Silver Basilisk: Silver Shifters - Book 4

by Chant, Zoe

  Then Bird stepped up to her. “Godiva, that coffee looks like it went cold. Would you like me to refresh it?”

  Godiva blinked and set down the cup. “No thanks. I’ve drunk about a gallon this morning. But it’s done its job. It seems like you people have everything locked down here, for now.”

  Bird said, “Do I hear a but?”

  “Not a but. A so,” Godiva said.

  Doris and Joey turned. Rigo stood, unsure whether to stay, move, speak or remain silent.

  Godiva then said, “And so, it seems to me that it’s time for me to make a road trip.”

  The conversation at the far end of the terrace stopped. Everyone turned Godiva’s way. Rigo could see the respect they held for her as they all waited for her to speak.

  “Road trip?” That was Doris.

  “Yep,” Godiva said, rising. “I’ve got a post office box to check.”

  “A post office box? Can I give you a lift?” Doris asked.

  Godiva’s quick grin flashed. “This one is just outside of Chicago.”

  And Rigo heard himself say, “I’ll take you.”

  He held his breath. He sensed the circle also holding their breaths—the entire world stilled for a breathless moment, then Godiva said, “You’re on.”

  Chapter 9

  GODIVA

  Godiva surprised herself with that “You’re on.” Surprise—doubt—relief—curiosity. Each unraveled through her head like a ball of yarn, tangling into a mess.

  Her first thought had been of the discomfort of all-night trips on the Greyhound bus, being woken at two and four in the morning for stops. Then she remembered that she had enough money to travel comfortably now, but the words escaped anyway.

  She looked at him to see if he’d meant it, or . . .

  A smile lightened his expression, like sunlight striking water.

  She tested her response to that smile cautiously, a little like poking a sunburn. To test him a little, she slapped her hands on her thighs and said, “Well, then, let’s get cracking.”

  Rigo shot a glance Joey Hu’s way.

  Joey smiled. “Since we’ve agreed we’re in waiting mode, I think between the rest of us we can cover flyovers while we get started on the infiltration plan.”

  Five minutes later, Rigo and Godiva sat again in the Phantom, the art deco-designed car that Rigo and Alejo had rebuilt. She covertly brushed her fingers over the old-fashioned armrest, wondering whose hands had put it there. This car was full of her son’s touch, as well as her . . . what should she call Rigo? Her ex-lover? One-time lover, she decided. That seemed neutral enough. And she shut the door on the hovering question: could it happen again?

  “It’s about two thousand miles . . .” Rigo began as he started the car, which purred smoothly. Yes, he’d definitely upgraded the engine. Is that what he did on that ranch he’d mentioned? Godiva told herself there would be plenty of time ahead to find out.

  “ . . . so call it thirty hours altogether,” Rigo finished.

  She realized she had missed everything he’d said about routes and so forth. Which didn’t mean squat anyway. So she got to what mattered, testing him again. “Thirty hours not all at once, I hope. We’re not racing against a ticking bomb.”

  He laughed. “Can I say I’m glad? Though Alejo would probably think it cool. He still helps Lance with the occasional Guardian missions.”

  “I’ll want to hear more about this Guardian stuff,” Godiva said, aware that she was still testing him. “Especially if there are secret handshakes and codes. But right now, the practical stuff. Hotels or motels, I don’t care, as long as they’re clean. Separate rooms. I pay for myself.”

  “Whatever you say,” he responded.

  “And no complaining about frequent bathroom breaks along the road. If I gotta, I gotta,” she warned.

  He stopped at a stop sign, and shot her a wry look. “Did I ever complain to you about anything?” he asked.

  “That was years ago,” she shot back. “We’re two different people now.”

  “I’m still a basilisk,” he said mildly.

  She gave in to the instinct to laugh. So far, all points to him. “Got it. I can be ready in ten minutes.”

  He sent her another of those innard-warming smiles. “It’ll take a bit longer than that to return to my motel and get my gear. I’ll be back in half an hour. Does that sound all right?”

  “I’ll be waiting,” she said.

  He pulled up in her driveway a short time later. She got out as soon as he stopped, and hustled inside.

