Night Shifters (78 page)

On the other hand, he also didn’t want to lose his phone. Not to mention that by now his father probably thought that he had eaten someone—instead of just having been startled while his fingers were half frozen. He didn’t think, even if his father thought so, that he would feel obligated to call the police and report, but you never knew. For most of his life, Edward Ormson had been a fairly amoral—if not immoral—corporate lawyer. He’d encountered ethics and a sense of responsibility late in life. Like any midlife crisis, it could cause some very strange effects. He might suddenly feel an irresistible obligation to report imaginary crimes.

That’s it,
Tom thought.
I’ll go back to The George and call him from there.
He climbed up from the bank of the river to the path, at least six feet above. Like all such canals, artificial or not, in Colorado, the bed for the little river was deep enough to accommodate a ten-times swollen volume in sudden flash floods.

Though, like the legendary Colorado blizzards, it was something he hadn’t experienced for himself, he’d heard of summers when sudden snowstorms up in the mountains sent water thundering down the canyons below, to cause untold damage. So the design of every waterworks in Colorado accounted for those.

He struggled all the way to the road level, and looked towards Fairfax. And then thought that it had taken him probably a good hour to walk here, and that added to the point where he had effectively hung up on his father meant that Edward was probably concocting scarier and scarier stories to tell himself. Right.

Sighing, he started down to the riverbed again. He’d look just one more time. Then there was Rafiel’s voice from the garden up there. Definitely Rafiel’s. And followed by a thud that indicated the idiot had just taken a header in the snow.

Tom cursed softly under his breath, and started climbing back up the steep bank. He wanted his phone. Badly. But considering the sounds he’d heard from under the bridge, he wasn’t absolutely convinced there wasn’t something or someone hiding there. Not so long ago, there had been a case in Denver of homeless men being found beheaded. Tom didn’t remember—since at the time he didn’t live in Colorado and all he had seen of the affair was the TV news that happened to be playing at a soup kitchen—whether the case had ever been resolved, or if there was still someone in Colorado, perhaps in the smaller towns now, whose hobby it was to kill males foolish enough to be out and unsheltered—and unobserved—in this sort of weather. So it probably wouldn’t hurt, before he went down towards the river and made himself invisible to anyone driving by, for him to have backup.

Having made it all the way to the path beside the river, Tom looked in the direction the thud had come from. Rafiel had gotten up, and was dusting off his knees.

“Are you okay?” Tom said.

“I’m fine,” Rafiel said, and glared at him. “You?”

“I’m great,” Tom said. “I just dropped my phone. Down on the river.” He paused a second. “Right after my father asked me if I’d eaten someone.”

“Oh,” Rafiel said. He looked uneasy. Had his parents ever asked him if he’d eaten someone? No. Never mind that. Probably not. Though Tom had yet to meet Rafiel’s mom, Rafiel had brought his dad over for lunch at The George a couple of times.

An older, sturdier version of Rafiel, his hair white and giving less the impression of a leonine mane than his son’s wild hair, Mr. Trall had impressed Tom as eminently sane. And eminently sane parents didn’t leap to the conclusion their sons went around eating people, not even when the sons happened to have another, more carnivorous form. Which didn’t help Tom at all, because his father wasn’t sane.

Rafiel was fishing in the pocket of his jacket. “Here, why don’t you call him on my phone?”

“Oh,” Tom said, surprised the idea hadn’t occurred to him, though considering how much ice he felt on top of his head, his brain was probably frozen solid. And not being a silicon-based life-form, this didn’t help his thought processes at all. He took the phone and started dialing his father’s number, all under what he couldn’t help feeling was Rafiel’s stern scrutiny.

“Hello? Dad?” Tom said, as the phone was answered on the other side.

“Tom. Oh. Good. I was . . . er . . . I’ve been worried.”

Tom tried to grit his teeth, which was pretty hard, as they insisted on chattering together. “No, Dad, I didn’t eat anyone.”

“Oh.” Pause. “Well, I didn’t think you had. I was just . . . er . . . worried.”

