Shield of Drani (World of Drani Book 1)

by Melonie Purcell

  Fury pulsed off the younger man. His flaxen eyes flashed, almost begging Nevvis to cross some invisible line, giving him permission to unleash his anger. Instead, Nevvis drew in a slow breath, shielded himself completely from Jalkean’s emotions, and spoke in the same authoritative voice he used with everyone else. “We don’t have time for this. You are in no position to admonish me for my actions. You have no idea what today was really about, and you have no idea the lengths I have gone to in order to keep that Arlele alive.”

  His attempt to calm the young kar failed. If anything, Jalkean’s fury boiled over into rage. “I’m in no posi…what! Someone has to stand up to you, Nevvis, and it seems like I’m the only one left on this planet brave enough to do it.” Jalkean lowered his voice as two Arleles rounded a corner and headed toward the warped door. When they had squeezed through, Jalkean stabbed his finger at the doors. “What happened in there was wrong, and you let it happen. Now, I will concede that she’s a tough one to handle. I’m not saying I want the job. But you are so used to having your way, you don’t think about the price others pay. Taymar does what you ask, for the most part, at least. She didn’t deserve that.”

  Nevvis watched the young kar for a moment and knew that there were too many truths in what he had said. But, there were also things Jalkean didn’t know, could never know, that skewed what he saw into simple choices. All of that he kept cloaked behind the shroud of controlled indifference that had become so natural. “Don’t judge my actions. Tay is my responsibility, not yours.” Nevvis shifted to telepathy and sent his thoughts to Jalkean alone, a skill only a handful of Dran could manage, Jalkean not being one of them.

  Jalkean flushed both from embarrassment and rage. He started responding in their native language, but a noise down the corridor silenced them both. Another rustle confirmed their suspicions, and they jogged over to the door in question. Without words or thoughts, both men put aside their fight and worked in perfect unison. Jalkean swiped the door and Nevvis dove in, sliding across the floor.

  A chair hurled through the air. She had been aiming at where his head should have been, and this time she had no intention of stopping short of her mark. As it crashed into the corridor wall in an explosion of parts, he rolled to his side and barely missed being pummeled by the chair’s wheel base. He just managed to get a lock on her psi-receptors when a desk barreled across the room toward him. Nevvis jumped up and threw himself across the top a heartbeat before it slammed into the wall. Bits of ceiling showered the floor.

  “Get her! Get her!” Jalkean called.

  Nevvis rolled over just as Taymar leaped onto another cabinet and threw herself through the huge glass window. Jalkean slid across the top of the desk and ran to the unlikely exit before Nevvis managed to find his feet.

  “Do you see her?” Nevvis asked, finally navigating the wreckage in the office to join him.

  “Great idea you gave her. ‘Jump out the window.’ Well, I guess she did what you asked, didn’t she?”

  Nevvis picked a piece of the ceiling out of his hair and leveled one of his deadlier looks at the kar. “And why didn’t you tag her instead of yelling for me to do it?”

  “Because I couldn’t see through a face full of lab coats. There she is.”

  Nevvis leaned out over the opening and looked down. A dense cluster of green and orange bushes shifted and snapped as Taymar struggled to her feet and took off at a slow, limping jog. “It’s a miracle she didn’t fall on her head. My luck, if I follow her down, I will. I’ll hold her from here; you go down and get her.”

  Jalkean turned and ran from the room, but not before mumbling something about giving the jump a try. Nevvis just shook his head and locked onto Taymar. A crowd was already forming as she struggled to run away from his hold. She truly was a stunning creature, even now with her hair falling around her in wild, sweaty chunks. It matched the spots that ran down the sides of her neck and forearms perfectly, making them stand out all the more against her light brown skin. But it was her eyes that had always captivated him. A person didn’t need telepathy to understand Taymar. Her every thought was right there in the ice-cold depths of her storm-gray eyes. She was frustrating, and alluring, and she could never be his. He would forever be her ki, her overseer. She would forever be his tali, his responsibility, but never a friend. Never a mate.

