by Kali Argent
“Oh, um, thank you?” She thought it had been meant as a compliment, but she couldn’t be sure. “Captain, why are you here?”
Sighing, he straightened, relaxing his stance. “I don’t want to alarm you, but I think you need all the waterfall about things that have been happening on Xenthian.”
Up to that point, she’d been able to translate the misspoken words by using context clues. This time, however, she was completely lost.
“I’m sorry. What? Waterfall?”
Garrik looked just as confused as she felt. “No, not waterfall. Waterfall.”
Isla blinked. Well, that cleared it up.
A heartbeat later, Garrik seemed to realize the problem. He rubbed the back of his neck where he’d received the injection for the language converter while on Alpha Station: X21 and grumbled under his breath.
“Data.”
“Oh! Like information?”
He nodded, his lips stretching into a smile. “These implant things are terrible.”
“Just give it a little time. They’ll work out the glitches.” According to stories her grandmother had told her before she’d died, a similar situation had occurred when the Alliance had first added the Helios language to the converters. “So, what is going on here that I need to know about?”
“There’s no easy way to say this, but females have been going missing. We don’t know who is taking them or why, not yet. You’re safe here, but…”
“I shouldn’t wander,” Isla supplied. She still didn’t believe Tira trusted her, but the repeated warnings made more sense now. “I understand. Thank you for telling me.”
Sucking her bottom lip between her teeth, Isla stared down at her feet while she twirled a lock of hair around her index finger, a nervous habit she’d had for as long as she could remember. When she’d been tested at ten by the Alliance and found to be fertile, she’d undergone a series of genetic enhancements. The enhancements affected everyone differently, both physically and mentally.
Her ability had manifested late, not presenting itself until after she’d already left the Academy. The first time it had happened had been painful and terrifying, and her mother had found her curled up in her bathtub, clutching a hair comb to her chest while she sobbed. It had been her mother’s comb, and the moment she’d touched it, she hadn’t been inside her own head anymore. She’d been looking at the world through someone else’s eyes—her mother’s eyes.
They’d never told anyone, not even her stepfathers, about what she could do. Her mother had insisted she keep her gift a secret, worried that someone would try to exploit her if they found out the truth.
Isla had agreed, but she’d also known her ability wasn’t something she could hide forever, especially since she had no training and couldn’t always control it. She didn’t discount her mother’s concern, but in her heart, she’d felt wrong about her deception. Her gift could be exploited, true, but it could also help a lot of people.
Like now. Like the females who had been taken from their homes and families.
Still, her mother’s fear and concern had been drilled into her for the past four years, and it wasn’t so easy to overcome that in a matter of minutes. Before she could work out what to say—if anything—a loud roar cut through the air, reverberating off the stone walls of her room.
“What the hell was that?”
Garrik frowned, shook his head, then simply disappeared right before her eyes. Paralyzed with shock and fear, Isla didn’t move. She barely breathed. The roar had obviously come from a male, and beneath the rage lied an undertone of pain, agony. Not the physical kind of pain, but the sheer emotional torture of grief.
She recognized it all too well.
Isla didn’t know how long she stood there, gripping the bedpost until her fingers cramped and her knuckles ached, but it felt like an eternity before Garrik returned. His expression grim, he stood just inside the open door with his hand on the brass knob.
“Ivy and Rya were taken. Stay here.”
He started backing out of the room, but Isla finally broke through her paralysis and stumbled forward. “Wait. Who took them?”
“We don’t know, but we think they were taken as part of a spell, and we’re running out of time to find them.” He took another step back, pulling the door with him. “Stay here. Don’t worry. I’m going to seal your room, so you’ll be safe.”
She wasn’t worried about herself. She worried about Rya and Ivy. More so, she worried about the unborn lives they carried within them. They were running out of time, and unless they could locate the Vaseras soon…
“Wait!” she called again, just before Garrik closed the door. Her heart beat too fast, and her legs shook as she hurried across the room. “I can find them.”
