Night Shifters

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  “Just a cup of coffee,” he said, and looked wildly around, lighting at last at a coffee shop sign a couple of blocks away, the edge of the advance of gentrification of downtown Goldport. “I won’t keep you long, I promise. I imagine you must be very tired.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Please,” the man said. “Tom is my only son. If there’s any chance I can … find him.”

  Again she had a feeling that what he had been about to say was not “find” but something else—persuade? Reach?

  “All right,” she said, setting off toward the coffee shop. “But just one cup of coffee.” She had to admit to herself at least half the reason for allowing him that one cup of coffee was that she wanted to know what was happening—exactly what was wrong—between those two. Had Tom told her the truth about being thrown out of the house? Or had he run away? What had his father thought of the whole thing? Did his father even know that Tom was a shifter? And did he love him despite that?

  Kyrie didn’t have any personal interest in the matter, of course. Well, Tom’s father seemed nice enough. Possibly too nice to be saddled with Tom as a child. But, really, ultimately, what drove her to walk those blocks to the coffee shop, what convinced her to sit across from him at the little, tottering table, amid the decor that tried to hard to be urban and sophisticated, was curiosity.

  She had grown up with many families, but none of them hers. And none of her families had ever shown her much of the tangled feelings between close blood relatives. All she had of it was the understanding drawn from books and movies. She saw family and familial love through a mirror darkly.

  So she went with Edward Ormson, and sat at the little table across from him, holding a cappuccino that she knew would have way too much milk, and watching the man sip his espresso grande, or very tall or whatever they were calling the huge cups these days.

  “How long has Tom been working at the Athens?” Mr. Ormson asked.

  “Six months,” Kyrie said. Was everyone going to ask her this question? If Mr. Ormson’s next question was about the murders three months ago, she was going to scream.

  But he nodded. “And he’s … he’s a good worker?”

  “He’s responsible,” Kyrie said, surprising herself with saying it. “And competent. He always shows up or calls if he’s ill. This is the first night he missed work completely.” And having said the words, she wondered where he was, what he was doing. She frowned at her cup of foam with very little coffee. She had as good as thrown him out. Of course, he deserved it. Or did he?

  Rafiel’s talk of an insect-origin powder, his talk of eggs in the wounds of the victim … Something was not right, and it seemed certain that high or not, Tom had been fighting something—some creature, possibly the same that had committed murder in the parking lot, just a day ago. But he had been high. And he should not have been high. He should have been more careful in her house.

  Somehow this moral high ground was not as satisfying as it should be. She realized that Mr. Ormson was looking attentively at her, and she managed a smile at him, her professional smile that meant very little but seemed to make people feel at ease. “He was better than most servers we get at the Athens.”

  “Was?” Mr. Ormson said. His blue eyes, so much like Tom’s, were filled with a coolly evaluating look that was nothing like Tom’s at all.

  She shook her head. “He didn’t show up today. I’m assuming he gave up the job. I don’t know …”

  But Mr. Ormson continued looking at her, coolly appraising. “Do you … I don’t quite know how to ask this question, but I need to—do you have any idea if my son might be involved in illegal activities?”

  Oh, Lord, the drugs. Yes, she was fairly sure that Tom was involved in illegal activities. But talking about it to this stranger felt like a violation of trust. Stupid to feel that way, she told herself. Stupid. And ridiculous.

  He’d broken confidence with her. He’d been a guest in her house and behaved with utter disregard, with utter—

  But she thought of the food left on her shelf. She had expected him to eat it all. She wouldn’t have held it against him if he had eaten it all. It must have taken a lot of willpower to control himself and not eat all the protein he could. She, herself, and Rafiel too, had binged shamelessly. But Tom hadn’t. And if he’d given in to the drugs later, perhaps he hadn’t realized what he was doing? Or perhaps he had but had no other choice?

  She looked at Mr. Ormson staring at her. No. Tom was, if nothing else, another shifter, a member of this makeshift family in which she’d ended up plunged suddenly. She owed him that much loyalty, if nothing else. Even if he were really guilty of murder; even if she ended up having to fight him or take him out—he was one of hers. And Mr. Ormson, even if his looks were testimony of a genetic relationship to Tom, was not one of them.

  She raised her eyebrows at Mr. Ormson, and he laughed, as if she’d said something very funny. Only the laughter echoed bitter and hollow at the edge of it. “Ah. I see,” he said, though she clearly did not. “Let me tell you what I know of my son. Let me explain.”

  “You don’t need—”

  “No, please let me, then perhaps you’ll understand better what I mean, and that I’m not merely fishing for something that will allow me to put my son away or something equally … drastic.

  “Tom was never an easy child. No, perhaps I lie there. He was a happy baby, chubby and contented. At least, we had a nanny, but when I was home and the nanny brought him to me, he was usually asleep and sometimes he … woke up and looked at me, and smiled.” He made a face, worried, as if trying to figure out, now, what those smiles might have meant, and suspecting them of some deeper and possibly bad meaning. “But then he started walking. And he started speaking. The first word he learned was no. And he said no very often over the next fourteen or fifteen years. His teachers told us there was nothing wrong with his mind, but his grades were dismal.”

