“I still cannot land good. Well? Good?”
“Well for adverb, good for adjective,” Wendy said, sending Alejo a questioning look.
Through the mate bond, he said,I sensed something out there. A shifter, but not Joey Hu or the Guardian. I sensed covert intent. That protective instinct galvanized him—he wanted his family safe. “That’s probably enough practice for one day. We don’t want to overdo it. “
Wendy said brightly, “Oriane, do you like to cook? I was going to bake a cake.”
Sam hopped around. “What kind of cake? Can I lick the spoon?”
Alejo followed more slowly, pausing once or twice to scan slowly. No one in sight. That protective instinct made him want to investigate. It was unlikely that whatever he’d sensed had been caused by Oriane’s appearance. Far more likely it was related to Ms. Nobett’s intrusive demands about rabid creatures and suchlike—and then he remembered the little city he had discovered, which he had temporarily forgotten about in the wake of the discovery that he had a daughter. He also remembered his promise to that small community. As he followed the youngsters toward the house, he extended his senses again. They were still there, watchful and silent now. He then noticed belatedly that Rocky and the others had not appeared. Had they sensed that distant, watchful gaze? No way of telling.
What ought he to do? He felt he was making progress learning how to be a father—a shifter father—but the question of that little community, specifically protecting them, seemed to require more than just him. Was that Guardian business? He didn’t know these local shifters. Hadn’t been around long enough for that. Mikhail Long seemed a good sort, but remote, like the dragon he was. However, he had promised to extend his patrolling over this end of town. Surely if he’d sniffed trouble, he’d let Alejo know.
For that matter, Alejo was fairly certain that whatever that was could not sense him, or Oriane, while in their human forms. Still, when everyone reached the house, he breathed an inward sigh of relief, fetched his phone, and called Joey Hu, who answered instantly.
Alejo said, “This might take a minute.”
Joey Hu said cheerfully, “You got me at the right moment. I just finished a barbecue, and we’re sitting around letting it digest.”
“Thanks,” Alejo said. “I have to go back a day or so…” And he described what he’d discovered in the garden. Joey Hu listened without comment, so Alejo went on to that vague sense of threat he’d sensed—and as he spoke, it occurred to him why it bothered him. “I just had a thought. It felt a lot like Mikhail Long’s dragon. I mean, I know it wasn’t him.”
“No, he would not hide his identity if he was scanning on the mythic plane,” Joey Hu said reassuringly. “I think we ought to contact him. Especially if you sensed another dragon. Would you like me to do that?”
“Thanks,” Alejo said. “You know him best. You’ll know what to say.”
EIGHTEEN
WENDY
At first things were…not tense. Tense had been dinners with the Champlains before the divorce. Uneasy, perhaps. Wendy kept up a stream of commentary as she set out the cake ingredients, until she remembered that Oriane had been speaking more Spanish down at the beach than English. And when she spoke in English, it was simple, two or three words at most, and primarily directed at Sam.
Wendy tried an experiment, still speaking slowly and clearly. “My father’s ancestors came from northern France. When I was in high school, I took French. Such a beautiful language, though I was terrible at it. It was especially embarrassing when I couldn’t pronounce our last name correctly at first.”
Oriane looked round-eyed at Wendy.
Wendy smiled and went on as she fired up the stand mixer. “Would you like to add the ingredients?”
“Yes?”
“It’s easy—we’ll cream the butter and the sugar together first. There you go!”
Oriane carefully stirred the butter, which Wendy had put out to soften to room temperature. Oriane was clearly charmed with the process as the sugar blended with the butter to a soft, smooth light yellow.
Wendy went on, “I never was very good at French. I liked to read it, but what came out of my mouth was a terrible American accent. Once I graduated, you should have heard the way people pronounced my name! Powlett, Puh-LAY, and one of my bosses insisted on calling me Ms. Bullet.”
“No!” Oriane said.
“Oh, yes. ‘Go get me fresh coffee, Ms. Bullet.’ In those days you didn’t tell your boss how to pronounce your name unless you wanted to be fired. There, that’s perfect. Now we’re going to alternate adding the flour mixture and the milk, so we need this on a low setting, or the batter will go flying all over the kitchen. As I learned the first time I made a cake by myself, when I wasn’t much older than you are.”
Wendy watched Oriane slowly, carefully, alternate ingredients, a teaspoon or two at a time. Wendy remembered her mother’s smiling patience, and bit back the urge to do it herself—she would have had the cake in the oven by now. But what was the hurry? She had a mission.
“Very good,” she said. “You are doing it perfectly. Much better than my first try, though I’m sure I am not the first who had to learn how to clean batter off the ceiling. Anyway, as I was saying, after hearing my name mangled for years, I got over my fear of trying to speak my terrible French. But by then there was no one to practice with. Je ne parle pas bien français, je ne parle pas français bien?”
Oriane’s lips parted.
“See how terrible my accent is? And my grammar, no doubt. I can never remember which adjectives go before the noun and which after.”
Oriane pronounced the sentence correctly in the softest of voices, and Wendy said, “Thank you! That’s the way it should sound!” And she tried another sentence. This time she knew she was mangling the verb tense as well as the conjugation, and when Oriane whispered the correct version, Wendy thanked her again.
