But sure, marijuana isn’t that kind of drug, but it’s still disgusting if it’s abused. Tommy sure as hell doesn’t have any medical problems, and you’d think he had advanced cancer based on how much he smokes.
“Yeah, well, we can’t do anything about the weed. It is California, after all. But I agree, if he wants this baby he’s going to have to change by himself.”
“You’re so lucky your siblings got a slap to the legs when they did something wrong. Mom had rules, yeah, but she didn’t realize how sneaky Tommy got until it was too late.”
Chapter Eighteen: Lucy
Digging into the salmon that decorated my plate, I licked my lips before lifting my loaded fork to my lips. It was raw, the fish cut into strips so thin I could see through it to the salad underneath.
The only other patron in the bar was Jon, and Todd leaned on the bar top to fiddle with his cell phone. Everything was quiet, peaceful, and I took the opportunity to bask in it.
Our togetherness still lingered in the forefront of my mind, but I couldn’t bear to ask Jon about it. Casting him a sidelong glance, my eyes followed him as he speared a tomato with his fork. He looked nice, his hair slicked back and his face cleanly shaven to reveal a placid expression. Filling my mouth, my gaze dropped to his lips as he chewed noiselessly. My blood started to pump harder in my veins, and heat suffused my cheeks before I forced myself to look away.
“Do you two want a beer or something?” I’d almost forgotten Todd was here, and my eyes flew to his form as he bent under the bar. He didn’t wait for an answer, emerging with three dark bottles to twist off the caps. “Cheers.”
Settling down two of them, Todd lifted his bottle bottom up to guzzle before turning to the kitchen door. My brows furrowed, a slight frown dragging down my mouth, but I didn’t worry about him. He wasn’t a guy that talked much or even associated with anyone outside of taking food orders.
Taking a swig of my beer, I let out a sigh as memories of the last time I drank floated into my mind’s eye. It’d been the day I met Jon, and my eyes once again slipped to him. The way he moved was so comfortable, and my ears twitched when he grunted absently at his beer.
“Drinking is the only thing the locals do here, huh? Work, drink, sleep, repeat. That sounds so boring.” Blinking slowly, it took my brain a few seconds to understand what Jon had said. It was the first time he complained about being here. His grumble was tinged in disgust, and I set my beer down with trembling fingers. Tightening my grip on my fork, I gulped down the lump in my throat before spearing another piece of salmon.
“I guess… but Todd’s not a bad guy, he’s just quiet. He prefers being in a kitchen over people, even if he doesn’t make anything elaborate.” My defense was weak, and Jon’s cheek rounded in a half smirk that told me he very much believed me.
“I can understand why you don’t like it here, Lucy. It’s so sleepy.”
I didn’t have a reply for that, and we lapsed into a heavy silence. I had never been anywhere outside of this town since we moved here. Ryan had everything air lifted that we needed, so there was no reason to go to Anchorage. California wasn’t even a place I could imagine; I never saw a single picture or video of it.
“Hey, Jon?” Twisting in my seat to face him, I bit on the inside of my cheek as Jon turned his head to me. “Is California a nice place to live?”
Chewing slowly, Jon’s gaze became far away as he thought, but I didn’t push him even as anxiety bubbled in my gut.
“It’s a great place. I live right between where it snows in the winter and where it just drops to 65 degrees. It’s not on the beach or anything, but the city I live in is nice. Really clean and neat and stately. I don’t think I could ever live anywhere else.” My eyes narrowed and lips pursed together at the smile that curved Jon’s mouth. It must be nice to like the place you live…
“Lucy…” My eyelids shuttered at the call, and I blinked hard as the faded jealousy slithered back into the abyss. “I want you to come back with me. To California.”
Shock overtook me, and my eyes widened into the size of saucers as my jaw unhinged. Jon only continued to stare, his face a mask of concentration and his eyes shining with hope. For a long moment I couldn’t do anything, even thinking seemed to be beyond my ability. My heart stuttered in my chest, and my lungs began to burn as they sat still behind my ribs.
“What?” Weak and stuttering, my voice cracked and caused my eyelid to twitch. Leaning forward, closer to me, Jon took my hands in his to rub the backs of my fingers with his thumbs. All the while he never took his gaze from mine, his eyes alive with determined fire.
“I want you to come with me. I was going to ask you after you shifted a few times, but you haven’t. It’s been two weeks. I don’t think Ryan and I are enough to get you to the place that shifting is safe. You need to be around other bear shifters.”
My bear perked up at that, but I beat back against her. Her excitement radiated out of her with an intensity that made it hard to think, and I shook my head hard.
“Lucy—” Squeezing my palms lightly, Jon forced my attention back to him as a smile picked up his lips. “I’m not going to force you. If you want to stay, or think it over, you can. No pressure, okay?”
Opening my mouth only to close it when nothing came out, my lips turned down in a frown as my brows furrowed. I gulped down the lump in my throat, and the frenzy in my mind started to calm. No pressure. No pressure. No pressure.
