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* * *

Kyrie was rattled. She didn't know if she had dreamed the beetles, out of being so tired, out of Rafiel's report on there being insect matter in and around the corpse last night.

Normally, Kyrie was very sure of her perceptions. She'd had to trust in them and them alone, as often those who were supposed to look after her or be in charge of her hadn't been very trustworthy at all.

But now? Now she wasn't sure of anything. The last two days had been a carnival of weirdness, a whirling of the very strange. Driving her car along familiar streets and around the castle just before her neighborhood, she thought she wouldn't be at all surprised to wake up in her bed, suddenly, and find that all this, from the moment she'd seen Tom as a dragon, had been a crazy dream. Although if that were true, then her subconscious harbored some very weird thoughts about Tom.

She pulled up at her house, and opened the front door, half expecting to find her house as ransacked as Tom's apartment. But everything inside looked normal and was in its usual place. She locked the door, picked up the mail that the carrier had pushed through the mail slot on the door. Junk, junk, and bills. Which seemed to be the modern corollary of death and taxes.

She went all the way to the kitchen, and saw her chair still under the door to the back porch. Had it really all happened? Had the little porch, which had been her main reason for renting this house, truly been destroyed?

She pulled the chair away, unlocked the door and looked at the broken windows, the glass on the carpet, the . . . mess. Then she turned on the light and walked into the room.

Rafiel had said that there was green powder on this carpet, like there was green powder on yesterday's corpse. She hadn't noticed. But now, by the light of dawn and the overhead light, she could see it—glistening on the carpet. It was even more visible because it must have rained sometime during the night when she wasn't paying attention to the outside—and the rain had puddled it into little rings and patterns on the beige carpet.

She wondered what it all meant, but couldn't even think straight. And she wasn't about to call Rafiel and ask him. Not right now, she wasn't.

Instead, she retreated to the kitchen, locked the door, and slipped the chair underneath. She wished the door were somewhat stronger than the hollow-core, Seventies vintage door it appeared to be. But it couldn't be helped. She was certainly not going to fashion a new door before going to bed. And she needed to go to bed.

She took a hurried shower, with torrents of hot water, and felt as if the heat and the massage on her sore muscles were reviving her. Coming out and drying her hair, she noted that Tom had hung up his towel very neatly on the hook at the back of the door. For some reason she'd expected it tossed on the floor.

As soon as she went into the bedroom, the phone rang. It was a cheap, corded affair and it was plugged in there because it was the only phone plug in the entire house. Possibly because the entire house was not hard to cross in twenty hurried steps.

Normally the only calls she got—at least since she'd got on the telemarketers do-not-call-list—were from Frank, asking if she wanted to come in and work extra hours. And if this were Frank right now, he could go to hell. There was no way Kyrie was about to turn around and go work another shift. Not with those beetles in the parking lot, and she didn't even care whether they were real or a product of her imagination.

But the voice on the other end of the phone wasn't Frank's. It was a voice that purred with masculine self-assurance.

"Kyrie?" it said, though she didn't remember giving Rafiel permission to call her by her given name.

"Yes."

"I have information on the victim."

So, he was going to call her every time he had information? But she bit her tongue and said, "Yes?" because she knew that anything else could start a debate or an argument and that would mean talking on the phone longer and staying awake longer.

"He was Bill Johnson. A roofer by trade. And apparently a coyote in his shifter form."

"A . . .?" How had Rafiel found that out? It wasn't exactly the sort of thing you could ask people about? Or . . .

"His wife had pictures."

"Pardon me?" Kyrie asked finding this, in some way, stranger than giant beetles in the parking lot of the Athens.

"His wife had pictures of him as a coyote. Lovely lady, I would judge about ten years older than him but looking and acting much older. A grandma type. She pulled out pictures, to show us, of what her husband looked like in his coyote form. She said he got the shape-shifting ability from his Native American ancestors and that he was, like their coyote of legend, a bit of a trickster. And then she said— "

"Showed us pictures?" Kyrie asked, as her mouth caught up with her brain in horrified wonder.

"Oh yes. She called him in to missing persons and Officer Bob and I and our one female officer, Cindy, all went along to take her statement and see if she had any pictures of the deceased. Because if it wasn't him, we didn't want to put her through identifying the body. Cindy came along on the principle that the lady might need a female shoulder to cry on."

"And?"

"And she took out the pictures and showed them to us. And the other two looked at each other and then at me as though they thought the poor lady was totally out of her mind with shock and all that. Which she probably was, of course. But still . . ."

"But still, he was a coyote. And she knew. And didn't mind."

"Mind? She was positively gleeful. Very sorry none of their six children inherited the characteristic."

