Gentleman Takes a Chance (27 page)

When Rafiel rang the doorbell, he was answered by a man who looked as if he could be cast, with no effort at makeup, as a hobbit in
Lord of the Rings
. Well, a rather tall hobbit, since he was about Rafiel's own height. But he had the hair perfectly right, and he was smoking a pipe. He was not wearing shoes, and Rafiel had to keep himself from looking down to see whether his toes were covered in curly hair, as Tolkien had insisted Bilbo Baggins' toes were. Instead, he focused on the amiable face, whose wrinkles showed it to be somewhat past middle age.

The man didn't smell like a shifter, and he'd seen nothing at the aquarium, and was shocked, shocked—as it turned out by the reports of cryptozoological discoveries in the parking lot of the aquarium and not by the deaths within. Before Rafiel could escape him, he had to be told that the man was a retired used- and rare-book seller, and to be given—he never understand why or how—a lecture on American horror writers of the nineteenth century and the value of their various first editions.

He escaped, gritting his teeth, to follow the winding Meadoway to Mine Street, where the next person lived who'd left both name and address at the aquarium at the time when it was probable the first man had gone for a totally unprotected swim with the sharks. This one was a bigger house, or at least taller, and instead of looking like a Swiss chalet, it looked exactly like a Southern antebellum mansion as it might have looked if Sherman had found himself in convenient possession of a shrinking ray.

The people who lived in it were obviously aware of the resemblance, as they'd painted the house aristocratic white, and had two rocking chairs on the diminutive porch.

Rafiel rang the doorbell twice, but no one answered, even though he could see the blue glow of a television through the windows of the darkened front room. He had visions of people dead in front of a TV screen, but he knew how unlikely that was. Far more likely that they had the sound turned way up and were far too interested in their program to listen to his ringing, or, after a while, knocking on their door. Or it was entirely possible they'd gone out for a burger or something they thought they needed to weather the coming snowstorm, and had left the TV on. People did that.

Before giving up, he sniffed around the door. It was unlikely he would be able to smell a subtle and old shifter smell without shifting, himself. But then again, this was not the aquarium, where shifters might or might not have passed. And even there, he'd picked up the original scent while in his human form and had only needed to shift to pinpoint its location.

In this case, if shifters lived here, it should be much easier. But his sniffing around the house, and around the driveway failed to raise even a vague suspicion of shifter-scent.

So, chances are that it's not here,
he thought, and headed for the number three on his list, which was only a couple of blocks down at Skippingstone Way.

The house was yellow and narrow, set on a handkerchief-sized lawn bordered by what, to judge from the pathetic, upward-thrust branches, must be lovely bushes in the spring and summer.

But Rafiel didn't pay much attention to the details, because as he parked his SUV and got out, he got a strong whiff of shifter smell. And the smell only increased as he opened the garden gate and walked up to the porch.

On the porch, a woman stood crying by a pretentious reproduction Victorian mailbox. And she smelled unmistakably of shifter.

Kyrie thought he looked cold. Cold and lonely, with his arms wrapped around himself, standing in the snowstorm. She would have thought he would have come inside, into the warmth. She would have thought he would have come to where they were. And then she thought perhaps he was stopping himself from shifting, and that was all.

But when he turned around to face her, his features bore none of the strange distortions that presaged shifts. His eyes were their normal shape, as was his nose, and his face wasn't even slightly elongated as it seemed to get when he was about to change into a dragon. His teeth, bared, as they chattered against each other, retained their normal human bluntness. But he was pale, and his eyes were veiled—as though they were covered with the nictitating eyelids he grew in dragon form.

He seemed to be glaring at her. "What?" he asked, and his voice was edged with anger, and shimmered with sharp barbs. The signs to stay away were clear, but Kyrie couldn't leave him here, alone and furious.

"I . . . is there anything I can do to . . . help?" Kyrie asked.

"Oh, don't worry," he flung. "I'm not going to shift."

