by Abel, Regine
“These two ships didn’t make it,” Legion said, indicating the dots closest to the northern hemisphere of the planet. “The last communications Doom received from the women on board was that they had, one by one, lost psychic contact with their Warriors.”
“Then there was a neural inhibiting device at their location,” Chaos said.
Legion shook his head. “Not according to the Warriors’ scans or the wide range scans the women performed. And it wasn’t complete psychic silence either. The women couldn’t communicate telepathically with the Warriors because all they heard was white noise.”
“Were the Warriors drugged?” I asked.
“That’s what your father initially thought after losing the first unit,” Legion said. “And that’s one of the reasons we’ve been putting so much pressure on your mother to find an antidote for those damn neural inhibitor drugs.”
“But no drugs were involved,” Chaos stated, reading between the lines.
“Correct,” Legion said with a heavy sigh. “The first shuttle was attacked and severely damaged, preventing the women from taking off. Before Doom lost contact with them, they told him they were being swarmed by Kryptids and were initiating a self-destruct. The Soulcatchers had felt their Warriors die but had been unable to capture their souls.”
“So, they could establish some contact, but it was distorted,” I reflected out loud, taken aback. “I’ve never heard of such an occurrence.”
“Which is why the Coalition is so nervous,” Legion said. “We are their meat shields. Without us taking the brunt of the damage before each battle, the war is lost. If the Janaurians have provided the Kryptids with a method to keep our girls from granting us rebirth, the Coalition will want them eradicated.”
“What are we going to do about it?” I asked, knowing Legion already had some ideas bubbling in the back of his head.
“We need to know what we’re dealing with,” Legion said, rubbing a hand over the bone spikes forming a straight line on his left shoulder. “Pulling out completely is a mistake. Doom and I both agree on that.”
“But Father had to follow his orders,” I countered. “He’ll be home in a week or so.”
And I couldn’t be happier. It had been too long since we’d last seen each other and, despite putting on a brave front, Mother seriously ached from being apart from her mate. Besides the need for her medical expertise here at HQ, her psychic abilities had never developed enough for her to qualify as a Soulcatcher.
“Yes,” Legion conceded, “but only to round up a small strike team of volunteers. The Coalition merely intends to blow up the planet, thereby putting none of us in harm’s way. But we need to know how the Janaurians are blocking our women so that we can devise a countermeasure. Using this new weapon, they’ve successfully defeated three of our scouting parties. So, you know they have eagerly reported their success to General Khutu and shared that technology with him—or whatever the heck it is.”
My blood ran cold. The Kryptid General was a ruthless, bloodthirsty, and genocidal dictator. While the Kryptid Queen was technically their ruler, we had come to suspect that the General had gone rogue and was using his complete control over the insectoid army to conquer and enslave the galaxy—for himself.
“Considering the large number of Kryptid ships lurking around, without the fleet to back them up, Doom’s team has no chance of survival if they are detected.”
“We will be sending a few scouting ships in stealth mode to assess the Kryptid presence in the region, especially before the arrival of the Coalition. Those ships will be able to provide assistance if things turn ugly.”
They won’t survive that mission.
“That still sounds like a suicide mission,” Chaos argued, echoing my thoughts.
My gaze weighed heavily on Legion, waiting to see his answer. As a Xian Warrior, I didn’t fear going into danger or the possibility of permanent death. But as a son, I couldn’t help fearing for the welfare of my sire. Less than two percent of all Xian Warriors had resulted from natural conception and birth, like me. All the others, including Legion and Chaos, were the original breed, created in vitro over sixty years ago, temporarily carried in the womb of a surrogate mother until their soul sparked, and then transferred into incubators until birth.
“The risks will be high,” Legion admitted before turning towards me, holding my gaze unflinchingly. “But Doom isn’t suicidal. He promised Victoria she’d live to be two hundred years old if she bonded with him, and he’s a man of his word.”
