Touched by an Alien

the girls. Both Claudia and Lorraine looked at Martini and Christopher as if they were idiots.
    “Who’d you tell?”
    “Well, the whole hospital wing, for starters,” Christopher said dryly. “He wasn’t breathing, having convulsions, things like that. Made it kind of hard to pretend it wasn’t a big deal.”
    “You couldn’t wait to tell them I’d broken the rules,” Martini growled.
    “I did consider just letting you die, yeah,” Christopher said. He actually sounded cheerful. This was a weird family.
    “Boys? If we can get you to focus for just one moment, what we want to know is if anyone higher up in the organization, say your father, Christopher, made any connections?”
    “My father was supremely disappointed that his nephew had used such poor judgment,” Christopher replied. “And I got a lecture for allowing Jeff to be an idiot. As if anyone could stop him.”
    “You getting the picture for why we’d rather marry an Earth physicist?” Lorraine asked.
    “Earth men are this dense, too.” They needed to know the fantasy wasn’t perfect, after all. “Jeff? Christopher? If we could get you two to stop squabbling and sort of focus here?” They both glared at me. Christopher really had the edge on glaring, though Martini was giving it a go, and, with some work, might give Christopher a run for the glare money.
    “Focus on what?” Martini asked.
    “On the fact that we need to get a lot of Everclear and put it into spray bottles.”
    Both of them looked blank. “What are you talking about?” Christopher asked. “Are you crazy?”
    “No, I’m trying to destroy Mephistopheles and possibly Yates at the same time.”
    They both still looked blank. But they were both still gorgeous, so I could forgive them. I knew without asking that Claudia and Lorraine wouldn’t.
    “From Jeff’s reaction, we’re deathly allergic to alcohol if ingested,” Claudia said, as if she were talking to the village idiots.
    “From what Kitty said, the parasite is affected by it, too.” Lorraine was also talking to idiots, but she wasn’t trying to be kind at all. “If we manage to put this together, we realize alcohol might be the key to stopping Mephistopheles. At least, that’s what the four of us have managed to grasp.”
    “And we’re just sitting here in shock, realizing that the two people who know everything that’s going on, who are also the heads of our agent operations, have also had the key to solving the entire Mephistopheles problem in their grasp for ten years,” Claudia added. “And we are wondering if you can possibly be as dumb as you both appear right now.”
    “I’m just thinking I’m staying in charge of this team,” I offered. “Apparently my two days is trumping your life’s work.”
    Christopher looked as if he couldn’t decide whether to yell, glare, or bang his head against the wall.
    Martini slumped farther down in the chair and leaned his head on his hand. “I hate my life.”

CHAPTER 33
    I SENT CLAUDIA AND LORRAINE OFF to figure out what the best way to spray the alcohol would be. Portable and potent were going to be the most important factors. Reader went off to round up as much high-proof alcohol as possible, using as many agents as were available.
    This left me, Christopher, and Martini with nothing to do. I considered sharing my first drinking experiences with them but decided against it. I cleared my throat.
    “I don’t want to hear it,” Martini snapped.
    “I wasn’t going to say anything. Earthlings are used to making mistakes.”
    “Thanks, we both feel much better now,” Christopher said. “Maybe you can point out what else we’ve been doing wrong all these years. Please wait for my father to be present, though.”
    I rolled my eyes. “Boys, you are both really dancing on my last nerve. You couldn’t have figured it out before today, okay? Even if someone knew alcohol was poisonous to A-Cs, it wouldn’t have meant it would affect Mephistopheles.”
    “Thanks,” Martini muttered.
    “Everyone was just shocked you didn’t see the immediate connection when we identified alcohol as the key element and James reminded us that Yates is a teetotaler.”
    “You’re not clear on the concept of stopping while you’re ahead, are you?” Martini snapped.
    “Not really. Not a lot of good examples of that kind of restraint around here.”
    “You want to tell us why you picked the team you did?” Christopher asked.
    No, I didn’t, because if I