Night Shifters

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  And then, worst of all, the dragon was very hungry. Starving. Ravenous. The dragon wanted food. Protein. And Tom didn’t think he could live with himself if he succeeded in eating another human being. Or even one of these three fools.

  A foot—he thought—crashed against his face. It felt like his forehead exploded. Blood flowed down, making him close his eyes.

  He screamed “No,” as much at the dragon within as at the pain.

  Kyrie had just fallen asleep when she heard something. At first it was a little sound. Like … something scraping.

  The sound, in itself almost imperceptible, intruded into her dreams, where she dreamed of mice, nibbling on cardboard. In her dream, she was in the back hallway of the Athens, and she opened the back door to the parking lot to find thousands of mice nibbling on large piles of cardboard boxes.

  As she stood there, paralyzed, the nibbling grew louder, and louder, and then the mice swarmed all over her, thousands of little paws all over her, insinuating themselves under her nightshirt, crawling up her belly, tangling in her hair.

  She woke up and sat up in bed. No mice. But she’d been sleeping uncovered, on top of the bed, and there was a breeze coming in around the door to the bedroom, blowing with enough force to ruffle her nightshirt and give her silly dreams.

  Kyrie looked at the clock on her dresser. Seven a.m. She should be asleep. She still had time to sleep. Turning her pillow over, she lay back down. And realized she could still hear the sound of mice nibbling on cardboard. She blinked. She was awake. She was sure of that. So why were mice …?

  And why did it feel like her head swam? She felt dizzy, as if she were … anaesthetized? Drugged? Slow?

  She looked at the shaft of light coming from the little window above her bed. Was that green powder dancing in the light? Was she dreaming it? And she still felt dizzy, as if her head wasn’t quite attached to her body.

  Getting out of bed, as silently as she could manage, she opened her bedroom door. The living room was empty and everything looked undisturbed. Definitely no mice. But she could still hear the crunching, shredding sounds from … the kitchen.

  Even more cautiously, feeling pretty stupid for moving around her own house as if it were some sort of secret dungeon, she crept down the hallway toward the kitchen. But before she got there, the green glimmer in the air became obvious. It was no more than a glimmer, she thought, a soft shine, like … a cloud of green dust. Green dust in the air. Green dust on the corpses. Green dust covering her back porch the day that Tom claimed he had been attacked by dragons.

  And she was light-headed and growing dizzy. As if she were being doped.

  Had they been dragons? Rafiel had said the powder was of insect origin, but was it? They didn’t even know what dragons were—exactly. Other than mythical beasts, of course. And she remembered the beetles in the parking lot of the Athens. It could be those.

  She stood there, for a moment, in the hallway of her own house, feeling her head swim. She stared at the green dust, listening to what sounded like an attempt to break through the door—if the thing trying to break through were armed with claws and pincers.

  Only, the attempt couldn’t be very serious, could it? It was a hollow-core door. How hard could it be to break it down? No, the purpose was to put the green powder into the house first, wasn’t it. And why would you do that?

  She thought of the victim in the parking lot of the Athens, covered in the green powder. And then she thought of Tom and Keith, clearly high as kites.

  Yes, Tom had seemed to do most of the damage she’d found in the sunroom. Yes, their response to the attack hadn’t been the most effective. But they had been high as kites. What if they had been high as kites because of the green dust?

  What if it that was what was causing her head to swim?

  In a moment, she was sure of it. She remembered Tom’s casual greeting of Keith when he’d stopped for the key. Friends? Perhaps, of a sort, the friendly acquaintance sort where you trust each other with a key in case you’re locked out. Or where you might exchange greetings in the hall. Perhaps the kind where you go in search of your acquaintance when you hear a murder has taken place at their job site. Not the type of friendship, though, where you go to someone’s house in order to share a drug with your friend.

  Kyrie retraced her steps down the hallway, quickly. Why, oh, why hadn’t she allowed herself to be so afraid of bird flu that she bought a couple of surgical masks? In the event, right now, all she could do was improvise.

