Gentleman Takes a Chance

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  "No, no," Tom said, his teeth chattering. "What I want to know is, have you heard of someone called Old Joe?"

  "What? The gator?" the man said blinking.

  It was Tom's turn to blink and then, in a sudden rush to seem innocent, "Gator?"

  "Oh, he says he turns into a gator," he said. "We call him Gator, see?"

  "Er . . . have you seen him?"

  "Not since yesterday, I think." He shook his head. "He said he was heading out to the aquarium. Don't make no sense to me. The aquarium is closed."

  "Er . . . yes, thank you." Tom said, as he started walking the other way again.

  "St. Agnes," the homeless man screamed after him. "They'll fix you."

  Tom nodded. He walked very fast away from the newly-gentrified area of Fairfax, the area where, since his arrival a year ago, the place had become clean, and all the street lamps worked, and where the businesses were bookstores and movie rental stores, restaurants and clothes stores.

  As he walked, the stores changed slowly to "antique" shops, thrift shops, used bookshops, used CD shops, and then another two blocks down, it was down to new age stores, churches advertising free hot meals, and then a bit further on, to where the buildings on either side of the street were warehouses, most of them empty and shuttered against intruders.

  Here, in the silence of the surroundings, Tom became aware of a strange sound—like an echo behind him. Feet crunching on snow, almost in perfect rhythm with his. He turned around. Sure enough, following him, at about a half-block distance, was Conan. Keeping him protected, Tom thought. Keeping an eye on him, more the like. A little, sentient spy camera, watching his every move.

  "Go away," he yelled, turning around. "I don't need you."

  Conan stopped. He looked up. He too had his arms wrapped around himself, only one of his arms was rather shorter than the other, and it made him look even more pitiful. "But . . ." he said. "But . . ." And that was it. His lip trembled.

  Tom had spent the last few months taking in every sad sack who stopped by the diner. But this was too much, to expect him to take on a sad sack who also happened to be not just a spy but an instrument used by the Great Sky Dragon. "Don't try it, Conan. You heard. You are a spy device for the old bastard. I don't want him around."

  Conan opened his hands. "You don't understand," he said. "I don't have a choice. I was told to follow you, to not let anything happen to you."

  "Did you know?" Tom asked. "Before you heard it from the . . ." He came closer, so he could talk to Conan. "From the dire wolf?"

  Conan shook his head. He looked miserable. He must have rushed out, because not only hadn't he bothered to put his jacket on, he was still wearing his George apron. "No. He said I was to protect you. I remember being very confused about how I was to do that, considering that, you know . . . you were stronger than I . . . but he said . . ." He shrugged. "I'd just dragged myself back, you know, to . . . well, to the restaurant on the outskirts of town, where . . ."

  Tom nodded. Where the point of contact with the triad was. He got that much.

  "I expected him to kill me," Conan said. "He punishes failure horribly. I've seen him kill other people for failing."

  "But you went back, anyway?" Tom asked. He couldn't understand it. "In your place, I'd have been putting as many miles between me and as many triads as possible as fast as possible."

  Conan shook his head. "It's not that easy. First, they are everywhere, truly. When you least expect it, in some small town, some out of way place, you'll meet one of them. And then there's . . . when you first join? I knew they put a tracker in you. I didn't know he could . . . you know . . . see through my eyes or anything. But I knew he could tell where I was. And if I didn't come back, he would send someone for me. And then he would make it really unpleasant."

  More unpleasant than death? Tom thought, but was afraid to ask. "So you went back."

  "After months, I went back," Conan hung his head.

  "I was wondering . . . I mean . . ." He shook his head. "I was almost dead but I came back in a few days, but you . . ."

  Conan's eyes were huge. "I was caught in the burning building," he said. "Everyone else died. I must have managed to drag myself out before my brain . . ." He shook his head. "I don't even remember the first month."

  "Oh."

  "The arm . . ." he shrugged, "is the least of it. I understand bone is hard to grow. They told me . . . in another three months or so it should be normal."

