Was it his imagination, or had he seen the shadow of a wing in the window above?
He reached across to unlock the passenger door, as she jumped in.
She fumbled with the seat belt as he tore out of the parking lot in a screech of rubber. Sweat was dripping from his forehead into his eyes. He was sure he was sitting on a chunk of glass. It had been years since he’d driven and he found the turns odd and difficult. The car his father had given him as a sixteenth-birthday gift handled much better than this. Good thing there was almost no traffic on the roads at this time.
He tore around the corner of Fairfax, turning into a narrower street and hoping he was only imagining the noise of wings above. He tried to choose tree-lined streets, knowing well enough that it was harder to see into them from above. The vision of dragons seemed to focus naturally on moving things. In a street of trees, shaken by the wind, in which shadows shifted and shook, it would be harder to see them.
Some of these streets were narrow enough—and the trees above them well over a hundred years old—that it made it impossible to see the streets at all, except as a green canopy. He took one street, then another, then yet another, tearing down quiet residential streets like a madman and probably causing the families snug in their brick ranches to wonder what was happening out there.
They passed two people walking, male and female, he tall and she much shorter, leaning into him. Shorts, Tshirts, a swirling white skirt, a vision of normalcy and a relationship that he couldn’t aspire too, and Tom bit his lip and thumped the side of the wheel with his hand, bringing a startled glance from Kyrie.
He’d gone a good ten minutes and was starting to think they’d lost their pursuers, when he thought of Kyrie. He turned to her, wanting to explain he really would pay and that she should not—
Her dark eyes gazed into his, unwavering. “How many cars have you stolen?” she asked.
The way he’d hot-wired the car, quickly—she swore it had taken him less than a few seconds—had chilled Kyrie to the bone.
She supposed she should have known someone with a drug problem, working minimum-wage jobs had to supplement with crime, but all of a sudden she realized he was more dangerous—more out of control than she’d thought.
More out of control than the other dragons?
And yet, after he’d driven like a madman for a while, he looked at her with a devastatingly scared expression in his pale face. Despite chiseled features and the now all-too-obvious dark shadow of unshaven beard, he managed to look about five and worried he’d be put in time-out.
“How many cars have you stolen?” she asked, before she knew she was going to say it.
His expression closed. She would not be able to describe it any other way. The eager, almost childish panic vanished, leaving in its place a dark, unreadable glare, his eyebrows low over his dark blue eyes. He turned away, looking forward, and shrugged, a calculated shrug from his broad shoulders. One quarter inch up, one quarter inch down.
“I used to go joy riding,” he said. “When I was a kid. I got bored.” And when she didn’t answer that, he added. “Look, I’ve told you. I’ll pay you for the damage.” And again, at her continued silence. “I couldn’t let us be caught. If they’d caught us, they’d have killed us.”
At this, he stopped. He stopped long enough for her to gather her thoughts. She felt so tired that if she weren’t in pain, she would have fallen asleep. But she hurt. Her shoulder felt as if it had been dislocated in the fight. There was a slash across her torso that she prayed wouldn’t need stitches, and a broad swath of her buttock felt scraped, as though it had rubbed hard against a scaly hide. Which it probably had, though she didn’t remember.
“Who are they?” she finally asked. “Why are they after you?”
“They’re a Chinese triad,” he said. “They’re members of a … crime syndicate. Asian.”
“Admirably described,” she said, and heard the hint of sarcasm in her own voice, and was surprised she still had the strength for it. “But what do they want with you?”
He hesitated. For just a moment he glanced at her, and the scared little boy was back, with wide-open eyes, and slightly parted lips.
He looked back at the road in time to take them, tightly, around a corner, tires squealing, car tilting. “They think I stole something from them,” he said, with the defensive tone of a child explaining it really, really, really wasn’t him who put the clamp on the cat’s tail.
Something. Kyrie was not so naive that she didn’t know Chinese crime syndicates—like most crime syndicates—dealt mostly in various drugs. “A drug deal gone bad?” she asked.
