“So, do we go there?” Conan asked. “Do we try it?”
Rafiel thought it would be a fool’s errand. Even the dumber of henchmen wouldn’t take a kidnapped wench home, right? Unless he was intending to kill her before she could be rescued and rat him out, and they really didn’t seem the type.
On the one hand, all criminals were small criminals till one day they snapped and went big. On the other hand, where else could they start? If Harry wasn’t home, perhaps someone at the place would give them another lead.
“Yeah,” he said. “We might as well try it.”
*
Riverside Park looked even worse at night and under the pouring rain than it looked midafternoon in the merciless glare of the sun. No, Tom thought. That wasn’t quite true. It didn’t look bad exactly. You couldn’t see the worn-out paint or the chipped walls, or the shabby appearance of many of the rides.
Mostly, though, it looked dark. There were some lights on. Tom thought they were the lights on the trees that lined the walkways. They were white and sparse, and seemed drowned under the downpour, like the lights in ships that have sunk, shining back at you out of the water. A wind had started up, or perhaps there was always a wind around here. There were places like that. Perhaps the wind gathered speed over the water. At any rate, it shook the lights, making them seem even smaller and more forlorn.
There were lights outlining the entrance tower, too, but it was empty, as it had been when Bea and Rafiel had gone in. Old Joe, just beside Tom, clacked his teeth at it, as though happy at this, but Tom thought that the park looked dark and forbidding and more like a house of horrors than a place of amusement.
Then he though that he only felt that way because of Bea and Rafiel’s story, and, after ducking under the stile, he turned back to Old Joe, and whispered, “Maybe the Pearl is no longer where they saw it.”
“Maybe not,” Old Joe said. He grinned one of his ghastly grins, all broken teeth. “Maybe it is now where the Great Sky Bastard is. Daddy dragon,” he added self-consciously, as though he were afraid of offending Tom. “Can you feel him?”
Tom started to shake his head, then his eyes opened wide. “Not exactly, but I can tell he is very close. How odd.”
“Not odd at all,” Old Joe said. “I’d say the park was where Maduh hides out, with her cub. Easy to have only one place to guard, yes?”
Tom didn’t know. He’d never had any place to guard. Well, except The George and his greatest danger there was someone forgetting to turn off the fryer and causing it to explode. He concentrated on following the path to the cottage, as Bea and Rafiel had described.
When it appeared in front of him, looming dark and smelling funny, he looked at Old Joe, but the old alligator gave him a challenging look, as though asking if he didn’t have the courage, then grinned. “We should shift, dragon boy. There will be a battle.”
“Maduh?”
“More likely her cub, but all the same. You say he’s eaten shifters before…”
Tom tried to remember the doglike creature, running with Rafiel after him. No match for a dragon.
Self-conscious and feeling more than a little strange at undressing before going into danger, Tom took his clothes off and folded them carefully. He’d gotten killed in his good leather jacket before, and he had no intention of letting it happen again.
He told his body to shift, even if it was difficult under the rain and with no moonlight to help, but he forced it, forced his body to twist and writhe, ignoring the pain as he shifted into his dragon form.
At the same time, he sensed into the cottage. Not feeling for anyone in particular, but for that thing—the warm glow he’d once stolen for its calming influence—the Pearl of Heaven. And he could feel it, he realized. It was in the cottage. That meant…
A scruffy dog-bear creature came screaming out of the cottage, making a sound like baying and growling combined. Tom felt his impact mid-body, sharp claws tearing at his sensitive left wing. He reacted by instinct and backhanded the creature with a powerful paw.
The little feral—Tom’s human side knew it—went flying through the air, and even before he hit the wall of the cottage with a sickening crunch, Tom was shifting—willfully shifting himself back to human, putting his clothes on quickly. A dragon was much too conspicuous a form. If the creature’s mother came— If that baying had been an alarm—
“I didn’t kill him!” he told Old Joe, more in hope than in any certainty. “Surely I didn’t kill him?”
