Love From Above: A Scifi Alien Romance (Yearning Book 1) Read online

  “That’s not quite the same. And neither of them would believe I wrote it. They’ll think you kidnapped me.”

  That made his eyebrows draw together.

  “Fine,” he said, braking rather suddenly and pulling over into a parking lot that had a phone booth in the corner. “But make it quick. Everyone is looking for us, Lyssa.”

  I nodded and got out of the car, fishing in my purse for coins. I dropped a handful of quarters into the phone and dialed my mom. I only talked to her briefly, telling her that Zoe and I were taking a vacation for a few weeks, and and that she shouldn't worry if she couldn't reach me.

  I didn’t know what to do about my mother at all. Lii had suggested that if we found a safe place, that we could contact her then and maybe bring her to us. It was a crazy idea, but I wasn’t willing to tell her about Lii’thoou and me over the phone, and I also wasn’t willing to fake my death — not yet.

  So I would ask Callie to cover for me until we could figure something out. And I hoped desperately that we could eventually bring my mother to us, even if the idea seemed totally nuts at the moment. The thought of never seeing my mother again was too much for me to contemplate with everything else that was going on.

  When I was done my call to my mother, I quickly punched in Callie’s number— after looking it up on the paper where I had written some of the phone numbers I might need.

  Who has phone numbers memorized anymore? The phone remembers them all.

  “Hello?”

  “Cal,” I said. “It’s me. Please, listen. I don’t have much time.”

  “Lyss? What’s going on? Are you all right? Is Zoe all right? Where are you? Why haven’t you called me?”

  She would have probably gone on, but I interrupted her. “Callie, Callie … I’m fine,” I said. “Remember Lii’thoou?”

  “Yes. Of course. The guy you ran away with.”

  “Well, I’m going away with him. Far away. I won’t be back for a long time. Maybe never.”

  “No, Alyssa, no. Don’t do this.” Callie sounded a little hysterical.

  “I’m going, Cal. And I really shouldn’t be calling you, but I had to say goodbye. I’m happy. Everything is wonderful. He loves me, and he loves Zoe. Please believe me.”

  “Lyssa, please. Don’t do this.” She was crying.

  “I’m going, and you can’t change my mind, Callie. Please be happy for me.”

  She sniffed and I could hear her blowing her nose. “Fine. But be careful, and if you can ever get a message to me, then please do.”

  “Okay. I told Mom that Zoe and I are on vacation for a few weeks. Will you cover for me until I can explain things myself?”

  “Lyssa…”

  “Cal, you know I wouldn’t ask you if there were any other way.”

  “Fine. But don’t take too long to tell her. I don’t like lying to your mom.”

  “I won’t,” I promised. “I love you, sweetie.”

  “Love you too. Be careful out there.”

  “I will. Goodbye, Cal.”

  “Bye, Lyss.”

  I hung up and stared at the phone for a moment, tears rolling down my cheeks.

  When I got back in the car, Lii’thoou put his hand on my thigh. “I really hope we can bring my mother to us,” I said, my voice a little choked up. “Because otherwise, I’m leaving her without saying goodbye.”

  “We’ll bring her, or you’ll get a chance to say goodbye,” he said, keeping his eyes on the road as he turned out of the parking lot.

  “Unless we die before we get off the planet, or once we get off the planet, or…”

  “Lyssa,” he said, glancing at me and accelerating the ancient bucket of rust that we were driving. “Think positive.”

  “Right,” I said. “Think positive. Think positive. Think positive.”

  Just then a state police car pulled out from a cross roads and put its lights on. Another came racing up behind us, siren screaming. And as we flew past an intersection, a third one pulled out, put on its lights, and effectively blocked us in.

  “I am positive…” I said, clutching the broken plastic of my ancient seat as Lii’thoou slammed on the gas. “That we are going to die.”

  22

  Lii’thoou

  “We’re not going to die,” I said, flooring the gas, hoping the pedal itself wouldn’t fall off.

