by Chant, Zoe
She let him have it right in the eye.
Cang recoiled, flinging her away so hard her head snapped back. For a couple seconds her body sailed upward, as Cang’s head whipped the other way—and Rigo was right there.
Eyes met eyes.
Green glowed.
And as Godiva reached the top of her parabola, she saw Cang flash from red to smoking dark stone, and begin to fall.
As she began to fall.
She sucked in a breath. But before she could let out a cry, a silvery wing flashed below her, and she found herself plopping onto that wing. She lay splayed out on it, her mind trying to catch up as her heart thumped frantically.
Impressions streamed through her mind as Rigo labored to keep her steady. Move to his body. The thought seemed to come from deep within her, no, it came with so much desperate love that she knew it was Rigo.
She inch-wormed herself sideways, catching hold of one of the protrusions that made up his crest. Holding onto that, she eased her shaking legs up onto Rigo’s body and clamped herself hard against him as the wing, freed at last, beat once, twice.
Rigo coasted downward in a slow, gentle spiral, as a quarter-mile or so out to sea Cang hit the water.
KA-TOOSH!
And turned to ash with a whoosh of steam.
Then Godiva’s mind caught up with her body. She was actually flying! She let out a whoop, as Rigo glided toward the shore. A few seconds later Rigo touched down on the deserted bit of palisade not far from the dispersing crowd. There was that whispery sound and he was a man again. He threw his arms around her. “Godiva, are you all right? It nearly killed me when I saw him—”
At the same time, she squawked, “Rigo! You’re hurt!”
She was still vibrating from the exhilaration of flight and lingering terror from her almost-fall, and most of all, fury at Cang daring to try using her against Rigo. What a horrible choice . . .
“I’ll always,” he vowed as they clung together, “choose you.”
Chapter 20
GODIVA
They were surrounded by the rest of the Gang of Four a short time later. Joey, Mikhail and Nikos each had their mate giving them support. Last of all came Bryony, Nikos’s second lieutenant of his hetairoi honor guard. The tough-looking young woman with short hair and colorful tattoos on her bare, muscular arms loped up to join Jen and Nikos.
For a moment, everyone was talking at once.
“Godiva, are you all right?”
“Godiva, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I thought I was going to have heart failure when I saw Cang swoop down on you!”
“That was amazing! What happened up there?”
“I can’t believe Cang is gone!”
“We still don’t know who was backing him,” Joey murmured.
Doris waved a hand. “With Cang gone, maybe they’ll go away.” She turned to Godiva. “I missed what happened up there. When I got here you were somehow up in the sky, then there was that huge splash, and you two were coming back right around the moment my brain was about to press the panic button.”
Rigo said proudly, “What happened was Godiva’s fast thinking. When Jen kept Cang’s reinforcements from getting into the mix, Cang somehow figured out who my mate was and went after her. She zapped him in the eye with that spray. And that was all it took.”
“Bold move,” said Bryony. “Respect.” She saluted Godiva, two fingers to her forehead.
“Of course Godiva zapped Cang in the eye,” Doris exclaimed, midway between laughter and tears of relief. “But it looked touch and go there—I was so afraid for Rigo, especially when I saw blood.”
Blood? Rigo was bleeding? Godiva let go of him to check—and she felt him catch her worry. She blinked at how . . . odd that was, as he murmured, “It’s just a couple of scrapes. Hardly feel it.”
He turned to the others as he held Godiva close against his side. “Looked to me like at least the attack didn’t happen.”
Doris nodded. “Though we got totally blindsided at the bakery, Godiva’s women all came through.”
Jen added with a grim smile, “Not one of Cang’s superspeed team was all that super.”
Joey looked up, his voice husky with effort. “They were about to come at us anyway when they saw Cang drop into the sea. Then they bolted.” He looked away unhappily, then added, “I’m going to have to figure out who among us was the traitor. There were only twelve people who knew about our gathering at the bakery.”
Doris slid her arm around Joey as she said, “I didn’t recognize either of the two who faked us out.”
