Shattered Earth (Shamans & Shifters Space Opera Book 3) Page 2

  He’d almost ignored the opportunity the Stealth’s mission provided for him to visit Earth safely and swiftly merely so as to stay clear of Kohia’s entrancing aura.

  The first time they’d met, he’d portalled in, uninvited, to her cousin Jaya’s in-laws’ home, and Kohia had met him with a blaster primed and ready to fire.

  Blaster fire was a sure way to painfully, if temporarily, incapacitate a shaman. Kohia hadn’t actually fired on him, but the threat had been there, and he’d adored her violent protectiveness.

  Nairo wasn’t a shifter, but he shared their fierce loyalty to family.

  Flames of sha energy flared in Kohia’s aura. She was beautiful and distracting, not just as an aura body, but as a woman.

  Starting a relationship with Kohia would be wildly inappropriate, Nairo reminded himself as being the focus of her attention set his senses blazing with sha-enhanced awareness and responsiveness. You cannot date a patient.

  Of course, there was no guarantee that Kohia would agree to be his patient, or rather, his test subject.

  “Why would you want to talk about me?” she demanded as the silence between them stretched out due to his distraction. There was sharp warning in her tone, but the sha energy in her aura flickered toward him more than away.

  He forced himself to concentrate on her face, rather than her personal energy. “If I determine it’s safe to attempt to trigger a shift in a volunteer while we’re within Earth’s sha energy fields, I think you’d be the best test subject. I’ve studied Vulf’s aura—”

  “Aura?” she interrupted.

  “It’s a term from Earth that shamanic healers have adopted to refer to how sha energy winds around and through a person,” he explained. “Your aura has certain characteristics in common with Vulf’s, primarily a stronger flow of sha energy than that of other shifters—although my sample has been small, obviously, given my limited research time—and bright flares of sha energy, as if your aura accumulates an excess…although ‘excess’ is the wrong word. There is no strain in your aura to suggest that you’re burdened by the additional sha energy flowing through you. You’re healthy.”

  “What a relief,” she said sarcastically.

  “I only meant…I didn’t want you to worry.”

  She stood and spun the pilot’s chair, before gripping the back of it. “Do you have any theories as to why I have extra sha energy?”

  “It could be natural, something you’re born with. Or it could be due to exposure to some catalyst.”

  Her fingers tightened briefly, pressing into the chair as claws might have done if she’d been in cat form. “You mean my cousin Jaya.”

  “It’s possible. Jaya has demonstrated unusual shamanic abilities. Perhaps her manner of using sha energy stirs up latent shifter abilities.”

  Kohia spun the chair again, and dropped into it. “You like her, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she trusts you.”

  He didn’t know where Kohia was going with her questions, but if it meant she’d agree to volunteer for him to study her, he’d answer them. “Yes. We’ve known each other since childhood.” His answer roused disturbing emotions. He’d known other shamans just as long, and recently discovered that a handful of them couldn’t be trusted. It had soured his trust in the Star Guild Shaman Academy and what it was meant to stand for: humanity’s service to Galaxy Proper, to all sentient species in the galaxy.

  “So why didn’t you ever hook up?”

  Nairo flinched back, appalled. “That would be wrong.”

  “Why?” Kohia hooked a knee up, slouching in her chair, suddenly amused.

  “Jaya…she…ugh. She could be my sister.”

  Kohia straightened alertly. “Really? She doesn’t treat you that way…” She frowned.

  He frowned even more. Her questions resurrected old guilt and anger at himself. “I’m four years older than Jaya. When her foster mother died, the Academy took her in as a boarding student. Most shamans are like me, and their talent doesn’t show itself until around twelve or thirteen. At that point, we’re brought to the Academy and taught how to use sha energy. Jaya was different.”

  He paused.

  “I know Jaya’s story,” Kohia said. “She was surrendered anonymously at the Academy as a toddler already capable of playing with sha energy. She was fostered out with the Ballantynes, which was fine as long as her foster mother was alive, but her foster father was a bastard who dumped her on the Academy so he could go off and be an all-important Shaman Justice.”

