Dazon Agenda: Complete Collection
DAZON AGENDA, COMPLETE COLLECTION
Co-Authored By Juno Wells and Aurelia Skye
© 2015 Juno Wells
All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental. The characters are all productions of the author’s imagination.
Please note that this work is intended only for adults over the age of 18 and all characters represented as 18 or over.
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Amourisa Press and Kit Tunstall, writing as Aurelia Skye, reserve all rights to WRITTEN IN THE STARS. This work may not be shared or reproduced in any fashion without permission of the publisher and/or authors. Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
© Kit Tunstall, 2015
Cover Images: Depositphotos.com/zhanna; innovari; Ruslan117 Deviant Art/Chrissy79 (Lightlines brushes)
Edited by J.C.
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WRITTEN IN THE STARS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
ALIEN’S BABIES
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Epilogue
DIPLOMATIC AFFAIRS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
MOON MADNESS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Epilogue
ACROSS THE STARS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
EMPEROR’S ASSASSIN BRIDE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Epilogue
About Juno
About Aurelia
Author Bio
WRITTEN IN THE STARS (DAZON AGENDA, BOOK ONE)
Blurb
Jada Washington suffers from a rare disease that has crippled her body and left her homebound. She copes by finding strength and support among the friends she’s made on an online forum for those afflicted by the disease. When her friends start to go missing, she knows someone is taking them. Her investigation draws the attention of a handsome alien inquisitor sent by his home world to investigate the disappearances. As they unravel the reason for the abductions, she finds it almost impossible to disbelieve Ryland Breese’s claim that she’s his mate. She might not believe in soulmates, but she can’t deny she’s attracted to the sexy golden alien. One of his kind is stealing Earth women, but he’s stealing her heart.
Chapter One
Jessminda42b9 was missing.
Jada had tried to be patient, but she was no longer clinging to the hope that her friend was busy doing something else. Like the other twelve women who had disappeared from the forum she ran, Jessminda had simply stopped posting.
At first, Jada hadn’t realized there were disappearances. It wasn’t completely uncommon for people to stop posting, or to go long stretches of time in between, even for the close-knit Internet community that composed the forum for sufferers of Kaiser’s Syndrome.
It wasn’t until the fourth member had dropped out of contact that Jada noticed their members were slowly disappearing. She had phone numbers for some of the missing women, and she had tried to call them all as the weeks had passed. Since they were Internet friends, she didn’t always have a way to reach them outside of email or the phone number for some, even though she was the administrator of the forum, but she had continued to send emails every few days that went unanswered.
It was completely unlike the women, most of whom had been her friends since she’d established the forum eight years ago. They had all joined within a few months of her setting up the website for Kaiser’s Syndrome sufferers after receiving her own diagnosis. It had been one of the ways she had coped, and as her mobility had dwindled, and her confinement at home had expanded, the forum had become one of the most important parts of her life.
She was deeply alarmed that twelve of her friends had fallen out of contact within the last two months, but Jessminda was particularly upsetting, because they were close friends. They had discovered within a few months of starting to chat that they lived in the same city, so whenever practical, they got together in person. With both of them confined to a wheelchair, it didn’t happen as frequently as either would have liked, but it was typical for them to see each other at least once a month.
She hadn’t heard from Jessminda for five days now, including emails and phone calls. She had called Jessminda’s brother, who often stopped to check in on her, and when he had finally called her back less than thirty minutes ago, it had been with the disquieting news that his sister wasn’t home. She usually informed him if she was going somewhere, just to be on the safe side.
Pradheep had also told her the neighbors hadn’t seen Jessminda come or go in the last few days. Even in a wheelchair, her friend was a dynamo, often wheeling around the apartment complex or sitting out by the pool in the summertime. It wasn’t like her to stay locked up in her apartment for days on end. She wasn’t like Jada.
She’d tried notifying the police, but they had dismissed her concerns, taking the view she couldn’t possibly be concerned about people not checking in on an online forum. The detective she had spoken with had been slightly rude about the whole thing, as though he considered her a waste of his time.
That meant she’d find no help with the authorities, so the only tool at her disposal was to slip into the underbelly of the world wide web and see what she could dig up. She made herself comfortable, slipped on compression gloves to protect her fragile wrists and finger joints, and began to finesse her way inside databases that were encrypted and technically supposed to be closed to her.
As she made her way around, starting with Internet providers and working outward after learning the identity of each woman who had gone missing over the past two months, she was temporarily amused at her own skills and familiarity with this side of life. Before she had gotten sick and received the unexpected diagnosis of Kaiser’s Syndrome, she’d barely used a computer at all, except for work. She’d known how to copy and paste and create new documents, but had no knowledge of how the processes worked or the code that kept everything flowing.