Old Joe in human form was bending over the kid, feeling the side of the neck. “No,” he said. Then, “We should kill him now. Maduh will smell his distress or feel his mind. If we kill him—”
Tom remembered the young creature. He remembered what Old Joe had said about being born in another form. You wouldn’t know good from evil, then. You’d barely know good. He couldn’t kill the kid. It was a kid, even though it might very well be older than Tom. “No,” he said. “No. Don’t kill it.”
He went into the dark cottage, and looked around. It was dark, but not so dark he couldn’t distinguish a pile of what looked like broken stuff—a counter and a bunch of chairs. But his feeling of the Pearl guided him unerringly.
It called to him, as concrete and clear as if it were smell or sight or another of his senses. He scrabbled at the floorboard in the middle of the structure. It was loose and came up easily.
Beneath it, the Pearl of Heaven glowed. It glowed as though sensing him. It glowed with a soft, white light, very gentle, like a mother’s kiss, like…like peace, like the promise of perfection.
Tom smiled, remembering the first time he’d seen it, and how he was sure it would be able to save him from himself. Was this personal? Was it responding to him? Or was it something it did for everyone? He remembered Rafiel saying something about making it glow being the easy part.
He started to reach down for it, then thought that he would have no more clue what to do with it than he had more than a year ago. But Old Joe knew what to do. And also, if Tom left Old Joe out there much longer with that feral kid…Well, sometimes he thought Old Joe wasn’t very far from feral himself. He might very well decide the kid was a snack. Or, more likely and ruthlessly, that he was less trouble dead than alive. He’d tell Tom it had all been a horrible accident, and that it didn’t matter. Even with the kid’s blood around his mouth.
So Tom found a piece of rope. It was sitting on the floor, and it was very thick, if somewhat ratty. It looked like the type of rope used to tie down boats, and it had probably been used for just that, with the little pleasure row-and-pedal boats for rent in the lake in the summer.
Tom took it out to Old Joe, who was looking at the unconscious feral shifter with the sort of speculative look someone might give a burger. Tom noted that the feral shifter remained in animal form, which was odd, since when you lost consciousness and control, you defaulted to your natural form. Then he remembered what Old Joe had said about being born shifted, if you were conceived shifted, and he felt slightly ill.
They bound the creature’s paws in the style commonly referred to as “hogtie.”
All the while, Tom could feel the Pearl of Heaven calling him.
*
The apartment building turned out to be one of a series, set within something that might, once upon a time, have been a park. The first thought Rafiel had was that even on Sierra Avenue, which had its rough patches, you didn’t normally see true squalor this close to a main thoroughfare. Up the street, restaurants were open, and across the street an old theater converted into a bar did a brisk business.
But here…
From outside, you shouldn’t have been able to tell there was something very wrong with the apartment complex. They were just buildings made of brick, tall, rambling-looking.
But there were unsettling details. Like the door being open, light spilling out, and the number of people walking by with barely-contained large dogs on leashes—even under the pouring rain.
Closer up, it was
weird to note that there were no numbers on the buildings. And that the door frame and the doors themselves looked worm-eaten battered. They looked like they’d been standing for centuries—an impossibility—without a coat of paint or any maintenance.
Getting out of the cars, they noted that several of the people with dogs looked extremely interested. Nick grimaced, visible in the light of door. “Damn, we should have known better than to bring the convertible.”
“I’m surprised we never made an arrest here,” Rafiel said.
“You haven’t?” Cas said. “Gee, they must send us juniors here. Battered children on the right, domestic disputes on the left, and straight ahead what I presume is the largest meth ring in the country, spread over nineteen apartments. What was the address again?”
Rafiel told him. “Right. That’s on the left, fifth floor.”
They walked past three open dumpsters exuding an unpleasant smell of rot, and past an incongruous group of children playing outside in the pouring rain, jumping into puddles and shrieking. At night? Where were their mothers?
