"This ordeal must end," a soft, disembodied female voice responded from under her burka.
Wyatt nodded.
"I bet I look like a ghost in this thing," Angelique said waving her arms around underneath her burka, the cloak, totally covering her body.
"It's the best way, Ma'am," Johnson said apologetically. Angelique looked like Angelique and he didn't want any problems with the fighters or guards. Men were after all, men.
They rode the rest of the way in silence, waved past checkpoints, climbing higher and higher in the hostile terrain until at last they passed over a narrow stone bridge spanning a gorge and they were there. A great metal door was opened for them, and two more after that, and their caravan drove single file onto a brown dirt courtyard of an ancient, moldy, castle-like fortification. Angelique stepped out of the car shuddering, the air seemed to have lost its warmth under the dismal pall that hung over the dejected place.
"This way," Johnson said leading them into the bastion, past the stares of grizzled bearded men. They walked downward, down staircase after staircase, and the further down they went in the damp fortress, the more Angelique thought the place stank of death. Twice she tripped over her burka (totally uncharacteristic for her) and went sailing into Wyatt's back. At last they reached a metal door that looked new. Johnson nodded to two men seated in front of it who nodded back wordlessly. He tapped a code into an electrical panel on the wall and a noise of clicking, whirring and grinding came from the door as it opened.
I heard that sound so often, the horror of that sound.
They walked through into a stone hallway and the metal door closed behind them.
"You don't need burkas in here," Johnson said as he approached a door at the far end. "Ready?"
Johnson tapped another wall-mounted electrical panel and the door opened. They all walked through.
It was two rooms, each large enough to be a bedroom, indeed each room, connected by a doorless entry, had a bed. There was another doorless room and peering inside Angelique glimpsed a tiny archaic bathroom.
Malcolm and Donald were seated at a table but stood eagerly as they entered.
"Wyatt!" Malcolm seethed, "I am your flesh and blood! How can you do this?"
"Pretty easy, Uncle Mal."
"For her? What has she said to you? She wanted it, Wyatt, she came willingly!"
For some reason a picture of Malcolm swearing on the Bible to Gramps that he'd never met Tinka's mother in his life popped into Wyatt's head.
"I've watched the videos, Uncle Mal. I've seen how willing your victims were. You'll be glad to know I have used some of your funds to pay anonymous lump-sum payments to all I could find along with a copy of your obituary. The rest of your money will be used to finance your accommodations here. I thought I would give you this opportunity to ask for forgiveness if you are so inclined. It will not alter your sentence but maybe it will go a bit to cleansing your soul."
"Mr. Cochran," Donald quailed, "he made me--"
"Shut up!" Malcolm yelled, cutting across Donald's desperate narrative.
"You don't have to do what he tells you to," Lexa directed her words at Donald, quietly and with absolute finality leveling Malcolm Cochran. "He has no authority over you anymore." Lexa pointed to the chain around Donald's ankle. "Yours you know will stretch into the other room. His will not. He can not get away from you. And he will be your sole companion for a long time."
"Which leads me to suspect," Johnson said to Malcolm, "that you will come to learn more about the act of rape than you ever imagined."
"Heh, maybe you'll get to like our team," Anthony said gaily. "In a decade or so."
"Are we done, Ladies?" Wyatt asked looking at Lexa and Angelique, again marveling at the ruthless sweet viciousness of feminine revenge.
"WHAT ABOUT TINKA?" Malcolm exploded to Wyatt. "SHE'S MY DAUGHTER! HOW CAN YOU DO THIS TO--"
"Tinka, I suspect, will be far safer without you, Uncle Mal. And with you gone maybe she'll finally have the courage to go look for her mother, get back what you took from her. At any rate you've left enough that she's an heiress now and I will always look after her as well. Shall we go?"
"Up to Lexa," Angelique said. "I'm only here for her."
"I DIDN'T KILL YOU!" Malcolm shrieked at Lexa as their eyes met for the last time.
"No, you didn't," Lexa said with an odd expression on her face that gradually changed into a shadow of a smile, the first one seen on Lexa in a long time. "I'm beginning to realize that."
