by anonymae
“Recalibration complete. Dr. Kayden Izmitt. Identity verified. Validated.”
“One guest. Twenty-four-hour duration,” Kayd commanded, allowing the old man to step up to the scanner. The silence between them a welcomed relief.
“Scanning,” the voice stated. “Recalibration complete. Dr. Efrayim Vang. Identity verified. Validated.”
Ignoring the machine, the old man faced him. “Leia and Boi. They all right?”
His scientist never understood why Dr. Vang insisted on using a human name for the specimen.
Like giving a one-celled organism a personality. Pointless.
Pride swelled Kayd’s chest as he met the old man’s gaze. He’d never been able to win the old man’s staring contests. His eyes always seemed to drift away. As if something inside him knew. If he looked too long, the old man’s eyes would lay bare all his sins.
“You’ll see soon enough.”
Metal bolts ground aside, and the security doors opened on a whoosh of air. Turning, Kayd slid out from under the old man’s prying regard. An odd relief slithered down his spine.
In the dark, the beast stirred and held Kayd motionless. Sensing…something. Instinctively, without taking its eyes from the dark, the beast placed a forestalling hand against the old man’s chest, commanding his silence.
A scream shot out from the dark.
It ricocheted off onyx walls, rattling the massive curtains into a mad dance of wraiths. And hitting Kayd square in the face. Drilling past his flesh, into his nerve endings.
A child’s scream.
01:37 Tank Biosphere the Cave 10/01/16
Past and present collided in her mind as a scream echoed in her ears. Punctured daggers into her heart. Emptied her lungs. Frozen, she did nothing to help her little sister.
A second scream, closer. Her left hand burned, as if pierced by the barbed stingers of a thousand wasps. Something clattered hard against stone.
Disoriented, Taleia blinked away tears. How many times had Jaden screamed? Once. She’d screamed once. Then she was dead.
She lifted her hand to her face. Blisters boiled over the surface of her palm, the tender flesh of her fingers. At the same time, its narrow bands of muscles twisted her hand in on itself.
A third scream. Much closer.
Light flickered at the edge of her vision. Focusing past tears, the light became a flame. The flame became a fire. Rabbits, skinned and gutted, sizzled on skewers.
The cooking hearth.
She remembered.
A skewer had fallen into the cooking fire. Trying to pull the skewer out of the fire, jostled the logs, sending up a galaxy of sparks.
The twinkling embers captured her attention, then drew her into the past. She’d sat, blindly staring at the dancing lights while fragments of memories came together. Fitting perfectly. Only to be torn apart by a scream. Trapped in her memories, she must have held on to the skewer.
Shit.
Clutching her hand against her chest, Taleia sprinted through the short, dimly lit tunnel, connecting all the niches in the cave.
Like a mirage dancing on sunbaked asphalt, heat radiated off her hand and arms. She did what she could to clean out her wounds. At the time, it wasn’t her first priority. Now she wished she’d done a better job.
Turning into the blind curve, something caught her around the hips, knocking her backward. Fire sang up her back and stretched burning tendrils around her ribs.
Scrambling back and up into a sitting position, she bumped into the cave wall, and a volcanic heat slithered down her forearms.
She looked down. Boi clung to her, her eyes stark.
Nightmare?
The child wound skinny arms around her waist, all the while sobbing in a high-pitched howl.
Not knowing what triggered the little girl’s panicked terror, she didn’t want to take any chances.
Lifting Boi up by her arms, Taleia cooed words of comfort. Slowly bending her knees, the little girl slid forward onto Taleia’s lap. And the child nestled against her, burying her face into the soft fur of Taleia’s garment.
Over several minutes, Boi’s howls turned into hiccuped sobs. Taleia lifted her arms, looped them around the little girl and out of the child’s line of sight.
Moments later, Boi tilted her head back, her nappy ’fro bobbing back and away from her face, looking at but not into Taleia’s eyes.
Crimson radiated from beneath the little girl’s chestnut skin. Two fat teardrops slid from between her spiked lashes surrounding red-rimmed and swollen hazel eyes. A tiny muscle ticked along her jawline. She hiccuped. Gulped down a quick breath. Then nodded once, her ’fro bobbing in counterpoint.
Has she come to a decision?
Taleia’s heart banged double-time.
Then the little girl wrapped her slender fingers a quarter way around each of Taleia’s wrists.
01:40 Complex Quarantine Ground Floor 10/01/16
Kayd scrambled up the recessed ladder, the old man on his heels. At the top of the catwalk, a step into his sprint, he glanced over his shoulder. The man was still behind him. Kayd shook his head.
