by Zoe Chant
Jen uttered a decided negative, turning her head away, her feathers briefly ruffling.
“The night is balmy,” Mikhail said. “It might be more peaceful for Jen out here.”
The trills this time were higher—agreement.
“Shall I stay out with you?” Nikos murmured softly, for her ears only.
Jen sidled up toward him. He grinned at her. “I’ll fetch a blanket and be right back.”
And so they spent their first night together, he in the lounge chair and she perched on the arm of his chair, with her head tucked under her wing.
FIFTEEN
JEN
When she’d suddenly found herself turned into a phoenix, the world seemed upside down.
No, that wasn’t quite it.
Her sight hadn’t changed up into down, or the other way around. It was more like the ground level had jumbled itself up with hazards, and she wanted to go high to get free of it. But her hands didn’t work right, nor her feet, and her eyes were just weird—she could nearly see all the way around her head, which at first made her dizzy. Then there were these extra . . . almost-colors, or colors that she had no name for, that she didn’t know how to deal with.
The worst was moving, until Nikos reminded her that it was a mistake to try to force her new body to be human when it wasn’t human.
Right. She was now a phoenix.
At first suppressing her instincts and letting this other consciousness within her take over wasn’t much better, because it felt helpless as a baby. But that changed fast.
Once she and her phoenix both understood how her claws worked to grip things beneath her, and she got her wings going, then everything got a whole lot better.
The toughest part was landing. But years of repeating a difficult move until her muscles learned it without her having to think paid off. It was nearly midnight when Bird called everyone to go in to get some rest.
Jen watched Nikos say goodnight to Mikhail and Bird before the pair went into the house. She knew he was worried about that Transfer Gate thing that had managed to get inside her somehow, though he hadn’t said anything. But she knew. One more thing to learn. She was aware how it worked now. At least, her head was. Both times it happened, she’d wanted to be somewhere else, and then she was.
So she perched on the back of a chair, and glared at a low tree branch in the garden. But her body didn’t budge. Maybe it was tiredness, maybe it was bird vision.
Nikos rejoined her, giving her that special smile that warmed her to the core. He stretched out on the chaise lounge with the blanket over him. She settled on the chaise arm. For a time she was content to sit and watch the wind with her amazing eyes, but when Nikos’s breathing slowed into sleep, she finally let her phoenix hide their head under a wing.
Without the constant stimulus of sight, she found her mind sinking and sinking . . .
. . . and the next thing she knew, she was falling.
She flung out her wings—but hands flailed helplessly as she dropped onto the chaise lounge. The empty chaise lounge.
Where was Nikos?
She rose on one elbow and found him back in unicorn form, grazing in the garden. His head came up, and the early morning sunlight shone in his eyes as he looked across at her.
She cleared her throat, and sat up carefully. She felt too long, as if someone had stretched her like taffy, until her mind settled back into its familiar sense of her human body.
A rustle and a step from the kitchen door brought her around. She had to get used to the limits of human sight again.
Bird appeared, carrying tea. “You’re you again! Good morning. I have oatmeal on the stove, and eggs ready to be fixed any way you like. Mikhail said he has plenty of workout clothes for you to borrow while you put yours through the wash. They feel it wouldn’t be a good idea to go back to your place for more.”
It was cheerfully said, but the fact that Jen couldn’t just jog home brought back all the weird stuff again: oracle stone, assassins, threats.
Well, if that was a part of having a mate (not to mention having a bird inside you), then it was time to suck it up and deal. “Thanks,” she said.
Bird’s house had plenty of bathrooms. A hot shower and a clean T-shirt and drawstring trousers, with her familiar suede jacket pulled on over the borrowed clothes, did a lot to restore Jen to normal. Bird served breakfast at the terrace gazebo so that Nikos in unicorn form could hear them. While Jen was inside, Joey had arrived. He sat at the table with Mikhail and Bird.
Jen nodded good morning.
