Mehanna swore that Grinnell and Tosci just vanished. It broke her concentration. She looked over at Lawaya, who was cheering her on. Mehanna had been stacking the fruits in various piles. When one hit her in the head, she looked up and wished she hadn’t. They were floating above her, but now starting to drop due to her lack of focus. With the movement of her hand, she froze them in space so she could walk out of range before allowing them to drop to the ground.
“That was quite pretty.”
“What was?” Mehanna looked at Lawaya, who had been standing with Tosci and Grinnell until a few microns ago. Seeing her free of the mirror made her feel so good.
“The fruit.” She pointed to a few pieces that were still floating above their heads. “You had it dancing around your head in a rhythm.”
“Really? I didn’t even know I had lifted them above my head.”
Lawaya watched as the fruit bounced against the ground. She studied Mehanna for a few microns. “You’re worried about Grinnell.”
“He and Tosci just disappeared. I feel like I should be able to see them, but I can’t.”
“You started playing with the fruit without thinking about it. I think that is what you need to do.”
“Not think about it?” Mehanna didn’t understand.
“Don’t try to figure out how they disappeared, just assume you should see them. Open your mind to the possibilities of what you are capable of.”
It made sense. She had been told that sometimes the simplest things were the right ones. She should be able to see them. She closed her eyes, focused her mind, then opened her eyes. The area to the right of Tosci’s house wavered before her eyes. Why was it wavering?
“Show me,” she said it softly, hoping the area wavering would clear up. Instead, images filled her head. She heard and smelled things that weren’t anywhere near her. Laughter surrounded her. Two little girls ran down a hall.
That’s Me and May.
How she knew that she wasn’t sure, but it felt right.
The two girls were playing.
“Shh,” said May.
“I’m sorry. We don’t get to play very often.” Mehanna smiled but curbed her laughter. “Should we build our shield so he can’t hear us? He probably won’t look for us if he thinks we’re quiet. He expects us to study all the time.”
“He told us to get ready for dinner.” May brushed her hands down the formal outfit she wore. “He’ll be mad if we muss up our clothes.”
“Who do you think he has brought to dinner this time?”
“Probably another man to talk into marrying one of us,” said May. “That’s all he’s done lately.”
“I don’t want to leave you.”
“I feel the same way.” May reached out her hand to her sister.
“Girls, it’s time.”
Mehanna recognized the woman talking to her younger self. It was Tosci. She was there too?
“Yes, ma’am.” The girls chorused. They followed her down a hall before the memory disappeared.
More memories floated to the surface. Always with the two of them. She felt her power surge through her. She remembered how to wield it. Simple things came to her as well as the more complex.
She looked at the area where she thought Grinnell and Tosci went and saw it clearly. Grinnell was rubbing his throat. If she harmed him. Mehanna wrapped her ability around Tosci, restricting her movements. “You’re not allowed to harm him.”
Tosci looked over at her and smiled.
Mehanna walked to where they stood. “What did you do?”
“I’m fine, Mehanna.” He rubbed his throat. “Tosci was showing me how difficult a time I’m going to have if I try to take on this maniac that is after you without being prepared.”
“Moorac will kill you.”
“You remember,” said Tosci.
She nodded.
“We need her to help us.” Grinnell pointed to Tosci.
“You know that is his sister.” She didn’t understand why, but she wanted Grinnell away from Tosci. The thought of her harming him made her skin crawl.
“Yes, she told me.” He took Mehanna’s hand in his. “She also hates him for what he did to you girls.”
She hadn’t realized she was holding her hand up to attack until he took it. “Then why didn’t she stop him?” Mehanna also realized she still held Tosci in the hold she put around the woman when she first saw through the magical shield Tosci had created.
“I think you need to ask her.”
She looked at the woman who had been there for her and her sister until they needed her. Releasing the magical hold she put on Tosci, she chose her words carefully. “Why should I trust you? You left with no explanation.”
“I didn’t leave. I was banned.”
“Banned?”
“I tried to talk my brother out of sending you two away. He became angry. So angry he banned me magically. I couldn’t enter the house as myself.” She focused inward and Mehanna found her childhood pet in front of her.
“Sara?” She picked up the small feline and hugged it close. “I thought some wild animal got you.”
“What’s going on, Mehanna?” asked Grinnell.
“When Tosci disappeared, I found this sweet feline. It started to come around at duro. I’d stand in my room looking out the window into the duro sky and hear its cries. I would sneak out to feed her, and she learned to climb up to my window at duro.” She sat the animal down and watched as it shifted back into Tosci. “You were still with us.”