  Taymar stumbled again and finally went down just as the kars started showing up to investigate. Jalkean finally pushed through the crowd and Nevvis released his hold. The quiet voice deep inside that loathed what he had just done tried to speak its mind, but he shoved it down and headed for the door. As always, he had done what had to be done. He didn’t have to like it.

  ###

  Pain ripped through Taymar’s entire body. She tried to push it back and keep running, but with each step the intensity swelled until it consumed her. She stumbled forward, but her legs wouldn’t hold her and her knees hit the ground, sending another shock of pain up her spine. A knot of people formed to watch, but none dared help–especially not the Arleles. They all knew she was running from a Dran and to help her was a crime.

  With another burst of determination, she pushed herself back up and staggered forward a few more steps. The pressure increased until her skull pulsed with her racing heart. One more step. If only she could get behind something so he couldn’t see her. Even Nevvis might lose his hold at this distance.

  “Taymar, stop. Just stop.”

  That was Jalkean calling from somewhere outside the throng of onlookers. Where were some trees? Newete was carved into a cursed jungle. There had to be trees somewhere.

  “Stop.” He dropped his hand on her shoulder and stepped around to block her. “You’re not helping yourself, so stop.”

  He was right, and the crushing pain had reduced him to a blur of black uniform. Her will depleted, Taymar crumpled to her hands and knees and waited. Instantly the pain vanished, leaving her sweating and exhausted in its wake. The sounds of the crowd shuffling away at the barked commands of the kars echoed in the background, but Taymar’s attention wasn’t on them; it was on Nevvis. As Jalkean pulled her arms behind her back and fired his laser key at her armband, she barely noticed. Heat from the containment band flared against her wrist. A familiar feeling.

  Even though she kept her gaze locked straight ahead, she felt Nevvis’s approach as clearly as if she were watching him. But still, she didn’t move. When he pressed the cold metal of the hypo-injector against her arm, she stared, unseeing, into the distance.

  The injection sent warm, numbing tendrils creeping into her mind. Her thoughts, hardened against Nevvis’s probing telepathy, began to fog and drift. Despite her efforts to stay coherent, the ground blurred and finally slipped away.

  She didn’t bother trying to resist when Jalkean pulled her to her feet. She couldn’t. But she still wouldn’t look at her ki. Not even when he stepped in front of her and pressed his hand against her forehead or brushed his thumb across her skin the same way she had. She wondered what he saw.

  “Take her back to my house and put her to bed. Stay with her. I have to take care of a few more things, and then I will be there.”

  Jalkean nodded and signaled for one of waiting kars to help him. Draped between the two men, Taymar was dragged to the transport pad.

  She made the trip back in silence. Talking took too much effort. Besides, the kar who was helping Jalkean talked enough for all of them. Already, clouds darkened the sky for the midday storm. In another hour or so, it would rain. Then it would stop. Night would come. Then morning. Another storm. More tests. It would never end.

  Her gaze drifted to the carpet of moss covering the path. It looked exactly the way it had when she left it. Nothing ever changed.

  When Jalkean finally closed the door on the babbling man, she sighed with relief. It would have been elation were it not Nevvis’s door that he had closed. A do
or she wasn’t free to open. The initial hit from the drug was starting to wear off as Jalkean guided her toward the bedroom wing, and she found a tiny reserve of energy.

  “He didn’t have to drug me.” Those few words left her drained.

  “You shouldn’t have run. What were you thinking? You were in Central Newete. Where did you think you were going to go? Keep walking. We’re almost there.”

  She shrugged.

  “Taymar, you have to quit reacting with your first impulse. It will just get you in trouble. Start thinking before you act.”

  “It’s part of my image.” The pictures and elaborate furniture lining the hall blurred into a mesh of shapes and colors. She closed her eyes and forced her brain to focus, but when she looked again, she realized they were only halfway down the hall. She couldn’t go on. Her feet stopped obeying her commands. “Why does Nevvis live in such a big house when he’s the only one who lives here?”

