She tore through the kitchen in a frenzy, ripping up drawers in disbelief and staring at the total lack of knives, forks, corkscrews, spoons or anything that could be used as a weapon. Her dishes were gone from the cupboards. There were no cans of cat food or jars of spaghetti sauce. There was nothing! There was
nothing
!
He was coming down the hall.
Daria seized a box of crackers and a handful of Tupperware and threw them, still screaming, peppering his face and chest with the only ammunition she could find. He stumbled back a pace, slapping at pudding cups and sandwich baggies full of cereal, and Daria raced around the cooking island, through the dining room, and back out into the hall behind him.
He bellowed her name at a volume that could rattle walls, and then he was running after her, the thunder of his stride pounding in her ears.
She reached the laundry room door, slipped and fell through it, then slammed it shut and crawled to the back door. She was still trying to scream, but her voice was gone; her breath shuddered in and out of her in whistling gusts.
The back door was boarded shut. Not just nailed, either, but screwed into place. She tugged at the boards, sobbing, and managed only to get splinters in both hands. The windows were barred. Why hadn’t she climbed out her bedroom window? There were no bars on the second story windows. The worst that could have happened was her falling and breaking her neck, and that was lots better than this.
Daria put her back against the door, looking in tearful desperation at anything she could use for a weapon. The room, like the kitchen, had been picked clean of everything sharp, heavy, or remotely dangerous. She grabbed an empty paint can off the work shelf and held it out before her like a cross, shaking violently.
The door to the hallway was still closed.
Daria stood there, the empty paint can heavy at the end of her arm, and finally managed one wobbly step forward. And another. And a third. She reached out across miles of distance and touched the doorknob.
Silence.
She tried to turn it.
It wouldn’t budge. He was gripping the other side.
Daria sprang back and banged into the washing machine. She threw her paint can at the closed door and then slid down to the floor and huddled there.
Nothing moved. The door remained shut.
Daria picked up a sock that had somehow missed the hamper and hugged it to her chest.
The doorknob began to turn.
Daria tried to push even tighter against the washing machine, but the laws of physics prevented her. She twisted the sock in her hands and shivered.
The door swept open and the man peered in at her. Fury made his golden eyes smolder, but he did not fly at her. He glanced down at the empty paint can, nudged it aside with his foot, and then took a step towards her.
She threw the sock at him with a despairing howl and then clapped both hands to her mouth and waited for death.
He looked at the sock. He looked at her. He looked skyward. And then he looked at her again. “Do you know who I am?” he asked. His voice had the prick of irritation but he was keeping calm.
She didn’t want to know, but her brain provided the information anyway. She nodded, tears streaming over her fingers and splashing onto her chest. When he only waited, she pried her hands a little apart and whispered, “Tagen Pahnee.”
Something in the hard set of his shoulders relaxed slightly, but he still looked pretty pissed at her. He took one step forward and stopped again. “What else do you remember?”
She remembered him holding her hair while she was sick in the sink. The thought seemed to curdle somewhere inside her; her shivering body began to go slack, not with relief, but in defeat. “You’re not going to hurt me,” she sobbed, not believing a word of it.
“No. I am not going to hurt you.” He regarded her with a bitter intensity and took another step toward her. “And you are not going to throw things at me.”
“Okay, I won’t.” She looked up at him through a shimmer of tears. “Now please go away, okay?”
“No.” He took the last step, and then reached down and took her arm. He brought her inexorably to her feet and glared down at her, his claws still strong on her bicep. “I need your help,” he said, stressing the word ‘need’. “And I am staying until I have it.”
“No!” she moaned, and tried to pull away from him. In a moment of pure absurdity, she heard herself add, “I’ll call the cops!”
“I have the phone,” he countered, his eyes narrowing. He let go of her and watched as she inched away from him and hugged the dryer. “Do I need to tie you before you stand still?” he demanded.
She looked at him, her lip quivering. She shook her head.
He took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then let it out in a sigh. His unnatural eyes glanced her way once more and then he turned his back on her and walked out. “When you are ready to listen,” he called as he left, “I will talk.”
