Night Shifters (58 page)

And yet, he worried. What if the executioner, whoever he was, was already inside, getting ready to ambush Kyrie and Rafiel around the corner of some tank, or push them into the shark tank? What could Tom do from out here?

He decided to land somewhere and shift, then see if he could break into the aquarium. In his misspent years as a transient, he’d often broken into places. Mostly into cars, when he absolutely needed transportation for a short period of time. Sometimes, into garden sheds, carriage houses or garages, in the coldest nights, to get some protection from the weather.

He’d never stolen anything in those break-ins and he’d felt positively virtuous about that, until Kyrie had made him understand the damage he caused, however minimal, still disturbed the lives of innocents.

Still, he had experience breaking into places. Granted, a garden shed was bound to have a flimsier lock than . . . well, a municipal aquarium, even—or perhaps particularly—a municipal aquarium run by a seafood restaurant chain. But all the same, he should be able to break in. And he should be able to find Kyrie and Rafiel. And warn them. Before they got pushed into the shark tank.

He took a half-circle flight away from the windows, looking for a place to land and shift, where he would be less likely to be seen from nearby buildings. This objective was made only slightly more difficult because he could not see into any of the buildings around, and therefore could not tell if anyone might be looking out of a window, and have enough visibility to survey the parking lot of the aquarium. He kind of doubted it, though.

His memories of the location of the aquarium, gathered during his visit, in sunnier—if briskly cold—weather, was that it sat on a corner, bordering two fairly well-traveled streets—Ocean Street, where the aquarium’s postal address was—and Congregation Avenue, which led straight to the convention center in less than a mile. On the other side of those roads were office buildings. The chances of anyone being in one of those buildings, on a snowy evening, were very low. In fact, possibly, nonexistent. He’d just land somewhere.

Down below him, in the parking lot, a car door banged. Somehow, in his mind, a voice echoed—not the Great Sky Dragon’s voice, but a voice just as immense, just as overpowering—
Hey, Dragon Boy!
it said.
Come and be killed.

Tom looked down. By the Italian sports car stood a slim, dark-haired man, his head thrown back in defiance. He was naked, but he didn’t seem to either realize it or care. He wore his nudity like others wore expensive suits. His head tilted up, he favored Tom with a wide and feral smile.
What is it, little one? Afraid of me? I’ll take you in fair combat. As fair as it can be when pitting an adult against an infant.

Tom wasn’t afraid—at least the dragon Tom had become wasn’t afraid. The human, locked within the dragon’s mind was not afraid either, or not exactly. He was not afraid of that creature down there, even if he was the vaunted executioner. For all he knew, the man would also change into a dragon, and come after him. And then he might be afraid. And then he might find a reason to kill this creature. But not yet.

And he didn’t react to the voice in his head, as he had first reacted to a similar intrusion by the Great Sky Dragon. Finding someone in your mind once—like any other type of event that is supposed to be impossible but isn’t—could hurtle anyone into a panic. The human mind was an amazing instrument, though. The second time of someone
speaking
in his mind didn’t make Tom feel as violated, or as scared. It was just a voice. Just a voice in his mind. Nothing more.

He took a slow pass over the parking lot, looking down at the person standing by the car. All too human and weak-looking. If Tom was worried about anything, it was not the possibility this person might kill him. No, it was the fear that he might kill this person.

For years, while Tom was a transient, without friends or a fixed place, one fear had pursued Tom relentlessly: the fear that he would shift and lose self-control, and kill someone. It had been his first fear when he’d shifted into a dragon.

And he’d managed to control it—most of the time. The only people he’d ever killed were shifters who were trying to kill him. And even then, if there had been another way, he’d have used another way to stop them. He didn’t think he’d ever eaten anyone—not even in the drug-haze days of his past.

He didn’t want to kill anyone now. Not even this creature—whether or not he was the executioner that Old Joe had gone on about. Tom swooped again, around the man, slightly lower, trying to think of what to do.

His instincts told him he should leave now, but if he did he would leave Kyrie and Rafiel unprotected.
That
he couldn’t do. That would negate his coming here to protect them. He had to, at least, warn them.

He swooped down again, closer. There had to be something he could do, without killing the man. Grab him by an arm and throw him away from the aquarium, perhaps. Then, while he took time to return—or while he shifted into a dragon and came after Tom, Tom would have a chance to warn Kyrie and Rafiel.

But as Tom got close, he saw the man was smoking a cigarette, completely impassive, disregarding the huge dragon closing in on him.

Tom could have bit off his head with a single motion. He could have rent it from his body with his claws. But he couldn’t do either, not to a defenseless-seeming human.

Instead, he flew by so close the tip of his wing almost touched the man, but he sheared off, sharply, and executed a circle, coming back, still aware that he couldn’t kill the man—that his own self-control wouldn’t allow it—but hoping, hoping against hope that the man would be scared.

Oh, are we playing a game?
a laughing voice asked in his mind. And suddenly Tom had no control over his body. None. He fell from the sky, like a pebble, unable to stop himself.

Hurtling towards the parking lot, Tom saw the man shift. Not into a dragon. The creature who stood in the parking lot hadn’t been seen on Earth for millennia uncountable. Tom recognized it, immediately, from its display in Denver’s Natural History Museum, though. It was a dire wolf: tall of shoulder, massive of bone, its teeth huge, unwieldy daggers flashing in the light.

