by Erin Raegan
Flying in Spaceships with Aliens
Kilbus Lord Book Two
Erin Raegan
Contents
1. The Day the Vitat Invade
2. Run
3. Ten days after Killian left Theo behind
4. Nearly One Year Since the Vitat Invasion
5. Visitors
6. The Call
7. Found
8. Time to Leave
9. First Trip to Space
10. The Deal
11. Arguments and Apologies
12. Finally Home
13. Grief
14. Lust and Anger
15. Flying in Spaceships with Aliens
16. An Unexpected Detour
17. Tumbling Walls
18. Quandary
19. Crowned Queen
20. Alien Greetings
21. To the Death
22. Kil vs Fenru
23. Playing Nurse
24. A Change in Direction
25. Angry and Afraid
26. Beast
27. Rage and Shame
28. Jump
Epilogue
Thank You
Acknowledgments
Other Books by Erin Raegan
Books by E.M. Raegan
About the Author
Glossary
Flying in Spaceships with Aliens. Copyright © 2020 by Erin Raegan. All Rights Reserved.
Cover Designed by Cortney E Designs
Edited by Joy Editing
All characters, alien or human, events―on planet Earth or otherwise―in this book are a product of the author's imagination and hours of daydreaming. Any resemblance to actual people, or otherworldly beings, living or dead, or actual events are entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or transmitted, or distributed, in any form, by any means, without explicit written permission from the author with the exception of brief quotations embodied in reviews or articles. This book is licensed for your enjoyment only. Thank you, a thousand times and all the hugs, for purchasing.
Flying in Spaceships with Aliens
I once had what I thought were small dreams. Dreams that I was never sure if I would have the chance to pursue. Even so, I had been content. Happy. Or so I thought.
All that changed when Killian entered my life. He showed me so much more, made me want so much more.
But just as quickly as he lifted me up, he shoved me down so far I didn’t think I would ever have the strength to find myself again.
Now those dreams that I had thought so small and possible had been ripped from me. Everything had been ripped from me. Gone was the possibility and contentment. Nothing but pain and destruction lay in its wake.
But fate wasn’t done playing with me just yet. It had one more cruel trick up its sleeve.
He was looking for me now. Scouring the earth for me. Love and pain dueled together, dragging us kicking and screaming back to one another.
I may be hidden now, but once he found me, I knew I wasn’t ever getting away from him again.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to even try.
Because my small dreams were growing into something big. Bigger than anything I could have ever imagined. And every single one of them was fueled and held close by the very alien that had crushed them before.
This story is dedicated to all my readers. You fell in love with Kil just as fast and deeply as I did and I am so grateful.
His story is for you.
Note from the Author
The following story takes place before and after the events of the Galactic Order series.
It is not necessary to have read the Galactic Order series to enjoy this series.
It begins the day the Vitat alien species invade the earth…
The Day the Vitat Invade
Theo
Footsteps down the long hallway preceded the shrill alarm. Two beeps for wakeup call.
I groaned, rolling over to my back and blinking open bleary eyes.
Day 343. Nearly a year in captivity. Nearly a year of white walls. Of endless tests and experiments. Nearly a year since I’d last seen my home.
A year since I’d last seen him.
I walked to my little notebook and picked up my stubby pencil, then wrote down the day so I would know another had passed. I knew I was missing days. I couldn’t have tracked them all through the endless tests and days of being passed from facility to facility. But I tried.
Tomorrow I would do the same. And the day after that. On and on, it would continue. Until the day I forgot. And that day would be a sad day. It would mean I’d given up any hope of getting free.
But I wasn’t there yet. Not today.
The book was filling up. I’d had it for months now. Savoring the white pages for as long as I could. I’d only written down my most important thoughts and desires. I didn’t know if they would give me another. As it was, they had wanted to take this one away from me.
Noah had talked them into letting me keep it.
I’d yelled at him. I hadn’t wanted any help from him. I still didn’t. But he was always around. His presence silently mocked me. The betrayer my own brother had turned out to be was a hard pill to swallow.
I washed my face in the little sink in the corner of my cell, changing out of one grey uniform and replacing it with a clean set. Sweatshirt and sweatpants, the material thick to ward off the chill of the compound, but scratchy. I couldn’t stand them, they held no personality. All of us captives were mirror images of each other. But I hadn’t been allowed to wear anything else except for the hospital gowns during testing. I would take the uniforms over the gowns every time. But even the slippers were uncomfortable.
I slipped them on anyway, then pulled my hair into my fist, grasping at the loose pieces to pull it back with a rubber band. It was growing back. Down to my shoulders now. I was glad. A shaved head made for even colder nights down here.
