Tales of the Citadel Series

Zeyan has been banished by her own race and her talents have developed under the careful eye of the instructors at the Citadel. When a psychic plague breaks out that shatters the mind body connection, the locals call the Sector Guard and they, in turn, call the Soul Keeper. It is time for her to return home. Orenn has envied his cousin Fenn’s life and love in the Sector Guard. As a telepath at the Citadel he recognizes a powerful will when he sees it and when Zeyan looks into his eyes, he also sees his future stretching before him, with her at his side. He had no idea it was going to be the other way around.

Brenawyn has lived life with one goal, survival. When Tracker of the Sector Guard lands on her planet she tries to buy herself some time at his expense and ends up with him and travelling to the Citadel. Training and teaching for four years, no one is more surprised than Bren when Tracker comes in, his body desperately needing her attention. After the healing he gives her another option, instead of languishing at the Citadel she can join him at Teklan base. She keeps him in suspense for the entire nine seconds that it takes her to make up her mind, and then they simply have to negotiate for her freedom. Easy.

Alda-Xeri enjoyed her life in her small town, helping those who needed surcease from pain during surgery or the last moments of life. When she is taken to the court to attend the duke’s final days, her life is altered forever and her talent twists in a way she never could have imagined. The Sector Guard helps her leave her home for a life in the stars, helping more than the wealthy. She agrees to an assignment she cannot remember and soon finds herself in the clutches of Raiders, taking pain from victims of experimentation and wondering how she is going to find the freedom promised her when all hell breaks loose and she leads the charge.

Kescu has been raised under ice. Under the surface of Wanlio 6, the locals live and thrive with the Ice Runner moving emergency and experimental supplies from one city and base to the other. Her talent is heat, but she channels it through metal plates, and she skates along the frozen surface of her world. Lorvik is a new botanist who is assisting a researcher at another base to develop fast-growing fruiting plants for starving populations. When the Ice Runner first arrives in his base, he knows she is more than she seems, but a kiss and genetic testing proves that his path has led him to the right woman. His woman. Negotiations do not go too smoothly, but Kes knows she is meant for another world. Life in the ice is beginning to hurt. She agrees to his suit, and he only has one more hurdle to pass. Her mother.

Ikari has enjoyed life on the family farm until a neighbour turns her in for being a talent, from that point on, things spiral rapidly beyond her control. She is put in a restrictor suit, shipped off world and sent to Teklan base to try to remove the suit without killing her. Ikari has an assignment as the courier on Dorali, and her new partner is waiting. Khivon has known his flier was coming to him for over a year, but when she shows up and her eyes spark memories of far-off nebulas, he feels his instincts taking over when his logic should have been holding fast.

After centuries of waiting, Rain has an opportunity to retrieve a creation that she designed and it means far more than a simple machine should. Her memories are wound around the weather machine and it has been used to destroy the natural order of Jarko. When she completes her introduction to the local mayor, he ends up leaving office suddenly and his replacement is first a member of the Citadel before he is acting mayor. He is more than willing to help her with the weather machine. Of course, being from the Citadel, there will be a price, but Rain has learned that there always is when it is for something she really wants.

Hahvi has spent eight years in the dome with other physical talents. Her body is wrapped in a restrictor suit, but she keeps her mind free to dream of possibilities. She is given to the Citadel, and when she meets the dream master, her world and her options shift dramatically. Rackon dreamed of a woman wreathed in flame, dancing across lava. This was the woman his people needed to help them save their city and the last of their civilization. Research pointed to Resicor, and after severe negotiations, she is handed over to them so that they can take on the trouble of her maintenance. Released from the restriction, she is free to use her talent for the first time in her life, unfortunately, she has to pick her outlet carefully or she could kill them all.

Being a bastard on Bassinor has been difficult enough, but Erinii Zakkata has always done her duty to family and that was what landed her in the facility to begin with. Gassed into a hallucinogenic state, she has spent four years trying to swim out of the fanciful creations of her mind, and with a little intervention from a familiar face she manages to find reality again. Or did she? Until she can find a way to escape she has to appear to be a madwoman in a psych facility, and when the role comes far to easily, she has to wonder if she has made it out of her nightmares or is she still trapped in her own mind, living out an escape that seems far too good to be true? A representative from the Citadel is now featuring heavily in her fantasies, but is he real or just another illusion to keep her from escaping her imprisonment? Time and a heavy detox will tell.