"Children." Kyrie was beyond astonishment. That a shifter could secure all these things that she thought were out of her reach because she was a shifter felt absolutely baffling.

"They live in Arizona," Rafiel said. "Where Bill and his wife lived till about a year ago, when they drove through town and stopped at the Athens for breakfast and all of a sudden realized they'd never felt so at home anywhere. So they decided to sell the place in Arizona and buy a house here. Ever since then, Bill went into the Athens for his morning breakfast after roaming the neighborhood as a coyote."

"Well, at least no one would notice a coyote. Not in Colorado."

"Right. Lions and panthers are something else."

"And dragons."

"Yes."

She could hear him take a deep breath.

"So, we know that the victim was definitely a shifter."

Shifter. Victim. The back of the Athens. The beetles. Kyrie desperately wanted to go to bed, but she felt she should tell Rafiel. After all, he was a police officer. He would know what to do about it, right?

"There is more," she said.

"More about the victim?"

"More . . . another victim."

"What?"

"I was . . . I forgot I parked my car up front," she said. "Because of the broken window. So I went into the parking lot and there were . . . They were beetles. That type of shiny rain-forest type beetle that they make jewelry out of?"

"Someone made jewelry out of beetles?"

"No. It would take a very big person to wear those as jewelry. They were six or seven feet long and at least five feet across, and shiny . . ."

"Are you sure you didn't dream this?"

"No, I absolutely am not sure. But I think they were there. They were huge and green blue and they were dragging something. A corpse. I think it was a corpse because I could smell the blood."

"A corpse? In the parking lot of the Athens? Another corpse?"

"I didn't see it. It was just something—a bundle—they were carrying. And it smelled like blood."

"Are you sure this is not a dream you were having when I woke you up with my phone call?"

"Quite." Kyrie looked toward her still made bed. "Very much so. I haven't gone to bed yet."

"Fine," he sounded, for some reason exasperated. "Fine. This is just fine. I'll go to the Athens and check."

"Take . . . something. They might be dangerous."

"Oh, I wouldn't worry," he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "I have my regulation bug spray can."

She had a feeling he didn't believe her, and she couldn't really blame him because she wasn't a hundred percent sure she believed herself. "Right," she said. "And, oh, remember you wanted to know about the dust on the floor of my porch. There is dust. It's bright green."

"Lovely," he said. "I'll be there. Right after I check the parking lot of the Athens."

* * *

Tom hurt. That was his first realization, his first awareness that he was alive. The back of his head hurt like someone had tried to saw it open, and the pain radiated around the side of his head and it seemed to him as though it made his teeth vibrate. An effect not improved by a twisted rag, which was inserted between his teeth and tied viciously tight behind his head. His legs and arms were tied too, he realized, as he squirmed around, trying to get into a better position. It felt like there was a band of something around his knees, and one around his ankles. Very tightly tied.

With his eyes closed, trying to remember where he was and why, he smelled old car oil and dust and the mildew of long-unoccupied places. His face rested on concrete, but part of it felt slick.

The gas station. He must be in the gas station he was passing when . . . When someone had hit him on the back of the head. So. Fine. Shaking, he opened his eyes a sliver. And confirmed that he was lying in a vast space, on a concrete floor irregularly stained with oil or other car fluids. This must have been a service station at some point. Light was dim, coming through glass squares atop huge, closed doors that took up the front of the building.

He looked around, but his eyes felt as if they couldn't quite focus. And he wondered if he'd been attacked by some random local hooligans, who had felt an irresistible craving for his leather jacket and the kid's dragon backpack, which no longer appeared to be anywhere near. Or if it was the triad again.

Through the fogs of his mind, he remembered that the white car parked by the road side had been the same make and model as the one that had turned around while he was shifting before. Had they seen him? Had they followed him? Along the highway? If they'd seen him follow the highway, it wouldn't be hard to calculate that he would stop in Las Vegas, New Mexico. It wouldn't have been hard to figure out, either, that he'd land and shift some distance from town.

It couldn't have been hard to find a place to lay in ambush for him.

In the next minute, there was a sound of high censure, in some form of Chinese. Oh, bloody hell. And then, out of a darker corner of the warehouse they came, all three of them. Tom had run into them a couple of times, before the time they'd ambushed him in his apartment.

He'd privately nicknamed them Crest Dragon, Two Dragons, and The Other One. And his opinion that their intelligence and their viciousness were inversely proportional did nothing to make him feel better right now. The only good thing, he thought, as they advanced, speaking fast Chinese at him as though he should understand it, was that they were in human form and not dragons.

