Tom had just kicked the door, and felt something—something giant and pincerlike reach for him when . . .
"What in hell?" came from the direction of the living room in a very male voice. A vaguely familiar male voice. And then there were strides—sounding echoey and strange through his distorting senses, advancing along, toward him.
Past the kitchen. He felt more than saw as two pairs of green wings took flight, from the backyard, into the dark night sky above.
And he turned in the direction of the steps to see Kyrie look at him, her mouth open in shock, her eyes wide, her face suddenly drained of color.
Keith was still doing fake kung-fu moves in the direction of the utterly broken windows. But Kyrie stood in the middle of the room, gulping air.
Behind her, stood the policeman lion, golden eyes and immaculate linen clothes, all in a vague tawny color. And he looked . . . disgusted.
Tom summoned all his thought, all his ability to speak, and came out with the best excuse he could craft. "It wasn't me," he said. "It was the dragons."
Kyrie stood in the middle of her demolished sunroom. The windows were all broken. As was the sliding door. And there was Tom—and he looked very odd. Tottery and . . . just strange. And there was another guy—his neighbor, she thought, from the apartment.
"I'm sorry," Tom said, again. "It was the dragons." He pointed at the backyard. "They were attacking."
His voice sounded odd. Normally it was raspy, but now it sounded like it was coming out through one of those distorters that kids used to do alien voices. And there had to be something wrong with him. He was walking barefoot on shards of glass. It had to hurt. In fact, she could see little pinpricks of blood on the indifferent beige carpet. But he didn't seem to be in pain.
"Tom, are you all right?" she asked. But by then she was close enough to look in his eyes. His pupils were huge, crowding the blue iris almost completely out of his eyes.
Kyrie took a deep breath. Damn, damn, damn, damn. She knew better, didn't she? Once a junkie always a junkie. And Tom was . . . Hell, she knew what he was. Shifter or not, someone with his upbringing wouldn't have fallen as low as he had without some major work on his part. He had to be totally out of control. He had to be.
But she'd almost believed. She'd almost trusted. She remembered how she'd felt bad about telling Rafiel on him. She remembered how she felt so relieved it wasn't a dragon's teeth on that man's body.
Hell, she still felt happy the man hadn't died by dragon. That meant she didn't have to keep Tom close until she figured out what to do about it. She just didn't have to. She was through with him.
"You're high," she said, and it sounded odd, because she hadn't meant to say it, hadn't meant to call attention to the fact, just in case Rafiel hadn't noticed it. But it didn't matter, did it? If Tom was this out of control, he was going to be arrested, sooner or later.
Tom shook his head, his dark eyebrows knit over his eyes in complete surprise. "Me?" he said. "No. Keith is high. He was talking about the mother ship. I mean, clear as day it was just two dragons."
Kyrie didn't know whether to laugh and cry. All these years she had kept away from dangerous men. She'd laughed at the sort of woman who let herself get head over heels with some bundle of muscles and no brain. And now she'd got involved with . . . this. Okay, so not involved, although if she told herself the truth, she had been interested in Tom. Or at least appreciative of his buff and sculpted body. She hadn't done anything even remotely sexual or physical to him, though.
Not that it mattered. She'd let him into her house. She'd let him stay here alone . . . And he'd got his buddy over, hadn't he? And they'd . . . what? Shot up? There didn't seem to be any smell of pot in the air, and besides she doubted that pot would cause this kind of trip. Of course, she knew drugs could also be swallowed or . . . And that wasn't the point. He'd gotten high and destroyed her property.
She looked around at the devastation in her sunroom, and wondered how she was going to pay for this mess. The landlord would demand payment. But she had no more than a couple of hundred in the bank, and that had to last for food and all till the end of the month. And she needed rent.
She took another deep breath. She was going to have to ask Frank for more hours. And even then, she might not make it.
Tom was looking at her, as though trying to interpret her expression, as if it were very hard to read—something he couldn't understand. "Uh," he said. "I'll leave now?"
Part of Kyrie wanted to tell him no. After all, well, he was still barefoot. And bleeding. And he was high. She should tell him to say. She should . . .
But no, she definitely should not. She'd kept him overnight, so he would be better off leaving in the morning. And now, what? He'd just caused more damage.
