Page 31 of Claimed by an Alien Warrior

After Las Vegas, they found themselves in the desert again; it stretched on in all directions, always seeming to lead to distant, blue-tinged mountains. The traffic thinned, but not enough to ease Zoey’s nerves. She caught herself on numerous occasions watching for cliché black SUVs in her mirrors, expecting government agents in black suits and ties to leap out, toss a bag over Rendash’s head, and wipe her memory with some high-tech gadget.

They took their first rest stop after an hour of driving. Zoey glanced out across the desert as she exited the restroom. There was a certain beauty to it, though she couldn’t stand the heat or the blazing sun in such places during most of the year. The December temperatures made it bearable; today was cool and clear, the sort of weather she could appreciate.

To the south, a trio of aircrafts — made into tiny specks by the distance — sped through the sky. Her anxiety increased, constricting her chest.

People are flying around in helicopters all the time. It’s nothing.

But what if they were the same ones that had been searching for Ren?

Zoey returned to the car, opened the door, and pulled out her road atlas. She flipped through the pages until she found their current position. Using the little scale ruler and her fingers, she measured the distance back to where she’d found Rendash, pausing to blow warm air into her chilled hands as she turned pages from Nevada to California.

She knew her estimate was inaccurate, but they were somewhere around one hundred and fifty miles from the rest stop where he’d entered her car. Would the search area really have inflated that much since last night? It seemed unlikely, but she couldn’t dismiss the nagging fear that they somehow knew Ren was with her. Should she have told the cop she was heading somewhere else?

For the first time, she was glad Ren had destroyed her phone. There were stories on the internet all the time about the government and criminals alike hacking into phones, accessing data, and tracking them via GPS.

“I’m here,” Rendash whispered from behind her, making her jump.

“Ugh! I’m never going to get used to that,” Zoey whispered back. She stepped away from the car, checked for onlookers, and opened the back door. The brush of his invisible body as he passed her was equal parts eerie and exciting.

The car wobbled as it took his weight. Would her shocks hold up to carrying him for untold miles?

Why the hell am I worried about my shocks, of all things?

She tossed the map onto his lap, shut the door, and hurried to the driver’s seat. She started the car and continued their journey.

They crossed into the northwestern corner of Arizona an hour later, where the terrain grew decidedly rockier, and forty more minutes took them over the Utah border.

They stopped twice more — once for gas and food, and once to stretch their legs and pee. Rendash didn’t take any chances; he turned invisible before she entered the parking lots, and she slipped her purse into the back seat as an excuse to open the door and let him out without looking like a crazy person.

Each time they stopped, she expected him to return with the foundation scrubbed off his face, but he kept it on despite his complaints.

As they drove on through Utah, the mountainous terrain that had remained in the distance for most of their drive grew steadily closer to the road, much of it dusted with snow. The snow only deepened as they turned onto I-70 and moved up into the mountains. She’d turned the heater on to high as the day progressed. Too soon, the sky began to dim with the approach of evening.

“Is there snow where you’re from?” Zoey asked.

“What is snow?”

Zoey swept a hand out to one side, indicating the land spread out around them. “All that white stuff. It falls from the sky in winter.”

“Yes. But only in certain places. Much of my home world is too warm for it.”

“It doesn’t snow where I lived in California, either, but it did a lot in my hometown in the Midwest.”

“I have been on a number of planets where it snowed heavily. It…” She saw him shake his head from the corner of her eye, and he said no more.

“It what, Ren?”

He sighed. “It serves as a stark contrast to freshly spilled blood.”

“Oh.” She was sorry she’d asked, but she couldn’t leave it on that disturbing note. “I used to love it when I was little. My dad and I played in it for hours, throwing snowballs, building forts and snowmen. Our fingers and toes would be so cold by the time we went inside that we were sure they’d fall off. Afterwards, he’d make hot cocoa to warm us up.” She smiled. “He always gave me extra marshmallows.”

“You speak of him with great fondness in your voice.”

“Yeah,” she said softly.

“Is he who you are traveling to see?”

“No, I was going to stay with a friend.” Her fingers tightened on the steering wheel, and her chest ached. It always did, when she thought about her dad. “My father…died when I was ten. He had cancer.”

---