Noah's Boy

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  “So, we don’t go above. Our challenge right now,” Rafiel said, “is to stay on the road and find the motel.”

  They took off from the parking lot, the white SUV almost hydroplaning in the water already accumulated, and fishtailing madly as they hit the minor river that Pride Street had become. Rafiel was aware of the headlights of Cas and Nick’s convertible ahead of him, and just hoped he wouldn’t accidentally hit them.

  *

  “Well, no flying,” Old Joe said, as they stood just outside the back door to the diner, under the tiny cantilevered overhang there. “Not in this. Not that I could, of course.”

  Tom’s mind had gone instead to how convenient this downpour was. In the blind sheets of rain falling—something rarer in Colorado than a diamond in a sandbox—no one inside the diner would be able to see them leave. Even if they weren’t distracted with the drama of Conan being dragged through the diner in handcuffs, which Tom was sure they were because Rafiel, Conan and the other two officers had waited outside the storage room door for Tom and Old Joe to come out. When they’d come out and turned towards the back, the officers walked Conan to the entrance to the corridor from the diner, very effectively blocking both sight and the chance of anyone coming back there and seeing Tom leave. They’d been reciting Conan’s Miranda rights loudly as Tom and Old Joe got out the door.

  But even with all this, Tom thought, even with the distraction, even with most diners—or all of them—concentrating on the Conan drama and not on what Tom was up to, it would be useless to get out stealthily if there had been good weather. Tom was not so stupid—nor did he imagine Jao was—that he wouldn’t have a lookout flying above the diner.

  Tom looked up, towards the slate-grey sky that lent its color to the upper layers of the deluge. It wouldn’t last. It couldn’t last. It rarely did. Colorado rains normally came in boring drizzles that went on for weeks or in sudden terrifying torrents that let floods down the canyons, but which did not last.

  But for now, it gave them a hiding space. “It’s a good thing,” he said. “No one can see us leave.”

  “You don’t want dragons in the way, as you find the … artifact?” Old Joe asked, as he and Tom stepped out into the sheets of rain. “You might need their help, dragon boy.”

  Tom nodded. “But not their interference with doing whatever needs to be done with the Pearl of Heaven, whatever you think I should do.”

  Old Joe clacked his teeth, in that laugh thing he did. “Yeah,” he said. “I think you think right, dragon boy. We’ll call them if we need them, but afterward. The problem with dragons is that they’re stupid.”

  “Present company excepted,” Tom said pleasantly. He’d been edging towards the white van in which they picked up supplies from the farmers’ markets in the spring and summer, and Old Joe paused, looking at Tom, so close that Tom could see his face, greeny-brown eyes seemingly shining in the rain.

  The eyes filled with mischief, and the teeth clacked. “I don’t understand,” he said, then grinned, a ghastly, broken-toothed grin, and said, “Just pulling your leg, dragon boy. I would not try to save you if you were stupid. But most dragons are. Reptile brain.”

  Tom refrained from telling Old Joe that alligators are reptiles, too, but as the old man started moving, weaving under the rain in a fair imitation of an alligator, Tom said, “Hey. We’ll use this van.”

  Old Joe turned and clacked his teeth. “We will? Why not walk?”

  “Not enough time,” Tom said. “I can feel the Great Sky Dragon stirring. We must get to him before he’s somehow forced to activate the gates.”

  Old Joe hesitated, then nodded.

  But as he took the passenger seat in the van and let Tom buckle him in, he sighed, regretfully. “It’s such lovely water,” he said. “Not much water here anymore.”

  Tom wondered briefly about that “anymore.” Had Old Joe come from warmer, wetter climes? Or had he been here since Colorado had been a warmer, wetter—and lower—clime?

  There was no use asking. You got roundabout answers like “Before horses” and “When it was different.” Tom had tried before.

  It occurred to him, with a shiver, that if the spirit creatures truly were the ancestors of shifters, or perhaps of everything on Earth, and if they’d taken flesh on Earth and then shaped everything around them, then it was quite possible that when Old Joe was visiting Dinosaur Ridge, he was remembering old friends. It would be like normal old people visiting cemeteries.

