Night Shifters (15 page)

“Our,” she said, before she knew where her mind was headed. “You said the human mind and referred to it as ‘our.’ You think our minds are human.”

“Do you think they aren’t?” Rafiel asked. “Why?”

Kyrie shrugged. “Up until last night I thought I was perfectly human,” she said. “I had no idea that I shifted shapes. I thought all that was an hallucination. Today I don’t know what I think.”

Something to the way that Rafiel’s expression changed, and to his gaze shifting to a point behind her, made her turn. The server approached to drop off the bill. Rafiel glanced at it and handed it, with a card, back to the server.

“Look, when I went to bed yesterday—well, today at sunrise—we didn’t have an ID on the victim yet. I’m scheduled to go and attend the autopsy today.”

“Why?”

“Why the autopsy? Because we don’t know exactly what killed the man. Our pathologist says the wounds look odd.”

“No, why would they have you attend it? I’ve seen this in cop shows on TV, but I don’t understand whey they need a policeman, who’s not an expert in anatomy or anything of the sort to be there.”

“Oh, that . . .” He shrugged. “Look, I’m the investigating officer. We don’t have a murder department. Until these bodies started appearing three months ago, our murder rate was one or two a year and those usually domestic. And the investigating officer has to attend the autopsy. It’s . . . That way we’re there. They film the autopsy, you know, but a lot of it never makes it onto the film or even the official report. And we need to know everything. Even some casual comment, that the examiner might forget to put in the official report, or that the cameras might not catch. Sometimes, crimes are solved on little stuff.” He grinned suddenly, disarmingly. “Of course, I’m going on my criminal-science class. As I said, most of the murders here don’t involve much solving. The murderer is usually sobbing by the kitchen door, holding the knife. But the classes I took said I should be there. Also, if they find any evidence—dust or hair on the victim’s clothing, I’ll be there to take it into custody. Chain of custody is very important, should the case ever come to trial.”

The victim’s clothing. Kyrie remembered the sodden rag of a body the night before, soaked in blood. She hadn’t been able to tell if he was wearing clothing, much less what it might be.

She emerged from the reverie in time to hear Rafiel say, “To the morgue?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“I was asking if you’d come with me to the morgue. To watch the autopsy.”

“Why?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Because though I’m not deputizing you, in a way I am? Because there might be something you see or notice. There might be a hair on the victim’s body that is that of a diner regular—”

“I doubt they can find a hair, with all that blood,” she said.

“You’d be amazed what’s found in autopsy. And I think you can help us. Perhaps help me solve the whole thing.” He paused a moment, significantly, playing with his napkin by folding it and unfolding it. “And then we can deal with it.” From his expression, he looked about as eager to deal with it as she felt.

“Won’t people mind?” Kyrie asked. “Isn’t it irregular to have me with you at something like an official autopsy?” She imagined facing the dead body again. All that blood. It was safer during the day, but it would still trigger her desire to shift.

“I’ll tell them you work at the diner,” he said. “And that you’re there because I think you might see or remember something. And if needed I’ll tell them you’re my girlfriend and you’re thinking of studying law enforcement. But it should just be me, and Officer Bob—Bob McDonald. Good man, he usually helps me. He’ll be there. But he was my dad’s partner when Dad was in the force. Bob won’t ask much of anything. He’ll trust me. He thinks I’m . . . as he puts it: ‘strange but sound.’
And no, he doesn’t know. At least we never told him. Of course, he’s around the house a lot.” He shrugged and set the napkin down, neatly folded, by his still half-full water glass. “So, will you come? With me?”

Kyrie sighed. She nodded. It seemed to be her duty to do this. Would it be her duty, also, to kill someone? To . . . execute someone? Until early morning today she’d never even examined her own ideas on the death penalty—she hadn’t had any ideas on the death penalty, trusting brighter minds than hers to figure that out. But now she must figure it out. If Tom had killed the man yesterday, did they need to kill him? Was there another way to control him? How much consciousness did he have while killing? And would any considerations of justice or injustice to him have anything to do with it? Or would it all be overruled by the need to keep society safe?

The server dropped off the credit card slip, and Rafiel signed it.

