“When?” he asked. “Tonight? Tomorrow?”
“I have two classes to teach tonight,” she said. “That usually leaves me pretty wiped out. Tomorrow . . . well, tomorrow night is our writers’ group. And a dinner beforehand at Bird’s. I think you’re staying there, right? Bird probably invited you to stay.”
“She did,” he admitted. “My students are elated. They fell in love with that house.”
“We all love that house,” Jen said with another of her bright smiles, this time with no grief or regret in it. “You could come to the writers’ group after?”
“Will it be a problem that I am not a writer?”
“No. They always welcome an audience,” she said.
His unicorn said, She wants to see us. But feels safe in a group.
“It sounds interesting,” he said. And then out it came. “Maybe we can go somewhere after?”
She blinked, her gaze shifted, then she said slowly, “I’d like that.”
As he walked out, then down the block to find a corner away from windows in order to shift and fly back to Mikhail’s and Bird’s house, the unicorn bugled in triumph.
Nikos reached Bird’s house, where he found Mikhail pacing back and forth along the upper balcony, gazing out to sea. “Ah, you’re back,” was all he said.
Joey would be the one to launch a third degree interrogation, but he was not there.
In a not-surprising parallel, Mikhail said, “Bird’s daughter-in-law and grandchild are visiting relatives for the weekend, so we are free to talk. Joey and his colleague Ann had to oversee the return of the equipment. I just got back from doing a flyover of the town. We hadn’t realized how closely we were being watched.”
“Or how well,” Nikos said.
Mikhail accepted that. “That, too. We’ve been assuming they withdrew to regroup after their loss up in the mountains. But someone seems determined. Joey is busy right now assigning watch posts to his young volunteers among the student population.”
“There are that many shifters here? It appeared to me to be an entirely human town.”
“The young ones, especially those alone or separated from families, tend to gravitate toward Joey exactly the way they do to you on the other side of the world.”
“But he finds them mates,” Nikos joked.
Mikhail’s rare smile appeared. “More like, somehow it happens when he’s around. Like a magnet.”
“Or a talent.”
Mikhail raised a hand. “Joey doesn’t intrude or impose. He detests those who make it their business to rearrange others’ lives for their own good.”
Nikos suspected that there was a not-very-deeply hidden meaning to Mikhail’s words. “Call it a power, then.”
“I think that might be closer to the mark,” Mikhail said, and glanced out to sea again, as though ready to spring into the air and fly high and long. As dragons did. “We were debating which of us ought to embark on the journey across the sea to report to the imperial capital, and who ought to remain here to monitor the situation.”
There lay a question behind that, too.
Nikos answered it. “I wish I could stay. Maybe another night, but then we must return. Apparently Medusa is back.”
“Medusa,” Mikhail said, brows raised. “Is that the gorgon I’ve heard about? I thought she gave up on trying to win you.”
Nikos uttered a short laugh. “I never believed it was my dubious attractions she was after. It’s my island she wants. Nobody says no to Medusa.”
“Medusa,” Mikhail repeated, and humor brightened his face, a rare flash. “Is that not a little on the nose?”
“She
likes being blatant,” Nikos said. “And she does have a sense of humor. She also runs with some very shady people. Last I heard she was playing around with them at the other end of the continent, or I would never have brought the girls on their grand tour. But my hetairoi report that one of her yachts has pulled into the harbor.”