"Yes," she said. She heard her voice so cold it could have formed icicles on contact. "Yeah. I think it would be best if you left and took your friend."
Tom nodded, and tugged on the shoulder of the other guy's sweater, even as he started inching past Kyrie, in an oddly skittish movement. It reminded her of a cat, in a house where she'd stayed for a few months. A very skittish cat, who ran away if you so much as looked at her.
As far as Kyrie could tell, no one had ever hurt the cat. But she skidded past people, as though afraid of being kicked.
Now Tom edged past her the same way, while dragging his friend, who looked at Kyrie, blank and confused, and said, "It was aliens, you know. Just like . . . you know. Aliens."
She heard them cross the house, toward the front door. She didn't remember the guy's car on the driveway, but it wasn't her problem if they were on foot. In fact, it might be safer in the state they were. And she didn't care, she told herself, as she listened for the front door to close.
"Kyrie," Rafiel said. He stood by the windows, frowning, puzzled. "Something was here."
They'd been walking for a while, aimlessly, down the street, when Tom because aware of three things—first, that he was walking around in a neighborhood he didn't know; second, that he was barefoot; third, that his feet hurt like living hell.
He sat down on the nearest lawn, and looked at his feet, which were cut, all over, by a bunch of glass.
This realization seemed to have hit Keith at the same time, which was weird. As Tom was looking in dismay at the blood covering the soles of his feet, Keith said, "Shit. You're bleeding."
Tom looked up. He remembered seeing Keith's eyes, the pupil dilated and odd. But Keith looked perfectly normal now, even if a little puzzled. "What happened?" he said. And frowned, as if remembering some thing that didn't make any sense whatsoever. "What happened to us back there. What . . ."
Tom shook his head. He knew what Keith's eyes looked like. And Tom had some idea what mind-altering substances could do to your mind and your senses. Hell, for a while there he was shooting everything that came his way. Heroin by choice, but he'd have done drain opener if he had any reason to suspect that it would prevent him from shifting into a dragon. He suspected, in fact, that he had shot up baking soda in solution more than a few times. And who knew what else? It was miraculous enough he'd survived all those years. But nothing nothing, equaled the trip he'd just gone through, back there.
He put his face in his hands, and heard himself groan. He'd messed it up for good and all. Not that there had ever been any hope that Kyrie would see him as anything other than a mess. Not considering what he'd done the night before. The . . . corpse. And then his being so totally helpless. There was no way he had a chance with Kyrie. Not any way. But . . .
But now she thought him a drug addict. And the policeman had been with her.
"I'm going to get my car," Keith said. "Do you have any idea which way we came?"
"You have a car?"
"Yeah," Keith said. "I parked just a couple of blocks from . . . your girl's . . ." It seemed to hit him, belatedly, that perhaps Kyrie was no longer Tom's girl. Not after what they'd done to her sunroom. "Do you have any idea which way we came?"
There was something to the dragon. Perhaps seeing the city from above so many times, Tom had memorized it like one memorizes a map, or a favorite picture. Or perhaps being a dragon came with a sense of direction. Who knew?
But by concentrating, he could just figure out which way Kyrie's house was. He wondered if the policeman would arrest them for even coming near.
Standing up, unsteadily, he said, "Come on." He winced at the pain in his feet. "Come on. It's this way, up the road here two blocks, then up ten blocks, and then to the left another five, and you should see her house."
Keith took a step back. "Whoa, dude," he said. "You've gone all pale, just standing up. Sit down. I'll go get the car. You're sure of the way?"
Tom nodded. He wanted to say he would go with Keith, but he could tell he would only slow Keith down. He sat down on the grass, again, with some relief. "Sure," he said. "Sure. You should see it. If not . . . come back."
He put his face in his hands, again, sitting there. He didn't know how long he and Keith had been fighting the . . . dragons? He was sure they were dragons, but there was a feeling of strangeness, his memory kept giving him images of a big, horned toe. No. A tooth. No . . .
He sighed. He was never going to remember. And he had no idea what had got him so high. And Keith too. For all his attitude with the girls, the one thing Tom had never suspected Keith of doing was getting involved in drugs. In fact, he would bet his neighbor had never got high before.
