Gentleman Takes a Chance

By

Sarah A. Hoyt

Shape-Shift Into Adventure!

Shapeshifters Kyrie and Tom try to live a normal life in a small Colorado town—normal, that is, considering one of them is secretly a panther and the other a dragon. But now a primeval Shifter feud grows infinitely more deadly, and Kyrie and Tom find themselves warriors in an ancient struggle for Shifter destiny itself!

Quick-witted fantasy doyenne Sarah Hoyt continues the brilliant contemporary fantasy "Shifter" saga begun in Draw One in the Dark.

"An engaging main character, and the book... romps along."

—Publishers Weekly on Sarah Hoyt’s delightful Ill Met by Moonlight.

Cover Art by Tom Kidd

BAEN BOOKS by SARAH A. HOYT

Draw One in the Dark

Gentleman Takes a Chance

From near and far the creatures gather—winged and hoofed, clawed and fanged, and armed with quick rending maws. Great hulking beasts appear that the world has not seen in uncounted ages: reptiles that crawled in great primeval swamps long before human foot trod the Earth; saber-toothed tigers and winged pterodactyls. And others: bears and apes; foxes and antelopes, all converge on a small hotel on the outskirts of Denver, as a snowstorm gathers over the Rocky Mountains.

Outside the hotel, some change shapes—a quick twist, a wrench of bone and flesh, and where the animals once were, there now stand men and women. Others fly into the room, through the open balcony door, before changing their shapes.

In there—in human form—they crowd together, massing, restive. Old and young, hirsute and elegant, they gather.

Outside the day dims as a roiling darkness of clouds obscure the sun. Inside the men and women who were—such a short time ago—beasts wait.

Then of a sudden he is there, though no one saw him shift shapes; no one saw him arrive.

He is not huge. At least not in his human form. A well formed man, of Mediterranean appearance, with well-cut if somewhat long lanky dark hair, sensuous lips and a body that would not have looked out of place in a Roman temple. He appears to be in his middle years and wears his nakedness with the confidence of someone who feels protected in or out of clothes.

But it is his eyes that hold the assembly in check—dark eyes, intense and intent—that look at each of them in turn as though he knew not only any of their possible sins and crimes, but also their nameless, most intimate thoughts.

"Here," he says. "It is here. It is nearby."

"Here," another voice says.

"Nearby."

"So many dead. Shapeshifters. Dead."

"We can't let this stand," someone says.

"It won't stand," the leader of the group says. "We'll find those who killed the young ones of our kind. And we will kill them. The blood of our children calls to me for revenge. I've executed the murderers of our kin before and I will do so again."

"The deaths happened in Goldport, Colorado," a voice says from the crowd and a finger points. "That way."

"I will be there tomorrow," the leader of the meeting says. A tenseness about him indicates certainty and something else—an eagerness to kill again.

* * *

Kyrie Smith looked up at the ceiling as a sort of scraping bump came from the roof of the tiny workingman Victorian that she shared with her boyfriend, Tom Ormson. The sound reminded her of ships at high sea—of the shifting and knocking of wood under stress. How much snow was up there by now? And how much could the roof withstand?

From the radio—high up on the shelf over the card table and two folding chairs that served as dining nook—came a high-pitched whistle, followed by a voice, "We interrupt this program to issue a severe winter storm alert. All city facilities are closed and everyone who is not emergency and essential personnel is requested to stay indoors. Goldport Police Department is on cold reporting. Should your home become unsafe or should you believe that it will become unsafe, these are the public shelters available."

There followed a long list of public buildings and churches. Kyrie thought briefly that with the weather the police couldn't be on anything but cold reporting—icy in fact—though she knew very well they meant that any accidents should be reported later. Cold seemed such an apt adjective for what was happening outside.

Not that she anticipated needing shelter. The little Victorian cottage had been here for over a hundred years and presumably had survived massive snowstorms. But though it was only three p.m., with the scant light outside, the swirling darkness looked more like stormy midnight than the middle of the afternoon.

It was her first blizzard in Goldport, Colorado. She'd lived here for just over a year, but the last winter had been mild, sparing her one of the legendary Rocky Mountain blizzards. Which she wouldn't have minded so much, except for the fact that those blizzards grew ever larger in the tall tales of all her neighbors, acquaintances, and the regular diners at The George.

For the last week—while the weathermen screamed incoming—the clientele at The George had been evenly divided between those who'd say not a flake would fall and those who insisted they would all be buried in snow and ice and future generations would find them like so many Siberian mammoths buried in permafrost, the remains of their last souvlaki meal still in their stomachs.

Kyrie suppressed a shudder, gave a forceful stir to the bowl of cookie dough she held against her jean-clad hip, and told herself she was being very silly. It wasn't like her to have this sort of fanciful, almost superstitious fear. She'd like to think she had imagination enough, but she'd never had time to let it run riot.

She had been abandoned as a newborn at the door of a church in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Christmas Eve, and had lived in a succession of foster homes, having to fend for herself more often than not. She'd grown up slim and graceful, with the muscular body of a runner.

At almost twenty-two, she'd been an adult and on her own for about four years. She rarely stayed at a job for very long. What she had thought for many years were dreams of turning into a panther—and now knew was true shape-shifting—usually scared her away from any given place, job or relationship and had kept her moving before anyone became too close. She'd been afraid of being made to see a psychiatrist. She'd been afraid of being given antipsychotic drugs. Sane or not, she wanted to know her thoughts came from her own mind, not from some chemical. And her madness—as she thought it—hurt no one. It was just dreams.

For years she told herself she didn't miss people, or relationships, or those other things that seemed to be a given right of all other humans. She kept her own house and her own mind. And, until three months ago, when Tom had become her boyfriend and started subletting the enclosed porch at the back of the house, she'd been lonely. Very lonely.

Then suddenly she'd had to believe she was a shifter. That the panther she dreamed of being was her other self. And that there were others like her. This had tossed her head first into a sea of new relationships, new ties.

This house and Tom were the closest thing she'd ever had to a family. Probably the closest thing he'd ever had to a family, too. Oh, he'd grown up with wealthy parents, she knew. He'd been raised in New York City by professional, well-to-do mom and dad. But that hadn't made them a family. It wasn't just that Tom's parents had divorced when he was very young. People might divorce and yet raise their children well and as a family. It was more that his mother had never cared again if Tom lived or died. And his father had left Tom to be raised by hired help, and only took notice of him when Tom got in some scrape and had to be bailed out—which he did regularly—possibly because it was the only time he got attention. And then, when Tom was sixteen, his father had walked in on him changing from a dragon to a human, and—horrified or scared—had thrown Tom out onto the streets of New York City in nothing but a robe.

After that Tom, too, had drifted aimlessly, living as he could, without anyone to rely on, without anywhere to call home. And now...

And now they lived together. And they were dating, presumably with a view to marriage, not that it had ever been mentioned. Of course, since Tom's father had bought the diner for them jointly, they were already part of a partnership.

And a touch of Tom's calloused hand could still set her heart aflutter, just like a sudden tender look from him, across the diner on a busy day, could make her feel as though she were melting from the inside out.

Still all their kisses and their caresses had an end. Tom always pulled back, before things went too far. Everyone in the diner—everyone who knew them—assumed that, since they dated and lived together, they were sleeping together as well. And Kyrie didn't know what to think. Tom said that he wanted to take it slow, to give them both time to establish a normal relationship before they became more intimate. And yet...

And yet sometimes, when he pulled back, she caught a hint of something in his eyes—distance and fear. Was he afraid he'd shift during lovemaking? It wasn't that unusual to shift under strong emotions, so that might be all it was. Or perhaps he'd realized he'd made a mistake and she was not whom he wanted?

A wave of protectiveness and of almost shocking possessiveness arose in her—the need to protect this, the one haven she'd found. Something—someone—must belong to her. And Tom was hers. Oh, not against his will. But hers to protect and hers to love.

Setting the bowl down, she pulled back her waistlong hair with a flour-covered hand, marring her carefully dyed-in Earth-tone pattern—that gave the impression of a tapestry whose lines shifted whenever she moved—with a broad streak of white. She frowned at the little door that led to the back porch where Tom was still asleep.

Would Tom be upset that she had turned off his alarm clock? They both worked the night shift at The George—a long night shift, often seven p.m. to seven a.m.—and he always set his alarm for two p.m. But she had turned it off because she thought there was no point going into the diner today and Tom might as well rest. The chances of their having enough customers to justify the money used in lighting and heating The George were very low. And even though it was only a few blocks away, Kyrie didn't want to drive in the storm howling outside. And she certainly didn't want to walk in it.

Whether Tom agreed with her was something else again. She looked down at the bowl of dough. A succession of never-ending foster homes had taught her that the easiest way of managing men was by setting something sweet down in front them. It tended to distract them long enough that they didn't remember to be angry.

Still, as she knelt down to rummage under the cabinet for her two baking sheets, she tensed at a sort of half-gasped cry from Tom's sleeping porch. Rising, she held the trays as a shield, and looked at the door into the enclosed back porch. Tom didn't cry out in his sleep. The house was barely large enough to swing a cat. If he sleep-screamed, she'd know by now.

He didn't yell again, but there was a deep sigh, and then the slap of his feet—swung over the side of the daybed—hitting the wooden floor of the sleeping porch. The sound was followed by others she knew well, from normal days. A confused mutter that, had she been close enough, would reveal itself as "What time is it?" followed by a cartoonlike sound of surprise, which was followed, in short order, by the sound of the back blind being pulled aside to allow him to look outside, and then by words she couldn't hear well enough to understand but which—from the tone—were definitely swearing.