The door stood open, as it had stood on the other building, and inside it looked like a normal apartment building that had come seriously down in the world. Though from the design and the way things looked, Rafiel guessed it had been built in the seventies, the building managed to convey the impression of sagging under its own age. The floor shook and creaked under their steps. The walls looked like they’d been mended many times, with whatever was at hand. Most of it was still plaster, or at least wallboard, but there were patches of mildewy molding and bits of fake tileboard nailed up, and further on, something that looked like Victorian wallpaper, slapped in a vast, irregular patch on the wall where, underneath, a long vertical crack was still visible.
“I don’t think we should go in this way,” Conan said.
“What do you mean?” Rafiel asked.
Conan started shaking lightly. “It’s on the fifth floor. I’ll fly.” He made a gesture towards the outside of the building and up.
Rafiel looked around, at a man edging down the hallway, with a large—bulldog? part dragon?—on a leash, and thought that he’d better get Conan out of a place where he might be overheard. He said, “Uh, okay.”
“If we go in this way,” Conan said, very sure of himself, “they’ll take her out the window.”
At that, he might have a point. Rafiel made a head gesture to Nick and Cas, signaling they should go on up. “Don’t knock. Just wait till they try to come out.”
Outside, the rain had stopped, and Conan undressed, then started to writhe and cough, in shapeshifting mode.
At the last moment, Rafiel thought of something and said, “How will you know which window is the right one?”
Conan, his mouth already an odd shape, spoke indistinctly, “I’ll look at all the windows,” he said, “on the fifth floor.”
Rafiel wished he could tell him not to do that, but from the numbers he’d seen on doors on the bottom floor, there was no rhyme or reason to the numbering scheme and the window could be anywhere. He groaned and said, “Try not to be seen.”
Conan, already a red dragon, nodded.
Rafiel hoped the people inside were tripping so hard that they didn’t figure out that, for once, the dragon was real.
*
“Reach in, like so,” Old Joe said.
Tom couldn’t see anything. He couldn’t even see the gesture Old Joe made. He was holding the Pearl of Heaven in his hands, its glow brighter than ever in his eyes. But he felt as though Old Joe had reached into Tom’s mind. No, not quite that. But as though Old Joe had touched Tom’s mind and was now guiding it, like an adult with his hand over the child’s hand, guiding a pen across the paper. Only what he was guiding was Tom’s mind to feel—to explore—the entire surface of the Pearl. Odd, to Tom it seemed like this surface wasn’t smooth at all, but a network of patches and places that looked like buttons or perhaps hot spots.
“How do you know how to do this?” Tom asked.
“My mother,” Old Joe said. “Great one of alligators. Great one of all reptiles not dragons. She had something like it. Jade. I saw her activate it. I could feel what she did. I couldn’t do it, but I could feel.” He made a sound like an admission of failure. “I might slip. I don’t know precisely.”
His mind was firm in orienting Tom’s as Tom’s awareness explored the patches. It was much like, he thought, running your mouse across active content on the screen, and seeing the label pop up. Not that a text label popped up. But he could feel what this area did, what that one affected. And there, in the center he found the area that throbbed like a migraine, and which felt like it somehow reached into him, even as he reached into it.
He pushed. It was like pushing the surface of the Pearl open, causing it to peel away and then…And then it engulfed him.
Tom would never be able to fully explain the sensation, but it was like falling, headfirst, into rushing water, or like entering a completely different world, or perhaps like changing completely, inside and out. The light of the Pearl seemed to shine inside him, taking him over. It was more than an illusion. He could see his hands glowing pearly-white as they rested on the Pearl of Heaven. Old Joe gasped an “Ah, yes.”
And then the thing that Old Joe called “dragon egg” within Tom exploded. It exploded outward—knowledge, thoughts, language, all running through Tom’s mind, uncontrolled.
He thought, I promised Kyrie that I would come back unchanged.
And then he collapsed under a torrent of ideas and feelings too strange to endure.
*
As far as Rafiel was concerned, the night became a cacophony of screams. There were female screams, male screams, and the shrill screams of children, all preceded and followed by the barking of dogs and high wailing of cats.
