Shield of Drani (World of Drani Book 1)

by Melonie Purcell

  When she finished, she yanked her fist free of Nevvis’s grip and shoved it toward the waiting doctor, enjoying his involuntary jump when she did. He stared at the open palm with obvious suspicion.

  “Well, get it over with,” Taymar prompted.

  “Are you sure you don’t want the blocker?”

  Taymar cocked her head in his direction.

  “Okay, then.” The doctor took the laser fuser from the waiting technician and gave her one last look before activating it against her skin. Pain surged up Taymar’s arm. Acting on its own, her arm yanked back and her fist closed against the burning light, but a hand came from behind and encircled her wrist. A little embarrassed, she didn’t comment when Nevvis stepped in close behind her and pulled her arm back down for the doctor to try again. His presence was annoying enough to help her refocus. It was pride over pain, and that was a battle she could win any day. As the doctor alternated between sterilizing and sealing the myriad of cuts, except for the occasional flinch, she remained still.

  “She has some on her leg as well,” Nevvis said, finally stepping away. “They have gone untreated and are now infected.”

  The doctor leveled an expression of exasperation at Nevvis that, in true Nevvis fashion, went completely ignored. He probably didn’t see the equally disapproving frown coming from Sean, who was on a different bench being attacked by a different technician. Without a doubt, he heard it, though.

  He patted the bench nearest him. “Now, hop up here and be good,” he said with a small smile.

  Taymar walked over to a different bench and pushed herself up onto it. After a moment, the doctor followed with a technician in tow.

  As the doctor began scrubbing the dried blood off of her calf, Nevvis took to surveying the room. He poked at a machine protruding from the wall, picked up what looked like a giant fish eye from a table, turned it back and forth in his hand before replacing it, and finally set off some sort of alarm by trying to twist a screen around to see what was on the other side. Taymar was so engrossed in watching the two technicians ushering Nevvis away from their beloved equipment that she yelped when the laser sealer hit her skin. Nevvis spun to face her, but she waved him off. “I’m fine. Don’t hover. You’re bad enough from over there.”

  At that, Nevvis shook his head and disappeared around a corner. His mind was as closed as ever, so Taymar gave the doctor’s efforts her full attention. The technician holding his tray of tools, a female about Taymar’s height, wore a coil of brown braids only slightly darker than her skin piled high on her head. Taymar teked one of the braids and lifted it just enough to make the woman jerk her head. After a pause, she teked a different braid and then another and yet another, until the woman swiped at the invisible assailant, nearly dumping the tray in the process. As the woman looked around in confusion, Taymar pretended to watch the doctor and waited.

  When she teked the woman’s braid again, the technician spun around, flinging blood-soaked pads and sterilizing cream across the room. Dr. Lats glanced up in confusion, and Taymar mimicked his expression as she watched the woman hurrying to clean up the mess. The doctor stared back at Taymar.

  “I didn’t do it,” she said.

  He didn’t look convinced.

  “What? I’ve been sitting right here…” Taymar broke off as shock surged from Nevvis’s mind. An instant later, he came rushing around the corner.

  “Something is terribly wrong with that woman in there,” he said, his tone demanding, almost angry.

  Dr. Lats dropped the sealer on the table and hurried to a vid display set into an adjacent wall. After tapping in a series of commands and after scrolling through the resulting numbers, he glanced at Captain Sean, who had joined him at the screen, and then turned back to Nevvis. “She’s the same. No change. Her mind is in a coma, but her body acts as if it’s running a marathon. It’s all I can do to keep her heart rate below a terminal threshold.”

  “Do you know what’s become of her?” Captain Sean asked.

  “That is Ranealla?” Nevvis asked. His appreciation for her physical attributes leaked from his normally sealed mind. In fact, the Dran was enamored.

  “She is, indeed.”

  Taymar prepared herself for the lecture she was certain would come. And let it come. Not even Nevvis could force her to release someone she had looped. He had tried the time she looped Targer, but in the end, she alone could undo the knots that kept her victims trapped in their own subconsciousness. And Ranealla the skalla wouldn’t be freed anytime soon. Taymar examined the partially sealed gash on her calf and did her best to appear disinterested in the sudden mayhem around her.

