"It merged with my body. I can show you."
With that, he began unbuttoning his coat right here in the park. Max sat there with her empanada forgotten in her hand, staring while he pulled back the jacket and then—help me someone—hiked up the black sweater he was wearing underneath.
The sweater peeled back to display a flat but not overly muscled stomach with a curling treasure trail of golden hair. While Max was still coping with this, Gio bared his chest, and all of a sudden her libido took a backseat to other feelings.
It looked as if he had been branded. There was an incredibly complex pattern seared into his chest, printed in the shape of a circle large enough to cover his pecs and reach almost all the way to his armpits. It dipped down to the top of his abs and up to his collarbone.
Within the outer circle were concentric rings of symbols. Some of them were partly obscured by his chest hair. It was like nothing Max had ever seen before, no language she knew.
"There's an identical version on my back," Gio said as she stared. "I'll spare you that."
He dropped the sweater. Max realized that she had begun to reach out with the hand not occupied with her lunch. To feel his skin, to glide her fingers over his chest hair, or to touch those awful burned-looking marks—she wasn't sure.
She dropped her hand quickly.
"Does it hurt?" she asked, looking up at him again. Gio had set the takeout box aside and was buttoning his gray jacket again.
"Some," he said. "That's not the effect that bothers me most. I can deal with a little pain. I had arthritis before, after all."
"Had?"
He flashed her a sudden, beautiful smile. Fortunately she was sitting down and therefore was spared the indignity of another near swoon. "Yes, as soon as this thing became part of me, I lost about twenty years. That's the good part, to be honest. At least I kept some of the gravitas of my hard-won maturity and didn't end up aged backward to fifteen. The mind boggles."
"How old are you?" she asked.
"I would have been seventy-four in October. As it is—you can be the judge, and your guess is as good as mine."
As she had noticed when he first walked into her office, there was an ageless quality to him. She could have guessed him anywhere from an early-silvering and firm-faced forty to sixty-five with extremely good genes. Seventy was probably pushing it, even in the modern day and age, but who knew? She had heard that Italians, as he appeared to be, tended to live long and healthy lives.
"So you got good health and a generous dose of unexpected youth," she said. "In exchange for chronic pain and recurring cultists. Definitely some fine print there."
Gio smiled at the humor, but the smile dropped away quickly, turning to a wistful expression. He reached for his lunch, and Max noticed that he had finished almost all of it already, beating out even her healthy shifter appetite. At least starving didn't seem to be one of his issues.
"That's not all of it," he said. "You'll see sooner or later, I expect. There's an animal inside of me now that I can't control. I doubt you can help me with that, although if we can figure out how to get the medallion out of me, it would solve two issues in one go, getting the animal out and the cultists off my back at once."
Max felt herself quailing internally at the idea of any shifter wanting to lose their animal. If she'd had any doubt that Gio hadn't been born a shifter, that would have done it.
"About this medallion," Max said. "You didn't—literally eat it, did you? I mean, you couldn't have, unless it's way smaller than I'm picturing."
"I did," Gio said. "It was about ..." He held his hands approximately a foot apart.
"What did you do, crush it up and drink it in a smoothie?"
"I was a stone lion at the time."
"You were a—Gio, could you just start at the beginning and tell me everything? Because I can't help you if I'm constantly stopping to say 'wait, you did a what' or 'how is that even possible,' and I think this is going to happen a lot."
Gio blew out a breath. "You're right." He closed the empty takeout container. "Can we walk? Because we've been still a long time. I'd like to move. I don't want to be surprised by cultists jumping out from behind the nearest tree."
"I haven't seen any signs that someone is tailing us," Max said. "And I'm pretty good at spotting a tail."
"You won't be able to spot this one. They can trace me magically. Even if they're not here now, they might be soon."
"Ah. Well. In that case, let's walk."
Max ditched the box in a trash receptacle, and they began strolling down one of the park's winding concrete bike paths. Gio paced at her side, moving with a loping grace that was—yes, very lionlike. Between that and the gold-and-silver mane, she could easily believe he was a lion.
"How fast can they locate you?" Max asked. "How does it work?"