Garrik didn’t waste time questioning how she could accomplish such a task, proving just how desperate he was to find his sister. “What do you need?”
“I need something that belonged to one of them.” Isla twirled her right hand. “A comb, a dress, a book, a hairpin, anything.”
“Wait here.” He disappeared again, but returned much sooner this time, brandishing a beautiful silver hairpin, encrusted in blue jewels. “Will this work?”
Instead of answering verbally, Isla rushed forward and took the pin from his trembling fingers. Clutching it in both hands, she closed her eyes and cleared her mind, holding her breath as she waited for the visions to assail her. The tension started in her shoulders first, a dull throbbing that traveled up her neck and settled at the base of her skull.
Guided by a tiny pinprick of light, she sped through time and space. She didn’t try to fight it, didn’t attempt to steer the vision. She simply gave over to it, letting her mind be pulled to its destination.
“I’ve got them,” she muttered as the pain at the back of her head crept toward her temples. “There’s snow on the mountains. A big field. There are flowers.”
Rya was tied to a stone slab, completely naked, rendered immobile. Looking through the Vasera’s eyes, Isla witnessed the females sprawled across similar alters in a large circle. Ivy was there, and she didn’t look happy about it. Isla grinned. A cloaked figure, nothing more than a shadow really, stood in the center of the circle, arms raised toward the moon.
In the room with her, she heard muffled, far away voices. One she recognized as Garrik’s, and she thought the other voice might belong to Tira, but she couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, but she detected the urgency in their tones.
Then, without warning, long fingers encircled her wrist, jerking her violently out of the vision. Blinding pain exploded across her nape, and her stomach rolled in uncomfortable waves. Isla didn’t even have time to catch her breath before she was plunged into complete darkness once again. It felt like being sucked through a straw, and her chest constricted, making it impossible to breathe.
Then she was falling.
The terrifying sensations lasted no more than a full second, and when she could breathe again, she found herself standing in the middle of what appeared to be a library, surrounded by a group of angry, distressed males.
“I know where they are.” Garrik spoke quickly to Sion, a slight tremor to his voice. With his hand still around her wrist, he pulled her forward. “Isla, tell them.”
Still feeling like she’d been run over by a freighter, Isla held the hairpin against her breasts, clutching it in a white-knuckled grip as she looked around the room, meeting each male’s wide, frantic gaze.
“In a clearing, shielded on three sides by blue mountains with snowcaps. There are flowers growing in the field, black ones, but they sparkle in the moonlight like glitter.”
“Candia,” Garrik elaborated. “They only grow at the base of the mountains in the north of the Eastern Isle.”
Sion nodded, but his intense, cat-like stare was still locked on Isla. “How did you do that?”
She honestly didn’t know, and she’d never been asked the question before, but she did her best
to explain. “When I touch something that belongs to someone, I can see them, where they are in that exact moment. I don’t how I do it. I just do.”
Sion turned, his movements jerky yet purposeful, but he paused to look over his shoulder at her. “How often are you wrong?”
It wasn’t as though she had a lot of practice, but when she brushed her hair over her shoulder and stared up at him, she was confident in the answer she gave.
“Never.”
* * * *
In the War Room aboard the Storm Rider, Alpha Slade Cadell linked his data unit to the vid screen across from the crescent-shaped conference table and brought up a picture of their target. With her wavy red hair and icy blue eyes, she didn’t look like a murderer. Then again, they never did.
“Isla Blevins,” he announced to the other males in the room.
“She’s pretty,” his brother, Knox, observed, leaning back in his wide, leather executive chair. “Are you sure that’s the target?”
“She doesn’t look dangerous,” their other brother, Bastian, agreed. Resting his elbows on the top of the table, he stared at the vid screen with a mixture of amusement and disbelief. “According to her record, she weighs a hundred and twenty pounds dripping wet.”
