So I supposed the truth was that my father had been some sort of otherworldly being. Alien? Angel? With a name like Gabriel, that didn’t seem out of the bounds of reason, but the whole thing was so crazy I didn’t know what I was supposed to think.
“Okay,” I said at length, as Marybeth watched me carefully with that expression which told me she ached for a hit of something to make this moment a little less real, a little less painful. Too bad. If I had to tough this out, she sure as hell would, too. “So you walked out and left your weird little girl behind, and then went on to your perfect life here in Taos. I’m guessing Mr. Engle isn’t exactly hurting for cash?”
“No,” she replied, a line forming between her brows for the first time as she frowned. “Ken has been very good to me.”
“Good for Ken.” I set down my untouched mug of tea and stood. “Okay, now that you’ve told me what happened, I guess I can see why Mart — why Agent Jones thought I should talk to you. What I’m supposed to do about it, I don’t know for sure, but I guess that’s not your problem. Can you take me back to my hotel? I’ve got some alien ass to kick.”
“Kirsten — ” Marybeth’s face was white.
“No, really,” I said. “Time’s a-wasting. Now I’ve only got seven days until the solstice, and I’m going to have to use up part of one driving back to Sedona. So I really just want you to take me back, please.”
As if realizing that any further argument was pointless, she put down her mug as well and rose. “If that’s what you want.”
“It is.”
* * *
The drive back was even more awkwardly silent than the one to her house had been. I stared out at the landscape as it passed by, thinking it looked a lot like I felt — bare and windswept, bleak. Maybe there was some beauty here, but I sure hadn’t found it.
I wondered who this Ken Engle was whom she’d married, whether she’d gotten sober first, or whether he’d met her while she was still drinking and was the one to get her on the straight and narrow. Probably didn’t matter one way or another. Not now. Thinking about that kept me from thinking about anything else, though, so the idle speculation did have its uses.
As we’d climbed into the Range Rover, I’d told her that I was staying at the Taos Inn, so she knew where to drop me off. When she pulled into an empty space in the hotel’s parking lot, she began, “Kirsten — ”
“Don’t,” I said. “Really, it looks like you’ve made a great life for yourself here, and I’m sorry I had to interrupt that. But now that I’ve heard what you were supposed to tell me, I’ve got to go.” I reached out for the door handle.
“Just — ” she began, and hesitated. Then, “Just be careful.”
Not really trusting myself to reply, I nodded and got out, then hurried away from the SUV. I didn’t bother to look back.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Because I hadn’t been thinking all that clearly when I made the reservation, I’d booked my room for two nights. As I hurried up the stairs at the Taos Inn, though, I knew I had to get out of there right away. I didn’t want to stay one second longer than I had to. I went in and packed up the few items I’d left out — toothbrush and toothpaste, the hairbrush I’d dropped on the bathroom vanity as I hurried to leave the room to meet Marybeth.
I grabbed my suitcase and went down to the lobby. “I need to check out,” I told the front desk clerk, and slid my key across the counter.
She took it, looked me up on the computer, and frowned. “You’re not staying tonight?”
“Something’s come up.”
Another frown. “Well, I’m not sure if I can give you a refund with this late of notice — ”
“It’s okay,” I told her. Of course there was no way I could let her know what was really going on, that giving up an extra hundred and fifty bucks over a late cancellation was really not going to make a difference in the grand scheme of things.
She bit her lip, worked on the computer, and said, “I can do a partial refund of fifty percent. Is that all right?”
“It’s fine,” I said. All I wanted was to hit the road, put Taos and Marybeth Swenson and her revelations behind me.
Of course, I knew it wasn’t as simple as that. I waited while the clerk closed out my bill, then signed the invoice, shoved my copy in my purse, and gathered up my suitcase. She stared after me with puzzled eyes, as if she could tell something was very wrong but didn’t quite know how to put her finger on it.
