Immortal Becoming
Immortal Becoming
Wendy S. Hales
The Enlightened Species Book One
AMAZON KINDLE EDITION
PUBLISHED BY
Wendy S. Hales
Immortal Becoming © 2012 Wendy S. Hales
All rights reserved
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This ebook is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Cover Design by Ronnell Porter
Editing by Alisa Carter,
The Professional Editing Edge
Second Edition editing by Patty Esch
Formatting by
Bob Houston eBook Formatting
Table of Contents
About the Book: Immortal Becoming
About the Book: Immortal Becoming
Shane Einar is a five hundred year old Volaticus Elven warrior, sworn to duty and honor. His species has inhabited the earth since the beginning of time. The sources of vampire, elves and fairy myths, Volaticus are in reality something altogether different. He never expected to meet Jess Reed. A female living amongst humanity completely unaware that she is Hulven, a human/Elven hybrid race of Volaticus, or that she is on the cusp of Becoming into her Elven traits. Shane should turn Jess over to the Symbiosis of Species Counsel, SOSC. His attraction to her along with her ability to enrapture him with a smile bars him from it. He rightly suspects that this female is his bloodmate.
Jess had always been psychic, a painful and confusing fact of her life. With Shane’s loving support she learns to control her abilities and discovers the psychically enlightened species that share this world.
Together they sacrifice the power of their bloodmating in the battle to save females from breeding cages under the control of an Elven rogue.
Dedication
For Larraine, my personal angel:
you made my dreams possible
Acknowledgments
With overwhelming gratitude to the Enlightened Species Readers
A huge thank you to: my mother, Lacey, Shavaughn, Kim, and Adrienne for loving the characters as much as I do and for allowing me to run off at the mouth for hours when I need to clear out the mental cobwebs and get to work.
To my husband who loves my quirks, you’re the best.
To my children who make sure I never forget how to laugh.
I am so proud to be your mother.
To my sister whose support is immeasurable, unwavering and true.
None of this would be possible without my friends and family who stick by me always.
Chapter One
This is going to hurt.
Pulling into the parking lot of the academy, Jess could feel her mental barriers being pounded by densely populated emotions. She’d be lucky if she didn’t end up in a seizure after being exposed to this much psychic stimuli.
After two anti anxiety pills and twenty minutes of breathing meditation in the parking lot, Jess was ready to give it a shot. “How’d I let Eric talk me into this?” she grumbled to herself for the thousandth time since last night, when she had finally caved to her foster brother’s incessant hounding. He had taught this class himself numerous times before he actually joined the police academy. Why couldn’t he teach it now that he was in the academy? Seemed to her that this entire group of cadets should already be black belts with Eric in their ranks.
Speak of the devil. “Jess, you made it. Only fifteen minutes late.” Eric ran up to meet her. “I didn’t mention to my instructors that I saw you pull into the lot twenty minutes ago.”
“I can leave if I’ve missed the class,” she said sarcastically, half turning back toward her Jeep. She would give anything to be able to jump in that beautiful new Jeep. Her first splurge ever, a reward for working her ass off and living on Ramen noodles for the last five years. She had been able to pay off the small business loan she’d taken out to buy her half interest in The Ryu, so she deserved it. Even if it meant another year of Ramen and working morning till, well, morning to pay for it. At least she was accustomed to that life, or lack of life, depending on your perspective.
“Oh hell no, you are not getting out of this. You promised.” Eric pointed at her, adding a pout guaranteed to always make her cave. “Besides, I can’t wait to see all those instructors in there bitching about you being late and getting their asses handed to them, not to mention the fact that you can help me impress one of the lady cadets. She may be off limits now, but after graduation, I am so going for that. The girl is hawt.”
