His Human Hellion (Ultimate Passage Book 2) (5 page)

Marissa

Marissa drove a good hour before she decided she better change her clothes, in case someone saw her. She found an isolated rest stop, grabbed a change from the duffel bag, waited until all the other cars had pulled out and ran into the restroom. She changed, washed her hands, stuffed the clothing in the barrel trashcan just outside the door and used a stick to push them under some fast food bags and water bottles and other trash. She went back inside and washed her face with the tepid, swamp-smelling water.

Now what? She had to contact Finn. She dug in her purse, no phone.

She scoured the front seat of the Asazi soldier’s car. No phone. Could he have pocketed it? She tried to remember, but couldn’t recall for sure. Of course he had. She should stop and call Finn from a payphone. Did payphones even exist anymore? She hadn’t seen one in years.

The one thing she wanted to do
, she still hadn’t done. She would visit Dad. It may or may not yield any clarity or solution, but right about now, her soul needed healing more than her mind needed answers.

*~*~*

Two hours later, she was pulling into the cemetery parking lot. It felt as if a weight had been lifted. In all the times she’d been here, and there were plenty, she’d never run into anyone here. She felt completely safe in this tiny cemetery full of German immigrants from more than a century ago. Most of the ones buried here were relatives of local farmers. She didn’t know what possessed her dad to pick this spot. One thing was for sure, it was wonderfully isolated, very country, and peaceful.

She turned the car off and ran to her father’s site. The grass was trimmed, as it always was, but still somehow, the marker seemed abandoned. She was sure Dan didn’t visit, and even if he did, she doubted he ever hand-pulled the weeds that tried to take over the marble headstone. She knelt and grabbed the offensive greenery from near the roots, yanking them out. She needed somewhere to discard the plants. Running back to the car, she opened the trunk and dug around until she found a shopping bag. She hastened back to her task of cleaning up his area. She didn’t have to talk out loud to her dad. She could talk in her head. She always felt like he could hear her thoughts when she talked to him
and she was too tired to speak it all out. Too tired to relive it all. She wiped the fall heat’s sweat from her forehead. She ran through everything in her mind, telling Dad all about it, catching him up. Well, she ran through everything except how hot it was to be with Finn. She kept her head-conversation with her father G-rated.

“So that’s it, Dad.” She resorted to talking out loud. “That’s the whole story. Pretty unbelievable, isn’t it?”

The swishing of the wind in the branches, the dust puffs the wind rustled up, the clouds passing above head creating shadows, all of this was as if her dad was there, listening, speaking to her.

“Now I don’t know what to do. I’m so tired.”

She didn’t remember ever feeling this tired before, but now, she was beat, weak, almost faint. It had to be the hormones from the pregnancy. She lay down on the grass, parallel to her father’s grave. Made a pillow of her purse.

She closed her eyes, all she needed was to rest the grit of fatigue away for a short spell. She wouldn’t sleep. She couldn’t sleep. There had been too much going on and adrenalin felt like it was still pumping in her body.

*~*~*

A sound woke her. A sound she should know. She knew that sound. She didn’t want to open her eyes to verify that sound because she knew it.

The sound of a shotgun being pumped.

She tried to regulate her breathing, but her pulse felt like it was revving up to the rate that would give her a heart attack. One tiny bit at a time, she cracked her eyes open.

A man, holding a shotgun on her. No, not a man, an Asazi She knew who he was. The other guard from that night. How did an Asazi find her out here?

“Get up slowly. No tricks. I will not hesitate to kill you. Not after what you did to my partner.”

There was no point in arguing with him or making him mad. She nodded, rose to her feet.

“Put these on.” He tossed a set of cuffs to her.

She’d had enough of cuffs, especially behind her back. She put them on, keeping her hands in front of her, not eager to have a face full of upholstery or making a long drive with her hands behind her.

“Can I say goodbye to my father?”

“No. I didn’t say goodbye to my partner.”

