Rya looked up at the sky. “I’ve given a hand now and then when … you know … dragon business.”
“Don’t tell Tom. Whatever happens, don’t tell Tom,” Kyrie said. “He’d go insane thinking of the insurance costs. But,” she said, more calmly, as she took off her apron and passed it to Rya, “if you can man … er … woman the cooking now, we won’t say anything more about it. I’ll go and see an alligator about some dragons.”
*
Tom looked at the dragons standing at the back, and though he didn’t say anything, and though none of the other dragons moved, he had the sense that every one there was aware of the dragons at the back and of their standing in … defiance? challenge? … of him.
He looked at them a long time, while the back of his mind ruffled through files. He had an impression he should know their names, should know who they were and what they wanted. “Li Liu,” he said at last as the names came to him, as well as the explanation that these two were brothers. “And Sun Liu. Do you believe you’re bigger than the Great Sky Dragon?”
“We are collaterals of the Great Sky Dragon,” the taller of the two dragons said, hissing his language like a pro. “We are the many-time sons of the Great Sky Dragon’s brother, and we say our claim is greater than yours.”
Tom hesitated. Of course, rationally, he wanted to say, “Fine, you be the Great Sky Bastard, then,” but he suspected that like most things involving the triad this was not a gentleman’s dispute, involving his stepping down and their receiving the honor. In fact, he wondered if they could receive the honor at all, even were he dead. He didn’t think so. He remembered the Great Sky Dragon’s gambit with Bea, and he very much doubted so. There was something else going on here that he could not fully comprehend, at least not yet.
He felt, as if a touch in his mind, a thought from Conan. It was both friendly and diffident, not so much an intrusion in his mind, as there had been when the Great Sky Dragon had sent him warnings before, but rather a hesitant touch, as though of a friend knocking at a room’s door. He received the touch with relief, and Conan’s voice said in his mind, weirdly still in his Southern drawl, “I don’t think they understand how it works. I mean, no one does. Everyone thinks it’s being the son’s son of the Great Sky Dragon, but I think … it’s more than that.”
Tom gave him a mental indication that it was indeed more than that. But meanwhile, he suspected the blue gentlemen dragons would not be fobbed off with that. He tried to reach into their minds, but he could not. Wasn’t the Great Sky Dragon supposed to be able to reach into the mind of every member of the triad?
“See, you are not him,” Sun Liu said. “We can keep you out.”
A pull through Tom’s mental files brought up the idea that the Pearl of Heaven, which Tom had had in his possession far too briefly, would solve that, but the process seemed complicated, and Tom wasn’t at all sure he understood it. What he was sure of was that this was not the time for a philosophical discussion.
He sighed. The file also informed him the only way to solve this was to kill his challengers, and it gave him a deep knowledge in his blood and bones of the sense of how to do it. It was as though he’d grown up in the culture and fought a hundred such battles—which the Liu brothers very well might have. He didn’t want to kill anyone. Then a thought intruded. Fortunately, in the dragon world, death could be painful and, in fact, horrible, but it need not be permanent.
Tom reared on his hind dragon legs, and flapped his wings to the sky. “We fly,” he said. “We fly.”
*
Old Joe wasn’t by the dumpster, and Kyrie walked some way down the alley, whistling his peculiar whistle, which had become Tom’s way of calling him.
She was about to give up, when something moved inside the ruin of the burned-out, water-soaked bed-and-breakfast across the parking lot from the diner. At first she thought it was a cat or a dog. That part of the ruin, where the tower collapsed, was open to the world, but when she blinked, she realized it was an old man, white-haired, soot-smeared, coming towards her, with a smile that exposed broken and missing teeth.
She recognized Old Joe at the same time she realized he was wearing a trench coat and was barefoot. He also looked like he’d been sleeping in a coal pile.
His smile enlarged, and he squeezed his eyes in amusement. “I was getting some clothes,” he said, “so I could come into the diner. I thought there might be some clothes in there, no? And there was.” He gestured, proudly, towards his trench coat.
