Night Shifters

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  It was eight a.m. in New York and the woman would probably be in the office.

  He considered going into the coffee shop, but they’d seen the girl run away from him. At the very least he’d get pitying stares. At worst, they would think he was some sort of pervert and had said something to her that was over the line.

  Shaking his head—he still couldn’t understand why she had run—he walked past the coffee shop. And came to a sort of little park in the middle of the sidewalk. He sat down on the park bench set in the four feet of lawn amid three dispirited trees.

  Tom walked in the shadow as much as he could. Partly because he was thirsty and partly because he realized a guy like him, in black leather, carrying a kid’s backpack had to look incongruous. He was holding it by the strap, dangling it from his hand, instead of carrying it on his back.

  He hoped anyone seeing him would think he was carrying it for a son or little brother and give it no thought. But you never knew. And he didn’t want people to remember his coming through here. He didn’t want the triad to be able to find him.

  Just before he got to town—he couldn’t see it, but he could smell it, a tinge of food and car exhaust in his nostrils—he saw a couple of cars abandoned. Something about the cars tickled his memory, but he couldn’t quite say what. Well, at least one of them looked awfully familiar. But it was just a Kia something or other, one of those economy cars that tried to look like SUVs and rarely managed more than looking like a toy patterned on an SUV.

  It wasn’t Kyrie’s car. That was white too, but much smaller. Besides, this one had a driver’s side window, Tom thought, and felt very guilty he hadn’t sent her the money to have that repaired.

  He’d been so furious last night, so furious because she’d failed to live up to his high standards. His high standards at that. It took some nerve. Now, he felt mostly tired and vaguely upset at himself, as if he had let himself down.

  Fine. He’d eat something, he thought, as he saw, in the distance, the outskirts of town—represented by what looked like an abandoned gas station. He’d eat something, he’d sleep, and then he’d think this whole thing over. If by then he still thought he had done Kyrie an injustice or somehow failed to live up to what should—yes, indeed, by damn—be his high standards, he would take as much of the money as he dared and mail it back to Kyrie before he vanished from her life.

  He couldn’t even tell why he wanted to deal straight with her. It wasn’t because she was a shifter. He wasn’t feeling particularly charitable toward Mr. Golden Eye Lion police officer. And it wasn’t because they’d worked together all this time—because though he’d enjoyed work at the Athens, Kyrie had always looked at him as if he were slightly below subhuman. And it wasn’t his attraction for her, because he’d already decided that he had not a snowball’s chance in hell.

  And then he realized it was how she’d treated him, when she had found him standing over that body. He’d been deranged. He’d been in dragon form. But she hadn’t even hesitated. And she didn’t even like him. He knew that. But she’d grabbed him, and helped him hide the evidence of his involvement in anything back there.

  She’d been there when he needed her the most. Whether she’d disappointed him by keeping funny sugar around or not, she didn’t deserve for him to leave her with a huge bill in car repairs. Okay—so that was that. He’d send her some money this evening, send her more when he settled some place and found a job.

  The decision put a spring in his step, and he almost walking normally when he reached the gas station. Which was too bad. Had he been dragging along the road and looking all around in despondency and depression, he might have noticed something about the shadows, something about movement.

  As it was, he walked by the squat brick building without a second glance. And didn’t know anything was wrong until he felt the impact of something hard on the back of his head. And then he had no time to think about it, as darkness closed around him.

  Kyrie was rattled. She didn’t know if she had dreamed the beetles, out of being so tired, out of Rafiel’s report on there being insect matter in and around the corpse last night.

  Normally, Kyrie was very sure of her perceptions. She’d had to trust in them and them alone, as often those who were supposed to look after her or be in charge of her hadn’t been very trustworthy at all.

  But now? Now she wasn’t sure of anything. The last two days had been a carnival of weirdness, a whirling of the very strange. Driving her car along familiar streets and around the castle just before her neighborhood, she thought she wouldn’t be at all surprised to wake up in her bed, suddenly, and find that all this, from the moment she’d seen Tom as a dragon, had been a crazy dream. Although if that were true, then her subconscious harbored some very weird thoughts about Tom.

  She pulled up at her house, and opened the front door, half expecting to find her house as ransacked as Tom’s apartment. But everything inside looked normal and was in its usual place. She locked the door, picked up the mail that the carrier had pushed through the mail slot on the door. Junk, junk, and bills. Which seemed to be the modern corollary of death and taxes.

  She went all the way to the kitchen, and saw her chair still under the door to the back porch. Had it really all happened? Had the little porch, which had been her main reason for renting this house, truly been destroyed?

  She pulled the chair away, unlocked the door and looked at the broken windows, the glass on the carpet, the … mess. Then she turned on the light and walked into the room.

  Rafiel had said that there was green powder on this carpet, like there was green powder on yesterday’s corpse. She hadn’t noticed. But now, by the light of dawn and the overhead light, she could see it—glistening on the carpet. It was even more visible because it must have rained sometime during the night when she wasn’t paying attention to the outside—and the rain had puddled it into little rings and patterns on the beige carpet.

