Night Shifters (3 page)

At first it was just that. A shadow, formless, moving on the concrete. Something with wings. Something.

Her hackles rising, she jumped back, cowering, head lifted, growling. And saw it.

A . . . lizard. No. No lizard had ever been this size. A . . . creature, green and scaly and immense, with wings that stretched between the earth and the sky.

The feline Kyrie dropped to her belly, paws stretched our in front of her, a low growl rising, while her hair stood on end, trying to make the already large jungle cat look bigger.

The human Kyrie, torpid and half-dormant, a passenger in her own brain that had been taken over by this dream of moonlight and forest, looked at the beast and thought,
Dragon
.

Not the slender, convoluted form of the Chinese dragons with their huge, bewhiskered faces. No. Nordic. A sturdy Nordic dragon, stout of body, with the sort of wings that truly seemed like they could devour the icy blue sky of the Norsemen and not notice.

Huge, feral, it stood before Kyrie, fangs bared, both wings extended, tip to tip probably a good twelve feet. Its muzzle was stained a dark red, and—as Kyrie knit her belly to the concrete—it hissed, a threatening hiss.

It will flame me next
, Kyrie thought. But she couldn’t get the big cat to move. Bewildered by something that the now dominant part of her couldn’t comprehend, she lay on her belly and growled.

And the Kyrie part of her mind, the human part, looked bewildered at the dragon wings, which were a fantastic construction of bones and translucent glittering skin that faded from green to gold. And she thought that dragons weren’t supposed to look that beautiful. Particularly not a dragon whose muzzle was stained with blood.

And on that, on the one word, she identified the enticing smell. Blood. Fresh blood. She remembered smelling it before the shape-shift. But it smelled nothing like blood through the big cat’s senses.

With the feline’s sharp eyes, she could see, beneath the paws of the dragon, a dark bundle that looked like a human body.

Human blood. And she’d almost lapped it.

Shock and revulsion did what her fear couldn’t. They broke the human Kyrie out of the prison at the back of her own mind. Free, she pushed the animal back.

Push and push and push, she told herself she must be Kyrie. She must be human. Kyrie was smart enough to run away before the dragon let out with fire.

And never mind that the dragon might run her down, kill her. At least she would be able to think with a human mind.

All of a sudden, the animal gave, and she felt the spasms that contorted her body back to two human legs, two human arms, the solidity of a human body, lying on the concrete, hands on the ground, toes supporting her lower body.

She started to rise to run, but the dragon made a sudden, startled movement.

It was not a spring to attack nor a cowering in fear. Either of those she could have accepted as normal for the beast. It was a vague, startled jump. A familiar, startled jump.

Like coming on Tom around the corner of the hallway leading to the bathroom and meeting him coming out of it. Tom jumped that way, startled, not quite scared, and she always thought he’d been shooting up in there—must have been shooting up in there.

Now the same guilty jump from the dragon, and the massive head swung down to her prone body, to look at her with huge, startled blue eyes. Tom’s eyes.

Kyrie. His human mind identified her a second before his reptilian self, startled, scared, surprised, would have opened his mouth and let out with a jet of flame.

His mouth opened, he just managed to control the flame. He tried to shape her name, but the reptilian throat didn’t lend itself to it.

Tom felt his nictitating eyelids blink, sideways, before his normal eyelids, the eyelids he was used to, blinked up and down.

She stood up, slowly, shivering. She was honey-colored all over. Both sets of his eyelids blinked again. He’d always thought that she had a tan. No lines. And her breasts were much fuller than they looked beneath the uniform and apron—heavy, rounded forms miraculously, perfectly horizontal in defiance of gravity.

He realized he was staring and looked up to see her looking into his eyes, horrified. He tried to shape an apology but what came out was a semi-growling hiss.

“Tom,” she said, her voice raspy and hoarse, her eyes frightened and . . . pitying? “Tom, you killed someone.”

Killed? He was sure he hadn’t. He stopped on a breath, then tasted in his mouth the metallic and—to his dragon senses—bright and delicious symphony of flavors that was blood.

Blood? Human blood?

