Night Shifters (97 page)

“It’s Kyrie,” she whispered. She’d left Tom taking care of her tables, with the excuse that she had to go take a shower to wake up, since she hadn’t slept in . . . much too long.

Conan opened the door, and looked at her, somewhat surprised. “Kyrie?”

“I need to talk to you. May I come in?”

“Yeah, sure.” He threw the door open into a room that was about a quarter the size of theirs—just a little bigger than the destroyed bathroom at home. It had a daybed against one wall, a small dresser and a desk opposite. At the end of it the door opened into a tiny bathroom, where she could just see the glass door of a stand-up shower, with what looked like a pair of underwear drying draped over it.

Without meaning to, she looked down. Conan was wearing pants—or rather shorts and a baggy white T-shirt. “Is anything wrong?” he asked her.

“Yes and no,” she said. She closed the door, then leaned against the desk while he slumped on his bed, and looked at her. And she explained. She explained everything. What had happened, what the plan was.

“But, Kyrie, I can’t,” he said. He put his hands on his head, grabbing a handful of his straight black hair on either side. “I can’t do that. He told me he’d kill himself, and the Great Sky Dragon said he meant it.”

“He would kill himself,” Kyrie said. “If he had to be . . . beholden to the Great Sky Dragon, yes. But don’t you see in this case he doesn’t have to? Even if he finds out I asked for help, I’ll be the one he’s mad at, you see. I’ll be the one who is indebted to the triads. He’s not.”

Conan looked at her, blinking, and it took her a moment to realize he was fighting back tears. “I’m not sure he’s not right, Kyrie,” he said, pitifully. “If I had any choice, now—which I don’t—I’d choose not to belong to the Great Sky Dragon, too.” And seeing Kyrie flinch, he must have realized what she’d thought, because he smiled. “I don’t know if he’s still listening to me, no. He might be. Or he might have turned off when Tom told him he wouldn’t allow me to follow him around.” A small frown. “I don’t think so, though, or Mr. Lung would have told you that you needed to do something else to get his attention, than just have me around. He didn’t, so I guess . . . Himself is watching. And he now knows I’d prefer not to belong to him, which is fine. I would. If he didn’t know that before . . .” Conan shrugged. “I don’t think he cares. I’m not
important
like Tom and I never had a choice.”

Kyrie sighed. In her mind only one thing mattered right now. She didn’t want to appear callous towards Conan. She even liked Conan in a way, though he was definitely one of the strays that Tom was so prone to picking up. But she didn’t have time or patience, just now, to discuss his philosophy of life. “Does this mean you won’t help?” she asked.

“No,” Conan said. “It doesn’t. I’ll help, of course. It’s not like I have a choice, you know. I have to help. Or die. And I’m not ready to die.”

“I was going to suggest you take my car, because—”

Conan shook his head. He looked very sad. “If I know how my people work, I expect there will be a car brought to me in the next hour, a car that Tom won’t identify. And just tell Tom I have a cough and decided not to work because I might be contagious. The only thing I want to know . . .” He paused.

“Yes?”

“Is what they intend to use me as, other than possibly bait. It’s not that I mind. It can’t be much worse than all the other things I’ve had to do. I just wish I had more of an inkling of what will happen than ‘Conan will watch, and then we’ll intervene.’” He looked very tired. “Doesn’t matter. I’m sure better minds than mine will handle it.”

Kyrie was caught between a desire to bitch-slap him and a desire to free him from his vassalage.

Kyrie hoped that Dante Dire had the place under surveillance of some sort. She had to—simply had to—arrange for him to follow them that night. She wasn’t quite sure how to do it, except, of course, by managing to pretend that the last thing she wanted was for him to follow them.

There was a good chance she wouldn’t need to do anything to get him to follow them. She suspected he had gone after Tom and Rafiel after seeing them leave the bed-and-breakfast. If that was the case, any of them going near the aquarium was likely to cause Dire to follow. She just wished she could be sure. She also wished she could be sure that Tom hadn’t blinded him for a few weeks. Because if Tom had, then it was going to be very hard to entrap him.

While Tom was busy at the grill and Keith was keeping up with the tables, in the brief post-dinner lull, and before Anthony came in to spell Tom, she took the time to go outside, into the parking lot, looking for Dire’s car.

Instead, she found Dire himself, standing outside the back door, smoking. His dark eyes, she noted, looked fine.

He grinned at her, as if he knew what she was looking at. In the next few words, he proved he did. “Well, Kitten,” he said, “you and your boyfriend are very rude.” He shrugged. “Not that I resent it from you. I like my women with a bit of spirit.”

“I am not your woman,” Kyrie said.

