Night Shifters

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  Conan’s expression shifted, from smug to sullen. “I wasn’t hiding from you,” he said, in the tone that a kid might use to say it wasn’t him who drew on the wall. “I was hiding from the dire wolf.”

  “Oh, that makes it ever so much better,” Kyrie said. “Not.”

  “Just go,” Conan said. “He’s going to come for us.”

  “I don’t think so,” Tom said, looking behind them. “He’s not back there, and besides, he knows where we’re going to go, doesn’t he?”

  “Does he?” Conan asked.

  “The diner,” Kyrie said. And then, softly, “Hopefully, he’s not so brazen as to come and attack us in the diner, in the parking lot, in front of everyone.”

  “Hopefully,” Tom said. “Or we’ll be dead. I mean, it’s not like we can, realistically, stop showing up at the diner.”

  “No,” Kyrie said. She started the car again, going more slowly. “But perhaps once he calms down, he won’t be as dangerous? I mean, I get a feeling we pushed him over the edge, and he didn’t very well know what he was doing.”

  “We pushed him over the edge?” Tom said. “We? What were you doing at the house, anyway? And without telling me. If Rafiel hadn’t told me—”

  “You should have asked Rafiel what I was doing at the house,” Kyrie said. She drove with jagged movements that caused the car to lurch one way then the other. “He called me and told me to meet him there. Something about one of his relatives repairing the house. And then he wasn’t there.”

  “He called you?” Tom asked. He remembered Rafiel coming into the diner, his confusion at not finding Kyrie in the bed-and-breakfast. He didn’t even want to think that Rafiel might be working with the dire wolf. If Rafiel was … If Rafiel had betrayed them …

  “He called me on my cell phone. Told me to meet him at the house ASAP. I thought it was a little weird, but he said he had everything ready to go right then, so I showered and went.”

  Tom groaned. Either Rafiel was mind-manipulated, or Rafiel had defected to—for lack of better words—the dark side. Either way, it could not be good. “But …” he said. “But …” And swallowed hard.

  “The only weird thing,” Kyrie said, “is that his words seemed to have … oh, I don’t know how to put it … no sound. No vocalization.”

  Tom found his forehead wrinkling in worry before he could think that he was worried. That didn’t feel right. Kyrie’s purse was at his feet, as it normally was when she was driving. He bent down and picked it up. “May I get your cell phone?” he asked. He didn’t like to reach into her purse without an invitation.

  “Sure,” she said, as she turned onto Pride Street. Five minutes from The George.

  He reached into the little pocket on the front lining where she normally kept her phone. He picked it up. “He called you on this cell phone?” he said. It wouldn’t turn on, there was no battery. So, he grabbed his cell phone from his pocket, and swapped the batteries. Then he turned the phone on and looked through calls received.

  “Yeah.”

  “When?”

  “This morning, almost right after you left, I think. I was lying in a patch of sun and unable to sleep, and then the phone rang.”

  Tom looked up and down through the list of numbers. The latest call the phone showed was three days before. He took a deep breath, and waited till she pulled in the parking lot of The George to speak. He wasn’t sure what telling her while she was driving would do.

  “Kyrie,” he said. “There’s no record of any such call.”

  “What?” Kyrie asked. She pushed the parking brake down with her foot, as she reached blindly for her cell phone. “Let me see that.”

  She pulled the cell phone from Tom’s nerveless hands, and went to the menu and calls received, and paged, frantically, up and down the list.

  She realized she was shaking violently, and she put the phone down on the seat, very slowly, then very slowly lowered her head towards the wheel, until she rested her forehead on it.

  “You mean the whole call …” she said, at last. “You mean, he just reached into my mind.” For some reason the thought made her physically ill. Reaching into her head to trick her seemed like the worst violation possible. “How could he? How?”

  “I don’t know. I think he has some sort of mind power,” Tom said, hesitantly. He laid his palm gently on her shoulder, as if he were afraid of touching her. But when she didn’t protest, he enveloped her in his arms and pulled her to him. “I’m sorry, Kyrie. I think this is worse than anything we faced before.”