Then Tom's bare feet padded towards the door between sleeping porch and kitchen. Kyrie, who in her short time of sharing the house with a male, had learned that if you appeared to be totally in command and quite sure you'd done the right thing, men—or at least Tom—were likely to go along with it, so she set the tray down on the card table at which they normally ate and started studiously setting little balls of cookie dough down on the tray, two inches apart.

Tom cleared his throat, and she looked up, to see him in the doorway. Her first thought—as always—was that, despite being all of five-six, he looked amazing, with pale skin, the color of antique ivory; glossy, curly black hair just long enough to brush his shoulders contrasted with intensely blue eyes like the sky on a perfect summer day, and generously drawn lips that just begged to be kissed. Her second thought was that the most sculpted chest in creation deserved better than to be encased in a baggy green T-shirt that read Meddle you not in the affairs of dragons, for thou art crunchy and good with ketchup. Even if she'd bought him the T-shirt. And the best ass in the tri-state area should not be hidden by flannel checker-pattern pajama pants in such virulent green and yellow they could give seizures to used car salesmen.

"I take it The George is closed?" Tom said, and raised his hand to rub at his forehead between his eyebrows.

He squinted as if he had a headache and there were heavy dark circles under his eyes. Granted, skin as pale as Tom's bruised if you sneezed on it, but he didn't normally look like death warmed over. She wondered why he did now. "It's either closed now or it will be very soon. I called Anthony and he said it was pretty slow. He wanted to shut down the stoves and all, close and go home. So I told him fine. I know we could probably walk to The George but—"

"I looked out," he said. "We might very well not find The George in this. Blinding blizzard." He blinked as if realizing for the first time what she was doing. "Cookies?"

"Well...the radio said that there will be emergency shelters and I could only figure two reasons for it. Either the snow is going to be so heavy that the roof will collapse, or they're afraid we'll lose power. Can't do anything about roof collapsing. Not that tall. But I can preemptively bake cookies. Make the house warm."

He came closer, to stand on the other side of the little table. Though he was still squinting, as if the light hurt his eyes, his lips trembled on the edge of a smile. "And we get to eat the cookies too. Bonus."

"Make no assumptions, Mr. Ormson." She waggled an admonitory finger. "This is the first time I've baked cookies. They might very well taste like builder's cement."

His hand darted forward to the bowl and stole a lump of dough. Popping it in his mouth, he chewed appreciatively. "Not builder's cement. Raisin and chocolate chip?"

She shook her head and answered dolefully, "Rat droppings. The flour was so old, you see."

He nodded, equally serious. "Right. Well, I'll take a shower, and then we can see how rat droppings bake."

Down the hallway that led to the bathroom, she heard him open the door to the linen closet. Using a clean towel every day was one of those things she didn't seem able to break him of. But part of living together, she was learning, was picking your battles. This was one not worth fighting.

She heard him open the door to the bathroom as she put the cookie trays in the oven. She was setting the timer when she heard the shower start.

And then...

And then the sounds that came out of the bathroom became distinctly unfamiliar. They echoed of metal bending under high pressure and tile and masonry cracking, wrenching, subjected to forces the materials weren't designed for.

Her first thought was that the roof had caved in over the bathroom. But the sounds weren't quite right. There was this...scraping and shifting that seemed to be shoving against the walls. The cabinet over the fridge trembled, and the dishware inside it tinkled merrily.

Kyrie ran to the hallway and to the door of the bathroom.

"Tom?" she said and tried the handle. The handle rotated freely—well, not freely but loosely enough that the door clearly was not locked. And yet it wouldn't budge when she pushed at it. "Tom, are you in there?"

A growl and a hiss answered her.

* * *

The lion leapt across the entrance of the Goldport Undersea Adventure. He bounded across the next room, amid two rows of large tanks. The private company that had bought out the municipal aquarium had outfitted this room to look like a submarine's control room, with gauges and the sort of wheels that turn to activate pressure locks, and buttons and things. When the aquarium was open and functioning, the screens above the controls showed movies of underwater scenes in various bodies of water around the world.

Now dead and silent, with the aquarium closed due to inclement weather, they were just large, dark television screens. The whole building was empty except for a woman in the back office and the lion, who sniffed his way down the pretend mountain path that wound among tanks stocked with fish from the world over.

As he padded past the tank with piranhas, the lion growled softly, startling the exhibit of sea birds on an elevated area and causing them to fly up till they met with the net that kept them within their space.

The lion didn't care. He had picked up the scent he had been looking for. A sweetish, almost metallic scent. The smell of shapeshifters. He put nose to the ground and followed it, growling softly to himself, past the little suspension bridge with the artificial river underneath—momentarily disoriented where water had sprayed and diluted the scent. But the scent picked up on the other side of the bridge.

The lion couldn't think why the scent was important. There was a part of his mind—as if it were someone else, another mind, locked deep inside his brain—telling him the smell related to death and killing.

The lion didn't know why death or killing would be important, and he couldn't smell death in the air anyway. There was no decay, no blood. Just a smell of fish and water and chemicals, and the smell of people, many people, some of which had probably passed by days ago but left behind the olfactory trail of their passage.

Then there was the clear bright scent of a shapeshifter. Not that the lion knew what a shapeshifter was, or not really. Just that this was the scent he was seeking, the scent he must follow, deep into the broad chamber decorated with a cement chest and a hoard of plaster coins that his other mind remembered as unconvincingly painted to resemble gold.

The chamber was vast, with a tall ceiling lost in darkness. The lion crouched close to the ground, and followed two trails of smell—or rather, one trail that wound itself around, in front of two vast tanks. Inside the tanks swam creatures the lion's inner mind told him were sharks. Large, with sharp, serrated teeth, they swam towards him, while he sniffed at the glass.

The lion paid them no more attention than he did the yellow tape that blocked one of the tanks and the service stairs, discreetly hidden behind some plastic fronds, leading back to the top of the tank. There was no smell there at all, and the lion didn't look at it. Instead, he turned to follow the interesting scent out of the chamber, towards the front of the aquarium.

And stopped when he heard a voice, coming from the opposite direction of where he had come. "Officer Trall?"

The words made the lion turn, giving something like a half-grunt under his breath, as he loped very fast back the way he had come. Very, very fast, his paws devouring the distance he had traversed so cautiously.

Steps followed him. Human steps. Steps in high heels—the inner voice told the lion. A woman.

The lion gave a soft, distracted roar as—the inner voice yelled to hide, to change, to do something—he leapt into a corner of the entrance chamber, around the side of the ticket booth, and into the narrow hallway that led to the bathrooms. He hit the door of the men's bathroom at a lope, and rolled into the room.

As he rolled he...shifted, his body twisting and writhing even as he tumbled, till a tall, muscular blond man landed, from a somersault, in the middle of the bathroom, by one of the closed stalls.

From outside the door, the voice called, "Officer Trall?"

"In here," the man who had been a lion answered, his voice shaking slightly. "Just a moment."

And it was just a moment, as he reached for his clothes—khaki pants and a loose-cut shirt that, with his mane of long, blond hair gave him the look of a surfer about to hit the waves—and slipped into them and his shoes with the practice of someone who changed clothes several times a day.

In fact, Officer Rafiel Trall of the Serious Crimes Unit of the Goldport Police Department, had clothes hidden all over town and in some of the neighboring towns as well. One thing shifting shape did—it ruined your wardrobe. Though he controlled himself—well enough during the day, with more difficulty at night—he still destroyed clothes so often that he'd developed a reputation as a ladies man throughout the department.

Every time he came back wearing yet another set of clothes, all his subordinates, from his secretary to the newest recruit, elbowed each other and giggled. Rafiel only wished his sex life were half as exciting as they thought it was. Not that he could complain, or not really. He dated his fair share of women. He just couldn't allow any of them to get close enough to see his...changes. So he had a lot of first and second dates and rarely a third.

He looked at himself in the mirror, frowning, as he combed his fingers through his hair. Receptionists, women officers, even the medical examiners and legal experts who had sporadic contact with the Goldport Police Department, all warned each other about him in whispers. He'd heard the words "fear of commitment" so often he felt like they were tattooed on his forehead. And it wasn't true. He'd commit in a minute. To any woman he knew would accept him and not freak out. In less than a minute to a woman like him, a shifter. Of his kind.

The thought of Kyrie came and went in his mind, a mix of longing and regret. No point thinking about it. That wasn't going to happen.

Instead, he opened the door—his relaxed smile in place as he met the aquarium employee who waited outside, a slightly worried look in her eyes. She was small and golden skinned, with straight black hair and the kind of curves that fit all in the right places. Her name was Lei Lani—which made him think of her as one of the Bond girls—and she was a marine biologist on some sort of inter-program loan from an aquarium in Hawaii.

Looking at her smile, it was easy to imagine her welcoming tourists in nothing but a grass skirt. Of course, thinking about that was as bad as thinking too much about her first name. Neither encouraged his good behavior.

"I'm sorry," Rafiel said. "One of those sudden stomach things."

"Ah. I was just checking, because I really should lock up and go home. I mean, everyone else has, and I only stayed because I live so close by here."

"Yeah. How bad is it out?"

"Blinding. As I said, if I didn't live within walking distance, I'd have left long ago. I mean, I'm not even sure you should drive in this. Perhaps you should stay at my place till the weather improves."

