As the sun got a little higher the garage opened and Mike’s dad backed out. Must be a work day. The activity at the other houses seemed to indicate that it was. Jess watched him back into the street and head off to work. She waited patiently as he turned out of the neighborhood. Others in the neighborhood would likely start moving soon. Another car, someone out for a jog, taking out the trash—and that someone would most likely be just a little freaked by a girl in armor with a sword strapped to her back sprinting suddenly out of the woods. So she rose in that quiet lull, hurried across the open stretch of ground between the woods and Mike’s house, around to the back, leapt the chain-link fence and landed at a crouch in his back yard behind a row of hedges.
Bo saw her at once. His head snapped up from what he was doing, sniffing some poop, it looked like, one ear up, the other flopping.
“Bo!” she whispered across the yard to him, holding out her hands as his surprised reaction melted into an ecstatic thrill and he was lunging the distance between them. Running for her as fast as he could.
He hit and she absorbed him, rolling to her back beneath his weight and squinting and giggling as he was instantly bathing her face with frantic, desperate kisses.
“Bo!” she talked to him through pinched lips, holding them closed against his heavy tongue as he lapped, in and out, darting all over with such enthusiasm. “Bo I missed you so much!”
He missed her too.
Clearly.
Bo was a mutt, black with white spots, nearly as big as she was, and he’d always adored her, seemingly, more than life itself. When she and Mike started dating it was love at first sight. Now that Bo hadn’t seen her in so long it was as if he couldn’t get enough. In no time he found every inch of exposed skin—which wasn’t much, as only her face and hands were uncovered by the armor—but he got them, licking so desperately, her face mostly, then her hands each time she held his head away so she could catch a breath … she wondered if he was about to start whimpering.
“Oh, Bo. I’ve missed you too.” She moved him to the side and sat up, but he pushed in, face to face, licking furiously. She couldn’t stop giggling, loving that he loved her so much, feeling the wet spots drying in the cool morning air—only to be slathered with fresh wetness as he moved so fast, so loving, getting it all. She recalled how he used to do this with her feet, especially when she and Mike were just sitting around hanging. Sometimes Bo would go at them for minutes on end, licking every single inch, all over, top to bottom, between every toe and front to back, side to side, how it used to make her and Mike laugh so hard, at Bo’s raw, desperate enthusiasm. Like he had to get them, all of them, before they got away.
Kind of like now, in a way, and she grew a little sad thinking how brief this reunion would be. I’ve got to go again, Bo.
“Let’s get Mike,” she told him and stood. As soon as she was up he jumped on her and tried to match her height, couldn’t, sat expectantly and looked up at her face. His prime target. Now she was tall again, too high to lick, and so he waited. For whatever command she might give. Anything she wanted. Chase away a bear? You got it! Go get you a stick? As you wish, my queen.
“I love you, Bo,” she petted him and turned her eyes to the house. Mike’s bedroom faced on the back yard. She looked at the drawn drapes behind the glass of his window.
Deliberately she wiped her face as free as she could of dog slobber. It was drying all over, drawing her skin tight. She opened her mouth wide a few times, making extreme faces, trying to restore a bit of composure, then rubbed more vigorously with the palms of her hands, pushed back her hair and cinched her ponytail tighter. She’d been in the armor for days with no shower. Did she stink? Her hair was greasy and all those other, little concerns, those meaningless worries from a bygone era. They niggled at her a moment and she let them go.
There were far bigger things in play.
She started across the yard. Mike could be under watch. The Kel could have their eye on him. Anything was possible. But she needed him.
Is he even here? she had the thought. His car’s here; he must be. As Bo paced along beside her she reached the window and stood. Bo sat and began panting, attention fixed on her, enamored, though occasionally he glanced at the window to his master’s bedroom.
She tapped it.
Waited.
Tapped again.
After the third tap the drapes pulled back slightly, from the edge, a face peeking out nervously to see what the hell was making the very deliberate, very not-normal noise.
