by Rachel Clark
“Do you have anything else electronic?”
“What the hell?” she finally asked as he scooped the rest of the bag’s contents back into her bag.
“Sorry, Flick, I just need you to trust me right now. Do you have anything else electronic on you?” She shook her head. “Any spare credit cards stashed in a side pocket?” Again she shook her head. Her emergency credit card was in her bedside drawer at home. “Okay, let’s go.” He turned to the other man in the room. “Do you need to signal Dak?”
The man shook his head. “He’ll see us as soon as we step into the hallway.” He moved close enough to place a hand on Chris’s cheek. “He knows what he’s doing, babe. We’ll make sure Felicity is safe.”
Chris nodded, wrapped a possessive arm around her waist, and then checked the corridor before stepping out of her office and practically dragging her toward the exit.
* * * *
Daku concentrated on perfecting the illusion so that none of the agents now milling around the gallery would notice him or the three people about to walk out the front door. He felt confident in his abilities, had always enjoyed this part of his natural talents, but without his dria-coldar to back him up he felt a little nervous. Ironically, it was the fact that these were the same men who’d killed Reyne that kept him focused. He wasn’t losing anymore of his family. He refused to allow himself to let them down.
He felt a soft swell of relief run through him as Chris, Felicity, and Naith walked out of the building without anyone noticing. Daku stayed in place long enough to make certain they were out of sight before moving to follow them himself. An agent stepped into his path, obviously not aware of who he really was thanks to the illusion Daku had surrounded himself with.
“Sorry,” the man said absently as he stepped around Daku and continued on his way. Thankfully, Daku’s illusion skills provided the polite smile he wouldn’t have been able to muster with his own lips.
He reached the parking lot just as Ben moved their vehicle toward the exit. Daku casually climbed into the passenger seat, leaned over to touch Ben’s hand in reassurance, and took his first full breath of the entire night.
* * * *
“Can someone please explain what’s going on?” Felicity asked with a raised eyebrow aimed at Chris. She already looked annoyed enough to bitch slap him. Thank fuck they’d grown out of that phase as teenagers.
But now that he had a chance to explain, he had no idea where to start. Oh, we’re just running from the government. These guys here with us? They’re all aliens, oh and by the way, also my lovers… didn’t seem like a very sane thing to say. Even if it was the truth.
“A few days ago a friend of ours was killed protecting us,” he said, trying to force down the emotions just thinking about Reyne caused him. Hell, it would be so much harder for Naith, Daku, and Ben. They’d been a family for much longer than Chris had known them, so he forced himself to explain quickly. “He helped us escape, but the men are still looking for us. When they couldn’t find us, they turned to tracking down my family and friends. It was only a matter of time before they found you.”
“So who are these guys? What the hell have you dragged me into?” She dropped her head forward, refusing to make eye contact. “Fuck, I don’t even know what you do.” The words were almost whispered, but Chris heard the plea behind them. He knew how she interpreted the image he projected, but he had a very good reason for it. Well, at least, he used to.
He reached for her but she flinched away, almost ending up in Naith’s lap. Naith gave him a startled look, and very carefully moved to give Felicity more space. It was obvious that Naith wanted to comfort her as much as Chris did. It had always been part of the plan to introduce her to his friends in the hopes that she would fit in with the men he considered family, but with Reyne’s death everything had changed in an instant.
Chris had urged Daku, Naith, and Ben to leave the planet, but they’d refused to go without him. And he couldn’t travel to their planet without first going through something they’d called “a claiming.” So they were stuck here, at least until Reyne’s brother arrived.
But none of that would make the situation any easier for Felicity to understand.
* * * *
Naith wanted to help, but just like Chris seemed to be doing, he worried how much information they should provide right now. Felicity already looked pissed off. When she realized that she’d never be able to go back to the life she knew, things would only get worse.
“Felicity,” Naith said in what he hoped was a deep, comforting tone, “we’re sorry that you ended up in the middle of this, but I assure you the men looking for you in the gallery are very dangerous. They have very little conscience and would not have hesitated to use you for their own purposes.”
“Use me?” she asked in a tone that suggested she was close to vomiting.
“As leverage,” Chris was quick to assure her. “They want Dak, Naith, and Ben. They know I’m with them, and they know I care for you, Flick.”
“What did you guys do?” she asked, flinching as she perhaps changed her mind on wanting to know the answer.
“It’s nothing they did, baby,” Chris said, again reaching for Felicity. This time she curled into his embrace. “Dak, Naith, and Ben aren’t from around here.”
Felicity sat up, shaking her head, pushing out of the brief embrace, her patience obviously gone. “Just give it to me straight, Chris,” she demanded in an annoyed tone. “No more half answers. Who the hell were those men at the gallery and why are they looking for you four?”
Chris glanced at Naith, and Naith looked up in time to see Daku and Ben nod in agreement.
“They’re from the government,” Naith said in a clear voice, “and they’re looking for us because we’re aliens to this planet.”
Chapter Two
Felicity laughed humorlessly. Aliens? As in not-of-this-world? As in little-green-men?
Uh-huh.
