Feverishly she woke the phone up and hit the text button, scanning rapidly.
From Doris: Godiva, sorry about the text, but I didn’t want to risk waking you. Joey said you were out pretty late last night. If you’re okay, just tap the Y for yes.
From Jen, an hour later: Godiva: If you want to talk, Doris and I are at Bird’s. With pastry. And coffee. Gallons of coffee—you can drink mine.
And, one minute later—just now—from Bird: Godiva, I am so very, very sorry we couldn’t tell you.
Tell me what? Godiva thought—and then remembered the last thing Rigo had said, about shifters and secrets. Doris knew . . .
Bird?
All thought of sleep had vanished. Godiva scooted out of bed. She took the shortest shower of her life, threw on some clothes, then grabbed her purse and went out to the garage, where she kept two cars, mostly for the use of her guests.
She took the key off the hook by the garage door, jacked up the seat so she could see over the hood, and started it up.
She drove rarely—just once in a while, to keep her hand in. Weird, how after all the sheer crazy of the past 24 hours, it was driving again that made her feel as if her life had taken another of those sudden turns.
She parked on the road below Bird’s fabulous garden, and walked up to the terrace, where she knew she would find the other three of the Gang of Four whenever the weather was fine. The fragrance of roses hung heavy on the air, amid the distant hum of bees as she topped the path and glanced toward the gazebo.
Yep. There they were. The scent of coffee drifted on the air. As she joined them, she scanned their faces—Doris apologetic, Jen inscrutable as a Norse goddess, Bird looking wistful as she uncovered a tray of fluffy omelets that had obviously just been made.
Godiva gave Bird the hairy eyeball. “If you tell me that you, or Mikhail, are really bees, or snails, or anteaters, then I’m going home and back to bed.”
As she’d hoped, Bird choked on a laugh.
Godiva grinned, relieved that this meant the whole shifter thing was some kind of aberration, if not downright dream. And then Bird said—proudly—“Mikhail is a dragon.”
“What?” Godiva plumped down onto the chair waiting for her.
“Two hundred feet long,” Jen said reflectively. “Silver. He’s magnificent. I say that, though I’m about to be married to the handsomest winged unicorn ever born.”
Godiva thought, It’s real. She looked around the sun-drenched terrace, the nodding roses, the distant haze over the ocean. All familiar sights, sounds, smells.
Shifters are real. And all three of them knew.
Doris’s gaze was steady. “I think I know where you are right now—yes, it’s the Real McCoy, and yes we knew, but we didn’t find out together. It was one at a time. We hated not telling you. But it’s not our secret to tell.” She cast a glance at Jen. “Well, two of us, anyway.”
Godiva slewed around and eyed Jen. “Wait, are you one of them?”
“Yep. Long story.”
Godiva fortified herself with a slurp of the coffee Bird had readied for her, exactly the way she liked it. “I’m going to want that story. But not yet. I’m still trying to get my head around . . . basilisk. Did you know Rigo was a basilisk?”
“We knew he was a shifter,” Doris said. “When he contacted Joey about the Long Cang matter.”
“Long Cang?”
Doris sighed. “Um. Where do I start?”
Godiva took a bite of a fluffy, perfect cheese Danish, and as the life-giving sugar joined the corpse-awakening power of the excellent Blue Mountain coffee, her brain finally felt thoroughly powered up. “I’ve been a mystery writer for the past thirty years, so I know my way around complicated plots. Start with the Maguffin. If there is one.”
Three heads nodded. “Oh, there is definitely a Maguffin,” Doris said, as Jen gave a snort.
Doris turned to Bird. “You were the first. Over to you.” She pointed to Jen. “Then we finish with you.”
Two pots of coffee, a sizable omelet each, and a shared plate of pastries later, Godiva was still feeling like she’d fallen out of her life and into someone else’s. As she listened to the three women describe their experiences, and the emotions they had gone through, Godiva’s mind kept bumping insistently up against a somewhat unpalatable realization, that over the years she’d let her emotions cramp down into a smaller box, utterly denying the possibility of all these hidden corners of the world.
She was at least right about one thing. It was time for yet another change. But instead of running away to a new city and a new identity, as she had before, it seemed that the change was going to happ