Gathering Darkness: A Paranormal Romance Collection Page 14

  The first days of May brought unseasonably warm weather to New York, and the entire city came alive, with residents quickly donning their new summer clothes and tourists arriving in droves.

  As much as Mia would’ve liked to join the other students lounging on the lawn with their books, she needed four walls around her in order to concentrate. Korum was becoming increasingly reluctant to have her go to the library, given her tendency to forget about the time while there, so she tried to study more in his penthouse. He set up a desk and a comfortable lounge chair for her in a small sunny room next to his own office—the place where he had met with Leeta and Rezav—and she began spending hours there instead.

  She was also starting to think about the summer. After finals, Mia was supposed to fly home to Florida to see her parents. She had been fortunate to get an internship at a camp for troubled kids in Orlando, where she would be one of the counselors. Since Orlando was only about ninety minutes away from Ormond Beach, she could easily visit her parents on the weekends or whenever she had days off. Although dealing with troubled children would not be the easiest gig, the experience was considered valuable for someone in her field and would greatly aid her on grad school applications.

  She had no idea how Korum would react to her essentially leaving for the next couple of months. It was possible that in another couple of weeks he would be tired of her, and then the issue would never arise. Thus far, he had not prevented her from carrying on with her schoolwork, and she hoped they might be able to come up with a workable solution for the summer as well—if their relationship lasted that far. For now, she decided to keep quiet and not rock the boat.

  Two days before her Statistics exam, with Mia beginning to think and dream in correlations, Korum got called away for some unknown emergency. Sitting in her study room, she heard raised voices speaking in Krinar across the wall. Minutes later, he came into her room and told her tersely that he would be away for the rest of the day.

  “If you need to go home to study or you want to hang out with your roommate tonight, feel free,” he added as an afterthought. “I may not be home tonight.”

  Surprised, Mia nodded in agreement and watched him depart swiftly, with only a quick peck on her cheek.

  Her heart jumped into her throat as she realized that this may be the chance she had been waiting for.

  She sat for a few minutes, making sure that he was truly gone. For good measure, she leisurely strolled to the bathroom and splashed cold water on her cheeks, trying to convince herself that there was nothing to worry about . . . that she was completely alone in the house. Her hands were shaking a bit, she noticed as she raised them to her face, and her eyes stood out against her unusually pale face. You can do this, Mia. All you have to do is just take a look around.

  She casually walked toward his office, ready to run into her own study at the first sign of his return. The penthouse was eerily quiet, with only her footsteps breaking the uneasy silence. Her heartbeat thundering in her ears, Mia tiptoed toward the office door.

  As before, the doors slid open automatically at her approach. Even though Mia had been expecting it, she still jumped at the quiet “whoosh.” Stepping in, she quickly surveyed her surroundings.

  The room was completely empty.

  A large polished table stood in the center, dominating the space. There were a few chairs positioned around the table, with the whole setup reminiscent of a corporate conference room. Mia was not sure what she’d hoped to see—perhaps a few papers left lying around or a computer carelessly turned on. But there was nothing.

  Of course, she realized, he would not be using anything as primitive as paper or a tablet computer. Whatever the K equivalent of a computer was, she likely wouldn’t even recognize it as such given the state of their technology.

  Not for the first time, Mia cursed her own technological ineptitude. Someone who had problems keeping up with all the latest human gadgets was particularly ill-equipped to spy on an alien from a much more advanced civilization.

  Walking into the room, she carefully approached the table. It looked like a regular table surface, but Mia remembered the three-dimensional image she’d seen on it that one time. She tried to remember what it was that Korum did to make it disappear. Was it a wave of his hand?

  Trying to imitate the gesture, she motioned with her right arm. Nothing. She waved her left arm. Still nothing. Frustrated, she stomped her foot. Unsurprisingly, that didn’t do anything either.

  Mia circled around the table, studying every nook and cranny. Getting down on her knees, she crawled underneath and tried to look at the underside in the crazy hope that there might be a recognizable button somewhere there. There wasn’t one, of course. The surface above her was completely innocuous, made of nothing more mysterious than plain wood.

  Trying to crawl out, Mia bumped against one of the chairs. Exactly like a corporate office chair, it had wheels and swiveled in the middle. A fleecy sweater Korum occasionally wore around the house was carelessly hanging on the back of it. She crawled around the chair, not wanting to disturb the arrangement in case Korum had a good memory for furniture placement.

  Sitting on the cold floor next to the chair, Mia stared despondently around the room. It was hopeless . . . John had been crazy to think that Mia could help somehow. If they were truly relying on her, then they were doomed. She was, quite simply, the worst spy in the world.

  Her butt was getting cold from sitting, and the whole thing was utterly pointless anyway.

  Trying to get up, Mia inadvertently brushed against the chair and lost her balance for a second. Grabbing onto the chair for support, she accidentally pulled off Korum’s sweater.

  Great. She wasn’t just a useless spy—she was also a clumsy one. Lifting the sweater, she brought it closer to her nose and inhaled the familiar scent. Clean and masculine, it made her warm deep inside. You have it bad, Mia. Stop mooning over the enemy you’re spying on.

