Gentleman Takes a Chance

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Tom frowned. "What can Conan do?"

  He saw that Conan, having approached the counter to drop off an order, was standing there, with the order slip in his hand, staring dumbly at Tom and then at the dire wolf, and then back at Tom again.

  The dire wolf shifted his attention to Tom and inclined his head slightly, in what might be an attempt at a courteous greeting. Then he looked at Conan and something very much like a contemptuous smile played upon his lips. "Him? I imagine he can't do much. In and of himself. I gather he was recently wounded and those limbs take their sweet time to grow in, when you're that young." His eyes twinkled with malicious amusement. "Who wounded him? You?"

  Tom nodded.

  "Yes, that would suit the daddy dragon's sense of humor, to send him to guard you, after that. And no, I don't expect he would be any good at it. Certainly no good at all, against someone like me. But unless I'm very wrong, the daddy dragon already has more able forces stationed nearby. He would have sent this creature because he looks helpless and inoffensive, and you, if the thing with the alligator shifter is any indication, have a tendency to take in birds with wounded wings, do you not? So he figured you'd take him in."

  "And?" Tom asked, his voice tense as a bowstring, as he shot a look at Conan, who looked ready to drop the order slip on the counter and run screaming into the night. He felt nausea again, the old sense of revulsion at the idea that the Great Sky Dragon knew him; understood him; was playing him.

  The dire wolf shrugged and seemed altogether too pleased with what he was about to say. "You see, as you age, you acquire other powers. What a lot of people would call psychic powers, I guess. The ability to enter minds, and to make them think things, or to activate their thoughts . . ."

  "Yes, yes, we've gathered that," Kyrie said, mouth suddenly dry.

  "I suppose you have," the dire wolf said, and smirked. "But the thing is, you see, that we can also use other, younger shifters, particularly those with whom we have a connection of some sort, as long-distance hearing devices. My guess is that this young one has sworn fealty to the Father of All Dragons, and the Father of All Dragons has, therefore, reached into his mind and made him into his very own listening device. He is listening to us now," the dire wolf bowed courteously in Conan's direction. "I don't know what his game is with you, but I am telling him now that I am staying out of it, and that no harm will come to you through me. None at all. You are his."

  Good, the word in the voice Tom had heard before echoed through his head, and suddenly he wondered if that had been what that first touch of the voice, while he was in the shower, had been. An attempt at getting him to admit fealty or subservience to the Great Sky Dragon. Doubtless, that would allow the old dragon to put a spy device directly in Tom's head itself, and not have to bother with Conan. Tom had a strange, sudden feeling that if he had accepted that, Conan wouldn't be alive. He had only crawled back, just in time, to have his boss find himself in need of a pitiful, inoffensive-looking creature. That was the only reason that Conan had been spared.

  "Not good," Tom said, making his voice just loud enough to sound forceful, without speaking to the whole diner. "I don't know why the Great Sky Dragon thinks he speaks for me, but he does not. I am not his to either condemn or protect or play games with. You came here to judge me and my friends, and my friends are the only group I owe any loyalty to. If you are going to condemn any of them, Kyrie, Rafiel or Keith, then I demand you condemn me as well," he said. "We are all one. What we did, we did as a group."

  He expected . . . oh, he didn't know. Outrage from the Great Sky Dragon. And possibly something more from the dire wolf—rage maybe. Tom could deal with rage right about now, even if he didn't want to have a shifter fight in the diner.

  This was not a game. He was not a pawn. And neither was anyone else, here. The sheer denuding of the humanity of everyone, shifter and not, that these old shifters seemed to do, so casually, made Tom want to hit someone. "We are not toys," he said.

  There was nothing from the Great Sky Dragon. Not a single word echoed through Tom's mind, and Tom had a moment of strange relief, when he thought he'd set himself free and that the Great Sky Dragon had, somehow, set him adrift. But then the dire wolf threw his head back and laughed so loudly, that a few people turned to look at him.

