Manipulating Mikey (First Wave Book 8) (6 page)

The moment he was away from Lauren,
Mikey felt his mind clear and his body relax, and he struggled to look around
the people holding him to the floor to check on her and make sure she was all
right.

Testing out whether or not he had
control of his voice again, Mikey called out, “Lauren!”

“Mikey! Let me go! I have to check
him, something is wrong!” he heard Lauren shout from far away.

Mikey looked up into the concerned
eyes of the Valendran Commander and whispered, “Keep her away so I don’t hurt
her,” before a rush of darkness overcame him.

Ivint let go of the unconscious
soldier and waved his hands until everyone backed away from him.

Lauren pushed through the crowd of
stunned diners and knelt next to Mikey, her hand going to his forehead.

“He’s on fire! Someone help me get
him to medlab!” Lauren said fearfully as she sent her energy out to find what
was wrong with him.

Ivint, seeing that Lauren was using
her gift, sent a call through the Shengari’ for assistance before he knelt next
to the doctor and studied the young soldier who had gone from pleasant and
respectful to violent in only minutes.

Lauren pulled her energy back,
unable to detect what was causing Mikey’s temperature to rise and began to scan
him for the problem. Minutes later, she directed the med techs in getting him
on the gurney as she followed them down the hall to the medlab. Ivint wasn’t
far behind.

“Lauren, do you have any idea what
happened to cause that?” Ivint asked.

Lauren answered without taking her
eyes off of her scanner and the results of the tests she’d performed.

“No, sir. His vitals are checking
out perfectly. I’m not sure what it is yet and will need to run more tests,”
she said as she entered the medlab behind the gurney with Mikey.

Lauren stopped in the open door,
braced her hands on either side of frame, and prevented Ivint from entering.

“I need to run some tests. As soon
as I know anything, I will contact you and Grai immediately,” she said as she
allowed the door to close behind her and set the privacy controls so no one
would enter.

She wasn’t sure why she felt so
protective of the handsome soldier and didn’t have time to care. Instead, she
concentrated her efforts on trying to figure out what was causing his
temperature spike and irrational behavior.

“Doctor, he’s in a partial comatose
state, but we can’t find a reason for it,” a tech stated at the same time the
door opened.

Lauren turned to see who overrode
her privacy codes and looked up in surprise at Grai and Blade.

“Why the hell are you here?” Lauren
demanded with her hands on her hips.

Grai nodded silently at Blade and
Lauren watched as Blade moved across the room to where Mikey lay on the bed.
When Blade raised his hands to Mikey’s head, Lauren couldn’t hold her tongue
any longer.

“Get your damn hands away from my
patient!” Lauren yelled as she ran to stop Blade from touching him.

Lauren gasped as she was caught by
Grai and held tightly as Blade put his hands on Mikey’s head and closed his
eyes. Lauren struggled harder against Grai’s steel like arms.

“Calm yourself; Blade is fixing
him,” Grai said roughly, trying not to hurt the struggling doctor.

Lauren stopped fighting and looked
up at him in shock.

“You let Blade do something to him?
What ever happened to ‘let me ride the memory’? What the hell did you do?” she
angrily demanded.

Blade opened his eyes, backed away
from the bed, and began walking to the door while Grai let go of Lauren. As
Lauren passed Blade on the way to Mikey’s bed, she kicked him as hard as she
could in the crotch. Blade dropped to his knees and groaned as he clutched his
wounded genitals.

“Ride that memory for a while.
Asshole,” Lauren whispered into Blade’s ear before she pulled out her comm and
started scans on Mikey before she even reached the bed.

“Lauren, that was damn unfair!”
Grai said with a low growl.

Lauren turned and gaped at him in
shock.

“Unfair? The guy has been tortured
and is trying to learn who he is, and you let that jerk,” she yelled, pointing
at Blade, “mess with his head! What the hell is wrong with you? Since when do
we do this to our own?”

