Night Shifters

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  He came all the way to the bottom of the tree, looked up at her, blinked, then smiled. “Kyrie,” he said.

  His voice was perfectly normal and human, and yet there seemed to be something to it, some kind of harmonics that made the hair stand up at the back of her neck. Not fright. She wasn’t scared of him. It was something else.

  For just a moment, there was the feeling that the panther might jump down from the tree and roll on him and … No.

  Kyrie tried to control the panther and had a feeling that the world flickered. And realized she was a naked human, sitting on a branch of a tree in a most unusual position. A position that gave a very interesting view to the man below.

  She scrambled to sit on the branch in the human way, and fought a desire to cover herself. She could either hold on to the branch or she could cover herself. Between modesty and a fall, modesty could not win.

  “Yes,” she said. Heat climbed up to her cheeks and she had a feeling she was blushing from her belly button to her hair roots.

  Yes, she was sure she was blushing from the way Rafiel smiled—a broad smile that exuded confidence and amusement.

  But when he spoke, it was still in a whisper. “I have this for you,” he said, taking it from his pants pocket and handing it up. “I stopped for just a moment when I heard the report on the radio. I told Bob I needed to use the restroom and let him radio we were taking care of it, while I went to a shop and bought this. I’m sorry if it looks horrible, my concern was that it fit in my pocket.”

  He handed up what looked like a little wrinkled square of fabric. When Kyrie caught it, she realized it was very light silk, the type that is designed to look wrinkled, and that there was a lot more material than seemed to be.

  Shaken out, the fabric revealed a sheath dress. Kyrie decided it was safer to climb down from the tree, first, and then put it on. With the dress draped over her shoulders, she climbed down carefully, until, on the ground, she slipped the dress on. Of course, she was still barefoot, but on a warm day, in Colorado, in one of the old residential neighborhoods of Goldport, that was not exactly unheard of.

  “Go out at the back,” Rafiel said. “From what I could see when we approached, the part where the garden borders on the alley doesn’t have any bystanders. If anyone sees you, tell them some thing about having come in to look for the panther, but the police ordering you out. And now, go.” As she started for the path, he pushed her toward another path, the other way. “No, no,” he said. “That way. If you go this way you will run into Bob and Bob is likely to have his gun out and be on edge. I don’t want you shot. Go. I’ll meet you at your house as soon as I can.”

  Her house. With the bugs. Kyrie shivered. But there was nothing for it. She had to go somewhere. At the very least, she had to go somewhere to get shoes.

  Edward didn’t wait long. He didn’t sit down. He didn’t dare sit down. There was only one chair, and it seemed to be in front of the table, with the peas on it.

  Instead, he stood, uncertainly, till the door opened, and a man came in. He looked … Well, he looked like an average middle-aged man, of Asian origin, in Colorado. He wore T-shirt and jeans, had a sprinkling of silver in his black hair, and, in fact, looked so mundane, that Edward was sure there must be a mistake.

  He opened his mouth to say so. And stopped. There was something in the man’s eyes—the man’s serious, dark eyes. They looked like he was doing something very difficult. Something that might be life or death.

  “Mr. Ormson?” he said.

  Edward Ormson nodded, and his eyes widened. Was this the human form of the dragon he had seen yesterday? He seemed so small, so … normal.

  But in Edward’s mind was the image of that last night before he’d … asked Tom to leave. He remembered looking out of the window of his bedroom, next to Tom’s room and seeing a green and gold dragon against the sky—majestic against the sky. He remembered seeing the dragon go into Tom’s bedroom. And he remembered … He remembered running to see it, and finding only Tom, putting on his bathrobe. He remembered the shock.

  These creatures could look like normal people. Perhaps …

  “My name is Lung,” the man said, and then, as though catching something in Edward’s expression, he smiled. “And no, I am not him. But you could say I … ah … know him.” Lung stepped fully in the room, and seemed to about to sit down in the plastic chair, when he realized that Edward didn’t have anywhere to sit.