Was that a seductive sparkle in her eye? Did Rafiel read it correctly? It wasn't that he wasn't tempted, but right now he had other things on his mind.

He shouldn't have been so reckless as to shift shapes while there was someone else in the building, but the hint of shifter scent he'd been able to pick up even with his human nose had forced him to check it out. After all, a shapeshifter at a crime scene could mean many things. The last time he'd picked it up, it had, in fact, meant that the shifters were the victims. But there was always the chance it meant the shifter he smelled was the killer. And a murder committed by shapeshifters, properly investigated, would out them as non-mythological. Which meant—if Rafiel knew how such things worked—that at best they'd all be studied within an inch of their lives. At worst...well...Rafiel was a policeman from a long line of policemen. He understood people would be scared of shifters. Not that he blamed them. There were some shifters that he was scared of himself. But the thing was, when people were terrified, they only ran away half the time. The other half...they attacked and killed the cause of their fear.

"I'll be okay. I have a four-wheel drive, and I've lived here all my life. This is not the first blizzard I've driven in," he said. He was still trying to process the input of the lion's nose. There had been a clear shifter scent trail throughout the aquarium. It had circled the shark area.

The shark area where, yesterday, a human arm had been found—still clutching a cell phone—inside a shark. The aquarium had been shut down—though the weather provided a good excuse for that. And the relevant area was isolated behind the yellow crime-scene tape. The dead man had been identified as a business traveler from California, staying in town for less than a week.

The question was—had he fallen in the tank or been pushed? And if he'd been pushed, was it a shifter who'd done the pushing?

* * *

The sound of the roar-hiss from the bathroom made Kyrie stop cold. Tom didn't—normally—roar or hiss. But the dragon that Tom shape-shifted into did.

She frowned at the door, trying to figure out how Tom could have become a dragon in the bathroom. And why. While Tom was a short human, as a dragon he was...well, he had to be at least... She tried to visualize Tom in his dragon form and groaned.

With wings extended, Tom had to be at least twenty feet from wing tip to wing tip and she was probably underestimating it. And he was at least twelve feet long and his main body was more than five feet wide, with big, powerful paws and a long, fleshy tail.

Now, your average bathroom might—for all she knew—be able to contain a dragon. But the bathroom in this house was not what anyone could call a normal bathroom. In fact in most other houses it would be a closet and not even a walk-in closet. It was maybe all of five feet by four feet—the kind of bathroom where you had to close the door before you could stand in front of the sink and brush your teeth. There was no way, no way at all, a dragon could fit in there.

"Tom," she yelled again, pounding on the door. "Tom! Please tell me you didn't turn into a dragon in the bathroom."

The sound that answered her was not Tom's voice—in fact, it resembled nothing so much as a distressed foghorn—but it carried with it a definite tone of apology and confusion.

"Right," Kyrie said, as she tried to push the door open. The problem, of course, was that the door opened inward. That meant to get in—or get Tom out—she must swing the door into the bathroom which was, in fact, already filled to capacity with dragon. The resistance she felt was some part of Tom's flesh refusing to give way.

She stopped pushing. She had no idea what had caused Tom to shift. Normally he only shifted involuntarily with the light of the moon on him and some additional source of distress working against his self-control. But what could make him shift, in the middle of a blizzard, in the bathroom?

She needed to get him to shift back. Now. Knowing why he shifted would help, but if she couldn't find out—and he wouldn't be able to answer questions very intelligibly—then she must get him to shift back by persuasion.

The door dated from the same time as the house—somewhere around the nineteenth century, when Goldport had been built from the wealth flowing from the gold and silver mines around the area. The wealth hadn't reached into this neighborhood of tiny houses—originally filled with workers brought from out East to build the mansions for the gold rush millionaires. Oh, the house was still far more solid than houses built today. The walls were lath and plaster or brick, instead of drywall. It was framed in heavy beams. But the doors—as she'd discovered when repairing hinges or locks before—were the cheapest, knottiest pine to be found in any time or place. One grade up from kindling. Further, to make their construction cheaper, they were not a solid panel, but a thicker cross-frame filled out with four veneer-thin panels.

Kyrie silently apologized for any injury she might do Tom, but she had to bring him out of this somehow. She went to the linen closet and wrapped her hand in a towel. Then she aimed at the thin pine panel and punched with all her strength.

The panel splintered down the middle and cracked at the sides. It remained in place, but only because it was held together by countless layers of paint. The dragon inside the bathroom made a noise like a foghorn, again.

Kyrie ignored the noise and, instead, started tearing at the door panel, pulling it out piece by piece. When she had all the pieces out, she leaned in to look into the bathroom. Which was not as easy as she'd anticipated. First because it was dark in there. Whatever else the dragon had done in the shifting, he'd definitely broken the ceiling light fixture. Judging by a sound that evoked a romantic brook running through unspoiled mountains, he had also torn the plumbing apart.

Worse than that, what she was looking at resembled a nightmare by Escher, where nothing made any sense whatsoever. There were green scales, and she expected green scales, shading to blue in spots. But part of what she saw was the bluish-green underbelly of the dragon Tom shifted into. And right next to the missing panel, a claw protruded—huge and silvery, glinting like metal in the moonlight. Next to it was crammed what looked suspiciously like a bit of wing.

"Tom," she said, trying to sound reasonable, while speaking to a mass of scales that, she realized, was pulsing rapidly with the sort of panting rhythm a frightened person might breathe in. "Tom, shift back. You can't get out like this. Shift back."

The scales and wing and all slid around, scraping the door. The dragon moaned in distress. For a moment, the huge claw protruded through the opening, causing Kyrie to jump back, startled. When everything was done moving around, a dragon eye looked back at her through the opening. The tile balanced just above its brow ridge only made it look more pitiful.

The eye itself—huge and double-lidded and blue—except for size and the weird additional inner lids, was Tom's eye.

Kyrie spoke to Tom's eye. "Tom, please, you must shift. I understand there had to have been something to make you shift. But if you don't shift back now I can't get you out of there. And that bathroom is going to freeze."

She didn't need to be a building expert to know the tiny window into the bathroom had to be broken. The sudden moisture at her feet made her cringe. First, they were going to flood the house. And then they were going to freeze it. And it wasn't even her house. She rented it. Good thing she'd long ago resigned herself to the idea she'd never see the security deposit again. And good thing she didn't expect to ever be rich. After paying for these repairs, she'd be flat broke.

"Tom," she spoke as calmly as she could, though she felt her heart racing and was holding back on a strong impulse to shape-shift herself. She could feel it as her nails tried to lengthen into claws, as her muscles and bones attempted to change shape. She gritted her teeth and forced herself to remain human. To remain sane. Becoming a panther now would only add to the confusion. "Tom, you must shift back. I don't know why you shifted, but there is nothing that we can't face together. We've done it before, remember?"

The eye blinked at her, panic still shining at the back of it.

"Look, breathe with me—slow, slow, slow." She forced her own breathing to a slow, steady rhythm. "Slow. Everything is safe. And if it isn't, you can't fight it while crammed in that bathroom. You must be human and come out of there first. Then we'll talk."

She spoke on so long that she almost lost track of what she was saying. It was all variations on a theme. The theme of being calm. Very, very calm. And shifting back.

Water was running under the door, covering the pine floor of the hallway in a thin, shimmering film, but she didn't dare move or stop talking. Was she having any effect? Tom's eye continued to glare at her, unblinking. She only knew he was alive because she could hear the dragon's breathing huffing in and out of huge lungs.

And then there was a sound like a sigh. Or at least a short intake of breath followed by a long, deep exhalation. The dragon flesh filling the broken part of the door trembled and wobbled. The distressed foghorn sounded again.

Other sounds followed—sounds Kyrie knew well enough and which she felt a great relief at. Not that she'd show her relief. She didn't want to startle Tom and stop the process. That was the last thing she wanted. Instead, she took deep, deep breaths, feeling Tom breathe with her, while muscles slid around with moist noises, and bones made sounds like cracking of knuckles writ large.

Tom sat there, on the soaked floor of the bathroom, on what remained of his ripped pajama pants and T-shirt. Plaster dusted his hair. His naked, muscular body showed a landscape of scratches and bruises.

He looked at her, mouth half open. Then he keened. It was neither crying, nor screaming—just a sound of long-held, pent-up frustration. He raised his knees and wrapped his arms around them, lowering his head and taking deep deliberate breaths.

She'd seen this before. She knew what it meant. He was fighting the urge to shift back. But he had it under control now. And he would be mortally embarrassed as soon as he had the time to be.

Kyrie did what any girlfriend—what any friend—could do under the circumstances. "Right," she said. "Don't go anywhere. I'm going to go turn off the water valve to the house."

* * *

Tom was mortally embarrassed. Once past the panic of the dragon and the heightened senses of the beast and the pain of being forced into what seemed to the dragon like a very tiny box—once he was himself—he didn't need to examine his surroundings to know the damage he had done.

The toilet was broken, the pieces shattered everywhere. The plumbing was torn apart. Faucets bent beyond recognition. Walls with their inner layer scraped off, in a way that was probably not structurally sound. The window was smashed—leaving jagged pieces of glass glinting in the frame. The shower enclosure destroyed. What had, less than half an hour ago, been a bathroom was now a disaster zone.

