But one thing she was quite sure of. She could not get in the house and go to sleep. Would never happen. And that denied the whole point of coming home. Might as well go back and go search for Old Joe with Tom when he went.
She sighed, and turned around to get in the car.
There—movement in the bushes, in the almost nonexistent space between the back of the house and the fence that enclosed the backyard. Her first thought was squirrel, but then she realized there was someone there, with a mask and some sort of weapon. She turned to face the threat as her body tensed with the precursor of shifting.
And then—
And then something hit her upper arm really hard, and she looked down, unbelieving. I was not shot with a tranquilizer dart, she thought.
Even as she thought it, her legs folded under her, and her vision faded to dark. Before she hit the cement of the driveway, she wondered what Tom would think.
Chapter 17
The breakfast rush over, Tom realized how exhausted he was. He’d sent Jason home at the beginning of it, and didn’t expect him back till lunch, but for all that, he felt like he could fall asleep in his tracks. It had been much too long a night, since they’d woken with Rafiel’s phone call. Under normal circumstances—like those ever happened around here—just the rush of people for Conan’s maiden show would have been enough to leave Tom feeling battered, but there had been so much on top of that.
He stared out the back window at the parking lot, and squinted at the burned-out ruin of the bed-and-breakfast. He wondered if Louise would be able to rebuild, if she had the money. Though the operation had always kept up a good front of seeming classy and well stocked—which he supposed was essential in the boutique hospitality industry—he felt that it had been run very close to the bone.
Perhaps it’s a reflection of how we run the diner, he thought, and rubbed his hand pensively on his chin, shocked to hear and feel the grating of half-grown beard. Vague, disconnected thoughts ran through his mind. With a quirk of the lips, he wondered about Rafiel and Bea and how they were getting along. Rafiel could be forbidding and patriarchal. Part of being the policeman in charge of anything involving shifters in this area, Tom thought—unofficially in charge, of course, which made it worse. Also possibly something to do with the fact that he was a third generation policemen. Such families tended to raise boy children in the expectation of serving and protecting.
And Tom wasn’t, of course, absolutely sure about Bea. He’d barely met her, even if he’d seen her twice so far, but he got the impression you could tell her what to do all you wanted to—you just couldn’t get her to obey. A young woman who would tell the Great Sky Dragon where to put it and with how much force, even if he suspected she’d been more polite than that about it, was not the sort of young woman that Rafiel could intimidate. He grinned at the idea that she and Rafiel would probably hate each other the more time they spent together. It didn’t matter, of course, provided they both were safe.
Then he thought of Conan and that voice. Who would have thought it? Certainly neither his parents nor the triad to whom Conan had been handed over at puberty when his shifting started. But Conan had dreamed of a career, and Tom meant to make sure his dreams came true. Which, even taking into account that Conan was dating Rya and that Rya was the more practical of the two, probably meant Tom would have to keep a very close eye on everything. Dreamers could be good artists, but most of them were terrible businessmen. And being a businessman, it turned out, required training and thought—a fact Tom was learning, slowly, through his mistakes. He’d not at all been prepared to run anything, by his drifting existence as a young man, moving from place to place, always afraid someone would notice that he was a dragon shifter.
On the other hand, he thought, At least it prepared me to survive by my wits, and figure out how to live. Conan didn’t even have that. He was handed over as a slave, his every thought controlled.
Thinking of that brought the memory and feel of the…thing in his mind. The intrusion of all the—for lack of a better word—files of Great Sky Dragon memory, the hidden knowledge of the members of the triad, all those shifters he could control. He felt around in there. If he focused, he could sense this or that dragon shifter, here and there, all over the world.
He didn’t want to be aware of them; he didn’t want to focus on them; he didn’t want to know what they were doing. If he did, he’d find himself an unwitting accomplice to a hundred or a thousand illegal activities. It wasn’t like the triads were benevolent social clubs, after all. He could neither denounce their illegal dealings—which police department would buy “I know it through telepathy”?—nor did he want to know about them.
So he skimmed lightly over them, and felt the mass back there, his dragon self. No, the Great Sky Dragon’s self, even if it wasn’t the same Great Sky Dragon that was external to Tom. Tom chewed on his lip.
What it came to was that he had to find out what was going on with the Pearl of Heaven and he had to figure out where the Great Sky Dragon might be. Tom would be damned if he was going to get stuck with this job.
In fact, it had better all be over with by the time his father came to visit, because what his father might make of it gave Tom cold sweats.
A touch on his shoulder made him turn. For a second he thought it would be Kyrie, but it was one of the shifters who often helped around the diner, and who, in fact, had helped last night during Conan’s thing. He smelled like a shifter, and he called himself a half-horse, but Tom had never asked what his form was. A horse, he assumed, of course. Maybe. Well, none of his business anyway.
In his human form, James was a dark-haired young man who worked as some sort of nursing aide at the local hospital. He had a habit of always glowering, which, at first, had made Tom think he hated the diner, and Tom couldn’t figure out why he kept showing up there so often. But it turned out—as they got to know the man better—the glowering was protection for social awkwardness. Which was good, because the tone in which he asked, “Do you need help?” might have sounded pretty aggressive otherwise.
“Yeah,” Tom said. “How did you know?”
“Other than the fact you look dead on your feet?”
Tom rubbed his chin again. “Yeah, I’ve been up…very long. Yeah, I could use some help.” Remembering the man worked nights, though, he said, “But shouldn’t you go home and sleep or something?”
“Nah. Could use some more money anyway.” A small smile. “Horse feed, you know? Got to keep the ponies happy.”
Tom nodded sagely, refusing to ask if the fodder was for himself or for actual horses, then said, “Yeah. If you can take over, Jason—the new guy—should come back before lunch, and Anthony too. And then Conan and Rya can go home,” he said, looking behind the counter where the two were jointly manning the cooking. He thought they looked very happy but neither of them was particularly competent. Only me, he thought. I train a greasy spoon cook and waiter and end up with a musician.
James had gone behind the counter and got his apron and signed in. He did this often enough, if irregularly, that the procedure was familiar to him. He brought his eyebrows down low over his eyes, as he touched Tom on the shoulder. “Go on then,” he said. “Go home and get some sleep.”
“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 w
hen 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?”
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