Night Shifters (11 page)

Suddenly she understood why he’d started to shift, what the words of Officer Trall would sound like to him. She sighed, heavily. “No one is arresting you. At least not yet.”

“But he
is
blackmailing us. He’s blackmailing you. About the towels in the bathroom. He knows about the blood. And it’s all my fault.”

“Yes,” Kyrie said, wondering if it was blackmail, or what it was, exactly. She remembered the expression in his eyes. Those eyes . . . If it was blackmail, what did he want, exactly? “He knows about the towels because he smelled them.”

“Smelled?”

“He found them by the smell of blood, I’d bet. Before any other policemen got to them. He got to them and bagged them and . . . I presume hid them. You were starting to shift, so you probably missed it, but he lowered his glasses and I could see his eyes.”

“And?” Tom asked.

“He had the same golden eyes as the lion in the parking lot,” she said.

“He is . . . like us?” Tom asked, as his mind tried to adjust to the thought. “He is the lion? How can . . .”

“You know the lion was like us,” Kyrie said.

He heard the annoyed note in her voice. She had slapped him. Hard. He’d almost gone to pieces in front of her. He felt like an idiot. “But, he’s a policeman. He looks . . . he looks well-adjusted. And he traced us . . . And . . . he’s in the police?” He swallowed, aware of sounding far less than rational and grown-up.

She nodded. “Yes. I’m very much afraid he’s in the police.”

“And he’s like us . . .” Tom couldn’t imagine it. How would he hide his shifts? How would he shift? How would he . . . Did his family know? Or didn’t they care? He tried to imagine having parents—a family—who accepted your shifts, who loved you even when you, yourself, weren’t sure you were human.

Kyrie shook her head. For just a moment there was empathy in her look. “I can’t imagine it either,” she said. “I suspect he normally works the night hours, though, just like us. Cops do, too, you know. It’s a nocturnal occupation. So we will probably find some of our kind as cops. It’s easier to control the shifting if you’re awake.”

Tom nodded. The whole thing was that even if you didn’t shift, if you were a shapeshifter you felt more awake—more aware—at night. It was inescapable. So if you wanted to sleep and actually be able to rest, you did it during the day. And therefore, of necessity, you worked nights.

“Speaking of which,” Kyrie said, “sun is coming up soon, and you’re practically falling down on your feet.”

“You’ve been yawning,” he said accusingly.

She looked at him, puzzled, and he realized he’d said it as if he needed to salvage his manhood. While she’d just been . . . telling the truth.

“I’m sure I have,” she said. “It’s late. Come on. You can sleep in the back room.”

Tom pulled his hair back and very much wished he had something to tie it back with. “I really should go,” he said. “The triad dragons are after me and . . .”

“Oh, not that again,” Kyrie said. “We’ve been over it.” And she said it in such a tone of great tiredness that Tom couldn’t answer.

Meekly he followed her back through the hallway, where she opened a linen closet and got out a thin blanket. And then she led him all the way back to the kitchen and opened a door he hadn’t even been able to see, next to the fridge. It was a narrow door, as if designed for very thin people. At the very back of the house, a small room, enclosed all in glass, opened. There were blinds on the windows, which made it not quite like sleeping in a fishbowl. Besides, the backyard was the size of a normal flower bed. Maybe ten feet by ten feet, if that much, and surrounded by tall wooden fences. Not a fence belonging to it, but the fences of other houses that met there.

“Sorry there’s not much of a view,” Kyrie said. “I planted roses out there, to hide the fence, but most of them died in the drought. Only a couple survive and they’re tiny.”

He realized she thought he was looking at the fence in horror, and he managed a smile. “No, no. It’s fine. I just need to sleep . . .”

“Well, this is the love seat. It doesn’t open up, but it’s fairly comfy. I’ve napped on it on occasion.”

Tom felt the sofa reflexively, even as a voice at the back of his mind asked him what exactly he intended to do if he found it lumpy. Go and sleep in a better place? Like, for instance, all the hotels that accepted barefoot men without a dime on them?

He sat down on the sofa and clutched the thin blanket to himself. “Thank you, Kyrie. Thank you.”