I didn’t smile at his attempt to lighten the mood. As long as my father remained alive and regularly injected my mother with his essence, she would preserve the body of the twenty-nine-year-old woman she’d been when she bonded with my father. But should he die, five years after his passing, she would begin aging again.
Legion gave me a sympathetic smile at my lack of reaction. “Doom knows better than anyone else what is stirring over there and therefore has the most chance of successfully pulling off that mission. The truth is, beyond finding out how they are blocking our women, we’re hoping to prevent the genocide of the Janaurian race.”
“I want to be part of the mission planning,” I said in a tone that brooked no argument.
Legion gave me that insufferable big brother smile he and the rest of the warriors often did, as if I were a petulant child.
“That was the plan,” Legion said. “We will iron out the details once your father arrives next week. In the meantime, I need you and Victoria to pull out all the stops to come up with some kind of antidote or dampener against the effects of neural inhibitors, whether it comes from a drug or a device.”
“We are,” I said, frustrated by our lack of progress. “Liena Xi arrived in Khepri this morning. Mother is convinced that if anyone can help us solve this, it’s her.”
“The chatter from the Warriors raves about the beauty of her soul. I haven’t heard this much noise since Ayana first set foot on Khepri,” Chaos said.
“Is that so?” Legion asked, an amused smile stretching his lips.
“Oh yeah. The Warriors are all twisted up in knots,” Chaos said with a derisive snort. His pitch-black eyes turned towards me, his gaze intense. “But according to Wrath, she’s already acknowledged her soulmate.”
“What?” Legion asked, his eyes flicking between Chaos and me.
Rising to my feet, a non-committal smile plastered on my face, I cast one last look at the holographic display of Janaur before looking back at my two companions, and best friends.
“She has indeed,” I said, matter-of-factly. “I’m heading back to the lab to see if we can pull off a miracle. Laters, old-timers,” I said, using one of my bratty Soulcatcher’s expressions.
I exited the room with their chuckles following me.
Chapter 3
Liena
After a week of poring over formulas, data, analyses, and experiment results, I still felt like I had only scratched the surface of the phenomenal work Victoria’s team had accomplished so far with Feryleze; the ‘antidote’ against neural inhibitor drugs and devices. As a biochemist, my job was not only to help them understand and counter the effects of the inhibitor drugs used against the Soulcatchers and Portals, but to also understand the risks and benefits of our own antidote on the women.
Messing with neuronal activity was dangerous business, especially when dealing with powerful psychics. A healthy brain needed a good ratio of what we called the E/I balance; in other words, for the brain to have a proper balance of neurotransmitters that Excited the synapses and ones that Inhibited them. An excess of glutamate—the excitation transmitter—could result in epileptic seizures, while an excess of GABA—the inhibition transmitter—could result in brain coma. Obviously, neither option would be appealing.
The main issue was figuring out how to stabilize their respective levels. We didn’t have a pure sample of the inhibitor drugs the Kryptids used. All that we possessed had been derived from blood taken from the women who
had been subjected to the alien drugs during a raid. The responses to our antidote differed based on who the sample had stemmed from. While injecting the drug successfully increased the women’s GABA levels, inhibiting their neural activity just enough to block psychic abilities, those levels remained stable and non-threatening to the women’s cerebral health. But the minute they received an injection of Feryleze to counter the drug, their levels went completely haywire, forcing us to knock the women out to prevent permanent damage.
Based on the latest research reports I’d read, Victoria’s team had switched to a nanobiologic version of Feryleze, the nanites sending excitation or inhibition signals to the women’s synapses as needed to maintain their I/E balanced. It would work for a few minutes, and then things would go belly up, the nanites apparently becoming overwhelmed.
I rubbed my eyes, and the muscles in my back complained. It had grown painfully stiff from leaning over my desk so long while reading all the documentation. Slipping out of my desk chair, I stretched then rolled my shoulders to loosen the knots.
