Gentleman Takes a Chance (20 page)

"Why are you afraid of me?" he asked, his voice trembling slightly. "If you're not a traitor to our people, you have no reason to fear me."

Ah! "What is a traitor to our people?" she asked, her voice cutting and slow, though she felt it coming from a shaking brittle place inside her. "I've never had any people. The only one I've ever belonged to is Tom."

"The dragon boy?" the creature asked, and there was real anger behind the words. "He's less than nothing. A larva. Not even a young one. Ignorant. Weak."

Kyrie read something in that, an echoing, resounding jealousy. Jealousy of Tom? Or jealousy, simply, that they had a relationship? What in this creature's past made him so angry at her?

"Tom is the only other shifter who ever took my side. Who ever cared for me."

"All of us care for you," the creature said. "It is the duty of shifter to look after shifter. You should always be loyal to your kin. Your people."

"I have no kin," Kyrie said. "I was adopted."

And before the creature could answer the flip response, she'd managed to reach her objective—the phone hanging on the wall of the kitchen. They should have a mobile phone, she thought. It had never seemed important before, and this phone had been practically free at the thrift shop, but if they had a mobile one . . . 

The phone cold in her hand, she pushed the automatic dialing button to get the diner. She saw the creature lunge towards the phone, finger extended, to disconnect her. But if he was afraid to stop her calling for help, that meant help was possible.

With her free hand, she grabbed one of the chairs, and threw it, as hard as she could, at the creature, then, grabbing the other chair, used it to keep him away from the phone, in a move reminiscent of lion tamers at the zoo.

"Put the phone down," the creature said, his voice sounding like sweet reason. "Put the phone down. I only want to talk to you. If you're not a murderer, I won't hurt you."

Oh, sure you won't. And what's a murderer to you, buddy?
she thought; at the same time her mind flooded with sheer relief at hearing Tom's voice answer the phone, brightly, "The George, your downtown dining option twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, how may I help you?"

"Tom," she yelled. "Tom. I'm home. And there's a creature. The dire wolf. Help."

She let the phone dangle before she heard Tom's response. From the other side of the table came growls and fury, as the creature, seemingly giving in to an uncontrollable impulse, shifted into his animal form.

Kyrie grabbed the chair and huddled in a corner holding it—legs out—like a defensive shield. Shifting would earn her nothing but the loss of her clear mind. She might not be able to defend herself this way, but she had to try. And she had to hope she would still be alive when Tom arrived.

Rafiel saw Tom reach for the phone and because Tom had just blocked his obvious path out from behind the counter—not on purpose, Rafiel was sure, but simply by reaching for the phone—Rafiel started going around his friend, to edge behind him and reach over to open the portion of the counter that allowed egress.

He heard Tom give his cheery signature-line response to the phone and rolled his eyes. As if anyone actually would consider a greasy spoon their choice for dining downtown, no matter how many times Tom repeated it. He found Kyrie's "The George" answer far more palatable.

Touching Tom's shoulder with his fingertips, Rafiel expected to cause the other man to step away, however briefly. But instead, Tom stood, frozen. Rafiel became aware that the voice coming teensy and distant through the old-fashioned phone was Kyrie's and that Kyrie sounded hysterical. He didn't remember Kyrie ever sounding hysterical, not even when she thought she was seeing Tom die before her eyes.

The fingers he had prodded Tom's shoulder with, in a very masculine keeping of distance in a friendship type of gesture, now became a full hand laid on Tom's shoulder. "What's wrong?" he asked, as he realized that Tom had gone frighteningly pale, and that his throat was working, his Adam's apple moving up and down, as if he were trying to speak through a great lump in the way.

But when Tom spoke, it wasn't to answer Rafiel. Instead, it was a raw scream, that seemed to have been torn out. "Kyrie!"

People at the nearby tables turned to look, and Conan looked up from a bill he was totaling up. Keith and his girlfriend, too, looked towards Tom, alarmed.

"What—?" Keith said.

But Tom spoke to Rafiel, apparently having totally forgotten that shifter business was secret, or that they might be in as much danger from being overheard as they would be from no matter which arcane shifter might be threatening them or, for that matter, murdering people at the aquarium.

