Hard hands caught me. Not Vulf’s. They held me upright, lifting me so that I moved forward whether I wanted to or not. For someone, I was both a shield against the Meitj guard’s blaster and their prisoner.
There was no answer from Vulf to my desperate appeal; only an echoing, empty tunnel of silence, and I fell down it into unconsciousness.
Chapter 13
I woke in Alex Ballantyne’s office in the Star Guild Shaman Academy. Maybe I’d have taken a shaken, relieved breath, but three things stopped me.
First, I was tied up and lying on the floor.
Second, when I reached for Vulf through our bond, I couldn’t feel his thoughts. My eyes flew open and I saw him.
He lay against the base of Alex’s desk. Unlike me, he wasn’t bound. But he was unconscious. He also had a syringe feathering against the carotid artery of his throat.
That was the third thing that stopped me from feeling any relief.
My gaze travelled disbelievingly from the syringe to the man who held it. “Alex?”
He crouched beside Vulf, studying me as I watched my helpless mate. “The drug in the syringe will kill him before any sha energy you can summon. This is your sole warning to be sensible and listen to me.”
“I would have listened without the dramatics.” And what was it with men telling me to listen, recently? First, Vulf. Now my former foster father.
I wished Vulf was awake to tell me to listen, or anything else.
Weak tears pricked my eyes and I blinked them back.
“The sedative we used makes you emotional,” Alex informed me, as if my tears needed any explanation other than the threat against my mate.
“They’re tears of rage.” Vulf would have been proud of me. I squirmed until I sat upright. My head swam for a few seconds before my vision cleared.
It felt as if I hadn’t been unconscious long, but I couldn’t trust my own perceptions—anymore than I could trust my reflexes, which was why I didn’t slam Alex with sha energy. In terms of the raw sha energy we could control, I might be stronger, but the drug in my body could have unknown effects.
The drug. As much as fear would have me focus on Vulf, I needed to pull a discreet thread of sha energy and purge the drug from my system before attempting anything else. Healing was a special calling among shamans, and whilst it wasn’t mine, the Academy curriculum had covered the basics. Countering an unknown poison meant a general flush of the circulatory system.
I pulsed a tiny thread of sha energy into my blood, keeping it subtle while remembering to look woozy so that I had a perhaps one percent chance that Alex wouldn’t guess what I was doing. If I attempted a full-on sha energy attack, he’d notice me pulling on the sha before I was ready and plunge the syringe into Vulf’s throat. But this was the Academy, filled with shamanic students who muddied the flow of sha energy on a regular basis. My tiny tweak to the sha thread to cleanse myself of the drug could conceivably go unnoticed.
Under other circumstances I’d have had zero chance of fooling Alex, but right now he was caught up in his own fears.
“You can’t free the Ceph,” he told me.
I blew out a loud, rude, exasperated breath. “Vulf agrees with you. The man you’re threatening is your biggest ally. He’d destroy them if he could.”
“No, we can’t do that,” Alex said seriously. The syringe stayed poised against my mate’s throat. “Shamans of the future may want to study the Ceph for how they use sha energy, but we’re not strong enough yet to free them.”
Despite the situation, I found myself arguing with him. “We wouldn’t be fighting the Ceph alone. The rest of Galaxy Proper mightn’t use sha energy, but they have their own talents, and weapons,” I added in a mutter.
The syringe withdrew from Vulf’s throat, just a fraction, as Alex glared at me. “It’s not about fighting the Ceph. It’s about power. At the moment, we’re the only sha energy users in the galaxy. That gives us status. When the Ceph show how limited we are in our sha energy use…we lose that advantage. We become nonentities in galactic happenings.”
I couldn’t follow his reasoning. “We, as in shamans or we, as in humanity?”
“Shamans!”
“You’re crazy,” I said flatly.
“You’re naïve.” Alex sighed. “That’s why I had to kidnap you and your mate. Left to yourself, you’d bounce along like some starry-eyed do-gooder, undermining everything we’ve worked for.”