As usual Crest Dragon—in his human form a young man with hair so well groomed Tom had wondered if it was a wig—took the lead, walking in front of the other two, who flanked him, left and right. Crest Dragon was waving the backpack around, and shouting something in Chinese.

Truth was, even without having any idea what the complaints in Chinese were, Tom understood the gist of the matter completely. And the gist of the matter was that the Pearl of Heaven hadn't been in the backpack.

Exactly what kind of an idiot did they think he was? He glared at them. And how stupid were they, really? Did they think they would not feel . . . it, if it were in that backpack. Tom remembered holding it, remembered the feeling of power and strength and calm and sanity flowing from it. He could feel across miles, and he was sure so would they be able to, if he hadn't taken extraordinary precautions in hiding it. And they'd thought he'd carry it in a back pack?

He glared at them, which was harder to do than it should be, because his eyes seemed to want to focus in different directions. How hard had they hit him on the head? And did they realize how hungry he was?

Crest Dragon came closer, waving his arms in theatrical exasperation. Then he flung the backpack—with force—across the building, grabbed Tom by the front of the T-shirt and, lifting him off the ground, punched him hard on the face.

Tom screamed. The pain radiated from his nose to match the pain on the back of his head, but sharper and sudden, edged around with blood and a feeling that his nose had broken. His vision blurred. If not for the rag in his mouth, he'd have bit his tongue.

Another punch came, immediately after. And he screamed again. He tasted blood and didn't know if it was running from the back of his nose, or from his mouth. And it didn't matter. Pain after pain came. He was vaguely aware of being kicked, punched, and hit with something—he wasn't sure what.

On the floor, curling into a tight ball, he endured each sharp pain as it came, and screamed as loud as he could. In the back of his mind, words ran, words so completely calm and composed that he couldn't think they were his. But the thoughts couldn't have belonged to anyone else. And they made sense.

One was: Scream. Stoicism is for fools. Another, just as sudden, as complete, was: Only idiots inflict pain for pain's sake. And the third, very clear, very sharp, was: I could shift. I could eat them.

It was the third thought that caused him to scream louder than the pain. And the word he would scream, if his mouth hadn't been so firmly gagged, would have been, "No."

Oh, he could shift. He could undoubtedly shift. And the binds on his limbs would break away with the force of the shifting, the greater strength and size of the dragon. Of that he had no doubt.

It was even possible that he could defeat all three of them, even if they too shifted. They were not swift of mind and they always had trouble coordinating attacks. But—and this was a huge but—he wasn't absolutely sure he could prevail. Not as tired and weak as he felt.

And then, worse of all, the dragon was very hungry. Starving. Ravenous. The dragon wanted food. Protein. And Tom didn't think he could live with himself if he succeeded in eating another human being. Or even one of these three fools.

A foot—he thought—crashed against his face. It felt like his forehead exploded. Blood flowed down, making him close his eyes.

He screamed "No," as much at the dragon within as at the pain.

* * *

Kyrie had just fallen asleep when she heard something. At first it was a little sound. Like . . . something scraping.

The sound, in itself almost imperceptible, intruded into her dreams, where she dreamed of mice, nibbling on cardboard. In her dream, she was in the back hallway of the Athens, and she opened the back door to the parking lot to find thousands of mice nibbling on large piles of cardboard boxes.

As she stood there, paralyzed, the nibbling grew louder, and louder, and then the mice swarmed all over her, thousands of little paws all over her, insinuating themselves under her nightshirt, crawling up her belly, tangling in her hair.

She woke up and sat up in bed. No mice. But she'd been sleeping uncovered, on top of the bed, and there was a breeze coming in around the door to the bedroom, blowing with enough force to ruffle her nightshirt and give her silly dreams.

Kyrie looked at the clock on her dresser. Seven a.m. She should be asleep. She still had time to sleep. Turning her pillow over, she lay back down. And realized she could still hear the sound of mice nibbling on cardboard. She blinked. She was awake. She was sure of that. So why were mice . . .?

And why did it feel like her head swam? She felt dizzy, as if she were . . . anaesthetized? Drugged? Slow?

She looked at the shaft of light coming from the little window above her bed. Was that green powder dancing in the light? Was she dreaming it? And she still felt dizzy, as if her head wasn't quite attached to her body.

Getting out of bed, as silently as she could manage, she opened her bedroom door. The living room was empty and everything looked undisturbed. Definitely no mice. But she could still hear the crunching, shredding sounds from . . . the kitchen.

