sedona files - books one to three

by Christine Pope

  That wasn’t one of my favorites, either, and I fought back a grin. “So did you not like it, or did it not like you?”

  “Both, unfortunately.”

  “But chili’s okay.”

  “Definitely okay.”

  Then it was ready, and I dumped the pasta into a bowl I found in the cupboard while Martin did the same with the chili itself. He’d already grated the cheese and put it in a separate, smaller bowl, so all that was left was to settle ourselves at the little table for two, where the flatware and glasses were waiting. I sort of wished we had a candle, just for some mood lighting, but I had to admit the fire was doing well enough for that. Besides, with everything we needed crammed onto the little dinette table, there wasn’t even room to accommodate a votive.

  I sat down, and Martin poured some wine into my glass before taking his own seat and getting some for himself. After I scooped some pasta onto his plate and ladled chili on top, I did the same on my own plate. He sprinkled cheese on both mounds of chili, then reached for his glass of wine.

  “To you,” he said.

  “Me? Why?”

  “You did very well today. Far exceeded my expectations. I’m…hopeful.”

  I took a large swallow of the wine. It hit my empty stomach in a rush, and I wondered whether I should have started with a few mouthfuls of chili instead. Can’t be helped now. “So you weren’t hopeful before?”

  He drank some wine as well before replying, “Let me rephrase that. I suppose I was hopeful at the beginning. But now I’m cautiously optimistic.”

  “And that’s better?”

  “Much better.”

  Mindful of my stomach, I dug into the three-way chili and ate for a minute in silence, letting the simple, hearty food do its work. “What’s it like?” I asked.

  “What is what like?”

  “Where you come from.”

  At first he didn’t say anything, although he did look across the table at me, directly meeting my gaze. He picked up his glass and watched the dark garnet-colored liquid inside pick up interesting glints of amber and ruby from the fire in the hearth. “Imagine this world,” he said, “but with no hunger, no disease, no pollution. No war, no conflict.”

  “So you’re from heaven, then,” I replied.

  To my surprise, he chuckled. “No, although I suppose some people on this planet might see it that way. No, we’ve just had much longer to conquer the demons humanity is still struggling to overcome. But this is why it’s so difficult for us to deal with the evil of the Reptilians — it’s been millennia since we sought to conquer, or make war, and therefore we have a hard time understanding those urges in others.”

  “So your people never get angry, or tired, or worried?”

  “Of course they do.” His expression clouded, and I wondered what he was thinking about. “But we have better mechanisms to handle it.”

  “And since you don’t have wars of your own, you won’t interfere with the ones the Reptilians start.” My tone sounded bitter even to myself.

  “Unfortunately, no. The help I’m giving you — the help Otto gives Persephone — is the most we’re allowed to do. And even that isn’t entirely applauded. There are some on our world who think we should keep ourselves entirely separate. Luckily, that mindset isn’t universal, and there are other races out there who deplore the depredations of the Reptilians as much as we do, but who lack the resources to fight them directly.” He took another sip of wine, then added, “The Reptilians also are clever, and exploit worlds on the outer fringes of the galaxy, in places where their destruction is more likely to be overlooked.”

  “But not here.” By that point I figured I’d had enough chili; I needed more wine. I reached over to the bottle and topped off my glass.

  Martin’s eyes narrowed a bit, but he didn’t comment. “Your world is unique in several ways.”

  “Glad we have something going for us.”

  At that remark he did frown, then said, “You have many things going for you. I told you before of the adaptability of human DNA. It’s unique, and leads us to wonder whether your world was actually the source of all humanoid life, which then somehow was dispersed across the galaxy.”

  “Oh, the old star-seed theory?”

  “You’ve heard of it?”

