It felt bizarre to come into physical contact with another male! Actually, angels never made physical contact unless they were in battle with one another or mating—not once they had reached puberty—not even with their parents. It took several moments to overcome the nausea and focus, but they almost instantly connected as soon as they had adjusted contact to align those brain centers that controlled telepathic communications.
Someone entered the room where they were standing and ordered them to sit. They ignored it, continuing to emit the distress call until they were forcibly separated.
They half fell half sat in the chairs provided when they were wrenched apart, but they exchanged a private glance of triumph.
They had heard a response!
Praise the ancient ones!
They just hoped whoever had responded to their distress call had managed to determine their location.
Dante discovered when he finally turned his attention to the humans on the other side of the glass from them that they were gaping at the two of them. He felt his face heat with discomfort.
They are gaping because they have not seen angels before, Galen said reassuringly. Not because they saw us touch one another.
I am going to touch you with my fist if you go into my head again without my leave! Dante growled.
Galen sent him a startled look. I did not know you did not intend for me to hear that.
Dante sent him a look of horror. Aeon’s balls! We are joined!
We are not! I am damned well not mating with you so do not get any ideas!
I will knock your teeth down your throat if you suggest that I would desire to again! I told you we should not try it!
You would rather stay here?
I would not! But we should have considered before we joined. Now we know the tales were not purely myth! And it is too late!
Do you desire me?
Dante gave him a look laced with both horror and fury. I most certainly do not!
Then we cannot be joined that way because I can assure you I do not desire you either. I do not know how this works, but it cannot be the way it was always believed it would.
“Rise! Get up!” A male voice barked at them, they supposed, over a communications device.
It jolted through both of them and they whipped a look around to discover they had been left alone.
“Get up! Show some respect, you alien bastards! The President is here!”
Their jaws tightening in anger, Dante and Galen exchanged a look. They got to their feet, however, as a door opened at the back of the room the humans occupied and a man entered. Slightly mollified by the fact that the humans had all stood in respect, they watched the man advance to the front and settle in the chair that had apparently been left for him.
He eyed them, his expression carefully neutral. “How thick is this glass?”
“Bomb proof,” the man beside him wearing a military uniform responded. “There’s a speaker there so they can hear you.”
“They understand English?”
“As far as we know.”
The President returned his attention to Dante and Galen. “You were both at the White House?”
How would he know? He was not there.
“Yes,” Galen responded. “You were not.”
He ignored that comment as if Galen hadn’t even spoken, making it clear that he was there to ask questions not answer them. “You have attacked our people. Why? What is it that you want?”
“The gods attacked you—using our people.”
The President frowned. “You’re saying there is a warring group that attacked us, but you aren’t a part of that?”
That explanation might be the simplest, Dante said pointedly.
But it is not the truth and if they discover the truth it would compromise any alliance we had managed to make.
But we do not know the truth, Dante growled. We can only speculate ourselves.
“In a sense,” Galen said in comprise.
“They are making war,” the President said angrily. “There is no mistake about that!”
“They are being manipulated. We do not know how. We are not entirely certain of why the overlords are doing this, but this is not something the changelings are doing of their own volition. Somehow the gods are controlling their minds and making them attack. We are the watchers. We are the guardians of the human preserve. We do not make war on humans!”
He had scarcely gotten the denial out when gasps from the room facing them alerted them that something was happening. Feeling a prickling sensation, Dante surged to his feet and whipped a look around the room.
He had a split second to dodge the sword that was swung at his head and would have decapitated him. Galen was not as lucky. He leapt back as the berserker swung but caught the tip of the blade with his shoulder as he stumbled on the chains binding his ankles.
They’d called a berserker! Aeon help them! They were bound hand and foot and trapped in a room with almost no room to maneuver!
And without a weapon of any description!
For the first few minutes, all Dante could focus on was the blade the changeling was swinging at him. It was pure luck that he threw up his hands to ward off a blow and the blade caught the chain, cutting it as cleanly as if it was intended to hack through steel rather than flesh and bone.
With his hands freed an idea formed.
He caught the chain that had been broken and began swinging it. Unfortunately, with one end still attached to his ankle manacles it was virtually useless. He might be able to do something with the full length of it.
He was not keen on the thought that the only way to make use of it was to allow the berserker to detach it the same way he had broken the chain at his wrists, however.
He did not have to offer his groin as a possible target for the blade, thankfully!
Galen tripped again, sprawling on his back on the floor. When the berserker attacked, he threw up his feet to fend him off and his ankle chain caught the blade. Dante grabbed one of the chairs they’d been sitting in, ripped it from the floor where it had been bolted and slung it at the berserker hard enough he staggered away from Galen.
