Night Shifters (24 page)

“Pardon me?” Kyrie asked finding this, in some way, stranger than giant beetles in the parking lot of the Athens.

“His wife had pictures of him as a coyote. Lovely lady, I would judge about ten years older than him but looking and acting much older. A grandma type. She pulled out pictures, to show us, of what her husband looked like in his coyote form. She said he got the shape-shifting ability from his Native American ancestors and that he was, like their coyote of legend, a bit of a trickster. And then she said—”

“Showed
you
pictures?” Kyrie asked, as her mouth caught up with her brain in horrified wonder.

“Oh yes. She called him in to missing persons and Officer Bob and I and our one female officer, Cindy, all went along to take her statement and see if she had any pictures of the deceased. Because if it wasn’t him, we didn’t want to put her through identifying the body. Cindy came along on the principle that the lady might need a female shoulder to cry on.”

“And?”

“And she took out the pictures and showed them to us. And the other two looked at each other and then at me as though they thought the poor lady was totally out of her mind with shock and all that. Which she probably was, of course. But still . . .”

“But still, he was a coyote. And she knew. And didn’t mind.”

“Mind? She was positively gleeful. Very sorry none of their six children inherited the characteristic.”

“Children.” Kyrie was beyond astonishment. That a shifter could secure all these things that she thought were out of her reach because she was a shifter felt absolutely baffling.

“They live in Arizona,” Rafiel said. “Where Bill and his wife lived till about a year ago, when they drove through town and stopped at the Athens for breakfast and all of a sudden realized they’d never felt so at home anywhere. So they decided to sell the place in Arizona and buy a house here. Ever since then, Bill went into the Athens for his morning breakfast after roaming the neighborhood as a coyote.”

“Well, at least no one would notice a coyote. Not in Colorado.”

“Right. Lions and panthers are something else.”

“And dragons.”

“Yes.”

She could hear him take a deep breath.

“So, we know that the victim was definitely a shifter.”

Shifter. Victim. The back of the Athens. The beetles. Kyrie desperately wanted to go to bed, but she felt she should tell Rafiel. After all, he was a police officer. He would know what to do about it, right?

“There is more,” she said.

“More about the victim?”

“More . . . another victim.”

“What?”

“I was . . . I forgot I parked my car up front,” she said. “Because of the broken window. So I went into the parking lot and there were . . . They were beetles. That type of shiny rain-forest type beetle that they make jewelry out of?”

“Someone made jewelry out of beetles?”

“No. It would take a very big person to wear those as jewelry. They were six or seven feet long and at least five feet across, and shiny . . .”

“Are you sure you didn’t dream this?”

“No, I absolutely am not sure. But I think they were there. They were huge and green blue and they were dragging something. A corpse. I think it was a corpse because I could smell the blood.”

“A corpse? In the parking lot of the Athens? Another corpse?”

“I didn’t see it. It was just something—a bundle—they were carrying. And it smelled like blood.”

“Are you sure this is not a dream you were having when I woke you up with my phone call?”

“Quite.” Kyrie looked toward her still made bed. “Very much so. I haven’t gone to bed yet.”

“Fine,” he sounded, for some reason exasperated. “Fine. This is just fine. I’ll go to the Athens and check.”

“Take . . . something. They might be dangerous.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I have my regulation bug spray can.”

She had a feeling he didn’t believe her, and she couldn’t really blame him because she wasn’t a hundred percent sure she believed herself. “Right,” she said. “And, oh, remember you wanted to know about the dust on the floor of my porch. There is dust. It’s bright green.”

“Lovely,” he said. “I’ll be there. Right after I check the parking lot of the Athens.”

Tom hurt. That was his first realization, his first awareness that he was alive. The back of his head hurt like someone had tried to saw it open, and the pain radiated around the side of his head and it seemed to him as though it made his teeth vibrate. An effect not improved by a twisted rag, which was inserted between his teeth and tied viciously tight behind his head. His legs and arms were tied too, he realized, as he squirmed around, trying to get into a better position. It felt like there was a band of something around his knees, and one around his ankles. Very tightly tied.

