The split level infirmary was amazing. With her phoenix’s sense she could tell how the warmth worked up through cracks between massive slabs of stone millennia old. The result was a lovely area filled with the plash of water. Native plants grew everywhere, with citrus predominant, lending their heady aromas to the atmosphere. Ancient statues, some crumbled by weather and old quakes, blended with newer decorations, all from Greek mythology.
Nikos was right. The sulfur smell was all but gone. Two of the pools still had ancient mosaics from long ago, one depicting silver dolphins leaping, and the other, blue monkeys playing among hanging gardens. Th
e idea of this being turned into polished steel and glass modernization aimed at big spenders made her stomach churn.
She found Nikos in a secluded grove of thick olive trees, where he stood next to a patient sitting in a chair, eyes closed. Nikos’s head bowed, so that his horn just touched the person’s forehead. It was a peaceful scene, but Jen could feel on the mythic plane how Nikos guided a thin stream of pearly qi into the reddish, pain-throbbing aura of the patient.
She backed away soundlessly, and soon was put to work washing out the shallow ceramic drinking vessels called kylixes that seemed to be part of age-old ritual here.
The shadows were lengthening when the infirmary staff saw the last patient down the hill. Jen’s stomach gnawed with hunger—she didn’t know what to eat while in her phoenix form, so she waited for her human nights for meals.
A bell rang, recalling everyone to the hall. Jen followed, seized by a fierce wish that she could sit down with Nikos. Share a meal. Such simple things, yet totally impossible.
Suddenly Nikos’s focus was there, at what she’d begun thinking of as her mental outer door. He never trespassed inside without her conscious invitation, and she was getting the hang of doing the same for him. She slowed down, so she could concentrate on the mental exchange.
Her sense of ease made a sharp left turn when Nikos’s thought came, Medusa is making her opening move.
“Keraunos?” Jen whispered, an echo of remembered pain flashing through her.
No—he seems to be hiding below on the yacht. For now. While I was busy up here with all these sick shifters she brought, all day her agents moved through the harbor and the other two fishing villages trying to buy property—offering insane amounts of money.
“Did anyone listen to her offer?” she asked.
Two—both newcomers to the island. They’ll discover what everyone already knows: all real estate deals go through me. That law’s been on the books since the days of bronze swords and sandals.
Well, that’s what being a king means, Jen thought to herself, smothering a laugh. To Nikos, “How does that change your plans?”
Since, strictly speaking, they haven’t done anything illegal, we won’t move against them by legal means. But everyone is on the alert, including the harbor patrol, as well as Grandmother Demi’s army. He then intrigued Jen by explaining Grandmother Demi and her posse of descendants, promising as they moved toward the hall that he would take Jen to meet this fascinating woman soon.
“I wish she and Godiva could meet one another,” Jen found herself saying. “What you say about Grandmother Demi—they sound a lot alike.”
Really? he responded. What little I learned of your friend Godiva, it seems she is a solitary person. Grandmother Demi is like the ancient plane trees, rooted deep into the rock of the island, along with her clan.
Jen said, “Huh. I never considered that! For someone who talks a lot, and loves to interact with people, Godiva really is kind of solitary, in that we don’t know zip about her life before she turned up in town. Well, everyone has lives, I guess—oh!”
They were so deeply melded that the sunset shift took them by surprise, right there on the castle wall between the infirmary and the hetairoi’s hall. Jen flapped up into the air as Nikos began to jog.
Guess I’m skipping dinner, Jen thought to herself. Good thing she’d had a substantial lunch after that weapons workout.
She hopped up onto the castle wall and dove off, glorying in spreading her wings and soaring out over the slope below. She decided to do a full circuit of the island everywhere except the harbor—she’d learn the shape of the shoreline, and hopefully distract herself from useless worries about Medusa, Keraunos, and everything else she couldn’t fix.
Also, sticking to the shore would distract her from the red, glowing pulse deep down at the bottom of the valley, which she knew now was not really a valley, but the thin layer over a volcano caldera. Not the place to go exploring as a brand new shifter. But the danger didn’t squash that internal pull the place exuded like some kind of magnet.
NINETEEN
JEN
The next few days passed, on the surface well-ordered, even fun, as the hetairoi bantered in typical teen and young-adult fashion over meals and workouts. But they were totally focused in their defense drills.
These were unsurprisingly organized into threat levels. What surprised her was how Nikos’s strategy was de-escalation. This island had been dedicated to healing for a couple thousand years, and that had formed their thinking. There was one plan that divided the castle from access below, by dropping a massive boulder perched above a key turn in the ancient zigzag, so that any infiltration could be dealt with one by one. She was experienced enough of a martial artist to see how the defenders would fight to leave an enemy wishing they’d never been born, but alive.
The highest threat level (one often used back in the bad old days of Aegean pirates, she learned) had the city people retreating up to the castle for safety, or to the caves below it, to be defended by the winged shifters. If an entire army attacked, Nikos’s people had some lethal defenses in place, beginning with landslides to take out invaders coming up the mountain.
Jen watched the castle drills, which involved not only the hetairoi but all the staff. She sensed tension mixed with expectation. In some, anticipation.
She finally caught up with her sleep (and got used to the different time zone), and began rising early, which meant she was ready for the shift into her phoenix before it happened. She got stronger at communication on the mythic plane each day, especially with Nikos. It was slowly becoming second nature to keep a mental door open just for him—and she sensed his own door open to her.
Sometimes it was nice just knowing that open door was always there. Other times they exchanged thoughts so fast that words blurred into sensory impressions—what they heard, saw, touched, even smelled and tasted—and the wonderful kaleidoscope of emotions they shared back and forth. With every exchange she felt the bond between them strengthening. Except for the equally intensifying longing to be with him as Nikos-the-man instead of Nikos-the-unicorn, she was happy, truly happy.