Noah's Boy-eARC (36 page)

But in the end she had to give in, because Tom was Tom. He was caring, responsible…good. Tom was good through and through. And that brought the words pouring out of her mouth. The thought of that something else, the dragon’s egg in Tom’s mind, the thought of that thing—cold, ancient—the thought of it unleashed, permeating everything, touching all that was Tom, made Kyrie’s blood run cold. “Tom,” she said, and her voice was small and helpless, helpless as she’d never felt, not even when she was a foster child, shuffled from home to home, at the mercy of strangers and bureaucrats. “Tom.” She swallowed because there were tears in her voice, and she didn’t want to shed them. “I don’t want you to— I don’t want you to change. I don’t want you to go. I don’t want you to do anything with the Pearl and…and the stuff the dragon put in your head. I’m afraid it won’t be
you
anymore. I’m afraid it will be like that sentence when I came in, and you said…you said it was something about being buried under the dragon. I’m afraid you’ll be buried under the dragon—that Tom will disappear under the dragon. That the man I love will stop existing, taken over by…the dragons.”

Tom looked at her. It was a long, intent look, and his eyes were his own: worried, overshadowed, carefully controlled. For the first time, she realized what it must feel like to him, that alien thing in his mind.

“Tom,” she said again in a strangled voice. “I just want you to come back. I mean,
as you
.”

He blinked at her, and she had the odd idea he was trying not to cry. But there were no tears, no water in his eyes. His hand rose again and cupped her face. It was a tender gesture, intimate. “I’ll come back,” he said. His voice was husky. “If I come back at all, Kyrie, I’ll come back as me. For you.”

And then he was gone, followed by Old Joe, who somehow gave the impression of an alligator’s reptilian crawl, even while walking on two legs. Then the door closed behind Old Joe. She wondered if Tom would manage to get out of the diner unseen. She wondered if he really would come back.

A clap of thunder shook the building, like a bad omen, and she thought she’d best go and help make sure the fryer didn’t explode.

Some people went out to fight ancient horrors. To others it was given to stay behind and make sure that fryers didn’t blow up. “However small,” she told herself, “I have my part to do.” But it didn’t feel small. Nor did the confidence Tom reposed in her—that she could save the world or some of the world if all else were lost—seem small. It seemed like he expected her, Atlaslike, to raise the weight of the world on her shoulders. And she wasn’t sure she had the strength to even lift herself.

But she meant to try.

* * *

Rafiel walked out of the diner, and into pouring rain so close and heavy that all he could do was reach out and grab Conan’s shoulder, to make sure he didn’t lose him in the storm.

It wasn’t, he thought, that he was afraid that Conan would run away, but he was afraid that the small Asian man would get lost in this mess and…And what? Drown?

But immediately after the facetious word, it came to Rafiel it wouldn’t be that impossible. In the way of Colorado rains, sudden and violent, if it went on for more than a couple of hours, it would overwhelm the storm water system that was designed for no more than a trickle.

Rafiel remembered being five and going to school at a time when it had rained for a week, and the entire road had become a raging river. The school hadn’t closed, but Rafiel’s mom had held onto his hand very tightly, as they walked on the sidewalk, a few inches above the roaring water.

For just a moment, this cold torrent made him wonder if just maybe, it was an omen, if they were going to be fighting blind. Well, it wasn’t going to be helpful. They couldn’t have Conan fly above and find any landmarks.

They got inside the car by touch, Rafiel pushing Conan through the door he’d heard open. Inside, they sat in the car, streaming water.

“Take the handcuffs off,” Conan said.

Rafiel looked at the diner. He was sure people were straining to see them, but the chances of their seeing inside his car, in this, were next to none. He reached across and removed the handcuffs. Both he and Conan looked like they’d stepped out of a shower.

He saw headlights come out, and from the flash of a white top, thought that Cas and Nick had put their top up, at least. That car must be good and soggy.

Conan pulled back at his streaming hair, and looked up at Rafiel. “We can’t fly above and…”

“I can’t anyway,” Rafiel said. “At any time.”

“No. But I can’t either. Not in this. Once, Tom flew to Denver to see his father in the middle of a storm, and said he was almost at Pueblo before he realized he’d gone wrong. It’s not…easy.”

“So, we don’t go above. Our challenge right now,” Rafiel said, “is to stay on the road and find the motel.”

