Night Shifters (30 page)

CHAPTER
8

Kyrie was not in a good mood. Oh, she was sure most of the reason for her feeling as down as she did was the fact that she really hadn’t slept much.

By her calculations, she had slept exactly two hours in the last forty-eight. And even with the best of payment plans—the handyman had allowed her to pay in installments for her new windows and doors—she would not have any spare cash for the next few months.

So she’d been going from table to table, forcing her professional smile and longing—just longing—for the end of the shift. It didn’t help that the night was exceptionally hot and the single air-conditioning unit labored, helplessly, against the dry heat that plunged through the windows patrons opened and clung around Kyrie in a vapor of french-fry grease and hamburger smell.

“It doesn’t help that Frank is acting like someone did him wrong,” Anthony said, as he passed her on the narrow isle between the plastic tables in the addition and gave her a sympathetic scowl. “Couldn’t you get your friend Tom to show up?” he said. “I mean, Frank said if I wanted to continue working here, I’d do this shift too.”

“I don’t know where Tom is,” Kyrie said, her voice sounding even more depressed than she felt.

Anthony—tonight resplendent in a ruffled red shirt and his customary tight black pants and colorful vest—looked very aggrieved. “Only, I’m missing my bolero dance group practice.” And, at the widening of her eyes that she couldn’t control, “Oh, Lord. Why did you think I dressed this way?”

Kyrie just smiled and looked away. There was an answer she had no intention of giving. Instead, she took her tray laden with dirty dishes to behind the counter, scraped them, and loaded them into the dishwasher.

Needless to say the diner was crowded tonight. Probably because people couldn’t sleep with the heat—since most houses in Colorado didn’t have air-conditioning—and had decided to come here and eat the night away instead. Normally, Kyrie and Tom, after six months of working together, had things down to a routine. Whichever of them went to bus one of his tables did the other’s tables too, if they needed doing. They’d worked it out, and it all evened out in the end. When the night was busy, it kept the tables clear so people could sit down as soon as other people left. And that was good. But Anthony, though he was a very nice man, wasn’t used to Kyrie’s routines.

Kyrie hesitated, alternating between being mad at Tom for not being here, and a sort of formless groping, not quite a prayer, toward some unnamed power to grant his safety. She had as good as kicked him out . . .

No. She wouldn’t go there. Of all the useless emotions in the world, the most useless was guilt. She slammed the last dish in the dishwasher, and checked the cell phone she’d slipped into her apron pocket.

Rafiel had said he’d call as soon as he had checked on Tom. He’d call even if he couldn’t find Tom. He hadn’t called yet. Why hadn’t he called?

Kyrie turned from the dishwasher, expecting to see Frank glaring at her for slamming the dish in. But Frank was leaning over the counter, seemingly elated by intimate conference with his girlfriend—or at least the woman he’d been seeing. Kyrie was afraid the staff had decided she was his girlfriend partly as a joke. Which was kind of funny, because the woman was not much to look at.

She had to be fifty if she was a day, with the kind of lined, weathered skin that people got when they’d lived too long outdoors. And she had the sort of features that were normally associated with British women of a horsey kind. Her hair was flyaway, mostly white, and if it could be said to have been styled, she’d been aiming to look like popular pictures of Einstein.

But Frank was leaning forward toward her, to the point where their foreheads almost touched. It revealed his neck, above the T-shirt, and showed a bandage there. Ew. Had his girlfriend given him a hickey?

They’d been seeing each other for a while, but today they seemed cozier than Kyrie had ever seen them.

On the way back to her tables, coffeepot in hand for warm-ups, Kyrie noticed that, despite the woman’s weathered features, she wore a very expensive skirt suit. Maybe Frank was interested in her for her money?

“Or maybe he has no taste,” she told Anthony, as they met one coming and one going into the addition. “But see, you wished him to get laid and there . . .”

“Don’t say it,” Anthony said. “Don’t even say it. I don’t have the money to buy as much mental floss as I’d need to get that image out of my mind.” He made a face, as he moved the tray the other way, to clear the doorway. “But it’s been going on for a while, now, hasn’t it? I hear she’s the new owner of the castle. And there’s talk she’s going to renovate it and use it as a bed-and-breakfast. So, perhaps it is just for money.” He looked hopeful.

Kyrie gave her warm-ups and then started taking orders. Went back and gave the orders to Frank, whom, she was sure, was ignoring them. Or didn’t even notice the new handful of orders spiked through the order wire.

Then she went back again, having caught movement by the corner of her eye, and the impression someone had sat in the enclosure. It wasn’t until she was at the corner table, near the outer door, facing the guy who had just sat down, that she recognized Tom’s father.

He looked like he’d been dragged through hell. Backward. By his heels. He looked like he hadn’t slept in more hours than she’d been awake. His suit was rumpled, his hair looked like he’d washed it and not given it the benefit of a comb—or clergy, since it tossed in all directions, as if possessed of a discordant spirit.

His dark blue eyes stared at her from amid bruised circles. “Don’t say it,” he said. “I know what you think of me, but don’t say anything. I think . . .” He swallowed. “I think that there’s reason. Oh, hell. I think they’re going to kill Tom. I need help.”

That he needed help was a given. That he was so worried about their killing Tom was not. She glared at him. “You didn’t seem to be worried about him at all before,” she said.

“I . . .” He swallowed again. “I’ve been thinking and . . . I don’t want them to kill him.”

