The constant stream of orders changed overnight, from burgers to pies and coffee and finally to omelets, eggs and bacon, sausages and hash browns. He felt as if he would never want to smell a cooking egg again in his life, and the pain in his wounded hands—continuously rehurt by his ceaseless work—had gone from a dull throbbing to a barely-keeping-from-screaming burn. He’d sent Kyrie away to rest a couple of hours ago, afraid that if no one else came in to relieve him at the grill he’d have to let Kyrie relieve him, and give her a quick crash course on breakfast dishes on the new stove.
He could have cried with joy when he saw Anthony come in. “It was getting cabin feverish at home,” he said, sheepishly. “It’s only a one-bedroom apartment. And the wind seems to have died down some, so Cecily fell asleep. You guys can go rest some.”
Tom nodded and removed his apron, shoving it under the counter. He was surprised by a sudden feel of pinpricks piercing through his bandages. Looking under the counter, he got a sudden hiss and battle scream from the orange kitten.
He took a quick look over his shoulder at Anthony. He couldn’t imagine leaving the kitten behind for Anthony to deal with, so as he grabbed his jacket from under the counter and slipped it on, Tom reached under and grabbed the protesting bundle of kitten and, ignoring the yowls of defiance, slipped it into his pocket.
Kyrie woke up to someone snoring on top of her. In a moment of unique confusion, she thought Tom must have decided to sleep on the bed after all, and he must be snoring, only the snore was so distant and tiny, that it couldn’t be Tom. She wondered, momentarily, as she struggled with what seemed to be several tons of gravel on her eyelids, whether Tom could have shrunk, because she felt a very warm and vibrating body—if a very tiny one—laid across the space between her breasts.
Her mind finally added up that these impressions made no sense, and brought her awake with a sudden jar. Her beginning to rise was met with sharp little needles to the chin and, opening her sleepy eyes, she saw a small orange blur. “Uh?” she said, which seemed the height of eloquence just then. She blinked and saw the sun shining fully across the room and onto the bed, and Tom blissfully asleep mostly on and partly off the sofa next to the bed. He had dark shadows under his eyes, and looked paler than usual. He’d taken his boots and socks off in his sleep, allowing her to see the bandage on his foot, and he was sleeping on his side, probably to avoid hurting his injured back.
Kyrie blinked at the kitten on her breasts. “Hello, Not Dinner,” she said in a singsong voice. “Are you one of Tom’s strays?”
The kitten purred and licked first one paw, then the other. Kyrie had to admit he was handsome, “In a conceited male feline sort of way.” She put her hand out to his tiny head and petted it, feeling the curve of the cranium beneath her fingers. “Mind you, you’re much cuter than Rafiel and you can tell him I said that.” She cast another look at Tom. She was sure she knew how this story went. Her boyfriend had found the kitten out, somewhere, under the snow. And since he couldn’t resist strays, be they human or not, he’d brought it in out of the cold.
She wondered if Tom had thought that cats pooped or that he needed to provide himself with a litter box for the critter. “What are we going to do with him?” she asked. “He adopts the most impractical creatures.” But, as Not Dinner purred happily and started a kneading motion at her throat, she couldn’t blame Tom. And she hoped Tom liked hapless felines. She happened to know that the bed-and-breakfast allowed pets. There was a big sign in the foyer proclaiming four-pawed guests welcome and Kyrie didn’t think it meant shifters. And she was sure the lady, a great cat lover, would find her a litter box for the newest member of the family.
Then she must find someone to fix the bathroom so they could return home. She wondered if one of Rafiel’s ubiquitous and very useful relatives happened to be a plumber. If Rafiel found them help within his odd family, it would save explaining what sort of cataclysm had happened in that bathroom. Rafiel could make up whatever he wanted or nothing. His family had to know that there was something very strange about their relative, but none of them seemed to mind covering up for him.
“Right,” she said, picking up the kitten, as she slipped out of bed, and dropping him atop the sleeping Tom. “You keep the dragon company while I get decent and go about finding you a litter box.”
She fumbled in her suitcase for her robe and slipped it on, before opening the door. And then she saw the headline on the local paper laid outside the door. And shrieked.
