A Space Girl from Earth (The Kyroibi Trilogy Book 1)

by Christina McMullen

  “He can’t possibly…” Isa began to protest, but cut off, narrowing her eyes at Julian. “Unless he had help.”

  “Do not feign ignorance. It is unbecoming of you,” Julian said sharply.

  “Mind yourself, Julian,” Isa snapped, but paled visibly when he simply raised his eyebrows in response.

  “I warned you that Svoryk would be drawn to the Kyr—”

  “No,” she gasped, shaking her head as if trying to physically remove something unpleasant. “That’s impossible. It’s too far and Ellie hasn’t… He wouldn’t have even known where to look!”

  “Hasn’t what?” Ellie gaped at her mother in confusion. The words they spoke were English, but they might as well have been speaking Greek for all the sense they were making.

  “He has no claim,” Isa hissed, still focused on Julian.

  “Claim? Mom, what are you even…? Oh god, you aren’t saying…” Ellie had been so wrapped up in the possibility that the mob was after them that she’d nearly forgotten that the email had brought up another rather uncomfortable truth. “That guy… Svoryk… He isn’t my…” She gulped, unable to say the words aloud for fear that they might be true. “He’s not… I mean, in your email…”

  “Your what, Ellie? Whatever are you— Oh heaven’s no!” Isa spluttered, realizing what her daughter was asking. “No, Ellie, that little cockroach is not your father! He’s the rat bastard who—”

  “Isa, it would be best to discuss this at the lake house,” Julian interrupted. “We are running out of time. I can only do so much to protect El’iadrylline before even Svoryk’s crude instruments find her.”

  A chill ran down Ellie’s spine. Like her mother, Julian normally spoke proper and unaccented British English. Even now, with his suddenly cold and impersonal behavior, his voice was as impeccable as his appearance. Yet when he spoke her full name, the name that even her mother rarely used despite being the one who saddled her with all five nearly unpronounceable syllables, it was with a strangely beautiful tenor that was not of this world, almost as if he sang her name.

  Somehow, though she could not explain how she could possibly know this, Ellie was suddenly aware that Julian’s pronunciation was in fact the purest and most correct. That he would know better than the woman who presumably bestowed the name upon Ellie both intrigued and terrified her.

  “What exactly are you supposedly protecting me from?”

  “It is nothing you need be concerned with,” her mother cut in hastily, sliding a look of irritation over at her assistant before taking a steadying breath to compose herself. “But Julian is correct, Ellie. We cannot linger here within the city while Svoryk is near. It’s too dangerous. There’s a car waiting for us. I’ll explain everything, I promise.”

  “Mom? You realize you’re acting like a crazy person, right? Both of you are.”

  But neither her mother nor Julian answered. Before she could question her mother further, there was a quiet whoosh of doors opening and Ellie was being rushed back into the elevator.

  “We’ll take the sedan. It’s fueled so we should have no need to stop,” Julian said as he keyed in the code that would take them to the private underground level of the garage used only by the building’s residents.

  When the doors opened again, he put out a hand, indicating that Ellie and Isa were to stay in the elevator. After checking to make sure they weren’t in immediate danger, he motioned for the women to go on ahead of him. Ellie rolled her eyes at what she saw as a sexist and unnecessary gesture. While Julian was tall, taller even than she was by several inches, he was hardly an intimidating figure. Ellie was sure that if there truly was danger, she would have better odds against their attacker than the slender and typically fussy assistant. Besides, her mother’s dark-windowed luxury sedan was parked only a few feet away. With two strides she could be at the car.

  But Ellie only made it one step before a sharp prickle, like a low voltage electric shock, shot through her hip, causing her to jerk sideways.

  “You! How the hell?” she gasped, completely dumbfounded to see the little toad of a man she thought she had lost. So he had been the guy they were talking about. Ellie seriously wondered why her mother and Julian considered this guy a threat.

  Up close he was even shorter than she remembered and there was absolutely nothing menacing about him. She pushed away, determined to use the self-defense training that had eluded her earlier, but the buzzing sensation in her hip must have been some sort of stun gun because her legs were unresponsive.

