"Where is Tom?" Kyrie asked.
Conan looked up at her, in mute misery. That look made thoughts run through her mind, thoughts she didn't like at all. There had been a fight and the Great Sky Dragon had killed Tom. After all, she remembered, the creature held it his right to discipline those he deemed to belong to him. Or else . . . or else, Tom had been run over. Or simply collapsed and frozen by the side of the road. "What. Happened. To. Tom?" she asked, her voice slow and controlled, even as she told herself that she would not shift. She would never shift. Not in the diner. Shifting wouldn't help anything. Conan already looked halfway between frozen and terrified.
He shook his head. "He is fine," he said, though the words weren't really easy to understand through his chattering teeth. "He's . . . he was fine when I left him."
And then, nerveless, as though his legs had turned to rubber under him and his body wasn't all that much more solid, Conan sank to his behind just inside the door of the diner. "He made me leave," he said. "He told me to leave. He made me leave. What if something happens to him?"
"Tom made you leave?"
A headshake. "No. Himself. He told me to leave. Tom said . . . he said he'd kill himself if I stayed with him, and the Grea—Himself said he meant it."
"Nothing will happen to Tom," Kyrie said. And bit her lip thinking that unfortunately she was growing as weary of the interference of elder shifters as Tom himself was. "It's all right. Come on." She helped him get up—or rather more or less pulled him up, by his arms, by main strength. "Come on. I'll get you coffee or something. You're frozen."
"He's out there, like that," Conan said. "In a T-shirt. What if something happens to him?"
"Tom is a big boy," Kyrie said. "He'll take care of himself. He used to live on the streets. It's not like he's a child whom we must look after."
She was telling herself that more than she was telling it to Conan. And she was so convincing that she almost believed it. At least for the next two hours, she managed to keep herself from freaking out thinking of Tom out there alone and what might happen to him.
It wasn't like the city was safe. There were the Ancient Ones, and whatever was throwing people to the sharks, and the Rodent Liberation Front and the triad. In fact, it was an interesting time to be a shifter in Goldport.
She was very close to losing all self-control, shifting, and loping about in the storm, trying to smell Tom out, when the phone rang.
"Hello," she said. "The George."
"Kyrie. It's Rafiel. Is Tom okay?"
And then, before she could control it, before she could remember that Tom was an adult and should be treated as such, all her anxiety came pouring out of her, "I hope so. But, Rafiel, he walked west on Fairfax two and a half hours ago and he hasn't come back."
"Uh. Does he have his phone with him?"
"Yes. Well . . . maybe. He should have it. But he isn't answering." An hour ago, in a moment of weakness, she'd tried to call three or four times. And another half a dozen times since.
"I see. You two fight?"
"No. Not really. He is just . . . he's mad at the . . . you know . . ."
"Yeah. I imagine." There was a pause, as if Rafiel were trying to think through things. "West on Fairfax?"
"Yeah."
"I see. I tell you what, I'll drive down the road a while and see if I can find him. What was he wearing?"
"What he was wearing when you last saw him. Jeans and a black T-shirt." She felt she needed to defend him against stupidity, even though Rafiel hadn't even paused in a significant manner. "He said he needed to cool off."
"Oh, yes. And I'm sure he has," Rafiel said. "Don't worry, okay? I'll see if I can find him."
* * *
Rafiel tried to call a couple of times. No answer. Stubborn dragon, he told himself, about his friend, with something between annoyance and admiration. That Tom wasn't answering Kyrie might or might not make sense. She didn't seem to think they had argued, but Rafiel's experience of women—his mother, aunts and girl cousins included—told him that just because a woman thought that, it didn't mean the man she had emphatically not argued with thought the same.
He drove slowly down Fairfax seeing no movement, let alone movement by someone in jeans and a black T-shirt. Tom had black hair. He should have stood out like a sore thumb.
Unless, of course, he's passed out by the side of the road and covered in a mound of snow, in which case he is pretty much white. Rafiel felt a tightening in his stomach at the thought. How long could a dragon survive hypothermia? In either form? Oh, okay, so they were hard to kill, but was freezing one of the ways they could be killed? He didn't know. And it wasn't as if he was going to go in search of Dante Dire to ask him.
