Night Shifters

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Which was how Edward’s mind worked. Once having convinced himself that Tom’s ability to shift was not dangerous, he’d become determined to use it as much as he could, and to derive usefulness from it as much as possible. Tom had to remind himself it was, in a way, an endearing quirk, a lot like Keith’s absolute certainty that being a shifter dragon would be just like being a superhero. And that his father could have absolutely no idea of the troubles besetting Tom at every side.

  He pulled over a huge bowl of peeled potatoes—essential ingredient of The George’s famous fresh fries, never frozen proudly advertised in marker on the huge plate glass window up front—and started slicing them into sticks on a broad expanse of cutting board, while he watched Conan give warmups and draw up bills for a couple of customers. He’d be just fine.

  “Anthony,” he said, before the young man turned away. “You didn’t … see the alligator out back again?”

  Anthony blushed. “Oh, geez, about that …” He sighed. “I’ve been thinking about it, and look, it was pretty late last night, and I think I just imagined things. It must have been the shadows, and the snow blowing, you know? I just got a bit goofy.”

  Tom shrugged. “Okay, just making sure.” He hesitated a second. “And you haven’t seen Old Joe, either?”

  “What? Oh, the old man … He’s probably downtown at the shelter, you know? The city shelter lets people in when it’s this cold, even when they wouldn’t let them in regular times. You know, no sobriety check or what have you.”

  “Yeah. He probably is.” And maybe he was, though Tom doubted it. He knew—none better—how shifters felt about crowded rooms, where your roommates could start looking like potential snacks, if you got stressed enough. “Don’t worry about it. I just thought, since it’s this cold …”

  “Yeah,” Anthony said. “Okay, call me if you need me.” He got his jacket from under the counter and put it on, pulling the hood on over his head, till he peered from under a welter of fake fur, like an Eskimo prepared for the arctic.

  “Right,” Tom said.

  And when Conan swung by to drop off orders, Tom grabbed his good arm. “Listen. I was thinking—I know you won’t want to sleep in the storage room or whatever because we might go out behind your back. But how about sleeping in the diner van parked in front of the bed-and-breakfast?”

  Conan looked startled. “Why?”

  “Well, you can’t go on sleeping on the steps. You don’t look any too awake, just now.”

  “Oh.” Conan sighed. “Look, I have money.”

  “So you keep telling me.”

  “If you promise that you won’t go anywhere without waking me first … I can rent a room at the bed-and-breakfast.”

  Tom thought about it. It seemed a little odd to have to notify his jailer that he intended to leave. On the other hand, perhaps Conan was a bodyguard not a jailer. Tom wasn’t sure he understood anything anymore. He certainly was sure he didn’t understand the Great Sky Dragon. “Well …” he said, after a wait. “Yeah. I suppose I can do that.”

  “Only you have to make sure you do,” Conan said. He shot Tom a resentful look. “When you disappeared yesterday and I had to go find you … If you’d died, you know …” He shook his head. “I was so busy at the tables I didn’t see you leave, and let me tell you, Himself wasn’t happy.”

  “How did the Great Sky—”

  “Shhh,” Conan said.

  “How did Himself know?” Tom asked and resisted an impulse to roll his eyes and refer to he who must not be named. “Did you tell him?” It seemed to him the height of stupidity for Conan to confess to have lost track of Tom for any time at all, much less to call the Great Sky Dragon and confess his misdeed.

  Conan sighed. “What do you think would have happened if I hadn’t told him?” he asked. “They’re everywhere. Someone would have told him, sooner or later. And then he’d have killed me for not telling him.”

  “Killed you?” Tom thought how ridiculous it was to kill someone for such a small offense. Particularly in a creature that claimed to want to protect Tom. He wanted to rebel. He very badly wanted to rebel. But not when Conan would be the one to pay for it. He nodded. “I’ll tell you before we go out.”

  And turned in time to see Rafiel come into the diner.

  Sometime between sixteen and twenty, Kyrie had simplified her getting-ready routine. The makeup that had seemed essential at sixteen had now gone by the wayside. The one fussy bit about her appearance was her hair dyeing and that she did once every three months and touched up once a month, and that was about it.

