Night Shifters (35 page)

“And all shifters smell alike?” Keith asked. “Regardless of species?”

Rafiel nodded.

“So, perhaps the gift of the dead corpse has to smell like a shifter?”

“It’s possible,” Rafiel said. “We don’t have enough to go on, but there are definite possibilities. Just the fact that it’s a shifter couple is interesting. I’d imagine the odds against it are enormous, and I wonder how long they’ve been a couple.”

“Probably about a month,” Tom said. “Since that’s when you started noticing the pattern.”

“Good job, Mr. Ormson. You might have a future in law enforcement,” Rafiel said.

The
Mr. Ormson
was clearly intended to be a teasing remark, and Tom was about to answer in kind, but he thought of his father. If he was in the bathroom, trying to stay out of their way, Tom didn’t want to call the others’ attention to his absence. Because if he did, and it was nothing, he was just going to sound totally paranoid. On the other hand . . . On the other hand . . . If he didn’t call their attention, and his father had gone to the triad . . .

Tom got up, carrying his cup of coffee, as if he were going to get a refill.

“So I think on the matter of the beetles, the best thing really would be to look them up in the Natural History Museum,” Keith said. “See if they have stuff about those beetles’ habits, then see what helps. And then we have the matter of the Pearl of Heaven.”

But Tom had reached the little alcove before the bathroom, the area with the sink and the coffeemaker and cups. Tom frowned at it, because it had no articles of personal hygiene, only one of those kits of horrible toothbrush with toothpaste already on that hotels gave guests who forgot their toiletries. And Tom couldn’t believe that his father—of all people—would have forgotten his toiletries.

The door to the bathroom was closed, but not enough for the latch to catch. Tom reached over, and slid it open with his foot, slowly. No one.

There could be a perfectly natural explanation. There should be a perfectly natural explanation. Tom was sure of it. But his heart was beating up near his throat, his mouth felt dry, and his hands shook. He put the coffee cup on the counter, very carefully, and then walked out, feeling light-headed.

Had he really believed his father cared? Had the thing with remembering how Tom liked his coffee been enough to make Tom believe his father gave a damn? He must really be starved for affection, if he’d believe his father could be more than a cold and calculating bastard.

He walked outside to the bedroom, feeling as if his legs would give out under him. His father had gone to the triad. Was probably, even now, making some plan to deliver Tom to the triad. And Tom didn’t want to be tortured again. Plus, they would probably be even more upset now, considering he’d just been the cause of death of a number of their affiliates.

“We should just leave it on some public place,” Keith said. “Like we left the car. And get the hell out of dodge. Let the triad feel it and go get it.”

Tom tried to shape his mouth to explain that his father had left, that he’d gone to denounce them—to denounce Tom—to the triad. But the betrayal was so monstrous that he couldn’t find the words.

And then he heard the key slide into the lock, and he turned, barely staying human, poised at the verge of shifting . . .

And his father came in, alone, carrying two very large bags with the name and the logo of one of the stores in the lobby. And another smaller bag, with the name of another of the lobby stores. One that specialized in candy and snacks.

They faced each other, silently, and his father looked so startled, so shocked, that Tom wondered if he’d started to shift already.

“I’m sorry,” his father said. “Was I needed? You guys seemed to be talking about things I didn’t understand and I thought I’d get some clothes and a comb, since I left without any of that.” He put the larger bags on the bed, then opened the small bag and fished out a red box tied with a gold ribbon. “I thought you might like these, Tom.”

Nuts with chocolate and his favorite brand. Okay, this was becoming ridiculous. His father might have kicked him out of the house at sixteen, and he might know next to nothing about Tom’s life since then, but, apparently, it was a point of pride that he remembered what Tom liked to eat and drink.

There was really no response for it, though, and Tom, no longer ravenously hungry, still felt peckish of sorts. Besides, this was a hideously expensive brand of chocolates and he hadn’t been able to afford it in years.

While he was tearing the ribbon, he saw his father open a bigger assortment of different types and set it on the side table. “For you guys, since none of you look like you’ve slept enough.”

Tom noticed that Kyrie’s eyes widened and that her hand went out for a dark chocolate truffle. He would have to remember that. Forget dead bodies. Any female with even a bit of Homo sapiens in her was going to go for the chocolates.

