Gentleman Takes a Chance

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Before Rafiel could blink twice, Tom was lifting off, flying across the clear skies of Goldport towards his own neighborhood.

  A curse sounded from the door of the diner. "He swore he'd tell me." There was a sound of ripping clothes. And then a red dragon rose, also, following Tom across the skies.

  This was folly, Rafiel thought, particularly while journalists obsessed with cryptozoology were already suspicious of the existence of dragons in town. But it didn't seem to matter, not just now. Nothing mattered, except Kyrie.

  Rafiel wanted more than anything to go and save her. He understood Tom's impulse completely. His body strained to be in the sky, speeding towards her, ready to help in any way he could. But Rafiel couldn't fly and Tom had asked him to stay here and, Rafiel realized, with Conan gone, following Tom, and Keith at the grill, there would be no one to wait tables.

  There weren't many people inside, but Rafiel was willing to bet there were more people than Keith could handle on his own, while cooking. Right. He ran his hand backward through his mane of unruly blond hair, aware, as he did it, that he would be making his hair stand on end and look more lionlike than ever. Right. Sometimes your duty requires you to be a hero, and sometimes it requires you to wait tables.

  He turned to do just that and opened the door to The George. As he stepped into the cool shadows of the hallway, he saw a woman's figure retreating rapidly, ahead of him.

  "May I help you?" he asked.

  She turned around. It was Keith's blond friend, with her much-too-thick jacket and that look she had of having been dropped headfirst into a fish tank and still not being able to tell the piranhas from the goldfish. "I was . . . looking for the bathroom," she said.

  It might very well be. Well—it could be, at least. If she was as confused as she looked, she might have walked all the way to the end of the hallway somehow managing to go by two bathrooms marked with the international icons for stick-figure man and stick-figure woman wearing triangle skirt without noticing them. He would even be willing to understand this confusion if the bathrooms had been marked salmon and shad roe, but since they seemed to be marked restroom it made the confusion less likely.

  On the other hand, perhaps she was a shifter. If that was the truth, she might have understood more of the conversation than she'd seemed to, and she might have been in search of further confirmation.

  And yet, she still didn't smell like a shifter to Rafiel. He'd keep a very close eye on her, even as he helped Keith sling the hash or at least the burgers, and prayed with as much faith as he could possibly muster that Kyrie would be all right.

  She might not be his—she would never be his—but he was not willing to face a world from which she was gone.

  * * *

  To shift or not to shift. Tom—as a dragon—landed on the driveway, just behind the car. He'd been thinking—as far as he'd been thinking at all—that he wouldn't shift. The dragon was a far more impressive foe than Tom, with all of his 5'6", no matter how strong, no matter how muscular.

  But he couldn't even get close to the door as a dragon, let alone enter through the back or front door and go to Kyrie's rescue. A quick look to the house next door, where an elderly couple lived, reminded him too that the longer he stayed here in dragon form, the more likely someone would see him and report him. A vision of journalists with snapping cameras had taken hold of his brain and he was struggling to shift back to human form, as—behind him—he heard a dragon land.

  Already in human form, Tom looked back, startled, to see a red dragon on the driveway. Conan. And Tom hadn't called him. But Tom didn't have time to discuss it with Conan, or even to worry about what the Asian dragon might do. Instead, he must go to Kyrie, if Kyrie was still alive, if Kyrie could still be saved. And he didn't even want to consider the possibility of anything else. He plunged through the kitchen door, into a scene of chaos and a gagging animal smell.

  "Tom," Kyrie said. She was on the floor, with a chair held as a shield. Across from her, biting and growling and lunging at the chair was the dire wolf, his fur on end, his eyes mad, saliva dripping from his daggerlike teeth.

  He can take me in one bite, Tom thought. He can behead me with a single bite. I'm going to die. But I can't become a dragon here. I can't. It would destroy the room and kill Kyrie, and he'd just port elsewhere.

  Blindly, he reached for the rack of utensils that Kyrie had put on the wall, next to the stove. He rarely cooked at home—both he and Kyrie normally ate at the diner, or else brought home food from the diner. However, Tom was taking cooking courses and on the rare occasions when he did cook at home, he felt the need for semi-decent implements. So Kyrie had tacked up to the wall one of those things with leather pockets normally used in workshops to keep hammers and whatnot. And over the last couple of months, they'd been buying good implements: chopping knives, spatulas, a meat-tenderizing hammer.

