Keith did a double take at Rafiel. "Taking a real job in your spare time, Officer Trall?"
"Nah. Just came by to talk to Tom," Rafiel said, looking embarrassed at being caught behind the counter as though he were an employee. "I'll be going now. Nice to meet you, Summer. Watch out for Keith. He's a troublemaker."
Tom caught Keith's questioning look at him, and frowned. Perhaps it was that he was behind this counter and cooking, with the scent of fresh fries, hamburgers, melting cheese and toasting bread in his nose. Perhaps through all this, it was too much to expect that Tom could smell another shifter. But though he could smell Rafiel faintly—the metallic scent associated with shifters coming through a mask of Axe cologne—there was no other hint of a shifter-scent. At least not close enough for him to track.
As Conan ducked behind the counter, to grab the coffee pot, Tom could smell him too, his scent a little sharper than Rafiel's and not overlaid with anything but soap and water. But, as far as he could tell, there was no other shifter-scent at all.
He would have to ask Keith why he thought this girl might be a shifter.
* * *
Kyrie couldn't breathe. Her chest ached and her throat stung and she couldn't breathe. It was all she managed to do not to claw at her own neck in frantic attempts to somehow force herself to get air in, through the miasma that surrounded her. It made no sense, because she knew she was breathing—somehow, she was still breathing, otherwise she would have passed out long since. But at the same time, the stink around her was so prevalent that she felt sure she couldn't be breathing. She just couldn't.
The smell surrounded her, intrusive, offensive. It seemed to her that she was not only inhaling it, but that it was coming through her ears and her pores as well. Pinning her down.
Where are you trying to go, Kitten Girl? Do you think I'd hurt a pretty thing like you?
Kyrie turned around. She wasn't sure why, but she felt as if the thoughts were coming from behind her, as she tried to get to the kitchen door—and somehow couldn't because the stink held her back, held her in place.
As she turned, she saw she was right. He stood in the shadows of the door from the hallway, just off the kitchen, and he seemed to be wearing a shimmery silver turtleneck and tailored black pants. He held a cigarette in his hand.
"We don't . . ." Kyrie said, slowly, because speaking hurt, thinking hurt, assembling thoughts into words seemed a labor worthy of Hercules. "We don't smoke. In the house. We don't approve of smoking. In the house."
She realized how ridiculous she sounded, as she was barely able to breathe and wondering what this . . . creature was and what powers he had over her. They'd determined in the parking lot that it could somehow reach into their minds and touch them. It could change what they were thinking. It was clear even to Kyrie's befuddled mind that it could also cause her to smell what she was smelling. There was no other way anything—human or animal—could smell that strongly, and the creature was or appeared to be in human form, standing in the demi-shadows of her hallway, smoking.
Kyrie hadn't been able to really look at him before—not in the parking lot at night, and under snow. But now she observed him. Was she seeing who he was, or who he appeared to be? And in either case, what could she deduce about him?
He was short for a male. Maybe an inch taller than Tom—she would guess him at five eight or thereabouts, and well built—that much was obvious from his huge shoulders, his muscular arms, his whole posture. The silvery turtleneck shimmered over muscle definition that would have made a gym bunny cry. This was not surprising. In Kyrie's experience most male shifters were built. Something about the animal form and the posture they assumed in their animal form made them exercise as humans normally didn't. In fact, what was strange was people like Conan who seemed to have not one functional muscle in their wiry, stringy shapes.
Beyond that, he was gold-skinned—a tone that Kyrie thought of as vaguely Mediterranean. Anthony's color. Could be anything from the southern regions, from Europe to the Americas. His hair was black, lank, and just a little long in front, falling in smooth bangs over his forehead, though the back seemed perfectly molded to the contours of a well-shaped head.
Other than that there was not much unusual about him—his nose was sharply aquiline, but not remarkably so. His forehead was high, but didn't give the impression of a receding hairline. His lips were broad and seemed sensuous, particularly now when they distended in a come-hither smile. But none of it would have made the man stand out on a crowded street.
