Noah's Boy-eARC (7 page)

His brain stopped. Parts of the lion body long ignored came to life and urgency. Rafiel stood smelling her, while at the back of his mind a primeval jungle, a primeval need beckoned.

She snarled and leapt. Her paw caught him on the side of the face, putting out his eye, taking most of his cheek, sending him flying, then sprawling in an unnatural position. He felt as though his spine had snapped and agony dulled his thoughts while the creature stood over him and growled.

One snap from those jaws and he’d be dead, his head separated from his body. Such a death blow would mean no coming back.

* * *

Kyrie saw Tom edging around to the alley and knew what he was going to do. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath. It smelled of fries and gyros, which had come to mean “home” to her since she and Tom had owned the diner. The smell calmed her a little. She said a general prayer that Tom wouldn’t get caught by a cell phone camera or worse. You’d think he would know better than to shift where there were bound to be people with cameras. But you might as well try to keep Tom from rescuing people as keep him from breathing. She decided at least to minimize the damage to the diner.

She would make sure fewer people were watching who could talk about mysterious flying dragons. And she’d make sure Anthony didn’t get so carried away he forgot the fryer.

* * *

Bea woke up in a smoke filled room. For a moment, blinking upward at the black-blue cloud between her and ceiling, she wondered if she were flying. Then she smelled burning. Not just burning wood, as in a fireplace, but the particularly unclean smell of a burning house, and then—

She ran to the window, which was closed, and looked down at firemen far, far below, holding up one of their jumping rigs. Jumping from here to there would be kind of like jumping from the top of a giant diving board into a washtub like in all those cartoons she’d watched when she was a kid.

She opened the window, took a lungful of air and yelled down ,“No.” Because she couldn’t jump. She just
couldn’t
. They yelled back, but she couldn’t hear them.

The worst part of all this was that her mind felt foggy and slow and she couldn’t figure out why she was here, in what appeared to be the prototypical tower for a fairy princess—a tower that was on fire below her. No. Not the prototypical tower. A look around disclosed that she was in a well-appointed room with a canopy bed, a nice armchair, and what looked like an antique desk. There was a bathroom opening off her right. The usual little cards on how to call the concierge gave away this was a hotel room. But where?

Instructions for what to do in a fire came back from her elementary school days. She ran to the door to the room, and felt it. Burning hot. Well, she wasn’t going to open that door. Instead, she went into the bathroom, soaked one of the towels, and stuffed it under the door.

This cut down the smoke, and her head cleared a little.

It still felt too painfully slow, as though she had a cold or were recovering from illness.

As she pushed the towel under the door with the tip of her toe, she remembered what she’d seen out the back window, across the parking lot. There was a diner there. There was something to do with a diner…

All of a sudden the voice of the Great Sky Dragon came back to her, telling her that she must meet and marry Tom Ormson, the co-owner of a diner.

She’d told him in no uncertain terms that she had no intention of marrying a total stranger—and more, a stranger who was in love with someone else—just because some many-times ancestor of hers decreed it. And she’d withstood his barrage of protest, telling him she wanted nothing to do with this, and she couldn’t understand why it would be more likely that the dragon shifters would obey Tom because he was married to her since she was also not Chinese.

He’d yelled at her. He’d lapsed into Chinese, or perhaps some even more ancient Asian language. And then she’d turned to leave.

Her head felt sore, and fingers run gingerly across her scalp disclosed a bump over her left ear.

Oh, no, he didn’t
she thought. But it was clear that the Great Sky Dragon had in fact done something to her. Her head hurt. She was probably concussed. And the idiots had put her here and set the house on fire. Why? Was it dearest many-times great-grand’s attempt at punishing her for not obeying? How nice of him.

Though to do him justice, perhaps he hadn’t set the house on fire. She went to the window again and saw that few people were watching the window. So, all she needed to do was shift, and then she could fly away from this, and—

And absolutely nothing. She tried to induce the shifting. Normally the problem was trying
not
to shift when she was panicked. Now, nothing would happen. Could the Great Sky Dragon take her shifting away? Surely not. He wasn’t magical. She didn’t know what the shifting was, but it wasn’t magic. Not the wave-a-wand type of magic at least.