With his eyes closed, trying to remember where he was and why, he smelled old car oil and dust and the mildew of long-unoccupied places. His face rested on concrete, but part of it felt slick.

The gas station. He must be in the gas station he was passing when . . . When someone had hit him on the back of the head. So. Fine. Shaking, he opened his eyes a sliver. And confirmed that he was lying in a vast space, on a concrete floor irregularly stained with oil or other car fluids. This must have been a service station at some point. Light was dim, coming through glass squares atop huge, closed doors that took up the front of the building.

He looked around, but his eyes felt as if they couldn’t quite focus. And he wondered if he’d been attacked by some random local hooligans, who had felt an irresistible craving for his leather jacket and the kid’s dragon backpack, which no longer appeared to be anywhere near. Or if it was the triad again.

Through the fogs of his mind, he remembered that the white car parked by the road side had been the same make and model as the one that had turned around while he was shifting before. Had they seen him? Had they followed him? Along the highway? If they’d seen him follow the highway, it wouldn’t be hard to calculate that he would stop in Las Vegas, New Mexico. It wouldn’t have been hard to figure out, either, that he’d land and shift some distance from town.

It couldn’t have been hard to find a place to lie in ambush for him.

In the next minute, there was a sound of high censure, in some form of Chinese. Oh, bloody hell. And then, out of a darker corner of the warehouse they came, all three of them. Tom had run into them a couple of times, before the time they’d ambushed him in his apartment.

He’d privately nicknamed them Crest Dragon, Red Dragon, and The Other One. And his opinion that their intelligence and their viciousness were inversely proportional did nothing to make him feel better right now. The only good thing, he thought, as they advanced, speaking fast Chinese at him as though he should understand it, was that they were in human form and not dragons.

As usual Crest Dragon—in his human form a young man with hair so well groomed Tom had wondered if it was a wig—took the lead, walking in front of the other two, who flanked him, left and right. Crest Dragon was waving the backpack around, and shouting something in Chinese.

Truth was, even without having any idea what the complaints in Chinese were, Tom understood the gist of the matter completely. And the gist of the matter was that the Pearl of Heaven hadn’t been in the backpack.

Exactly what kind of an idiot did they think he was? He glared at them. And how stupid were they, really? Did they think they would not feel . . . it, if it were in that backpack. Tom remembered holding it, remembered the feeling of power and strength and calm and sanity flowing from it. He could feel across miles, and he was sure so would they be able to, if he hadn’t taken extraordinary precautions in hiding it. And they’d thought he’d carry it in a back pack?

He glared at them, which was harder to do than it should be, because his eyes seemed to want to focus in different directions. How hard had they hit him on the head? And did they realize how hungry he was?

Crest Dragon came closer, waving his arms in theatrical exasperation. Then he flung the backpack—with force—across the building, grabbed Tom by the front of the T-shirt and, lifting him off the ground, punched him hard on the face.

Tom screamed. The pain radiated from his nose to match the pain on the back of his head, but sharper and sudden, edged around with blood and a feeling that his nose had broken. His vision blurred. If not for the rag in his mouth, he’d have bit his tongue.

Another punch came, immediately after. And he screamed again. He tasted blood and didn’t know if it was running from the back of his nose, or from his mouth. And it didn’t matter. Pain after pain came. He was vaguely aware of being kicked, punched, and hit with something—he wasn’t sure what.

On the floor, curling into a tight ball, he endured each sharp pain as it came, and screamed as loud as he could. In the back of his mind, words ran, words so completely calm and composed that he couldn’t think they were his. But the thoughts couldn’t have belonged to anyone else. And they made sense.

One was:
Scream. Stoicism is for fools
. Another, just as sudden, as complete, was:
Only idiots inflict pain for pain’s sake.
And the third, very clear, very sharp, was:
I could shift. I could eat them.

It was the third thought that caused him to scream louder than the pain. And the word he would scream, if his mouth hadn’t been so firmly gagged, would have been, “No.”