"I didn't think you were going to," she said, trying to keep her voice low and even, because she knew—she knew damn well—that in this mood Tom was like a small child, easily annoyed, easily angered by things he thought she had said, even when she couldn't be further from thinking it. "I just wanted to know why you were out here, alone and . . . and why you look so angry?"

"Why? Why I look so angry?" he asked. "What do you mean I look so angry? I'm being claimed. I'm being owned. By a creature so old we can't even guess at his motives. By a crime boss, Kyrie! And he . . . he uses people as instruments. He used Conan as a spy camera. And he probably can reach into Conan's mind all the time."

"I know. I realize how it feels, but . . ."

"But you sit there," Tom said. "And you talk to that creature, that . . . that dire wolf, even as he's going on about how he doesn't know what the Great Sky Dragon wants with me. He's talking about how ephemerals and shifters are different, and how our only loyalty is to shifters, and you are there, listening to him!"

"What did you expect me to do?" she asked. "Did you expect me to attack him? In the diner? Besides, he was giving us information we needed."

"Information!" His tone made it sound like the word should be a swear word. "Information! How do you know there is a word of truth in what he said?"

"Does it matter? Clearly there's
some
truth. I mean, I know it's tainted, that it's from his point of view. But, is it to some extent still true? Does it still have some contact with reality? Is it . . . is it going to work for us or against us?"

He was running his fingers through his hair, pulling it out of the bind that kept it in place at the back, scattering around wildly—making it look like a particularly energetic cat had been playing with his hair. "So is it?"

"I don't know," Kyrie said. She again managed to bring her voice down, to control her volume of speech. She knew he wasn't angry at her as such, truly she knew it, no matter how angry he might sound or how much it might seem to her like he was furious at her or perhaps—ridiculously—jealous of Dire. No, she mustn't sound like that. She must be calm and collected so that he would perhaps calm down. "But I know there is nothing we can do."

"Nothing we can do?" he said. "What do you mean nothing we can do? There has to be something we can do—there has to be a way to be free of all of this, hasn't there?" His eyes were wild, almost unfocused.

When Tom had first been hired by The George's erstwhile owner, he'd been addicted to drugs. Heroine, mostly, from what she understood of his stories. The drugs had been a misguided attempt to self-treat the shifting, to prevent himself from changing into a dragon whenever his emotions got control of him. Now, if Kyrie didn't know better, she'd think he was using again. There was a wildness to him, barely restrained and very much full of anger and something else, something seemingly uncontrollable. His blue eyes blazed with it as he said, "Why should I belong to someone? Belong as in be owned? Like a possession? A . . . thing? And only because I was born the way I am? Don't you understand, Kyrie, don't you see how wrong it is?"

Kyrie knew how wrong it was. She also understood, with startling clarity, at a glance, how different her background and Tom's were. He'd been left alone, to more or less raise himself. He might have been as unwanted as she was, as ignored, as disposable to those who were responsible for his existence. But unlike hers, his unsupervised childhood and barely supervised teenage years had been free of the control of strangers. His father might not have known or cared enough to control Tom and to make him follow rules, or even laws. But at least he'd not appointed revolving strangers to have power over Tom's life and determine what he could or couldn't do or say or wear to school.

A ward of the state since she was a few hours old, Kyrie had been passed from one controlling authority to another—foster families, social workers and the sometimes ironically named children advocates, all had passed her from person to person and there was nothing she could do except obey. She tried to convey this to Tom. "You think you're alone in this?" she said. "You think that it's because you're a shifter that strangers have a say over you? I was abandoned by my parents when I was just hours old," she said. "And from then on, I belonged to the state. Which in truth meant that I belonged to whomever the state appointed to look after a group of children. Strangers all, but they could determine everything, including what shots I got, and to what school I went. They could move me around to another foster family, uproot me from the neighborhood, leave me at the mercy of strangers."

He opened his mouth, but didn't answer. Instead, his mouth stayed open, then he closed it, with a snap. He put out a hand, and seemed like he would touch her face with his fingertips, only he let his hand fall before he could do it. "But that doesn't make it better, Kyrie," he finally said, his voice softer, but still seeming to simmer with outrage. "That doesn't make it any better. Yes, your upbringing was horrible, but that is supposed to be over. We're supposed to be our own people, now. We're supposed to be starting over. There shouldn't be anyone who can do this to us." His hand made a gesture in midair, which she supposed symbolized the control that the ancient shifters might have over them. "There shouldn't be anyone who can mess with our minds, our lives, what we are, this way."

