Most of Goldport was equally dark, from its slumbering suburbs to the blind silence of its downtown shops. Only the streetlights shone, at intervals, piercing the velvet blackness like so many stars.

At the edge of the western suburbs that climbed -- square block after square block -- into the lower slopes of the Rockies, the neon sign outside a Chinese Restaurant flickered. Three Luck Dragon flared, faded, then flared again and finally turned off completely.

A hand with nails that were, perhaps, just a little too long turned over a sign that hung on the window, so that the word closed faced the parking lot.

After a while, a sound broke the silence. A flapping, noise, as though of sheets unfurling in the silent night. Or perhaps of large wings beating. Descending.

Had anyone been awake, he’d have seen a large, dark creature – serpentine and thin – with vast unfolding wings descend from the night sky till his huge taloned feet met the asphalt. It closed its wings about itself and waited.

It did not wait long. From alleys and darkened streets, people emerged: teenagers, in tight jeans and t-shirts, looking nervous, sidling out of the shadows, glancing over their shoulders as if afraid of being followed. From yet other alleys ... creatures emerged: long, sinuous, in moist glistening colors between green and

blue. They slid, monstrous heads low to the ground, curved fangs like daggers unsheathed in the moonlight. And sometimes dragons seemed to shift to naked teenagers and back again. In and out of the shadows, knit with walls and garbage bins, slithering along the hot cement of the pavements came young men who were dragons and dragons who were nervous young men.

They gathered in front of the Great Sky Dragon. And waited.

At length the dragon spoke, in a voice like pearls rolling upon old gold "Where is it?" he asked. "Did you get it back?"

The amorphous crowd of humans and dragons moved. There was the impression of someone pushed forward. A rustle of cloth and wings. A murmur of speech.

The young man pushed forward was slender, though there was a suggestion of muscles beneath his leg-molding jeans and of a substantial chest straining the fabric of the white t-shirt. His bare arm displayed a tattoo of a large, green, glistening dragon and his eyes had an asian fold, though it was clear from his light brown hair, his pale skin that he was not wholly asian.

He was, however, completely scared. He stood trembling in front of the monster, who brought a vast golden eye to fix on him. "Yesssssss?" The dragon said. "You have something to report? You’ve found the Pearl of Heaven?"

The young man shook his head, his straight, lank hair swinging from side to side.

"No?" the dragon asked. Light glimmered on his fangs as he spoke, and his golden eye came very close to the boy, as if to examine him better.

"It wasn’t there," the youth said, rapidly, his English not so much accented, as retaining the lilt of someone who’d grown up in a community full of Chinese speakers. "We looked all over his apartment. It wasn’t there."

The golden eye blinked, vein-laced green skin obstructing it for a just a moment. Then the huge head pulled back a little and tilted. "We do not," it said, fangs glimmering. "Tolerate failure."

It darted forward, so quickly the movement seemed to leave a green trail in the air like an after-image. The fangs glistened. A delicate tongue came forth.

The boy’s scream echoed a second too late, like bad special effects. It still hung in air as the youth, feet and hands flailing, was lifted high into the night by the great dragon head.

A crunching sound. A brief glimmer. Two halves of the boy tumbling, in a shower of blood, towards the parking lot.

A scurry of cloth and wings followed, as men and dragons scrambled away.

The great golden eyes turned to them. The green muzzle was stained red. "We do not tolerate failure," it said. "Find the Pearl of Heaven. Kill the thief."

It opened its wings and, still looking intently at the crowd, flapped their great green length, till it rose into the dark, dark sky.

In the parking lot below no one moved till the last vestiges of the sinuous green and gold body had disappeared from view.

#

Kyrie was worried about Tom. Which was strange, because Tom was not one of her friends. Nor would she have thought she could care less if he stopped showing up at work altogether.

But now he was late and she was worried...

She tapped her foot impatiently, as she stared out at the window of the Athens, the Greek diner on Fairfax Avenue where she’d worked for the last year. Her wavy hair, dyed in multicolored layers, gave the effect of a tapestry. It went well with her honey-dark skin, her exotic features and the bright red feather earring dangling from her ear, but it looked oddly out of place with the much-washed full-length red apron with Athens blazoned in green across the chest.

Outside everything appeared normal – the winding serpentine road between tall brick buildings, the darkened facade of the used cd store across the street, the occasional lone passing car.

She looked away, disgusted, from the windows splashed with bright, hand-scrawled advertisements for specials – souvlaki and fries - $3.99, clam chowder - 99 ¢, Fresh Rice Pudding – and at the large plastic clock high on the wall.

Midnight. And Tom should have come in at nine. Tom had never been late before. Oh, she’d had her doubts when Frank hired the young street tough with the unkempt dark curls, the leather jacket and boots and the track marks up both of his arms, clear as day. But he had always come in on time, and he was polite to the customers, and he never seemed to be out of it. Not during work time.

"Kyrie," Frank said, from behind her. Kyrie turned to see him, behind the counter – a short, dark middle aged man, who looked Greek but seemed to be a mix of Italian and French and Greek and whatever else had fallen in the melting pot. He was testy today. The woman he’d been dating – or at least sweet on, as she often walked with him to work, or after work – hadn’t come in.

He gave Kyrie a dark look from beneath his bushy eyebrows. "Table seven," he said.

She looked at table seven, the broad table by the front window. And that was a problem, because the moon was full on the table, bathing it. It didn’t seem to bother the gaggle of students seating at it, talking and laughing and eating a never-ending jumble of slices of pie, dolmades, rice pudding dishes and olives, all of it washed down with coffee.

Of course, there was no reason it should bother them, Kyrie reminded herself. Probably not. Moonlight only bothered her. Only her...

No. She wouldn’t let moonlight do anything. She wouldn’t give in to it. She had it under control. It had been months. She was not going to lose control now.

The students needed warm ups for their coffee. And heaven knew they might very well have decided they needed more olives. Or pie.

She lifted the walk-through portion of the counter and ducked behind for the carafe, then back again, walking briskly, towards the table.

Her hand stretched, with the pot’s plastic handle firmly grasped in manicured fingers, adorned with violet-blue fingernail polish. One cup refilled, two, and a young man probably two or three years younger than Kyrie stretched his cup for a warm-up. The cup glistened, glazed porcelain under the full moonlight of August.

Kyrie’s hand entered the pool of moonlight, brighter than the fluorescent lights in the distant ceiling. She felt it like a sting upon the skin, like bathwater, just a little too hot for touch. For a disturbing second, she felt as if her fingernails lengthened.

She bit the inside of her cheek, and told herself no, but it didn’t help, because part of her mind, some part way at the back and mostly submerged, gave her memories of a hot and wet jungle, of walking amid the lush foliage. Memories of soft mulch beneath her paws. Memories of creatures scurrying in the dark undergrowth. Creatures who were scared of her.

Moonlight felt like wine on her lips, like a touch of fever. She felt as if an unheard rhythm pounded through her veins and presently–

"Could we have another piece of pie, too?" a redheaded girl with a southern drawl asked, snapping Kyrie out of her trance.

Fingernails – Kyrie checked – were the right length. Was it her imagination that the polish seemed a little cracked and crazed? Probably.

She could still feel the need for a jungle, for greenery – she who’d grown up in foster homes in several cement-and-metal jungles. The biggest woods she’d ever seen were city parks. Or the miles of greenery from the windows of the greyhound that had brought her to Colorado.

These memories, these thoughts, were just illusions, nothing more. She remembered those times she had surrendered to the madness.

"One piece of pie," she said, taking the small notebook from her apron pocket and concentrating gratefully on its solidity. Paper that rustled, a pencil that was growing far too blunt and required lots of pressure on the page.

"And some olives," one of the young men said.

"Oh, and more rice pudding," one of the others said, setting off a lengthy order, paper being scratched by pencil and nails that, Kyrie told herself, were not growing any longer. Not at all.

Still she felt tension leave her as she turned her back on the table and walked out of the moonlit area. Passing into the shadow felt as if some inner pressure receded, as though something she’d been fighting with all her will and mind had now been withdrawn.

While she was drawing a breath of relief, she heard the sound – like wings unfolding, or like a very large blanket flapping. It came, she thought, from the back of the diner, from the parking lot that abutted warehouses and the blind wall at the back of a bed and breakfast.

Kyrie wanted to go look, but people were waiting for their food, so she set about getting the pie and the olives and the rice pudding -- all of it pre-prepared -- from the refrigerator behind the counter. Next to it, Frank was peeling and cutting potatoes for the Athens’ famous fresh made fries, never frozen, which were also advertised on the facade, somewhere.

While she worked, some of the regulars came in. A tall blond man who carried a journal in which he wrote obsessively every night between midnight and four in the morning. And a heavy-set, dark haired woman who came in for a pastry on her way to her job at one of the warehouses.

Kyrie looked again at the clock. Half an hour, and still no Tom. She took the newcomers’ orders.

On one of her trips behind the counter, for the carafe of coffee, she told Frank, "Tom is late."

But Frank only shrugged and grunted, which was pretty odd behavior for the guy who had brought Tom in out of nowhere, hired him with no work history while Tom was, admittedly, living in the homeless shelter down the street.

As Kyrie returned the carafe to its rest, after the round of warmups, she heard the scream. It was a lone scream, at first, startled and cut short. It too came from the parking lot at the back.

She told herself it was nothing to do with her. There were all sorts of people out there at night. Goldport didn’t exactly have a large population of homeless, but it had some, and some of them were crazy enough to scream for no reason.

Swallowing hard, she told herself it meant nothing, absolutely nothing. It was just a sound, one of the random sounds of night in the city. It wasn’t anything to worry about. It–

The scream echoed again, intense, frightened, a wail of distress in the night. Looking around her, Kyrie could tell no one else had heard it. Or at least, if Frank’s shoulders were a little tenser than normal, as he dropped fries into a huge vat of oil, it was the tenseness of expectation, as if he were listening for Tom.

It wasn’t the look of someone who’d heard a death scream. In fact, the only person who might have heard it was the blond guy who had stopped writing on his journal and was staring up, mid-air. But Kyrie was not about to ask a man who wrote half the night what exactly he had heard or hadn’t. Besides the guy -- nicknamed the poet by the diner staff -- always gave the impression of being on edge and ready to lose all self control, from the tips of his long, nervous fingers, to the ends of his tennis shoes.

And yet...

And yet she couldn’t pretend nothing had happened. She knew she had heard the scream. With that type of scream, someone or something was in trouble bad. Back there. In the parking lot. At this time of night most of the clientele of the Athens came in on foot, from the nearby apartment complexes or from the college dorms just a couple of blocks away. It could be hours before anyone went out to the parking lot.

Kyrie didn’t want to go out there, either. But she could not ignore it. She had the crazy feeling that whatever was happening out there involved Tom, and, what the heck, she might not like the man, but neither did she want him dead.

She gave a last round of warmups, looked towards the counter where Frank was still seemingly absorbed in his frying, and edged out towards the hallway that led to the back.

It curved past the bathrooms, so if Frank saw her, he would think she was going to the bathroom. She was not sure why she didn’t want him to know she was going to the parking lot. Except that – as she got to the glass door at the back – when she saw the parking lot bathed in the moonlight, she thought that something might happen out there, something... Something she didn’t want her employer to know about her.

Not that it could happen. There was nothing that could happen, she thought, as she turned the key. Nothing had happened in months. She wasn’t sure what she thought had happened back then hadn’t all been a dream.

The key hadn’t been turned in some time and it stuck, but finally the resistence gave way, and she opened the door, and plunged into the burning moonlight.

Feeling of jungle, need for undergrowth and vegetation, her heart beating madly in her eardrums, and she was holding it together, barely holding it together, hoping...

She jumped out onto the parking lot and called out, "Tom–"

Something not quite a roar answered her. She stopped.

And then the smell hit her. Fresh blood. Spilled blood. She trembled and tried to stop. Tried to think.

But her nose scented blood and her mouth filled with saliva, and her hands curved and her nails grew. Somehow, with clumsy claws, she unbuttoned her uniform. She never knew how. As the last piece of clothing fell to the ground, she felt a spasm contort her whole body.

And a large, black jungle cat ran swiftly across the parking lot. Towards the smell of blood.

#

Soft pads on asphalt. Asphalt. The word appeared alien to Kyrie’s mind, locked in the great loping body, feeling the movement, the agility, and not quite believing it.

Strange feeling on pads. Hard, scratchy.

Muscles coiling and uncoiling like darkness flowing in moonlit patches. Bright moonlight like a river of fire and joy. Running. Smelling with sense that no human ever possessed.

And the feline stopped, alert, head thrown back, sniffing. A soft growl made its way up a throat that Kyrie could only just believe was her own.

Smell – a rich, spicy, flowing smell, like cinnamon on a cold winter night in Kyrie’s human memory, like rich molten chocolate, like freshly picked apples to that dwindling part of herself who thought with human memories.

She took a deep breath and felt her mouth fill and overflow with drool, while her paws moved, step on step, towards the smell, soft pads on asphalt, growl rising from throat.

What was it? What could it be? Her human mind could not identify the smell which came at her with depth and meaning that humans did not seem capable of perceiving.

She felt drool drop through her half-open mouth, onto the concrete, as she looked around for the possible source of the wondrous scent.

There were... cars – she had to force herself to remember the word, to realize these were man made and not some natural plant or animal in a jungle she’d never seen but which was all this body knew and wanted to remember.

Cars. She shook her great head. Her own small, battered Ford, and two big vans that belonged to Frank and which he used for the daily shopping.

Around the edge of the vehicles she followed the scent. It was coming from right there, behind the vans, from dark liquid flowing along the asphalt, between the wheels of the van. She padded around the vans. Liquid looked black and glistened under moonlight, and she was about to take an experimental lap when the shadow startled her.

At first it was just that. A shadow, formless, moving on the concrete. Something with wings. Something.

Her hackles rising, she jumped back, cowering, head lifted, growling. And saw it.

A... lizard. No. No lizard had ever been this size. A ... creature, green and scaly and immense, with wings that stretched between the Earth and the sky.

The feline Kyrie dropped to her belly, paws stretched our in front of her, a low growl rising, while her hair stood on end, trying to make the already large jungle cat look bigger.

The human Kyrie, torpid and half-dormant, a passenger in her own brain that had been taken over by this dream of moonlight and forest, looked at the beast and thought Dragon.

Not the slender, convoluted form of the Chinese dragons with their huge, bewhiskered faces. No. Nordic. A sturdy nordic dragon, stout of body, with the sort of wings that truly seemed like they could devour the icy blue sky of the Norsemen and not notice.

Huge, feral, it stood before Kyrie, fangs bared, both wings extended, tip to tip each probably a good twelve feet. Its muzzle was stained a dark red, and – as Kyrie knit her belly to the concrete – it hissed, a threatening hiss.

It will flame me next, Kyrie thought. But she couldn’t get the big cat to move. Bewildered by something that the now dominant part of her couldn’t comprehend, she lay on her belly and growled.

And the Kyrie part of her mind, the human part, looked bewildered at the dragon wings which were a fantastic construction of bones and translucent glittering skin that faded from green to gold. And she thought that dragons weren’t supposed to look that beautiful. Particularly not a dragon whose muzzle was stained with blood.

And on that, on the one word, she identified the enticing smell. Blood. Fresh blood. She remembered smelling it before the shape-shift. But it smelled nothing like blood through the big cat’s senses.

With the feline’s sharp eyes, she could see, beneath the paws of the dragon, a dark bundle that looked like a human body.

Human blood. And she’d almost lapped it.

Shock and revulsion did what her fear couldn’t. They broke the human Kyrie out of the prison at the back of her own mind. Free, she pushed the animal back.

Push and push and push, she told herself she must be Kyrie. She must be human. Kyrie was smart enough to run away before the dragon let out with fire.

And never mind that the dragon might run her down, kill her. At least she would be able to think with a human mind.

All of a sudden, the animal gave, and she felt the spasms that contorted her body back to two human legs, two human arms, the solidity of a human body, lying on the concrete, hands on the ground, toes supporting her lower body.

She started to rise to run, but the dragon made a sudden, startled movement.

It was not a spring to attack nor a cowering in fear. Either of those she could have accepted as normal for the beast. It was a vague, startled jump. A familiar, startled jump.

Like coming on Tom around the corner of the hallway leading to the bathroom and meeting him coming out of it. Tom jumped that way, startled, not quite scared, and she always thought he’d been shooting up in there – must have been shooting up in there.

Now the same guilty jump from the dragon, and the massive head swung down to her prone body, to look at her with huge, startled blue eyes. Tom’s eyes.

#

Kyrie. His human mind identified her a second before his reptilian self, startled, scared, surprised, would have opened his mouth and let out with a jet of flame.

His mouth opened, he just managed to control the flame. He tried to shape her name, but the reptilian throat didn’t lend itself to it.

Tom felt his nictating eyelids blink, sideways, before his normal eyelids, the eyelids he was used to, blinked up and down.

She stood up, slowly, shivering. She was honey-colored all over. Both sets of his eyelids blinked again. He’d always thought that she had a tan. No lines. And her breasts were much fuller than they looked beneath the uniform and apron – heavy, rounded forms miraculously, perfectly horizontal in defiance of gravity.

He realized he was staring and looked up to see her looking into his eyes, horrified. He tried to shape an apology but what came out was a semi-growling hiss.

"Tom," she said, her voice raspy and hoarse, her eyes frightened and... pitying? "Tom, you killed someone."

Killed? He was sure he hadn’t. He stopped on a breath, then tasted in his mouth the metallic and – to his dragon senses – bright and delicious symphony of flavors that was blood.

Blood? Human blood?

The shock of it seemed to wake him. He looked down to see a corpse between his paws. His paws were smeared with blood. The corpse was a bundle, indistinct, neither male nor female, neither young nor old. It smelled dead. Freshly dead.

Had he run someone down? Killed him? Had he?

He tried to remember and he couldn’t. The dragon...

He took his hand to his forehead, felt the clamminess of blood on his skin, and realized he was human again. Human, smeared with blood, standing by a corpse.

And Kyrie had seen him kill someone.

"No," he said, not sure to whom he spoke. "Oh, please, no."

#

Tom’s voice was low at the best of times. Now it came out growly and raspy, like gravel dragging around on a river bottom. His transformation, much faster than hers, had been so fast that she’d hardly seen it.

He stood by the corpse. Broad shoulders, small waist, muscular legs, powerful arms. A body that, except for his being all of five six, and for the track marks on his arms, could have graced the cover of body-building magazines. Only his muscles weren’t developed to the grotesque level the field demanded.

And above it all, was a face that managed to make him look like a frightened little boy.

His hair had come loose from the rubber band he used to confine it in a ponytail. Loose, it just touched his arms, in a rumple of irregular curls. His skin was pale, very pale all over. Not exactly vampire white. More like aged ivory, even and smooth. And his eyes were a deep, dark and yet somehow brilliant, blue.

They now opened in total horror, as he stared at her and rasped, "I didn’t. Kill."

Her first reaction was to snap out that of course he had. She’d seen him by the corpse, his muzzle stained by blood. Then she remembered she’d almost lapped the blood, herself. Lapped. And she’d known what it was before shifting too.

She shuddered, and remembered what the blood smelled like to the jungle cat. The beast as she’d learned to call it years ago, when she’d first turned into it. Or hallucinated turning into it, as she’d convinced herself had happened over time. That theory might have to be discarded now, unless she was hallucinating Tom’s shifting, too.

"I don’t remember chasing," he said. "Killing."

A look down at the corpse told her nothing, save that it had been mauled. But wouldn’t Tom... The dragon have mauled it anyway? Whether he’d killed it or not?

Tom was looking down, horrified, trembling. Shock. He was in shock. If she left him here, he would stay like that. Till they were caught.

She reached for his arm. His skin felt skin cold, clammy to the touch. Was it being the dragon? Or being naked in the night? Or the shock? She had to do something about the shock. No. She had to do something, period.

"Come," she said. "Come."

He obeyed. Like a child, he allowed her to pull him all the way to the back door of the diner.

She stooped to pick up her clothes, trying not to get blood on them.

#

Tom stumbled after Kyrie, confused. The parking lot was cold. He felt it on his wet skin. Wet. He looked down and saw patches of blood on his body. Human blood.

"You’re shaking like a leaf," Kyrie whispered. She opened the back door of the Athens and looked in, along the corridor that curved gently towards the bathroom. She said, "Go in. Quickly. Get into the women’s bathroom. Don’t lock. I’ll come."

He rushed forward, obeying. In his current state, he couldn’t think of doing anything but obeying. But a part of his brain, moving fast beneath the sluggish surface of his shocked mind, wondered why the women’s bathroom. Then he realized the women’s bathroom was just one large room and locked, while in the men’s restroom they’d managed to cram the stall and a row of urinals. And the outer door didn’t lock.