Dante Dire presented the other problem. Because Kyrie hadn't said anything about looking for two people, one following the other, he presumed that Conan hadn't gone with Tom. That meant Tom was out there without his human security cam. What if the bad guys had found him first? While Rafiel had got the idea that Dante Dire was cringingly afraid of the Great Sky Dragon, he didn't get the feeling that he was even vaguely impaired by moral considerations or feelings that he should not kill. Particularly—he suspected—no feelings that he should not kill dragons.
As stupid as it was that Dante Dire, sent to investigate the death of shifters, would end up killing shifters to get them out of his way, Rafiel suspected that this was a nobody picks on my little brother but me matter. After all, the Great Sky Dragon, supposed protector of all dragons, had killed at least one of their members in Goldport. The police had processed the body and Rafiel was sure he had been bitten in two in the parking lot of the Chinese restaurant. And the Great Sky Dragon had damn well near killed Tom, too, for all his new interest in protecting him.
Rafiel had now gone all the way to the west end of Fairfax. He turned around and started driving the other way, slowly. A movement from a doorway called his attention. It looked khaki, not black, but considering everything, perhaps with the snow it just looked that way.
Hopeful, he pulled up to the curb, stopped the car, jiggled a little in his seat, just to make sure at least one of his wheels wasn't on solid ice, parked and set the parking brake. "Hey there," he called to the indistinct, blurred form in the doorway.
The form stirred. Almost immediately, Rafiel realized it couldn't be Tom. This was someone older with white hair, probably taller and bulkier than Tom, though that was hard to tell, as he was huddled in the doorway with one of those Mylar space blankets over most of his body save for his shoulders and head. The flash of khaki was from the shoulders, covered in some sort of jacket. He looked at Rafiel from bleary eyes half hidden under unkempt bangs.
"Uh . . ." Rafiel said, jiggling his keys in his pocket. "Do you want a ride to a shelter?"
The eyes widened. "No shelter," he said, with something very akin to fear. He shook his head and rustled the corner of his shiny silver coverings. "I got my blanket."
"Oh. All right," Rafiel said. The man didn't seem drunk, but he seemed as averse to going into a shelter as, say, Tom or Kyrie or himself would have been. Rafiel sniffed the air, smelling nothing, but he wasn't sure he would have smelled anything as cold as it was. He would swear his ability to smell had frozen with his nose. Perhaps, he thought, he should come back and smell the man later. And, as the inanity of the thought struck, he snorted. Yeah, because he really needed to find another charity case for Tom. Old Joe wasn't enough. "Hey," he said, on impulse. "Did you see a guy go by here? About yea tall, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt? Black hair about shoulder long or a little longer?" How was it possible that he was suddenly so unsure of Tom's hair length? He almost sighed in exasperation at himself. Yes, Kyrie was far more interesting to look at, but he should have noticed his best male friend's hair length.
"I told him he needed a jacket," the old transient man said and nodded.
"Uh. You did? Good call."
"Yeah, he was going that way," the man said, pointing west. "If you are looking for him, g
oing that way"—he pointed east, the direction Rafiel was now headed—"won't help."
"Right, but see, I went miles on Fairfax and I didn't—"
"He was looking for Old Joe," the derelict said. "Him that thinks he can be a gator? I told him last I heard Old Joe was headed for the aquarium. I don't know what he meant to do at the aquarium, though."
The aquarium, yeah, that would be like Tom. Let cryptozoology zanies take over the local paper. Let them get pictures of creatures that shouldn't possibly exist fighting it out in the parking lot of the aquarium. Tom, who shifted into one of the creatures, would immediately feel honor bound to go the aquarium. Why didn't I think of it before? "Thanks," he told the old man. "I'll . . . get you a coffee or something."
The man smiled, revealing very brown teeth. "Why, that would be very nice of you."
Back in the car, Rafiel turned around. The aquarium. What are the odds?
