Night Shifters (64 page)

And then there was the voice, a voice without vocalization behind it, a voice that seemed to come from the phone and yet not, a voice that seemed curiously devoid of sound, “Welcome, Pretty Kitten.”

Gasping and gulping, through the horrible smell, Kyrie turned.

Run.

“Hey, Rafiel,” Tom said, as Rafiel walked up to the counter, “I thought you said you’d come by this evening?”

Rafiel shrugged. “I was going to, but I talked to my cousin Mike, and he said that he could go by this afternoon, and I happened to be in the neighborhood, because I have to . . . do some interviews.” He looked around. “In relation to the case in the aquarium.” Shrug. “So I thought I’d drop by and get the house keys from you.”

“All right. If you want to come behind the counter, they’re in my jacket pocket under there,” he said, as he flipped a couple of burgers. And broke two eggs onto the griddle surface of the new stove. He looked over his shoulder and was amused to see Rafiel gingerly lift the pass-through portion of the counter, as though he was afraid it might be spring-loaded or something. He didn’t remember if Rafiel had ever been behind the counter, for all he’d offered to man the diner, just yesterday.

“Yeah,” he told Rafiel. “Down there. Just under the edge of the counter. You’re going to have to look, because there’s Conan’s stuff under there too, and there’s the time sheet boards. At least there isn’t a cat today.”

“A cat?”

“Uh . . . Kyrie and I have a cat. I mean, a kitten. He’s barely larger than one of the burger buns. Full of himself, though.” He heard his own voice become embarrassingly doting, sounding much like the voices of old childless people who dressed their pets in costumes for Halloween and took them out trick or treating. He changed the subject, abruptly, “Hey, why didn’t you just go to Kyrie? She’s probably awake by now.”

“I’m sure she’s awake,” Rafiel said. “I went by there. The owner—Louise?—said that Kyrie had left to go check on something back home. Yeah, I could have gone by your place, but that was out of my way and this isn’t. What?”

The “what” made Tom aware that he was standing there and staring at Rafiel with an idiotic expression on his face. He felt oddly betrayed, and he couldn’t have explained to himself why. But the idea of Kyrie going back to their place without telling him made him feel like she had shut him out or something.

Of course, this was very stupid. It wasn’t like he and Kyrie lived in each other’s pockets, or anything. Sometimes he woke up in the afternoon, and she was gone—gone to the store, or to do laundry or something. Of course, she always left him a note on the table. Of course, that might also be because when she went she took the only vehicle they normally kept at home, and if she wasn’t going to be back in time, it meant Tom had to walk to The George.

“Nothing. I just . . .” Tom said, struggling with the feeling of betrayal, and not knowing what to say. “She didn’t tell me she was going to go home, that’s all.”

“No?” Rafiel said, and frowned slightly, his blond eyebrows meeting up above his oddly golden eyes. “Weird.”

“Well, not really,” Tom said, almost defensively. “I mean, it’s not like I own her, or she needs to tell me where she’s going to be, or . . .”

“No, but you’d think she’d tell you anyway.”

Tom thought perhaps Rafiel thought this meant he and Kyrie had had a falling out, and he wasn’t really ready to be a rival with Rafiel for Kyrie’s affections, again. He said, “Look, I don’t think she means to dump me or anything, it’s just . . . I’m guessing she went home because she realized she missed something. We left kind of in a hurry and didn’t bring a lot of stuff.” Of course, most of that stuff, like their toothbrushes, hairbrushes and most of their toiletries had, presumably, been ground to dust by his shifting in the bathroom.

“Yeah, but you’d think she’d tell you so you could tell her if you needed anything from home, too.”

Tom shrugged. “I can walk there, if I do. It’s no big deal. I was just surprised, that’s all. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong.”

“No,” Rafiel said. He was still squatting by the space under the counter where they put their jackets and where they stored aprons. He had Tom’s jacket in his hands, but he hadn’t pulled it out yet. “It’s just . . . very weird? I mean, I have this feeling it’s weird. I know that I don’t know Kyrie as well as you do, that I don’t know the . . . patterns of your relationship, like you do. But it seems to me she always tells you when she’s not going to be where you expect her. How many times have I been here, talking to you—or at home talking to you, for that matter—and you get a phone call from Kyrie saying she’s going to the supermarket or the thrift shop, or the bookstore, and do you want anything. Or she tells you if she’s going to have the oil changed, and it’s going to take a while.”

“So maybe she thought it would be very quick and wasn’t worth mentioning,” Tom said. But he felt it too, the wrongness of it. He just didn’t want Rafiel to start thinking along the
Kyrie might be available again and I might have a chance
lines. “Anyway, my keys should be in there, righthand pocket. Yeah, that’s it. My house key is the simplest one. Yeah. The keys for this place are way more complicated.” He watched Rafiel remove the house key from the ring, fold the leather jacket carefully and push it back under the counter.

Meanwhile, Tom assembled two Voracious Student specials, with the double cheeseburgers and the egg and enough fries to sink a small ocean liner, and set them on the counter ringing the bell and announcing “Eighteen and ten.”

Conan scurried towards the counter. He was getting better, Tom thought. He was also learning to carry the coffee carafe in his weaker hand. Tom had no idea how much longer it would take for the full arm to grow in, and it just now occurred to him that they would need to make some explanation to Anthony. He was thinking experimental treatment. It covered a multitude of sins, and most people didn’t enquire any further.

