Bad Vibrations: Book 1 of the Sedona Files (9 page)

He pulled away a few inches and said, “I probably shouldn’t have done that.”

“Why not?” I managed, glad I was able to string even two words together.

“With everything that’s going on, with what’s at stake—” He shook his head. “Kissing you in the parking lot like I was back in high school isn’t exactly a mature reaction to the situation.”

My lips still tingled from the touch of his mouth. “So why did you do it?”

His shoulders lifted. “I kept looking at you during dinner, wondering. I suppose some part of me just said the hell with it.”

“Then say the hell with it again,” I told him, and the words were barely out of my mouth before he bent down and kissed me once more, his hands tightening on my arms, holding me tightly as if he was afraid someone or something might come along and snatch me away.

No chance of that. It would take an act of God to pull me away from Paul, that much I knew. The familiar sensation was back, the one of absolute certainty. Whatever else was going on, and whatever dark forces might have forced us to flee here where no one knew us, I did know I was meant to be with Paul. Crazy, sure—I’d known the man for less than forty-eight hours. But the same still, quiet voice that had guided me through my counseling sessions seemed to have returned long enough to tell me I had finally found the one man who took me as I was and expected nothing more…and nothing less.

His pocket buzzed against my collarbone, and I jumped, breaking our contact. He shook his head, then reached in and pulled out his cell phone.

“Yes, Jeff, we’re on our way. Just had to…wait for our check.” And he closed the phone and stuffed it back in his pocket.

“You are such a liar,” I told him, even as he clicked the remote to unlock the car, then opened the door for me.

“It wasn’t a complete lie. We did have to wait for the check.”

“A whole three minutes.” But I got the point, and lowered myself into my seat as he went around to his own side of the car.

Neither one of us said anything as he started the engine and then backed out of the parking space before pointing the Camry toward Fourth Street and Raymond’s lab. Somehow, though, it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. The pressure of his lips seemed to linger on mine, and I smiled a little as I stared out the window at the streets passing by. Whatever might still be waiting for us, I knew Paul had feelings for me, feelings strong enough that he’d acted on them, even though logically both of us should have known to keep our libidos in check until we’d gotten the rest of this mess sorted out.

At the moment, I was very glad neither one of us had turned out to be all that logical.

Nothing seemed to have changed appreciably as we pulled into the parking lot at Lampson Labs. The Prius and the shabby white van were still in their respective places, and the front office was still noticeably empty, the fluorescent lights within glaring out through the open blinds. Paul and I got out of the Camry and went in, heading toward the back of the building.

We found Raymond and Jeff in one of the labs, Raymond with his eyeballs apparently glued to a complicated piece of equipment I guessed was some sort of microscope, although it appeared to be an order of magnitude greater in complexity than the sorts of microscopes we’d used when I was at college and taking my required biology coursework. Jeff hovered a few feet away, and shot us an irritated glare as we entered the room.

“Nice of you to drop in,” he remarked.

I barely refrained from raising a guilty hand to my lips, as if Paul’s kiss had left an imprint there. Which was just silly, since I’d done a quick reapplication of lipstick on the way over.

“What have you got?” Paul asked, his tone mild. You’d have thought he was the one who’d had the calming glass of wine with dinner.

At that point Raymond lifted his head from the microscope, but slowly, as if reluctant to turn away from whatever he was inspecting. “It’s definitely alien,” he said.

Paul’s eyebrows went up slightly. “How do you know?”

“Are you a biologist?”

“No.”

“Well, then,” he replied, as if that explained everything.

It was my turn to throw an aggrieved glance in Jeff’s direction. “You called us back here because you said you had something important to tell us. So what is it?”

“It’s alien,” Jeff said, “but it’s not exactly biological. That is, it appears to be an engineered virus of alien origin, but in a nanotech delivery system. We’ve never seen anything like it.”

“No one’s seen anything like it,” Raymond mumbled, his face planted back on the microscope as if pulled there by some irresistible force.

“So what does it do?” Paul asked.

“We don’t know yet for sure,” Jeff replied, after throwing a quick glance at Raymond, as if guessing that the biologist wasn’t about to provide the answer. “We just thought you should know it’s definitely not spray-tan oil.”

No kidding. I didn’t pretend to understand exactly what they were talking about, but I could tell from the furrow between Paul’s brows that he had gotten some of it, and didn’t appear to be precisely encouraged by the news.

“This delivery system,” he said. “I assume it’s intended for quick absorption through the skin?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

“But you don’t know why.”

At that point Raymond did look up from the microscope. “Not yet. If you think you can do any better—”

“Of course not,” Paul broke in. It seemed to me he’d been mostly thinking out loud, not actually trying to impugn Raymond’s research abilities. “Ms. O’Brien and I will continue our side of the investigation,” he went on. “Let us know if you find anything else.”

