by T. J. Quinn
Most of Earth remained at that level some 800 years later. Their biggest accomplishment was the re-establishment of the Star Port at Farringay on the what was left of the North American Continent. The StarPort was under Federation control, but most of Earth was run by gangs and overlords just like Michelle said.
Hankura wished there was some way to help Michelle and her brother---more than what he had done. She had seen so much danger in her five years, he wondered if she would live to grow up. Would she still be alive when he grew up---in case he really could go back and find her? There was something amazing and powerful that drew their minds to connect. Even at his age, he knew that. They could even be psi mates. Was that what he had sensed between them? It was so rare for his kind. How could he know? Maybe he could figure it out while he was on Velran. The Wholaskans should know if what he mother said was true. She believed so, anyway. A psion could tell.
Even at ten, Hankura knew what that meant. Psi mates became lifemates, according to the Path of Insight. He might not know for certain until he met her. He wouldn’t I have a chance to do that until he was grown, now that Argus Lu had left the Sol System. Then again, maybe it had only been a dream. At that point, he wasn’t so sure anymore.
During the rest of the journey to Velran, he became friendlier with his primary attendant Lucy. She was the one who had greeted him at the shuttle on Aledus. While he knew not to try to read her, he could sense that she was a caring person. She showed him through the various departments on the ship and introduced him to the crew as much for their peace of mind as his. There were still times he felt scared and lonely, but he no longer took out his feelings on the crew.
Lucy assured him that Velran was a good place for a psion to learn to use his abilities safely without hurting anyone. The Wholaskans were a kindly race that favored human psions. Many young human and non-human psions were sent to Velran for psi training and for education.
CHAPTER TWO
The farther he traveled from the Earth, the more uncertain Hankura became about his mind meeting with Michelle. He only vaguely wondered if he would ever know. After the experience, his anger and despair began to recede about being sent from his home to boarding school. Plenty of kids went away to school, but mostly older ones. The damned Psi Laws made it necessary for him to go at such an early age.
Psion training at the Aledan Psi Institute was a harsh, spirit breaking process. Natar, his mother, made his father promise it would never happen to him. Ludren wanted to move the family to Belderon another planet in their star system. Mother adamantly refused and wouldn’t explain why she opposed the plan.
“Then we should move to Velran,” Ludren countered. “Many families move to keep their psion children out of the Aledan Psi Institute. Then we could all be together. I don’t want to miss ten years or more with my son!”
“No, we can’t. This is our home. What would we do on Velran? It’s going to take ten years or more for Hankura to be trained.”
“Yes, ten years that our boy will be gone---ten years that we will miss as he grows into manhood. Isn’t that more important than staying on a world where psions are treated like undesirables? What is that going to teach Trevin and Capra?” he argued. His voice grew loud, and his temper flared. “I don’t know why you can’t see reason where Hankura is concerned. If you loved him enough, you wouldn’t hesitate to do what is best for him.”
“Ludren, you don’t know what you are asking! I have my reasons, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” Natar shouted back at him.
“Fine, then you take him the Star Port. I won’t be part of sending him away. I think what you’re doing is wrong, I have half a mind to go with him!”
Then his mother started to cry and ran to the bed chamber she shared with Ludren. His father had stalked out of their dome to walk among the yarrel flowers in their fields. That’s what he did whenever he was upset and needed to think. Yarrel flowers were used make an exotic wine called yash. They had made his family wealthy and continued to support a luxurious lifestyle. His family could well afford to go to Velran together, but Natar wouldn’t hear of it.
In the days leading to Hankura’s departure, it seemed like his father was angry all the time. Sometimes, it seemed to Hankura that his father was angry at him because he was a psion. Mostly, Ludren was angry with Natar who remained stubbornly determined to send him to Velran. His brother and sister seemed none the wiser.
Natar was hiding something, but Hankura didn’t dare probe her mind to learn what. She was scared about whatever it was, and she didn’t want Ludren to know.
Right up until the day they took him to Salla Star Port, Hankura had hoped she would change her mind, and they would all go together. At least his father relented and went with them. When the whole family loaded into their hovercraft, Hankura dared to hope they were going together. But when they arrived at the hoverport there was only his luggage droid to unload. Then he knew he was going to Velran---alone.
He could barely hold in his hurt and anger as they walked through the starport to the docking bay where the Argus Lu’s shuttle waited to take him up to board the passenger freighter orbiting Aledus. They had been lucky to find a ship with a crew willing to take a child alone that far through space---especially a psion. But Hankura had already dawned with his telepathic ability, and his mother had gotten him a Belderon trained telepath to teach him basic control.
But once he reached age ten, Hankura’s parents had two weeks to enroll him in the Aledan Psi Institute or remove him from Aledus. Until they reached the shuttle in the docking bay, he’d hoped they would change their mind and go with him. They were angry, he was angry. His siblings didn’t really understand what was happening.