  Tom saw the dire wolf turn towards him, and he knew he had only seconds, and he knew that he couldn't turn his back on the creature. So he reached with his right hand and grabbed the first handle he could. What he got was a polished, sealed-wood handle, and, from the heft, the meat-tenderizing hammer, with a weighted hammer on one side and a hatchet on the other. Too short to keep the wolf's jaws from closing on his head. He reached again, and brought out . . . an immense skewer. It was Kyrie's latest acquisition, and Tom wasn't absolutely sure what she meant him to use it for. It wasn't a classical skewer as such, but it had a skewer in the center and then four, smaller, metal prongs, on the bottom. Kyrie had said something about a TV commercial for it that mentioned roasting a chicken in a standing position. Since Tom couldn't imagine why anyone would want to do what sounded like a convoluted form of medieval torture—at least if the chicken were still alive—he'd thanked her effusively and set the skewer in the wall pocket, determined to forget it.

  Now he realized it was a formidable weapon. He turned to the dire wolf, holding the hammer-ax in one hand, and the skewer in the other, and opened his mouth to say something pithy and challenging on the lines of make my day. And the smell enveloped him. It was like the smell of a hundred cats in heat; the smell of a thousand unwashed, wet dogs. It filled his mouth, his nostrils, his every pore. It made it impossible for him to think, impossible for him to move.

  "Look out," Kyrie yelled and, rising from her defensive position, hit the dire wolf hard across the back of the head with what remained of her portable chair.

  Tom felt the teeth clamp on his leg, and screamed, inhaling more of the smell. He knew what he should be doing. He should be attacking the creature, making him back up, allowing Kyrie to go behind him, allowing them both to escape, with Tom guarding the retreat, towards the car and away.

  But no matter how much he thought of it, as the feral mad eyes faced Tom's, as the creature growled and snarled and salivated, all Tom could think was that he couldn't move. That the stench enveloping him was somehow preventing his movement.

  "Tom, damn it," Kyrie said, her voice high and hysterical. "Do something. We're going to die."

  And at that moment . . . there was a voice. It was the voice that Tom had heard in the shower before, the voice of the Great Sky Dragon. It echoed in his mind, filling up all of his senses, so that it was visible sound and scented words, and seemed to touch him all over, as if in an enveloping blanket.

  Mine, the voice said. Mine. Under my protection.

  Like that—with those words—the horrible gagging smell was gone from Tom's nostrils, from Tom's mind. The feel of the Great Sky Dragon's words still echoing in him—seeming to make his very teeth vibrate—Tom stepped forward, and brought the skewer in hard on the creature's eye, thinking only that if he destroyed the brain it might be the same as beheading. But the dire wolf had jumped backward just in time. The tip of the skewer cut a deep gash down the side of his face, while the ax, which Tom had managed to swing as a follow through, cut across his left ear.

  The creature screamed. Blood spurted. And through it all, his voice, less powerfu
l than the Great Sky Dragon's but also echoing inside Tom's head and not outside, as voices were supposed to, sounded, He must pay. He must pay. And he's not yours. He's not Asian. You can't claim him.

  The stench came back, less overpowering, but back, nonetheless. But only for a second. The Great Sky Dragon's voice sounded again, and clearly he was a creature with a very simple philosophy. Mine, he yelled. Mine. I've claimed him.

  The stench vanished. The dire wolf growled. Tom swung forward, skewer and ax swinging. Making a space behind him. "Go, Kyrie, go," he said. "The car, now."

  She got up and lurched, behind him, towards the door, while he moved to block the dire wolf from getting to her. The creature wasn't teleporting or giving the impression of teleporting. Whatever it was that the Great Sky Dragon's voice caused, it seemed to cause the dire wolf to become unable to create what, for lack of better words, one must call supernatural effects.

  "Come," Kyrie yelled, as she opened the door, and ran full tilt outside. "Come."