They took off from the parking lot, the white SUV almost hydroplaning in the water already accumulated, and fishtailing madly as they hit the minor river that Pride Street had become. Rafiel was aware of the headlights of Cas’ and Nick’s convertible ahead of him, and just hoped he wouldn’t accidentally hit them.

* * *

“Well, no flying,” Old Joe said, as they stood just outside the back door to the diner, under the tiny cantilevered overhang there. “Not in this. Not that I could, of course.”

Tom’s mind had gone instead to how convenient this downpour was. In the blind sheets of rain falling—something rarer in Colorado than a diamond in a sandbox—no one inside the diner would be able to see them leave. Even if they weren’t distracted with the drama of Conan being dragged through the diner in handcuffs, which Tom was sure they were because Rafiel, Conan and the other two officers had waited outside the storage room door for Tom and Old Joe to come out. When they’d come out and turned towards the back, the officers walked Conan to the entrance to the corridor from the diner, very effectively blocking both sight and the chance of anyone coming back there and seeing Tom leave. They’d been reciting Conan’s Miranda rights loudly as Tom and Old Joe got out the door.

But even with all this, Tom thought, even with the distraction, even with most diners—or all of them—concentrating on the Conan drama and not on what Tom was up to, it would be useless to get out stealthily if there had been good weather. Tom was not so stupid—nor did he imagine Jao was—that he wouldn’t have a lookout flying above the diner.

Tom looked up, towards the slate-grey sky that lent its color to the upper layers of the deluge. It wouldn’t last. It couldn’t last. It rarely did. Colorado rains normally came in boring drizzles that went on for weeks or in sudden terrifying torrents that let floods down the canyons, but which did not last.

But for now, it gave them a hiding space. “It’s a good thing,” he said. “No one can see us leave.”

“You don’t want dragons in the way, as you find the…artifact?” Old Joe asked, as he and Tom stepped out into the sheets of rain. “You might need their help, dragon boy.”

Tom nodded. “But not their interference with doing whatever needs to be done with the Pearl of Heaven, whatever you think I should do.”

Old Joe clacked his teeth, in that laugh thing he did. “Yeah,” he said. “I think you think right, dragon boy. We’ll call them if we need them, but afterward. The problem with dragons is that they’re stupid.”

“Present company excepted,” Tom said pleasantly. He’d been edging towards the white van in which they picked up supplies from the farmers’ markets in the spring and summer, and Old Joe paused, looking at Tom, so close that Tom could see his face, greeny-brown eyes seemingly shining in the rain.

The eyes filled with mischief, and the teeth clacked. “I don’t understand,” he said, then grinned, a ghastly, broken-toothed grin, and said “Just pulling your leg, dragon boy. I would not try to save you if you were stupid. But most dragons are. Reptile brain.”

Tom refrained from telling Old Joe that alligators are reptiles, too, but as the old man started moving, weaving under the rain in a fair imitation of an alligator, Tom said, “Hey. We’ll use this van.”

Old Joe turned and clacked his teeth. “We will? Why not walk?”

“Not enough time,” Tom said. “I can feel the Great Sky Dragon stirring. We must get to him before he’s somehow forced to activate the gates.”

Old Joe hesitated, then nodded.

But as he took the passenger seat in the van and let Tom buckle him in, he sighed, regretfully. “It’s such lovely water,” he said. “Not much water here anymore.”

Tom wondered briefly about that “anymore.” Had Old Joe come from warmer, wetter climes? Or had he been here since Colorado had been a warmer, wetter—and lower—clime?

There was no use asking. You got roundabout answers like “Before horses” and “When it was different.” Tom had tried before.

It occurred to him, with a shiver, that if the spirit creatures truly were the ancestors of shifters, or perhaps of everything on Earth, and if they’d taken flesh on Earth and then shaped everything around them, then it was quite possible that when Old Joe was visiting Dinosaur Ridge, he was remembering old friends. It would be like normal old people visiting cemeteries.

Once more Tom felt as though he were leaning over the unfathomable possibility that he, himself, would live so close to forever as made no difference. It was rather like leaning over an abyss and finding out it was, in fact, bottomless.

