Gentleman Takes a Chance (21 page)

Mine,
the voice said.
Mine. Under my protection.

Like that—with those words—the horrible gagging smell was gone from Tom's nostrils, from Tom's mind. The feel of the Great Sky Dragon's words still echoing in him—seeming to make his very teeth vibrate—Tom stepped forward, and brought the skewer in hard on the creature's eye, thinking only that if he destroyed the brain it might be the same as beheading. But the dire wolf had jumped backward just in time. The tip of the skewer cut a deep gash down the side of his face, while the ax, which Tom had managed to swing as a follow through, cut across his left ear.

The creature screamed. Blood spurted. And through it all, his voice, less powerful than the Great Sky Dragon's but also echoing inside Tom's head and not outside, as voices were supposed to, sounded,
He must pay. He must pay. And he's not yours. He's not Asian. You can't claim him.

The stench came back, less overpowering, but back, nonetheless. But only for a second. The Great Sky Dragon's voice sounded again, and clearly he was a creature with a very simple philosophy.
Mine,
he yelled.
Mine. I've claimed him.

The stench vanished. The dire wolf growled. Tom swung forward, skewer and ax swinging. Making a space behind him. "Go, Kyrie, go," he said. "The car, now."

She got up and lurched, behind him, towards the door, while he moved to block the dire wolf from getting to her. The creature wasn't teleporting or giving the impression of teleporting. Whatever it was that the Great Sky Dragon's voice caused, it seemed to cause the dire wolf to become unable to create what, for lack of better words, one must call supernatural effects.

"Come," Kyrie yelled, as she opened the door, and ran full tilt outside. "Come."

"I will," Tom said, kicking the door fully open with his foot, and backing into the open door, still holding the skewer and the ax.

The dire wolf made a jump—a clumsy jump—towards him. There was no Great Sky Dragon voice, but Tom swung at him, hard with the ax, and cut him across the nose.

Kyrie honked the horn, and now Tom turned, thinking it was the most stupid thing he could do, but also that he ran much faster that way. The passenger door of the car was open, and he more threw himself at the opening than ran into it.

His head on Kyrie's shoulder, he reached to close the door, even as she started the car and backed out of the driveway. The dire wolf came running out of the kitchen and chased them. Kyrie turned abruptly, hitting the wolf with the back left wheel and saying, under her breath, "Sorry, it wasn't intentional."

Tom took a deep breath, two. He straightened, and buckled his seat belt. "To whom are you apologizing?"

"You. Him. I don't know. I didn't mean to run him over. Did I run him over?"

Tom looked back at what looked very much like a bleeding dire wolf still chasing them. "I don't think so. Can you go faster?"

She pressed the gas down, taking these little residential back streets at speeds normally reserved for the highway, and breathing deeply, deeply, as if recovering from shock.

It took Tom a moment to realize that it wasn't breathing, it was sobs. "Kyrie," he said, aghast. He'd never seen her cry. He'd never heard her cry before. Not like this.

"I can't help it," she said. "Reaction." She turned again, seemingly blindly. "I thought I was going to die. And then I thought you were going to die and I . . ."

"I thought you were going to die," a voice said from the back. Conan's voice. He popped from the back seat like a deranged jack-in-the- box, and Kyrie slammed on the brakes hard, stopping them suddenly in the middle of a tree-lined street. "I thought you were going to die. You screamed. So I called Himself. I told him I couldn't go in, but I thought the enemy was in there. And then . . . he aimed for your mind and the enemy's mind."

"What the hell?" Kyrie said. And it was all that Tom could do not to turn around and plant his fist in the middle of Conan's smug-looking face.

Instead, he turned around and said, "What are you doing? What do you think you were doing, hiding back there?"

Conan's expression shifted, from smug to sullen. "I wasn't hiding from you," he said, in the tone that a kid might use to say it wasn't him who drew on the wall. "I was hiding from the dire wolf."

"Oh, that makes it ever so much better," Kyrie said. "Not."

"Just go," Conan said. "He's going to come for us."

"I don't think so," Tom said, looking behind them. "He's not back there, and besides, he knows where we're going to go, doesn't he?"