Panic was a nice thing to have in bad situations. It numbed the senses nicely and kept one from having to come to real grips with horrible things. Unfortunately, it was not self-perpetuating. Without the continued presence of the stranger (The alien! The monster! The clawed, fanged, evil
thing
!) to feed it, panic slowly bled out of her and lucidity stole in.
Daria shuffled forward, keeping contact with the dryer as long as she could, as though it were her own private tether to normalcy. She stooped and picked up the sock she’d thrown and returned it to the hamper. She put the empty paint can back on the shelf. It was dulcet powder, and she’d need the sample if she ever had to repaint her bedroom.
The door was still open, inviting her back into her house. The stranger was nowhere in sight. Daria tugged her t-shirt down over her thighs, steeling herself, and finally stepped out into the hall.
He was in the living room, cleaning up the wooden shards that used to be her coffee table. He glanced at her when she crept in, but that was all.
Daria waited nervously for him to do something and when he only continued to ignore her, she moved past him and picked up the bills she’d dropped in front of the door. She had nowhere to put them, so she righted the end table and put them there. The coat rack went back in the corner. The coats were hung up on the rack. After that, she had nothing else to do but look at Tagen Pahnee, the invader.
He leaned the pieces of her coffee table against the wall and turned around to face her. He glanced once at the muted TV—Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy was prosecuting the blue hell out of some little old lady—and then he looked at her again. It was hard to meet his frustrated, golden gaze without flinching.
She opened her mouth several times before she managed to ask the question that had been gnawing at her. “Are you an alien?”
“Am I—?” Surprise smoothed the anger out of him, and made his hard features seem somehow younger. A thin smile twitched at the corners of his mouth, exposing the tips of some very sharp teeth. “No,” Tagen said. “You are.”
The incongruity of that statement left Daria speechless and a little dizzy. She swept her eyes around the room, trying to draw strength from all the nice, normal things that bolstered up her life, and then looked back at him helplessly. “Why did you lock me in?”
“To keep you from running out,” he replied, raising one brow archly. “I need you, Lindaria Cleavon.”
“Daria,” she said. “Just Daria.”
Tagen nodded, closing his falcon’s eyes briefly. “Yes,” he muttered. “You told me this.”
“What…What are you?” she asked. “What are you doing here? What are you going to do to me?”
He was watching her mouth closely, as though trying to read the words as they left her, and he gave his head a hard shake as her voice started to climb. “Slowly,” he said. “Please.”
She backed up a step, but there wasn’t anywhere to go. She stood and looked unhappily into his alien face, feeling lost.
Tagen seemed to be waiting for her to repeat her questions, and when she lapsed into her miserable silence, a thin line appeared between his eyes. He regarded her with that half-frown for a long space of seconds, and then said, “I do not know many of your words, but I will explain as much as I can. More than that, I can only say it is not my…my plan to hurt you. I would not be here at all if my need were not…not…bad.” He scowled at the inadequacy of the word and then shot her a glance.
She did not volunteer another. Eventually, he went on.
“I am—” He gestured at the TV, where a new
Law & Order
had started. “—a police. I have come…There is someone…”
He stopped, frustration climbing through his whole body, and glared at the television. “I cannot tell you. I have no words.”
Daria shook her head, her hair snapping out wildly. “No, no-no-no! You can’t just lock me in here with you and say it’s okay because you’re a cop! That’s not a reason, that’s a résumé! Now you tell me what you’re doing here or I’ll—”
Tagen shot her a glare and then advanced on her like a panther. His mouth opened and out came a furious rush of sound that she tried hear as an alien language for several minutes before she realized her was speaking perfect Spanish.
The bones went out of Daria’s body. She staggered back and he came forward, circling her and driving her out the corner until she hit the edge of the couch. She sat strengthlessly and stared up at him. There was something so fundamentally surreal about an alien speaking Spanish, although she supposed there was no reason that should be any stranger than one speaking English.
“Stop,” she said finally. “Just stop. I don’t understand you.”
