The Visitor: Alien Hunger Special Edition (30 page)

She realized wasn’t angry with Garryk
for not telling her the truth because it wasn’t the least bit
reasonable to think that he could have.

In any case, the truth had been there
the entire time—staring her in the face. She’d seen what she’d
expected to see, heard what she’d expected to hear. She’d dismissed
all of the little ‘hints’ dropped along the way, anything that
didn’t fit her preconceived notion of who and what he
was.

She was as guilty of fooling herself
as he was of deceiving her.

Maybe more guilty.

Because he couldn’t have carried it
off without her complete cooperation.

Beyond that, she knew it had to be
true that the deception hadn’t been conceived for her—or not for
her alone, certainly. That had been executed when he’d arrived,
when he’d been her student so long ago—or posed as her
student.

So she wasn’t furious and unforgiving
that he’d deceived her—because she realized she’d never been
completely duped and also because she knew the charade had been set
up to protect him, not to take advantage of anyone—her
included.

She realized she also wasn’t
especially angry with Garryk about whisking her away without even
discussing such an important issue with her—the issue of whether to
live on Earth or move to another planet!

She didn’t have to look far to know
why.

She’d felt very, very threatened when
the Feds had burst into her home and hauled her out like a common
criminal. She had felt—still did—that they had something really
unpleasant in mind for her—which threatened her baby
indirectly.

And she totally believed it would have
been a direct threat to the baby if they’d discovered she was
carrying a little half-alien.

She wasn’t ready to go there yet,
though, so she swept that thought to the back of her mind and
addressed the confession Garryk had made that that was one of the
main factors in his decision.

She hadn’t told him she was pregnant.
He’d pretended he hadn’t noticed anything, but she realized that
was clearly a pretense.

He hadn’t just been posing as a
doctor. He’d told her he really was one and his people were far
more advanced and she thought that probably meant he was more
knowledgeable than human doctors.

So he could easily have figured it out
from her symptoms and just thought he’d let her tell him when she
was ready.

Or it hadn’t been an
accident.

He’d set out to get her pregnant so
he’d been watching for symptoms.

She thought.

She wasn’t sure she wanted to confront
him about that. She didn’t know his motives if he had set out to
make her pregnant, and if he hadn’t …. Well, she hadn’t been very
responsible or he couldn’t have gotten her pregnant.

Maybe it would be better not to point
fingers?

But it did occur to her that, if he’d
planned it, and he was a doctor, then he knew the baby was fine
even if it was half human and half whatever he was.

He wasn’t human and she thought that
part … unnerved her.

It was all of the unknown factors that
frightened her, she realized, and she didn’t think anything Garryk
could say or do was going to erase those fears and doubts or even
ease them appreciatively. Only time, and facing the issues, was
going to prove she had reason to be afraid or that she
didn’t.

And meanwhile, she was scared—angry
and, although she didn’t really want to face it, had been trying
very hard not to think about it at all, she was grief stricken at
losing her baby.

Forever.

She tried to tell herself that Garryk
had had to go or die and that she was glad he’d wanted to take her
because that was the only thing about the situation that could be
called ‘choice’.

He’d cared enough about her to take
her to protect her and their unborn child even though she could see
he’d been worried it would destroy what they’d had
together.

And she realized she truly did love
him and believed they could surmount the odds stacked against
them.

She would’ve been heartbroken if he’d
left her. She knew without any doubt that it wouldn’t have mattered
that he was alien if he’d abandoned her. She would’ve been
desperately unhappy to lose him.

That realization went a long way
toward acceptance of the situation, but she was still too torn to
feel any happiness about it even if there’d been no anxiety about
living with an alien on an alien world—a colony world, at that,
which suggested that it was at least somewhat primitive.

She tried to convince herself that
she’d lost Larry a long time before takeoff and that she’d known,
deep down, that there was very little chance he’d ever come
around.

But there’d been
a
chance and now there
wasn’t one.

* * * *

There was no question about who was
the door when the knock came. Beyond the fact that she recognized
Garryk’s forceful demand for entry, she was pretty sure there
wasn’t another soul on the ship.

She couldn’t imagine he’d taken a
cruise ship to Earth.

She also couldn’t imagine that he’d
had anything like a starship to command—even though he’d mentioned
a mother ship.

She got up and went to the door
anyway, opening it herself rather than calling out permission to
enter.

Garryk scanned her face—the only
indication that he’d been doubtful of his welcome.

“
Hi, mom.”