The sound of the frosted door swishing open had my head jerking up. A handsome Warrior—not Raven—came in fully dressed and strutted over to Shereen to hand her a data stick. I had grown used to the men walking in and out in various states of dress or undress. As much as I welcomed the scrumptious eye candy—bare or otherwise—I had to once again school my features not to show my disappointment.
No man had ever elicited such a strong reaction from me as Victoria’s son had. For some silly reason, I had thought the feeling had been mutual. I kept looking for his face on each of the broad-shouldered, mouth-wateringly muscular Warriors that constantly seemed to come out of the woodwork. Aside from the occasional glimpses of Raven caught here and there, I mostly had no luck. I should have felt relief. I mean, what could be cheesier than rolling in the hay with the boss’s son? Not to mention I wouldn’t be staying long. While the possibility of a fling with him had me instantly hot and bothered, intimacy with a Warrior always involved a mental link.
The thought of entering Raven’s mind, touching his soul and letting him touch mine, drew me like a moth to a flame, while also twisting my innards into painful knots. I hated that Silas had cheated me out of using my sixth sense. After all these years, I continued—allowed myself—to be his victim. But how could I learn to trust again when my mentor, the one person who should have had my best interest at heart, used my blind trust to trap me within my own seventeen year old mind? For weeks, he had forced me to share his twisted fantasies, an endless nightmare I couldn’t escape from, convinced that he could break me into sharing them willingly in the real world.
While I had survived that ordeal, he hadn’t survived past the first month of his life sentence in jail. And yet, eleven years later, the slimy feel of his twisted soul slithering all around mine continued to haunt me. Intensive therapy had put an end to terrible crises and panic attacks I would go into whenever in the presence of a male psychic. I’d resumed a semblance of a ‘normal’ life, but I’d sworn off any men with even the slightest hint of psychic ability. The three relationships I’d had since my ‘recovery’ had been deemed healthy, although my therapist, Mary, merely called them safe.
And ultimately, they had been failures.
According to Mary, I needed to get back in the saddle, get involved with another psychic, and relearn the beauty of mind-melding. As long as Silas’ touch remained the last thing I had experienced, it would forever continue to taint this type of intimacy for me. Even considering a psychic connection had me feeling faint and nauseous. But now, for the first time in over a decade, I almost wanted to try… with Raven. I was nowhere near ready, but once the seed had been planted in my mind, it could only grow. That actually made me excited, not only because of my attraction to Raven, but also because it signaled that maybe, at long last, Silas was losing his hold on me.
Raven was the official psychic trainer of the Vanguard. If anyone could help me overcome my hang ups, it would be him.
The main door to the lab opened to Sonia’s bubbly voice. My heart skipped a beat and I held my breath. Not daring to hope, I watched the beautiful, blonde Soulcatcher walk in, followed by her Warrior, Raven. His eyes immediately sought me out, and our gazes connected. A wave of dizziness washed over me, my skin turning hot then immediately cold before erupting in goosebumps.
A slow, sensual smile stretched his lips as his gaze flicked to my aura. My cheeks heated, and I tried desperately to keep my emotions in check. According to Shereen, Xian Warriors could tell exactly how we felt based on the shifting colors of our auras. Pink revealed you were drawn to someone. The more saturated the shade, the stronger the attraction. Remembering how Wrath had teased Raven about my aura being a ‘nice pink’ still had me mortified. How utterly unfair that we were completely open books to them while blind to their emotions?
“Stop eye-fucking each other, you two,” Sonia said, a taunting glimmer in her stunning blue eyes.
My jaw dropped. Raven gasped. Shereen snorted, then chuckled.
“Sonia!” Raven exclaimed reprovingly.
“What?” she asked, opening wide her totally-not-innocent eyes. “You were!” she approached my workstation, giving me a shameless once over. “You’re even prettier in person than in his messed-up head.”