  The actual packing really would only take five minutes. Dealing with her guests might take longer, if they showed a tendency to hover, to worry, to issue cautions. She hated being treated like a doddering oldster, even if people were well-meaning, so she had to get her mind in the right space to be pleasant and grateful for the attention.

  She found Wendy in the kitchen, in the midst of chopping veggies for the crockpot. The pungent aromas of fresh onion and carrot and greens hung promisingly in the air.

  Tough, irascible Eve was unloading the dishwasher, and dignified, quiet Lily sat at the breakfast bar, keeping them company. Out in the garden, visible through the window, Wendy’s little boy was intent on some game, sunlight winking off his glasses.

  Godiva stood in the doorway, braced herself, and stated, “I’m going on a road trip. The house is yours while I’m gone, of course.”

  Wendy laid down the carving knife as the other women fell silent.

  “Shouldn’t be real long,” Godiva said into the silence. “This is to Illinois and back.”

  Eve set a cup on the hook and turned. “With?”

  “Someone from my past.”

  “You’ve got us on speed dial, right?” Eve said. “For ‘in case’ scenarios.”

  Godiva tapped the pocket of her purse where her phone lived.

  “When are you leaving?” Wendy asked.

  “He’s picking me up in half an hour.”

  “Shall I pack you both a sandwich?” Wendy asked.

  “Thanks—I’m good,” Godiva said. “And I don’t even know what he eats anymore. Guess I’ll find out.” A quick scan of faces, and she knew they wanted to ask questions, but wouldn’t unless she gave an opening.

  Which she couldn’t do now. If ever.

  “You’re all awesome,” she said, and retreated to her room, her throat stinging a little, though this was just a road trip, not a Grand Move.

  But she knew what that sting was: they cared. She had come to this town entirely alone, expecting to end her life alone. But gradually she’d somehow become a part of this . . . whatever it was.

  She laughed at herself as she hauled out her suitcase once again. Wow, had her feelings . . . really, everything had done a 180.

  She opened her closet and studied her clothes. The closet was half full of boxes of author copies of her mysteries, which she portioned out as giveaways for fundraisers and good causes. She’d never been heavily into clothes. In the old days she couldn’t afford it, and as she got older, she and fashion had gone down ever-widening roads, beginning with eighties shoulder pads, which she had ripped out along with the price tags on the few things she’d bought.

  Mostly she’d worn out her old clothes. Her last pair of hip-hugger jeans had bit the dust in 1995, and since then, she’d pretty much gone with cotton drawstring pants, which were comfortable and airy. She had a couple of fringy, beaded things left over from the seventies that hung there for nostalgia reasons, otherwise most of her tops were chosen for practicality. The colors ranged between basic black, gray, rose, and teal, her favorite shade. It was the shade she invariably had her nails done in, though sometimes she opted for hot pink or glittery silver.

  For warmth, she had a beautiful haori jacket Lily had brought back to her from Japan when she’d gone to visit her sister in Kyoto. That was Godiva’s dressy jacket. She kept it folded between tissue paper in her dresser. Should she bring it? She turned that way, then turned back. No.
She was not expecting to dress up. This was an investigative road trip, not a romantic getaway.

  So she added her old zip jacket in case there was a cold night, and turned back to her bureau. The top drawer was full of lacy, colorful underthings.

  She stood there, tapping her fingers on the suitcase, unwilling to open that drawer and display all those sexy undies. Ruby-crimson. Emerald-green. Purple-passion. That’s what it had said right on the label, and of course she’d bought them instantly, because no one would ever, ever see them.

  But now she opened the drawer slowly, as if Rigo stood invisible in the room, watching her pack. But it wasn’t a creepy feeling. Whatever else had happened between them, he’d never been any kind of a creeper.

  Call this weird feeling . . . prospective intimacy. Even the words made her feel off-balance. If she was honest, it was because she wasn’t repelled or disgusted at the idea of him possibly, under some distantly dated circumstance, seeing these lacy nothings. Across a vast room. . . In dim light. . .

  “Separate rooms,” she muttered.

  Anyway, she didn’t own any granny panties, so it was either pack these or go commando. And she wasn’t going to sit for hours in a car without wearing undies.