  For a moment, it comforted her, that he held her like that, tightly, against his body. He was still naked—she was quite sure he had forgotten that—and his skin smelled of the hotel’s soap overlaid with sweat from fear and fight. It was not unpleasant. His hair was loose—as it always was after he shifted back and forth. He kept a package of hair ties in the glove compartment of the car, in a kitchen drawer at home, and in one of the supply rooms in the diner. His hair brushed her face, softly, like silk.

  And for a moment—for just a moment, as her breath calmed down—this felt good and protective and healing. She had a sense that she belonged to him—that she was his, that Tom was somehow entitled to hold her like this and that he—as scattered and lost as he’d been most of his life—he was somehow protecting her. As he’d protected her, or tried to, in that kitchen.

  But slowly the thought intruded that he was just looking after her because he looked after everyone—Old Joe, Conan, Not Dinner, and even Keith and Anthony to an extent. Tom seemed to think it was his duty, his necessary place in life, to go through it helping everyone and everything. And this made his arms around her, his soothing voice, the hand now gently stroking her hair and cheek, utterly meaningless.

  She shrank back, laughing a little, disguising her embarrassment at having been, momentarily, emotionally naked. “You must put clothes on,” she said. “What if someone looks in the car and sees me sitting here with two naked guys?”

  “I don’t have clothes,” Conan said from the back seat, his voice dull and seemingly trying to be distant, as if he were apologizing for being present during their embrace. He hardly needed to.

  Tom pulled back. He took a deep breath, as if he needed to control himself, and she didn’t look down to see if he needed to control himself in that sense. It wouldn’t help to know he’d been embracing her out of automatic pity but that lust had mixed in. She wanted to know he had held her for other reasons—she wasn’t even sure what reasons she wanted it to be. Perhaps because he felt so incomplete without her, that he had to hold her and protect her to be able to hold and protect himself. She wanted him to think of them as a unit, she thought. As belonging. And perhaps that was, ultimately, her greatest foolishness, that she so desperately wanted to belong with someone. Not to. She had no fancy to be owned or restricted in that way. For much too long, growing up, she had belonged to the state of North Carolina—had been in effect the child of the state—that she did not want to belong to anyone. But she wanted to belong with someone, to be part of a group. Not at the mercy of passing bureaucrats and their whims, but able to contribute and be taken into account by a group.

  She’d thought she was part of that. Even days ago, if you had asked her, she’d have said that she and Tom and Rafiel were just that sort of group. A you and me against the world group.

  But now the dire wolf could get in her mind and force her own friendship for Rafiel to betray her. And Tom was determined to protect the world and its surroundings. “There’s clothes under the seat,” she told Conan. “Get some for Tom too. We stuff them there, when we go shopping. We buy extra stuff, I wash it and stuff it down there. From the thrift shop, so they’re clean but worn.”

  “Worn is fine,” Conan said, as he passed, over Kyrie’s shoulder, a grey pair of sweat pants and a red sweat shirt to Tom.

  “I think you should go shower,” Kyrie said. “Both of you. I’ll go inside”—she made a head gesture towards the diner—“and hold t
he fort, while you guys make yourselves decent.”

  Tom frowned a little but then nodded. “If he comes in the diner—” he said.

  “I’ll call, okay? I don’t think he’s going to do much in front of every customer at the tables, truly.”

  “You don’t know that,” Tom said. “He could reach in and touch your mind. Like he did before. We don’t know how many minds he can touch. He could make everyone in the diner ignore him, as he kills you or dismembers you.”

  “I’ll call you. I’ll call you as soon as he comes,” she said, almost frantically, wanting to go back to the diner, which right now represented routine and normalcy, and to be allowed to go on with life, to forget that someone out there—someone who didn’t wish them well—had the power to reach into her mind and make her hear and think things that had never happened.

  “I don’t know what the owner is going to think, of my keeping going to the bedroom with different guys and coming out in new clothes,” Tom said, under his breath, but Conan only gave him this unfocused, uncomprehending look, as if he were talking about some different planet, or something so strange that Conan’s mind couldn’t begin to understand it.

