Night Shifters

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Tom didn’t know whether to be relieved or worried that all Frank said was “I thought you’d disappeared.”

  “No,” Tom said. “Wasn’t feeling well for a while and my dad came to town to look after stuff, so I was with him. I’m sorry I forgot to call.”

  For some reason, this seemed to alarm Frank. “Your dad? You have— You’re in touch with him?”

  Tom shrugged. “He heard I wasn’t okay and he came to check on me. It’s not that rare, parents caring about their kids,” he said. Of course, he had no previous experience of this, and he wasn’t absolutely sure he trusted his father’s newly conciliatory mood. But he’d enjoy it while it was there and not expect it to stay, so he wouldn’t be wounded when it disappeared.

  Frank looked upset with that. “Well, get on with it. You have tables to attend to.”

  To Tom it was like returning home. He realized, as he was tying on the apron—“And we’ll dock the extra $10 from your paycheck. I can’t figure out what you people do with your aprons. Eat them?”—that he’d missed all of this.

  The air-conditioner was pumping away ineffectively, too far away from the tables to make any practical difference, which meant that the patrons had opened the windows again, allowing the hot dry air of Fairfax Avenue, perfumed with car exhaust and the slight scent of hot asphalt, to pour in and mingle with the hot muggy air inside the Athens, perfumed with clam chowder, burgers, and a touch of homemade fries.

  It was almost shocking to realize, but he really loved the place. His mind went over the panorama of seasons and imagined the Athens in winter, when it was snowy out and cozy inside and customers would linger for hours at the corner tables—near the heat vents—drinking coffee after coffee. He’d enjoyed coming in from the freezing cold outside and encountering the Athens as though it were a haven of dryness and warmth. He felt happy here. He wondered if it was just whatever pheromones the beetles had laid down around this place talking.

  And speaking of pheromones, he got to work, greeting now this customer, now the other, taking orders, refilling coffees. To his surprise people remembered and had missed him.

  “Hello, Tom,” one of the women who came by before going to work at the warehouses said. “Were you sick?”

  “Yeah,” Tom said, and smiled at her. She was spectacularly homely—with a square face and grey hair clipped short. But she seemed to treat him with almost maternal warmth, and she always tipped him indecently well. “Touch of something going around.”

  “You guys should be more careful,” she said. “Just because it’s warm, doesn’t mean that you can’t get sick. Working nights, and you probably don’t sleep as much as you should. I abused my body like that when I was young too. Trust me, it does send you a bill, though it might come twenty years down the road.”

  “Well, I’m all right now. What will you have?” He leaned toward her, smiling. And felt a hand pat his bottom lightly.

  He believed in being friendly to customers but this was ridiculous. He turned around ready to blast whoever it might be, and saw Kyrie, leaning against him to talk to the customer. “Is this big ape bothering you, ma’am? Should I remove him?”

  The customer grinned. “My, you’re in a good mood. I guess your boss’s hot romance makes things easier, right? He’s not on your case so much?”

  “Hot romance?” Tom asked.

  “Oh, you don’t know?” the customer said. “He’s been sitting there all the time holding hands with that woman who bought the castle. The one he’s been seeing off and on. Now she’s here all the time.”

  “I meant to tell you,” Kyrie said. “But I didn’t want to talk in front of people. They spent yesterday necking over the counter. It was … weird. Poor Anthony had cook all the meals. Slowed us down to a crawl.”

  “Well, Anthony is a nice boy,” the woman said. “But not like Tom.”

  “Ah, so you wouldn’t want our big ape removal services,” Kyrie said, and smiled at the woman, then at Tom, and flitted away to go take the order of the next table.

  She left Tom quite stunned. Had Kyrie smiled at him? And had Kyrie really patted his bottom? Forget pheromones. What were they pumping out of those air-conditioners?

  “Well, have you asked her out?” the woman said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Oh, don’t play stupid. Have you asked Kyrie out?” the woman asked, smiling at him with a definite maternal expression.

  He felt his damn all-too-easy blush come on and heat his cheeks. “Oh, I wouldn’t have a chance.”

