by Sarah Wynde
Kaio dipped his head. “I apologize. I intended no negligence. Luken’s health has been my priority.”
The subtext was obvious—how selfish of her to be worried about her cellphone and her messenger bag when Luke was wounded. Fen glared at him.
“Now, now.” Gaelith leaned forward. “You’re worried, child, and you must not be. All will be well.”
Child?
“I look young,” Fen said. “But I’m a legal adult. I take care of myself. A couple days in paradise, awesome, rad to the tenth, rocks the big one.” She couldn’t keep her hands still and her voice was rising with each additional adjective, so she stopped herself and took a deep breath. In a quieter voice, she said, “But I want to know when I’m going home.”
“Oh, child.” Gaelith hurried around the table to her. Fen let herself be hugged, but she stayed stiff and rigid in Gaelith’s arms. The woman wasn’t as tall as her brothers, but Fen still fit under her chin. “All will be well,” Gaelith repeated, patting Fen’s back.
Luke hovered next to them. “Soon, soonest,” he said, sounding worried. “We must let the police do their work.”
Fen gritted her teeth. She didn’t want comfort, she wanted information.
“After I return Gaelith to her home,” Kaio said, “I shall retrieve your property and interrogate the officers in charge of the investigation. I shall endeavor to discover every detail they have gleaned from the scant evidence and inform you forthwith. And I shall particularly press them to expedite their work so as to speed your return. Does that satisfy?”
Fen pulled away from Gaelith’s hug. From his voice, she couldn’t tell whether Kaio was mocking her or not. She thought he was, but she couldn’t protest because Gaelith and Luke were both agreeing, voices relieved, that he was exactly right and that was exactly what should be done.
Aliens.
Damn them.
They were so very, very nice.
An Arrival
“And today’s excuse?”
Fen frowned at Luke in mock-disapproval. “Excuses are for losers.”
He grinned at her. “Come on, Fen.” He held out a hand, wiggling his fingers enticingly. “Come swimming with me. You’ll enjoy it, I promise.”
Fen looked at the brilliant blue of the water behind him, the sun glaring off it so brightly that it shone like a mirror. “It’s too bright.”
“If I ask you later, you’ll say it’s too dark.”
“Well, then it will be too dark.”
“Or too salty or too chlorinated or too cold or too warm…” Luke flopped down on the sand next to her chaise lounge.
“Or too wet,” she said. “Always too wet.”
“You’re so silly.” Luke sighed with a melodramatic heave of his chest and Fen looked back at her book, smiling.
Wrapping her head around the alien thing hadn’t been easy. But in the two days since Gaelith and Kaio left, Fen had come to a couple of conclusions.
First, these aliens couldn’t be regulars on planet Earth. Luke, like his siblings, talked like someone out of a romantic play. The last time they’d visited must have been at least a couple of hundred years ago.
Second, the reason they were here couldn’t be to conquer or destroy. No way was that Luke’s thing. He was… gallant. Insanely polite. Completely sweet. And excellent company.
Fen liked him.
She liked him a lot.
Luke put a hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun and squinted up at her. “Cards?”
She waved her book at him. “Reading.”
“You’re always reading.”
“So not true. Didn’t I watch an entire episode of that ridiculous television show with you less than two hours ago?” she protested.
“How can you not love it?” He sat up again, arms encircling his knees with lanky grace. “Vampires, werewolves, gorgeous girls?” The flash of teeth held pure mischief.
“Pretty boys?” she answered him flippantly.
“Prettier than me?”
Fen fluttered her eyelashes at him. “Is there such a thing?”
Kaio, now, Kaio might be prettier than his brother. But Luke was young, he’d catch up. And he was far more fun than Kaio. Fen never had to wonder what his words meant or what hidden meaning lay behind his actions.
“Alas,” Luke said dolefully, “I am but average among my cousins.”
“Seriously?” Fen peeked over the edge of her sunglasses at him. “How many cousins do you have?”