An attractive young woman with short dark hair and sparkling brown eyes was waiting to greet them. His parents each hugged him and told him they loved him. They wished he didn’t have to go. Hankura stood there sullenly and didn’t hug them back. He started to walk away when they released him then stopped and turned back to face them.
“You don’t love me, or you wouldn’t make me go alone. I hate you all, and I’m never coming back!” he shouted ran into the shuttle with his luggage droid trailing behind him.
He’d meant it when he said it, but now after seeing the hardships of Michelle’s life through her eyes, his life didn’t seem as bad. With two more months of space travel to go, Hankura decided to stop feeling sorry for himself and learn more about space travel and how the ship worked. He’d even downloaded specs on the passenger freighter to his foldable computer tablet.
The Argus Lu was a tramp freighter, and they got steady work going between Aledus, Earth, and Velran. Lucy was a Velran trained telepath. Supervising young psions from Aledus was one of her primary duties when she wasn’t scheduling passengers and freight pick-ups. She was the reason the captain agreed to take passengers like Hankura Narcaza to Velran for training.
He wasn’t the first angry, sullen boy they’d transported to Velran and probably wouldn’t be the last. Lucy Allen was born on Aledus. Her parents took her and moved to Velran because of the wretched Psi Laws. Their tour of the Aledan Psi Institute had horrified them with the harsh methods they used to train young psions to adhere to the discriminatory laws that treated psions as second-class citizens. The training employed ‘pain therapy’ and brainwashing techniques to make the psions behave.
Unlike the sub-groups of humans that had varied skin pigmentation and subtle differences in physical appearance, psions weren’t easily recognizable. So, psions were required to wear distinguishing patches on their clothing outside their homes so ‘Normals’ could recognize and avoid them or harass them. It wasn’t just the Normals who harassed them, but the Enforcers too.
Lucy’s parents never thought much about their world’s legal system that was designed to protect Normals from mentally unstable psions until they discovered their daughter was a psion. Then their eyes were opened. Soon as they realized what Lucy’s life would be like under Al
edan Psi Laws, they sold their agri-complex and moved to Velran where Psions had equal rights.
Whenever the Argus Lu locked into Aledus orbit, Lucy stayed aboard unless she had passengers to meet. If she went ground side at all, she never left the Port, meeting the passengers just outside the shuttle. She wasn’t the only psion in the crew. Pilot Jack Allen was her husband. While the Captain wasn’t a psion, one of his parents was.
Most other passenger liners would carry adult psions, Argus Lu was one of a small number that accepted psion children. It took time for children to learn control of their ability and shield their minds from the noise of other peoples’ thoughts. Lucy and Jack had taken special training on Velran to help children do that if they didn’t already know how.
Hankura did. His biggest problem was emotional. Their efforts to protect him by sending him to Velran left him devastated. It didn’t feel like protection. It felt like rejection. Why didn’t they come with him? They could afford it. Their agri-complex was fully automated. They didn’t need to be there to run it. The crop was sold through a broker. They didn’t have to do anything but watch yarrel flowers grow and wait for deposits into their accounts. He was their problem child, so they got rid of them.
Hankura had felt his father’s anguish as he walked into the shuttle, but he never looked back, or he would have seen the silent tears that rolled down his cheeks. Natar had forced him to make a terrible choice. Knowing it was the hardest thing she had ever done didn’t make it hurt Ludren any less. Now his first-born son was gone for at least ten years, and Hankura hated them for it. Ludren knew it wasn’t Natar’s fault she felt the way she did, but that didn’t quell his resentment for her part in this solution to protect their son. They would be lucky if they ever saw him again.
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Vampire
Brotherhood
The Dark Words Series
Prequel
A.J. Daniels
GTQ LLC
Orlando, Florida
Copyright © 2017 by A.J. Daniels
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.
GTQ LLC
PO Box 540375
Orlando, FL 32854
www.gtq.com
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Vampire Brotherhood/A.J. Daniels -- 1st ed.
ISBN
CONTENTS
Ghosts Whispering From The Past
Touching the Face of a Goddess
Vampire Brother
Don’t Name It or You Won’t Want to Kill It
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Chapter 1
Ghosts Whispering From The Past
The planet Earth was a weird and beautiful place. The sky was blue, the oceans were deep, and it was just about far enough off the beaten path not to be visited by his kind any time soon. Alek had been stranded on this obscure planet for over fifty years and had somehow managed to carve out a semblance of a life for himself and his family. The humans were an odd lot but he had slowly become used to their strange ways.
