Noah's Boy-eARC (31 page)

Old Joe was edging out the door after him, and Tom said, “Stay,” just in time to have the old man turn around, looking resigned, and come back to sit on the sofa.

Conan made as if to shut the door, then said, “Why is there a jet of water across the yard?”

This was when Kyrie lifted her head from Tom’s shoulder and said, “If you would, if there are no dragons around anymore, would you go turn off the water? In the house to the east.”

Conan nodded and darted out the door. Tom wanted to tell him it might not be safe. Then he realized nowhere and nothing would be safe for his associates. At least not until he got the old Great Sky Dragon back, and perhaps not then. After all, the dragons would still want Tom to reproduce with the right woman, wouldn’t they?

Kyrie was telling him the story of being tranquilized and finding herself in a basement, apparently in one of the cabins at the Tomahawk, and of walking back on sore feet.

“You should have stopped someone. A motorist or something,” he said, “and asked to use a cell phone.”

“On Sierra,” she said, looking at him in disbelief. “They would have wanted to see me use the cell phone in a totally different way.”

He inclined his head to the side, conceding the point, then said, “From now on—”

“I strap a disposable phone to my thigh? I was thinking the same,” she said. “Rafiel has the right idea.” She took a deep breath. “Tom, I could kill for a glass of water.”

“I’d say you had plenty of water,” Tom said, as he tracked Conan coming back into the house. “Conan, please lock.” He took Kyrie’s hand to lead her to the kitchen, while she told him about the two dragons in the yard, how she’d trained the hose on them, and how it had worked to distract them.

“I guess they thought someone hidden behind the bush was wetting them, or perhaps it was just the shock of being hit with cold water when they were steaming hot.”

“Or both,” Tom said.

“Well, then,” she said. “I couldn’t avoid running through the spray to get in.”

He nodded and left her at the door to the kitchen, while he went to get her a glass of ice water. Old Joe and Conan trailed behind her, while Not Dinner rubbed at her ankles, despite being dripping wet.

Kyrie drank the water quickly. “Probably can’t strap a glass of water to my leg, too,” she said in a sad tone.

“Probably not,” he said. “Maybe some cash to buy water. But you didn’t shift to come home, did you?”

She frowned. “No. That’s why I’m still dressed. Though…”

“Though?”

“Though I tried to shift. I thought the panther would make better time getting home, but it didn’t seem to work. I guess I was too tired and hungry. Have you guys eaten?”

“No,” Tom said. Something about not being able to shift wasn’t right. He kept thinking that he’d heard something related to that recently, but he couldn’t put his finger on what. “But that’s not the important thing right now. I think we’re all in terrible danger, Kyrie. You guys more than me, because they wouldn’t dare kill me. Not without another heir. Well, at least not
this
set. Those two who challenged me might not mind. But now they’ve got the idea that by getting someone close to me, they can force me to do what they want—”

“Yeah,” Conan said mournfully from behind Tom. “You
are
going to have to kill a few of them.”

* * *

Rafiel and Bea walked hand in hand between the trees to the very end of the wooded area. All along the way, there was the sense of movement from the path. Rafiel wished he could have convinced Bea not to tag along. He didn’t like this. He didn’t like this at all.

He wasn’t a superstitious man. He didn’t buy crystals, he didn’t believe anyone could tell you the future and he most certainly didn’t believe in ghosts.

It wasn’t just that they got their share of crazy people who said they had to beat the cashier and steal the game system because his aura was all wrong. That didn’t bother Rafiel, because they got crazy people of all descriptions and types.

No, it was more as though the fact that he turned into a lion and was friends with people who turned into animals used up his full allowance of weird. After that, he had no more left to give, and anyone wanting to discuss his aura, or in general, talk of the uncanny, would have to meet with his hard and skeptical nature.

But the things out there were uncommonly like ghosts. He could sense them. He could see the results of their passage. But he couldn’t see
them
, and it was unlikely they were there in any physical sense. Rafiel didn’t like it, and he liked even less the feel that he couldn’t protect Bea from whatever this was. Maybe he should have studied table-turning and exorcism?