A talent for knowing what folks were thinking was something Aliiva had come to terms with, but leaving her home and using those skills at the Citadel was not something she was prepared for. Learning etiquette, deportment and self defense becomes her focus, but when the combat instructors keep running away, what is she supposed to do? Returning from a harsh assignment, Baengar is not very keen to take on a new apprentice, until he sees Aliiva. Making sure that she is prepared to take on whatever comes her way is his primary concern. As they get to know each other, the concern shifts into something much more intense, and when they are sent on a mission together he knows that they have a destiny beyond their duty.

Physical talents are illegal on Resicor, they fear an uprising and so lock their active talents away. Col knows her talent for flight can get her arrested and if she dares to show it in public, her life will end in the dome. A robbery at a museum ends up with her being thrown off a roof and it is fly for her life or die a free woman. She negotiates with herself swiftly and decides that freedom might be possible if she can live to see it. Ysyr is on retrieval duty when he meets his first Resicor and she knocks him and his instincts on their backsides. Life with this woman might be awkward, but being without her is intolerable from the moment she put her trusting hand in his.

Syrella was a talent in a noble family where talents were not normally accepted. Her parents decided that learning how to control her skills would be better for her than being shunned at home, so they sent her to the Citadel school at Thoola. Sy learned everything she could, including the surprising side benefit to her talent and shifted from student to instructor as the years passed. Sy receives a call that changes her life. She is the last inheritor of an ancient throne, and she must leave the Citadel immediately. Dorium is the bodyguard that the Citadel assigns to her and he just happens to be the man that Sy has had a crush on all her life. Death threats, greedy nobility and facing a deadly grandmother are all precursors to the one thing she is looking forward to, the Vexar Day of the Dead.

Iris has used her ability to dream her target’s location to gain recognition and to be the most efficient hunter she could be. The psychic knives that appear at the ends of her hands help her to stun rather than kill prey when a death is not necessary. Nothing escapes her, not livestock, not lost people. Anything that runs, she can hunt. When the Citadel calls on her to help find a lost object in an alien jungle, how can she resist the urge to test her skills on another world? Venin is a throw-back shifter of the Azon variety. He has the ability to embrace his peoples’ most ancient form and use the instincts that accompany it to his advantage. Partnering with Iris is not his first inclination but once he gets to know the hunter, he wants nothing more than to sprint with her in the wild and test out both of their basic instincts to the max.

Dev’s talent makes her unwanted on her own world so she chooses to join the Citadel in an effort to find another where acceptance will be offered. Helsin is the physician who tests her talent and when he confirms her strength he offers her a position in the Lowel Citadel, a base that is still in the planning stages. Dev becomes the first employee of Lowel Citadel, based in the Udell base and trained by the Sector Guard. With a resume like that it is no wonder that on her first assignment she is told that she has a talent for crisis management. Her living arrangements are crisis enough.

Naka was adrift with no means to focus, but accidentally starting a tremor in her hometown lets everyone know what she is and sentences her to confinement. The Citadel sends a representative to take her away, but the information that he is given will make sure that she finds no friends off Resicor. Her life is no longer her own, but her talent begs to be used, and on the planet of Piq, she finds something very wrong. The empty world should not be empty. Its mind has been stolen and lodged in the moon. In his efforts to escape, the living mind of the planet has almost ripped his old body apart. With skills she didn’t know she had, Naka steps in to carry one mind back to its home. She hopes she will survive the process.

Priina lived on a farm, and one night, she broke the laws of Cial and ventured through the wall to find some lost herd animals. She finds the remains of her beasts and is attacked by a creature that is far beyond her experience. She survives the encounter but is changed forever more by the exposure to the alien beast. Her people ship her off world so that her contamination will not spread into a susceptible population. Six years at Citadel Thoola gives her an education, self-control and an appreciation for the variety of species in the Alliance with their differences embedded in their very genes. She is summoned to active duty at Citadel Lowel and the man sent to collect her is the one who saved her six years earlier. Can Rhanos induce her into a partnership when she refuses to let her instincts rule her, even a little bit?

Jiska has grown up as her people’s fiercest general. When peace breaks out, she is reassigned to Citadel Lowel and given a partner who needs a bodyguard. After a few minutes in his presence, she knows why. She is assigned to protect him, even if she wants to kill him. Deskin is a Negotiator specializing in hostage situations. He needs a bodyguard to watch his back while he plies his trade, and General Jiska Irthano is far more than he could hope for. Jiska has grown up denying her needs from clothing and shelter to companionship and love. The Citadel offers a solution to her denial in every category.

