by Zoe Chant
She chuckled. “Oh, the miracle of air conditioning! Anyway, to avoid nosy questions I used to invent new pasts for myself anytime someone asked. One of my roommates had heard at least three different stories from me. She was pretty cool, actually. Never called me on my crap. She gave me a Solstice present once, a notebook and a fountain pen, and said I should write my stories down. I tried, but I didn’t know how to spell half the words in English, so I’d write in Spanglish, but then nobody could read it. I found it was less fun, just writing for myself. I already knew what had happened. I wanted an audience, and people seemed to like hearing my stories. So I took a remedial English class that was held in People’s Park.”
“I had to do the same,” he said. “Night school, for me. So you started your mysteries then?”
“Nah, that was later. Well, I was writing all along. Even joined a kind of writer’s group, though it was really more of a mutual hoorah group. Criticism not allowed, only praise. That was nice, except when people fought yawns when I read, but then gave me a lot of canned compliments about how great I was, before hustling on to their own reading.”
“Human nature,” he said.
“Yup. Also fake, the way you tell someone who just got a terrible haircut that they are so awesome for trying new things. I couldn’t fool myself I was any good when the same compliments were handed to everybody else. So I took a creative writing class from a guy who was an actual paid teacher, but he liked donating time at the community center. He told me to be a writer I had to be a reader. And handed me a bunch of paperbacks people had left behind. Am I boring yet?”
“No,” he said, trying to restrain his delight now that she seemed to be opening the door into Godiva a crack.
“Any case, there isn’t much more to tell. I loved mysteries, especially the funny ones. Discovered I was really good at figuring out whodunnit before the people in the book. Thought I’d try writing my own, and had so much fun, yadda yadda. Listening to writers blab about writing is about as exciting as watching them write, which is the equivalent of watching paint dry. Though, for the writer, it might feel at times like you’re climbing Mount Everest, your butt has never actually left the chair. And here I am, yapping on about it. Wow, this is a lot like driving in California, flat road, flat, rocky land with little growing on it, lines of mountains in the distance. Except for these funky-looking touristy places.”
“Farther on there are some architectural monstrosities from the forties, fifties, and sixties,” he said, fighting against disappointment that she’d shut the door once again.
Had he done something? No, she was looking avidly out the window, soaking in the scenery.
So he bit back the questions, and for a time silence reigned as they passed old adobe houses left to wind and weather. But just as the landscape began to change to patches of shrubbery on ridges and hills, with the occasional tree, Godiva said in a reminiscent voice, “I also loved travel books. Describing places I knew I’d never get to. Oh, look, are those deer?”
There were indeed deer peacefully cropping under the branches of some beautiful blue spruce.
Godiva had her phone out, and snapped pictures of the deer as they drove toward the signs pointing the way toward the Grand Canyon. After that she was far too busy looking around for wildlife for conversation. Rigo smiled to himself, finding her eagerness was exactly the same as it had been when he first met her sneaking time to visit the horses.
They reached the entrance at last. The traffic was sparse, so parking was easy. “It’ll be maybe an hour walk from here,” he said. “But trust me, the rim is worth it.” He wanted to see her face when she first looked out over that vast area.
“I could really use some exercise,” she said as she clapped a sun hat on her head, and pulled her cane out of the trunk. “This looks like a nice path. All these pretty rocks lining it. So will we be hauling ourselves up a mountain?”
“No, when they say rim, they really mean rim.” And he went on to point out that the national park named Gooseneck was even more spectacularly abrupt. One moment you’re driving along flat ground, with a small fence ahead. You walk up to that low fence, look out over an abrupt drop straight down thousands of feet to the San Juan River winding below.
They followed a clump of tourists, Godiva grinning, camera in hand, as they passed the signs for the Grand Canyon rim.
Then suddenly they were there.
She halted, and drew in a long slow breath as she gazed wide-eyed out over the layers and layers of wild geological action over millions of years. The vista was vast, the rocky formations exalting in their forms. The river looked like a ribbon far below.