So . . . How had they got high?
The sugar. It had to be the sugar. He'd drunk nothing but the coffee. No one, absolutely no one would put drugs in eggs or bacon. So, it had to be the sugar. He'd put three spoons in the coffee. Kyrie. Kyrie kept drugs in the house.
He blinked in amazement. Okay, so he'd stolen the—he'd stolen it—he forced his mind away from what it was—so he could give up drugs. There had been one too many times of waking up choking on his own vomit, struggling for every breath and not sure he was going to make it to the morning. There had also been the ever-present fear of being arrested, of shifting in a jail cell. Of eating a bunch of people.
So, he'd stolen it and tried to use it to control his shifts, so that he would stop waking up in the middle of the day dreaming he had eaten someone the night before and not being sure if it was true or not. The drugs weren't working so well for that, anyway. Or to make him stop hurting.
But, even with the . . . object in his possession he hadn't been able to give up on drugs, not entirely, until he'd started working at the diner, and he'd been . . . He'd seen Kyrie, and he'd seen the way she looked at him. And . . . he chuckled to himself. He'd tried to change. He'd really tried to change his ways to impress her. And all the time, all this time, she was doing drugs, too. Perhaps all shifters did them, to control the shift? Or perhaps she disapproved of him for other reasons. But, clearly, a straight arrow she was not.
"Are you okay?" Keith asked. He'd stopped the car—a beat-up golden Toyota of late Eighties vintage—in front of Tom and rolled down the window.
Tom realized he was laughing so hard that there were tears pouring down his face. He controlled with an effort. "Oh, I'm fine. I am perfectly fine."
He had, in fact, been an idiot. But not anymore.
When the office was empty like this, late at night, and Edward Ormson was the only one still at his desk, sometimes he wondered what it would be like to have someone to go home to.
He hadn't remarried because . . . Well, because his marriage had blown up so explosively, and Sylvia had taken herself such a long way away, that he thought there was no point trying again.
No. He was wrong. He was lying to himself again. What had made him give up on family and home wasn't Sylvia. It was Tom.
He looked up from the laptop open on his broad mahogany desk, and past the glass-door of his private office at the rest of the office—where normally his secretaries and his clerks worked. This late, it was all gloom, with here and there a faint light where someone's computer had turned on to run the automated processes, or where someone had forgotten a desk lamp on.
He probably should make a complaint about the waste of energy, but the truth was he liked those small lapses. It made the office feel more homey—and the office was practically the only home Ormson had.
The wind whistled behind him, around the corner of the office, where giant panel of window glass met giant panel of window glass. The wind always whistled out here. When you're on the thirtieth floor of an office building there's always a certain amount of wind.
Only it seemed to Ormson that there was an echo of wings unfolding in the wind. He shivered and glowered at the screen, at the message one of his clerks had sent him, with research details for one of his upcoming trials. Even with the screen turned on, he could still see a reflection of himself in it—salt-and-pepper hair that had once been dark, and blue eyes, shaped exactly like Tom's.
He wondered if Tom was still alive and where he was. Damn it. It shouldn't be this difficult. None of this should be so difficult. He'd made partner, he'd gotten married, he'd had a son. By now, Tom was supposed to be in Yale, or if he absolutely had to rebel, in Harvard, working on his law degree. Tom was supposed to be his son. Not the constant annoyance of a thorn on the side, a burr under the saddle.
But Tom had been trouble from the first step he'd taken—when he'd held onto the side table and toppled Sylvia's favorite Ming vase. And it hadn't got any better when it had progressed to petty car theft, to pot smoking, to the school complaining he was sexually harassing girls. It just kept getting harder and harder and harder.
He thought he heard a tinkle of glass far off and stopped breathing, listening. But no sound followed and, through the glass door, he saw no movement in the darkened office. There was nothing. He was imagining things, because he had thought of Tom.
Hell, even Sylvia hadn't wanted Tom. She'd started having an affair with another doctor at the hospital and taken off with her boyfriend to Florida and married him, and set about having a family, and she'd never, never again even bothered to send Tom a birthday card. Not after that first year. And then Tom . . .
This time the noise was more definite, closer by.