  Nairo nodded. He agreed with her scorn. Alex Ballantyne was a bastard not just for what he’d done to Jaya two decades ago, but for his much more recent attack on her and her mate partner, Vulf Trent. “When Jaya started at the Academy, it was my first year there, too. But I was four years older than her. All of us were four or five years older than her.”

  “That’s a huge gap when you’re kids.”

  “Kids adjusting to new powers,” Nairo clarified. He understood why he’d failed Jaya years ago. That didn’t mean he’d forgiven himself. He was a healer. Caring for others ought to be at the core of his being. “The problem was exacerbated because Jaya was proficient in sha energy use, while the rest of us were still adjusting to even being able to perceive sha energy, let alone access it to do things. It made her seem capable, when she was really just a scared, grieving littlie. I was overwhelmed adjusting to my talent and…I failed to help Jaya deal with her grief and fear. She retreated from us, just withdrew into herself. The teachers ended up taking her out of class for private tutoring for a couple of years until the age gap lessened between her and other new students.”

  He struck his fist into his open palm. “I should have been there for her as a big brother. You don’t need shamanic talent to provide someone with compassion and connection. After we failed her, she never opened up enough to give anyone at the Academy a chance to get close to her, but…you pegged it. I think of her as a younger sister. I kept an eye on her progress. She never seemed to need help.”

  “But you were there in case she did.”

  It wasn’t a question, but he nodded agreement anyway. “Not that I was able to help when it mattered. What Alex did, kidnapping her and threatening Vulf’s life, he should be jailed for—with a disrupter running.”

  Kohia’s eyebrows rose. She smiled. “Vicious. I didn’t know you were capable of it.” A disrupter was a recent human invention that prevented a shaman from accessing sha energy. Given that Alex’s ego was tied up in his shamanic talent, using a disrupter on him was a fitting punishment.

  “People have the wrong idea about healers.” It was a fundamental misconception that Nairo seldom bothered to correct. However, Kohia was a pirate captain. She wouldn’t hold that rank without having gained sufficient experience to understand his explanation. “A good healer has to be ruthless. Sometimes there are no good options, and damage has to be excised. Sha energy has its limits. In an emergency response situation, triage can mean leaving those hurt worst to die so that many can live.”

  Unexpectedly, Kohia leaned forward and grabbed his wrists, holding them apart.

  He flushed. He’d forgotten himself, and his agitation had shown in how he pounded one fist harder and harder into the palm of his other hand.

  She kept hold of his hands, turning her grip into a firm clasp. “I thought you taught healing at the Academy.” Nice, safe and protected, her dismissive tone said.

  His mouth twisted. Few understood the nature of his position with the Academy. He could hardly blame Kohia for being fooled by the deceit he himself had set up to protect himself from endless demands for his healing abilities. “You thought I was an academic, hands untouched by blood?”

  “Now who’s being dramatic?” She gave his hands a shake, and released them.

  He wished he hadn’t teased her. When she’d touched him, their auras had flickered against one another, merging delicately and arousingly. He stared at her eyes, and saw that her pupils
had widened.

  So she felt their connection, too.

  Satisfaction surged through him. Mutual attraction opened up possibilities, even if they couldn’t act on them while she served as his test subject for shifting. He told her the truth of himself. “I serve as an emergency response healer in disaster relief operations. I can’t respond to every call—hence my public status as an academic, not an active healer—but when a shamanic healer can make a significant difference another shaman at the Academy will open a portal for me so that I can travel to the disaster area immediately. Using another shaman’s portal conserves my sha energy for healing,” he added the explanation for her benefit as a non-shaman. “The collected sha energy in the crystal around my neck is a portable resource that I utilize when and where it’s required. As a side project, I’m hoping to collect some of the sha energy flowing around Earth. Jaya reported an abundance of it.”

  “That should be fine,” Kohia said absently. “What would you want me to do as your test subject?”