And Tom was sitting in the middle of it, looking up at Kyrie, who stared back in shock. She was very pale. No doubt toting up the expenses he had caused her. The lease was in her name. They'd be lucky not to get kicked out, even after they repaired the damages. And all because he couldn't control his shifting and had gotten scared by—

In that moment, staring openmouthed at Kyrie—who looked, as she always did, like a Greek goddess who had consented to come down from her pedestal and wear jeans and a T-shirt and a single, red-feather earring—he remembered what had made him shift.

There had been a voice in his head. There had been a voice—echoing in his mind as clearly as though it were coming through his ears, which it wasn't. The voice had been of an entity known to Asian cultures as the Great Sky Dragon.

Whether he was really the father of all dragons as legend maintained, or not, Tom could not know. What he did know was that he was the leader of Asian triads in the west—that he ruthlessly murdered and stole and sold drugs and did what he had to do to keep his people safe and prosperous. And his people were only those who could shift into dragons. A specific kind of dragon. A kind Tom wasn't.

Their last meeting had brought Tom closer to his death than he ever cared to go. As close as he could go and still come back. And now he had pushed his way into Tom's head.

Tom shuddered as panic tried to establish itself and force him to shift again.

No, and no, and no! Nothing would be served by becoming a dragon. There were threats that the human brain was best suited to handling, no matter how much the puny human body might not be a match to claws and fangs and wings.

He heard himself make a sound—a half scream of frustration at the body he couldn't control—as he lowered his head and concentrated on breathing. Just breathing.

In this state he only half heard Kyrie say something about the water valve. He heard her walk away as he controlled himself. And then he smelled burning. The cookies.

It was, strangely, a welcome relief from other thoughts. He got up. Everything hurt. He felt as though every fiber of his body had been bruised and as if all his bones had cracked, crazed, like plates exposed to high pressure. Groaning, holding on to walls and furniture, telling himself he didn't have time to be in pain, he didn't have time to heal; he padded through the soaked hallway to the kitchen where just the barest bit of water was making it over the little metal lip dividing the kitchen linoleum from the hallway wood flooring. His feet slipped as he hit the linoleum, but he balanced, and rushed to the oven—as much as he could rush without screaming. He remembered one of his nannies reading him the original story of "The Little Mermaid" and how, after the mermaid had traded her tail for legs, every step she took would be like walking on knives. This felt like that, except the knives were also throughout his torso and down his arms, and small daggers seemed to stab through each of his fingers as he flexed them.

Oven mitts on, he pulled the tray of cookies out and set it atop the stove, then carefully turned the oven off. The cookies were less burnt than he'd expected—just looked like they'd gotten a suntan.

Right. He'd best make himself decent quickly. They had bigger trouble than the cookies, and there was absolutely no way he could take a shower now. But if he remembered correctly, when you turned off the water valve to a house, whatever water was in the pipes or in the heater remained. That might just be enough to, at the very least, get the grit of masonry off his skin and hair.

He limped to the hallway closet, full of purpose—because any purpose, and any thought was better than to think again of what had made him change or to acknowledge his pain—and grabbed a handful of washcloths and a towel. And he tried not to think of the pain. It would pass. He would be fine. Shifters healed very quickly. Particularly well-fed shifters.

He wet the washcloths at the faucet in the kitchen, and put soap in about half of them—then retreated with them and the towel back to his room.

Fortunately he was familiar with this sort of ad hoc washing. He'd had to do it often enough when he was living on the streets and only working occasional day jobs, between the ages of sixteen and twenty or so. Contrary to public perception, given a supply of paper towels and soap, it was possible to wash up—at least enough to not stink—at a stall in a public bathroom. It didn't, by any means, beat a long soak in a tub, or even a hurried shower, but it would do if it must. And clearly it must.

He was going through the motions of wiping down with soap, then wiping the soap off, noting that the soap stung in a high number of abraded places, and that just touching his skin brought on a pain on the edge of unbearable, when he heard the back door close and Kyrie call tentatively, "Tom?"

"In here," he said. "I'll be out in a moment."

She didn't come in. Their rules for when they were allowed to see each other naked wouldn't make sense to anyone else. They didn't even make any rational sense to Tom himself. But they made emotional sense.

Because of the shifting, they had seen each other naked long before they had a relationship, and often saw each other naked in all sorts of situations. But while human and not coming off from a shift, they respected each other's privacy as much as possible. Kyrie would no more walk into his room while she knew he was naked than he would walk in on her in the shower. Oh, yes, they were dating. They were in love, or at least—Tom smiled to himself, as he extracted as much masonry as possible from his long dark hair—he thought so. His opinion might be insufficient, since he'd never had any experience with the emotion before. Still, he would give his left hand, or wing, or claw for Kyrie and she'd proven often enough she'd do the equivalent for him.

But they were both intensely private people. And neither of them had experience of relationships before. So they were taking it slow and trying to establish the feelings and the boundaries before becoming more physical. Not the least because neither of them was sure how the beasts they shifted into would react to more physical. The prospect of becoming dragon and panther during sex could be regarded as either hilarious or terrifying, depending on how macabre one's sense of humor.

Having finished his Spartan wash, he dried with the towel, tied his hair back—after rummaging for the elastic in the bedclothes—and slipped on a pair of jeans and a loose white T-shirt. Remembering the water in the hallway, he put on socks and his leather boots and came out of his room to find Kyrie coming in too, from the other side, duct tape in hand.

"I wiped the water from the floor in the hallway and sealed the bathroom," she said, matter of fact. "So the cold doesn't come into the rest of the house." Then looking at him, she smiled. "You cleaned up."

He felt himself blush that she was surprised he'd take the trouble to clean up. "I didn't think masonry was the in look this winter."

She nodded solemnly, stowing the duct tape in the drawer under the coffee maker. "There's coffee," she said, while pouring herself a cup. "I'd started it when—" She stopped. "Thank you for saving the cookies."

He bit back the obvious answer: "You don't need to put on the politeness. No need to thank me, since I was the one who made you forget them." Most of his life, long before he'd found out he was a shifter, at sixteen, he'd been giving the answer guaranteed to infuriate people and rejoicing in getting a reaction. Any reaction. He didn't know why. That was just the way he was.

It was tempting to say that he'd become a hostile bundle of aggression because both his parents were busy professionals, too busy in fact to notice their son existed. Tempting and, no doubt, some psychologist would say it in all seriousness.

But Tom didn't believe in psychology any more than he believed in any other organized religion. And at some point a grown-up had to stop blaming his parents for his quirks. Perhaps that was what had set him off...perhaps not. Perhaps some accidental genetic combination had caused him to be born hostile and contrary. But three months ago, when he'd moved in with Kyrie, he'd decided that habit stopped and quickly too. So now he bit his tongue and sighed. "They are a little too tanned."

She smiled back, as if she knew of the averted response and appreciated his effort. "No matter. Still edible." Picking up a cookie, she sat down.

He got himself coffee. Her whole attitude said we have to talk, and he supposed they did. He used the time of filling the cup and sugaring his coffee to think of what he could say that would mitigate what he had just done.

I'll pay for it was obvious, though he had exactly zero clue how. All the money he had—just like all the money Kyrie had—was part shares in The George. And, unlike what he would have imagined before getting into it, profits and debts weren't as clear-cut as they seemed. His father—in an impulse for atonement that could not be gainsaid—had bought them the building and equipment for The George. That much they had. But it wasn't money. You couldn't walk into the mall with five bricks and buy a T-shirt. And there was no way he could swap one of the industrial freezers for the repair bill on the bathroom. For one, because they needed the freezers.

Which was the issue with the money. The George was doing well. Money came in every night and day. The few upgrades he and Kyrie had been able to afford here and there—a coat of paint, new Formica on the tables, re-covering the vinyl booths, a new stove—were drawing in a better clientele, too. In addition to the manual laborers and students who had always drifted to The George, they now got young professionals from the gentrified area a few blocks away, amused at the dragon theme of the restaurant and intrigued by Tom's culinary experimentation.

They were—from what Tom understood of the raised eyebrows of his accountant, who was a man of few words—doing very well indeed, having unwittingly become the spearheads of the push for gentrification in that area of Fairfax. But the money that came in went out again very quickly, and the improvements fueled other improvements. There were waiters to pay and Anthony's salary had been raised since he'd become manager. To keep the better clientele, Tom had bought new silverware and dishes and improved the quality of everything from the paper goods to the coffee mugs. His own self-respect as a cook had forced him to buy better quality meat.

His father—when they talked—assured him all this would eventually pay off and while the cycle seemed fruitless and inane right now, eventually the money coming in would outstrip the need for improvements and Tom and Kyrie would find themselves wealthy or close to it. Today was not the eve of that day, though. Their separate bank accounts, if pooled, would net them maybe two thousand dollars. On which they had to live for the month. Not enough for this type of repair.

He could, of course, ask his father for help, but just the idea of it was enough to give him heartburn. He'd solved—he thought—his life-long struggle with his father. While his father was not the best of parents, neither was Tom the best of sons. But still...Edward Ormson had forced his sixteen-year-old son out of the house at gunpoint onto the streets of New York City on the day he found that Tom shifted shape into a dragon.

Tom could forgive, but he could not forget. He'd accepted the diner, but even that had smarted, and he'd only accepted it because he could tell how much Kyrie wanted it. And he'd talk to his father and be civil when he called because the man was trying his best to establish a relationship. And Tom was not so flush with friends that he could turn down anyone willing to befriend him. Even if it was his own father.

But he'd be damned if he was going to go cadging his father for money. He'd be damned if he'd go back to his father every time he found himself in a scrape. He'd be damned if he gave his father reason to think of him—ever again—as his fucked-up son.

