He gave me an enigmatic look. “Because Sal Galen is no longer at the base.”
“Oh.” I swallowed, and did what I could to push back the little thrill of fear that went over me. I was not particularly looking forward to going back onto the Eclipse, but there wasn’t much I could do about that now.
We pulled off onto a Forest Service road and followed it for long enough that my Honda wouldn’t be visible from the highway. I found a pullout, probably used for people who wanted to leave their vehicles behind as they went hiking, and Gideon and I climbed out of the car.
A quick glance around to make sure we truly were alone, and then Gideon activated the conveyor. The sensation was still unpleasant, but at least this time he held my hand during the process, and I told myself I had nothing to worry about.
I guessed I’d have to see about that.
We materialized in a chamber I’d never seen before, a huge cavernous space that looked as if it might have been intended as a hangar for atmospheric craft. At the moment I didn’t see any ships, though.
What I did see was a very large crowd of people, at least several hundred of them. I blinked, realizing that I was staring at a group of human women of various races and ethnicities, each with her Reptilian companion. What the hell?
My body tensed. Gideon didn’t release his hold on my hand, even as Sal Galen approached. Next to him was a young woman maybe a few years older than I, pretty, with long fawn-brown hair and striking green eyes.
She looked calm enough. Nothing about the way she stood there in her long dress seemed to indicate she was being held here against her will. In fact, she even smiled when Sal Galen looked down at her before addressing Gideon and me.
“Thank you for coming,” he said.
Gideon inclined his head, and I managed a half-hearted smile. What in the world was going on here?
“I wanted to tell you about your father,” Sal Galen said then. “He has been made comfortable, but we have determined that the damage to his mind cannot be reversed.”
I felt Gideon tense, but he only nodded again, while I could only feel a flood of relief. It was horrible to be happy that someone had suffered permanent brain damage. However, at least this meant that we wouldn’t have to worry about Lir Shalan ever again. And maybe this was Sedona’s way of finding justice. The alien leader might have found something noble in dying for a cause, but I doubted he would have been pleased by a fate that involved being a mindless invalid for the rest of his life.
“We are about to leave,” Sal Galen went on. “And we will be leaving for good.”
His words should have relieved me, but I could only think about the woman who stood next to him, and the hundred more who looked on silently, each with her Reptilian guard.
“What about them?” I asked, lifting my chin in the direction of the watching women.
“They are coming with us.”
Gideon shook his head. “You know that is not acceptable.”
Sal Galen offered us one of those lipless Reptilian smiles. In this case, though, it wasn’t condescending, or cruel. Rather, he seemed amused, as if he was in on a joke we couldn’t understand. “The rest have been sent home. These are the ones who wanted to stay.”
I must not have been hearing correctly. He couldn’t possibly mean that all those women had chosen to remain with their Reptilian captors…could he?
Frowning slightly, Gideon said, “I don’t understand.”
The woman standing next to Sal Galen spoke then. She had a soft, barely noticeable southern accent. “I know it must seem strange to you. But we were offered the choice. We want to go with them.”
“But why?” Maybe it had been rude of me to ask the question, but I couldn’t keep myself from doing so.
Her hand slipped down to cup her belly. Only for a second or two, but in that moment I knew she must be carrying Sal Galen’s child. “They’re not all like Lir Shalan,” she said. “Many…but not all. Not all the Reptilians are monsters, just as not all men are good people. A lot of us have nowhere to go. We’re being offered a chance to make a difference. They need us.”
Sal Galen looked down at her, and his expression softened. I’d never been able to read a Reptilian before, but I could feel it then, a soft pulse of affection, of…
…of love.
Was it possible? Gideon had made it sound as if the Reptilians were incapable of love, but he could have been only speaking of his experiences with his own father. And maybe, just maybe, that strange alien race did have it within their hearts to love…if that love was able to find its true object.
“I see,” Gideon said. He looked past Sal Galen to the assembled group of Reptilians and humans. Most of them stood very close to one another; some of them were actually holding hands. With so many clustered together, I couldn’t get anything except a very general impression, but I didn’t sense any fear. Nervousness, excitement, but nothing to tell me that these women didn’t want to go with the aliens who had claimed them. “And I have your assurances that the others have already been sent back?”
“Yes. It took some time, but they will all awake in their beds, with perhaps a memory of a bad dream.”
“But surely they’ll be told that they were abducted,” Gideon said. “And what if any of them were with child?”
“Some were,” Sal Galen said. His tone sounded subdued, but he looked directly at us without blinking. “They did not want those children, but of course the embryos they carried were precious to us. So they were taken in the usual manner, and will be sustained until they can survive on their own. It is not optimal, of course, but I would not force an unwanted child on anyone. Parents will be found for them when the time comes.”
Probably the best solution to a very difficult situation. And it wasn’t even completely unheard-of; abduction stories were full of phantom pregnancies, of accounts from women who swore they were pregnant, but who then awoke from their abduction experiences with absolutely no evidence that they’d ever been carrying a child. In this situation, it was probably a mercy that they’d escaped so unscathed.
