Doris went on, “They have to have it to find out what’s in it. Anyway, I brought your purse from the bakery, Bird and I came to get you, brought you here, and put you to bed. That’s the general gist.”
Jen sat back. “Wow, and a lot of those students of Joey’s are shifters? I got the feeling he was their den mother. Now I know why. Um, beside
s his great cooking. So that’s pretty much it? I want to see Joey and Mikhail turn into animals. Not that I don’t believe you, it’s just . . .” Jen shrugged.
“That’s almost it,” Doris said. “Here’s where it all gets personal.”
“Mates,” Bird said. “Mikhail and I are mates. Joey and Doris are mates. It’s more than a lover and friend. Shifters—when they find their mate, it’s for life.” She pointed to herself, then Doris, then went on to explain what they’d learned.
Jen had thought she’d pretty much topped out the Amaze-o-Meter. But this news went way beyond—and yet it, out of all of it, made the most sense. Nothing about the oracle stone, even about the existence of shifters, came near to explaining why, after just a few days, she felt so very right about Nikos.
“With humans it’s slower,” Bird said quickly. “And it’s not like you’re forced into it. You could still say no—”
Jen went straight to what mattered. “So what you’re saying is, he feels about me the way I do about him?” She was pretty sure she already knew that, but it felt really good to get it confirmed.
“Yes,” Bird and Doris said together.
“The truth is, I think I fell in love with him when we first scrapped outside the bakery. If that makes me sound like a walking cliche, I can live with that. It also feels like I’ve known him forever. That I can say anything to him. I never felt that way with Robert. In the beginning, I was too young and inexperienced—it wasn’t his fault, it was me trying to be what he wanted me to be. Which became habit.”
“We were programmed to do that, back in those days,” Bird said. “Be good, be what the man wants, and that’s the recipe for a happy marriage.” She looked sour, an expression so rare for her that it looked odd on her face. “And you all know what fun my first marriage was.”
Doris nodded. “Whenever I felt sorry for myself for missing out all those years, I thought of Bird’s ex, and I was okay with having been the town’s oldest wallflower. Until I met Joey. And then, yes, it was pretty much instant. Not that my head realized it. I had baggage, so much baggage, but my heart knew it.”
“Well,” Jen said. She was now half a breath from running out the door, jumping onto her bike, and riding as fast as she could to Bird’s house to see Nikos for herself. “I thank you for filling me in on the ‘there’s more,’ and thank you for saving the best for last.”
“Yeah. . . . about that,” Doris said. “We’re still not quite done with the story.”
Bird said, “What exactly do you remember at the end?”
Jen frowned. “Not much. I got bit, then hit by lightning.”
“You got hit by lightning,” Doris said. “What does that usually do?”
“If you survive it, your nervous system gets scrambled. Is that why I feel kind of . . . oh, like I woke up an inch shorter, or taller?”
“You pretty much died,” Bird whispered. “Your heart stopped for a few seconds.”
Doris added quickly, “We’re not saying that the EMTs couldn’t have jump-started you, because that happens. People do survive electrocution. But Nikos was right there, and he did the only thing he knew how to do.”
“Which was to turn you into a shifter,” Bird finished.
“WHAT?”
Jen looked down at herself. Still human. She’d seen herself in the bathroom mirror. Definitely herself—and not even any bruises. She’d expected to see lots of those.
She turned a death stare up to Doris and Bird. “Don’t tell me I was a slug, or something really gross—”
“Phoenix,” Bird said quickly. “You were . . . are . . . I think . . . a phoenix.”
“A phoenix? But . . . that’s awesome,” Jen gasped. “Okay, maybe this is me being twelve years old again, but I always wanted to fly. All my life. It was another of those things I didn’t dare tell Robert because he simply didn’t understand fantasy. He didn’t even understand fiction. His entire life was dedicated to being a crusader for serious causes, which made my fantasies seem really, well, self-indulgent. So . . . I can fly?”
“We don’t know. Nobody does. Turning a human into a shifter is rare,” Doris said. “The guys don’t know if you’ll ever shift again. Or if you’ll be able to control it. Or fly. All the stuff they did instinctively when really little.”
Bird’s eyes rounded. “Nikos poured half of himself into you, which is another reason he’s up at my house. He’s pretty wiped out.”
Doris collected the teacups and carried them to the sink, then turned around. “The thing is, you were unconscious when you shifted back from phoenix to human. At the same time, while he was trying to stand up, he shifted from human to unicorn. Not on purpose, unlike usual. So . . .”
“The dishes can wait,” Jen said, her mind filled with the image of Nikos worn out, maybe worried about her. “Let’s g—”