She could see Mike had been asleep.
As they made eye contact through the glass she didn’t try to speak, feeling a lump rising in her throat. For a long instant Mike was stuck, simply holding the drapes to the side, cracked just enough to see, frozen in place. Only the slow widening of his eyes indicated any change.
After he finally processed what he was seeing he let the drapes go at the edge, opened them from the middle and unlatched and lifted the window.
And there he stood. Mike. On the other side of his open window, staring at her. Wearing only his boxers—Darth Vader boxers, she managed to notice—having just crawled from a deep slumber, bed-head and sleepy-eyes. He rubbed those now.
“Jess?” He squinted, as if unsure whether he was dreaming.
“Hi, Mike.” She looked down at Bo, who remained sitting beside her, tongue lolling, peering eagerly between she and Mike as if to say, Look! Look who I found!
Mike, for his part, just kept staring at her, processing, waking up, and as he did those same, teen nerves flitted across her thoughts and almost made her blush. For an awkward moment she looked away.
“This is so weird.”
CHAPTER 37: ALL HAIL THE QUEEN
Eldron just wanted to get back to his command. He’d been with Voltan through this whole debacle, been his sounding board before that, and Eldron was not entirely certain he wanted to be front and center for what he saw unfolding. Voltan he admired, the queen he mostly despised, but now did not seem the time for any of this.
“She is arriving, lord,” Voltan’s fleet admiral informed him. That man was higher rank than Eldron, commander of Voltan’s flagship dreadnought, which they were aboard. But Eldron was with Voltan and a few of his other senior officers and, for the moment, occupied a high position by virtue of that fact. It was a sort of implied rank. In a way, in that moment, he was like Voltan’s right-hand man.
As Cee stormed onto the bridge he sincerely wished he wasn’t.
“To your tac room,” she pointed brusquely as she maintained a brisk stride in that direction. Like ordering a child.
Voltan, remarkably composed, nodded and turned, following her into his situation room. Eldron turned too—missing his chance to hesitate—and once in motion was committed. He followed along as if part of the party, which he now most definitely was.
Silently he cursed his reaction. No one else went and the three of them entered the room and the door shut.
“This is treason!” Cee tore into her Praetor at once, small before him, looking up into his face as if she wanted to rip the mocking eye patch from his bad eye and gouge out the other. “You ordered they be allowed to escape! You let them board my ship!”
“I did not order them to be allowed to escape,” Voltan replied, maintaining his calm.
“You let them board my ship!”
“It was my desire to learn their intention.”
And the slap came. Hard across Voltan’s cheek, and he made no move to block the queen’s swing. Eldron cringed with the sharp sound, skin on skin, but Voltan was unmoved. He stared at the queen as she seethed.
“You let them board my ship! What “intention” could you possibly learn from that! Tell me, Voltan, what more do we now know! They have our captive! We know not what else they did! They got away and we know nothing!”
Voltan was silent.
“You and your weak-minded “tactics”, coddling these humans! Giving them room to breathe! To think!” Cee nearly smac
ked him again. “Useless! If we weren’t so much more powerful than them this invasion would already be ruined! At your hand and yours alone!”
Eldron wondered what game Voltan was playing. Beyond the obvious. To Eldron’s more objective observation it seemed as if Voltan expected all this and the queen was likely playing right along. Eldron wondered if she noticed.
But her next statement, Eldron was sure, caught even Voltan unawares. Could not have been part of his design.
“With me, Praetor.” Cee’s posture and voice went to ice. She turned for the door. “To my ship,” she said as she left. “You are relieved of command.”
**
Everything stacked up and those first few minutes were insanely awkward. Way more then Jess would’ve expected. Especially after all she’d been through to get there. The reality of Mike, live and in the flesh, compounded by the reality of everything else, ended up being tougher than she thought. But she got through it—as did Mike, mostly—and they were on their way. Like breaking through a dam, and now that they were over that hurdle her center was back and she was once more on point. Mike, of course, had never been “on point” in his life, never faced with anything such as this, and so for him the awkwardness kept coming back. Long stretches of marvel he could not seem to get past.
