Night Shifters

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Tom had lost his home and left without even the clothes on his body. For the second time in his life. And the thought that Keith might want Tom’s body made Tom start to laugh—rapidly changed into a cough when Keith looked at him, puzzled. He knew Keith. That was not in the realm of possible.

  Keith, for his part, just seemed to want to reassure himself Tom was okay. Having done that, he now sipped the coffee very slowly. “I guess your girlfriend is out?” he asked.

  “Kyrie had an appointment,” Tom said.

  “She’s cute,” Keith said. “How long have you guys been together?”

  Ah. “Well, we work together,” Tom said, edging. “And one thing led to the other.”

  Keith nodded.

  “You? Did the girl see any other dragons last night?”

  Keith frowned. “Now that you mention it, yeah. She said she saw four dragons later on. One jumped down to the parking lot, and then three others flew away a while later.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe she has a dragon obsession. She’s fun and all, but it might be more weirdness than I want to handle.” He scratched his head and adjusted his hat. “I have weirdness enough at college.”

  Tom nodded, not sure what to say. And Keith launched in a detailed description of his college trouble, which involved pigheaded administrators and some complex requirements for graduation that Tom—who’d never been to college, only vaguely understood.

  And then in the middle of it—he’d never quite understand it or be able to explain it—there were wings.

  Only it wasn’t quite like that. There was a powder. A green powder, like a shimmer in the air. Tom had sneezed and was about to say something about it, but it didn’t seem to matter. It was as if he were floating a long way above his own body.

  And Keith jumped up, dropping the cup that he’d been holding. Tom jumped for it, in the process dropping his own cup. Both cups shattered with a noise that seemed out of proportion to the event, and seemed to go on forever in Tom’s mind.

  And then he turned, but he seemed to turn in slow motion. For one, his body didn’t understand that his legs actually belonged to him. And his legs felt like they were made of loose string, unable to support his weight. He tripped over his feet, and as he plunged toward the floor there were … wings over him. Green wings. Dragons. Green. Wings. Had to be dragons.

  Suddenly the windows weren’t there. Ripped? The screens were ripped from the frames. Glass lay at his feet. And the tip of a green paw came into the room, only it didn’t look like a paw, more like a single toe with a claw at the end.

  Tom grabbed for the low coffee table in front of the love seat. It was wicker and very unstable, but he struck out with it, hard, at the thing. There was a … tooth? fang? coming toward him, and he batted at it with the table. It made a hissing sound, not at all like a dragon sound. And it was dripping. At least Tom didn’t think it was a dragon sound. He had no idea what he sounded like when he was shapeshifted.

  Keith was kicking something large and green and shimmering.

  “Stop,” Tom yelled. “You can’t kick a dragon. It will blaze you.”

  Keith looked at him, and Keith’s eyes were huge, the pupils so dilated there was almost no iris left. It reminded Tom of something but he couldn’t say what.

  “Mother ship,” Keith said. “The mother ship has landed. They’re coming for us. I saw a movie.”

  “Really,” Tom said, reaching out. “You shouldn’t kick dragons.”

  Tom had managed to wrench the wooden leg away from the wicker table, and he had some idea he could stab the dragon with it. But one of the dragons was attacking Keith, while the other was … crouching against the glass door. If Tom could attack that one …

  He started to go for the handle to the patio door, but all of a sudden it wavered and changed, in front of him, and it was the door to the Athens, with all the specials painted on. He pulled at it, but it wouldn’t open. So he backed up, and kicked high at it.

  The glass shattered with a sound like hail.

  The big green body leaning against it shuddered and turned. Toward Tom.

  Two toes-with-claws reached for him. A fang probed.

  He had time to think, Oh, shit. And then he remembered what Keith’s eyes looked like. They looked like his own, in the mirror, back when he was using.

  The morgue of Goldport was in a low-slung, utilitarian-looking brick building. Someone with misconceived ideas of making it look like Southwestern architecture had put two obviously nonfunctional towers in asymmetrical positions atop the tile roof.