Alek leisurely strolled through the city park on his lunch break. Pulling his hoodie up over his head, he was careful to block out as much as the sunlight as possible. Though his kind thrived on their new world, prolonged exposure to sunlight did strange things to their photosensitive skin. Vampires were one of the few species that never fed in the middle of the day. The human world stopped every day at the same time for this activity called lunch. It was one of the several times each planetary rotation when his mortal counterparts fed. Alek had long since identified it as an opportunity to either have a refreshing swim or a massage.
Today, he had taken a shortcut through the park to get to his favorite spa with the intention of swimming his lunch break away. Normally, he thought of walking to swim as a clever way to cram twice the exercise into his hectic life.
In the year 2092, the world was a very different place. Since the end of the alien wars, the ozone layer was extensively damaged to the point of being at imminent collapse. Alien weapons had leached exotic chemicals, including high concentrations of abrasive particulate matter into the upper ionosphere, creating what the humans called the Cerion Effect.
The Cerion Effect resulted in increased oxygen in the air, fluctuations in atmospheric pressure, and a slight increase in surface temperature. The ice caps melted, creating more temperate zones in the polar regions. A rapid influx of water into the oceans as the ice caps melted lead to an increase in sea level, which ate up an estimated hundred kilometers of the coastal land mass around each continent. Eventually, the planet would become uninhabitable but not for generations.
The atmospheric changes allowed plant and animal life to grow much larger than before the ships had landed. The changes had been well tolerated by the human physiology, proving mortals were both robust and adaptable. The Most noticeable change was size, with the average human nearing six feet tall. The effects had been especially profound in the deep ocean ecosystems, where squid were now regularly growing to the size of skyscrapers. Alex didn’t understand the intricacies of why this was happening but, then again, he was a computer programmer, not a botanist.
The lush New Florida landscape was hot and balmy, even in the fall. Alek came to a stop, unwittingly drawn to a bizarre flowering plant. The lush foliage towered over him, covered in beautiful snow white blossoms the size of his head. Each bloom had several long thin tendrils snaking out from the center. The tiny filaments gently undulated in the breeze performing a captivating ghost like dance in the wind. A light floral scent filled his nostrils. It was a heady scent, and one he’d not encountered before. It was so out of sync with the surrounding vegetation that anyone would know it was obviously of alien origin. It was just one of dozens of new uncultivated life forms thriving on this new world, much just like himself.
Alek paused briefly to let the intoxicating scent wash over him. His body quickly calmed and a transcendental feeling stole over him. This was what his people would identify as a moment of heightened spiritual awareness. He immediately decided to embrace it, unware of the impending danger creeping ever closer.
The sounds of nature filled his ears, the sweet scent of the spring flora filled his nostrils, and a warm breeze swirled around his body, caressing his skin like a long lost lover. He felt a brief wave of calmness wash over his senses and his head began to fill with memories and thoughts of days long past. It felt like being tugged gently backward by a hand of a wise and all-knowing specter from his past.
Hearing the soft whisper of long departed friends soothed his battered soul. He could feel long dormant emotions flare to life. It felt good to reconnect with his inner self in that way. It was that part of themselves vampires considered to be the most sacred. He felt whole and complete for the first time in a long endless age, standing there centering himself in the moment.
Alek had never spent much time contemplating the sacred scrolls of his people, but he tried to live his life in in a righteous manner. During the time of war, he’d been forced to do things that slowly ate away at his soul. The war was long over and he was only now coming to grips with the memories that haunted him still.
The one experience he could never get past was losing his fighting partner and best friend. Jensen had sacrificed himself to give Alek a chance to escape. Although Alek recognized it as an act of unselfish love and compassion, the fact that he was alive to enjoy life and a family, while his friend was lying cold in the gr
ound never sat well with him.
At night, his dreams were haunted with images of seeing his friend die and of what might have been, had his friend lived. They would probably both have families, and would have visited each other’s homes. Their children would have played together. He knew if Jensen were still alive, he would tell him to suck it up and get on with his life. Jensen would tell him to be careful and watch his back.
Jensen said things like that so often, Alek could almost hear his friend and see him in his mind’s eye. He was waving his arms and his lips were moving…he was shouting at him…something about there being danger…Jensen was shouting at him to get down.
Suddenly, Alek slid back into reality, sensing danger in the here and now. He quickly opened his eyes and looked around. Nervously scanning the landscape proved fruitless. He was not sure what he was looking for, but the birds had stopped tweeting and something was different. Then it hit him, he was being followed.
His vampire senses began pulling in information faster than his brain could process it. The sound of breathing drifted to him on the wind, and he could smell them…four of them. His nostrils flared slightly. With some concentration, he could make out the scent of two humans, a vampire and…maybe a Kalian. One was recently injured…he could smell the faint scent of human blood.
He spied movement about a hundred yards away in the bush. They were looking right at him. That was a red flag because people kept to the pathways in the park rather than lurking in the brush. His eyes zeroed in on a form lying close to the ground. His mind registered the rifle in his hands about the same time as he felt a prick on his chest.