“No problem,” Raymond replied, sounding sour even for him. “It’s not like I’m planning on sleeping tonight.”

There didn’t seem to be much of a way to reply to that, so I sent him what I hoped was a reassuring look, even as I wondered what the hell Paul thought we could investigate. I’d been under the impression that we’d pretty much hit a dead end…at least, until we got more information out of Raymond.

But I kept my mouth shut as Paul made his curt goodbyes and went back to the car. It wasn’t until he’d pulled out of the parking lot and had us headed back toward the freeway that I asked, “So do you have some hot leads I wasn’t aware of?”

“No,” he said briefly. “Which way to get back to the motel?”

“North on the 15, and the 210 west.”

There was still a good bit of traffic around the onramp because of the influx from Ontario Mills, but we made it onto the freeway without incident. A few miles passed by without either of us saying anything. It wasn’t until we’d transitioned to the 210 and were headed toward Pomona that I said, “So what do you think that nanovirus is for?’

“I’m not completely sure.” He had his face forward, his attention focused on the unfamiliar roadway. “There has to be some connection with the film industry, but I’m just not seeing it right now.”

“Film industry?”

“Look at the clientele at Lotus. You yourself said a good number of the people who patronize that spa are individuals with influence in the movie industry. And Alex Hathaway told you that his girlfriend had suffered a complete personality change after going to get her tan. So let’s go with Jeff’s earlier theory, that the spray tan provides a means to get this nanovirus—if that’s what it truly is—into a human host. Maybe you were right when you said earlier that Alex’s girlfriend was simply a mistake. It doesn’t mean there aren’t others being infected, people who have far more power than an out-of-work actress. What do you think they might be trying to control?”

I wanted to tell him that it was silly to believe aliens would really care enough to take over a bunch of studio execs, but a cold little chill somewhere in the midpoint of my spine told me he wasn’t just engaging in a bit of blue-sky thinking. It figured my spider sense would kick in just when I really didn’t want to hear what it had to tell me. Of course I didn’t have any direct contact with the film industry, but I knew many people who did…and from what I’d heard, the people who ran Hollywood were scary enough on their own without being taken over by aliens in the bargain.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, it just doesn’t make any sense that aliens would care about the movies one way or another. They’re just a bunch of flickering images in the dark.”

Flickering images in the dark…

It struck me then, the way these things sometimes did, as if they’d been sent down a pipeline by God or the universe or whatever else you wanted to call it. Far more than a notion—a certainty, the inescapable realization that what my mind had just whispered to me was the absolute truth.

I didn’t remember making a sound, but I must have, because Paul looked over at me sharply. “Persephone? Are you all right?”

“No,” I replied. “I really don’t think I am.”

He reached down from the steering wheel with his right hand and wrapped his fingers around mine. “What is it? Did you sense something?”

There was a lot to be said for being with a man who just accepted your psychic powers and didn’t joke about them or try to exploit them. “I think I know what they’re doing.”

“What?”

I swallowed against the sick taste in my throat and hoped my dinner would stay where it was. “They’re not here to destroy us,” I informed him. “They’re here to control us.”

S
urprisingly
, he didn’t appear all that startled. “What makes you say that?”

“I just know.”

“How?” A pause. “Is Otto back?”

“No,” I replied, sounding a little testy. Did Paul really think I couldn’t have one flash of intuition without my spirit guide’s help? “This one just came to me—as things did before Otto showed up, and still do on occasion. Thank God, since it looks like Otto’s permanently relocated to the Bahamas or something.”

“So what does your intuition tell you?”

“Just that the aliens are looking for a way to control us, and it’s connected to the movies somehow. Or actually, movies and television.” I shut my eyes then, drawing myself into the dark. The interior of a car barreling down a freeway at seventy miles an hour was perhaps not the best place for peaceful contemplation, but one worked with the available materials. That sensation was there still, accompanied by a rapid succession of images, some from films I’d seen recently, others snippets from television shows. And from all of them vibrated a sense of wrongness, a flicker at the very edge of perception no one would have ever known to look for. A dissonance began to build in my mind, pulsing at some subsonic level that caused a throbbing pain to build in the bone behind my ears.

Unable to endure it a second longer, I opened my eyes. At once those painful harmonics disappeared, and I let out a hitching little gasp.

“Persephone?” Paul asked, his tone sharp with worry.

“I’m okay. Get off at the next exit.”

He must have heard the tension in my voice, because he only nodded and then maneuvered the car over to the right, pulling off the freeway at Towne. From there he seemed to recognize where he was, because he didn’t ask for any further directions as he headed south toward Foothill and the motel where we were staying.

It was only after he’d pulled into the parking lot and followed me up the stairs to the room we shared that he said, “What did you see?”

