That didn’t sound appealing at all. I pushed away from him a few more inches and crossed my arms. “I hope you’re not suggesting I try to fall asleep right here so you can attack me in my dreams or something.”
A rueful head shake. “No, that’s not necessary. All I need you to do is sit down again and close your eyes.”
With a sigh I stepped away from him and resumed my seat on the fallen log. Somehow I had a feeling that this next exercise wasn’t going to be nearly as thrilling as the last one. I closed my eyes, letting myself draw on the energy once more, wrapping it around me like a warm blanket on a cold winter night.
And then I began to feel…something. At first I couldn’t even say what it was, although it somehow made the flesh crawl on the back of my neck, giving me that twitchy feeling you get when you can hear a fly buzzing around but don’t quite know where it is. Then it shifted from a fly buzz into a feeling of pressure on my skull, as if someone or something were trying to bore its way into my brain. Not even sure of exactly how I was doing it, I pushed more of the light toward my head, letting it surround me with a glow that seemed to intensify the more pressure was put on it.
This silent battle went on for…minutes? Seconds? I didn’t know for sure. But the pressure finally lifted, and I opened my eyes to see Martin watching me with an expression of approval…and something else. Awe?
No, that was silly. He did look fairly impressed, though.
“From the look on your face, I’m guessing I did okay,” I remarked, then stood. My legs wobbled under me, and I sucked in a breath of cold air and willed them to steady themselves. That war of wills had taken more out of me than I thought.
“More than okay.” A few swift strides, and he was next to me, his hand on my elbow. “Don’t worry if you feel a little weak. That’s completely normal.”
“Normal for whom?” I retorted, but I didn’t try to move away from him. No, I liked the feel of his hand on my arm, the knowledge that he was there to support me if I should stumble.
The sound of voices coming down the trail made Martin’s head snap up, and I saw his eyes narrow behind the sunglasses. In that instant I could see why he’d done such a good job of infiltrating the MIBs. He looked like a Secret Service agent about to throw himself in front of the President to take a bullet.
No such extreme measures were necessary, however, as the source of the voices came into view a few seconds later. Another couple, probably around my age, and a lot scruffier than the man and woman with the Audi. At the sight of them Martin relaxed visibly.
They seemed to notice us about the same time we noticed them. The young man, with a patchy beard and a disreputable-looking knitted cap, raised a casual hand at us from across the creek and then splashed cheerfully through the water as if it wasn’t a few degrees above freezing. His companion, a girl with long dark braids under her own woolen cap, flashed a smile at me as they passed and said, “Beautiful morning, huh?”
“Yeah,” I replied, inwardly thanking God or whatever powers were looking after Martin and me that the pair hadn’t come along just a few minutes earlier. That could have been awkward.
Then they were gone, and I glanced down at my watch. Damn. I could have sworn it was only about ten-thirty in the morning. Instead, the numbers on the dial told me that it was almost two.
“Is this going to keep happening?” I asked Martin in plaintive tones. “Because it’s really hell when you’re trying to keep any kind of schedule.”
“It will get better as you learn to control things.”
At that moment my stomach growled, and he grinned. “Sounds like I need to buy you lunch.”
“Probably,” I agreed, then paused. While having Martin wine and dine me all over Sedona sounded like fun in theory, it wasn’t very practical. The cabin had a small kitchenette. It would make a lot more sense for us to run into town and get some supplies at the store, then come back up here to prepare whatever meals we needed.
I explained this to Martin as he led me back up the trail toward the parking lot.
“That makes sense,” he said. “Besides, having to explain all this eating out on my expense reports is a real nightmare.”
Raising an eyebrow, I shot him a “give me a break” look, and he laughed.
“Okay, you got me. But it is a good plan. The less time we waste, the better.”
Time, always time. I tried not to brood on the hours and days slipping away, the shrinking window in which I could get up to snuff as an alien defender. No, that didn’t sound right. I wasn’t defending the aliens, after all, but (I hoped) defending the people I cared about from them.
