Noah's Boy-eARC (2 page)

“Until someone stole the Pearl of Heaven and I found that while I could touch his mind, I could not control him as I could other dragon shifters. And it wasn’t just because he had dragon blood from the tribe of the west, for I could sense he had my blood too. I had people trace back through his ancestry and found that he was descended from that long-ago forgotten son. And he is my only male descendant on the unbroken male line, the only one with a power close to my own. The only one who can carry my burden. The one who
will
carry my burden.”

A fleeting
poor bastard
crossed Bea’s mind, but she did her best to look attentive and blank.

“His name is Tom Ormson and he is…” The man she was now sure was the Great Sky Dragon shrugged. “Very young. I think in his early twenties. He lives here in town and owns a diner, The George.”

“Yes?” Bea said.

“I’d like you to marry him.”

For a while, Bea was speechless. She’d heard of arranged marriages, of course, particularly in Asia, but her parents were American and thoroughly modern, and they would no more think of contracting a marriage for her than they would think of binding her feet. When she found her voice, she said, “And he’s agreed to this?”

“Oh, no. He doesn’t even know about it.” A frown pulled at the old dragon’s mouth. “In fact, I think he has plans of marrying a panther shifter. He’s living with her. Completely unsuitable, of course. Her people are not our people.”

“But you think he’ll agree?” Bea asked.

“I think he’ll tell me to go to hell,” the old dragon said, and looked up with a faint smile. “And so will his girlfriend. She’s feisty enough, and she has no fear of me.”

“But…you want me to marry him? You said you can’t make him do what you wish, so…”

“No. You’ll have to find how to make him do what I wish.”

Bea stood up. Her legs were trembling. She couldn’t let her father lose the business he’d worked for all his life, but neither could she agree to this. The elderly man-dragon wanted her to seduce a total stranger who was in a serious relationship. No. There were limits to what she was willing to do, even for her beloved father. They’d get tired of trying to force his hand eventually. They’d leave them alone. Bea couldn’t sell herself for life for the sake of her father. That was prostitution and slavery, combined.

Standing, she glared down at the Great Sky Dragon. She could feel power rolling off him, though she could not have explained what type of power or how she felt it.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ve got the wrong person. I’m sure there’s someone else you can call on, who will be willing to do it. I don’t want to trick a man who is in love with someone else into marrying me. I don’t want an arranged marriage.”

There was a long silence. “I’ll let myself out,” Bea said.

“Stay!” It wasn’t so much an order as a sudden plea. She’d turned to leave the room and now turned again. The Great Sky Dragon was looking up at her, and his eyes held an expression she’d have thought impossible: raw, undiluted fear.

“Don’t you understand?” the Great Sky Dragon said, his voice low. “Do you think this is something I’d want, throwing an untrained girl at a stubborn boy and hoping for the best? Compared to me you’re nothing but babies. I thought he could have his panther girl and be happy, and when it dissolved in a century or two, then I could guide him towards a marriage that will produce dragons.

“But there is a trial coming and I’m not sure I can— If I’m not here, he’ll need to be married to one of our own, recognizably our own. He doesn’t look like our kind. My people will rebel at his orders. And it will need to be known that he will have dragon children, to rule after him. In the battle ahead, there might not be thousands of years to spawn.”

Bea didn’t realize she’d sat down, but her trembling legs were about to not let her stand up anymore. “Why would he be giving orders?”

“My grandfather told me of the dragons-beyond-the-stars who could—who would one day attack the Earth.” The Great Sky Dragon shrugged. “I always thought it was a legend, nothing more. But—lately I’ve had signs that it is not. There is a great power out there, encircling, trying to remove me, trying to…” He frowned. “I think trying to attack my people. I’ve lived very long, and death doesn’t scare me, but—”

“But?”

“But when I go, all my power—and the destiny of my people—will fall on the head of Tom Ormson, a stranger, raised outside our traditions.” He held up a hand to keep her from interrupting. “Oh, I know, you also have not been taught our traditions, but everyone knows your parents, both of them, are descended from my firstborn daughter. They will fall in line. And you can help your husband through the trial to come by winning for him the respect of our people.”