  The car shot forward surprisingly fast, leaving the police vehicles behind us. They gave chase, but I kept going at a ridiculous speed that I thought would shake the car to pieces, and they couldn’t — or didn’t dare — catch up.

  “We’re almost there,” I said, taking a hard right on a dirt road. Alyssa and Zoe slid across the seat to the other side of the car. “Sorry.”

  A hubcap flew off on the turn, and I had to slow down almost immediately; but that didn’t matter, because so did the cops. Soon, we were bouncing down a rutted road that led up into the hills.

  “There goes another hubcap,” Alyssa muttered as we crashed into yet another pothole. She was holding Zoe in the back, and I felt terribly guilty about putting the little girl in danger by driving so fast and crazy.

  “The police cars are gone,” Alyssa announced, twisting around to see behind us.

  “Good,” I said. “See? Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “Uh oh,” she said, in a worried tone.

  “What?” I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that three black SUVs had replaced the police cars following us. And the SUVs were handling the road much better than this old car. They were gaining on us.

  “Shoot, that’s the FBI, right?” Alyssa said. I didn’t know why she was asking, because she would know better than me.

  I shrugged. Probably.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said as we arrived at a small field. I parked and jumped out, handing Alyssa the backpack and picking up the little girl. “Let’s go.”

  I held the baby in my arms, clutching her carefully to me. I honestly didn’t know how these humans managed with so few arms. Zoe was waking up, but still sleepy. We jogged as quickly as we could up the path that led into the hills and to my spaceship.

  Suddenly, there were gunshots behind us. “Run,” I yelled, beginning to tear up the slope behind Alyssa. She was fast, and I ran as hard as this human body could to keep up with her, protecting Zoe with my body.

  “Left,” I said, pushing myself harder. “Go left.”

  Alyssa followed the trail that was practically nonexistent, and we came out on the side of a rock-covered hill. She scrambled over the rocks, twisting around every so often to see that I was still coming with Zoe. Bullets ricocheted off the boulders, and Alyssa glanced back, her eyes afraid.

  “It’s okay,” I called out to her. “We’re almost there.”

  Then there was a familiar humming that made me groan. It was the sound of an almost-silent spaceship. A second later, smoke filled the forest, making the nearly-invisible spaceship even harder to see. A precaution so the humans didn’t see our superior technology, which wasn’t even supposed to be on their planet.

  I tilted my head to look up, and through the smoke I was able to spot Voran’zi’s ship. Laser blasts hit the ground on either side of me. I put on a burst of speed and reached Alyssa, pushing a bouncing, squealing Zoe into her arms. Thank goodness the little girl wasn’t scared. She thought it was all a game.

  “Go,” I said. “It’s just a little farther. A cave.”

  She nodded and ran, with Zoe held tightly against her chest.

  I drew the gun that I had taken from the galactic officer who had tried to arrest me and aimed at the spot on the ship where the cameras were that fed the view screens. I held my breath and fired, scoring what I hoped was a direct hit. Then I shot down the hill in the direction the gunfire had come from, in order to discourage our human pursuers.

  There. That ought to give us a little more time.

  I tore up the trail as fast as I could. When I got to the cave, Alyssa was standing inside, talking quietly to
Zoe and bouncing her. I went straight to the ship, which was shaped like a flattened football and so black it was almost invisible.

  I entered the code, followed by a DNA scan. As soon as it recognized me, it began to glow and a door opened, a ramp shooting out.

  “Come on,” I said, holding a hand out to Alyssa. She hesitated a moment. “You ready?” I said, worried that she had changed her mind.

  “Yes,” she said with a firm nod. “Let’s get out of here.”

  With a determined look on her face, she stepped into the ship, and I grinned at her. “Better buckle in. It’s going to be a little bumpy at first.”

  She smiled back.

  “Bring it on.”

  Alyssa

  Zoe was bouncing in my arms.

  “Car ride?” she said.

  She loved going for rides in the car.

  “Sort of,” I said, strapping her into a seat next to mine. The chair and straps adjusted themselves for her smaller body. “It’s like a car, but it’s called a spaceship.”

