Phaze

by S. C. Mitchell

  Creepy as all hell.

  Mary’s footsteps retreated around the back of the slab.

  Something cold touched her fingers on the other side.

  “Her fingers are solid.” Mary’s astonishment came through clearly in her tone. “How?”

  Kayla wished she knew.

  “Pull it back, honey.” Heather sounded far away. Everything seemed so much darker, hazier, like looking through a dense fog.

  Kayla placed her right hand on the slab to give her leverage to pull, but that hand too sunk into the granite.

  Oh no. She’d counted on using the slab to regain her equilibrium.

  Off balance, she stepped forward to regain her stability. Her foot pushed into the granite.

  Falling, stumbling, the misty world spinning around her, she caught herself on the second step. Teetered, then found her balance. The room grew light again. Her vision cleared.

  A camera on a tripod, similar to the one Mary had been using, was now in front of her. The forced air of the room’s ventilation system wicked sweat from her exposed skin. So much exposed skin.

  She was completely naked.

  Her bare butt bumped the granite slab behind her. “Did I really . . .?”

  Holy crap.

  “Amazing.” Mary disappeared around the slab, then returned with Kayla’s lab coat in hand. “Put this on, I’ll get the rest of your clothes in a minute.”

  Heather nodded, a broad smile across her face. “Right through the slab.” Her eyes narrowed, her mouth firmed. “I wasn’t planning on letting you go that far today. Are you okay?”

  Kayla brought her hand to her bare chest. “Yeah, I think so.”

  She accepted the offered lab coat, shucking into it and buttoning it up. After two deep breaths, she spun around slowly to take it all in. She’d done it. She’d walked through a solid wall of granite.

  Mary stepped toward one of the cameras, but Heather waved her off.

  “Keep the cameras rolling.” Firmly grasping Kayla’s shoulders, Heather looked her straight in the eye. “While the memory’s fresh. What did it feel like? What did you experience? Let’s get it all recorded.”

  Over the next few minutes she related all she’d felt, prompted by question after question from Heather and Mary. That darkness at the edge of her vision. Muffled sounds. At times she rode the edge of hysteria. How? Why?

  “You want any of these?” Joel’s voice drifted over the slab, pulling her back from the precipice of madness. His muscular arm came around the side with her clothing draped over it.

  She’d completely forgotten about retrieving the rest of her garments and, oh God, after her deep dive into Amber’s underwear drawer, Kayla updated her own intimates. Her brand new, scanty, candy-apple-red bra and panties set dangled from Joel’s fingers. Her cheeks warmed, but so did her heart.

  The cad. He was flirting once again, just to lighten the mood, and keep her sane.

  “Give me those.” She snatched her clothes from him. “And stay over there while I get dressed.”

  A deep sigh. “Stuck in the no-ogle zone.”

  “I think we got everything recorded.” Mary shut down the two video cameras and carried them toward Heather’s laptop.

  “I’m going to need copies of those video files.” Joel’s tone danced with humor. “You know, for security reasons.”

  Heather rolled her eyes. “Not going to happen.” She winked at Kayla. “We’ve got your back, sister.”

  She shrugged out of the lab coat and started dressing. Inconvenient and embarrassing. Would there be some way to make a fabric that would stay with her when she passed through objects? First she needed to understand how she’d done it. Hopefully Heather’s amazing brain contained some theories.

  Wheels started turning inside her own mind.

  She strapped on her shoulder holster and shrugged back into the lab coat. Finally dressed, Kayla tromped around the barrier. Hand out, she confronted Joel. “Gun.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Now Joel had to live with the vision of her in that red bra and panties. His erection strained in his jeans. This whole flirting thing would be a hell of a lot more fun if he wasn’t serious half the time.

  Okay, most of the time.

  He handed her the Glock. “Seriously, though, let’s keep those video files off the network and locked down somewhere even I can’t find them. I’m going to delete the in-lab security cam footage as well, sight-unseen, I promise. It’s bad enough we’ve got Chris’s butt floating around the internet.”

  The flirting needed to end. They’d gotten past the awkwardness of seeing each other naked. Kayla was an amazing woman with a good head on her shoulders.

  And an amazing body beneath.

  Gorgeous, azure eyes embedded in her beautiful pixy face. Bold red lips, made for kissing. Every time he flirted with the sexual fantasy that was Kayla Armstrong he came closer to burning himself on the flames of his own mistrust.

  Kayla wasn’t Amber. Nowhere near.

  And what Kayla did to him was the farthest thing from his reaction to the slimy snake that now resided behind bars. Multiple life sentences would keep Amber locked up forever. It was time for Joel to lose the baggage left over from the things she’d done to him.

  Kayla holstered her Glock and buttoned up her lab coat. She’d opted for an oversized, frumpy lab coat. It almost hid the gun and holster. Even that didn’t help Joel’s real problem. She was still an awesome ball of sexy.

  He took a step back, adjusting his stance and trying to ease the sudden restriction at his crotch. “We probably should stop the flirting.”

  Kayla moved into him, her lips mere inches from his. “I’ll miss it.”

  What was she saying?

