Chapter 9

 

Vaughn boggled at him. What the hell was happening?

“Greetings, lonely ladies of Earth,” he intoned again in a theatrical voice. He clenched his teeth. “Larfing advertisements,” he hissed. “That’s not what we need.”

His brown irises and their yellow rings were nearly eclipsed by whirling circular bolts of pure white, and his pupils were constricted to merest pinpricks.

Vaughn bit her lip, watching him wrestle internally with the living data he’d downloaded into himself.

“Please indicate your preferred style of physical conjoinment…” A hectic jade flush chased across his cheeks, and he groaned.

Not a pained groan, exactly.

Oh god, was he getting all the information remaining from the dating site’s users and their sexual and emotional inclinations? How many aliens, how many humans had shared their deepest desires? He was going from never having kissed to…every boom-chicka-wow in the universe?

He flattened his hands on his thighs, his fingers digging deep into the fatigues until she thought he must be leaving bruises in his own muscles. His bright green blood glistened on the matte black.

Tentatively, she reached over and touched his blanched knuckles. “Dejo?”

He shuddered and closed his eyes. “I can’t…”

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t take it in. You don’t have to live it.” She remembered the shame and anger of the first woman who’d come to her about the revenge porn site, how she’d tracked down others. All of them sharing themselves in love and longing, only to have their desire stolen from them and shared with strangers, left betrayed and mortified. She herself had seen the pictures and then forced herself to read the hateful, humiliating comments left by men who dishonored themselves more than any of their victims.

What a difference from this worlds-spanning union of beings seeking to come together.

As much as she might hate the Intergalactic Dating Agency for failing Rayna and the others, the ideal inspired her.

But right now, the vast well of hot and heavy information was apparently pushing her cool, slick data specialist toward insanity.

She slipped her fingers under his, prying his grip off his thigh. “Ride it out,” she urged.

“It’s…” His long exhalation shivered. “Hard. I’ve never had to take in so much.”

“You don’t have to let it take you.”

He clamped her hand in his. “Want to.”

The confession between his clenched teeth sent a sympathetic quiver through her core. To know all the yearnings of how many planets’ worth of loneliness and the dreams of being filled…

He raised her hand to his chest. Since he’d used his vest for her rappelling harness, only his coat was between them, but the strong material seemed like nothing with the heat of his body radiating through.

Or maybe she was overheated, reflecting back.

“Need to get back to the Onoffon.” His pecs heaved under her palm. “Get this out of me. And get me into you… Wait, no. That isn’t what I meant to say out loud… I feel lightheaded.”

She surged to her feet, pulling him with and steadying him when he wobbled. “Hopefully that goo doesn’t make you heavier.”

He closed his eyes. “For some reason, I have an overwhelming urge to spin in circles in a flowery meadow and sing.”

Ugh. With his hand in hers, they headed for their escape.

As they hustled through the compound, she berated herself for that moment where she hadn’t been sure he would pull her up. It would’ve been so easy for him to tuck the tank under his arm and sprint off once he had what he needed. Despite his claim that she might have to carry him, he kept pace with her, only stumbling once when they strode down the main corridor with the posters. One of the holograms had projected out at him, and the couple pictured were in a particularly erotic pose.

Well, he did still need her to drive him back to his spaceship.

Where he would then fly away, never to be seen again.

The painful thud of her heart was just aftershocks, she told herself, the letdown of retrieving the data.

Scavenging. She could be honest with herself.

At least about some things.

Since he’d disabled the plasma array once they were in, they were able to hurry down the sloping lawn without fear of being vaporized. And he’d already explained that the sub-aural distressors were focused on incoming, not outgoing, intruders, which meant they plunged into the forest without hesitating.

All the hard part was done. They were in the clear. They’d done it. They’d get to the Onoffon and he could download everything he’d taken from the IDA’s memory banks.

She huffed out a hard breath.

“What is that smell?”

Was he imagining some exotic perfume, a ghost sensation from the dating agency data? She glanced at him uncertainly, inhaling as she did so. “I don’t…” Then she caught the whiff. “Smoke?” Uh oh. “Did something get vaporized behind us?”

“I disabled the array. Disabled means doesn’t work anymore,” he said distractedly, looking around them. “We need to just get out of here.”