Eric had come along way from the scrawny, freckled faced, red-headed dork he had been when his mother had taken Jess in as a foster kid. He was overconfident, with big blue eyes and perfectly placed freckles on skin that could somehow still tan. At six foot two and a lean one-ninety-five, he had his pick of girls. They’d hovered around him non-stop since high school. The only thing remaining of that eleven-year-old kid was the red hair, currently cut military short for the academy, making him look more youthful than twenty-one.
Whatever had possessed Ellen Reed to bring a teenage girl straight out of juvie into her single-parent home, Jess still couldn’t understand. Her love and loyalty to both Ellen and Eric were fierce. They were two of only four people in the world for whom Jess would go into a public setting, ever. This class was a testament to that. She could already feel the effects of all of the emotions of the people at the academy.
In through the nose, out through the mouth
, she reminded herself, breathing slowly.
“There are only twelve cadets and three instructors, Jess. Is it too many people?” Eric asked. His blue eyes reflected genuine concern as he watched her practice her breathing exercises.
She shook her head without pausing from the rhythmic breathing. She didn’t bother telling him that the class did not adequately account for the full number of emotions and psychic stimuli that were attacking her. Her range of sensitivity was expanding and becoming more acute lately, another thing she’d kept to herself. She had no intention of worrying Eric or Ellen any more than they already were about her anomalies.
She could still see the horrified look on Ellen’s face during Eric’s high school graduation, when Jess had been overwhelmed. The psychic overload of an auditorium full of people created a squeezing pressure in her head. She thought it would explode. Instead she’d dropped into a seizure. Ellen had insisted that they take her to the hospital.
Once there the continued psychic bombardment had made matters worse. The doctors ran test after test. X-rays, MRIs, EEGs, everything they could think of with no results and no lessening of the pain. Jess cried in agony. Ellen and Eric cried with her in fear. Finally the doctors shrugged and sent her home with a sedative and an anti-anxiety prescription. They diagnosed her with complicated migraines, which she figured was the medical equivalent of saying they had no F-ing clue. Turned out that the anti-anxiety meds did help her manage some of the symptoms. Go fig.
That day had bonded the three of them even tighter as a family. Ellen and Eric had always known that Jess hated to be around a lot of people, but that day Jess finally confided in them about how much pain she endured and how she had learned to block herself from most of the effects when small numbers of people were around her. No matter what she did, too many people overwhelmed her defenses. Even Ellen and Eric could cause her some discomfort when their emotions ran high. That was rare and a pain that she would gladly accept to be a part of their lives.
Today she had agreed to face the pain and teach this class simply for the opportunity to see the happiness and pride shining out of her brother’s eyes. To marvel at the knowledge that his pride was in
her.
“So is there a particular instructor you would like me to single out for this ass-handing you mentioned?” She forced a small grin for her brother’s benefit and was rewarded with a glint of mischief in Eric’s eyes. He wiggled his eyebrows up and down, eliciting a snorted laugh from Jess.
“Officer Denbow,” he said. “He got the better of me in one of the classes I taught last year. Now that he’s my instructor, he gloats over me like a conquering Viking. I don’t think he wanted me to teach this class as his cadet. Deep down the dick knows he got lucky and doesn’t want to be spanked by me.”
Jess’s very first student had been Eric. She hadn’t even realized at the time that she was teaching him. She only remembered him coming home after school crying. The kids were teasing him about his freckles and red hair. Jess had hugged him until he had cried himself out, and then she took him into the back yard and started teaching him the first martial arts techniques she had learned when she had been a few years younger than he had been.
She was ten when she’d begun watching through the window of the Ryu at the classes being taught inside. Then she would race home and secretly practice everything she saw until she could do it perfectly. Those early moves were the first she’d shared with Eric.
Entering the gym, Jess braced herself against the psychic onslaught, wincing against a wave that didn’t come.
Amazing. Maybe the drugs worked better today,
she thought.
“
Shield yourself, female.”
A deep male voice resonated against her mind.
Jess gasped and looked around. Everyone in the room seemed to be intently listening to the police officer in the front of the class teaching about the proper use of pepper spray.