  He brought himself under control with what looked like an effort, reached for a napkin and wiped tears of laughter down his face. "Very funny. Very brave and gallant. No wonder the lady appreciates you, Dragon Boy. You say those things as if you really believed in them. But you know better and I know better. Your elder has claimed you, and in light of your elder's claim, I know you're his, and therefore I am keeping my hands off you. It is not part of my mandate to get people into a war, or to cause trouble for any other ancient shifters. So, I regret to inform you, but you're his, and his you'll remain."

  "And what do you intend to do about the rest of us?" Rafiel said. "While there were deaths, as you and the others have felt, they were in self-defense. And as for the young ones who died, it was an accident."

  There was a baring of teeth. "I am investigating," he said, slowly. "You know what they say about police work. Most of it is boring and painstakingly slow. I'm going over reports of the case in the local paper. I am looking at the site. I'm making my own determinations." He stood up. From his pocket, he removed the amount of money for the coffee, and carefully laid it on the counter. "I will try to keep shifters from being hurt," he said.

  And then he was gone, gliding towards the door, or perhaps teleporting towards it, with a grace so quick and irrevocable that they couldn't have stopped him had they tried.

  Tom, on the tip of whose tongue it had been to ask exactly what had happened to the alligator shifter, exactly what this monster might have done to the old friend—the old dependent—that Tom was in the habit of feeding and looking after, was forced to be quiet.

  Forced to be quiet, standing there at the counter, looking at his hands slowly clenching into fists. He wanted to scream, or pound the counter. He wanted to shift. And what, with one thing and another, he hadn't taken the time to eat any protein. He hadn't done anything to recover from his last shift. And it didn't seem to matter. He could feel his hands trying to elongate into claws. He could see his fingernails growing.

  He stumbled, like one drunk or blind, towards the back door, and outside, stepped into the cold air of the parking lot, suddenly startled that darkness had fallen and that it was snowing again—a steady snowfall, with large flakes. The surprising coldness of the air stopped his fury—or at least acted like a slap in the face, making him take long breaths, and pace a little, stomping his feet, trying to calm down.

  He wasn't going to shift. He wasn't going to. As he passed the stove, Keith had called out to him that he needed to go. Tom couldn't leave Keith stuck with this. And while he could, possibly, call Anthony in, if it was snowing again Anthony might be reluctant to come.

  He stomped his feet again. There were no windows looking over the parking lot, and the only light came from the two street lamps, which shone, in a spiral of light as though the light were a fracture in the glass of the night, a crack through which something human shone.

  There was nothing, Tom thought, blankly. Only the beast and the night. They resent humans for their light, for their bringing light into the night hours. For their science, for their thought. They resent us. I am human. I might be something else as well, but I'm not one of those. I'm not like them. I am not owned. I don't care if I was born of them. I don't care what unnameable offenses they think they suffered at the hands of those they call ephemerals.

  He stomped his feet again, and walked out to the parking lot, then back again, the snow falling on his head and, he hoped, cooling it. Shifters are dangerous. Any humans who tried to defend themselves against my kind probably had good reason to. We are dangerous. It's not like we are a harmless and persecuted minority. Oh, there are plenty of those in the world, and the crimes imagined against them are numberless.
But no one has to imagine crimes against shifters. No one needs to create grand conspiracy theories to think we control the world or the markets, or even the arts. No. Our crimes are obvious and brutal.

  He put his arms around himself, as he realized he was out without a jacket and that the bitter snow-laden wind was cutting through his sweat shirt to freeze the beaded sweat of anger on his body. I have met less than twenty adult shifters in my life and half of those were murderers. I cannot, I will not, believe it is wrong for people like Keith to suspect us of intending ill to the rest of them. Clearly this Dire creature intends plenty of ill to normal humans. Clearly. And the others . . . He shook his head.

  "Tom?" Kyrie's voice said, hesitant, from the doorway of the diner. "Tom?"

