Learning to Blush (6 page)

Graham put his hand over his heart and raised up his fingers in his own traditional greeting. “I’m Captain Graham Masterson. This is my cousin, Commander Thorton Hux.” He moved his hands into his pocket when he realized he had the human’s attention on his hand. He realized immediately why—he had six fingers.

Thorton smiled, revealing a larger smile than was usual. They just stared, unblinking, at the humans.

Tim cleared his throat uneasily. “Nice to meet you. Uh,” he said. “Well… Get on the truck. I guess,” Tim invited, jerking his thumb in the direction of the truck bed. “Just sit on the back; we promise to drive slow for you.”

“Really, if you’re not okay, you can totally say so!” Penny assured, trotting up between them as they walked to the back of the truck. “I can call a hospital—you don’t look so good, you know. Maybe there was a brain injury or something,” she mentioned to Graham, who gave her an insulted look in response.

“Penny—truck,” Tim instructed, pointing to the vehicle.

Penny fluttered over to the driver’s side and climbed in, only Tom was right behind her. “Scoot, Sis,” Tom told her.

Thorton heard a small argument from the front. “But it’s my truck and I always drive…!”

“And you just hit a couple of guys. I’m driving, and we’re dropping you off at Mike’s.”

“But it’s
my
truck…!” Penny repeated. “And they came out of nowhere!”

Tim whispered something in her ear, which sounded like, ‘
Safety precaution. We don’t want to drive strangers with you around.
’

Thorton grinned, and agreed with the kid. He and Graham did look strange compared to the humans, although not too much so. Still, they had too many fingers, their teeth were too sharp, their eyes were too clear, and they didn’t blink except once every hour. The humans had to have noticed that Graham and Thorton were a little off.

They took off down the trail, which was barely a dirt path. Dust flew everywhere.

Graham just sat down on the back of the truck, his eyes dully looking forward. “This isn’t the middle of nowhere,” Graham sighed to him. “Ellie’s body was probably found. She’s probably already buried…”

Thorton groaned, “Graham, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, eh? Stay sane with me a little while longer. We came this far.”

Graham made a weary face but eventually appeased Thorton with a nod.

Thorton sighed and shook his head, knowing he’d have a struggle on his hands as soon as they saw Ellie’s body.

* * *

Penny kept glancing toward the back of the truck until her brother put his arm around her shoulders to prevent her from doing it.

She felt a little jerky about hitting someone with her truck, particularly men so damn large—one of them had to have been about seven feet tall… He was so much larger than Timmy and Tommy, the tallest boys in the county as they both stood nearly six and a half feet.

The men were extremely handsome, even though they had very strained expressions. They seemed tired and weary soldiers she’d seen only during war documentaries. She couldn’t place their accents at all; at first they sounded Celtic, or maybe even Baltic. Either ethnicity might explain the fact that they were pale, as if they simply didn’t get out in the sun, despite the fact that their builds made them seem like they spent time in the military or even professional football, and were walking in the sunlight in the middle of nowhere.

Still, she did want to learn more about them. They were probably in their thirties, so probably too old for her, but they were both extremely attractive with very nice muscle tone in their arms and chests. Though they were tall, they weren't at all lanky. The shorter one, Thorton, could easily be described as bulky—his shoulder muscles and arms were more defined, although he had cut-off sleeves that elevated the look, as well as shards of a tribal-like tattoo that stretched across his arm and all the way up his neck. He wore what looked like an orange-gold earring in one of his ears, completing a perfect bad-boy look.

She might have been attracted to them even if they weren’t foreign… But foreigners, despite where they were from, held an undeniable appeal on its own. Even though she was over eighteen now and the Californian border was only an hour and a half away, she still had never left the state.

In a way, she had recently come to be envious of her cousin, Ellie, who had wandered out of the wilderness two months ago after a two-year-long disappearance. The clothes she wore were ripped to tatters and her wrist had been broken, but there was a sharp, strange accent to her now, and every now and then Penny had heard her curse in a foreign language. Nobody knew whether to believe she had been hidden away in the protective custody program where she'd claimed to have been, but Ellie certainly wasn’t telling any other stories.