As they came to the end of the little wooded area, they found themselves facing a play cottage. Bea looked at him with a question in her eyes, and he leaned in to whisper in her ear, “It’s part of the train line that goes around the park. It still does, but now mostly at night, and they don’t bother with this stuff. It’s just the lights on the lake, and the lights of the rides that make it fun. But when I was little, the train went around all day, and they used to have these staged scenes of fairy tales, you know, cottages and Snow White and castles and Cinderella and all. The cottages used to do double duty as concession stands. But sometime in the nineties, the figures of Snow White and the dwarves started looking ratty and instead of painting them, they just carted them away. Some of the buildings are still concession stands, but these, in hard to reach places, were just left to rot. Maybe they were too expensive to demolish. Like the hippodrome.”

The hippodrome and all the bones left behind there was a bad image to have and he watched—no, he sensed—
entities
slip into the half-open door of the cottage.

He and Bea couldn’t go into the half-open door. In fact, he didn’t want to go anywhere near the place where the things were converging and…seemingly being sucked into the cottage. The way they’d been slipping in, it must be chockablock with them in there.

The idea of having one of the things move through him made him shudder, which was stupid because he didn’t even know that there was a way the things could go through a person. He thought it was more likely they’d go around. After all, the door was half-open to let them in.

But all the same, he could imagine one of the things going through him, all clammy and ethereal, made of cold energy like a wind that blew through a person, instead of around. He shivered, grabbed Bea’s hand harder and pulled her around the cottage, away from the things, a way from the door. He remembered vaguely that there was a window on the other side. If it was a real window or just painted on the façade there was no way of knowing.

He hoped it was real. Otherwise it was going to be kind of hard to listen in through what looked like stucco.

* * *

Tom was outside the bathroom, shouting through the door while Kyrie showered, telling her the story of his confrontation with Jao, trying to explain his dilemma. “It is not,” he said, “that I don’t think it’s going to take a lot to keep everyone safe. And I’m perfectly aware that they act according to a different code, but it seems to me, if I kill him, I’ve already lost.”

He heard a sigh behind him and guessed it was Conan, because Old Joe had ambled towards the kitchen. Other than making sure that Not Dinner had gone the other way towards the bedroom, Tom ignored Old Joe. He’d told him not to leave the house, and so far, he’d not heard the back door open. He did hear the sounds of someone rustling around in the fridge, and—leaving aside how much Old Joe might eat—he could imagine Kyrie declaring they’d have to disinfect the whole kitchen. But right now that was the least of his concerns.

He expected Kyrie to tell him to grow up or to grow a pair, or something, or maybe to make as exasperated a sound as Conan had just made, but as she opened the door and came out, wearing the jeans, T-shirt and shoes she’d taken in with her, and combing her hair, she said, “No, you’re right.”

“You don’t understand,” Conan said, in a tone of exasperation. He was leaning against the wall down the hallway. “If this is your idea for winning hearts and minds, or whatever, you’re going about it entirely the wrong way. It won’t work, Tom. They…dragons don’t understand this.”

Kyrie and Tom both looked at him, and Kyrie said, “You can’t say dragons don’t understand kindness. You—”

Conan shook his head. “No, that’s not what I mean, though you should be aware, I, myself, am a very atypical dragon. Most are older than this country, let alone having been raised in it. They don’t understand our codes, and they were raised in a pretty rigid code of their own.” He sighed deeply. “It’s like you’re speaking in a language they never heard and hoping they understand you. And it’s not kindness, exactly, to do that. What you’re doing is confusing them and making them feel leaderless. No wonder they want to betray you, or at least to please the old Great Sky Dragon, whom they’re hoping very much comes back. He will kill them for any reason or none. Individually, he doesn’t value them very much, but at least they can understand him.”

