“Of course.”
The rest clamored around, but I noticed now, so very carefully so as not to jostle me with their extraordinary strength. They had been learning.
“I want a pop!”
“Aunty Sri, your breath stinks bad!”
“You went first last time!”
“What about me? I never get to be first!”
I distributed more pops and hugs and sent them running off back into the field.
“So you’re staying here then.”
Red nodded her head; her eyes fixed on the children. I followed her gaze. “You know that Kanona has plans,” I said, watching as Dorran lifted a massive boulder that was at least three times his size and just as heavy, and start running with it. They were bred to be super-soldiers, and now they would be raised in House Stargazer. Their choices would be limited.
“She can try to have plans,” Red said with clenched fists. “It’s why I have to stay.”
I looked over at the children, laughing at bubbles in the sunlight. A blade twisted in me invisibly.
“I’m not going to let myself get bogged down too much by obsessing about the future or the past,” she said, glancing at my guard. “Life is fragile. I’m going to enjoy what I can, while I can.”
I knew that all too well.
“I’m going to go see if I can find another book to read.”
“Good luck. Don’t forget, you’re expected at the Hospitality Lunch.”
I cursed. “Of course it would be today, of all days.”
I’d just have to keep my mouth shut and make sure I wasn’t noticed. That couldn’t be that hard, would it?
My Dearest Beloved Daughter,
Is it so terrible that a father wishes to see his daughter happily wed? I will take care of everything.
I put down the screen without reading the rest of the letter.
I sat on the ends of a U-shaped table up on a dais in a room that was most definitely a throne room, even though it was called “The Hall of Auspicious Welcome,” or some other flowery thing. Kai and Kanona sat in the middle, while assorted courtiers drifted throughout in the room. Twice a week, it was the Stargazer custom to hold an open lunch, where everyone could “enjoy Stargazer hospitality.” The table was laden with the natural bounty of their estate: ripe fresh fruits and vegetables in all the colors of the rainbow and at least twelve species of avians, roasted, stewed, and poached with exotic spices from distant planets along with bizarre-looking sea creatures that everyone claimed tasted better than they looked.
It was a display of wealth, power, and extravagance, in an audience for people to air their grievances. As always, guests were garbed in gorgeous embroidered flowing floor-length robes of fire, azure, jade, dawn, and a dozen other hues, as if they were a collection of carnivorous flowers.
I glanced at the letter again.
My Dearest Beloved Daughter,
I could hear my brother Ral’s voice in my head, noting the use of the possessive, the lack of title. My father was still undeterred in his quest to use me as a political pawn.
I suppose I should be flattered. My father had been a dictator for most of his life and expected everyone to jump when he grunted. Ral had years of learning to handle him.
I hadn’t.
The injection site in my forearm itched, reminding me of the depths to which my father would go to get his way.
I hadn’t been born in the court, and I didn’t have the political survival skills. More importantly, he would have taken my child.
Not that it mattered now.
Three figures in Nightclaw colors stood in the center of the room. Two men, one woman, the emissaries who had brought me the letter. The dense light-absorbing fabric of their uniform signaled synth-armor, a clear sign that they came prepared to fight if necessary.
“The Lady Seria is a guest, free to come and go as she pleases,” said Kanona.
The taller man stepped toward me. Another handsome face, but one that had an air of familiarity. The guards announced him as a Lord Aralon, so he was probably another random cousin of mine. He turned to me. “Your father misses you and wants you to come home.”
I made myself lean forward, to show I wasn’t afraid. “Alzar-4 is not home.”
Aralon lowered his hand to his side.
To say the muscles were tense was like saying a tiger had stripes. And as if to show just how completely unprepared I was for this world, my innate reaction was to laugh.
Aralon looked at Kai. “It is not unprecedented for a House to deny an Alpha the right to his progeny. But consider if you would, what happened the last time.”
The room went silent.
The Evermore War.
This wasn’t happening. This was the cusp of insanity.
I clutched the arm of my chair, trying to stifle a giggle. Nightclaw couldn’t be threatening to restart a five hundred years long war over me.
Kanona glanced nonchalantly at her fingernails. Kai looked as if he were bored. “The Lady Seria is a guest, free to come and go as she pleases.” Kanona looked at the men, a cold smile spreading across her face. “But unfortunately you wolves are not guests.”
A whine of smart weapons rang through the air from the Stargazer guards and the Nightclaw messengers.
“Wait!” I said, standing up. They all looked at me. “My father wishes me to return because he wants to marry me off. Well, you can go and tell him the question is moot. Because I am getting married, but to a man of my choosing.”
Lord Aralon looked perplexed. He had not expected this response.
“To…whom?”
Kai leaned forward and smiled with white teeth. “To me.”
Chapter Four
Six Months Earlier…
Planet Tranquility
I can’t be pregnant.
I took another sample, a fresh one this time and shoved it into the machine. “Test it again.”
I sat back down on the cover of the toilet seat. Would Kai know from the blood sample I had given him before I left?