Rafiel straightened up, slipping Tom’s key in his pocket, and at that moment Keith came in, more or less towing a young woman. Keith was wearing his normal attire when the temperature went above freezing but not over 80—a CUG T-shirt, this one reading “I’m just a CUG in the college wheel,” and jeans, topped by an unzipped hooded jacket in sweatshirt material. The girl with him, on the other hand, was dressed as if she thought she was going on a hunting expedition in the arctic wastelands. She was wearing a sweatshirt, a huge, puffy ski jacket in bright shocking pink, and the sort of fuzzy pink muffler that Tom associated—for reasons known only to his psychiatrist, should he ever acquire one—with Minnie Mouse. The rest of the girl’s appearance certainly said mousie, if not necessarily Minnie. She was too skinny, the type of too skinny that the nineteenth century would have associated with consumption and a romantically early death, pale and had colorless white-blond hair that seemed insufficient for her head size and age. It was cut in a page boy just at her ears, but it gave the impression of having trailed off of its own accord and stopped growing due to either lack of energy or effort.

And yet, the way Keith looked at her, Tom saw that he seemed to be attracted to her. Who knew why? It made absolutely no sense to Tom, but then very few pairings did. He supposed his was as much of a surprise to everyone as theirs was to him. After all, what on Earth was a cat doing with a dragon? Or vice versa? And what was a nice girl like Kyrie doing with Tom?

“Hey Keith,” he said. “Is this the friend you told me you’d bring by to meet me?”

The girl blushed furiously and Keith smiled. “Yeah, this is Summer Avenir, Tom. I’ve told her this is the best place in the world to get a burger, besides being my own, personal hangout, which, of course, immediately makes it better.”

“Of course,” Tom said. “Nice meeting you, Summer. And this is Rafiel. He’s a friend.”

Keith did a double take at Rafiel. “Taking a real job in your spare time, Officer Trall?”

“Nah. Just came by to talk to Tom,” Rafiel said, looking embarrassed at being caught behind the counter as though he were an employee. “I’ll be going now. Nice to meet you, Summer. Watch out for Keith. He’s a troublemaker.”

Tom caught Keith’s questioning look at him, and frowned. Perhaps it was that he was behind this counter and cooking, with the scent of fresh fries, hamburgers, melting cheese and toasting bread in his nose. Perhaps through all this, it was too much to expect that Tom could smell another shifter. But though he could smell Rafiel faintly—the metallic scent associated with shifters coming through a mask of Axe cologne—there was no other hint of a shifter-scent. At least not close enough for him to track.

As Conan ducked behind the counter, to grab the coffee pot, Tom could smell him too, his scent a little sharper than Rafiel’s and not overlaid with anything but soap and water. But, as far as he could tell, there was no other shifter-scent at all.

He would have to ask Keith why he thought this girl might be a shifter.

Kyrie couldn’t breathe. Her chest ached and her throat stung and she couldn’t breathe. It was all she managed to do not to claw at her own neck in frantic attempts to somehow force herself to get air in, through the miasma that surrounded her. It made no sense, because she knew she was breathing—somehow, she was still breathing, otherwise she would have passed out long since. But at the same time, the stink around her was so prevalent that she felt sure she couldn’t be breathing. She just couldn’t.

The smell surrounded her, intrusive, offensive. It seemed to her that she was not only inhaling it, but that it was coming through her ears and her pores as well. Pinning her down.

Where are you trying to go, Kitten Girl? Do you think I’d hurt a pretty thing like you?

Kyrie turned around. She wasn’t sure why, but she felt as if the thoughts were coming from behind her, as she tried to get to the kitchen door—and somehow couldn’t because the stink held her back, held her in place.

As she turned, she saw she was right. He stood in the shadows of the door from the hallway, just off the kitchen, and he seemed to be wearing a shimmery silver turtleneck and tailored black pants. He held a cigarette in his hand.

“We don’t . . .” Kyrie said, slowly, because speaking hurt, thinking hurt, assembling thoughts into words seemed a labor worthy of Hercules. “We don’t smoke. In the house. We don’t approve of smoking. In the house.”

She realized how ridiculous she sounded, as she was barely able to breathe and wondering what this . . . creature was and what powers he had over her. They’d determined in the parking lot that it could somehow reach into their minds and touch them. It could change what they were thinking. It was clear even to Kyrie’s befuddled mind that it could also cause her to smell what she was smelling. There was no other way anything—human or animal—could smell that strongly, and the creature was or appeared to be in human form, standing in the demi-shadows of her hallway, smoking.

Kyrie hadn’t been able to really look at him before—not in the parking lot at night, and under snow. But now she observed him. Was she seeing who he was, or who he appeared to be? And in either case, what could she deduce about him?

He was short for a male. Maybe an inch taller than Tom—she would guess him at five eight or thereabouts, and well built—that much was obvious from his huge shoulders, his muscular arms, his whole posture. The silvery turtleneck shimmered over muscle definition that would have made a gym bunny cry. This was not surprising. In Kyrie’s experience most male shifters were built. Something about the animal form and the posture they assumed in their animal form made them exercise as humans normally didn’t. In fact, what was strange was people like Conan who seemed to have not one functional muscle in their wiry, stringy shapes.

Beyond that, he was gold-skinned—a tone that Kyrie thought of as vaguely Mediterranean. Anthony’s color. Could be anything from the southern regions, from Europe to the Americas. His hair was black, lank, and just a little long in front, falling in smooth bangs over his forehead, though the back seemed perfectly molded to the contours of a well-shaped head.

Other than that there was not much unusual about him—his nose was sharply aquiline, but not remarkably so. His forehead was high, but didn’t give the impression of a receding hairline. His lips were broad and seemed sensuous, particularly now when they distended in a come-hither smile. But none of it would have made the man stand out on a crowded street.