Poor Sal’s had grown back patchy in places. Bets had been devastated when they shaved hers, but it was nearly as long as mine now.
I stood at my glass door, rubbing last night’s sore injection bruise on my inner arm as I waited for them to come for me. Two minutes later, the alarm sounded again.
Three this time. For mealtime.
Mike came to let me out. He did so with tired eyes but a small smile. He slipped a hidden letter from his pocket into my palm as I passed him, and I grinned at him. A silent thank you.
Holden would be waiting for this. And I would get his apple this morning in return.
“Late night?” I asked Mike as we walked down the hall. My hands were free, a concession I earned through good behavior that stemmed from my grim surrender to this new imprisoned existence.
As we passed the many cells around mine, I impassively looked into their empty voids. The rest of my family was kept in a separate wing of the compound. I was left here all alone. Their prized stuck pig forbidden to converse freely without their authorization.
Mike grunted. “Late shift.”
“The others are still sick?”
He sighed and nodded, lightly guiding me by my arm around the corner in the hall. I watched him closely. Mike was the only person I had grown to trust in my time here. As much as I could trust one of the men that locked me away night and day.
He was stationed here, and he’d told me he, and the other guards, lived in an aboveground building beside the compound entrance. But Mike had been forced to take over more shifts as the flu worked its way through the compound.
“Have they seen a doctor?”
He chuckled grimly. “Only the best.”
That was true. We had some of the best doctors here. Who else could be trusted to work so closely with us? The alien-touched freaks? Only the very best.
“Well, what did they say?”
He shook my shoulder playfully. “They’re good. I’ll be back to normal hours in no time.”
I walked ahead of him into the cafeteria—or galley, as the guards called it. Sal and Bets were already there. Sal sat at the table with a pack of cards, solitaire laid out in front of him. No newspapers here. We weren’t allowed any information from the outside world. Not unless the guards revealed anything—most of the time by accident. And forget contact. No calls in or out. No emails or anything.
We didn’t exist to the outside world and it didn’t exist to us.
My entire family was with me. They had been since the moment the men in black broke into our house and stole us from our beds. Holden and Jeremy from their apartment. Since then, we’d been moved from place to place until we finally settled here with Dr. Newman. I didn’t even know where here was.
But Abby. She wasn’t here. I doubted Abby even thought we were alive. I hadn’t seen her in a year. I probably never would again.
She’d been lucky. So many in our town had been. Either it was too much effort to quarantine an entire town and somehow keep it quiet from the rest of the world, or they simply didn’t know how often those three invaders had interacted with the people we left behind.
I was grateful. This was not a life I would wish on anyone. Especially not my best friend.
Bets bustled around, fixing us each a plate from the measly buffet. She’d lost her purpose down here. Having nowhere to cook for her family, no way to take care of them, had really messed with her mind. She did what she could to feel needed, and we let her.
I sat patiently, waiting for my sloppy oatmeal and bland toast. It was Tuesday, so we got an apple as our side. My favorite. I’d been looking forward to it all week. The crisp sweet taste. It was one of the only things they allowed us that somehow managed to stay free from the metallic disinfectant air of the compound that succeeded to pollute everything that surrounded us.
Holden and Jeremy were escorted inside, and their two guards shackled them to the table. Of all of us, the boys weren’t allowed out of their cells without cuffs. They had been too hard to control.
I sighed as they sat without incident. After months of watching them resist our new life, watching the guards subdue them by any means necessary, months of bruises and broken bones, I was grateful to see them without anything new. It would kill Bets not to baby them if they’d shown up injured again.
I didn’t blame Jeremy and Holden. I admired them. I hadn’t been brave enough to resist as long as they had. I’d only made it three weeks. Over a dozen bruises, two broken fingers, a fracture in my collarbone, and four rounds with the tasers had been more than enough to make me compliant.
The higher-ups had wanted me to convince the brothers to get with the program and not fight back, but I hadn’t. I couldn’t. I might not have been brave enough to fight back anymore, but they were. Dr. Newman hadn’t been happy about my refusal. But outside of holding back a few meals and locking me in my room for a few weeks, they hadn’t pushed the subject.
After Bets had gotten the boys breakfast, we all sat together. Uncle Sal put away his card game. This was the only time we would see each other today. Not for lunch or dinner. Only ever breakfast.
“Boots, you want to start?” Uncle Sal asked me.
I nodded, poking at my oatmeal. “Another brain scan last night. They took more blood. Bed at eight like usual. Nothing this morning.”
The same as nearly every night and day here. It was never-ending.
“Sleep okay?” Bets pushed.
I smiled weakly at her. “As good as any other night.”
She frowned but then looked at Jeremy.
