Noah's Boy-eARC (12 page)

As though her movement had awakened him, Anthony lurched to life, and started taking care of things, asking her in a whisper, “Where is Tom?”

“I don’t know. He must be waiting tables.”

“I don’t think so. He hasn’t brought me any orders.”

“Well, he must—”

The song finished and talking became impossible over the storm of applause. In the center of it, Conan tilted his hat back and looked in shocked surprise at the crowd. Slowly, a dark red color suffused his cheeks. “Uh…You…You think…” He cleared his throat. He took his guitar up properly again and played a few chords. The crowd quieted immediately.

Conan smiled at them. “The next song is one I wrote, and it’s dedicated to a really special woman, Rya. Rya, if you’re out there, I was a jerk, and I wrote this for you.”

For a moment, Kyrie was afraid. Just because the man had a voice like golden syrup pouring on the perfect stack of pancakes, it didn’t mean he could write songs.

But the chords he played were slow and sad, and coherent, and when he started singing…Well, her first impulse was to dart up front, hit him on the head, make him stop singing.

Not that it was a bad song. On the contrary. It was a beautiful poem about wishing one could fly away from all one’s cares and mistakes. It was called “If I Could Fly to You.”

The problem was exactly that. Kyrie thought anyone would know this was about the experience of being a dragon shifter. And it took all her not inconsiderable self-control to hold back and allow herself to realize that while the lyrics were plain to
her
, they wouldn’t be to anyone else. She needed to shut up and let the man play.

She’d been accustomed to thinking of Conan as a boy, perhaps because of how he behaved with Tom, but it was obvious he was a man. His voice made him so, and she could see the shyness and the deference drop away from him as he sang, the people in the crowd clearly drinking in his voice and his words.

As he started a third song, after a storm of applause, Anthony said in a whisper in the sudden silence, “I’m fairly sure Tom is still in the storage room, Kyrie. And that’s just not normal. He knows we’d need him out here and besides, you know…he’s not…he’s not that trusting, and he wouldn’t trust me with this load of frying if he were all right. He would be out here to check on me by now.”

Kyrie wished she could say otherwise. But Anthony had a point.

Except…except maybe Tom had gone into the storage room to avoid making Conan nervous? No. That made no sense. Tom had gone into the storage room
because
Conan was nervous.

“You’re right,” she said. “I’ll go.” She stepped out to the pass-through, and down the hallway to the door to the storage room.

From within she could hear someone groaning, but it didn’t at all sound like Tom. She called out “Tom?” And then she pushed the door open.

* * *

He had too many legs. That was the first thing Tom thought, followed shortly by the unavoidable fact that he had too many arms. In fact, he also had too many eyes. The eyes were everywhere, looking at everything from full daylight to darkest night. The arms and legs were here and there, picking things, moving things, walking, running.

Some of his bodies appeared to be fighting. Others were sleeping. But he was all of them. He was everywhere.

No. Nonsense. I am Tom Ormson. I am in Goldport, Colorado, in the storage room of a diner called The George.

This was absolutely and undeniably true. But it wasn’t the whole truth. He was also Johnny Li, a teenager in New Jersey, involved in a street fight, and trying very hard not to shift into a dragon. He had only shifted twice before, and he didn’t have a lot of self-control. He didn’t know how to avoid it.

Tom sent a firming thought Johnny’s way, with the admonition not to shift, but the moment of clarity, of identifying that as one of his bodies, had already passed. In its place was the feeling of being everywhere and everyone at once.

He knelt on the floor of the storage room, and pressed his fists to his forehead, trying to calm a myriad of sensory impressions that he knew were not coming from
his
body, but which were, nonetheless, as real and immediate as though they were.

Eternity seemed to pass, and all he could manage was maintaining the certainty that his principal part, his principal and most important body, was Tom, here, in the storage room, kneeling on the floor.

But with this self-possession came a call—a need in many voices. All those people, all those bodies he was and yet wasn’t, were calling him. He must be the dragon. He must be seen. He must let the most important of them come and pay him homage. He must let the nearer ones assemble and recognize that the tribe of dragons had a new head, that the slain Great Sky Dragon lived again.