And in that moment he regained control of his body, enough control at least, to tumble to an ungraceful semi-stop, skidding on his tail on the frozen ground.

The creature sprang, with a lightness that belied his size. A sharp pain stabbed into Tom’s awareness, and his wing was seized and ripped. He turned, claw raised, ready to strike, but the dire wolf had moved, quickly, more quickly than should be possible, and bit hard on Tom’s wrist. Only Tom’s last-second recoil prevented him from ripping out Tom’s throat. The yellow eyes of the monster shone with unholy glee amid grey fur, and Tom would have flown away—maimed wing and blood-dripping paw. But he couldn’t. Kyrie and Rafiel were in there. They could be coming out any moment. What would this monster do to them?

“What the—!” Kyrie said, as she came through the door, and saw Tom being attacked by a creature out of a museum’s diorama. For a moment that was all she could think, her mind seemingly frozen on that point—wondering if she was dreaming, if all those visits to the museum had finally affected her sanity, as she told Tom they were bound to. The museum was his favorite haunt, when they took a day off to go to Denver, and sometimes she felt as though she could have drawn every display from memory—including the broken places in the bassilosaurus skeleton.

She heard a soft growl at her side. Rafiel. A look at the policeman showed him, by touch, without even seeming to notice, stripping off his clothes.

And Kyrie, feeling the shift shudder through her, as she stared at the unlikely creature striking at her boyfriend, thought that this creature moved like nothing she’d ever seen. His movement was like a special effect, where the movie editors cut and pasted frames without regard, so that they displaced someone from one place to the other, without moving them the intervening distance. She was sure this was not what was happening, but the effect was rather as though the creature teleported from one place to the next instantly. And it was biting, rounding on Tom, and slashing, rending, always attacking.

Rafiel, already in lion form—tawny and sleek and large, though not half the size of the creature battling Tom—rushed into the battle, his mane snow-flecked. And Kyrie charged, right behind.

It was folly, her human mind said, sheer folly, to rush like this into battle with a creature that seemed supernatural in its movements. But what else could she do?

The creature teleported towards Rafiel—materializing right in front of him, Tom’s blood dripping from the huge dagger teeth, a look of unholy amusement in the slitlike yellow eyes. It lunged at Rafiel and it was clear from the movement that it meant to take Rafiel by the throat, or perhaps to bite his neck in two, killing him in one of the few ways a shifter could be killed.

But as the massive-fanged mouth opened, Tom leapt, and bit the creature sharply on the hind quarters, causing it to close its jaws just above Rafiel’s neck, barely touching him with its fangs.

And now Tom was raking what seemed to be a badly bleeding paw across the creature’s flanks and making a high, insane hiss of challenge.

And Kyrie, who could see that the creature’s eyes were—startlingly—more amused than scared, jumped in, her fur ruffled, growling low in the back of her throat.

The creature rounded on her, ignoring Tom’s attack on its exposed flank and pinning Rafiel, casually, beneath a massive paw. It sniffed at Kyrie and the slitted yellow eyes looked more unholy and more amused than ever.
Hello, pretty kitten girl. It would be a shame to kill you, wouldn’t it?

The voice, in her mind, made her jump. She knew it was this creature in front of her, and not the Great Sky Dragon, but she suddenly understood why Tom had reacted as he did to the dragon in his mind. She heard a keen of not quite pain escape the panther’s throat and she felt what seemed like a dirty finger rifling quickly through her mind.
Interesting mind, Kitten. Better defended than Lion Boy’s
. The feel of unholy laughter.
But not by much.

And then, suddenly, there was a streak of red from above, and a thing that looked much like a falling boulder through the snow resolved itself into Red Dragon, flying in.

It roared something that sounded much like “No,” or as close to the word “no” as a dragon’s mouth could form. And in the next moment it landed in front of the dire wolf. Kyrie expected the wolf to port away or to attack, but he didn’t do either. Instead, he stood in place, looking confused.

Red Dragon let out a stream of flame at the dire wolf, just as Kyrie wondered why Tom hadn’t done so. And the dire wolf wasn’t there.

What sounded much like “spoilsport,” echoed in her mind, and the dire wolf seemed to be quite gone, though they couldn’t tell where. Moments later, a sound that seemed disturbingly like human laughter floated from the place where it had retreated.

For Tom it all went too fast. First, he was fighting a creature that seemed to be everywhere at once. His only hope was to take to the sky, but before he could—his bleeding wing, hurting every time he moved, threw off his balance—the creature struck him again. And again. At both front paws, and back paw.

And slowly it dawned on Tom that if the dire wolf could strike him like this, at will, and wherever it chose, then it could have killed him. That it wasn’t killing him should have been a relief, but it wasn’t. Because he had a feeling that the creature was playing with him the way cats play with mice.

And then there was Rafiel, who seemed to appear out of nowhere, and Tom wanted to yell at him and Kyrie to run, but the dragon throat didn’t work properly and he couldn’t give them the warning in a way that they could understand. And the only thing for it was for him to intervene and save Rafiel from the dire wolf, even though it probably would mean Tom would die for it. But he’d come to save Kyrie and Rafiel, and he was going to do it, if it was his last action on Earth.

He launched himself at the dire wolf, biting and scratching where he could reach. And then . . .