Night Shifters (10 page)

CHAPTER
3

The noise of the doorbell echoed, seeming to fill the small house.

Kyrie jumped and Tom turned his wrist toward himself, as though checking time on a watch he didn’t wear.

She swept her gaze toward the narrow little window in the shower, instead, checking the scant light coming through, blue tinged, announcing the end of blind night, the beginning of barely lit morning.

“It can’t be anyone about the . . . It’s too early,” she said.

And saw Tom pale, saw him start shaking. “Go to the kitchen,” she told him, sure that in his mind as in hers was the memory of the bathroom at the Athens, full of bloodied towels, probably tainted with his hair and skin. And hers.

Why, oh, why hadn’t she put the used towels in her car? Dumped them somewhere? But where? Outside Tom’s apartment? They hadn’t exactly had time to stop anywhere and get rid of things.

It was too late for all that, now. All her life, she had faced crises and looked after herself. What else could she do? There hadn’t been anyone else to look after her. Now she had to look after Tom too. Not the first time she had this sort of responsibility. Younger kids at foster homes often clung to her, sure that her strength would carry them. And it did, even when she thought she had no strength left.

He was shaking, and she put a hand out to him, and touched his arm. It still felt too cold, even through the sweat suit. “Go to the kitchen. Sit down,” she said. “Stay. I’ll go see who it is. I’ll deal with it.”

She walked out through the kitchen and the hallway, to the front room with its curved Seventies vintage sofa that she’d covered in the pretty red sheet, and the table made of plastic cubes where she kept her books and her few prized possessions. It should give her a sense of security, but it didn’t. Instead, she wondered what would happen to her books if she were arrested and what would happen to the house if she lost her job. Though it was just a rental, it was the first place she could call hers, the first place where she was not living on someone else’s territory and on someone else’s terms.

She shook her head. It wouldn’t come to that. She wouldn’t let it come to that.

The front door was one of the cheap hollow metal ones, but it did have a bull’s eye. The neighborhood was quiet enough and the whole city was basically safe, so she supposed it had been put there to allow occupants to avoid Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Now she leaned into the door and put her eye to the tiny opening. Out there was . . . a stranger.

He stood on her doorstep, and he was tall, blond. Broad shouldered, she supposed, but with the sort of relaxed posture and laid-back demeanor that made him look more like a surfer than a body builder. Increasing the impression was hair just on this side of long, the bangs overhanging his left eye. He wore a loose white linen suit that seemed to accentuate his relaxed expression. The sunglasses that covered his eyes despite the scant light made him look like one of those artists afraid of being recognized, or else like a man who’d just flown in from a vacation in Bermuda and had not yet fully realized that he was back home.

The sunglasses made his expression unreadable, but he seemed to be looking intently at the door. As Kyrie watched, he raised his hand and rang the doorbell again.

It was what? Four, five in the morning? Surely this was not a casual visit. Casual visitors didn’t insist on being answered at this time of night. But then what? A rapist or a robber? What? Ringing the doorbell? Wasn’t that sort of unusual? Besides, she could handle herself. Surely she could handle herself.

Kyrie unlocked the door and opened it the length of the chain. The chain was another puzzler. Either the neighborhood had been a lot worse when the security device was installed, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses were unusually persistent.

“Ah,” he said, when she opened the door, and smiled flashing teeth straight out of a toothpaste commercial. “Ms. Kyrie Smith?”

Before she could answer, there was a faint rustling sound behind her. She turned and saw Tom mouthing soundlessly, “Police?” He raised his eyebrows.

She shrugged. But it if was police, then she really needed to answer. Before he took too close a look at the car. The upholstery was doubtlessly smeared with blood. And, doubtlessly, some of it would be the murder victim’s.

Tom nodded at her, as if to tell her to go ahead and open the door. And Kyrie did, about a palm’s width further.

The man on the other side got closer. He wore some strong aftershave. No. Not strong, but insinuating. He looked down at her, his eyes unreadable behind the sunglasses. “Ms. Kyrie Grace Smith?”

She nodded. Smith was the name of a foster family she no longer remembered, but it had stuck to her throughout her growing up years.

He reached for a pocket of his linen suit, and brought out a leather wallet, which he opened with a flourish that must have taken years to learn. “Officer Rafiel Trall, Goldport Police Department. May I speak to you for a moment?”

Tom swallowed hard and was sure he’d turned pale at the announcement that the man on the other side of the door was an officer of the law. He’d had run-ins with the police before. He had a record. Oh, he’d never been arrested for more than a night or a couple of nights. And he’d been a minor. And every time his father had bailed him out.

But still, he didn’t know what kind of record they kept or if it would have been erased when he turned eighteen. He was sure a couple of times they’d tried to charge him as an adult. Wasn’t sure if it had stuck. He hadn’t been paying much attention back then. He’d been cocky and full of himself and his family’s power and position.

Since he’d left home, he’d done his best not to be caught. He tried to visualize being in jail, and needing to shift. Or shifting without meaning to. He imagined turning into a dragon in confines where privacy didn’t exist. He couldn’t be arrested. He wouldn’t be. He would kill himself first.

