Destiny's Shift (3 page)

he had given her as well as the two human men he had saved her from. She just hoped

that her quick assessment of him as a decent male was correct.

He hurried her down to the mouth of the alley while taking out his phone from his

pocket. “Hey, Noah,” he said quietly. “You’re not going to believe . . .” He paused for a

moment, then said, “Are you shitting me?” They continued jogging. Again the language

confused her, but she thought she got the point.

He pulled her to a stop just as the alley met the street and glanced down at her.

Somewhere along the way he had donned a pair of very dark sunglasses, making the light

emanating from his eyes somewhat muted. What they were to do with the glow from her

eyes, she couldn’t fathom.

“Okay, man. If I can’t go back to the silo, I need a safe house. I can’t just roll into

the local Motel 6,” he said into the phone.

She wondered what a silo was, and why anyone would lay down and roll

anywhere.

He listened for a moment, then nodded. “Okay, got it. Good travels, and I’ll see

you on the safe side for some scotch. I think we’re all going to need it.”

Jovan put his phone away, and she wondered briefly what the safe side entailed,

and why this side, whatever that was, would be described as the . . . unsafe side?

He shoved his phone back into his pocket and looked down at her, the bright

green from his eyes barely noticeable through the glasses.

“See that white Hummer over there?”

Liberty looked around, wondering exactly what a Hummer was, so she looked for

something white. A behemoth white vehicle was parked about a block down.

“I believe so,” she said quietly.

“That’s our ticket out of here, okay? And then you and I are going to go

somewhere safe for the night.”

“Very well, sir,” she said.

Grabbing her hand, he broke out into a run, and she struggled to keep up.

Chapter 3

They drove in silence for quite a while, Jovan feeling calmer with each mile.

When Liberty’s eyes had lit up, saying he was shocked would have been the

understatement of the year. There was also a moment of inner struggle for him. He knew

he couldn’t leave the female to fend for herself with her eyes glowing pink, but at the

same time, he didn’t want to get involved with her. Sure, he had stepped in with those

two guys, but any male worth the mud on his boots would have done the same, SR44 or

human. But he rolled alone. He liked being alone because it helped him keep his sanity.

When he was alone, he didn’t have to worry about people’s thoughts or feelings.

However, he really didn’t see that he had much of a choice but to take her with

him. There was simply too much at stake, namely the necessary secrecy that humans

didn’t find out there were aliens living among them. Hell, the Six Saviors had kept tabs

on people who claimed to have seen aliens, as well as the aliens themselves that had been

caught. The government was not nice to either, and Jovan and the other Six Saviors had

no desire to be sliced and diced in the name of science or some other bullshit.

He sighed. If humans knew what was living among them, there would be nothing

short of a witch-hunt, with Jovan and his fellow Warriors on the top of the list, followed

by the vampires. Or maybe the vampires would take first place. Either way, Jovan knew

he and his fellow Warriors would be in the top two.

The news at home hadn’t been good. He hadn’t gotten the full story from Noah,

but Noah said something about the FBI being at the outside gate of the missile silo where

they lived in Phoenix. Not a swarm of them, just one guy peeking around in a blue jacket

with a blazing FBI logo.

Just over a year ago, Hudson had killed his brother, a Colonist, who had told him

before he died that Hudson had “no idea what’s coming for you.”

Maybe the eagle had landed, and that fuck-all was about to begin.

Noah had made it crystal clear that Jovan was to stay away from the Phoenix silo

due to the FBI guy trolling around the property. Thankfully, Noah was always looking for

investments and had recently bought a house in the Phoenix area he planned on renting

out as a high-end vacation house. And that was where Jovan was headed.

He rubbed the two-day stubble on his face and glanced over at his passenger. She

twirled one of those ringlets around her finger and stared out the window while chewing

on her bottom lip, looking very innocent and sweet, yet tired and worried.

He was glad his so-called gift had apparently decided to cease and desist because

he couldn’t hear her thoughts.

Again he wondered what the hell she was doing working in a strip joint, and then

he realized he didn’t know her name. He had gone through the evening calling her the

French maid.

“What’s your name?” he asked quietly.

“Liberty,” she said, glancing at him, then bowing her head.

“It’s nice to meet you, Liberty. I’m Jovan, in case I didn’t tell you beforehand.”

“You did, sir,” she replied demurely with a small smile.

He grinned back. It had been a long time since anyone had spoken to him with

deference. He certainly didn’t get that from his fellow Warriors, and he was trying to

blend in with humans, not be treated differently by them. In fact, the last time he had

been addressed with a title had been on SR44, where he was treated with reverence

because of his standing as one of the Six Saviors. “You don’t need to call me sir, Liberty.

That’s a sign of deference, and I don’t need deference. We’re equal here, okay?”

She turned and stared out the window, chewing on her lower lip, looking troubled.

“What did you do on SR44?” he asked.

After a pregnant pause, she said, “I was born into servitude.”

There was a moment of silence, and Jovan let that one sink in. “Servitude? Are

you kidding me? I didn’t think that happened anymore.”

“Truly, Warrior, it happens. Before I left, the custom had become more popular.”

Being born in to servitude was a long-ago tradition—the male of a royal family

joined, or slept, with a female servant to produce a child. This ensured that the female

servant would not leave the male’s employment, and it also gave him the right to give

away the offspring to another male relative, or to keep the offspring for his own use.

Jovan thought this custom had been thrown out eons ago, but obviously there were still

some assholes practicing it, and it pissed him off.

“To whom?” he asked through gritted teeth.

