Gentleman Takes a Chance (19 page)

Meanwhile, Tom assembled two Voracious Student specials, with the double cheeseburgers and the egg and enough fries to sink a small ocean liner, and set them on the counter ringing the bell and announcing "Eighteen and ten."

Conan scurried towards the counter. He was getting better, Tom thought. He was also learning to carry the coffee carafe in his weaker hand. Tom had no idea how much longer it would take for the full arm to grow in, and it just now occurred to him that they would need to make some explanation to Anthony. He was thinking experimental treatment. It covered a multitude of sins, and most people didn't enquire any further.

Rafiel straightened up, slipping Tom's key in his pocket, and at that moment Keith came in, more or less towing a young woman. Keith was wearing his normal attire when the temperature went above freezing but not over 80—a CUG T-shirt, this one reading "I'm just a CUG in the college wheel," and jeans, topped by an unzipped hooded jacket in sweatshirt material. The girl with him, on the other hand, was dressed as if she thought she was going on a hunting expedition in the arctic wastelands. She was wearing a sweatshirt, a huge, puffy ski jacket in bright shocking pink, and the sort of fuzzy pink muffler that Tom associated—for reasons known only to his psychiatrist, should he ever acquire one—with Minnie Mouse. The rest of the girl's appearance certainly said mousie, if not necessarily Minnie. She was too skinny, the type of too skinny that the nineteenth century would have associated with consumption and a romantically early death, pale and had colorless white-blond hair that seemed insufficient for her head size and age. It was cut in a page boy just at her ears, but it gave the impression of having trailed off of its own accord and stopped growing due to either lack of energy or effort.

And yet, the way Keith looked at her, Tom saw that he seemed to be attracted to her. Who knew why? It made absolutely no sense to Tom, but then very few pairings did. He supposed his was as much of a surprise to everyone as theirs was to him. After all, what on Earth was a cat doing with a dragon? Or vice versa? And what was a nice girl like Kyrie doing with Tom?

"Hey Keith," he said. "Is this the friend you told me you'd bring by to meet me?"

The girl blushed furiously and Keith smiled. "Yeah, this is Summer Avenir, Tom. I've told her this is the best place in the world to get a burger, besides being my own, personal hangout, which, of course, immediately makes it better."

"Of course," Tom said. "Nice meeting you, Summer. And this is Rafiel. He's a friend."

Keith did a double take at Rafiel. "Taking a real job in your spare time, Officer Trall?"

"Nah. Just came by to talk to Tom," Rafiel said, looking embarrassed at being caught behind the counter as though he were an employee. "I'll be going now. Nice to meet you, Summer. Watch out for Keith. He's a troublemaker."

Tom caught Keith's questioning look at him, and frowned. Perhaps it was that he was behind this counter and cooking, with the scent of fresh fries, hamburgers, melting cheese and toasting bread in his nose. Perhaps through all this, it was too much to expect that Tom could smell another shifter. But though he could smell Rafiel faintly—the metallic scent associated with shifters coming through a mask of Axe cologne—there was no other hint of a shifter-scent. At least not close enough for him to track.

As Conan ducked behind the counter, to grab the coffee pot, Tom could smell him too, his scent a little sharper than Rafiel's and not overlaid with anything but soap and water. But, as far as he could tell, there was no other shifter-scent at all.

He would have to ask Keith why he thought this girl might be a shifter.

Kyrie couldn't breathe. Her chest ached and her throat stung and she couldn't breathe. It was all she managed to do not to claw at her own neck in frantic attempts to somehow force herself to get air in, through the miasma that surrounded her. It made no sense, because she knew she was breathing—somehow, she was still breathing, otherwise she would have passed out long since. But at the same time, the stink around her was so prevalent that she felt sure she couldn't be breathing. She just couldn't.

The smell surrounded her, intrusive, offensive. It seemed to her that she was not only inhaling it, but that it was coming through her ears and her pores as well. Pinning her down.

Where are you trying to go, Kitten Girl? Do you think I'd hurt a pretty thing like you?

Kyrie turned around. She wasn't sure why, but she felt as if the thoughts were coming from behind her, as she tried to get to the kitchen door—and somehow couldn't because the stink held her back, held her in place.