  “They left you standing?” he asked. “I’m so sorry.” He opened the door and spoke sharply to someone back there, then stepped fully in. Moments later, a young man, with long lanky hair almost covering his eyes, came in and set down a chair. Another one, swiftly, ducked in the wake of the first, to remove the cloth and all the peas in it. As soon as he’d withdrawn the first one showed up again, to spread another, clean tablecloth on the table. And after that, yet another one set a tray with a teapot and two tea cups on the table.

  Lung gestured toward the—blue, plastic—chair they’d brought in. “Please sit,” he said. “Might as well be comfortable, as we speak.”

  Edward sat on the chair, and faced Lung across the table. “Tea?” Lung said, and without waiting for an answer, filled Edward’s cup, then his own. “Now … may I ask why you were looking for … him? His name is not normally spoken so … casually.”

  Edward took a deep breath. “How do you know my name?” he asked.

  Lung smiled, again. He picked up his cup, holding it with two hands, as if his palms were cold and had to be warmed on the hot porcelain. “He told us. He told us he brought you to town. That you were to … convince your son to speak.”

  “Ah,” Edward said. “I don’t know where to find my son,” he said, picking up his cup and taking a hurried sip that scalded his tongue. “I haven’t seen Tom in …”

  Lung shook his head. “I don’t question his judgments. It wouldn’t do to do such,” he said. He looked at Edward and raised his eyebrows just a little. “He says you have been … useful to us in the past, so you know a little of … his ways. And of us. Do you not?”

  Edward inclined his head. More than simple acknowledgment, but less than a nod. “I have defended … people connected to him, before. I know about …” He thought about a way to put it that wouldn’t seem too open or too odd. “… about the shapeshifting,” he said at last.

  Lung inclined his head in turn. “But do you know about the other … about his other powers?”

  Edward raised his eyebrows, said nothing.

  Lung smiled. “Ah, I won’t bore you with ancient oriental legends.”

  “Given what I’ve seen, what I’ve felt; given that I was brought here by … the—”

  “Him.”

  “Him, I don’t think I would dismiss it all as just a legend.”

  “Perhaps not,” Lung said. “And yet the legend is just a legend, and, I suspect, as filled with imagination and wild embellishments. What we know is somewhat different. But … he is not like us. That we know. Or rather, he is like us, but old, impossibly old.”

  “How old?”

  Lung shrugged. “Thousands of years. Before … civilization. From the time of legends. Who knows?” He drank his tea and poured a new cup. “What we do know is this—he has powers. Perhaps because he is old, or perhaps, simply, because he was born with more powers than us. I couldn’t tell you which. But whatever powers he has, it is said that he can feel things—sense them. Perhaps it’s less premonition than simply having been around a lot and seeing how things tend to work out.” He inclined his head and looked into his tea cup as though reading the future in its surface. “If he thought you should be here, then he has his reasons.”

  “But I can’t find my son. I haven’t seen my son in years. I didn’t even know if he was alive. The— he said that I was responsible for my son, but surely you must see … I haven’t seen him in years.”

  Lung looked up, gave Edward an analyzing glance, then nodded. “As is, I think we have it all in hand. We know wher
e your son is. We have … Some of our employees have got him. In a nearby city. And they’re confident he will eventually tell them what he did with the object he stole. We don’t know why he thought it necessary to get you, nor why he thought you should be here. But he is not someone whose judgments I’d dream of disputing.”

  A silence, long and fraught, descended, while Edward tried to figure out what he had just been told, in that convoluted way. “Are you telling me I have to stay here, but you’re not sure why?” he asked.

  The back alley wasn’t empty, but it was nearly empty. At least compared to the crowd that surrounded the castle garden in the front. Here at the back, there were only half a dozen people looking in, staring at the lush, green garden, spying, presumably, for movement and fur.

  There were two boys and a young girl of maybe fifteen, wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a ponytail and holding a skateboard under her arm. The other three people looked like transients. Street people. Men, and probably past fifty, though there was no way to tell for sure.

