Provoked (Space Mage Book 1)

by Izzy Shows

  Zvarr faltered as a blast caught him in the center of his chest, and his body froze in the air for a precious moment.

  "Ishtak ni vamos tay," I said, pointing a finger at him. "Ustamos linak ach vis. Sumos—"

  "No!" he roared, his eyes locked on mine, but he couldn't move. I held him in place as I continued the chant.

  The death spell.

  Just before the last syllable left my lips, I saw an emptiness in his eyes, a look of pure terror.

  "You can't do this! You can't leave—"

  And then the world exploded around me.

  Kaidan

  Not again.

  Horror kept me riveted in place for a good ten seconds before I leapt into action, racing across the desert to the growing mushroom cloud that marked the spot where Xiva and Zvarr had been in the air.

  Watching that battle, being a part of it, had been the most charged thing I'd ever done. I'd never felt more alive, never trusted someone more, never experienced anything that could measure up to the glory of it all.

  But she can’t die now. Not after I just got her back.

  I couldn't feel her in my mind the way I had during the fight—the little energy residue that meant she was there, listening, helping. It had been strange at first, but nice in a way I had never expected to feel.

  It had felt right, like all my life there'd been an emptiness that had finally been filled. Yeva, she’d called me—her fighting partner, though it felt like a closer bond than that.

  I couldn't let go of what I had just been given. I wasn't willing to.

  The mushroom cloud was still spreading as I plunged into it, not caring about the harm it might do me, not caring that my oxygen mask might not be able to filter it. I had to find Xiva, had to make sure she was alive—and I had to finish off that bastard brother of hers if he was still breathing.

  The minutes I spent tearing through that cloud were the worst of my life, but at last it began to clear, and I found Xiva lying on the ground. Her brother was nowhere in sight, but I wasn’t worried about him.

  I worried about the way she was lying there, like a broken doll.

  I threw my gun to the side as I sank to my knees beside her, and pressed my ear to her chest to listen for her heartbeat—but there were none.

  "No, no, no," I groaned, and I pressed closer to her, as if that would somehow change things. "You aren't allowed to die."

  And still there was nothing. Her chest didn't rise or fall, and her two hearts did not beat.

  I pounded a fist against the sand, snarling, and felt the rage leap inside me.

  Do not fear so, warrior.

  Her words were a gentle caress in my mind, sending the rage fleeing from me in a way I never would have thought possible.

  Slowly, I lifted my head to look at her face, but she looked the same as she always had.

  "Xiva?" I whispered.

  A moment, yeva. Give me a moment.

  Hope flared inside me.

  "You can't have a damn moment," I growled. "Open your fucking eyes."

  Her lips parted then, letting out a deep, throaty laugh that struck home in my heart, and at last her eyes opened and locked with mine.

  "It's done, Kaidan," she said, a sad kind of happiness in her eyes. "He's gone."

  I gathered her into my arms and held her tight. "Good, because I swear to God, if I had to watch him slam you to the ground one more goddamn time…"

  She laughed again.

  Never was a sound more beautiful than that.

  "Never again. It's over. We won."

  She lifted her arms and closed them around my back, and I allowed myself to feel a sense of peace that had long been absent from my life.

  I had a place in the universe again. And we had won.

  Xiva

  "Holy shit," Walter said, gaping at the two of us.

  "Language," Kaidan said with a lazy grin as he leaned against one of the trees in the oasis.

  Night had fallen, and the walk back to the oasis had been long and slow, for both he and I were long out of energy from the battle with Zvarr. I had tried to hide my limp from him, but he had seen it and threatened to carry me. Such was not to be accepted. I had chastised him appropriately.

  He may be my yeva, but that changes nothing about the laws of proximity.

  I guarded the thought from him in my mind, for now that the pathway had been opened, there was no way to close it. I was also careful to ensure that I was thinking in my own language and not in Common. Some things, he didn't need to know about.

  "I just wish I'd been there to see it," Walter said. "It sounds amazing."

  "It was bloody," Kaidan said bluntly, and I winced as I looked at the wounds on his face. Wounds that my brother had put there.

  I had offered to heal him—as High Priestess, it had been necessary for me to learn the arts of war and healing in equal measure—but he had declined. Apparently, even across species, all males are the same arrogant and stubborn beings, unwilling to accept help.

  "Not the kind of place for someone like you," Kaidan continued.

  "Someone like me?" Walter said.

