Noah's Boy-eARC (23 page)

“Yeah.” Tom thought about doing just that. About going back home to Kyrie, about climbing in bed with her, asleep and peaceful. About Not Dinner curled up on their feet—

But he didn’t know how long he had. If Old Joe was right, then at any moment the Great Sky Dragon—depending on the extent of his injuries—could wake up and be forced to activate the Pearl of Heaven, whatever that meant. If it meant something bad…

He sighed. “I’ll do some stuff first.”

He took off his apron, stowed it in the place under the counter, ran his hand through his hair. He felt naked without his black leather jacket, but it was too warm to wear it. And his beard, the way it looked, half grown, if he wore a leather jacket with this, people would run from him on the street.

He rapped on the counter to get Conan’s attention and told him to man the fort till Anthony came in. Both Conan and Rya smiled and nodded, and Tom wondered if they’d heard a single word he’d said.

The parking lot was half empty, the breakfast rush ended. Tom stood for a moment wondering where to find Old Joe, then thought that the crocodile shifter was, after all, worried about Tom himself, and therefore would be somewhere around.

He checked near the dumpster, which Old Joe often mined for food. Tom didn’t understand why the man preferred his food discarded and half-rotted, when he could simply come in and ask for some. Perhaps he just didn’t like asking. He seemed to be almost pathologically independent. Except for a soft spot where Tom was concerned—and not very soft, he just appeared to not want Tom to get killed—Old Joe didn’t seem to like any Earthly attachments.

The dumpster was not full, and there were no alligators near it. Tom walked to the alley, and that’s when he caught a glimpse of someone in the ruins of the bed-and-breakfast. It was a person and he was looking for an alligator, so it took him a moment to realize it was Old Joe. Particularly since the old man, asleep in the ruins, was fully dressed.

“Joe?” he said.

Instantly, the old vagrant was awake, and sitting up, his eyes wide. “Dragon boy?” he said.

“Ah—I’d like to talk to you,” Tom said.

Old Joe nodded. “I thought you might. So I didn’t go. And I didn’t shift.” He sounded almost virtuous. “I stayed here and waited for you.”

“Good,” Tom said. “Come inside. I’ll get you some breakfast and we can talk.”

* * *

“I feel like I should let you sleep,” Rafiel said, “before making you drive all the way to Goldport again.”

“You’re not
making
me,” Bea said. She’d showered and dressed, and come out to find that Rafiel had cleaned the kitchen and dressed too. She assumed that he had showered enough the day before. “I also think we should go back.” She tied her hair back with a scrunchy. She was wearing her comfy jeans and a large man’s shirt she’d liberated from her father’s drawer some months ago. She was aware that on her it looked cute and made her seem like a little kid pretending to be grown up, without distracting from her obviously feminine figure. She was also aware that most men would think she was being careless and casual, Rafiel likely included. Sometimes she thought it was unfair to let men think such things—they were in many ways curiously innocent creatures.

Rafiel made a face, then smiled. He had changed into khakis and a dark blue, short sleeve shirt. And he looked good. Really good, despite the healing scars across his face. “Yes, but I’m not sure we shouldn’t rest first and—”

Bea shook her head. “I’m fine, really. I drove down all the way from Georgia by myself, you know. Yeah, I’d like to actually sleep tonight, but come on, it won’t be the first time I skip sleep for one night. I’ll be fine.” She hesitated. “Unless you’d rather drive, because—” She almost said “because you don’t trust me,”
but stopped herself in time, realizing that would seem manipulative, and it wasn’t what she’d meant to do.

He shrugged, and this time his smile was open. “It’s your truck. It would be a little odd for me to drive your truck. And besides,” he said, and his smile clouded a little, “it’s not like I slept much longer than you did last night.”

Which she guessed was true. And she guessed he didn’t want to think about what he’d been doing instead—
much of it standing under a freezing cold shower
, she thought—and so she smiled and said instead, “I closed the skylight in the bedroom.”

“Oh, good,” he said. “I meant to ask you.” He sighed. “I wish we could stay longer. It’s really nice up here.”

“Yes,” she said. “I figured that it would be really nice to point that telescope up and…” She trailed off and blushed, as she realized she sounded like she was inviting herself back here, which she supposed she was. But all the same…she didn’t want Rafiel to think that she didn’t care for the place that was clearly his pride and joy.

