Night Shifters (40 page)
Authors: Sarah A. Hoyt
Tags: #Fiction, #Fantasy, #General, #Contemporary, #Urban
If he didn’t give them much time to react, perhaps they wouldn’t have time to summon the Great Sky Dragon. Edward wasn’t sure he could face that presence.
In fact, he wasn’t sure at all he would survive this experience. Despite everything he’d told Keith, he was sure that the triad could buy a replacement lawyer, once they got rid of him.
The funny thing was that he didn’t much care if anything happened to him, provided nothing happened to Tom. He’d never got around to changing his will, and if he died, at least Tom would be taken care of. It wasn’t like he’d ever been much of a father.
Kyrie hung up her apron and picked up her purse. It hit her, suddenly, and with a certainty she’d never felt before that whatever happened tonight was decisive.
Because, if she went to the castle and found nothing, she’d have to live in hiding. Perhaps move. Because she couldn’t know what the beetles knew or where they were.
On the other hand, if she went up there tonight and found corpses . . . well, it might be the last time she hung her apron on this peg and headed out, at the end of the shift, into the Colorado morning with the sky just turning pink, Fairfax Avenue as deserted as a country lane, and everything clean and still.
She got in her car and drove home, but only opened her front door to throw her purse inside the living room. Then she put her key in her pocket and headed back out.
The way to the castle was quick enough and at this time of morning there wasn’t really anyone out. Kyrie could walk unnoticed down the streets. Which was good, because whether Frank and his girlfriend were shifter beetles or not, Kyrie didn’t want him to know that she suspected him or his girlfriend. She wanted him to think that she had gone home, normally, and stayed there.
In a way she wished she could. Or that she—at least—had Tom or Rafiel with her. She couldn’t believe that both of them had turned on her at the same time, and she wondered if it was some argument they’d had, of which she was only catching the backlash. Who knew?
The castle looked forbidding and dark, looming in the morning light. Most of the windows were boarded up, except for some right at the front, next to the front door. She supposed that Frank’s girlfriend, not needing all the rooms—at least until such a time as she opened a bed-and-breakfast, if those plans were true—had opened only those in which she was living.
Kyrie wondered what Frank’s and whatever her name’s plans were, if they really were the beetles and if they truly were in the middle of a reproductive frenzy.
Were they intending on having all their sons and daughters help in the bed-and-breakfast? Or simply to take over the castle with their family? Kyrie seemed to remember that beetles were capable of laying a thousand eggs in one reproductive season, so even the castle might prove very tight quarters. And how would they explain it? And would the babies be human most of the time? Or humans all the time till adolescence?
There was no way to tell and Kyrie wondered if other shifters worried about it. She did. But others were, seemingly, in a headlong rush to reproduce, regardless of what it might mean. She thought of Rafiel and scowled.
As she approached the front entrance to the garden, Kyrie saw a woman in a well-cut skirt suit and flyaway grey hair walking away from the alley where the back entrance opened. She was walking away from the castle, toward Fairfax. Maybe she was going to pick Frank up from work.
Which would mean, Kyrie supposed, that they weren’t guilty and were just an older couple in dire need of social skills.
But it would also mean it was safe to go into the castle gardens. Kyrie ran in.
The gardens were thick and green in the early morning light. There was dew on the plants, and some of it dripped from the overhead trees. Above, somewhere, two birds engaged in a singing competition. She started toward the thicker part of the vegetation, where she could undress and shift. She didn’t think that the woman living here now had any domestic help, but if she did, Kyrie didn’t want some maid or housekeeper to scream that there was a girl undressing in the garden. Embarrassing, that.
Avoiding a couple of spiders building elaborate webs in the early morning sunlight, Kyrie made it all the way to the center of the garden, somewhere between the path that circled the house, and the outside fence.
There were ferns almost as tall as she was and she felt as if she’d stepped back into another geologic age when the area was covered in rain forest. She removed her clothes quickly and with practiced gestures. Shirt, jeans, shoes, all of it neatly folded and set aside. And then she stood, in the greenery, and willed herself to change.
It came more easily than she expected. The panther liked green jungles and dark places. It craved running through the heavy vegetation and climbing trees.