As she turned, she saw she was right. He stood in the shadows of the door from the hallway, just off the kitchen, and he seemed to be wearing a shimmery silver turtleneck and tailored black pants. He held a cigarette in his hand.

"We don't . . ." Kyrie said, slowly, because speaking hurt, thinking hurt, assembling thoughts into words seemed a labor worthy of Hercules. "We don't smoke. In the house. We don't approve of smoking. In the house."

She realized how ridiculous she sounded, as she was barely able to breathe and wondering what this . . . creature was and what powers he had over her. They'd determined in the parking lot that it could somehow reach into their minds and touch them. It could change what they were thinking. It was clear even to Kyrie's befuddled mind that it could also cause her to smell what she was smelling. There was no other way anything—human or animal—could smell that strongly, and the creature was or appeared to be in human form, standing in the demi-shadows of her hallway, smoking.

Kyrie hadn't been able to really look at him before—not in the parking lot at night, and under snow. But now she observed him. Was she seeing who he was, or who he appeared to be? And in either case, what could she deduce about him?

He was short for a male. Maybe an inch taller than Tom—she would guess him at five eight or thereabouts, and well built—that much was obvious from his huge shoulders, his muscular arms, his whole posture. The silvery turtleneck shimmered over muscle definition that would have made a gym bunny cry. This was not surprising. In Kyrie's experience most male shifters were built. Something about the animal form and the posture they assumed in their animal form made them exercise as humans normally didn't. In fact, what was strange was people like Conan who seemed to have not one functional muscle in their wiry, stringy shapes.

Beyond that, he was gold-skinned—a tone that Kyrie thought of as vaguely Mediterranean. Anthony's color. Could be anything from the southern regions, from Europe to the Americas. His hair was black, lank, and just a little long in front, falling in smooth bangs over his forehead, though the back seemed perfectly molded to the contours of a well-shaped head.

Other than that there was not much unusual about him—his nose was sharply aquiline, but not remarkably so. His forehead was high, but didn't give the impression of a receding hairline. His lips were broad and seemed sensuous, particularly now when they distended in a come-hither smile. But none of it would have made the man stand out on a crowded street.

None of it but the eyes. His eyes were gold. More gold than Rafiel's, which fell in the outer limits of brown. This creature's eyes were gold to the point of having an almost metallic shimmer to them. And like metal they were cold, unfeeling, blank. A blankness somehow lit from behind, like the screen of an old-fashioned computer.

The result was a look of perfect madness, the look of someone who had gone beyond normal human thoughts, normal human processes. Perhaps beyond thoughts at all.

He grinned at her as though he were a famished wolf and she a particularly tasty morsel of steak. Which might be an analogy much too close for Kyrie's comfort. She backed up, slowly, fighting against the smell, which seemed to hold her in place, to prevent her from moving, to drain her of all energy. It wasn't real, she told herself.

But she still couldn't reason her way to turning around and unlocking the door and running out onto the driveway. And perhaps that was not as irrational as it seemed to be. She didn't want to turn her back on the thing smiling seductively at her. The idea of turning her back on him, made her think of his being on her suddenly, biting into her, savaging her.

She backed against the door, without taking her eyes off him. If she was going to die, she would die with her eyes open. She would face her death without flinching.

Back against the door, she took a deep breath and told herself she was not smelling anything. Nothing at all. It was a smell of the mind, as she fancied Shakespeare might have said. Something that didn't exist. The air in her kitchen would be as untainted as it was when she came in. Cold and clammy, with a hint of disused space, and perhaps the ghost of cookies past, but nothing else.

"What do you want?" she asked the man smiling at her from the shadows. "What do you want from me?"

And the moment she asked, she recoiled, because it seemed to her like inviting the vampire into your home. This gave the creature a chance to say that he wanted her to die. And then, somehow to make it so.

But he laughed, a full-throated and very masculine laughter that she might have found pleasant under different circumstances. He emerged from the hallway and grinned at her. The light from the kitchen window behind her fell fully on his face. It should have made him look less unpleasant or more human. But all it did was gild the planes and features so that he looked like the antique funeral mask of an ancient and cruel emperor. The kind that would have ordered hundreds of thousands of people killed at his funeral rites.

