by Susan Grant
“Both hands on the wheel! We’re in line of sight and he’s got a plasma rifle. One mistake and we’re powdered DNA!”
Jana grimaced. “You don’t have to yell!”
He softened his tone a little. “My name is Cavin, by the way. Cavin of Far Star. I never told you that.”
“Apparently there are a lot of things you never told me.” He looked too human to be believable as an alien, but here they were in the midst of a firefight with a robot-assassin who could slice cars in half, and not only was Peter’s—uh, Cavin’s—clothing nothing she’d ever seen outside one of her nephew’s video games, with a flick of his wrist, he was able to start and steal whatever vehicle he wanted.
“Ah!” Jana flinched at the screech of brakes and a blaring horn. She’d run a red light. She, who’d gotten only one ticket her entire life—and that was for going two minutes overtime at a parking meter.
“This way.” Cavin jerked the wheel to the right and pointed her down a side street lined with neat rows of upscale homes. They were less than three blocks from Evie’s house. She could walk there. She could borrow Evie’s Honda and still make it home before midnight. She let up on the accelerator.
“Faster.” He turned the rearview mirror to better see it. “He’s got us in his sights.”
A man walking his dog stared at them as they flew by. “We’re going to hit someone!” She took her foot off the accelerator.
Cavin slid his leg over as if to cram his heavy boot on the gas. His foot hovered menacingly. “Either you do it, or I do it.”
Jana shoved his leg away. “I’ll do it.” At least she’d be able to maintain some sense of control. But the SUV sputtered and slowed. A chime dragged her attention to the dash. The low fuel light was on. Hooray! It was the best luck she’d had all day. “It’s out of gas.”
“Out,” Cavin said.
“Yes. Completely out.” She laughed maniacally. God bless busy parents who pushed filling up to the last minute.
“No, out.” He leaned over her lap and shoved open the door. “He’s coming. We’ve got to get out now and run.”
“Where?” She turned around. The street was dark and empty. “I don’t see him.”
Cavin thrust the wrist gauntlet at her. A tiny map showed a red X. It slid with menace toward a white square. “Tell me we’re not the square,” she said.
“I wish I could.” He pushed her, and she stumbled into the street. She grabbed for her purse and the bag of groceries. The smell of bananas was strong, telling her that they’d gotten crushed. But she didn’t dare leave the groceries behind and turn them into evidence that could link her to this fiasco. “What about fingerprints? Mine are in the database and—”
“I wiped the car clean. No trace of DNA is left.”
God bless technology. Cavin grabbed her by the hand and pulled her down the center of the street. By now, all the dogs on the block were barking. A few porch lights were on that weren’t on before. Where could she run and hide where no one would see her? A ski mask would have come in handy. In the future, she’d have to remember to keep one in her purse.
The heel of her left pump broke off. “Piece of shit.” Oh, Grandpa would have been proud of the deterioration in her language. She hopped along and threw off the other shoe. It clanged against a mailbox. In about two seconds, her panty hose were trashed. Pebbles pierced her heels. “Ow, ow.” She dropped the bananas, thought about backtracking to retrieve them and nixed the idea. She still had the shopping bag and the all-important receipt with her identity attached. Space invaders or not, she didn’t want to be linked to this mayhem in any shape, any form.
She was still within walking distance of Evie’s house. The plan to commandeer the Honda would still work. She’d be home by midnight. “I have a plan,” she gasped.
“What’s that?”
“You go on ahead. Run where you need to. Lose the assassin, and I’ll hide.” She tried to wriggle her hand from Cavin’s strong grip.
“No, Jana.” Cavin grabbed her wrists and pulled her close. Shadows fell across his face, illuminating the urgency there. His expression was masculine, take-charge. He was adorable, but there was nothing “pretty-boy” about him. With a swell of longing, she realized he was everything she’d been looking for in a man, and couldn’t find.
Miss Snow…Miss Virgin Snow. She squeezed her eyes shut, the visual equivalent of holding her hands over her ears and singing, “Lah lah lah.”
