Banished To Earth Book Two, Souls Adrift (1)

Banished To Earth

Book Two

 Chapter One

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    Silhouette was not dead. But the shadowy figure looming over her had been—or should have been. He stood against the morning sun, a dark shape cut out of gold, staring down as the tide hissed along the beach.

    “Get up, or die in the sand,” the shadow said. “I can still smell life in you.” The words were human. The voice was not. It rasped with a brutal, unnatural edge that scraped across her ears like salt-packed grit grinding into her skin. As that gruff, domineering tone bored its way into her half-conscious mind, it dragged another voice up from the filth of her memory—her father’s voice, low and certain: The first time is the worst time.

    “The first time is the worst time,” she muttered, the words coming out like shards of glass forced through a torn throat. Her leather-clad chest rose as she dragged in a deep breath of cold, cleansing sea air and let it burn life back into her.

    “First time? You talking about me?” the stranger growled. “What are you trying to say? What do you know about me? Sit up and tell me plain.”

    The sea breeze chilled her more than his words did. She shut it out by warming her body with her newly awakened Hunter power. Then she lifted her face from the sand and shoved her father’s voice back into the slime pit of her past, where it belonged.

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    Sensing another Hunter in him, she pulled her bravado around herself like a robe and said, “All I know is that you smell like fish.” She pried apart her salt-crusted eyelids and looked up. His massive frame blotted out the sun and seemed to dare her to guess what he was.

    A spear of white sunlight flashed past what must have been his head as he recoiled from her searching eyes.
    “Bashful,” she teased. Squinting, she rolled onto her left side and slung her long, sand-flecked black hair away from her flawless, cover-girl face.

    He stepped back. “What do you see?” The question was meant as a demand, but it came out sounding perilously close to a plea.

    “Not much,” she said, savoring the weakness she heard in him. It reminded her of her father begging for mercy. “The sun’s in my eyes. Help me up, please,” she purred in her best little-girl

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voice, pretending she needed him.

   The shadow man wavered over her like a flag flopping limply in a dying breeze and then backed away.

   “Allies now, enemies later, okay,” she said, feigning fear this time, “You are Hunter, and you are like me, are you not?”

   He turned away from her, “I was,” he said, unintentionally revealing the long gray fin protruding between his shoulder blades.

  “Oh,” she said with genuine shock, “what happened to you,” she asked, fearing the same thing might somehow happen to her. The Transit Authority, the highly advanced race of aliens and self-appointed judges of the galaxy that had changed her two days ago, had changed him as well.

   If his transformation did this to him, might it not do the same thing to her? “They weren’t through with you?” She asked, rising to her feet, her bravado sagging.

   “The Aliens did not do this; another Hunter, Chase Gillette, became a monster and did this to me!” He roared. “It-he bit me made me the very thing the Aliens meant me to destroy!”

  “Really,” Silhouette was genuinely surprised, as she carefully circled the strange ‘new man’ until the sun was at her back.

  “You know him,” He asked, almost looking back at her as he spoke.

 “Uh, what, ah yeah,” she stammered, astonished by the impossible appearance of this grey-skinned man thing, sporting black swim trunks he had scavenged from a nearby abandoned house, towering over her. A weird emotion began to rise from some part of her that she thought long dead. Pity. “He ah, was this nervous nerdy sort, didn’t take him for much of a Hunter. He did have a monster in tow, a little alien vampire girl, a Cry’chee named Pry.”

  “His wife,” The man thing shrieked, “he did this to me to save her! Where was he?”

 “I portal shifted behind them in a Wilmington parking lot,” She said, still trying to make sense of what she was seeing, “Stepped right out of the air, just a few feet behind them. He should have sensed the portal opening, but the fool and his little razor haired wifey were too busy trying to save another Hunter to notice it. I saved their lives, jumped right down an alien T-rex’s throat

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and cut my way out. It would have killed them if I hadn‘t taken him down. Okay, it was fun too.”

“You’re first?” He asked, rising to his full six-foot five height as he turned to face her. 

“Wha, what,” Her words caught in her throat as his impossible, surreal appearance

struck her full in the face.

     It was as if someone had stripped the pathetic man’s skin right off his body, ' re-dressed’ him in sharkskin, plucked his eyes out and shoved cold black marbles into the bloody hollows,