Noah's Boy-eARC (26 page)

The war council in the corner booth continued. Or rather, Old Joe and Conan were doing their best to convince Tom that he couldn’t—he simply couldn’t—fly over to the Three Luck Dragon and set fire to the building.

“I fail to see why not,” Tom said.

“Mostly because ashes are really hard to interrogate.”

“Fine,” Tom said. “I’ll only burn them a little. They can recover.”

It was the recoil in Conan’s eyes that reminded him that Conan had been burned nearly to the point of no return and had come back over excruciating months, and that he really, really, really would have preferred to die than endure that. “I’m sorry,” Tom said immediately. “See, I’m not very good at being ruthless. I hate…but I want Kyrie back. I’m very afraid of what they might be doing to her.”

“My guess is that they’ll keep her quite safe until they see what you do,” Conan said, “and that the worse thing you could do for her safety is give in to their demands. Since I don’t think you intend to do that—”

“No, but—”

“There is time to think of what you can do. You can control Jao and the others, right?”

Tom paused, then nodded. “Yes, but— I mean, I can control them, but I can feel there’s this area in Jao’s mind that is closed to me, and I’m not sure—how do I put this? I’m afraid that if I push on, it I might destroy his mind or at least his sanity…such as it is.”

“Oh, he’s sane. Very well adapted to the culture he grew up in. I see. I know the old bas— the Old Great Sky Dragon could reach into our minds and make us do things, and find information, and…well, he used me as a spying device for a while.”

“Yes,” Tom said. “And I can do that for minutes at a time, but it’s not very targeted. I end up going from triad member to triad member, more or less at random. I don’t think…I mean, as you said, I’m still rather like a blunt instrument when it comes to using Great Sky Dragon powers. I expect it takes practice.”

“It must,” Conan said, deep in thought.

But Old Joe, who had ordered, and got another big plate of bacon, and was munching his way through it contentedly, said, “Then be blunt instrument.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“No, no begging. Blunt instrument. You can have them do what you want? Have boss man of clan, man who ran things for daddy dragon, come here. Then you can interrogate him in your home territory.”

Tom thought of bringing Jao here, but all he needed was to bring attention to the diner. More likely than not, Jao would arrive in dragon form. He sighed. “No. Better go to my home first and have them come there.”

Going to his home, at any rate, gave him the chance to check and see how they’d got Kyrie, and whether they’d hurt her. Because if they hurt her, then ruthless might not begin to describe his behavior.

* * *

Kyrie wished she knew whether it was near dinnertime, and if they had any intention of feeding her, because if they were to bring her dinner and come in at an inconvenient time…

But after sitting there in the dark a while, she decided it was nonsense, anyway. If they came in and caught her while she was loosening the board, there was a good chance no one would notice. Even if they brought a flashlight or something, it was likely the light wouldn’t be very strong. And if they came in after she’d loosened the board…she’d just leave.

The thing about keys and key holders—her key holder being a heavy, flat, steel rectangle with
Kyrie
engraved on it—was that they could make really handy levers. Particularly when you had as many keys as she had, between the keys to the various supply vans, her car, the diner, and the home keys, plus that old key she carried around, from her very first apartment, as a souvenir and a guarantee that she could survive on her own.

She could afford to bend or break a couple of keys and still pry the board off the window. Besides, as far as she had felt with her fingers, the board was not exactly very well fastened. If you wanted to fasten the board in a way that would be difficult to remove, you’d use screws in the corners, and her captors had not.

Perhaps they had never thought to use a bunch of keys as a tool, and therefore thought they were tossing her in there without any tools, in the dark, and therefore assumed she could never figure a way out.

Kyrie worked a long time, doggedly. To her relief, there was no knock at the door, nothing that foretold dinner. Sometimes she could hear steps above her, which confirmed the idea that she had guards, or people moving above her.