“It was self-defense. Actually it was an accident. I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

“Proceed.” He gestured to the other car in the parking lot.

She picked up her purse and made her way to the car.

Finn

Finn’s phone rang. His heart stopped. Marissa. She was safe. Except it wasn’t her name on the screen. No. it was Kal’s. This should have made him somewhat happy, perhaps, but it didn’t. He pressed the screen to answer. “Tell me she’s okay.”

“She’s okay.”

“Now tell me how you know this and where she is.”

“She’s been picked up by Talik. He’s taking her to the vessel. She will be transported to Kormia. For trial. For murder.”

Merck’s partner. This scared the hell out of Finn. He knew not all murderers made it to trial in Kormia. He knew that Kal was hoping that she’d be tried, but the reality was that if the Council decided she didn’t deserve trial because of the nature of her crime, she’d be sentenced to death. Immediately. Death meant abandonment to the lands outside of the Asazi area. To the Kormic.

“You said she will be transported. That means she hasn’t been. I want to be on the vessel with her.”

“That will not be possible.”

“Why the hell not?
Let me talk to your father. He could do something.”

“It’s out of our hands. I’ve talked to him already. Trust me. I know how you feel about Marissa. I don’t want anything to happen to her. The vessel is departing
Earth in moments. I can meet her on arrival. I can make sure she’s secure. I’ll then come get you. Is that good enough? I hope you say yes, that’s the only option I have.”

“How soon will you be here? And where will you be?”

“I need twenty-four hours.”

“Yes. But tell me where the vessel is right now. I have to try to intercept it.”

Kal exhaled. A very definite exhausted exasperated sigh. It irritated Finn because his primary concern was Marissa. Why did it feel as if Kal wasn’t on his side?

“
They are in the same area near northwest Houston. Unless you are less than five moments away, you’ll be too late and I am coming to Arizona—that’s where I am ordered to go. You will need to be there. To meet me there. That’s where I’ll pick you up.”

“I’ll be back
at the ranch house on time. But now, I’m too close to Houston to take a chance on not seeing her, not helping her.”

Finn reached to press to end the call and had another thought. ”Kal. Wait. Another thing.”

“Yes?”

“If anything happens to her, anything at all, I want you to tell the Governors-Select that I will contact the media on
Earth. I will tell them everything about us. I will submit myself to be examined.”

“No Finn. If I tell them that—”

“Do it.”

“You will be sealing a fate that you don’t want.”

“Just do it. Swear to me you will.”

“I can’t.”

“Swear it.”

“I will.”

Finn pressed end.

Marissa

The Asazi soldier drove back to the same hilly knoll with the thicket of trees. The place where she’d killed the other one. She averted her eyes as they passed the tree where the knife had been. She didn’t want to be reminded of that. The soldier parked the car, reached toward the bottom of one post, his hand disappeared under the ground, and then the hill opened up, grass and dirt moving aside in the hilly knoll. It yielded a hidden door, pushing tufts of grass out of the way. He drove the car inside the large garage-door-sized opening. Inside the doorway was a dark tunnel.

Parking
the car, he pressed a button that closed the large door they entered through, came around to Marissa’s side and yanked her out. Marissa hesitated.

“Go.”
He shoved her forward.

Her eyes were slow to accustom to the darkness inside.

“Move.” He shoved her forward.

She took a few steps and paused. She couldn’t see anything. The inky blackness was pervasive. “I can’t see where I’m going.”

“Keep moving.” Another push on the small of her back.

She bit back a reply. She wanted to yell at him to be gentle.

A sudden brightness made her blink. At first she’d thought it was like being outside in the bright daylight, but then she quickly realized that it was not sunlight, and it wasn’t as bright as she thought. All of the light came from a vessel in the middle of a room that was lined with metal. A perfectly round room that had a high ceiling and was encased in a wall made of some sort of steel or something.