  So she stuffed a fistful of frilly undies into the side pocket of the roller and zipped it tight. Toiletries case last, then she rolled to her study to hesitate over her laptop. She’d established that they would not drive straight through, horrible thought, so . . . when they parked for the night, what then? She’d always traveled alone, taking books to read and a notebook and pen to write with. In this technical age, it was even easier, because she could pack her e-reader and her laptop. The question was, would she be closed in her room for the evening, to write or read?

  Or . . .?

  “Take the laptop,” she told herself. It didn’t add much weight.

  The pair of sandals she was wearing would do for the entire trip—she was even less interested in shoes than she was in clothes . . . though she looked down at her feet, aware of a sneaky sense of satisfaction that she’d gotten that recent pedicure.

  She glanced at her canes in the corner. She had a fancy carved one, a plain one, and a folding one. She didn’t expect to be hiking steep hills, but who knew? Anyway, his car was large.

  So she grabbed the plainest cane, then turned to the desk. She hadn’t asked Alejo when last he’d checked, or asked someone to check, the post office box. Her agent went twice a year, and they were about four months into her last check.

  On impulse—she couldn’t say exactly what she was testing—she yanked from the pages from the reading she hadn’t done at the writers’ group out of the recyclable trash. She selected two pages, folded them, and stuffed them into an envelope. Then she addressed it to Alejo Cordova, added the post office box address, put a stamp on, and tucked it into her purse.

  She was done.

  Fifteen minutes to go.

  She grabbed 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 flicked the very modern sound console fitted into the beautiful wood of the dashboard. “Want some music?” he asked. “What do you listen to these days? I remember there was only that one radio back in the diner, and the owner only played it when there were big band or mariachi shows.”

  “I don’t really like big band or mariachi,” she said. “Reminds me of scrubbing down beer-sticky tables with greasy cloths. And that was on the good days. Anything else is fine. Folk, classic rock, bluegrass, jazz, and for when I’m typing a big blowout at the end of a book, nothing works like Russian opera, the more bombast the better.”

  “I love your mysteries,” he said. “Alejo and I discovered them just this year.”

  “Okay,” she said, not sure how she felt about that.

  “Your wisecracking detective is my favorite. Somehow I heard your voice reading them. Especially the funny parts,” he went on. “Alejo said the same
. Two chapters into the first one I gave him, he said, ‘this P.I. kind of reminds me of Mom.’”

  “I sound pretty different now than I did all those years ago,” she muttered, pleased and uncomfortable at the same time. “Like a cockatoo. Too many years of hollering orders over the counter to the cooks. I didn’t know you read mysteries.” Then she grimaced at how inane that sounded.

  He paused to change lanes, and effortlessly transitioned to the northbound freeway. He really was a steady, unflashy driver. Exactly the type she preferred.

  “Well, I wasn’t much of a reader when I was young. I had so little schooling, and then books seldom came my way. Wasn’t until later, when I was laid up with a fractured leg from a bad fall, and there was no radio much less a TV, that I discovered the library. Raymond Chandler was my gateway drug. That led through Dashiell Hammett up to Dick Francis to spy stories as well as mysteries.”

  Her lips parted, then she gave herself a mental shake. It was way, way too early to burble, Me, too! She wasn’t even certain why she held that back, especially as he’d read her mysteries, but he bridged the awkward moment by going on to ask if she’d ready any Raymond Chandler, and if so, which one did she like best?

  Talk about mysteries, what they liked and what they hated, ate up the miles. When the lights of Las Vegas glowed on the horizon in the blue of twilight, Rigo said, “We’ve an empty tank, and I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry. Do you want to stop now, or try to make it into the city?”

  “Stop now,” she said. “I worked in Las Vegas for a while, to fund the rest of my trip west. I’ve seen it, and the traffic is probably ten times worse now.”

  He chose the next exit that showed the gas/food/motel signs and they drove into a small, dusty town, heat waves still rising from the pavement though the sun was setting behind them.

  Once they got the car gassed up (and Godiva had to laugh at the awe in the faces of the workers there when they saw the car) Rigo rolled out onto the main street. She couldn’t help but notice that Rigo’s eyes passed the chains in favor of seeking local hole-in-the-wall eateries that had tons of cars in the lot, meaning the locals knew it was good.