by S. E. Smith
I had to try. I sigh, close my eyes, and swish my tail over the dirt. This man is good, and a perfect chin rest.
“Here she comes, Ranger,” Graig murmurs.
My eyes open. Mommy has just left the big building. I thump my tail on the ground.
“Do you know how lucky we are she took us both in?” Graig is watching Mommy with a look that matches how I felt inside. Warm and happy. We are happy together, all three of us. Four, if I count Buck. My pack.
“Do you know the Terrian saying ‘good things come in small packages’, Ranger?”
He sounds happy. I thump my tail a little harder, but I keep watching Mommy.
“Hey, you two,” Mommy calls. I jump up and run to greet her. “Hey, baby.”
Mommy scratches my ears real good, then hugs Graig. They do that weird thing where they pressed their mouths together. It is a special greeting only the Alpha and her mate do. I’m not allowed to do that with them. Trust me, I’ve tried. But that is okay.
“What’s for lunch?” Mommy asks.
“Colf sandwiches.” Graig hands her a packet.
“Sounds exotic.”
“Matiran ham. Here’s the colf bone for you, Ranger.” He tosses something in the air and I jump up to grab it before it hits the ground.
Oh, boy! A bone! I love bones. I take it over to gnaw on in front of the cube door. This is the best place to see the entire yard.
“There are turkey buzzards circling something in the north field, near the edge of the trees,” Mommy says.
“I’ll check it out this afternoon.”
They continue talking, but I shut them out, focusing on the delicious colf bone. Good, so good.
Quiet seems to come suddenly. I lift my head up, looking for danger. But there is none. Mommy is straddling Graig’s lap though, their mouths pressed together again. Then Graig stands up and Mommy wraps her legs around him. She makes a happy sound—a laugh.
He strides toward me. “Stay, Ranger.” Those words I understand completely, even though they were mumbled against Mommy’s mouth. I duck my head when he steps over me, then turn to watch my two-leggers go inside.
It’ll probably be a while before they come out again. It usually is. In the meantime—I cast a glance toward the bench. What a stroke of luck. They left their half-eaten sandwiches…
Also by Lea Kirk
PROPHECY, Book One of the Prophecy Series
SALVATION, Book Two of the Prophecy Series
ALL OF ME, A Prophecy Series Short Story
About Lea Kirk
Lea Kirk loves to transport her readers to other worlds with her romances of science fiction and time travel. Her fascination with science fiction began at six years old when her dad introduced her to the original Star Trek TV series. She fell in love with the show, and was even known to run through her parents' house wearing the tunic top of her red knit pantsuit and her white go-go boots pretending to be Lieutenant Uhura. By nine years old she knew she wanted to be a writer, and in her teens she read her first romance and was hooked. She lives in California with her wonderful hubby of twenty-six years and their five kids (aka, the nerd herd). You can find out more about Lea at her website, leakirk.com, or on Facebook and Twitter.
@LeaKirkWrites
LeaKirkAuthor
www.leakirk.com/
Escape Run by Carysa Locke
About Escape Run
Teegan’s job as a hunter is to track down the Talented, those driven insane by their gifts. She and Ember, her psychically gifted fox, have tracked dozens of people for Cole, the man who works to rehabilitate and recover these troubled souls. When one of Cole’s most dangerous patients escapes, Teegan and Ember are on a hunt that could prove fatal if she doesn’t keep her focus on her mission. Unfortunately, Cole is proving one distraction that might make this her last hunt if she can’t do that.
Can Teegan keep her heart and mind in the game long enough to save an entire planet’s population, or will her distraction lead to heartache – and possibly death for everyone?
Prologue
When humanity stretched its wings and colonized planets far beyond the reaches of their own galaxy, new vistas were discovered. New science. Breakthroughs in not only space travel, terraforming, and colonization, but in the human body itself. Ways to enhance it. Humanity wanted men and women capable of settling harsh planets and surviving to thrive.
