Schnapps tugged on his leash. The dog had grown tired of waiting while Courtney gazed at the sunset. There were fields to explore and raccoons to chase and the white-furred Sealyham terrier was oblivious to the beauty of the night sky. But his owner was captivated by the distant twinkling stars, the patterns they formed, and the tantalizing secrets they teased. “Look at all those stars. There must be millions, each the center of its own solar system circled by dozens of planets.” She looked down at Schnapps wistfully. “If I started now and traveled across the globe, by the time I die I still won’t have seen the entire world. And that’s just a pinpoint in the universe. I’ll never see most of everything that exists.” Schnapps pulled against his collar, having eyed a squirrel clambering up a tree. Unlike his owner, the terrier cared little for existential thought and preferred to live in the moment.
“I’ve always found the world more beautiful when draped in the darkened hues of the night than in the harsh glare of day.”
Courtney pivoted in the direction of the man’s voice. “Nicholas!”
The vampire smiled. “I see you’ve found your dog.”
“This is Schnapps. He likes to chase squirrels but eventually he comes home. You can pet him if you’d like.”
Nicholas knelt to pet the terrier but the dog growled at him.
“Schnapps!” Courtney admonished him. “What’s gotten into you?” She turned back to Nicholas. “I’m so sorry. He’s always friendly. I’ve never seen him act like that before.”
“Animals can be skittish when meeting strangers.” He called out to the terrier and their eyes met, locking onto each other’s. The dog’s growl morphed into a whimper and then faded to silence. Schnapps meekly walked over to Nicholas and licked his hand. “See? All he needed was a bit of reassurance.”
“You came back. I was beginning to think I’d never see you again.”
“I told you we’d meet again if you wanted to.”
“How did you find me?”
“I followed your scent.” The vampire smiled again.
Courtney returned his smile. “You’re so funny.” She turned serious. “Were you able to free your friend?”
“Not yet. But I expect Jaxson will be home soon.”
“I went back to the woods this morning but I didn’t see any sign of him or the others. I think they may have left and taken Jaxson with them.”
Nicholas grew concerned. “You shouldn’t have gone out there. You know how dangerous it is.”
Courtney shrugged sheepishly.” I know. I was looking for you. I thought you might be trying to rescue your friend.”
“You’re a brave girl.” Nicholas looked at her admiringly. “But also a foolish one. Promise me you’ll never do anything like that again.”
“If you told me where you lived I wouldn’t have had to go looking for you. Where do you live?”
“In a very large house in an isolated area on the edge of town.”
“That sounds lonely.”
“Not really. There are a lot of us under one roof.”
“Then, you have a large family? Lots of brothers and sisters?”
Nicholas cracked a half-smile. “More of an extended family. It’s sort of like a group home.”
“Like for delinquents and drug users?” Courtney bit her lip. “Oops, that didn’t come out right.”
“No, we all came together after losing our families and formed a new family.”
“Your parents are dead?”
Nicholas nodded. “A long time ago.”
“I’m so sorry. Here I am being nosy and asking all these personal questions without a clue. I didn’t mean to dredge up bad memories.”
“That’s all right. They’re good memories but distant ones. As I said, it was a long time ago.”
“So, tell me about your new family. Is Jaxson part of it?”
Nicholas nodded. “He can be rather impulsive and usually gets into trouble. Misha and Scarlett are close to his age. They’ve become like sisters. They go out together for nights on the town, and prowl around the college campus to meet young men. Zachary and Audrey are older; I guess you could think of them as a big brother and big sister to the rest of us.”
“But no parental figures to tell you what to do?”
Nicholas hesitated. As a vampire, he was used to compelling people to do his bidding, but now somehow, he was the one who felt compelled to answer the innocent girl’s questions as honestly as he could. He didn’t know why Courtney had that effect on him, but he couldn’t lie to her. So instead, he shaded the truth. “Our Elders live with us, but they are quite old and seldom leave their rooms.”
Courtney nodded. “Walkers and oxygen tanks, I suppose. It’s really kind of all of you to take care of them and not cart them off to a nursing home.”
The image of Gaunt and Talia and the other Elders ensconced in a nursing home brought a chuckle to Nicholas. “I don’t think they would fit in to that environment, but it is an amusing thought.” He saw the bewildered look on Courtney’s face. “What I mean is, because of their advanced age the Elders are quite set in their ways.”
Courtney pointed to a streak of light illuminating a path across the evening sky. “Look, a shooting star.”
Nicholas’s eyes followed the bright object. “Perhaps.” He pondered what else the night sky held.
Brexa glanced down at her control panel. “We’re approaching the planet. I’m decelerating to sub-light speed.”
“Will we be visible to the humans?” Kira asked.
Brexa shook her head. “From the ground, our shuttlecraft will appear for only several seconds as it decelerates, and then only as a brief streak of light. The humans will mistake it for a meteor.”
