Page 17 of Rock Hard Alien

I carefully opened the limousine door and made sure none of the neighbours were watching. I was at the edge of the village, but in a place with just under a thousand souls, everyone knew everybody's business. Keeping an alien gargoyle hidden was going to be a challenge.

Pam had offered for us to stay in a house the agency owned, but I'd refused. I wanted to be home. Annoyingly, that meant that Cairn was coming with me, too. He'd found it uncomfortable when I went downstairs to the cash machine while he had to stay inside the agency's office. We would have to experiment further to see just how much distance we could put between us without Cairn turning to stone.

But not now. I was tired. Confused. Exhausted. All I wanted was my sofa, a blanket and a cup of tea.

Instead, I'd have to play host to a gargoyle who kept calling me mate.

“I think we're good. Go straight inside. No dilly-dallying.”

Cairn cleared his throat. “I am sorry. I don't understand.”

“No lingering about. I don't want anyone to see you.”

The lock squeaked as I turned the key. I kept forgetting to oil it. I held the door open wide and motioned for Cairn to follow me. He had to bend his head to fit through the doorframe. My little cottage really wasn't made for someone as large as him.

My home consisted of one big open living space with a separate bathroom and a mezzanine bedroom on a platform I'd secured with thick iron chains to the roof beams. The platform was sturdy but it did swing slightly whenever I stepped on it from the wooden ladder leading up to it. It was unlike any other house I'd ever lived in and it was entirely and utterly my own.

“You have a perch,” Cairn said, sounding amused.

“It's a bedroom. It just happens to lack walls. I wanted the open plan feeling without having a bed in the living room.”

He laughed. “I love it. Your dwelling is very different from my own, but it tells me much about you.”

“Like what?”

“You don't like to feel confined, yet you also want to be cosy and protected. You like to have guests, but you don't want them to stay overnight.” He pointed at the large wooden table in the centre of the room. It had six hand-carved chairs assembled around it, which was five too many most days.

“And you don't like to cook,” he added.

It was scary just how right he was about everything. I hadn't realised that if my cottage was alive, it would be the biggest gossip in the village. And that said a lot, considering Mrs Baker next door knew more about my schedule than I did myself.

“I rarely have the time to cook,” I defended myself. “And it's not as much fun if you cook just for yourself. I do quite like to do it for other people. But you saw how long it took us to get here from Glasgow. Most of my friends live in the city and don't want to come all the way out here.”

“I prefer this over the city. Too loud, too dirty there. And the buildings weren't tall enough.”

“If you want skyscrapers, you'll have to go to London. We don't have those here.”

“Sky-scrapers?” he repeated slowly. “Do they reach the edge of your atmosphere?”

I laughed. “No, their name makes them sound bigger than they are. They're tall, but not that tall.”

“Back home, our cities reach so high that they almost touch space,” he said, eyes turning dreamy. “Gharrgoils like to roost up high. We used to live in caves and mountains, but when we moved into cities, we built them as high as possible. The more money and power you have, the higher you live.”

“And how high did you live?” I asked before realising that maybe that was a little insensitive.

Cairn grinned. “High enough to see the curvature of the planet. I was not as rich as my neighbours, but I fought many battles that raised my standing.”

I noticed we were still standing by the door. I motioned him to sit on my sofa, a restored Chesterfield that I had patched with tartan fabric. It was a colourful mess and I loved it to bits. Cairn pulled his wings tight against his back and cautiously sat down, as if he expected the sofa to collapse underneath his weight.

How heavy was he even? Were there still parts of him that were stone?

So many questions, yet I didn't know where to start.

“This world is so soft,” Cairn said quietly. “Soft fabrics. Soft beings. Even your language is soft. It is so very different from home.”

I wasn't sure whether to take that as an insult. I didn't like being called soft. I had spent all my adult life fighting stigma in a job where I was always the only woman. I'd grown harder than I'd thought possible. I'd become one of the guys, swearing, drinking, moving like them. I wasn't soft.

“What is your world like then?” I asked, then cringed. I sounded harsher than I'd intended.