Once she had displayed symptoms, they had moved quickly, and she’d been diagnosed with rapid progression less than a year after the first diagnosis. She had ended up in a wheelchair within two years, and it had changed her life. She stayed home most of the time now, and she had discovered she didn’t mind it. The social creature she had been before was the one that felt like the façade that had finally fallen away, rather than her feeling like she was retreating into a sh
ell and hiding from the world.
With all the free time on her hands, and looking for some way to use it, since she could no longer work as a paralegal at the busy law firm where she had been employed, she had learned all kinds of useful information. That had somehow led to her finding her way into hacking, almost by accident.
There was something fun and pleasing about solving the mysteries and breaking the code, and there was an illicit thrill that went with looking through all the deepest, darkest places of the Internet that had drawn her. She wasn’t the best cracker around, but she was pretty good, and she had learned it all easily.
Two hours later, she leaned back in her wheelchair and pulled her hands from the keyboard, taking a break for a moment as she absorbed everything she had learned.
While it was still fresh in her mind, she put her hands back to the keyboard and pulled open her blog. It was an unusual posting for her, since she was far more likely to write about the daily challenges of living with Kaiser’s Syndrome, or share her recipes and cooking, which was another hobby of hers.
She didn’t touch on hacking or conspiracy theories even in a casual way usually, but her blog seemed like the best venue at the moment. The authorities wouldn’t take her seriously, and she couldn’t reveal her source of information to any recognized media establishment. She would have to act as a citizen journalist and hope enough people became interested in the topic to force the authorities to investigate.
This is a different blog post for me, everyone. As you know, if you’re a reader of my blog, I’ve run a forum for Kaiser’s Syndrome victims the last eight years. There are only about eighty-five members, so when they started to disappear, I took notice. These are the kind of women who don’t just stop talking to us one day and drop off the face of the earth. For a lot of us, we’re as close as family.
I called the local police, but Detective Thorne dismissed my concerns, so I had to become more creative. I’ve discovered it’s not just my friends going missing. My source revealed there are almost four hundred active cases of missing women with Kaiser’s Syndrome at the moment worldwide.
I assume you’re not new to my blog, and you know what Kaiser’s Syndrome is. Just to be on the safe side, let me give you a quick refresher course. Kaiser’s Syndrome is a genetic condition caused by inheriting a tiny fragment of extra DNA on the ninth chromosome. It only causes symptoms in women and is passed from mother to daughter, but it’s only active if the father is also a carrier.
It was only recently discovered, and doctors don’t know everything about it. Dr. Hans Kaiser was the first to label and identify it. His patients who had it suffered from the same shared genetic anomalies, including an extremely rare blood type identified as AO-negative. That’s due to the genetic mutation, and the link is still unexplained.
Also unexplained is why Kaiser’s Syndrome affects mostly women of African or Indian descent. Eighty percent of women who have Kaiser’s Syndrome are in those two nationalities. Men can receive the gene from their mother, but they’re only ever carriers. There hasn’t been nearly enough testing to determine why that is, or if it’s more prevalent among other races of men, or also mostly confined to Indians and Africans.
So the question becomes, what happened to four hundred women with a disease that progressively affects their neurological and musculature system, rendering us disabled and virtually immobile as the disease progresses? Is there a connection? It’s true that people go missing every day. According to the National Crime Information Center’s website, there are more than six hundred thousand open missing persons cases right now.
Am I simply seeing a coincidence? Am I trying to generate a link where none exists? Or is there someone targeting women with Kaiser’s Syndrome for some reason? I could think of a few theories as to why, and the most predominant one would be medical experimentation, but that makes little sense. I’m certain many of us would volunteer for experimentation if we could get the funding and the attention necessary to make Kaiser’s Syndrome a known and easily recognizable disease with public urgency for a cure.
It’s true pharmaceutical companies are motivated by profit, and they’ve certainly done underhanded or shady things in the past, but it seems beyond the norm even in that industry to actually kidnap people on whom to experiment. So what is the explanation?
I eagerly await any theories, and I encourage you to share this post. Only through public demand will authorities take action. Right now, disappearances are scattered over multiple jurisdictions worldwide, and I’m not even certain anyone has made the connection besides myself. Help me to change that, loyal readers.
After finishing the post, she sat back as a wave of exhaustion swept through her. She had certainly depleted all her energy today, and suddenly all she wanted to do was go to bed and sleep for a thousand years. Knowing it would be a while before anything started happening with the blog post, and assuming she was being wildly optimistic that any public official would act on the information contained therein anyway, she decided to have an early night.
