Shattered Stars

by Theresa Kay

  Another shrug. “I can’t say I understand much of what my father does, but I do know Trel is a priority to him. He’ll protect her no matter the cost. Even if that cost is the other children.”

  SOMETHING BRUSHES ACROSS MY MIND. No, not something—someone. My sister. She’s here. She’s…

  I crack open my eyes. Where? How? Every inch of my body aches. My muscles, joints, and tendons are struggling to hold me together. The room spins.

  So. Damn. Dizzy.

  I push up to a sitting position. My upper body lurches back and forth, and I have to close my eyes again, pressing the heels of my palms to them in an attempt to stop the spinning.

  There it is again, the familiar touch of Jax’s mind. Or rather, the feeling of it. She’s not reaching out to me. She’s… training?

  Pieces of my shattered mind slide into place. It’s still cracked, but there’s enough of it left for me to cobble a few thoughts together and remember where I am and how I got here. And Jax. She visited me. She… left? No. I pushed her. I tried to hurt her. I—

  No. I won’t think about it. I don’t need those memories. I just need to function.

  Hard to do when the damn room won’t stop moving.

  They drugged me. That’s why everything’s so off. But… my fuzzy mind can only make one connection. To my sister. Not to everyone, and sure as hell not to him. I would happily spend the rest of my life like this if it meant my head was quiet.

  Something tugs at my arm. An IV hooked to a bag of clear fluid. I’ve been out long enough to need that? How long has it been? A day? More?

  And why am I awake? Wouldn’t they want to keep me out until they knew what to do with me?

  A groan rumbles up from my chest, and I pull my palms away from my eyes.

  I need to see Jax. I need to apologize.

  I need to get out of here.

  The walls press in around me, and my lungs freeze up. The room’s too small. There’s no air in here. There’s—

  No. I take a deep breath. I can’t lose myself to panic. I need to keep a clear head. Well, as clear as it can be while still clouded with drugs.

  This place is far from the E’rikon research facility. This place is far from Grandfather. Here, I have nothing to fear.

  Except what I might do if I lose control.

  I walk to the door on unsteady feet. “Hello?” My fist pounds against it. “Anyone out there?”

  No answer.

  Back to the bed, because this is going to hurt. I close my eyes and reach out with my mind. A stabbing pain accompianies the effort, but I push past it.

  Two human guards out front. Another on the floor below. And someone—an E’rikon!—headed this way. The E’rikon jolts when it feels the touch of my mind, but continues walking until it—she?—stands outside the door to my cell.

  A click. The door swings open and the E’rikon steps inside. Pale yellow hair and matching eyes. She’s unfamiliar.

  My head cocks to the side as she points a slim metal cylinder at me and gestures for me to get up.

  “Who—” My voices cracks, and I break into a cough. I pound on my chest with a fist and try again. “Who are you?”

  No answer. Verbal or mental. In fact… I squint at her, reaching out to her mind. She’s locked down as tight as she can be, not a single mental feeler in my direction, not a single stray thought or feeling.

  “What do you want?” I ask.

  She makes the gesture again. “Come with me.”

  “Who. Are. You.” I lean against the wall and cross my arms over my chest. As fuzzy-headed as I am, something seems off about all this. Why would the guards allow this E’rikon to march in here and open my cell? For that matter, how in the hell did she time it so well? Or did she? Was that why she was so surprised when I touched her mind? Because she thought I’d still be knocked out?

  She grits her teeth. “Very well then.” She presses something on the side of the cylinder, and it emits a high-pitched whine. A second later, an invisible wall hits me, knocking me back.

  What the hell was that? My head is pounding and my mind feels… numb, as if that wall put some kind of damper on the world around me.

  She tilts her head to the side, watching me.

  “Whaaa…” My mouth isn’t working. Neither is my throat.

  A smile creeps onto her face, dark and vengeful. She steps forward, reaches into her boot, and withdraws a slender metal… stick? No, there’s something glowing on the end. A blade? She kneels next to the bed and whispers something in E’rikon. Then her arms rise, bringing the blade of light to hover over the side of my neck.

