Alien Soulmate (Paranormal Romance Aliens) (4 page)

He smiled and finally picked his head up from the table, rubbing at his face. It was going on two full days since he'd last slept, and he was seriously considering taking a milder form of the sleeping tonic he'd given to Carver and passing out for the next several hours.

A knock on the door halted his train of thought, and he frowned. "Come in."

The door slipped open and E'lira entered on light feet, dressed in her mourning blues with her eyes downcast. She glanced around the room once she had closed the door behind her and frowned.

"Have you seen Carver?" she asked. "I thought he would be in here with you, but I haven't seen him since last night. I… I wanted to speak to him."

Ithril sighed. An unfortunate side effect of this whole plan was having to lie to his sister. E'lira had lost enough people in her life, and he hated having to be the one to tell her that she had temporarily lost another. Especially since he for one knew that Carver would never have left on his own.

But he reminded himself to think of the bigger picture and shook his head. "No, I haven't. I think… E'lira, you might want to sit down for this."

Her eyes went wide, and she dropped into the nearest chair. "What? Ithril, you're scaring me. What's happened to him?"

"I… I went looking for him earlier, to see if we could talk before the Council meeting. But I couldn't find him. His rooms were trashed, though, and it looked like he'd packed in a hurry. And one of the transporters is missing. I think… I think he's gone, E'lira."

The silence in the room was deafening, and Ithril's stomach churned as he waited for his sister to absorb that.

"What do you mean gone?" she asked. "Where would he go?"

"I don't know. I thought the worst at first, but there was no sign of forced entry, and no one reported seeing anything. If he'd taken a transporter no one would have stopped him since he has leader clearance now. I don't know. Maybe he just needed some time after Father… Maybe he just needs space or something? I don't know."

The despair in E'lira's eyes almost broke him, but he firmed his jaw and his resolve. "It'll be okay," he promised softly. "I'm not going to abandon you, E'lira. You're not alone."

She stiffened and narrowed her eyes at him as if looking for something. "I know," she said. "I know I'm not. I… need to think."

Ithril didn't stop her when she got up and left the room, but he slumped in the chair with a sigh. Hopefully every day wouldn't be as taxing as this one, or he wouldn't have any energy left for fighting the Des'kos when the time came.

Colorful swearing spilled out of the living room and into the kitchen as Vivian rummaged in her box, looking for the part that she knew she had just seen. "Where is it?" she muttered under her breath, lifting the box and looking under it and even going so far as to stick her hand under the couch to see if it had rolled away when she wasn't looking.

"I swear to god, I am going to turn this whole place inside out if I can't find that stupid—oh. Never mind. False alarm."

"Was it in your other hand?" her friend Elijah asked, sighing as he came out of her kitchen with a tray of food and two sodas. "If it was in your other hand, I'm withholding this dinner I made for you."

"If by made you mean ‘picked up from the Chinese place down the block', then I'm not too worried about it," Viv fired back with a grin. She dropped the part back into the box and scooted over to the low table, wiping her hands before grabbing for the soda and cracking it open. A few long sips later and she felt more refreshed than she had before, and she pulled out the wooden chopsticks and cracked them into two so she could tear into the steaming food in front of her.

Eli grinned at her and ate his food at a slower pace. "Fair. But seriously, was it in your other hand?"

"Yes, okay? It was in my other hand. In my defense, I've been handling stupid little fiddly things all day, so they're all starting to look alike to me. Why did I think this was a good idea again?"

"Because you went on a long and impassioned rant about how you wanted to play your games on a machine that you knew wouldn't crap out on you because you'd built it yourself? Because we went to the store and you made some salesgirl cry with the amount of questions you threw at her about their gaming rigs? Because you quite possibly have a problem with your brain that no one has discovered yet? I can keep going."

Vivian leveled a glare at him. Elijah Parker was her best friend in the world and had been for the last seven years, but he was a smart aleck if there ever was one, and he seemed to delight in making her want to throttle him.

"You know, sometimes I have to ask myself why I even bother with you," she said, stuffing beef lo mein into her mouth and chewing thoroughly.

"I feel quite the same way," he replied. "But then I remember that you would starve to death buried under a pile of unidentifiable machine parts if I didn't come around every day, and I suck it up and consider it a public service to be your friend."

