Gentleman Takes a Chance (37 page)

"Not here you don't have to find one," Kyrie said, sternly. She felt very angry. In fact she felt as though she could throw lightning bolts out of her eyes, she was so mad. "We already have the Great Sky Dragon to deal with. We have some reporter taking pictures of our shifted forms. We have the Rodent Liberation—"

"What?" Dante asked, his eyes very intent.

"Rodent Liberation Front. They—"

"No. The reporter part."

"Oh." Kyrie shrugged. "Front page of the
Weekly Inquirer
this morning."

He glared at her. "You let a reporter photograph you
shifting
?"

"No," she said. "We didn't let . . . she came to the diner, she—" Kyrie stopped short of saying that Keith had brought her. She didn't even know why, but her tongue just stopped short of it, as though a red light had gone on in her mind. "We found she'd taken pictures of Tom shifted. And Conan too." She paused and tried to bite her tongue, but it wouldn't stay still. "They were going to my rescue when you . . . were threatening me."

Dante Dire glared at her. He threw his head back. "I can't believe," he said, "that you thought you needed their help. I can't believe they are so foolish as to allow themselves to be photographed. And I can't believe that dragons—dragons!—would shift where they could be seen. This is all a big muddle, and I will end up having to sort it out."

Kyrie, who felt weirdly grateful he had at least moved on from demanding that she choose a sacrificial victim for him to turn in to the Ancient Ones, started telling him not only didn't he have to sort it out, but this had nothing to do with him. "I don't think you—"

"Kyrie?" Tom had opened the door of the diner and stood looking at her and Dire. He nodded to Dire, as if he were a casual acquaintance and not an ancient horror who could destroy them all. "I wonder if you could come back from break," he said.

"Yes. Yes, of course," Kyrie said, walking away from Dire and practically scurrying towards the open door. "Of course."

She followed Tom in, and half expected to hear Dire come in behind them, but instead she heard something like a soft chuckle behind her. She didn't turn. She didn't look.

She followed Tom all the way past the areas of the counter that customers sat at. All the way to the cooking area, at the other end.

He smiled a little at her, as he turned to put a few burgers on the grill.

"Look, I didn't want to talk to him, but I thought—"

"That you didn't trust him out there, lurking, scaring our customers," Tom said. He smiled over his shoulder. "I got that. I was worried too."

"Yeah. He . . . was saying more of the same. That he needed to . . . to throw someone to the Ancient Ones."

"Or to the wolves," Tom said.

"Metaphorically," Kyrie said. "Look, it's just . . ."

"I know. I just went to rescue you. I wasn't sure you would get rid of him otherwise."

"Thank you," she said. And wondered if Tom had seen the dire wolf before she had, if he'd made plans . . . This wasn't the time to ask him. "Maybe you should go and get some sleep. I could get Anthony in early. And that would get you here for . . . for a little while longer than I am . . . You know . . . so we . . . so the diner is not without us."

The look he gave her over his shoulder was worried, this time. "Perhaps that would be better, yes," he said.

And she knew that he had understood what she couldn't explain. That she felt responsible for the customers in the diner. That a lot more of them than John Wagner and the mouse-teacher might be shifters. And that Dire might very well decide on one of them as a scapegoat. And she couldn't live with it.

Rafiel parked behind the diner, and pulled out his cell phone. "Yeah, McKnight?" as soon as McKnight answered.

"Yeah?" McKnight answered, cautiously.

"Two things. Look up any records for John Wagner and also . . . I don't know how you can do this, but . . ." He reasoned quickly that, of course, Dante Dire might have used another name. But he couldn't fly, so he presumably had to use some means of transport—airplanes. Even if private. And he would rent places. And while he could use another name, it was Rafiel's guess that most people didn't change all that often. Most shifters, either. They got comfy with a name and kept it, he guessed. "Check up on Dante Dire," he said. "Particularly anything having to do with Hawaii, and also when he might have come to town. Any place in Colorado he might have been."

"Dante . . . ?"

"Dante Dire," Rafiel spelled it.

"Who . . . ?"

"Just someone who's been around a lot, and I wonder . . ." He had a moment of fear. What if McKnight stumbled on something that—He stopped. That what? Tipped him to the fact that there were shapeshifters? Not likely. Rafiel suspected that for the average person it would take having their noses rubbed in it. In fact, they would have tumbled on to what was happening long ago if it weren't so. "He's just suspicious," he said. "Nothing definite, so don't break any laws, but check up on him, okay?"

