The thought did stab at Tom, now and then, in the dark of the night. Sometime, long ago, sometime between that night when his father had turned him out of the house in his robe and bare feet, and the Tom who had found Kyrie and a semblance of normal life, he’d become very aware of how different he was, how odd. If he were all alone— If people found out what he was—
The best prognosis he could think of was secret labs somewhere in the bowels of some military installation, but he suspected that was a dream of thriller—or perhaps comic book—writers. On the few occasions when normal people had seen him or one of the other shifters, Tom had become acquainted with the human tendency to ignore and deny what they couldn’t accept. And people changing between humans and animals was something most people couldn’t accept. Tom, as far as he’d been a normal human for over half of his life, and insofar as he still tried to think as one, would very much like to believe such a change was impossible, too.
What normal people tried to do with something impossible was to destroy it and bury it, so that they could then feel it had never happened and never existed.
And sometimes, still, Tom woke up in the middle of the night—or more likely, given his hours, early morning—beside the sleeping Kyrie, and stared at the ceiling and imagined what people who were truly terrified might do. To him. To them.
But that was something he’d lived with since he’d known he shifted, something he’d faced in those long lonely vigils while Kyrie and Not Dinner slept. It was not something that compelled him to orient his whole life around dragons and what Jao called “dragonkind.” Tom had been alone before, he’d evaded danger before. He could do it much better now that he had friends. Even if his friends were not dragonkind.
Tom said, “Yes, yes, humanity came from families and tribes. Animals usually do. But we’re better than animals, aren’t we? At least we’re supposed to be. Yes, I’m human. Yes, I’m a shifter. Do I owe particular loyalty to dragon shifters? I won’t let you be destroyed, since I was left in charge of you, and therefore I owe you some kind of, er … Chinese obligation. And I will try to get your Great Sky Dragon back, or, if not that, find someone else to fulfill those duties. But I will not betray myself and marry someone I don’t love, or fail to marry someone I love just because of imagined duty to these people who happen to shift into forms close to mine. That is nonsensical.”
Tom let a glare shine forth to go with the words, but the glare met Jao’s own glare, and clearly Jao had been practicing that glare much longer than Tom could have in the time he’d been alive.
Worse, as Tom looked away, he saw poor Conan, standing just behind Jao and looking at Tom with something akin to horror. Had Conan also believed that Tom would be loyal to dragons simply because that was his other form? Insane. And if he did, had Tom just disappointed him horribly?
Jao clicked his tongue. He said something in Chinese which Tom failed to understand, except for the tone giving him the impression that it was something uncomplimentary about himself. Then he sighed, as though having to use English were a debasement of his principles. “What do you want of me?”
“I want Kyrie back,” Tom said, “and I want you to make what efforts you can to find where the Great Sky Dragon is held. Then I’ll do what I can to rescue him.”
Jao narrowed his eyes. “I can’t give you the panther girl—” He stopped Tom from opening his mouth with a hand held up. “I can’t give you the panther girl back, because she has escaped her captivity sometime before you called me. There is no point at all asking me where she was held or how she escaped. I didn’t know those things. It was all arranged on what we call the long hand, someone else being hired to arrange it. I couldn’t have the details at the surface of my mind, where you could find them.”
“Was she held in the city at least?” Tom asked, with a thought that he could always shift and fly over Goldport until he found her. By now, Kyrie would have shifted, and a very upset big black panther had a way of making its displeasure known.
Jao shrugged, and Tom bit his tongue to avoid screaming. All right. He would go into the dragon egg. He would use all his eyes-bodies, that confusing multitude of dragons to look for Kyrie. It was all their fault, after all.
“I don’t know where the panther girl is,” Jao said, “and we’ve made no progress in finding the Great Sky Dragon’s remains. I hope they are still intact, I trust he will indeed come back to us.” His lip curl matched Tom’s. “I don’t think you are worthy of the position.” He lifted his head, and looked from beneath partly lowered lids at Tom, managing to convey someone looking from a moral height and a great distance away. “But whether the Great Sky Dragon comes back to us or not, we must fulfill his plans and get sons for the dragon clan, and like it or not you’re our only chance. Your feelings and your vaunted individuality will not be allowed to stand in the way.”
“Perhaps,” Tom said. “But you won’t secure my cooperation by kidnapping the woman I love.”
Jao pushed his lips out, then said, “There are ways,” in a manner that made Tom think of syringes and laboratories. Jao added, “If he comes back and finds I failed his wishes, he will kill me. What will you do?”
*
When she came within sight of the house, Kyrie couldn’t—for a moment—believe the dragons in the yard. Oh, it wasn’t that they were totally unexpected. Not after she’d seen them flying overhead. It was more that they were so unexpected, there in the tiny, sloping yard of their brick workingman Victorian. They crouched, one on each side of the front door, like outsized gargoyles. It wasn’t even fully dark yet, and Kyrie wondered what her neighbors would think as they started coming home from work—which some of them would be doing about now. Or what her next-door neighbors, who happened to be a very nice retired couple, would think if they looked out of their enclosed front porch in the direction of her front lawn.