Chapter 2

Riverside Park, at the edge of Goldport, was a thrill whose time had passed. Competing with the various flags, gardens and other franchised, national attractions which specialized in rides based on the latest technology, its main advantage was being cheap and therefore it appealed mostly to the young, the recent immigrants and the impecunious.

Slumbering quietly at the edge of a small lake—the river in the name being one of those mysteries no one could explain—it displayed a flashy entrance tower that dated from the orientalist period of the nineteenth century when pseudo arabesques had been in vogue. It appeared quite nice at night, when bright little lights outlined its contours making it look like something out of a fairy tale and when no one could see its flaking paint and the parts that were boarded up.

Its vast central pavilion, which once had hosted shows by all the big bands and dancing by all the fashionable local couples, now housed bumper cars. The hippodrome that had seen horse races back in the middle of the twentieth century had long since closed. Its sun-bleached carcass, encircled in a tall wall that stood, as incongruous and forlorn as the bones of a long-dead dinosaur, was posted all over with signs warning visitors off exploring its dark interior.

Not that many visitors were interested. Most came for the corny spider rides, the colorful dragon roller coaster, and the not very horrible house of horrors. A few aficionados and romantic souls came for the wooden roller coaster or the turn of the—twentieth—century merry-go-round.

But right then, early May, the only people in the park were there to work. Teams of men fanned out up the slope and down the path, cutting down the knee-high grass and calling to each other in Spanish.

Jason Cordova straightened up, as the mower he’d been pushing choked on the knee-high weeds.
Man, the least they could do is get some riding mowers. Rent them or something. And if not, then with grass like this, we should be using scythes.

Despite the relatively mild weather, sweat glued his T-shirt to his body and his jeans felt like they had insects climbing up inside them. He knew it was probably his imagination, but he still had to suppress an urge to scratch and an even stronger urge to take off his jeans and shake them.

He listened to the chatter around him and frowned.
It’s like they went to the day labor office and picked everyone with a Spanish name.
Which was probably exactly what they’d done. And it wasn’t that Jason didn’t speak Spanish. He did. He’d studied it in college. For all the good it was doing him in the current economy.

A shout that he couldn’t quite understand but that seemed to mean he should be getting back to work made him say, “Yeah, yeah,” as he started pulling the cord to restart the mower. But the motor only sputtered, and then he realized the shout hadn’t been at him.

Instead, his coworkers were shouting to each other and running towards an area where tall grass remained.
Oh, what the hell,
Jason thought, as he ambled in that direction, wondering exactly what they’d found there. A credit card? Someone’s illegal weed patch? Or, judging by the trend of the conversations he’d heard before, and what seemed to really interest all his coworkers, perhaps there was a girl there who’d somehow lost all her clothes?

Before he got to the center of the excitement, he saw two of the guys running away, their faces more green than olive, and another one throwing up into a recently mowed patch.

Jason jogged forward the next few steps. And froze. Laying on the trampled tall grass was one his coworkers. He was small, probably Mexican. What remained of his white T-shirt was torn and covered in red-black blood. The lower half of his body was unrecognizable—his stomach torn open, the guts spilling. It looked like something had eaten a good portion of the man’s insides.

Jason would never know quite how it happened, but he found himself throwing up, too, right beside the tall grass. But as he straightened, wiping his mouth on the back of his leather gloves, he realized there were a lot fewer men around. Like…none. Though he could see one or two in the distance, jumping the fence, and another desperately swimming across the lake.

Oh, good God,
he thought, as he called aloud, “Stay, don’t go. We must report this to the police.” Which he realized was exactly the wrong thing to say, as they ran even faster.

A trail of moving grass near at hand called his attention, and he rushed there, determined not to face the police alone. “Stop,” he said. But then realized it wasn’t one of his coworkers he was looking at. It wasn’t any human. It had to be the largest feral dog he’d ever seen. Well…feral something. Immense, beastly, its maw stained with blood, it looked like what happens to big bad wolves who die and don’t go to heaven.

