Chapter Two

 

Violet Dufresne staggered to her feet, staring at the car that had nearly side-swiped her, and was now speeding away down the street. Her Great-Aunt Dorcas was standing on the sidewalk, yelling as the driver sped away, and waving her cane furiously. Fortunately, nobody had been hurt by the lunatic behind the wheel.

Violet tried to look on the bright side, like her late mother would have wanted her to. Sure, she was now splattered with mud from head to toe, and she’d tripped and broken a heel and ripped her last good pair of pantyhose, but she wasn’t dead.

Also, times like this made her glad that she was well-padded. It might not make her the most desirable date, but it cushioned the blow when she fell on her butt.

Her hair, which she’d carefully flat-ironed that morning, had been splashed with water when the speeding car had gone through a huge puddle. She glanced at her reflection in a picture window and grimaced. Now the left side of her hair was smooth and flat and the right side had sproinged back into its usual wild, out-of-control brown curls.

Well…it had just been an accident. It must have been.

“Maybe that person is just a terrible driver,” she said to Dorcas.

“And maybe pigs can fly.” Dorcas squinted through her thick Coke-bottle glasses and scowled at her cell phone. “Curse it. I tried to get the license plate number, but the picture came out blurry.”

Violet leaned down to look at the cell phone. “That’s because it’s not turned on. You have to turn the phone on to use the camera. Did you forget to charge it again? If it’s not charged, it won’t work.”

Dorcas looked at the phone in disgust. “Well that’s just stupid. Poor design. I’m going to write a letter.”

“To who?”

Dorcas adjusted her glasses and looked down her nose at Violet. “Who do you think? To Mr Apple, of course. He made the stupid thing.”

“Riiight. Okay. Anyway, they’re gone now. I’m sure it was an accident.” But she couldn’t keep the doubt from creeping into her voice.

Dorcas shook her head. “Violet, stop being such a chucklewit. That person just tried to flatten you. On purpose.”

“Possibly,” Violet conceded. The car had disappeared around a corner. Various passersby who’d witnessed the near-fatal incident shrugged and moved on. Just another day in the big city.

“Definitely. That car aimed at you. If you hadn’t tripped, you’d be singing with the angels. And I don’t need to remind you, your singing voice scares the birds out of the trees. I don’t think the angels are ready for you just yet. You’ve got to go to the police again.” Dorcas had her hand on Violet’s arm and tried to turn her around.

Violet shook Dorcas’s hand off. “I’ve got a job interview in twenty minutes,” she reminded her.

Dorcas stared at her in disbelief. “You’re still going? Looking like that?”

Violet winced and glanced down at her mud-splattered clothing. She’d recently finished her master’s degree in marketing, and was interviewing at Clotham & Taylor, a fancy firm in uptown Manhattan. If she limped really fast on her broken heel, she’d make it on time.

“I need this job,” Violet said, hobbling as fast as she could. “Student loans to pay, groceries to buy. I’m strangely addicted to eating, I find.”

Dorcas’ social security check was barely enough to keep her in a rent-controlled apartment in a terrifying neighborhood. She supplemented her earnings by playing poker (and cheating, Violet was pretty sure), but Violet couldn’t impose on her great-aunt for money. It was enough that she was crashing on Dorcas’ couch rent free – for now. She had to pay her back.

Dorcas picked up her pace to keep up with Violet, slamming her cane down on the sidewalk with each step.

“No, you need to stay alive. Believe me, I want you to start making money so that you can support me in the style I’d like to become accustomed to, but you need to be alive to have a job. Go to the police.”

“The last time I went to the police, they didn’t take me seriously at all. Or the time before that. I can see the looks they give each other now when I walk in the door.”

Violet had suffered weird near misses multiple times over the last few months. A flowerpot falling from a window had nearly brained her. Another car had nearly sideswiped her. A gunshot had shattered a window as she was walking by. A mugger had popped out of a doorway and chased her ten blocks until she ran around a corner and into a restaurant.

But the police had insisted there was no proof that any of those incidents were more than just bad luck.

“You’ve got to try,” Dorcas protested.

“I have no information to give them,” Violet pointed out. “Other than that it was a gray car. I don’t know what make or model it was, and I didn’t see the license plate. Did you even get a look at the driver?”

Dorcas shook her head. “No, I was too busy running for my life.”

“Me too. Well, tripping for my life. Well, tripping over my own feet and accidentally saving my own life.” She hobbled faster. Her ankle hurt.