“I want to go.” Flying from my lips, my affirmation made me tense as Jon’s eyes widened. He left at the end of the week, I knew, but we hadn’t talked about it. Holding my breath in the still silence, my face twitched as my lips threatened to split my cheeks. Well, Jon and I hadn’t, but Paul was bad at secrets.
“You do? You don’t want to think about it?” My frown disappeared, and a giggle escaped my lips at how astounded Jon sounded.
“Paul told me you were going to ask when you went to the bathroom last night. But, Jon, I don’t need to think about it. You know I hate living here and now I don’t even have a job anymore. Ryan even said it was fine, that my ‘shitty attitude’ would go away. So yes, I want to go.”
My long-winded speech came to an end, and I finally let go of trying to control the long, broad grin that curved my cheeks. It was so wide it made my eyes water, and beyond that I watched Jon copy me. I’d seen him smile so many times, but this one was the biggest, the brightest, the happiest.
My chest tightened, and a giggle managed to slip past the strangling lump in my throat.
“Yes!” Jumping from his seat, Jon wrapped me in a bear hug and twirled around in tight circles. He only stopped to kiss me, and a groan bubbled up as dizziness and hot air mixed inside my skull.
It wasn’t a long kiss, but it was hard and intense and I knew I would never tire of it.
***
END
Sneak Peak: Awakening
Awakening
Phoenix Rising
By:
Amelia Wilson
J. A. Cummings
Table of Contents:
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Copyright © 2017 by Amelia Wilson/J.A. Cummings
All rights reserved.
In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited, and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.
Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.
Prologue
The jungle was hot and oppressively humid, but Theyn could not stop to rest. He had encouraged the local native population of this green planet to help him construct his isolation chamber, allowing them to also build a tomb they felt was appropriate for a god. He did not have the heart to tell them that he was not in
need of a tomb and was not a god, but he doubted that they would be very impressed to know that their mysterious guest from the stars was only a botanist.
He hesitated at the mouth of the stone construct they had built for him, taking one last look up at the sky. The stars were brilliant and beautiful, but the constellations were not the ones he had come to know. He was filled with the ache of homesickness and stabbing grief. Somewhere out there, far beyond this solar system, his world was in flames, and he would never see his home again.
He and his Companion had escaped the destruction of their world in a borrowed research probe that was never meant to carry lifeforms this far from home. It had been a desperate act, but both Theyn and Beno had a strong will to live. They were the last survivors of Ylia, and they meant to carry her legacy into the future somehow.
Near the fourth planet in this system, an inhospitable red-colored rock, their probe had encountered an asteroid field. There was no propulsion capability on the probe and no way to avoid a collision, so they were knocked off course and forced to jettison in separate escape pods when they reached the outer atmosphere of this world.
Theyn counted his blessings. Neither of them were navigators, and they had done a blind launch. If it hadn’t been for the asteroids, they most likely would have ended up flying straight into Sol, the yellow sun at the center of this system. They were fortunate to have landed on a world with life, a compatible atmosphere, and gravity slightly lighter than their own. If they had to find a new world, this one was acceptable.
Theyn’s escape pod had landed here on an isthmus covered in jungle and populated by bipedal intelligent life. They had taken him to be a god, which is how he found himself here today, about to be sealed into a hibernation cell in the bottom of a stone pyramid.
He hoped that Beno, wherever he had landed, was having better luck. He hoped that Beno’s escape pod had also included the specifications for the construction of the hibernation cell. Otherwise, he would be very, very lonely when the cell finally released him, nine hundred standard orbital time units from now.
He took a deep breath, possibly his last breath of fresh air for a very long time. He would have been lying if he’d said he wasn’t a little afraid.
The natives were watching him, the young woman that they insisted on bringing with them leaning on the shoulder of one of the warriors. She was inebriated and unable to stand on her own. The warrior shook her gently, and her eyes rolled back into her head, a thin line of greenish drool escaping from her lax mouth. Theyn shuddered. He did not understand these primitive ways.
The escape pod had been designed to be converted into a hibernation cell so that anyone in need could afford to wait for help to arrive in safety. There was never any way to know what sort of infectious diseases or parasitic life forms might exist in a new biosphere, so it was better to be safe than sorry. Once he was sealed into his cell, he would be put into decontamination and a deep sleep. His cell would be linked to Beno’s, assuming that Beno’s cell survived his landing. When one of them awoke, so would the other, and then they would find each other again. Ylians were social creatures; they could not exist in isolation.
The natives helped him climb into his hibernation cell, obeying his direction on how to encase it once he had sealed it from the inside. Once it was activated, his cell would require very little power, but what it needed it could obtain through the soil beneath the stone floor of the chamber. He had placed the array himself. He would be all right, he was certain of it. He hoped that somewhere out there, Beno could say the same.
He closed his eyes and took one last breath as he lay down. The native chieftain spoke to him, but Theyn could not understand the words he said. He only smiled as gently as he could as he closed the lid.
