Track 59

“A Soul Kind of Feeling”

Present Day

“What do we tell Jake and Alondra? And Carole?” I ask Hayden as we head back down the stairwell.

Hayden sucks in a huge breath. I can practically see his brain working overtime to assess the pros and cons. Finally, he gives a firm, decisive nod. He speaks as well as uses sign language. “Everything. But I’ll do it. In my own way.”

My eyes pop. “You know how to freakin’ sign?”

“I told you,” he says with a shrug. “We’re good with languages. Even nonverbal ones.”

“Just don’t scare them. They’ve been through enough.” I stop to adjust my shoe. Something sharp is sticking into my foot. When I stand up again, Hayden’s staring at me and fidgeting. “What’s wrong?”

“You’re not scared of me?” There’s a hopeful plea in his voice.

A millennium seems to pass as we look into each other’s eyes. I see beyond the obvious hotness that would make a modeling scout double back and offer him a Vogue cover job on the spot. In the past few weeks, Hayden’s been nothing but the best kind of human—gentle, sweet, funny, smart. Not to mention brave. Some people say moving from one city to another is a pain in the butt. Hayden and his family unit moved from their galaxy to ours.

“No, not one bit,” I say, my throat thickening with emotion. With a slight tremor in my hand, I cup his jaw and bring his lips to mine.

But I’m scared for him.

Scared because he’s counting on me to stop the abductions.

…

A little while later, I’m handing out cups of cold water to Jake, Alondra, and Aunt Carole. But they’re all frozen in shock on the couch in the reception area.

And it’s all Hayden’s fault.

They barely said a word as he methodically explained his story. Though, at one point, Jake asked for unequivocal proof. Hayden made the couch levitate by an entire two feet off the carpet.

Finally, Aunt Carole moves to her desk, arms and legs stiff. Without a word, she draws out her gin stash and drinks straight from the bottle. She gasps and delicately wipes her lipsticked mouth. “Okay, now I’ve heard everything.” She pauses. “That is everything? What else are you going to say? There’s an invasion coming?”

“That’s it. We’re not invading. We’re…leaving. Soon.” Hayden signs as he speaks. As I listen to him, my chest seems to crush in on itself like a black hole.

Alondra’s studying Hayden like he’s an artist’s model. She looks intrigued and intimidated all at once. I can tell she appreciated him using her own language.

No one is running in panic to the door or making any threatening moves toward Hayden. Much to my relief.

I clear my throat. “I think we can agree that there’s a common enemy here, right? And it’s someone terrestrial. They’re kidnapping humans—including my mother—and aliens.”

Nodding soberly, Alondra signs, “Didn’t I tell you the aliens were nice to us, Cassidy?”

“You did. Aliens are the good guys.” Glancing at Hayden, my heart flops over. I blink rapidly to hold back the tears. The question now is who the hell is doing this to us? And if they can overpower someone who has supernatural abilities, what chance do we have against them?

“Should we really call you an alien, Hayden?” Aunt Carole puts away the gin and straightens. “You just don’t look any different to us.”

He gives her a lopsided grin. “I’m fine with my Earth name. I like it. I’m used to it now.”

“Do you have an Aguan name?” I sign. Hayden McGraw, to me, is such a movie star kind of name. Something that a talent agent would pluck out of a phone directory and say “There’s a name that belongs on a theater marquee.”

He signs one letter at a time.“Zhor.”

“No last name? Just Zhor?” I sign, and he nods. “Nice.”

“Yeah, nothing weird or alien about Zhor,” Jake says. “Do you also have a hammer and cape? A brother named Loki?”

“No,” Hayden replies, “but I do have a five-year-old sister who could probably create a thunderstorm if you just give her an afternoon to work out the kinks.”

I slide my hand into his and give it a tender squeeze. I don’t care what his name is. As long as it’s not Darth Vader.

“How am I gonna tell Angie?” Jake says, sweeping his curly hair off his forehead with both hands.