  "You're too young, kid. It wouldn't have been safe."

  Walter groaned and shook his head. "I'm twenty-five. I'm not that young!"

  I giggled, covering my mouth with my hand when I saw the murderous look in Walter's eyes.

  "Forgive me. Such an age is indeed a child to my people," I said.

  "Well, at least you have an excuse. Kaidan knows full well that twenty-five is not a kid." He glared at Kaidan.

  "Might as well be, for all the sense you have. I stand by what I said. War is no place for someone like you."

  I tried to find the words for what I wanted to stay, but the language was still difficult for me, and the conversation carried on before I could find them. I groaned aloud, hating that I couldn't speak to them in my own language. Did they have any idea how smart I was in Stryxi?

  "What's wrong?" Kaidan said.

  "Is difficult," I said. "Your language."

  The wind rushed around me, but it did not whip against my skin like it might have. Instead, it felt like the soft caress of a parent.

  Vivoth.

  What was he trying to say?

  "I wish there was some way for me to upload the language to you, now that we're connected," he said, grinning as if it were a joke.

  "Kaidan!"

  "What?" His eyes widened, and he looked around as if he expected to find a liza waiting to pounce on him. "What's wrong?"

  "You! Ah, you genius!" I clapped my hands together. "I do not understand 'upload,' but I think you are saying to share Common inside my mind, yes?"

  "Uh…yeah, that's what I was saying," he said, regarding me warily. "But that isn't possible, is it?"

  "I think maybe," I said cautiously. "Is OK if I could try, yes?"

  He shifted from one foot to the other, clearly uncomfortable. "Yeah, OK, I guess. It's not like you weren't already in my head."

  "Yes," I said. "Is true."

  I sat down on the ground and gestured in front of me for him to do the same. "Sit, sit. I think will not be short."

  He continued to look wary as he sat down. "Be gentle, OK?"

  "I try," I teased. "Not to break mind."

  He shuddered. "Don't even joke about that."

  I gestured for him to lean forward, and he did, and I placed my fingers on his temples, closing my eyes as I reached for his mind.

  Are you sure about this? His words mirrored what he'd asked me before the battle.

  No. But believe in this.

  All right.

  I immersed myself in his mind, plunging deeper than I had gone before. The bond of a yeva did not require more than a surface connection in order to feel one another's thoughts and emotions and predict movements; it only required that which was conscious. To find his language inside his mind, I would have to dig deeper, into the subconscious.

  I heard his sharp inhale as I dove deeper and deeper, an
d felt the way he flinched as I brushed against one memory and then another. I tried not to look too closely, tried not to see what he might not want me to, but it was impossible to hide everything.

  What I saw in his mind broke my heart.

  A beautiful woman with raven hair and loving eyes, cruelly snatched from his life by a hover car gone awry.

  The emotions in the memory told me it was his mother, and the pain was still fresh.

  Another woman, this one with golden hair and tawny skin, shaking her head as she picked up a suitcase and walked out the door.

  It was as if I was him, sitting down heavily in the chair behind me and plunging my head into my hands, fighting the tears that came from the pain of losing someone else—but this time because she couldn't deal with what I was. Couldn't accept the changes in me. Hated me now.

  It was not your fault, I tried to tell him, pushing acceptance through the bond, but he shied away from me.

  Just keep moving, he said. And try not to look so closely.

  Mentally, I nodded, and I continued on.

  And then I became aware of an odd sensation inside myself, of someone moving through my memories.

  Sorry. I don't know what's happening. I can't seem to—oh, Xiva…

  Fresh pain spilled over, an aching in my heart, a pain I had associated with the day Zvarr left me, and I knew Kaidan was inside my mind the same way I was in his. He was looking at my memories, because they wouldn't go away.

  Instinct told me to shut the doors in my mind to keep him out, but I knew that would lead me to withdrawing from his, and that wasn't what I had come here for.

  I would have to deal with him looking at my past, the same way he allowed me to look at his.

  More memories came and went, the deeper I went into his mind. The day he woke up after surgery to be told that he would never be the same man he'd been the day before. The day he signed up for the military, thinking it would give him a purpose in his now aimless life. The day he tried to kill himself—oh, Kaidan, no!

  Don't look at that, hon. It’s not pretty. His voice in my mind was rough, full of emotion, and I knew he hated for me to see him like that.

  I ached to be there, to take the gun from his hand, to stop him from such a horrid thing.