Yeah, there would be more room in the women’s bathroom to clean up, he thought, even as he skidded into the door to the bathroom, on damp, bare feet.

"Why didn’t you turn the light on?" Kyrie said, coming in after him, turning the light on.

She went to the sink and started washing herself, making use of the paper towels and the water. Considering where she’d been, she had very little blood on her. Not like Tom. He tasted blood on his tongue.

And now he was shaking again.

"Stop that," Kyrie said. She was clean now, and putting her clothes back on. How had she managed to get out of her clothes before shifting?

He tried to remember his own clothes, and where he’d left them, but his memory was fogged and confused, intercut by the bright golden blur of the dragon’s thoughts.

"Are you going to clean yourself or am I going to have to?" Kyrie asked. She’d somehow got fully dressed before he could notice. She stood there, looking proper, in her apron. She’d even put the earring back on her ear. She’d remembered to take that off. What was she? Some kind of machine?

Tom pulled his hair back from his face. "I’m naked," he said.

"I’ve noticed," she said, but she wasn’t looking. And now she had the expression back on her face – the expression she’d shown Tom since the first day he’d arrived at the Athens and Frank had offered him a job. The expression that meant he was no good, he was possibly dangerous, and that Frank was crazy to trust him.

He knew she would glare at his track marks next and, damn it all, he hadn’t shot up since he’d got– Well, since he’d got the job. He stopped the thoughts of whatever else he’d got forcefully. You really never knew what the other dragons could hear. He didn’t think they were telepathic. He thought they were just watching him really closely. But he wasn’t about to bet on it. No way. He wasn’t about to let his guard down. He’d seen what they could do, way back when–

He shook his head and took deep breaths to drive away his memory – which could force him to become a dragon as fast as the shine of the moon or the smell of blood. He concentrated on the thought that it was nearby – it. The treasure he’d stolen. The magic that helped him stay himself.

A wet and cold paper towel touched his chest and he jumped. Kyrie’s glance at him held a challenge. "I’ll do it if I have to," she said.

He shook his head and pulled the towel from her hand, rubbing it briskly on his shoulders, his arms, his chest. He discarded it in the trash can, thinking about DNA evidence and trying not to. Telling himself he couldn’t have done it, he couldn’t have killed anyone. He couldn’t. He just couldn’t. That was something he couldn’t live with – knowing for sure he’d killed anyone.

But the police would think– The police–

He started shaking again and took deep breaths to control it. He folded another mass of paper towels and wet it and ran it on his face, his hands. The face looking back at him from the mirror looked more red than white, smeared with blood.

Whose blood? Who had that person been, out in the parking lot? Tom didn’t remember anything. Nothing, before opening his eyes, staring at the dead body, and seeing Kyrie. And that wasn’t right. It had been like that at first, but it had given him more control and he was supposed to know what he’d done while in dragon form. He was supposed to remember.

Kyrie was looking at him, attentively, cautiously, like a bomb expert trying to decide which wire to cut in a peculiar homemade contraption.

Tom bit his tongue and managed a good imitation of his normal, gruff tone. "It’s all right," he said. "I’m fine."

She cocked her head to one side, managing to convey wordlessly that there were about a million interpretations of fine and none of them applied to him. But aloud she said, "I’m going out for just a second. Lock up after me. When I come back I will knock once. Only once. Let me in when I do."

Tom locked the door behind her, obediently. He wondered where she was going, but it wasn’t like he had any room left to argue about what she might want to do. He should count himself lucky she hadn’t screamed bloody murder when she’d found him in the parking lot. Perhaps she should have screamed bloody murder. Wasn’t that the name for what he’d done? No– He hadn’t– He couldn’t–

A muffled knock. He realized that not only had Kyrie been gone for a while, but also that he’d somehow managed to remove most of the red stains from his hands and face. His hair was a drying, sticky mass that he didn’t want to investigate, much less clean.

"That will do," she said. "You can wear these." She extended to him, at the end of a stiff arm – like a person feeding a wild animal – what looked like a red jogging suit.

"It’s mine," she said, as though mistaking his hesitation for a belief that she’d mugged a vagrant for the clothes. Or taken them from the corpse. "I usually jog in the morning before going home. Safer here. It’s a main street."

He swallowed hard, trying not to think of what street would be less safe than Fairfax. But then if she lived nearby – as he did – in the interlacing warren of downtown streets, there would be many less safe. Well, not less safe in reality – the crime rate in Goldport was never that high and most deaths were crimes committed by and between gang members. But in the side streets, dotted with tiny houses, or with huge Victorian mansions long since turned into tiny apartments, a woman jogging alone in the wee hours of the morning would not be seen. And that, perhaps, meant she wouldn’t be safe – because she could disappear and not be noticed for hours.

A thought that whoever tried to attack this woman would be far from safe himself crossed Tom’s mind and he beat it down. Perhaps that was what she was afraid of. Of being mugged in the dark street and killing–

He grabbed the jogging suit. It felt too cold to his hands, and too distant – as if it weren’t real fabric but some fabric-like illusion that his senses refused to acknowledge fully. As if he weren’t really here. As if this were all a dream and he would, shortly, wake up back in the safety of his teenage room, in his father’s house, with his stereo, his tv, his game system, all those things he’d needed when life itself wasn’t exciting enough.

The clothes fit. Of course they would fit. Kyrie was his height, just about, and while his shoulders were much broader, and his chest far more muscular, she had other... endowments. A memory of her in the parking lot swept like a wave over him, and he felt a warm blush climb his cheeks and adjusted his – her – jogging pants and prayed that she wasn’t focusing there just now.

But he might have been too late, because she frowned as if she were about to ask if blood turned him on. She didn’t, though. Just said, "Wait for me. By the back door."

"The back?" he said. His voice came out too low and raspy. "But–"

"You can’t walk through the diner like that. It’s clear your hair is caked with blood. Someone might notice and say something. Later. When... someone asks."

The police. But neither of them mentioned it.

"I’m going to tell Frank I’m going out for a moment," she said.

He nodded. She was efficient. She was determined. And she was helping him. It was more than he could have hoped for. And certainly no fault at all of hers if it made him feel helpless and out of control.

As he hadn’t been in six months.

#

Kyrie wasn’t sure what she was going to tell Frank. She had some idea he’d already be on simmer from what he would see as her sudden disappearance. In the ten steps between the bathroom and the diner proper, she ran her options through her mind – she could tell him she felt ill. She felt ill enough after the mess in the parking lot and the more specific mess in the bathroom. And the last thing any greasy spoon owner wanted was to have a sick employee – visibly sick – tending to tables. On the other hand, if she did that, she was going to be some hours short this month. Because there was no way she could come back again tonight. And there was rent to pay.

She didn’t know what she going to say at all until she emerged from the corridor into the yellowish light of the diner and said, "Frank, I need a few minutes, to go to Tom’s." Which made perfect sense as she said it. A few minutes should suffice to go to Tom’s house, because Tom walked here, and if Tom walked here, he couldn’t live very far away. That meant a couple of minutes would also see him back to his home with no problem at all. And her back here, pretending she’d just dropped by his place.

Frank was attending to the students’ table and had the sort of look on his face that meant he was trying very hard not to explode. Kyrie had worked for him for a year and she’d been a reliable employee, never late, rarely sick and trustworthy enough to be left alone with the register on occasion. None of which were easy to come by in a college town in Colorado for the late night shift and considering what Frank was willing to pay.

He looked over his shoulder at Kyrie, and his brows beetled together, nonetheless, and he managed, "What? More minutes?"

"Tom is sick," she said. "He called me." Let Frank wonder why and how she’d given Tom her cell phone number. "He wants me to buy him some stuff at the pharmacy and drop it by. Over the counter stuff," she added, thinking that most of what Tom probably took was not over the counter.

Frank looked like he was going to say something like that, for just a moment, but he gave it up. Probably he couldn’t imagine Kyrie buying illegal drugs. And in that he would be right. She got enough lawlessness in her everyday life, enough to hide and disguise, that she did not need any more adrenalin.

So Frank shrugged, which might be taken for agreement, and Kyrie rushed back down the hallway, hoping to find Tom, hoping Tom hadn’t shifted, hoping that for once things would go well. For just this once.

Tom was where she expected him – at the back of the diner, facing the door to the parking lot. He was pale and had started trembling again, and there wasn’t much she could say or do for that. She wondered if he’d killed the man. She didn’t want to think about it. It didn’t matter. If he had, could she blame him? She knew the confusion of mind, the prevalence of the beast-self over every civilized learning, every instinct, even. How could she accuse someone else who’d given in perhaps further?

Of course she could, a deeper voice said, because she didn’t give in. She’d fought her – as she’d thought – hallucinations tooth and nail and she’d held onto a normal life of sorts. No friends, no family, no one who might discover what she’d thought was her hideous madness, but she made her own money, she lived her own life.

She managed a weak smile at Tom by way of reassurance, as she turned the key and opened the door.

She took a deep breath to steel herself against the smell of blood, the light of the moon. She must stay in control. She must.

But she wasn’t ready for the other smell – the hot, musky and definitely male smell that invaded her nostrils as she stepped onto the parking lot.

Dizziness and her mouth went dry and her whole body started fluttering on the verge of shifting shape, and she told herself no. No. Regained control just in time to see it, at the edge of the parking lot, under one of the lights.

Not it. Him. The smell was clear as a hallelujah chorus in her head. He was at the edge of the parking lot, and he was tawny and huge and muscular.

A lion. He was a lion. Was he a lion like she was a panther and Tom was a dragon, or...

Or what? An invader from the vast Colorado savannah outside Goldport? Where lions and zebras chased each other under the hot tropical sun?

She shook her head at her own silliness.

Behind her, Tom drew breath, noisily. "Is it?" he asked.

"Yes," she said.

"But–" He drew breath again and something – something about the movement of his feet against the asphalt, something about his breathing, perhaps something about his smell (since when could she smell people this way?) made her think he was about to run.

She put out a hand to his arm. "Do not run," she said. "Walk steadily."

His arm felt cold and smooth under her hand. Light sprinkling of hair. Very little of it for a male. Perhaps being a dragon... She didn’t want to think of that. She didn’t want to think of Tom, muzzle deep in blood.

Which of course, meant the lion could smell them. Smell the blood on them. "You mustn’t run," she said. "We... Cats are triggered by motion. If you run he will give chase. Walk slowly and steadily towards my car. The small white one. Come."

They made their way slowly, steadily, across the parking lot, in the reek of blood. Perhaps the lion wouldn’t be able to smell Tom in the overwhelming smell.

Perhaps they could make it to the car. Perhaps... Perhaps the moon was made of green cheese and it would rain pea soup tomorrow.

He smelled powerful, musky. She could hear him draw breath, was aware of the touch of paw pads on the asphalt. She felt those movements as if they were her own, her heart accelerating and seeming to beat at her throat, suffocating her.

Paw touching asphalt, and paw touching asphalt, and paw touching asphalt. Measured steps. Not a run. Please don’t let it be a run.

And her movements matched his -- slow, measured, trying to appear unconcerned, escorting Tom to the car, guiding him.

Tom walked like a wooden puppet. Was he that terrified of the lion? Didn’t he know in his dragon form he was as big? Bigger? Stronger? Why was he afraid?

But her rational self understood. He was afraid because he was in human form. And every human at the back of his mind feared the large felines who lurked in the shadows and who could eat him in two bites.

Kyrie herself was sweating and cold by degrees, and felt as if her legs were made of water, as she concentrated on following the beast’s movements by sound.

They hit the moonlight, out of the shadow of the diner and into the fully illuminated parking lot. The heat of it felt like fire playing over Kyrie’s skin and she kept her head lowered. She took deep breaths. Her heartbeat echoed some old jungle rhythm but she told herself she would not, she would not, she could not shift.

And the smell of him – of the lion – enveloped her, stronger than ever. Her senses, sharpened from wanting to transform, gave her data about him that a mere nose should not be able to gather. That he was young. That he was healthy. That he was virile.

She pulled Tom forward, and the lion followed them at a distance -- step, step, step, unhurried, unafraid. She prayed he wouldn’t start running. She prayed he wouldn’t leap. And inside, deep inside, she felt as if he was toying with her. Playing. Like a cat with a mouse.

She was not a mouse.

Sweat formed on her scalp, dripped towards her eyes, made her blink. The car loomed in front of her, white and looking much bigger than it usually did. Looking like safety.

Kyrie pushed her key fob button to unlock it, and felt as if her fingers slipped on the smooth plastic, as though she had claws and unwieldy paws.

No. She must not. She must remain human. She must.

Breathing deeply and only managing to inhale more unabashed male musk, she shoved Tom, slightly, and said, "Go around to the passenger side. Get in."

She didn’t know which she feared most. The idea of being attacked of the idea of seeing Tom attacked, of seeing Tom torn to pieces. Of shifting. Of joining in.

She shuddered as her too clumsy fingers struggled with the car handle. She saw Tom open the door on the other side. Get in. She struggled with the handle.

And the lion was twenty steps away, crouching in the full light of the moon, augmented by the light of a parking lot lamp above her. He was crouching, front down low and hindquarters high.

Hindquarters trembling. Legs bunching.

Jump. He was going to–

He jumped, clearing the space between them, and she leaned hard against her car, her heart hammering in her chest, her body divided and dividing her mind. Her human body, her human mind, wanted to scream, to hide. Her human body knew that the huge body would hit her, claws would rend her. That she was about to die.

But her other mind... Her other mind practically died in the ecstatic smell of healthy young male. Her other mind thought the lion knew her, guessed her, smelled her for an equal. That the lion wanted– Not to eat her.

She realized she’d closed her eyes, when she felt him landing near her – landing with all four paws on the asphalt. Not on her, but so close to her she felt the breeze of his falling, and smelled him, smelled him hot and strong and oh, so impossibly male.

She felt her body spasm, wish to shift. She fought it. She struggled to stay herself.

Through half-open eyes, she saw a lion’s face turned towards her, its golden eyes glowing, its whole expression betraying... smugness?

Then it opened its mouth, the fangs glowing in the light and a soft growl started at the back of its throat. She didn’t know if it was threatening her or...

Something to the growl – something to the sound crept along her nerves like a tingle on the verge of aching. If she stayed– If she stayed...

The car door opened, shoving her. She leapt aside, to avoid being pushed into the lion. A hand reached out of the car, dragged her. She fell onto her seat. Blinked. Tom. Tom had pulled her into the car.

"Drive," Tom said. "Drive."

He reached across her, as he spoke and slammed the door. From outside, the lion made a rumbling sound that might have been amusement.

She didn’t remember turning the ignition. She didn’t remember stepping on the gas. But she realized she was driving down Fairfax. Tall, silent apartment houses succeeded each other on either side of the road, lighted by sporadic white pools of light from the street lamps.

"Where do you live?" she managed, glancing at Tom. Part of her wanted to tell him she hadn’t been afraid, she hadn’t been...

But she wasn’t even sure she could explain what she’d been. She had been afraid. That was a huge beast. But also, at some level, she was afraid she would end up shifting, cavorting with him. Over a half-devoured human carcass.

"Two blocks down," Tom said, and swallowed, as if he’d had the same thought at the same time. "Audubon apartments. On the left."

She remembered the place. Not one of the graceful Victorian remnants, but half a dozen rectangular red-brick boxes sharing a parking lot. During the day there were any number of kids playing in the parking lot, and usually one or two men working on cars or drinking beer.

Now, in the dark of night, it was silent and ill lit. As she pulled into the parking lot, Tom asked. "It was one of us, wasn’t it?"

"Pardon?" she said. She knew what he meant. She knew all too well. He was asking if the lion was like them. If the lion too had a human form and one not so human. But Kyrie had managed, until very recently to convince herself she only had one form and that everything else was hallucination. Mental illness.

Now this whole thing felt like mental illness. She parked the car, turned the engine off.

"You know..." Tom said. His blue eyes were earnest, and he plucked at her sleeve like a little kid seeking reassurance. "You know, a shape-shifter. Like us."

She shrugged. "Seems unlikely it escaped from a zoo," she said. "Someone would have given the alarm, wouldn’t they?"

Tom nodded, as if considering this. "What.... what did it want?"

Kyrie shrugged. She wanted to say he wanted everything but all she had to go on was the smell. And she didn’t wish to discuss her response to the smell with Tom.

"Do you think it killed the... person?"

Did you? Kyrie thought, but only shrugged. How did you ask someone who looked as bewildered and shocked as Tom if he’d committed murder? And was she really feeling sorry for Tom? Must be going soft in the head.

Tom got out of the car, patted down where the pockets would be in normal pants and Kyrie realized he wouldn’t have keys.

But he turned around and said, "Thank you for driving me," and pushed the door as if to close it.

"Wait, do you have keys?"

He shrugged. "The neighbor usually keeps them," he said. "For me. I keep his."

His? For some reason it had never occurred to Kyrie that someone like Tom could entrust his key – or anything else – to a male. If she’d thought of his social life outside work at all, she imagined a never-ending succession of sweet things across his mattress. But now she realized she was probably wrong. It was unlikely there was anyone on his mattress. He had come from a homeless shelter. And he was a dragon.

"Keith keeps my key and I keep his... So if we lose it while we’re out," Tom said, an edge of impatience in his voice. "He’s a college student. They lose their keys." He hesitated a minute. "Gets stinking drunk too." He said it as if he, himself, never took any mind-altering substances.

And out of nowhere, an altruistic impulse, or perhaps the thought that he’d saved her – from what? – with the lion in the parking lot, made her get out. "I’ll come with you," she said. "To make sure you get in okay."

She had a feeling, a strange feeling something was wrong. Wrong with this parking lot, with this entire area. There was a feeling of being watched and not in a friendly manner, but she wasn’t sure by whom, or how. Any other day, any other time, she would have shrugged it off. But now... Well... perhaps she was picking up smell or something. Something was definitely wrong.

She got out of the car, unsteady on her legs, glad that the moonlight was hidden by the shadows of the buildings. The pressure of the full moonlight was all she needed now. At the same time, she felt as if the buildings themselves were looming shapes waiting to jump her.

It wasn’t possible, was it? For the buildings to be shifters? With a human form? What was this? How many people did it afflict? And why was she afraid?

She wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Sweat trickled down her back and her legs felt like water while she followed Tom to the steps outside the door of the nearest building.

#

"Keith might not be home," Tom said, pressing the button. Actually, it was damn bloody sure that Keith Vorpal would not be home. Keith was a film student at Goldport College and somewhat of a ladies’ man. One or the other tended to keep him out of the house on warm summer nights. He always assumed Tom had the same sort of life and only seemed somewhat amused Tom managed to come home naked so often. He took Tom’s mutters of some good beer or a glass too many and asked no questions. Which in itself would be worrisome, except that Keith’s own life was such a mess of perils and odd adventures that he probably took it for granted everyone else’s life was that crazy. And no worse.

Their arrangement with the keys rested on a vague hope that one of them might be home when the other needed a key. So far it had worked out, more or less. But there was always the chance...

Tom rang again. A buzz he recognized as Keith’s voice came through the loudspeaker. He couldn’t actually understand what Keith said, but he could guess. "It’s Tom, man," Tom said. "Lost my key, somehow..."

Another buzz that Tom – with long practice – understood to mean that he should ring Keith’s door and Keith would give him the key. Then the front door clicked open.

"Sorry there’s no elevator, but–" Tom started, and shut up. Most apartment buildings in Goldport, much less most apartment buildings in Downtown Goldport didn’t have elevators. He must be having flash backs to his childhood in an upscale NY condo.

As it was, the Audubon was more upscale than the places he’d lived in the last five years even when he’d been out of the shelter. There were no rats. The cement stairs covered in worn carpet were clean enough and didn’t smell of piss. And if, now and then, like on the third floor, you could hear a baby cry through the thin door of an apartment, you could be sure the little tyke had just awakened and needed to nurse, and not that he was being beaten within an inch of his life.

These were solid working class apartments, where people scrimped and saved to get by and might wear clothes from thrift shop racks, but where most families had two parents and both parents worked, and where kids went to school and played, instead of doing drugs. Or selling them.

Yeah, it could be much, much worse. Tom rubbed his hand across his face as he climbed, as fast as his feet would carry him up to the third floor. He hated with shifting shape – particularly shifting shape when he didn’t mean to and staying shifted for... hours, he guessed as his last memory was from when the moon first appeared in the sky, around maybe nine. He wondered what he’d been doing. It had been months since shifting had come with such total memory loss.

If he could find his clothes, he would know what had happened, but right now he only had a memory of fear – of fleeing. And then nothing at all until he’d come to himself in that parking lot, with Kyrie staring at him and the bloodied corpse at his feet.

