Night Shifters (87 page)

Rafiel didn’t think the Great Sky Dragon was stupid at all. And even through his headache, he had to concede Conan’s logic. He didn’t see the Great Sky Dragon leaving a corpse that close to Tom, not if he wanted to protect him, at any rate.

His headache was worse. “Damn,” he said. “That means it was probably Dire.”

Conan nodded, sagely.

“Which means we need to figure out a way to deal with him.”

“Deal with him?” Conan said. “You can’t. Not alone. That’s why Himself sent me, so that . . .”

Rafiel looked at Tom. Tom shook his head at him, but said nothing.

“Right,” Rafiel said. “I think I’ll take my headache and go see if I can come up with any new ideas.”

Tom smiled at him, suddenly. “Where are you going to take your headache?”

“I don’t know,” Rafiel said. He had a savage need to be mad at someone and to be rude to someone, and he didn’t want to do it here, and he didn’t want to be mad at Tom. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll drive in circles for a while till I think of somewhere to go.”

The quizzical half-amused look he got back didn’t really help his mood or sense of humor any. Nor did hearing Tom tell Conan—clearly, in answer to a question he didn’t hear, “No, I don’t want you to help. I don’t want the Great Sky Dragon involved in this. It’s between me and my
friends
. If the Great Sky Dragon gets involved I’ll make sure to die. And then all his work and meddling will be for nothing.”

Kyrie was worried and she didn’t like to be worried. Or rather, she tried to minimize the time she spent being worried, tried to minimize the time she devoted to feeling stress. She much preferred, by far, to work on solutions than to turn over in her mind things that couldn’t be helped.

But she was sure that it had been Dire who’d killed that poor woman. She remembered her own words to him—in haste and rage, and mostly wanting to get rid of him—about the reporter and the paper. Oh, she should have known better than to say that sort of thing to a psychopath, but she didn’t feel guilty. Not exactly.

She had simply not been brought up with the idea that whatever she might say to someone might cause that person to go off and take it into his head to kill someone else. Though she’d grown up in foster homes, and some of her foster siblings had been less than stable, she’d never met with that level of volatility. Now she had. And she’d take it under advisement in the future. It had perhaps been stupid of her to speak of the poor girl. But Kyrie hadn’t intended her death, and nothing could be served by castigating herself over crimes she hadn’t meant to commit.

And yet, she felt a nettle of guilt and a nettle of worry, as she went about, waiting on tables. She would swear she smelled at least two shifters, perhaps more, though it was hard to tell through the smell of bacon and eggs and fresh-grilled pancakes.

However, when she stopped by the Poet—who had come in unusually late, and was clearly staying for breakfast—she could smell him—she was sure of it—the sharp tang of shifter around him.

She stopped long enough to refill his cup, and she could feel the smell rising from him, and then she noticed something else. What he had written on his notebook, in tiny, obsessively-neat block print, was “A modest proposal for a rodent revolution.”

Rodents, Kyrie thought, moving away as he looked at her, and before he could realize she’d read over his shoulder. A Rodent Liberation Front. She wondered how real that was. It had seemed to—pardoning the pun—ferret out that school teacher rodent. Perhaps it had spies?

She shivered at the idea of an army of rodents spying on people. It reminded her of the movie
Ratatouille,
which she’d thought Tom would like, because, even though it was an animation for children, it was about a rat learning to be a chef. And since Tom had started culinary classes and was invested, heart and soul, in cooking the best he could for The George, Kyrie had thought this would be the perfect movie. Only the scene of the rats, flowing like a furry tide to take over the restaurant and do everything in it at night, had made Tom jump up and say, “Turn it off.” Kyrie herself had felt pretty uncomfortable, too, though perhaps not as much as Tom, who’d said that all he could think was of a similar tide of rats taking over The George. The juxtaposition in his mind of rats and cooking surfaces just seemed to drive him crazy.