I laughed at the ridiculousness of it.
Kai had a shifter’s suspicion of the Library and then some. When I told him of my origins, of my first memories of Kjarn, the records lost of the refugee ships that had carried me there, he was convinced there was a conspiracy.
“The Library is known for the deep game they play,” he had said. It was why the great shifter kingdoms of Altai and Alzar-4 refused to allow Infoists access to their networks and their planets.
“They don’t play any game,” I said.
“Standing too close to a fire can blind you.” he had replied.
Then he convinced me to give him a blood sample to see if he could find any clues to my heritage and I assented.
My eyes widened. Would he know?
I thought back to the days he had been here. No, the blood sample I gave him was an older one, before we…
The device beeped again.
The same result.
I was pregnant.
“What happened to the birth control?” I asked, my voice screechy in panic.
The medical bot responded, “The implant has a 99.999999908 effectiveness. You are in the .00000 — “
“That’s enough. Oh, stars.”
I slumped to the floor of my bathroom
I was going to have a baby.
Not just any baby.
Kai’s baby.
There was water on my hands. I looked around for the leak, then I realized they were tears.
This was going to mean everything to Kai. I spent my life searching for my parents. I never had a family. And now I was going to be a mother.
A nervous giggle burst out of me, the bubbly kind that only escaped when the craziness was too much to swallow.
I had thought about children, in the theoretical sense, and agreed that it would be nice to have some someday, in the way that it would be nice to visit First Earth one day and see the birthplace of humanity.
But I had ne
ver actually thought about the reality of children. Which meant a family.
I was going to be a part of a family.
I looked at the calendar.
Kai would return in two days. I could wait two days to tell him.
I was going to have a baby.
Not just any baby.
Kai’s baby.
There was a knock on the door.
A screen popped into existence. Sensor analysis floated around the image. An unknown shifter had knocked, the probability of being a werewolf at 99.9999%.
The problem with shifters was that they all looked gorgeous, the class of beautiful that you jealously knew they were born with. Shifters didn’t take to cosmetic surgery; the shifting process always brought them back to their original form, whether human or wolf.
She was a pale little thing. Her dark hair shone with a gloss that was peculiar to shifters. She said, into the camera.
“Seria Callax-Smith?”
“Yes?”
“I am Nissa Aralon, of the House of Nightclaw. I’ve come a very long way to see you.”
“Do you need the Library’s assistance? I’m available to help during regular office hours.”
The woman quirked her lips in an amused smile. “Trust me, I’ve never been so desperate that I would seek the aid of an Infoist.”
Yes, Kai had made it perfectly clear that shifters didn’t trust the Library. Once upon a time, the Library was the Ealen institution that not only created them but enslaved them. Though that was at least two thousand years ago, and though the Library’s mission had changed dramatically, for shifters, it wasn’t long enough.
“I’d be obliged then if you would then enlighten me as to why you are here.”
She cocked her head, a bird-like gesture, though it was more raptor on the verge of clawing your eyes out than song lark. “I’ve come with the results of the blood sample you gave to House Stargazer.”
On any other day news like this would have taken me a whole day to process. I put my hand on my belly, which had always had a plumpness to it, and thought of the life within me.
Whatever came of the test results would be secondary.
I glanced at the screen. The sensors showed no weapons, at least none that emitted any electronic signatures. But then again, most shifters didn’t need weapons to hurt you.
And tigershifters and werewolves were notorious for their hatred of each other.
“Are you one of Kai’s friends?”
She snorted. “I’m not acquainted with Lord Stargazer.”
Lord Stargazer? This had to be a joke. “You expect me to believe that a werewolf has answers to a blood sample I gave to a tigershifter?”
The shifter frowned into the camera. “When you put it that way, it does sound preposterous. But part of the peace agreement that ended the Five Hundred Years War was that Royal Houses would always share genetic information with the most appropriate House.”
“I’m not following.”
“It means if one House discovers a descendant of another House, they are obliged by the treaty to notify the other House.”
I shivered. If she was saying what I thought she was, then life would not be comfortable for my child, to say the least.
I threw on a robe and a set of elbow length fingerless gloves. A series of pearlescent buttons ran up the length. If there were trouble, the buttons would explode into a mesh that would hold the werewolf long enough for me to get help.
I stood in the kitchen doorway, facing the front door, then took a deep breath before letting her in.
The door slid open.
“Come in,” I said, more calmly than I felt. “Do you want some tea?”
Her nostrils flared, her hand lingering on the frame of the doorway as she stepped in. “If you wouldn’t mind, thank you.”
As I rummaged through my kitchen cabinets, I saw her eyeing my place with the distaste of someone who had just been invited into a paper box. The werewolf dragged a finger against the shelf, examined the dust and sniffed it.
I swiped the wall to set the water temperature “Are you of House Stargazer?”
“I’m a werewolf of Nightclaw,” she said, a touch of defensiveness in her voice.
I picked up two mugs and decided to give her the chipped one. “How does my blood concern a werewolf of Nightclaw?”