  She wondered what it all meant, but couldn’t even think straight. And she wasn’t about to call Rafiel and ask him. Not right now, she wasn’t.

  Instead, she retreated to the kitchen, locked the door, and slipped the chair underneath. She wished the door were somewhat stronger than the hollow-core, Seventies vintage door it appeared to be. But it couldn’t be helped. She was certainly not going to fashion a new door before going to bed. And she needed to go to bed.

  She took a hurried shower, with torrents of hot water, and felt as if the heat and the massage on her sore muscles were reviving her. Coming out and drying her hair, she noted that Tom had hung up his towel very neatly on the hook at the back of the door. For some reason she’d expected it tossed on the floor.

  As soon as she went into the bedroom, the phone rang. It was a cheap, corded affair and it was plugged in there because it was the only phone plug in the entire house. Possibly because the entire house was not hard to cross in twenty hurried steps.

  Normally the only calls she got—at least since she’d got on the telemarketers do-not-call-list—were from Frank, asking if she wanted to come in and work extra hours. And if this were Frank right now, he could go to hell. There was no way Kyrie was about to turn around and go work another shift. Not with those beetles in the parking lot, and she didn’t even care whether they were real or a product of her imagination.

  But the voice on the other end of the phone wasn’t Frank’s. It was a voice that purred with masculine self-assurance.

  “Kyrie?” it said, though she didn’t remember giving Rafiel permission to call her by her given name.

  “Yes.”

  “I have information on the victim.”

  So, he was going to call her every time he had information? But she bit her tongue and said, “Yes?” because she knew that anything else could start a debate or an argument and that would mean talking on the phone longer and staying awake longer.

  “He was Bill Johnson. A roofer by trade. And apparently a coyote in his shifter form.”

  “A …?” How ha
d Rafiel found that out? It wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you could ask people about? Or …

  “His wife had pictures.”

  “Pardon me?” Kyrie asked finding this, in some way, stranger than giant beetles in the parking lot of the Athens.

  “His wife had pictures of him as a coyote. Lovely lady, I would judge about ten years older than him but looking and acting much older. A grandma type. She pulled out pictures, to show us, of what her husband looked like in his coyote form. She said he got the shapeshifting ability from his Native American ancestors and that he was, like their coyote of legend, a bit of a trickster. And then she said—”

  “Showed you pictures?” Kyrie asked, as her mouth caught up with her brain in horrified wonder.

  “Oh yes. She called him in to missing persons and Officer Bob and I and our one female officer, Cindy, all went along to take her statement and see if she had any pictures of the deceased. Because if it wasn’t him, we didn’t want to put her through identifying the body. Cindy came along on the principle that the lady might need a female shoulder to cry on.”

  “And?”

  “And she took out the pictures and showed them to us. And the other two looked at each other and then at me as though they thought the poor lady was totally out of her mind with shock and all that. Which she probably was, of course. But still …”

  “But still, he was a coyote. And she knew. And didn’t mind.”

  “Mind? She was positively gleeful. Very sorry none of their six children inherited the characteristic.”

  “Children.” Kyrie was beyond astonishment. That a shifter could secure all these things that she thought were out of her reach because she was a shifter felt absolutely baffling.

  “They live in Arizona,” Rafiel said. “Where Bill and his wife lived till about a year ago, when they drove through town and stopped at the Athens for breakfast and all of a sudden realized they’d never felt so at home anywhere. So they decided to sell the place in Arizona and buy a house here. Ever since then, Bill went into the Athens for his morning breakfast after roaming the neighborhood as a coyote.”

  “Well, at least no one would notice a coyote. Not in Colorado.”

  “Right. Lions and panthers are something else.”

  “And dragons.”

  “Yes.”

  She could hear him take a deep breath.

  “So, we know that the victim was definitely a shifter.”

  Shifter. Victim. The back of the Athens. The beetles. Kyrie desperately wanted to go to bed, but she felt she should tell Rafiel. After all, he was a police officer. He would know what to do about it, right?

  “There is more,” she said.

  “More about the victim?”

  “More … another victim.”

  “What?”

  “I was … I forgot I parked my car up front,” she said. “Because of the broken window. So I went into the parking lot and there were … They were beetles. That type of shiny rain-forest type beetle that they make jewelry out of?”

  “Someone made jewelry out of beetles?”

  “No. It would take a very big person to wear those as jewelry. They were six or seven feet long and at least five feet across, and shiny …”

  “Are you sure you didn’t dream this?”

  “No, I absolutely am not sure. But I think they were there. They were huge and green blue and they were dragging something. A corpse. I think it was a corpse because I could smell the blood.”

  “A corpse? In the parking lot of the Athens? Another corpse?”

  “I didn’t see it. It was just something—a bundle—they were carrying. And it smelled like blood.”

  “Are you sure this is not a dream you were having when I woke you up with my phone call?”

  “Quite.” Kyrie looked toward her still made bed. “Very much so. I haven’t gone to bed yet.”

  “Fine,” he sounded, for some reason exasperated. “Fine. This is just fine. I’ll go to the Athens and check.”

  “Take … something. They might be dangerous.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “I have my regulation bug spray can.”

