Alien in the House

worldview and talents.
    But as I wasn’t really saying, my talents tend to lie in areas most people ignore, like talking to space animals and catching on to whatever the crazed evil geniuses have going before it’s too late.
    It’s been quiet for a few months, relatively speaking, which is nice and all, but tends to make me a little jumpy. Because quiet rarely means things have settled down. Quiet—in the almost three action-packed years of my experience with the A-Cs of Earth—means that the bad guys are readying for the Execution Phase of the next major conspiracy to take over the world or worlds and destroy everyone I know and love.
    So I’m paying attention, because they’re not going to catch us with our pants down, so to speak, while I’m still on duty. Of course, I don’t always look for evil bad guy conspiracies. But when I do, I make sure to look everywhere.
    •   •   •
    That’s right. I
am
the most interesting, bad-guy-foiling, sometime-superbeing-exterminating, mutated diplomat for an outer-space principality in the world. Okay, in the galaxy. What can I say? I get around.



CHAPTER 1
    “T HIS IS THE THIRD representative to become incapacitated in as many weeks,” the TV announcer’s voice shared.
    “This is the only one incapacitated,” Jeff corrected, presumably for my benefit, seeing as the TV announcer wasn’t going to hear him unless said announcer had the best hearing in the galaxy.
    “What do you mean?” I paid as much attention to the news as I did to the inner workings of the common housefly, which was to say, not at all. Hey, just because it was sort of my job to pay attention to the news didn’t make me excited about it. I had a husband who seemed to live to stay on top of things, after all.
    “I mean the first two are dead. This one’s in the hospital.”
    “Anyone we know? Knew?”
    “Yes.” Jeff sighed the sigh of a husband who’s required to stay on top of things because his wife refuses to. “The two who died were from Alabama and Oregon, and they died in a car crash. This latest one is from Montana, and he’s got an extreme case of pneumonia. Because he’s in his late eighties, the prognosis isn’t good. You’ve met all of them at one time or another. I’d tell you their names, but I don’t have the desire to play your version of Name That Tune.”
    “Why don’t you find a
Love Boat
or
Fantasy Island
marathon going on? You’ll enjoy those so much more than the constant barrage from CNN and C-SPAN.”
    “This is part of the job of being the Head Diplomat, baby.”
    I managed not to say that it was the boring part. There were lots of boring parts to our jobs now. They were interspersed with lots of terrifyingly exciting parts, the most recent of which had exposed the fact that aliens lived on Earth to the majority of the world’s population. Change, it was good for you, right?
    There was a knock at our door. Seeing as Jeff was engrossed in the afternoon news, and seeing as I didn’t want to have to catch him up on whatever he’d miss in the minute and a half it would take to answer said door, I dutifully trotted out of our humongous living room to do the job. Helpful, that was me all over. Since we lived on half of the top floor of the American Centaurion Embassy, this also wasn’t me taking any kind of risk. Whoever was knocking lived here.
    Opened the door to find our top floor neighbors standing there, otherwise known as Christopher and Amy Gaultier-White. True to form, Christopher was glaring. Patented Glare #5, to be precise. “Have you heard the news?” he asked as he strode in past me and headed for the living room and his cousin, my husband.
    Amy sighed. “He’s a little stressed.”
    “That’s his natural state of being. But, shocking one and all, yes, I’ve heard the news. If the news is about dead and dying politicians.”
    Amy looked shocked for a moment. She was one of my best friends from high school, so she knew about my “love” of the news. She recovered quickly. “Oh. Jeff told you?”
    My turn to sigh. “Yes, yes, fine. I was busy.”
    “Doing what? Jamie’s at daycare right now.”
    “I was wrapping her presents.” Our daughter’s first birthday loomed, and, since she was born on Christmas day, I felt it was unfair to do combo presents, meaning I had a lot of things Jeff felt were far too much for a one-year-old to be wrapped, bagged, tagged, and hidden.
    Sure, as the daughter of a Jewish father and