Shield's Lady

light he saw when he had first learned to work prisma.
    Sariana stroked the lock with a lover’s touch and Gryph drew a deep breath. He reached for her free hand.
    “Think of light,” he whispered. “Think of light in all its different colors. Think of a beam of white light broken out into a hundred million rays, each slightly different than the one next to it. Follow the spectrum into the range where the colors have no names. Look at the colors you can’t see with your eyes. You can see them with your mind. Do you understand?”
    “I don’t know. I think so.” Her voice shook.
    “Now look for the colors in that range that have a certain pulse.” Gryph realized he was holding onto Sariana with a savage grip.
    Her eyes were closed and she had gone rigid with unnatural tension. Her fingers were frozen on the lock.
    “Hold onto that pulsing light ray, Sariana. Follow it back to its source.”
    Gryph never knew what made him try for a working link. No woman had ever been able to work prisma according to the history he knew.
    But he was desperate and Sariana was a most unpredictable female.
    He touched the other side of the prisma lock and carefully tuned into it. Sariana was there. There was definitely another presence in time with his lock and it was not a weak presence.
    Gryph didn’t stop to analyze what was happening. He cautiously reached out for other rays that would be generated by a crystal ship, the way he had been doing all afternoon.
    Without any warning he found them.
    The unseen vibrations of prisma light focused on the weapon kit lock and bounced through Gryph’s head with such force that he nearly screamed.
    He did hear a scream, but it wasn’t his own. It was Sariana.
    He wanted to reassure her but he wasn’t given the chance. Unprepared to handle such an incredibly strong focus, Gryph’s brain did the only sensible thing. It shut down temporarily and plunged him into unconsciousness.

Chapter
    15

    SARIANA was shaking as she knelt beside Gryph. He was lying in the same unconscious sprawl he had been in the first time she had seen him. Frantically she sought for a pulse in his throat. Her own pulse was racing as if her bloodstream was attempting to dilute and drain away the impossible, unnamed rays of light that had filled her head for a split second.
    “Gryph, wake up. Please wake up.” Her trembling fingers found the steady beat in his throat and she told herself he was all right. “Come on, Gryph, open your eyes,” she ordered tightly. Her whole being willed him to awaken. She almost collapsed when his dark lashes fluttered and lifted. He gazed up at her for a long moment.
    “I always said you were an unpredictable woman, Sariana. But this time you’ve outdone yourself.” Gryph swore softly as he sat up. Gingerly he reached for his weapon kit and reattached it to his belt.
    “What happened?” she demanded, sitting back on her heels in the sand.
    “You helped me work prisma,” he told her simply. “We found the weapon ship. Or at least we found the beams it’s putting out. I’ve never tuned in to live prisma crystal before, but I was told years ago that if I picked it up I would recognize it. The men who taught me that were right. It’s very similar to neutralized prisma but it has a slightly different pulse. I’ll be able to track it now.” He leaned back against the rock from which he had toppled a few minutes earlier and gave her a strange smile. “It’s supposed to be impossible, you know.”
    “What is?”
    “No woman has ever worked prisma. The original Shield teams were all male and all their descendants are male.”
    “What about their Shieldmates?” Sariana asked. She was getting a distinctly uneasy feeling.
    Gryph gazed up at he stars for a moment before answering. “Until now being a Shieldmate meant only that a woman had the ability to link with a Shield and, if all went well, give him a son. Sometimes, if everything went very well, there would eventually be two or three sons. Some experiments have been done through the yeas, but no woman has ever been able to work prisma beyond the point of being able to tune in to her lord’s lock. We’ve always assumed the talent didn’t go farther because the women had never undergone the original genetic alteration. They might have the potential, but without the chemical injection needed to strengthen that potential, women can’t truly work prisma.”
    “Sounds like just the sort of conclusion a bunch of men