Kyrie looked at the ID, then at the man.

“May I come in?” the man asked. “I have a few questions to ask you. Just a few minutes of your time.”

Silently, Kyrie opened the door, and the man came in. He didn’t look surprised at all at seeing Tom, whom he greeted with a nod. But then why should he look surprised? He couldn’t know that Kyrie didn’t have a boyfriend, could he?

Tom willed himself to relax, to show no fear. Fear would make the man suspicious and would make him look harder for something that had triggered that reaction.

“Look, this is just a quick visit,” the policeman said. “A quick question. You work at the Athens on Fairfax, right?”

Kyrie nodded.

“Mr. Frank Skathari, your boss, said you had left about midnight?”

Had it been midnight? Tom wondered. It seemed like an eternity to his tired body, his dizzy mind. He saw Kyrie nod and wondered if she had any more idea of the time than he did.

“You didn’t see any large animal in the parking lot?”

“An . . . animal?” she asked.

“There was a corpse . . . I’m sorry. You might not have noticed,” he said. “It was behind some vans. But there was a corpse, and it looked like it died by accident. An attack by some creature with large teeth. We’re thinking like a Komodo dragon or something.”

Dragon. Tom felt as if the word were directed at him. The policeman looked at him as he spoke. Or at least, his face turned in Tom’s direction. It was hard to see what the man was looking at, exactly, with those sunglasses on. “People bring these pets from abroad,” he was saying, as Tom focused on him again. “And let them loose. It could be dangerous. I just wanted to know if you’d seen something.”

“No,” Kyrie said, and sounded amazingly convincing. “I saw nothing strange. I was just concerned with Tom . . .” She made a head gesture toward him. “With getting Tom his medicine.”

“Medicine?” the policeman asked, as if this were the clue that would unravel the whole case.

“Migraine,” Tom said. It was the first thing to cross his mind. His father, he remembered, had migraines. “Migraine medicine.”

“Oh,” the policeman said. “I see.” He sounded alarmingly as if he did. He looked at one of them and then the other. “So, you won’t be able to help me.”

“I’m afraid not,” Kyrie said.

“That,” he said, “is too bad. I was hoping you’d have coffee with me tomorrow.” He looked at his watch and nodded. “Well, later today—and discuss if you might have heard something suspicious or . . . found something. Perhaps in the bathroom of the diner. We haven’t looked there, yet, you know?”

Tom heard the sound of a train, inside his ears, complete with whistles and growing thuds. He felt as if he would pass out. The bathroom. The damn man had looked in the bathroom and . . . seen the towels. And he going to use it to blackmail Kyrie? Blackmail Kyrie into what? What had Tom got Kyrie into?

He felt a spasm come over his whole body, and knew he was going to shift. And he didn’t have the strength nor the will power to stop it.

Kyrie gasped. He managed to see her through a fog of pre-shift trembling, and realized she wasn’t looking at him, but at the door she had just closed.

Then she turned around and something—something about him, about the way he looked, made her eyes grow huge and panicky. “No,” she said. “No, you idiot. Don’t shift.”

Her hand grabbed firmly at his arm, and it felt warm and human and real.

Kyrie turned from closing the door on the policeman’s smiling face, and saw Tom . . . She couldn’t describe it. He was Tom, undeniably Tom, human and bipedal, but there was something very wrong about his shape. His arms were too long, the wrist and quite a bit of green-shaded flesh protruding from the end of the sleeve. His hands were stretched out, too, his fingers elongated and the space between them strangely membranous. And his face, beneath the huge, puzzled blue eyes, looked like it was doing its best to grow a snout.

“No, no, you idiot,” she said. “Don’t shift. No. Calm down.”

He stood on one foot, then the other, his features blank and stupid. His face already half-dragon and unable to show human emotions. His mouth opened, but what came out was half hiss, half growl.

She slapped him. She slapped him hard. “No,” she said. “No.”

And he shivered. He trembled on the edge of shifting. She realized she had smacked what could be a very large, very angry dragon in a minute. And then she smacked him again on the nose, as if he were a naughty puppy.

She judged how her shifts had left her, tired, witless. He’d shifted twice now. Oh, so had she, but the first time very briefly. How long had he been shifted? What had he done?

“You cannot shift now,” she said. And slapped him again.

He blinked. His features blurred and changed. All of a sudden he was Tom, just Tom, standing there, looking like someone had hit him hard with a half brick and stopped just short of braining him. He seemed to be beyond tiredness, to some zombielike state where he could be ordered about.

“Oh, damn,” he said, so softly that it was almost a sigh. He looked at her, and his eyes showed a kind of mad despair behind the tiredness. “Oh, damn. I can’t be arrested, Kyrie, I can’t. I was . . . when I was young and stupid. My father . . . got me out, but sometimes I spent a night in lockup. Kyrie, I couldn’t survive it as a dragon. When my dad threw me out, I spent the night in a runaway shelter and . . . it was torture. The dragon . . . The beast wanted to come out. All those people. And being confined. If they take me in on suspicion of murder, if I have to stay . . . Kyrie, I couldn’t. I’ll kill myself before that.”