  "Oh," Tom said again, and thought that if Conan imagined this made him feel more charitable towards the Great Sky Dragon, he was a fool. All right, Tom might have been guilty of ripping out his arm and burning him, but it had been in self-defense. While the Great Sky Dragon was the one who had sent him after Tom.

  "When he sent us out first, he had told us to kill you. Find the Pearl of Heaven, kill the thief. And then all of a sudden, when I came back, he wanted you alive. He wanted you protected." He shrugged. "I don't understand any of it, but I knew it was my chance to . . . to be accepted again. I didn't know he could see through my eyes until today. I thought I had to call him. I called him when you flew away." He sounded miserable. "When you went back to your house because of the dire wolf . . ."

  Tom didn't understand it either, but of one thing he was sure. "I want you to go back, now, Conan, all right?"

  Conan blinked at him, in complete confusion. "But I have to . . ."

  "I want you to go back to the diner, and don't worry about me. Nothing is going to happen to me. Look, it's like this—if you stay here, I'm going to change and flame you. You can't flame me, because you're supposed to protect me, not kill me. If I flame you," Tom kept his voice steady, though he was, in fact, very sure he could never flame the hapless and helpless Conan, "you won't be able to follow me, anyway—and at best you'll have to come back as you did."

  "No!"

  "The Great Sky Dragon can't blame you for going back."

  Conan opened his mouth to protest.

  "No, look, I'm not going to get in any type of trouble. I just want to walk around for a while, until I calm down. Nothing will happen to me. I promise. And I won't let you come with me, anyway."

  Conan opened his mouth again. "Don't you understand?" he asked, his voice vibrating and taut with despair. "If you want to flame me, do it. But I can't go back. Himself doesn't tolerate failure and I'm not very valuable to him. Not like you."

  In Tom's mind an odd idea formed. If he was valuable to the Great Sky Dragon, then there was only one thing he could use to threaten the creature. "If you don't go back," he said, "I will kill myself. I'll throw myself from an underpass or fling myself under an eighteen-wheeler. I think if I destroy the brain, I won't come back. And I'd rather be dead than owned."

  Conan started and looked up at Tom, as if trying to gauge how serious the threat was.

  Tom looked back with desperate resolution. He would rather kill himself. Particularly if he was going to live millennia. A human lifetime of obeying someone was bad enough. An eternity would be hell on Earth. And then when he'd found out that the Great Sky Dragon could use his people—literally—as instruments . . . That was the worst of all. Tom could not face that. He let his revulsion show on his face, too.

  Conan looked panicked, but nodded. He held his hands open on either side of his body, palms towards Tom, in instinctive appeasement. "All right," he said. "I'll go. I'll go."

  And he turned around and started down the street. Tom hesitated. Did this mean the Great Sky Dragon was going to leave Tom alone? Or that he had someone else watching Tom?

  Tom shrugged. It didn't matter. He continued down Fairfax, now solidly in the office neighborhood, all closed, of course, in the storm. Hands in his pockets, he walked on, under the falling snow. He was shivering, but that didn't matter.

  What he wanted to know—what he very much needed to find out—is how he could rid himself from all the creatures who wanted to claim ownership of him, and make his life his own once more. He, who had never obeye
d father nor mother, nanny or teacher, would not now turn his life over to more than half mad, dangerous old beings who played under no moral rules he could understand.

  From deep within his jeans pocket, his phone rang.

  * * *

  Tom stepped off the road onto a space on the grounds of the aquarium, on the other side of the parking lot. In summer this was a pleasant-enough space with a little bridge over a carefully directed, and probably entirely artificial, small stream, trees, flowers, benches. Right then it was a winter wonderland, with icicles dripping off the trees and slippery ice underfoot.

  Tom fished in his jeans pocket, thinking it was Kyrie, and answered the phone, his half-frozen fingers fumbling with the buttons.

  "Tom?"

  "Dad?"

  "Oh, good. I have been delayed at the airport again. Something about flights to Denver being cancelled. Look, I really need you to go there, and to wait in the loft for the cable guy."

