Noah's Boy-eARC (22 page)

Bea blinked. “No. I’ve wanted to beat them to death with a weighted sock on occasion, but not to eat them.”

“Oh. Well…when you’re really tired and hungry and…”

A monstrous idea crossed Bea’s mind. “You ate someone?” She wasn’t sure that was something she could forgive, or something she could even start to understand.

He shook his head. “No, but…it was the same thing.”

Bea stared, confused about how anything could be the same as eating someone. “You killed someone?”

He shook his head again. “No, but…when I stepped outside, there was this smell, like…like…I can’t describe it. I shifted and…and…when I came to, when I got control over the lion’s mind again, I found that…that is…The creature who attacked me before? She…I was…We were having sex in shifted form. I tried to pull away and she…” He touched the deep gauges on his face.

Bea didn’t know what to say or how to say it. Part of her, having contemplated the possibility of his having eaten a human being, now wanted to laugh with relief, but she realized the experience had shocked Rafiel to his core. And looking at him, she slowly understood why. “How long…” she asked. “How long has it been since you lost control so completely, and weren’t aware of what you were doing?”

He frowned at her. “Not since I was very young and in college,” he said. “Not since…” He shook his head. “It was…I feel no attraction to…I don’t even know what the woman looks like in person…It was like…” He shook his head again, as though to clear it. “It was as though something or someone had taken over my mind. It’s a very disquieting, scary feeling. I wanted to…I want to know why, how. I want to make sure it won’t happen again. If she can make me do that, what else can she make me do?”

Bea looked at him. “I expect,” she said. It was a slow word, drawn out. “I expect the next time, you’ll have more control. We learn to control the beast by being the beast. This…mating in lion form…it was the first time?”

He made a face and smiled a little. Red flooded like a tide into his cheeks. “At the risk of alarming you, it was the first time in either form.” He lifted his hand, as though to defend himself from an accusation she hadn’t made. “You have to understand,” he said. “I can’t be sure…I’ve always been afraid of losing control and shifting. Tom…Tom says it doesn’t happen, and anyway, you know, he’s not afraid of that with Kyrie, because she knows he shifts, though I don’t think his bedroom is big enough to— Never mind.”

“To hold a dragon? No. Particularly now. He’s…he’s grown. There seems to be something—beyond. I mean, it’s like magic. The Great Sky Dragon died, and it’s like his death activated something that changed Tom from a juvenile dragon into a full adult. Oh, that’s not right. It made him into a full adult Great Sky Dragon, not just a dragon.”

Rafiel looked at her for a long while, then sighed. “He’s going to need our help, isn’t he?”

Bea opened her mouth, then realized he’d said “our.” He thought of them as a unit. She should have been horrified, particularly in view of the fact the man had been mating in lion form with some prehistoric horror. But then…but then he was even more shocked by it than she was. And she meant what she’d told him. In the future, knowing it was possible, knowing what it felt like, he’d know how to resist it—how to keep his head. And if he didn’t…well, if he didn’t, he’d
really
need her.

She took a deep breath, understanding that this was right, that, somehow, they were supposed to be a team, and that he understood it too. “Yeah. I think so,” she said.

* * *

She shouldn’t go home without him. Kyrie wasn’t stupid enough to go home without Tom and think he would keep out of trouble till she came back. But unfortunately she was tired enough to
have
to go home. She must sleep.

In the parking lot of The George, getting into her car, she looked back at the diner. It was full of people having breakfast and, on the addition side, where it was all enclosed in glass and you could see everything, Tom was talking to a table of regulars, Rafiel’s colleagues in the police force.

She frowned a little, wondering how Rafiel was healing, and if there was any relation between his troubles and the Great Sky Dragon. It seemed too big a stretch to connect a feral juvenile shifter and the byzantine hierarchy of the triad organization. No. It was just their luck that right now they had two loads of trouble in town, both of them related to shifters. Because they were just that exceptionally lucky.

