of the unexpected kind
DON'T READ BEFORE FINISHING BOOK 74!
Chapter 1: Aru
"This was one of your dumber ideas, Aru." Dagor swiveled his laptop so Aru could see the screen. "They sent a drone to scout the area, and now they know we are not there. What did you think they would do? Show up to investigate? Not likely."
"What's important is that they showed their hand," Negal said in his usual calm, monotone voice . "We now have proof that they know how to decipher the locations of the signals, and you know what that means. It was a smart opening move that prompted the opponent to make a counter move, which, in turn, will inform our next one."
Aru arched a brow. "Since when are you defending my decisions?"
It was rare that Negal backed him up. Usually, the older trooper grumbled about the rookie getting promoted because of damn politics or nepotism, and every time Aru made a wrong move, Negal smirked in satisfaction. But despite the attitude and the snarky comments, he wouldn't have swapped the guy for someone more accommodating unless he was forced to.
Negal had the experience that Aru lacked, and the old trooper kept him on his toes, and would never sabotage the mission just to prove how wrong their commander was to make Aru the team leader.
Dagor leaned back in his chair. "They probably forced Gor to decipher the signals. The fact that his tracker stopped broadcasting doesn't mean that he's dead. It only means they took it out of him—like they did to the other settlers before him."
When nearly all the signals had stopped broadcasting simultaneously, they had assumed the cause was interference, but since not many things could disrupt the signals produced by the trackers, they had to assume that it hadn't been a natural phenomenon or an accident.
At the time, they had been investigating a possible pod landing in Tibet. The remote location was four days on foot from the nearest paved road and nowhere near any international or even local airport.
Getting to Karelia to investigate what happened had taken a long time, and in the meantime, the signals had come back online from the Baltic Sea, not too far from the port of Helsinki. When they had started winking out one after the other, Aru had feared for the lives of the Kra-ell.
Not that he would have been allowed to intervene even if he and his team could do anything about it.
Their job was to observe and report, but they hadn't reported anything yet, and if what he suspected was true, they wouldn't be submitting a report regarding the fate of the Kra-ell anytime soon.
Thankfully, they had one hundred and fifteen Earth years until anyone came to check on them, and that left plenty of time to collect all the relevant information and come up with a compelling story to tell their commander about why they had failed to discover whoever had taken over Gor's compound before it had happened.
The facts so far were that someone had blown huge holes in the wall surrounding the Kra-ell compound, and had taken out everyone who was still alive and put them on a ship. Then they had either killed everyone or just took out their trackers.
What gave Aru hope that the Kra-ell were still alive was that it didn't make sense for anyone to storm the compound, kill very few Kra-ell, capture most of them alive, put them on a ship, and then kill them.
The invaders had to be a formidable force to take the Kra-ell captive, and the prime suspects were other Kra-ell who had woken up from stasis, figured out that they had trackers implanted in their bodies, and had taken them out before Aru's team had arrived on Earth and started tracking Gor and the Kra-ell he'd held in his compound.
It was a perfectly reasonable scenario, but that wouldn't be good enough to appease their commander. He would view it as a failure, and their next mission would be in an even more godforsaken sector of the universe.
That, however, would not sit well with the other person Aru was secretly reporting to, so perhaps he shouldn't worry about exile to a remote sector. Although his commander could still find other ways to make their lives miserable. Just the loss of favor would devastate Dagor and Negal. An unfavorable evaluation from the commander would ruin any chances of promotion for them, and no one wanted to spend hundreds of years in some wretched corner of the universe, doing work that was of little importance to anyone back home.
Although if the Kra-ell had gotten themselves free somehow, the commander couldn't blame Aru and his team for being ignorant of what had been brewing inside the compound. After all, they had been instructed to stay away and not let their presence be known.
Gor and two other purebloods hadn't been in the compound at the time of the attack, and that hinted that the invaders had been waiting for just such an opportunity and had been helped by rebels from the inside either with intel or with active combat.
Still, that was irrelevant as far as their commander was concerned.
He would not care about a brewing rebellion they had missed, but he would care about the others and Aru's team's ignorance of their existence.
