Night Shifters

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  He walked down one of the cracked sidewalks that ran along the front of the pocket-sized lawns, kicking a stray piece of concrete here and there, to vent his anger. Damn. He couldn’t walk out of the city on foot. And he wasn’t at all sure he could start flying from inside the city. What if someone saw him? What if … they saw him?

  He walked along as a thin rain started trickling down on him from the sky above. The rain felt … odd. He’d been living in Colorado for six months and this was the first time he’d seen rain. There was a feeling of strangeness, at first, and then, despite the warmth of the night, discomfort at water seeping everywhere and dripping from his hair onto the back of his neck, running down the back of his jacket.

  He walked a long time on his still-tender feet and passed a roped-in car dealership. But it was the sort of car dealership you got in this kind of area—selling fifth-or sixth-hand cars. Of course, he thought, as he walked past, his hand idly touching the rope that marked off the lot, he could probably break into those cars far more easily than into any others. But … he stared at the wrecks and semi-wrecks under the moonlight. What were the chances that the owner of this lot was living so close to the bone that the theft of a car would really hurt him?

  Tom looked at the facade of the dealership proper, and it was a well-known car dealer. Chances were they’d never feel it. His hand weighed the stone in his pocket.

  On the other hand … On the other hand, the theft of a car—or one more car, as Tom doubted this would be the first—might be what caused the dealership to close doors at this location, to give up on this neighborhood, perhaps to give up on this level of car, at all. And then people in this neighborhood would find it harder to get a car. Perhaps harder to find jobs.

  Tom dropped the stone out of his jacket pocket and kicked it violently aside. Then he dropped the screwdriver after it. He walked down the road, his hands shoved deep in his pockets.

  He would have to walk, as far as he could out of Goldport. He’d go south, toward New Mexico. Lots of empty space that way, less chance of someone seeing or noticing a dragon flying against the sky. But damn, he could get much, much farther if he could ride. As it was, he’d almost surely get caught by the three dragons. And this time he would have to face them alone.

  He realized he was chewing on his lower lip, as he walked down the street where the dilapidated houses gave way to houses in even worse state but divided into apartments, and then to warehouses tagged with the occasional gang graffiti.

  He pulled the collar up on his leather jacket. Even with the ridiculous backpack on his back, he didn’t think anyone would challenge him. Not for a moment.

  Knowing this trip was likely to end in his death, he wished he could buy something to make it easier. Not a lot. Probably nothing to inject. Just some pot to smoke, to ease his nerves. He was going to die, he might as well go easy. Besides, he’d seen there was no point trying to escape the grip of drugs, if even Kyrie did them.

  In his six months in the city, he’d seen plenty of drug dealers standing around in shady corners, waiting. This was the type of neighborhood to attract them. But perhaps the rain, unaccustomed in Colorado, had driven them indoors. Tom couldn’t see anyone, and certainly not anyone with that pose of alert shiftiness that identified a dealer. He had money. He was willing. But no one was selling.

  “Damn dealers,” he muttered to himself under his breath. “Just like cops. Never around when you need one.”

  Wide awake and hopeless, he headed south and west while the sun set and the breeze grew cooler, ruffling at his damp hair, his soaking jeans.

  “Frank, do we have rice pudding?” Kyrie asked, coming near the counter.

  Frank looked up with a frown, from a talk he’d been having with three customers seated at the part of the counter where you could get food served. His girlfriend wasn’t around again, tonight, so he was in a mood. “I just came in and I haven’t made any. If there’s any, it’s leftover from yesterday.”

  Well, it was all gone, then. But before Kyrie could turn to go give Rafiel the bad news, Frank added, “Is Tom coming in later?”

  “Tom?” Kyrie didn’t know what to say. She honestly had no idea. And for just a moment was startled that Frank would ask her about Tom. Except that of course, last night she’d taken time off to take medicine to Tom. Or at least that was what she had told Frank. And then she’d told Frank that Tom was in really bad shape and she had to take him home with her and watch him.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He left my place a few hours ago.”

