He wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand and nodded, trying to muster the ability to talk again through a throat that burned with bile. “Yes … I … I’m sorry.”
“No,” she was passing him something. He realized it was a bunch of folded-over Kleenex, and he wiped at his mouth and looked at her.
“I’m sorry. I don’t even know why I ran, much less why it made me sick.”
She gave him a small smile. “I know,” she said. “Hungry ghosts. That’s what I was thinking when I ran. I wasn’t far behind you.”
*
They’d cleaned up the mess that Old Joe had made in the kitchen, which was quite an epic mess, Kyrie had to admit, even by Old Joe standards. She’d known when she’d seen him with the half-eaten raw egg that there was a mess, and there was: yolk and eggs smeared all over, smashed shells on the floor. Normally she wouldn’t have bothered beyond sweeping everything he might have touched into a trash can, but they needed to talk, so she’d started to wipe down counters, handing the leftover milk in the open carton to Old Joe and saying, “Finish it.” Because there were no used glasses anywhere, she was fairly sure he’d drunk from the bottle.
Tom and Conan had squeezed into the kitchen, too, which meant the tiny room was rather more crowded than it ever was meant to be. They edged around the folding table and the two chairs, but Tom swept the floor, and Conan got spray cleaner and a paper towel and started wiping the fridge inside and out, leaving Kyrie to clean the counters and the stove and wipe at the finger marks on the window sill and the door.
They worked around Old Joe who moved like a sleepwalker and made sounds about how the people from other worlds were really, really bad, and how they didn’t want to meet them in the flesh. “They send spirit forms over, sometimes, but not full spirit forms. No real energy. Even then, they can kill, they can—”
They walked around him, cleaning. Kyrie thought that all of them needed the sense of normalcy that came from cleaning and returning things to a mundane everyday appearance.
“We can’t stay here,” she said at last. “I mean … I know they can’t come into the house as dragons, but it wouldn’t be all that hard to lay siege to the place, then send someone in human form, one by one, to collect us. The house is not that secure, and while Not Dinner is fearsome, he’s not exactly a guard dog.”
“No,” Tom said. “The thing is, I think they can sense me no matter where I am.”
“Not if you turn it off,” Conan said.
Tom gave him a worried look, then said, “Oh, I see.”
“You see?” Kyrie said.
“Something like what Jao did, to keep me out of the part of his mind that knew whom he’d hired to kidnap you, so I didn’t have a picture of them and couldn’t find them. Only, of course, I’m much better at locking parts of my mind against him. I would be, right, I mean …”
“Yes, you’re the Great Sky Dragon,” she said.
There was a moment of hesitation, and Tom drew in breath. “I don’t think I am,” he said. “Worse, I don’t think I can be, and that’s why we must bring the old Great Sky Bastard back.” He looked at Kyrie. “You know what I mean.”
She was looking back at him, intently. “Yes, and yet, no.” Tom looked perfectly blank and she had to smile. “Look,” she said. “You look after everyone all the time, so it would seem logical that you should be in charge, but …” She shook her head. “I see what you mean on taking over the triad as it is. On the other hand, maybe as it is is merely a reflection of the Great Sky Dragon, not—”
Tom shrugged. “I really don’t care what it is a reflection of—or not. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life ruling over a bunch of people whose only resemblance to me is that they too can turn into dragons.”
Kyrie almost said it, but she bit her tongue in time before the words he didn’t want to hear came out. In her head, though, they sounded as loudly as though she’d spoken them. But, Tom, the words ran through her mind. What if they need you? What if this is what you were born to do? Can you walk away? Do you even have a choice?
*
Bea sighed without meaning to, as she thought that apparently she was destined to see way more naked males than she ever meant to. She could only hope it encouraged her facility at life drawing.
She thought this as the two wolves, who’d come running sometime while Rafiel was throwing up and stood a little while away looking at them, now turned and writhed in the agony spasms of shifting. She looked away. She knew what it felt like when she was shifting forms, and she couldn’t avoid the idea it was somehow indecent to watch other people do so.
