Night Shifters

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  DRAW ONE IN THE DARKPROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  AFTERWORD

  GENTLEMAN TAKES A CHANCE

  NIGHT SHIFTERS

  by Sarah A. Hoyt

  There are those living secretly among us who have the power to change their physical form from that of a human to an animal, even animals thought to be mythical, such as dragons. Throughout out the ages, these shape shifters have come together to protect themselves from humans—and other shape shifters. One of those places they’ve come together is the town of Goldport, Colorado.

  Draw One in the Dark

  Someone—or something—has been killing shifters in large numbers, and the most ancient and powerful of shifters are converging on the Goldport to find the killer. According to their code, killing another shifter is a crime, no matter if the shifter was slaughtering humans. Now Kyrie Smith, a young panther shifter, must decide where she will stand: with her group or with humanity at large.

  Gentleman Takes a Chance

  Every one of us has the beast inside. But for Kyrie Smith, the beast is no metaphor. She can shape shift into a savage, black panther. Kyrie’s lonely life changes forever while waitressing at a diner in Goldport, Colorado. Investigating frantic screams from the parking lot, Kyrie stumbles upon a blood-spattered dragon crouching over a mangled human corpse. The dragon shapeshifts back into her coworker, Tom. Now Kyrie and Tom must discover if their human sides can survive or if a war among shifters will bring out the beasts in them—permanently.

  Draw One in the Dark

  Gentleman Takes a Chance

  Night Shifters (omnibus)

  Noah’s Boy

  Darkship Thieves

  Darkship Renegades

  A Few Good Men

  NIGHT SHIFTERS

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Draw One in the Dark copyright ©2006 by Sarah A. Hoyt.

  Gentleman Takes a Chance copyright ©2009 by Sarah A. Hoyt

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4767-3651-8

  Cover art by Tom Kidd

  First Baen paperback printing, June 2014

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hoyt, Sarah A.

  Night shifters / Sarah A. Hoyt.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-4767-3651-8 (omni trade pb)

  1. Dragons—Fiction. 2. Imaginary wars and battles—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.O96N55 2014

  813’.6—dc23

  2014009917

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  eISBN: 978-1-62579-286-0

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  DEDICATION

  One of the amazing side benefits of becoming a professional writer is to be able to personally meet and become friends with people you’ve read and admired from afar.

  I’d like to dedicate this book to David Drake, whose friendship, by itself, is enough to compensate for all the tribulations, sweat, and tears of a career in writing.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank Sofie Skapski, Kate Paulk, Pam Uphoff, and Lee McGregor for proofing and doing occasional continuity interventions. Without them, this story would be very difficult to follow. And I’d like to thank my husband, Dan Hoyt, who at a crucial point in the story came up and told me how much I was playing with his emotions and how he needed the rest of the story right then. It made finishing the book much more fun.

  The July night sprawled, warm and deep blue over Goldport, Colorado. In the distance the mountains were little more than suspicions of deeper darkness, a jagged outline where no stars appeared.

  Most of Goldport was equally dark, from its slumbering suburbs to the blind silence of its downtown shops. Only the streetlights shone, at intervals, piercing the velvet blackness like so many stars.

  At the edge of the western suburbs that climbed—square block after square block—into the lower slopes of the Rockies, the neon sign outside a Chinese restaurant flickered. Three Luck Dragon flared, faded, then flared again, and finally turned off completely.

  A hand with nails that were, perhaps, just a little too long turned over a sign that hung on the window, so that the word “closed” faced the parking lot.

  After a while, a sound broke the silence. A flapping, noise, as though of sheets unfurling in the silent night. Or perhaps of large wings beating.

  Descending.

  Had anyone been awake, he’d have seen a large, dark creature—serpentine and thin—with vast unfolding wings descend from the night sky till his huge taloned feet met the asphalt. He closed his wings about himself and waited.

  He did not wait long. From alleys and darkened streets, people emerged: teenagers, in tight jeans and Tshirts, looking nervous, sidling out of the shadows, glancing over their shoulders as if afraid of being followed. From yet other alleys … creatures emerged: long, sinuous, in moist glistening colors between green and blue. They slid, monstrous heads low to the ground, curved fangs like daggers unsheathed in the moonlight. And sometimes dragons seemed to shift to naked teenagers and back again. In and out of the shadows, knit with walls and garbage bins, slithering along the hot cement of the pavements came young men who were dragons and dragons who were nervous young men.

  They gathered in front of the Great Sky Dragon. And waited.

  At length the dragon spoke, in a voice like pearls rolling upon old gold. “Where is it?” he asked. “Did you get it back?”

  The amorphous crowd of humans and dragons moved. There was the impression of someone pushed forward. A rustle of cloth and wings. A murmur of speech.

  The young man pushed forward was slender, though there was a suggestion of muscles beneath his leg-molding jeans and of a substantial chest straining the fabric of the white T-shirt. His bare arm displayed a tattoo of a large, green, glistening dragon and his eyes had an Asian fold, though it was clear from his light brown hair, his pale skin that he was not wholly Asian.

