“They are?” I asked, shocked that the people Raphael worked for would include such a hostile race as part of their organization. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“From the outside, I suppose it would not. But the Assembly is open to any sentient race that has achieved faster-than-light travel. I suppose the nearest analogue would be your United Nations. The member states are not all the best of friends, from what we have been able to discern.”
There was an understatement. Yes, relations had been slowly improving over the last decade or so — and the joint Mars mission was a reflection of those improved relations — but there were still member states that caused far more problems than they solved. And yet they were still allowed to be part of the organization.
I nodded, and Raphael went on, “It is not the Assembly’s place or our inclination to interfere in the business of member races, since such interventions are rarely successful, but occasionally we have been forced to it, simply because the Reptilians’ depredations became too extreme to be overlooked. Afterward, they would retreat to their sector, as they always do, and we would allow them to isolate themselves and recover as necessary.”
“Why would the Assembly do that?” I asked. “It seems like the Reptilians are just going to keep doing what they’re doing if they have a base to operate from.”
“Because we strongly believe that all the sentient races of the galaxy — and there are many, the vast majority of whom have never troubled themselves with Earth — should have their own sanctuary, their own place where no one else dare interfere.”
I frowned. “But Mars isn’t their place!”
“Is it Earth’s?”
Well, he had me there. I would have thought we had more claim, since Mars was in our solar system, but maybe the Assembly didn’t see it that way. “Okay, but when they’re doing such awful things — ”
His fingers tightened on mine. “Then it becomes far more difficult, yes. And what they keep attempting to do here….” The words died away, and I saw him lift his shoulders. “That is far worse, because they are trying to harness a force that should not be theirs, one that should only exist for the people of the Earth. If, of course, they ever learn to use it properly.”
“What is it, really?” I asked with some curiosity. “That is, of course I’ve heard my whole life about Sedona’s energies, and I’ve experienced them for myself, felt how strong they are, but the one thing no one’s really explained to me is why those energies are there, of all places, and why they’re different from any other planetary energy fields that might exist.”
“You’re hoping for answers,” he said. “In most cases, I would be able to provide them. But in this instance, I really can’t say for sure. Our scientists have been trying to unravel this particular puzzle for thousands of years. For whatever reason, the energy fields in the Sedona area are so strong that even those untrained in their use can still tap into them somewhat. For someone like your mother, or Persephone Oliver, who has gifts that most ordinary humans don’t possess, those energies can become a potent weapon — but only if used in self-defense. That quality is the one thing about them the Reptilians have never been able to accept.”
I shifted so I was facing toward Raphael then, although our fingers remained entwined. I could feel his tighten on mine slightly as our eyes met. So difficult to keep myself from leaning forward and kissing him again, although I knew we needed to make sure the air between us was completely clear. “And is that why they keep trying? Because if they could somehow use it as a weapon — ”
“Then they would utterly destroy the world as you know it,” he said quietly. “I cannot say the human race would be annihilated, because the Reptilians do enjoy keeping their slaves. But I very much doubt it would be an existence that anyone would wish to have.”
No, probably not. I thought of Taryn then, face earnest as she tried to think of a way we could negotiate with the Reptilians. Some people would have laughed at her for being naïve. I’d never go that far, but it was clear she hadn’t grasped the whole picture. “Why now?” I asked, then shook my head. “I mean, not now now, exactly but why didn’t the Reptilians attempt to take over a long time ago, when there weren’t even any people living in the area? You’d think it would be easier.”
“What makes you think they did not?” His dark eyes were grave, watching me. “That is, you say there were no people living in the area, but the Yavapai and the Havasupai have been in the region for centuries. They did not dwell in Sedona proper, since they considered it sacred land, but it was because of its sacred nature that they came to its defense when the ‘lizard-men,’ as they called the Reptilians, attempted to establish a base there, hundreds of years ago. The tribes knew the power of the land, and used that energy for its defense, just as your mother — and Persephone Oliver, to a lesser extent — used it as well.”
“So the Reptilians went off to lick their wounds…”
“…and in the intervening time, the white men moved into the area and made it their own without clearly realizing the power of the land they’d claimed as theirs.”
“But if that’s the case, why did the Reptilians come back?”
Raphael’s face went very still. “Because they were invited.”
“‘Invited’?” I repeated. “By whom?”
“Your own people.” He hesitated for a few seconds, then gently released my hands so he could get up from the couch and move toward the view-screen with its image of crescent Earth. As I stared at him in shock, he went on, not looking at me, “That is to say, certain elements in your government. After contact was made in the middle part of your last century…deals were made. In exchange for gifts of technology, the Reptilians were allowed back into Sedona. They promised to stay quiet, to remain hidden, which they did for many years. They were merely waiting for the right time.”
The right time — which, according to my parents, had been that solstice in December, twenty-five years ago. I really didn’t want to think about the way our government, or at least certain people in it, had been all too willing to sell us out. But then, they probably hadn’t thought the Reptilians would turn on them like that. No, they couldn’t have been that naïve. More likely they had considered Sedona and the energy wells there expendable. What they hadn’t realized was that the Reptilians had more or less considered the entire human race expendable.