They’d reached the landing on the third floor and he lurched to Keith’s door on the left, and pushed the doorbell. Despite his having called, he didn’t expect a fast response and didn’t get it. From inside came Keith’s voice and a higher, clearly female voice, and then the sound of footsteps, something falling, more footsteps.

Tom smiled despite himself, guessing that Keith had still been explaining to his visitor why the doorbell had rung from downstairs, when it rang again up here.

When the door opened, Keith looked disheveled and sleepy. He was a young kid – although to be honest he might be older than Tom. Tom just perceived him as much younger than himself -- perhaps because Keith didn’t shift. Keith was blond and generally good looking. Right then, he was blinking, his blue eyes displaying the curiously naked look of the eyes of people who normally wore glasses and suddenly found themselves without.

His hair was a mess and he looked confused, but he was grinning as he handed Tom a set of keys. Though the student held the door almost closed, Tom glimpsed a redheaded girl behind Keith. He felt a little envious. It had been years since he’d even dreamed of sharing his bed with anyone. He could never guarantee he wouldn’t shift and scare a date halfway to death. Or worse.

Then he realized Keith was looking enviously at him. Tom followed the direction of Keith’s gaze, and saw Kyrie standing just behind him, hands on hips, as though daring Keith to make a comment. And Tom felt at the same time ridiculously pleased that Keith thought he could be involved with someone like Kyrie and a little jealous of Keith’s admiration for her. Keith didn’t even know her. He didn’t even know who she was. He didn’t know that she shifted, as well.

"Thanks," Tom said, a little more dryly than he should. He snatched the key from Keith’s hand and started up the stairs at a faster clip than he should, considering how he felt.

Keith grinned. "No problem. But I have to go back. This girl is something else. She swears she saw a dragon flying over the building. A dragon." He shook his head.

A dragon. Tom managed a noncommittal sound of empathy. Probably Tom. But Tom didn’t dare ask questions about what he’d been doing or what direction he’d been flying. Instead, he turned and started up the stairs. Up and up and up, to his fifth floor landing, Kyrie’s steady gait keeping pace with his.

His door was... locked. He let out a breath he hadn’t been aware of holding in. After all, he did not know how or when he’d shifted and all he had was the memory of fear, of running away. It was possible they had found him in his apartment. It was possible... If they’d figured out his name, and they must have by now, it would have been easy.

But the door was locked, his doormat looked untouched. Everything was as it should be. No light came under his door. Everything was normal at least to human senses and he didn’t want to use his dragon senses. He didn’t want to reach for that other self, for fear it would bring them. And for fear of what he might do. He swallowed hard, thinking of the corpse.

There could be nothing odd in his apartment. The only reason his hand trembled was because of his being so tired. And the corpse and everything.

He slid the key in and turned it.

#

In the moment before Tom opened the door Kyrie had a wild surge of panic. She wanted to tell him to wait, but she couldn’t speak. And she didn’t know why he should wait. She just had a feeling – added up from rustling, from sounds she could not possibly have heard, from an odd smell, from a weird tingle up her spine – that something was wrong, very wrong.

Perhaps Tom was going to drag her into his apartment and– And what? Imagination failed her. She had seen him in that bathroom, so slow and confused he didn’t even seem to know how to wipe away blood from himself. She had seen him standing there, helpless. She could hardly believe he would now turn around and rape her.

On the other hand, didn’t they sacrifice virgins to dragons in the Middle Ages? She almost smiled at the thought of Tom as virgin-despoiler. The way he looked, he’d have trouble beating away the ones who threw themselves at him. Kyrie managed to calm herself completely, when Tom reached in and turned on the light.

The light revealed an unprepossessing living room, with the type of dark brown carpet that landlords slapped down when they didn’t expect to rent to the upper echelons of society. But the rest...

The furniture, what there was of it – splinters of bookcase, remnants of couches with ugly brown polyester covering – seemed to have been piled up in the middle of the room as if someone had been getting ready to light a bonfire. And the window – the huge picture window opposite – was broken. A thousand splinters littered the carpet. Books and pieces of books fluttered all over.

Tom made a sound of distress and stepped into the room, and Kyrie stepped in behind him. He knelt by a pile of something on the carpet, and Kyrie focused on it, noticing shreds of denim, and what might or might once have been a white t-shirt. And over it all, a torn purple rag, with the Athens logo. The Athens sent the aprons home with the employees to get laundered at employee expense.

That meant that Tom had been ready to go to work when... The tingle in her spine grew stronger and the feeling that something was wrong, very wrong overwhelmed her. It was like a scream both soundless and so loud that it took over her whole thought, overcame her whole mind, reverberated from her whole being.

"Tom," she said, putting a hand on his shoulder. "Tom, we’d best--"

She never had time to finish. Someone or something, moving soundlessly behind them, had closed the door.

Kyrie heard the bolt slide home and turned, skin prickling, hair standing on end, to stare openmouthed at three men who stood between them and the door.

Men was dignifying them with a name they didn’t quite deserve. They were boys, maybe nineteen or twenty, just at the edge of manhood. Asian, dressed all in black, they clearly had watched one too many ninja movies. The middle one wore exquisitely groomed slightly too long hair, the bangs arranged so they fell to perfection and didn’t move. He must spend a fortune on product.

The ones on either side were not so stylishly groomed, but one sported a tattoo of a Chinese letter in the middle of his forehead, while the other had a tattoo of a red dragon on the back of each hand – those clearly visible and he was clenching his fists and holding them up in a gesture more reminiscent of boxing than karate.

The far one shouted something, and Kyrie grabbed hold of Tom’s arm, and shoved him behind her. He’d gone wooden puppet again.

The pretty boy in the middle laughed and said something – Kyrie presumed in Chinese – to his friend. Then added in English, "He only speaks English." But when he turned to Tom all traces of laughter had vanished from his expression, as he said, "You know what we want. You foiled the first fool who came looking, but, you see, we returned for you. Now give it to us, and we might not kill you or your pretty girlfriend."

Pretty girlfriend? Kyrie registered as if from a long way away that they were talking about her. Truth was very few people ever had called her pretty. She was too... striking, and proud to be called that. Also at some level people must always have sensed what she was, because since she’d turned fifteen and the panther had made its first appearance, few men had made taunting comments in her presence. Hell, few men even addressed her in any way.

But if there was an instinct for self-protection, this trio was lacking it. The little one with the two dragons on the backs of his hands started laughing.

At least, he threw his head back and Kyrie thought he was laughing, a high pitched, hysterical laughter. And then she realized what the laughter really was as his outlines blurred and he started to shift. Wings, and curving neck. All of it in lovely tones of red and gold, like all those Chinese paintings. But the features – that in paintings had always made Kyrie think of a naughty cat – looked malevolent. He hissed, between lips wholly unprepared for speech, "Give us the pearl."

Pearl? A pearl seemed like a very odd thing for Tom to steal. Was it some form of drug? Kyrie glanced behind her, to see Tom shaking his head violently. The fact that he was the approximate color of curdled milk, his normally pale skin looking downright unhealthy and grey, did not reassure her that by his shaking his head he meant he’d never heard of such a thing as a pearl.

"Tom?" she said.

He only shook his head again.

"Right," the middle one said. "You want to play rough, rough it is."

And suddenly a golden dragon took up most of the small brown room. And there were claws reaching for Kyrie. No. Talons. And someone’s fangs were close to her face, a smell like a thousand long-forgotten sushi dinners invading her nostrils. A forked tongue licked her ear and through the lips not fashioned for speech, through the accent that he showed even in English, she nonetheless understood the young man’s words as he said, "We’re going to have so much fun."

She’d never shifted when she was scared. The few times she’d shifted it had been just the moon and usually summer calling to her, the feeling of jungle in her mind, at the back of her brain.

But as her fear closed upon her throat, making breathing almost impossible, as her heart pounded seemingly in her ears, as her blood seemed to race away from her leaving her cold as ice, she felt something...

She wasn’t sure what was happening until she heard the growl erupt from her throat. A full growl, fashioned from melodies of the jungle.

Lizards. Uppity lizards, at that. They dared challenge her? Try to grab her?

Turning around, she swiped a giant paw across the tender under flesh of a clawed foot holding her. And then she leapt for the throat of the giant beast who was trying to claw her down.

It was – the part of her that remained human, deep in the mists of consciousness thought – like the armada and the English ships. The Spanish armada’s huge, slow ships might be stronger and better armored. But they had no hope against the small English ships that could sail around them, landing shots where they wished till the giant ship was crippled.

Kyrie grabbed the beast by the throat, hanging on, till she tasted blood – and what blood. It was like drinking the finest champagne straight from the bottle.

The beast yelled and reached for her with its claws. It managed to scrape her flank, in a bright slash of pain. But she jumped out of the way before the creature could grab her, and she was on top of his head, as both his friends converged, trying to grab her. And she leapt at the soft underbelly of the red one – Two Dragons, the human Kyrie thought – in a mad dance of claws sinking into soft, unarmored flesh.

And then up again, and leaping at the eye of the next dragon.

That there were three of them was not an advantage. After all, three large, slower moving beings only helped each other get hopelessly entangled while Kyrie danced upon them like a deadly firefly, in a frenzy of wounding, a joy of blood.

She was vaguely aware that she too was bleeding, that there were punctures on her hide and that, somehow, one of them had managed to sink his fangs into her front paw – her right arm. But she didn’t care. Right then, allowed the madness she’d long denied, she jumped at the dragon’s eyes, swiping her claws across them and relishing the dragon’s shriek of pain, the bright blood jumping from the right eye. She jumped and leaped, possessed of fierce anger, of maddened, repressed rage.

But while the beast exulted in the carnage, while the feline gyrated in mayhem, a small trickling feeling formed at the back of Kyrie’s mind. It was like the first melting tip of an icicle, dropping cold reason on her hot madness. The feeling, at first, was no more than that – just a trickling cold, protesting, demanding – she wasn’t sure what. The beast, in its frenzy, ignored it.

Until slowly, slowly, the feeling became words and the words became panic in Kyrie’s mind. She was fighting all three dragons. She was keeping all three dragons at bay – just. But there were three of them, there was one of her and the beast’s muscles were starting to hurt and... How could she get out of here?

There was no way of reaching the door. All the dragons were between her and the door and none of her sorties had brought her close to escaping.

Blood in her nostrils, mad fury in the beast’s brain, what remained of the human Kyrie tried to think and came up with nothing but an insistent, white surge of panic. And she couldn’t let it slow her down. She couldn’t. If she did, all would be lost. But she couldn’t fight forever.

In a twirl, claws sinking into the nearest dragon’s hide, she thought of Tom. But the corner into which he’d shrunk when she’d shifted was vacant.

The coward had run out the door behind her back, hadn’t he?

She felt a horrible sense of betrayal, a let down at this, and her extended paw faltered, and the dragon above her reared.

It was the center dragon – who in human form had artificially smooth and immovable hair. In dragon form he had a tall crest, red and gold. Well, it had been red and gold, it was now much darker red in spots, thanks to Kyrie’s claws. And blood ran down its cheek from one of its eyes. But the other eye was unblinking fixed hatred, as it opened its jaws wide, wide, fangs glistening.

Kyrie needed to jump. She needed to. But her muscles felt powerless, spent. Stretched elastic that would not spring again.

The big head descended to devour her, teeth ready to break her neck. And a taloned paw grabbed her roughly around the middle, swept her back.

She turned. She turned with her remnant of strength, her very last drop of fury, to snarl at the dragon behind her.

#

She snarled at him, Tom thought – amazed he could think clearly in dragon form. He’d willed himself into being a dragon. Willed himself into it.

He desired it and pushed. He knew she was going to have problems leaving. He knew she couldn’t fly.

And he knew she was an idiot for even fighting. They had no chance. But then, neither could he leave her to die alone. She had taken care of him, when she’d found him in suspicious circumstances. She’d shown him more kindness than his own father had. And she was a shifter like him. They were family: bonded deeper than any shared genes, any joint upbringing.

He shifted suddenly, unexpectedly, leaping in the air, and out of his corner so quickly the other dragons didn’t seem to register it. He had only the time to see that she was cowering, that the dragon above her would finish her. And then he was reaching for her, grabbing her, jumping out the open window, even as she turned to snarl at him.

But the snarl – lip pulled back from vicious fangs – faltered as she recognized him.

He held her as gently and firmly as he could. He mustn’t drop her. But neither must he hurt her. He could smell blood from her. He could smell fear.

He unfurled his wings – huge parachutes. Above him, the other dragons hadn’t appeared yet. Perhaps she’d done more damage than he’d thought. Perhaps they had a few minutes. A very few minutes.

Down in the parking lot, her car was a small abandoned toy. Her keys would be in his apartment, he thought, and shook his huge head, amazed at the clarity of the human thought in beast form. Normally he didn’t even remember what he’d done as a dragon. Perhaps because he was responsible for another? He’d never been responsible for anyone but himself.

But they must run. They must get out of here very fast. And as beasts, he could not explain to her what danger they were in. He couldn’t even think, clearly think, of where to run.

The dragon wished to crawl under a rock, preferably by a river, and hide.

But Goldport was not so big on rivers. There was Panner’s creek, which in the summer became a mere trickle winding amid sun-parched boulders.

He flew her down to the parking lot, slowly, landed by the car and wished to shift. He didn’t dare reach for the strength of the talisman to allow himself to shift. No. The dragons would sense, that.

Instead, setting Kyrie down carefully, he WILLED himself to shift. He thought himself human, and shivered, as his body spasmed in painful shift.

He was naked. Naked, sitting on the warm asphalt of the parking lot, next to Kyrie’s car and a panther. No. Next to Kyrie. In the next minute, she also shifted, and appeared as a naked, bloodied young woman, lying on the pavement next to him.

"The car," he rasped at her, his voice hesitant, difficult, like a long-neglected instrument. "We must leave. Soon. They will pursue."

She looked at him with confused, tired eyes. Her chin was scratched, and there was too much blood on her everywhere. He wondered how much of it was hers. Did they need to go to the hospital? They healed very quickly. At least Tom did. But what if these wounds were too serious? How could they go to the hospital? How could they explain anything?

"I don’t have keys," she said, and patted her hips as though looking for keys in pockets that were no longer there.

Tom nodded. He got up, feeling about a hundred years old after two shifts in such a short time. His legs hurt, as did his arms, and his whole body felt as though someone had belabored him with sticks.

But he was human now and he could think. He remembered.

One eye on the window of his apartment, wondering how long he had, he said, "I’m sorry. I’ll pay." Then he grabbed one of the stones on the flowerbed nearby – a stone bed, to tell the truth since he’d never seen flowers there. He smashed the window with the stone, reached in, unlocked the door.

Sweeping the crumbs of glass from the seat, he smashed the key holder, reached down to the floor and grabbed a screwdriver he’d noticed there while Kyrie was driving him. "Remembered you had this here," he said, turning to see her bewildered expression as her car started. And then "Get in. I’ll pay for the damage. Just get in."

Was it his imagination, or had he seen the shadow of a wing in the window above?

He reached across to unlock the passenger door, as she jumped in.

She fumbled with the seat belt as he tore out of the parking lot in a screech of rubber. Sweat was dripping from his forehead into his eyes. He was sure he was sitting on a chunk of glass. It had been years since he’d driven and he found the turns odd and difficult. The car his father had given him as a sixteenth birthday gift handled much better than this. Good thing there was almost no traffic on the roads at this time.

He tore around the corner of Fairfax, turning into a narrower street and hoping he was only imagining the noise of wings above. He tried to choose the tree-lined streets, knowing well enough that it was harder to see into them from above. The vision of dragons seemed to focus naturally on moving things. In a street of trees, shaken by the wind, in which shadows shifted and shook, it would be harder to see them.

Some of these streets were narrow enough – and the trees above them well over a hundred years old -- that it made it impossible to see the streets at all, except as a green canopy. He took one street, then another, then yet another, tearing down quiet residential streets like a madman and probably causing the families snug in their brick ranches to wonder what was happening out there.

They passed two people walking, male and female, he tall and she much shorter, leaning into him. Shorts, t-shirts, a swirling white skirt, a vision of normalcy and a relationship that he couldn’t aspire too, and Tom bit his lip and thumped the side of the wheel with his hand, bringing a startled glance from Kyrie.

He’d gone a good ten minutes and was starting to think they’d lost their pursuers, when he thought of Kyrie. He turned to her, wanting to explain he really would pay and that she should not–

Her dark eyes gazed into his, unwavering. "How many cars have you stolen?" she asked.

#

The way he’d hot-wired the car, quickly – she swore it had taken him less than a few seconds – had chilled Kyrie to the bone.

She supposed she should have known someone with a drug problem, working minimum wage jobs had to supplement with crime, but all of a sudden she realized he was more dangerous – more out of control than she’d thought.

More out of control than the other dragons?

And yet, after he’d driven like a madman for a while, he looked at her with a devastatingly scared expression in his pale face. Despite chiseled features and the now all-too-obvious dark shadow of unshaven beard, he managed to look about five and worried he’d be put in time out.

"How many cars have you stolen?" she asked, before she knew she was going to say it.

His expression closed. She would not be able to describe it any other way. The eager, almost childish panic vanished, leaving in its place a dark, unreadable glare, his eyebrows low over his dark blue eyes. He turned away, looking forward, and shrugged, a calculated shrug from his broad shoulders. One quarter inch up, one quarter inch down.

"I used to go joy riding," he said. "When I was a kid. I got bored." And when she didn’t answer that, he added. "Look, I’ve told you. I’ll pay you for the damage." And again, at her continued silence. "I couldn’t let us be caught. If they’d caught us, they’d have killed us."

At this, he stopped. He stopped long enough for her to gather her thoughts. She felt so tired that if she weren’t in pain, she would have fallen asleep. But she hurt. Her shoulder felt as if it had been dislocated in the fight. There was a slash across her torso that she prayed wouldn’t need stitches, and a broad swath of her buttock felt scraped, as though it had rubbed hard against a scaly hide. Which it probably had though she didn’t remember.

"Who are they?" she finally asked. "Why are they after you?"

"They’re a Chinese triad," he said. "They’re members. A... crime sindicate. Asian."

"Admirably described," she said, and heard the hint of sarcasm in her own voice, and was surprised she still had the strength for it. "But what do they want with you?"

He hesitated. For just a moment he glanced at her, and the scared little boy was back, with wide open eyes, and slightly parted lips.

He looked back at the road in time to take them, tightly, around a corner, tires squealing, car tilting. "They think I stole something from them," he said, with the defensive tone of a child explaining it really, really, really wasn’t him who put the clamp on the cat’s tail.

Something. Kyrie was not so naive that she didn’t know Chinese crime syndicates – like most crime syndicates – dealt mostly in various drugs. "A drug deal gone bad?" she asked.

He had the nerve to tighten his lips, and shake his head. "I don’t deal drugs," he said.

Whee. There was one form of criminality he didn’t stoop to. Who would have thunk it? "So..."

"I didn’t steal it, okay?" he said. "I didn’t steal anything. They think I did, and they’re trying to get it back."

"Sounds ugly," she said. Somehow she felt he was lying but also not lying. There was an edge to his tone as if he weren’t quite so sure how he’d got himself into this type of situation.

"It is," he said. "They’ve been after me for months." He shrugged. "Only they’ve just figured out my name, I think. Now they can follow me, wherever I live. They’re shifters. Dragons."

"I gathered."

"They worship the Great Sky Dragon..."

"Uh?" she had never heard of any shifter divinity. But then again, she’d never heard of any other shifters. All of a sudden, vertiginously, as though standing at the edge of a precipice and seeing a whole world open before her, she wondered if there was a whole culture, a whole society she didn’t know about. Some place she belonged, whole families of shifters. Perhaps the only reason she’d never known about it was because she was adopted and she didn’t know her own birth family. "Shifters have their own gods?"

Tom shrugged. "I think he was a Chinese divinity. Or one of their sacred animals, or something."

"Did you get involved with them because you... shift? Into a dragon? Is your family ... does your family shift?"

Tom shook his head. "My father doesn’t... No."

"Then how did you get involved with the triad?"

He looked confused, then shrugged – not a precise shrug. "I don’t know," he said. He seemed on the verge of saying something, but shook his head, as if to his own thoughts. "My father–" He stopped dead, as though something in him had halted not just the words but the train of thought as well.

They were driving down a narrow, tree-bordered street. Ahead of them, loomed the dark expanse of the Castle – officially known as Chateau D’Aubigerne, a castle imported from the Loire, stone by stone by a man enriched in the gold rush. It now stood smack dab in the center of Goldport, abandoned and empty, surrounded by gardens gone to seed and an eight foot high iron fence like massed spears. Now and then there was talk of someone buying it, restoring it, and making it into a hotel, a mall, a resort, or just a monument for tourists to gawk at. But all those projects seemed non starters, perhaps because the Castle was well away from all the hotels and convention centers, in a street of tiny, workmen brick ranches, with cars on blocks and broken plastic toys in the front yards.

