Alejo laid the phone down face up so that both could see, and hit the connection button, pressing speakerphone at the same time.
Then he stared. Instead of the expected oily sales scam smile, he found two very tired-looking female faces staring into the phone. They looked a lot alike, one a woman—was she familiar? —the other a young teen. They shared the same dark arched brows, though the kid had a piercing in one of hers. She had also shaved one side of her head, and dyed the hair on the other side an electric blue. But what dominated her face was a pair of expressive, blazing black eyes, so familiar—
The woman whispered something as she fumbled with the phone so only she appeared. “Alejo,” she said, her French accent strong. “You remember me, yes?”
Alejo stared. Shedidseem familiar—
“Roxane,” she stated, her irritation coming across through the way she rolled that initial R. “We spent a weekend together. In New York—”
Alejo stared witlessly, memory crashing back. The breakup with his cat friend who found her mate. Meeting Roxane in a bookstore of all places—from there to her hotel—
“That was years ago,” Alejo said, casting a horrified look at Wendy.
“Thirteen years,” Roxane stated, her accent very strong. “Me, I can tell you to the date when it was. Thirteen years and nine months and four days. I thought, ah! It does not matter what I thought. There is a problem that we have, you and I—”
“Me?” Alejo repeated. “But we haven’t spoken since then, and—”
“We still have a problem. She is one and a half meters tall, her name Oriane. My daughter. And yours.”
Alejo said, “Wait. I remember we were careful.” He cast a glance at Sam, who was goggling at him. “Very careful,” he repeated.
“Yes, I know, moi. And I thought it was that scélérat Jean-Paul, and I counted wrong, but it cannot be.”
Alejo just stared at the desperate woman in the phone, who looked stressed to the max. Of course she would be. What time was it in France right now, three in the morning? Had she been calling all night?
“If I am responsible, I’ll do what’s right, but after all this time, I’m not sure what to say.”
“I know,” Roxane stated forthrightly. “I do not understand either, but thismustbe from you—”
She staggered, then disappeared out of the phone’s view altogether, to be replaced by the glowering, sullen face of the kid with the blue hair as Alejo began to say, “What must be from me?”
“This!” the girl declared, and shifted.
Leaving Wendy, Sam, and Alejo staring not at a girl, but at a large bird with a high azure and gold-tipped peacock’s crest. The bird’s beautiful head rested on a slender neck of mostly golden feathers underneath, then swept out into a body with sapphire feathers down the back, shading to crimson and gold feathers on its sides. The phone joggled as someone moved back and back and back. The bird gave a cry, then extended her wings—knocking over a lamp and a clock on a bookcase.
Sam bounced upright. “She’s a shifter,” he shrilled. “Just like you! Only why isn’t she a chimera?”
Alejo stared helplessly Wendy’s way, feeling the slow-motion detonation of his life. His love. Himself—
“She’s a simurgh,” Wendy said—then threw back her head and uttered a whoop, that same merry, open laughter she had enchanted him with when their eyes first met over a chicken suit.
FOURTEEN
WENDY
Wendy stared at Alejo’s phone, and at the ethereal blue and gold and crimson simurgh gazing back. She felt as if she had fallen through the looking glass, except it was not she tumbling through the air emotionally. This angry girl, Sam’s excitement—above all Alejo’s confusion, steadied her oddly.
When the world suddenly went sideways, there was nothing like an emotional meltdown to ground one.
On the phone, the simurgh—Wendy only knew what it was after having done research for a film years ago, until some producer had said “Fantasy doesn’t sell” and boy howdy hadthatprediction proved wrong—vanished, replaced by the angry young teen, who now stood there with her arms crossed, as her anxious mother peered into her phone.
Wendy bent over Alejo’s phone and met the woman’s eyes, mom to mom. “Roxane, what do you need?”
“Help,” Roxane said. “I think I am going mad!” She turned her head as, somewhere behind the phone, Oriane yelled something. There was a quick exchange in highly idiomatic French, then Roxane said, “Alejo, you do know what this is, Oriane has become?”
Wendy glanced to Alejo, who sent her a pleading glance before he bent over the phone. “I do. She is a simurgh.”
Wendy joined him. “You can find them in Persian history. Very benevolent.”
