Night Shifters (32 page)
Authors: Sarah A. Hoyt
Tags: #Fiction, #Fantasy, #General, #Contemporary, #Urban
She realized she was grinning, as well as blushing because Edward Ormson was looking at her as if she had just taken leave of her senses.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just realized why your son annoys me so much,” and was gratified to see him look puzzled at this. “But you don’t need to worry about him right now. He is . . . fine now.”
“He is?” Edward Ormson started to get up, then sat down. He looked as though someone had cut all his strings, or whatever had been holding him up. He visibly sagged in his chair.
He looked so relieved that she had to smile. She picked up his coffee cup. “Let me get you another coffee. Warmer.”
But he got up and handed her a twenty-dollar bill. “No,” he said. “No. I don’t think I need the coffee. Or the . . . pie. I just need to go to bed. I’m . . .” He rubbed his hand across his forehead. “I find I’m very tired.” He pulled something else from his wallet and wrote rapidly in the back of it. “This is my card. There’s my cell phone on the front and I put my room number at Spurs and Lace.” He handed it to Kyrie. “If Tom should . . .” He swallowed. “If you tell Tom . . .” He shrugged. “I don’t want . . . Let him decide.”
“I owe you about ten, twelve dollars change,” Kyrie said. “Even with tip.”
But he waved it away. “I don’t want to waste time. I don’t care. I’m very tired. I haven’t slept in . . . much too long.”
Kyrie almost argued, but then she saw him stumble to the door. She put the bill in her apron pocket. She would ring it up later.
She wondered where Tom was and how he really was. And what was happening.
When they stopped at the convenience store, Keith went in first.
“I forgot to ask if he had any money,” Rafiel said from the back.
Tom had been dozing. He opened his eyes and looked back at Rafiel, then at the front of the brightly lit store and grinned. “I’d tell you that he probably does or he’d have said something, but since we’re talking about a man who thinks driving while looking backwards to talk to you is a perfectly safe practice, I can’t really be sure.”
Rafiel nodded. He looked . . . less than composed and was hiding behind the backseat. Fortunately though even at this time of night the convenience store/rest stop was full of people, Keith had parked in a place with two empty spaces on either side. Of course, the store was brightly lit in front and even with the tinted windows, Rafiel had to feel awfully exposed.
“I don’t think anyone can see in,” Tom said, in what he hoped was a friendly voice. He was still starving and his mouth felt dry as sandpaper, but the brief doze had made him feel much more human, much more in command of his own faculties. He felt . . . almost like himself. Enough to feel sorry for the guy. Even if the guy had a lot more chances with Kyrie than Tom himself.
Rafiel raised his eyebrows at Tom’s comment, and nodded. “I hope not, I would never live down being arrested for indecent exposure. Even if I explained it—somehow—and went free. It’s not something police officers are supposed to do, walking around naked.”
“Must be a bitch,” Tom said, leaning back against the seat and closing his eyes. He wanted to go in and get water and food. All his money was still in the backpack. He’d checked. But he would prefer to go in with one—or preferably—two people who could grab him if he passed out. Or started shifting and tried to eat one of the tourists.
“Yeah,” Rafiel said, quietly. “I have clothes hidden all over town.” He was silent a minute. “I just never thought I needed them in the neighboring towns too.”
Tom smiled in acknowledgment of the joke, and felt a hand on his shoulder.
“I don’t think we’ve been formally introduced,” Rafiel said. “My name is Rafiel Trall. I’m a police officer of Goldport.”
Tom opened one eye to see a hand extended in his general direction. He shook it, hard. “Thomas Ormson,” he said. “Troublemaker. Broadly speaking of Goldport, also.”
Rafiel nodded. “I haven’t thanked you for saving my life,” he said.
“You don’t need to,” Tom said. “I thought you were someone else.”
Rafiel smiled. “At least you had the excuse of darkness. Apparently other . . . dragons have trouble telling a female panther from a male lion. In full light.”
“Ah . . . how did . . .?”
“Kyrie had sent me to check on Keith,” Rafiel said, then frowned. “No. To tell you the truth, Kyrie sent me to look for you. She thought Keith might know where you were. So I was at his place when dragons came in. Through the window. So I . . . shifted before I knew what I was doing. And they tranquilized me. With a dart gun.”
Tom nodded. “They really weren’t very polite,” he said, thinking how much preferable a dart gun would be than what they’d done to him. “I think they injected me with marinade.”