Colonies grew into independent worlds with politics of their own. Empires rose and fell. Wars broke out between systems. Humans enhanced to be more were drafted as soldiers. Some empires turned to cloning to boost their numbers. Others relied on biotech that made people more than human. And the Talented were created: humans biologically enhanced with powerful psychic abilities that made them gods on the battlefield. Men and women designed to kill with a thought, to hunt specific targets, and find them anywhere in the universe.
But eventually, all wars end.
The newly established Commonwealth of Sovereign Planets brokered a hard-won peace. Territories became sovereign systems. And those who once created the Talented, who wielded them in battle with the precision of a surgeon’s laser, realized they had no more use for gods who might challenge the power of the new monarchy. They betrayed their loyal soldiers, sentencing them to death.
The Talented did not go easily. Some disappeared into the populace, pretending to be merely human. Others fled to the fringes of occupied space, stealing ships and creating a fleet that even the Commonwealth Navy feared to challenge. They turned pirate, stealing what they needed to survive. Telepaths, hunters, and assassins, they established their own colonies outside of the Commonwealth. And down through the generations, their gifts bred true.
One
It was the wrong season.
A thin layer of snow blanketed the ground, covering the sway of silver grasses and sticking to the pealing redbark trees lining Teegan’s property. The colorful slab of dorite flecked with flashes of bright gold and deep blue that normally formed the centerpiece to her garden was hidden beneath a frost of white. More flakes fell from a winter-gray sky, slowly gathering in the peculiar silence that blanketed the world at first snowfall.
Except this was summer.
Teegan stared at the snow, brow furrowed. A flash of silver and copper caught her eye as something streaked across the ground. The figure vanished a moment later, but paw prints formed a trail moving toward her. Teegan relaxed and stepped off her back porch, sandaled feet crunching through the thin crust of ice.
It wasn’t cold. That was her first thought. Wearing only a thin silk robe and an old pair of sandals, she should have been freezing. But looking down at her bare toes, her smooth black skin stark against the white, she felt perfectly comfortable. No fog of breath misted the air in front of her face, and no goose bumps shivered across her body.
Soft fur brushed beneath her hand. A moment later the air shimmered, and Ember appeared beside her, sitting demurely with her elegant, thick tail wrapped around her feet. She resembled pictures Teegan had seen of ancient animals called foxes, but Ember was kith-vos, a species native to this world, Tarsiss Prime. And Ember was no simple animal. The kith were every bit as intelligent as their human bond-mates. Perhaps more so. They held mysteries, Teegan was sure, that remained unknown to the humans who colonized their world three centuries ago.
And they shared the psychic abilities of the Talented.
It’s snowing, Ember said. Her mental voice was clear and melodic. She tilted her head in an expression of confusion that looked almost human.
“I know.”
Ember looked up at Teegan with a glint in her blue eyes. Her fur rippled in the wind. She was almost entirely a silver color that disappeared against the brightness of snow, but tufts of red circled her eyes like a mask, and tipped the end of her tail and each paw, as though they’d been dipped in the color. It is high summer. It does not snow in high summer, Teegan. There was a distinct tone of disapproval to the kith’s mental voice. As if she couldn’t ab
ide the sky spitting snow in the wrong season.
But she was right. Teegan cast her gaze back over her garden. Flowers that should have been blooming – that had been, only the day before – lay dormant. The redbark trees stood like silent sentries, stark limbs stretched toward the sky with none of the brilliant green leaves that should have been waving in the breeze.
During high summer, Tarssis Prime’s orbit carried the planet along its closest pass around the system’s star as it made its oblong journey. Temperatures soared, and there was no possibility of snow, even on the coldest day.
Teegan turned abruptly and walked back into her house. Silently, Ember followed her, ears flicked back as she picked up on her bond-mate’s mood.