  * * *

  Rafiel knew a thundercloud when he saw one. He knew that Tom was leaving to deal with anger. He'd been around Tom enough to recognize the signs—as well as the signs that the man was fighting hard not to shift in front of all his customers.

  Rafiel could also understand, from the tightening of Kyrie's jaw and the way she looked as if she'd like to bite something in two, as she watched Tom head out the back door, that there might be a storm brewing there.

  Had he been an uninterested observer, he might very well have stayed around and convinced both of his friends to act like civilized, mature human beings. He might point out to Kyrie that killing Tom might seem like a really good idea, except that if she should succeed she would spend days not eating and moping about wishing she had him back—and that miracles rarely happened twice. He might point out to Tom that if he wanted a woman with an actual spine he had to allow her to think with her own mind, even if at times her actions seemed strange or ill-advised to him.

  But Rafiel wasn't an uninterested observer, and inserting himself into his friends' possible argument seemed to him the worst possible way to bring about a reconciliation. They were all too aware—as he was—that he'd wanted Kyrie for himself. So he would leave them alone and hope they cooled off.

  As for Rafiel, he must go interview the people who had signed the guest book at the aquarium the week before the first bones were found. It was probably a quixotic endeavor and a foolish one, to try to find the shifters by following up on the people who had been at the aquarium at one time or another. Surely, it was stupid. He wouldn't have signed that visitors' book, so why should anyone else? Particularly anyone else who was a shifter, who had something to hide and who didn't want to be confronted with the evidence of where he'd been and what he'd been up to.

  He wasn't supposed to conduct interviews this late, but then, it was just on five o'clock, the early darkness an artifact of the season, the proximity to the mountains and the impending snowstorm. And these interviews were not, strictly speaking, procedure. In fact, he still wasn't absolutely sure how to justify them to his superiors.

  While in his car, heading for the first address listed in the guest book, he dialed his partner at the station. "McKnight?" he said.

  "Yeah? Where have you been? We have—"

  "Later. I'm following an idea of my own. I was just wondering if you'd do me a favor, and check on the aquarium again. Did anyone do a thorough sweep of that platform above the shark tank?"

  "We looked at dirt and prints on the railing and that, yeah," McKnight said. "Well, except the railing seemed to have been cleaned up, but we looked at the floor and all, for all the good it did us. The thing is, you know, it couldn't be just accidental falling in. There's normally a cover there, and it's quite sturdy enough to withstand the weight of an adult falling in. It's only removed to allow the cleaners to get in the tank. At this point, frankly, we're wondering if it's not so much murders as a body disposal system. The coroner hasn't looked at the body yet, so I can't tell you if our boy drowned or was otherwise killed. We might not be able to find out, anyway. Among the things not present seem to be his lungs."

  "Yeah," Rafiel said, mostly to stem the flow of words. McKnight was new, and Rafiel was supposed to train him. An endeavor only slightly impaired by the fact that McKnight had just come out of college, with a degree in law enforcement. He was, therefore, to his own personal satisfaction, the highest authority possible on how to solve murders. Rafiel's own training and years of experience were dwarfed by McKnight's learning of the latest techniques, the latest research, the latest ways to go about it.

  Which in the end boiled down to McKnight's opinions, nothing else. "This is something different," Rafiel said. "I talked to one of the aquarium employees." Let McKnight think that he had in fact spent the entire day in pursuit of that all-important interview. And let McKnight not guess that he'd been doing double duty as waiter at The George. Though given that he'd interviewed Lei while there, Rafiel thought he could convincingly—if falsely—make a case for having spent his day hiding, in disguise, while he waited for Lei to come in. "And she said not only were the door locks easy to open, but that male aquarium employees were in the habit of bringing dates there. She said that often there were used prophylactics in the planters around that small platform. I don't suppose those have been swept for clues."

  McKnight was silent for a moment, which had to count as a miracle in several religions, Rafiel thought. When he came back, it was with less than his normal, self-assured verve. "I don't know about that," he said sullenly. "That platform is actually fairly broad, and the planters are pretty far away from the place where the vic fell or was pushed into the aquarium. So, there's no telling what people might or might not have looked at, that far away."