Rafiel’s face went very puzzled, but at that moment, Keith opened the door and threw a bundle at Rafiel. “Shorts, T-shirt, flip-flops. All in the best of taste and the cheapest stuff we could get and still make you decent. Enjoy.”
Tom turned back to look at the clothes while Rafiel unfolded them. The T-shirt was white, with a mountain lion on the front and it said “Get Wild In New Mexico.” The shorts were plaid and managed to look like a cross between bad golf clothes and a grandpa’s underwear. And the flip-flops managed to combine green yellow and a headachy-violet in the minimal possible amount of rubber.
Looking at Rafiel staring aghast at the getup, Tom realized he really liked Keith an awful lot.
But Rafiel recovered quickly. “I’ll pay you back, of course,” he said.
Keith nodded. Tom, not sure Rafiel meant that as a threat or a promise, raised his eyebrows. Then he said, “Look, I’m dying of thirst. And hunger. I have some money and I want to go inside, but I want one of you to come with me. Or both, preferably.”
“Why?” Keith asked.
“Well . . .” Tom shrugged. “I haven’t eaten in very long. I also haven’t slept much. When I eat I might pass out or . . . as soon as I’m a little stronger, I might try to shift and . . . eat tourists.”
Keith’s eyes went very wide.
Rafiel, moving frantically and, from the bits visible in the rear view mirror, dressing, in the back seat, said, “Even in Colorado that seems a bit drastic. And I don’t even know if New Mexico’s tourists are as annoying as ours.” There was a sound of flip-flops thrown about, and then Rafiel opened the door. “Come on then. We’ll escort you to the food and water.”
Anthony had moved behind the counter and was turning burgers on the grill. That Frank didn’t even seem to have realized he was cooking, was worrisome.
Anthony turned around, putting plates on the counter for Kyrie to pick up. “Those are your orders,” he said. “And would you cover table fifteen for me? And table five?”
Kyrie nodded. She assumed that Frank hadn’t responded to Anthony’s requests that he cook. Considering that he normally wouldn’t let them behind the counter for more than dishwasher-filling, coffee-pot-grabbing stints this was alarming indeed. But Frank was still bent over the counter, staring into the eyes of his dowdy girlfriend and whispering who knew what sweet nothings to her.
When had this become so serious? Kyrie had seen the woman around before, but never actually interfering with Frank’s work.
They touched a lot, Kyrie noticed. More than they talked. Her hand was on his, her fingers beating a slow tattoo on the back of his hand. And his were on the side of her other arm, also beating some weird rhythm.
Ah, well. Dating for the speech impaired. And sight impaired, Kyrie thought, looking back at Frank’s Neanderthal profile, and his girlfriend’s faded lack of beauty.
But Anthony was moving the burgers and fries, mixing the salads, and generally cooking like a demon, and she didn’t have much time to look at her employer as, over the next few minutes she carried trays back and forth, fulfilling long overdue orders for both her tables and Anthony’s.
When she was caught up, she came back to get the carafe and the pitcher of iced tea for refills. Frank’s girlfriend had got up and was heading out of the diner via the back hallway. Either that or going to the bathroom, of course.
And Frank had seemed to wake up. “No,” he yelled at Anthony. “What are you doing?”
Uh-oh. Now the explosion came, Kyrie thought. But as she approached, she realized Frank wasn’t storming over the fact that Anthony had been manning the grill and the deep fryer. Instead, he was throwing a fit because there was a little insect on the counter, and Anthony had been about to squish it with a paper towel.
“What?” Anthony said, his hand poised above the little creature—which looked like a beetle of some sort, only too small to be any of the normal ones found in diners. “It’s an IPS beetle, man. It lives in pines. It must have come in because the windows are open.”
“There’s no need to kill it,” Frank said, pushing Anthony’s hand away and taking the paper towel from it at the same time. With infinite patience, he coaxed the beetle onto the paper towel.
Anthony shrugged and turned the burgers. “It’s not like it’s endangered or anything, you know? They spray for them up in the mountains. They kill spruce.”
But Frank didn’t seem to care. He got the beetle all the way into the towel, then walked out back, along the hallway.
Half fascinated, wondering what could have turned Frank, purveyor of burgers to the masses, into a lover of the small and defenseless, Kyrie followed him part of the way. Enough to see him open the back door and put the beetle out, on the ground, close to the Dumpster.
Then he waved at his girlfriend, who was walking across the parking lot.
“Is she an animal lover?” Kyrie asked as Frank came back in.
“Debra? No. Why?”
Kyrie wasn’t about to explain. Instead, she said, “Is it quite safe for her to walk home alone at night like that?”