“Lousy coppers,” Dorcas muttered resentfully. Her resentment came from long experience; she and her late husband had been card sharks and pool hustlers.

Violet laughed. “Has anyone actually said that in real life in the last fifty years?”

“I’m not too old to put you over my knee, young woman.”

“But you’re too slow,” Violet said, hobbling off quickly and leaving Dorcas behind.

 

An hour later….

Violet sat glumly on the sagging pea-green couch in the living room of Dorcas’ tiny apartment. Dorcas was out buying groceries, which was good, because that meant she wasn’t there to say “I told you so.” She would have, too. And she’d have done a little dance while she said it. Violet loved Dorcas, but Dorcas could be a mean old lady sometimes.

The receptionist at Clotham & Taylor had looked at Violet in horror as she limped through the door. Violet had tried to explain the near miss with the car, but it hadn’t seemed to help.

She’d watched the interviewers’ eyes glaze over. The job interview had lasted five minutes and ended with, “Thanks, we’ve got lots of other candidates to speak to, if we need any further information, we’ll call you.”

Violet’s laptop pinged. She picked it up off the old, scratched coffee table, and flipped it open.

A message appeared on her screen in huge, bright-red letters.

You’re dead, bitch.

And then the message disappeared.

Violet went cold.

The stalker was inside her computer.

It felt utterly creepy and terrifying, as if the person were there in her house.

“What the hell, universe?” she yelled to nobody in particular.

This made no sense at all. She was a dead-broke marketing graduate. She didn’t have any angry ex-boyfriends; hell, most guys barely gave her a second glance. She certainly hadn’t inspired any stalkers.

She didn’t come from some Mafia family; her parents had been teachers who’d died when she was in her teens. She hadn’t offended anyone, that she knew of. She didn’t owe anybody money other than the federal government, and she was fairly sure they didn’t send assassins.

And yet somebody had repeatedly tried to kill her. And if that person was able to hack into her computer, that probably meant they knew everything about her. Including where she lived.

She glanced at the unopened invitation on her desk. She’d gotten half a dozen of them in recent weeks. They all came from a place called the Starcrossed Dating Agency. A few months earlier, her best friend Allison had met a man through Starcrossed and moved overseas to marry him. The agency specialized in matching women up with wealthy men from Europe. It would have sounded weird and sketchy to Violet if she didn’t keep getting enthusiastic emails, texts and phone calls from Allison about how great her new guy was.

Allison had tried to talk Violet into signing up at Starcrossed too, but Violet had been a month away from finishing up her marketing degree, so she’d declined.

Now an alarming thought occurred to her.

If the person who was stalking her knew where she lived, they might threaten Dorcas too.

Maybe if she signed up for this dating agency and met someone, they’d fly her overseas.

It wouldn’t really be false pretenses. She was single. Very, painfully single. She hadn’t had a decent date in years. Most of the men she’d met in New York were obsessed with chasing after skinny models and actresses, and so fixated on dating apps that they barely noticed when they had a real woman sitting across the table from them. Always chasing the next good thing, and clumsy, chubby, frizzy-haired Violet was never the next good thing.

So yeah, if she met someone, she’d be open to a relationship.

And this message on the computer made it painfully clear: she had to leave the city, to make sure that Dorcas didn’t turn into collateral damage. With no job and no savings, she couldn’t afford to do it on her own.

So the next morning, she went to Anders Tower in midtown Manhattan, where the dating agency was located. Dorcas, who was suspicious of everyone and everything, insisted on tagging along with her.

“If anyone tries to roofie you, I’ve got my cane. And my pepper spray.” Dorcas waved her cane in the air menacingly.

They were ushered into a waiting room with a dozen other hopeful prospects, and a short while later, a very tall man came out to meet them. He introduced himself as Madok. He looked to be in his fifties, with thick, dark hair shot through with gray. Madok looked like the love child of a linebacker and a basketball player, on steroids. He wore a gray wool custom-tailored suit, which fit him amazingly well despite his height and bulk.

Madok singled out Violet and Dorcas and ushered them into his enormous office. It was oddly decorated, with furniture made from a black wood with red grain, of a type Violet had never seen before. Abstract spiral sculptures twisted in the corner of the room.

“I am so glad you are here. I am one of the owners of this agency. Let me start by telling you, this isn’t exactly your typical dating agency,” he explained as the door to his office shut behind him – oddly enough, all by itself.

