“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.
Chapter Eight
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.
Before running into the Trissians, Merrick had made a pilgrimage to the Kindred home world—a foolish and pointless quest as it turned out. He’d gone to try and clear his mind of the constant conflict his two natures caused, and to ask forgiveness for the bloody deeds of his past. The pilgrimage hadn’t been so much for himself as for Sylvan—Merrick hadn’t wanted to bring bad luck to his old friend’s joining ceremony.
“So stupid,” Merrick muttered to himself, as he steered the star-duster through the Earth’s solar system. “So fucking stupid to think going there would help…”
* * * * *
He’d approached the temple, a vast white marble structure with ceilings so high he couldn’t see the murals painted on them, with more than a few misgivings. Like all Kindred, he believed in an all knowing Goddess, the Mother of All Life, but unlike most of his kin, Merrick didn’t think she was particularly benevolent or kind. His own sorry existence proved that.
The temple was housed within the holy mountain and hundreds of white marble steps led up to it. Merrick climbed them, two at a time, and saw a line of priestesses in simple white robes. Most had their heads bowed reverently and the dim light of the elegantly tapered torches glimmered in their green streaked hair. It reminded him of his mother, who had also been one of the rare female Kindred as most priestesses were. They stood before the raised dais which housed the Empty Throne—the seat which had been empty since the last Counselor had died centuries ago and his only son and heir had been lost.
One of the priestesses stepped forward as he came to a stop before the white marble throne. “Why do you come here, Warrior?” she demanded, frowning in a most unwelcoming way. “Kneel as you speak. And remember when you answer that you speak to none other than the High Priestess of the Empty Throne—the mouthpiece of the Goddess herself.”
Unwillingly, Merrick had knelt before the Empty Throne. He couldn’t place the priestess’s age. Her long, curling hair was pure green and worn loose around her shoulders and her eyes were a solid emerald with no pupil, iris, or white to interrupt their blank, unbroken expanse. That blind yet knowing stare was strange and otherworldly and the high priestess’s demeanor was anything but welcoming. But Merrick hadn’t come all the way to First World just to turn around with his tail between his legs.
“I come asking forgiveness for my past misdeeds,” he rumbled, bowing his head in reluctant submission. “My past has not been a kind one.”
“Your past or your present either,” the priestess said, frowning. “Oh yes, Warrior, I see into you with no effort at all. You are a killer. A murderer many times over.”
“I am,” Merrick acknowledged, nodding coolly. “I don’t deny it. But I’m going to be a part of an old friend’s joining ceremony and I don’t wish to bring him bad luck. I need—”
“You need much more than I can give you.” The priestess made a dismissive motion. “Be gone. Bloody hands are not welcome at the Goddess’s table, nor bloody boots on her sacred sands.”
“What the fuck?” Merrick growled. “I came asking for forgiveness. And you’d damn well better believe this is the first and last time I’ve ever asked for that.”
“It is just as well. Some sins cannot be forgiven.” The high priestess wrinkled her nose, as though she smelled something bad. “You would do well to remember that in future. And furthermore—”
But her words ended in a choked gurgle. Suddenly her strange blank emerald eyes had gone pure white and her voice dropped into a low, sing-song tone as words that didn’t seem to be her own poured from her throat.
“You shall find your bride on your journey to help a friend seal his love. She who is meant for you waits wrapped in darkness—waits for your kiss to awaken her, warrior. You shall be her light and she shall be yours. You will heal each other, body and soul, though the path to that healing will be long and thorny. Go now and find your female. Only then will your troubled soul find peace.”
Her eyes changed back to green and she looked at him. “You are blessed indeed, Warrior—the Goddess has gifted you with a prophecy though I cannot imagine why. Do you understand it?”
“No,” Merrick snarled. He was so tall that even with him kneeling and the priestess standing, they were still eye to eye. “You’ve got it wrong, your Holiness,” he said sarcastically, ignoring the gasps of the other, lesser priestesses at his blasphemy. One did not tell the High priestess of the Empty Throne that she was mistaken but Merrick didn’t give a damn about protocol. This female had treated him like shit she’d wiped off her shoes and then given him a ridiculous, unwanted prophesy he hadn’t asked for. In the light of those circumstances, he felt no more need to bow and scrape.
The strange, blank emeralds of her eyes blazed. “How do you mean, warrior?” she asked, her voice cool and forbidding.
“You prophesied that I would meet someone—a female.”
“Indeed, and what is wrong with that?”
He shrugged. “To begin with, I’m not looking for any fucking female to complete me—I’m not like the other pathetic Kindred, all searching for their brides. I don’t need anyone but me to get along.” He spat on the temple floor, drawing more gasps from the other priestesses. “And second, even if I wanted to find a bride, it’s not possible. I’m a half breed—a hybrid. I’m not able to connect with a female and form a bond. Not that I want to.”
“Oh?” She raised one pale green eyebrow at him. “Do you dispute my prophecy?”
“Hell yes, I dispute it. There hasn’t been a female born yet who would take one look at this…” Merrick pointed at himself—his massive frame, scarred face, and mismatched eyes. “And not run for the hills.”
“It is difficult for me to believe too, but the Mother of All Life does not lie. There is a bride for you.” The high priestess sniffed disdainfully. “Though Goddess know
s I feel sorry for her.”
Merrick’s hands clenched into fists at his sides. He would never hit a female but this bitch was really pushing it. “That’s enough,” he growled. “I came here for absolution—not to hear your fucking false prophecies and insults. I’m leaving.”
“Not yet!” Raising one arm, the priestess pointed at him with an accusing finger. “I have words for you, Hybrid. Turn back and hear them or face the consequences.”
Merrick looked at her in disbelief. “Are you threatening to curse me?”
“You curse yourself, warrior.” The priestess’s strange eyes had grown cold by now. As cold as the frozen exterior of his home planet, Tranq Prime. “Hear me well—there is a bride awaiting you. Her love will prick your heart like a thorn, giving you pain such as you have never imagined.”
Merrick feared nothing—surviving what he’d been through as a child left little room for fright. But at her words a cold finger touched his heart and he knew he would pay for the disrespect he had shown her.