Yavil suffers from an intellectual infection. Her mind absorbs every detail of everything she sees, and she can force understanding on her students when she goes into lecture mode. Her brainstorms have gotten the attention of the Alliance, and after she speaks with one of their representatives from Citadel Morganti, she is on her way to working as an educator to the best and brightest of talents. Hosh is a first aid instructor assigned to Citadel Morganti, and when he listens to Yavil’s lecture on the local flora and clotting properties of minerals on Tebr, he is filled with complete understanding of the topic. This is a new experience for him, so he signs up for the entire series of lectures, and by the time they are complete, he knows more than just how to grow plants in a vacuum, he knows that Yavil is the group educator that the Sector Guard has been looking for.

Born to a star, Wiali faced fifteen hundred years of stasis followed by ten years of work in the Citadel. While frozen, the entire Archive of the Alliance ran through her mind, her education was controlled by her whims. When her father went nova, she was finally and definitely alone until the moment Suek’s last Avatar came to tell her she was transferred from Citadel Aria to Citadel Lowel, the adjunct to Sector Guard Base Udell. Braenar knew that Suek had chosen him for Wiali, but the mechanism by which they would meet again was a mystery until she walked into his life with a group of students trailing behind her. From that moment on, he kept tabs on her until the day he could tell her that she was stuck working with him in deadly and dangerous situations. Planets, power and infinite peril...What girl doesn’t want that sort of thing in her life?

Kiiki has spent ten years in the Dome, the first to be dumped there when she was fourteen. Now, the Citadel is offering her a chance to get out and she is not hesitating. Her family will keep, she needs out NOW. Harken is a cloud-formed Nishan and Kiiki’s new partner. How can she trust a man who can choose any shape he wishes on a world where they want her to use her power talent for hours a day? Her attraction to her strange companion grows with his appreciation of her skills. By the end of the assignment, she is incomplete without him, and he is obsessed with protecting her. Her injuries have occurred because of the nature of her talent, and there is nothing more frustrating than a protector who cannot protect his charge from herself.

Veera’s mind broke wide open during a tragedy. A telepathic call for help sent her into a coma where every mind around her was open to hers. A stint on an island where no one spoke or thought a harsh word was just what she needed, but when she was offered a chance to live a life out in the open, she agreed to everything that the shape-shifter asked. Life was something that she needed to find. Stanik trained to be Veera’s link for eighteen months. When he finally met her, her physical presence sent his senses reeling. The reality was much better than the images her family had sent him to entice him into agreeing to share his mind with hers. He gives her stability, and she gives him attitude, a challenge and someone to protect. It is a fairly even swap.

Abandoned at the doors of an abbey, Lieta began life with knowledge of how to use any talent she was in contact with. As she grew, so did her collection of accessible power. When the Citadel came to the abbey to ask for her assistance, she was astonished to learn she was not only not the only one of her kind, but she was one of the only sane ones. Her species enjoys being worshipped and that is rarely a good result for their people. Lieta has to stop them, nullify them and make sure that they won’t hurt others. Running into one of her previous arrests and finding out that she is expected to let him be her shadow is a shock. Muraz once fancied himself a god, but after being shown that he was not alone, he has decided that working with the only being more powerful than himself might be educational.

Hidden does his work in secret and silence. Searching for the deadly weapon known as the Destroyer of Ichadra, he insinuates himself into an archaeological team looking for the ancient power. The woman he finds is young, strong and can rip him apart at the molecular level with the wave of her hand. Rathi can remember over sixteen hundred years, but she has slept for the last thousand. The handsome male who wakes her entreats her to do what is right and that alone wins her agreement. When she sees that her world is dead, she must choose to align herself with a current power, and nothing will convince her like a kind word and an offer to help discover what happened to those who came before.

Riasa has been working with the resistance to warn talents of the scanning bots flying overhead on schedules. The warning of eyes in the sky saved lives and families. Rescued before she could be caught, Riasa begins life at Citadel Teklan, but she knows something is very wrong. Confronting her suspicions, she calls in help and destroys the only home she has been offered before getting assigned to a flyer with wings of stone. Natu was disgruntled to be picking up a farmer’s daughter on Resicor, but once he met Riasa and saw her talent in action, he had to admit that he had been in the right place at the right time.