Well, the bad aliens, anyway. Martin was an entirely different class of alien. One might even say classy alien, considering he always opened the car door for me, the way my grandmother said a gentleman should.
A gentleman and an alien. I supposed I could do worse…
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The problem with going shopping in a town where there were only two main grocery stores (tempting as New Frontiers might be, I knew that loading up on expensive organic cheese and vegan brownies wasn’t very practical) was that you run the risk of running into someone you know. In this case, that someone at Safeway just happened to be my sister.
We did almost literally run into one another, since she was coming up the baby products aisle just as we turned the corner from the produce section to the meat department. The front of her shopping cart collided with mine, and she began to say an automatic, “Oh, I’m sorry — ”
Then she looked up and actually focused on who she was talking to. Recognition flashed over her face and she started to smile at me…until her gaze moved past me to rest on Martin, who was a pace or two behind me. Then the smile sort of froze halfway in place, giving her a strange lopsided look.
Oh, crap.
“Hi, Kara,” I burbled, in a cheery voice that wouldn’t have fooled anyone, least of all my sister. “We’re just grabbing a few things. Is Grace home with Lance?”
“Yes,” she said, the smile gone completely. Her eyes were still fixed on Martin. “Hello, Agent Jones. Out of uniform today?”
He glanced down at himself, at the sweater and jeans clearly visible under his overcoat, which he hadn’t buttoned up. “I’m off duty,” he said easily.
“Ah.” Her eyes were a brighter blue than either Martin’s or mine, and when that stare returned to me, I felt as if it was boring right into my brain. “Hey, Keeks, can I have a word?”
“Um…sure.” This was not going to be good. “Martin, why don’t you go on ahead to the meat department? Boneless skinless chicken breasts always work…ground beef…”
“I’ve got it,” he said. He gave me a look that seemed to ask, You going to be okay?
I nodded infinitesimally, and he came up next to me and took the shopping cart from under my nerveless fingers. I hadn’t even realized I was still holding on to it.
Kara maneuvered her own cart a few feet away, into the leeward side of the clearance rack of odds and ends shoved into a corner, then crossed her arms and stared at me. “So it’s ‘Martin’ now, is it?”
“Yeah. So?” I really didn’t know what my best approach to the whole situation should be, but “wounded little sister” always worked pretty well.
“What do you mean, ‘so’? He’s a Man in Black, Kirsten, in case you hadn’t noticed. What the hell are you doing playing house with him?”
That remark hit a little too close to home. Of course she could have no idea that he and I actually were shacked up at the Forest Houses resort. No, I was sure she’d just been referring to the grocery shopping expedition, which probably looked bad enough.
I didn’t say anything for a moment, trying to decide how I should respond.
Of course Kara, being an older sister, took the opening as an opportunity to jump in and continue her attack. “And you left the UFO Tours van at the store without saying anything to me, and you haven’t been answering your phone all day — ”
“I was someplace where the reception wasn’t good.”
“And where was that?”
“Up the canyon,” I replied. I figured that was vague enough that it really wouldn’t give anything away. We could have been doing anything from shopping at the Native American marketplace at the Dairy Queen to having red-hot sex at one of the resorts.
Judging by Kara’s expression, it was pretty obvious what she thought we’d been up to. “Even ignoring all that, don’t you think he’s just a little too old for you?”
“Look who’s talking,” I retorted. “Lance didn’t just pass his driver’s test, you know.”
Her mouth thinned. “That is totally different.”
“Different how?”
“Well, for one thing, I was thirty when Lance and I got together. There’s a big difference between thirty and twenty-three.”
I couldn’t help replying, “Only seven years,” even though I knew that wouldn’t go over well.