"Does he?" Conan asked.

"The diner," Kyrie said. And then, softly, "Hopefully, he's not so brazen as to come and attack us in the diner, in the parking lot, in front of everyone."

"Hopefully," Tom said. "Or we'll be dead. I mean, it's not like we can, realistically, stop showing up at the diner."

"No," Kyrie said. She started the car again, going more slowly. "But perhaps once he calms down, he won't be as dangerous? I mean, I get a feeling we pushed him over the edge, and he didn't very well know what he was doing."

"
We
pushed him over the edge?" Tom said. "
We?
What were you doing at the house, anyway? And without telling me. If Rafiel hadn't told me—"

"You should have asked Rafiel what I was doing at the house," Kyrie said. She drove with jagged movements that caused the car to lurch one way then the other. "He called me and told me to meet him there. Something about one of his relatives repairing the house. And then he wasn't there."

"He called you?" Tom asked. He remembered Rafiel coming into the diner, his confusion at not finding Kyrie in the bed-and-breakfast. He didn't even want to think that Rafiel might be working with the dire wolf. If Rafiel was . . . If Rafiel had betrayed them . . . 

"He called me on my cell phone. Told me to meet him at the house ASAP. I thought it was a little weird, but he said he had everything ready to go right then, so I showered and went."

Tom groaned. Either Rafiel was mind-manipulated, or Rafiel had defected to—for lack of better words—the dark side. Either way, it could not be good. "But . . ." he said. "But . . ." And swallowed hard.

"The only weird thing," Kyrie said, "is that his words seemed to have . . . oh, I don't know how to put it . . . no sound. No vocalization."

Tom found his forehead wrinkling in worry before he could think that he was worried. That didn't feel right. Kyrie's purse was at his feet, as it normally was when she was driving. He bent down and picked it up. "May I get your cell phone?" he asked. He didn't like to reach into her purse without an invitation.

"Sure," she said, as she turned onto Pride Street. Five minutes from The George.

He reached into the little pocket on the front lining where she normally kept her phone. He picked it up. "He called you on this cell phone?" he said. It wouldn't turn on, there was no battery. So, he grabbed his cell phone from his pocket, and swapped the batteries. Then he turned the phone on and looked through calls received.

"Yeah."

"When?"

"This morning, almost right after you left, I think. I was lying in a patch of sun and unable to sleep, and then the phone rang."

Tom looked up and down through the list of numbers. The latest call the phone showed was three days before. He took a deep breath, and waited till she pulled in the parking lot of The George to speak. He wasn't sure what telling her while she was driving would do.

"Kyrie," he said. "There's no record of any such call."

"What?" Kyrie asked. She pushed the parking brake down with her foot, as she reached blindly for her cell phone. "Let me see that."

She pulled the cell phone from Tom's nerveless hands, and went to the menu and calls received, and paged, frantically, up and down the list.

She realized she was shaking violently, and she put the phone down on the seat, very slowly, then very slowly lowered her head towards the wheel, until she rested her forehead on it.

"You mean the whole call . . ." she said, at last. "You mean, he just reached into my mind." For some reason the thought made her physically ill. Reaching into her head to trick her seemed like the worst violation possible. "How could he? How?"

"I don't know. I think he has some sort of mind power," Tom said, hesitantly. He laid his palm gently on her shoulder, as if he were afraid of touching her. But when she didn't protest, he enveloped her in his arms and pulled her to him. "I'm sorry, Kyrie. I think this is worse than anything we faced before."

For a moment, it comforted her, that he held her like that, tightly, against his body. He was still naked—she was quite sure he had forgotten that—and his skin smelled of the hotel's soap overlaid with sweat from fear and fight. It was not unpleasant. His hair was loose—as it always was after he shifted back and forth. He kept a package of hair ties in the glove compartment of the car, in a kitchen drawer at home, and in one of the supply rooms in the diner. His hair brushed her face, softly, like silk.

And for a moment—for just a moment, as her breath calmed down—this felt good and protective and healing. She had a sense that she belonged to him—that she was his, that Tom was somehow entitled to hold her like this and that he—as scattered and lost as he'd been most of his life—he was somehow protecting her. As he'd protected her, or tried to, in that kitchen.

