Night Shifters (37 page)

He was the most regular of the regulars. If he had looked at all—and Kyrie had never been absolutely sure of the poet’s being fully engaged with the world—he would know, better than anyone, how long Frank’s romance had been going on.

The man reached nervous fingers for the ceramic cup with the fresh coffee in it, and fumbled with getting it to his mouth to drink. His pale-blue eyes rested on Kyrie’s face for a moment, then away. “I . . . It’s just a journal. My therapist said I would be better off for writing a journal.”

“A journal,” she said. She had a feeling the man wasn’t used to much female attention, but if what he wrote was indeed a journal, then he would have all the data there, at his fingertips. “I would never be disciplined enough for a journal.”

He grinned, showing her very crooked teeth. Then looked rapidly away and continued, speaking intently to the salt shaker. “Well, it’s all a matter of doing it at the same time every day, isn’t it? Just being regular and doing it at the same time. After a while it becomes a habit and you could no more go without it than you could go without eating or sleeping.”

He looked back at her, just a little, out of the corner of the eye, reminding Kyrie of a squirrel, tempted by nuts on the sidewalk but hesitant about coming out in the open.

She smiled at him. “You must write all sorts of fascinating details about everything that happens in there. I mean, so much better than just memory. My coworker and I were just talking about how long our boss has been in love with that lady there.” She gestured with her head. “And we couldn’t remember when they started going out.”

“Oh.” The poet fumbled with his journal, flipping through the pages in a way that seemed to indicate he wasn’t absolutely sure how to use fingers. The gesture of a terminally nervous neurotic. “I can tell you the exact day. I have it here, all written down, because it was so amazing. She came in, they looked at each other, and it was like . . . you know, the song, across a crowded room and all that. They looked at each other, their eyes met, and she hurried over there and they held hands.” He found the right page and, for once, dared to look up at Kyrie, as he showed it to her. “There, there, you see. Almost exactly a month ago. And they’ve been like that ever since. Oh, not every night, not that . . . absorbed . . . but at least a few nights a week she walks him in or waits for him when he goes out.”

The way he looked at Kyrie, shyly and sort of sideways, seemed to indicate he had his own personal dreams of getting to hold hands with her someday. Kyrie didn’t feel that charitable, but smiled at him anyway, and glanced at the page—of which she could understand nothing, since it appeared to have been written by dipping a spider’s legs in ink and letting it wander all over the page. “Very nice. Well, now I’ll know what you’re doing and I can tell the other people when they ask.”

She wandered away to check on orders. So far, no one had asked for anything cooked, but it was bound to happen. “Tom, you might need to take over the grill,” she said, as she passed him. “As people start coming in who want their early morning dinners.”

He looked surprised. “Sure,” he said. “I can probably load dishes while I’m up there too, if you want me to.”

She didn’t tell him anything about Frank and his girlfriend, but she was thinking. What she was thinking, mostly, was that this whole eyes meeting across a crowded room didn’t happen to people. Not in real life. But it might very well happen to bugs who were acting on instinct and pheromones.

It turned out not to be as bad as Kyrie expected. The clinch of hands over the bar stopped before the crunch, and Frank took over flipping the burgers and cooking the eggs and what not.

From about ten to midnight they were so busy that Kyrie didn’t even notice the other guys had come in—Keith and Rafiel and Tom’s dad—until she saw that Tom was serving that table. And then she forgot about them again, as she was kept running off her feet, taking pie to one and a hamburger to another, and a plate of dolmades to a particularly raucous group in a corner.

As the crowd started thinning, past midnight, Kyrie went up to the counter to put the carafe back. And when she turned, Rafiel was standing by the counter. “Can you take a fifteen-minute break?” he said. “Tom says he can handle it till you come back.”

“Frank,” she said, and realized that Frank had heard them. He waved them away. “Go. If Tom can handle it, I don’t care.”

On the way to the front door, Kyrie told Tom, “Thank you.”

He looked slightly puzzled and then frowned at Rafiel, which did not seem at all like a natural reaction. “Are you sure you asked him?” she asked Rafiel.

“Yes, yes, I asked him.” He led her outside, toward his car, parked on the street. “I’m not saying he’s incredibly excited about it, but I asked him.”

