Alien in the Family

by Gini Koch

  “My mate?” Reader and I called them mates, sometimes, but I’d never heard an A-C refer to a spouse this way.

  Chuckie’s eyes were closed and I could see the conspiracy wheels turning. “Why did you ask about the Ancients?”

  “Because they were shapeshifters. I’m pretty sure they’re our angels from Bible stories. We’ve figured they had trouble adapting to our bad air when they came back in recent times, since they died on the A-C home world.” He opened his eyes. “No spacesuits.”

  He raised his eyebrow. “You’re kidding.”

  “No. Anyway, according to ACE, our A-Cs are the most advanced of those races.”

  “But that doesn’t mean the others weren’t around when the Ancients first came by,” Gower said. “But shapeshifting was an Ancient trait. They were trying to save the worlds, not destroy them.”

  I thought about Operation Fugly. “Why are we assuming that every one of the Ancients was good? I mean, Mephistopheles is proof the devil was around. Couldn’t some missionary have gone bad?”

  “They do all the time,” Tito offered. “I know plenty of priests who didn’t stay all that close to God. I mean, humans are fallible.”

  “The Ancients weren’t human,” Gower said.

  “That doesn’t mean they weren’t fallible. Or that they didn’t get tired and decide to settle down. Maybe they thought they’d help the warlike folks more by being there full time. There’s a ton of possibilities. But I think we’ve got Ancient blood in the folks from the warlike planet.”

  Christopher nodded. “Okay, I’m good with the working hypothesis. Now what?” We got out of the elevator and, happily, went the opposite way from the Lair.

  “Why the hell did she kiss me?” It still wasn’t computing. It had given her away, and anyone with half a brain would have known it would. Someone could imitate how Martini looked, but if he didn’t kiss the way he did, I’d know it wasn’t him.

  “She thought you looked hot,” Martini offered. “Why does it matter? You didn’t like it, did you?”

  We reached the holding cell. She was in there, extremely well strapped down. I could see signs of torture. I didn’t mind and figured I should. I saw her nose had been fixed, but it still had some tape on it. I took Martini’s jacket off and handed it back to him. “No, Jeff, I didn’t like it. You’re a far better kisser.”

  “Why are you wearing security tags?” Chuckie asked.

  “I sort of stole the clothes.”

  “Yeah, but I paid for them,” Martini said. “Here, hang on.” He fiddled with the tags. “Your other clothes and shoes are back in the suite in Vegas, by the way.”

  “Thanks, but, Jeff, the tags stain the clothes if you take them off wrong.”

  “Only if a human does it.” He held out the tags. They looked opened properly. He’d also taken off the price tags. I took a look and quickly looked down. The scary expensive clothes weren’t stained. “Thanks. And, um, thanks for not minding that I bought this.”

  “You look great. Maybe the outfit will last long enough to wear out to dinner, but I’m not betting on it.”

  “Me, either. So, Chuckie, do I want to know what you did to her?”

  “Probably not.”

  “It was less than I was ready to do to her,” Christopher said. I could tell he was serious. “The C.I.A. just has some techniques that are more quickly effective.”

  “Was she afraid of you?”

  “Not really. She seemed contemptuous, honestly . . .” Chuckie’s voice trailed off. “You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking?”

  “Never piss off the comics geek-girl. Yeah, I’m thinking exactly that.” I looked up at him. “Kill her if she gets loose, but otherwise, I’m gonna go have a girl chat with our shapeshifting Wonder Woman.”

  CHAPTER 22

  THEY LET ME INTO THE CELL. It wasn’t all that large, but it was big enough that I didn’t have to be right on top of her. She had short blonde hair and was very muscular but in an attractive way. I almost laughed, though—she was clearly not from the A-C home world. Not that she was ugly, but she wasn’t a stunning beauty, either. Her eyes also looked wrong—larger, more elongated, and they were dark purple. Her limbs were the same, elongated just a bit, but enough to look out of proportion for a human. A-Cs were in perfect proportion, I verified that every night.