He had the nerve to tighten his lips, and shake his head. “I don’t deal drugs,” he said.
Whee. There was one form of criminality he didn’t stoop to. Who would have thunk it? “So …”
“I didn’t steal it, okay?” he said. “I didn’t steal anything. They think I did, and they’re trying to get it back.”
“Sounds ugly,” she said. Somehow she felt he was lying but also not lying. There was an edge to his tone as if he weren’t quite so sure how he’d got himself into this type of situation.
“It is,” he said. “They’ve been after me for months.” He shrugged. “Only they’ve just figured out my name, I think. Now they can follow me, wherever I live. They’re shifters. Dragons.”
“I gathered.”
“They worship the Great Sky Dragon… .”
“Uh?” She had never heard of any shifter divinity. But then again, she’d never heard of any other shifters. All of a sudden, vertiginously, as though standing at the edge of a precipice and seeing a whole world open before her, she wondered if there was a whole culture, a whole society she didn’t know about. Some place she belonged, whole families of shifters. Perhaps the only reason she’d never known about it was because she was adopted and she didn’t know her own birth family. “Shifters have their own gods?”
Tom shrugged. “I think he was a Chinese divinity. Or one of their sacred animals, or something.”
“Did you get involved with them because you … shift? Into a dragon? Is your family … does your family shift?”
Tom shook his head. “My father doesn’t … No.”
“Then how did you get involved with the triad?”
He looked confused, then shrugged—not a precise shrug. “I don’t know,” he said. He seemed on the verge of saying something, but shook his head, as if to his own thoughts. “My father—” He stopped dead, as though something in him had halted not just the words but the train of thought as well.
They were driving down a narrow, tree-bordered street. Ahead of them loomed the dark expanse of the Castle—officially known as Chateau D’Aubigerne, a castle imported from the Loire, stone by stone, by a man enriched in the gold rush. It now stood smack dab in the center of Goldport, abandoned and empty, surrounded by gardens gone to seed and an eight-foot-high iron fence like massed spears. Now and then there was talk of someone buying it, restoring it, and making it into a hotel, a mall, a resort, or just a monument for tourists to gawk at. But all those projects seemed nonstarters, perhaps because the Castle was well away from all the hotels and convention centers, in a street of tiny, workmen’s brick ranches, with cars on blocks and broken plastic toys in the front yards.
Tom slowed down till he was going a normal speed and said, “Where can I take you?”
“Beg your pardon?”
He grinned at her, a fugitive grin that transformed his features and gave her a startling glimpse of what might lurk underneath the troubled young man’s aggression—humor? Joy? “Where can I drop you off? Where do you live?” He smiled at her, a less naughty smile this time, more that of a patient adult facing a stupid child. “You can’t go to work like that, can you?”
She shook her head, panicked. Gee. Frank was going to be mad. She might already have lost her job. A surge of anger at Tom came up, but then vanished again. Someone had once told Kyrie that if you lost a job making l
ess than ten dollars an hour you could find another one within the day. In her experience this was true. And besides, it wasn’t like Tom had asked her for help.
She’d just jumped in and helped him. Hell, she thought she’d learned not to do that years ago.
“My place,” she said. “It’s down the next street. Turn right. Third house on the left.”
“House?”
“Rental. It’s smaller than an apartment, really. I just … I don’t like people around.”
He nodded and maneuvered through the turn and up to her house, at a speed that could only be considered sedate after his early high jinks.
The house was tiny—eight hundred square feet and one bedroom, but it had a driveway—a narrow strip of concrete that led right up to the back door and from which a narrow walking path led to the front door. This late at night—or early in the morning—all of Kyrie’s neighbors would be asleep and she was grateful for that.
As Tom pulled up to the back door, she had only two steps to go, stark naked. And she always left the key under a rock in the nearby flower bed. She hated to be locked out of her house and didn’t know anyone in town she could trust with a key. It was one of the side effects of moving around so much.
