Niklosi's Nightmare (First Wave Book 10)

Niklosi’s
Nightmare

By Mikayla
Lane

Editor Beth
Braden

[email protected]

Cover art by: humblenations.com

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places, organizations, affiliations and incidents either are the product of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

First and
Second Wave Series in Reading Order

Hunting
Cari

Finding
Jess

Chasing
Dare

Grai’s Game

Viper

Taming Jax

Drago

Grounding
Gracus

True
Traitor

Mikal

Manipulating
Mikey

Saving Koda

Chris

Niklosi’s
Nightmare

Haruki –
Coming in October 2016

Find me on
Facebook at:

facebook.com/author.mikaylalane

Find an encyclopedia of characters at:

mikaylalane.wikia.com/wiki/Mikayla_Lane_Wikia

To my Readers:

Thanks so much for all of the
awesome reviews, suggestions and comments.

As always, feel free to email me.

[email protected]

Mikayla Lane

454 Word Document Pages

88,387 Words

Ver. 1.0 7-22-2016

Chapter One

It wasn’t the right hook to his
face that angered Niklosi as he fought the Relian, it was where he was being
forced to fight and the weeks he’d spent tracking them. He, Traze, and Decano
had been hunting that particular Relian unit for weeks, and they hadn’t caught
up to them until they reached this humid hell hole in the backwater of a state
called Missouri.

The Relians had known they were
being hunted and had staged the currently failing ambush on Nik and his team in
the hopes of shaking them from their trail. It obviously wasn’t going the way
the Relians had hoped.

Niklosi kicked the alien back from
him and drew his KA-BAR knife. He stepped into the Relian, thrusting the knife
deep into his upper abdomen, grabbing the back of the alien’s head to keep him
still while he brutally twisted the knife and pulled upward. The alien went
limp and Niklosi pushed the body to the ground as he turned to face the next
enemy combatant and noted Traze and Decano still fighting.

He wiped the sweat from his
forehead with the back of his sleeve as he drew another blade and stormed up to
where Traze was holding his own against one of the Relians. Without hesitation,
Niklosi drove both knives into the Relian’s kidneys.

Seizing the opportunity, Traze
plunged his own knife into the Relian’s neck. Nik wiped his blades on the
alien’s shirt as he pulled them from the body and turned in time to see Decano
put down the remaining enemy—or so he thought.

“Yo, bro! That was sick!” Traze
said as he knelt and wiped his own blade clean on the dead alien.

“Shut up!” Nik growled as he
listened intently. “There! Damn it!”

Niklosi took off running in the
direction of another Relian trying to flee from them through the heavily wooded
area.

“Where are you going?” Traze called
out as he started chasing after Niklosi.

“We got a damn runner. Stay there
and get rid of those bodies,” Nik replied through the shengari’ so he wouldn’t
have to waste his breath.

Niklosi had no idea where the
Relian idiot was running; there was nowhere to hide. The scanners had indicated
that the area was devoid of humanoid signatures for at least a mile around, and
Nik couldn’t imagine that the Relians would have some hidden alien base in the
middle of this muggy hell.

He angrily wiped at the sweat
covering his brow as he launched himself over a fallen log, grateful for the
full moon and the beast in his brain that gave him advanced vision that allowed
him to see the obstacles in his path. They hit the mile mark, and Nik was
getting increasingly frustrated at the fast Relian.

“Damn, where is he going?” Decano
complained as he followed behind Nik.

Niklosi didn’t bother to respond.
Instead, he harnessed the energy of his anger into action and ran even faster,
rapidly closing the distance between him and the ruthless alien killer he was
hunting.

It had only been a few weeks since
Grai learned Dagog had issued orders for terrorist assaults around the globe to
destabilize the governments and create chaos. With the Alliance ships, headed
by Koda and Scaden, preventing the Relians from sending reinforcements to the
planet, Dagog switched tactics to a ground campaign using the forces he still
had on the planet and the human scum who joined the Relian cult, Ralidina.

