Noah's Boy

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  As though in a ceremony in the church Tom had attended as a child, the audience seemed to have an instinctive reaction to this.

  One by one, the shining bodies that made the parking lot look as though it were covered in a patchwork of shining, bejeweled cloth, dipped, as each dragon knelt his front legs and lowered his powerful neck and massive head towards the asphalt in a sign of respect.

  Almost every dragon. At the back, two—dark blue and huge—stood defiant, staring Tom in the eye.

  *

  Bea had gone to bed in the little loft bedroom which she privately thought of as “eagle’s nest.” There was no reason to think of it that way and, on the face of it, it was a stupid designation, since she understood eagle nests were made of the usual twigs and sticks, and this space was as neat or neater than the rest of the house.

  It was also, she understood, peculiarly Rafiel’s.

  Over dinner, he’d told her that—as fond as he was of the house where he and his parents lived in Goldport—all his favorite memories of childhood were bound up in this cabin, because when they were here, his often-busy father wasn’t distracted with police work or anything else, but was free to spend time with Rafiel. And his mother who, in town, worked as a librarian and rarely had time for home cooking, much less baking, would bake endless batches of cookies and treats. And Rafiel would be free to roam around the surrounding forest, after having been instructed on how to avoid dangers.

  They’d come here, he told Bea, a lot of weekends, but also two solid weeks every summer, as well as at Christmas. And because they were usually here on weekends when he was growing up—unless his father was working over the weekend—most of Rafiel’s hobbies and leisure activities from when he was a kid were here.

  It seemed to be true. She noted a telescope in a corner, which would have been fun—would probably still be fun—if one opened the skylight and pointed the telescope at it. She noted, too, an assembled Lego robot of some sort in a corner. And there were walkie-talkies tucked in the same corner.

  Not that there were many toys. It was clear what remained must have had special significance to Rafiel and had stayed behind while the rest was discarded or put in storage. What there was now in the room seemed to make it a comfortable retreat for a busy man. One of the walls, short, at the end of the sloping ceiling, was covered with bookcases made of polished pine and double-stacked with colorful mystery paperbacks.

  Agatha Christie, Carolyn Hart, and a lot of other names she recognized on scanning. She would have to look at them more carefully during the day, she decided, but she felt oddly tired—perhaps from the drive, and the night air of the forest.

  Or perhaps, she thought ruefully, it was that she had died and come back to life. Seemed like an activity that would tire anyone out.

  She shook her head. No. This was no time to think about it. But it was no time to read either. She felt relaxed as she hadn’t been in a long time. Perhaps—of course—it was the very excellent bottle of chianti that Rafiel had unearthed and opened for them after dinner. That could be the reason, since she rarely drank and usually not half a bottle.

  But now, her job was to get in a nightgown and in bed. Rafiel had brought her a nightgown, still in plastic packaging, explaining, “No, it’s not my mom’s. Mom and Dad keep nightgowns, pajamas and T-shirts out here in about every size for when they have parties, so that if people drink too much, Mom can persuade them to stay overnight.”

  The nightgown was actually a large-size T-shirt emblazoned with “GOLDPORT, COLORADO, THE GOLDEN CITY.”

  “I think Mom bought them bulk when the city was changing designs or something,” he said. “Anyway, there’s new toothbrushes in the drawer in your bathroom, and there should be toiletries in the cabinet under the sink.”

  There was all that, and Bea laid out the nightgown, brushed her teeth and took a long and reassuringly warm shower, before crawling into bed beneath a homey quilt.

  Drifting to sleep, she hoped that Rafiel’s mom would get through to her parents. And in the next moment, she was stark awake, with a message—no, a need—running through her head.

  There were no words in it, or at least no words she recognized, but it was an imperative order. She must get out of bed. She must shift. She must fly in the direction the need pulled her.