He understood enough of the call, of the need, of the mess in his head, to know what had happened, and what he was in for. He staggered to his feet, and stood, shaking, “I don’t want it,” he said to the clear air around him. “Someone else should take it. I’m not even Asian, let alone Chinese. And I’m not the head of any triad.”

From the other side of the door—seemingly from another world away—Kyrie’s voice said, “Tom.”

And then the door opened, and let in the strains of a strong and smooth male voice singing “You are Not Alone.” And the sight of Kyrie’s shocked face staring into his.

Chapter 13

Her first thought was that Tom had had a stroke. That was the only explanation she could summon for the manner in which he stood there, barely moving, his face looking like he was concentrating for all he was worth. But concentrating on what?

“Tom?” she said hesitantly, then again, more strongly, “Tom!”

He didn’t move. He didn’t look up. A tremor passed through his hand, upwards, then passed downwards again. It was not a movement she’d ever seen in Tom, even when he shifted. She took a deep breath and tried to think of what to do.

She knew what she would have done if this were anyone else, anyone but one of the people she knew who shifted shapes. If Tom had been an anonymous person off the street, one who didn’t smell like a shifter; if someone in the diner had started behaving like this, shaking a little from position to position, but neither reacting to voice nor looking up, nor…moving normally, she would have called an ambulance immediately.

But for shifters medical services must always be a risk, a careful balance between pain and control. If you were in pain or scared, you were likely to change shapes and then where would you be?

Tom’s dragon wouldn’t even fit in an ambulance. Being squeezed inside a small space would only make him crazier and more unable to shift back to human—she knew this from when he’d accidentally shifted in their tiny bathroom once before.

And then there were all sorts of other considerations. They hadn’t fully determined, yet, what certain medications did to them. They were okay with aspirin, and Tom’s drug use seemed to have left him addicted only in a way that could be kicked rather quickly: after all with a shifter’s healing capacity, this might be expected.

But who knew what stronger sedatives would do? They might knock out the upper brain, while leaving the animal shifter to rampage happily through the hospital wards.

In Kyrie’s mind, headlines proclaiming that a dragon shifter had decimated the patients and medical personnel of Memorial Hospital ran in stark black on white. Only let that happen once, particularly with an animal that no one could imagine had simply wandered in from outside, and next thing you knew the authorities would be hunting shifters. Given all the legends of shifters throughout the centuries, the hunt wouldn’t end well for either party.

No. She had to figure out how to deal with this without the hospital. Tom had come back from the dead once. Surely even recovering from a stroke wouldn’t be impossible. She had to keep him stable and quiet till then.

She walked into the room, closing the door behind her, cutting off the sound of applause as Conan finished his song. She moved in a measured and slow way because even she truly had no interest in facing an upset dragon. “Tom,” she said. She put a hand on his shoulder, shocked to find it burning hot, as though he were running a fever. “I know that you’re not feeling well, but I don’t know what’s wrong. I want to help.”

He moved his other hand fast—too fast. It looked to her like the sudden movement of a lizard when aroused. But all his hand did was clasp over hers, squeezing it a little. It felt like her hand was caught between two hot plates, but she didn’t protest.

Tom raised his head slowly and looked at her.

She heard herself make a strangled sound of protest, even as her heart sped up in an explosion of panic. She would have stepped back if she could, but she couldn’t with her hand caught between his hand and shoulder.

His eyes looked…like Tom’s eyes and perfectly normal. And also
not
. They were the same shape and color they usually were, the enamel blue that made such a contrast with his dark hair. But there was something that made them different—so different that it was like looking into the eyes of a stranger.

The eyes looked old. It was as though gazing into them could lead one to see into the vanishing centuries, into millennia without end.

They weren’t really Tom’s eyes, unless they were Tom’s eyes in a couple thousand years after he had, several times, outlived the world he was born into and the friends of his youth.

