Noah's Boy-eARC (32 page)

A first glimpse through the window shocked Rafiel, almost as much as the smell from inside that hit his nose.

First, the woman he’d heard, the woman who stood in the center of the cottage, could have been a Renaissance madonna in a painting by da Vinci. She had that broad forehead that they seemed to prize, and almost perfectly regular features, framed by golden-blond hair. Despite wearing jeans and what looked like a peasant blouse, she had a certain antique air—an impression of being not so much old or out of a time long ago, but of being ageless, someone who had always looked like this and would always look like this.

The effect was heightened by the soft silvery light reflecting on her face.

The cottage interior was dark. There seemed to be some broken furniture in a corner but if it had ever been used as a concession stand, and had been wired as such, it had been a long time ago. Now it was dark, filled with something shadowy and not quite visible, with this blond woman in the middle, holding in her hands—

Rafiel had seen it once, long ago, and he remembered it because immediately afterwards he’d watched the Great Sky Dragon punish someone in a way that had seemed at the time irrevocably fatal.

It was about the size of a grapefruit, perfectly round, and it had the softly white reflections of a pearl.

In fact, Rafiel knew what it was. It was what the dragons called the Pearl of Heaven, their special and carefully guarded object. Tom had stolen it once, because he had thought that it would help him get over his addiction. It hadn’t, but it had seemed to have other effects on both him and the dragons. The dragons had chased him over half the country and exacted terrible punishments until he returned it.

Now, it didn’t look exactly like a normal pearl. It seemed to be shining with an interior light, a silvery pale light, which shone up into the face of the woman, making her look ethereal and not quite real. Paradoxically, it bounced off the shapes around her. There were dozens of them, and they seemed to flow into each other. The light bouncing off them made them look exactly like shrouded humans and made the fact that some of them were partially inside the others or twined with the others seem as wrong as the more nightmarish drawings of Hieronymus Bosch.

Rafiel ignored the shapes and concentrated on the woman—partly because he could smell her, and he recognized the smell. He would lay very good odds she was the creature who had beat him after he followed the feral shifter, and the same creature who had seduced him in the woods.

He still couldn’t think of that event without a vague nausea stealing over him and causing his stomach to plunge. He could imagine, all too well, Tom teasing him over it. Why be so upset at copulation? After all, though they’d all been afraid of it, it seemed to bring with it no bad side effects, despite their shifter nature.

But it was that he’d had sex with someone he didn’t know, someone in animal form, and worse, that he’d had sex with her in a completely helpless way. Once he’d smelled her, he’d been gone. There had been absolutely nothing he could do to prevent himself from copulating with her, despite all his misgivings, despite his higher principles, despite the fact that he had always wanted to be sure he could trust anyone he did
that
with.

It felt, he thought, rather as it must feel to be raped. He’d heard rape victims—usually female—describe that feeling of not being in control, of not being able to say no, of being overpowered, of never again feeling safe, and he felt it echo in him. There was also the same guilt. Rape victims would go on and on, analyzing their clothes, the way they stood, and what they’d done, trying to figure out if they’d done something, anything to bring the ordeal on.

The analysis resulted badly for him, because he had betrayed himself. The woman—the female—might have put out heavy pheromones, but in the end, it was his own body that had reacted, his own body that had made him engage in sex in animal form.

Even now, feeling sick to his stomach at the thought, the smell of her, attenuated though it was in her human form, caused him to react. Part of him wanted to go through the window, part of him wanted to dive through and cavort with her right there, despite the scary immaterial creatures.

He felt as though a cold hand were drawing up his back at the thought, but then he looked over at Bea, and saw her gazing at him. Did she know? Did she guess? It didn’t matter. She looked scared and worried, and her look made whatever arousal had started in him subside. Nothing was more important than keeping Bea safe, except perhaps earning her respect. And he was going to guess her respect hinged on his acting like a human being and not like a rutting animal.

He gave her a smile he was afraid was sickly, even as inside the shapes whispered in their buzzing words, “You can’t activate it. You don’t have what it takes. Only some of you can. The dragon boy, the new Sky Dragon can. I’m not sure the old dragon can, even if he knew how.”

