The Dracons' Woman: Book 1 of the Soul-Linked Saga

by Laura Jo Phillips

  The Lobos’ HeartSong

  Book Two of the Soul-Linked Saga

  by

  Laura Jo Phillips

  Available Christmas 2011

  Chapter 1

  Saige Taylor opened her eyes and saw nothing. She closed her eyes tightly and counted to ten, forcing herself to count slowly. When she reached ten, she lifted her eyelids a tiny bit at a time. It didn’t help. Either there was unremitting darkness with no trace of light anywhere, or she had gone blind. Her breath began to come in short, harsh pants and she realized two things at once. The first was that she was breathing only through her nose because her mouth was gagged. The second was that her fear was causing an all too familiar red tinge to encroach around the edges of her vision. It was a warning. If she wasn’t careful she was going to push herself into a seizure.

  She closed her eyes again, determined to keep them shut. It was easier to deal with the total blackness when her eyes were closed. Then she began to focus on her breathing. The gag in her mouth made it difficult to breathe evenly and deeply, but that actually helped her to focus more. A few minutes later she had her breathing under control, though her entire body felt shaky.

  “All right Saige,” she said silently to herself. “Time to figure out what the heck is going on here.”

  She began to take careful inventory of herself and her surroundings. A few minutes later she was again focusing on her breathing. She had discovered that her hands and feet were tightly bound, that she seemed to be enclosed in some sort of cloth bag, and that she was in a padded box.

  It took far longer for her to calm herself this time but she knew that if she didn’t make the effort and she allowed herself to become too excited, she could die. Having never really lived, dying was not an option she wanted to explore. When she was finally able to take a long deep breath, she took a moment to just be thankful for it.

  “How did I get here?” she wondered. “And, why am I here?”

  She concentrated on relaxing her mind and body before casting back, trying to remember what had happened. At first all she could remember were vague, blurry images and she wondered for one heart-stopping moment if she really had gone blind, and this was a memory of her vision fading.

  As the memory unraveled in her mind, her vision cleared and she remembered waking up, still in her little sleeping compartment aboard the Cosmic Glory. She knew she where she was because she felt that big lump just under her left hip that had been plaguing her for the entire week she had been sleeping in that hard, narrow bed.

  It was the murmur of low male voices that had awakened her, but while her brain insisted that she leap from her bed and demand to know what they were doing in her compartment, her body refused to do so much as twitch. She had to struggle to force her eyelids to open a fraction, and she had been unable to open them further than that no matter how hard she tried.

  A new voice entered the low conversation taking place mere inches from her, but she could not turn her head or even shift her eyes to see who was speaking. Then a figure moved into her field of vision, reached towards her and placed a cold metal object against the skin of her arm.

  The compartment was dimly lit, barely more than a soft glow illuminating the small space. But it was enough for her to see all she wanted to of the figure standing so close to her prone and paralyzed body.

  The figure was undeniably male, very tall, and easily the most ethereally beautiful being she had ever seen or imagined. His skin was the color of new snow and sparkled with iridescence even in the dim light, giving off sparks of red, blue and gold as he moved. His eyes were blue and, like his skin, iridescent, so that it was hard to focus on them because of the constant flashes of light and color. He had very long golden hair that rippled and flowed around his face and over his shoulders as though it had a life of its own.

  The man was so beautiful that Saige thought he could have easily passed for an angel. Except for one thing. Saige knew with absolute certainty that he was the most evil being she had ever laid eyes on. Looking at him gave her the same feeling she got when she looked at images of spiders. If there was one creature that she was glad to know was extinct on Earth since the Bolkin Wars, it was spiders. But, even as creepy as they were, spiders weren’t evil. They were just bugs. The being standing so close to her helpless body was completely and totally malevolent.

  The man raised the metal object and looked at it, his beautiful face becoming even more stunning as his perfectly sculpted lips stretched into a smile, revealing flawlessly even, white teeth. If Saige could have moved, she would have shuddered with revulsion.

