Viper (Second Wave Book 1) Read online

  Viper

  By Mikayla Lane

  Cover art by: humblenations.com

  First Wave Series in Reading Order

  Hunting Cari

  Finding Jess

  Chasing Dare

  Grai’s Game

  Second Wave Series in Reading Order

  Viper

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  TDB- Thank you for being such an awesome person! You help in more ways than you know!

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  To my Readers:

  Thanks so much for all of the awesome reviews, suggestions and comments.

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  Mikayla Lane

  443 Word Document Pages

  94,100 Words

  Chapter One

  Viper fle’ te’ Trugh of the planet Tezaria was having a really bad day. It started with the dreams that had been awakening him every night since they had arrived on Earth three months ago to help Balduen Skardard of Valendra.

  The disruptions to his energy had begun immediately after the dreams had started and kept him feeling restless, uneasy and frustrated.

  His people, the Tezarians were known for their ability to connect with a planet's energy on a natural, primal level. However, he knew that the disruptions weren’t being caused by his connecting with the Earth’s rhythm. He wasn’t able to concentrate long enough to bond with the planet’s energy. That was the first indication that something was wrong. It had never happened to him before.

  Viper was abruptly brought out of his thoughts and back to the reality of his bad day when he felt the fist that connected to his already swollen jaw.

  “Tell me where they are! How many of you are here?” The Relian hybrid, scourge of all the known worlds, screamed at Viper.

  Viper felt the rush of blood fill his mouth and turned his head to spit it out on the ground near the Relian’s feet. He grinned awkwardly with swollen, bleeding lips and chuckled slightly, knowing it would anger the volatile alien standing above him.

  “You will tell me, you bastard!” The Relian growled, before hauling back his leg and kicking Viper in his already abused ribs.

  Viper sucked in his breath at the pain radiating through his torso, the pain in his head forgotten for a moment while his ribs burned like fire. Damn, he was seriously screwed he thought as the Relian stormed off again.

  Gathering his energy, he tried desperately to send a message through the universal telepathic energy path known as the Shengari’, to his brother Dread. He was again met with an eerie silence in his mind.

  The concussion he’d gotten when the transport crashed disrupted the energy signals in his brain, preventing him from using the telepathic communication path.

  Viper thought back to the crash, trying to figure out if anyone else had survived. He didn’t remember anything but the warning given by the pilot and the interior alarms blaring before the transport was hit with heavy fire and then the rapid fall of the craft to the ground.

  He awakened, tied to a tree on the edge of a clearing, hours ago, judging by the location of the moon in the sky. Other than the periodic beatings and questioning by the five Relians, Viper had not seen any sign of the others that had been in the transport with him.

  It was supposed to be a routine recon mission, nothing more than checking out some strange stories that had been hitting the Internet about unusual disappearances and invisible men.

  Ivint Torenson, former High Councilor of the planet Valendra and Grai T’Alq, the half Relian and half Valendran hybrid, leaders of the Alliance, had decided that the occurrences were happening far too often to not be taken seriously.

  The area being only a hundred miles from one of their main command centers gave rise to the concern that their location may have been compromised or close to discovery.

  When the last Relian finally walked away from him, Viper again tried to break free from the ropes that were tied tightly around his wrists and ankles. Ignoring the pain in his head and body, he struggled until he was too tired to continue.

  The only thing he’d managed to accomplish was making the ropes slick with his blood. They were bound far too tightly to break free on his own; he thought with a heavy sigh.

  Viper looked around, blinking hard to try to focus on the slightly blurry images around him. Nothing but trees and underbrush, the details were still too out of focus to recognize. The Relian’s only had on gear and light packs. So they either dropped after the crash or were on the ground already and had pulled him from the wreckage.

  It was the only thing that made sense to him. It didn’t really matter though, Ivint and the others back at the command center in Dillon, Texas would have a rescue mission on its way, if not already here. He just had to tough this out until they found him, he thought with another sigh that hurt his ribs.

  Closing his eyes to ease the pain in his head and gather his energy to try to contact his brother again, Viper took a deep breath and almost choked. Opening his eyes wide, he whipped his head around from side to side, trying desperately to see what he was smelling.

  There was nothing there, not that he could see. However, he knew better. He could scent it. His heart began to race, and he fought harder against the ropes; he had to get free. Now.

  *****

  Lara Blain was having a really bad day. Another one. It seemed the only time she ever had a good day anymore was when she was here, out in the wild. And away from people.

  At twenty-six years old, she had become a hermit. The government called it Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. An unfortunate side effect of the IED, improvised explosive device that killed her teammates and almost killed her.