The shock of it seemed to wake him. He looked down to see a corpse between his paws. His paws were smeared with blood. The corpse was a bundle, indistinct, neither male nor female, neither young nor old. It smelled dead. Freshly dead.

Had he run someone down? Killed him? Had he?

He tried to remember and he couldn’t. The dragon . . .

He took his hand to his forehead, felt the clamminess of blood on his skin, and realized he was human again. Human, smeared with blood, standing by a corpse.

And Kyrie had seen him kill someone.

“No,” he said, not sure to whom he spoke. “Oh, please, no.”

Tom’s voice was low at the best of times. Now it came out growly and raspy, like gravel dragging around on a river bottom. His transformation, much faster than hers, had been so fast that she’d hardly seen it.

He stood by the corpse, looking lost despite his broad shoulders, small waist, muscular legs, powerful arms. Except for his being all of five-six, and for the track marks on his arms, Tom could have graced the cover of bodybuilding magazines. Only his muscles weren’t developed to the grotesque level the field demanded.

And above it all his face that managed to make him look like a frightened little boy.

His hair had come loose from the rubber band he used to confine it in a ponytail. Loose, it just touched his arms, in a rumple of irregular curls. His skin was pale, very pale all over. Not exactly vampire-white. More like aged ivory, even and smooth. And his eyes were a deep, dark, and yet somehow brilliant blue.

They now opened in total horror, as he stared at her and rasped, “I didn’t. Kill.”

Her first reaction was to snap out that of course he had. She’d seen him by the corpse, his muzzle stained by blood. Then she remembered she’d almost lapped the blood herself. Lapped it! And she’d known what it was before shifting too.

She shuddered, and remembered what the blood smelled like to the jungle cat.
The beast
,
as she’d learned to call it years ago, when she’d first turned into it. Or hallucinated turning into it, as she’d convinced herself had happened over time. That theory might have to be discarded now, unless she was hallucinating Tom’s shifting, too. She couldn’t quite believe that.

“I don’t remember chasing,” he said. “Killing.”

A look down at the corpse told her nothing, save that it had been mauled. But wouldn’t Tom . . . the dragon have mauled it anyway? Whether he’d killed it or not?

Tom was looking down, horrified, trembling. Shock. He was in shock. If she left him here, he would stay like that. Till they were caught.

She reached for his arm. His skin felt skin cold, clammy to the touch. Was it being the dragon? Or being naked in the night? Or the shock? She had to do something about the shock. No. She had to do something, period.

“Come,” she said. “Come.”

He obeyed. Like a child, he allowed her to pull him all the way to the back door of the diner.

She stooped to pick up her clothes, trying not to get blood on them.

Tom stumbled after Kyrie, confused. The parking lot was cold. He felt it on his wet skin. Wet. He looked down and saw patches of blood on his body. Human blood.

“You’re shaking like a leaf,” Kyrie whispered. She opened the back door of the Athens and looked in, along the corridor that curved gently toward the bathroom. She said, “Go in. Quickly. Get into the women’s bathroom. Don’t lock it. I’ll come.”

He rushed forward, obeying. In his current state, he couldn’t think of doing anything but obeying. But a part of his brain, moving fast beneath the sluggish surface of his shocked mind, wondered,
Why the women’s bathroom?
Then he realized the women’s bathroom was just one large room and locked, while in the men’s restroom they’d managed to cram the stall and a row of urinals. And the outer door didn’t lock.

Yeah, there would be more room in the women’s bathroom to clean up, he thought, even as he skidded into the door to the bathroom, on damp, bare feet.

“Why didn’t you turn the light on?” Kyrie said, coming in after him, turning the light on.

She went to the sink and started washing herself, making use of the paper towels and the water. Considering where she’d been, she had very little blood on her. Not like Tom. He tasted blood on his tongue.

And now he was shaking again.

“Stop that,” Kyrie said. She was clean now, and putting her clothes back on. How had she managed to get out of her clothes before shifting?

He tried to remember his own clothes, and where he’d left them, but his memory was fogged and confused, intercut by the bright golden blur of the dragon’s thoughts.

