Night Shifters (49 page)

“Yeah?” he said, into the phone.

“Uh,” Rafiel’s voice said from the other end, as though the phone’s being answered were the last thing he could possibly expect. Then, “I’d like to . . . I need to talk to you and Kyrie, when you have a minute.”

There was that tone in Rafiel’s voice—tight and short—that meant he was on the job. Tom wondered if Rafiel was alone or if he was picking his words carefully to avoid scaring a subordinate. Aloud he said only, “’Ssup?”

“Murder. There’s . . . been . . . well, almost for sure murder. Human bones and stuff at the bottom of the shark tank at the aquarium.”

“And?” After all, solving murders was Rafiel’s job and he usually managed it without a little help from his friends.

“And I smell shifter,” Rafiel said. “All over it.”

“Oh,” Tom said. “We’ll be at The George.” And suddenly he felt exactly like a man in the path of an oncoming train.

His dreams had been full of a nightmare about some ancient menace; the Great Sky Dragon had spoken in his mind; and now there was murder, with shifter involvement.

Was the shifter a murderer or the victim? Either way, it could make Tom’s life more of a mess than it already was.

“Don’t shift! Don’t shift! Don’t shift!” Kyrie told herself. But she wasn’t at all sure she was listening, and she kept looking anxiously at her hands, clenched tight on the wheel. Her violet nail polish was cracked and peeled from her run-in with the bathroom door, so it was hard to tell whether the nails were lengthening into claws or not. Part of the reason she kept her nails varnished was to make sure that she saw the first signs of her nails lengthening into claws. Today that wouldn’t work.

Outside the window, in the palm of visibility beyond the windshield, white snowflakes swirled. Past that, the flakes became a wall of white, seemingly streaming sideways, shimmering. Somewhere out there, in the nebulous distance, there were twin glimmers of dazzling whiteness, which were the only indications Kyrie had that the headlights of her tiny car were on.

“Maybe we should have walked,” Tom said. He shuffled in his seat and leaned close to the snow-covered windshield, as though he could lend her extra vision.

Kyrie gritted her teeth. Maybe they should have, except that the three steps they’d taken on the driveway, their feet had gone out from under them, and they’d only remained upright by holding onto the car. From which point getting in the car had seemed a given. She slowed down—which mostly meant defaulting to the fractional amount of sliding the car seemed to do all on its own—and twisted up her windshield wipers’ knob, not that it did much good.

“How can you see?” Tom asked.

“I can’t,” she said, just as a sudden gust of wind cleared the space ahead enough for her to see they were at the intersection of their street and the next perpendicular one. And that a massive, red SUV was headed for them at speed.

Don’t shift, don’t shift, don’t shift,
Kyrie thought, as a mantra, even as she felt her whole body clench and her muscles attempt to change shapes beneath her skin, to take the form of a panther.
Don’t shift, don’t shift, don’t shift,
as she struggled to keep her breathing even, and bit into her lower lip with teeth that weren’t getting any longer, not at all, not even a little bit. She maneuvered quickly with a tire up on the sidewalk, tilting crazily around the corner, even as the SUV went by them and buried them in a shower of slush. Bits of ice rattled against roof and windows.

A moan from Tom reminded her she wasn’t the only one worried about panic setting off a shape-shift reaction. “Perhaps,” he said, in the voice of a man working very hard to control himself. “I should get out and . . . fly?”

“What? Shift twice without eating? First thing in the morning? And the second time after getting hurt?” she said, and on that, as he moaned again, she realized she’d said the wrong thing. Shifting shapes demanded a lot of energy and, for some reason, it set off a desperate craving for protein. So did the lightning-fast healing of shifters. All Tom had eaten since shifting was half a dozen cookies. And there was no protein at all around. Except, of course, her. She wasn’t about to volunteer. And she knew Tom would rather die than eat a person, much less her.

She pushed the gas, taking advantage of a momentary break in the storm that allowed her to see a major crossroads ahead. Too late, she saw the light was red, but she was sliding through the intersection on the power of her momentum and slamming on the brakes only caused her to fishtail wildly and finally pivot halfway through to the left. Fortunately this turned the car right onto Fairfax, where she was supposed to be. Sliding, she pressed the gas cautiously. Their shifting position caused the snow to seem to shift directions, so that she could now see—more or less—out her front window, but nothing on the side.

I’ll never find The George,
she thought to herself, and glared at her nails telling them they weren’t becoming claws, no they weren’t,
not even a little bit
.

A sudden dazzling purple light to the left made her breathe in relief and confusion. The George’s sign was still lit. Thank heavens. Anthony mustn’t have closed yet, which meant, of course, that lights and heat would still be on, and less trouble than turning them on again. It also made the diner easier to find.

She brought the car to a minimally-sliding, almost-complete stop and took a deep breath. Normally, turning left into the parking lot of The George from Fairfax involved taking your life in your own hands. Fairfax was a four-lane road, the main east-west artery of Goldport, and it was heavily traveled all the time. In addition, mistimed traffic lights ensured there was no break in the two lanes of traffic across which you must cut to make it into the parking lot.

Today, it involved another kind of risk. She couldn’t see at all through the storm, to find out if any traffic was oncoming. Just white blankness. True, there were very few vehicles out, but she’d managed to almost run into two of those few on the way here. Kyrie took a deep breath. There was nothing for it but to turn. And she wasn’t going to shift.
Not at all
.