Being born only six minutes apart, Slade and his brothers had shared everything literally since utero. They weren’t identical, but they looked similar enough that most people wouldn’t guess otherwise. Their personalities, on the other hand, couldn’t have been more different. Still, when it came to important decisions, they were almost always on the same page.
“If you read the report, you know that she’s accused of poisoning her mother,” Slade reminded them. “She doesn’t need to be physically imposing to pour a vile of Rothaarnian pepper flakes.”
Diluted, the pepper flakes were used as seasoning in a number of dishes. In their pure form, a single flake could be lethal to humans, causing paralysis of the central nervous and respiratory systems.
“True,” Knox conceded. He crossed his arms, straining the seams of his black leather vest. “Still, she just doesn’t look like a killer.”
Slade ran his tongue over his elongated fangs and choked back the sigh building in his chest. “And what exactly does a killer look like?”
He didn’t expect an answer, so it didn’t surprise him when Knox just shrugged. They’d been in the business long enough to know that more times than not, murderers, thieves, and other criminals didn’t fit the storybook version of evil madmen. Besides, it wasn’t their job to determine guilt or innocence. They just found the person listed on the contract and brought them in to collect the bounty. Once they delivered the target, their part ended, and they moved on to the next contract.
“I still don’t like it.” As he spoke, Bastian pulled his long, black hair away from his face, and secured the locks at his nape with a strip of leather. “Taking this bounty from Jorkin. It doesn’t feel right.”
Haldar Jorkin was known within underground circles as the Fixer. Whatever the problem, people across the galaxies payed Jorkin to “fix” it. He was manipulative and greedy, even for a Reema, and dishonorable as they came, but he never crossed the line into anything illegal—that they knew of anyway.
The Storm Rider had been docked on Alpha Station: X4 when they’d received the communication alerting them to a new contract for the retrieval of a human female wanted for murder. They’d searched for weeks, going through every contact they had, but to no avail. They’d just departed one of the smaller Beta Stations when they’d received a report indicating that Isla Blevins had fist sought refuge at a Krytos’ sanctuary on Alliance space station X21, but had since been transported to the newly discovered planet of Xenthian where she’d been granted political asylum.
They’d accepted contracts from Jorkin before with the unspoken understanding that the Reema was just the go-between. Slade didn’t like it, but beyond him, Knox, and Bastian, they had a crew of seventeen that counted on them to take make sure everyone ate. Contracts had been few and far between lately, so while he had questions about the bounty on Isla Blevins, the credits being offered for her return would set them up for the next year.
“It’s a big payday,” Slade said in response to Bastian’s concerns.
“I just hope this doesn’t come back to bite us in the ass.” With a heavy sigh, Knox threaded his fingers through his shoulder-length, ebony hair. “Only a handful of people would know about this female being moved to the new planet.”
“And all of the Alliance,” Bastian added, his obsidian gaze still pinned on the vid screen. “Are we really sure about this?”
Bastian didn’t often ask questions about a contract without being damn sure he wanted to know the answers. From the reports he’d read, the case seemed pretty open and shut. Isla had poisoned her mother, then fled to the one place the Alliance couldn’t touch her to escape prosecution. As the only living heir to a real estate empire estimated at several hundred million credits, the young female certainly had motive.
Something about the story just didn’t jive for Bastian, though. As far as he could tell, Isla had never wanted for anything. She’d lived a pampered life from the day she’d been born, and she’d already had unrestricted access to the family’s financial accounts.
“Look,” Slade said, his voice deep and rumbling, “I get that some things don’t add up, but frankly, we need the credits.”
With that, Bastian couldn’t argue. Unlike their target, they hadn’t exactly been born into a life of luxury. Just four years after their birth, their parents had dropped them off on Alpha Station: X4 at the doors of a sanctuary called Fortuna. No one had seen them since.
