Night Shifters (73 page)

“Well, then,” Rafiel said, reasonably. “I would go out there now, before the snow becomes a blizzard.”

From the other end of the phone there was something very much like an inarticulate exclamation of protest that, should it be more closely listened to, might translate into a profanity.

Rafiel chose not to listen to it any closer. Instead, deliberately, he pressed the off button of his phone, and turned his attention to navigating the maze of small neighborhoods, the opposite side of Fairfax from the one Tom and Kyrie lived on.

The neighborhoods weren’t very different, though. In the early twentieth century, they might have been colonized by Irishmen or Poles, instead of the Greeks that had colonized the area north of them. Yet the houses all looked very much alike. Less brick here, and more the sort of elaborate, architecturally detailed Victorian houses that looked like mansions shrunk down to pint size. These houses often had three floors, but the floors would each contain no more than one room and a landing for the stair leading to the next floor.

They had, at one time, housed the laborers—many of them highly skilled—imported from Europe to build the elaborate mansions of the gold rush millionaires. The men and women enticed over to work for the newly rich had stayed and built their own dollhouse version of the boss’s manor. And when the gold had evaporated and the silver lost its value they had stayed behind and added far more solid wealth to Colorado than mere metal could ever bring it.

Now in the beginning of the twenty-first century, the houses were mostly occupied by another kind of skilled laborer. While the neighborhood where Tom and Kyrie rented had never decayed appreciably, it had also never been exactly rehabilitated. Instead, the original Greek settlers had stayed, and the power of family and community supervision had kept the area, as the saying went, poor but honest. And now, when the younger generations were more likely to go to Denver to study, and then out of the state to work, it was mostly the realm of retirees, with no life and immaculate lawns.

The neighborhoods on the other side of Fairfax had been more ethnically diverse, and when the wealth of gold had rushed away from Goldport, there had been nothing there to keep people behind—no family, no weight of tradition. So instead they had moved on, restless, probably to Denver, where there were still mansions to build and money to be made.

In their absence, and with Colorado University right there, a few blocks away, another type of person had moved in. In the sixties, that type of person had often lived fifteen to a two-bedroom Victorian, and grown weed in the basement and generally destroyed the neighborhoods.

And then, recently, the sort of people who liked to buy destroyed properties and improve on them had moved in. Intellectuals, artists, a good number of childless couples with nothing but time on their hands to work on the houses. The houses looked pretty and almost newly built, though after coming across two of them painted in purple and accented with pink, Rafiel wished that these people had never heard the term
painted lady
or that they might have procured a translation of the term
good taste
before engaging in wanton remodeling.

He consulted his planner, and found that all three of the people he meant to see lived in this crisscrossing of pathways, shaded by century-old trees. The first one was on Meadoway, and he turned sharply onto it, admiring the faux-Victorian street light fixtures, and wondering if they were paid for by the neighborhood association or if anyone in the area had friends in city hall.

The first house he was looking for turned out to be one of the smaller ones—a two-floor Victorian with steeply descending eaves and a sort of look of being a Swiss chalet treasonously transported to the middle of Goldport, painted a weak aqua accented with green, and still feeling a little shell-shocked about the whole thing.

When Rafiel rang the doorbell, he was answered by a man who looked as if he could be cast, with no effort at makeup, as a hobbit in
Lord of the Rings
. Well, a rather tall hobbit, since he was about Rafiel’s own height. But he had the hair perfectly right, and he was smoking a pipe. He was not wearing shoes, and Rafiel had to keep himself from looking down to see whether his toes were covered in curly hair, as Tolkien had insisted Bilbo Baggins’ toes were. Instead, he focused on the amiable face, whose wrinkles showed it to be somewhat past middle age.