  It had taken her eight long months to recover from the physical injuries. It was ten months later, and she still couldn’t recover her mind. The nightmares plagued her the moment her eyes closed. A dark shadow at the back of her mind that waited until she was vulnerable in sleep before coming out to torture her soul.

  If the pain she had gone through, the physical and emotional scars not enough, the final betrayal came this morning. The notice from her attorney that her government had deemed her too dangerous to be out in society with a weapon and were trying to revoke her right to protect herself.

  The same government that had trained her to use those same kinds of weapons and had forced her to use them in their wars, was trying to take hers from her.

  It had been bad enough when she had returned, and the Veteran’s Hospital jerked her around for months over her rehabilitation. Routinely denying her appointments or even ‘mistakenly’ cancelling her benefits. But this was too much.

  She was no danger to anyone, not even herself. They knew that. They were afraid she would talk about what she knew, they were trying to wear her down. Before he was killed during the IED attack, John had warned her that they would try to intimidate them, silence them.

  Lara stopped and used the chance to catch her breath, allowing the pain at the thought of John to flow through her. He was her best friend; her only friend. They had met in Afghanistan when they had been assigned to the same unit.

  It was the first time in her life that she hadn’t felt awkward when she met someone. It had felt like they were old friends, long lost family, from the moment their eyes connected.

  Blinking back tears, Lara shook her head to clear her thoughts. She didn’t need to think of John right now. She needed to
get this done, keep her promise, before they finally got to her.

  Pulling back her shoulders, she repositioned the heavy packs and crept silently through the trees. She was determined to get to her grandfather’s hunting cabin by morning. This was the last trip she needed to make, nothing more was needed now. Nothing else mattered anymore.

  Lara had been making these trips for months now. When she realized that those she had trusted the most had betrayed her; had betrayed them all. It wasn’t the PTSD causing them to try to disarm her and others just like her who had been returning from their wars.

  It was because they knew that when the time came, and they started to institute their plans that she, and the other vets like her would help the people stand up. Would help them to fight what was coming.

  John had been the first to intercept the communications. His love of all things electronic helped him build some pretty amazing devices in their down time. One of which found the strange frequency and the communications between their superiors… and the enemy.

  John had a friend back home, and he had been sending copies of the communications to him for weeks before they were sent out on that ambush. The one she wasn’t supposed to survive. The one John didn’t survive.

  If it hadn’t been for a local tribe that had found her, she wouldn’t have made it. They cared for her while they reached another unit, not her own, that got her out of there. She had no doubt if her own unit had found her first that she never would have made it home. She had no doubt that the rogue leaders would have made sure of it.

  Was it really PTSD if all the people, except you, that had heard the tapes were dead? She shook her head, thinking about John’s friend who had been killed recently in a suspicious house fire. He had sent her the tapes right before his death. She was the only one left now; she thought as she adjusted the pack with the tapes in them.

  There was nowhere to go now that they wouldn’t find her. At least if she stayed in their world. Lara snorted at that thought. Their world. She had always felt like an outcast, even among her own family. As if she were the only one who was out of place. Everyone was a stranger, even her parents.

  John was the only one who had ever felt like family. Now he was gone, and she was all alone again. She had no siblings and according to her parents, they didn’t either. With her parents dead these past four years, she was the last of her family.

  At least, she didn’t have to worry about losing anyone else that she cared about; she thought with a sigh. It was a perk of being a loner, someone who never fit in… or belonged.

  Lara stopped for a moment and watched the moon begin to rise over the tops of the trees. She was exhausted, but refused to stop this close to the cabin. The normal three-day trek to the cabin would only take two if she pressed on.

  Even though she didn’t mind sleeping beneath the stars, it was the nightmares that she feared, and the memories and the pain that they brought with them. No, she thought; she wouldn’t sleep tonight. Whether she actually tried to or not.

  She was more restless today than normal. Almost driven to get to the cabin as quickly as possible. She didn’t know why, and really didn’t care. She had learned over the years to trust her instincts. They saved her life on more than one occasion and this time they were telling her to hurry.

  Besides, she could rest when she got there, she thought. She’d been setting the place up for months now, ever since she got well enough to make the three-day hike from her parent's home.

  At first, it was because it was the only place where she felt at peace. It was only later that Lara realized it was the only place she could go that was safe. That was when she began laying in supplies.

  It was the only rehabilitation she was going to get since the VA had abandoned her. She remembered the first time she had set out on the trip. It was miserable. The three-day trek had taken seven, and it had taken four more days at the cabin for her to heal well enough to try to come back.

  The eight days it had taken her to recover from the trip when she came back had only made her more determined to keep doing it until she could make it in three days again.