When she looked back, there were two men there. It was undeniable, she thought, that they had considerable Mediterranean blood. It was there, in the dark curls, the olive skin, and the proportions that recalled Greece’s statues.
It was also undeniable they were related, perhaps brothers. They had that look of family, even if one’s eyes were grey and the other’s dark, dark brown. And they were smiling at her in a way that recalled the way that dogs had of giving the impression they were laughing, with tongues half hanging out.
Rafiel, finishing wiping his mouth, glared at them. “Damn you,” he said. “Damn you. Why didn’t you tell me?”
The slightly taller grey-eyed one grinned, this time a very human grin. “I swear it never occurred to me that you didn’t know, Rafiel. I mean, we knew.”
“You don’t smell shifter,” Rafiel said. The other man, the one he wasn’t talking to, went around Bea’s truck, and she realized there was a convertible there, something beautiful and curved, clearly of fifties vintage, and painted hot pink. He came back carrying two bundles of clothes and handed one to his—brother? Friend?
“Oh, is that what you were going by?” the policeman said, grinning. “There is … well, there are certain herbs you can eat, which mask the smell. My mother told me about them when I started edging towards puberty. It keeps cats and dogs from reacting to you as though you were an animal, see? I think it must have kept many of our ancestors alive.”
“Damn you,” Rafiel said again. Bea wondered why he was so mad. There didn’t seem to be any reason for it. True, the wolves hadn’t helped them, but then really there had been nothing to help them with, had there? Just listening to that horrible scene in the cottage. She didn’t think that if she and Rafiel had decided to attack queen bitch in there it would have made any difference.
The grey-eyed man looked obviously puzzled at Rafiel’s anger. He arched his eyebrows. “I don’t understand. Were we supposed to tell you? Report to you?”
Rafiel leaned against her truck, away from the place where he’d been sick. “You let me carry the burden all alone.”
“The … burden?” the man said, and looked towards Bea as though for enlightenment, then gave a smile, as though noticing her for the first time, “Sorry, Miss, I’m Cas Wolfe, and this is my cousin Nick—Stravos Nikopolous, the last of which is his crazy dad’s idea of what Americans can pronounce, and not a real name at all. He was wrong too. On the pronouncing. So my, er … junior serious crimes investigator cousin goes by Nick. You can also call him ‘Hey, you,’ but I’m the only one who can call him stupid.”
The other man, almost fully dressed, shook his head. “Ignore Cas. He has a tendency to run off at the mouth around pretty women, but he’s an almost-married man.”
“Eh, so is Nick for all intents and purposes, though he doesn’t tend to get enthusiastic around pretty women.” This earned him an elbow to the ribs, making Bea think that if the men weren’t brothers, they acted like it. “And you are?”
“Beatrice Ryu,” she said. “Bea to my friends.” Because it seemed only polite after she had seen them in their shifted form, she added, “Dragon shifter.”
Cas opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, Rafiel cut in, “If you two are done with the music hall comedy routine, the reason I’m furious is that you let me think I was the only shifter in the department. You let me deal with
crimes by shifters alone. You let me—”
“Oh, chill,” Cas said. “We really didn’t know you didn’t know. I wondered about that shark thing. I smelled shifter all around there, but I—”
“Guys,” Nick said. “It might not be the healthiest thing to sit around here, discussing this. Not to put too fine a point on it, but that … female, back there, did not strike me as the kind to let bygones be bygones, and it strikes me if she should find we saw her and overheard her—”
Cas turned pale. “I got the impression that was her cub, and she was hurting it just to … to feed the things.”
“Yes, I got the impression they feed on pain and fear,” Nick said. “And she’s clearly not afraid to inflict both … and she spares no one.”
“The poor dumb thing,” Rafiel said. He sounded like he was going to throw up again, and Bea was very sure he was not talking about the woman back there. “That poor dumb thing.”