  I gave him a disbelieving look. “I grew up in a household that lived, breathed, and slept UFOs. I read Chariots of the Gods instead of Little House on the Prairie. I’ve probably been exposed to every implausible theory there is on the subject of UFOs and aliens, secret bases, you name it. So yeah, I’ve heard of the star-seed theory. It would explain you, your people, wouldn’t it? I mean, you obviously look like a human, and although I’ve never seen him, I’ve heard Otto does, too, when he’s in his true form. I guess the Reptilians and the other humanoid lifeforms I’ve not yet had the pleasure to encounter strayed from that, but they’re still bipedal and have two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, right?”

  Martin nodded. “More or less.”

  Judging by the expression on his face, I probably didn’t want to know what that “less” meant. “Okay, so we have über-DNA. What else?”

  A lift of his chin toward the window, as if to indicate the landscape outside. “The vortexes.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said, and ate another mouthful of chili. “I’ve read that there are energy vortexes all over the place, if you know where to look for them.”

  “That’s partially true, but the concentration of vortexes here, and their individual powers, isn’t repeated anywhere in the known universe. No wonder the Reptilians came to Sedona — they wanted to tap into the power of the vortexes while also helping themselves to some human DNA along the way.”

  I reflected that sometimes it wasn’t all that great to be special. If we were just a regular medium-sized desert town, like Tucson or Santa Fe, we could have been overlooked completely. “I guess that makes sense. But if they came here to tap into the vortexes, why haven’t they done so before this? I mean, it’s not as if they just showed up three months ago.”

  “The Reptilians are advanced technologically, but they’re not infallible. It’s taken them this long to determine the best way to access and utilize the energy of the vortexes. That’s why they need to make such a big push on Sunday, on the solstice. At 11:14 a.m., to be precise.”

  Knowing the exact time cheered me up a little. I supposed I should have looked it up, but I’d been a little busy. “Eleven o’clock in the morning? At least I’ll be able to confront the aliens on a good night’s sleep.”

  At this remark, Martin sat upright, and frowned, as if trying to recall some important piece of data. “Sorry. That’s 11:14 Greenwich time. Here it’ll be 4:14 a.m.”

  I groaned. “Great. So I don’t even have four more days after this. Saturday night is the apocalypse.”

  “Sunday morning, actually.”

  That comment earned him a very evil stare. “If it happens before seven o’clock in the morning, it’s still night in my book.”

  At another time he might have smiled. Instead he watched me carefully, eyes darkened by the dimness of the room. “You’ll be ready.”

  “So you say.” Good thing he was feeling so confident, because, despite my performance this morning, I couldn’t see how on earth — pardon the pun — I was supposed to defeat a base full of Reptilians single-handed.

  “You will.”

  I didn’t really feel like arguing with him, so I just picked up my wine and had a few more healthy swallows. By that point I could tell it was starting to get to me — not that I was drunk or anything close to it, but I did feel a little bit swimmy, with a lightheaded, floating sensation that wasn’t at all unwelcome. It felt good to be a bit disconnected, what with everything that was going on. “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Good.” He dumped some more pasta and chili on his plate, then sprinkled cheese on top. Alien or not, that man could eat when he wanted to.

  It was probably the wine that prompted me to
ask, “And us?”

  A forkful of three-way chili stopped approximately an inch from his mouth. “Us?”

  “You.” I pointed at him with my own empty fork. “Me.” And I turned the fork around so it was roughly level with my chin. “How do we fit into all this? At breakfast you said, ‘The first time I saw you,’ and then you tried to make a joke about it, but I don’t think you were telling me the whole story, were you?”

  “I didn’t want to frighten you off.”

  At that I did laugh, although the rusty chuckle I gave didn’t sound all that amused. “Frighten me off? Believe me, if I were sufficiently freaked out, I would have bolted a long time ago. So what aren’t you telling me?”

  He was silent for so long that I began to worry he didn’t intend to say anything after all. Then he finished the wine in his glass and poured some more — not a lot, about a third of the way up the glass. “Probably one reason our world is so at peace, so harmonious, is that we all have one lifemate, one person to spend this existence with. We always know when we meet this person, because we see our other self in them. For some this happens early in life, and for some, a good deal later. For a rare few, it doesn’t happen at all. Otto is one of those, which is part of the reason why he’s here pretending to be a sixteenth-century Turkish eunuch.”