I shivered, and Raphael came back toward me at once, sinking down on the couch so he could take me in his arms. For a long moment I let him hold me, since I needed the warmth and reassurance of his touch. All right, even a day earlier, if someone had asked, I probably would have said Raphael was the least reassuring person in the universe. Now I knew better.
“I know it’s difficult to hear,” he murmured, then ran a comforting hand down my hair. “But I wanted you to have some perspective on what we were fighting. They do not give up. They suffer their defeats, but they are willing to wait and try again.”
“So what can stop them?” As much as it frightened me to ask the question, I had to know. Surely there had to be an answer, something besides this ongoing pattern of fight and retreat.
But Raphael was only silent for a long moment. Then he said sadly, “I don’t know.”
* * *
We sat quietly for some time afterward, just holding each other. I wondered if he would try to advance things further than that, but it seemed he was willing to go slowly. Maybe since he’d already waited a few thousand years for me to show up, he didn’t really want to rush into things.
Which, strangely, didn’t disappoint me as much as I thought it might have. Our conversation had put something of a damper on the passion that had flamed between us. Oh, I could still feel myself react to him, but in a more muted way, not with quite that same raging fire in my veins. Just as well, probably. I couldn’t go around like that all the time; I’d never be able to concentrate.
He did kiss me again, slowly, with a sort of wonder, hands tangling in my hair as
he held me close. I opened my mouth to him, savoring his taste, telling myself it was enough for now. This was all so strange and new that I needed time to come to terms with the way matters stood between us. There was still plenty of time for future intimacies.
When he let me go, he said, “I must return you home now. If I keep you away too long, your parents will begin to ask questions.”
“My parents.” Oh, yeah, that was going to be fun. Never mind that I was an adult and could make my own choices. I’d been balanced in a precarious state for the last few year or so, attempting to become more independent, but never quite managing it. Moving into the casita had been one step, and taking on part-time jobs at Aunt Kara’s UFO Depot store and the Taste of Sedona wine shop another, although even put together, those two jobs didn’t pay enough for me to support myself. Not that I really needed to. When I turned twenty-one, my parents had given me a large lump of cash, with careful instructions as to how to invest it — instructions I followed to the letter, since I didn’t know anything about managing a portfolio. I supposed that money could have come from my father being on the Paranormality TV show with Paul Oliver and my Uncle Lance all those years, but I had my doubts. Finances were never an issue for us, just as they were never an issue for my grandfather Gabriel. The star-folk they’d both come from might have exiled them here on Earth, but at least they’d done so in a way that ensured the exiles would never lack for creature comforts.
Raphael was silent for a moment. Brows pulling into a slight frown, he asked, “This is going to be a problem?”
“They’re going to freak out,” I said frankly.
“You Earth people do have an unusual turn of phrase.” His frown smoothed itself slightly as something seemed to occur to him. “But in your world you are certainly considered to be an adult with full autonomy. How much difficulty can they cause?”
“You don’t know my parents.” Raphael shot me an ironic glance at that remark, so I added, “All right, you know them slightly. But you don’t know them as my parents. When they find out that the former Otto the Soul Crusher has designs on their daughter, they’re going to go on the warpath.”
From the baffled look in his eyes, I got the impression he’d only followed about fifty percent of my comment. “‘The Soul Crusher’?”
“Never mind,” I said. “We all know that you’re not exactly on their list of favorite people, okay? Maybe after the Mars rescue, they’ve softened slightly, but I doubt that’s enough to make them think it’s okay for the two of us to be together.”
He seemed to absorb that observation, then gave the slightest lift of his shoulders. “Can they stop you?”
“No,” I replied. “But they can probably make my life hell before they finally give in.”
* * *
Raphael’s little transport gizmo — energy-jumper, whatever — was so finely tuned that after giving me a final kiss and promising me he would be in contact very soon, he was able to send me straight from his ship into the driver’s seat of my SUV. I sat there for a moment, blinking at the wall directly in front of the Beemer’s hood and trying to adjust to the abrupt change in scenery. His kiss seemed to linger on my lips. I pressed my fingers to my mouth, not wanting to lose a single second of that amazing sensation.
But it faded, as those things always did, and a few seconds later I resolutely pushed the button to fire up the ignition. A fine, cold rain had begun to fall, and I was glad that I hadn’t had to walk from the creek to my car. Had Raphael known, or was he merely trying to be discreet about the manner in which I reappeared in Sedona?
I took my time going home — which wasn’t saying much, since the house was only five minutes away from the shopping center where Raphael and I had met. A glance at the clock on the SUV’s dashboard told me I’d been gone a little more than two hours. Not really all that long to have your entire world turned upside down, I supposed.
Since I hadn’t been on Raphael’s ship for too ungodly an amount of time, I found myself hoping that my parents might still be at Kara’s house. After all, two hours was barely enough for that group to get up a good head of steam, most days. But when I pulled into the garage, I had to swallow my disappointment, since my parents’ steel-gray Mercedes was already sitting there, its surface faintly beaded with the same fine, misty rain I’d just driven through. They must have gotten home only a few minutes earlier.
