Noah's Boy-eARC (16 page)

But one thing was sure. Old Joe was one of the older shifters still alive, and if something weird was happening with Tom and the dragons, he would probably be able to explain it to her. That is, supposing she could get him to tune in to the present and pay attention to her for a change.

His memory might or might not be erratic, but Old Joe often gave the impression that his perception—the part of him that was aware of his surroundings—wandered through the millennia in which he’d been alive. His responses were random and nonsensical most of the time.

Unless Tom was around, of course. For reasons not immediately clear—unless it was gratitude to Tom for looking after him—Old Joe seemed very fond of Tom, or perhaps amused by him.

Kyrie finished her notes on the accounting for the night, and caught Jason’s eye, right after he set down a load of dirty dishes. There was only one table occupied in the diner right now, though there would be the usual burst of activity at about half-past midnight, as people came in from late movies and late art shows, or just having finished a study session. But Jason had been tried by fire in one of the most demanding nights the diner had ever seen. “Jason, do you think you could hold down the fort for an hour or so?” she asked.

“Uh.” He looked behind the counter dubiously. “I don’t know how to operate anything. I suppose I could manage the dishwasher and the grill, but…”

“Well, that’s fine. Just tell them we’re out of fries. It’s actually true; I think we went through all the potatoes, certainly all the peeled ones we had reserved. It will be an hour or a little more.”

Rya cleared her throat. “Are you going to…find out where the guys went?”

“Sort of. I’m trying to figure out what made them go. What…this is all about.”

“Um,” Rya said. “Sometimes I help out. When Conan works on Saturday afternoons. I think I can manage the grill and stuff, if Jason will do the serving, and I will do some potato peeling too.”

“The fryer? You can manage the fryer?”

Rya looked up at the sky. “I’ve given a hand now and then when…you know…dragon business.”

“Don’t tell Tom. Whatever happens, don’t tell Tom,” Kyrie said. “He’d go insane thinking of the insurance costs. But,” she said, more calmly, as she took off her apron and passed it to Rya, “if you can man…er…woman the cooking now, we won’t say anything more about it. I’ll go and see an alligator about some dragons.”

* * *

Tom looked at the dragons standing at the back, and though he didn’t say anything, and though none of the other dragons moved, he had the sense that every one there was aware of the dragons at the back and of their standing in…defiance? challenge?…of him.

He looked at them a long time, while the back of his mind ruffled through files. He had an impression he should know their names, should know who they were and what they wanted. “Li Liu,” he said at last as the names came to him, as well as the explanation that these two were brothers. “And Sun Liu. Do you believe you’re bigger than the Great Sky Dragon?”

“We are collaterals of the Great Sky Dragon,” the taller of the two dragons said, hissing his language like a pro. “We are the many-time sons of the Great Sky Dragon’s brother, and we say our claim is greater than yours.”

Tom hesitated. Of course, rationally, he wanted to say, “Fine, you be the Great Sky Bastard, then,” but he suspected that like most things involving the triad this was not a gentleman’s dispute, involving his stepping down and their receiving the honor. In fact, he wondered if they could receive the honor at all, even were he dead. He didn’t think so. He remembered the Great Sky Dragon’s gambit with Bea, and he very much doubted so. There was something else going on here that he could not fully comprehend, at least not yet.

He felt, as if a touch in his mind, a thought from Conan. It was both friendly and diffident, not so much an intrusion in his mind, as there had been when the Great Sky Dragon had sent him warnings before, but rather a hesitant touch, as though of a friend knocking at a room’s door. He received the touch with relief, and Conan’s voice said in his mind, weirdly still in his Southern drawl, “I don’t think they understand how it works. I mean, no one does. Everyone thinks it’s being the son’s son of the Great Sky Dragon, but I think…it’s more than that.”

Tom gave him a mental indication that it was indeed more than that. But meanwhile, he suspected the blue gentlemen dragons would not be fobbed off with that. He tried to reach into their minds, but he could not. Wasn’t the Great Sky Dragon supposed to be able to reach into the mind of every member of the triad?

“See, you are not him,” Sun Liu said. “We can keep you out.”