He'd rather live on the streets, he thought decisively, as he made his way back to the table and sat down, cup in hand. He'd done it before.

He looked up, frowning slightly, to meet Kyrie's attentive gaze on him. She was examining his face—probably for signs of the madness that had caused him to shift in the bathroom.

When she saw him looking, she smiled. "Have a cookie."

* * *

What Kyrie wanted to know was why he'd shifted. But she was terrified that if she asked him, he'd feel the need the shift again. After all, whatever it was had to be powerful enough to cause a visceral panic reaction. Thinking about it might bring on another shift.

His eyebrows lowered a little and as he took a bite of the cookie, he did it as if it required a large amount of concentration. When he looked back at her, his gaze remained worried and more than a little bit confused.

"I figured," he said, his tone slow and calculating. "I might be able to get a loan. But I don't know how because I don't want to mortgage The George because that's yours too and, you know—"

"What?" She hadn't meant to interrupt, but the last thing she'd expected was for him to start talking money.

"The bathroom," he said, gesturing airily.

"Oh, that. I looked at the walls and they seem to be fine. You just peeled the tile off and destroyed the plumbing and appliances. Cosmetic stuff. We'll find a handyman. Place is solidly built." She shrugged. "Yeah, we'll borrow if we have to. We could do it all ourselves, you know, with a good how-to manual, but we don't have that much free time and a functioning bathroom is kind of a necessity." Seeing him open his mouth, she went on, redirecting the conversation, "Which is why I think we should go to The George."

He blinked at her. "What?" he said, his tone exactly matching her earlier one as, clearly, the gears of his mind had been grinding at a different place.

"I think we should go to The George until the blizzard is past and we get the bathroom repaired. While I don't like the idea of driving in this, we'll have a bathroom at The George. I mean—no place to take showers, though we can probably get a room at the bed-and-breakfast next door for that—but we'll at least have a place to go to the bathroom. The weather—not to mention the neighbors—kind of precludes just peeing in the yard."

Her absurd words managed to bring a smile to his lips, but it vanished very fast. "Yeah. We'll have to go."

"Yes. I know we could just stay at the bed-and-breakfast, but if we're going to be that close to The George, we might as well open too. I'm sure you don't want to spend however long in just a tiny rented room. And we might get a few diners, and it might just pay for that opening. And the bed-and-breakfast. I mean, we could go to one of the emergency shelters, but you and me and an enclosed space with a lot of people..." She shrugged. Given what had just happened to him, in the bathroom, she didn't need to draw pictures of a dragon and a panther rampaging amid distressed refugees.

He nodded and took a sip of the coffee. "Okay," he said. "I'll take a sleeping bag. In case we rent a room with only one bed." He got up and headed for his sleeping porch, clearly intent on packing. "And my laptop. Perhaps I can do some of the paperwork that's been accumulating."

"Tom..." She didn't want to ask, but she'd have to. "Why the shift? Was it the storm? You don't normally shift during the day, much less—" She stopped.

He'd turned around, a hand going up to his head, as if to pull back hair that didn't need it—a habit of his when he was nervous. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed. He sighed. For just a moment, it seemed to her, he was concentrating very hard on not shifting. "It was the Great Sky Dragon," he said. "I...I don't know how to put this without sounding like a science fiction story, but I heard him in my mind. Without sound." He took a deep breath like a drowning man who has succeeded in getting his head above water for a moment. "I know I sound crazy, but...He was there."

She shrugged at him. They were people who could—and did—change into animal shapes with or without wishing to. And still, he was afraid she'd think having experienced telepathy made him sound crazy.

"So you heard him in your mind," she said. "Did he threaten you?"

Tom shook his head. "No, that was the odd part. He warned me. But it wasn't a threat. He said someone he called the Ancient Ones wanted to kill us. That we should beware."

"Right. We'll stay out of retirement homes," Kyrie said, and immediately after, "I'm sorry. It isn't funny. But why should he warn us now, when he went out of his way to almost kill you before?"

Tom shook his head and looked startlingly naked and vulnerable—as if it cost him something to admit this. "I don't know."

The phone rang.

* * *

For an intense panic-filled moment, Tom thought it would be the Great Sky Dragon calling him to repeat the vague warnings he'd spoken within Tom's mind. It took a deep breath and remembering the damages to the bathroom to keep him from shifting again right then and there. His back brain equated dragon with safe. He told himself the phone wouldn't eat him, as he stretched his hand to the phone on the wall and picked it up.

The caller ID window read "Trall, Rafiel" which made him draw a sigh of relief. For all his faults—and there were many—and despite the fact that he still carried a torch for Kyrie, Rafiel was the closest thing Tom had to a friend. He was, with Kyrie, almost the only other shifter Tom was friends with. Almost because an addled alligator shifter who went by "Old Joe" didn't exactly qualify as a friend. Not so long as friendship involved more than Tom covering up for Old Joe's shifts and giving him bowls of clam chowder on the side. Kyrie, Rafiel, Old Joe, an orangutan shifter, two now-dead beetle shifters and the dragon triad were the only adult shifters Tom had ever met, period. He guessed there weren't many of his kind in the world. The few, the proud, the totally messed up.

"Yeah?" he said, into the phone.

"Uh," Rafiel's voice said from the other end, as though the phone's being answered were the last thing he could possibly expect. Then, "I'd like to...I need to talk to you and Kyrie, when you have a minute."

There was that tone in Rafiel's voice—tight and short—that meant he was on the job. Tom wondered if Rafiel was alone or if he was picking his words carefully to avoid scaring a subordinate. Aloud he said only, " 'Ssup?"

"Murder. There's...been...well, almost for sure murder. Human bones and stuff at the bottom of the shark tank at the aquarium."

"And?" After all, solving murders was Rafiel's job and he usually managed it without a little help from his friends.

"And I smell shifter," Rafiel said. "All over it."

"Oh," Tom said. "We'll be at The George." And suddenly he felt exactly like a man in the path of an oncoming train.

His dreams had been full of a nightmare about some ancient menace; the Great Sky Dragon had spoken in his mind; and now there was murder, with shifter involvement.

Was the shifter a murderer or the victim? Either way, it could make Tom's life more of a mess than it already was.

* * *

"Don't shift! Don't shift! Don't shift!" Kyrie told herself. But she wasn't at all sure she was listening, and she kept looking anxiously at her hands, clenched tight on the wheel. Her violet nail polish was cracked and peeled from her run-in with the bathroom door, so it was hard to tell whether the nails were lengthening into claws or not. Part of the reason she kept her nails varnished was to make sure that she saw the first signs of her nails lengthening into claws. Today that wouldn't work.

Outside the window, in the palm of visibility beyond the windshield, white snowflakes swirled. Past that, the flakes became a wall of white, seemingly streaming sideways, shimmering. Somewhere out there, in the nebulous distance, there were twin glimmers of dazzling whiteness, which were the only indications Kyrie had that the headlights of her tiny car were on.

"Maybe we should have walked," Tom said. He shuffled in his seat and leaned close to the snow-covered windshield, as though he could lend her extra vision.

Kyrie gritted her teeth. Maybe they should have, except that the three steps they'd taken on the driveway, their feet had gone out from under them, and they'd only remained upright by holding onto the car. From which point getting in the car had seemed a given. She slowed down—which mostly meant defaulting to the fractional amount of sliding the car seemed to do all on its own—and twisted up her windshield wipers' knob, not that it did much good.

"How can you see?" Tom asked.

"I can't," she said, just as a sudden gust of wind cleared the space ahead enough for her to see they were at the intersection of their street and the next perpendicular one. And that a massive, red SUV was headed for them at speed.

Don't shift, don't shift, don't shift, Kyrie thought, as a mantra, even as she felt her whole body clench and her muscles attempt to change shapes beneath her skin, to take the form of a panther. Don't shift, don't shift, don't shift, as she struggled to keep her breathing even, and bit into her lower lip with teeth that weren't getting any longer, not at all, not even a little bit. She maneuvered quickly with a tire up on the sidewalk, tilting crazily around the corner, even as the SUV went by them and buried them in a shower of slush. Bits of ice rattled against roof and windows.

A moan from Tom reminded her she wasn't the only one worried about panic setting off a shape-shift reaction. "Perhaps," he said, in the voice of a man working very hard to control himself. "I should get out and...fly?"

"What? Shift twice without eating? First thing in the morning? And the second time after getting hurt?" she said, and on that, as he moaned again, she realized she'd said the wrong thing. Shifting shapes demanded a lot of energy and, for some reason, it set off a desperate craving for protein. So did the lightning-fast healing of shifters. All Tom had eaten since shifting was half a dozen cookies. And there was no protein at all around. Except, of course, her. She wasn't about to volunteer. And she knew Tom would rather die than eat a person, much less her.

She pushed the gas, taking advantage of a momentary break in the storm that allowed her to see a major crossroads ahead. Too late, she saw the light was red, but she was sliding through the intersection on the power of her momentum and slamming on the brakes only caused her to fishtail wildly and finally pivot halfway through to the left. Fortunately this turned the car right onto Fairfax, where she was supposed to be. Sliding, she pressed the gas cautiously. Their shifting position caused the snow to seem to shift directions, so that she could now see—more or less—out her front window, but nothing on the side.

I'll never find The George, she thought to herself, and glared at her nails telling them they weren't becoming claws, no they weren't, not even a little bit.

A sudden dazzling purple light to the left made her breathe in relief and confusion. The George's sign was still lit. Thank heavens. Anthony mustn't have closed yet, which meant, of course, that lights and heat would still be on, and less trouble than turning them on again. It also made the diner easier to find.