Edward rose from his desk, his fingertips touching the desktop, as if for support. He told himself there were no such thing as dragons. He told himself people didn't shift into dragons and back again.
Every time he told himself that. Every time. And it didn't make any difference. There were still . . . Tom had still . . .
No sound from the office, and he drew in a deep breath and started to sit down. He'd turn off the computer, pack up and go . . . well, not home. His condo wasn't a home. But he'd go back to the condo, and have a drink and call one of the suitably long list of arm candy who'd been vying to be Mrs. Ormson for the last few months, and see if she wanted to go to dinner somewhere nice. If he was lucky, he wouldn't have to sleep alone.
"Ormsssson."
His office door had opened, noiselessly, and through it whistled the sort of breeze that hit the thirtieth floor when one of the windows had been broken. It was more of a wind. He could hear paper rustling, tumbling about, a roaring of wind, and a tinkle as someone's lamp or monitor fell over.
And the head pushing through the door was huge, reptilian, armed with many teeth that glimmered even in the scant light. Edward had seen it only once. He'd seen . . . other dragons. Tom not the least of them. But he hadn't seen this dragon. Not more than once. That had been when Edward had been hired to defend a triad member accused—and guilty—of a particularly gruesome and pointless murder.
This creature had appeared, shortly after Edward had gotten his client paroled, and while Edward was trying to convince him to go away for a while and not to pursue a bloody course of revenge that would have torn the triad apart—and, incidentally, got him dead or back in jail.
This dragon—they called it the great something dragon?—had flapped down from the sky and— Edward remembered his client's body falling from a great height, the two pieces of it tumbling down to the asphalt. And the blood. The blood.
He swallowed bile, hastily, and stood fully again. Stood. Ready to run. Which was foolish, because the thing blocked his office door, and its huge, many-fanged head rested on its massive paws. There was nowhere Edward could run.
The dragon blinked huge, green eyes at him, and, as with a cat's secretly satisfied expression, it gave the impression of smiling. A long forked tongue licked at the lipless mouth. "Ormson," it said, still somehow managing to give the impression that the word was composed mostly of sibilants.
"Yes?" Edward asked, and found his voice wavering and uncertain. "How may I help you?"
"Your whelp has stolen something of mine," the dragon said. Its voice was only part noise. The other part was a feeling, like a scratch at the back of the brain. It made you want to flip up your cranium and scratch.
"My . . .?"
"Your son. Thomas. He's stolen the Pearl of Heaven."
Edward's mouth was dry. He opened it to say this was entirely Tom's business, but he found himself caught in an odd crux. If Tom had stolen something, then Tom was still alive. Still alive five years after being kicked out of the house. Had he learned something? Had he shaped up? He almost had to, hadn't he, or he would be dead by now? No one could continue going the way Tom had been going and still be alive after five years on their own, could they?
He swallowed hard. But Tom had stolen something. This seemed to imply he'd learned nothing. He'd not changed.
He clenched his hands so tightly that his nails bit into his palm. How could Tom still be a problem? How could he? Didn't he know how hard he made it on his father? Didn't he care?
"I don't know what my son has done," he said, and his voice came out creditably firm. "I haven't seen him in more than five years. You cannot hold me responsible for what he has done."
"He has stolen the Pearl of Heaven," the dragon rumbled, his eyes half closed and still giving that look of a secret smile.
"So, he's stolen some jewelry," Edward said. "Get it from him. I don't care."
Did he care? What if they killed Tom? Edward didn't know. He didn't even know if it would grieve him anymore. It wasn't supposed to be this hard. He'd been saying that since Tom was one. And it hadn't got any easier.
"It's not that easy," the dragon said. "The Pearl is . . . dragon magic. Ancient. It was given to us by the Emperor of Heaven. It will not do him any good, but it is the center of our strength. We need it, or we shall fall apart."
Great. Tom would manage to steal some cultic object. Hell, if he found an idol with an eye made of ruby, he'd dig the ruby out just to see what would happen. And Edward remembered all too well the incident in the Met Museum with Tom and the mummy when Tom was five. Other kids just never thought of this kind of trouble to get into.
"So get it. From him. I know nothing of it."