He was hunched over his plate, his cuff chain clanking against his tray as he shoveled his meal into his mouth. “Nothing new.”
Bets narrowed her eyes on him but moved on to Holden.
He shrugged, narrowing his eyes at my balled-up hand under the table. I winked at him, and the tension drained from his shoulders.
“Just bored, Bets. Slept all right.” Then Holden tossed me his apple.
She sighed and looked down. “Same with us. Nothing new.”
Uncle Sal’s eyes bore into the side of my face. I looked down, avoiding him until he said, “Still just Theo, then?”
Everyone looked at me. It was still just me. Had been for the last two months. They had stopped poking and prodding everyone else in waves. Bets first. Then Holden. Sal and Jeremy stopped almost simultaneously. All four of them months ago.
We didn’t know about Frank. They could still be testing him like they were me. We hadn’t seen Frank for almost half a year. His health had taken a downturn. One day he was fine, the next he was being moved to another facility. They never told us where. Or if he was okay. All we could do was speculate and hope.
“They still haven’t said anything?” Bets asked, not really expecting an answer.
We didn’t know anything. They never told us anything.
They asked the questions, we answered. That was it.
“Why still Theo?” Jeremy grumbled angrily. “She wasn’t any more exposed than we were.”
Exposed. To aliens. That was what all this was about, wasn’t it? How exposed were we to the aliens? What kind of effects did that have on us?
That was what they wanted to know. Why they couldn’t let us go. Wouldn’t let us go.
But it had been so much more in the beginning. Then, it was what did we know? What could we tell them? Were the aliens coming back? Were they still here? What did the aliens want?
We’d tried silence at first, mutually deciding we would give them nothing. Too afraid of what would happen to us after they got everything they needed from us.
That hadn’t lasted longer than a day.
The men in black were convincing. And smart. They knew how to get us to cooperate. One threat toward Aunt Bets—one very real gun to her head—and every one of us cracked wide open.
We spilled it all. Killian, Leo, and Oren. How we met them. What they did to us. All of it.
Almost all of it anyway.
No one knew how close I’d gotten to Killian. Not really. They suspected of course. My brother had seen us on the couch after all. But for whatever reason, my brother hadn’t revealed that secret.
Not yet anyway.
I’d suffered through invasive examinations. They were thorough. I shuddered as I remembered. At least it had been a woman doctor. That didn’t make it okay, but it would have been worse if Dr. Newman had known exactly how close I’d gotten to Killian. Newman wasn’t as kind as the female doctor had been. I didn’t think I would have recovered if that had gone any differently.
They hadn’t found anything. Of course they hadn’t. Because Killian and I had never actually gotten that far. And thank everything kind and good that we hadn’t.
Holden carefully and quietly uncrumpled the folded letter under the table. He had to read it here so I could slip it back to Mike before any of us were caught with it. Each of us at the table smoothly shifted to block the view of the cameras and the surrounding guards as Holden quickly, with tension in his shoulders, read the letter.
When he was done, he picked up his cup of water and casually let a few drops fall onto the paper, smearing the words. Then he crumpled in and handed it back to me. The rest of us continued to eat, acting as if nothing had happened, but our eyes kept flying back to Holden. Waiting anxiously.
He discreetly looked around before leaning into the table. Low, so low, “Nothing.”
We all seemed to sag into our seats. Mike had been trying for weeks to get us information on Abby and Frank. We sent out letters through him and rarely heard back anything useful.
“Why doesn’t he just tell you that before he gets your hopes up?” Jeremy grumbled.
&nbs
p; “You know he can’t,” I muttered.
All the guards were wearing mics. There was a likely chance we all were and didn’t know it. This could all be a sick game they played with us. I couldn’t even truly trust Mike.
After breakfast, Mike escorted me from the cafeteria to the medical wing. I sat on the padded chair as Dr. Newman poked and prodded my arm with a needle, pulling more blood from me. What they did with it? I had no clue. But they took a lot over the last year. Too much.
“We’ll be moving you again,” the doctor said casually, adjusting the wiry frames on his thin face.
“Again?” I’d lost count of how many secret government buildings we’d been moved to.
He nodded absently.
“When?”
“Tomorrow,” he murmured. “You’ll be given a few moments with your family before transport arrives.”
I froze, gaping at him. “They’re not coming with me?”
He shook his head. “No, they’ll remain here for the time being.”
I swallowed hard. We were being split up. It was my worst fear. I knew arguing wouldn’t get me anywhere. Tearing up with emotion, I looked at Mike standing stoically in the corner. He subtly shook his head. Warning me.
I sucked in a heavy breath and looked down. “Why are you moving me?”
Mike stiffened.
Dr. Newman sighed. “You know I cannot answer that, Theodora.”
