sedona files 06 - enemy mine

by Christine Pope

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  That reply elicited another raised eyebrow. Callista settled herself on the couch and took a couple of swallows of wine as well. “Sit down,” she commanded. “You’re making me nervous, hovering over there like that.”

  Since there wasn’t much else I could do, I sat.

  “You were on that ship for eleven days,” she went on. “And you told everyone that you’d spent a lot of time with Gideon. So you must have been doing something when you were with him.”

  “Just talking,” I said. “That’s all.”

  “About what?”

  “I told him about growing up psychic, and he told me a little bit about his mother. Not a ton, though — I still don’t know her name, or how old Gideon was when she died.” At least, I had to assume she was dead. Gideon always talked about her in the past tense.

  “I’d want to die, too, rather than have sex with a Reptilian.” Callista gave an exaggerated shudder and drank some more wine. “Talk about your fates worse than death. Can you imagine?”

  I really couldn’t, and I didn’t want to think about it too much. “No. I’m sure it must have been awful.”

  “I don’t understand why they’d want to be with human women at all,” she continued, even though I would have preferred to have the conversation go in a very different direction. “I mean, it’s not as if we find them attractive, so why would they be attracted to us?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered slowly. “I’m not sure it’s even really an attraction, actually…more like a desire to dominate.”

  A shiver went over her, but the doorbell rang before she could say anything. I set down my wine glass and hurried over to the door. The delivery guy from Moon Dog Pizza was out there, so I dug my phone from my pocket and signed off on the bill they’d emailed me. The delivery guy got the confirmation on his phone, saw the size of the tip, then grinned before murmuring a quick thanks and heading back out to his truck.

  “I’d planned to cover that,” Callista protested.

  “You brought the wine,” I replied, balancing the pizza box on one hand while I shut the door and locked it with the other. “It’s no big deal.”

  She didn’t look that convinced, but she didn’t say anything as I brought the pizza over and set it down on the coffee table. I opened the lid and dished a slice each onto our plates.

  “Okay,” she continued, as if there hadn’t been any interruption in the conversation, “I suppose I get the domination thing, but there are other ways to do that without having sex with someone.”

  “Aren’t you kind of fixating on this?”

  “No. It’s just…weird. And now these women disappearing….” She shivered slightly, although her apparent disgust didn’t prevent her from picking up the piece of pizza on her plate and taking a large bite.

  I couldn’t really argue with her. “One thing I did notice,” I began.

  Her big blue eyes lighted up with curiosity. “What?”

  “Now, I’m not an expert on Reptilians, even though I was on their ship for a while. But I did notice that I didn’t see any aliens who looked like they were female.”

  “Really? How could you even tell?”

  “Well, that’s the problem. I couldn’t tell for sure, and I suppose a biologist would argue that their differences in physiology wouldn’t mirror those of us humans, since reptiles are cold-blooded and don’t nurse their young. But still….” I stopped there and shook my head. “I still can’t help thinking that there really weren’t any of their women on board that ship.”

  “Maybe they’re big old raging sexists and don’t believe in having female crew members.”

  Considering what I’d seen so far of the Reptilians — Gideon being an exception — I could accept Callista’s explanation as to why I hadn’t encountered anyone on the Eclipse who appeared to be obviously female. But again I had that feeling of missing something, that there was more to the story than I’d been able to piece together so far.

  So I said, “Possibly,” and took a bite of pizza.

  Callista also had some of her pizza, then washed it down with rosé. To my surprise, I’d discovered that it was actually a fairly decent combination. After she was finished chewing, she said, “Maybe they don’t have any. Maybe that’s why they’re taking our women.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I replied. “I mean, there have got to be millions of Reptilians out there in the galaxy. The way Raphael talks about them, they seem like a force to be reckoned with, one the Assembly sort of considers a thorn in its side. Or am I misinterpreting things?”

  “No, you’re right.” She deposited another slice of pizza on her plate and sprinkled some extra parmesan cheese on top from one of the packets that had been included with our delivery. “That’s basically exactly the way he’s made it seem. When I went in front of the Assembly, the Secretary seemed to be doing his best not to antagonize them too much. But….” Her words trailed off, and she took a big bite of Canadian bacon and pineapple, chewed quickly, then said with some excitement, “Clones!”

  “What?”

  “Maybe they’re all clones! The Reptilians, I mean. We all know they’re really good at the genetic stuff, so maybe they’ve been using cloning to keep their race going.”

  That actually sounded like a good theory, and one I wasn’t sure I would have thought of. While Callista sipped at her wine, a triumphant gleam in her eyes, I picked at the problem some more. If the Reptilians were such masters of genetic manipulation, then why were they resorting to the very unpredictable method of natural biological reproduction?

  I asked Callista as much, and she shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “God forbid I should ever have the knack of being able to figure out how a Reptilian thinks. It just seemed like the cloning angle would explain a lot of things.”

  It would. But not all of them. And with me back here on Earth and Gideon up there in orbit somewhere — if the Eclipse was even still here in the solar system — I didn’t think I’d be getting the answers I needed anytime soon.

