Holly had always been one of those people who had been different, who had been more than a little … insane. At least that was what her parents had tried to tell her when they’d dropped her off at the county children’s home. She knew differently, though. She knew she wasn’t crazy. She was actually very intelligent.

They hadn’t sent her away because she was a bad child or a hell-raiser. Overall, she had been very quiet and good, but they hadn’t understood her constant need for mental stimulation, so they shook their heads, then wiped their hands of her.

So, she hadn’t fought her parents’ decision. She hadn’t grumbled or complained. Instead, she’d embraced the solitude and done with it as she pleased. She’d actually lived, and her mind had flourished. Inside of the facility, Holly had found herself in a niche that had longed to be filled. And fill it, she had.

For a number of years, Holly had pretended to fit in with the status quo—she did the studies that she was supposed to do and interacted where she should interact. She had even found herself making friends.

However, she soon discovered that she did better with computers than she did with people. By the time she was a teenager, she’d programmed the computers at the home. She had earned her keep by making sure each and every single thing that was technological was running at the highest peak possible. And if she sometimes got a little lonely, well, she could deal. But that was then and this was now. Now Holly had her own home. She had her own apartment, job, and stability that she hadn’t had before.

She attributed much of her success to the way she had grown up—curious and ready to take on the world. She’d also found that she loved the challenge of breaking into systems, which had led her to one so heavily encrypted she wasn’t sure what was right and what was wrong, or even what it really was.

Giddy glee—that’s what flowed through her as she bypassed system after system. It made her all kinds of happy to finally have a challenge that was worth her time. She all but rubbed her hands together and danced in her seat while pushing the wire-rimmed glasses back on her nose and clipping the long fall of raven’s-wing-black hair back up behind her head. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, I’ll get it cut. The same lie she always told herself.

Tonight, however, oh tonight is a very, very good night. She snickered as she played cat and mouse with the security features built into the firewall of the business she was hacking and chewed her lip while moving through files. She read at a lightning-fast pace, taking in the information in the data banks faster than a Borg assimilated humans in Star Trek. Oh yes, this is some very good stuff indeed.

She stopped at a file that had been one of the two hardest to open and gulped. “What the heck?” she muttered, moving her mouse off the information to make the print larger. I have to be reading it wrong, because there’s no way the dates are correct.

Printing off the data, she leaned back in her chair, kicked her booted feet up onto the metal desk, and frowned. “Methinks I have perhaps fallen into someone’s manuscript.” She had a mile-wide grin on her face. She loved science fiction and paranormal novels. And this one looks like it’s going to be a hell of a read.

Holly scanned through the outlines for each of the heroes of the manuscript, getting sucked in deeper with every turn of the page. “The author did a lot of research on Gaius and Alexander the Great. This is seriously awesome. Too bad they didn’t turn it into a romance, because that’s the best-selling genre out there.” She flipped more, then frowned. “Huh. Wonder who in the world this Mercury character is supposed to be. Maybe he’s going to be the missing link or something like that? It will be interesting to learn just how the author spins this one.”

Quickly pivoting in her chair, she pulled up the Internet space and tossed together a website for “Unknown Author” and the series he or she was writing about, The Guardians, also known as The Guardians of the Light, and became the writer’s number one fan. “Oh, wonder if they have a social media presence?” she asked herself and began to look for any trace of the author via Facebook, Twitter, and even the new site, Tsu. “Huh. Weird. Oh well, likely they want to wait until the first book comes out before they burst onto the scene. I can’t wait.”