Night Shifters (14 page)
Authors: Sarah A. Hoyt
Tags: #Fiction, #Fantasy, #General, #Contemporary, #Urban
Tom knew how much food cost. Over the last five months one of his delights had been learning to cook. He’d bought cookbooks at the same thrift stores at which he shopped for clothes and furniture. Since on a diner waiter’s salary it was a challenge to cover everything and put money aside—as he felt he had to—he’d reveled in trying to create quasi-gourmet dishes from meats on special and discounted produce. And he’d eaten a lot of tofu.
Now he cooked quickly, peppering his eggs from a shaker by the stove. His stomach growled at the smell of the utilitarian fare. He knew, from other shifts, that the craving for protein was almost impossible to deny, the morning after a shift. Kyrie clearly knew it too.
Kyrie again. Sitting down to eat, he opened the paper. And choked.
Right there, on the front page, the headline above the fold screamed “Murder at Local Diner!”
The picture of the Athens in black-and-white made the huge parking lot with the tiny diner beside it look like something out of a film noir.
The story was all too familiar to Tom. They’d found a body in the parking lot—of course anyone reading only the headline would think that they’d found it in the diner proper. Which meant that Frank was probably sizzling. If he was awake. Since he preferred to work nights, perhaps his day manager hadn’t found it necessary to wake him and tell him about the paper. Then again, sometimes Tom thought Frank worked around the clock. He always seemed to be at the diner.
Frank’s mood might matter or not. Tom hadn’t decided yet what he was going to do about work. He needed the job. Wanted it. He’d enjoyed working at the diner more than he cared to think about. It had been his first long-term employment. A real, normal job.
Before this he’d just signed up with the day laborer places. But he’d enjoyed the routine, the regulars, and getting them served quickly, and getting their tips. Smiling just enough at the college girls to get a good tip without their thinking he was coming on to them. The minor feuds with the day staff, the camaraderie with Kyrie and . . . well, he wouldn’t call it camaraderie with Frank, but Frank’s gruff ways.
He had felt almost . . . human. And now it would all vanish. It all would go as if it meant nothing. Like, having a family. Like school. Like a normal adolescence.
He finished eating and cleaned his plate with bread from the red bread box over the fridge, before carefully washing the dishes and putting them away.
Normally he compensated after nights of shifting by grabbing some fried chicken on the way to work the next evening. Or by eating a couple of boiled eggs. Most of what he cooked at home was near vegetarian. So this might be the most protein he’d eaten at one sitting in years.
Oh, he could afford bacon and eggs, but he’d been saving money. He had some idea that he would go to a community college and get a degree. He’d dreamed of settling down.
Now, of course, as soon as he could swing by an ATM, he would have to empty the five hundred in his account to pay Kyrie for the car repairs and the groceries. And at that he’d probably still owe her money. But he would send her money from . . . somewhere.
And on this he stopped, because he hadn’t told himself he was going to run. Not yet. But, after all, with the apartment in ruins, and the police investigating a crime around his place of employment, what else could he do? He had to run. Just as soon as he could retrieve . . .
it
from the Athens.
The doorbell rang. Tom thought it would be the police, come to arrest him. But how could they know he was here? Of course, Kyrie might have spoken, but . . .
He tiptoed to the door, trying to keep quiet, and looked through the peephole. Keith Vorpal stood on the doorstep, baseball cap rakishly turned backward and an expression of intense concern on his good-natured face. Since Vorpal didn’t usually feel much concern for something not involving shapely females, Tom was surprised and curious. Also curious about how Vorpal had found him.
He opened the door on the chain and looked out.
“Man,” Keith said as soon as he saw Tom. “Good to see you’re alive. They think someone broke into your place and destroyed it, then tried to set fire to the pieces of furniture. It’s all everyone talks about. Did you see anything weird when you were there?” He looked up at the space over the door, probably where the house number was. “I guess you spent the night here?”
Tom opened the door. “Come in,” he said.
Keith came in, looking around the room with the curiosity of someone visiting a strange place.
“How did you find me?”
Keith shrugged. “Your boss, at that dive you work in. He said you were staying with the girl, Kyrie? And he gave me the address.”
How did Frank know? Perhaps Kyrie had told him. She must have called in sometime after they got back to her place.
“Come on,” Tom said. “I’ll get you some coffee.”
Moments later, they were in the kitchen and Tom had managed to get cups and coffee, and locate the sugar and milk.
“I guess you’ve been here a lot?” Keith asked.
Tom shrugged, neither willing to lie full-out, nor to destroy this impression of himself as a man in a relationship that Keith seemed to envy.
He wondered why Keith had come over. He seemed to be worried about Tom. But Tom wasn’t used to anyone being worried about him. Did this mean the human race wanted him back?
CHAPTER
4
“There have been,” Rafiel Trall said, leaning over the table and keeping his voice low, “a series of deaths in town. Well, at least they’re classified as deaths, not murders. Bodies have been found . . . bitten in two.”