At any other time I might have considered the awkwardness of the situation, of the two of us sharing a room after a kiss that had forever changed the way we viewed one another. Right then, though, I could only think of the painful wrongness that made itself felt in my very bones, of the similarly soul-deep knowledge that somehow the very mediums we employed for entertainment were going to be used against us.

“I don’t know how they’re doing it,” I replied. “I don’t even know how I know, but I’ve learned not to question these things. But somehow they’re building a—I don’t know what you’d call it—some sort of signal into the movies and TV shows that are coming out of Hollywood.”

His eyes narrowed slightly. I watched as he went back to the door and tested the lock, then turned toward me. “A carrier wave. I can see how that might work. But we need to be able to find out how they’re doing it—what the wave is composed of, to see if there’s any way of blocking or neutralizing it.”

“Easier said than done.” I sat down on the bed I’d been using and kicked off my shoes. They were more or less comfortable, but almost any pair of shoes needs a breaking-in period, and it had been a long day. What I wanted right then was to lie down and lose myself in blissful sleep for a few hours. My mind, however, had other plans.

That prickly feeling returned, along with the certainty that whatever the aliens’ ultimate goal might be, they weren’t even in the testing stages yet. Made sense, or Paul and I and everyone around me would have already been turned into a brain-controlled zombie. Well, maybe not Paul; I got the impression he wasn’t much of a movie or TV guy. At any rate, luck seemed to have guided us to discovering the plan while it was still in its embryonic stages. But it was beginning to happen, and would continue, if we didn’t do something to stop it. What that something would be, I had no idea.

Paul said quietly, “There’s always a way.”

Who knew a ufologist could be such a Pollyanna? I wished I had some sort of retort to make, but the truth was, I didn’t have the energy. The wave of dark sound that had welled up into my brain seemed to have drained whatever reserves I had left. “Well, if you have a plan, I’d love to hear it.”

He didn’t appear to be put off by my reply, but sat down in the chair by the window and appeared to think for a moment. “What we really need is someone who works in the technical end of the business, but who hasn’t yet been affected. As far as I can guess, it seems the actual alien takeover is geared more toward the top level of the studios. There’s a possibility that the tech people have escaped unscathed.”

I wanted to argue that you’d think the techs would be the first people to be taken over, since one person smelling a rat might be enough to upset the whole plan, but I didn’t know that for sure. After all, from what I’d heard, the people in the trenches pretty much kept their heads down and just did their work. There were too many people waiting in line for those jobs for anyone to make waves. One of my clients, who worked post-production, had some horror stories that would make your hair curl—

Of course. Tyler Russo was a sound engineer at a lab out in Studio City. We’d had a session only two days earlier. I found it hard to believe the aliens had already suborned Tyler—surely I would have noticed if something was wrong. And even if he was on the list, it seemed as if there were a good number of people higher up the food chain who were more in danger of being spray-tanned into mental domination.

“I think I know someone we can talk to,” I said, and then, as Paul’s eyes lit up, “…tomorrow. I’m pretty sure Tyler would find it odd to have me calling him out of the blue at nine-thirty on a Friday night.”

“Tyler?”

“A client of mine. He’s a sound engineer. He’d be a good place to start.”

“You are a woman of infinite resources.”

I laughed. “I don’t know about that. I do know a lot of people. That helps. As for the rest—we’ll just have to see. Just because he’s a sound engineer doesn’t mean he’ll be able to nail down this carrier wave-whatsis.”

“But he might be able to direct us to someone who could.”

“Hopefully.”

Paul stood up then and stared at the closed curtains for a moment, as if seeing something in the tacky blue and green striped fabric that I apparently had missed. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, obviously on edge about something.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Sorry I couldn’t come up with a better plan, but—”

“It’s not that. I’m just—I suppose I’m not sure how we’re supposed to proceed.”

“Proceed?” I repeated. “Proceed with what?”

In answer he came and sat down on the bed next to me. “With this.”

I probably should have been more prepared for the kiss, since it wasn’t our first, but once again it seemed he had blindsided me. Not that I minded—the second his lips touched mine, a rush of warmth flooded my body, all the way from the tips of my toes to the crown of my head. The wave of heat seemed to push out the weariness that had come over me after my bout in the car, and I pressed against him, feeling the strength of his arms as they tightened around me, hearing the wordless little sigh he gave as we clung to each other.

It seemed the most natural thing in the world to roll over on the bed, to have his weight suddenly on top of me. I held him close, hoping by that contact I was telling him it was all right, that I wanted this.

Apparently I had telegraphed my need to him, because his hands moved lower, tracing the curve of my breasts, pausing at the buttons of my blouse.

I might have breathed a “yes.” Or maybe he didn’t need any words to know what I wanted. Whatever the case, those strong fingers of his worked their way down the row of buttons, loosening each one as he went. And he moved lower as well, his breath warm against my throat at first, and then against my breast.