"YOU CAN'T DO THIS! NOT FOR THEM!" Malcolm screeched at Wyatt.
"It's not vengeance, Uncle Mal. Well, maybe some. But to me your actions are unexplainable and therefore unpredictable. The world is safer with you here. But as for you, Donald, these are good women and I suspect the day will come when they take pity on you and tell me to release you which I'll do, as long as you haven't murdered anyone." He looked darkly at Malcolm. "Though you might want to watch your own back around your former employer here. I suggest for actual sleeping you do that in the other room."
"C'mon, lovebug," Lexa said taking Anthony by the arm and leading him out, her tears coming brilliantly, silently, purging Malcolm Cochran from her soul. She wondered if Anthony knew how much she loved him for saving her, rescuing her, pulling her out of the deep black pit of torment even when she'd begged to just drown, and bringing her to this moment of salvation and rebuilding. "I have Robert's audition in L.A. to get to."
"You haven't asked, but Margret's going home next week though she doesn't know that yet," Angelique said to Malcolm as she too turned her back on him to leave.
"How did you do it," he gasped in mindless lather, "I have to know. How did you do it?"
Angelique stopped in the doorway, turned and stared at Malcolm.
"I," she said drawing herself up to her full height, "read a lot." She disappeared through the doorway.
"My wife does have talents," Wyatt almost chuckled to Johnson as they too left the secured chamber, the screams of Wyatt and Donald muffled as the door behind them closed unambiguously shut.
It was just as long a trip back. And as their jet hurtled down the runway to take them all home and Angelique felt herself rising up, into the clouds, she looked around the cabin at the people seated nearby.
I bet I can fly like in dreams, I can fly in the clouds forever.
She was flying in the clouds --with Anthony, the most valuable of friends, the kind who didn't want to take, only to give. And Lexa, her best friend, a person who could come through fire and --ultimately she was sure-- become whole again. And Johnson, she would never understand how she could have earned such devotion from such a man.
And her husband. She had a husband. Wyatt. A man loved her. And she loved him back. If that wasn't flying in the clouds she didn't know what was.
Somehow in this life she had risen to a height she had never even peeked at in her old. She was connected to people. She loved and was loved. How had that happened? The change was like rising from the dead and she had to squelch a giggle because for her it really was.
And suddenly she remembered her own name and oh my God IT FIT! She was Phoenicia! Her mother had named her that ridiculous name after her grandmother. Her nickname wasn't May-May, it was Fi-fi. She was Fifi! Should she tell Wyatt? No. Because she wasn't Fifi anymore, not really.
"Heh," Wyatt said softly, gently pulling her chin toward him so she was looking into his eyes, "where are you?"
"I think," she said in gratefully mounting appreciation, "exactly where I'm supposed to be."
And above her, higher than the clouds she soared through, Angelique's guardian angel stretched luxuriantly. It had not come for her in death for the simple reason that she had not wanted to go. But it had watched, waiting for when she was ready, and so had seen that moment when she had been pulled so violently back to Earth. It had not been easy to find her a worthy Protector but it had, and now it was ready for a well deserved slumber.
Only one thing bothered it, t
he coincidence of the names. An angel goes into the body of a child named Angelique. A woman named after a Phoenix rises to a new life. Mighty big coincidences. Of course it knew The Big Guy Upstairs, if not having a sense of humor exactly, did have quite the sense of irony.
Angelique and Wyatt had found each other through, as Angelique called it, A Great Cosmic Fluke. So just before her guardian angel at last slept it wondered how much of a fluke the whole thing had truly been.
When it came to two people falling in love and The Big Guy Upstairs it thought happily, you just really never knew.
∞
Sample bonus chapters from Alien Advantage [bad guys chase the good guy humor], The Dangerous Path of Loving Jaesha [erotic romance], and Coquina Hard [historical fiction].