Apparently there were people in this horrible place sober enough to recognize when a dragon looked in their windows. Fortunately, as the windows began to be thrown open, Conan found his mark. He kicked a window in. There was a different kind of scream.
Just as Rafiel had changed his internal pleading to Please let him not bite anyone to death, Conan exploded out the window with a girl held in his forepaws. Rya, Rafiel supposed, though it was hard to tell as she appeared to be unconscious. Please let her not be dead. At least not permanently.
Behind Conan, orange flames shone inside the room, and then—seconds later—billows of smoke.
Oh hell, he set fire to the room. This whole place will go like tinder. Rafiel dialed 9-1-1 reflexively. Minutes later, he saw two very odd-looking young thugs come running out of the building. Very odd, as most of their hair appeared to have burned away, and so had most of their clothes. They were followed by the casually strolling Cas and Nick.
In the distance, sirens started up.
Conan landed next to Rafiel. Men with dogs started approaching, then looked uncertainly at the dragon and stopped.
Conan handed the girl to Rafiel. It was Rya, and she was unconscious, which, Rafiel reminded himself, was better than dead. Rafiel picked her up, reflecting on how light people could feel heavy when entirely unconscious, and lay her on the back of the car. By that time, Conan had managed to rreturn both shifted into human and dressed. He climbed into the passenger seat, looking exhausted, and said, “Let’s get out of here before the firemen…Let’s go to someone’s house”
Nick was on the driver’s side, as Rafiel got in. “My house. Follow me. We didn’t prevent the perps from running, so much as we made them stop, drop and roll.” He grinned. “No lasting damage, I think, but they’ll learn not to mess with dragons’ girlfriends. Hell, they might go honest from now on.”
Rafiel hesitated as he started his car. “We should be reporting the kidnapping. I know how tricky it is, but—”
“No,” Nick said. “Are you mad? You straights aren’t very good with hiding things, are you? Do you want to explain the whole thing? Including the dragon?”
“No.”
“Goo
d, then follow me.”
They made it out of the parking lot just ahead of the fire trucks entering it.
*
Tom woke up. For a long and strange moment, he wasn’t sure who he was, or even where he was. He certainly couldn’t remember going to sleep, and from the way his head throbbed, he wasn’t sure he had.
He could smell blood, and his wrists hurt, and he felt vaguely queasy.
Then he remembered that he and Old Joe had been…in Riverside Park, with the Pearl of Heaven. He remembered the Pearl of Heaven suffusing and permeating his being. He thought—
“Joe?” he said. No one answered. There was an odd smell of blood in the air. With great effort, Tom opened his eyes. The first thing facing him was the baleful eye of an alligator. He thought Old Joe and that Joe didn’t look right. Then he managed to bring his eyes fully open and stared.
He closed them. It had to be a nightmare. It couldn’t be true. No one—no one—would want to kill Old Joe, certainly not by ripping him apart limb from limb. Not by splitting his skull and removing his brain.
But when Tom opened his eyes, the alligator was still there. There was no lying to himself that this wasn’t Old Joe, either. He’d known the old shifter long enough to know which teeth were broken, and the exact pattern of the scales. Even in the dim light, he knew it was Old Joe’s corpse he was looking at.
Grief and horror caught in his mind, paralyzing it, mingling with the throbbing pain at the back of his head. He wanted to throw up, he wanted to cry, and he wanted to be elsewhere, where Old Joe was still alive, and where he’d make that teeth-clacking sound and call Tom “dragon boy.”
And then Tom realized that overlaying all of this was the feel of the Great Sky Dragon nearby, very awake. And then, closer at hand, someone breathing.
He saw feet in shoes, beyond Old Joe’s corpse, by a piece of Joe’s mutilated foot. He swallowed, hard. He looked up.
She was blond and beautiful and—he remembered Rafiel’s description—had the sort of widely separated eyes and broad, clear forehead that the Renaissance had praised.
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