“It never rains but it pours,” she said under her breath, feeling somehow comforted at the trite phrase. When you’re knee-deep in shifters and threats from the stars, you want to be reassured today really
is
the first day of the rest of your life. Of course, she would prefer being reassured that life would last more than a few days. Particularly for Tom, since Tom seemed to have one of his ideas, and that was never a good thing.

Kyrie toyed with staying on and following Tom in whatever he intended to do, but then she thought through what he told her: he was going to let Jason go home, then have him come back,
then
Tom would do something. Kyrie yawned. She would take a quick nap and return in more than enough time to figure out what Tom was up to, particularly since it involved finding Old Joe, a task that was often, at best, hazardous.

She drove the short distance home through the narrow neighborhood streets. Since most of the small homes in the area were occupied by older couples, the only signs of life were people watering their lawns or walking their dogs. She pulled up the inclined driveway and parked. At the back door, she started to turn the handle and froze.

Something was wrong. Seriously wrong. She could feel it not quite as anything rational, nor as anything she could have put into words, but as a creeping feeling up the back of her spine, something that made her pause and feel…wrongness.

She couldn’t put it any better than that.

The house was closed, as she and Tom had left it. The neighborhood looked perfectly normal for this time of morning. There were no strange cars parked near their yard. There were no unfamiliar cars at all. She could name all the cars around. Mr. and Mrs. Jones brown, ancient station wagon next door. And the other way the Phillson’s van. And across the street, the red truck that always parked there.

But there was still the feeling that somewhere, somehow, doom lurked. She tried to push away the uneasiness, tried to put her keys in the lock, but the desire to get back in the car and drive away was almost overpowering.

Now,
Kyrie thought.
Now. It can’t be. There can’t be anything around here that would hurt me. I’m imagining things. I’ve had too many shocks in succession.

But one thing she was quite sure of. She could not get in the house and go to sleep. Would never happen. And that denied the whole point of coming home. Might as well go back and go search for Old Joe with Tom when he went.

She sighed, and turned around to get in the car.

There—movement in the bushes, in the almost nonexistent space between the back of the house and the fence that enclosed the backyard. Her first thought was squirrel, but then she realized there was
someone
there, with a mask and some sort of weapon. She turned to face the threat as her body tensed with the precursor of shifting.

And then—

And then something hit her upper arm really hard, and she looked down, unbelieving.
I was
not
shot with a tranquilizer dart,
she thought.

Even as she thought it, her legs folded under her, and her vision faded to dark. Before she hit the cement of the driveway, she wondered what Tom would think.

Chapter 17

The breakfast rush over, Tom realized how exhausted he was. He’d sent Jason home at the beginning of it, and didn’t expect him back till lunch, but for all that, he felt like he could fall asleep in his tracks. It had been much too long a night, since they’d woken with Rafiel’s phone call. Under normal circumstances—like those ever happened around here—just the rush of people for Conan’s maiden show would have been enough to leave Tom feeling battered, but there had been so much on top of that.

He stared out the back window at the parking lot, and squinted at the burned-out ruin of the bed-and-breakfast. He wondered if Louise would be able to rebuild, if she had the money. Though the operation had always kept up a good front of seeming classy and well stocked—which he supposed was essential in the boutique hospitality industry—he felt that it had been run very close to the bone.

Perhaps it’s a reflection of how we run the diner,
he thought, and rubbed his hand pensively on his chin, shocked to hear and feel the grating of half-grown beard. Vague, disconnected thoughts ran through his mind. With a quirk of the lips, he wondered about Rafiel and Bea and how they were getting along. Rafiel could be forbidding and patriarchal. Part of being the policeman in charge of anything involving shifters in this area, Tom thought—unofficially in charge, of course, which made it worse. Also possibly something to do with the fact that he was a third generation policemen. Such families tended to raise boy children in the expectation of serving and protecting.