  “Poor Otto.”

  “He says he sees it differently…something about being glad to be free of all the sighing and weepy eyes and declarations of true love.” Martin’s lips quirked, as if he were trying to repress a grin at Otto’s expense. “At any rate, I’d thought I had the same destiny in store for me. I didn’t mind being assigned here, since I had no one to leave behind.” The blue eyes caught mine, and I didn’t think I could have looked away if I’d wanted to. “And then I saw you that first time at the UFO Depot last summer, and I knew.”

  “You knew…” I let the words trail off. My heart had begun to race in my chest, telling me what he was about to say before he even said it.

  He didn’t blink. “I knew you were the one. Improbable as it was, the lifemate I thought I’d never find was here, on this world, in this town.”

  “B-but you didn’t say anything — ”

  His hand went up to run through his hair, mussing it, the disarray somehow making him look even more handsome…if that were possible. “What was I supposed to say, Kirsten? I was in the middle of a case, and anyway, what would your reaction have been if I’d gone up to you and said, ‘Hello, Kirsten, you don’t know me, but I’m your destined lifemate. And oh, I also happen to be an alien. Hope you don’t mind.’?”

  I wanted to argue, but I knew he was right. Even hearing it now shook me, shook me to my core. That wasn’t the sort of declaration I’d been expecting, and as much as Martin’s revelation explained a good many things, it still didn’t explain everything. “Okay, I probably would have freaked,” I admitted. “I’d like to say that I wouldn’t, but…”

  “Exactly. At least now we’ve spent some time together.” He paused, and studied my face, as if searching for an answer he wasn’t sure he wanted to find. “But still — I don’t know what this means for you.”

  Good question. I hesitated, unsure as to how best to articulate my thoughts. Even discounting the whole alien lifemate thing, I wasn’t used to guys making open declarations of their feelings. Oh, sure, the boyfriend of my senior year in high school once used the “L” word, but in hindsight I was pretty sure that was just his way of guaranteeing that I’d sleep with him. But this — I saw the terrible hope in Martin’s eyes, knew he must be wondering if I shared those feelings. We’d kissed, of course, but he’d spent enough time here to know that among us earthlings, that didn’t always mean that much.

  What I did know was that I’d had a physical reaction to him from early on, of an intensity I couldn’t really explain to myself. Yes, he was extremely good-looking. It was more than that, though. As he said, it was as if something in me had responded to something in him, even though at the time I had no way of knowing what that really meant.

  I reached out and touched his hand, reassuring myself with its very familiarity. “It means that now I know I wasn’t crazy for feeling drawn to you from the very beginning. Here I just thought I was being mesmerized by your good looks, when all along it was actually some crazy alien chemistry thing.”

  It’s hard to say exactly how it happened, but one minute I was touching his hand, and the next he was standing, pulling me to my feet so he could wrap his arms around me, touch my lips with his. He tasted of the wine he’d just drunk, and maybe a little of cheddar cheese, and that also seemed so reassuringly normal that it was the most natural thing in the world for us to stumble away from the dinette table and the remains of our dinner, to fall onto the bed, his weight on me, his hands moving over my body, touching me in a way I’d only dreamed about.

  Suddenly it seemed far too warm in there with the fire crackling away in the background. As if he’d had the same thought, Martin took hold of my sweater and pulled it and the T-shirt I wore underneath up and over my head in one swift motion. I did gasp then, because the air was colder than I had expected. But that was all right, because in the next instant he pulled off his own sweater, and I was treated to the sight of a wonderfully sculpted torso, his abs taut and defined, the muscles on his arms larger than I had expected.

  He didn’t give me much time to stare and admire, because he drew me toward him again, bare flesh meeting bare flesh, a heat building in me that had nothing to do with the fire blazing a few feet away. I wrapped my legs around him as he kissed me again and again, drinking in the taste of my mouth like a man dying of thirst in the desert would drink from an unexpected spring. Then I realized both of us still wore our jeans, and it seemed silly to have them on when we both knew where this was going.

