Gentleman Takes a Chance

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  "Never mind," he said, and managed a little smile. "It's just sometimes it's so hard being both, you know, living between worlds. I've tried to be human, and I can't—not all the time. And it just occurred to me, if I could just be a lion—be a lion all the time and stop . . . stop thinking like a human, stop caring about what humans think . . . it would be easier."

  There were many things Kyrie wanted to say. That she understood—though she wasn't sure she did. She relished her rationality too much to let it go in exchange for a promise of simpler thinking. That she felt for him. That she could think of what it all must mean to him. But instead, what came out of her lips, was, "There's always the zoo."

  As soon as she heard it, she was afraid he would be offended. And that was a heck of a thing to do to him, anyway. He'd just revealed an inner part of himself—at least she didn't think he was playacting, though with Rafiel, it was sometimes pretty hard to tell—and she'd answered with a joke.

  To her surprise, he gurgled with sudden laughter. "Oh, yes . . . But if I couldn't control the changing even then, it could get a little embarrassing, no? Not to mean dangerous, right there in the feline enclosure."

  "Yes," she said. Then changed the subject quickly. "But you think one of the sharks might have done it?"

  Rafiel shrugged. "It still doesn't make any sense, does it? I mean, they get fed, as sharks. Why would she . . . or whatever . . . feel a need to come out and push humans into the tank?"

  "Perhaps she has a taste for human flesh," Kyrie said. "Or perhaps there was someone who saw her shift, and had to be eliminated."

  * * *

  The refrain in Tom's mind had changed to oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, and he jumped up from the seat. Kyrie and Rafiel were being stalked by someone called the executioner for whatever the Ancient Ones were.

  He ducked into the storage room and dialed Kyrie on his cell phone. There was no answer. It rolled over much too fast, in fact. He bit his tongue, thinking. Kyrie never charged her cell phone. Which meant, he had to get to her—somehow.

  Oh, maybe Old Joe was dreaming it all up, but this seemed a bit complex, and the man's hesitations about time and place were much too realistic, and unless Old Joe's dreams came in technicolor and surround sound, Tom didn't think it was a dream at all. No. Tom thought that Old Joe was somehow trying to reassure him and claim loyalty points for not having turned him in.

  Had he not turned them in? Who knew. Maybe he had. Or maybe he had turned Kyrie and Rafiel in. His primary loyalty seemed to be to Tom, who fed him and looked after him. Everyone else was a distant concern. He might care for Kyrie because Tom did. On the other hand, Kyrie thought that Tom encouraged Old Joe to hang around, and endangered them, and she made no secret of her feelings.

  Tom came out of the storage room and dove behind the counter, kitten in hand. "Here," he told Keith, handing over the small, orange fluffball, and ripping off his apron over his head.

  "What am I supposed to do with him?" Keith asked, holding the puzzled creature, who was meowing and hissing at having his sleep disturbed. "No matter how much Old Joe wants him, I'm not grilling him."

  "No," Tom said. "He's not dinner. Just put him somewhere. I have to go out . . . uh . . . for a few minutes. I'll be right back, I swear."

  Keith looked closely at the kitten who was wearing the universal kitten expression that means let them come, all together or single file. I have my claws. "How am I supposed to keep him from wandering around? Let me tell you how many health violations—"

  "Oh, I'm sure. But if we let him go, Old Joe is likely to eat him. Just tie him up or something. Some sort of a leash."

  "A leash? A cat?" Keith asked, in the vaguely horrified voice of someone who's just been instructed to confront a savage creature.

  "Well, something," Tom said. "Please? And mind the place. I need to go out. Truly." He looked doubtfully at the kitten trying to claw at Keith. "Give him some food or something. Cats stay where they're fed, right?" And to Keith's look of incredulity, "Look, just try."

