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  Everyone is raving about Stacey Klemstein's

  The Silver Spoon

  " The Silver Spoon is one hell of a science fiction ride reminiscent of the 1980s TV miniseries 'V', a mouthy heroine with a heart of gold."

  – Romance Reviews Today

  "Original, gutsy, well-written…a must-buy for fans of SF

  Adventure/Romance. I loved this book!"

  –Linnea Sinclair, RITA-winning author of Gabriel's Ghost

  "If you like sci-fi, you'll love this book. I highly recommend it."

  – ParaNormal Romance Reviews

  "…an intriguing science fiction suspense novel, almost impossible to put down."

  – Fallen Angel Reviews

  "…a whole new take on world building with Earth as the starter."

  – Enchanted in Romance

  "…a very interesting, engaging aliens-on-Earth story with a few unexpected twists."

  – Novelspot

  "[Zara and Caelan's] relationship has a Terminator-meets- Starman sense of drama and charm."

  – Speculative Romance Online

  "…an exciting science fiction adventure with unexpected twists and turns that leaves readers clamoring for more. Stacey Klemstein is an author to watch!"

  –Bonnie Vanak, author of The Sword & The Sheath

  "Klemstein has created a science fiction romance I couldn't put down and a heroine I was rooting for to the end! I can't wait to read more from this talented author."

  –Isabo Kelly, author of Thief's Desire and Marshall's Guard

  Stacey Klemstein

  The Silver Spoon

  A Zara Mitchell Story

  THE SILVER SPOON

  A Zara Mitchell Story

  Book One

  An Echelon Press Book

  First Echelon Press paperback printing / June 2007

  All rights Reserved.

  Copyright © 2007 by Stacey Klemstein

  Cover and illustration ©Nathalie Moore

  Echelon Press

  9735 Country Meadows Lane, #1-D

  Laurel, MD 20723

  www.echelonpress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Echelon Press.

  ISBN 978-1-59080-548-0

  10 Digit ISBN: 1-59080-548-8

  eBook 1-59080-549-6

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Acknowledgements

  Writing a book is not a solo effort. So, I'd like to this chance to thank everyone who helped me along the way.

  My thanks to:

  God, for making all things possible.

  My mom, for reading Little House on the Prairie (and Go, Dog, Go! ) to me over and over again. My dad, for introducing me to Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Luke Skywalker and, my favorite, Princess Leia.

  My husband, Greg, for always believing this was possible and for dragging me out from behind my computer occasionally.

  My Grandma Barnes, for reading my first novel and encouraging me to keep writing.

  Karen Syed and Echelon Publishing, for putting faith in me as well as my books.

  Linnea Sinclair, for showing me who and what I aspire to be. Lead on, Captain!

  Shannon Trasatti, for giving me my first chance in this business.

  My English teachers and professors, Mrs. Buske, Mrs. Koshinski, Professor Byrne, Professor Feaster and Professor Uehling.

  My fellow writers at work, for listening to me ramble, reading excerpts and celebrating with me.

  My first readers: Ed, fight choreographer and web consultant extraordinaire, Deb, my is-this-scene-too-racy expert, Julie, who read this at work in less than a day and proclaimed it good, Becky, for catching all the missing words and for telling me that when she read it she forgot it was my stuff she was reading, and finally, Stacy Greenberg.

  Stacy deserves an acknowledgements page unto herself. She read every query letter, synopsis, and email I sent out, never hesitating to re-read things over and over again. She answered my nervous what-am-I-going-to-do-now phone calls, commiserated over my rejection letters and kept a cool head, something I was incapable of at times. And she never once stopped believing in me or my book, even when I wasn't feeling too sure. The Silver Spoon would not be what it is today without all the help of these people, especially Stacy. So, to my co-worker, my friend and first, first reader, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

  All of you made this possible, and I can't thank you enough for your time, your kindness, and your generosity of spirit and words. You helped make my dream come true.

  Chapter 1

  I was at the diner when I got my first real look at an Observer. I'd seen them on television–news clips about first contact, press conferences after the landing, the rare interview–but nothing could have prepared me for being twenty feet away from a genuine alien.

  It was a Friday night, just before closing. Business was slow at the Silver Spoon, so I'd decided to close the kitchen early and wait on the remaining tables myself. Only a handful of customers still lingered over pie and coffee. I was behind the counter, pleading with and cursing the ancient cash register, trying anything to get it to spit out the night's total. But nothing seemed to work.

  The bell on the door jingled, and everyone looked up to see Sheriff Brigham and Deputy Dewey coming in, and a man, hands cuffed in front, being pulled along between them. At first, I don't think anyone paid the prisoner any notice–at least, not more than they normally would. The diner was on the way to the station, and Sheriff Brigham, who seemed to have little self-control in any area, had difficulty passing up fresh pie even if it meant bringing "company" along. I'd given up trying to reason with him. So, after making sure it wasn't someone they knew, everyone went back to their sweet potato pie. I didn't go back to my reluctant register, though. Instead, I watched as the sheriff's party selected a booth. There was something not quite right about the prisoner, something odd but familiar.

