Noah's Boy-eARC (28 page)

Rafiel responded to her question about the park casually, “It’s probably just maintenance of something.” But his features were anything but casual, locked in the sort of frown that brought his blond eyebrows low over his eyes. She didn’t know him well, of course, and yet she thought that the expression was the one he wore when he was trying to tell his back brain not to worry about something he clearly did worry about.

He drummed his fingers under the window, then he lowered the window a little and—to Bea’s surprise—sniffed the air. He made a face. The drumming fingers turned into a fist, rhythmically hitting the place under the window.

After a while, he turned to her, “Look…we found a bunch of mauled bodies in here.” He told her the story of finding corpses and the feral teen shifter. “It was that feral shifter I was following when I—when you met me.” The frown intensified, and she thought that it served to hide stronger emotions, in this case probably embarrassment. “So…so…I was…that is, he might be here again. I’d like to go take a look, but I…Promise me you’ll lock the car, and put the windows up. And don’t open for anyone but me or two guys who look Greek and who likely will be driving a restored convertible.” To what must have been her look of sheer confusion: “Cas and Nick restore old cars in their free time, and at least one of them drives the car around for a year before selling it.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I don’t remember what they’re driving now, but it being summer, it’s probably a convertible. Likely something from the fifties.”

“Right,” she said. Her mind seemed to be stuck on the idea that it wasn’t fair for him to go and risk himself alone. On the other hand, he was a police officer and she wasn’t, right? He was paid to take risks to protect people, while she wasn’t paid for anything, frankly.

And what he was asking her, she realized, was that she not add to his worries by going into danger when she wasn’t prepared to handle it.

She looked up at him, and arranged her features to the most compliant she could manage. “Sure,” she said. “Just…be careful.”

He looked over his shoulder, as he was about to open the door of the truck and then, unexpectedly, a smile broke out. With the scars across his face still visible—would they vanish?—he looked piratical.

She was quite unprepared for what he did, grabbing her hand and kissing it. His lips pressed against the back of her hand, hot and pliable, and somehow, indefinably, very intimate. “I will,” he said, and his voice was oddly husky.

And then he was out of the truck, walking in long, easy strides towards the gate to the park. She locked the car and ran up the window, and then she watched intently as he slipped into the shadows near the gate and went in, melding with the darker shadow. Through the open gate, she could glimpse, in cool green shadow, a bunch of kiddy rides, including something that looked like a huge frog holding a basket.

She heard the sound of metal hitting metal, distant and forlorn like wind-driven noise can be. She leaned back with her head on the seat rest. Rafiel was a sensible man. He would go and see what was going on, and then he’d come back.

She’d just reached this point in her thoughts when she heard the scream. It was an animal scream—no human throat could make that noise—and it was loud and insane.

And before she knew what she meant to do, she was pulling the keys out of the car and sticking them in her pocket, then running towards the sound of trouble.

* * *

Kyrie was hot and thirsty and tired. How weird it was that a distance she could cover in the car without noticing, seemed so long while on foot.

Of course, part of it was the fact that when you walked anywhere near the Tomahawk Motel you were assumed to be walking the streets for a living. Kyrie had come around the park and onto the sidewalk near the main street, on the assumption that if anyone tried to kidnap her from the public sidewalk, she could scream the place down, and there was at least some chance one or more people would stop and either come to help or pay attention to who was dragging her away.

Sierra Street, which ran parallel to Fairfax and about eight long blocks away, might not be the best area of town, but it was well traveled, which, in the circumstances, meant an abundance of witnesses to keep her more or less safe.

But in the meantime, and possibly because—damn it—she was wearing Bea’s too-tight dress, she got cars slowing down next to her, and even guys calling hopefully, “Hey, hey,” and in one case, with misguided courtesy, “Miss? Miss?”

She was tired enough to almost consider answering one of them and scaring him into taking her home. But scaring one of them took shifting, and once she shifted, as hot and hungry and thirsty as she was, there was no telling what she would do.