“You can’t,” I sign. “It’s been killing me to keep secrets from her, too. Not to mention my dad. But for everyone’s safety, we have to keep this between us.”

Jake’s nose starts to twitch. He pales and gets up fast. He trips over an archive box. Pages scatter. “Fuck. Nosebleed.”

“Nosebleeds are a classic sign of alien abduction. In movies, anyway,” Carole says in a subdued voice as Jake runs down the hall.

Alondra frowns at the files spread across the reception area floor. She crouches and starts stuffing them back into the box. I move to help her, but something sharp literally stops me in my tracks. I sit on the couch and ease off my shoe.

“Hey, something just fell out of your sneaker.” Aunt Carole seizes on a piece of paper lying under my dangling foot and passes it to me.

I read the looped handwriting. My heartbeat judders. I let the page fall to the carpet. “Oh my…”

Another memory from the abduction surfaces. Earnest brown eyes. Golden blond hair. A whispered voice.

“Your job is to get out of here and find my parents.”

“You’ll feel it in your soul…”

Hayden picks up the note. Blood drains from his face. “Daisy/Jane Flanagan is alive. PHIU.”

With a shriek that could shatter glass, Aunt Carole jumps up and down. “She’s alive!”

Legs shaking, I get to my feet. Another fuzzy-edged memory swirls to the fore. “Jane wrote this. She meant I’d feel it in my sole, not soul. My shoe sole.”

Hayden gives Alondra the note, then runs to a back office.

Blood roars through my ears. “Jane is the woman who injected me with the drug! She wrote the note!”

Aunt Carole turns sober in an instant. “Little Jane Flanagan is behind your abductions?”

“No, she was trying to help me,” I sign. Putting a hand to my temple, I beg my brain to hurry up and sort through the jumble of images and sounds and memories. Pieces of a conversation echo in my head.

“Perhaps she has Stockholm syndrome,” Aunt Carole says thoughtfully. “That’s when kidnap victims sympathize with their captors.”

Jake returns with tissues stuffed up his right nostril. He looks over Alondra’s shoulder. “Holy fuck. What the hell is PHIU?”

Hayden comes back with a box. He drops it on the floor with a thud and extracts a file. “I came across this last week. A land acquisition from D.W. Prospecting to the U.S. government in 1947.”

I frown. “Governments buy back land all the time. Even contaminated property. What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Your federal government sold it in 1985 to a new corporation called the Parallax Human Intervention Unit. PHIU.”

“Human Intervention Unit? Sounds totally dehumanized.” Jake’s lip curls. “Like a human resources department.”

“There was a note in Mom’s computer about Parallax,” I whisper. She was close to finding Jane. “Let me look at the note that was in my shoe again.”

This time, it’s not just the handwritten text that grabs me. It’s the faint gray logo letterhead in the top right-hand corner that depicts five moon phases. Crescent, half, full, half, crescent.

Strains of “The Whole of the Moon” thunder through my head and get louder by the second. The brass section, the drums, the piano, the vocals—they all come together in a heart-thumping crescendo.

Gasping, I poke the note. “I interviewed a woman named Mabel Parkes. She and her kids were in the playground in DC on the day Jane Flanagan went missing. She gave me a description of a van that had this logo on it!”

“What does this all mean?” Jake says.

Cracking my knuckles, I pace the room. “Before my mom had her breakdown, I’m pretty sure she found out who kidnapped Jane.”

“Why didn’t Nina tell anyone?” Aunt Carole asks. I detect a slight hint of hurt lacing her words.

“She needed to verify it first, prove it wasn’t a hoax,” I sign.

“Do you believe this woman?” signs Hayden. “What if she isn’t who she says she is?”

“I don’t know for sure, but even if it isn’t Jane Flanagan, this woman is crying out for help. I can’t ignore that,” I sign. Our “mission” seems to be expanding by the second. Rescue Mom. Rescue Jane. Stop the abductions. “How hard would it be to get in contact with an ex-president? DM them on Twitter or something?”

“There’s probably a hundred protocols to follow if you want them to take you seriously,” signs Alondra.