“Rafiel, if he doesn’t think he can handle it alone I shouldn’t leave him.” She started to walk back, but Rafiel came after her and grabbed her arm.

“Seriously,” he said. “I don’t think he minds the work. He minds you going out with me. Oh, don’t look like that,” he said, before she was aware of looking like anything at all. “He knows we have to talk. He says there’s some stuff you found out.”

“Yes,” Kyrie said, and sat down on the passenger side of the car. Rafiel had held the door open for her, and closed it as soon as she sat down. He then walked around the car to his side.

“I thought I’d take you for a cup of coffee, so we can talk? There’s an all-night coffeehouse down the street.”

Kyrie nodded. She had no need for coffee, but she wanted to tell Rafiel about the beetles, and what she thought of the beetles.

Edward watched Tom, after Kyrie left. He watched Keith too. Mostly because Keith puzzled him. He sat at the table, taking everything in, seemingly unaffected by the fact that there were not one but two types of shapeshifters that might want him dead.

Dragons and beetles and who knows what, oh my.
“You’re not scared at all?” he asked Keith, in an undertone.

Keith looked back at him, as though trying to decide exactly how many heads Edward might have. “Well,” he said. “It’s not so much that I’m not scared. Although . . . I don’t think I am, you know?”

“Why not?” Edward asked. He thought of the Great Sky Dragon, flying through the sky and using what seemed to be magic to get from one place to the other without having to cross the space between. He thought of even Tom in his dragon form, of Tom’s flying across the New York sky, seeming completely nonhuman.

“I don’t know,” Keith said. “I told them it was because I read so much science fiction and comic books—and that’s probably true.” He shrugged. “I mean, you see something very often, even if you know it’s fiction, it makes an impression on you after a while and part of you hopes or believes it to be true, right? I mean, even if your mind knows it isn’t.”

“It’s possible,” Edward said. To be honest he didn’t remember what it was like to be that young anymore. It had been at least twenty-five years since he’d read any fiction. No. More. In college, his fiction reading had just tapered away to nothing. “I suppose it’s possible.”

“Well, in a way it was like that,” Keith said. “I mean, the idea would have probably struck me as much odder, much more impossible if I’d never seen it in stories. But the important thing is, I saw it happen in the worst possible circumstances.” He lowered his voice. “They grabbed us and they took us in, and Rafiel was . . . um . . . shifted. And Tom was all tied up, and—”

“He was. Tied?” Edward knew what Lung had told him, and at some level, consciously, he knew that being captured by the triad could be no picnic. But somehow, seeing Tom walk into his hotel room had given him hope that it was all just a big fight. He knew Tom could handle himself in a fight. He wasn’t so sure about Tom being helpless.

“Yeah. He was completely tied-up. And he . . . They’d . . . His clothes were caked with blood. They’d taken his jacket and boots off. I think they might have thought to keep them after they . . . you know, got rid of him. Or perhaps they thought that the leather would protect him. And then he . . . shifted. I knew it was still him because of his eyes. And he freed me. And I freed Rafiel, who recovered much faster than they expected. And then we were . . . fighting. And that’s the thing you know.” He looked at Edward and seemed to realize that Edward was trying very hard to imagine but didn’t really know. “I realized they can be taken out with a good tire iron. You don’t need to be one of them.”

Edward was following his son with his gaze. Tom looked so . . . competent. He’d removed his leather jacket and was wearing a red apron with “Athens” on the chest, and doing a job his father had never, possibly, imagined a son of his doing. But he was doing the job competently.

There had been no complaints. On the contrary. People smiled at him and it was clear that several of the regulars were very fond of him. And he answered back and smiled, and seemed to be a part of this diner. A trusted employee. Which was more than—just five years ago—Edward could have imagined.

To be honest, he couldn’t have imagined it two days ago. If he’d thought of Tom at all, he’d thought of Tom as being in jail, or perhaps dead. He would never have believed his son was sane and responsible enough to hold down any job.

“Really,” Keith said. “I’d love to be able to shift, because it’s cool, but I’m not afraid of them. I mean, the nice ones are nice. The other ones would probably be just as dangerous as normal people.”

