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.
“A professor? Yeah. Pharmacology. CUG School of Medicine.”
“Oh, wow. I thought he was just nuts. He started telling me how he had all these names, including Speaker to Lab Animals and Professor Squeak.”
Kyrie hesitated, but in the press of people it wasn’t a good time to mention shapeshifting, so she just said, “He’s eccentric, but a very nice man.”
“Yeah, well, he was taking orders and didn’t know what to do with the tips.”
“Well, no,” Kyrie said, when their paths crossed again.
Their desultory conversation wound down as the diner returned to normal activity for that time of night—almost empty with only three tables still occupied by large groups. Three or four people remained near Conan too, one of them the fiercely protective Rya who was standing between him and a large, well-dressed man, who was trying to talk to Conan about something.
Kyrie looked over at Tom, who leaned over one of the tables, talking to regulars, a smile on his face as he traded jokes with the man they’d long known as the Poet, who turned out to be Rya Simmons’ father, Mike.
Tom looked … natural, Kyrie thought. Or at least, if she hadn’t known that something was very wrong, she would have thought that he looked perfectly natural. He seemed tired and moved in a slightly forced way, like someone valiantly dragging himself past his last ounce of strength and willpower. But there was nothing unusual, no odd movements, as he picked up the tray with the used plates, and laid down the accounting for the table of seven people.
“So, do you think he’ll make enough to marry my daughter?” Rya’s father asked Tom with a wink, as Kyrie approached them.
“He has asked?” Tom said. “Braver than I thought.”
“She’s probably asked him,” Mike conceded with a smile. A retired TV weatherman, he was writing a novel in his sleepless nights, to stay conscious and not turn into a were-fox. He’d left his daughter at five, trying to avoid tainting his family with his weirdness. But when his daughter had started shifting herself, she had found him.
“Well! I’d be happy about Conan and Rya,” Tom said, and for just a moment his voice reverberated oddly, seeming to echo off the walls of the diner and to be imbued with authority and knowledge that had never been Tom’s. He must have noticed it too, and the people at the table all stared up at him, but then Tom cleared his throat, “Anyway, at least he didn’t completely tank and chase our customers away. I’m not sure how much we made, but it was a lot.”
“Well, then, maybe you should give my future son-in-law a cut?” Mike said, only half joking.
Tom assured him he intended to do just that, then went back to the counter, with Kyrie trailing him anxiously.
Behind the counter, Anthony was removing his apron, with an air of grim determination, “I have to go now, Tom, really. My wife is threatening to change the locks.”
Tom nodded as he set down the tray loaded with dirty dishes, and put them in a holding area, waiting for the washing machine to finish its cycle. “We’ll see how much we made and make sure you get a cut, too,” Tom said.
“Well, that might help. We need to move to a bigger apartment.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, you know. There will be a kid, any minute now.”
Was Tom’s smile a little forced as he said “Congratulations”? And even Kyrie couldn’t avoid a pang as Anthony beamed at them, saying, “About time you two had some, but you got to get married first! And think about it. Our kids could play together.”
“Our kid would totally beat up your kid,” Tom said, but it was automatic.
From the other side of the counter, leaning on it, Rya said, “Mr. Ormson!” She’d been introduced to Tom as Tom, and to Kyrie as Kyrie, but she insisted on calling them Mr. Ormson and Ms. Smith. Which was funny, since she was probably only two years or so younger than Kyrie. “Mr. Ormson. You’ll let Conan sing on Wednesdays, right? Here?” Conan, standing behind her, looked hopeful. Behind him were two men, also looking hopeful.
Tom turned around. There were dark circles under his eyes, but his gaze had a strange brilliance. “I’d rather he sings Saturdays, though we might need to come up with some new table arrangement to get more people in. Why?”
Rya gestured to the two men nearby. “They want to hire Conan to sing at their bars, and I was saying he shouldn’t do that, when he has worked for you all this time, and you’re friends and—”
The two men started up with a babble of explanations from which the word “nonexclusive” emerged. Tom nodded. “I don’t see why he can’t sing for them other nights. I’ll take the night he can give us. It’s a small venue here anyway, but, Conan, don’t sign anything without getting it looked at by a lawyer.” And with those words, the reverberation, the sound of authority was back.
Conan raised his eyes, staring at Tom with wide-open eyes, as Tom went on, “My dad will help you out, when he comes to visit. Just don’t sign anything till he tells you it’s okay.”
Conan didn’t answer. He was still staring at Tom. He pushed Rya gently aside. He tried to get under the pass-through, but the hat caught. He looked as if he would speak, but then realized there were nonshifters nearby. He swallowed hard.
“Tom,” he said, “I must talk to you.”
*
“No, Mother,” Rafiel said. “No, I’m not lying to you. Yes, I’m quite sure I’m all right. Well, I wasn’t for a while. No. It was a fight that … well, it doesn’t matter. Yes, a fight with a creature. You could say that. Yes, very much like the sabertooth last winter, but this one is female. No, not that type of female.”
There was a pause. Bea watched his face, attentive, patient and more than a little bit embarrassed.
