Night Shifters (59 page)

And then the creature sniffed Kyrie—at least it seemed like that to Tom, through the red mist his vision had become—and then . . . and then there was Conan. Conan had flamed towards the dire wolf, making Tom wonder why he, himself, hadn’t. What was wrong with him? He’d sat here and let the creature maul him, with hardly any attempt at defense. Certainly without using his main weapon. Why?

And then the creature fled and there had been a suggestion of mocking laughter in Tom’s mind. He stood, under the snow, bleeding, shivering, wondering if the creature was gone for good, or it was waiting for Tom to shift, if it was waiting for Tom to become more vulnerable, if—

“Shift, Tom,” Kyrie said. “Now. You can’t get in the car as a dragon.”

“You left without me—” Conan was saying, clearly already shifted. “You left without me. Do you know what Himself would have done to me if you had died?”

“Shut up, Conan,” Kyrie’s voice, curt. “Tom, shift
now
.”

And Tom realized Conan and Rafiel and Kyrie were in the car, and that they had clothes, and Kyrie was dressing in the backseat, and he blinked, once, twice, once the human way, up-down, then the dragon way, his nictating eyelids flickering side to side, then the human way again, and he groaned out loud as his body twisted and bent and . . . shifted.

His muscles were still writhing to proper shape beneath his skin, his scalp tingling as the bones of his skull adjusted, his vision double as his eyes changed, when he flopped into the back seat of the SUV, falling across the scratchy fabric.

Kyrie, mostly dressed, reached across him to shut the car door. As it slapped shut, Rafiel stomped on the gas. The wheels spun a moment, and then they were hurtling out of the parking lot in a guided slide that careened gracefully around a curve and past a—he was sure of it—red light.

“What if he had come back?” Tom asked. “As . . . as a dire wolf? And killed us while we were human and vulnerable?”

“Was that what that was?” Rafiel asked. Incredibly, he seemed to Tom to be dressing and driving at once, through the blinding white snowstorm. Tom blinked, but the impression remained, as Rafiel put on a sleeve of his shirt, while he held the wheel with the other hand and then presumably steered by the force of his imagination while he used both hands to quickly button his shirt. “A dire wolf?”

“Yes,” Tom said, throwing himself back against the seat, and straightening as he felt the pain of open wounds at his back. “Oh, damn, I’m bleeding all over your upholstery.”

“Never mind that,” Rafiel said. “My uncle has a car detail place. Kyrie, would you look under the seat? There’s a first aid kit there, and there should be another pair of pants and a shirt, too, besides the ones Conan got. They’ll be long on you, Tom, but it’s all I have.”

“I left clothes, in the trunk of Kyrie’s car.”

“Of course. You can change into them there, if you prefer . . . I just thought . . .” Rafiel took another corner in a way that appeared to be skating on two tires. “Kyrie? How badly wounded is he?”

Kyrie had turned Tom halfway towards the window. “Gash across the back,” she said. “I suppose that’s the tissue your wings extrude out of. Looks vicious but it’s mostly skin, and the antibiotic cream is stopping the bleeding, I think.”

“Should we go to the hospital?” Rafiel asked.

“Not for this, but his hands . . .”

And Tom, who was aware both his hands stung like mad, but also that he could still use them—he’d checked—growled low in his throat. “No hospital. What are we going to tell them? Animal bite? Leave it alone. You know it will heal fast.”

“Dragons heal very fast,” Conan said quickly, in the sort of singsong voice that denoted he’d learned this somewhere, by rote.

By touch, almost by instinct, Tom reached into the first aid kit, grabbing cotton wool and hydrogen peroxide and a roll of self-clinging bandages, cleaned away the worst of the wounds and started bandaging his left hand with his right. Kyrie started helping him halfway through, and by the time she’d got his left hand neatly bandaged, and snipped the excess bandage, she said, “He’ll do, Rafiel. And it should be all right by tomorrow. Will hurt a bit to use his hands, but . . .”

“You’ll go to the bed-and-breakfast next to the diner,” Rafiel said. “What is it called?”

“Spurs and Lace,” Kyrie said. “It’s not as kinky as it sounds. I think they thought it was an allusion to the Old West.”

