He didn’t move. He didn’t look up. A tremor passed through his hand, upwards, then passed downwards again. It was not a movement she’d ever seen in Tom, even when he shifted. She took a deep breath and tried to think of what to do.
She knew what she would have done if this were anyone else, anyone but one of the people she knew who shifted shapes. If Tom had been an anonymous person off the street, one who didn’t smell like a shifter; if someone in the diner had started behaving like this, shaking a little from position to position, but neither reacting to voice nor looking up, nor…moving normally, she would have called an ambulance immediately.
But for shifters medical services must always be a risk, a careful balance between pain and control. If you were in pain or scared, you were likely to change shapes and then where would you be?
Tom’s dragon wouldn’t even fit in an ambulance. Being squeezed inside a small space would only make him crazier and more unable to shift back to human—she knew this from when he’d accidentally shifted in their tiny bathroom once before.
And then there were all sorts of other considerations. They hadn’t fully determined, yet, what certain medications did to them. They were okay with aspirin, and Tom’s drug use seemed to have left him addicted only in a way that could be kicked rather quickly: after all with a shifter’s healing capacity, this might be expected.
But who knew what stronger sedatives would do? They might knock out the upper brain, while leaving the animal shifter to rampage happily through the hospital wards.
In Kyrie’s mind, headlines proclaiming that a dragon shifter had decimated the patients and medical personnel of Memorial Hospital ran in stark black on white. Only let that happen once, particularly with an animal that no one could imagine had simply wandered in from outside, and next thing you knew the authorities would be hunting shifters. Given all the legends of shifters throughout the centuries, the hunt wouldn’t end well for either party.
No. She had to figure out how to deal with this without the hospital. Tom had come back from the dead once. Surely even recovering from a stroke wouldn’t be impossible. She had to keep him stable and quiet till then.
She walked into the room, closing the door behind her, cutting off the sound of applause as Conan finished his song. She moved in a measured and slow way because even she truly had no interest in facing an upset dragon. “Tom,” she said. She put a hand on his shoulder, shocked to find it burning hot, as though he were running a fever. “I know that you’re not feeling well, but I don’t know what’s wrong. I want to help.”
He moved his other hand fast—too fast. It looked to her like the sudden movement of a lizard when aroused. But all his hand did was clasp over hers, squeezing it a little. It felt like her hand was caught between two hot plates, but she didn’t protest.
Tom raised his head slowly and looked at her.
She heard herself make a strangled sound of protest, even as her heart sped up in an explosion of panic. She would have stepped back if she could, but she couldn’t with her hand caught between his hand and shoulder.
His eyes looked…like Tom’s eyes and perfectly normal. And also not. They were the same shape and color they usually were, the enamel blue that made such a contrast with his dark hair. But there was something that made them different—so different that it was like looking into the eyes of a stranger.
The eyes looked old. It was as though gazing into them could lead one to see into the vanishing centuries, into millennia without end.
They weren’t really Tom’s eyes, unless they were Tom’s eyes in a couple thousand years after he had, several times, outlived the world he was born into and the friends of his youth.
He nodded slightly at her, almost formally, as if to tell her he understood her fear. He removed his hand from atop hers. She didn’t move, because she didn’t want to run away from Tom, And if she took a step back, she would flee.
His mouth opened. His tongue licked at his lips as though they were too dry, which they probably were, considering how hot he was. And then he spoke.
The words that came out…if they were words, if he was not just croaking…sounded alien. They didn’t have the sound of any western language, or the sound of any Asian language she’d ever heard.
Perhaps the stroke, or whatever it was had affected his speech center, but those sounds felt like words, though words she couldn’t possibly know.
“Tom, I don’t understand,” Kyrie said.
*
It was Kyrie’s touch that woke Tom. Though perhaps waking was not the right word. He knew he’d been awake, aware the whole time. Perhaps more aware than he’d ever been before.
