Angel Fire

Chapter One Jeff Makowski leaned over Grace’s bassinet, his expression more than a little dubious. “She doesn’t look like a half-alien baby to me.” “Quarter alien,” I corrected him. “Or something like that, anyway. No one really knows if Grayson was actually half alien or a little more or a little less.” “Still.” I reached past Jeff to pick up Grace, who submitted to my less than expert handling with her usual aplomb. She cooed, blew a milk bubble, and reached out for a piece of my hair as it fell over my shoulder. I hastily scooped the stray lock out of the way. Now I understood why Kara had started wearing her hair in a ponytail most days. I’d just figured it was because she didn’t have time to do anything else with it, but I realized she also needed to keep it away from grabby baby hands. Jeff continued to watch me with a sour expression on his face as I held Grace up against my shoulder and patted her back. Not that I was really surprised by his reaction; Jeff generally tended to look as if he’d just smelled rancid two-week-old leftovers. What had truly surprised me was his being here in Sedona at all. He’d emailed me just the day before, saying that he planned to come to Arizona for a little while, maybe a week, maybe more. Lance had offered to let him crash at his condo, since it was pretty much vacant now that he’d moved in with Kara. Things weren’t really formal yet — they’d had a few more important things on their minds than planning a wedding — but there’d never been any question of them living separately. Not now. Why Lance didn’t just sell the condo, I didn’t know, but maybe he figured the market was soft at the moment and so was waiting for a better opportunity. Not really my business, anyway. I was still trying to wrap my head around the way things had changed, how my sister was now a mother and practically a wife, and I was an aunt. Aunt to a baby unlike any other on the planet. Okay, Grace looked like a normal month-old infant. You’d never guess her father had quite a bit of alien DNA running through his veins. But everyone in our little UFO-chasing group knew better. Human babies didn’t go from conception to birth in three months flat. Funny thing was, after her accelerated gestation period, she seemed to be developing like a regular baby. The midwife had checked her out thoroughly, and Kara and Lance even allowed a bunch of tests to be run. The upshot was that Grace could pretty much pass any casual inspection. You’d have to do cell-level DNA testing to discover that something not of this world was twisting its way along those double helixes. So it was decided the adopted Romanian orphan story would float after all, and Grace came home without too much ceremony and went to the pediatrician — who found nothing strange about her — and made her debut at a local MUFON meeting to a whole bunch of cooing and exclamations. If anyone thought it strange that my sister had suddenly gotten it into her head to adopt a baby, no one said anything out loud. Then again, these were people who spent their whole lives thinking about aliens and UFOs. A Romanian orphan barely merited the batting of an eyelash. “I didn’t know babysitting was in your repertoire,” Jeff remarked as I went over to the couch, still holding Grace, and sat myself down. “Or yours,” I replied, balancing Grace with one hand as I reached for the remote on the coffee table. Showing unexpected chivalry, Jeff moved forward and scooped up the remote, then handed it to me. “I didn’t come over to babysit. I came over to satisfy my scientific curiosity.” “And?” He frowned again. “She just looks like a baby.” “Well, what did you expect? Grayson looked like a normal guy.” I paused, thinking about the hybrid soldier who was her father. “Well, okay, he looked like a normal underwear model.” Jeff’s expression grew even more jaundiced, if that was possible. “Besides,” I added, shuffling through the Apple TV menu until I got to the cache of old Walking Dead episodes on Kara’s system, “she’s not just any baby. She’s my niece, so watch it.” For a minute, he didn’t say anything. Then, “Are you sure you should be watching this stuff in front of a month-old baby?” He jerked a finger toward the TV, where the series’ intrepid survivors looked as if they were about to open a serious can of whup-ass on a herd of zombies. I rolled my eyes. “Oh, please. Like she’s able to process any of it.” Still, I grabbed the TV remote and turned the sound down a little. “How do you know what she can process? She’s part alien.” Buzzkill. With a sigh, I paused the show and then scowled up at him. “Why are you here, anyway?” “I wanted to see the baby.” “I mean in Sedona. Yearning for a white Christmas or something?” “Yeah, about that.” He shifted so he could look out the sliding glass window in the dining room, where the landscape lights showed pale little patches of snow from the night before that hadn’t completely melted yet. “What’s up with this weather?” “Um, elevation above four thousand feet. If it bothers you, you should’ve stayed in sunny L.A.” He made a grunting sound that might have been a half-laugh. “Sunny, right. It was pouring buckets when I left.” “Well, there you go. This time of year, if it