In the moment before Tom opened the door Kyrie had a wild surge of panic. She wanted to tell him to wait, but she couldn't speak. And she didn't know why he should wait. She just had a feeling—added up from rustling, from sounds she could not possibly have heard, from an odd smell, from a weird tingle up her spine—that something was wrong, very wrong.
Perhaps Tom was going to drag her into his apartment and—And what? Imagination failed her. She had seen him in that bathroom, so slow and confused he didn't even seem to know how to wipe away blood from himself. She had seen him standing there, helpless. She could hardly believe he would now turn around and rape her.
On the other hand, didn't they sacrifice virgins to dragons in the Middle Ages? She almost smiled at the thought of Tom as virgin-despoiler. The way he looked, he'd have trouble beating away the ones who threw themselves at him. Kyrie managed to calm herself completely, when Tom reached in and turned on the light.
The light revealed an unprepossessing living room, with the type of dark brown carpet that landlords slapped down when they didn't expect to rent to the upper echelons of society. But the rest. . .
The furniture, what there was of it —splinters of bookcase, remnants of couches with ugly brown polyester covering— seemed to have been piled up in the middle of the room as if someone had been getting ready to light a bonfire. And the window—the huge picture window opposite—was broken. A thousand splinters littered the carpet. Books and pieces of books fluttered all over.
Tom made a sound of distress and stepped into the room, and Kyrie stepped in behind him. He knelt by a pile of something on the carpet, and Kyrie focused on it, noticing shreds of denim, and what might or might once have been a white t-shirt. And over it all, a torn purple rag, with the Athens logo. The Athens sent the aprons home with the employees to get laundered at employee expense.
That meant that Tom had been ready to go to work when. . . The tingle in her spine grew stronger and the feeling that something was wrong, very wrong overwhelmed her. It was like a scream both soundless and so loud that it took over her whole thought, overcame her whole mind, reverberated from her whole being.
"Tom," she said, putting a hand on his shoulder. "Tom, we'd best--"
She never had time to finish. Someone or something, moving soundlessly behind them, had closed the door.
Kyrie heard the bolt slide home and turned, skin prickling, hair standing on end, to stare openmouthed at three men who stood between them and the door.
Men was dignifying them with a name they didn't quite deserve. They were boys, maybe nineteen or twenty, just at the edge of manhood. Oriental, dressed all in black, they clearly had watched one too many ninja movies. The middle one wore exquisitely groomed slightly too long hair, the bangs arranged so they fell to perfection and didn't move. He must spend a fortune on product.
The ones on either side were not so stylishly groomed, but one sported a tattoo of a Chinese letter in the middle of his forehead, while the other had a tattoo of a red dragon on the back of each hand—those clearly visible and he was clenching his fists and holding them up in a gesture more reminiscent of boxing than karate.
The far one shouted something, and Kyrie grabbed hold of Tom's arm, and shoved him behind her. He'd gone wooden puppet again.
The pretty boy in the middle laughed and said something—Kyrie presumed in Chinese—to his friend. Then added in English, "He only speaks English." But when he turned to Tom all traces of laughter had vanished from his expression, as he said, "You know what we want. You foiled the first fool who came looking, but, you see, we returned for you. Now give it to us, and we might not kill you or your pretty girlfriend."
Pretty girlfriend? Kyrie registered as if from a long way away that they were talking about her. Truth was very few people ever had called her pretty. She was too. . . striking, and proud to be called that. Also at some level people must always have sensed what she was, because since she'd turned fifteen and the panther had made its first appearance, few men had made taunting comments in her presence. Hell, few men even addressed her in any way.
But if there was an instinct for self-protection, this trio was lacking it. The little one with the two dragons on the backs of his hands started laughing.
At least, he threw his head back and Kyrie thought he was laughing, a high pitched, hysterical laughter. And then she realized what the laughter really was as his outlines blurred and he started to shift. Wings, and curving neck. All of it in lovely tones of red and gold, like all those Chinese paintings. But the features—that in paintings had always made Kyrie think of a naughty cat—looked malevolent. He hissed, between lips wholly unprepared for speech, "Give us the pearl."