Tom slowed down till he was going a normal speed and said, "Where can I take you?"

"Beg your pardon?"

He grinned at her, a fugitive grin that transformed his features and gave her a startling glimpse of what might lurk underneath the troubled young man’s aggression – humor? Joy? "Where can I drop you off? Where do you live?" He smiled at her, a less naughty smile this time, more that of a patient adult facing a stupid child. "You can’t go to work like that, can you?"

She shook her head, panicked. Gee. Frank was going to be mad. She might already have lost her job. A surge of anger at Tom came up, but then vanished again. Someone had once told Kyrie that if you lost a job making less than ten dollars and hour you could find another one within the day. In her experience this was true. And besides, it wasn’t like Tom had asked her for help.

She’d just jumped in and helped him. Hell, she thought she’d learned not to do that years ago.

"My place," she said. "It’s down the next street . Turn right. Third house on the left."

"House?"

"Rental. It’s smaller than an apartment, really. I just... I don’t like people around."

He nodded and maneuvered through the turn and up to her house, at a speed that could only be considered sedate after his early high jinxes.

The house was tiny – eight hundred square feet and one bedroom, but it had a driveway – a narrow strip of concrete that led right up to the back door and from which a narrow walking path led to the front door. This late at night – or early in the morning – all of Kyrie’s neighbors would be asleep and she was grateful for that.

As Tom pulled up to the back door, she had only two steps to go, stark naked. And she always left the key under a rock in the nearby flowerbed. She hated to be locked out of her house and didn’t know anyone in town she could trust with a key. It was one of the side-effects of moving around so much.

As she started to open the door, she looked at Tom. He was sitting behind the wheel, the engine still going, looking forward. The car was hers, but she could hardly tell him to leave it and run off naked into the night. On the other hand – where was he going to go even with the car?

She had to invite him in. She didn’t really want to, but she saw nothing else she could do. Nothing else a decent human being could do. She tapped him on the arm. "Turn that off. Come inside. Have a shower. I’ll grab another jogging suit for you."

He looked surprised. Dumbfounded as if she’d offered him a fortune. "Are you sure?"

"Where would you go otherwise?"

He shrugged. "I’ll figure... I’ll figure something. I always do." For just a second a dangerous liquid quality crept into his voice, but he only shook his head and swallowed. "Look, it’s not safe to be around me."

"I’ve noticed. But you have nowhere else to go. Come inside. I’ll make coffee."

He took a few seconds, then grabbed the screwdriver and turned it. And nodded at her. "Can I come out through your side?" he said. "Less–"

"Exposure, yes," she said. "And don’t break anything. I have a key."

She dove out the door and retrieved her key from its hiding place.

#

Later Tom would think he might never have agreed to go to Kyrie’s house, except for the chunk of glass slowly working its way into his buttock.

It was clear she didn’t really want him around, and he wasn’t sure he could blame her. After all, he wasn’t sure he wanted himself around most of the time. And she’d seen him at one of his most dangerous moments.

It would probably be a kindness for him to leave. But then he came up on the fact that he was naked, he was shaking with exhaustion, and there was a big glass chunk becoming a permanent part of his behind.

He turned off the car and waited till she was out and had opened the door, before he dove out of the car, after her. And stepped into a cozy kitchen – cozy and homey and like no place he’d ever been before.

His father’s condo had been huge. This entire house would probably fit in the kitchen. And the kitchen of that house had been white and chrome, imported Italian marble and mosaic floors. But it was the domain of Mrs. Lopez, their cook. Never the family kitchen. Never a place where the family gathered for meals.

Of course no family could really gather in this kitchen either. Not unless they were all unusually close. It was barely big enough to contain both of them, a card table, two folding chairs, a refrigerator, stove and a tiny counter with sink. Above the table, on the wall, hung a painting of an old fashioned-bicycle done in shades of red and pink on black, the front wheel dwarfing the rest.

Kyrie closed the door behind him. "This way," she said, as she led him out of the kitchen via the interior door, and into a hallway. She opened another door and turned the light on. "The bathroom. I’ll go get you something to wear."

He stepped into the bathroom, where there was just enough space for himself, between tub, sink and toilet.

Kyrie returned almost immediately and knocked, and he hid himself behind the door as he opened it. It seemed silly when they’d been together, naked for most of the evening. But then Kyrie had put on a robe – a fluffy, pink robe that made her look young and feminine.

She handed him a bundle of clothes and said, "There’s plenty of water. Outsized water heater, so don’t worry too much. But I’d like to shower after you, so don’t use more than you have to."

He nodded, took the clothes, set them on the toilet tank, and started the shower. Plunging under the water he felt it like a warm caress. He tried not to notice that it ran red-stained down the drain. The corpse...

The corpse seemed wholly unreal in this white-tiled shower that smelled of lavender and a subtle hint of Kyrie’s perfume. Tom had never noticed her perfume before, but it was definitely her smell. Something spicy and soft that he’d caught before as an undertone at work.

He removed the glass chunk from his backside, by touch, then soaped himself vigorously. He had no right to intrude on her life, nor to bring his own messes into her house. He had no right to endanger her. He should leave as soon as possible.

Guiltily, he used her shampoo, which was some designer brand and smelled of vanilla. His hair, too, yielded quantities of red blood-stained water.

What would the police think? Would the police track him? And Kyrie? He’d tell them she was innocent. He was the murderer.

Was he the murderer?

He couldn’t think about it. Stepping out of the tub, he heard Kyrie knock at the door. She then opened it a sliver, and held out a towel. "Sorry. Forgot to give them earlier," she said.

And she was being kind to him. Far kinder than anyone had been in a long time. He thanked her, dried himself, combed his hair with his fingers, the thick black curls falling into their natural unruliness, and dressed in her jogging suit.

Coming out the door, he had his words ready. About how he would be going now, no time to chat, really, best thing would be to get out of her hair as soon as possible, and then–

And then she was waiting at the door and smiled at him. "I made coffee. It’s in the kitchen. Do you drink coffee? I won’t be a minute."

And she went past him into the steam-filled bathroom.

He couldn’t exactly leave when she was being so friendly, so he went into the kitchen, where she’d run the coffee maker, and set cups, sugar and cream out. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry that one of the cups was embossed with a dragon, but he took it, anyway.

#

Kyrie showered quickly, wondering what was wrong with her. Didn’t she want him out of the house. Now? Yesterday?

But she’d never talked with another of her kind. And perhaps he knew what had happened. Perhaps he’d remember if he’d killed the person in the parking lot. And perhaps she’d be able to figure out how he’d got involved with the triad and if she’d now be in danger.

And perhaps tomorrow it would rain soup. And cream.

But there were more material considerations, too. Her arm, where Two Dragons had got in a glancing bite at the panther’s paw. It looked like the tooth had pierced her arm. It wasn’t exactly bleeding – just a trickle of blood that increased under the warm shower. She examined the puncture dispassionately. Her memory of the adrenaline-fueled fight had fuzzy edges and she could not remember if the bite had released, or if it had been fully completed before something she did caused the dragon – who in human form wore the tattoo of two dragons on his hands – to let go.

If the first, it was probably a narrow, not too deep cut. If the second... Well, she could easily be looking at a puncture all the way to the bone, at an infection. She couldn’t afford that, but neither could she afford to go to the hospital.

Oh, not monetarily. She probably could scrape up the money for a quick visit to the emergency room or one of the twenty four hours med centers. What she couldn’t afford was for doctors to ask how she got her wound. For them to notice anything at all strange about the shape of the wound. For them to remember her wounds when someone brought the corpse in, certainly with similar wounds. No. Better to trust in Tom and ask him to help her clean her arm and perhaps bandage the wound. Better the devil you know.

There were other wounds too. One on her hip, which she could bandage herself, and then one across her shoulder, at the back, which she didn’t think she could take care of without help.

She got out of the shower and dried a little more vigorously than she need, to punish herself for her stupidity in getting involved in Tom’s affairs. She bandaged her hip and her torso, before putting on her robe again.

Frank was going to make her pay for the apron. But at least she still had a job. She’d called while Tom was showering. While Frank had been none too pleased to hear she wouldn’t be back the rest of the night, neither had he fired her.

In the kitchen, Tom stood, holding the cup of coffee. The one with the dragon. Kyrie smiled. She hadn’t even thought about his reaction. It had come, like most of her dishes, from the Salvation Army thrift store. She picked up the cup left on the counter and poured herself a cup of black coffee. He hadn’t thrown a snit at the dragon. He hadn’t imagined it was a dig directed at him.

Perhaps he was not quite so touchy and anti-social as she would have thought he was. Or perhaps...

Kyrie looked him over. He smelled of soap and her shampoo, and he looked far less dangerous than he had. His black curls were damp from the shower, dripping down his back. His expression was just bewildered enough to make him look younger he normally did. Even the fact that he was frowning into his coffee cup didn’t make him look threatening, just puzzled.

He looked at her, and the frown became less intense, but the eyebrows remained low over the blue eyes, which looked like they were trying to figure out something really difficult. Like the meaning of the universe. "Why?" he said. "I’m dangerous." He shrugged, as if he hadn’t said exactly what he meant to say. "I mean, it’s dangerous to hang out with me. You saw... my apartment." He took a sip of coffee, fast, desperately, as if trying to make up for words that didn’t come out quite right. Then choked, coughed, and set the cup down to cover his mouth. "Why did you let me in here?" he asked.

Kyrie could have said many things. That his apartment was one of the reasons. Who would send him out there naked, in a car that looked, clearly, like it had been broken into? Who would send him out into the night with nowhere to stay, no safe place to crash?

But before she spoke, she realized that there would be many people – perhaps most people – who would do that. She’d met them often enough growing up. The families who took foster children but didn’t want them associating with their real children; the children at school who shunned you because you lived in a less than savory part of town; the teachers who assumed you were dumb and hopeless because you didn’t live with your blood family.

Had she done the same with Tom, in shunning him because of his appearance? His drug habit? But no. She’d been justified in that. Those were things he could and should control. However, this trouble... Well, perhaps he’d brought it on himself. Perhaps at the root of it all was a drug deal gone bad, or the theft of something valuable.

She couldn’t imagine anyone stealing anything valuable from a triad composed of dragon shape-shifters. She would have to assume Tom was brasher, and perhaps braver, than she. But she didn’t know him well enough to rule it out, either.

And again, she had had plenty of experience with his type: the alcoholic foster parents, the doping foster brothers. You gave them chance and chance and chance, and they never improved, never got any better. They just told you more and more lies and got bolder and bolder.

She didn’t know what to say and she couldn’t guess in which category Tom would fall. So, instead, she stuck to the need at hand. That had always seen her through. When in trouble, stick to the need at hand.

"I need you to help me bandage my arm and disinfect my back," she said. And not sure why his eyes grew so wide at this request, added, "Please?"

He nodded and shrugged. "Of course," he said. His eyes remained wide, as if he were either very surprised or very skeptical. "Where do you keep the first aid supplies?"

#

"They’re in the bathroom," Kyrie told him. "Behind the mirror."

Tom headed that way. It was a relief to have something to do – to have something to think of. He’d been sitting there, feeling miserable, drinking his coffee, wondering what was the best way to leave.

The bathroom was still full of steam – but the smell was indefinably different there. Not just the soap and shampoo he’d used also, but something else... Something he could neither define nor explain. It smelled like Kyrie. That was all he could say. It was a familiar smell and he realized he’d smelled it around her even under the layers of odors at the Athens. A hint of cinnamon, an edge of burnt sugar. Only not really, but that was what the smells made him think of. Like... What the kitchen smelled like when Mrs. Lopez had been making pastries.

He opened the medicine cabinet and collected bandages, antibiotic cream, small scissors, bandages, hydrogen peroxide and cotton wool. It was the best stocked home cabinet he’d ever seen. Other than his own. Shape-shifters. You came home cut, scraped, you weren’t even sure how.

And Kyrie was one of them. Just like him.

That he was attracted to her didn’t make it any easier. He’d been attracted to her from the first moment he’d seen her – giving him the jaundiced once-over when Frank introduced them. But his attraction to women had come to nothing these last five years, ever since he’d found out he was a shape-shifter.

There were too many things to be afraid of – shifting in front of her, for instance. Hurting her while he was shape-shifted. And then the whole thing with the drugs, with which he’d tried – unsuccessfully – to control his shifts. It made him associate with too many shady characters for him to want any girl he even liked involved with. And then, of course, the... He shifted his mind forcefully away from even thinking of the object. That. And the triad. This without even thinking of nightmare scenarios: pregnancy. A baby who was born shifted.

And now in one night he’d managed to visit all but the last of these scenarios. He’d shifted in front of Kyrie. He’d probably hurt someone else in front of her. And he’d landed her in the thick of his trouble with the triad. Damn. And all this when he’d just found out she was a shape-shifter too. She was one like him.

Oh, she was not the only one he’d met, in his five years of wandering around, homeless and rootless. But she was the first one he’d talked to, the first one he’d had anything to do with. The only female... Up to tonight, he would have sworn that only males shifted shape.

And what good did it do him that she too was a shape-shifter – that she would understand him?

Absolutely none. First, he had blown it so far with her that if his hopes were a substance they would be scraping them off the floor and ceiling for months. And second – and second there was the triad.

Tom had been attracted to Kyrie before tonight. Now he liked her. He liked her a lot. He might very well be on his way to falling in love with her. If he had the slightest idea what love was and how one fell in it, he would be able to say for sure. But here the thing was – he cared about her. He cared a lot. An awful lot. He didn’t want her dead. As he was bound to be, soon enough, now that the triad had got really serious about finding him.

"It’s right there on the shelf," Kyrie’s voice said from the doorway. He turned to see her framed in the door, those big, dark eyes, looking puzzled.

"Oh, yes, right," he said. "It’s actually in my hands." He turned around and lifted the hands filled with first aid stuff. "I’m sorry. I spaced. I guess I’m tired."

She nodded solemnly. He didn’t remember ever seeing her laugh. Smile, sure, a bunch of times, mostly the polite smile you gave customers late at night when they came in looking tired and out of it. But never laugh. Was laughter too far out of control for her? And why did he want to know? It wasn’t as if he’d ever find out.

"Right," she said. "Shifting that many times in a row. Staying shifted that long. I’ve shifted, but not for long tonight, so I’m not–" she yawned and covered her mouth with her hand. "That tired."

He smiled, despite himself, grateful that she couldn’t see it because she had turned her back and was heading back towards the kitchen. Where she sat at the table, pulled the cord on the lamp overhead to turn it on, and rolled up the sleeve of her robe to show a narrow wound with bluish borders, like a bruise.

He sat on the other chair, laid the first aid materials down on the table. "That looks awful," he said.

She nodded and turned her arm over. On the bottom there was another bruise, another puncture.

"It went all the way–" he started.

She shook her head. "No. The dra– He just bit me. I don’t know how deeply. It feels different... In the other body." She’d lowered her head to look at her own arm, and her hair had fallen across her face. The temptation to reach over and pull that multicolored curtain back was almost more than he could endure.

"Have you had a tetanus shot?" he asked, going on routine. "Because if you hadn’t, you should. I don’t know how clean..." He realized he was about to say he didn’t know how clean dragons’ teeth were and caught himself in time. He smiled. There was no avoiding it. He was a dragon. She knew he was a dragon. And on that, at least, there was no reason for awkwardness. Hell, she shifted too. He had to keep telling himself that. He had to remember. "I, personally, brush and floss. Use mouthwash, even. But I can’t answer to the cleanliness of another dragon’s teeth."

That got him a smile. Little more than the polite smile that she gave customers, but a smile nonetheless, and even a teasing sort of reply. "No unified dental hygiene guidelines for dragons?"

"Afraid not," he said. He soaked one of the balls of cotton wool in hydrogen peroxide and gently started to cleanse the area. "Seriously, you really should go to a doctor. I know we shifters heal quickly, but these deep puncture wounds can be dangerous. Only a tiny area exposed to air, see. The space in there can develop an infection very easily. And you could get blood poisoning, something horrible." He looked up and saw her open her mouth. "I know what you’re going to say, and I’m not going to tell you that you’re wrong. The last thing we need. The very last thing is to call attention to ourselves – particularly with strange animal bites. And I understand how you feel about being in the hospital. I slept under a bridge many a night, rather than going to a shelter when the moon was full and the impulse to shift greater. But, Kyrie, I’m not joking." He pushed as much hydrogen peroxide as he could into the puncture, on both sides, by squeezing the cotton right atop of it. "If you get a fever, the first sign of swelling on your arm, and you must – must – see a doctor. It could kill you."

"You know a lot about this stuff."

He nodded pulling back the cotton wool, tossing it in the kitchen trash in the corner and waiting while her arm dried. Then he got antibiotic cream and started slathering it on. There was no reason to tell her anything. Or maybe there was. He’d been so desperately alone all these years. "My mom is a doctor," he said.

"Is she..." Kyrie swallowed. "Is she..."

"She left dad about ten years ago," he said. "When I was a kid. Went down to Florida with her new husband. I haven’t seen her since. But up till I was ten I gave her many reasons to perform first aid on me, and I heard this speech a lot."

Kyrie frowned at him. Then shook her head. "I was going to ask if she was a dragon."

Tom shook his head, then shrugged. "I don’t think so. I know dad isn’t. And I don’t think mom is. I’ve never..." He was about to say that he didn’t know any older shifters, but then realized he did. He had seen a couple of derelicts shifting while he flew above in the middle of a summer night. It had been further out west, towards New Mexico, and they’d shifted into coyotes and headed for the hills. He remembered because back then, seeing the tattered men shift into ragtag coyotes he’d wondered if he’d end up like that. Old, still a transient, still homeless. It had been part of what led him to steal... "I don’t think it’s hereditary, or at least not that way. Why? Are your parents shifters?"

She shook her head and shrugged, and her eyes got soft and distant. "I wouldn’t know. They left me at the entrance of a church in Charlotte, North Carolina when I was just a few hours old. I was found by parishioners coming in for the midnight services on Christmas night. There were headlines all over the papers, about it. But I never knew..." She shrugged again. "I was raised by foster families."

And perhaps that explained why she held herself under such tight control? Tom wouldn’t know. He knew about as much about foster care as he knew about happy family life. A couple of his acquaintances of convenience, while he had been on the streets, had been foster children. They’d told him hair raising stories about the system. But did it mean that every one was like that? Or only the ones who’d gone seriously to the bad?

He taped the bandages in place over the puncture. "Blood poisoning will make a visible circle, it will start just above the wound, and it will be a red circle that will slowly move upwards if it’s not treated. If you see a circle on your arm, you must go to the doctor, immediately."

"Am I to assume personal experience speaks here?" Kyrie asked.

He managed a smile. "My best friend and I." He hadn’t thought of Joe in years. Wondered where he was now. What he was doing. "We had these plastic swords, but you know, they were disappointing because they really couldn’t cause enough damage. We could bang on each other all day long with them, they were too light and definitely not sharp. So we improved them by sticking nails in the tip. Rusty nails." He saw her wince. "Yeah. Lucky for us my mom caught the infection in time. Even then I was on antibiotics forever. Now that I think about it, lucky we were both lousy swordsmen, too. We never managed to kill each other, though we tried for a whole day."

He pulled her sleeve down, and started to gather the stuff.

"No," she said. "I want you to look at my back. "It feels abraded." As she spoke, she loosened her robe, and edged it down at the back – to reveal a shoulder that had been stripped bare of skin.

"It’s more than abraded," Tom said. And because the sight of the robe sliding over the raw flesh of her shoulder made him cringe, he added, "Let me," and pulled the robe down slowly, at the back. In the process, the front fell too, revealing one of her breasts almost to the nipple. Golden skin the color of honey, and it looked velvet soft. His fingers wanted to stray that way, wanted to feel...

He concentrated on her back, kneeling so that her back was all he saw. He found the end of the skinned portion where her shoulder blade ended. "This looks awful. How?"

"I think it was a paw swipe," she said. "The claws missed me, but the scales got me."

"Ah," Tom said. He had never thought he was that lethal in his dragon form, and to be honest, he wasn’t sure he was. He didn’t know how much he looked like the Chinese dragons. He was aware the tail was different, the paws more massive, but he’d never looked at himself in a mirror while shifted. Or if he had, he hadn’t managed to remember it.

He got the antibiotic cream and started applying it in a thin layer to Kyrie’s back, trying to touch so lightly that he wouldn’t hurt her. She didn’t seem to flinch from the touch, so he must be succeeding. There had been a time he wanted to be a doctor. Before... All of this.

