Night Shifters (26 page)

And these things, these . . . creatures . . . had violated it. Worse. They’d come into her house before, and they’d made Tom . . . high. They’d made Tom destroy part of her house. They’d given her an entirely wrong impression about Tom.

Not that they could be the ones who gave her the impression that Tom was an addict—or an ex drug addict. But they, as they were, had given her the impression that Tom didn’t care about being a guest in her house, that he’d violated her hospitality. And because of them, she’d let Tom go—no—encouraged Tom to go, out there, somewhere, with no protection.

For all she knew, he was already dead. His own father was looking for him for the dragon triad. And she had kicked him out. Because of these things.

Anger boiled through her, together with a not unreasonable fear that there was no way out of this predicament and that she was going to end up as dead as that corpse they had rolled about in the parking lot of the Athens a few hours ago.

She heard a scream tear through her throat, and it seemed to her that the more advanced beetle—the one coming from the kitchen—stopped.

It seemed to Kyrie too that—though there was nothing on the beetle, anywhere, that could properly be called an expression—the beetle looked like it had just realized it was in deep trouble. Perhaps it was the thing’s vague, confused attempt at skittering backward.

And then Kyrie jumped forward. There was no use at all attacking the pincers, so she vaulted over them. She used to be quite good at gymnastics in middle school. In fact, for a brief period of time, she’d thought that she was going to be a gymnast. But the foster family she was with didn’t have the time to drive her to the extra practices.

Yet, just enough skill remained to allow her to vault over the pincers, and toward the monstrous head.

Blindly, more by instinct than anything else, Kyrie stabbed at the thing where the head carapace met the body carapace. She stabbed the umbrella down hard and was rewarded with a satisfyingly squishy sound, a spray of liquid upward, and a shriek that was part steam release and part the sound of a car’s valves going seriously wrong.

From the other beetle came a sound of high distress, and it advanced. But its companion’s body—dead?—blocked its way, and Kyrie jumped down from the carapace, on the other side, ran through her kitchen and out through her ruined back porch.

In her tiny backyard garden, she realized in her human form, she could never get enough of a running standard to jump over the six-foot fence.

But, as a panther . . .

She had never cavalierly shifted. Certainly never during the day. And yet, she was so full of fear and anger, of adrenaline and the need to fight or fly, that it seemed the easiest thing in the world. She willed herself into cat form and, suddenly, a black panther was rearing and taking a jumping leap at the fence. She cleared it with some space, just before she heard a sound behind her. It was an odd hissing, and a sound like . . . wings?

She had an odd feeling that these beetles could fly.

“Will you talk?” Crest Dragon asked.

Tom shook his head. There had been more . . . beatings. At least he supposed they would call it beatings. More accurate would be brutalizing to within an inch of his life.

Tom knew he would heal. The problem was that he suspected so did his captors. And that they were being more unrestrained with him than they would be with practically anyone else.

His defense right now was to look more confused than he felt, to look more tired than he felt. He shook his head and mumbled something that he hoped passed for a creditable wish to speak.

Red Dragon said something in their language that, for all it was unintelligible, was still clearly scathing. Crest Dragon answered curtly and sharply. They both turned to glare at Other Dragon, who shook his head, said something, then shrugged. He disappeared into a corner, where they seemed to have piled up some bags and other effects.

He returned, moments later, with . . . Tom blinked, unable to believe his eyes. But Other Dragon was definitely holding a syringe. A huge syringe. Tom frowned at it. It looked just a little smaller than those sold as basters at stores. He’d once been tempted to buy one for about two minutes until he realized the amount of meat he could actually afford didn’t ever require external basting, much less internal.

Now he blinked at the syringe, and looked up at Other Dragon in some puzzlement. What the hell was that? What did they think they were doing? What did they want to put into him? Truth serum? Or marinade? Did they think he would be all the better for a touch of garlic and a bit of vinegar?

Other Dragon seemed rather puzzled as to what he should be doing, too. Twice he turned around to ask something in Chinese. Twice he was told off sharply—or so it seemed—also in Chinese.