“How are you feeling today?” Joey asked.
“Great,” Jen said. “Actually, really great. I realize I probably shouldn’t run home, but I could use a five mile jog and then a workout.”
Mikhail turned his austere face toward her. “It is as before. Cang and his followers believe you are dead.”
Joey said easily, “Cang’s gang right now doesn’t have enough interest in you to follow up to make certain of it, and it helps that some of them were arrested speeding up the freeway toward Los Angeles the other morning. They’ve got other things on their minds. We’d like to keep it that way.”
It didn’t take much to realize how easy it would be to discover she’d survived, if Cang’s minions were curious enough. A question at Linette’s about the tall blond woman at the writer’s group would reveal her name. From there it would be easy to close in on the studio or even her house, endangering her perfectly innocent neighbors.
She nodded. “But I can’t hole up here forever.” Then she added, “Wait. That’s not a solution anyway. There’s still that lightning-guy after Nikos. And those bozos after that oracle stone, right?”
“Joey and I will deal with the oracle stone,” Mikhail said. “We know it’s empty now—that what they want is actually inside you. We need to conceal that fact as long as we can. Ideally, forever. So we’ll carry on guarding the landslide as if it were still there, until the celestial empress sends help.”
Jen said, “Can’t that help come through the Transfer Gate? The other one, I mean.”
Mikhail said, “There is a limit to how often they can be used, and how much can be carried. Living beings transfer better than non-living material, but even then, the qi begins to overheat.”
“Right,” Jen remembered. “Nikos told me that.”
Joey smiled. “I have enthusiastic volunteers who think it’s hilarious to let Cang’s spies spy on them guarding an empty site. A couple of my shifter students offered to sneak around now and then, exchanging code words and notes, to give the spies something to watch.”
Jen grinned. “More power to them.” Then she turned to Nikos, his horn gleaming in the morning light, his black coat shining with rich silver highlights. “I know what you’re all saying but not saying. You need to take the girls home before that assassin does something terrible.”
Joey and Mikhail exchanged glances, as Bird looked worried. Joey said, “Leave the oracle stone to us. You and Nikos need to figure out your next step. Of course we’ll help in any way we can.”
“Got it,” Jen said. She looked toward Nikos, not sure if the question she was feeling was from him, or just her imagination. This mate telepathy was the weirdest thing so far.
No, she thought. No, that would be the Transfer Gate.
And she knew what she needed to do.
But first: finish breakfast.
Mikhail got up from the table. “I’m going to fly the perimeter of the property.”
“Invisible?” Bird asked. “I hope?”
“Not to mythic shifters,” Mikhail said with a dragonish smile. “I want Keraunos to see me.”
And between one breath and another, he surged into the air, elongating into a magnificent silver dragon. Jen’s breath caught. He was far more formidable than Long Cang—and she rejoiced to see it.
She drank the rest of her coffee and finished her eggs and bacon. Bird waved her off of helping to clean up, so she ran down the garden to Nikos. She badl
y wanted him to be a man again while she was a woman—all she’d gotten so far was one kiss! But if she couldn’t have the man, at least she could admire the magnificent unicorn that was his other nature.
He trotted to meet her, and she grinned. “It’s so good to be able to talk again. Yes, I know there’s that other kind. And I promise to try to get used to it. First, if I wasn’t here, you’d be taking Cleo and Petra back to your island, right?”
But you are here. And I would never change that, came his rich inner voice, resonant with conviction. She realized that it was impossible to lie effectively this way. Oh, maybe some could, but . . .
She shook her head, dispelling that useless trail of thought, and said, “But you’re waiting on me, right?”
Yes. It was simply, even tranquilly said, and again she felt the resonance of truth. How strong his love was, even though they were just beginning to know each other.