  “Do you know where he was going?”

  She shook her head. “He was with his friend. The guy who lives downstairs from him,” Kyrie said, as she pulled a stray strand of hair behind her ear. And as she did, the customers at the counter looked up. And she froze.

  They were the three from the night before. The three dragons. None of them permanently injured, as far as she could tell, though she was sure she’d got the eye of at least one of them in the battle.

  But they sat there, at the counter, uninjured, and the middle one even had his hair arranged, as artificially perfect and smooth as before. They all wore tight jeans and satin-like shimmering jackets, with dragons in the back. They looked like something out of a bad karate movie, and Kyrie was so shocked at seeing them here, in … well, the glare of the fluorescent lights, that she didn’t know what to do.

  Red Dragon was the one sitting next to where Kyrie stood. He backed away from her, his eyes wide, and said something in Chinese that sounded like a panic attack.

  The middle one said something in return, something she couldn’t understand, and put his hand into his pocket, pulling out a sheaf of bills, which he laid on the counter. And then, the three geniuses, in massed disarray, started toward the door. A process only slightly hampered by the fact that not one of them was willing to turn his back on Kyrie. So they moved backward as a group, bumping into tables and booths, snagging on girls’ purses and men’s coats, and muttering stuff in Chinese that might be apologies or threats.

  Clearly, they were rattled enough to forget their English. Clearly, they thought that Kyrie’s panther form was too dangerous to anger. Although why they thought she would shift into a panther right then and take them to pieces in front of the diner patrons was beyond her.

  Pulling and shoving at each other, they got to the door, then in a tinkling of the bells suspended from it, out of it, tumbling onto the sidewalk where the lights were starting to show, faintly, against the persistent glow of the sunset.

  “What was that all about?” Frank asked. “Did those guys know you?”

  “I have no clue,” Kyrie said, choosing to answer the first question. And this was the absolute truth. She couldn’t figure out why they would be scared of her. After all, even if she had been so stupid as to shift here, in the middle of the diner, they could have shifted too, and then they would have had the upper hand. There were three of them, after all.

  Unless … She smiled faintly at the thought. Unless the total idiots thought this was a shifter diner and that everyone here would be shifters. If Tom was right the shifting was ancient, well established in their culture, and perhaps passed on in families. They had a lore and a culture. For people like that it must be utterly bewildering when strangers shifted. Perhaps they think we too band together.

  Frank was glowering at her, and she realized she was still smiling. He reached for the plates and cups the guys had left on the counter and pulled them down, near the cleaning area, by the dishwasher, glowering all the while and banging the utensils around so much that, if they weren’t break-resistant, they would probably have shattered.

  “What’s wrong?” Kyrie asked.

  But he just glowered at her some more, grabbed a dish towel from the counter, and wiped at the serving surface with it. “Oh, nothing. Everything is fine and dandy. You and Tom and …” He lifted his hands, upward, as though signifying his inability to understand any of them.

  Kyrie skidded bac
k to the sun-porch, to give Rafiel the distressing news about the rice pudding.

  “There’s no rice pudding,” she said. “And the three dragons who were at Tom’s apartment were just here.”

  “The dragons?” he said and started to rise. “Here?”

  “In human form,” she said. “They left.” She frowned. “They seemed afraid of me.”

  He looked at her a long moment, then shook his head. “I don’t know what to do. I wonder why they were here.”

  “Looking for Tom,” she said.

  “Oh.” He looked out the window. “We could follow them, but there’s only two of us—”

  “And neither of us can fly,” Kyrie said. “Besides, there’s only one of us. I’m working. But since there’s no rice pudding, you’re free to follow them.”

  He just grinned up at her. “Oh, bring me pie à la mode, then. I don’t care. I’m in it for the vanilla ice cream.” And he winked at her.

  “What kind of pie?”

