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  “You’re the doctor,” Rast muttered. Lifting his shirt, he turned so that Sylvan could see his back. “Well?”

  “Oh!” Nadiah couldn’t help gasping. Right along Rast’s shoulder blades, running the length of his muscular back, two long, red welts had appeared. Just like my dream, she thought, remembering the nightmare she’d had earlier. I foresaw this. But why would the Goddess send me a vision of an allergy attack? Unable to stop herself, she touched one thick red welt lightly. It seemed to throb under her fingertips and Rast jumped.

  “What?” he demanded, turning his head. “What do you see?”

  “I’m not sure exactly.” Sylvan frowned. “I suppose it could be an allergic reaction but I’ve never seen anything like it. Most of the time a patient will break out in hives all over or—oh!” he ended in surprise.

  “They’re disappearing!” Nadiah exclaimed and indeed, the long red lines running along the human detective’s shoulder blades were fading as suddenly as they had appeared. Soon they were nothing but faint, white scars no thicker than a thread.

  “You never told me what they were,” Rast complained. “I can’t see my own back, you know.”

  Sylvan shook his head. “It appears you might have had an allergic reaction of some kind but it seems to be over now. Is your skin still itching?”

  Rast frowned. “No…no, it’s fine now. That’s weird.” He pulled down his shirt. “My, uh, mother told me when I saw her last that I had an injury there, on my back, when I was a kid. “You think whatever you gave me might have reacted to the old scar tissue somehow?”

  “I suppose it’s possible—you are human, after all and I injected you with Kindred compounds.” Sylvan sounded thoughtful. “We heal faster and better than you do—perhaps the Kindred components were simply trying to heal the old wound.”

  Rast shrugged his shoulders experimentally. “Well it feels find now. You think everything is okay?”

  “I think so, yes. But if you want to stay another day and let me observe you…”

  “No.” Rast shook his head decisively. “The longer we stay the longer that Y’dex bastard has to yank on the blood bond. We need to go get this over with.” He looked at Nadiah. “Don’t you think?”

  Reluctantly, she nodded. She would have loved to have another day or two with her friends and family aboard the Mother Ship but Rast was right—they needed to confront her intended and get the challenge over with. Besides, Y’dex had given them exactly one solar week to get back to Tranq Prime. If they took more time than that, her parents might declare a forfeit and hand her over to her fiancée the minute she stepped off the ship.

  “All right.” Sylvan sighed. “I suppose there’s nothing left to say except safe journey. May the Goddess, the Mother of All Life, hold you safe in the center of her palm and give you victory in your quest.” He hugged Nadiah one last time and despite herself, she felt hot tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. “Goodbye. Be well,” he murmured in her ear.

  “I’ll miss you.” Nadiah clung to her cousin in desperation and then hugged Sophia again too. “Both of you—so much.”

  “We’ll miss you too!” Sophia was openly crying, which made Nadiah feel a little better about her own tears. “I’ll pray you come back to us soon.”

  “Me too,” Nadiah whispered. With a last, backwards glance, she climbed into the small silver ship and strapped herself into the passenger seat. All her other goodbyes had already been said back at Sophie and Sylvan’s suite—there was nothing left to do now but go.

  Rast pumped Sylvan’s hand once more in the human gesture of friendship Nadiah was beginning to recognize and then climbed into the ship beside her.

  “All right,” he said, working the controls with smooth efficiency. “Let’s go. Time to face the music.”

  Nadiah didn’t know what that meant but she did understand that she was leaving the one place in the galaxy where she’d been happy and truly free for the first time in her life.

  And though she prayed to come back to the Mother Ship soon, she feared desperately that she might never see it or her beloved Sophia and Sylvan again.

  Chapter Eight

  Merrick twisted the steering yoke on his small star-duster, aiming in the general direction of the tiny blue and white dot his star charts assured him was the planet called Earth. He’d heard it was nothing much to look at but he’d still been hoping to get there before this—a long time before.

  “Goddess damn it,” he muttered, running a hand over his shaved head. He kept his hair convict short because it was easier to deal with that way. Along with his massive seven foot seven frame and mismatched eyes—one gold and one blue—it made him look like what he was. A thug.

  Or that was what they called him growing up on Tranq Prime. Thug, low life, half breed, scum—you name it, he’d heard it. The good folks on TP weren’t known for their tolerance of anything different, especially if that difference was Kindred in nature. And Merrick had not one but two Kindred bloodlines in his heritage—the fiery Beast Kindred line that filled him with bloodlust and urged him to kill, and the chilly Blood Kindred line which made him cold as ice when he did so. The killing frost which came over him in times of violence and his huge size made him a male to be feared and avoided.

  Hybrid vigor—the scientific term for a half breed growing bigger, stronger, and faster than its parents. If you cross a lion and a tiger, the resulting offspring will dwarf every other animal around it. That was the story of Merrick’s life. Even in a room filled with Kindred warriors, he stood head and shoulders above the rest. And thanks to his mixed heritage, he had sexual attributes of both Kindred races—the mating fist of a Beast Kindred and the fangs of a Blood Kindred. Unfortunately, while a true Blood Kindred’s fangs only grew when he was angry or aroused, Merrick’s fangs were permanently elongated. They served as a constant reminder of what a freak of nature he was—a half breed that should never have been born in the first place.

  Despite the chilly temperature in the little star-duster, he wore only a black tank top over his tight black flight pants. The scars on his broad, bare shoulders proved his life hadn’t been easy but they were nothing compared to the scar on his face, a twisted white line that bisected his left eyebrow and narrowly missed his eye—the blue one—before continuing on down his cheek in a broken squiggle. That one had been done by his own father—or at least the man his mother had been living with at the time. Merrick had left Tranq Prime soon after that and he’d been on his own ever since.

  His childhood on the frozen planet was something he would rather forget. Back then, Sylvan had been the only bright spot in the black pit of his existence. The only true friend Merrick had ever had.

  “So what do I do to thank him for standing by me?” he growled to himself as he twisted the steering yoke again. “I go and fuck up his joining ceremony. Some friend I am.”

  He had been right on schedule until the Trissian pirates caught him in their energy web. They wanted him dead but Merrick wasn’t one to roll over and die. He hid in the guts of the ship, a one-male ambush, and waited for them to board his little star-duster. He wasn’t going down without a struggle— and it was a struggle which left every last one of the damn Trissies in a mangled, bloody heap at his feet. Only their pilot, who had stayed on their ship while the rest boarded his star-duster, had lived to tell the tale.

  Merrick didn’t remember much of the conflict. When the killing frost was on him, he saw nothing but red. Using no weapons but his fangs, which grew even longer when he was enraged, he ripped the pirates apart, tearing out their throats with his teeth and disemboweling them with his bare hands. And he didn’t stop—couldn’t stop—until every last one of the thieves who had dared to invade his ship was dead.

  Afterwards, his arms red to the elbows and his face smeared with their blood, he regretted killing them all. Not because of the pain he’d caused—they had wanted to cause him the same and worse. But because he wondered how much information they’d gotten. How