"It's Kyrie," he said, and swallowed. "It's the . . . creature from the aquarium. He . . . I must go. I must go to her."

And as he spoke, he tore from around his head the red bandana which he usually wore, pirate-style, while cooking, and he pulled his apron off.

"Tom," Rafiel said, in warning tones, afraid that his friend would decide to shift, right there in the diner. But Tom, clearly, wasn't that completely lost to reason. He ducked under the pass-through in the counter, and ran towards the hallway.

"Keith, take the grill, please," Tom called over his shoulder, thereby proving that he wasn't completely lost to reason at all, or perhaps that his devotion to the diner outweighed everything else, even his love for Kyrie.

Rafiel didn't stand around to see if Keith took over the grill and stoves. Instead, he ducked under the pass-through on his own, and ran down the hallway after Tom. "Let me go," he said, as Tom, in what seemed to be a blind rush, struggled with the back door. "Let me go. I can go. I can defend her."

"No," Tom said, with a sound like a hiccup. "No."

"You don't think I would fight for her?"

Tom had managed to unlock the door and now pulled it open and walked out into the parking lot, and, after looking around—Rafiel hoped he was making sure that no one was coming or going close enough to see him—ducked behind the dumpster, where he would be invisible from nearby Pride Street.

He started undressing, rapidly, rolling his clothes in a bundle. "Stay," he told Rafiel. "Give Keith a hand. I'm sorry if I was too loud in there. She's in trouble. It's not that I don't think you'd fight for her. But flying is faster."

And like that, Tom kicked his boots aside, dropped his pants and underwear in a bundle, pulled off his shirt and writhed and twisted, coughing, once, twice, three times, as his body changed shapes and textures, the smooth skin becoming green scales, the head elongating . . . 

Before Rafiel could blink twice, Tom was lifting off, flying across the clear skies of Goldport towards his own neighborhood.

A curse sounded from the door of the diner. "He swore he'd tell me." There was a sound of ripping clothes. And then a red dragon rose, also, following Tom across the skies.

This was folly, Rafiel thought, particularly while journalists obsessed with cryptozoology were already suspicious of the existence of dragons in town. But it didn't seem to matter, not just now. Nothing mattered, except Kyrie.

Rafiel wanted more than anything to go and save her. He understood Tom's impulse completely. His body strained to be in the sky, speeding towards her, ready to help in any way he could. But Rafiel couldn't fly and Tom had asked him to stay here and, Rafiel realized, with Conan gone, following Tom, and Keith at the grill, there would be no one to wait tables.

There weren't many people inside, but Rafiel was willing to bet there were more people than Keith could handle on his own, while cooking.
Right.
He ran his hand backward through his mane of unruly blond hair, aware, as he did it, that he would be making his hair stand on end and look more lionlike than ever. Right. Sometimes your duty requires you to be a hero, and sometimes it requires you to wait tables.

He turned to do just that and opened the door to The George. As he stepped into the cool shadows of the hallway, he saw a woman's figure retreating rapidly, ahead of him.

"May I help you?" he asked.

She turned around. It was Keith's blond friend, with her much-too-thick jacket and that look she had of having been dropped headfirst into a fish tank and still not being able to tell the piranhas from the goldfish. "I was . . . looking for the bathroom," she said.

It might very well be. Well—it could be, at least. If she was as confused as she looked, she might have walked all the way to the end of the hallway somehow managing to go by two bathrooms marked with the international icons for stick-figure man and stick-figure woman wearing triangle skirt without noticing them. He would even be willing to understand this confusion if the bathrooms had been marked salmon and shad roe, but since they seemed to be marked restroom it made the confusion less likely.

On the other hand, perhaps she was a shifter. If that was the truth, she might have understood more of the conversation than she'd seemed to, and she might have been in search of further confirmation.

And yet, she still didn't smell like a shifter to Rafiel. He'd keep a very close eye on her, even as he helped Keith sling the hash or at least the burgers, and prayed with as much faith as he could possibly muster that Kyrie would be all right.

She might not be his—she would never be his—but he was not willing to face a world from which she was gone.

