sedona files 05 - falling angels

by Christine Pope

  There was a joke. She’d been mooning over him for three years now with no end in sight.

  The waiter came up and asked if we wanted another round. I was about to shake my head no, but Kelsey recklessly ordered another dirty martini, so I shrugged and asked for another pear-tini. Since Taryn had barely touched her pinot grigio, she smiled and said she was fine.

  He went off toward the bar, although I noticed the quick glance he sent over his shoulder at Kelsey as he walked away. Girlfriend really needed to wake up, because our waiter was pretty damn cute, for a regular Earth guy.

  Then I heard a murmur of voices coming from the bar, and someone saying, “Turn it up! Turn it up!”

  Mystified, I swiveled in my seat toward the muted commotion. On the wall above the bar was a group of projected heads-up displays showing the usual — several different sporting events, although pickings were pretty slim in early February, now that football season was over; some kind of infomercial; a news broadcast. It was this last that had everyone’s attention. And as I listened, I began to understand why.

  “…transmissions abruptly cut off approximately thirty minutes ago. Since that time, mission control reports absolutely no contact with Venture. Teams are working now to determine whether this is a simple equipment malfunction or whether Venture has encountered something far more serious. The ill-fated mission took off from Cape Canaveral seven months ago and has a crew of four men and two women. It is too early to tell….”

  I turned toward Kelsey and Taryn, both of whom were staring back at me, white-faced. Taryn especially looked scared half to death, green eyes again fixed on some point that only she apparently could see.

  “Is it them?” I demanded. “Is it?”

  “I — I don’t know.”

  I’d always known her to be a truthful person, but right then I could tell she was lying. Why, I had no idea, but I didn’t have time for that kind of crap.

  “Don’t bullshit me, Taryn.”

  Her glance strayed to the screen, where some talking head was now expounding on apparently every single one of the ten thousand things that could have gone wrong with the mission and how it was far too soon to start panicking. Or words to that effect, anyway.

  Meanwhile, Kelsey was looking back and forth between us, not quite baffled. That is, I think she wanted to be baffled, to pretend that she didn’t know what we were talking about, who “they” were. I always got the feeling she would have much preferred to have been born into a nice, normal family that didn’t have part-alien half-sisters and cousins and whatnot, but instead she got our current collection of craziness.

  Taryn picked up her glass of wine and drained what remained of it — more than half the glass. I stared at her, startled despite my worry. She was not the type to chug her drinks.

  “It is them,” she whispered. “But that’s all I know.”

  For a second, it seemed as if I couldn’t move. Then I was digging in my purse for my car keys. I had no idea if Raphael had heard anything yet about what seemed to be going on somewhere in the black spaces between Mars and Earth, but right then all I could think about was being with him, of having him hold me and tell me this latest development wasn’t as bad as it sounded.

  Even if it was a lie.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Although he had complained that it was a clumsy form of communication, Raphael had allowed me to pick out a cell phone for him. Yes, we could communicate mentally, but the farther apart we were, the more difficult our subvocal discourse became, and the martini bar where I’d been with Taryn and Kelsey was on the opposite side of town from the house I shared with Raphael, and there were a couple of very large hills in between.

  So I told my car to call Raphael’s cell, then felt my fingers begin to tighten on the steering wheel as the phone rang and rang before it went to voicemail. The factory-standard message came over the speakers, since he’d never bothered to change it.

  I resisted the urge to hang up without saying anything, even though I knew that he’d already developed a bad habit of leaving the phone sitting on the nightstand rather than carrying it with him. “Raphael, there could be some trouble brewing. I’m on my way home. I’ll be there in five.”

  After ending the call, I drove far too fast the rest of the way to the house, pulling around some tourists who were waffling at the entrance to one of the traffic circles that joined 89A and Highway 179. I earned an angry honk for my trouble, but I barely noticed as I sped up once again, and ignored the flashing “speed limit 35” warning on my dashboard. So what if I was going nearly twenty miles an hour over that?

  That level of speed wasn’t possible on the road which wound up to the house, so I slowed down to around thirty and gritted my teeth as I swung around every curve. When we’d picked out the property, I’d been attracted to the way it sat far up on the side of the hill, distant enough from the highway that you could barely hear the background murmur of traffic. Now, though, I found myself cursing the very isolation I’d once thought so desirable. Would I ever get home?

  Eventually I did, of course. I pushed the button for the garage door opener when I was still half a block away, then let out a sigh of relief when I saw the little convertible Raphael had bought for himself sitting inside the garage. He was still learning to drive, but that hadn’t stopped him from getting that shiny red BMW.

  Which meant he must be around somewhere. Possibly roaming around the garden, although it would be at least another month before anything but the evergreens showed any real signs of life. I reminded myself how irritated I got whenever people expected me to be reachable all the time, but I wasn’t sure how much good those self-admonishments did.

  “Raphael!” I called out as I came into the kitchen. “Have you seen the news?”

  Silly question, really. While he did possess a keen interest in what was going on here on good old planet Earth, he never watched the television news, calling it “blather and bloviation.”

