Gentleman Takes a Chance (16 page)

Tom grinned, seeing her point, but shrugged. "Well, Kyrie, look at it this way—if we survive this, then we'll need the diner in good shape, particularly considering the repairs to the bathroom. And if we don't survive, the fact that I was worried about running the diner won't make a bit of difference."

But Tom found, as he crossed the slush-filled parking lot of The George, that things were not that clear-cut in his mind. It was sort of like telling someone to stop worrying because nothing could be done about a problem. It wasn't in the human mind to stop worrying—to stop looking for the door out of the sealed room; to stop searching for the one true route through the labyrinth. He was sure that if the world were doomed to destruction by asteroid within a day or two, and everyone on Earth were informed of it, at least half of them would go to their graves still frantically looking for an escape from the approaching cosmic collision. In the same way, the sane thing to do, surrounded by problems he couldn't solve, might be to concentrate on the problems he could solve—on the diner, his bathroom, and the fact that his hands—though well enough to go without bandages—still hurt and would probably be sensitive to the heat from the stoves.

That would be the sensible thing to do, and the sane one. Which meant, of course, that his mind insisted on going through everything he couldn't do anything about—the murders at the aquarium; the executioner come to town; whatever the organization might be of old shifters, and beyond that where Old Joe might have gone and whether he was alive.

The weather had done one of those sudden reversals that Tom's almost year of living in Colorado had got him used to—it had gone from several degrees below freezing the day before, and blowing snow and howling wind, to fifty degrees with a very slight breeze which stirred the branches of the icicle-hung trees. All the icicles were dripping, too—from the branches of the trees and the edges of the buildings, a drip drip drip that seemed to be waiting only for a conductor and some rhythm to turn into an animated movie's symphony of thawing and spring.

Only it wasn't spring at all. And tomorrow could very well be freezing again. Or alternately it could be eighties, with everyone wandering around in sandals and T-shirts.

As Tom took a long detour around a melting pool in the middle of the parking lot, he fancied that even the birds on the trees that lined the streets were piping in tones of surprise, as if asking themselves if this was the last of snow or the beginning. He was smiling to himself at the idea of birds driven to Prozac by Colorado weather, but his detour brought him full-face with a poster on the wall of the diner—where it wouldn't have been visible from the back door. That wall was in fact where the storage rooms protruded a little from the otherwise square plan of the building.

The poster was glued at an angle on the whitewashed wall, and it was the sort of poster—printed on cheap paper, in two colors—that normally advertised a dance or a new more or less non-registered nightclub or, alternately, some new band come to town. At first Tom thought it was a new band. It might still be a new band. Only what the words across the top read, in huge bright red type—rodent liberation front. Beneath it was a rant in pseudo-Marxist terms, urging "The downtrodden, the despised who live at the edges of society" to "rise up and take what you want. No more foraging for fallen nuts, no more eating discards. Rise up and take your freedom in your hands. There are more of us than them. Rodents of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your mousetraps."

Tom blinked at the page. It was possible it was all allegorical and meaningful and too symbolic for words. They were, after all, not that far away from CUG—Colorado University at Goldport—and since fully half the students seemed to eat at The George any given day—or more typically night—Tom was aware how the minds worked who might be behind this pamphlet. They were the sort of minds that were convinced coming up with a particularly clever image or metaphor excused not having anything new to say.

Without his knowing he was going to do it, his hand reached out and plucked the paper from the wall. It could be a metaphor, a clever image, a college thing to delude themselves that they were doing something to save the world. But in his gut—in a big, insoluble cold lump at the pit of his stomach—he knew it wasn't. He knew it was . . . shifter business. Squirrels the size of German shepherds smoking cigarettes. Crazy. But how crazy did the dragon thing sound to other people as well?

He folded the poster and put it in his pocket, and started walking towards the diner. And heard the splish-splosh behind him of someone stepping on ice, then on water, then falling butt-first into the water. And turned to see Red Dragon—no, Conan. He had to get used to calling him Conan—sitting in a puddle of water, looking very surprised.