“Your name,” Kyrie said. “It’s an odd spelling.”

“Rafiel? I was named after an Agatha Christie character. Mom is a great fan.”

“Jason Rafiel,” Kyrie said. “
Nemesis
and
Caribbean Mystery
.”

He smiled. “Mom will love you.” Then he seemed to realize how that might sound, and he cleared his throat. “So, will you come with me?”

Kyrie sighed. “I really don’t want to,” she said. “But—”

“But?”

“But I think I might have to.” She felt as if her shoulders were being crushed by the weight of this responsibility she didn’t really want to take.

Tom had given Keith coffee and shuffled him to the back room where Tom had spent the night. He felt more at ease there, as if he were intruding less on Kyrie’s privacy. She’d let him sleep here. It was a de facto guest room.

“I was just worried about you,” Keith said, sitting down on the love seat as Tom motioned toward it. “The paper said a corpse was found behind that diner place where you work. And then with the apartment the way it looked, I thought—”

He had never clearly said what he thought, just frowned and looked worried. And Tom wasn’t absolutely sure how to respond. It had been five years since he had actually needed to talk to someone or had a personal connection with anyone. And apparently socialization was reversible, because as far as making small talk—or any talk at all—he might as well have been raised by wolves.

He hadn’t been a solitary child. He’d always had his buds, back when he was growing up, all the way from his playgroup in kindergarten to what—he now suspected—had been a rather unsavory group of young thugs in his adolescent years. In fact, it could be said that Tom, growing up, had spent far too little time alone with his own mind and his own thoughts.

But the last five years . . . Well, there had been interactions with other humans, of course, some of which still made him cringe. The man who’d tried to rob him outside his father’s house. At least Tom hoped he’d been trying to rob him. Though why a barefoot kid in a robe would have anything worth taking, Tom couldn’t understand. All he remembered was feeling suddenly very angry. He remembered shifting, and the dragon. And coming to with a spot of blood in front of him, and no one near him.

And there had been other . . . simpler interactions. But there had been practically no social interaction. Every time he’d talked to another human, or another human had talked to him, one of them had pretty clearly and immediately wanted something of the other.

Now, he couldn’t see any signs that Keith wanted something of him. At any rate, there was nothing Tom had—what few possessions he’d owned had been destroyed at the apartment—his changes of clothes, his secondhand furniture, his . . . he realized with a start that his thrift-store black-leather jacket would be lost as well, and felt more grief over that than he’d felt over anything else. That jacket had been with him from almost the time he got kicked out of the house. He’d bought it almost new, with the proceeds of his first day as a laborer.

In many ways, that jacket defined him. It had a high enough collar for him to raise and hide his often-too-vulnerable face at moments when he wanted just his tough exterior to show. He’d learned early that looking tough and perhaps just a little crazy saved him from having to do real violence. Which, when anger could literally turn you into a beast, was half the battle.

Tom had lost his home and left without even the clothes on his body. For the second time in his life. And the thought that Keith might want Tom’s body made Tom start to laugh—rapidly changed into a cough when Keith looked at him, puzzled. He knew Keith. That was not in the realm of possible.

Keith, for his part, just seemed to want to reassure himself Tom was okay. Having done that, he now sipped the coffee very slowly. “I guess your girlfriend is out?” he asked.

“Kyrie had an appointment,” Tom said.

“She’s cute,” Keith said. “How long have you guys been together?”

Ah. “Well, we work together,” Tom said, edging. “And one thing led to the other.”

Keith nodded.

“You? Did the girl see any other dragons last night?”

Keith frowned. “Now that you mention it, yeah. She said she saw four dragons later on. One jumped down to the parking lot, and then three others flew away a while later.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe she has a dragon obsession. She’s fun and all, but it might be more weirdness than I want to handle.” He scratched his head and adjusted his hat. “I have weirdness enough at college.”

Tom nodded, not sure what to say. And Keith launched in a detailed description of his college trouble, which involved pigheaded administrators and some complex requirements for graduation that Tom—who’d never been to college, only vaguely understood.

And then in the middle of it—he’d never quite understand it or be able to explain it—there were wings.

