Gentleman Takes a Chance (29 page)

"I swear, just as we managed to get the kids out of the area, a little naked man came out from under that area—you know, the area where you can crawl to look up and see the crabs and things, as if you were inside the aquarium. He looked Asian—I'd think Japanese. Or at least he looked like the Japanese in movies. And he looked very old. His hair was all white and he was almost bent in double. And . . . well, he was naked, so I looked more attentively." She seemed to realize how that might sound and gasped slightly, before saying, all in a rush, "I mean, I mean, because I'm familiar . . . because I know when you shift suddenly you often find yourself, you know, naked. So I looked, because he didn't look like a streaker or a flasher or any of that kind of person, so I thought, I thought . . . how odd, and maybe he was a shifter. Only it wasn't a real thought, I mean, with words or anything, just an impulse to look more closely at him and see, you know . . . what was wrong."

Rafiel refused to tread in the minefield of innuendo that surrounded that statement. Instead, he said, "And then?"

"Oh, that's the craziest part of all, and I've spent a lot of time wondering if I'd gone around the bend, you know? But this is the thing . . . he winked at me, when he saw me looking. Just winked with all the calm in the world. And then he . . . climbed the tank. He wasn't very big. Shorter than I. And you know the tanks are open at the top, right? So he climbed the tank and he . . . dropped into it. And then . . . I couldn't see him anymore."

"Do you mean he disappeared?"

She shook her head. "No, I don't think so. It's just as he splashed in, there was all this turmoil and then . . . there were just crabs and anemones there. Nothing out of the ordinary." She looked apologetic. "I hadn't counted the inhabitants of the tank before he dropped in."

"No one would have asked you to," he said, reassuringly.

"I confess," she said. "When I first heard of the bones and the arm found in the tank, I thought it might be a shark shifter, and that he hadn't changed in time . . . ?"

Rafiel hadn't thought of that, and that was a horrible idea, though it would certainly explain the moved-aside cover. And it wasn't like it was completely crazy. After all, sharks ate each other, too. And the remains being as sparse as they were, and having been in the water, how could he be sure the victims weren't shifters? But three shark shifters? All meeting the same fate? Unlikely.

"Thank you for your help, Ms. Gigio," he said. And then, because he felt he owed her something, he added, "I don't expect you'll have any more trouble with those pamphlets, but if you do, give me a call." He handed her one of his business cards. "I'll do what I can."

"Oh, thank you," she said, holding the card close to her chest. "That's so kind of you."

He didn't know what to answer to that, so he merely said, "Good evening, ma'am." And started towards the stairs. At which point, curiosity overtook him. There was something he had never fully understood about shifting. Oh, sure, Tom and Kyrie could go on and on about genes and about crossover from other species—borrowed genes or something like that—and about all this sort of pseudoscientific stuff, but what Rafiel wanted to know was what happened to the law of conservation of mass and energy when one shifted.

After all, Tom was easily five times his normal size when he shifted. Oh, sure, Tom was a muscular guy, but if you took his mass and distributed it across the bulk of the dragon, the dragon would be lighter than a cloud. Rafiel himself knew he was considerably heavier as a lion than as a man, though the lion was also much larger.

How would those differences in size play themselves over creatures that were much further from human at either end of the scale? What would a mouse shifter look like? Or a crab shifter, for that matter? He kept thinking of the report of the squirrel the size of a German shepherd. That would make finding shifters at the aquarium far easier.

"So . . . how big are you?" he asked. "When you shift?"

She blinked, and blushed, as if he'd asked her a very intimate question. "About . . ." she said. "Oh, normal size, you know? For a mouse."

And then, as if she'd broached the inadmissible, she opened her door and darted inside, leaving Rafiel rooted to the spot, thinking,
Cat and mouse. Bad idea.

Tom was all too conscious of having been stubborn, and strange, and that he'd probably annoyed Kyrie—or at least deserved to annoy her. He felt guilty about walking away from their discussion, but he didn't know what else he could tell her, and he was very much afraid he would change into a dragon, right there in the parking lot.