The sha energy had vanquished the drug in my body. I felt more alert, although I was careful to keep my posture slumped and my eyelids lowered. But even alert, Alex’s actions and justification baffled me.
He wanted power? He already had it. He was one of only two Shaman Justices in existence. That meant something.
True, in the five years that I’d travelled the galaxy as a starship shaman contracted to guide ships as they jumped through wormholes, I’d found that the various peoples of the galaxy were pretty much disinterested in the existence of shamans. Most of them hadn’t heard of us or believed our abilities exaggerated. Starship crews were the exception. They tended to both want starship shamans for the safety we gave their journeys, while isolating us onboard because they considered us uncanny.
“Maybe the ordinary people of the galaxy don’t think much of shamans,” I conceded. “But those who make decisions, those with political power, they respect us—or our usefulness.” I stretched, and immediately came up against the constraints of manacles on my wrists and ankles. I grimaced. “Or they did until you kidnapped Vulf and me on Naidoc. That was insane.”
“No one saw me,” Alex said.
I ceased wriggling around in a futile attempt to stop the right ankle cuff digging into my skin. “Even if you used a bubble of invisibility, who else could do so but a shaman?”
“There are technological inventions that provide invisibility.” Alex paused. “But my use of a portal confirms that a shaman kidnapped you. I’ll leave proof here at the Academy that it was Winona Hayden who did so, and you won’t contradict that proof.”
Dread congealed as a cold lump in my stomach. I’d been ignoring the threat against Vulf, not wanting to learn to what extremes of abuse my former foster father was willing to go. But whether I wanted to learn or not, it seemed he was going to enlighten me. Menace coarsened his voice.
The temptation to reach for sha energy and duel it out with him was nearly overwhelming, except that the syringe against Vulf’s throat remained a threat too immediate to risk.
“What do you want me to do?” I stopped pretending to be dulled by the drug and scowled at Alex.
“I want you to go to your meeting with Professor Summer, learn everything he has to tell you, neither promise nor do anything for him or whoever is with him, and return to your mate’s starship to report to me.”
“And when they ask where I went and where Vulf is?”
“Refuse to answer.”
Desperation started up a drumbeat in my blood. “You know this can’t work, Alex. You’ve risked your position as a Shaman Justice—”
His free hand, the one not holding the syringe against Vulf’s throat, jabbed the air in my direction. “They can only learn it was me if you tell them. If you do, he dies.”
Even if I did what he said, even if I somehow withstood the Meitj’s concern and questioning regarding my disappearance and Vulf’s continued absence, Alex would find keeping Vulf a prisoner for long dangerous. Which meant he wouldn’t.
This was insane! Why was Alex risking everything he already had on the exceedingly slim chance that I might otherwise free the Ceph?
“Dan.” Alex spoke into his communicator.
A half second later, his office door opened. The Academy’s former weapons master and current chancellor stood there.
Seeing Alex’s ally doubled my sense of betrayal. I’d thought Dan Carson was one of the good guys, that he designed and taught the use of sha energy as a weapon so that shamans wouldn’t have to use it as such. That the threat would be enough.
Vulf had implied as much.
I also sucked at maintaining a fighter’s readiness.
While I was distracted, concentrating on Dan’s entrance, Alex threw the syringe at me like a dart, striking me in the soft skin of my face. I crumpled back into unconsciousness.
Professor Summer steadied me as I slumped back onto the hospital bed. Whatever had been in the drug Alex had used on me, this time my stomach reacted to it with violent nausea. Fortunately, there was no need to be subtle in my use of sha energy here in what was presumably a Meitj hospital, so I wrenched at the sha energy that flowed weakly through it and purged my body of the drug and the virulent chemical stew that resulted from my worry for Vulf.
“I’m okay,” I said to Professor Summer a minute later. As I swung my legs to the side of the bed, I saw the pool of vomit. “Sorry.”
“You’re ill.” Worry tinted the elderly Meitj’s eyes emerald green, or perhaps that was an effect of the hospital’s stark lighting.
A small, agile cleaning robot zoomed up to deal with my former stomach contents.