“Excuse me?” I asked, staring at her, disbelieving.
“Scaly head over there has the hots for you,” Sonia said, gesturing at Raven with her head. “Do you know how annoying it is to soulcatch someone and be bombarded with flashes of him drooling over a girl he’s too wimpy to pursue?”
“Sonia, that’s enough,” Raven growled, frowning at her with a seriously displeased look on his gorgeous face.
She flicked her straight, long hair over her shoulder, completely ignoring him. “You do have gorgeous hair, but seeing how I’m not into girls, it’s a little aggravating to have him bemoaning all day how he craves to sink his fingers through it, and wondering if your skin is as silky as it seems, and…”
“That’s it,” Raven snapped reaching for her.
Sonia, no doubt having anticipated his move, ran to the other side of an empty workstation, without ceasing to spill her Warrior’s secrets.
“And your lips! He thinks they’re sinfully sexy, and he wants to devour them and find out if you taste as sweet as your aura says you do,” she shouted, words coming out faster as she attempted to avoid being caught… in vain.
“You’re going to be sorry for that one,” Raven said, moving at lightning speed to catch her. “That’s enough out of you.”
He tossed her over his shoulder, carrying her like a sack of potatoes. Sonia seemed completely unfazed while Shereen appeared on the verge of choking from laughter. But Sonia wasn’t done. She lifted her head to look at me, determined to finish having her say, while Raven carried her towards the frosted doors.
“He wants to know how your hands will feel on his skin and how hard you will claw at his scales and bite his neck. He…”
Her voice cut off as the frosted-glass doors closed behind them. I turned to Shereen, her face almost as red as her dyed hair. She was making hiccupping sounds as she tried to catch her breath.
“What the heck was that?” I asked, flabbergasted.
“Re-revenge,” Shereen choked out between two laughs.
“Revenge for what?”
“Just a… just a minute,” Shereen said, leaning on her workstation while she recovered.
I waited impatiently, my gaze flicking towards the frosted-glass door as if it could somehow explain part of what had just happened.
“Sonia has a huge crush on one of the engineers spearheading the construction of the new residential areas in the suburbs of Khepri,” Shereen said, wiping the tears of laughter from her cheeks. “He’s Tegorian—tall, muscular, furry, with a very interesting tail—but Raven said no.”
My jealousy immediately flared.
“How is that his business?” I asked, my tone harsher than in
tended.
Shereen gave me a knowing smile that made me blush again. “You will soon discover that our Warriors are extremely protective of us.”
“Protective or possessive?” I challenged.
“Protective,” Shereen said, suddenly becoming serious. “Possessive only with the true mate. Our boys would subject themselves to permanent death without hesitation to protect or save any of us. The Vanguard is a very special place, Liena. Despite our different personalities, the women here are all sisters. And the guys are our big brothers.”
“I thought Warriors and Soulcatchers were all, or mostly, couples?” I asked.
Back on Earth, teachers in the psychic training programs made it clear that intimacy between a Soulcatcher and her paired Warrior strengthened the bond and made her more effective. Seeing how the Warriors were so hot, many of the women anticipated that part. To my relief, though, Victoria had mentioned in passing that Raven and Sonia were not a couple.
“We all thought as much until we came here,” Shereen said with a smile. “Sure, some of the girls hook up with some of the Warriors, but those occurrences are actually quite few and far between. Contrary to what they teach in school, the intimacy between the pair doesn’t need to be sexual. The bond can simply be deep friendships, or fraternal love. The Warriors are big flirts, but in most cases, it doesn’t go beyond that.”
Shereen settled back in her desk chair and, lifting her left foot, she rested her chin on her knee. Shifting on my feet, I leaned against my work bench, drinking in her words.
“The Warriors are very careful about crossing certain lines with the women. Our boys are amazing and very easy to fall in love with. That has caused some issues in the past with the women getting unrealistic expectations.”