  "I will," Tom said, kicking the door fully open with his foot, and backing into the open door, still holding the skewer and the ax.

  The dire wolf made a jump—a clumsy jump—towards him. There was no Great Sky Dragon voice, but Tom swung at him, hard with the ax, and cut him across the nose.

  Kyrie honked the horn, and now Tom turned, thinking it was the most stupid thing he could do, but also that he ran much faster that way. The passenger door of the car was open, and he more threw himself at the opening than ran into it.

  His head on Kyrie's shoulder, he reached to close the door, even as she started the car and backed out of the driveway. The dire wolf came running out of the kitchen and chased them. Kyrie turned abruptly, hitting the wolf with the back left wheel and saying, under her breath, "Sorry, it wasn't intentional."

  Tom took a deep breath, two. He straightened, and buckled his seat belt. "To whom are you apologizing?"

  "You. Him. I don't know. I didn't mean to run him over. Did I run him over?"

  Tom looked back at what looked very much like a bleeding dire wolf still chasing them. "I don't think so. Can you go faster?"

  She pressed the gas down, taking these little residential back streets at speeds normally reserved for the highway, and breathing deeply, deeply, as if recovering from shock.

  It took Tom a moment to realize that it wasn't breathing, it was sobs. "Kyrie," he said, aghast. He'd never seen her cry. He'd never heard her cry before. Not like this.

  "I can't help it," she said. "Reaction." She turned again, seemingly blindly. "I thought I was going to die. And then I thought you were going to die and I . . ."

  "I thought you were going to die," a voice said from the back. Conan's voice. He popped from the back seat like a deranged jack-in-the- box, and Kyrie slammed on the brakes hard, stopping them suddenly in the middle of a tree-lined street. "I thought you were going to die. You screamed. So I called Himself. I told him I couldn't go in, but I thought the enemy was in there. And then . . . he aimed for your mind and the enemy's mind."

  "What the hell?" Kyrie said. And it was all that Tom could do not to turn around and plant his fist in the middle of Conan's smug-looking face.

  Instead, he turned around and said, "What are you doing? What do you think you were doing, hiding back there?"

  Conan's expression shifted, from smug to sullen. "I wasn't hiding from you," he said, in the tone that a kid might use to say it wasn't him who drew on the wall. "I was hiding from the dire wolf."

  "Oh, that makes it ever so much better," Kyrie said. "Not."

  "Just go," Conan said. "He's going to come for us."

  "I don't think so," Tom said, looking behind them. "He's not back there, and besides, he knows where we're going to go, doesn't he?"

  "Does he?" Conan asked.

  "The diner," Kyrie said. And then, softly, "Hopefully, he's not so brazen as to come and attack us in the diner, in the parking lot, in front of everyone."

  "Hopefully," Tom said. "Or we'll be dead. I mean, it's not like we can, realistically, stop showing up at the diner."

  "No," Kyrie said. She started the car again, going more slowly. "But perhaps once he calms down, he won't be as dangerous? I mean, I get a feeling we pushed him over the edge, and he didn't very well know what he was doing."

  "We pushed him over the edge?" Tom said. "We? What were you doing at the house, anyway? And without telling me. If Rafiel hadn't told me—"

  "You should have asked Rafiel what I was doing at the house," Kyrie said. She drove with jagged movements that caused the car to lurch one way then the other. "He called me and told me to meet him there. Something about one of his relatives repairing the house. And then he wasn't there."

  "He called you?" Tom asked. He remembered Rafiel coming into the diner, his confusion at not finding Kyrie in the bed-and-breakfast. He didn't even want to think that Rafiel might be working with the dire wolf. If Rafiel was . . . If Rafiel had betrayed them . . .

  "He called me on my cell phone. Told me to meet him at the house ASAP. I thought it was a little weird, but he said he had everything ready to go right then, so I showered and went."

  Tom groaned. Either Rafiel was mind-manipulated, or Rafiel had defected to—for lack of better words—the dark side. Either way, it could not be good. "But . . ." he said. "But . . ." And swallowed hard.

  "The only weird thing," Kyrie said, "is that his words seemed to have . . . oh, I don't know how to put it . . . no sound. No vocalization."

