It seemed to take forever even after the boat grew quiet before they heard someone yell ‘all clear’ and then the man who’d stuffed them in the ‘coffin’ lifted up the lid and stared down at them.
Nick covered her with his body and hands and glared at the man. Grinning, the man shrugged and left them to climb out without assistance.
Claire was cold enough from lying in the metal box, even with Nick there to help keep her warm that she was more than a little tempted to take him up on his not so subtle offer to warm her up in other ways. Instead, she ignored the hint and curled on her side under the blanket, trying to regain the warm cocoon that had engulfed her before. Nick lay beside her, stroking her until she stopped shivering and began to drift off again and then got up, dressed, and left the cabin.
Mildly annoyed, Claire drifted for a few moments, trying to decide whether she should get up or not and finally dozed off. She woke a little later when the mattress was jarred.
Peeling her burning eyelids up, she discovered it was Maddie who’d joined her, not Nick.
Maddie gave her a knowing smirk that annoyed the hell out of her. “What?”
“I see Nick helped you out of those wet things.”
Claire narrowed her eyes. “They were wet, damn it! I felt like a popsicle!”
Maddie nodded wisely. “Ah! I thought I heard howling … I mean heard the wind howling!”
Claire felt her face flame. She bit her lip to contain a smile. “You did not!”
Maddie laughed. “I was fishing actually.”
“Bitch!” Claire snapped, but she laughed with her sister although she felt like kicking herself for falling for Maddie’s trap.
“I guess this means you’ve settled on Nick, then?”
Discomfort wafted through Claire, and not just because Madelyn had leapt to the conclusion that her romp with Nick was a commitment. She very much feared, now in the stark light of day, that Nick might also have interpreted it that way.
Holy shit! That was what came of letting her pussy do the damned thinking! The stupid whining bitch had gotten her into deep shit!
“God, Maddie! Do you really think this is the time for something like that? I mean, we could not possibly be in a more vicarious position! I was actually mostly thinking I was glad I was still alive and not bound for Gitmo!”
Madelyn studied her thoughtfully for several moments and finally got up. “Why don’t we sneak into the kitchen and hunt sustenance? I’m starving and I wasn’t up fucking half the night! You must be desperate for food!”
Claire gave her a look. “Made love. And we weren’t doing it all night!”
Maddie snickered. “Uh oh! Guess that means you’re thinking about keeping him. That’s generally when women start insisting it’s making love not fucking. You going to make me an aunty at long last?”
At that joking comment, Claire gaped at her sister in horror, going cold all over. How long had it been since she’d used birth control?
* * * *
They were all preoccupied during the remainder of the trip. The captain and crew were focused on the possibility that the Navy had figured out their ruse and sent someone steaming after them. Nick was trying to figure out what to do and where to go next, because they damned well weren’t out of the woods even if they made it to their destination. Madelyn was anxious about the whereabouts of her missing husband, Robert—whether or not he actually was missing or if he was just going out of his mind worrying about her because he thought she was missing.
And Claire was preoccupied with her woman’s cycle, berating herself over her lack of control, and trying to figure out what she wanted to do herself and how she was going to handle it if she had thoroughly mucked things up with her behavior.
Because, even supposing Nick might have some interest in permanence, she could be carrying Dante’s baby—assuming that was even possible!
For that matter, she could be carrying Nick’s baby and that screwed up any possibility of making a true commitment to Dante.
Of course they both knew she had been intimate with both or at least had to suspect it!
Well, there was certainly no doubt in Dante’s mind! Not when he’d freaking beamed into her apartment while she was having sex with Nick and stood over them!
Nick … she wasn’t sure of whether or not he suspected at all. He could be totally blindsided and ripped apart by news that she had been sleeping with Dante—to put it nicely—and that she was pregnant with his child if that turned out to be the case.
She didn’t want to do that to him.
But maybe she already had?
Resentment mingled with the sense of guilt that settled on her shoulders like a lead weight. She hadn’t made any commitment to either man—not verbally or even by omitting to tell either one about the other.
The problem was that Dante had assumed the guise of a Catholic priest when he’d emerged from the ancient buried city the sinkhole had revealed and she’d never actually told Nick that that was nothing more than an illusion. Despite the jealousy he’d openly displayed, Nick might well not have a clue that Dante was an alien being—not a priest, not even of Earth.
So she actually had omitted informing Nick—not from choice but because of the disaster in Florida that had convinced Dante she would be safer with her sister half a world away.
That complicated her situation even more to her mind.
She didn’t see how she could remedy the situation at this point and to make things worse Nick had rescued her from the clutches of the U.S. government, but they were all in hot water now. The only thing rescuing her and Maddie had resolved was to free them, to prevent the government, at least temporarily, from doing whatever they’d had it in mind to do once they threw them in the Gitmo prison.
She couldn’t see much possibility that the government would simply throw up their hands and say ‘Oh well, they escaped. Rats!’ and turn their attention elsewhere. If anything they would probably be more ruthlessly determined to get their hands on them—all of them.
Because Nick had made himself a target when he’d thrown in with them.
