The Imprint Trilogy Book #1
HASH
Human Alien Species Hybrid
April M. Reign
HASH
Published by April M. Reign
Copyright ©2013 by April M. Reign
Pubit Edition
www.aprilmreign.com
Cover Design by: April M. Reign
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by an electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without the permission of the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of this author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Books by
April M. Reign
For current information on new releases visit:
www.aprilmreign.com
Series / Sagas
Hell Has a Conscience: The Dhellia Series
Quest for the Keys: The Dhellia Series
Bound to Darkness: The Turning Series
Unleashed: The Turning Series
I.O.U.: The Mancini Saga
Snap Shot: The Mancini Saga
Christmas with the Mancinis: The Mancini Saga
Dominic: The Disciples of the Damned Series
Vypers: The Disciples of the Damned Series
Slayers: The Disciples of the Damned Series
Friend or Foe: The Disciples of the Damned Series
Stand Alone Books
Beyond Today
Dividing Destiny
Enticing the Moon
2013 Release
Trial by Fire: The Dhellia Series
Still Born: The Mancini Saga
Vampire Vengeance: The Turning Series
War The Horsemen: The Disciples of the Damned Series
Dedication:
Life is full of twists and turns. You never know where your personal journey might take you. I dedicate this book to those opportunities.
My sincerest appreciation to:
To those who have shown me support and encouragement in all that I do.
The Imprint Trilogy
Hash #1
Prologue
It was always the accident.
Every time I slept, my dreams came back to haunt me with memories of things that I couldn’t possibly have remembered from when I was very young.
While I rode in the car with my parents, my memory of the cornfields around us, the steady thrum of the car engine, seemed real. I was never quite certain whether those details were ones I truly remembered, or if they were memories I’d invented over the years to fill in any missing parts.
Like my parents’ faces. Their voices. I’d been only three years old when the accident happened, yet in my dreams, my parents’ faces were always pin sharp. My father had dark hair and a beard that didn’t really suit him, and my mother had soft blonde hair that almost matched the corn tassels as the car whizzed by the fields.
Just seeing my parents, I could feel the familiar sense of dread rising. Not toward them. No, they were my world.
Dread…at what was coming.
How could these memories be so vivid? The masculine, comforting sound of my father’s voice as he spoke softly to my mother seemed so natural. “We could just take our time and maybe stop off at a couple of towns along the way.” He glanced over at my mother’s face and the sides of his almost-hidden lips beneath his mustache twitched upward with an adoring grin.
“Do you think we should tack on a couple more days?” my mother’s soft, sweet voice replied.
“We don’t have to get to the West Coast until the new semester starts next week. Things are going to be busy once I make it to CalTech.” He smiled fully this time when he said, “Besides, what’s wrong with wanting to spend a little extra time with my two favorite ladies?”
He glanced back at me in my booster seat and grinned. That single smile was the only one I could remember from my father. His smile should have brought me comfort or happiness, but it didn’t. It just made me afraid. His smile was just one more step toward that moment when the world, as I knew it, ceased to exist.
My mother’s voice, now sharp with a rising alarm, stunned me. She pointed out her window toward the sky and my eyes followed her finger. “Frank, what’s that?”
I wanted to scream, but dreams didn’t work that way. I had to watch it again in my dream, knowing the outcome. I was trapped in the body of the child I had been, while my mother pointed, while my father stared, and while red and yellow dragon-colored flames filled the sky.
I looked then. I looked, and for one beautiful, terrifying instant, I saw it. I saw the circle of metal, far larger than our car, plunging through the fiery air. I saw it, and I heard my mother scream at the top of her lungs, “Frank, brake!”
My eyes widened, my heart pounded, I pulled my eyes away from the sky and looked at her side profile. That moment was the last time I could remember seeing my mother—that image of her sitting there, so terrified and so beautiful all at once. Her milky white skin turned red in the reflection of the growing fiery light in the sky, as the object streaked closer to us.
My father’s hand moved between them and I saw him grip her delicate fingers as if he knew something bad was going to happen.
I didn’t know that part then.
I didn’t understand what was going on, I only knew that my mother was frightened, and that if she was frightened, then I should be frightened, too. I saw my own tiny arm reaching out toward her…my small fingers spread, tears in my eyes.
My father braked hard enough to throw me forward against the safety straps of the booster seat. He shouted something, my mother screamed again, and even I joined in.
The thin wails of a three-year-old cut through it all as we skidded across the paved road and off into the dirt shoulder.
Then the fiery thing hit us, and for a moment, in my dream, everything seemed to freeze at that second of impact. It was as if gravity didn’t exist because I was just floating. We all were. I could see my mother’s hair hanging almost in a halo around her face, her mouth open in a silent scream.