Kyrie forced it, instead, to stand very still and smell. It didn’t take long. The smell was quite unmistakable.
“Hello,” Edward said into his cell phone in the back of the car. “May I speak with Mr. Lung?”
There was no answer, but a clunking sound as though the phone had been dropped onto a hard surface. From the background, Edward could hear the enthusiastic voice of a monster-truck rally narrator. Then, as if from very far off, the shutting of a door echoed.
Edward hoped this meant that someone was calling Mr. Lung. It was, of course, possible that once it had been determined that Edward hadn’t called to order an order of moo goo gai pan with fried rice on the side, the cashier had simply left. Or gone to the kitchen to pinch an egg roll or his girlfriend’s bottom.
It took a long time, but at long last, Edward thought he heard, very faintly, approaching footsteps. And then—finally—the sounds of a phone being moved around on a counter.
“Mr. Ormson?” Lung’s voice asked.
“Yes. I have what you . . . I have the object you require. I’m heading to the restaurant to return it.”
“You are? And your son?”
“We’ll leave my son out of this,” Edward said.
“I see. Will we?”
“Yes.”
“Your son caused much damage and death to our . . . organization.”
Edward said nothing. What was he supposed to say?
After a long while, Lung sighed. “I see. But you are returning the object in dispute.”
“Yes.”
“Well, then I shall wait anxiously. I will see you in how long?”
“About ten minutes,” Edward said, and hung up the phone. He looked at the light growing brighter and brighter in the east, every minute. If he was very lucky, then they wouldn’t summon the Great Sky Dragon this close to dawn. Or if they did, he wouldn’t make it here.
If he was very lucky.
He felt he could stand just about everything short of facing that huge, enigmatic presence once again.
CHAPTER
12
The panther scented the corpses right away. Fortunately, they were a little past ripe, even for its tastes. Kyrie was grateful for this.
Locked at the back of the huge feline mind, she could feel the huge paws tread carefully through the undergrowth, and she could feel the big feline head swaying, while it tasted the air. Death. Death nearby.
The death smelled enough like what the animal recognized as its own mortality to slow down its steps, and it only continued forward because Kyrie forced it to.
But it continued. Around the lushest part of the vegetation and toward a little clearing of sorts, in the midst of it all.
The vegetation that had once grown here had been torn out, unceremoniously, by the roots, rose bush and fern, weed and bulb, all of it had been pulled up and tossed, unceremoniously, in a huge pile beside the clearing.
What there was of the earth there had then been turned. Graves. Kyrie could smell them, or rather the panther could.
Kyrie was sure the smell would be imperceptible to her human nose, but her feline nose could smell it, welting up through the imperfectly compacted earth—the smell of decay, of death, of that thing that inevitably all living things became.
Only this death had the peculiar metallic scent that Kyrie had learned to recognize as the smell of shifters. The people laid to rest here had been shifters. Her kind. She looked at the ground with the feline eyes, and forced the feline paw to make a scratching motion on the loose earth.
It didn’t take long. The hand wasn’t much more than fifteen inches down.
The panther wanted to run away and to forget this, to pretend it had never existed.
But Kyrie forced it to walk, slowly, ponderously, to where Kyrie had left her clothes. Kyrie would shift. And then she would call the police.
But before she got to where her clothes lay, she found herself enveloped by a cloud of green dust. It shimmered in the morning air, raining down on her.
Pollen. It had to be pollen. Just pollen. She wished it to be pollen. But she could feel the panther’s head go light, and indistinct forms take shape before her shifted eyes. Game, predators, small fluffy creatures and large ones, all teeth and claws, formed in front of the panther’s eyes, coming directly from her brain.
Kyrie could feel the huge feline body leap and recoil, as if the things it were seeing were normal.
And then . . . And then she saw the beetle. It was coming through the vegetation, blue-green carapace shining under the morning light.
Not quite sure what she was doing, Kyrie forced the panther throat to make a sound it had never been designed for. She screamed.
The Chinese restaurant looked dismal grey in the morning light, as Edward got out of the cab in front of it.