  In the bed-and-breakfast, she didn’t even have her shampoo or the shower gel she liked to use. Since the bathroom had been obliterated, and all her products with it, all she had was what Spurs and Lace provided, in an artistic little basket lined with lacy fabric. There were three bottles of shampoo, all seeming to belong to some brand that invested a lot in aroma therapy. Vanilla, mint and—bizarrely—coffee. Preferring her coffee on the inside, Kyrie grabbed the vanilla. There were three bars of soap for her perusal, but a look in the tub revealed that Tom had already started a bar that smelled minty fresh. He had also used up a bottle of shampoo labeled chamomile. She was sure he was missing his Mane and Tail, the worst-named shampoo for a dragon to use since the dawn of time.

  The shower proved to have a torrential flow of water, and she washed quickly under it, only slightly hampered by the fact that, two minutes into her shower, Not Dinner screeched from outside the shower “Mur?” and patted tentatively at the shower curtain.

  “Er,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  “Yow?”

  “No, really. We humans don’t mind water. Heck, we like it.”

  A disbelieving “Nahooo?” answered her and she grinned. “I’m only a kitty part of the time, and I refuse to lick myself for hygiene.”

  “Mur!”

  “Yes, I know, quite terrible of me, isn’t it?” She finished rinsing and came out of the shower, drying herself briskly, and rubbing her hair almost completely dry with a towel, before combing it. Judging by the drip-drip-drip sounds from outside the bedroom window and the brilliant sunshine which had disturbed her sleep, the weather had turned some sort of corner. Which was very good, because she didn’t think she could go outside with damp hair, otherwise. She had vague visions of doing that and having her hair freeze to her head as a large, unwieldy mass.

  While she was home, she should grab a couple of hats for herself and Tom, she thought, as she slid into jeans, a red sweatshirt that was probably originally Tom’s, but which she’d claimed by rights of laundress, and had been wearing for the last two months. The man never wore long sleeve shirts, anyway. Just his Tshirts under his black leather jacket.

  She put her shoes on and told Not Dinner, “Now, Notty, try to be good. I’ll ask the lady to bring you some food, until we can buy you some kitten cans.”

  “Mur?” he followed her to the door with the dancing step of young, overconfident kittens and seemed terribly disappointed that she wasn’t willing to let him follow her outside. An illfated last minute rush at the door made her grab him in her hand—where he fit, fairly comfortably, then toss him into the room, as she quickly shut the door.

  She asked the proprietress—a large, maternal woman named Louise—to feed the delinquent and informed her that he was a flight risk. It wasn’t till she got to the car that she thought she should have asked Louise for a recommendation to a vet. She would need to get Notty his shots, and she should probably have him microchipped, at least if he had wandering paws.

  Perhaps she would ask Rafiel, she thought, and smiled absently. He should know everything there was to know about the care of male felines in this town. But her smile died down, as, maneuvering through the mostly-melted streets, she wondered what Rafiel could possibly want. Oh, he’d said that he wanted to meet her at her house. And he’d said it was because of the bathroom …

  Or had he said that it was because of the bathroom? Kyrie couldn’t reme
mber exactly. She frowned. Was there another reason? He’d sounded so odd over the phone—as if he’d been not so much talking as making modulated breathing sounds. But no … that wasn’t right either. It was just as if there were no force of vocalization behind his words. No real sound. He’d said he had something in his throat. Like what? An elephant?

  A brief image of Rafiel prowling the zoo and taking a big bite off an elephant amused her. And she smiled at herself, but as she entered her neighborhood, she went back to frowning. Rafiel’s car wasn’t parked on the street. This was like an itch at the back of her mind, an itch to which her brain responded by coming up with lots of reasons for the absence—his car had broken down, and he was borrowing someone else’s; he had parked in the driveway; he was late.