He looked at her surprised. And behind the surprise something else. As if he were wondering why she was asking him the question. “Sure. She lives just at the castle. She’ll be fine.”
It didn’t seem to admit further discussion.
“No more hot dogs,” Keith told Tom. He handed him a thin pack of something cold. “Sliced ham.”
Tom grabbed at it, trying to focus. He was vaguely aware that he’d eaten something like twenty-six hotdogs. And drunk something like four huge cups of something sickly sweet with a flavor vaguely reminiscent of cherries.
Somewhere at the back of his mind was the awareness that he was going to need to use the restroom soon. Even a shifter’s bladder couldn’t possibly hold that much.
But much closer at hand was a need for protein. Lots of it. He grabbed the pack Keith gave him and was about to bite it as Keith pulled it away.
“Whoa, you need to unwrap it.”
Tom was aware of growling. Or rather he was aware of several faces of tourists roaming around turning to him in shock. He was aware of Keith jumping, then shoving the pack—now peeled halfway—back at him.
He shoved the ham into his mouth and ate it, becoming aware, halfway through, that his manners left much to be desired. And that the burning pit of hunger at the center of his being was . . . calmer, if not completely filled.
Rafiel, to whom Tom had handed a hundred dollars to deal with the damage, because he couldn’t think and eat at the same time, approached them, carrying a bag of food. Tom could see a block of cheese and a couple of containers of what might be yogurt through the bag.
“Ready?” Rafiel asked. “You seem to have slowed down some.”
Tom finished the last crumbs of meat, resisted an urge to lick the package. “I’ll use the restroom,” he said. “And I’ll be right out.”
“Good point,” Rafiel said. “We grabbed you snacks but no drink. Keith, get us a six-pack of water.” He passed Keith some money. “Tom, can I use your cell phone? In the car?”
Tom nodded.
When he got back to the car, Rafiel was behind the wheel and Keith next to him. “You get in the back,” Keith said. “We figure you’d want to sleep some.”
“There’s cheese and cold cuts and stuff in the bag,” Rafiel said. “If you’re still hungry. And there’s water. You can lie down. I drive better than he does.”
“And there’s a bag of baby wipes,” Keith said. “Your face is caked with blood. I didn’t even think how weird it looked till we went in there.”
Tom climbed into the back. He was about to tell them he wasn’t that tired, when he stretched out on the broad and comfy back eat. And then his eyes closed. And he didn’t know anything more.
CHAPTER
9
He woke up with a running conversation up front.
“So, why was he so hungry again?” Keith said.
“The transformation takes . . . I don’t know. Strength. Power. It costs us what seem to be parts of ourselves. The muscle needs to recover.”
“Would he really have . . . Would he have eaten someone or was he . . . ?”
“I don’t know,” Rafiel said. “I don’t know Mr. Ormson that well. I don’t know how many shape-shifts he’d had without replenishing himself. I guess it’s . . . I mean . . . I guess it depends. I’ve never eaten anyone.” There was a short silence, and Tom saw Keith look at Rafiel.
“Well, at least not that I remember,” Rafiel said. “When you’re very hungry or very tired, or scared, or in any other way pressed, the memory of when you’re . . . the beast . . . changes. And we smell dead bodies a long distance away. So . . . I found a lot of corpses. Still do. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten anyone, though. And since in my job I deal with unknown deaths and disappearances, I probably would have heard of it. Or, when I was too young to be in the force, my father would have. So . . .” He shrugged.
Tom sat up and rested his face on the front seat, between the driver and passenger sides. “I might have eaten some of that corpse in the parking lot . . .” he said, and looked at Rafiel, in the rearview mirror. “I don’t know if I killed him.”
Rafiel shrugged. “As to that, I can reassure you, at least. You didn’t. The corpse had no tooth marks, certainly no marks of being killed by a dragon.”
“The guy who died?” Keith asked. “In the parking lot?”
Rafiel nodded, at the same time Tom asked, “But you said he was killed by a Komodo.”
“Oh, that’s right,” Rafiel said. “We never told you . . . Kyrie and I when we came back you two were high because of the beetle powder. Well, insect powder, but Kyrie says it was beetles.”
“Beetles?” Tom and Keith said, at the same time.
“There was green powder all over Kyrie’s back porch,” Rafiel said. “And it seemed to be of insect origin and . . . well, I have the lab checking for some form of hallucinogenic properties. But the lab seemed to think that corpse at least had some traces of hallucinogen in his blood. So, we think that the green powder caused both of you to get high and hallucinate.”
