Noah's Boy-eARC (8 page)

Then she sighed. “My name is Beatrice Bao Ryu. Bea to my friends. I am…” Deep breath. “I was an art student at the University of Georgia, but—”

“You shift into a dragon.”

“Oh, yeah, since I was about fourteen. But it seems, because they don’t— It took them a while to find out what I was and that I was…”

“Them?”

“My parents and…and whoever it is, who works…the Great Sky Dragon’s people. My parents aren’t shifters. They only found out I shifted over Christmas. And I think…there started to be trouble at Dad’s business. Dad is a vet. Veterinarian. Clients would get anonymous calls saying that he was mistreating the animals when he boarded them and that he…well…other bad stuff. And the animal hospital was broken into twice, and everything…what wasn’t stolen was smashed. I didn’t know why, though I knew Dad was worried and, well…that we were having money trouble.”

She looked up and saw Tom’s blank look. “I know, it sounds unrelated, but it isn’t. I heard my parents talk, and I found out that—you see…my dad was being blackmailed. He had to send me…send me here. Send me to the Great Sky Dragon, or they were going to bankrupt Dad. I didn’t like the sound of that”—she made an airy gesture—“so I came out to see who this Great Sky Dragon, Ancient One person was, and to tell him what I thought of what his triads were doing to Daddy.”

“Oh, I’d have paid to see that,” Tom said, and grinned. “I think I was the only one to ever defy him before.”

She shrugged nonchalantly. “I went to see him where his letters to my dad said to meet.” She waved her hand again. “At the Three Luck Dragon.”

“Yeah, he likes that place,” Tom said. He had his own memories of the restaurant, his own reasons to stay away from it. For one, he’d been eviscerated in its parking lot. Fortunately dragons weren’t that easily killed. In fact, short of cutting the body into two or more pieces or separating head from body, they would come back from about anything.

Still, Tom remembered dying and, knowing the Great Sky Dragon had considered that a gentle spanking, it made him very careful about the creature. He took a sip of his coffee. “So, what did he want with you? And did you say no? Is that why two dragons tried to roast you?”

She covered her face. When she looked up her cheeks were glowing red. “No. Yes. I mean…I said no. But then…but then I don’t remember anything. I woke up in that room, and…and I couldn’t shift.” Her last words came out in a near whine.”

As Kyrie approached, Tom extended a hand to touch her. He needed the reassurance of her proximity, the comfort of knowing that whatever madness was about to engulf them—from feral shifters to whatever it was the Great Sky Dragon’s people were cooking up now—they would face it together.

“I think they knocked me out,” the girl said. “I have a lump over my ear. I think they knocked me out and…”

Kyrie looked at Tom and he looked back at her. Feeling married extended beyond sharing the same bed and kissing without worrying about morning breath. Kyrie’s glance said as clearly as possible,
You have to tell her the truth. She has to know what she’s up against.

Tom didn’t know how much of Bea’s story Kyrie had heard, but he knew she was right. He took a deep breath. “No. I think he killed you.”

The girl blinked, looked startled. “I-I beg your—pardon?”

Tom took another deep breath, feeling like he was diving into freezing waters. Kyrie kissed him and patted his shoulder as though to give him courage, before going off. “Sorry. I don’t know how else to say it. The Great Sky Dragon doesn’t think it’s a very bad punishment…He…” He paused and took another deep breath.

“I’m not dead,” Beatrice said, her voice just a little too loud.

“No. Of course not. The only way to kill a dragon is to separate the head from the body or cut the body in two. And even that I’m not sure about, if the two halves are brought together immediately. I’m also fairly sure you can’t come back from being burned to cinders, but I might be wrong. You’re not dead, but my guess is that the Great Sky Dragon gave you a killing blow and did it on purpose, so you were temporarily dead. The telltale is that you can’t shift. You usually can’t shift for about a day after you recover…come back to life. Whatever. And he probably had someone else check in in your place, because Louise sounded all confused about your checking in, and you don’t remember it. You must have been dead some days…Usual is three days, of course.”

“Dead? I…what day is it?”

“Wednesday.”

“It was Sunday.” She put her head in her hands.

“Yeah,” Tom said, as gently as he knew how. “That would…well…Usually it takes a few days to come back, and I’m going to guess he knew exactly where to put you and…I have bad news—I heard two dragons were seen setting fire to the bed-and-breakfast.”