As she started to open the door, she looked at Tom. He was sitting behind the wheel, the engine still going, looking forward. The car was hers, but she could hardly tell him to leave it and run off naked into the night. On the other hand—where was he going to go even with the car?
She had to invite him in. She didn’t really want to, but she saw nothing else she could do. Nothing else a decent human being could do. She tapped him on the arm. “Turn that off. Come inside. Have a shower. I’ll grab another jogging suit for you.”
He looked surprised. Dumbfounded as if she’d offered him a fortune. “Are you sure?”
“Where would you go otherwise?”
He shrugged. “I’ll figure … I’ll figure something. I always do.” For just a second a dangerous liquid quality crept into his voice, but he only shook his head and swallowed. “Look, it’s not safe to be around me.”
“I’ve noticed. But you have nowhere else to go. Come inside. I’ll make coffee.”
He took a few seconds, then grabbed the screwdriver and turned it. And nodded at her. “Can I come out through your side?” he said. “Less—”
“Exposure, yes,” she said. “And don’t break anything. I have a key.”
She dove out the door and retrieved her key from its hiding place.
Later Tom would think he might never have agreed to go to Kyrie’s house, except for the chunk of glass slowly working its way into his buttock.
It was clear she didn’t really want him around, and he wasn’t sure he could blame her. After all, he wasn’t sure he wanted himself around most of the time. And she’d seen him at one of his most dangerous moments.
It would probably be a kindness for him to leave. But then he came up on the fact that he was naked, he was shaking with exhaustion, and there was a big glass chunk becoming a permanent part of his behind.
He turned off the car and waited till she was out and had opened the door before he dove out of the car after her. And stepped into a cozy kitchen—cozy and homey and like no place he’d ever been before.
His father’s condo had been huge. This entire house would probably fit in the kitchen. And the kitchen of that house had been white and chrome, imported Italian marble and mosaic floors. But it was the domain of Mrs. Lopez, their cook. Never the family kitchen. Never a place where the family gathered for meals.
Of course no family could really gather in this kitchen either. Not unless they were all unusually close. It was barely big enough to contain both of them, a card table, two folding chairs, a refrigerator, stove, and a tiny counter with sink. Above the table, on the wall, hung a painting of an old-fashioned bicycle done in shades of red and pink on black, the front wheel dwarfing the rest.
Kyrie closed the door behind him. “This way,” she said, as she led him out of the kitchen via the interior door, and into a hallway. She opened another door and turned the light on. “The bathroom. I’ll go get you something to wear.”
He stepped into the bathroom, where there was just enough space for himself between tub, sink, and toilet.
Kyrie returned almost immediately and knocked, and he hid himself behind the door as he opened it. It seemed silly when they’d been together, naked for most of the evening. But then Kyrie had put on a robe—a fluffy, pink robe that made her look young and feminine.
She handed him a bundle of clothes and said, “There’s plenty of water. Outsized water heater, so don’t worry too much. But I’d like to shower after you, so don’t use more than you have to.”
He nodded, took the clothes, set them on the toilet tank, and started the shower. Plunging under the water, he felt it like a warm caress. He tried not to notice that it ran red-stained down the drain. The corpse …
The corpse seemed wholly unreal in this white-tiled shower that smelled of lavender and a subtle hint of Kyrie’s perfume. Tom had never noticed her perfume before, but it was definitely her smell. Something spicy and soft that he’d caught before as an undertone at work.
He removed the glass chunk from his backside, by touch, then soaped himself vigorously. He had no right to intrude on her life, nor to bring his own messes into her house. He had no right to endanger her. He should leave as soon as possible.
Guiltily, he used her shampoo, which was some designer brand and smelled of vanilla. His hair, too, yielded quantities of red bloodstained water.
What would the police think? Would the police track him? And Kyrie? He’d tell them she was innocent. He was the murderer.
Was he the murderer?
He couldn’t think about it. Stepping out of the tub, he heard Kyrie knock at the door. She then opened it a sliver, and held out a towel. “Sorry. Forgot to give them earlier,” she said.