Hayden shrugs. “Well, we’ll just have to go through every one of those protocols. Or find a way to bypass them all.”

“Don’t they have a charity or foundation?” Aunt Carole asks. “Maybe we can reach them through that.”

I snap my fingers. “Anna Kingston! She was a White House intern. I’ve been trying to get in touch with her for weeks, but we keep missing each other. She must know someone who can help.”

Alondra dumps a box of files on Carole’s desk while I call Kingston. There’s no answer. Of course. I’m forced to leave a message. I make room for Alondra and turn to my phone’s internet browser. My finger slips on the screen, taking the browser page back to Lewis Blake’s Wikipedia page that Billie tapped on days and days ago. His late wife’s name jumps out at me.

Eden Marie Blake.

The page has a single, decades-old picture of a dark-haired Blake. Impressive, hawklike nose. Eyes clear and sharp, even behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. He seems familiar somehow. But if he’s a senator, it’s possible I might have seen him interviewed in the media.

“You need to see this.” Alondra shoves a file that bears the U.S. government seal under my nose, but I can’t focus.

Instead, I read the Wiki page. “When Eden Marie Blake was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in 1985, Senator Blake retreated from public life to care for her…”

Eden.

What are the chances that Blake has something to do with Eden Estate? He’s a Colorado native. A mining heir. But he could also be involved in the health care industry somehow.

He named a mental institution after his wife?

Alondra snaps her fingers under my nose. “Memory experiments. Sleep studies. Mind control. Nanochip implantations… Are you getting this? These are files about a CIA black-ops program that was canned in the eighties.”

“What about it?” Hayden steps closer, brow furrowed. His phone bleeps incessantly, but he ignores it.

“There was a debriefing center for the program.” Alondra throws the file onto the desk and looks from Hayden to me steadily. “Guess where it was.”

“Eden Estate,” I sign, simultaneously spitting out the words with venom. Flashes of the rundown, rotting building hit me like lightning. That’s no “wellness” center. My mother’s not a patient. She’s a captive. I’ve got to get the man who stole her from me. Steel pours into my spine. I stand straighter. “Do you know what this means? The same people who’ve got Mom and Jane are the same people who are kidnapping us. We have to break them out of there.”

“Hell, yes! Right now!” Aunt Carole exclaims at the same time Jake yells, “Fuck, yeah!”

Alondra nods vigorously. “I’m ready to kick butt.”

“Wait, tonight?” Jake asks. Excitement fades from his face. “I’m supposed to take Angie to that new James Bond movie.”

“Oh…” My chest twinges. I try to find the right words. “You can’t stand her up again. It’d shatter her.” Selfishly, I need Jake and his considerable brawn if we’re going to storm the castle. At the same time, the thought of Angie getting hurt again kills me. If only she could understand why Jake had to bail on her.

“Thanks for adding the ‘again.’ Way to rub it in.” He smirks and I cringe. Guess I found the wrong words.

Alondra signs, “You could take her with us. Wouldn’t that be more thrilling for her than sitting through a crappy movie that’s full of CGI stunts?”

“No, I won’t put her in danger,” Jake says. He paces, his jaw firming as he mulls over his options. “I can’t keep lying to her, man. Can you guys at least give me a chance to explain everything? She deserves to know. Then, depending on whether or not she breaks my balls, we can meet up later to jailbreak your mom. Without Angie.”

“Yes. She deserves to know. And you both deserve each other. You’re good for her.” Eyes blurring with tears, I hug Jake. “Hayden, are you okay with us telling Angie? I swear to you she will keep it quiet. Hayden?”

But Hayden’s not paying attention. He’s staring at his phone like he wants to hurl it into the nearest dumpster.

“The Aguan Grays are coming,” he bites out without looking at me, but he signs it, too, so I know he meant for me—and everyone—to understand him.

My breath hitches. “What does that mean?”

Finally he looks at me, dark eyes blazing like twin wildfires. “They’re extracting my family unit within the hour.”