Jaci's Experiment (5 page)

Jaci’s eyes widened in shock. “It could hurt him? Healing me can harm him? Why didn’t he say something?”

Rick tilted his head, watching her most un-Alvian responses. “It would weaken him. All healing does.

Some kinds of healing gifts work differently, but the few healers I’ve known have all experienced power drain of one sort or another. We give it to the people we heal, you see.”

“Oh, no.” Jaci collapsed into her seat. “He touched me earlier today, but he did it yesterday too. Several times. It felt so good. He calmed my turmoil. But I don’t want to hurt him in order to make myself feel better.”

“He’s a mind healer?” Now it was Rick who sounded shocked.

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Jaci nodded. “He said he can do both. He can heal physical injuries, but also problems of the mind.”

“Wow.” Rick sat on the couch next to Callie, putting his arm around her shoulders, playing absently with the ends of her hair. “He must be something. I’ve heard rumors of mind healers, but they’re few and far between. The power needed is enormous, and the drain of that kind of work is serious.”

Jaci shot to her feet. “I’ve got to get back! I’ve got to check on him!”

Callie could feel the Alvian woman’s panic and she knew it would do her no good.

“Wait, Jaci. Think. You can’t show them your fear and I might just have a way to check on your man without your people knowing. Will you let me try?”

Jaci sank back down still agitated, but willing to listen. “How?”

“My brother is a strong telepath. You probably have heard of him. The Alvians call him Hara.”

“Hara is your brother? Holy shit!”

“She’s definitely been hanging around with humans,” Rick observed with a chuckle at the earthy expression coming out of this very proper Alvian woman.

Callie smiled. “Are any of your Breed friends telepathic at all?”

“David is. And so is Michael. Ruth too, but she has to be close to someone to hear them, she said.”

“All right,” Callie said, leaning forward, “here’s what we’re going to do.”

After a bit of planning, Callie contacted her brother using a secure crystal. Jaci was warmed by the obvious love in his voice as he talked with his sister and she filled him in on Jaci’s situation. She was growing uncomfortable with how many people were learning her secret, but she realized quickly that she needed them. She needed a support system of some kind if she were to survive, changed as she was.

Hara was in the northern city and took only a moment to seek out David’s mind in the pens beneath. He reported back that David was tired, but otherwise all right. David 45

himself had said he was fine, but Hara could see deeper. He could use his extraordinary gifts to feel the energy levels of the mind he contacted, and he reported the truth back to his sister.

“Dave wants to know how Jaci’s doing. Actually, both he and Mike are a bit irate. They’re worried about her going off with someone they’re calling ‘that scumbag Grady’. Do you think they mean our old pal Grady Prime?” Callie chuckled at her brother’s humor but Jaci was too on edge.

“Tell them I’m fine. Grady Prime would never harm me.”

Apparently he heard that through the communication crystal because he answered her directly. “I think they’re more worried that he’s going to put the move on you. They sound very possessive. Why’s that?”

She didn’t understand all of his words, but the tone was clear. “I don’t want him.”

Callie caught her attention. “You and I both know with a man that highly ranked in your society, it’s not a matter of what you want.”

Jaci shrugged uncomfortably. “Yes, he has asked me to consider having sex with him again, but I don’t think he would force the issue. He seems to think that even with his rank, because he’s a soldier, he’d be insulting me.”

“Again?” It was Rick who caught her guilty flush. “You’ve had sex with him before?”

“Only once,” she admitted uncomfortably, “and only because it was my duty. He’s an elite. I was filling in for the girl who usually services him for sample collection. It was last week, just after the test agent started to change me and he seemed to notice how much I…uh…well…how much I enjoyed having sex with him. He told me he liked it and wanted to do it again, but he gave me the choice to seek him out. I haven’t and I won’t. I don’t want him.”

Two pairs of Breed eyes watched her in shocked silence. It was Hara who came to her rescue, his voice sounding through the room over the communication crystal.

“I can’t tell them that.”

“No!” she shouted in alarm. “You can’t!”

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“I just said that, didn’t I?” He seemed to chuckle a bit at her vehemence. “I’ll tell them not to worry. I’ve known Grady Prime all my life and I know he wouldn’t force himself on any woman. That’s a truth they can find some comfort in, but if I were you, I’d straighten out this thing with them when you get back.