ALIEN ADVANTAGE
By
Lorain O'Neil
CHAPTER ONE
It was the air conditioner dying that woke me up. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve thought if only I hadn’t woken up, I’d be a rich fat cat lawyer by now. The darn thing was, I’d become addicted to the soft hum of that air conditioner, like a lot of people in college dorms are. The white noise drowns out the clowns around you, lets you sleep. If it stops for some reason though, bang, you’re wide awake. That’s what happened to me even though it was three o’clock in the morning and I’d been dead to the world. Of course I wasn’t living in the dorms anymore then, I’d moved into an old apartment out in the Gainesville boondocks (translation: cheap) where I was a third year law student at the University of Florida College of Law.
When that air conditioner died, I did oh so regrettably open my eyes, and what I saw was a strange vibrating green light flooding my bedroom. The window shade drawn by my bed looked positively aglow with it. I reached for the shade but just as I touched it, the light winked out. Blip. Gone. On its own, the air conditioner cranked back up. I shrugged it off, laid back down in bed and dismissed the phenomenon. But then that green light was suddenly there again, and the air conditioner sputtered back out. A transformer, I decided; an electrical transformer has blown up outside or something, who cares? Well, worth a quick look, right? I sat up and raised the shade, staring out at the street. Everything was bathed in that eerie green light. I saw the light pole by the road --it was out. The opposite side of my street was just a pine forest, but on my side all my neighbors’ doorlamps were out. The green light winked off yet again, the air conditioner rumbled back to life and the streetlamps fluttered back on. The street looked normal, completely silent.
It is certifiably, absolutely, one hundred per cent amazing, the colossally unfair tricks fate plays on us: one moment you’re plodding along an anonymous contented law student, the next --finito.
I was still sitting up in bed scanning the street when I saw the damn thing. About half the size of a house, a green ball of light floating up, up from behind the forest.
I didn’t believe in UFO’s, yet there was this thing! It was just there hovering. The rush of it overwhelmed me. My reason went on vacation. I was on my feet, running out the door in wild excitement to gawk up at the thing. I didn’t know. God, I didn’t know. My life was over. My good life, anyway.
CHAPTER TWO
I know you want to hear about what happened between me and that thing in the sky, and I will tell you, but it’s best that I tell you about it in context with Little Island, a place you would like very much until you realized you wouldn’t be leaving any time soon. It was where I ended up after that UFO got me. Before that, I was just a poor Floridian (also known as a Cracker). Both my parents were dead and I hadn’t seen my two sisters since well before that night I brainlessly ran out to complete catastrophe. I guess I should’ve been grateful that my parents weren’t around anymore because if they had been, you can bet the Doctor or the General would’ve used them against me quite effectively. But to be without a family --it hurt. Made me vulnerable. The people at Little Island knew that of course, it was one of the things they tried to use against me, make me feel like they were my family. Crap, I’d shoot myself now before I ever felt familial to the Doctor.
As to my arrival on Little Island, it came by way of sheer rotten luck, which I imagine you’re thinking --correctly-- I was having an awful lot of. I landed only a few hundred miles from the place, though it probably wouldn’t have mattered, they’d have gotten me anyway, but I like to think that I would’ve gotten away. Ego, I suppose. I was piloting that little spaceship myself (yes, I’ll get to that) when I landed, all right, crashed then. I’d escaped the aliens who’d taken me that night in Gainesville after I’d so gleefully presented myself up to them.
I should start my explanation by telling you that I could “talk” to that alien ship I piloted back to Earth. Or rather I could think at it. That’s how I flew it home. I would think “SLOW DOWN” or “TURN”, etc. That “thinking” (the experts at Little Island call it “thought projection communication”) was taught to me by the aliens to communicate with them. They also used it to run their ships and to communicate with each other. It was --and still is-- very hard for me. I’m not like Eugene, who could read you a whole book via it if he wanted to.
You don’t “shout” your thoughts or concentrate hard and screw your face up like those fake telepaths on TV do. It’s just the opposite. You wash your mind clean and let everything just fall away until you’re left in a rather pure-feeling state. Then your thought (I can only communicate a few words) just sort of bubbles up and “connects” to something. In my case it was “GO EARTH” and whoosh! I was off. I’d stolen one of the aliens’ ships and I’ll never know who was more astounded, me or them. The General tells me I’m the only person who ever escaped the aliens on his own, much less steal a spaceship, but that’s the General speaking, so who knows.
