Touched by an Alien (9 page)

I put my hair into a ponytail, tossed my brush, a headband, a couple of extra scrunchies, and my spare hairspray into my purse. Then I examined the pictures.

He’d moved them all, not much, but enough for me to notice, because I never dust. I could see fingerprints in the dust on the frames, as well as smudges in the dust on the counter, showing where a picture had been and now wasn’t quite on the spot any more.

The pictures here were the ones that mattered most to me—my parent’s wedding picture, my senior picture from high school, my sorority composite picture, me and my parents with my car when it was brand new, a multi-picture collection of my closest friends from school, college, and work, another multi-picture set of our relatives and pets through my lifetime.

But the ones that had the most dust removed from them were from my sixteenth birthday. Chuckie had been into photography at that point, and while he pretty much refused to have his picture taken, he’d gotten some awesome snaps of others. In one I was wearing a tiara and holding my cats, Oingo and Boingo, with my parents and Sheila and Amy around me, all of us grinning like idiots. In the other I was still in the tiara, but I was with my then-boyfriend, Brian. He and I were pretending to do the tango, we were both laughing, and he had me dipped, so that I was upside down in the shot with one leg up in the air.

So that explained the princess and tiara comments. Prick.

There was a knock on my bedroom doors. “Are you dressed yet or can I come in?”

“Oh, come in.” I’d deal with Christopher’s invasion of my privacy later.

Martini came in and gave me an appraising up and down. “You clean up nice. A little casual, but that’s okay. However, you should know I like the Stones better.”

“Proof you’re an idiot, just as I suspected.” I grabbed my purse. “Do I need anything else?”

He shook his head. “Nope. Just do me a favor and claim you were worried about twisting your ankle in your heels.”

“You don’t want to get bawled out by Uncle Mr. White in front of the whole Home Base crew? And I was all ready to be impressed.”

“If you admit that you wanted to come here so I could ravage you, I wouldn’t get in trouble.”

“Dream on.”

“Bed’s right there. Though, looking at it, maybe we’ll have our first romantic moment at my place. I actually understand the concept of cleaning and straightening.”

“I’m thrilled. If you can cook, too, we might begin to have an understanding.”

“I’m a great cook.” He took my hand again. “You tell me what you like, I’ll make it for you.”

“Your second strong argument. I’ll try to focus on your strengths while you race us back to the freaking men’s room at the airport.” I made sure everything was off and locked.

“We could go to the one in the ladies’. Saguaro International actually does have a ladies’ room gate, and I don’t mind at all,” he said with his widest grin yet.

“You really aren’t clear on the concept of quitting while you’re ahead, are you?” We left the apartment, and I locked the door. I wondered when I’d see it again.

“Hey, I fed your fish.”

“So, supposedly, did Christopher. They’ll probably die from overfeeding now.”

“I’ll help you through your bereavement.”

“You’re a prince.”

Martini opened his mouth, then slammed it shut. He seemed to be listening, but I couldn’t hear anything.

“What is it?”

“One of the people who checked on you earlier was your landlord?”

“Yes. Nice people. Paranoid, but nice.”

“That’s it. What apartment are they in?”

“Why?”

“We’re right here. Let’s have you go reassure them you’re okay.”

“Suddenly you’re all about the caring of what my friends, family, and extended circle think?”

“That’s me. Let’s go visit your landlord. You’ll be glad we did, trust me.”

“Not yet, but maybe I will in a few years.” We walked downstairs, and I knocked on the landlord’s door.

It opened a crack. “Katherine?”

“Hi, Mr. Nareema. Just wanted to let you know I was okay.”

“I saw you on the news. You were very brave.” At least Christopher hadn’t made me look like a dork, insofar as Mr. Nareema was concerned anyway.

“Thanks, it was sort of instinctual, not planned.”

“I understand. There have been people in your apartment. Men. In matching suits.” Mr. Nareema sounded frightened. Then again, he always sounded frightened.