Tom woke up with Kyrie shrieking, and saw Not Dinner rush towards her and the open door. “Kyrie,” he said. “Not Dinner.”
Kyrie bent down just in time to stop the tiny animated projectile attempting to run out the door, and grab him in her hand, even as she scooped up the paper with her other hand. She closed the door with her foot and returned to Tom. “Look at this,” she said, and turned the paper towards him so that he could read the above-the-fold headline.
The Weekly Inquirer—which was a daily paper, a dissonance of nomenclature that bothered no one in Goldport—normally printed city news first page, relegating the national and international news to the middle sections where—it was felt in town—the rest of the world belonged, being far less important than their concerns.
Local news normally consisted of some business moving to town, some business moving out; an event of importance in the life of the mayor; some trial for fraud or embezzlement; a parade; or what Tom referred to as “pretty puppy” news. Today Tom would have expected the big headline to be about the snowstorm. And it was. At least the headline just beneath the title of the paper, in dark blue letters, was “Goldport Slammed by Storm.” But above the fold, and in screaming red letters just beneath the newspaper’s name was “Strange Animals Seen Around Town.” And beneath that “Dragons and Saber-Toothed Tigers and Smoking Squirrels.”
“Smoking squirrels?” he said, looking up at Kyrie, whose hand was shaking so much that the newspaper was oscillating before his eyes.
“Whatever. But dragons? Saber-tooth?”
“It wasn’t a saber-tooth,” Tom said, reasonably. “It was a dire wolf.”
“Oh, yes, and I’m sure that the international spotters of extinct animals would care,” she said, as she set the kitten on top of him and started reading from the paper. “Last night, amid the howling gusts of the storm—who writes this paper? The Bronte sisters?—a man passing by a building near the aquarium swears he saw in the parking lot a dragon or some other large creature battling it out with what he swears was a saber-toothed tiger. With great presence of mind he snapped a photo with his cell phone.” Kyrie stretched the paper towards Tom so he could see an indistinct picture of dark shapes amid white snow. “He took a picture of us.” Kyrie said.
If Tom squinted and sort of looked at it sideways, the dark blobs in the snow did look like Kyrie, the dire wolf and himself. In shifted forms. Or perhaps like three sacks of potatoes. “Kyrie, it’s completely fuzzy. No one could recognize a dragon in that.”
“No, but … if it hadn’t been snowing, someone could have gotten a real picture of you and me and the dire wolf.”
“All right. I will do my best not to get in fights with homicidal maniacs,” he said, and sat up. “At least not when people might get a clear picture of me. Do you have any idea how I should sell this truce to the homicidal maniacs?”
But Kyrie only looked at him with a blank and panicked look. “But they know. Someone knows.”
“Kyrie!” Tom said. “How many times do people read this sort of thing, or think they see it, or report it? It doesn’t make any difference. Black panthers up in Ohio, I remember reports of that—”
“Yeah, a lot of them when I lived there.”
“Oh, really?” he smiled briefly. “Well, I was on the cover of the Inquirer once. I mean, the real one, the tabloid. Someone got me, flying over town, with a telephoto lens. No one believed it of course. Not after half the tabloids spent the nineties reporting on the president’s alien baby.”
He put his hand out to her, and held her wrist. “No one will believe it, Kyrie. That picture doesn’t look any better than the countless pictures of the abominable snowman. And if it did, people would say it was Photoshopped. Calm down will you? Everything is fine. And look, about the cat, if you don’t want it—”
“No, I always wanted a cat and he seems very nice … in an insufferable male feline way.”
“I don’t know if he’s a male, I just—”
“Oh, he’s a male, trust me. I just know.” She grinned, and tossed the newspaper down. “Right, I must go and find him a litter box.”
By the time she came back, carrying a small plastic box filled with grey granules, Tom was reading the paper, frowning, very puzzled over reports that a giant squirrel—the size of a German shepherd—had been seen in various locations downtown “wearing a beret and smoking cigarettes,” he told Kyrie. “I mean, and you’re afraid people will believe the thing about the dragon when they finish with this.”
Kyrie looked confused. “Are you sure it’s not someone like us? I mean … a shifter squirrel?”