  If the feelings in her had words, the words would be: The Great Sky Dragon has died. The Great Sky Dragon lives forever. Every dragon within wing-reach of him must pay homage.

  She had a fleeting thought that she couldn’t shift. It was less than twenty-four hours since she’d been dead. And yet … and yet, she must shift, the imperative was that serious.

  The pangs of shifting twisted her muscles, as her bones tried to change shape. If she didn’t obey the need, her body would do it anyway, and she would shift here, and be wedged in this room, possibly breaking half the furniture.

  With all her willpower, she held off the shift, as her hand found the button that Rafiel had shown her, the one that opened the skylight above. The colder night air hit her on the face, as she stripped off the nightgown.

  Even standing on the bed, the skylight was impossibly above Bea’s reach. She grabbed Rafiel’s desk chair and, with an apology to the sheets, set it on top of the bed. At least she wasn’t setting the chair on top of the quilt and risking tearing it.

  Climbing on the chair, unsteady upon the mattress, she managed to grasp the edges of the skylight. Pushing with her feet to get a better grip made the chair fall from under her, crashing sideways onto the floor.

  It left her suspended from the skylight. Fortunately, she was not a normal woman.

  If there’s one thing growing wings does, Bea thought, it gives you a set of arm muscles that would give Olympic lifters a case of envy.

  She pulled up her feet in a graceful gesture that would have made gymnasts cry. And then, planting her bare feet against the side of the skylight, she pulled herself out, until she was stark naked, standing on the roof of the log cabin beside the skylight.

  For a moment, she wondered what she would say if Rafiel appeared in the room, or down in front of the cabin and asked what she was doing.

  Fortunately the question didn’t arise. Almost immediately her body started hurting for real, as breath was knocked out of her body by her muscles and bones twisting and changing, and by wings extending, strong as silk, translucent as clouds from her shoulders.

  She had barely transformed when, the drive in her demanding it, she took to the sky, wings outspread.

  *

  Rafiel had been asleep. At least, he was almost sure he’d been asleep. He didn’t quite know how to describe the state he’d been in.

  His mother would have been deeply gratified had she known that Bea had, in fact, made such an impression on him that he was considering a relationship.

  He couldn’t have explained why to himself, much less to his mom. Or to Bea. Which was why he intended on saying exactly nothing until he found a coherent way to explain how he felt.

  But the truth was, deep inside, and in a way that made no sense to him and probably would make no sense to anyone else either, he was already sure that Bea was the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. Which was loony, right? After all, she was a dragon. If he was going to settle with another shifter, shouldn’t it be a nice lion girl?

  The idea made him smile sleepily as he lay there, between sleep and wakefulness, between reality and dream.

  So, Bea was still in college. Art. Well, the advantage of art was that she could practice her profession anywhere, right? He hadn’t asked what year she was in, but she’d said she was twenty-one, so it should be either her junior or senior year.

  It would be hard of course, Georgia was a ways distant, and Bea hadn’t flown here, and he wasn’t sure how long it would take her to fly as a dragon—but probably too long. It took Tom an hour just to get to Denver, though to be honest the only time he flew to Denver was when it was such bad weather that he couldn’t drive, and h
is father had some sort of emergency.

  Anyway, so flying was a third of driving, and that was still too long. Over a weekend, she’d be able to do little more than fly here and fly back.

  But there were airplanes, after all, and though he was suspicious of airplanes, as he was suspicious of all forms of transportation or lodging requiring him to be compressed in next to someone else, he could manage that. He could fly up and visit every other weekend. Expensive, but doable.

  Doable for a year. And then they could get married, and she could move here.

  In his mind’s eye he could already see them married, with a few kids, bringing the kids up to the cabin on weekends, with grandma and granddad. They would buy a place of their own. Even his parents had to understand that. They would settle down in a routine and take the kids for the Tuesday-children-eat-free special at The George, and having Tom go all goofy as he usually did around kids, and make his special dragon-shaped fries and rocket-ship jelly doughnuts for the little ones.