“It is the best I could manage,” Sal Galen went on. “But it has been determined that we have enough candidates here to provide some hope, and so we are going home.”
I didn’t know enough about biology and genetics to know whether a hundred-odd women and the children they would produce would be enough to salvage an entire race. Maybe, especially if the embryos taken from the women who didn’t want them were added to that number. Better minds than mine must have made that determination.
Gideon nodded. “The wisest course. I think this world has shown that it does not respond well to interference.”
“True enough.” Sal Galen paused then, his gaze sharpening as he looked at Gideon. “But you, Lir Gideon — you are staying?”
Without hesitation, Gideon replied, “Oh, yes. This is my home now.” And his fingers tightened on mine, warm and welcome and reassuring.
So the Reptilians were gone, their not-so-captive brides leaving with them. I wondered about those women, about what it was in their lives that made them think a future on an alien planet with an alien mate would be better than what they were leaving behind. But then I recalled the haunted look in that nameless woman’s eyes as she’d stood close to Sal Galen and told me that not all Reptilians were monsters. Maybe she was leaving the real monster behind somewhere on good old planet Earth.
Earth. Yes, the Reptilians had gone back to their home world, but they’d still left a mess behind them. When several thousand women reappear at the same time with nearly identical stories about being kidnapped by aliens, it’s the sort of thing that’s pretty hard to sweep under the rug.
There were hearings, lawsuits, mutters about a possible impeachment. That didn’t go anywhere, mostly because there was no real evidence connecting the President to the people who’d brokered the original deal with Lir Shalan. She even took a lie detector test to prove her innocence, but many people believed she must have
been in on it. With the aliens gone, there was no one around to either corroborate her story or deny it.
For myself, I was fairly certain her hands were clean in this matter. Maybe I was giving too much credit to my sex, but I just didn’t want to think that a woman would sell out other women in such a way. At any rate, she managed to hang on to her office while a flurry of house-cleaning went on around her, although everyone knew she’d only be a one-term commander-in-chief. No reelection efforts could survive that kind of scandal.
The same sort of soul-searching and house-cleaning went on around the globe. Several leaders, including the president of Venezuela, were actually removed from their posts.
As for the tech the Reptilians were supposed to have handed over…well, its fate was much more mysterious. Maybe they’d stalled, and hadn’t actually provided anything concrete yet. I could see Lir Shalan doing just that, making promises while women were being systematically scooped up from around the globe, hoping he could hedge and obfuscate long enough that he would meet his quota and then disappear, leaving those gullible humans empty-handed.
Or maybe it had all been removed to the deepest, darkest, most secret lab facilities money could buy. Lance and Martin and Raphael and my father had several lengthy discussions on the topic, trying to decide whether the tech actually existed, and, if so, where it had gone and who had taken it. True to his usual jaundiced outlook on the world, Lance insisted that the remnants of the oil companies, trying to hang on to the market share they had left, had spirited it away somewhere to prevent anyone from having access to truly renewable energy. My father thought it must be in a secret base, while Martin and Raphael — who did have more experience dealing with the Reptilians — guessed it had never been in human hands at all.
And Gideon had just shaken his head and smiled. When I asked him for his thoughts on the matter, he’d only shrugged and said that if the World Space Agency came out and announced its new ships had been equipped with faster-than-light drive, then he’d know where the technology had ended up. Until then, he didn’t want to hazard a guess.
We were still living in the cottage, trying to figure out what to do with ourselves. Kara had said we could stay there as long as we needed, giving us a much-appreciated refuge, but I knew that couldn’t last forever. Lance knew people who knew people, and so it hadn’t been too difficult to provide Gideon with a false identity, one that made him seem like just another American citizen, same as the rest of us. I went back to work at the store because we needed some money coming in, even though Kara wasn’t charging us any rent.
And then Gideon saw me staring at the computer one morning, gazing at the page where I was supposed to start registering for classes. “You seem troubled,” he said.
“Oh, well….” I lifted my shoulders. “I was supposed to transfer to NAU for the fall semester, and I need to sign up for classes soon if I want to get anything good. But now….”
At once he bent and kissed me on the cheek. “My love, nothing has changed. You should go.”
I blinked at him. “But what about you?”
“Well,” he said reasonably, “I suppose I should go, too.”
And he did. I still wasn’t sure how Lance and his secret army of hackers managed it, but somehow they manufactured an academic record for Gideon and sent it off. It must have been something pretty stellar, because he was accepted within the week, even though transfers for the fall semester were officially closed.
So we would be moving to Flagstaff and going to college together, and even though that fate seemed a little mundane for the son of a former Reptilian leader, Gideon was happy about the changes coming in our future. “I need to fit in, don’t I?” he asked. “How better than as just another college student?”
I couldn’t really argue with that. He even managed to line up a job at the Starbucks at the mall, working as a barista. Well, I couldn’t deny that he did make a good cup of coffee. For myself, there weren’t a lot of openings for psychics in Flagstaff, but I found a part-time position at a crystal shop in the old town district, so I wouldn’t be going too far afield. Between those two jobs — and because Michael had said we could take over his inexpensive apartment when the lease was up — we felt we were pretty well set.