  Her eyes meet mine. They’re full of triumph and pride. “May you rot in the human hell.”

  Blind instinct forces my arm into motion, knocking hers to the side and shoving myself up. She bares her teeth and takes another swing at me with the blade. A line of fire sears across my left palm as the blade slices into it. I grab her wrist with my other hand and yank her sideways, pulling her off balance. She topples over, only to be back at me in seconds.

  Whatever she did to me is wearing off. And fast.

  I duck out of the way, but this time I throw myself off balance. I crash to my knees. Any physical strength I had is near gone and I’m already out of breath. If this comes down to a physical fight, there’s no question I’ll be the loser.

  Would that be such a bad thing?

  She grabs my hair, pulls my head back, and once again positions her blade at my throat. She’s hissing something in my ear, words wrapped with hate and rage, but I understand none of them.

  And I don’t care.

  Until she switches to English. “You were supposed to be so powerful. Is your sister this easy to kill? How does she hope to defeat the Reva sire?”

  A protective rage crashes through me, clearing away the remains of whatever block she managed to put in place. Fire lines my veins, liquid heat I gather into a single mental pool and then send pouring from my mind to hers.

  I push up to a crouch and watch as she opens and closes her mouth in silent pain. She can’t even scream. She falls onto her side, her limbs twitching, and green blood bubbling at her mouth. Her eyes, wide with surprise and glimmering with agony, are glued to my face. I guess that stupid little gadget of hers was supposed to last longer. Sucks to be her.

  Smiling, I pull the heat away from her mind and send licking flames of it along her limbs and torso. A brush down her side. A caress on her cheek. It’s a pretty thing to watch her twist and contort and try to get away. She still can’t scream. I’ve taken her voice, and her hearing too. All she can do is feel my anger, watch me smile, and taste the blood in her mouth. E’rikon blood. The blood of the people who locked me up, chained me down, and tortured me. The blood of the people who tortured my sister. And the blood of the people who made me the monster I am. The horrible, hateful monster I’m now unleashing on the one before me.

  But she’s not human, so I don’t really care.

  Hatred has taken the place of my fiery rage—a deep, dark hatred for the E’rikon that’s been forming and growing ever since they put me in that white white room and sent that white white light into my head over and over and over…

  “What did they call that thing? That thing your people used on me?” I lean forward so we’re eye to eye, and I release enough of her mind and body to allow her to speak.

  “P-p-please,” she stutters.

  I click my tongue against my teeth and shake my head. “That’s not it.” Nose to nose now, I show her the whirling darkness that lives behind my eyes. “Why don’t you try that again?”

  “Kiun. It is called the kiun.”

  I rock back onto my haunches and launch a finger into the air. “That’s it.” Forward again, inches apart. “How does it work?”

  “I…” She shakes her head. “I do not know.”

  Press my lips together. Narrow my eyes. She doesn’t know. “Fine. I’ll improvise.”

  “What?” Her brow furrows, confusion, fear,
and pain written on her face.

  Agony screams up my arm, a raging inferno that burns away everything. Including the film of hatred shading the world around me.

  I scramble backward, away from the fallen E’rikon girl who just slammed that blade of hers into my upper arm. Smart and quick and desperate, that one. But not desperate enough to force her body into movement and get herself out of this room.

  Horror washes through me as I take in what I did. How I acted. How easily I slipped into the darkness and let it take me over.

  But wasn’t it fun?

  No.

  Maybe a little…

  My head cocks to the side as I study the defeated thing in front of me. Could I make her feel the anguish of the kiun with only my mind? How many times could she survive it? As many as I did? It wouldn’t take much time to find out. It would be simple. I—

  No. No. No. No. NO!

  I dig my fingers into the wound in my arm, needing the clarity the pain brings. I grit my teeth and push up to my feet.

  Her eyes her eyes her eyes…

  What did I do?

  Who am I?

  What am I?

  I dry heave. The only thing in my stomach is acid.

  I can feel it, the shadowy blackness, slithering in my head, pulling at my thoughts, twisting my emotions. My fingers scrabble at the wound in my arm, pressing deeper and deeper until I swear I feel bone. But it’s losing its effectiveness.