Ellie had to have gone somewhere really far away. Really,
really
far… Because she came back different; strangely wiser, even smarter and quicker, and she cursed and smoked far less than she used to. Penny’s family believed that Ellie had to be off doing things she wasn’t ‘proud of,’ but Penny didn’t care. She still found herself wishing she could have been in Ellie’s shoes.

Tim and Tom stopped in front of her family’s garage, pulling off to the side of the street rather than in the lot. “Go in and wait for us to get back, ‘kay?” Tom asked her.

Penny nodded and looked back at the truck, grinning at the strangers. “You’re gonna be okay? Again—I’m really, really sorry …”

“We’ll be fine,” Thorton grinned, showing a row of absurdly white teeth. “Thanks for your concern.”

“I’ll… I’ll see you later, then.” She attempted a smile, but she felt ridiculous.

“If I’m lucky,” Thorton replied and bowed his head. Graham, the taller one, didn’t even look at her. He looked extremely solemn. “Good bye.” Thorton gave a small wave of his hand, and Penny focused on his extra fingers. She swallowed when she looked back at their faces and saw how forlorn they looked.

“Good luck,” she found herself saying, giving a weak wave, knowing by the look of them that they needed it. Then, with a scrunched nose, she watched them all drive off.

Chapter Three

Mike came into the garage all in a spitfire. He had been that way all week, since his girlfriend had broken up with him. Now, it seemed like every time he looked straight at the garage, it filled him with rage. His girlfriend didn’t want to get serious with a ‘car mechanic’, and although it hurt, he almost couldn’t blame her. The garage was too damn monotonous anymore, even with his family working with him… Family he normally
liked.

Even when his baby sister definitely wasn’t working on what he’d told her to. “Damn it, Ellie, you need to be working on the Toyota!” he said, spotting his sister’s small red sneakers and dark-blue jumper pant legs poking out from underneath a Nissan truck.

“Toyota’s done,” Ellie called back as if the task had bored her.

“You replaced an entire transmission already?” he doubted. It was a two-person task just lowering the transmission in—especially in Ellie’s case, whose body was small enough that a strong wind could blow her over.

“Transmission wasn’t the problem. The old transmission was in good shape, Mike. You diagnosed it wrong. A terminal circuit was on the fritz. I just replaced the damn thing, and it’s good as new.” She grumbled and kicked her foot as she applied force to something underneath the truck. “Now, THIS is a big goddamn problem. I might as well be working on the Titanic for how much this has rusted over. It’s so fucking flood damaged… You know, maybe just pass me a pistol. I got a clear shot. We’ll just shoot the damn thing and put this out of its misery.”

Mike glared at her shoes. “It’s not your job to run diagnostics. You work for
me
, Kid. When it says on the sheet to replace a transmission, replace the damn transmission,” he ordered her, sounding exasperated.

“Okay, then I’ll just remove my brain before I come in here,” she replied snidely.

“You might as well,” he shrugged. “I didn’t hire your brain. I hired your
hands
.” As if he even hired her at all; she'd been working in the family garage since she was old enough to lift a wrench.

Suddenly she laughed. “Get me a saw and I’ll give ‘em to you,” she told him.

He made a face and then decided to try to give up being angry. He could never be angry for too long at a time—not with his kid sister, anyway. He shook his head and chuckled.

In truth, Ellie’s know-it-all personality was annoying, but he was happy to have her back. Although she was harder to handle than his cousins, it was nice to have someone working under him who cared and came to work sober. “Touché,” he admitted, writing something on the sheet. “Alright, well, I’m sure the Henderson’s will love keeping a thousand bucks in their pocket. You’re going to make us all destitute, though.”

“Are you kidding? We have more jobs than we have hands or space for. We need to expand,” she whined. “Hire some more people, get a bigger place. Move out of the sticks.”

“Come on, we’ve been in this town for forever,” Mike reminded her. “Though, really… Even if we had a money tree growing in the back yard, it doesn’t matter.” He scratched his fingers through his hair. “Ever feel… unchallenged? No matter what folk bring in here to fix?”

“Ah, a mechanic’s ennui,” Ellie replied, her shoe kicking straight as she tightened something. “Yeah, I feel that way constantly about myself. It’s because this stuff is all so lame. Boats, cars, lawn mowers, Cessnas and computers… Snoreville. Still—ain’t like anyone else can do it as good.”