“Because you are a werewolf of Nightclaw.”
I turned and focused on holding the vessel to the dispenser and letting hot water stream into the mug, then brought it over to the table and set it down slowly. “Sugar? Cream?”
“Plain, thank you.” She watched me, waiting for my reaction.
I should have a response. It was an unexpected answer to a question I had been asking my whole life.
And yet, all I could think about was that my child would be a mixed shifter. Not that such combinations hadn’t happened in the past, but they were infrequent. And so much depended on the Houses and the culture they had been born into. We humans tended to categorize Alzar-4 and Altai as the “werewolf planet” and the “tiger planet” but the reality was far more complicated. There were ancient clans of tigershifters on Alzar-4 and probably just as many tiny kingdoms of wolves on Altai, each with their own rules and culture around such things.
Nissa folded herself into a seat at the table and picked up the tea with two hands, savoring the warmth. She gave me a brilliant smile that failed to reach the corners of her eyes. “You and I are cousins, well, many times removed, but cousins all the same.”
I looked at her, all lustrous dark hair, pale skin, and petite frame. I was a big, dark, kinky-haired bovine in comparison.
“I can see the family resemblance.”
She sipped her tea and gave it a look of surprise.
“This is good.”
“Unlike the rest of our food?”
She only smiled, took another sip. “I can speak no truth that you will like.”
If I hadn’t known she was a shifter before, that just confirmed it. Kai had been horrified by what I had stocked in my kitchen, pronouncing it completely inedible and not even suited for rodents.
Well, rodents wouldn’t actually eat the nutrit-bars. They were deliberately made to be toxic to most pests.
She set the mug down, folded her arms and leaned back. “I am here because you are not only just any blood descendant. The Alpha of Nightclaw is your father.”
I burst out laughing. Tears came to my eyes. It was the dream of every orphan; to discover that they were actually the misplaced progeny of royalty, eager to reclaim them.
But not now, not with the baby I carried.
“Well, that was not the reaction that I was anticipating.”
I couldn’t stop laughing. All my life, I believed that there was nothing more that I wanted than to find than my parents. And then I met Kai. And realized I was pregnant.
She sipped her tea again. “Blood doesn’t lie.”
“Does he—“ I swallowed, unable to believe I was actually going to say the words. “— my father know?”
“I’m here on his behalf. He wants you to come to Alzar-4 to meet him and the rest of your family.”
I sat down. Every orphan dreamed their birth parents were out there, somewhere, tragically wealthy and searching for them. How many times had I dreamed of finding out the truth?
“When?”
“I was asked to see if you can leave tonight.”
“Tonight?” I checked the calendar in my vambrace, the date two days away filled with adorable hearts. “Is it that necessary?”
She made a face. “It hasn’t hit the stellarwebs yet, but war is coming. The war analysts predict an interstellar blockade along the main route between here and Alzar-4. We need to leave as soon as possible so we can keep you safe.”
There was so much to consider in what she just said. War? That meant the wolves and tigers were fighting again.
I fought the urge to place my hand on my stomach.
“War analysts? Is that
a job?”
“In Nightclaw it is. We don’t have precogs, unlike Stargazer. You never answered my question on how you know Lord Stargazer.”
“I don’t know Lord Stargazer. A friend of mine, Kai Eversea, must have contacted him for help.”
“Eversea? Is that what he told you his name was?”
I had a feeling that I wasn’t going to like where this was going. But I couldn’t stop myself.
“Yes.”
She tapped at her vambrace, held it forward. A hologram of Kai floated in midair. “His Grace, the Duke Kai Ni Qian Stargazer, Earl of Eversea, Baron of Nahreen, Royal Knight General of the Most Honourable Order of the Eclipse. Is this your ‘friend’?
I felt something I hadn’t known, crack within me. It hurt so much it seemed impossible that there was no sound.
What had he said to me?
I do various things in service to my House. I’m not supposed to talk about them.
Nissa gave me an oddly sympathetic look. “You know he’s almost certainly betrothed don’t you? For someone like him, it’s arranged at birth.”
I could not help but remember his last words to me before he left.
You are my destiny, Seria.
Sharp pain radiated into my body, cutting me with each memory of his words. I looked at my hands, almost surprised to see that they weren’t bleeding.
Nissa reached for my hand, but I jerked back at her touch.
I looked at the gorgeous werewolf woman so out of place in my kitchen, just like Kai had been.
Something in me had always known that he was never supposed to be part of my life.
Stars, I was carrying his child.
Nissa’s eyes scanned me, almost too perceptive.
I knew, right there, that I couldn’t tell her about Kai’s baby. Already, she suspected something. I had to change the subject.
“Are you going to tell me that Nightclaw and Stargazer are mortal enemies?”
“Not exactly mortal enemies. We have been fighting on opposite sides of the last two or three wars though. I think your father might have killed his uncle or something.”
Taken By The Tigerlord: a sexy tiger shifter paranormal psychic space opera action romance (Space Shifter Chronicles Book 2) Page 4