“I couldn’t leave you. If my brother hadn’t decided to pilot that damn ship himself, I would have gone with you to that planet. He could detect my power in a small environment. It takes a lot of energy to maintain a shift like that. It’s not the same as it is for a shapeshifter. He would have realized that the cat wasn’t real.” She inhaled then let her breath out slowly, wanting to maintain her composure. “I think my brother knew, or at least suspected, I was still trying to help you girls. That’s why he brought you to that planet himself.”
“Why didn’t you follow?”
“Ships are very rare on our planet. It took me lunas to get off our planet just to get away from him. By that time, I had no idea where he brought you, and I searched his house to find anything to hint where he could have taken you. So I came here and started searching.”
“He stuck them on a small planet that didn’t have space travel,” said Grinnell. “You could have been on the next planet in that solar system and never would have found them.”
“The man is very smart. Did you ever see him on the planet, Mehanna?”
“No. I had been left out in the middle of nowhere and stayed there.” She clasped her hands in front of her. “I don’t know why, but I feared the indigenous people, so I never allowed them to know where I lived. I went through their trash and grabbed anything I thought I could use, but I did it when they were sleeping. I hoped they thought I came from a nearby village and thought it worked until recently.”
“He probably wanted to keep you and your sister apart, so he put that fear in you.”
“Did he put the ability to build computers and force fields in me too?”
“No,” said Tosci. “That was all you. You were very good at anything you wanted to learn about. But you should remember that, since you broke through the block he put on you.”
“My memories are still coming back to me. Little snippets of the life I lived before. Were we nothing more than an experiment to him?”
“I didn’t think my brother was capable of such cruelty. His desire to be the most powerful wizard on the planet drove him to do things I never expected.”
“Do you consider yourselves wizards?” asked Grinnell.
“Some do. We do have the ability of what some call magic. The old stories and legends called those people wizards. Others called them witches and warlocks. We never saw it as a special power because we all have it. That’s why we have kept to ourselves.”
“Some of your kind did leave your planet because we have heard of you,” Grinnell said. “The stories call it Mystic.”
“The name means ‘ground’ in our language,” said Tosci. “Ironic, isn’t it?”
“If Moorac is that powerful, how am I supposed to free myself from him?”
“I’m not sure if this will make sense. When we were young, my brother was a good student. He learned everything he was taught and pushed to get high grades, but I never thought he was obsessed with it. He was always praised because he did well. Then he met a young boy from another section of our world who was very gifted. He was also a bit of a brat. He challenged my brother and bested him. My brother never got over that. Before, when we were in school if I happened to do better, he would congratulate me, but after that his anger was a force to be reckoned with. It scared me. I never tried to best him in school again. I did push myself to be the best, I just never showed him what I could do.” She looked at Mehanna. “I had hoped this dura would come where you wanted to defeat him. You can do things naturally that we had to train hard to accomplish. But my brother is very good. And he will use whatever he can to try to force you to do what he wants.”
“You believe he will use Grinnell to get to me.” She tightened her hold on Grinnell’s hand.
“You care for him. I can see that.” She looked from Mehanna to Grinnell. “My brother will see it too and that will anger him because he wanted you for himself.”
“If he wanted that, he shouldn’t have sent me away.” Mehanna took a deep breath. “You said you will train me?”
“Yes.” She looked at Grinnell. “Your ship can scan for others?”
“All I need is his ID code and I can track him anywhere.”
“Even if he can hide it?”
“Why would he hide it?” said Grinnell. “He has no idea who we are or what we’re up to.”
“My brother seems to know things that he shouldn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if he did know everything already.” She brushed her hands on her outfit. “But I am probably just being a little paranoid.”
“If he is as good as you say, why hasn’t he found you? You seem to be very comfortable here. You don’t strike me as a woman afraid for her life.”
“I have safety measures in place.” Tosci waved her hand to reveal a dome-like structure over them. “If he comes near here, I’ll know.”
“Then how will my ship's security system be of any help?”
“Because I can enhance certain technology to search for magic as well. It will give us an extra layer of protection.”
“I’ll take you to my ship.”
“Thank you.” She looked at Mehanna. “I’d like to start your training right now. Lawaya can work with you as well.”
She showed Mehanna what she wanted her to work on and explained to Lawaya what it should look like if she mastered it. She also told her what to do to get Mehanna to practice the next level. Once she was sure Mehanna knew what she wanted to do, she gestured for Grinnell to lead the way.
“I know you wanted to talk to me alone,” said Grinnell.
“I know Mehanna, and I know she will believe that she can fix my brother.”
“And you know better.”