At last he sighed, and walked up to Tom, and held the hypodermic in front of Tom’s face and shouted something that sounded like a samurai challenge. While Tom blinked, puzzled, Crest Dragon said something from the back. Other Dragon turned. Then looked again at Tom and smiled. A very odd smile, Tom thought. A smile of enticement, of offer that would have made much more sense—as starving as Tom felt—if he’d been holding a rare steak. He leaned in close to Tom and said, “You want this, right?”

The syringe was filled with a colorless liquid. It could be . . . anything. And Tom realized, suddenly, with something like a shock, that he very much did
not
want it, whatever it was. Perhaps it was the Pearl of Heaven that had eased his way up from the pit he’d dug himself into, but he could remember the days he was using. It had seemed so simple then. It had seemed to him that he was sparing himself pain and thought, both.

A life that was too bizarre, too complex—his feelings for the home he’d lost, his wandering existence, and the dragon he could become suddenly, unexpectedly—had been suddenly simplified. He’d sometimes, before the drugs, forgotten what he’d done as a dragon, but when he’d started using, it had made it that much easier. He could either forget or pretend it was all part of a bad trip.

He didn’t have to believe—in the unblinking light of day, he didn’t have to believe that he had no control over the beast. And he didn’t have to see that the beast existed. He didn’t even have to be believe himself alone—expelled from the only home he had ever known.

No—the drugs had blurred his mind just enough to make him be able to pretend it was all a dream—just a dream. That he was still sixteen and still at home. That he was not a shapeshifter, a dangerous, uncertain creature.

He’d thought he was fine. He’d . . . He frowned at the syringe, thinking. He’d thought he was doing great. He’d anaesthetized himself into being able to bear his life.

Until he’d woken up choking on his own vomit once too many times. Until he’d woken up, in the morning, naked, under some underpass or beside some shelter, wondering what the dragon had done in the night and why.

And then there were the dreams. Lying asleep in daytime and dreaming of . . . eating someone. Of chasing people down. Of . . . Oh, he was almost sure none of it had ever happened. There would have been talk. News reports. Someone would have noticed. But the dreams were there, and the dreams made him fear one day all control would slip from the dragon and the dreams would become true.

And then there had been the Pearl of Heaven. And the job. And . . . and Kyrie. Who was he to judge her if she too chose to anesthetize herself, sometimes? She had helped him when he needed it most. He wanted to remember that. And he wanted to control the dragon. He wanted to know what he did, to know it was true. He didn’t want the slippery dream, again.

“I want to own my own mind,” he said, his raspy, low voice startling him. It seemed to come from so far away. And the words were odd, too, formal, stilted, not like himself at all. “I don’t want drugs,” he said in a still lower voice.

Crest Dragon said something that had the sound of profanity to it. And Other Dragon looked back confused. It was left to Red Dragon, the brash, perhaps younger of them, to step forward and say, “Well, then, if you don’t talk, we’ll have to give you some.”

Which, of course, made perfect sense. But Tom couldn’t talk. Because if he talked they would kill him. But if he didn’t talk, they would give him this stuff. Which, of course, would make him talk.

He—who just the night before had been looking desperately for a drug dealer—realized if he were going to die, he would rather die sober. He’d rather know whatever there was to know, experience what there was to experience, with a clean perception. But then . . .

But then, and there it was. If he told them they would kill him for sure. Possibly in a painful way. If they gave him the drug . . . perhaps they would leave him alone while they went to verify he’d told them the truth. Okay, it was unlikely they would leave him alone. But with these three geniuses it was possible. At any rate, it would take them longer . . . They would have to get the words from him—and Tom had no idea what this drug was, or if it would make him talk quickly. Or at all. And then they would have to verify.

That would take longer than if he told them the truth up front and they rushed off right away to verify it. Or called someone in Goldport. And that meant there would be more time for something to happen. Something . . .

Red Dragon was waiting. He had his hands on either side of his skinny waist—a dragon tattoo shone on the back of each hand. “Well,” he said, with a kind of petulant sneer. “Are you going to tell us where the Pearl of Heaven is?”