It was something Kyrie appreciated in Tom, that he could have heard a declaration like this and smiled and said, “How nice.” But Kyrie was not Tom and their minds didn’t work in the same way. Throughout her upbringing, she’d often found herself being the oldest foster child in seriously inadequate households, and having to look after all the young ones, as a means of keeping them from being neglected. This had bred a personality into her that was somewhere between mommy and educator. The mommy was willing to concede that Old Joe putting on … anything before sauntering into the diner was an improvement. It wouldn’t be the first time he crouched outside the side windows, popping up now and then like an insane jack-o-lantern, his hair all on end, and his wrinkled, naked body flashing up and down, trying to catch Tom’s eye, so Tom would bring him clothes or food. The educator, on the other hand, felt forced to say, “Well, yes, but it’s filthy. Come into the back, I’ll get you clothes, and you can wash and put them on.”
Old Joe looked dubious, but followed her into the hallway of the diner and waited while she got clothes from the pile they kept for him in the storage room. They bought them at the thrift store on any-piece-of-clothing-for-a-dollar day, and blew a couple of hundred dollars twice a year. As far as Old Joe’s mind went, clothes were consumables. He’d wear them when he had to, but he wouldn’t bother to take them off, or hide them so he might wear them again. Instead, he would shift and either tear them to shreds in the process or soon afterwards, while he walked around.
Kyrie had often read reports of an alligator wearing a tattered T-shirt, and it was only the fact that she had some willpower and could control her more whimsical moods that had saved her from giving Old Joe a bowler hat.
When she came out with the bundle of clothes, he took them, but looked at her sheepishly. “I got to wash?” he asked.
“We don’t want people in the diner to be all disgusted at your being filthy,” she said.
Old Joe looked very sad and said something she couldn’t quite understand, but which she suspected was his version of “When in Rome,” though considering this was Old Joe, it might very well be “When in Atlantis” or “When in Mu.”
He disappeared into the women’s restroom, because it was the more spacious one, and also because Kyrie, frankly, didn’t trust him not to try to wash in the urinals. So, whenever Old Joe washed, he washed in the ladies’ room. Kyrie stood at the door, waiting, preventing any woman from trying to get in. Not that any did. There were still few people in the diner, and none got the urge just then.
When he was clean, Joe knocked from the inside, and Kyrie opened the door.
He still looked like a derelict. To make Old Joe look like something other than a derelict would take … well, probably plastic surgery. The truth was that his wrinkles had wrinkles, and that the wrinkles on his wrinkles had got so much ground-in dirt in them that they might as well be tattoos. Or maybe they were tattoos. Whenever Old Joe had grown up, it was now almost unimaginably long ago, and it was almost certainly a preliterate society that had left no trace. Maybe facial tattoos had been a manhood ritual or something.
So, he still looked dirty, and his remaining white hair looked as wild as Einstein’s but less clean. And he … It wasn’t so much that he stooped or shambled. Oh, you could say he did both, but the words were, to an extent, inadequate. Yes, he stooped. Yes, he shambled. But his posture was more reminiscent of someone who had collapsed into place over centuries, becoming not so much aged as … petrified, stratified. Like a
little mountain in human form.
Still, the eyes that looked at her weren’t tired or stony at all. Instead, they were full of the merriment he seemed to find in anything unusual or unsettling.
And Kyrie realized there was something very unusual indeed, as she realized he was still clutching the filthy trench coat in his—presumably just-washed—hand.
Old Joe had dressed in that trench coat without Tom or herself making him. And that was kind of like hearing the sun had risen in the west, or that soup had fallen from the sky. It was impossible. Absolutely and completely impossible.
But he’d done it.
She looked into the twinkling eyes and asked carefully, with slow suspicion dawning that she wasn’t going to like the answer at all, “Why were you going to come into the diner?”
He grinned. “I hear dragon boy got dragon egg. I wanted to know how he’s doing with it, because …” He looked suddenly embarrassed. “I like dragon boy. He’s nice people.”
