Collision (Colliding Worlds Trilogy Book 1)

  Collision

  Part One of the Colliding Worlds Trilogy

  Rachel Aukes

  COLLISION

  Copyright 2018 Rachel Aukes

  Kindle Edition: July 2018

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Waypoint Books LLC

  Cover Design by Kit Foster Designs

  Edited by Kriegler Editing Services and Terri King Editing Service

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Available Now

  Bonus Material

  Also by Rachel Aukes

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Ouachita Forest, Arkansas

  It wasn’t the first time a good idea had come back to bite Sienna Wolfe in the ass, but it could be the last. She checked her phone again. No signal. She shoved the phone back into her pocket. Taking a deep breath of autumn air laced with the scent of burning wires, she clicked on the flashlight and stepped into the wingless aircraft.

  The light sliced through the smoky blackness and fell upon a figure slumped over the instrument panel. The pilot’s dark flight suit and mask covered him from head to toe, making it impossible to tell if he was still alive or not.

  Trembling with adrenaline, she stepped closer and held her left palm an inch from his covered face. Warm shallow breaths tickled her skin. The breath she’d been holding rushed from her lungs in a frosty puff of relief.

  He’s alive.

  She ran her hands over his body, feeling for broken bones or fabric wet with blood. Finding neither, she looked for a way to remove the face mask that seemed to be a part of his flight suit. A persistent beep echoed through the cylindrical ship, which she tried to ignore. Inching back to full height, Sienna paused, thinking through her next steps.

  Plane crashes in the Arkansas forests were often fatal. Even though she had a pilot’s license, she’d never been around a plane crash, let alone in one. When she’d heard the telltale sound of trees breaking not far from her cabin, she’d jumped onto her ATV to investigate. It hadn’t taken long to discover the smoke and locate the ship.

  Sienna figured it had to be military, given how unusual it was. So super-secret, the ship didn’t even have an N-number. Adding that fact to a middle-of-the-night, low-level flight meant the military was likely testing some new addition to their fleet. She was surprised—and disappointed—to not see rescue helicopters already, leaving her as the sole first responder.

  She blew out a breath and rubbed her hands together. “I can do this.”

  While checking the pilot for injuries one more time before attempting to move him, a small sound under the louder beeping distracted her. Shining the beam toward the rhythmic plip-plop, the light fell on rivulets flowing down the wall toward a crumpled mass of sparking instrument panel. Bending down on one knee, she dipped a finger in the liquid and smelled the clear, almost gel-like substance. It was foreign, like an exotic nighttime plant, but the underlying hint of kerosene was unmistakable; it had to be some sort of jet fuel.

  It was then that the sound clicked something in her brain. The beeps were speeding up; what used to be a second pause between each was now half that. She’d assumed the beeps were a proximity alarm.

  Her lips parted. Oh, hell.

  It made perfect sense that the military would have an auto-destruct on new technology to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. In a rush, Sienna fidgeted with seamless seatbelts that had no visible latches. Her fingers brushed over a switch that moved. She heard a snap, and in a blur, the belts retracted into the floor. As the pilot crumpled forward, she slid her hands under his arms to keep his head from hitting the floor.

  At the risk of further injury, she dragged the man toward the door. His rubber-soled boots dragged across the floor, the friction pushing the limits of her strength. Her hands slipped, and the pilot fell with a thud.

  She bent over to get hold of him again but stopped cold when movement caught her eye. The trail of fuel had now become a river and was running down toward a section of smoking wires. Her eyes widened. Interlacing her fingers around the man’s chest in a Heimlich-maneuver style hold, she put everything she had into hefting him through the doorway and outside the ship.

  Her arms burned as she dragged him across the ground. Not knowing how far away she needed to be, she kept dragging him. Her legs shook. Her back felt like it could give out at any moment.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Startled, she dropped the pilot and snapped around to find another man nearly hidden by the trees. Relief flooded her at no longer being alone. “Oh, thank God you’re here. Help, please. He’s hurt bad. We’ve got to get clear. I think the ship could blow.”

  He made no move.

  She’d heard about that type of response dozens of times before. How onlookers froze at the sight of an accident. Just her luck she got one of those. Her jaw tightened. “Hey, you. I need your help here.”

  He stepped forward then. Tall as a professional wrestler, he wore a strange soldier-meets-gladiator outfit. His silver hair glistened in the moonlight. But what most drew her attention were the flesh-like, tattoo-covered wings that spanned behind him. Strange, since it was nowhere close to Halloween.

  She shook it off. “Do you have a car nearby? Otherwise, we can get him onto my ATV—Hey!”

  He grabbed her wrist and yanked her to him. Pinning her arms against her, he patted her pockets down with his free hand.