“I didn’t know about the assassin, Jana. I’m sorry for that. I thought whoever had pursued me had died in the crash, and never did I assume it was a REEF. Mistakes, all. But if you take off alone, there’s no guarantee the REEF will follow me and not you. At least with me you have a chance. Trust me, Squee.” Again, the pet name made her heart twist. “Like the night you let me take you into the air. We flew.”
“We crashed. Together we were too heavy.”
He looked to the sky and shook his head. “Gods, all these years I remember the flying. She remembers the crashing. What about afterward when we watched the moon rise over the water? We didn’t know a word of each other’s language, but it didn’t matter. We didn’t feel the need for speech. Do you remember that?”
“Yes,” she said in a smaller voice.
Apparently satisfied by her answer, Cavin tugged her along again, but this time at a reasonable jog. She half limped, half ran to keep up with him. Gasping to catch her breath, she shoved damp strands of hair off her forehead. All of it had spilled out of the chignon she’d anchored with two cloisonné picks, and who knew where those had gone. Her suit was stained and smelled like bananas, and her panty hose hung in shreds. “What are you?” she asked. “The truth.”
“I’m a man.”
“Yes, I got that part.” Loud and clear, too. “Who are you, besides an alien?”
“I’m a soldier in the Coalition Space Force. I enlisted too young to become a pilot and then when I was finally old enough, I realized I liked what I was doing more. A ground fighter—a ‘grunt’ as it is known here on Earth. Staying alive, keeping my friends alive…I wasn’t looking for glory.”
His hair was cropped short now, a military cut, but still as shiny as she’d remembered. She wondered what they’d said to him at training camp when he’d showed up with his long braided locks. “What’s the Coalition? Your planet?”
“No, the Coalition controls thousands of worlds. Including Earth.”
Jana bristled. “Earth still controls Earth.”
“Not for long.” Cavin aimed his wrist gauntlet at a brand-new silver Lexus sedan parked in a driveway. “The Coalition parliament and the queen have approved your world for acquisition.”
“They what?”
Bip, bip went the sound of a car alarm being disarmed. Lights came on inside the Lexus.
“Hey, what are you doing? Cavin, no—”
“Get in.”
She folded her arms over her ruined suit. “Make me.”
He scooped her up into his arms and dropped her into the driver’s seat, leaning over her to buckle her seat belt. His mouth and those mesmerizing lips were very close to hers. “Drive, or die at the hands of the most feared assassin in the galaxy.”
“You argue very convincingly,” she said, a little breathless.
“This isn’t an argument.” His voice was thick, telling her he felt the heat between them, too. “It’s an order.”
“Hey!” Someone shouted from an upstairs window. “Get out of my car!”
Jana’s stomach dropped. The man aimed his cell phone at her to take a picture. She ducked down before he could get a clear shot. Drive away or run? Quickly she weighed the risk of having to explain her role in all this versus the still-viable chance of getting through this at the end, alive and undiscovered. “Get in, Cavin.”
He landed in the passenger seat. The car started as the doors slammed, encasing them in leather-soft, luxury-car silence. Cavin had no leg room. His knees were crammed against the dash, halfway to the ceilin
g.
“He took a picture of you,” she said frantically.
“He thinks he did. My armor’s AI saw the camera and blurred the return image. The suit is capable of enhanced invisibility, as well. How do you think I followed you to the market without being seen?”
“I haven’t had time to think about it. It’s been a little busy. But now that you bring it up, how did you get from the ranch to the store—fly?”
“Only to the nearest road. I hitchhiked on a series of cars and then a truck. Hung on for the ride.”
“Omigod.”
“They never knew I was aboard.”
“Unlike me,” she muttered. She left streaks of rubber on the driveway as she backed up, tires spinning. The car careened down the block, leaving a trail of bedroom and porch lights coming on behind them.
Chapter Four
THE SAFEWAY BAG SLID across the backseat of the Lexus and thumped into the door. The smell of chocolate mixed with that of factory-new leather. So much for eating the Phish Food. “Where’s the assassin?”