  Tom was fairly sure this was not true. After all, the man had grown up in Tennessee, no matter how strange his parents’ culture might have been. He’d watched the same shows, read the same newspapers—generally speaking—and listened to the same music—well, perhaps more country and western—that Tom listened to.

  And yet, he genuinely seemed to have no idea why Tom going to his rented room to shower with different guys accompanying him might make the owner of the bed-and-breakfast a little uncomfortable.

  “She’s going to think I’m running a business,” Tom added, under his breath. But it was all pointless: his worrying and Conan’s—had to be deliberate—lack of comprehension. They met no one as they walked along the oak-floored hallways of the bed-and-breakfast. The room, when Tom opened it, was as Kyrie must have left it—with the bed coverings thrown half back, and her hair brush thrown on top of the clothes.

  Almost by instinct—he certainly had not had time to get used to this—before Tom opened the door fully, he opened it a crack and put his hand in the opening, as if to catch a baseball. Seconds later a furry warm ball hit it, and clung to his wrist with sharp little needle claws. Tom laughed, as he brought the creature up and held him against his chest. “Hello, Not Dinner. Foiled again.” Then he opened the door fully, allowing Conan into the room, and closing it and locking it afterwards. “You can shower first,” he said. And realized that Conan was barefoot. “Did you leave your shoes … ?”

  “Somewhere in the parking lot,” Conan said, sullenly.

  “I left mine in the diner, near the entrance,” Tom said, looking down at his toes. “Well … I didn’t even realize I was barefoot till now. We get used to this stuff.”

  “Yeah,” Conan said, and went into the shower, to emerge, just seconds after, wearing the same clothes but looking far cleaner, his odd crest of hair standing up. Tom realized in losing his left arm, Conan had lost the red dragon tattoo he’d once had upon his left hand. He wondered if the new one would grow in with the same tattoo. No, it couldn’t. That would require something uncomfortably like magic. Then would Conan have to go and tattoo the same image on the back of his hand?

  Putting Not Dinner down on the bed, where he proceeded to attack some dust mites floating on a ray of light, Tom got up, wondering what part of Conan’s belonging to the dragon triad was volitional, and what part was enforced. He remembered his saying that his parents had more or less turned him over to the Great Sky Dragon because he was a dragon and therefore belonged to him. Belonged. What a very strange word to use.

  And Tom knew he should be furious with Conan for allowing the Great Sky Dragon to aim for Tom’s mind once more. But he’d aimed for the dire wolf’s mind. And Tom had no delusions. He knew that if the Great Sky Dragon hadn’t spoken in his mind, the chance was good that he’d now be dead. Dire wanted to kill him. And he couldn’t defend himself against Dire. That much was clear.

  Tom turned the water on high and hot, and opened a new soap from the little basket of toiletries. Stupid as it was, he, who had for so long washed himself with soap from dispensers and with a combination of wet and dry paper towels at an endless succession of public restrooms throughout the land, felt an almost physical repulsion at the thought of using the same soap Conan had used. The soap Kyrie used, sure. No problem there. She was his, he was hers, in all but the legal marriage sense. He couldn’t imagine life without Kyrie and he very much hoped she could not imagine life without him.

  But the idea that Conan had used that soap and that there were sloughed-off, Conan skin cells in it made his flesh crawl. Which was stupid, he thought, as he washed himself almost vengefully, under water so hot that it made his skin sting. Conan looked clean enough, and he seemed to be a nice guy.

  And then Tom realized it was the thought of the intimacy of belonging. Families used the same bathroom, the same soap. He wasn’t ready to admit Conan into his family—if he would ever be. Conan belonged to the Great Sky Dragon—that creature that had now made free of Tom’s mind, twice, without a welcome mat.

  While the thought that the Great Sky Dragon could make free of his mind didn’t fill him with the same horror that having her mind manipulated by the dire wolf seemed to fill Kyrie—understandably, because all the Great Sky Dragon had done was talk in his mind, not manipulate him into believing things that weren’t true. Also, arguably, because the Great Sky Dragon, at least at this very moment, didn’t seem to feel like killing Tom—it made him feel uncomfortable and used.