  But it was a memory, and I was powerless to do anything but watch until it went away and allowed me to move on.

  So many painful memories passed in front of my eyes.

  The life he'd led had not been a pleasant one, and the more I saw, the more I realized that there had been no happiness in it, none that I could see. How could that be?

  The sight of his planet through his eyes tore at my heart as well. These humans hadn't cared for their world, and it showed in the way they did not care for one another.

  No one had cared for him, not since the woman with the raven hair had died.

  I can't keep going like this, I thought, looking at all the pain in his mind. I don't want to make you relive these memories.

  It's nothing. Just a life not worth living. Find what you're looking for so we can stop.

  Inside, I felt like I was weeping for the little boy who'd lost his mother and his faith in the same blow. I didn't know how to keep going, didn't know how to stop, either.

  At last, as yet another painful memory faded away, leaving my soul feeling like it had been cut to pieces, I found it.

  The knowledge rushed through me, but it wasn't alone. It was not just language that I'd found, but culture and history as well.

  It burned inside my brain, leaving me gasping for air. There was enormous pain associated with the learning, and there was nothing I could do to escape it. Nothing but ride it out and hope it would come to an end soon.

  And then I was back in my own body, lying flat on the sand, feeling like I had the worst hangover ever.

  "Are you two OK?" Walter's voice was cautious.

  I opened an eye. "I don't know."

  "You were crying, and so was Kaidan."

  I forced myself to sit, though the effort cost me, and saw that Kaidan was struggling to a sitting position as well.

  "Soldiers don't cry," he said roughly. "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "That's not true," I said, confused. "Warriors cry for the brethren they've lost, for the mothers and children they could not save, for the honor of the wounded and the dead. Warriors cry for all they did and could not do, and it is not a shame to admit such a thing."

  The two of them gaped at me.

  "What?"

  "That was quite the mouthful you fired off," Kaidan said, grinning. "I guess all that was worth it."

  "Oh!" I looked down at my lap and then back up at him with a tentative smile. "Yes, I can… I don't have to hunt for the words. They’re just…there!"

  "Good," he said. "I'm glad. Now, let's never do that again."

  His grin was gone, and his eyes were shadowed, and I knew he was reliving the things I'd made him see again.

  Pain struck my heart, and I wished desperately that there was something I could do.

  There’s nothing to be done, Xiva. It’s just a part of life.

  My skin flared with embarrassment. I had grown accustomed to thinking without much heed to such pathways, ever since Zvarr had left me, for he was the only one who had been able to do such a thing.

  I would have to be more careful going forward.

  "Kaidan?"

  "Yes?"

  "Can I ask a favor of you?"

  He frowned. "You want another favor after you dug through my mind and had me fight your crazy demon brother?"

  I flushed and looked down at my hands. "Oh."

  "I'm kidding. What is it?"

  I peeked up at him from beneath my eyelashes. "Would you take me to see the stars?"

  His smile was blinding.

  "I'll take you wherever you want to go."

  Nytoc

  A child.

  How could one child be so powerful? How could she destroy my vessel?

  She will die for taking Zvarr from me. The best vessel I had come across in millennia, and that child, took him from me. Now, I have nothing. Now, I am limited.

  I'll find a new one—but not on Eyrus. I won't stay on this planet one second longer, not now that those humans have opened up the universe. I will find a vessel, and then she will die.

  Not yet, though.

  Let her find new people to love.

  They will be taken from her too.

  And once I've gotten rid of her, it'll be you next, Vivoth, dear brother. And then the universe will be mine to rule.

  Careful, Nytoc. Your plan is futile. I chose a worthy vessel, and she will see my will through to the end.

  Preorder book 2, Enslaved!

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  Also by Izzy Shows

  The Codex Blair Series

  Grave Mistake

  Blood Hunt

  Dark Descent

  Wild Game

  Grim Fate

  High Stakes

  Other Books in The Codex Blair Universe

  The Fallen’s Crime

  The Fallen Hunter

  Ruled by Blood

  Blood Captive: Origin

  Blood Huntress

  Blood Slave

  Space Mage

  Provoked

  Enslaved

  About the Author

  Izzy Shows writes urban fantasy novels for adults, and much more in her spare time. She’s also an avid LARPer and enjoys storytelling in all art forms. She can be a little cooky, and really enjoys talking about her works, writing in general, or all things fantasy. To learn more about her you can follow her on twitter or check out her website.

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  Book 1)