Niklosi's Nightmare (First Wave Book 10) Read online

  Niklosi’s Nightmare

  By Mikayla Lane

  Editor Beth Braden

  [email protected]

  Cover art by: humblenations.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, affiliations and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First and Second Wave Series in Reading Order

  Hunting Cari

  Finding Jess

  Chasing Dare

  Grai’s Game

  Viper

  Taming Jax

  Drago

  Grounding Gracus

  True Traitor

  Mikal

  Manipulating Mikey

  Saving Koda

  Chris

  Niklosi’s Nightmare

  Haruki – Coming in October 2016

  Find me on Facebook at:

  facebook.com/author.mikaylalane

  Find an encyclopedia of characters at:

  mikaylalane.wikia.com/wiki/Mikayla_Lane_Wikia

  To my Readers:

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

  As always, feel free to email me.

  [email protected]

  Mikayla Lane

  454 Word Document Pages

  88,387 Words

  Ver. 1.0 7-22-2016

  Chapter One

  It wasn’t the right hook to his face that angered Niklosi as he fought the Relian, it was where he was being forced to fight and the weeks he’d spent tracking them. He, Traze, and Decano had been hunting that particular Relian unit for weeks, and they hadn’t caught up to them until they reached this humid hell hole in the backwater of a state called Missouri.

  The Relians had known they were being hunted and had staged the currently failing ambush on Nik and his team in the hopes of shaking them from their trail. It obviously wasn’t going the way the Relians had hoped.

  Niklosi kicked the alien back from him and drew his KA-BAR knife. He stepped into the Relian, thrusting the knife deep into his upper abdomen, grabbing the back of the alien’s head to keep him still while he brutally twisted the knife and pulled upward. The alien went limp and Niklosi pushed the body to the ground as he turned to face the next enemy combatant and noted Traze and Decano still fighting.

  He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve as he drew another blade and stormed up to where Traze was holding his own against one of the Relians. Without hesitation, Niklosi drove both knives into the Relian’s kidneys.

  Seizing the opportunity, Traze plunged his own knife into the Relian’s neck. Nik wiped his blades on the alien’s shirt as he pulled them from the body and turned in time to see Decano put down the remaining enemy—or so he thought.

  “Yo, bro! That was sick!” Traze said as he knelt and wiped his own blade clean on the dead alien.

  “Shut up!” Nik growled as he listened intently. “There! Damn it!”

  Niklosi took off running in the direction of another Relian trying to flee from them through the heavily wooded area.

  “Where are you going?” Traze called out as he started chasing after Niklosi.

  “We got a damn runner. Stay there and get rid of those bodies,” Nik replied through the shengari’ so he wouldn’t have to waste his breath.

  Niklosi had no idea where the Relian idiot was running; there was nowhere to hide. The scanners had indicated that the area was devoid of humanoid signatures for at least a mile around, and Nik couldn’t imagine that the Relians would have some hidden alien base in the middle of this muggy hell.

  He angrily wiped at the sweat covering his brow as he launched himself over a fallen log, grateful for the full moon and the beast in his brain that gave him advanced vision that allowed him to see the obstacles in his path. They hit the mile mark, and Nik was getting increasingly frustrated at the fast Relian.

  “Damn, where is he going?” Decano complained as he followed behind Nik.

  Niklosi didn’t bother to respond. Instead, he harnessed the energy of his anger into action and ran even faster, rapidly closing the distance between him and the ruthless alien killer he was hunting.

  It had only been a few weeks since Grai learned Dagog had issued orders for terrorist assaults around the globe to destabilize the governments and create chaos. With the Alliance ships, headed by Koda and Scaden, preventing the Relians from sending reinforcements to the planet, Dagog switched tactics to a ground campaign using the forces he still had on the planet and the human scum who joined the Relian cult, Ralidina.

  The Alliance teams had been working around the clock for weeks to take down the Relian and Ralidina units as fast as they could find them. The more the Relians attempted to coordinate attacks among their human cult members, the easier it was for the Hybrid teams to track them and end the threat they posed to the humans.

  But these bastards, Niklosi thought as he pushed himself faster, these bastards we’re tracking are the worst.

  Nik and his team had been on their trail for a week and had followed them from the epicenter of their cult in the Middle East to the US. They’d been able to stop the bombing the group had planned on a community daycare center, but the Relians had slipped through their fingers while they were dec charging the bombs in a safe location.

  Nik wasn’t the kind to give up, and he’d followed these four idiots across the globe, doggedly determined to eliminate the constant threat that they posed to the humans and this planet.

  Nik growled as he wiped more sweat from his face and again wished they’d caught up to the bastards in a more pleasant climate. He hated the humid climes on his own planet, and he thought the ones on Earth were even worse.

  That corner of Missouri, although still shaking off winter, was much warmer than Nik preferred, and the occasional chilly breeze wasn’t doing anything to cool his body or his anger at the Relian he was chasing.

