Night Shifters (77 page)

“Yeah, it does,” Kyrie said. And still, in her mind, she saw Tom walking through the storm. How could he survive it? Could he survive it? She heard Dire saying that most of the young shifters died through their own stupidity and she gritted her teeth and pretended that everything was fine, and got orders, and put them on the carousel of spikes on the counter, for Anthony.

More people came in. Probably people who weren’t all that familiar with Colorado, Kyrie thought, and who found it easier to weather the storm in here than alone in whatever tiny apartments they lived in. She kept a smile on her face, and worked as efficiently as she knew how, while Anthony turned out the meals in record time.

She didn’t know how long it had been, when she heard the back door open. She set down the tray and the carafe of coffee on the counter, and ran down the hallway. “Tom,” she started, with some idea of finishing the sentence with “Tom, I was so worried.”

But instead of Tom, it was Conan, coming in. He was a vague shade between blue and lavender. His teeth beat a mad rhythm. His hair was so covered in snow that he might as well have been wearing a powdered wig.

“Where is Tom?” Kyrie asked.

Conan looked up at her, in mute misery. That look made thoughts run through her mind, thoughts she didn’t like at all. There had been a fight and the Great Sky Dragon had killed Tom. After all, she remembered, the creature held it his right to discipline those he deemed to belong to him. Or else . . . or else, Tom had been run over. Or simply collapsed and frozen by the side of the road. “What. Happened. To. Tom?” she asked, her voice slow and controlled, even as she told herself that she would not shift. She would never shift. Not in the diner. Shifting wouldn’t help anything. Conan already looked halfway between frozen and terrified.

He shook his head. “He is fine,” he said, though the words weren’t really easy to understand through his chattering teeth. “He’s . . . he was fine when I left him.”

And then, nerveless, as though his legs had turned to rubber under him and his body wasn’t all that much more solid, Conan sank to his behind just inside the door of the diner. “He made me leave,” he said. “He told me to leave. He made me leave. What if something happens to him?”

“Tom made you leave?”

A headshake. “No. Himself. He told me to leave. Tom said . . . he said he’d kill himself if I stayed with him, and the Grea—Himself said he meant it.”

“Nothing will happen to Tom,” Kyrie said. And bit her lip thinking that unfortunately she was growing as weary of the interference of elder shifters as Tom himself was. “It’s all right. Come on.” She helped him get up—or rather more or less pulled him up, by his arms, by main strength. “Come on. I’ll get you coffee or something. You’re frozen.”

“He’s out there, like that,” Conan said. “In a T-shirt. What if something happens to him?”

“Tom is a big boy,” Kyrie said. “He’ll take care of himself. He used to live on the streets. It’s not like he’s a child whom we must look after.”

She was telling herself that more than she was telling it to Conan. And she was so convincing that she almost believed it. At least for the next two hours, she managed to keep herself from freaking out thinking of Tom out there alone and what might happen to him.

It wasn’t like the city was safe. There were the Ancient Ones, and whatever was throwing people to the sharks, and the Rodent Liberation Front and the triad. In fact, it was an interesting time to be a shifter in Goldport.

She was very close to losing all self-control, shifting, and loping about in the storm, trying to smell Tom out, when the phone rang.

“Hello,” she said. “The George.”

“Kyrie. It’s Rafiel. Is Tom okay?”

And then, before she could control it, before she could remember that Tom was an adult and should be treated as such, all her anxiety came pouring out of her, “I hope so. But, Rafiel, he walked west on Fairfax two and a half hours ago and he hasn’t come back.”

“Uh. Does he have his phone with him?”

“Yes. Well . . . maybe. He should have it. But he isn’t answering.” An hour ago, in a moment of weakness, she’d tried to call three or four times. And another half a dozen times since.

“I see. You two fight?”

“No. Not really. He is just . . . he’s mad at the . . . you know . . .”

“Yeah. I imagine.” There was a pause, as if Rafiel were trying to think through things. “West on Fairfax?”

“Yeah.”

“I see. I tell you what, I’ll drive down the road a while and see if I can find him. What was he wearing?”

“What he was wearing when you last saw him. Jeans and a black T-shirt.” She felt she needed to defend him against stupidity, even though Rafiel hadn’t even paused in a significant manner. “He said he needed to cool off.”

“Oh, yes. And I’m sure he has,” Rafiel said. “Don’t worry, okay? I’ll see if I can find him.”

Rafiel tried to call a couple of times. No answer. Stubborn dragon, he told himself about his friend, with something between annoyance and admiration. That Tom wasn’t answering Kyrie might or might not make sense. She didn’t seem to think they had argued, but Rafiel’s experience of women—his mother, aunts and girl cousins included—told him that just because a woman thought that, it didn’t mean the man she had emphatically not argued with thought the same.

He drove slowly down Fairfax seeing no movement, let alone movement by someone in jeans and a black T-shirt. Tom had black hair. He should have stood out like a sore thumb.

Unless, of course, he’s passed out by the side of the road and covered in a mound of snow, in which case he is pretty much white.
Rafiel felt a tightening in his stomach at the thought. How long could a dragon survive hypothermia? In either form? Oh, okay, so they were hard to kill, but was freezing one of the ways they could be killed? He didn’t know. And it wasn’t as if he was going to go in search of Dante Dire to ask him.