The sky was beginning to cloud up again. I stowed my suitcase in the back of the Jeep, got in, and started it up. With my luck, it would start snowing again as I was driving, but I wasn’t going to worry about that now. I glanced over at the clock on the dash. Eleven forty-two. Pretty sad that it had taken less than an hour for Marybeth Swenson to turn my life upside down all over again.
No. Don’t think about that now. Just drive.
But I couldn’t help thinking about it as I headed south once again, driving at least ten miles over the speed limit. That voice was back in my head again, the one that seemed to keep whispering, Hurry, hurry, hurry. Getting a speeding ticket would only slow me down further, though, so I eased up on the gas pedal just a little.
You didn’t talk until you were almost two…have you ever been sick a day in your life?…you asked me if I’d had that dream again…
How I wished I could get her voice out of my head, come up with some way to forget the things she had told me.
Ironic that I had just told Michael a few days earlier I knew I wasn’t psychic.
Guess this lady was protesting just a little too much.
And Martin Jones had known. I couldn’t begin to figure out how, and for some reason that made me angry. Maybe being angry was good. If I were angry, then I’d be less likely to be scared.
Who was Gabriel? What had led him to that club in Scottsdale almost twenty-four years ago? Just some old-fashioned alien slumming?
My brain was doing a pretty good job of flogging me, and I’d barely managed to crawl my way through Española, which didn’t look any better on a cold Monday morning. Scowling, I jacked in my iPod and turned up the volume, but the Foo Fighters weren’t giving me much reassurance, either.
Run and tell all the angels that everything is all right…
No, everything was definitely not all right. And I wasn’t too happy with the angels at this moment, if this mysterious “Gabriel” turned out to be one of them.
The day turned darker as I went south, but it wasn’t until I was back on Interstate 40 and crossing the Continental Divide that rain began to hit the windshield. Mouth tightening, I turned on the wipers and told myself to be glad that I was at an elevation where the precipitation was only rain and not snow.
Easy to say. I wasn’t feeling too glad about anything at that moment.
I didn’t know exactly what I was feeling, though. Okay, so booking the room for two nights had been pretty stupid. Maybe in the back of my mind I had thought that Marybeth and I would have some teary reunion, and she’d apologize for all the terrible things she’d done, and somehow she’d be my mother again, and we’d spend hours catching up before she gave me the one neat little piece of information that would help me defeat the aliens once and for all.
Not terribly realistic on my part; life didn’t work that way. It was pretty clear to me that, despite her saying she hoped one day to be part of Kara’s and my lives, she really didn’t want that. She had her beautiful house and her rich husband and her pretty little shop, and dealing with the daughters she’d abandoned twenty years earlier would only mess up her perfectly ordered world.
I didn’t even have the energy to hate her anymore. As Michael probably would have pointed out, I had more important things to do with my time.
Okay, so, according to Marybeth, there was more to me than met the eye. That just didn’t compute. I didn’t feel different — I just felt like me. Maybe I’d sensed the malice coming from the aliens, but I was no psychic. I wasn’t like Persephone, getting w
eird feelings about things all the time and having visions and talking to a spirit guide. There had never seemed to be anything that out of the ordinary about me. Yes, I’d never been sick, but I knew two other kids at my high school who also had perfect attendance, so that never seemed strange to me. I’d been a good student. So were a lot of other kids. No signs of genius IQ, nothing to show that my father had contributed anything that stellar to my DNA.
I was so busy brooding that at first I didn’t realize the rain on my windshield had begun to turn to snow as I made the slow climb up to Flagstaff. Then I felt the slightest slip of the tires and really focused, seeing the pavement of the highway starting to blur behind the drifting flakes.
“Well, shit,” I said aloud, letting off on the accelerator and engaging the four-wheel drive. Of course the chains were in the back if I really ended up needing them, but the thought of having to pull over to put them on didn’t exactly thrill me.