As relieved as she was when they finally sailed within sight of land, therefore, Claire’s relief only actually extended to getting off the damned boat and onto something that didn’t bounce and rock.
And getting dry. She was desperate to be completely and totally dry and not sticky with salt, because the humidity at sea was about a thousand percent and she hadn’t actually felt totally dry since they’d taken that terrifying mid-night swim.
If anything, she was more tense about what was to come, though, and she couldn’t say that it sort of balanced things out. Her focus simply shifted in another direction to add more of a load.
That intensified significantly when she discovered they were sailing into an Irish port. Somehow, she’d thought they must be heading for South America. She knew they’d already been sailing for days on the naval ship before Nick had rescued them and that their destination was the Caribbean. She’d assumed when the man Nick had hired to help picked them up that they would simply continue in the same direction and since the U.S. government was after them they’d head to South America rather than north.
Neither Nick nor Lyle McGinn was in favor of being predictable, however. McGinn had swung around and headed to Europe.
By the time they sailed into port, the boat had been totally transformed from a fishing boat into a pretty run down looking yacht. She’d wondered why the crew had set about removing the trappings of a commercial fishing vessel and tossing nets etc. into the sea. But it turned out that arriving in Ireland as vacationing tourists drew far less attention to them than they would’ve garnered if they’d arrived as a commercial vessel of any kind—they weren’t importing things to sell in competition with the Irish fishermen. They’d come to make a nuisance out of themselves staring at everything and spending money!
Claire didn’t know what to think when Nick produced visas for them, because she and Nick were
apparently traveling as husband and wife—which was news to her! But it took a supreme effort of will to pretend to be nonchalant as they went through the process of entering a foreign port.
It wasn’t until those uncomfortable moments that it dawned on Claire that she didn’t have a penny to her name—not on her.
“I don’t suppose they would have a bank nearby where I could access my account at my bank,” she wondered aloud.
Nick squeezed her hand warningly. “Let’s not talk about that here, Babe. We’ll figure it all out when we get a room.”
But she didn’t have the money to pay for a damned room!
She was beginning to get a really clear picture of her situation that was crushing her with guilt. As grateful as she was to Nick, she wasn’t sure she would’ve jumped into his arms if she’d had time to consider what the outcome was going to be. She might have opted to take her chances at Gitmo and cling to the belief that she’d be released or be able to wrangle a release with a lawyer.
Of course she’d heard some nasty rumors about that place and how people had a way of ‘disappearing’ there—because the homeland security bastard Bush had created had the power to rescind all constitutional rights and could haul Americans off and into that hole without due process—and torture them.
But they were just rumors, right? Paranoid delusions of the conspiracy theorists?
Not that it mattered now.
Nick had opened that cell door and she’d leapt into his arms.
Nick hailed a cab for them when they’d parted company with the captain and crew of the boat and asked for an out-of-the-way place for the not-rich. The cab driver had barely cracked a smile, but he had taken them to a quaint hotel on the outskirts of the city that looked like it must be a couple of hundred years old.
But then this was part of Europe. There were a lot of places that didn’t just look like they were a couple of hundred years old. They were hundreds of years old, a hard concept for Americans to get used to. It was for Claire anyway. Realistically, she knew the actual age of the United States, but it seemed like it had been there forever and it was hard to grasp how very much older European countries were. It was almost a source of amazement to see a structure in the U.S. that was more than a hundred years old and they were treated with veneration—became iconic landmarks, prized and carefully protected antiques, or museums.
People actually lived in, or worked in, structures in Europe that were twice or three times as old as the oldest standing buildings in the U.S.
The Inn where they got rooms, as it turned out, was one of those. It wasn’t a reproduction of a quaint old Irish Inn and Pub. It was an actual old Inn and Pub that had been passed down through umpteen generations of the same family.
Unfortunately, as quaint as it was and even though it had been ‘modernized’—shortly before the second world war—it was pretty damned uncomfortable.
But Claire didn’t have a penny to her name and she struggled mightily to pretend it was just so charming she was thrilled.
Madelyn seemed to take it in stride, but then she spent a lot of time sleeping on a narrow cot in a tent ….
Since their passports identified them as husband and wife they were assigned to the same room. Madelyn was given the room on the other side of the paper thin wall and might just as well have been in the same room except that she couldn’t actually see them—unless she found a crack or a missing knot hole big enough to peer through.
Apparently the Irish weren’t big on insulation.
Or maybe they just hadn’t wanted to tear out the old wall? Since the wiring that had been added a couple of hundred years after construction was completely exposed it seemed to indicate that that had been a consideration.
Claire settled on the bed once they were in their room since there was nowhere else to sit. “You don’t think I should try to access my bank account?” she asked tentatively.
“We can’t. You need to make sure your sister knows that.”
“Why not?” Maddie demanded from the other side of the wall.
Nick’s lips tightened. “Why don’t you just join us so we don’t have to yell?” he growled.
Claire gave him a reprimanding look.
Maddie breezed into the room, looking completely unfazed by Nick’s sarcasm. “Why can’t we? I don’t have a dime to my name and Claire doesn’t either! Not that I don’t appreciate everything you’ve done … uh … uh ….”
