Silver Basilisk - Zoe Chant Page 0,34

find a real answer, she was going to have to deal with her own situation, which still felt . . . off-balance.

Godiva blinked, trying to pull her thoughts to the present, and caught an exchanged look between the other three.

Then Jen said, “I take it Rigo explained his side of your history together? If you don’t want to talk about it, I get it.”

Godiva sighed. Either she told them everything—and she didn’t even know that yet—or kept it really short. “According to him, he made his first shift the day I told him about the kid. He scrammed, scared he’d zap me and the kid if our eyes met. And he tried to find me, but I’d moved, and then there was the whole post office thing, and letters that apparently vanished—both mine and Alejo’s. Which is still a mystery.”

And there it was, the reason she felt off-balance. Everything fit, except that long silence. She’d had post office boxes everywhere she’d lived, including here, until she bought the house. Not once had there been anything funky about the service.

She knew she was going to have to find the sense of it, one way or another.

So she waved a hand. “End of story.”

They knew it wasn’t—not even close to the end—but they accepted her at her word, because they were awesome. Godiva sat there appreciating their quiet acceptance, and fighting a sudden ache in her throat, as Doris and Bird began stacking the dirty dishes.

Jen said, “Excuse me a sec. I promised to bring Nikos over when he finished something on the island.” Then she vanished, leaving a waft of air that smelled like olives.

Godiva blinked at the spot where Jen had stood, thinking that this was definitely a new turn in her life, where Jen could go from one side of the world to the other in the blink of an eye, to the island where her soon-to-be husband was a king.

Godiva sat where she was, wondering what kind of king-biz there could be in modern times, until her phone rang.

She was sure it was Rigo, then she laughed at herself for mistaking sheer wish-fulfilment for some sort of storybook psychic connection. Serve me right if it’s some bozo trying to tell me the FBI is after me and I have to give them my bank account numbers quick, she thought as she fished in her purse.

Doris and Bird had gone with their dishes into Bird’s huge house. Godiva was alone there, but she wandered away as she answered. “Yeah?”

“Godiva?”

It was Rigo. Warmth flooded her as he asked, “You okay after last night’s marathon?”

Was she okay? Godiva walked down the shallow steps into the rose garden as she considered the question. The sense of betrayal that had shadowed her down the years despite her best efforts to ignore it or otherwise obliterate it had receded. Not vanished. It was more like the sun passing beyond the horizon, but you knew it was still there.

Rigo had obliged her by transforming, no shifting, repeatedly, to prove she hadn’t dreamed up a basilisk. As if her wildest dreams would ever have concocted such a story. It all added up, even to the missing letters . . . or did it?

“Godiva? Did the call drop?”

“Still here,” she said. “Trying to figure out my answer.”

“You don’t believe me.” He sounded resigned. A little hurt, even.

“It’s more like the jury is still out. About some things,” she said, thinking of those letters she’d never gotten. The ones she’d sent that went . . . where?

“That’s fair,” he answered, but she could feel the hurt still there.

No, she told herself. That was her merely projecting. He could be feeling, thinking, anything, and how would she know? A couple years of intermittent dating, followed by decades of utter silence . . . she couldn’t say she knew him even back then, and definitely not now. They were two utterly different people from who they’d been back then.

“What can I do?’ he asked.

She could tell herself it didn’t matter, but it did. It mattered a lot.

“Let me think about that.”

And he said, “Anything. Oh—Joey is calling me. I can hang up on him—”

“No. Go ahead. I just got done hearing all about Long Cang the Evil Red Dragon, and the Maguffin Stone that isn’t really there, and the zombies. That seems to be an ongoing problem, and they want your help. We can talk after Joey Hu gets done with you. I need time to think anyway.”

“Sure,” Rigo said.

Again