“Nor did I,” Joey said, his voice not much more than a whisper. It was clear to Godiva that he’d used up all his strength coming to the palisade. “Thought they were random customers, and one of them was drunk.”
Jen said bracingly, “Well, at least Cang is no longer a problem. That’s the important thing. And our people were great. Godiva’s women, and our infiltrators. Bryony, here, especially. She thought fast on her feet there at the end, or the fight might have come off after all.”
“How?” Doris asked.
Everyone turned to the young woman, who spoke up in her heavy Greek accent. “Cang’s attack team was rallying to start something. They thought I was one of them. At first I was going to distract them by starting a fight among them. Then I got an idea. It was time for them to know that the Oracle Stone was empty, and I knew the way to do it. I started howling about scams. I said there was no treasure and no reward. They wouldn’t even get paid, and Cang was keeping them in the dark. That spread like fire.”
Bird said, “It’s true! I was just catching up with the rest of you when a bunch of them pushed past me, complaining that they’d been lied to. One of those big beefy ones smelling like eucalyptus was whining that even if there was an elevator down to the cave, there was nothing to find, which meant nobody would get a cent, and Cang lied, and rawr rawr rawr.”
“That was fast thinking,” Godiva said to Bryony, who grinned.
Bird fervently agreed, then turned to Mikhail. “Let’s get you home. I know you feel rotten. Just looking at you hurts.”
“Are you guys going to be all right?” Godiva asked, looking from Mikhail to Nikos to Joey.
“Oh, we’ll be fine,” Joey said wanly. “It was too small a dose to do anything serious. The effects will wear off in a day or so.”
Godiva eyed those gray faces, and once again pulled the age card. “Then I suggest everybody go home. We can get together as soon as you’re . . .” Human? Uh, try again. “Better.”
It said a lot about had badly the poisoned shifters felt that no one argued.
Just as well. By then reaction was setting in. Godiva’s hands trembled as Bird held out her handbag. “I saw it fall, and got it first thing. Everything should still be in it.”
“Thanks, Bird,” Godiva said, and they all parted.
Rigo slid an arm around Godiva, whose hip was now barking like a hound from hell. Her bad knee howled like a banshee. As for her ribs where Cang had grabbed her, she felt them creak every time she took a breath. And her neck twinged from her head snapping back when Cang had thrown her, before she went into freefall.
“Not far,” Rigo murmured.
Godiva blinked. Here it was again, that inner sense of him. She knew where the cuts were on him without looking. And they were cuts, not scrapes. Likewise, he had to be feeling her own aches. So weird!
And even weirder when she remembered that she could share her thoughts instead of burying them as usual. “This whole mate bond inner phone line is . . . funky,” she said, just to have the fun of saying it.
His smile brightened briefly. “I know. It is for me, too.”
“Funky, but good.”
He didn’t speak, but ran his fingers lightly over the outside of her arm—the one place where she had no aches or pains.
Neither spoke on the drive back. That felt right, too, that they didn’t have to talk. She could sit back, shut her eyes, and feel him beside her
, content to be together in spite of the residue of fear at Cang’s cruelty. It was that mate bond internet again.
When they got to the house, a couple of the house guests were in the living room. Wendy was bringing in coffee and mugs. Any hope Godiva had of sneaking by went out the window when Eve jumped up off the couch. “Godiva, what happened?”
Wendy set the tray down, looking worried.
“I took a fall,” Godiva said, and wondered if this was how Doris, Jen, and Bird had felt when they lied to cover up shifter stuff. “I’ll be fine after a little horizontal time. This is Rigo, by the way.”
“Hi,” Wendy said, her eyes round, as Lily and Eve grabbed coffee mugs.
Godiva felt Wendy’s gaze following them, but she didn’t ask questions. Good—all that could come later, when she and Rigo figured out a story.
Together.
As soon as they got into her room, she insisted that they bandage his cuts first. Rigo sat silently under her ministrations, and then said, “Shall we see the damage?” He glanced at her side.