  “Svoryk, unhand my daughter.” Isa’s voice sounded nothing like the woman Ellie called mother.

  “Isaverlline,” the man hissed, eying her with a derisive sneer. “I offered you a life well above your station and you spit in my face. I warned you could not hide from me that which is rightfully mine.”

  “Rightfully yours?” Isa laughed. The haughty cackle sounded like a challenge, followed by an actual challenge as she drew a small pistol from her purse. “Your hubris is astounding, Svoryk. Let my daughter go and perhaps I’ll allow you to live long enough to stand trial for your crimes.”

  “Has everyone lost their minds?” Ellie shrieked, eyeballing the gun that was basically aimed in her direction. She tried to push away, to dive for cover, but every movement felt sluggish and strained.

  “Do you think me a fool? Your weapon is primitive and useless. Mind your manners and perhaps I’ll allow you to live long enough to see why your cowardly flight into exile was for nothing.” Svoryk punctuated his statement by turning a dial on the device he held against Ellie’s hip. The static buzzing went from irritating to painful in an instant. Despite her brain’s desperate command to run, Ellie’s legs still refused to move.

  “Hey!” Ellie shouted, turning a terrified eye to her mother. “What the hell is going on?”

  “Stop posturing, Svoryk.” Isa rolled her eyes and to Ellie’s horror, seemed completely oblivious to her daughter’s situation. “Surely even you are intelligent enough to realize that the Kyroibi will be rendered useless if you kill her.”

  “K-kill?” Ellie squeaked as the panic rose with in her. Surely, this had to be a dream. A nightmare. Perhaps she had taken a nap and the stress of failing her exam had finally taken its toll on her mental state.

  “I have no intention of killing her…yet,” Svoryk sneered. “I will have the Kyroibi and after that…” His little beady eyes roamed Ellie’s body in a way that was offensive, disgusting, and terrifying all at once. “…I will have what is left.”

  “Why you filthy little…”

  Ellie didn’t hear the rest of her mother’s insult because at that moment, something heavy landed against her back and the electric buzz at her hip cut out. She stumbled, arms flailing for several steps before sprawling face first into the ground.

  “Ellie, come with me.”

  With a surprisingly firm grip, Julian lifted Ellie to her feet and pushed her towards the stairwell. Her primitive brain complied, but her instincts told her she couldn’t leave her mother.

  “Mom!”

  Isa turned at the sound, but Julian’s firm grip on her shoulder prevented Ellie from running to her mother.

  “Ellie, go with Julian.”

  “But…” she began to protest, but she was cut off as she felt an arm slide around her waist and her feet leave the ground. “What are you doing? Put me down!”

  Svoryk’s eyes widened in surprise as they fell on Julian. Isa took advantage of the distraction. The last thing Ellie saw before disappearing up the stairs was her mother throwing a most un-ladylike punch that caught Svoryk off guard.

  Outside, Julian began to run, dragging a stunned Ellie once again through the city before she had a chance to even process what was happening.

  “Julian, where are you going?” she asked, trying to pull away, but his grip was surprisingly strong. In fact, he was proving to be much stronger than Ellie originally suspected. And ridiculously fast. She had no choice but to keep her legs moving or be dr
agged along the sidewalk. “We can’t leave my mom with that man!”

  “Your mother is more capable than you know,” he informed her in a voice that Ellie felt was just a little too calm for the situation. His grip on her wrist tightened and Ellie felt like she was being yanked through the fabric of time and space, adding to the already impossible forward momentum. “Just keep running,” Julian commanded. “And whatever you do, do not let go of me.”

  “Like I can get out of your death grip,” she grumbled through clenched teeth.

  “Sorry,” he said curtly, but relaxed his grip only enough to slide from her wrist to her hand as he pulled her along. “Just please, stay with me.”

