CHIMERA’S KISSPrepared to lie, cheat death, and steal the unimaginable power of an alien male who claims he was sent to save her, Haley is drawn into a dangerous world she never imagined existed, but she refuses to be a pawn in an alien war. She will stop at nothing to save her cousin and give her Marked Mate exactly what he needs…freedom. She’s a Timewalker, after all. It should be a simple thing to travel back in time to prevent her cousin’s death, even if that means the scarred warrior she’s grown to love won’t remember her at all.
But in love, and in war, nothing ever goes according to plan…
Chimera’s Kiss by Michele Callahan – An Excerpt:
Haley Miller’s eyelids popped open and she stared at the dark ceiling fan that rotated in quiet circles over her head. She was frozen in place by a cold numbness that flowed into her limbs. The icy dread bloated her psychic senses like helium filling a balloon.
Someone’s in the house.
She turned her head to quickly scan her small bedroom from where she lay sprawled in bed. The red numbers on her digital alarm clock read 3:23 a.m. Her desk was littered with books. The hardwood floor and tattered throw rug were bare but for the slip-on shoes she’d kicked off earlier. Frayed and worn through in places, her burnt-orange backpack leaned on the wall next to the closed door. Everything was shadowy and undisturbed except for the steady whirring comfort of the small ceiling fan rotating in the same, steady rhythm that normally lulled her to sleep.
But something was very, very wrong.
She’d been dreading feeling this again, ever since those stupid alien spaceships had shown up over the U.S. a few weeks ago. That was the day she realized her odd birthmark was connected to something not of this world. Something foreign to the Earth completely. Something from another place.
The spaceship had settled over Denver, floating in the sky like something out of a Star Wars movie, and her birthmark had literally heated on her arm until it felt like she was being branded. The circular mark then turned three shades darker and she’d felt an odd buzzing, like it was saying “Hello” to an old friend on some super-secret, inaudible frequency, and she just happened to be the radio.
She’d looked up into the sky from the front porch of her Boulder home to where one of the three spaceships had hovered like a giant floating wasp, and accepted that life as she knew it was over.
Haley had spent the rest of that day hiding in her house like a coward. And, just like nearly every other person on the planet, she’d stayed glued to her TV until it was over. Washington D.C., Denver, and Los Angeles had all been invaded. When the spaceships left a few hours after they’d appeared, she’d nearly fainted with relief.
The government had tried to spin it almost immediately. With only three spaceships, and those only seen over three U.S. cities, it had been easy for the spin doctors to convince most of the world that the whole event was nothing more than a Hollywood propaganda stunt to promote a new science fiction movie coming out later in the year. The majority of Earth’s inhabitants had swallowed the lie hook, line and sinker.
She didn’t believe a single word of it. And neither did her cousin, Danielle, or her best friend, Makayla. The three of them all had one little problem with the movie angle. The new, darker marks in their skins. All three of them had felt something that day. Something bizarre and haunting, because after that, things had gotten weird.
Haley would have bet her life that whoever, or whatever was on those ships, they weren’t friendly, peace-loving, cute little Ewoks from her parents’ old-school Star Wars movie.
The feeling of dread, of evil, she’d had that day flowed through her now, stronger and more frightening than anything she’d ever felt before. She struggled to breathe, and her hands shook like dried aspen leaves in the wind.
“Danielle.” Her barely there whisper got her moving. She threw aside the covers and sat up. Her cousin’s room was at the end of the hall. Haley barely spared a thought for their other two roommates in this rambling, two-story rental home. The other two girls didn’t have the alien birthmarks from hell on their skins, couldn’t feel the aliens’ presence. Not like her cousin, Danielle, who could not only sense their presence, but catch snippets of their freakish thoughts as well.
Their roommates thought the spaceship’s arrival had been, “freaking awesome”. Haley and Dani had been hiding, drinking shots and hoping to feel normal again. Their roomies had hopped in their car and headed downtown, to get closer. They’d believed the Hollywood lie, and Haley hadn’t been able to summon the energy to try to convince them of the truth.
The dark energy rolling through Haley’s body right now left no doubt in her mind that they were in big trouble. She climbed out of bed, her hot-pink pajama shorts and tank all that covered her as she tiptoed, barefoot, to her bedroom door.
Pressing her ear to the old wood, she listened for a few moments, but heard nothing. She lifted her head to scan the room for a weapon. No knives. No gun. Damn. She had the aluminum baseball bat that had once belonged to her younger brother. Her mother had pressed it into her hands and insisted she take it with her when she’d moved into the dorms on campus six years ago. A stupid Little League baseball bat. Hardly a weapon of choice against an alien home invasion.
Better than nothing.
She grabbed the bat and slowly opened her door so she could step into the dark hallway.
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