Desired By The Sacred Alien (Sci-Fi Alien Romance) Read online

  Desired By The Sacred Alien

  Meg Ripley

  Copyright © 2015 by Meg Ripley

  www.redlilypublishing.com

  All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be used or reproduced in any form without written permission from the authors, with the exception of brief quoted passages left in an online review. This book is a fictional story. All characters, names, and situations are of the authors’ creation. Any resemblances to actual situations or to persons who are alive or dead are purely coincidental.

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only; this copy is not available for resale or to give to another reader aside from any transaction through Amazon’s e-book lending program.

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  This book is intended for readers age 18 and over. It contains mature situations and language that may be objectionable to some readers.

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  "Do you ever stop?"

  Ethan stepped through the canvas flap to the tent and slid a plate of food onto the table in front of Liora. She barely glanced up, continuing to scrutinize the pages of notes spread across the surface of the rickety card table and compare them to a book open on her lap even as she reached forward to rip off a chunk of the flat bread and fold it into her mouth.

  After a few chews, she looked up at Ethan with an intense expression that belied the exhaustion behind her eyes. She swallowed the bite of bread and reached for her canteen.

  "I can't," she replied, taking a long sip and setting the canteen aside again. "I am positive I'm onto something. I just have to figure out what it is."

  "What you are onto is the beginning of delirium," Ethan said, trying to scoop the notes up into a stack but she stopped him by slamming her hand flat onto the papers.

  "I know I'm right, Ethan. Just look. Look at these sketches I made of the new hieroglyphics we found in the pyramid," she held one of the pages of notes out to him, "Now look at the key from what we know about the language from the time that particular pyramid was built. There are at least six distinct hieroglyphs that aren't in the key and that haven't shown up anywhere else."

  "That doesn't mean anything, Liora."

  "Of course it does," she said, dropping the page back down to the table and turning back to the book in her lap.

  Ethan sat down in the chair beside her, careful to tuck his gangly body sideways so that his knees didn't hit the side of the table and send all of her work onto the tarp beneath them. He reached up and moved the camping lantern she was using for light a bit further away from him and rested a hand on the table.

  "Liora, you're an Egyptologist. You've been studying the culture for years. That means you know that we didn't just suddenly stumble on a completed key that was like 'Hey, this is our complete written language from the time'. It took extensive studying and investigation to piece together the language and we're still finding ways that it evolved. Just because you found a few hieroglyphs that don't fit into our current understanding of the language doesn't mean that it confirms your theories."

  Liora sighed. She had heard all of this so many times before. Ever since she started deeply investigating the link between extraterrestrials and ancient Egyptian culture she had been subjected to a seemingly never-ending onslaught of conversations with colleagues that always balanced somewhere between artificially perky pep talk and condescending mockery. It didn't matter what any of them said, though. Her research was thorough and intensive, and what she found made far more sense to her than some of the explanations other researchers gave.

  She picked up the sketches she had made again and stared at the series of markings. As always, her eyes were drawn immediately to two markings that appeared among a block of easily translated hieroglyphics in several places throughout the pyramid. The first of these markings featured interlocking circles, one beneath and to the diagonal of the first. The second looked like a crude pair of hands, wrists touching and fingers turned away from each other, cradling a tiny pyramid of slightly wider and deeper dimensions of the one they explored.

  These two markings were the first anomalies Liora had noticed in her investigation of the writings within the recently-discovered pyramids, and the ones that excited her the most when she looked at them. They were nothing like any of the accepted and translated hieroglyphs, and they convinced her that she had discovered a secondary language not written by the human ancient Egyptians, but by extraterrestrial visitors who had come to Earth and shared their technology and culture with the people they encountered.

  "It will be sunrise soon and you'll have to start a whole new day of your actual work," Ethan told her, "Don't you think you can at least get a little bit of sleep? I'm really worried about you."

  Liora nodded and pushed back from the table, putting the heavy book on top of her notes in case a breeze stirred up. She took the plate of food Ethan had saved her from dinner and stepped out of the tent to breathe in some fresh air. The sky was massive and clear above her and she stared up at it as she finished eating.

  "Don't you ever wonder, Ethan?"

  "Wonder what?" Ethan asked, his voice sounding strained as he tried to speak through a yawn.

  "Why there are so many planets and stars just in this galaxy alone if we are the only creatures in it? It just doesn't make any sense that there is this expansive universe around us and somehow this is the only planet that got any living creatures on it."

  Ethan sighed and joined her gaze up at the sky.

  "I don't know, Liora. I honestly never really stopped to think about it."

