“Rigo will do,” Rigo said. “Rodrigo was my pa, a meaner polecat never walked this earth. No offense to polecats,” he added hastily, in case one of these guys was related to a skunk shifter.
Old habits of speech came out when he was unsettled, and he was about as settled as a bronco sniffing a rattlesnake on the wind. Maybe the mate bond was dying after all. He supposed he deserved it, but here were these men he’d liked at their first meeting, now eyeing him like he was week-old road kill.
STILL OUR MATE, his basilisk stated.
How can you tell? Rigo shot back internally.
As usual, no answer. It was a miracle his basilisk had actually spoken twice in a day. Once in twenty-five years was more like it.
Rigo sighed. “I get that it looks pretty bad. My fault.” And when their expressions didn’t alter a whit, he added, “I’d like to explain, but I think it ought to wait until I’ve talked it out with Sh—Godiva. Gotta get used to that. Suits her, though. We talk it out, then she can say whatever she wants about the past. I ain’t gonna argue, even if she still thinks me the worst thing to crawl outa Hell since Lucifer.”
At that, Joey Hu smiled crookedly. “It’s just that I’ve never seen Godiva get . . . that . . . intense.”
Rigo understood immediately. “What I can tell y’all is, I mean to make it up to her. If she’ll let me.”
Joey’s smile widened with a little less caution and a lot more sympathy, and the others . . . looked a little less menacing.
Rigo began to breathe with relief, and then the door opened and three women came out. They saw him, and it was road kill all over again. Times three. These women had to be Godiva’s posse. Of course she had a posse. Back in the day, you couldn’t find a more loyal friend—or a more passionate defender.
He wondered what to say without getting them more riled up, then unexpectedly Joey Hu spoke. “Doris . . . Bird . . . Jen. This is Rigo Tzama. I gather he and Godiva have some issues to work out. But he’s also here to help us with Long Cang.”
The female posse looked a little less like they were looking for a solid rope and an oak to hang it from in order to invite him to his own personal necktie party. He said, “And I confess I’m still a mite confused. So, the former Guardian of the West is a red dragon, right?”
“He is,” said Joey Hu.
“But he went renegade, and now wants an Oracle Stone buried under a cliff near here. Except the Oracle Stone ain’t—isn’t really there, or is it?”
Joey glanced around. So did Rigo. The only people in view were busy staring at his pastry-decorated Phantom, and commenting in low voices, as if the car could hear.
Joey lowered his own voice. “The Oracle Stone is still there, but Cang does not know that it’s merely an empty shell—that what it protected is gone.” At that everyone glanced at the taller woman, before Joey went on, “Only we know it. So we still have to defend it until we can round up Cang, and whoever is backing him. Meanwhile . . .” He gave a soft sigh. “We have a new problem.”
“New?” One of the women gave Rigo the fish-eye.
“Me?” Rigo asked, figuring he might as well man up.
“No. Zombies,” said Joey.
“Zombies?”
“Zombies?”
“ZOMBIES?”
That was all three of the women.
Joey turned to the one he’d called Doris, and from the way he smiled, Rigo knew that this was Joey Hu’s mate. Joey said, “Not real zombies. Ah, not that zombies are real,” he corrected hastily.
In spite of the situation—Godiva’s death glare was still reverberating around Rigo’s chest cavity—he felt a spurt of amusement at the women’s expressions of disgust at the word ‘zombies.’
Joey went on, “I told Rigo that another pair of people was found by my student volunteers guarding the Oracle Stone site.”
Doris said, “I thought the ones they found were students who’d been partying too hard?”
“That’s what we all thought,” Joey said. “But this pair this morning were not the sort of people who party. One drives a delivery truck. The other was wearing ER scrubs. I stashed them on the chaise lounges in my yard to sober up before I left to come here. But I just got a call from one of my roaming scouts that they are on the move again.”
The tallest woman—she had to be Nikos’s Jen—said, “When you say zombies, what exactly do you mean?”
“Like,” Doris put in cautiously, “with fingers and ears and things falling off?”