He wrapped his arms around himself, shoving his hands under his arms to keep them warm, as he walked. He relished the sound of his boots against the snow. One of the good things about them was that they had such great traction. He also relished the fact that his hands and arms felt so cold they seemed to burn. Snow was settling all over him. One of the homeless who walked along Fairfax summer and winter was huddled in the recessed doorway of the realtors down the street.

He gave Tom an odd look from under disheveled bangs. "Whoa there, pal," he said. "You won't last long like that. They give coats for free down at St. Agnes. Got me this one." He patted his huge, multipocketed safari jacket. "Really warm."

Tom nodded, but walked on, without even slowing down. Wouldn't last long? How long could he last? How long did things like him live? And what happened to them when they went beyond the limits of normal human life? What did it do to you to live long enough to see all the normal people around you die? And their children, their grandchildren, everyone you could care for? Would it mean that you would come to think of them as ephemerals? As things? Creatures who didn't matter?

If that was true, then Tom didn't want to be a shifter. He didn't want to live to lose touch with everyone he knew—to see Keith's grandchildren get old and grey, and Anthony's great grandchildren die out. To lose all meaningful contact with people.

He stomped his feet, trying to find an outlet for his anger. He didn't want to be owned, he didn't want to owe anything to the Great Sky Dragon. Much less did he want to owe anything to the dire wolf, who had already proven that he had no respect for anyone, not even other, younger shifters—not even older shifters, if Old Joe was any indication.

And Old Joe was something else, working at Tom's mind. Where was he? Where could he have gone? It would be like Old Joe—Tom nurtured no illusions about his charity case—to have disappeared completely at the first sign of a threat. It would be like him . . . but it wouldn't be like him to go more than twenty-four hours without turning into an alligator and coming back to raid the diner dumpster. Particularly in this sort of cold weather when his shifter metabolism would be demanding protein.

Tom backtracked to where the homeless man sat. "Hey," he said.

The man looked back up at him. "Ah, you decided to come back for the coat? But I can't give you the coat, or I'll freeze, see." His speech was more articulate than Tom was used to from the people who would stay in doorways even when the weather turned bitterly cold. The main reason to not go to one of the free shelters was, normally, that they demanded sobriety and this person could not swear to it. "Go to St. Agnes. They will look after you."

"No, no," Tom said, his teeth chattering. "What I want to know is, have you heard of someone called Old Joe?"

"What? The gator?" the man said blinking.

It was Tom's turn to blink and then, in a sudden rush to seem innocent, "Gator?"

"Oh, he says he turns into a gator," he said. "We call him Gator, see?"

"Er . . . have you seen him?"

"Not since yesterday, I think." He shook his head. "He said he was heading out to the aquarium. Don't make no sense to me. The aquarium is closed."

"Er . . . yes, thank you." Tom said, as he started walking the other way again.

"St. Agnes," the homeless man screamed after him. "They'll fix you."

Tom nodded. He walked very fast away from the newly-gentrified area of Fairfax, the area where, since his arrival a year ago, the place had become clean, and all the street lamps worked, and where the businesses were bookstores and movie rental stores, restaurants and clothes stores.

As he walked, the stores changed slowly to "antique" shops, thrift shops, used bookshops, used CD shops, and then another two blocks down, it was down to new age stores, churches advertising free hot meals, and then a bit further on, to where the buildings on either side of the street were warehouses, most of them empty and shuttered against intruders.

Here, in the silence of the surroundings, Tom became aware of a strange sound—like an echo behind him. Feet crunching on snow, almost in perfect rhythm with his. He turned around. Sure enough, following him, at about a half-block distance, was Conan. Keeping him protected, Tom thought. Keeping an eye on him, more the like. A little, sentient spy camera, watching his every move.

"Go away," he yelled, turning around. "I don't need you."

Conan stopped. He looked up. He too had his arms wrapped around himself, only one of his arms was rather shorter than the other, and it made him look even more pitiful. "But . . ." he said. "But . . ." And that was it. His lip trembled.