Grai held out a hand to help Blade
stand as he glared at Lauren.

“You dare lecture me about doing
things to our own after what happened at Fiorn’s Folly? There is a very valid
concern regarding where his loyalties lie! I will not have him loose at this or
any of our facilities unless I know our people are safe! How the hell do you
know this isn’t a set up? That he isn’t still loyal to them even after what
they did to him?” Grai demanded, his voice rising with his anger.

“What the hell did you do to him?”
Lauren shouted at both men.

Blade braced his hands on his knees
as he tried to breathe away the pain as he looked up at Lauren.

“It was a worm. Same kind I’ve used
on us since we were kids. There was no intention of hurting him, only making
sure he didn’t find a way to notify the humans where we are!” he said, his eyes
accusing as he glared at her.

Lauren glared at both of them as
she crossed her arms over her chest.

“A worm? Just a simple worm?
Really? Did you ever use one on anyone before they were beast bonded?” she
asked, her voice sounding deceptively casual as she saw Blade’s eyes widen
before he cursed.

“What?” Grai asked, looking between
Blade and Lauren for an answer.

“Blade just realized the reason he
didn’t use worms on the unbound, like Mikey. Why don’t you tell Grai why you
didn’t,” Lauren said, her anger radiating from her in waves.

Blade wiped a hand down his face
and shook his head at his own stupidity while he turned to Grai.

“She’s right . . . I honestly
didn’t think about the fact that he isn’t beast bonded. The energy worm I sent
into his mind was supposed to attach to the strands of energy that extend from
the beast into the brain,” Blade explained before Lauren interrupted.

“When there are no strands that
extend, that worm is like a pinball bouncing around the beast and causes major
disruptions in the energy of the host. If not caught in time, the beast becomes
superheated and causes irreversible brain death!” Lauren yelled, her fists
clenched in anger at the risk they took with her patient’s life.

Grai remained unfazed by her anger
or the situation.

“A mistake was made that won’t be
made again. It does not negate the need for him to monitored closely to ensure
the safety of everyone here! Or did you forget that we have children and
families here that need protected?” Grai demanded, unwilling to feel the least
bit sorry for his decisions.

Lauren wasn’t about to be cowed by
the intimidating leader. Not where her patients were concerned and certainly
not where
this
patient was concerned.

“There are other ways to watch him
without risking his life! You should have told me! What was the point of
bringing him here if you thought he was so dangerous? You could have taken him
anywhere! Why? What are you doing?” Lauren accused as it dawned on her that
Grai was using the young soldier for something.

Grai didn’t even flinch at her tone
or accusations.

“The protection of our people, our
families, and children is a duty I take very seriously. I will not stand here
and allow you to chastise me for doing my job just because you don’t like the
person used to achieve it. There has never been a plot to harm the man, only to
ensure that he didn’t notify anyone where he was until he figured out if he
wanted to remain here or return to them,” Grai argued, uncaring if she believed
him or not. He’d done what he had to do.

Lauren’s anger only rose at the
callous, calm way Grai tried to defend his actions.

“How dare you! You aren’t some
supreme leader that has the authority to endanger anyone you want just because
you think they might be a threat! He’s one of our own!” Lauren yelled back.

Grai’s nostrils flared, and he took
a deep breath to calm himself.

“This comes from the person who was
more than willing to side with Fiorn against her own people until he went too
far and threatened a pregnant woman and child! Don’t stand there and pretend
offense to something you are guilty of yourself! Again, this only arises as a
problem because of who he is to you, and not because of who he is in general! I
suggest the next tests you perform evaluate your compatibility to him as a mate
and when you finally come to your own senses, Amun will be here to take over
his care because you obviously are far too close to this situation—and him—to
be objective,” Grai ordered, leaving Lauren stunned and speechless.

Grai looked at the shell shocked
doctor and tried to calm his own quick anger. He put a gentle hand on her
shoulder and made sure his voice was calm.