  Rafiel Trall parked in front of the building, and Kyrie parked beside him. There were a couple of other cars and a couple of white panel vans parked in front. The street was the sort of little-traveled downtown street that connected quiet residential streets to the industrial areas with their warehouses and factories.

  Rafiel put sunglasses on as he came out of the car, and Kyrie wondered for a moment if his golden eyes were unusually sensitive to light. It didn’t seem like the most practical eye color to have.

  He saw her staring and smiled at her, as if he thought she was admiring him. Kyrie looked away quickly. The man clearly had an ego as large as his shifted shape.

  But he was quiet as they walked inside the building. Though it was air-conditioned, it didn’t have the same feeling of clean cool as the inside of the hotel. Instead, the cold here felt clammy and clinging and there was a barely discernible smell. If Kyrie had been pressed to define it, she would have said that it smelled like her car a day after she’d lost a package of ground turkey in it, last May. It was the stink of spoiled meat, mixed with a faint tinge of urine and feces—what she’d once heard someone call the odor of mortality—but so faint that she couldn’t quite be sure it was there.

  “Have you ever been to this type of place?” Rafiel asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Sensitive stomach?” he asked.

  She shrugged. She truly didn’t know. She remembered the corpse last night and felt a recoiling—not because she’d been on the edge of losing her lunch over it, but because she remembered all too clearly how appetizing the blood had smelled. Appetizing was far worse than sickening. “I don’t think so,” she said.

  And at that he gave her his bright smile, which seemed to beam rays of warmth through the chilly atmosphere. “Well, anyone of our kind has seen dead bodies, right?”

  Kyrie blinked, bereft of an ability to answer. Had she seen dead bodies? Only the one yesterday. What was he telling her? She looked at the bright smile, the calm golden eyes, and wondered what hid behind it. Oh, she’d guessed—it wasn’t that hard given his history—that Tom might have done things he was sorry for. There was that edging and shying away behind his silences. And a man like him who didn’t seem totally devoid of interior life and yet ended up on drugs was clearly running away from something.

  But until this moment, Kyrie had allowed herself to believe the something had been a few petty thefts, car joyriding, other things that could well fall under juvenile delinquency. Never … never murder. She’d never thought of murder, until Rafiel thought that. And now she wondered if the other shifters really had that much trouble controlling themselves in animal form that killing humans was common and accepted. And if it was, what was she doing here? What was the point of murderers investigating murders? If it was normal for shifters to kill humans, how much should the life of a human be worth it to them? How could Rafiel be a policeman? And how could Rafiel talk of it so calmly?

  But she couldn’t ask him. He’d continued ahead of her, down the cool tiled hallway, and she had followed him, without thinking, by instinct, like a child or a dog. And now he stood near a man who sat at a desk, and said, “Hi Joe. I’m here to see last night’s pickup.” He removed his sunglasses and pocketed them.

  Joe, a middle-aged man, with a greying comb-over and a desk-job paunch, looked pointedly at Kyrie.

  Rafiel smiled, that dazzling smile that seemed to hide no shadows and no f
ears. “Girlfriend,” he said. “Kyrie is thinking of joining the force and I told her she should see an autopsy first. Kyrie Smith, this is Joe Martin. You know I’ve talked to you about him. He practically keeps this place running.”

  Kyrie, head spinning at being called someone’s girlfriend, put her hand forward, to have it squeezed in a massive, square-tipped paw. Joe gave her what he probably thought was a friendly smile, but which was at least three quarters leer, and told her in a tone he surely believed was avuncular, “You take good care of our boy, Ms. Smith. He’s been lonely too long. Not that some ladies haven’t tried.”

  And on that auspicious blessing, they walked past Joe and down the hallway, past a row of grey doors with little glass windows.

  They all looked similar to Kyrie, and she had no idea what prompted Rafiel to stop in front one of them. But he stopped, and plunged a hand into his pants pocket, handing her a small notebook. She took it without comment, though considering the tightness of Rafiel’s pants, she had to wonder what quantum principle allowed him to keep notebooks in there. When he handed her a pen too, from the same provenance, she was even more impressed, because sharp objects there had to hurt.

