When Earth is conquered by the sinister Greys and the alien who killed Evie's husband returns seeking her help, she must find a way to enact her revenge and fight the growing feelings for the creature who is an exact replica of the man she loved.
*...
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When I awoke, when even the act of opening my eyelids felt like lifting the heaviest of weights, Tom was crouched just a few metres away, his elbows resting on his knees, the gun – my gun – pointing in my direction.
But that couldn't be right, could it? My Tom wouldn't aim a gun at me. Why would he? I closed my eyes to the madness of it all and remembered.
I hated how my mind did this to me. It never drip-fed my memories. It threw them at me, hurled them, drowned me in them all at once, violent and unforgiving. It held my head under the surface as I kicked and screamed and with every gulp of water that flooded my mouth, my chest, it just fucking hurt. It hurt just as much as it did the day after he died, when I woke up in my own bed, to see his side empty and cold. It hurt as much as it did every day after his death, when everything around me reminded me that he was gone and never coming back.
Only now he was back.
Shut UP, Evie. Not him. It's NOT him.
Except the thing pointing the gun at me looked like Tom. Same eyes. Same face.
His face. Oh god, his face.
The rage swelled; a tidal wave of anger that came at me so fast that I almost wasn't ready for the power of it as it engulfed me. I was infuriated that this thing could think to take everything away from me, then come back into my life and have the audacity to sit there, pointing a gun at me, as if I was the one who'd done something wrong. As if I was the one who'd stolen the whole world from him.
Him. It. Whatever the fuck it was.
I began to sit up, the movement too sudden, and the pain hit hard – a double explosion that tore through my head and body – and I cried out, collapsing back onto the sleeping bag underneath me. Tears of agony and frustration pricked my eyes, the heat building exponentially behind them. A ripple of nausea curdled in my stomach and quickly forced the bile up into my throat.
Rolling onto my side – an action that wrenched a cry of pain from my lungs – I grabbed the first thing I could see, a small hand-towel dampened with dark patches that looked suspiciously like blood and I retched into it. The acid burned in my throat and on my tongue. It didn't take long before I was retching up nothing but bilious air and a scalding humiliation.
I sank back onto the sleeping bag, my head woozy, my limbs weakened and shaky.
'Codeine. I gave you codeine. You don't react well to codeine.'
The word repetition sounded robotic and I hated it, because it was Tom's voice and yet not Tom's voice. I registered the sound as him, but the tone was off, creepy, like I was listening to a recording from beyond the grave.
'The doctor prescribed it when you had that...' The Grey paused, his brow creasing in thought as if trying to get his head around the right words. '... bad migraine. You said, you couldn't take codeine because it made you sick and dizzy. But it... helped.'