  “I told you I don’t care,” he said. “Just bring me a wedge.”

  “Green bean pie it is, then,” she said, and walked away. To bump into Anthony, the last of the day shift to leave. He was in his street clothes, which, in his case were usually elaborate and today consisted of a ruffled button-down white shirt, red vest and immaculate black pants. “Hey,” he said. “What’s up with Frank? He’s acting like a bear with two heads.”

  Kyrie shrugged and Anthony sighed. “What that man needs,” he said, as if this summed up the wisdom of the ages, “is to get laid. He seriously needs to get laid. His girlfriend hasn’t been in for too long.” And with that, he twirled on his heels and made for the door. Kyrie had often wondered if in his free time he was a member of some dance troupe. At least that would explain the bizarre clothes.

  Kyrie went back to scout out the pie, though the only choices were apple and lemon. She chose lemon, figuring he would like it less, and put two scoops of ice cream on the plate with it. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to thwart Rafiel—but a man who ordered with that kind of complacency did deserve green bean pie. Or at least Brussels sprouts. Too bad they didn’t have any on the menu.

  She took the plate of pie in one hand, the carafe in the other, set the pie in front of Rafiel and went off, from table to table, warming up people’s coffees.

  Despite her best efforts to banish it, the image of Frank getting laid was stuck in her mind. She looked across the diner at Frank, behind the counter, his Neanderthal-like features still knit in a glower. She shuddered. There were things the human mind was not supposed to contemplate.

  Edward Ormson’s first thought was that they couldn’t be in Colorado. Not so fast. Even by airplane it took over three hours. And they couldn’t be flying at airplane speeds. Well, they could, but it would have left him frozen as a popsicle sitting astride that dragon.

  And he hadn’t been frozen, nor gasping for air. The temperature around him had remained even, and he’d felt perfectly comfortable. Only twice, for just a moment, light seemed to vanish from around them. But it was such a brief moment that Edward hadn’t had time to think about it. Now he wondered if some magic transfer had taken place at that moment.

  Oh, Edward didn’t believe in magic. But then he also didn’t believe in dragons, he thought and smiled with more irony than joy while the dragon circled down to a parking lot in a street of low-to-the-ground buildings.

  They landed softly on the asphalt and the huge wings that had been spread on either side of him, coruscating and sparkling in the light like living fire, closed slowly.

  “Down,” the dragon said. Or perhaps not said it, because Edward didn’t remember sounds. Just the feeling that he should get down. He should get down immediately.

  He scrambled off, sliding along scales that felt softer on the skin than they should have.

  But once he stood, in the parking lot, holding his briefcase, he realized that the front of his suit had tiny cuts, as though someone had worked it over with very small blades.

  He frowned at it, then looked up at the dragon who glowed with some sort of inner fire, in front of him. The beast opened its huge mouth, and all thought of complaining about damages to his clothes fled Ormson’s mind.

  “Find your son,” the dragon said, in that voice that wasn’t exactly a voice. “Make him give back what belongs to me.”

  And, just as suddenly as he’d appeared at Edward Ormson’s office, the dragon now stretched its wings, flexed its legs, and was airborne, gaining height.

  Alone in the parking lot, Edward became aware that it was raining, a boring, slow rain. Behind him, a little Chinese restaurant called Three Luck Dragon had its open sign out, but there were no cars parked. So either it catered to a local clientele, or it had none.

  Did the Great Sky Dragon mean anything by dropping Edward off here? Or was it simply the first convenient place they’d come to?

  Edward saw the curtain twitch on the little window, and a face peer out. The lighting and the distance didn’t allow him to see features, but he thought it would be the proprietors looking to see if he intended to come in.

  Well, today was their lucky day. He’d go in and order something, and get out his cell phone. He would bet now he knew where Tom had last been seen, he would be able to find the boy with half a dozen phone calls.

  One way or another, he always ended up cleaning up after his son.