Please, don’t let him have gone to the police,
Tom thought, as he watched Rafiel turn on his heel and head back towards the truck. Tom had a vague moment of panic at the thought that Rafiel was just going to drive back. Well, at least he’d left him with the phone. But the slog back to The George seemed suddenly like too much of an effort to make. Tom was very cold and very tired, and maybe he should just lie down here and—

“So what sort of trouble are you in?” Edward Ormson asked, over the phone. “I notice you’re using someone else’s phone. Isn’t that your policeman friend? Tom! You’ve been arrested.”

Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn! His youthful antics had included several arrests, for vandalism, for joyriding, for possession. His father had bailed him out countless times. But did this justify—five years later—his father assuming he’d been arrested, just because he was using a policeman’s phone?
Well, okay, yeah, it probably kind of does,
he thought.

“I’ll get someone to come post bail as soon as—”

“I wasn’t arrested, Dad. It’s . . . hard to explain over the phone. Do you remember the pearl?” He raised his eyebrows and had trouble concentrating on the flow of conversation, as Rafiel was making his way back, a bundle of fabric swinging from one hand.

“You didn’t steal it again?”

“No, I didn’t steal anything. Ow.” The last sound was because Rafiel was roughly and very matter of factly putting a hooded sweat shirt over Tom’s head and dressing him in it without so much as by your leave. It involved pulling Tom’s hands through the sleeves, as if he’d been a child or a mental patient. “Ow, all right. I can dress myself, Rafiel.”

“What?” Edward asked.

“Nothing. Rafiel has decided I’m not properly attired for the weather and is making me put on a hoodie.” He glared at Rafiel.

“Seems sensible to me, if what I’m seeing on the weather channel is any indication,” Edward said. “So, you were saying about this pearl.”

“Not the pearl. The . . . owner of the pearl. He seems to think I belong to him. Because of who I am, you know?”

“Because you’re my son and I worked for him?”

Sheesh. His dad could be surprisingly dense. “No, Dad. No. Because I am . . . you know, like him and his relatives.”

“Oh. What is he doing? We could file a—”

“Father.” Despite his annoyance Tom almost laughed. At least his father was trying to help. Which was, all things considered, not bad. “I am sure he wouldn’t be the least intimidated by a legal order of some sort. He eats lawyers for breakfast. Probably literally.”

Rafiel pulled the hood up over Tom’s head. Tom said into the phone, “Look, I have to go. I’ll call you from The George when I get there.”

Right now the diner, with its warmth and warm coffee and food seemed to Tom like a vision of lost paradise. He hung up and gave Rafiel the phone. And then he noticed that Rafiel had a flashlight in his hand. One of the larger ones of the type people said the police often used as a weapon in a pinch. Tom stepped back. But Rafiel said, “Come on. Let’s go look for your phone one last time.”

“Kyrie will be worried,” Tom said.

“Just a minute. We’ll look for your phone and if we don’t see it, with the flashlight, then we go back. And, you know, Kyrie is probably not that worried. She knows I’m looking for you.”

Tom bit his tongue to avoid saying that of course that would calm down anyone’s anxiety, because who could ever doubt that once Rafiel was on the case everything would turn out for the best? But considering that Rafiel had found him, and gone out of his way to try to help him, his sarcasm would be misplaced. “All right,” he said.

Seeing Tom subdued always frightened Rafiel a little. He’d been through law enforcement courses. He knew Tom’s type.

Tom was the kind of person who usually had to be dragged away from whatever incident had just happened, still kicking and screaming and throwing a fit. The sort of person who could never get a traffic ticket without adding resisting arrest to the charges. The sort of person, in fact, who wasn’t subdued unless he were very sick or very scared. Since Tom didn’t look either, Rafiel had to assume freezing did something to shifter dragons.

Reptiles. Cold blood. Can’t they die if they get cold enough?
He didn’t want to think about it, and besides, he’d given Tom a hoodie. Granted, it was Rafiel’s size, and therefore a bit long on Tom, but that was good as it would go over Tom’s hands.

