As they came to the end of the little wooded area, they found themselves facing a play cottage. Bea looked at him with a question in her eyes, and he leaned in to whisper in her ear, “It’s part of the train line that goes around the park. It still does, but now mostly at night, and they don’t bother with this stuff. It’s just the lights on the lake, and the lights of the rides that make it fun. But when I was little, the train went around all day, and they used to have these staged scenes of fairy tales, you know, cottages and Snow White and castles and Cinderella and all. The cottages used to do double duty as concession stands. But sometime in the nineties, the figures of Snow White and the dwarves started looking ratty and instead of painting them, they just carted them away. Some of the buildings are still concession stands, but these, in hard to reach places, were just left to rot. Maybe they were too expensive to demolish. Like the hippodrome.”
The hippodrome and all the bones left behind there was a bad image to have and he watched—no, he sensed—entities slip into the half-open door of the cottage.
He and Bea couldn’t go into the half-open door. In fact, he didn’t want to go anywhere near the place where the things were converging and … seemingly being sucked into the cottage. The way they’d been slipping in, it must be chockablock with them in there.
The idea of having one of the things move through him made him shudder, which was stupid because he didn’t even know that there was a way the things could go through a person. He thought it was more likely they’d go around. After all, the door was half-open to let them in.
But all the same, he could imagine one of the things going through him, all clammy and ethereal, made of cold energy like a wind that blew through a person, instead of around. He shivered, grabbed Bea’s hand harder and pulled her around the cottage, away from the things, a way from the door. He remembered vaguely that there was a window on the other side. If it was a real window or just painted on the façade there was no way of knowing.
He hoped it was real. Otherwise it was going to be kind of hard to listen in through what looked like stucco.
*
Tom was outside the bathroom, shouting through the door while Kyrie showered, telling her the story of his confrontation with Jao, trying to explain his dilemma. “It is not,” he said, “that I don’t think it’s going to take a lot to keep everyone safe. And I’m perfectly aware that they act according to a different code, but it seems to me, if I kill him, I’ve already lost.”
He heard a sigh behind him and guessed it was Conan, because Old Joe had ambled towards the kitchen. Other than making sure that Not Dinner had gone the other way towards the bedroom, Tom ignored Old Joe. He’d told him not to leave the house, and so far, he’d not heard the back door open. He did hear the sounds of someone rustling around in the fridge, and—leaving aside how much Old Joe might eat—he could imagine Kyrie declaring they’d have to disinfect the whole kitchen. But right now that was the least of his concerns.
He expected Kyrie to tell him to grow up or to grow a pair, or something, or maybe to make as exasperated a sound as Conan had just made, but as she opened the door and came out, wearing the jeans, T-shirt and shoes she’d taken in with her, and combing her hair, she said, “No, you’re right.”
“You don’t understand,” Conan said, in a tone of exasperation. He was leaning against the wall down the hallway. “If this is your idea for winning hearts and minds, or whatever, you’re going about it entirely the wrong way. It won’t work, Tom. They … dragons don’t understand this.”
Kyrie and Tom both looked at him, and Kyrie said, “You can’t say dragons don’t understand kindness. You—”
Conan shook his head. “No, that’s not what I mean, though you should be aware, I, myself, am a very atypical dragon. Most are older than this country, let alone having been raised in it. They don’t understand our codes, and they were raised in a pretty rigid code of their own.” He sighed deeply. “It’s like you’re speaking in a language they never heard and hoping they understand you. And it’s not kindness, exactly, to do that. What you’re doing is confusing them and making them feel leaderless. No wonder they want to betray you, or at least to please the old Great Sky Dragon, whom they’re hoping very much comes back. He will kill them for any reason or none. Individually, he doesn’t value them very much, but at least they can understand him.”
Tom did understand what Conan was saying. He had had that exact feeling, while talking to Jao, as though they were speaking different languages. “Yes, Jao kept saying that it was my duty to look out for dragonkind or something like that. But I keep thinking that if … I mean, look, it’s a lot like the Ancient Ones wanting to punish us for killing shifters, even though the shifters were killing other people. If it comes to that, if it comes to a choice …”
Conan nodded. “I’m not saying that you should do otherwise, Tom. I’m not sure what I would have done, and I was handed over to the Great Sky Dragon when I was a teenager. My parents would say I deserted him or something, the way I’m behaving.” He looked up at Tom, and the way his eyes narrowed, Tom got the feeling Conan was getting a headache. “Look, they’re going to try to get me to make you fall in line. You know that. You know what they’ve done to me before.”
What they’d done to him included leaving him on his own, to come back from a severe burning all on his own. “And, Tom, I understand what you say—I left once, though I needed your help to leave—but … but they’re going to keep pushing all of us until you do what they want.”
Tom opened his hands in a show not so much of helplessness as of exasperation. “What do you want me to do?” he asked. “Do you want me to marry Bea, or, I suppose, any ten females, just to make sure I have a dragon son? Would you leave Rya to marry someone they picked for you?”