  “Tay,” Nevvis said, from where he stood near the far wall. “You have to let her go.”

  “I really don’t,” she replied without looking up. “The little skalla wants to sneak around in people’s minds? She can deal with the consequences.”

  “She’s not like us,” Nevvis insisted, taking a step closer to the bed. “Her mind doesn’t work like ours. You have to let her go.”

  Taymar poked at her leg, prodding fresh blood from the unsealed part of the wound.

  “She’s dying, Taymar. You’re killing her.”

  At that, Taymar looked up. His brows were furled in concern and frustration. His normal pleasant, noncommittal smile was replaced with a frown, and genuine fear radiated from his mind. He sincerely believed the woman was dying.

  Taymar pushed the doctor’s abandoned equipment aside and hopped off the bench. Dr. Lats hurried to stop her, but Captain Sean blocked him as she brushed by and wound her way to the dimly lit room housing the telepath she already hated.

  It wasn’t hard to understand what had grabbed Nevvis’s attention. The woman was stunning, even in a coma. Her skin was so white it nearly glowed in the dark room, and it presented a startling contrast to the pool-of-space black hair puddled beneath her head. Curves rolled into bumps and smoothed into muscle-bound planes in all the right places, and the whole thing rose and fell in short, gasping breaths. Taymar reached out and brushed the woman’s mind. Suffocating darkness greeted her.

  “I wonder why she did that,” Taymar mumbled to herself as she probed deeper into the unresponsive mind.

  “You’re the one who did that, Tay. Not her,” Nevvis said from directly over her shoulder.

  Taymar shook her head and shoved him away. Leaning over Ranealla’s panting body, Taymar dropped her mental shield and plunged into the woman’s mind. The shadow of Nevvis’s thoughts clung to her own as the Dran followed her in, but Taymar ignored him. Let him see what she was doing. It wouldn’t help; every mind was different, every looping unique. And without telekinesis, he would never be able to undo it.

  Ignoring Nevvis’s lurking thoughts, Taymar immersed herself in the vacuum of Ranealla’s subconsciousness. Normally, the mind was a torrent of images and memories all crashing together at an impossible pace. Only a skilled and experienced telepath could sort through the chaos and come out with something useful, which was the difference between those who called themselves telepaths and those who really were.

  Instead of the hum of mental noise, Taymar found only deadly silence. Instead of images, only tiny threads of light twisted into a network of webs disturbed the emptiness. They were to be expected, of course. Taymar had gone through great efforts to put them there. But where a mind should have been struggling to free itself of the bindings, Ranealla’s thoughts simply didn’t exist.

  One by one, Taymar dissolved the tiny balls of light using her thoughts and a gentle nudge from her teke. With each thought she unlooped, Taymar waited for Ranealla to come screaming forward, but the darkness continued in unsettling perfection. The loops were created in that emptiness. Taymar had hit her opponent with enough mental force to cause a momentary mental blackout, and in that instant she had used Ranealla’s emerging thoughts to create a web. The more she tried to think her way out of it, the more twisted up she would get. Basically, it was like working out a complicated equation in a dream
state. But Ranealla wasn’t trying to work anything out; she simply wasn’t there.

  As the last of the knots dissolved, Taymar called out telepathically into the darkness of Ranealla’s mind. When nothing changed, Taymar shoved her thoughts forward, effectively screaming into the other woman’s mind, but was rewarded with only the cavernous darkness.

  Throwing caution aside, Taymar climbed up on the table and grabbed Ranealla by the shoulders. “Wake up,” she screamed both mentally and physically. “Why are you hiding?” She felt Nevvis pull away, but didn’t bother trying to see why. Instead, she gave Ranealla another violent shake. “Stop sleeping! Wake up.”

  Like a swimmer finally coming up for air, Ranealla jolted upright, sucking in a long, deep breath. Her eyes flew open, and she stared openmouthed at Taymar. Fear and shock flooded her newly freed mind.