Wrong season. No chill in the air. There was only one explanation that was plausible: this wasn’t real. She was in a psychic landscape, one she hadn’t created. In reality, she was probably still asleep in her bed, Ember a warm presence curled up beside her.
Only the most powerful telepaths could pull off something like this. Teegan could count the number she knew personally on one hand. She lived on a planet of Hunters, a people with the primary Talent of tracking and finding anyone, anywhere. Many of them also possessed telepathy, but it rarely manifested as more than a basic Talent among her people.
Getting past her shields would take someone she trusted.
She folded her arms stiffly, anger tightening her jaw. She took a deep breath, closing her eyes and mentally counting to ten in a futile attempt at holding on to her temper. “Cole.” She hadn’t spoken his name in years, but it had to be him. The only time he’d ever been to Tarssis had been during winter. He’d seen the snow sticking to the redbark trees.
“You wouldn’t open my messages.” The sound of his voice, low with a hint of gravel, shivered through her. It had been so long since they’d spoken, she’d forgotten the effect it had. Teegan opened her eyes.
He was standing in her house. He looked exactly the same. Cole Madras was a big man, tall and broad, with the muscular look of a soldier. His hair was dark and long enough to brush his shoulders. A few strands of gray threaded through it, catching the light. Cole wasn’t the sort to use nanites or dye to hide the changing color. His face was more arresting than handsome, strong and square with a few lines around his expressive mouth, and at the corners of his eyes. Hazel, his eyes had always reminded Teegan of the forest. Green and brown and full of secrets. His skin was lighter than her own, browned by the sun.
Emotions too complicated to untangle closed her throat and held her frozen for an endless moment. Funny, how the mind created physical responses in a completely mental environment.
“I didn’t want to hear them. I didn’t want to see you.” Liar. It had taken all of her self-control to ignore those messages.
“That much was obvious.” Nothing showed on his face, no hint of emotion to tell her how he felt about it. Not that she couldn’t guess. Cole had never completely understood her choice to walk away.
The moment filled with tension as they looked at one another, the past hanging unspoken between them. Teegan was caught between memorizing every line of his face, and desperately wishing she could wake up and forget this ever happened. Her gut churned with the roil of emotion.
Cole! Teegan, you did not tell me that Cole sent us messages. Ember’s voice was reproving as she bounced across the space between them to dance around Cole’s feet. It broke the tension. Cole leaned down and drew a hand over Ember’s head and down her back, stroking the kith. Ember preened, licking his hand when he drew it back. We have missed you, Cole.
“Speak for yourself.” Teegan couldn’t stop the words, and she studiously ignored the look her bond-mate gave her.
But you did miss him, Teegan. Ember’s thought was sent on a private mental thread. Cole would not hear it unless the kith wished him to.
You know I can’t tell him that, Ember.
You can, Teegan. You don’t wish to. Those are two different things. Sometimes the kith’s literal way of looking at the world made certain things hard to explain. Like why Teegan had cut Cole from her life seven years ago and never looked back. Had it really been seven years? Time certainly moved quickly. Seeing him, it felt like yesterday.
She cleared her throat. “Who gave you docking permission?” Outsiders didn’t come to Tarssis without the express permission of one of the eleven ruling families. The Hunters preferred to remain largely separate from their pirate brethren. And there was no possibility that Cole could have concocted this elaborate telepathic landscape if he wasn’t on planet. He was powerful with uniquely specialized gifts, but reaching across space to do something like this just wasn’t possible.
“House Khallin.”
Teegan felt something painful stab through her, even though she’d half expected it. Thanks, Mom. To her credit, her mother probably thought she was doing Teegan a favor. She’d been complaining for years that Teegan spent too much time isolated from others. But, damn it, she was thirty-eight years old. She didn’t need her mother interfering in her choices, however well-intentioned it might be.
“Well, you can go ahead and depart back to your rock. I’m not interested in whatever you have to say.” She deliberately made her tone flippant and mocking.
