The phone rang and rang, and Tom could visualize it, hanging in the kitchen, ringing loudly, forlornly, startling Not Dinner who would be sleeping in his favorite perch by the bedroom window. The idea of the empty house and the phone ringing made him feel vaguely sick.
A rough hand grasped his wrist. He looked up into the unexpectedly understanding eyes of Old Joe. “They got cat girl?” he asked.
And Tom became aware that Conan stood by the table, looking down at him.
Tom set the cell phone on the table, very carefully. The thing was, as the Great Sky Dragon, he could reach into the minds of the men under his command. He extended a tentative tendril of consciousness towards Jao. Jao was sitting behind the reception desk at the Three Luck Dragon. He was staring unseeing at the TV screen which showed some sport or other. Tom probed deeper. There. There was a node of secrecy they were trying to hide from him.
Surely the triads wouldn’t be stupid enough to try to force him to marry Bea by kidnapping Kyrie? Surely they would know he could reach into their minds and control them? Surely …
“You didn’t scare them enough,” Conan said. “You didn’t make them take you seriously. You didn’t make them realize that you were serious.”
Tom looked up at him. He wanted to say that he’d taken two dragon shifters apart limb by limb. He wanted to say he’d rained blood and destruction on them.
Conan pushed Old Joe further into the booth and sat next to Old Joe, looking intently at Tom. “No, listen, I know you think you were very cruel and terrible, but Tom, you don’t know what these people are used to. You don’t know what they expect.”
Tom didn’t know whether to feel grateful that Conan had called him Tom and not something like “sir,” or be worried about Conan’s intent look.
“Yes, you temporarily killed some people but not permanently. Listen, the Great Sky Dragon would set tests that people were supposed to fail, and then kill them for failing. The entire hunt for … for you, when you had the Pearl of Heaven, was a made-up quest, to try to corral you and figure out what you were made of. But he killed those who failed all the same.”
“You can’t expect me to kill people just to prove I’m serious,” Tom said. His voice seemed to come from a long way away.
“No? They do. They kill people without a second thought. Most people in the triad aren’t very important, unless the Great Sky Dragon needs them for some reason, like he needed you. They expect you to be the same. For millennia, they’ve thought of themselves as nothing but possessions, nothing but an extension of the triad, nothing but … a piece of the Great Sky Dragon’s mind. Nothing. They expect that sort of mind at the top. You didn’t take over. You didn’t show them the same ruthlessness. So, no, they think of you not as the Great Sky Dragon, but as his heir, who is not obeying his will. They’re trying to bend you to his will.”
Tom looked up, suddenly suspicious. “How do you know? You can’t have heard what—”
“No,” Conan said. “But I heard you answer expecting Kyrie. I know it wasn’t Kyrie who answered you. And I could feel your mind probe looking … for someone harboring guilty knowledge. You’re not very good yet at not broadcasting these things. Don’t feel bad. He had thousands of years of practice, and sometimes he wasn’t very good. But he was ruthless.”
Tom looked up at Conan’s anxious face. Conan looked like hell, tired and sleepless, but also pale and scared. More scared than he’d looked in the Three Luck Dragon parking lot.
Old Joe was still grasping Tom’s wrist between two calloused and greasy fingers. “Listen to the young man, dragon boy. He’s right. You weren’t harsh enough. The dragon clan always, always expects their leader to be strong and demanding. They don’t know the difference between cruelty and strength. You’re not cruel, they think you weak. They took cat girl, didn’t they?”
“Yes. They said they’ll free her if I marry … whom they want me to marry.”
“You know it’s not even true, right?” Conan said. “Oh, it might be true, in a way, or they might think it is. But if they find they can control you that way, no one connected to you will ever be safe, nor will you ever be able to do anything at all you want. You will always have to do what they want you to. You won’t have a will of your own.”