  That look in her eye. Something crackled in the air between them. Was he overheating? Short-circuiting?

  How far could he go with this? There were boundaries he didn’t dare cross. He was her boss, after all. Still, he needed to know.

  He took her hand. Pulled her out into the hall, away from the others.

  Lacing his fingers into her thick blond curls, he drew her lips toward his. He’d only meant to come close, test the waters. She didn’t resist and he couldn’t stop himself. Just one small taste and he’d back off.

  Their lips met. His darkest nightmares disappeared into the sweetness of the moment. She was, as he’d known deep down, everything he’d imagined and so much more.

  Unbridled desire rose within, and he deepened the kiss. Logic and sanity screamed at him to stop. He couldn’t.

  Kayla opened to him. She flung her arms around him and pulled him closer. Her tongue invaded, tangling with his.

  Sweet. So incredibly sweet.

  Then responsibility reared its ugly head. He had a facility to run. He was interrupting important research. This was Kayla. He was her boss. This broke protocol. He had no right . . .

  He broke the kiss. Pulled back.

  They were both panting like they’d run a marathon. How had he let things get this out of hand?

  But he didn’t regret the moment. Couldn’t regret the discovery that Kayla, perhaps, harbored some feelings for him.

  Her beautiful eyes deepened to a seductive shade of azure. Interest, passion, arousal.

  Was he surprised?

  Yes. After Amber he’d considered himself unlovable, somewhat despicable. At the very least, disgusting. That any woman, let alone one as wonderful as Kayla, should find him at all desirable, blew his mind.

  Heather cleared her throat. “About time.”

  Standing in the doorway, Heather and Mary stood with broad smiles across their faces.

  Joel straightened, pulled further away from Kayla’s warmth. “I’m sorry.” That was a lie. “I’ll let you get back
to work.”

  An urgent message blinked in the messaging inbox on his internal computer. He forced his steps back toward the stairwell.

  “You’re not running away from this, Joel Weisberg.” Kayla’s tone held passionate promise.

  “No. Never. We need to talk . . . later.” But he did need to give them both some breathing space first. Time to consider. “I just got a message from Homeland Security. I . . . I need to go.”

  Convenient or not, Xi Force was needed.

  Once around the corner, he could breathe again.

  ~ ~ ~

  Kayla’s lips still tingled. She brought her fingertips to her mouth, still savoring Joel’s heady passion.

  Had that really just happened?

  She hadn’t been able to restrain herself. It looked like he hadn’t either. All that flirting had suddenly exploded in their faces. Warm, erotic ripples washed through her.

  She’d kissed Joel Weisberg.

  Suddenly, walking through a wall, slipped to second place in the list of interesting things she’d done today.

  Chapter 5

  The request came from Homeland Security through Joel’s FBI connections. Clear lines of communication hadn’t yet been set up for HS to contact Xi Force directly. The Xi Force program was too new.

  His old partner, Aaron Braddock, acted as liaison to the other departments.

  Braddock_Aaron: Xi Force backup requested for HS mission.

  No details, of course. Damned Homeland still hadn’t learned to share. Definite trust issues.

  He’d almost turned them down.

  With that kiss still burning on his lips, a mission was the last thing Joel wanted. He wanted to stay near Kayla. Protect her. But that was personal . . . emotional.

  Security in and around the building had been updated. The new windows had been installed, the guard doubled, and Jason Pike’s Rangers patrolled the grounds regularly. There wasn’t much Joel could add to keeping Kayla and the Xi Force Headquarters building safe and secure.

  He needed this mission to take a step back and ponder what this all meant going forward.

  But, oh yeah, he did plan to go forth. This was a tipping point. The darkness of his past receding, maybe he could put all the mess behind him and move forward. Once he got back, some one-on-one time with Kayla would be the first thing on his social calendar.

  Rummaging through his internal files, Joel discovered he had no social calendar.

  Create_Calendar_File: Social.

  Fixed.

  Now he needed some dates on those dates.

  And he needed to figure out how to move forward with Kayla in a relationship and still keep within departmental regulations.

  Hell, he’d quit the FBI, Xi Force, the whole fucking rest of the world, if it meant he could go on kissing Kayla like he just had.

  Joel pulled on his costume . . . uniform.

  It felt a little stupid, but at least it wasn’t skin-tight spandex. Kayla did a fantastic job of forging fashion and functionality into something very wearable. He stuck with a black and gray, despite Kayla’s continued insistence in offering swipes of color. This color scheme better fit his superhero name, Shade, and he really didn’t want to stand out.

  He’d leave that to Chris. That bright red and yellow costume couldn’t be missed and placed Z-Bot front and center in just about every photo and video taken of them in action. Chris didn’t seem to mind, and in fact often noted how much he liked his new celebrity status.

  Good. The team needed a front man, and Joel certainly didn’t want that position, even though he was considered the team leader.

  They took the Xi Force copter to the airport and met up with Aaron Braddock on the runway in front of a shiny new air vehicle. On top of Aaron’s liaison duty to the other agencies, he was also in charge of securing new infrastructure, like this amazing aircraft.