  He was, however, completely scared. He stood trembling in front of the monster, who brought a vast golden eye to fix on him. “Yesss?” The dragon said. “You have something to report? You’ve found the Pearl of Heaven?”

  The young man shook his head, his straight, lank hair swinging from side to side.

  “No?” the dragon asked. Light glimmered on his fangs as he spoke, and his golden eye came very close to the boy, as if to examine him better.

  “It wasn’t there,” the youth said, rapidly, his English not so much accented as retaining the lilt of someone who’d grown up in a community full of Chinese speakers. “We looked all over his apartment. It wasn’t there.”

  The golden eye blinked, vein-laced green skin obstructing it for just a moment. Then the huge head pulled back a little and tilted. “We do not,” it said, fangs glimmering, “tolerate failure.”

  It darted forw
ard, so quickly the movement seemed to leave a green trail in the air like an afterimage. The fangs glistened. A delicate tongue came forth.

  The boy’s scream echoed a second too late, like bad special effects. It still hung in air as the youth, feet and hands flailing, was lifted high into the night by the great dragon head.

  A crunching sound. A brief glimmer. Two halves of the boy tumbling, in a shower of blood, toward the parking lot.

  A scurry of cloth and wings followed, as men and dragons scrambled away.

  The great golden eyes turned to them. The green muzzle was stained red. “We do not tolerate failure,” it said. “Find the Pearl of Heaven. Kill the thief.”

  It opened its wings and, still looking intently at the crowd, flapped their great green length, till it rose into the dark, dark sky.

  In the parking lot below no one moved till the last vestiges of the sinuous green and gold body had disappeared from view.

  CHAPTER

  1

  Kyrie was worried about Tom. Which was strange, because Tom was not one of her friends. Nor would she have thought she could care less if he stopped showing up at work altogether.

  But now he was late and she was worried… .

  She tapped her foot impatiently, both at his lateness and her worry, as she stared out at the window of the Athens, the Greek diner on Fairfax Avenue where she’d worked for the last year. Her wavy hair, dyed in multicolored layers, gave the effect of a tapestry. It went well with her honey-dark skin, her exotic features, and the bright red feather earring dangling from her ear, but it looked oddly out of place with the much-washed full-length red apron with “Athens” blazoned in green across the chest.

  Outside everything appeared normal—the winding serpentine road between tall brick buildings, the darkened facade of the used CD store across the street, the occasional lone passing car.

  She looked away, disgusted, from the windows splashed with bright, hand-scrawled advertisements for specials—souvlaki and fries—$3.99, clam chowder—99¢, Fresh Rice Pudding—and at the large plastic clock high on the wall.

  Midnight. And Tom should have come in at nine. Tom had never been late before. Oh, she’d had her doubts when Frank hired the young street tough with the unkempt dark curls, the leather jacket and boots, and the track marks up both of his arms, clear as day. But he had always come in on time, and he was polite to the customers, and he never seemed to be out of it. Not during work time.

  “Kyrie,” Frank said, from behind her. Kyrie turned to see him, behind the counter—a short, dark, middle-aged man, who looked Greek but seemed to be a mix of Italian and French and Greek and whatever else had fallen in the melting pot. He was testy today. The woman he’d been dating—or at least was sweet on, as she often walked with him to work, or after work—hadn’t come in.

  He gave Kyrie a dark look from beneath his bushy eyebrows. “Table seven,” he said.

  She looked at table seven, the broad table by the front window. And that was a problem, because the moon was full on the table, bathing it. It didn’t seem to bother the gaggle of students seating at it, talking and laughing and eating a never-ending jumble of slices of pie, dolmades, rice pudding dishes, and olives, all of it washed down with coffee.

  Of course, there was no reason it should bother them, Kyrie reminded herself. Probably not. Moonlight only bothered her. Only her …

  No. She wouldn’t let moonlight do anything. She wouldn’t give in to it. She had it under control. It had been months. She was not going to lose control now.

  The students needed warmups for their coffee. And heaven knew they might very well have decided they needed more olives. Or pie.

  She lifted the walk-through portion of the counter and ducked behind for the carafe, then back again, walking briskly toward the table.

  Her hand stretched, with the pot’s plastic handle firmly grasped in manicured fingers, nails adorned with violet-blue fingernail polish. One cup refilled, two, and a young man probably two or three years younger than Kyrie stretched his cup for a warm-up. The cup glistened, glazed porcelain under the full moonlight of August.

  Kyrie’s hand entered the pool of moonlight, brighter than the fluorescent lights in the distant ceiling. She felt it like a sting upon the skin, like bathwater, just a little too hot for touch. For a disturbing second, she felt as if her fingernails lengthened.