  “Get out of here,” I manage to say through gritted teeth.

  Eyes wide, she attempts to get to her feet, but her legs won’t support her.

  That thing inside me grins at its helpless prey.

  If she can’t leave, I need to. It won’t be held back for long, and I don’t think I can stop myself again. Maybe if I can find a quiet place to hide, away from things it wants to kill and maim, I’ll have time to get control back—as fickle as it may be. I’m putting anyone I come in contact with at risk, but it’s a risk I have to take. If I stay here… I’ll kill her… rip her apart… shatter her mind.

  Humans should be safe from me, and hopefully that’s all I’ll run into. With two fingers buried to their second knuckles in the flesh of my arm, I spin and run out the open door.

  TRAINING WITH VITRAD WAS MY worst idea ever. Why did I ever think he and I could work together? Not only do I have to put up with him—an even harder task now that I know more about how he’s treated Rym and the threat he may pose to Ethan—but he uses almost the exact same method of teaching Jastren did. It didn’t work for me then and isn’t working for me now. We’ve been out here at least an hour with no discernible progress.

  And I have an audience to my failure: Lir, Rym, and Kai.

  “Try again,” says Vitrad for the umpteenth time as he paces across the clearing. Cold. Businesslike. I’d like to remove that combination of words from his vocabulary.

  I close my eyes and reach for the mental connection, but nothing’s there. Vitrad is nothing but a big blank space, and the only thing I can hear is the breeze in the trees around us.

  I blow out a breath and shake my head. “It’s not working.”

  “Perhaps you are not trying hard enough,” he says. For at least the third time. Why did I suggest this again?

  “I’m trying. Maybe it’s your teaching that sucks.”

  Vitrad’s upper lip curls. “Perhaps your insolence or your laziness is the barrier to your learning.” And now I just want to hit him. I’ll admit to the insolent bit, but who is he to call me lazy? “My methods—”

  “Aren’t working,” says Rym in a dry voice. “Clearly.”

  The two of them lock eyes and have what I’m sure is a venomous mental conversation. Finally, Vitrad’s lips thin, and he steps back. “Fine. Make your attempt.”

  Rym releases a slow breath through his nose and turns his attention to me. He winks. “Everyone’s been trying to train you by starting with the link: simple mind-to-mind communication. But what you most need to learn is how to control your enhancements. So far you’ve only been able to access them when you were dealing with a strong emotion, like when Lir broke the bond. And when that happened, you used your shikiza based solely on instinct. Correct?”

  I nod.

  “With you, the link seems to come and go depending on the circumstances and who’s initiating the connection. The only people you can link to with any regularity are my cousin and your brother. It could be because of your unconscious use of the lingali or shield enhancement, but I’m not so sure that’s the case. Anyway, my guess is that you have been trying to do it backwards—learning the link to help you learn the enhancements. The link is normally instinctual to the E’rikon and leads into the ability to wield an enhancement, but with you—like almost everything with you—it’s different. So we need to… think outside the box.” He chuckles to himself, probably at his use of a human phrase. “I think we need to forget about the link for now and work on triggering your enhancements—to figure out ways that you might control them.”

  Damn. His idea makes a whole lot of sense. But there is one thing… “I used the link to connect to your dad in the city, and I accessed the shield enhancement that way. Why did that work?”

  “There are exceptions to everything, I suppose,” says Rym. “Or the strong emotion you felt in the confrontation allowed you to access both the link and the enhancement.” He shrugs. “It isn’t an exact science. Just a guess.”

  “So what do you think we should do?”

  “Well…”

  My eyes narrow. “I don’t like the sound of that. What is your plan exactly? Throw me off a cliff to scare me? Irritate me until I explode?”

  “That is the part I’m not sure about. I have been at the other end of your shikiza when you lost control. I would prefer—”

  Kai flies toward me and grabs me from behind, his arm locked around my throat. What the hell? My heart’s pounding as my fingers scratch at his arm. He’s cutting off my air. Blackness creeps in around the edges of my vision, and my struggles become more frantic. Can’t breathe. Can’t breathe. Fear is creeping up from my toes, icy cold and spreading.