Well, and wasn’t that big of him? After all, Tom was only his son. She narrowed eyes at him. The shock, when she’d realized he was working for the people who’d already tried to kill his son once, had turned her stomach. She still didn’t feel any better about Mr. Edward Ormson. She’d be less disgusted by a giant beetle. “What will you be eating, sir?”

He looked as surprised as if she’d slapped him. “What . . . what . . . I need to talk. Seriously. They’re—”

She took her notebook out of her apron pocket, and tapped the pencil on the page. “I’m at work, Mr. Ormson, and my job is to get people food. What can I get you?”

“I . . . whatever you want . . .”

“We’re all out of rat poison,” Kyrie said, the words shocking her as they came out of her mouth.

His eyes widened. “Coffee. Coffee and a . . .” He looked at the menu. “Piece of pie.”

She wrote it down and walked away. She really, really, really needed to convince Frank to start making Brussels sprout pies. Or cod liver oil ones.

Tom woke up from a sort of formless dream. He didn’t remember falling asleep. His last memory had been of Crest Dragon and Other Dragon having a picnic of sorts in front of him.

Now he opened his eyes to an empty building. He didn’t know how long he’d slept, but his nose no longer hurt, and it seemed to him like the pain in his tied arms had eased a little too. Perhaps he’d gotten used to being tied up. Or perhaps his arms had been without circulation so long that he could no longer feel them.

The last should have been alarming, except it wasn’t. Everything seemed very distant, as if a great sheet of glass made of indifference separated him from the world and his own predicament.

He lay there, and listened to his own breathing. He would assume he still hadn’t talked, though it was—of course—possible he had said something while he was in a half awake state. And if he had . . .

Well, it was possible that the three dragons had gone off to get the Pearl and would presently come back and kill him. Tom could shift now, of course, but what if they were still here? Perhaps just outside? First, as tired as he was, he couldn’t fight all three of them at once. Second, what if he ate them?

His mouth felt so dry—his tongue glued to his palate by thirst, that he was sure he would bite them just for the moisture. And yet, there was an off chance. Would he lie here and wait for death? No. He would shift. As difficult as it was, as tiring as it was, he would shift.

Before he could collect his mind enough to concentrate on the shift, though, he heard sounds outside. A couple of cars, a lot of voices. Speaking Chinese. He closed his eyes, and pretended to be asleep.

A group of people came in, babbling in Chinese. Several men, by the sound of it. Tom half opened his eyes, just enough to look through his eyelashes, without anyone realizing that he was actually awake. He forced himself to keep his breathing regular.

And then from the middle of the babble a voice emerged. “Hey. Hey, what’s the idea?”

Keith. The voice was Keith’s. What was Keith doing here, though?

“You’re okay, you’re okay,” one of the other voices answered, in accented English. “As soon as your friend answers questions, we’ll let you go.”

And then two men came in, breathing hard, carrying a sack with something very heavy in it. “Where do we put her?” they asked.

“Here,” another voice answered. The forest of legs in front of Tom parted enough for him to see, on the ground, a trussed-up human, and the big sack being laid down behind it.

“She’s starting to wake up,” one of the men said.

“That’s fine,” another one answered. “With the tranq she’ll be weak as a kitten for a while.”

A kitten. Tom blinked, trying to focus his gaze. A kitten. The sack—some kind of rough burlap—was large enough to contain a heavy feline. She. Kitten. Kyrie. Not Kyrie.

“Oh, look, he’s awake,” one of the men who’d come in—and who looked far smarter than the three reverse geniuses—said and grinned. “Yes, that is your girlfriend, but don’t worry. So long as you tell us where you hid the Pearl of Heaven, she’ll be just fine.”

Kyrie. Tom didn’t want to shift. If he shifted, he was going to eat someone. But he couldn’t tell them where the Pearl of Heaven was, either. Because then they’d just kill him. And Keith. And Kyrie.

He felt his heart speed up and his body spasm. And there was no turning back.

There was blood. There was blood and screams and panic. Tom’s vision—the dragon’s vision, was filled with people. He flamed. There was the smell of fire, and of cloth burning. People with clothes on fire ran to either side of him.

The dragon wanted to feed. To the dragon’s nostrils, all flesh was food. The smell of humans, the smell of fodder so close was more than he could endure. The dragon tried to nip left, right . . .

But Tom knew once the dragon started feeding, it wouldn’t stop till all humans around it were eaten. He knew from some deep instinctive feeling that having reached the depths of hunger, the dragon would now eat past satiety. And he couldn’t let it happen. He couldn’t.

If he ate a human, he’d never be able to live with himself. And if he ate Kyrie . . . No.

Tom—what there was of Tom in the huge scaley body with the flapping wings and the tearing claws and the flaming mouth, controlled the body and the wings and the mouth. Forcefully, he walked forward slashing with his claws at all opposition. Taken by surprise, the others ran out of the way. Tom could hear, to his side, the cough-cough-cough like laughter of a dragon shifting. He would deal with that later.

Before the dragon shifted, before he had to battle others of his kind, he would free Keith. And Kyrie.

Disciplining the dragon, he bent over Keith, and, with a sharp claw, burst the ropes that bound his friend’s legs and hands. Keith was looking at Tom with huge eyes and, for a moment, Tom thought he would run away. He remembered that Keith had no idea who the dragon was. But Keith was looking intently at him and said, “Tom?”

Tom nodded, rapidly, and managed to get out, through a mouth not well adapted to speech, “Run.”

Then he bent and ripped the burlap bag open. He couldn’t see the feline—definitely a feline shape—inside move, though. He felt more than saw movement from it, and then he heard a stumping step from the side, and knew that a dragon had shifted shape near him.