Maybe she was being a little impulsive, inviting the Olivers over so soon, but Kara hoped Persephone’s powers would prevail where hypnotherapy had not. Sooner or later they’d have to get through the impenetrable wall that seemed to have enclosed Grayson’s past. Best that it should come from Persephone, who would be sympathetic no matter what happened.
Funny how someone she’d only known for a few months had become her best friend. Kara’s circle was large, but she counted most of them as acquaintances and not close friends. She and Kiki had always been very close, of course, though that wasn’t quite the same as having a friend of your same age and experience, more or less. Until Paul Oliver came along, Persephone’s love life hadn’t been all that great, either. She knew what it was like to be a single woman in her early thirties with the sort of job that tended to scare off any halfway decent prospects.
Anyway, Kara had to hope that Seph would like Grayson and want to help. She really didn’t see how anyone could not like Grayson, but maybe Persephone would think Kara was rushing things. Maybe so. She didn’t want to admit it to herself, but Kara knew the current state of affairs couldn’t continue indefinitely.
* * *
On Tuesday she put together her famous Greek stew in the crock pot so she wouldn’t be rushing around at the last minute, trying to get everything ready in the scant hour between the time the shop closed and when the Olivers were due for dinner. She tried to impress on Grayson the need to be ready for company at a little after six, and he nodded, but she wasn’t sure how much sank in. He’d been preoccupied with the motorcycle, whose carburetor was proving to be a little more temperamental than he had planned.
So she wasn’t all that surprised when she got home around six-thirty and found him still out in the garage, grease smudges on his chin and cheekbone, and his hands not fit for company in their current state.
“You have got to take a shower,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “My friends are going to be here in half an hour.”
“That’s plenty of time,” he replied, fiddling with some unidentifiable slender brass part.
“Um, no, not really. Come on, Grayson — you’ve been messing with that thing all day.”
“All right.” An expression of irritation passed over his features, but almost at once he relaxed and shook his head, as if annoyed with himself. “Sorry, Kara. I’ll go make myself pretty.”
“You’re pretty right now,” she said, and gave him a swift kiss while avoiding the grease smudge on his chin.
He got up then and went inside the house, thankfully in the direction of the master bath. For the last few days they’d given up any pretense of him having separate accommodations in Kiki’s old room.
Somewhat relieved, Kara went back to the kitchen to crumble the feta cheese and get the kalamata olives ready to be added to the stew. Since it was a one-dish meal, about all that was left was to prep the salad and heat up the loaf of bread she’d bought at Wildflower on her way home from the shop.
She didn’t know whether Persephone had been an on-time sort of person prior to hooking up with Paul Oliver, but the couple could always be counted on to be punctual. So Kara wasn’t surprised when the doorbell rang at one minute past seven. Grayson, of course, was nowhere in sight. She’d have to make excuses for him and hope he wouldn’t take too much longer.
Persephone enveloped Kara in a hug when she opened the door. “We’ve been so out of touch — but Lance told us about the UFO and the MIBs — ”
“Yesterday’s news,” Kara said, with what she hoped was an airy wave of the hand. “Come on in.”
Persephone and Paul followed Kara into the kitchen, where Paul sniffed the air appreciatively.
“That smells amazing.”
“It’s Greek stew.”
He threw a look of mock-dismay at his wife. “So you’re half Greek, Persephone, but it’s the Swedish gal who ends up making me Greek stew?”
“If you thought you married me for my cooking, we’re both in a world of hurt.”
“No, it was all your other sterling qualities, fortunately.”
They exchanged fond glances, and Kara felt something inside her twist a little. This was what she wanted with Grayson — this feeling of being so easy, so relaxed. But was that possible when so much of him was still hidden from her?
“My apologies for Grayson,” she said then. “He got a little caught up in working on the bike, and I had to pry him away from a carburetor. He should be out of the shower in a few minutes.”