But none of the guys took back the words, all nodding sagely as she tried to interpret that tidbit of information. She had no idea how long they traveled in silence but when the car finally stopped they were a long way out of the city.
Pale light filled one window of the small, ramshackle farmhouse but other than that the rest of the place seemed deserted.
“Welcome to our temporary home,” one of the men in the front seat said as he turned to look at her. He held his hand out to shake. She took it warily, but tried to be polite.
“We’d hoped to meet you under better circumstances, Felicity, but very few things have gone our way recently.”
She nodded, having absolutely no idea what to say.
“We’re safe here,” the other man reassured her. “Come, we’ll show you around.”
“Could I maybe get some names first?” she asked. She was still trying to rationalize the fact that these guys thought they were aliens. She’d known Chris hadn’t exactly been a saint in the past decade, but she hadn’t really expected him to get mixed up with a bunch of…drug addicts?
None of them looked like they were on drugs, but she supposed the damage of some drugs could be lifelong. She’d read somewhere that occasionally drugs could set off mental psychoses in some people. Perhaps that was what she was dealing with here.
“I’m Naith,” the man sitting in the backseat with her and Chris said. He indicated the man she’d just shaken hands with. “That’s Daku.” He reached over to touch the other man. “And this is Ben.”
She nodded. She had their names. Now what?
“Come on, Flick,” Chris said as he reached for her hand and opened the car door. “I’ll make you a hot chocolate, and then we’ll answer all of your questions.”
She nodded, now uncertain that she wanted to hear any more of what they had to tell her.
* * * *
Ben couldn’t take his eyes off the lovely human. She wore her hair just past her shoulders, the gentle blonde waves framing her face, the fashionable glasses simply adding to h
er appeal. She hadn’t smiled since she’d met them, an understandable reaction considering the circumstances, but he had no doubt that when she was happy it would be very clear on her face.
Right now, though, the woman looked like she’d been abducted from everything she’d known and thrust into an entirely different world, which sadly wasn’t far from the truth. Whether she understood it or not, Felicity Hogan’s world had just changed forever and there was no going back.
Ben wanted to hold her close and promise to make everything right again, but now that Reyne was gone he couldn’t even promise that. Without the genetic changes being claimed by a dria-coldar would cause, it wasn’t safe for Chris or Felicity to leave their planet. But Ben, Daku, and Naith couldn’t leave either of them here alone to face the men who would do them all harm.
“What planet are you from?” Felicity asked in a tone of voice that suggested she was humoring delusional people.
“We call our planet Jernodria. It’s 540 light years from here and takes about three Earth months to get there via one of our planet’s transport freighters.”
She gave Daku a smile and nodded, but it was clear that she didn’t really have any way of understanding how far away their planet truly was.
“The light from your nearest star—I believe humans call it Sol—to this planet takes just over eight Earth minutes,” Ben offered quietly. “Our planet is approximately thirty-five-million times farther away than your sun.”
“Seriously?” she asked looking a little bit impressed. Perhaps she thought they were just really well-researched, delusional humans.
“Yes, Flick, seriously,” Chris said as he handed her a hot chocolate. “Although, as I understand it, the space travel isn’t quite as simple as going from point A to point B. It involves a lot of…what did you call it, Ben?”
“Roughly translated into English it means ‘worm-hop’ or maybe ‘space-jump.’ It’s a type of technology that can take us from one point to another almost instantly, but it requires use of preset points that have to have a large area in between.” Felicity nodded, but still looked confused. “Most of the time is spent traveling to those points at a speed approximately two thirds the speed of light,” Ben offered in what he hoped was a tone she found reassuring. “Basically that means we could travel to the Earth’s sun in about twelve minutes. Not that we would want to travel to the sun, of course.”
“Oh, okay,” she said as she looked around the room, not really making eye contact with any of them. “So…um…how did you guys meet?”
“Reyne saved my life,” Chris said in a choked, tiny voice. Daku moved to offer him comfort as he tried to explain. “My cover had just been blown—”
“Cover?” Felicity asked as if she’d never heard the word before.
“Sorry, Flick, I keep forgetting that you didn’t know. I used to work as an undercover cop.” He shook his head as if trying to erase some of the bad memories he had from that time of his life. It was admirable that he’d been so dedicated in getting drugs off the streets, but it had nearly cost the man his life. Ben wanted to trade places with Daku, his need to hold his human lover close suddenly urgent. “My old job hasn’t been a secret for months now, but with everything else going on, it wasn’t something that I got around to telling you.”
Felicity was staring at him, looking stunned.
“Don’t look at me like that, baby,” Chris said with one of his usual soft laughs as he moved out of Daku’s embrace and went to sit beside Felicity. “You knew I wasn’t a criminal—despite what the evidence suggested. You wouldn’t have kept our friendship intact if you’d truly thought I was capable of selling drugs.”
“Don’t be so sure,” she mumbled softly. “You’re the closest thing to family I have left.”
He laughed softly again. “I know you, Miss Goody Two-shoes. If you’d truly believed I was doing something that awful, you would have called me on it.”