“How about a hot bath?” she asked, wiggling her brows. “Kill two vultures with one brick.”
He helped her undress. Even lifting away the tunic from her side had her hissing and wincing, “Ow, ow, ow. Damn, that is going to be black and blue from boob to booty.”
“Let me,” he whispered, “kiss it.”
She didn’t think she had a chuckle left in her, but there it was as his soft lips gently brushed over her ribs.
She put a few drops of healing lavender into the steaming bathwater, then they climbed into her huge tub, which was spacious enough for two. Her body relaxed into the water, and the aches gradually eased a bit.
She felt Rigo’s steady gaze, and was going to speak. Then she realized he knew she was not, despite her wishes, up for anything acrobatic. The tenderness in his smile made it clear that he was on the same page. That he would always be on the same page.
He slid over, and gently pulled her against him. They lay there in the swirling water, limbs heavy and tangled.
Sometimes, what a person truly needed was just to be held.
After a time during which she exulted in the silky feel of his skin next to hers, and the sound of his breathing somewhere over her head, she said, “Here I am, over eighty, and I have about as much clue about how to talk relationship stuff as an eight-year-old.”
She reveled in the rumble of his laughter through his chest. Then he said, “Does it have to be either-or?”
She sent a tidal wave surging around as she sat up. “Ow.” She leaned back again. “Am I ever going to get used that?”
“We can close it off,” he said, and she felt how carefully he spoke.
“But I don’t want to. I want to get used to it. I want to have gotten used to it fifty years ago. But we don’t get that time back. So what I’m saying is, I love my house. I’m sure you love yours. It’s not fair to ask you to give yours up. So either it’s the planes, trains, cars, or bus, or . . .”
“Like I said, it doesn’t have to be either-or. We can spend some months here, then there. I like this town. I like the people. I like your friends. Took to ‘em once they stopped looking at me as if, and I quote your detective here, I was a wall of plague rats. Which I don’t resent, because they did it out of loyalty. So, time here, and when it gets hot and dry and the fire season starts, we’ll go to the ranch, where the autumn nights are cool, and the colors spectacular.”
Godiva sat up again, more cautiously this time. “But . . . one thing I’ve read over and over, is that ranch work never ends. Can you be away for months?”
“I’ve been a boss only in name only for years now. Alejo has been running things for ten, fifteen years. And even he has been traveling for Guardian business off and on. We’ve got residents who could use a turn at managing. It’s all negotiable. Godiva, you’re too important to me. We’ll figure out how to make it work.”
He leaned forward and took her face in his hands. “I, too, wish we could get those fifty years of silence back, but since nobody I know has a time-travel power, we just have to make up for it.”
He kissed her long and thoroughly.
They napped with limbs entwined. Despite still being sore from Cang’s rough treatment, Godiva dropped into sleep with that wonderful feeling of wishing the moment would never end, then remembering, oh, wait, things are just going to keep getting better.
They woke at sunset to an empty house, and found a tasty soup left in the crockpot on warm, with fresh-baked bread on the cutting board. Godiva was still sensitive to the miracle of Rigo being in her space. It still seemed like she was caught in a delightful dream world. Now that the urgency about Long Cang was over, she could enjoy everything about Rigo. Once again she sensed that he was doing the same when his eyes turned toward her, brimming with laughter and love.
All the house guests were elsewhere, for which Godiva was grateful, though she felt invisible question marks hovering around her. They took their dinner out onto the patio behind the house, overlooking her garden, lit some lanterns, and when they sat down, Godiva said, “We’ve got to figure out what to say to my houseguests, none of whom know anything about shifters.”
“Whatever you’re comfortable with.” Rigo’s voice was as soft as the summer air.
“Then we’ll keep it simple,” Godiva stated. “We squabbled, I ran off, you tried to find me, we both got lost in those pre-internet days. Until you read one my books and someone put you onto me. I hate to be a walking cliché, especially when it comes to what I call the Stupid Plot, the Big Misunderstanding. But I buttered that bread, so now I have to lie in it.”
