Night Shifters (92 page)

“The problem,” Rafiel said, as Notty climbed the rest of the way inside his shirt and installed himself on his shoulder, under his shirt, his little orange fuzzy head protruding from Rafiel’s collar and making a sound reminiscent of a badly tuned diesel engine, “is that if shifters weren’t a secret, and I could tell my medical examiner what to look for, I’m sure they could find traces of whatever happened, maybe enough to tell us if we’re looking for a crab shifter, a shark shifter or none of the above.”

“Unless your medical examiner is a shifter himself,” Tom said, emerging from the bathroom, and tying his hair back. “I wouldn’t recommend it. If you’re lucky, he’ll recommend a psychiatric evaluation. If you’re not, he might believe you.”

Rafiel sighed. “I know. But we still have to figure out something.”

“Yes,” Tom said. “Yes, we do.” He turned around to face Rafiel and smiled a little. “Nice second head, by the way.”

Rafiel petted Notty’s head protruding from his shirt. “Yeah, I think it will make me a veritable chick magnet.”

“Not advisable. Notty would eat the chicks.”

“Probably. But you know two heads . . .”

“Think better than one. Yes. Which reminds me . . . Could you . . . I mean, you have the keys to the aquarium, right? I mean, that’s how you took Kyrie there before?”

Rafiel nodded.

“Well, then I think I might have an idea. We’ll need to go by my house but I think there’s something we can do.”

Kyrie’s head was whirling. Mr. Lung had believed her, when she said that Tom would not kill himself, provided it wasn’t his independence that had been compromised. And he’d told her to let Conan Lung—whom he assured her was no relation, except in the way that all dragon shifters were supposed to be descended from the very first dragon—in on whatever the plan was. He promised that so long as Conan was with them, or where he could see them if they got in trouble, help would be instantaneous. So now, the question was—how to trap Dire?

And did she want to entrap him? Did she truly want to kill him? Despite everything that she’d told the owner of the Three Luck Dragon, she felt squeamish at the thought. After all, he hadn’t tried to kill her. If that was what he wanted to do, he would have done it long ago. He’d pursued her, and tried to scare her and hurt her, but he had not actually sought to kill her.

Should she kill someone who wasn’t trying to kill her? To say that he was a sadist—which, of course, he was—and was trying to terrorize her and hurt her just didn’t seem enough reason to kill him. As she drove into the parking lot of The George and noted Rafiel’s car parked where he normally parked when he was visiting, she sighed. It stretched the definition of self-defense to kill someone merely because they were psychopaths.

Oh, she was quite sure that Dire had killed plenty of people in his time. Well . . . she was almost sure he had killed Summer, the journalist. But horrible as that crime was, it was almost sure that he had done it to protect them. To keep them secret. Yes, of course it could be argued that by keeping their secret, he kept his own. But he could just as easily have killed them, and he hadn’t. She opened the door of the car and got out onto the cool parking lot almost deserted in the after-lunch lull.

“Hello, Kitten Girl,” a familiar voice said.

She spun around to see Dante Dire—in human aspect, wearing a well-tailored black suit, standing just steps from her. Her stomach knotted. Her heart sped up. She tasted bile at the back of her throat. He could read thoughts. Had he been reading her thoughts the last few minutes?

If so, he seemed in a strangely good mood. “I want you to know I’ve solved all our problems,” he said, grinning at her. “I want you to know you don’t have to worry anymore.”

Our problems? What can he mean?

He laughed at what was, doubtlessly, her very confused expression. “Ah, I see you don’t know. Well . . . it’s like this. You know I came here to decide on who had killed a great deal of young ones, right? I was to do preliminary investigations, and then tell the council what I had found and wait for their decision. They’d probably send three or four more to verify my conclusions, and you know . . .” He put his hand in his pocket and made a sound of jingling, probably with change. “The truth is if they probed the problem, they would find that it was of course you and your friends . . . If it were just your friends, I wouldn’t mind denouncing them. I don’t know why the daddy dragon has an interest in Dragon Boy, but I’m sure—Dragon Boy not being one of his own nestlings, see?—that if push came to shove, he would let Dragon Boy go. And I could fulfill my mission and go back to my normal life.”

As he spoke he approached her, and somehow his voice became lower and more seductive. “And let me tell you, my normal life is the sort of life anyone would dream of. I have my own private plane. I have bank accounts in every country. I’ve lived long enough to allow me to accumulate more money than I know what to do with. When I arrive somewhere, even if I arrive naked,” he flashed her a smile, “I can always be properly attired and in a brand-new car within an hour.”

He came very close, until his face was almost touching hers, and his voice descended till it was just a purr. “You can share that life with me, Kitten Girl. I can show you the world and everything beyond. Come on. You were made for better things than this dinky little diner.”

Kyrie knew that he was doing something to her mind, even as he spoke, in that low seductive voice. She could feel her mind not so much changing as being changed for her. All of a sudden, as if she were looking through Dante Dire’s eyes, the diner did look small and dinky—almost decayed, in fact, though they’d remodeled it extensively when they’d taken over three months ago.

Why do I want to do this? Is this really what I want to do with my life, serve hash and soup to students and people who are making barely more than minimum wage? Is this really how I want to spend every day?
All of a sudden the place where she had at last felt she belonged seemed tacky—a squat of concrete, a glare of neon. And Tom, who was like the other half of her heart, seemed like a boring young man with curiously foreshortened ambition. All he wanted to do was take cooking classes and spend his life incrementally improving food and service at The George until it was the best diner in Colorado. In his free time, he did accounts or researched recipes. The most exciting thing they’d done in the last three months was take a weekend off and go to Denver to visit the
Titanic
exhibit at the Natural History Museum. Truth be told, Tom was a very boring man. And her life with him would be a very boring life.