  “You live here.”

  “I don’t count.”

  After a long pause and several attempts at keeping Taymar on her feet, Jalkean stopped in the hallway. “It’s part of his image.” He fired his key at the armband, dissolving the confinement beam, and pulled her arm up behind his neck. His other hand wrapped around her waist and pulled her forward. “You can do this, Taymar. Keep walking. Almost there.”

  Almost wasn’t good enough. She couldn’t take another step. “This is fine,” she said, ready to lie down on the thick rug that covered the floor. “It’s not like I can get out of his house alone. I don’t need to go all the way to the bedroom.”

  “Yes, you do. You’ll feel better when you’ve gotten some sleep.”

  When they finally made it to the room, Taymar didn’t protest as Jalkean helped her onto the bed. He slipped off her shoes and pulled a blanket over her, but her eyes were already closed. she sent, too tired to speak.

  “What makes you think he’ll listen to me?”

 

  “Yes, but don’t expect it to do any good. Nevvis does what he wants. You know that.”

  She managed a slight nod. How right he was. Jalkean’s footsteps faded away as she let the drug claim her.

  Chapter 3 – Stolen

  Nevvis swiped the medcom door and stepped back out onto the wet walkway. He sucked in a lungful of the fresh air to clear his head of the stench of the sterile lab. Venting his anger on the pompous mush-mind of a doctor hadn’t been nearly as cathartic as he had hoped. A full day of reviewing reports and responding to lower Council requests still awaited him, and he was in no mood to do any of it. Then there was Taymar. He glanced at his wrist. The display told him what he already knew. The day was half over.

  A soft rain pattered around him as he stood under the cover of the building’s overhang, deciding what to do. The transtrem line backed up past the shelter as people tried to get to their destinations before the real rains hit. Whatever else he did, he wasn’t waiting in that to do it. Nevvis glanced around for a discreet place to use his personal transtrem. Not the sort of thing he wanted to advertise. He spotted an empty doorway, but hesitated when a thundering boom reverberated through the sky. The cloud cover was too thick to see anything, but he didn’t have to see it to know what it was. They were early. He wasn’t ready. Maybe it was just thunder.

  A second crack of not-thunder exploded around him, this time so loud he felt it rumble up through the walkway. Fear and panic pelted him in waves from the people still navigating the walkways, and Nevvis had to tighten his shield to block the assault of emotions. Through the clouds, the tiniest glint of metal confirmed his fears.

  “Dicci! Jalkean, what have you done?” Without another thought, Nevvis tapped a code he had hoped to never need into his wristband and waited. As the blue haze of the transtrem swirled around him, the people of Newete started running for shelter. An explosion of light erupted to his right, but before the sound hit, he disappeared to a place no one would ever find him.

  ###

  Banging at the other end of the house pulled Taymar back to the world of the living. Either Jalkean was rearranging furniture without the help of an Arlele’s teke or Nevvis was in an outright snit; unlikely, but entertaining to consider. Unfortunately, Jalkean had activated the dinisolate shield around the room. Her telepathy wouldn’t reach past the wall. If the dinisolate shield was up, so was the containment field on the door. She wasn’t going anywhere.

  She stretched, blinked against the assaulting light, and rolled over to watch the rain pelt against the glass that made up an entire wall of Nevvis’s bedroom. The drug was still in her system. It and the steady patter of rain called her back to sleep as she tried to think of names for Nevvis. What was the new Alliance word for zimit? Something about a body part. A hole. Or something like that. She closed her eyes. Swearing in another language didn’t have the same appeal. Zimit sounded so much better.

  Another crash followed by a string of angry voices sent Taymar scrambling to her feet. Jalkean yelled. There was a series of clicks, a screech like a bird, and then silence. The room blurred as Taymar tried to shake off the last pull of the drug. Feet ran her way, but she couldn’t tell how many. She glanced over both doors. The red lights confirmed her suspicion. Jalkean had set the c-field. Zimit! Her band wouldn’t let her pass.

