Light Within Me Read online

  Before the Six Saviors were sent to Earth to capture and kill the Colonists, they were told that they would not be allowed back to SR44, nor would they be permitted contact with any of their kind until all twelve Colonists were dead. The Six Saviors all agreed with Noah, that with their excellent skills, it would be a short trip. In and out. Over and done with.

  And then, party on.

  And on.

  They knew they would be hailed as heroes when they returned to SR44. They discussed the parades and parties in their honor that would take place, and none of them could wait to celebrate their accomplishments.

  Noah remembered when he had said good-bye to his family the night before they shipped out.

  “Come back to me safe, my lovren,” Julia had said after they had “joined,” or made love.

  “Of course,” he had said, trying to hide his excitement of finally having a mission and a purpose. “I’ll only be gone a short time. We’re highly trained. We’re the best of the best. Piece of cake.”

  He had said the same thing to his parents as well.

  Jesus, he didn’t think he had been so wrong about anything in his life. And he’d been wrong about a lot of shit, but that had been an epic miscalculation.

  Obviously, all the Warriors had been dead wrong, because here they were, still walking the Earth two hundred and eleven years later.

  They had run into a few setbacks, to put it mildly.

  First, the Colonists had taken on human bodies. No one knew how this had happened. The Six Saviors had thought their prey would be easy to track and spot as they would be nothing but wisps of black smoke filtering among the humans. When a person of SR44 was sent to the Colony, they turned black. No one knew why, but theories argued that the lack of sunlight caused them to change. Others believed that the evil in their rotting souls made them lose their color. Whatever color they might have been when they lived on SR44 dissipated once they moved to the Colony. The Six Saviors knew the Colonists had landed in rural Montana, so they presumed the Colonists would be easy to catch. With not a lot of people around, they could fight their war and destroy the Colonists without a lot of human interaction.

  But once again, wrong answer. The Colonists scattered like roaches from a chemical spray. Good thing they weren’t gambling in Vegas. They’d have to go home with LOSER stamped across their foreheads, not to mention empty pockets.

  The second thing the Six Saviors didn’t count on was that the Colonists immediately began mating with humans, passing on their corrupted DNA. The Six Saviors agreed that the original twelve Colonists needed to be stopped immediately, and then they would look into their offspring. If they were violent, if they had inherited their father’s evil ways, they needed to be eradicated as well.

  The third thing that put a dent in their plan was that the Colonists began to commit crimes on Earth. Oh yes, the human population had their dregs as well, but the really bad crimes could be attributed to the Colonists of SR44.

  As for their efforts of catching the Colonists, the Six Saviors functioned well as a unit, and they had stayed together. Only years later did they start fanning out in groups of two, but they always lived together in a home base.

  It was tough, nearly impossible, to tell the difference between a human crime and one committed by a Colonist. The only telltale sign was a dusting of stuff that looked like black ash at the crime scene. It was undetectable by human eyes, but sometimes, if the Six Saviors were lucky, it would show up in a photograph if the angle was right. The best way to know if a Colonist had committed a crime was for one of the Six Saviors to see the crime scene first-hand. At the crime scene Noah just left, there had been no trace of the ash.

  The Six Saviors assumed the ash was a leftover trace of the black forms the Colonists morphed into while living on the Colony. But that was just a guess.

  Noah slid his foot off the gas as a highway patrol came into view. The officer sat in his car, talking on the phone with the interior light on, seemingly oblivious to the drivers on the highway. Good thing, because Noah had been going ninety in a seventy-five zone.

  It became apparent over time that the crimes the Colonists committed seemed to be more serious and serial in nature. The Six Saviors needed to be able to work with the humans, yet have the flexibility to work outside their laws if needed. They had decided that since Noah was their assigned leader on SR44, he should be the link to the human world. Not that he was particularly sociable or anything. There were others among the Six Saviors who probably would have done a better job, but they stuck to the given hierarchy. That, and Noah had exceptional instincts and criminal-profiling skills. He built his reputation as an investigator by helping the human police solve their crimes. In turn, when he was certain that they had located crimes their species had committed, he would put out information on what to look for, and the human police kept him informed of what they’d found through faxes, e-mails, photos and, like today, calling him to visit the crime scene.