Uh-oh. He knew what had happened to Tom. It should have been a relief, Kyrie thought, because if Old Joe knew, it meant that Old Joe could tell her what had happened, and maybe even why and how to get around the problem. But it didn’t feel like a relief. This whole dragon egg thing didn’t sound pleasant. She had a vision of a juvenile dragon bursting from Tom’s chest and bit her lower lip.
“Go into the corner booth,” she said, “and wait. I’ll bring you food.”
And she was left to torture herself with scary suppositions while she wiped off the soot marks from wall and sink and dried the water splashes on the floor. They really should install a shower in the storage room the next time they had some spare cash. Having people wash in the ladies’ room was messy and probably violated all sorts of rules and regulations.
Of course, next time they had some spare cash was assuming things would return to normal. And Kyrie wasn’t sure of that at all.
*
Was it really Tom up there, in front of the restaurant? Bea had trouble believing it. She’d met his dragon, after all, on the ledge of that bed-and-breakfast tower, but the truth was that if Tom perched on that ledge now, he would have taken it down in a crashing heap.
He was … enormous. How did a dragon grow? And then she heard his voice in her mind. Standing at the edge of the crowd, she saw the two idiots stand and challenge him. Not that she was sure they were idiots. But then, they had to be. No sane person would challenge something the size Tom was now. And no sane person would challenge anyone, dragon or human, whose eyes showed as much bewildered fear as Tom’s did at that moment.
Tom didn’t want to be where he was. That didn’t surprise her. She’d gathered he had no intention of being a leader of the triad. But he was there and—as he issued the challenge, because it was very obvious what he meant by “We fly”—she realized he would fight for the position he didn’t want.
She wondered why.
Then she stopped wondering. She’d met Tom only this day, and she couldn’t say she was his lifetime friend. But Tom was … The Tom she’d met had seemed to be polite, caring, nice—in outdated but probably accurate terms, a good man.
Nothing could have prepared her for seeing his dragon take to the air, flanked by the two blue dragons.
It should have come as no surprise that both blue dragons went up at once. Or perhaps it shouldn’t have. She didn’t know. What were the rules of sportsmanship for dragons? And did it matter if two went up at the same time against another dragon that was so massively larger than either of them?
Like every other dragon present in the parking lot, she sat back and turned her face up to watch.
Tom flew straight up, green-blue underside flashing bright. He looked bigger, more substantial than the other two. But the other two weren’t daunted. The larger one tried to fly to the side of Tom and bite him on the neck. Tom evaded it, almost skewering himself on the other dragon’s claw—out and trying to disembowel him.
And then it seemed to her that Tom lost patience. He reached out with arm claws, and grabbed the other dragon’s arm and twisted viciously and pulled. Clearly he had more strength than the others, because the arm tore off the dragon’s body. A fine rain of blood fell on the upturned faces of dragons.
Tom kicked away the larger blue dragon trying to attack him, almost eviscorating the dragon in the process, and turned his fury on the smaller blue dragon. Methodically, like a psychopathic little boy with a fly, he ripped off the dragon’s other arm, then the nearest leg.
And then he flamed, burning off the dragon’s wings as the dragon, in shock, tried to run away. And as the dragon’s brother tried to attack Tom by burning at Tom’s side, presumably to pull him off the other, Tom turned without hesitation and burned him, full in the face.
The smaller blue dragon had fallen like a stone onto the parking lot, his blood spattering those who’d hastily moved away from his falling path. The bigger one now fell too, hitting the pavement with force, close to Bea who’d scuttled back onto the little side street to give him room to fall. She had a chance to see him hit, blood splattering up from the impact, and then shift, almost immediately, into a small Chinese man with a burned face and shoulders. He was dead. Very, very dead. She felt queasy and looked again as Tom returned to stand in his spot in front of the restaurant.
Was this really the same civilized, kindly man she’d met earlier? She couldn’t believe it.
Neither could she believe the way the other dragons closed in around the fallen, not stepping on them but surrounding them completely, not wary of being near corpses or paying them any more mind than if they’d been a discarded candy bar wrapper.
