Night Shifters

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Tom blinked at the page. It was possible it was all allegorical and meaningful and too symbolic for words. They were, after all, not that far away from CUG—Colorado University at Goldport—and since fully half the students seemed to eat at The George any given day—or more typically night—Tom was aware how the minds worked who might be behind this poster. They were the sort of minds that were convinced coming up with a particularly clever image or metaphor excused not having anything new to say.

  Without his knowing he was going to do it, his hand reached out and plucked the paper from the wall. It could be a metaphor, a clever image, a college thing to delude themselves that they were doing something to save the world. But in his gut—in a big, insoluble cold lump at the pit of his stomach—he knew it wasn’t. He knew it was … shifter business. Squirrels the size of German shepherds smoking cigarettes. Crazy. But how crazy did the dragon thing sound to other people as well?

  He folded the poster and put it in his pocket, and started walking towards the diner. And heard the splish-splosh behind him of someone stepping on ice, then on water, then falling butt-first into the water. And turned to see Red Dragon—no, Conan. He had to get used to calling him Conan—sitting in a puddle of water, looking very surprised.

  Surprised was the least of his problems, though, to tell the truth. He didn’t look good. Not good at all. His skin was pale enough to look almost the color of Tom’s and he had big circles under his eyes, and to make things worse, he was attempting to get up, but not managing to balance himself enough to do so, because of his shortened arm.

  “I shouldn’t go to him,” Tom told himself. “I truly shouldn’t go to him. How stupid can I be? One day I’m going to help someone who is going to kill me.”

  But in his mind was his sixteen-year-old self, alone, on the streets of New York City in a bathrobe and as lost and confused as any kid could ever have been anywhere. And he’d survived only because the gentleman down the street—an orangutan shifter, though his family didn’t seem to notice he was one—who sold roasted chestnuts on the street corner, had seen him and taken him in, and given him a jogging suit, and let him stay there a couple of days, till Tom had caught hold of the idea of day labor and had got a fake ID that said he was eighteen and could, therefore, be hired.

  And he was closing the distance to Red Dragon and holding him on the side of his weak arm and hauling him up, even as he looked down at what he was wearing—the jogging suit that Kyrie had given him and a pair of those shoes that you slip your feet into, which have an almost completely smooth bottom. No socks. “You need boots,” he said. “For this weather. We’ll take you to the thrift store tomorrow or something, okay?”

  “I have money,” Conan Lung said, in the tone of someone protesting charity. “I brought money with me. In a pouch. I could buy new boots.”

  “Oh? Good for you,” Tom said, not sure whether to be amused or saddened and being, after all, wholly skeptical. If he had money, why grab the elastic shoes? They weren’t that much better than the flip-flops Tom had given him. “And you have family in Goldport, too, don’t you?” he added, remembering that their past adventures seemed to involve Goldport’s minuscule Asian minority.

  He shook his head. “Tennessee,” he said, and wiped his dripping nose to his sleeve, and looked back, at a bottom that was entirely soaked in runoff from melted snow.

  “Oh, now, you’re just putting me on,” Tom said. “And don’t worry about the sweatsuit. I have a couple others in the storage room. For … this sort of situation.” He decided he didn’t want to talk about Old Joe to the Great Sky Dragon people. “I’ll get you one. Socks too.”

  “I’m not putting you on,” Conan said. He sounded aggrieved and tired, and just the slightest bit exasperated—though Tom couldn’t tell at whom. “Mom and Dad have a restaurant in Knoxville. People don’t all come in to New York City anymore when they immigrate. Planes go everywhere.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tom said, holding onto himself with all his will power to prevent himself from giggling at the fact that Conan had completely forgotten to have an accent. Or completely forgotten to have an Asian accent. Now that Tom thought about it, there was just an edge of a southern twang to his voice. It sounded, Tom thought, like something he’d tried very hard to rid himself of. Something that he hadn’t quite managed to leave behind him. And quite out of place in a triad member.