  Tom had wanted a pet. The closest he'd come to having a pet was having fish. But those were more like animated swimming plants, as far as he was concerned. From the ages of five to ten, he had spent hours dreaming of various pets, from cats to horses. But his parents' lifestyle did not include time for animals. Truth be told, it barely included time for Tom. So he didn't have much idea what one did with pets, beyond a vague idea you told them what to do and they did it. At least, that seemed to be the interaction of owner and dog that he observed at various parks and in various streets. Except perhaps in the matter of bodily functions, dogs pretty much obeyed. It was all go here, come here, and stay. And by and large, the various mutts did. Surely cats couldn't be that much different. He had a lurch of doubt when he realized that save for a very old lady with a hairless cat on a leash, he'd never seen a cat be walked. "Er . . . just don't let him poop anywhere, okay?"

  "Right . . ." Keith said in that tone of voice that indicated that as soon as Tom left the diner, he was calling the men in white coats to go after him. And Tom thought he very well might, but it didn't matter. He ran down the hallway to the back door, and out in the blinding storm where, more by instinct than by sight, he found the car where Kyrie had parked it. Fishing in his pocket, he found the car keys. He undressed, shivering under the snow and shoved his clothes and shoes into the car trunk, and shut it with a resounding thud, even as he felt his skin bunch and prickle with cold. He hooked the keys to a link in a bracelet that Kyrie had made for him. It was silver, but made of the sort of elastic weave—somewhat like chain mail but not really—that adjusted to his changes in size as he shifted from man to dragon and back again.

  A brief thought of Conan came to him, with a sharp stab of annoyance. Don't let Conan see him. Don't let Conan realize he was gone. The last thing he needed, right now, was Conan's intervention, or to have to drag Conan with him on this dangerous expedition. Conan was a complication he didn't need. He wished with all his strength, with everything he could, that the Red Dragon shifter wouldn't realize he was gone until Tom was well away.

  And then he forced his body—unwilling and fighting and screaming with pain and begging for more time to recover—into the series of spasmodic coughs and twists that changed the shape of bones and muscles, and made wings grow from the middle of the shoulders.

  Wings that spread and flapped, once—twice—powerfully, lifting the dragon aloft in the blinding snow.

  * * *

  "Nasty way of getting rid of your exes," Rafiel said. And shook his head. "Or of course, perhaps we are completely wrong. The smell wasn't continuous. At least for me, it wasn't. You?"

  "No, I couldn't follow it from the bathroom to the shark tank. Also, I thought there was a faint trail in the jellyfish and crab area, and all the way to the seafood restaurant." Which she privately thought was the height of bad taste to have attached to an aquarium, though right now, after shifting, those fishies in the tanks were starting to look startlingly like protein packs with incidental fins. "But it wasn't truly contiguous, and it . . . well, it didn't feel quite the same to me. I'd say there were two trails. Maybe three."

  It was only as she saw the sudden look of alarm cross Rafiel's face, that Kyrie realized this was probably not the right thing to say.

  "Three?" he said. "Are you sure?"

  She shrugged. "Rafiel," she said, unable to fully keep her impatience out of her voice. "You know very well that you are the best sniffer of us all, when it comes to shifter-scent. I can only tell you what I smell . . . and it's probably less than you can sniff out."

  But he shook his head, and swallowed hard. "No, the problem is that when you said it, it made sense, it clicked. Not one interrupted trail, but three trails. What the hell does that mean? A cabal of shifters, ready to kill people at the aquarium? What are we looking at here? A mob of shifters who have turned on all non-shifters? A shifter religion sacrificing the non-shifters?"

  Kyrie shrugged. "Or just, perhaps, three peop
le who happen to be shifters and who walked through the aquarium."

  Rafiel grimaced, but nodded. "Oh, perhaps you are right. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but . . ."

  "But our situation encourages paranoia?" she said. "Hiding from the world, unable to reveal what we are. Even in this multi-culti time, when every minority gets a pass simply for being a minority, we will never, ever, get such a pass. Because we are . . . dangerous?"

  Another grimace that might have been an attempt at a smile. "I was going to say that sometimes paranoia is right, however little we like to admit it."

  "Uh." Kyrie shrugged. "I would say we have insufficient data to say."

  She started walking away from the bathroom area, and out of the monitors and clearly fake, Victorian-looking submarine hardware area, towards the stairs. The stairs were broad and spiral and surrounded by glass—giving them rather the look of an aquarium designed to contain people.