The man didn’t smell like a shifter, and he’d seen nothing at the aquarium, and was shocked, shocked—as it turned out by the reports of cryptozoological discoveries in the parking lot of the aquarium and not by the deaths within. Before Rafiel could escape him, he had to be told that the man was a retired used- and rare-book seller, and to be given—he never understoodd why or how—a lecture on American horror writers of the nineteenth century and the value of their various first editions.

He escaped, gritting his teeth, to follow the winding Meadoway to Mine Street, where the next person lived who’d left both name and address at the aquarium at the time when it was probable the first man had gone for a totally unprotected swim with the sharks. This one was a bigger house, or at least taller, and instead of looking like a Swiss chalet, it looked exactly like a Southern antebellum mansion as it might have looked if Sherman had found himself in convenient possession of a shrinking ray.

The people who lived in it were obviously aware of the resemblance, as they’d painted the house aristocratic white, and had two rocking chairs on the diminutive porch.

Rafiel rang the doorbell twice, but no one answered, even though he could see the blue glow of a television through the windows of the darkened front room. He had visions of people dead in front of a TV screen, but he knew how unlikely that was. Far more likely that they had the sound turned way up and were far too interested in their program to listen to his ringing, or, after a while, knocking on their door. Or it was entirely possible they’d gone out for a burger or something they thought they needed to weather the coming snowstorm, and had left the TV on. People did that.

Before giving up, he sniffed around the door. It was unlikely he would be able to smell a subtle and old shifter smell without shifting, himself. But then again, this was not the aquarium, where shifters might or might not have passed. And even there, he’d picked up the original scent while in his human form and had only needed to shift to pinpoint its location.

In this case, if shifters lived here, it should be much easier. But his sniffing around the house, and around the driveway failed to raise even a vague suspicion of shifter-scent.

So, chances are that it’s not here,
he thought, and headed for the number three on his list, which was only a couple of blocks down at Skippingstone Way.

The house was yellow and narrow, set on a handkerchief-sized lawn bordered by what, to judge from the pathetic, upward-thrust branches, must be lovely bushes in the spring and summer.

But Rafiel didn’t pay much attention to the details, because as he parked his SUV and got out, he got a strong whiff of shifter smell. And the smell only increased as he opened the garden gate and walked up to the porch.

On the porch, a woman stood crying by a pretentious reproduction Victorian mailbox. And she smelled unmistakably of shifter.

Kyrie thought he looked cold. Cold and lonely, with his arms wrapped around himself, standing in the snowstorm. She would have thought he would have come inside, into the warmth. She would have thought he would have come to where they were. And then she thought perhaps he was stopping himself from shifting, and that was all.

But when he turned around to face her, his features bore none of the strange distortions that presaged shifts. His eyes were their normal shape, as was his nose, and his face wasn’t even slightly elongated as it seemed to get when he was about to change into a dragon. His teeth, bared, as they chattered against each other, retained their normal human bluntness. But he was pale, and his eyes were veiled—as though they were covered with the nictitating eyelids he grew in dragon form.

He seemed to be glaring at her. “What?” he asked, and his voice was edged with anger, and shimmered with sharp barbs. The signs to stay away were clear, but Kyrie couldn’t leave him here, alone and furious.

“I . . . is there anything I can do to . . . help?” Kyrie asked.

“Oh, don’t worry,” he flung. “I’m not going to shift.”

“I didn’t think you were going to,” she said, trying to keep her voice low and even, because she knew—she knew damn well—that in this mood Tom was like a small child, easily annoyed, easily angered by things he thought she had said, even when she couldn’t be further from thinking it. “I just wanted to know why you were out here, alone and . . . and why you look so angry?”

“Why? Why I look so angry?” he asked. “What do you mean I look so angry? I’m being claimed. I’m being owned. By a creature so old we can’t even guess at his motives. By a crime boss, Kyrie! And he . . . he uses people as instruments. He used Conan as a spy camera. And he probably can reach into Conan’s mind all the time.”

“I know. I realize how it feels, but . . .”