She brought the car to a minimally-sliding, almost-complete stop and took a deep breath. Normally, turning left into the parking lot of The George from Fairfax involved taking your life in your own hands. Fairfax was a four-lane road, the main east-west artery of Goldport, and it was heavily traveled all the time. In addition, mistimed traffic lights ensured there was no break in the two lanes of traffic across which you must cut to make it into the parking lot.

Today, it involved another kind of risk. She couldn't see at all through the storm, to find out if any traffic was oncoming. Just white blankness. True, there were very few vehicles out, but she'd managed to almost run into two of those few on the way here. Kyrie took a deep breath. There was nothing for it but to turn. And she wasn't going to shift. Not at all.

She turned the wheel, fully expecting to go into a spin, but the tires grabbed onto some bit of yet unfrozen pavement and propelled them in a queasy slide-lurch across the other lanes of the road and up a gentle ramp into the parking lot.

The snow didn't allow her to see any other cars in the parking lot, and Kyrie didn't care. Bordered by the blind, windowless wall of a bed-and-breakfast and a warehouse, the parking lot gave on to the back door of The George and, through two outlets, to Pride and Fairfax Streets both. Right now, she waited until the car stopped sliding, then put it in park and pulled the parking brake, and leaned over the wheel, breathing deeply. You're safe, you're safe. Don't shift. There was no point even trying to find parking spots in this mess.

When her racing heart had calmed down, she lifted her head and saw the parking lot—as much as could be seen. Drifting snow spider-webbed by the light of two street lamps and the purple glare from the diner's back sign obscured everything save for the two large supply vans parked in the middle of the lot. She looked to the passenger side of the car, where Tom was blinking and, she suspected, had just opened his eyes after calming himself.

"We should really—" Kyrie started and stopped. Through the snow she'd glimpsed something, half seen. She thought it was...but it couldn't be. Surely...

"Was that," Tom said, his voice small, "a dragon's wing?"

* * *

"Go inside," Tom said, as he glimpsed the wing again, through the multiplying flakes. "It's a red wing. It's..." He didn't say it. He couldn't quite assemble words.

His brain, still fogged from his quick shift into dragon and back, still laboring under the guilt of what he'd done to the bathroom—let alone the terror of the precipitous drive here, which had felt less like driving than tumbling down a chute—could not manage to describe the wing. But he was sure, from his two brief glimpses, that it was a Chinese dragon. An Asian dragon like the Great Sky Dragon and his cohorts.

Feeling for the door handle with half-frozen, still aching fingers, Tom managed to grasp it and throw the door open against resistence of what he hoped was stiff wind, and not a dragon tail or claw, as he yelled over the howling storm at Kyrie. "Go inside. I'll deal with it."

He plunged out of the car, his hair and his unzipped black leather jacket whipping about in the howling storm, just in time for his feet to go out from under him, and to reach, blindly, for the car door for support, and bring himself upright, and stare into...

He was big and red. No. As he blinked to keep his eyes from freezing, he thought he wasn't that big. Smaller than Tom himself in dragon form. But he was also horribly familiar—more familiar as Tom focused on the details and noted that the dragon's front left paw was much smaller than the other. He was...Red Dragon. Not only was he was one of the Great Sky Dragon's cohorts, but when Tom had last seen him there had been a big battle, and Red Dragon had ended with his arm ripped out at the roots. Or rather, Tom had ripped Red Dragon's arm off, then used it to beat Red Dragon with.

Tom knew—from experience—that his kind was hard to kill. But this was a particular foe he'd never thought to see again; one he was sure had more reasons for vendetta against him than anyone else alive.

He felt his throat close and the panic he'd—barely—managed to control in the car surged through his body like electric current, seeking grounding. Not finding it, it twisted in a sparkle through his flesh. He felt his bruised, battered limbs wrench, and his body bend, and a hollow cough echoed through his throat mingled with a scream of pain that he could no longer keep back. His mouth opened, and he swallowed an aspiration of snow, cold and suffocating. He knew, absolutely knew, that if he shifted he would attack Red Dragon and probably try to eat him. He was that protein-starved. A protein-starved Tom ate uncooked meat and whatever else he could get his hands on. A protein-starved dragon would hunt live prey.

"Run," he told Kyrie with what was left of his human mind and his human voice, already sounding slurpy and hissy as his teeth shifted position. "Run inside, Kyrie."

He could just tell in the periphery of his beclouded vision that she was not obeying. Not even considering it, and he wondered if his voice had already changed too much. If perhaps she couldn't understand him. His body twisted again, the pain of shifting unbearable on his bruised flesh and caked bones, and he kept his eyes on the other dragon, in case he should have any ideas of flaming or striking. Dragons were hard to kill but not impossible. This Tom knew. If you severed the head from the rest of the body, if you divided the body in two. If you incinerated the body. Possibly if you destroyed the brain. Those deaths even a dragon could not overcome.

Tom had to think of how to inflict them on his foe, and he had to protect himself from them. He felt his fingers lengthen into claws and—

"No," it was Kyrie's voice, decisive sounding. And Kyrie—slim, unshifted, very human Kyrie—stood between the two dragons, her dark blue ski jacket making her just slightly bulkier than normal as she yelled at both of them. "No. You're not going to change, Tom. Deep breaths. I'm not having you pass out or worse when you shift. Don't you dare."

There had been a time when Tom had sought out cures for his condition. He'd tried to prevent his shifting with illegal drugs and with will power, with perfect diet and with lack of sleep. He'd visited places where people said native tribes had once worshiped. He'd taken yoga and tried to meditate. None of it had worked.

In times of stress, or when the moon was just right, causing some change in the tides of his being; when panic or excitement overcame him, he would change. And he couldn't control it, any more than a human being can stop sneezing by wishing to stop. But Kyrie standing in front of him and saying "no" tore to the very center of his being and stopped the already started process.

He groaned as he felt his muscles return to their normal position, his bones resume proper human shape. In this state, it was like being filleted, his body sliced by a thousand sharp knifes, but it was needed and he willed it to happen.

She'd made him think even if what he was thinking was that they were both in great trouble. The red dragon had come back to seek vengeance. And, being a triad member and therefore an outlaw, he would stop at nothing. Tom's life, Kyrie's life, their friends, the diner—all of it would be in danger. And behind Red Dragon stood the powerful, mysterious figure of the Great Sky Dragon, who had taken Tom's life only to give it back again, and whom Tom didn't even pretend to understand. But Tom stopped and thought long enough to realize that if he were to shift now he would, probably, as Kyrie had said, lose consciousness. And that would not solve anything. Even if Red Dragon didn't take advantage of his weakness to behead him, an unconscious dragon in the parking lot becoming hypothermic would only add to Kyrie's troubles.

Through clenched teeth he asked Red Dragon, "What do you want?" But Red Dragon only glared and bobbed his neck up and down, waving his head like some deranged bobble-toy, his mismatched limbs rearing, his wings flaring.

"Go inside," Kyrie answered, looking at Red Dragon, but speaking to Tom, impatiently. "Go inside, Tom. We can't have you here. Not weakened. I'll find out what this...what he wants."

"But—" Tom said, and stopped as he realized he was about to say "I'm the man. I'm supposed to protect you." He could not say that. Man or not, he was in no state to protect anyone.

Feeling his cheeks heat in shame, he retreated. He retreated step by step, while staring at Kyrie. He walked backwards, through the blowing snow, till Kyrie and the red dragon were no more than outlines of themselves, patterns of shadow drawn on the surrounding whiteness. He felt his heart beat, hard in his chest. He was sure it was beating hard enough that if he looked down he'd see it pound even through the shirt and his black leather jacket. His mouth was dry and tasted vaguely of blood as though the hoarse cough that normally heralded his transformation had stripped it of its lining. He cleared his throat, more because he wanted to remind Red Dragon and Kyrie that he was still there—more because he felt like a coward and a fool, backing away from confrontation and leaving his girlfriend to face evil alone. But he didn't know if the sound carried that far, and besides, what good was it to remind them he was there, when he could do nothing to defend the woman he loved?

Oh, sure, Kyrie was a were panther. Oh, surely, she could defend herself. She had fought these creatures before but...

But if he'd not helped Kyrie then, she would have died. And now he was going to leave her alone with one of these—a creature that was bigger than her feline form, a creature that could burn her to cinders. Everything that was Tom—normal and human and responsible—wanted to stay and protect Kyrie. But he knew better, he knew how sensible Kyrie was. And he knew his body would not stand another shift.

He wished there was someone he could call to, but all the shifters he knew for a fact were shifters were a homeless man and Rafiel—who might or might not be inside. Was Rafiel inside? He'd called Tom. Had he had time to get here, yet?

Tom must check. He stepped back faster and faster. He couldn't see so clearly through the snow anymore, but Kyrie seemed to be circling the dragon, or the dragon seemed to be circling Kyrie. It couldn't be good, but at least he saw no flame. That at least was better than it could be.

He stepped back. As he walked into the purple glow of the sign at the back door he felt the warmth of the diner behind him. Even through the glass door at the back, enough heat escaped that, without looking, he could tell where the door was.

Stepping back towards the warmth, he heard the key in the lock, and then the door opened, right behind him.