"When did you shift for the first time?" Kyrie asked.

Tom’s hand trembled immediately, as the memories flooded him. Flying over the city. Not the first time, but one of the first. Seeing everything. Then coming home. Breaking the bedroom window. It was devilishly hard to work the paws when you weren’t even sure what was happening to you. And then his father. His father, with the gun, ordering him out.

Hell, he didn’t even know his father had a gun until then. Until that moment, had anyone asked, he’d have said his father wouldn’t have a gun in the house. Tom had heard his father go on and on about gun control quite often. And he was too young to understand hypocrisy.

He took a deep breath and managed to push the memory away. To this day he wasn’t sure why his father had ordered him out of the house. He’d shifted back by then. He’d shifted back and grabbed hold of his robe. Which is why he’d ended on the street in his robe and barefoot.

But he controlled the memories, squeezed a dollop of cream from the tube. Kyrie hadn’t asked again, so he probably hadn’t taken that long to get himself under control. "I was sixteen," he said. "I never had any warning before. I just... Shifted. In the moonlight."

In the moonlight, in his room, with its comfortable bed, and all the posters, and the tv, the stereo, the game system. All the things he’d once thought needed to survive. "I was all excited too," he said. "That first time. I thought it was a cool, super hero thing."

She was silent, and he thought she was thinking about what a fool he’d been. He concentrated on what he was doing. Fingers on the wound on her shoulder, lightly, lightly, spreading a thin, shining layer of antibiotic cream.

"I was fourteen," she said, speaking as from a great distance. "I thought I was dreaming the first few times. And then I thought I was hallucinating. I thought I had ... I don’t know. Seizures or something. I used to imagine that my parents were two mental patients who’d had me and had smuggled me out of the madhouse so I could be raised on the outside."

He laughed despite himself and she turned to look at him, her expression grave. Not offended, just grave.

"I don’t think there were any mental hospitals like that in the nineteen eighties," he said. "Where they kept the children of the patients locked up along with the parents. Were there?"

Kyrie shook her head and smiled again, a smile fractionally warmer than the ones she gave the customers. "Not in this country, no, I don’t think," she said. "But I was very young. Just a kid. I thought..." She shrugged. "Actually at first I thought someone was putting datura in my food or something."

"Datura?" he asked.

"An hallucinogenic. At least, Agatha Christie has a mystery in which someone is putting it in a man’s shaving cream to make him dream that he’s a werewolf, and I thought–"

"I read Christie too," he said. Often her books were the only thing available in safe homes for at risk youth or what not, where he sought temporary refuge. That and the ever-yellowing pile of National Geographics. It was Tom’s considered opinion that National Geographics were alien artifacts routinely bombarded down onto the Earth. "But isn’t datura something Indian, something..."

"I didn’t tell you I was rational, did I?" Kyrie asked.

He shook his head and reached for the gauze, cutting it to fit the area on her shoulder, and laying it gently atop the wound.

"I thought someone was trying to make me think I was crazy. Perhaps my foster parents. They get more for special needs kids, you know? And then I read up on it, and I decided I was schizophrenic. I couldn’t tell what I did while I was under this condition, so I started hiding. At first I was lucky that no one saw me, and then when I realized what caused it – the full moon, a feeling of anger. Anything. I was damn careful over the next four years. Always slept alone, even if arrangements called for other kids in the room. I’d take a blanket and go sleep on a tree, if needed. It... Made for interesting times and made me change families even more often. And then I was on my own, and I’ve been careful. Very careful. But I still thought it was all in my mind. Till tonight."

Tom shook his head, as he started taping the gauze in place. He couldn’t imagine not knowing the shift was true. But perhaps it was different for dragons. He saw the city from above. He saw things happen. And, of course, within a month of his first shifting, his father had seen him shift and had shouted at him and ... ordered him out. For shifting. Hard to tell yourself it was all in your mind after that.

"How many of us are there?" Kyrie asked. "I mean – there’s you and the triad, but... You’ve known about this more and have been more places. How many shifters have you met?"

#

She had to talk to keep her mind off what he was doing. He wasn’t hurting her. On the contrary. His fingers, touching her skin ever-so-lightly were a caress. Or the closest to a caress she could remember.

It had been too long since she’d even let anyone touch her. Certainly not since she’d started shifting. Before that there had been foster siblings who’d got close, some she’d hugged and who’d hugged her. But not since then.

Tom’s touch was very delicate, as if he were afraid of breaking her. It felt odd. She didn’t want to think of him, back there, being careful not to hurt her.

And she really wanted to know how many shifters he’d seen in the five years since he’d left his house. She hadn’t been out much. Well, not out on the street and not out while aware of being in a shape-shifted body. She hadn’t been looking for other shifters. But he might have been. Hell, considering his thing with the triad, he probably had been.

He paused at her question. He’d been taping the gauze down over her wound, and he stopped. For a moment she thought she’d offended him.

But he sighed. "I don’t know for sure," he said. "I wasn’t counting. Including the occasional enforcer for the triad or not?"

"The enforcers for the triad have been trailing you all this time?"

She was sure he’d smiled at that, but she wasn’t sure how. His fingers resumed their gentle touch, taping the gauze in place.

"No," he said. "Only a... part of a year." He paused again. "Without counting them and ... and the other triad dragons, of whom there are many, I’d say I’ve seen about twelve, maybe thirteen shifters. Not... Not close enough to talk to. I’ve only talked to a couple. I never went out of my way to talk to them. And sometimes, it was ambiguous, you know. Like, you’re walking downtown and you see someone walk in a certain direction and moments later a wolfhound ... or a wolf... comes from the same direction. The only ones I knew for sure were the triad and the orangutan and the coyotes. There seems to be any number of them within the triad. Hundreds. And that might be hereditary. They seem to think they’re descended of the Great Sky Dragon. They marry among themselves and they have rites and... and stuff."

"So – excluding the triad – a dozen in five years? That doesn’t seem like many."

"No. And most of the time it was larger cities than Goldport. Large cities back East. New York and Boston and Atlanta."

"Odd," Kyrie said. "Because just last night..."

"Yes, you and me and that lion," Tom said, his voice grave, as he finished taping the gauze in place. At least she assumed he’d finished, because he lay the tape back on the table, with the scissors on top of it. And then, ever so gently, he tugged her robe back in place. "I’ve been thinking the same. Why that many in one night. With the triad here, too, we must be tipping the scales at ... a lot of shifters. And I wondered why."

Kyrie wondered why too. She’d been living in Goldport for over a year. She remembered the greyhound bus had stopped here and she’d thought to stay for a night before going on to Denver. But she’d never gone on. Something about Goldport just felt... right. Like it was the home she’d been looking for so long. Which was ridiculous, since it was what remained of a gold boom town that had become a University town. And she never had anything to do with either mining or college.

But Goldport had felt... Not exactly familiar, but more safe. Secure. Home. Like the home she’d never known. She had walked from the Greyhound station to the Athens and seen a sign on the window asking for a server. She’d applied and been hired that night.

But what attraction could the small, odd town have for other shifters. Well... Tom had come via the Greyhound too, she supposed. And Frank had offered him a job.

As for the lion... She wouldn’t think about the lion. "It’s probably just a coincidence," she told Tom. And it probably was. Three were not, after all, a great sample. Perhaps they were the only three shifters in town – other than the triad – and had just chanced to bump into each other. The blood had surely helped. She swallowed, remembering what the blood smelled like in the other shape.

Tom came around and started gathering the first aid supplies.

"What kinds of shifters are there? What kinds did you see? Just big cats? And werewolves? And dragons? Or..."

Tom stopped what he was doing. He didn’t drop the supplies, just held them where they were. He didn’t look at her. "You’re going to think I’m an idiot," he said.

"Um... No," Kyrie said. She couldn’t understand why she would think he was an idiot now. She had a thousand reasons to think him careless, low on self-preservation instincts and probably a little insane. But... an idiot? "Why?"

He sighed. "I swear one of those shifters was a centaur. I know what you’re going to tell me, that centaurs don’t exist, that I was just seeing a horseman, that–"

"No I’m not," Kyrie said.

"You’re not?"

"Tom, dragons are thought not to exist too."

"Oh," He looked shocked. As if he’d never thought of it that way. Then he grinned. "Well, then I can tell you. Another one of them was an orangutan. Little stooped man, sold roast chestnuts on the street near ... Near my father’s house. And he shifted into an orangutan at night. He was a very nice man, once I got to talking to him. He told me that his wife and his daughters sometimes didn’t notice when he shifted." He grinned at that, as he gathered all the first aid supplies, and headed back to the bathroom.

Kyrie followed him, wondering what to do next. He’d helped her. And, whether his association with the triad was dangerous or not, he, personally, didn’t feel dangerous. And they’d lost the triad for the night, hadn’t they?

She was reluctant to send him out alone and barefoot into the night. What if he got killed? How would she feel when she heard about it? How would she live with herself?

And besides, having grown up without family, all alone, this was the first time she’d found someone who was genuinely like her. Not family – at least she didn’t think so, though he could be a half brother or a cousin. One of the curses of the abandoned child was not to know – but someone who had more in common with her than anyone else she had found. And if he’d gone bad... She shook her head.

She didn’t know why he’d gone bad. She remembered the smell of blood in that parking lot and the madness in the apartment. Clearly, she too had it in her to commit violence. She would have to control it. Perhaps he was just weaker than her? Perhaps he could not control himself as well.

He put the stuff back in the medicine cabinet, carefully organized, and turned around. "I’ll get out of your hair now, okay. Just report your car stolen. You have insurance, right?"

"Yes, but..."

"Oh, I’ll still pay you for the window," Tom said. "But it might take me a while to be able to get to an ATM. I have some money. Not much. I don’t think I’ll get my deposit back for the apartment. I thought I’d head out of town, lead the ... the dragons away from you."

"And leave me stuck in the middle of a murder investigation?"

He opened his hands. "What else can I do? I can’t undo what happened." He looked earnest and distraught. "Someone died. And, Kyrie, I wish to all that’s holy that I could tell you it wasn’t me who killed him. But I can’t. He’s dead, and I’m..."

He opened his hands denoting his helplessness. "I wish I could tell you I never touched him and that I would never have done that, but my mind is all a blank. I don’t even remember being attacked in my apartment, honest. If it weren’t for the state it’s in..."

His hair had fallen in front of his eyes, and he tossed his head back to throw it back. "Look... I might very well have done it, and they might find evidence linking me to it. I’m not sure how your DNA works when you’re shifted. But if it was... If they think I killed him, all you have to say is that I asked you for a ride home, that you had no idea anyone was dead. You could have come out in the parking lot and never seen it, you know? It was behind the vans. I took advantage of your charity and stole your car. No one will hold that against you."

Kyrie bit her lip. There were other things he wasn’t even thinking about, she thought. For instance, the paper towels. Properly looked over they’d probably find traces of her hair, dead skin cells, whatever.

But fine, the major evidence would point to him, and she could probably come up with a story that would let her off and get him out of her life forever. So, why didn’t she want to? Was it because once he was gone she could go back to imagining that she was just hallucinating the shifts? And she wouldn’t have a witness to her shape-shifting.

She put her hands inside the wide sleeves of her robe. "I think that’s tiredness talking," she said. "I think if I can come up with an excuse, so can you. You’re exhausted from who knows how many hours shifted. And you don’t look well." This last was the absolute truth. Tom had started out looking shocked and ill, and he’d progressed to milk-pale, with dark, dark circles under his eyes, bruised enough to look like someone had punched him hard. "You could crash the car out there," she said, and seized upon that. "And I don’t want it made inoperable. The insurance never pays you enough to junk it."

He frowned at her, the frown that she had learned to identify as his look of indecision.

"I have a love seat," she said. And to his surprised look, "In the sunroom at the back. Sleeping porch, really, from when they treated tubercular patients in this region. They thought fresh air was essential, so they had these sun porches. Someone glassed this one in, and there’s a love seat in it. Nothing fancy, mind you, but you can have it and a blanket."

She could see him being tempted. He was so tired that, standing in the middle of her little bathroom, he was swaying slightly on his feet. She could see him looking in what he probably thought was the direction of the sun porch, and she could practically hear the thoughts of the love seat and blanket run through his head. She could also see him opening his mouth to tell her thanks but no thanks.

Which was when the doorbell rang.

#

The noise of the doorbell echoed, seeming to fill the small house.

Kyrie jumped and Tom turned his wrist towards himself, as though checking time on a watch he didn’t wear.

She swept her gaze towards the narrow little window in the shower, instead, checking the scant light coming through, blue tinged, announcing the end of blind night, the beginning of barely lit morning.

"It can’t be anyone about the... It’s too early," she said.

And saw Tom pale, saw him start shaking. "Go to the kitchen," she told him, sure that in his mind as in hers was the memory of the bathroom at the Athens, full of bloodied towels, probably tainted with his hair and skin. And hers.

Why, oh, why hadn’t she put the used towels in her car? Dumped them somewhere? But where? Outside Tom’s apartment? They hadn’t exactly had time to stop anywhere and get rid of things.

It was too late for all that, now. All her life, she had faced crises and looked after herself. What else could she do? There hadn’t been anyone else to look after her. Now she had to look after Tom too. Not the first time she had this sort of responsibility. Younger kids at foster homes often clung to her, sure that her strength would carry them. And it did, even when she thought she had no strength left.

He was shaking, and she put a hand out to him, and touched his arm. It still felt too cold, even through the sweat suit. "Go to the kitchen. Sit down," she said. "Stay. I’ll go see who it is. I’ll deal with it."

She walked out through the kitchen and the hallway, to the front room with its curved seventies vintage sofa that she’d covered in the pretty red sheet, and the table made of plastic cubes where she kept her books and her few prized possessions. It should give her a sense of security, but it didn’t. Instead, she wondered what would happen to her books if she were arrested and what would happen to the house if she lost her job. Though it was just a rental, it was the first place she could call hers, the first place where she was not living on someone else’s territory and on someone else’s terms.

She shook her head. It wouldn’t come to that. She wouldn’t let it come to that.

The front door was one of the cheap hollow metal ones, but it did have a bull’s eye. The neighborhood was quiet enough and the whole city was safe, so she supposed it had been put there to allow occupants to avoid Jehovah witnesses.

Now she leaned into the door and put her eye to the tiny opening. Out there was... A stranger.

He stood on her doorstep, and he was tall, blond. Broad shouldered, she supposed, but with the sort of relaxed posture and laid back demeanor that made him look more like a surfer than a body builder. Increasing the impression was hair just on this side of long, the bangs overhanging his left eye. He wore a loose white linen suit that seemed to accentuate his relaxed expression. The sunglasses that covered his eyes despite the scant light made him look like one of those artists afraid of being recognized, or else like a man who’d just flown in from a vacation in Bermuda and had not yet fully realized that he was back home.

The sunglasses made his expression unreadable, but he seemed to be looking intently at the door. As Kyrie watched, he raised his hand and rang the doorbell again.

It was what? Four, five in the morning? Surely this was not a casual visit. Casual visitors didn’t insist on being answered at this time of night. But then what? A rapist or a robber? What? Ringing the doorbell? Wasn’t that sort of unusual? Besides, she could handle herself. Surely she could handle herself.

Kyrie unlocked the door and opened it the length of the chain. The chain was another puzzler. Either the neighborhood had been a lot worse when the security device was installed, or the Jehovah Witnesses were unusually persistent.

"Ah," he said, when she opened the door, and smiled flashing teeth straight out of a toothpaste commercial. "Ms Kyrie Smith?"

Before she could answer, there was a faint rustling sound behind her.

She Turned and saw Tom mouthing soundlessly "Police?" He raised his eyebrows.

She shrugged. But it if was police, then she really needed to answer. Before he took too close a look at the car. The upholstery was doubtlessly smeared with blood. And, doubtlessly, some of it would be the murder victim’s.

Tom nodded at her, as if to tell her to go ahead and open the door. And Kyrie did, about a palm’s width further.

The man on the other side got closer. He wore some strong aftershave. No. Not strong, but insinuating. He looked down at her, his eyes unreadable behind the sunglasses. "Ms. Kyrie Grace Smith?"

She nodded. Smith was the name of a foster family she no longer remembered, but it had stuck to her throughout her growing up years.

He reached for a pocket of his linen suit, and brought out a leather wallet, which he opened with a flourish that must have taken years to learn. "Officer Rafiel Trall, Goldport Police Department. May I speak to you for a moment?"

#

Tom swallowed hard and was sure he’d turned pale at the announcement that the man on the other side of the door was an officer of the law. He’d had run- ins with the police before. He had a record. Oh, he’d never been arrested for more than a night or a couple of nights. And he’d been a minor. And every time his father had bailed him out.

But still, he didn’t know what kind of record they kept or if it would have been erased when he turned eighteen. He was sure a couple of times they’d tried to charge him as an adult. Wasn’t sure if it had stuck. He hadn’t been paying much attention back then. He’d been cocky and full of himself and his family’s power and position.

Since he’d left home, he’d done his best not to be caught. He tried to visualize being in jail, and needing to shift. Or shifting without meaning to. He imagined turning into a dragon in confines where privacy didn’t exist. He couldn’t be arrested. He wouldn’t be. He would kill himself first.

Kyrie looked at the ID, then at the man.

"May I come in?" the man asked. "I have a few questions to ask you. Just a few minutes of your time."

Silently, Kyrie opened the door, and the man came in. He didn’t look surprised at all at seeing Tom, whom he greeted with a nod. But then why should he look surprised? He couldn’t know that Kyrie didn’t have a boyfriend, could he?

Tom willed himself to relax, to show no fear. Fear would make the man suspicious and would make him look harder for something that had triggered that reaction.

"Look, this is just a quick visit," the policeman said. "A quick question. You work at the Athens on Fairfax, right?"

Kyrie nodded.

"Mr. Frank Skathari, your boss, said you had left about midnight?"

Had it been midnight? Tom wondered. It seemed like an eternity to his tired body, his dizzy mind. He saw Kyrie nod and wondered if she had any more idea of the time than he did.

"You didn’t see any large animal in the parking lot?"

"An... animal?" she asked.

"There was a corpse... I’m sorry. You might not have noticed," he said. "It was behind some vans. But there was a corpse, and it looked like it died by accident. An attack by some creature with large teeth. We’re thinking like a Komodo dragon or something."

Dragon. Tom felt as if the word were directed at him. The policeman looked at him as he spoke. Or at least, his face turned in Tom’s direction. It was hard to see what the man was looking at, exactly, with those sunglasses on. "People bring these pets from abroad," he was saying, as Tom focused on him again. "And let them lose. It could be dangerous. I just wanted to know if you’d seen something."

"No," Kyrie said, and sounded amazingly convincing. "I saw nothing strange. I just concerned with Tom..." She made a head gesture towards him. "With getting Tom his medicine."

"Medicine?" the policeman asked, as if this were the clue that would unravel the whole case.

"Migraine," Tom said. It was the first thing to cross his mind. His father, he remembered, had migraines. "Migraine medicine."

"Oh." The policeman said. "I see." He sounded alarmingly as if he did. He looked at one of them and then the other. "So, you won’t be able to help me."

"I’m afraid not," Kyrie said.

"That," he said. "Is too bad. I was hoping you’d have coffee with me tomorrow." He looked at his watch and nodded. "Well, later today – and discuss if you might have heard something suspicious or... found something. Perhaps in the bathroom of the diner. We haven’t looked there, yet, you know?"

Tom heard the sound of a train, inside his ears, complete with whistles and growing thuds. He felt as if he would pass out. The bathroom. The damn man had looked in the bathroom and... seen the towels. And he going to use it to blackmail Kyrie? Blackmail Kyrie into what? What had Tom got Kyrie into?

He felt a spasm come over his whole body, and knew he was going to shift. And he didn’t have the strength nor the will power to stop it.

Kyrie gasped. He managed to see her through a fog of pre-shift trembling, and realized she wasn’t looking at him, but at the door she had just closed.

Then she turned around and something – something about him, about the way he looked, made her eyes grow huge and panicky. "No," she said. "No, you idiot. Don’t shift."

Her hand grabbed firmly at his arm, and it felt warm and human and real.

#

Kyrie turned from closing the door on the policeman’s smiling face, and saw Tom... She couldn’t describe it. He was Tom, undeniably Tom, human and bipedal, but there was something very wrong about his shape. His arms were too long, the wrist and quite a bit of green-shaded flesh protruding from the end of the sleeve. His hands were stretched out, too, his fingers elongated and the space between them strangely membranous. And his face, beneath the huge, puzzled blue eyes looked like it was doing its best to grow a snout.

"No, no, you idiot," she said. "Don’t shift. No. Calm down."

