A Little Rhine Must Fall (3 page)

“I didn’t say you were, honey,” Mark gave me a hug. “I know another pet can be a lot. If you don’t want her I can take her to the pound tomorrow.”

Bastet growled and bit him lightly on the hand.

“Ow!” He was laughing. “See, Piper! She wants to stay.”

:Take us to the pound and you shall feel our wrath!:

“Fine,” I sighed, “she can stay. For a while.”

:We knew you would see reason. Now, where is the bedroom? We like to sleep on the right side of the bed:

“You are not sleeping on my side of the bed,” I informed her sternly.

Mark snorted. “You tell her, Piper.”

I looked around the living room. “Where’s Harvey?”

Mark stood up and stretched. “He’s around somewhere. Probably asleep under our bed.”

:He’s hiding:

I ignored her. “Has he met her royal highness yet?”

“Yeah. Took one look and ran for the woods. I’ll go dig him out.”

“No, that’s okay.” I headed for our room. “I’ll walk him out in the back yard.” I tried to give Bastet a significant look. She yawned again.

:We shall just hang out here with Mark:

Otis gave a little meow, jumped off the coffee table and ran out of the room.

:On second thought …:
Bastet jumped off the couch and followed him.

“Come back here!” I yelled.

Mark smiled. “They’re fine, Piper. I think Otis has a crush. Let’s give them some alone time.”

“Alone time!” but he was already pulling out the Xbox controller and turning on the TV. “Fine,” I muttered under my breath. “I’ll just talk to her later.”

Harvey was hiding under our bed. His furry little behind was just showing under the edge, but when I called him, he scooted farther under and refused to come out. I wasn’t in the mood for it. “Harvey, come now,” I commanded with the Voice. I didn’t feel bad about using my ability on animals. They were
supposed
to obey. Harvey dragged out from under the bed and reluctantly followed me out into the backyard.

I had wanted to talk to Bastet some more, but she and Otis had disappeared to whatever dimension cats go to when they don’t want to be found. Harvey did his business and dashed back into the house. My cell phone was just starting to ring and I grabbed it and headed back to my room. It was Cecily.

“You won’t believe who has moved in!” I greeted her.

“Piper,” she interrupted. “We have a problem.”

Oh, my favorite words in the world!

“What?” My heart was now residing somewhere around my knees.

“The aliens are here.”

My heart finished dropping and landed on my toes.

Chapter Three:

Aliens

“Aliens!” you say. “Come on, Piper. First you would have me believe that vampires, ghosties and ghoulies really go bump in the night, and now you bring up
aliens
?”

It sounds stupid. At least,
I
thought it sounded stupid when
I
first heard of it and I had already had inconvertible proof that things beyond my ken really did exist. But seriously! Aliens? The story I had been told was that an alien spaceship had entered our galaxy and was approaching Earth. (Please, hold your laughter ‘till I finish.) Contrary to the imaginations of Sci-Fi writers with their warp-drive and hyper-drive and what-have-you drive, it takes a good long time to travel through space. On the order of
years
.

The species of the USB were concerned about this possible “invasion” and had come up with several plans. The WAND wanted to stop hiding from humans, start harvesting them (killing them) for power, and go on the defensive. Some of the vampires also thought this was a grand idea and rather tasty. Enter Piper (me), and the reason that the witches hate me so much.

If humans have no magical abilities, then none of the different species had any qualms about killing them. Or, only as many qualms as you or I would have at killing a cow or a chicken. When I came along though, the USB had to admit that humans
did
have some magical abilities and Sarah and I were allowed to join for all of mankind. (Big responsibility and we’ve been working like mad to bring some more “humans with abilities” on board to help out.) This put a stop to the “hunt the humans to extinction” plan and made the witches try their best to remove Sarah and me and cause our membership to “expire.”

In the past few months, I had been trying so hard to stay alive, keep my family alive, and come up with some convincing lies for Mark, that I hadn’t given much thought at all to the alien question. If I had, I would have assumed that we were still years out from their arrival and taken a Scarlett O’Hara view of the whole thing. As in, I’d think about it tomorrow. Now Cecily was telling me that it
was
tomorrow, and time to start thinking. And worrying.