“Jesus, Kiki, you know there’s a huge difference between where you are emotionally at twenty-three and where you are at thirty. I’d gone to college, run a business, been engaged — ”
“Okay, I get it. I’m just some stupid little girl who doesn’t know what she’s doing. Not that you even know I’m doing anything.”
At once her expression softened. Just a bit, but it was something. “I don’t think you’re stupid. And I know that Agent Jones is supposed to be helping you with — well, you know,” she amended quickly. No one had come by to rummage through the clearance items, so we were pretty much on our own. Even so, it was one thing to have a conversation overheard where it sounded as if you were giving your little sister crap for her romantic choices, and quite another thing to bring up alien invasions and impending doom.
“Anyway,” she went on, “I know you said he was important to everything, and that you needed his help, but — ”
“But what?”
“But…I saw the way he looked at you. I wouldn’t call it exactly professional.”
My ears perked up. No way I was going to pass up a chance to get some outside confirmation that Martin wasn’t just using me for his own ends. “How did he look at me?”
Her gaze slid away from mine, but at least she answered. “He looked at you the way Lance looks at me. Like I’m some gift he can’t quite figure out how he earned. So just be careful, okay?”
“Okay.”
My assent didn’t seem to reassure her. She frowned, and pushed a stray strand of hair back behind her ear. “And for God’s sake call Jeff while you’re still someplace that has reception. He texted me because he said he’d been trying and trying to get hold of you. He almost sounded worried, if you can believe that. I’ve got enough on my plate without having to babysit Jeff Makowski, too.”
“I will,” I said automatically. “I’ll check in once we’re done here.”
A nod, and then she grasped her shopping cart and pushed it away from mine, heading into the refrigerated section where the bagged salads were kept. I noticed then that her car was full, which meant she was wrapping up just as we were getting started.
I wondered what Jeff wanted that was so damn urgent, but I guessed I’d find out soon enough. In the meantime, I needed to get back to Martin.
* * *
By the time I caught up with him, he’d finished with the meat department and had gone on to the dairy section. I looked down at the neat packages of meat and fish and chicken, at the almost dizzying array of cheese and yogurt, and wondered if he was stocking up for armageddon.
Actually, maybe that was exactly what he was doing.
He turned to me, a carton of two-percent milk in one hand. “Glad to see you’re still alive. Kara looked like she was about to breathe fire.”
“It’s okay. She was just being a big sister.” I glanced at the milk carton. “I’m lactose-intolerant, you know.”
His face fell.
“I’m kidding,” I told him, and plucked the carton from his hand and put it in the shopping cart.
“That wasn’t funny.”
“It’s your own damn fault for not remembering that I had two kinds of cheese in my omelette this morning.”
A head shake, and he headed off toward the bakery section. My favorite.
Martin watched in astonishment as I dumped containers of blueberry muffins, brownies, and croissants into the cart, then picked up a loaf of wheat bread and a bag of sourdough dinner rolls and added them to the pile. “You can’t possibly be thinking of eating all that.”
“Watch me,” I said. I’d never met a carb I didn’t like, and it never seemed to matter what I ate — I was always just the size I was, which leaned toward the thin side. Yeah, the girl you love to hate, although in this case I guessed I could blame my enviable metabolism on my father. Then again, Marybeth hadn’t plumped up over the years, either, so maybe I got it from both parents.
“This should be interesting,” he muttered, and followed me into the condiment aisle, where I got my favorite sweet-hot mustard and some salad dressing.
“That should do it,” I announced, after dropping a bottle of Newman’s Own into the cart and pointing it toward the checkout stands.
Martin cast a grim eye over the jam-packed shopping cart. “I would hope so.”
“Worried about the total?” I inquired, and started to reach for my wallet. “I mean, I’d hate to make the bean counters at MIB Central’s heads explode.”
“It’s fine,” he said, moving past me, his own wallet already in his hand.
I grinned, but still pulled out my rewards card and gave it to him. “This should help ease the pain a little.”