He turned. "Anthony!" he said, or rather gasped in surprise, turning back to look and see if Anthony—who had no idea shapeshifters or dragons existed—would see the dragon through the snow before the door closed. But there was nothing out there, just the briefest of shadows, and did he hear Kyrie's car trunk open? What was she doing? Stashing the defeated body of her opponent? Well, it could be worse. If she was opening a car, then she had to be alive. Probably.

"Tom?" Anthony asked. He was slim and Italian or perhaps Greek or maybe some flavor of South American. Or maybe he had all those in his ancestry somewhere. Olive skinned, with curly dark hair, and a Roman nose, Anthony was a local boy, grown up in this neighborhood. He was Kyrie's and Tom's guide to local stores and events. And every small business owner seemed to know Anthony, whose approval counted for more with them than their better-business-bureau rating. He was also the leader of a bolero dancing troupe and newly married. And the one person they trusted enough to let him manage the daytime shift unsupervised.

"Yeah."

"You guys came in."

"You're open."

"I was going to close, but then people started trickling in and kept coming in. Cold, you know. Or just wanting to see people." He shrugged. "And there's freaky stuff around here, and..."

But Tom was listening, wildly, for the sound of the car door, for the sound of Kyrie, for what might be happening out there, in the howling snow.

* * *

Kyrie knew this was crazy, but it would be crazier to do nothing. She circled around the red dragon, looking up at the creature, as it circled in turn, to keep her in sight. She could feel her other form itching to take over, but she didn't think that would be the best of ideas. Because the dragon wasn't attacking her. Why wasn't the dragon attacking her?

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

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

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

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

It was shifting. It was becoming human.

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

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

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

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

"Protect the Great Sky Dragon?" Kyrie asked.

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What?"

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

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

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

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

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

"An alligator?"

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

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

"In restaurant dumpsters?" Anthony asked, dubiously.

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

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

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

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

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

"And I may go? Home?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What does Rafiel want?" she asked Tom as she worked. Rafiel had gone back to his booth. "I know he called, and said something about a murder, but then we got...sidetracked."

"There was a murder," Tom said, in an undertone. She noted that there was now an assembled burger near the grill, and that he was taking bites of it between flipping the burgers on the grill. This was good, because it meant Tom had become himself enough that he wanted his meat cooked, and with mustard and whole wheat buns and lettuce and pickles.

"And he thinks it involves shifters," he said, taking a bite of his burger.

"Oh," Kyrie said. "When it rains..."

"Yeah, apparently it pours when it snows too," he said, with a significant look at the windows, fogged with the inside heat and humidity and still being dusted with an ever-thicker snowfall.

He set the food on the counter, neatly grouped by table for her to deliver and said, still in that undertone, "I take it he poses no threat?" He gave a head gesture towards Red Dragon who sat in his booth looking forlorn and as confused as a little kid among strangers.

Kyrie frowned. "Ask me again in half an hour," she said, and delivered all the orders before making her way to Rafiel. She had left him sitting at his table, without so much as taking his order, because he was a friend and, as such, not likely to take offense if she didn't attend to him.

"I'm sorry," she said, as she approached him. "We're very shorthanded today."

He nodded, though his glance went, inevitably, to Red Dragon with his foreshortened arm, as if he suspected her of making a bad joke. "It's okay," he said. "I just came to ask you and Tom to come with me. I need your help. Well...I need the help of...people I can trust, and I don't want to..." He shook his head, and looked at Tom behind the counter. "I don't suppose you could get someone else in, to look after the place? While you come with me? Or could Tom manage alone?"

Kyrie looked up as the bell behind the front door tinkled, and yet another couple came in, muffled to the eyes and sliding on the coating of snow and ice that covered the soles of their shoes. They dropped into seats at a nearby table, and Kyrie said, "I don't know how Anthony managed alone, Rafiel. I don't think we can go anywhere now. Besides, how do you propose to drive in that?"

Rafiel shrugged. "Four-wheel drive and I'm used to this. I learned to drive in this."

Kyrie nodded. Rafiel, like Anthony, was local. "Well, I still don't know how I can come with you. Not with..." She waved around at the diner, and nodded towards the new customers, assuring them silently that she could see them and would be with them shortly. "Maybe if one of our employees shows up," she said, doubtfully.

"Yes. Get me a coffee and a piece of pie, please. I'll wait."

She frowned at him, because his willingness to wait meant he was convinced this did indeed involve shifters, and that meant there was no one else he could trust.

Looking towards the booth, she assured herself that Red Dragon was still there, now looking fixedly at Rafiel with a scared expression. Perhaps it was Rafiel that he thought he had to protect Tom from.

She took the order of the new couple—two coffees, which meant they had braved the walk just to be near other people—and went back to grab the pie for Rafiel.

"Chick-pea pie," she announced, as she set it down in front of him—a joke that had developed from the fact that Rafiel never specified what kind of pie he wanted, which led to her inventing more and more outrageous pretended contents to his food. "And your coffee."

"What does he want?" Rafiel asked, looking at Red Dragon and not even acknowledging her joke.

"He says he's come to redeem himself by protecting Tom," she said, and was gratified to watch Rafiel's eyebrows shoot up. She wasn't the only one who found this absurd.

* * *

"Kyrie says that you can't manage the diner alone," Tom heard Rafiel say, in barely more than a rumbling whisper. Tom had just moved the furthest away from customers possible, while remaining behind the counter. The sheer pileup of dishes from the tables Kyrie was cleaning demanded that he put them in the dishwasher, which was around the corner from the coffee maker, and almost to the hallway.

He looked up from slamming the dishes down. Rafiel had a slice of apple pie in one hand and his coffee in the other and was standing by the portion of the counter where Tom normally put the dishes for Kyrie to carry away. Past him, Kyrie was cleaning one last table. There remained four fully occupied ones, but everyone had been served, and had gotten their bill, and seemed to be just sitting around, talking, reluctant to face the storm again. "Maybe if it slows down now." "It might, you know?" "It's nasty out."

"I'm surprised there's anyone here," Rafiel said. "At least anyone who doesn't need to be here. What possessed you to come in?"

"I shifted," Tom said, slamming the last few plates into the dishwasher, shutting it and turning it on. "In our bathroom. There's...uh...no bathroom left."

He looked up, to see Rafiel staring at him, as he half expected, openmouthed. "In your bathroom? Why?"

Tom shrugged. "It will sound very strange."

"Not as strange as deciding to shift in the bathroom. How could you possibly think you'd fit. Or that there would be—"

"Fine," he said. "There was a voice in my head. The Great Sky Dragon's voice."

"The...?"

"Yeah."

Rafiel looked at Red Dragon. "Threatening?"

Tom shrugged. "I thought so at the time. Now I'm not so sure. He was talking about some Ancient Ones or others who were, supposedly, after me."

"I see," Rafiel said, in that way he had that made it clear he did not see at all. He ate his apple pie in quick bites.

"At the time," Tom said, "I didn't even realize the voice was in my head. It sounded like he was talking to me through the bathroom window. Considering the last time I met with him..."

"He almost killed you?"

"Yes. Panic had carried me halfway through the shift before I realized he was in fact in my mind, and for some reason this failed to be reassuring."

"Ancient Ones," Rafiel said. "Shifters?"

"I don't know. He didn't say. I just...I'd had a weird dream about...very old shifters. Some with shapes that...well..." He felt stupid, but had to say it. "A saber-toothed tiger and all that."

"Stands to reason," Rafiel said. "We're not easy to kill...so some of us would be very old."

"Well...we don't know if our longevity is any greater. Legends aren't exactly clear on that, are they? Vampires, sure, but shifters..." He shrugged. "If we lived that much longer than normal people, wouldn't the world be overrun by us? And wouldn't it be far more obvious that we exist?"

"How do we know there aren't a lot more of us than we thought? I mean, we know shifters are attracted to this place. Do you know how many of your customers are shifters?"

"Yes. You and Old Joe out back, though I'm not sure I'd call him a customer." He added at Rafiel's blank look, "The alligator." He took a quick look around the diner. "Speaking of which. I should check on him. If Kyrie asks, tell her I just went out back and will be right back."

He ducked out into the back hallway, hoping that Old Joe would still be there. The man seemed to be old and confused enough that he shifted shapes at all sorts of times for any reason or no reason at all. And Tom dreaded the thought of his being naked and lost in the snow, scared away by the cantaloupe that Anthony had thrown at his head.

* * *

Rafiel heard Kyrie behind him. No. He smelled her before he heard her—that sharp tang that indicated a shifter, followed by the symphony of scent that was Kyrie herself. She didn't wear perfume—that would probably have covered up all other scents to him—but her smell reminded him of cinnamon and fresh cut apples and the smell of fresh mown grass. All of those were very subtle undertones overlaid on a smell of soap, but they twisted together in a scent that meant Kyrie.

"Tom went outside. Something about an alligator," Rafiel said without turning back.

Kyrie gave what was not even a suppressed sigh, just a slightly longer breath. He could almost hear her shrug. He couldn't tell if it was impatience or exasperation. "Yeah," she said. "He's one of Tom's strays."

There would have been a time when Rafiel would have pursued that hint of impatience with his rival. No matter how much Rafiel might deny it or what he might say, Kyrie remained his dream girl, whom he thought the perfect woman for him. The one he loved and could never have.

For a moment, a nonphysical ache seemed to make his heart clench, and then he shook his head. "Look, it's just..." He shook his head again when he realized he was about to tell her that he couldn't discuss Tom without appearing partial because he still wanted her and wanted her badly. Then he realized he couldn't tell her that.