As he was paying the fare, the cabby gave him an odd look. “They’re closed, you know,” he said. “They only open for lunch and that’s not for seven hours.”
“I know,” Edward said, giving the man a generous tip and handing the credit card slip back. When you’re not sure you’re going to live, you can be very generous. “I’m meeting someone.”
The cabby frowned. An older man, with Anglo-Saxon features, he was one of those men whose expressions are slow and seemingly painful, as though their faces had been designed for absolute immobility. “Only,” he said, “they’ve found corpses in this parking lot, all the time. I’ve read about it in the paper. Are you sure you want . . . ?”
Edward nodded. He wanted to explain he was doing it for his son, but that made it sound way too much like expected a medal for doing what any decent father would do. Brave death to keep his son safe. Only . . . he supposed he hadn’t been a decent father. Or not long enough for it to be unremarkable.
“I’m sure,” he said. “I’ll call you for the trip back,” he said. “Your name is on the receipt, right?”
“Right,” the cabby said, but dubiously, as though he couldn’t really believe there would be a trip back.
The truth was neither did Edward. As he walked away from the cab—already peeling rubber out of the parking lot—and toward the silent door of the Three Luck Dragon, with the closed sign on the window, he would have given anything to run away.
But instead he fumbled off the backpack as the door opened a crack and Lung’s face appeared in the opening. “Ah, Mr. Ormson,” he said. Then he stepped aside and opened the door further. “Come in.”
“There is no need,” Edward said. “I have what you want, here. Take it and I—”
But the door opened fully. And inside the room were a group of young men, all glaring at him. They all looked . . . dangerous. In the sort of danger that comes from having absolutely no preconceived notions about the sanctity of the human life.
“I said, come in,” Lung said.
It wasn’t the sort of invitation that Edward could refuse. For one, he was sure if he did those dark-haired young men glaring at him out of the shadows would chase him down and drag him back. The only question was whether they would shift into dragon form first.
Edward suspected they would.
Walking away from Goldport by the shortest route did not require going near Kyrie’s house. However, walking away from Goldport and not heading out of town via the route to New Mexico did lead Tom down Fairfax Avenue, in the general direction of the castle and Kyrie’s neighborhood. Though those were a few blocks north from his path.
Kyrie. The name kept turning up in Tom’s mind with the same regularity that a sufferer’s tongue will seek out a hole in a decaying tooth. It hurt, but it was the sort of hurt that reassured him he was still alive.
Kyrie. The problem was that he’d actually had hope. He’d seen her look at him. She’d patted his behind. She’d smiled at him. He’d had hope, however foolish that hope might have been. If he’d never hoped for anything, he wouldn’t have been so shocked and wounded at seeing her with Rafiel.
And, yes, he was aware that the fact he couldn’t bear to see them together was a character failing of his, not of theirs. He was also aware she hadn’t betrayed him. Looks and even pats on the bottom are not promises. They certainly are not a relationship. They are just . . . Lust.
Perhaps
, he thought, as he walked in front of closed-up store doors and dismal-looking storefronts in the grey morning daylight,
perhaps she lusts after me—though who knows why—but when it comes to love, when it comes to a relationship, she’s a smart girl. If she were interested in me, it would only be proof of either stupidity or insanity.
But . . . but if it wasn’t her fault, why was he punishing her?
He scowled at his own thought. He wasn’t punishing her. If anything, he was keeping himself from being punished daily by the sight of her with Rafiel.
It hurt. No, it wasn’t rational, but it hurt. Badly. And Tom didn’t do well with hurt. He wasn’t punishing Kyrie. He’d go out of town, through Colorado Springs. Probably buy a bus ticket there. Maybe go to Kansas for a while. It had been a long time since he’d been in Kansas.
But, the relentless accusing voice went on in his mind, if he wasn’t trying to punish her, why was he leaving Kyrie to face the beetles alone? Why was he leaving her when she couldn’t even sleep in her house?
Because it wasn’t his problem. Because she wasn’t his to worry about. She could always bunk up with Rafiel, couldn’t she? And she was sure he’d keep her safe. She wasn’t Tom’s to keep safe.
If she had been, he would have given up his life for her, happily enough.