“Bitten?” Kyrie asked, while her thoughts raced. Only one kind of thing could bite a person in two. Well, maybe many kinds of things, but in the middle of a city like Goldport, almost for sure all of those things would be shapeshifters. People like her. Tom had said that there weren’t that many out there. But there were three of them and the triad. Were there more? And if so, what was calling them to Goldport?
“Bitten,” Rafiel said, and his teeth clashed as he closed his mouth, as though the words had been distasteful for him to say. And he held his teeth clenched too, visible through his slightly parted lips. “Our forensics have found proteins in the bites that they say are reptilian but not . . . not of any known reptile.”
He sat up straight and was silent a moment. “The theories range wildly,” he said. “From pet Komodo dragons that escaped and grew to huge proportions, to an alligator, somewhere, to . . .” He shrugged. “An extinct reptile that survived somewhere in the wilderness of Colorado and has just now found its way into town. Though that theory is on the fringes. It’s not like we’ve called a paleontologist in to look at the bite marks yet. But . . .” He took a deep breath, and it trembled a little as he let it out. “But the teeth size and the marks are definitely . . . They’re very large teeth, of a reptile type. I . . .” He shook his head. “You must realize in what position this puts me. Everyone at the police is talking escaped animals and Jurassic revivals. They’ve stopped just short of positing UFO aliens, but I’m very much afraid that’s coming up next.”
“And meanwhile none of them guesses the truth,” Kyrie said, leaning back.
He nodded. “Or at least what might be the truth,” he said. “You see in what kind of a position this puts me. . . .”
She looked at him across the table, and could well imagine that sort of divided loyalty, that confusion of identities. There were many things she wanted to ask. How many other shifters he’d met. Why he suspected Tom specifically. Instead, she heard herself say, “How did you become a police officer?”
He grinned. “Oh, that was easy. Granddad was one. Dad is one.” Suddenly the grin expanded, becoming the easy smile of the night before. His hand toyed with his silverware on the side of his plate. “If I hadn’t become a police officer, they would think there was something wrong with me. The shifting, they can forgive even if they can’t understand. Not being a policeman? Never.”
It was a large hand, with square fingers. No rings, except for a large, square class ring, and she scolded herself for looking for rings. Yeah. They could get together and raise a litter of kittens. What was she thinking?
Rafiel shrugged. “So, you see . . .”
“And your . . . shifting . . . when did you start?”
He took a deep breath. “It started when I was about twelve. My parents were aware of it first, as I did it in my sleep. They were a little scared, but I was normal otherwise, and how do you go and tell someone your kid . . . well . . .”
Kyrie nodded. “So . . . they aren’t?”
“No. And Dad is retired now, but the first he heard about these corpses he asked if I knew . . .”
“And you think it’s Tom?” Kyrie asked, her hands unaccountably clenched on the side of the table, as if this mattered to her personally.
He shrugged. “Just . . . the shape matches, and I’ve never met another one large enough to actually sever a body in two. But if he was in town that far back, and there were no murders something must have happened three months ago that triggered them. And then you say that he was at work on Wednesday. And on Wednesday we found a body right behind the Three Luck Dragon. Well, actually it was found on Thursday morning, but we think he died around midnight on Wednesday.”
Kyrie thought back. As far as she could tell Tom had been at work and had been much as normal.
“Of course,” Rafiel said. “The time is never exact. There could be a two-hour difference one way or another. And you see, I don’t know any other shifters, any other shape that could just bite a man in half. And how common can a dragon be?”
Kyrie thought of the triad. “There are others . . . like Tom in town.”
“Really?” Rafiel asked. He raised his eyebrows. “I’ve only met, truly met, another one besides you. He was a wolf and was passing through town. Transient. He was brought in for petty theft, and shifted while I was booking him. Fortunately Goldport has a tiny police force. Most officers are part-timers. And I was alone in the room with him at the time. I could . . .. cover things up and talk sense to him. But that was only one I ever talked to. And he was a mess. Drugs, possible mental illness. I’ve . . . smelled others, but I don’t know their shapes.”
“Smelled?” Kyrie asked, aware of his smell so close, just across the table, that reek of masculinity and health and vigor—like the distilled scent of self-confidence.
He looked at her, with the look of a man who tries to evaluate whether someone is playing a joke on him. “Smelled—there is a definite scent to those . . . like us. A slightly metallic smell? An edge?”
Kyrie shook her head. She hadn’t been aware of ever smelling people before. Perhaps because she hadn’t been aware of really shifting shapes before. She thought of people as people, not smells. And yet, as Rafiel mentioned it, she was aware that there was a slight edge in common in his smell and Tom’s and perhaps her own. If their smell had been music, the metallic scent would have been a note, subdued but persistent, in the background. She blinked.
“These other . . . dragons,” he said, lowering his voice on the last word. “Are they part of . . . the Asian community in town?”
“Why do you ask?” Kyrie said.
“Because all the victims were Asian or part Asian,” he said. “That’s why I was so surprised when I saw your . . . when I saw Thomas Ormson in his other form. Though thinking about it, he didn’t look oriental even as . . . a dragon.”