He stood on one foot, then the other, his features blank and stupid. His face already half-dragon and unable to show human emotions. His mouth opened, but what came out was half hiss, half growl.

She slapped him. She slapped him hard. "No," she said. "No."

And he shivered. He trembled on the edge of shifting. She realized she had smacked what could be a very large, very angry dragon in a minute. And then she smacked him again on the nose, as if he were a naughty puppy.

She judged how her shifts had left her, tired, witless. He’d shifted twice now. Oh, so had she, but the first time very briefly. How long had he been shifted? What had he done?

"You cannot shift now," she said. And slapped him again.

He blinked. His features blurred and changed. All of a sudden he was Tom, just Tom, standing there, looking like someone had hit him hard with a half brick and stopped just short of braining him. He seemed to be beyond tiredness, to some zombie-like state where he could be ordered about.

"Oh, damn," he said, so softly that it was almost a sigh. He looked at her, and his eyes showed a kind of mad despair behind the tiredness. "Oh, damn. I can’t be arrested, Kyrie, I can’t. I was... when I was young and stupid. My father... got me out, but sometimes I spent a night in lockup. Kyrie, I couldn’t survive it as a dragon. When my dad threw me out, I spent the night in a runaway shelter and... It was torture. The dragon... The beast wanted to come out. All those people. And being confined. If they take me in on suspicion of murder, if I have to stay... Kyrie, I couldn’t. I’ll kill myself before that."

Suddenly she understood why he’d started to shift, what the words of Officer Trall would sound like to him. She sighed, heavily. "No one is arresting you. At least not yet."

"But he is blackmailing us. He’s blackmailing you. About the towels in the bathroom. He knows about the blood. And it’s all my fault."

"Yes," Kyrie said, wondering if it was blackmail, or what it was, exactly. She remembered the expression in his eyes. Those eyes... If it was blackmail, what did he want, exactly? "He knows about the towels because he smelled them."

"Smelled?"

"He found them by the smell of blood, I’d bet. Before any other policemen got to them. He got to them and bagged them and... I presume hid them. You were starting to shift, so you probably missed it, but he lowered his glasses and I could see his eyes."

"And?" Tom asked.

"He had the same golden eyes as the lion in the parking lot," she said.

#

"He is... like us?" Tom asked, as his mind tried to adjust to the thought. "He is the lion? How can..."

"You know the lion was like us," Kyrie said.

He heard the annoyed note in her voice. She had slapped him. Hard. He’d almost gone to pieces in front of her. He felt like an idiot. "But, he’s a policeman. He looks... He looks well adjusted. And he traced us... And... he’s in the police?" He swallowed, aware of sounding far less than rational and grown-up.

She nodded. "Yes. I’m very much afraid he’s in the police."

"And he’s like us..." Tom couldn’t imagine it. How would he hide his shifts? How would he shift? How would he... Did his family know? Or didn’t they care? He tried to imagine having parents – a family – who accepted your shifts, who loved you even when you, yourself, weren’t sure you were human.

Kyrie shook her head. For just a moment there was empathy in her look. "I can’t imagine it either," she said. "I suspect he normally works the night hours, though, as we do. Cops do, too, you know. It’s a nocturnal occupation. So we will probably find some of our kind. It’s easier to control the shifting if you’re awake."

Tom nodded. The whole thing was that even if you didn’t shift, if you were a shape-shifter you felt more awake – more aware – at night. It was inescapable. So if you wanted to sleep and actually be able to rest, you did it during the day. And therefore, of necessity, you worked nights.

"Speaking of which," Kyrie said. "Sun is coming up soon, and you’re practically falling down on your feet."

"You’ve been yawning," he said accusingly.

She looked at him, puzzled and he realized he’d said it as if he needed to salvage his manhood. While she’d just been... telling the truth.

"I’m sure I have," she said. "It’s late. Come on. You can sleep in the backroom."

Tom pulled his hair back and very much wished he had something to tie it back with. "I really should go," he said. "The triad dragons are after me and..."

"Oh, not that again," Kyrie said. "We’ve been over it." And she said it in such a tone of great tiredness that Tom couldn’t answer.

Meekly he followed her back through the hallway, where she opened a linen closet and got out a thin blanket. And then she led him all the way back to the kitchen and opened a door he hadn’t even been able to see, next to the fridge. It was a narrow door, as if designed for very thin people. At the very back of the house, a small room, enclosed all in glass, opened. There were blinds on the windows, which made it not quite like sleeping in a fish bowl. Besides, the backyard was the size of a normal flowerbed. Maybe ten feet by ten feet, if that much, and surrounded by tall wooden fences. Not a fence belonging to it, but the fences of other houses that met there.

"Sorry there’s not much of a view," Kyrie said. "I planted roses out there, to hide the fence, but most of them died in the drought. Only a couple survive and they’re tiny."

He realized she thought he was looking at the fence in horror, and he managed a smile. "No, no. It’s fine. I just need to sleep..."

"Well, this is the love seat. It doesn’t open up, but it’s fairly comfy. I’ve napped on it on occasion."

Tom felt the sofa reflexively, even as a voice at the back of his mind asked him what exactly he intended to do if he found it lumpy. Go and sleep in a better place? Like, for instance, all the hotels that accepted barefoot men without a dime on them?

He sat down on the sofa and clutched the thin blanket to himself. "Thank you, Kyrie. Thank you."

She looked surprised. Had he really come across as that much of a prick, that she’d be surprised because he thanked her?

Apparently, because Kyrie stood there, looking at him, eyebrows raised, as though evaluating a new and strange artifact, before she said,"Good night," and left.

Tom lay down and pulled the blanket over himself. It couldn’t have taken more than ten seconds before he fell asleep and into dreams populated by darkness, pierced by sharp claws and glimmering fangs – and a huge pearl, the size of a grapefruit and glowing like the moonlight at the full.

#

Kyrie frowned all the way to her room. She told herself that she must get her head examined, she really, really must.

In jerky movements, angrier at herself than she would like to admit, she undressed, throwing her robe over the foot of the bed.

Normally she slept naked. It was a habit she’d picked up since she’d started renting this house. All her life, up till then, she had been staying with someone else, under someone else’s rules – when she was a foster child – or in a communal building, an apartment building where she didn’t want someone to come in attracted by noise, while she was having what she thought of as one of her episodes, and find her naked. In retrospect, it was very foolish of her to think she didn’t actually shift, since the episodes usually meant she woke up naked. At least, she told herself, she had learned to remove her clothes fast in the first throes of the shift.

Looking back, she thought it had all been an elaborate game with herself, to keep herself fooled about the nature of the shifting. After all, if she’d wakened with clothes nearby shredded to bits by large claws, she’d have had to think. She’d have had to admit something else was going on, right?

But in her own home she went to sleep naked, so that when she woke up naked she could pretend nothing at all untoward had happened in the night. Dreams, just dreams. She could tell herself that and believe it.

Only now, she stood naked in the middle of her bedroom and felt... well, nude. There was a man in the house. A young, attractive and not particularly wholesome young man.

Okay, so he was in the back room and frankly, from the way he’d been swaying slightly on his feet, he probably wasn’t in any state to be walking around. Not even stumbling around. And there was a locked – she paused and turned the key in the lock – door between them.

But still, she looked at herself in the mirror and she looked distressingly naked. Which meant... She blew out a breath, in annoyance at herself, as she scrambled to her dresser, got her loosest t-shirt and a pair of panties and slipped them on.

What was she thinking? Up till this night she’d never found any reason to like Tom. And what had changed about this night? Well, he might have killed someone. And he was being chased by triads trying to recover something he’d been stupid enough to steal from... gangsters.

Yeah. There was a good reason to allow him to sleep in her house. There was a good reason to expose herself to the potential danger of a practically strange – no practically about it, in fact, she knew Tom was strange – man in the house.

She pulled back the covers on the narrow bed pushed up against her wall. The bedroom was barely large enough for the bed and the dresser – both purchased from thrift stores. It would be too small if she had a double bed.

She lay down on the mattress – or more accurately, threw herself down on it with the sort of angry fling of the body that a thin thrift store mattress couldn’t quite take.

She shifted position and flung the covers over herself, refusing to admit she’d bruised something.

There was a reason for Tom to be here. Sure there was. She didn’t want to throw him out into the night, barefoot, tired and confused.

Only, if she’d caught the drift of Tom’s story right, he’d been surviving on his own, out there for a long time. He was a big man. Well, perhaps on the short side, but definitely well developed and muscular and...

No, this was worse than the lion. She turned face down on the mattress and buried her face on her pillow.

The bedroom was in deep darkness, partly because it was the only room in the entire house that had only one tiny window – very small and high up on the upper corner of the back wall.

Now she wondered if the full light of day was near.

What kind of an idiot was she?

Tom was clearly dangerous. Beyond the fact that she’d found him leaning over a fresh corpse, beyond the fact that he seemed to know how to steal cars, with barely a moment to think about it, he’d just admitted to a career of juvenile delinquency. And he’d almost shifted. In the middle of her living room, he’d almost shifted, for heaven’s sake. And he’d almost for sure stolen something that had the triad gunning for him.

What? Was she now suddenly attracted to hard luck cases? She’d always laughed at women who came to the diner and, over breakfast with their equally clueless friends, complained about being disappointed by men that, surely, they knew were no good from the beginning. If you picked up with ex-cons, drug addicts, thieves – how could you expect anything good to come of it? Why would they respect you when they’d never respected another human being?

She knew this. So, why would she take this one in? Why? He wasn’t even any good at being bad. He was a mess of trembling jelly between bouts of dangerous behavior.

She remembered him in the parking lot, under the moonlight. Pale skin and muscle-sculpted body, and those eyes...

Okay, so he was pretty. Since when was pretty worth all this trouble? The world was full of handsome men who weren’t her problem. Men who would run the first time she turned into a panther.

And there was the problem, and there she came to and stopped. Because for all else that might be said for Tom, he wouldn’t run.

Neither – probably – would officer Trall. She remembered the disturbing moment when he’d lowered his glasses and fixed her with those recognizable golden eyes, that even in human form, with normal sclera, iris and pupil were unmistakable. And he looked just as good in human form.

She threw back the covers.

Again, pretty he might be, but that man was trouble. Pure trouble. He was a shifter, yes, but he was also a police officer. And what did the officer want with her? Why did he want to meet her? She was not so innocent that she didn’t notice – of course she did – that he’d mentioned the bathroom which meant the paper towels. Was it a threat? Was he blackmailing her? Blackmailing her into what?

She remembered the lion in the parking lot of the Athens – virile and energetic and very, very male.

She bit her lip. She wished she could convince herself that it would take a lot of blackmail to get her to what the Victorians called a fate worse than death. But she doubted it. If Tom hadn’t been there, if he hadn’t pulled her into the car, she very much suspected she would have shifted and...

And then there was Tom. His image flickered through her mind, as she tossed her thin blanket and turned first this way, then that. He’d been so gentle, so... respectful, when he helped dress her shoulder. Which, by the way, should hurt, shouldn’t it?

She sat up in bed and prodded at her bandaged areas, but nothing hurt. Perhaps the antibiotic cream was also an analgesic. She had a bad habit of buying whatever was on sale without reading it too carefully. Well, just as well it didn’t hurt. She lay down again, and closed her eyes.

But her thoughts went on behind her closed eyelids.

What was she going to do with Tom? Did she have to do anything with Tom? How far was she responsible for him?

She saw his features close at her comment, she saw his lost expression, all pale face and huge, shocked eyes. She saw him the parking lot, dragon-form, muzzle blood-stained, and in the bathroom of the Athens, all over blood, his long, dark hair caked with it. She saw him in her living room, half dragon and mostly man, clearly out of control.

What had he meant to do? Attack the officer? Why? For speaking out of turn?

All right. So, Rafiel Trall might have sounded like he was blackmailing her – blackmailing them. But she wasn’t sure he was. There was something to his expression – a softness, a hopefulness... that made her doubt that he meant to threaten her. And even if he were. What did Tom mean to do? Eat him? Was he so devoid of any sense of right and wrong? Had no one ever told him you didn’t eat people? Ever?

The bed felt too hard, the blanket too hot, the sheet too wrinkled beneath her tossing body.

She was never aware of the moment at which she fell into a dreamless sleep.

#

Kyrie woke up with the phone ringing.

The phone was on the dresser, across the room from the bed. The ring itself, seeming to run up and down her nerves like fire, carried her halfway there, still asleep, and she woke up fully with the receiver pressed to her ear, while she heard herself say "Hello," in a sleepy voice.

"Ms. Smith?" the voice on the other side was a masculine purr, dripping with sensuousness that caressed the syllables, making the Ms. sound dangerously like Miss and Smith sound like a compliment, an indent proposition.

She knew it was Rafiel Trall without his announcing himself. She could see him at the other side of the phone, relaxed and seductive masculinity, poise and confidence and that something in his eyes, that something in his expression that said he was very bad for her. In the way that chocolate was bad for you. And all the more irresistible for being bad.

"How may I help you, officer?" she asked, making her voice crispy and official. All business. She had to keep this all business.

"In a lot of ways," he said. "But right now I just want to ask you a favor."

She could hear him smile, and she couldn’t quite tell how. One of her first jobs, out of high school, had been with a cold-calling telemarketing company. The job hadn’t lasted long, though she’d been surprisingly good at it. Perhaps, she thought now, they could hear the harmonics of the panther in the human voice. And bought. And bought. And were very polite with it.

At that job they’d told her to always smile while she was talking because people on the other side could tell. She’d never believed it till now.

The silence lengthened between them, stretched like taffy, feeling sticky and endless, thinner and thinner, but never breaking. "All right," she said, at last. "Ask."

This time there was a very masculine chuckle at the other end.

"I can always say no," she said, tempted beyond endurance by the chuckle.

"You can," he said, gravely. "But I hope you don’t. There’s a restaurant about... Oh, two miles from your house. It’s the in-house restaurant at Spurs And Lace."

Spurs and Lace, was the one good hotel in a western town plagued with cheap motels and improbable cabin resorts, which catered to those families too poor, too numerous or too shy to stay at the one Holiday Inn. The nineteenth century hotel was in a completely different class. Once used by moneyed Easterners coming for the benefit of the mineral waters and the dry western air, it had been renovated within an inch of its life, furnished with antiques and updated. It was now the haven of moneyed business travelers and honeymooning couples. An executive resort, Kyrie believed they called it.

"The Restaurant is called Sheriff’s Star , but despite the name it’s good," Trall went on. "They serve brunch, which we’re just about in time for."

Again, she said nothing. Oh, she could see where this was going, but she would let him come out and say it.

"I’d like to swing by your house to pick you up in about ... oh... five minutes?"

"Why would you like to pick me up?" Kyrie asked, though her mind, and the recollections of his smell from the day before, gave her pretty good indications.

The chuckle again. "I’d like to feed you, Ms. Smith. Nothing worse than that. And if, during brunch, you should feel like talking to me about the diner, and what you think might have gone on in that parking lot in the dark, I will discuss the other cases we’ve had with you and–"

"Did you say other cases?" Kyrie asked.

"Indeed."

"Other cases of..." She remembered his story the day before. "Attacks by Komodo dragons?"

"Possibly. Mysterious attacks, shall we say."

"I see."

"Well, I think if we discuss it, we’ll both see better," he said. "So... I’ll pick you up in a few minutes, if that is acceptable."

"No," Kyrie said, before she even knew she was going to say it. But as soon as the word was out of her lips, she knew why. She knew she had to say it. Stranded at a restaurant with only this relative stranger and no way home on her own? No. She didn’t think so. She might have gone stupid last night, but now it was the next day and she wouldn’t be stupid anymore. "No. I’ll bring my car. I’ll meet you there. In twenty minutes."

She could see him hesitate on the other end of the phone. She wasn’t sure how, or not exactly. Perhaps the letting out of breath, or perhaps some other sound, too light for ears to consciously discern. But it was there. And it was followed by an hesitant, "Your car..."

And now it was her turn to smile into the phone, "Why, officer. Would you be embarrassed to be seen with me, because of the condition of my car?"

"What? Of course not. It’s just that I thought with the broken window, you have a security liability and–"

"Oh, I wouldn’t worry, Officer Trall. After all, it’s a good part of town, isn’t it?"

After she put the phone down, she thought that it was a good part of town. And that her car might look ever so slightly embarrassing. But probably more so for Officer Trall whom she doubted ever left the house without wearing a pressed suit.

She refused to be intimidated by him. Or scared by his obvious, open, clear sexuality. To begin with, whether he turned into a lion or not, he was – as she had reason to know, being a female counterpart – only human. Or possibly something less. How much the animal controlled them was something that Kyrie didn’t wish to think about. And second, there was very little reason he would be romantically interested in her. She’d guess his suit had cost more than she made in a month.

Chances were he turned on that feline, devil-may-care charm with every female in sight. And meant nothing by it.

Still, she wouldn’t look like a charity date. Not at the Sheriff’s Star, she wouldn’t. Too many times in childhood, she’d found herself dressed in foster sisters’ – or brothers’ – discards, cowering at the back of a family group, afraid someone would ask why a beggar was let in.

Now she might dress from thrift shops – her salary rarely extended to new clothes, except for underwear and socks – but at a size six that meant she got last year’s designer clothes, donated by women so fashion conscious they spent half their time studying trends. That and a bit of flair, and her naturally exotic features made most people think her beautiful. Or at least handsome.

Before getting in the shower, she checked her wounds under the bandages, and was shocked at finding them completely healed and only a little red. There would be scars, but no wound. Interesting. Very interesting. She must make sure to figure out what that antibiotic cream was. She needed to buy more of it. She always kept a well stocked first aid cabinet – part of her trying to be prepared to survive any emergency on her own – but this had been the first time she’d needed it.

She rushed through a shower, dried her hair properly into position and slipped on a white t-shirt – or at least a knit shirt – with a mass of soft folds in the front, that gave the appearance of a really deeply cut decolletage – but a decolletage so hidden by the swaying material in the front that it was a matter of guessing whether it was really there or not.

Then she put on the wrap-around green suede mini-skirt. No fishnets, which she occasionally wore to work. There was no reason to look like Officer Trall was having brunch with a hooker either and – with this outfit – fishnets would give that impression. Instead, she put on flesh-tone stockings and slipped her feet into relatively flat shoes.

Fully dressed, she thought of Tom. If she was going to leave him here alone, in the house, without a car, she should leave him a note.

Backtracking to her dresser, she grabbed the notepad and pen she kept in her underwear drawer, and wrote quickly, I had to go out. There’s eggs and bacon in the fridge. Shape-shifting seemed to come with hunger and, from the way her own stomach was rumbling, Tom would be ravenous. Don’t go anywhere till I come back. We’ll discuss what to do.

She went to the kitchen and was about to put the note on the table, when she heard a rustle of fabric from the doorway to the back porch.

Tom stood there, looking only half awake. But his blue eyes were wide open as they stared at her. "Whoa," he said, very softly.

It was, in many ways, the greatest compliment anyone had paid Kyrie in a long time. If nothing else, because it seemed to have been forced from his lips before his mouth could stop it.

#

Tom awakened with the sound of steps. For a moment, confused, he thought it was his upstairs neighbor walking around in high heels again. But then he realized the steps were nearby by. Very nearby.

He woke already sitting up, teeth clenched, hands grabbing... the side and seat of a rough, brownish sofa.

He blinked as the world caught up with him – the night before and the events all ran through his mind like a train, overpowering all other thought and leaving him stunned.

And then he realized he could still hear steps nearby. Kyrie. He was in Kyrie’s house. She had put him up for the night, though he still couldn’t quite understand why. He’d have thought he was the last person in the world whom she’d want around. But she had given him the sofa to sleep on, and the sweat suit, and...

Still half-asleep, and with some vague idea of thanking her and getting out of her house and stopping endangering her as soon as possible, he lurched to his feet and stumbled towards the kitchen.

Kyrie stood by the table, her hair impeccably combed, as it usually was when she came to work. The first time Tom had seen her, he’d thought she was wearing a tapestry-pattern scarf. When he’d realized it was her real hair, he’d been so fascinated that he couldn’t help staring at her. Until he’d realized she was looking at him with frowning disapproval bordering on hatred. And then he’d learned to look elsewhere.

But this morning, in her own kitchen, she looked far more stunning than she usually did when she came to work. There was this folded down front to her blouse that seemed – at any minute – to threaten to reveal her breasts. He remembered her breasts and his mouth went dry. Beyond that, she wore this tiny suede thing that looked like a scarf doing the turn of a skirt. Below it her legs stretched, long and straight to her feet which were encased in relatively low heeled but elegant shoes, seemingly made of strips of multicolored leather woven together.

