“But this makes no sense,” Karmelite protested. “The appropriate thing for your family to do at this point would be to try to punish me.”
“No, not at all. You did the right thing by telling the truth, so the appropriate thing to do is reward you.” Mawmaw was beaming now. Her faith in basic decency had been restored.
“I side with Scaly Satan’s mother on this one,” Marjan said. “The appropriate thing to do would be to pun— awk!” she finished as Mawmaw shoved a cookie into her mouth. “Nopf fair. Ypf knpf I cpnt refift these,” she complained, mouth full.
Jaspar’s mother stood there, shaking her head, with a frown on her face.
“What was that you said, dear?” Mawmaw said.
“I didn’t say— urpf!” Karmelite said as Mawmaw shoved two cookies in her mouth.
“Should have seen that coming,” Liza said smugly.
Karmelite chewed the cookies.
She grabbed several more. Everybody stared at her.
“What?” she said defensively. “I am not entirely convinced that there is no poison in these sugar circles. My constitution is extremely strong. Therefore, the more of these sugar circles I consume, the less likely it is that anyone else will perish from the human’s treachery.”
And with that, she grabbed the plate of cookies and walked out of the house.
“I’ll make you a copy of my recipe,” Mawmaw called after her, “but I’ll leave out the poison!”
La La had retracted her teeth. She walked over to Jaspar, tugged on his legging, and held out both her paws.
“I accept your apology,” Jaspar said to her, and gave her two pieces of candy from his bag. She stuffed them both in her mouth right away and did three back flips.
“I believe that you owe me a date that should start, say, at lunch time,” Jaspar said triumphantly to Liza.
Liza glanced at her grandmother. She needed time to think. Her emotions were in a whirl. The last several days had been terrible. When she’d believed that Jaspar had been lying to her, the sense of betrayal had cut her to the bone. She’d craved his presence all the time, and had to fight to resist it. She’d tossed and turned all night, yearning for his warmth, his kiss, his touch… She’d forced herself to wall him out. If she let him back in, could she ever escape? What if he betrayed her for real? She didn’t know if her heart could survive that.
He won’t, a little voice deep inside her whispered.He would never betray you, and you know it.
She rubbed her face with her hands. Stall. She needed to stall. “I need to help my grandmother. We’re still getting a lot of customers.”
Mawmaw shook her head. “Oh, don’t worry, your grandfather and I can handle it, and I brought in a couple of people from town to help out.”
“Seriously?” Liza glared at her, eyes narrowed. “Why is everyone conspiring against me to force me to date this highly questionable alien?”
Her grandmother shrugged. “He kind of grows on you, actually,” she said.
Liza snorted. He had indeed grown on her, but not in a way that she was going to discuss with her grandmother.
“You’re just a sucker for romance stories that start at Christmas,” Liza said. She glanced at Jaspar. “All right, you win,” she said. “What kind of date are we going on?”
“I will show you my ship,” he said.
* * * * *
That afternoon, as Jaspar and Liza were headed to the hovercraft, Korl hurried over, waving at them.
“We spotted some unusual Harbinger activity,” Korl said to Jaspar. “We’ve seen a group of them wandering around in an area several miles outside town. They’ve been there several times. There’s nothing there – no buildings, no houses, just dead apple trees. We just saw a new group head out there today, about half a dozen of them.”
Jaspar frowned in thought. “There are no other structures out there at all? A secret weapons stash, perhaps?”
Korl shook his head decisively. “No, none at all. We would have read their energy signatures.”
“Who owns that property?” Jaspar asked him.
