to look up to meet his eyes—way up. He should be a lot taller.
Then she pushed the strange thoughts away. Why would she think such things about her fiancé? Douglas was short and thin—he always had been. Why would she expect him to be taller and more muscular all of a sudden?
But he smells wrong, too, whispered a little voice in her head. He doesn’t smell like warm, masculine spice. I don’t like it!
“Douglas,” she said, pulling out of the hug when she absolutely couldn’t stand it anymore. “Did you, er, change your cologne or deodorant while I was…was gone?”
It seemed wrong to even say such a thing. Because as far as Alli could remember, she had never left. But since Douglas kept insisting and the calendar seemed to back him up…
“Of course not—why would you ask such a thing?” he asked and shook his head. “I was too busy looking for you to do anything else! I even handed the Johnson account off to someone else, just so I could concentrate on finding you and you know how lucrative that is! It cost me a great deal of time and effort, you disappearing like you did.”
Alli shook her head.
“I’m sorry, Douglas—I just don’t remember any of this.” She sighed. “Maybe I should go up to the Mother Ship. Maybe someone there can help me make sense of all this. ”
“The Mother Ship?” He frowned. “Why would you go there?”
“I don’t know.” Alli frowned. “I just have a feeling that somehow this…everything that supposedly happened to me…somehow has to do with the Kindred.”
Her fiancé threw up his hands.
“Fine. Just call me once you get there so I know you’re all right. I’ll stay here and make some calls to the Police Department—I have to cancel the Missing Persons report they have on you and ask them to close the case.” He shook his head. “Honestly, this is a relief—they were beginning to ask me some very suspicious questions.”
Alli frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, they seemed to think I had done away with you somehow!” Douglas made a face. “As if I would, after all the money I’ve already put out on the wedding!”
Inwardly, Alli winced. Leave it to Douglas to reduce everything to dollars and cents—even her apparent disappearance and the loss of an entire month of her life that she couldn’t account for.
“I’ll call you when I get there,” she said and kissed him lightly on the cheek, though honestly, she really didn’t want to get anywhere near him. Though she didn’t understand why, getting physically close to her fiancé just felt uncomfortable, which was really strange. It had never bothered her before, but now it felt wrong.
Well, add it to the list of weird things happening today, Alli told herself.
She had to get up to the Mother Ship and try to find some answers. As she had told Douglas, she had a very strong feeling that somehow the Kindred had something to do with what had happened to her.
She only wished she knew what it was.
Thirty-Six
“Oh, I’m so relieved you’re back, all safe and sound!” Sophia gave her a big hug, squeezing Alli tight for emphasis as she pulled her into her suite. “Come on and sit down. You really don’t know where you went?” she asked, examining Alli’s face anxiously as they both settled on her couch.
Alli shook her head. “I wish. Douglas is going crazy about it but I don’t remember a thing. The last thing I can recall is going to sleep in bed beside him. And the next morning—or what felt like the next morning to me, anyway—when I woke up, he was insisting that I’d disappeared and been gone almost an entire month somehow!”
“You did and you were,” Sophie assured her. “We thought maybe you’d come back up here to the Mother Ship somehow, even though your shuttle was still at your house on Earth. We turned the whole place upside down looking for you.” She leaned forward and looked into Alli’s eyes. “What we were most afraid of was that you’d somehow been taken by that Kru’ell One you’d been dreaming about. I even had Doctor Lambert monitor her PORTAL, but we couldn’t find you anywhere, even though she was combing through different universes for days!”
Alli shook her head. This was too much to take in all at once.
“PORTAL? What’s that?” she asked, skipping over Sophie’s other strange statements about Krue’ell Ones and different universes.