  Tom found his forehead wrinkling in worry before he could think that he was worried. That didn't feel right. Kyrie's purse was at his feet, as it normally was when she was driving. He bent down and picked it up. "May I get your cell phone?" he asked. He didn't like to reach into her purse without an invitation.

  "Sure," she said, as she turned onto Pride Street. Five minutes from The George.

  He reached into the little pocket on the front lining where she normally kept her phone. He picked it up. "He called you on this cell phone?" he said. It wouldn't turn on, there was no battery. So, he grabbed his cell phone from his pocket, and swapped the batteries. Then he turned the phone on and looked through calls received.

  "Yeah."

  "When?"

  "This morning, almost right after you left, I think. I was lying in a patch of sun and unable to sleep, and then the phone rang."

  Tom looked up and down through the list of numbers. The latest call the phone showed was three days before. He took a deep breath, and waited till she pulled in the parking lot of The George to speak. He wasn't sure what telling her while she was driving would do.

  "Kyrie," he said. "There's no record of any such call."

  * * *

  "What?" Kyrie asked. She pushed the parking brake down with her foot, as she reached blindly for her cell phone. "Let me see that."

  She pulled the cell phone from Tom's nerveless hands, and went to the menu and calls received, and paged, frantically, up and down the list.

  She realized she was shaking violently, and she put the phone down on the seat, very slowly, then very slowly lowered her head towards the wheel, until she rested her forehead on it.

  "You mean the whole call . . ." she said, at last. "You mean, he just reached into my mind." For some reason the thought made her physically ill. Reaching into her head to trick her seemed like the worst violation possible. "How could he? How?"

  "I don't know. I think he has some sort of mind power," Tom said, hesitantly. He laid his palm gently on her shoulder, as if he were afraid of touching her. But when she didn't protest, he enveloped her in his arms and pulled her to him. "I'm sorry, Kyrie. I think this is worse than anything we faced before."

  For a moment, it comforted her, that he held her like that, tightly, against his body. He was still naked—she was quite sure he had forgotten that—and his skin smelled of the hotel's soap overlaid with sweat from fear and fight. It was not unpleasant. His hair was loose—as it always was after he shifted back and forth. He kept
a package of hair ties in the glove compartment of the car, in a kitchen drawer at home, and in one of the supply rooms in the diner. His hair brushed her face, softly, like silk.

  And for a moment—for just a moment, as her breath calmed down—this felt good and protective and healing. She had a sense that she belonged to him—that she was his, that Tom was somehow entitled to hold her like this and that he—as scattered and lost as he'd been most of his life—he was somehow protecting her. As he'd protected her, or tried to, in that kitchen.

  But slowly the thought intruded that he was just looking after her because he looked after everyone—Old Joe, Conan, Not Dinner, and even Keith and Anthony to an extent. Tom seemed to think it was his duty, his necessary place in life, to go through it helping everyone and everything. And this made his arms around her, his soothing voice, the hand now gently stroking her hair and cheek, utterly meaningless.

  She shrank back, laughing a little, disguising her embarrassment at having been, momentarily, emotionally naked. "You must put clothes on," she said. "What if someone looks in the car and sees me sitting here with two naked guys?"

  "I don't have clothes," Conan said from the back seat, his voice dull and seemingly trying to be distant, as if he were apologizing for being present during their embrace. He hardly needed to.

  Tom pulled back. He took a deep breath, as if he needed to control himself, and she didn't look down to see if he needed to control himself in that sense. It wouldn't help to know he'd been embracing her out of automatic pity but that lust had mixed in. She wanted to know he had held her for other reasons—she wasn't even sure what reasons she wanted it to be. Perhaps because he felt so incomplete without her, that he had to hold her and protect her to be able to hold and protect himself. She wanted him to think of them as a unit, she thought. As belonging. And perhaps that was, ultimately, her greatest foolishness, that she so desperately wanted to belong with someone. Not to. She had no fancy to be owned or restricted in that way. For much too long, growing up, she had belonged to the state of North Carolina—had been in effect the child of the state—that she did not want to belong to anyone. But she wanted to belong with someone, to be part of a group. Not at the mercy of passing bureaucrats and their whims, but able to contribute and be taken into account by a group.