  “Space sip,” she repeated.

  “Yes, we’re going to go into space.”

  “Yay!” she said rather madly, probably picking up on my nerves. She clapped her hands and squealed. Lii was busy starting the ship, but he took a moment to give me the happiest look I had ever seen on his face.

  “Everyone secure?”

  I nodded. He had changed into his true form and the human shirt was on the floor, ripped. Returning his eyes to the controls in front of him, he tapped a console, and a view screen appeared in the front of the ship.

  It had four quadrants. One was showing what was directly in front of us. Another had a view of the humans hiding behind rocks and in the forest, waiting for us to descend the hill. The third was a visual on the alien ship hovering above.

  And the last was showing the sky, where I supposed we would be going soon. I felt a little sick to my stomach, but I took a deep breath and reminded myself that this was what I wanted. I loved Lii.

  The ship moved forward, towards the front of the cave, and the exit that was way too small.

  “How are we going to get out of here?” I said, worried. “There’s not room. How did you even get it in here?”

  He didn’t look at me, and I shut my mouth. I would need to trust him in these things. Because I knew nothing about spaceships and how they got in and out of cave mouths that weren’t big enough for them.

  Suddenly there was the sound of a blast, and a large section of the wall disappeared. I felt my eyes go wide.

  Lii’thoou carefully piloted the spacecraft through the hole and then there was another blast. A fifth view appeared, showing what was behind us. The cave looked as if it had never been blasted.

  “What?” I said, flabbergasted. “How?”

  “You know how on your computer you can cut something and then paste it?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s kind of like that. I cut it and stored it in the quantum field, and then when I needed it to be put back, I pasted it back in the same place I took it from. There’s a fine crack that is repaired during the pasting process, so it’s nearly as good as new.”

  “Oh,” I said, already overwhelmed.

  Lii’thoou lifted the spacecraft straight up. “Our ships are cloaked, but I’m going to send another cloud of smoke towards the humans just in case,” he said, busy at the console. “It’ll cover things while we take off, so they won’t see the effects.”

  I imagined seeing all the signs of a spaceship taking off without actually seeing the spaceship. Yeah, that would be pretty odd.

  But humans were stubborn. They would cling to their ignorance, and probably explain it as an odd weather phenomenon like raining frogs or something like that.

  “Okay.”

  “Car ride, car ride, car ride,” Zoe was chanting. It sounded like caw wide.

  With a few swipes, we took off towards the sky, with Voran’zi’s ship close behind us. They waited until they had cleared Earth’s atmosphere before they started shooting at us. Probably to avoid showing themselves to the primitives.

  We must have been moving at extremely high speeds, but it felt as though we weren’t moving at all. Lii’thoou shot at the other ship, and they returned fire. It was all very silent, not like in the movies.

  “Damn,” Lii’thoou said to himself.

  “What?”

  “They’ve hit the shields. They’re down to eighty-two percent.”

  “Oh my God,” I said, feeling so excited. “That’s really a thing?”

  He gave me a bewildered look. “Yes, it’s a thing, and it’s not a good thing.”

  “Oh,” I said, squashing my excitement, as I suddenly realized that I was on an honest-to-goodness spaceship out in space. It was hard to believe.

  I changed my voice to serious. “Right. Yes. Not good.”

  Then I turned to Zoe and gave her a big excited smile. There was another hit to the ship, and we actually felt it knock us to the side.

  “No,” Lii’thoou groaned. “They’ve hit the shield generator. Our shields are down.”

  “Shields down, shields down,” Zoe said and it sounded like sheeds dow.

  “Uh oh,” I said. That did not sound exciting. It sounded dangerous. “What do we do now?”

  Lii’thoou

  As Voran’zi’s ship hit our shield generator and took out our shields, this suddenly seemed much less like a good idea. It wasn’t like before, when there was only me, and whatever risks I took only affected myself.

  I had the love of my life and her child with me. I didn’t want anything to happen to them.