Dante Dire presented the other problem. Because Kyrie hadn’t said anything about looking for two people, one following the other, he presumed that Conan hadn’t gone with Tom. That meant Tom was out there without his human security cam. What if the bad guys had found him first? While Rafiel had got the idea that Dante Dire was cringingly afraid of the Great Sky Dragon, he didn’t get the feeling that he was even vaguely impaired by moral considerations or feelings that he should not kill. Particularly—he suspected—no feelings that he should not kill dragons.

As stupid as it was that Dante Dire, sent to investigate the death of shifters, would end up killing shifters to get them out of his way, Rafiel suspected that this was a
nobody picks on my little brother but me
matter. After all, the Great Sky Dragon, supposed protector of all dragons, had killed at least one of their members in Goldport. The police had processed the body and Rafiel was sure he had been bitten in two in the parking lot of the Chinese restaurant. And the Great Sky Dragon had damn well near killed Tom, too, for all his new interest in protecting him.

Rafiel had now gone all the way to the west end of Fairfax. He turned around and started driving the other way, slowly. A movement from a doorway called his attention. It looked khaki, not black, but considering everything, perhaps with the snow it just looked that way.

Hopeful, he pulled up to the curb, stopped the car, jiggled a little in his seat, just to make sure at least one of his wheels wasn’t on solid ice, parked and set the parking brake. “Hey there,” he called to the indistinct, blurred form in the doorway.

The form stirred. Almost immediately, Rafiel realized it couldn’t be Tom. This was someone older with white hair, probably taller and bulkier than Tom, though that was hard to tell, as he was huddled in the doorway with one of those Mylar space blankets over most of his body save for his shoulders and head. The flash of khaki was from the shoulders, covered in some sort of jacket. He looked at Rafiel from bleary eyes half hidden under unkempt bangs.

“Uh . . .” Rafiel said, jiggling his keys in his pocket. “Do you want a ride to a shelter?”

The eyes widened. “No shelter,” he said, with something very akin to fear. He shook his head and rustled the corner of his shiny silver coverings. “I got my blanket.”

“Oh. All right,” Rafiel said. The man didn’t seem drunk, but he seemed as averse to going into a shelter as, say, Tom or Kyrie or himself would have been. Rafiel sniffed the air, smelling nothing, but he wasn’t sure he would have smelled anything as cold as it was. He would swear his ability to smell had frozen with his nose. Perhaps, he thought, he should come back and smell the man later. And, as the inanity of the thought struck, he snorted. Yeah, because he really needed to find another charity case for Tom. Old Joe wasn’t enough. “Hey,” he said, on impulse. “Did you see a guy go by here? About yea tall, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt? Black hair about shoulder long or a little longer?” How was it possible that he was suddenly so unsure of Tom’s hair length? He almost sighed in exasperation at himself. Yes, Kyrie was far more interesting to look at, but he should have noticed his best male friend’s hair length.

“I told him he needed a jacket,” the old transient man said and nodded.

“Uh. You did? Good call.”

“Yeah, he was going that way,” the man said, pointing west. “If you are looking for him, going that way”—he pointed east, the direction Rafiel was now headed—“won’t help.”

“Right, but see, I went miles on Fairfax and I didn’t—”

“He was looking for Old Joe,” the derelict said. “Him that thinks he can be a gator? I told him last I heard Old Joe was headed for the aquarium. I don’t know what he meant to do at the aquarium, though.”

The aquarium, yeah, that would be like Tom. Let cryptozoology zanies take over the local paper. Let them get pictures of creatures that shouldn’t possibly exist fighting it out in the parking lot of the aquarium. Tom, who shifted into one of the creatures, would immediately feel honor bound to go the aquarium. Why didn’t I think of it before?
“Thanks,” he told the old man. “I’ll . . . get you a coffee or something.”

The man smiled, revealing very brown teeth. “Why, that would be very nice of you.”

Back in the car, Rafiel turned around.
The aquarium. What are the odds?

But it was a few minutes’ drive there, at the most, and it wasn’t as though he didn’t have excuses he could give for being on the grounds. He turned onto Ocean Street and started driving slowly around the parking lot. And caught a flash of a black T-shirt—or mostly black, as it seemed mottled in white—as the person wearing it stepped off the garden path and disappeared from view.

Yeah, Tom,
Rafiel thought, with a mix of concern and annoyance.
Because who else would think that late in the evening, in the middle of a snowstorm, is a good time to go explore the garden of the aquarium?

Still, he wasn’t at all sure and couldn’t do more than hope that it was indeed Tom, as he parked on the street and jumped out. He ran across the garden, ice and—presumably—frozen grass crackling under his feet. “Tom,” he yelled. “Tom.”

And then he hit a patch of ice, and his feet went out from under him.

Tom heard Rafiel’s voice. He’d walked down the slope towards the river, and he’d looked every place possible his phone might have hit the ice. But it was dark, he didn’t have a flashlight and—as far as he could tell—his phone would now be covered by snow, and a lump amid the other lumps resting on the riverbed. While it might be possible to distinguish it from rocks and twigs by its shape, every minute that passed was making it more indistinct, and Tom had no idea how long he’d been looking. He didn’t wear a watch—something Kyrie told him was silly. Normally he could rely on the clock on the wall of The George.

And now, between being cold and the snow falling all around muffling sound, he didn’t know if five minutes had gone by, or an hour. Or more. Sometimes, the phone rang, but even that didn’t make it any easier to find, because it seemed that, just as he had isolated an area the sound might be coming from, the ringing stopped again.

All of this was worsened by the fact that he had to look for the phone from the bank. He didn’t think the river was frozen enough to support him. And while the “river” was probably no more than two feet deep, at most, Tom didn’t want to get his feet and legs wet. He was cold enough.