To shift or not to shift. Tom—as a dragon—landed on the driveway, just behind the car. He'd been thinking—as far as he'd been thinking at all—that he wouldn't shift. The dragon was a far more impressive foe than Tom, with all of his 5'6", no matter how strong, no matter how muscular.

But he couldn't even get close to the door as a dragon, let alone enter through the back or front door and go to Kyrie's rescue. A quick look to the house next door, where an elderly couple lived, reminded him too that the longer he stayed here in dragon form, the more likely someone would see him and report him. A vision of journalists with snapping cameras had taken hold of his brain and he was struggling to shift back to human form, as—behind him—he heard a dragon land.

Already in human form, Tom looked back, startled, to see a red dragon on the driveway. Conan. And Tom hadn't called him. But Tom didn't have time to discuss it with Conan, or even to worry about what the Asian dragon might do. Instead, he must go to Kyrie, if Kyrie was still alive, if Kyrie could still be saved. And he didn't even want to consider the possibility of anything else. He plunged through the kitchen door, into a scene of chaos and a gagging animal smell.

"Tom," Kyrie said. She was on the floor, with a chair held as a shield. Across from her, biting and growling and lunging at the chair was the dire wolf, his fur on end, his eyes mad, saliva dripping from his daggerlike teeth.

He can take me in one bite,
Tom thought.
He can behead me with a single bite. I'm going to die. But I can't become a dragon here. I can't. It would destroy the room and kill Kyrie, and he'd just port elsewhere.

Blindly, he reached for the rack of utensils that Kyrie had put on the wall, next to the stove. He rarely cooked at home—both he and Kyrie normally ate at the diner, or else brought home food from the diner. However, Tom was taking cooking courses and on the rare occasions when he did cook at home, he felt the need for semi-decent implements. So Kyrie had tacked up to the wall one of those things with leather pockets normally used in workshops to keep hammers and whatnot. And over the last couple of months, they'd been buying good implements: chopping knives, spatulas, a meat-tenderizing hammer.

Tom saw the dire wolf turn towards him, and he knew he had only seconds, and he knew that he couldn't turn his back on the creature. So he reached with his right hand and grabbed the first handle he could. What he got was a polished, sealed-wood handle, and, from the heft, the meat-tenderizing hammer, with a weighted hammer on one side and a hatchet on the other. Too short to keep the wolf's jaws from closing on his head. He reached again, and brought out . . . an immense skewer. It was Kyrie's latest acquisition, and Tom wasn't absolutely sure what she meant him to use it for. It wasn't a classical skewer as such, but it had a skewer in the center and then four, smaller, metal prongs, on the bottom. Kyrie had said something about a TV commercial for it that mentioned roasting a chicken in a standing position. Since Tom couldn't imagine why anyone would want to do what sounded like a convoluted form of medieval torture—at least if the chicken were still alive—he'd thanked her effusively and set the skewer in the wall pocket, determined to forget it.

Now he realized it was a formidable weapon. He turned to the dire wolf, holding the hammer-ax in one hand, and the skewer in the other, and opened his mouth to say something pithy and challenging on the lines of
make my day
. And the smell enveloped him. It was like the smell of a hundred cats in heat; the smell of a thousand unwashed, wet dogs. It filled his mouth, his nostrils, his every pore. It made it impossible for him to think, impossible for him to move.

"Look out," Kyrie yelled and, rising from her defensive position, hit the dire wolf hard across the back of the head with what remained of her portable chair.

Tom felt the teeth clamp on his leg, and screamed, inhaling more of the smell. He knew what he should be doing. He should be attacking the creature, making him back up, allowing Kyrie to go behind him, allowing them both to escape, with Tom guarding the retreat, towards the car and away.

But no matter how much he thought of it, as the feral mad eyes faced Tom's, as the creature growled and snarled and salivated, all Tom could think was that he couldn't move. That the stench enveloping him was somehow preventing his movement.

"Tom, damn it," Kyrie said, her voice high and hysterical. "Do something. We're going to die."

And at that moment . . . there was a voice. It was the voice that Tom had heard in the shower before, the voice of the Great Sky Dragon. It echoed in his mind, filling up all of his senses, so that it was visible sound and scented words, and seemed to touch him all over, as if in an enveloping blanket.