  A moment later, I froze as twenty more Galactic Police Force ships dropped out from faster-than-light speed. There was no way we were getting away from this. We had no shields, and we were surrounded.

  I received a transmission.

  “Request permission to come aboard,” said Voran’zi’s voice.

  “Permission granted,” I said, and Alyssa looked at me with big eyes.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “We’re outnumbered and outgunned,” I said. “We don’t have a choice. I won’t risk you and Zoe in a fight with no shields. We wouldn’t last two minutes, anyways.”

  “Shit,” Alyssa said, then glanced at Zoe. Thank goodness, the baby girl seemed to be distracted by the blinking lights on my console and not paying attention. No doubt the little darling would be chanting that word to the rafters if she heard it. “What do we do, Lii?”

  I shook my head, giving a little shrug. There was a beep, and I glanced at my console. “A ship’s docking,” I told Alyssa.

  “Damn it,” she said, undoing her seat belts and coming to me. I undid mine as well. She wrapped her arms around me and pulled me close.

  “Lyss,” I said, tangling my fingers in her hair.

  She pulled back. “Are they going to take you, Lii?” Her eyes were filled with tears.

  “I don’t know,” I said, trying to memorize her face. “Probably.”

  “I love you,” she said, and kissed me desperately.

  When we pulled away, I gazed into her eyes — tears were rolling down her cheeks. “I love you.”

  The doors to the bridge slid open, and Voran’zi stepped through. She was by herself. I looked into Alyssa’s eyes one more time, and then turned to meet my fate. Wiping at her face, Lyss stepped into place beside me. And I knew she would stand by me for as long as she was able to.

  “Well, Lii’thoou,” Voran’zi said, looking disappointed. “Looks like you’ve screwed up again.”

  23

  Lii’thoou

  “I did screw up,” I admitted. “What are you going to do, Vora? Put me back in jail?

  “You know, you probably should. I’m a real hardened criminal. A danger to society. You sure you want to stand there with me not in cuffs? What if I attack you?”

  She pursed her lips, and I felt a sense of satisfaction that I had gotten under her skin. At least I had that much
control over my life.

  “Mama, mama,” Zoe said, bouncing in her seat and reaching her arms out to Alyssa to pick her up. I swallowed hard, trying not to think about life without these two. Trying not to think about how close we had come to getting away.

  Alyssa went and unbuckled Zoe, picking her up. Then she came back and the three of us stood together, facing Voran’zi.

  My parole officer laughed in derision. “What did you think you were going to do, Lii’thoou, run away and live happily ever after?”

  “That was the idea,” I said, putting one arm around Alyssa. She gave me a sweet look, ignoring the bitter comments Voran’zi was throwing our way.

  “And you thought we wouldn’t catch you?”

  “Not where we’re going,” I said, not telling her where we had planned to go.

  “We would have caught you. The Galactic Police Force has eyes everywhere.”

  She walked over and examined my console.

  “If you were really going to get away, you’d need us to not be looking for you in the first place,” she said, meeting my eyes, and there was an inflection in her tone that I didn’t understand.

  Then I was distracted from it by the sound of Zoe calling me. “Leelee, Leelee,” Zoe said, putting her tiny hand on my shoulder. “Car ride.”

  I held out two of my hands and Alyssa gave her to me. I ignored Voran’zi for a moment and looked at the little girl in my arms.

  “Hey, Zo. No more car rides. You’re going to go home now.” I looked up at Voran’zi, speaking to her. “And you are going to set them up for life with lots of money, a nice house, a reliable car, everything. I’ll surrender.”

  Voran’zi seemed surprised. “Lii’thoou, can I talk to you privately for a moment?”

  “Fine,” I said, inclining my head towards the door that led to the private quarters. “Over here.”

  She followed me off the bridge and into the hall, waited until the door closed, and then turned to me.

  “What are you doing, Lii’thoou?” she said, gazing up into my eyes. The expression on her face was completely bewildered. “Why are you dragging this woman and her child into your mess? It’s not right.”