“The size of a German shepherd and wearing a beret? What are the chances?”
“Not high,” Kyrie said. “But if it’s true …”
“If it’s true,” Tom said, feeling as though he had a bit of ice wedged in his stomach, “then he’s gone completely around the bend. Which I suppose would make him an ideal suspect for the aquarium murder.”
“And perhaps for whoever unleashed the executioner on us,” Kyrie said.
At that moment, the phone rang. And Kyrie sprang towards it. “It’s Rafiel,” she said.
Tom raised his eyebrows at Kyrie, as she pushed the button on the speaker and Rafiel’s voice filled the room. He sounded nervous … or perhaps hassled was a better term. “Kyrie?”
“And Tom,” Kyrie said. “We’re on the speaker.”
“Oh? Oh. Good. That saves me telling you stuff twice.”
“What stuff?” Tom asked.
“Well … this morning, we got a call. At the station. They found …”
“Another arm?” Kyrie asked.
“Yes, but in this case, there was a body attached to it. Badly mauled. Aquarium. We’re … processing it.”
“Do you need our help?” Tom asked.
“Processing a body?” Rafiel asked, incredulous.
“No. With … anything.”
There was a hesitation. Rafiel cleared his throat. “Yeah, but I can’t …” His car horn sounded. “Did you see the paper, this morning?”
“The squirrel?”
“And the … you and the dire wolf.”
“And?” Tom asked impatiently, waiting—fearing—what would come next but needing to hear it because until he heard, it was always worse than he thought. Until he heard it, he would think he’d been found, he’d been recognized, he’d been …
“And this morning, when we were called in, there were already reporters in the parking lot. From the Weekly Inquirer. They were looking for fur or scales, or who knows what. But they got hold of the murder, right at the beginning. And considering, they seem really interested … you know, the thing is the Weekly Inquirer was bought recently?” He seemed to wait for them to comment and when all that Kyrie and Tom did was exchange a look, he clicked his tongue. “The Weekly Inquirer was bought by Covert Corp.”
“Covert what?”
“The corp. thing is sort of misleading. I mean, they are a corporation. But they are a family company. They own several magazines. Crosswords, mystery. But the most important property, the one they started with, is called Unknown. It’s a magazine of cryptozoology.”
“Crypto what?”
“Animals that aren’t supposed to exist, or animals that aren’t supposed to be there. Dragons and … that.”
“Oh. But if they own many companies … What could it mean for the WI in particular?”
“The patriarch of the clan, Lawrence Stoneman … He’s very hands-on, you could say. He seems to keep one of his kids in charge of each place the corp buys. His daughter, Miranda, is in charge of the Weekly Inquirer. And she grew up on cryptozoology. I think their interest in the murder is secondary, frankly, as opposed to what interesting animals they might find lurking around. In other words …” Rafiel hesitated.
“We can none of us afford to be obvious?” Kyrie said.
“With a maniac stalking us, and a second murder at the aquarium—where there are two, maybe three shifters running around?” Tom said.
“Exactly. So, yes, I do want your help, but I do need to be more careful about getting that help than I’ve been. I’ll come in if I can, tonight. Meanwhile, if you must shift, be careful where you do it, and who might see you. More careful than normal, that is.”
“Right,” Tom said. And sensing Rafiel was about to hang up, he added, “Oh, do you have any relatives who could fix our bathroom?” And in response to a scowl from Kyrie, he added, “Not for free. We’ll pay. I’d just like to get someone who can start right away, so we can move back home soon, and who won’t ask … awkward questions.” This brought up his deep-seated envy of Rafiel, who not only hadn’t lost his family over his shifting nature, but whose family stood ranked behind him, solid, bolstering and protecting him.
Tom had been told that Rafiel’s parents knew he was a shifter. This explained—or at least Rafiel thought it did—why Rafiel still lived at home. Tom didn’t know how many other members of the extended family knew about it, and he was afraid to ask. In a world where the lack of safety of a shifter meant revealing the existence of them all, he didn’t want to learn of the possible issues with Rafiel’s security. Rafiel’s family seemed to have done well enough with the secret so far, and Tom, who had no personal knowledge of how real families behaved, would not judge.