But what kind of love was that? He minded seeing her with Rafiel? He minded her being happy? But he didn’t mind leaving town while she was in danger?
No wonder she’d picked Rafiel. Tom’s love was starting to sound a lot like hate.
As the last few thoughts ran through his mind, Tom’s steps had slowed down, and now he stopped completely in front of the closed door of a little quilting shop, just one crossroad past where he would have turned up to go to Kyrie’s place.
Maybe he should go and check on her. See if she was home. See if she was well . . . Then, if she told him she was fine and that Rafiel would take care of her, he could leave town with a clear conscience and never worry.
He turned around, in front of the shop—the window screaming at him in pretty red cursive that summer was the ideal time to quilt—and headed back toward the crossroad. He’d just turned upward on it, when he saw, ahead of him, just scurrying out of sight on a bend of the road, a giant beetle, its blue carapace shining in the sun.
Kyrie
, Tom thought. He knew there were other places they could be headed. But right then he thought of Kyrie. He thought only of Kyrie.
And then the scream came. It was all Kyrie and yet not human—a warbling mix of terror coming from a feline throat designed only for roaring and hissing.
Without even noticing what he was doing, he broke into a run. He made the turn ahead in the street in time to see the beetle creep into the greenery-choked garden of the castle.
And the scream came again.
Kyrie was hallucinating. Or rather, the panther was. In front of the feline eyes arose a hundred little animals that needed hunting, or rearing predators.
And yet, at the back of the panther’s mind, Kyrie managed to remain lucid, or almost lucid. There was a beetle. She must not lose track of that. A beetle with a shimmering blue-green carapace. And it was trying to kill Kyrie. And lay eggs in her corpse.
This certainty firmly in mind, Kyrie aimed at anything green-blue that she caught amid the snatches of illusion clogging the panther’s vision. The panther’s claws danced over the extended limbs with what looked like a poison injector at the end but might merely have been a lethal claw of some sort. She careened over the bug’s back, and scrambled halfway away before the beetle caught up.
They were right over the graves, and the funky smell of them disturbed the panther, even through the hallucinations.
And at the back of the panther’s mind, Kyrie knew soon she would be dead and buried in this shallow grave.
Tom had run full tilt into the garden of the castle, before he realized what he was doing. He was only lucky the beetles were too busy to realize he was running after them.
Of course, what they were too busy with was Kyrie. And once they noticed Tom they would start pumping the green stuff, and make Tom high as a kite and his fighting totally ineffective.
Twenty yards from them, seeing the huge black feline leap and dance ahead, in mad attack, Tom stopped. He pulled his jacket off, and tossed it in the direction of a tree, making a note where it was. He would come back for it. Then he peeled off the white T-shirt and, wrapping it around his head, tied it in a knot at the back. Its double thickness of fabric made it hard to breathe, and he could wish for better clothes to fight in than the pants that were slowly castrating him.
But he didn’t get his choice. And it didn’t matter. He must fight for Kyrie.
He grabbed a tree branch and plunged forward into the battle swinging it at any beetle limbs within his reach.
Clouds of green stuff emanated, turning the air green and shimmering.
Tom realized the smaller beetle—the one he’d followed?—was immobile and rubbing its wings to emit cloud after cloud of green powder. Meanwhile the one fighting Kyrie—and so far not losing, though also not managing to get any hits in—was not emitting green powder.
Interesting. So, they could only make people hallucinate when they weren’t actively fighting, was that it?
Well,
he thought, jumping back and landing atop the beetle, with a huge tree branch in hand.
Well. He was about to take the fight to the enemy.
And now Kyrie was sure that she, personally, was hallucinating. On top of the panther-conjured images of scared little furry things, there was . . . Tom. Oh, not just Tom, but Tom in gloriously tight jeans, with his shirt removed, and his muscular chest bare in the morning sunlight.
Of course, the shirt he’d taken off was tied around his face, which seemed a really odd hallucination for her to have. And she would think she would dream of his grabbing her and kissing her, rather than of his hitting some very hard blows on the beetle with a huge tree trunk—far too big to be a branch—he’d got from nowhere.