Tom felt his lips curling upward, which was strange, because he wasn’t in the least amused. “No fear there,” he said. “I have not the slightest intention of marrying Bea. At any rate, I don’t think she has the slightest interest in marrying me.”
He looked up and realized that Old Joe and Conan were staring at him with a half-expectant, half-apprehensive look.
“So?” Old Joe asked.
“So,” Tom said, “if it’s ruthlessness they want, it’s ruthlessness they get.”
*
Rafiel and Bea drove into Goldport as the sun was setting. Though saying they drove in was not the right idiom, insofar as Rafiel was fairly sure he had slept half the way into town. Bea hadn’t complained of driving while he slept, and when he’d awakened, he’d found she was listening to music very low.
“We’re almost at Goldport,” she said. “You know, I have absolutely no idea where to stay. I remember looking it up beforehand, because I figured I would have to stop somewhere overnight after talking to the triad, and I found a hotel and a bed-and-breakfast …” She paused for a moment. “I guess the bed-and-breakfast is gone now, but at any rate, I thought that they were both too expensive for me—and then there were a bunch of motels, but I wasn’t sure which ones were safe. I guess you can tell me which are safe?”
Rafiel bit back his instinctive Of course you’ll stay with me, just in time, so that instead of saying anything, he growled low in his throat, which he turned into a cough as he sat up. But truly, the motels around Goldport were fairly dismal, as he should know. They’d been tourist motels in the fifties, when it was fashionable for families of mom, dad and kids to drive around the country sightseeing.
Many still retained the folksy appearance and even names from that time. There were motels called after Old West heroes, like the Kit Carson out on Ore Road. And there were others named after exotic locales which had absolutely nothing to do with the American West, but which might very well have provided incitement to the would-be travelers of a bygone era. He remembered how the Mecca Motel had hung up a sign saying AMERICAN OWNED AND OPERATED right after 9/11, lest anyone would suspect the dismal collection of whitewashed buildings on the road out of town towards the mountains of being owned and operated by petro dollars or Saudi princes.
But the fact was that the type of tourist that stayed overnight at that kind of low-rent motel had gone the way of the dodo. Most of the motels around Goldport were now occupied by people whose credit was so bad that they couldn’t even get a rental contract and must instead rent week to week, often paying with the aid of government assistance. There were also some, like the one on Sierra Street downtown, which had convenient arrangements with ladies who only needed the bed for a night or two, and the one up on the west side that was often used by sex offenders as a temporary place to live after release.
For a city with as low a crime rate as Goldport, the motels still managed to be a focus of bad things happening and bad people hanging out. In fact, Rafiel often felt that if they could just get rid of all the flea-bag motels, the rest of the city would be very little trouble. This thought was countered by his colleague Cas Wolfe, though, who insisted that the motels worked as collectors of people prone to undesirable behavior, so that if they weren’t absolutely sure there was anything wrong in town, they just had to go knock at one or two doors at the nearest hotel to find something illegal. He maintained this was the best way for them to show work and keep their jobs.
“You are very quiet,” Bea said.
“Look, none of the motels are safe,” Rafiel said.
“Are you sure? There was this one as I was getting into town, with a big neon, er … Native American in traditional headdress, and the cabins were shaped like
log houses, and I thought—” Something must have made her look at him, and he knew what his face would be showing. “No?”
“Well, they’re not used to renting the rooms for the whole night,” Rafiel said. “And I’ve never checked that they change sheets between—”
“For the whol— Oh no. Really?”
Rafiel shrugged. “Most of the time we can’t prove anything, and they have lookouts, and if we tried to raid it, we’d just end up coming up dry, but yeah. I mean, it’s well known. People make jokes about Tomahawk Motel. Like, you know, school kids in my day said things like ‘Your sister has her own room at the Tomahawk Motel.’”
“Oh, how sad. It looked cute.”
