Chapter 1

‘Oh, crap!’ Jean thought.

Jean felt the venom being injected into her blood stream. At first, the sting of the fangs sinking into flesh didn’t register. Her heart rate was still up around one twenty as she was in flight mode. When she’d scurried off the path and slithered under the bushes in the gully, the local wildlife was the last thought on her mind.

Jean didn’t dare cry out. With luck, the spider she had encountered wasn’t as venomous as she feared. However, with her luck of late, she didn’t hold out much hope of this eventuality. This forest was lousy with aracnzi. She felt an excruciating, burning sensation on the top of her right arse cheek, near her spine and then it went numb.

‘Not good, not good,’ she thought as fear and stress shot her system full of adrenaline.

Jean found her mind busy categorising the sensations. She doubted the antivenin she had in her pouch would be effective in her case. She hadn’t finished perfecting it. She was close, but there were still side-effects. It seemed to work fine on the lab animals that didn’t have the shapeshifting genes in their systems.

Of the small flickers that carried the Shifter gene, all bar one that she had tested had died gruesomely. The other flickers’ reactions were still the same as for the Shifters documented to die from this spider’s bite. For some reason it caused the Shifters to change, but they didn’t change into one of their other forms completely.

Different limbs and internal organs changed piecemeal to other forms and then changed again, often rapidly and without the person’s control. This happened after the paralysis abated. So far, all who had been bitten by the spiders called aracnzies had died horribly, as their bodies ripped themselves apart internally.

The smaller the frame, the faster they were affected. With her 161cm frame, she knew she didn’t have long before the effects were irreversible. Jean pushed her short, tightly curled red hair off her pale face. Her dark purple eyes peered through the low limbs of the bush, as she felt the ground vibrate with the passage of many heavy footsteps.

She heard one of the men ask, “Are you sure she went into this area of the forest?”

“Yes, she was going to check her traps,” another man answered surlily.

‘Pauli,’ she thought angrily. ‘That lying, sneaky son of a slider sold me out. I knew he was bad news the moment I was forced to have him on my team.’

When she had seen the soldiers jumping down from the Carrier, she knew that she had run out of time. Jean had already entered the forest but then realised she had forgotten to pick up her coat. She had retraced her steps and stopped when she heard the truck approaching her laboratory complex.

They didn’t get a lot of visitors out here. This particular forest was not utilised because the aracnzi were so numerous. They were also a bite first, ask questions later, type of spider. The Bellini Mountain Range where the aracnzi lived formed an area called the Exclusion Zone. The range separated two countries called Rollin and Vasa.

The lab she worked from was located on the edge of the zone on the Vasa side of the mountains. She had been stationed here for the last six months, to find a solution. They didn’t wish to kill the spiders just neutralise their venom. The silk they produced was exceptional.

A single strand, not much thicker than a hair, could support the weight of the huge spiders, and the strands were hard to cut even with a diamond-edged knife. When the silk was woven into cloth and formed into soft underclothes, they made exceptional body armour and thermal clothing.

The material repulsed electrical charges and even most projectiles. It also acted as an insulator against cold and even excessive heat. A full suit made from the silk was extremely expensive to buy due to the current production levels of the silk. Queen Vasari wanted to farm the aracnzi more efficiently so she could make better armour for her soldiers and the nobles.

Jean knew that her country was heading for war with the Rollinians and even possibly Civil War, but fighting wars wasn’t her problem. The two Queens, Robina and Vasari, always seemed to be odd’s and had been sniping at each other for centuries. Every twenty-five years or so something happened that ended up with border skirmishes or small conflicts.

The only thing that seemed to stop them destroying these forests was the fact that the aracnzies only lived here. The two countries hadn’t had a large battle in her life time, but things had been brewing for the last couple of years. Jean couldn’t see why the two Queens couldn’t get along.

The reason for the latest unrest, of all things, was because of an alien. Vasari had him, and Robina wanted him. From what she’d heard, he’d appeared in the Sacred Room. He had been unconscious, and when the doctors examined him, they found he was different from any of the races here on Tara.

While he looked like a tall blonde haired Genteli, 190cm tall and twenty years of age, he carried the Shifter gene that changed gender and form. It was the fact that he was able to change to female in any of his forms but stayed male when asleep that had the nobles and mages excited.

He was also fertile in any of his forms. Jean had to stifle a giggle as she remembered he was also supposedly well-endowed in his human male form, and he had caused Vasari to faint when she had seduced him. The Queen had no intention of giving him up.

Males on their continent, Dori, outnumbered females nearly three to one. The male Shifters here could change form but not gender. Only female born Shifters could change gender and form. All of the races here had issues with low female birth rates and worse, poor fertility in their males. The Keltrian females also tended to have five to ten years between children.

Being a matriarchal society, it was normal for a woman here to have two or more male concubines. The males also didn’t seem to live as long as the females did, even if they had magical items. Male mages were popular as first husbands unless one chose a female Shifter.

While other scientists were battling the low female birth rates, it wasn’t Jean’s concern, as her’s was spiders, the aracnzies to be more precise. War was coming, and everyone knew it. Robina was getting increasingly agitated that Vasari wouldn’t share her alien.

In the year that the alien had been here, six of the children that he had sired had been born female Shifters. He may not have gotten the pleasure of inseminating all of the women chosen for his progeny, but his semen was apparently very effective. He was also a Mage, and this factor also made him highly valuable.

Vasari was apparently selling his sperm to the highest bidders and using it to buy loyalty. She hadn’t come into season since his arrival. Jean had heard rumours that her one living daughter, Halina, wasn’t happy with the new man in her mother’s life.

If he did manage to impregnate her mother, Halina knew that her position could become fragile. It was tenuous as best even now, as the Crown may not choose her as the heir. The Crown wasn’t necessarily passed onto the oldest female of the line, as it had a mind of its own.

So far, it hadn’t indicated whom it wanted to go to. It had stayed in the royal line for the last thousand years or more, but that hadn’t always been the case in their history. Magical items tended to go to the person who best suited the item.

Vasari hadn’t produced a female child for eighty years, and since then she’d had only had two sons, and the younger was forty. None of her current batch of children had shown any great magical abilities either. This was also a concern for the ageing Queen and her Council.

The councillors were beginning to suspect that even with her magical crown; the Queen was getting close to the end of her life. She was nearing four hundred years of age. Neither had she abdicated. It was rare for a ruler to rule beyond three hundred years.

Other rumours suggested that Queen Robina had similar problems in her province. She was only about twenty years younger than Vasari was, and her only living daughter was even older than Halina. Speculation flourished as to whom the crowns would choose.

Both countries were gearing for war. If the crowns didn’t choose a royal heir, all hell could break loose as the different factions realigned under the person chosen or tried to eradicate them. A new Queen was vulnerable until she learnt how to wield the magic associated with the crown.

Only the nobility and the members of the Mages Guild held magical items. It was said that the Guild was only loyal to the crown, not who wore it. They were to protect the wearer no matter who it chooses. In the last two centuries and particularly the last ten years, it had been noticed that the membership of the Guild had waned.

Chapter 2 »