Rigo laughed, accepting that as their story, as she’d known he would.
They didn’t stay up much past that. She tried to hide her stiffness, until he grinned and said, “How about experimenting with that bath in there?”
By the time he was done with her, she felt like her bones had been magically smoothed and her muscles combed like silk. She was scarcely aware of the two of them pouring themselves into the water bed, his arms around her as he whispered, “Are you all right with me taking a predawn flight?”
She had just enough strength to mutter, “Is that how Mr. B gets his exercise?”
Rigo’s soft chuckle stirred the top of her hair. “Mr. B., heh. Judging by the hum inside me, my basilisk likes that.”
She pressed her ear up against Rigo’s chest, hoping to hear the hum, and tumbled into slumber.
When she woke, Rigo was gone. She shut her eyes, trying to imagine him in the air, and for a heartbeat got a glimpse of the dimming lights over Los Angeles, spread like an emperor’s treasure below. She sensed his burst of joy in working his wings to increase speed until the wind whistled, then spreading them to ride the air currents high in the sky, as he contemplated with happiness coming back to his mate.
She squinched her eyes shut and tried to send him a pulse of love back. Did it work? She’d have to ask. She stretched deliciously, her body feeling far less achy than she had expected. Was that due to Rigo’s magic fingers or the magic mate bond?
“Both,” she decided, and was about to get up when her phone rang.
It was the ringtone for general friends. “Hello?”
“Godiva!” It was Mattie’s breathless voice. “It’s not too early, is it?”
“Perfect timing.” Remembering that Mattie had been one of her recruits, she added, “I hope nothing’s wrong?”
“Not at all! No, no, no, no, it’s just the opposite, oh boy, you have no idea . . .” She heard squidgy phone-bobbling noises, then Mattie stage-whispered, “I didn’t get a chance to call yesterday, because, between one thing and another—but wait, I should probably start at the beginning, shouldn’t I, or I’ll get all tangled up, and forget where I was, so anyway you got up so fast to follow those poor people yesterday that I wondered if you knew, and so I thought maybe I’d better ask you, but I wasn’t sure how to do it and not get myself into a sticky situation, if
you know what I mean, and I was thinking over what I should say when my daughter called about my nephew who she saw over at Bridge Way walking like a zombie, if you get my drift, and I got distracted between one thing and another, and . . .”
“When Mattie finally got to the point,” Godiva said to Jen, Doris, and Bird later that afternoon, “it turns out she saw Long Cang grab me. She’s a shifter! Her entire family, they’re all shifters.” She swung her head toward Doris and Bird. “I know you two have met Mattie.”
“She’s donated clothes at my synagogue’s drives to collect for the homeless,” Doris said.
Bird spoke up. “She used to be a regular at the shop I worked at. She made all her own clothes.”
Godiva turned from one to the other. “Did you know she was a shifter?”
Doris said, “I only found out recently when Joey recognized one of her grandkids, who was one of the zombies we dog-whistled to cure. Since I don’t know Mattie that well, neither Joey or I was going to say anything. We figured they had to be one of the shifter clans who feel safest keeping themselves to themselves.”
“Turns out Mattie is a squirrel shifter,” Godiva said. “Her family are all squirrels. She married another squirrel—it was an arranged marriage between the families, but it turned out great. I got all that in about half an hour, and Mattie still hadn’t finished a single sentence.”
Doris grinned. “I don’t think Mattie has finished a sentence in all the half a dozen times I’ve met her. But you’d have to look hard to find a nicer, kinder woman.”
“Very true,” Godiva said.
They were sitting on the patio behind Joey and Doris’s ranch house, as Joey’s army of student volunteers swarmed around setting up a pot luck meal in celebration of the defeat of the red dragon and the breakup of his gang. Joey, still looking a little wan, was over at the barbeque chatting as one of his exchange students did the cooking, sending delicious smells wafting through the air.
Godiva had been to Joey’s many times. He was famous among students at his university for his great cooking. But until now, she’d of course only seen humans at the gatherings.