  Preliminary plans for this vehicle came across his desk only a few weeks ago. Could the airplane actually have been completed so quickly? The spec sheet said it would be able to take off and land vertically, and hit Mach 8. With a range of over twenty-thousand miles, it could take them almost anywhere in the world in just a few hours.

  “Is that it?” Chris’s eyes widened as he scanned the craft.

  Aaron nodded. “We’re calling it Xi-1 and this is her maiden voyage. A good excuse to see what we’ve got.”

  With seating for twenty passengers plus the two seats in the pilot’s cabin, Xi Force would have the speed and flexibility to respond to threats around the globe if necessary.

  “I’ll show you around and introduce you to your pilot after the mission.” Aaron indicated they should board the craft. “Right now we’re a little pressed for time, so if you would?”

  Joel strode up the boarding steps. “What do we know?”

  “Two things.” Braddock followed close on his heels. “First, we have a building full of dead people. Ownership traced to Ghaim through dummy corporations.”

  In the back of the vehicle twelve combat-ready Homeland Security agents sat grimly buckled in for takeoff.

  Braddock reserved the foremost seats for himself, Joel, and Chris. They buckled in as the doors were closed and the stairway retracted. Engines roared and the Xi-1 lifted straight up off the runway.

  “What’s the second thing?” Joel raised his voice to be heard over the whine of the craft’s roaring engines, but he didn’t want to wait to ask. The way Braddock held back told Joel it wasn’t good.

  Braddock closed his eyes. “Wylde is missing.”

  “What the . . .? Homeland shouldn’t even know about Wylde.”

  Okay, maybe both sides needed to play nice.

  Braddock shook his head. “They don’t. I was on my way to tell you about Wylde when this other thing broke. It’s near Wylde’s place. I can’t say for sure the two are related at all. Still . . .”

  “Maybe he’s just gone AWOL. Or he’s in the woods with that pack of his and just forgot to check in. It wouldn’t be the first time Jonathan Wylde has disappeared for a few weeks. He usually comes back on his own.”

  “I activated the hidden surveillance cameras in the area, and only one still worked. The one in the rafters of his cabin.” Braddock passed Joel his phone. The pictures from their remote surveillance told a chilling story.

  Wylde’s cabin had been trashed. Front door bashed in. Definite signs of a struggle. Blood smears. Bullet holes.

  So much for hoping Wylde had gone off on his own.

  John Wylde was a genetically altered human. Well, almost human. He looked completely normal, but at a very early age his father had spliced wolf DNA into him. For years, the man treated his own son like an animal. Wylde appeared more at home in a wolf pack than with people, and he’d found a pack that accepted him as a wolf.

  Joel had been working to bring him back, getting him the cabin, teaching him to be human again. It had been a challenge at first, but he was slowly coming around. Still, Wylde found more companionship with his wolves than with people.

  Most everyone who knew about Wylde, thought Joel was crazy for even dealing with him. Maybe they were right.

  Aaron’s reply broke his train of thought. “I cordoned off the mountaintop but figured you’d want to check on him personally. Then I got the news of the Ghaim activity in the area.”

  “How close to the other incident?” Maybe the two weren’t related.

  Braddock shook his head. “Less than a mile.”

  Too close to be a coincidence.

  A team of Ghaim agents against Wylde? It was anybody’s guess who won that fight.

  Wylde would be as pissed as a cornered badger and even more dangerous. He loved that cabin. It constituted the only place he’d ever found peace. And his pack was there.

  One
way or another, Joel would have to check on Wylde’s pack. Those wolves were everything to him.

  “He could still be free. On the run.”

  Braddock shrugged. “He’s bat-shit crazy, man. On the run or in Ghaim’s hands? Either option sucks.”

  Joel never placed Wylde in the bat-shit crazy category. Delusional, yes, that couldn’t be argued. With his enhanced abilities, John Wylde would have been considered a prospective member of the Xi Force team except for his distinct antisocial tendencies.

  Not really a team player. So what did Ghaim want with him?

  “I’ll take Chris and stop by Wylde’s place later, first we need to deal with this other problem.” Joel owed it to Wylde to check in on his pack at the very least.

  Braddock nodded. “I figured you would. The Xi-1 can take you there whenever you’re ready.”

  ~ ~ ~

  “A what?” This went way beyond anything Kayla had studied.

  She sat in the living quarters of Apartment Four. The comfortable seating and steaming cups of coffee didn’t make her discussion with Heather and Mary any more normal.

  “A dimensional phase shift.” Heather took a quick sip from her mug. “My readings indicate you’re there, yet not.”

  “Oh, well, that’s perfectly understandable.” Kayla shook her head. She needed another cup of coffee, another pot of coffee, another ocean of coffee. “How can I be there and not there at the same time?”

  Mary cleared her throat. “We believe the parts of you traveling through the solid object are sent to a parallel dimension where nothing, except those parts, exists.”

  “That’s the darkness you’re seeing in your peripheral vision. Echoes from that nothing dimension.” Heather made the whole wacko notion sound like one-plus-one-is-two, duh. “It is all just a theory. We’re still working on it. But it is grounded in the data we recorded when you went through that granite wall.”