Tom ran down the hallway, full speed. He doubted that Old Joe could have run faster than Tom could walk. But the alligator that Old Joe shifted into could. He moved at a frighteningly fast clip, tail swaying. The door slammed shut behind Joe.
Tom hit it a couple of seconds later, the full impact of his body on the cold glass making it swing open. Snow flew into his mouth and stung his eyes, and as he looked around, frantically, all he could see of Old Joe was a trail in the snow, fast becoming covered by the more recent fall.
"Joe?" he said, stumbling along the trail, to where the dumpster stood, surrounded by a brick wall on three sides—presumably to hide from the customers' minds the ultimate fate of their leftovers.
A happy sort of clack-clack sound, not unlike castanets, made him veer sharp left, into the enclosure and almost step on Joe's tail. "There you are," he said, relieved that Old Joe had gone no further. "You really shouldn't wander off like that. You can have warm burgers inside, why are you—"
He froze as he heard a high-pitched animal battle scream and hiss—and almost ran forward, past Old Joe's front paws, to where he could see a little kitten, just inches from Old Joe's happily clacking snout.
It was orange and fluffy and tiny—maybe eight weeks old. Old enough to have open eyes and stand more or less firmly on spindly legs. Tom felt mingled dread and relief. Relief because he'd had other images in his mind, including a helpless baby shifter dragon. Dread, because instead of running, or jumping on the dumpster—if he could jump—the silly little creature stood facing Old Joe, hair fluffed out all on end, blue eyes blazing. As if it thought it could scare away a huge, armored gator. As Tom watched, it emitted another high-pitched battle scream.
Old Joe lunged. Before his teeth could grab the little creature, Tom stooped and picked it up. "No," he told Old Joe. "This is not dinner." He felt the kitten sink all claws into him, even as Old Joe looked up with a look of intense disappointment in his eyes.
Tom absently held the kitten close to him, hoping that the warmth would mollify him. He didn't dare put him down. Even if he had owners—and it was possible he might, and had only wandered in called by the smell of the diner refuse—what kind of owners let a baby this size walk around outside in a snowstorm? Making his voice stern, he yelled at Old Joe, "Shift. Now. Into human form."
The alligator looked up at him with such a sad look that Tom expected it to start crying. A different type of crocodile tears, Tom guessed. He cleared his throat, to avoid showing weakness, and said, "Now. You have no business being out here shifted. You know what kind of trouble Kyrie and I could get into if they found you. Do you want us to get in trouble?"
The alligator shook his head, earnestly.
"Right. Then shift," he said, and averted his eyes from the vagrant's form, as it writhed and twisted, from crocodile to human. "Better," Tom said. "Now stay. Don't you dare shift again or wander off." Aware that the poor creature was naked, he darted inside, grabbed the discarded sweats, and brought them out.
Old Joe put them on, with the expression of a school child obeying an unreasonable taskmaster. He looked resentfully at Tom from under lank clumps of steel-grey hair. "It's tasty. It's been too long since I've eaten an animal."
Tom shuddered. "You're not going to eat this one, either," he said, firmly, holding and sheltering the orange fluffball in his hands. The kitten had started cleaning himself, in affronted dignity, as though to let Tom know he could take care of himself fine, thank you so much.
Old Joe didn't say anything else about it. He gave Tom a half-amused, half-sad look. Though his eyes could be called brown, they had faded as much as the rest of him, so that they looked even more pitiful and washed out. The grey sweat suit—picked up at the thrift store down the street and faded and washed out as it was—looked like a scream of color on the small, short body. As Old Joe stood up, he never straightened to his full five feet or so of height. Instead he stooped forward, bent, and shuffled along.
Tom shifted his hold on the kitten, and held Old Joe's arm, as he led him inside.
"Walk better as a gator," the man said in a raspy voice, tainted with an undefinable accent.
"Undoubtedly," Tom said, maneuvering to open the door, without dropping either of his charges. "But alligators are not native to the Rockies, and if anyone sees you, they'll call animal control. And then what are we supposed to do?"
Old Joe nodded, but Tom wondered how much he understood of his speech. Most of the time Old Joe's hold on reality was thread-thin, no more than a dime's edge worth of awareness. Sometimes, though, when he spoke, Tom glimpsed . . . he wasn't sure what. Perhaps the man that Old Joe had once been—sharp and incisive, bordering on the acerbic. And sometimes, sometimes, he seemed old and wise and world weary, but very much intelligent and capable of logical thought.
The thing was, you just never knew which Old Joe you had. It could be the wise old man or the crazy old codger. His shifting between an alligator and a human wasn't nearly as confusing as that. At least that you could tell. What went on inside his mind wasn't nearly as obvious.
Tom led him inside and to the booth, and said "Stay," then ducked behind the counter, to ask Keith to get a burger started. He cursed himself, inwardly. He'd given the old man clam chowder, because he'd been thinking he'd be cold, of course. But the thing was, he'd just shifted, so of course he'd gone outside, in search of protein. "Make that a triple," he said.
Keith looked at him, as he threw three patties on the grill. "Hungry?"
"Not for me. Old Joe. Bring it to the table when you're done."
"Sure," Keith said.
Tom went back to the booth, where he'd left Old Joe. He didn't want to leave the old man alone too long, for fear he'd shift and escape outside again. At a guess, Tom imagined the only reason he'd managed to get away unnoticed is that there hadn't been anyone seated close enough to him to see him. But three more tables had gotten filled up since then, and while they were too far away to hear him, they had full view of the table. And Tom had no idea how to convince spectators that all twelve people at those tables had hallucinated a man changing shapes into an alligator.