  Kyrie, still under cover of thick greenery, wondered at the strange minds of these people who would come and surround a place where they’d seen what they thought was a jungle animal disappear. What kind of idiots, she asked herself, wanted to face a panther, while unarmed and empty-handed? She might be a shapeshifter but at least she wasn’t so strange as this.

  They were all roughly disposed on either side of a broad gate that seemed to have rusted partly open.

  Kyrie could, of course, just walk out and tell them what Rafiel had suggested—that she had felt a sudden and overwhelming desire to look for the panther herself. But she would prefer to find some way past them without having to speak. Remembering a scene from a Western, long ago, she looked at the ground and found a large rock. Picking it up, she weighed it carefully in her hand. Then she pulled back, and flung the rock across greenery, till it fell with a thud at the corner of the property.

  Noise like that was bound to make them look. They wouldn’t be human if they didn’t. In fact, they all turned and stared, and Kyrie took the opportunity to rush forward and out of the enclosure.

  They turned back to look at her, when she was in the alley, but she thought none of them would be sure he had seen her in the garden, and started walking away toward the main road and home.

  “Hey, miss,” a voice said behind her.

  Kyrie turned around.

  “Are you the one who owns the castle?” one of the homeless men asked.

  She shook her head and his friend who stood by him elbowed him on the side. “The woman who owns the castle is much older, Mike.”

  She didn’t stay to hear their argument and instead hurried home as fast as she could. Once out of the immediate vicinity of the castle, everything was normal and no one seemed unduly alarmed by the idea of a panther on the loose. So Kyrie assumed that Rafiel wouldn’t have too much of a problem convincing them that it had been a collective hallucination.

  Her house looked … well, wrecked, the front door open, crooked on its hinges, the door handle and lock missing. Inside, the green powder was everywhere underfoot and, in the hallway, where she had confronted the creature, there was something that looked like sparkling greenish nut shells. Looking closer, she realized they were probably fragments of the beetle—struck off when she’d stabbed it with the umbrella?

  The umbrella was still there, leaning against the wall. But the beetles had vanished.

  CHAPTER

  7

  Lung nodded, then shrugged at Edward Ormson’s question. “I don’t pretend to know why he wants you here, though I’m sure he has his reasons. However, you don’t need to stress too much in search of your son. As I said, he is … We have him. And he will talk.”

  A cold shiver ran up Edward’s back at those words. They had Tom? “What do you mean by having him? Do you … are you keeping him prisoner?”

  Lung seemed puzzled by Edward’s question—or perhaps by the disapproval that Edward had tried to keep from his voice, but which was still obvious. “He stole from us,” he said. “Some of our men have captured him. They will find out where he put the Pearl of Heaven one way or another.”

  One way or another. Edward found his hand trembling. And that was stupid. All these years, he’d gone through without knowing if Tom was dead or alive, or how he was doing. He hadn’t worried at all about him. Why should the thought that he was being held prisoner by a dragon triad disturb him so much? Why should he care?

  Oh, he could hear in the way Lung said that Tom would tell them the truth eventually that they probably weren’t being pleasant with him. He doubted they were treating him very well. But in his mind, with no control from him, was the image of Tom on that last night. Barefoot, in a robe.

  Edward had thought … well, truth be told, he couldn’t even be very sure what he’d thought. He’d seen the triad dragons in action often enough. He knew what they could do. He’d seen them kill humans … devour humans. He’d seen the ruthlessness of the beasts. Seeing his son become a dragon, himself, he’d thought …

  He’d thought it was an infection and that Tom had caught it. He’d thought his worthless, juvenile delinquent of a son had now become a mindless beast, who would devour …

  His throat closed, remembering what he’d thought then. He didn’t know if it was true or not. He assumed not, since Tom wasn’t a member of the triad and lacked their protection. If he’d been making his way across the country devouring people, he’d have been discovered by now. He would have been killed by now. So Edward was forced to admit that his son must have some form of self-control. Well. Clearly he had to have some form of self-control if he’d not given in to whatever persuasion they were using to make him talk.