His team's only lucky break was when Gor and his companions were captured shortly after that and taken to Los Angeles, where the others had most likely come from. But then their signals had winked out as well, and Aru and his team had been left in the dark.
It had been Aru's brilliant idea to go to China and locate the trackers of the first Kra-ell who had arrived on Earth—the scouting team that the Kra-ell queen had sent ahead of the settler ship.
The location of where the bodies of the dead scouts had been cremated was known, and since the trackers were unaffected by fire, it was only a matter of finding them. It hadn't been easy, but they had found five, of which only three were still operational. They could have kept digging, but he figured out that three was just the right number to lure the invaders out of hiding and show their hand.
His gamble had worked, but the question was what to do next.
Chapter 2: Kian
Kian returned to the war room, pulled out a chair next to the conference table, and sat down. "Syssi had a vision earlier," he said without bothering with a preamble. "She saw three men in a canyon that was sparsely covered in vegetation." He flicked his gaze over the team he'd assembled to deal with the situation.
Unsurprisingly, Turner's expression remained impassive. It took a lot more than a prophetic vision to get the guy rattled. William was working on the footage the drone had collected from the canyon, trying to see if he'd missed something, Jade seemed nervous, and Kalugal looked curious and somewhat amused.
His cousin wasn't a stranger to visions. Jacki also experienced them, but only on rare occasions, even less so than Syssi. Unlike Kian, though, Kalugal didn't mind that his mate had them, and he didn't fear they would affect her well-being.
Onegus arched a brow. "I assume that the three men Syssi saw in her vision are the ones emitting the signals?"
Kian shook his head. "The drone footage from the canyon indicates otherwise, so we have to assume that Syssi's vision was from the near future, which is why we need to switch to the high-altitude drone on the next fly-by."
"Why?" Jade asked. "So they won't see it? They weren't even there."
"Not yet," Kian said. "We have to assume that the three individuals managed to rig the trackers, so they emit signals without the benefit of a live host, and hid them among the rocks."
The alien trackers were tiny, and there was no way William could find them in the footage. Normally, they needed a live body to provide the energy from them to transmit the signal, and the men might have implanted them in small animals, but to keep the critters from scurrying away, they'd have had to put them in cages, and that was probably what William was looking for as he scanned the zoomed-in footage in slow motion on his laptop.
"The vision could also be from the far future," Anandur said. "What were the men in the vision wearing?"
Kian lifted a hand. "Let me finish first and then ask your questions."
Anandur's lips formed a thin line, and he didn't say another word.
Brundar nodded.
"When Syssi's consciousness flew over the men, they were arguing, and then something caught their attention, and they looked up. Naturally, Syssi's first thought was that they could see her floating overhead, but she quickly realized that it must have been something above or behind her. She couldn't see or hear what it was, but that's the dreamy nature of visions. Many of the details are missing, and others are unclear, and it's never obvious whether the vision is a window into the past or the future."
As everyone around the conference table nodded in agreement, Kian took a sip from his bottle of water.
"One of the men pointed a strange-looking weapon at what I assume was our drone, but then one of his companions stayed his hand, and the argument resumed." He put the bottle down. "Syssi didn't know that we were flying a drone or that the signals were coming from a canyon, so you can rest assured that her vision hadn't been influenced by anything I told her."
"What exactly did you tell her?" Jade asked.
He should have known she would be the most skeptical of the bunch.
"All I told Syssi was that the signals were coming from a nearby location, and just like the rest of us, she assumed they were being emitted by the Kra-ell—either the scouting team that had been sent ahead of the settler ship or the settlers themselves."
After more than seven thousand years, the Kra-ell scouts shouldn't be alive unless they had gone back into their stasis pod to prolong their lives and stayed there for hundreds of years at a time.
It was a logical thing to do, and Kian still believed that they had done it, but it no longer seemed like the signals were coming from them, and he had arrived at that conclusion even before Syssi had told him about her vision.