She looked surprised. Had he really come across as that much of a prick, that she’d be surprised because he thanked her?

Apparently so, because Kyrie stood there, looking at him, eyebrows raised, as though evaluating a new and strange artifact, before she said, “Goodnight,” and left.

Tom lay down and pulled the blanket over himself. It couldn’t have taken more than ten seconds before he fell asleep and into dreams populated by darkness, pierced by sharp claws and glimmering fangs—and a huge pearl, the size of a grapefruit and glowing like the moonlight at the full.

Kyrie frowned all the way to her room. She told herself that she must get her head examined, she really, really must.

In jerky movements, angrier at herself than she would like to admit, she undressed, throwing her robe over the foot of the bed.

Normally she slept naked. It was a habit she’d picked up since she’d started renting this house. All her life, up till then, she had been staying with someone else, under someone else’s rules—when she was a foster child—or in a communal building, an apartment building where she didn’t want someone to come in attracted by noise, while she was having what she thought of as one of her episodes, and find her naked. In retrospect, it was very foolish of her to think she didn’t actually shift, since the
episodes
usually meant she woke up naked. At least, she told herself, she had learned to remove her clothes fast in the first throes of the shift.

Looking back, she thought it had all been an elaborate game with herself, to keep herself fooled about the nature of the shifting. After all, if she’d wakened with clothes nearby shredded to bits by large claws, she’d have had to think. She’d have had to admit something else was going on, right?

But in her own home she went to sleep naked, so that when she woke up naked she could pretend nothing at all untoward had happened in the night. Dreams, just dreams. She could tell herself that and believe it.

Only now, she stood naked in the middle of her bedroom and felt . . . well, nude. There was a man in the house. A young, attractive, and not particularly wholesome young man.

Okay, so he was in the back room and frankly, from the way he’d been swaying slightly on his feet, he probably wasn’t in any state to be walking around. Not even stumbling around. And there was a locked—she paused and turned the key in the lock—door between them.

But still, she looked at herself in the mirror and she looked distressingly naked. Which meant . . . She blew out a breath, in annoyance at herself, as she scrambled to her dresser, got her loosest T-shirt and a pair of panties, and slipped them on.

What was she thinking? Up till this night she’d never found any reason to like Tom. And what had changed about this night? Well, he might have killed someone. And he was being chased by triads trying to recover something he’d been stupid enough to steal from . . . gangsters.

Yeah. There was a good reason to allow him to sleep in her house. There was a good reason to expose herself to the potential danger of a practically strange—no practically about it; in fact, she knew Tom was strange—man in the house.

She pulled back the covers on the narrow bed pushed up against her wall. The bedroom was barely large enough for the bed and the dresser—both purchased from thrift stores. It would be too small if she had a queensize bed.

She lay down on the mattress—or more accurately, threw herself down on it with the sort of angry fling of the body that a thin thrift-store mattress couldn’t quite take.

She shifted position and flung the covers over herself, refusing to admit she’d bruised something.

There was a reason for Tom to be here. Sure there was. She didn’t want to throw him out into the night, barefoot, tired, and confused.

Only, if she’d caught the drift of Tom’s story right, he’d been surviving on his own, out there for a long time. He was a big man. Well, perhaps on the short side, but definitely well developed and muscular and . . .

No, this was worse than the lion. She turned facedown on the mattress and buried her face on her pillow.

The bedroom was in deep darkness, partly because it was the only room in the entire house that had only one tiny window—very small and high up on the upper corner of the back wall. Now she wondered if the full light of day was near.

What kind of an idiot was she?

Was she now suddenly attracted to hard-luck cases? She’d always laughed at women who came to the diner and, over breakfast with their equally clueless friends, complained about being disappointed by men that, surely, they knew were no good from the beginning. If you picked up with ex-cons, drug addicts, thieves—how could you expect anything good to come of it? Why would they respect you when they’d never respected another human being?

She knew this. So, why would she take this one in? Why? He wasn’t even any good at being bad. He was a mess of trembling jelly between bouts of dangerous behavior.