A pull through Tom’s mental files brought up the idea that the Pearl of Heaven, which Tom had had in his possession far too briefly, would solve that, but the process seemed complicated, and Tom wasn’t at all sure he understood it. What he was sure of was that this was not the time for a philosophical discussion.

He sighed. The file also informed him the only way to solve this was to kill his challengers, and it gave him a deep knowledge in his blood and bones of the sense of how to do it. It was as though he’d grown up in the culture and fought a hundred such battles—which the Liu brothers very well might have. He didn’t want to kill anyone. Then a thought intruded. Fortunately, in the dragon world, death could be painful and, in fact, horrible, but it need not be permanent.

Tom reared on his hind dragon legs, and flapped his wings to the sky. “We fly,” he said. “We fly.”

* * *

Old Joe wasn’t by the dumpster, and Kyrie walked some way down the alley, whistling his peculiar whistle, which had become Tom’s way of calling him.

She was about to give up, when something moved inside the ruin of the burned-out, water-soaked bed-and-breakfast across the parking lot from the diner. At first she thought it was a cat or a dog. That part of the ruin, where the tower collapsed, was open to the world, but when she blinked, she realized it was an old man, white-haired, soot-smeared, coming towards her, with a smile that exposed broken and missing teeth.

She recognized Old Joe at the same time she realized he was wearing a trench coat and was barefoot. He also looked like he’d been sleeping in a coal pile.

His smile enlarged, and he squeezed his eyes in amusement. “I was getting some clothes,” he said, “so I could come into the diner. I thought there might be some clothes in there, no? And there was.” He gestured, proudly, towards his trench coat.

It was something Kyrie appreciated in Tom, that he could have heard a declaration like this and smiled and said, “How nice.” But Kyrie was not Tom and their minds didn’t work in the same way. Throughout her upbringing, she’d often found herself being the oldest foster child in seriously inadequate households, and having to look after all the young ones, as a means of keeping them from being neglected. This had bred a personality into her that was somewhere between mommy and educator. The mommy was willing to concede that Old Joe putting on…anything before sauntering into the diner was an improvement. It wouldn’t be the first time he crouched outside the side windows, popping up now and then like an insane jack-o-lantern, his hair all on end, and his wrinkled, naked body flashing up and down, trying to catch Tom’s eye, so Tom would bring him clothes or food. The educator, on the other hand, felt forced to say, “Well, yes, but it’s filthy. Come into the back, I’ll get you clothes, and you can wash and put them on.”

Old Joe looked dubious, but followed her into the hallway of the diner and waited while she got clothes from the pile they kept for him in the storage room. They bought them at the thrift store on any-piece-of-clothing-for-a-dollar day, and blew a couple of hundred dollars twice a year. As far as Old Joe’s mind went, clothes were consumables. He’d wear them when he had to, but he wouldn’t bother to take them off, or hide them so he might wear them again. Instead, he would shift and either tear them to shreds in the process or soon afterwards, while he walked around.

Kyrie had often read reports of an alligator wearing a tattered T-shirt, and it was only the fact that she had some willpower and could control her more whimsical moods that had saved her from giving Old Joe a bowler hat.

When she came out with the bundle of clothes, he took them, but looked at her sheepishly. “I got to wash?” he asked.

“We don’t want people in the diner to be all disgusted at your being filthy,” she said.

Old Joe looked very sad and said something she couldn’t quite understand, but which she suspected was his version of “When in Rome,” though considering this was Old Joe, it might very well be “When in Atlantis” or “When in Mu.”

He disappeared into the women’s restroom, because it was the more spacious one, and also because Kyrie, frankly, didn’t trust him not to try to wash in the urinals. So, whenever Old Joe washed, he washed in the ladies’ room. Kyrie stood at the door, waiting, preventing any woman from trying to get in. Not that any did. There were still few people in the diner, and none got the urge just then.

When he was clean, Joe knocked from the inside, and Kyrie opened the door.

He still looked like a derelict. To make Old Joe look like something other than a derelict would take…well, probably plastic surgery. The truth was that his wrinkles had wrinkles, and that the wrinkles on his wrinkles had got so much ground-in dirt in them that they might as well be tattoos. Or maybe they were tattoos. Whenever Old Joe had grown up, it was now almost unimaginably long ago, and it was almost certainly a preliterate society that had left no trace. Maybe facial tattoos had been a manhood ritual or something.

