Manipulating Mikey (First Wave Book 8) by Mikayla Lane

their
health! And my fingers when they’ve spotted me eating something they want!” he
complained.
    Grai laughed heartily at Chris’s
over dramatization of Angel and Dree. He’d heard similar tales from his other
sons as well, all begging to be allowed to help further with the search for
Koda. Of course, it was under the guise of getting away from the pregnant
females for a while. He’d not risk his children doing his job.

 
    Chapter
Seven
     
    Mikey stood at the window and
stared at the flashes of light periodically coming through the aurora
australis. He and Lauren had gone into adjourning bedrooms to sleep hours
before, but he still couldn’t seem to stop his mind from thinking about
everything he’d seen and learned about Base Beta.
    The place was mind boggling. The
last few weeks were nothing short of a true mind fuck. He had begun to wonder
if he wasn’t schizophrenic and having hallucinations. If it hadn’t been for
running into walls and other people while staring at everything around him,
he’d be convinced there was something wrong with his head. 
    It was all real, though, and he was
having a hard time trying to figure it out. He’d seen the relics in the
repository and knew why the aliens were protecting the items from the humans.
Mikey shook his head.
    Now I’m thinking of them as humans.
A month ago I was a human , he thought. Or thought I was .
    Now, he was beginning to realize
just how different he was. The longer he was with these people in this strange
place, the more he could feel the energy throbbing through him. The irony was,
the more he felt the energy, the stronger the voice grew in his head, and the
more he noticed the changes in himself.
    Mikey clenched his fists and could
hear the fabric stretching to accommodate his larger muscles as his biceps
flexed. Since they’d arrived at what Lauren called Base Beta, any clothes he’d
gotten had grown uncomfortably tight around his thighs, chest, and biceps in
just a day’s time.
    It wasn’t the physical changes that
were concerning him though, it was the mental and visual ones that made him
worry if something was wrong.
    After the incident with the
disappearing man named Indrid, Mikey had begun seeing more than just the
flashes of light in the colors of the sky. Mikey’d seen a terrible, misshapen
face in one particular flash that had gotten unusually close to the ground. It
was repelled from hitting the ground by a bluish dome shaped shield of sorts
that seemed to activate only when certain flashes of light came through the
aurora.
    If it was only the strange lights, faces
in the lights, and the shield, he may have overlooked it. But he’d begun to see
. . .
    Ghosts. It’s the only thing they
could be, he thought as he looked at the empty street below and saw the
same spirit staring up at him.
    The woman had been there when he’d
first come out onto the balcony. At first, he’d thought that she was real.
    Until a large hare ran right
through her feet.
    It’d shaken him so badly he’d
retreated from the balcony into his room. Now he stood behind the glass and had
a staring contest with the ghostly female below his window.
    Surely if there were ghosts roaming
this place, someone else would have noticed them by now, he
thought, wondering for the tenth time if he was hallucinating.
    Only one damn way to find out.
    Looking down at the female one more
time, he turned from the window and quietly left his room. He slipped down the
stairway and stood at the bottom, his hand paused on the door handle. Shaking
his head to clear the paranoid thoughts running through it, he pulled the door
open and walked through it before he could change his mind.
    He walked down the pathway that led
to the side where his balcony was and stopped short as he turned the corner.
This time, instead of staring up at him, she was turned towards him as if she
had expected him to come down.
    Closer now, he could see that she
had pretty light green eyes and light brown