Pearl? A pearl seemed like a very odd thing for Tom to steal. Was it some form of drug? Kyrie glanced behind her, to see Tom shaking his head violently. The fact that he was the approximate color of curdled milk, his normally pale skin looking downright unhealthy and grey, did not reassure her that by his shaking his head he meant he'd never heard of such a thing as a pearl.
"Tom?" she said.
He only shook his head again.
"Right," the middle one said. "You want to play rough, rough it is."
And suddenly a golden dragon took up most of the small brown room. And there were claws reaching for Kyrie. No. Talons. And someone's fangs were close to her face, a smell like a thousand long-forgotten sushi dinners invading her nostrils. A forked tongue licked her ear and through the lips not fashioned for speech, through the accent that he showed even in English, she nonetheless understood the young man's words as he said, "We're going to have so much fun."
She'd never shifted when she was scared. The few times she'd shifted it had been just the moon and usually summer calling to her, the feeling of jungle in her mind, at the back of her brain.
But as her fear closed upon her throat, making breathing almost impossible, as her heart pounded seemingly in her ears, as her blood seemed to race away from her leaving her cold as ice, she felt something. . .
She wasn't sure what was happening until she heard the growl erupt from her throat. A full growl, fashioned from melodies of the jungle.
Lizards. Uppity lizards, at that. They dared challenge her? Try to grab her?
Turning around, she swiped a giant paw across the tender under flesh of a clawed foot holding her. And then she leapt for the throat of the giant beast who was trying to claw her down.
It was—the part of her that remained human, deep in the mists of consciousness thought—like the armada and the English ships. The Spanish armada's huge, slow ships might be stronger and better armored. But they had no hope against the small English ships that could sail around them, landing shots where they wished till the giant ship was crippled.
Kyrie grabbed the beast by the throat, hanging on, till she tasted blood—and what blood. It was like drinking the finest champagne straight from the bottle.
The beast yelled and reached for her with its claws. It managed to scrape her flank, in a bright slash of pain. But she jumped out of the way before the creature could grab her, and she was on top of his head, as both his friends converged, trying to grab her. And she leapt at the soft underbelly of the red one—Two Dragons, the human Kyrie thought—in a mad dance of claws sinking into soft, unarmored flesh.
And then up again, and leaping at the eye of the next dragon.
That there were three of them was not an advantage. After all, three large, slower moving beings only helped each other get hopelessly entangled while Kyrie danced upon them like a deadly firefly, in a frenzy of wounding, a joy of blood.
She was vaguely aware that she too was bleeding, that there were punctures on her hide and that, somehow, one of them had managed to sink his fangs into her front paw—her right arm. But she didn't care. Right then, allowed the madness she'd long denied, she jumped at the dragon's eyes, swiping her claws across them and relishing the dragon's shriek of pain, the bright blood jumping from the right eye. She jumped and leaped, possessed of fierce anger, of maddened, repressed rage.
But while the beast exulted in the carnage, while the feline gyrated in mayhem, a small trickling feeling formed at the back of Kyrie's mind. It was like the first melting tip of an icicle, dropping cold reason on her hot madness. The feeling, at first, was no more than that—just a trickling cold, protesting, demanding—she wasn't sure what. The beast, in its frenzy, ignored it.
Until slowly, slowly, the feeling became words and the words became panic in Kyrie's mind. She was fighting all three dragons. She was keeping all three dragons at bay—just. But there were three of them, there was one of her and the beast's muscles were starting to hurt and. . . How could she get out of here?
There was no way of reaching the door. All the dragons were between her and the door and none of her sorties had brought her close to escaping.
Blood in her nostrils, mad fury in the beast's brain, what remained of the human Kyrie tried to think and came up with nothing but an insistent, white surge of panic. And she couldn't let it slow her down. She couldn't. If she did, all would be lost. But she couldn't fight forever.
In a twirl, claws sinking into the nearest dragon's hide, she thought of Tom. But the corner into which he'd shrunk when she'd shifted was vacant.
The coward had run out the door behind her back, hadn't he?
She felt a horrible sense of betrayal, a let down at this, and her extended paw faltered, and the dragon above her reared.
It was the center dragon—who in human form had artificially smooth and immovable hair. In dragon form he had a tall crest, red and gold. Well, it had been red and gold, it was now much darker red in spots, thanks to Kyrie's claws. And blood ran down its cheek from one of its eyes. But the other eye was unblinking fixed hatred, as it opened its jaws wide, wide, fangs glistening.