  “Enough of that,” Callista went on. “You’re pretty good at angling a conversation the way you want it to, Taryn, but you still haven’t given me much of an answer about you and Gideon.”

  “That’s because there is no me and Gideon,” I protested. “Nothing happened.”

  “I know. You told me that.” Her eyes, the perfect deep blue of a mountain lake, glinted with interest and a good deal of speculation. “But did you want something to happen?”

  Oh, damn, she had me there. Yes, I could hedge and say there had been no attraction, no spark between us, but I really hated to tell such an outright lie to the best friend I had in the world. There had been…something. I’d fought it, hadn’t wanted to admit that I liked him very much, despite our differences in background and biology and…well, pretty much everything.

  Liked. There was a weak word. In fact, my feelings for him had gone way beyond like, into an attraction I couldn’t explain, had wanted to give in to, even though I’d known that would be a terrible idea.

  “You did!” she said, setting down her wine glass. “I knew it!”

  I wanted to tell her that she didn’t know anything, but that would have been both rude and untrue. “I just….” I began, and stopped there. Problem was, I really didn’t know what to say. If I admitted to her that I cared for Gideon, then I’d also have to admit the same thing to myself.

  Her expression altered, and the triumphant gleam in her eyes faded immediately into worry. She came closer, then leaned over and gave me a quick hug before scooting back over to her side of the couch. “It’s okay,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with caring for someone, you know.”

  “Even the half-alien son of an enemy leader?”

  “Maybe especially because he’s the half-alien son of an enemy leader. Give him a little Earth-style lovin’, and maybe he’ll see the error of his ways.”

  “Callista!”

  “
I’m just saying.” She took a large swallow of her rosé, and poured some more into her glass. “Seriously, he’s half-human, right? So maybe if you could reach out to him — ”

  “How?” I asked, not bothering to keep the bitterness out of my voice. For all I knew, she could sense what I was feeling anyway. Some of those insights were a little too close to home, unless she’d been able to pick some of that stuff right out of my mind. “He’s up there, and I’m down here. What am I supposed to do, stand out in the front yard and put up the bat signal or something?”

  “Okay, you have a point. But we should be able to figure out something. I mean, your father is a rocket scientist.”

  “Astronomer,” I corrected her. “And astrophysicist.”

  “Still.”

  Despite his impressive credentials, I really didn’t think my father could do much to help me. Yes, there was the communications center at the Reptilians’ abandoned base, but I could only imagine the look on his face if I went to him and asked if he could show me how to use the equipment there so I might reach out to my would-be alien boyfriend.

  That would go over really well.

  “I don’t think we can do anything,” I said, and followed her lead by pouring more wine into my glass. Unlike me, since I hardly ever had more than a second glass. But if this wasn’t the correct occasion to get mercifully drunk, what was?

  Callista hadn’t missed the way I’d topped off my drink. “Taryn, I don’t think that’s the solution.”

  “Probably not,” I agreed.

  Right then she looked as if she wanted to say something else, but stopped herself. After a pause, she raised her glass and clinked it against mine. “To drowning your sorrows.”

  I only hoped they would be drowned. I had a feeling that, like a body which hadn’t been properly weighted down, they’d inevitably float to the surface to remind me of what I’d lost.

  Callista left about an hour after that. My head felt swimmy, but even though I knew I should go to bed and sleep off the half-bottle of rosé I’d just drunk, I felt restless. I didn’t want to go to sleep. I wanted….

  I wanted answers. Maybe not the ones everyone was looking for, but something to satisfy my own personal curiosity.

  My laptop was in its bag in the bedroom, along with all the other luggage I’d brought with me. I retrieved the computer and then took it out to the living room so I could sit down with it on the couch.

  Gideon had never mentioned his mother’s name, but I refused to believe it could be that difficult to track her down. After all, Sedona was a sleepy little place despite its brisk tourist trade. How many people could have disappeared here over the years? Also, I knew exactly when she’d been taken. December twenty-first, twenty-five years ago.

  I went to the search page and typed in “woman missing, Sedona, Arizona” and the date. Immediately it flipped over to a list of hits, the top one being a piece that had run on the AZCentral website.

  Phoenix Woman Missing, the headline said.

  And there was her picture.

  God, Gideon looked just like her. Or rather, his features were a masculine echo of hers: the full mouth, the somewhat hooded dark eyes, even the wave in her near-black hair. Elizabeth D’Onofrio. An Italian surname. So that odd impression I’d had when I’d first met him, that he wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Renaissance painting, hadn’t been so far off the mark after all.

  Tearing my eyes away from the image, I tried to focus on the text. Elizabeth Angela D’Onofrio, twenty-four, had gone to Sedona with a group of friends for the solstice. But because it had been cold and windy, her two friends had begged off and decided to stay in. Elizabeth had gone out anyway. Her friends had been concerned but not overly so; she was an experienced hiker and had been to Sedona numerous times. She knew the trails. She’d gone out well-equipped, in all-weather gear and carrying several flashlights, and with enough food and water to last her for two days.

  And then she’d vanished.

  The Forest Service and the local sheriff’s department combed the hills and canyons and dry creek beds, but no sign of her was ever found. Her parents, Gideon and Maria, hired private investigators.