  By the time she had gotten the letter this morning, she had been making the trek twice a week, taking at least one sled of supplies with her each time. The letter had been the sign she had been waiting for, telling her it was time for her to disappear. To live to fight another day. At least until she could warn others, get the information into the right hands.

  It was the only mission keeping her going now. Her promise made to John was the only thing left for her to finish. Her only purpose. There was nothing left for her here without the man she loved like a brother, the only person she had ever felt truly connected with.

  The moment she had looked into his dark-blue eyes, she had felt like she had come home. She knew he had felt it as well by the widening of his eyes and the brilliant smile he had given her. It had only taken him moments to clear a path to her, taking her hands in his own he smiled down at her, uncaring that dozens of people in camp were beginning to stare.

  “Where have you been? I have missed you madly! Where is your tent? Let me grab your bags. Come, sister of my heart and tell me where you have been and how you ended up finding me here.”

  Lara was so overwhelmed by the rush of feelings for the man; she had followed him like a zombie as he chatted with her. There had been no way to deny it though, she thought with a sad smile, he had been right. They were family.

  They thoroughly checked both of their lineage; they knew that they had absolutely no blood in common that ran through their veins. But they were family. Somehow, someway, something went wrong, and they were born in the wrong families. They knew, deep down, that it was true, no matter how crazy it sounded to anyone else.

  It was as if their souls knew the mistake and wouldn’t allow the connection to be denied. For the first time, she felt at peace. As if she finally belonged here now. No longer alone and out of place.

  They were inseparable for eighteen months. Their connection was so deep they could finish each other’s sentences, know what the other was thinking and react in battle to each other’s movements. Even though they were in a war zone, their lives in danger every second, she had never been happier in her life.

  For those eighteen months, Lara wasn’t the strange loner who people avoided and mocked. The bullied little girl who buried her pain in other worlds in the books that she read. No one ever cared that she was kind, or that she would die for a stranger, all they saw was the awkward and painfully shy girl who knew she didn’t belong.

  With John, she wasn’t that person. He taught her how to bury the pain, overlook the past and be proud of who she was and relish the uniqueness.

  It was undoubtedly unique. Enough to bring it to the attention of their teammates who ended up calling them bro and sis as a joke. Lara smiled at the memories, pushing on in the deepening darkness through the barely there path in the forest.

  She didn’t need a light; she knew the path by heart. She had been six years old when she met her grandfather for the first time and made her first trip into this forest. Her mother’s father had come as a surprise and had begged her mother to let her go fishing with him for a few days at their old homestead cabin.

  He had leaned down to her at the start of the journey and told her to pay close attention, one day she would need to remember the way. Throughout the three-day trip, he pointed out specific markers for her to remember. The unique roots of a tree, a particular rock outcropping, odd little permanent signs in the landscape to remember where she was.

  He had been right about her needing to know the way. It was as if he had known his time had come and this last trek, with her, his only remaining task to complete. The day they reached the cabin he had died, and she had been forced to make the three-day journey back, alone, to get help.

  Everyone had called it a miracle that she had made it back alive, but it had only made her even stranger to the other kids and even most of the adults. There h
ad even been snide, painful accusations that maybe she had killed her grandfather, even though the autopsy revealed it had been a massive heart attack.

  From then on she had been known as a freak, and all she wanted was to go back into the forest, where her mind felt at peace. Where the animals and the trees didn’t judge her or punish her for being different.

  At six years old, there was no way her parents would let her back out there again, so she ran through the pathway in her mind every night, never forgetting the way that her grandfather had taught her to get there.

  By ten years old, she had convinced her parents to buy her a tent and would spend most good nights sleeping beneath the stars. It had taken a while for her parents to realize that she was moving her tent farther away from the house, closer to the edge of the forest. By then the strained relationship between them made the new arrangement almost a relief to them all.

  It wasn’t that her parents didn’t love her, or that she didn’t love them. On the contrary, they loved her very much and she them. They just had no idea how to relate to or communicate with one another. They seemed to have absolutely nothing in common, no bond at all. It was like living with kind and wonderful strangers.

  The older she got, the more obvious it became to all of them that she didn’t belong there. With them. On the weekends or school holidays, she would spend most of her time outside, in the woods surrounding their home, in the mountains and sleeping in the tent at night. She’d go for days without seeing them.

  Her father had taught her how to shoot when she was ten, when he realized that she may need to protect herself from animals at night in the tent. Every few days she would bring something else out to the tent that made it more like a home. Her parents, seeing how happy she was, would help by buying her things to make her more comfortable.

  It wasn’t until Lara was sixteen that she had convinced them to let her spend spring break at the cabin by herself. She had bought one of those personal locator beacons and promised that she would use it if she needed to.