Gentleman Takes a Chance (6 page)

Truth be told, from what she remembered, Red Dragon had been the least effectual of the triad members. Why would he be the one sent? Unless—she took a look at his shrunken arm—he was trying to avenge himself all on his own.

He opened his mouth and she tensed, ready to hit the snow and roll away from his breath. Instead he made a pitiful sound, low and mournful in his throat.

"What?" she said, as if she expected the creature to speak. Instead, it made the sound again, and then it coughed. The cough was just like Tom's when he was about to change. Or when he was about to flame, of course. She tensed and circled, watching. It moaned and circled in turn. Suddenly, it spasmed. Contorted.

It was changing. Kyrie, who'd thrown herself to the snow-covered ground, looked up to see the creature bend and fold in unnatural ways, seeming to collapse in on itself.

It was shifting. It was becoming human.

But why is he shifting? Wouldn't his dragon form give him the advantage? What could he gain by becoming human?

What he couldn't gain, clearly, was warmth, because in the next moment he stood there, looking like an instant popsicle in the shape of a young Asian male, skinny and very, very naked in the howling storm. He covered his privates with one hand—the other arm being rather too short to allow him to reach that far, and he looked at her with pitiful eyes, even as his skin turned a shade of dusky violet.

"What do you want?" she asked, using all her will power to keep her teeth from chattering. "What do you want? What do you wish from me?"

He shook his head slowly, his eyes very wide. She wondered if he looked like that out of fear of her, and realized it was more likely that it was the cold. "I . . . Must speak. I was sent to speak. To you. I must protect . . . Him."

"Protect the Great Sky Dragon?" Kyrie asked.

Red Dragon shook his head. He had a crest of hair in the front—rumpled—probably a natural cowlick, and in human form, his eyes looked small and dark and confused. "No, not him. He sent me."

He did not speak with an accent so much as with the shadow of an accent—as if he felt obligated to sound Asian, even though he didn't. It made his words seem stilted. He talked while shivering and the words emerged through short panting breaths. "He sent me to redeem myself. The Great Sky Dragon. Sent me."

"To redeem yourself?" Kyrie yelled as the snow blew into her mouth. She looked at the snow-covered ground for a stone or something with which to hit the enemy. Nothing was visible under the snow, but she must find something. Because she now knew he had come to kill Tom.

And then Red Dragon wrapped his arms around himself, a curiously defenseless gesture. "He send me to protect the young dragon. He says I must prove I'm worthy before I'm trusted, and this is where he wants me to prove myself. I am to defend the young dragon from the Ancient Ones."

"Defend?" Kyrie asked, her voice a mere, surprised whisper as her mind arrested on the word she could not have anticipated. "Defend? Defend Tom?"

"Tom," Anthony's voice said from behind Tom, as Tom tried to see beyond the light of the diner's back window, beyond where it seemed a dazzle upon a confusion of snow. Beyond all that, he was sure now, there were two human figures. And that must mean . . . Both of them were alive, which he supposed was good.

"Tom," Anthony's voice again. "Look, I don't suppose you and Kyrie are going to stay?"

"We have to," Tom said, still intent on the two people out there in the snow. Why weren't they walking any nearer? He had no doubts that Kyrie could more than hold her own in a fight with Red Dragon, provided they were both in human shape, but all the same, he wished that they would come closer—that he could hear what they must be saying. "We need a bathroom."

It was only as the silence lengthened that Tom thought his remark might be cryptic and he was trying to figure out how to describe what had happened in their bathroom, without giving away that he shifted shapes. A daunting task. "The pipes burst," he said at last, which, of course, was true. He stared into the snow. Were they now, finally, walking towards the diner?

"Oh," Anthony said. "So you two are staying? Because, you know, my wife is alone, and we don't have groceries and if we end up not being able to . . . I mean . . . If we're snowed in for a week or . . . I know I'm supposed to work, but, you see, my wife is not used to Colorado weather, and she's nervous at all the emergency announcements on the radio and—"

Tom looked over his shoulder at Anthony's anxious face, and understood what Anthony hadn't quite said. "You want to go home," he said. "Sure. Go."