“Too many. I shall endeavor to be sure that you meet none of them.”
Fen laughed. “It doesn’t seem likely.”
“Oh, little you know my cousins. Were they aware I had such a lovely guest, you may be sure they would be visiting. Dropping by, one after another, and then before one knew, crowds of them until the house veritably overflowed.”
Fen shook her head at him. He was such a goof. “Don’t tell them then.” She opened her book again.
“The game with the clubs?”
Fen chuckled, snuggling into the chaise lounge, book in front of her. “You and I together are the world’s worst tennis players. We can’t even get the ball over the net half the time and we’ve never managed to hit one back. I can’t imagine why you want to keep trying. And those aren’t clubs, they’re rackets.”
“Rackets, yes,” Luke said. “But does not racket mean crime?”
“Yeah, it can mean something illegal, but it also means…” She pantomimed a swinging motion. “That thing. It has other meanings, too. Google?”
“Google.” Luke nodded. “I shall return.”
He bounded up and took off running toward the house. Fen watched him go, a half-smile curving her lips, and then turned back toward her book.
She’d found the laptop in the office next to the library and introduced Luke to Google. He’d been immediately infatuated, more proof that no way was he human. No rich boy alive didn’t know how to use a basic search engine. He’d be gone for ten minutes, maybe longer, while he searched the meaning of “racket” and followed links to pictures and other sites.
And she would read her book. She’d finished Romeo and Juliet. Yeah, maybe it was lovely, but those kids were stupid-ass idiots. Seriously, killing yourself for someone you’d known for a week? Dumb, dumb, dumb.
She was starting The Great Gatsby, for which she had higher hopes.
At the sound of an engine, she looked up.
A plane was coming in for a landing.
Fen closed the book, not bothering with a bookmark. It was about time Kaio returned. He’d promised her information as soon as possible. Apparently that meant “sometime in a far-off future when I’m not likely to get yelled at for not knowing shit.”
She stood and grabbed her sundress from the foot of the chaise lounge. She’d started bringing along a sundress to wear in case Kaio came back. Not that she thought she needed to hide her bikini-clad body, but… eh, a little extra fabric between her body and Kaio’s eyes just seemed prudent.
Not for him, of course.
Gay guy, what did he care?
But for her.
She pulled the dress over her head. As she emerged from the folds of cloth, the plane was taxiing toward the end of the runway. It wasn’t the one on which they’d arrived. It was smaller, dingier, a Honda Civic of a plane compared to the limo they’d used before. But she began walking toward it so she could start harassing Kaio as soon as he disembarked.
And then she paused, a trickle of uncertainty running along her spine.
Nope, nope, an internal voice was saying. Not a stranger’s voice, her own voice. Not a hallucination, an intuition.
That plane wasn’t very big.
It wasn’t elegant.
It wasn’t Kaio.
As the door to the plane opened, Fen stopped breathing.
She recognized that face. It would have been hard to forget. No, impossible to forget.
The man who’d tried to murder her less than a week earlier hopped easily
out of the plane onto the ground. He took up a position by the side of the wing as another man followed him down, and then a third.
The third man tugged at his jacket sleeves and Fen glanced up the runway to see Eladio approaching the plane, a welcoming smile on his face.
Fuck.
She was breathing again, in tight gasps, the air barely reaching her lungs.
Eladio was in on it.
In on what? part of her brain asked, but the other part whirled away from the runway and bolted toward the house.
The sand was a bitch to run in. Each step weighed ten pounds and Fen couldn’t stop envisioning her attempted murderer pulling out his gun and firing toward her back. But what could she do? Hide or escape—those were the choices.
Reaching Luke came first, though. Gorgeous Thug Guy had already shot him once and he would be a sitting duck staring at a computer screen in the office.
By the time she burst into the house, her lungs were burning and she was gasping for air. She had to pause to rest in the open atrium, hands on her knees.
