by Selena Scott
The five of them, Ansel, Ruby, Milla, Inka and Kain all stood at the edge of the lagoon staring toward the waterfall. Four of them felt its seductive, snakelike pull.
Milla, Ansel and Ruby all wore backpacks on their backs. They were packed for a camping trip. None of them had mentioned how ridiculous that was. They didn’t even know if what they were walking into had air to breathe, much less places to pitch a tent. Was it the future? Was it a doorway to a different part of earth? Or another dimension?
They didn’t know.
They were going to find out.
“Welp!” Milla shouted, clapping her hands and rubbing them together. “I, for one, can’t take another second of this suspense. Shall we?”
There were quick hugs all around, no one wanting to make this more emotional than it had to be.
“Take care of her,” was all Ansel said to Kain. And they both knew he was talking about Inka.
Kain said nothing. Just nodded. The three who started the short walk toward the waterfall would never realize that they’d been given the easier task. The task of leaving. The two who watched the others go felt their hearts torn out of their chests. Both Kain and Inka stared down the potential of a reality without Ansel and Milla. Half their damn family.
But there was a boy’s life at stake. There was Ruby’s life at stake. And there was their safety as well. All of them knew that the gates were multiplying little by little. They had to know more about them, or risk succumbing to them.
Inka swung an arm around Kain’s shoulders as they both watched the waterfall start to glow, splashing light across the clearing. “They’re coming back,” she whispered to no one in particular.
Milla tightened her backpack strap across her chest and felt a thrill of fear and excitement. When was the last time she’d felt that? It almost felt good. She made it to the waterfall first and the urge to jump through it was almost overwhelming. But she stepped back. She knew who was supposed to go through first.
Ansel clapped his sister on the shoulder as he stepped past her. Ruby took his hand as they stepped up to the waterfall, glowing seductively. Even Ruby could see the appeal of it, even if it didn’t call to her in the same way.
She took a deep breath and turned to look up at Ansel. He nodded his head. With their fingers laced and their eyes on each other, they stepped through to the other side.
The End
Alec’s Game
PROLOGUE
Many Years Ago
The boy dodged the sharpened spear that came within half an inch of his breastplate. He’d overbalanced but was able to duck into a roll that he was hoping looked intentional. Regardless, he was on the ground now and swiped at his attacker’s feet with the machete he gripped in his free hand.
The attacker both anticipated and easily avoided the boy’s blow and was already whipping his spear around for the kill shot. Straight to the boy’s exposed neck. But the boy knew the attacker’s moves well and anticipated them. He rolled onto his stomach and knew what was going to happen. The spear pierced his armor on his back shoulder blade and sliced straight through to his flesh. The boy grunted in pain but didn’t stay down. He sprang to his feet, sheathing the machete and reaching for his bow and arrow in a practiced, if not graceful, maneuver.
But when he turned, he saw that his attacker had already pulled his most deadly weapon, a throwing knife. The man was poised with the knife at the tip of his fingers, as if he’d already thrown it. The boy knew that he was dead.
“Damn it to hell!” the boy screamed, resisting the urge to throw his bow and arrow onto the ground in rage. Bested again.
His attacker just chuckled, looping the throwing knife into a secret compartment at his belt. “It was better that time, John. Really.”
John Alec scoffed at his father’s words. He might be eight years old, but he knew when an adult was patronizing him. “I was slow and clumsy and you know it, Father.”
“He’s right, Father!” John’s six-year-old sister called from the tree stump where she sat sharpening her favorite weapon, also a knife. “I think he’s getting worse.”
Their father chuckled at both of them. “Well, at least that time you didn’t stomp on your own weapons in a fit of rage over losing.”
John Alec blushed. That had only been one time but he didn’t think he’d ever live it down. His father had forced him to train without weapons for two months after that. He’d been ‘killed’ within seconds every single time.