  Before the telepath could form words, Taymar dropped down off the table and wiped her newly sealed hand across her filthy pants. It itched. And it had evil telepath on it.

  “Really?” Nevvis asked, making her jump. She had forgotten he was there. How that was even possible she didn’t have time to figure out, because the ridiculous woman was trying to speak and making a mess of it.

  Taymar looked over at Nevvis and smirked. “Learn anything…ki?”

  “What did…what...” The keel rushed over to help the frail telepath as she tried to sit up. The process was going about as well as her slurred speaking. “How did you do that? Why did you do that?”

  After giving Nevvis an eye roll, since he obviously found this new telepath intriguing, Taymar turned to face the woman now sitting sideways on the bed. She was beautiful, that much was true enough. Delicate was the word that described her best. Like the skeletal shell of a spent brakeal crystal. Even her ears ended in a long, fragile point that fell back with her sheet of black hair. But, beautiful or not, she had poked around where she didn’t belong and was the reason Taymar was on the ship and not on Daryus, where she belonged. “You shouldn’t stick your mind out there unless you know how to keep it from getting slapped down. Next time, I may not let you go.”

  Ranealla only stared, as did the rest of them, Nevvis included. Exactly what he was thinking, Taymar wasn’t sure, but she knew he would be asking questions soon enough. And let him ask.

  When Ranealla couldn’t manage a second cohesive sentence, Taymar turned back to Nevvis. “Can we go now? My leg is fine. My hand is fine.” She glanced over at Captain Sean, who was still standing near the entry. “Your pet is fine.” Without waiting for an answer, she headed into the main room, intent on the door. A brief stab of pain made her stop just in front of it.

  Behind her, Nevvis asked the doctor about her leg. “I don’t think it will give her trouble. If it does, just bring her back,” the doctor replied, but his mind screamed out his hope to never see Taymar again.

  “I’ll have security show you to your cabin,” Captain Sean said. “I can’t be saying what you want for accommodations for Taymar, but I’m a might reluctant to put much more than a blanket in her cell, given what she managed with a glass of water.”

  “The room will be fine, Captain. For both of us.”

  Taymar could hear Captain Sean’s argument pouring from his mind long before any words found their way to his lips. Apparently, so could Nevvis. “Taymar will be more secure with me than in a cell.”

  At those words, Taymar’s stomach threatened to jump out of her throat. She wanted to run or scream or something, but she knew it would do no good. She would never even reach the hall before the pain would become paralyzing. Instead, she just turned to the door and waited the whole time, forcing air through her collapsing lungs.

  His frustration leaking out of his mind like the spoken word, the captain brushed past Taymar without a backward glance and swiped his hand across the door sensor. The door slid open to reveal two uniformed guards just on the other side. When Captain Sean had called for them, Taymar had no idea. After a terse word with the two men, the captain headed down the corridor and disappeared.

  “This way, sir,” the shorter of the two said to Nevvis before heading down the same corridor, but in the opposite direction.

  Nevvis tried to drop his hand on Taymar’s shoulder, but she jerked away and headed after the guard. Not surprisingly, the second guard fell in behind Nevvis. They made their way to the deck shuttle, and just like before, all four of them stood in silence as the small box conveyed them in silence to Nevvis’s new room. Always to Nevvis’s room, Nevvis’s house, Nevvis, Nevvis, Nevvis! The small vial hidden beneath her waistband felt as if it were growing as she stood there trying not to think of it. She focused on the blinking lights and swirling patterns beneath the milky surface on the walls instead.

  Chapter 12 – Together

  All too soon, the guard stopped in front of a door and swiped it open. “The ambassador’s suite, sir,” he said, stepping back slightly.

  “Thank you. This will do just fine.”

  Taymar’s feet stopped just outside the door. They refused to step inside and she didn’t blame them. A small nudge from Nevvis propelled her forward, and the door slid closed behind her. Nevvis’s door. The door to Nevvis’s cabin. Her heart about leaped out of her throat when Nevvis bumped her shoulder as he slipped past, his huge yawn echoing in the silence.