Even more cautiously, feeling pretty stupid for moving around her own house as if it were some sort of secret dungeon, she crept down the hallway toward the kitchen. But before she got there, the green glimmer in the air became obvious. It was no more than a glimmer, she thought, a soft shine, like . . . a cloud of green dust. Green dust in the air. Green dust on the corpses. Green dust covering her back porch the day that Tom claimed he had been attacked by dragons.

And she was light-headed and growing dizzy. As if she were being doped.

Had they been dragons? Rafiel had said the powder was of insect origin, but was it? They didn't even know what dragons were—exactly. Other than mythical beasts, of course. And she remembered the beetles in the parking lot of the Athens. It could be those.

She stood there, for a moment, in the hallway of her own house, feeling her head swim. She stared at the green dust, listening to what sounded like an attempt to break through the door—if the thing trying to break through were armed with claws and pincers.

Only, the attempt couldn't be very serious, could it? It was a hollow-core door. How hard could it be to break it down? No, the purpose was to put the green powder into the house first, wasn't it. And why would you do that?

She thought of the victim in the parking lot of the Athens, covered in the green powder. And then she thought of Tom and Keith, clearly high as kites.

Yes, Tom had seemed to do most of the damage she'd found in the sunroom. Yes, their response to the attack hadn't been the most effective. But they had been high as kites. What if they had been high as kites because of the green dust?

What if it that was what was causing her head to swim?

In a moment, she was sure of it. She remembered Tom's casual greeting of Keith when he'd stopped for the key. Friends? Perhaps, of a sort, the friendly acquaintance sort where you trust each other with a key in case you're locked out. Or where you might exchange greetings in the hall. Perhaps the kind where you go in search of your acquaintance when you hear a murder has taken place at their job site. Not the type of friendship, though, where you go to someone's house in order to share a drug with your friend.

Kyrie retraced her steps down the hallway, quickly. Why, oh, why hadn't she allowed herself to be so afraid of bird flu that she bought a couple of surgical masks? In the event, right now, all she could do was improvise.

She opened the door to the linen cupboard and got a washcloth, which she tied over her mouth and nose, careful to cover them as much as possible. Then she retreated further, into the living room where she grabbed the umbrella she had bought for what she thought was a fabulous price when she first moved to Colorado. As her year's worth of letting the umbrella sit by the front door had proven, the price hadn't been quite so fabulous as she then thought. Never mind. It would be of use now.

She grabbed the umbrella by the solid wooden handle that had so impressed her when she bought the thing and wielded it like a samurai sword.

Just in time. From the kitchen came the sound of the door breaking down and then a dry shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, as of chitinous legs moving over the linoleum of the kitchen. She heard her chair being dragged, the table overturned. And she heard the thing shuffle closer, toward the hallway. At the entrance to the hallway it stopped, and, in a series of dry scrapings, it sent forth another cloud of glowing green powder. From the other side of the house came the sound of the door falling down. The front door. Wouldn't the neighbors see it? And who would believe it? They could see it all day long. They'd think they were going crazy and not tell anyone about it.

Kyrie put her back against the hallway wall, as a cloud of green powder came from the living room side, too.

She prepared to sell her life dearly.

* * *

Tom woke up choking. A taste of blood in his mouth, and his nose felt wholly obstructed. He coughed, and it seemed to help, clearing both mouth and nose. But he was thirsty and he was still lying, twisted, on the floor of the old service station. And his mouth was still gagged.

"Are you going to talk or not?" Crest Dragon asked. He stood directly in front of Tom, hands on hips. "Are you going to tell us where you hid it, or will we have to hurt you again?"

Tom blinked. He opened his mouth, and screamed, because that was all he could do. With a gag in his mouth, it was very hard to tell the idiots he had a gag in his mouth.

Two Dragons screamed something menacing in Chinese in response to his scream, and struck a pseudo-karate position he had probably learned from movies. He came running toward Tom and Tom closed his eyes, fairly sure they were going to hit his nose again.

But before Two Dragons got to him, someone yelled. Other Dragon? Tom opened one eye. It was indeed Other Dragon. The one with the Chinese character tattooed on his forehead. He spoke rapidly, pointing at Tom. And he had one arm in front of Two Dragons, who looked confused. Crest Dragon looked vexed. He turned toward Two Dragons. "You didn't remove the gag? I told you to remove the gag," he said, in rapid English, and threw a punch at Two Dragons who avoided it by ducking under it.

He didn't tell Crest Dragon, obviously the head of this outfit, that he too could easily have seen that Tom was gagged. Instead, he untied the gag at the back of Tom's head, his fingers scraping at Tom's scalp and tangling in Tom's hair as he did it.

As the gag fell away, Tom opened and closed his mouth, hoping his jaw wasn't dislocated. It hurt as if it were, but that was probably only the result of having his mouth open like that for hours.