“Lauren, run the tests. Take a
little time to adjust to the results and work with Amun to figure out the
discrepancies you found in his mitochondrial DNA. The worm is gone and another
one won’t be put there, but I’m going to suggest that you both move to Base Beta
while you figure things out. For the sake of everyone’s safety, I hope you will
agree,” Grai said softly.

Lauren nodded her head absently,
Grai’s previous words still sinking in.

Blade grinned broadly as he walked
past Lauren to the door, limping only a little.

“Congrats, my friend. Seeing this
look on your face was almost worth the hit to my balls. Almost. I owe you one,”
he said with a teasing grin as he squeezed her shoulder in support before he
left.

Chapter Six

Lauren paced in front of the window
for the second hour in a row as she waited for Mikey to awaken. With Amun’s
help, she’d been able to clear Mikey’s brain of the energy residue from Blade’s
mind worm, and his temperature had stabilized.

She and Amun had discovered that
Mikey’s unbound beast had seen the worm as a threat to his host and had shut
down Mikey’s brain to protect it from the foreign invader. Once Blade removed
the worm and the residue was cleared, Mikey’s body came out of the coma, but he
still hadn’t awakened, and that worried her.

Lauren stopped pacing, pulled out
her comm, and ran the same scans on him as he lay in the bed near the window.
When the screen flashed the same information, she sat heavily on the side of
the bed and gently ran a hand down his cheek.

The scans showed that he was well
and sleeping, but Lauren couldn’t help but feel something was still wrong. She
tried to convince herself that it was just her imagination or irrational fear
because she wasn’t sure how to handle the results of the other scans she’d
done. Still, she couldn’t shake the niggling suspicion that she was missing
something.

She stood to resume her pacing when
her hand was grabbed and she looked down into Mikey’s smiling face.

“Why you look so glum, doc? What
happened?” Mikey asked as he sat up and looked around the unfamiliar room.

Lauren sat back down on the bed and
smiled at the young man who the scans said was her mate.

“You’re OK now. You just had a bad
reaction to something. What do you remember?” Lauren asked, pulling out her
comm to run more scans now that he was awake.

Mikey shook his head for a moment,
trying to clear the fog shrouding his memories. He remembered Lauren coming to
his room and going to the dining hall with her . . . Mikey jerked his head up
and looked at Lauren in horror.

“Oh God . . . tell me I didn’t say
those things,” Mikey said, grabbing his head with both hands as the memories
flooded his mind.

Lauren reached out to lay a calming
hand on his arm when Mikey skittered across the bed and stood on the other
side.

“Don’t touch me . . .” he said as
he saw in his mind the way he’d raised his fist to her in the dining hall.

Lauren stood and faced him on the
other side of the bed.

“Mikey, it wasn’t your fault. There
was a problem with . . . your treatment that caused you to act differently. It
won’t happen again,” Lauren promised, wishing she could strangle Grai and
Blade.

She didn’t dare tell him that it
was Blade who’d caused the problem without making him pull away from them
all—and her. He was her mate, and she couldn’t stand the thought of losing him
before she could even get to know him.

At 85 years old, and a child of two
hybrids, Lauren hadn’t spent much time considering the whole mating thing.
Maybe it was the fact that she’d found her mate that made her consider it now,
she wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter. She refused to lose her chance at a
future before it could begin.

Mikey grabbed his head in his hands
and slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. He couldn’t stop his
mind from replaying the moment he’d raised his fist to strike Lauren, and he
was horrified at what he’d done and at the fear he saw in her eyes.

He heard a movement and looked up
to see Lauren coming towards him on the other side of the bed, and he jerked
himself to his feet as he looked around wildly for a door.

“Don’t come near me!” he warned as
he saw the door and rushed out.

Lauren followed him out of the door
and skidded to a stop when she saw him standing in the middle of the hallway
with his mouth agape as he looked around.

“Where the hell are we?” Mikey
whispered as he took in the enormous hallway.