Perhaps, Kyrie thought, looking at the glistening red scales or one, the almost phosphorescent green scales of the other, I can tell them these are inflatable yard decorations that I’m trying out for Christmas.
She wasn’t very coherent. Her feet hurt her even more than they managed to do after a double shift waiting tables at The George, and besides, she could kill for a glass of water.
That thought connected to the thought that though the dragons hadn’t seen her yet, they would invariably notice her if she tried to run up to the—open? Why was the front door open? There was more than likely another dragon guarding the side door she normally entered through.
Which meant … which meant it would be very difficult to get into the house. And she wanted to get in the house and have a truly massive glass of water and, if she could, a shower, and put on her walking shoes, and call Tom and ask him for help.
The dragons couldn’t fit in the house. Not only couldn’t they go in in dragon form, but in the tiny rooms of a house that was all of six hundred square feet, they would do themselves severe injury while demolishing the building around them, were they to shift.
So … inside the house she would be safe from them, or about as safe as she was likely to be.
And that meant she had to get in the house, but how to do it when two large, glistening, Chinese dragons lay down on the front lawn staring at the front door with all the intent alertness of a cat watching a mousehole. To walk up the garden path would be the equivalent of a mouse walking into the cat’s mouth.
Kyrie stood half-hidden by a parked car in front of her neighbors. The dragons had a slight heat distortion above them. The setting sun was clearly enough to warm them.
And then she saw, near her, the curled end of her neighbor’s hose. She knew the family. They weren’t home. They were a little older than Tom and Kyrie, and had two small children. Their interactions with Tom and Kyrie were friendly but somewhat forced, as though there must inherently be something wrong with a young couple not setting about having kids. Of course, in a way they were right in that there was something very different about Tom and Kyrie, had they but
known.
But the other reason they weren’t particularly close was that both couples worked long hours and were rarely at home at the same time. Right then, the couple who owned this house would be picking their kids up at daycare and swinging by the fast food place.
Kyrie closed her eyes and promised herself she would pay the Johnstons for the water she was about to waste. And then she leapt at the coiled hose, grabbed the end and, pulling it with her, went to the faucet on the side of the Johnstons’ house. Before turning it on, she wedged the hose behind a bush, between two forked branches, held by two rocks. Aimed at the hot dragons.
Then in one long sprint, not stopping to draw breath, much less to think, she turned the faucet full on and started running madly towards her front door—betting that the startled dragons would lurch to where the hose was.
*
Bea shoved back with her elbow, but before it made contact, the man behind her had sidestepped, taking himself out of harm’s way. “I’ve been trained, Bea,” Rafiel’s voice said in a whisper. “I expect the elbow to the ribs.” And the relief that it was Rafiel made her legs go weak and her knees buckle.
“I only covered your mouth to keep you from screaming,” he whispered. “What are you doing here? I thought I told you to stay in the car.”
He removed his hand from over her mouth and let go of her. She turned around, relief turning to anger. Really. Couldn’t he have approached her from a side she could see him, instead of playing games? She told him that in an angry whisper, and added, “You might as well have covered my eyes and told me to guess who you were.”
His lips twitched. “No. You could still have screamed when you saw me suddenly.”
She was fairly sure she hated that smile more than anything, except that she didn’t hate it at all—instead it felt safe and right to have him here. Like things should be this way. “I had to come,” she said, her whisper just as urgent as his. “I heard a scream. I thought you needed help. I couldn’t let you be killed while I—”
He shook his head. “I wasn’t being killed. I’m a trained police officer.” She thought he was going to say that he didn’t need the help of art students, but instead he said, oddly softly, “I didn’t want you to be in danger.” And his golden eyes were soft too.
“I don’t think danger can be helped,” she said. “And it was an animal scream of pain. It might have been a lion.”
He nodded once, but said, “It wasn’t this lion.”
“And then there were the wolves.”
This got her a very odd glance. “The—wolves?”
“I don’t know where they came from, but two wolves went running by me, side by side, when I was halfway between the car and here. I thought they were shifters. Not sure why, even, but I thought so, the way they ran, side by side, the way they didn’t even look at me, and the fact that they were … well fed.”
“Did they smell shifter?” Rafiel ask.
“Smell?”
“Sort of metallic and spicy. You probably smell it, and I know I smell it. So do Tom and Kyrie. I was told … six months ago, that not all shifters have the smell. Some aquatic mammals don’t. But I think it would take a special wolf to be aquatic.”
“I didn’t smell anything,” she said. “But I wasn’t—”
“You might not have noticed,” Rafiel said. “Anyway, this whole place smells like it was drenched in shifter pheromones for a while. All of it. Probably the feral living in the hippodrome, but …”
Bea nodded. She could see he was worried. She could see he was scared. She was completely ready for what he would say next.
“I’ll figure out what’s going on.” He ran his hand across his forehead, in a gesture that gave her the impression he was really tired. “You go back to the truck.”
She shook her head.
His lips twitched. “Why not?”
“Because I won’t be any safer out there. Didn’t you hear what I said, about there were two werewolves—I’m sure they were werewolves—who went past me? Anything could happen to me out there in the parking lot all alone. And anything could happen to you, in here, all alone. If we’re together, at least we can watch each other’s back.”
