Provoked (Space Mage Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Mailing List

  Also by Izzy Shows

  Kaidan

  Xiva

  Nytoc

  About the Author

  Provoked

  Book One of the Space Mage Series

  Izzy Shows

  Copyright © 2017 Izzy Shows

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Mailing List

  Also by Izzy Shows

  1. Kaidan

  2. Xiva

  3. Kaidan

  4. Xiva

  5. Kaidan

  6. Xiva

  7. Kaidan

  8. Xiva

  9. Kaidan

  10. Xiva

  11. Kaidan

  12. Kaidan

  13. Xiva

  14. Kaidan

  15. Kaidan

  16. Xiva

  17. Kaidan

  18. Xiva

  19. Xiva

  20. Kaidan

  21. Kaidan

  22. Xiva

  23. Kaidan

  24. Xiva

  25. Xiva

  26. Kaidan

  27. Kaidan

  28. Xiva

  29. Xiva

  30. Kaidan

  31. Kaidan

  32. Xiva

  33. Xiva

  34. Xiva

  35. Kaidan

  36. Kaidan

  37. Xiva

  38. Xiva

  39. Kaidan

  40. Xiva

  41. Nytoc

  Also by Izzy Shows

  About the Author

  Don’t forget to join my VIP list and my Facebook group to find out about new releases, promotions, special sneak peeks and engage in titillating conversation!

  Also by Izzy Shows

  The Codex Blair Series

  Grave Mistake

  Blood Hunt

  Dark Descent

  Wild Game

  Grim Fate

  High Stakes

  Other Books in The Codex Blair Universe

  The Fallen’s Crime

  The Fallen Hunter

  Ruled by Blood

  Blood Captive: Origin

  Blood Huntress

  Blood Slave

  Space Mage

  Provoked

  Enslaved

  Kaidan

  The memory played out in front of me, just as it always did. How many times had I watched this memory since I'd started this journey? Too many, that was for certain. It was really the only thing that took my mind off the cabin fever that threatened to consume me on this seemingly endless voyage through space.

  I was spoiled with it now. I didn't have a sim chamber back home—those things were damn expensive—but they'd made sure to put one on the ship. They had to, or else they risked me going into rage. That was an ever-present risk with us these days, us manipulated bastards. The government had fucked us, experimented on our bodies and manipulated our genes to turn us into perfect soldiers: capable of going days without sleep, of being fully functional after only two hours of sleep if we even got that, able to punch through just about any metal, able to take bullets for days without slowing down… Yeah, they'd twisted and twisted until they got their perfect little minions to do whatever they wanted.

  And they’d done it all without consent. At no point was the offer made to me to have my genes screwed around with, but that was life as a military grunt, and that counted three times over for a Raider. We didn't have rights, not like the rest of humanity, not anymore. Only the desperate joined the military these days, or the fools.

  I was the latter category. I'd joined as soon as I was of age, wanting to get out of the hell hole I was living in, and I hadn't cared what would happen to me. If I could go back in time and beat some sense into my younger self, I'd do it in a heartbeat. That stupid kid had gotten me into this position, and there was no turning back from it. You don't leave the military; you die.

  And they didn't just magnify my natural abilities, didn't just make me a super-soldier, although they didn't know that. No, once they’d opened up my genes to that kind of mutation, they’d just kept on going. I'd learned new things about myself, things I wished I didn't know.

  Like how I could sprout five-inch claws from my knuckles, stronger than any metal I'd ever seen, capable of slicing through bone, I was pretty sure. I hadn't tested that out—I wasn't exactly itching to get put away for murder. But that wasn't all. I'd found that, when I felt like my life was in danger, my skin seemed to sprout scales all over, encasing my body with them. Scales that a bullet couldn't penetrate, that a knife couldn't cut through.

  And believe me, that I tried.

  Yeah, yeah, I know, you shouldn't put a gun to your head and pull the trigger, but I didn't have a hell of a lot left to live for these days. I didn't have family back on the old green and blue, and all I was was a military grunt. My life was following one set of orders after another, trudging along and doing as the government told me. Sure, I'd made it pretty far up in the ranks, but what did that matter? Just a different kind of orders, that's all.

  I was a Raider, the elite of the elite. Even more so than the few other genetically modified super-soldiers. I'd gotten here through a lot of tough work, but that was mostly due to boredom. You had to have somewhere to go in the system if you wanted to distract yourself from the fact that your life was a giant pile of shit.