  He frowned again and took a quick sip of his espresso, as if it could control the flow of words. “I was going to say the first call from the police station, saying he’d been arrested was a shock, but that isn’t true. From nursery school onward, we got calls, from Tom’s teachers and supervisors. He’d stolen something. Or he’d broken something. His language violated all the rules of every school that ever took children. He had … I think they call it appositional deviational disorder. He couldn’t obey and he wouldn’t submit to any authority.”

  Ormson’s lips compressed into a bitter line. “By the time he became officially a teenager, I’d run out of options. Counselors and boot camps, and whatever I thought might straighten him out, just made him more violent, more unruly. His mother had left by then. She— I think she couldn’t understand him. I couldn’t understand him, either, but I had my work. She … she found someone else and moved to Florida, as far as she could from us and still remain on the East Coast. And Tom and I settled into a routine. As long as he kept his … infractions beneath a certain threshold, I could get him out of jail the same day, and no harm done. I thought … I thought he would grow out of it.”

  Kyrie finished her coffee. For some reason, the story was making her feel sorry for Tom. Oh, it was foolish. It was borderline suicidal to feel sorry for someone like Tom. But in his father’s descriptions—it seemed to her, from kids she had known in foster care—she read a desperate desire of Tom’s to be seen, to be noticed, to be acknowledged. Oh, she didn’t think it could all have been solved with a nice talk by the fire. Life tended not to behave like a Disney special, so much more the pity. She suspected that by the time that Tom had learned to walk, learned to say that all-vital no, the problem was already intractable. But nonetheless it was possible to feel sorry for the man he might have been.

  “There was joyriding,” Ormson said. “And drugs. And one or two cases of lewd acts in semipublic places.”

  Was he watching her face to see if she was shocked? The only thing Tom hadn’t told her about was the lewd acts, and she wondered how much o
f those was showing up naked in public places—something neither he, nor she, could control.

  “So.” He leaned back. “You can’t possibly fear to let me know something he’s done. You see, I know.”

  She inclined her head, in a gesture that might have been a yes, or just curiosity.

  He smiled, a tight-lipped smile. “I see,” he said. “Well, then I’ll ask it outright. Do you have any reason to think my son did something … stole something from a … an organized crime group?”

  She must have trembled, without meaning to. The triad, the three exceedingly dumb dragons at the diner today, all came to her mind, and she must have trembled as she thought about it. She immediately calmed herself down, and forced herself to relax, but there was that look of understanding on Ormson’s face.

  “You don’t have to answer that, but you do have to answer me this. It’s very important. Do you know where he’s hidden it? The Pearl?”

  The Pearl. Ormson wanted the same pearl the Chinese dragons had spoken of. How could he know about it? Clearly Tom hadn’t told him about it. He hadn’t even seen Tom and wasn’t sure where Tom might be. So …

  She looked at him, and in his intense expression read the same eagerness of the three dragons looking at Tom the night before. The Pearl, they had said. And they’d asked where he hid it.

  On her feet, she pushed the chair forward. She remembered to take the cup with her, which was a little strange, in retrospect, and put it on the tray near the other dirty cups.

  She headed toward the door at a good clip and got there before Mr. Ormson seemed to realize it, before he got up, before he came after her, with a haste that made everyone in the coffee shop turn to stare at them.

  Kyrie was aware of their scrutiny as she ran out, into the still deserted early morning street. She heard him come after her, almost immediately, heard him call, “Ms. Smith. Kyrie. Please, I must explain.”

  But all she could think was that he—was he really Tom’s father?—was working for the dragons. He had no more concern or care for Tom than he did for her. They were shifters, they were alone. They must look after each other.

  She ran full tilt back to the Athens, and heard him run behind her, also at full clip. But she was much younger than him, and she ran faster, and was well ahead of him by the time she reached the Athens and headed for the parking lot.

  It was only in the parking lot that she realized she hadn’t parked there that day. And that was the least of her worries.

  Tom was tired. At just that moment, he wasn’t absolutely sure how the dragon felt. Though he was still the dragon.

  He could feel the dragon’s wings, suspended between the earth and the sky, the dragon’s front legs tucked upward in flight position, the dragon’s tail, serving as a rudder to direct the pattern of flight. But a part of him, a core, looking out through the dragon’s eyes, and trying—desperately trying to find a populated place to land—was wholly human, wholly Tom. And tired.

  He had to stop soon, he thought as the dragon flew above the spectacular painted desert, the brightly layered mesas of New Mexico. But New Mexico was empty. That was what had made it so attractive. It was a place he could hide, far from human contact. But he needed some humans. He was going to need food and sleep, soon. And he did not want to hunt for wild rabbits, eat them raw and fall asleep on the hard-packed desert dirt.

  The dragon’s eyes, more far-seeing than any humans, followed a highway and following the highway, a conglomerate of buildings. It wasn’t very big. Nothing to compare to the Colorado cities Tom had left behind. It wasn’t even as big as Goldport.

