Page 29

I should’ve turned around when my camel guide refused to go any farther.

In hindsight, that was the first red flag.

Not the cracked tablet with radiation warnings scratched in three languages.

Not the flickering lights dancing on the sand like a mirage was trying to seduce me with its best nightclub impression.

Nope. Just me, Jas Navarro, genius cryptid podcaster-slash-freelance journalist, trudging into a restricted zone in the Sahara like I was auditioning for a Darwin Award.

But curiosity is a hell of a drug. So is ambition. And I was chasing both like a girl on fire.

The desert stretched before me in endless waves of gold, each dune carved by wind into ripples that resembled an ocean frozen in time.

My boots sank with each step, leaving behind imprints that were already being erased by the restless sand.

Three hours since I’d left the last village.

Two since my guide had abandoned me with wild gestures and fervent prayers to Allah.

“Demon lights,” he’d said in broken English, pointing at the horizon where something pulsed beneath the sand. “Bad place. Very bad.”

I’d doubled his payment and promised to return by sunset. He’d laughed in my face.

“No return,” he’d said, patting his camel’s neck before climbing atop it. “Only ghosts return.”

Now, squinting through the afternoon haze, I understood his fear.

The air had changed. Thickened. Electric currents raced across my skin like phantom fingers, raising goosebumps despite the blistering heat.

My satellite phone had died an hour ago, and my compass spun in lazy circles, the needle twitching like it was having a seizure.

Classic signs of electromagnetic interference. The kind UFO hunters had wet dreams about.

I wiped a sweaty hand across my forehead, squinting through the heat haze toward the barely-there structure I’d spotted two dunes back.

It looked like a hunk of ancient metal half-buried in sand, sun-bleached and humming beneath my boots.

Definitely not Bedouin. Definitely not in any archaeology database I’d checked.

Which meant jackpot.

My podcast listeners would lose their minds. After three years of chasing legends—Bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest, ghost ships in the Bermuda Triangle, the Montauk monster—I’d finally found something that couldn’t be explained away by weather patterns or drunk eyewitnesses. Something otherworldly.

If the anonymous tip that had led me here was right, this wasn’t just a UFO landing site. It was a doorway. A gateway to somewhere else, activated every hundred years by the alignment of stars or electromagnetic fields or whatever cosmic bullshit my source had rambled about.

“The gateway will open soon,” the email had read. “Three days after the winter solstice, when the Pleiades align with the Great Pyramid. Be there or wait another century.”

I’d traced the IP address to a cybercafé in Cairo that had mysteriously burned down the next day.

Classic. The locals called this place Bab al-Jinn—the Door of Spirits.

Western explorers who’d ventured too close had disappeared, only to return months later with impossible stories and radiation burns.

All of which made for killer podcast material.

My recorder was already strapped to my backpack, and my GoCam was blinking green.

I crouched low, brushing sand off a slab of metal that curved up from the ground like a rib cage.

There were symbols etched into it—circles, slashes, alien geometry that didn’t belong on Earth.

And the closer I got, the warmer it felt beneath my fingers.

“This is Jasmine Cruz Navarro,” I spoke into my recorder, keeping my voice steady despite the adrenaline pumping through my veins. “December twenty-fourth, approximately fourteen hundred hours. I’m at the coordinates sent by our anonymous source, and I’ve discovered what appears to be?—”

I paused, running my fingers along the grooves of the symbols. They were warm to the touch, almost hot, pulsing with what felt like a heartbeat.

“—what appears to be non-terrestrial technology of unknown origin and purpose. The metal has properties I’ve never encountered before. It’s warm, almost like it’s alive.”

I reached into my pack for my sample kit. A scraping here, a soil sample there—standard procedure for when I found something worth analyzing. But as I leaned closer, my long braid slipped over my shoulder, the tip brushing against the center symbol.

It flashed—a split-second of brilliant green light—and I jerked backward, heart hammering against my ribs.

“Shit,” I hissed, fumbling for my water bottle. My throat suddenly felt like I’d swallowed the Sahara. “Did you see that? Tell me the camera caught that.”

The symbols were glowing now, faint pulses of emerald and gold that reminded me of the Northern Lights I’d photographed in Alaska two years ago. They moved like liquid, flowing from one etching to another in geometric patterns that hurt my eyes to follow.

This was big. Bigger than anything I’d covered before. Governments would kill for this kind of discovery. Hell, if half the conspiracy theories about Area 51 were true, they already had.