  I didn't have anywhere else to go now; there was no more forward movement. All that was above me were the positions you got through politics, not honest hard work, and those spots never went to bastards like me. They were for a whole different class, the people who got the best treatment in society these days, the ones who never had to worry about where their next meal was coming from. The ones who could turn a blind eye to the way they'd destroyed our planet and decimated the population. We couldn't even grow fucking food in the ground anymore. It all had to be done in labs, and you can bet your ass the poor weren't getting any of that.

  So, no, I didn't have any more aspirations to reach, I didn't have a family to care about, I didn't have anything. Just my orders and the few buddies I had in my Raider crew. And even those I held at arm’s length. No point in getting close to someone who might die tomorrow.

  All that's to say, yeah, I tried to put a bullet in my head. Didn't work, though. I'm still here, and it looks like there's not gonna be an easy way out for me.

  So, what do I do with all this time on my hands, while I'm waiting for the ship to reach its destination? I sit in the sim chamber, watching memories, playing make-believe, and sometimes just wishing something would show up and get rid of me so I didn't have to think about any of this shit anymore.

  I knew I was sitting in a chair in an empty sim chamber—a metal box, basically—but that's not what it looked like or felt like.

  All around me was a beautiful park, one of the last ones that had been around back in the day. Trees actually stood tall all around me, the ground was green with the grass that I hadn't seen in ages, and there were children running around. Laughing. Enjoying the sun on their faces and the joy they got from tossing a ball or picking flowers or playing tag with one another.

  Right in front of me was a little boy, no older than five or six—five and three-q
uarters, actually—and in his lap was a pair of action figures. Beside him, on her knees, was a beautiful woman with long brown hair and gentle eyes. Her skin was a light tan, almost tawny, and she had a smattering of freckles on her face.

  Mother.

  My heart ached as I looked at her, wishing I was that little boy again so I could run to her and feel safe in the cradle of her arms. She was smiling, teasing the little boy as they played with the dolls together, telling some ridiculous story that they were acting out with the figures, completely absorbed in the world they had created together.

  It was a simple memory, not much to care about for most people, but it meant the world to me. It was the last good memory I had, the last time I had been happy in my entire life. Not long after that, the world had taken my mother from me.

  A drunk driver had smashed his hover car into the ground while she was walking home from work, snatching her life away from her before she could feel a thing, if the docs were to be believed.

  Not that I really believed anything that came out of those assholes’ mouths anymore, but back then, I had. I had hoped they were right, because I couldn't stand the idea of my mother being in pain for a single second.

  I couldn't stand why she'd been taken from me, but I'd understood what it meant, even that young.

  After that, the numbness had taken me, and it'd never really left. I didn't feel a whole lot anymore, except for those basic animalistic emotions that you can't beat out of a human being. Anger, mostly. Anger at the world for taking her from me, anger at the scientists for experimenting on me against my will, anger at everything that dared to exist.

  But there was something else when the anger melted away, as it was wont to do: an exhaustion I had never been able to escape from, an emptiness that threatened to swallow me whole if I allowed it.

  I was tired. Tired of living. Tired of following orders and having nothing else in my life.

  Tired of existing.

  And now they had me on this fucking mission, which anyone with a brain could handle. I was here to protect a bunch of scientists and their crew on a terraforming mission. They had found some planet sixty gigaparsecs out in space that had apparently never been inhabited. That was the only rule the UPC—the United Planetary Council—had when it came to whether or not we were allowed to settle a planet. They had given us permission, since we’d fucked our own planet, and now the scientists thought they got to play God and make their own little world for us all to move to.

  Like I said, anyone with a brain could protect these guys, but it wasn’t exactly public knowledge what they were doing. They didn’t want to get anyone's hopes up. So, it was down to the Raiders to get this done.

  And me? I just followed orders, no matter how much I wished I didn't have to anymore.

  I didn’t have a purpose anymore, if I ever had, and I knew I wasn’t about to find it on some godforsaken rock out in the void of space. Not that I got a say in any of this.

  My head started to ache with all the thoughts running around inside it in conjunction with the memory playing in the sim chamber. You weren't really supposed to let your mind wander while you were in here, because it could cause complications.

  Probably should wake the shrink and let him know I'm feeling this way. That's what he's here for, to make sure I don't lose my shit while they're all in stasis waiting to arrive on the planet.

  But I would never do that. I didn't trust shrinks any more than the other scientists, and I wasn't about to open up to one of them.

  Just as I was settling deeper into the chair, trying to turn my mind back to the memory to see if I could find any comfort in it, I felt the ship rock.

  What the hell?

  And then the alarms began. We were being boarded.

  With a growl, I lunged from the chair and broke into a run to get out of the chamber and back to the flight deck. If I could get to the guns before whoever it was broke in, there wouldn't be anything to worry about.

