by Zoe Chant
“It’s reaction more than the temperature,” she said, but when he pointed toward the car, she headed that way. Then gave him a kind of twisted grin, a flash of the old Shirl he’d known back then. “I was sure you’d stolen this pimpmobile.”
“Pimpmobile? My heart, it’s broken,” he said, striving for a lighter tone.
“Well, the truth is, it’s way too elegant for a pimpmobile. Not nearly enough chrome and other bling.”
He laughed. “Alejo found the chassis parked alongside some old farm equipment, put it on a trailer, and brought it home. We worked on it together. It took us ten years to find all the parts, rebuild it from the frame up, and to get it running again. Then, because neither of us cares especially about it being pure vintage, we modified it up to modern standards. My guess is, it’s a lot more comfortable then it was originally. Certainly eats less gas.”
He opened the passenger side, and she hopped in. He went around to the other side, scarcely permitting himself to acknowledge his triumph at having come this far. He was far too aware that he could still screw it all up. But the basilisk was humming inside him, a deep contented sound that Rigo had never heard before.
He got behind the wheel, and she faced him in the darkness. “I want to talk to Alejo.”
“Of course,” Rigo said, pulling out his phone.
He hit Alejo’s number and then handed her the phone. The phone screen lit at once with a video call. She bent over it.
“Hello—is that you, Mom?”
“Alejandro?” she whispered. “You’re so handsome! You look so young!”
Rigo glanced over her shoulder at their son’s smiling face.
“You look wonderful, Mom,” Alejo exclaimed, his voice resonant with sincerity.
“Hah! I look old. Because I am.”
“You look wonderful to me. I’m so glad Dad found you.”
Godiva bent over the phone, her profile still. Rigo’s throat ached when he saw her lips tremble before she pressed them into a firm line. Her voice was husky as she said, “Alejo, I didn’t hear . . . only those post cards before you turned eighteen . . . all these years . . .”
“I wrote, Mom,” Alejo said, his voice equally husky. “All senior year of high school, and again, once I got out of the Navy.”
“Navy?”
Alejo laughed a little unsteadily. “You remember what time it was.”
“Vietnam War era,” Godiva said. “I forgot. But I never did pay any attention to the news in those days. You got drafted?”
Alejo rubbed his hand through his thick blue-black hair, the same shade hers had been. “Oh, I don’t even know where to start.”
Rigo leaned over. “You went back to high school.”
On the phone, Alejo said, “Right. My last post card, I asked you to send my birth certificate. Do you remember that?”
Godiva stared. “What? The last post card I got, you talked about the Golden Gate Bridge. I have every post card memorized. I have every one of them.”
Alejo looked confused. “But why didn’t you ever write back?”
“I did! I have—every year, including this one!”
Alejo rubbed his hand through his hair again, then whooshed out his breath. “Well, I guess I’d better start from there. We didn’t hear from you, after I wrote to give you the ranch address. So Dad made me write to the state for my birth certificate. That fall I went back to high school. He said we’d drive out to Illinois to find you after I graduated, but bam! A week after graduation I got my draft notice.”
He paused to look anxiously into the phone, as Godiva stared at him, her profile stunned.
Then he started talking again, more quickly. “Dad said to go for the Navy, which might lessen my chances of being thrown into the ground fight in Vietnam. I did. I spent my hitch on an aircraft carrier, repairing helicopter engines, because I’d learned about wiring at home. Anyway, before I started high school, I asked my old friend Lance to go to the box to check for mail for me, since you hadn’t written to me at the ranch. You remember Lance?”
“The skinny kid with glasses and an Afro bigger than he was? How could I forget him? You two were always making war against some bully you called Barf, when you weren’t making blanket forts. I distinctly recollect one winter you turned the living room into some kind of secret lair.”
“That’s Lance. He’s a shifter, too. He was the one who guessed what was happening to me. Dad told you about shifters, right?”
“He started to.”
“Anyway, about the post office box. Lance said he checked, but he never found anything. When my hitch in the Navy ended, I went to Illinois myself. Stayed with Lance. We went to our old place, but they said you’d moved out a couple years before. So I sat down and wrote a letter right them. After that, I wrote every year. Lance promised to keep checking the box for me, and send me anything he found. But he never found anything—including my letters. So we assumed you were getting them.”
“I didn’t,” she exclaimed. “And I kept checking. Then after I got an agent, she checked for me, as she’s Chicago-based. And I kept writing to you, because my letters were never in the box, so I assumed you were getting them, but not writing back for some reason. . .”
She stopped, and Rigo could tell from their mirrored expressions that both were trying not to make the other unhappy. Then she pasted on a smile that hurt him to look at as she said, “I don’t want to sound like I’m arguing. Especially now, when we’ve finally reconnected. I’m so glad you’re alive, though I can’t even begin to understand what any of this means. I have a thousand questions, and I bet you do, too. But I can see how tired you are, and it’s got to be one a.m. back there right now.”
“I was up all last night,” Alejo admitted. “Couldn’t sleep. And work starts early. Mom, I’m so glad Dad found you!”
Rigo watched Godiva press her lips firmly again, but her spine was as straight as it had been when she faced down drunken, rowdy customers when she was eighteen. “Well, now I know you’re okay. The rest can wait until tomorrow. Right now I . . . need to hear some stuff from . . . your dad.”
“Right. Got it. Good night, Mom. I love you.”
“Love you, too,” Godiva whispered, and handed the phone back.
It was warm from her fingers. Rigo’s chest ached with the need to take her in his arms, but he kept himself still. He would have to earn his way back into her trust, a step at a time.
He was about to speak when her phone rang. She started, then pulled it out of her purse, and hit the speaker button. “Doris?”