He reared up on his hind legs, stretching his body to the sky, “The Great Sky Dragon is dead. The Great Sky Dragon lives forever.” And, as though on cue, every dragon prostrated themselves, and Bea did, too. But she wondered how bad this would get.
CHAPTER 15
“What do you mean by the dragon egg?” Kyrie asked, sliding into the booth across from Old Joe. She’d put a bowl of clam chowder in front of him, and slid a plate of souvlaki and gyro meat in beside it. She had put silverware down, too, but Old Joe was always whimsical about silverware, using it when he very well felt like it, and ignoring it or treating it as jewelry the rest of the time.
This was one of the times he’d chosen to ignore it—which was just as well, because the sight of Old Joe with fork and knife twisted into what remained of his hair always made people turn and stare, and Kyrie would much rather they didn’t attract attention just now.
So she tried not to act offended or put off as he drank the clam chowder from the bowl and stuffed meat in his mouth with his fingers. He must have been aware of her disapproval, nonetheless, because he used the napkin on his fingers and lips before answering her. “It’s the knowledge of all the dragons. It always passes to Great Sky Dragon when Great Sky Dragon dies.”
“Uh? What do you mean it passes to him when he dies? Do you mean in the spirit world or something?”
Old Joe shook his head, then resumed stuffing his mouth. Kyrie got up and got a cup of coffee for herself and one for Old Joe. She took a sip from her cup while she waited for him to answer.
“Like,” he said, at last, “like when the king is dead someone becomes king; so like, the king is dead, long live the king?”
“Oh. The new Great Sky Dragon gets … knowledge? What knowledge?”
“The knowledge of all the sky dragons before. The dragon egg it’s called.” He frowned. “Or was called when the curr—the last Great Sky Dragon inherited.” He reached across and patted her hand, as if he thought she needed reassurance. “A long, long time ago. More time ago than I can count. The other Sky Dragon. Before dragon boy.”
Perhaps Kyrie had known it all along. Surely she had known it was a danger since she’d heard Bea’s story, but the idea was so preposterous that Kyrie had been keeping it at bay. “I … you mean Tom is the Great Sky Dragon?”
Old Joe nodded. “At least … there seems t
o be … Something is not right, but he is, at least, in the place of the Great Sky Dragon right now”—he clacked his teeth together in the way that, in alligator form, always gave the impression that he was laughing—“acting Great Sky Dragon.”
“But Tom would never accept it,” Kyrie protested. “Tom would never want to be … they’re a criminal organization. He’d never—”
“No,” Old Joe said. “You don’t understand. No choice. No choice for dragon boy. It’s in the blood. The memories follow the blood. It was … built that way when we came to this world.”
“When we came to this world?” Kyrie repeated, as she suddenly had a disturbing vision of Old Joe as a UFO cultist. Besides, she was absolutely sure she hadn’t come to this world, she had been born here.
“When our kind came to this world,” Old Joe said, and again patted her reassuringly.
“We were built so some people would … remember for everyone. And the Great Sky Dragon might be the only line that still goes on that remembers. Part because they keep to themselves, dragons do …” He frowned. “The rest of us have forgotten. Even I have forgotten, and I was supposed to remember. I was … But dragon boy has the inheritance in the blood, he has the dragon’s egg, and if he has the Pearl …” An odd sound as he put his tongue up between his two widely spaced front teeth and sucked air. “If he figures out how to use the Pearl … then he could remember all that he needs to remember.”
Kyrie’s head reeled. “Built? No, forget that. Just tell me … Why would Tom need to remember anything?”
“Well,” Old Joe’s eyes had a look of faraway remembering, as though looking upon unheard-of vistas. “Our people were hounded from world to world, weren’t they? We came here for refuge, didn’t we? But we must remember, because I can sense their agent among us … Whatever happened to the old dragon was their doing and unless dragon boy is ready to stand up to them …”
“Yes?”
“Even if he’s ready to stand up to them, but doesn’t know how to … we’ll die in this Earth too, and we’ll be gone forever.”
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