  She had a feeling he didn’t believe her, and she couldn’t really blame him because she wasn’t a hundred percent sure she believed herself. “Right,” she said. “And, oh, remember you wanted to know about the dust on the floor of my porch. There is dust. It’s bright green.”

  “Lovely,” he said. “I’ll be there. Right after I check the parking lot of the Athens.”

  Tom hurt. That was his first realization, his first awareness that he was alive. The back of his head hurt like someone had tried to saw it open, and the pain radiated around the side of his head and it seemed to him as though it made his teeth vibrate. An effect not improved by a twisted rag, which was inserted between his teeth and tied viciously tight behind his head. His legs and arms were tied too, he realized, as he squirmed around, trying to get into a better position. It felt like there was a band of something around his knees, and one around his ankles. Very tightly tied.

  With his eyes closed, trying to remember where he was and why, he smelled old car oil and dust and the mildew of long-unoccupied places. His face rested on concrete, but part of it felt slick.

  The gas station. He must be in the gas station he was passing when … When someone had hit him on the back of the head. So. Fine. Shaking, he opened his eyes a sliver. And confirmed that he was lying in a vast space, on a concrete floor irregularly stained with oil or other car fluids. This must have been a service station at some point. Light was dim, coming through glass squares atop huge, closed doors that took up the front of the building.

  He looked around, but his eyes felt as if they couldn’t quite focus. And he wondered if he’d been attacked by some random local hooligans, who had felt an irresistible craving for his leather jacket and the kid’s dragon backpack, which no longer appeared to be anywhere near. Or if it was the triad again.

  Through the fogs of his mind, he remembered that the white car parked by the road side had been the same make and model as the one that had turned around while he was shifting before. Had they seen him? Had they followed him? Along the highway? If they’d seen him follow the highway, it wouldn’t be hard to calculate that he would stop in Las Vegas, New Mexico. It wouldn’t have been hard to figure out, either, that he’d land and shift some distance from town.

  It couldn’t have been hard to find a place to lie in ambush for him.

  In the next minute, there was a sound of high censure, in some form of Chinese. Oh, bloody hell. And then, out of a darker corner of the warehouse they came, all three of them. Tom had run into them a couple of times, before the time they’d ambushed him in his apartment.

  He’d privately nicknamed them Crest Dragon, Red Dragon, and The Other One. And his opinion that their intelligence and their viciousness were inversely proportional did nothing to make him feel better right now. The only good thing, he thought, as they advanced, speaking fast Chinese at him as though he should understand it, was that they were in human form and not dragons.

  As usual Crest Dragon—in his human form a young man with hair so well groomed Tom had wondered if it was a wig—took the lead, walking in front of the other two, who flanked him, left and right. Crest Dragon was waving the backpack around, and shouting something in Chinese.

  Truth was, even without having any idea what the complaints in Chinese were, Tom understood the gist of the matter completely. And the gist of the matter was that the Pearl of Heaven hadn’t been in the backpack.

  Exactly what kind of an idiot did they think he was? He glared at them. And how stupid were they, really? Did they think they would not feel … it, if it were in that backpack. Tom remembered holding it, remembered the feeling of power and strength and calm and sanity flowing from it. He could feel across miles, and he was sure so would they be able to, if he hadn’t taken extraordinary precautions in hiding it. And they’d thought he’d ca
rry it in a back pack?

  He glared at them, which was harder to do than it should be, because his eyes seemed to want to focus in different directions. How hard had they hit him on the head? And did they realize how hungry he was?

  Crest Dragon came closer, waving his arms in theatrical exasperation. Then he flung the backpack—with force—across the building, grabbed Tom by the front of the T-shirt and, lifting him off the ground, punched him hard on the face.

  Tom screamed. The pain radiated from his nose to match the pain on the back of his head, but sharper and sudden, edged around with blood and a feeling that his nose had broken. His vision blurred. If not for the rag in his mouth, he’d have bit his tongue.

  Another punch came, immediately after. And he screamed again. He tasted blood and didn’t know if it was running from the back of his nose, or from his mouth. And it didn’t matter. Pain after pain came. He was vaguely aware of being kicked, punched, and hit with something—he wasn’t sure what.

  On the floor, curling into a tight ball, he endured each sharp pain as it came, and screamed as loud as he could. In the back of his mind, words ran, words so completely calm and composed that he couldn’t think they were his. But the thoughts couldn’t have belonged to anyone else. And they made sense.

  One was: Scream. Stoicism is for fools. Another, just as sudden, as complete, was: Only idiots inflict pain for pain’s sake. And the third, very clear, very sharp, was: I could shift. I could eat them.

  It was the third thought that caused him to scream louder than the pain. And the word he would scream, if his mouth hadn’t been so firmly gagged, would have been, “No.”

  Oh, he could shift. He could undoubtedly shift. And the binds on his limbs would break away with the force of the shifting, the greater strength and size of the dragon. Of that he had no doubt.

  It was even possible that he could defeat all three of them, even if they too shifted. They were not swift of mind and they always had trouble coordinating attacks. But—and this was a huge but—he wasn’t absolutely sure he could prevail. Not as tired and weak as he felt.