There was a sound from the other side that might have been assent, and Rafiel said, "Right. I'll call back." And hung up. He cut his ignition and got out of the truck. Halfway through stepping down, he saw something through the snow.

He would never be able to swear to what it was. A dog, a bear, something rounding the building, or just—perhaps—a shadow. But he thought Dire, and having thought it, he followed the suspicious shadow around the building to the front.

And stopped, because in front of the building, leaning against the lamppost was the blond girl from the newspaper. There was something odd about her, but he couldn't put his finger on it, and he said, "I beg your pardon, you—"

And then it hit him. His human nose, not as sharp as his lion nose, was nonetheless acute enough to catch the smell of blood—the smell of death. Closer, closer, he saw that the girl was pale, dead—her eyes staring unseeing straight ahead. But she'd been propped up against the lamppost, and her clothes had been put back on. And she couldn't have been dead very long, because there was a steady drip-drip-drip of blood down the front of her clothes, from beneath her ski jacket.

For a moment he stood horrified, but his mind was working, behind it all. Dire. He was sure Dire was involved. Oh, he couldn't have done it now. No way that could have happened. But he had to be involved—somehow.

In his mind it all added up. Dante had killed the girl earlier, then . . . Then led him here. Like a gigantic joke. A joke perpetrated by an unfeeling, uncaring, ancient creature.

Like the shark murders—it would be just Dire's idea of a joke, to set it up, somehow, so that he could push into the tank guys who had been dallying with one of the female employees. The first time they'd seen him was around the aquarium. Perhaps he had a way in all along. Why shouldn't he? Rafiel had managed to get keys easily enough. And it would amuse some
thing
like Dire to create the impression of a shark shifter and see how they reacted.

With numbed fingers, Rafiel had—somehow—retrieved his phone from inside his jacket. He hit the redial button, staring at the corpse of the blond girl. "McKnight. Send the meat wagon and . . . and come along. There's been a . . . death. In front of The George. And get someone to check the visitor book at the aquarium. Find out if Dante Dire was there . . . anytime in the last month."

Tom woke up with the phone ringing, and a panicked Notty digging needle-sharp claws into his underarm, where he'd been nestling.

"Ow," he said, grabbing the furry body blindly in his right hand, then looking for the phone on the bedside table with his left. One of the good things of this split sleeping schedule was that he got the bed when Kyrie wasn't here. And her pillow still smelled like her, too.

"Yeah," he said, turning on the phone, and fully expecting it to be Kyrie telling him about some emergency at the diner. Before he heard any sound from the other side of the phone, he'd already covered the possibles in his mind. She might have run out of paper napkins. Or it could be the beef. Did he order more beef? Perhaps it was the dishwasher flaking again. They needed to buy a new one soon. "Yeah?"

"Oh, damn," Rafiel's voice. "Damn, damn, damn."

Tom sat up, setting Notty down beside him on the bed. "What?" His relations with Rafiel had been less than cordial at one point, but even back then, Rafiel had never called him for the purpose of cursing at him.

"Tom?" Rafiel said, as if surprised to hear him.

"You called me."

There was a silence on the other side, a silence during which Rafiel seemed to be taking several deep breaths. "Oh, shit, Tom, we're in so much trouble."

"What happened?" Tom said, jumping out of the bed and looking around for his clothes. He'd showered before going to bed, so he could probably skip it this time. Truth be told he had a shower problem—he enjoyed so much being able to shower when he pleased that he had a lot of showers even when not shifting back and forth. Unfortunately they did not have support groups for the hygiene-dependent. "Rafiel, what happened?" he repeated when no answer came.

"We found . . . a corpse," Rafiel's voice was distant, like he was holding the phone away from his mouth, or perhaps speaking in a tiny voice. "Just outside the diner. I'm calling you while McKnight is talking to Kyrie."

"Outside the diner!" Tom said. "In the parking lot again?"

"No, corner of Pride and Fairfax. By the lamppost. She was . . . propped up. Leaning against the post . . ."

"She?" Tom's mind went immediately to the woman whom Rafiel had found, the woman who was a mouse shifter.

"The . . . Summer Avenir. The reporter for the paper? The one that Keith talked to or brought in?"

"The one that published dragon pictures?"

"Yeah, we're going to have to talk to Conan. And the . . . whoever the triad members are in this area."

"She was killed by a dragon?" Tom asked.

