Night Shifters (9 page)

He took a deep breath and managed to push the memory away. To this day he wasn’t sure why his father had ordered him out of the house. He’d shifted back by then. He’d shifted back and grabbed hold of his robe. Which is why he’d ended on the street in his robe and barefoot.

But he controlled the memories, squeezed a dollop of cream from the tube. Kyrie hadn’t asked again, so he probably hadn’t taken that long to get himself under control. “I was sixteen,” he said. “I never had any warning before. I just . . . Shifted. In the moonlight.”

In the moonlight, in his room, with its comfortable bed, and all the posters, and the TV, the stereo, the game system. All the things he’d once thought needed to survive. “I was all excited too,” he said. “That first time. I thought it was a cool, superhero thing.”

She was silent, and he thought she was thinking about what a fool he’d been. He concentrated on what he was doing. Fingers on the wound on her shoulder, lightly, lightly, spreading a thin, shining layer of antibiotic cream.

“I was fourteen,” she said, speaking as from a great distance. “I thought I was dreaming the first few times. And then I thought I was hallucinating. I thought I had . . . I don’t know. Seizures or something. I used to imagine that my parents were two mental patients who’d had me and had smuggled me out of the madhouse so I could be raised on the outside.”

He laughed despite himself and she turned to look at him, her expression grave. Not offended, just grave.

“I don’t think there were any mental hospitals like that in the 1980s,” he said. “Where they kept the children of the patients locked up along with the parents. Were there?”

Kyrie shook her head and smiled again, a smile fractionally warmer than the ones she gave the customers. “Not in this country, no, I don’t think,” she said. “But I was very young. Just a kid. I thought . . .” She shrugged. “Actually at first I thought someone was putting datura in my food or something.”

“Datura?” he asked.

“A hallucinogenic. At least, Agatha Christie has a mystery in which someone is putting it in a man’s shaving cream to make him dream that he’s a werewolf, and I thought—”

“I read Christie too,” he said. Often her books were the only thing available in safe houses for at-risk youth or whatnot, where he sought temporary refuge. That and the ever-yellowing pile of
National Geographic
. It was Tom’s considered opinion that
National Geographic
s were alien artifacts routinely bombarded down onto the Earth. “But isn’t datura something Indian, something . . .”

“I didn’t tell you I was rational, did I?” Kyrie asked.

He shook his head and reached for the gauze, cutting it to fit the area on her shoulder, and laying it gently atop the wound.

“I thought someone was trying to make me think I was crazy. Perhaps my foster parents. They get more for special-needs kids, you know? And then I read up on it, and I decided I was schizophrenic. I couldn’t tell what I did while I was under this condition, so I started hiding. At first I was lucky that no one saw me, and then when I realized what caused it—the full moon, a feeling of anger. Anything. I was damn careful over the next four years. Always slept alone, even if arrangements called for other kids in the room. I’d take a blanket and go sleep in a tree, if needed. It . . . made for interesting times and made me change families even more often. And then I was on my own, and I’ve been careful. Very careful. But I still thought it was all in my mind. Till tonight.”

Tom shook his head as he started taping the gauze in place. He couldn’t imagine not knowing the shift was true. But perhaps it was different for dragons. He saw the city from above. He saw things happen. And, of course, within a month of his first shifting, his father had seen him shift and had shouted at him and . . . ordered him out. For shifting. Hard to tell yourself it was all in your mind after that.

“How many of us are there?” Kyrie asked. “I mean—there’s you and the triad, but . . . You’ve known about this more and have been more places. How many shifters have you met?”

She had to talk to keep her mind off what he was doing. He wasn’t hurting her. On the contrary. His fingers, touching her skin ever-so-lightly were a caress. Or the closest to a caress she could remember.

It had been too long since she’d even let anyone touch her. Certainly not since she’d started shifting. Before that there had been foster siblings who’d got close, some she’d hugged and who’d hugged her. But not since then.

Tom’s touch was very delicate, as if he were afraid of breaking her. It felt odd. She didn’t want to think of him, back there, being careful not to hurt her.