Then the world reasserted itself and we tumbled, rolling, over and over. It was too fast. Too rough to follow, but my dream provided snapshots. My father whipped forward into the steering wheel. My mother’s head sent spider web patterns through the glass of the windshield. The world blurred and turned outside, tumbling the way it tumbled when my father spun me around or lifted me into the air when we’d play. But it was much more dizzying.
My dream jumped forward to the stillness of the aftermath. The kind of stillness that could only come after the end of that much violent, unexpected movement—the kind of terrifying stillness where even the creak of metal around me felt like an intrusion.
I crawled from what was left of the car, crying, looking around for my mother and father. The safety straps of my chair must have torn and set me free. I crawled, and I cried because everything hurt. Even in the dream, it hurt.
Ahead of me, there was a tangle of metal sticking out of the ground. A furrow of torn-up earth led to it, wider and deeper than I was tall. I could see the wreckage of the thing that had hit us in the dream, watching the torn-up curves of the metal and seeing the strange, impossible ways they connected to one another.
I tried to hold back. I tried not to go on. But I had, so I did, despite what was coming. That was how the dream worked. I crawled along the edge of the crater the metal thing had made, and in it, I saw the woman.
She w
asn’t my mother. Even as a child, I recognized that. My mother wasn’t so unnaturally tall and slender, and my mother didn’t have gleaming metal, which swirled and looped around her body, twisting in patterns that caught the descending sunlight as she lay there, staring over at me, her eyes so dark that they were a crayon black.
She reached out toward me, and my child form made its way over to her, half walking and half crawling. I was searching for comfort, for someone to wrap their arms around me and tell me that everything would be okay. Even in my dream, I remembered that confused toddler need.
I watched on, in my dream, knowing I wouldn’t wake up until the end part was done. Couldn’t it, just once, stop short of this point?
The long, thin woman stared at me. Her eyes were large, much larger than any eyes I had ever seen. She spoke in a language I didn’t understand. When I did not reply, she tried again, and in my dream, it was in English.
“There, little one. Come here. You’re hurt.”
I crawled to her, unable to help myself. She effortlessly lifted me into her lap. I could remember how safe I felt there even though I knew I wasn’t. Her arms wrapped around me the way my mother’s arms would when I was scared of the dark. I closed my eyes and imagined it was my mother, and I slowly leaned in and rested my head on her chest.
Her voice, as she spoke to me, was slightly deeper than my mother’s voice and it was desperate. “I’m hurt, too. Maybe too much. We weren’t supposed to be here. Celenia was secure. The Devourers could not touch us. We were traveling to talk about helping our neighbors. How could we guess that our own people would betray us?” She stroked my hair. “I know, sweetheart. I know you don’t understand now. But you will.”
I looked up at her and she went on.
“We had to run. We were aiming for home, but something went wrong. Sabotage. We…” she gestured to the wreckage. “My husband and son were in there with me, and now I am dying. Even with the key holding me together, I am dying. When I do, it will die, too, and then, what will become of all of us?”
I’d long since stopped wondering how I could remember the words, let alone understand them at that age. I didn’t care. All I cared about was what came next. Despite my resignation before, I fought to try to make myself get away. I needed to do something other than sit there stupidly hurting, trusting this woman because she spoke so softly.
She reached down behind herself, touching her neck. Something came away in her hand. Something that I looked at, fascinated in my dream. Something that shone as brightly as anything I had ever seen before. She held it out, obviously growing weaker with every second.
“If there were another way…but there isn’t. I’m sorry, child.”
She pressed the cold metal to my skin, and it burned as if it were as hot as the sun. As a three year old, I screamed for it to stop and even as I woke from my dream unable to tolerate the pain, my screams, although deeper in tone, were as fierce and desperate as they were when I was a child. For the thousandth time, my first thought was that I wished that this dream would let me wake up just a second or two earlier.
Chapter One
I woke with a scream, sitting up in my bed, staring around at the white-walled box of a room around me. My room. My bed. My dressing table. The small chair and stack of books that my tutor had asked me to read were right where I had left them.
The two-way glass off the far wall, darkened and reflective, was still there and still, after a dream like the one I always had, was comforting. I was in the Institute and I was safe. At least, that’s what I tried to tell my rapidly beating heart.
I stood, using the surface of the wall to brace myself. I lifted my pajama shirt and revealed my back and midriff and then I turned to see if it was still there. I used the reflective two-way glass to check the metal implant, the way I always did when I woke from my reoccurring nightmare. By now, it was no more than a habit. Maybe I’d hoped that it would simply be gone one day. But it never was. It was as much a part of me as my own spine and it had wrapped itself around my spine from the inside out, making my body its comfortable home.
“I don’t know why you’re doing that, Jade. You know it’s there.”