"Ah," the dragon said. And the sound, somehow, managed to convey an impression of disapproval, an impression of denial. "But the child is always the responsibility of the parents, isn't he? Your son has hidden the Pearl of Heaven. It is up to you to find it and give it back to us."
The or else remained unspoken, hanging mid-air, more solid, more certain than anything the dragon had said.
"I don't even know where he is," Edward said.
"Goldport, Colorado."
"Fine," Edward said, nodding and trying to look businesslike. He scooped up his laptop, picked up his case from the floor, started pushing the laptop into it. "Fine, fine. I'll call tomorrow. I'll make enquiries. I'll try to figure out where he—"
A many-clawed paw lifted. With unreal, careful precision, it rested atop the briefcase and the laptop and just touched the edge of Edward Ormson's hand. The claw shimmered, like real gold, and ended in an impossibly sharp talon.
"Not tomorrow," the dragon said. "Now."
"Now?" Edward blinked, in confusion, looking down at the talon on his hand, the tip of it pressing just enough to leave a mark, but leaving no doubt that it could press hard enough to skewer the hand through sinew and bone. "But it's what? Nine at night? You can't really book flights at this time of night. Well, not anymore. You can't just show up at the airport and book a flight on a whim. With the security measures that simply doesn't happen anymore."
"No airport," the dragon said, his paw immobile, the pressure of his talon palpable.
"Driving?" Edward asked, and would have sat down, if he weren't so afraid that some stirring, some careless gesture would make the creature stab his hand with that talon. He didn't know what would happen if he did that. He didn't know how Tom had become a dragon, but if the legends were right, then it was through a bite. Or a clawing. "Driving would take much longer. Why don't I book a flight tomorrow. I'll fly out before twenty-four hours. I promise."
"No driving. I'll take you. Now."
"You'll take me?"
The claw withdrew. "Pack your things. Whatever you need to take. I'll take you. Now."
There really wasn't much choice. Less than ten minutes later, Edward was straddling the huge beast's back, holding on tight, while they stood facing the place where the dragon had broken several panels of glass to get in.
There was a moment of fear as the dragon dove through the window, wings closed, and they plunged down toward the busy street.
A scream caught in Edward's throat. Not for the first time, he wondered why no one else saw these creatures. Was he having really vivid hallucinations while locked up in some madhouse?
No. No. He was sure other people saw them. But he was also sure they forgot it as soon as they could. He, himself, tried to forget them every time he saw them. Every time. And then they appeared again.
They plunged dizzily past blind dark offices and fully lit ones, toward the cars on the street below.
At maybe tenth-floor level, the dragon opened his wings, and turned gracefully, gaining height.
Edward was never sure how they flew. He'd always thought thermals . . . But these wings were flapping, vigorously, to gain altitude, and he could feel the back muscles ripple beneath his legs.
He'd put his briefcase's shoulder handle across his chest, bandolier style. And that was good because the dragon's scales were slicker and smoother than they seemed to be, and he had to hold on with both hands to the ridge that ran down the back of the dragon, as the dragon turned almost completely sideways, and gained altitude, flying above the high-rises, above Hudson Bay, circling. Heading out to Colorado. Where Edward was supposed to convince Tom to do something he didn't want to do.
Oh, hell.
"What?" Kyrie asked, looking at Rafiel who stood by the windows, frowning at them.
"This window was broken from the outside," he said. "Something ripped the screen aside, and hammered that window down. From the outside."
"How do you know?" she asked. She was looking at her patio door and wondering how she was going to be able to pay for all that glass. Safety glass, at that, she was sure. "How could you tell?"
"The glass fragments are all on the inside," he said. "And scattered pretty far in."
"The glass fragments for this patio door are pretty much inside, too, but there's a bunch of them outside," she said. "I think you're reading too much into it."
"No," Rafiel said. "I'm no expert, of course. I could bring the lab here, and they could tell you for sure. But—see, on the patio door, the glass is kicked all the way out there, almost halfway through your backyard."
"Which isn't very far," Kyrie said.
"Admittedly," Rafiel said. "But see, the door I'm sure was kicked from the inside. But the windows weren't. There's some glass that crumbled and just fell on that side, but most of it got pushed in here, all the way to the middle of the carpet."