  Once more Tom felt as though he were leaning over the unfathomable possibility that he, himself, would live so close to forever as made no difference. It was rather like leaning over an abyss and finding out it was, in fact, bottomless.

  He started the van and backed carefully out of the parking lot and into the alley. If anyone were following from above, they would be less likely to catch a glimpse of movement, of white, if the van followed the alley to the next major intersection. The alley was so narrow, looking down into it was difficult due to the buildings on either side and the occasional overhanging tree.

  Once at the major intersection, their lights, their movement would get lost in the stream of other lights and movement.

  “I guess,” Tom told Old Joe, “you’ve been alive a long time?”

  Old Joe was staring ahead. “You lose track,” he said, “after a while. And anyway …” He stopped a long time and sighed. “Numbers. I never liked numbers.”

  “Did you come from the stars?” Tom asked.

  This caused a chuckle, a clacking of teeth together, a shake of the head. “No. Not me. Earth-born me.” Another long silence followed, and Tom looked to Old Joe, as they stopped at the end of the alley, waiting for a break to get into the flow of traffic again.

  Old Joe had narrowed his eyes, as though he were trying to see something through the rain. But since he was looking at the buildings across the street—shuttered warehouses with blank brick facades—Tom guessed that he wasn’t actually looking at much of anything but the past, or his own thoughts. Old Joe sighed, again. “It was a long time ago, but I knew some of the came-from-the-stars people.” Another silence. “There was lovely girl, but she—”

  A long break and another sigh. “It’s all the same, you know, born from the stars, born wrong, Earth-born human. Shifter and human and all. We all learn to be human.”

  He pronounced human “hooman,” which gave Tom a brief vision of Old Joe as a LOL-alligator, as he turned into the stream of traffic and tried to decide whether it would be easier or more difficult to take the highway up to the amusement park. “We are human,” Tom said.

  “Yes, that’s what I said. Human nonshifters need to learn to be human too, like star-born, like wrong-born.”

  “Wrong-born?”

  “When your mother and your father …” He sighed. “Like Maduh’s child. When you mate in … not-human form. Then child born not-human form. Live longer. Spend more time animal. Take longer to learn to be human. But in the end must learn to be human. There is nothing else.”

  “There is animal,” Tom said, genuinely puzzled, because he knew Old Joe spent a lot more time as an alligator than as a human, and seemed to enjoy it far more, possibly because alligators didn’t have to wear clothes, wash or use silverware. Though once when he’d asked, Old Joe had told him that the problem was that human itched. Which Tom wasn’t even about to parse.

  In the silence, he saw, through the corner of his eye, Old Joe shake his head violently. “Animal is fun for shifter. It’s like … playing. But you’re always a little human, even in animal, when you learn to be human. You stay. And you enjoy being animal, but is playing. Being animal without being human is not … really being alive. It’s … it’s nothing. It’s one day and another and another; it’s doing wrong without knowing is wrong. It’s not living.”

  “You’re saying animals are not sentient?” Tom said. Then, realizing he might have outstripped Old Joe’s English vocabulary—he often got the impression he should be having these discussi
ons with the old man in ancient Egyptian or something—he said, “I mean, animals are not aware they’re alive.”

  Old Joe shrugged, a movement Tom glimpsed as he started up the ramp onto the highway. “Don’t know. Your cat boy, the Not Dinner one, might know he’s alive. Don’t know. Their brain is different. But shifter-born animal isn’t right until he learns to be human.”

  “You mean, like the little feral, Maduh’s son? The one who killed a lot of people around the amusement park?” It came to Tom that whether the young creature was pathetic or not, whether innocent or not in the sense that he didn’t know he’d done anything wrong, Tom was heading towards his lair. He wondered if the creature would be a problem. What if Mom had left the feral cub guarding the Pearl of Heaven? What if she was guarding the Pearl of Heaven herself? What did Tom intend to do about that?