  She opened the door to the linen cupboard and got a washcloth, which she tied over her mouth and nose, careful to cover them as much as possible. Then she retreated further, into the living room where she grabbed the umbrella she had bought for what she thought was a fabulous price when she first moved to Colorado. As her year’s worth of letting the umbrella sit by the front door had proven, the price hadn’t been quite so fabulous as she then thought. Never mind. It would be of use now.

  She grabbed the umbrella by the solid wooden handle that had so impressed her when she bought the thing and wielded it like a samurai sword.

  Just in time. From the kitchen came the sound of the door breaking down and then a dry shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, as of chitinous legs moving over the linoleum of the kitchen. She heard her chair being dragged, the table overturned. And she heard the thing shuffle closer, toward the hallway. At the entrance to the hallway it stopped, and, in a series of dry scrapings, it sent forth another cloud of glowing green powder. From the other side of the house came the sound of the door falling down. The front door. Wouldn’t the neighbors see it? And who would believe it? They could see it all day long. They’d think they were going crazy and not tell anyone about it.

  Kyrie put her back against the hallway wall, as a cloud of green powder came from the living room side, too.

  She prepared to sell her life dearly.

  Tom woke up choking. A taste of blood in his mouth, and his nose felt wholly obstructed. He coughed, and it seemed to help, clearing both mouth and nose. But he was thirsty and he was still lying, twisted, on the floor of the old service station. And his mouth was still gagged.

  “Are you going to talk or not?” Crest Dragon asked. He stood directly in front of Tom, hands on hips. “Are you going to tell us where you hid it, or will we have to hurt you again?”

  Tom blinked. He opened his mouth, and screamed, because that was all he could do. With a gag in his mouth, it was very hard to tell the idiots he had a gag in his mouth.

  Other Dragon, the one with the Chinese character tattooed on his forehead, screamed something menacing in Chinese in response to his scream, and struck a pseudo-karate position he had probably learned from movies. He came running toward Tom and Tom closed his eyes, fairly sure they were going to hit his nose again.

  But before Other Dragon got to him, someone yelled. Red Dragon? Tom opened one eye. It was indeed Red Dragon. He spoke rapidly, pointing at Tom. And he had one arm in front of Other Dragon, who looked confused. Crest Dragon looked vexed. He turned toward Other Dragon. “You didn’t remove the gag? I told you to remove the gag,” he said, in rapid English, and threw a punch at Other Dragon who avoided it by ducking under it.

  He didn’t tell Crest Dragon, obviously the head of this outfit, that he too could easily have seen that Tom was gagged. Instead, he untied the gag at the back of Tom’s head, his fingers scraping at Tom’s scalp and tangling in Tom’s hair as he did it.

  As the gag fell away, Tom opened and closed his mouth, hoping his jaw wasn’t dislocated. It hurt as if it were, but that was probably only the result of having his mouth open like that for hours.

  “Now,” Crest Dragon said, and smiled, graciously, looking much like some sort of society hostess. “Now, will you tell us where you hid it?”

  Tom judged his chances. What he needed most—what he wanted more than anything—beyond the inner dragon’s wish to tear these goons apart and use them as a protein source, was water. Liquid.

  He looked
at Crest Dragon and, in a voice he didn’t need to make any raspier, he managed, “Thirsty. Very. Thirsty.”

  Crest Dragon looked disgusted, and for just a moment Tom thought they were going to resume beating him. He turned around to the other two.

  “You know they said we shouldn’t hurt him to where he couldn’t talk,” Red Dragon said. “You know he has to be thirsty.”

  How long had it been since he’d been thrown here? It seemed like forever. And he hadn’t drunk anything before. Tom closed his eyes, as his captors’ argument progressed into whatever form of Chinese they talked, Mandarin or Cantonese or whatever. Red Dragon had said they shouldn’t hurt him to the point where he couldn’t talk. Tom had realized, sometime in the last few days, that stealing the Pearl of Heaven had been a grievous mistake. Oh, he remembered it from when he was a kid, in his father’s house. He remembered some old Chinese guy showing it to Edward Ormson at his home office.

