Night Shifters (8 page)

Kyrie could have said many things. That his apartment was one of the reasons. Who would send him out there naked, in a car that looked, clearly, like it had been broken into? Who would send him out into the night with nowhere to stay, no safe place to crash?

But before she spoke, she realized that there would be many people—perhaps most people—who would do that. She’d met them often enough, growing up. The families who took foster children but didn’t want them associating with their
real
children; the children at school who shunned you because you lived in a less than savory part of town; the teachers who assumed you were dumb and hopeless because you didn’t live with your blood family.

Had she done the same with Tom, in shunning him because of his appearance? His drug habit? But no. She’d been justified in that. Those were things he could and should control. However, this trouble . . . Well, perhaps he’d brought it on himself. Perhaps at the root of it all was a drug deal gone bad, or the theft of something valuable.

She couldn’t imagine anyone stealing anything valuable from a triad composed of dragon shapeshifters. She would have to assume Tom was brasher, and perhaps braver, than she. But she didn’t know him well enough to rule it out, either.

And again, she had had plenty of experience with his type: the alcoholic foster parents, the doping foster brothers. You gave them chance and chance and chance, and they never improved, never got any better. They just told you more and more lies and got bolder and bolder.

She didn’t know what to say and she couldn’t guess in which category Tom would fall. So, instead, she stuck to the need at hand. That had always seen her through. When in trouble, stick to the need at hand.

“I need you to help me bandage my arm and disinfect my back,” she said. And not sure why his eyes grew so wide at this request, added, “Please?”

He nodded and shrugged. “Of course,” he said. His eyes remained wide, as if he were either very surprised or very skeptical. “Where do you keep the first-aid supplies?”

“They’re in the bathroom,” Kyrie told him. “Behind the mirror.”

Tom headed that way. It was a relief to have something to do—to have something to think of. He’d been sitting there, feeling miserable, drinking his coffee, wondering what was the best way to leave.

The bathroom was still full of steam—but the smell was indefinably different there. Not just the soap and shampoo he’d used also, but something else . . . Something he could neither define nor explain. It smelled like Kyrie. That was all he could say. It was a familiar smell and he realized he’d smelled it around her even under the layers of odors at the Athens. A hint of cinnamon, an edge of burnt sugar. Only not really, but that was what the smells made him think of. Like . . . What the kitchen smelled like when Mrs. Lopez had been making pastries.

He opened the medicine cabinet and collected bandages, antibiotic cream, small scissors, bandages, hydrogen peroxide, and cotton wool. It was the best-stocked home cabinet he’d ever seen. Other than his own. shapeshifters. You came home cut, scraped, you weren’t even sure how.

And Kyrie was one of them. Just like him.

That he was attracted to her didn’t make it any easier. He’d been attracted to her from the first moment he’d seen her—giving him the jaundiced once-over when Frank introduced them. But his attraction to women had come to nothing these last five years, ever since he’d found out he was a shapeshifter.

There were too many things to be afraid of—shifting in front of her, for instance. Hurting her while he was shape-shifted. And then the whole thing with the drugs, with which he’d tried—unsuccessfully—to control his shifts. It made him associate with too many shady characters for him to want any girl he even liked involved with. And then, of course, the . . . He pulled his mind forcefully away from even thinking of the object. That. And the triad. This without even thinking of nightmare scenarios: pregnancy. A baby who was born shifted.

And now in one night he’d managed to visit all but the last of these scenarios. He’d shifted in front of Kyrie. He’d probably hurt someone else in front of her. And he’d landed her in the thick of his trouble with the triad. Damn. And all this when he’d just found out she was a shapeshifter too. She was one like him.

Oh, she was not the only one he’d met, in his five years of wandering around, homeless and rootless. But she was the first one he’d talked to, the first one he’d had anything to do with. The only female . . . Up to tonight, he would have sworn that only males shifted shape.

And what good did it do him that she too was a shapeshifter—that she would understand him?

Absolutely none. First, he had blown it so far with her that if his hopes were a substance they would be scraping them off the floor and ceiling for months. And second—and second there was the triad.