The hall was so large that Mikey
felt like he’d awakened into an alternate universe inhabited by giants. He saw
Lauren come out into the hallway with him, and he instinctively put her behind
him as he looked for potential threats.

“There is nothing to fear. This is
one of our many bases on the planet. I brought you here so that you could learn
more of our people with a lot less ‘aliens’ around,” Lauren said gently as she
peeked around his back to look up at him.

Mikey looked around in awe, still
trying to understand what he was seeing.

“Where is this place?” he whispered
as he took a few tentative steps forward.

Lauren smiled, incredibly glad that
his surroundings had distracted him from the incident in the dining hall. He
was intelligent though, and she knew that at some point he would recall it
again. She only hoped that she could sufficiently explain things to him before
that happened; she was tired of taking two steps forward and one back with him.
Knowing he was her mate made her more determined than ever to convince him that
he should stay.

Lauren slipped her hand in his and
pulled him a little further down the hall.

“This is Base Beta, in Antarctica.
Do you recall the stories about Admiral Byrd and his flight to inner Earth?
Well this is where he came. Our people were already here,” Lauren said, seeing
Mikey’s eyes light in recognition of the name.

Mikey looked around the hall as he
allowed Lauren to pull them further down the long passage.

“Why did you build it so big?”
Mikey asked, still whispering, although he wasn’t sure why since Lauren wasn’t.

Lauren chuckled, delighting in his
curiosity and the change in topic.

“We didn’t build it. It was already
here when we re-discovered it. But we have the permission of the owners to be
here. You’ll get to meet some of them. If you’re a history buff, you’d know
them as Hyperboreans. They are the guardians of the rainbow bridge,” Lauren
explained as she led them to the door at the end of the long hallway.

Mikey was trying to rack his brain
for where he’d heard that name before. He’d always preferred to read than watch
most of the garbage on the TV, but he did love watching anything that had to do
with history and science.

They finally reached the door at
the end of the hallway, and Lauren opened it to reveal a stone staircase just
as wide as the hallway. Mikey was amazed at the long, wide steps as they
descended the seemingly never ending stairs. Lauren turned at the bottom and
opened another door. This time sunlight streamed through the opening and
beckoned Mikey.

When he finally stepped outside, he
took a sharp breath and looked around.

“There’s no way this is
Antarctica,” Mikey whispered as he took in the herd of wooly mammoths and the
green grass and trees.

Lauren grinned broadly and pointed
upwards.

“There’s the rainbow bridge,” she
said.

Mikey looked up and gasped at the
red and green swirls of the aurora australis above him. He had only seen the
phenomena in pictures or on the TV, and he was stunned at its beauty in real
life—until he looked closer.

Mikey’s mouth fell open in surprise
as he stared up at what the beautiful colors disguised.

“What the hell is that?” he asked
as he moved farther away from the door and out into the open.

Lauren looked up curiously,
thinking maybe he was seeing one of their craft. Seeing nothing unusual, she
sifted Mikey’s energy to make sure Blade hadn’t put in another worm when he was
supposed to take the other one out.

“What is what?” Lauren asked, still
scanning the skies to try and see what he did.

“The flashes of light in the
colors,” Mikey said as he continued staring upwards.

Lauren tried, but didn’t see any
flashes of light.

“Mikey, where are you seeing this?”
she asked, becoming concerned.

Mikey pointed above them.

“Right up there. Every minute or so
a bright flash of light goes through the colors. What is that?”

A deep throaty chuckle behind them
had Lauren and Mikey turning, and Mikey placed Lauren protectively behind him
as he faced the odd man smiling broadly as he looked up.

“Indrid!” Lauren said as she moved
from behind Mikey and approached the handsome man.

Mikey watched as the odd man’s
white eyes shone with light as he looked at Lauren. Indrid was tall—a few
inches taller than him—with black, iridescent skin that seemed to sparkle from
within. He had a bald head with white eyebrows and a white goatee. Although Lauren
seemed to know the man and believed him to be safe, Mikey could feel the deadly
energy that ran through him.

