Hearts of Ishira (Hearts of Ishira Saga) (69 page)

“Ri found one of our ships,” Hunter said baldly, just for shock value, grinning as Jace blinked with surprise. It took the younger man just another moment to smile widely and hop out of bed, alert and ready for action.

“Where? How soon before it gets here? Which ship? Who was the commander?”

“Slow down!” Arianna laughed up at her mate. “It is still pretty far out, I think. I don’t know… I have no way of judging spatial distances using astral projection.”

“You… actually touched minds with someone out in space?” Jace asked, his eyes widening. Hunter grinned proudly at her. She lost her smile.

“Is that unusual?” she asked a little anxiously. Hunter, too, got out of bed, both men retrieving their pants and stepping into them. What a shame, to cover up such wonderful male bodies. She sighed.

“It has never happened before, that I know of,” Hunter admitted. He watched her for a moment, thoughtful. “I wonder if there’s something special about you, being human, that makes you capable of such a journey?”

“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “I guess it’s a possibility… But I still don’t know how I did it.”

“Do you think you could do it again?” Jace asked, excitement growing in him. “If I could scan you while you’re doing that, we might be able to figure it out.”

“Figure out psychic phenomena?” she asked, chuckling with disbelief. The men looked at her, bewildered.

“Of course,” Hunter said. “Why not? It’s just another function of the brain.”

She blinked at that then mentally shook herself. She had to remember that they had technology and knowledge that her world didn’t, yet. The possibility of being able to see what was going on in her noggin when she had her ‘psychic’ episodes intrigued her, though. Grinning at Jace, she said, “Let me get dressed.”

That was easier said than done, since she needed help dressing. And while both men wanted to help her to dress, neither one seemed to want it to happen quickly. She was sore in ways she had never imagined possible. She muttered about that when Hunter dragged her underwear on for her, which prompted Jace to want to re-examine her butt. She finally shooed both of them away and tugged on a tunic that went to her knees, just to dissuade them from further orifice invasions and posterior observations. They weren’t touching her for a week, at least, after their two-pronged last night.

She grinned to herself as they quickly brushed and braided her hair and secured the end with a leather thong. She was sore, but it had been totally worth it.

The three of them hurried to the med center. Because it was the middle of the night, there was only one medic on duty, and with no current patients to worry about, he was snoozing at the main computer station. Jace patted him amiably on the shoulder and, warrior that he was, the man was instantly awake and alert.

“Fire up the scanners, Jax,” Jace told him, moving toward the main diagnostic scanner and turning it on. He turned and looked at Hunter and Arianna. “Now… what were you doing when you found the ship?”

“A ship?” the medic asked, his head snapping up, hope shining in his eyes. Hunter grinned lopsidedly at him.

“We don’t know which one yet, so don’t let it get out, but Ri made contact with one of our refugee transports tonight.”

The warrior’s smile was brilliant, and he bowed his head toward her in respect as he hurried to follow orders.

“I was asleep and dreaming,” Arianna told Jace. “And I think I was touching Hunter. Our energies seem to grow quite a bit when we combine them.”

“That makes sense,” Jace murmured, flicking toggles and punching up commands on various pieces of equipment. “What we know of the brain of a Reader is that it somehow is able to attract and hold energy that ‘regular’ brains can’t. We still don’t know why, but we know that it does, and we can measure it. I’ve never heard of one Reader’s power enhancing another’s, though. That’s new. Hunter and Sean are the first we know of that is occasionally able to take pain from the injured.”

“I can do that, too,” Ri admitted slowly. The men both looked at her. She shrugged. “I’ve always been able to heal. Usually just in times of extreme duress. My baby brother once got stung by a hornet. He was deathly allergic to bee stings. He was going to die. There was no way to get an ambulance, a medic, there in time.”

“What did you do?” Hunter asked curiously.

“I picked him up, held him as tightly as I could, and prayed with all my heart for help.” She smiled at the memory. “This brilliant, white light shot down through my head, all the way down to my toes, encompassing both him and me. Then it left, a split second later, and when it did… there was no bee sting. No swelling, no anaphylactic shock, nothing. My brother was fine.”

“And you?” Hunter asked gently, sensing more. She frowned and shook her head.

“I smashed the hell out of the hornet, for stinging him. I was a nervous wreck. He was only five, so he didn’t really think much of it. But I knew what could have happened, and what
did
. When our mom came home from work, he told her about it. She… didn’t take it well. Things like that just aren’t accepted in our world.”

“But you saved his life,” Jax pointed out, looking confused. “On our world, you would be considered a hero.”

“On mine, people prayed for my wicked soul, because only God is supposed to be able to heal. So since I’m not God, they figured the power that saved him had to have come from evil.”

“That’s idiotic,” Hunter snorted. “All power comes from the gods. It is how you choose to use it that creates good or evil.”

“See,” Arianna said, throwing up her hands in frustration. “That’s what I’ve been saying for years!
You
get it!”

“Of course I do,” he said, grinning at her. “But then, I am a healer, as well.”

“Okay, if you two are done admiring each other’s godlike statuses, I would like to do this,” Jace said, chuckling. Hunter and Ri grinned at each other, then sat on the scanner as Jace instructed them to do. “So, you were asleep, Ri, and apparently snuggling.”

“Yup,” she agreed happily, nudging Hunter’s arm with her shoulder. She felt his contentment through the touch.

“It seems that each time we share energy,” Hunter said slowly, analytically, “Our connection gets deeper, stronger.”

“Is that normal?” Jace asked, looking at his brother. Hunter shook his head.