  “Yes, definitely this one,” he said, his voice perfectly pitched and melodious. “She is berezi. I will send a prime controller down for her. Please be certain Lio is informed that she is to receive special treatment.”

  Saige did not know what a berezi was, nor had she ever heard of anything called a prime controller. She did know that whatever the man meant by ‘special treatment’, it would not be anything good for her. She also knew that if she had been able to, she would have gone into a full blown panic attack. Or worse, a seizure. She supposed that was the good thing about whatever they had done to her. She could not move, therefore she could not react involuntarily and give herself away. She had no doubt that, had the being known she could see him and hear him, he would have done something particularly unpleasant to her.

  That was the last thought Saige could remember having until waking up to find herself bound and gagged in a box. She wondered briefly who the man had been, but just picturing him in her mind made her feel sick.

  She felt her breathing begin to pick up again, and focused on that for a little while. Once it was back under control, she wondered what she should do. Surely there had to be something she could do besides just lie there and wait for whatever was going to happen next.

  “Come on Shi-Shi, use your head.”

  Saige was so shocked that she almost forgot to breathe. She could not remember the last time she had heard her father’s voice in her mind, but she knew it had been years. Still, she would never mistake that voice. And only he had called her Shi-Shi.

  There had been a time, after his death when she was still a little girl, that she had heard him talking to her every day. She had clung to that voice, depended on it to help keep the loneliness at bay. But the doctors had told her that she was living in the past and that it was not a good thing to do, so she had eventually silenced the beloved voice. Years later, when she’d become an adult, she had tried and tried to remember what he had sounded like, and the things he had said to her. But no matter what she did, she had never been able to conjure him up in her mind again.

  “Why now?” she asked herself. “After all this time, why now?”

  She ran his words through her mind again and again, but could not make sense of them. Finally she gave up and focused on her breathing again. The moment she stopped trying to force the memories, they came.

  Suddenly she was five years old again, sitting on a bed in a semi-dark room decorated in pink and white. She heard her father in her mind saying “Come on Shi-Shi, use your head”. The little girl she had been closed her eyes and thought “Daddy can I have a drink of water please?” Her father’s laughter had sounded in her mind, followed immediately by the bedroom door opening. Saige looked up, excited to see her father again even if only in a memory, but at that moment the memory faded.

  “Was that real?” she wondered. It felt real, but why had she never remembered any of that before? It seemed to her that she should have been able to remember doing something so incredible.

  “Use your head Shi-Shi,” her father’s voice repeated in her mind.

  “Okay Daddy,” she thought. “It can’t hurt to try I suppose.”

  Jackson Bearen shut down his vid screen and rubbed his eyes wearily. It was late, he was tired, and he was no closer now to solving the mystery that had plagued him for the past several months than he had been the day he’d discovered Barc Lando
n’s secret ident cards and bank account balances. The former security officer had been under Jackson’s supervision for three years and Jackson had never suspected the human male of anything more dangerous than a lousy personality. Only after the man’s untimely death had Jackson discovered he’d been into something dirty, and by then it was far too late to ask Barc anything. Jackson had a bad feeling that whatever Barc Landon had been into, it had something to do with the spaceport, and that was Jackson’s territory. He just hadn’t been able to discover what it was yet.

  He stood up, stretched and tapped the vox in his ear before reaching for the electronic clipboard sitting on the corner of his desk.

  “Hey Clark,” he said when his brother answered. “I’m ready to get something to eat. How about you?”

  “And then some,” Clark replied. “Rob is too.”

  Jackson frowned down at the clipboard in his hands, not really hearing Clark’s response. “You there Jackson?”

  “Yeah, I’m here,” Jackson said after a moment. “Didn’t you tell me that a maintenance man signed in to work on a cargo bay door today?”