He nodded slightly at her, almost formally, as if to tell her he understood her fear. He removed his hand from atop hers. She didn’t move, because she didn’t want to run away from Tom, And if she took a step back, she would flee.

His mouth opened. His tongue licked at his lips as though they were too dry, which they probably were, considering how hot he was. And then he spoke.

The words that came out…if they were words, if he was not just croaking…sounded alien. They didn’t have the sound of any western language, or the sound of any Asian language she’d ever heard.

Perhaps the stroke, or whatever it was had affected his speech center, but those sounds felt like words, though words she couldn’t possibly know.

“Tom, I don’t understand,” Kyrie said.

* * *

It was Kyrie’s touch that woke Tom. Though perhaps waking was not the right word. He knew he’d been awake, aware the whole time. Perhaps more aware than he’d ever been before.

But at Kyrie’s touch, the infinity of awareness, the broad vistas of being everywhere and everywhen at once changed. He was Tom Ormson, and he was in the storage room of The George.

It felt as though he’d been spread, amoebalike over the entire world, a nebulous cloud of Tom permeating everything and not at all present in the body to which Tom should belong.

At Kyrie’s touch, at her cool hand on his shoulder, the nearness of her, her presence, the cloud of Tom’s consciousness pulled in, concentrated, occupied once more the contours of his familiar body, and he was Tom Ormson, in his own head, staring out of his own eyes.

A nagging feeling informed him that he was also something else. There was some
one
else at the back of his head, some sort of entity. Not the Great Sky Dragon, but…but the essence of everything the Great Sky Dragon was supposed to be.

“I—” He looked at Kyrie and managed a smile, though it took so much effort he wondered how natural it looked. “I’m all right, Kyrie.”

She raised her eyebrows. He could smell her fear, but she remained standing right by him, her hand on his shoulder, her eyes showing only concern for him. “Are you sure?”

He patted her hand now, gently. “I think so. I…Something happened to me—”

“A stroke?”

He frowned. Was that what it was? He’d heard of people who had strokes that made them think half of their bodies wasn’t even theirs. But he’d never heard of anyone who had a stroke and suddenly thought he had more than one body, or that his being occupied the space of several bodies, all over the world. “No,” he said, speaking slowly. “I don’t think that’s what it is.” He probed tentatively at whatever was in his mind, that other entity residing…behind his skull, looking out through his eyes. Was this how multiple personality disorder felt? But no. He looked at it, tried to make sense of it. This wasn’t like another person or another personality. This was more like…He frowned. How odd. “It’s like a file catalogue,” he told Kyrie. “Sorry. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but it’s like someone downloaded a lot of compressed files onto the back of my mind.”

“Compressed?” she asked.

“Yes. I can’t…I have to think of each of them in turn to see what is inside, and I suspect it would take an effort of will to open one fully. One of them seems to have pictures…very old pictures and…information about dragons. I—”

“A human being is not a computer!” Kyrie protested. “People can’t get stuff downloaded into them.”

“Yes, but are we people?”

“Of course we’re people. What else would we be?”

Tom had thought he knew, now he wasn’t so sure. There was an unsteadiness beneath his certainty about the world. He felt as though if he moved a foot wrong, he’d find there was nothing beneath it, and—what he thought of as himself—would fall through the solid contours of what he thought of as the world, and be lost in a formless limbo beyond retrieving. “Yes. And if you’re going to say that if you cut us we bleed, I’ll agree we’re human so long as humans are considered to be sentient beings with at least theoretical control of their own actions. But that’s not what I’m asking, Kyrie. Not philosophy, but physics, biology…what we are, the things we are. As beings we can turn into other forms, and people—at least normal people—can’t. So perhaps we can get things downloaded into us too. How would I know?”

She was searching his face with anxious eyes. “What if all the…the files open? Will you be someone else?”

Tom probed the vast mass of information hiding somewhere in the recesses of his mind. “Kyrie, I don’t think I have enough space for all of them to open. I don’t think it would be possible. It feels like just one file has…as much…as much in it as the rest of me: a lifetime, a full personality.”