“Well,” he said. “No. I hope not. She almost killed me. No. I’m fine now. You know how quickly I heal.
“Beg your pardon? No, I’m fairly sure I didn’t break Stephanie’s heart! I never even met her. Mother! When I was five doesn’t count. And I’m sure she’s forgiven me for breaking her doll by now. No, I don’t think I need to marry her to repair that particular sin.”
There was a long interval in which he answered her questions, and slowly, Bea started to realize what they had in common and why he had felt so familiar to her.
He finished hesitantly with, “Mom, could you call this number?” He took the number Bea had earlier scrawled on a paper napkin. “Tell them their daughter is all right, that you don’t have any details, but she’s safe and will come home as soon as possible. I … don’t mention any names, certainly not my name.”
There was a silence, and red climbed up his cheeks. “No. I … no. It’s related to that attack. Besides, the dragon triad is after her. Uh? No. Not involved.” And suddenly he was looking up at Bea, and she realized for the first time that while the eye that had been injured looked somewhat bloodshot, it wasn’t missing anymore—no longer a mass of dried, black blood. Instead, it was a normal eye which, like the other eye, was the color of dark, aged brandy. And both of them twinkled with amusement. “She’s very nice. No. Well, we’ll see. Maybe you’ll get to meet her.”
Rafiel hung up, and Bea had time to control her blush. She said, slowly, “Your parents … are very protective.”
And now he turned around, and now his own c
heeks were red, and he was trying to explain, stammering, “No, this is the thing, see, they found out I could shift when I was thirteen, and Kyrie and Tom think I’m some sort of wimp because I still live at home, but the thing is, it’s not that I’m afraid of going out, it’s—”
“I know,” she said, very quietly, interrupting him. “I know. It’s not so much that you are afraid of going out. You aren’t. I’m not. It’s that you’re concerned for how worried they are for you, and you want to make sure that nothing—nothing—ever happens to you that can hurt them. You … you’re very protective of them, not the other way around.”
He looked at her, speechless, for a moment, then a small smile formed on his lips. “Yeah. You get it. If they’d treated me badly when they found out—if they’d been like Tom’s father when he kicked him out—then I would have been free to grow up, go away and … be on my own. But they are the kindest people in the world, and they do everything they can to protect me. They feel so guilty that they somehow passed this genetic doom to me. The only thing I can do, the only thing I can think is how not to hurt them. They were very worried when I was at college in Denver, you know. They used to come up for dinner twice a week, and I ended up driving home most weekends, and everyone said I was a mama’s boy, but that wasn’t it, you know? That wasn’t it at all. I didn’t want them to worry.”
“I understand. I do the same thing with my parents,” Bea said. “Which is why I was so worried that they might … you know … worry themselves sick, or think the evil dragons had got me, or something.”
“Yeah,” he said. His hand was on the kitchen isle. “Yeah.”
She touched his hand briefly with her fingertips, then she said, lightly, casually, trying to make little of that touch, “We should eat. Is the chicken ready?”
*
Tom looked at Conan, and it seemed to him he was looking at his friend as though from a long, long distance away. Which was weird. Objectively, he knew that Conan was just out of reach of Tom’s outstretched arm, if that far away. He was just standing there, looking up at Tom, his eyes as wide as he could make them. He’d removed his hat, revealing a wealth of very black, glossy hair. In what remained of his performance outfit, clutching the guitar neck, he looked like a Chinese elementary school kid masquerading as a cowboy. The impression was increased by his look of bewilderment. “Tom, I must talk to you.”
In Tom’s ears, the words sounded like something said a long way off, through a membrane, echoing as weirdly as Tom’s own voice had sounded inside his skull for the longest time. And Conan looked tiny, as did Rya and even Kyrie. He could turn around and look at them, in turn, but while he knew they were all crowded right there around the counter, the feeling was that he was very alone in the middle of a vast circle of emptiness with all his friends looking on from a great distance.
He swallowed hard. Maybe this isn’t just the obtaining of some files. Maybe there is more to this than just my receiving knowledge from the Great Sky Dragon. A bad thought of how the Great Sky Dragon had spoken through his lips was dismissed. Instead he swallowed hard again and heard his own voice vibrating oddly, trembling. “Kyrie,” he said, probably louder than he intended, and full of the urgency of someone who feels his control falling away. “Kyrie, please take over. I … I need to talk to Conan for a moment. It’s”—swallow to try to keep his voice clear—“important.”
Kyrie, looking up at his face, seemed like she’d argue, then decided not to. She nodded.
Tom ducked under the pass-through and rushed down the hallway, not quite sure where he was going, but aware that Conan was following him, wherever that was.
They stepped outside the back door, and there was an alligator by the trash dumpster. This was neither strange nor unexpected. Old Joe, an alligator shifter, often hung out near the dumpster. Rescuing a kitten from Old Joe’s happy-snapping jaws had saddled Tom and Kyrie with a pet cat.
But Old Joe didn’t even slow down Conan, which was odd, because Conan never trusted the alligator.
And as the warm air hit Tom, he felt something odd. He felt like he was going to shift. But it was like no shift he’d been through before.