But at Kyrie’s touch, the infinity of awareness, the broad vistas of being everywhere and everywhen at once changed. He was Tom Ormson, and he was in the storage room of The George.
It felt as though he’d been spread, amoebalike over the entire world, a nebulous cloud of Tom permeating everything and not at all present in the body to which Tom should belong.
At Kyrie’s touch, at her cool hand on his shoulder, the nearness of her, her presence, the cloud of Tom’s consciousness pulled in, concentrated, occupied once more the contours of his familiar body, and he was Tom Ormson, in his own head, staring out of his own eyes.
A nagging feeling informed him that he was also something else. There was someone else at the back of his head, some sort of entity. Not the Great Sky Dragon, but…but the essence of everything the Great Sky Dragon was supposed to be.
“I—” He looked at Kyrie and managed a smile, though it took so much effort he wondered how natural it looked. “I’m all right, Kyrie.”
She raised her eyebrows. He could smell her fear, but she remained standing right by him, her hand on his shoulder, her eyes showing only concern for him. “Are you sure?”
He patted her hand now, gently. “I think so. I…Something happened to me—”
“A stroke?”
He frowned. Was that what it was? He’d heard of people who had strokes that made them think half of their bodies wasn’t even theirs. But he’d never heard of anyone who had a stroke and suddenly thought he had more than one body, or that his being occupied the space of several bodies, all over the world. “No,” he said, speaking slowly. “I don’t think that’s what it is.” He probed tentatively at whatever was in his mind, that other entity residing…behind his skull, looking out through his eyes. Was this how multiple personality disorder felt? But no. He looked at it, tried to make sense of it. This wasn’t like another person or another personality. This was more like…He frowned. How odd. “It’s like a file catalogue,” he told Kyrie. “Sorry. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but it’s like someone downloaded a lot of compressed files onto the back of my mind.”
“Compressed?” she asked.
“Yes. I can’t…I have to think of each of them in turn to see what is inside, and I suspect it would take an effort of will to open one fully. One of them seems to have pictures…very old pictures and…information about dragons. I—”
“A human being is not a computer!” Kyrie protested. “People can’t get stuff downloaded into them.”
“Yes, but are we people?”
“Of course we’re people. What else would we be?”
Tom had thought he knew, now he wasn’t so sure. There was an unsteadiness beneath his certainty about the world. He felt as though if he moved a foot wrong, he’d find there was nothing beneath it, and—what he thought of as himself—would fall through the solid contours of what he thought of as the world, and be lost in a formless limbo beyond retrieving. “Yes. And if you’re going to say that if you cut us we bleed, I’ll agree we’re human so long as humans are considered to be sentient beings with at least theoretical control of their own actions. But that’s not what I’m asking, Kyrie. Not philosophy, but physics, biology…what we are, the things we are. As beings we can turn into other forms, and people—at least normal people—can’t. So perhaps we can get things download
ed into us too. How would I know?”
She was searching his face with anxious eyes. “What if all the…the files open? Will you be someone else?”
Tom probed the vast mass of information hiding somewhere in the recesses of his mind. “Kyrie, I don’t think I have enough space for all of them to open. I don’t think it would be possible. It feels like just one file has…as much…as much in it as the rest of me: a lifetime, a full personality.”
Kyrie let go of his shoulder now and went to the shelves that were stacked with mustard pots. She started turning them so they all faced the same way, and spoke as though to the mustard pots. “I don’t like this,” she said. “I don’t like the idea that there’s…other…that there are other people in there.”
“They’re not people. More like…the information in people,” he said slowly, more sure as he went along and touched each file, without opening it, and yet getting from it a listing of contents. “Like, what they learned.”
“Don’t care. Where did this came from? Who downloaded it?”
“I think,” Tom said slowly. “I feel it was the Great Sky Dragon, only that’s not quite right.”
“Damn him. First Bea, now this.”
