Silver Basilisk - Zoe Chant Page 0,22

as Doris helped carry the remains of the pastries to the kitchen.

“Good night,” Doris called, with a glance that Godiva couldn’t interpret. Worried . . . and something else.

“Good night,” Godiva said, shrugging it off.

Linette gave a distracted wave, clearly too busy with making sure the bakery was shipshape before she locked up for the night.

Godiva headed toward the door, knowing Rigo was out there. She could feel him there. Which was weird, considering the fact that she firmly believed that psychic powers and all the rest of it was so much hooey. If any of it had been real, why hadn’t Alejo contacted her when she thought about him so hard, all these years?

Remembering that sent a flood of irritation through her, which gave her the courage to march out the front door.

Sure enough, Rigo stood a few yards from the entrance to the bakery. The rest of the street was empty. Everyone else had left, and Linette’s car was parked in back.

“Shirl,” Rigo said softly, the same voice she’d heard in dream after dream. “Godiva. Ah, sorry, I’m still trying to get used to—”

Strategy, she had learned, was the essence of attack. Or was that attack was the essence of strategy? Anyway she cut him off. “I’ve been Godiva a whole lot longer than I was ever Shirley. Five names between. You would have known, if you hadn’t walked out on me.” Her voice quivered. She stopped, drawing in a hissing breath. She would not be weak. “Where’s my son?”

“At home—”

Relief flooded through her. Alejo was alive! He was safe! “Which is where?”

“Kentucky, at—”

“Kentucky? How did he end up there?”

“That’s where my ranch is—”

“So he lives with you? Still?” The relief vanished too quickly as all the pain beneath welled up despite her determination to hold her emotions in check. “He’s all right, and lives with you, but he somehow hasn’t had the time to . . .”

She’d meant to be calm. Rational. Factual. But the truth was too harsh. Rigo lived with Alejo, her son, whom she bore and raised on her own until he hit seventeen and vanished. Who hadn’t seen fit to come to see her, after all these years. “You know what,” she said fiercely, “I don’t care what excuse you’re going to yap. I won’t believe a damn word you say, so you can just—”

He interrupted her for the first time. “I know it was wrong, walking out on you all those years ago. But. This,” Rigo said tersely, “is why I ran.”

And before her astonished eyes, his outline blurred.

At first she thought it was the damn sting in her eyes—she refused to think of it as tears. But when she blinked, Rigo’s outline began to elongate, his dark hair rippling in texture until it somehow became overlapping scales that glinted like armor in the reflected light from the street lamp. His body continued to change shape, arms reaching out and out until between one moment and the next they snapped into great raptor wings, the taloned tips reaching from one side of the street to the other.

His head transformed, the scales smaller, sweeping in a lethally elegant pattern up and over his head, rising into a steely crest down his arched neck. The crest continued down his back into a long serpent’s tail that snapped back and forth with enough power to crush one of the cars parked along the street.

His nose had transformed into a razor-edged beak that reminded her of an eagle. He balanced on two armored legs that ended in great claws. But dominating all were his eyes, a fiery golden red that briefly flickered a virulent green.

Her jaw dropped. Her breath caught in her throat as she tipped her head back—he had to be at least twenty feet tall, towering over her.

His eyes glowed with greenish light. He turned his head, and looked down at a crumpled chip bag someone had thrown on the sidewalk. A laser-thin greenish beam lanced from his eyes to the bag, which glowed briefly as red as a coal. When the glow died down, there was nothing left but a tiny pebble, a thin wisp of smoke rising from it.

Then the great head swung back, and the eyes gazed down at her in what she would swear at any other time was appeal.

Her brain had absolutely frozen.

This cannot be happening, a little voice gibbered inside her—and yet as she gazed up at those eyes, whole pupils had become vertical slits, she somehow recognized