  “Yes, while you were with the Lobos filing the turn around request for the Cosmic Glory. He said he had a repair request for a faulty door in Number 6 Cargo Bay.”

  “I was just glancing at the day’s work-order log and I don’t see anything for any cargo bays on here.”

  “Huh,” Clark replied. “I’m sure it was Cargo Bay 6, Jackson. Actually, now that I think about it, there was something a little off about that substitute maintenance guy.”

  “Off in what way?” Jackson asked.

  “Nothing specific,” Clark replied. “I just didn’t much like the guy.”

  Jackson thought about that for a moment. Clark had good instincts and if he hadn’t like the substitute maintenance man, Jackson thought there was probably a reason for it.

  “Hang on a second.” Jackson set the work-order log down and reached across his desk for another electronic clip-board. He flipped it on and began scrolling through the entries. “There doesn’t appear to be a repair request for that door either,” he said into the vox as he quickly typed in a global search command. He had the results two seconds later.

  “No repair request, no work order, and a sub maintenance man that you thought was off,” Jackson said.

  “I’ll round up Rob and meet you out there,” Clark said.

  “See you in a few,” Jackson responded.

  Jackson put the clipboard back on his desk, flipped off the lights, closed the office door behind him, and walked quickly up the hall towards the employee lounge. He felt something niggling at his brain, a sensation that was mildly familiar but he could not quite place it. He picked up his pace a bit, an odd sense of urgency growing in him.

  He unlocked the door to the employee lounge with a swipe of his card in the reader, noting that it was empty as he hurried through it. Nothing unusual about that at this time of night, he thought as he worked his way through the neat groups of tables and chairs to the safety door in the far west wall. Another swipe of his card and he was in the access tunnel that led to the huge cargo bays where shuttles, transports and other ships offloaded their cargo.

  “help me.”

  Jackson froze in his tracks, every sense sharply focused as he tried to pinpoint the source of that small, weak, cry for help. After a few long moments he let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding and started walking again. Perhaps he’d imagined it.

  “Help me, please.”

  Jackson stopped again. The cry was stronger this time. Strong enough for him to realize that he had not heard it with his ears, but with his mind. He was familiar with that form of communication, but only with his brothers, and only when they were in their bearenca forms.

  Jackson didn’t waste time trying to figure out how a woman was able to communicate with him in that manner, and he was certain that it was a woman. Instead, he sent a call back.

  “Where are you?” he asked, pushing hard with his mind and his magic to send his thoughts back along the same path she had used to reach him.

  “You can hear me? Oh, please help me,” the voice came back to him in a rush and he sensed that the sender was close to panic.

  “Yes, I can hear you,” he said, keeping his thoughts calm and even. “I need you to tell me where you are.”

  There was a moment’s silence. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I think I’m locked in a box. I can’t move and it’s too dark to see.”

  Jackson thought quickly. “Alright, I have an idea,” he said. “Just be patient one moment.”

  He waited for her small “okay,” before he tapped the vox in his ear. He told Clark what was happening and outlined his plan. When he was finished, he began walking slowly down the access tunnel once more.

  “I’m going to keep walking along here and I want you to keep talking to me,” he sent. “I think that the closer I get to you, the clearer you will sound.”

  “Okay,” the woman said. “May I ask you your name please?”

  Jackson smiled. The woman was locked up somewhere and yet she was being as polite as though she were at a social gathering. “My name is Jackson,” he said. “My brothers, Clark and Rob are going to approach from the other end of the building, so if one of them starts talking to you don’t be afraid.”

  “Okay, Clark and Rob,” she repeated. “I sure do hope you are able to find me soon.”

  Jackson kept walking slowly, noting that the woman’s voice was getting clearer in his mind as he approached Cargo Bay 6. His sharp ears picked up the low murmur of male voices. He tapped his vox.

  “Clark, our woman is in Cargo Bay 6 and she has company,” he said softly.