And she really wanted to know how many shifters he’d seen in the five years since he’d left his house. She hadn’t been out much. Well, not out on the street and not out while aware of being in a shape-shifted body. She hadn’t been looking for other shifters. But he might have been. Hell, considering his thing with the triad, he probably had been.

He paused at her question. He’d been taping the gauze down over her wound, and he stopped. For a moment she thought she’d offended him.

But he sighed. “I don’t know for sure,” he said. “I wasn’t counting. Including the occasional enforcer for the triad or not?”

“The enforcers for the triad have been trailing you all this time?”

She was sure he’d smiled at that, but she wasn’t sure how. His fingers resumed their gentle touch, taping the gauze in place.

“No,” he said. “Only a . . . part of a year.” He paused again. “Without counting them and . . . and the other triad dragons, of whom there are many, I’d say I’ve seen about twelve, maybe thirteen shifters. Not . . . not close enough to talk to. I’ve only talked to a couple. I never went out of my way to talk to them. And sometimes, it was ambiguous, you know. Like, you’re walking downtown and you see someone walk in a certain direction and moments later a wolfhound . . . or a wolf . . . comes from the same direction. The only ones I knew for sure were the triad and the orangutan and the coyotes. There seem to be any number of them within the triad. Hundreds. And that might be hereditary. They seem to think they’re descended of the Great Sky Dragon. They marry among themselves and they have rites and . . . and stuff.”

“So—excluding the triad—a dozen in five years? That doesn’t seem like many.”

“No. And most of the time it was larger cities than Goldport. Large cities back east. New York and Boston and Atlanta.”

“Odd,” Kyrie said. “Because just last night—”

“Yes, you and me and that lion,” Tom said, his voice grave, as he finished taping the gauze in place. At least she assumed he’d finished, because he lay the tape back on the table, with the scissors on top of it. And then, ever so gently, he tugged her robe back in place. “I’ve been thinking the same. Why that many in one night. With the triad here, too, we must be tipping the scales at . . . a lot of shifters. And I wondered why.”

Kyrie wondered why too. She’d been living in Goldport for over a year. She remembered the Greyhound bus had stopped here and she’d thought to stay for a night before going on to Denver. But she’d never gone on. Something about Goldport just felt . . . right. Like it was the home she’d been looking for so long. Which was ridiculous, since it was what remained of a gold boom town that had become a University town. And she never had anything to do with either mining or college.

But Goldport had felt . . . Not exactly familiar, but more safe. Secure. Home. Like the home she’d never known. She had walked from the Greyhound station to the Athens and seen a sign on the window asking for a server. She’d applied and been hired that night.

But what attraction could the small, odd town have for other shifters. Well . . . Tom had come via the Greyhound too, she supposed. And Frank had offered him a job.

As for the lion . . . She wouldn’t think about the lion. “It’s probably just a coincidence,” she told Tom. And it probably was. Three were not, after all, a great sample. Perhaps they were the only three shifters in town—other than the triad—and had just chanced to bump into each other. The blood had surely helped. She swallowed, remembering what the blood smelled like in the other shape.

Tom came around and started gathering the first-aid supplies.

“What kinds of shifters are there? What kinds did you see? Just big cats? And werewolves? And dragons? Or . . .”

Tom stopped what he was doing. He didn’t drop the supplies, just held them where they were. He didn’t look at her. “You’re going to think I’m an idiot,” he said.

“Um . . . no,” Kyrie said. She couldn’t understand why she would think he was an idiot now. She had a thousand reasons to think him careless, low on self-preservation instincts, and probably a little insane. But . . . an idiot? “Why?”

He sighed. “I swear one of those shifters was a centaur. I know what you’re going to tell me, that centaurs don’t exist, that I was just seeing a horseman, that—”

“No, I’m not,” Kyrie said.

“You’re not?”

“Tom, dragons are thought not to exist too.”

“Oh.” He looked shocked. As if he’d never thought of it that way. Then he grinned. “Well, then I can tell you. Another one of them was an orangutan. Little stooped man, sold roast chestnuts on the street near . . . near my father’s house. And he shifted into an orangutan at night. He was a very nice man, once I got to talking to him. He told me that his wife and his daughters sometimes didn’t notice when he shifted.” He grinned at that, as he gathered all the first-aid supplies, and headed back to the bathroom.

