Everything around her was the same, and yet nothing was the same.
She walked away from the car. After a few seconds, he started up the engine, and drove away. Only then did she look back, and watched until his tail lights vanished around the corner.
Then she walked thoughtfully up the driveway to the house. It was a long driveway, which gave her time to think. But she couldn’t think. Her thoughts lay inside her, inert as a stunned mouse.
She was still trying to wrap her head around that basilisk—wondering if she was some kind of weirdo for finding Rigo in that form awe-inspiring rather than horrible—when she reached the door.
But before she could open it, her phone rang. This time it was Jen.
Godiva punched Facetime, and there was Jen looking like a Viking goddess ready for battle, but her forehead puckered with worry. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Godiva said. “I didn’t have to touch my pepper spray once.”
“What did he say?’
She opened her mouth to begin with “You’d never guess in a million years,” then Rigo’s voice echoed, That part has already happened. This shifter craziness was a secret that concerned people’s lives.
Doris knew, and had kept the secret from Godiva, which meant she’d kept it from Jen.
So Godiva said only, “He put me on the phone to my son. Gets points for that. The rest will come.” And then, though ordinarily she loathed pulling out the old age card, she figured this was anything but ordinary circumstances. “Listen, I haven’t slept a wink since he blew into town. I gotta crash before I fall asleep on my feet.”
“I’m just glad you’re okay,” Jen said.
They rang off. Godiva let herself into the dark, quiet house. Pretty soon she climbed between her cool sheets and settled into the gently undulating water bed, letting all the tension seep out of her body.
But her mind didn’t get the memo. For a while her thoughts raced along, jinking back and forth between questions.
Basilisk. Was Alejo a basilisk, too? No, Rigo had said chimera. And her own family had been . . . swallows? So these things weren’t inherited? Argh! She had to stop asking herself questions she couldn’t answer, or she’d be awake all night. Again.
She closed her eyes . . . and memory threw her back to her tiny apartment behind Hidalgo’s diner. Rigo didn’t look all that different now than he did back then, except for that silver at his temples. Unlike her, who the last time he’d seen her had been young and springy with a shiny black braid that she could sit on.
They’d cuddled together on the couch, holding tight to each other. How she’d loved his smell, a bewitching, sexy combination of man and leather and a little bit of horse and dust. But that night he’d smelled of adrenaline sweat, a heady scent that in anybody else would be gross, but in him was . . . sexy. She remembered thinking that, and being happy that he would come to her straight after work.
But according to him, he’d come to her after a fight.
She remembered the tremble in his muscles as he buried his face in her neck. “Preciosa,” he’d whispered over and over—they almost always spoke in Spanish in those days . . . how funny, that his English had that Texas drawl, but his Spanish was the quick, percussive northern accent of Mexico . . . Shifters mate for life.
Well that obviously isn’t true, she reminded herself drowsily. According to his story, he hadn’t known he was a shifter until the day they parted, so maybe the rule didn’t have time to get invoked. Or something.
She examined that memory, testing it cautiously with the last lingering bits of conscious thought. It no longer hurt. It had gone numb, which was better, wasn’t it?
Now she could call up that memory without fear or guilt: his desperate kisses, the warm dusty air, their limbs entangled. Memory became dream, drawing her down into warm kisses, their hearts thrumming against one another’s ribs, until she spiraled down into deep sleep.
Tinkle-ding!
Somewhere under layers and layers of dream image, Godiva recognized that sound. It was her phone, announcing a text message.
Inexorably she floated up toward sunlight and awareness. And groaned, turning over in hopes of recovering the warm, cozy dream world again.
She hated text messages. Everybody knew that. A phone was a phone, not a typewritten nanny following one around everywhere. She’d told everyone, if they didn’t want to talk to her on the phone, then send email. Why torture her thumbs on that maddeningly tiny screen? What a ridiculous invention!
Tinkle-ding!
There went another one.
Godiva sighed, giving up. She leaned over to grab her phone off the nightstand, and memory came crashing back. She shut her eyes, the emotional storm so intense she clutched at the bed as if was rocking. Rigo—basilisk—hallucination—
She shook off the questions, grabbing onto the one vital piece of reality she could vouch for: she had really spoken to Alejo. Hadn’t she? That wasn’t dream . . .