He took it without further comment and swiped it, then handed it back to me. Elise, the check-out person, knew me, of course, and I saw her eyebrows tilt a bit as she glanced at Martin, then at me, and back over at him again. It was fairly obvious from the items we’d selected that this was a stocking-up sort of trip and not just a party-food run, so God knows what deductions she was making from all that. Couldn’t really be helped, though.
Fortunately, she kept up a breezy stream of chatter about the weather, and if Martin noticed her noticing him, well, he didn’t give anything away, but only thanked her as she handed him the receipt. I trailed after him, my cheeks hot, which was probably stupid. I was an adult, after all. If Elise wanted to think I was shacked up with Martin, let her.
Actually, I supposed I was sort of shacked up with him, if not in the strictest sense of the phrase.
We loaded all the groceries into the trunk. By then it was pushing four o’clock, and the skies had already begun to darken toward twilight. Remembering Kara’s remark about Jeff, after I’d gotten in the car and buckled my seatbelt, I fished my phone out of my purse and double-checked my messages. Three texts, asking me to come over to Michael’s (and sounding progressively more annoyed), and then a voicemail that ended with Jeff saying testily, “I didn’t come to Sedona expecting you to pull a disappearing act on me. Geez.”
I still didn’t know exactly why Jeff had come here in the first place, so his having any expectations of me was a bit rich. Still, I experienced a pang of guilt when I thought about him cooped up at Michael’s house. A place that cluttered had to be anathema to Jeff’s overly precise soul.
Pulling the phone from my ear, I let out a sigh. “I may have to babysit Jeff a little tomorrow. It sounds like he has something he wants to talk about. Maybe he’s made some progress in decrypting the aliens’ transmissions.”
Martin didn’t take his eyes from the road. “If you think it’s necessary. Better you do it first, in the morning, so we can have the rest of the day uninterrupted.”
“Okay,” I replied, and wondered what was scheduled for tomorrow. Vortexes? Maybe. Jeff was no more of an early-morning person than I was, but around ten should be safe. So I picked up my phone and tapped out a quick text: Sorry I bailed. See you tomorrow at 10. I knew better than to use textspeak with Jeff; I’d done that onc
e out of haste and then got a fifteen-minute lecture on the deterioration of the English language.
The message had hardly been sent before my phone chimed, signaling his reply. Tomorrow at 10. Don’t be late.
And what are you going to do if I am? I thought, but only texted back: Okay. Besides, I knew I wouldn’t be late. The sooner I could get that over with — whatever it was — the sooner I could get back to the important stuff.
To Martin.
* * *
It was full dark by the time we reached the cabin. We had to make two trips to haul all the groceries from the car, and it took another fifteen minutes or so to unload everything and put it in its proper place. By then my stomach was really protesting its emptiness, even though I’d sneaked a cookie out of its container and eaten it back in the store. One chocolate chip cookie, however, was not enough to replace all the energy I’d used up that morning.
So we rattled around companionably in the tiny kitchen space, putting together some quickie “three-way” chili using the Carroll Shelby mix’s recipe and some pasta and cheese. It was a meal I remembered from my childhood; Grandma used to make it a lot in the winter, and it was always one of my secret comfort foods. I was a little surprised at Martin agreeing to eat it, though.
“This doesn’t really seem like your thing,” I remarked as I stirred the pasta.
“Why not?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know…I guess three-way chili just isn’t high on my list of things I expect highly evolved alien races to eat.”
He laughed, and reached up to a shelf to retrieve a couple of glasses so he could take them over to the table. A bottle of a local red wine was already airing out; I hadn’t seen those wine bottles when I started loading things into the shopping cart, but I had to admit I was kind of happy he’d slipped them in there. “I’ve been here for five years, remember? Even in the MIB department, you still have to be one of the guys and go out for burgers and 3 a.m. doughnut runs. I managed to keep up with most of it, although I’m pretty sure I’m going to do whatever I can to avoid menudo in the future.”
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