Cavin checked his gauntlet. “Gods, he’s—” A ball of lightning ripped past her window. The air smelled as if it was on fire.
Jana screamed. “What the hell was that?”
“Plasma mortars.”
“Rifles? Grenades? The guy’s a traveling arsenal.”
“Accelerate!”
The urgency in his voice was enough motivation to obey without argument. If Jana slid any lower in the driver’s seat, she wouldn’t be able to see over the dashboard. “How did he sneak up on us like that?”
“My wrist gauntlet shows the pursuit. Unfortunately, it also helps the assassin hone in on us. I can switch it on long enough to take a peek then I have to turn it off. Until just now, it was off.”
Great, just great. All that advanced technology and he couldn’t use it. “Why’s this guy after you? Because you came here?”
“Someone hired him. Someone driven by arrogance, and ignorance, and fear.”
Okay. He did not sound happy. There was more going on here than she knew. But nothing she had time to worry about now. Her plate was full enough keeping the car moving at top speed without killing any innocents.
“My visit to Earth has nothing to do with the REEF’s attempts to kill me, but it does complicate things.”
Jana rolled her eyes. “Ya think?”
She raced through the surface streets and merged onto the highway, headed west. She didn’t know where she was going, only that she wanted to get there fast.
The fog was thickening. Cars traveled slowly. She wanted to drive even slower than they were, but she remembered the threat of Cavin’s boot over the accelerator. Jana drove as fast as she could stand it until the visibility became so poor that she could see no more than a couple of car lengths ahead. She lifted her bare foot off the gas pedal.
“Don’t slow down,” Cavin ordered.
“I can’t see.”
“I can.”
“How can you see?”
He tapped on his visor, which he’d pulled over his eyes. “With this I can see for miles ahead. Fog, darkness, no problem.”
“No problem,” she muttered, imitating him. “How do you speak English so well if you’re an alien?”
“A universal translator brain implant.”
“You have something lodged in your head?”
“Yes. I have several bioengineered, enhanced features throughout my body. All soldiers do.”
“Enhancements, huh.” Jana’s mind went wild with possibilities as she ran her gaze from his head down to his big…thick…hard…platform boots. Then she forced her attention back to the road. “But how did you get access to the language?” She was a self-avowed intellectual geek; she loved asking questions to satisfy her curiosity. But now she asked as much to cling to sanity as to learn. Lose her anchor to reality, and she feared she’d dissolve into a useless, trembling puddle. “Do you know other languages, too?”
“Not know. Ability to access is a better description. Most of Earth’s dialects are available via my translator. Not all, because unfortunately, we were limited to those dialects we could harvest from the communications signals leaving the planet. Your TV, music and radio radiate out into space—think of a pebble dropped in a still pond. The Coalition captured the ripples.”
Again, intellectual fascination battled with a primal fear of something far more powerful than anything on Earth. “Say something in your language.”
He spoke a few words that reminded her of her mother’s Russian. It was a blessedly normal-sounding language, devoid of weird buzzing noises and the insect-like clicking sounds one would expect from an alien language, if one actually spent the time to ponder alien languages. She knew she never had. Until Cavin, Jana assumed the concept of aliens visiting Earth was the invention of really bored people with low-quality cameras living in remote parts of New Mexico and Nevada.
“It is the official language of the Coalition,” he said. “The queen’s tongue.”
It seemed very Buck Rogers to actually have a queen of the galaxy. “What’s she like?”
“Queen Keira? I saw her only once, at a distance during her coronation. She was very young. She’s a grown woman now, and said to be quite beautiful, but somehow she’s resisted taking a consort. She almost killed a man who tried to take her by force.”
You go, girl. “Almost killed? Why didn’t she finish the job?”
“Once she had sliced off his male parts with a sword, I suppose she felt that killing him at that point would have been considered an act of mercy. He lives on as a palace eunuch as a reminder for those suitors who would attempt to force themselves on the queen.”