She squeezed her hands so tight that she thought she was going to put holes into her palms, but nothing happened.

Why wasn’t the shift working?

Had the Great Sky Dragon done something that meant she couldn’t shift? But why? And why put her in this room, behind the diner? What in heaven’s name could he mean by this? And by setting the building on fire? Bea realized she was absolutely sure that he’d done just that, though she couldn’t say why. If only her head didn’t hurt so badly.

Smoke was now coming in from outside too, a thick pillar of it obscuring the parking lot. She coughed and for a moment thought she was going to shift, but the burn up her nose and at the back of her throat told her it was only the smoke.

There was a
thud
on the roof ledge outside her window, and she ran toward the sound. Through the smoke, she had a brief glimpse of glistening green scales, a set of silver claws, and a rolling golden eye, and then—

A young man was there. He was dark-haired, blue-eyed, and completely naked. His black hair was curly and much too long, making him appear a wild man. But she remembered the scales, the claws, the eye. A dragon shifter. She wondered if he were one of the Great Sky Dragon’s. She wondered what excuse he meant to use for being naked. But none of it mattered. He knocked at the window. She opened it. And then—

And then he was reaching in and saying, “I’m sorry, this is going to sound very odd—”

He stopped and sniffed, and for a moment she wondered what he was smelling, besides the obvious smoke in the air, but his voice was subtly different as he said, “Or perhaps not so very odd. Listen, I shift into a dragon and I’m going to shift. And then I’m going to fly you down to an area behind the dumpsters where I can shift and change. Do you think you can climb on my back?” he asked, even as his face seemed to already be elongating for the shift. “And hold on while I fly you down?”

She wanted to make a joke about wanting to be introduced first, but instead she nodded once and watched as he coughed and writhed in the change from human to dragon. The hand grasping madly at the windowsill changed to a giant clawed paw.

The dragon facing her looked nothing like her own dragon form. He was sturdier, more massive and looked less like the serpentine dragon of Chinese myth. Bea didn’t look like Chinese dragons in tapestries and parades either. For one, she had wings. But this man’s dragon looked more like something that might have been carved into the front of a Viking ship: barrel-chested and heavy-jawed.

His mouth worked, and he said something that sounded like “now.”

She scrambled hand over hand, grabbing at his neck, surprised by the feeling of warm scales, wondering if hers felt like that too; then she stepped onto the narrow ledge of shingles, trying to throw a leg over the massive ill-balanced body, and mentally cursing the Great Sky Dragon.

She lost her footing and held her breath, seeing the fire trucks so far below. He grabbed her with his spare paw and threw her over his back, barely giving her time to hold onto his neck before flying down, carefully keeping behind the smoke, to land with a jar in the alley, behind the dumpsters. He began contorting almost immediately and Bea jumped off.

She stood, shaking, not believing she was on solid ground, and it was all she could do to keep herself from kissing the compacted dirt of the alley.

Moments later, he was saying, through a coughing fit, “I’m sorry. I had to hurry you. If the breeze shifted, they would have seen us.”

“No, that’s fine,” she said and averted her eyes, as he dove for a bundle of fabric behind the dumpster. “Thank you for saving me.” She wasn’t sure if she should fake astonishment at his being a shapeshifter, but in the next second she was glad she hadn’t, because he came from behind the dumpster, fully dressed, grinning, tying back his hair with a rubber band.

“So,” he said, “I guess you don’t shift into something that flies.”

“I—” She started, then hesitated. “I…” And blushed. “Dragon actually. But…how did you know?”

“You smell shifter. You know?” His eyes widened. “No. You don’t know. I see. Dragon?” His eyes went up to the tower. “But then—”

“I…” She took a deep breath. “I don’t know. There was…there was…I woke up in there. It was on fire. And I couldn’t shift.”

“Oh?” Tom Ormson said, but didn’t press it. Instead, he said, “We’d best go around and you tell them you came down…the drainpipe or something. Dang. We should have tied some sheets together to make it seem more likely…”

“That we didn’t
fly
down?” she asked with a shaky smile, unexpectedly liking this man more than she’d expected to when she figured out he was the Great Sky Dragon’s candidate for her hand. “I don’t think it will matter. The way my door felt, the fire was just behind it—”

A loud
crash-bang
from the tower, and Bea looked up to see the roof cave in. A scream went up from the parking lot. Tom took a deep breath. “Well, that’s that,” he said.