Nimble for an old man, observed his scientist.
Behind the deck’s giant display, Kayd tapped several keys embedded into the central console. An amber glow, from multiple monitors, kindled to life. The old man stepped up to one of the displays.
“They’re in the tunnel. The section after the kitchen and before Boi’s room,” he growled.
The old man extended his right hand toward his monitor. In a few short motions, he mimed pulling the image from the display, packing it into his left hand, then throwing its contents at the main monitor.
The image splashed onto the screen. Kayd adjusted the associated nanocams from infrared to full spectrum.
Like a Kirlian photograph, slender tongues of amber limned around two silhouettes. Slowly, Kayd adjusted the nanocam’s settings. Ocher coronal discharges dissolved. Pooling out from the darkness, appeared the brown-skin profiles of the witch and his specimen.
Shoving his hands into his pockets, he let his scientist watch. And record.
Specimen 112358 sat quietly. Comfortably. As if this was a natural, everyday occurrence for her. For them.
Though the mass of curlicues bobbled on her small head, the specimen sat straight with her hands behind her, her delicate fingers wrapped around the witch’s overly large wrists.
And then she tugged. Each wrist. Once. In opposite directions. As if determined to pry open the arms holding her.
In a freezing rush down his spine, Kayd’s ire crystallized.
Those aren’t scratches.
Something slick and slimy crawled around in his skull.
Focus, reminded his scientist. The hollow space in his chest grew wider. She’ll heal, the scientist insisted. Remember your endgame.
“A few scratches. A couple of bruises.” The old man’s country drawl thickened, grew heavier. Like gravity, his voice commanded. Forcing Kayd’s attention away from the main monitor and toward him.
The old man’s body, silhouetted by the amber light from multiple displays, seemed taller, broader. Virile. The air shimmered around him in refracted waves. His voice, the rumble of boulders caught in a flood, pressed against Kayd’s inner ear.
“This…this is how you treat a woman?”
His head ached.
She knew the risks, his scientist argued. She’s an adult. She can take care of herself. This is not your problem.
“The specimen?” Kayd ground out.
“Did you hear me?”
Blood thrummed against his temple. His heart pounded. Stay focused, whispered the scientist.
“The specimen,” he panted.
The old man stood stock-still—nothing on him moved, not even air. With the impassive gaze of a predator, it seems as if his old mentor looked into and then through him. A suffocating weight wrapped him in a coffin of spider’s silk. He couldn’t breathe. He balled his hands into fists.
Snap.
Silence and darkness competed for dominance. Finally, the old man grumbled, “Other than elevated heart and breathing rates, vitals are normal.”
Though his former mentor was halfway across the large room, his words bit into him. And he hated it. Absolutely hated it.
Upset but unharmed.
Returning his attention to the main screen, he was in time to see the specimen cup the witch’s high cheekbones.
Something’s wrong. With a quick hand gesture, he ordered the nanocam to zoom in.
The child did not look into the witch’s gaze, but over the witch’s left shoulder. Then she opened her mouth.
This isn’t Regression. It’s worse.
ABOUT ANONYMAE
Before she wrote, anonymae read. She read a lot. All the time. Mostly paranormal. Some mystery. Some horror. She read authors who spoke to her. Authors who captured the essence, not the stereotypes, of other cultures. Authors who took her far afield.
But one fateful day, she ran out of reading material. Desperate, she called the only person she knew who had excellent taste in paranormal novels. And her wily friend, happy to help, suggested a series of unconventional novels about dragons in love.
This unconventional series opened a door to a paranormal dimension anonymae hadn’t explored. Soon after, she collected novels of her own she enjoyed. While she enjoyed plot twists and turns, compelling romance, and well-written phrases, she grew tired of wedging herself into heroines that weren’t a good fit.
Recalling a quote from one of her favorite authors, “If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it,” she did.
But that’s not what’s uncommon about anonymae. What’s most uncommon is that she is shy. A shyness born from understanding what is and is not important. In addition to her spiritual practice, flora, fauna, and friends, what’s most important to anonymae are her readers, particularly writing romance novels her readers enjoy.
anonymae is a paranormal romance writer and an uncommon woman. A Dean’s Academic Honors Recipient in Creative Writing, she was a poet long before launching herself, headfirst, eyes closed, and fingers uncrossed, into fiction writing. And like life, her route up to this point was circuitous in the extreme.
For more information please visit anonymae’s website at www.anonymae.com.
