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“I’ll see you tomorrow, Mr. Cappa.” With a polite nod, she hurried to the car and rode back to her hotel, silently fuming.
She was going to have her hands full with this man. The payoff had better be worth it.
Chapter Five
Ethan
“PrinceA’zal,lookthisway. Your hologram is glitching again.”
Ethan grunted in annoyance and hissed in a low voice. “How many times do I have to remind you? We aren’t on Luxxor.”
“I’m sorry. A lifetime of calling you by your name is hard to break,Ethan.”
Ethan turned the left side of his face away from the lunch crowd in the pub and fiddled with the implanted bracelet on his wrist. The device was programed with an impressive array of options, from teleportation to an invisibility cloak, yet for some reason the setting that controlled his human hologram—the most important feature—refused to work correctly. He brought the bracelet to his mouth and whispered, “Reset hologram.”
The program cloaked him with a static image of himself. To anyone looking his way, he would appear human while the program reset his hologram. The glitch in his human matrix was jeopardizing his ability to remain a part of Earth society. He was enjoying his time on this planet and wasn’t in a hurry to leave preemptively.
A few seconds later, the program was reset. “Better?”
Tristan gave him a subtle once over. “Yes. You can resume charming the ladies.”
Ethan arched a brow. There was only one woman he was interested in charming, and he hoped she’d show for the drink they’d planned. Something unusual happened when he met her yesterday. He’d become familiar with a handful of Earth females since arriving on this planet and all of them had excited his human form. But Kimber McLeedy had caused a deeper, more primal reaction in him. She touched histrueform. The pulse inside his endtax—his second heart reserved to feel love for a mate — had pounded rapidly, flooding him with mating endorphins.
He hadn’t realized such a reaction was possible with a human female. This was the Luxxorian’s first foray on Earth, and they had a lot to learn about this species. They were here for their Ruspa, the celebration of life and relaxation every male Luxxorian enjoyed before entering military service. It was a year-long rite of passage that took place on a pleasure planet where males could enjoy themselves, within reason, of course.
The rules were firm. No taking non-Luxxorian mates. No producing offspring. They had to obey all laws of the planet, and never reveal their true forms. They’d been going to the same pleasure planet for so long that it was second nature. But an environmental problem closed the planet to incomers, and the Ruspa was rerouted to Earth.
Command had studied humans before deciding to use Earth, but the species was still a mystery. They had given Ethan and the others reproductive blockers to prevent DNA spread and carefully crafted their holographic programs to appear as human as possible. But the first gen holograms had glitches, as Ethan was finding out, and it wasn’t ideal. He couldn’t turn purple while speaking to Kimber or have his voice glitch and change or the consequences would be severe.
The Neb was always watching, waiting, ready to scrub the brain of any human exposed to a Luxxorian’s true form.
Tristan poked at the hamburger on his plate. He’d yet to acclimate to Earth food and not for the lack of trying. “We should return to Washington. I’m getting bored here.”
Ethan picked up the burger that Tristan clearly would not eat and took a bite. He’d been thinking of returning to their apartment in Washington lately, but something always stopped him from going. They’d come to Ireland because of the lights. Ethan was interested in the other intergalactic species that lived here. They’d known about them before coming, of course, but didn’t realize the full extent of what the grays—the skwerm — were doing to this planet. He couldn’t think about leaving Dingle without feeling an overwhelming sense of urgency, as if he had unfinished business here. So, they stayed.
It made a bit more sense last night when he met Kimber. For the first time in weeks, the urgency was gone. He couldn’t share that with Tristan. Not yet. He let his friend think they were staying so Ethan could spy on the grays a while longer.
“Are you saying that to discourage me from the skwerm?”
“Yes,” Tristan said quickly. “Your father wouldn’t be pleased.”
“I’m not starting an interstellar war, Tristan. Just monitoring things.”
“The skwerm are a nuisance, not a threat.”
Ethan took a sip of his beer. “Perhaps not a threat to us, but they’ve been preying on humans for centuries. What if they decide to turn their attentions to Luxxor? Shouldn’t we have the advantage of finding out what the humans know about them?”
Technologically advanced, the tall, thin skwerm were a parasite of this galaxy. Masters of abduction and mind-washing, they often performed mysterious experiments on species plucked from their home worlds, sometimes putting them back, sometimes keeping them. He suspected that many of this planet’s reported missing were victims of alien abduction, either killed from experiments or sold on the galactic skin market.
Tristan kept his voice low. “The skwerm would never target Luxxor. We are a military superpower. We would annihilate them.”
That was true. Luxxor had the strongest military force in the galaxy. And soon it would be his turn to serve, even if it was in name only. As the crown prince of Luxxor, he would train but would never see battle, a contingency that infuriated him. He’d rather fight than stand by in the safety of his family’s fortress while every other male risked their life for their planet.
“It didn’t stop them from trying to breech our atmosphere, did it?”
Luxxorian Intelligence had intercepted the skwerm testing equipment that could break through Luxxor’s shielded atmosphere shortly before Ethan came to Earth. Nothing more came of it, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t one day.
“We chased them off like the cowards they are.”
