Gentleman Takes a Chance (34 page)

Behind the counter, a Chinese family made Tom tense, before he scolded himself that race had nothing to do with it. Yes, most dragon shifters might be Asian. But he clearly wasn't. And the dire wolf was just as bad as the Great Sky Dragon's triad. Perhaps worse, as at least it could be claimed that the Great Sky Dragon tried to protect all dragon shifters—while the dire wolf seemed to have very few loyalties but to himself. Tom wondered if Dire was representative of the Ancient Ones at all. Perhaps he'd just chosen to claim the role. There was no telling.

Rafiel was clearly known here. He ordered a dozen doughtnuts, rapidly choosing the flavors, and grinning at Tom's bewildered expression. "I told you. We're required to visit these places. At least once a week."

Tom shook his head, smiling a little.

"Do you want coffee?" Rafiel asked. And when Tom nodded yes, he proceeded to order three. "I owe one to a guy in a doorway on Fairfax. He told me where to find you."

"The guy in a khaki jacket?" Tom asked.

"Yeah. He didn't seem to want to go to a shelter at any cost, and he had one of those Mylar blankets." Rafiel shrugged. "I wondered . . ." But never said what he wondered as he handed the bills over to the lady behind the counter.

Later in the truck, Tom said, "I wondered too. But he didn't smell of shifter."

"I know," Rafiel said. "Though to be honest, as cold as I was, I don't think I could smell anything."

"That's possible," Tom said. He bit his lip. "But I think I or you would have smelled something . . . even just a hint."

Rafiel nodded. He put a hand into the doughnut box, nudging it open in a way that bespoke long practice. He wedged a doughnut in his mouth, as he shifted into gear with his free hand. Then, with the doughnut still in his mouth, he backed out of the parking lot of the doughnut shop and onto the road.

"Why a dozen doughnuts?" Tom asked. "Seriously. Don't tell me they'd kick you out of the force. Why a dozen doughnuts?"

Rafiel took a bite of his doughnut, dipped into the box again for a napkin and wedged the napkin-wrapped doughnut into the cup holder on the dashboard, all while driving with one hand, in a way that Tom had to admit, given the snow and what looked to him no more visibility than about a palm beyond the windshield, seemed a bit cavalier.

"Energy," he said. "I think I'm going to have a long night of it. I don't think I can go and interview the male employees now, of course. But if Old Joe was right, and if there really was a body at the aquarium, I should get a call any minute now. And that usually means a few hours securing the scene, sweeping for evidence and all that. It's not a five-minute job."

"Right," Tom said.

"But first," Rafiel said, in all seriousness, "we must take the coffee to Khaki Guy, whom we'll do our best to sniff out, if he is a shifter. And then we must meet Kyrie. There's a meeting I'm not looking forward to."

"Why?" Tom said, surprised.

"Because I didn't call her as soon as I found you." He grinned wider and added, with every appearance of enjoying the thought, "She's going to rip my balls off and beat me with them."

Kyrie was glad they arrived at the room almost exactly fifteen minutes later. She had just the time to pick up Not Dinner, who, being a cat, and faced with a surfeit of stuffed furniture and other comfortable sleeping surfaces, had chosen to fall asleep in the bathtub. But he'd woken up when she first came into the bathroom, and scrabbled up her petting arm, until she held him under her chin and petted him, while he purred ecstatically.

She'd managed to get to the bed, with him trying to climb into her shirt, under the neckline, and install himself on her left shoulder, when she heard the key in the lock, and then Tom came in.

He still looked like nothing on earth, with his hair floating around him, in a wild dark cloud. He was wearing a hoodie she'd never seen on him, and which must be Rafiel's, since it was dark grey and said "Policemen Do It More Forcefully" across the chest. He was also carrying a doughnut and a cup of coffee. And he stood, just inside the door, grinning sheepishly at her, while Rafiel came in, behind him, and closed the door.

The weird thing, she thought, was that Rafiel looked scared, while Tom didn't. Tom looked more embarrassed, as if he'd done something horribly stupid. Which, of course, in a way, he had.

"Sorry," he said. "I still can't understand how you could take it so calmly." A blush climbed his cheeks. "But I guess you're more grown-up than I am. You've always been."

