Crash Morph: Gate Shifter Book Two Read online

  CRASH MORPH

  THE GATE SHIFTER SERIES

  BOOK TWO

  by

  JC Andrijeski

  Copyright © 2014 by JC Andrijeski

  Published by White Sun Press

  Cover Art 2014 by JC Andrijeski

  Ebook Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please visit an official vendor for the work and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  CRASH MORPH

  THE GATE SHIFTER SERIES: BOOK TWO

  “I was going to find that damned kid, Jazzy Jiāng, if it killed me.…”

  Dakota Reyes, twenty-something private eye, finally made it back to Earth and back to Seattle, after dropping through a dimensional portal one very bad night, nine months earlier. She didn’t come back alone: a shape-shifting alien named Nihkil, her lock-mate and friend from that other world, came with her.

  …So did a bunch of other shape-shifting aliens, anti-human terrorists trying to escape their human enslavers in that other world. But that last part was an accident. Sort of.

  Now Dakota and Nik are hiding out with Dakota’s friends, Irene and Gantry, and Dakota’s con artist brother, Jake. The psychopath who nearly killed her on her last job is still hanging around, too, looking for revenge. Dakota’s also got a new job, looking for missing girls kidnapped by human traffickers, and her pal, Gantry, tells her there’s a contract out on her, one with probable ties back to the government. Oh, and the leader of the terrorist aliens, Razmun, is trying to get Dakota thrown in jail so he can kidnap Nihkil.

  Worse, all of these things seem strangely connected.

  Then there’s Nik himself. Sometimes, Dakota would prefer if she could just keep her hot, shape-shifting pal at a distance, but despite Gantry’s warnings and Nik’s own “issues,” she’s finding that increasingly impossible to do.

  THE GATE SHIFTER SERIES is an unusual shifter romance centering on shifters from another world altogether, called morph. Earth humans remained blissfully ignorant of the existence of alternate dimensions until Nihkil Jamri tries to save private detective, Dakota Reyes, while he is surveying Earth. Part urban fantasy, part detective series, part paranormal romance, part science fiction adventure, the Gate Shifter series explores crime solving, interstellar warfare and alien romance with the least likely candidates imaginable.

  Dedicated to Cindie

  Who is always navigating aliens

  In one form or another...

  1

  Waking Up, Visitors and High-Octane Coffee

  It took me more than the usual amount of time to wake up.

  It took me even longer to remember where I was.

  Really, that’s pretty understandable, so yeah, I gave myself a pass in terms of the whole early worm, bird thing everyone goes on about. After all, not so long ago, really, I’d woken up to find myself inside a mirrored, ice-blue room on a space ship in another dimension.

  It wasn’t a particularly fun dimension, either.

  In fact, I mostly remembered a lot of pain and fear and other horrible things, including having people cut into me for tissue samples, being kidnapped again and again, being bombed by terrorists, double-agents masquerading as friends, the enslavement of whole races, attempts to brainwash my boyfriend to get him to join a group of fanatical weirdos...and so on.

  Yeah, so maybe I was a little wary, when I first opened my eyes these days.

  Turned out, on this day, everything was A-okay.

  Well...in comparison, anyway.

  I found myself lying on a fold-out couch with a beat-up, saggy mattress.

  A really ugly fold-out couch, sure, covered in this godawful lime green and pink floral pattern that only someone like Irene could drag out of the ass-end of a yard sale and plunk down money for...but the thing was clearly from Earth. It was also clearly housed inside a very dingy but familiar-looking living room in the lower level of a Craftsman house.

  So yeah...from me?

  Zero complaints.

  I wasn’t even alone.

  Looking out the window, I could tell it was about two hours too early for Irene to be crawling into the kitchen for coffee. It was, on the other hand, just about the right time to go running, if I was feeling up to it. Watching the overcast sky lighten through the glass windows leading out to the wraparound porch, I tried to decide if I was.

  Something about lurching back into the old routines felt almost heavenly.

  At the same time, getting up and running, with the way my body felt and the crap I’d put it through these past few weeks, and even just the readjustment to Earth gravity and whatever else, also struck me as unnecessary torture.

  I still lay there, mulling it over, trying to remember Irene’s shoe size and whether I could even find a pair of running shorts in this mess of crumb-dusted pizza boxes and computer equipment and empty wine bottles spread over her floor...when an arm wrapped around me.

  He tugged me against him, pressing against my side, and immediately I stiffened, glancing his way. It was hard to stay on high alert, though, with him stroking my bare stomach under my shirt. It was even harder not to relax into him when he pressed into me again, and nuzzled the back of my neck with his face.

  “Hey,” I said, a little lamely.

  He raised his head and smiled, but didn’t speak.

  Looking over the stretched-thin t-shirt I wore after pulling it out of one of Irene’s less-dirty piles, he frowned a bit, as if puzzled.

  Looking down at the band logo there, I shook my head.

  “Just a local thing. I wouldn’t worry. It won’t help you learn English.”