  "Come on, Rafiel," she said, staring out at the blizzard's magnificent raging whiteness. She would guess during one of Colorado's many unclouded days, one would have a magnificent view from here of the city of Goldport, such as it was, sprawling at the base of the Rockies. Now you couldn't even see the office tower across the street. It was just white and more white, blowing and swirling as far as the eye could see.

  And just as she thought this, she realized she was wrong—because in the middle of the storm, a flash of green and gold showed, at her eye level, three stories up from the ground.

  "What the—" Rafiel blurted out from behind her. "Is that—"

  And in the next second, Kyrie was sure that that was indeed her errant boyfriend in dragon form, because Tom, all of him, emerged from the storm, as close to the glass as he could fly and not crash into it. His expression looked alarmed as he stared in at them. If alarmed at his proximity to the glass, or with flying in a storm, or something else, it was hard to tell.

  There was just a flash of terrified blue eyes, the dragon's mouth open in silent protest. And then . . . Tom flying away.

  "Tell me he didn't just fly here through the storm to check on us?" Rafiel said.

  And part of Kyrie wanted to tell him exactly that, except it depended on what Rafiel meant by checking on them. Kyrie was willing to bet that Tom wasn't jealous of their being out, alone, together. She was willing to bet that, because Tom had all but encouraged them to go out, even Tom wasn't that . . . paranoid as to change his mind so quickly. Besides . . . besides, if he didn't know he'd won that contest and won it for good, then Kyrie would give up on the whole relationship right now.

  But it had looked to Kyrie exactly as though Tom had been checking up on them. Not in jealousy or fear that they were about to betray him, but in confused fear for them . . . Fear of something happening to them.

  Where had he got that idea? And was he right?

  * * *

  Flying in the snow was far easier to talk about than to do. The part of Tom that remained Tom at the back of the dragon's brain was fairly sure that the dragons—if they'd ever existed except as shifters—could never have been creatures of cold climates.

  A string of complaints came from the dragon's body, penetrating Tom's mind. Cold might make him ache less, but cold hurt by itself. And he couldn't see. And the wings got no traction against this air laden with snow, which kept accumulating on their broad and outspread surface, thereby multiplying the cold and the lack of movement.

  It felt as though the dragon's wings and his toes would presently freeze so absolutely that they would fall off, like so many enigmatic pieces of flesh raining on urban Goldport. Rain of dragon parts. That would be a new one at least. Forget rains of fish.

  And yet, Tom's mind, deep within, like an implacable rider on a restive horse, insisted with all his will power that they must—must—go to Kyrie. They must protect her. And Rafiel too. The big lump might have been Tom's rival at some point. He was still, doubtlessly, a big lump. Also, generally speaking, a pain in the behind, always appearing so relaxed and laid back and comfortable with himself, while Tom most of the time felt that his personality and mind were sort of like one of those statues kindergartners sculpt: made of itty bits and pieces too mishandled to ever cling together properly, and forming no more than a suggestion of a shape, rather than the shape itself. But still, Rafiel was a friend. Pain or not, he would stand—had stood by Tom—when it was down to kill or be killed. And also, Tom suspected, deep within, Rafiel was a more honorable man and a more noble one than he liked to admit even to himself.

  Be it how it may, Kyrie was Tom's girlfriend and Rafiel was one of his very few friends. They would not be allowed to stand alone as they faced whatever and whoever that executioner creature might be.

  His purpose impelling him, he flew as fast as he could through downtown, sometimes descending to the top level of the high buildings, where the houses and offices formed a sort of sheltered canyon. He wondered if someone would see him, out of a window or a door—or rather if they'd see the suggestion of a dragon flying in the storm. He wondered what cryptozoology rumors would rise from it—like the Lizard Man in Denver, or all those black panthers and black dogs that appeared everywhere.

