A sick feeling crept over Sevan. "Wait, are you thinking that this Stegian guy got his hands on her?"
Nina shook her head. "Not him personally, unless he"s found a way to travel about during suns up. He"s a vampire and a sorcerer. Your people feared him so much so that legend tells he arrived in chains and that it was the other supernaturals aboard the vessel that imprisoned him."
Jacquelyn closed her eyes and put her hand out, appearing to scan thin air. She squinted and then gasped. "No."
"No, what?" Nina asked. "I"m picking up residual blood spots near the fourth gate to the outer limits. My sensors indicate it is Lorelei"s blood. If that"s true then she is badly injured."
Sevan charged toward the door only to find Christian grabbing hold of him. "Let go of me. I"m going to get my wife."
"We are all going to get her. Trust me when I say it will take the entire group to ensure we get to her."
"What if that guy f.u.c.ks with your head again? Huh?" Sevan needed to lash out at someone. Christian was the closest target. He shoved hard, breaking the man"s hold on him. The beast within roared dangerously close to the surface. It felt as though it might actually break free. Unsure if he could really control it, Sevan looked to his brother with wide eyes. "If something goes wrong and I shift, don"t let me hurt anyone."
"If you shift?" Nina asked. "You mean you are not straight humans?"
"No," Jacquelyn answered for him. "They both carry the gene of a lion within them. It was a recessive trait, one that had been thinned to the point of barely registering. That"s why my sensors didn"t pick it up when their ship entered our atmosphere."
"Then how are you sensing it now?" Nina asked.
Christian touched Sevan"s shoulder and squeezed it gently. "Because the prophecy is true. The warriors that will help in the fight have been summoned to what was meant to be their home-they"ve come to grow into their full power and potential."
"Will we shift fully?"
"I would a.s.sume that in time you will. And I share your concern about not knowing if you will be able to control yourself the first time out." Christian narrowed his gaze on Nina. "Gather your men. Have them each cover an area and report to one another on their progress. Also be sure that each team is equipped with tranquilizers, should Lorelei"s husband and the father of your future niece or nephew lose control and shift, they are to shoot him with them and get him back to the compound. He can be put in a holding chamber until morning."
Nina shook her head. "He"ll never stand for that."
Sevan"s nostrils flared. "Listen, lady. I don"t know or care what your problem with me is but I can tell you this. I am not now, nor am I ever leaving Lorelei or our child. She is my wife and I love her more than life itself. If I become a threat to her you have my permission to shoot me in the forehead with a silver bullet."
"He means it," Jordan said, backing him up.
Nina smiled. "Good to know."
Chapter Eight
Lorelei lifted her head slightly and tried to make sense of where she was. The minute her gaze fell upon the bladed torture chair she knew right away-she was within Stegian"s compound, or castle as he so often referred to it. In its hundred and fifty years it had played home to countless murders and torturous acts. In fact, only six months prior Lorelei had found herself in a similar room, only Christian had been strapped to the torture chair while Stegian fought for control of his mind.
"There is my Lorelei," a deep, familiar voice said. "I didn"t think you"d wake yet today."
Lorelei did her best to sit up but her entire body ached and lying on the cold stone floor hadn"t helped that any.
"Samson?"
"Yes," he said, stepping over her body.
She stared at his shiny black boots and did her best to focus on them, not him. The pain in her chest wasn"t from a wound but from the knowledge that the man before her had owned her heart at one point in her life but was now a puppet for evil.
"Why do you not look at me, Lorelei? Have you not missed your chosen mate?"
"You gave that right up when you..." There was no way she could bring herself to say it.
Samson laughed, sounding so very much like his brother, Christian, that Lorelei forced her guard up, afraid she"d trust or believe him. "Are you still upset about our last meeting, Lorelei?"
He bent down and for the first time in six months, Lorelei looked into the face of the man she had mistakenly trusted with her life. While Samson had Christian"s same long blond hair and muscle bound body, he had a face that had often left him being razed for being as smooth as a baby"s bottom. It had also been one of the many things she"d loved about him. Sadly enough, his innocent good boy looks were the reason she"d fallen into Stegian"s trap six months earlier.
Samson ran his cool hand over her arm and tipped his head. "Your markings are gone. Why?"
He doesn"t know?
He jerked his hand away as if she"d burned him. "He has done it, hasn"t he? My brother has claimed you and planted his seed deep within you." Samson stood quickly. Sharp, dagger-like finger nails shot out as his incisors lengthened before her eyes, leaving fangs in place of his normal teeth. "Tell me, does he f.u.c.k you better than I did?"