Jason felt his body clench and twist. His mouth contorting, he made an effort to speak, as he managed to pull off his jeans and T-shirt before they got shredded. “Nice doggie,” he said.

* * *

Rafiel felt like he was going stark, raving mad.

Okay, so no murder investigation—or in this case, what seemed to be the investigation of death by misadventure—was ever a good thing. Ever.

Goldport wasn’t exactly a crime capital, but as one of four senior investigators in its serious crimes unit, Rafiel saw his share of the seamy underside: thefts, break-ins, the occasional drunken Saturday night mutual shoot-out, and the share of drug traffic that couldn’t be avoided anywhere these days. They even had murders—quite a few recently.

But on this particular Friday afternoon, he’d been finishing his paperwork, and giving some thought to the girl his parents had arranged for him to go out with that night. His parents—heck, his entire family—were anxious to see him matched up. Nearing thirty and living in your parents’ house was not how the story should go. Particularly not when you were a successful police officer. But Rafiel’s parents should know better.

They knew that their son shifted into a lion at the drop of a hat, or sometimes even without any hats dropping. They knew he lived in fear of hurting someone while shifted, and also that normal people, who didn’t change shapes, wouldn’t understand that he remained throughout more than half human: that in either form he tried to do the best he could and serve justice.

What did they think would happen if a woman came home to find her husband—or fiancé—had changed into a giant jungle cat? Did they think she would take it as an inconvenient but endearing thing?
Oh, well, he’s a lion shifter, but at least he makes good coffee?

He could only imagine his parents’ desire for grandchildren had overwhelmed their common sense, leaving him with the task of taking this “daughter of old friends” on a first date, being polite and nice but cold, so she wouldn’t feel too disappointed when he never called again.

Some days he wished he didn’t know there were female shifters in the world, people with whom, theoretically, he could share both sides of his nature. He also wished he were unaware that Kyrie Smith, one of his two best friends, shifted into a panther. Some days he wished he could help thinking that he and Kyrie could have made a go of it, if the other one of his best friends hadn’t been around. But Tom Ormson was around. And though he was quite unsuitable for Kyrie as a shifter—shifting into a dragon—he was very compatible with Kyrie as a human.

Rafiel had had doubts about that, in the beginning, but once those two had gotten together, they’d stopped being individuals and become a whole that was bigger than the sums of its parts: they’d become Tomandkyrie, a composite creature more competent than either of them was separately, and so inseparable that he might as well try to come between Siamese twins.

What made things worse, was that Rafiel wasn’t even sure he would have a chance with Kyrie if something happened to Tom. He had a feeling that a Rafielandkyrie creature would not be nearly as good as Tomandkyrie, and might in fact fail to gel at all. And besides, he liked Tom—the scruffy, scaly bastard that he was—and, if needed, he’d die ensuring nothing bad happened to Tom. The two of them had fought together enough, been through enough danger to develop a brother-in-arms camaraderie, stronger than any romance.

No. What Rafiel really needed to do was find a girl he could love and who wouldn’t mind his shifting. And the last requirement cut down the population of eligibles to a negligible number, most of whom would live too far away for him to ever meet.

He’d been contemplating that when his afternoon got worse, with the phone call about the man found mauled. At Riverside Amusement Park—where, even at the height of the season, if one dropped a virus that selected for non-native Spanish speakers, no one would catch it—a man had had some sort of death by misadventure and the police were called to investigate.

It had been hard to understand what the heck was going on, because the person calling it in kept lapsing into something that Rafiel suspected was Greek. But Rafiel had caught stuff about a mountain lion and Mexicans and—this was emphatic—definitely not the owner’s fault.

Now he stood in the middle of Riverside, while a medic, who’d accompanied the police, patched up one of the workers: the only one remaining. Well, the only
live
one remaining.

Not far from them, in the long grass, a forensic team went over the victim: Hispanic, late twenties and dead. Very dead. According to the forensic team, several feet of intestine—and various other internal organs—were missing.