  By the time he reached the aquarium, minutes later, he'd almost convinced himself that Old Joe had dreamed the whole thing. It was all a nightmare conjured from the old shifter's brain and whatever memories remained in that confused amalgam of personality. There would be no one there with Rafiel and Kyrie, and he would be in trouble with Kyrie for having left the diner for no reason at all. He almost looked forward to that monumental scolding, because if Kyrie was scolding him, that would mean that she was all right. And that all his fears were unfounded.

  And yet, dipping towards the parking lot of the aquarium, as he approached, to check how many people might be within and if he might have to shift form and hide, before he exposed them all, Tom saw that Rafiel's big, black SUV was not alone there. Parked just across from it—in what might have been, had the lines under the snow been visible, the immediately opposing space—was a low-slung Italian sports car.

  Tom-the-dragon blinked at the red car, in confusion. It looked like a dormant beast that would, at any minute, fling up and fly or attack. Definitely attack, judging by the look of the vehicle.

  Perhaps it is the car of an aquarium employee, said Tom's more reasonable human mind.

  Right. Right, Tom's unreasonable human mind answered. I'm absolutely sure it is. Scientists and fish-feeders often own cars that look like that.

  Well, the place has a restaurant, too. Perhaps it's the car of the owner.

  To this, even the doubting Thomas within could not have interposed any serious rebuttal. Instead, it settled into a non-verbal response—a prickling at the back of Tom's long dragon neck . . . a feeling of uneasiness in the pit of his stomach. And it was no use at all his telling himself that he was being silly. He flew around the building and thought he caught a glimpse of Rafiel and Kyrie on the third-floor stairway, but it was not something he could swear to. The glass was thick and curved, and probably designed to ensure the privacy of those within at the expense of the curiosity of those without.

  He flew around again, hoping they would come out, because then he could change and warn them. But there was nothing, except a suggestion of movement in a room where the aquariums seemed filled with the spindly forms of crabs. Tom had visited the aquarium with Keith once, a month ago—because one of Keith's would-be girlfriends worked there—and seemed to remember just such a room, right next to the restaurant. He and Keith had joked that the crabs were all probably terminally neurotic and tormented by dreams of drawn butter. But the movement—what seemed like a woman or a small man flitting around a corner was too brief to make sense of.

  And yet, he worried. What if the executioner, whoever he was, was already inside, getting ready to ambush Kyrie and Rafiel around the corner of some tank, or push them into the shark tank? What could Tom do from out here?

  He decided to land somewhere and shift, then see i
f he could break into the aquarium. In his misspent years as a transient, he'd often broken into places. Mostly into cars, when he absolutely needed transportation for a short period of time. Sometimes, into garden sheds, carriage houses or garages, in the coldest nights, to get some protection from the weather.

  He'd never stolen anything in those break-ins and he'd felt positively virtuous about that, until Kyrie had made him understand the damage he caused, however minimal, still disturbed the lives of innocents.

  Still, he had experience breaking into places. Granted, a garden shed was bound to have a flimsier lock than . . . well, a municipal aquarium, even—or perhaps particularly—a municipal aquarium run by a seafood restaurant chain. But all the same, he should be able to break in. And he should be able to find Kyrie and Rafiel. And warn them. Before they got pushed into the shark tank.

  He took a half-circle flight away from the windows, looking for a place to land and shift, where he would be less likely to be seen from nearby buildings. This objective was made only slightly more difficult because he could not see into any of the buildings around, and therefore could not tell if anyone might be looking out of a window, and have enough visibility to survey the parking lot of the aquarium. He kind of doubted it, though.

  His memories of the location of the aquarium, gathered during his visit, in sunnier—if briskly cold—weather, was that it sat on a corner, bordering two fairly well-traveled streets—Ocean Street, where the aquarium's postal address was—and Congregation Avenue, which led straight to the convention center in less than a mile. On the other side of those roads were office buildings. The chances of anyone being in one of those buildings, on a snowy evening, were very low. In fact, possibly, nonexistent. He'd just land somewhere.

  Down below him, in the parking lot, a car door banged. Somehow, in his mind, a voice echoed—not the Great Sky Dragon's voice, but a voice just as immense, just as overpowering—Hey, Dragon Boy! it said. Come and be killed.