Kyrie needed to jump. She needed to. But her muscles felt powerless, spent. Stretched elastic that would not spring again.
So this is how it ends. . .
The big head descended to devour her, teeth ready to break her neck. And a taloned paw grabbed her roughly around the middle, swept her back.
She turned. She turned with her remnant of strength, her very last drop of fury, to snarl at the dragon behind her.
She snarled at him, Tom thought—amazed he could think clearly in dragon form. He'd willed himself into being a dragon. Willed himself into it.
He desired it and pushed. He knew she was going to have problems leaving. He knew she couldn't fly.
And he knew she was an idiot for even fighting. They had no chance. But then, neither could he leave her to die alone. She had taken care of him, when she'd found him in suspicious circumstances. She'd shown him more kindness than his own father had. And she was a shifter like him. They were family: bonded deeper than any shared genes, any joint upbringing.
He shifted suddenly, unexpectedly, leaping in the air, and out of his corner so quickly the other dragons didn't seem to register it. He had only the time to see that she was cowering, that the dragon above her would finish her. And then he was reaching for her, grabbing her, jumping out the open window, even as she turned to snarl at him.
But the snarl—lip pulled back from vicious fangs—faltered as she recognized him.
He held her as gently and firmly as he could. He mustn't drop her. But neither must he hurt her. He could smell blood from her. He could smell fear.
He unfurled his wings—huge parachutes. Above him, the other dragons hadn't appeared yet. Perhaps she'd done more damage than he'd thought. Perhaps they had a few minutes. A very few minutes.
Down in the parking lot, her car was a small abandoned toy. Her keys would be in his apartment, he thought, and shook his huge head, amazed at the clarity of the human thought in beast form. Normally he didn't even remember what he'd done as a dragon. Perhaps because he was responsible for another? He'd never been responsible for anyone but himself.
But they must run. They must get out of here very fast. And as beasts, he could not explain to her what danger they were in. He couldn't even think, clearly think, of where to run.
The dragon wished to crawl under a rock, preferably by a river, and hide.
But Goldport was not so big on rivers. There was Panner's creek, which in the summer became a mere trickle winding amid sun-parched boulders.
He flew her down to the parking lot, slowly, landed by the car and wished to shift. He didn't dare reach for the strength of the talisman to allow himself to shift. No. The dragons would sense, that.
Instead, setting Kyrie down carefully, he WILLED himself to shift. He thought himself human, and shivered, as his body spasmed in painful shift.
He was naked. Naked, sitting on the warm asphalt of the parking lot, next to Kyrie's car and a panther. No. Next to Kyrie. In the next minute, she also shifted, and appeared as a naked, bloodied young woman, lying on the pavement next to him.
"The car," he rasped at her, his voice hesitant, difficult, like a long-neglected instrument. "We must leave. Soon. They will pursue."
She looked at him with confused, tired eyes. Her chin was scratched, and there was too much blood on her everywhere. He wondered how much of it was hers. Did they need to go to the hospital? They healed very quickly. At least Tom did. But what if these wounds were too serious? How could they go to the hospital? How could they explain anything?
"I don't have keys," she said, and patted her hips as though looking for keys in pockets that were no longer there.
Tom nodded. He got up, feeling about a hundred years old after two shifts in such a short time. His legs hurt, as did his arms, and his whole body felt as though someone had belabored him with sticks.
But he was human now and he could think. He remembered.
One eye on the window of his apartment, wondering how long he had, he said, "I'm sorry. I'll pay." Then he grabbed one of the stones on the flowerbed nearby—a stone bed, to tell the truth since he'd never seen flowers there. He smashed the window with the stone, reached in, unlocked the door.
Sweeping the crumbs of glass from the seat, he smashed the key holder, reached down to the floor and grabbed a screwdriver he'd noticed there while Kyrie was driving him. "Remembered you had this here," he said, turning to see her bewildered expression as her car started. And then "Get in. I'll pay for the damage. Just get in."
Was it his imagination, or had he seen the shadow of a wing in the window above?
He reached across to unlock the passenger door, as she jumped in.