  The last thing she wanted to do was to stay with Julian, but she had no choice. His hand was like a vise around hers and they were running so fast that their surroundings were little more than a blur in Ellie’s peripheral vision. Typically, she enjoyed running. What had started as a method of coping with panic had become a daily ritual that she relished, but this was different.

  In fact, it was nearly the opposite. Instead of therapeutic, a too familiar darkness began to settle over her. Ellie could not move her legs fast enough to outrun the dread and she wanted nothing more than to stop. Certainly, they had to be several blocks away at least, but still they ran. Any attempt to ask Julian to slow down, stop, or where they were headed was met by stony silence or outright refusal.

  Finally, just as she felt she couldn’t take another step, Julian came to an abrupt stop. With no warning, Ellie was unable to stop her own momentum, but instead of slamming into Julian’s back, he swung her around in a wide arc to avoid a collision. Even so, she stumbled, surprised when her fall was broken by a soft bed of pine needles.

  “No way…”

  When the world finally stopped spinning, Ellie blinked at the sea of brown and green. Above her, the trees from which the needles had fallen rose toward the sky and the air was filled with their pungent green scent. She stared blankly with wide eyes until Julian offered his hand and helped her to her feet. From his pocket, Julian pulled a set of keys.

  Ellie watched, dumbstruck, as he inserted a key into the lock on the tall wooden door in front of them. Not just any door, but the door to her mother’s summer home in Lake George. She absolutely had to be dreaming.

  Chapter 4

  “I’m hallucinating. I have to be.” Ellie glared at Julian. “What did you do to me?”

  “I didn’t drug you, if that is what you are implying. Your perception has not been altered, though I can certainly understand why you might think otherwise.”

  “Oh, so you’re just calling me crazy?”

  “I didn’t say that either.” Julian unlocked the door and stepped aside, but Ellie made no move to enter the cabin.

  “Right,” she growled. “So I’m just supposed to accept that we teleported to Lake George. Oh, and we did so to escape the villainous toad man who wants to—I don’t even know what toad man wants, but apparently it was okay to leave Mom behind. This… this is insanity, Julian.” Ellie took a deep and ragged breath. Her heart was pounding and her mind was racing in every direction at once. Surely, she had been a bit stressed about the exam earlier, but not that stressed. No, this experience was far too lucid to be stress induced.

  “El’iadrylline, I promise you are not suffering from physical or mental trauma brought about by psychological conditioning, drug use, or by any nefarious means. Questioning the reliability of your perceptions based on the improbability of our current geographical location in relation to the time it would logically require for us to travel from New York City to Lake George is quite understandable, but I need you to be calm and allow me to explain. You have simply experienced a method of travel that is new to you.”

  Julian’s strange, almost inhuman response—and the fact that he managed to get it all out without drawing an extra breath—did nothing to assure Ellie that she wasn’t dreaming. According to her cell phone, the time was just after nine in the evening. An hour earlier she had only just arrived at her mother’s condo. Regardless of how real the situation appeared, Ellie refused to accept that she and Julian had defied the laws of physics and traveled on foot from New York City to Lake George in a little more than one half hour.

  The screen on her phone darkened momentarily before it timed out, yet Ellie continued to stare, feeling completely disconnected from reality. Julian found her at a subway stop that should have been a fifteen minute cab ride from her mother’s condo, yet it hadn’t taken them but a few short minutes to sprint the distance. That alone was impossible, but thinking back, Ellie didn’t recall the two of them meeting any resistance at all, despite the sidewalks being jammed packed with pedestrians as was usual on any given evening in Manhattan.

  “Right, so teleportation it is,” she muttered as she tucked the phone into her backpack. “So I guess this is where you— huh?”

  When she looked up, Julian was no longer standing next to her.

  “Ellie, please come inside.”

  A light came on and Ellie blinked as Julian reappeared just inside the doorway, a dark silhouette against the sudden brightness. The urge to run, to get as far away from the madness as she possibly could, warred with her need for the familiarity the lake home provided, leaving her rooted on the threshold, unable to move in either direction.