I didn’t look at Em for a moment, wanting to make sure, not even answering until I had used the glass to look at the lines of silvery metal radiating down my spine. It looked like someone had taken a kind of large metal starfish and welded it to the skin of my back, so that the uppermost tendrils just showed on my neck and draped slightly down my shoulders while the lowest reached all the way to the base of my spine. A silvery starburst gift from that woman the night of the crash and I couldn’t get rid of it, even if I wanted to.
This morning, Em’s voice was more irritating than comforting. Sometimes, she got on my nerves more than she should have. As I stared at the metal on my back, I could hear her in the corner throwing a fit about me ignoring her.
“Oh, please tell me that you’re not doing the whole ‘not talking to me’ thing again. We’re nineteen, not kids.” Em sighed, irritated.
I finally turned and narrowed my eyes at Em. Emerald. It had seemed like such a great joke at the time. She looked almost exactly the way I did. Nineteen, blonde hair, with the chiseled athleticism that came, in my case, from doctors’ exercise and dietary regimen. And those eyes. Those startling green eyes were so much greener than any normal eyes had a right to be.
We were both dressed in identical white sweatpants and t-shirts. There were a few differences, of course. There was no sign of the implant on Em, and her hair was almost boyishly short while mine hung in a braid almost to my waist. Oh, and she wasn’t real. There was always that.
I decided to respond to her last statement. “If I’m not a kid, then aren’t I a little old for imaginary friends?”
“Imaginary? As if, Jade. I’m as much alive as you are even if no one else can hear or see me.”
“Says you.”
“Says you, too, when you start talking about what’s beyond these walls. Aren’t I the one that you confide in? I’m pretty real then, aren’t I?”
I hated when she did that. She used moments when we actually connected against me. It was cruel and always left me at a loss for words. “You have your moments.”
“Hang on a minute. Remember the time when you were curled up in a ball in that corner and you were wailing about—”
“Okay! Okay! You made your point.”
Em put her finger to her lips. “Shh, not so loud. You wouldn’t want to wake up the doctors, would you?”
“They’re watching anyway.” I looked out at the glass. Someone was always watching. They had been since I was a little girl. Since they brought me here and worked so hard to save my life after the accident. I could remember men in military uniforms, then doctors in white coats. What scared me then was a natural part of my life now.
“Of course they are.” Em walked up to the glass, knocking on it. Her fingers didn’t make a sound against the window, but they didn’t go through, either. “I was just trying to make you feel better. I wonder if some of them still think you’re just cuckoo?”
“Cuckoo? Really, Em? Where do you come up with these words?”
“Mad then. Remember when you had half the staff scared to come into your room because you were arguing with,” Em opened her hands and opened her arms, “the air.”
I sighed and plopped down on my cot. So much for trying to make me feel better. I shook my head. “There are days when I still wonder. I mean, I’m still getting the dreams. I’m still seeing you.”
Em pouted and went to sit down on the other side of the cot. Her body didn’t make an indentation and she slid toward the wall so she could lean her back against it. There were days when she was like an annoying elder sister, and there were days when she was like an annoying child. There were very few days when she wasn’t annoying.
“Well, you’re awake now,” she said. “Read something to me.”
I shook my head. “Read it yourself.”
Em reached down, her hand passing through the topmost of the stack of books. “Very funny. Come on, Jade. What else is there to do here? I’m bored. It’s not like I sleep.”
Bored. Em was always bored. Always restless. Even now, she had stood from the cot and paced the room, stopping at each of the walls and pressing her hands flat, like she might be able to slip through them like a ghost, if she tried hard enough. Yet, she never ventured far from me, even when we were out in the Institute, going through the scientists’ endless tests.
“Ah, here we go.” Em stood in front of the door, locked from the outside. From in my room, it didn’t look like a door, but rather another section of the wall. It had always been like that. There were times when it bothered me, but not many. After all, I had everything I needed here, and the doctors were mostly just trying to protect me.
“Here we go…what?” I asked.
“You’ll see.”
“I hate when you do that.”
“Oh, Jade, loosen up and try to have some fun. You have visitors.”
Em had an ability to know when someone was close to the door. She had warned me on several occasions when I wasn’t reading or doing something they had asked me to do. I don’t know why she warned me when surveillance was on me around the clock.
The door opened and the woman who came in was in her forties, a little shorter than I was, with a kind of gentle beauty, even when she looked as worried as she did now. She had mousy blonde hair that fell in slightly tangled curls and wore a white coat over casual clothes. She had the scent of jasmine around her, as usual. I knew her well.
“Jade, are you all right?” Dr. Stevens asked.
“I had another nightmare, Dr. Stevens. The same as usual.”
“The woman in your dream took you in her arms?”
“Yes.”
HASH: Human Alien Species Hybrid Page 1