“I can’t believe my girlfriend—ex-girlfriend,” he corrected, “is a total badass.” He looked between her and the road as he drove. Sadly part of their reunion had been a break-up, but so far Mike was taking it well. Too much had happened. He just seemed happy to see her. He twisted his grip on the wheel with mild excitement—happy to be a part of whatever she was up to. Happy, in truth, to be doing anything that seemed remotely a rebellious act against the Kel.
Jess sank further into the seat and tried to stay calm. Earlier they grabbed coffee from a drive-through—a local chain—and she’d been taking delicious pulls since, managing to achieve, to her delight, momentary rapture with each wonderful sip. The guy in the drive-thru window couldn’t get over her armor and the sword. To his questioning remarks she told him simply it was cosplay. The sword was between her legs, leaned against one thigh, handle sticking up past the sill. She gave no specifics, said she was wearing contacts to explain her yellow eyes and casually explained she was playing the part of an ancient alien Samurai priestess.
It felt hugely dangerous to be in the armor, along with the other paraphernalia she carried, riding along in the open in Mike’s loud little car, but then everything was dangerous right then. Getting coffee was just part of acting normal, and when Mike suggested it she really wanted it, plus she needed to eat, and so to his offer her immediate response was “Sure”.
She got a bagel to take the edge off, plus a large cup of her favorite coffee, and they hit the road.
She took another, soothing sip.
Sooo good!
It was her favorite, something she hadn’t had in what felt like forever. Like the coffee was such a distant memory it was almost a new discovery. Nom-nom frou-frou just the way she remembered, she ordered it just the same, and every time she tasted it all the ponderous, important things in her life fell briefly away. With each sip she was just doing cosplay, wearing a ridiculously realistic suit of armor, out for a ride with her boyfriend, enjoying the beautiful morning with the windows down, fragrant breeze in her face. Teenage Jessica and only that.
She took another sip and closed her eyes.
Weird didn’t begin to describe the reunion with Mike. The last time they were together was after Vegas, and so much had happened since then, so many monumental things … the disparity that existed between them now was stark. Sure, back then, when they were going out, she had secrets. Big, amazing, incredible secrets. A whole other world worth of secrets. At that point, though, more or less, not much else about her had changed. Back then she was still the same girl she always was, still regular Jess, just having been through ordeals beyond anything she could explain. Back then she knew about another world. Back then she was hiding a suit of powered armor in the barn. Other things. Despite all that nothing about her was really different. Not yet. Not then. She was Jess, he was Mike.
Now …
Things had definitely changed.
Already they’d had the discussion of her eyes. It was one of the first things, not unexpectedly, and she’d just told him she had no idea, that the change happened somewhere and she didn’t know if it was just a reaction to something that happened to her or what. Fortunately the explanation was enough for Mike and they moved on. No need to reveal more than the bare minimum required to get this next phase done. No need to put him at risk. Mike filled her in on his perspective and she kept her side of things as simple as possible, saying only that when she disappeared last time it wasn’t another case of amnesia, but that she’d been kidnapped by a group that ended up being connected to the Bok. Mike twigged on that, of course; he knew the Bok—the whole world did—and he was quick to tell her, with a mix of awe and overblown enthusiasm, that the Bok had been killed, all of them, a massacre, and that the whole Kel and everyone else was freaking out. Since that time the Kel had been shutting down the news, turning things off—basically starting to put the squeeze on everyone. Because, Mike said, and here was the amazing part, the Bok were killed by one person. Yep. Right in their headquarters, a lone assassin; at least that was the story that leaked before the Kel shut everything up, and could she believe it? Did she know? What did she think? It was fantastically impossible yet so frickin awesome and had she heard any of this?
