Page 7 of Tara's Warriors

“Two men,” she murmured as she tried to hold onto the fleeting images from her dreams that were already burning away in the morning light. “Two incredibly hot, sexy men who were worshiping me.”

“That doesn’t sound like a nightmare.” Rachel chuckled.

Flushing, she shook her head, straining to hold onto her memories. “There was a ship…a big ship filled with hate and pure evil above us. A terrible ship. I…they were in great danger… Ugh, I can’t remember anymore. Where’s Jillian?”

“Eating breakfast with the National Guard.”

“What?”

“While you were sleeping, a lot has happened. Why don’t you get dressed and come grab some food? You’re not going to believe this shit.”

Chapter 2

Phin

Alarms blasted through Phin’s mind along with a mild electrical shock from his implant, shattering his dreams of a woman with pale blonde hair and skin as soft as aminlar’sfur.

Through his mental link to his battalion, the warning came through again loud and clear. Hive had been spotted entering the planet Ciltin’s atmosphere, and they were under attack.

Cursing, he rolled out of his bunk then dashed to his armor unit, his mind filling with information.

Ciltin was an ice planet on the edge of the territory controlled by the Hive, a rugged and inhospitable place inhabited by a quadruped race of blue furred creatures named the Qoulin, renowned for both their loyalty and fearlessness in battle. It was because of this fearlessness that they managed to hold off the Hive as long as they had, but the attacks by the race of psychopathic women were becoming more and more frequent. That was the reason Phiniar and his battalion were there. Ciltin provided a strategically important base for the Kadothia’s vast alliance, and the loss of the planet to the Hive would strike a major blow against them.

As he suited up into his green battle armor, Phin listened in on various data streams, cursing again as the size of the incoming enemy ships grew and grew.

Intelligence had indicated that there would be an assault, but nothing so big.

There were at least seven Hive mercenary ships, and one mothership that was more deadly than all seven mercenary ships combined. The mothership held the actual Hive members, twisted creatures with powerful mental and physical capabilities. The Kadothian males that were lucky enough to hold strong bonds with Kadothian Matriarchs were safe from the Hive’s psychic weapons, but those men were few and far between. Most races in the Bel’Tan galaxy were vulnerable to the Hive’s mental manipulations, and without the Kadothian Warriors to stop them, the race of sadists would soon overtake the galaxy.

All Kadothian Warriors on the frontlines held mental bonds with Kadothian Matriarchs, the women who ruled his planet. But those precious females were few and far between, leaving many Warriors with fragile bonds at best, and offering scant protection against the Hive. Though Phin tried not to think about it, his own bond was nowhere near as strong as it should be. His Matriarch, Lady Floriali, was a good woman—too good. She had bonded more than her fair share of Warriors, her compassion overruling her common sense. Not that he could blame her. Lady Floriali had lost three of her sons in battle against the Hive and would do anything she could to protect the Warriors of Kadothia. To make matters worse, she was old—incredibly old—and Phin feared that, at any moment, he’d feel the shattering of their bond as she passed into the next life. Because of Lady Floriali’s advanced age, most of the Warriors bonded to her were kept closer to Kadothia. Unfortunately, the Hive seemed to be gaining strength and fighters by the second, while the Kadothian’s were losing far more battles than Phin liked to think about.

When the call had gone out for volunteers to defend Ciltin, he’d been compelled to answer. Something inside of him, the connection that bound his soul to the Lord of Life, urged him to go. While some of his fellow Warriors teased him about missing his calling to be a priest for the Lord of Life, Phin shrugged them off. For as long as he could remember, his strong connection to the Lord of Life had been a part of him—a pure, clean, strength that helped guide him through life. That presence in his heart rang like a bell when the call had gone out among the Healers for help.

His dream flashed through his thoughts again, and he paused as the power of the memory washed through him. The brief remembrance of the woman’s scent, full of life and the feeling of warm sunlight on his skin, had him catching his breath as the ghost of her essence teased him. The dream had been so real, so intense, that he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d had a true dream. If the strong and lovely female had been his bondmate, the woman he’d desperately spent the last hundred years searching for across the Bel’Tan galaxy.

For a moment, he paused, the memory of another male being in the dream teased his mind. He hadn’t been alone with hisalyah. No, there had been another male there with him in the dreamscape. An unfamiliar Kadothian Warrior, one whose mother had to be one of the catlike people from planet Soruta. The evidence of the other man’s lineage had been stamped in his wide, flat nose, sharp cheekbones, and slanted teal green eyes.

Could it be that he had a blood brother waiting out there for him as well? Longing filled him, the yearning for a family, a husband and bondmate of his own, threatened to overwhelm him. He had to take a deep breath, to try and push aside his own needs and focus on the battle ahead. If he hoped to find either of them, he needed to survive what promised to be a vicious onslaught.

“Senior Healer Dobrin,” came a voice in his mind, cutting through his thoughts. “We need you on the surface at coordinates Z1938. Ground combat, two mercenary squads have attacked a youngling village. The forcefield is still holding to keep out the ships, but ground troops have managed to infiltrate.”

Anger and fear tried to derail his rational mind, but he forced himself to remain calm. The Ciltin’s raised their children at home until puberty, then sent them away to a communal school for half the year once their young reached that precarious age between puberty and adulthood. Phin had spent many pleasant hours at a few of the youngling villages, teaching healing techniques to those that showed an aptitude for it. His throat thickened as he thought of all the bright, eager, friendly younglings being slaughtered by the Hive mercenaries.

“Senior Healer?” the voice from his com link said. “Do you read me?”

“Yes,” Phin ran through the mental stockpile of his healing packs, “I will depart in momentarily.”

“Lord of Life be with you, Senior Healer.”

“You as well.”

Now fully geared, he grabbed his pack of medical supplies and secured it as he sprinted through the wide hallway leading from the sleeping quarters of the barracks to the transport pods.

Thousands of Kadothian Warriors milled about the transport area in their black, brown, blue, and a scattering of green armor, their face shields already in place, hiding their identities. Normally, they would be teleported to their various destinations, but it wasn’t safe to use teleporters during an attack. There were all kinds of weapons that could be used to cause a disruption in the trip, resulting in partial teleports or men being lost entirely in the space between. Instead, they were forced to use transport pods. Made of a cloaking material that would blend into its surroundings, the capsules were a little larger than a fully geared Kadothian Warrior.

To Phin, they’d always reminded him of the size of a coffin.

Keeping his mind focused on his mission, Phin stepped into a waiting transport pod and braced himself as the arms and legs of his armor fused to the sides. In an instant, he was free falling through the air in the capsule, the craft shifting slightly as its micro rockets propelled him quickly to his destination. The screen on his helmet fed him a live picture of his transport streaking through the thin air of the upper atmosphere. All around him, the curvature of the planet’s atmosphere stretched out in a line of glowing blue touching the darkness of space, which quickly blurred as the pod streaked through the atmosphere toward its destination on the horizon. Splitting his attention between his surroundings and the battles going on below, he cursed at the mounting casualties. Help from a nearby planet was on the way, but the ground forces would be hard pressed to hold out long enough for it to get there.

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