“Oh,” Tom said, and could say no more. Of course. It wasn’t Kyrie’s sugar. It was the things attacking them. He frowned as he tried to remember. He’d thought they were dragons, but looking back he wondered why. He could remember what seemed to be long, long limbs, with fangs at the end, and he remembered green wings, but they didn’t in any way look like dragon wings.
“But you said something about Komodo dragons?”
“Well, yes. There have been a few deaths that seemed to be caused by Komodo dragons. Really large Komodo dragons. Because the victims were all Asian, I suspected it had to do with triad business, and now I’m almost sure of it. I suspect it’s the dragon triad. Some way they punish their members. That seems to be totally unrelated to the thing going on with the beetles. You seem to be the only link, Mr. Ormson.”
Tom groaned. “My father is Mr. Ormson. I’m Tom. Particularly . . .” He managed a tired smile but couldn’t see if Rafiel responded because all he saw of Rafiel in the rearview mirror was his very intent eyes. “Particularly to people who’ve seen me wolf down two dozen over cooked convenience store hotdogs.” He made a face. “They weren’t even all that good.”
“Oh,” said Keith. “There were also two containers of cottage cheese while the man was cooking more hot dogs, and a couple of pepperoni.”
“Pepperoni?” Tom asked, and felt a moan break through his lips. “I don’t even like pepperoni.”
“Well, if you’re going to throw up,” Rafiel said. “You’d best do it out the window. We’re still in Raton and we have about two more hours before we get home.”
“I’m not going to throw up,” Tom said. “Now, if I had taken Keith’s finger when he tried to pull the cold cuts away, then I might have.”
“You growled,” Keith said.
“Dangerous that,” Rafiel said, and though Tom couldn’t see his face, he was now quite sure there would be a smile twisting the policeman’s lips. “Taking food from a starving dragon. Just so you know, it’s not all that safe with a lion, either.”
Keith made a sound that might have been a really fake whimper, then perked up and grinned at Rafiel. “Oh, well. Worth the price of admission just to have heard you explain to the cashier that Tom had an eating disorder. I don’t know how they thought that related to the fact that his face was covered in blood. Why was your face covered in blood?” he asked, looking back.
“Well . . . I think I took Red Dragon’s arm. Front paw. Whatever. But I think there was blood before.” Tom touched a snaking pink scar that crossed his forehead. “They broke my skin there. And I think they might have broken my nose, though it looks the normal shape, so maybe they just hit it hard enough to make it bleed and tear the cartilage.”
“But . . . How long ago?” Keith said.
“We heal freakishly fast,” Rafiel said. “But you might want to use the wipes back there, anyway, Tom. I’d suspect you rubbed some of it off on the seat back there, but you still look like you were in an accident. And if you don’t clean up and we stop for any reason . . .”
Tom noted that his first name had been used, as he grabbed the baby wipes and wiped at the mess, using the rearview mirror, for guidance.
“And are you undead?” Keith said. “I mean . . . can you be killed, unless it’s a silver bullet, or whatever?”
Rafiel shrugged. “I don’t know. Tom, have you ever been killed?”
“I thought I was going to be,” he said. “Out there, alone with the triad guys. I thought if they didn’t kick me to death, they were going to kill me some other way. And if not, I thought I would be killed if I gave them what they wanted.”
“And what did they want?” Rafiel said, very softly.
“Well,” Tom said. “I brought the conversation around because I thought you deserved to know, but I’m not sure how to explain. Let me start by saying my dad was a lawyer.”
“Ah, well, all is clear,” Keith said. “No wonder you turn into a dragon.”
Tom grinned. “He’s a lawyer with a big firm, in New York. Or at least he was, five years ago. His firm represented some Asian families that had . . . contracts with the triads. It wasn’t so much, I think, that the firm set out to represent a criminal organization. More like they started representing people at the margins of it, and then eventually, they were defending members of the triad in criminal trials. And my dad is a criminal lawyer. So . . .”
Rafiel nodded. “Yeah. I suspect a lot of lawyers end up having contact with less than savory creatures.”
“Well, at one point, some people came over to my father’s house. There was something that had landed from China, and they wanted him to keep it safe for them till the next day. He was the only person they trusted in New York, one of the very few people they’d had contact with. They came to our condo, which I remember my father was very upset about because he hadn’t given them permission.