He walked her around to the parking lot, where the firefighters were looking up at the tower with a look of the sheerest horror. That was when a matronly woman suddenly yelled, “Ms. Ryu!”

Bea was puzzled. She had no idea how this woman knew her name.

“You poor thing,” the woman said. “You’re confused and no wonder. Of course, when you checked in, you didn’t really spend much time talking to me. I’m Louise Carlson, the owner of the Spurs and Lace, of course.”

“Oh?” Bea said. “I checked in?” Zombie drugs. They must have given her zombie drugs.

“Oh dear. Well, of course you’ll be confused. You know, you were wearing those dark glasses, and I never realized how unusual your eyes are. I was thinking about you up there on the tower. I’m just glad you got out. How—”

“I…climbed down sheets,” she said. “Until I could get to the shed roof.”

Louise blinked, “I didn’t think we had
that
many sheets.”

“Er…closet. Ten.”

“Well, very glad to see you,” the nearest firefighter said. “We have a paramedic who—”

“No, I’m quite well,” Bea said.

“I’m just going to take her into the diner and get her some coffee,” Tom said, with a tone of quiet authority. His absolute calm—his absolute certainty—seemed to carry its own weight. One of the firefighters made a sound, but Louise pointed out that Ms. Ryu couldn’t be involved with starting the fire, after all, nor could she know anything about it, since it had started several floors below her, and then Tom Ormson was leading her to the back door of the diner.

As they entered, Bea was impressed by the fact that with the tragedy playing itself out back there in the parking lot, there was no one watching at the back door of the diner, or through the window that faced the fire. In fact, it seemed almost as if she’d just entered a classroom where kids had been very naughty and then became models of good behavior when the teacher came back. There was a strained “I’m being good, Ma” quality to the groups sitting around the tables, and even to the two employees behind the counter, one a young man manning a grill and fryer and the other a woman doing something to vegetables that included a lot of very fast chopping. Neither of them gave off the vibe of being the “teacher” figure.

And then Bea saw her. She was tall—taller than Tom Ormson—and, Bea thought dispassionately, she was also very beautiful with golden skin and long brown hair, the edge of it dyed in a way Bea wouldn’t mind imitating if she could figure out how.

Bea knew two things at once. One was that this was Tom Ormson’s girlfriend. And the other was that if she tried to steal this woman’s boyfriend she would be in for a hard, hard fall.

Not that she had any intention of stealing Ormson. Even if he was nice and good-looking. The world was full of nice, good-looking men, and trouble like this she didn’t need.

The woman turned from giving coffee warm-ups to the table she’d been attending, and as she looked toward Ormson, Bea could sense some form of communication pass between them. Bea felt Ormson touch her arm very lightly and he pointed at the corner booth in obvious invitation, but she dug in her heels, turned around and said, “I— I’m sorry, Mr. Ormson, I—”

“Sit down,” he said, very quietly, “and tell me who sent you.”

She realized she’d called him by name and he’d never introduced himself. She could explain it. She could say that she’d heard it somewhere. But as she slid into the booth and saw those blue eyes watching her with an odd mixture of interest, amusement and wariness, she realized that perhaps it would be best if she avoided any unneeded complication and told him everything. He was a dragon shifter—the only one she knew other than the Great Sky Dragon. And unlike the Great Sky Dragon,
he
seemed to be sane.

Sitting quietly, she folded her hands on the table. Tom Ormson got two cups of coffee, slid one in front of her, took one for himself, sat down. “Now, suppose you start talking. In itty-bitty words, because it’s already been a long day. Tell me who sent you.” He gave her a look. “You don’t look quite like one of the Great Sky Dragon’s people, but you look close to it.”

Chapter 8

For a moment Tom thought she was going to bluff him. He could see the thought passing behind her jade-green eyes. Unusual eyes in an Asian face, but Asian was only the predominant cast to her features. Beneath it, she looked as exotic and unplaceable as Kyrie.