She turned the wheel, fully expecting to go into a spin, but the tires grabbed onto some bit of yet unfrozen pavement and propelled them in a queasy slide-lurch across the other lanes of the road and up a gentle ramp into the parking lot.

The snow didn’t allow her to see any other cars in the parking lot, and Kyrie didn’t care. Bordered by the blind, windowless wall of a bed-and-breakfast and a warehouse, the parking lot gave on to the back door of The George and, through two outlets, to Pride and Fairfax Streets both. Right now, she waited until the car stopped sliding, then put it in park and pulled the parking brake, and leaned over the wheel, breathing deeply.
You’re safe, you’re safe. Don’t shift.
There was no point even trying to find parking spots in this mess.

When her racing heart had calmed down, she lifted her head and saw the parking lot—as much as
could
be seen. Drifting snow spider-webbed by the light of two street lamps and the purple glare from the diner’s back sign obscured everything save for the two large supply vans parked in the middle of the lot. She looked to the passenger side of the car, where Tom was blinking and, she suspected, had just opened his eyes after calming himself.

“We should really—” Kyrie started and stopped. Through the snow she’d glimpsed something, half seen. She thought it was . . . but it couldn’t be. Surely . . .

“Was that,” Tom said, his voice small, “a dragon’s wing?”

“Go inside,” Tom said, as he glimpsed the wing again, through the multiplying flakes. “It’s a red wing. It’s . . .” He didn’t say it. He couldn’t quite assemble words.

His brain, still fogged from his quick shift into dragon and back, still laboring under the guilt of what he’d done to the bathroom—let alone the terror of the precipitous drive here, which had felt less like driving than tumbling down a chute—could not manage to describe the wing. But he was sure, from his two brief glimpses, that it was a Chinese dragon. An Asian dragon like the Great Sky Dragon and his cohorts.

Feeling for the door handle with half-frozen, still aching fingers, Tom managed to grasp it and throw the door open against resistance of what he hoped was stiff wind, and not a dragon tail or claw, as he yelled over the howling storm at Kyrie. “Go inside. I’ll deal with it.”

He plunged out of the car, his hair and his unzipped black leather jacket whipping about in the howling storm, just in time for his feet to go out from under him, and to reach, blindly, for the car door for support, and bring himself upright, and stare into . . .

He was big and red. No. As he blinked to keep his eyes from freezing, he thought he wasn’t that big. Smaller than Tom himself in dragon form. But he was also horribly familiar—more familiar as Tom focused on the details and noted that the dragon’s front left paw was much smaller than the other. He was . . . Red Dragon. Not only was he was one of the Great Sky Dragon’s cohorts, but when Tom had last seen him there had been a big battle, and Red Dragon had ended with his arm ripped out at the roots. Or rather, Tom had ripped Red Dragon’s arm off, then used it to beat Red Dragon with.

Tom knew—from experience—that his kind was hard to kill. But this was a particular foe he’d never thought to see again; one he was sure had more reasons for vendetta against him than anyone else alive.

He felt his throat close and the panic he’d—barely—managed to control in the car surged through his body like electric current, seeking grounding. Not finding it, it twisted in a sparkle through his flesh. He felt his bruised, battered limbs wrench, and his body bend, and a hollow cough echoed through his throat mingled with a scream of pain that he could no longer keep back. His mouth opened, and he swallowed an aspiration of snow, cold and suffocating. He knew, absolutely knew, that if he shifted he would attack Red Dragon and probably try to eat him. He was
that
protein-starved. A protein-starved Tom ate uncooked meat and whatever else he could get his hands on. A protein-starved dragon would hunt live prey.

“Run,” he told Kyrie with what was left of his human mind and his human voice, already sounding slurpy and hissy as his teeth shifted position. “Run inside, Kyrie.”

He could just tell in the periphery of his beclouded vision that she was not obeying. Not even considering it, and he wondered if his voice had already changed too much. If perhaps she couldn’t understand him. His body twisted again, the pain of shifting unbearable on his bruised flesh and caked bones, and he kept his eyes on the other dragon, in case he should have any ideas of flaming or striking. Dragons were hard to kill but not impossible. This Tom knew. If you severed the head from the rest of the body, if you divided the body in two. If you incinerated the body. Possibly if you destroyed the brain. Those deaths even a dragon could not overcome.

Tom had to think of how to inflict them on his foe, and he had to protect himself from them. He felt his fingers lengthen into claws and—

“No,” it was Kyrie’s voice, decisive sounding. And Kyrie—slim, unshifted, very human Kyrie—stood between the two dragons, her dark blue ski jacket making her just slightly bulkier than normal as she yelled at both of them. “No. You’re not going to change, Tom. Deep breaths. I’m not having you pass out or worse when you shift. Don’t you dare.”

There had been a time when Tom had sought out cures for his condition. He’d tried to prevent his shifting with illegal drugs and with will power, with perfect diet and with lack of sleep. He’d visited places where people said native tribes had once worshiped. He’d taken yoga and tried to meditate. None of it had worked.

In times of stress, or when the moon was just right, causing some change in the tides of his being; when panic or excitement overcame him, he would change. And he couldn’t control it, any more than a human being can stop sneezing by wishing to stop. But Kyrie standing in front of him and saying “no” tore to the very center of his being and stopped the already started process.

He groaned as he felt his muscles return to their normal position, his bones resume proper human shape. In this state, it was like being filleted, his body sliced by a thousand sharp knives, but it was needed and he willed it to happen.