Alien Portals: A SciFi Alien Multiverse Romance Novel

by Ruth Anne Scott

  “Who do you think I am?” he asked.

  “You know too much about the wall and the streams. That’s not something that anyone else knows. No one but a man I met after going through a fucking portal that you didn’t think that you needed to tell me that I was going to find.”

  “You found the portal?” he asked.

  “When I was on the phone with you in that cavern, I was looking at engravings in the wall. I touched them and it felt like I was falling. The next thing that I knew, I was in the middle of the desert.”

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Galadriel sat down on the couch and took a handful of cheese. In between bites, she told them what happened after finding herself in the desert, describing the burned village and the moment when she first saw Vyker. She tried to recall the fear that she had felt in that first moment, but she knew that her voice only expressed the affection that she felt now.

  “His name is Vyker,” Galadriel said.

  Rick’s hand came up to cover his mouth, and she saw tears forming in his eyes.

  “You know him,” she said. “You know Vyker.”

  Rick nodded.

  “I haven’t seen him in a very long time,” he said. “Not since–”

  “He was just a baby.”

  Rick’s eyes widened and she nodded.

  “You are him. You’re his father’s best friend.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Galadriel’s hands were shaking, but she fought to keep them still. She didn’t want to show the emotion that was building inside her. Rick nodded, and she looked away briefly though she knew that she had already cried out all of the tears that her body could produce.

  “My name is Rilex. I came here through a portal just after Vyker’s mother and father died. Malan had entrusted me with building his monument to protect the portals to what he considered the most dangerous of the streams. He knew that the StarKillers were close to finding the way into our stream through that portal and that the wall replica there was critical to his mission of restoring the true temple. I never found out why. I had only been in the stream for a few days when I tried to go back. I got confused. I went into the wrong cavern, and I ended up here.”

  “I don’t understand,” Galadriel said. “Why would you come here? The wall wasn’t here then. Why would the portal connect you to a different stream so far away from your time?”

  “It’s not a different stream, Galadriel. I thought that it was. Up until I met you, I thought that it was. When I realized what you knew about the wall, though, I knew that it couldn’t be. The only way that you would feel as connected to it as you do, and the only way that you could have noticed those engravings change is if this was the true wall. You didn’t move through the streams when you went back to Vyker. You just moved through time, just like I did.”

  “If this is the same stream, though, that means…”

  The thought she now had was too painful for her to speak.

  “My kind is gone now,” he said.

  “But…”

  “The wall is all that’s left of our civilization. But that’s alright. That’s fine. That’s what happens. Time passes, and things change. What matters is that time is continuing onward. The temple was restored.”

  “But the wall. That’s all that’s left of it.”

  “Now. But that’s not what matters. What matters is that it was restored and sealed. Once that happened, it was permanent. It didn’t matter what else happened. Our kind could disappear, and it didn’t matter. The stars had been made and the temple preserved. The universe would carry on.”

  “Vyker told me that the stars represent the people who created them and that once those people die, the stars fall. How are there still stars?”

  “Those are the stars of the most powerful and important people of our kind who ever lived. Their stars will linger on.”

  “We didn’t finish restoring the wall,” Galadriel said, her throat tight and painful. “I didn’t mean to come back here. Jem and I came through the portal without realizing it. There were still at least four star stones missing.”

  He reached into his pocket and withdrew a small leather pouch. Tipping it, he let a shimmering green stone slide out into his palm. Galadriel gasped and met his eyes.

  “This belonged to Malan, Vyker’s father. He had it with him when he died. I brought it with me when I went into the portal. I was never able to bring it back to the wall.”

  “There was another stone in that stream,” Galadriel told him. “It was in the replica of the wall.”

  He hung his head.

  “I never found it. I failed Malan’s trust in me.”

  “We found it,” Galadriel reassured him. “We put it back in the temple.”

  “But there are still others,” he said. “This means that there are three more that you didn’t find. We have to find them and get them back to the temple.”

  “How? If all this time you’ve been here you weren’t able to go back, how are we going to get there now?”

  “When the wall appeared in the desert and they started researching it, I immediately went there to see if there was some way that I could get home. I knew that it being here meant that there was something significant that was supposed to happen, but I didn’t know what. I had already been here for so long and hadn’t found a way to get back. I heard about the researchers who had disappeared, but when I went into the cavern, I couldn’t find the portal.”

  “You went into the cavern? You told me that you never had.”

  “I couldn’t tell you who I was, Galadriel. You would never have believed me, and then I wouldn’t have been able to help you.”

  “The portal that the researchers went through ended up in the frozen stream. That one was far in the back, though. I didn’t even see it when I was in there. How did you not notice the one that I went through?” She stopped, her stomach sinking. “It’s sealed.”

  “What?” Rilex asked.