  He’d brought his underwear, jeans, a T-shirt and socks into the bathroom with him. He’d packed—as he always did—a half-dozen rubber flip-flops, bought at the end of summer. He’d wear those till he could get back to his boots. He could lend a pair to Conan, as well. They wouldn’t be much worse than his stupid elastic shoes. He dressed in the bathroom and emerged into the bedroom, with words on his lips which summed up the whole issue he had with this situation: “I don’t belong to the Great Sky Dragon,” he said, defiantly, saying the words aloud—even though he knew it would bother Conan.

  Conan had been playing with Not Dinner—or at least submitting mutely to having his sleeve climbed, and his hair and ear played with. He looked up, startled, and frowned at Tom, “You have to,” he said. “You’re a dragon.”

  “I’m not a dragon like you,” Tom said forcefully, almost viciously. “In case you haven’t realized, we don’t look at all alike. As dragons. My body type is completely different. I am like one of those dragons that Vikings used to carve in the front of their ships. Perhaps there was once some organization I belonged to, like you belong to the Great Sky Dragon. But I don’t belong to him. Or to you.”

  He felt vaguely guilty saying this, as if he were proclaiming the superiority of Nordic dragons over Asian dragons. In truth, he didn’t feel like that at all. He was sure the Asian dragons were far more adept at surviving, for one. Look at how they had an organization that looked after them. And look at how their legends had managed to convince people that they were good and righteous—while all the European dragons had managed to do was simultaneously convince people that they were dangerous and that they slept on massive hoards of gold. Thereby creating perfect conditions for people to hate them and to steal from them—to take their valuables and proclaim themselves heros in doing this.

  He wondered if the hoard and treasures were true, and then thought that if shifters really lived as long as Old Joe claimed—as long as the Great Sky Dragon appeared to have been alive—then it could very well be true. If you looked at the panorama of your life as covering hundreds or thousands of years, then everyone got to live in interesting times. Every long-lived shifter’s life could cover wars and revolutions and endless upheavals. And gold often saw you through all of those. So why not hoard?

  “It doesn’t matter,” Conan said. “It doesn’t mat
ter if you are an Asian dragon or not. You are a dragon. You’re a child of the … of the G … of Himself.”

  Tom frowned at him. That was what he had wanted to fend off, he realized. Not the fact that the triad dragons were Asian—he really couldn’t care less about that. What he wanted to fend off, more than anything, was Conan’s—and seemingly the Great Sky Dragon’s—belief that Tom belonged to him from birth. That Tom had no choice in this matter.

  Tom had never been good at obeying. His inability to obey his parents, his teachers, his counselors or his advisors had made his—and probably his parents’—lives living hell long before he had turned into a dragon and been kicked out of the house. He always felt like, should someone tell him to go one way, he must immediately go the other. It was something deep within himself, something he was aware of but didn’t feel he could change without becoming someone else—without dying, in a way.

  And now this organization he didn’t like or trust, this organization that was involved in criminal activities, and whose code of honor was as quirky as that of any mafia throughout history, wanted to claim him. He shrugged, as if to throw back their imagined weight from his shoulders, and picked up a hair tie from the packet he’d left on top of the dresser. Confining his still-damp hair into a ponytail, he said, jerkily, “I am not his child. And even if I were, that wouldn’t mean I was his. That I belonged to him.”

  Yet Conan had allowed himself to be mutely handed over to this organization by his dutiful parents. Tom thought it was better—and more humane—to force your kid out on the street at gunpoint, as his father had done, than to hand him over to the designs and whims of a supernatural creature who probably would care nothing for him.

  He saw Conan’s small despondent shrug, which seemed to signify he couldn’t do anything about either Tom’s belonging to the Great Sky Dragon or Tom’s stubbornness, and Tom said, “I am my own.”

  And in the next moment wondered how that could be true, when the Great Sky Dragon had the ability to enter his mind and make him hear his thoughts.