They are jealous men and they really seem to hate Grady for some reason.”

“He’s the one who finally captured them,” she told him despondently. She wasn’t looking forward to facing her men?her friends, she corrected herself?with the news.

She heard Hara sigh on the other side of the connection. “That explains it then. I’m impressed it took Grady to get them. They only send him out for the hard cases.” He paused just a moment. “Look, Jaci, when you get back I’m going to track you down. Mara 12 won’t suspect anything if I make friends with you now that you’ve met my sister. I’ll find you to thank you for treating her so well. Praising you can only help your career, right?”

“I don’t give a shit about my career.”

Rick chuckled at her use of the human expletive that seemed to have become her favorite.

“I can understand that, given what’s been happening to you, but you can’t let my mother and her pals know that.”

Suddenly she remembered just who she was talking to. Hara was the son of Mara 12 and a Breed male with Hara DNA. Jaci knew because she was a member of Mara 12’s staff, though Hara’s origins weren’t a matter of public knowledge. He was half-Alvian and related to one of the most important scientists in the city. Undoubtedly he was watched closely, but he also deserved great respect, just by virtue of his DNA?Mara and Hara together was a formidable mix.

“So, I’m going to find you when you get back, to thank you for being nice to my sister and you’re going to become my friend. My mother knows how close I am to Callie.”

“Why would you want to be my friend?” She was dumbfounded by the generosity of these people she’d only just met.

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Hara chuckled and it warmed her. “I think you need all the friends you can get right now, Jaci. There are precious few of us with entry to the Alvian culture who can understand and experience emotion. I’m hoping in the long-term we can help our human friends and family by influencing Alvian society for positive change and understanding.”

“I’d be happy if they’d just leave me alone,” Jaci grumbled.

“I understand your feelings, but what about your friends? What about Mike, Dave and Ruth and her baby? Don’t you want them to have a better life too?”

“I do,” she said softly, “but what can I do to help that? I’m only a Jaci and not of high rank.”

“Let me worry about that, sweetheart.” Hara’s voice was calming and soothed her distraught senses, even over the crystal. Only one other man had ever called her by that human endearment and she desperately wanted to feel his arms around her again.

“Tell David I miss him,” she said softly, “and that I won’t let him touch me again unless he promises not to drain himself.”

There was a short silence while she imagined Hara passing on the message telepathically.

“He says you can try to keep him away, but you won’t succeed.” He chuckled. “And Mike’s jealous as hell.”

Her heart lifted for the first time. “Tell Michael not to worry. I miss him too. Just as much.”

“Just so you get the full picture, she Hums with both of them.” Callie chimed in, sharing Jaci’s secret with her brother.

“Really?” Hara sounded interested and a bit amused. “Well, that’s a nice development. Shall I explain to them what it could mean?”

Jaci’s heart started pounding. “I tried, but there was no time. We only have about ten minutes each day.

This is all still so new.”

“Well, I have all night to talk with them now that we’ve established contact. I can tell them about the tests if you like, and my own observations of my father’s mating with 48

Mama Jane, as well as my sister’s experience. It might help. Resonance mates are a wholly Alvian concept and not something they would have experienced in the old world.”

“I think that’s a good idea, Harry,” Callie told her brother. “I’ve given her a small crystal she can use to do the tests. If they are mates…” She let the sentence drift off.

“If either or both of those men find that Jaci is their true mate, I’ll do all in my power to see they can be together. It’s the least the Alvians owe humanity for taking and changing their world. But we have to take this one step at a time, and I’m going to talk to Papa Caleb too. Maybe he’s seen something.”

“Thank you, Hara. I fully realize that you don’t have to do any of this for me and I can only surmise you are a wise and kind person. You have my gratitude.” Jaci’s formal words rang clear through the room and her heart was a bit lighter. Somehow that feeling of hope was bubbling up to the surface again, even if she had no real reason to think the future would be any better than the present.

“I think we’re going to be good friends, Jaci. I’ll look for you in a day or two. Until then, take care.”