Felicity shrugged, but it was clear to Ben that she would have done just that. She might not have been comfortable with the image he’d projected, but she’d trusted the man underneath.
“When my cover was blown, and they’d realized I wasn’t about to tell them details of my investigation”—Ben shuddered at the memories of how badly injured Chris had been when Reyne had brought him home to them—“the boss decided to finish the job himself. That’s when Reyne stepped into the room.” Chris smiled as he remembered those moments. It seemed incredible to Ben that Chris could smile at all after what he’d been through. “I’ve never seen anything like it. One moment I’m sitting there expecting a bullet to the head. The next thing I know a giant silver wolf runs into the room and an invisible force is throwing the men around as if they were toy dolls in a twister.” Chris’s eyes turned glassy as he quickly finished the story. “Long story short, Reyne brought me to his home, used Jernodrian medicine to help me heal faster, and introduced me to the men he loved.”
He reached for Ben’s hand then, squeezing it tightly in an obvious effort to control his own emotions.
“Can…can I ask what happened to Reyne?” Felicity sounded nervous, perhaps beginning to believe what they were trying to tell her. But it was clear to Ben that none of them really wanted to go through the details of their dria-coldar’s death, yet it seemed important that Felicity know the man they’d all loved.
“Reyne was a dria-coldar. The title roughly translates to leader in your human language. In many ways he was a warrior, capable of shape-shifting and using telekinesis to protect his family.” Ben tightened his grip on Chris’s hand as memories started to overwhelm him. He took a deep breath and tried to continue. “We were living in a rented home not far from your gallery when we were raided by humans claiming to be ATF agents. It quickly became obvious that they weren’t who they said they were.” His voice faltered as those horrifying minutes replayed in his mind. He went into Chris’s embrace gratefully.
“They knew what they were after,” Chris continued for him, “because they sprayed the room with automatic weapons. Reyne used his telekinesis to stop the bullets hitting Daku, Naith, and Ben, but with his shape-shifting abilities he knew he could survive dozens of bullet wounds without a problem, so he didn’t cover himself. He wasn’t prepared for the exploding rounds the bastards pumped into his chest.”
“I’m sorry,” Felicity said with a catch in her voice. “I didn’t mean to upset—”
“No, Flick, it’s okay,” Chris said as he ran a couple of fingers tiredly across his eye. “We need you to know that Reyne did everything he could to protect his podmates, but it still wasn’t enough. The men who are after us are dangerous. They knew enough about a dria-coldar’s weaknesses and instincts to kill Reyne. If he hadn’t been concentrating so hard on protecting his family, they would never have gotten an exploding round near him.” He leaned over and grabbed her hand. “But now that they know I’m involved they wouldn’t hesitate to use you as leverage against us.”
Felicity swallowed hard, but bravely asked her next question. “H–How did you get away?”
“They weren’t the only ones with a gun,” Chris said in a tight voice. Ben knew Chris hated the thought that he may have killed some of the men who’d attacked them that day, but it had been a very clear “them or us” situation. “I was in the bathroom when it all went down. I don’t think they even knew I was in the house. Despite massive injuries, Reyne managed to protect the four of us as I took our attackers out one by one.”
Ben hugged Chris closer as Felicity tried and failed to hide her concern. “You’re sure they weren’t federal agents?” she asked worriedly. She glanced at Ben, clearly anxious that they’d misled her friend. If she was as protective of him as Chris had suggested, she was likely trying to figure out how to get him away from them. “Could I…ah…speak to you in private?”
“Flick, I know this all sounds incredible, but please just trust me on this. I promise you I’ve never lied to you. Even when I was working undercover I managed to evade y
our questions rather than outright lie.” He reached over and lifted her hand into his. “Daku, Naith, and Ben truly are aliens. We don’t know who those men were or why they came after us, but they knew what Reyne was, and they knew how to kill him.” It was clear that Felicity was shaken by the situation she’d suddenly found herself in, but she nodded slowly, making it obvious that she trusted Chris as well.
* * * *
“So what happens now?” Felicity asked, glancing around the single room of the farmhouse they were currently in. There was only one door and that probably led into a bathroom. The rest of the area was a single huge open space. One wall had what seemed to be three double beds pushed together. She wasn’t quite certain how to interpret that, so she shoved the thought aside for now.
“Reyne’s brother boarded a transport yesterday. He insisted on coming to Earth so that he can protect us.”
“But it’ll take at least three months for him to get here,” Daku added grimly. “Felicity, we’re not helpless. We have ways of protecting you and each other but you’ll never be able to go back to your old life.”
“Never?” Felicity asked in a very tiny voice. A part of her was still waiting for the punch line. But if this was a practical joke it was in very poor taste. And maybe it was her trying to think the best of the man, but Chris seemed very upset that he’d shot several men even though he’d apparently been given little choice. He certainly wasn’t acting like a hero who’d saved his friends from the jaws of death.
“I’m sorry, Felicity,” Daku said solemnly. “The plan had always been for us to meet you. Once we’d gotten to know Chris, we knew we wanted you as part of our family, but then Reyne died and everything changed.”
