Silver Basilisk (Silver Shifters 4)

Fat drops of rain spattered on the ground, and one hit his face.

He d

ecided the easiest course was to scope out the diner. If it looked terrible, he’d do some exploration on Yelp for suggestions. He crossed the parking lot in a few strides, entered the diner, and met the smells of ground coffee and fresh bread.

He picked up a menu and was halfway through scanning it when he felt a presence at his side.

Here she was, a straight-backed little figure dominated by those expressive black eyes, now framed by white hair. She wore a loose floaty thing in that shade of green-blue he’d sometimes heard call teal, over loose black linen pants and sandals, with her painted toes peeking out. The color matched her top. A shiver ran through him, he wanted so badly to take her into his arms, warm and soft and vital.

But he reached for a polite smile. “Sleep well?”

“Like I was bonked over the head and dropped like a rock,” she said. “Now I’m starved.”

“I was just checking out the menu. They don’t offer much, but from what I see, everything is fresh, and smells good.”

“Lead me to it,” she said.

They were the only ones in the small diner. Godiva ordered an omelet, coffee, and fresh fruit slices, then leaned her elbows on the table and peered across the table at Rigo.

“Okay,” she said, taking him once again by surprise. “Fair’s fair. You haven’t asked me a damned thing, outside of have I read Raymond Chandler. Go ahead. Shoot.”

“I figured you’d talk when you were ready,” he said, easing his way along this new path.

She shrugged. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

He didn’t speak right away, but took the time to set his coffee cup down if the fate of the world required precision, as his mind raced.

Godiva merely waited.

He looked up, his head a little tilted, then said, “All the way across the US I kept reordering the questions I wanted to ask once I found you. Outside of the first question, they kept changing—because I didn’t know what the answer to Number One would be. Though I imagined hundreds of possible answers. Just, not the one you gave me.”

“Which is? Though I think I probably know.”

“What we’re on the way to find out, why you never wrote back to Alejo.”

“But I did write,” she stated.

“I said it wrong. Why your letters, and his, crossed. No, they didn’t cross, because that would mean they landed.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding seriously, but with no return of her initial anger. “No, I get what you mean. What did you think?”

That could be a leading question, but he shook that thought away. She had never been the kind to insinuate something. She’d always come right out with it.

So he said, “I completely understood not wanting to communicate with me ever again. But I couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t answer Alejo’s letters.”

“Totally fair,” she said.

He paused as the food was set down before them. When they were alone again, he continued. “I know it’s ridiculous to talk about the mother-son bond as if it’s the same for everyone. I knew that growing up.”

Here, her eyes flicked between his. “You never told me anything about your childhood, other than admitting we’d had the same kind of dad.”

“For my mother, the world revolved around my older brother. She never saw that he was a bully and a thug. Like my father. He signed up as soon as World War I started, thinking the war was one giant carnie shooting gallery. When a bomb took him out in France, the life went out of her. I did my damndest to please her, but she wasted away. By then Dad was in jail. I left home the day after her funeral.”

He sighed. “But everything Alejo told me about the two of you during his childhood convinced me that you two were tight. That you cared deeply. Well, the fact that you kept moving when he got bullied, or when someone slandered or threatened the two of you—the care you took in renting that post office box in the first place—convinced me that you were pacing a hole in the street wanting to hear from him.”

“I was,” she whispered. “I was. I went out every single night to search, until I got the first post card. And then when they stopped, I waited a year, saving every penny. And when no more came, I headed west toward the last place he’d been, San Francisco.”

“So . . . what happened when you got out west?” he asked. “Not about the letters. You told me you never got any. How about we set aside the questions about why until we reach the Midwest. But . . . your life?”