  “Just take notes,” Rafiel told her. “And no one in there will ask who you are. They’ll assume you’re a new officer I’m training. Goldport has one of the smallest full-time forces in the state. To compensate, we have a never-ending string of part timers, usually either people blowing through town for a few months, or people who took a couple of months of law-enforcement courses and decided it wasn’t for them. If they ask, then I’ll tell them you work at the diner and I want your opinion, okay?”

  Kyrie nodded, feeling marginally better about being an apprentice policeman than about pretending to be Rafiel’s girlfriend. A sense of unease about Rafiel built in her mind, even as she nodded and held the notebook and pencil as if she were official. Might as well make some notes, too. Hell. Who knew? She might need them. She was, after all, investigating this herself, wasn’t she?

  Rafiel opened the door and the smell of spoiled meat leaked out, overwhelmed—fortunately overwhelmed—by the smell of chemicals. She thought she detected rubbing alcohol and formaldehyde among them.

  Inside was a small room, with tiled walls and floor, all leading down to a drain in the center of the floor, above which a metallic table was placed and into which something was gurgling. Kyrie knew very well what the something would be, but she refused to look, refused to investigate.

  In the full light of day, without the pressure of the moon on her body and mind, it was unlikely that the smell of blood would be appetizing. But she refused to give it a chance, all the same.

  The tiled room should have looked cold and sterile and it probably would have, had it been tiled in standard white. However, the walls looked like someone had either gone crazy with artistry or—more likely considering what Kyrie had seen of how the public departments of Goldport, from town hall to schools, operated—they’d received remnant tiles from various public projects.

  Be it as it may, bright blue, fierce red, sunny yellow, and the curious terra cotta orange of Southwest buildings covered walls and floor.

  It all went to make the man who stood in the middle of the room look greyer and more colorless. He would be, Kyrie judged, somewhat past middle age. Colorlessness came not only from his white hair, but from a skin that looked like he was never allowed out in the sunlight. He had an aquiline nose that looked broken but probably had just grown like that, and—on either side of it—brightly sparkling blue eyes, rife with amusement.

  “Hello there, Rafiel,” he said, and grinned. He wore a lab coat, and the sleeves—and his hands, in latex gloves—were stained as colorfully as the tiles that surrounded him. “We were just about to start, but Bob—” He nodded toward the other man in the room, who was somewhat past middle age, with a bald head surrounded in a fringe of grey hair. He wore a bright Hawaiian-style shirt, incongruously patterned with what seemed to be palm trees and camels on a virulently green background. “—Bob said it was proper if you were here, as there should be more than one of you watching.”

  “I’m sorry,” Rafiel said. There was some change that Kyrie couldn’t quite define to his tone. “We were having breakfast.”

  The man in the lab coat—a doctor?—grinned. “Breakfast, before this? Oh, no. You know so much better than that.”

  “To be honest, Mike,” Bob said, “he hasn’t tossed his cookies in about a year. Not since that vagrant found at the warehouse that had been there for over three months, last summer, remember?”

  Rafiel said nothing, only shook his head and a light red tinge appeared on his cheeks. And Kyrie realized all of a sudden what his tone had been. The sound in his voice had been the sound of a little boy responding to his betters, of a young man convincing the elders of his worthiness.

  “This is Kyrie Smith,” Rafiel said, gruffly. “She’ll be taking notes.”

  The two older men looked at her as if noticing her presence for the first time. The medical examiner smiled and Bob raised his eyebrows, his eyes twinkling with amusement. She rather suspected that, notebook or not, she’d just been relegated to the girlfriend realm again.

  She ducked her head, while the examiner turned to a point in the wall, where a little light flashing and a glint of something seemed to indicate the presence of a camera, and said, “We have washed and set the body, ready for examination.” He gestured toward the body on the table.