“Alright then, young Valentina,” her father called to her. “Your turn, my darling.”
She kept her eyes on the glinting side of the blade she was sharpening. “I’d rather you rested first, Father.” She cast her eyes up to his, a show of both defiance and challenge. “So that when I win, you can’t blame it on fatigue.”
Their father threw his head back and laughed. A sharp, distant noise through the emerald green woods had all three of them freezing and squinting into the distance.
“Is it time to move camp again?” John Alec asked his father.
“Yes.”
John Alec and Valentina caught one another’s eyes. They wilted. They knew that every time they moved camp, they got further and further from the battleground. That their father was keeping them just close enough that he could know what was happening and never close enough to actually fight.
Valentina slid down from the tree stump, sheathing her knife and coming to stand right next to her brother. She was a head shorter, but no less fierce in her appearance. Both of them had light brown hair and dark brown eyes. They had the glowing-eyed, dirty-skinned appearance of two children who’d spent their entire lives out of doors. They wore thick canvas pants and tunics underneath their weaponry. A bow and arrow apiece, throwing knives at the belt, a small mace at the hip, a machete for John Alec and a dagger for Valentina. They looked every inch the tiny warriors.
“But, Father!” Valentina protested.
One stern look from him had her snapping her mouth closed. Tease their father they might, but directly defy him they did not.
The two children sullenly packed up their camp the way they had a hundred times, quickly, efficiently. Within ten minutes they were hiking out, Valentina leading the way, toward a new camp.
“Father?” John Alec asked, half listening to the distant booms of the skirmish they were leaving behind. “Do you miss the battle?”
His father squeezed his eyes closed at the question. Sometimes it was so clear to him how much more he had to teach his children. Especially Valentina. She was the more skilled fighter, and vicious. But she wanted the fight more than she wanted what she was fighting for. Now, his son, John Alec, he fought less technically, but with a pumping well of justice and honor as his energy source.
“No, John,” he answered his son honestly. “I fear the battle.”
“What?” John Alec reeled. His father wasn’t afraid of anything. He was known across the land as the most skilled warrior that had ever lived.
“Yes. To battle is a horrible thing. It changes a person in ways he or she cannot reclaim.” The boy was silent and his father tried to answer his question in another way. “But if you are asking if I wish I could be a part of it, then the answer is yes. It makes me anxious to be so far away, to not be able to aid in what I know to be justice.”
John Alec’s heart skipped. This was it. The moment he’d been waiting for. “Then why don’t we go, Father? Why don’t we turn back and head closer to the battle? Valentina and I are ready! I can’t beat you, but you’re the best warrior in the land. I’m sure I could beat the foot soldiers–”
“John,” he spoke quietly and his son fell instantly silent. “I will never fight alongside my children.”
John Alec felt the world tumble away from his feet. As long as he could remember, fighting alongside his father, his battle-scarred, strong father, had been John Alec’s dream. He could barely conceive of the glory. The rightness. He knew he could not lose with his father by his side. But to hear hi
m say ‘never’? John Alec’s throat squeezed down tight.
“Why?” The boy’s word was hushed and horrified, but it was the best he could do.
The man watched as his daughter, fifty or so feet in front of them, turned a full circle, scouting out a new place to camp. She would choose well, she always chose well. He turned back to his son.
The boy looked like a miniature version of him, he knew. And it made his heart squeeze. He just hoped that his son would be as lucky as he had been. To have love. To know love. And then to have children, and know a different, even more consuming love. “Because, John,” he didn’t put a hand on his son’s shoulder, he knew John Alec, and he knew how condescending that would feel to the young warrior, “if I fought with you in a battle, it would be you that would have my allegiance. I would protect you and Valentina at every cost. And that is not what this battle is about.” He tossed his head in the direction of the noise in the distance. “This battle is for the lives of the shifters. Stolen from their own world. Enslaved here. It’s cruel and unnatural. They have the souls of men, John.”