To change subject, and disguise his attention to her every action—and also how scared he’d been at his father’s absence—Tom looked at his father and managed to say in a voice almost devoid of hostility, “I wonder if you could talk to us about the triad,” he said. “How you came to be here, I mean. And how they got you to come here.”

“The Great Sky Dragon kidnaped me from my office,” Tom’s father said. He dipped into the common box, too, and got a nut chocolate also. It was one of the tastes they shared. “He picked me up and told me that my son was my responsibility and he was going to bring me here, and I could find you and the Pearl, after which he’d take me back to New York. He made it clear I wasn’t to return until I’d found them their Pearl. Tom, why did you take it?”

Tom shrugged. He’d tried to explain this before, and was getting tired of explaining. Particularly because the idea seemed really stupid now, and also because he was starting to realize what he’d searched for in the Pearl was what he’d found with Kyrie and even with the guys—acceptance, caring for him, giving a damn if he lived or died.

Instead, he said, “Because hard drugs weren’t working for me.” And seeing his father look shocked, Tom smiled. “Because the Pearl made me feel loved and accepted and I hadn’t felt that since . . . In a long time.”

His father had gone slightly red, and was looking at Tom as though evaluating something. “So,” he said, “do you still need it?”

Tom shook his head. “No. I told the . . . them.” He gestured toward Keith and Rafiel. “I told them that I would give it back, if I could just figure out how to do it. I haven’t really been able to do that. Not recently.”

“What do you mean?” Edward asked.

“I mean that if I gave it back to them, they’d kill me. They made it very clear they didn’t take kindly that I’d stolen it. It’s their . . . cultic object or something. They don’t like the idea that a stranger grabbed it. I think they’ll feel the stranger must be killed. Considering what they did to me when they captured me . . .”

“Okay,” Edward said, very calmly. “So, how about I take the Pearl back?”

Rafiel choked on his chocolate. “Not a good thing,” he said. “Because if you do that, then I suspect they’ll kill you. The whole thing they said about you being responsible for Tom?”

“Okay,” Keith said. “I’ve already said it, but you guys were out of the room. I think the easiest thing is for us to take it somewhere public and leave it. Yeah, they might still come after Tom in search of revenge, but there is at least a chance that after the massive ass-whooping of last night, they would leave him alone as being way too much trouble to discipline.”

“Well . . .” Tom said. “Yes, it’s possible.” It wasn’t probable. And it wasn’t the plan he would have picked, if he had any other semi-sane choice. But he didn’t think he did, and leaving the Pearl somewhere public and running beat his plan to keep hiding it and running from the triad.

“You could leave it in front of the triad center here in town,” Edward Ormson said. “You could put it at the door, in a bucket of water. Wait till the bucket dries. By the time the water dries and they feel it—if we hide it a little—we’ll all be out of town.”

Tom looked up. “Out of town?”

“You could come back home,” his father said, suddenly animated. “Maybe go to college.” He looked around at the rest of them. “And I’d arrange for the other two here to go wherever they want to go. College? Move and a business? Just say it. I assume Officer Trall would be safe, by virtue of his position?”

Tom could feel his jaw set. “The only home I’ve ever known . . .” he said. There was the thought that Kyrie might want to go to college, but he didn’t think she wanted to go at his father’s charity.
He
didn’t want his father’s charity. “The only home I’ve ever known burned a few days ago. I’ll have to find some other place to live.”

His father looked away and there was a silence from everyone else for a moment. “Anyway,” Tom said, “leaving the Pearl somewhere and letting them know later is the best plan I’ve heard, Keith. Perhaps leave it in a bucket of water and call them though, instead of leaving it in the open and letting them sense it. We don’t know if there are other dragons like me around and getting it stolen again would be a pain. They’d only come after me again.”

“Yeah,” Rafiel said. “So . . . where did you hide the Pearl and how much trouble do we need to go through to retrieve it?”

Tom did a fast calculation in his head. He wasn’t sure of Rafiel or his father yet. Though, sadly, he was more sure of Rafiel than his father. Rafiel had at least fought against the triad dragons.