“He is obsessed. I don’t know what happened with that boy that could have caused my brother to snap the way he did, but I think my brother doesn’t want to be fixed. He wants to get even.”
“I had wondered.” He led the way down the stream until they got to the clearing where he had left the ship.
“I am sorry about what I did to you earlier, but you needed to see what my brother is capable of.”
“I’ve been through the cruelty of General Varal.” He pressed a button on his wristband to bring the ship into view. “I don’t think he can do anything I haven’t already been through.”
“How can you say that? He’ll kill you and make Mehanna watch.”
“Varal made promises to me then killed my family. Mehanna knows this.” He gestured for her to follow him up the gangplank. “If she knows how cruel this Moorac could be she would know how he would handle our relationship, and I haven’t seen her regret anything that happened between us.”
“That is a wonderful sentiment, but how are you going to react in the moment?” she asked.
“You don’t have to worry about me.” Why was she pushing so hard?
“Prove it to me.”
“How?” he led the way up into the ship.
“I could read your file.”
“Sure. Computer? She needs proof that I can handle someone like Moorac.” He sat down at his station and pulled up his files as well as his security information. “Now understand that you only have access to what I have opened here.”
“So what happens if I try to open something I shouldn’t?”
He shrugged as he stood. She’d be frozen in place. He’d like to see her magic get her out of that one.
She took the seat he vacated and opened the file. It didn’t take her long to load the data Grinnell requested so the ship would have the tracking info he needed to find and follow Moorac’s ship. Next, she turned her attention to Grinnell’s file.
“There isn’t much there,” he told her. “Varal wasn’t one for keeping records, only a list of who he wanted killed.”
“Did you keep a journal?”
“I’m not sure I feel comfortable with you reading my innermost thoughts.”
“Okay. I get that.” She looked up at him. “But my brother can be cruel. I’ve seen him in action. I need to be sure you can stand up against him.”
“Varal blackmailed me into working for him by promising my family would be safe, then he killed them.”
“My brother can lock you inside your mind, facing your worst duromare over and over again.”
“You don’t think I did that with the slaughter of my family? I had heard the rumors and slipped away from Varal to find out if they were true. If Varal had caught me, he would have killed me.”
“That isn’t the same as he making you watch as he kills your family over and over again.”
“My imagination did that for me.” Grinnell clenched his hands. “You don’t know what it was like for me to lose everyone I loved and then find myself being hunted. I had to think on my feet. I hid the best I could until I found a way off my home planet. I didn’t know if I would ever come back to it. I had to learn the social customs of a dozen planets on my own by trial and error, and quickly. If I got it wrong, I was punished. I’ve been jailed, beaten, drowned, electrocuted. What else is there?”
“I get it, but I want you to be prepared. I can teach you a few tricks to use that might break his concentration for a secur, but the secur he realizes you don’t have any power yourself he’ll either ignore you or use you as an example.”
“He still bleeds, doesn’t he?”
“Of course, but you have to be able to touch him first, and that would be the problem.”
“Others have gotten the best of your people, and they didn’t have your powers.”
“That is true, but we were innocent in the beginning. We trusted the wrong people. Believed they had our best interest at heart. My people learned the hard way that if we weren’t careful, we could be used.”
“With your abilities? I don’t see how anyone could get the best of anyone from your planet.”
“Yet you didn’t suspect anything when you met Mehanna.”
“Of course I did. The fact that she could create her fruit from thin air made me aware of the possibility of where she came from. I just don’t know where the planet is.”
“So you’re here to find my world.”
“No.” He frowned. “I needed to find Lawaya. When Mehanna showed me she was trapped in a mirror, I promised to help her get Lawaya released. We brought Lawaya and her mirror to Emori so Lawaya could help Astrid. Then we followed a trail that led us to you.”
“And I showed her how to release Lawaya. You know you have fulfilled your promise.”
He blinked. He had been released from his obligation and hadn’t even thought about leaving. How did he feel about Mehanna? Why hadn’t he made plans to leave?
“Mehanna, you don’t seem to be focused,” Lawaya chided.
“Sorry.” She straightened her shoulders. “I keep getting these memories, and I’m not sure if I should trust Tosci. I know that her brother is the true villain, but she went along with a lot of what he wanted to do.”
“Do you think she is working for him?” said Lawaya.
“I don’t know what to think. I’m not sure if I like the fact that Grinnell is with her by himself.”
“You’re jealous.”
“What?” she shook her head. “No.”
“Yes. You two haven’t talked about how you feel about each other, and you know he has fulfilled his promise to you. He could climb on his ship and leave.”
