by Erin Raegan
Contents
1. Meet Theodora Aka: Theo Aka: Boots
2. Meet The Kilbus Lord Aka: Kil or Lord or His Majesty or Asshole
3. The First Greeting
4. Dining with Strangers
5. The Beginning Of A Dangerous Infatuation
6. One Too Many Tipsy
7. Warning Signs
8. The Obsession
9. Licorice and Jealousy
10. Mixed Signals
11. Fright Night
12. Late Night Interruption
13. Cryptic Warning
14. The First Crack
15. Justification
16. Kisses and Confessions
17. Cryptic Warning
18. Playing Cards with Aliens
19. Out of Time
20. Revelations
21. Regrets
22. Their End
23. Safeguards
24. Ten Days Later
To be continued
Acknowledgments
Other Books by Erin Raegan
Books by E.M. Raegan
About the Author
Glossary
Playing Cards with Aliens. Copyright © 2020 by Erin Raegan. All Rights Reserved.
Cover Designed by Cortney E Designs
Edited by Joy Editing
All characters, alien or human, events―on planet Earth or otherwise―in this book are a product of the author's imagination and hours of daydreaming. Any resemblance to actual people, or otherworldly beings, living or dead, or actual events are entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or transmitted, or distributed, in any form, by any means, without explicit written permission from the author with the exception of brief quotations embodied in reviews or articles. This book is licensed for your enjoyment only. Thank you, a thousand times and all the hugs, for purchasing.
Playing Cards with Aliens
Small town. Small life. Smaller dreams.
I’m content. Happy. It might not make sense to most people but this is the life I chose for myself.
If there’s a small part of me that wants to travel and see the world, I’m okay with appeasing that desire with travel magazines and planning future vacations. I want this life and a life full of adventure. I don’t see why I can’t have both.
I’m just fine with waiting.
But something beyond me has already decided that my contentment with life is about to change.
That change came with three new faces. Three new visitors that have suddenly—before I knew what was happening—taken over mine and my family’s lives. They live with us. They eat with us. They sleep and share a bathroom with us. I don’t remember inviting them. I don’t remember consenting to their invasion in our lives.
I don’t remember much of anything these days.
But they’re here.
He’s here.
And I don’t think I want them to leave.
I don’t want him to leave.
At least until I realize why we stopped asking questions. Why we accept their vague explanations and strange mannerisms.
Why we can’t shake the headaches.
Then I can’t get rid of them fast enough.
I can’t get rid of him fast enough.
Even if it breaks my heart.
This story is dedicated to all my readers. You fell in love with Kil just as fast and deeply as I did and I am so grateful.
His story is for you.
Note from the Author
The following story takes place prior to the events of the Galactic Order series.
It is not necessary to have read the Galactic Order series to enjoy this story.
It begins one year before the Vitat alien species invade the earth…
Meet Theodora Aka: Theo Aka: Boots
Theo
Two faded boots stopped in my line of sight, the brown leather cracked and peeling at the toes. The boots were so familiar to me, I knew who they belonged to without having to look up.
My fingers sank deeper into the chilling soil and wrapped around a carrot. I pulled it up and laid it in the basket sitting beside my dirty knee, a smile pulling at my mouth.
I continued on, checking the soil as my limp ponytail knocked into my ear lightly. I couldn’t hear him with my earbuds in, but I knew he was impatient by the way his feet shifted. He could shut off the music playing from my phone, as it was sitting on the bench beside him, but instead, Uncle Sal tickled my nose with the end of my hair.
My nose wrinkled and scrunched as I glared into the sun at him. His mouth was moving though he knew I couldn’t hear a word he said. I sighed with a smile, popping out my earbud as Sam Hunt sang about my cold heart.
“For you again,” my uncle said in a disgruntled voice, even as he kept whacking me in the nose with my hair.
I batted him away. “What did you say, old man?”
He sighed heavily and flipped my hair dramatically. “Your brother’s on the phone for you again.”
I rolled my eyes and stood, dusting the dirt off my knees and jeans. “That’s the third call this week.”
He dropped his heavy arm around my shoulders as we walked back up the hill toward the small cottage. Uncle Sal’s belly was large, blocking out the view of the massive junkyard down the road, but I could see his old red Chevy Stepside sitting in the drive.
“You’re home early. Who’s watching the shop?”
“Frank has things there for now,” he said defensively.
Frank was my uncle’s good friend and business partner. They were both in their sixties, both of them day after day complaining about their aches and pains. Frank scooted around the junkyard on a scooter due to his failing legs, leaving most of the work for Uncle Sal, who was just two years post heart surgery. I shook my head in resignation.
The Layton boys were out of town today, playing a show in the next county over. Otherwise they would have been there to take on the heavy lifting.
“Don’t start,” he grumbled as we reached the rickety white porch.
