veteran of the force offered a gripping account of his encounter with Caydinn’s would-be assassin: “He melted my weapon—turned it to molten metal so I’d drop it. Then he floated me twenty feet in the air and stuck me there. I thought it was over. I thought I was going to die. I’ll tell you what, twenty-seven years on the force and I never saw anyone like him. He was one cold son of a [expletive deleted].”
Tonight, the “outer space killer” remains at large.
Evie Jasper Holloway peered past the open front door to her house, searching for signs of an alien invasion. A very personal invasion. The REEF was dead, but the fact that an extraterrestrial killer had paid her home a visit at all continued to unsettle her. He’d broken into her home, rifled through her things and traumatized her dog!
Barking, Sadie gazed at her with luminous dark brown eyes, her wet nose twitching. The Chihuahua’s heart beat furiously as shivers wracked her little body.
“Such a powerful heart.” Evie kissed a silken ear. “That’s the heart of a lion, not a little dog. Yes, it is. You’re my brave girl, fighting off that monster.”
A piece of fabric torn off the alien’s pant leg was the only evidence of the confrontation when she’d left Sadie in care of a pet-sitter at home while she took the kids to Disneyland for Easter break. No one was sure of the details, but when the police arrived at the house, Sadie dropped from the ceiling onto their heads. The dog hadn’t been the same since.
Then again, neither had the rest of the world. Jana and Cavin had spent the weekend holed up in a secret bunker in the desert hacking into the long-ago crashed Roswell saucer. They’d used its aged software to trick the aliens into believing Earth owned a powerful space fleet. It was the ultimate scam, the kind of crazy scheme that shouldn’t have worked but somehow did. On the downside, if the aliens ever found out they’d been duped by a bunch of low-tech Terrans, they’d turn around and come right back. No one but the president, a few select officials, and the Jasper family knew about the trick—and only because they’d been part of the masquerade.
“Aren’t you coming in, Mom?” Evie’s two teens strode past without a care, running upstairs to pack suitcases to bring to the family ranch, where the entire Jasper family would gather to mourn the loss of their patriarch, “Grandpa Jake.”
From the top of the stairs, her son John shook his head at her. Her unease baffled him. “An assassin from outer space was in our house, Mom. Our house. Think of it, a real Terminator. So cool.”
Cool? The kid was insane. This house was her safe haven, a small slice of sanctuary in a world where privacy was a commodity. She’d grown up on the campaign trail; she knew how to handle herself in public before she learned to walk. But unlike the rest of the Jaspers, she hadn’t a single ounce of desire to be around government in any shape or form, nor did she want the responsibility of public service.
Except when one of the family members hit a milestone like an election victory, placing her in the reflected glare of their spotlights, she’d gotten her wish. Now her perfect suburban anonymity had gone poof.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Prophetically, not too long ago over a couple of margaritas, her brother, Jared, compared their desire to live a private life to selling one’s soul to the devil: sooner or later your debt would come due.
He was right. Their family’s role in saving the planet had dragged all of them back into the public eye—and an interstellar killer to her door. An alien “terminator”.
Warily, Evie inspected her dining room table and the newspapers the assassin had left scattered. The only things that mattered to her were home and family—her children. Cavin’s would-be murderer would have stolen it all without a blink of an ice-blue cyborg eye.
You were disposable to him, a means to an end.
That was the root of what upset her, she realized. Not mattering. It was a sore point, and getting more so as time passed. She was the black sheep of the family, the perennial underachiever.
Yet she was happy. Deep down, she knew she’d eventually find her calling, her true purpose in life. But she wasn’t disposable; she knew that. To her ex-husband, maybe, and to the press. Even