  She bit the inside of her cheek, and told herself no, but it didn’t help, because part of her mind, some part way at the back and mostly submerged, gave her memories of a hot and wet jungle, of walking amid the lush foliage. Memories of soft mulch beneath her paws. Memories of creatures scurrying in the dark undergrowth. Creatures who were scared of her.

  Moonlight felt like wine on her lips, like a touch of fever. She felt as if an unheard rhythm pounded through her veins and presently—

  “Could we have another piece of pie, too?” a redheaded girl with a Southern drawl asked, snapping Kyrie out of her trance.

  Fingernails—Kyrie checked—were the right length. Was it her imagination that the polish seemed a little cracked and crazed? Probably.

  She could still feel the need for a jungle, for greenery—she who’d grown up in foster homes in several cement-and-metal jungles. The biggest woods she’d ever seen were city parks. Or the miles of greenery from the windows of the Greyhound that had brought her to Colorado.

  These memories, these thoughts, were just illusions, nothing more. She remembered those times she had surrendered to the madness.

  “One piece of pie,” she said, taking the small notebook from her apron pocket and concentrating gratefully on its solidity. Paper that rustled, a pencil that was growing far too blunt and required lots of pressure on the page.

  “And some olives,” one of the young men said.

  “Oh, and more rice pudding,” one of the others said, setting off a lengthy order, paper being scratched by pencil and nails that, Kyrie told herself, were not growing any longer. Not at all.

  Still she felt tension leave her as she turned her back on the table and walked out of the moonlit area. Passing into the shadow felt as if some inner pressure receded, as though something she’d been fighting with all her will and mind had now been withdrawn.

  While she was drawing a breath of relief, she heard the sound—like wings unfolding, or like a very large blanket flapping. It came, she thought, from the back of the diner, from the parking lot that abutted warehouses and the blind wall at the back of a bed-and-breakfast.

  Kyrie wanted to go look, but people were waiting for their food, so she set about getting the pie and the olives and the rice pudding—all of it pre-prepared—from the refrigerator behind the counter. Next to it, Frank was peeling and cutting potatoes for the Athens’s famous “fresh made fries, never frozen,” which were also advertised on the facade, somewhere.

  While she worked, some of the regulars came in. A tall blond man who carried a journal in which he wrote obsessively every night between midnight and four in the morning. And a heavyset, dark-haired woman who came in for a pastry on her way to her job at one of the warehouses.

  Kyrie looked again at the clock. Half an hour, and still no Tom. She took the newcomers’ orders.

  On one of her trips behind the counter, for the carafe of coffee, she told Frank, “Tom is late.”

  But Frank only shrugged and grunted, which was pretty odd behavior for the guy who had brought Tom in out of nowhere, hired him with no work history while Tom was, admittedly, living in the homeless shelter down the street.

  As Kyrie returned the carafe to its rest, after the round of warmups, she heard the scream. It was a lone scream, at first, startled and cut short. It too came from the parking lot at the back.

  She told herself it was nothing to do with her. There were all sorts of people out there at night. Goldport didn’t exactly have a large population of homeless, but it had some, and some of them were crazy enough to scream for no reason.

  Swallowing hard, she told herself i
t meant nothing, absolutely nothing. It was just a sound, one of the random sounds of night in the city. It wasn’t anything to worry about. It—

  The scream echoed again, intense, frightened, a wail of distress in the night. Looking around her, Kyrie could tell no one else had heard it. Or at least, if Frank’s shoulders were a little tenser than normal, as he dropped fries into a huge vat of oil, it was the tenseness of expectation, as if he were listening for Tom.

  It wasn’t the look of someone who’d heard a death scream. In fact, the only person who might have heard it was the blond guy who had stopped writing on his journal and was staring up, into mid-air. But Kyrie was not about to ask a man who wrote half the night what exactly he had heard or hadn’t. Besides the guy—nicknamed “The Poet” by the diner staff—always gave the impression of being on edge and ready to lose all self-control, from the tips of his long, nervous fingers to the ends of his tennis shoes.

  And yet …

  And yet she couldn’t pretend nothing had happened. She knew she had heard the scream. With that type of scream, someone or something was in trouble bad. Back there. In the parking lot. At this time of night most of the clientele of the Athens came in on foot, from the nearby apartment complexes or from the college dorms just a couple of blocks away. It could be hours before anyone went out to the parking lot.

  Kyrie didn’t want to go out there, either. But she could not ignore it. She had the crazy feeling that whatever was happening out there involved Tom, and, what the heck, she might not like the man, but neither did she want him dead.

  She gave a last round of warmups, looked toward the counter where Frank was still seemingly absorbed in his frying, and edged out toward the hallway that led to the back.

  It curved past the bathrooms, so if Frank saw her, he would think she was going to the bathroom. She was not sure why she didn’t want him to know she was going to the parking lot. Except that—as she got to the glass door at the back—when she saw the parking lot bathed in the moonlight, she thought that something might happen out there, something … Something she didn’t want her employer to know about her.