“Miss?” One of the guys who worked around the house approached, voice worried.
“Just getting in a little workout,” Fen choked out as she straightened. She tried to smile, hoping she didn’t look as flat-ass terrified as she felt. From his wary response, she guessed her smile was more of a grimace, but when she waved him off, he backed away.
She hurried along the interior hallway toward the library, passing the overflowing bookshelves without a second thought, and beyond them, into the office.
Luke looked up from the computer. “Racket is a noise. A loud noise.”
A loud noise, like the one going to happen any minute when Gorgeous Thug Guy and his friends began shooting?
“We’ve got to get out of here.” Fen grabbed Luke’s hand and started tugging him toward the door.
“To go where?” Luke asked, not resisting her pull.
God, that was the question, wasn’t it? “Anywhere. How can we escape from the island?”
“What do you mean? Escape what?” Luke sounded puzzled but obliging as he followed her into the library.
Fen headed straight for the door. The rooms in this interior part of the house—the library, the office, the dining room—had no windows, no exits to the outside. Safer in hurricanes, she supposed, but she didn’t want to wind up trapped. But by the time they reached the library door, she could hear male voices down the hallway, in the atrium.
She paused. Those had to be the new arrivals. What were they doing? Were the men spreading out to search for her and Luke? The voices were rumbles of sound, no words.
Behind her Luke started to say something and she whirled, hushing him with a hiss and a finger over her mouth. He was smiling as if she were playing a game, but when he saw her glare, his face sobered.
“What is it?”
She pulled him with her and pressed up against the bookshelf by the door, trying to listen to the sounds in the atrium. If she moved to close the door, they might hear or see her. She and Luke would be stuck. And somehow she doubted the library held a stash of hidden weapons that would let the two of them take on a cold-blooded killer or three.
Or four.
Eladio.
Good guy or bad?
Her brain was running wild, scenario after scenario playing out in her imagination. Was Eladio a traitor, a disgruntled employee selling out his employer? Or was he an innocent victim, tricked by a clever plot of the even cleverer drug dealers who’d tracked them to this isolated island?
“What’s happening?” Luke whispered.
“The guy who shot you is here.” Fen barely breathed the words.
Luke’s eyes widened and he pushed away from the bookcase, taking two steps toward the door before Fen caught his arm.
“No,” she hissed at him. “He’s got friends. And Eladio acted like he knew them.”
Luke’s lips tightened, a look that reminded Fen of Kaio. She swallowed, a lump in her throat. Stupid to wish Kaio were here. But she couldn’t help remembering the calm confidence in his voice when he told her he’d gone to Zach’s apartment himself.
Luke leaned against the bookcase next to her, but closer to the door. Together, the two of them listened.
The voices neared them. Fen couldn’t understand what they were saying. They grew louder as they approached and the conversation continued, but the words kept slipping out of her grasp. Were they even speaking English? Maybe not.
Luke, though, looked intent, eyes half-lidded. She’d dropped his arm, but his hand slid down and grasped hers. He squeezed and nodded, and Fen let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.
He nodded again, a quick dip of his head as the voices receded.
“Can we run?” Fen whispered.
“Wait. One minute,” Luke said, his voice as soft as hers had been.
Fen felt as if she was holding herself together with Scotch tape and chewing gum.
Wait?
Um, no.
Run, run, run.
It was a miracle she wasn’t already hyperventilating her way to unconsciousness. She’d never fainted during a panic attack, but hey, first time for everything.
A door closed.
Fen started toward the library door, but Luke held her back, shaking his head.
“It’s our chance,” she whispered.
“Not yet.”
“Dude, do you not get it? That guy tried to kill both of us. We’re hiding out on this island so he doesn’t get a second try. Staying here—” Her whispered words were increasingly frantic but the moment Fen heard a door open, she fell silent.
Gently, Luke pushed her back, away from the entrance. “Wait.”
Fen scowled.