But it was a few minutes' drive there, at the most, and it wasn't as though he didn't have excuses he could give for being on the grounds. He turned onto Ocean Street and started driving slowly around the parking lot. And caught a flash of a black T-shirt—or mostly black, as it seemed mottled in white—as the person wearing it stepped off the garden path and disappeared from view.
Yeah, Tom, Rafiel thought, with a mix of concern and annoyance. Because who else would think that late in the evening, in the middle of a snowstorm, is a good time to go explore the garden of the aquarium?
Still, he wasn't at all sure and couldn't do more than hope that it was indeed Tom, as he parked on the street and jumped out. He ran across the garden, ice and—presumably—frozen grass crackling under his feet. "Tom," he yelled. "Tom."
And then he hit a patch of ice, and his feet went out from under him.
* * *
Tom heard Rafiel's voice. He'd walked down the slope towards the river, and he'd looked every place possible his phone might have hit the ice. But it was dark, he didn't have a flashlight and—as far as he could tell—his phone would now be covered by snow, and a lump amid the other lumps resting on the riverbed. While it might be possible to distinguish it from rocks and twigs by its shape, every minute that passed was making it more indistinct, and Tom had no idea how long he'd been looking. He didn't wear a watch—something Kyrie told him was silly. Normally he could rely on the clock on the wall of The George.
And now, between being cold and the snow falling all around muffling sound, he didn't know if five minutes had gone by, or an hour. Or more. Sometimes, the phone rang, but even that didn't make it any easier to find, because it seemed that, just as he had isolated an area the sound might be coming from, the ringing stopped again.
All of this was worsened by the fact that he had to look for the phone from the bank. He didn't think the river was frozen enough to support him. And while the "river" was probably no more than two feet deep, at most, Tom didn't want to get his feet and legs wet. He was cold enough.
On the other hand, he also didn't want to lose his phone. Not to mention that by now his father probably thought that he had eaten someone—instead of just having been startled while his fingers were half frozen. He didn't think, even if his father thought so, that he would feel obligated to call the police and report, but you never knew. For most of his life, Edward Ormson had been a fairly amoral—if not immoral—corporate lawyer. He'd encountered ethics and a sense of responsibility late in life. Like any midlife crisis, it could cause some very strange effects. He might suddenly feel an irresistible obligation to report imaginary crimes.
That's it, Tom thought. I'll go back to The George and call him from there. He climbed up from the bank of the river to the path, at least six feet above. Like all such canals, artificial or not, in Colorado, the bed for the little river was deep enough to accommodate a ten-times swollen volume in sudden flash floods.
Though, like the legendary Colorado blizzards, it was something he hadn't experienced for himself, he'd heard of summers when sudden snowstorms up in the mountains sent water thundering down the canyons below, to cause untold damage. So the design of every waterworks in Colorado accounted for those.
He struggled all the way to the road level, and looked towards Fairfax. And then thought that it had taken him probably a good hour to walk here, and that added to the point where he had effectively hung up on his father meant that Edward was probably concocting scarier and scarier stories to tell himself. Right.
Sighing, he started down to the riverbed again. He'd look just one more time. Then there was Rafiel's voice from the garden up there. Definitely Rafiel's. And followed by a thud that indicated the idiot had just taken a header in the snow.
Tom cursed softly under his breath, and started climbing back up the steep bank. He wanted his phone. Badly. But considering the sounds he'd heard from under the bridge, he wasn't absolutely convinced there wasn't something or someone hiding there. Not so long ago, there had been a case in Denver of homeless men being found beheaded. Tom didn't remember—since at the time he didn't live in Colorado and all he had seen of the affair was the TV news that happened to be playing at a soup kitchen—whether the case had ever been resolved, or if there was still someone in Colorado, perhaps in the smaller towns now, whose hobby it was to kill males foolish enough to be out and unsheltered—and unobserved—in this sort of weather. So it probably wouldn't hurt, before he went down towards the river and made himself invisible to anyone driving by, for him to have backup.
Having made it all the way to the path beside the river, Tom looked in the direction the thud had come from. Rafiel had gotten up, and was dusting off his knees.