I told myself to stay calm, then fished my lip gloss out of my purse so I could reapply it. A quick inspection in the rearview mirror told me I looked more or less normal. Yes, maybe my color was a little high, since usually I was fairly pale, like my mother, but the flush in my cheeks could easily be attributed to walking in the rain to get back to my car. After all, they thought I’d been shopping for the past two hours.
Once I felt reasonably together, I got out of the car and headed for the door that led into the house. When I opened it, I heard voices coming from the kitchen. Damn. That meant I had absolutely no chance of avoiding the gauntlet.
Head high, I strode into the kitchen, praying neither of my parents would notice anything strange. They were leaning up over the counter, my mother’s new silvery tablet computer propped in front of them.
“We had Thai two nights ago,” my father said, his tone not quite pleading, and despite everything, I had to smother a grin. My mother was the takeout queen of Sedona. Clearly, all the domestic genes in my family had gone straight to Kara. Or maybe she’d inherited her skills in the kitchen from her biological father. Lord knows my maternal grandmother was not the domestic type. Or so I’d heard. I’d never had the privilege of meeting the woman.
“But this new place just opened up,” my mother protested, then turned as she heard me enter. “Oh, there you are. I had no idea you planned to do quite that much shopping.”
“I guess the time just got away from me.” I moved quickly to one of the cupboards under the pretext of fetching myself a glass so I could get some water from the door in the fridge.
“Find anything?” my father asked.
Damn. Of course I hadn’t really been shopping, so I didn’t have anything to show for those two hours I’d been gone. I could say I hadn’t found anything I liked, but that was really out of character. If I went shopping, I always came back with something.
“Um….” I swung my purse off my shoulder with my free hand so I could set it on the kitchen table, and then heard a faint crackle inside, as if from a plastic bag. What the…? “Just a little something,” I said.
His eyebrows lifted. “Is it a secret?”
“No, of course not,” I told him. “We’re way past Christmas.” Praying I wasn’t making a colossal mistake, I reached into my purse and pulled out a small red plastic bag. Inside that box was a rectangular object.
A jewelry box.
“So you did get it after all?” my mother asked, apparently deciding the takeout debate could wait, since it was only a little after two in the afternoon.
Please, I thought, and opened the box.
Inside was the amethyst necklace I’d been coveting for over a month. It lay coiled in the box, the cut-stone beads that made up the “chain” shimmering in the kitchen light, the central pendant with its deeper stone and accent pale blue topazes sparkling up into my surprised eyes.
I had no idea how he’d done it, but I sent a mental thank-you winging upward to where Raphael’s ship circled in silent orbit, undetectable by any human technology.
“Um, yes,” I said. “I decided I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted more, so I sort of blew the whole wad on the necklace.” When I had a chance, I’d have to ask Raphael exactly how that particular piece of jewelry had ended up in my purse. I prayed that he hadn’t just spirited it away without paying for it somehow. The necklace was worth a decent chunk of change, and I didn’t want to think of some poor shopkeeper being deprived of the income.
“It’s gorgeous,” my mother said, but there was the faintest hint of disapproval in her voice, as if she wasn�
��t sure I should have been quite that extravagant. But even if I had spent all my Christmas money on it, rather than having Raphael get it for me, that was my choice, wasn’t it? She didn’t have any business telling me what I should or shouldn’t spend my money on.
I realized I was getting a little worked up…probably because the choice I was thinking of really didn’t have much to do with the necklace at all. I hated lying to my parents, but right then I didn’t know what else to do.
“So,” I said, after I’d closed up the box and put it back in my purse, “I would have thought you all would still be up at Aunt Kara’s, hashing over the Mars mission.”
My father, who up until that point had appeared faintly amused by the exchange between my mother and me, suddenly looked quite sober. “Well, Logan was tired, and Grace wanted to take him home. So they left, and everything kind of deflated after that. There really wasn’t that much left to discuss, anyway. The astronauts are on their way home, and Raphael made sure they won’t remember anything of what happened, so that’s the end of that chapter.”
I thought of everything Raphael had told me while I was on his ship and wasn’t so sure. Sure, we’d snatched their prize away from the Reptilians, but they were the proverbial bad penny. They always seemed to turn up sooner or later, and I didn’t know if we’d continue to prevail against them. Sooner or later, our luck would have to run out.
In the next instant, I realized that allowing myself to think of Raphael had been a very bad idea, because my mother’s eyes narrowed.
“What aren’t you telling us, Callista?”
Panic lanced through me, and I immediately shook my head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mom.”
My father looked similarly puzzled. “Kirsten?”
“I got a flash of something just then.” Her eyes, bluer than mine, might as well have been laser beams boring into my brain. “It felt like guilt.”
Damn. Now, I still hadn’t been able to prove conclusively that my parents possessed the ability to read my thoughts the way Taryn Oliver could, but even garden-variety human parents had a sort of sixth sense when it came to telling if their kids were trying to hide something. With my parents — especially my mother — that sixth sense seemed to have developed to a preternatural level.
sedona files 05 - falling angels Page 9