Conan made a face. “If it hadn’t been for you,” he said, “I wouldn’t have had any choice. And I doubt I’d even have met Rya. But now? Now I can have Rya. Now I can … I know I can sing?” it was a statement, but it finished in a rising, interrogatory tone.
“You can sing,” Tom said.
“Now I know I can sing, I couldn’t leave Rya and … and music and go back, no.”
“Well, I can’t go back either,” Tom said. “Particularly since I was never there.”
“Tom, if it would be easier to pretend you and I have broken up, just pretend until, you know, we figure this out,” Kyrie said. She bent to pick up Not Dinner and pet him. Tom couldn’t see her expression, but he didn’t need to see her expression. He knew how to answer that.
“Don’t even joke,” he said. “If they think they can make me do what they want, there will never be an end to it. No. We will not give an inch. Frankly, I’m starting to wonder if the beings from the stars could be any worse.”
There was a crashing sound from the kitchen. Old Joe appeared on the doorway holding an egg. There was raw egg on his lips, and raw egg smeared on a hole atop the egg. He seemed to have been sucking a raw egg. But the face, around and under the smeared egg yolk was white as a sheet, leaving his network of dark wrinkles looking like tattoos, and his eyes looking like black holes. “No, don’t say. They are worse,” he said.
CHAPTER 20
There was a window in the cabin wall, and when they got near enough, Rafiel saw the wolves. He’d thought that Bea had been seeing things, or perhaps imagining things, but there were two matched grey wolves, side by side, just under the window. And from the way their heads were cocked, it was impossible not to imagine that they were human enough or sentient enough to be listening very carefully to what was going on inside.
As they got nearer, voices became more obvious, or rather one voice that Rafiel could call as such, and a swarm of odd buzzing that seemed to form words. It was like having words formed by the sort of static you get on radios between stations.
The voice was female and said, in an imperious tone, “But you have to show me how to do it. I don’t think the old fool knows. Even when he comes back.”
/> The buzzing back was less distinct, though Rafiel thought he caught the words “receptive” and “right.”
Closer yet, he realized that there was a hole in the glass of the window, which was probably why the sound was so clear. The wolves, he noted, turned to look at him and then away. The moment they’d looked at him had been enough, though.
Something you got used to, as a shifter, was knowing that the eyes remained remarkably the same between human and shifter. Oh, you might lose the whites and the shape might change, but you usually retained the same color and, strangely, the same expression as you had in human form. The two pairs of eyes that turned to him were startlingly familiar.
His shock was not so much that Cas and Nick, his colleagues in the force, were werewolves—he supposed considering Cas’ last name was Wolfe, he should have thought about this before—but the fact that he’d never smelled even a hint of shifter-scent around them. If it was going to be that way, then he couldn’t be sure about anyone.
And then he felt a niggling prickle of anger at the two of them. How could they have let him shoulder the burden of solving all the shifter crimes in town, of thinking he was the only one holding the line of justice on shifters, when they could and should have been shouldering their share? How dared they?
But he said nothing, just squeezed Bea’s hand and said, “It’s all right,” then guided her so they were positioned on either side of the small window, each with a wolf standing by their knees.
A first glimpse through the window shocked Rafiel, almost as much as the smell from inside that hit his nose.
First, the woman he’d heard, the woman who stood in the center of the cottage, could have been a Renaissance madonna in a painting by da Vinci. She had that broad forehead that they seemed to prize, and almost perfectly regular features, framed by golden-blond hair. Despite wearing jeans and what looked like a peasant blouse, she had a certain antique air—an impression of being not so much old or out of a time long ago, but of being ageless, someone who had always looked like this and would always look like this.
The effect was heightened by the soft silvery light reflecting on her face.
The cottage interior was dark. There seemed to be some broken furniture in a corner but if it had ever been used as a concession stand, and had been wired as such, it had been a long time ago. Now it was dark, filled with something shadowy and not quite visible, with this blond woman in the middle, holding in her hands—
Rafiel had seen it once, long ago, and he remembered it because immediately afterwards he’d watched the Great Sky Dragon punish someone in a way that had seemed at the time irrevocably fatal.
It was about the size of a grapefruit, perfectly round, and it had the softly white reflections of a pearl.
In fact, Rafiel knew what it was. It was what the dragons called the Pearl of Heaven, their special and carefully guarded object. Tom had stolen it once, because he had thought that it would help him get over his addiction. It hadn’t, but it had seemed to have other effects on both him and the dragons. The dragons had chased him over half the country and exacted terrible punishments until he returned it.
Now, it didn’t look exactly like a normal pearl. It seemed to be shining with an interior light, a silvery pale light, which shone up into the face of the woman, making her look ethereal and not quite real. Paradoxically, it bounced off the shapes around her. There were dozens of them, and they seemed to flow into each other. The light bouncing off them made them look exactly like shrouded humans and made the fact that some of them were partially inside the others or twined with the others seem as wrong as the more nightmarish drawings of Hieronymus Bosch.
Rafiel ignored the shapes and concentrated on the woman—partly because he could smell her, and he recognized the smell. He would lay very good odds she was the creature who had beat him after he followed the feral shifter, and the same creature who had seduced him in the woods.