“Whatever. Tom, I want you to go to Spurs and Lace and go to bed. I’ll man the diner for the rest of your shift.”

“Like hell you will,” Tom said. “Don’t be stupid. You can’t handle the new stove and grill. And you don’t know anything about cooking or serving, either. And that is if Keith hasn’t set the place on fire in the last half hour, because he doesn’t know much more than you do.” He set his jaw, and caught sight of himself in the rear view mirror and realized with a shock that he looked much like his father in a mood. “I’ll do the rest of my shift, thank you very much. We’ll see if Anthony can come in tomorrow morning, and if not we’ll call our backups till someone makes it in. There was that woman—Laura Miller?—who applied last week. We could always give her a chance.”

Rafiel seemed confused. He cleared his throat. “But you’ll be in pain,” he said. “And I . . .” He cleared his throat again. “I owe you my life.”

Tom shrugged. “So, shut up and drive.”

“I think,” Kyrie said, “you should at least go to Spurs and Lace for a few minutes and shower. At least if they have a room and they should. They usually have rooms during the week. On the weekend they get all booked up with romantic couples or whatever.”

Tom sniffed at himself. “All right,” he said, realizing he needed to concede on something, and also that fighting a dire wolf had not improved his rather dubious hygiene from this morning.

“Just don’t shift in their bathroom,” Kyrie said, as she slapped bandages on his back, then handed him a bundle of clothing. “You might as well wear this and take the other clothes to change.” And then, quickly, “Tom, why didn’t you just call? I mean, you had my cell number, and Rafiel’s. I understand you came over to protect us from this—that you knew this . . . creature was after us, somehow, but . . . Why not just call?”

Tom shook his head. “Your phone battery was out, Kyrie. You never remember to charge it.”

“Oh,” Kyrie said.

“All right,” Tom said again as he slipped the rather loose, long pants on. “Rafiel, I want you to come with me.”

“What? To shower?” Rafiel asked. “I said thank you already—”

“Feeble,” Tom said, rating the joke. “No. So I can talk to you about what sent me out there, and what I think that creature is. Without anyone in the diner listening in.”

“I should come,” Conan said. “I should listen in. I’m supposed to protect you.”

All three of them yelled “No” at the same time, leaving it to Tom to explain, “No offense, Conan, but you’re not exactly a friend.”

“You hired me! And I was sent by Himself, I—”

“Himself is not exactly a friend, either,” Tom said. “At least he hasn’t proven himself one.”

Conan frowned, wrinkles forming on his forehead, as though he were trying to understand a very difficult concept. “You’re a dragon,” he said. “You belong to him!”

“Beg your pardon? I don’t belong to anyone but myself,” Tom said, his voice echoing his father’s iciest tones. “In case you haven’t heard there was this guy called Lincoln who freed the slaves.”

“No,” Conan shook his head, looking forlorn. “You don’t understand. You’re a dragon. You belong to Himself. Like . . . like family.”

“Oh, and if you think that’s a recommendation or reassuring, I should tell you a bit more about my family,” Tom said, grinning impishly. Kyrie smiled at him. “I have never gone out of my way to obey them or to belong to them, either.”

Conan opened his mouth, as though to reply, but seemed to realize it would be useless, and frowned slightly, as if he were facing a situation for which no one had prepared him.

“Won’t it look weird?” Rafiel asked. “My going in with you, when you’re going to get a room and shower?”

“I’m going to get a room for myself and Kyrie, for tonight and tomorrow,” Tom said. “Probably three nights, actually. I can’t imagine us going home before that. Heck, if we go home before a week, it will be a small miracle. I’ll explain in detail what happened to our bathroom. But as for why you’re going with me to the room, that’s obvious.” He raised his bandaged hands. “I was in an accident. We’ll let them think it was a car accident. And you want to make sure I’m not going to pass out or anything.”

“Oh,” Rafiel said.

“And then I can tell you about the dire wolf. If I’m not mistaken, he’s the person that Old Joe described as the executioner for the Ancient Ones.”

“What did you mean ‘executioner’?” Rafiel asked. He leaned against a heavy carved rosewood table in Tom’s rented room at Spurs and Lace.