“No problem,” Paul said. “My stomach can hang on for a little while longer.” He glanced out the sliding glass doors, where the red rocks above the backyard were beginning to turn even redder with the coming of sunset. “You mind if I take a look at your yard? I still haven’t had a chance to really check out the medicine wheel Michael made for you.”
“Absolutely.”
“But only if you open the wine first,” Persephone put in. She handed Paul the bottle of cabernet she was carrying.
“Opener?” he asked, looking resigned.
Suppressing a smile, Kara went to the odds and ends drawer and pulled out a corkscrew, then handed it to him. He struggled a little with the foil but eventually got the cork out. “Glasses?”
Kara produced those as well, and he poured a decent measure into each wine glass before snagging one for himself and letting himself out into the yard.
“Poor dear,” Persephone remarked. “I’m probably better at that than he is, but I like to make him feel useful.”
“Yeah, right. I’m guessing he’s more than a little useful.”
The other woman cocked her head slightly and twisted a dark curl around one finger. “Oh, okay. He’s definitely useful. And decorative. But enough about my husband. Tell me about this mystery man. We’re gone five days and you’ve already found someone?”
“More like ‘finally found someone,’ but yes. It seems kind of crazy, but — ”
“These days I don’t worry about crazy so much. It’s easier that way. How did you meet him?”
“Well, that’s kind of complicated.” Even now Kara wasn’t sure exactly how to explain what had happened, although she knew the truth would have to come out at some point. She drank some wine, hoping that might make the confession a little easier. “He just sort of…stumbled over my doorstep, in a manner of speaking.”
“Ah.” If Persephone the psychic had picked up more from Kara’s statement than its face value, she didn’t seem to show it.
But then Kara thought she heard movement down the hallway, and she looked past Persephone to see Grayson cutting through the living room on his way to the kitchen. His hair was still a little damp, but otherwise he looked more than presentable, in clean jeans and the one button-up shirt she’d bought him, with the sleeves rolled back slightly because of the warmth of the day. “Here he is. Grayson, this is my friend Persephone. Persephone, this is Gray — ”
The word broke off abruptly, because Kara watched as Persephone turned to greet Grayson…only to see the psychic turn white. She was always pale, but now she looked as if she were going to faint. The wine glass slipped from her fingers and fell with a crash to the floor.
“Oh, my God,” she whispered.
Grayson looked at Persephone in confusion, then over at Kara.
Kara asked, past the constriction of worry in her throat, “Seph, what’s the matter?”
Persephone shook her head. “It’s not possible. He’s…he’s one of them!”
Somehow Kara managed to ask the question, even though her own hands had begun to shake. When a psychic had a reaction like that, it was not a good thing. “One of who?”
It was Paul who answered. Apparently he had headed back toward the house as soon as he’d seen Grayson appear. The astrophysicist shut the sliding door behind him and said, “One of the alien/human hybrids.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Kara shook her head, wanting to disbelieve, knowing the only way she could handle this was to deny
what they had said. “That’s not possible.”
“We were there,” Paul stated, looking grim. He glanced over at Grayson, who had watched the exchange with an expression of complete bewilderment on his face. “We saw them. We know what they look like.”
“Oh, come on. He’s as human as you and I are.”
“No, he’s not.” Persephone stared at Grayson, glassy-eyed, rather like a small desert rodent mesmerized by a snake. “He may look it, but he’s not.”
For the first time Grayson spoke. “What are you saying? That I’m — what? Some sort of science experiment?”
“You could put it that way,” Paul replied. He, too, was watching Grayson with extreme care, but more the way a cop might regard someone with whom he’d had questionable dealings in the past. “So you don’t remember anything?”
“No.” The green eyes were harder than Kara had ever seen them, glittering with repressed emotion. Was it anger? Confusion? Could he even feel those things?
Had he ever felt anything for her?