Vexaniali has spent her life in solitude, finding ways to entertain herself on an empty world that has become her prison. She was ordered to keep anyone from landing, but it was just a make-work job to keep her out of the way. Burn arrives and offers her a chance to use her skills on a variety of worlds under the aegis of the Citadel Arcani. Moving a cure around a world using her mastery of air is time consuming and tiring but not difficult. It is a good start, and when Burn offers himself to top up her flagging energies, how could she refuse?

Iara was a Kozue whose talent was peace and tranquility. Her parents sold her as a bodyguard to a royal house when she was just nine years old. Twelve years as a bondservant gave her an education that the Citadel continued when she escaped from a fate worse than death. Partnered with Lock of the Sector Guard, she stifles her urge to scream. There is one man guaranteed to shake the calm she brings to others and she is stuck in a ship with him. Lock admires Iara for her skill, her poise and her beauty. Finding a female Kozue without family or clan to protect her makes her a target, but her talent makes her formidable and very sexy to his senses.

Reeda works in the marketplace selling her mother’s scarves. Each one is a custom weave and no two are alike. When her friends at the marketplace need her, she comes running and takes care of business when peacekeepers are too far away. Each intervention requires her to record her use of her assessment talent with the peacekeepers in order to make sure she isn’t misusing it. When a Citadel recruiter comes calling, she has to negotiate with Reeda’s formidable mother before she will be allowed to leave home. A nine-foot member of the spider species, l’nal, raised Reeda. Mother has been attentive, protective and an excellent educator. She negotiates the best deal for Reeda and gets her into the Citadel with a tremendous salary and built-in vacations. Bilro is a Guardian in training on Balen when he meets Reeda, and the moment he takes in the way she studies, he is charmed. When he finds her witty, he is smitten, and when the call summons him to his new post, he is gone. What are the odds of them meeting again when Reeda goes looking for trouble?

Wiyra is an astral investigator. She can leave her body and search any specific point in space that she wishes. She merely has to know its location before she leaves herself. A problem arises when she leaves to examine some mineral deposits and returns to the place her body should be, only to find it missing. Her entire home is missing. Her cousins, grandfather and brothers are all gone with no trace. There is only one person she can turn to, and while it makes her grit her astral teeth, she heads to Citadel Reevish. Master Tracker Burin is woken from a sound sleep by an astral hand in his head, and while he is startled, delight soon follows. Wiyra has come to him for help and the Citadel does nothing for free. He has her right where he wants her...as soon as he finds her.

Kedna has been consigned to fostering on the empty world of Iskan when her power and her health become dangerous. Being mentored by a planetary Avatar is difficult, but moving the weather for an entire world is second nature. When she is older and her skills are needed off world, she is paired with her first member of the Sector Guard. He is a pain in the butt and harbours resentments toward her for hogging his ancestral planet. She simply concentrates on the job and earns his respect in the bargain. Fast forward to her twenty-third birthday and they cross paths again. This time, she knows his measure and he knows hers. Respect turns to fascination and progresses into a flirtation that crosses the stars.

Winera showed her talent as a Scorcher in a spectacular first display of heat and destruction. The Citadel welcomed her with open arms. Years after joining the Citadel, she is finally a full-fledged Scorcher and ready for her first official mission with a member of the Sector Guard. She had no idea that she was getting more than just a partner when a bundle of feathery fluff claims her as his own, much to her new partner’s amusement. Hyl has been waiting for the matchmaker to find him a partner that he can do more than go into battle with. One look at Winera and he knows that this fiery woman could set his senses ablaze. Smudge is a Yaluthu who has been patiently waiting for his person. When he sees the woman of fire, he knows she is the one that he is destined to be with, and he flings himself into her arms. Let’s not talk about the ship. She has too much attitude.

Skiria has been funnelling files out of the capitol for years, hiding those who can pass for standard, talentless folks. Her telepathy got her a position in the government, but it also put her on their radar, and when they needed someone to fill a vacancy, she was hauled out of her apartment and given a promotion. Tied down and given a sedentary position to keep Resicor from rising and claiming an Avatar, Skiria is slowly dying. When she finally succumbs, she is disposed of in the most direct fashion and swept off world for a mission that she doesn’t understand. All in a day’s work.