She remembered him in the parking lot, under the moonlight. Pale skin and muscle-sculpted body, and those eyes . . .

Okay, so he was pretty. Since when was pretty worth all this trouble? The world was full of handsome men who weren’t her problem. Men who would run the first time she turned into a panther.

And there was the problem, and there she came to and stopped. Because for all else that might be said for Tom, he wouldn’t run.

Neither—probably—would Officer Trall. She remembered the disturbing moment when he’d lowered his glasses and fixed her with those recognizable golden eyes that, even in human form, with normal sclera, iris, and pupil, were unmistakable. And he looked just as good in human form.

She threw back the covers.

Again, pretty he might be, but that man was trouble. Pure trouble. He was a shifter, yes, but he was also a police officer. And what did the officer want with her? Why did he want to meet her? She was not so innocent that she didn’t notice—of course she did—that he’d mentioned the bathroom, which meant the paper towels. Was it a threat? Was he blackmailing her? Blackmailing her into what?

She remembered the lion in the parking lot of the Athens—virile and energetic and very, very male.

She bit her lip. She wished she could convince herself that it would take a lot of blackmail to get her to what the Victorians called a fate worse than death. But she doubted it. If Tom hadn’t been there, if he hadn’t pulled her into the car, she very much suspected she would have shifted and . . .

And then there was Tom. His image flickered through her mind, as she tossed her thin blanket and turned first this way, then that. He’d been so gentle, so . . . respectful, when he helped dress her shoulder. Which, by the way, should hurt, shouldn’t it?

She sat up in bed and prodded at her bandaged areas, but nothing hurt. Perhaps the antibiotic cream was also an analgesic. She had a bad habit of buying whatever was on sale without reading it too carefully. Well, just as well it didn’t hurt. She lay down again, and closed her eyes.

But her thoughts went on behind her closed eyelids.

What was she going to do with Tom? Did she have to do anything with Tom? How far was she responsible for him?

She saw his features close at her comment, she saw his lost expression, all pale face and huge, shocked eyes. She saw him in the parking lot, dragon-form, muzzle bloodstained, and in the bathroom of the Athens, all over blood, his long, dark hair caked with it. She saw him in her living room, half-dragon and mostly man, clearly out of control.

What had he meant to do? Attack the officer? Why? For speaking out of turn?

All right. So, Rafiel Trall might have sounded like he was blackmailing her—blackmailing them. But she wasn’t sure he was. There was something to his expression—a softness, a hopefulness . . . that made her doubt that he meant to threaten her. And even if he were. What did Tom mean to do? Eat him? Was he so devoid of any sense of right and wrong? Had no one ever told him you didn’t eat people? Ever?

The bed felt too hard, the blanket too hot, the sheet too wrinkled beneath her tossing body.

She was never aware of the moment at which she fell into a dreamless sleep.

Kyrie woke up with the phone ringing.

The phone was on the dresser, across the room from the bed. The ring itself, seeming to run up and down her nerves like fire, carried her halfway there, still asleep, and she woke up fully with the receiver pressed to her ear, while she heard herself say “Hello” in a sleepy voice.

“Ms. Smith?” the voice on the other side was a masculine purr, dripping with sensuousness that caressed the syllables, making the “Ms.” sound dangerously like “Miss” and “Smith” sound like a compliment, an indent proposition.

She knew it was Rafiel Trall without his announcing himself. She could see him at the other side of the phone, relaxed and seductive masculinity, poise and confidence and that something in his eyes, that something in his expression that said he was very bad for her. In the way that chocolate was bad for you. And all the more irresistible for being bad.

“How may I help you, officer?” she asked, making her voice crispy and official. All business. She had to keep this all business.

“In a lot of ways,” he said. “But right now I just want to ask you a favor.” She could hear him smile, and she couldn’t quite tell how. One of her first jobs, out of high school, had been with a cold-calling telemarketing company. The job hadn’t lasted long, though she’d been surprisingly good at it. Perhaps, she thought now, they could hear the harmonics of the panther in the human voice. And bought. And bought. And were very polite with it.

At that job they’d told her to always smile while she was talking because people on the other side could tell. She’d never believed it till now.