The nails came out of the first corner, and Kyrie felt them. They were really long nails, but had been run into stucco, which is the sort of material that lets go, once you’ve pulled enough. Armed with this knowledge, she now knew to pry them a little loose, then pull at the corner of the board with her fingers. The process was considerably faster after that, though it made the tips of her fingers hurt.

Under the board, as she expected, there was glass. Kyrie felt it, cool against the fingers. It let light into her cell, too, which revealed itself as small but not particularly squalid. She noted the lack of a bathroom and wondered whether that meant they didn’t intend to keep her long, or whether they were just stupid. She wouldn’t bet against the second.

Outside, she could see ground level, and her idea that she was in the suburbs vanished. For one, the area immediately outside the window was all pebbles, then concrete. More importantly, she could see the reflected light of garish neon. And, with the wood out, and the window it had hidden consisting of a poorly insulated frame and thin glass, she could hear traffic nearby and, periodically, the sound of car radios that indicated considerable traffic stopped at a light.

Goldport wasn’t that large a town. It had once been a mining town, left almost abandoned in the silver bust. Then the tech boom had come in, and a few firms had moved to town. And then CUG had opened, and its research facilities had brought in another batch of well-educated residents. So Goldport was a small town that, in summer, had a halved population, except for the influx of tourists, while during the school year it swelled with college students.

The only place that had that sort of sustained traffic was downtown. This meant she couldn’t be very far from either The George or her place.

Right. By the scant light, she looked at the wood frame. She could break the window, of course, but there was simply no way, absent a glass cutter, to make window breaking noiseless. Kyrie might risk it when the traffic was at its loudest, but she doubted even the most obnoxious hip-hop beat sounded like breaking glass. She could also wait for the inevitable ambulance wail or police siren. But those weren’t regularly spaced. That meant she could be waiting a long time, and if duri ng that time someone came to bring her dinner…or something…and noticed the wood was off the window…

Kyrie bit her lower lip, thinking. The frame of the window looked like something from the mid-twentieth century, two parts, with the glass in some sort of recessed groove, and then with the interior frame nailed over it. It wasn’t designed to open, and the frame might very well be held together mostly by paint.

She could probably use one of the slimmer keys to pry the frame away, then dislodge the glass. She shrugged to herself. It was, at least, worth a try.

She inserted the key for one of the cargo vans that belonged to The George—a slim, pointy, Ford key—into the side of the frame where she could feel the breeze coming through. It went in easily, and the wiggling of the key produced a groan of wood and nails, and a considerable loosening.

Right. But she couldn’t trust that the builders of this place hadn’t been stupid enough to put the groove that held the glass on the interior frame. Who knew? Perhaps they had mounted the whole thing as one piece. That meant by prying at the frame, she risked having the glass fall and shatter, which would be noise enough to bring her captors to check. Unless, of course, they were deaf.

Thoughtfully, Kyrie pushed her bed towards the window, as tight to the wall as it could be, and then, just in case, took the blankets and bunched them in a heavy roll between wall and bed, so if the glass fell, it was likely to make less noise.

Then, to ensure that the chance of the glass falling was smaller, she worked at the frame from the top.

To some extent, this was easier than removing the board. Ddoing so broke the key to the van, and then the key to the other van, but that was because she had to work through tighter portions, and the dried paint keeping the frame together was harder to break. But it finally gave.

She’d been right, she thought, sweaty and shaking, as she gently pulled the frame off from the top. Someone had been dumb enough to set the glass in the interior portion. So she had to pull it down, gently, gently, till it was horizontal, like a picture frame with the glass resting in it.

She stood a few minutes, taking deep breaths, holding the frame and the glass in it.

Then she stepped down from the bed and set frame and glass on the floor.

She climbed back on the bed, and put her head and shoulders through the opening. There was enough room to pull herself through, though it was tight. Outside, as she’d expected, was a pebble bed with an ancient, weathered statue of a frog seeming to indicate that sometime, perhaps long ago, someone had cared enough to decorate the area.

