Revealed (7 page)

“Really?” Sophie looked surprised. Baird was a master pilot—an instructor’s instructor.

“Really,” Sylvan assured her. “Now come, space is being folded as we speak and Nadiah and Rast can’t miss the window of opportunity.”

The three of them walked over to the sleek silver ship and Rast turned to meet them. “Ready to get going?”

“Not at all.” Nadiah took a deep breath. “But I don’t think we have any choice.”

He nodded shortly. “Good enough. Let’s go.”

“Wait.” Sylvan put up a hand. “I have something to tell you and something to give you before you go.”

“All right.” Rast nodded respectfully. “Shoot.”

Nadiah was certain that was just an expression—he didn’t actually mean that Sylvan should shoot him with his blaster. It seemed odd to her but her cousin had clearly heard it before because he nodded back before speaking.

“I just want to go over the route with you one more time.” He looked at Rast. “You know that because of where Tranq Prime is in its orbit, the fold won’t put you directly by it. You’ll be almost five standard days out but the autopilot is configured to take you straight to it. All you have to do is help with the landing.”

Rast nodded. “No problem. Can do.”

“I know you can,” Sylvan said gravely. “I was just telling Sophia and Nadiah what a good pilot you are.”

“I know.” Rast flashed them a sardonic grin. “I heard.”

Sylvan frowned. “You have hearing like a Kindred.”

“Reflexes too.” Rast cracked his knuckles. “Don’t worry. Nadiah’s in safe hands. I promise to protect her with my life—
all
of her.”

The emphasis he placed on the last words made Nadiah frown. Had Sylvan said something to him on their trip to Earth? If so, what? “We’ll be fine, Sylvan,” she told her cousin. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Sylvan brushed her cheek lightly with his knuckles.

“And what do you have to give us?” Rast was clearly impatient to be gone.

“This.” Raising a hypo-blast to the human’s muscular arm, Sylvan injected him with a
hiss,
before he could protest.

“Ouch!” Rast complained, rubbing his shoulder. “What the hell was that?”

“A hemo-booster with some Kindred compounds in it to strengthen your blood.” Sylvan put the hypo-blast away. “The lab isn’t done with the full analysis of your blood—that will take more than a week because it goes all the way down to the molecular and genetic level. But early analysis suggest that this booster should at least give you a fighting chance against Nadiah’s intended.”

“Thank, then.” Rast nodded. “I guess I can use all the help I can get.” He twitched uncomfortably. “But… are you sure you didn’t give me something I’m allergic to?”

Sylvan frowned. “Of course not—the hemo-booster was specifically formulated for your body—it should have nothing in it that your system would reject or react to. Why?”

“Because my back is itching like
crazy.”
Rast twitched again. “Right along my shoulder blades—ouch!”

“Let me have a look.” Sylvan made a motion with his hand. “Raise your shirt.”

“You’re the doctor,” Rast muttered. Lifting his shirt, he turned so that Sylvan could see his back. “Well?”

“Oh!” Nadiah couldn’t help gasping. Right along Rast’s shoulder blades, running the length of his muscular back, two long, red welts had appeared.
Just like my dream,
she thought, remembering the nightmare she’d had earlier.
I foresaw this. But why would the Goddess send me a vision of an allergy attack?
Unable to stop herself, she touched one thick red welt lightly. It seemed to throb under her fingertips and Rast jumped.

“What?” he demanded, turning his head. “What do you see?”

“I’m not sure exactly.” Sylvan frowned. “I suppose it could be an allergic reaction but I’ve never seen anything like it. Most of the time a patient will break out in hives all over or—oh!” he ended in surprise.

“They’re disappearing!” Nadiah exclaimed and indeed, the long red lines running along the human detective’s shoulder blades were fading as suddenly as they had appeared. Soon they were nothing but faint, white scars no thicker than a thread.

“You never told me what they were,” Rast complained. “I can’t see my own back, you know.”