And she, who only a couple hours before was thinking exactly the same, shook her head. "No. I don't think it's a matter of being more or less grown-up. Truly. I think we're just . . . very different people." And then, for fear he'd interpret this as breaking up with him when, in fact, over the last hour or so she'd come to the conclusion she
couldn't
live without him, even if she tried, she added, "And that's okay. I mean, we're supposed to be. It would be very weird to fall in love with yourself, wouldn't it?"

Tom looked slyly at Rafiel and for just a moment, Kyrie thought he was going to say that Rafiel managed it fine. But instead, he shrugged a little, and that, Kyrie thought might in fact be a function of growing up. He'd learned not to bait the policeman.

"So . . . you said you needed to talk to me? Tell me . . . something?"

Tom nodded. "At least right now," he said, "I don't need to shower." And smiled. "I keep thinking I'm going to catch one of those horrible diseases you catch from washing too much. A fungus or something, because I destroyed the normal balance of the skin."

He walked to the vanity, and grabbed his hairbrush and started vigorously brushing his hair back, tying it neatly again, in his normal ponytail. While he did so, he talked. He told her of walking out—of thinking about a lot of things, though he wouldn't specify what those things were—of hearing that Old Joe might be at the aquarium and of wandering there. Then he told her about the phone, and how his father had thought he'd eaten someone.

Kyrie had to clench her hands into fists at this point, and make an effort not to speak out loud. Because she who never had parents, at least had an idea of what parents were supposed to be. And what they weren't. And she was fairly sure they weren't supposed to be like Edward Ormson. Oh, surely, his son was a strange creature. An enigma that they couldn't quite solve. But he should know Tom enough to know he wouldn't—couldn't—murder anyone. Much less eat him or her. Yes, she knew that Tom claimed to always be afraid of that also. Which was silly. Perhaps she knew him better than he knew himself, but she was quite aware that he would never do anything like that.

Thinking this she met his eyes in the mirror and they smiled at each other. He stepped back, slowly, to sit by her side on the bed, and hold her hand. "I shouldn't have gone away," he said. "Yes, I needed to cool off. But I needed to be with you as well. As is, I made you worry needlessly. Is . . . is Conan all right?"

"Very worried about you," Kyrie said. "He kept thinking the Ancient Ones might get you, and then the Great Sky Dragon might come for him."

Tom smiled, this time ruefully, and squeezed her hand a little. "I figured it was something like that."

"Okay, my story now," Rafiel said. He had sat backwards on the vanity chair, facing them, his arms around its middle, his chin resting atop of it. Despite his obvious grown-up proportions, the width of his shoulders, the glint of a five o'clock shadow in a tawny color that matched his leonine mane, he looked much like a truant boy. He told them, clearly, and doing the expressions and the voices of both himself and his interlocutors about his three interviews with aquarium visitors. "The thing," he said, "is that she told me there was another shifter, in the aquarium. She thought he was one of the spider crabs." He sighed. "So maybe that was the other shifter we smelled." He explained about his earlier interview with Ms. Gigio.

"Do you think she's the woman that Old Joe was warning you about?" Kyrie asked. "I mean . . ."

"I don't even know if Old Joe hallucinated the whole thing," Tom said. "Until there is proof to the contrary, I'd like to withhold opinion as to whom he was talking about."

Kyrie nodded. Rafiel looked up and shrugged a little. "She doesn't smell like a shifter. If she's only a crazy person who is pushing people into the shark tank . . . then she's not my problem."

"Rafiel!" Kyrie said, before she realized that she was going to say it, a note of indignation in her voice. "I can't believe you'd say that. What do you mean she's not your problem? You sound like . . . Dire . . . with all his talk about how ephemerals don't matter, how only shifters do."

Rafiel shook his head, even if a slight amount of color appeared over his high cheekbones. "You misunderstand me," he said. "That's not what I meant at all. Only that it won't require anything special from me—just police work, which I would do for any other case. It's not my problem as a shifter; I don't have to skulk and lie and find a way to make it all come out right. Only . . . only make sure that we find the culprit and she has a proper trial. Or he, if it's not Lei, but it's still not a shifter. It's the shifter angle that has me worried. Right now, the more I hear and the more I probe into this, the more I get worried that there is a shifter angle—it could be anyone, from Dante Dire, to this unknown spider crab shifter to . . ." He shook his head. "I don't think it could be Ms. Gigio. But it could definitely be the Rodent Liberation Front, whoever they are. Any rodent shifters crazy enough to try Marxist theory must be ready for everything."