Galen leapt to his feet, swinging the freed chain and then pitching it toward the rogue angel’s blade. It struck the blade and the end swung around it, tangling the deadly steel and allowing Galen to jerk it free of their attacker’s hands. Galen and Dante leapt on him then, subduing him and then rendering him unconscious.
Breathing heavily from the battle, they didn’t even have the chance to catch their breaths before they saw the glowing light that presaged another angel beaming into the room with them and then another and another. Within seconds, the room was filled, thankfully, not with rogues but with allies.
Two of the angels took the rogue and beamed out with him before he could regain consciousness. Dante and Galen, now with a small army of their own at their backs, turned in time to see the President being hustled from the other room.
“We can be allies against a common foe!” Galen shouted.
The President halted, throwing off the hold of the men trying to protect him. “You can’t attack us and call yourself friends,” he said angrily.
“We were attacked! Did you not see that? These rogues are not in control of their own minds! They are being manipulated to attack! We can stop them if you will give us the chance! We can imprison them until we can find a way to reverse whatever it is the gods have done to them, but we will be enemies if you are determined to kill! And then we will all die because you cannot defeat the gods without our help. And we cannot defeat them without yours!”
The President studied them for a long moment. “This is our home world and we will fight to the last man to protect it!” he said forcefully.
Dante stared at him and then turned to exchange a look with Galen. Galen shook his head slightly in warning, but Dante decided to ignore it. “This is NOT your home world. This is your prison. The remnants of the human race were exiled here
after the last intergalactic war and the treaty of Hilbradease and we, the fallen, were exiled here to watch over you. To make sure the human race remained in exile, contained here at the far edge of the universe, and could no longer be a threat to other civilizations.
“By the treaty of Hilbradease, this world was designated as the human preserve, but it will become your graveyard if you are not careful.”
“As a show of friendship, we will capture the changelings and hold them so that they cannot do more harm and then we hope that we will be able to speak about an alliance between your people and ours!” Galen added quickly.
The secret service hustled the President out after that, hurrying him down a long hallway and into an elevator. The elevator took them down four levels and they hurried into a secure vault and sealed the door.
The scientists of the facility had already been warned of the breach and had hurried into the vault before them.
“What did you make of that?” the President asked the Secretary of Defense.
The Secretary frowned. “Sounded like pure fiction to me, Mr. President, but then again if anybody had told me a few weeks ago that we’d be conferencing with aliens I would’ve told them they were off their rocker!”
“If he told you this was our technology we’d stolen,” one of the scientists volunteered, “then it wasn’t fiction.”
That caught the President’s attention and he stopped the secret service agent who would’ve pushed the man back. “And you are?”
“Dr. Robert Heinlein—Head of R&D of the Particle Transporter. We’ve been collaborating on the research uncovered in Kuwait and … well the SETI people have managed to decipher a good deal of the information encoded in our own DNA. It matches.”
The President blinked at him. “Matches? You’re saying …?”
“Sir, it looks like we hid the data in our own DNA. We’ve been able to match enough to suggest that, anyway.”
“We didn’t steal alien technology?” the Secretary of Defense exclaimed. “It was our own? How’s that possible? We haven’t even been able to test DNA for long.”
The President studied him thoughtfully for several moments. “It would be possible if what that alien said was true.”
* * * *
Claire had wavered for days between anger and despair. Being a single mom was a scary proposition even though she was a very long way from being an unwed teen. It was even scarier when she considered that she wouldn’t be having an ordinary baby.
What could she do if it had wings like Dante? There would be no hiding it!
And hate was already stirring because there’d been a half a dozen blitz attacks by angels—that she’d heard of. There could have been far more. They were so cut off from everything!
Not but what that was a good thing considering their circumstances! And they had been busy enough trying to settle into the new lives they were struggling to make for themselves that they hadn’t had a lot of time to mourn for the lives they’d lost or suffer from boredom.
But that was small comfort when all was said and done.
The garden she’d started was a total disaster—she had a black thumb!—but it still offered her some solace. It was a quiet place where she could focus on something besides her personal problems.
Which was why she wasn’t terribly pleased when she finally got up and discovered Nick had followed her into the garden.
“Can we talk?”
She glared at him. She hadn’t spoken to him beyond ‘pass the salt’ since his proposal the week before and it wasn’t something she wanted to discuss. “I’d rather not,” she said tightly.
He stopped her by blocking her path. “I screwed up, ok? I know. I’m trying to make things right here.”
Claire pressed her lips together angrily.