  "Dad!" Tom turned around, to look at the frozen river. He had a feeling he'd heard something move or slither down there. It couldn't be water. That would be frozen. So what could it be?

  "No. You see, I wouldn't ask if it were just because I want to watch TV, but in the beginning, at least, I'm going to be working from home, and I need the cable connection for the internet."

  "Dad, I can't get to Denver," Tom said, drily, keeping his teeth from knocking together by an effort of will.

  "Why not? How long would it take you to fly there? It's only a three-hour drive away. Flying couldn't be more than twenty minutes."

  "Flying in the current blizzard would probably take about three hours," Tom said. He felt suddenly very tired. "And besides . . . look, I just can't."

  "You know, I don't ask you to do this stuff every day," Edward Ormson said, in an aggrieved tone, from the other end of the connection. "It's just that this is really important to me, and I thought . . . Well, I thought our relationship was better these days."

  Their relationship was better these days. Tom was very conscious that no matter what bad parents his parents might have been, he had been a truly horrible son, himself. And he owed his father for The George. "If I could at all, I would, Dad. It's just that I'm in the middle of a big mess just now."

  "A mess? What type of a mess? Anything legal?"

  His father was a corporate lawyer, and clearly, just now, a hammer in search of a nail.

  "No," Tom said. "Look, it's just . . . not something I feel comfortable discussing on the phone."

  "Did you eat someone?"

  Tom dropped the phone. It went tumbling down over the brick parapet of the bridge and hit the river below with a hard thud. Under the bridge, there was that sound as if something had moved or slithered. It was so faint, that Tom couldn't be sure it had happened or if his half-frozen ears were giving him back impossible phantom sounds.

  * * *

  Rafiel got in his truck thinking that while the woman was a shifter, and seemed apparently harmless, yet he couldn't get involved with her. For one, the moment she found out he was a lion shifter . . . He shook his head. Cat and dragon might be one thing—and he still wasn't sure how that would play out in the end—but cat and mouse would be insane. It would require that he lose his marbles completely.

  He got his cell phone from his pocket and dialed McKnight's cell phone. "Hey, Dick," he said, using McKnight's diminutive in an attempt to forestall more protests.

  The answer from the other side of the phone had almost as much of a squeak as that of Ms. Gigio's, "Yes?"

  "So . . . have you done the platform?" he asked.

  "Yeah, yeah. We . . . I brought a team over." He spoke with such haste, such obviously tumbling guilt, that it was obvious to Rafiel that he had found something.

  "What did you find?"

  "We . . . uh . . . I found . . . that is . . . Michelle and I found a couple of used condoms, tied up, in the planters. We will have them processed and . . . and get back to you with the results."

  "Thanks, McKnight. Do," Rafiel said, keeping the amusement, but not the forcefulness out of his voice.

  He hesitated for a moment, starting the car away from Ms. Gigio's home. Where would he go now? He was dying to know what was happening with those condoms. Well . . . at least Lei had told the truth about that. Maybe.

  Getting the phone again, he said, "Dick, can you give me the address of all of the aquarium's male employees? Female, too, while you're at it."

  McKnight could. Or at least he could after much hemming and hawing and getting hold of the aquarium records from someone. He cleared his throat, nervously, and in a reedy voice gave Rafiel three male names—John Wagner, Carl Hoster and Jeremy Fry—and three female names—Suzanne Albert, Lillian Moore, Katlyn Jones—and addresses, all within a mile of the aquarium in the area where old Victorians had been converted into apartments, amid a lot of other, mostly cinder-block apartments, of fifties vintage. It mostly housed college students. And they were all close enough to the diner too.

  Rafiel was feeling uneasy enough about Tom and Kyrie and whatever their little spat might have devolved into. Some part of him told him that, interested party or not, suspicious or not, he should have stayed around and refereed their argument. They were both younger than him, and both of them had far less experience of relationships.

  Not that I can tell them a lot about relationships, Rafiel thought. After all, I am the master of the love them and leave them.

  "Rafiel?"