Lorelei knew better than to answer. The thing that stood before her was no longer a Shamenian royal, it was a monster-a vessel for pure evil. Somehow Stegian had not only managed to break Samson mentally, he"d converted him physically as well. Samson now possessed his powers as a Shamenian and those of a vampire. If that wasn"t bad enough, his sire had been none other than Stegian himself.
Where once there had been emerald green eyes, there now lay black pools of hate focused solely on Lorelei. She shifted a bit and cried out as the open gash on her upper right thigh pulled slightly.
Samson smiled, looking every bit as evil as she knew he could be. "So sorry about that leg, Lorelei. My men tell me it was necessary, that you tried to fight them all single-handedly. Is this true?"
Narrowing her gaze, Lorelei let it go hard. "I won"t let you hurt Christian again."
"Ah," Samson tipped his head back and laughed, "It is so like you to be more concerned about others than yourself. What if I told you that my master has a new set of targets in mind?"
Sevan.
Lorelei?
The sound of Sevan"s voice in her head sent a surge of hope through her. Doing her best to hide her joy, Lorelei continued to stare at Samson with a hard look. Lorelei, baby, where are you? We"re all looking for you. Jacquelyn says you"re injured and it"s bad.
It"s just my leg. I"ll be fine.
Sevan"s worry was so great that Lorelei actually felt it through the mental link they"d managed to forge. True mates did that. Powerful true mates could do that and so much more.
The air around her grew heavy with the smell of stagnant water. For a moment, the scent of death seemed to coat her tongue, bringing her dangerously close to vomiting. She closed her eyes and did her best to control herself.
"Hag, what business have you here?" Samson asked.
Hag? Stegian was rumored to have a set of hags at his disposal. It was rumored that they were just as evil as he was. No Shamenian had ever lived to tell if the rumor was true or not. Now, Lorelei knew it was.
Think. How can I defeat a hag?
"The master has sent me to drain the child"s life force. His power can be harnessed and used to fight the rest of the group," a shaky, old voice said.
Lorelei didn"t open her eyes. Instead, she did her best to clear her mind of worry, of fear and most of all of hate. A pure mind was the only answer. If the hag fed off power, energy and emotion, Lorelei needed to be a blank slate.
Concentrating, the things around her seemed to amplify. The cold, hard stone floor now seemed to have a distinctly musty order. She"d smelled something similar as a child. The lagoons near the edge of the red sea were known to emit odd odors dependent upon the way the winds blew. Stegian"s castle wasn"t near the lagoons.
What was going on?
Opening her eyes, Lorelei found herself surrounded by overgrown foliage in shades of red, green and yellow. The red leaves, so long as they weren"t attached to a tree with a sage green trunk were safe. If they were and she was somehow nestled in a patch of poisonous ollenna trees then she wasn"t much better off than she"d been in Stegian"s dungeon. It was still a mystery how she"d even ended up outside to begin with. Could her own, inborn powers have kicked in and removed her from harm"s way or had it been the baby?
Concern for the safety of the child she now carried kicked in and Lorelei struggled to sit up. Pain rippled through her upper leg, causing her to cry out. The slightest ruffling in the bushes behind her told her she wasn"t alone. "Who"s there?"
"Me," Jacquelyn said, appearing next to her quickly. The young girl put her hand out and covered the wound on Lorelei"s leg. "This is deep and it"s infected."
"I"ll heal."
Jacquelyn"s penetrating gaze suggested otherwise. "I"m picking up traces of ollenna poison. You might have cut yourself on one of their razor sharp thorns when struggling or..."
"Or they could have deliberately put it in my wound." Lorelei bit back tears as she held her cry of pain in as well.
"b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l, Jacquelyn, I"ve not the strength to heal myself of something that major right now and I can"t possibly walk back to the compound."
Jacquelyn nodded. "I know. I"ve been trying to reach Sevan and the rest of them but Stegian is going out of his way to jam technology. He knew we"d come looking and he knew they"d need my help."
"Yeah, but did he know I"d end up out here instead of locked in a torture chamber with Samson?"
"Did he hurt you again?"
Lorelei snorted. "No, but a hag came into the room with the intent of draining the baby"s life force."
"How did you end up here?" Jacquelyn asked. "You just appeared out of nowhere and my sensors instantly picked you up."
"That, I don"t know."