“I didn’t mean it that way!” Nick let out an exasperated sigh. “Look! I never thought I’d be this bad at this kind of thing, but …. Babe! I love you! I’m just … I guess it’s because it’s important that I can’t get it out without sticking my foot in my mouth!”
That speech gave her pause, dissipated her anger like mist before the sun.
He caught her shoulders. “I’m crazy about you! I have been since the moment we met. I want to marry you. I told you that before I found out you were pregnant. Before any of this shit happened. I still want that.”
Claire studied his expression carefully. “You mean it? You aren’t just saying that because you have this misguided idea that I need to be rescued?”
He pulled her close. “You can’t tell I’m crazy about you?” he murmured.
Claire felt her resistance melting. It would be so easy to let him take charge and ‘fix’ everything for her. He wanted to. He seemed to want to, anyway. And Nick was very, very good at fixing things.
“But … what about the baby?”
His arms tightened. “I guess we’re having a baby.”
For the first time since she’d realized she was probably pregnant, Claire felt a thrill of anticipation go through her. She’d never really thought about herself as a mother. She thought of it now with a mixture of wonder and fear and hopefulness.
Maybe she should take him up on his offer? She didn’t think he was going into it blindly and it was scary as hell to think of trying to handle the ‘unknown’ all by herself.
She thought if the baby hadn’t been half alien, if she hadn’t been on the run with her old life in shambles, she could’ve handled being a single mother. She didn’t feel competent to handle her new reality all alone.
She knew she could count on Maddie to try to help her, but the truth was that Maddie was probably less qualified to handle this than she was. Maddie had married her college sweetheart, Robert Heinlein, right out of school and although she was used to dealing with life on her own to a degree, she knew she had Robert to fall back on. And there were a lot of life’s difficulties that she relied on Robert to handle.
Nick felt that Claire was weakening toward the idea and searched his mind for something he could say that might settle the deal between them and wouldn’t set Claire’s back up again.
Before he could think of anything he felt comfortable trying, the birdman abruptly materialized in the garden.
Fucking hell!
What the hell are you doing here? I thought you were dead!
Dante narrowed his eyes on the arms that tightened around Claire, holding her. I came to be certain that Claire was safe. She is my woman, he growled. That is my child nestled within her womb. I do not expect her to come to me now—when our people are at war. I would never ask that of her—to stand with me against her own people—but when our people become allies I will return for her.
Now that’s where you’re wrong, Nick responded. Claire is my woman and whatever’s in her belly … well that’s mine, too. And she just agreed to marry me.
The End.
Read an Excerpt from The Watchers, part one of the watchers saga.
THE WATCHERS
by
Kaitlyn O’Connor
Chapter One
Claire wasn’t certain what woke her. She might have heard or felt something that filtered through her sleeping mind and roused the conscious side of her brain. It may have been the tiny animal portion of her brain, still primitive and ready to react instantaneously to threat, that brought her swimming upward swiftly toward full awareness.
Whatever it was, the alarms failed her at the most critical juncture of her life, the one time she needed her instincts to survive, because she didn’t actually have time to react. She was so sluggish even when she reached complete consciousness she couldn’t process what she’d detected and determine what the threat was or how to react to it.
Then again, none of her instincts might have been triggered.
She’d gone to bed late and, as tired as she was from almost a week of breaking down the old nest, sorting and packing belongings, and then moving and unloading and sorting, she’d been too wired to fall asleep.
That meant she might never have completely achieved her goal of restful sleep, not even for a matter of minutes, but she was aware of a rapid rise from the depths toward the light of awareness.
She did know that she emerged with a jerk from unconsciousness to consciousness, even though she wasn’t certain what had made her awaken, and that it was the ominous, distinct sound of breaking glass just as she reached the horizon that made her bolt upright.
Her feet hit the floor beside her bed before she had even fully assimilated the sound, but her mind was working furiously with it. Was it close? Had the sound come from inside her apartment? What had broken? Who broke it? Was it an intruder? Or did something just fall? How could anything just fall over, though?
The first ripple of motion that went through the floor beneath her feet and made her stagger was hardly discernible. She thought, in fact, that she was still so drunk with sleep that she’d simply lost her equilibrium momentarily.
The second vibration left no room for interpretation. It was so violent it seemed to roll the floor beneath her feet like the waves of the ocean rolling toward shore.
She thought she screamed, but she was never afterwards certain. There was a roar that increased in volume to deafening proportions in a matter of seconds, swallowing her. The only thing she was completely certain of was that she’d woken to a life or death situation and she had to react—quickly—if she wanted to live.
Exiles Page 15