By then it was starting to get dark. No chance of getting the Jeep back to Henry before he closed at five; it was pushing four-thirty now, and I was still at least an hour and a half away from Sedona. More, really, because I knew with the weather like this I wouldn’t chance going down through the canyon. I’d have to take the long way around and come up through Sedona from the bottom, through the Village of Oak Creek, which meant tacking on another half hour at least. Wonderful.
One good thing about the foul weather, though — it made me shift focus from my turbulent thoughts to the treacherous driving conditions. Of course I’d driven in snow before. But up here it was much worse than it would be in Sedona. I’d have to hang on until I got through Flagstaff and part of the way down Interstate 17 before things improved much.
By the time I reached the interchange, I’d dropped down to about forty miles an hour, and everyone around me was doing the same thing. Not that there was a lot of traffic, even though by that point it was going-home time for a lot of people. I clutched the steering wheel grimly and thanked Henry under my breath for the loan of the Jeep. No way I could have pushed the Night Tours van through this.
And as I crept southward, I began to feel a mounting chill that the heater couldn’t begin to combat. I cranked it up a little further, but even so icy shivers kept running down my back, and I began to imagine I was hearing that ominous murmur of voices again, pitched so low you could almost pretend it wasn’t there, almost tell yourself it was just road noise.
I knew better.
This was crazy, though — I was just passing the turn-off for Schnebly Road, and so wasn’t anywhere close to Sedona. Well, not really. In the summer, you could take a four-wheeler along Schnebly down some pretty serious goat paths, and eventually end up at the traffic circle right in front of Tlaquepaque Village. As the crow flies, it was maybe fifteen miles or so. But had the aliens gotten so much stronger in the time I’d been gone that I could sense them all the way out here?
During most of the drive I’d done a pretty good job of not thinking about how vulnerable I was, a girl alone in a very expensive vehicle on some fairly obscure roads. Now, with the darkness seeming to press on all the Jeep’s windows, I couldn’t help obsessing over it. The glass seemed pretty flimsy protection from whatever was lurking out there, but at the moment I couldn’t do much about it. I tried to tell myself that I wasn’t completely alone — there was one vehicle probably a quarter-mile in front of me, and a pair of barely visible headlights in my rearview mirror. If something happened, it wasn’t as if there would be no witnesses. Faint comfort. I’d read too many UFO cases to know that I couldn’t be snatched right up under the noses of multiple witnesses if that was what the aliens wanted to do.
Even so, I tried to match my pace to the vehicle ahead of me, just so I wouldn’t lose sight of its taillights. It seemed as if the person behind me was doing the same thing, too. Those other drivers might not be suffering my particular attack of the heebie-jeebies, but no one really wanted to feel completely adrift in the darkness and the falling snow.
When I saw the turn-off for Sedona, I almost wept with relief. Of course, there could still be aliens lurking in the bare manzanita and scrubby juniper that lined Highway 179. But at least I knew that road like the back of my hand. Also, the snow began to lighten as I made my way toward the Village of Oak Creek until it was little more than a flake or two blowing across my windshield at any given time. A few minutes later, I saw the lights in the Village, and uttered a silent prayer that I’d made it this far. Of course, there was still a five-mile gap between Oak Creek and Sedona proper where the aliens could get the jump on me if they felt like it, but there were almost always people going back and forth along that route, no matter what time of day or night it might be.
Sure enough, a big Ford truck pulled out from a gas station about a car length in front of me as I followed the last roundabout at the top of the Village, and I practically hugged his bumper all the way home. By then the devil’s chorus in my head had subsided, along with the sensation of cold that had accompanied it. When I finally pulled into my assigned parking space at my apartment complex, I felt almost normal.
Well, as normal as anyone could feel after a nine-hour drive and learning that their father might or might not be an alien. Or an angel. Or something.