Chelsey’s attention instantly snapped
toward the sound of the voice she immediately recognized. She
stared at Larry in shock.

“
We’ve been waiting on you
to eat and I’m starving. You comin’ or what?”

He didn’t just look like Larry. He
sounded like Larry—from the voice to the way he talked.

“
Larry?” Chelsey gasped in
shocked disbelief, tearing her gaze from him to glance at Garryk
questioningly—and with dawning outrage.

Garryk frowned at the boy and nudged
him.

“
Oh!” Larry surged toward
her and gave her a rough, brief hug. “Ain’t this cool? I can’t wait
to see the colony. It just sucks that I can’t tell anybody.” He
glanced from his mother’s face to Garryk’s. “I’ll wait for you guys
in the gallery.”

“
Galley,” Garryk corrected
absently.

“
Kitchen.”

Garryk lifted a hand in a defensive
gesture. “Don’t clobber me! They’d taken him into protective
custody like they were trying to do to you. I thought he’d be
alright, but I figured I might as well at least ask him if he
wanted to come with us since I went to so much trouble to get in
there.”

Chelsey gaped at him, feeling her
anger subside so swiftly she felt curiously deflated. Doubts
flickered through her mind, but she banished them almost as quickly
as they arose.

For one thing, she trusted Garryk, she
realized, and she believed him.

Secondly—well, she
couldn’t imagine the Feds
not
picking up Larry—or in fact anyone they thought
might have been close enough to Garryk to give them any
information.

Or talk.

She frowned. “And he actually wanted
to come?”

Garryk grinned. “He punched me in the
gut and demanded that I cough up his mother.”

Chelsey gasped, covering her mouth.
“Seriously?”

His expression became wry. “Yes.
They’d already debriefed him, apparently, said enough he had a good
idea of what the situation was anyway.”

She frowned. “You didn’t have any
trouble convincing him?”

He lifted his brows
questioningly.

“
That you were a space
man.”

He chuckled. “I think beaming in
pretty much did that.”

Chelsey looked at him questioningly.
“You can do that?”

Garryk scooped an arm around her
shoulders and urged her out of the room. “We—we’re a ‘we’ now—a
family—fellow colonists. And I’m with Larry—I’m starving. Let’s
eat. I’ll fill you in over dinner, lady.”

Epilogue

It was strange how much living on
Barcque, the colony world Garryk took her to, was like living on
Earth.

And how different it was at the same
time.

The gravity wasn’t the same—because it
was a larger world—but by the time Chelsey was ready to give birth
she’d grown accustomed to the stronger pull, more muscular, and
that difference ceased to concern her at all.

It had six moons and
Chelsey didn’t think she would
ever
get used to that. She always felt like she was
living in a dream-world when she watched the parade of the moons at
night.

She’d actually felt that way—as if
reality had been permanently suspended—from the moment Garryk tried
to tell her he was an illegal alien—to the world, not just America.
She’d calmed enough when she discovered he’d collected her son for
curiosity and wonder to exert itself, to be distracted from her
sheer terror at learning Garryk wasn’t who she thought he was, to
allow healing and acceptance to set in.

She’d calmed enough to begin to absorb
what Garryk had said to her and actually believe he meant it—that
he loved her, wanted her for his woman, and he would do whatever it
took to protect her and their unborn child.

She couldn’t say that she’d enjoyed
the ‘voyage’ in the truest sense—it had been far too unnerving for
any sort of relaxation—but her amazement had preoccupied her until
her psyche had adjusted and calmed enough to allow her to think
without hysteria blocking logic.

And there was one thing, she realized,
that superseded the lies Garryk had lived. In all the time since
he’d returned to Earth, he’d shown her nothing but love. She
couldn’t doubt that it was true that he’d come back for her—that he
was willing to go beyond the ends of the Earth for her.

She also didn’t doubt her love for
him. It hadn’t changed at the discovery that he wasn’t human. He
was still the person she’d fallen in love with.

Naturally, she allowed him
to sweat over it for a while before she agreed to
begin
to consider
forgiving him, but in spite of everything it was hard to think of
Garryk as being anyone but Garryk. And that being the case,
impossible not to forgive.

She loved him.

He adored her.

And they both worshipped their little
bundle of joy.

The only shadow on her horizon was the
loss of her home world and the people she’d left behind, but Garryk
promised her a trip to Earth as soon as he could save up the money
to lease another mother ship.

And with that promise her cup
overflowed.

The End.