Kyrie shook her head. “Nordic,” she said. “Like what they used to carve on the prow of Viking ships.” She wondered if the Viking figureheads had been drawn from life. And if they’d really existed, all that time, in the past. “But yes, the other dragons are Asian. Tom said they are members of a triad.” She hesitated.
“An organized Chinese crime syndicate?” Rafiel asked. Then added, “I see. Look, I know you feel like you’re betraying him or something. But . . . put yourself in my place. The police will never be able to solve this series of deaths. And I know—or at least I think I know—something that could lead them to the truth. But if I speak, I won’t be believed. And if I demonstrate it, I don’t know . . . I suspect the first few of us who come out to society at large face the charming prospect of a life in the laboratory. I don’t want that. I don’t know anyone who wants that. I’m sure you don’t. But at the same time I want to stop the murders. The people being killed . . .”
He shrugged. “They don’t deserve to die, and we should put a stop to it. If the killers are like us—and there’s a great chance they are—then it’s our responsibility to stop it.” He looked desperately up at her, his expression very intense and not at all like the relaxed image of the day before. “Do you understand what I’m saying at all?”
Kyrie understood. At least intellectually she understood. And suddenly, in a rush, she felt as if she, the orphan, had been adopted into a family, a family that came with obligations, with requirements. She looked at Rafiel’s intense golden eyes, and hoped his smell was not influencing her as she said. “Yes, I see. But you must promise to do nothing against Tom on . . . anything else. Anything beyond the murders. It is not his fault if he is a shifter, and if he weren’t a shifter, none of this would come out about him.”
Rafiel nodded once and leaned forward. His plate was now empty and he pushed it forward and joined his hands on the place where it had been, his whole attitude one of intense attention to her.
She told him what had happened the night before. Her considerations and thoughts and final decision to take Tom home to his apartment. The condition of the apartment. The attack by the triad members.
She could no more stop herself talking than she could stop herself breathing. Her mind was powerless against his masculine scent.
Rafiel nodded. “That would make sense for the deaths we’ve been seeing.” He pulled a notepad out of his pocket and noted down the description of the triad members. “Not that we can do anything about it officially,” he said. “Because if they catch them then they’ll . . . They might very well figure out about us as well, you know.”
Kyrie nodded. The rules of this group to which she belonged despite herself were revealing themselves as complex. If they must be hidden—and they must, because revealing one of them would mean revealing all of them—then, surely, surely, they would have to police their own. Like other secretive communities of what had at the time been considered not quite humans all through history, they would have to take care of their own. Slaves, immigrants, serfs—all had policed themselves, to avoid notice from the outside, as far back as there had been humans in the world.
One way or another. She wondered what that meant. She could understand it to mean nicely or by force. And she wondered if Rafiel Trall understood it.
And looked up to find his intelligent golden eyes trained on her. “You know that means we might have to . . . take care of it on our own,” he said. “I . . . never met any of
us
till a couple of years ago, and I never thought about it. The possibilities of someone going bad, doing something terrible and how the normals would never be able to take care of it and we’d have to step in. I never thought about it. I thought there might be a half a dozen of us in the world . . .”
Kyrie shook her head. “Tom has seen a dozen or so over five years. Not counting the dragon triad, where he thinks there could be hundreds. I think there’s more than half a dozen. I wonder . . .”
“Yes?”
“I wonder how long this has been going on and why no one seems to know about it.”
“I don’t know,” Rafiel said. “When my parents found out, they tried to research. They found legends and stories, poems and songs. And Mom, who reads a lot of scientific stuff, thinks there might be such a thing as . . . migratory genes. People attaching the genes from other species. Going partway there, as it were. But I’ll be damned if that explains mythological species, too. Like dragons. Wonder if there are sphinxes and sea serpents, as well.” He shook his head. “There seem to be a lot of legends about . . . people like us, until magic stopped being believed and science stepped in. I think we’ll have to admit that we are not . . . things of the rational universe. I’m sure Thomas Ormson’s shift violates the rules of conservation of matter and energy.” He frowned, then suddenly grinned, a boyish grin. “Good thing that’s not the sort of law I have to enforce.”
Kyrie nodded. Men and their puns. “I’ve thought the same. But if we exist, if we exist anyway, how come no one has found out? How come one of us hasn’t slipped spectacularly in a public place yet, and been found out?”
“Who says we haven’t?” Rafiel said. “Have you ever heard of cryptozoology?”
“Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster?” she asked, unearthing the word from a long-ago spree on the Internet looking up strange stuff.
Rafiel started to shake his head then shrugged and nodded. “For all I know, they’re of ours too, yes,” he said. “But more than that. Giant panthers in England, the lizard man of Denver, the thylacine in Australia that keeps being seen, years after it’s supposedly extinct. And giant tigers and giant black dogs. All of those. And perhaps,” he sighed, “Bigfoot and Nessie too.” He looked at her. “They’re all seen. They’re all found. It’s just that they’re impossible, see. And the human mind is very good at erasing everything that is not possible. I . . . My mother says that the human mind is an engine designed to order reality.” He paused and frowned. “You have to meet Mom to understand. But if she’s right, then our minds are also designed to reject anything that introduces disorder, anything that goes against the grain.”