  “It’s sealed. When I met, Vyker he told me that he was shocked that I came through the portal because it had been sealed for as long as he knew that it was there. He assumed that his father sealed it. He didn’t know how I could have gone through it.”

  Rilex shook his head.

  “I don’t know. Moving through a sealed portal is something that only the most powerful of our kind can do, and even then it can only happen in the most desperate of circumstances.”

  “Vyker made those engravings in the wall,” she told him. “They were written in code.”

  “That’s why I didn’t understand them,” he said. “I knew that engraving by heart, but when I saw the engravings that had been changed, I couldn’t figure out what they were supposed to mean. They didn’t make sense.”

  “They were made to guide us through the streams. I showed him the imprints I had done, and we were able to follow them to find the stones. Then, he went back to the temple and made the engraving. The only problem is that the engraving that brought us to Jem is the last one. There aren’t any other engravings. How do we find the last stones?”

  “Are you sure that there aren’t any more engravings? There might not have been when you first went, but what about now?”

  Galadriel realized that she hadn’t even paid attention to the engravings when she saw the wall.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Three,” Ty said.

  “The museum won’t be open for another five hours. We have to get in to see the wall. If the changes are still there, it means that Vyker made it back to the stream.”

  “Galadriel, you need to rest,” Ty said.

  “No,” she protested. “I need to get back to Vyker. Either you come with me or you don’t, but I’m going.”

  ****

  An hour later, Galadriel walked out of her apartment carrying a bag she had filled with fresh clothing and other important items. She closed the door and locked it, not knowing when, or eve
n if, she was ever going to unlock it. She rushed to the parking garage where her parents had parked her car after it was returned from the excavation site when she had to fly to the excavation site, she picked up a rental at the airport. Inside was the luggage that had been in the hotel room after she checked in. It was like she had been erased from ever having been at the excavation site.

  She pulled around in front of the building, and the three men piled in. The trip was much faster driving than it had been running, and within minutes she was parking down the street from the museum. She turned off the car and looked at the men.

  “It looks like the police left,” she said. “They probably think that the alarm was just a custodian.”

  “Well, to be honest,” Ty said, “who breaks into a museum that doesn’t have any art in it?”

  Galadriel glared at him.

  “Tonight, we do.”

  The four of them approached the museum carefully, making sure that there was no one else walking around the perimeter. She didn’t know if there were any security cameras posted on the outside, but she figured that even if there were, they had already caught her running out, and there wasn’t anything that she could do now.

  “We shouldn’t go through the front door,” she said.

  “There’s a loading dock in the back,” Rilex offered. “The security probably isn’t as stringent there.”

  They crept around to the back of the building and soon found the ramp that led up to the loading door. The lighting was not as bright here, and Galadriel felt protected by the shadows. They walked up to the back of the building, and she tested the latch on the door.

  “It’s locked,” she said. She stepped back and looked above the door. “There’s a window,” she said. “Jem, do you think that you can break it?”

  Jem picked up a brick from the ramp and easily reached up and smashed it through the glass, his incredible height making it so that he barely had to raise his arm above his head to reach it. He brushed the pieces of broken glass away from the frame.

  “I’m too big to get through it,” he said, “but he’s not.”

  Jem was looking at Ty, and Galadriel joined his glare.

  “Will you?” she asked.

  Ty looked at her like he was going to reject the idea, and then sagged.

  “The things that I do for you,” he grumbled.

  Jem offered him a boost, and Ty climbed up toward the broken window.

  “Be careful,” Galadriel said. “Try to find something to step on.”

  Ty made his way through the window and Galadriel waited tensely to hear him call out to them. A few moments later, the door creaked and opened. Ty smiled out at them.

  “They leave the key in the door,” he said. “They need to work on their security measures.”

  “Come on,” Galadriel said, pushing past him. “If we’re lucky, they don’t have security guards at this time of night.”

  The four of them wove their way through the storage room at the back of the museum and then stepped carefully out of the door into the main corridor. They listened carefully for the sound of footsteps coming their way, but the corridors were silent. Moving as quickly as they could, they headed back into the exhibit with the wall. Galadriel dropped to her knees in front of it again and squinted in the near-darkness to try to see the engravings.

  Rilex took his phone from his pocket and held it up to shine the light on the wall. He immediately crouched down beside her.

  “This one,” he said. “This one is different.”

  Galadriel smiled tearfully.

  “He made it back,” she said. “He made it back to the temple.”

  “That’s only part of it. He still needs the other stones.”

  “What does the engraving say?” Jem asked from behind them.

  “Remember where you arrived.”

  The engraving was simple and straightforward, not complex like the others. Galadriel thought about it for a few moments.

  “The desert?” she asked. “Does it mean that I should go back to the desert?”