  “Ellie, please. It’s safer inside,” Julian said quietly, taking her gently by the elbow and steering her into the cabin. Inside, Ellie looked around at the familiar architecture of the home where she had spent countless summers and holiday weekends. It seemed real. The painting her mother had purchased at a local gallery still leaned against the back of the sofa, awaiting the decision as to where best to hang it. Next to the painting was a pair of sandals that Ellie had borrowed on the same day her mother bought the painting.

  Her feet gave a sympathetic twinge as she remembered the way the hard leather straps cut into her ankle. Ellie had been so relieved to take the shoes off that she’d forgotten to return them to her mother’s closet. It was these small, normal, and completely insignificant memories that finally broke through the confusion. The shock of the impossible situation fell away and her panicked anger returned.

  “Oh my god, Mom!” she gasped, rounding on Julian with her hands balled into fists. “What were you thinking? We have to go back!”

  “Calm yourself, Ellie. As I told you already, your mother is quite capable of protecting herself.”

  “Calm myself? That creep had a gun or something and… and he threatened to kill her!” She couldn’t believe how blasé he was being about her mother’s safety. “We should call the police! Why didn’t you call the police already? What about Dad? Did anyone tell him what happened?” She swung her backpack off and dumped it on the sofa, pawing through her belongings with shaking hands. Julian might have lost his mind, but she wasn’t just going to go along with it. She spied her phone and snatched it up, but Julian’s hand came down over hers.

  “Svoryk will not kill your mother.”

  “And what makes you so—” Ellie cut off as a dark thought wormed its way into her mind. She pulled her hand back as if burned.

  Isa and Julian had been alone. She hadn’t noticed at the time because she was too busy trying to figure out everything else, but now that she could look back on the scene, Ellie realized that there was no driver and no body guards. There wasn’t even an intern with them. Her mother never went anywhere without an entourage that contained at least one bodyguard.

  “You were in on it.” Ellie’s accusation was quiet, but sharp. “Oh my god! You had my mom kidnapped so you could extort ransom money out of Richard.”

  “Ellie,” Julian’s voice held an edge of warning as he plucked the phone from her hand and set it just out of reach on the coffee table. “Be reasonable. Your step-father made arrangements to meet us here as soon as he learned that Svoryk had found you. He will arrive tomorrow morning.”

  “That wasn’t a denial, Julian.”


  Her voice remained steady, but Ellie’s terror was growing steadily.

  “Ellie, you’re trying to rationalize that which cannot easily be explained. I know this isn’t easy—”

  “That wasn’t a denial either, Julian!” Ellie interrupted, gritting her teeth to keep her voice from betraying her fear.

  “Svoryk isn’t after your mother, Ellie. He’s after you.” Julian paused for a moment to allow his words to sink in. “We are here because Isa’s orders were to protect you and I did as she asked.”

  “And this is your idea of protecting me?” Ellie laughed, but there was no humor in the rusty bark that issued from her throat.

  She’d read about situations like this before, where kidnappers mess with their victim’s mind. Convincing them of things that couldn’t possibly be real. There was a term for this. Ellie couldn’t remember the name, but surely, that was what Julian was doing. The apparent manipulation of time, the strange and cryptic conversations, trying to insinuate that he was the only one who could save her. It was like something out of an old black and white thriller.

  Gas lighting. That was the term. Somehow, Julian had orchestrated the events in such a way that left her delusional and disoriented. Ellie closed her eyes, determined to clear her mind and find a calm and rational way to see through the complicated ruse, but a sudden jolt, like a burst of lightning inside her head, found her thoughts even more jumbled and confused.

  “Julian? W-w-what the hell are you doing?” she asked in a small wavering voice.

  A confused frown creased Julian’s brow.

  “What do you mean?”

  Ellie clamped her mouth shut before the absurd question had a chance to leap from her tongue. It was more than a stray thought, yet not quite tangible enough to be called a sound, but whatever it was, it warred for control of her mind. Worse, it was winning, telling her what to think and how to feel. Impressions, really, but it was telling her to do the very last thing she thought prudent at the moment.