  “Yeah,” Old Joe said, though it had the feeling of repressing some other thought, some other words he was not going to say. “I worry a lot about him. I don’t know what become of him.” The sudden cackle and the clacking of teeth. “And I don’t know what become of us, when we go up against him. He’s likely to be guarding the Pearl. I don’t want to kill innocent cub, but we might have to give him the sleep-death.” He clacked teeth. “Because stupid doesn’t mean not dangerous, and those in animal form who don’t know human often are cunning, fast. Lethal.”

  “I was thinking the same,” Tom said. The highway was relatively clear of water, at least most of its length, though a bit collected in the shallow bottom of hills. At least highways were built to shed water, even if old city streets and alleys seemed sometimes to be built to collect it. “I was thinking that we’d have to find a way to get him out of the way without hurting him.”

  “Without hurting?” Old Joe said. “I didn’t say that. I don’t think that is possible. We all hurt, dragon boy. Life is hurt. You know you’re still alive because you still hurt. You’re too soft. You’re too kind. You’ve never had to face real. But real is there, and real hurts.”

  Tom started to open his mouth, to tell Old Joe that he knew real plenty. He had lived the life of a big city runaway, and even if, by shying away from most humans, by reason of his shifting, he’d never experienced most of this personally, he had seen all the varieties of what could go wrong, and how bad things could get.

  But then he thought of the time since Old Joe had been young, the time since … Since dinosaurs? Since Colorado had been a subtropical wonderland?

  He didn’t want to know. There were things that he didn’t want to know, even if he could. But he knew even without pinpointing the details, that Old Joe had to have seen more real than Tom could ever see. In a way, the life of modern man wasn’t and couldn’t be real. People had shelters from the rain, and antibiotics, and soft furniture. Even before one got to the internet, and cell phones and modern conveniences, even the most wretched of the big-city homeless would seem to someone—even a chieftain—of the Paleolithic as living so far in the lap of luxury as to be in paradise.

  Old Joe cackled, as though realizing where Tom’s mind had got him. A grubby hand reached out and patted Tom’s arm. “Don’t worry, dragon boy. Real comes to all of us, sooner or later. And until you find the courage to face it, you got me.”

  The rain was slackening a little as Tom saw the exit sign for Riverside. He looked to the sky, but saw no sign of dragons.

  *

  Rafiel saw the sign for the Tomahawk Motel, the cartoon Indian chief, bending forward under the rain, then straightening again, in a weird war dance, as now this, now that neon tube lit.

  It had been one of the fun memories of Rafiel’s childhood, a landmark on his way home from school in winter, past the early Rocky Mountains nightfall, or on his summer trips to the zoo with his parents, when they drove home after dark, with Rafiel tired and happy in the back seat. Seeing the Indian meant that his parents’ house wasn’t that far off and, early on, Rafiel had been enchanted by what seemed to be images made of pure light. Even getting older and being able to see the dull neon tubes that lit off and on hadn’t killed the magic.

  He turned, just past the Indian and up the graveled drive. Fortunately, he didn’t need to see well to be able to drive to the cabin that housed the checkin and office. It wasn’t as if every other day there wasn’t some complaint that required the police to come here and talk to the manager. In fact, the night manager, whom they would be seeing right now, was almost an old friend, in the sense that friends are people you don’t arrest even when you know that you really, really should. Also in the sense that friends are people whose character defects you have to put up with, because you can’t change them. And the fact that they now and then sell a little blow on the side doesn’t mean your relationship changes.

  He gave a motion of the head to Conan, as he parked in front of the building. “You stay here,” he said. “The window glass is bulletproof, so you’ll be—”

  “No. I’m coming.” Conan looked stubborn. “I can take care of myself, Rafiel. For heaven’s sakes, I can change into a dragon.”

  As if that were protection from anything, Rafiel thought. But he guessed before he embarked on that line of reasoning that it would be useless. Conan was worried about his girlfriend, and even if Rafiel could convince him that he would be less than useless in a fight, what would that do, other than make Conan even more desperate to prove he was not useless? Which in the end would probably only get him in greater danger.