His next suspicion was that some of the assassins who had been smuggled among the settlers had come out of stasis before Igor had figured out how to track the signals. They had removed the trackers from their bodies so he couldn't find them, but they had been tracking him and followed his signal to Los Angeles.
That had been the only logical explanation for them suddenly appearing in the clan's backyard.
But after Syssi's vision, he no longer knew what to think.
Had the gods left a sleeper team on Earth? Had members of that team tracked Igor? Had they been aware of what he had done to the members of each pod that had come online? How could they have stood by when he'd murdered innocent males and subjugated the females?
Were they following a non-interference directive and were supposed to only observe?
If so, why were they interfering now?
Did they suspect the involvement of immortals? The hybrid descendants of the exiled gods they had been sent to eliminate?
Kian had so many questions and so few answers, and he hated relying on visions to form his strategy.
Chapter 3: Kalugal
Kalugal was more than intrigued by Syssi's vision. In fact, he was a little awed, and that was despite his own mate being clairvoyant. But what Jacki typically saw was more localized and individual, while Syssi sometimes got to see epic events—like the Odus' decommission and the Kra-ell who had supervised it.
In fact, he'd been told that Syssi had envisioned the Kra-ell years before the clan had learned of their existence. At the time, she hadn't realized that the people she created for one of the Perfect Match Virtual Studios environments were not the product of her imagination but a glimpse into the future or maybe the past.
Still, she hadn't gotten all the details right, so although her visions were legendary, they shouldn't be taken verbatim.
Also, there was another problem with the story Kalugal had been told about Syssi and the Krall.
The one detail everyone seemed to overlook was that the original Krall adventure had been created by the Perfect Match programmers before Syssi had come on board. She'd elaborated on and changed it, but someone had thought of it before her.
Was one of the humans working for Perfect Match a seer? It wasn't such a great leap of logic. Humans had been known to have prophetic visions, and some didn't realize that their minds did not create what they saw.
Except, it was also possible that she had played around with designs for the different Perfect Match environments even before Kian had bought a majority stake in the company for her and had made her a board member.
Before the studios had become operational, William had come on board and had been instrumental in debugging the software and giving it the edge the original founders envisioned but couldn't quite get. So Kian's team had been involved from the very start, which probably included Syssi.
"We all know not to take Syssi's visions lightly," Onegus said. "What else did she see?"
Kian leaned back. "Syssi said that the weapon one of the men aimed at the drone looked like a monocular, which is odd on two accounts. One is that it had no visible trigger, so it couldn't have been a projectile weapon, and we have to assume that it was a laser or something that operated in a similar way. The other is that one of the males aimed it at our drone." He looked at Turner. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know, no manmade hand-held weapons can shoot down a drone at the height we were flying it."
Turner nodded. "That's correct."
"I wish the alien-looking weapon was the most troubling part, but it's not." Kian leaned forward and put his hands on the table. "When the three looked up at the drone, Syssi got a good look at their faces, and she was positive that none were Kra-ell. She thinks that they were gods."
Jade gasped. "I'll be damned. How the hell did they get here so fast?"
"They had to be already here," Kian said. "Syssi's impression was that they were friendly, but as much as I trust her visions, I wouldn't base our strategy on it."
The cogs in Kalugal's mind started spinning.
If the three males were gods, they must have arrived long after the original gods had perished. In fact, they had likely arrived after the Kra-ell ship had exploded and the pods had landed on Earth.
They would possess technology and knowhow that was priceless, and if Syssi was right and they were friendly, they might have sought out the clan to get its help or cooperation.
Once contact was established, he should seize the opportunity and become instrumental in the negotiations. That would not only grant him access to what those gods would offer up as part of the negotiations, but it would also increase his influence in the clan and get him the second council seat that right now seemed even less likely now than it had originally.
With Toven joining the council and possibly Jade, Kalugal would have no grounds to request another seat. Jade represented nearly half of the village population, so if he got two seats, she should get at least six. Kian would never allow the majority to be comprised of non-clan members.