  “And I do have money. In a pouch. I wear it on a flexible anklet when I shift,” Conan added, sullenly, clearly having caught Tom’s disbelief.

  “All right. You have money. Couldn’t you have got yourself decent shoes, then?”

  Conan shook his head. “No,” he said. “I got them at the Short Drugs down the block, and this was the best they had. It was this or flip-flops.”

  “You know …” Tom said, leading him towards the back door of the diner and opening it for him. In the hallway, Conan wiped his feet on the mat at the entrance, and duck-walked into the hallway, his cheap shoes squeaking on the concrete. “It might surprise you, but in a list of shoe stores, Short Drugs wouldn’t be in the first hundred, being a drugstore and all.”

  Conan sighed, a sigh half of exasperation, as if Tom were being particularly daft. “I couldn’t let you go, could I? I went to Short Drugs because it was just down the block.”

  And Tom, having closed the door, froze. “Couldn’t let me go? As in, you’re keeping me prisoner?”

  Conan looked back, and now his voice was definitely furious. “No, you fool. I couldn’t leave you unprotected.” He blushed, hard, whether with embarrassment at proclaiming himself Tom’s protector, or with anger, Tom couldn’t tell. “What if I left you, and they killed you?”

  “Shhhh,” Tom said, forcefully, leaning against the wall, finger against lips, concerned most of all with the fact that Conan had yelled, and people might have heard him. “Shhh.”

  As if on cue, Anthony’s worried face peeked around the corner in the hallway. “Tom? Everything all right?”

  “Everything is fine,” Tom said, talking over Conan’s shoulder. “Conan fell in the parking lot. I’m going to grab him some dry clothes, and then I’ll come in and you can go home.”

  “Oh, good,” Anthony said. “Because you know Cecily will get worried.” He smiled, but still looked somewhat worried, as he looked at Conan. However, he seemed reassured enough that Conan and Tom weren’t about to come to fisticuffs.

  Tom opened the door to the storage room, and pulled out a sweat suit. “Okay,” he said. “You’re here to protect me. You’ve told me this before. But I must ask you—because you never told me—what are you supposed to protect me from … ?”

  Conan looked back at him. There was naked fear in his eyes, followed by something very much like defeat or humiliation. He took the sweat suit—grey, much washed—that Tom was holding out to him. “I don’t know,” he said, miserably. “He didn’t tell me. Just that they were bad and … very powerful. And very large. And knowledgeable and … shifters.”

  “And he sent you? To protect me?” Tom asked. And realizing what he’d just said, and that Conan’s hand was clenching hard at the end of his atrophied arm, he added, “I’m sorry, but … you’re smaller than I in both forms, and with that arm …”

  Conan shook his head. “You don’t understand. You don’t understand, okay?” His voice started rising again in a note of hysteria, and Tom pulled him into the storage room and closed the door after them, because the only other choice was pulling him into the bathroom and that would look funny. The room was piled high with boxes of paper napkins, potato chips and crackers. All the edibles were sealed in plastic or foil and it shouldn’t have smelled, but they still did, so that it was a lot like being locked inside a giant box full of stale crackers.

  “What don’t I understand?”

  Conan clutched the sweat suit in his good hand, clenched his other fist, and spoke through his clenched teeth. “Any of it. I was in high school. I was in the drama club and the choir and … and I was i
n the Latin club, too. And then …” He shook his head. “I shifted. And the next thing I know my parents were calling on … on Him. And he took me away. Because I was a dragon. I belonged to him. I was his to … protect and order. Like … like feudal, you know?” His shoulders sagged, despondently. “I was going to be a Country and Western singer. I was …” He shook his head.