At the opposite end from where she stood was another tunnel. She wondered where that led and if that was where he was taking her.

In the middle of the room, a vessel that reminded her of a science fiction movie glowed, casting off the light that bounced off the walls and caused the brightness that initially felt like it would blind her.

She whistled under her breath. The vessel, or ship, or whatever it was, stood on three legs, much like a plane’s landing gear,
except it wasn’t wheeled and it was higher off the ground. Like a tripod with dwarfed legs. The vessel was elliptical with a pointed nose, or rear, whatever that was, because she couldn’t tell what the front and the back was, not yet anyway. Oh! Now she knew what it reminded her of. That spy plane her dad used to love. The SR-71 Blackbird. Only this thing was not as lean or long. It was like the Blackbird’s fat, ugly sister. Probably smaller if she had to take a guess, because she’d never seen a Blackbird herself, but imagined they were pretty big, as planes went.

“I’m not getting in that.”

“You killed my best friend. I will have no problem killing you and claiming it was necessary. They will believe me.”

The look in his eyes, the calmness of the blue-green hue of his skin convinced her that he was not one to mess around with.

“In.” He gestured to a metal staircase that was more like a ladder than a staircase.

She led the way up the stairs, fighting her instincts to kick him in the face and make a run for it
because she knew she couldn’t win if she did. There was no way.

The interior seemed divided in a cockpit and a main area. The main area had several pod-like structures with chairs in them. It reminded her of that movie, the one where the woman comes back with an alien baby inside of her.
That wasn’t a very nice baby. Marissa couldn’t fight the shudder that overcame her. She prayed her baby was nothing like that. She hoped it was like a Finn junior. Please, let it be like Finn, not some creepy creature that eats people.

“Sit.” He pointed to the first pod-thingy.

She hesitated. He jerked the shotgun up.

She
lowered herself into the snug seat, grimacing, still cuffed. “What about these?”

He didn’t respond, rather, he pressed a button that lowered a glass
lid. Thank goodness it was clear, otherwise her claustrophobia would send her over the edge. When the lid was all the way down, he pointed to a tube that had a suction cup on the end. “Put that on and breathe.”

Her mind flew to the baby. Would whatever she breathed in harm it? “What is it?”

“Just do as you are instructed.”

“No. I don’t know what’s in it.”

“It will help you while we return to Kormia.”

Yeah, that told her nothing. She took a deep breath,
then put it over her nose and mouth, held her breath, and closed her eyes.

She counted to thirty then opened her eyes a tiny bit, just enough to see the soldier getting into a pod, closing the lid and putting the apparatus over his own face.

Who the hell was going to drive? Or fly? Or whatever this thing did.

Her lungs burned with the effort of holding her breath
. She moved the apparatus aside slowly, with stealth and sucked a lungful of air in.

Finn

Finn pulled into the unpaved road that led to the hill. This was where Kal said Talik took her.

He reached under the fence post and opened the entry way. The first thing he saw was the car.

Running to it, he opened the door. The keys were in the ignition, as they were always supposed to be. But there was no one around.

With as much quiet as he could he ran toward the center room, praying that he’d find the vessel there
, that he’d encounter Marissa and Talik. The total darkness at the end of the tunnel told him that the center room was dark. He tried not to let disappointment take hold of him yet, to wait until he verified what he was already suspecting. He reached the end of the tunnel and found the center room completely empty. He dropped to his knees. His wings flared open, then wrapped around his shoulders. He dropped to all fours, heaving, panting. She was gone. Gone to a place where she would be met with hostility for killing Merck. A place where she wasn’t worth anything at all except what she could deliver to his people.
Snap out of it.
That’s what Marissa would have said. She’d have been right, too. This was not the time to yield to emotions. It was time to get to Arizona, to the ranch. To wait for Kal to get there to pick him up and take him home.

Home. A place he’d become accustomed to thinking he’d never see again. A place he’d been glad not to return to. Life was much simpler
and better here on Earth.