She fumbled with the seat belt as he tore out of the parking lot in a screech of rubber. Sweat was dripping from his forehead into his eyes. He was sure he was sitting on a chunk of glass. It had been years since he'd driven and he found the turns odd and difficult. The car his father had given him as a sixteenth birthday gift handled much better than this. Good thing there was almost no traffic on the roads at this time.
He tore around the corner of Fairfax, turning into a narrower street and hoping he was only imagining the noise of wings above. He tried to choose the tree-lined streets, knowing well enough that it was harder to see into them from above. The vision of dragons seemed to focus naturally on moving things. In a street of trees, shaken by the wind, in which shadows shifted and shook, it would be harder to see them.
Some of these streets were narrow enough—and the trees above them well over a hundred years old -- that it made it impossible to see the streets at all, except as a green canopy. He took one street, then another, then yet another, tearing down quiet residential streets like a madman and probably causing the families snug in their brick ranches to wonder what was happening out there.
They passed two people walking, male and female, he tall and she much shorter, leaning into him. Shorts, t-shirts, a swirling white skirt, a vision of normalcy and a relationship that he couldn't aspire too, and Tom bit his lip and thumped the side of the wheel with his hand, bringing a startled glance from Kyrie.
He'd gone a good ten minutes and was starting to think they'd lost their pursuers, when he thought of Kyrie. He turned to her, wanting to explain he really would pay and that she should not—
Her dark eyes gazed into his, unwavering. "How many cars have you stolen?" she asked.
The way he'd hot-wired the car, quickly—she swore it had taken him less than a few seconds—had chilled Kyrie to the bone.
She supposed she should have known someone with a drug problem, working minimum wage jobs had to supplement with crime, but all of a sudden she realized he was more dangerous—more out of control than she'd thought.
More out of control than the other dragons?
And yet, after he'd driven like a madman for a while, he looked at her with a devastatingly scared expression in his pale face. Despite chiseled features and the now all-too-obvious dark shadow of unshaven beard, he managed to look about five and worried he'd be put in time out.
"How many cars have you stolen?" she asked, before she knew she was going to say it.
His expression closed. She would not be able to describe it any other way. The eager, almost childish panic vanished, leaving in its place a dark, unreadable glare, his eyebrows low over his dark blue eyes. He turned away, looking forward, and shrugged, a calculated shrug from his broad shoulders. One quarter inch up, one quarter inch down.
"I used to go joy riding," he said. "When I was a kid. I got bored." And when she didn't answer that, he added. "Look, I've told you. I'll pay you for the damage." And again, at her continued silence. "I couldn't let us be caught. If they'd caught us, they'd have killed us."
At this, he stopped. He stopped long enough for her to gather her thoughts. She felt so tired that if she weren't in pain, she would have fallen asleep. But she hurt. Her shoulder felt as if it had been dislocated in the fight. There was a slash across her torso that she prayed wouldn't need stitches, and a broad swath of her buttock felt scraped, as though it had rubbed hard against a scaly hide. Which it probably had though she didn't remember.
"Who are they?" she finally asked. "Why are they after you?"
"They're a Chinese triad," he said. "They're members. A. . . crime sindicate. Asian."
"Admirably described," she said, and heard the hint of sarcasm in her own voice, and was surprised she still had the strength for it. "But what do they want with you?"
He hesitated. For just a moment he glanced at her, and the scared little boy was back, with wide open eyes, and slightly parted lips.
He looked back at the road in time to take them, tightly, around a corner, tires squealing, car tilting. "They think I stole something from them," he said, with the defensive tone of a child explaining it really, really, really wasn't him who put the clamp on the cat's tail.
Something. Kyrie was not so naive that she didn't know Chinese crime syndicates—like most crime syndicates—dealt mostly in various drugs. "A drug deal gone bad?" she asked.
He had the nerve to tighten his lips, and shake his head. "I don't deal drugs," he said.
Whee. There was one form of criminality he didn't stoop to. Who would have thunk it? "So. . ."
"I didn't steal it, okay?" he said. "I didn't steal anything. They think I did, and they're trying to get it back."
"Sounds ugly," she said. Somehow she felt he was lying but also not lying. There was an edge to his tone as if he weren't quite so sure how he'd got himself into this type of situation.
"It is," he said. "They've been after me for months." He shrugged. "Only they've just figured out my name, I think. Now they can follow me, wherever I live. They're shifters. Dragons."
"I gathered."