  She gave me a slow smile once the door closed. “Is he dead?”

  “Who?”

  “Your mate. The one I fooled.”

  “No, he’s not dead. He’s not my mate, either.”

  “He loves you. You love him.” It was true, but not in the way I assumed she meant.

  “What makes you say that?”

  She laughed. “It was obvious.”

  “Why did you kiss me?”

  Her eyelids lowered. “You are attractive.”

  “And you’re so crappy an assassin that you stopped to grab some nookie before killing the target?”

  “You are not my target.”

  “James was?”

  “No. He was . . . annoying.” Interesting. Reader hadn’t been the target, and she’d known it from the get-go. So who was she really after if she wasn’t after the guy she thought was my mate?

  “Why?”

  “He was pawing you. And you enjoyed it.” Her eyes flashed. “You are a woman of power, yet you let them touch you. You show off your body for them.” And the trash guys, but who was keeping score?

  “We’d call you Amazons here. What do you call yourselves?”

  “You cannot pronounce it.”

  “Yeah, we hear that a lot. Apparently double suns make you strong, speedy, and fast talkers. Pity none of you ever want to become an auctioneer or something equally benign. You’re all really annoying, though, I can say that. You can speak our language, how?”

  “Radio waves carry. Even through the net.” Her eyes flashed again.

  “No one on this planet put that net up. We have one around us, too.”

  “The ones who put it up are coming here. To crown a new king. And he will die before the crown reaches his head.”

  Great, they were after my mate, my real one. “No one here wants that crown.”

  “Liar. All men crave power.”

  “Sure, but there are different ways to get it. Besides, you’re power-mad, too. So, what do you call yourselves that we can understand?”

  “The Free.”

  “Hilarious. Since you’re the least free people out there.”

  “Yes, we do understand the irony. We will be freed from the tyranny, and we will make all who bound us pay.”

  “You realize that most of the people you’re going to exact your revenge against are innocent of the crimes?”

  “No man is innocent.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake. How do you all reproduce without men?” She gave me another slow smile. “Come here and I will show you.”

  “Wow, you’re so smooth. I don’t want to have sex with you. You’re not my type.”

  “Because I’m a woman?”

  “Because you kiss like crap. I mean, I realize it was the start of a girl fight, but jeez, you sucked, and not in a good way.”

  “I can do things no man can or will.”

  “Wow, you all buying that on your planet? Sure, there are plenty of men who don’t have a full range of moves. Mine doesn’t happen to be one of them. Plus, if that kiss was your opening salvo, you just cured any bi-curiosity I might have had. Gag me, okay? I’m gonna assume, however, that Earth lesbians kiss better, because a girl should always keep her options open. Now, cut the crap. You didn’t come across the galaxy to hit on me, and I think you’re a psycho bitch, so I’m not fixing you up with my single lesbian girlfriends, either. The love connection’s out, so why the hell are you here?”

  “To destroy the royal family’s hopes of succession.” She looked out the door. “I see them. Know they will die.”

  “Everybody dies. But I’m not going to let you kill them.”

/>   “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t like your style.”

  She shifted, and Reader was staring at me. “You would prefer his style?”

  “Oh, yeah, totally. Of course, he’s in love with someone else. Another man, to be exact. He’s one of my best friends, not my lover.”

  “Men and women cannot be friends.”

  “Well, sure, not all the time. Like, two of the guys outside the door are friends of mine, but between you, me, and the straps, they’d both do me in a New York Minute if they could. Of course, they won’t because they know I’m not in love with them, and, unlike you, they don’t force themselves on women who aren’t willing.” Of course, Christopher sort of had, but I hadn’t been all that unwilling.

  Train of thought change time—I knew Martini was focusing his full empathic skills on me right now. “But James is my friend, only. And unless he stops being gay, which seems unlikely, he’ll only be my friend. Which is too bad, really, especially since I’m damned sure he kisses better than you.”