  But if Rafiel’s car had broken down, he was likely as not to let her know in advance, so she would know the car to look for. It wasn’t the sort of thing Rafiel forgot. Rafiel was a policeman. Details were his life. And he never parked in the driveway, which was a minuscule comma beside the tiny dot of the house and had barely enough space for Kyrie’s subcompact. When Tom worked later and had to drive the diner’s van home, he had to park on the street. And not just because he didn’t want to block Kyrie in, but because there was no way to park two cars in the driveway without one of them having half of its back wheels on the street.

  And besides, as Kyrie got to the driveway, it was empty and wet from melting ice. She started to pull in, while the back of her scalp bunched up. Something is wrong, an inner voice said. Something is very wrong.

  But that inner voice was wrong nine times out of ten. Fact was, Kyrie’s inner voice was a paranoid patient, and had to be kept carefully locked up in its rubber room, or else she would never hear a sound that wasn’t suspicious, she’d never approach a place that didn’t feel eerie, and she would spend her entire life running from shadows. Deliberately, she stopped within sight of her kitchen door, and put the car in park, the wheels slightly turned so that—should the car roll down the driveway—it would rest across the bottom of it, instead of slipping out into the street and potentially running into other cars.

  Her foot remained on the brake, her hand resting on the keys, her car idling.

  Run.

  No. No, she wouldn’t run. She had run too many times, after she was out of foster care—after she was on her own. Without family or any close friends, with nothing to anchor her down, she had drifted. Convinced she was hideously insane—with her dreams of turning into a panther, her secret fears of eating people—she had kept everyone at arm’s length and ran every time someone got too close, every time anyone seemed hostile. Every time a shadow waved in the wind. But now she had a place, she had a job, she had Tom. She had something that was hers, and she wasn’t running.

  She pushed the parking brake in, relishing the feel of it under her foot, the slight grind of its going in. Then she reached for her purse, from the floor of the passenger side of the car. Where was Rafiel? This was so much like him, telling her to come to the house, and then not being here when she got here. And immediately, she scolded herself, because no, it wasn’t like Rafiel at all. He was arrogant, not careless. If he said he would be somewhere, he would be there. He might act put out because she hadn’t rushed to meet him, unwashed and in robe and slippers, but he would be there.

  She bit her lip. Okay. All right. So something had happened. Could be anything. He was on a murder investigation. Perhaps someone had called and told him he had to be at the morgue now. This minute. Or perhaps … or perhaps something else had happened. Perhaps he’d had a fender bender. Or something.

  A brief image of Rafiel laid out on a hospital bed made her wince. He wouldn’t like that. They all tried to stay out of hospitals as much as possible. Besides being a crowded place, with lots of other humans—it would be a mess to shift in—their healing rate would call too much attention.

  She reached for her purse, pulled out her phone. She would call him, figure out if anything had happened to him. Help him, if she needed to.

  But the phone was dead. Out of batteries. Kyrie caught herself growling under her breath. She could swear she had recharged it last night. Clearly she hadn’t.

  She resisted an impulse to throw the phone—with force—across the driveway, and instead put it back in her purse and zipped her purse shut forcefully.

  Okay, so Rafiel wasn’t here, and she couldn’t call him. What then?

  She could go back. She could go to The George. It was only five minutes away. She could call Rafiel from there.

  But what if he showed up as soon as she drove away? What if it was only a small delay, some administrative thing that kept him back? Then he would be there any second, wouldn’t he? And when he got there, he wouldn’t find her.

  But she could call him.

  In five minutes. What if by then he had driven away, furious? Oh, he had no right to be furious. He’d called Kyrie out of the blue. He’d told her to be here. There was no reason at all she should have obeyed him. And he’d said—or at least, he’d agreed—this was about her bathroom. Which meant he wouldn’t be coming by alone. He would be with his uncle or cousin, or whoever in his vast tree of relatives was a plumber or a tile layer, or a good enough handyman. And that meant he wouldn’t leave in five minutes.

  But none of these rational arguments amounted to a hill of beans. After all, Rafiel was all male cat in this one thing, that he could act as capricious as he pleased, and make everyone else seem like they were the irrational ones, the ones who were failing him in some horrible way.