Edward frowned. That thought too would have been unbelievable five years ago. But he was looking at Tom, and thought Tom was not much different than he would have been if he’d never turned into a dragon. He was just Tom. And, on balance, a much better person than Edward had any right to expect.

Just then, Tom noticed him looking and arched his eyebrows. Edward looked away. He might have thrown Tom out from fear and confusion. Getting him back, however, was going to require a full and rational siege.

If only they managed not to get killed by any other shifters. Edward wished he had Keith’s certainty that they could fight against shape changers on equal terms.

“We need to talk,” Rafiel said. He pulled the chair out for Kyrie, and waited until Kyrie had sat down before going around to his side. He picked up both their orders too, her iced mocha latte and his tall cup of something profoundly foamy.

“Yes, I . . . Tom thinks—”

“Wait,” Rafiel said. “We don’t need to talk about the . . . creatures.” He looked around again, as though afraid someone around them might understand the cryptic comments. “We need to talk about Tom.”

“We—uh? What about Tom?”

“Well, he’s not as bad as I expected,” Rafiel said. “Not nearly. But he is . . . ah . . . Tom has issues.”

Kyrie nodded. “Yes, but—” She didn’t want to discuss Tom nor Tom’s issues, nor could she imagine what Tom had to do with any of this. Tom’s personality had nothing to do with the predicament they were in.

Sure, it would have been helpful if he could have managed to avoid tangling with the triad dragons. But that was, surely, just a fraction of his problems. The beetles loomed much larger in Kyrie’s mind, perhaps because she had experienced them up close and personal. And Tom was not a were-beetle. Of that she was sure.

“No. I just . . .” Rafiel looked flustered, which was a new one for him. “I just am going to say this once and be done, okay? I can’t help notice that he’s attracted to you, and I think I’ve seen you . . . I mean, you give the impression of being attracted to him too, sometimes.”

“I don’t think I am,” she said. “It’s just that we’ve been working together for a while and I think I’ve misjudged him horribly, and I feel guilty about that. So I’ve been nice to him, but I don’t think—”

“Good,” Rafiel said. “I mean, really. Tom is not a bad person, but I think he’s been through a lot in his life, and I think it makes him . . . well . . . I think he’s sometimes not as well-adjusted as he would like to be. And I wouldn’t want to wish that on you.”

He put his hand across the table, on top of hers. Kyrie withdrew her hand, slowly, not wanting it to seem like a rejection. If she was reading this right, Rafiel had just tried to clear the field of his rival in a most underhanded way, something she thought only women did. Perhaps because she’d seen it between women and girls in her middle and high school years.

Fortunately, she wasn’t sure she was interested in either of these men—or in any men. She’d seen too much of marriage and relationships through her time in foster care to think that she would ever take any relationship for granted or view it as a given. On top of that the kinks the shifters’ natures would put into any relationship just about had her deciding to remain celibate the rest of her life. The knife-in-the-back approach to friendship and love certainly didn’t incline her toward Rafiel.

“Tom thinks that Frank and his girlfriend might be the beetles,” Kyrie said, rapidly, before Rafiel could resume his wholly inappropriate talk.

“Frank and his girlfriend?” Rafiel asked. “Why?”

Kyrie told him. She told him about the woman who ordered pie every night and who said that Frank and his girlfriend had held hands a month back, and about the poet and the whole eyes meeting across a crowded room thing.

Rafiel frowned. “Don’t you think it’s all a bit in the air?” he asked. “I mean, they’re just a middle-aged couple, and perhaps they’re not so good on the relationship and getting along with each other front. Perhaps they aren’t very good at connecting with each other?”

“But . . .” Kyrie said, and seized on the one thing she was sure of. “But his girlfriend first met him around a month ago.” And then, with desperate recollection. “And, you know, he had a Band-aid on his neck the day after I speared the beetle.”

Rafiel sighed. “He and how many guys in Goldport? Think. Perhaps he cut himself shaving.”

“At the back of his neck?”

“Well, okay, so he scratched himself. Or had a pimple that blew up. It happens. Don’t you think if he’d been stuck with an umbrella, even in another shape, it would require more than a Band-aid?”

“Not necessarily,” Kyrie said. “We heal fast.”