“Here?” I squeaked. “As in,
here
here?”

“What other kind of
here
is there?”

“Well, there’s ‘here in this solar system,’ ‘here somewhere on the planet,’ and then there’s ‘here right in this very city.’” The distinctions seemed rather obvious to me.

There was a pause while she sorted it out. “Here as in ‘arrived at the planet, but not yet landed.’”

I took a breath. Okay. I could handle that. Alien invasion. Perhaps we should stock up on Earth viruses. I wasn’t freaking out. I was remaining calm. Calm and serene, like a mountain pool, surrounded by flowers and butterflie—

“Piper?”

Oh yeah, I was still on the phone. “Yeah?”

“Are you okay?” Cecily sounded worried.

“Okay? Of course, I’m okay. You just told me that aliens are invading, why wouldn’t I be okay?” I might have sounded a little testy. Maybe.

“They might not be invading.”

“Just tell me what happened from the beginning. Then I’ll decide how much I want to freak out.”

“Conserving energy are we?” She sounded like she was smiling.

I shrugged, “It’s been a long day. I’ll tell you my surprise after you tell me yours.”

There was a rustle on the other end of the phone, “Where should I start?”

“The Synod wanted to see you,” I prompted.

“No,” Cecily corrected me. “Svobadova wanted to see me. Each of the species on the Synod is sending a representative to meet with the aliens.”

“They’ve heard from the aliens?”

“They call themselves the ‘Endring’ and they want to talk.”

“What about?”

“Earth’s surrender.”

Oh. Good. Honest and aboveboard. No beating around the bush. I gulped.

“It’s okay, Piper. The Synod will either come to an arrangement with the Endring, or fight.”

“Yeah, that sounds just peachy. Why was I ever worried?” My tone was dripping sarcasm.

Cecily chose to ignore it. “The vampires have chosen me to be their representative.”

“Why you?” I asked. Then, realizing that I might have sounded rude, “I mean, I’m sure you’re perfect for the job, but aren’t there other vampires who umm …” How could I politely say that her friendship with me hadn’t exactly endeared her to the rest of her kind, and I would have thought they would send someone in better standing?

Cecily laughed. “They think that my relationship with you has given me a better understanding of different species and thus I am the perfect person to greet and negotiate with aliens.”

“I’m not
that
weird,” I muttered, slightly offended.

“Yes,” she answered coolly, “you are. But that’s not the point. I have been chosen, and I will be in a position to care not only for my own people, but also for the humans.”

That was good. I doubted any of the other Synod species would spend a second worrying about what would happen to humans.

“Where’s the meeting?” I asked. I couldn’t really see them all sitting down for a confab at the local Denny’s. Where
do
you meet with a hostile alien race? I wasn’t prepared for the answer.

“The moon.”

“The moon?”

“Yes.”

“As in, made of cheese, orbiting the Earth, one small step for man, moon?”

“Unless you know of another one.”

I growled. “No need to get smart. I was just asking. How in the world are you having a meeting on the
moon
?”

I was taking this all rather well. It helped that I didn’t really believe any of this was happening. I fully expected to wake up one day, have no abilities, and realize that it had all been one crazy dream. The only problem with this hope was that I was nowhere near imaginative enough to have made this stuff up. Maybe I was on drugs. Yeah. That could explain a lot.

“Drugs,” I murmured then realized Cecily was talking. “What did you say?”

She sighed. “Were you off in Piper-land again?”

“What’s ‘Piper-land?’” I wanted to know.

“It’s where you go when you get that weird look on your face and I can tell you’re thinking something stupid,” was the annoying answer.

“I am
never
thinking something stupid!” I protested.

“Fine,” she smirked. “What were you just thinking about?”

I pursed my lips, realized that she couldn’t see me and made a face at the phone. “Nothing.”

“Uh-uh,” she scolded. “Prove it. What were you just thinking?”

“Fine,” I spat out. “Drugs. I was thinking about drugs.”