"I hate to leave you guys in the lurch, but all the prep stuff is done, and there's a pot of clam chowder and I left a large bowl of rice pudding in the freezer and—"

"Go," Tom said. He was now sure that Kyrie and Red Dragon—in human form—were coming towards him, but they were walking very slowly, and he could not figure out why. Unless Red Dragon was still naked, but Tom knew Kyrie kept a bunch of spare clothes in her car. Had she been caught short for once?

"There's . . . look, Tom, you're going to think I'm crazy, but . . ."

He had to turn around, no matter how much he wanted to keep an eye on Kyrie. And then he realized all of a sudden perhaps Kyrie was delaying coming inside because she could see Anthony there behind Tom and there was something she didn't want Anthony to notice. Like the fact that she was naked. Or the fact that she could change shapes. It was a strange part of their secretive life to know a person they trusted absolutely with their business and their local connections could not be trusted to know what they truly were. But neither Tom nor Kyrie were willing to risk the reaction.

So Tom turned, away from the door, away from the parking lot, and towards Anthony, who, looking relieved to have Tom's attention at last, held the door open, stepped aside and gestured Tom towards the inside of the diner as he said, "Tom, look. It's . . . oh, this is going to sound stupid, but . . . You see, you might have to call animal control."

"Animal control?" Tom asked, as they walked the long, slightly curving hallway that led from the back door to the diner proper. They passed the door to the two bathrooms on the left, the doors to the freezer room and the two storage rooms on the right, and then found themselves at the back of the diner, looking at the newly recovered brown vinyl booths, the five remaining green vinyl booths that Tom planned to upgrade as soon as possible, and tables newly covered in fake-marble formica. Out of habit Tom counted: five tables occupied here and, from the noise, another five or six occupied in the annex—a sort of large enclosed patio attached to the diner, which had larger tables and which was preferred by college students who arrived in huge, noisy bands.

Tom took off his leather jacket, folded it and stuffed it in the shelf under the counter, then reached to the shelf under that for an apron with The George on the chest. Then felt around again for the bandana with which he confined his hair while cooking—usually to prevent hair falling on the food, though today it would also keep the grill masonry-free, as he was sure his hair was still full of drywall, grout and tile fragments.

"Look, I don't know who deals with situations like this," Anthony said. He frowned. "For all I know it escaped from the zoo or something."

"What?"

Anthony looked embarrassed. "It's an alligator. I know you're going to think I'm completely insane, but I went out there, to throw some stuff away just a few minutes ago. Because, you know, Beth didn't come in, and we don't have anyone to bus, and the kitchen trash . . ."

"Yes." Beth was the new server, and not the most reliable of employees.

"Yeah, anyway, so, I went out there to throw the stuff away, and you . . . Oh. You're going to think I've gone nuts."

"I doubt it," Tom said flatly. He'd just noticed—sitting in his favorite table, by the front window, under a vivid scrawl advertising meatloaf dinner for $3.99—the blond and incongruously surferlike Rafiel Trall. He managed to look like a refugee beach bum, even while wrapped in a grey parka and miles from the nearest ocean. Rafiel looked up at his gaze, and raised eyebrows at Tom.

"Well . . . whatever. If you think I'm nuts, fine, but I swear there was an alligator by the dumpster, eating old fries and bits of burger."

"An alligator?"

"I know, I know, it sounds insane."

And Tom, to whom it did not sound insane at all—Tom, who, in fact, was suppressing an urge to blurt out that it was nothing but a homeless gentleman known as Old Joe, who happened to be an alligator shifter—instead shrugged and said, "No, it doesn't sound insane. You know, people buy them little as pets, then abandon them."

"In restaurant dumpsters?" Anthony asked, dubiously.

"I don't see why not," he said. "People abandon cats here all the time. Why shouldn't they abandon alligators?"

Anthony took a deep breath. "Well . . . sewers in New York, and I've heard of alligators in reservoirs here, but . . ."

"People are weird," Tom said, squirming, uncomfortable about lying to his employee and friend.

"I guess," Anthony said, frowning slightly, as though contemplating alligator-infested restaurant dumpsters were too much for him. He rallied, "Well, be careful when you go back there, all right? I beaned him with a half-rotten cantaloupe and he hid behind the dumpster but I don't think he's gone away."

"Yeah." He hoped Old Joe hadn't gone away. He was totally harmless, and mostly in need of a minder. And that minder, for the time being at least, was Tom.

