Page 21 of Etched in Stone
“I got you. I got you.” He didn’t ask Ray what he wanted. The bartender turned and mixed and returned with a neon purple concoction for her and a whiskey, neat for Ray.
“Twice in a week. I’m glad you’ve been taking my advice,” the bartender said.
Jesse took a sip from her drink. The thing was a perfect concoction of sweet and sour, cold and salty. She nodded, smiling, as the alcohol kicked in.
“Good, eh? What’s your name, sweetie?” he said, flashing a smile himself. Ray didn’t seem as friendly.
“Pablo tried to dump her off a roof,” Ray told him, getting right to the point.
“I see. I think I might have discovered why Rose is all hot to trot about your little thing.”
Wait, was Jesse the little thing in this set?!
“They started blinking,” the bartender said, leaning over the bar as if were telling a great secret.
“Blinking,” Ray said. He didn’t sound very credulous.
“Blinking?” Jesse repeated.
“Blinking.” The bartender leaned back to gauge Ray’s reaction. Ray’s hand tightened so hard onto the edge of the bar that his claws dug into the wood.
“Hey, easy on the furniture.”
“Sorry. Are you sure? I’ve been waiting for that blasted thing to blink for over a thousand years.”
“What can I tell you? That’s the rumor on the street.”
“Clue me in, please,” Jesse said. The punch was beginning to hit her, but she didn’t think that she’d drunk enough to be this confused.
“The sigil,” Ray began. “If it blinks, it means it’s activated. If it’s activated it means two things.
First of all, someone has either fished the beacon out of the Atlantic or constructed a new one.
Secondly, it means that someone out there has come to retrieve us.”
“You mean there’s an alien ship out there?” Giles asked, eyes growing wide as they glanced upward.
“Giles, they’ll be camouflaged and shielded against detection. And they won’t come down. It’s against the code. They’ll bring us up.”
Jesse sat silent for a moment. Ray was leaving. Leaving Earth. He was going home and leaving her to herself. If he left, was there any guarantee that the Rose Syndicate would leave her alone?
Would she be safe once he went back to his space ship in the sky?
“How long do you have?” she asked him suddenly.
She meant, how long do we have? How much time did she have before she was completely alone in the world?
“I don’t know. I’d have to gain access to a sigil.”
“Don’t you have one?” the bartender asked.
“I did. But the Rose Syndicate stole it when they captured me. It must have been destroyed when-”
Ray broke off and looked down, shaking his head. “Otherwise I would have known that it had gone active. We’re attuned to only one, but we can activate any that we find.”
“So you have to locate one and then check it to see,” Giles said.
“Yes.”
