Crash Morph: Gate Shifter Book Two (5 page)

And he did, too.
 

Nik, that is.
 

Mean what he said.

“...I would like coffee first,” Nihkil told me, looking away from Gantry for the first time and aiming those now-blue eyes at me. I couldn’t help but notice that his eyes were almost the identical color as Gantry’s. I wondered if Jake or Gantry noticed, then pushed that aside, too.

They
would
notice, eventually.

Maybe that was even the point.

Jake laughed, looking delightedly up at Nihkil, who I assumed Jake had some sort of boy-crush on at this point.

“Oh, sis,” Jake said, confirming my suspicions. “He is simply adorable. Can I keep him? Just one night.” He glanced down Nik’s body again. “...Maybe a long weekend.”

Nihkil barely spared him a glance, other than to take in his expression.

He looked back at me. “Coffee?”

“What am I? Everyone’s waitress?” I muttered, but I pulled myself back to my feet, walking over to rummage around in the cabinets for a more-or-less clean fourth mug. Truthfully, I kind of liked having the distraction. I felt my shoulders tense more than a little when I glanced back at Nik, though. I warned him with my eyes before Nik turned back to face Gantry.
 

Even so, I nearly dropped the Disneyland mug I held in one hand, when I heard Nik’s first words to my pal from special forces.

“I am not human,” Nik said simply.

I turned sharply, glaring at him.

“Nik,” I said. “Not a good idea.”

Nik looked at me, his now-brown eyes placid. “Why not? He is your friend, isn’t he?” He looked back at Gantry. “We will need friends. We will need as many allies as we can find, if we are going to stop Razmun and his people, before it is too late.”

“Nik,” I said, my voice sharper that time. “No...seriously. Not now.”

Nihkil looked only at Gantry.

I saw him measuring the other man with his eyes, barely looking at Jake at all.

Nik had good instincts about people, I knew. I’d seen it before. Despite some of his questionable choices in friends...Razmun and his alter-ego “Ledi,” being chief among them...or maybe because of that, really...Nik had gotten really good at seeing past the surface with people. Somewhere along the line, Nihkil learned how to read people’s faces, too, maybe even better than Gantry himself.
 

Nik was also spooky smart...regardless of whatever he might or might not understand about particular social norms and whatnot.

I suppose he had to be all of those things, being an inter-dimensional space explorer, as well as living as a slave under an alien race. Otherwise, he’d likely be dead, eaten or rotting away in some interstellar prison about now.

Even so, I was a little stunned at how quickly he zeroed in on Gantry over my brother.

“You are a soldier?” he said to Gantry. “A fighter. Is that not true?”

“More or less,” Gantry said, glancing back over his shoulder at me.
 

Seeing his cocked eyebrow, I only shook my head, motioning towards Nik, as if to say,
you asked for it.

I’d pretty much decided to go with Nik’s gut on this one, even if it was already making my palms sweat and causing me to spill coffee on the counter as I wondered what Gantry would do with whatever information Nik gave him.
 

Before Gantry could press Nik again, Irene showed up in the kitchen doorway, wearing her trademark morning kimono over a white tank top and men’s boxers.

“Who’s not human?” Irene said, rubbing her face with one hand.
 

The skin of one cheek and part of her forehead had an uneven ridge embedded into one side, likely from being sweated to her pillow. Her white-blond hair bunched up strangely in the back and on one side of her head, and the black silk kimono hung open, trailing a silk belt.

“Is there coffee?” she asked me.

Giving in to the fact that I was the morning’s coffee girl, I dutifully dumped the dregs of the last pot into her favorite unicorn mug and handed it to her. Then I turned around and dumped out the remaining grounds, washing the built-in, metal filter of her German coffee maker so I could make a fresh pot.
 

I figured we’d need it. It was looking like it was going to be a long morning.

Gantry faced Nik again. He gave my alien friend a puzzled smile. When he next spoke, Gantry’s voice held a note of humor. Still, I might have been the only one to hear the faint thread of real curiosity beneath that.

“You said you aren’t...human?” Gantry said, still watching Nihkil’s face. “So, uh...what is it that you
are,
exactly, friend? Nik, is it?”

“Nihkil, yes.” He took the coffee mug I offered him, sipping some off the top and making the same grimace Gantry always did, without hesitating to take a longer drink. “...I am morph,” Nik added, his irises shifting to a darker brown color as he spoke.
 

He glanced at Jake, pausing briefly on Irene before finally looking at me.
 

“Morph are not from this world,” Nik added. “Truthfully, I am not even sure which dimension I am in currently. I did not see the map for this one,” he added, glancing at me.

He took another longish swallow of the dark roast.

I dumped more coffee grounds into the clean filter. I didn’t really want to look at Gantry or Jake or even Irene at that point.

Still, as Nihkil began to talk, I found myself gradually tensing.

