"Nasty way of getting rid of your exes," Rafiel said. And shook his head. "Or of course, perhaps we are completely wrong. The smell wasn't continuous. At least for me, it wasn't. You?"
"No, I couldn't follow it from the bathroom to the shark tank. Also, I thought there was a faint trail in the jelly fish and crab area, and all the way to the seafood restaurant." Which she privately thought was the height of bad taste to have attached to an aquarium, though right now, after shifting, those fishies in the tanks were starting to look startlingly like protein packs with incidental fins. "But it wasn't truly contiguous, and it . . . well, it didn't feel quite the same to me. I'd say there were two trails. Maybe three."
It was only as she saw the sudden look of alarm cross Rafiel's face, that Kyrie realized this was probably not the right thing to say.
"Three?" he said. "Are you sure?"
She shrugged. "Rafiel," she said, unable to fully keep her impatience out of her voice. "You know very well that you are the best sniffer of us all, when it comes to shifter-scent. I can only tell you what I smell . . . and it's probably less than you can sniff out."
But he shook his head, and swallowed hard. "No, the problem is that when you said it, it made sense, it clicked. Not one interrupted trail, but three trails. What the hell does that mean? A cabal of shifters, ready to kill people at the aquarium? What are we looking at here? A mob of shifters who have turned on all non-shifters? A shifter religion sacrificing the non-shifters?"
Kyrie shrugged. "Or just, perhaps, three people who happen to be shifters and who walked through the aquarium."
Rafiel grimaced, but nodded. "Oh, perhaps you are right. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but . . ."
"But our situation encourages paranoia?" she said. "Hiding from the world, unable to reveal what we are. Even in this multi-culti time, when every minority gets a pass simply for being a minority, we will never, ever, get such a pass. Because we are . . . dangerous?"
Another grimace that might have been an attempt at a smile. "I was going to say, that sometimes paranoia is right, however little we like to admit it."
"Uh." Kyrie shrugged. "I would say we have insufficient data to say."
She started walking away from the bathroom area, and out of the monitors and clearly fake, Victorian-looking submarine hardware area, towards the stairs. The stairs were broad and spiral and surrounded by glass—giving them rather the look of an aquarium designed to contain people.
"Come on, Rafiel," she said, staring out at the blizzard's magnificent raging whiteness. She would guess during one of Colorado's many unclouded days, one would have a magnificent view from here of the city of Goldport, such as it was, sprawling at the base of the Rockies. Now you couldn't even see the office tower across the street. It was just white and more white, blowing and swirling as far as the eye could see.
And just as she thought this, she realized she was wrong—because in the middle of the storm, a flash of green and gold showed, at her eye level, three stories up from the ground.
"What the—" Rafiel blurted out from behind her. "Is that—"
And in the next second, Kyrie was sure that that was indeed her errant boyfriend in dragon form, because Tom, all of him, emerged from the storm, as close to the glass as he could fly and not crash into it. His expression looked alarmed as he stared in at them. If alarmed at his proximity to the glass, or with flying in a storm, or something else, it was hard to tell.
There was just a flash of terrified blue eyes, the dragon's mouth open in silent protest. And then . . . Tom flying away.
"Tell me he didn't just fly here through the storm to check on us?" Rafiel said.
And part of Kyrie wanted to tell him exactly that, except it depended on what Rafiel meant by checking on them. Kyrie was willing to bet that Tom wasn't jealous of their being out, alone, together. She was willing to bet that, because Tom had all but encouraged them to go out, even Tom wasn't that . . . paranoid as to change his mind so quickly. Besides . . . besides, if he didn't know he'd won that contest and won it for good, then Kyrie would give up on the whole relationship right now.
But it had looked to Kyrie exactly as though Tom had been checking up on them. Not in jealousy or fear that they were about to betray him, but in confused fear for them . . . Fear of something happening to them.
Where had he got that idea? And was he right?