Then I did moan, wanting more, needing to have him touch every part of me. He fumbled a little as he worked the hooks of my bra, even as I reached up to pull at his jacket. It ended up tossed haphazardly onto the other bed, followed by his shirt, which made a distinct clunk as it hit the floor.

“Oops,” I whispered. “Forgot you had your phone in your pocket.”

“The hell with the phone,” he said, and then his mouth covered mine again, as his bare torso touched my exposed skin.

That was enough for me to forget the phone, forget the world and alien conspiracies and pursuing government agents. I pressed against him, my fingers loosening his belt, pushing his jeans out of the way. He did the same with me, those strong fingers of his touching me in places I really hadn’t expected him to be that familiar with.

It had been a long time since I’d felt this way, with heat flowing out to every part of my body. Hell, I didn’t know if I’d ever felt precisely like this. I do know he definitely broke my personal record for bringing me to the fastest orgasm.

Then he paused, and said, “Well, shit.”

“What?” I gasped. I was still lying flat on the bed; at the moment I wasn’t sure if I were capable of sitting upright.

He raised himself on one arm and ran a hand through his hair. “I didn’t exactly think I was going to need protection on this trip.”

Oh. Luckily, I had made certain arrangements at the pharmacy when we’d picked up our other supplies; thank God for computerized prescription systems. Life was complicated enough without skipping multiple pills and having to start over from scratch the next month.

I thought about it for roughly a half-second and said, “I don’t care. I’m on the Pill.”

Without moving, he replied, “You trust me that much?”

“As long as you swear you haven’t been banging UFO groupies at symposiums from coast to coast.”

“God, no.” He laughed then. “You do have quite the imagination.”

All I wanted at the moment was to show him just how good my imagination really was. “Well, then. And since my last sexual encounter predated my last yearly checkup by at least six months, I’d say I’m in the clear, too.”

“If you put it like that…”

“I do.”

And he was on me again, mouth against mine, as he shifted his weight and was suddenly just there, filling me, our bodies meeting in a rush of heat and need. I wrapped my legs around him, drawing him into me further, as we rocked in perfect rhythm, drawing ourselves into that perfect circle where nothing else existed except the sound of our cries, the pulse of our blood.

When it was over, he remained on top of me for a long moment, cheek laid against mine. I could feel the hastened beat of his heart, hear his rapid breathing. Then he kissed me, ever so gently, just the lightest brush of his lips against the side of my mouth, before he lifted his weight from mine and stumbled toward the bathroom.

I stayed where I was, breathing in, breathing out. It seemed as if I drifted in a bubble of perfect warmth and comfort. In a few minutes I’d have to do my own post-coital cleanup, but for the moment I was content to remain in place, reveling in that moment of gentle balance. Right then, I wasn’t worried at all. I knew Paul and I would find some way to make everything right. He and I fit together, better than I had ever dreamed.

The aliens didn’t stand a chance.

W
e both slept in
, still basking in the afterglow. And when we awoke, we both reached for one another, as if driven by some unheard signal, and made love again, this time slowly and quietly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Afterward, we got into the shower together, and then laughed as we tried to negotiate the cramped quarters without getting soap in each other’s eyes.

Things got a little more sober after we had dressed and realized we needed to make some sort of plan for the day. Paul checked his cell phone and shook his head at the conspicuous lack of messages from Raymond or Jeff.

“It’s probably nothing,” I told him, after I hit my hair with one last blast of defrizzing spray and hoped for the best. “You saw how Raymond was. He’s probably still glued to that microscope. He’ll call us when he has more information. Come on—let me buy you breakfast.”

He gave a reluctant nod. “You’re right. And by the time we’re done with breakfast, it should be late enough for you to call this Tyler person.”

I glanced at my watch. A little past nine-thirty, but I knew from my interactions with Tyler Russo that he sometimes kept very odd hours if he was in a crunch on a big project. It would have to be a leisurely breakfast. Maybe a call around eleven wouldn’t be completely beyond the pale.

Paul and I stopped on the way to the car to pay for two more nights at the motel. It seemed safer to do it in small increments, just so we wouldn’t be on the hook for more days than we needed if we had to suddenly pull up stakes and get out of town. This just seemed to be common sense, and not any push from a greater spiritual power, but you never knew. Besides, although my store of cash was still holding up pretty well, I knew that eventually it would run out, and then we’d have to figure out what to do next.

In the meantime, it was a beautiful spring day, and the feel of Paul’s hand in mine as we walked to the car was just enough to remind me of the other, more intimate touches we’d shared. And the warmth in his eyes told me he was recalling the same things, with just the slightest glint that indicated he was ready for Round Three whenever we got the opportunity.