  Memories from drifting west, through parts of New Mexico, months ago, brought up the name Las Vegas, New Mexico. One of those towns forever being confused with a better known town of the same name in a different state. It was the only city large enough to have a hotel in the area within reach of his flying.

  He aimed for it and flew in its direction, determinedly, feeling the weight of the backpack reassuring on the dragon’s ankle. He had money in there. And clothes. He’d land somewhere outside town, make himself decent for human contact, then slip into town and stop at some truck stop—he seemed to remember an awful lot of them in Las Vegas—for breakfast. And then find a cheap motel room to crash in. Anything, really, so long as it didn’t rent by the hour. He wanted to sleep in peace and quiet.

  And then he could start looking for something more permanent, and thinking of a way to survive. Some place to hide out for a few months, till the triad either found the Pearl on their own or forgot about him.

  And then … He had a fleeting thought he could go back to Kyrie then, and maybe … But no. That avenue was closed and he knew it.

  The human brain in control of the dragon body guided himself down and down and down, to land between two mesas, on rocky ground, where no one would see him.

  He shifted, an effort even greater than shifting into dragon had been the evening before. When it was done, he was weak and pale and trembling, standing naked in between the two rock spires, holding onto the handle of the backpack.

  How he managed to get dressed, he didn’t know. It involved a lot of starts and stops. Even the times he’d run away from other cities, from other states, he’d never made himself fly eight hours straight, through the night.

  Las Vegas could not be more than a mile away. He’d gauged it well when he’d landed. He didn’t want to land so close to the populated area that someone would see him shifting. And he was right by the only road into town coming from the direction of Goldport.

  He put his backpack on and summoned strength from determination. He must make it to town. It was the only way he was going to get eggs and bacon and a cup of coffee. He could almost taste the cup of coffee. Not to mention the orange juice. Hell, anything wet would do.

  With the dry desert air stinging his nostrils and his parched throat, he headed toward Las Vegas.

  CHAPTER

  6

  That she’d gone to the parking lot instead of up front where she’d parked her car was the least of Kyrie’s worries because in the parking lot there was … She swallowed hard, trying to comprehend it and unable to. They were …

  They were green and huge and glittering like jewels in the full light of day. And they were some sort of Amazonian beetle. At least, Kyrie remembered, vaguely, having seen much smaller versions of these creatures at the Natural History Museum in Denver, pinned solidly through their middle, against a background of black velvet. In a glass case.

  But those were small. And dead. The legend had said something about them being used for jewelry, and she could kind of see that, from the way the green carapaces glowed with blue highlights, in the light of the morning.

  It would be five-fifteen, she thought, or possibly five-thirty, and soon there would be people coming to breakfast at the Athens, and yet in the parking lot of the building, there were two giant … insects dragging something.

  She couldn’t even look at the something. She didn’t need to look at the something. She could smell the symphony of blood sharp and clear as day from where she was standing.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, a steady and very worried voice was intoning, oh crap, oh crap, oh crap, almost in the tone of someone praying.

  The little voice was prescient. Or more in tune than Kyrie’s body and the rest of Kyrie’s mind, which stood, amazed and immobilized, staring at the insects.

  She didn’t know when they first saw her—where were the eyes in those things?—but she noticed a little start and their leaning into each other, communicating—with what? Antennae?—somehow, and then they turned. They advanced on her.

  At this moment the little voice that had been intoning oh crap, grabbed the rest of Kyrie. It turned her around. It sent her running, in broad strides, around the Athens and to her car. She had a vague impression of people inside the diner turning to look at her as she ran by at full speed. Would the beetles follow? Out here, up front? In front of everyone?

  The
y wouldn’t if they were shifters, but what if they weren’t?

  What, she thought, as she put her hand in through the broken window to release the latch, pulled the door open, and, without pause, dove headlong into her car. They’re the result of some nuclear accident? Or some exterminator’s bad dream?

  She stuck the key in the ignition, started the car, and headed down the street. It wasn’t until she was headed toward home, speeding as much as she dared in this zone, that she realized her moment of frozen panic couldn’t have taken much more than a few seconds. It seemed much longer, subjectively, but as she pulled away from the curb, in her car, she saw Edward Ormson on the sidewalk, hands on sides, slightly bent over, in the position of someone who’s run too fast, too far.

  He had just—almost caught up with her. As for the beetles, they were nowhere in sight. Had she imagined them? She wasn’t about to drive around the back of the Athens to find out.

  Edward Ormson stared at the girl, his mouth hanging open in wonder.

  She’d run away from him. She’d looked at him as if he were something profoundly disgusting, and then she’d left without warning. This was not something that happened to him normally, when he was trying to ask someone questions.

  Why had she run? What had he said that was so terrible?

  Confused, he walked back up in the direction of the coffee shop, where the area was much better. His head ached and he felt very tired. Dragon-lagged, he thought. Whatever magic the dragon had used to get here had left Edward feeling as if he’d been beaten.

  So … this avenue to find Tom hadn’t worked. And he needed to get back to New York as soon as possible. He’d best find a place where he could call his secretary again and get her to call around and ask more questions, find someone who might know where Tom was.