  She glared at me. “And the other three?”

  “Well, the totally hot black guy is my friend’s boyfriend. Be glad I’m the one in here, not him. It’s a toss-up between which one of us hates you more.”

  “So, your lover is still alive?”

  “If you mean the guy you’re pretending to be right now, yeah. He’s still alive, no thanks to you.”

  She laughed. “He will be nothing. I smashed his brain. On purpose.”

  I decided Chuckie hadn’t tortured her enough. “Pity for you. Because he’s going to be fine.”

  “Impossible.” She shifted back to herself.

  “Nope, quite possible. He’s going to be fine. Without hair for a little while, but he’s so damn good looking that it won’t matter. Oh, and yeah, I can see why you like shifting into him; he’s beyond hotter looking than you.”

  “And the others?”

  “One of them’s a new recruit and the guy who saved my friend’s life. And the other one actually is my mate. See if you can guess who’s who. I gave you the easy one.” The one she already knew.

  I knew she was fully aware that Reader wasn’t my man—she wouldn’t have used Gower’s image to lure him if she hadn’t been. She hadn’t made a mistake attacking Reader so much as a choice to up the body count. Attacking him had given her away and ended in her capture, but she didn’t seem worried, more like she was playing a game. And that meant I had to figure out what game it was and what she thought she was achieving before she got a chance to hurt anybody else. Specifically Martini, because I wasn’t buying that she didn’t know which one he was any more than I was buying her pickup lines.

  “We will kill them all. That way, there is no confusion.”

  “Who’s ‘we’? I’m supposed to believe there’s more of you whacked out bitches on my planet?” I knew there was at least one other, but I was hoping we’d catch a break.

  “My mate is here. She will ensure my freedom and the death of your beloved men,” she spat the word, “and your enslavement.”

  “Oh, it’s always the enslavement with you people. Never the playing nicely with others. And I’m supposed to believe there are only two of you here? What a lame-ass invasion. Two insane Amazons against an entire planet? No wonder you all were locked onto your home world—who’d want to let the lot of you out?”

  “We are all that will be needed.”

  There was something in the way she said it. Or rather, in the way her eyes didn’t meet mine. Wow, no one from their entire solar system could lie. Amazing. “You’re not actually emissaries from your government, are you?”

  She looked at me and her eyes were wide. “What do you mean?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Why?”

  “I figure I’d rather call you by your name than Whacked Out Psycho Space Bitch, which is what I’m leaning toward. Oh, and, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m sure I can’t pronounce your freaking name in my language. You’re a chick, fake it.”

  I half expected her to say Diana. “You may call me Moira.” Oh, well, she was too militant and anti-Earth to be the real Wonder Woman, after all. On the other hand, I figured she’d picked the name for a reason—Moirae was what the Greeks called the Fates. And the A-C solar system had been around and active when all the Earth races were still babies.

  “Great. So, Moira, what’s your mate’s name?”

  “She is not captured, I will not betray her.”

  “Fine. So, when did you two decide on this plan of conquest, before or after you got exiled?”

  Her jaw dropped. “Wha . . . what do you mean?”

  I leaned against the wall. “I’m just spitballing here, but I’m guessing that your world leaders wouldn’t be wasting their time coming to Earth. I don’t care who you think’s here, it’s too damned far away. Especially since the planets that made the decision to lock you guys down are all a lot closer to home.”

  I shifted. Martini made leaning against walls look a lot more comfortable than it was. “Now, the royal family is sending someone out here, ostensibly to give me the royal marriage test that I’m going to flunk impressively, but no one in the entire universe can convince me that the head royal honcho or honcha is going to be arriving on our unwelcoming shores. Only the completely moronic would do that, and they may be many things, but stupid surely isn’t one of them. So they’re sending a representative, or several. Then they’ll enact their little plan of world domination or world extermination on us. But your people wouldn’t care about that. They want to deal with the folks nearby, to make them pay for what they did. And I can understand that. But you can’t, can you?”