  He jumped a large depression in the ground and grinned as he saw the Relian’s head bobbing through the trees just ahead of him. Nik drew his gun, slowed his breathing, and took aim at the target. He got off five shots and ran towards the rapidly falling body.

  “You stupid asshole! Making me chase you though this hellhole! What is that smell? Is that you? No, it can’t be you, because you smell like dead asshole!” Niklosi said as he kicked the dead alien in the ribs before wiping his muddy boots on the Relian’s shirt.

  Nik knelt down and placed a light stone against the body, smiling in satisfaction as the body super-heated. He stood and just stomped the alien’s feet and calves to scatter the dusty remains when he heard a strong but definitely feminine voice.

  “Police! Put the weapon down and step back from the body! Now!”

  Niklosi stole a quick glance at the woman in uniform, holding a gun on him. He quickly noted her pretty hazel eyes, shoulder length dark hair pulled back in a ponytail and pretty features before he realized just how screwed he was.

  “Oh this is fucking great!” Niklosi muttered as he kicked the body again, sending up more dust as the entire chest collapsed to fine particles on the ground. “Now I have to deal with the human law. Fuck you, fuck you very much!”

  *****

  The night air was still a little chilly as spring began to make its way through the Ozark Mountains in southwestern Missouri. The days were becoming warmer and longer, and acting Baker’s Creek Police Chief BJ Markson sighed at the thought of summer and an end to the long winter.

  She held her hands to her face and blew warm breath in them as she tried to get the feeling
back in her numb fingers and bemoaned the fact that she’d finished her thermos of coffee an hour ago.

  BJ heard a small sound to her left and her eyes scanned the heavily wooded area closely, hoping to find whatever it was that had old man Jepson in such a fit since she’d returned home. With the full moon shining so brightly, she was quickly able to see the possum that was making the racket and let out a small sigh.

  She leaned her head back in the seat of the town’s one and only patrol car and tried to ignore how uncomfortable it was. The beat up, unmarked sedan wasn’t much, but the engine had been spruced up by the local boys, and the only tech wizard around for a hundred miles helped get a radio and a few other gadgets installed to make it more of an official and useful vehicle.

  Not that it mattered too much; BJ knew every one of the 354 residents of Baker’s Creek. She grew up with half of them and was raised by the other half, pretty much like anyone else from the small Ozark community. The only thing she was ever called for was to be a mediator between family feuds and to calm the occasional superstitious fear—like she had the last four nights.

  BJ again looked out at the surrounding woods and decided if the rest of the night went as quietly as the three previous nights she’d sat hidden in the trees, just off the road to Jepson’s place, she was going to call off her surveillance.

  It was probably just superstition and not reality that made old man Jepson come down to the small police station in town and file a complaint about “haints and the howler” coming for his soul in the night. BJ had kept her face a stone mask as she tried to assure Jepson that if ghosts and a local legendary creature were stalking him, that she’d put a stop to it.

  BJ sighed heavily as she closed her eyes and smiled. She had missed the unique and varied people that she’d grown up with after she’d joined the police force in St. Louis and was glad to be back home—even if it meant sitting in the woods for four nights in a row to catch whatever ghosts or mythical creature old man Jepson thought were coming for him.

  Ghosts and non-existent creatures were easy for BJ compared to the humans hell bent on killing each other and everyone around them. She’d have more luck charging the howler with trespassing than changing the general apathy and downright disdain people showed for human life these days.

  It wasn’t the adults that bothered BJ when she worked in St. Louis. They made their decisions, they chose the path they walked, and she felt no sympathy for those who willingly picked up a weapon with the intention to harm another.

  It was the children who had ripped out her soul and forced her to come back home begging for the simplicity, superstitions, and love of her home town. The final straw for her had been her last call to a middle class home in a beautiful area where she’d found the bodies of a days-old infant and her two-year-old brother.

  Beside their little bodies was their father, surrounded by paramedics as they tried to keep the man alive. She watched the gun he’d used to slaughter his babies as it was carefully placed in an evidence bag, but it was the heart-rending shrieks of the new mother who’d come home and discovered the bodies that had broken BJ’s heart.

  The senseless tragedies were becoming far too common, and a lack of personal responsibility was at an all-time high. People were more inclined to video someone getting beaten to death than help them in order to get their 15 minutes of internet fame.

  That day was no different. The neighbors knew the husband had been drinking and abusing his family. They’d heard the fights and screams for months, but no one ever called the police, preferring to ignore the bruises on the family and the fear they lived in.

  That day they heard the gun shots, but instead of calling for help, they waited for the mother to come home and find her dead babies. Then they descended on the home with their phones and cameras as they videoed her screams and pain while she tried to call 911 to get help for her babies because no one would stop videotaping it to make the call for her. BJ was beyond incensed when she’d arrived and the neighbors were still recording the events and posting them online.

  She’d asked them politely to stop recording, for the sake of the mother, but they’d refused, hurling insults instead. They excused their lack of basic human emotions as their “right” to do whatever they wanted. Free speech.