Mike was monotonous as he replied, shaking his head despite the fact that she couldn’t see his body language, “Yeah, well, since Dad and Uncle Pete retired, we can’t really afford to go bigger. We’re stuck, Kiddo.”

Ellie audibly sighed but was drowned out by the sound of Penny walking through the front door, causing the bell in the corner of the door to ring.

“So, something totally weird just happened,” she announced, smoothing the air in front of her with her hands.

Mike immediately looked out the window to see Tim and Tom driving Penny’s truck towards the stoplight ahead. The truck, which was new, was absolutely filthy and caked with dust and mud with two guys sitting in the back of the truck. “What did you DO to it? How do you DO that in six
hours?
”

“We were just racing down the trail,” Penny shrugged, very used to her cousin’s nagging, but still not liking it. “It was their idea… Until I hit a couple of hikers with the damn truck. They just came out of nowhere!”

Mike gasped and paled. “
What
? Was someone
hurt
?”

“No, they got up okay…” Penny told him. “Big guys. They dinged the truck door a little bit, but I already had the brakes to the floor when I got to them, and they just got knocked over. They were barely even fazed. I mean, HUGE. One guy had to be seven feet tall. And get this—both of them have six fingers. And I mean,
functional fingers
, like great-grandpa had.”

Ellie quickly rolled out from under the Nissan. “What about two big guys with six fingers?” she demanded, pushing herself up onto her feet.

“You killed my father, prepare to die…” Penny quoted, sending herself into a giggle fit.

“I can’t believe you put a fucking dent in it already, Pen!” Mike lectured, frowning. “You need to be more careful. I could fucking kill Tim and Tom. They know better. We can’t afford shenanigans. What if you guys got sued?”

“Shut up,” Ellie said firmly, hushing Penny’s giggling and Mike’s lecturing with two harsh words. “Did these guys have names?”

“Yeah… Captain something-something and Commander something-something,” Penny drawled, looking suddenly very unsure of herself.

“Commander Thorton Hux? Captain Graham Masterson?” Ellie asked, her body as still as a statue, her eyes getting larger and rounder by the second.

Mike and Penny were wondering if Ellie had ever looked so serious.

“Yeah!” Penny chimed excitedly. “That was it!” She shook her head and raised an eyebrow. “You KNOW them?
How
?”

“I gotta go, I gotta get over there! Where’d they go? How do I look?” She was suddenly pacing around erratically until she stopped and suddenly charged, “YOU HIT THEM WITH YOUR CAR?”

Penny blanched. “Uhhh…. J… just a
little
…” she stuttered.

“Where are they?”

“Uh…” Penny swallowed. “Tim and Tom took them to the hospital,” Penny said, but put out her hands and waved them about as soon as Ellie’s eyes lit up with horror. “No, no! They said they weren’t hurt. They said they were on their way there already!” Penny wrung her fingers on her long braid. “I’m sorry! I didn’t hurt them!” she assured, looking like she might buckle under the stress of the question.

“Stupid!” Ellie shouted. “Stupid,
stupid
!” Ellie ran to the mirror by the front desk—it was really a beer sign with a mirror backing, but it revealed a reflection covered with engine grease and sporting ratty hair. She gasped. “I look terrible!” she cried. Without another word, she sprinted towards the stairs and to her apartment above the garage, leaping up the steps three stairs at a time.

Mike slowly turned his head towards Penny, as if he was hoping she could translate Ellie’s behavior into something he could understand.

She merely shrugged.

“Huh,” he said, a crease appearing in the middle of his forehead as he sat down at his desk. “That was highly irregular. Did… Did she say she knew them?”

“That’s what she said,” Penny replied. “I don’t know when she could have met them…
Unless
…”

“Unless these guys are part of the Case of the Missing Eleanor,” Mike agreed with a nod. “Maybe we’ll see whose theory is correct, huh? We should meet these guys…”

“Why? What do you think she was doing for those two years?” Penny asked, lifting herself up so she was sitting on the desk.

He looked hesitant to say for a second, but then decided that it was better to be sure about being right. “Two words,” he finally said. “
Pony girl
.”