  She tried to arrange the sweater back in its original position, and her fingers felt something unusual. A small protrusion on the edge of the sleeve that didn’t seem to belong on a soft sweater like that.

  Her pulse jumping in excitement, Mia lifted the sleeve to take a closer look.

  On the bottom of the sleeve, a tiny chip was embedded in the fabric. It was the size of a small button, and it was sheer luck that Mia’s fingers had landed on it—otherwise, she would not have noticed it in a million years.

  A light went on in her head. Korum had been wearing this sweater when he waved his arm and made the image disappear, Mia remembered with chills going down her spine. He had literally had a trick up his sleeve!

  Nearly jumping in excitement, Mia examined the little computer—or at least, that’s what she presumed it was—with careful attention. The thing was tiny and had no obvious on or off button.

  “On,” Mia ordered, wondering if it would respond to voice commands.

  Nothing.

  Mia tried again. “Turn on!”

  There was no response this time either.

  This was frustrating. Either the chip did not respond to voice commands, or it did not understand English. Then again, it could be programmed to respond only to Korum’s voice or his touch.

  Maybe if she massaged it herself?

  She tried it. Nothing.

  Blowing in frustration at a curl that had fallen over her eye, Mia considered her options. If the thing responded to Korum’s touch, then it probably knew his DNA signature or something like that. In which case, she had no chance of getting it to work.

  Discouraged, Mia sat down on the floor again. It seemed to help the last time she was stumped. If only there was some way she could test her theory—like a chunk of his hair or something . . .

  Suddenly hopeful, Mia jumped up and ran to the bedroom to see if she could find any stray hairs. To her huge disappointment, the room was utterly hair-free, except for a couple of long curly strands that could only be her own. Korum was either a clean freak, or he sim
ply didn’t shed his hair the way humans did.

  Furiously thinking it through, Mia ran to the bathroom and grabbed his electric toothbrush. Maybe it had some traces of his saliva or gum tissue . . . She held up the toothbrush to the little device with bated breath.

  The device blinked, powering up for a second, and then fizzled out again.

  Mia nearly screamed in excitement.

  She held the toothbrush even closer, nearly brushing the sweater with it, but the chip remained silent and dark.

  Mia’s teeth snapped together in frustration. She was on the right path, but she needed a bigger chunk of his DNA. His clothes might have some, his shoes, the sheets on the bed . . . But those would likely be trace amounts, like those on the toothbrush.

  The sheets on the bed! A big grin slowly appeared on Mia’s face. She knew exactly where to get that big chunk.

  Going into the laundry room, she dug through the pile of towels and dirty linens that had piled up in the recent week. Korum tended to do his own laundry for some weird reason, and he usually did it on Mondays. Given that today was a Saturday, the room was chock-full of DNA tidbits, courtesy of their active sex life.

  Mia pulled out a particularly stained pillowcase, blushing a little when she remembered how it got that way. Bringing it into the office, she held it up to the little device and waited, hardly daring to hope.

  Without any sound, the chip blinked and turned on. A giant three-dimensional image appeared on the table surface. Her heart in her throat, Mia slowly hung the sweater back on the chair—which did not affect the image at all—and walked around the table, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Spread out before her was a giant three-dimensional map of Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs. It was like a much fancier, much more realistic version of Google Earth.

  Slowly pacing around the table, Mia stared at the familiar landscape laid out in front of her. There was Central Park, right in the middle of the tall narrow island that was still the cultural and financial center of the United States of America. Much lower, all the way on the west side, Mia could see Korum’s luxury high-rise, outlined in perfect detail.

  Fascinated, she stretched her hand toward the small building image, wondering if it had any substance to it. Her fingers passed right through it, but she felt a small electric pulse run through her palm. All of a sudden, reality shifted and adjusted . . . and Mia cried out in panic as she found herself standing on the street and looking directly at the building itself—not its image, but the real thing.

  Gasping, she stumbled backwards, falling and catching herself with her hands.

  There was no pain at the contact with rough surface of the sidewalk; in fact, the sidewalk felt like nothing at all. Everything seemed strangely muted and silent. There were no cars passing on the street and no pedestrians leisurely strolling by.

  It had to be a dream, Mia realized with a shiver, or a really vivid hallucination. Maybe she was really dying from the contact with the alien technology, and this was her brain’s last hurrah. It didn’t feel like that, though—it just felt weird, like she had fallen into a reflective pool of something and the reflections turned out to be real.

  Virtual reality.

  Mia knew it with sudden certainty. Even today’s human technology could give a weak imitation of it through all the three-dimensional movies and video games. The Ks could obviously do much better, making her feel like she was actually in the image herself. This had to be the K version of Google Maps, where, instead of placing the little orange figure on the digital map to look around via pictures, the map simply placed the viewer into the three-dimensional reality.

  The question now was how to get out.