"How positively noble of you."

"It is, isn't it? I should be receiving my invitation for sainthood any day now."

Vivian arched an eyebrow. "You know you have to be martyred for that, right? I'm sure I've got some unidentifiable machine part around here that can help make that happen for you if it's really what you want. I'd hate to stand in the way of your dreams. What kind of friend would I be?"

This was a common enough occurrence between the two of them, sitting on her living room floor eating and snarking at each other. They'd been doing it for years now, and it was as routine as anything else.

Viv liked to joke that Eli was like her good luck charm. She always had him around when she was building something new because he kept her head on straight and made sure that she didn't actually lose herself in whatever it was she was doing.

Her mother despaired of her most of the time. Twenty three years old with no prospects. Of course, that wasn't even remotely true. She had plenty of prospects. Vivian had been the youngest graduate in her class, and she'd graduated a year early at that. She was one of the only female robotics and engineering graduates in the state, and already she had major companies courting her.

What her mother meant by prospects were things like dates and men flocking around after her. It had been alright when she'd thought that Eli was her boyfriend, but once she'd found out that Eli was gay and had very little interest in her in that way, Vivian's mother had gone back on her crusade to get her daughter married off before she was twenty five.

It wasn't like Vivian wasn't attractive, she always said. Viv was a very pretty girl, all things considered. She had a head full of chestnut colored curls that spilled down her back and over her shoulders when she couldn't be bothered to tame them into something resembling a style. Her eyes were a clear, cool gray, and she had dimples when she smiled. She was short and curvy, and she got plenty of looks from men on the street, but she was just never interested in returning them.

No one wanted to hear her talk about machines and fiddly bits, and that was one of her passions in life. It was one of those things that she wasn't going to pretend like she wasn't into just to keep someone's attention.

And really, she was fine. She wasn't lonely most of the time, and when she was, there was a running joke about how she could just build a robot lover and solve her problems that way.

Eli was good company, anyway. He made fun of her sometimes, but in that way that proved that he cared about her. He'd even offered to pretend to be her boyfriend just so her mother would get off of her back about how she was apparently going to die alone. In the end, Viv had declined because knowing her mother, she would start hinting about marriage or something and then they would have had to fake a breakup to throw her off. It would have ended up being too much hassle. But Eli was a sweetheart for offering, and Viv was more than content with his friendship to break up her time spent fiddling with things. So it wasn't a big deal, and definitely not the catastrophe her mother made it out to be.

She was making good progress on her latest project. Good enough that the next couple of days would see it finished, and then she would spend the rest of the summer playing games and relaxing. It would be perfect.

In the fall, she'd have to decide which of the seven or some companies that were all jockeying for her attention she would actually choose. She knew what he father would say: play the field, make them give you the sweetest offers they can. It was tempting, really, and it definitely wasn't like the big names couldn't afford to court her a little. Clearly they saw something in her that they wanted, and as much as she would deny it if anyone ever asked, it was nice to have someone vying for her attention, even if it was just a few different tech companies.

"Hey, you in there?" Eli was asked, waving his hand in front of her face with an amused look. "Not already planning your next rig are you? You've not even finished with this one yet."

Vivian grinned and shook her head, clearing those thoughts away. "Not yet. Still puzzling out this one for now. It's gonna be awesome once I get it going. So much RAM, so much speed, flawless graphics. No game will be off limits to me."

Eli smiled and shook his head. "I'm going to have to come and pry you out of your chair, aren't I? Just to make sure you shower and eat every day."

"Maybe," Viv replied with a shrug. "That's what friends are for, though, right?"

He just rolled his eyes, and between the two of them they demolished the rest of the food. Now that she was fed and hydrated, she was ready to dive back into the bowels of the computer, using the tiny penlight in her mouth to make sure she was putting everything where it belonged. She'd done this enough times that it wasn't hard to keep her concentration and listen to Eli complaining about his neighbors and the fact that they apparently had kinky sex right up against the wall they shared.

She laughed as he described the way the husband had been begging to apparently be his wife's "little pony", nearly inhaling the screw she had swapped out for the penlight in her mouth.

When she declared herself done for the night, she flopped back onto the carpet, sighing softly. "My brain is shut down for the night."