“I must know how,” the woman said. “I’m sure the old dragon can, if he doesn’t have any choice but do it. I got his measure when I felled him. I tasted his soul. He’s weaker than I. Even if
I
can’t activate the Pearl, if you tell me how to do it, I can make
him
do it.”

“It’s not tell,” the things buzzed. “It’s show. We can no more show you how to do it than you can show us what it’s like to have such an abomination as a body. That thing was built for one like us, for one with the spirit—the soul—to be able to operate it. You don’t have that soul. It’s like…you don’t have the right…” The buzzing stopped and Rafiel had the impression it was groping for words. “You don’t have the right appendages,” the last word was pronounced as if it were something distasteful, perhaps one of the grosser scatological words.

“But I can make it glow,” the woman said, in a tone of peevishness, like a child that is being lied to or denied something it thinks essential.

“A child’s trick,” the voices buzzed. “Making it glow is easy. Making it fully operate, making it revive the knowledge of how to unlock the world gates is something else, and you can’t do it. When you got locked in the fleshy self, you lost that. You lost the parts of you that would allow you to do it. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea to rebel. Perhaps you shouldn’t have been so headstrong.”

The woman stomped her foot. She looked mutinous. She looked exactly like people do when told “I told you so” when they themselves had already figured it out. She glared at the immaterial beings. “Maybe you need more feeling,” she said.

She reached out, while holding the Pearl in her right hand. Her left hand plunged behind the clutter of broken furniture and dragged out—pale and naked and trembling, his hands over his head—the feral shifter Rafiel had fought before. As they watched, the woman’s nails, which seemed unusually large, tore a strip across his chest.

The creature screamed, a scream of pain and terror, and his eyes turned in trembling, uncomprehending terror towards the woman inflicting the pain. It seemed to be trying to snuggle to her, even as she ripped again, this time down the feral’s arm. Blood flowed in the wake of her nails, and a sort of shiver went through the cottage. The invisible creatures, seen only by their reflection of pale light, moved in, one crowding into the other, compacting, through and into the feral who shivered and cried again, a high, animal sound.

Rafiel was running. He’d always thought he was a brave man. He’d never run from any physical threat: not from prehistoric shifters, nor from the more human threats that he’d confronted in the past. But he couldn’t stop his recoiling horror, he couldn’t stop himself from running.

Maybe it was in part the knowledge that he’d had sex with that creature who was hurting what seemed to be a defenseless young, perhaps her own. Maybe it was the dumb look in the feral’s eyes, as it tried to snuggle up to the very person hurting him.

Most of all, though, he thought it was those mostly transparent creatures, silvery in the light of the Pearl, flowing into each other and crowding for what the woman had called the “feeling.” They were worse than vampires. After all, at least blood was something physical. But they were crowding to something else, and Rafiel’s stomach clenched at the thought of what that something might be.

He realized he was leaning on his car and throwing up, when he felt Bea’s hand on his shoulder. He thought he’d now disgraced himself completely in her eyes, but all she said, in a concerned voice, was, “Are you all right?”

He wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand and nodded, trying to muster the ability to talk again through a throat that burned with bile. “Yes…I…I’m sorry.”

“No,” she was passing him something. He realized it was a bunch of folded-over Kleenex, and he wiped at his mouth and looked at her.

“I’m sorry. I don’t even know why I ran, much less why it made me sick.”

She gave him a small smile. “I know,” she said. “Hungry ghosts. That’s what I was thinking when I ran. I wasn’t far behind you.”

* * *

They’d cleaned up the mess that Old Joe had made in the kitchen, which was quite an epic mess, Kyrie had to admit, even by Old Joe standards. She’d known when she’d seen him with the half-eaten raw egg that there was a mess, and there was: yolk and eggs smeared all over, smashed shells on the floor. Normally she wouldn’t have bothered beyond sweeping everything he might have touched into a trash can, but they needed to talk, so she’d started to wipe down counters, handing the leftover milk in the open carton to Old Joe and saying, “Finish it.” Because there were no used glasses anywhere, she was fairly sure he’d drunk from the bottle.