“I think I’m going to be sick,” she whispered, and she turned from them and ran, ran down the hallway to the guest bathroom, where she dropped to her knees and vomited up the wine she’d just drunk and the little that remained of her meager lunch. She clung to the bowl and gasped, thinking of his hands on her, of him inside her, when all the time he’d been some alien thing, some construct —
She retched again, over and over, until it felt as if she were puking up her very guts, as if she were trying to expel the alien taint from within her body. Then she realized her frame was racked not just with sickness, but sobs, as she wept over the loss of what she thought she’d had with him, of what she thought he’d meant to her.
Someone’s hand then, gently stroking her hair. Persephone’s voice. “I’m so, so sorry, Kara.”
Doubled over with wretchedness, Kara could only continue to cling to the toilet, the cold porcelain under her fingers somehow holding her down, the only thing connecting her with reality. She choked, “I — I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t.” From somewhere Persephone brought out a damp washcloth and began to wipe the heat and the sick from Kara’s cheeks. “I’m sorry I broke it to you like that. But when I saw him — it just came over me in a wave, and…it just sort of spilled out.”
“It’s all right.” Somehow Kara found the strength to loosen her grip on the toilet bowl, to force her shaky legs into a standing position. “It’s better that I know.”
“Paul’s with him now. He seems a little…shell-shocked.”
As well he might, she supposed. If hearing the truth had been terrible for her, what must it have been for Grayson? To find out that you weren’t you, not a real man, but something built by aliens for their own inscrutable purposes?
The nausea had passed, and now Kara only felt spent, as if she’d just spent a day running uphill in the heat. She got one of the little paper cups out of its dispenser and rinsed out her mouth, not once, not twice, but three times, and then pulled out another cup and drank down enough water so she wasn’t feeling quite so dehydrated. Now her body had been more or less taken care of.
She wished she could say the same thing for her spirit.
“What am I supposed to do now?” she whispered. “How can I go back and face…him? Is he a he? Or is he an it?”
Persephone gave her a look that seemed to say, You’d know that better than I would… But she only replied, still in the gentle, soothing voice usually reserved for her clients, “He’s a he. Of course he is. And it’s obvious he’s not under their control…at least it doesn’t feel that way. Something very strange is going on.”
“Well, that’s Sedona for you.”
A twitch of the other woman’s finely arched brows, as if she knew all too well the hurt Kara was hiding under the glass-sharp edge of brittle humor. “Do you want to wait here? We’ll figure something out if you don’t want to see him…”
Kara shook her head. What good would hiding in a bathroom do her? She had to face him, face what he was. A convulsive spasm of her hand, and the little paper cup was crushed flat. She threw it into the trash. “I’m all right.”
Persephone didn’t look all that convinced, but she didn’t say anything, only nodded and let Kara exit the bathroom and head back into the kitchen. Grayson was sitting at the little table in the nook, head down, hands buried in his thick hair as if he were trying to feel his way through it to the secrets buried within his skull.
Seeing him like that, Kara felt a stab of pity go through her, unexpected as a knife thrust. It was fine for her to run to the bathroom and moan the loss of what might have been, but at least she was still herself. She hadn’t lost her identity, only to discover the truth in all its horror.
Paul looked over at them. The set of his mouth was grimmer than Kara had ever seen it. “You okay?”
She nodded but didn’t quite trust herself to speak.
“You get anything?” Persephone asked.
A shake of the head. “He still claims not to remember anything.”
At that remark Grayson finally glanced up. His green eyes glinted as he said, “I don’t remember anything. I don’t know what you people are talking about!”
“I know you don’t,” Persephone said, and her voice still sounded curiously gentle. She added, her gaze fixed on Paul, “He really doesn’t. I don’t know what’s going on, and I doubt we’ll figure it out tonight, but I’m not getting anything bad off him.”
“Except that he looks like about a hundred other men back at Secret Canyon who tried to kill us.”
Improbably, a dimple flickered into existence next to her mouth for about a second before it disappeared again. “Well, yes, besides that.”