"I just want to know you better," he spoke. It was, she realized with a shock, the first time she heard his voice. Before, he hadn't deigned to speak in audible words, but had tried to reach into her mind. She wondered if this meant that she'd scored a point. She very much doubted it.

Fighting against the smell that surrounded her, fighting against the suggestion that she was a small, frail, young thing at the mercy of this ruthless primeval evil—something she was sure he would like her to believe—she made her voice cutting and as sarcastic as if she were talking to Tom and Rafiel. "The normal way to get to know a woman is to go somewhere she is and introduce yourself. Some of the more polite people might ask her for coffee."

His laughter jangled, pleasant and cultured, but with something just slightly off-key behind it. It was, Kyrie thought, like when you heard thunder overhead, and the glassware in your cupboards tinkled in tune with it. A false note, a strange intrusion in what she was sure he wanted to be a perfectly polished image. She tried to keep this knowledge from her eyes, though, and must have succeeded, because he bent upon her an expression of great amusement—as though she were a particularly clever pet or a favored pupil.

Bending at the waist, hands on his thighs, the red glow of his cigarette end turned outward, he said, "Dante Dire at your service."

"Cute," she said, keeping her voice sarcastic.

"Nothing comes of denying what you are, Kitten. It is better to embrace it."

"I am not 'Kitten.' And I don't care to embrace anything." Said primly and with her back to the door and her lips taut.

"Really?" His insane eyes danced with merriment. "Don't you now? Oh, don't worry about it, I'm not going to eat you." He took a pull of his cigarette. "And if I did, you'd enjoy it." Again the mad dance of his insane eyes, followed by, "What do you think I am? Why do you think I'd want to hurt you?"

Because you broke into my house.
Kyrie thought.
Because you are using a smell that can only be supernatural to keep me cowed. Because you talked in my mind. Because you attacked and wounded my boyfriend. Because you speak to me as if I were not an adult.

She kept these thoughts up front, while behind them she ran others. She thought that if he was using his mind power on her, if he'd used some trick of pretending to be Rafiel—she was sure of it now—to lure her, it must mean he didn't want to or couldn't face all of them together. She didn't know why, since he had seemed to do pretty well with it in the parking lot of the aquarium. But it was clear he didn't like it, and didn't care to repeat it. And that was fine. Absolutely fine. But there was more. The fact that he was keeping the smell on her, and feeling that the smell was suffocating her, must mean he was afraid of her thinking clearly, of her thinking what she must do.

The thought sneaked behind her mind, afraid to be seen by whatever mind-scan capacities he had, that she should turn around and open the door. But . . . no. She couldn't do it, even if she tried. Simply couldn't.

"You have nothing to fear from me," Dire said. "I don't know what you were told about me, but you can think of me as a private investigator. I'm here to find out what is killing our people."

Kyrie made a sound at the back of her throat. "Our people?" she asked. "I am not a dire wolf."

He made a dismissive gesture with his cigarette. "Shifters."

Behind it all her thoughts went on. So she couldn't turn her back on him. It would be just too creepy. Which left her with no other choice . . . or perhaps . . . Like a glimmer, at the back of her mind, came the idea that she could move
towards
Dire, instead of away from him. Move towards Dire, but maneuver so the little folding table and chairs that she and Tom used for their meals would always be between them, and her back too close to the kitchen counter and stove to allow him to teleport behind her. She was sure that there were some rules to this teleportation thing, if teleportation it was and not just an ability to make people forget they'd seen him move through the intervening space. She was sure even if he could instantly magic himself across the room, he couldn't do it when there was a good chance he would end up with a table, a chair, or a fridge embedded in his toned-and-tanned body.

She took a step towards him, and saw his eyes widen in shock, and the stench vacillated for a moment, allowing her to take a breath of the cold, untainted air of the kitchen. The stench returned, of course, but she knew now more than ever that it was fake. Another step, and it seemed to her that a flicker of something moved behind his eyes, as if he, himself, had been on the verge of taking a hasty step back. She sidestepped, then sidled rapidly around the table.