Sylvan shook his head. “It appears you might have had an allergic reaction of some kind but it seems to be over now. Is your skin still itching?”

Rast frowned. “No…no, it’s fine now. That’s weird.” He pulled down his shirt. “My, uh, mother told me when I saw her last that I had an injury there, on my back, when I was a kid. “You think whatever you gave me might have reacted to the old scar tissue somehow?”

“I suppose it’s possible—you are human, after all and I injected you with Kindred compounds.” Sylvan sounded thoughtful. “We heal faster and better than you do—perhaps the Kindred components were simply trying to heal the old wound.”

Rast shrugged his shoulders experimentally. “Well it feels find now. You think everything is okay?”

“I think so, yes. But if you want to stay another day and let me observe you…”

“No.” Rast shook his head decisively. “The longer we stay the longer that Y’dex bastard has to yank on the blood bond. We need to go get this over with.” He looked at Nadiah. “Don’t you think?”

Reluctantly, she nodded. She would have loved to have another day or two with her friends and family aboard the Mother Ship but Rast was right—they needed to confront her intended and get the challenge over with. Besides, Y’dex had given them exactly one solar week to get back to Tranq Prime. If they took more time than that, her parents might declare a forfeit and hand her over to her fiancée the minute she stepped off the ship.

“All right.” Sylvan sighed. “I suppose there’s nothing left to say except safe journey. May the Goddess, the Mother of All Life, hold you safe in the center of her palm and give you victory in your quest.” He hugged Nadiah one last time and despite herself, she felt hot tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. “Goodbye. Be well,” he murmured in her ear.

“I’ll miss you.” Nadiah clung to her cousin in desperation and then hugged Sophia again too. “Both of you—so much.”

“We’ll miss you too!” Sophia was openly crying, which made Nadiah feel a little better about her own tears. “I’ll pray you come back to us soon.”

“Me too,” Nadiah whispered. With a last, backwards glance, she climbed into the small silver ship and strapped herself into the passenger seat. All her other goodbyes had already been said back at Sophie and Sylvan’s suite—there was nothing left to do now but go.

Rast pumped Sylvan’s hand once more in the human gesture of friendship Nadiah was beginning to recognize and then climbed into the ship beside her.

“All right,” he said, working the controls with smooth efficiency. “Let’s go. Time to face the music.”

Nadiah didn’t know what that meant but she did understand that she was leaving the one place in the galaxy where she’d been happy and truly free for the first time in her life.

And though she prayed to come back to the Mother Ship soon, she feared desperately that she might never see it or her beloved Sophia and Sylvan again.

Merrick
twisted the steering yoke on his small star-duster, aiming in the general direction of the tiny blue and white dot his star charts assured him was the planet called Earth. He’d heard it was nothing much to look at but he’d still been hoping to get there before this—a long time before.

“Goddess damn it,” he muttered, running a hand over his shaved head. He kept his hair convict short because it was easier to deal with that way. Along with his massive seven foot seven frame and mismatched eyes—one gold and one blue—it made him look like what he was. A thug.

Or that was what they called him growing up on Tranq Prime. Thug, low life, half breed, scum—you name it, he’d heard it. The good folks on TP weren’t known for their tolerance of anything different, especially if that difference was Kindred in nature. And Merrick had not one but two Kindred bloodlines in his heritage—the fiery Beast Kindred line that filled him with bloodlust and urged him to kill, and the chilly Blood Kindred line which made him cold as ice when he did so. The killing frost which came over him in times of violence and his huge size made him a male to be feared and avoided.

Hybrid vigor—the scientific term for a half breed growing bigger, stronger, and faster than its parents. If you cross a lion and a tiger, the resulting offspring will dwarf every other animal around it. That was the story of
Merrick
’s life. Even in a room filled with Kindred warriors, he stood head and shoulders above the rest. And thanks to his mixed heritage, he had sexual attributes of both Kindred races—the mating fist of a Beast Kindred and the fangs of a Blood Kindred. Unfortunately, while a true Blood Kindred’s fangs only grew when he was angry or aroused,
Merrick
’s fangs were permanently elongated. They served as a constant reminder of what a freak of nature he was—a half breed that should never have been born in the first place.