  No answer. Well, he could be in the bedroom we’d designated as the study, with his and hers desks and laptops to match. He did like to listen to music while he read the news online — usually the feed from the BBC — or amused himself by lurking in conspiracy theory and UFO chatrooms. I’d told him that was a bad habit to pick up, since he knew the truth of the situation while the people in those online forums obviously didn’t, but he’d only given me a gorgeous but infuriating smile and said that such a pastime was far more entertaining than watching any scripted shows on television.

  So be it. I hurried toward the back of the house where the study was located, only to find it empty as well. I stopped in the middle of the room, trying the best I could to push back the panic rising within me.

  “Raphael!”

  Nothing. We’d debated getting a dog but hadn’t reached a decision yet, mostly because Raphael was still getting used to cohabiting with me, let alone a canine, and so the house felt empty. Completely, strangely empty.

  I went from room to room, wondering if Raphael was napping in the master bedroom, or fixing himself a snack in the kitchen. Nothing. Not even a note on the countertop saying that Martin had swung by to take him shooting in the woods. The gang had been trying for a while to get Raphael to join in their outdoor activities, but he’d seemed more puzzled than anything else that people would find shooting cans off the top of fence posts an enjoyable way to pass the time.

  Biting my lip, I went out to the living room. Not that I expected to find him there — it was open to a good deal of the house, and so it would have been impossible for him to ignore me calling for him — but because I didn’t know where else to go.

  Then I saw something gleaming on top of the coffee table. Something flat and metallic, almost like a dog tag, except it was bigger than that, a little smaller than a business card. A frown pulling at my brow, I went over and picked it up. The metal was a dark, dull gray, almost the color of lead, except far lighter in weight.

  Scratched into the surface of the metal
was a set of characters I’d never seen before and certainly didn’t recognize. They looked halfway between Cyrillic and kanji, but I knew enough to realize they were neither of those. As I stared down at them, though, they seemed to shift and sharpen, turning into words of recognizable English.

  We have him.

  * * *

  Everyone assembled in my living room. Generally, Aunt Kara’s house was the location for such convos, but expecting me to drive after the shock I’d experienced was probably presuming a bit much. I’d had just enough presence of mind to call my mother’s cell before breaking down into hysterical tears, and that was about all I could manage.

  Now I sat on the couch, my mother next to me, while my father kept turning the strange piece of metal over and over in his hands. “Menkh,” he said.

  Lance raised an eyebrow. “What?”

  “The material this is made of. The Reptilians use it. Nearly indestructible at the beginning, but also brittle and short-lived. It’ll shiver into dust in the next couple of hours.”

  “Convenient,” I remarked bitterly. “No evidence.” Nevertheless, I’d still taken a picture of it with my phone, although I doubted that would help much. Evidence more compelling than a piece of metal had been faked plenty of times before that. I blinked away my tears and stared up at my father. He was the best authority on anything alien-related at that point, since Raphael had been taken by the Reptilians and my grandfather Gabriel was miles away at his home in Flagstaff. “But if it’s Reptilian, why could I read what it said?”

  “Because it was written in the common language of the Assembly. I’ve never taught it to you because I didn’t see the point, but some memory of it must have been passed along to you through my blood.”

  Right. That wasn’t creepy or anything. I sniffled, and my mother pulled another tissue from the box on the coffee table and passed it over to me.

  The television was on in the background, although Paul Oliver was the only one paying it much attention. More talking heads dissecting the continuing radio silence from the Mars mission, trying to fill up hours of air time with very little real information. Kelsey and Taryn had taken up residence on a couple of the dining room chairs, while Kara and Lance sat on the couch opposite the one where I’d more or less collapsed. Both Melissa and Kevin were at work, so they’d have to get filled in later. Persephone stood at the window, staring at the last sullen dregs of the late-winter sunset as if attempting to read them like tea leaves.

  For all I knew, she could. I still didn’t have an exact handle on how the whole clairvoyance/clairsentience thing worked. As intimidating as it could be, Taryn’s ability to read minds seemed much more straightforward, although I knew there was a lot more to her talents than simply reading minds. Like her mother, she also had the ability to see things no one else could.

  “There were no other attempts to communicate?” my father asked then. His tone was kind, soothing even, but something about the way he was asking his questions made me wonder if he was hearkening back to a time before I was even born, when he’d been pretending to be a Man in Black. How many other people had he questioned in such a way?

  “No,” I said, blotting my eyes with the tissue. My mother had also had the presence of mind to bring a small trashcan from the guest bathroom when she fetched the box of Kleenex for me. I dropped the used tissue into the receptacle. “Nothing else. Just that.” I stared balefully at the rectangular piece of metal, which my father had just set back down on the coffee table. “It’s like an intergalactic ‘fuck you.’”

  Neither of my parents commented on my language, probably because they knew that would only open the door to more cursing, which tended to be my last resort when I couldn’t think of what else to do. “I suppose you could call it that,” my father said. “So…they took him. But why? What purpose could holding him hostage serve?”

  “I don’t know. In that crazy hearing on Penalta, it sounded as if they wanted me, but the Secretary put the kibosh on that. So is this revenge?”