“When I Read with Mom or Dad, Sean, or any of the others, we just… touched minds. With Ri, it’s different. It’s like our minds… intertwine with each other, almost like we have the same brain, the same soul, for just a moment.”

“Is it the same with you?” Jace asked Arianna softly. She looked up at Hunter, sharing an intimate look with him.

“Yes.”

“Must be nice,” Jace sighed beneath his breath. Ri felt the stab of envy he felt for his brother and mate. But he shook that off and forced his attention back to the matter at hand. “What I think I’d like to do is take scans of each of you at rest, then while Reading a normal person, Reading each other, then Reading each other while touching. The last scan will be of the two of you, joined mentally, with Ri trying to reach our mystery commander out there in space, if possible.”

“If I can,” Ri promised.

For an hour, they took all the readings that Jace wanted, repeating some exercises several times just to be sure he was getting accurate results. Jax sat at the main station, taking notes on all of the data while Jace studied the scans. Finally, for the last scan, he had them both lie on the wide scanner bed, facing one another. Hunter, recalling how he’d sent Arianna the coordinates, reached up and held her face between his big palms, resting his forehead to hers. Jace started the scan immediately, then told Ri to try to project herself out toward the ship.

Closing her eyes, Arianna opened her mind to Hunter’s energy, allowed it to swirl into her, flow through her, expand to fit her body, then she released her own, augmenting his. They fed on each other’s energy that way for a moment, letting it build. Ri focused on the touch of the mind out in space, remembering what it felt like, how it looked inside her head, the brilliance, the shimmering vibrancy of the colors. With a shout she didn’t know she let loose, she sent her mind soaring through the atmosphere, out into the vastness of space, in the direction she had gone before.

Her mind homed in on the other as though it was a beacon shining brightly through the void. With an exultant burst of energy, she found the commander of the ship in his office off the bridge. She felt his surprised smile as he recognized the touch of her mind, and she allowed him to sense her return grin. Wordlessly assuring him that they were just doing an experiment, she flitted about in his head for a moment. She got an intense feeling of desire from him, the need to meet her, to see her in person. She laughed and let him know that it would be soon. Then she was able to focus on his eyes. Just his eyes. Strange, that she could see everything else, but not his face.

You have Hunter’s eyes
! she thought.

The man sat up straighter, startled at her revelation.

You can think in words?
he tentatively asked in return, then...
Hunter? You know him?

He is my mate,
she told him proudly.
So is Jace. Do you know him, too?

The man didn’t answer for a moment. When he did, she felt the raw emotion in him and wondered at it. She got the sense that he was swallowing a lump in his throat. Before she could analyze the feelings, her energy began to flag, and she sensed Hunter’s energy growing weaker.

I have to go back,
she said, regretfully.
It takes a lot of energy to do this, apparently.

But you’ve only just got here,
the man’s mental voice was soft, regretful.

Hunter is grounding me, feeding me energy. He can’t keep that up for very long. I have to go. I’m sorry.

Wait!
His mind called out to her.
Tell Hunter and Jace… keep their curiosity in check until I can come keep an eye on them.

Who
are
you?

Just tell them that. Then you’ll know.
There was a sweet mental caress, then amusement.
Their mate, huh?
Now I
really
can’t wait to meet you!

Why?

His answer was a chuckle that for some reason left her both unsettled and excited at the same time.

When she drew back into her body, Hunter was pale and breathing heavily, shaking with the effort of grounding her. Arianna felt fine though. Realizing he needed help, she quickly urged some of her energy into him, bolstering him until he looked better and was almost back to normal.

“Wow,” she breathed against him once he had recovered a bit.

“Yeah,” he agreed, holding her close. “Wow.”

Jace let them sit up while waiting for the results of the scan, and looked at them expectantly.

“Hunter, did you hear the message he sent?” Arianna asked, cocking her head at him. He shook his own.

“It’s like before…I could barely sense him at all. I know it’s someone I know, but other than that…”

“Maybe this will help. He said to tell you, both of you, to keep your curiosity in check until he can come keep an eye on you.”

The men froze. Hunter’s face showed his shock as he looked at his brother. Jace’s eyes were shiny with… hope? She sensed their desire to believe what she’d just said, but also their unwillingness to hope too much.

“He has Hunter’s eyes,” she felt compelled to tell them, for some reason thinking it would make a difference.

“
Sean
!” Hunter breathed, his face dissolving into a brilliant smile of pure joy. He clasped Jace to him, the brothers exchanging huge bear hugs. “It’s Sean!”

Jace and Hunter swept Ri into their arms, holding her tightly, murmuring over and over again their thanks for finding their brother. When they let her go and stepped back, she was staring at them.

“Brother?” she whispered. The men nodded. Ri’s brain called up the memories of Hunter at the cemetery, telling her of his former team, how it had originally included all four of his brothers.

And that in his society, teams tended to share their lives with one woman. She stared up at her mates, her throat working though no sound came out.

“Um, guys?” she was finally able to croak, “Does this mean that I’m going to have another mate?”

The echo of Sean’s mental chuckle reverberated through her mind.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Hunter promised to answer her questions about their mating traditions, but Jace insisted on looking at the brain scans first. Ri frowned at him, knowing they were stalling.

“I think I’ve figured something out,” he said excitedly, bringing up several scans. Ri and Hunter crowded together to see the screen. Jace grinned at them. “The one on the right is Hunter’s brain. It’s a bit dimmer than yours, Ri, which is no more than I suspected.”

He got a grunt from Hunter and a scowl that promised mayhem of a brotherly fashion, once they were done here. Ri choked back a chuckle.