  “Someone is moving the box. Is it you?” the woman asked fearfully.

  “It’s alright,” Jackson sent back as he hurried the last few feet to the door and carefully pulled it open a crack. “We’ll get you out of there.”

  He broke off communication with the woman as he peeked into the cargo bay. He saw three human men standing around a small wooden crate that he was certain contained the woman he’d been talking to. The outer bay door that the maintenance man had “fixed” that morning was standing partially open, and there was a ground truck backed up to it.

  “It’s my turn Lucky,” said a small round man with thick glasses and a scraggly beard. “You got the last one, and Frank got the one before that. This one is mine.”

  “Shut up Willy,” said a tall man with a huge belly and stringy hair. “It’s your turn when I say it’s your turn.”

  The third man laughed, a high cackling sound that hurt Jackson’s ears. The tall man, Lucky, reached out casually and clipped the man on the jaw, effectively stopping the laughter. Instead, the man now moaned with pain, both hands cupping his jaw.

  “Shut up Frank,” Lucky said. Frank subsided at once, though he continued to hold his jaw and sniffle.

  Lucky turned back to Willy and bent down to pick up a small silver case which he set on top of the crate and opened.

  “I got orders that this one gets special treatment. That means she gets the prime controller and that takes longer to kick in. After that, we get to break her in to test it before we take her to Lio. You’re too soft and tender for that, Willy.”

  “That’s not true,” Willy retorted. “I can be just as rough as you if I want.”

  Lucky straightened up, holding a small silver object in his hand. He tossed the object lightly into the air and caught it, his face splitting into an ugly grin. “Okay, I’ll let you have her, but on two conditions. You gotta do exactly as I tell you, and it’s gonna cost half your pay.”

  “That’s so unfair!” Willy whined loudly.

  Lucky lifted a hand and Willy flinched back. “Fine, you take her then,” Willy said angrily, lowering his voice. “No bitch is worth half my paycheck. But next time is my turn.”

  Jackson had heard more than enough. He pushed the door open and calmly stepped into the Cargo Bay
, a cavernous room with metal walls and concrete floors littered with various mechanical lifts and pallets for loading and unloading cargo. The three men gaped at him for a long moment before Lucky reached into his pocket for a weapon. Jackson waited patiently while the man pulled the small laser gun, pointed it at him, and fired. Jackson smiled as he felt a small flash burn on his thigh. That was all he needed.

  He threw back his head and roared as he transformed into his bearenca, an eighteen foot tall bear-like creature with foot long fangs, razor sharp claws and a shiny coat of dense white fur, broken here and there with large patches of black. He lowered himself to all fours and stalked towards the three human males.

  The one called Frank was the smallest and the fastest of the three. He ran for the cargo bay door, slipping easily through the small gap between the door and the ground-truck. Jackson let him go without a glance. He’d be back.

  He kept his attention on the tall one named Lucky. He was the meanest of the three and, Jackson thought, the wiliest.

  As Jackson stalked closer to him, Lucky aimed and shot at him repeatedly. The man was a terrible shot, only managing to graze Jackson a few times. Not that it mattered to Jackson. His body healed wounds from a mere hand laser weapon in seconds.

  The man called Willy, his eyes wide with fear, his mouth hanging open in shock, was scuttling backwards as fast as he could move his feet. Jackson wasn’t sure if the man was aiming for the door or not, but a few moments later he slammed backwards into the metal wall at full speed and knocked himself out.

  Jackson shook his huge head in disgust, his eyes never leaving Lucky, the only one of the three who had not tried to run. Lucky slipped the small silver object from the case into his pants pocket with one hand, while aiming the laser gun at the wooden crate with the other. He grinned widely, baring stained yellow teeth. Jackson paused, still several feet away from both the crate and Lucky.

  “So you’re one of them bear things,” Lucky said with a smirk. “Well guess what? There’s a woman in this box and if you come one…”