In her mind’s eye the years with Tom stretched endlessly, never too flush with money and forever living on the outside of all fashionable or even exotic entertainment. Nothing would ever happen, nothing ever break the routine.

“That’s it,” Dire said, softly, his face so close she could feel his warm breath on her skin. “That’s exactly it. He’ll kill you with boredom, Kitten Girl. He’ll be the death of you.

“Or . . . you could come with me,” he said. Through her mind there flashed, in succession, images of her in various designer clothes, images of her on a Mediterranean beach. Images of her eating in fine restaurants and taking airplanes. By Dire’s side. And in her mind, for whatever reason, she was madly in love with Dire.

Kyrie didn’t love Dire. In fact, she couldn’t imagine being in love with any psychopath. She shook her head. “You’re in my mind,” she said, speaking through her clenched teeth, against the waves of love and attraction washing through her brain. “And you weren’t invited.”

He chuckled softly, in amusement. She raised her knee and hit him between the legs. Hard. The images vanished from her head. Before he could recover, before he could shift, before he could climb into her mind again, she ran, like mad, into the diner. She knew it wouldn’t afford her much protection—or at least she thought it wouldn’t—but she didn’t care. She wanted away from that cold, dark mind.

She ran into the diner through the back door, and ran down the hallway into the diner itself. Anthony, who was peeling potatoes, turned around to give her a very puzzled look.

“I’m sorry,” Kyrie said, ducking behind the counter. “I thought you’d need me. That I was away too long.”

“No, you’re fine. As you see, we don’t have that many tables occupied.”

“Yeah, I see,” Kyrie said, as she put the apron on.

“Oh, Keith came in,” Anthony said. “He says he can use the cash.”

“Oh good,” Kyrie said.

Anthony chopped the potatoes into sticks. “Well, with him here, rush hour wasn’t really a problem. And Conan is getting better, despite that arm.”

“Yeah. He’s fairly smart,” Kyrie said. Anthony said something about Conan singing really well, too, but Kyrie wasn’t thinking of that. She was thinking of Dire, out in the parking lot. She didn’t want to kill him. Not if she could help it. But she wasn’t sure she could.

In Rafiel’s car, Tom called Kyrie on the cell phone. Or rather he called The George, but it was she who answered, as he expected.

“Hi, Kyrie,” he said.

She seemed faintly surprised and oddly suspicious. “Who is this?”

Had he slept such irregular hours that he still had sleep-voice? He didn’t think so, but he cleared his throat all the same and said, “Me,” with, he realized afterwards, the kind of confidence only a boyfriend would have in being recognized from such a syllable.

It seemed to work. Or at least she said, “Oh. I didn’t expect you to be awake.” She took a deep breath. “You know,
he
has impersonated Rafiel before . . .”

Tom took a look at Rafiel who was driving while tapping his fingers on the steering wheel in rhythm with some very strange song about never growing old. “Yeah. But only over the phone.”

“We are talking over the phone!” Kyrie said, as if he’d taken leave of his senses.

“Oh . . . you mean . . .” Tom took a deep breath. “Well, I’m not going to ask you to go anywhere or anything, just wanted to know if Anthony is okay staying till six or so? Because it will be till then before I come back.”

“All right,” Kyrie said. “A long shift but . . . he’s been pulling those.”

It seemed very strange to Tom that she didn’t ask him why or where he was going, or even what he was intending to do. It wasn’t that Kyrie was overly inquisitive or determined to have him live in her pocket. It wasn’t even that she demanded to know where he was at all times. But when he called to tell her he was going to be late for something, she asked why. Normal human curiosity. He thought of what Kyrie had said about Dire. “He has impersonated Rafiel before.” But surely Dire wouldn’t say that about himself if he was impersonating Kyrie. Besides, Tom remembered the description Kyrie had given of how Rafiel sounded over the phone—all breath, no voice . . . Kyrie didn’t sound that way. And, on yet the other paw, Kyrie sounded exactly like she did when she was harassed and shorthanded.

“I’m sorry if I am putting you in a bind,” he said. He’d discovered nine-tenths of a good relationship was preemptive apologizing even if you didn’t know—sometimes he would say particularly if you didn’t know—what you had done wrong. He’d found that his social skills, blunted by looking out only for himself for much too long, sometimes missed fine points of the effects his actions might have on Kyrie.

“You’re not,” Kyrie said. “I’ll manage. Anthony was planning on staying at least that long, and Keith has come in. We’re okay.”

“Oh. I’m just . . . I’m with Rafiel. I’m helping him run an errand.”

“All right. Call if you’re going to be later than six. Or I’ll worry.”

“Right,” Tom said, and hung up.

Rafiel, pulling into the parking lot of the aquarium, gave Tom a quizzical glance. Perhaps it was just Tom’s expression—there was more amusement than there should have been. “She upset about you staying out late?”

Tom did his best to glare at Rafiel. He was fairly sure this was wasted effort. All his efforts to glare at the policeman before—glare him into silence; glare him into being sensible—had met with chuckles. This time was no exception. Tom shook his head. “If you’re going to tell me ‘better me than you,’ even I am not stupid enough to buy that.”