The Alliance teams had been working
around the clock for weeks to take down the Relian and Ralidina units as fast
as they could find them. The more the Relians attempted to coordinate attacks
among their human cult members, the easier it was for the Hybrid teams to track
them and end the threat they posed to the humans.

But these bastards
, Niklosi
thought as he pushed himself faster,
these bastards we’re tracking are the
worst.

Nik and his team had been on their
trail for a week and had followed them from the epicenter of their cult in the
Middle East to the US. They’d been able to stop the bombing the group had
planned on a community daycare center, but the Relians had slipped through
their fingers while they were dec charging the bombs in a safe location.

Nik wasn’t the kind to give up, and
he’d followed these four idiots across the globe, doggedly determined to
eliminate the constant threat that they posed to the humans and this planet.

Nik growled as he wiped more sweat
from his face and again wished they’d caught up to the bastards in a more
pleasant climate. He hated the humid climes on his own planet, and he thought
the ones on Earth were even worse.

That corner of Missouri, although
still shaking off winter, was much warmer than Nik preferred, and the
occasional chilly breeze wasn’t doing anything to cool his body or his anger at
the Relian he was chasing.

He jumped a large depression in the
ground and grinned as he saw the Relian’s head bobbing through the trees just
ahead of him. Nik drew his gun, slowed his breathing, and took aim at the
target. He got off five shots and ran towards the rapidly falling body.

“You stupid asshole! Making me
chase you though this hellhole! What is that smell? Is that you? No, it can’t
be you, because you smell like dead asshole!” Niklosi said as he kicked the
dead alien in the ribs before wiping his muddy boots on the Relian’s shirt.

Nik knelt down and placed a light
stone against the body, smiling in satisfaction as the body super-heated. He
stood and just stomped the alien’s feet and calves to scatter the dusty remains
when he heard a strong but definitely feminine voice. 

“Police! Put the weapon down and
step back from the body! Now!”

Niklosi stole a quick glance at the
woman in uniform, holding a gun on him. He quickly noted her pretty hazel eyes,
shoulder length dark hair pulled back in a ponytail and pretty features before
he realized just how screwed he was.

“Oh this is fucking great!” Niklosi
muttered as he kicked the body again, sending up more dust as the entire chest
collapsed to fine particles on the ground. “Now I have to deal with the human
law. Fuck you, fuck you very much!”

*****

The night air was still a little
chilly as spring began to make its way through the Ozark Mountains in
southwestern Missouri. The days were becoming warmer and longer, and acting
Baker’s Creek Police Chief BJ Markson sighed at the thought of summer and an
end to the long winter.

She held her hands to her face and
blew warm breath in them as she tried to get the feeling back in her numb
fingers and bemoaned the fact that she’d finished her thermos of coffee an hour
ago.

BJ heard a small sound to her left
and her eyes scanned the heavily wooded area closely, hoping to find whatever
it was that had old man Jepson in such a fit since she’d returned home. With
the full moon shining so brightly, she was quickly able to see the possum that
was making the racket and let out a small sigh.

She leaned her head back in the
seat of the town’s one and only patrol car and tried to ignore how
uncomfortable it was. The beat up, unmarked sedan wasn’t much, but the engine
had been spruced up by the local boys, and the only tech wizard around for a
hundred miles helped get a radio and a few other gadgets installed to make it
more of an official and useful vehicle.

Not that it mattered too much; BJ
knew every one of the 354 residents of Baker’s Creek. She grew up with half of
them and was raised by the other half, pretty much like anyone else from the
small Ozark community. The only thing she was ever called for was to be a
mediator between family feuds and to calm the occasional superstitious
fear—like she had the last four nights. 

BJ again looked out at the
surrounding woods and decided if the rest of the night went as quietly as the
three previous nights she’d sat hidden in the trees, just off the road to
Jepson’s place, she was going to call off her surveillance.

It was probably just superstition
and not reality that made old man Jepson come down to the small police station
in town and file a complaint about “haints and the howler” coming for his soul
in the night. BJ had kept her face a stone mask as she tried to assure Jepson
that if ghosts and a local legendary creature were stalking him, that she’d put
a stop to it.

