"I was just about to call and make sure you were safe, dear—"
"Oh, yes, absolutely. Everything seemed perfectly ordinary when I locked up. Do they have any idea who the culprits are?" she asked cautiously.
"Chief Durham assures me that they're pursuing every lead," Marion said, her voice earnest.
In other words, Reive thought, they have no idea. How could they? None of the evidence at the scene would have made any sense at all to humans.
"I'm so sorry, Marion," Jess said. "And I only called in the first place to—to tell you I'll be out of town this weekend. I found a lead on a book I was looking for and I, um, I'm flying out of Indianapolis to get it. I don't expect to be back before Monday at the earliest."
"I can't imagine we'll be open next week, if it's as bad as they say," Marion said.
"I hate to leave you to deal with it all on your own."
"No, no, don't cancel your trip. Actually," Marion said, and Reive could hear the old lady perking up. "This might be an opportunity. We're going to need funds for the rebuilding, and it might be possible to get the money from the city council for that new reading room we've been wanting. And we could organize the local teenagers into a cleanup crew; perhaps if they're involved with rebuilding the library, they'll be more invested in it."
Jess now looked like she was suppressing a smile. "It sounds like you've got this well in hand. I have to go, but I'll call and check on you, all right?"
"You just have fun and don't worry about us here," Marion said. "I'm sure they'll have the culprits in hand soon."
"Oh yes," Jess said. "I'm sure. Take care, all right?"
She hung up and took a slow, deep breath, resting both hands loosely on the steering wheel.
"I can't believe I lied to Marion," she said, sounding like she had run a marathon.
"You were magnificent."
"She'll be okay, won't she? Will they bother her?"
"I don't see why they would," Reive said. "She doesn't have anything they want." He smiled a little. "She seems to be handling it okay."
"That's Marion," Jess said. She shook her head. "I thought she'd be devastated, but instead she's on fire to organize the whole thing. She'll have the library whipped back into shape in half the time that it would take anyone else."
"She seems like a great lady."
"Oh, she is, she really is. I hope I have half her energy when I'm her age," Jess said. She reached behind the seat and fumbled around, then came up with a half-empty box of granola bars. "Snack?"
"Sure." Reive took one, though he wasn't particularly hungry. One of the worrying side effects of the poison was that he hadn't really felt like eating. Normally he would have been starving, with his shifter metabolism in overdrive trying to heal his body.
"We can stop and grab a burger or something on our way to the airport." Jess gave a nervous laugh and opened the wrapper with her teeth, driving one-handed. "I can't believe I'm doing this. Flying off to Italy with someone I've barely met. Believe it or not, I'm not normally like this. I'm usually a very cautious person."
Reive couldn't help smiling again. She sounded more put out by the fact that she was doing something spontaneous than she was about having her entire life upended by gargoyles. "I really am sorry about your library," he said. "Especially if I had something to do with it."
"No, I don't think it was you," Jess said with a strangely intense conviction. "Don't blame yourself. I—I guess collecting all those things about gargoyles, asking around on message boards and shopping online book sales, I was painting a target on myself. I just didn't know it."
The low evening sun slanted into their eyes as they merged onto a bigger freeway. Jess pointed to the glove compartment, with his knees bumping it. "There are sunglasses in there. Could you get them out for me? I'm sorry, I don't have any for you."
"I'm fine." His eyes had naturally adjusted; shifters could tolerate a wider range of conditions—light and dark, heat and cold—than humans could. He passed the sunglasses to her, felt a brief thrill at the touch of her hand. "So what's the deal with the gargoyle collection?" he asked to distract himself. "Did you know they were real beforehand?"
"I ... it's just a hobby," she said a little too quickly. "I should have been researching dragons instead, apparently. Are you the only one?"
"No, there are entire clans of us. You're taking this much better than most people do when they find out about dragons, by the way."
"Have you told a lot of people?"
Reive grinned. "Okay, you got me. No, I haven't."
"Maybe people would take it better than you think."
"That's true," he admitted. "I haven't been around humans that much."
"Where do dragons live? How have they stayed secret all this time?"
He was not oblivious to the fact that she'd just redirected the entire conversation from her secrets to his, by which he could only conclude that she did already know about gargoyles, but didn't want to talk about it for some reason.
She might know things that would help us, his dragon said. We should tell her.
This is coming from YOU? Reive thought back at it. You're the most secretive reptile in existence.
I don't know, there's just something about her. I feel like we can trust her.
Reive grunted.
"Sorry," Jess said. "That was a really intrusive question. I take it back."
"No, no, it's not your question. I was having a conversation with my dragon."
Her eyes went wide behind the sunglasses. "What do you mean?"
Huh. Maybe he was wrong that she was a shifter. "It talks to me. Shifters—we talk to the animal part of ourselves."
"Oh," she said, sounding surprised and a little puzzled. "Well, everyone talks to themselves, don't they? Most people don't answer back, though."
I like her, his dragon purred.
"True," Reive said. "My dragon likes you, by the way."
"Just to be clear," she said, looking pleased, "your dragon is you, right?"
"It's the instinctive part of me. The part that just knows. You probably have something like that too, some little part of you telling you what to do, some part that skips straight past right and wrong to the things you instinctively feel. It's just that for most people it doesn't have a voice."
"No," Jess said, and now she looked sad, for reasons he wasn't clear on. "I've never heard a voice like that."
Definitely not a shifter, then. Maybe he was simply wrong about how physically strong and mentally resilient humans were.
"You're human," he said. "You're not supposed to."
For some reason this made her look even sadder. But then she did the same thing she'd done earlier when she had started to cry, and straightened up, visibly packing away her sadness and anxiety, putting on a calmer face.
Reive would have wondered what kind of life she'd led that had taught her to do that, except he didn't have to wonder. He recognized that look because he'd felt it from the inside.