  "You should. What if everything that we think we know about the history of the world and all of the cultures in it is wrong? There is so much technology and architecture and signs of cultural interactions that just cannot be explained by our current understandings of the world, but people just ignore it. If more people would choose to be open-minded and look beyond what is spoon-fed from generation to generation maybe we would discover that there is a whole bigger existence out there that is inextricably tied to our history and is the key to our future."

  Liora felt Ethan rub her back and without another word he ducked into his tent and zipped the flap closed. She stayed outside a few minutes longer, pondering the stars above her and the shadow of the pyramid where her tent sat. Finally she felt the ache in the back of her eyes and knew she needed to rest. She placed the plate on the table set in the center of the ring of tents and climbed back into hers, zipping the flap closed and falling back onto her sleeping bag without even bothering to remove her boots.

  ****

  Liora had only been asleep for a few hours when the sounds of other members of the dig team preparing for breakfast woke her. She resisted the feeling of consciousness for as long as she could, feeling the heaviness and exhaustion of her body now even more than she did before she went to sleep. Finally she couldn’t resist it any longer and she groaned, dragging herself out of the tent and immediately over to the outdoor shower set up behind the main tent.

  This was not her favorite part of her job. She loved the feeling of stepping into a room no other h
uman had touched for thousands of years and brushing away the dust, coaxing out the secrets held just beneath the surface. What she didn't love was the days spent sleeping in tents, the oppressive, burning heat, and not seeing a bathtub for the entire length of the dig.

  The water broke through the haze of sleepiness and washed away the fine layer of dirt that always seemed to cover her when she was working. When she felt like a person again, Liora dressed and joined Ethan at the long table in the center of camp to choke down breakfast and swallow two cups of black coffee.

  Twenty minutes later they were climbing down into the pyramid and the combination of carb-laden flat bread and caffeine had kicked in so that she moved confidently along the tight corridors to the section they had just had the opportunity to enter the day before. Impatient as usual, she didn't bother to wait for the crew behind her to set up the floodlight that would illuminate the work area ahead of her and instead held a lantern up to splash light on the path at her feet and penetrate the intense, almost tangible darkness that filled the chamber.

  The incredible darkness was one of the most terrifying elements of her explorations. This was a darkness unlike any other, so deep it was almost as if the ancient people who closed the chamber thousands of years before had trapped the night within it.

  Liora took several strides into the chamber until she felt like she was near the place she had been the night before when they had to stop their research. She held the lantern up so it glowed across the wall and made the hieroglyphics visible in the aged stone. The stone had a finely grained texture beneath her fingertips as she traced the shape of the symbols etched into the wall, translating the message in her mind as she went.

  The space around her suddenly lit up as the crew managed to get the floodlight in place and direct it into the chamber. Ethan came up beside her and she saw him running his eyes along the hieroglyphics.

  "They tell about when the pyramid was built. This section," she said, running her hand along a series of hieroglyphs, "says that this pyramid was meant as a monument to cooperation and civility among strangers."

  "What does that mean?" Ethan asked, glaring at the symbols as if convinced that they didn't actually say what Liora said they did.

  "You know what I think it means," she said softly, "Look."

  She pointed out one of the markings that did not fit with the other hieroglyphs. It was positioned slightly to the side and beneath the rest of the symbols like a signature or footnote to the message. Liora touched it carefully, feeling an inexplicable connection to the marking.

  "I don't see any other entrances," Ethan said, gazing around the chamber, "This must be the end of that corridor."

  "Maybe," Liora said.

  She continued along the wall, following the hieroglyphics as she walked. When she reached the corner, she found that the symbols seemed to disappear into the seam of the two walls, breaking off in the middle of a phrase and picking up on the other wall in the middle of another thought. She took a few steps back and followed the symbols again, taking note of the symbols that didn't fit in with the others and translating as she went to try to understand the odd separation of the two phrases. Her fingers touched the final symbol at the seam and she felt the wall give slightly.

  Liora withdrew her hand sharply. During her career she had learned that stones within a pyramid suddenly moving often had devastating results and she braced herself. When several seconds passed without anything happening, she cautiously raised her hand and applied pressure to the symbol again. A section of the wall shifted and she was able to push it completely out of the wall. She glanced back at the rest of the crew, but none seemed to notice her and she stepped forward through the false wall and into the space beyond.

  The false wall slid closed behind her and Liora raised her lantern to illuminate the newly discovered chamber. It was a small space, no larger than a walk-in closet. It was the smallest chamber Liora had ever seen within a pyramid and panic started to rise in her chest as she realized that the purpose of such a chamber was probably to trap those trying to compromise the pyramid. She lifted her hand to the wall beside her and felt the deep grooves of hieroglyphs beneath her fingers.

  Liora illuminated the wall with her lantern and found the surface covered with scattered symbols. Some seemed to stand independently of the others, while others were clustered together like sentences.