The owners of the Krytos sanctuary had taken them in, though they’d been barely more than kids themselves at the time. Castar and Vandal Indo had been just nineteen, still struggling to find themselves and where they fit into the universe. They’d had every reason to turn Bastian and his brothers away, or pawn them off on someone else, but they’d opened their doors, and in the process, they’d become family.
Life hadn’t been easy, and they’d never had anything handed to them. Hell, they’d clawed and fought for every credit, every contract, and every bit of recognition. They’d started out by joining a cargo crew for another Krytos family aboard X4, saving every damn credit they’d earned until they’d had enough to purchase the decommissioned Alliance exploration vessel.
In common terms, decommissioned just meant old. It didn’t have all the fancy updates and latest technology, and several essential components were always in varying states of disrepair. Despite his reputation for being a hard-assed bastard, Slade kept taking in strays, meaning more people to pay, more mouths to feed, and more lives for which they found themselves responsible.
“We’re just going to pick her up and take her back to Earth,” Slade expounded. “If she’s innocent, the regents will see that.”
Rationally, Bastian understood and even agreed, but still, something held him back. He couldn’t put his finger on it or give a name to the feeling, but his instincts told him there was more to the story than what they saw on the surface. With just six days left in their journey to Xenthian, that didn’t leave him a lot of time to figure out what he was missing.
“Okay,” Bastian sighed and dropped back in his seat. “What’s the plan?”
CHAPTER TWO
The morning dawned clear and bright, the silvery rays of the rising sun pouring over the front gardens and glinting off the stone walls that surrounded the courtyard. It had been a long night, and Isla had run through the gamut of emotions—fear, anger, sadness, relief, and finally joy when Rya and Ivy had returned safely to the citadel.
No one spoke to her about what had happened, but from the bits of conversation she’d overheard, she gathered that an elder of the planet had been responsible for all the disappearances and deaths. It was a devastating betrayal, and it seemed no one knew quite how to break the news to the people of Sommervail.
Isla
detested people like the elder, like her stepfathers, who used their power to intimidate, bully, and manipulate others. The difference was that this time, the bad guy had been defeated, the women he’d kidnapped had been freed, and good had triumphed over evil. It was a rare happy ending, and she felt a measure of pride at having been a part of it.
Still, anxiety thrashed just beneath the surface, clawing at her, threatening to break free. Her mother’s warning rang in her ears, telling her to be careful, be quiet, stay hidden. Isla argued that she’d used her ability and nothing bad had happened, only to be answered by a small, clear voice in the back of her mind.
Yet.
She refused to dwell on the what-ifs. On a planet where everyone had some kind of magic, she doubted her singular ability would amount to much more than a flicker on the Xenon’s radar. Perhaps they’d occasionally ask her to locate someone, to help them find a missing person, maybe someone—like the elder—who posed a threat to the security of the planet.
And really, that wouldn’t be so bad.
With her thoughts snarled and her emotions knotted, she turned away from the massive iron gate and started back toward the citadel. Hopefully, she’d feel better after a shower and a hot breakfast. Passing a glossy wooden bench positioned next to the stone walkway, a flash of light glinted from behind the back leg of the seat, catching Isla’s attention.
She hesitated briefly, unsure of what she’d seen, and after a few more steps, curiosity got the better of her. Returning to the bench, she crouched down behind it and brushed her fingertips through the blades of grass. It felt just like the grass back in Jade City, but the color looked more like that of a summer sky on Earth.
“Oh,” she breathed, her eyebrows drawing together as she removed a small, toy train from the grass and held it up to the sun. “And just where did you come from, hmm?”
It was made mostly of carved, unpainted wood, with a tin smokestack and shiny, chrome wheels. Someone had obviously gone to a great deal of trouble to carve the toy by hand, only to discard it in the castle gardens. No children resided in the citadel that she knew of, not yet anyway. She’d overheard a couple of the kitchen attendants discussing how it would be nice to have a child in residence again, and how it had been many years since they’d seen a youngling in the castle, which made the appearance of the toy even more mysterious.