Kyrie followed him, wondering what to do next. He’d helped her. And, whether his association with the triad was dangerous or not, he, personally, didn’t feel dangerous. And they’d lost the triad for the night, hadn’t they?

She was reluctant to send him out alone and barefoot into the night. What if he got killed? How would she feel when she heard about it? How would she live with herself?

And besides, having grown up without family, all alone, this was the first time she’d found someone who was genuinely like her. Not family—at least she didn’t think so, though he could be a half brother or a cousin. One of the curses of the abandoned child was not to know—but someone who had more in common with her than anyone else she had found. And if he’d gone bad . . . She shook her head.

She didn’t know why he’d gone bad. She remembered the smell of blood in that parking lot and the madness in the apartment. Clearly, she too had it in her to commit violence. She would have to control it. Perhaps he was just weaker than her? Perhaps he could not control himself as well.

He put the stuff back in the medicine cabinet, carefully organized, and turned around. “I’ll get out of your hair now, okay. Just report your car stolen. You have insurance, right?”

“Yes, but . . .”

“Oh, I’ll still pay you for the window,” Tom said. “But it might take me a while to be able to get to an ATM. I have some money. Not much. I don’t think I’ll get my deposit back for the apartment. I thought I’d head out of town, lead the . . . the dragons away from you.”

“And leave me stuck in the middle of a murder investigation?”

He opened his hands. “What else can I do? I can’t undo what happened.” He looked earnest and distraught. “Someone died. And, Kyrie, I wish to all that’s holy that I could tell you it wasn’t me who killed him. But I can’t. He’s dead, and I’m . . .”

He opened his hands, denoting his helplessness. “I wish I could tell you I never touched him and that I would never have done that, but my mind is all a blank. I don’t even remember being attacked in my apartment, honest. If it weren’t for the state it’s in . . .”

His hair had fallen in front of his eyes, and he tossed his head back to throw it back. “Look . . . I might very well have done it, and they might find evidence linking me to it. I’m not sure how your DNA works when you’re shifted. But if it was . . . If they think I killed him, all you have to say is that I asked you for a ride home, that you had no idea anyone was dead. You could have come out in the parking lot and never seen it, you know? It was behind the vans. I took advantage of your charity and stole your car. No one will hold that against you.”

Kyrie bit her lip. There were other things he wasn’t even thinking about, she thought. For instance, the paper towels. Properly looked over they’d probably find traces of her hair, dead skin cells, whatever.

But fine, the major evidence would point to him, and she could probably come up with a story that would let her off and get him out of her life forever. So, why didn’t she want to? Was it because once he was gone she could go back to imagining that she was just hallucinating the shifts? And she wouldn’t have a witness to her shape-shifting.

She put her hands inside the wide sleeves of her robe. “I think that’s tiredness talking,” she said. “I think if I can come up with an excuse, so can you. You’re exhausted from who knows how many hours shifted. And you don’t look well.” This last was the absolute truth. Tom had started out looking shocked and ill, and he’d progressed to milk-pale, with dark, dark circles under his eyes, bruised enough to look like someone had punched him hard. “You could crash the car out there,” she said, and seized upon that. “And I don’t want it made inoperable. The insurance never pays you enough to junk it.”

He frowned at her, the frown that she had learned to identify as his look of indecision.

“I have a love seat,” she said. And to his surprised look added, “In the sunroom at the back. Sleeping porch, really, from when they treated tubercular patients in this region. They thought fresh air was essential, so they had these sun-porches. Someone glassed this one in, and there’s a love seat in it. Nothing fancy, mind you, but you can have it and a blanket.”

She could see him being tempted. He was so tired that, standing in the middle of her little bathroom, he was swaying slightly on his feet. She could see him looking in what he probably thought was the direction of the sun-porch, and she could practically hear the thoughts of the love seat and blanket run through his head. She could also see him opening his mouth to tell her thanks
but no thanks
.