“Wow,” Godiva breathed. “Wow.”
“That limestone layer?” he murmured, bending toward her, though the other people around them were too busy with cameras to glance their way. “That was formed at the bottom of the sea. I was told that that limestone got up there, nine thousand feet above sea level, during a war between krakens and dragons epochs ago.”
“Okay,” she muttered. “I would have scoffed a week ago, but now nothing will surprise me. Krakens? Of course there are krakens.” She smiled up at him from under the brim of her sun hat. “Wouldn’t you love to go flying out over that mega-canyon?”
He bent down again and whispered, “I did.”
She grinned in delight. “Of course you did. And?”
“It was just as astounding as you can imagine. The air currents so strong I soared for miles without having to do much more than bank.”
“I wish I could fly,” she sighed. “Always wanted—hey. Where are those people going?”
“There are all kinds of tours and walks. Some are for rock climbers, others less strenuous, but even so, it’s really hot at the bottom of the canyon.”
She seemed completely oblivious to the sun beating down directly onto the dark brim of her hat. Rigo’s basilisk stirred within him, heightening his awareness of a shift in the winds flowing over the canyon.
“I don’t want to go all the way down,” she said. “Just a little ways, so I can see some of those sediment layers up close. Especially those ones at an angle. Imagine what kind of forces tipped them like that!” She bustled toward one of the pathways, moving like the hummingbird he remembered.
He cast another doubtful look upward. The sky was bright blue, but the basilisk smelled thunder on the wind.
Rigo looked toward Godiva, halfway down the path already. She halted behind a clump of people gathered at a point where several trails led off.
“ . . . and we’re seeing a possible storm on the doppler,” a park ranger was saying as Rigo caught up. She pointed to a bulletin board. “So we’re cancelling the one o’clock trail rides . . .”
Rigo turned to ask Godiva what she wanted to do, but she wasn’t beside him. He turned, in time to see her vanish around an outcropping glittering with mica.
He caught up. “They’re issuing storm warnings,” he said. “We have an hour’s walk back to the car.”
“Eh.” She waved her phone upward. “It’s blue sky overhead! They just have to be extra cautious. And I don’t want to go far. I only want to get an unimpeded shot of the river way down there. I think I’m going to have to add a road trip into my next book, just so I can fit this in. It’s too spectacular to waste.”
And off she went, the cane tapping. He noticed she didn’t lean on it all that heavily, but mostly seemed to use it as extra support for her footing, yet she still moved quickly.
Rigo followed, loving the sight of her complete absorption in the gorgeous scenery. Two, three, then five times she stopped, looked around, then muttered, “No, just a bit farther . . . There. Right over there, that has to be it.”
She stood at the lip of a cliff, and began a slow panning of the entire canyon—but halted halfway, exclaiming, “Where did the light go? It’s noon!”
She glanced up at the same moment Rigo did, to discover a weather front spreading with deceptive slowness from the south. “That i
s a weird cloud,” she said. “It looks kind of like an amoeba.”
“It’s a storm cell,” Rigo said as a gust of hot wind tore at them from below. “We’d better get back up the trail.”
“Okay,” Godiva said, balancing the cane between her knees so she could toss her phone into her purse with one hand and clap her other on her head to keep her hat from taking flight. “Wow. The sky was clear ten seconds ago.”
She bent into another gust of wind, this one tearing along the cliffs, bringing a scattering of huge drops of rain. She staggered as the wind buffeted her. The wind ripped her hat from her head and sent it spinning out over the thousand foot drop. Rigo leaped forward to try to shelter her, but the wind scoured past from yet another direction, gaining strength by the moment, as overhead the gray cloud intensified to a dark lanced with green.
Godiva bent nearly double over the cane as she stumped up the path, but again the wind did its best to swat them right off the side of the cliff. Godiva’s eyes widened as a gust threatened to take her light body away into the wind, and Rigo caught her hand.
