How to Date an Alien (21 page)

I didn't know how long I was in there. My
head had been hit multiple times on the way into the cell and I
kept drifting in and out of consciousness. As the feeling slowly
started to come back to other parts of my body, I could feel every
ounce of pain that shot through me. It was like I was reliving the
battle blows over and over again when each part of my body came to
life. I tried to ignore the pain and the feeling like I was
slipping away into a painful nightmare, but the more I pushed
myself to stay awake and fight, the more I drifted. I looked down
at my communicator and realized that it had broken on the way in. I
was stuck with no way to communicate with the outside world.

I tried to stop my eyes from closing, but the
darkness fell around me no matter what, and then the nightmares
came. They felt even more real than before, and I swore I was
actually living them. I saw the queen and her laughter surrounded
me. Her white hands reached for me, finding every bruise and open
wound she could to cause pain. I screamed out, but no one could
hear me. No one was coming for me. I felt hopeless.

I wondered what my mother was thinking. She
had no idea that Circe was more than just an Air Force base and
probably thought that I was just filing papers in some higher-up's
office. Little did she know that I was lying in an ice box so cold
that I couldn't cry because my tears would just turn to ice before
they even left my eyes. I thought about my dad and wondered if he
thought that this was his fault for insisting that I do the
internship. He just wanted to help me all along and I took it for
granted. I realized that he really had a reason for not wanting me
to see Ace.

And Ace, my Ace, my beautiful alien. I
wondered if I would ever see him again or if the queen would
destroy me and the planet before I would even get to say good-bye.
I thought about the way his hair lay on his head, spiking wherever
it decided, and the way it felt as he laid his head next to mine. I
wondered if I would ever feel the tremble of his lips and that icy
hot sensation they left on mine when he kissed me.

I was roused out of my trance when I heard
movement in the room. I thought it was finally my time to meet the
queen and see my execution. I tried to sit up, but I couldn't move.
I felt like I had at least a few ribs broken and it hurt to
breathe.

"Are you here to kill me?" I whispered.

A hand reached through the cage and I felt
the warmth pressing against my face. It wasn't like the hands of
those Caltians that brought me in there; it was familiar. A
comforting touch.

"Ace?" I breathed.

"It's me," he whispered. "I thought I would
never see you again."

I squinted in the dark, barely able to make
out the outline of his face. "I can barely see you."

"I'm right here and this time I promise not
to leave you. I missed you too much for that," he said and pressed
his other hand to my face.

"I missed you, too," I said, choking back the
iced tears that paraded on my lashes.

"I wish I hadn’t put you through all of this,
but I didn't think it would happen this way. The last thing I
wanted was for you to get hurt," he said and brushed the hair away
from my face. His warm touch on my bruises numbed the pain. "You
shouldn't have come here."

I looked down at my bruised body, thinking
how none of this would have happened if I would have just joined
some sort of club at school and got into Columbia on my
extracurriculars. But as my eyes trailed back up to the outline of
Ace's face I knew that there was no way that I would have changed
meeting him for the world.

"You would have done it for me," I whispered.
"The day you saved me from Magpie was the day my life truly
began."

Ace cupped my face in his hands. I leaned
toward the edge of the cage and he pressed his lips to mine. Every
ounce of pain that I had felt previously floated away from the
touch of his mouth on mine. I wanted to stay in that moment forever
and just pretend that all of the bad things hadn't happened. When
he pulled away, I sighed. I wanted more, but he pressed his fingers
to my lips, his dark eyes glowing.

"I don't want you to have to ever miss me
again." He moved his fingers from my lips and put both of his hands
on the bars of the cage. I listened as he bent them back, watching
the heat from his hands molding the bars like Play-Doh until there
was a big enough opening for me to get through. Ace put his arms
around me, pressing my body against his and pulling me out of the
cage and onto his lap.