  It looked much better than the night before. Or perhaps much worse. It was all a matter of perspective. The night before, it had looked like a piece of meat wrapped in blood-soaked rags. Now, laid out on the table, it looked definitely human.

  “The victim,” the medical examiner continued, in that officious voice that people get when talking into recording instruments, “is a Caucasian male, blue-eyed, five foot nine, two hundred and thirty pounds, probably between thirty and forty years old. As far as we can determine, he died of multiple stab wounds, by an instrument to be determined.” He gestured toward a large Ziploc bag at the corner of the room, against the multicolored wall. It was filled with something that looked black and ragged. “I removed the victim’s clothes—T-shirt and slacks—in the presence of Officer McDonald, and bagged them. They will be handed to the custody of Officer McDonald and Officer Trall for further analysis. As reported to me by Officer McDonald, the corpse was not found to have any identification and the police department is waiting for a missing-persons report that might give some clue as to his identity.”

  “Instrument to be determined, Mike?” Rafiel asked, leaning forward to take a closer look at the very pale corpse crisscrossed by dark gashes.

  The medical examiner looked up. “They don’t look like knife stab wounds.”

  “What about … I mean, yesterday we thought it might be another of those animal attacks?”

  “What animal … ? Oh, the victims cut in half?” Mike said. “Not that I can tell. I mean, yeah, the other ones have some marks consistent with perhaps animal teeth, though I would hate to see the animal with teeth that size. But this one …” He frowned. “More like he was stabbed multiple times by a weird implement. A nubby sword with a serrated edge, perhaps?”

  Rafiel blinked. He looked toward Kyrie and frowned.

  Kyrie felt relieved. Well, at least a little relieved. She took a deep breath. A nubby sword with a serrated edge didn’t seem like anything that Tom could have been carrying on him. She had seen his teeth—glimmering in the moonlight—and they looked as polished and smooth as the best gourmet knives. So they couldn’t be confused with these stabbing implements. And Tom hadn’t had anything on him. She remembered him in the bathroom.

  Her sense of relief surprised her. Did she care that much if Tom was guilty or not? But then she thought that considering she might be called on to administer justice, and considering she had already hidden him from the law, in a way, yes, she did care.

  She made a quick note on the nature of t
he implements, and looked up to see that the doctor and Rafiel were removing something, with tweezers—from the man’s grey hair.

  “Looks like the same green powder found on the clothes and the body when we first examined it,” Mike said. “We’re sending it for analysis.”

  Rafiel was frowning at a little baggie into which he’d collected what looked like a sprinkle of bright green powder. “Looks like pollen,” he said. “Anything flowering about now that’s this bright green?” he looked at Bob.

  “Not that I know,” Bob said. “Label it. We’ll hand it over to the lab. Who knows? They might actually figure it out.”

  He shrugged and Kyrie didn’t know if he was being ironic. She also didn’t have time to think about it, because Mike had sliced a Y shape on the man’s chest and opened the body cavity.

  The smell of death and corruption became all encompassing, and the sight of the organs … Kyrie swallowed. Even as she swallowed and struggled with nausea, she felt relieved that it wasn’t hunger and that she wasn’t finding this in any way appetizing. Perhaps panthers only ate fresh meat.

  “Are you okay?” Rafiel asked.

  She wasn’t okay. The smell seemed to be short circuiting her brain and making her blood rush loudly in her ears. But she nodded and got hold of the considerable willpower she resorted to when she had to prevent herself from shifting. She nodded again. “I’m fine,” she said, though her voice echoed tiny and distant.

  “Look at that,” the doctor said. “That’s the stab that killed him. Right through the heart.” He pointed at an organ that looked exactly like the others, to Kyrie, all of them an amalgam of red and green, yellow and the sort of greys that really shouldn’t exist in nature. “There are several others that reached vital organs, but I’d say that’s the one that stopped it. Pretty much ripped the heart to shreds, in fact.”

  Rafiel and Bob had moved closer, and were looking into the opened body.

  “What are those white things?” Rafiel asked.

  “Damned if I know,” Mike said. “They look like some sort of adipose deposits.”