Kyrie looked. There were glass pieces all the way through the room, to the foot of the sofa where Tom had slept. There were spots of blood, too, where Tom had walked on the glass, apparently without noticing.
Suddenly, it was too much for Kyrie, and she sat on the end of the sofa where there was no glass. "How could he?" she asked. "What was he high on, anyway? There was glass everywhere. Why couldn't he feel it? What's wrong with him?"
Rafiel looked puzzled and started to say "Who?—" Then he shook his head. "If you mean Ormson, I think there's a lot more wrong with him than even I could tell you. Though I think I'll do a background check on him tomorrow. His getting that other young punk here worries me. Perhaps he's a dealer? And that guy came by for a hit?"
Kyrie was about to say that she'd never seen any signs that Tom dealt—but what did she have to go on? She had suspected him of it. He'd said he didn't. And, of course, she would trust him because he was a model of virtue and probity. "What is wrong with me?" she asked.
And now Rafiel looked even more puzzled and she almost laughed. Which showed how shocked she was, because there really wasn't anything to laugh about.
The golden eyes gave her the once-over, head to toe. "I don't see anything wrong with you."
For a moment, for just a moment, she could almost smell him, musky and virile like the night before. She got up from the sofa. That was probably what was messing her up. It was all down to pheromones and unconscious reactions and stuff. It was all . . . insane.
She grabbed her right hand with her left, as if afraid what they might do. "Well, that's neither here nor there," she said. "Is it? These windows are going to cost me a fortune, and I will have to work a bunch of overtime to pay for it."
"I could talk to my dad. He knows— I could get someone to do the job and you could pay for them on credit."
Kyrie twisted her lips. One thing she had seen, through her growing up years, and that was that families usually went wrong when they started buying things on credit, no matter how necessary it seemed at the time. And since many of the foster families fostered for the money allowance a new kid brought, she had seen a lot of families who had gone financially to the wrong. "No, thank you," she said. "I can take care of myself."
"But this is wide open," he said. "And there's something killing shifters. What if they come for you? How are you going to defend yourself? I have to protect you. We're partners in solving this crime, remember?"
Kyrie remembered. But she also remembered that she wasn't sure what all this meant to Rafiel. And didn't want to know. She'd been a fool for trusting Tom. She'd be damned if she was going to repeat the mistake with Rafiel. What if he had the door fixed in a way that he could, somehow, come in and kill her in the night?
She couldn't figure out any reason why he would want to kill her. But then, she couldn't figure out any reason why anyone would want to go around killing other shape-shifters. It had to be a shifter. Only a shifter would smell them. So, what would he get out of killing his own kind? And who better to do it than a policeman?
"No, thank you," she said, again. "You don't have to take care of me. I can take care of myself. I've been doing it all my life. Pretty successfully, as you see."
"But—"
"No buts, Officer Trall." Without seeming to, she edged around him, and guided him through the doorway from the sunporch into the kitchen. She locked the door to the outside, then grabbed the extra chair and wedged it under the doorknob, the way she'd secured her bedroom in countless foster homes, when she'd been lucky enough to have a room for herself. "You'd best leave now. I need to have something to eat, and then I'll go to the Athens early. The day shift is often a person late, and if I can pitch in at dinnertime, I can work some overtime, and that will help pay for this . . . mess."
As if taken off balance by her sudden forcefulness, he allowed himself to be shepherded all the way out the kitchen door.
"Thank you again," Kyrie said. And almost told him it had been lovely. Which could apply to the luncheon, but certainly was a gross overstatement when it came to the autopsy, and just plain silly when applied to what they found back here. Which, admittedly, wasn't his fault.
He was still staring at her, the golden eyes somehow managing to look sheepish, when she closed the door in his face. And locked it.
Alone in the house for the first time in almost twenty-four hours, she rushed to the bedroom. She needed to get out of her skirt and into jeans and a t-shirt. Then she'd eat something—at a guess bread, because she imagined that Tom would have eaten every ounce of protein in the house—and get out of here. The diner had to be safer. More people, more witnesses.
Although it hadn't helped the guy last night, had it?
She shuddered at the thought of that bloodied body on the slab. She would park up front, she decided. On Fairfax Avenue. Within plain sight of everyone.