“Well, I had time to think last night, while the girls and I were flying around. They kept talking about ‘home’ with that special note in their voices. It’s a note that I’ve heard, and I recognize, but I don’t use it because I never felt it. For years and years I was globe-trotting too much. Yes, I know we bought the house. I love this town. I love my friends here. But I realized last night that my house isn’t my home. It had been the closest thing to it. Sort of. It was ‘our home’ but there is no ‘our’ anymore. Does that make sense?”
His response was very careful. Are you saying that you are willing to visit Vasilikos Alogo, even knowing that there might be trouble?
“I’m saying I want to. I still have my old go-bag in the closet, left over from years of habit. I could be packed in five minutes—all I need to add are a toothbrush, my ID, and my laptop. I could walk away from the rest. Though I’ll probably put my little plant outside and pay the neighbor kid to water so everything doesn’t die.”
Every time I think you cannot surprise me, you do, came his voice, the intensity of his love making her giddy.
“But I know what has to come next, which is how to get there. I’d assumed we’d need to book flights to the closest airport, then take a boat, until the girls admitted last night that you flew here from Europe. I think I could do that. So far flying seems to use the same energy as running, and I can run for miles. But it still took you some time. So I want to try something first.”
With that, she turned away before he could stop her. She knew that the Transfer Gate worked. Both times she’d not just wanted to be somewhere else, she’d thought herself there. Once to him, once to her living room, an instinct that had turned out to be a bad idea. Her house was no longer a retreat. That is, it wasn’t for someone who had become a phoenix as well as a person.
And she was not about to give up being a phoenix.
She’d tried transferring while in her phoenix, but it hadn’t worked, maybe for the same reason that her phoenix did not talk to her. She didn’t seem capable of anything besides . . . being a phoenix. That was okay, right now. It was morning, Jen-the-human was rested and full of energy.
So before she could second-guess herself, she turned toward the gazebo in the middle of the terrace, a space she knew very well after eating countless meals there. She got it firmly in her mind, gave a little hop, and . . . a slight jolt, a little disorientation, and she was there.
She’d done it.
She drew in a shaky breath, turned, and shot a triumphant grin at Nikos in the garden—to find him right up against the wall, ears flat. She didn’t have to see those to sense his worry. She executed a triumphant two-step, and laughed as she sensed his own inner laughter.
She vaulted over the low wall. It was crazy, how good she felt—like she’d gotten back her thirty-something stamina. She put her hand to the flat space between his eyes, scritching a little as she said quickly, “I remembered everything you said. It works. I have to have quiet, to concentrate, to see myself there. It’s like taking a step without actually moving. I can do it!”
She felt his lingering concern as a kind of voiceless hum. I’ve never heard of a Transfer Gate becoming a power. I don’t want to risk your being endangered by it.
Jen said, “I don’t mind experimenting in small ways. Nothing hurt after I did it.”
She felt him hesitate, not wanting to start an argument. So she waited, not wanting to make it an argument—their first.
Her instinct was right. His unicorn’s inner hum deepened as his voice whispered in her head, It’s your power, and your choice. But I can’t curb my concern.
“I respect that. And concern is only one of the thoughts crashing around inside me. I’m paying it enough attention to try these little experiments first,” she murmured, standing on her tiptoes and pressing her forehead against his. She reached up to stroke his mane as she said, “Even when I was a brash college student winning competitions right and left, I never expected to pick up a weapon and take on a horde of real henchmen out for blood.”
Footsteps behind her broke her attention from Nikos. She turned to find Joey approaching, his face almost unrecognizable without his characteristic smile. “Mikhail has spotted Keraunos roaming the perimeter,” he reported abruptly. “He went to ground when he saw Mikhail.”
Nikos’s thought came fast, He’ll be back. We had to expect that. I need to get the girls away as soon as possible. As well as not bring danger to the people here.
Jen immediately understood. The easiest way to corner Nikos would be to capture someone important to him, and force him trade a life for a life—it had to be Number One in the Villains’ Playbook.
She felt his inner laugh, and realized she’d shared the thought.