He waited for his son to finish the creed.
“And we fight for their freedom,” John Alec supplied a moment later. He laid the back of his hand over his forehead, exposing his palm to the man before him. It was the symbol of the warriors who fought for the shifters.
“That’s right.”
John Alec watched as his father turned to tromp through the woods toward Valentina, who was already setting out their bed rolls for the night. Those two people were the only thing he had in the world. He pictured Valentina in a battle, on her back, an enemy’s knife at her throat. John Alec pictured exactly what he would do to anyone who tried to hurt her. For a moment, his eight-year-old black and white mind shifted, and he caught a shade of gray. He understood what his father spoke of. The distraction of loving someone he fought beside.
John Alec’s world became black and white again as his brain drifted back to the battle. To what it would mean for his heart, for his soul, for his glory, to fight for the lives of shifters. To have a part in freeing them. He would fight one day. This he knew. And he would fight for justice.
CHAPTER ONE
Present day
Milla Keto did not like surprises. She hated the slow motion moment it took for her brain to take it all in. She hated the dumbfounded look she just knew she’d have on that unusually pretty face of hers. And she hated the disadvantage of having to scramble to catch up.
And Milla Keto was currently standing in the middle of the biggest surprise of her life. Pissed as hell. Not because of what she was looking at, but simply that she hadn’t expected it.
“Wow,” her brother, Ansel, murmured from right next to her as they stared out at a familiar lagoon, the waterfall that fed into it pounding right behind them. “It’s… a mirror image.”
He wasn’t wrong. Even the trees that lined the lagoon were placed in exactly the same arrangement as the world they’d just come from. The weather was different, a crisp fall breeze and a dull gray sky instead of the blue summer day they’d just left behind.
“Was anyone else expecting, like, a different planet or something?” asked Ruby Sayers, Ansel’s girlfriend and the whole reason they were there on this new planet. “Like little blue aliens and a purple sky?”
Milla said nothing. She’d had absolutely no idea what to expect. In her book, it would have been foolish to expect any one thing in particular. They’d walked through a goddamn glowing waterfall – the same one that Ruby’s younger brother had disappeared through a year before – for fuck’s sake. They might have been sucked away into another dimension for all Milla knew.
But here they were. Staring out at a mirror image of the world they’d just left behind and Milla was strangely… disappointed. She loosened her grip on the knife she’d had at the ready as she’d followed her brother through the waterfall. Apparently there weren’t any enemies chomping at the bit to destroy them. Ah, well. There was always tomorrow.
Milla turned and surveyed the waterfall they’d just walked through. Experimentally, she shoved a hand back through it. Her stomach dropped when she encountered time-smoothed stone, as perfectly impenetrable as she’d feared. They couldn’t just step back through. Milla stared at the waterfall. On the other side of it, in the world they’d just left behind, her twin sister, Inka, and her brother, Kain, waited for them. She was glad they hadn’t come. It didn’t make sense for all of them to be trapped wherever the hell this was.
“Alright,” Milla said, more to herself than anyone else. She was done staring around in mystified awe. Her brain might want another second or two to acclimate to the whole world-jumping thing they’d just done, but Milla’s heart was already moving on. They were here, they had a damn mission. Show, I’d like to introduce you to road.
She strode forward.
“You look like you got a plan,” Ansel said. At well over six feet tall, Ansel could easily keep pace with Milla’s long-legged strides, but Ruby was stumbling along behind them.
“No plan,” Milla shrugged, trying not to be annoyed at Ruby’s pace. The woman was only human after all. Not everyone could be like the Ketos. “Just getting the lay of the land. Are there civilizations the same as back on earth? Dwellings in the same places? Or is it just the topography that matches? We should go up the mountain and see how far we can see.”