I considered my hospital gown. “I’m fine, but I need clothes. Real clothes.”
“Jaya, where is Vulf?” Professor Summer asked.
I’d have felt warmed by proof of his concern for Vulf if I wasn’t keeping the sha energy flowing to dampen my emotional responses. A cascade of hormones rioting in fury and fear wouldn’t help me—or Vulf. “I can’t say. I need clothes. Then we need to talk, fast, about why you called me here. I presume we’re on Naidoc?”
“Yes.” The Meitj Emperor strolled into the room. Fortunately, the cleaner had sanitized the floor. “Where did you go when you vanished? I presume it wasn’t voluntary?”
“It most definitely wasn’t voluntary.” I saw with relief a female Meitj enter carrying a stack of human clothes. “One moment, please.”
The Emperor and his uncle, the elderly history professor, politely turned their backs to me and directed their eyes to face the door.
Evidently, that was as much privacy as I was going to be given. I jumped off the bed and dressed quickly in the cotton lingerie and one-size fits no one blue dress. “I’m decent.” I slipped my feet into sandals as the two Meitj turned back to face me. “I can’t answer questions about Vulf. I need to save him. How long has it been since Vulf and I were kidnapped?” I needed to know how long I’d been unconscious and how much time I had to act.
The entire shifter pirate fleet would descend on San Juan and the Academy if they knew Vulf was prisoner there, but that would take days, and Vulf didn’t have days. His rescue was up to me.
I needed information that I could use as leverage in negotiating with Alex. Although ‘negotiating’ was an inadequate term for what I intended.
It had taken me years, but I finally understood the nature of the man who’d once been my idolized foster father. When Celine died, Alex hadn’t left me out of grief or for any other excuse he might offer, but because as an ambitious man, sole responsibility for a child would have limited him. I’d been jettisoned in his pursuit of personal power. It was ironic then that two decades later, he needed me to achieve whatever it was he planned.
Now, I had to piece together, from what I knew and the information Professor Summer could provide, the nature of Alex’s scheme.
Raine, the Meitj Emperor, was the most politically powerful person in the solar system, but fortunately he was also pragmatic. He comprehended that they’d get neither answers nor cooperation from me until he answered my questions. “You vanished from outside the space dock entrance for three hours. You then reappeared, unconscious. You were brought here, to a clinic attached to the space dock which operates to provide emergency medical assistance to non-Meitj visitors. You’ve been unconscious for three hours.”
I’d lost six hours of my life, with an intermission for Alex to terrify me with his threat against Vulf’s life. “Thank you,” I acknowledged Raine’s information briefly but with genuine gratitude.
And maybe I’d misjudged the reason for his offer of the information because his multifaceted eyes gentled in hue, which was a sign of compassion among the Meitj.
I hastily looked at Professor Summer. I couldn’t risk accepting others’ pity. It would undermine my composure. “I need you to proceed as if I hadn’t been kidnapped and returned, but cutting out anything superfluous. Let’s get straight to the point of why you want me here, and I don’t believe it’s merely to say good-bye to my grandfather.” Vulf had been smarter than me on that point. Quite apart from Alex’s actions, the Emperor’s presence by my bedside indicated that the professor’s reason for summoning me to Naidoc was important.
Professor Summer’s left eye tilted to include Raine in his focus, but most of the elderly academic’s attention was for me. “You do need to see your grandfather. I believe Ivan would wish to hear our discussion.”
And why would the wishes of a terrorist who’d threatened the lives of millions of your people matter to you? But I bit back the question and walked forward. “Then let’s go see him.”
I’d expected that we’d have to travel to a maximum security prison, but instead I recognized our destination as the Imperial Palace. Anything that saved time worked for me, and the short journey from the space dock to the palace along the main boulevard was much faster than travelling out to a remote prison. I didn’t comment, only waited for Raine to lead the way into the hexagonal building. It seemed that repairs from where Ivan had exploded part of it were already complete. Certainly no signs of damage showed.
We headed inward by a path that might have been familiar. The problem was that the passages that framed the hexagonal rooms confused me. Vulf would have recognized where we walked.
