Laura Jo Phillips

The Lobos’ HeartSong

Book Two of the Soul-Linked Saga

by

Laura Jo Phillips

Copyright © 2011 by Kathleen Honsinger

Cover art/design Copyright © 2011 by Kathleen Honsinger

All rights reserved.

DEDICATION

As always...

For my husband.  Thank goodness you have such an astounding amount of knowledge in your head about stars, planets, galaxies and just about anything else I need.  It is so much easier to ask you than to look it all up. And so much more fun, too.  Once again, and always, I never could have done this, and had so much fun doing it, without you.

For Mom, Grandma, and Great-Grandma---Thank you all for the creativity you passed along to me, as well as the heart to do something with it.  There is a little bit of each of you in these books, just as there is a little bit of each of you in me.

The Katres’ Summer

Book Three of the Soul-Linked Saga

by

Laura Jo Phillips

Available Early 2012

Chapter 1-

Will be available to read online soon.

Look for it at:

www.laurajophillips.com

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 end up having 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 took stock 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 what felt like 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 small sleeping compartment aboard the
Cosmic Glory
.  She knew 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 was unable to open them further than that no matter how hard she tried. 

A new voice entered the conversation taking place only inches away 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 toward her and placed a cold metal object against the bare 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 glittered with iridescence even in the dim light, giving off sparks of red, blue and silver 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 there were few of 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 beside 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.  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 and hear him, he would not have been pleased.

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 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 hadn’t been able to hear her father’s voice in her mind since she was a child.  Even so, she would never mistake his voice, and he was the only one who’d ever 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.  Until 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 over and over, 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 green and white.  She remembered that room, the white furniture with the green trim her father had painted on it just for her.  The ruffled curtains at the window.  The teddy bear she held in her arms.  She had not thought of any of those things for years, had not really remembered them until now.

As the adult Saige gazed around the dim room from behind the child’s eyes, she heard her father in her mind saying “
Come on Shi-Shi, use your head
.”  The girl she had been closed her eyes and thought “
Daddy can I have a drink of water please?
”  Her father’s laughter 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 all she saw was a dark figure carrying a glass of water before the memory faded away.

“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 Landon’s secret ident cards and bank account balances.  The former security officer had been under Jackson’s supervision for two 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 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 order for the
Cosmic Glory
.  He said he had a repair request for a faulty door in number six 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 six, 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.  Clark had good instincts and if he hadn’t liked the substitute maintenance man, Jackson thought there was probably a good 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 switched it on and began scrolling through the entries.  “There doesn’t appear to have been a repair request filed 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, turned off the lights, closed the office door behind him, and walked quickly up the hall toward 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 long silence 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, thank the stars!  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.”