No one spoke as they bushwhacked up the mountain. Ansel and Milla knew the Catskills well, they’d lived there most of their lives. And the mountains they hiked up now were no different. It took two hours to get to the peak where Milla knew they would be able to peer out at the land before them. If everything really was the same, they should be able to see a few different towns down in the valleys. And when night came, they’d be able to see the dim glow of New York City in the far distance. Well, if they even had cities in this mirror world.
As they crested the mountain, there were almost no noises except for Ruby’s hard breathing at having kept pace for two hours of uphill climb. Again, Milla bit back her annoyance. It wasn’t at Ruby in particular, actually, she liked Ruby. Thought she was a good match for her brother. But rather, Milla’s annoyance was pointed at anyone who held her back in any way, shape or form. The only soft spots she had in her life were for her siblings, and even those weren’t that soft.
At home, back in Manhattan, she ran her own tech company. She was a good boss in that she never surprised her employees, she was the same every single day. Efficient, brutally honest, and she always, always made the decision that was the best for her company. It hadn’t exactly made her any friends. But it had made her and her employees quite a bit of money. Because if there was one thing she was, it was fair. If Milla made money, so did the people who worked for her.
She hadn’t seen any particular reason to change anything about her personality up until a few months ago. She and her boyfriend had split up, which had hardly bothered her, but he’d said one thing on his way out the door that had bothered her a great deal. “Compassion, Milla. It exists. Anything you’re bad at, you pretend it doesn’t exist. But you can’t ignore this one for the rest of your life.”
She’d resented that. One, because she liked to think she was good at anything she tried. And two, because the bastard had been right. She wasn’t good at relationships, so she barely ever had them. She viewed boyfriends as more of a backdoor toward regular sex. When they became clingy or needy or irksome, she just found a new one. And he was right that she wasn’t any good at compassion. Thus, she’d scoffed at people who required it. People like sweet, soft Ruby Sayers.
But she could be good at it if she tried. She’d just never wanted to before. But damn Matt Mills to hell. He’d been a crappy boyfriend but she didn’t care. She was gonna learn how to be compassionate just to spite him. She’d be so compassionate he wouldn’t even recognize her the next time he saw her. So here she was, not saying anything rude to Ruby when she and Ansel had to wait for her to catch up, yet agai
n, when they weren’t more than fifty feet from the top of the peak. Look at Milla, world, sweet as pie.
“Doin’ great, darlin’,” Ansel murmured to Ruby, reaching down and hauling her right up the three-foot rock face she would have had to climb.
Milla sighed and turned back up the mountain. Now, there was a man who didn’t have to work at compassion. Ansel Keto was pretty much the best big brother in the entire world. Kind, patient, steady as a rock. Nothing shook that man. Except for Ruby Sayers.
And that kindness was the reason Milla had stepped into another world just a few hours ago. About a year ago, Ruby’s little brother, Griff, had been sucked away into the waterfall and into this world, never to be heard from again. Now that they’d figured out how to come through themselves, Ruby didn’t waste any time coming for her brother.
Milla understood that. If one of her siblings needed her like this, she would be there, every time. As it was, there wasn’t a chance in hell that Ansel would let Ruby do this alone. And Milla wasn’t going to let Ansel go on his own. So, she understood. She totally got it. She understood this part of Ruby Sayers. They were both in this foreign world for their brothers.
It was that that had Milla reaching for Ruby’s hand when they reached the top peak. It was a bald, mostly rock outcropping that was high enough to see all their near surroundings. Beyond that, the other mountains got in the way. But the rocks could be loose and Milla, not wanting Ruby to slip, steadied her.
“Thanks,” Ruby said breathlessly before she turned to face where Milla was already facing.
Milla felt her stomach drop out. Great. Just great.
“There’s nothing,” Ruby whispered. She looked in the direction of the small town of Twin Hills, which, had they been on earth, would have been visible from here. Then she looked back in the direction of Green Mills, the town where they all lived. Nope. Nothing. Not so much as a single rooftop or a curl of smoke.