  But I’m not frozen.

  I jam my elbow up and back into his chest, knocking some of the wind out of him. My booted foot slams down on his, and his hold relaxes enough for me to bend forward and retrieve the knife from my boot. I flip it in my hand and pull my arm forward in preparation to stab it backward.

  Stop! Lir’s voice halts the movement before it begins.

  Kai releases me, coughing from the hit to his chest, and holds his hands up by his sides.

  I stalk forward, one step, two steps, the knife angled in front of me as I approach him. “What. The. Hell.”

  He shakes his head, hands still raised. “I was simply following orders.”

  Orders? Orders?

  I spin on Rym, but he looks about as shocked as anyone. My eyes find Vitrad, who’s leaning against a tree and observing me with a calculating expression. Like he’s gauging my reaction. Because that’s exactly what he’s doing.

  I storm over to him, knife still in my hand. “Are you trying to get somebody killed?”

  “This is war, Jax. People will die,” he says in a voice laced with icy reason. “I thought it important to test your reflexes, though I had not taken into account the fact you might default to a physical reaction rather than a mental one. Besides, no one was hurt. I would not have let it get that far.”

  “Not let it get that far?” I sputter. “If one of my enhancements had decided to react, how exactly would you have stopped me?”

  Vitrad jerks his chin toward Lir. “He would have.”

  The fingers of my empty hand curl into a fist, and outrage locks my lips closed. Does Vitrad not care about anyone? He couldn’t have known for sure Lir could stop me, or even if it would have been safe for Lir to try. He could have gotten seriously hurt, and Vitrad doesn’t even care. As it was, nothing but my very new and very fragile control of my panic attacks kept me from doing
who knows what to the Vi’askari.

  “Next time you want to send someone in as a guinea pig, send yourself,” I say, quietly seething. I turn away from him and replace the knife in its sheath. “Rym, I think your idea has merit, but maybe I have trouble with the link because I’ve only actively tried to link to Jastren and Vitrad. Without a better way to predict the outcome of triggering my enhancements, I think I should first try linking with someone I can actually tolerate. Like you.”

  He shrugs. “I suppose we can give it a shot.” He claps his hands, leans forward, and stares at me intently for a few seconds. His brows go up and he looks at me expectantly.

  All I can do is give him a blank stare. I heard nothing, not the slightest peep.

  He grins at me. “Well. Probably best you didn’t catch that one anyway.” He winks. “It was a little disrespectful.”

  Lir gives him a droll look. “As if she expected any different from you.”

  Rym laughs. “You could always do this with her, cuz. I’m putting my life on the line for you, and that’s the thanks I get?”

  Lir’s eyebrow shoots up and he opens his mouth to retort, but I hold up a hand. “Stop it, you two. The joking around isn’t helping right now.” I point a finger at Rym. “And suggesting I might kill you isn’t making this any easier. Shouldn’t I be relaxing, connecting with my inner peace or something?”

  “Touch her,” says Vitrad. He steps forward until he’s standing with us, an unwelcome intruder. “That is what I did. Perhaps it was the physical contact that allowed me to link with her.”

  Rym waggles his eyebrows. “I’m willing if you are.”

  I roll my eyes, a small half smile on my face. But Vitrad glares at Rym. What an asshole. I can’t believe this guy is Rym’s father—laughing, smiling, clowning-around Rym. Then again, it wasn’t as if Vitrad had much to do with how Rym turned out—or much to do with him at all. I send a hard look back at Vitrad, but he’s not paying any attention to me.

  Rym’s smile doesn’t falter, but there’s a hidden pain in his eyes. He might not be looking at his father, but he must feel that glare. And who knows what the asshole might be saying to him. Can Rym block him out? The E’rikon don’t read thoughts so much as talk to each other in their heads, but can they mute someone if they don’t want to hear them? Or is Rym stuck with hearing his father’s admonitions? Plus, they’re family. Does Rym have to feel his father’s disgust too?