She told him she’d heard.
No way in Hell was she going to tell him how.
And so she summed up her presence by saying she’d escaped before any of that, taking this suit of armor and the sword because they looked useful and, well, a little awesome (a reason that would ring true for any teenage-boy—why not take something awesome?) and how she managed to find her way free and connect with a human resistance cell and had been with them ever since.
Of course the idea of being part of a resistance cell struck Mike as the most awesome part of all. I knew there was a resistance! he’d exclaimed enthusiastically. I knew it! Her revelation was confirmation of a deep-seated hope, that humanity wasn’t sitting back and taking it after all, and after she told him that, that she was a part of said resistance, and with the armor and all else, she officially became a badass in his eyes.
The reality of her situation would, unfortunately, blow his mind. For now her little lies were working.
Accordingly, per her story, she’d been working with this resistance since the invasion and was on her way to recover something that had been hidden a long, long time. Kind of an Indiana Jones-type secret, a relic the cell needed, and they believed it would help against the Kel. It was her they trusted to do it, she needed to stay super off the radar, and she’d chosen Mike to help.
Close enough to the truth, while being so far from it, Jess was mildly proud of her fabrication.
It excited the hell out of Mike. He was eager to be a part.
On his side of things he confirmed the Kel never came to their school, never talked to anyone as far as he knew. Why would they? They had a world to invade. Of course he knew nothing of her connection and how badly the Kel might want her.
She could see Mike’s teen mind was coping with all this, probably better than most, and he seemed mostly himself, and most things around him were mostly the same, his life, his school, his car and all else, but there was also the sheen of terror in his eyes.
Mike, like everyone, was scared shitless.
What were the Kel going to do? And how would things change now that the Bok had been killed? Did this mean the invasion was about to accelerate?
She studied his profile. Remembering how much she loved him. Sweet Mike, putting himself in danger for her, perhaps grave danger, so normal, so unprepared for anything.
So part of her former life.
“They were calling you Gone Girl,” he glanced over, sensing her eyes on him.
“Bianca too, but mostly you, ‘cause you disappeared twice. But you know,” he kept looking between her and the road, brap-brapping along, surging and braking, shifting and clutching with cuts of the wheel, weaving aggressively through traffic. “I expected you to come back. Just like last time. And look!” He smiled. “You did.”
His driving was making her nervous. She cringed each time he goosed it—which was often. Mike was beyond even the average teen in that regard. For him it was habit. Here was a boy and his car, one he tuned himself, one he practically built himself, and it was so ingrained into the fiber of his existence, that need to do things to impress, to be cool—even if unconsciously—and it was potentially drawing attention.
“Can you drive like an old man?” she asked. “I know it’s against your nature. Stay in your lane? Wait for slower cars, come to a complete stop? You know. See how little you can stand out.”
He nodded and backed it down. Understanding the gravity of the mission.
Inwardly she breathed a sigh of relief.
“It’s firing super clean,” she commented as he let a gap build between them and the car ahead, rolling down to the speed limit and putting a comfortable distance between them. “Feels tight.” A perfectly timed comment, and it gave him the attention he craved, offsetting the restriction of her request and, more importantly, letting him know she was impressed by his pride and joy and, most importantly, that she noticed.
It was all he needed.
“We’ve done a few things,” he took a hand from the wheel and put it out the window, driving easy. Levi and Matt were the “we”, she was sure. Same as always. She doubted any of that had changed in the short time she’d been gone. “My new chip came,” he turned a little glum, “right before the invasion. We put it in after things settled down. Advanced the timing. Something to do, I guess, after they took over and left everything alone.” His gaze faded. “So weird,” he shook his head quietly to himself, then was back in focus. She was impressed with how quickly he shrugged off the apocalyptic thoughts. “Anyway,” he goosed the throttle—just a blip and the response was instant, a hard surge and enough to make his point. “It’s a sweet tune.”
Star Angel: Prophecy Page 44