“People fly nowadays. And people who come to town on business want to stay at a hotel or, at most, a nice bed-and-breakfast with a family atmosphere, but between the horror movies giving the impression that roadside motels are psycho magnets, and the fact that, well … most of them were designed for people with kids making their leisurely way across the land, their clientele has just vanished. I suspect most of the people who used to stay at those now stay at the campgrounds on the east side of town.”
“Maybe you can lend me a tent,” Bea said. “I don’t think I can stay at the hotel, really. I looked at the rates. And I probably shouldn’t ask your friends if they’ll put me up, right?”
Rafiel had been trying to figure out how to phrase it, and now he thought he had it. “No. Of course not. You can stay with my parents.”
From the way his offer fell, heavy, between them, he guessed he’d been misunderstood. “Listen, it’s like this: I know I theoretically live with them, but I don’t really. When I came back from college, they had the basement converted into an apartment, and I have my own entrance … You can have my place as long as you need, and I’ll stay upstairs in the guest room, or you can stay upstairs. In either case you’ll be perfectly safe. I wasn’t making an untoward—”
She got very red, but laughed at that. “No. Really. We were alone in a cabin in the woods. I’m aware if you were of a mind to ravish me, you could have done it there. It’s just that I feel I shouldn’t put you and your family through this kind of trouble. My problems are not your fault. I came to town to deal with the dragon triad. It’s nothing you’ve done.”
Rafiel could feel his lips compressing. You can’t, he realized, tell a girl you’ve met just over twenty-four hours ago that it is your duty and right to look after her, not even if you feel in your heart that this is absolutely true. Correction. You don’t tell her that, particularly if you feel in your heart that this is absolutely true. Because any girl—particularly a girl who has had a particularly insane arranged marriage pushed on her—is likely to run for the hills at that type of thing.
The only time he’d tried to seriously court a woman since his high school days—beyond the constrained first dates, in which he tried to be pleasant but not so pleasant that they were heartbroken when he failed to call—had been his attempt at telling Kyrie that they were meant for each other. The spectacular failure of the technique in that case did not encourage him to attempt it again.
But, he realized, there was a way he could tell Bea he felt responsible without telling her he’d spent the last twenty-four hours feverishly dreaming of her as his wife, and of the cute kids they’d have. At least the part of the twenty-four hours when he wasn’t having wild animal sex with some creature whose human form he wouldn’t even recognize. He was very grateful that Bea had taken that particular revelation with absolute calm, but he didn’t need to remind her of it, either. Or make her think he was more unstable than he was.
So, instead he said, slowly and reasonably, “Listen, I know it’s stupid, but I do feel responsible for your safety, because, you see, I am the only shifter in the police force. My duty to protect the public and keep criminal activity down is particularly strong when it comes to crimes committed by and against shifters. With my knowledge, and without my being able to do much to curb it, a criminal organization run by foreign gangsters set up in Goldport, and I ignored it because they weren’t even selling drugs in the area. But I should have known they were up to something, and if I had investigated and pursued their ties, they might not have been able to bother your father, and you wouldn’t have come all the way up here. So the fact that you’re here is my fault, and it’s up to me to keep you safe while you’re in the area.”
She was quiet a long while. Then she gave him an evaluating look, just as they passed the sign that said, WELCOME TO GOLDPORT COLORADO. “You’re right,” she said. “It is stupid. If you had managed to stop them from doing stuff in Goldport, they’d just have conducted operations elsewhere. It’s not like you could, singlehandedly, stop a dragon triad that spans the globe. And if I hadn’t come to Goldport on this business, I’d have gone elsewhere, Denver or somewhere. And you wouldn’t be able to protect me there.”
“Then it is fortunate I can protect you here,” he said, with his best smile, and hoped that his face had healed enough that it didn’t look creepy.
It must have, because she laughed. “You’re a lunatic.”
