Godiva winced, and he hated to see that troubled look. But he had to get the truth out there. “So when you told me you were pregnant, all I could think of was you meeting my eyes, or our baby meeting my eyes . . . and so I ran. The morning after I left you I went to the spot where we’d had the fight, half-convinced I’d hallucinated it all. I half-hoped I had. The statues weren’t there, but there were three piles of ash, which the wind was already carrying away. They’d dissolved as soon as the first drops of rain hit them, the night before. All I could imagine was doing that to you.”
Silence fell. Somewhere in the kitchen, a grinder whined, and the heavenly scent of fresh-ground coffee wafted into the room.
Godiva huffed in a long breath, her eyes half-closed. “Well.” She lifted her mug, took a hefty swig, then set it down with a click. There was a flash of her old spirit, despite the tremble still in her fingers. “I imagined all kinds of excuses after that. Typical male excuses for dumping a woman flat. I yelled at you and pleaded with you and argued with you and, yes, even begged you, in my imagination. In dreams. For years. But I never came up with that.”
She took another, even bigger swig, so big her eyes watered. “I almost want to slip a dose of whiskey in this coffee, but I don’t want to wake up tomorrow and think this was all a hallucination. Shifters. I’ll get used to it.”
Rigo smiled. “Hope so. Your son is one, as I said.”
And she got it in one—but he’d always believed she was a lot smarter than he was. “Is that why he left? It wasn’t just a teenage-boy-turning-into-a-man thing?”
“He first shifted when he was sixteen. He knew you were human, of course, but his friend Lance, a bear shifter, was able to clue him in generally. But he didn’t know that much about mythic shifters, as they are so rare. Lance told Alejo that his father was probably a mythic shifter, too, so Alejo decided to look for me. The Jacksons helped.”
“So he inherited the shifting from you.”
“Actually, it turns out there’s shifters on both sides of Alejo’s family.”
“Your—wait, you don’t mean my family?”
“How much do you want to hear?” he asked.
Her eyes widened. “Everything! Is that why my dad was mean as a mad rattler?”
“It was actually your mother’s side. She was on her own until she fell in with your father, who was in his young days a decent artisan, making and repairing guitars.”
Godiva sighed. “Not when I was small. All I remember is that he was repairing wagons and stuff like that, which he traded for booze more often than not. But by then we were living in the desert because he’d run from the law. But how do you know all that?”
“Because when I woke up from the six-week bender I went on after I left you, and discovered that you’d skipped town after being fired, I thought you’d gone to your family. So I tracked them down. Your dad was dead. He’d gotten into a fight with someone meaner than he
was, not long after you left. It was your mother who took longer to find.”
“I was twelve when she left me,” Godiva said. “I remember that night as clear as . . .” She shook her head.
“As the night I abandoned you,” Rigo finished flatly, then he took a steadying breath. This was so much harder than he’d expected, but he owed her the truth. All of it. “What you probably didn’t know is that her sister—a swallow shifter—had come looking for her, against the wishes of the matriarch of the family.”
Godiva stared into the distance. “My mother used to say she had no family except my father. So she did have family. How did you find that out?”
“That is a long story, involving falling in with a shaman who recognized that I was a shifter and took me in long enough to teach me some things that I ought to have known. But this is about you, not me. I discovered that your mother’s family lived in a remote village above the Rio Grande Gorge. It can only be reached by flying, which is their protection.”
“She never told me,” Godiva whispered.
“Well, that might be because, like all the other children who turned out human, she was escorted to the border when she turned fifteen and told to find her own life. All I could discover is that she eked out a living for a few years before she married your father, who had inherited his own shop. He lost it gambling, right around the time you were born, and vanished with you and your mother.”
“I remember he got into trouble gambling, then fighting when he lost,” Godiva muttered. “Then he’d come home and take it out on Mama.”
Rigo nodded. “The shaman knew about your mother through his own shamanistic network, I guess you could call it. Your mother was taken by her sister to a shaman-midwife. Once she was healed, they headed back for you, but by then your father was dead and you were long gone. They turned south, and I was unable to trace them beyond that. Too much time had passed. I crossed back into the States to try to find you, stopping only to talk to my grandfather Tzama, who now told me the truth about the shifter side of my family. By then it had been almost two years. Godiva, I realize this is a lot to take in.”
She rolled a fierce eye his way, brimming with a sort of wry amusement. “Swallows. Is that where the hummingbird in your story came from?”
“No,” he said. “Before I discovered I was a shifter, I always thought of you as a hummingbird. So quick, and vivid.”
Her answering smile was brief, a little bemused, and bewildered.
As she gazed down into her empty mug, he said, “I would love to spend the rest of the night talking to you. It’s so good to see you again. But like I said, you’ve just taken in a lot. And I have some stuff to do tonight. There’s another matter I promised to help with, which I can tell you about later, if you like. Right now, well, as you said to Alejo, it’s late.”
At that, all the tension went out of her shoulders. “I guess . . . yes. I think I’m ready to pack it in for the night.” Another expressive look. “And I bet you know right where I live, don’t you.”
“You didn’t exactly hide yourself,” he said apologetically. “But I promise not to turn up uninvited.”