Tom had been attracted to Kyrie before tonight. Now he liked her. He liked her a lot. He might very well be on his way to falling in love with her. If he had the slightest idea what love was and how one fell in it, he would be able to say for sure. But here the thing was—he cared about her. He cared a lot. An awful lot. He didn’t want her dead. As he was bound to be, soon enough, now that the triad had got really serious about finding him.

“It’s right there on the shelf,” Kyrie’s voice said from the doorway. He turned to see her framed in the door, those big, dark eyes pensive and wondering.

“Oh, yes, right,” he said. “It’s actually in my hands.” He turned around and lifted the hands filled with first-aid stuff. “I’m sorry. I spaced. I guess I’m tired.”

She nodded solemnly. He didn’t remember ever seeing her laugh. Smile, sure, a bunch of times, mostly the polite smile you gave customers late at night when they came in looking tired and out of it. But never laugh. Was laughter too far out of control for her? And why did he want to know? It wasn’t as if he’d ever find out.

“Right,” she said. “Shifting that many times in a row. Staying shifted that long. I’ve shifted, but not for long tonight, so I’m not—” She yawned and covered her mouth with her hand. “—that tired.”

He smiled, despite himself, grateful that she couldn’t see it because she had turned her back and was heading back toward the kitchen. Where she sat at the table, pulled the cord on the lamp overhead to turn it on, and rolled up the sleeve of her robe to show a narrow wound with bluish borders, like a bruise.

He sat on the other chair, laid the first-aid materials down on the table. “That looks awful,” he said.

She nodded and turned her arm over. On the bottom there was another bruise, another puncture.

“It went all the way—” he started.

She shook her head. “No. The dra— He just bit me. I don’t know how deeply. It feels different . . . in the other body.” She’d lowered her head to look at her own arm, and her hair had fallen across her face. The temptation to reach over and pull that multicolored curtain back was almost more than he could endure.

“Have you had a tetanus shot?” he asked, going on routine. “Because if you hadn’t, you should. I don’t know how clean . . .” He realized he was about to say he didn’t know how clean dragons’ teeth were and caught himself in time. He smiled. There was no avoiding it. He was a dragon. She knew he was a dragon. And on that, at least, there was no reason for awkwardness. Hell, she shifted too. He had to keep telling himself that. He had to remember. “I, personally, brush and floss. Use mouthwash, even. But I can’t answer to the cleanliness of another dragon’s teeth.”

That got him a smile. Little more than the polite smile that she gave customers, but a smile nonetheless, and even a teasing sort of reply. “No unified dental hygiene guidelines for dragons?”

“Afraid not,” he said. He soaked one of the balls of cotton wool in hydrogen peroxide and gently started to cleanse the area. “Seriously, you really should go to a doctor. I know we shifters heal quickly, but these deep puncture wounds can be dangerous. Only a tiny area exposed to air, see. The space in there can develop an infection very easily. And you could get blood poisoning, something horrible.” He looked up and saw her open her mouth. “I know what you’re going to say, and I’m not going to tell you that you’re wrong. The last thing we need. The very last thing is to call attention to ourselves—particularly with strange animal bites. And I understand how you feel about being in the hospital. I slept under a bridge many a night, rather than going to a shelter when the moon was full and the impulse to shift greater. But, Kyrie, I’m not joking.” He pushed as much hydrogen peroxide as he could into the puncture, on both sides, by squeezing the cotton right atop of it. “If you get a fever, the first sign of swelling on your arm, you must—must—see a doctor. It could kill you.”

“You know a lot about this stuff.”

He nodded, pulling back the cotton wool, tossing it in the kitchen trash in the corner, and waiting while her arm dried. Then he got antibiotic cream and started slathering it on. There was no reason to tell her anything. Or maybe there was. He’d been so desperately alone all these years. “My mom is a doctor,” he said.

“Is she . . .” Kyrie swallowed. “Is she . . .”

“She left Dad about ten years ago,” he said. “When I was a kid. Went down to Florida with her new husband. I haven’t seen her since. But up till I was ten I gave her many reasons to perform first aid on me, and I heard this speech a lot.”

Kyrie frowned at him. Then shook her head. “I was going to ask if she was a dragon.”