  Noah smirked as he thought of the more famous killers who had been Colonists. Jack the Ripper? A Colonist. Thankfully, the Six Saviors had gotten to him before the humans figured out who he was. In the human world, he simply disappeared. In Noah’s world, he suffered a hard death.

  Charles Manson? Yes. Jeffrey Dahmer? Oh, yeah. The problem with the last two was that the humans beat the Six Saviors to them. At least the Six Saviors had been able to get to Jack the Ripper. They had tried to infiltrate the prison to do away with Manson, but it had been a no-go. That fucker was locked up tighter than a virgin in a chastity belt.

  Noah removed his sunglasses and looked in the rearview mirror. His eyes had turned orange, which had been the color of his form on SR44. During the day, they were a blackish-gray color. He scratched at his jaw again. He ran his fingers through his hair. He had been in this body so long he could no longer remember what his original form felt like.

  “Shit,” he mumbled, his eyes going back to the road. He had come to accept about fifty years ago that unless a miracle presented itself, he would never leave Earth. Sure, he had been more than eager to roll on the mission when it had been given, but he certainly didn’t expect he would never return home. He remembered the day that knowledge had made itself known.

  The Six Saviors had surrounded a rural farm in Texas where they had pegged a Colonist. They had studied the murder scenes of this particular bastard and finally found out where he lived. The Colonist had mated with a human woman and had sired a son. No one knew where the woman was, and they could only guess that her loving husband had put her six feet under . . . unwillingly.

  As some of his fellow Warriors put an end to the Colonist, Noah had been inside with the ten-year-old boy. The boy stared at him, his black hair hanging to his chin, his gray eyes dead. His father had just been killed, and the kid was devoid of all emotion. It had chilled Noah’s bones that night, and for many, many nights afterward.

  “You just killed my father,” the boy said icily.

  Noah had gone on a song and dance about how the kid would be better off with other members of his family, when the kid cut Noah off.

  “No,” the boy said, shaking his head, a thin smile crossing his lips. “No. I’m just like my father. I’m bad. Very bad.”

  Noah knew the kid wasn’t channeling Michael Jackson. He had meant it, literally.

  At the time, Noah had the passing thought to put a knife in the kid’s throat, but he couldn’t do it. He realized the kid knew he had evil flowing freely through his veins, and it sickened Noah, but he couldn’t do anything about it. He simply couldn’t kill a kid.

  He watched the boy walk out of the house, never to be heard from again. Noah then knew that his job would never be finished and his existence now belonged to Earth. He realized that his life as he knew it on SR44 was gone—scratch that, stolen from him.

  He was pretty sure he would never see his lovren, or mate, again, even if he did complete his mission down here. He barely remembered Julia anyway. He did remembe
r she had been kind and gentle, her wisps of honey-colored smoke had been pretty. But again, that was a long time ago.

  He didn’t pine for her. In fact, if he was honest with himself, he didn’t miss Julia either, which brought him full circle back to the fact that he probably never loved her at all. She was simply a part of his past, and he had accepted that he most likely wouldn’t revisit.

  His life was now on Earth. But his home was still SR44. There was a difference. He had a life here, albeit a very pathetic one. Hell, he wouldn’t even consider it a life, or even an existence. Sure, his heart beat, his lungs pumped air in and out, he had a place to sleep, he ate, and he even laughed every now and then.

  But he didn’t have a life.

  He missed his life on SR44, his training, his family, and the total beauty of the planet . . . his home.

  His so-called life on Earth was empty, filled with thoughts of death, seeing and smelling death, the emptiness of what death left behind. And at times he felt lonely, but it was what it was. He thought back to the kid. Noah wondered how many lives that boy had taken, how many lives Noah could have saved if he had just done away with the spawn when he had the chance.