  Fear brought forth a fresh surge of adrenaline. She bucked and kicked at him. “What are you doing? Let go!”

  He ignored her and pulled out her phone then sent her tumbling to the ground. He dropped the phone, pulled out a gun, and fired. The blast, strangely quiet, obliterated her phone with the same results as a large caliber. Sienna froze.

  He holstered his weapon. “You need to come with me. You’ve seen things you should never have seen.”

  Sienna clawed against his iron grip, but he pulled her in the direction away from her cabin, her struggles not hampering his stride in the least.

  “No!” she yelled and grabbed a tree not much larger than a sapling. She held on tight. The small branches sliced her palm as she was pulled away. A blast of heat shot past her, and the grip on her wrist loosened. She rolled onto her knees and looked up to see her assailant lying on the ground, smoke rising from a gaping chest wound. She jerked her attention back to the pilot, who was now conscious, leaning against a tree a few feet away, and shakily holding a weapon pointed in her direction.

  She held up both hands. “Please, don’t shoot. I’m unarmed. I’m here to help.”

  She couldn’t see his expression, what with his face being covered, but he lowered the gun and she let out a sigh of relief. Keeping an eye on the pilot, she ging
erly leaned over the newcomer to check for a pulse. Not that she needed to; a hole had burned straight through his chest. The guy never had a chance.

  Her finger brushed against a wing as she leaned back on her heels, and she jerked her hand away from the unexpected warmth emanating from the flesh-like prop.

  Coming to her feet, she focused on her breathing. “He’s dead.”

  The face mask, as before, blocked any expression.

  She kept her hands where he could see them. “Your ship has a fuel leak. I think your ship is going to blow.”

  “Are you aligned with the Draeken?” he asked.

  Draeken. That name rang a bell; something her mother had said a couple months back. Sienna shook away the thought, making a mental note to ask Kat about it later. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He lifted the gun again, directly at her heart.

  Sienna didn’t think, or realize what she was doing, as she swung her leg out and kicked the pilot in the head. The weapon flew from his hand. She dived for the gun, fumbling through the leaves to grab it. Standing above the pilot, she gripped the weapon with both hands and aimed it at his chest. Waited a moment. Nudged him with her toe. Waited another moment. Nudged him again.

  In the distance, she could still hear the beeps, only now they were even closer together.

  Leave him.

  That was the logical thing to do. After all, the pilot had just killed a man and had been going to shoot her. But leaving someone to bleed out in an Arkansas forest went against everything Sienna stood for.

  Tucking the weapon into the waistband of her cargos, she managed to hoist the pilot onto the back of the ATV she’d ridden in on. His legs dangled over the sides of the rack. She then leapt onto the seat in front of him and gunned the throttle. The engine roared, tires kicking up dirt and pine needles.

  A massive boom rocked the ground and a shockwave nearly sent her tumbling from the ATV. Then, as if she was a sliver of metal drawn to a magnet, heat sucked her back toward the explosion. There was no air to breathe, let alone scream. She hunkered down over the handlebars with a death-grip and pushed the throttle in all the way, holding on for dear life. The ATV chewed its way forward inch by inch through the ravenous suction.

  Then, as suddenly as it came, the wind vanished and the woods hushed, like someone had hit the mute button. Slowing the ATV, she looked over her shoulder then slammed the brakes. She hopped off and stood, staring blankly at the crash site.

  Confusion settled over her. There was no fire. No debris. No sign of wreckage. It was as though nothing had been there, like the ship and the shredded trees around it had imploded into nothingness.

  Aside from the eerie absence of nighttime forest noises, everything appeared normal. Nothing to even hint that a ship had crashed there less than an hour earlier.

  “Impossible,” she whispered.

  Sienna didn’t know how long she stood there in open-mouthed shock. Regular glances back at her still-present passenger proved that everything had been real and not some hallucination. Her heart felt like it was pumping lead, making it difficult to catch her breath. Without her phone, her only option was to head back to her place and contact the authorities.

  The half-mile drive through the winding pine woods felt interminable. She clutched the handlebars in a vice-grip as she tore around trees, ignoring small branches whipping at her face. She slowed only to glance back every once in a while at her unconscious passenger.

  When she finally pulled up to the front steps of her stone cabin, adrenaline still surged through her veins. She knew the sensation all too well. As a humanitarian relief worker, she’d been in the middle of a half dozen civil conflicts in as many Third World countries. But she’d never, ever looked down the barrel of a gun before. It was a feeling she hoped to never experience again.

  What made things worse was that the dead man had destroyed her only working phone, as the cabin had no landline.