He still couldn’t think of that event without a vague nausea stealing over him and causing his stomach to plunge. He could imagine, all too well, Tom teasing him over it. Why be so upset at copulation? After all, though they’d all been afraid of it, it seemed to bring with it no bad side effects, despite their shifter nature.
But it was that he’d had sex with someone he didn’t know, someone in animal form, and worse, that he’d had sex with her in a completely helpless way. Once he’d smelled her, he’d been gone. There had been absolutely nothing he could do to prevent himself from copulating with her, despite all his misgivings, despite his higher principles, despite the fact that he had always wanted to be sure he could trust anyone he did that with.
It felt, he thought, rather as it must feel to be raped. He’d heard rape victims—usually female—describe that feeling of not being in control, of not being able to say no, of being overpowered, of never again feeling safe, and he felt it echo in him. There was also the same guilt. Rape victims would go on and on, analyzing their clothes, the way they stood, and what they’d done, trying to figure out if they’d done something, anything to bring the ordeal on.
The analysis resulted badly for him, because he had betrayed himself. The woman—the female—might have put out heavy pheromones, but in the end, it was his own body that had reacted, his own body that had made him engage in sex in animal form.
Even now, feeling sick to his stomach at the thought, the smell of her, attenuated though it was in her human form, caused him to react. Part of him wanted to go through the window, part of him wanted to dive through and cavort with her right there, despite the scary immaterial creatures.
He felt as though a cold hand were drawing up his back at the thought, but then he looked over at Bea, and saw her gazing at him. Did she know? Did she guess? It didn’t matter. She looked scared and worried, and her look made whatever arousal had started in him subside. Nothing was more important than keeping Bea safe, except perhaps earning her respect. And he was going to guess her respect hinged on his acting like a human being and not like a rutting animal.
He gave her a smile he was afraid was sickly, even as inside the shapes whispered in their buzzing words, “You can’t activate it. You don’t have what it takes. Only some of you can. The dragon boy, the new Sky Dragon can. I’m not sure the old dragon can, even if he knew how.”
“I must know how,” the woman said. “I’m sure the old dragon can, if he doesn’t have any choice but do it. I got his measure when I felled him. I tasted his soul. He’s weaker than I. Even if I can’t activate the Pearl, if you tell me how to do it, I can make him do it.”
“It’s not tell,” the things buzzed. “It’s show. We can no more show you how to do it than you can show us what it’s like to have such an abomination as a body. That thing was built for one like us, for one with the spirit—the soul—to be able to operate it. You don’t have that soul. It’s like … you don’t have the right …” The buzzing stopped and Rafiel had the impression it was groping for words. “You don’t have the right appendages,” the last word was pronounced as if it were something distasteful, perhaps one of the grosser scatological words.
“But I can make it glow,” the woman said, in a tone of peevishness, like a child that is being lied to or denied something it thinks essential.
“A child’s trick,” the voices buzzed. “Making it glow is easy. Making it fully operate, making it revive the knowledge of how to unlock the world gates is something else, and you can’t do it. When you got locked in the fleshy self, you lost that. You lost the parts of you that would allow you to do it. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to rebel. Perhaps you shouldn’t have been so headstrong.”
The woman stomped her foot. She looked mutinous. She looked exactly like people do when told “I told you so” when they themselves had already figured it out. She glared at the immaterial beings. “Maybe you need more feeling,” she said.
She reached out, while holding the Pearl in her right hand. Her left hand plunged behind the clutter of broken furniture a
nd dragged out—pale and naked and trembling, his hands over his head—the feral shifter Rafiel had fought before. As they watched, the woman’s nails, which seemed unusually large, tore a strip across his chest.
The creature screamed, a scream of pain and terror, and his eyes turned in trembling, uncomprehending terror towards the woman inflicting the pain. It seemed to be trying to snuggle to her, even as she ripped again, this time down the feral’s arm. Blood flowed in the wake of her nails, and a sort of shiver went through the cottage. The invisible creatures, seen only by their reflection of pale light, moved in, one crowding into the other, compacting, through and into the feral who shivered and cried again, a high, animal sound.
Rafiel was running. He’d always thought he was a brave man. He’d never run from any physical threat: not from prehistoric shifters, nor from the more human threats that he’d confronted in the past. But he couldn’t stop his recoiling horror, he couldn’t stop himself from running.
Maybe it was in part the knowledge that he’d had sex with that creature who was hurting what seemed to be a defenseless young, perhaps her own. Maybe it was the dumb look in the feral’s eyes, as it tried to snuggle up to the very person hurting him.
Most of all, though, he thought it was those mostly transparent creatures, silvery in the light of the Pearl, flowing into each other and crowding for what the woman had called the “feeling.” They were worse than vampires. After all, at least blood was something physical. But they were crowding to something else, and Rafiel’s stomach clenched at the thought of what that something might be.
He realized he was leaning on his car and throwing up, when he felt Bea’s hand on his shoulder. He thought he’d now disgraced himself completely in her eyes, but all she said, in a concerned voice, was, “Are you all right?”
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