“Well—”
“Are you going to be all right?”
“Yeah,” Tom said, making tentative movements, and taking a step towards Kyrie. It all worked fine. “I just…I think I was momentarily overloaded. It was very hard not to shift. I was afraid I’d eat Conan. How is he doing, by the way?”
“What?”
“How is his show going? I remember hearing clapping.”
“Oh, yes. He can sing, Tom. He really can. They’re…people love it, and he’s lapping it up, even if he has the world’s worst taste in clothes.”
“We should go out there, Kyrie,” Tom said, feeling he had to do something normal, to act normal in some way or he was going to implode. Inside him, the locked information was like a sore tooth that one tries to avoid touching with one’s tongue, but which one is always aware of. “We should be selling stuff, and making sure the serving staff isn’t overloaded. I suppose Laura has left now, and she was never supposed to serve, anyway, which leaves Jason serving and Anthony manning the fryer. He might forget to keep a close eye. What if the fryer explodes?”
“You have a weird relationship with that fryer,” Kyrie said.
Tom grinned at her, and this time didn’t feel like he had to force it. “I don’t like things that can destroy the diner if they blow up.”
“Like half the customers?”
“Well, that too, but then so can I. I meant…”
“I know what you meant.” Kyrie touched his arm tentatively. “On the good side, you’re no longer burning.”
“No, I think that too was a function of the…download,” he said. He opened the door and waited for her to step through.
She started to, but then turned around. Through the open door came the strains of “You are Not Alone,” in a powerful voice no one could believe might come from Conan’s unimpressive frame. “Tom? What was that you said? When I touched you first? Was it…what language was it?”
Tom had no idea what she was talking about, at first, but then remembered pronouncing words, words that made his throat hurt saying them. He remembered their coming out of his mouth, though he didn’t remember forming them in his brain, and as he thought of them, his mind automatically zoomed in on one of the more deeply-buried files, the ones that his brain told him were oldest.
A touch brought up memories of a similar language, though he needed to make an effort to open the subfile for all the words he’d heard. Words in a language whose sounds made his throat hurt with remembered injury poured out, their meaning felt rather than known.
He squinted against the stronger light coming from the hallway, against the sound of clapping out there. He tried to concentrate on English, as the other language blurred and blended with it, the edges indistinct.
“It was…” he said. “I am not…gone…no. I am not dead. I’m…covered? Hidden? No. Buried. I am buried…beneath…the dragon.”
*
He cleans up nice, Bea thought. And on the heels of that thought was shock at herself for letting her guard down.
There was something faintly scandalous about the whole situation. She was in a cabin in the woods, isolated, with a man she had never met until a few hours ago, and he’d just come out of the shower, smelling of soap and shampoo.
He was wearing what looked like running shorts, very short and loose, and a tan T-shirt that had a picture of a big lion with “The Lion Sleeps IN Tonight.” Her eyes widened a little at the words, remembering he shifted into a lion, and he followed her eyes, and had the grace to blush. “My mom gave it to me,” he said. “When I was twenty or so, because, you know, it’s what I wear on weekends, when I do sleep in.”
She nodded, but still felt uncomfortable. Not because she felt they were too intimate, but because she didn’t feel shocked at their being so intimate. There should be…more embarrassment, she thought, rather than just embarrassment at not being embarrassed.
With a shrug at her own foolishness, she said, “I found some steaks but they’re all frozen.”
“We can defrost them,” he said. “We have the technology!” He opened a sliding door to display a wall-mounted microwave discreetly hidden behind it. “Mom just doesn’t like to give the impression that this is in the twenty-first century, you know—but it doesn’t mean she wants to cook over an open fire. Though we do that too, at times. There’s a grill out back.”
“Yeah,” Bea said, blushing a little, and not sure why. “Only, you know, I think steak is better if it is allowed to defrost properly, right?”
“Right, and marinate,” Rafiel said. “What else do we have?”