"Damn," Keith said, after a while of driving in silence.
"What now?" Tom asked. He'd been sitting there, his head in his hands, trying to figure out what he was going to do next. He felt as if his life, over the last six months, was a carefully constructed castle of cards that someone had poked right in the middle and sent tumbling.
If Kyrie was no better than him, then maybe it was something wrong with the nature of shifters. Maybe that was why everyone he'd met was a drifter, or . . .
"I forgot to tell you why I came looking for you," Keith said.
"I thought it was to make sure I was all right," Tom said.
"Well." Keith nodded. "That was part of it, only . . . I went to pay the rent today and I got to talking to the building manager about what happened at your apartment and she said . . . The manager got a bunch of your things from the floor. Before she called the police to look at it."
"The police? To look at my things?" Tom asked. He was trying to imagine why the woman would do that. She was a little old lady who looked Italian or Greek and who had always seemed pretty nice to him.
"No, you fool. She got the things before the police came over, because she figured they were your things and you might need them, and the police would just tie them up."
"Oh, what did she get?"
"I don't know. It looked like was some of your clothes, and your boots, and a credit card."
Tom blinked. "I don't have a credit card." Had one of the triad dropped his credit card behind? Tom hadn't been impressed by the collective intelligence of the dragon enforcer trio, but that seemed too stupid even for them.
"Your ATM card, then."
"Oh."
"The manager said it was none of the police's business. She asked me to bring you by for your stuff." Keith looked at Tom. "But maybe I should take you to emergency first. For your feet?"
"No," Tom said. First, because he had enough experience in his own body to know that any wound would heal up seemingly overnight. And second because if he could get some clothes on, and his hand on his ATM card, he was going to find some stuff to buy. Heroin, by choice, but just about anything else would do, short of baking soda. This time he was going to get high and stay high. He would be feeling no pain.
In jeans and a comfortable T-shirt, Kyrie went into the kitchen. She felt naked without the earring she normally wore. She'd found it in a street fair when she was about fourteen and it had been her favorite piece of jewelry since. But there was no point crying over spilt milk or spoiled jewelry. She had lost it somewhere at Tom's house, while becoming a panther. She would have to look out for another one.
Meanwhile she need to eat something, even if just bread and butter.
She put the kettle on for tea, and opened the fridge to see if perhaps a couple rounds of her lunch meat had survived. And was shocked to find eggs and bacon still sitting on the shelf, where she had left them. Looking at the containers, she determined he'd eaten about a third of her provisions. Which meant she would still have enough for the rest of the week, even if she shifted once or twice.
She'd long ago decided to make breakfast her main protein meal of the day. Even if she ate breakfast at the time other people ate dinner. Eggs and bacon, particularly bought on a sale, were far cheaper than meat for other meals.
She got the microwave bacon tray, and noticed Tom had washed it very carefully. She put the pan on for eggs, and again noticed it had been scrubbed with a soft, plastic scrubber, per manufacturer instructions for nonstick pans. Sitting at her little table, washing down the food with a cup of sweet tea—which she preferred to coffee unless she felt a need to wake up suddenly—she felt vaguely guilty about throwing Tom out.
Then she realized the source of her guilt was that he'd actually made an effort to wash the dishes and that, as ravenous as he must have been—she remembered what she'd felt like at the restaurant—he hadn't eaten all of her food. She smiled to herself. So, it was fine if the man were a one-person demolition engine, as long as he had good household habits?
She shook her head. Okay, she clearly was going soft in the head. Perhaps it was the shifter-bond. But if so, couldn't she feel more tenderly toward Rafiel? Was the way to her heart to give as much trouble and cause as much damage as humanly possible?
After washing her dishes, she grabbed her purse and hurried toward the Athens. She'd park up front. With the driver's window in the state it was, she didn't want to leave the car unwatched, anyway. She'd park up front, and keep an eye on it through her work shift.
Hopefully the diner would be short-staffed for the dinner shift, the last few hours of the day staff. Hopefully. They usually were, but then things never went the way one wanted them to, did they? And she'd have to buy another apron from Frank's stock, kept for when a staff member walked out of the job with the apron still on. Another expense.
She checked the chair under the lock between the kitchen and the back porch before leaving the house.