She had tried to shift, in fact, down by the river, on the idea that sightings of black cats weren’t even rare, and, after all, the panther could run a heck of a lot faster than a human. But though she tried with all her might, the shift wouldn’t come. She figured it was some sort of psychological block. She knew if she shifted she would be dangerous.

And so she walked on in the heat, breathing the fumes of cars.

Three blocks away from The George, she considered that perhaps she should just go there and bully someone into driving her home. Heck, Tom might very well still be there.

But she had a bad feeling about going there, about that empty parking lot where, not so long ago, she and Tom had discovered bodies. Besides, two of the blocks between Sierra and Fairfax, where The George sat, were lined with deserted warehouses. She didn’t know who had kidnapped her or why—though she could make some guesses—but she knew they had hid near her house and used a tranquilizer dart on her. That meant they probably were organized and financed by someone, not street gangsters in a spur-of-the-moment thing. More, they’d locked her in a semi-secure room, which meant that they’d been planning to hand her over to someone.

It reeked of the triad, frankly, which meant they had more than enough people to have a group lurking in each of the warehouses. And though most of their foot soldiers were not what you’d call bright, they were all dragon shifters. Kyrie could hold her own against dragons. At least the panther could. She could fight one or two of them. But if there were more than that…

She walked along the sidewalk, footsore and hot, wishing that she’d thought to wear better shoes. You never think you’re going to have to walk four miles suddenly. From now on, she’d wear walking shoes all the time. Even while naked in bed.

The idea made her smile despite herself, and she gritted her teeth and pushed on. If she had brought a phone or money…but those were in her purse. Maybe she should start following Rafiel’s lead and strap gear to her thigh.

As she passed the intersection nearest The George, it seemed as though she heard the sound of wings unfurling above, the sound of dragons passing. It was a sound she knew all too well, from her time with Tom. She looked up, hoping it was Tom, hoping he was looking for her.

But the glimpse of wings above was a bright, iridescent blue, nothing like Tom. The body shape, too, seemed more sinuous, more Chinese dragon than Nordic one.

Were they looking for her? Quite likely, she thought. They had always been one of the contenders if not the main contender for who had kidnapped her.

She knit herself with the shadows of buildings, trying to look inconspicuous. It seemed to her that other dragons passed overhead. How many? And why? Was the entire triad out, looking for her?

Chapter 19

Tom looked at Old Joe and Conan sitting at the edge of the sofa, waiting. He wondered if they knew how little of their expressions, how little of their body posture showed any sort of confidence that he could handle this challenge. He wondered if they knew how scared they looked.

He doubted it. But maybe they did. Conan licked his lips and said, “You should call him now.”

Tom nodded. Things he could not explain to his friends—and to Old Joe, whom he refused to quite call a friend though he supposed the old alligator was somewhere between a mentor and an advisor—included how difficult it was to access the dragon knowledge.

Not difficult in the unlocking it and looking inside sense. That was easy enough. In fact, sometimes, he had to keep the…dragon egg, for lack of a better word, from prompting him with and things he really did not need to know or wish to know.

But it was difficult to unlock just a little, to see just a little, and not to be prompted by the rest of this weight of knowledge in his mind. It was much like carrying a whole group of people in his mind, people who, objectively, were older and probably more knowledgeable than him. It wasn’t easy to ignore their promptings, their ideas, the fact that they were there.

And now he had to reach in, to deliberately think how to reach for one of his subordinates, to open the locked knowledge in his mind. What if he couldn’t close his mind to it again? What if he…what if the power to summon his subordinates erupted, or became addictive, or—

Part of him thought he was being ridiculous. The other part of him could remember what had happened in the parking lot and under the Three Luck Dragon, where he’d reached into the guards’ minds. There was a feeling that this sense of power, the sense of being able to command other people might very well become addictive.