  The woman pressed her lips together. “Don’t be stupid. She might have talked to me, but that entire little display was for your benefit. You do have a chance.”

  Tom hesitated. He could feel his mouth opening and closing, as he failed to find something appropriate to say, and he was sure, absolutely sure, he looked like a landed guppy. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not anyone’s prize catch.”

  “So?” the woman shrugged. “No one is. You don’t make babies start screaming when they see you. You’ll do.”

  He had to get hold of this conversation. And his own unruly emotions. He and Kyrie had things to do. Far more important things. The Pearl had to be returned. They had to stop whatever scary beetles were trying to kill them both. This was no time to go all googly-eyed at the girl. “Yeah, well … anyway, what will you be having?”

  “The usual. See if you have apple pie. I don’t know if Frank baked yesterday, he seemed so distracted with his girlfriend. Apple for preference, but cherry would do. And a coffee, with creamer and sugar on the side.”

  “Sure,” Tom said and beat a hasty retreat around the edge of the booths and back to the counter. There was apple pie in the fridge. He knew the customer enough to put the pie in the microwave for a few seconds’ zap to chase the chill away. He got the coffee and the little bowls with cream and sugar and put it all on a tray.

  And turned around to see Frank and his girlfriend—and he almost dropped the tray.

  There was something odd about Frank and his girlfriend, both, and Tom couldn’t quite say what it was.

  He’d seen them before together, but usually when she picked Frank up or dropped him off. Now, they were holding hands over the counter, quite lost in each other’s eyes. They weren’t talking. Only their hands, moving infinitesimally against each other seemed to be communicating interest or affection or something.

  With such an intense gaze, you expected … talk. And you really didn’t expect people their age to be that smitten.

  He realized he was staring fixedly at them, but they didn’t even seem to have noticed. They continued looking at each other’s eyes.

  There was other crazy stuff happening there, Tom thought. Because while the woman didn’t look like a prize—she looked like she’d been run through the wringer a couple dozen times, and perhaps hit with a mallet for good measure—she dressed well, and she looked like she could do better.

  And if she was really the new owner to the castle, she couldn’t be all that poor. The property, dilapidated and in need of work as it was, was yet worth at least half a mil, just on location. Where would someone like her meet someone like Frank? And what would attract her to him?

  He set the pie and the coffee in front of the customer, who said, “I see you’ve noticed the lovebirds.”

  “Yes,” Tom said, distracted. “I wonder how they met.”

  “I don’t know,” the woman said. “It was at least a month ago. In fact, when I saw them first, a month ago, they were already holding hands like that, so it might have been longer.”

  A month ago. The cluster of missing people had started a month ago. How would those two facts correlate? Tom wondered. He smiled at the customer and said something, he wasn’t sure what, then backtracked to get the carafe to give warmups to his tables.

  Was he being churlish? After all, he also didn’t compare to Kyrie. If he should—by a miracle, and possibly through sudden loss of her mind—manage to convince Kyrie to go out with him,
wouldn’t people look at them funny like that too, and say that they couldn’t believe she would date someone like him?

  But he looked at Frank, still holding the woman’s hands. And Kyrie had said that the day before he’d been so out of it that he’d let Anthony work the grill. Frank, normally, would not let any of them touch the grill. He said that quality control was his responsibility.

  Tom looked at Frank and the woman. He could swear they hadn’t moved in half an hour. That just wasn’t normal.

  He tracked Kyrie through the diner, till he could arrange to meet her—as he went out, his tray laden with salad and soda, to attend to a table, and she was coming back, her tray loaded with dishes—in the middle of the aisle, in the extension where a whole wall of windows separated them from Frank and made it less likely Frank would overhear them.

  “Kyrie, those two, that isn’t normal.”

  To his surprise, Kyrie smiled. “Oh, it’s cute in a gag-me sort of way.”

  “No, no. I mean it isn’t normal, Kyrie. Normal people don’t sit like that perfectly quiet, fluttering fingers at each other.”

  Kyrie flung around to watch him, eye to eye. “What are you saying?”