The whole was... He heard himself exclaim under his breath and she turned around. He had a moment to think that she was going to disapprove of him again. But instead, she looked surprised, her eyebrows raised.

"I’m sorry," he said. "I’m not used to seeing you dressed up. You look... amazing." He just wished her little feather earring hadn’t got lost. It would have looked lovely with that outfit.

"Thank you." She smiled, and her cheeks reddened, but for only a second, before the smile was replaced by a worried expression. As if she thought he wouldn’t compliment her unless he had ulterior motives. "I was about to leave you a note," she said. "There’s eggs and bacon in the fridge."

He realized he was starving. But still, it felt wrong to impose that far. She was being too generous. There was something wrong. "I should go," he said.

"Eat first. And then we’ll talk," she said. She spoke as if she had some plan, or at least some intention of having a plan. She threw the note she had written to him into the trash, opened the cupboard above the coffee maker. "There’s cups and coffee beans here," she said. "The coffee grinder is behind the coffee beans. I’m going to go for brunch with..." She took a deep breath and faced him. "I’d rather you don’t leave because I’m going to go for brunch with the policeman."

Tom felt a surge of panic. "You mean, he might want to arrest me?"

She looked puzzled. "No. I mean I might get some information out of him about what happened and what we can do, or even if there’s any danger at all." She waved him into silence. "I know there’s still danger from the triad, but I’m hoping there is no danger from the police. If there is, I’ll call and let you know, okay?"

He nodded dumbly. Something in him was deeply aggrieved that she had dressed up to go to lunch with the policeman. But of course, there was nothing he could do about that. She wasn’t his. He had no chance of her ever even looking at him like less than a dangerous nuisance.

And then for a moment, for just a moment, she looked at him and smiled a little. "Wish me luck," she said.

And she was out the door. And he silently wished her whatever luck meant to her. But he felt bereft as he hadn’t in a long time. As he hadn’t since that night he’d been thrown out of the only home he’d ever known.

#

Okay, and on top of everything else, the man is paranoid, Kyrie thought as she got out. Why would he think I wanted to turn him in to the police? In the cool light of day, her car looked truly awful, with its smashed driver’s side window. She would have to get a square of plastic and tape it over the opening. Fortunately it rarely rained in Colorado, so it wasn’t urgent. As for getting money to fix it... Well...

She put the key in the broken ignition socket, thinking that would probably be more expensive to repair than the window. And she would make sure Tom paid. Yes, he’d done it to save their lives, but much too thoughtlessly. Clearly he’d either never owned a car, or never owned a car for whose repair he was responsible.

From the look of the sun up in the sky, it was noon and it was a beautiful day, the sidewalks filled with people in shorts and t-shirts, ambling among the small shops that grew increasingly smaller and pricier in the two miles between Kyrie’s neighborhood and the hotel.

There were couples with kids and couples with dogs dressed like children, in bandanas and baseball caps. Lone joggers. A couple of business women in suits, out shopping on their lunch hour.

Again Kyrie experienced the twin feelings of envy and confusion at these people. What would they do if they knew? What would they think if they were aware that humans who could take the shape of animals stalked the night? And what wouldn’t Kyrie give to change places with one of them? Any one of them. Even the business woman with the pinched lips and the eyes narrowed by some emotional pain. At least she knew what she was. Homo sapiens.

She pulled into the parking lot of the hotel, and, unwilling to brave the disdain of the valets, parked her own car. Wasn’t difficult to find a parking space during the week.

Entering the hotel was like going into a different world from her modest house, her tiny car, or even the diner.

The door whooshed, as it slid aside in front of her, and the cold air reached out to engulf her, drawing her into the, tall and broad, atrium of the hotel, whose ceiling was lost in the dim space overhead, supported by columns that looked like green marble. The air conditioning cooled her suddenly, making her feel composed and sophisticated and quite a different person from the sweaty, rumpled woman outside, in the Colorado summer.

The smoked glass doors closed behind her. Velvet sofas and potted palms dotted the immense space. Uniformed young men, on who knew what errands, circulated between. This hotel was designed to look like an old west hotel, one of the more upscale ones.

She could all too easily imagine gun slingers swinging from the chandeliers, a bar fight breaking out and the uniformed receptionists ducking behind their marble counter.

Kyrie hesitated but only for a moment, because she saw the signs to the restaurant and followed it, down into the bowels of the atrium and up in the elevator to the top floor that overlooked most of Goldport. Light flooded the restaurant through windows that lined the every wall. Kyrie could not tell how big it was, just that the ceiling seemed as far up as the atrium’s, but fully visible – a cool whiteness twenty feet up. Soft carpet deadened the sound of steps and the arrangement of the tables, on different levels and separated by partitions and judiciously placed potted palms, made each table a private space.

A girl about Kyrie’s age, blond and cool and wearing what looked like a business suit in pretty salmon pink, gave her the once over.

"May I help you?"

"Yes," Kyrie said. "I’m meeting a Mr. Trall. Rafiel Trall."

The girl’s eyes widened slightly. And there was a gratifying look of envy.

What, thinking I can’t possibly be in his league, sweetie? Kyrie thought, and reproached herself for her sudden anger and calmed herself forcefully, giving the woman a little smile.

"Mr. Trall is this way," the hostess said, and, picking up a menu, led her down a winding corridor amid wood and glass partitions and palms. From the recesses around the walkway came the sounds of talk – but not the words, the acoustics of the restaurant being seemingly designed to give tables their privacy – and the smells of food – bacon and ham and sausage, eggs, roast beef. It made her mouth water so much that she was afraid of drooling.

then the hostess led her around a wooden partition, and stepped back. And there, getting hastily up from his chair was Rafiel Trall. He was perhaps better dressed than the night before, when his pale suit had betrayed a look of almost retro cool.

Now he was wearing tawny chinos and a khaki colored shirt. His blond hair still shone, and still fell, unruly, over his golden eye. The mobile mouth turned upwards in what seemed to be a smile of genuine pleasure at seeing her. "Miss Smith," he said, extending a hand. He tossed his head back to free his eyes of hair. There were circles of tiredness around his golden eyes, and creases on his face, as though he too had slept too little and not well.

He shook her hand hard, firmly. The hostess disappeared, silently, walking on the plush carpet as though gliding.

"Sit, sit," Rafiel Trall said. "Relax. I was horribly hungry, so I ordered an appetizer." He waved towards a platter on the table. "Seafood croquettes," he said. "High on protein, though perhaps not the kind..." He grinned. The golden eyes seemed to sparkle with mischief of their own.

Kyrie sat down, bonelessly. What am I doing here? She asked herself. What does he want from me?

And there, she knew the answer to the first one. She was here because he had blackmailed her into coming. Regardless of whether a threat had been uttered, regardless of what the threat he might actually mean, Rafiel Trall had mentioned those bloody towels in the bathroom.

Kyrie didn’t own a television, but she had watched enough episodes of CSI on the diner’s television, during slow times of the day, that she knew that on the show, at least, they could tell if someone had wiped someone else’s blood off their skin with a paper towel. There would be skin and hair and sweat...

But she remembered Tom and the way Tom had looked. What else could she have done then? Short of ignoring the whole thing and pretending it had nothing to do with her? And then what would have happened to Tom? She wasn’t sure what she thought was worse – Tom eating the corpse, or Tom getting killed by ambush in his bedroom.

So she’d used the towels, and now Rafiel Trall held the towels over her head. And Tom’s head. Which had brought her here.

But why did Officer Trall want her here? And what was the point of it all? Did he want to blackmail her for favors? No. If he wanted to do that, he would demand she meet him elsewhere, wouldn’t he? However secluded the table might be... It wasn’t that private.

Besides – she looked up at Rafiel Trall and refused to believe that he had that much trouble getting dates that he needed to force a girl into bed. Even if she admitted she didn’t look like chopped liver.

She became aware that he’d said something and was now sitting, his napkin halfway to being unfolded on his lap, while he looked at her, expectantly.

There was no point lying. "I’m sorry," she said. "I have no idea what you said."

He smiled. "No. You were miles away. I said your outfit is very becoming."

Before she could stop it, she felt heat rise up her cheeks. "Thank you," she said. "But I would like to know why you asked me to come here?"

He grinned at her. "I would like to have breakfast with you and to discuss... some cases the Goldport police force has encountered recently."

Her expression must have became frozen with worry, because he shook his head. "I do not in any way suspect you, do you understand? I just think you could literally help me with my enquiries. And I thought it was best done over a nice meal."

Kyrie nodded and picked up her menu, then put it down again, as the prices dismayed her.

"Ms. Smith – I’m hoping for your help with this. I’ll pay for your meal." He smiled, showing very even teeth. "This is a business brunch."

She hesitated. She was aware that whatever he said, breaking bread with someone was an expression of friendship, an expression of familiarity. After all, throughout human history, enemies had refused to dine together.

"Look," he stared at her, across the table, and, for the first time since last night, didn’t smile. "I’m sorry I mentioned the bathroom, which I meant to make you think of the paper towels. It was unworthy of me. And stupid. In fact, I ... got rid of them, okay? I risked my position. But I’m sure... Just, I’m sorry I mentioned them. I didn’t know any other way to make you help me, and we must talk. About... dragons and what’s going on."

His voice was low, though Kyrie very much doubted anyone overhearing them – and the restaurant really seemed to have very good privacy-designed acoustics – would have no idea at all what they were talking about. But his expression was intense and serious.

She nodded, once. Not only was she starving, but she had left Tom in charge of the kitchen, with bacon and eggs at his disposal. Considering how many times he’d shifted the night before and how tired he’d looked, she was sure that he would have eaten all of it and possibly her lunch meat besides, before he could think straight.

Besides, what did Trall mean dragons? He’d mentioned crimes. More than one? What had Tom done? Before she threw her luck in with his, she had to know, didn’t she?

"Very well, Officer Trall," she said. "I’ll have brunch with you."

He smiled effusively. At that moment, the server reappeared and he informed her they would be having the buffet. He also ordered black coffee, which Kyrie seconded.

The buffet spread was the most sumptuous that Kyrie had ever seen. It stretched over several counters and ranged from steamed crab legs, through prime rib, to desserts of various unlikely colors and shapes.

Kyrie was interested only in the meat. Preferably red and rare. She piled a plate with prime rib, conscious of the shocked glares of a couple of other guests. She didn’t care. And at any rate, back at the table, she was glad to notice that Rafiel Trall’s plate was even more full – though he’d gone for variety by adding ham and bacon.

They ate for a while in silence, and Rafiel got refills – how long had he been shifted the night before? Could a lion have killed the man? – before he leaned back and looked appraisingly at her. "How long have you known your friend? The... dragon?"

Kyrie, busy with a mouthful, swallowed hastily. "About six months," she said. "Frank hired him from the homeless shelter downtown for the night hours. He told me he was hiring him from the homeless shelter and that he thought Tom had a drug problem, so I’m guessing that Frank thought he was doing the world a favor, or was trying to garner a treasure in heaven, or whatever."

Rafiel was frowning. "Six months ago?"

Kyrie’s turn to nod. "No, wait. A little more, because it was before Christmas when we were really crunched with all the late shoppers and people going to shows. And the other girl on the night hours had just left town with her boyfriend, so we were in the lurch. Frank got a couple of the day people to fill in, but they don’t like it. Most of them are girls, who think this part of town is unsavory and don’t like being out in it at night. So he said he was doing something for community service, and he went and hired Tom."

Rafiel was still frowning. "And is he? On drugs?"

Kyrie shrugged. She thought of Tom, so defenseless last night, she thought of Tom, looking ... admiring and confused this morning. And she felt like a weasel, betraying him to this stranger.

But she didn’t seem quite able to help herself. Something was making her talk. His smell, masculine, feline, pervasive, seemed to make her want to please him. So she shrugged again. "Not on work time, that I’ve noticed," she said. She didn’t find it needed to mention the track marks. To be honest, they might be scars. She hadn’t looked up close. It seemed more indecent than staring at his privates. Which she hadn’t done, either. Well, maybe she’d seen them by accident yesterday, but no more than to note he had nothing to be ashamed of.

"His name is Thomas Ormson?" Rafiel asked. "Thomas Edward Ormson?"

Kyrie shrugged again. "I’ve never known his middle name. I know he’s Ormson because he introduced himself as Tom Ormson."

Rafiel made a sound at the back of his throat, as though this proved something. "If you excuse me," he said.

She ate the rest of her roast beef in silence, wondering if, by confirming Tom’s name, she had given something essential away and if Tom would now be arrested. But Rafiel simply came back with yet another plate of meat. "How long have you known he was... a shifter?" Rafiel asked, cutting a bite of his ham.

"Not... not until last night. He was late. I heard a scream and I went to look. And he was... shifted." Why couldn’t she stop herself talk? Why would she trust this stranger?

"And there was a dead person?" Rafiel asked.

Kyrie nodded.

Rafiel frowned and ate home as fast as she could. "Has he been late other nights?"

"No," Kyrie said.

"Are you sure? Not last Thursday? Does he work on Thursdays?"

Kyrie frowned. "He works on Thursdays, and he wasn’t late."

"And he’s been in town for more than six months?"

She nodded.

Rafiel Trall ate for a while in silence. Kyrie was dying to know what this was all about.

"Why do you ask?" she said. "You said there had been crimes, not one crime."

Rafiel nodded. "What I’m going to tell you is not known much outside the police department. There have been a couple of reported cases, but no one has put two and two together."

#

Alone in the house, Tom showered. He felt guilty about it, because it was Kyrie’s shower. Her water. Her soap. Her shampoo. But at this point he owed her a bunch of money, and he just added to it mentally.

Most of his time on his own, he’d found shelters for runaway kids and, then, when he was older, homeless shelters. He hadn’t been homeless as such. He’d just moved from shelter to shelter in between bouts of getting in trouble and running away. He’d only slept outside when the moon was full. Shortly after leaving his father’s house – even now his mind flitted away from the circumstances of that leaving – he’d thought it best to abandon New York City altogether. There were too many opportunities, there, for a rampaging dragon to do serious damage. And far too many people who might see him do it.

He’d drifted vaguely south and westward, moving when he thought someone had caught a glimpse of him in shifted form and, once, when a picture of him, as a dragon, in full flight, was published on the front page of the local rag. It had been syndicated to the National Enquirer, too. If his father caught a glimpse of it, on a supermarket line, would he have– But Tom shook his head. If he’d not actually given up on his father, he should have. Long ago.

But running or settled for a while in a town, he’d never had an apartment until these last five months. And all showers at these institutions had been rationed and far from private. All the soap had smelled of disinfectant, too.

The last five months, the showers had been heaven. And he’d bought the best soap he could find. His one luxury. But now he was homeless again, adrift. And, with the triad pressing down, he might have to leave.

He only hadn’t left already because Kyrie had insisted he stay. And Kyrie was... the only one of his kind he’d ever got close to. Oh, he might also have quite a huge crush on her. But that didn’t count. He’d had crushes before. He’d moved on. But Kyrie... He bit his lower lip, standing in her tiny bathroom and turning on the water.

Kyrie was something he didn’t know what to do about. He didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to loose the only kindred feeling and fellowship he’d ever known. But with the triad chasing him, what else could he do?

He showered, enjoying the water, then dried his hair and put the jogging suit Kyrie had lent him back on. He didn’t own anything else. He didn’t even own this. Nothing but his own skin.

A look outside, through the kitchen window, showed him a paper in the driveway. He wondered if Kyrie would mind if the neighbors saw him. But considering she hadn’t told him anything about it, he’d assume she didn’t.

He walked out to get the paper. It was noon, or close to it. The earliest he’d wakened in a long time. The air, though already suffocatingly hot, felt clear and clean, and he smelled Kyrie’s roses, and the neighbor’s profusion of flowers that spilled over the lawn and around the mailbox, in an array of pastel colors.

The neighbor, an elderly lady, sat on the porch with a tall glass of something, her white hair in curlers. She smiled pointedly at Tom and waved at him. Tom waved back and found himself grinning ridiculously. Bending to pick up the paper, he felt as if he were living something out of a movie. A domestic morning. And he wished madly that he could live that life and have that kind of morning. That kind of life. Just be a normal person with a normal life.

But, who was he kidding? Judging from all the trouble he’d got into before he’d started transforming into a dragon, his life wouldn’t have been any different had he been perfectly normal. He’d probably still be running from town, a drifter. He probably still would have used. He probably...

He put the paper on the table, while he nuked himself a profusion of bacon and fried some eggs in a frying pan on the gas stove. He left half the eggs and bacon in the fridge. He could have eaten them all, easily enough, but he didn’t want to do that to Kyrie. Yeah, she’d probably get lunch bought for her today, but what if she shifted again tonight and needed breakfast tomorrow?

Tom knew how much food cost. Over the last five months one of his delights had been learning to cook. He’d bought cookbooks at the same thrift stores at which he shopped for clothes and furniture. Since – on a diner’s waiter salary it was a challenge to cover everything and put money aside – as he felt he had to – he’d reveled in trying to create quasi-gourmet dishes from meats on special and discounted produce. And he’d eaten a lot of tofu.

Now he cooked quickly, peppering his eggs from a shaker by the stove. His stomach growled at the smell of the utilitarian fare. He knew, from other shifts, that the craving for protein was almost impossible to deny, the morning after a shift. Kyrie, clearly knew it too, having given him access to all her food.

Kyrie again. Sitting down to eat, he opened the paper. And choked.

Right there, on the front page, the headline above the fold screamed Murder at local diner! The picture of the Athens in black and white made the huge parking lot with the tiny diner beside it look like something out of a film noir.

The story was all too familiar to Tom. They’d found a body in the parking lot – of course anyone reading only the headline would think that they’d found it in the diner proper. Which meant that Frank was probably sizzling. If he was awake. Since he preferred to work nights, perhaps his day manager hadn’t found it necessary to wake him and tell him about the paper. Then again, sometimes Tom thought Frank worked around the clock. He always seemed to be at the diner.

Frank’s mood might matter or not. Tom hadn’t decided yet what he was going to do about work. He needed the job. Wanted it. He’d enjoyed working at the diner more than he cared to think about. It had been his first long-term employment. A real, normal job.

Before this he’d just signed up with the day laborer places. But he’d enjoyed the routine, the regulars, and getting them served quickly, and getting their tips. Smiling just enough at the college girls to get a good tip without their thinking he was coming on to them. The minor feuds with the day staff, the camaraderie with Kyrie and... well, he wouldn’t call it camaraderie with Frank, but Frank’s gruff ways.

He had felt almost... human. And now it would all vanish. It all would go as if it meant nothing. Like, having a family. Like school. Like a normal adolescence.

He finished eating and cleaned his plate with bread from the red breadbox over the fridge, before carefully washing the dishes and putting them away.

Normally he compensated after nights of shifting by grabbing some fried chicken on the way to work the next evening. Or by eating a couple of boiled eggs. Most of what he cooked at home was near-vegetarian. So this might be the most protein he’d eaten at one sitting in years.

Oh, he could afford bacon and eggs, but he’d been saving money. He had some idea that he would go to a community college and get a degree. He’d dreamed of settling down.

Now, of course, as soon as he could swing by an ATM, he would have to empty the five hundred in his account to pay Kyrie for the car repairs and the groceries. And at that he’d probably still owe her money. But he would send her money from... somewhere.

And on this he stopped, because he hadn’t told himself he was going to run. Not yet. But, after all, with the apartment in ruins, and the police investigating a crime around his place of employment, what else could he do? He had to run. Just as soon as he could retrieve... it from the Athens.

The doorbell rang. Tom thought it would be the police, come to arrest him. But how could they know he was here? Of course, Kyrie might have spoken, but...

He tiptoed to the door, trying to keep quiet, and looked through the peephole. Keith Vorpal stood on the doorstep, baseball cap rakishly turned backwards and an expression of intense concern on his good-natured face. Since Vorpal didn’t usually feel much concern for something not involving shapely females, Tom was surprised and curious. Also curious about how Vorpal had found him.

He opened the door on the chain and looked out.

"Man," Keith said as soon as he saw Tom. "Good to see you’re alive. They think someone broke into your place and destroyed it, then tried to set fire to the pieces of furniture. It’s all everyone talks about. Did you see anything weird when you were there?" He looked up at the space over the door, probably where the house number was. "I guess you spent the night here?"

Tom opened the door. "Come in," he said.

Keith came in, looking around the room with the curiosity of someone visiting a strange place.

"How did you find me?"

Keith shrugged. "Your boss, at that dive you work in. He said you were staying with the girl, Kyrie? And he gave me the address."

How did Frank know? Perhaps Kyrie had told him. She must have called in sometime after they got back to her place.

"Come on," Tom said. "I’ll get you some coffee."

