Reality Bites

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my parents.

Acknowledgment

Dawne, Darcie, Cyn and my wonderful street team, I couldn’t do it without you.

Prologue

My mother was a ditzy actress whose one claim to fame was a low-budget movie about Viking berserkers called Runestone. Mom fell in love with the Viking culture and changed her name from Kirsten Jones to Freya Odin.

It’s also why I got stuck with the swell name Brunhilda. Mom said I was born to become a great warrior like my father. I was a Valkyrie. You know, one of those mythical female warriors.

Dad, a great warrior? Only in Mom’s mind. It seems my father had been a stuntman, and evidently not a very good one. He was killed in a battle scene when he fell off his horse and was trampled.

Every time I tried to get more information about my klutz of a father, Mom would burst into tears and drink herself into oblivion. In her drunken ramblings, she called him Thor. I seriously doubted he was the god of thunder.

Mom said I was the spitting image of my dad. Yay me. I always wanted to look like a guy. The only picture she had of him was grainy and out of focus. Dad was a big, muscular dude with long black hair and what looked like fangs. Which was kinda weird because there weren’t any vampires in Runestone.

To my mother’s horror, at the age of six I healed a cat’s broken leg. By eight I could move things with my mind. Which totally freaked out Mom. She said if I ever let anyone know about my Siren abilities, the military hunters would come and take me away. I would never see her again. Needless to say, that scared the piss out of me, but it didn’t stop me from using my powers.

After a quick Internet search at the school’s library, I discovered Mom belonged to the legendary Jones family that called Phoenix, Arizona home. They were famous psychics, and most of them served in the military. They had Mom listed as missing and offered a sizable reward for any information on her location. As far as I could tell, Mom didn’t have a lick of psychic ability. Which was probably why she had run away. Or did it have something to do with my dad?

My attempt to get more information on Mom triggered some kind of alarm, and within hours, soldiers swarmed my grade school. I managed to sneak out and hurried home. I told Mom what had happened, and boy was she mad. She packed our suitcases, and we left Las Vegas.

I was ten years old when Mom got a gig to play a saloon girl in a western. The movie was filmed at an Old West theme park outside Bisbee, Arizona called Dead Man’s Gulch. The owner and local stuntman, Hank Benson, a Kevin Costner lookalike, fell madly in love with my very beautiful mother and talked her into marrying him. Had she said yes because the Jones’s soldiers were hot on our trail? Maybe.

Three months later, Mom swerved to miss a coyote, ran off the road, and hit several saguaro cacti. I wasn’t injured, but she died a slow, painful death, and my budding powers weren’t strong enough to save her. Hank found me covered in my mother’s blood and promised I would never be alone again. He adopted me and became Pops, the father I’d never had.

Hank had been an Army Ranger, and still did the occasional wet work for the government. He had the perfect cover as a highly sought after stuntman and explosives expert. To keep me safe, Pops taught me everything he knew. Which saved my life when the monsters came.

I was eighteen when the aliens invaded our world. They called themselves the Tai-Kok. They were malevolent, depraved ghouls who live to eat. The image of these tall, hairless, skeletal humanoids with a mouth full of sharp metal teeth is forever burned into the mind of every man, woman, and child left on Earth. Completing the nightmare are their three bloodred eyes that glare out of skin so transparent you can watch as your loved ones are being digested.

No one knows how the Tai-Kok found our world or why they consider us good eating. The few peace delegates that tried to communicate with them got butchered. After that, everyone was too busy running for their lives to find out why.

The one good thing that resulted from the monsters’ attacks was they unified humanity. For the first time in recorded history, every country on Earth joined forces to fight the alien invaders, and Central Command was born.

The Tai-Kok ate their way across Europe and the Middle East until they had the bad luck to capture a suicide bomber and take him aboard their ship for snack time. He blew himself up over the Pacific. Luckily, the ship crashed outside Tucson, Arizona. We salvaged their technology and have been using it against them ever since.

Five years ago, my cousin Kaylee Jones mated with a Coletti warlord, which proved to be a mixed blessing. The Coletti and their allies now protect Earth from Tai-Kok and the ratlike Rodan raiders, but this protection came with a price. They demanded we turn over all psychic women to them. Seems they need us as breeding stock.

Why, you ask? Six hundred years ago, the Coletti race was almost wiped out in the Great Galactic War. Unfortunately for the females of the universe, chemicals used in the war created a genetic anomaly, and only one female baby was born for every one thousand males. The Coletti women were going the way of the dodo bird.

Facing extinction, the Coletti warlords started raiding other planets and species for their prized psychic females. It didn’t matter one bit if the woman protested. They took her anyway. Once Zarek, the Overlord of the Coletti clans, discovered the Jones family’s unique psychic powers and our blood’s ability to heal cellular damage, he promptly seized control of Earth. Any woman who displayed psychic capability was immediately taken to their home world, where her DNA was converted to match the Colettis’. That’s where their swell tentacles came into play.

