Night Shifters (27 page)

He was drinking a beer, straight from the can. To the other side of the elaborate oriental fan hung a calendar with a pinup standing in front of a huge truck. Something about this—the irreverence, the Western intrusions, stopped Edward from his course, which was to ask about the Great Sky Dragon.

Perhaps the creature had only left him in the parking lot because it was convenient. But the name . . . Three Luck Dragon, while not unusual, seemed to speak of dragons, and dragons . . .

He realized he’d been standing there for a while in silence, and probably looking very worried, as the man behind the counter swiveled around to look at him.

“How may I help you?” he asked.

Edward took a deep breath. Come on, if worse came to worst, what would happen? He could always tell the man that Great Sky Dragon was just the name of another restaurant, couldn’t he? That he’d got confused?

And besides, if he didn’t ask, what would happen? It wasn’t as if Edward was going to figure out where Tom was, much less manage to convince Tom on his own. And he had a sneaky suspicion that if he tried to just forget the whole thing and go back to New York, the creature would just come and pluck him out of his office again. Or his house. There was only so much plate glass he was willing to replace.

All this was thought quickly, while the man’s dark eyes stared at him betraying just a slight edge of discomfort, as if he were waiting, madly, to go back to his tractor pull on TV.

“I was looking for the Great Sky Dragon,” Edward said.

“What?” the man asked, eyes widening.

“I was looking . . . I wondered if you could tell me where to find the Great Sky Dragon,” Edward said.

There was a silence, as the man looked at him from head to toe, as if something about Edward’s appearance could have reassured him that this was something to do. Slowly, the cashier’s hand reached for a remote near the cash register, turned the TV off.

Then he came out from behind the counter and said, “You come with me.”

Edward took a deep breath. What had he got into? And what would it mean? Had he just managed to startle a member of the dragon triad who had no idea who he was or what he was doing? And if he had, would he presently be killed by people who didn’t even ask him why he wanted the Great Sky Dragon, or what he wanted of him.

He was led all the way through, past a bustling kitchen and past a set of swinging doors, into a grubby corridor stacked high with boxes.

At the very back of the corridor, a door opened, and the cashier reached in, turned on the light by tugging on a pull chain on the ceiling.

Light flooded a room scarcely larger than a cubicle. There was a folding table, open. An immaculate white cloth covered it. And on the cloth was a mound of peas—some shelled, some still in their pods. On the floor was a bucket, filled with empty pods. Behind the table was a plastic orange chair.

“Wait here,” the cashier said. “Just wait.”

Hesitantly, afraid of what this might mean, Edward went in. The cashier closed the door after him. Edward could hear the lock clicking home.

“I’ll go in and look for it,” a voice Kyrie knew said.

“But I wouldn’t be too alarmed. It was probably just a large cat. I very much doubt it was a panther. I haven’t heard of any panthers having been lost by the zoo. And panthers are not common here, you know,” Rafiel Trall’s voice went on, as usual radiating self-confidence.

A babble of voices answered him and, from the panther’s perch atop the branch, Kyrie gathered that the crowd out there were insulted that Rafiel thought they could confuse a large house cat with a panther.

And yet, the way Rafiel talked, that certainty that exuded from his words, was so convincing that she could also hear the resistance running away. She could almost hear people starting to doubt themselves.

“I’ll go in,” Rafiel said. “With Officer Bob. Just to be on the safe side, please no one follow us. We’ll do a thorough search. If we find it warranted, we will then call animal control. Right now all this commotion is premature.”

The panther heard them come into the garden. Wondered how long it would take them to find it. Them. Officer Bob. Kyrie wondered what Officer Bob would think if he found her.

But Officer Bob was looking one way, and Rafiel was looking the other. She could hear them separate. She could hear officer Bob walking away. She could hear . . . She could hear Rafiel following her trail here.

He followed it so exactly that she started wondering if he was following the trail of broken branches and footprints she’d doubtless left, or following her scent. She remembered he seemed to be able to smell other shifters. To smell them out better than she did, at any rate.

He came all the way to the bottom of the tree, looked up at her, blinked, then smiled. “Kyrie,” he said.

