Night Shifters (66 page)

He started undressing, rapidly, rolling his clothes in a bundle. “Stay,” he told Rafiel. “Give Keith a hand. I’m sorry if I was too loud in there. She’s in trouble. It’s not that I don’t think you’d fight for her. But flying is faster.”

And like that, Tom kicked his boots aside, dropped his pants and underwear in a bundle, pulled off his shirt and writhed and twisted, coughing, once, twice, three times, as his body changed shapes and textures, the smooth skin becoming green scales, the head elongating . . .

Before Rafiel could blink twice, Tom was lifting off, flying across the clear skies of Goldport towards his own neighborhood.

A curse sounded from the door of the diner. “He swore he’d tell me.” There was a sound of ripping clothes. And then a red dragon rose, also, following Tom across the skies.

This was folly, Rafiel thought, particularly while journalists obsessed with cryptozoology were already suspicious of the existence of dragons in town. But it didn’t seem to matter, not just now. Nothing mattered, except Kyrie.

Rafiel wanted more than anything to go and save her. He understood Tom’s impulse completely. His body strained to be in the sky, speeding towards her, ready to help in any way he could. But Rafiel couldn’t fly and Tom had asked him to stay here and, Rafiel realized, with Conan gone, following Tom, and Keith at the grill, there would be no one to wait tables.

There weren’t many people inside, but Rafiel was willing to bet there were more people than Keith could handle on his own, while cooking.
Right.
He ran his hand backward through his mane of unruly blond hair, aware, as he did it, that he would be making his hair stand on end and look more lionlike than ever. Right. Sometimes your duty requires you to be a hero, and sometimes it requires you to wait tables.

He turned to do just that and opened the door to The George. As he stepped into the cool shadows of the hallway, he saw a woman’s figure retreating rapidly, ahead of him.

“May I help you?” he asked.

She turned around. It was Keith’s blond friend, with her much-too-thick jacket and that look she had of having been dropped headfirst into a fish tank and still not being able to tell the piranhas from the goldfish. “I was . . . looking for the bathroom,” she said.

It might very well be. Well—it could be, at least. If she was as confused as she looked, she might have walked all the way to the end of the hallway somehow managing to go by two bathrooms marked with the international icons for stick-figure man and stick-figure woman wearing triangle skirt without noticing them. He would even be willing to understand this confusion if the bathrooms had been marked salmon and shad roe, but since they seemed to be marked restroom it made the confusion less likely.

On the other hand, perhaps she was a shifter. If that was the truth, she might have understood more of the conversation than she’d seemed to, and she might have been in search of further confirmation.

And yet, she still didn’t smell like a shifter to Rafiel. He’d keep a very close eye on her, even as he helped Keith sling the hash or at least the burgers, and prayed with as much faith as he could possibly muster that Kyrie would be all right.

She might not be his—she would never be his—but he was not willing to face a world from which she was gone.

To shift or not to shift. Tom—as a dragon—landed on the driveway, just behind the car. He’d been thinking—as far as he’d been thinking at all—that he wouldn’t shift. The dragon was a far more impressive foe than Tom, with all of his 5’6”, no matter how strong, no matter how muscular.

But he couldn’t even get close to the door as a dragon, let alone enter through the back or front door and go to Kyrie’s rescue. A quick look to the house next door, where an elderly couple lived, reminded him too that the longer he stayed here in dragon form, the more likely someone would see him and report him. A vision of journalists with snapping cameras had taken hold of his brain and he was struggling to shift back to human form, as—behind him—he heard a dragon land.

Already in human form, Tom looked back, startled, to see a red dragon on the driveway. Conan. And Tom hadn’t called him. But Tom didn’t have time to discuss it with Conan, or even to worry about what the Asian dragon might do. Instead, he must go to Kyrie, if Kyrie was still alive, if Kyrie could still be saved. And he didn’t even want to consider the possibility of anything else. He plunged through the kitchen door, into a scene of chaos and a gagging animal smell.