Surprised was the least of his problems, though, to tell the truth. He didn't look good. Not good at all. His skin was pale enough to look almost the color of Tom's and he had big circles under his eyes, and to make things worse, he was attempting to get up, but not managing to balance himself enough to do so, because of his shortened arm.

"I shouldn't go to him," Tom told himself. "I truly shouldn't go to him. How stupid can I be? One day I'm going to help someone who is going to kill me."

But in his mind was his sixteen-year-old self, alone, on the streets of New York City in a bathrobe and as lost and confused as any kid could ever have been anywhere. And he'd survived only because the gentleman down the street—an orangutan shifter, though his family didn't seem to notice he was one—who sold roasted chestnuts on the street corner, had seen him and taken him in, and given him a jogging suit, and let him stay there a couple of days, till Tom had caught hold of the idea of day labor and had got a fake ID that said he was eighteen and could, therefore, be hired.

And he was closing the distance to Red Dragon and holding him on the side of his weak arm and hauling him up, even as he looked down at what he was wearing—the jogging suit that Kyrie had given him and a pair of those shoes that you slip your feet into, which have an almost completely smooth bottom. No socks. "You need boots," he said. "For this weather. We'll take you to the thrift store tomorrow or something, okay?"

"I have money," Conan Lung said, in the tone of someone protesting charity. "I brought money with me. In a pouch. I could buy new boots."

"Oh? Good for you," Tom said, not sure whether to be amused or saddened and being, after all, wholly skeptical. If he had money, why grab the elastic shoes? They weren't that much better than the flip-flops Tom had given him. "And you have family in Goldport, too, don't you?" he added, remembering that their past adventures seemed to involve Goldport's minuscule Asian minority.

He shook his head. "Tennessee," he said, and wiped his dripping nose to his sleeve, and looked back, at a bottom that was entirely soaked in runoff from melted snow.

"Oh, now, you're just putting me on," Tom said. "And don't worry about the sweatsuit. I have a couple others in the storage room. For . . . this sort of situation." He decided he didn't want to talk about Old Joe to the Great Sky Dragon people. "I'll get you one. Socks too."

"I'm not putting you on," Conan said. He sounded aggrieved and tired, and just the slightest bit exasperated—though Tom couldn't tell at whom. "Mom and Dad have a restaurant in Knoxville. People don't all come in to New York City anymore when they immigrate. Planes go everywhere."

"I'm sorry," Tom said, holding onto himself with all his will power to prevent himself from giggling at the fact that Conan had completely forgotten to have an accent. Or completely forgotten to have an Asian accent. Now that Tom thought about it, there was just an edge of a southern twang to his voice. It sounded, Tom thought, like something he'd tried very hard to rid himself of. Something that he hadn't quite managed to leave behind him. And quite out of place in a triad member.

"And I do have money. In a pouch. I wear it on a flexible anklet when I shift," Conan added, sullenly, clearly having caught Tom's disbelief.

"All right. You have money. Couldn't you have got yourself decent shoes, then?"

Conan shook his head. "No," he said. "I got them at the Short Drugs down the block, and this was the best they had. It was this or flip-flops."

"You know . . ." Tom said, leading him towards the back door of the diner and opening it for him. In the hallway, Conan wiped his feet on the mat at the entrance, and duck-walked into the hallway, his cheap shoes squeaking on the concrete. "It might surprise you, but in a list of shoe stores, Short Drugs wouldn't be in the first hundred, being a drugstore and all."

Conan sighed, a sigh half of exasperation, as if Tom were being particularly daft. "I couldn't let you go, could I? I went to Short Drugs because it was just down the block."

And Tom, having closed the door, froze. "Couldn't let me go? As in, you're keeping me prisoner?"

Conan looked back, and now his voice was definitely furious. "No, you fool. I couldn't leave you unprotected." He blushed, hard, whether with embarrassment at proclaiming himself Tom's protector, or with anger, Tom couldn't tell. "What if I left you, and they killed you?"

"Shhhh," Tom said, forcefully, leaning against the wall, finger against lips, concerned most of all with the fact that Conan had yelled, and people might have heard him. "Shhh."

As if on cue, Anthony's worried face peeked around the corner in the hallway. "Tom? Everything all right?"