“Just wanted to know if you’re okay, or if I should call out the Mounties.”
“Naw, I’m fine,” Godiva said. “Thanks for checking in.” She thumbed the phone off.
Rigo said, “Would you prefer to sit in a coffee shop? There’s a nice one on Pacific Coast Highway that I sampled my first night out here. Best coffee I ever had in my life.”
“Yeah. Do that,” she said gruffly.
He drove in silence, keeping the speed low and steady in case she began to feel unsafe. But when he stopped at a red light and risked a glance her way, her gaze had gone so inward he wondered if she’d forgotten that she was entirely alone with him.
The light changed. He pulled into the parking lot of the all-night coffee shop, stopped the car, and shut off the engine. Before he could open the door, she turned to him. “You said. That night. The last time we saw each other. That that was the first time you . . . did that.”
“Shifted,” he said.
“Shifted. Shifter. Shapeshifter, that’s what it’s from, right? Then werewolves are real?”
“Yes.”
She let out a sigh. “Maybe it’s just me being old, but I’m trying to get my head around the fact that the world is a whole lot weirder than I thought.”
“It’s a human thing,” he said. “Believing only what we see. So . . . I showed you. I’m sorry if it was too much at once.”
She tipped her head, then said in tha
t small, gruff voice, “You sprang it on me because I wasn’t going to believe a word you said otherwise.”
“Well, you had reason,” he returned. “I know that. I’ve known that from the moment I walked away from your door that night. Don’t think I haven’t replayed that conversation a thousand times ever since, wishing I could hire someone to kick me for making all the wrong choices. Here, let’s go inside. They get their coffee from a farm on one of the Hawaiian islands, and it’s fresh-ground every day.”
They walked in the door. The place was plain, even dumpy on the outside but the inside was nicely decorated, with real wood, tiffany lamps glowing like jewels, and lots of ferny things. She looked around and smiled. Maybe it was a bit seventies, but he’d always liked that look—and it seemed she did as well.
They headed for one of the comfortable booths. No plastic or glaring fluorescent lighting here. Godiva sniffed appreciatively, then said with an expression of wonder, “I don’t understand why this place isn’t packed to the rafters around the clock.”
“Because most of the customers are shifters,” Rigo said. “I was given the address before I came west. We can talk safely here.”
They sat across from each other in a booth. A young man ambled up and handed them a menu. After they ordered, Godiva looked across the table at Rigo, then said, “I still don’t get why you didn’t say anything. Was it because you thought I couldn’t handle it?”
“It was because I couldn’t handle it. Because I’d just turned three men to stone when their eyes met mine. Three very bad men, you could even say evil. Erich, Tonio, and Gravas. But I had no idea it was going to happen until I did it,” Rigo said.
Godiva scowled. “I remember that Erich, if he’s the one who always tried to flush out Eddie, just to pick on him. Called him all sorts of mean insults, but Eddie was smart enough to see him coming and hide whenever he could.”
“Tonio insisted on being the boss of the horses, but all he cared about was speed. He was careless and cruel, and criminally negligent. And Gravas, the owner, didn’t give a damn about anyone, horses or men. He was all about the money he could wrench out of us all. All three were evil, and they liked being evil.”
“So you didn’t know about the shifting, before then?”
“No.” He shook his head. “After I left, I found out that my grandfather Tzama was an iguana shifter. Ordinary animal shifters tend to make their first shift a lot younger. I didn’t, Grandfather assumed I was human, and so he never told me. I took off as a teen, much like you did, and for a lot of the same reasons.”
“I remember you told me once your dad was in jail for assault.”
“It was after he got caught finally and couldn’t argue or bribe his way out that I was able to think about taking off for good. The instinct to shift didn’t start hitting me until I was around eighteen. I drank to suppress it. I hated drinking. I hated having to get up and ride when my head was pounding from hangovers. But it was the only way I could numb this instinct I couldn’t explain, that scared the crap out of me.”
The coffee arrived then. Godiva plopped milk into it and then stirred slowly, absently, the spoon whirling round and round as he said, “I sensed that it was dangerous. I was dangerous, if I let it happen. It seemed to be caught up with my ability to hear the thoughts of animals—”
“What?” she dropped the spoon into the mug.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s how I got into the rodeo business in the first place. I was a good rider because I understood the horses and they understood me. I tried to get Gravas to let me do the training, but Tonio was his cousin. He was a bad boss, but worse, if he didn’t win in the ring, he took it out on us. We riders knew we had to let him win most of the time, but that day, his horse had stumbled, and I won—well, later that night Tonio threatened to shoot my pinto, but I realized later that was just an excuse to get me out there. He tried to jump me. I lit into him. Tonio yelped for Erich to jump me from behind, Gravas sat by to watch, laughing at the prospect of me being beaten to a pulp.”
“I never liked those men, but I never knew any of that.”
“I know. I didn’t want to drag the dirty parts of my life into your clean life.”
She looked away, and he said quickly, “Well, to get this sordid bit of my history over with, when both men went for me, the instinct hit me harder than ever before. Thanks to you, I was stone cold sober that night, or I probably would have died, as like I said, being drunk suppressed the shift-instinct. Tonio grabbed up a piece of iron to beat my brains out, and without knowing how, or even what, suddenly I was a basilisk. Erich fell on his ass screaming. Tonio yelled at Gravas, shoot it, shoot it! Gravas pulled out the pistol he always carried—”
Rigo sighed. “He glared at me as he took aim. My eyes met his, and he instantly turned to stone, his finger pulling the trigger. Never got off that shot. Then I looked at the other two. Same thing happened. All it took was eyes meeting eyes. I was so shocked I shifted back to myself, and then ran like hell. Straight to you, my safety island in a sea of bad. My sanity.”
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.”