  As if sensing my thoughts, the prisoner lifted his head, bringing his glance up from the floor to look in my direction. I caught a flash of silver in his eyes and a chill spread through me. The Silver Spoon

  He was one of them, an Observer.

  Instantly my chest tightened up and I started to wheeze. It was the same reaction I had whenever I watched the Observers on television, read about them in the papers or saw them in my dreams.

  It wasn't anything easy to see, like horns or tentacles that pegged him as an alien. The Observers look too much like us for that. Actually, they look almost exactly like us, except for the silvery eyes and the fact that they tend to be too tall and too fast to be mistaken for human. Some people consider them better looking. But in my mind, their precise good looks, every feature defined and centered, rob them of whatever similarity they have to us and leave them looking as cold and beautiful as an army of marble statues.

  This one, for example, stood at least three or four inches taller than Dewey's six feet, but it was the rest of him that drew stares, some of open admiration, others of surprise and fear. He had a long, straight nose, a strong jaw that any male soap star would have killed for and a mouth with a full, touchable lower lip. His dark hair was a bit too long, almost reaching his strange eyes, which he kept averted to the ground. His light gray T-shirt contrasted sharply with his darker skin–their natural coloring is like a deep summer tan for most of us, something to do with their natural climate being much warmer than ours. And when Dewey pulled on the handcuffs to encourage him along, the prisoner's honed biceps strained the sleeves of his shirt, making h
is reluctance clear.

  What was an alien doing here? And more importantly, why had the sheriff brought him into the diner? While I didn't know the answer to the first question, as I watched everyone's stares swing round from the Observer to me, I had a sneaking suspicion about the second.

  Things have been quiet for a while, so let's see what happens 8

  Stacey Klemstein

  when we bring the town crazy in close proximity to what she fears most. That should be fun. I could almost hear Sheriff Brigham thinking it, his big red face grinning at me. Cold sweat prickled my forehead. It felt like that moment just before an attack of the flu, only I knew it wasn't something as simple this time. My first impulse was to run and hide in the kitchen until the sheriff and Dewey left and took that Observer with them. But I knew they wouldn't let me off that easily. They wouldn't leave, not without a show. But I'd be damned if I'd let them control me, push my button to get me to dance, or scream in this case.

  I wiped my hands down the front of the apron covering my jeans and tried to slow my breathing by counting between inhales and exhales. Then I grabbed the coffee pot and walked out from behind the counter toward their booth. As I filled empty coffee cups at the few tables along the way, I tried to think about the best way to handle this. It wasn't like I could threaten to call the cops on the sheriff for bringing an Observer in here. Plus, I'd known Sheriff Brigham all my life–he didn't respond well to threats. So, that left me with what? Pretending everything was normal. Sure. No problem, I'd been doing that for the last two years, just not very well. I hadn't gotten a full night's rest since the Observers landed. The same dream–a female Observer shoving me into darkness to suffocate–pulled me out of sleep and sometimes onto the front lawn, leaving me gasping for air every single night. In the beginning, I'd tried to keep the dreams to myself. But that's not easy when you're found outside repeatedly, flopping around in front of the neighbors like a dying fish trying to get back to water. A shrink told me that it was post-traumatic stress, a delayed reaction to my parents' death, triggered for some reason by the arrival of the Observers. Whatever. I didn't have enough money for that kind of therapy. So, after a while my nightly battle, and my daily dread of it, had just become a way of life, like someone 9

  The Silver Spoon

  with OCD counting steps or a superstitious person avoiding sidewalk cracks.

  But now, faced with the real thing instead a figment of my apparently broken mind, pretending to be normal would be more of a stretch. This time–I tightened my sweaty grip on the coffee pot–I'd deserve an Oscar if I could pull it off. I approached their table, mentally counting to three between each inhale and exhale.

  "Hey, Zara. How's Scott? Baby brother doing all right as the big man on campus?" Sheriff Brigham asked. I started to answer, fine, but I made the mistake of first stealing a look at the Observer sitting across the table next to Deputy Dewey. He, the alien, I mean, was staring at me, making no attempt now to hide his silver and brown eyes. His body trembled as he watched me, and blood, red just like ours, trickled from a gash under his left eye. He didn't look like cold marble now.

  My false calm snapped. "Get him out of here." Sheriff Brigham grinned. "What's the matter? You don't like our new tourist?" He leaned a little farther out toward me. "I thought maybe you'd want to talk to him. You know, ask him his plans for taking over the world." He sniggered. I would have shut my eyes in humiliation, but I didn't want to risk losing track of that Observer. I'd once confessed to the sheriff, after one of my more traumatic late night outdoor episodes, that I thought my dream might have meaning. That it was trying to tell me something bad was going to happen. He'd pretended to take me seriously at the time, but then by the next morning, not only was I the laughingstock of town; I also had an order from Doc Heresford to drive to Midland to see a psychiatrist.

