Max realized that her soft touches had turned to slow petting, stroking his shoulder and flank.
The sound of the shower turning off in the bathroom recalled her to herself. She didn't have the luxury of glorying in Gio's leonine beauty, as much as she wanted to.
He must be very tired to have slept through the bed collapsing under him. She gave his shoulder a little shake. There was no response except another ripple of his stone skin.
"Gio, wake up."
He finally grunted and raised his head. Then there was a moment of stunned immobility as he evidently took in the changes to his body.
Max went down to a crouch so she could look him in the stone eyes.
"Gio, you're okay. You just shifted in your sleep. You can change back easily."
Gio's entire body shuddered—and then he was human again, lying in the collapsed ruins of the bed. Max was a little disappointed to see that his clothes had come back with him.
A quick flash of surprise and what looked like pain passed across his face before he blinked a few times and sat up. "That's never happened before," he said, flexing a hand as if to assure himself that it was flesh and blood again. "Not all the way, at least. Usually it hurts enough to wake me up."
"Maybe you were dreaming. I occasionally used to shift in my sleep when I'd dream about jaguar things." She decided not to mention that it had last happened when she was six or seven years old. Involuntary shifting was something that most shifters grew out of as they matured.
But Gio hadn't had a shifter childhood. All this was new to him.
Gio, meanwhile, had noticed that he was lying in the flattened remains of his bed. "Huh. Maybe I should start sleeping on the floor. What time is it?" He got up, and Max couldn't help admiring how graceful he was, even when abruptly awakened in the middle of an involuntary transformation.
"Getting on towards evening." Max glanced toward the late afternoon sunlight gleaming between the crooked blinds. "I don't mind having you as an alarm clock. It's time to start making plans anyway."
"Javic—" Gio began, looking quickly around the room.
"He's in the bathroom."
Javic picked that moment to emerge, damp-haired and wearing the jackalope T-shirt. "Thanks for the new threads," he said wryly.
"Figured that if you're leaving the cult, you ought to try dressing less a supervillain," Max said. She moved from the floor to sit on the end of Javic's still-intact bed. "I was just pointing out we ought to make plans, gear up, and move."
"Tonight?" Gio asked.
"Why wait? We might as well strike now. The longer we wait, the more time they'll have to start worrying what Javic's up to and what we're planning. Going in fast and hard makes more sense."
Gio was smiling a little. Max didn't realize why until she ran it back in her head and realized what she'd said. "Oh, stop," she said, and threw a pillow at him. Gio caught it, his smile widening.
Javic took the room's only chair, turning it around to sit with his arms folded on the back. "How can I help?"
Max snapped her fingers. "I knew I forgot something when we were at the store. We need something to draw on, and to draw with. Javic needs to sketch us the layout of the place where the cult is."
"I wish you'd stop calling it—"
"Javic," Max said, "it's a group of people who wear black robes, chant in circles, and are trying to take over the world using gargoyles. It's a cult."
Gio was feeling in his pockets. "How about this?" he asked. "I got it from the motel office. I thought it might come in handy."
It was a cheap brochure-style map of tourist attractions. The back was blank. Gio offered a motel pen along with the brochure.
"You stole their pen? Nice."
"There was an entire jar of them," Gio said. "I've always felt more comfortable with a writing utensil in my pocket. You like knives, I like pens."
Javic hitched his chair over to the nightstand between the beds. He spread out the brochure with its back turned up and began to sketch.
"Where is their base exactly?" Gio asked. "I've glimpsed it through your portals, but Mace and I know nothing about them other than that."