  In the middle of this pleasant revelry, imagining a slightly more plump Bea sitting across from him at the diner table, smiling at their kids’ antics, he heard a big crash.

  It wasn’t quite enough to wake him, but it was enough to startle him. He was aware it came from above. But he didn’t hear Bea cry out or any other sound of distress, and he assumed she’d just tripped and knocked something over. For him to go running to see what it was would only make her feel uncomfortable and out of place, which was not something he wanted to do.

  So, instead, he stayed very still. But as he was starting to drift into dream again, he heard the sound of dragon wings.

  It was unmistakable to anyone who had heard it even once. That flap-flap-flap might sound somewhat like sheets waving in the wind, but only if the sheets were massive and more substantial than any sheet ever was, and if the wind whipping them around was gale-force.

  No. It was a dragon.

  Rafiel sat up in bed listening, as the sound of wings circled the cabin. His heart was beating very fast, near his throat.

  Was it Bea? It might be, even though they’d thought she wouldn’t be able to shift for a day. But why would she be shifting like this, without telling him? Was she really, secretly, an agent of the Great Sky Dragon or some other shifter organization? Had she shifted in order to take word to someone else? Or was something else at work? Was she uncomfortable? Had he made her uncomfortable? Had he come on too strongly? He’d tried to be good about it, but what if he’d hinted at his certainty that they’d end up together? That was enough to spook many a young woman, dragon or not.

  And what if it wasn’t Bea at all, but one of the dragons of the Great Sky Dragon? He had to know.

  Half awake, he rushed into a robe, then across the hallway and the kitchen to the back door of the cabin. It opened onto a covered porch, set with rocking chairs, on which his parents sat on Saturday afternoons and read while watching the wildlife around.

  Rafiel ran down the back steps, barefoot, thinking belatedly that he was going to get the mother of all wood splinters, and trying to ignore it.

  He ran a little while down the back path, trying to look up, but there was no dragon in sight.

  “Umph,” he said, standing on the beaten-dirt path as a raccoon ran out of the forest, took one look at Rafiel and disappeared running into another part of the forest.

  “Right,” he said. He’d imagined the wing sound, and probably the big crash too, for all he knew. He would go back upstairs and …

  At that moment it hit him. It was a smell, but it was a smell such as he’d never smelled as a human before. It was … louder than words, a symphony of feelings, of offers, of seduction.

  It was, he realized, the smell of a female feline in heat. As the thought crossed his mind, he had already changed, and was running, headlong, into the forest, lion paws striking the soil so hard they brought up dirt clods. His nose followed the divine scent.

  *

  Kyrie finished counting out the drawer and tallying everything. It wasn’t as difficult as it had once been, because while buying the expensive fryer, they’d chosen to go into deeper debt for a computerized cash register. So she had an accurate account of all the credit card purchases as well as a clear figure of what she should have in cash—which she had and a little more. For a moment, she was confused, then remembered that Jason had told her Speaker had insisted on not taking tips. She sighed. It just made things difficult, but she imagined his intentions had been good, and it would be churlish to be upset.

  The take was still staggering, particularly the profit part of it. Partly because most of what people had ordered had been relatively low-overhead items like coffee and iced tea. And they’d ordered a lot of drinks.

  She looked up to see a disconsolate Rya hanging around. “I think they went on, er … flying business,” she told Kyrie.

  Kyrie nodded. “I thought so,” she said, as she wrote down figures to verify later.

  Rya blinked owlishly at her. “How do you put up with it? The”—she lowered her voice, though the diner was almost empty no—“the dragon thing? It seems more complicated than all the shapeshifting is.”

  You have no idea how complicated it can get, Kyrie thought, but didn’t say it. Instead, she said, “Oh, it’s … well … You cope with it. Everyone has weird stuff, right?”