  And before Tom could think of what to say—lost in his own forgotten dreams, though he didn’t remember ever wanting to be anything so definite and wholesome as a singer—Conan said, “It doesn’t matter.” He spoke in a flat tone. “You see, my parents didn’t know what else to do with me, and … I don’t have anywhere else to go. It’s all … Well, honor and that. I disgraced the Great … Himself. I … didn’t get the Pearl of Heaven for him. So …”

  Tom remembered the long torture session that Conan and the others had subjected him to. He’d have felt angry, but he didn’t know what had been at the back of it. He was just starting to glimpse what drove those he had assumed were crazed gang members. “So you have to redeem yourself.”

  He almost added that he didn’t feel very reassured by the Great Sky Dragon sending Conan, anyway. But he didn’t. He was learning that what came flying out of his mouth might hurt other people, even, possibly, people who didn’t deserve to be hurt. And besides, he had a feeling—not quite a rational feeling, not even a thought, more of a prickling at the back of his neck that told him that the Great Sky Dragon’s plans weren’t as simple as they seemed. Instead, they were folded over themselves, more intricately than a highway map. And what he saw might not be all of it. He just wished he could be sure the rest of it was not against him.

  “Well,” he said, “I’ll leave you to change.” And escaped out the door of the storage room, to find Anthony in the hallway, looking at him with a very strange expression.

  Tom wasn’t sure how much Anthony had overheard, or what had caused him to come and look. But all Anthony said was, “I thought you’d have him change in the bathroom. He’s going to get mud on the packs of napkins.”

  Kyrie was dozing on the bed. She would have liked to fall fully asleep again, but this seemed to be beyond her ability while a small creature lay down purring, squarely between her breasts, and punished any attempt at moving with sharp little claws at the base of her throat and a sort of soft “mur” that sounded like an admonition.

  So she lay there, on the bed, on her back—which was far from her favored sleeping position—with a patch of sun squarely in her eyes. She tried to move her head just a little sideways. The needlelike claws got her at the hollow of her throat. “Mur.”

  “Yes, yes, I get it. I’m not allowed to move. I get it.”

  “Mur!”

  She opened a cautious eye, in time to see Not Dinner curl up into a ball. But he remained facing her, and one of his eyes opened just a little.

  Kyrie would have giggled, but she was fairly sure that this would have brought the claws out again, so she closed her eyes and tried to get back to dozing. Which was not exactly as easy as it might sound, while her mind kept giving her images of Tom fighting the dire wolf. There was something wrong about that creature. Besides the fact that it should have been extinct long before humans walked the Earth. The way it had moved … She shivered, and instinctively lifted a hand to ward off the claws, and the phone rang.

  She jumped up and grabbed the bedside phone, but the ringing continued, and she realized what was ringing was her cell phone, and jumped for her purse, which was propped up against the sofa.

  The phone showed Rafiel’s number. She opened it. “Yeah?”

  She remembered, belatedly, that she’d dumped the kitten on the bed and hoped he wasn’t hurt. A look at him revealed him angrily licking himself and pointedly ignoring her.

  “Kyrie?” Rafiel said. He sounded weird. Detached and breathy as if he had lost his voice and were speaking on echoes alone, unable to put any emotion in his words.

  “Yes? What is wrong?”

  “Nothing. Everything is fine.”

  “You sound very odd.”

  “Oh, got … something in my throat. Look, I don’t suppose you can meet me at your house?”

  “At my house? Why?” she said. And when he didn’t answer immediately she said, “Is it about the bathroom?”

  “Exactly,” he said. “The bathroom. I’ve got someone to fix it. If you’ll just meet me there …”

  “When?”

  “Now?”

  “No can do. Must de-stink and put clothes on.”

  “Oh, why bother? We’re only going to take them off.”

  “What?” She actually removed the phone from her ear and looked at the caller ID, to make sure that it was really Rafiel.

  “I’m sorry. Bad joke.”

  “Very bad joke.” Rafiel hadn’t said something like this since she and Tom had got together. She wondered if he was trying to revive that rivalry, then realized it was probably just his idea of a joke to break the tension. He’d been with her in the SUV, and he hadn’t even looked at her in a suggestive manner. “Okay. Give me half an hour,” she said, matter-of-factly. And hung up.