Jen, do you think you could reach a place you’ve never seen, if I show you a photo? That’s how the celestial Transfer Gate works: the knight who tends it uses photos. That’s how I got home the one time I experienced that kind of transfer.
“How’s this,” Jen said. “You told me mass is more important than distance. How about if I ask Bird or Doris if they’re willing to go from one side of the garden to the other with me? And if it works, I can take the girls, one at a time?”
“I’ve used the Gate along with a knight several times,” Joey said, clearly having heard the silent as well as the spoken conversation. “Try it with me.”
Jen put her hand on Joey’s shoulder and pictured her gazebo spot—and the two of them stumbled forward, nearly crashing into a potted hydrangea inside the gazebo. Just as when she’d transferred with Nikos, she got that weird sense of being shoved by an invisible hand. So having another person along really did make the difference.
“Now let’s try it with somewhere I haven’t seen first,” Jen said.
Joey took out his cell phone. “Just today one of my students forwarded a picture of a meditation garden she designed, maybe five miles from here. I know she’s at class right now. The location is secluded, the last house in a cul-de-sac.”
He handed her the phone. Jen bent over the photo, studying every detail. She fixed on a cracked tile in front of a big ceramic vase, gave a little hop as she thought herself there . . .
And there she was, a little dizzy for a moment as she breathed in the fragrance of herbs growing in neat rows behind a carving of a smiling Buddha.
I can do this, she thought in wonder. Then she realized she was standing in someone’s private yard uninvited, transferred herself back to the gazebo, and met the waiting faces. She felt Nikos’s relief, and saw Joey’s in his sudden smile.
When the girls emerged after their night’s sleep, Joey explained that they had to leave as soon as they’d eaten breakfast. Jen would take them home—where they were to bring the other hetairoi up to date.
Cleo’s eyes widened. Petra said softly, “Keraunos will come to the island once he knows we’re gone, won’t he.”
Jen was leaning against Nikos’s powerful shoulder. “Nikos wants to remind you that that’s home ground. As for your clothes and things, I promise I’ll bring them later. I’m also le
aving my own stuff for a second trip. We don’t want to risk extra mass while I transfer two people at once.”
Still, the girls were uncharacteristically quiet during breakfast. Afterward they said their thanks very properly and formally, then joined Jen on the terrace. While they ate, she had been studying a snapshot Nikos had on his cell.
Petra volunteered to go first. After all the tension and buildup, the actual transfer was the opposite of dramatic: one moment they were in California, the next in a climate more or less the same, but the scents of the countryside were far different. Jen got an impression of white stone throwing back late afternoon sunlight, then she transferred back.
Cleo was next. Though she was a bit smaller than Petra, this time when Jen returned, though she was alone, she felt that invisible fist a third time—and she sneezed, waving her hand before her face. The smell coming off her clothes threw her back to the days when she’d done all the ironing for her family: scorched cotton.
Mikhail had returned from patrolling his. “You now know the limits on your Transfer power,” Mikhail said calmly, when she reported the scorch smell. “Give it at least an hour. Longer, if you are at all tired or weakened.”
“I don’t feel bad, just . . . like I sat too long next to a fire,” Jen said.
“The qi needs to settle,” Joey replied. “But Nikos can’t transfer in unicorn form anyway. He’s too large.”
Jen said, “It will have to be right at sunset. I did it by accident last time. This time I know what I’m doing.”
Joey agreed.
Everyone dispersed to various tasks. Jen told Nikos she had something to do, and found her purse where Doris had left it when she and Bird had arrived following Jen’s first transfer.
Her phone still had half a charge. She hated lying to anyone important to her, even a small lie, and so she went to the side of the house, and called Master Reynaldo.
“Jen! How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine, but I called to say that I’m going to take a leave of absence. I can try to make it short, rather than leave you in the lurch . . .” She stopped there, realizing she didn’t want to lie, but she couldn’t tell the truth if he asked.