He didn’t seem to notice any awkwardness. He picked up the suitcase she’d brought in to get her clothes and which was now closed and resting in the front hall. He escorted Bea out and locked the door. “I have an astronomy manual somewhere, from when I was little,” he said. “And when we come back, if it’s nice, we’ll look up, and I’ll try to figure out names and constellations.” He grinned, as he put the suitcase back behind the seats. “My dad used to do that with me when I was little, but I never memorized any. I just liked the shiny lights and the blue in the back. I guess I never thought of something like being an astronomer or anything. I always wanted to be a cop, like my dad and granddad.”

She got into the driver’s seat and waited till Rafiel climbed in and secured himself, before starting the truck. “You never thought of being anything else?”

He lifted an eyebrow at her. “Should I have?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess because part of my background is Asian and they always, you know, expect you to follow family footsteps, I…perhaps I rebelled against it a bit. I wanted to do my own thing. I wanted to be myself. Dad is a vet, and when I was little, he and Mom talked a lot about how good I was with injured animals, and maybe I wanted to grow up and be a doctor.”

“But you didn’t?”

She smiled. Shook her head. “No. I never really wanted to do anything but draw.”

“Well,” Rafiel said. “In my case, it wasn’t so much following family tradition, you know. It was just what I wanted to do. I heard Dad talk around the kitchen table about his cases, and it seemed to me like it was really important work, and really fascinating too. He and Mom said, once or twice, that I could be a lawyer or…or anything I wanted, but that wasn’t what I wanted to be. I wanted to—” He sighed and leaned back. “I wanted to be in the streets, protecting people. I only had doubts after…after I found out I was a shifter. I thought I might not be safe around people. I’ve worked…very hard, at being safe around people.”

“Which is why yesterday shocked you so much,” she said.

“Yes. You understand. It wasn’t…the act itself, though it felt odd, I mean, in lion form—” He stopped short, and took a deep breath. “It wasn’t that, though. It was that I was out of control, that I couldn’t stop myself.”

“Now that you know what it is like,” she said, “you’ll be able to. Now you’ll be able to control it, like you control the blood lust or the need to change when you shouldn’t.”

“You sound very sure,” he said. “Did you ever—”

She laughed. “No. But I know how the process works, if it makes sense. I don’t like to do things I don’t mean to do, so it’s really important for me to control this sort of thing.”

“I can’t imagine anyone making you do something you don’t want to,” Rafiel said.

“Oh, I can,” Bea said, thinking of how close she had come to considering the Great Sky Dragon’s idea, if it meant they would leave her dad alone. If Tom hadn’t had a girlfriend. If he hadn’t been a total stranger. She might at least have considered pretending to go along with it. “But it’s not easy. This is probably fortunate for your friend, Tom Ormson.”

She laughed, but he didn’t, just nodded solemnly. “For all of us, really,” he said.

* * *

Old Joe ate bacon and eggs with the relish of someone who had been years without food. Tom knew for a fact that this wasn’t true, because he’d fed Old Joe several times in the more recent years, and he was sure Kyrie had too, not even counting the fact that he’d watched the old shifter put away food at the back of the Three Luck Dragon.

But no one watching the old shifter push strip after strip of bacon into his face could believe anything other than that he was starving. Tom kept his cup of coffee filled, and thought that at the very least, it did a man good to see someone eat with that much gusto. It gave the impression that some things were worth doing full tilt. And when a man had been alive and eating for thousands of years, to still find that much enjoyment in mere food was amazing.

Tom’s mind leaned briefly over vistas of thousands of years, of seeing all his friends who weren’t shifters grow old and die. It wasn’t just a matter of seeing Anthony grow old and die, but Anthony’s son and grandson, and great-grandson, until—if Anthony’s descendants survived to that time—everyone on Earth was descended from Anthony. He blinked, thinking that Old Joe, probably looking much as he did now, had seen the era come and go when it was cutting edge to domesticate horses. He’d seen the time when the ax was the most cool and awesome of weapons give way to the nuclear era.

How did you stay sane through such shifts? How did you stay human? He didn’t want to know. He had no more desire to die than any other human did, but he also didn’t want to outlast the entire world he knew. It was one thing for the world to change around you and along with you. It was another matter entirely to find that you were alone and your world dead and buried and the subject of archeological excavations.