Tom did understand what Conan was saying. He had had that exact feeling, while talking to Jao, as though they were speaking different languages. “Yes, Jao kept saying that it was my duty to look out for dragonkind or something like that. But I keep thinking that if…I mean, look, it’s a lot like the Ancient Ones wanting to punish us for killing shifters, even though the shifters were killing other people. If it comes to that, if it comes to a choice…”

Conan nodded. “I’m not saying that you should do otherwise, Tom. I’m not sure what I would have done, and I was handed over to the Great Sky Dragon when I was a teenager. My parents would say I deserted him or something, the way I’m behaving.” He looked up at Tom, and the way his eyes narrowed, Tom got the feeling Conan was getting a headache. “Look, they’re going to try to get me to make you fall in line. You know that. You know what they’ve done to me before.”

What they’d done to him included leaving him on his own, to come back from a severe burning all on his own. “And, Tom, I understand what you say—I left once, though I needed your help to leave—but…but they’re going to keep pushing all of us until you do what they want.”

Tom opened his hands in a show not so much of helplessness as of exasperation. “What do you want me to do?” he asked. “Do you want me to marry Bea, or, I suppose, any ten females, just to make sure I have a dragon son? Would you leave Rya to marry someone they picked for you?”

Conan made a face. “If it hadn’t been for you,” he said, “I wouldn’t have had any choice. And I doubt I’d even have met Rya. But now? Now I can have Rya. Now I can…I know I can sing?” it was a statement, but it finished in a rising, interrogatory tone.

“You can sing,” Tom said.

“Now I know I can sing, I couldn’t leave Rya and…and music and go back, no.”

“Well, I can’t go back either,” Tom said. “Particularly since I was never there.”

“Tom, if it would be easier to pretend you and I have broken up, just pretend until, you know, we figure this out,” Kyrie said. She bent to pick up Not Dinner and pet him. Tom couldn’t see her expression, but he didn’t need to see her expression. He knew how to answer that.

“Don’t even joke,” he said. “If they think they can make me do what they want, there will never be an end to it. No. We will not give an inch. Frankly, I’m starting to wonder if the beings from the stars could be any worse.”

There was a crashing sound from the kitchen. Old Joe appeared on the doorway holding an egg. There was raw egg on his lips, and raw egg smeared on a hole atop the egg. He seemed to have been sucking a raw egg. But the face, around and under the smeared egg yolk was white as a sheet, leaving his network of dark wrinkles looking like tattoos, and his eyes looking like black holes. “No, don’t say. They are worse,” he said.

Chapter 20

There was a window in the cabin wall, and when they got near enough, Rafiel saw the wolves. He’d thought that Bea had been seeing things, or perhaps imagining things, but there were two matched grey wolves, side by side, just under the window. And from the way their heads were cocked, it was impossible not to imagine that they were human enough or sentient enough to be listening very carefully to what was going on inside.

As they got nearer, voices became more obvious, or rather one voice that Rafiel could call as such, and a swarm of odd buzzing that seemed to form words. It was like having words formed by the sort of static you get on radios between stations.

The voice was female and said, in an imperious tone, “But you have to show me how to do it. I don’t think the old fool knows. Even when he comes back.”

The buzzing back was less distinct, though Rafiel thought he caught the words “receptive” and “right.”

Closer yet, he realized that there was a hole in the glass of the window, which was probably why the sound was so clear. The wolves, he noted, turned to look at him and then away. The moment they’d looked at him had been enough, though.

Something you got used to, as a shifter, was knowing that the eyes remained remarkably the same between human and shifter. Oh, you might lose the whites and the shape might change, but you usually retained the same color and, strangely, the same expression as you had in human form. The two pairs of eyes that turned to him were startlingly familiar.

His shock was not so much that Cas and Nick, his colleagues in the force, were werewolves—he supposed considering Cas’ last name was Wolfe, he should have thought about this before—but the fact that he’d never smelled even a hint of shifter-scent around them. If it was going to be that way, then he couldn’t be sure about anyone.

And then he felt a niggling prickle of anger at the two of them. How could they have let him shoulder the burden of solving all the shifter crimes in town, of thinking he was the only one holding the line of justice on shifters, when they could and should have been shouldering their share? How dared they?

But he said nothing, just squeezed Bea’s hand and said, “It’s all right,” then guided her so they were positioned on either side of the small window, each with a wolf standing by their knees.