The cane went spinning away as a stronger gust buffeted them. Both her hands clung to his. In spite of the wind and the stinging splatters of rain increasing by the second, warmth flooded through him.
“Trying to hustle here . . . but my knees aren’t getting . . . the memo,” Godiva panted.
“When we came down I noticed a crevasse. It should be up ahead about a hundred feet,” he said. “Maybe even a cave, if we’re lucky.”
“I know there’s supposed to be . . . a million caves all through these canyons,” Godiva gasped. “Weren’t there . . . entire communities . . . ages ago?”
“I think so. Ah! There it is,” he said, as lightning glared overhead.
Thunder crashed, shaking the stones around them. And hail roared down with the force of a pistol shot.
Rigo tried his best to shelter Godiva as he guided her into the crevasse he’d spotted. Icy wind shoved at them from behind, bringing a curtain of hailstones. Most of them struck his back. The crack was maybe twenty feet deep, but at least they were mostly out of the wind and weather, though not the cold.
“I’m sorry about this,” he began.
“Why?” she asked, shivering violently. “This is a hundred percent on me. In my defense I will say that I’ve gotten so used to Southern California’s weather that when someone says fifty percent chance of rain I mentally translate that to five percent. And if it comes, it’ll be five minutes’ worth.” Her teeth chattered a little as she added firmly, “I’ll tough it out. Sorry I dragged you into this.”
Lightning flared so bright it seemed to enter the cave, then another mountain-rattling clap of thunder. The noise of hail softened, but the curtain blurring the cave entrance only thickened from gray to white— a snow flurry! It wouldn’t last, of course, but it was dangerous enough, soaked as they were.
Godiva sat on the ground, her arms curled around her knees, which were pulled up to her chin like a child. Her top was plastered to her back, outlining the knobs of her spine, making her look so vulnerable it tore at his heart. He wanted to wrap himself around her, but he was as wet as she.
But that was as a human.
He looked at the components of the crevasse, letting his basilisk sense the density of the stone. Ah. There.
He glanced up. Maybe fifteen feet to the apex. It was going to be a very tight fit, but . . . he shifted, curling his long dragonish tail gently, carefully, around Godiva. Then he focused on a segment of stone, concentrated, and zapped it with a sustained glare until it glowed a deep red, emanating welcome heat.
And then settled as best he could, his basilisk utterly content to be protecting his mate.
Chapter 11
GODIVA
At first it startled her when Rigo shifted, and she watched, fascinated as his eyes lanced a glowing shaft of green light at a rock. She sneezed violently at the smell of burning stone, but when his huge body blocked that howling wind, she scooted gratefully as close to the glowing stone as she could get, her toes tucked under his armored tail.
“Thanks,” she sighed, thankful for Rigo’s smooth, scaled back blocking the wind. “Number 5,437 on the Getting Old Shit List is temperature changes. I used to be proud that I could endure any weather. Maybe it’s not age. Maybe living in Southern California has made me go soft.”
She looked to either side, where Rigo’s legs formed protective columns, and slid her hand along the smoothness of Rigo’s scales. They were steely, cool to the touch. She leaned over to study more of him, admiring a huge claw the size of a manhole cover that looked like it could shred a tank. Potentially fierce—Rigo’s basilisk looked like he could personally take on an entire tank regiment, even with close air support—but he sat so still and quiet, curved around her like her very own fortress.
She turned her head up the other way to admire more of him, her admiration turning to dismay when she saw his magnificent crested head bent at an awkward angle. “That cannot be comfortable,” she exclaimed. “Go ahead and change back. This mega-heat you made is more than warm enough. Anyway, it’s raining out there again. The temperature has to be coming up a bit.”
He blurred, and with a brief whispery sound he was human again. He dropped down next to her, one forearm propped on his bent knee, hands loose. She’d always liked his hands, the palms rough from work, but gentle even in their latent strength.
She eyed his profile as he peered out at the rain slanting down, smooth skin over strong bones, eyelashes long and gold-tipped. Was that from working out in the sun? What did he do, anyway? She had yet to ask.