  “That we’re looking for a weird insect-like romance. And I think that’s it. The pie-and-coffee lady says that they first met a month ago, at least. I didn’t pay any attention when it started, just sort of realized it was going on. I guess the idea of Frank getting some and maybe leaving descendants was so scary I kind of shied away from it. But the pie lady thinks it was already going on a month ago. Though even she says it’s getting more intense.”

  “I haven’t given it much attention, either,” Kyrie said. “A month at least, or a month?”

  “At least a month, I don’t know anymore.”

  Kyrie looked suitably worried. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. I’ll make enquiries.”

  Kyrie turned on her rounds, to stop by the poet, and give him a warm-up on his coffee. “We always wonder what you write,” she said and smiled. All these months, she’d never actually attempted to talk to the poet, but she figured someone had to. And he was there every night the same hours.

  He was the most regular of the regulars. If he had looked at all—and Kyrie had never been absolutely sure of the poet’s being fully engaged with the world—he would know, better than anyone, how long Frank’s romance had been going on.

  The man reached nervous fingers for the ceramic cup with the fresh coffee in it, and fumbled with getting it to his mouth to drink. His pale-blue eyes rested on Kyrie’s face for a moment, then away. “I … It’s just a journal. My therapist said I would be better off for writing a journal.”

  “A journal,” she said. She had a feeling the man wasn’t used to much female attention, but if what he wrote was indeed a journal, then he would have all the data there, at his fingertips. “I would never be disciplined enough for a journal.”

  He grinned, showing her very crooked teeth. Then looked rapidly away and continued, speaking intently to the salt shaker. “Well, it’s all a matter of doing it at the same time every day, isn’t it? Just being regular and doing it at the same time. After a while it becomes a habit and you could no more go without it than you could go without eating or sleeping.”

  He looked back at her, just a little, out of the corner of the eye, reminding Kyrie of a squirrel, tempted by nuts on the sidewalk but hesitant about coming out in the open.

  She smiled at him. “You must write all sorts of fascinating details about everything that happens in there. I mean, so much better than just memory. My coworker and I were just talking about how long our boss has been in love with that lady there.” She gestured with her head. “And we couldn’t remember when they started going out.”

  “Oh.” The poet fumbled with his journal, flipping through the pages in a way that seemed to indicate he wasn’t absolutely sure how to use fingers. The gesture of a terminally nervous neurotic. “I can tell you the exact day. I have it here, all written down, because it was so amazing. She came in, they looked at each other, and it was like … you know, the song, across a crowded room and all that. They looked at each other, their eyes met, and she hurried over there and they held hands.” He found the right page and, for once, dared to look up at Kyrie, as he showed it to her. “There, there, you see. Almost exactly a month ago. And they’ve been like that ever since. Oh, not every night, not that … absorbed … but at least a few nights a week she walks him in or waits for him when he goes out.”

  The way he looked at Kyrie, shyly and sort of sideways, seemed to indicate he had his own personal dreams of getting to hold hands with her someday. Kyrie didn’t feel that charitable, but smiled at him anyway, and glanced at the page—of which she could understand nothing, since it appeared to have been written by dipping a spider’s legs in ink and letting it wander all over the page. “Very nice. Well, now I’ll know what you’re doing and I can tell the other people when they ask.”

  She wandered away to check on orders. So far, no one had asked for anything cooked, but it was bound to happen. “Tom, you might need to take over the grill,” she said, as she passed him. “As people start coming in who want their early morning dinners.”

  He looked surprised. “Sure,” he said. “I can probably load dishes while I’m up there too, if you want me to.”

  She didn’t tell him anything about Frank and his girlfriend, but she was thinking. What she was thinking, mostly, was that this whole eyes meeting across a crowded room didn’t happen to people. Not in real life. But it might very well happen to bugs who were acting on instinct and pheromones.

  It turned out not to be as bad as Kyrie expected. The clinch of hands over the bar stopped before the crunch, and Frank took over flipping the burgers and cooking the eggs and what not.

  From about ten to midnight they were so busy that Kyrie didn’t even notice the other guys had come in—Keith and Rafiel and Tom’s dad—until she saw that Tom was serving that table. And then she forgot about them again, as she was kept running off her feet, taking pie to one and a hamburger to another, and a plate of dolmades to a particularly raucous group in a corner.