Nick cleared his throat. “So, you see, it is a matter of … I mean … If she saw us leave. If one of the things sensed us—”
“Yeah,” Cas said. “We should go somewhere.”
Rafiel gave every impression of making a great effort to gather his wits. “That was the Pearl of Heaven she was holding,” he said. “It’s Great Sky Dragon business.”
Bea could tell from the look the cousins traded that they had absolutely no idea what Rafiel was talking about. For a moment it occurred to her to wonder how it was possible for someone—some shifter—to live in a town with the power of the Great Sky Dragon and not to be aware of it.
Then she realized that the power was mostly over dragons. Clearly shifters not connected to or involved with dragons in some way could and did ignore the power. But she didn’t feel like explaining it or what was happening with the dragon triad. Nor how the power seemed to have devolved to an outsider. No. She didn’t want to explain any of it, and she’d give much not to tell anyone at all about the Great Sky Dragon’s plans for her, either.
She didn’t need to. Rafiel nodded gravely and said, “I’d better call Tom.”
*
They’d gone to the diner, on the idea that they might as well. Not that it was more unlikely for the triad to find them there than at the house, but first, they did have a responsibility to the diner, and as Tom said, they’d left it oddly staffed, if not short-staffed, exactly. They couldn’t ask Anthony to work around the clock. Also, it was harder for the triads to confront them there than at the house, because, well … after all, they had as much invested in keeping everything secret as Tom and Kyrie did. And having it all out at the diner was rather too public. Even if a lot of people at the diner were shifters, not all of them were, and the triad wouldn’t risk others finding out, no more than the rest of them would.
Of course, they’d already gone too far, parking those two dragons on their front lawn, but Tom supposed having summoned them over in dragon form, he’d already done that damage, and they’d figured, Why not? And that’s why they think I’m really dangerous, too, he thought. Because I summoned them in dragon form, I risked discovery. Jao’s words came back to him, “You don’t care for dragonkind.”
Driving in the car, with Old Joe and Conan crammed in the back seat, he tried to make a joke of Jao’s threats that they could too make him reproduce with the right woman.
Kyrie gave him a quizzical look, “I suppose they mean date rape drugs or something?”
He shook his head. “I’m not an expert, mind you, but I understand those don’t work really well on men. We have to be, you know, active. Even alcohol can stop that. I had the most horrible thought of needles and stuff.” But once he said it, he wondered if there were other ways. The problem with all this, he thought, was that he knew so little about the nature of shifting. And that was, of course, another reason to go to the diner. Dr. Roberts was as likely as not to go into the lab at night. Driven by his shifter nature, or perhaps not wanting to shift near his wife and children, he said that he liked to check on experiments when the lab was empty and quiet, and that might very well be true. At any rate, he would be by the diner for breakfast very early, and then Tom could question him. Hopefully. And maybe he could shed some light onto … everything. Though it was going to be a problem, since Tom didn’t have a clue where to start asking questions.
When he got to the diner, the parking lot was full, which struck him as odd, because at near eight p.m., the dinner hour should have been on its way out and the diner starting to empty.
Coming in the door made him raise his eyebrows. The George was in a downtown area, and as such, even in a white-bread town like Goldport, it had plenty of ethnic variety. Not that Tom normally gave ethnicity or skin color much thought. He didn’t have any clue what Kyrie might be, and it bothered him not at all. Kyrie was Kyrie, and he was himself. The fact that they shifted worried him far more considerably than any variation in human forms, because normally he thought about the regulars in the diner by smell: those who smelled like shifters and those who didn’t. Anything else, as far as he was concerned, was ephemeral and unimportant variation.
But damn it, you couldn’t come into the diner and find it half packed with Asian people and not wonder why. As large as the Asian population was in Goldport—relatively speaking—it wasn’t that large in total. The George wasn’t some sort of Asian restaurant that would be frequented by all the best Asian families, which was just as well, since the people at the tables weren’t families, but mostly single men.