rains in California, we get snow here. Sometimes. Has to be cold enough, though.” Grace managed to grab a handful of my hair, and I had to spend the next minute extricating it from her clutching little fist. Couldn’t really blame her, I supposed; my hair was a shade or two lighter than Kara’s, but probably to a baby one lock of long blonde hair looked pretty much the same as another. Maybe she was missing her mother. This was the first time Kara and Lance had entrusted me with babysitting duties, and it had taken a lot of talking on my part to convince them I was up to the task. I was still sort of shocked that they’d left Grace with me, even though they were only five minutes away at the Heartline Café. Kara wouldn’t travel any farther than that, even though, as far as we knew, there was absolutely nothing for her to be worried about. Things had been normal enough the past few months — well, if you could refer to running your sister’s business while she was a state away giving birth to a part-alien baby as “normal.” Anyway, the baddies out at the base in Secret Canyon had gone dormant again following their latest setback. None of us knew whether this was just a lull in the storm, or whether they’d finally decided Sedona really wasn’t working out for them and had gone elsewhere. But there had been remarkably few UFO sightings in the area this autumn, and although I would much rather have been concentrating on my own web design business, I knew I owed it to Kara to mind the store until she was back up to speed. This dinner at the Heartline Café was the first time she’d gone out since giving birth. Although Jeff and I had hung out together a good deal, we really hadn’t talked much about anything personal, and I liked it that way. I knew our relationship was the subject of some worry on my sister’s part. I’d tried to tell her it was no big deal, that she was making mountains out of molehills, but sometimes it seemed as if Kara’s whole reason for being was to worry about stuff, so I gave up. I couldn’t even explain the situation to myself half the time. It wasn’t as if Jeff was the world’s greatest conversationalist. I wasn’t attracted to him, that was for sure. So as to the real reason for why Jeff was in Sedona now — besides wanting to see whether Grace was green or had antennae sprouting from her head or something — I really couldn’t say, except I was pretty sure it had nothing to do with my charms. Maybe he just didn’t want to spend the holidays alone. As far as I knew, he didn’t have any family. I’d been to his house in L.A. For all its ramshackle appearance on the outside, inside it was sterile and clean and conspicuously lacking in any personality. No family photos, no antiques that could be heirlooms, not even collections of old books or anything else to show he had a connection to anyone else on this planet. It was possible he didn’t. Maybe he was an orphan, just like me. Okay, if you wanted to get technical about it, I wasn’t exactly an orphan. My mother was alive somewhere — Taos, New Mexico, according to the latest intelligence — but she might as well be dead as far as I was concerned. I refused to acknowledge the existence of someone who’d walked out on my sister and me when I was only three years old. Luckily, Kara wanted no more to do with our mother than I did, so at least that was one thing we agreed on. Still standing at the window, Jeff straightened up from his usual slouch and stared out into the storm, eyes narrowing. “There’s something out there.” “I doubt it. Even Mrs. Martinez brings her cats in when the weather is like this.” “I saw something,” he said flatly. I recognized that tone from the times when we’d argued over some minute detail of computer coding. It meant he was the authority and he knew what he was talking about, and that was that. When the subject was computers, I didn’t bother to argue. I knew way more about their inner workings than most people probably even guessed, and I could hack in and out of some pretty secure systems, thanks to Jeff’s coaching, but he could still code rings around me. However, when it came to Sedona, or my sister’s house, he didn’t know what the heck he was talking about. I set Grace back down in the bassinet and went over to the window, pausing next to Jeff so I could stare out into the blurry darkness. Snow in Sedona was generally dry and light; the flakes floated, delicate as feathers, illuminated here and there by the backyard lights. I didn’t see anything. It was cold enough that I could actually feel the chill radiating out from the sliding glass doors. I crossed my arms and kept my gaze fixed on the drifting snow. I still didn’t see anything. But for some reason, I thought I could hear something — what, I wasn’t exactly sure. It almost sounded like a crowd of people murmuring…or maybe it was just the wind. Sometimes it could really howl down the chimney when it got going. Then the hair on the back of my neck began to stand up, because I heard something I could identify. Gort, Kara’s shepherd/Keeshond-mix dog, was growling low in his throat. Gort hardly ever growled. He might bark when someone was at the door or if one of Mrs. Martinez’s cats had the temerity to invade our