Rule number one: Run from the Shadows. Unless one knows the secret that will save you.

A Cybershock Story

I live in a world of waifs and shadows. Live might be an overstatement. I scrounge and scramble and survive in an atmosphere made thick and gray by the ashes of the Fallen. And sometimes I dream of sunlight. My parents were taken, even though they followed all the rules. Never scavenge at night. Never talk to Shadows. Don’t fight the Sweepers. Run. Run. Run.

Now that they’ve taken my little brother, Douglas, I’ve realized I’ve only been surviving for him. I have two choices: Follow him or lie down and die. I can’t just quit after years of struggle. I wouldn’t know how if I tried. Determination is all I have left.

And then I meet him.

He claims to be a rogue who can help me find my brother. It’s got to be a lie. But I don’t run. I stop. I listen. And I make a deal with a Shadow even though I know it will mean the death of me.

Never talk to Shadows.

But no one ever told me what would happen if I kissed one.

Warning: May cause fantasies of forbidden kisses from dark heroes who balance on the edge of evil. Where shadows wait and ashes fall…

He’s got to be out of his mind. Or head over heels. Maybe both.

If Silk Jones’s superiors think she’s going to hide quietly in protective relocation, they have another thing coming. She was bred to be the perfect law-enforcement machine. Quiet isn’t her style.

Nothing will stop her from finding her partner’s killer. Not the assassin who took him down. Not her own government. Not the fact that she’s in a completely different dimension. And certainly not her by-the-book new partner, who thinks she’s insane and operates on some antiquated idea that he’s protecting her.

Davis Rule doesn’t believe in little green men. Yet, thanks to an interdepartmental shake-up, he’s stuck on Sightings duty. No borderline-insane Ufologist is going to hamper his plans to wiggle out of this assignment as soon as possible—until he discovers a little green man can be almost six feet of knockout blonde who’s quite capable of knocking him out.

Silk would like nothing better than to shake off the doggedly chivalrous Davis, return home and bring the murderer to justice. Except she’s got the craziest urge to keep him by her side. Especially when it becomes clear that allies and enemies aren’t so easy to define.

Warning: Contains one combustible couple thrown together without a hope of dodging the flames.