His voice was perfectly normal and human, and yet there seemed to be something to it, some kind of harmonics that made the hair stand up at the back of her neck. Not fright. She wasn’t scared of him. It was something else.

For just a moment, there was the feeling that the panther might jump down from the tree and roll on him and . . . No.

Kyrie tried to control the panther and had a feeling that the world flickered. And realized she was a naked human, sitting on a branch of a tree in a most unusual position. A position that gave a very interesting view to the man below.

She scrambled to sit on the branch in the human way, and fought a desire to cover herself. She could either hold on to the branch or she could cover herself. Between modesty and a fall, modesty could not win.

“Yes,” she said. Heat climbed up to her cheeks and she had a feeling she was blushing from her belly button to her hair roots.

Yes, she was sure she was blushing from the way Rafiel smiled—a broad smile that exuded confidence and amusement.

But when he spoke, it was still in a whisper. “I have this for you,” he said, taking it from his pants pocket and handing it up. “I stopped for just a moment when I heard the report on the radio. I told Bob I needed to use the restroom and let him radio we were taking care of it, while I went to a shop and bought this. I’m sorry if it looks horrible, my concern was that it fit in my pocket.”

He handed up what looked like a little wrinkled square of fabric. When Kyrie caught it, she realized it was very light silk, the type that is designed to look wrinkled, and that there was a lot more material than seemed to be.

Shaken out, the fabric revealed a sheath dress. Kyrie decided it was safer to climb down from the tree, first, and then put it on. With the dress draped over her shoulders, she climbed down carefully, until, on the ground, she slipped the dress on. Of course, she was still barefoot, but on a warm day, in Colorado, in one of the old residential neighborhoods of Goldport, that was not exactly unheard of.

“Go out at the back,” Rafiel said. “From what I could see when we approached, the part where the garden borders on the alley doesn’t have any bystanders. If anyone sees you, tell them some thing about having come in to look for the panther, but the police ordering you out. And now, go.” As she started for the path, he pushed her toward another path, the other way. “No, no,” he said. “That way. If you go this way you will run into Bob and Bob is likely to have his gun out and be on edge. I don’t want you shot. Go. I’ll meet you at your house as soon as I can.”

Her house. With the bugs. Kyrie shivered. But there was nothing for it. She had to go somewhere. At the very least, she had to go somewhere to get shoes.

Edward didn’t wait long. He didn’t sit down. He didn’t dare sit down. There was only one chair, and it seemed to be in front of the table, with the peas on it.

Instead, he stood, uncertainly, till the door opened, and a man came in. He looked . . . Well, he looked like an average middle-aged man, of Asian origin, in Colorado. He wore T-shirt and jeans, had a sprinkling of silver in his black hair, and, in fact, looked so mundane, that Edward was sure there must be a mistake.

He opened his mouth to say so. And stopped. There was something in the man’s eyes—the man’s serious, dark eyes. They looked like he was doing something very difficult. Something that might be life or death.

“Mr. Ormson?” he said.

Edward Ormson nodded, and his eyes widened. Was this the human form of the dragon he had seen yesterday? He seemed so small, so . . . normal.

But in Edward’s mind was the image of that last night before he’d . . . asked Tom to leave. He remembered looking out of the window of his bedroom, next to Tom’s room and seeing a green and gold dragon against the sky—majestic against the sky. He remembered seeing the dragon go into Tom’s bedroom. And he remembered . . . He remembered running to see it, and finding only Tom, putting on his bathrobe. He remembered the shock.

These creatures could look like normal people. Perhaps . . .

“My name is Lung,” the man said, and then, as though catching something in Edward’s expression, he smiled. “And no, I am not him. But you could say I . . . ah . . . know him.” Lung stepped fully in the room, and seemed to about to sit down in the plastic chair, when he realized that Edward didn’t have anywhere to sit.

“They left you standing?” he asked. “I’m so sorry.” He opened the door and spoke sharply to someone back there, then stepped fully in. Moments later, a young man, with long lanky hair almost covering his eyes, came in and set down a chair. Another one, swiftly, ducked in the wake of the first, to remove the cloth and all the peas in it. As soon as he’d withdrawn the first one showed up again, to spread another, clean tablecloth on the table. And after that, yet another one set a tray with a teapot and two tea cups on the table.