backyard, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard the dog growl at anyone…or anything. Something had gotten him going this time, though, and I strained to look once more into the darkness, to see something in the little areas of light around the solar lamps. Even though it was snowing now, the weather had been bright and sunny for most of the day; the lamps were fully charged. And then they blinked out all at once, and absolute black reigned outside. I couldn’t see anything at all, but it was as if some unseen pressure began to push down on me, to press against my throat. I struggled for breath, even as Jeff gasped, “What the hell, Kirsten?” Without thinking, I reached up and grasped the drapes — Kara had them hanging from those little metal clips attached to rings — and slid them shut, as if those simple lengths of fabric could provide some sort of barrier against whatever was lurking in the dark outside. Almost as soon as I had blotted out the sight of the backyard, the pressure on my throat eased, and Gort stopped growling. The lights flickered and I tensed, icy tentacles of fear running down my back. God, what if we lost power altogether? But then the electricity seemed to reassert itself, and the lamps in the living room kept shining as if nothing had happened. For a long moment, neither Jeff nor I spoke, but only stared at each other, like two little kids who had just discovered that “Bloody Mary in the mirror” wasn’t only a slumber-party game. Finally he said, “Was that…?” I lifted my shoulders and looked past him to the lengths of heavy rust-colored cotton that blocked the view outside. Finally, I shook my head. “I don’t know.” By some unspoken agreement, we said nothing to Kara and Lance when they got home, but only told them Grace had been a perfect angel — the simple truth — and went our separate ways. Since Jeff was staying in Lance’s condo, he got to save money on a hotel room while acting as temporary caretaker of the place at the same time. The arrangement made sense, but as I got into the UFO Night Tours van that was my usual transportation around town, I found myself wishing that Jeff had decided to crash on my couch instead. At least that way, I wouldn’t have to drive home alone. No such luck. I turned the key in the ignition, cranked the heater to full blast, and turned up the ancient CD player as well. Jeff was already pulling away from the curb in his own van. Somehow, it seemed vitally important to follow him as closely as I could, even though we’d only share the same route until we got out on 89A. Then he’d be heading west, while I needed to go east, back through the heart of town, then south a little to my apartment complex off Highway 179. Better short-term company than none at all, and I backed out a little too quickly, startling when the van’s tires slipped on the slick pavement. I cursed under my breath and eased up, but was glad to see that Jeff hadn’t gotten all that far ahead of me. He was driving like a ninety-year-old afraid of getting his license revoked. No real surprise — I guessed he didn’t have a lot of experience driving in the snow. It wasn’t falling all that hard, a few flakes here and there, but it was just enough to make the roads slippery and treacherous. For some reason, I found myself holding my breath as I stopped at the light, watching as he turned right while I had to wait for the signal to turn green. It wasn’t all that late — a little after eight o’clock — but the streets were still almost deserted. Not a lot of tourist traffic on a Wednesday night, and I guessed the weather had kept quite a few people safely in their hotel rooms and rented condos and Airbnbs. Most of the time, I would’ve been glad not to have to share the road with a bunch of people unfamiliar with the area, but at the moment, I would have welcomed a traffic jam. At least I wouldn’t have felt so alone as I eased the van out onto the highway and headed toward home. And although I’d always appreciated Sedona being a “dark sky city,” meaning there was a conscious effort to keep nighttime illumination to a minimum so it wouldn’t interfere with stargazing, right then I would have been happy to see blazing billboards and streetlights every ten feet. Maybe that would have kept my mind from playing tricks on me, kept me from thinking I glimpsed movement out of the corner of my eye when there was nothing to see, or imagining that some kind of massive craft hovered above me, blacker than black against the night sky, when in reality nothing was up there but some quickly scudding clouds. My fingers tightened on the steering wheel as I slowed down for the first roundabout in the center of town. Normally, I would have gone to the right and turned down Brewer Road so I could avoid the second roundabout, but tonight I stayed on the highway. The shortcut was way too dark, with trees almost meeting overhead. Anything could be lurking down there…. I gave myself a mental shake and muttered, “Get a grip, Kirsten,” but even so, I didn’t relax my death grip on the steering wheel. Really, the road wasn’t totally deserted — just ahead of me was a Chevy Suburban with Oregon plates going almost ten miles per hour below the speed limit. On any other