"Well, she was killed by something with really big teeth," Rafiel said, in the tone of a man who has come to his rope's end and still has quite a bit to climb. "And then she was propped up. This is putting a damper on our normal story of attacks by wild animals, you know? It's clear"—he took a deep breath—"very clear it was one of us." He lowered his voice. "I can smell shifter all over the scene, still. I thought I'd seen Dire before, but . . . I don't know."

Tom moaned and dropped onto the bed, to put his socks on. His feet and in fact all his wounds from the encounter with the dire wolf were completely healed and the very faint scars would soon vanish. "We must make sure he stops."

"Who?" Rafiel said.

"Dire."

"Uh . . . yeah. I'd say that's a given. The question is how."

"I don't know," Tom said.

"You could"—Rafiel cleared his throat—"talk to the Great Sky Dragon."

Tom stopped, his hand on his sock, his mouth on the verge of uttering an absolute no. Instead, he took a deep breath. "You must see we can't, Rafiel. You must see we
can't
."

"Why not? If they are rival organizations, both ancient, why can't you talk to the Great Sky Dragon and make him deal with Dire? I mean, I know that Dire said he had a non-aggression pact with the triad, but it doesn't seem to me as if that pact is much good. How could it be? Otherwise he wouldn't have gone through all that trouble to make sure the triad knew he didn't intend to kill you."

Tom heard himself make a sound that was half annoyance and half anger. "I still can't ask for their help, Rafiel. If we ask for the help of a criminal organization, how can we, in the future, hold ourselves able to stop them? If we ask for the help of an organization that deals in drugs, that kills, that basically seems to view other humans—what did Dire call them?—ephemerals, as mere cattle to be milked, then how can we hope to stand for justice among our kind? Or anywhere?"

There was a long silence. Tom had the impression that Rafiel was running several arguments through his own head and discarding them just as fast as he thought them up. Finally he made a sound somewhere between a huff and a sigh. "Tom, we can't be so pure as the driven snow. I understand what you're saying. And standing for justice is very well—don't get me wrong. I'm as fond of graphic novels as Keith is. And justice and truth and all that, but Tom . . . I'm afraid he's going to kill one of us. I don't even know, you know . . . if he might not have set up the aquarium murders. He's . . . cunning, and he has an . . . odd sense of humor. Look at how he conned Kyrie into going to the house. At any point he could turn and decide to hold one of us—or all of us—responsible for those deaths and just kill us." Pause. "You know, it's quite likely it was him who killed this woman, without so much as a thought."

"Well, she did publish pictures of dragons in the newspaper," Tom said.

"But it could have been Photoshop. I mean, even if she had caught you mid-shifting, do you think that it couldn't be Photoshop? No one will take it seriously. Look at all the pictures of the alien that the tabloids keep following up on and publish. Do you believe he exists?"

"No," Tom said. "And no, I don't think anyone paid undue attention to the pictures. But they are pictures of our kind and . . . well . . . Dire is very old. At least assuming it was him. Though, frankly, the Great Sky Dragon is very old too, and I don't think any of his younger subordinates would have dared point out to him that times have changed."

"No," Rafiel said. "I'm sure they wouldn't. So . . . they killed this young woman. Without a thought. Because she was . . . an ephemeral."

"No, because she was an ephemeral they thought was threatening shifters." Tom found his mind going down the dangerous path that he knew these people's minds must take every time. He said matter of factly, "Think of it from their perspective, how it must have been throughout history. The discovery of a shifter would lead to a hunt for others. Death was always the end. Of course they would kill anyone that was a remote threat."

"Of course? You sound as if you approve."

"No. Understanding is not approving. There is a qualitative difference." He felt suddenly very tired. "You know, when I was on the streets, they had all these programs where you were supposed to mingle with the other runaways and empathize and understand them. Sometimes that's what you had to do for a meal. And the counselors always seemed to think that if you understood someone, you'd like them . . . and you know? It's not true. Sometimes the more you talk to a teenage habitual liar and drug pusher, the less you like them. But . . . but I do understand how they got to be the way they are. And at the same time . . ." He took a deep breath. "I understand how we could go that way. From the best of motives. Protecting ourselves and our friends. I understand how we could start deciding that . . . killing the occasional ephemeral meant nothing. Or even that we should kill a few every now and then, out of the blue, to keep the other ones in fear. I understand them, Rafiel. And it scares me. That's another reason not to ask for the Great Sky Dragon's help. That, and I'd like to continue being able to call my soul my own."