"And crazy enough for anything," Tom said ruefully.

At that moment, Rafiel's phone rang. He picked it up and answered. From their side, the conversation bordered on cryptic. Rafiel said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. I'll be there." And hung up, and got up to go.

"They found a corpse?" Tom asked, his body as taut as a bowstring, his tension seemingly communicating itself to Kyrie via the hand he held.

Rafiel nodded. "Yes. He's . . . He was almost not eaten at all—they'd . . . the sharks had just started on him, and they fished him out. Well . . . I don't know about not eaten at all." He looked a bit green and swallowed, as if the images his words evoked were getting to him, as well. "But he still has a face and lungs. And . . . well . . . they figure that they will be able to identify him, and look for signs that he was pushed into the tank while still alive. Or not."

Kyrie nodded.

"Glad I got the doughnuts," Rafiel told Tom. "It's going to be a long night. I'll call you guys or come by when I'm off."

And, with Kyrie holding tightly onto Notty, to prevent the orange fuzzball making a dash for the door, Kyrie and Tom stood up, to say goodbye to Rafiel, as he opened the door to leave.

And stopped, staring at the newspaper outside the door. It was one of the many peculiarities of the
Weekly Inquirer
that it was usually delivered late on the night of the day it was dated, sometime between eleven and midnight. Probably because it had started as a weekly paper, and there was less emphasis on the news being up to the minute, than on it being wittily or interestingly reported.

Only this time, none of them looked to see whether the news was properly reported. Instead, the three of them stared aghast at the headline, in screaming red, marching across the top of the front page:
Local Diner Haunted by Dragons.
Beneath it was a picture far clearer than any that zoological papers and magazines had ever boasted. It showed Tom and Conan both flying in dragon form. Tom was somewhat more distant—and therefore a little more blurred—but Conan was in the full glare of a very good electronic camera that had captured every scale and every fold of his skin in all its glory, as well as his mouth, open, the fangs parted, as if to roar.

"Wha—" Kyrie said in shock.

Rafiel swore under his breath. And then Notty took off, running down the carpeted hall. And Tom took off after it.

Tom caught the cat just short of the stairs. It required throwing himself headlong, his hand extended as if for the great baseball catch. What he caught was a tiny handful of spitting fury, that he held very firmly, while bringing it up to his chest, and standing up. He registered, distantly, that he'd just hit his knee hard, and that the wood beneath the carpet had far less give than he expected.

Holding Not Dinner, he limped back to the bedroom. Rafiel was still standing, holding the paper. "I have to go," he said, in a little, squeaky voice.

"But how . . ." Kyrie said.

Rafiel blushed. "I should have told you."

"What should you have told us?" Tom asked. "You saw someone take that picture?"

"Well . . . not quite that . . . But that Summer girl that Keith brought in? Right after you and Conan took off—" He turned to Kyrie. "This was when they were trying to rescue you, you know. Anyway, right after they took off, Keith's girlfriend was right there, at the back door, and I thought it was very weird. She said she'd got lost looking for the bathroom, but you know, it's not like it's all that hard to find, or like it's not properly marked, and right there . . ." He frowned. "I remember at the time thinking that something was wrong, and even more so when she disappeared right after. But then Dante Dire came in, and it just made me forget all that stuff."

"Yeah," Kyrie said. "I think he has that effect."

And Tom had to admit he did. "I'm sure," he said, feeling like his voice was constricted, "that it is all a matter of priorities. I mean, the dire wolf could kill us. What is the worst this woman could do? Make me move on?" He shrugged, attempting to look completely unaffected by this. "How bad would that be? I've moved so much, from town to town, and . . . all over." But he didn't want to move, and his heart was breaking over even the possibility of doing so. He didn't want to go anywhere. Let alone that he had Kyrie and a home, even if it was just a rented house, and apparently, now, a kitten.

He didn't want to leave the diner behind. It was the first time in his life that he felt invested in a place. He owned The George—half of it. It was his. He had shaped it already and would shape it more, make it something uniquely his, his own diner.