Jaci took his words to heart. She would have to be extra careful not to show her expanding emotions.

They were getting stronger all the time now and each new revelation stunned her with its intensity.

“I love you, Harry.” Callie said to her brother, signing off with clear affection for her sibling, so far away.

They ended the communication and Jaci just sat there in shock for a moment. So much had happened in such a short time.

“I don’t know what to say.”

Callie laughed, putting her small hand over Jaci’s and passing some of that amazing empathic warmth to her, making her feel slightly better. Jaci marveled at the small Breed woman’s intense power.

“Say you won’t mind when I request Mara sends you from now on to check my baby’s progress. I like you, Jaci, and I want to help you.”

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Jaci felt a tear slip from her eye. This woman had a huge heart and Jaci could learn a thing or two from her. Silently, she nodded, unable to speak lest her emotions get the best of her. It was a terrifying feeling, but it was also sublime in its way.

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“You’re the one who warned us when that other tech was coming,”Mike accused the new voice in his mind telepathically. They’d been talking back and forth for a good half hour or more now since Harry had sought them out.

“Guilty as charged. I monitor the pens from time to time to see how they’re treating everyone, but my mother doesn’t know it. She’d be pissed if she found out, so keep it quiet, okay?”

“Why? Who’s your mother?”Dave’s tone was suspicious. They really didn’t know who this guy was except that he was an incredibly strong telepath and undoubtedly human. Or was he?

They could actually feel his sigh in their minds
. “I’m half-Alvian. My mother is the lead scientist in
this city, Mara 12. My father is human. His name is Justin O’Hara. The Alvians call me Hara, but
I prefer Harry.”

“We’ve heard rumors about you, kid. Son of a bitch. They actually did it. They bred with a human just to see how the baby would turn out.”Mike was clearly disgusted by the idea.

But Dave was more understanding.
“You’ve probably had it pretty rough, Harry. Thanks for
leveling with us. And thanks for the warning the other day. You saved Jaci a lot of trouble.”

“My sister filled me in on what happened to her. Tough break. But my Uncle Caleb says it’s one more link in the chain that will save humanity. He’s a strong precog and he hasn’t been wrong yet.”

“You think what happened to Jaci is a good thing?”Dave’s question was cautious.

“More importantly, does your precognitive uncle believe it?”Mike was more practical, as usual.

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“Let’s put it this way,”Harry said seriously,
“if she turns out to be compatible with one or both of
you, you’ll celebrate the day she got sloppy in the lab. Having a true mate is a blessing, especially
now that human women are so scarce. I know, I’ve seen the relationship my father has with my
step-mother and the one my sister has with her mates. They’re lucky people and if either of you
are so lucky as to have already found your mate, you’ll have my eternal envy.”

“So how do we know if she’s this?
what did you call it
?
resonance mate? She told us about the
humming phenomenon, but she didn’t have time to tell us the rest and we weren’t able to find
much on the viewer.”
David’s question was clinical, but excited nonetheless.

“My sister gave her a crystal. The next time you’ve got her to yourselves, put the crystal nearby, then take her in your arms.”

“I think I like the sound of these tests,”Mike murmured with a touch of humor that all three men enjoyed.

“The first test is the Hum. She said you both Hum with her. That’s good. One down, two to go. The second test is the Kiss. With the crystal nearby, kiss her and the crystal should glow reddish-orange. The Hum will increase too, but I guess you won’t be able to hear it since you’re human.”

“What’s the third test? Is there a third?”Mike wanted to know.

“The third test is the Embrace. Touch her skin on skin and deepen the kiss, fitting your body to hers intimately. The crystal will shine yellow like the sun and the Hum will increase as well. After that, there’s only the Joining and from what I’ve heard, when you join with your true resonance mate, the crystal will shine with the light of a thousand stars. I’ve never experienced it myself, but to give you some idea, my sister and her mate caused such an energy rush during their first joining, half the crystals in this city glowed and she was over three thousand miles away.”

“No shit?”Dave used his favorite expletive though there was a bit of awe in each of the three men’s joined minds.

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“One or both of you could be her mate, so you might have to get used to the idea of sharing,”Harry warned.