Leaning back in his chair, Kalugal crossed his arms over his chest. "Syssi's vision reinforces my earlier assessment that the three activated the signals as a way to make contact with us and not to lure us into a trap and harm us. In fact, I'm so sure of their intentions that I volunteer to head to the canyon with no more than three men to meet them on equal terms. I think that would be received better than showing up in force, which will signal that we are afraid of them." He smiled at Kian. "Not to toot my own horn, but I'm a much better negotiator than you are."
Kian regarded him with thinly veiled amusement. "Thank you for the offer, but let's not get ahead of ourselves." He braced his elbows on the table. "We must not forget who created Igor and the other assassins and who programmed them to dispose of all legitimate heirs to the Eternal King's throne. These three might be the assassins' handlers, or alternatively, they could be genetically modified gods who were sent to Earth to complete the mission that the original assassins had been tasked with but failed to complete because their ship had exploded and their stasis pods had been damaged. "
Turner nodded. "I agree with Kian. For some, it is natural to assume the best of people, but it is not for us." He scanned the faces of everyone present. "We don't have the luxury of being naive and trusting. We need to assume the worst and hope to be surprised for the better."
Kalugal couldn't argue with that.
Too much was at stake, including the lives of his mate and son. He'd rather catch Kian's paranoia than make a rush decision that might endanger everyone he loved and cared about. After all, he was a descendant of the Eternal King as well. His great-grandfather had not been the official heir to the throne, but he had been the Eternal King's son.
Kian regarded him with his intense eyes. "Even if we decide to send a small welcoming party with a massive backup in case things go wrong, you can't be a part of it. As a council member, you are privy to information that we can't allow to fall into enemy hands."
Kalugal was immune to most compulsion, but not all, and if any of the three possessed Igor's ability, he wouldn't be able to resist the compulsion to reveal all of his secrets, and those included much more than the location of the village and how to get there.
"Unfortunately, you're right." Kalugal sighed. "As the saying goes, with great responsibility comes great sacrifice."
Kian chuckled. "Actually, the saying is that with great power comes great responsibility, and with great responsibility comes great accountability, but in your case, sacrifice and accountability are probably one and the same."
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Vampire’s Consort
When Gabriel’s company is ready to start beta testing, he invites his old crush to inspect its medical safety protocol. Curious about the revolutionary technology of the Perfect Match Virtual Fantasy-Fulfillment studios, Brenna agrees. Neither expects to end up partnering for its first fully immersive test run.
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When Lisa’s nutty friends get her a gift certificate to Perfect Match Virtual Fantasy Studios, she has no intentions of using it. But since the only way to get a refund is if no partner can be found for her, she makes sure to request a fantasy so girly and over the top that no sane guy will pick it up. Except, someone does. Warning: This fantasy contains a hot, dominating crown prince, sweet insta-love, steamy love scenes painted with light shades of gray, a wedding, and a HEA in both the virtual and real worlds.
Captain's Conquest
Working as a Starbucks barista, Alicia fends off flirting all day long, but none of the guys are as charming and sexy as Gregg. His frequent visits are the highlight of her day, but since he’s never asked her out, she assumes he’s taken. Besides, between a day job and a budding music career, she has no time to start a new relationship. That is until Gregg makes her an offer she can’t refuse—a gift certificate to the virtual fantasy fulfillment service everyone is talking about. As a huge Star Trek fan, Alicia has a perfect match in mind—the captain of the Starship Enterprise.
The Thief Who Loved Me
When Marian splurges on a Perfect Match Virtual adventure as a world infamous jewel thief, she expects high-wire fun with a hot partner who she will never have to see again in real life.
A virtual encounter seems like the perfect answer to Marcus's string of dating disasters. No strings attached, no drama, and definitely no love. As a die-hard James Bond fan, he chooses as his avatar a dashing MI6 operative, and to complement his adventure, a dangerously seductive partner.
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The beautiful architect working late on the twelfth floor of my building thinks that I’m just the maintenance guy. She’s also under the impression that I’m not interested.
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I don’t need the complications.
When she tells me about living out her mermaid fantasy with a stranger in a Perfect Match virtual adventure, I decide to do everything possible to ensure that the stranger is me
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