He started the van and backed carefully out of the parking lot and into the alley. If anyone
were
following from above, they would be less likely to catch a glimpse of movement, of white, if the van followed the alley to the next major intersection. The alley was so narrow, looking down into it was difficult due to the buildings on either side and the occasional overhanging tree.

Once at the major intersection, their lights, their movement would get lost in the stream of other lights and movement.

“I guess,” Tom told Old Joe, “you’ve been alive a long time?”

Old Joe was staring ahead. “You lose track,” he said, “after a while. And anyway…” He stopped a long time and sighed. “Numbers. I never liked numbers.”

“Did you come from the stars?” Tom asked.

This caused a chuckle, a clacking of teeth together, a shake of the head. “No. Not me. Earth-born me.” Another long silence followed, and Tom looked to Old Joe, as they stopped at the end of the alley, waiting for a break to get into the flow of traffic again.

Old Joe had narrowed his eyes, as though he were trying to see something through the rain. But since he was looking at the buildings across the street—shuttered warehouses with blank brick facades—Tom guessed that he wasn’t actually looking at much of anything but the past, or his own thoughts. Old Joe sighed, again. “It was a long time ago, but I knew some of the came-from-the-stars people.” Another silence. “There was lovely girl, but she—”

A long break and another sigh. “It’s all the same, you know, born from the stars, born wrong, Earth-born human. Shifter and human and all. We all learn to be human.”

He pronounced human “hooman,” which gave Tom a brief vision of Old Joe as a LOL alligator, as he turned into the stream of traffic and tried to decide whether it would be easier or more difficult to take the highway up to the amusement park. “We are human,” Tom said.

“Yes, that’s what I said. Human nonshifters need to learn to be human too, like star-born, like wrong-born.”

“Wrong-born?”

“When your mother and your father…” He sighed. “Like Maduh’s child. When you mate in…not-human form. Then child born not-human form. Live longer. Spend more time animal. Take longer to learn to be human. But in the end must learn to be human. There is nothing else.”

“There is animal,” Tom said, genuinely puzzled, because he knew Old Joe spent a lot more time as an alligator than as a human, and seemed to enjoy it far more, possibly because alligators didn’t have to wear clothes, wash or use silverware. Though once when he’d asked, Old Joe had told him that the problem was that human itched. Which Tom wasn’t even about to parse.

In the silence, he saw, through the corner of his eye, Old Joe shake his head violently. “Animal is fun for shifter. It’s like…playing. But you’re always a little human, even in animal, when you learn to be human. You stay. And you enjoy being animal, but is playing. Being animal without being human is not…really being alive. It’s…it’s nothing. It’s one day and another and another; it’s doing wrong without knowing is wrong. It’s not living.”

“You’re saying animals are not sentient?” Tom said. Then, realizing he might have outstripped Old Joe’s English vocabulary—he often got the impression he should be having these discussions with the old man in ancient Egyptian or something—he said,“I mean, animals are not aware they’re alive.”

Old Joe shrugged, a movement Tom glimpsed as he started up the ramp onto the highway. “Don’t know. Your cat boy, the Not Dinner one, might know he’s alive. Don’t know. Their brain is different. But shifter-born animal isn’t right until he learns to be human.”

“You mean, like the little feral, Maduh’s son? The one who killed a lot of people around the amusement park?” It came to Tom that whether the young creature was pathetic or not, whether innocent or not in the sense that he didn’t know he’d done anything wrong, Tom was heading towards his lair. He wondered if the creature would be a problem. What if Mom had left the feral cub guarding the Pearl of Heaven? What if she was guarding the Pearl of Heaven herself? What did Tom intend to do about that?

“Yeah,” Old Joe said, though it had the feeling of repressing some other thought, some other words he was not going to say. “I worry a lot about him. I don’t know what become of him.” The sudden cackle and the clacking of teeth. “And I don’t know what become of us, when we go up against him. He’s likely to be guarding the Pearl. I don’t want to kill innocent cub, but we might have to give him the sleep-death.” He clacked teeth. “Because stupid doesn’t mean not dangerous, and those in animal form who don’t know human often are cunning, fast. Lethal.”

“I was thinking the same,” Tom said. The highway was relatively clear of water, at least most of its length, though a bit collected in the shallow bottom of hills. At least highways were built to shed water, even if old city streets and alleys seemed sometimes to be built to collect it. “I was thinking that we’d have to find a way to get him out of the way without hurting him.”