  My father ran a hand through his hair, disarranging the expensive cut. “I doubt it. The Reptilians are a bloodthirsty race, but they are also calculating. They know how to play the long game. Revenge rarely suits their purposes, as it shows a loss of control.”

  “Admirable,” Lance said dryly.

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that.”

  Persephone came back toward where we were all sitting. Maybe she’d given up staring out the window because dusk had finally given way to full dark. “If they were simply out for revenge, I think they would have done something a little more…final.” She stopped there, but there was no need for her to continue. We all could guess what she meant by “final.”

  “It’s true,” my mother put in. “I’ve had some contact with their minds, and it’s…well, it’s not pleasant, not by a long shot. Even that brief exposure was enough to tell me that they enjoy prolonging things, making a person suffer. And mental anguish is often the worst suffering there is.” She squeezed my hand, as if to tell me that she hated saying these things, even though they might be necessary for getting to the bottom of what was going on. “Giving someone a quick death isn’t their style.”

  If that comment was supposed to make me feel better, it wasn’t doing a very good job. I gulped down some air and told myself that crying wasn’t going to help anything. I needed to keep my head screwed on straight.

  Taryn spoke up for the first time. “If they left a message, it sounds to me like they intended to keep the lines of communication open. Otherwise, they would have just taken Raphael and left us all to wonder what had happened to him.”

  I supposed she had a point, although I couldn’t help feeling a little irritated that it seemed to be back to “communication” with her. “Then why haven’t they contacted me? Just to keep the torture going a little longer?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “I wouldn’t know much about that. I haven’t had any contact with them the way you or your parents have.”

  Again I got that strange flicker from her, as if there was something she wasn’t telling me. If circumstances had been different and we’d been alone, I might have pushed and tried to get her to open up. But I had way too much to worry about right then.

  “They’re aliens,” Lance said then, his voice harsh. “And not the good kind. Expecting any kind of logic from them is a waste of time.”

  Paul turned away from the television, using the remote to mute the sound, although he already had it set fairly low so as not to disturb our conversation. “I don’t believe that at all. Every move they’ve made indicates something they’ve been planning for a while. It may not feel logical to us because their goals and motivations are so different from ours, but that doesn’t mean they’re lacking in logic. Just the opposite, in fact.”

  My uncle looked unconvinced. “So if you were a coldly logical alien, what would you be planning?”

  A smile at Lance’s question, and Paul shook his head. Unlike my father, he’d gotten a good bit of gray over the past five years or so, but it didn’t look bad, just reinforced the impression he gave of a retired college professor. Which I supposed he was, even though that retirement had been more or less forced because of his belief in UFOs and aliens.

  “I don’t want to speculate. I don’t have enough data. It feels as if we’re still missing something here. Yes, we know that the Reptilians wanted to tap into Sedona’s vortexes to give them a power unlike anything you can find elsewhere, but I’m not sure if that’s the whole story.”

  “What else do we have that they’d want?” I said. “Some sort of element or other resource you can only get here?” Even as I asked the question, I knew I was probably grasping at straws. If the Reptilians truly had been working behind the scenes with some of the world’s leaders, then I had no doubt they would have gotten exactly what they’d wanted in exchange for handing over some of their technology secrets.

  “There is none,” my father replied. “Earth is certainly not
the only planet of its type in the galaxy, and it doesn’t possess anything that can’t be found in abundance elsewhere. There is the vortex energy, but….” He shook his head. “There is something strange about their desire for that energy. Their race simply doesn’t have the ability to tap into it the way anyone with Pleiadian blood can, or even the way a human might.”

  “Could they force a human to use it?” Taryn asked, and everyone looked at her with some surprise. I noticed a tinge of pink on her cheeks, but her voice was steady enough as she went on, “I’m just wondering because of what you’d said about your interactions with them, Kirsten.”

  Since she sat so close to me, I could feel my mother go rigid. “I — I guess I never really thought about it from that angle.”

  My father ran an abstracted hand over his chin, as if rubbing at stubble, although his chin looked smooth enough to me. In general, Pleiadians didn’t seem to be all that hirsute. “It could be possible,” he said, the words coming out slowly, as if he was puzzling through them as he spoke. “Their mental abilities are different in nature from ours, but they can touch another’s mind if they concentrate hard enough. So I can see how they might try to use a human as a puppet to get at the energies they want to bend to their own uses.”

  “Which would explain why they would want to keep a few choice specimens around, even if they wanted to kill most of us off.” My mother’s voice was hard, brittle. I knew that the Reptilian leader from her time had shown her images of destruction…but also of slavery. A fate the human race had avoided, thanks to the people who now sat in my living room with me.

  I shivered, but at the same time a terrible impatience seized me. “That might explain what they did then, but it still doesn’t explain what they’re doing now with Raphael. He’s not human. He doesn’t have any particular ability when it comes to accessing the energy here. I mean, no more so than any Pleiadian. They would have done better to get me, since I’m at least a quarter human. Or Mom. Or even Persephone or Taryn.”