Tom had spent the last few months taking in every sad sack who stopped by the diner. But this was too much, to expect him to take on a sad sack who also happened to be not just a spy but an instrument used by the Great Sky Dragon. "Don't try it, Conan. You heard. You are a spy device for the old bastard. I don't want him around."

Conan opened his hands. "You don't understand," he said. "I don't have a choice. I was told to follow you, to not let anything happen to you."

"Did you know?" Tom asked. "Before you heard it from the . . ." He came closer, so he could talk to Conan. "From the dire wolf?"

Conan shook his head. He looked miserable. He must have rushed out, because not only hadn't he bothered to put his jacket on, he was still wearing his George apron. "No. He said I was to protect you. I remember being very confused about how I was to do that, considering that, you know . . . you were stronger than I . . . but he said . . ." He shrugged. "I'd just dragged myself back, you know, to . . . well, to the restaurant on the outskirts of town, where . . ."

Tom nodded. Where the point of contact with the triad was. He got that much.

"I expected him to kill me," Conan said. "He punishes failure horribly. I've seen him kill other people for failing."

"But you went back, anyway?" Tom asked. He couldn't understand it. "In your place, I'd have been putting as many miles between me and as many triads as possible as fast as possible."

Conan shook his head. "It's not that easy. First, they are everywhere, truly. When you least expect it, in some small town, some out of way place, you'll meet one of them. And then there's . . . when you first join? I knew they put a tracker in you. I didn't know he could . . . you know . . . see through my eyes or anything. But I knew he could tell where I was. And if I didn't come back, he would send someone for me. And then he would make it really unpleasant."

More unpleasant than death?
Tom thought, but was afraid to ask. "So you went back."

"After months, I went back," Conan hung his head.

"I was wondering . . . I mean . . ." He shook his head. "I was almost dead but I came back in a few days, but you . . ."

Conan's eyes were huge. "I was caught in the burning building," he said. "Everyone else died. I must have managed to drag myself out before my brain . . ." He shook his head. "I don't even remember the first month."

"Oh."

"The arm . . ." he shrugged, "is the least of it. I understand bone is hard to grow. They told me . . . in another three months or so it should be normal."

"Oh," Tom said again, and thought that if Conan imagined this made him feel more charitable towards the Great Sky Dragon, he was a fool. All right, Tom might have been guilty of ripping out his arm and burning him, but it had been in self-defense. While the Great Sky Dragon was the one who had sent him after Tom.

"When he sent us out first, he had told us to kill you. Find the Pearl of Heaven, kill the thief. And then all of a sudden, when I came back, he wanted you alive. He wanted you protected." He shrugged. "I don't understand any of it, but I knew it was my chance to . . . to be accepted again. I didn't know he could see through my eyes until today. I thought I had to call him. I called him when you flew away." He sounded miserable. "When you went back to your house because of the dire wolf . . ."

Tom didn't understand it either, but of one thing he was sure. "I want you to go back, now, Conan, all right?"

Conan blinked at him, in complete confusion. "But I have to . . ."

"I want you to go back to the diner, and don't worry about me. Nothing is going to happen to me. Look, it's like this—if you stay here, I'm going to change and flame you. You can't flame me, because you're supposed to protect me, not kill me. If I flame you," Tom kept his voice steady, though he was, in fact, very sure he could never flame the hapless and helpless Conan, "you won't be able to follow me, anyway—and at best you'll have to come back as you did."

"No!"

"The Great Sky Dragon can't blame you for going back."

Conan opened his mouth to protest.

"No, look, I'm not going to get in any type of trouble. I just want to walk around for a while, until I calm down. Nothing will happen to me. I promise. And I won't let you come with me, anyway."

Conan opened his mouth again. "Don't you understand?" he asked, his voice vibrating and taut with despair. "If you want to flame me, do it. But I can't go back. Himself doesn't tolerate failure and I'm not very valuable to him. Not like you."

In Tom's mind an odd idea formed. If he was valuable to the Great Sky Dragon, then there was only one thing he could use to threaten the creature. "If you don't go back," he said, "I will kill myself. I'll throw myself from an underpass or fling myself under an eighteen-wheeler. I think if I destroy the brain, I won't come back. And I'd rather be dead than owned."