The ship was moving very fast, and when I finally thought I saw Earth through the window (the ship had a few small window-like portholes) I realized in lunch loosing horror that the ship wasn’t slowing down. The thing apparently needed landing instructions and I knew as much about landing a spaceship as you do.
SLOW DOWN, I thought, and felt the connect, but couldn’t tell if the ship had truly slowed. I was sure the planet below had to be Earth, but I couldn’t make out what part of Earth I was looking at before the window got obscured by, I don’t know what, burning atmosphere or something. Ask an astronaut, not a law student. For all I knew I was about to go splat in the middle of North Korea.
I washed my mind as clean as total panic allowed and pictured northern California as I’d seen it once from a satellite picture on the net. THERE, I whimpered. I figured I’d have a better chance of not crashing into some city there, as I would if I aimed for the east coast. There was a jolting shudder throughout the spacecraft, then darkness. The ship had flown into the night side of Earth and I could see nothing but fuzzy red streaks flashing by the windows.
Think, I yelled aloud in an awesomely high squeal. Assume the ship is going to land in northern California. Should I tell it how? LAND SOFT, I thought frantically but not well enough, because I felt no connect. I tried again, picturing a large black flat area, and thought LAND SLOW THERE. Part of the thought connected but I wasn’t sure which part.
That’s when the ship crashed. I realize now that the ship interpreted the “large black flat” area as a forest at night and the “slow” as just that. I did indeed land slowly, careening in slow motion into tree after tree, leaving me with a fractured skull from being thrown about inside and some pretty outlandish promises having been made to God. I must have thought OPEN twenty times before the spaceship door did (I have plenty more to tell you about that damnable door) and I stumbled out hoping for people, preferably young nurse-like people, all waiting for me with outstretched arms saying “Thank goodness you got away!” and “Don’t worry, we’ll take care of you.” In short, I was a mess, physically and emotionally, and that’s why I was such a pathetically easy picking.
I collapsed face down in soft forest dirt --I can still rem
ember how delicious it smelled. Earth! I was free-- I’d survived! If my head hadn’t felt like it was cleaved in two and my whole body like a boulder was sitting on it, I would’ve danced a jig. Instead I apparently opted for just fainting, a stupefying choice I suppose, but one a charitable mind would forgive under the circumstances.
It was the sound of the helicopters that brought me to.
If you’ve never heard helicopters coming at you, you can’t possibly know what it’s like. Liquid thunder all around me. Sounded like an invasion force about to land on top of me.
It was still dark and I couldn’t see much, with the trees blotting out everything except the hapless path I’d carved through them with my seemingly indestructible spacecraft. I could sure hear though.
I wanted to be rescued, but at the same time the sound of that particular rescue force was terrifying, and the result was useless indecision on my part.
I should have run, not that it would have made much difference I suppose, but at least I would’ve made the effort, not been such a damned pansy cowering there in the leaves and dirt swirling up around me. But it felt like I was cemented to the ground, struggling to control the turmoil in my head, not to mention my bowels.
The first of the helicopters set gingerly down on the swath of fallen trees I’d unfortunately provided for them. Lights appeared everywhere, giant burning searchlights finding me, concentrating on me. Men appeared everywhere too, shouting, pointing, an excruciating conflagration of noise that left me even more confused and frightened than I already was. I just wanted to go home, leave me alone I gulped, just let me go, please.
I don’t know what I expected, anything from being shot to being hugged as a returning hero. I was kneeling beside an object any fool could plainly see was a UFO. I waited for hysteria, astonishment, or awe from those men as they raced about around me and the ship.
They did not speak, but several at once surrounded me, keeping their lights concentrated on me. I saw no weapons. Seizing the last of my courage in my hands, I searched for a statement, some incredibly brilliant opening words of greeting that explained my circumstances reasonably and understandably.
Angelique Rising Page 22