Tom suppressed a groan as he ducked behind the counter. He put on the bandana he used to confine his long black hair, to keep it from the cooking, and donned the apron with THE GEORGE and the image of the dragon flipping pancakes blazoned across the chest.
Anthony looked anxiously at him, and when Tom nodded, said, “Right. We’re working very funny hours, aren’t we? Are you going to tell me what is going on, or just send me home and tell me you’ll call me again when you need me?”
Tom opened his mouth to tell Anthony it was the latter, but then saw that Anthony looked worried. Really worried. This wasn’t the normal teasing and complaining he did about the long hours and Tom and Kyrie’s habits.
“Why?” Tom said. “Why?” He couldn’t get any closer to phrasing it clearly.
Anthony’s head jerked towards the nearest tables packed with Asian men. They were eating, or at least they were ordering, judging by the profusion of plates stacked on their tables. Perhaps they thought they’d get thrown out if they didn’t order every so often. Their incomprehensible conversation drifted back to Tom, together with their smell: shifter.
“So?” Tom said. He couldn’t let Anthony know these people smelled of shifter, nor that there was anything threatening about their presence. For a moment, the mad thought of telling Anthony everything—all about the triads, all about becoming the Great Sky Dragon, all about shift and change and the weird forms of half the people in the diner—came to Tom. He wondered, even after all this time, how long it would take Anthony to grab a cell phone and call a psychiatrist to deal with Tom’s illusions.
Better not try it. The problem is that though you could almost always be sure that people wouldn’t take you seriously, you couldn’t be sure sure. And never with someone like Anthony.
Anthony sighed and rolled his eyes, “I’m not stupid, you know,” he said in a whisper just loud enough to be heard above the fryer, but not loud enough to be heard by the people at the tables. “It’s not normal for us to get these many Chinese people.”
“Maybe there’s a convention in town or something,” Tom said.
“Appealing only to Chinese?” Anthony said. “Funny. And don’t think I don’t realize they’re all men, all relatively young, and more than a few of them tatted up.”
“Yeah, and … ? Anthony, I just got here. I don’t know what you’re insinuating, but I didn’t conjure these people up out of nowhere. I don’t know who they are.” Okay, that was a lie, because he could know who they were, and very easily too. All he ha
d to do was concentrate and he could be in any of their heads, looking out through their eyes. Momentarily, without meaning to, he was in the head of a young man with a Chinese character tattooed on his forehead, and he saw himself, obviously upset, talking to the cook behind the counter. And Tom realized he’d put on his leather jacket before leaving the house, and forgotten to take it off when putting on his apron.
He now removed it, and Anthony’s look said, “See? I can tell you’re rattled.” But what Anthony said aloud was, “You guys were helping Rafiel with something, and it’s no use at all telling me this isn’t blowback because I know about triads.” He huffed. “I know there are triads in town. Some of my relatives … You know I have relatives everywhere, and some of them have talked about triads and Chinese drug dealers, and look, Tom, if Rafiel was undercover it had to have something to do with drug trafficking.”
“Not that I know of,” Tom said. He thought back on what they’d actually helped Rafiel with, and thought it would actually be nice if that had something to do with the triads, because it would give them only one problem to solve. Unfortunately he was fairly sure that was its own problem and something quite different.
“I don’t think this is related to Rafiel at all,” he said, putting conviction into the words.
Anthony’s dark eyebrows went further up. “Whatever, Tom, I just want you to know … Well, I have a lot of family in town.” He paused and looked slightly puzzled, as though he weren’t absolutely sure if he was happy about it, as he repeated, “A lot of family. So, if things become ugly and you need help, you know my number. And I don’t mean just help at waiting tables or manning the fryer.”
“No problem,” Tom said, and tried to say it casually and not show he was far more touched than he could show. Anthony didn’t even know who or what Tom was. Not really. But he could sense something was wrong, and, despite the fact that, over the year that Anthony had worked for Tom, Tom had been a troublesome boss, irregular about the hours, and strange about changing equipment, Anthony was ready to come to Tom’s rescue, in something that might involve a confrontation with criminals.
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