And Tom wasn’t, of course, absolutely sure about Bea. He’d barely met her, even if he’d seen her twice so far, but he got the impression you could tell her what to do all you wanted to—you just couldn’t get her to obey. A young woman who would tell the Great Sky Dragon where to put it and with how much force, even if he suspected she’d been more polite than that about it, was not the sort of young woman that Rafiel could intimidate. He grinned at the idea that she and Rafiel would probably hate each other the more time they spent together. It didn’t matter, of course, provided they both were safe.

Then he thought of Conan and that voice. Who would have thought it? Certainly neither his parents nor the triad to whom Conan had been handed over at puberty when his shifting started. But Conan had dreamed of a career, and Tom meant to make sure his dreams came true. Which, even taking into account that Conan was dating Rya and that Rya was the more practical of the two, probably meant Tom would have to keep a very close eye on everything. Dreamers could be good artists, but most of them were terrible businessmen. And being a businessman, it turned out, required training and thought—a fact Tom was learning, slowly, through his mistakes. He’d not at all been prepared to run anything, by his drifting existence as a young man, moving from place to place, always afraid someone would notice that he was a dragon shifter.

On the other hand,
he thought,
At least it prepared me to survive by my wits, and figure out how to live. Conan didn’t even have that. He was handed over as a slave, his every thought controlled.

Thinking of that brought the memory and feel of the…thing in his mind. The intrusion of all the—for lack of a better word—files of Great Sky Dragon memory, the hidden knowledge of the members of the triad, all those shifters he could control. He felt around in there. If he focused, he could sense this or that dragon shifter, here and there, all over the world.

He didn’t want to be aware of them; he didn’t want to focus on them; he didn’t want to know what they were doing. If he did, he’d find himself an unwitting accomplice to a hundred or a thousand illegal activities. It wasn’t like the triads were benevolent social clubs, after all. He could neither denounce their illegal dealings—which police department would buy “I know it through telepathy”?—nor did he want to know about them.

So he skimmed lightly over them, and felt the mass back there, his dragon self. No, the Great Sky Dragon’s self, even if it wasn’t the same Great Sky Dragon that was external to Tom. Tom chewed on his lip.

What it came to was that he had to find out what was going on with the Pearl of Heaven and he had to figure out where the Great Sky Dragon might be. Tom would be damned if he was going to get stuck with this job.

In fact, it had better all be over with by the time his father came to visit, because what his father might make of it gave Tom cold sweats.

A touch on his shoulder made him turn. For a second he thought it would be Kyrie, but it was one of the shifters who often helped around the diner, and who, in fact, had helped last night during Conan’s thing. He smelled like a shifter, and he called himself a half-horse, but Tom had never asked what his form was. A horse, he assumed, of course. Maybe. Well, none of his business anyway.

In his human form, James was a dark-haired young man who worked as some sort of nursing aide at the local hospital. He had a habit of always glowering, which, at first, had made Tom think he hated the diner, and Tom couldn’t figure out why he kept showing up there so often. But it turned out—as they got to know the man better—the glowering was protection for social awkwardness. Which was good, because the tone in which he asked, “Do you need help?” might have sounded pretty aggressive otherwise.

“Yeah,” Tom said. “How did you know?”

“Other than the fact you look dead on your feet?”

Tom rubbed his chin again. “Yeah, I’ve been up…very long. Yeah, I could use some help.” Remembering the man worked nights, though, he said, “But shouldn’t you go home and sleep or something?”

“Nah. Could use some more money anyway.” A small smile. “Horse feed, you know? Got to keep the ponies happy.”

Tom nodded sagely, refusing to ask if the fodder was for himself or for actual horses, then said, “Yeah. If you can take over, Jason—the new guy—should come back before lunch, and Anthony too. And then Conan and Rya can go home,” he said, looking behind the counter where the two were jointly manning the cooking. He thought they looked very happy but neither of them was particularly competent.
Only me,
he thought.
I train a greasy spoon cook and waiter and end up with a musician.

James had gone behind the counter and got his apron and signed in. He did this often enough, if irregularly, that the procedure was familiar to him. He brought his eyebrows down low over his eyes, as he touched Tom on the shoulder. “Go on then,” he said. “Go home and get some sleep.”