“Oh,” Rafiel said. “I see. Yes, we have plumbers in the family, and one of my uncles can probably do the drywalling stuff or tile or whatever.” There was a silence that gave the impression he was trying to think things out. “Yeah, it will do very well. It will give me an excuse to come by the diner later this evening. We’ll just have to be careful there.”
Rafiel disconnected, and Tom limped towards the shower to wash. He and Kyrie needed to eat something, and one of them should probably go in early to relieve Anthony. Normally, they should have had three shifts. They hadn’t, mostly because Tom hadn’t had time to even think of hiring a third manager, much less one who was practiced in using the complex new stoves. But they couldn’t ask Anthony to do a twelve-hour shift, not when he was newly wed, anyway, so Tom would go in early. He grabbed a change of clothes and headed towards the bathroom, Not Dinner happily winding in and out between his ankles. “I wonder if that Laura person who was supposed to come for an interview yesterday will show up today. Do you think they’ve cleared the roads enough for traffic?”
Kyrie giggled, and as Tom stared, she said, “I’m sorry, but with everything going on, it’s so much like you to be worried about the diner, and getting another manager/cook for the diner.”
Tom grinned, seeing her point, but shrugged. “Well, Kyrie, look at it this way—if we survive this, then we’ll need the diner in good shape, particularly considering the repairs to the bathroom. And if we don’t survive, the fact that I was worried about running the diner won’t make a bit of difference.”
But Tom found, as he crossed the slush-filled parking lot of The George, that things were not that clear-cut in his mind. It was sort of like telling someone to stop worrying because nothing could be done about a problem. It wasn’t in the human mind to stop worrying—to stop looking for the door out of the sealed room; to stop searching for the one true route through the labyrinth. He was sure that if the world were doomed to destruction by asteroid within a day or two, and everyone on Earth were informed of it, at least half of them would go to their graves still frantically looking for an escape from the approaching cosmic collision. In the same way, the sane thing to do, surrounded by problems he couldn’t solv
e, might be to concentrate on the problems he could solve—on the diner, his bathroom, and the fact that his hands—though well enough to go without bandages—still hurt and would probably be sensitive to the heat from the stoves.
That would be the sensible thing to do, and the sane one. Which meant, of course, that his mind insisted on going through everything he couldn’t do anything about—the murders at the aquarium; the executioner come to town; whatever the organization might be of old shifters, and beyond that where Old Joe might have gone and whether he was alive.
The weather had done one of those sudden reversals that Tom’s almost year of living in Colorado had got him used to—it had gone from several degrees below freezing the day before, and blowing snow and howling wind, to fifty degrees with a very slight breeze which stirred the branches of the icicle-hung trees. All the icicles were dripping, too—from the branches of the trees and the edges of the buildings, a drip drip drip that seemed to be waiting only for a conductor and some rhythm to turn into an animated movie’s symphony of thawing and spring.
Only it wasn’t spring at all. And tomorrow could very well be freezing again. Or alternately it could be eighties, with everyone wandering around in sandals and Tshirts.
As Tom took a long detour around a melting pool in the middle of the parking lot, he fancied that even the birds on the trees that lined the streets were piping in tones of surprise, as if asking themselves if this was the last of snow or the beginning. He was smiling to himself at the idea of birds driven to Prozac by Colorado weather, but his detour brought him full-face with a poster on the wall of the diner—where it wouldn’t have been visible from the back door. That wall was in fact where the storage rooms protruded a little from the otherwise square plan of the building.
The poster was glued at an angle on the whitewashed wall, and it was the sort of poster—printed on cheap paper, in two colors—that normally advertised a dance or a new more or less non-registered nightclub or, alternately, some new band come to town. At first Tom thought it was a new band. It might still be a new band. Only what the words across the top read, in huge bright red type—rodent liberation front. Beneath it was a rant in pseudo-Marxist terms, urging “The downtrodden, the despised who live at the edges of society” to “rise up and take what you want. No more foraging for fallen nuts, no more eating discards. Rise up and take your freedom in your hands. There are more of us than them. Rodents of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your mousetraps.”
Night Shifters Page 50