  These carvings looked newer and more precise than the others she had studied, almost as though they had been carved only recently. She didn't recognize them as the language she had been translating in the larger chamber and the longer she looked, the more she noticed the six unusual symbols she had shown Ethan. A new one stood out to her and she felt compelled to touch it, drawn to it with an even stronger appeal than the interlocking circles that had entranced her since she first discovered them.

  As soon as her fingertips rested on the symbol she saw a flash of blinding light and felt her body lifted from the floor. An intense pull within her made her feel as though she were being sucked toward the wall in front of her and she prepared for impact, but it never came. Nearly as quickly as the sensation came, it ended and she hit the ground. She had dropped her lantern, but the darkness around her was not as deep as it had been only moments before. Ahead of her was a narrow corridor and beyond it, the bright flare of sunlight.

  ****

  Liora climbed to her feet carefully, wincing at a sharp pain through her hip from the impact with the stone floor. She looked around and found that she stood in a chamber nearly the same size as the one she had discovered in the pyramid, but the air was fresher with the movement of the breeze coming in from outside and only shadowy thanks to the sunlight that could come through the door only a few yards away.

  She pressed her hands to the walls around her, feeling the hieroglyphics engraved beneath, but the stone didn't give. There were no other doors, no way to leave the chamber but the hallway. Realizing she had no choice, she swallowed the fear building in her throat and started down the corridor toward the glare of the sunlight.

  She stepped out into surroundings so lush it felt as though she had walked into a tropical jungle. Vibrantly green plants grew up around the base of the building she stepped out of and created a thick, springy carpet beneath her feet. Liora walked forward a few feet and then turned around to see the building she had just left. It looked like a smaller version of the pyramid she had been researching and the image of the unexplained hieroglyph of the hands cradling the pyramid appeared in her mind.

  Behind her she heard a snap like a twig breaking and she spun around. The world around her was serene and after a moment, the frantic pounding of her heart calmed. She turned back to the pyramid and noticed a large engraving beside the sharply rectangular opening she had exited. It closely resembled the symbol of the hands and the pyramid, but the pyramid cupped in the palms had the slimmer, sharper dimensions of the pyramid she had been exploring.

  "They're connected," she whispered to herself, the astonishing realization hitting her so suddenly she couldn't hold it inside.

  "Who are you?"

  The sound of a deep, rumbling voice behind her startled her, and Liora turned so quickly she almost stumbled backwards. A man stood several yards away at the edge of a thicket of dense trees, poised on top of a moss-covered boulder so he loomed above her. Her breath caught in her throat as she looked at him, stunned in place by impossibly blue eyes that seemed to pierce through her.

  He jumped down from the boulder, landing in a crouched position that made the muscles beneath the bare skin of his back tense and shift. Liora's mouth watered and she felt her belly tighten as he rose slowly to his feet and took a step toward her.

  "Who are you?" he repeated.

  His voice was like the roll of thunder just as the air heats up right before a storm begins. He took another step toward her, staring at her with unwavering intensity.

  "Liora," she replied, her voice coming out softer than she had intended.

  "How
did you get here?" he demanded.

  He had stopped approaching and Liora felt a flicker of disappointment, wishing he would come closer so she could get a better look at his eyes. She struggled to come up with the words to respond, but even she wasn't sure how she had gotten where she was.

  "I came through that building," she said, gesturing behind her.

  "That's impossible. How did you get here?"

  A spark of frustrated anger joined the combination of fear and excitement roiling through her. She gestured at the building again.

  "Apparently it's not impossible because that is exactly what happened. I was researching a pyramid in Egypt, I found a false wall, I stepped through it, I touched some hieroglyphics, and now I'm here."

  It all came out of her in a rush as she went step by step telling him how she arrived in the new place, trying to clarify it for herself at the same time.

  "I told you, that is impossible," he said harshly, rushing past her so that he could walk into the building.

  She followed him toward the building but stopped just outside, afraid that if she entered she would end up back in the pyramid, and she wasn't ready to leave this beautiful place, or the equally beautiful man, quite yet. He stalked down the corridor into the chamber and flattened his palms on the walls as she had, pressing into the stone and turning several times to touch different areas of the walls. After several moments, he strode back toward her with such power Liora stepped back to create more space for him.

  "I don't understand," he said, the low tone of his voice saying he spoke more to himself than to her.

  He looked sharply at her and closed the space between them with one long step, forcing her back against the stone side of what she realized now was a small, single-chamber pyramid. His body didn't touch hers, but was only inches away, the warmth radiating toward her so she felt it heating her skin almost painfully. Her eyes met his and the boldness of the color along with the seething heat of his skin told her that he was not human.