Tom grinned. It made his lips hurt, as cracked as they were and with dried blood caked on them, but he grinned anyway. He wished he could gather enough saliva to spit at them, but of course, he couldn’t. “Your grandfather’s wonton,” he said.

And, as they held him down; as the needle went into his arm, he relished the look of surprise—and confusion—on Two Dragon’s face.

Paws on concrete. The sidewalk—an alien word from her human mind, forced, unwilling, on the panther, intruded. Sidewalk. People. People walking.

There were screams. Mothers and terrified babies, hurling to the side of the street. A man standing in front of her, gun cocked.

Kyrie’s human mind pulled the panther sideways. The bullet whistled by. The panther crouched to leap. Kyrie tugged at the panther.

Trapped. The panther’s brain rushed to every nook and cranny, to every possible hiding place, but she was trapped. There was nowhere she could go. No safety. No jungle.

Smell of trees, of green. Smell of moss and undergrowth.

Like a passenger in a lurching car, Kyrie blinked, becoming aware that she was veering off the street and toward the triangular block of land where the castle sat, with its own little forest around it, surrounded by high black metal fence, full of Victorian scrolls and rusting in spots.

Leaf mold on paws. Trees rustling overhead. The pleasing sound of things scurrying along the ground, in the soft vegetation. Screams behind her. People pointing through the fence, screaming, yelling.

The panther ran and Kyrie guided it as she could. Through the undergrowth, to the thick clumps of vegetation. She told the panther they were being hunted. That something bigger and meaner was after them. The panther crouched on its belly and crept, belly to the grass, close to the ground, forward, forward, forward, till it found itself all but hidden under the trees.

Kyrie had lost sense of time. She didn’t know how long she had been in the panther’s mind—a small focus of humanity, of sanity, within the beast. But she knew it had been long, because she could feel pain along the panther’s muscles, from holding the position too long.

The panther wanted to climb a tree, to watch from above. It did not like this cowering, this submissive posture. And Kyrie couldn’t hear any noise nearby. What remained rational and sane of herself within the panther thought that the people had stayed at the fence, talking, whispering.

They would call the police. Or the zoo. Or animal control. They wouldn’t risk their lives on this. No. The panther wanted to climb the nearest tree and Kyrie let it, jumping so quickly up the trunk that Kyrie didn’t detect any raised voices, any excitement at seeing her.

The tree was thick, and heavily covered in leaves. And it was around a corner from the front of the house. This way she would see the animal control officers approaching with their darts. Perhaps she could escape.

She wasn’t so stupid that she couldn’t see the possibility for discovery, for being caught. But she wouldn’t think of it. She wouldn’t think past trying to escape. She thought, as fast as she could, as hard as she could. And she saw no way out of this. Unless animal control officers missed her. She didn’t imagine this happening. She could picture them beating the garden, tree by tree, bush by bush, looking for her.

The other option, of course, was for her to shift. She blinked. It hadn’t occurred to her before. Of course, it would be humiliating. But being found naked in a public garden had to be better than to be tranquilized as a panther, and become a woman under sedation. She didn’t know if that would happen—but it could.

But . . . But if she were found naked in a public garden, and if her house were examined, wouldn’t she be committed? Or in some other way confined? Who would believe she was okay when she’d left her house torn to bits behind and was now here in this garden? At the very least they’d think she was on drugs. It wouldn’t do at all.

Edward Ormson waited for only one moment, in the shabby entrance of the Chinese restaurant. He’d expected the oriental decor, and it was there, in a round, white paper lantern concealing the light fixture on the ceiling, on the huge fan pinned to the wall behind the cash register, in the dragon statue carved of some improbable green stone or molded from glow-in-the-dark plastic, that stood glowering on the counter by the register.

But the man behind the register, though unmistakably Chinese, wore a grubby flannel shirt and jeans and managed to look as much like the Western rednecks around him as he could. And the TV hanging from the wall was on and blaring, showing the scene of a tractor pull.