“Nick,” Claire supplied even though she didn’t believe for a minute that Maddie had forgotten his name.
“I thought it was …. Started with a D. Never mind! Nick—I appreciate the rescue and I fully intend to pay you back for everything it cost you to spring us ….”
“Why don’t you just stand out in the street and play town cryer? Announce to everybody that we’re fugitives?” Nick hissed.
“Don’t be ugly to my sister!” Claire snapped, stunned by Nick’s behavior.
He seemed to wrestle with his temper—and won. “Look! I know you two aren’t used to this sort of thing. Well, I’m not if it comes to that. But I’ve taken part in enough operations to know how damned unhealthy it can be to blow your cover! We can’t afford for anyone to get the idea that we’re fugitives. And we can’t afford to contact anyone we know and we can’t afford to access bank accounts. We have the U.S. government on our asses! Nobody has more god-like powers than they do. They can track us in a matter of minutes if we try to access any accounts.”
Claire gaped at him in dismay. Not that she hadn’t had any inkling at all that that was possible. She watched movies! But she’d thought she could at least make one run at the bank, clean out her account and then run like hell! What was she going to do about money? A person couldn’t survive without money!
“Well! We’re screwed!”
Claire shared her sister’s sentiments.
“Not yet. And don’t worry about paying me back,” he added with grim humor. “I stole the money from Uncle Sam to start with.”
Claire’s jaw may have struck the floor at that bald admission. “You …?” she said faintly.
“I had access to a special account set up for emergencies that might pop up on a mission. I cleaned it out. Figured the bastards owed us since it was their fault we couldn’t get to our own money. Anyway, I think of it as an advance against our property in the U.S. … because you can bet your ass they’ve seized all of our combined assets by now.”
Madelyn sank weakly onto the bed beside Claire. “What are we going to do?” she asked faintly.
Nick shook his head and began to pace. “Maybe we should start by trying to piece together exactly what happened and why?”
Claire and Madelyn exchanged a look. Madelyn shrugged. “Ok, I know this is going to sound crazy, but just hear us out, ok?” Claire started.
Nick looked around and finally settled on a wooden stool.
She stared at him a long moment, wrestling with the tangle of facts in her mind and finally decided just to start at the beginning.
“When I was trapped down in the sinkhole, I saw something. Later, I went back—because I just needed to know,” she added when Nick’s expression turned from open interest to dark with anger. “I’ve never been religious—but when I thought I was going to die down there I thought I saw an angel. I had to know if I was losing my mind.”
“So you risked your life climbing down in that damned hole?”
Claire’s lips tightened. “You risk your life regularly. Why is it crazy for me to?”
“Because I risk mine to save people! Not just to … assuage my curiosity!”
Anger swelled inside her, but Claire dismissed it after a moment. They were different and nothing more surely outlined those differences than that comment. She was of the opinion that the search for knowledge was worth some risk. And if there hadn’t been plenty of people that agreed the human race wouldn’t be where it was! Everyone would have stayed home to be safe!
Deciding to ignore the provocation to
argue, she continued. “I thought I might have seen a rock formation that appeared to be an angel. But when I got down there I saw that the sinkhole had uncovered a cave and that cave had formed around an ancient city. Then I thought maybe it had been a statue. But what it actually was … well it was Dante.”
“The priest that can turn himself into a birdman?” Nick asked tightly.
Stunned surprise ripped through Claire. “You saw him change?”
“Yeah. The bastard was blatant about it, too. Like he wanted me to know and didn’t give a shit who else did. I was talking about getting leave to go after you and he overheard and he just shifted from priest to birdman and flew off. There must have been a hundred witnesses—with the possibility of thousands.
“And then they canceled my leave directly after that, pulled us out of the recovery operation, and shipped us over here to retrieve ‘stolen U.S. technology’.” He gave Madelyn a pointed look. “And that’s as much as we were told … beyond the fact that we were headed for the Persian gulf.”
That was almost more shocking than the first revelation! “Good god!” She exchanged a questioning look with Madelyn. “That publicly?”
“Clearly he wasn’t too worried about keeping it a secret,” Maddie said dryly.
Claire frowned. “That doesn’t fit what he’d told me.” She shook her head. “He kept saying there were things we weren’t allowed to know. Why would he do that—so publicly display that there were aliens among us—when he knew the gods would annihilate us?”
This time Nick looked shocked. “The gods?” he echoed.
“The other alien race that’s here. At least, I don’t think they’re right here—on Earth—but Dante referred to them as the overlords.”
“The gods?”
Claire shrugged. “As crazy as it sounds, it really does make a lot of sense. It’s kind of like … the Christians are always referring to Jesus as Lord—as if that’s synonymous with god when that isn’t the case at all. That’s just the title they gave men of importance in the old days—usually men of wealth and power—lord. From what I understand, when they arrived they, well they must have told the humans what they were and in our minds they were supernatural beings and the names became synonymous with deities—supreme beings, powerful supernatural beings when in fact it was just their name for themselves like we call ourselves humans. The gods are a race of aliens. The angels are a different race of aliens.”
Exiles Page 6