“I know. They were from the government.”

He gasped. “Do we need to flee?”

“No, no,” I reassured quickly. The Nareema family had had to flee their homeland and still weren’t over it. I’d never gotten the full why out of them, mostly because it was hard to talk to any one of them for more than five minutes without feeling like a total paranoid yourself. “They’re good government. Protecting us. They wanted to make sure everything was safe here.”

“It is,” Martini said, with, I had to admit, a very charming smile.

“Good.” Mr. Nareema didn’t sound convinced. “Take care, Katherine. Call if you . . . need help.”

“Thanks, I will.” We backed up a step, and the door closed. Several locks were turned. Martini and I walked down the hall. “That was fun.”

“He sounds like he feels a little better,” Martini said. “Apparently I reassured him.”

“
You
did? Really? You’re a prince to all, aren’t you?”

“Let’s see if you still think that in a minute,” he said. He took my hand, took a step, and then we were moving. This time I could tell it was faster, much faster. As we flew along, everything was going by so quickly I couldn’t take it in, couldn’t figure out where we were, and my brain politely asked to shut down.

Just as things were going black, we stopped. Martini pulled me into his arms, and I leaned my head against his chest. “Just breathe slowly,” he said quietly, while he massaged the back of my neck.

“What’re you doing?” I mumbled. It felt good, and my stomach and head were clearing.

“A little trick I know for keeping beautiful agents from passing out on me again.”

“I’m not an agent.”

“Yet.” He rubbed a little more, and I felt normal again. “All better?”

“Yeah.” I pulled away from him a bit. “How is it you know what I’m feeling?”

“I’d like to say it’s because I’m so in tune with you.” He sighed. “Actually, it
is
because I’m so in tune with you. I’m empathic. It’s a great trait in a field operative. I’m probably the best empath we have. It’s one of the reasons I got to you first.”

I considered this. A part of me really felt manipulated. The other part, however, was relieved to not be fainting or throwing up. “So, that’s why you wanted to visit Mr. Nareema?”

“Yeah. I picked up anxiety, focused toward your apartment and extending toward you. Paranoia really broadcasts well, emotionally speaking. And I wasn’t kidding—he felt better seeing you, but even more so seeing me.”

“Knowing them, that doesn’t really ring true. You look official.”

“And I left after telling him everything checked out okay. Trust me, his anxiety dropped enough to fall off my main radar.”

Nauseated or not, this was interesting. “So, you get emotions from everyone? Doesn’t that get overwhelming fast?”

“It can.” I raised my eyebrow and he grinned. “Okay, yes, it does. A lot. We have blocks—mental, emotional, and drug-related—that all empaths use to keep the emotional chatter down to a minimum.”

“But then, how are you useful if your powers are muted?”

He shrugged. “Our jobs are to spot where a superbeing is likely to form. They don’t attract to low-stress situations for whatever reason. So we only need to monitor high-level emotions. The closer we are to someone, the easier it is to pick up their emotions as well.”

“So, what if someone’s fighting next door when you’re trying to sleep?”

He grinned. “Don’t worry. I won’t lose focus when we’re intimate.”

“Believe me, last thought on my mind.” I had another thought that was well ahead of wondering how Martini stayed in the moment while doing the deed. “Is that why you could control the police at the courthouse?”

Martini shook his head. “Nope. That’s technology. Ours, not the Ancients’.”

“You have mind-control technology?” This was disturbing, much more so than discovering that Martini probably already knew I was freaked out by this news.

“Yes, but it’s not what you think. You’ll get to see how it works either at Home Base or the Science Center. But we need to move it.”

“Lead on to the bathroom,” I said with a sigh, resigned to another ditz performance.

GETTING INTO THE MEN’S ROOM
wasn’t as tricky as getting out. Martini went in first and waited until the other men left. I found a sign that said the bathroom was temporarily closed for cleaning, which meant no one else was going in. We went to the stall, Martini made some movements in the air, and we were whooshing off again.

