The Dark One

from DuPris. 'You don't know what he is,' Michael said urgently. 'He killed our parents. He-'

'He is the only hope for the beings of our planet,' Trevor interrupted, his gray eyes feverish. 'Without him they will all be sucked into the consciousness. That's worse than death.'

Michael fought for something to say-something to convince Trevor that he had DuPris all wrong, but he didn't have a chance.

'Oh, look at the time,' DuPris exclaimed sarcastically. 'We really must be going.' He grabbed Trevor by the wrist, and their bodies began to disappear.

'No!' Michael yelled. 'Trevor, you can't-'

He tried to make a grab for his brother, but nothing was left of Trevor except his eyes. His gray eyes, almost the exact color of Michael's. An instant later they vanished, too.

'No!' The scream felt like it ripped pieces of Michael's flesh from inside his body on the way out. His brother had joined up with DuPris. His brother.

'You want to know what happened to your father, Kyle?' Isabel asked, in full-on ice princess mode. 'That thing killed him.'

'He's dead? My dad's dead?' Kyle asked, his voice flat. He was still staring at the spot where DuPris and Trevor had been.

'I'm sorry,' Liz told him.

Kyle didn't answer.

Michael couldn't help feeling for the guy. He remembered how crushed he'd been when he knew with absolute certainty that his parents were dead. It was like his body had frozen from the inside out, his heart almost too cold to continue beating.

Max walked up to Kyle, guided him over to the bed, and forced him to sit down. Then he sat beside him, glancing warily at his friends.

'I don't know how much you know, so I'll start at the beginning,' Max said, his voice low and soothing, the way it would be if he were talking to a hurt animal. 'Your father was with an organization called Project Clean Slate. Its mission was to hunt down… aliens, for experimentation and possibly extermination. DuPris is an alien. He went after your father and killed him. Destroyed the whole Project Clean Slate compound, too.'

'I was the one who-' Adam began, sounding young and scared.

'Adam was there,' Michael cut him off. 'He was the one who saw what happened to your father.' There was no reason for Kyle to know that DuPris used Adam's body to commit the murder. And if he had to pound Adam's pointy little head into the floor, someday Michael was going to get Adam to accept that.

'Aliens,' Kyle repeated. 'You expect me to believe that?'

But Kyle clearly did believe it. What choice did he have, after what he'd just seen? Michael wondered how long it would take him to figure out-

Kyle suddenly stood up, practically springing from the bed. 'Then you are, too, right?' Kyle asked Max.

Max glanced from Michael to Isabel. Michael shrugged. It's not like Max really had a choice here. Yeah, he could try and feed Kyle some bull, but Kyle had seen too much.

'Yeah,' Max answered. 'I am.'

'Get out of here,' Kyle ordered. 'I want all of you gone. I don't need you to-'

'To what? Get revenge?' Alex demanded. 'Grow a brain, Kyle. With that Stone, even without it, DuPris could turn you into a pile of dust in a second, just like-'

Alex stopped before he said 'your dad.'

'Out!' Kyle screamed, his voice breaking.

This was one time when Michael was happy to take orders from Kyle Valenti. He took Maria's hand and headed for the door, but Kyle grabbed his arm as he passed, jerking him to a stop. 'I'll take the device,' he commanded. His voice was solid again, even though his eyes were petrified.

'No, I don't think you will,' Michael answered.

'Give it to me, or I tell everyone-everyone-exactly what I saw here today,' Kyle shot back. Michael didn't doubt that Kyle was telling the truth. The guy had nothing to lose, and that made him dangerous. Reluctantly Michael handed him the silver disk.

'With this thing I can turn off the Stone or whatever, right?' Kyle asked.

'Don't even think about it, Kyle,' Michael warned. But he knew it was all Kyle was going to be able to think about. Michael understood about obsession.

***

'I think I'm going to go to bed,' Kevin said, the second Maria and Michael got him home.

Maria couldn't remember a time that her little brother had volunteered to go to bed. 'Why can't I stay up as late as Maria?' had been his constant question since he was old enough to talk. The fact that she was six years older than he was had never been accepted as a reasonable answer.

'Yeah. I'm sure you're tired. But Kev-' Maria glanced at Michael. 'You know you can't talk about anything that happened, right?'

Kevin actually managed to grin at her. 'You'd be in big trouble if Mom found out you let me get kidnapped,' he said. Then the smile kind of slid off his face.

It wasn't the kidnapping part that bothered him. In some weird way, Kevin probably thought of that as an adventure, especially because the guy who kidnapped him wasn't much older than Maria. But the other stuff… Maria remembered how terrified she was when she had discovered the truth about Max, Michael, and Isabel. Suddenly she had no idea what to say.

'Here's the deal, Kevin,' Michael said, surprising Maria by taking the initiative. 'There are people out there who might want to hurt Max if they knew that he was… different. If you tell anybody what happened, they'd probably end up telling someone else-even if they promised they wouldn't.'

He shot a look at Maria, and she knew he was remembering how Liz had broken her promise to Max by telling Maria the truth. And how Maria had then told Alex.

'You get what I'm saying?' Michael asked Kevin. 'Eventually the wrong people could find out, and they might come and take Max away. Max, and me, and Isabel, and Adam.'

Maria was surprised that Michael had given Kevin so much information. But it made sense in a way, at least revealing that he and Max were the same. Kevin knew Michael a lot better than he knew Max. Michael was around a lot, and Maria had realized a while ago that Kevin liked having a guy around. Sometimes living with just Maria and their mom got a little too female intensive for him.

'Why are you here?' Kevin blurted out. 'I mean, why don't you live on your own planet?'

'Our parents came to Earth to see if it was a place that would accept colonization. They decided humans weren't quite, uh, ready to deal,' Michael explained. 'They were about to go home and tell everyone that, but their ship crashed. Max, Isabel, Adam, and I were in these incubation pods, and the pods survived. We were inside for more than fifty years, growing. Then we broke free, and-'

Michael must have noticed Kevin's eyes glazing over because he wrapped it up fast. 'And that's why we live here. We don't have any way of getting back home.'

Kevin nodded. He backed out of the living room. 'I'm going to go to sleep.'

'You want me to come tuck you in?' Maria asked.

Kevin gave her his most disgusted look.

'Sorry,' she said quickly. Kevin turned and jogged down the hall.

'You're not going to offer to tuck me in, are you?' Michael joked after they heard Kevin's door shut.

The image of Michael lying in a bed rushed into Maria's mind. She shoved it right back out as fast as she could. She and Michael were in friend mode. She didn't know how much he was still thinking of Cameron, the girl that had squished his heart between her fingers, but she did know that whether he was thinking about Cameron or not, he certainly wasn't thinking about Maria. At least not that way.

'How about some antistress tea?' Maria asked, not wanting to even go near Michael's tucking-in question.

'Not right now.' Michael flopped down on the couch, and Maria happily joined him. Even if Michael didn't think about her that way, he was still better than any antistress tea ever brewed. Just being near him, feeling the warmth emanating from his body, made her feel like… like purring or something. Even