Concern for her missing friends filled her mind, but it was no match for the pure physical exhaustion in her ravaged and withered body. She hated being at the mercy of the disease, which trapped her in a useless body and zapped all her energy. As she drifted off to sleep, she couldn’t help indulging in a slight fantasy, one in which her friends and the other women with Kaiser’s Syndrome were taken for a noble purpose, one that resulted in a cure for everyone. She wasn’t normally so Pollyannaish, but on the edge of sleep, she indulged the optimistic thought until unconsciousness swept over her.
Chapter Two
It had been almost a week since her blog post, and while Jada certainly hadn’t forgotten about it, it had slipped to the back of her mind in a way. There had been somewhat of a flurry in the first few days, and it had received the most hits of any of her blog posts ever, along with countless retweets on Twitter and shares on Facebook, but all the excitement and buzz generated from the article had done nothing to interest the authorities.
Jada continued trying to contact her friends, and she grew more alarmed as two others stopped posting on the forum and didn’t respond to their emails any longer. She didn’t have phone numbers for those women, so she had no other way to contact them, but her concern grew.
On the forum, the women were discussing ways to protect themselves, and Jada wished she had a gun like some of the ladies. It had always seemed like an unnecessary device before, since she lived in an urban area with police that responded quickly, but now that they weren’t responding at all, she was feeling weak and terrified, which pissed her off. She had fought long and hard for her independence, and she resented that whatever was happening could make her feel frightened to even open her door long enough to check her mail or arrange to take the bus to the market.
Acting from that apprehension, she was cautious that afternoon when her doorbell rang. It could be her latest delivery from Amazon or a neighbor. Perhaps it was even her stepsister, though that seemed unlikely since Erica was firmly immersed in her own world and only stopped by to visit her two or three times a year despite living within fifty miles.
Grasping the poker from the fireplace, she moved her electric chair to the door, peeking out through the peephole that had been lowered and modified so she could see it comfortably from her chair. A strange man stood on the other side. She couldn’t see all of him, but he appeared a bit bland in his dark suit. “Who is it?” she asked through the door.
“Are you Jada Washington, author of Jada’s Blog?”
Jada’s stomach tightened with dread that she had no logical reason to feel. The unknown was scary enough, and suspecting she was being targeted—well, her and every other woman with Kaiser’s Syndrome—was plenty of reason to be cautious and wary. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“My name is Ryland Breese, and I’m here to investigate the disappearances of the women you mentioned in your blog.”
“Show me your badge.”
He hesitated. “I don’t have a badge,” he said softly.
She shook her head, a harsh laugh escaping her. “Do you really think I’m going to let you in without a badge? I don’t know who you are.”
Without awaiting a reply, she backed away from the door before turning her chair to face it a few feet away. She was hoping he had gone away, but when he knocked again, she gritted her teeth.
“Please, Ms. Washington, I only want a few moments of your time.”
“Or maybe you want to kidnap me and make me disappear like my friends. Go away now before I call the police.”
There was silence, and it lengthened to the point where she was starting to feel optimistic that the person on the other side of the door had given up and chosen to go away. If he was really investigating the disappearances, he would produce a warrant or a badge before he got into her home. If he had other, more nefarious plans, at least she wouldn’t make it easy on him by opening her door and inviting him in for sweet tea and abduction.
Just as she had taken a deep breath of relief, the door started to glow with a golden light that emanated under the door sill and around the cracks. She watched with openmouthed shock as the locks unlocked themselves, all unlocking in a neat and orderly fashion one after the other. As a final step, the chain fell out of the plate before dropping to the wall. She lifted her poker with abject terror as the door slowly opened, and the bland man stepped inside.
“What are you doing? Get out of my house.”
He ignored her, pausing to close and lock her door again, doing so by placing a palm against the door. After she was locked in with him, he took a couple of steps toward her before pausing and holding up his hands. “Please, Jada, I mean you no harm.”
“Who are you? Why are you here?”
He sighed, and then the air around him seemed to twitch and vibrate for a moment. It was like watching blurred pay-per-view at fast-forward. One second, he was the nondescript man, and the next, he was far taller, far more imposing, and anything but bland. His skin was brown, perhaps even a few shades lighter than her own, but with golden luminescence that was beautiful and hypnotic at the same time. He had tawny-brown eyes with that same gold shine to them, and his features were strong. While he wasn’t classically handsome, he was certainly compelling to look at.