  Gideon, I thought. So he’s named for her father. I’m surprised Lir Shalan allowed that.

  I pulled in a breath and returned to reading the article. Eventually the FBI was called in, but they couldn’t find anything, either. It was if Elizabeth D’Onofrio had disappeared off the face of the earth.

  Which was, as I knew by now, exactly what had happened.

  I stared at her photo, which appeared to have been a professional head shot. Had she modeled? She was pretty enough. I supposed if I dug some more, I could find that out, along with anything else I wanted to know.

  But I didn’t. It seemed disrespectful to be snooping around in her past when I didn’t have any idea how much Gideon actually knew about her. At least I was able to discover who she was, and what the world thought had happened to her. I didn’t want to learn about her hopes and dreams. Had she been seeing someone? Engaged? I supposed if she’d been married, the article would have mentioned that, but it didn’t say anything about her relationship status.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her picture. “I’m sorry for what happened to you. But you would be proud of your son. In the end, he did the right thing.” It could have been the alcohol, but I felt tears begin to sting at my eyes, and I had to swallow past a lump in my throat. “And I’m so grateful to him for that. But now….”

  I had to stop there for a second. Because now I wasn’t sure what I’d meant to say.

  A tremor went through me, and Elizabeth D’Onofrio’s image blurred as my eyes clouded with tears.

  “But now,” I murmured, as I closed the laptop, “now I wish he hadn’t…because I miss him.”

  And I buried my face in my hands and wept.

  CHAPTER NINE

  It’s never a good idea to drink too much when you have to go in to work the next day. It’s an even worse one when you’re not used to drinking in the first place, and your job involves peeking into other people’s minds. And let’s just leave aside altogether my meltdown over Elizabeth D’Onofrio’s picture. My eyes had looked puffy and red when I woke up, but after I pressed a cold washcloth against them for a bit, they seemed to go almost back to normal.

  Thank God the cottage was well-stocked with coffee and tea. I drank coffee when I really needed an extra jolt, but tea was gentler on my system, so I got out a box of Darjeeling and set the kettle to boil. Even after I’d had a few sips, though, I realized the Darjeeling wasn’t quite enough to quiet the headache raging inside my skull.

  I made two cups anyway, since I knew coffee would be too hard on my roiling stomach, and then had toast and cheese, because yogurt didn’t sound so good to me right then. There was also some leftover pizza in the refrigerator, but just looking at it was enough to make me feel vaguely queasy. After that, a long hot shower, some ibuprofen, and I was almost ready to face the world.

  Luckily, I didn’t have to be at work until eleven, which gave me time for the painkillers to kick in, and also allowed my hair a sufficient span in which to dry. Every once in a blue moon I’d blow-dry it straight and use a flat iron on it, but that took hours. It was so much easier to allow it to bounce naturally into its own springy curls.

  Although I’d driven over from my parents’ house the afternoon before, it still felt strange to slide in behind the wheel and say, “Crystal Vision, please.”

  The engine started up, and the car backed out of the driveway. From what I could tell, the neighborhood surrounding the cottage was a quiet one, with most of the people who lived there locals. By that hour of the morning, it seemed as if just about everyone was at work, though I did see an older man walking a big golden retriever before the car went around the corner and headed out to the highway.

  It did help that I’d come back in the middle of the week. Not as many tourists, although the traffic did seem unusually thick for a Thursd
ay morning. I frowned at the car with Texas plates sitting in front of me at a stoplight, and then wanted to groan. End of March. Spring break.

  Great. Dealing with alien invasions could really push the mundanities of earthbound life right out of your head.

  But there wasn’t much I could do about it now, since I’d already promised Leila that I would be in today. With any luck, because the weather was so beautiful, people would be more interested in hiking or going to Slide Rock State Park or participating in any one of the outdoor activities Sedona offered, rather than sitting in a cramped back room at a crystal shop and having their cards read.

  I left my car on the lowest level of the parking structure adjacent to the store, making sure that my monthly parking permit was showing on the dash so I wouldn’t get a ticket, or worse, towed. My life was complicated enough without having to get my car out of impound.

  The familiar scent of sage incense hit me as soon as I walked into the shop. I blinked; I’d been so used to it that I hadn’t even noticed the smell anymore, but now, after being away for so long, the intense perfume almost made my eyes water.

  Or maybe it was just the effects of my rosé binge from the night before.

  “Taryn!” Leila called out. She was off to one side, an elderly, intense-looking woman with a shock of white hair standing next to her. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Much better,” I said. That morning my reflection in the mirror had been sort of pale, but I figured my pallor only made my father’s story about me having strep that much more plausible. I’d gone easy on the blush and used a natural rosy lip stain, just so I wouldn’t appear too blooming.

  Leila’s head tilted slightly, and she gave me a critical look up and down. Although when I wasn’t working I tended to be a jeans and T-shirts kind of person, the tourists expected a psychic to look like a psychic. So today I had on a long skirt decorated with sequins and embroidery, metallic ballet flats, and a white scoop-neck top that fit a good deal more snugly than my casual clothes, along with big silver hoop earrings and my favorite turquoise and silver cuff bracelet.