  With no other options available, Taymar used her mind to rip a metal sculpture off the wall and reshape it into a crude knife. If Nevvis was the one making all that noise, she was in huge trouble. More clicking sounds just outside the door firmed up her resolve. Taymar ran over to a cutout in the wall closest to the door and sucked in a long, slow breath. No one in their right mind broke into Nevvis’s house, so if it wasn’t Nevvis coming through that door, whoever it was would be dangerous.

  Her heart thumped in her chest and the thrill of an impending fight pushed away whatever remnants of the drug were left. The footsteps slowed. At least two different people crept toward the room, maybe more. They weren’t trying for stealth so much as caution. Taymar waited, her makeshift knife clenched in her fist, knees bent, ready to pounce.

  An arm came into view. She wrapped her mind around it, ready to attack, but hesitated. The person’s skin was tinted orange. What kind of thief painted itself orange? A dead one. Taymar raised her weapon and stepped out of her hiding place. The intruder spun to face her, ropes of braided skin flung out around its head like locks of hair as it turned. Knife poised in the air, Taymar stared.

  Whatever this creature was, it wasn’t from Drani. Not only was the intruder pale orange, but its nose was small and flat, ending in slits that opened and closed as it breathed. Large brown eyes that tapered out to long, narrow slits stared back at her. It moved its mouth, which like the rest of its features was smooth and angular, and the clicking sound she had heard earlier resumed. Narrow braids of white skin that dangled from its head swung back and forth as it shook its head. It looked like the skin darkened halfway down the braid. Taymar was still staring at the strange creature’s head when a second one rounded the corner.

  Confronted with two of them, Taymar shook off her shock and sprang into action. As her weapon slashed down on the first creature, she yanked a small table out of the corner with her mind and sent it flying toward the second attacker’s head. The first one jumped back, missing the worst of the blow, but a thin blue line appeared on its arm as what could only be blood began flowing from the cut she had made.

  She followed her momentum and brought the knife up again. The second intruder matched her by raising its arm as well. It opened its hand. A burst of light flashed out of its palm, and Taymar’s body jerked back, knocking the knife to the floor. A peculiar feeling of numbness washed over her, and for a brief moment it felt as if she were floating. The sharp, acidic taste of blood filled her mouth. The skin-haired creature lowered its hand, a hand that had only one thumb, and darkness consumed her.

  ###


  His transtrem dropped Nevvis right back in front of the medcom, only it was a far different scene from the one he had left hours before. Boulder-size chunks of former buildings blocked the walkways and smoke clogged the air. Were it not for the heavy rain the fires would no doubt be much worse, but deep pools were already forming where the normal drainage systems were damaged. To his right, the walkway buckled and caved into a massive crater, where one of the invading ships had fired its weapon. The hole was fast becoming a small lake. People scurried around, some crying, others calling out to friends and family buried in the rubble.

  Thankfully, eleven of the twelve other members of the Leading Council had made it to the bunker safely. The last thing they needed to do was bring up one of the prospects at a time like this.

  Over near the nonfunctioning public transtrem pad, two Arleles postured for a fight. What they could possibly have found to fight over he couldn’t guess, but he knew with certainty that similar scenes were happening across the city. Fortunately, a third Arlele who overshadowed the two fighters both in mass and in disposition stepped in and directed them toward a rescue effort already underway.

  Nevvis twisted the small tube in his hand and reset his personal transtrem for the pad near his house, hoping for the best. His home was located in the far outskirts of the city. The attackers would have no reason to go there, but if they had and the pad was damaged, he was in for a long wait. A wait he didn’t have time for. He needed to get to his office to begin assessing the damage and to see if he could still manage to pull his plan together. The Shreet weren’t supposed to attack for another couple of weeks. He wasn’t ready. Taymar wasn’t ready. Nevvis stabbed at the remote again, kicking himself for his stupidity. What had he been thinking? The Shreet were trying to take over the entire quadrant, destroying anyone and anything that got in their way. Of course they weren’t going to stick to his timescale!