Strange, white eyes turned to stare
at Mikey.

“I came when I felt your energy
here. You can see the unseen,” Indrid Cold said. Indrid had arrived at Base
Beta after being reunited with his son, Mikal.

Mikey wasn’t sure what to say, but
he knew he was expected to say something.

“Um, I’m Mikey Davis,” he said as
he held out his hand to the man.

Indrid smiled as he took Mikey’s
hand and didn’t seem to be the least surprised when Mikey stiffened and
tightened his grip on Indrid’s hand.

Mikey could feel his whole body
begin to vibrate from the inside as he held Indrid’s hand. His muscles
contracted as he looked into the strange, white eyes and saw a rainbow of
colors before he jerked his hand out of Indrid’s and gasped for breath.

Lauren was immediately by his side
and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Are you all right? What happened?”
she asked with concern.

“He is fine. He doesn’t understand
his gift. Yet,” Indrid said cryptically.

“What gift?” Mikey asked as he
tried to slow the vibrations running through his veins.

“You aren’t quite ready yet. But
when you are, I will help you,” Indrid said before he turned to Lauren. “When
he needs me, call my name.”

“What do you mean?” Lauren asked.

“Call my name,” Indrid said before
he disappeared before Mikey’s startled eyes.

“What the hell?” Mikey uttered as
he put Lauren behind him and scanned the area for the strange, disappearing
man.

Lauren put a gentle hand on his
back, enjoying the feel of his body beneath her hand.

“It’s OK, Mikey. He is one of the
Hyperboreans I was telling you about. There are a few of them here, and one of
Grai’s adopted children, Mikal, is Indrid’s biological son. They have the
ability to shift into the wind,” Lauren explained as she moved from behind him
to look up in his face as she took his hand in her own.

Mikey used his other hand to rub
his face, trying to understand what was going on. Since the moment he awakened,
he felt as if he’d gone down the rabbit hole.

“I don’t know what to believe
anymore,” he whispered as he rubbed her hand, hoping she was real.

Lauren sighed in sympathy and
stepped closer to him, putting her other hand on his cheek.

“It’s a lot to take in. I’m sorry.
I should have realized that before agreeing to bring you here. I thought it
would bring you peace. I didn’t know it would affect your gift,” Lauren said,
wishing she’d thought it through better.

Mikey hated to see her sad and upset—especially
over him, and he wanted to make her feel better. He pulled her close, draped an
arm over her shoulder, and turned them back to the wooly mammoths and the city
laid out around them.

“I’m a tough guy; I can take a
little surprise. This is an amazing place. Why don’t you show me around and
explain it to me,” Mikey said, truly curious about the ancient city.

“Are you sure?” Lauren asked with
concern, wondering if it was too much for him.

Mikey chuckled and pointed to the
mammoths.

“I think if you don’t start
explaining then I’m going to run over there and pinch a mammoth to make sure
I’m not dreaming,” he teased.

Lauren giggled at the image that
invoked in her mind.

“That probably wouldn’t be a good
thing. Let’s head towards the center of the town, and I’ll fill you in on the
way,” Lauren offered.

*****

Grai paced the conference room as
they replayed the breakup of Koda’s craft over and over again trying to see the
direction the second piece may have gone.

Blade stared at the footage on the wall
before he closed his eyes and replayed Mikey’s version in his mind. Opening his
eyes, he walked over to the wall and pointed to a specific area.

“Can we get a closer look at this
area?” he asked Traze and Cristali.

Cristali pulled up the footage from
that quadrant of the sky that evening and began to play the footage right
before the aerial fight began.

“Change the angle a bit,” Blade
ordered as he sat on the floor in front of the wall, ignoring the curious
looks.

Blade looked up at the wall and watched
the scene unfold before him for several long minutes.

“There!” he yelled as he stood.
“Replay that last 20 seconds.”