  Tom had taken over the grill, and was keeping an eye on Conan as he cooked. He’d found out Conan had camped out on the steps of the bed-and-breakfast all night, which he supposed explained the fumbling way he was moving and how bleary eyed he looked.

  The problem, as Tom saw it, was that he could easily get Conan to crash in their house—if their house were operational. But their house was nowhere near operational. And in the bed-and-breakfast, they couldn’t exactly offer him the living room floor and Tom didn’t feel quite sanguine enough about letting him sleep on the floor of the suite. Inoffensive, he might be, but Tom could hear just the right note of sarcasm in Kyrie’s voice if he told her that Conan would be sleeping on their floor. He could tell Conan he could sleep in the storage room, but beyond the fact that this would freak out Anthony, he wondered if Conan would do it.

  He’d just settled on offering him the back of one of the diner’s vans—in which he and Kyrie did supply runs to the local farmers’ markets twice a week in season—and telling him he could park the van in front of the bed-and-breakfast—and look out the window for all Tom cared, when Anthony reappeared from, apparently, making sure Conan hadn’t willfully destroyed supplies.

  “Everything seems to be fine in the supply room,” he said, removing his apron.

  “Mmm,” Tom said, noncommittal, as he turned to shave an order of gyro meat off the hunk slow-roasting.

  “Well, you know … he’s still a newbie,” Anthony said. “So, you never know.” He folded his apron and put it under the counter. “Keith left today at around ten, said something about bringing a girl to meet you.”

  “Yeah. Someone from college.” Tom shrugged. “Maybe he wants me to give her a job.”

  “We do need people,” Anthony said. “That Laura woman, whom we were supposed to interview, said she would come by as soon as the snow has melted. Something about not having a four-wheel drive.” He shrugged. “So, if you’re sure you don’t need me anymore …”

  “No, I don’t. That’s cool, you can go.”

  “Right. I’ll come back late in the afternoon, if you need a break. Just call me. And speaking of calling?”

  “Yes?”

  “Your dad called.”

  Tom felt every muscle in his body tense. He might be closer to Tom than he had been in Tom’s entire life—close enough that he was closing his New York City law practice and uprooting it to Denver. Of course, Denver—three hours away—was the smallest city that he considered “livable.” And Tom wouldn’t mind it at all, if it weren’t for Edward’s seeming conviction that, as the largest city—and capital—of Colorado, Denver must be well known to everyone who had lived in the state for any amount of time. Not only that, but it must be within easy reach of anyone wishing to, oh, look up an apartment for their erratic father.

  The other thing was, his dad had his home number and h
is cell phone number. Why was he calling The George during the daytime? He knew very well his son tended to be awake nights and sleep during the day.

  “He said that the cable guy is coming to his loft this week, but he can’t fly to Denver till next week, and …” Anthony hesitated. “He seemed to want you to go to Denver and wait for the cable guy at his place.”

  And, though he might try to become closer to his son, Edward remained as self-centered as a gyroscope. “Right,” Tom said, ticking up call Dad in his long list of things to do and worry about. “I’ll deal. I have to explain to him that even if I could normally have gone to Denver over the week—which I doubt, as shorthanded as we are—there’s snow all over and the highways are closed.”

  Anthony seemed to be unsure whether he should say something, but finally it came hurtling out, “Well, I told him the highways were closed,” he said defiantly.

  “And?” Tom asked, surprised by the tone.

  “He said you should fly,” Anthony said. “Does he have any idea how small our airport is or how hard it would be to operate in inclement weather?”

  “None,” Tom said. “Don’t worry about it. He’s my dad. I’ll deal with it. He’s not a bad guy he’s just … you know how it is. Lived his whole life in the Northeast.” He set the platter of gyro meat, fries and pita bread on the counter and rang the bell to call Conan’s attention. And managed, very nearly, not to grit his teeth. There was no way to tell Anthony that no, Tom’s father didn’t expect his son to take an airplane. He expected his son to fly as a dragon.