“Why drugs?” At least she sounded surprised. She might have guessed that I was off on a mental rabbit trail, but she hadn’t guessed the destination. I was unpredictable. That was a good thing, right?

“It doesn’t matter,” I answered regally. “I will concede the point for the moment. Anyways, I was asking how and why the moon?”

“‘How’ is easy. The witches are setting up a Zipline in return for permission to join the delegation.”

“Great,” I groaned. “First impressions being what they are, the aliens will be fully justified in blasting Earth to slag.”

Cecily giggled. Glad she found this so entertaining. “The ‘why’ is a little harder. Svobadova wasn’t exactly in a chatty mood. From what I could gather, the task force monitoring the alien ship picked up a single transmission that gave selenographic coordinates and a date and time.” She sounded a little proud of her vocabulary. “Selenographic means—”

I interrupted. I had no idea what it meant, but I could guess, and I wasn’t going to let her get away with that schoolteacher tone. “I know what it means. It refers to longitude and latitude on the moon.” I struggled to keep my voice even and not to rise up in a question at the end.

“Oh,” she sounded deflated. “I had to look it up.”

“That’s okay,” I was magnanimous. “It’s not a word you run across every day.”

There was a pause in the conversation. Finally Cecily broke the silence. “The meeting is tomorrow, Piper.”

I swallowed. At least there wouldn’t be a lot of time to worry. Suddenly I realized that my best friend was going to another planet (basically) and meeting a hostile race and might not return. “Cecily?”

“Yes?”

“Be safe, okay?” I felt a prickling behind my eyes.

“I promise,” she replied and hung up.

:You have to go with her:

I jumped a mile in the air, bashed my shin on the bedpost on the way down, tripped over the pair of shoes I’d left on the floor and landed on my butt.

Bastet sat primly in the doorway. Drat! I’d forgotten to tell Cecily about my new houseguest.

“Can’t you knock or something?” I hissed at her.

:Cats don’t knock:
she smirked.
:No knuckles:

I’d “no knuckles” her! This was not going to work. My heart couldn’t take it. “And what’s with the mind speech?” I asked angrily, pulling myself up off the floor. “Last time we met you had no problem talking out loud.”

She gave me an enigmatic look.
:We
could
talk out loud. If you would rather have your husband overhear our conversations:

She had a point. Bad enough that he could overhear
my
end. He might think that I was crazy. Nothing terribly new there. If he overheard a
cat
talking, he might think that
he
was crazy. Slightly more problematic.

“Well then,” I picked up the shoes and carried them to the closet. “Can you read my mind so I don’t have talk aloud?”

:No:
she glided after me into the closet.
:That would be an invasion of privacy:

I noticed that she hadn’t really answered the question. Either she
couldn’t
read minds, or else she chose not to. Afraid that it might be the latter, I decided to pretend that my mind was sacrosanct and not push the issue.

Exiting the closet, I sat down on the hope chest at the foot of the bed. “Come on, Bastet,” I said tiredly, “why are you really here?”

She yawned, lay down sphinx-style on the ground and closed her eyes.
:Because of a poem, Piper:

I wasn’t in the mood for guessing games. I just glared at her and kept quiet. She opened one eye, caught sight of my frown and quickly shut her eye again.

:If all of Earth’s creatures would avoid their doom,

She of the Rhine must stand on the moon:

“What does that mean? It’s not even good poetry!” I huffed.

:It means, dear child, that you are going to have to join the Synod delegation to the moon:

Chapter Four:

Oracle

I wish I could say that I instantly delivered a stunning riposte and waltzed out of the room. Instead, I sat there and gaped, mouth opening and closing in pure goldfish style. Although worried for Cecily’s safety, I had no intention of joining her off-planet. I was a mother! A wife! My family needed me! There was
no way
I was heading off on a dangerous mission to meet a hostile alien force. Uh-uh. No sir-ee, bob!

I gathered up my tattered cool and snapped my mouth shut. “No,” I said.

Bastet stared at me, unblinking.
:It’s not like you have a choice, Piper:

“Not have a choice!” I echoed, perhaps a little wide-eyed. “Not have a choice!”