"What do you mean she simply vanished?" Stegian asked, his jaw tight and his gaze hard. The urge to kill something was great. All that stood before him was one of the hags and Samson.
Samson shook his head, still appearing shocked by the entire affair. "Master, she simply closed her eyes and vanished."
"She came into her full powers," the hag said, looking back at him with milky-white eyes.
To his knowledge, the hags were all blind but somehow, they managed to see. The one before him smiled, revealing a mouth full of missing teeth. "It is the third eye, master."
"And did this third eye prove useful when the prisoner was escaping?"
Her already pale, light green skin seemed to lighten even more. Stegian couldn"t help but pride himself on the fear he could instill in others. "I await an answer."
"N-o," she said, shakily.
"I see." Stegian took a step forward. "Would you please enlighten me as to why I should keep you around? Samson fights on the front lines, killing Shamenians and Tegmen. What is it you and your sisters provide?"
The hag tossed her head back and shrieked as Stegian thrust his power out and through her ragged body. Her skin began to sink in on itself as he drained her body of its power.
The cell door blew open and the other two hags appeared. Stegian smiled, licking a fang as he did. They stopped instantly. "Master, we have located the Janelle woman. She lies near the lagoons. An energy force is with her. We believe it to be both natural and unnatural."
"Meaning?" He released his hold on the hag for a moment to hear the others out.
"It means that the woman is somehow emitting extremely high levels of energy and that something else, we do not understand what, is aiding her."
"The prophecy," Samson whispered. "It"s coming true."
There was a time when Stegian dismissed theories containing ancient prophecies. That was until he held the scrolls in which they were written and had a vision so clear that it did the unthinkable-it terrified him.
"I shall go to the lagoons, Master," Samson said.
"Take several others with you." Stegian stared at the converted Shamenian. "Do not think yourself better than an offworlder."
Chapter Nine
"Jordan, do you read?" Sevan repeated into his headset. "d.a.m.n thing isn"t working."
"It"s not your equipment, it"s the others. They can jam electronics. That"s why Jacquelyn could only reach so far to find Lorelei. They make it almost impossible for her signal to come through. Every now and then she gets the best of them, but it doesn"t happen too often," Nina said, her back to him.
"Can I ask you something?"
"You want to know who the others are," Nina said, stopping on the worn path. "You don"t seem to believe what Christian and I have already told you."
"Yeah."
"We spoke the truth, Captain. The others are your world"s nightmare creatures. The ones you gathered up and shipped away. We are not lying when we say that they are a result of Project Exorcism."
Sevan thought back and his eyes bulged as he thought back to all he knew about Project Exorcism. It had been called that due to the nature of the cargo being gathered and shipped out-vampires, werewolves, witches, anything that wasn"t human was either forced into hiding, killed, or placed on containment ships.
The deal had been struck with the paranormal leaders, allowing them to pick the planet they would relocate to.
They were given the choice of five, but only allowed to choose one. Five ships were loaded to capacity, only one arrived at the destination. The other ships were thought to have perished in the meteorite shower that occurred shortly after take off. No one had heard from them since they"d departed all those years ago, each carrying nearly a hundred military personnel, several top-notch scientists and doctors, along with several thousand supernatural creatures.
"How many of them survived?"
Nina laughed. "I couldn"t honestly tell you. It was our grandparents who were directly involved in the great coming." She took a deep breath before continuing. "From the stories and the records, the crash happened at dusk.
From all accounts, the human crew had come under attack from a select number of supernaturals who were not pleased with the idea of being cargo sent out into s.p.a.ce. I know that many lost their lives directly after the crash, but some were spared by the intervention of the natives that were here along with the aid of those supernaturals not believing death should come to all humans."
She slowed her pace a bit and glanced back at him. "Christian"s family was the head family, similar to a royal family. The head of the supernatural rebellion overthrew them almost immediately. That was no small feat. The people, my people, the Shamenians, who have lived on this planet since the dawn of time are not as normal as the humans who"d come here with the ship. We have abilities that supersede your kind. I believe, as do many of our scientists, that we were all one once, long ago, but that we separated somehow, spreading out over six different galaxies. I also believe that the environments we inhabited pre-determined our evolution from there. This would explain why by all outward appearances we are the same as the humans.
"I believe in many ways we are similar to," she seemed to search for the right words, "the magical ones. I"m sorry I do not know your history as well as I should. Lorelei is better at this than I am. We were all educated in your ways and customs growing up. There are still a select few pure humans here, but almost all are forced to live within the safety of the compound walls for fear of being slaughtered by the others."