After the Overlord took over, Pops gave me my Mom’s diary. He said I needed to know the truth. To my dismay, I discovered my birth father, Thor, had been a Coletti warlord who had crashed landed on Earth. Desperate for blood, he had broken into my mom’s house and claimed her as his blood mate. Daddy dearest managed to impregnate my mother before he was killed. He must have been a piss-poor warrior, because he really had been trampled in a battle scene.

Why had Thor never converted my mother? Was it her lack of psychic abilities? Did he already have a mate? Was she a convenient blood bank? Mom genuinely loved the jerk, but that could have been nothing more than mind control.

And me? I was a freakin’ half-breed. At least now I knew why I was so much stronger than a normal woman. Pops hated the Colettis. Did he still consider me his daughter? Or was I now the enemy?

He looked shocked when I asked him. Wrapping me in a bear hug, Pops told me I was his daughter and nothing would ever change that. In that moment, I knew I was human, not Coletti, and I would fight to the death to keep from being converted.

Pops announced that he wasn’t going to stand idly by and let the Colettis rule our world. He started a resistance movement called Earth First. Thousands of like-minded individuals joined our cause. Our success at rescuing and hiding psychic women seriously pissed off the Coletti warlords. They hunted us relentlessly. We knew it was only a matter of time before they found us, but we had a few tricks up our sleeves.

Chapter One

Dead Man’s Gulch, a piece of the Wild, Wild West plunked down in the middle of the Arizona desert. Off the beaten path, its isolation made it the perfect headquarters for our resistance movement. Underground bunkers had been added when the Tai-Kok and Rodan began raiding our world.

My tiny office was located in the jail. I loved the atmosphere. The walls were covered with old wanted posters. A leather duster and gun belt complete with a functional 1873 Colt Peacemaker hung on the antique coatrack.

I polished the gold badge pinned to my fringed leather shirt. Officially, I was Dead Man’s Gulch’s marshal, and when the need arose, I was authorized to make arrests.

With my long black hair and copper-colored skin, most people thought I was Native American, not Coletti. Which worked out perfectly when the theme park was still open. I could either become Calamity Jane, the great American sharpshooter and sheriff, or an Indian princess.

My latest bust had been a transient who thought an abandoned ghost town would be the perfect place to set up housekeeping. The buildings might look empty, but they’re not. Two hundred soldiers usually live below ground in the bunkers. Pops had taken all but the command staff to raid a holding center in Texas.

Through the dusty front window, I watched a coyote amble down the dirt street. With a sigh, I surveyed my cluttered desk. Paperwork was the bane of my existence. As Pops’s second in command I was responsible for strategy, equipping our troops, and getting new identities for the rescued women.

Central Command had a stranglehold on weapons, and we were forced to buy from Mexican gunrunners. Not an exercise for the faint of heart. The thugs thought a woman would be an easy mark, until I taught them otherwise.

To make things really interesting, the Overlord had sent his best hunter, Jaylan, to Earth to track down and eliminate all members of Earth First. He had already destroyed our bases in Nevada and Oregon. Pops was beyond pissed.

A thousand fireflies sparked in my brain as my internal radar went on red alert. I almost inhaled my gum when an enormous Coletti warrior abruptly teleported into my office.

His fangs bared in a feral snarl, he demanded, Where are they?

Holy hell, it was Jaylan! This was so not good. I quickly stomped on the silent alarm hidden beneath my desk, and assumed my mother’s ditzy demeanor. We’re an Old West theme park, and while your costume is very authentic, we’re looking for gunslingers, not Jedi knights or Coletti invaders.

Jaylan cocked a disbelieving eyebrow and leveled the barrel of his laser pistol at my chest. Put your hands up.

No sense in getting all cranky. We aren’t hiring right now, and even if we were, you’d have to lose those fangs.

The warlord leaned across the desk, literally oozing menace. Do you wish to die?

Boy, someone sure got up on the wrong side of the bed. With that stinky attitude, no one is going to hire you, but seeing how you drove all the way out here, I’ll give you an application form. I reached into my top desk drawer and froze when Jaylan jammed his laser pistol against my forehead.

Do not move.

I popped my gum loudly. Okeydoke.

Put your hands up, Jaylan commanded again.

Blowing a huge purple bubble, I slowly raised my hands and tried not to laugh when he grabbed the trash can and ordered, Spit it out.

I spat. My wad missed the trash can and hit his spiffy boot instead. Ooops.

Ooops? Jaylan’s eyes burned with the promise of retaliation.

"Sorry. My aim was off a bit.