Night Shifters (20 page)

He stalked off, down Fairfax Avenue, away from the Athens and toward the nearest ATM that way. He had a vague idea that he should go back and pay Kyrie for the mess. He would have done it the day before. But now he told himself there was simply no way. Not any way in hell. She should have told him about the sugar. It was all her fault. Yeah, he probably still owed her for the car—but because of the sugar he was now headed out of town, with nothing but a handful of possessions. He was going to need all his money.

He realized he was holding her responsible for the fact that she wasn’t perfect. And that was fine, as far as he was concerned. Wasn’t there someone—one person—in the world he could look up to?

“When is your break?” Rafiel asked. He’d been sitting at one of the small tables in the extension room that used to be the sun porch of the Athens and had been enclosed, sometime decades away, to make more space for tables.

Like a sun porch, it was informally furnished. Just plastic tables and chairs, of the type people used outside. On a Friday like this, and when the dinner hour was in full swing, it filled up fast.

A family group or a gaggle of laughing and screaming students surrounded every other table. Only Rafiel sat alone.

She’d smiled at him when first serving him, and the rest of the time she’d avoided looking too closely at him, as she served the noisy groups around him. But now she was pouring a warm-up of coffee into his cup, and he said, “Come on, please? I need to talk to you.”

She would believe him a lot more and talk to him with a far clearer conscience if she couldn’t detect, as an undertone to his soap and aftershave smell, the lion’s spicy-hot scent. She didn’t trust herself around that smell. She behaved very stupidly around it. Instead, she made a big show of looking around, as if mentally counting people. “No way for the next hour or so,” she said. “I have to keep refills and desserts and all coming. They allowed me to work because they were two people short. There’s no way I can take a break.”

To her surprise, he smiled. “Okay, then. I’ll have the bowl of rice pudding. A la mode.” He lowered his voice, “And then I want to talk to you. There’s some very odd autopsy results.”

Stealing the car wasn’t hard. Tom walked along the darkened working class neighborhoods first, looking at all the old models of cars parked on the street.

It had to be an old model, because his way of starting a car without a key wouldn’t work on the newer models. And in those streets, around Fairfax, with their tiny, decrepit brick houses, the cars spotted with primer on the front, there was a prospect on every corner. He could steal a dozen cars, if he wanted to.

Half a dozen times, he walked up to a sickly looking two-door sedan, a rusted and disreputable pickup and put his hand on the door handle, while he felt in his pocket for the stone he’d picked up from a flower bed near his apartment. The only other piece of equipment necessary to this operation was a screwdriver, which he’d bought from a corner convenience store.

He had everything. So, why didn’t he just smash the window, break the ignition housing, start the car, and drive away? Most of these houses looked empty and people were probably still at work or already asleep.

But he’d put his hand on the handle, and reach for the rock, and remember how hard it was to make ends meet from his job at the Athens. How he had never been able to buy a car, but used to read the Sunday paper vehicles for sale ads with the relish of a kid looking through a candy-store window.

From those ads, he knew many of these cars would be a few hundred dollars, no more. But a few hundred dollars was all he had in his pocket, and it had emptied his account. And accumulating it had required endless small sacrifices, in what food he ate, in what clothes he wore. Hell, he didn’t even shop the thrift stores at full price. It was always at half-price or dollar-day sales.

Oh, he wasn’t complaining. He was lucky to have a job, given his past work history and his lack of training. Correction. He’d been lucky to have a job. Now it was over and he’d be lucky to ever have another. What were the owners of these cars employed at? What did they do?

Fuming, he turned away. Damn. This going-straight thing was like some sort of disease. You caught it, and then you had the hardest trouble getting rid of it. They probably didn’t sell honesty-be-gone tablets at the local drugstore.

He walked down one of the cracked sidewalks that ran along the front of the pocket-sized lawns, kicking a stray piece of concrete here and there, to vent his anger. Damn. He couldn’t walk out of the city on foot. And he wasn’t at all sure he could start flying from inside the city. What if someone saw him? What if . . .
they
saw him?

He walked along as a thin rain started trickling down on him from the sky above. The rain felt . . . odd. He’d been living in Colorado for six months and this was the first time he’d seen rain. There was a feeling of strangeness, at first, and then, despite the warmth of the night, discomfort at water seeping everywhere and dripping from his hair onto the back of his neck, running down the back of his jacket.

He walked a long time on his still-tender feet and passed a roped-in car dealership. But it was the sort of car dealership you got in this kind of area—selling fifth-or sixth-hand cars. Of course, he thought, as he walked past, his hand idly touching the rope that marked off the lot, he could probably break into those cars far more easily than into any others. But . . . he stared at the wrecks and semi-wrecks under the moonlight. What were the chances that the owner of this lot was living so close to the bone that the theft of a car would really hurt him?

Tom looked at the facade of the dealership proper, and it was a well-known car dealer. Chances were they’d never feel it. His hand weighed the stone in his pocket.

On the other hand . . . On the other hand, the theft of a car—or one more car, as Tom doubted this would be the first—might be what caused the dealership to close doors at this location, to give up on this neighborhood, perhaps to give up on this level of car, at all. And then people in this neighborhood would find it harder to get a car. Perhaps harder to find jobs.

Tom dropped the stone out of his jacket pocket and kicked it violently aside. Then he dropped the screwdriver after it. He walked down the road, his hands shoved deep in his pockets.

He would have to walk, as far as he could out of Goldport. He’d go south, toward New Mexico. Lots of empty space that way, less chance of someone seeing or noticing a dragon flying against the sky. But damn, he could get much, much farther if he could ride. As it was, he’d almost surely get caught by the three dragons. And this time he would have to face them alone.