Yet there was Kyrie, and no, he didn’t think he could get Kyrie back by simply asking nicely. Those people who said that everything could be resolved with negotiation had never gone to kindergarten, or at least not to the same kindergarten Tom had gone. Things could be solved with negotiation between reasonable people, of course. But what that had to do with solving things with people who wanted to hog all the animal crackers, or with people who wanted you to marry a girl you’d never seen until yesterday, was beyond Tom.

In this case, what he was trying to do was not merely show two low-ranking dragons that he could reach into their minds and force them to move aside. No. What he had to do involved bending one of the higher ranking dragons—perhaps the highest ranking one, besides the Great Sky Dragon—to his will. To think it would be easy was nonsense. And to think that once having conquered the power he would be able to give it up easily was even sillier.

Yet, for Kyrie, Tom would do quite a lot more than risk becoming addicted to the power of the Great Sky Dragon to summon his people.

He went into his mind, into those same depths that had poured on him, like a submerging flood, when the Great Sky Dragon died. It felt much the same for a moment—as though he had many arms, many legs, as though he was many people in a variety of situations, and all he could do was hold on tight to the idea that there was still a Tom there—a person, immutable, at the heart of the storm.

Once he’d found himself, as the center and fulcrum of all the perceptions, all the knowledge coming at him from everywhere a dragon was, he found Jao.

For a disconcerting moment, he found his mind inside that of Jao, who was standing inside the Three Luck Dragon—in the little space behind the reception counter/bar, where the TV was always on some sports show that no one in his right mind could possibly be interested in: curling or synchronized banana peeling or extreme ironing.

In this case, the sport appeared to involve throwing something that looked like hedgehogs across a marked space. Tom didn’t see it very well or for very long, because Jao had just looked over his shoulder at the screen, and then looked down at the papers on the little desk space behind the counter. The papers were written in Chinese, but in Jao’s mind, somehow, Tom understood Chinese, and knew the papers were spreadsheets of figures and profit for the Three Luck Dragon.

He became aware of someone nearby, a young man—perhaps one of the guards Tom had scared—who said something in Chinese.

Jao answered, “No, we shouldn’t need any more vegetables, because—” also in Chinese. And then he became aware of Tom in his mind.

Tom could feel Jao sensing him reaching into his own mind. And he could feel the surprise and irritation at it. He could feel Jao’s body stiffening with opposition to the intrusion. There were no words exchanged, just Jao feeling Tom within his mind and registering his disapprobation, his distaste.

And then Tom said to Jao, within Jao’s mind,
Come.

It was more than that. It was more like pulling a tether; more like reeling in a fish. It was an unavoidable command. Tom knew it had the same force of the command that had, instinctively and unavoidably, called every dragon within wing reach to pay his respects to the new Great Sky Dragon.

Come,
he said, and forced it. And behind it, he could hear Jao say “Come” as though relaying the command, or perhaps tasting it. He didn’t know which.

But the dice were cast, and now all he could do was wait.

* * *

Halfway to the door of the amusement park, Bea heard a noise behind her, like something—it didn’t sound like someone—running. She turned a little, looking over her shoulder just in time to see two dogs go by her. No, not dogs.

She’d never seen wolves like this before. All her experience of wolves came from nature specials and from visits to zoos, and in the first, wolves were never running full tilt, one on either side of her. And in the latter, wolves tended to lounge around, with the ease of predators who had been shown they’d get food three times a day, regardless of what they did.

But once this pair ran past her, and then ahead of her, side by side, in easy, long strides, she realized that they were in fact grey wolves, a matched pair, shiny and well-cared for. Not like wild wolves should be at all, something at the back of her mind said.

Which was silly, because she had no idea what wolves
should
be like.

It didn’t stop her. She sped up and ran just as fast, behind the wolves, who disappeared into the park, running.

Part of her thought they had to be shifters, of course. And maybe they were, but didn’t Colorado have a native population of wolves and coyotes and such?

The funny thing was that even though she thought all this, she didn’t even slow down, running after the wolves into the darkened entrance of the park.