  “No,” Rilex said, shaking his head. “If the star stones had been there, Vyker would have already found them. It’s something else.”

  “Here,” Jem said.

  Galadriel looked at him.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Here. When we arrived here, you said that the portal brought you not to the museum, but to the wall.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “But we didn’t arrive at the wall. We were further in the exhibit.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Galadriel climbed to her feet and ran toward the place in the corridor where they landed after moving through the portal. She looked around frantically, trying to find significance in the location in the exhibit.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, her voice high with exasperation. “What does he want? What am I supposed to do?”

  Suddenly the words went through her mind again.

  Remember where you arrived.

  “It is the desert,” she said. “He is talking about the desert.”

  “We can’t go there now,” Ty said.

  “We don’t have to.”

  Galadriel ran back down the hallway, bypassing the exhibit with the wall and going into the next room.

  “What’s this?” Ty asked.

  Galadriel was running along the sides of the room, looking into each of the glass display cases.

  “This is the Gylex exhibit,” she said. “When I got to the excavation site, I was standing in the research site for the Gylex civilization. That’s why they thought that the wall had something to do with that culture. It showed up where they had been excavating a settlement. Vyker told me that he had never heard of that culture, but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t in the same place. It just means that they came well after his kind left.”

  “So?” Ty asked.

  “So what happens when one civilization disappears and another takes over the same area?”

  “They find the artifacts from the first culture,” Jem said.

  Galadriel nodded.

  “Exactly.”

  She got to a tall glass case at the back of the room and paused. Inside was a collection of jewelry found in the excavation site. Her hand flattened to the glass, and she realized that she was barely breathing. In the center of the case, resting on a piece of blue velvet, was a necklace. Its narrow, gold chain held a heavy teardrop-shaped pendant, the amber encasing a large, round stone.

  Galadriel ran her fingers along the edge of the case until she found the seam that indicated the door. Dipping her fingers into it, she eased the pieces of glass apart until the door opened. She grabbed the necklace and ran to Rilex, holding it out to him. He took it from her and nodded.

  “This is it,” he said.

  “Galadriel?”

  She turned toward the sound of Jem’s voice and saw him standing beside a small piece of pottery sitting on a platform. There was another stone embedded in the center of it, painted accents seeming to create a ceremonial dish. She picked it up, and without a second thought, dropped it to the floor, shattering the pottery. The stone skittered across the floor, and Galadriel scooped it up.

  “That’s three,” she said, handing the stones to Rilex.

  Suddenly, she felt as though all of the adrenaline had run out of her body. Nausea washed over her, and she ran toward the bathroom. When she emerged a few minutes later, Rilex was scrutinizing her.

  “We need to get you back to Vyker,” he said.

  “But we only found three of the stones.”

  “That is enough for now. Where is the portal that brought you here?”

  Galadriel drew Jem’s necklace out of her pocket and handed it to him.

  “The engraving is on the other side. We didn’t even know what it was until we went through it.”

  “But Vyker told me that the portals don’t go back to where
they started. We don’t know where it would bring us.”

  Rilex looked at her with determination in his eyes.

  “It’s the only chance we have. We can’t go through a sealed portal, so the one in the desert won’t work. The frozen stream is too dangerous. The only choice that we have is to use this portal and find out where it brings us. It might be the last chance we get.”

  She nodded, and they went back through the museum the way that they had come, exiting through the loading door and closing it behind them as best they could even though they couldn’t lock it. When they reached the car, Galadriel reached inside and withdrew the bags that she had had with her as well as the one that she had packed. Rilex took the luggage from the hotel and draped it over his shoulder.

  “Just in case,” he said.

  Galadriel nodded and turned to Ty.

  “Are you coming with us?” she asked.

  Ty hesitated. He glanced around as if he would find the answer somewhere in the early morning haze.

  “This is real, isn’t it?” he asked.

  Galadriel gave a short, mirthless laugh and nodded.

  “Even I couldn’t just come up with this, Ty. I’m scared.”

  He nodded.

  “I know you are,” he said. “Will you come back for me?” he asked, lowering his voice to a whisper.

  Galadriel tilted her head back to try to regain control over the emotion swelling within her and caught sight of Orion overhead. She felt the strength of Vyker’s presence with her, and knew that she might have to make the choice, and if she did, this moment would not be it.

  “I don’t know if I can,” she answered, the tears starting again.

  “Then, I guess that there are going to be two missing people,” he said.

  Galadriel smiled through her tears and gathered Ty into a tight hug. She knew that he was making a decision that could put his life in danger, but he was willing to do it for her.

  “Are you ready?” she asked the other two. They nodded, and she looked directly into Jem’s eyes. “Are you sure, Jem?” she asked. “You could stay. You might be able to find a way home.”

  The warrior straightened his back and shook his head.