Cole’s mouth thinned. He lived on an asteroid that had barely managed the terraforming necessary to be livable. But he took an absurd pride in what he’d accomplished there, and Teegan knew it. Black Rock would never be luxurious, but Cole had made something of the place, building inside the asteroid, so to the outward eye it looked uninhabited and unworthy of further inspection. But inside, Cole and his team used caves, tunnels and solar reflectors to redirect energy from the system’s star to inside the asteroid. He’d built not only living facilities, but vast gardens to grow fresh fruit and vegetables. The asteroid had pockets of water and underground rivers and lakes that Cole had harnessed for both energy and life. It was beautiful, in a harsh and wild way. But Teegan made it sound like just another piece of floating space junk.
“I’m not here to talk.” Cole pushed aside her insult, almost visibly shrugging it off. “I’m here for your help.”
Teegan arched an eyebrow. “That’s too bad. We don’t have a contract anymore. Find someone else.”
“I need you.”
She waved a hand toward the door. “You’re on a planet full of Hunters, Cole. You don’t need me.”
“You’re wrong.” The look in his eyes said he was talking about a lot more than whatever job he had for her. Teegan looked away, unable to hold that gaze for long.
“I can’t help you.” The words came out softer than she intended. Still sitting beside Cole, Ember whined quietly. With the psychic bond they shared, her bond-mate could feel Teegan’s emotions.
Letting the personal go for the moment, he switched tactics. “I need a Hunter, Tey.” She flinched hearing that nickname again. Cole was the only one who ever used it.
“I told you. You’re on a planet full of them.”
“No one else has a firsthand imprint of this mind.”
Teegan froze. A Hunter tracked people through a psychic impression of their thoughts. Everyone’s mind was a unique mix of their own personality, memories, emotions, and experiences. It was more unique than a fingerprint, as individual as DNA. Once a Hunter felt the imprint of someone’s mind, they never forgot it.
Hunters sometimes gained these signatures secondhand. An impression from a mental connection the individual shared with someone else. Teegan had once tracked a small boy lost in the wilderness by pulling his mental imprint from his mother’s thoughts. It was imperfect, like a smudged picture, but it could work. A firsthand imprint was a thousand times better.
She stared at Cole. She’d helped him hunt down a number of Talented in the past. People who had, for one reason or another, tried to escape being sent to Black Rock. “Who?”
She knew before he said it. She could see it on his face, and her lungs were already starting to constri
ct before he spoke the name.
“Deacon Harlow.”
She could hear the sorrow in his voice, the heaviness that lay beneath the stark grimness of that name. But she wasn’t looking at Cole anymore. She stared at nothing, and struggled to keep her breathing even. She didn’t technically need air here, in this construct. But her sleeping body did. And she had no doubt she was having a physical reaction in the real world.
A warm weight pressed against her side, Ember whining low in her throat as she rubbed her cheek against Teegan in an attempt to comfort.
“How?” She heard herself ask the question, but it was distant, like she was listening to someone else. Cole’s asteroid was a prison, of sorts. Talented who were mentally damaged, too dangerous to allow among a regular population, were sent to Black Rock, where Cole and his team of specialists tried to help and heal them. And in the meantime, keep them from hurting themselves or anyone else. It had extremely thorough security features, and Cole himself monitored the most dangerous guests. Deacon definitely counted among them.
“The new queen. You felt the claiming?” he asked.
“Everyone did.”
When the Talented were created, the men who made them were clever. They added a safety feature, a woman with the Talent to influence them and bend them to her will. So that soldiers made for killing and war would always have an off switch if it became necessary. The women born with this Talent were called queens. It was the rarest of all gifts, but recently a new queen had been found. And she’d bonded the Talented to her, an effect that would be felt for years to come. There were some among the pirates, like Cole, who theorized that the connection to a queen was necessary. That some Talented who went mad did so because they lacked the feedback of that connection. Others argued that a queen was just another master, a yoke they had no desire to serve.