Oh, he could shift. He could undoubtedly shift. And the binds on his limbs would break away with the force of the shifting, the greater strength and size of the dragon. Of that he had no doubt.

It was even possible that he could defeat all three of them, even if they too shifted. They were not swift of mind and they always had trouble coordinating attacks. But—and this was a huge but—he wasn’t absolutely sure he could prevail. Not as tired and weak as he felt.

And then, worst of all, the dragon was very hungry. Starving. Ravenous. The dragon wanted food. Protein. And Tom didn’t think he could live with himself if he succeeded in eating another human being. Or even one of these three fools.

A foot—he thought—crashed against his face. It felt like his forehead exploded. Blood flowed down, making him close his eyes.

He screamed “No,” as much at the dragon within as at the pain.

Kyrie had just fallen asleep when she heard something. At first it was a little sound. Like . . . something scraping.

The sound, in itself almost imperceptible, intruded into her dreams, where she dreamed of mice, nibbling on cardboard. In her dream, she was in the back hallway of the Athens, and she opened the back door to the parking lot to find thousands of mice nibbling on large piles of cardboard boxes.

As she stood there, paralyzed, the nibbling grew louder, and louder, and then the mice swarmed all over her, thousands of little paws all over her, insinuating themselves under her nightshirt, crawling up her belly, tangling in her hair.

She woke up and sat up in bed. No mice. But she’d been sleeping uncovered, on top of the bed, and there was a breeze coming in around the door to the bedroom, blowing with enough force to ruffle her nightshirt and give her silly dreams.

Kyrie looked at the clock on her dresser. Seven a.m. She should be asleep. She still had time to sleep. Turning her pillow over, she lay back down. And realized she could still hear the sound of mice nibbling on cardboard. She blinked. She was awake. She was sure of that. So why were mice . . .?

And why did it feel like her head swam? She felt dizzy, as if she were . . . anaesthetized? Drugged? Slow?

She looked at the shaft of light coming from the little window above her bed. Was that green powder dancing in the light? Was she dreaming it? And she still felt dizzy, as if her head wasn’t quite attached to her body.

Getting out of bed, as silently as she could manage, she opened her bedroom door. The living room was empty and everything looked undisturbed. Definitely no mice. But she could still hear the crunching, shredding sounds from . . . the kitchen.

Even more cautiously, feeling pretty stupid for moving around her own house as if it were some sort of secret dungeon, she crept down the hallway toward the kitchen. But before she got there, the green glimmer in the air became obvious. It was no more than a glimmer, she thought, a soft shine, like . . . a cloud of green dust. Green dust in the air. Green dust on the corpses. Green dust covering her back porch the day that Tom claimed he had been attacked by dragons.

And she was light-headed and growing dizzy. As if she were being doped.

Had they been dragons? Rafiel had said the powder was of insect origin, but was it? They didn’t even know what dragons were—exactly. Other than mythical beasts, of course. And she remembered the beetles in the parking lot of the Athens. It could be those.

She stood there, for a moment, in the hallway of her own house, feeling her head swim. She stared at the green dust, listening to what sounded like an attempt to break through the door—if the thing trying to break through were armed with claws and pincers.

Only, the attempt couldn’t be very serious, could it? It was a hollow-core door. How hard could it be to break it down? No, the purpose was to put the green powder into the house first, wasn’t it. And why would you do that?

She thought of the victim in the parking lot of the Athens, covered in the green powder. And then she thought of Tom and Keith, clearly high as kites.

Yes, Tom had seemed to do most of the damage she’d found in the sunroom. Yes, their response to the attack hadn’t been the most effective. But they had been high as kites. What if they had been high as kites because of the green dust?

What if it that was what was causing her head to swim?

In a moment, she was sure of it. She remembered Tom’s casual greeting of Keith when he’d stopped for the key. Friends? Perhaps, of a sort, the friendly acquaintance sort where you trust each other with a key in case you’re locked out. Or where you might exchange greetings in the hall. Perhaps the kind where you go in search of your acquaintance when you hear a murder has taken place at their job site. Not the type of friendship, though, where you go to someone’s house in order to share a drug with your friend.