  Willing herself into action with a grunt, she dragged the pilot off the ATV and up the stone steps, the smooth material of his flight suit making her job all the harder to maintain her grip. Seconds felt like minutes as she hauled the dead weight into her home and dropped him unceremoniously on her couch. Her muscles shook with fatigue. Sweat ran down her temple and tickled her cheek.

  She pulled out the gun with one hand as she swept back hair that had become plastered to her face. She stared blankly at the black weapon for only a second before she rushed into her bedroom, removed the Glock she stored in her nightstand, and checked to make sure it was still loaded with one round in the barrel. Its heft and familiarity comforted her, helping her to calm down. She then hid the pilot’s weapon deep in her closet.

  Eying her clothes, she yanked out a couple flannel shirts, gave the fabric a quick tug, and hurried back to living room. There, she tied his wrists together with one shirt then used the second shirt to bind his wrists over his head and to the floor lamp. She knew it wouldn’t hold him for more than a second if he tried to attack, but a second could make the difference between Sienna becoming a victim or firing her gun.

  Finished, her stomach churned as she leveled her handgun on him. When he didn’t move, she pulled out the chair at the computer desk across the room from the couch. She may not have a land line phone, but she did have high-speed Internet. After a quick search, she pulled up the Hot Springs emergency services website. She opened a chat message and entered minimal details about the crash, the pilot, and her address.

  She looked back at the pilot. She hoped someone would be monitoring the messages, or else she’d be forced into driving the man to the hospital an hour away. The idea of negotiating winding roads with one eye and a gun leveled on her passenger sounded less than ideal.

  While she waited for a return message, she typed a quick email to her mother:

  Hey Kat—Hope you’re enjoying Argentina. Need info on that “Draeken” thing you mentioned last month. It’s important. Love, Sienna

  Sienna wished she’d listened to her mother more closely. She leaned back in the chair and kept the gun level on her 'guest' as she waited for a response. Seconds passed like hours, and she found herself tapping her feet as she waited.

  Still no response from either the emergency services or from the pilot.

  After waiting a full minute without him showing any sign of consciousness, she headed to the bathroom and grabbed anything that could be used as a medical supply.

  She knew he could die without medical attention. Her legs didn’t want to move, but she willed them forward, edging closer and closer until she reached him and dropped the supplies into a pile on the floor.

  She was no medic, but she knew the first rule in any accident was to stabilize the patient. She couldn’t just sit around and wait while he died.

  His breathing was steady, although not strong by any means. He likely had internal injuries. She felt around his neck for the edge of his mask. Locating it, ever so carefully she rolled it up then yanked it off.

  And gasped.

  His skin looked like he’d taken a shower in liquid gold. Dark tribal-style tattoos swirled over his skin, but there didn’t seem to be a specific design to the way they curved around his neck and onto his face—a face with a nasty bruise forming around an even nastier swollen eye that was no doubt caused by her boot. She winced at the harm she’d caused, but then reminded herself that he’d been the aggressor, not her.

  She leaned back.

  Holy. Shit. First, the guy with wings; now this.

  Tattoos were one thing, but this was something else. Even if they were some kind of military thing, there seemed no logical reason for the anti-stealth glimmer that covered his skin.

  No way was this guy real. Despite a successful career in selling the possibility of it, she’d never really believed in it. There was no such thing as an… she could barely even think the word.

  Alien.

  Chapter Two

  Sienna half-expected to see a cameraman p
op out and yell “Surprise!”, but no one did, which meant she was alone with someone who was like no one she’d seen before. She had assumed the pilot was military, but it was far more likely that both men were members of some rival cultish gangs.

  She was in way over her head—and she’d seen plenty of crazy in her life. For her first eighteen years, she’d followed her parents across the globe with their humanitarian efforts. After a relatively normal college career, she spent the next fifteen years consulting with the military.

  But this guy…

  And the other guy…

  A shiver ran across her skin as fear seeped into her. If only she had her phone, she could call 9-1-1. Instead, the mess fell squarely on Sienna’s shoulders until someone checked the chat message she’d left. For better or worse, she was the one who’d witnessed the crash.

  She stood over the man for another long moment. Convinced he wasn’t playing possum, she set her gun down and checked for injuries. She was more careful and slow this time as she ran her hands over his arms, feeling for broken bones. She then moved to his chest and down his abdomen, stopping when she discovered a spot where the material was saturated.

  She tried to cut down the front of the flight suit, but the thin fabric was stronger than she would have guessed. Even with both hands clasping the shears, cutting through the fabric was a painfully slow process. When the final bit of fabric covering his torso was cut away, she found the source of the wetness about an inch below his rib cage. Blood seeped from a deep gouge, but it was unlike any blood she’d ever seen before. It was thick and dark and definitely not crimson.