“I didn’t say anything,” I grumbled back mockingly with a smile.
I didn’t need to. Frank had no business running the junkyard on his own any more than Uncle Sal did. But they already knew mine and Aunt Bets’s opinions on the matter.
“Don’t tell your aunt,” he said under his breath as we climbed the porch.
I grinned as I watched my dirty sneakers smack against the faded paint. “My lips are sealed.”
He grunted and opened the screeching screen door for me. We kicked off our shoes before heading through the small front entrance into the bright kitchen. Aunt Bets’s décor was a mix of 1960s and flower child. Oranges and yellows. Hardcore geometry leaking all over the place. With a shit ton of daisies scattered everywhere.
Uncle Sal pushed me into the lemon-yellow kitchen and went right to the fridge to pop open a beer— a beer he knew his doctor said he shouldn’t be drinking. I headed to my aunt sitting at the small dining table, clipping the fresh bouquet of roses I’d picked for her in the garden. Beside her was the old beige corded phone, my brother impatiently waiting on the line.
I hadn’t heard my uncle’s old truck coming up the drive, so I didn’t know how long they’d had my brother waiting, but my aunt had more than likely answered the phone and set it right down, waiting at least ten minutes before she even asked my uncle to come tell me.
Aunt Bets loved to make my brother wait.
She gave me her most innocent smile, her massive silver beehive bun bobbing as she tilted her head toward the phone.
I rolled my eyes dramatically, just to annoy her, and picked up the phone. I rested my butt against the table and my arm crossed my chest, cupping
my elbow. My aunt and uncle pretended to busy themselves as I took a deep breath, but I knew all four of their ears were tuned in on every word about to leave my mouth.
An inquisition would follow this short call, just as it had every other time my brother had bothered to call in the last twenty-odd years.
The phone hit my ear and I cleared my throat. Neither of us spoke for a moment. There was a familiar script to these calls. Mostly I only had to recite it once every few months. But ever since I graduated from high school four years ago, the calls had come more and more frequently, each call more uncomfortable than the last.
“Theodora,” my brother’s scratchy voice greeted my ear.
Aunt Bets had the hearing of a bat. She snorted indelicately, ducking her head into the roses to avoid my warning glare. No one called me Theodora other than my brother. Not since my mother had dropped us off on my aunt and uncle’s front porch twenty years ago.
“Hey, big brother,” I said back. My voice was cool, despite the slight tremble in my hands.
“I’ve been trying to call all week.”
And I had purposefully not answered.
I hadn’t seen him in four years, hadn’t had the full effect of his disapproval shoved down on my shoulders since graduation, but I could still feel it through the phone line. “Been busy.”
It wasn’t a lie. I helped Aunt Bets at the tea shop from sunup till sundown five days a week and Uncle Sal at the junkyard every other spare minute I had. I was supposed to be there today, but Sal had insisted Aunt Bets needed more help in the garden.
Still, my words weren’t exactly truthful either, and Noah knew it. He was too smart not to.
I could have called back the other two times he’d tried calling. But I hadn’t.
He gave me another tense moment of stony silence. “How are you?”
I answered him with the same fine I had for years. Then we went through the motions, trading half-hearted courtesies. Neither of us ever truthfully answering the other.
Me, because I knew he didn’t actually care.
Him, because he never had been honest with me and never would be.
I’d accepted our odd relationship. It had only taken me until about my sixteenth birthday to reach that acceptance. But it didn’t hurt me like it used to. Just a dull sting.
Noah was sixteen years older than me. We never could breach that age gap—though not for my lack of trying. He was our mother’s firstborn. She’d gotten knocked up when she was just seventeen years old.
Uncle Sal said she left home with Noah’s daddy the moment she found out. Her parents disowned her, and since Uncle Sal was no longer living at home—his parents private and proud—he hadn’t known to go looking for her until a while later. By then she had been long gone from Iowa and living in a tiny apartment in Illinios.
They weren’t able to repair their lost relationship and our mother wanted nothing to do with her old family. Despite my uncle reaching out repeatedly, Noah grew up without ever knowing our mother’s family. Instead he was bounced from home to home to home as my mother bounced from man to man to man.
He didn’t have a good childhood. He had a hard, lonely life. He had to grow up way too fast, taking care of our mother. He fed her, washed her after her latest boyfriend beat her to a bloody pulp, and eventually took a job to support the both of them. And now it showed in his inability to develop any kind of healthy relationship.
Then—as if things hadn’t already been bad enough for him—when he was fifteen, my mother met a man in a bar and got knocked up with me. But by then, Deandra was tired of playing mother. I was lucky she bothered to have me at all.
Thirteen days after my second birthday, her alcoholic boyfriend broke up with her and she loaded the both of us in her car under the guise of a fresh start. After a long drive with a wailing two-year-old and a pissed-off teenager, she dropped us off at her estranged brother’s house in Pennsylvania and never looked back.