She sighed. “It is a long story, sir . . . I mean, Jovan, please excuse me. I would

prefer to only tell the story one time as it is so painful. If perhaps we could get to our

final destination, then I could administer the story and be done with it.”

Jovan nodded, his gut tightening. If she was here, there was obviously something

going on at home. “What’s happening to SR44?”

Liberty sighed heavily. “One time, sir. One time. The story makes my chest ache

and my stomach feel ill.”

Chapter 4

FBI agent Blake Birmingham stood outside the fence where he could see the

missile silo in the distance. Technically, he shouldn’t be contemplating jumping the fence.

The property was privately owned, and he had no legitimate reason to be here.

Well, legitimate as far as the law was concerned. As far as his small segment of

the government was concerned, he should have been over the fence already and storming

the silo.

He sighed, rubbed his face, and began walking the perimeter of the fence.

Looking up, he saw the cameras, but noticed that they didn’t move. He walked for a

minute, then turned to look up at the camera he had just passed. Apparently, they didn’t

move while he was looking at them, but the lens that had been facing him a moment ago

was now pointing at his back.

So someone was home, but evidently not in the mood for throwing out the

welcome mat.

As he walked, he recalled the package that had landed on his desk about a year

ago. The contents looked as though a child or a deranged person had scribbled them. The

papers talked of Warriors called the Six Saviors from a planet named SR44 that had taken

on human bodies and whose eyes glowed at night. And apparently, they lived right here

in this missile silo. At least that was what the package had indicated.

Blake ran his hand over the black stubble on his head and flipped his sunglasses

up, revealing his hazel eyes and looked up at another camera. He remembered he had

almost tossed the whole package in the garbage, but something niggling his insides made

him keep it. He had put it out of his mind until he got a phone call two weeks ago that

there had been a fiery crash in the Arizona desert. Apparently, a UFO crashed and four

beings who looked completely human, but—surprise!—their eyes glowed at night, were

captured. At that point, Blake had brought the package out from the filing cabinet where

he had buried it and studied it again.

He had just come from Area 2, out in the middle of the Senora Desert of Arizona.

Area 51, on the outskirts of Vegas, was put out there for public consumption. It was

basically an operating base that did absolutely nothing but look like it was operating. It

used to be fully functional, but then the public became too curious, and Area 2 was built.

Everything happened in Area 2, and it was where the glowy-eyed aliens were taken. He

had spent three days listening and watching interrogations of two of them. On the ugly

meter of one to ten, with ten being the ugliest, he put it at about a fifteen.

What his government was doing was nothing short of torture.

The beings were shackled, their bodies dripping with monitoring equipment. At

night, needles were inserted into their eyes, and there was talk of actually removing a

couple of eyeballs to be studied.

Blake could still hear the screams of pain as the aliens were poked and prodded,

all in the name of science and understanding how their bodies worked. They had been

deemed the highest level of threat to National Security and had been classified as

terrorists.

Frankly, it all seemed a little ridiculous to Blake. The aliens didn’t seem

threatening at all, especially with how forthcoming they were with information.

One particularly interesting bit of information the aliens gave up regarding the

Warriors—the Six Saviors—was that they were sent to Earth hundreds of years ago to kill

the Colonists. They aliens described the Colonists as pure evil, and they even apologized

for the Colonists and the problems they caused on Earth. When the aliens were asked

what a Colonist looked like, the main answer was that they didn’t know, but imagined the

Colonists to have human bodies. One thing they did agree on was that their souls were

black.

It quickly became very apparent to Blake that the focus of the special unit of the

FBI should be to identify and catch these Colonists, not study these aliens who looked

human except at night when their eyes lit up. It seemed he was the only one who thought

that way though, because when he brought it up to a superior, he had been brushed off.

For some reason, the information the aliens provided about the Colonists made

Blake think of his own father. His father had been a cruel man, one who loved to beat his

wife and child. They had lived in rural Alaska, the nearest neighbor over two miles away,

a place where everyone kept to themselves. Whenever a beating occurred, Blake could

see black ash around the house, but his mother never could.

The day his father had beat his mother to death in the living room, she had told

him that she and Blake were leaving. At age fifteen, Blake had stood by helplessly as the

first fist flew, connecting with her jaw, and he knew that he would be next. In an effort to

save his mother, he ran into his parents’ room, pulled the shotgun from his father’s closet,

and hurried back downstairs. When his father rounded the corner, Blake shot him twice in

the chest. Then he watched as his father disintegrated before his eyes into a pile of black

ash. Needless, to say, that had surprised the hell out of him and stunned him into

immobility.

His father had beaten his mother to death. Blood ran from her nose and ears, and

her eyes stared at the ceiling, all spark of life gone from them. Thankfully, it was

summertime, and the frozen Alaska ground was pliable. With tears running down his

face, he remained strong. Perhaps his strength came from the beatings he had taken his

whole life, or maybe it was the determination he had seen in his mother’s eyes when she

told his father they were leaving, but he was able to bury his mother that day in their

small backyard. His mind and body swirled with different emotions: hating her for

marrying his father and being so weak that she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, take Blake away

earlier. Ultimately, he was destroyed by her loss.

Within a week, he had sold all of their possessions and never looked back.

Deciding that he had wanted out of the frigid air of Alaska, he headed for Arizona where

he lived on the streets for a year while going to school, forging all the necessary

documentation needed for him to attend. He lived behind a pizza joint fighting the rats for

the leftovers at the end of the night. Eventually, the man who owned the restaurant,