“Tom,” Kyrie said. She was on the floor, with a chair held as a shield. Across from her, biting and growling and lunging at the chair was the dire wolf, his fur on end, his eyes mad, saliva dripping from his daggerlike teeth.

He can take me in one bite,
Tom thought.
He can behead me with a single bite. I’m going to die. But I can’t become a dragon here. I can’t. It would destroy the room and kill Kyrie, and he’d just port elsewhere.

Blindly, he reached for the rack of utensils that Kyrie had put on the wall, next to the stove. He rarely cooked at home—both he and Kyrie normally ate at the diner, or else brought home food from the diner. However, Tom was taking cooking courses and on the rare occasions when he did cook at home, he felt the need for semi-decent implements. So Kyrie had tacked up to the wall one of those things with leather pockets normally used in workshops to keep hammers and whatnot. And over the last couple of months, they’d been buying good implements: chopping knives, spatulas, a meat-tenderizing hammer.

Tom saw the dire wolf turn towards him, and he knew he had only seconds, and he knew that he couldn’t turn his back on the creature. So he reached with his right hand and grabbed the first handle he could. What he got was a polished, sealed-wood handle, and, from the heft, the meat-tenderizing hammer, with a weighted hammer on one side and a hatchet on the other. Too short to keep the wolf’s jaws from closing on his head. He reached again, and brought out . . . an immense skewer. It was Kyrie’s latest acquisition, and Tom wasn’t absolutely sure what she meant him to use it for. It wasn’t a classical skewer as such, but it had a skewer in the center and then four, smaller, metal prongs, on the bottom. Kyrie had said something about a TV commercial for it that mentioned roasting a chicken in a standing position. Since Tom couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to do what sounded like a convoluted form of medieval torture—at least if the chicken were still alive—he’d thanked her effusively and set the skewer in the wall pocket, determined to forget it.

Now he realized it was a formidable weapon. He turned to the dire wolf, holding the hammer-ax in one hand, and the skewer in the other, and opened his mouth to say something pithy and challenging on the lines of
make my day
. And the smell enveloped him. It was like the smell of a hundred cats in heat; the smell of a thousand unwashed, wet dogs. It filled his mouth, his nostrils, his every pore. It made it impossible for him to think, impossible for him to move.

“Look out,” Kyrie yelled and, rising from her defensive position, hit the dire wolf hard across the back of the head with what remained of her portable chair.

Tom felt the teeth clamp on his leg, and screamed, inhaling more of the smell. He knew what he should be doing. He should be attacking the creature, making him back up, allowing Kyrie to go behind him, allowing them both to escape, with Tom guarding the retreat, towards the car and away.

But no matter how much he thought of it, as the feral mad eyes faced Tom’s, as the creature growled and snarled and salivated, all Tom could think was that he couldn’t move. That the stench enveloping him was somehow preventing his movement.

“Tom, damn it,” Kyrie said, her voice high and hysterical. “Do something. We’re going to die.”

And at that moment . . . there was a voice. It was the voice that Tom had heard in the shower before, the voice of the Great Sky Dragon. It echoed in his mind, filling up all of his senses, so that it was visible sound and scented words, and seemed to touch him all over, as if in an enveloping blanket.

Mine,
the voice said.
Mine. Under my protection.

Like that—with those words—the horrible gagging smell was gone from Tom’s nostrils, from Tom’s mind. The feel of the Great Sky Dragon’s words still echoing in him—seeming to make his very teeth vibrate—Tom stepped forward, and brought the skewer in hard on the creature’s eye, thinking only that if he destroyed the brain it might be the same as beheading. But the dire wolf had jumped backward just in time. The tip of the skewer cut a deep gash down the side of his face, while the ax, which Tom had managed to swing as a follow through, cut across his left ear.

The creature screamed. Blood spurted. And through it all, his voice, less powerful than the Great Sky Dragon’s but also echoing inside Tom’s head and not outside, as voices were supposed to, sounded,
He must pay. He must pay. And he’s not yours. He’s not Asian. You can’t claim him.