“Oh, yes. Guilty as charged. Now, if you don’t mind, I presume my car will still be outside Riverside Amusement Park. If you don’t mind taking me there to pick it up, I think we can get it before dark. And then you can follow me home.” He realized belatedly that he’d called his house home, but she didn’t say anything, and he dug in his pocket for his cell phone. “I’ll call Mom and ask her if there’s enough dinner for two more. If she’s not cooking, or there’s something that can’t be stretched to four, I’ll take you out to dinner.”
“Oh, really,” Bea said. The blush was back. “I wouldn’t want to put your mom to any trouble.”
“No trouble at all.” He didn’t want to tell Bea his mother would think that her prayers were finally answered. Even less did he want to tell her that he very much hoped they were. Instead, he said, “Turn left at Madison, then right at Mariposa Street.” And he dialed his parents’ number.
*
“You can’t just go to the Three Luck Dragon and set fire to it,” Conan said. He spoke in the sort of urgent whisper he might use to calm down a dangerous mental patient.
The whispering part was because Anthony had come in to take a late shift in response to Tom’s call begging him to come in. They must have trained Anthony well, because he barely looked askance at Tom sitting in the corner booth with Conan and one of the more disreputable vagrants around.
“You know I’m only supposed to work days not nights, right?” was all Anthony had said.
Tom nodded and said, “That’s why we pay you double for nights. Look, I just want you to take over and stay as long as needed. I have … some stuff to do and I don’t know when it will be done.”
And then Anthony had muttered something or other about a diaper service and gone behind the counter. Moments later, Rya had been sent home, and now Anthony was running the area behind the counter with Laura’s help, acting as though this were perfectly normal and also as though Tom weren’t there at all. Jason was waiting tables. James had left a while back, probably for his night shift at the hospital. Tom fleetingly wondered if the man ever slept, but it wasn’t any of his business.
The war council in the corner booth continued. Or rather, Old Joe and Conan were doing their best to convince Tom that he couldn’t—he simply couldn’t—fly over to the Three Luck Dragon and set fire to the building.
“I fail to see why not,” Tom said.
“Mostly because ashes are really hard to interrogate.”
“Fine,” Tom said. “I’ll only burn them a little. They can recover.”
It was the recoil in Conan’s eyes that reminded him that Conan had been burned nearly to the point of no return and had come back over excruciating months, and that he really, really, really would have preferred to die than endure that. “I’m sorry,” Tom said immediately. “See, I’m not very good at being ruthless. I hate … but I want Kyrie
back. I’m very afraid of what they might be doing to her.”
“My guess is that they’ll keep her quite safe until they see what you do,” Conan said, “and that the worse thing you could do for her safety is give in to their demands. Since I don’t think you intend to do that—”
“No, but—”
“There is time to think of what you can do. You can control Jao and the others, right?”
Tom paused, then nodded. “Yes, but— I mean, I can control them, but I can feel there’s this area in Jao’s mind that is closed to me, and I’m not sure—how do I put this? I’m afraid that if I push on, it I might destroy his mind or at least his sanity … such as it is.”
“Oh, he’s sane. Very well adapted to the culture he grew up in. I see. I know the old bas— the Old Great Sky Dragon could reach into our minds and make us do things, and find information, and … well, he used me as a spying device for a while.”
“Yes,” Tom said. “And I can do that for minutes at a time, but it’s not very targeted. I end up going from triad member to triad member, more or less at random. I don’t think … I mean, as you said, I’m still rather like a blunt instrument when it comes to using Great Sky Dragon powers. I expect it takes practice.”
“It must,” Conan said, deep in thought.
But Old Joe, who had ordered, and got another big plate of bacon, and was munching his way through it contentedly, said, “Then be blunt instrument.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“No, no begging. Blunt instrument. You can have them do what you want? Have boss man of clan, man who ran things for daddy dragon, come here. Then you can interrogate him in your home territory.”
Tom thought of bringing Jao here, but all he needed was to bring attention to the diner. More likely than not, Jao would arrive in dragon form. He sighed. “No. Better go to my home first and have them come there.”
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