“He wouldn’t leave us here with no way off this planet,” Mehanna defended.
“He could send another ship for us.”
She shook her head. “Grinnell wouldn’t do that.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.” Mehanna had to back up her words. “He could have left at any point, you know that. Once you helped Astrid, he could have sent me on my way, but he didn’t. He wanted to help me face the people who sent me away.”
“He promised to help you free me.”
Mehanna stared at her as her words sunk in. She was right. He no longer had to help her. What would he do?
Grinnell walked back to Tosci’s house in silence. What would Mehanna want now that he had fulfilled his obligation? He realized he didn’t want to leave her. The question was, how did she feel about it?
“You are deep in thought,” commented Tosci.
He looked at her.
“You’re afraid she’ll send you away, aren’t you?” She smiled. “You love her.”
“I don’t think you should be commenting on something you know nothing about.” Grinnell didn’t want to think about the feelings bubbling up inside him. He hadn’t had time to examine them yet.
“We’ll see.”
The house came into view and Grinnell straightened his spine.
Lawaya turned and spotted him and gave him a knowing smile. Okay, why did she smile at him like that?
Mehanna looked at him a little oddly. Then she wouldn’t look back at him. She looked at her hands, the sky above, even the ground, but not at him. Just by the way she was acting, he knew they’d had the same conversation he and Tosci had. He wished he knew what they had said to each other. It would give him a better idea of how to speak to her. First, though, he had to get her away from everyone.
He felt like the odd man out while the three women talked about what Mehanna could and couldn’t do. He wanted to grab her by the hand and drag her away but wasn’t sure if that would be smart.
Tosci announced she was going to fix dinner and Lawaya volunteered to help, and just like that, they were alone.
Now he had to figure out how to broach the subject.
“So, are you going to leave now?” asked Mehanna.
Well, that was to the point. Might as well be just as to the point.
“Do you want me to?”
She blinked at his question. The look in her eyes told him she didn’t.
“Say something.”
“I would miss you.”
“Okay. If you want to play this game, fine. You never answered my question. Do you want me to leave? If you do, I’ll jump on my ship and never look back.” Grinnell pointed away from them. “But you want me to stay, I’m in all the way. I’m not going to let you use me, then send me away later.”
“Even if all I’m trying to do is protect you?” She looked at him with those beautiful eyes that revealed what she really felt.
“Even then.” He placed his hands on her shoulders. He wanted to wrap his arms around her, protect her from anything that could cause her harm. “How can I be there for you if you push me away?”
“He can be quite cruel.” Her gaze didn’t flinch. Like a mirror to her soul, he could see she didn’t want to send him away in the depths of her eyes, but she feared what Tosci’s brother could do to him.
“I’ve been shown.”
“Tosci.” Her voice had a bitter tone to it.
“She wanted to be sure I understood what Moorac can do.” He brushed his hands up and down her arms. “I know I don’t have the ability that you do, but he still bleeds. I asked.”
She laughed at that. Mehanna grasped his hands with hers. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“And I feel the same way.”
“There is a way you can tap into my power.” She started swinging their joined hands.
“What? How?”
“If we bonded.” She didn’t look at him. Probably because she didn’t want to see how he would react to this information. “You would be able to use my power.”
“Really?” The implications were enormous. “No wonder why he wants you. If he could access your power, he would be hard to beat.”
“It’s also why we decided to hide.” She broke the hold she had on his hands. “There were people who pretended to care, pretended to care only to get us to bond with them so they could access the power we have naturally.”
“You realize this bonding is for life.” He slid his fingers under her chin and lifted her face so she had to look at him. “Can you see me in your life forever? We don’t know that much about each other. You don’t know that much about you. Those memories are still coming, aren’t they?”
“I do know my heart.”
“And what does it say?”
“That we have something special.”
Her simple statement shook him to the core. “Are you sure? I’m the only man you’ve been with. What if you meet someone else you find attractive? If we bond, you would be stuck with me.”
“I know that the entertainment feeds were fake, but it showed me what made women happy. You make me happy,” she said simply.
He smiled at that. “Mehanna, I don’t want you to make this decision because of what we have to face. You need to make this decision because you want to spend the rest of your life with me.”
“Grinnell. I wouldn’t have given you my body if I didn’t feel something for you.” She touched his face. “There is magic between us. I know you felt it too.”
“That isn’t the reason for us to bond. Not for life.”
“What do I have to do to prove to you that I do want this? Moorac has nothing to do with my feelings for you.” She smiled. “My question is, do you feel the same way I feel? Or was our time together just superficial to you?”