As she reveled in the warmth from the stone, she let her gaze travel down over the white shirt molded by the shape of his arms. His look had changed so much from the old days, when he switched between two very worn pairs of jeans—this was back in the days when jeans belonged to the working person, before they became a fashion—sun-faded cowboy shirts, ragged kerchief, and a battered, low-brimmed hat. The only thing shared between then and now was riding boots.
Godiva knew nothing about labels. Her fashion sense had firmly stayed in the hippie era. But his slacks looked expensive without being flashy, and his cotton shirt fit well over his broad shoulders and that long torso as flat as when she’d known him. She liked the idea that he stayed in shape . . .
Wow, that stone was sure putting out the heat.
Or was the heat inside? She was suddenly aware of a stirring way down deep, where she’d thought the ashes had long gone cold. In fact, she’d done her damndest to put those fires out, out, out.
Welp.
She mentally bullhorned a reality check on herself—a granny-aged battle-axe getting the hots was about as alluring as a bag of mad badgers. Get a grip!
She moved back a couple inches from that stone. When she moved, he stirred, looking down at her with the softest hint of a smile, but concern in his dark eyes. “You okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she said in her heartiest voice. “Fine, fine, fine. More than fine. If anything, it’s getting to be a tad crispy in here. Not that I’m complaining. Better than freezing, oh yessirree.” She was babbling. Click! Her teeth shut off the blather.
“Storm is starting to pass,” he said.
That was nice and neutral, but she was still feeling that curiously intimate atmosphere. Grasping for a reality that she was beginning to suspect was gone forever, she cleared her throat, stared at that glowing stone that he’d heated up with just a look, and said, “So let me wind up my sob story. I think I mentioned I spent the last of the sixties mooching around Haight-Ashbury, working various crap jobs and taking alternative courses, but I was always, always, searching for Alejandro Cordova, which was the name I’d written on his birth certificate. My mother’s name.”
“I know,” he said gently.
“I wrote to him once a month, and sent money every birthday and Christmas. And every year if I could manage, sometimes every other year, I begged off wherev
er I was working—or quit, if they refused to give me time off—and scraped together enough cash to take the Greyhound back to that suburb of Chicago to check that box. I told you all that. At least I didn’t find my own letters. Since they weren’t there, I comforted myself with the knowledge that at least he had them, which meant he was alive.”
She sighed, her shoulders tight, as she gazed out into the silvery-gray wall of rain slanting down. “Okay, that’s sufficiently depressing, and it’s bringing us to the questions we just can’t answer. So why don’t you tell me what you were doing when he found you? How he found you? Unless it’s some kind of shifter secret?”
“As for how, basilisks are very rare. I think I told you that his school friend Lance Jackson, and his dad, are part of the Midwest Guardians. They heard about me when I began rescuing horses, some of whom were shifters. Word travels fast in shifter circles. When Alejo first arrived, I took him with me to rescue some horses from a bad situation, and then another rescue that I heard about when we reached the west coast.”
“How did you get into rescuing horses?”
“That was my goal after I failed to find you, to rescue Gravas’s horses. They were a lot easier to find. They had been sold to a circus to pay off Gravas’s debts. Since I didn’t have two cents to rub together, I worked to take on the ones that wanted to leave. Some of them adapted to the circus life. The food was good, the people as well, and running in a steady circle was easier than the rodeo life, especially on the older ones. Look,” he indicated the outside, where a sun shaft slanted down. “We can probably head up the trail now.”
The stone was already beginning to cool off. Godiva began to hoist herself up—but fell back with a grunt. “Stench-weasels! My head is ready for the walk, but my joints seem to have decided on a mass protest.”
“Hand up?” he asked.
She was going to refuse out of habit—she hated letting anyone see signs of age—but somehow, with him, it didn’t matter so much. She was what she was, there wasn’t much point in trying to hide it, especially with her cane somewhere a thousand feet below.