“I was . . . oh, probably five? My mom was working. My nanny was watching soaps. I was very bored. So I snuck around to hear what my dad was saying. These people were not like the people who normally came to visit, you know—they wore actual Chinese outfits in silk. I was fascinated.”
He was quiet a while. He remembered the Pearl unveiling. He remembered . . .
“And then?” Rafiel said.
“And then they explained to my father that this was the Pearl of Heaven. It had been given to the Great Sky Dragon by the Heavenly Emperor. They said that many of their members, though not all, had the ability to shift shapes to become dragons. I didn’t believe them, of course. And I could tell my dad didn’t. And then they put this felt bag on his desk, and they pulled it down. And the Pearl appeared. It was . . . Imagine something that radiates light, that makes you swim with happiness.
“They said that it was needed to keep peace amid shapeshifters who were dragons part of the time, because the characteristics of the dragons remained in the humans, and there was too much strife otherwise. As a kid—and you realize I never had what could be called a good family life, back then—all I could sense and feel was the warmth and approval of the Pearl. And that’s all I remembered.”
“And?” Keith asked.
Tom realized he’d been quiet for a long while. “And then at sixteen I started turning into a dragon. I had a little trouble believing it at first, and then I thought that it was very cool. Like a superpower.”
“That’s what I think,” Keith said.
“And then . . . My father caught me coming in as a dragon and transforming. I actually had this down to a science. I could kind of perch on the balcony outside my bedroom, and shift back to human, and then drop into the room through the sliding doors. Anyway, my dad caught me. He must have seen the dragon fly in. And he came to look. I only had time to grab my bathrobe. He thought . . . I don’t know what he thought, but he looked terrified. He ordered me out of the house. I thought he was joking. He got a gun.”
Tom laughed without humor. “My father who was a member of I don’t know how many antigun organizations. He had a gun somewhere in his desk. He ran to grab it. I thought he was joking. I thought he would calm down. He ordered me out of the house at gunpoint and I went.”
“Barefoot and in a robe?” Rafiel said. “In New York City. Amazing you survived.”
Tom shrugged. “There are organizations for runaways. I wasn’t, but I was the right age, the right profile, and all I had to do was say no when they offered to mediate my return home with my father.” He shrugged again. “In a year I was lying about my age and getting jobs. But I hated the shift. I hated that it came when I didn’t expect it. And because I fought it till the last possible minute, I often couldn’t remember what I’d done when I’d shifted. I . . .” He looked at Rafiel. “I tried street drugs.”
“Anything in the last six months?” Rafiel asked. “Since you’ve been in Goldport?”
“Only whatever the triad boys injected into me,” Tom said.
“Ah. We don’t regulate marinade. The rest is really none of my business. It’s all hearsay, anyway. I have no proof. You might just be nuts and think you used and sold drugs.”
“I never sold it,” Tom said.
“Good. That’s harder to give up, sometimes,” Rafiel said. “What with connections . . . So, you tried some funny stuff, to control it. Did it?” His interest sounded clinical.
“Not so you could notice. I was using mostly heroin because of its being a depressant. I thought it would stop the shift. Since the shift came with big emotions and such.”
Rafiel nodded.
“So I wanted to give it up, but I was scared,” Tom said. “The one thing the drugs did was make me forget. And make me calmer when I wasn’t a dragon. They . . . simplified my life. I couldn’t obsess about being a dragon shapeshifter or about the fact that my own father had kicked me out of the house, or any of that, because I was too worried about getting enough money for the next fix.”
Rafiel nodded. “Weirdly, I’ve heard other addicts say that this was more important for them than the physical effects. The simplification of life and of choices.”
“It was for me,” Tom said. “And then one day, I was in a small city—I don’t even remember where—and I felt . . . I felt the Pearl. And I got the bright idea that if I had the Pearl I wouldn’t need the drugs. So I followed the feeling. And I came to this incredible meeting of dragon shapeshifters. It was dark and the little town was asleep. The parking lot was filled with men . . . And many dragons. And there was . . . The Great Sky Dragon. I don’t know how to explain this.
“He’s like a dragon god. Not like God, the God above, the one God, but like a god. Like . . . like the Roman gods would be to humans. That’s how the Great Sky Dragon was to the rest of us. I could imagine people offering sacrifices and . . . virgins to him. Like in the legends. And he had the Pearl.”
Tom heard himself sigh. “I wanted the Pearl. I’m not stupid. Not when I don’t want to be. They were all basking in the glow of the Pearl and stuff. And they were all scared of the Great Sky Dragon. I’m not very good at being scared,” he said, and watched Rafiel nod.