  He nodded, then blinked a little as if still waking up. I watched his eyes shift into a sharper focus as he commenced looking around the room. His eyes looked a lot clearer than mine felt, on the other hand, but I could feel his tiredness, too. Thankfully, his wounds had mostly healed from that mess that went down when we landed. I’d been worried those first few days.

  Nik looked more or less like himself again, body-wise, that is.

  I have to admit, it was a really nice body. I was pretty distracted by the muscular bare chest, pale white that it was...even more than the fact that his black hair stuck up over his head. Nik didn’t have a spare ounce of flesh on him anywhere. His stomach was lean and muscular to the point where I had trouble not wanting to touch him there, if only to see what his skin felt like between scars. He gave whole new meaning to the term “six pack.”

  Hell, his body would give Gantry’s a run for his money, and I’d never known anyone who was as much of a workout fanatic as Gantry.

  I’d noticed Irene checking Nik out more than a few times, too. Really, I suspected she’d had a small crush on Nik ever since we’d landed on her doorstep a few weeks earlier.

  Looking at him now, more or less objectively, I could see why.

  Even beyond his jawline and the near-perfect musculature, Nik had a kind of languorousness to him, too...meaning to the way he moved. Since he was a morph and could change his form into other animals and whatever, I’d sometimes wondered if that quality constituted some remnant from when he’d shifted into other body types.

  Meaning ones that moved with more grace than your average human.

  Whatever it was, it was sexy as hell.

  As if he felt some measure of my thoughts, or perhaps just the direction in which they lay, Nik leaned d
own, nuzzling my face again as he pressed deeper against me.

  “You are getting up?” he murmured. “Out of bed?”

  I shrugged, flushing a little warmer when I felt the heat coming off him. “Thinking about it. Why? Have I turned you into a coffee addict already?”

  Nik gripped me tighter, but didn’t move his face away from my neck.

  “Did you hear a sound?” he said, instead. Raising his head, he looked down at me, and I got lost watching his eyes shift from green to a lighter gold. Smiling at me, he shook me a little, as if he’d noticed I was distracted by his face. “I heard something, Dakota,” he clarified. “...Like a machine, but irritating. Perhaps some kind of alarm?”

  “Alarm?”

  That got my attention.

  Frowning as I looked between his now pale gold eyes, I glanced around the rest of the room. I couldn’t imagine Irene setting an alarm clock, not unless she had a really good reason.

  Cocking my head, I found myself listening.

  Once I had, it came again.

  The door buzzer.

  Damn it.

  I quickly realized that must have been what woke me up, too. I’d heard it, enough to wake me up, but it must have stopped before I figured out what I was hearing.

  “I hear something outside, too,” Nik added, watching my face. “...Someone.”

  Frowning deeper, I gave him a look.

  “Do you have animal hearing, too?” I said.

  Nik looked mildly puzzled, then shrugged.

  “We could ignore it,” he said, caressing my arm with his fingers. “Whoever they are, there are only two of them, so perhaps they would come back. We could pretend we didn’t hear the buzzing and have sex, instead.” His expression grew more intent as he looked down my body. “I would rather have sex, Dakota...”

  Feeling my face flush warmer, I threw off the blanket, swinging my legs over to the side of the couch. Considering Nik and I hadn’t done that even once yet, I wasn’t about to go there with him now. Not with someone standing outside Irene’s door...or two someones.

  That didn’t even get into the fact that we were on a broken down couch in the middle of Irene’s filthy living room.

  I didn’t want our first time to be accompanied by someone smacking Irene’s antiquated door buzzer with their thumb. Anyway, Irene herself could wander out of the bedroom at any time...either to silence the door herself or in search of coffee.

  “Forget it,” I said. “Irene sleeps almost as light as you do.”

  “Should you answer that, Dakota?” Nik said, his voice sharpening. “You...yourself?”

  I hesitated, glancing back at him.

  Thinking over his words, I realized he had a point.

  “I can’t hide out forever,” I told him with a shrug. “I’ll use the peep-hole, okay?”

  That only brought back Nik’s puzzled expression, though.

  It hit me again that I had a total Earth virgin on my hands.

  It would take months to get Nik up to speed, even just on basics like toilet paper and how to eat in front of other people without calling attention to himself. Not like Nik was gross or anything when he ate, far from it. But there were...differences. Especially when meat was involved.

  Walking in a vague zig-zag pattern over the obstacle course on the floor, I approached the door wearing nothing but the thin t-shirt hanging down to my thighs and Hello Kitty underwear (also courtesy of Irene), I peered through the fish-eye hole in the middle of the door, only to find it completely blocked.

  I just stood there for a second, trying to remember if I’d seen anything hanging on Irene’s door that might have blocked it. It was that, or someone had their their hand over it, to keep me from seeing who it was.

  Glancing around, I spotted the gun hanging out of a holster from Irene’s thrift-store coat rack. It was the same Glock my ex-special forces pal, Gantry, left me during his one and only visit to see me since I’d gotten back. I knew the gun probably came from his own private store. Gantry hadn’t said much about why he was giving it to me, but I guessed he hadn’t quite gotten over the fact that I’d disappeared without a trace for months on end.