  Maybe if she closed her eyes and reopened them, she would find herself back in the office. Squeezing her lids shut, Mia tried counting to five. Halfway through, she lost her patience and peeked. Nope, she was still definitely in front of the building.

  Her next initiative was to pinch herself . . . hard.

  Ouch.

  She definitely felt that pain, but her view didn’t budge. She stomped her foot. Her leg communicated that sensation to her brain as well, but Mia was still in that mysterious world.

  Crap. She was starting to panic. What if she could never leave this place, or worse, what if she was still in it when Korum got home? He would know immediately that she had been snooping. There was no way to spin this in a positive light, or to pass it off as random curiosity. She had clearly gone to extraordinary lengths to access his files.

  Think, Mia, think. If she had entered this world so easily, there had to be an equally easy way to get out. Something had to be real in this surreal place, even if everything seemed fake.

  Raising her arms at her sides, Mia slowly turned in a circle. Initially, her outstretched hands encountered nothing but air. She took a step to the right and repeated the process. Then another step and another. On her fifth attempt, her fingers brushed against something soft and familiar. The sweater! She couldn’t see it, but she could definitely feel it.

  Grabbing it with a desperate grip, Mia attempted to locate the device. And there it was, a tiny nub near the edge of the sleeve. As soon as Mia touched it, the familiar electric pulse ran through her hand. For a second, she experienced that feeling of disorientation, and then she was standing on solid ground—on the floor of Korum’s office inside the building she had just been looking at.

  Nearly shaking in relief, she stared at the map still spread out before her. She’d done it! She—Mia Stalis, who had to be taught how to operate the latest iPads—had actually entered an alien virtual reality world and come out unscathed.

  Of course, she still hadn’t learned anything useful. As much as she wanted to stop and go back to memorizing the standard deviation formula, she had to explore this opportunity further.

  This time around, Mia knew what she had to do to avoid getting lost in that strange world. She put on Korum’s sweater herself. It was huge on her, nearly reaching down to her knees. His deliciously familiar scent surrounded her, almost as if she was standing in his arms. For some reason, she found it very comforting, even though she knew that he might kill her if he saw her in this moment.

  Walking around the table, she examined the map in detail. The image seemed to pulse slightly, and there were areas that shimmered more than others. One particular building in Brooklyn almost had a glow around it.

  A glow? Mia had to investigate it further.

  Extending her hand toward the tiny image, she closed her eyes and braced for the reality shift. When she opened them, she was on the street, looking at a quiet tree-lined residential block populated by a row of red-brick townhouses.

  To her surprise, the scene was far from empty. Stifling a startled gasp, she watched a man hurry into one of the houses. He walked right past Mia on the street, without even a cursory glance to acknowledge her presence. Of course, Mia realized, she wasn’t really there from his perspective. She was either watching a live video feed—a very realistic one—or, more likely, a pre-recorded video.

  A saying she’d once heard nibbled on the edge of her mind. Something about advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. That’s exactly what it was like with the Ks, thought Mia. She felt a little like Harry Potter in his invisibility cloak—though her adversary was admittedly much better-looking than Voldemort.

  Gathering her courage, she followed the man up the steps and into the house. This is not real, Mia. They can’t see you. You can get out any time you like. She opened the door—which was unlocked for some reason—and stepped inside.

  There was no one in the hallway, but she could hear people in the living room. Her heart pounding in her throat, Mia slowly approached the gathering. The big sweater wrapped around her felt like a security blanket, giving her the nerve to continue.

  Tiptoeing into the room, Mia hovered in the doorway, waiting for someone to yell out, “Intruder!” But the occupants of the room
were unaware of her presence. Feeling much calmer, Mia began to observe the proceedings.

  There were about fifteen people gathered there, of various ages and nationalities. Only three of them were women, including a middle-aged lady who looked like a professor. The other two women were young, probably around Mia’s age, although the stressed look on their faces aged them somehow. A lean blond man was sitting with his back turned to Mia, but there was something about him that looked familiar.

  “John,” said the middle-aged woman, addressing the blond man, “we really need to work out these details. We can’t just blindly trust them—”

  He turned his head to respond, and Mia realized with a sinking feeling in her stomach that she knew this John—that she had spoken to him twice in the last few weeks. And that meant only one thing: what she was observing had to be a meeting of the Resistance— and if she was observing it through Korum’s virtual reality video, then he was obviously onto them.

  Oh dear God. They thought they were safe, that they weren’t being tracked. Why else would they all be gathered here like this? John had said that Korum was specifically in New York to stamp out the Resistance movement . . . because they were getting close to some breakthrough. But clearly, Korum was even closer to his goal of hunting down the freedom fighters.

  She had to warn them. They were sitting ducks in that Brooklyn house. Korum could ambush them at any moment.

  Suddenly, Mia felt every hair on the back of her neck rising. The puzzle pieces snapped into place, and she gasped in horrified realization.

  It may already be too late for John and his friends.

  Why else would Korum leave so abruptly today? He knew exactly where they were. There was no reason for him to wait any longer. The ambush—if it hadn’t occurred yet—was about to take place.