Lung gestured toward the—blue, plastic—chair they’d brought in. “Please sit,” he said. “Might as well be comfortable, as we speak.”

Edward sat on the chair, and faced Lung across the table. “Tea?” Lung said, and without waiting for an answer, filled Edward’s cup, then his own. “Now . . . may I ask why you were looking for . . . him? His name is not normally spoken so . . . casually.”

Edward took a deep breath. “How do you know my name?” he asked.

Lung smiled, again. He picked up his cup, holding it with two hands, as if his palms were cold and had to be warmed on the hot porcelain. “He told us. He told us he brought you to town. That you were to . . . convince your son to speak.”

“Ah,” Edward said. “I don’t know where to find my son,” he said, picking up his cup and taking a hurried sip that scalded his tongue. “I haven’t seen Tom in . . .”

Lung shook his head. “I don’t question his judgments. It wouldn’t do to do such,” he said. He looked at Edward and raised his eyebrows just a little. “He says you have been . . . useful to us in the past, so you know a little of . . . his ways. And of us. Do you not?”

Edward inclined his head. More than simple acknowledgment, but less than a nod. “I have defended . . . people connected to him, before. I know about . . .” He thought about a way to put it that wouldn’t seem too open or too odd. “. . . about the shape-shifting,” he said at last.

Lung inclined his head in turn. “But do you know about the other . . . about his other powers?”

Edward raised his eyebrows, said nothing.

Lung smiled. “Ah, I won’t bore you with ancient oriental legends.”

“Given what I’ve seen, what I’ve felt; given that I was brought here by . . . the—”

“Him.”

“Him, I don’t think I would dismiss it all as just a legend.”

“Perhaps not,” Lung said. “And yet the legend is just a legend, and, I suspect, as filled with imagination and wild embellishments. What we know is somewhat different. But . . . he is not like us. That we know. Or rather, he is like us, but old, impossibly old.”

“How old?”

Lung shrugged. “Thousands of years. Before . . . civilization. From the time of legends. Who knows?” He drank his tea and poured a new cup. “What we do know is this—he has powers. Perhaps because he is old, or perhaps, simply, because he was born with more powers than us. I couldn’t tell you which. But whatever powers he has, it is said that he can feel things—sense them. Perhaps it’s less premonition than simply having been around a lot and seeing how things tend to work out.” He inclined his head and looked into his tea cup as though reading the future in its surface. “If he thought you should be here, then he has his reasons.”

“But I can’t find my son. I haven’t seen my son in years. I didn’t even know if he was alive. The— he said that I was responsible for my son, but surely you must see . . . I haven’t seen him in years.”

Lung looked up, gave Edward an analyzing glance, then nodded. “As is, I think we have it all in hand. We know where your son is. We have . . . Some of our employees have got him. In a nearby city. And they’re confident he will eventually tell them what he did with the object he stole. We don’t know why
he
thought it necessary to get you, nor why
he
thought you should be here. But he is not someone whose judgments I’d dream of disputing.”

A silence, long and fraught, descended, while Edward tried to figure out what he had just been told, in that convoluted way. “Are you telling me I have to stay here, but you’re not sure why?” he asked.

The back alley wasn’t empty, but it was nearly empty. At least compared to the crowd that surrounded the castle garden in the front. Here at the back, there were only half a dozen people looking in, staring at the lush, green garden, spying, presumably, for movement and fur.

There were two boys and a young girl of maybe fifteen, wearing jeans, a T-shirt and a ponytail and holding a skateboard under her arm. The other three people looked like transients. Street people. Men, and probably past fifty, though there was no way to tell for sure.

Kyrie, still under cover of thick greenery, wondered at the strange minds of these people who would come and surround a place where they’d seen what they thought was a jungle animal disappear. What kind of idiots, she asked herself, wanted to face a panther, while unarmed and empty-handed? She might be a shapeshifter but at least she wasn’t so strange as this.

They were all roughly disposed on either side of a broad gate that seemed to have rusted partly open.