His eyes went really soft again, and crinkled a little at the corners, while his lips pulled into a smile. “Right.” He pointed towards the place where she’d seen the movement. “There is something going on down there,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said. “I was headed there to figure it out.”
He reached and took her hand. His own hand was much, much larger than hers, and very warm. It felt somehow protective, as it enveloped hers. She looked up at him and nodded.
*
Tom stood up involuntarily as Kyrie came running into the room. For a moment he didn’t recognize her. She rarely wore a dress, and besides, she was soaking wet. But as he stood up, she came running into his arms, and clung to him, which was not something he thought of Kyrie doing She was panting slightly, as though she’d been in a race, and shuddering while she made disjointed remarks like, “Two of them,” and “garden hose” and inexplicably “Tomahawk.”
Tom was aware of the look of disgust Jao cast him, which frankly had the power to neither surprise nor worry him. He put both arms around Kyrie, and kissed her ear because it was the only place he could reach, and asked her why she was soaking wet, and—when he looked up—found that Jao had gone.
Old Joe was edging out the door after him, and Tom said, “Stay,” just in time to have the old man turn around, looking resigned, and come back to sit on the sofa.
Conan made as if to shut the door, then said, “Why is there a jet of water across the yard?”
This was when Kyrie lifted her head from Tom’s shoulder and said, “If you would, if there are no dragons around anymore, would you go turn off the water? In the house to the east.”
Conan nodded and darted out the door. Tom wanted to tell him it might not be safe. Then he realized nowhere and nothing would be safe for his associates. At least not until he got the old Great Sky Dragon back, and perhaps not then. After all, the dragons would still want Tom to reproduce with the right woman, wouldn’t they?
Kyrie was telling him the story of being tranquilized and finding herself in a basement, apparently in one of the cabins at the Tomahawk, and of walking back on sore feet.
“You should have stopped someone. A motorist or something,” he said, “and asked to use a cell phone.”
“On Sierra,” she said, looking at him in disbelief. “They would have wanted to see me use the cell phone in a totally different way.”
He inclined his head to the side, conceding the point, then said, “From now on—”
“I strap a disposable phone to my thigh? I was thinking the same,” she said. “Rafiel has the right idea.” She took a deep breath. “Tom, I could kill for a glass of water.”
“I’d say you had plenty of water,” Tom said, as he tracked Conan coming back into the house. “Conan, please lock.” He took Kyrie’s hand to lead her to the kitchen, while she told him about the two dragons in the yard, how she’d trained the hose on them, and how it had worked to distract them.
“I guess they thought someone hidden behind the bush was wetting them, or perhaps it was just the shock of being hit with cold water when they were steaming hot.”
“Or both,” Tom said.
“Well, then,” she said. “I couldn’t avoid running through the spray to get in.”
He nodded and left her at the door to the kitchen, while he went to get her a glass of ice water. Old Joe and Conan trailed behind her, while Not Dinner rubbed at her ankles, despite being dripping wet.
Kyrie drank the water quickly. “Probably can’t strap a glass of water to my leg, too,” she said in a sad tone.
“Probably not,” he said. “Maybe some cash to buy water. But you didn’t shift to come home, did you?”
She frowned. “No. That’s why I’m still dressed. Though …”
“Though?�
�
“Though I tried to shift. I thought the panther would make better time getting home, but it didn’t seem to work. I guess I was too tired and hungry. Have you guys eaten?”
“No,” Tom said. Something about not being able to shift wasn’t right. He kept thinking that he’d heard something related to that recently, but he couldn’t put his finger on what. “But that’s not the important thing right now. I think we’re all in terrible danger, Kyrie. You guys more than me, because they wouldn’t dare kill me. Not without another heir. Well, at least not this set. Those two who challenged me might not mind. But now they’ve got the idea that by getting someone close to me, they can force me to do what they want—”
“Yeah,” Conan said mournfully from behind Tom. “You are going to have to kill a few of them.”
*
Rafiel and Bea walked hand in hand between the trees to the very end of the wooded area. All along the way, there was the sense of movement from the path. Rafiel wished he could have convinced Bea not to tag along. He didn’t like this. He didn’t like this at all.
He wasn’t a superstitious man. He didn’t buy crystals, he didn’t believe anyone could tell you the future and he most certainly didn’t believe in ghosts.
It wasn’t just that they got their share of crazy people who said they had to beat the cashier and steal the game system because his aura was all wrong. That didn’t bother Rafiel, because they got crazy people of all descriptions and types.
No, it was more as though the fact that he turned into a lion and was friends with people who turned into animals used up his full allowance of weird. After that, he had no more left to give, and anyone wanting to discuss his aura, or in general, talk of the uncanny, would have to meet with his hard and skeptical nature.
But the things out there were uncommonly like ghosts. He could sense them. He could see the results of their passage. But he couldn’t see them, and it was unlikely they were there in any physical sense. Rafiel didn’t like it, and he liked even less the feel that he couldn’t protect Bea from whatever this was. Maybe he should have studied table-turning and exorcism?
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