Angel Fire

Chapter 2-1

Chapter Two

The store was probably the last place I felt like going the next morning, but Kara hadn’t come back to work full-time yet, so it was my duty to run the place most days. Things had been glacially slow, and I wasn’t looking forward to yet another day of clock watching.

You’d think the weeks leading up to Christmas would be busy for us, but Sedona actually tended to be sort of dead until right after the holiday. People wanted to come into town for the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and even right afterward into the first of January, but before then? Not so much. True, there was always the influx of pagan types who wanted to be around the vortexes on the solstice. Unfortunately, they tended to spend all their money on new crystals for their collections and not on UFO literature and alien-motif tchotchkes.

I placed a king-size travel mug filled with green tea on the counter, then pulled my MacBook Pro out of my backpack and set it up on the counter, plugging an ethernet cable into its designated port. Kara didn’t bother with wi-fi, but at least she did have high-speed internet. Since business had been so slow, I worked on my clients’ projects in between helping the odd customer here and there. A string of brass bells hung from the shop door, ready to announce the arrival of whatever tourists did decide to show up.

The fears of the night before seemed to have blown away with the clouds and the snow. This morning was fiercely bright, the sun glinting off the patches of snow that still survived. The ridge lines would probably stay white for several days as long as the temperature didn’t rise too much, but the slippery streets I’d had to navigate on my way home from Kara’s were already a memory.

My newest client owned an art gallery in West Sedona, and wanted a site that would help showcase her art and draw more customers out to that part of town. I was glad I could use HTML5 to build an animated portfolio that wouldn’t be a drag on those customers who had slower computers — or not show up at all on devices like iPads and iPhones, which wouldn’t even support Flash. Playing with the code helped take my mind off that sensation of unbearable pressure I’d felt the night before, that wave of cold, that sound of hellish voices murmuring words I couldn’t understand.

I’d almost called Jeff this morning but decided against it. If he wanted to hash things over, he knew where to find me. Besides, I knew for a fact he wasn’t an early riser and probably wouldn’t have appreciated a phone call any time before noon.

Maybe I was sticking my head in the sand. Of course I wouldn’t bother Kara with this — and I didn’t feel close enough yet to Lance to open up to him — but maybe I should tell Michael Lightfoot what had happened. He was always calm, considerate, never judgmental, sort of the uncle I’d never had, a sympathetic ear when I needed one. I somehow doubted Jeff would talk to Michael, although he might decide to say something to Lance.

Great. If that happened, then Lance would probably give me s**t for not mentioning the incident to him first. Some days it seemed I just couldn’t win with Lance.

The bells on the door jingled, and I looked up from my laptop. A couple of tourists in their thirties, probably from Southern California, judging by the way they were overly bundled up against the forty-degree temperatures outside.

I pulled a smile out of somewhere. “Welcome to the UFO Depot. Can I help you?”

“Oh, we’re just browsing,” the woman said, giving me the funny side-eyed look I was used to by that point, the look that always seemed to ask, Do you really believe in this stuff?

“Okay,” I said, knowing better than to say anything else. “Just let me know if you need anything.” And I returned my attention to my computer screen, switching to a mindless task like resizing images in Photoshop so I wouldn’t completely lose track of what I was doing if they did end up buying something.

And although I’d pegged them as lookie-loos, the husband did actually buy one of the “I Had a Close Encounter in Sedona, Arizona!” T-shirts. His wife didn’t look overly thrilled with his purchase, leading me to guess they probably wouldn’t be having a close encounter of their own when they got back to their hotel room.

Then they left, and quiet descended once again. Kara tended to play dreamy New Age space-themed music when she tended the store, but I could only handle so much of that stuff. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be too happy if I blasted hard rock, so I went with silence instead. Besides, it was easier for me to concentrate on my real work without a distracting soundtrack.

The bells on the door jingled again. In the middle of saving a file, I said automatically, “Welcome to the UFO De — ” And the words sort of caught in my throat, because I looked up on the last syllable and realized that my latest visitor wasn’t a tourist at all, but Martin Jones, Kara’s erstwhile Man in Black.

Okay, he wasn’t really “her” Man in Black the way Grayson had definitely been “her” alien-human hybrid super-soldier, but since she’d been the first one to meet Agent Jones, I’d always sort of labeled him that way in my mind.

Well, when I wasn’t privately referring to him as “s*x in a suit.”

I’d last seen him in August when he’d stopped in the store, looking for Kara. He’d disappeared soon after Grayson performed his sabotage on the alien base in Secret Canyon, and we’d all sort of assumed that he’d gone back to wherever MIBs hung out. Too bad, since he was awfully easy on the eyes.

But now he was here, looking even more gorgeous than I remembered, a long wool overcoat half hiding the trademark black suit, aviator shades covering his eyes. The suit was enough to make him stand out in Sedona, even aside from his good looks; the high-desert town wasn’t exactly business-suit territory. Dress shirts and ties for the waiters in some of the higher-end restaurants, and for some of the guys who worked in the local banks and so on, but a full-on suit?