But he’d misjudged his father once. He looked sidelong at his father, and read discomfort and understanding in his eyes, as if he were completely sure Tom wouldn’t trust him, and understood it too. As well he should. And yet . . . Tom was going to have to take the risk at some point. Might as well start.

“It’s in the toilet tank at the Athens,” Tom said. “The ladies’ room. It has a huge toilet tank, the old-fashioned kind, so I just put it in there.”

Kyrie’s eyes grew huge. “What if the tank had stopped?” she asked. “What if . . .”

He shrugged. “It seemed fairly sturdy. Besides, I wrapped the Pearl in dark cloth, before I put it in. You know the light isn’t very good there. If someone looked in there, as ancient as the tank is, they’d just think there was some type of old-fashioned flushing mechanism that they didn’t understand.”

“And it’s been there?” Rafiel asked. “These six months?”

Tom nodded.

“Have you considered,” Rafiel said, “that maybe it’s the Pearl that’s attracting people to the Athens and making them feel at home there?”

“I don’t think so,” Tom said. “If I can’t feel it when it’s submerged, if the triad dragons can’t feel it while it’s submerged, then how should strangers?”

“Besides,” Kyrie said, “that feeling was there before. It was there a good six months before that. I felt . . . I know this is going to sound very strange, but I felt almost called to Goldport. Like I had to come here. And once I got here, I had to go to the Athens. Then I saw the wanted sign and I applied.”

Rafiel fidgeted. “I developed the habit of going to the Athens for breakfast about a year ago too. And it’s not near my house. I just felt . . . called to go there. And I felt okay once I was there.”

Tom sighed. “I came to the Athens a few times for meals, before Frank noticed me. He asked if I wanted a job. I didn’t want to take a job under false pretenses, so I told him the truth. That I was homeless, that I hadn’t had a fixed address for a long time, that I’d never had a full-time job and that I had a drug habit I was working on kicking. He told me as long as I kept clean once he’d hired me, he didn’t mind any of those. . . . What’s weird is that I’d already stopped in Goldport, and I had no idea why. It was like something in my subconscious had called me here, and to the Athens.”

“Aha,” Keith said. “Beetles. Mr. Ormson, is your computer connected to the Internet, and can I use it?”

Tom’s father nodded. “Sure. Why?”

“I want to search the Natural History Museum. They have a lot of their collections online now. And they have a bunch of links to other scientific institutions.”

“What do you mean by
aha beetles
?” Tom asked.

“Well . . .” Keith blushed. “You see, I like reading weird things.”

“You told us,” Kyrie said. “Comics and SF.”

“Eh. Those are actually the sanest things I read. I also read science books. For fun. As I said, biology is fascinating, particularly insects. I seem to remember that certain beetles can put down pheromones that attract other beetles and their particular type of prey to their environment.” He shrugged, blushing to the eyes. “So I think we should find out if the beetle Kyrie says looks like the shifter beetles is one of those.”

“Makes sense,” Rafiel said.

“Let me help you navigate the computer,” Tom’s father said, “in just a moment. Meanwhile . . . Tom, I don’t mean . . . Well, you have blood on your face and your hair, and I thought . . .” He’d walked to the bed and pulled up one of bags. “I don’t think you’ve changed pants size, and I just got you XL shirts and that. I grabbed you some socks and underwear too. The store here only has designer clothing, but I didn’t want to go outside and look for another store.”

Clothes? His father had got him clothes? Tom’s first impulse was to say no and scowl. But if he was trying to keep his purity from his father’s gifts, he was a little late. While the others talked, he’d been happily munching away on his chocolate with nuts. And the box was empty. Besides, he hated wearing jeans without underwear; the leather boots, without socks, were rubbing his feet raw; and if he was to have to go out soon, then he would have to shower.

So instead of his planned heated denial, he said, “Fine. I’ll only be a minute. If anyone needs my opinion on anything, call me.”

He grabbed the bag from the bed and took it with him to the little alcove before the bedroom. It weighed far more than it should for a pair of jeans and a couple of T-shirts. Opening it, he found it had at least as many clothes as he had owned back in his apartment. Better quality though. And more variety. There were a few pairs of jeans, and chinos, T-shirts, and a couple of polos. And, yes, underwear and socks.