Chapter Two
She should feel sad, devastated and even angry, but instead Liz Parker felt none of those things. She felt no need to corner Michael and learn what had happened to Max until she could recite every detail from memory. No, she had displayed little or no interest in the incident, as Meta Chem was now calling it, or even the cover story the Sheriff and the others had concocted. What was the story again? She shook her head. She honestly couldn't remember, because in the end it didn't matter. It wasn't going to change the simple fact that she still felt nothing, but that hadn't always been entirely the case. She thought as her cold fingers began the steady trek up her middle furiously pushing buttons inside of their holes to cover it up as fast as she could.
In the beginning, there had been fear. For hours after Max confided in her the truth, her brain had been on a loop. He was an alien. That's nonsense her rational side had chimed in, ' aliens didn't exist,' but one did. He thought she was beautiful. It was laughable that with that one little glimpse. She had fallen so hard. She had forgotten one important little thing.
He was an alien.
She wasn't.
There had been more feelings. She had felt them all. Love in the way he used to play with the edges of her hair. Lust in the way he grabbed her and slammed her down on the Crashdown counter. She would never forget the look in his eyes or the feeling of his hands creeping dangerous past the hem of her skirt.
Her fingers stopped in their work as she noticed a missed button. Warily, she pulled on the fabric releasing all the buttons from their holes and just stared at the sight before her.
Hurt still knifed its way through her as she recalled him kissing his 'alien' in the rain. She had just stood there and watched as his hands cupped Tess' face the same way he had always done with her. She had chosen the same inaction as she listened to his mother announce that Tess was his alien leaving her to be what exactly? In all her infinite wisdom, Liz hadn't waited around for an explanation, because at that moment the truth had stared her right in the face.
He was an alien.
She wasn't.
Her eyes drifted down to the sight just above her breasts. The joys of hindsight she thought stretching her hand over her tummy ignoring the green glow that emanated through the splits of her fingers.
She had come back from Florida a little bit older, and little more jaded. She had given up, but he hadn't. He wouldn't, but he had to. It's what his walking, talking older version had taken so many pains to get her to see, right? To rip both of their hearts out to save the world, she placed her hand over eyes as the ache in her head intensified.
She should have told him to get lost. No, her lips twitched upwards. She had a myriad of expletives now at her disposal she liked to use on him first, but there would be no verbal unleashing. He had left her, her harbinger of doom encased in the body she loved.
Together, they turned something with the potential to be beautiful into something twisted and soiled. At that thought, a deadly heat uncurled inside of her.
Caution railed on her to stop, but she was tired of being cautious. Caution had cost her everything. Tess had never been cautious sailing into Roswell and telling her true motives to anyone she could get to listen, but Tess was his alien wife. The woman he touched in a way he would never touch her. A woman who now carried a part of him inside of her that could even be a living breathing entity by now for all that Liz knew.
Yet thousands of miles away, the sometimes human Lizzie Parker had sprung up from her bed screaming as the presence of her fallen lover surged through a connection she had thought had withered and died along with everything else. Had she imagined the whole thing? The play of his hands against her face or the soft tingling that had passed into her from the butterfly kiss he pressed against her lips.
Oh, how she wanted to believe in him and in them. She thought staring down at her chest, but there was just one glaring question that kept getting in the way. One whose explanation had made even less sense to her when he have given it some months ago.
"I wanted to be with someone who was like me."
"Then why did you pick me?" she whispered not having received her answer from her visit to the cemetery.
Instead, a single green spark slithered out from her fingertips slamming into the wall and an object unseen by her. With a mixture of shock and horror, the answer to her question started to take shape. For the first time, she allowed herself to acknowledge the royal seal of Antar glowing where Max Evans' silver hand print had once been. She was finally one of them with the death of the one she had wanted to be an alien for.
Sighing, she finished with her shirt and tucked her wisps of hair back into her bun. Dropping two hair clips, she spun around and tried to scream. For there, lying face down in a pool of gray blood was a silver bodied monster while another crouched over its body.
Holding her hands up, she backed up as the second creature advanced on her on all fours.