They stepped up their pace, although the effort left him stumbling. If he fell, she wasn’t entirely sure she could carry him, but if she had too…

Maybe if they’d not been so relieved to leave the compound, they would’ve kept the drones in the air as advance scouts. As it was, their first warning was a glow through the trees ahead of them, red as the dangerous parts of the 3D imaging but much larger.

Dejo balked. “What—?”

“My car,” she gasped. “Stay here.”

She broke into a run.

Everything she had left in life was in that scrappy little car.

She dodged through the trees, branches clawing at her as if to hold her back, but she snapped them off in her urgency, not even feeling the scrapes. The red glow seemed to shrink, as if everything she had was receding, and a mocking hiss snaked into her ears, though she barely heard it over her pounding pulse.

She jolted out of the forest onto the narrow roadway just as the last flicker of red died out.

Her car was a smoking ruin, drenched in white foam.

The sheriff’s deputy turned toward her, hefting the extinguisher defensively. “Hold it right—” He peered through the drifting haze of smoke and powdery duff, turned operatic in the shining white beams of his cruiser. “Oh, it’s you. Wondered if you were inside.”

She stumbled to a halt, her hand over her mouth. “What…?”

The deputy shrugged, his ill-fitting coat rippling over his not-quite-wide-enough shoulders. “Fire.” When she sent a wild, furious stare his way, he shrugged again. “Was hoping you could tell us. Since you weren’t burnt up inside.”

“I have no idea what happened,” she said. “We were just…”

Shit. What was she supposed to tell this clueless Earther? Shit shit. Since when did she think of other people as clueless Earthers?

She covered her obvious hesitation with a harsh sob. “I can’t believe this. My car is gone.”

“Not entirely,” he pointed out, entirely unhelpfully. “You’re just lucky the sheriff got a call about smoke and sent me out here.” He gave her a vicious glare through muddy brown eyes that seemed too close together. “Fire got outta control, coulda ended up charging you with arson. What are you doing out here in the middle of the night anyway?”

Well, fuck. There really was no good reason. “Hiking,” she said. If the hick deputy wanted to be curt, she could oblige him. “That’s what folk come out here to do, right? Got turned around.”

“Maybe that’s what happened to your sister,” he said snidely.

As she opened her mouth to respond—probably with a version of ‘fuck you’ right before she took out his front teeth and then probably got arrested for assaulting an officer of the law but really, considering she was already a B&E scavenger, why stop now?—another figure stepped across the glare of the cruiser’s headlights.

At first she thought it was Dejo since the shape was large, but another step brought the sheriff herself into the light, and Vaughn realized a second cruiser was parked behind the first. With its lights off, she hadn’t noticed it.

The sheriff ambled forward, hands on her hips above her gun belt. “Cool it, Henson. Lady lost her sister. And now her car. Bound to make anyone a mite testy.” She nodded at Vaughn and tilted her hat back on her forehead, revealing a shock of dark gray hair flattened by the brim. “Older cars, if you don’t keep up repairs, engine trouble can end up in a fire.”

Vaughn bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself from cursing. “Not usually.”

The sheriff’s pale blue eyes narrowed, almost quicksilver in the headlight glare, but then she nodded reluctantly. “Sometimes though. Seems like that’s what we have here.” She glanced around the dark forest. “Guess you’ll be needing a ride back into town. At least you’ll sleep well after all the hiking you did.” Her narrowed gaze tracked Vaughn up and down once. “Not seen hiking gear like yours before.”

“Got used to all the latest and greatest when I was with the National Guard,” Vaughn said. “Like to stay sharp.” She was tempted to lie, say she was still in, in the hopes of garnering more cooperation from these local leos. But checking her discharge status would be too easy. Also, why was she suddenly wanting to lie? Damn Dejo and his scavenging.

Speaking of whom… Where was he? Had the data dump knocked him out, or worse?

Part of her wanted to run back into the forest to find him. The rest of her knew she had to deal with the situation at hand.

And a tiny but fiendishly persuasive part of her wondered if he’d left her.

“You weren’t snooping around the resort, were you?” Deputy Henson lifted one finger toward her face. If he was closer, she might’ve snapped it off. “It’s closed. Your sister ain’t there. We looked. And Sheriff Giles told you to leave it alone.”

Vaughn blinked at him slowly. “Oh, is the dating resort where she disappeared out this way?”