So instead, he slid into the pockmarked green vinyl seat across from Old Joe, who looked up at him, suddenly, with startlingly focused eyes. "They're here, you know?" he said. "They're in town."
"Who is in town?" Tom asked. Through his mind, like a scrolling list, went the names of everyone that Old Joe might be referring to: the Great Sky Dragon's people; whoever had killed the people at the aquarium; some unspecified group that hated shifters.
"Them," he said, and shrugged. "You know, the Ancient Ones."
And all of a sudden, either dredged from memory or created by his mind on the spot, Tom had a comic book cover in his mind, showing the Greek gods in full array and under them the words "The Ancient Ones."
He sighed. "Right." In the morass of Old Joe's mind, who knew what was true and what wasn't. And now the kitten was asleep on Tom's palm, as Tom shielded him with his other hand, so that Old Joe wouldn't see him and get hungry. "Right."
At that moment, Keith dropped the burger in front of Old Joe, who grabbed it as if he'd been lost in a burgerless desert for centuries. "Sorry," Tom said, in an undertone. "I should have remembered you'd need protein. It was stupid of me. No wonder you changed."
Old Joe shook his head, as emphatically as the alligator had, near the dumpster. "That's not why I changed," he said. "It was the Ancient Ones. I can't take them like this. They might kill me, you know?" His eyes gave Tom an appraising look from under the long grey hair. "You know what they're like."
"Actually," Tom said, "I don't." He wondered if Old Joe was talking about something real or something out of his nightmares.
Old Joe devoured the burger, with its bun and pickles, in fast, ravenous bites, all the more surprising because his teeth appeared to be broken and stained, and possibly moss-covered. How old was he? Tom had heard—and had observed in his own years on the street—how hard a life like that could be on people. When you threw in the alcoholism and drug use that plagued people on the streets, how likely was it that Old Joe was no more than middle-aged? Forty. Maybe fifty.
On the other hand, Old Joe was a shifter. So was Tom. And through five years of sleeping outside and roughing it through horrible winters, and working at the roughest manual labor, and shooting up and smoking and eating any amount of drugs . . . Tom had never managed to look his age, let alone unnaturally aged. At twenty-one, he looked closer to eighteen, except for the dark shadow of beard on his face. Even with his five o'clock shadow, he still got carded every time he tried to buy a beer. So Old Joe could not have aged all that fast, could he? Not unless he'd come up with some pinnacle of self-destructiveness that Tom had left untouched. And that, Tom found very hard indeed to believe.
But then again, perhaps alligators aged differently from dragons. How was Tom to know? The problem, he thought, as Old Joe demolished the burger, is that he knew so few shifters. Not enough to give him a statistical universe, truly.
He adjusted his hands, trying to remove one, to rub at his forehead, and stopped short when the kitten emitted a vaguely threatening purr and put out a paw to hold Tom's hand in place. He was so much like Kyrie, asleep, on the sofa, putting out a hand to hold Tom back when he tried to walk off, that Tom smiled. A smile that died quickly, when he heard Old Joe say, in an almost singsong voice, "They want to kill you, you know?"
It was all Tom could do, not to look over his shoulder at where Conan was talking to a customer. "Who?" he asked, instead. "The Ancient—"
Old Joe nodded. "You see, they formed"—he wrinkled his forehead—"many years ago." He waved a hand with short, broken, dirty nails. "To punish those who hurt shifters. And to create a law for shifters. And they know about the deaths. At the castle." His voice was raspy, and he looked one way and another as if to make sure he couldn't be overheard.
"Many years ago?"
"Before cars. Or airplanes or . . . gaslight." His eyes seemed to be looking far away into the past. "Or horses."
"I see."
"I was young, you know? And they said that shifters needed rules and laws to protect them, and to rule themselves, that they needed to defend themselves against the others . . . the ones who would hunt them. And then they formed a . . . a group."
"I see. And why do you think this group is after us? Just because so many young shifters died?"
Old Joe shook his head, then shrugged. "He came to me, when I was outside. Dante Dire did. He came to me. He's the . . . killer for the Ancient Ones, the . . . how do you call it, when someone kills the condemned for a king? The executioner!" He looked very proud of himself for having come up with the word. "That's what he is. He punishes those who hurt shifters. And he came to me and said that many young and blameless shifters had died, and that it was all your fault, and . . . yours and . . . your girl and the policeman. And he wanted to know your names."
"How could he know we did it, and not know our names?"
"He can feel it. Many people can. Well, ancient shifters can."
"And he wanted to know who we were?"
"Yeah. He tried to get me to change," Old Joe squinted. "But I wouldn't. And then, you know, your manager came out, and he went away, but I was hit with a cantaloupe."
Tom tried to think through the confusion of articles, then shook his head. It didn't matter if it was all a dream of Old Joe's. Or rather, of course it did, since dreams couldn't possibly kill them, and real, pissed-off shifters on a rampage could. But . . . but for now, not knowing to which aspect of Old Joe he was addressing himself, he had to treat the thing as if it were deadly serious. "Is there some way they could figure out who we are? Since you didn't tell him? And why did he come to you?"
"He didn't come to me," Old Joe said, somewhat defensively. "He came to the diner because of the smell that attracts shifters, you know. And then he figured this is where all shifters came. And he recognized me. So he asked. I didn't tell him." He folded his gnarled hands in front of him, on the formica table looking for all the world like a schoolboy who expects a reward, then looked up and smiled a little. "I wouldn't worry. You're safe. I saw Dante Dire again, just a little later. When your girl and that policeman . . . what's his name? When they went out, he got in a car and followed them." He patted Tom's hand, reassuringly. "So, you see, you are safe."
Tom didn't feel at all reassured.