Damn, getting on her bad side was not a good idea. Not a good idea atall.
Humph.I left her side to take up a perimeter station at the corner of our little hideout. I was tired. I was sleeping and yet so tired. How the hell was thatpossible?
Suddenly, I felt Damien’s energy pulling at me. Turning, I saw that he had come up beside me and held out his hand. In it was a hunk of what looked like a chocolate brownie or something. It lay on a piece of foil, crudely cut but delicious-looking.
“Would you like to try some of Josephine’s famous fudge?” he queriedformally.
Damn, this guy knew all of my weaknesses. I could die in the next ten minutes, so why the hellnot?
I grabbed the whole piece and popped it into my mouth. The second I bit down, creamy peanut butter leaked out onto mytongue.
I moaned. “Oh my God,” I said with my mouth full. “Please tell me she makes these all thetime.”
When I looked up, Damien was watching me with an unreadable gaze. “She does,” he saidfinally.
I just nodded, adjusting my grip on my gun and suddenly uncomfortable alone with him. Being near him seemed intimate, even though we weren’t touching. If I was being completely honest with myself, I was lonely and Damien felt like something that could fill a void, but he was a client so obviously that would be messy. I needed to ask Maxine to set me up withsomeone.
“Rock band,” Damien said randomly, looking out into the green hazy planet’ssurface.
I quirked an eyebrow. “Huh?”
He smiled and my stomach did a few somersaults. This man was unnaturally attractive. “Before the Dream Wars started, I wanted to be in a rock band. Bum around California, touring in a van, and not take over my father’scompany.”
Ahhh. Yes, the game we all played. What would we be doing if the ghouls had never landed. I smiled. “Rock band guys are rough and weathered. You’re toopretty.”
His face lit up and he stepped closer to me. “You think I’m pretty?” His voice washusky.
Not this again.I rolled my eyes, ignoring him. “I wanted to be an oceanographer. Work on saving the ocean and all thatstuff.”
I still remembered the science experiment we’d done in class, where we added dish soap to an oil spill and the oil retreated. I was sure I was going to single-handedly save marine life. Then the ghouls landed and we all were given one job:survive.
“Is that why your favorite color is blue?” He reached out and fingered a lock of my hair. “Like theocean.”
Geez, Damien Striker was intense. Everything about him felt so… penetrating. We were standing in the middle of an alien planet, knowing he was a sentry attraction and they would try to kill us any minute, and he was trying to get to know me? I had to shut this down. It was cute at first, but I was not going to date thisguy.
“Yeah, something like that. Thanks for the chocolate.” I walked away to work the outerperimeter.
The look on his face, the hurt just as I turned, gnawed at mygut.
Chapter Nine
Iwas in a weird mood.I stayed on the perimeter for the next two hours, just scanning the rocky horizon and keeping to myself. We’d dispersed the two Striker 9000 phaser guns to Maxine and Brisk, our front linemen. I had my compact semiauto with a variety of smart bullets, some heat-seeking, some scatter, and then a bunch of the good old lead-filled kind. Best of all, I had my samuraiswords.
Behind our little hide-out was a thick alien treed forest, and ahead of us was a rocky tundra of nothing but sharp shards of molten local sediment. I was just looking out at the rocky landscape when a pink glow in the sky caught myeye.
Dawn.
I knew even though she wasn’t close enough for me to be sure. Her vibration called to me, reached out and caressed the outer bounds of myawareness.
‘Kit is in trouble. Everything is changing,’she said, the words registering deep in mymind.
My eyes widened and I nearly stumbled backward. We’d never spoken from this far away, so I wasn’t expecting to hear her voice in my head. She was still in the sky and descending in her slow and graceful way. I tried not to panic at her words. Galadrias had a weird way of talking, and time was weird to them too. I wasn’t sure if she meant immediate trouble, or the future. And what kind of things werechanging?
‘I’m sorry about your fallen friends.’I didn’t need to tell her I had seen them. She already knew I’d spoken with one of them as theydied.
‘Galadrias weren’t always peaceful,’she said cryptically, and chills rose on myarms.
‘What do youmean?’
