He hadn’t meant to shift.
But he hadn’t counted on the powerful effect of her standing there almost within arm’s reach, the sight of her making his senses swim. And through those heightened senses seared a terrible sense of betrayal beneath her fiery temper, a blast of emotion that threatened to smoke his heart right out of his chest.
And so, for the second time in his life, the basilisk forced his way out.
Godiva staggered back a step, eyes huge, her mouth rounded in a voiceless What?
He gazed anxiously down at her, strictly leashing the power of his eyes, even though he knew—now—that even if he let his power slip he could never hurt his mate. But he didn’t want her to feel the slightest vestige of that paralyzing power.
She was already still enough, poised for flight.
He stilled, too. Didn’t dare so much as move, lest he make things even worse than he had already.
She backed up another step. Then, with the bravery he had loved in her from the first day they met, she recovered that step, planted her feet wide, crossed her arms over her chest and stood her ground—all five foot zero inches of her—as she said, “I don’t understand.”
He shifted back. Godiva let out a soft sigh, rubbed a hand across her eyes and muttered, “I must be hallucinating.”
“No,” he said. And shifted again, this time deliberately.
A car drove by, headlights stabbing into the darkness. Godiva glanced from the car to him and back. “I have to be hallucinating,” she muttered. “They’re acting like they don’t see you. Unless someone in that car is frantically dialing 911 and reporting a giant . . . thing.”
He shifted back to his human self once more. “They can’t see me. Only you can, right now.”
“What even is that? I mean . . . you. What are you? In that . . . that shape,” she asked, her shoulders tight.
He ached to take her in his arms, but kept himself rigidly under control.
It was for her to make the first move.
“I’m a basilisk,” he said. “As well as human. We call ourselves shifters, as we can shift from one form to the other.”
She stared, her face in the street light blank, her eyes wide.
So he continued. “It—the shift—was new to me, too, that last night you and I saw one another. I’d just come from a fight, where it . . . happened. And I zapped three men into stone. Without even realizing I could do it.”
Another pause. She hadn’t moved. She didn’t even seem to breathe.
So he forced himself to go on. “I ran to you. It was my first instinct. But when you told me—about the child—all I could see in my mind were those smoking stone statues, something I’d done without even trying, and I was so afraid it would happen to you. To our baby. And so I ran.”
He sighed, but it didn’t loosen the stress clamping his shoulders. All the thousands of conversations he’d imagined with her, none had begun with him shifting first. Afraid he’d destroyed any chance he had with her, he went on more quickly, “It was stupid. Cowardly. Wrong, to run off without a word. I know that. I knew that. But I was terrified that I’d inadvertently zap you.”
Silence, during which he counted the thrumming beats of his heart against his ribs. Somewhere in the distance a sea bird cawed.
Then she said, low, almost a whisper, “Can you . . . do it again?”
He shifted.
This time she took a step forward, and her small hand reached up very slowly, very tentatively. He forced himself not to lean into her touch—the first touch in over fifty years—lest she misinterpret it.
She stood on her tiptoes and ran her fingers lightly over the metallic feather-scales running along the top of his wing. “It’s real,” she breathed. “You’re real.”
He shifted back.
Her brow puckered. “Alejo? Has he ever . . . seen that?”
“Yes. He’s a shifter, too. A chimera.”
“What even is that?”