  He looked up at Lung, who was staring at him, obviously baffled by his reactions. “What are you doing to him?” he asked. In his mind, he saw Tom, that last night he’d seen him. He saw Tom who looked far more tired and confused than he normally was. He hadn’t even attempted to fight it. He’d opened his hands palm up to show he wasn’t armed—as if he could be, having just shifted from a dragon. He’d tried to talk, but he didn’t make any sense. Something about comic books.

  These many years later, Edward frowned, trying to figure out what comic books had to do with the whole thing. Back then he’d found the whole nonsense talk even scarier, as though Tom had lost what little rationality he had with his transformation. And he’d got his gun from his home office desk and ordered Tom out of the house.

  Tom had gone, too. And, somewhat to Edward’s surprise, he hadn’t made any effort to get back in.

  “I thought you hadn’t seen him for years?” Lung asked. “That you didn’t care what happened to him?”

  “I don’t. Or at least …” But Edward had to admit that this last recollection he had of Tom as a sixteen-year-old youth in a white robe, and looking quite lost was an illusion. A sentimental illusion. It was no more real, no more a representation of their relationship than the picture of Tom in the hospital, two days old, with a funny hat on and his legs curled toward each.

  It was a pretty picture and one that, as a father, he should have cherished forever. But Tom had been very far from living up to the picture of the ideal son. And in the same way, at least five years had passed since Tom had been that boy of sixteen, and even if Edward had done him an injustice then—had Edward done him an injustice then?—the man he was now would have only the vaguest resemblance to that boy.

  Back then, Tom hadn’t known anything but his relatively sheltered existence. And though he’d been popular and had the kind of friends who had got him in all kinds of trouble, his friends were like him, privileged. Well taken care of.

  Suddenly Edward realized where his uneasiness was coming from about Tom and who Tom was, and what he had assumed about Tom for so many years. “It’s his girlfriend, Kyrie,” he said.

  “Girlfriend?” Lung asked.

  “Yes … or at least, I think she is. She said they were just coworkers, but th
ere is something more there. She seems to care for him. She was furious at me for … I think she realized I was working for you, and she was furious at me.”

  “The panther girl?” Lung asked.

  “I’m sorry?” Edward asked confused.

  Lung smiled. “The girl who was with him two nights ago. The one who shifts into a panther.”

  “She …” Edward’s mind was filled with the image of the attractive girl shifting, shifting into something dark and feline. He could imagine it all too well. There had been that kind of easy, gliding grace in her steps.

  “Oh, you didn’t know. Yes, she is a shifter. But I never knew she was his girlfriend.”

  “I just thought …” Perhaps what had bound them was their ability to shift shapes? But what would a dragon want with a panther? The images in Edward’s mind were very disturbing and he found himself embarrassed and blushing. “There are other shifter shapes? Other than dragons?”

  Lung smiled. “Come, Mr. Ormson, you’re not stupid. Your own legends talk about other shifters … werewolves, isn’t it? And were-tigers too? And the legends of other lands speak of many and different animals?”

  Edward felt his mouth dry. “This has been going on all along? People shift, like that.” He made a vague gesture supposed to show the ease of the shifting. “And they …” He waved his hand.

  “We don’t know for sure,” Lung said, seriously. “He who brought you here says there have always been shifters, and as you know he’s not the sort of … person, whose word one should doubt. He is also, not, unfortunately, someone one can question or badger for details. He says that there have always been shifters. But that shifters are increasing.”

  “Increasing?”

  “There are more of them.”

  “How? Is it … a bite?” He’d thought that back then. He remembered being afraid that Tom would bite him. He remembered having gone through the entire house, trying to think whether he’d touched anything Tom had touched. Tom’s clothes, his toothbrush had all been consigned to the trash at his order.