I tugged at sha energy and dampened the hormones that wanted to riot into panic and fear, to be expressed as either angry action or wild tears.
A door guarded by two Meitj soldiers opened. The Emperor walked through first. Professor Summer gestured for me to follow.
My footsteps faltered as I recognized the circular stage in the center of the room and the empty tiered seating around it. This was the court room. This was where Ivan had been tried for his crimes, found guilty, and escaped amid much destruction.
Ivan waited in the center of the circular stage. There were no guards with him and his arms hung loose at his sides. He wasn’t shackled.
He wasn’t dangerous, I realized. When we’d last been here, Raine had used the Imperial Crown to strip Ivan of his shamanic talent. Without access to sha energy, my grandfather was no more than a tired old man.
Not that Ivan looked tired. Nor did his wiry frame seem any skinnier than usual despite his reported hunger strike. He looked curious, obdurate and unashamed to see me. Considering that the last time we’d been here he’d knocked me out and kidnapped me (and I really hoped that kidnapping wasn’t going to be a theme in my life—I’d have to see about improving my passive sha energy defenses) Ivan ought to have looked ashamed.
Instead, he raised his head and called, “Come to say your farewells to a dying man?”
I bit my lip hard. This man had hurt me emotionally long before he’d turned terrorist and kidnapper. All I’d ever done was love him and heed his advice, only to learn that he’d kept information concerning my dead mother from me for no good reason. Or perhaps his reasons made sense to him. If I had no one else in my life, I’d be more emotionally dependent on him. But it had been a cruel thing to do to a child.
Here and now, though, Ivan and our complicated relationship wasn’t the issue. I had to save Vulf. So I quickened my pace to catch up with the Emperor and joined him on the circular stage. When I neared Ivan I saw that he wasn’t as unaffected by meeting me as his jaunty greeting indicated. Sadness dulled the blue of his eyes, and his hands twitched as if he would have reached out to me.
I turned to Raine.
He needed no other prompt. “I have refused your grandfather’s request to b
e placed into stasis so that he may share the fate of the Ceph. In response, he has undertaken a hunger strike until the Ceph are freed or he dies. I find your grandfather’s crimes abhorrent, but he is a sentient individual, a person. I would rather he not commit suicide on Naidoc.”
I hadn’t anticipated the last sentence or Raine’s sudden silence. “Are you sending Ivan off-planet?”
The Meitj Emperor tapped his middle claws together, a habit of many Meitj when they were considering a matter, or wished to imply that they were. “Jaya, do you agree that the Ceph should be freed?”
In the intimidating and formal court room there was only Raine, Professor Summer, Ivan and me. They all saw me flinch at the question, but none questioned my reaction.
“I hate seeing anyone imprisoned.” Involuntarily, I looked at my grandfather.
He held my gaze. “If there is a chance of freeing the Ceph, you must take it.”
I wanted to scream at him that it wasn’t so simple, that his reckless actions had led indirectly to my mate’s life being in danger. It required a conscious effort to look away from Ivan to Raine. “Why does my opinion matter?”
The Emperor crossed to where he’d stood the last time we were here and activated a panel. It slid open, and he extracted the Imperial Crown.
My grandfather’s breath hissed between his teeth. The crown was the piece of sha energy technology that had torn his shamanic talent from him.
I reached for the sha energy that flowed through the Imperial Palace. I didn’t necessarily intend to do anything with it. I craved its reassurance, that it was there and available to me. To be without it would strip my life of vibrancy and change the essence of who I was. Without any other punishment, either that of imprisonment or his self-chosen hunger strike, Ivan was suffering from his inability to sense and access sha energy.
Raine held the crown with his upper, stronger claws and his eyes tilted down to study it. The crown represented the duty the Imperial family had borne for forty two millennia: keeping the Ceph in stasis. What had it cost them and their species? Had knowledge of the Ceph’s quiescent power driven the Meitj’s development of interstellar weaponry?
Cosmic Catalyst (Shamans & Shifters Space Opera Book 2) Page 19
