Noah's Boy-eARC (3 page)

They hadn’t found the mountain lion yet. But that wasn’t the worst news. The guy who’d been mauled and was being patched up said it wasn’t a mountain lion but more like a dog, but even that he wasn’t sure of. He said it was a weird animal.

And Rafiel could smell shifter. It was a smell he’d decided only shifters could smell, metallic, with a salty tang, and unmistakable once you first smelled it. And it was all over the place.

“So, it was a dog?” he asked the guy who sat on the chipped cement bench by the closed spider ride—the big black apparatus with its cuplike seats frozen and vaguely threatening in the afternoon light.

The guy’s name was Jason Cordova, notwithstanding which, he spoke English perfectly and without the slightest hint of an accent. His only Spanish words came flying out as the emergency medic bandaged his arm and shoulder, which had been mauled by something. Something with sharp teeth. His white T-shirt, smeared in blood, lay on the bench by his side.

Jason was dark enough to be some variety of Hispanic, though most of it, Rafiel thought, would be due to his working outside in the sun. He wore his hair short, with the tips dyed white-blond, and he looked at Rafiel, shook his head, then tried to shrug, which brought about another outbreak of Spanish, in which the word “Madre” featured prominently. “Thing looked like a dog,” he said, at last, looking at Rafiel out of narrowed eyes, though they seemed to be narrowed more in pain than in suspicion. “But it didn’t fight like any dog. And it didn’t bite like any dog.” He shook his head. “I was lucky I had my hunting knife, because the day labor office is in a bad area and— Anyway, I must have cut it halfway to pieces before it let me go. And its jaws were like…steel clamps.”

“I’ve never seen a bite like this,” said the medic who’d come with the ambulance Rafiel had called. He blinked grey eyes behind coke-bottle glasses. “I’ve treated all sorts of injuries, even people mauled by mountain lions.” He looked at Jason. “You’re very lucky to be alive.”

“Yeah, I feel lucky,” he said, in the tone that implied he didn’t. “I’m unemployed, divorced, crashing on a friend’s sofa and, in good months, making enough to pay for my own food and fuel, and now I’m going to have to pay for the ambulance someone called. It’s not like the park has insurance.”

The medic grinned, and started to put his stuff away in a little bag. “Nah, the park will pay. They don’t want you to go to a hospital and have to show papers. I’ve sent the ambulance back anyway, so it’s just my time.” He stopped. “And I suppose you do have papers.”

“Sure I have them. I was born in California, so I have a birth certificate,” Jason said, sounding vaguely amused. “I suspect I was the only one. I mean of the workers. But I didn’t tell the owners. They can’t pay minimum wage or do all the paperwork stuff, and if I’d told them I wanted that, they’d never have hired me.”

“Yeah, I won’t tell them. You keep a watch on that. I disinfected as much as I could, but there might be something left in there. It’s a deep wound. If you notice a ring of red form and start to expand, get yourself to emergency and fast. Oh, and…”

But Rafiel was no longer listening. Instead, he was smelling the air around him. It didn’t much matter to him—or not exactly—whether the creature was a dog or a mountain lion, or some mutant, undefined creature.

What mattered—and this was very important—was that he could smell shifter in the area, all around, in fact. There was a sweet-metallic tangy scent that he knew all too well. He smelled it every day in his own clothes, rising from his own body. And he smelled it from Kyrie and Tom and the dozen or so shifters who frequented The George—the diner Kyrie and Tom owned together.

The thing was that the scent lingered in areas where shifters had been. Sometimes for hours. It had been so strong around the dead man, that Rafiel was sure the man had been a shifter. But was the killer a shifter or not?

It made all the difference. As Rafiel stood here, away from the scene, he could hear the forensic team discussing their findings in the blood-spattered area with long grass, where the body lay.

If the killer was just a wild animal on the loose, then Rafiel could let the team figure it out in their own way. There would be the routine police investigation, the normal adding up of evidence till they could take the case to trial and corner whoever was responsible for the animal being loose: police, park or perhaps the owner of the animal. Then whoever was responsible would be fined or given community service, or something similar.

In that case, Rafiel would function just as Officer Trall, a professional and well-trained police officer.