But slowly the thought intruded that he was just looking after her because he looked after everyone—Old Joe, Conan, Not Dinner, and even Keith and Anthony to an extent. Tom seemed to think it was his duty, his necessary place in life, to go through it helping everyone and everything. And this made his arms around her, his soothing voice, the hand now gently stroking her hair and cheek, utterly meaningless.

She shrank back, laughing a little, disguising her embarrassment at having been, momentarily, emotionally naked. "You must put clothes on," she said. "What if someone looks in the car and sees me sitting here with two naked guys?"

"I don't have clothes," Conan said from the back seat, his voice dull and seemingly trying to be distant, as if he were apologizing for being present during their embrace. He hardly needed to.

Tom pulled back. He took a deep breath, as if he needed to control himself, and she didn't look down to see if he needed to control himself in that sense. It wouldn't help to know he'd been embracing her out of automatic pity but that lust had mixed in. She wanted to know he had held her for other reasons—she wasn't even sure what reasons she wanted it to be. Perhaps because he felt so incomplete without her, that he had to hold her and protect her to be able to hold and protect himself. She wanted him to think of them as a unit, she thought. As belonging. And perhaps that was, ultimately, her greatest foolishness, that she so desperately wanted to belong with someone. Not to. She had no fancy to be owned or restricted in that way. For much too long, growing up, she had belonged to the state of North Carolina—had been in effect the child of the state—that she did not want to belong to anyone. But she wanted to belong with someone, to be part of a group. Not at the mercy of passing bureaucrats and their whims, but able to contribute and be taken into account by a group.

She'd thought she was part of that. Even days ago, if you had asked her, she'd have said that she and Tom and Rafiel were just that sort of group. A
you and me against the world
group.

But now the dire wolf could get in her mind and force her own friendship for Rafiel to betray her. And Tom was determined to protect the world and its surroundings. "There's clothes under the seat," she told Conan. "Get some for Tom too. We stuff them there, when we go shopping. We buy extra stuff, I wash it and stuff it down there. From the thrift shop, so they're clean but worn."

"Worn is fine," Conan said, as he passed, over Kyrie's shoulder, a grey pair of sweat pants and a red sweat shirt to Tom.

"I think you should go shower," Kyrie said. "Both of you. I'll go inside"—she made a head gesture towards the diner—"and hold the fort, while you guys make yourselves decent."

Tom frowned a little but then nodded. "If he comes in the diner—" he said.

"I'll call, okay? I don't think he's going to do much in front of every customer at the tables, truly."

"You don't know that," Tom said. "He could reach in and touch your mind. Like he did before. We don't know how many minds he can touch. He could make everyone in the diner ignore him, as he kills you or dismembers you."

"I'll call you. I'll call you as soon as he comes," she said, almost frantically, wanting to go back to the diner, which right now represented routine and normalcy, and to be allowed to go on with life, to forget that someone out there—someone who didn't wish them well—had the power to reach into her mind and make her hear and think things that had never happened.

"I don't know what the owner is going to think, of my keeping going to the bedroom with different guys and coming out in new clothes," Tom said, under his breath, but Conan only gave him this unfocused, uncomprehending look, as if he were talking about some different planet, or something so strange that Conan's mind couldn't begin to understand it.

Tom was fairly sure this was not true. After all, the man had grown up in Tennessee, no matter how strange his parents' culture might have been. He'd watched the same shows, read the same newspapers—generally speaking—and listened to the same music—well, perhaps more country and western—that Tom listened to.

And yet, he genuinely seemed to have no idea why Tom going to his rented room to shower with different guys accompanying him might make the owner of the bed-and-breakfast a little uncomfortable.

"She's going to think I'm running a business," Tom added, under his breath. But it was all pointless: his worrying and Conan's—had to be deliberate—lack of comprehension. They met no one as they walked along the oak-floored hallways of the bed-and-breakfast. The room, when Tom opened it, was as Kyrie must have left it—with the bed coverings thrown half back, and her hair brush thrown on top of the clothes.