After the second, more leisurely lovemaking, they both fell asleep, still in each other’s arms.
It was full dark when a quick rap on the door woke them abruptly, and Mateo’s voice doused Nikos with cold water through the veins when he called, “Boss, we’ve trapped Keraunos. Shall we take him out?”
Nikos’s first instinct was to say yes, but he was so sensitized to Jen now that he waited as she turned a troubled gaze his way, her eyes gleaming in the darkness. “No,” she whispered.
She sat up, her gaze going distant, then she said, “I have to go.”
“Mateo. Do nothing unless you have to,” Nikos called. “We’ll be right there.”
They showered together, but quickly. The first of many, Nikos promised himself—and felt her flicker of laughter, and anticipation.
They dressed and went hand in hand down to the training ground, where they found all the hetairoi gathered in a circle around Keraunos. They held weapons in one hand and in the other lanterns, flashlights, and one torch, which Tassos had brought from somewhere. Keraunos stood alone in the center of the circle, hands in the pockets of a long, fog-gray coat, blond hair adrift as lightning flickered in slow patterns all over his body.
When he saw Jen, his head came up. “I killed you,” Keraunos spoke at last, in a soft voice.
Nikos, still highly attuned to Jen, felt her recoil—and then gather herself, and reach on the mental plane.
Nikos thought he was strong in that skill, but now that Jen had integrated with her phoenix, she left him at the gate. He followed in wonder as she touched Keraunos’s psyche, and then began sifting the scars of psychic pain until deep down, she sensed a bewildered puppy.
“Look at me,” Jen said, not angrily, or even scolding. “Look,” she invited, and he heard the echo of her phoenix in the crystalline note in her voice.
His pale eyes lifted briefly, then flinched away.
“Look, Keraunos,” she murmured even more softly—an invitation, not a command, the very opposite of Medusa’s distorted power.
He shuddered all over when she said his name, and his gaze flicked back to hers—and held. “You can control the lightning,” she said, her phoenix speaking through her in that pure voice that was phoenix and Jen united. “You always could control it. But those who wished to use you forced you apart from everyone else. Alone. They wanted a weapon. The cost to you to become that weapon was immaterial to them.”
Silence stretched between them as lightning flickered, blue and lethal, all over his body. He stood in arm’s reach, but he did not move. Deep in that icy gaze she sensed the truth of him, far below the many scars of pain and utter loneliness, and Nikos shared it.
There is no one for me, they said. The thought was a mere breath, almost too soft to catch.
But Jen caught it. Not true, she thought back, just as soft—only for Keraunos, and only permitting Nikos to hear. I can sense her. But she too is bounded by walls of iron and spikes. And because he had been lied to for so long, she drew him into her mind, and let him glimpse that tiny gleam on the mythic plane that had nothing to do with physical distance.
Then his gaze dropped, he shuddered again, and he did what nobody ever would have expected. The lightning faded to a mere flicker.
Then he bowed, low. Turned. And dashed between Ava and Delos, the two who were not mythic shifters. They drew back, looking to Nikos for orders.
He opened his palm: stay.
Keraunos reached the low wall. Everyone gasped when he threw himself over. But he turned an expert somersault in midair, then shifted. In ice-blue wolf form he landed on a rocky precipice, glanced briefly back, then with a flick of his tail he was gone.
The hetairoi turned wondering gazes to Jen, and in that moment, he knew that they had truly accepted her as their kyria.
AFTERWARD
JEN
She hadn’t had time to think about her future, until she woke up in Nikos’s arms and knew she was home at last.
She liked the island very much, and knew she would grow to love it. But she, a globe-trotter for so much of her life, recognized that wherever her mate was, that was home. For him, this island was home—his roots were there—but in finding her, his life was complete.
She got to meet Grandmother Demi at last, and a great many interesting characters on the island. She loved their food and their music, loved waking up to the fragrance of citrus and wild thyme, loved flying everywhere. Including down into the volcano’s molten core, which she did occasionally, if her phoenix seemed to need a jolt of qi. Shifting was as easy as breathing. She could even blink, as Cleo called it—turn invisible to any but mythic shifter eyes.
Best of all, she said one morning to Nikos, knowing he’d appreciate it, “I can travel as much as I want, but my carbon footprint will be zero.” She could imagine Robert smiling in agreement about that!
Jen brought her own, Cleo’s, and Petra’s belongings over in small transfers over the next few days, staying long enough to replant her window orchid and hire a neighbor kid to do her watering. She meant to report back to Doris and Bird, but somehow it was easier to grab what she needed and go, promising herself a longer visit the next time.
Especially as she was writing again.