"So is that where that super strength comes
in handy?" I wrapped my arms tightly around him, enveloping myself
in the feeling of his hardened chest against mine.

He let out a breath of air though his nose.
"Remind me never to be in a dangerous situation with you and try
not to laugh."

I searched the darkness to see if there was a
way to escape. "So what now? Have you killed off all the guards and
now we can get away?"

"Not exactly." He shifted his body and helped
me rise to my feet. After lying on the floor for hours I was pretty
stiff, and my broken ribs felt like they were about to puncture
right through my chest. "I just found the right moment to sneak out
and find you. After that I really wasn't sure where to go from
there."

I held onto Ace, trying to steady myself.
"You really don't have a plan?"

"Do you have one?" His face was right next to
mine. As his words hit my lips I realized the full gravity of our
situation, and that we definitely weren't free yet.

"I was thinking that we'd wing it." I bit
down on my lip.

Ace let out a cold puff of air and pressed
his forehead to mine. "We can't just sit in this closet all day
kissing and hoping that no one comes looking for us."

I smiled. Despite everything that had
happened I was still completely in love with the alien, and there
was nothing he could say that wouldn't make me smile. "As tempting
as staying in here and kissing all day is, we should really find a
way to get back to Circe and go from there."

He nodded, taking my hand in his. "There
should be a few ships that are available out in the landing area
that we could use, and the queen definitely wouldn't attack if I
was at Circe."

"Sounds like a plan to me." I followed Ace as
he let go of my body, still gripping onto my hand, and we walked
toward the door.

"Okay, I'm going to open this door and we are
going to make a run for it as fast as we can to one of the fighter
drones. Do you think you can run?" he whispered, looking back at
me.

I winced. The pain in my legs and chest had
gone away with Ace's touch, but it was back with a fiery vengeance.
"I can try."

Ace opened the door, the dim light from the
hallway felt like a million tiny needles on my face as we pushed
through. I was ready to run, to be free, to get back to Circe, and
to have everything go back to normal. We turned to our left, but
before we could even get a footing we were greeted by a wall of
Caltian guards.

"Crap," I murmured, looking up at Ace. "What
do we do now?"

The dark eyes of the Caltian guards were
locked on us as their wicked smiles curved along their faces.

"Run," Ace said in a voice barely above a
whisper. He whipped me around and started sprinting at full speed,
dragging me along with him.

"Ace, I don't know if I can do this." My ribs
ached as I tried to catch my breath, lagging behind while he had to
forcefully pull me alongside him.

"You have to. It's not much farther; I
promise." Ace glanced back at me. "Take off your belt or something
if that will help you move quicker."

My belt
. I stopped but Ace pulled me
harder.

"What are you doing?" Ace widened his eyes,
pulling me along as he kept on running.

I unzipped the front pocket of my belt and
felt the heat of the fireballs in my hands. I looked over my
shoulder at the guards who were almost an arm's length from me.
Thumbing one of the fireballs in my hand, I threw it as hard as I
could at the guard in front of the line.

Laughing, he caught the fireball and looked
down at its glowing red mass. "Silly girl, you think your human
weapons can harm me?" He closed his hand around the ball, pressing
his fingers against it. Before he could say another word, his body
was engulfed in orange flames. They started from his palm and
quickly leapt along his body. His mouth opened to scream, but his
body rapidly took on the appearance of a melting candle. The other
guards stopped and stepped back, staring at the fiery guard's
melting body until he became a small pool of liquid on the floor
below.

Ace did a double take, then looked down at
me, eyeing the remainder of the fireballs in my hand. "Do you think
you have enough of those to stall them until we get to the landing
pad?"

As the air around the fiery guard cooled
down, the other guards' angry faces came into view and they started
sprinting at us in full force. I took a handful of fireballs and
threw them with all my strength at the guards, lighting five of
them on fire. Their screams rang only briefly before their bodies
melted to the ground.

I turned back to Ace, my grin spreading. "I
think I can manage."