“What about their satellites monitoring the airspace?” Kira asked.
“Our cloaking system will interfere with their satellite observations,” Brexa said. “And once we enter the atmosphere the hologram will make us look like an ordinary Earth aircraft, and we will again decrease our speed to match that of such aircraft until we reach the landing point. I assume you want us to land in the same location our command ship landed in?”
Kira nodded. “We can’t risk flying across the planet looking for an ideal landing site. Despite your assurances, it would be unwise to put too much faith in our cloaking apparatus. Remember, it failed to stop Jaxson from discovering our ship.”
Jaxson forced a smile from his weakened lips. His stomach was still cramping as an after-effect of swallowing the toxic alien blood.
“Charting a course to return to the landing site, my princess. Secure yourselves; there will be turbulence when the shuttle encounters friction as it enters the planet’s atmosphere. Then, we’ll slow to a crawl until we arrive at the landing site.”
As Brexa had warned, the shuttlecraft was jolted upon reaching the atmosphere and rocked to and fro. Brexa slowed its descent, having attained a suitable cruising altitude. Quill’s eyes darted nervously from the control panel readouts to the panel itself. She feared the shuttle had slowed too much and would trigger the short-circuit. She was right. Sparks leapt from the control panel as it bled a steady stream of blackish-gray smoke, before exploding.
“What’s happening?” Kira asked.
Brexa waved the smoke away and frantically tried to make the moribund control panel come back to life. “I’ve lost control of the shuttle!” The shuttlecraft spun wildly as it careened downward. Brexa pressed a button above her. “I’ve activated the crash landing protocol. We should make impact within the next one hundred-and-twenty seconds.”
Kira glanced behind her and gave Jaxson a longing look of desire tinged with despair. Had she discovered the purpose of her existence only in the last hours of her life? she wondered. She thought of her father and Kevian, and then of her people. Kira took a deep breath. I’ve lived my entire life as a princess; if I’m to die this day, then I shall die a princess. “Open a channel to the Calpernia, Brexa. I need to record a final message to our people.”
“Our communications equipment was fried by the explosion,” Brexa said. “Besides, the ship has probably traveled out of range. It should be behind the moon by now.”
Quill grew increasingly frustrated. She had not intended to be the architect of her own demise. “This planet is seventy-one percent water; that’s why we chose it. Can’t you steer this damned shuttlecraft into a body of water?”
“And then what?” Brexa asked. “The shuttlecraft would either break apart on impact with the water and we would drown or else it would sink to the seafloor.”
Jaxson chuckled at the irony. “Trapped beneath tens of thousands of gallons of the water you came here to steal from us.”
“I’ve managed to get the force field to work,” Brexa said, “That should maintain the structural integrity of the shuttlecraft during impact and the crash protocol calls for instantaneous deployment of air cushions throughout the cabin. Brace yourselves for impact.”
Kira glanced again behind her at Jaxson’s face and closed her eyes. It was the last thing she saw before the shuttlecraft struck the ground.
Courtney smiled at Nicholas. “You know, you never gave me your phone number.”
“That’s because I don’t carry a phone,” Nicholas replied.
Courtney’s eyes widened. “Everyone has a phone.”
Nicholas shrugged. “The only people I need to speak to are already sharing a house with me. It’s just not practical for my lifestyle to walk around with one. I can give you the number but if you called now it would be ringing somewhere in my bedroom.”
Courtney was amazed. “How can anyone live without a phone? How do you talk to your friends?”
Nicholas ruminated. “I guess I haven’t made any since we moved here. After all, Jaxson, Misha, Scarlett, Audrey, and Zachary are my friends. We share a lot in common; certain qualities outsiders would be hard-pressed to understand.”
“I can’t wait to meet them.”
Nicholas gulped. “I’m not sure that would be a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“My family means everything to me; I’m devoted to them. But like all families, they have their idiosyncrasies.”
“You mean they’re weird. You don’t have to be embarrassed. My father the general commands his household like it’s an extension of the military base; and my best friend Valerie lives with her wicked stepmother. It’s normal to have a dysfunctional family of oddballs.”
Nicholas smiled, his fangs flashing for the briefest of moments. “In that case, my family is excessively normal.”
Courtney grasped his hand. “Then, let’s go. I’m looking forward to meeting them.”
Nicholas frowned. “They’re not what you’d expect.”
“Look, if we’re going to be friends, then you and I will be going to each other’s houses sooner or later. That’s what friends do.” She paused. “Unless it’s me. Are you embarrassed to bring me home?”
“Of course not.” Nicholas knew the Elders would not approve of humans being brought to the mansion unless it was because they would never leave alive. But the Elders seldom ventured upstairs from the basement so they wouldn’t necessarily know. And he felt he could control any situation that might arise. Perhaps it was better to introduce Courtney to the other vampires so they would recognize her and not attack her on the streets. If the idea backfired and it turned into a fiasco, he could always trance her and wipe away any memory of the meeting. “All right, but it’s a bit of a walk.”
