Not until she is ready to ask. The subject of non-humans lay in the air. He refused to enter her mind without permission but he suspected she had not forgotten. It did not take his mythic awareness to sense that this careful step toward intimacy was new for them both—courtship for him, and for her, trusting him inside her place of safety.
Rueful laughter bloomed inside him as the thought occurred that he was learning courtship while hoping with every cell of his being never to use it again. To win the trust of this gentle woman, whose arts, whether in food or on paper, promised layers of complexity. But one thing he was certain of: he must permit her to choose when to ask.
“Yes,” she said, eyes bright. “I love museums! I used to take my sketchpad to the art museum over by La Brea, when I was growing up in Los Angeles. As often as I could I’d go to the Getty, where my favorite art was. I’d take my lunch and sit overlooking the sea from the back garden.”
“You like heights?” he asked.
“I do, especially overlooking the ocean. It’s never the same, ever.”
“Very true. . . .”
As the talk drifted from the sea to favorite landmarks and back again to art, he was aware of the dawn of happiness. That sun had yet to rise, but it beckoned just beyond the horizon of awareness.
They talked on about different forms of art, which led to artistic talent, and how some people seemed to be good at whatever they touched, and how talent could pass down in families. He relished how she glowed when he admitted that he had saved Fei Zhan’s early scrawls.
“They didn’t show a vestige of artistic talent,” he admitted. “And he’d probably made them at the behest of his tutors or his mother, but he had made them—they had come from his hands—and so I carried them with me. I took them out to look at until the paper finally fell apart.”
“I did the same thing,” she said softly, her eyes glistening. “I had so very little of my kids, just a few of those scrawls. And Skater had drawn in one of my books once. His father scolded him for mistreating a book, but I tried to get him to stop the scolding. Illustrating that book made perfect sense to a two year old. His mother made drawings in books, so he was making a drawing in a book! I still have that book, in the nightstand next to my bed. I also managed to save some drawings Bec had made at nursery school for Mother’s Day. Those were more precious to me than diamonds—”
She halted, giving a wide-eyed glance at the clock. “Oh! I should serve the dessert! We have half an hour before we should leave.”
Bird brought out a dessert that smelled like apples and cinnamon. “This is Apple Brown Betty,” she said quickly. “It’s the only thing I remember my mother loving to make. She left the recipe behind in her Joy of Cooking cookbook.”
She served them each a piece. He took a bite, relishing the blend of apple and spice, complemented by the delicate, sweet-salty crust.
“Do you like it?” she asked.
“It’s delicious.” He finished it off as she watched with a happy smile.
It was then that he noticed that her dessert sat before her almost untouched. She squared her shoulders, and he knew that the moment had come.
She said slowly, “So . . . you said something about . . . others. Not-human others. Did you mean animals?”
“In part,” he said, laying down his fork. “Long ago, humankind lived side by side not only with the animal world, but that of the dual-natured—humans who could also be animals.”
She gazed at him, her pupils huge. “What happened to them?”
“As humans became the dominant group, the dual-natured—nowadays they are known as shifters—had to hide themselves among the humans.”
“As my friend Godiva once said, humans are overrated,” she said tartly. His dragon hummed with laughter.
Then Bird sobered. “I know that’s not fair. I’ve read enough history to know that we humans can be both wonderful and cruel. And are very good at both. Very,” she whispered as she looked up, and away, then back. “So what you are saying is that these shifters . . .
still exist?”
“Yes,” he said.
Her pupils were enormous. “And you know the truth because . . .”
“I am one of them.”
He locked down hard on the mental realm, though he felt his dragon struggling to delve into her thoughts as much as he was able. Then cold showered through Mikhail’s nerves when he saw the glint of tears along the lower edges of her eyes.
She got abruptly to her feet, reached for his empty plate, took it and her untouched dessert to the kitchen counter, and began to busy herself in tidying. When he saw the tremble in her fingers, he got up and took a step toward her.
“Bird,” he said as gently as he could, sick with dread. He’d lost her—he’d frightened her—he wanted to cut out his tongue.
She gave a tiny sob, and leaned her hands against the sink. “It’s okay,” she said in a high voice. “Having a senior moment here.”