“Hello, Kiki,” Agent Jones said, his tone casual, as if dropping into my store out of the blue was no big deal.

“Kirsten,” I replied automatically, wishing I’d never bestowed the nickname on myself. Getting everyone to stop calling me that was a Sisyphean battle at best, but necessary if I wanted people to start taking me seriously.

“Kirsten,” he repeated, and smiled.

That smile did certain things to portions of my anatomy that I really didn’t want to think about. I closed my laptop. “Kara’s not working today.”

“I know.” He moved a little farther into the shop, pausing a foot or so from the counter I was sitting behind. “So, how do you like being an aunt?”

“It’s great,” I said. I wasn’t about to let him rattle me. So sure, he knew about the baby. How much he knew about the baby, well…that was the $64,000 question, wasn’t it? I mean, you didn’t have to be a government agent to know that Kara Swenson, owner of the UFO Depot, had just adopted a baby. It wasn’t as if she was hiding Grace under a rock.

“Good.” His smile faded a little. “I actually didn’t come in here to see Kara. I came here to see you.”

“You did?” Normally, I would have been happy enough to learn that a guy of Martin Jones’s caliber had come into the store expressly to see me. When the hot guy in question was a Man in Black, though, that sort of statement wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

“Yes.” He paused and glanced away from me, as if taking in the clutter of alien-themed merchandise, from the crowded bookshelves on the far wall to the stacks of T-shirts and the alien plush dolls on the low tables. God knows what he thought of all that stuff. Taken in aggregate, it did look pretty silly, even though I knew the creatures that had inspired it were no laughing matter.

And I sort of doubted Agent Jones’ presence here, the day after those aliens had decided to let me know that they hadn’t taken a powder after all, was exactly a coincidence.

The silence stretched out for a minute, but I wasn’t about to break it, no matter how uncomfortable it might feel. If he’d come here to tell me something, then he could just tell me. He was going to find out real fast that I wasn’t a game-playing kind of girl.

“Been quiet here lately?”

“Oh, well, we’re mostly busy right after Christmas,” I told him, even though I knew he wasn’t really asking about business.

He reached up and took off his sunglasses. The blue-gray of his eyes was a little shocking against his olive skin and dark hair. I’d just assumed he must have brown eyes, judging by his coloring.

Gorgeous as they might be, those eyes were just a little too piercing. “I wasn’t talking about the store.”

“Oh?”

“Do you want to talk about what happened last night?”

Uh-oh. I cleared my throat and said, “Not really.”

“It would be smarter for you if you did.”

“Is that a threat?”

He looked a little taken aback at my words. “No. As I once told your sister, we’re on the same side.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, nonplussed. Wow, that was eloquent. To cover my confusion, I reached over for my mug of green tea and took a long sip. “I’m not sure what you want me to say,” I went on. “I mean, it sounds as if you already know what happened.”

“I know something happened. I want to know exactly what it was.”

“Well, then, sounds like you’re doomed to disappointment, because I don’t know exactly what it was, either. If anything.”

He just stood there, waiting, watching me with those improbable blue eyes. I’d never thought of myself as someone who rattled easily, but it was really hard to meet that stare and not want to spill everything.

Then, again, he’d probably been doing this for a while. I wondered exactly how long, and how old he was. Translation: I wondered how much older he was than I. Ten years? Twelve? He looked like he was somewhere in his mid-thirties.

Not relevant, Kiki! I scolded myself. Shrugging, I remarked, “Not much to say. I mean, I could’ve just been having a galloping case of the heebie-jeebies.”

One eyebrow lifted. “‘Heebie-jeebies’?”

“Okay, maybe it was a little more than that. But really, it just felt dark and cold and…heavy. The solar lights went out. And I heard something.”

“Something like what?” His tone was calm enough, but I caught a little edge to it that I didn’t like, as if even Martin Jones the super-cool MIB was hearing something he didn’t particularly care for.

“Just…voices.” I stopped for a moment, forcing myself to recall that faint but somehow hostile murmuring I had heard at the outer limits of my perception, as if hundreds or even thousands of beings were speaking all at once. “Not words or anything. I couldn’t even tell you if it sounded human. Just this weird murmur, rising and falling. Jeff didn’t hear it.”

“Jeff Makowski.”

I didn’t bother to ask how he knew who Jeff was. “Yes. He was with me over at Kara’s house. But Gort sure heard it…and he didn’t like it.”

Martin Jones didn’t ask me who Gort was. I guessed he must have met the dog when he came to first question Kara in August, just after she had her buzz-by — briefly celebrated on YouTube before the powers-that-be pulled the plug — from a UFO while trying to conduct a tour.

Needless to say, we hadn’t offered any UFO tours since then.

“And how did it make you feel?”

How did it make me feel? What the hell was this, a session with my shrink? I crossed my arms. “Well, it didn’t make me feel all warm and fuzzy, that’s for sure.”

He didn’t crack a smile. “It’s…worrisome…that they would make their presence known to you like that.”

“You’re not exactly inspiring confidence here, Agent Jones.”

This time, his lips quirked a little. But his expression sobered again just as quickly. “That wasn’t my intention.”