  Hidden around the corner, the then very young Tom had seen the Pearl and felt it. He’d felt the radiance of it penetrating to the core of his being. Since he’d later come to realize that it was a … cultic object of dragon shifters, he supposed that the fact that it resonated with him, even then, must mean he’d already been a dragon. It wasn’t a late-caught affliction, but something he’d had all his life and only became active in adolescence.

  Years later, he’d felt the call of the Pearl and he’d slithered, among those other dragons, so different from himself, to a meeting, where he’d seen the Great Sky Dragon. And the Pearl. He hadn’t understood almost anything of the meeting. But he’d seen the guy who had the Pearl shift back into his normal form. And he’d followed him to an unassuming little restaurant. Where he’d stolen the Pearl.

  Oh, the reasons he’d stolen it seemed valid at the time. He’d thought since this was used by shifters, since it gave forth a feeling of safety and calm, it must be something that helped control shifts. And perhaps it was. At least, since he’d had it, Tom had been able to stop his drug-taking. Gradually, but he’d stopped it. And the withdrawal effects he’d expected from heroin—all the horrible vomiting and cramps he’d heard about—had never materialized. Or not to any degree worth talking about. It hadn’t been much more than a stomach flu. So perhaps the Pearl had helped.

  Only then the triad had picked up the scent, and Tom had found that unless the Pearl were kept submerged in water, every dragon within miles of it could follow it.

  He didn’t even know how many dragons there were around. But he knew that there were enough that they’d tracked him. They’d tracked him all the way to Colorado, tracked him to Goldport … And he had to leave the Pearl immersed in water, which meant he, himself, couldn’t use it.

  So, if he couldn’t use it, he might as well give it back. Only he couldn’t give it back, because he’d seen enough of the dragon triad, enough of the ruthless way in which they disposed of those who crossed them.

  They were so mad at him that these—admittedly low-level—thugs had pretended to forget to remove his gag and had proceeded to beat hell out of him. And no, he wasn’t so stupid he would believe that they’d actually forgotten to remove it. No. They hated him. They had it in for him. So … The minute he told them where the Pearl was, the moment one of them verified it, got his hands on it, and phoned the others back to tell them where it was, he was a dead man.

  And Tom didn’t want to die. Not yet. So many times over the last few years, he’d thought he would be better off dead.

  He didn’t know what was different now, to be honest. He still didn’t have a chance with Kyrie. Kyrie was probably, even now, snuggling with her lion-policeman.

  But, damn it all, Tom felt a sting to his pride, a sting to what he retained as his sense of self, to think that if he died now, Kyrie would only think of him as a fuckup, as a junkie so far out of control that he couldn’t keep from getting high in her house—even if he used her drugs for it.

  He took a deep breath. He wanted to live. He wanted to know why she kept drugs. He wanted … he wanted Kyrie, and a house, roses, and everyday paper delivery.

  He wanted the normalcy that had never been his.

  A hand lifted him roughly, and he opened his eyes, bracing for a hit. But instead, he found Red Dragon pressing the neck of a water bottle against his lips.

  Tom drunk gratefully, as if the water had been the breath of life.

  As his mouth and nose became hydrated, the smell of the other three became more obvious. There was some sort of cologne, cheap and probably bought in gallon bottles, and the smell of the masses of product that Crest Dragon had slathered on his hair.

  But above it, stronger than all of that, was the smell of living flesh. “No,” Tom said. It was all he could tell the inner dragon, who was slavering at the thought of eating these fools.

  Edward Ormson walked along the street, too stunned to even hail a cab from the two or three that drove by. This was all very bewildering. Social workers down at the homeless center remembered Tom as one of their successes, the landlady liked him, the librarians at the public library down the street gushed over him.

  Were they really talking about Tom?

  And he still couldn’t understand what had made the girl run. In fact, he had no idea at all.

  He frowned. It didn’t make any sense. What did she know? And who was she, really? She said she barely knew Tom. She said that they’d just worked side by side for about six months.