Chapter One
Dr. Sera Cooper adjusted the lamp on her helmet and crouched next to a stone panel in a subterranean passageway. The corridor she was in had been hacked out of bedrock by hand tools over five hundred years ago, and the chisel marks still stood out in places on the low ceiling above her head. Above her, a stone pyramid reached a thousand meters into the sky, only recently rescued from its green jungle cocoon by weeks of back-breaking work.
In the dim light from her headlamp, Mayan glyphs danced across the stone, eroded by the slow trickle of water that flowed through the cavern. Several of the stone glyphs were covered with thick, clinging moss that obscured the characters. She gently scraped some of the moss away with the edge of her trowel and peered closer.
She squinted her blue eyes and blew a stray blonde curl out of the way as she read the ancient writing. As an archaeologist specializing in the Mayan culture, she was able to read glyphs as well as she could read an e-mail from her best friend, but this inscription was defying all of her efforts.
“This makes no sense,” she muttered. “‘The god came from the jaguar star and...green jade...mushrooms?’ What the hell?” She scraped the stone again, trying to clean it more thoroughly.
One of the glyphs moved. It pressed in like a button on a machine, and a low grinding noise filled the corridor. The stone panel she had been examining shuddered and slid backward into the cave wall, moving with a soft hum. It receded, moving to the right until it was completely swallowed by the stone around it, almost like a pocket door in a modern house. An opening gaped in front of her now, and the darkness beyond it was absolute. Air rushed back at her, stale and smelling of earth and dank, wet stone.
Sera swallowed hard and adjusted her head lamp again. Her heart thudded in her chest in wild excitement. A hidden chamber! She wanted to run inside, but her sense of self-preservation overrode her eagerness to explore. She picked up her walkie talkie and contacted her assistant, who was on the surface in the artifact tent.
“Joely,” she said. “I need you. Bring your brightest flashlight.”
Her voice came back immediately, responding to the quivering excitement in Sera’s tone. “Are you all right?”
“Perfect. Just… bring some light and get down here.”
She put the radio away and shone her light into the darkness. From what she could see, the chamber she had just opened was fairly large. She could see more glyphs carved into the walls. There was a large object in the center of the room, and from where she crouched, it looked like a sarcophagus. Beside it, a human-shaped bundle of textiles, wrapped with rope vines and lying on its side, rested on a low stone platform. A thrill shot through her, and she shivered. She had just made the greatest discovery of her career.
Joely clambered into the chamber, crawling forward through the claustrophobic tunnel where Sera had been working. She had two battery-powered lamps in her hands, and when she reached Sera, her mouth dropped open.
“Oh my God,” she said. “What is that?”
Sera took one of the lamps. “We’re about to find out.”
She turned on the lamp on its highest setting and pointed it into the chamber. The room sprang into view, illuminated at last, and she crept inside. Once she made it through the doorway, she was able to stand again. Joely followed behind her, her dark eyes wide.
“Oh my God,” Joely said again.
Sera went to the object in the center of the room. It was a sarcophagus, and it was covered with the same garbled glyphs that had graced the door to this chamber. She leaned closer to examine the carvings, and she could hear a low hum emanating from inside the stone coffin.
“Get the team,” she said. “This is now priority one.”
***
It took them weeks to properly record the glyphs from the doorway and the sliding panel. After a good deal of inspection, they realized that the door was attached to an ingenious hydraulic system utilizing rainwater and an intricate system of stone counterbalances to shift the panel. The chamber contained a sarcophagus, firmly sealed, and lying beside it was the wrapped body of an adolescent female, likely some sort of sacrifice. The poor girl had probably been entombed alive to accompany the tomb’s occupant, who was obviously a very importan
t person. There were no grave goods to speak of, but the sarcophagus was extremely long. Sera was willing to bet that there was a cache of burial objects inside.
The interior walls of the chamber were covered in an elaborate creation myth she had never encountered before, something about gods from the sky. She had read it twice to make sure she understood what it was saying, and she still couldn’t quite believe her eyes.
Joely was setting up the laser scanner to record a 3-D image of the chamber for closer examination back in the lab. “I don’t know, Sera,” she said, shaking her head. “If those Ancient Aliens people get hold of this, we’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Tell me about it,” she groaned. “Do you think we can publish without including a translation?”
Her assistant laughed. “Not on your life.”
They started the scanner and let a laser light grid pass over the entire interior space of the tomb, careful to stay out of the way of the beams as the machine slowly rotated, taking readings and downloading the details of the space. Sera stood with her hands on her hips, watching the readout as the data was recorded.
“This is so much better than having to draw all of this by hand,” she said. “Can you imagine what the first archaeologists went through? They must have all had art classes.”
“I took art classes,” Joely said.
Sera was surprised. “Really? You didn’t tell me that.”
“Yep. Art was actually my minor. I specialized in charcoal illustration.” She grinned. “It was great when the frat boys came in to do nude figure modeling to earn beer money.”
She snorted a laugh. “That was probably the only reason you took the class - a little free peek.”
Hunting for Love (UnBearable Romance Series Book 2) Page 8