Kyrie shrugged. "I didn't say my upbringing was horrible." And then caught herself saying it and thought how strange it was, because by various definitions, it had, indeed, been horrible. "I said that it w—" She shrugged. "It wasn't right. But then neither was yours. Just in very different ways. What I said is that I know this game. There is no point, when people think they own you, in just beating against it like . . . like a trapped bird ripping itself to shreds on the wire of the cage. When people think they own you, the only way you can get away with being yourself, the only way you can keep them off balance enough that they don't actually control you, is to play them one against the other. I think," she rubbed her forehead, as she thought of it. "I think we should do that. I think we should play the Ancient Ones against the dragons, the dragons against the Ancient Ones. I think we should go with the ones who demand least from us and—"

But Tom was shaking his head, making his black, curly hair fly about, like the ends of a whip. "No," he said. "No. We can't. We won't. Any concession we make to these people is like trading away a bit of ourselves and of who we are. Kyrie! Can't you see that they're evil? Can't you see them for what they are?"

"I can see they are very powerful," she said, hearing her voice toneless, and keeping it toneless, because otherwise she too would start yelling and next thing you knew, there would be people gathering to watch their argument. The only reason they hadn't gathered already, as far as she could see, was that it was snowing so hard, and they were in the back parking lot, while most people in The George were gathered up front, near the front entrance. "I can see they have mental and other powers that we lack. I can see too, that having lived so long, they have . . . they can call on contacts, on experience, on people they know. We can't do anything against that, either. So the only chance we have of defeating them, or even of holding them at arms' length, is to play them one against the other."

He shook his head. "There has to be another way. There has to." His hands were curling in fists. He looked at her, again unfocused. His face was contracted, as if in a spasm of pain. "I can't . . ." He shook his head. "They're not good, Kyrie. As people or as shifters. They're not good. We can't let them dictate to us. Ever."

"I'm not saying we should let them dictate to us." And now impatience crept into her voice. "I'm saying that we should use one to combat the other."

"No." He pressed his lips together, in narrow-lipped disapproval. "No."

"Then what are we to do?"

He faced her for a moment. His hands went at his hair again, pulling it back, but in fact snagging it in great handfuls, so that it hung in fantastical disarray around his face, making him look like an extra in a commercial picturing a society with no combs. "I'll figure out something," he said.

And with that the infuriating man started walking away. Kyrie ran after him, slipped on the ice and ended up having to clutch his shoulder to stay upright.

As he turned to look back at her, she said, "You can't go out there like that. Not in a T-shirt. Not . . . like that."

"Yes. Yes, I can," he said. His voice was absolutely flat, now, all emotion gone. "Yes I can. I need to cool off, Kyrie. Don't worry. I'll be back and I'll think of something."

She wanted to scream and shake him till his teeth fell out. It wasn't that she didn't love him. She was as conscious of loving him as she was that he was one of the more infuriating creatures alive—and possibly more infuriating than most dead ones too. Tom had a way of making her want to scream and stomp her foot. Sometimes, she almost understood his father who—trying to justify himself to her at one point—had told her that Tom had brought his disowning on himself, not by changing into a dragon, but because changing into a dragon was the last in a long line of disappointments and infuriating resistence to all normal behavior. His father hadn't disowned Tom because he was a dragon, but because he knew how out of control the human part of Tom was, and that, in a dragon, was terrifying.

But then she realized what Tom was saying. He needed to cool off. He needed to control himself. Which was the other side of the coin, that Tom's father had never seen or never been willing to see. Tom had an almost fanatical need for self-control. The things he'd done that seemed most out of control had more often than not been done to try to get control of himself. It might not be the best survival strategy in the world, but it was his, and who was Kyrie to try and change it? And what good would it do her to try?