  But there was something else, there. Something to the way she talked about him, to the silences, to what she didn’t say.

  Oh, Edward had always known that Tom could be very charming to women. In fact, it seemed to him that women tended to like rogues and fools and Tom had a strong component of both, so it shouldn’t surprise Edward that women liked his errant son. Even when Tom was little, just toddling around the place, the cook, Mrs. Lopez had been quite smitten with him. It was all they could do to keep her from feeding him on cookies and cake constantly. And Tom took advantage of it, of course. He’d been all smiles to the woman, even when he threw tantrums at his parents.

  And yet, Kyrie Smith didn’t seem to Ormson as the sort of woman who would be attracted to men who were trouble. No. Despite her exotic features and odd hairdo, she’d come across as capable, self-contained, controlled.

  So, why did she seem so protective of Tom? Was it possible that for once in his life, just once, Tom had managed to attract someone in more than a superficial way? Was it possible that for once in his life Tom had a real relationship going? Or did she know something about the Pearl of Heaven itself?

  For Tom to steal from the triad seemed like the stupidest form of madness, the last loss of grip on reality that the boy could have come to. But what if this were a cunning plan, hatched by someone with better organizational skills than Tom’s? What if Kyrie was behind it? What if she had something in mind for the Pearl?

  Edward needed to know more. That’s all there was to it. He needed to know more about this whole thing before they could expect him to find Tom and force the boy to give the Pearl back.

  He hailed a cab. He’d go back to the restaurant in whose parking lot he’d been let out, and he’d go find out exactly what this was all about. He’d worked for triad members now and then. He was, after all, a criminal defense lawyer.

  It had started with pro bono cases, when he’d been asked to represent indigent clients. One of them was associated with the triads somehow, and that had brought him the triad business.

  He remembered how shocked he’d been when he’d first realized that some members of the triad of the dragon—the ones he dealt with—were shapeshifters, capable of shifting into dragons. But he had never expected that this would somehow make Tom into a dragon. And he was still not sure how that could have happened. Nor was he sure how Tom could have got involved with the group again after he left his father’s house.

  But he knew he had to stop it. Somehow. And soon. He had to get back home to New York.

  Beetles. De
finitely beetles. There was no other name for it. Shiny green carapaces and pincers. Advancing toward Kyrie, one from either end of the hallway. And they hissed. Or at least, it wasn’t a proper hiss. Not like a cat’s hiss, or anything. More like …

  More like a kettle left too long on the fire. Or more like the release of hydraulic pressure from a train as it stops. That type of hiss.

  One hissed, then the other hissed. They were communicating. They were communicating as they hunted her, as one approached from each side and they contrived to capture her in the middle, Kyrie thought.

  This wouldn’t do. This couldn’t do. If she let them continue to advance, she’d find herself impaled by those two pincer-ended arms that kept advancing toward her, advancing inexorably in front of the shiny blue carapace, even while the creatures behind the pincers hissed at each other.

  She imagined the hiss saying, “There she is, we’ve got her cornered.”

  Fear and an odd sort of anger mixed in her. This was her house. This was the only house that had ever been truly hers. All those years, growing up, she’d gone from house to house, from foster home to foster home, never having a place of her own, never having a say in even something as little as the color of her bedspread or the positioning of an armchair.

  This house, tiny as it was, was the first place that had belonged to her alone. Well, that she’d been sole renter of, at any rate. Where, if she so wished, she could put the armchair on the roof, and it would stay there, because this was her space.

  And these things, these … creatures … had violated it. Worse. They’d come into her house before, and they’d made Tom … high. They’d made Tom destroy part of her house. They’d given her an entirely wrong impression about Tom.

  Not that they could be the ones who gave her the impression that Tom was an addict—or an ex drug addict. But they, as they were, had given her the impression that Tom didn’t care about being a guest in her house, that he’d violated her hospitality. And because of them, she’d let Tom go—no—encouraged Tom to go, out there, somewhere, with no protection.