"Now," Crest Dragon said, and smiled, graciously, looking much like some sort of society hostess. "Now, will you tell us where you hid it?"

Tom judged his chances. What he needed most—what he wanted more than anything—beyond the inner dragon's wish to tear these goons apart and use them as a protein source, was water. Liquid.

He looked at Crest Dragon and, in a voice he didn't need to make any raspier, he managed, "Thirsty. Very. Thirsty."

Crest Dragon looked disgusted, and for just a moment Tom thought they were going to resume beating him. He turned around to the other two.

"You know they said we shouldn't hurt him to where he couldn't talk," Other Dragon said. "You know he has to be thirsty."

How long had it been since he'd been thrown here? It seemed like forever. And he hadn't drunk anything before. Tom closed his eyes, as his captors' argument progressed into whatever form of Chinese they talked, Mandarin or Cantonese or whatever.

Other Dragon had said they shouldn't hurt him to the point where he couldn't talk. Tom had realized, sometime in the last few days, that stealing the Pearl of Heaven had been a grievous mistake. Oh, he remembered it from when he was a kid, in his father's house. He remembered some old Chinese guy showing it to Edward Ormson at his home office.

Hidden around the corner, the then very young Tom had seen the Pearl and felt it. He'd felt the radiance of it penetrating to the core of his being. Since he'd later come to realize that it was a . . . cultic object of dragon shifters, he supposed that the fact that it resonated with him, even then, must mean he'd already been a dragon. It wasn't a late-caught affliction, but something he'd had all his life and only became active in adolescence.

Years later, he'd felt the call of the Pearl and he'd slithered, among those other dragons, so different from himself, to a meeting, where he'd seen the Great Sky Dragon. And the Pearl. He hadn't understood almost anything of the meeting. But he'd seen the guy who had the Pearl shift back into his normal form. And he'd followed him to an unassuming little restaurant. Where he'd stolen the Pearl.

Oh, the reasons he'd stolen it seemed valid at the time. He'd thought since this was used by shifters, since it gave forth a feeling of safety and calm, it must be something that helped control shifts. And perhaps it was. At least, since he'd had it, Tom had been able to stop his drug-taking. Gradually, but he'd stopped it. And the withdrawal effects he'd expected from heroin—all the horrible vomiting and cramps he'd heard about—had never materialized. Or not to any degree worth talking about. It hadn't been much more than a stomach flu. So perhaps the Pearl had helped.

Only then the triad had picked up the scent, and Tom had found that unless the Pearl were kept submerged in water, every dragon within miles of it could follow it.

He didn't even know how many dragons there were around. But he knew that there were enough that they'd tracked him. They'd tracked him all the way to Colorado, tracked him to Goldport . . . And he had to leave the Pearl immersed in water, which meant he, himself, couldn't use it.

So, if he couldn't use it, he might as well give it back. Only he couldn't give it back, because he'd seen enough of the dragon triad, enough of the ruthless way in which they disposed of those who crossed them.

They were so mad at him that these—admittedly low-level—thugs had pretended to forget to remove his gag and had proceed to beat hell out of him. And no, he wasn't so stupid he would believe that they'd actually forgotten to remove it. No. They hated him. They had it in for him. So . . . The minute he told them where the Pearl was, the moment one of them verified it, got his hands on it, and phoned the others back to tell them where it was, he was a dead man.

And Tom didn't want to die. Not yet. So many times over the last few years, he'd thought he would be better off dead.

He didn't know what was different now, to be honest. He still didn't have a chance with Kyrie. Kyrie was probably, even now, snuggling with her lion-policeman.

But, damn it all, Tom felt a sting to his pride, a sting to what he retained as his sense of self, to think that if he died now, Kyrie would only think of him as a fuckup, as a junkie so far out of control that he couldn't keep from getting high in her house—even if he used her drugs for it.

He took a deep breath. He wanted to live. He wanted to know why she kept drugs. He wanted . . . he wanted Kyrie, and a house, roses, and everyday paper delivery.

He wanted the normalcy that had never been his.

A hand lifted him roughly, and he opened his eyes, bracing for a hit. But instead, he found Two Dragons pressing the neck of a water bottle against his lips.

Tom drunk gratefully, as if the water had been the breath of life.

As his mouth and nose became hydrated, the smell of the other three became more obvious. There was some sort of cologne, cheap and probably bought in gallon bottles, and the smell of the masses of product that Crest Dragon had slathered on his hair.

But above it, stronger than all of that, was the smell of living flesh. "No," Tom said. It was all he could tell the inner dragon, who was slavering at the thought of eating these fools.

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