Only it wasn’t quite like that. There was a powder. A green powder, like a shimmer in the air. Tom had sneezed and was about to say something about it, but it didn’t seem to matter. It was as if he were floating a long way above his own body.

And Keith jumped up, dropping the cup that he’d been holding. Tom jumped for it, in the process dropping his own cup. Both cups shattered with a noise that seemed out of proportion to the event, and seemed to go on forever in Tom’s mind.

And then he turned, but he seemed to turn in slow motion. For one, his body didn’t understand that his legs actually belonged to him. And his legs felt like they were made of loose string, unable to support his weight. He tripped over his feet, and as he plunged toward the floor there were . . . wings over him. Green wings. Dragons. Green. Wings. Had to be dragons.

Suddenly the windows weren’t there. Ripped? The screens were ripped from the frames. Glass lay at his feet. And the tip of a green paw came into the room, only it didn’t look like a paw, more like a single toe with a claw at the end.

Tom grabbed for the low coffee table in front of the love seat. It was wicker and very unstable, but he struck out with it, hard, at the thing. There was a . . . tooth? fang? coming toward him, and he batted at it with the table. It made a hissing sound, not at all like a dragon sound. And it was dripping. At least Tom didn’t think it was a dragon sound. He had no idea what he sounded like when he was shape-shifted.

Keith was kicking something large and green and shimmering.

“Stop,” Tom yelled. “You can’t kick a dragon. It will blaze you.”

Keith looked at him, and Keith’s eyes were huge, the pupils so dilated there was almost no iris left. It reminded Tom of something but he couldn’t say what.

“Mother ship,” Keith said. “The mother ship has landed. They’re coming for us. I saw a movie.”

“Really,” Tom said, reaching out. “You shouldn’t kick dragons.”

Tom had managed to wrench the wooden leg away from the wicker table, and he had some idea he could stab the dragon with it. But one of the dragons was attacking Keith, while the other was . . . crouching against the glass door. If Tom could attack that one . . .

He started to go for the handle to the patio door, but all of a sudden it wavered and changed, in front of him, and it was the door to the Athens, with all the specials painted on. He pulled at it, but it wouldn’t open. So he backed up, and kicked high at it.

The glass shattered with a sound like hail.

The big green body leaning against it shuddered and turned. Toward Tom.

Two toes-with-claws reached for him. A fang probed.

He had time to think,
Oh, shit
. And then he remembered what Keith’s eyes looked like. They looked like his own, in the mirror, back when he was using.

The morgue of Goldport was in a low-slung, utilitarian-looking brick building. Someone with misconceived ideas of making it look like Southwestern architecture had put two obviously nonfunctional towers in asymmetrical positions atop the tile roof.

Rafiel Trall parked in front of the building, and Kyrie parked beside him. There were a couple of other cars and a couple of white panel vans parked in front. The street was the sort of little-traveled downtown street that connected quiet residential streets to the industrial areas with their warehouses and factories.

Rafiel put sunglasses on as he came out of the car, and Kyrie wondered for a moment if his golden eyes were unusually sensitive to light. It didn’t seem like the most practical eye color to have.

He saw her staring and smiled at her, as if he thought she was admiring him. Kyrie looked away quickly. The man clearly had an ego as large as his shifted shape.

But he was quiet as they walked inside the building. Though it was air-conditioned, it didn’t have the same feeling of clean cool as the inside of the hotel. Instead, the cold here felt clammy and clinging and there was a barely discernible smell. If Kyrie had been pressed to define it, she would have said that it smelled like her car a day after she’d lost a package of ground turkey in it, last May. It was the stink of spoiled meat, mixed with a faint tinge of urine and feces—what she’d once heard someone call the odor of mortality—but so faint that she couldn’t quite be sure it was there.

“Have you ever been to this type of place?” Rafiel asked.

She shook her head.

“Sensitive stomach?” he asked.

She shrugged. She truly didn’t know. She remembered the corpse last night and felt a recoiling—not because she’d been on the edge of losing her lunch over it, but because she remembered all too clearly how appetizing the blood had smelled. Appetizing was far worse than sickening. “I don’t think so,” she said.