  Besides, she realized, she had a phone in the house. Oh, they rarely used it, and in fact Tom had suggested they give it up and go all digital. But his father had protested that it was a number where he always knew he could reach them, even when their cell phones were out of a charge or they were out of range. In fact, it seemed that the phone, on the wall of the kitchen, and possessed of a built-in answering machine, mostly existed to take Edward Ormson’s messages.

  Which didn’t mean it couldn’t call Rafiel’s cell.

  Full of new decision, Kyrie got out of the car and slammed the door behind her. The driveway wasn’t anywhere near as icy as it had been the night before, which was good. She should probably shovel the walk while she was here. Although most people in Colorado left their snow and ice on the sidewalk and let it merrily accumulate through the cold days, the law, technically, said that they were supposed to shovel within twenty-four hours of a major snowfall. The snow was melting on the sidewalks across the street, but not here, and Kyrie shuddered at the thought of what might happen if the postal carrier slipped and broke a leg on the way to their front door.

  She paused at the door to the kitchen, frowning. The door itself was old, much painted, and starting to peel, a layer of red showing beneath the current decaying layer of white paint. It didn’t matter, because it was normally covered by a screen door, which had a glass screen, conveniently slid down for winter. Kyrie was sure—as sure as she was of having charged her phone—that Tom had closed that screen door. She remembered him half-skating back through the ice that then covered the driveway to do it. He’d mumbled that otherwise it would probably fold back in the wind and maybe be wrenched off. So, why was the screen door half open now?

  Run.

  No, nonsense. Probably some weather-defiant Jehovah’s Witness had come and opened the screen door to knock. Or perhaps one of their neighbors, worried about the lack of lights in the house had come to check on them. Most of the people in this neighborhood were elderly and retired and took an inordinate interest in Kyrie and Tom because they weren’t and perhaps because they reminded them of their grandchildren.

  She got her keys from the pocket of her winter coat, and unlocked her door into the kitchen. The house felt empty. It had that cold/empty feel of a house where no one is.

  It should feel empty. They’d never given Rafiel a key. They were friends, but normally they met at the diner.

  Right. I’ll just c
all the arrogant lion boy, she thought, as she walked the four steps across the kitchen to the phone. But as she picked it up and before she could dial, a smell rose around her.

  It was thick, miasmalike, overpowering. Her throat and nose closed. She gagged. It was like … like walking into a closed shed at the zoo, where someone had been housing several hundred wild animals.

  And then there was the voice, a voice without vocalization behind it, a voice that seemed to come from the phone and yet not, a voice that seemed curiously devoid of sound, “Welcome, Pretty Kitten.”

  Gasping and gulping, through the horrible smell, Kyrie turned.

  Run.

  “Hey, Rafiel,” Tom said, as Rafiel walked up to the counter, “I thought you said you’d come by this evening?”

  Rafiel shrugged. “I was going to, but I talked to my cousin Mike, and he said that he could go by this afternoon, and I happened to be in the neighborhood, because I have to … do some interviews.” He looked around. “In relation to the case in the aquarium.” Shrug. “So I thought I’d drop by and get the house keys from you.”

  “All right. If you want to come behind the counter, they’re in my jacket pocket under there,” he said, as he flipped a couple of burgers. And broke two eggs onto the griddle surface of the new stove. He looked over his shoulder and was amused to see Rafiel gingerly lift the pass-through portion of the counter, as though he was afraid it might be spring-loaded or something. He didn’t remember if Rafiel had ever been behind the counter, for all he’d offered to man the diner, just yesterday.

  “Yeah,” he told Rafiel. “Down there. Just under the edge of the counter. You’re going to have to look, because there’s Conan’s stuff under there too, and there’s the time sheet boards. At least there isn’t a cat today.”

  “A cat?”

  “Uh … Kyrie and I have a cat. I mean, a kitten. He’s barely larger than one of the burger buns. Full of himself, though.” He heard his own voice become embarrassingly doting, sounding much like the voices of old childless people who dressed their pets in costumes for Halloween and took them out trick or treating. He changed the subject, abruptly, “Hey, why didn’t you just go to Kyrie? She’s probably awake by now.”