“No,” he snapped. “No no no. You cannot command me to speak and then refuse to hear me merely because you do not know Panyol.”
“Okay, I get the point.” Daria dropped her gaze and tugged her t-shirt over her knees. “I’m sorry.”
“We,” Tagen said fiercely, “must find some way of living together, because my patience is growing very thin and I am not going to leave until my questions are answered.”
“You may not believe this,” she said, tears stinging at her eyes and unsteadying her words, “but I am dealing with you the best I can.”
For a moment, the anger continued to smolder in his gaze. Then he let out a breath and stepped back, the tension fading from his body. “Yes,” he said, and he sounded tired. “I suppose you are.”
She made herself see him then, not just look at him, but truly
see
him. She saw a stranger who knew full well that he was alone and far from home. She saw a man at the end of his endurance, exhausted down to the very bones of him, and desperate enough to grab at straws. She saw a cop at the end of a long day, one who had put himself in a lot of danger and who was still determined to do his job. She saw Tagen Pahnee, and it broke her a little.
“Okay,” she said. “What are your questions?”
He met her gaze, mistrustful now that she had shown compliance, but then come forward again, intensity a hammer behind every word. “What are your planet’s defenses?” he demanded. “Who has control over the weapons that orbit Earth? Can they be used to repel off-world invasion? What are your methods of locating alien life-forms once they have come to your world? What is your access to the media of—”
“What are you talking about?” Baffled, Daria interrupted him with upraised hands and a hard shake of her head. “We don’t have anything like that on Earth! Most people probably don’t even believe in aliens, and no one could stop a—” The breath fell out of her, heavy as a hot stone, and she stared at him. “Alien invasion?” she gasped. “You’re invading Earth?”
“What?” Now it was his turn to draw back, confused. “No!”
“Don’t lie to me!” She sprang up, her fists balled uselessly at her side and shouted at him. “Why else would you need to know what Earth’s defenses are? I’m not a complete idiot, you know, I can connect the dots! You’re going to invade and kill us all, and you think I’m going to help you do it! Well, I’m not! You can kill me, but I’m not telling you shit!”
Tagen derailed her suicidal bravado with one universally-recognizable gesture. He raised his hand and smacked himself in the forehead.
Daria’s growing outrage blew out of her like steam from an open kettle. She blinked at him, watching him stand before with his eyes tightly shut and his breath coming hard and slow between tightly-clenched jaws, and slowly sat back down. “You…aren’t invading?”
“No.” Tagen moved nothing but his mouth and that not much. “Not as you mean it. There is one only. I am here to take him back.”
“Then…then why would you need to know all that stuff about…weapons and…and repelling aliens and…”
He snatched his hand away and glared at her. “I
thought
perhaps Earth’s defenses may have located him, sparing me the trouble. It was a fool’s thought, not a conqueror’s. Did you really think I would come to
land
on Earth and
then
ask what defenses you possessed if I came to invade?” he demanded, sweeping his arm out to one side as though physically displaying the stupidity of that notion. “And that you would think all of Jota would come to Earth! Do you know what that would
cost
? What would put such a thought into your head?!”
Daria picked at the hem of her t-shirt, her eyes darting to the shelves beside the TV where she kept her DVDs. Damn the movies.
“No,” Tagen continued. “Only one has come to Earth and only I am come to find him. Even if I were to die, still no one else would come. Your Earth is quite safe from invasion. Are you glad with that?”
“Am I…? Yeah, I guess I’m satisfied.” She risked an upwards glance and dropped her eyes back to her knees when she saw he was still glaring at her. “Sorry.”
He did not seem much mollified. “Will you answer now or must I ask again?”
“I don’t think Earth has any defenses the way you’re thinking,” she said. “And if there’s weapons in orbit like you said, I don’t even know what they are. As for tracking aliens on Earth…Tagen, we just don’t have that kind of technology.” She peeked at him again; he was glaring at the television screen. “Who is this guy you’re looking for?” she asked. “What did he do? And why did he come here?”