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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TWO YEARS EARLIER
My hand is shaking.
I will it to stop. I even cover it with the other, in the hope I can stifle the tremble that feels as if its vibrating right down to my bones, but then both hands shake together on the table-top: a clear sign of my guilt.
I'm not stupid. I know it's what they're thinking.
Suspicion is a hard thing to hide. You can try to conceal it, but there's a well of truth in a person's eyes that no mask can ever cover up.
I can see it in their eyes now. In the way they keep glancing at each other. In the way they keep looking at my hands clasped together in front of me, a forever shaking mass of bones and skin.
I've been through the story three times already and each time I'm left with the same images in my head, these constant torturous pictures that keep haunting me, an endless living nightmare I just can't escape from.
Tom brushing his thumb over my knuckles. Feather-light. Like the caress of warm air on my skin. Like the first gentle kiss of the sun.
Tom clutching at the monster that has knocked him to the ground. Its mouth is covering his, not with a kiss, but something else – something that muffles Tom's screams. Its long, thin fingers are pressed against his temples, the digits moving like twitching spider's legs against his skull, as if its feeling for something, searching for something.
Tom's hands – the ones that barely thirty minutes ago had held my own – clawing at the oily-grey flesh of the creature, drawing strange dark blood from where his fingers gouge.
His hands – the ones I always thought so beautiful – scrape and scratch, the fight growing weaker, until finally they release their hold of the creature and fall limp to the ground.
Tom's fingertips stained with blood.
That's what I see now. That's what I see as I look at my own, the skin around my nails reddened and raw where I have bitten and gnawed at them.
My guilt is a hot brand to my flesh. I feel it burning as I sit here, scalded by their suspicion, scalded by the knowledge of what I did and by what I'm doing now. Telling stories. Telling lies. Fabricating everything because the truth is too insane to be spoken out loud. I can't give life to the truth. How can I? How can I possibly ever speak of it?
With a name straight from a prime-time police TV drama, Detective Inspector Eddie McCain has a stare forged from the toughest steel. Its edge is sharp and cuts deep each time, as if he hopes to cleave the flesh from my bones until he finds the truth buried deep within.
He knows I'm lying. He's playing the vaguely-good cop, for now. The benefit-of-the-doubt cop.
But he sees through me, just as I see through him.