Rafiel started towards the river, and then started, slowly, down the slope. His knee still hurt from banging it on the path when he had fallen and he had no intention of taking another header.

“Here,” Tom said, stepping up beside him and offering him a hand. “My boots are sturdier than yours.”

Rafiel took Tom’s hand for support, half afraid that the very cold-feeling fingers would snap off under the grasp of his hand. He was sure—more than sure—that a normal person would have hypothermia from this adventure. But it always came back to . . . they weren’t normal, were they?

They made it all the way to the bottom, where the frozen river glistened two steps from them. Unfortunately, it only glistened in the spots not covered up by snow. The rest was an amorphous, lumpy mess. He turned his flashlight on, and pointed it at the river and at that moment, Tom’s phone rang. This helped Rafiel pinpoint the roughly rectangular snow-covered lump. “There,” he said, nailing the shape with the beam of his flashlight. “Right there. Can you get it?”

Tom looked out speculatively. “I don’t know if the ice will hold up. But if the ice breaks under me and I wet my feet, it’s okay, because you’ll give me a ride back to the diner, right?”

“Right,” Rafiel said. Had the idiot thought that Rafiel was going to just come out, then leave him to freeze out here? “If parts of your body start breaking off from the cold I’m fairly sure Kyrie would kill me,” he said, and grinned sheepishly at his friend. “So, yeah, I’ll give you a ride back, you idiot.”

Tom nodded and edged cautiously on top of the frozen river, with the sort of duck-footed waddle of someone trying to neither slip nor skate on the surface. In the middle of the river, he picked up the phone, then, as he was straightening, dropped it again.

“Would you stop that?” Rafiel asked impatiently. “The idea is to get back into the car and back to The George. Not to stand here and play find the phone.”

But Tom shook his head, and bent, and picked up the phone again. He walked back close enough that he could whisper and Rafiel would hear him. “There’s something in the tunnel under the little bridge, Rafiel. I saw a tail disappear that way.”

A tail. Great. Rafiel was going to assume that, no matter how much Rafiel might want it to be otherwise, Tom didn’t mean he had seen the friendly, furry, potentially wagging tail of a kitten or puppy. “Uh . . . a tail?”

“Reptilian. Dragging.”

Rafiel frowned in the direction of the bridge and the shadows under it. It seemed to him, as he concentrated, that he did hear something very like a rustle from under there. But . . . a tail? “Perhaps the Great Sky Dragon sent one of your cousins to look after you.”

“They’re not my cousins.”

“Whatever,” Rafiel said, feeling an absurd pleasure, as if he’d scored a point. “They think they are.”

“I’m hardly responsible for people’s delusions.”

How could someone like Tom, who didn’t so much get in trouble as carry it into the lives of everyone around him, sound so much like a New England dowager?

“Yeah, but anyway, maybe he sent one of his underlings to look in on you?”

Tom shook his head. “Well, he did. Conan. But I sent him back his merry way. Or not merry.” Tom frowned. “Besides,” he whispered, “the tail looked like an alligator’s.”

“An alli—” Rafiel resisted an urge to smack his own forehead, and, shortly thereafter, an urge to smack Tom—hard—with the flashlight. “You mean Old Joe? The homeless guy said he told you he was at the aquarium.”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “I figure he’s hiding out here, in alligator form.”

“Is that why you’re whispering? Look, what do you want with Old Joe, anyway? So he’s hiding here, as an alligator. Perhaps we should leave him alone?”

Tom shook his head, which was par for the course. Of course he didn’t think they should leave Old Joe alone, because that would be the life-preserving, not-getting-into-worse-trouble solution.

“Okay,” Rafiel said. “So what do you want to do?”

“I figure he knows something,” Tom whispered back. “And I want to find out what it is.”

“Uh . . . what he knows is probably the best places to sleep when a storm threatens, and, Tom, you aren’t even that with it. You ought to be indoors.” And watched. By a nursemaid. Or a psychiatrist.