So, he still looked dirty, and his remaining white hair looked as wild as Einstein’s but less clean. And he…It wasn’t so much that he stooped or shambled. Oh, you could say he did both, but the words were, to an extent, inadequate. Yes, he stooped. Yes, he shambled. But his posture was more reminiscent of someone who had collapsed into place over centuries, becoming not so much aged as…petrified, stratified. Like a little mountain in human form.

Still, the eyes that looked at her weren’t tired or stony at all. Instead, they were full of the merriment he seemed to find in anything unusual or unsettling.

And Kyrie realized there was something very unusual indeed, as she realized he was still clutching the filthy trench coat in his—presumably just washed—hand.

Old Joe had dressed in that trench coat without Tom or herself making him. And that was kind of like hearing the sun had risen in the west, or that soup had fallen from the sky. It was impossible. Absolutely and completely impossible.

But he’d done it.

She looked into the twinkling eyes and asked carefully, with slow suspicion dawning that she wasn’t going to like the answer at all, “Why were you going to come into the diner?”

He grinned. “I hear dragon boy got dragon egg. I wanted to know how he’s doing with it, because…” He looked suddenly embarrassed. “I like dragon boy. He’s nice people.”

Uh-oh. He knew what had happened to Tom. It should have been a relief, Kyrie thought, because if Old Joe knew, it meant that Old Joe could tell her what had happened, and maybe even why and how to get around the problem. But it didn’t feel like a relief. This whole
dragon egg
thing didn’t sound pleasant. She had a vision of a juvenile dragon bursting from Tom’s chest and bit her lower lip.

“Go into the corner booth,” she said, “and wait. I’ll bring you food.”

And she was left to torture herself with scary suppositions while she wiped off the soot marks from wall and sink and dried the water splashes on the floor. They really should install a shower in the storage room the next time they had some spare cash. Having people wash in the ladies’ room was messy and probably violated all sorts of rules and regulations.

Of course, next time they had some spare cash was assuming things would return to normal. And Kyrie wasn’t sure of that at all.

* * *

Was it really Tom up there, in front of the restaurant? Bea had trouble believing it. She’d met his dragon, after all, on the ledge of that bed-and-breakfast tower, but the truth was that if Tom perched on that ledge now, he would have taken it down in a crashing heap.

He was…enormous. How did a dragon
grow
? And then she heard his voice in her mind. Standing at the edge of the crowd, she saw the two idiots stand and challenge him. Not that she was sure they were idiots. But then, they had to be. No sane person would challenge something the size Tom was now. And no sane person would challenge anyone, dragon or human, whose eyes showed as much bewildered fear as Tom’s did at that moment.

Tom didn’t want to be where he was. That didn’t surprise her. She’d gathered he had no intention of being a leader of the triad. But he was there and—as he issued the challenge, because it was very obvious what he meant by “We fly”—she realized he would fight for the position he didn’t want.

She wondered why.

Then she stopped wondering. She’d met Tom only this day, and she couldn’t say she was his lifetime friend. But Tom was…The Tom she’d met had seemed to be polite, caring, nice—in outdated but probably accurate terms, a good man.

Nothing could have prepared her for seeing his dragon take to the air, flanked by the two blue dragons.

It should have come as no surprise that both blue dragons went up at once. Or perhaps it shouldn’t have. She didn’t know. What were the rules of sportsmanship for dragons? And did it matter if two went up at the same time against another dragon that was so massively larger than either of them?

Like every other dragon present in the parking lot, she sat back and turned her face up to watch.

Tom flew straight up, green-blue underside flashing bright. He looked bigger, more substantial than the other two. But the other two weren’t daunted. The larger one tried to fly to the side of Tom and bite him on the neck. Tom evaded it, almost skewering himself on the other dragon’s claw—out and trying to disembowel him.

And then it seemed to her that Tom lost patience. He reached out with arm claws, and grabbed the other dragon’s arm and twisted viciously and pulled. Clearly he had more strength than the others, because the arm tore off the dragon’s body. A fine rain of blood fell on the upturned faces of dragons.