  He said, instead, “Fine, you can come out.” And realized Nick was knocking at the window. Rafiel lowered it, and Nick’s hand emerged from his sleeve, holding a smart phone, which he handed to Rafiel. “I looked up the description Tom gave us in the list of usual suspects, and this guy came up. Harry Rivers.”

  Rafiel looked at the picture of an unprepossessing young man with close-set eyes and a pimply face. “I see,” he said. Very young. The story of Kyrie’s escape from her captors came to him. Perhaps these were the only non-dragon thugs the dragons knew. Minor drug suppliers, he guessed, people the triad dealt with.

  Perhaps their youth and stupid look meant that Rya wasn’t in danger at all. Or perhaps she was in more danger. When it came to incompetent thugs, you never could tell.

  *

  Kyrie taught Bea to handle the fryer, to the extent of calling Kyrie when something went wrong. Jason and James seemed to have the waiting at tables under control. Particularly since half the triad members had left. Kyrie wondered if they’d left to follow Tom, and wondered why they would. She wondered what their cluttering the diner tables had meant, anyway. Did they really think that Tom was that easy to force into line? Or was there some other reason? Were they perhaps protecting him from something? Was that why half of them remained behind? But what could they be doing?

  She couldn’t answer any of the questions, and it would have looked like a perfectly normal day, except that everyone—the dragons and Jason, and James, and everyone in the place that she knew for sure were shifters, and Laura, who might be one—looked like they were tense.

  It was, Kyrie thought, like when you were waiting for the phone to ring.

  Which, of course, is when the phone rang. She picked it up and said, “The George, how may I—”

  “We have the fox girl,” a voice said, “and we will kill her, unless the Great Sky Dragon marries Bea Ryu and provides children for the dragon.”

  She opened her mouth to tell them that this was no way to get what they wanted out of Tom, that they were more likely to get what they wanted with a sob story, but they weren’t likely to manage this even with the saddest story ever, because— But they had hung up.

  She looked at the phone a few seconds. Then she looked around the diner and noted the feeling of tension in every back, the odd posture of everyone. No, this was not going to end well. As much as she wished to imagine that nothing bad could possibly happen, as much as she wished to believe that tonight would be like all other nights, she knew better.

  She grabbed the phone ag
ain, dialed Anthony’s number.

  “Can you come in?” she asked.

  He didn’t even ask who it was. Doubtless he recognized her voice. And he didn’t put in the token resistance he normally did, or say his wife would kill him. Instead, he said, his voice tight and full of feeling, “I knew it. I knew I’d be needed. I’ll be right there.”

  *

  The motel manager looked fifty, though Rafiel knew, from having had cause to look at the man’s license in the past that he was only thirty-five. He was shorter than Rafiel—almost as short as Conan—with a ferrety face and untidy red hair that was going white in the way red hair sometimes did, by fading all over, like aluminum siding in the sun.

  He stood behind a pale green counter that looked like a plastic structure with a Formica top trying to pretend to be marble. The only lamp still working was a fluorescent light in the ceiling, its fellows on either side completely dead, which was good, Rafiel thought. The lack of light prevented their seeing just how dirty the grey carpet was, and how the smudges on the wall might be blood or even more unsavory substances. Rafiel had been in there during the day, and he remembered how very difficult it was to avoid staring at those stains and trying to figure them out.

  The manager looked at Rafiel out of strained eyes underlined by bruised, puffy skin. “There was no reason for me to stop them,” he said. “Two guys with money, and well, they paid for a night, and what was I to do? Follow them to see if they had a woman with them?” A sudden unpleasant grin. “Think about it, that could be much better than the alternative! Not that I want to know. People pay for the cabins, and they’re entitled to their cabins and I—”

  Cas rushed in, telling the man that for once they didn’t think he had done anything wrong, but did he remember this guy, and did he have his name and driver’s license noted down anywhere?

  Rafiel thought the chances were very high that it was a fake license, but what the heck, they had to at least try.

  The manager came up with a name: Harry Rivers. After some deliberation and apparent trouble interpreting his own handwriting, he came up with an address on Sierra Avenue, about eight blocks away.