  But I didn't get down more than two corridors before the sound of ugly shouts reached my ears, and I flattened myself against a corner just as the voices got closer, before they could see me.

  Fuck.

  "I'm telling you, this ain't no ship carrying anything worth shit," one of them said in heavily accented Common.

  "Shut up, Brix. We got a mission to do, no questions asked. There might not be shit around here, but we ain't here for that. Find the crew." The voice that had responded to the first had a much more upper-crust accent, like he'd been around the center of the system more than the first guy had.

  What did he mean, he has a mission?

  My eyes narrowed, and my hand went to the gun at my hip. I didn't need to waste time trying to figure out why the pirates were here; I just had to neutralize them before they could do any damage to the ship.

  Hopefully, they hadn't taken out any of the navigational systems when they boarded.

  Wake the others. You're going to need backup.

  The thought came to me just as more voices joined the fray—more pirates coming on board. If my ears were right, and they had to be—enhanced hearing and vision were more of the gifts I'd gotten in the manipulation process—I counted ten or eleven mercs on board.

  A sketchy number for me to try to take down on my own. I was the only one awake, because they only needed one person to check the systems routinely, and only one person needed to hit the switch to wake the rest of the Raiders, which was what I was supposed to do in the event of an attack.

  But…

  Wasn’t this what I'd been wishing for? An opportunity to go out in a fight, like any good warrior would want? Besides, the stasis pods of my men were keyed to my biorhythm. If I reached a crisis state, they would automatically be woken up and injected with a stimulant to rush them into battle mode and bypass the general nausea and fogginess that came with stasis.

  They would be awakened if shit got bad enough, which was supposed to only be in case of a surprise attack, but that would give me the opportunity to go out like I wanted.

  A gift from God, if I had been the type to believe in one.

  Decision made, I charged out of my hiding place with a roar and launched myself at the first pirate I found, blasting him with two energy shots before I connected with his body.

  He slammed to the deck with a loud thud, a cry of surprise yanked from his throat. I felt two bolts of energy slam into my hide before my scales activated, sheathing my body in their protective armor.

  The next few shots I heard but didn't feel. Damn it. It was going to take a lot to put me down. I only hoped these men were up to the task.

  I tried not to fight too hard, but I could feel the rage at the back of my mind, trying to take me over.

  The pirate I was on top of landed a lucky shot at my chin after I boxed his ears, sending me jerking back more out of surprise than actual physical pain. The scales prevented me from feeling too much, but the guy was wearing a set of brass knuckles.

  He followed that up with a sharp kick to my chest, which landed me squarely on my ass. He was on his feet seconds later, blaster raised and firing before I could so much as lock eyes with him.

  His blast rocked my chest, jerking one shoulder to the side, but I only laughed in response.

  His eyes widened with a sudden terror.

  "Yeah, buddy, you're gonna need to do better than that," I said, climbing to my feet and dusting my knees off.

  "Your…your face…" he whispered, horror-struck.

  "Huh?" I frowned, then chuckled. "Oh yeah, the scales. Sorry, bud. Them’s the breaks." He gritted his teeth, clearly done with the conversation, raised his blaster again and fired two more shots—this time right in my face.

  I jerked back several steps, feeling the blinding pain ringing around my head for the first time.

  That was when it happened.

  The pain was like a trigger, and the rage had already been pushing at me, urging me to take their blood.

  I saw red, and my abilit
y to think logically or apply any measure of reason abandoned me. The claws sprang from my knuckles, and with a low roar, I charged forward again.

  With one swipe, I ripped open his throat and almost severed his head from his body. He dropped to the deck with a disturbing gurgle, blood spraying from his throat.

  I turned to the other two pirates, who had been intermittently firing their blasters at me, and slowly advanced on them.

  "Shit, shit, shit! She didn't say anything about this!" It was the voice of the first pirate I'd heard, but I didn't stop to wonder what he meant.

  I tore into him with the same ferocity I had the first, ripping through his protective armor and disemboweling him. At the same time, my other hand flashed out and slashed through the oxygen mask the other pirate was wearing. Glass flew into his eyes and bounced off my scales, but that was nothing compared to the damage my claws did to his face.

  He was mauled beyond recognition.

  The heat of the hunt had taken me, and the beast inside roared its approval at the bloodshed, urging me on to more. I stalked the corridors of the ship, my enhanced ears picking up the panicked murmurs of the other pirates as they tried to hide.

  I realized dully in the back in my mind, beyond the red haze, that I was between them and the exit.

  Good. There was no escape. I would taste their blood, and it would be good.