Page 5 of King from the Sky

Chapter Three

“So, what the hell are you?” Emily asked.

She had almost expected the man to be dead or gone when she came back to the animal hospital with her car. It had taken her just twelve minutes to run the four blocks home and back and she was starting to feel pretty good about the food and alcohol she had consumed that night. With all that had happened to her and as fast as she’d just ran she was sure she had burned up all those evil calories. Yay fitness! She almost laughed at the insanity that rolled through her brain sometimes.

“What?” the man asked.

“Don’t play games with me. This is serious. What the hell are you?”

The man took a deep breath. “My name is Alex. As you may have guessed I’m…not like other guys.”

Emily glanced at his corny sense of humor, but she did feel a zing of sexy attraction for that smile he was sporting.

“Are you talking about the lion thing? Yeah, I kind of noticed that,” Emily replied, laying on the sarcasm extra thick.

“Yeah. I’m a shifter. I possess the power to turn into a lion, which apparently is a rare thing on this planet.”

“What do you mean ‘on this planet’?” Emily asked. What the hell was he trying to say? Being vague and dancing around questions was more of a woman’s thing---or a politician’s.

“I can’t tell you any more,” Alex said. “I’d be putting your life in danger if I did.”

“I want answers. Or I’m calling the police right now,” Emily said.

Alex was silent for a moment. Finally, he spoke again.

“Ok, I’m not from Earth. I come from a planet called Zuha. It is about eighty light years away from here.”

“What? Are you serious?”

“Do you really think there is another rational explanation for what you just saw?” Alex responded, wincing in pain as he grabbed his stomach. He was applying pressure and trying to stop the bleeding.

Emily’s mind began to spin around what Alex had just told her. But she knew he was right. There was no other explanation for what had happened right before her eyes. The man beside her was no man at all; he was an alien. She wanted to ask him how many others were just like him. What was he doing here? How had he been shot, but the hospital was looming a few hundred feet in front of them.

There would be time for questions later. He was going to die if he didn’t get some help ASAP, though it was nothing short of miraculous that he had not died yet given how much blood he had lost and the length of time the bullet had been in his system.

She pulled up in front of the ER and ran inside.

The woman at the front desk was definitely bored out of her mind as she sat there reading a book on her phone and occasionally glancing at her computer screen. It was a slow night apparently in the ER of their small little town. Emily was about to change all of that.

“I have a gunshot victim! I need help!” Emily yelled only a few feet from the lady’s face.

Emily ran back out of the hospital screaming that he was outside. She ran to the passenger’s side seat and carefully started to ease Alex out of the car. She noticed that he had been considerate enough to only bleed on the towels she had placed over the seat of the car for him.

Just then a few EMT’s arrived with a wheel chair and quickly wheeled him inside.

Emily waited in the waiting room while Alex was wheeled to a room in the back. She was in shock that the man had been able to even carry on a conversation with an injury like that. It was beyond insane.

Emily had avoided the questions that the admittance representative had asked her about Alex’s identity and his insurance. She explained to the woman that she did not know the man. She had found him shot in the street by himself and she didn’t want to waste time waiting for an ambulance. The woman didn’t seem to really buy the whole story, but it was enough to buy some time until Alex could give them some real answers or simply vanish into thin air. That was a possibility too. He might never come back out again.

Emily had so many questions to ask him about life and the universe. How had he got here? What had happened to him? How did he get such an amazing smile? Emily had tried to forget that sexy smile and those amazing dimples of his, but she just couldn’t get it out of her head.

It had been a while since a man had such a profound effect on her and she was starting to seriously wonder what in the hell was wrong with her? She had ignored her social life for months and had never taken her dating life that seriously anyway (or at least she pretended not to—it helped to hide the pain of rejection) and now here was this mystery man who wasn’t even a man at all. He was a bona fide alien. What had her life become?

Or was he really an alien? It was possible that he’d made the whole thing up. But she knew what she had seen. She was not crazy and she had not been hallucinating. The man was turning back and forth from man to lion repeatedly in front of her. It had not been a hallucination. There was no way it was humanly possible unless you were not human. She didn’t believe in monsters or ghosts, so it had to be the truth.

Come to think of it she didn’t believe in aliens either. She had never really given much credibility or real thought to the idea that there was life on other planets. It had never been something she was concerned with and she had accepted that she would probably never get to explore other galaxies in her lifetime. If she had been born three thousand years into the future than that might have been a possibility.

The more she thought about it the more mixed her feelings became. Was it weird that she found the alien thing to be incredibly sexy and interesting? Was she really that demented? She groaned to herself at the possibility that anything could ever happen between them. Was he even human? He appeared to be an ordinary man who was able to shift into a lion. As that though raced through her mind she had to laugh out loud. Jesus, Emily. What have you gotten yourself into? What is wrong with you? You can’t develop a mini-crush on some guy who is from outer space.

She wondered what her friends would say if they were there and knew the story. Laura would have told her to go for it but the others might have been severely freaked out. She was sure of it. She didn’t even know why she was waiting anymore. Did she really have to find out everything about him that badly?

The short answer was yes. Definitely, yes.

Emily moaned as she closed her tired eyes to let them rest. Her eye balls felt like they were being scraped out by some mad man with a scalpel. She had decided to wear contacts tonight and she was paying for it now. Why didn’t she just stay with the glasses? Because her friends would have razzed her about it all night long. That was why. She knew her friends meant well, but sometimes their constant joking at her expense got the better of her and it was always worse when they had been drinking. But she knew they loved her and would never want to hurt her feelings. They just wished that she would get out a bit more and get excited about life.

She had tried to tell them over and over that she loved her life, but to them real life was all about finding romance. Sometimes her friends were worse than the popular girls clique on a teenage Soap Opera. It was pathetic.

So pathetic.

She woke up hours later in the waiting room to a cop shaking her shoulder.

He looked upset.