  “No blood from that line should remain!”

  “So, did they rape and kill your family members or something?”

  “No. They enslaved our entire race.”

  “Yes, yes, enslaved, big net, got it. I’m asking you if they did something else to make you suffer.”

  She looked as though she didn’t understand the question. “They denied us our place in the stars. That is sin enough.”

  Great. She and presumably her mate were fanatics. Wonderful. “So, the two of you decided, what? That you were going to take care of any remnant bloodlines?”

  “We were sent here by the Grace of God to enact vengeance.”

  “Oh, right. Um, I don’t think that’s God’s plan.”

  “Of course it is. Why else would She have allowed us to escape?”

  CHAPTER 23

  “ESCAPE FROM WHERE?” I wasn’t surprised Moira was calling her God a female. It would have been a lot weirder if she’d thought God was male.

  Moira didn’t answer. She just gave me a dirty look, then checked out my chest. I had a feeling she was doing it to make me uncomfortable. Didn’t work, especially since I’d just flashed the twins at all my guys a few hours earlier.

  “So, you two were under arrest, weren’t you?”

  She looked away from me. “No.”

  “Who arrested you? Your own government?”

  She kept on not looking at me. I moved into her line of sight. She turned her head to the other side. I had the feeling she was going to try this child’s move all day. Another thought rose up.

  “How old are you?”

  “We don’t count age like you do.”

  “I’m sure. How old are you in the way you do count?”

  “I am of age.”

  Aha. She was a kid, by their standards, anyway. Only kids made sure you knew they were old enough to do what they were in trouble for doing. A fanatical kid. But a kid. And kids had fears and usually not a lot of defenses against them. “So, Moira, just want to tell you something.”

  “What?” She turned back to look at me.

  I got up closer to her, but not so close she could head butt me. “When I find your mate, and I will, I’m going to make sure I destroy her in the most evil, painful way possible. I’ll make sure to smash her brain in and do other horrible things to her. And
I’m going to make you watch. You’ll get to see her suffer, and then you’ll get to see her die. How does that sound?”

  Moira didn’t look as confident. “You will never be able to catch her.”

  “Caught you.”

  “Only because you had help.”

  “I’ve got a lot of help. And your mate doesn’t, does she? She had you, but you’re not going anywhere. In fact, I’m going to shoot you full of drugs, so you can’t escape even if you manage to get out of the restraints. They might kill you, but I’m willing to take that risk.”

  “She is more experienced than me. You won’t catch her.”

  I did my best to give her my mother’s most intimidating smile. It worked, if the look in Moira’s eyes was any indication. “Of course I will. She’s going to come to try to rescue you. And I’ll be waiting. I’ll have so many traps waiting for her that even if most don’t work, one will. Then you’ll get to see her suffer and die. So you can feel what it’s like when you hurt a person someone else loves.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Because you not only hurt someone I love, you gloated about it. You were happy to hurt him, and you had no reason to do it other than pure viciousness. On this world, we have an old saying: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. My father’s people wrote that, millennia ago. It’s still apt. I’m going to make sure you suffer like you made me and my friends suffer. Only worse.”

  She swallowed. “You won’t succeed.”

  “Sure I will. I’ll bet you’ve missed check-in time with your mate. She’ll be looking for you, realize we’ve got you. There’re only a few places we’d take you. She’ll be here, soon. And I’ll be ready.”

  I dug into my purse and pulled my phone out. “Chuckie.”

  “Yeah. Why are you calling me?” I looked out of the corner of my eye and saw him walk away from the window. I went farther away from Moira, so she couldn’t hear him, at least, I hoped.

  “I want all manner of security put on the Center. Make them evil, make them nasty. Do your worst, and do a lot of it. Space Bitch’s girlfriend’s going to be coming to save her, and I want our little friend here to see her gal suffer and die. Got that?”