Tom shook his head, then shrugged. “I don’t think so. I know Dad isn’t. And I don’t think Mom is. I’ve never . . .” He was about to say that he didn’t know any older shifters, but then realized he did. He had seen a couple of derelicts shifting while he flew above in the middle of a summer night. It had been further out west, toward New Mexico, and they’d shifted into coyotes and headed for the hills. He remembered because back then, seeing the tattered men shift into ragtag coyotes he’d wondered if he’d end up like that. Old, still a transient, still homeless. It had been part of what led him to steal. . . . “I don’t think it’s hereditary, or at least not that way. Why? Are your parents shifters?”

She shook her head and shrugged, and her eyes got soft and distant. “I wouldn’t know. They left me at the entrance of a church in Charlotte, North Carolina, when I was just a few hours old. I was found by parishioners coming out of the midnight services on Christmas night. There were headlines all over the papers, about it. But I never knew . . .” She shrugged again. “I was raised by foster families.”

And perhaps that explained why she held herself under such tight control? Tom wouldn’t know. He knew about as much about foster care as he knew about happy family life. A couple of his acquaintances of convenience, while he had been on the streets, had been foster children. They’d told him hair-raising stories about the system. But did it mean that every one was like that? Or only the ones who’d gone seriously to the bad?

He taped the bandages in place over the puncture. “Blood poisoning will make a visible circle, it will start just above the wound, and it will be a red circle that will slowly move upwards if it’s not treated. If you see a circle on your arm, you must go to the doctor, immediately.”

“Am I to assume personal experience speaks here?” Kyrie asked.

He managed a smile. “My best friend and I.” He hadn’t thought of Joe in years. Wondered where he was now. What he was doing. “We had these plastic swords, but you know, they were disappointing because they really couldn’t cause enough damage. We could bang on each other all day long with them, they were too light and definitely not sharp. So we improved them by sticking nails in the tip. Rusty nails.” He saw her wince. “Yeah. Lucky for us my mom caught the infection in time. Even then I was on antibiotics forever. Now that I think about it, lucky we were both lousy swordsmen, too. We never managed to kill each other, though we tried for a whole day.”

He pulled her sleeve down, and started to gather the stuff.

“No,” she said. “I want you to look at my back. It feels abraded.” As she spoke, she loosened her robe, and edged it down at the back—to reveal a shoulder that had been stripped bare of skin.

“It’s more than abraded,” Tom said. And because the sight of the robe sliding over the raw flesh of her shoulder made him cringe, he added, “Let me,” and pulled the robe down slowly, at the back. In the process, the front fell too, revealing one of her breasts almost to the nipple. Golden skin the color of honey, and it looked velvet soft. His fingers wanted to stray that way, wanted to feel . . .

He concentrated on her back, kneeling so that her back was all he saw. He found the end of the skinned portion where her shoulder blade ended. “This looks awful. How?”

“I think it was a paw swipe,” she said. “The claws missed me, but the scales got me.”

“Ah,” Tom said. He had never thought he was that lethal in his dragon form, and to be honest, he wasn’t sure he was. He didn’t know how much he looked like the Chinese dragons. He was aware the tail was different, the paws more massive, but he’d never looked at himself in a mirror while shifted. Or if he had, he hadn’t managed to remember it.

He got the antibiotic cream and started applying it in a thin layer to Kyrie’s back, trying to touch so lightly that he wouldn’t hurt her. She didn’t seem to flinch from the touch, so he must be succeeding. There had been a time he wanted to be a doctor. Before . . . all of this.

“When did you shift for the first time?” Kyrie asked.

Tom’s hand trembled immediately, as the memories flooded him. Flying over the city. Not the first time, but one of the first. Seeing everything. Then coming home. Breaking the bedroom window. It was devilishly hard to work the paws when you weren’t even sure what was happening to you. And then his father. His father, with the gun, ordering him out.

Hell, he didn’t even know his father had a gun until then. Until that moment, had anyone asked, he’d have said his father wouldn’t have a gun in the house. Tom had heard his father go on and on about gun control quite often. And he was too young to understand hypocrisy.