And yet . . . wouldn’t such a furry tide of rats—such a group of shifters—have power? Shouldn’t she be able to get help from them? She knew Tom didn’t want to ask for help from the Great Sky Dragon. She understood it, even. But this was a diner customer.

The thought lasted all the walk back behind the counter, to replace the spent carafe and take up the filled one. Tom was behind the counter also taking over from Anthony and listening to Anthony’s instructions on what was cooking and at what stage.

“I’ll be back by six, right?” Anthony said. “Is that early enough for you? Because, you know, these double shifts are killing me, though Cecily says we could use the money because she wants a large screen TV. Where she plans to put the large screen TV in our apartment, I don’t know, though doubtless I’ll find out.”

“You’ll find out she wants to move to a bigger one,” Tom said, in an amused tone, and Kyrie was surprised and admiring at once, that he could keep this calm and joke with Anthony like that, with everything that was hanging over their heads.

Anthony shrugged. “Ain’t that the truth. But she’s worth it. She’s a great cook. Her steak is almost as good as yours. And I’m sorry, Tom, you’re a good-looking man, but Cecily is much prettier.”

Tom chuckled at that, and Anthony, putting his jacket on, ducked out of the counter and off towards the hallway. And Kyrie turned to Tom and said, “What about the RLF?”

Tom blinked at her. “Beg your pardon?”

“What about the Rodent Liberation Front?” Kyrie said. “What if we asked their help?”

“You’re joking, right?”

“Well, they are a group of shifters, and they seem to be . . .” She looked up to see Tom’s lips tremble. “Well, all right, the idea of an army of rats is somewhat creepy.”

“Creepy isn’t the half of it, and what I fear is not an army of rats,” Tom said, “it is an army of rats, mice, gerbils, squirrels and guinea pigs.”

“But . . . surely they could . . . do things?”

“Like what, nibble people to death?” Tom asked. Then shrugging, “Oh, I grant you they could probably be very useful in spying and that sort of thing, but . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t know, Kyrie. All these organizations seem to come with their own, for lack of a better word, agenda: their own assumptions about who’s in and who’s out. I’d prefer to just be human.”

Kyrie had to giggle at that. “Ah. Well. So would I, but we’re not.”

Tom shook his head. He frowned. “No. But perhaps we must be? I mean, I’m not going to deny, I can’t deny, that I’m also something else, but we live in a society of humans and our parents . . . well . . . at least mine,” he had the grace to blush, as if just remembering that she had no clue who or what her parents were, “are human. We owe humanity something . . . Even if we owe our kind something too.” He looked annoyed, as though he’d just noticed that his tongue had got him hopelessly tangled. “Look, if I saw someone go after a . . . a mouse shifter, simply for being a mouse shifter and because the difference scared them, of course I would defend him or her. We owe each other that. But . . .”

“But if you found a mouse shifter nibbling on human babies at night and counting it as not mattering because he thought himself superior and more human than them . . . You’d eat the bastard?” Kyrie asked.

Tom flashed a smile. “Kill. Despite my dad’s imagination, I do try very hard not to be a cannibal.”

Kyrie chuckled. She could no more imagine Tom being a cannibal than she could imagine him being a mass murderer. Shifter or not, she knew her boyfriend held himself to a very stern standard. And would not, could not deviate. Not and remain himself. Which meant he couldn’t ask for help. And that she would have to be the guarantor to the Great Sky Dragon that Tom wouldn’t kill himself. She thought she could do that, if she had asked for help—and not him. If it were her debt.

A couple came in, and Kyrie went to seat them at a table by the window and take their order. The problem, when it came right down to it, was that Kyrie was also not absolutely sure that Tom could kill Dire even presuming he found a way to defeat his mind powers, no matter how much he thought Dire was dangerous to humans. She knew Tom. She thought Tom’s own scruples would stop him. He would only kill when cornered. He would kill to protect his friends. But, given Dire’s abilities, when Tom found himself cornered it might be too late.

