She laughed out loud, a full body laugh that filled him with light.
“Busted,” she chortled. “I must have sounded like a space case.”
You sounded, he sent the thought with a memory of his first sight of her, the way I felt inside.
“Well, I’ll work at the telepathy thing,” she promised. “The girls are so sweet! I asked if they could show me their shifter forms. Just to cement the whole thing in my head. Petra is graceful no matter what form she’s in, and as for Cleo, I never thought that the word ‘hippogriff’ would enter into any conversation I ever had. Especially followed by ‘adorable.’ But Cleo is adorable. And gorgeous, with that warm golden brown, the same color the hills turn around here in early summer.”
Nikos felt her laughter bubbling through her.
“Now they want to show me what they bought at the mall. I guess I keep needing to reassure myself you’re real. That you’re you. All that stuff they told me about hetairoi and the rest, it sounds more like a dream than real life—you really live in a castle?—oh, here they are with their things!”
The girls reappeared with fabric draped over their arms. Jen rejoined them, and looked on admiringly as they showed off their purchases. Unnoticed, the shadows began to meld, as the sun dropped toward the Pacific Ocean in the background.
When Petra and Cleo went to put the things back in the room they shared, Jen used the opportunity to return again to Nikos’s side, her expression wistful.
She flung her arms around his neck, this time without hesitation. “It’s beginning to sink in that all this is real,” she murmured into his mane. “Including that assassin. Who’s after you. I’m beginning to realize that it’s me, holding you back.”
Never think that way, he began.
Up on the terrace, Bird appeared, and called, “It’s almost time to think about dinner. Who’s staying? I need a head count so we can plan a meal—”
At that moment, unnoticed, the last of the sun vanished below the western waters—and three things happened.
Nikos began to shift to his human form. In that instant, Jen’s arms around him blurred into wings as she shimmered into a golden phoenix, her eyes wide with panic.
And third: they both found themselves in Jen’s living room.
Crash! Rattle rattle rattle.
Nikos fell to his knees—at least he was no longer a unicorn. But Jen tried to fling her arms out. They had become wings, which knocked over both the lamps in the small room. Bits of broken vase and light bulb scattered across the table and fell into the carpet.
Jen turned, one of
her wings catching painfully on a table leg. Her long, graceful neck arched, and she turned toward him, terror widening her eyes.
“Jen, you’ve shifted,” Nikos said, glad he was human again so he could speak. “You’re in your phoenix now. The shift seems to be tied to the appearance and disappearance of the sun. I’m not surprised, as the sun is your animal’s element. Moonlight is mine. We can figure this out.”
With profound relief, he watched awareness replace the panic in her sapphire-blue eyes.
“Here. Let me help disentangle you.” He bent and freed one wing from the lamp cord, then he moved around the couch to where her other wing was cruelly tangled up in the laptop computer’s cord. She looked around, then hopped up onto the table next to her laptop, and—carefully—folded her wings. He could feel her concentrating on learning how to manage her phoenix-self. It was extra difficult inside a house not designed for the comfort of large birds.
She was shivering. He forced himself to move slowly, remembering that one’s animal’s perceptions were different than human perceptions. She was getting a lifetime’s experience all in one go. He said, holding out his open palm, “We can still talk by touch, if you like.”
Her beautiful head bowed down toward his hand. He stroked his fingers gently over the glorious feathered crest going from between her eyes to the upper part of her long neck. The features were soft as down, a glistening ruddy gold.
“Do you remember how we got here?” he asked.
Jen stilled, then laid her head gently on his palm. I think so. I was holding you, then the world turned weird and my hands didn’t work, and all I wanted was to be home. And then I smashed into the lamps. But at least you’re here.
“That’s right,” he said. “So we’ve learned something about how the Transfer Gate works. The first time, you wanted to be with me—and you were there. This time, you wanted the safety of your house, and because you were touching me at the time, we both came.”
But it wasn’t as easy, she responded. It felt like something pushed me.
“I felt the same thing,” Nikos said. “Which is the way I felt the one time I passed through the empress’s Transfer Gate with one of her knights, after she gave me this ring. I learned then that it’s best if one person goes through at a time. Two can go, if they are touching, but no more than that. The Gates can be overused. There’s a smell like hot metal when that happens.”
She shivered again.
“I was told that it was less about distance than mass,” he went on, still in a slow, calm instructor’s voice, so that her bird would comprehend. “I stepped through from Northeastern China to my island halfway around the world, in an instant. That was after waiting a while for the Gate to restore its qi, after the last person had gone through. It might be the same for you.”