  Rya nodded, but looked doubtful. “It’s all the ancestral loyalty and stuff … though I think you don’t get that from Tom.”

  “You’d be amazed,” Kyrie said, then took a deep breath. She felt just as out of step as Rya looked. She’d guessed Tom and Conan had gone, as Rya put it, on “flying business” but what the business might be, she had no idea. She did have a good idea that something had happened to Tom, something relating to the Great Sky Dragon, something she hesitated to think about too much, because every time the Great Sky Dragon came into their lives it was bad news. Oh, sure, the last time, he had prevented Tom from being killed—probably several times over—but … That was barely enough to forgive him for what he had done to Tom before. And besides, it seemed whenever the Great Sky Dragon became involved, things were about to get complicated.

  Either it was some problem with the dragon triad or … or one of the other older shifter organizations. It seemed to Kyrie—though, admittedly, her actual experience of this was limited—that all the older shifters went crazy in a peculiar way, becoming paranoid and trying to enforce shifter law, whatever that was, with a like-minded group of other shifters, who were the only ones in the world they would trust. There were the triad and the Ancient Ones; Old Joe, the alligator shifter who often hung out around the dumpster of the diner, had hinted there were others.

  Thinking of Old Joe made her stand straighter. Yes, Old Joe was probably nuts in many ways. But then, from things he’d said about being alive before the domestication of horses … she was fairly sure that no human brain—no shifter brain either—was designed to store that much information. Though he wasn’t addled as such. It was more that he’d decided that following human rules, or shifter rules, or any rules at all was no longer in his interest.

  In his human form, he lived the life of a vagrant, hitting all the soup kitchens and the clothing giveaways in the city—and the diner too, half the time—and sleeping in parks and under underpasses. In alligator form … well … He roamed all over town, and seemed to enjoy himself immensely, judging from reports of people finding an alligator in all sorts of unusual places, including but not limited to the archeological dig at the edge of town, which he haunted for reasons that he’d never been willing to explain to Kyrie. Probably like old people hanging out at the cemetery, Kyrie thought. They’re digging up dinosaur bones, after all. He’s probably looking up old friends. The idea was very silly. Old Joe had never given any indication of being on Earth before human occupation, which might not have been possible anyway.

  But one thing was sure. Old Joe was one of the older shifters still alive, and if something weird was happening with To
m and the dragons, he would probably be able to explain it to her. That is, supposing she could get him to tune in to the present and pay attention to her for a change.

  His memory might or might not be erratic, but Old Joe often gave the impression that his perception—the part of him that was aware of his surroundings—wandered through the millennia in which he’d been alive. His responses were random and nonsensical most of the time.

  Unless Tom was around, of course. For reasons not immediately clear—unless it was gratitude to Tom for looking after him—Old Joe seemed very fond of Tom, or perhaps amused by him.

  Kyrie finished her notes on the accounting for the night, and caught Jason’s eye, right after he set down a load of dirty dishes. There was only one table occupied in the diner right now, though there would be the usual burst of activity at about half-past midnight, as people came in from late movies and late art shows, or just having finished a study session. But Jason had been tried by fire in one of the most demanding nights the diner had ever seen. “Jason, do you think you could hold down the fort for an hour or so?” she asked.

  “Uh.” He looked behind the counter dubiously. “I don’t know how to operate anything. I suppose I could manage the dishwasher and the grill, but …”

  “Well, that’s fine. Just tell them we’re out of fries. It’s actually true; I think we went through all the potatoes, certainly all the peeled ones we had reserved. It will be an hour or a little more.”

  Rya cleared her throat. “Are you going to … find out where the guys went?”

  “Sort of. I’m trying to figure out what made them go. What … this is all about.”

  “Um,” Rya said. “Sometimes I help out. When Conan works on Saturday afternoons. I think I can manage the grill and stuff, if Jason will do the serving, and I will do some potato peeling too.”

  “The fryer? You can manage the fryer?”