"Good, it probably needs a break," Eli opined from the couch where he was scrolling through his phone. "Oh, hey, did you hear about that weird craft thing?"

Viv frowned. "What weird craft thing?"

"According to this these three guys found what looked like some kind of unidentified aircraft in one of those fields down Madison. It didn't look like it had crashed or anything, just like it had landed and someone had either left it there or was still inside. So they ran back to their car to get one of the guys' camera, but when they got back, it was gone."

"Sounds like maybe someone was drinking too much," Viv teased.

"That's what everyone wanted to write it off as," Eli agreed. "Especially when they called in the police and everything. But the tracks were still there when the police showed up, and the stalks in the field were still bent and broken from where the craft was. It looked like it had been driven or even dragged away, and then the tracks just seemed to disappear without a trace somewhere in the middle of the corn. It's weird."

That was weird. Vivian wasn't superstitious by any stretch of the imagination, and she was a firm supporter of the ‘don't believe it until you see it' way of thinking. But something about this sparked her memory in a way she didn't understand, and she had to scratch her head and think for a moment.

"Did they say anything else?"

"Just that they're looking into it," Elijah said. "And that if anyone has any information, they should call the police department, blah, blah, blah. Why?"

"I'm curious. I mean, things disappearing into thin air is kind of not normal."

"Well, yeah. But it could also be some kind of elaborate prank. I mean, they tested these guys for drugs and alcohol and they came up clean. Apparently they had just been out for a walk in the field when they found it." Eli shrugged and ran a hand through his hair. "Could be anything really."

Vivian grinned. It could be anything, and that was one of the main reasons why she was interested. If it was some kind of UFO or something, she wanted to find it. She wanted to take it apart and study it. See how their tech was different from the tech she was used to. It seemed like she wasn't doing a good enough job hiding the manic gleam in her eye because Eli groaned.

"I know that look. That's your ‘I'm about to go into crazy geek mode' look, and it's my cue to go."

"Aww, you don't have to," Viv said, but it would be easier to throw herself into combing the internet for every single scrap of information on this if he wasn't there.

"Don't give me that," Eli said, getting up and stretching. "I already know that you don't really want me to stay, so I don't need you to try and pretend like you do."

Vivian smiled sheepishly and saw him to the door, accepting his hug and his insistence that she not stay up too late with a good natured grin. They both knew how well that was going to go over.

Whenever she got it in her head that she wanted to do something, it was hard for her to give up before she'd done it.

Once everything was put away, she settled herself on the couch with her laptop and began by searching the web for any stories related to the appearance of the craft. She found a few more accounts of the same story that Eli had told her, including an official statement from police that basically said they didn't know what was happening, but they didn't believe it was some kind of prank or that there was anything for people to be worried about.

Those two statements were too contradictory for Vivian's liking, and she closed out of that page and continued her search, bringing up older stories that were too similar to be coincidence.

Even as far back as seventy years ago there were reports of the same things happening. It wasn't just limited to the area around the city, either. All over the world, there were reports of crafts showing up one minute and then disappearing the next.

Some of them were clearly not true and some were the general crop circle, little green men propaganda, but it was very easy to tell the difference between them, and the more she read about the stories that seemed similar, the more she was convinced that there was something going on.

"Now, I just have to figure out where the crafts are going," she muttered under her breath.

It would make sense to assume that they had simply flown back up to wherever they came from, but there were a few holes in that logic. And there were too many other options available for her to just decide that that was what happened. There could be invisibility cloakers or stealth modes at work here. Maybe the crafts had never gone anywhere, they were just hidden.

The men who had reported seeing them had described the crafts as being "smaller than an airplane but bigger than a car" , which didn't do a lot to narrow it down, but definitely made it seem more plausible that someone would have noticed something like that taking off again. Even if it was in the middle of a field.

Vivian's mind was made up. There was no way she could let something like this pass her by. Not when she could discover something that had clearly been stumping people for longer than she had been alive.

Most likely she wouldn't even find anything, and that was okay. At least she would be able to say that she'd tried, right? There was no harm in going to the scene and trying to see what she could find.

When she glanced at the clock and found that it was a good four hours since she'd sat down and already well after midnight, she stifled a yawn with one hand and closed her computer, heading to bed and hoping she could get some sleep with the excitement that was fluttering in her stomach the whole time.