Despite the chilly temperature in the little star-duster, he wore only a black tank top over his tight black flight pants. The scars on his broad, bare shoulders proved his life hadn’t been easy but they were nothing compared to the scar on his face, a twisted white line that bisected his left eyebrow and narrowly missed his eye—the blue one—before continuing on down his cheek in a broken squiggle. That one had been done by his own father—or at least the man his mother had been living with at the time.
Merrick
had left Tranq Prime soon after that and he’d been on his own ever since.

His childhood on the frozen planet was something he would rather forget. Back then, Sylvan had been the only bright spot in the black pit of his existence. The only true friend Merrick had ever had.

“So what do I do to thank him for standing by me?” he growled to himself as he twisted the steering yoke again. “I go and fuck up his joining ceremony. Some friend I am.”

He had been right on schedule until the Trissian pirates caught him in their energy web. They wanted him dead but
Merrick
wasn’t one to roll over and die. He hid in the guts of the ship, a one-male ambush, and waited for them to board his little star-duster. He wasn’t going down without a struggle— and it was a struggle which left every last one of the damn Trissies in a mangled, bloody heap at his feet. Only their pilot, who had stayed on their ship while the rest boarded his star-duster, had lived to tell the tale.

Merrick
didn’t remember much of the conflict. When the killing frost was on him, he saw nothing but red. Using no weapons but his fangs, which grew even longer when he was enraged, he ripped the pirates apart, tearing out their throats with his teeth and disemboweling them with his bare hands. And he didn’t stop—
couldn’t
stop—until every last one of the thieves who had dared to invade his ship was dead.

Afterwards, his arms red to the elbows and his face smeared with their blood, he regretted killing them all. Not because of the pain he’d caused—they had wanted to cause him the same and worse. But because he wondered how much information they’d gotten. How much had their scan of his star-duster revealed? Their spy-probe had read all his ship’s data and scanned all its systems for anything of value. Has it revealed his secret? It was too late to find out—when the killing frost left him, the Trissian ship was already speeding away into the blackness of space, putting as much distance between itself and his star-duster as it could.

He was angry at himself for not being better prepared for the attack. Of course, who could have predicted that Trission pirates would come after him in the Centauri system? Honestly, he couldn’t even figure out why they bothered with him— Trissies typically went after fat cat merchants with huge space yachts, not ragged mercenaries like himself.
Merrick
didn’t have much—he traveled light through life because he never knew when he was going to have to pick up and leave.

He only had one thing of value and there was no way the pirates could have known about it. Under the hull of his small star-duster was a small but ingenious mechanism that generated wormholes—tears in the fabric of space-time which allowed him to jump from one spot in the vast universe to another in the blink of an eye. Considering that even moving at light speed, it could take millions of years to travel across a single galaxy, the wormhole generator was an invaluable tool.

Of course it was temperamental and didn’t work all the time. In fact, it had been giving him trouble since the Trission attack which was why he was in manual mode as he flew through the Earth’s solar system.

Part of the problem might have been the fact that the wormhole generator had been built using alien technology
Merrick
had scavenged from an abandoned wreck. He didn’t completely understand it to be honest, although it had been immediately apparent to him what it did.
 
What he needed was time to assess the damage and work on the star-duster, but he wanted to wait until he was safe on the Mother Ship to do it.

But though the pirate attack had been brutal and bloody, it wasn’t what currently occupied
Merrick
’s thoughts as he flew toward the Kindred Mother Ship. No, what he couldn’t stop thinking about, what his mind kept prodding the way a tongue will prod a loose tooth, was what had happened
before
the ambush, on First World—the home planet of the Kindred race.