"Everything is fine," Tom said, talking over Conan's shoulder. "Conan fell in the parking lot. I'm going to grab him some dry clothes, and then I'll come in and you can go home."

"Oh, good," Anthony said. "Because you know Cecily will get worried." He smiled, but still looked somewhat worried, as he looked at Conan. However, he seemed reassured enough that Conan and Tom weren't about to come to fisticuffs.

Tom opened the door to the storage room, and pulled out a sweat suit. "Okay," he said. "You're here to protect me. You've told me this before. But I must ask you—because you never told me—what are you supposed to protect me from . . . ?"

Conan looked back at him. There was naked fear in his eyes, followed by something very much like defeat or humiliation. He took the sweat suit—grey, much washed—that Tom was holding out to him. "I don't know," he said, miserably. "He didn't tell me. Just that they were bad and . . . very powerful. And very large. And knowledgeable and . . . shifters."

"And he sent you? To protect me?" Tom asked. And realizing what he'd just said, and that Conan's hand was clenching hard at the end of his atrophied arm, he added, "I'm sorry, but . . . you're smaller than I in both forms, and with that arm . . ."

Conan shook his head. "You don't understand. You don't understand, okay?" His voice started rising again in a note of hysteria, and Tom pulled him into the storage room and closed the door after them, because the only other choice was pulling him into the bathroom and
that
would look funny. The room was piled high with boxes of paper napkins, potato chips and crackers. All the edibles were sealed in plastic or foil and it shouldn't have smelled, but they still did, so that it was a lot like being locked inside a giant box full of stale crackers.

"What don't I understand?"

Conan clutched the sweat suit in his good hand, clenched his other fist, and spoke through his clenched teeth. "Any of it. I was in high school. I was in the drama club and the choir and . . . and I was in the Latin club, too. And then . . ." He shook his head. "I shifted. And the next thing I know my parents were calling on . . . on Him. And he took me away. Because I was a dragon. I belonged to him. I was his to . . . protect and order. Like . . . like feudal, you know?" His shoulders sagged, despondently. "I was going to be a Country and Western singer. I was . . ." He shook his head.

And before Tom could think of what to say—lost in his own forgotten dreams, though he didn't remember ever wanting to be anything so definite and wholesome as a singer—Conan said, "It doesn't matter." He spoke in a flat tone. "You see, my parents didn't know what else to do with me, and . . . I don't have anywhere else to go. It's all . . . Well, honor and that. I disgraced the Great . . . Himself. I . . . didn't get the Pearl of Heaven for him. So . . ."

Tom remembered the long torture session that Conan and the others had subjected him to. He'd have felt angry, but he didn't know what had been at the back of it. He was just starting to glimpse what drove those he had assumed were crazed gang members. "So you have to redeem yourself."

He almost added that he didn't feel very reassured by the Great Sky Dragon sending Conan, anyway. But he didn't. He was learning that what came flying out of his mouth might hurt other people, even, possibly, people who didn't deserve to be hurt. And besides, he had a feeling—not quite a rational feeling, not even a thought, more of a prickling at the back of his neck that told him that the Great Sky Dragon's plans weren't as simple as they seemed. Instead, they were folded over themselves, more intricately than a highway map. And what he saw might not be all of it. He just wished he could be sure the rest of it was not against him.

"Well," he said, "I'll leave you to change." And escaped out the door of the storage room, to find Anthony in the hallway, looking at him with a very strange expression.

Tom wasn't sure how much Anthony had overheard, or what had caused him to come and look. But all Anthony said was, "I thought you'd have him change in the bathroom. He's going to get mud on the packs of napkins."

Kyrie was dozing on the bed. She would have liked to fall fully asleep again, but this seemed to be beyond her ability while a small creature lay down purring, squarely between her breasts, and punished any attempt at moving with sharp little claws at the base of her throat and a sort of soft "mur" that sounded like an admonition.

So she lay there, on the bed, on her back—which was far from her favored sleeping position—with a patch of sun squarely in her eyes. She tried to move her head just a little sideways. The needlelike claws got her at the hollow of her throat. "Mur."