Silver Basilisk - Zoe Chant Page 0,40

her sun hat, then rolled back out to the living room.

Wendy came out of the kitchen, holding a silver thermos. “Here’s a water bottle. Always good on a road trip.”

“I didn’t think of that,” Godiva exclaimed. “And I would have, fifteen minutes after departing. Or so it went in my Greyhound bus days. Thanks!” She slid the thermos into her purse. “Time to jet.”

The other two emerged from the kitchen, which was nice of them, but hastened Godiva toward the door. She hated long goodbyes—long being anything over “See ya!”

She hustled right out the door, leaving that subject behind her the way a puppy leaves a mess on the carpet.

She shut the front door, and let out a deep breath as she took the letter out of her purse and clipped it to the mailbox. There was still Saturday pickup; as long as the mail hadn’t been delivered yet, the mail carrier would take this away after delivering the day’s mail.

She turned away, and looked up. The day was lovely, so she’d just wait in the driveway.

But when she got there, she found Rigo’s elegant car waiting, the engine humming quietly. It looked like he was texting on his phone. She was halfway to it when he looked up saw her, and smiled. He popped the trunk, then got out to offer to put her suitcase in it. She waved him off, and with a grunt of effort chucked it and the cane in beside his gear bag. Another spurt of that unsettling sense of intimacy there.

They got into the car.

She said, “Sorry to keep you waiting. You could have banged on the door. I promise, no hidden cannon to blast the random arrival.”

Rigo said easily, “I was about to text you. I just got the map up and ready. Southern California is really a spaghetti of freeways, isn’t it?”

Godiva felt some of the tension in her neck give way. One of her many roommates over the years had been the queen of passive-aggressive, all “Let’s go with the flow” beforehand, then a martyr afterward if you hadn’t guessed what she’d really wanted. That one had been the worst, but Godiva had lived with a wide variety of people since those long-ago days with Rigo.

He responded with an easy smile, but she wasn’t going to let herself relax. So, time to take hold of the conversation before he did. “Which reminds me. How old are you, anyway? I don’t think you ever told me—” when we were dating “—in the old days.”

He grinned over at her as he drove down the street. “I’m not even going to ask how you got from freeways to my age. I was born in 1900.”

“So you’re way over a hundred, but still driving California freeways.”

“Ah, I see the connection now,” he said. “Yep. But in a sense, I wasn’t much older than you when we met. I told you shifters age slowly.”

“Understatement,” she said, and then the writer brain took hold. “What was it like, being a kid when cars were still the latest thing?”

“I didn’t even see a car until I was a teenager,” he said as he smoothly merged into the traffic on the freeway. “My first glimpses were a couple steam-powered jalopies. I didn’t see my first gas-burning car until somewhere in the twenties. My first thought was how bad it stank. You wouldn’t believe the blue clouds of grit, then the noise. Put-put-put-BANG! Every horse bolted. Dogs howled. Nobody believed they would ever be a thing. I didn’t ride in a car—didn’t even want to—until years after that. But of course trains had been around for decades. I liked those. They stayed on their tracks, and so long as you stayed off those tracks, you, and your horse, and the train, got along just fine.”

“You obviously changed your mind. I remember you wanting a Phantom.”

“Yep. First time I rode in the back of a truck up a steep hill. A few years before I met you, when a friend took me out into the desert in his rattletrap Model A to learn to drive, I was a convert.”

That easy comment opened up another cascade of questions, about what he had been doing since their parting. First to mind, how many women he’d been with?

She shut that down hard. Even if he had a harem fit for an emperor, it was none of her business.

She was only aware of the pause having become a silence when he leaned down slightly and