“I think we can handle that. We’re not proud of it, but since the cataclysm, we’ve shared women.”Again it was Dave who was so forthcoming with details Mike would rather have kept to himself.

“Are you brothers? I only ask because my step-mom is mate to all three O’Hara brothers. I was working on that theory until my sister found her mates who are completely different species.”They could hear the dismay in his voice even telepathically.

“We’re cousins. We had a business together before the cataclysm and we’ve always been close. Being gifted in the old world, you know, it made us stick together.”

“Yeah, back then we had to hide our psychic abilities, now it’s the thing that saved us.”David’s tone was dry.

“You’re both telepathic, but I sense more. Dave, you’re a healer, right? That’s what had Jaci so up in arms that they called me. But what about you, Mike?”

“I’ve got a tiny bit of empathy and sometimes I can mind read, but my biggest skill is that I’m a dreamwalker.”Mike used the slang term for telepaths who had the ability to insert themselves into other people’s dreams. It was a rare as well as a somewhat tricky gift, just like mindreading, which was another slang word for high-level telepaths who could pick up on the thoughts of other people even when they were not being directed to them.

“Made me a bit of a shark in business,”Mike continued, “
but I tried never to abuse the information I
learned from my rivals too much. It’s hard to believe that was over twenty years ago now. I’m
getting to be an old man. What day is it, kid? Do you know?”

“September twenty-second. Why?”

“Damn, my forty-sixth birthday just passed. Jaci’s too young for me.”

“Well, actually, Alvians don’t age like you did. She’s probably about the same age as you chronologically, but you’ll have to ask her to know for sure. Their lifespan is about five or six hundred years, as is yours now.”

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“What?”David was clearly shocked.

“Oh, I guess you didn’t realize. When Mara first took my Uncle Caleb from the family for study, I brokered a deal with her. By then she realized the humans left on Earth after the cataclysm most likely carried at least some Alvian DNA. Hara was one of their famous explorers and he was lost to them. He probably stayed here on Earth and was one of my distant ancestors. You two probably also have Alvian ancestors back in your family’s far past. Anyway, you have the gene that would make you age like an Alvian, but it was turned off by your human side. I asked her to turn it back on so my father, uncles, step-mother and siblings could live longer, but I recently found out Mara’s been doing it to all the human prisoners so she can study them longer. She doesn’t want to take the risk that she might lose the traces of Alvian DNA you all carry by taking too long to discover its uses.”

“Holy shit.”Dave was as eloquent as ever.
“So you mean that she turned off our aging gene two
years ago when we were caught?”

“Probably, but I can try to check your records to be absolutely sure.”

“Do that, would you, kid? This is big news and a little hard to take in.” Mike picked up the slack for his shocked cousin.

“Hang on a second, I’ll be back shortly.”

And with that, Harry was gone from their minds.

The two cousins stared at each other.

“We’re going to live five hundred years?”

“Or maybe six.”Mike added helpfully, equally stunned as his cousin.

“Holy shit.”

Far above the pens in the city, Harry was hacking into his mother’s computer system. He chastised himself for not looking for this information before, but he was glad he’d checked now. Mara had apparently decided, with the High Council’s approval, not to take any chances on losing more of their ancestors’ DNA. She’d blanketed the remote areas of

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the Earth with an airborne agent that would infect every human who breathed it, altering their DNA so they ceased to age as a normal human.

That meant his new friend Mike wasn’t actually forty-six, but more like thirty-six or even younger, depending on when he’d been exposed to the agent. She’d started distributing it almost fifteen years ago.

This news was too big to keep to himself. He had to tell his family, but first, he had to tell Mike. He owed the man that much for giving him a reason to check.

He reached out gently with his mind, finding the man easily now that he knew the path.

“Hey, Mike, I have good news, I think. They didn’t administer the agent when they caught you. I just discovered my mother’s team started blanketing the Earth with a gene-altering agent about fifteen years ago. You were probably exposed back then because they tested you when you were caught and your Alvian aging gene had definitely already been activated. Dave’s too.”

“So what you’re saying is I’ve got basically forty-six years worth of living in a thirty-one year old body?

And I’ll age about one year physically for every fifty years of actual time?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Holy shit.”