Man trouble. Jana felt a certain kinship with the young queen. She wondered if Brace Bowie could benefit from similar treatment. “What did you say, by the way, when you spoke in your language?”
“Concentrate on your driving.”
She made a face at him and focused on the road ahead. Suddenly, the visibility shrank to fifty feet or less. Ahead was a solid, white blanket of fog. A bare minimum of reflector bumps kept her centered in the lane. “I can’t see. Help me out here.” Her foot came off the gas.
“No! Do not slow. Go…go right. Right.”
She swerved into the right lane—and moaned as they narrowly missed a late-model Volkswagen.
“Left!”
She veered left. Another car swept past in the fog. Focus on the reflector lights. Stay between the lines. She saw no more than a few car lengths ahead, and she must be going sixty or seventy, at least. Concentrate. Stay between the lines. Jana wanted to barf from nerves. All that held her back was the thought of soiling someone else’s car.
“Foot off the fuel pedal slightly,” Cavin said. “Now…right turn.”
She did as he said.
“Accelerate.”
As Cavin calmly issued directions, the Lexus wove in and out of the slower cars, making them look as if they were standing still. By now, they were almost to downtown Sacramento. The fog was even thicker here. She was driving almost completely blind. On the plus side, if she couldn’t see anyone then no one could see her. Except the assassin.
To calm herself, she counted backward from ten, found it too complicated and stopped. Stay under the radar, keep a low profile. Only hours ago she’d promised her grandfather exactly that. “Snow,” she whispered. “Virgin snow.”
“Snow?” Cavin peered outside into the fog. “It is forty-six-point-two of your degrees outside. That is too warm for the precipitation to freeze.”
Jana decided against an explanation. It was all she could do to concentrate on staying in her lane and pray this nightmare came to an end soon. “Where’s the assassin now?”
“He lost us, it seems.”
Jana shot him an outraged look. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“Because your local law enforcement vehicles have been redoubling their efforts to catch us.”
Her heart tumbled. “What?”
<
br /> “Left—now!” Cavin shouted.
She swerved into the left lane, but not before she almost clipped a police car. By the time she managed a small scream, the police car’s flashing lights had disappeared in the fog.
“Cavin, we almost hit a police car!” An image of its two occupants’ startled faces burned in her mind.
“Exit here.”
“Why?” Jana asked even as she obeyed his order.
“The police have formed a roadblock ahead. They’ve an array of weapons aimed at us. And they’ve thrown spikes in the road that will tear apart these tires and cripple the vehicle.”
Jana’s stomach ached. Her head throbbed, and her throat was dry. “But the police will recognize this car. If the fog clears, we’re done.” And she’d get to explain it all during the arrest. Yet, even if she could talk her way out of any blame, how could she leave Cavin to take the fall? She couldn’t. He was Peter, first of all, and they shared some sort of bizarre bond that was as powerful now as it was decades ago. He looked too human for anyone to believe he was an alien, and the gee-whiz tech he had on him would only get the military involved, the FBI, CIA, DIA, DHS, too, and every other acronym-laden organization in existence. By morning, he’d be on his way to an undisclosed mental facility, where he’d “disappear” and she’d be on her way to the front page of the Sacramento Sun. The headline scrolled across the back of her eyes: Can We Trust Them? Jaspers Continue Downhill Slide. She grimaced.
“Here, Jana—stop!”
She fishtailed to a stop at the bottom of the entry ramp.
Several old cars were parked along a gritty street. Across the road was a bar with no name and a neon sign that said Cocktails. Fog drifted in cottony strands, muting the letters. “That one,” he said, pointing to an old Chevy decked out in green and purple iridescent paint.
Jana eyed their new target dispassionately. Her lack of upset over stealing another car was a testament to how shell-shocked she was.
Before abandoning the Lexus, she grabbed her purse and the sticky grocery bag. At the bottom of a puddle of thick melted ice cream and the little chocolate fish she’d never get to eat but no longer had the appetite for, she found the receipt and shoved it in her purse. Now the only evidence left behind would be a squishy Safeway bag and a container of Phish Food.