Dire might not kill Tom. Kyrie wasn’t sure how the truce of the Ancient Ones with the dragons would hold given an attack on a dragon. But she knew that he would hurt Tom. And wreak havoc on the rest of them.

And she saw no way out of it, she thought, as she set the two orders for French toast on the counter. They had to get rid of Dire, but Tom wouldn’t let her ask for the help of anyone who might defeat the creature.

Rafiel didn’t drive in circles. He drove through streets where people were making their cautious way to work—some of them for the first time in three days. It was slow going, and very broken progress, as he had to stop often to avoid ramming into the car in front of him, or else slow down for groups of schoolchildren slipping, sliding and giggling across an ice-patch on the crosswalk.

He stopped by a friendly doughnut shop—not his normal one—and grabbed two crullers and a tall cup of coffee, before retreating to the car parked in front of the shop, sparing just one grateful thought to his shifter metabolism that—thank heavens—allowed him to eat as much as he pleased of what he pleased.

The shop was in a neighborhood of small, remodeled townhouses and apartments. It had either been there since the middle of the twentieth century or someone had gone through a whole lot of trouble to make sure it looked as though it had. Though it had no tables, the interior had that green-formica and chrome look of the Fifties, and the sign over the shop blinked in pink and green neon good doughnuts. Which they were, or at least the crullers were—soft and moist. And the coffee was just as it should be, black as a murderer’s soul, hot as hell and strong enough to peel paint—or stomach lining.

Rafiel’s phone rang. He saw McKnight’s cell number and took the phone to his ear with a “Yeah?”

“That guy you had me check on?”

“Dante Dire?”

“Yeah, I left a couple of the part-timers dealing with the data stuff. They didn’t want to see the body.”

“Yeah.”
Smart part-timers.

“Well, we didn’t find signs that he was in the aquarium, but . . . well, his movements are kind of hard to check. He’s all over. But he . . . well, he’s been in Colorado for a couple of months. Also . . .”

“Also?”

“He made a killing in the stock market. Several times. He’s either an amazing gambler, or he is crooked as hell.”

Or he can read minds,
Rafiel thought and shivered. “Thanks, McKnight.”

Rafiel drank and ate in his car and considered his options.

He was about five blocks away from the aquarium. In the bewildering way towns in the west had of turning from residential to commercial and back again, this neighborhood became all offices as soon as you crossed under the expressway to the west. And then the aquarium was right there. He should go back to the aquarium. Oh, it was only one of the cases on his plate right now, but it was—arguably—the one he could actually do something about.

Whatever Tom and Kyrie had to say, he couldn’t figure out how he could do anything about the dire wolf. And he certainly couldn’t do anything about Conan and the Great Sky Dragon. He felt sorry for Conan, poor bastard, but that was about it. He didn’t know where, if at all, the alligator fit in all this, and he’d be damned if he understood, even mildly, what was going on with a shifter crab. But whatever was going on at the aquarium he had to solve. There had to be a female involved, which seemed to rule out the old Japanese shifter. Unless, of course, the Japanese shifter disapproved of immoral behavior in his aquarium. Who knew? Morals had changed a lot, hadn’t they, even in the last couple decades, let alone from whatever old era this shifter came from? And then there was always Dire. Dire’s casual disregard for life. And even if they didn’t find a trail showing he’d been in town, he might have been. And he might have mind-controlled those victims into jumping in the tank. To . . . make their life difficult? Keep them on their toes while he investigated their other alleged misdeeds?

His motives were almost impossible to fathom, except that it was pretty sure they weren’t good. He seemed to take relish in casual emotional torture.

Or it could be a female at the aquarium.

He became aware that someone was knocking enthusiastically on the passenger side window, and looked away from pink and green neon to see Lei Lani’s face surrounded by fluffy grey fake fur on a red ski jacket hood. She tapped the window again, and smiled.