He curled his finger back in and slanted a glance at the sheriff, letting out a blustering noise. “Don’t matter. You need to just—”

“Henson,” the sheriff interrupted. “Stow that extinguisher, why don’t you, and let’s get poor Ms. Quaye back to town. She’s probably exhausted.”

When he puffed his cheeks out but obeyed, Giles turned to Vaughn again. “I apologize, Ms. Quaye. He’s youngish, and male.” The sheriff smiled wryly with half her mouth. “You probably don’t believe me, but he’s actually quite dedicated and dependable, even if he doesn’t always”—she rubbed the side of her nose—“capture the nuance of things.”

Since that description could’ve been about her not so long ago, Vaughn felt the sustaining energy of her anger gutter out, like her alleged engine fire. What had happened? Had it been whoever shot at her and Dejo outside the saloon—?

Sheriff Giles stiffened and hauled out her revolver, aiming in Vaughn’s direction. “Hold it right there.”

Adrenaline spiked Vaughn’s pulse again and she twisted to see Dejo walking slowly out of the trees.

Oh fuck, the sheriff was going to shoot an alien with green blood…

Or—huh—just a guy. A slightly hunched, scruffy guy in blue jeans and a light blue puffy down jacket. “Oh no,” he groaned. “The car. What happened? I can’t walk another step, Vaughnie.” He stumbled to a halt and bent over, his hands braced on his knees. He looked up through rumpled blond hair to stare at the sheriff. “Did you catch the guy, Sheriff? You should get a reward.”

Giles’s grip on her service revolver never wavered. “Who are you? Where’d you come from?”

Vaughn hustled toward him. “This is my boyfriend,” she said hurriedly, and every bit as convincingly as his blond hair. Since when was he a puffy-jacketed blond?

He was probably wondering since when was he her boyfriend.

“Sorry I fell behind, babe,” he said. “That last beer went through me faster than…er.” He glanced at the sheriff as he straightened. “Do you think someone’s trying to hurt Vaughn? First her sister, now her car.”

Giles cleared her throat, lowering the gun, although she didn’t holster it. “I don’t see there’s a connection there, son. Her sister went missing months ago. I understand the need to…mourn with long nighttime walks and beer”—her tone said she didn’t understand or approve—“but I think this latest incident is telling you to let it go.”

Vaughn did everything she could to hide her bristling. As if she’d ever let Rayna go. “Thanks for the offer of the ride, Sheriff.” She glanced briefly at Dejo and he nodded. “We’d like to go back to town, please.”

Couldn’t exactly ask the sheriff to take them to the spaceship parked outside city limits.

The sheriff spoke briefly to Henson while Dejo stood with his hands on his denim-clad (since when?) hips, peering into the slagged car.

“Tires are melted,” he murmured to Vaugh. “Must’ve been a very hot fire.”

Almost as hot as him in tight jeans…

She must just be tired and broken inside. She’d lost her livelihood, her sister, her car home and all her possession, basically the last of everything she had in the world except a few grand in savings. And yet she was utterly numb except for the tingle when she looked at him.

He put his arm around her shoulders when the sheriff ambled back to them. When she rested her hand against his ribs, he squeezed her gently. The fabric under her palm wasn’t soft, puffy down in the usual slick poly shell but the tough, light fabric of his tactical fatigues. The very faintest buzz of bumblebees reached her, only because she was nestled close to him; the drones, casting some sort of holographic illusion around him.

The sheriff stopped in front of them. “Ready to go?”

“Done,” Dejo said.

She nodded. “Henson will tag your car for towing and let you know when it’s available after our investigation.”

Vaughn held back a scowl. They’d done fuck-all to find Rayna but they’d investigate a burned-out car? But she supposed anything they’d learn might identify whoever shot at them. It all had to be connected.

Didn’t it? Her heard whirled. In an infinite universe, were connections even possible? Obviously the people—Earthers and alien people—who’d used the Intergalactic Dating Agency hadn’t been able to find connections without the help of a building-sized artificial brain that had itself been reduced to a disgusting slurpee by the uncaring fates and some asshole bride-stealing alien who wouldn’t confess his mistakes.

She found herself leaning too heavily against Dejo as they settled into the back of the sheriff’s cruiser. Wasn’t fair to him, considering he was still reeling from all that data.

Feeling the assessing weight of the sheriff’s gaze in the rearview mirror, Vaughn straightened.

