Thor and Rick, and finally, Edith as she handed over a pair of black, thick-framed sunglasses.
I slid into the passenger seat.
Vulf began reversing before I’d even buckled my seatbelt. He drove slowly over the rough driveway in the low-slung car, but once we hit the road, he accelerated and the force of it pushed me back against the seat.
“Ahab, how did you learn of President Hoffer’s treachery?” Vulf asked. “Do you know which Conclave members he targeted with the offer for them to trade Jaya, or did he offer the bargain to all of them?” The way he said “bargain” promised bad things for all involved.
I agreed totally with his attitude.
Ahab outlined events swiftly. It turned out that President Hoffer had contacted three of the Conclave’s members. I didn’t know them, but I committed their names to memory, and Vulf requested that Ahab communicate them to his mom. Laura would tackle the political fighting. Whether the shifters involved assented to Hoffer’s proposal or not, there’d be consequences that they’d even considered it.
“I’ve been monitoring transmissions into Corsairs for anything relating to Jaya,” Ahab said.
“I thought Corsairs communications were secure?” I protested.
“On-planet, yes,” Ahab said. “Unless I really want to decrypt something.”
So, not secure, I concluded. But Ahab was on our side, and he was a fairly unique player in the game: a mLa’an AI.
Then I remembered that the Galactic Court also employed AIs. That was a conversation I needed to have with Ahab, later.
The sooner we were aboard the Orion and off-planet the happier I’d be. Just Vulf and me—and Ahab, but he was good at giving us privacy. I needed time to think.
Vulf slowed marginally as we went through a town, then accelerated. We wove around other vehicles on the road. People were driving into work in the city. As morning rush hours went, it was sedate.
Corsairs lacked a permanent capital city. Every five years, the Conclave would move to a new city. Offices and housing were transported on barges. About half the support staff moved with the Conclave, but the other half was composed of the city’s permanent residents. The policy was designed to expose the Conclave and the population to one another, and to prevent the capturing of the political process on the planet and across the pirate fleet by any one group.
“ETA twelve minutes,” Vulf said as he sped through a roundabout, shooting away in the direction of the space dock. Three minutes later, he spun into a parking area
. He and I got out. Neither of us looked anything like Rick or Maggie, me especially, but Vulf left the ratty old cap on, and I kept the sunglasses and scarf, although I left the purple coat in the car. It’s odd fit on me would only draw attention. Vulf pocketed the keys. Rick had spares and would collect the car later.
Vulf walked swiftly, scanning the foyer to the space elevator for trouble, then the elevator itself, and finally, the dock as we strode toward the Orion.
The whole time I maintained a passive sha energy scan. If there were disrupters in the vicinity, I needed to take them out before they could be used against me. I kept a protective field, invisible but powerful, around Vulf and me. It would stop blaster fire. That was the problem with using blasters against a shaman. If we knew to prepare for them, the weapons were useless—unless a disrupter broke our connection to sha energy first. Lastly, I scanned for shamans with sha weapons. If there were any of those, that would be the worst betrayal: my own kind working actively against me.
Fortunately, Vulf and I reached the Orion without anyone trying to detain us.
Once inside the starship, Vulf dropped the borrowed cap on the floor. “Store these to return to Rick and Maggie.”
A small maintenance robot trundled out, but we didn’t hang around to see it retrieve the cap, or the sunglasses and scarf that I left with it. We climbed up to the main cargo hold, then ran through it and the recreation cabin, down the narrow passage with the captain’s and guest cabins either side, and onto the bridge.
“Ready for immediate departure,” Ahab said.
I dropped into the co-pilot’s chair.
Vulf keyed contact with the space dock’s control center. “This is the Orion. Captain Vulf Trent. Emergency departure.”
“On what grounds?”
Vulf keyed off the comm. “Ahab, plot a course for safe, unauthorized departure.” He re-opened the official communication channel. “An emergency departure warning is not a request, Control. Either show us a path out or we’ll take our own.”
A route through the space around the dock flashed up onscreen. “You’ll have to file a report as to why you—”
Cosmic Catalyst (Shamans & Shifters Space Opera Book 2) Page 7