  I reached down and fumbled with his belt buckle, then got it undone and reached for the button of his jeans underneath. At that point he lifted his mouth from mine and whispered, “This is — this is what you want?”

  A big question. Ever since that one fumbling experience in high school, I’d avoided sex, partly because I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, but also because I didn’t want to do anything that would have people comparing me to my mother. I was on the pill, mostly as a “just in case” sort of thing, and also because I liked that it knocked my period down to three or four days, but I hadn’t thought I was going to put it to the test during the alien apocalypse.

  Now, though…now I knew I wanted nothing but Martin. I wanted to give him that part of myself I’d been holding back for years.

  “Yes,” I breathed. “Oh, yes. More than anything. Please.”

  And that was all it took, because his hands were reaching behind me, undoing the clasp of my bra, then moving over my bare breasts, awakening shivers in me unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. I think I was murmuring “yes, yes, yes” over and over, but it was hard to say for sure, as the heat in the center of my body seemed to be expanding ever outward, enveloping me in a supernova of need. The next thing I knew, he’d undone my own jeans and pulled them down, dragging my underwear with them, but I didn’t care anymore, didn’t care about anything but the feel of his hands and mouth on me, his fingers reaching between my legs and stroking, concentrating all that heat and desire in my core.

  Good thing no one was staying at the cabin next door, because as he brought me to the release I’d denied myself all these years, I cried out, gasping, digging my nails into his shoulder as he took me to the brink of ecstasy and right over the cliff.

  I collapsed on the mound of pillows, gasping, and while I was attempting to recover myself, he took off his jeans and threw them somewhere on the floor. His underwear — black boxer briefs — followed immediately afterward. Wow. He definitely looked human all over…or at least like my ideal of a human male.

  Then I didn’t have time to think about comparative anatomy, because he was on the bed next to me, his hard shaft pressed against my leg as he took
me in his arms again. His mouth found my nipple, tracing circles around it, and I was crying out again, pressing myself against him, wanting to feel as much of his skin against mine as possible.

  He shifted his weight, positioning himself above me. Even in the dimly lit room I could see the gleam of his eyes. “We don’t have to go any further — ”

  I let out a little moan. “Don’t you dare. I want you. Now. Please.”

  A sharply indrawn breath was his reply, and then I felt him pushing against me, felt the hardness of his flesh entering me, taking away an emptiness I hadn’t even realized was there until he filled it. His breath was hot on my neck as he moved in and out, and I rocked my hips along with that rhythm, the whole thing as easy as breathing, as if I had done this with him hundreds of times before.

  Time spun away from me. There was only this warm darkness, the heat of our bodies taking away the December chill as if it had never existed. And in that eternity I felt the climax overtake me again, my entire being shuddering as he reached orgasm as well, our bodies locked together in a perfect puzzle that only the two of us could solve. At last we collapsed on the bed, Martin reaching for me so he could pull me close, hold me as the aftereffects rippled through me, mini aftershocks following a quake that had shaken me to the foundation of my being.

  He reached out and touched the corner of my eye, where some unexpected tears had pooled. “Are you — was that all right? I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

  “No,” I replied. “God, no. That was…better than anything I could have imagined.”

  No reply but him holding me even tighter, his mouth leaving light kisses on the top of my head, on my temple, at the edge of my cheekbone. So tender, so unlike the frenzied passion of a few minutes earlier.

  In that small piece of eternity, he had given me yet another reason to go on fighting.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  We dozed for a while, then awoke an hour or so later and reached for one another again, bodies locking in passion as if drawn together like iron filings to a magnet. After that I managed to stumble out of bed, reclaim my underwear and my T-shirt, make an effort at brushing my teeth and washing my face. When I crawled back under the covers, Martin drew me to him again, joining his body warmth to mine. I fell asleep for real that time, knowing I was safe, and loved.