Moments later, they were in the kitchen and Tom had managed to get cups and coffee, and locate the sugar and milk.

"I guess you’ve been here a lot?" Keith asked.

Tom shrugged, neither willing to lie full-out, nor to destroy this impression of himself as a man in a relationship that Keith seemed to envy.

He wondered why Keith had come over. He seemed to be worried about Tom. But Tom wasn’t used to anyone being worried about him. Did this mean the human race wanted him back?

#

"There have been," Rafiel Trall said, leaning over the table and keeping his voice low. "A series of deaths in town. Well, at least they’re classified as deaths, not murders. Bodies have been found... bitten in two."

"Bitten?" Kyrie asked, while her thoughts raced. Only one kind of thing could bite a person in two. Well, maybe many kinds of things, but in the middle of a city like Goldport, almost for sure all of those things would be shape-shifters. People like her. Tom had said that there weren’t that many out there. But there were three of them and the triad. Were there more? And if so, what was calling them to Goldport?

"Bitten," Rafiel said, and his teeth clashed as he closed his mouth, as though the words had been distasteful for him to say. And he held his teeth clenched too, visible through his slightly parted lips. "Our forensics have found proteins in the bites that they say are reptilian but not... Not of any known reptile."

He sat up straight and was silent a moment. "The theories range wildly," he said. >From pet Komodo dragons that escaped and grew to huge proportions, to an alligator, somewhere, to..." He shrugged. "An extinct reptile that survived somewhere in the wilderness of Colorado and has just now found its way into town. Though that theory is on the fringes. It’s not like we’ve called a palaeontologist in to look at the bite marks yet. But..." He took a deep breath, and it trembled a little as he let it out. "But the teeth size and the marks are definitely... They’re very large teeth, of a reptile type. I..." He shook his head. "You must realize in what position this puts me. Everyone at the police is talking escaped animals and Jurassic revivals. They’ve stopped just short of positing UFO aliens, but I’m very much afraid that’s coming up next."

"And meanwhile none of them guesses the truth," Kyrie said, leaning back.

He nodded. "Or at least what might be the truth," he said. "You see in what kind of a position this puts me..."

She looked at him across the table, and could well imagine that sort of divided loyalty, that confusion of identities. There were many things she wanted to ask. How many other shifters he’d met. Why he suspected Tom specifically. Instead, she heard herself say, "How did you become a police officer?"

He grinned. "Oh, that was easy. Grandad was one. Dad is one." Suddenly the grin expanded, becoming the easy smile of the night before. His hand toyed with his silverware on the side of his plate. "If I hadn’t become a police officer, they would think there was something wrong with me. The shifting, they can forgive even if they can’t understand. Not being a policeman? Never."

It was a large hand, with square fingers. No rings, except for a large, square class ring, and she scolded herself for looking for rings. Yeah. They could get together and raise a litter of kittens. What was she thinking?

Rafiel shrugged. "So, you see..."

"And your ... shifting... when did you start?"

He took a deep breath. "It started when I was about twelve. My parents were aware of it first, as I did it in my sleep. They were a little scared, but I was normal otherwise, and how do you go and tell someone your kid... well..."

Kyrie nodded. "So... they aren’t?"

"No. And dad is retired now, but the first he heard about these corpses he asked if I knew..."

"And you think it’s Tom?" Kyrie asked, her hands, unaccountably clenched on the side of the table, as if this mattered to her personally.

He shrugged. "Just... the shape matches, and I’ve never met another one large enough to actually sever a body in two. But if he was in town that far back, and there were no murders something must have happened three months ago that triggered them. And then you say that he was at work on Wednesday. And on Wednesday we found a body right behind the Three Luck Dragon. Well, actually it was found on Thursday morning, but we think he died around midnight on Wednesday."

Kyrie thought back. As far as she could tell Tom had been at work and had been much as normal.

"Of course," Rafiel said. "The time is never exact. There could be a two hour difference one way or another. And you see, I don’t know any other shifters, any other shape that could just bite a man in half. And how common can a dragon be?"

Kyrie thought of the triad. "There are others... like Tom in town."

"Really?" Rafiel asked. He raised his eyebrows. "I’ve only met another, truly met another one besides you. He was a wolf and was passing through town. Transient. He was brought in for petty theft, and shifted while I was booking him. Fortunately Goldport has a tiny police force. Most officers are part timers. And I was alone in the room with him at the time. I could.... cover things up and talk sense to him. But that was only one I ever talked to. And he was a mess. Drugs, possible mental illness. I’ve ... smelled others, but I don’t know their shapes."

"Smelled?" Kyrie asked, aware of his smell so close, just across the table, that reek of masculinity and health and vigor – like the distilled scent of self-confidence.

He looked at her, with the look of a man who tries to evaluate whether someone is playing a joke on him. "Smelled – there is a definite scent to those... like us. A slightly metallic smell? An edge?"

Kyrie shook her head. She hadn’t been aware of ever smelling people before. Perhaps because she hadn’t been aware of really shifting shapes before. She thought of people as people, not smells. And yet, as Rafiel mentioned it, she was aware that there was a slight edge in common in his smell and Tom’s and perhaps her won. If their smell had been music, the metallic scent would have been a note, subdued but persistent, in the background. She blinked.

"These other... dragons," he said, lowering his voice on the last word. "Are they part of... The Asian community in town?"

"Why do you ask?" Kyrie said.

"Because all the victims were Asian or part Asian," he said. "That’s why I was so surprised when I saw your... When I saw Thomas Ormson in his other form. Though thinking about it, he didn’t look asian even as... a dragon."

Kyrie shook her head. "Nordic," she said. "Like what they used to carve on the prow of Viking ships." She wondered if the Viking figureheads had been drawn from life. And if they’d really existed, all that time, in the past. "But yes, the other dragons are Asian. Tom said they are members of a triad." She hesitated.

"An organized Chinese crime syndicate?" Rafiel asked. Then added, "I see. Look, I know you feel like you’re betraying him or something. But... put yourself in my place. The police will never be able to solve this series of deaths. And I know – or at least I think I know – something that could lead them to the truth. But if I speak, I won’t be believed. And if I demonstrate it, I don’t know... I suspect the first few of us who come out to society at large face the charming prospect of a life in the laboratory. I don’t want that. I don’t know anyone who wants that. I’m sure you don’t. But at the same time I want to stop the murders. The people being killed..."

He shrugged. "They don’t deserve to die, and we should put a stop to it. If the killers are like us – and there’s a great chance they are – then it’s our responsibility to stop it." He looked desperately up at her, his expression very intense and not at all like the relaxed image of the day before. "Do you understand what I’m saying at all?"

Kyrie understood. At least intellectually she understood. And suddenly, in a rush, she felt as if she, the orphan, had been adopted into a family, a family that came with obligations, with requirements. She looked at Rafiel’s intense golden eyes, and hoped his smell was not influencing her as she said. "Yes, I see. But you must promise to do nothing against Tom on... anything else. Anything beyond the murders. It is not his fault if he is a shifter, and if he weren’t a shifter, none of this would come out about him."

Rafiel nodded once and leaned forward. His plate was now empty and he pushed it forward and joined his hands on the place where it had been, his whole attitude one of intense attention to her.

She told him what had happened the night before. Her considerations and thoughts and final decision to take Tom home to his apartment. The condition of the apartment. The attack by the triad members.

She could no more stop herself talking than she could stop herself breathing. Her mind was powerless against his masculine scent.

Rafiel nodded. "That would make sense for the deaths we’ve been seeing." He pulled a notepad out of his pocket and noted down the description of the triad members. "Not that we can do anything about it officially," he said. "Because if they catch them then they’ll... They might very well figure out about us as well, you know."

Kyrie nodded. The rules of this group to which she belonged despite herself were revealing themselves as complex. If they must be hidden – and they must, because revealing one of them would mean revealing all of them – then, surely, surely, they would have to police their own. Like other secretive communities of what had at the time been considered not quite humans all through history, they would have to take care of their own. Slaves, immigrants, serfs – all had policed themselves, to avoid notice from the outside, as far back as there had been humans in the world.

One way or another. She wondered what that meant. She could understand it to mean nicely or by force. And she wondered if Rafiel Trall understood it.

And looked up to find his intelligent golden eyes trained on her. "You know that means we might have to... take care of it on our own," he said. "I... never met any of us till a couple of years ago, and I never thought about it. The possibilities of someone going bad, doing something terrible and how the normals would never be able to take care of it and we’d have to step in. I never thought about it. I thought there might be a half a dozen of us in the world..."

Kyrie shook her head. "Tom has seen a dozen or so over five years. Not counting the dragon triad, where he thinks there could be hundreds. I think there’s more than half a dozen. I wonder..."

"Yes?"

"I wonder how long this has been going on and why no one seems to know about it."

"I don’t know," Rafiel said. "When my parents found out, they tried to research. They found legends and stories, poems and songs. And mom, who reads a lot of scientific stuff, thinks there might be such a thing as... migratory genes. People attaching the genes from other species. Going partway there, as it were. But I’ll be damned if that explains mythological species, too. Like dragons. Wonder if there are sphinxes and sea serpents, as well." He shook his head. "There seem to be a lot of legends about... people like us, until magic stopped being believed and science stepped in. I think we’ll have to admit that we are not ... things of the rational universe. I’m sure Thomas Ormson’s shift violates the rules of conservation of matter and energy." He frowned, then suddenly grinned, a boyish grin. "Good thing that’s not the sort of law I have to enforce."

Kyrie nodded. Men and their puns. "I’ve thought the same. But if we exist, if we exist anyway, how come no one has found out? How come one of us hasn’t slipped, spectacularly in a public place yet, and been found out?"

"Who says we haven’t?" Rafiel said. "Have you ever heard of crypto zoology?"

"Bigfoot and the Lochness monster?" she asked, unearthing the word from a long ago spree on the internet looking up strange stuff.

Rafiel started to shake his head then shrugged and nodded. "For all I know, they’re of ours too, yes," he said. "But more than that. Giant panthers in England, the lizard man of Denver, the thylacine in Australia, that keeps being seen, years after it’s supposedly extinct. And giant tigers and giant black dogs. All of those. And perhaps," he sighed. "Bigfoot and Nessie too." He looked at her. "They’re all seen. They’re all found. It’s just that they’re impossible, see. And the human mind is very good at erasing everything that is not possible. I... My mother says that the human mind is an engine designed to order reality." He paused and frowned. "You have to meet mom to understand. But if she’s right, then our minds are also designed to reject anything that introduces disorder, anything that goes against the grain."

"Our," she said, before she knew where her mind was headed. "You said the human mind and referred to it as our. You think our minds are human."

"Do you think they aren’t?" Rafiel asked. "Why?"

Kyrie shrugged. "Up until last night I thought I was perfectly human," she said. "I had no idea that I shifted shapes. I thought all that was an hallucination. Today I don’t know what I think."

Something to the way that Rafiel’s expression changed, and to his gaze shifting to a point behind her, made her turn. The server approached to drop off the bill. Rafiel glanced at it and handed it, with a card, back to the server.

"Look, when I went to bed yesterday – well, today at sunrise – we didn’t have an ID on the victim yet. I’m scheduled to go and attend the autopsy today."

"Why?"

"Why the autopsy? Because we don’t know exactly what killed the man. Our pathologist says the wounds look odd."

"No, why would they have you attend it? I’ve seen this in cop shows on TV, but I don’t understand whey they need a policeman, who’s not an expert in anatomy or anything of the sort to be there."

"Oh, that..." He shrugged. "Look, I’m the investigating officer. We don’t have a murder department. Until these bodies started appearing three months ago, our murder rate was one or two year and those usually domestic. And the investigating officer has to attend the autopsy. It’s... That way we’re there. They film the autopsy, you know, but a lot of it never makes it onto the film or even the official report. And we need to know everything. Even some casual comment, that the examiner might forget to put in the official report, or that the cameras might not catch. Sometimes, crimes are solved on little suff." He grinned suddenly, disarmingly. "Of course, I’m going on my criminal science class. As I said, most of the murders here don’t involve much solving. The murderer is usually sobbing by the kitchen door, holding the knife. But the classes I took said I should be there. Also, if they find any evidence – dust or hair on the victim’s clothing, I’ll be there to take it into custody. Chain of custody is very important, should the case ever come to trial."

The victim’s clothing. Kyrie remembered the sodden rag of a body the night before, soaked in blood. She hadn’t been able to tell if he was wearing clothing, much less what it might be.

She emerged from the reverie, in time to hear Rafiel say "To the morgue?"

"Beg your pardon?"

"I was asking if you’d come with me to the morgue. To watch the autopsy."

"Why?" she asked.

He shrugged. "I don’t know. Because though I’m not deputizing you, in a way I am? Because there might be something you see or notice. There might be a hair on the victim’s body that is that of a diner regular–"

"I doubt they can find a hair, with all that blood," she said.

"You’d be amazed what is found in autopsy. And I think you can help us. Perhaps help me solve the whole thing." He paused a moment, significantly, playing with his napkin by folding it and unfolding it. "And then we can deal with it." From his expression, he looked about as eager to deal with it as she felt.

"Won’t people mind?" Kyrie asked. "Isn’t it irregular to have me with you at something like an official autopsy?" She imagined facing the dead body again. All that blood. It was safer during the day, but it would still trigger her desire to shift.

"I’ll tell them you work at the diner," he said. "And that you’re there because I think you might see or remember something. And if needed I’ll tell them you’re my girlfriend and you’re thinking of studying law enforcement. But it should just be me, and Officer Bob – Bob McDonald. Good man, he usually helps me. He’ll be there. But he was my dad’s partner when dad was in the force. Bob won’t ask much of anything. He’ll trust me. He thinks I’m... as he puts it: strange but sound. And no, he doesn’t know. At least we never told him. Of course, he’s around the house a lot." He shrugged and set the napkin down, neatly folded, by his still half-full water glass. "So, will you come? With me?"

Kyrie sighed. She nodded. It seemed to be her duty to do this. Would it be her duty, also, to kill someone? To ... execute someone? Until this evening she’d never even examined her own ideas on the death penalty – she hadn’t had any ideas on the death penalty, trusting brighter minds than hers to figure that out. But now she must figure it out. If Tom had killed the man yesterday, did they need to kill him? Was there another way to control him? How much consciousness did he have while killing? And would any considerations of justice or injustice to him have anything to do with it? Or would it all be overruled by the need to keep society safe?

The server dropped off the credit card slip, and Rafiel signed it.

"Your name," Kyrie said. "It’s an odd spelling."

"Rafiel? I was named after an Agatha Christie character. Mom is a great fan."

"Jason Rafiel," Kyrie said. "Nemesis and Caribbean murder."

He smiled. "Mom will love you." Then he seemed to realize how that might sound, and he cleared his throat. "So, will you come with me?"

Kyrie sighed. "I really don’t want to," she said. "But–"

"But?"

"But I think I might have to." She felt as if her shoulders were being crushed by the weight of this responsibility she didn’t really want to take.

#

Tom had given Keith coffee and shuffled him to the back room where Tom had spent the night. He felt more at ease there, as if he were intruding less on Kyrie’s privacy. She’d let him sleep here. It was a de-facto guest room.

"I was just worried about you," Keith said, sitting down on the love seat as Tom motioned towards it. "The paper said a corpse was found behind that diner place where you work. And then with the apartment the way it looked, I thought–"

He had never clearly said what he thought, just frowned and looked worried. And Tom wasn’t absolutely sure how to respond. It had been five years since he had actually needed to talk to someone or had a personal connection with anyone. And apparently socialization was reversible, because as far as making small talk – or any talk at all – he might as well have been raised by wolves.

He hadn’t been a solitary child. He’d always had his buds, back when he was growing up, all the way from his playgroup in kindergarten to what – he now suspected – had been a rather unsavory group of young thugs in his adolescent years. In fact, it could be said that Tom, growing up, had spent far too little time alone with his own mind and his own thoughts.

But the last five years... Well, there had been interactions with other humans, of course, some of which still made him cringe. The man who’d tried to rob him outside his father’s house. At least Tom hoped he’d been trying to rob him. Though why a barefoot kid in a robe would have anything worth taking, Tom couldn’t understand. All he remembered was feeling suddenly very angry. He remembered shifting, and the dragon. And coming to with a spot of blood in front of him, and no one near him.

And there had been other... simpler interactions. But there had been practically no social interaction. Every time he’d talked to another human, or another human had talked to him, one of them had pretty clearly and immediately wanted something of the other.

Now, he couldn’t see any signs that Keith wanted something of him. At any rate, there was nothing Tom had – what few possessions he’d owned had been destroyed at the apartment – his changes of clothes, his second hand furniture, his... he realized, with a start that his thrift store black-leather jacket would be lost as well, and felt more grief over that than he’d felt over anything else. That jacket had been with him from almost the time he got kicked out of the house. He’d bought it almost new, from a thrift shop, with the proceeds of his first day as a laborer.

In many ways, that jacket defined him. It had a high enough collar for him to raise and hide his often-too-vulnerable face at moments when he wanted just his tough exterior to show. He’d learned early that looking tough and perhaps just a little crazy saved him from having to do real violence. Which, when anger could literally turn you into a beast, was half the battle.

Tom had lost his home and left without even the clothes on his body. For the second time in his life. And the thought that Keith might want Tom’s body made Tom start to laugh – rapidly changed into a cough when Keith looked at him, puzzled. He knew Keith. That was not in the realm of possible.

Keith, for his part, just seemed to want to reassure himself Tom was okay. Having done that, he now sipped the coffee very slowly. "I guess your girlfriend is out?" he asked.

"Kyrie had an appointment," Tom said.

"She’s cute," Keith said. "How long have you guys been together?"

Ah. "Well, we work together," Tom said, edging. "And one thing led to the other."

Keith nodded.

"You? Did the girl see any other dragons last night?"

Keith frowned. "Now that you mention it, yeah. She said she saw four dragons later on. One jumped down to the parking lot, and then three others flew away a while later." He shook his head. "I don’t know. Maybe she has a dragon obsession. She’s fun and all, but it might be more weirdness than I want to handle." He scratched his head and adjusted his hat. "I have weirdness enough at college."

Tom nodded, not sure what to say. And Keith launched in a detailed description of his college trouble, which involved pig-headed administrators and some complex requirements for graduation which Tom – who’d never been to college, only vaguely understood.

And then in the middle of it – he’d never quite understand it or be able to explain it – there were wings.

Only it wasn’t quite like that. There was a powder. A green powder, like a shimmer in the air. Tom had sneezed and was about to say something about it, but it didn’t seem to matter. It was as if he were floating a long way above his own body.

And Keith jumped up, dropping the cup that he’d been holding. Tom jumped for it, in the process dropping his own cup. Both cups shattered with a noise that seemed out of proportion to the event, and seemed to go on forever in Tom’s mind.

And then he turned, but he seemed to turn in slow motion. For one, his body didn’t understand that his legs actually belonged to him. And his legs felt like they were made of loose string, unable to support his weight. He tripped over his feet, and as he plunged towards the floor there were... wings over him. Green wings. Dragons. Green. Wings. Had to be dragons.

Suddenly the windows weren’t there. Ripped? The screens were ripped, from the frames. Glass lay at his feet. And the tip of a green paw came into the room, only it didn’t look like a paw, more like a single toe with a claw at the end.

Tom grabbed for the low coffee table in front of the love seat. It was wicker and very unstable, but he struck out with it, hard, at the thing. There was a ... tooth? Fang? Coming towards him, and he batted at it with the table. It made a hissing sound, not at all like a dragon sound. And it was dripping. At least Tom didn’t think it was a dragon sound. He had no idea what he sounded like when he was shape-shifted.

Keith was kicking something large and green and shimmering.

"Stop," Tom yelled. "You can’t kick a dragon. It will blaze you."

Keith looked at him, and Keith’s eyes were huge, the pupils so dilated there was almost no iris left. It reminded Tom of something but he couldn’t say what.

"Mother ship," Keith said. "The Mother ship has landed. They’re coming for us. I saw a movie."

"Really," Tom said, reaching out. "You shouldn’t kick dragons."

Tom had managed to wrench the wooden leg away from the wicker table, and he had some idea he could stab the dragon with it. But one of the dragons was attacking Keith, while the other was... crouching against the glass door. If Tom could attack that one...

He started to go for the handle to the patio door, but all of a sudden it wavered and changed, in front of him, and it was the door to the Athens, with all the specials painted on. He pulled at it, but it wouldn’t open. So he backed up, and kicked high at it.

The glass shattered with a sound like hail.

The big green body leaning against it shuddered and turned. Towards Tom.

Two toes-with-claws reached for him. A fang probed.

He had time to think, "Oh, shit." And then he remembered what Keith’s eyes looked like. They looked like his own, in the mirror, back when he was using.

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