Alien Knight Blind Date Disaster

to look down at himself, then up at Isabella. His brows lowered. “I do not glow.”
“Okay. Whatever you say, Commander.” She purposely used his title, the one his men had used, and he did not refute or deny it. Interesting. “So, are you going to tell me who just tried to kill us?”
“No.”
Isabella coughed. “Excuse you?”
He shook his head. “You misunderstand. I cannot tell you because I do not know who they were.”
Well, she had an idea. The sleezy street gang she’d been in contact with had helped her set up this meeting, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. At least not until she found out how Falden knew about it, and why he had shown up instead of her black market contact. Not only had her contact not shown up, but Falden and his Caldorian buddies had crashed the party, along with some freakish alien with green sludge for blood.
And that freakish alien had said he was going to take the female. Take her where? And to whom? Had she been set up? Was she being hunted? Or had they been after Falden and his invisible friends? That kind of tech would sell for a fortune.
Safely out of the immediate area, she hit the gas, grinning to herself when the back of his thick skull hit the headrest. She was no stranger to fast cars and even faster getaways. “So you don’t know who attacked us?”
“I do not.”
“How is that possible? They were after you.”
“They were humanoid. Possibly from Earth. There are many planets with humanoid species. Earth is just one of them. And there are others who are able to mask their true identity and walk among you.”
“So…you’ve been attacked by other aliens? Aliens that look like us? People from Earth?”
“Many times.”
“Well that one had green sludge for blood. So what kind of alien was he?”
“That narrows the choices to several dozen possibilities.”
“What? Please tell me that was just a bad joke.”
Before he could respond, a black SUV shut off its headlights and came up on her bumper. Close. Too close. “No. No. No.”
She downshifted and stomped on the gas pedal, putting distance between her car and the aggressive driver behind them, hoping the gut feeling she had was wrong. When a bullet shattered the back window, she cursed and turned a sharp right, the car’s wheels squealing on the pavement as she fought to recover from the spin.
“They’re shooting at us. With real bullets. The kind that kill people.” Why did she feel the need to state the obvious? But then he seemed completely calm. Maybe he hadn’t freaking noticed the glass shattering!
“Drive faster. Their vehicle is large and cumbersome. You should be able to outmaneuver them, even with this primitive machine.”
She took another turn, spinning the back end of the car in a semicircle to make the sharp cut onto the highway on-ramp. Accelerating with every ounce of speed she could pull from the car, she turned off the headlights and wove between traffic until she could hide in front of a large vehicle nearly identical to the one following them.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his hand clenched around the door handle.
“Hiding. And waiting.”
“For what?”
“This.” With the attacker’s SUV trailing too far back to see their small car’s movement from their angle, she crossed two lanes of traffic and took an exit at high speed. Racing to the bottom, she turned the corner and drove beneath the freeway’s overpass, pulled to the side of the nearly deserted industrial road and waited.
One full minute passed. Two. When five full minutes had gone by with no sign of pursuit, she turned the lights on and creeped onto a side street. She knew this area well, had been tracking black market dealers down here for a couple of months. She had even signed a lease on a studio loft nearby under a false name so she would have somewhere to hide her work and, more importantly, a place to lay low if her investigation became too dangerous. She knew every dark alley, deserted building and hiding place in this section of the city. But hiding wasn’t her goal, at least not tonight.
“I’ll take you back to your base now.” She’d take him home, get inside, shake him loose and have a look around the Caldorian base. She had to get to Sevron, tell him what she knew. Get some answers. But Sevron had stopped responding to her messages. He’d disappeared. The official word from the Caldorians was that nothing had happened. The explosions and sounds of battle, the fires a few weeks ago were nothing more than “training exercises.” She rolled her eyes. The military had been using that lie for decades. And her gut was telling her that was a lie. Beyond that, Sevron had left her very specific instructions.
Trust no one but the king, Dagan.
As in NO ONE. Sevron had warned her that there was a traitor on the Caldorian base, someone on the inside, and he didn’t know who it was. Was this Falden the traitor? How had he known where she would be? And if he wasn’t the black market contact she’d been supposed to meet, as she very much suspected he was not, then who the hell was he and how did he get here?
With Sevron not responding to her messages, she’d tried to reach the king. But getting past the bureaucrats when she couldn’t tell them who she really was or what she really wanted had proved futile. Getting past the perimeter security? Impossible. She’d tried. More than once. The last time they caught her, they’d threatened to call the human authorities and ask that she be charged with trespassing with the intent to commit a terrorist act, and incarcerated.
What the Caldorians wanted, they got. Slap the terrorist label on her, and she’d rot somewhere until she was dead. And who knew how long that would be if the government—or the Caldorians—found out what she knew.
At the very least she