Book excerpt: Phoenix O'Halloran, Red to her friends, is a brash, in your face journalist who always gets her story. Having long ago lost touch with her emotions, except righteous indignation, she now has a very strange problem. Her subconscious has acquired a voice of its own. It's insisting it’s an extraterrestrial alien who needs her help. Not only that, he's her mate. Long ago Trian was a member of a team aboard a galactic defense spaceship, sent to stop an invasion of Earth. An unsavory group of demonic aliens wanted Earth for its mineral resources. They had no qualms about removing any obstacles in their way, planets, civilizations and anyone sent to stop them. It didn’t go well for Earth’s defenders. Immortal yet frozen in stone they had no choice except to wait out the eons. An ancient prophecy told that only through the compassion of spiritually evolved humans would each of them be freed. And there’s the first problem. Phoenix knows she wouldn’t know compassion if she fell over it. She certainly isn’t spiritually evolved. Though she now lives in Boswell and she has had the retrovirus to repair her DNA she still can’t do anything like the others around her. She can’t telepath, except with the one voice in her head, she can’t teleport and she’s shown no sign of any other special skills. She’s the least likely person to help Trian yet it appears fate has decreed she’s the one. Then there’s the other problem. The stone that is currently Trian is holding up the side of a mountain. If that mountain side falls...