“He—He wanted me to burn?” She looked almost wooden, her face unnaturally immobile, but she’d gone very pale. And before Tom could answer, she added, “I’m sorry. Where is the—”

He pointed her to the restroom and she went. She came back minutes later, looking composed, but still faintly green.

Chapter 9

Bea couldn’t understand why the idea that she’d been dead and was alive again would have made her throw up. Perhaps it was the shock. And she couldn’t say she felt better afterwards. She wasn’t sure “better” was the word, except that the physical distress and then rinsing her mouth and washing her face and hands had made her feel like some time had elapsed. Like she’d had time to catch her breath.

Ormson was sitting at the table eating, but his girlfriend was hovering at the end of the hallway, waiting. She led Bea to the booth, and Ormson got up, tied on a bandana to confine his hair, and went off to the restroom.

There was a steaming pot of tea and two cups on the table, and the woman poured the tea and pushed a cup toward Bea, “I thought tea was better for you just now,” she said. Then she pushed a container of sugar packets at Bea. “And sugar is good for shock.”

Bea rarely sweetened her tea, but she did it now.

The woman waited till Bea took a mouthful, then said, “My name is Kyrie, by the way.”

“I…my friends call me Bea.” She paused. “How— Why did Mr. Ormson say that about…about the Great…about my being killed?”

Kyrie looked serious. “Because you can’t shift afterwards, for about a day or so. Just getting hit on the head doesn’t stop your shifting, but being dead and coming back does.”

Bea was going to ask how they knew that, then stopped. She didn’t even want to know which of them it was who had been killed before. Instead, she inclined her head and drank a mouthful of sweet tea. And swallowed. And looked up—to meet sympathy in the young woman’s eyes.

“If it makes you feel better, he once gutted Tom from neck to groin and left him for dead. I thought he was dead. The morgue here still talks about it as one of the oddest cases of shock. But…I thought he was dead.” Her eyes were dark with pain.

“But why?”Bea asked. “What was the point of roasting me alive? Or…undead or something?”

The woman smiled. “I think,” she said, “that this is the Great Sky Dragon’s idea of introducing you to Tom in a romantic fashion.”

“What?” Bea swallowed hard. “I want to tell you that I—”

“Don’t have the slightest interest in my boyfriend?” Kyrie said, and smiled. “Yeah. I kind of figured. You don’t look like an arranged marriage sort of girl, but you know, the…Himself is very old, and—”

“And has read way too many comic books?”

“Oh, more than likely,” Kyrie said dryly.

At that moment
She Only Comes Out at Night
sounded in the tinny tone of a cell phone, and Kyrie dug into her pocket to bring it out. She listened for a moment, then said, “Shit,” not as though it was a swear word, but as though it was a statement of fact. “Shit.”

* * *

Rafiel woke up. It was…cold, very cold, and it was hard and prickly under him, as if he were lying on a bed of thorns.

So this is what hell feels like,
he thought. His mouth was parched, his body hurt as though someone had worked him over with sandpaper, and his eyes appeared to be glued shut. His skin was icy cold, but covered in sweat. At least he hadn’t lost a whole day.…Had he lost a whole day?

Working against what seemed to be heavy weights sitting on each of his eyelids, he opened his eyes and looked up at a red-tinged sky. Only one eye worked. His left eye appeared to be obstructed—blackness was all he saw. Memory came back to him, of pursuing the feral shifters, of the strange female feline, of…her paw penetrating his left eye.

Had she killed him? He had no idea if, like dragon shifters, lion shifters also came back from the dead, but he had a feeling that the same rules applied, that they were, somehow, all parts of a whole.

He managed to raise himself onto his elbows. No, this was not something he could wait and heal from. For one, he was starving for protein—so hungry that if a rabbit crossed his path, he’d eat it raw, fur and all. For another, he was scratched, scraped and bitten over most of his body, and his left thigh appeared to have been torn open by a massive claw.

For a moment he was afraid to look at his right thigh. Then he did, and the phone was still there, secured by its orange coil.

It took him forever to get the phone off his thigh and even longer to dial Kyrie’s number, even though both she and Tom were on his contacts’ list. He kept hitting the wrong buttons. When he dialed it, he put the phone to his ear and then almost fell asleep, listening to the phone
meep
against his ear.