  One thing was certain: He was going to hunt down and kill each one of those cock-sucking Colonists and make them pay for taking his SR44 life away from him.

  His kind lived to be around two thousand years old. Noah still had oodles of time before he would bite the big one. In fact, he had one thousand four hundred and eighty-eight years left. But really, who was counting? His human body was a male in his early thirties—a male in his prime. He would stay in this form at this age as long as he remained focused on the job of finding the criminals.

  Every now and then, a small ray hope emerged, and he thought that maybe, just maybe, he would be able to go home.

  But not tonight. Tonight there wasn’t even a flicker of hope on his radar. It was a dead, voided, black screen.

  Chapter 3

  After the large electronic gate closed behind him, Noah pulled into the driveway of his missile silo. Yes, a missile silo. A small smile crept across his face. He loved the place. And the irony. An alien living in a missile silo.

  Nice one.

  After the Cold War, the US government had plans to abandon numerous missile silos around the country to show the old Soviet Union that they meant business in nuclear disarmament.

  Noah had played the stock market for years. If he spent enough time watching the market, he could determine what would go up and what would go down. It was all cyclical, and he had amassed a huge fortune. He bought a few of the silos around the country for next to nothing, then spent a shitload of money fixing them up so they were habitable.

  Of course, the government took the missiles.

  Buried into the ground nine stories deep, he had taken each floor and made them into living quarters. An elevator—down the middle of the silo—took everyone from floor to floor. Or, if they preferred, they could take the stairs located on the outer edges of the living quarters. The top two floors were common living space. That was where the Six Saviors ate, watched TV, played pool, and tried to keep track of and hunt down the Colonists in what they simply called the “War Room.”

  He had chosen the missile silos for a number of reasons, the first being privacy. They had moved around quite a bit in their two-hundred-plus years on Earth, and privacy had always been an issue. Plus, they were in the middle of nowhere, devoid of any neighbors sticking their noses in their business.

  The second reason was that the place was a fortress. A few times, some of the Colonists had turned the tables and started hunting the Six Saviors. Things had gotten dicey on more than one occasion. Here, security was impenetrable.

  Third, living in a missile silo, especially a pimped-out missile silo that had the best of everything, was fucking cool.

  Noah’s boots crunched under the dirt as he walked to the door. He punched in the key code on the keypad, and the three-foot thick steel door popped open. He pounded down two flights of metal stairs as the door swished to a close behind him. He went to the second door, where he punched in another code on another keypad. He went in and was greeted by AC/DC’s Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap blasting through the Bose speakers and the smell of garlic. Noah knew the scenario before he even laid eyes on any of the others.

  Based on the amount of garlic he smelled, Hudson would be in the kitchen cooking something Italian on his stainless steel Viking appliances. Talin and Cohen would be kicked back on the big, leather sofa in front of the TV playing God of War on the PlayStation. Rayner and Jovan would be gone a few more weeks on an assignment in California.

  Noah waved at Hudson as he walked in, not even bothering to try to say anything above the noise, then headed for the TV room with the PlayStation and the bar. He didn’t give a shit about the game; he just wanted the contents of the bar.

  He nodded to Talin and Cohen, made fast work of a shot of scotch, then lined up another. Hudson came in and killed the stereo. The silence was deafening. Noah looked up at the big male.

  “Anything?” Hudson asked. His eyes were shining a bright yellow, which was the color of his form on SR44, his black hair falling to his shoulder blades in a ponytail. He was built like Noah . . . well, like all of them. Noah had heard the saying “built like a brick shithouse,” and that pretty much summed them up. Hudson liked nice clothing, and his black silk shirt hung outside his brown silk pants. His black loafers were made of the finest leather, and a large gold bracelet clasped his wrist. It was a good thing he could be one of the meanest, nastiest motherfuckers Noah had ever seen, or all of them would have ridden Hudson on his metrosexual clothing choices.