Tom and Conan had squeezed into the kitchen, too, which meant the tiny room was rather more crowded than it ever was meant to be. They edged around the folding table and the two chairs, but Tom swept the floor, and Conan got spray cleaner and a paper towel and started wiping the fridge inside and out, leaving Kyrie to clean the counters and the stove and wipe at the finger marks on the window sill and the door.

They worked around Old Joe who moved like a sleepwalker and made sounds about how the people from other worlds were really, really bad, and how they didn’t want to meet them in the flesh. “They send spirit forms over, sometimes, but not full spirit forms. No real energy. Even then, they can kill, they can—”

They walked around him, cleaning. Kyrie thought that all of them needed the sense of normalcy that came from cleaning and returning things to a mundane everyday appearance.

“We can’t stay here,” she said at last. “I mean…I know they can’t come into the house as dragons, but it wouldn’t be all that hard to lay siege to the place, then send someone in human form, one by one, to collect us. The house is not that secure, and while Not Dinner is fearsome, he’s not exactly a guard dog.”

“No,” Tom said. “The thing is, I think they can sense me no matter where I am.”

“Not if you turn it off,” Conan said.

Tom gave him a worried look, then said, “Oh, I see.”

“You see?” Kyrie said.

“Something like what Jao did, to keep me out of the part of his mind that knew whom he’d hired to kidnap you, so I didn’t have a picture of them and couldn’t find them. Only, of course, I’m much better at locking parts of my mind against him. I would be, right, I mean…”

“Yes, you’re the Great Sky Dragon,” she said.

There was a moment of hesitation, and Tom drew in breath. “I don’t think I am,” he said. “Worse, I don’t think I can be, and that’s why we must bring the old Great Sky Bastard back.” He looked at Kyrie. “You know what I mean.”

She was looking back at him, intently. “Yes, and yet, no.” Tom looked perfectly blank and she had to smile. “Look,” she said. “You look after everyone all the time, so it would seem logical that you should be in charge, but…” She shook her head. “I see what you mean on taking over the triad as it is. On the other hand, maybe as it is is merely a reflection of the Great Sky Dragon, not—”

Tom shrugged. “I really don’t care what it is a reflection of—or not. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life ruling over a bunch of people whose only resemblance to me is that they too can turn into dragons.”

Kyrie almost said it, but she bit her tongue in time before the words he didn’t want to hear came out. In her head, though, they sounded as loudly as though she’d spoken them.
But, Tom,
the words ran through her mind.
What if they need you? What if this is what you were born to do? Can you walk away? Do you even have a choice?

* * *

Bea sighed without meaning to, as she thought that apparently she was destined to see way more naked males than she ever meant to. She could only hope it encouraged her facility at life drawing.

She thought this as the two wolves, who’d come running sometime while Rafiel was throwing up and stood a little while away looking at them, now turned and writhed in the agony spasms of shifting. She looked away. She knew what it felt like when she was shifting forms, and she couldn’t avoid the idea it was somehow indecent to watch other people do so.

When she looked back, there were two men there. It was undeniable, she thought, that they had considerable Mediterranean blood. It was there, in the dark curls, the olive skin, and the proportions that recalled Greece’s statues.

It was also undeniable they were related, perhaps brothers. They had that look of family, even if one’s eyes were grey and the other’s dark, dark brown. And they were smiling at her in a way that recalled the way that dogs had of giving the impression they were laughing, with tongues half hanging out.

Rafiel, finishing wiping his mouth, glared at them. “Damn you,” he said. “Damn you. Why didn’t you tell me?”

The slightly taller grey-eyed one grinned, this time a very human grin. “I swear it never occurred to me that you didn’t know, Rafiel. I mean, we knew.”

“You don’t
smell
shifter,” Rafiel said. The other man, the one he wasn’t talking to, went around Bea’s truck, and she realized there was a convertible there, something beautiful and curved, clearly of fifties vintage, and painted hot pink. He came back carrying two bundles of clothes and handed one to his—brother? Friend?