Kyrie must have been right about the crazy idea behind the name. The suite felt like a mashup of Old West and Old Whorehouse. It was bigger than a room, consisting of a bedroom with a queen-size bed, a sofa dripping in velvet and fringe, a dresser that would take five men and a winch to transport, and a hat rack with three cowboy hats on it, and a small sitting area in a projection that was part of a tower, surrounded by windows. The sitting area was outfitted with two too-precious-for-words carved wood armchairs, whose cushions were tormented by a print featuring cowboy boots and roses in random profusion.

Then there was the bathroom, which had a heavy rosewood table facing it. Above the table hung a gold-leaf-framed mirror and above that, on the flowered-wallpaper wall, a pair of spurs.

Rafiel shut his eyes, because you could go nuts trying to make sense of this stuff, and said, “What could he mean by executioner? And why would anyone want to execute us?”

“I think it was the larvae, you know, the ones who died in the fire. Old Joe says the Ancient Ones can feel . . . death on that scale. And that they’re looking for the culprits.”

“The culprits!” Rafiel heard the sound that came out of his throat, derisive like a cat spitting. “What about the shifters who were being murdered before that?”

“I don’t know,” Tom sounded exhausted. Rafiel heard the water go off, then the shower curtain close. “Perhaps they think that we did those too.”

“And who are they?” Rafiel asked, feeling the anger in his voice and knowing he was projecting his fear into anger and throwing it at Tom. “These Ancient Ones,” Rafiel said with less force. “It’s pretty absurd to be judged by people you don’t know and whose rules you can’t understand. Who are they? What do they want?”

Tom came out of the bathroom, fully dressed, though it didn’t seem like he’d have had time. He was limping, and his foot showed red slashes across it. Rafiel remembered the dire wolf biting at Tom’s back paw.

Tom limped to the bed, sat down, and started putting socks on. “They’re a group. I think they’re a group of shifters who have lived very long lives.”

“Oh?” Rafiel said. “What’s very long? And should we be looking for a group then, or just one man?” Something tickled at the back of his mind, but he couldn’t quite pinpoint it.

Tom shrugged. “I honestly don’t know,” he said. “Because, you see . . . Old Joe . . .” He shrugged again, wincing as he stood tentatively on his wounded foot and looked about for his boot. “Old Joe, you know, is vague. He drifts in and out of reality, and it’s hard to tell. He told me that the Ancient Ones were around before horses.”

“Before horses evolved? Or before they were domesticated?” Rafiel asked. “Because either way . . .”

“It’s unlikely? Yeah. I know. That’s why I said he’s unreliable. And he said that this creature, the dire wolf, had come to town, that he was their executioner, but he didn’t say that the rest of them hadn’t come too. Or how many there were. For all I know, and presuming that this story is true—and the executioner thing seems to be—then, you know, it could be that we’re looking for anything between a busload of shifters as old as time, and two or three sixty-year-old shifters.” He shrugged. “I couldn’t tell you.”

But his words had tickled something in Rafiel’s mind. Two or three shifters. “At the aquarium,” he said, “Kyrie and I caught at least two different scent trails. Maybe three.”

“Oh?” Tom tensed, looking up. “Any of them our friend the wolf?”

Rafiel shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “At least the smell wasn’t right. Though all the scents were so faded . . .” He shrugged.

“You know,” Tom said, “that’s the other choice. No Ancient Ones, no conspiracy of shifters. Just Old Joe going senile, and one homicidal dire wolf shifter.” He’d found his boots, and was putting them on. “Who knows how many of us are homicidal? It was always my fear that I’d go that way.” Tom’s boots were work boots, probably picked up second- or thirdhand at some time when Tom was doing manual labor. But even looking vaguely like weapons of mayhem, they were part of Tom.

Rafiel had seen Tom turn back into high danger to recover them. Lacing them as tightly as that had to hurt his injured foot, but who was Rafiel to interfere with his friend’s masochism?

“Unfortunately,” Tom said, “I don’t think that’s it. I don’t think it’s just Old Joe and our dire acquaintance. When has our life been that easy?”

Kyrie shaved broad swathes off the gyro beef roast rotating on its vertical metal spike, and turned her back to the counter and the customers, to eat with the voracious appetite a recent shift brought on.