  No one bothered to think of the devastated mother who’d have to forever relive that day because there would be footage on the internet because of the callous trash looking for someone to pay attention to them for five minutes. No one wanted to admit that if they’d called the police a month earlier, those babies might be alive.

  When an officer grabbed the hand of a teenager trying to lift up the sheet on the stretcher carrying the dead bodies to get a picture and told him to get the hell back behind the police line, the press immediately asked the kid if the officer had used excessive force and offered to buy the tape from anyone who may have caught the officer doing anything wrong.

  When things got so bad that a good cop trying to protect the dignity of two dead babies and their grief-stricken mother sent the press stirring up more hate, BJ knew it was time to leave the city. The next day, she’d turned in her gun and badge. Three days after that she was driving back home with her old pick-up truck loaded down with her belongings.

  She’d barely driven into town when Irwin, the mayor, had stopped her truck in the middle of Main Street and offered her the job of Baker’s Creek sole police officer/chief of police. The minor skirmishes between the hill-folk were certainly not as exciting as St. Louis, but there was never a dull moment either, and it suited BJ just fine.

  Who needs a ghost or a howler when the coffee is haunting me now? BJ thought with a grimace as she shifted uncomfortably in the seat.

  With no one around for miles, except for old man Jepson sleeping peacefully in his house, BJ opened the door, closed it as quietly as she could so the interior light would go off, and moved around the car to the other side. She looked all around to make sure she was alone before she undid her pants and quickly handled her business.

  She was just buttoning her pants and adjusting her holster when she heard the rustling in the distance. She hunkered down at the side of the car and peered out into the woods, trying to figure out what was running and in what direction.

  It didn’t take long for her to figure out whatever it was, it was big and heading her way. She ducked down further, watching carefully for where the person was going so she could surprise them.

  BJ knew when she first spoke to Jepson that she was most likely dealing with the local kids and had really hoped to catch them so she could put a stop to their harassment of the older man. She grinned as she realized it was going to work out better than she’d planned as the footsteps came closer to the car.

  The rustling she’d first heard was now loud crashing sounds as someone tore through the heavily wooded area to the left of the road. The closer the sounds came, the more BJ realized that whatever was running wasn’t trying to scare anyone with the racket they were making.

  More curious than concerned, BJ peered above the hood of her car as the sounds came closer. She could hear labored breathing and a second runner behind the first. Since she’d already assumed there was more than one prankster, it didn’t surprise her to hear more than one set of footfalls heading her way.

  Counting the seconds between the footfalls, BJ tried to determine the length of the stride of the runners but gave up when it kept coming out all wrong. She knew the kids couldn’t be that big.

  Bigfoot isn’t that big, she thought with a snort.

  Moments later, she was left speechless as a large man leaped from the woods into the middle of the dirt road. The man’s incredibly long stride was taking him across the rest of the single lane road when several loud shots rang out through the night, and he suddenly crumpled in the middle of the road.

  BJ stood and grabbed her gun, drawing the weapon and pointing it in the direction the shots had come from as the other footsteps came closer through the woo
ds.

  “You stupid asshole! Making me chase you through this hellhole! What is that smell? Is that you? No, it can’t be you, because you smell like dead asshole!”

  A tall, dark-haired man stomped into the middle of the road in front of the fallen man and kicked him twice in the ribs before wiping his boots off on him. Everything happened so fast, and BJ watched in horror as the man knelt down next to the body and held something to it that glowed brightly for a moment, causing her to shield her eyes from the glare.

  When she opened her eyes again, the running man’s body looked like something from a bad horror movie. It was completely desiccated, as if ready to crumble to dust at any moment. This was proved seconds later when the tall man began stomping on the body and dust began flying around.

  BJ stood and aimed her gun at him.

  “Police! Put the weapon down and step back from the body! Now!” she ordered, keeping her car between herself and the huge man, who looked shocked to see her.

  “Oh this is fucking great!” Nik muttered as he kicked the body again, sending up more dust as the entire chest collapsed to fine particles on the ground. “Now I have to deal with the human law. Fuck you, fuck you very much!”

  “I said, put the weapon down and step back. Now!” BJ yelled, moving around the hood of her car to stand a few feet from the killer.

  This was hill country, and BJ was the only police officer within sixty miles. She didn’t have much time to control the situation before the evidence of the crime was carried away on the wind. With no hope of backup close by, BJ stood her ground and aimed her weapon with steady hands on the killer.

  Niklosi looked at the gun in his hand and rolled his eyes as he holstered the weapon, unwilling to harm the small human female who was just trying to do her job. He would never harm an innocent if he didn’t have to, and he assumed that Decano or Traze would catch up shortly and render her unconscious while she had her attention on him.

  “I have no beef with you, and this will be short, so wait a minute,” Niklosi growled in irritation as he moved to stomp on the pelvic area of the desiccated body.