“That’s okay; Schnapps loves long walks. If they haven’t had dinner yet, I could even suggest we have a bite together.”
“No, don’t do that.” Nicholas brushed Courtney’s shoulder-length hair so that it covered her neck. “My family usually goes out for dinner as soon as it gets dark. But they’ll probably be home by the time we get there.”
After a brisk walk in the cool evening air, they arrived at the secluded mansion.
“Wow, this really is off the beaten path. I didn’t know this place existed. How could I miss a place this huge?”
“It’s set back on the property, well hidden by the trees and foliage,” Nicholas said.
“The rent must cost a small fortune. No wonder you have so many people under one roof.”
“Actually, we purchased the mansion for a rather reasonable sum. Apparently, no one wanted to live here. It has a long and sordid history. It was used centuries ago for smuggling guns and other contraband, and later as a way station for runaway slaves.”
“Your family must be quite wealthy to own a mansion, no matter how good a deal you got on it,” Courtney said admiring the structure as they approached the entryway.
“The Elders accumulated quite a lot of wealth in their lifetime and as I said, they don’t have much opportunity to spend it.” Nicholas opened the wooden double doors and they stepped into the foyer. The moonlight behind them reflected on the marble floor. Courtney’s eyes were drawn upward to a pair of lit candles bracketed in sconces against the walls. “How romantic.”
“We use candlelight throughout the house,” Nicholas explained. “The mansion was deserted for decades and never wired for electricity.”
Courtney stepped into the drawing room and admired the ancient tapestries by candlelight. “It’s like being in a museum or stepping back through time.”
“You find it… Weird, I believe was the word you used earlier?”
“No,” Courtney said quickly, adding, “well, kind of, but it’s really neat in a way, too. I mean, my friend Valerie has electricity but she lives in a tiny apartment that would fit into your drawing room. And those tapestries… they’re beautiful. I’ve never seen anything quite like them.”
“Then, you don’t mind the candlelight or the lack of electricity?” the vampire asked.
Courtney gazed around the room. “Oddly enough, I really don’t. Just being here is like an experience in itself.”
“I imagine some might find it surreal,” Nicholas said. “But it suits our needs.”
Courtney looked up to see two young women, a redhead and a brunette, enter the drawing room.
“You’ve brought us a visitor,” the redhead said. “If I’d known, I would have held off on dinner.”
Courtney leaned in and whispered to Nicholas, “See; I told you so.”
“Scarlett, Misha,” Nicholas said, gesturing to the redhead and the brunette respectively, “this is my guest, Courtney. I trust you’ll treat her with the respect due any of my friends.” He stepped toward Scarlett and whispered, “The girl is under my protection. No one is to harm her.”
Misha smiled. “So, she’s the one.” She noted Courtney’s bemused countenance and approached her, grasping her hand. “Nicholas told me earlier he had made a new friend.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” Courtney said, releasing Misha’s cold hand and accepting Scarlett’s proffered hand. “I’ve been dying to meet Nicholas’ family.”
“Most people are,” Scarlett said. “So how did you and Nicholas meet?”
Courtney held up Schnapps. “My dog ran away and I bumped into Nicholas and Jaxson while I was looking for him.”
“You’ve seen Jaxson?” Misha asked in surprise.
“Not since he was captured in the woods last night,” Courtney said.
“She knows?” Scarlett asked.
“Courtney was with me when Jaxson was taken,” Nicholas said.
“Nicholas saved my life. Those terrorists or whoever they were would’ve killed me if it hadn’t been for him.”
“Terrorists?” Scarlett repeated, realizing Courtney did not know Jaxson’s abductors were aliens.
Misha playfully ran her fingers through Nicholas’ hair. “Apparently, our young Nicholas can be quite heroic when a damsel is in distress.”
“He was incredible. You should’ve seen him. He picked up a tree and threw it at two of them.” Courtney saw the shocked expressions on their faces. “It was one of those adrenaline surges people get in extreme situations, but it was awesome.”
Scarlett shot Nicholas a knowing glance. “Adrenaline surge? It certainly sounds like an extraordinary sight.”
A somewhat older-looking blonde stepped into the drawing room. “I heard voices.” She noticed Courtney. “We have company?”
“Yes, Audrey,” Nicholas said. “My friend and guest, Courtney.”
Audrey perused the teenager. “How… unexpected.”
“I hope I’m not intruding,” Courtney said.
“Of course not,” Audrey replied. “I’ve always been rather fond of pets.” She turned to Nicholas. “Zachary is in the study. You should let him know you’ve returned. And bring your pet.”
Courtney placed Schnapps down on the floor. “You don’t have to worry; he’s housebroken.”
Audrey glanced down at the terrier, noticing it for the first time. “And bring the dog, too.”