  Rafiel, who had become skilled in the doublespeak employed by McKnight and other young hires, knew what that meant. What it meant, simply put, was that McKnight had been the one in charge of looking all around the area for clues and had decided—from his naturally superior knowledge—that there was no point in looking through the planters. That they were too far away from the area of the crime and that he was, therefore, safe in ignoring them. "I would appreciate it if you'd go over with someone and do a thorough looking over at that area. I don't need to tell you the possibilities it opens, including that of a romantic spat."

  "Uh . . . both the vics were male."

  "Yes, indeed," Rafiel said, tartly. "And of course, we only know of the male employees using the area as a love nest. However, my information was given to me by a female, and she might not have wished to implicate female employees, don't you think?" He didn't even wish to go into other possibilities with McKnight. "Just go and see what there is to find and how easy the area might be to get into after the place is locked down." And when one hasn't taken the trouble to procure copies of the keys, of course. "I will talk to you again in the morning."

  Before he could hang up, McKnight's voice came through, high, upset, "Now? You want me to go now?"

  "No time like the present, and you know how it is in these investigations. It might all be hanging on some little fact."

  "But . . . but the weather channel says it's going to snow," McKnight said. "They say it's going to snow a lot. Another big blizzard headed our way in fact. I don't want to go out there in a blizzard."

  "Well, then," Rafiel said, reasonably. "I would go out there now, before the snow becomes a blizzard."

  From the other end of the phone there was something very much like an inarticulate exclamation of protest that, should it be more closely listened to, might translate into a profanity.

  Rafiel chose not to listen to it any closer. Instead, deliberately, he pressed the off button of his phone, and turned his attention to navigating the maze of small neighborhoods, the opposite side of Fairfax from the one Tom and Kyrie lived on.

  The neighborhoods weren't very different, though. In the early twentieth century, they might have been colonized by Irishmen or Poles, instead of the Greeks that had colonized the area north of them. Yet the houses all looked very much alike. Less brick here, and more the sort of elaborate, architecturally detailed Victorian houses that looked like mansions shrunk down to pint size. These houses often had th
ree floors, but the floors would each contain no more than one room and a landing for the stair leading to the next floor.

  They had, at one time, housed the laborers—many of them highly skilled—imported from Europe to build the elaborate mansions of the gold rush millionaires. The men and women enticed over to work for the newly rich had stayed and built their own dollhouse version of the boss's manor. And when the gold had evaporated and the silver lost its value they had stayed behind and added far more solid wealth to Colorado than mere metal could ever bring it.

  Now in the beginning of the twenty-first century, the houses were mostly occupied by another kind of skilled laborer. While the neighborhood where Tom and Kyrie rented had never decayed appreciably, it had also never been exactly rehabilitated. Instead, the original Greek settlers had stayed, and the power of family and community supervision had kept the area, as the saying went, poor but honest. And now, when the younger generations were more likely to go to Denver to study, and then out of the state to work, it was mostly the realm of retirees, with no life and immaculate lawns.

  The neighborhoods on the other side of Fairfax had been more ethnically diverse, and when the wealth of gold had rushed away from Goldport, there had been nothing there to keep people behind—no family, no weight of tradition. So instead they had moved on, restless, probably to Denver, where there were still mansions to build and money to be made.

  In their absence, and with Colorado University right there, a few blocks away, another type of person had moved in. In the sixties, that type of person had often lived fifteen to a two-bedroom Victorian, and grown weed in the basement and generally destroyed the neighborhoods.

  And then, recently, the sort of people who liked to buy destroyed properties and improve on them had moved in. Intellectuals, artists, a good number of childless couples with nothing but time on their hands to work on the houses. The houses looked pretty and almost newly built, though after coming across two of them painted in purple and accented with pink, Rafiel wished that these people had never heard the term painted lady or that they might have procured a translation of the term good taste before engaging in wanton remodeling.