"They worship the Great Sky Dragon. . ."
"Uh?" she had never heard of any shifter divinity. But then again, she'd never heard of any other shifters. All of a sudden, vertiginously, as though standing at the edge of a precipice and seeing a whole world open before her, she wondered if there was a whole culture, a whole society she didn't know about. Some place she belonged, whole families of shifters. Perhaps the only reason she'd never known about it was because she was adopted and she didn't know her own birth family. "Shifters have their own gods?"
Tom shrugged. "I think he was a Chinese divinity. Or one of their sacred animals, or something."
"Did you get involved with them because you. . . shift? Into a dragon? Is your family . . . does your family shift?"
Tom shook his head. "My father doesn't. . . No."
"Then how did you get involved with the triad?"
He looked confused, then shrugged—not a precise shrug. "I don't know," he said. He seemed on the verge of saying something, but shook his head, as if to his own thoughts. "My father—" He stopped dead, as though something in him had halted not just the words but the train of thought as well.
They were driving down a narrow, tree-bordered street. Ahead of them, loomed the dark expanse of the Castle—officially known as Chateau D'Aubigerne, a castle imported from the Loire, stone by stone by a man enriched in the gold rush. It now stood smack dab in the center of Goldport, abandoned and empty, surrounded by gardens gone to seed and an eight foot high iron fence like massed spears. Now and then there was talk of someone buying it, restoring it, and making it into a hotel, a mall, a resort, or just a monument for tourists to gawk at. But all those projects seemed non starters, perhaps because the Castle was well away from all the hotels and convention centers, in a street of tiny, workmen brick ranches, with cars on blocks and broken plastic toys in the front yards.
Tom slowed down till he was going a normal speed and said, "Where can I take you?"
"Beg your pardon?"
He grinned at her, a fugitive grin that transformed his features and gave her a startling glimpse of what might lurk underneath the troubled young man's aggression—humor? Joy? "Where can I drop you off? Where do you live?" He smiled at her, a less naughty smile this time, more that of a patient adult facing a stupid child. "You can't go to work like that, can you?"
She shook her head, panicked. Gee. Frank was going to be mad. She might already have lost her job. A surge of anger at Tom came up, but then vanished again. Someone had once told Kyrie that if you lost a job making less than ten dollars and hour you could find another one within the day. In her experience this was true. And besides, it wasn't like Tom had asked her for help.
She'd just jumped in and helped him. Hell, she thought she'd learned not to do that years ago.
"My place," she said. "It's down the next street . Turn right. Third house on the left."
"House?"
"Rental. It's smaller than an apartment, really. I just. . . I don't like people around."
He nodded and maneuvered through the turn and up to her house, at a speed that could only be considered sedate after his early high jinxes.
The house was tiny—eight hundred square feet and one bedroom, but it had a driveway—a narrow strip of concrete that led right up to the back door and from which a narrow walking path led to the front door. This late at night—or early in the morning—all of Kyrie's neighbors would be asleep and she was grateful for that.
As Tom pulled up to the back door, she had only two steps to go, stark naked. And she always left the key under a rock in the nearby flowerbed. She hated to be locked out of her house and didn't know anyone in town she could trust with a key. It was one of the side-effects of moving around so much.
As she started to open the door, she looked at Tom. He was sitting behind the wheel, the engine still going, looking forward. The car was hers, but she could hardly tell him to leave it and run off naked into the night. On the other hand—where was he going to go even with the car?
She had to invite him in. She didn't really want to, but she saw nothing else she could do. Nothing else a decent human being could do. She tapped him on the arm. "Turn that off. Come inside. Have a shower. I'll grab another jogging suit for you."
He looked surprised. Dumbfounded as if she'd offered him a fortune. "Are you sure?"
"Where would you go otherwise?"
He shrugged. "I'll figure. . . I'll figure something. I always do." For just a second a dangerous liquid quality crept into his voice, but he only shook his head and swallowed. "Look, it's not safe to be around me."
"I've noticed. But you have nowhere else to go. Come inside. I'll make coffee."
He took a few seconds, then grabbed the screwdriver and turned it. And nodded at her. "Can I come out through your side?" he said. "Less—"
"Exposure, yes," she said. "And don't break anything. I have a key."
She dove out the door and retrieved her key from its hiding place.