BJ sighed heavily as she closed her
eyes and smiled. She had missed the unique and varied people that she’d grown
up with after she’d joined the police force in St. Louis and was glad to be
back home—even if it meant sitting in the woods for four nights in a row to
catch whatever ghosts or mythical creature old man Jepson thought were coming
for him. 

Ghosts and non-existent creatures
were easy for BJ compared to the humans hell bent on killing each other and
everyone around them. She’d have more luck charging the howler with trespassing
than changing the general apathy and downright disdain people showed for human
life these days.

It wasn’t the adults that bothered
BJ when she worked in St. Louis. They made their decisions, they chose the path
they walked, and she felt no sympathy for those who willingly picked up a
weapon with the intention to harm another.

It was the children who had ripped
out her soul and forced her to come back home begging for the simplicity,
superstitions, and love of her home town. The final straw for her had been her
last call to a middle class home in a beautiful area where she’d found the
bodies of a days-old infant and her two-year-old brother.

Beside their little bodies was
their father, surrounded by paramedics as they tried to keep the man alive. She
watched the gun he’d used to slaughter his babies as it was carefully placed in
an evidence bag, but it was the heart-rending shrieks of the new mother who’d
come home and discovered the bodies that had broken BJ’s heart.

The senseless tragedies were
becoming far too common, and a lack of personal responsibility was at an
all-time high. People were more inclined to video someone getting beaten to
death than help them in order to get their 15 minutes of internet fame.

That day was no different. The
neighbors knew the husband had been drinking and abusing his family. They’d
heard the fights and screams for months, but no one ever called the police,
preferring to ignore the bruises on the family and the fear they lived in.

That day they heard the gun shots,
but instead of calling for help, they waited for the mother to come home and
find her dead babies. Then they descended on the home with their phones and
cameras as they videoed her screams and pain while she tried to call 911 to get
help for her babies because no one would stop videotaping it to make the call
for her. BJ was beyond incensed when she’d arrived and the neighbors were still
recording the events and posting them online.   

She’d asked them politely to stop
recording, for the sake of the mother, but they’d refused, hurling insults
instead. They excused their lack of basic human emotions as their “right” to do
whatever they wanted. Free speech.

No one bothered to think of the
devastated mother who’d have to forever relive that day because there would be
footage on the internet because of the callous trash looking for someone to pay
attention to them for five minutes. No one wanted to admit that if they’d
called the police a month earlier, those babies might be alive.

When an officer grabbed the hand of
a teenager trying to lift up the sheet on the stretcher carrying the dead
bodies to get a picture and told him to get the hell back behind the police
line, the press immediately asked the kid if the officer had used excessive
force and offered to buy the tape from anyone who may have caught the officer
doing anything wrong.

When things got so bad that a good
cop trying to protect the dignity of two dead babies and their grief-stricken
mother sent the press stirring up more hate, BJ knew it was time to leave the
city. The next day, she’d turned in her gun and badge. Three days after that
she was driving back home with her old pick-up truck loaded down with her
belongings.

She’d barely driven into town when Irwin,
the mayor, had stopped her truck in the middle of Main Street and offered her
the job of Baker’s Creek sole police officer/chief of police. The minor
skirmishes between the hill-folk were certainly not as exciting as St. Louis,
but there was never a dull moment either, and it suited BJ just fine.

Who needs a ghost or a howler when
the coffee is haunting me now?
BJ thought with a grimace as she
shifted uncomfortably in the seat.

With no one around for miles,
except for old man Jepson sleeping peacefully in his house, BJ opened the door,
closed it as quietly as she could so the interior light would go off, and moved
around the car to the other side. She looked all around to make sure she was
alone before she undid her pants and quickly handled her business.

She was just buttoning her pants
and adjusting her holster when she heard the rustling in the distance. She
hunkered down at the side of the car and peered out into the woods, trying to
figure out what was running and in what direction.

It didn’t take long for her to
figure out whatever it was, it was big and heading her way. She ducked down
further, watching carefully for where the person was going so she could
surprise them.