“But you sit there,” Tom said. “And you talk to that creature, that . . . that dire wolf, even as he’s going on about how he doesn’t know what the Great Sky Dragon wants with me. He’s talking about how ephemerals and shifters are different, and how our only loyalty is to shifters, and you are there, listening to him!”

“What did you expect me to do?” she asked. “Did you expect me to attack him? In the diner? Besides, he was giving us information we needed.”

“Information!” His tone made it sound like the word should be a swear word. “Information! How do you know there is a word of truth in what he said?”

“Does it matter? Clearly there’s
some
truth. I mean, I know it’s tainted, that it’s from his point of view. But, is it to some extent still true? Does it still have some contact with reality? Is it . . . is it going to work for us or against us?”

He was running his fingers through his hair, pulling it out of the bind that kept it in place at the back, scattering around wildly—making it look like a particularly energetic cat had been playing with his hair. “So is it?”

“I don’t know,” Kyrie said. She again managed to bring her voice down, to control her volume of speech. She knew he wasn’t angry at her as such, truly she knew it, no matter how angry he might sound or how much it might seem to her like he was furious at her or perhaps—ridiculously—jealous of Dire. No, she mustn’t sound like that. She must be calm and collected so that he would perhaps calm down. “But I know there is nothing we can do.”

“Nothing we can do?” he said. “What do you mean nothing we can do? There has to be something we can do—there has to be a way to be free of all of this, hasn’t there?” His eyes were wild, almost unfocused.

When Tom had first been hired by The George’s erstwhile owner, he’d been addicted to drugs. Heroin, mostly, from what she understood of his stories. The drugs had been a misguided attempt to self-treat the shifting, to prevent himself from changing into a dragon whenever his emotions got control of him. Now, if Kyrie didn’t know better, she’d think he was using again. There was a wildness to him, barely restrained and very much full of anger and something else, something seemingly uncontrollable. His blue eyes blazed with it as he said, “Why should I belong to someone? Belong as in be owned? Like a possession? A . . . thing? And only because I was born the way I am? Don’t you understand, Kyrie, don’t you see how wrong it is?”

Kyrie knew how wrong it was. She also understood, with startling clarity, at a glance, how different her background and Tom’s were. He’d been left alone, to more or less raise himself. He might have been as unwanted as she was, as ignored, as disposable to those who were responsible for his existence. But unlike hers, his unsupervised childhood and barely supervised teenage years had been free of the control of strangers. His father might not have known or cared enough to control Tom and to make him follow rules, or even laws. But at least he’d not appointed revolving strangers to have power over Tom’s life and determine what he could or couldn’t do or say or wear to school.

A ward of the state since she was a few hours old, Kyrie had been passed from one controlling authority to another—foster families, social workers and the sometimes ironically named children advocates, all had passed her from person to person and there was nothing she could do except obey. She tried to convey this to Tom. “You think you’re alone in this?” she said. “You think that it’s because you’re a shifter that strangers have a say over you? I was abandoned by my parents when I was just hours old,” she said. “And from then on, I belonged to the state. Which in truth meant that I belonged to whomever the state appointed to look after a group of children. Strangers all, but they could determine everything, including what shots I got, and to what school I went. They could move me around to another foster family, uproot me from the neighborhood, leave me at the mercy of strangers.”

He opened his mouth, but didn’t answer. Instead, his mouth stayed open, then he closed it, with a snap. He put out a hand, and seemed like he would touch her face with his fingertips, only he let his hand fall before he could do it. “But that doesn’t make it better, Kyrie,” he finally said, his voice softer, but still seeming to simmer with outrage. “That doesn’t make it any better. Yes, your upbringing was horrible, but that is supposed to be over. We’re supposed to be our own people, now. We’re supposed to be starting over. There shouldn’t be anyone who can do this to us.” His hand made a gesture in midair, which she supposed symbolized the control that the ancient shifters might have over them. “There shouldn’t be anyone who can mess with our minds, our lives, what we are, this way.”