The stench came back, less overpowering, but back, nonetheless. But only for a second. The Great Sky Dragon’s voice sounded again, and clearly he was a creature with a very simple philosophy.
Mine,
he yelled.
Mine. I’ve claimed him.

The stench vanished. The dire wolf growled. Tom swung forward, skewer and ax swinging. Making a space behind him. “Go, Kyrie, go,” he said. “The car, now.”

She got up and lurched, behind him, towards the door, while he moved to block the dire wolf from getting to her. The creature wasn’t teleporting or giving the impression of teleporting. Whatever it was that the Great Sky Dragon’s voice caused, it seemed to cause the dire wolf to become unable to create what, for lack of better words, one must call supernatural effects.

“Come,” Kyrie yelled, as she opened the door, and ran full tilt outside. “Come.”

“I will,” Tom said, kicking the door fully open with his foot, and backing into the open door, still holding the skewer and the ax.

The dire wolf made a jump—a clumsy jump—towards him. There was no Great Sky Dragon voice, but Tom swung at him, hard with the ax, and cut him across the nose.

Kyrie honked the horn, and now Tom turned, thinking it was the most stupid thing he could do, but also that he ran much faster that way. The passenger door of the car was open, and he more threw himself at the opening than ran into it.

His head on Kyrie’s shoulder, he reached to close the door, even as she started the car and backed out of the driveway. The dire wolf came running out of the kitchen and chased them. Kyrie turned abruptly, hitting the wolf with the back left wheel and saying, under her breath, “Sorry, it wasn’t intentional.”

Tom took a deep breath, two. He straightened, and buckled his seat belt. “To whom are you apologizing?”

“You. Him. I don’t know. I didn’t mean to run him over. Did I run him over?”

Tom looked back at what looked very much like a bleeding dire wolf still chasing them. “I don’t think so. Can you go faster?”

She pressed the gas down, taking these little residential back streets at speeds normally reserved for the highway, and breathing deeply, deeply, as if recovering from shock.

It took Tom a moment to realize that it wasn’t breathing, it was sobs. “Kyrie,” he said, aghast. He’d never seen her cry. He’d never heard her cry before. Not like this.

“I can’t help it,” she said. “Reaction.” She turned again, seemingly blindly. “I thought I was going to die. And then I thought you were going to die and I . . .”

“I thought you were going to die,” a voice said from the back. Conan’s voice. He popped from the back seat like a deranged jack-in-the-box, and Kyrie slammed on the brakes hard, stopping them suddenly in the middle of a tree-lined street. “I thought you were going to die. You screamed. So I called Himself. I told him I couldn’t go in, but I thought the enemy was in there. And then . . . he aimed for your mind and the enemy’s mind.”

“What the hell?” Kyrie said. And it was all that Tom could do not to turn around and plant his fist in the middle of Conan’s smug-looking face.

Instead, he turned around and said, “What are you doing? What do you think you were doing, hiding back there?”

Conan’s expression shifted, from smug to sullen. “I wasn’t hiding from you,” he said, in the tone that a kid might use to say it wasn’t him who drew on the wall. “I was hiding from the dire wolf.”

“Oh, that makes it ever so much better,” Kyrie said. “Not.”

“Just go,” Conan said. “He’s going to come for us.”

“I don’t think so,” Tom said, looking behind them. “He’s not back there, and besides, he knows where we’re going to go, doesn’t he?”

“Does he?” Conan asked.

“The diner,” Kyrie said. And then, softly, “Hopefully, he’s not so brazen as to come and attack us in the diner, in the parking lot, in front of everyone.”

“Hopefully,” Tom said. “Or we’ll be dead. I mean, it’s not like we can, realistically, stop showing up at the diner.”

“No,” Kyrie said. She started the car again, going more slowly. “But perhaps once he calms down, he won’t be as dangerous? I mean, I get a feeling we pushed him over the edge, and he didn’t very well know what he was doing.”