My brother lasted a few months, but he was unused to rules and structure. He gave my aunt and uncle headache after headache. Unwilling to follow curfew. Unwilling to help out in either family business.
After spending his first fifteen years of life taking care of the one woman he shouldn’t have had to, he’d been saddled with a baby sister he couldn’t help but resent.
So like a bad sequel, emanating my mother, the day he turned eighteen, he too left his family behind. Me behind.
My aunt and uncle had been devastated. They tried to keep up with him. Calling to check in. Offering money. Stressing the importance of family and that he would always have a place to come home to. Insisting he listen to his baby sister babble about her days.
But he soon stopped answering their calls.
It wasn’t until I was eight years old that he finally called again. But not for Aunt Bets or Uncle Sal.
For me.
I didn’t remember much of those days. I was too young. But I did remember how thrilling it was to get to talk to my big brother. The one who had left home so long ago. I carried on and on during our short calls, not realizing his answers were short and cold. I didn’t care that he never stayed on the line for longer than a few minutes.
I was blissfully oblivious.
I lived for those calls.
I used to come running every time I heard the phone ring. Not once paying attention to my aunt’s teary eyes. Never hearing my uncle’s hushed curses. I didn’t know how let down I would feel as I got older and realized how little Noah had ever cared about my new princess dress or the weekly trips to the lake. But my aunt and uncle did. They wanted to protect me from it, but they also had hope that Noah would eventually see how much his baby sister worshipped and loved him.
How she would wait anxiously by the phone when he forgot to call every month. Devasted.
But he never did. And eventually I grew up and caught on. Noah didn’t actually want to know me. He didn’t see Sal or Bets as family. He barely knew them. I was his blood, the only living member of his family as far as he cared. No one had heard from Deandra for years.
After years of traveling and climbing up from obscurity, the guilt had finally crept over him. Our monthly calls were more about him trying to quiet that persistent guilt inside himself than wanting to know me.
“Have you given any more thought to what I said?” he asked stiffly, as if he was reading our last twenty conversations from a teleprompter.
I turned from my aunt and uncle’s probing gazes. “No.”
His disappointment was like oil. I would be scrubbing it off for hours after we hung up. I could almost imagine his lips pressing tight against his clean-shaven face. Pale like me, his cheeks would flush red. His hand would be in his greying sandy hair, clenching it in frustration. I fixed my eyes on Lollipop, my aunts carved wooden memorial to her old tabby cat, in the window, trying to block out the image.
But it was impossible. The man had fed me bottle after bottle when Deandra went out to bars. He’d changed my dirty diapers. I didn’t remember a lick of that time, but Aunt Bets had told me how tightly I’d clung to him our first few weeks here. He had once been my everything.
I didn’t blame Noah for going off on his own. He hadn’t signed up to raise me. He had stayed long enough to make sure our aunt and uncle were decent enough guardians. And by doing that, he’d missed just how amazing they were, how giving and kind and loving.
But I did blame him for his interference now—twenty years later.
“It was no the last hundred times you asked, Noah, and it’ll be no the next hundred.”
“Then I’ll keep asking until we hit two hundred and one.”
I sighed heavily, my breath crackling over the line. I didn’t know why he was pushing this. Four years was too long to push this desire of his on me. Guilt could only carry you so long. But no matter how many times I told him he was off the hook he just couldn’t let it lie.
“What would I do in college?” I demanded, as I had four years ago.
/> It had been four years since I’d seen Noah in person. That was also the first time he had shown up on Sal’s porch since he left at eighteen. Before then, I’d only seen him three times. The first two, after I’d begged Uncle Sal to take me.
All three times, I had been unwelcome. We’d stayed in dusty motels for days until Noah could spare a few minutes for coffee.
I was nine the first time, and I had been amazed at our first meeting. Anticipating it for weeks. Noah was a grown man and my hero. He wore fancy suits and drove a fancy car. Uncle Sal had grumbled about the price of the coffee the entire time Noah sipped on a pretty latte. I’d had stars in my eyes for this sophisticated brother of mine. He was so different from the people in my small town.
The second time, it was much the same. Me starstruck. Noah indifferent.
The third time I saw him was right after my sixteenth birthday and it was then that it finally clicked how little interest Noah had in seeing me. Jeremy Layton had gotten his license and driven me and his brother out to see Noah for my birthday. The Layton boys and I walked into that very same coffee shop Sal had taken me to, to meet Noah, and instead of viewing that visit through child eyes, how fancy and magical, it was instead stuffy and uncomfortable. My brother wore a nearly identical suit and drove an even fancier car from when I was a child, but this time, I had looked at his cold, apathetic expression and not felt an ounce of joy or excitement.
It was awkward and depressing.