“Where you folks staying in town?” Giles lifted one eyebrow. “Can’t rightly recall where you said, last time we talked.”

Because Vaughn hadn’t wanted to admit she was living out of her car. Rural county sheriffs didn’t necessarily appreciate vagrants.

Probably because they took to scavenging with unseemly quickness.

“That little motel on the west side of town,” she said. “If you drop us off there, we’d sure appreciate it.”

Giles clicked her tongue. “Sure thing. Been a rough time for you. Sorry Sunset Falls hasn’t been a better experience for you.”

“Learn a little something new from everything you do, though, right?” Dejo said.

Vaughn glanced at him, wondering why he was needling the sheriff.

But Giles just nodded. “I expect that’s so.”

The west side of Sunset Falls was the closest reasonable drop-off point to the Onoffon, but it was still going to be a long walk. As crappy as her car had been, she was going to miss it. Vaughn almost stumbled getting out of the cruiser when Giles stopped under the carport of the motel.

“Here you go.” The sheriff slung her elbow over the seat to stare back at them. “Henson’ll be in touch about the fire. Meantime, try not to get turned around again, ya hear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Dejo said. “We sure won’t.”

Vaughn mumbled her thanks for the ride, sounding churlish even to her own ears. Maybe because a bad attitude was all she had left.

She headed for the stairs that led to the motel’s second level, Dejo following, wanting to be out of sight until the sheriff pulled away. Then she slumped against the rough brick façade.

Dejo pitched his shoulder next to her. “I can’t make it to the Onoffon tonight. And it’s not safe to be out here on the street, in someone’s sights.” He pushed upright. “Come on.”

“Where…?” She trailed behind him to the office door under the vacancy sign.

“I saw this in one of those television shows,” he told her.

The sleepy, grouchy clerk emerged from the back room long enough to take a credit card from Dejo and basically throw them a key.

Walking down the row of numbered rooms on the second level balcony overlooking the parking lot and the dark trees beyond, Vaughn shook her head. “You have a credit card.”

“I would be a poor data scavenger not to. Anyway, the universe still runs on credit.” He paused at the right room number and stared down at the worn brass key in his hand.

Vaughn plucked the key from his fingers and inserted it into the lock.

Housekeeping was obviously in a better mood than the front desk. The room, though almost as small and worn as the key, was clean, scented lightly of pine. Instead of the usual motel-standard ugly bulk abstract acrylic painting “decorating” the wall, there was a gorgeous black and white print of the big Montana sky full of clouds.

But it was the single bed that caught her eye.

“I am going to experience an Earther shower,” Dejo announced.

She twisted on her heel to face him. The illusion had dropped away, revealing his weariness.

She hustled to his side. “How are you holding up?”

“I am holding the data well enough.” He touched his temple. “It’s strange…”

“I can’t even imagine.” She guided him to the bathroom and started the shower in the tiny stall. “Going to be a tight fit.”

Something about the wording made her feel tight inside. Maybe it was just the cramped room with him so close, looking vulnerable in a way he hadn’t even with a laser hole burned through his chest. She had to help him hold it together until they could get back to his ship and complete the download.

By the time she’d lined up the little bottles of toiletries and unwrapped a soap for him, steam was pouring over the shower door. “There you go. I’ll go after you.”

“In the television, the Earthers showered together.” His eyes glinted, not with the white sparks of the IDA data, but something much more primitive.

What the hell kind of television had he been watching? “I only told Giles you were my boyfriend because—”

“I know why,” he murmured. “There are things in my head… Such knowledge from so many across the galaxies even the cloud-whores would be shocked.”

She was feeling a little shocky herself. “Wash it off.” She pushed him toward the shower and fled the bathroom.

Of course, there was nowhere really to go. The small room, the single bed, the laser-shooting arsonist somewhere out there…

When Dejo emerged from the bathroom in a rush of minty steam with only a skimpy white towel wrapped around his waist, she averted her gaze and fled for the shower herself.

But the tiny room was awash—literally—with him: the cinnamon espresso scent of his skin, the mere glimpse she’d had of his body with the wings marked across his broad chest, her own yearning to fall and let someone, anyone—him—catch her, just for what remained of the night.

She braced one palm on the shower wall and dropped her head between her shoulders, letting the cooling water pound her back. She’d be strong again tomorrow…