He was turning into his brother before her very eyes. Bossy as shit and way too sure of himself.
Luke stepped into the doorway and beckoned to someone in the hallway.
Eladio entered the room, a frown on his face. “What is it? The delegation from…” He paused as he spotted Fen, dipping his head. “Miss.”
Delegation? What the hell? But Fen didn’t have time for questions as Luke said, “Fen recognized one of the new arrivals as the man who assaulted her and shot me.”
Eladio stiffened, his eyes widening, before his expression melted into a glare that would have done a volcano justice. “Which one? I’ll see him called before the council before day’s end.”
“You can’t,” Luke said. “We can’t. Think of the explanations.” He glanced at Fen and stopped speaking.
Eladio followed his gaze. “Ah. Yes, the ramifications would be… unfortunate.”
Unfortunate? Fen didn’t like the sound of that.
“Yes.” It was all Luke said, but Fen felt a shudder run down her back.
She stuffed her hands in her pockets, closing her fingers around the reassuring coolness of her crystal, and hunched her shoulders. She hated feeling this way—small and alone and helpless. She wanted to be in her apartment, under her covers. She clenched her teeth against the urge to scream. I want to go home.
Two heads swiveled to face her.
“Drop it!” Luke said, voice urgent. “Let go, let go, quickly.”
She stared at him. What was he talking about?
“That’s done it,” Eladio said. “There’ll be no hiding now.”
None too gently, Luke grabbed Fen’s arm and tugged it out of her pocket.
“Hey,” she protested as he forced her fingers open and shook her crystal out into his hand.
“You’ll have to take the boat,” Eladio said.
“And go where? If the Val Kyr have a receiver, they’ll be after us before the sun sets.” Luke stared down at the blue rock as if it were poisonous, his jaw clenched.
“What other choice is there? We’ll delay them as long as we can.” Eladio sounded authoritative but his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed.
Fen glared at both of them. What was going on? What were they talking about?
“You can’t." Eladio’s air of formal politeness, the perfect butler persona he wore like a dress uniform, was gone. His voice was frantic as he added, “Kaio would never—”
“He told us to keep her safe,” Luke said, interrupting him.
“He didn’t—he couldn’t have—he wasn’t…” Eladio shot a desperate glance in Fen’s direction, and then hissed, “You know the penalties.”
“I’m taking her home,” Luke repeated stubbornly. “She belongs there.”
“She does not.”
“What are you talking about?” Fen asked in a furious whisper. “Take me where?”
“We’ll have to swim for it,” Luke said. “I’ll be back with help.”
Swim? No, that wasn’t an option.
But Fen didn’t get a chance to protest as Luke grabbed her hand. “Keep them busy.”
Eladio sighed, his head tilting as if he were listening for sounds from the dining room. “You’re just like your father.” The words sounded like a complaint, but he added, “Be brave.”
“You, too.” Luke nodded. “I will return with aid as soon as may be. Distract them. Delay them. Don’t fight.”
Eladio’s answering smile was grim.
Fen let Luke draw her out of the library, along the hallway, through the atrium and outside. But as they dashed across the patio and down to the sandy beach, she mustered the words to question him breathlessly. “What the hell is going on?”
“If they have a crystal receiver, they know you’re here,” he answered her. “That means you need to be elsewhere before they decide upon a course of action.”
She gasped as he tugged her toward the water. “What sort of course of action?”
“Slaughter us all and take you prisoner is undoubtedly under consideration.” Luke grinned but the smile didn’t reach his eyes.
Fen thought she might choke on her own saliva. “What?”
“Other variations upon that theme are likely.” He wasn’t looking at her as he headed into the ocean.
Water curling around her feet, Fen wailed, “Wait. Stop.”
Luke paused. “We don’t have time. I will answer your questions as I may, but we must away before the Val Kyr decide what to do. Our kind is not prone to haste, but Eladio and I are young and move with the impulsiveness of our age. In this case, I do believe our youth serves you well.”