night, I might have uttered a few choice curses about tourists under my breath. Right then, I was just glad to have their taillights to follow. Surely the aliens wouldn’t swoop down on me with witnesses so close by? Well, they’d done a lot worse than that over the years, actually, but nothing happened as we passed Tlaquepaque Village, still with a few stalwart vehicles in the parking lot, then took the roundabout that brought us onto Highway 179. The Suburban, God bless it, turned down my side street, although I knew it must be heading for the Arabella Hotel and not my own shabby little apartment complex just a little farther down. Sure enough, the SUV pulled into the parking lot for the hotel, which was still packed. One of Sedona’s most popular restaurants, Elote, was located on the same property as the Arabella, and it was the one place you could always guarantee there would be a lot of people well past ten o’clock. But the parking lot in my own complex was quiet and still, although lights shone from most of the apartment windows. Not my own, though — I’d been stupid enough to head out to Kara’s without leaving even a single lamp on. “Great,” I muttered as I turned off the engine and grabbed my backpack. Nothing for it, though. I climbed out of the van and locked it, then grasped my keys with the house key sticking out between my index and middle fingers — supposedly you could use your key as a weapon if someone attacked you, although I guessed the self-defense experts who came up with that one were thinking more of muggers and rapists than alien invaders. A cold wind pulled at my hair and found its way past the scarf I had tied around my throat as I made my way to the stairs. A metallic noise brought me up short, until I realized it was just someone throwing trash into the dumpster behind the Circle K, whose property butted up against the apartment complex. My heart still thumped away uneasily, though, and I found myself bolting up the stairs, running as if a horde of Greys was after me. Of course, they weren’t. I managed to open the door and get inside with no problem, although my fingers shook as I turned the deadbolt and flicked the light switch. Immediately, the hanging Moroccan-style lamp over the dinette table turned on, flooding the room with a warm, reassuring glow. That wasn’t enough, though. I went into the kitchen and turned on the overhead light there as well, revealing nothing more frightening than a couple of empty glasses and plates that I’d been too busy to put in the dishwasher. Usually this would be the point where I told myself I was acting like an i***t. Tonight, though, I wasn’t so sure. I hadn’t been imagining that awful pressure I felt at Kara’s house. Jeff had experienced the same thing. Something had been lurking out there, something heavy, dark…inimical. Yeah, that was a ten-dollar word for you. But it did seem to describe what I’d felt almost perfectly. Something was out there, and it wasn’t friendly. And yeah, go ahead and laugh at me — the girl who wanted more than anything to see a UFO, to experience some of the crazy stuff that seemed to happen to everyone else except her. Persephone and Paul O’Brien had actually been in the alien base, and my sister Kara almost had a UFO run her over, for crying out loud, but I’d never seen a damn thing. Oh, I believed, but only in a secondhand way, because nothing had ever happened directly to me. Except tonight. And I realized I wasn’t liking it all that much. Well, that was just great. So much for Kirsten Swenson, intrepid explorer into the unknown. Frowning, I stalked through the combo living room/dining area and down the hall to my bedroom. Even though I was feeling more than a little annoyed with myself, I wasn’t so irritated that I didn’t still flip on the bedside lamp as soon as I entered the room. A swirl of soft cedar incense — my favorite, because it always seemed to say “Sedona” to me — greeted me, instantly comforting, the scent lingering long after the stick had burned out. My apartment, with its mishmash of yard sale finds and consignment store goodies, its Indian textiles and art-glass lamps, seemed the last place an alien would want to defile. Then again, the ranch house Kara had inherited and carefully decorated in a Southwest style too tasteful to be called kitschy wasn’t exactly the most likely place for an alien invasion, either. And even a casual reading on the topic of abductions and visitations was enough to show that aliens went where they wanted to go, whether it was a suburban tract home or a car on an empty country road. And what had they been after? Had they somehow figured out that Grace was the offspring of one of their hybrid soldiers? Or were they just keeping an eye on Kara after her brush-by with them in August? I wouldn’t flatter myself by thinking they were looking for me. Not much there to interest them, except maybe my association with Kara and Grace, and of course the rest of our group of alien hunters. It was probably naïve to think that they didn’t know who we were, and that we had a particular interest in UFOs. For whatever reason, we’d been mostly ignored…until now. So what had changed? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.