“Be careful,” Conan was saying. “You can’t do that here. Not unless you want to give the whole thing away.”
“What?” Tom asked, still feeling as though he were dizzy and nothing made much sense at all.
Now Conan was grasping his arm, squeezing, “Listen, Tom, before you shift. You must pay attention. The dragons are coming. All the dragons. All who can get here in time. You are now the Great Sky Dragon, aren’t you?”
Tom tried to make some protest, but he couldn’t quite speak, and then Conan said, “You are. I knew it when I looked at you in the diner. It was all I could do not to— I knew you would be someday, but not … this soon. Tom. You must not shift here, or if you do, you must fly away soon. Where are you going? Where are you going that the dragons can come?
“They’re coming, Tom. You can’t stop it. They’re coming to pay you homage, to see with their own eyes that we still have a leader. And you must be where they can all land, and not be seen by everyone.”
*
The parking lot of the Three Luck Dragon, Tom thought. And the idea was obvious, as was, in retrospect, the advantage of that place. It explained why dragon gatherings took place there so often. Set against the cup of a hillside, its near neighbors—a jewelry store with a prominent sign that it bought used gold, and a little hole-in-the-wall laundromat—were closed at night. Which left the parking lot—far more vast than necessary for three such establishments—free for gatherings of large-bodied, flying, secretive creatures.
“The parking lot,” Tom said. “Restaurant.” And saw Conan nod, which was good, because Tom was already shifting. And that was bad in itself, because they were in the parking lot, where customers of The George might see it.
Half-running, feeling as though he were already losing control of his body, Tom rushed into the alley and behind the dumpster. Barely in time. He’d just managed to hide when the pain of shifting hit him, and he managed—just—to discard his clothes before they tore. He was aware that Conan was doing the same, but it didn’t matter. Shifting was a private hell, a nerve-ending searing experience that preempted all rational thought and made it impossible to see clearly.
When it was done, Tom realized Conan was indeed nearby, a red dragon, Chinese style, with the funny catlike face of Chinese dragons and unusually long red whiskers. Conan’s look at Tom was the first time Tom realized something was wrong.
Oh, not wrong, exactly. But something was strange. He’d been shifting into a dragon for over seven years. By now he should know what his dragon felt like. Only this felt different—bigger.
It was, he thought, like when he had a growth spurt as a young boy, and would for a few days feel as though his outlines, his sense of where his body was, had gotten horribly distorted.
Now, when he spread his wings their span was huge, and as he flapped them to get to the sky, he flew much faster. He could sense Conan flying behind him, too, and he had a sudden, odd impression of himself as having grown … what? Two times as large as he’d been. Note to self, shifting in a small powder room could kill you.
His size changed everything, including his perception of where he was going—or how long it would take to fly there. But he managed, feeling as awkward and strange as a male adolescent in a suddenly large body. Which, he thought, in the human mind at the back of the dragon’s thoughts, might very well be what he was.
The parking lot of the Three Luck Dragon seemed to rush up at him far too quickly, and he landed awkwardly near the closed doors, aware that even as he landed, they opened, and two men already in the process of changing rushed out to stand behind him.
He had no time to wonder who they were or where they’d come from. It was as though his landing had been a signal, but more than likely his landing had been just in time. Because this would have happened wherever he was: as soon as he landed,
he was aware of the sound of wings all around, a flapping noise, like sheets in the wind, like exceptionally large flags being whipped around.
He turned around, barely able to take in the sight.
From every direction, dragons were flying in: dragons in all colors and sizes. All of them that he could see had the faces of Chinese dragons, and many had the sinuous bodies that appeared in Chinese representations, as well. They came in all sorts of tones, from light pastel to deep-jewel red and blue and green: sometimes all in one individual. They came flying in so fast that Tom thought half of them wouldn’t be able to land. They came in so massed that sometimes it seemed two and three were flying almost one on top of the other, and it was amazing none of them collided, or entangled wings.
They landed, so close that it was like a crowd of people standing with no room to move their arms. They stood, wing jostling wing, a moving mass of shining scales, large and small, bright and pale.
Tom understood, suddenly, a fact delivered by those sealed files at the back of his mind, that size was a function of age for dragons, as well as a function of natural heredity. None of which explained his own size change. He was almost sure that he hadn’t aged a hundred years in minutes.
And he wished he knew what to say to them. As he thought this, he knew immediately that he’d be able to speak clearly because he’d be using dragon language, delivered up by yet another of his files. And yet he balked at it. He was not who they thought he was.
But there was no point arguing with the instinctive knowledge of what to do. He had a sense of how many times this ritual had been repeated—and only twice in error—throughout the millennia uncountable that dragons had been on Earth. And that twice had been … best for the ritual to take place anyway. Without the ritual, dragons wouldn’t have a head. And it would be a bad, bad thing to have giant lizards, many of them only theoretically controlled, fanning out over the world and doing what they pleased to the nonshifting mass of humanity.
He felt his dragon mouth adjust into unfamiliar shapes, as sounds came out of it, “I am the Great Sky Dragon,” he said, knowing he lied, but not caring just then. “He is not dead. He lives.”
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