SECRETS VOLUME 29
Indulge Your Fantasies
Nathalie Gray, Nicole North, Dominique Sinclair, Saskia Walker
Copyright © Nathalie Gray, Nicole North, Dominique Sinclair, Saskia Walker 2010
All Rights Reserved, RED SAGE PUBLISHING, INC.
Excerpt from Chimera
(Nathalie Gray)
He was blind. Eyes wide open yet couldn’t see a thing. Voices, smells of camphor and ammonia.
But no image. Where was he?
Burning pain shut up his nape. As a needle would. A click from inside his skull made him blink
and work his jaw against the strange pressure accumulating in his ears and behind his eyeballs.
How could something “click” inside one’s head? Nausea rose in his throat. He felt wired yet
lethargic. The last thing he remembered was sitting inside the shuttle on his way from New
Heraklion for some time off down planet-side. Then this.
“Is he linked yet?” a man asked. Thirties, educated, careful. Familiar. Was he talking about him?
Linked to what?
“No,” replied a woman. Gravelly voice, low. Older, smoker. “You’ll know when he is.”
“Download complete,” chimed a computer-generated, genderless voice.
He tried to sit but couldn’t even move his hands. Panic bubbled closer to the surface. He pushed
it down. No time for that. Later. Always had to be calm, focused and alert so he could do his job.
People depended on him, dammit.
Maybe he wasn’t blind. Maybe they’d just put something over his eyes. Had he been kidnapped
by some renegade force, terrorist group, a political party maybe? Well, he wasn’t going to make
it easy for the fuckers. They better have strapped him tight because he wasn’t staying.
Grunting, he curled his torso up by a few inches so he could rub his face against his shoulder…
And wished he hadn’t. His world vacillated. He squeezed his eyes shut against the nausea.
Just breathe.
Panic made a grand comeback and this time, this time he couldn’t push it down, just as when
he’d been a child, a scared little boy who’d stuffed teddies and pillows in all the menacing
recesses of a too-large bed. Only way to stop the monsters. And even then, sometimes it didn’t
stop them. They’d wait for him to fall asleep so they could crawl out from underneath the bed
and claw into his skull, plague him night after night with horrific nightmares. Even now as an
adult, he still couldn’t sleep in a bed without waking half a dozen times each night, prey to the
monsters, half-remembered but always in the back of his head. Sleeping on a mattress on the
floor wasn’t a fashion statement for him. Survival, sanity, fuelled this peculiar habit.
Terror seized him by the throat. His breathing accelerated. A moan escaped him. He could talk!
“What’s going on with him?” the man asked. “He's not awake, is he?”
“Of course he is,” the older woman snapped.
“My god… Will he remember this? Won’t he fight it when it’s time?” Fear rendered the man’s
voice high-pitched, made him instantly contemptible.
“Do you think they’ll believe him? After he’s been triggered, he’ll have six hours, then the
implant will self-destruct, leaving nothing behind. As for fighting it, no one has ever been able
to. Pain is a great motivator.”
His heart beat so fast it hurt. “Where am I?” he managed to croak. His throat burned.
“Your codename will be Chimera,” the woman replied, her voice near his left ear. She smelled of
ashtray and old-woman perfume, a mix of roses and some unknown chemical.
Codename? What the hell for? Chimera. How fitting to the monsters plaguing him.
Another intracranial click a split second before the very word Chimera blazed like white-hot
steel behind his eyelids. Then pain hit. Hard. In his brain, over his face, every limb. He thought
he heard a man screaming, realized with shock it was him. Between desperate gulps for air, he
felt they’d lowered something against his face, some kind of lid or cover. It almost touched his
nose. He started panting. His breath hit him in the face, smelled of medication and sour beer. But
he never, ever drank alcohol, not in his profession and certainly not after having been raised in a
household of drunks.
He was suffocating!
A moment later, something whistled near his forehead, sending a tiny ribbon of air down on his
face. A sweet smell filled whatever contained him. Pod, stasis chamber…or coffin. He felt
sleepy. Stopped screaming.
Inside, the computer voice accompanied him into oblivion.
“Launch sequence activated.”