I listened to every word he said, too, even though he talked for awhile.

I’m assuming no one else missed anything Nik said, either, since not one of them broke the silence that entire time, not to laugh at either or both of us, to make sounds of disbelief, to cough, to clear their throats, or even to ask for more coffee.

Nik told them everything.

Well, more or less.

He told them about the morph, how they can shape-shift from birth––well, from the womb really––and how morph take a primary form when they’re first born. He explained that the primary form then served as a kind of “default” for individual morph forever after, and was the one they normally would revert to when wounded or sick.

He told them about the locks. He explained how morph have one person with whom they share their shape-shifting ability at any given point, and that this person can either stop them from shifting, allow them to shift, or compel them to do so.

He told Gantry, Irene and Jake that he used to work for humans, back in his home-dimension, where morph were conquered and then enslaved.
 

He told them about the dimensional portals they called “gates,” and how only morph could pass through them. He told them how every human who tried, prior to me, died pretty much on the spot. Nik also told them how he met me in that alley that night in Pioneer Square, and how I ended up following him back through that portal to Nik’s world after we ran away from a bunch of other morph, from a different planet in his home dimension.

Nik told them about Razmun, how he kidnapped us after pretending to be a human for however-many years while secretly running a morph terrorist organization on the side.
 

Nik explained about the bombing, the third gate, how Razmun wanted us to help him re-locate all of the morph to a human-free world.
 

Nik then explained how he, Nik, wrestled the gate navigation from Razmun and gave it to me so I could bring us all back to Earth. He explained that the “escaped zoo animals” on the golf course were fleeing morph, shape-shifting to get away from the human authorities.
 

Nik also told Gantry, Jake and Irene that he had no idea where any of the several hundred morph who’d come through the portal with us currently were.

Nik told them all of that, and then he stopped talking.

He just sat there, looking at them, and sipping his now-cold coffee.

While he did, there was this really big, really heavy-feeling silence.

“You have no idea where they are?” Gantry said finally, looking over at me before his eyes swiveled back to Nik’s. “None. Whatsoever?”

He said it more like he was confirming a fact, not really asking a question.

“No idea,” Nik said.

I’d seen Gantry’s facial expression change a number of times while Nik spoke, but now, truthfully, I couldn’t get much of a read on him at all.

“So what do you plan to do?” Gantry asked Nik, raising his coffee mug politely to indicate that he wanted some, when I pulled the pot off the warmer and sloshed it in people’s general direction. After I’d poured more for everyone except Jake, I jumped up to sit on the tile counter.
 

By then, Nik had apparently finished thinking about Gantry’s question.

“I have considered that,” Nik said, glancing at me. “I think that I should try to determine if the gate in that golf course could be stabilized.”

“Stabilized?” Gantry said, his voice still unemotional. “So it can be re-used, you mean? Like those two gates the humans were using on your other world?”

“Yes,” Nik said, visibly relieved that Gantry had followed the basics, at least.

I found myself watching Gantry a bit more warily, wondering how he could possibly be as cool with all this as he was acting.

“...Yes,” Nik repeated. “If we can find or create a stable portal from a naturally-occurring gate, it is possible that we can persuade Razmun to take his people somewhere else. Somewhere not here...” he added, as if that part wasn’t particularly clear.

“Can you show us?” Irene blurted, staring at him with much clearer eyes than what I’d seen when she’d first entered the room. “...The shape-shifting thing?”

Jake’s eyes widened at the question, right before he looked back at Nik, nodding enthusiastically at the idea.

Gantry only frowned, but he seemed to be waiting, too.

Nik glanced at me.

Again, I shrugged. Might as well go the whole-hog now.

Anyway, it was probably the only thing that would keep both of us from waking up in straightjackets because Gantry decided I’d gone completely nuts and tried to have me committed along with Nihkil.

Nik stood up from the table.

There was a general scraping of chair legs and moving feet as everyone except Gantry got up and stepped back, giving Nik space. I continued to sit on the kitchen counter, wearing only the long t-shirt and the Hello Kitty underwear, swinging my legs as I clutched my coffee, which I’d missed enough in Nik’s world to still appreciate each and every swallow.
 

Even so, I watched along with the rest of them as Nik took off the black shirt, hanging it over the back of the nearest of the kitchen chairs.

I was curious, in spite of myself.

Apart from the erensyi and the dragon on the golf course, I really hadn’t seen Nik do his thing. His lock had been closed for most of the time I’d known him.

I saw curiosity in Gantry’s face, too, but it barely touched the harder look of skepticism that masked his expression as he stared up at Nik. We’d definitely fallen into the fruitcake category at this point. I could almost see it in those blue irises.
 

Nik had, anyway. Maybe Gantry was still reserving judgment on me, until he heard what I had to say about Nihkil’s story.