Page 7 of The Alien's Cruel Starfrost Domain

“Get a coat,” he grumbled, and this time I was the one who frowned. My stepfather had never before shown any concern for my comfort—or well-being, or anything else a reminder to get my coat might suggest.

But before I could ask him about it, he ordered me out to his pickup.

Like an idiot, I went.

Mama had died in a hit-and-run, mowed down by a driver a witness said had almost certainly been driving drunk. In the moment, I didn’t see the irony of a drunk Roland leading me to my own doom. Looking back on that day, I find the whole situation darkly funny—or I would, if I ever allowed myself to think about it.

I didn’t fully understand the magnitude of my mistake until Roland got behind the wheel and began careening down the back roads of our tiny Texas county, muttering all the while. I caught only part of what he said, words like “stupid little bitch” and “thinks she can mooch off me forever.”

I wasn’t crying—not yet. Instead, I begged Roland to let me drive us home, promised he’d feel better once he had some sleep, offered to make him coffee, anything.

His broad shoulders curved forward, and he ducked his head, leaving him hunched over the steering wheel as my words battered against him. He stayed focused on the road and never answered me.

In fact, he didn’t say a word until he’d dragged me out of the truck and into what I initially assumed was a flea market, the kind that pop up all over the Texas Hill Country as soon as the weather warms up in the spring or cools down in the fall.

For a moment as we made our way through the gate in the barbed wire fence, relief actually swirled through me. Roland couldn’t be planning anything too terrible, right? Not if he was taking me to a flea market.

He’d been acting weird, sure, but not so strange I couldn’t convince myself it was all in my head.

That’s what I thought—I’d been imagining things—right up until the moment I finally looked, really looked, at the people manning the stalls.

Their faces were wrong, gray and lumpy, their bodies twisted and misshapen under their clothing, and as we walked by them, they all called out the same words. “Come buy, come buy!”

Sometimes they added descriptions of their wares—silver and gold, diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, strange fruits glistening in the dawn sunlight just peeking over the horizon—but mostly they repeated that odd phrase, their voices blending into a hideous chorus.

I didn’t realize they weren’t people at all until later.

Too much later.

“Come on, Lara,” Roland growled, tugging at me harder. “We’re late.” I blinked in surprise. Roland almost never called me by my name. For a while after he and my mother had first married I hadn’t been certain he even knew it.

We made our way deeper into the field, moving through the rows of stalls. Other than the creepy vendors, it struck me as being just like any other outdoor market I’d ever been to. Some of the stalls had cotton or vinyl awnings, half-tents set up to cover the tables. Other vendors had their wares stacked on tables in front of them and on the ground around them.

But the one time I glanced over my shoulder toward the entrance, I could no longer see it.

That’s when I realized the stalls in this marketstretched out into the distance, going much farther than I thought they should be able to, given the size of the field I had seen when we parked the pickup.

There were people milling around, as well, and it hit me with a shock that felt almost physical—there were many more people here than could have come from the few vehicles parked in the almost-empty parking lot by the entrance. I tried to convince myself there must be another parking lot somewhere, another area where the vendors loaded and unloaded. But even then, I didn’t believe it.

I should have listened to my instincts. I should have wrenched my arm out of Roland’s harsh grip and run.

Somehow, though, I knew it was already too late.

When I began to see the other market patrons—the fantastical shapes, the pointed ears, the fluttering wings, the extra joints and crooked noses and glittering, unbelievable beauty of some of the creatures wending their way among the stalls—I didn’t even gasp. I must have decided it was a dream, though I don’t remember consciously thinking it.

The brown, dead grasses left from the end of summer had been trampled down by the passage of hundreds of feet, and my tennis shoes occasionally kicked up clumps of dirt. That seemed real enough. But nothing else around me did.

Roland never let go of my arm, and any time I tried to stop to examine something that caught my eye—not because I was interested in buying anything, but because I could not help myself—he jerked me along, still muttering under his breath, although now I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

“Roland!” a voice called out, and his head whipped around. “Over here,” the voice continued, and with a wave, Roland made his way down a side aisle of the market.

I was so dazed that when Roland finally jerked me to a halt, I stumbled against him, then reached up to push my hair out of my eyes.

Where we’d stopped, an odd little man stood behind a battered wooden table. Unlike the other vendors, he didn’t have anything out for sale—just a ledger and several pens. Not regular ballpoint pens,either, but the truly old-fashioned kind with feathers on one end and a pot of ink next to them.

He was even weirder than the people I had seen manning the tables toward the entrance. His skin was a mottled gray and green, his shoulders hunched under the off-white linen shirt he wore, its sleeves rolled up to accommodate his short arms. His eyes were completely black, as if the pupils had swallowed both the irises and the whites, leaving only bright buttons reflecting the light, and his smile curled up on one side of his mouth, revealing glimpses of what looked like a sharp yellow fang.

He looked like an unholy cross between a human and a frog, with his skin slightly damp and his body squat and round, his arms too short, his legs slightly bent.

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