  He regretted that she’d brought them back to the original topic, but that was his ego asserting itself. There was no reason for Kohia to be impressed that, despite his academic cover story, he did actually help people. Absently, he noticed that the aura for the Freel, Aaron, was juddering, and straightened the core flow of sha energy through the man’s chakra fields. Aaron’s aura steadied. The rest of the crew were stable, Kohia among them.

  “What animal would you shift into, if you could shift?” he asked.

  “A tiger.”

  Powerful and dangerous. His gaze flicked to her red hair, the color of copper pots and pans reflecting firelight in an old-fashioned country kitchen.

  “That’s not my natural hair color, which is black.” She picked up the end of her braid and flicked it. “This is tiger-red because I dye it.”

  “An attempt to manifest your animal self.”

  “Now you sound like an academic,” she snapped.

  He frowned, aware that he’d offended her with the personal comment. He retreated to the safe ground of his shift-initiation research project. “As a test subject, I’d need you to attempt a shift onboard the Stealth, either while it’s on Earth’s surface or within its orbit.”

  “In contact with the flows of sha energy around Earth.” Kohia demonstrated that she understood his project, and something of how sha energy worked.

  “Yes. Will you?”

  Absently, she wrapped her red braid around her hand and tugged on it.

  Nairo felt that tug in his body, as if it was he who clutched her hair and they were having rough sex.

  If she noticed his sudden arousal, no sign of that awareness crossed her face. She studied the readouts of the starship’s passage through the wormhole. She was obviously thinking. A second tug of her braid confirmed that. But whether she was thinking about the starship’s journey or the risks of attempting a shift was unclear.

  “Vulf’s robot wolf form is significantly larger than a normal wolf. The safest place for me to attempt to shift is in the cargo hold. It’s empty at the moment, apart from our supplies. My tiger would have room there…if she emerges.”

  Her wistful sadness, as if she didn’t dare hope for her shift, snagged Nairo’s heart. He had long ago learned to distance himself from people. A healer burned out if they connected with everyone. He had his family and a few close, old friends. It was a way of protecting himself from the continual demands people made, consciously and unconsciously, for healing. “I won’t ask you to attempt a shift until I’m confident it has a chance of success.”

  Her green eyes narrowed. “Just how confident are you?”

  “Do you know anything about terraforming a planet to support human life?”

  She blinked at the apparent non sequitur. Like the predator she was, the blink indicated far more than mere surprise. She was considering whether to eat him now—in other words, push for a direct answer to her question—or allow a chase. She was a tiger shifter. Of course she chose the chase.

  He’d known that she was a cat shifter, one of the feline clan, before he’d requested passage on the Stealth’s mission to Earth. He’d learned the clans of the other crew members as well before boarding. The more information he had, the less excuse there was for error. He’d spent the journey time so far studying the crew’s auras for differences and similarities that might be caused by their unrealized potential to shift into different animal forms.

  Which still left open the question of why Vulf, the only shifter to successfully achieve his animal form, had done so as a robotic version. Had the desperation of surviving Earth’s nuclear winter driven an instinctive warping of the sha energy flow for the shift? But even then, that didn’t explain how the robotic form had so smoothly and efficiently formed. Vulf’s robot wolf form was a lethal predator. For a first attempt at something so radically new—and shifting from organic to inorganic form and back was the definition of radical—there ought to have been some stutters to the process. Some hiccups of function and form. Instead, Vulf’s aura held steady and vibrant in both forms.

  If he could be confident that Kohia’s aura would hold in the same way, Nairo would risk her attempting to shift—especially now that he’d heard the longing in her voice for her animal form.

  He watched her hands, steady on the controls, correct the Stealth’s headlong jump through the wormhole.

  Then she checked the readouts, nodded fractionally, and looked at him again.

  “Terraforming a planet is a rare specialization among shamans,” he began his sideways explanation of how he’d judge when it should be safe to attempt a shift. “But we’re all taught the basics of it. The starting point is to identify the existing flows of sha energy that engulf a planet. Some will flow like great rivers. Others are streams. Some are tiny and random, like snowflakes. Once the sha energy of a planet and its surrounding environment has been mapped, then the shaman who has accepted responsibility for terraforming the planet has a prioritized list of objectives. There are things that must be done, and in a particular order, for the planet to move in the direction of being capable of supporting human life. The shaman redirects the flow of sha energy to achieve those objectives. The first stage focuses on redirecting the most powerful sha energy forces, the rivers. They’re not really rivers.”