None of it but the eyes. His eyes were gold. More gold than Rafiel's, which fell in the outer limits of brown. This creature's eyes were gold to the point of having an almost metallic shimmer to them. And like metal they were cold, unfeeling, blank. A blankness somehow lit from behind, like the screen of an old-fashioned computer.
The result was a look of perfect madness, the look of someone who had gone beyond normal human thoughts, normal human processes. Perhaps beyond thoughts at all.
He grinned at her as though he were a famished wolf and she a particularly tasty morsel of steak. Which might be an analogy much too close for Kyrie's comfort. She backed up, slowly, fighting against the smell, which seemed to hold her in place, to prevent her from moving, to drain her of all energy. It wasn't real, she told herself.
But she still couldn't reason her way to turning around and unlocking the door and running out onto the driveway. And perhaps that was not as irrational as it seemed to be. She didn't want to turn her back on the thing smiling seductively at her. The idea of turning her back on him, made her think of his being on her suddenly, biting into her, savaging her.
She backed against the door, without taking her eyes off him. If she was going to die, she would die with her eyes open. She would face her death without flinching.
Back against the door, she took a deep breath and told herself she was not smelling anything. Nothing at all. It was a smell of the mind, as she fancied Shakespeare might have said. Something that didn't exist. The air in her kitchen would be as untainted as it was when she came in. Cold and clammy, with a hint of disused space, and perhaps the ghost of cookies past, but nothing else.
"What do you want?" she asked the man smiling at her from the shadows. "What do you want from me?"
And the moment she asked, she recoiled, because it seemed to her like inviting the vampire into your home. This gave the creature a chance to say that he wanted her to die. And then, somehow to make it so.
But he laughed, a full-throated and very masculine laughter that she might have found pleasant under different circumstances. He emerged from the hallway and grinned at her. The light from the kitchen window behind her fell fully on his face. It should have made him look less unpleasant or more human. But all it did was gild the planes and features so that he looked like the antique funeral mask of an ancient and cruel emperor. The kind that would have ordered hundreds of thousands of people killed at his funeral rites.
"I just want to know you better," he spoke. It was, she realized with a shock, the first time she heard his voice. Before, he hadn't deigned to speak in audible words, but had tried to reach into her mind. She wondered if this meant that she'd scored a point. She very much doubted it.
Fighting against the smell that surrounded her, fighting against the suggestion that she was a small, frail, young thing at the mercy of this ruthless primeval evil—something she was sure he would like her to believe—she made her voice cutting and as sarcastic as if she were talking to Tom and Rafiel. "The normal way to get to know a woman is to go somewhere she is and introduce yourself. Some of the more polite people might ask her for coffee."
His laughter jangled, pleasant and cultured, but with something just slightly off-key behind it. It was, Kyrie thought, like when you heard thunder overhead, and the glassware in your cupboards tinkled in tune with it. A false note, a strange intrusion in what she was sure he wanted to be a perfectly polished image. She tried to keep this knowledge from her eyes, though,
and must have succeeded, because he bent upon her an expression of great amusement—as though she were a particularly clever pet or a favored pupil.
Bending at the waist, hands on his thighs, the red glow of his cigarette end turned outward, he said, "Dante Dire at your service."
"Cute," she said, keeping her voice sarcastic.
"Nothing comes of denying what you are, Kitten. It is better to embrace it."
"I am not 'Kitten.' And I don't care to embrace anything." Said primly and with her back to the door and her lips taut.
"Really?" His insane eyes danced with merriment. "Don't you now? Oh, don't worry about it, I'm not going to eat you." He took a pull of his cigarette. "And if I did, you'd enjoy it." Again the mad dance of his insane eyes, followed by, "What do you think I am? Why do you think I'd want to hurt you?"
Because you broke into my house. Kyrie thought. Because you are using a smell that can only be supernatural to keep me cowed. Because you talked in my mind. Because you attacked and wounded my boyfriend. Because you speak to me as if I were not an adult.