Dorcas scowled at him suspiciously and fiddled with her keychain.

“No pepper spray needed,” Madok informed her. “I am not planning on kidnapping your niece and selling her to a brothel in Europe.”

They stared at him.

“How did you…?” Dorcas trailed off suspiciously.

“I’ve got some psychic abilities,” he said. “And that is not the strangest thing you’re going to hear today.”

* * * * *

“Good lord. He wasn’t joking,” Violet said as she followed a group of women down a long hallway, headed towards what looked like a blank wall.

“I know, right? I still couldn’t believe it, even after everything they showed us. I totally thought I was being punked,” said a woman named Samantha.

She was one of twenty other women who’d signed up with Starcrossed to seek out a match…on another planet.

When Madok had first explained what kind of dating agency Starcrossed really was, Violet had thought the exact same thing – that he was filming something for a reality TV show.

Starcrossed was not an international dating agency, Madok had told her. They were an interstellar dating agency. They matched women with various races of humanoids who had evolved from the same common ancestor as humans – but thanks to some genetic tinkering, these humanoids could shift into animal form, like werewolves. Madok came from a race called the Vulfans, who had mixed their genetic material with that of dire wolves – the huge, prehistoric wolf species that was extinct on Earth.

To sign up for the agency, the women had to be willing to leave their old life on Earth behind, and only make occasional visits home, during which they were strictly sworn to secrecy about their new lives.

Violet and Dorcas had been skeptical, of course.

Dorcas had gone so far as to use phrases like “bull-puckey” and “lying horse’s patootie”.

Madok had stood up and shook his head several times…and his ears had turned pointy and furry, like a wolf’s. “When I’m on your world, I have to concentrate hard all the time to suppress that,” he said.

“Special effects,” Violet had said coolly.

Madok had pressed an invisible button on the top of his desk and called in an assistant, a slender young woman who’d walked through the door, shut it behind her, and quickly stripped off her clothes. As Violet spluttered in shock, the woman had shifted into a wolf.

Pale fur had washed over her skin, and between blinks her eyes had faded to an icy wolfish blue. As she fell to her hands and knees, her limbs had twisted and her pretty face had pushed out into an elongated snout, her ears riding up higher on her head and unfurling into velvety points. The snowy white wolf had rolled out her pink tongue in an affable doggy laugh at Violet’s gasp of astonishment.

“Even better special effects,” Violet had muttered again. But she’d reached out and stroked the wolf’s fur, feeling the silkiness slip through her fingers. It felt so real. How were they doing this?

The wolf had then reversed the shift, turning back into a woman. She’d quickly dressed and left, giving the dumbfounded Violet a wave as she trotted off.

Madok had finally convinced Violet he was on the level when he’d pulled a strange machine the size of a computer tablet out of his desk and waved it in front of Dorcas’ face. Dorcas had looked at him indignantly. “Hey, your stupid machine broke my glasses!” she’d complained. She’d pulled her glasses off. Then she’d looked around the room in confusion.

“I can see,” she’d marveled. “I don’t need my glasses anymore!”

They really did have some crazy otherworld technology.

So Violet had agreed to go off-planet and give the whole dating-an-alien thing a whirl. They’d clamped a bracelet on her wrist that would act as a universal translator and tracking device. And they’d even allowed Dorcas to accompany her.

There were certain rules. If she didn’t find an alien husband, she’d be returned to Earth along with Dorcas – with their memories wiped. She’d find that all her student loans were paid off and $100,000 deposited in her bank account, with a false memory implanted telling her she’d won it in a lottery.

It had seemed like a win-win. She’d be safe, Dorcas would be safe…

But now, the wall at the end of the hallway suddenly vanished, and beyond it, they could see a strange new world – with tall spiral buildings in the distance, standing out against lilac-colored skies. Suddenly “safe” seemed like a relative term. It wasn’t just the weird beauty of the outer-space landscape. The soft breeze that reached Violet smelled alien too. Not bad, just strange. Anxiety prickled over her skin, and she was aware that her heart was beating a little bit too fast, from a combination of excitement and fear.

“I still think this is one of those candid camera shows,” Dorcas said to herself, but with less conviction. They walked through the opening and took in their surroundings. They were standing on an enormous rooftop patio, and a group of very tall men and women wearing black-and-blue tunics and leggings were waiting to greet them. All of them had pointed, fur-tufted ears.

“Aunt Dorcas. Look at the sky,” Violet said. Two enormous moons floated overhead.