  “I can recognize a metaphor,” Kohia drawled.

  He nodded. “The shaman has to maintain these rivers in their new position, occasionally refining the route according to feedback, until the sha energy flow holds steady. Then the secondary streams are addressed. The process takes decades.”

  “But it’s still significantly shorter than the centuries that were required prior to shamans joining Galaxy Proper. You know, shamans capable of terraforming a planet are incredibly valuable.”

  He looked at her narrowly. “Obviously, I know that. Only, I suspect you have a different interpretation of just how to realize their value.”

  Her teeth flashed. “Pirate, remember? A shaman midway through a terraforming project would make a great hostage. The corporation investing in the planet would be forced to pay a massive ransom.” She was heart-poundingly gorgeous as she contemplated the diabolical cleverness of the scheme.

  “You wouldn’t…”

  “Kidnap a shaman?” She laughed. “Well, it worked for Vulf.” The wolf shifter had kidnapped Jaya, and now, they were mate partners and obviously happy together. Kohia’s laughter faded into a low gurgle of wicked amusement. “Do you want me to kidnap you?”

  Yes, please. Just him and her, alone. No responsibilities. No duty. Just honest desire.

  He’d have sworn he hadn’t moved a muscle, but she leaned forward, undeniable interest sparking in her eyes. She slid off her chair and prowled to him; leaned in. “Is that a ‘yes’?” Her breath whispered against his ear, warm and as tantalizing as the hand petting his chest.

  “No. I require you as a test subject for shifting on Earth. Kidnapping—or anything else.” He couldn’t resist add
ing that, not with her so close. “Personal wishes have to wait.”

  “Wishes, or desires?”

  How did the woman get a purring note into the last word, desires? He put a hand over hers on his chest, trapping the torment of her teasing caress.

  “I wouldn’t kidnap a shaman,” she whispered the confidence in his ear. “I don’t like hostage taking. It gets messy and emotional.”

  He turned his head to look at her directly, curious if he’d gotten her meaning correctly. “And you don’t do messy and emotional?” They weren’t talking about kidnapping anymore. They were talking about the attraction between them.

  “I’m waiting to find my mate partner. Anyone else is nothing more than filling in time.”

  The words were harsh. The desire in her eyes and pulsing in her aura was just as contradictorily fierce. She wanted him, even as she pushed him away and denied part of herself. She was setting boundaries before a relationship could develop.

  Nairo’s healing included mental as well as physical health. Boundaries were important. If you couldn’t respect another person’s boundaries, then a relationship would struggle; perhaps shatter under the strain. However, with Kohia, more than his ego resented where she attempted to institute her boundaries.

  “I hope you find your mate partner soon.” He spun the co-pilot’s chair to the left, enough to remove her mouth from proximity to his ear and her hand from his chest. He felt the loss of both, but not as much as he regretted the hope gone from somewhere inside him. He was not going to confess even to himself that his heart felt chilled.

  For the first time, he saw Kohia bewildered. For an instant, her hand hovered in the air, no longer touching him, and her mouth parted.

  Whatever she meant to say, if anything, or if she was dumbfounded that a man might refuse the emotional aridity of a purely physical relationship entered into knowing it would go nowhere—

  Nairo hauled his flaring aura under control. Anger served no useful purpose. He should be relieved that by her response Kohia had removed the temptation he might have felt to confuse his personal attraction to her with his duty to all shifters. “If you agree to be the test subject for shifting on Earth, I will chart the flow of sha energy in you in the same way that a shaman plans the terraforming of a planet. I have a sketch of how sha energy flows through Vulf both during his shift and as an inorganic robot wolf. I will overlay it with your chart and develop a map that ought to trigger your shift. Do I have your agreement?”