“Well, you have a bunch of frozen veggies.”
“Yeah, Mom buys them in the summer, then deep-freezes them for when we come up in winter, but the last winter was so bad we didn’t come up much.” He opened the freezer drawer at the bottom, and looked up at her. “Do you eat chicken?”
“Sure. I mean…doesn’t everyone?”
He shrugged. “I’ll cook up a couple of chicken breasts, make a sherry sauce to disguise the defrosted-in-haste taste, and I think we have rice somewhere up there—would you look?” He pointed at a cabinet and she looked, bringing out a package of brown rice. He nodded. “I’ll make us some stir-fried veggies to go with it. Tomorrow we’ll go to the local market and grab fresh veggies. It’s kind of a small market, for the communities up here, but it does have veggies, or it should by now, even if the selection will be more limited than in the city.”
While he talked, he stood up and started the chicken defrosting, then got out the still-frozen vegetables: carrots and mushrooms and green beans. He made a face. “It won’t be the best thing I’ve ever cooked.” His hair was damp from the shower and rather than standing up like a mane, curled around his ears and the back of his neck. For some reason this made him look young. It was very endearing. He concentrated wholly on the cooking.
The spacious kitchen had a central isle, with the stove on it, and that was where he moved to work. She pulled one of the barstools to it, and sat there, watching him.
He looked up, half-smiling at one point, “So, you don’t cook at all.”
She waggled a hand at him. “Ramen. I’m in college, remember?”
“Ah, yes. So…your parents…do they have any idea where you are?”
She hesitated. “I think they believe I’m back in college. I tried to make sure…I didn’t expect to be gone this long.” She hesitated again. “But if I call them…”
“The Great Sky Bastard will track you down? Likely. He doesn’t seem to ever forget a grudge, does he?”
“No.” She hesitated. The whole idea of what had happened to her, the idea that she had in fact been dead for some unspecified period of time was unbearable. She sighed. “No.”
Rafiel dumped the vegetables from the c
utting board onto the oil. Then he grabbed a wooden spatula and started working the spattering, still-frozen veggies around. “I could call them. My cell phone, I mean. Whatever— I mean, I don’t think whatever it was…whoever it was who attacked me has the type of capabilities of the Great Sky Dragon. I could call your parents and tell them you’re fine, and will get back in touch when—”
“No,” the word practically screamed itself. She sighed. “I’m sorry, but really, no. You know, the thing is…I mean…You’re a man.”
He laughed lightly as he turned the fire down. “Noted. And yeah, I can sort of see your point.” He bit his lip. “Tell you what…I have to call my mom anyway, or they’ll worry.” He blushed a little, again looking much younger than his late twenties. “I know it’s silly when I’m a grown man, but really, they will worry, so I tell you what—I’ll call them and ask them to call your parents. Would that work?”
“It might,” she said. “The Great Sky Dragon might suspect I’m in Goldport, but he knows that anyway. Yeah. That might work.”
“All right,” Rafiel said. “It’s a deal.” But something in his eyes looked worried.
Chapter 14
When they returned to the diner’s dining room, Conan was standing up in the little circle they had cleared for his performance. Somehow it had gotten much smaller, with various people crowding around, all trying to talk to him.
He had his guitar in one hand and was bowing, seemingly in response to everything addressed to him. Tom patted Kyrie on the shoulder. “I’ll go rescue the poor man; you make sure people have food, if they linger, and that no one leaves without paying.”
It was easier said than done, but on the other hand, the diner seemed to have acquired several volunteer servers. “They said they’re regulars,” Jason said. He was red-faced and looked beat, but was grinning. “And Anthony confirmed it. Some guy called James Stephens who said he’s half a horse, and a big man who goes by Professor Squeak.”
“Oh, Professor Roberts.”
“Is he really?” Jason asked, as he and Kyrie crossed back and forth giving warm-ups and bussing tables.
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