She kept these thoughts up front, while behind them she ran others. She thought that if he was using his mind power on her, if he'd used some trick of pretending to be Rafiel—she was sure of it now—to lure her, it must mean he didn't want to or couldn't face all of them together. She didn't know why, since he had seemed to do pretty well with it in the parking lot of the aquarium. But it was clear he didn't like it, and didn't care to repeat it. And that was fine. Absolutely fine. But there was more. The fact that he was keeping the smell on her, and feeling that the smell was suffocating her, must mean he was afraid of her thinking clearly, of her thinking what she must do.
The thought sneaked behind her mind, afraid to be seen by whatever mind-scan capacities he had, that she should turn around and open the door. But . . . no. She couldn't do it, even if she tried. Simply couldn't.
"You have nothing to fear from me," Dire said. "I don't know what you were told about me, but you can think of me as a private investigator. I'm here to find out what is killing our people."
Kyrie made a sound at the back of her throat. "Our people?" she asked. "I am not a dire wolf."
He made a dismissive gesture with his cigarette. "Shifters."
Behind it all her thoughts went on. So she couldn't turn her back on him. It would be just too creepy. Which left her with no other choice . . . or perhaps . . . Like a glimmer, at the back of her mind, came the idea that she could move towards Dire, instead of away from him. Move towards Dire, but maneuver so the little folding table and chairs that she and Tom used for their meals would always be between them, and her back too close to the kitchen counter and stove to allow him to teleport behind her. She was sure that there were some rules to this teleportation thing, if teleportation it was and not just an ability to make people forget they'd seen him move through the intervening space. She was sure even if he could instantly magic himself across the room, he couldn't do it when there was a good chance he would end up with a table, a chair, or a fridge embedded in his toned-and-tanned body.
She took a step towards him, and saw his eyes widen in shock, and the stench vacillated for a moment, allowing her to take a breath of the cold, untainted air of the kitchen. The stench returned, of course, but she knew now more than ever that it was fake. Another step, and it seemed to her that a flicker of something moved behind his eyes, as if he, himself, had been on the verge of taking a hasty step back. She sidestepped, then sidled rapidly around the table.
"Why are you afraid of me?" he asked, his voice trembling slightly. "If you're not a traitor to our people, you have no reason to fear me."
Ah! "What is a traitor to our people?" she asked, her voice cutting and slow, though she felt it coming from a shaking brittle place inside her. "I've never had any people. The only one I've ever belonged to is Tom."
"The dragon boy?" the creature asked, and there was real anger behind the words. "He's less than nothing. A larva. Not even a young one. Ignorant. Weak."
Kyrie read something in that, an echoing, resounding jealousy. Jealousy of Tom? Or jealousy, simply, that they had a relationship? What in this creature's past made him so angry at her?
"Tom is the only other shifter who ever took my side. Who ever cared for me."
"All of us care for you," the creature said. "It is the duty of shifter to look after shifter. You should always be loyal to your kin. Your people."
"I have no kin," Kyrie said. "I was adopted."
And before the creature could answer the flip response, she'd managed to reach her objective—the phone hanging on the wall of the kitchen. They should have a mobile phone, she thought. It had never seemed important before, and this phone had been practically free at the thrift shop, but if they had a mobile one . . .
The phone cold in her hand, she pushed the automatic dialing button to get the diner. She saw the creature lunge towards the phone, finger extended, to disconnect her. But if he was afraid to stop her calling for help, that meant help was possible.
With her free hand, she grabbed one of the chairs, and threw it, as hard as she could, at the creature, then, grabbing the other chair, used it to keep him away from the phone, in a move reminiscent of lion tamers at the zoo.
"Put the phone down," the creature said, his voice sounding like sweet reason. "Put the phone down. I only want to talk to you. If you're not a murderer, I won't hurt you."
Oh, sure you won't. And what's a murderer to you, buddy? she thought; at the same time her mind flooded with sheer relief at hearing Tom's voice answer the phone, brightly, "The George, your downtown dining option twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, how may I help you?"