This time I didn’t even attempt to watch or enjoy it. He held me again and I put my face in his neck and tried to pretend I was on a tilt-a-whirl. Of course, I hate the tilt-a-whirl.

I felt the jolt that meant we were at our destination and opened my eyes as Martini put me down. We were in a doorway of, as I looked around, a small shed that said “Explosives” on it. But the only thing inside the shed was a gate. I looked outside the doorway—lots of buildings looking both dull and oppressive, lots of jeeps, lots of men in uniform, lots of jets.

“We’re at an air base?”

“I mean it, marry me. Yes, we’re at the Groom Lake U.S. Air Base. Or, as we call it, Home Base.”

“Or, as the rest of the world calls it, Area Fifty-One.” I was a comics geek-girl, and, hey, I could recognize the names if not the faces, as it were. After all, Chuckie had been one of my best friends since ninth grade, and anyone nicknamed Conspiracy Chuck clearly lived for UFO stuff. Area 51 had a lot of names, and I knew them all.

“I think our kids are going to be fantastic,” Martini said, as he started off toward one of the bigger and more oppressive-looking buildings about a quarter mile away. “How many do you want?”

“I want to know why I could see the gate here and at the crash site but not in the bathrooms.”

“They’re cloaked. Duh.”

“Uh-huh. So how can
you
see them?”

He looked over his shoulder. “Keep up. And, yeah, okay, the cloaking doesn’t actually work on anyone with A-C blood. We can see the cloak but we can also see through it, because the light waves aren’t moving too fast for us. They’re too fast for any human or human-made device. And, before you ask, the parasites and the superbeings don’t have A-C blood, so they can’t see through the cloaking, either.”

I wasn’t sure if I believed him, but I got the impression he wasn’t lying. “So you’re saying that there are no A-C-based parasites?”

“Not that we know of.” Martini sounded sincere, but I wasn’t as sure about the lying this time, particularly since he pointedly wasn’t making eye contact. But this brought up a question all the excitement had washed away. “What happened on your planet when the parasites arrived?”

Martini didn’t answer me. Him not talking was shocking in and of itself, but this was pretty damning. I caught up to him and grabbed his arm. “Tell me what happened when they got to your planet.”

He stopped walking and turned to face me. Martini’s expression was unusual—solemn and tense. “They never came to Alpha Centauri.”

I decided to take this news calmly. I ran through all the questions this statement brought up and decided to go with the bottom line. “Why not?”

“We aren’t sure. Once the Ancients arrived, it was the ‘there are other inhabited worlds’ wake-up call for us. It might just have been that our ozone shield worked to keep the parasites out.”

“Ozone shield?” I wondered if Al Gore knew about this, and I figured he didn’t or we’d already have a documentary about how much better the Alpha Centaurions were at protecting their precious resources.

“Same issue as Earth has right now. We just figured out how to create a world shield that keeps the good stuff in and filters the bad stuff out. It’s similar to the cloaking technology.”

“Why hasn’t someone shared this with Earth?”

He sighed. “You don’t have the right raw materials to make it work. We have some elements on A-C that don’t exist on Earth. Maybe because of the double suns, maybe just because of how our world evolved. Like our ability to travel at hyperspeed. There are some things we can do that a human will never be able to.”

“Could you export the materials to us?”

“Possibly, but the parasitic threat is much more real and much more serious. A few superbeings could destroy the world tomorrow. And these days hundreds can show up in the course of a week.”

“These days?”

“The number of parasites reaching Earth is increasing each year. In the sixties, it was a few, almost like a military advance team. Now? Now it’s all we can do to keep up with them.” He let that sit on the air for a few moments, then continued. “We got the shield up on Alpha Centauri a few years after the Ancients arrived. We’ve never had a parasite sighting. We do get messages from home, three to five years after they were sent. Those your governments do intercept, but they’re in our native language.”