Kyrie worked her arms through, so she could put her hands against the external wall and work her body out. Above her, she could see a lighted window, and hear the noise of people talking and—from the sound of it—some sort of computer game.

When she was up to her hips outside the room, a shadow fell on the window above. For a moment, Kyrie had a glimpse of a young man, around college age, with a can of some beverage in one hand, and she froze, hoping he wouldn’t open the window and that he wouldn’t look out.

Turning her head, she saw, to her right, a neon sign with a stereotypical cartoon Indian chief, the headdress blinking in garish green and blue, and a hand lighting and blinking to seem to wave up and down. Beneath it the words, only partly illuminated, in yellow, but still legible, read Tomahawk Motel.

As he turned back away and towards the inside, she pushed harder with her hands, to pull herself out.

This was a mistake. Something in the frame of the window caught at her jeans and gave a groan like a spirit caught in eternal torment.

From inside, loudly, came a swear word followed by, “What was that?”

And Kyrie shoved for all she was worth and pulled free from the window, feeling the pocket of her jeans tearing, and not caring. At the back of her mind, she quickly realized that if she ran towards the road she would be more likely to be caught. She could hear a door open on the other side of the motel cabin in whose basement she’d been captive. They’d come here, they’d see—

She was already running, hunched over, towards a dark area, past other cabins, out, and down, away from the road.

Although she’d never been here, she knew the area from driving past. Down there was a creek and an area full of brush and trees. She ran towards it, and crawled under the first clump of bushes she came through. She half expected to find condoms and needles under there, but clearly the people who frequented the Tomahawk were not the type to commune with nature by the creek.

She heard shouts and calls, and finally a couple of cars starting up. She wondered if those were her captors going in search of her, or thinking they were doing so, going towards the road, towards The George.

The George was south of here, two cross-streets away. Her house was the other way from this little wooded area, past a small maze of neighborhood streets. Which way did they think she’d be more likely to go?

She took deep breaths and tried to decide what to do.

* * *

It was when they got to his car, in the parking lot of Riverside, that Rafiel realized he was an idiot. Okay, so he probably had good indications before, including the fact that he was falling for a woman about whom he knew precious little, other than that she was an art student and could shift into a dragon.

He also knew that she had talked back to the Great Sky Dragon, that she wasn’t put off by danger—in fact she’d volunteered to come into greater danger in order to help Tom—and that she viewed his relationship with his parents as he viewed it, which, now that he thought about it, was damn rare.

Maybe he wasn’t totally stupid for starting to think he’d like to spend his whole life with Bea. Fine. But he was totally stupid for not having remembered that his car keys had been lost more than a day ago in that disastrous change into a lion.

Bea didn’t make him feel any better either, when she said, “But why didn’t you have it attached to your leg, with the phone?”

Rafiel sighed. “Normally,” he said, “I just call my parents, or Tom, for the spare set of keys.”

He’d called Tom first, but got no answer at home, and when he called the diner, he was told that Tom had left with Conan Lung and Old Joe. That sounded like official business, and weird official business at that, so he’d not called Tom’s cell phone. The way things were, he might get Tom mid-transformation, or perhaps mid-conference with some triad guys, and Rafiel had a strong feeling that there was nothing worse for the image of a great leader than stopping in the middle of a conversation about the possible invasion of the world to go take a friend his car keys. He tried Kyrie’s phone and no one answered.

He could call his parents, but he’d asked his mother if he could bring a friend for dinner, and maybe to stay a couple of days, and had barely escaped embarrassing questions which Bea would overhear. If he called again…

Then he thought of his colleagues in the police. He’d got his mom to call him in sick yesterday, and of course they wouldn’t have his particular key, but it was a little known fact that there were a limited number of vehicle keys, per make, and that the police had copies of most of those. They had to, because when a car was discovered by the side of the road exuding a strange smell, not causing more damage than strictly needed was important, just in case it turned out to be a crime scene.