I knew there was no chance now of getting the Jeep back to Henry tonight; it was almost nine o’clock. So I lugged my suitcase out of the back and patted the Jeep on its rear bumper, thanking it for its good service in getting me home safely, before I went upstairs.
Everything looked the same. Apparently the aliens hadn’t come in to “toss” the place in my absence or anything like that. I set the suitcase down by the coffee table and took off my coat and scarf, and hung them from the hall tree in the corner, since the apartment was too small for me to have an actual coat closet. Then I ran my fingers through my hair and let out a relieved sigh.
Weariness weighted my limbs. It had been a hell of a day. Logically I knew that I should put my things away, grab something light to eat, and then do the usual face washing and teeth brushing before going to bed.
However, logic and I weren’t really on speaking terms at the moment. I grabbed my purse, pulled Martin Jones’ business card out of my wallet, and dialed the number.
* * *
If he was surprised by the call, he sure didn’t show it. Then again, maybe he’d guessed that I would want to grill him after receiving Marybeth’s not-so-welcome “news.”
He showed up approximately five minutes after I called, which meant he was either lurking around to see if I was going to get jumped by any more alien-possessed people, or his hotel was fairly close by.
I’d barely shut the door before saying, “You knew all along, didn’t you?”
The blue eyes didn’t blink. “I suspected.”
“You suspected.”
“It was a strong suspicion.”
I stared across the room at him to where he stood by the sliding glass window to the balcony, and something inside me seemed to break. Without even realizing what I was doing at first, I launched myself at him, getting close enough to pound his chest with my fists, even as I repeated over and over, “You knew! You knew!” before my words devolved into outright sobs.
And then somehow his hands were grasping my wrists, keeping me from hitting him again, and from there his arms closed around me as I wept into his chest, wept for knowing I had lost my mother all over again, and worse, had lost something I didn’t even know I had until it was gone. Over the years I had wondered who my father might be, wondered if anything about me was like him — the color of my eyes or the shape of my chin or the way I laughed. Anything.
But now that faceless father wasn’t just some unknown man my mother had slept with on another in a long series of drunken nights, but a mysterious being of unknown origins and powers. And it seemed he just might have passed some of those powers on to me.
At last I came back to myself enough to realize I was standing there with Agent Jones’ arms aro
und me. Maybe I should have pulled away, but I also realized that I liked the feel of those strong arms encircling me, despite how angry I had been with him just a few minutes earlier.
Oh, Jesus, I really was messed up.
I pulled away then, sniffling. “Sorry about that,” I muttered.
“You don’t really think I minded, do you?”
Looking up, I saw him watching me, noticed a gentleness in his expression that I hadn’t seen before. But it was something more than that — a warmth, maybe. Yes, it must have been that, because something in his gaze made the blood in my veins seem to run a little hotter, my heart beat a little faster. And that was really crazy. Sure, I’d made jokes to myself about Martin Jones, the hot Man in Black. But something about the look in his eyes told me that what I was feeling was no joke.
“I — I don’t know,” I replied in faltering tones, and dragged my gaze away from his. “I’m acting like an idiot. Sorry.”
“You’re not an idiot.” He looked over at the couch. “Maybe you should sit down.”
That sounded like a great idea, considering my legs were roughly the consistency of rubber at the moment. I went to the sofa and basically fell onto the worn cushions. I wondered for a second or two whether he would come and sit next to me, but he remained at the window, almost as if he were standing guard.
“All right,” I said wearily, once I realized he had no intention of moving from his post, “I went and got the great revelation. I went on my vision quest, as Michael Lightfoot put it. Now will you please tell me exactly what the hell is going on and what I’m supposed to do next? We don’t have a lot of time.”
“No, we don’t.” He paused, then added, “But it’s not safe to talk here, and you’re tired.”
“What do you mean, ‘it’s not safe to talk here’? Are they…listening?”
“In a manner of speaking. It would be better for us to talk tomorrow at the place I’m staying.”
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