  Noah shook his head. “Nothing. Not one of ours. Vampires again.”

  “No shit?” Talin chimed in from the couch, his eyes not leaving the TV. He wore blue sweatpants and a frayed AC/DC shirt from the ’80s. How the thing stayed together was anyone’s guess. He wore his dark hair high and tight, and his eyes were a fluorescent blue, the color of his form on SR44.

  “Those bloodsuckers need to keep their bad boys on a leash,” Cohen mumbled, also wholly focused on the game. His jet-black hair hung like a mop on his forehead, causing him to frequently push it out of the way. His eyes burned a bright purple. He too was dressed in sweats, and he wore a T-shirt that said Never Underestimate the Power of Stupid People in Large Groups.

  There were grunts of agreement.

  “Anything from Rayner and Jovan?” Noah asked as he shed his leather coat and threw it over the barstool.

  Hudson crossed his arms over his chest, his huge biceps straining the shirt. “They called a couple of hours ago. They lost our Colonist number six in Sacramento. They’re trying to re-track.”

  Noah nodded. The Six Saviors had killed five of the original twelve Colonists, and were closing in on number six in Sacramento. They thought they had a lead on number seven in Reno, but it had been a dead end.

  Just a fucking vampire.

  Noah looked around the room. Done in dark blues and warm browns, the place relaxed him. The oversized stuffed leather couch formed an L facing the ninety-six-inch plasma TV. A hand-carved table he had picked up in Canada was serving as the footstool for Talin and Cohen’s large feet. He sat in a barstool and slipped off his combat boots to rub his feet in the thick, brown carpet. He was pretty certain there wasn’t anything better than rubbing his feet in the carpet after a long day.

  “What’s cooking?” he asked Hudson.

  “Found a new recipe with a garlic twist on chicken parmesan.” That brought on a round of approval.

  “Nice.”

  “Fuck yeah.”

  “Sweet.”

  Hudson turned back toward the kitchen. “Dinner will be ready in ten.”

  Noah filled his glass again, hoping the scotch wouldn’t kill the tastiness that a dinner cooked by Hudson offered.

  Chapter 4

  Abby shut the door to her apartment and leaned against it. She closed her e
yes for a brief moment, exhausted.

  Not that she had a particularly difficult day working at the Reno newspaper in the Crime Department. She had finished an article on some robberies and had a relatively quiet day.

  No, she was exhausted from stress, not work.

  She remembered her boss’s words from this morning. She needed to do an amazing article fit for the crime pages by Friday, or she would be on the cutting block in the next round of layoffs. No, she didn’t like her job much, but she needed it. She lived paycheck to paycheck while trying to pay off the student loans and a boatload of credit card debt. She would fight to keep this job.

  Her large, black cat, Neptune, strolled out of the bedroom to greet her. He stood in the middle of the living room and howled loudly, letting her know he was hungry.

  “It’s nice to see you too,” she said, kicking off her heels.

  She fed him, then changed into pajamas even though it was only 6:00 p.m. She didn’t have anywhere to go, no one to see.

  She popped a Lean Cuisine in the microwave and looked around her little space. She really did love her apartment, especially the huge picture window in the living room. She loved the way the afternoon light filtered through the white, gauzy curtains, lighting up the whole place. Sure, it was a little hot during the summer, but all the rest of the year made up for a few warm nights.

  When the microwave let her know her dinner was ready, she poured herself a big glass of wine and sat down on the couch to eat. She watched a few minutes of the news, then found a marathon of CSI.

  Perfect.

  Her eyes drifted and caught the picture on her end table.

  She felt the familiar ache in her chest. Abby was nine years old when the picture was taken, and it was one of the last photos with her mom.

  In the photo, her mother, Iris, pressed her cheek against Abby’s, and both of them were smiling brightly in their silly Inspector Gadget birthday hats. Abby remembered the cartoon fondly. She had never been one for Rainbow Bright or Strawberry Shortcake. She liked the idea of being a spy instead of riding some sparkly pony.