And yet, Old Joe managed it and seemed to still enjoy life. He looked up, his brown eyes seeming to laugh at Tom. “So, dragon boy?” he said. “Worried?”

“Yes,” Tom said. He had found long ago that Old Joe was not nearly as simple as he seemed, and he was certainly not simpleminded. After several thousand years of watching people dissemble and change, the old shifter knew very well when he was being lied to. Stood to reason, you would. Practice made perfect and one thing that Old Joe had lots of practice with was humans.

Old Joe laughed, a rattling sound in his throat, and opened his mouth, displaying sparse teeth. He clucked his tongue behind those teeth. “I thought you’d be. You’re not stupid, you. And dragon egg would worry anyone that isn’t stupid.” He sobered up, but his eyes narrowed, as though studying Tom. “You know, stupid people would think dragon egg is power.”

“Yes,” Tom said. Then he tried to put into words what he felt about what he was being offered. “It is knowledge. Perhaps more knowledge than anyone has in the world today? And they say knowledge is power. But it comes with…obligations. It might, because of the way dragons are, allow you to control several thousands of people all over the world. But that kind of power over people…” He tried to make sense of it enough to put into words. “That kind of power over people means that they have power over you, too. Like…You know Rafiel, my policeman friend?”

Old Joe nodded. “Cat boy,” he said, and shoved three strips of bacon into his mouth.

“Yes, well. He’s a police officer, which means he has a certain amount of power. He can charge people, and he can arrest them, and if nothing else, he can make people’s lives very uncomfortable. But at the same time, that means he has a duty. Particularly since he is the only shifter member of the police force, it means he must be involved in every shifter-related crime, and keep people from finding out what and who we are. It comes with a duty. He can’t just shrug off…well, like the young feral shifter killing people out at the amusement park.”

The moment the words were out of his lips, he realized he was giving Old Joe information the alligator shifter hadn’t had before. The man sat up, and his eyes opened wide. “Feral shifter? Like Joe? Free of clans? Free of associations?”

“No,” Tom said. He felt his voice was dryer than he meant it to be. “Feral as in doesn’t speak. Not human. He’s a skinny kid. Teenager. And he’s feral.”

“Skinny kid? Boy? Yea tall?” Joe got up and indicated a height above himself.

“Uh. Yeah. About that.”

Joe fell back on the seat so bonelessly that the sound of his sitting down made people turn to look at him. His mouth dropped open. He closed it with an effort. “Her son,” he said. “Where her son is, she is.”

“She?”

“She…Maduh. When I knew her, Maduh. She. You know…” Looking up he was faced with the fact that Tom didn’t, in fact, know. “You know, Dante, the…the sabertooth. She’s his mate, his…” He lifted a hand with two fingers together. “She’s his half, his other.”

“His wife?” Tom asked. He seemed to remember that the sabertooth who’d come to town determined to kill them all, the sabertooth that had tried to seduce Kyrie, had seemed remarkably single.

Old Joe bit at his lower lip. “Well…In a way, maybe, but not…No. It’s different. It was…a long, long time ago. They’re one. They stayed together…” He shook his head as if trying to go beyond where words could go. “I don’t know how to explain, but she and him, could sense each other and…”

“You mean, she’s come to avenge him?” This seemed to lose Old Joe, but Tom was thinking of the female who had attacked Rafiel. “And that the young one is her son?”

Old Joe nodded. He made a gesture with his fingers, waggling them as if to indicate something. “He—boy—was born in other form. Beast form. He—”

“You mean, he’s a human shifter? He shifts into human? Like others shift into animals?”

Old Joe gave a grunt of assent, and Tom tried to think. What did that
mean
exactly? What was the difference? Except perhaps that he hadn’t spent much time in human form. He looked over his shoulder, but the entire area around the corner booth was empty. “This is what Kyrie and I are afraid of and why we decided we shall never have children.”

Suddenly, unexpectedly, Old Joe erupted into laughter. He laughed so hard that Tom thought he’d gone mad. There was something a little repulsive in that unbridled guffawing, and all Tom could do was stare. Trying to talk to Old Joe would fall on deaf ears just then. Perhaps the old man had gone mad? He had reason enough. Besides, it could be argued he was always, at best, on the short end of sanity.