“Are you going to clean yourself or am I going to have to?” Kyrie asked. She’d somehow got fully dressed before he could notice. She stood there, looking proper, in her apron. She’d even put the earring back on her ear. She’d remembered to take that off. What was she? Some kind of machine?

Tom pulled his hair back from his face. “I’m naked,” he said.

“I’ve noticed,” she said, but she wasn’t looking. And now she had the expression back on her face—the expression she’d shown Tom since the first day he’d arrived at the Athens and Frank had offered him a job. The expression that meant he was no good, he was possibly dangerous, and that Frank was crazy to trust him.

He knew she would glare at his track marks next and, damn it all, he hadn’t shot up since he’d got—Well, since he’d got the job. He stopped the thoughts of whatever else he’d got forcefully. You really never knew what the other dragons could hear. He didn’t think they were telepathic. He thought they were just watching him really closely. But he wasn’t about to bet on it. No way. He wasn’t about to let his guard down. He’d seen what they could do, way back when—

He shook his head and took deep breaths to drive away his memory—which could force him to become a dragon as fast as the shine of the moon or the smell of blood. He concentrated on the thought that it was nearby. It. The treasure he’d stolen. The magic that helped him stay himself.

A wet and cold paper towel touched his chest and he jumped. Kyrie’s glance at him held a challenge. “I’ll do it if I have to,” she said.

He shook his head and pulled the towel from her hand, rubbing it briskly on his shoulders, his arms, his chest. He discarded it in the trash can, thinking about DNA evidence and trying not to. Telling himself he couldn’t have done it, he couldn’t have killed anyone. He couldn’t. He just couldn’t. That was something he couldn’t live with—knowing for sure he’d killed anyone.

But the police would think— The police—

He started shaking again and took deep breaths to control it. He folded another mass of paper towels and wet it and ran it on his face, his hands. The face looking back at him from the mirror looked more red than white, smeared with blood.

Whose blood? Who had that person been, out in the parking lot? Tom didn’t remember anything. Nothing, before opening his eyes, staring at the dead body, and seeing Kyrie. And that wasn’t right. It had been like that at first, but it had given him more control and he was supposed to know what he’d done while in dragon form. He was supposed to remember.

Kyrie was looking at him, attentively, cautiously, like a bomb expert trying to decide which wire to cut in a peculiar homemade contraption.

Tom bit his tongue and managed a good imitation of his normal, gruff tone. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m fine.”

She cocked her head to one side, managing to convey wordlessly that there were about a million interpretations of
fine
and none of them applied to him. But aloud she said, “I’m going out for just a second. Lock up after me. When I come back I will knock once. Only once. Let me in when I do.”

Tom locked the door behind her, obediently. He wondered where she was going, but it wasn’t like he had any room left to argue about what she might want to do. He should count himself lucky she hadn’t screamed bloody murder when she’d found him in the parking lot. Perhaps she should have screamed bloody murder. Wasn’t that the name for what he’d done? No— He hadn’t— He couldn’t—

A muffled knock. He realized that not only had Kyrie been gone for a while, but also that he’d somehow managed to remove most of the red stains from his hands and face. His hair was a drying, sticky mass that he didn’t want to investigate, much less clean.

“That will do,” she said. “You can wear these.” She extended to him, at the end of a stiff arm—like a person feeding a wild animal—what looked like a red jogging suit.

“It’s mine,” she said, as though mistaking his hesitation for a belief that she’d mugged a vagrant for the clothes. Or taken them from the corpse. “I usually jog in the morning before going home. Safer here. It’s a main street.”

He swallowed hard, trying not to think of what street would be less safe than Fairfax. But then if she lived nearby—as he did—in the interlacing warren of downtown streets, there would be many less safe. Well, not less safe in reality—the crime rate in Goldport was never that high and most deaths were crimes committed by and between gang members. But in the side streets, dotted with tiny houses, or with huge Victorian mansions long since turned into tiny apartments, a woman jogging alone in the wee hours of the morning would not be seen. And that, perhaps, meant she wouldn’t be safe—because she could disappear and not be noticed for hours.

A thought that whoever tried to attack this woman would be far from safe himself crossed Tom’s mind and he beat it down. Perhaps that was what she was afraid of. Of being mugged in the dark street and killing—