"Tom," she yelled. "Tom. I'm home. And there's a creature. The dire wolf. Help."
She let the phone dangle before she heard Tom's response. From the other side of the table came growls and fury, as the creature, seemingly giving in to an uncontrollable impulse, shifted into his animal form.
Kyrie grabbed the chair and huddled in a corner holding it—legs out—like a defensive shield. Shifting would earn her nothing but the loss of her clear mind. She might not be able to defend herself this way, but she had to try. And she had to hope she would still be alive when Tom arrived.
* * *
Rafiel saw Tom reach for the phone and because Tom had just blocked his obvious path out from behind the counter—not on purpose, Rafiel was sure, but simply by reaching for the phone—Rafiel started going around his friend, to edge behind him and reach over to open the portion of the counter that allowed egress.
He heard Tom give his cheery signature-line response to the phone and rolled his eyes. As if anyone actually would consider a greasy spoon their choice for dining downtown, no matter how many times Tom repeated it. He found Kyrie's "The George" answer far more palatable.
Touching Tom's shoulder with his fingertips, Rafiel expected to cause the other man to step away, however briefly. But instead, Tom stood, frozen. Rafiel became aware that the voice coming teensy and distant through the old-fashioned phone was Kyrie's and that Kyrie sounded hysterical. He didn't remember Kyrie ever sounding hysterical, not even when she thought she was seeing Tom die before her eyes.
The fingers he had prodded Tom's shoulder with, in a very masculine keeping of distance in a friendship type of gesture, now became a full hand laid on Tom's shoulder. "What's wrong?" he asked, as he realized that Tom had gone frighteningly pale, and that his throat was working, his Adam's apple moving up and down, as if he were trying to speak through a great lump in the way.
But when Tom spoke, it wasn't to answer Rafiel. Instead, it was a raw scream, that seemed to have been torn out. "Kyrie!"
People at the nearby tables turned to look, and Conan looked up from a bill he was totaling up. Keith and his girlfriend, too, looked towards Tom, alarmed.
"What—?" Keith said.
But Tom spoke to Rafiel, apparently having totally forgotten that shifter business was secret, or that they
might be in as much danger from being overheard as they would be from no matter which arcane shifter might be threatening them or, for that matter, murdering people at the aquarium.
"It's Kyrie," he said, and swallowed. "It's the . . . creature from the aquarium. He . . . I must go. I must go to her."
And as he spoke, he tore from around his head the red bandana which he usually wore, pirate-style, while cooking, and he pulled his apron off.
"Tom," Rafiel said, in warning tones, afraid that his friend would decide to shift, right there in the diner. But Tom, clearly, wasn't that completely lost to reason. He ducked under the pass-through in the counter, and ran towards the hallway.
"Keith, take the grill, please," Tom called over his shoulder, thereby proving that he wasn't completely lost to reason at all, or perhaps that his devotion to the diner outweighed everything else, even his love for Kyrie.
Rafiel didn't stand around to see if Keith took over the grill and stoves. Instead, he ducked under the pass-through on his own, and ran down the hallway after Tom. "Let me go," he said, as Tom, in what seemed to be a blind rush, struggled with the back door. "Let me go. I can go. I can defend her."
"No," Tom said, with a sound like a hiccup. "No."
"You don't think I would fight for her?"
Tom had managed to unlock the door and now pulled it open and walked out into the parking lot, and, after looking around—Rafiel hoped he was making sure that no one was coming or going close enough to see him—ducked behind the dumpster, where he would be invisible from nearby Pride Street.
He started undressing, rapidly, rolling his clothes in a bundle. "Stay," he told Rafiel. "Give Keith a hand. I'm sorry if I was too loud in there. She's in trouble. It's not that I don't think you'd fight for her. But flying is faster."
And like that, Tom kicked his boots aside, dropped his pants and underwear in a bundle, pulled off his shirt and writhed and twisted, coughing, once, twice, three times, as his body changed shapes and textures, the smooth skin becoming green scales, the head elongating . . .
Gentleman Takes a Chance Page 15