But if the killer had been a shifter
in
his shifted form, it all changed. Because a shifter who killed once, rarely stopped killing unless he were caught. And it wasn’t as though Rafiel could bring the apparatus of the law to bear on him. You couldn’t really tell a judge “This isn’t a dog, it’s a werewolf.”

Well, you could. But then they put you in a nice resting place, medicated to the eyeballs. And, given that Rafiel himself was a shifter lion, heaven only knew how the meds would affect his shifting. He might become a lion and eat a few nurses not-in-a-good-way. He took a long whiff of the air. There was the smell from the dead body, the smell around it, and another smell.

“Hey, something wrong? You allergic to something?” the medic asked.

And Rafiel became aware that he’d been sniffing for all he was worth, as though he expected to find his way with his nose. Which he probably could. In fact, he would swear the smell came from the path to the parking lot, past the closed-up hippodrome.

“Ragweed,” he said automatically. It had the advantage of being true, not that it mattered. “So, could you write me an informal report on the wounds? In case I have to take this to trial.”

“You can’t take an animal to trial,” the medic said. Then he grinned sheepishly. “Though I suppose you could take his owner. And maybe you should. But I bet you it doesn’t have one. I bet you it’s one of those wild animals that seem to show up further and further into town every year. Like that Komodo dragon that went around eating people—what was it? two years ago?—and did you hear about the bear who went through the trash dumpster behind the alcohol and tobacco kiosk on Fifteenth? He then ran through bar row, looking in dumpsters. When they tried to catch him, he ran through ten backyards and across five streets before being struck by a car as he ambled across the road in front of Conifer Park. And I bet you that they treated him and freed him, too, probably not too far from town. Ready to do the same again next year. A miracle he didn’t kill someone.”

Rafiel made a perfunctory nod and said, “Nothing we can do, eh? It’s the way it is. But I still need that report.”

“Right. I’ll write up something. It won’t be Shakespeare.”

“No problem. Shakespeare didn’t really report on medical conditions and it wouldn’t do us any good to be told the wound is not as wide as a church door,” Rafiel said. The intensity of the smell was driving him insane. It was separating itself into strands, too: the dead body, or the area around it, and a trail leading to the hippodrome and another…

He should—to follow proper procedure—go over to where the forensic team was working and see if there was anything else they needed. Instead, Rafiel frowned as Jason put his blood-spattered but intact T-shirt over his badly mauled body. At that moment, the shifter-smell hit Rafiel full in the face, and he stared, his mouth half open.

The medic was walking away, far enough along the path that he wouldn’t hear anything that Rafiel or Jason said. Jason turned a puzzled and slightly weary face to Rafiel.

“Lucky you had your hunting knife, huh?” Rafiel said. “I don’t suppose you want to show it to me?”

Jason blinked. A dark tide of red flooded behind his tanned skin. “I must have dropped it,” he said. “Somewhere in the grass, I guess.” And with a shrug, he continued, “Maybe your team will find it.”

Rafiel sighed. He sat in the clear space of bench beside Jason. “I’d think
you
were the killer, you know, and that those wounds were received from whatever that poor bastard”—a head inclination towards the crime scene—“turned into, except that they say he’s been dead since probably really early morning, before you came to work. They think he was one of the guys they hired yesterday, and he decided to bunk here for the night. And your wounds are fresh. So it’s clear there’s yet a third shifter around—or maybe merely a second, if that’s only his smell around the corpse—but he’s still around and you got those wounds in a shifted fight with him. Don’t go telling me about a hunting knife. You might have cut the other shifter up pretty bad, but it was all teeth and claws, wasn’t it?”

Silence went on so long, that if Rafiel couldn’t smell the scent of shifter coming from Cordova—a scent made stronger by exertion, and mixed with that of his blood—he would have thought he was imagining it.

But then Cordova spoke, his voice very tired. “I see. The police know.”

“Eh. This policeman knows,” Rafiel said, inhaling for all he was worth, intent to detect a shift in adrenaline that would signal that the man was about to attack. Or shift and attack. It never came. Rafiel extended his legs in front of him, doing his best to appear at ease.

Turning, he found that Cordova was staring at him, studying him. “What…do
you
change into?” the man asked at last.

“Lion. You?”