  As the crowd started thinning, past midnight, Kyrie went up to the counter to put the carafe back. And when she turned, Rafiel was standing by the counter. “Can you take a fifteen-minute break?” he said. “Tom says he can handle it till you come back.”

  “Frank,” she said, and realized that Frank had heard them. He waved them away. “Go. If Tom can handle it, I don’t care.”

  On the way to the front door, Kyrie told Tom, “Thank you.”

  He looked slightly puzzled and then frowned at Rafiel, which did not seem at all like a natural reaction. “Are you sure you asked him?” she asked Rafiel.

  “Yes, yes, I asked him.” He led her outside, toward his car, parked on the street. “I’m not saying he’s incredibly excited about it, but I asked him.”

  “Rafiel, if he doesn’t think he can handle it alone I shouldn’t leave him.” She started to walk back, but Rafiel came after her and grabbed her arm.

  “Seriously,” he said. “I don’t think he minds the work. He minds you going out with me. Oh, don’t look like that,” he said, before she was aware of looking like anything at all. “He knows we have to talk. He says there’s some stuff you found out.”

  “Yes,” Kyrie said, and sat down on the passenger side of the car. Rafiel had held the door open for her, and closed it as soon as she sat down. He then walked around the car to his side.

  “I thought I’d take you for a cup of coffee, so we can talk? There’s an all-night coffeehouse down the street.”

  Kyrie nodded. She had no need for coffee, but she wanted to tell Rafiel about the beetles, and what she thought of the beetles.

  Edward watched Tom, after Kyrie left. He watched Keith too. Mostly because Keith puzzled him. He sat at the table, taking everything in, seemingly unaffected by the fact that there were not one but two types of shapeshifters that might want hi
m dead.

  Dragons and beetles and who knows what, oh my. “You’re not scared at all?” he asked Keith, in an undertone.

  Keith looked back at him, as though trying to decide exactly how many heads Edward might have. “Well,” he said. “It’s not so much that I’m not scared. Although … I don’t think I am, you know?”

  “Why not?” Edward asked. He thought of the Great Sky Dragon, flying through the sky and using what seemed to be magic to get from one place to the other without having to cross the space between. He thought of even Tom in his dragon form, of Tom’s flying across the New York sky, seeming completely nonhuman.

  “I don’t know,” Keith said. “I told them it was because I read so much science fiction and comic books—and that’s probably true.” He shrugged. “I mean, you see something very often, even if you know it’s fiction, it makes an impression on you after a while and part of you hopes or believes it to be true, right? I mean, even if your mind knows it isn’t.”

  “It’s possible,” Edward said. To be honest he didn’t remember what it was like to be that young anymore. It had been at least twenty-five years since he’d read any fiction. No. More. In college, his fiction reading had just tapered away to nothing. “I suppose it’s possible.”

  “Well, in a way it was like that,” Keith said. “I mean, the idea would have probably struck me as much odder, much more impossible if I’d never seen it in stories. But the important thing is, I saw it happen in the worst possible circumstances.” He lowered his voice. “They grabbed us and they took us in, and Rafiel was … um … shifted. And Tom was all tied up, and—”

  “He was. Tied?” Edward knew what Lung had told him, and at some level, consciously, he knew that being captured by the triad could be no picnic. But somehow, seeing Tom walk into his hotel room had given him hope that it was all just a big fight. He knew Tom could handle himself in a fight. He wasn’t so sure about Tom being helpless.

  “Yeah. He was completely tied-up. And he … They’d … His clothes were caked with blood. They’d taken his jacket and boots off. I think they might have thought to keep them after they … you know, got rid of him. Or perhaps they thought that the leather would protect him. And then he … shifted. I knew it was still him because of his eyes. And he freed me. And I freed Rafiel, who recovered much faster than they expected. And then we were … fighting. And that’s the thing you know.” He looked at Edward and seemed to realize that Edward was trying very hard to imagine but didn’t really know. “I realized they can be taken out with a good tire iron. You don’t need to be one of them.”