Free Blue Abyss: Timewalker Chronicles, Book 3 (The Timewalker Chronicles) by Michele Callahan Page A

traveled to her pores and rose up on her skin to run over her sensitive flesh like small streams of sweat. She was like a kitchen cloth being wrung out over the sink. Water flowed off her body and dripped onto the floor until her lungs were completely clear. Time to get what she came for.
    Ruthlessly she squeezed her thumb to get enough blood to enter.
    She didn’t waste time on the little prison cell that housed Raiden’s sleeping form. She felt a bit like she was jumping off a bridge. It was not something she wanted to stop and think about. She’d had a bungee cord tied around her feet and jumped off a bridge in New Zealand. They didn’t let her look over the edge until she was ready to jump. And once she was on the ledge they didn’t give her time to stop and think. Countdown. Leap. Thinking would have given her time to be scared, more scared.
    “This time, you get to die. Alien assholes.” Mari leaned her forehead against the closed door, the door she knew the dark things hid behind, and whispered her vow. Killing these alien monsters was worse than jumping off a bridge. Much worse.
    But, for the first time in two years, she actually believed she had a fighting chance to get out of here alive.
    She squeezed her thumb again until she was sure she had enough blood to operate the crystal doorway, and opened it. As before, the two faceless beings rose to inspect her, surprised by her entrance. She didn’t pause to talk, or wait for them to speak to her, she simply raised her arm to the nearest one and fired a blast of light. The monsterdisintegrated before her eyes and fell like a cloud of dust to the floor.
    Yes!
    The other raced for her with inhuman speed. She immediately turned and fired again. The flash of light cleared and there was nothing left of the creatures but a faint dusting of black ash where the two aliens had been. Mari kicked at the pile with the toe of her dive bootie. The ash mixed with water and congealed between the threads. Mud under her shoe. Gross.
    “Take that, you assholes.” Celestina promised her that this was the only weapon that could distort their molecules enough to banish them from this world. She hoped they were dead. Really, really dead, and not just banished to some other dimension waiting to pop back out at her, or travel through time to kill her again.
    Not that it would matter. There were more of them somewhere, a whole society, if that was what she wanted to call it. And after a lifetime of nightmares, Mari had long ago resigned herself never to sleep peacefully again.
    With the immediate threat gone, the blaring noise of hundreds of screens assaulted her ears. Radio chatter from military men speaking in English, Chinese, Russian and a handful of other languages she couldn’t recognize or understand flooded the room. She searched the perimeter of the room. It was a very plain room. Two chairs, hundreds of monitors and radios. No water, no food and nothing to indicate that any human had ever been here before. There were no creature comforts of any kind.
    Then she saw something stuffed in the corner leaning against the wall. A small black stone with her new symbol, the Shen, engraved in its center. She had no idea what it was, or who it belonged to, but it was a Timewalker symbol, and these aliens had no right to it.
    “I’ll just take that, thank you.” Mari stuffed the stone in a pocket and zipped the fabric around it. She looked around, relief making her shake like a leaf. She’d killed them. And thanks to Celestina, it had been easy.
    The room left a bad taste in her mouth. Whoever built it was obviously using it to spy on governments the world over. Alien murderers did not need to know where the President was at any given time, or the leaders of any other country.
    Celestina hadn’t said anything to her about destroying this place while she was down here, but those alien creatures were using it for something and whatever that something was, it wasn’t good. Decision