The timer on the oven went off, and Kara started. Oh, right. The damn bread.
She hurried across the kitchen, glad to have something to do, glad she could busy herself with locating some pot holders to pull the bread on its cookie sheet from out of the oven. The watching eyes of the trio at the table in the nook felt heavy on the back of her neck, and after she set the cookie sheet down on the counter she turned around and snapped, “Well, what was I supposed to do? Let it burn?”
“Of course not,” Persephone soothed. “In fact, I think we should all just sit down and have something to eat and try to figure this out.”
“You what?” Paul demanded, in tones that suggested he thought she’d finally taken leave of her senses.
“Yes,” she said serenely. “Kara, do you need help with anything?”
Not sure of exactly the best way to respond, Kara pointed at the refrigerator. “Um…salad?”
“Got it.”
And Persephone sailed over the fridge, got out the bag of romaine lettuce and the package of tomatoes and a bottle of Caesar dressing, and set to, since the salad bowl and tongs had already been sitting out on the countertop. Grayson and Paul looked at each other in bemusement, as if they didn’t quite know what to do with themselves.
“Paul, darling, can you get the wine glasses? And Grayson, the bottle of cab? Although I think we’ll probably end up needing more than just the one…”
“I’ve got plenty in the wine rack in the dining room,” Kara said faintly. She didn’t quite know what she should do, but she thought, after she forced herself to eat something, getting mercifully drunk might be a very good thing.
“Great.” Persephone sprinkled some Parmesan cheese on top of the dressing, added the succulent little grape tomatoes, and then finished off the salad with a handful of croutons.
The two men silently gathered up the wine and the glasses and headed out to the dining room. Persephone picked up the salad and followed them. Feeling as if she’d just been dropped into some bizarre alternate reality where it was considered perfectly normal to sit down to dinner with an alien, Kara took up a pair of pot holders and lifted the ceramic crock out of its metal housing and carried it in to the dining room. She’d already set down a trivet to protect the
table from the crock, so she put the container of stew there, then murmured that she’d be back in a bit with the bread and butter.
They were all hovering around the table, as if unsure as to where they should sit. No surprise, she thought. Neither Paul nor Persephone probably wanted her sitting next to Grayson, but if they were seated across from one another, things could be even more awkward. She was pretty sure she couldn’t manage to make it all through dinner while staring into those green eyes and trying to decide if she still saw anything human in them.
But they also couldn’t all stand here like a bunch of overgrown partygoers in the world’s most awkward game of musical chairs. She cleared her throat and said, “Grayson, how about you sit at the head of the table, and Paul on your right, and Persephone on your left…”
They all hastened to take the places she’d indicated, and she sat down in the chair at the foot of the table. Yes, she’d still be across from Grayson, but since the table was a rectangle, there was a lot more space dividing them than there would have been if they’d taken the seats Paul and Persephone now occupied.
For a minute no one said anything. There was the food to occupy them, the ritual passing of the salad bowl, the breaking of the bread, the pouring of more wine. Kara forced herself to put a bite of salad in her mouth, then another. To her surprise, she found it tasted good. The sweetness of the tomatoes and the crisp flavor of the greens seemed to erase the last of the sick taste from her mouth. There was water in addition to the cabernet Paul and Persephone had brought, and she drank some of that, too, made sure she had taken at least three healthy swallows before she allowed herself to drink any of the wine.
But even so, there came the inevitable time when the salads were done and the empty bowls pushed aside. Ladling out the stew and passing around the bread took up a few more minutes, and at last Persephone said, “Since I know none of you know what to say, I’ll start.”
Paul lifted an eyebrow, and Grayson looked a little alarmed.
“Don’t worry — I don’t bite.” Her gaze slid to Paul for a second, and she added, with the faintest hint of a smile, “Well, unless you ask. Anyway, Kara’s probably mentioned that I’m a psychic.”
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