  Gantry also wasn’t stupid.

  He probably thought I needed it, given how I showed up on Irene’s door with a blood-splattered naked guy a few weeks back. Especially since I still hadn’t given either of them much in the way of an explanation...much less an intelligible story...at least, not yet.

  But telling your friends that your new boyfriend is a shape-shifting alien and that there might be a few hundred more of his kind running around Washington State and the general environs of Earth, thanks to you, wasn’t exactly going to be a fun story to tell. Especially given that said aliens arrived here inter-dimensionally with their murderous, shape-shifting terrorist leader who had a hard-on for killing humans as revenge for the enslavement of his race.

  So...yeaaah.

  Given that scenario, “Where to start?” would be an understatement.

  So far, I’d managed to get away with telling Irene and Gantry that I’d been out of the country and that I’d gotten myself in trouble with some aliens. Which was sort of true...but only in the most literal, fun-with-language sense. I knew neither of them were satisfied with how little I’d said about those missing months, but I’d been giving myself some time off to think about what I wanted to tell them, and just to get used to being back here at all.

  So yeah, while it was nice to have a gun and thus not be completely defenseless, truthfully, I had no idea how much good the gun would do me if one of those shape-shifting aliens stood at Irene’s door now. And apart from the aforementioned pissed off shape-shifting aliens, I had no idea who else might be looking for me at that point.

  For all I knew, my biggest worry right now might be the cops.

  Or, more realistically...Homeland Security.

  I waited until the buzzer chittered again, so high of a sound that probably only dogs, Irene and Nik could hear it, at least without someone pointing it out to them.

  After another sigh, and feeling reckless for some reason, I wrenched open the door.

  My brother, Jake, faced me, grinning from ear to ear.

  I gaped at him, sure I was hallucinating.

  Jake looked exactly the same as I remembered him, from the expensive-looking designer jeans and clubby silk shirt welded to his muscular body...to the faint smirk on his full lips and the massive amounts of hair gel sticking up his thick, black hair.

  I could tell he’d picked out the shirt’s color because the jade green silk highlighted and emphasized his bright hazel eyes. His shoes looked like bowling shoes, I noticed, with neon pink laces, and the jeans looked well-worn. Knowing Jake, however, those two articles of clothing alone probably cost more than what Irene paid in grocery bills over the past year.

  Even more than me, the mixed-race thing really worked for Jake.

  His high-cheekboned face had the best of our mother’s half-Japanese ancestry and our father’s Cuban roots. His skin always wore a light tan, and his eyes had a faint tilt at the corners that gave him an exotic look, even without the hairless body and the incongruously light color of his irises. His actual eye color was pure European, light enough that he got a lot of stares for those alone, even without the full lips, meticulously gym-sculpted body and wicked smile.

  To bastardize an old Mickey Spillane quote, he was trouble on two legs, my brother Jake.

  I wasn’t sure if it was better or worse that I could see that, even being related to him.

  Before I could wrap my mind around the fact of Jake’s even being there, on Irene’s front porch, much less make a peep of noise in his direction, Jake opened his arms and flung himself at me, squeezing me against his athletic chest and swinging me around in a dizzying arc.

  That was another thing about Jake.

  He was like a little kid. In both the good and the bad ways.

  It could be really endearing, sure, but most of the time, I wanted to stran
gle him for it.

  Either way, if I’d had anything in my stomach at all at that point, it likely would have ended up all over the front of Jake’s designer shirt. As it was, I let out a surprised yelp, holding him off with my arms as he laughed and spun me around again.

  I was still staring up...and then down...at his face in total bewilderment when Jake set me back on my feet, still beaming at me in delight.

  Then I glanced to my right, and saw Gantry leaning against the doorframe, a wry smile on his broad, tanned face, his own light eyes catching the early morning sunlight.

  “Mornin’, gorgeous,” Gantry said, inclining his head.

  Blinking at him, and seeing the grim set of his mouth, even below that faint but still charming smile, I couldn’t help but think, uh oh.

  Whatever this is, it can’t be good.

  “I thought you’d be happier to see me,” Jake pouted. “I came all the way here!” He folded his arms tight against his broad chest, in part, I suspected, to show off his rippling muscles.

  Being a full-time scam artist had its perks, I guess.

  Lifetime gym memberships always seemed to be one of them.

  Knowing Jake, he thought keeping his body in primo shape was a part of his job. Like being an actor or a male model, he had to look the part.

  “I’m ecstatic, Jake,” I said, sighing in sarcastic drama as I combed my fingers through my tangled black hair. “I can hardly contain my overflow of joy...it’s like a rainbow of giddiness on the inside...if only you could see.”

  Switching back to my regular voice, I gave Jake a direct look over my shoulder.

  “Are we drinking it black these days?” I said, holding out the chipped mug where I’d poured his coffee. “Or what?”

  On the front of the mug was a poodle with a bubble over its head with the words I Luv You in looping cursive strokes.