“Bear.” And to what must have been sudden comprehension in Rafiel’s face, “Hey, I’m broke, and I guess I like liquor? I don’t know. I don’t remember much when I’m already tipsy and then become…you know…That hike from the forest preserve about killed me too. Just happy we heal fast. And that the person who found me thought I’d got drunk and undressed while drunk, and got me clothes and food.”

“I have a cell phone,” Rafiel said, “strapped to my thigh with one of those plastic coil things. Stays in place even when I shift. That way, if I end up too far from where my clothes are, I can always call friends.”

“Smart that,” Cordova said, and looked down at his feet. “Only you have to have friends who know, and I don’t have those. Even my wife didn’t know. She thought I kept disappearing and was having an affair, and when I didn’t want to talk to her about it, she said I was emotionally unavailable.” He shrugged.

They sat side by side a little while, then Cordova said, “But that guy, the dead one, I don’t think he was shifter. I think the shifter-smell is from the killer. It’s really strong around all that area, and it goes that way.” He pointed the same way Rafiel had been smelling it.

“Could it be one of the other workers?” Rafiel asked. “Where did they go?”

A grin answered him. “It’s as I told you before,” he said. “They ran so fast, they’re probably halfway to Mexico by now.”

“Yeah, but what path did they take out of the park, do you remember?”

This got him a very odd look, as it should have, because Jason was not stupid. Clearly, from his diction, his vocabulary, the man was smart and well-educated. He stood up on visibly shaky legs. “Three of them went that way. And a bunch ran that way. And then a few ran that way.”

He pointed in three directions, in which the park ended in a fence, bordering a little used road. Which made sense if you were an illegal worker trying to run away.

“Not that way?” Rafiel asked, pointing in the direction of the path to the parking lot.

Jason shook his head. “Nah. None of them had cars, you know? The owners picked us up in a truck.” He hesitated a moment. “Say, you’re not going to try to catch them or…?”

“I’m not INS,” he said. “And if I caught them, there would only be a mess and they’d end up on the streets again.”

“It’s just,” Jason said, gesturing with his head towards the ticket house where a motley group of people clustered, “that I don’t think they have much choice.” The people in the ticket house looked Greek and seemed to be the extended family of the owner of the park. They were arguing—or perhaps just talking—in very loud voices.

“The workers?” Rafiel asked.

“Any of them. The workers come because they’re hired, and these people hire them because they couldn’t afford minimum wage much less all the deductions and things.” He frowned. “The minimum wage law and the benefits and things, it’s all very pretty on paper, but it’s like legislating the weather, man; it does no good. All it does is make you think everything is fine until reality bites you some place or other.”

Rafiel nodded and said, “So none of them went where the smell goes,” he said. “Which means…Shit. There is definitely another shifter at large, isn’t there?”

Cordova hesitated. He lifted his hand, then let it fall. He looked over his shoulder and all around, to make sure he was suitably isolated and that no one could hear him. Then he sighed. “Man, I don’t want to tell you this. You look like you have troubles enough.”

“What?”

“After…in the fight, you know…I had a pretty good grip on this dude, and I was biting and then…”

“And then?”

“He shifted and slipped out of my grasp,” Jason said. “He just became this skinny, young dude, maybe fourteen or fifteen…” He hesitated while Rafiel gave vent to a string of profanity.

Jason Cordova just nodded, as though Rafiel had made an observation worth noting, then said, “Yeah, but…that’s not the worst of it. I grant you I was shifted myself, and I don’t remember what happened really clearly, but from the way he looked and how…well…I don’t think he’s all there. And I’m almost sure he’s not, you know…normal. His eyes, you know. They were more feral as human than in animal form.”

Chapter 3

Tom turned in bed, almost but not quite fully awake. He felt Kyrie stir, waking up.

Being in the same bed with someone was still an odd feeling. For so many years, Tom had been afraid of sleeping near any other human—scared of changing shapes in his sleep and killing his companion by morning.

But he and Kyrie had shared this house for over a year, and this bed for five months now, and even Kyrie had started to talk about it as “our bed” instead of “my bed.” So the feeling was odd, but good. Married feeling, Tom thought. Not that marriage was for the likes of them. Not really. They couldn’t have kids. Kids might inherit their shape-shifting. And if one of them did something horrible, it was better not to have a spouse who would have to live it down.