  Heat swept through my face, leaving a fiery embarrassment behind. "I said, get him out of here." People started shifting in their seats, turning to get a better look at what was going on.

  10

  Stacey Klemstein

  "Now, you just relax there, Zara. We have it under control. This loiterer," Sheriff Brigham paused to grin at Dewey, "ain't going to cause any problem in here."

  "You picked him up for loitering?" For a moment, disbelief overtook my fear and humiliation.

  Sheriff Brigham sat up straight and adjusted his gun belt, the way he did whenever he felt people were questioning his authority. "He was hiding in the alley across the street by the old movie theater. God knows what he would have done next, if Mrs. Sutton hadn't called and reported him." Mrs. Sutton ran the boutique next door to the diner. As the owner of a boutique in a former mining town, she always had time to mind everyone else's business as well as her own.

  So, they'd arrested him for being an alien and then beat him up to further prove their point. This place was going to be flooded with Observers if the Council, their ruling body, or our government ever got wind of this. The Lockwood Treaty gave Observers diplomatic immunity, similar to that given to human foreign diplomats. Not that the sheriff would care, even if he knew. To him, Observers were less than human, nothing to be feared and certainly not worth respecting.

  "Fine, whatever. Take him in, then." My heart still thumped in my chest like a rabbit trying to fight its way out of a cage. Behind me, I could hear chairs shifting on the floor and people whispering. I wasn't sure if people would greet this first alien in our little town with cameras or shotguns, I'd just rather it didn't happen anywhere near me.

  "Get us some pie and coffee, Zara, and we'll be on our way." The sheriff's face grew darker red with every word, and I knew he wasn't going to back down.

  I looked to Dewey for help. He'd remained silent during this entire conversation, and now that I was calling on him, he shifted in his seat uneasily and wouldn't meet my eyes. 11

  The Silver Spoon

  Damn it, Dewey, I thought. He and I had gone out on one date, a couple years back. He'd cornered me in the front seat of his pickup. In response, I'd opened the door and helped him out to the parking lot with my foot. Later, he'd apologized profusely, and I'd promised never to tell anyone. But it seemed that gratitude would only get me so far. I was on my own for this one. I stepped forward, turned the coffee cups upright on the table, and sloshed coffee into them.

  "Now, a couple slices of your sweet potato pie, and we'll be set here," Sheriff Brigham said. But he was frowning now, staring at the Observer across the table. I couldn't figure out why until I looked down and realized that, without thinking, I'd filled the coffee cup for the alien as well.

  Too bad. I wasn't going to take it away. The fact that I'd reached that close to begin with was enough to send a shiver through me. As I watched, the Observer lifted his hands from beneath the table, the silver of his handcuffs glinting in the light, and wrapped them around the cup, like he was trying to warm them.

  I automatically looked to his face again, my pulse still pounding in my ears, but he was no longer watching me. Instead, he was staring out through the big picture window into the dark parking lot. I followed his gaze, but all I could see were our reflections. My face, a pale globe in the night, with red hair spilling out of an already sloppy ponytail. His eyes–silver points of light as they reflected the florescent overheads in the diner–the dried blood on his cheek, and the gash below his eye, which seemed smaller somehow.

  "Pie, Zara?" The sheriff broke into my trance, startling me into looking at him. Now, he was frowning at me, like I'd done something wrong. More likely, it was simply that he was mad that I'd cheated him out his entertainment.

  An idea struck. I pulled myself together enough to give them 12

  Stacey Klemstein

  a smile, a bright and overly sweet one. My little brother Scott could have told the sheriff that meant trouble.

  "Sheriff, I'd love to help you out with that, but you know I can't serve food here with a health code violation like this. Human would be bad enough, but Observer blo
od? The CDC would be on me like a raccoon on spoiled meat." My mention of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made Brigham go pale. In the heat of the chase, our good sheriff had apparently forgotten Observer blood was still classified as a no-no. Actually, Observer anything, in terms of bodily fluid, was still considered potentially hazardous, even though it'd been more than two years since the landing and the CDC's original campaign to warn the public. They said exposure to that kind of stuff could give us diseases the Observers were immune to but we weren't–kind of like the whole smallpox thing with the Indians. I'd read up on it, just like everything else I could find on the Observers, but never given it much thought, considering I'd planned to stay as far away from the Observers as possible. But this could work for me now. I turned on my heel and left, knowing the sheriff would be less likely to pull his tail between his legs with me standing there. A line had formed at the register, three or four customers eager to get out, whether to gain some distance from here or to spread the gossip, I didn't know.

  When I finished ringing up their bills and avoiding all their questions, I looked up and found Brigham gone. Unfortunately, he'd left Dewey and the Observer behind.

  I stalked out from behind the counter. "Where's Sheriff Brigham? Why are you still here?" Anger brought me closer to their table than I'd been before.

  Dewey looked miserable, like he was on the verge of tears. He kept rubbing his right fist with a napkin in his left hand. "I don't know. He told me to wait here. He said he got a call out to the Baker place, but I didn't even hear it on the radio." 13