This was either a UFO or a very elaborate prank. Either way, I’m getting a bonus.

I took a breath. Reached forward. Touched the center of the glyph.

The world blinked.

No sound. No wind. Just a vacuum suck that yanked the air out of my lungs and the sand out from under me. I screamed—maybe. Or maybe it was just in my head. The light flared around me in gold and green, and then the ground disappeared.

I fell.

Not down. Not up. There was no direction, no orientation, just the sensation of being stretched and compressed simultaneously, my body pulled apart at the atomic level and then slammed back together.

Colors that had no name streaked past me, smearing across my vision like wet paint.

The universe turned inside out, revealing its machinery—gears and cogs and impossible geometry that my human brain couldn’t process.

Time collapsed. Expanded. Folded in on itself.

I tasted copper. Smelled ozone. Felt my cells vibrate at frequencies that threatened to shake me apart.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped.

Tumbling, weightless, through a tunnel of burning light. I hit something—soft and sharp at the same time—and then heat slammed into me like a fist. Not Earth heat. Not even Sahara heat. This was wrong. Oppressive. Alive.

The sand here burned like fire. The air scraped my throat with every breath.

Two suns blazed overhead. No clouds. No shadows. No landmarks. Just dunes and a shimmering horizon and a sudden, deep, nauseating certainty.

I wasn’t on Earth anymore.

The realization hit me like a physical blow, driving me to my knees. My stomach heaved, but nothing came up—just dry, painful retches that left me gasping. My ears popped, adjusting to the pressure change. My skin prickled with sweat that evaporated instantly in the brutal heat.

This couldn’t be happening. Time travel, maybe. Hallucination, probably. But another planet? That was the stuff of bad sci-fi movies, not real life. Not my life.

And yet.

Two suns. Two fucking suns hanging in an alien sky that wasn’t quite the right shade of blue—more teal than azure, deeper and more intense than Earth’s atmosphere. No moon. No familiar constellations. Just vast, unforgiving space stretching above me like a cosmic joke at my expense.

“This isn’t real,” I wheezed, my voice sounding strange in the thinner air. “This is a heat stroke dream. Or someone drugged me. Or?—”

My pack was still on my back, heavier now in what felt like slightly stronger gravity. I fumbled for my satellite phone, though I already knew it was useless. No satellites here to connect to. No cell towers. No internet. No nothing.

I was alone in a way humans had never been alone before.

I staggered forward. My boots sank in the sand. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. My skin was boiling inside my clothes. I tried to think. Tried to record something, say something, but my vision blurred and the buzzing in my ears turned to a roar.

The heat was overwhelming, crushing down on me like a vise.

Each breath felt like inhaling fire. I’d survived a war zone in Syria, an earthquake in Nepal, and a hurricane in Puerto Rico.

I’d stared down gun barrels and corrupt officials and competed with media sharks for the best shots.

But this—this was different. This was beyond human endurance.

My GoCam was still recording, its little green light a steady pulse against the overwhelming orange-gold of this alien desert. Would anyone ever see the footage? Would anyone even look for me when I didn’t return?

I had no family waiting for my call. No boyfriend expecting me home. Just an editor who’d want to know why I’d missed my deadline, and podcast listeners who would assume I’d finally given up the ghost-hunting gig.

I collapsed to my knees. Then to my side.

The sand burned through my clothes, scorching my skin, but I couldn’t find the strength to move. My heart pounded too fast, then too slow. The world tilted and spun around me, my vision narrowing to a pinprick of consciousness.

And just before darkness swallowed me whole, I saw them.

A pair of eyes—gold, slitted, glowing with something wild and hungry—appearing like twin stars through the haze.

They floated above me, disembodied in my fading vision, before resolving into a face that wasn’t human.

Couldn’t be human. The angles were wrong, the proportions alien, the skin a burnished copper that reflected the twin suns like metal.

The creature—the person—whatever it was—tilted its head, studying me with predatory intensity. Its mouth moved, forming words I couldn’t hear over the rushing in my ears.

I tried to speak. To move. To do anything but lie there dying on alien sand under alien suns.

But my body had reached its limit.

And then everything went black.

Ready to meet the alien warrior who finds her?

Download Deserted and prepare to fall hard for Rhaekar Onca of House Acinonyx.

Look for Deserted , available June 20, 2025

(High heat. Fated mates. Grumpy alien sand daddy. You’ve been warned.)