  “Find somewhere and sit,” he ordered, looking around the small apartment. He disappeared around a narrow partition.

  The cabin consisted of a main area that served as both the entertainment room and the bedroom. A couch, chair, and short table arranged in a small semi-circle took up the majority of the space. To the side of the grouping was a bed built into a well-disguised nook in the wall. The bed was actually built on a stack of drawers. A small bed table stuck out to the side on one end, while a narrow panel that Taymar guessed to be a closet completed the nook on the other end. Across the room, opposite the bed, was a small round table.

  Taymar skirted the couch to peek around the archway Nevvis had disappeared through. He was bent over some sort of converter in a tiny kitchen. He tried to give her a reproving glance, but since she didn’t care if he approved of her behavior or not, it didn’t take. Instead, she continued her assessment of the room. It was a short assessment. The only other door was at the far end of the cabin. It had to be the washroom. The walls were sparsely decorated, and aside from the main pieces of furniture, the cabin was essentially empty.

  Taymar looked back at the couch and, inviting as it was, she decided to stand. The door wasn’t locked. Yet. Maybe all wasn’t lost. She just needed to get to another shuttle. It was a fair bet that Nevvis wouldn’t approve of that plan, so he would need to stay behind, which meant he would need to be unconscious. Her thoughts went unbidden to the vial she was hiding, and she rushed to replace them with images of Ranealla as she searched the room for something heavy or moldable. Everything seemed to be made of some kind of metal, which took too much focus to try to reform. He would catch her the second she tried. She glanced at the viewer in the center of the table. Maybe it was heavy.

  “Tay,” he said from behind her.

  She jumped and spun, ready to swing, but the space was empty. He smiled at her from the archway, a glass in each hand. “I hate it when you do that!” she said.

  “All I did was call your name.”

  “You projected it at me, and you know I hate that.”

  “Well, I was trying to keep you from doing something stupid. Like throwing a viewer at me. Come sit down.” He pointed to the couch with a glass. “You couldn’t launch a shuttle now even if you could get to one, which you can’t.”

  “I’ll stand.”

  “Look,” he demanded, walking around to set one of the glasses on the couch table. “Look out the window.” The scene visible through the small opening looked more like a splatter painting than space. It was black, with areas of purple marbled into it. Wavy red, yellow, orange, and white lines streaked in long patterns down either side of the ship’s obvious path.
“We’re tunneling through space right now,” Nevvis explained after a long drink. “Not only would this ship not let you launch a shuttle, but if you did, it would implode into so many particles you wouldn’t even register as space debris.”

  Nevvis shook his head in dismay. “I will never know how you managed to steal a shuttle from an Alliance starship—and make it to a planet, for that matter—without getting caught. Or killed.”

  “I borrowed some pilot’s brain,” she answered, dropping down onto the couch.

  “Did you give it back?” Nevvis asked with a smile as he settled on a spot next to her.

  When Taymar turned to answer him, he was yawning again, which of course not only made her yawn, but also reminded her of just how tired she really was. Tired and famished. She hadn’t eaten in what felt like days, and was thinking about a hot meal when Nevvis’s hand on her neck made her jump.

  “Be still,” he demanded, picking a small twig out of her hair. “You’re filthy. You need to wash.” As he spoke, Nevvis softly brushed her hair back from her face. It was not his words that kept her sitting on the couch, but the pressure of his mind on hers. It had been a hard lesson to learn, but she was finally wise enough to know that with Nevvis she had to choose her battles carefully. Many, many days in isolation had taught her that. Fighting with Nevvis over playing with her hair would only result in him touching more than that. So, instead, she used the one weapon she always had: her mouth.

  “If you don’t like the way I smell, ki, then why don’t you get away from me? There is a perfectly good chair right over there.”

  He made a production of sniffing the air. “No, it won’t work. You truly stink. More than usual, I mean.”

  Taymar shot him her best intimidating glare, but it didn’t take. They had that in common. He only laughed and stood. “Taymar,” he said, handing her the glass from the couch table, “you are fun to watch. Drink some water and follow me. The washroom is over here. You can go first.”