The diner had become packed, while she was gone—every table filled, even the table at which she’d first seated Conan. A couple was squeezed together into the too-small booth, cooing and billing and holding warm cups. Keith was working the grill like a pro, though Kyrie noted that he sometimes let things go a little too long, and the edges of omelets were often brown as Tom didn’t allow them to be, and the bacon seemed full of burnt crunchy bits. And he was clearly late with the orders.

However, to do Keith justice, that last might not be so much his fault as Conan’s. The new waiter, newly returned amid the tables of the packed diner looked much like a fly that had hit the window pane once too many times. He was trying to serve everyone clamoring for his attention and seemed completely lost. That he only had one good arm to hold the serving tray didn’t help, as his other arm, at best, helped stabilize things, but could not help with the weight, which meant he carried far less per trip out to the tables than she normally did. The orders were piled on the counter. As Keith turned and put another one down and called out, “Table 23,” he seemed to realize the futility of it, saying, “Oh, never mind,” and putting five or six orders on a tray, he rushed out to distribute the platters, far faster than Conan seemed able to.

“That little rat you guys hired left me alone while you were gone,” Keith said. “I don’t know where he went but . . .”

“Don’t worry about it,” Kyrie said. “He went to help us. We know where he was.”

Keith raised his shoulder sulkily, but didn’t say anything for a while, till he said sheepishly, “I’ve kept people quiet,” as he returned in what seemed like seconds, to tend to the grill, “by giving them free hot chocolate. I hope that’s okay.”

“It’s fine,” Kyrie said.

“Also, of course, there’s nothing else open today which helped keep them here.”

Kyrie took the point, and having finished a plate of gyro meat, she put the plate with the others collected from tables, and reached under the counter for her apron, intending to go out to clear the backlog as fast as possible. Only her hands, thrust under the counter, met with something like sharp little needles. On her pulling the hands back, the needles withdrew, only to stick her again when she reached out once more, only much less further in than before. “What the—?” she said, reaching out.

“Oh, that’s Not Dinner,” Keith said, flipping a burger.

“What?” she asked, as she knelt to look in the dark shelf where they kept folded aprons to the left and the time sheets to the right. Golden eyes sparkled back at her, and she looked closer, to make out a little orange ball of fluff making his way very fast to lie possessively atop the time sheets. “It’s a kitten.”

“Yeah,” Keith said. “Not Dinner.”

“I don’t have the slightest intention of eating him,” Kyrie said, upset, as she reached in and managed to retrieve the apron before the avenging claws got her. “You know you can’t have your pet here. We’re not allowed to have animals, except service animals, on the premises.”

“He’s not my pet.”

Kyrie took a deep breath, deciding everyone had gone mad, and Keith right now was representative of everyone. What on earth could he mean? That the diner was suffering an infestation of cats, like some places had sudden infestations of rats? It didn’t bear probing, not now. Grabbing a tray and filling it with orders, and picking up the coffee pot for warmups, she started among the tables, clearing up the backlog.

Many regulars looked happy to see her, and other people just looked happy to get their orders at last. In a few minutes, she had the main of it taken care of and, having directed Conan to start bussing newly emptied tables, returned to fill the dishwasher, restart the coffee, and pursue the interesting matter of a sudden plague of kittens.

Before she could, though, and while she was bent over the dishwasher, filling it with dirty plates, Tom and Rafiel came in, and Tom made an exclamation of distress and touched Kyrie’s arm. “Kyrie, where’s Old Joe?”

She looked up. “I don’t know. Where was he?”

“I left him in booth number five.”

“Well, he wasn’t here when I came in,” she said.

Tom swore under his breath and, at her startled look, said, “Not your fault. He must have gone alligator again. I hope he’s not going to go after one of the customers in the parking lot. And I hope we find him, because we need to talk to him.”

As he spoke, Tom reached over the grill, as Keith pulled a stack of cooked burgers aside and said, “I made these for you. I figured you’d need them.”

“Great thought. Thanks,” Tom said, grabbing the burgers and eating one after the other, like a kid with candy. “I’ll take over the grill in a moment.”

“I gave Not Dinner some milk and a few pieces of hamburger,” Keith added.

“Not . . . oh. The kitten,” Tom said. “Good.”