Suddenly there was Kyrie’s voice. “Hello?”

He had to swallow twice before he could talk, “Kyrie. I’m…hurt.”

“Where?”

“Out I-25,” he said, then thought. “Goldminers Road? I think.” He swallowed, trying to gather what was left of his saliva. “Field…Tom? Aerial?”

“Shit,” Kyrie said. “Shit.”

“Sorry. Risk. Hate to have him shift, but I—”

“Don’t mention it,” Kyrie said. “It’s just…we don’t have anyone to man…Wait while I see if Anthony will stay on a little longer.”

“I—” Rafiel had to take a deep breath and was still shaky as he said. “It’s just I’m afraid whatever it was will come back and kill me.”

* * *

Kyrie didn’t remember what she’d told Bea. In fact, she had started to get up from the table and leave without saying anything at all, until it occurred to her that the poor woman was likely to wonder. Then she turned back and said, “Beg your pardon. A friend of ours is in trouble and needs us.”

Anthony was taking off his apron when Kyrie opened the pass-through and entered the area behind the counter, where the grill and Tom’s new fryer and all the food preparation machinery was. Something in her face must have alerted Anthony to trouble, because he turned around and said, “No. Don’t even think about it. My wife is already—”

“You have to, Anthony,” Kyrie said. “You just have to. We have to go and help Rafiel. It’s a matter of life or death.”

“Rafiel?” Tom said, turning around and catching Kyrie’s expression, which warned him that there would be absolutely no discussion of the trouble Rafiel had got himself into. “Oh…that…thing?”

Kyrie nodded.

Anthony looked fit to be tied. “You know, I thought the police force had teams and intervention and, you know,
stuff
for this kind of thing. Why does Officer Trall always need you guys to pull his fat out of the fire?”

Chapter 10

It was a good question, and Tom wished he had an answer to it. But he didn’t. After all, it was impossible to tell Anthony, whose closest-held secret was that he danced bolero with a local troupe, that his bosses and their best friend shifted into animal shapes, an affliction that often landed them in trouble and caused them to have to get each other out of said trouble.

Kyrie cleared her throat, and Tom knew he had to come up with something as his employee stood there, holding the folded dark red apron with The George emblazoned on the chest, and looking from one to the other for some explanation.

“It’s a secret thing,” Tom said. “You know, he does things…that is, you know, there is trouble with…with drug dealing, and Rafiel is undercover and if he’s picked up by other police officers, his identity will be blown.”

“This is Goldport,” Anthony said, almost yelling. “There are only—what? Half a dozen senior officers? I bet half the city knows him. Certainly the half of the city that is likely to have run-ins with the police. They’ll figure out who he is, even if it’s you two picking him up!”

“They haven’t. He has a really good undercover disguise,” Tom said.

“Really good,” Kyrie said, full of fervor.

It must have been her tone of voice that convinced Anthony. He rolled his eyes towards the ceiling, which had been newly degreased and painted just two months ago, and seemed to be contemplating the meaning of life, or perhaps the meaning of his bosses’ madness. “Fine,” he said, at last, as he put his apron back on. “Fine, fine, fine, fine. You’re lucky that I’m kind of fond of you, though you’re both complete lunatics. But I’m warning you right now, if my wife divorces me, I’m going to come gunning for you.”

Never having figured out if Anthony was Greek or Hispanic or some other culture with a very close-knit family, but knowing for a fact that Anthony knew everyone in the neighborhood, and that everyone was likely to know Anthony, and that half the neighborhood were perhaps not as…clean-cut as they could be, Tom took the warning seriously. “She won’t. We’ll pay you double time.”

Anthony glared at Tom. “You’re a nut. Go on, hurry up, but don’t leave me here all alone with Conan’s thing tonight.”

* * *

“Conan’s thing?” Kyrie asked. She had turned to get out of the space behind the counter, but now she turned back. The words had an ominous ring, if she could just remember what they referred to.

The thing was, she suspected there had been a lot of talking, or perhaps pleading from Conan, who often seemed to mistake Tom for an indulgent father. The relationship was weird, given that Conan had started out by trying to kill Tom at the orders of the Great Sky Dragon, back when Tom had stolen the Pearl of Heaven, and the Great Sky Dragon had been trying to capture him and—from the looks of it—kill him.