"Are you okay?" Tom said.
"I'm fine," Rafiel said, and glared at him. "You?"
"I'm great," Tom said. "I just dropped my phone. Down on the river." He paused a second. "Right after my father asked me if I'd eaten someone."
"Oh," Rafiel said. He looked uneasy. Had his parents ever asked him if he'd eaten someone? No. Never mind that. Probably not. Though Tom had yet to meet Rafiel's mom, Rafiel had brought his dad over for lunch at The George a couple of times.
An older, sturdier version of Rafiel, his hair white and giving less the impression of a leonine mane than his son's wild hair, Mr. Trall had impressed Tom as eminently sane. And eminently sane parents didn't leap to the conclusion their sons went around eating people, not even when the sons happened to have another, more carnivorous form. Which didn't help Tom at all, because his father wasn't sane.
Rafiel was fishing in the pocket of his jacket. "Here, why don't you call him on my phone?"
"Oh," Tom said, surprised the idea hadn't occurred to him, though considering how much ice he felt on top of his head, his brain was probably frozen solid. And not being a silicon-based life-form, this didn't help his thought processes at all. He took the phone and started dialing his father's number, all under what he couldn't help feeling was Rafiel's stern scrutiny.
"Hello? Dad?" Tom said, as the phone was answered on the other side.
"Tom. Oh. Good. I was . . . er . . . I've been worried."
Tom tried to grit his teeth, which was pretty hard, as they insisted on chattering together. "No, Dad, I didn't eat anyone."
"Oh." Pause. "Well, I didn't think you had. I was just . . . er . . . worried."
Please, don't let him have gone to the police, Tom thought, as he watched Rafiel turn on his heel and head back towards the truck. Tom had a vague moment of panic at the thought that Rafiel was just going to drive back. Well, at least he'd left him with the phone. But the slog back to The George seemed suddenly like too much of an effort to make. Tom was very cold and very tired, and maybe he should just lie down here and—
"So what sort of trouble are you in?" Edward Ormson asked, over the phone. "I notice you're using someone else's phone. Isn't that your policeman friend? Tom! You've been arrested."
Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn! His youthful antics had included several arrests, for vandalism, for joyriding, for possession. His father h
ad bailed him out countless times. But did this justify—five years later—his father assuming he'd been arrested, just because he was using a policeman's phone? Well, okay, yeah, it probably kind of does, he thought.
"I'll get someone to come post bail as soon as—"
"I wasn't arrested, Dad. It's . . . hard to explain over the phone. Do you remember the pearl?" He raised his eyebrows and had trouble concentrating on the flow of conversation, as Rafiel was making his way back, a bundle of fabric swinging from one hand.
"You didn't steal it again?"
"No, I didn't steal anything. Ow." The last sound was because Rafiel was roughly and very matter of factly putting a hooded sweat shirt over Tom's head and dressing him in it without so much as by your leave. It involved pulling Tom's hands through the sleeves, as if he'd been a child or a mental patient. "Ow, all right. I can dress myself, Rafiel."
"What?" Edward asked.
"Nothing. Rafiel has decided I'm not properly attired for the weather and is making me put on a hoodie." He glared at Rafiel.
"Seems sensible to me, if what I'm seeing on the weather channel is any indication," Edward said. "So, you were saying about this pearl."
"Not the pearl. The . . . owner of the pearl. He seems to think I belong to him. Because of who I am, you know?"
"Because you're my son and I worked for him?"
Sheesh. His dad could be surprisingly dense. "No, Dad. No. Because I am . . . you know, like him and his relatives."
"Oh. What is he doing? We could file a—"
"Father." Despite his annoyance Tom almost laughed. At least his father was trying to help. Which was, all things considered, not bad. "I am sure he wouldn't be the least intimidated by a legal order of some sort. He eats lawyers for breakfast. Probably literally."
Rafiel pulled the hood up over Tom's head. Tom said into the phone, "Look, I have to go. I'll call you from The George when I get there."
Gentleman Takes a Chance Page 24