He grinned again, flashing white between taut lips. “Oh yes,” he said. “I know that. But you know, shifters’ lives are long and all that might yet change. Your boyfriend is too dumb to know what’s good for him, so he’s not likely to make old bones.”

“I think my boyfriend is perfectly fine,” she said, snappishly. And meaning the snap, too, because Dire annoyed her—besides putting a chill up her spine—and because she thought he would expect her to react this way.

Dire shrugged. He took a pull on his cigarette, making the tip glow bright. “I’m sure you do. You’re both very young. Young as ephemerals. But he doesn’t understand that, when needed, one must sacrifice a friend . . . or two.” His gaze on her was speculative, and she felt as though she were being considered as a “sacrifice.”

“And have you sacrificed many
friends
?” she asked, wrapping her arms around herself.

If she expected him to flinch or look guilty, she would have been sorely disappointed. He threw his head back and laughed. “One or two . . . dozen. But I’m still here, aren’t I?”

“Yes,” Kyrie said, and judging the time to be right, added, “In fact, I wish you weren’t here so much. What are you doing here, all the time? Are you following us?” Mentally, she projected the feeling/idea that tonight of all nights she didn’t want him around.

She watched his eyes quicken, but nothing more in his gaze gave away that he’d caught on to something. His voice was quite disinterested and amused as he said, “I find you entertaining.”

Tom felt awkward and stupid. Which, he supposed, in many ways he was. At least when the many ways involved human interaction. He felt very strange taking time off and getting into the supply van with Kyrie. Kyrie drove till they were outside the aquarium, about the time that Rafiel would be starting his date. It was unlikely, of course, that Lei Lani would be dragging Rafiel to the aquarium at the beginning of the date—even if Rafiel was right in his suspicions. Even if she intended to drag him there later.

But they didn’t want to be too far away to intervene if she did take him there. The time was quite likely to be too short, then. And the idea was not to have Rafiel get himself killed. For one, even if they got the woman immediately afterwards, the police tended to get religious when one of them got killed. They would leave no stone unturned. And when it came to murders committed by shifters, Tom would very much like to let mossy stones lie. And for another . . . Tom liked the lion bastard. Life wouldn’t be nearly as much fun without a friend in the police, he thought. Why, they might not get pulled into whichever murder was going on, on the vaguest suspicion that a shifter might be involved.

So, they’d taken the laptop—still quiescent—and driven to a block from the aquarium, where they’d parked on a darkened side street. The van smelled of old cabbage and—strangely, since Tom didn’t remember carrying any in it—stale crackers. It had only two seats, since the back was normally filled with crates and boxes of supplies for the diner. In summer and fall, he and Kyrie had taken the van to the farmers’ market early every morning, when Anthony came in to relieve them. They’d got better deals, and better produce too. Though Tom had probably gone overboard on the apricots, which was why they had about a hundred jars of jam in the cold room at The George. Which would come in really handy the minute he learned to make homemade bread.

But because he and Kyrie rarely got to go out alone, because he didn’t want them to sit in the front seats and be obvious, and because he was a fool, he’d made sure the van was clean and he’d brought a blanket to spread on the metallic floor that had long since lost its carpet, if it had ever had one.

He’d also brought two very large throw pillows from their room.

It was only when Kyrie had looked at the blanket and the pillows, and turned an inquisitive glance towards him, that he realized how it might look. “What?” he said. “What? I thought it would be more comfortable than the bare floor and all, while we wait.”

She had smiled just a little, an odd, Mona Lisa smile. “I’m sure it will be,” she had said all soft and breezily.

And now they were parked on a side street, less than a block from the aquarium. It was a narrow street and at this point pretty much deserted, with what looked like an empty—with broken windows—house on one side, and a park on the other. They left the front seats and went to the back, where they sat primly on the pillows across from each other, and they put the laptop up, its back against the front seats. The laptop had been a gift from Tom’s father and, until now, he’d never used it for anything more exciting than doing the accounting for The George.

But the laptop wasn’t being exciting either. A blank screen with a field of stars streaming past—his screen saver—stared back at them. Tom looked at it, then looked at Kyrie. The laptop was supposed to beep if it caught anything, and just now, Tom was disposed to let the laptop do its thing and not give it undue attention. Because, after all, if you couldn’t trust your laptop, what could you trust?

Instead he looked over at Kyrie. He was dating the only woman in the world who could look like a goddess in worn jeans and a utilitarian brown sweat shirt. The brown brought out the olive tones in her skin, and went seamlessly with the layer-dyed hair which was her only concession to vanity. Well, she had one other, but he wasn’t sure whether that was due to vanity or to her belief that this was her good-luck charm, much like his boots were his—but she was wearing her red feather earring, dangling from her ear, jewel-bright against her dark hair. It seemed to highlight her dark-red lips, which were jewellike enough even without the benefit of lipstick.