On the Fourth of July, Kara had everyone over to the house for their traditional barbecue. The big oaks and sycamores that shaded the property made it fairly safe for Gideon to leave off his disguise, so we were able to relax and enjoy being with the family. By that point everyone was so used to his appearance that it really didn’t merit a second glance.
The sun was hot, but under the trees the breeze was pleasant. Lance and Kevin had brought out the long picnic tables they kept in storage for much of the year, and we all gathered around, trying to decide what to eat next — another hot dog, or some of Kara’s famous barbecue beans, or maybe it was time to move on to strawberry shortcake. Beer bottles cooled in several plastic tubs, and sangria sat in a glass dispenser full of bits of lemon and lime and orange.
I sipped sangria and leaned my head against Gideon’s shoulder, watching as Melissa and Grace and Logan played Frisbee out on the lawn. My father and Lance were wrapped up in another of their ongoing conspiracy discussions, while Martin, Kirsten, Kara, and my mother seemed content to listen and just shake their heads every once in a while. Raphael and Callista had wandered off to wade in the creek. And Michael sat at the end of the table, Kelsey next to him, as they were immersed in a conversation about the condo they’d just rented, and were figuring out the logistics of getting moved in before he started his new job at Lowell Observatory in late August, now that his dissertation had been accepted.
“Happy?” Gideon asked, his voice warm and low at my ear.
I looked around at all of us, at this strange family that had endured the test of time, alien invasions, and personal triumphs and tragedies. There had been moments in my life when I’d desperately wanted to be normal, when I didn’t want the gifts I’d inherited, but the girl who’d wished she could be just like everyone else had long since fled. It was my very differences that had brought me to where I was now, to the man who sat beside me and woke up next to me every day. I knew I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
“Oh, yes, Gideon,” I said, then covered his hand with mine. The contrast between his green skin and my lightly tanned fingers was almost shocking in the bright sunlight, but I didn’t mind. His alien coloring was part of who he was, part of who he would always be, and I wouldn’t ever do anything to change it. I took in a deep breath of the warm air, the light wind scented with the perfumes of a thousand flowers and the deeper, mossier notes of the creek. Sedona’s energy slept within me, its task now done.
My fingers tightened on Gideon’s, feeling the strength in him, the courage to face a new and different future on a world he was still coming to know.
“I’m very happy, my love.”
The End
AUTHOR’S NOTE
COMING FULL CIRCLE
When I first sat down to write Bad Vibrations back in 2011, I really had no intention of creating anything except a fun paranormal romance adventure story that would indulge my lifelong interest in UFOs and the supernatural. Self-publishing at Amazon was fairly new back then, and I didn’t give much thought to turning the book into a series.
My research brought me to Sedona, and I fell in love with the wild natural beauty of the place, from the soaring red rocks to the clear waters and cascades of Oak Creek. Fast-forward a few years, and my writing career was taking off to the point where I could create my stories full time. Desert Hearts and Angel Fire joined Bad Vibrations as I realized there was a much bigger story to tell. My husband and I relocated to Sedona, where I found more inspiration among the red rocks. The Sedona Files story grew and grew, and came to include the second generation of UFO hunters in Star Crossed, Falling Angels, and now Enemy Mine.
Bad Vibrations was set in the spring, as is Enemy Mine. That decision wasn’t anything conscious o
n my part, but I realize now that moving through the seasons and the years has allowed these books to come full circle, to arrive at a place of growth and renewal, even as the series winds down to its end.
I now call Santa Fe home, but Sedona will always hold a little piece of my soul.
Blessings,
Christine Pope
Santa Fe, New Mexico, May 2016
ALSO BY CHRISTINE POPE
THE WITCHES OF CLEOPATRA HILL
(Paranormal Romance)
Darkangel
Darknight
Darkmoon
Sympathetic Magic
Protector
Spellbound
A Cleopatra Hill Christmas
Impractical Magic
The first three books of this series are also available in an omnibus edition at a special low price!
THE DJINN WARS
(Paranormal Romance)
Chosen
Taken
Fallen
Broken
THE SEDONA FILES
(Paranormal Romance)
Bad Vibrations
Desert Hearts
Angel Fire
Star Crossed
Falling Angels
The first three books of this series are also available in an omnibus edition at a special low price!
TALES OF THE LATTER KINGDOMS
(Fantasy Romance)
All Fall Down
Dragon Rose
Binding Spell
Ashes of Roses
One Thousand Nights
Threads of Gold
The Wolf of Harrow Hall
THE GAIAN CONSORTIUM SERIES
(Science Fiction Romance)
Breath of Life
Blood Will Tell
The Gaia Gambit
The Mandala Maneuver
The Titan Trap
The Zhore Deception
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christine Pope has been writing stories ever since she commandeered her family’s Smith-Corona typewriter back in the sixth grade. Her work includes paranormal romance, fantasy romance, and science fiction/space opera romance. She fell under the Land of Enchantment’s spell while researching her Djinn Wars series and now makes her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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