He realized he was chewing on his lower lip, as he walked down the street where the dilapidated houses gave way to houses in even worse state but divided into apartments, and then to warehouses tagged with the occasional gang graffiti.

He pulled the collar up on his leather jacket. Even with the ridiculous backpack on his back, he didn’t think anyone would challenge him. Not for a moment.

Knowing this trip was likely to end in his death, he wished he could buy something to make it easier. Not a lot. Probably nothing to inject. Just some pot to smoke, to ease his nerves. He was going to die, he might as well go easy. Besides, he’d seen there was no point trying to escape the grip of drugs, if even Kyrie did them.

In his six months in the city, he’d seen plenty of drug dealers standing around in shady corners, waiting. This was the type of neighborhood to attract them. But perhaps the rain, unaccustomed in Colorado, had driven them indoors. Tom couldn’t see anyone, and certainly not anyone with that pose of alert shiftiness that identified a dealer. He had money. He was willing. But no one was selling.

“Damn dealers,” he muttered to himself under his breath. “Just like cops. Never around when you need one.”

Wide awake and hopeless, he headed south and west while the sun set and the breeze grew cooler, ruffling at his damp hair, his soaking jeans.

“Frank, do we have rice pudding?” Kyrie asked, coming near the counter.

Frank looked up with a frown, from a talk he’d been having with three customers seated at the part of the counter where you could get food served. His girlfriend wasn’t around again, tonight, so he was in a mood. “I just came in and I haven’t made any. If there’s any, it’s leftover from yesterday.”

Well, it was all gone, then. But before Kyrie could turn to go give Rafiel the bad news, Frank added, “Is Tom coming in later?”

“Tom?” Kyrie didn’t know what to say. She honestly had no idea. And for just a moment was startled that Frank would ask her about Tom. Except that of course, last night she’d taken time off to take medicine to Tom. Or at least that was what she had told Frank. And then she’d told Frank that Tom was in really bad shape and she had to take him home with her and watch him.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He left my place a few hours ago.”

“Do you know where he was going?”

She shook her head. “He was with his friend. The guy who lives downstairs from him,” Kyrie said, as she pulled a stray strand of hair behind her ear. And as she did, the customers at the counter looked up. And she froze.

They were the three from the night before. The three dragons. None of them permanently injured, as far as she could tell, though she was sure she’d got the eye of at least one of them in the battle.

But they sat there, at the counter, uninjured, and the middle one even had his hair arranged, as artificially perfect and smooth as before. They all wore tight jeans and satin-like shimmering jackets, with dragons in the back. They looked like something out of a bad karate movie, and Kyrie was so shocked at seeing them here, in . . . well, the glare of the fluorescent lights, that she didn’t know what to do.

Red Dragon was the one sitting next to where Kyrie stood. He backed away from her, his eyes wide, and said something in Chinese that sounded like a panic attack.

The middle one said something in return, something she couldn’t understand, and put his hand into his pocket, pulling out a sheaf of bills, which he laid on the counter. And then, the three geniuses, in massed disarray, started toward the door. A process only slightly hampered by the fact that not one of them was willing to turn his back on Kyrie. So they moved backward as a group, bumping into tables and booths, snagging on girls’ purses and men’s coats, and muttering stuff in Chinese that might be apologies or threats.

Clearly, they were rattled enough to forget their English. Clearly, they thought that Kyrie’s panther form was too dangerous to anger. Although why they thought she would shift into a panther right then and take them to pieces in front of the diner patrons was beyond her.

Pulling and shoving at each other, they got to the door, then in a tinkling of the bells suspended from it, out of it, tumbling onto the sidewalk where the lights were starting to show, faintly, against the persistent glow of the sunset.

“What was that all about?” Frank asked. “Did those guys know you?”

“I have no clue,” Kyrie said, choosing to answer the first question. And this was the absolute truth. She couldn’t figure out why they would be scared of her. After all, even if she had been so stupid as to shift here, in the middle of the diner, they could have shifted too, and then they would have had the upper hand. There were three of them, after all.

Unless . . .
She smiled faintly at the thought.
Unless the total idiots thought this was a shifter diner and that everyone here would be shifters.
If Tom was right the shifting was ancient, well established in their culture, and perhaps passed on in families. They had a lore and a culture. For people like that it must be utterly bewildering when strangers shifted.
Perhaps they think we too band together
.

Frank was glowering at her, and she realized she was still smiling. He reached for the plates and cups the guys had left on the counter and pulled them down, near the cleaning area, by the dishwasher, glowering all the while and banging the utensils around so much that, if they weren’t break-resistant, they would probably have shattered.

“What’s wrong?” Kyrie asked.

But he just glowered at her some more, grabbed a dish towel from the counter, and wiped at the serving surface with it. “Oh, nothing. Everything is fine and dandy. You and Tom and . . .” He lifted his hands, upward, as though signifying his inability to understand any of them.

Kyrie skidded back to the sun-porch, to give Rafiel the distressing news about the rice pudding.

“There’s no rice pudding,” she said. “And the three dragons who were at Tom’s apartment were just here.”

“The dragons?” he said and started to rise. “Here?”

“In human form,” she said. “They left.” She frowned. “They seemed afraid of me.”

He looked at her a long moment, then shook his head. “I don’t know what to do. I wonder why they were here.”

“Looking for Tom,” she said.

“Oh.” He looked out the window. “We could follow them, but there’s only two of us—”

“And neither of us can fly,” Kyrie said. “Besides, there’s only one of us. I’m working. But since there’s no rice pudding, you’re free to follow them.”