Kyrie noted that Tom seemed to know about the kitten. In fact, she would bet the kitten was Tom’s. Tom and his
strays
! Meanwhile, Rafiel had gone out the back door. He returned in a moment, snow glinting in his hair. “He’s not out back, Tom. I can’t find him. There’s no trail I can see.”

Tom took over the grill. “Go attend to the tables,” he told Keith. “I’ll take care of cooking.”

Keith hesitated, and Tom was sure that he was hoping to hear what was going on, but he wanted to talk to Kyrie and he didn’t want to leave the tables unattended. “We’ll let you in on it,” he said. “I promise.”

“That’s not it,” Keith said. “I want to talk to you.” He spoke in an undertone, and looked worried. “There’s someone . . .”

“Right,” Kyrie said from Tom’s side. “I’ll go do those two tables that just came in.”

“So?” Tom said.

“It’s this girl . . .”

Tom choked on gurgled laughter at the idea that anyone at all would come to him for romantic advice, but he managed to stop and make his features attentive. “Yes?”

“She’s . . . she goes to school with me, and she looks really . . . I don’t know how to put this, but I think she’s a shifter. That was why I came by today. If I bring her, can you . . . sniff her out?”

Tom looked at him, and felt his brow wrinkle into a frown. “Probably,” he said. “Rafiel can for sure. Why do you think she’s a shifter?”

Keith shrugged. “I can’t quite put my finger on it, but she looks tired in the morning, and . . . you know . . . she talks a lot about strange animals. She had a book on cryptozoology. It just seems . . .”

“Does she change clothes a lot?”

“Not that I’ve noticed, but . . .” Keith shrugged. “Just a feeling, okay? I’ve been around you guys enough for that.”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “Fine.” He returned to cooking and, remembering that Rafiel, too, would be having shift-hunger, he grabbed one of the frozen t-bones from the freezer by the grill, and threw it on. His mind was working on the problem he and Rafiel had discussed. The idea of a group or groups of shifters skulking around making decisions about their lives, that they could not possibly anticipate. Did this group have anything to do with the bones in the aquarium? And how could Tom and Kyrie defend themselves from the dire wolf, who seemed capable of teleporting?

They spent the rest of the night watching the door and looking out back around the dumpster, but as far as Tom could tell, both any possible hostiles and the alligator shifter were miles away.

On a normal night there were several lulls, but as the wind howled, fiercer and fiercer outside the diner, rattling gusts of snow against the broad windows and leaving them spattered as if with the spray-snow people used for decorations, customers drifted regularly in and out.

It seemed to Tom, though he didn’t look closely at anyone at the tables—kept busy with constant cook orders instead—that some people came in several times during the night. They were probably being kept awake by the wind and the snow, or perhaps the Victorians converted into apartment houses around here weren’t exactly airtight and had inadequate heat. Tom remembered staying in many rental rooms and apartments where the temperature, on full-blown heat, never reached above tepid.

The constant stream of orders changed overnight, from burgers to pies and coffee and finally to omelets, eggs and bacon, sausages and hash browns. He felt as if he would never want to smell a cooking egg again in his life, and the pain in his wounded hands—continuously rehurt by his ceaseless work—had gone from a dull throbbing to a barely-keeping-from-screaming burn. He’d sent Kyrie away to rest a couple of hours ago, afraid that if no one else came in to relieve him at the grill he’d have to let Kyrie relieve him, and give her a quick crash course on breakfast dishes on the new stove.

He could have cried with joy when he saw Anthony come in. “It was getting cabin feverish at home,” he said, sheepishly. “It’s only a one-bedroom apartment. And the wind seems to have died down some, so Cecily fell asleep. You guys can go rest some.”

Tom nodded and removed his apron, shoving it under the counter. He was surprised by a sudden feel of pinpricks piercing through his bandages. Looking under the counter, he got a sudden hiss and battle scream from the orange kitten.

He took a quick look over his shoulder at Anthony. He couldn’t imagine leaving the kitten behind for Anthony to deal with, so as he grabbed his jacket from under the counter and slipped it on, Tom reached under and grabbed the protesting bundle of kitten and, ignoring the yowls of defiance, slipped it into his pocket.