  He'd forgotten he'd left the cell phone on, and now looked at it in puzzlement, thereby putting his brakes on a little too late for the red light ahead. He hit a patch of ice as he braked and slid through the intersection to the glorious accompaniment of the horns of cars which swerved to avoid him. Good thing I'm a policeman, he thought as he took a deep breath, made sure he wasn't about to shift—his nails looked the same size, and there was nothing golden or furry about his hands—and said, "Yeah, McKnight?"

  "Are you going to go talk to these people?" McKnight asked.

  "That's the idea," Rafiel said.

  "In this weather?"

  "Well, all the more chance to find them at home, right?" Rafiel said, and hung up before McKnight would actively and loudly worry about his life or his safety or something.

  Then he pressed one of his preset dials, and rang up The George.

  * * *

  Kyrie started worrying about Tom almost as soon as he left the parking lot. It wasn't that she was angry at him—or not exactly. A part of her understood that he couldn't bear to be controlled by someone else, much less someone who legally and morally should have no power over him.

  Another part of her wanted to tell him to grow up already and that adults knew they couldn't have life all their own way, that they couldn't forever hold at bay the unpleasant parts of reality and those they would rather not deal with. But that part of her, she told herself, was firmly under control. Yes, she was sure that Tom was overreacting. But at the same time he was just as sure that she was underreacting, enduring the interference of the dire wolf in her affairs with excessive placidity and total lack of protest.

  Which, she thought, was not really true. She could very easily—and happily, for that matter—allow herself to scream and rant. For all the good it would do.

  But she would not allow herself to scream and rant at Tom. Because that would do no good. She was sure he'd gone off to cool off and that he too was trying to hold his temper in check. And she couldn't fault him. She preferred he did that than he shifted and took it out on all those nearby.

  Keith was looking intently at her. "Is Anthony coming in?"

  "In a few minutes," Kyrie said, keeping her voice calm. In her mind, she was imagining Tom walking blindly into the storm. She wished he had taken his jacket.

  "I can't stay, Kyrie. I have to get home," Keith said. "I have no idea what happened to Summer. She must think I'm crazy. I bring her here for a coffee, and the next thing you know, I'm cooking."

  "Yeah," Kyrie said
. "Anthony is on his way. " He'd sounded frankly relieved to be called in. Kyrie wondered what exactly his wife had been doing to make him so happy to hear from her. But Anthony solved it himself as he came in. "It's crazy just sitting in the house, watching reruns of Friends," he said. "I mean, it's a studio, and it's just snowing outside. And then Cecily is worried about . . . you know . . . the storm and whether the roof is going to cave in. Like . . . we're on the third floor down from the top of the building. If the roof caves in on us, we're in a world of trouble." He looked sheepish for a moment, as he divested himself of his jacket and put on his apron and the hat he wore while he was cooking—which was, granted, not as stylish as Tom's bandana, but served the same purpose of keeping hair out of the food. "She's not . . . I mean, I don't want you to think she's crazy or something. It's just she's not used to going through these blizzards. I guess for people who didn't grow up in Colorado it must look much worse than it is."

  "Yeah, it does," Kyrie said. And still, in her mind, she saw Tom walking through the storm. How could he survive it? Could he survive it? She heard Dire saying that most of the young shifters died through their own stupidity and she gritted her teeth and pretended that everything was fine, and got orders, and put them on the carousel of spikes on the counter, for Anthony.

  More people came in. Probably people who weren't all that familiar with Colorado, Kyrie thought, and who found it easier to weather the storm in here than alone in whatever tiny apartments they lived in. She kept a smile on her face, and worked as efficiently as she knew how, while Anthony turned out the meals in record time.

  She didn't know how long it had been, when she heard the back door open. She set down the tray and the carafe of coffee on the counter, and ran down the hallway. "Tom," she started, with some idea of finishing the sentence with "Tom, I was so worried."

  But instead of Tom, it was Conan, coming in. He was a vague shade between blue and lavender. His teeth beat a mad rhythm. His hair was so covered in snow that he might as well have been wearing a powdered wig.