Ace sprinted down the hall as I followed,
keeping one hand in his and the other throwing fireballs at the
guards as fast as I could. We made it through each dark hallway,
lighting them up like the Fourth of July as the flames engulfed the
guards, leaving nothing but liquid pools of their remains.

"I can see it. The landing bay is right
through these doors," Ace yelled, pointing to a set of large double
doors.

I lost track of the remaining guards and
figured that most of them were either covered by the flames or lost
in the smoke and ash. Ace stopped in front of the doors, just long
enough to lean in and cup my face in his hands. "You're amazing, do
you know that?"

I could feel my face turn as hot as the
fireballs. "It really wasn't anything.

Ace grinned, kissing my forehead. "And
modest, too."

"Don't thank me yet. We still have to make it
out of here."

"Right." He nodded, turning back to the
double doors and pushing them open.

I felt the cool breeze of the desert sky
coming in through the ship's opening, but my smile faded as my eyes
fell onto Marsilo standing in front of a throng of guards. His evil
smile lit up the whole room.

"And where do you think you two are
going?"

Ace tightened his grip on my hand, waiting
for me to throw another fireball. I reached into the front of my
belt, but realized there was nothing left inside. How could I have
used all of them? I searched the belt, realizing that there was
nothing left. I gasped, looking from Ace to Marsilo. There was no
way out.

Marsilo's dark eyes fastened on me as that
sinful smile curved farther into his face."I guess it's about time
you meet mommy."

I'd never really experienced the whole 'meet
the parents' rite of passage. Most people in Winnebago knew
everyone and it wasn't like I'd ever had a real serious boyfriend
anyway. So, combine the fear of meeting the boyfriend's mom, with
the fact that she threatened to kill said girlfriend, and I
instantly turned from the warrior for the weak to the wimpiest of
the weak. Ace didn't loosen his grip on my hand as we walked down
the cold hallway. I wasn't moving very fast and had no idea about
the extent of my injuries. Plus, I hadn't seen a mirror in quite
some time and probably looked worse than I felt.

"Everything will be fine," Ace whispered. We
had guards on our backs, sides, and Marsilo leading the way. I knew
that there was no way to escape at that moment and somehow I didn't
think that everything was going to be fine.

Marsilo stopped in front of two large doors
that looked like they were made out of marble with intricate
carvings wrapping from corner to corner. He pressed a gloved hand
into one of the carvings. A screen popped up in midair, and a
spiky-haired man with an angry scowl stared out at us.

"What is it now, Marsilo? Can't you see that
we are trying to start a war here?" the man asked in an accent that
sounded like a mixture of a choir boy and my uncle Guido.

Marsilo smiled an all-too-coy smile and waved
his hand in my and Ace's direction." I just thought that the queen
might want to see what her son has been up to."

The screen turned toward Ace and me, zooming
in and out on our intertwined hands. I gulped, trying to loosen my
grip from Ace's hand, but the more I tried, the harder Ace's hand
clung to mine. He held his chin up and stared right at the screen
with an expression that said
try me
.

"This isn't on the queen's schedule." The
face on the screen sighed. "But I'm sure this is something she'd
like to see."

The screen disappeared just as quickly as it
appeared, followed by the doors slowly creaking open. I was
expecting something industrial-looking like the rest of the ship
with its dark walls and twinkling blue lights, but the queen's
office looked more like something from a medieval castle. The
perimeter of the room was covered in floor-to-ceiling textured
walls that had the same intricate carvings that decorated the
marble doors outside. Large, dark pillars flanked each side of a
large, raised platform. On the platform sat an oversized, claw-foot
chair that looked like it had been made from one of those twisted
trees that you see in fairy tales when someone goes down the wrong
path into the woods. But this definitely wasn't a fairy tale,
because sitting on the chair and staring down at me was the same
woman who had been starring in my nightmares, the queen.