  Western towns don’t taper off. Or at least that was what Tom had seen, ever since his drifting had brought him west and south to Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. You walked down a street, surrounded nice Victorian homes and suddenly you’re amid five-floor brick warehouses, with the noises of loading and unloading, of packing and making of things resounding within.

  And then, a couple of blocks away, you were in the middle of a high prairie, with tumbleweed blowing around. Looking back, you could still see the warehouses, but they were so incongruous that they seemed to be part of another world.

  Tom turned to look at the dark edge of the warehouses. He stood on what had abruptly become a country road, its asphalt cracked underfoot. Looking just beyond where he was standing, he saw nothing but an underpass, just ahead. Why there was an underpass was a question he couldn’t answer, as it was just two country roads meeting. Perhaps this was what people complained about, with public projects that made no sense.

  But right then Tom was grateful of the underpass. In this landscape of brown grass and blowing tumbleweeds, there wasn’t much cover, otherwise. He made for the underpass and stripped quickly, shoving all his clothes and boots into the little backpack with the happy dragon on the back. The boots were a tight fit into the small space, but he got them in, and zipped the thing. Then he loosened the back straps to their outmost, and put them around his wrist.

  Willing yourself to shift was like willing yourself to die. Because the process of shifting, no matter how easy, always hurt. It took desire to do it, but it needed something else. He got out from under the overpass, and stood—naked in the moonlight, willing his body to shift, willing.

  A cough shook him, another, heralding the preliminary spasms that often preceded the shapeshifting. Pain twisted in his limbs, wracked his back, as his body tried to extrude wings from itself. He opened his mouth and let the scream come—something he never did within a city—the scream of pain of his human self, the scream of triumph from the ancient beast once more let forth.

  A car drove by, toward the outside of town. One of the tiny SUVs in white. A Kia or a Hyundai or one of those. Tom’s confused senses were aware of its turning around and then zooming past again. But no one came out. Worse comes to worst, his still rational mind thought, as his body shifted. They’ll just call 911. And good luck with convincing a dispatcher they just saw a dragon.

  In the next moment it no longer mattered. The dragon was him. He was the dragon. His body fully shifted, Tom spread his wings fully, feeling the caress of wind and rain on them. He opened his mouth and roared, this time in triumph. Hi
s vision sharpened. He was in a vast non-cave. And the dragon knew they should go to ground, they should find a cave.

  No, the human part of Tom said. No. Not to a cave. We’re flying west. Deep west, until we come to a town. We’ll follow the highway that will take us to Las Vegas, New Mexico, by early morning. Then … cave.

  The dragon blinked, confused, because the image in its mind, for a cave, had mattresses and pillows and other things that made sense only to the human. But it had learned, over the years, to trust the ape cowering away at the back of its mind.

  It trusted it now, even when it found something wrapped tightly around its front paw. The human mind said they were clothes, and that they shouldn’t be discarded.

  The dragon harrumphed, loudly. Then spread its wings again, sensing the air currents. Half of flying was coasting. If you needed to beat your wings the whole time, you were going to die of tiredness soon.

  He felt the currents. He flapped a little. He gained altitude. He headed out of town.

  “Break?” Rafiel asked.

  Kyrie was about to shake her head, but stopped. The dinnertime crowd had thinned. Students had left for concerts or movies or whatever it was that college students did with their evenings. And the families, too, had vanished, probably home to their comfy chairs and their TVs.

  The only two people in the diner were a man at the back, who seemed to be signing the credit card slip that Kyrie had dropped on his table. And Rafiel.

  Kyrie looked at the wall clock. Ten-thirty p.m. That meant there would be a lull till eleven or thereabouts, when the late-night people would start coming in. And she only needed ten minutes.

  She backtracked to the counter and put away the carafe she’d just used to give Rafiel a warm up. “Frank, is it okay if I take ten minutes?” she asked.

  Frank turned around. He was still glowering. “Fine. It’s fine,” he said, as if he were saying that it was all completely wrong.