"And I may go? Home?"

"Yeah." Tom saw Rafiel had stood up and approached the counter and now leaned behind Anthony, trying to catch Tom's eye. He remembered Rafiel's call had been about murder. "Yeah, go home, Anthony. I've got it covered."

He turned blindly—more on instinct than on thought—to the far end of the counter, where no customers sat, and where the two huge polished chrome coffee machines stood, probably a good twenty years out of date. They shimmered because Tom had taken steel wool to them last month, during a long, slow week, and now they managed to look retro, rather than obsolete.

On the way he grabbed still-frozen hamburger patties from a box Anthony had left beside the grill. He didn't think before he grabbed them, and he didn't think before biting into the first one. It was hard, and the cold made his teeth hurt, but he couldn't stop himself. He needed protein. He desperately needed protein, with an irrational bone-deep craving. If he ignored the craving, then there was a good chance the customers would start looking like special protein packs on two legs. Particularly since his body would be trying to heal the damage he'd caused by shifting in the cramped bathroom.

The third patty in his hand, holding it like a child holding a cookie, and hoping no one was looking too closely, he peered at the coffee machines. The caffeinated side was low, and he thought he should also bring the small backup coffee maker from the back room and use it to run hot chocolate, because on a day like this they should offer a special on hot chocolate. And doing this work at the end of the counter would allow Rafiel to approach him and talk to him without either calling attention or risk being overheard. Which was essential if that murder truly involved shapeshifters. And it probably did, because Rafiel wasn't a fool. Impetuous sometimes and a bit too cocky, but not a fool.

Tom got the spare coffee maker from the back room, and then the good spicy hot-chocolate mix from the supplies room. He darted to the front and wrote on the window with a red dry-erase marker, hot chocolate, 99¢ a cup and was setting up the coffee maker—scrupulously cleaned—to run hot chocolate, when he heard Rafiel lean over the counter. At the same time, he heard steps down the hallway. Kyrie's steps—he'd know them anywhere—and someone else's.

Behind him, Rafiel's voice hissed, suspicious, "What is
he
doing here."

Kyrie should have known that Rafiel would be at The George. As she came in with Red Dragon—in the grey sweatsuit that Tom kept in the back of the car, in case of unexpected shifts—she saw Rafiel ahead and bit her tongue before she echoed his question.

Instead, she shoved Red Dragon ahead of her, hissing as she passed, "Tom, the tables."

He looked around at her, unfocused, and she realized he was holding a hamburger patty in his hand. His eyes still had that odd, semi-focused look they got when he hadn't fully recovered from a shift. She doubted he fully understood what she told him and, anyway, it didn't seem to her as if he'd know what to do with the tables, right now. Hungry dragon. Tasty customers. Perhaps this was not the best of ideas.

"Never mind," she said, and she shoved Red Dragon into a tiny booth covered in tattered green vinyl. Customers never picked it unless the rest of the place was full. It barely fit two people and those people had best be very close indeed. Also, now that Tom had started having some of the booths recovered in new brown vinyl, the older ones, with their cigarette burn marks and the scuffs on the fifties-vintage green vinyl were ignored. That Red Dragon let her just push him, and fell to sitting, like a little kid, reaching out with his shrunken arm to hold onto the table, filled Kyrie with something very close to irritation. "Sit. Stay," she told him.

She ducked behind the counter and picked up her apron—green and embroidered with The George on the chest, atop a little figure of a cartoon dragon.

The pocket still held her notebook and pen. She picked up a coffee carafe and started towards the tables, dispensing warm-ups and taking down orders for this and that, all the while thinking of what might be going on. What on Earth could the Great Sky Dragon mean by sending Red Dragon to
protect
Tom? What could Tom need protection against? What was all that talk of
redeeming
himself? And what could Red Dragon, who could barely challenge Kyrie herself,
do
to
protect
Tom?

She came back to Tom and passed along orders for half a dozen burgers and fries, a platter of souvlaki and a bowl of clam chowder, before ducking behind the counter and assembling two salads. Tom seemed to have finished bingeing on raw beef, and his eyes looked more focused. He also looked vaguely nauseated, as he usually did when he'd just realized he'd eaten something odd.