And she was being kind to him. Far kinder than anyone had been in a long time. He thanked her, dried himself, combed his hair with his fingers, the thick black curls falling into their natural unruliness, and dressed in her jogging suit.
Coming out the door, he had his words ready. About how he would be going now, no time to chat, really, best thing would be to get out of her hair as soon as possible, and then—
And then she was waiting at the door and smiled at him. “I made coffee. It’s in the kitchen. Do you drink coffee? I won’t be a minute.”
And she went past him into the steam-filled bathroom.
He couldn’t exactly leave when she was being so friendly, so he went into the kitchen, where she’d run the coffeemaker, and set cups, sugar, and cream out. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry that one of the cups was embossed with a dragon, but he took it anyway.
Kyrie showered quickly, wondering what was wrong with her. Didn’t she want him out of the house. Now? Yesterday?
But she’d never talked with another of her kind. And perhaps he knew what had happened. Perhaps he’d remember if he’d killed the person in the parking lot. And perhaps she’d be able to figure out how he’d got involved with the triad and if she’d now be in danger.
And perhaps tomorrow it would rain soup. And cream.
But there were more material considerations, too. Her arm, where Red Dragon—the one who in human form had two red dragon tattoos—had got in a glancing bite at the panther’s paw. It looked like the tooth had pierced her arm. It wasn’t exactly bleeding—just a trickle of blood that increased under the warm shower. She examined the puncture dispassionately. Her memory of the adrenaline-fueled fight had fuzzy edges and she could not remember if the bite had released, or if it had been fully completed before something she did caused the dragon to let go.
If the first, it was probably a narrow, not-too-deep cut. If the second … Well, she could easily be looking at a puncture all the way to the bone, and at an infection. She couldn’t afford that, but neither could she afford to go to the
hospital.
Oh, she could afford it monetarily. She probably could scrape up the money for a quick visit to the emergency room or one of the twenty-four-hour med centers. What she couldn’t afford was for doctors to ask how she got her wound or for them to notice anything at all strange about the shape of the wound. For them to remember her wounds when someone brought the corpse in, certainly with similar wounds. No. Better to trust in Tom and ask him to help her clean her arm and perhaps bandage the wound. Better the devil you know.
There were other wounds too. One on her hip, which she could bandage herself, and then one across her shoulder, at the back, which she didn’t think she could take care of without help.
She got out of the shower and dried a little more vigorously than she needed, to punish herself for her stupidity in getting involved in Tom’s affairs. She bandaged her hip and her torso before putting on her robe again.
Frank was going to make her pay for the apron. But at least she still had a job. She’d called while Tom was showering. While Frank had been none too pleased to hear she wouldn’t be back the rest of the night, neither had he fired her.
In the kitchen, Tom stood, holding the cup of coffee. The one with the dragon. Kyrie smiled. She hadn’t even thought about his reaction. It had come, like most of her dishes, from the Salvation Army thrift store. She picked up the cup left on the counter and poured herself a cup of black coffee. He hadn’t thrown a snit at the dragon. He hadn’t imagined it was a dig directed at him.
Perhaps he was not quite so touchy and antisocial as she would have thought he was. Or perhaps …
Kyrie looked him over. He smelled of soap and her shampoo, and he looked far less dangerous than he had. His black curls were damp from the shower, dripping down his back. His expression was just bewildered enough to make him look younger the he normally did. Even the fact that he was frowning into his coffee cup didn’t make him look threatening, just puzzled.
He looked at her, and the frown became less intense, but the eyebrows remained low over the blue eyes, which looked like they were trying to figure out something really difficult. Like the meaning of the universe. “Why?” he said. “I’m dangerous.” He shrugged, as if he hadn’t said exactly what he meant to say. “I mean, it’s dangerous to hang out with me. You saw … my apartment.” He took a sip of coffee, fast, desperately, as if trying to make up for words that didn’t come out quite right. Then choked, coughed, and set the cup down to cover his mouth. “Why did you let me in here?” he asked.
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