The problem with it, he thought, repressing an impulse to kick something, was that he liked Tom. They'd saved each other's lives, more or less, a couple of times. They'd fought side by side. There was something in that for men—something older than time, older than human thought. It made them blood brothers; comrades at arms. But beyond all that, he liked Tom. Tom was odd and he did things Rafiel couldn't fully understand but then, in a way everyone appeared like that to everyone else.

Tom came in the back door then. Because of the slight curve of the hallway, Rafiel couldn't see him, but he could hear him, talking to someone who answered back in a raspy voice. This presumably meant, Rafiel thought, that Tom was bringing back the former alligator now in human form. Not that he put it past Tom to drag an alligator into the diner. And the fact that he could easily convince everyone in there that this was perfectly normal and nothing unexpected was part of what was unique about the man. Part of the reason Rafiel knew it was no use to try to seduce Kyrie. Not anymore. He had seen his competition and he knew he didn't measure up.

Instead, he turned around, to look at Kyrie, who was staring down the hallway, towards the sound of an opening door. "He keeps old clothes in one of the storage rooms," she said. "For Old Joe. Because he shifts for no reason, and it means he ends up naked a lot."

Rafiel shrugged. "The reason I came," he said, "is that we found an arm. At the aquarium."

"An arm?" She looked at him blankly, with a horrified expression. "An arm?"

"There was a cell phone ring that came from inside one of the sharks," Rafiel said. "The cleaning divers heard it. They thought, you know...the shark had swallowed a cell phone. People lean over—there's an observation area—and they drop things in the water. But then they found the bones at the bottom of the tank. Human bones. That's when we were called in, to determine if they were, in fact, human. They were. A couple of vertebrae. Some toe bones." He waved his hand. For some reason the finding of those fragments of humanity at the bottom of a shark tank affected him more than finding a whole decomposing body, as he often had. They were more pathetic and more anonymous, demanding more of his pity, his outrage—and his justice.

He shook his head, to dismiss the image of the bones—a handful of them, no more. Kyrie looked at Tom, leading Old Joe—a man so old he was almost bent over, and whose skin and hair were not so much white as the curious colorlessness of the very aged—to one of the corner tables, and now Tom was ducking behind the counter and getting a bowl of clam chowder and taking it back to Old Joe.

"So they opened the shark," Rafiel said, hearing his own voice sound toneless. "And they found a human arm, still clutching a cell phone."

"Someone fell in the aquarium?" Kyrie asked, and now Rafiel had her full attention, and Tom had come up and was nearby, his eyebrows raised.

"Was it a shifter?" he asked. "Who fell?"

Rafiel shook his head. "No. It wasn't...it's just...we went over today, with a team, and did the full work-up, and while we were there, I kept smelling this shifter smell, around the shark tank and up to the little observation area. And then around the offices, too. So I made sure to forget one of my notebooks behind, and I went back to pick it up. There was only one employee there, closing up for the day, really, and she didn't mind having me look around the crime scene." He cringed inwardly, knowing exactly how many violations of procedure he had incurred, but knowing that procedure, somehow, failed to account for shifter criminals and the shifter policemen whose life might be destroyed by them. "If it's even a crime scene, of course."

"And?" Kyrie said.

"And there was a definite trail of shifter-smell winding around the observation area from which the vic could have fallen into the tank."

"But surely," Tom said, "it could also mean that of the many visitors to the aquarium, one was...you know, like us."

Rafiel nodded. "Oh, it could mean that. Definitely. And that's the problem. I couldn't smell all around and..." He shrugged. "I wanted your noses on the case, as it were. I...stole a set of keys while the employee was busy." That she had been busy on a wild goose chase for the wallet he claimed to have dropped somewhere only made him feel slightly guilty. He noted that neither Kyrie nor Tom looked shocked by his behavior, either. Tom chewed his lip and looked like he was thinking. "I truly can't go," he said. "Kyrie is not that good on managing the grill area. It's new. The whole stove is. She's not used to it yet."

Kyrie looked as if she would protest, but was sweeping automatically back and forth across the tables with her gaze, even as she frowned. "Perhaps," she said, "I can come with you if we do it briefly?"

Rafiel looked towards Tom. He knew very well that Kyrie didn't need anyone's permission and, in fact, he was perfectly well aware that Kyrie would resent his openly asking if Tom minded her going with him. Because it would imply Kyrie needed a minder and that she was less than a fully conscious participant in the relationship. Both of which were lies.

So Rafiel didn't say anything, but he looked at Tom.

There had been times, only a few months ago, when Tom would have been very upset at thinking of Rafiel and Kyrie going anywhere together without him. But now he just looked towards the booth where Red Dragon sat and asked, "Can you take him with you?"

Rafiel raised his eyebrow, in mute question, wondering if Tom meant to use Red Dragon as a chaperone. But the look back was guileless and open. "It's just I'd rather not have him around when I already shifted once today. And not in the diner. I don't want to shift again, and I don't want to do it here. And there are two of you..."

Kyrie nodded. She had that jutting-lower-lip look she got when she'd determined on a course of action. "Let me talk to him, first," she said, and walked towards the booth, carrying the coffee carafe and a cup, in what might be a gesture of hospitality or, simply, the most discreet weapons she could carry in this space.

* * *

Red Dragon was still huddled in the booth where Kyrie had left him, and looked around with huge eyes, as if he expected everyone in the diner to shift shapes and devour him.

And he says he wants to protect Tom, Kyrie thought, and shook her head slightly at the absurdity of it. It has to be a joke. Perhaps not his joke, but the Great Sky Dragon's.

She pushed a cup in front of him, and poured coffee into it from the carafe and just as she was thinking that no matter how many packets of sugar Red Dragon put in it, he needed protein and she ought to have thought of it, Tom set a plate in front of Red Dragon, containing two whole wheat buns and what appeared to be a triple hamburger and a whole lot of cheese.

Considering that she knew very well how Tom felt about Red Dragon, Kyrie felt her heart melt. Tom was like that. He would give up his own shirt to clothe someone else, even if it was his mortal enemy. This both scared her and made her think her boyfriend was the best person in the world.

Red Dragon looked sheepishly at Tom who said, "Protein. After shifting."

The young man nodded at Tom and picked up the burger with shaking hands, while Kyrie looked up at Tom and gave him her warmest smile. He looked worried enough, but he winked at her, before returning behind the counter to fool with the grill or start preparations for the next dish, or whatever it was he did back there half the time. Kyrie was quite contented to leave the cooking to Tom, and most of their clientele seemed to approve of the decision.

She turned back to Red Dragon, who was wolfing down the burger.

"I can't call you Red Dragon," she told the creature who faced her, clutching the burger tightly as if he were afraid she'd take it away. "Do you have a name?"

Red Dragon blushed and paused, caught just after taking a bite, his mouth full, the burger awkwardly in his hand. "I'm...My name..." He blushed darker and looked down at the burger, setting it slowly down on the plate, as he hastily chewed what was in his mouth. "My name is Conan Lung."

"Conan?" Kyrie asked. She didn't know whether she believed it, and she almost laughed at the idea of this man, who was shorter even than Tom, much slimmer, and—definitely—no barbarian hero, being called Conan.

"I..." He sighed. "My parents used comic books to improve their English, and they liked Conan."

That he was descended from the sort of people who thought that their son was likely to grow up to be a barbarian hero, might explain his delusional thoughts of protecting Tom. Might. She doubted anything could fully explain that.

"Right, then, Mr. Lung," she said. "What I want to know—"

"Call me Conan," Conan Lung said, quickly, and in the sort of undertone that implied he expected a rebuff.

"Right then," Kyrie said, thinking to herself she hoped the creature wouldn't think they were the best of friends, now. In his last foray into their lives, he'd chased them all over town and he'd helped catch and torture Tom. She knew that like all cowards, he could be exceptionally cruel in a fight. And she didn't want to have him at her back in a dangerous situation. In fact, she didn't want to have him anywhere that she couldn't keep a sharp eye on him. "You said you came to protect Tom?"

Red Dragon cast a fearful look at Tom, then another back at Kyrie. "The Great One said that I must come and protect the young dragon," he said, and bobbed a small bow, as though just speaking of the Great Sky Dragon must entail a need to kowtow. "He said I should answer for his life with mine."

Kyrie frowned. Conan sounded terribly earnest and she didn't think just now, scared as he looked, that the man was capable of lying so convincingly. However, having met the vast golden dragon that was master of all other Asian dragons in the West, she couldn't imagine his sending Conan to Tom as a protector.

"You're...He told you you're to protect Tom? You're a bodyguard of sorts, then?"

Conan bobbed his head again, then shook it desultorily. "Not... a bodyguard. My...my fighting is not all that could be desired. But I am one of the Great One's...you know? One of his vassals. I'm supposed to...to report to him what's happening around...the young dragon. To...to call him if needed."

"Do you mean," Kyrie started, narrowing her eyes, "that you are spying for the Great Sky Dragon? That if there is any trouble..."

"He can be here in no time at all," Conan said. "He tried telling the young dragon to beware, but the young one didn't seem to understand him, so I am here to protect him." A bite of the burger and a fleeting look under his—annoyingly thick and long—lashes at her. "And...and you. By making sure the Great One can chase away any enemies before they can harm any of you."

"But protect us from what?" Kyrie asked. She didn't at all like the idea that the Great Sky Dragon had effectively planted a spy among them. She wasn't sure she trusted his intentions or his ideas of what was proper. And she was very sure she didn't trust the Great Sky Dragon, himself. A creature more than a thousand years old—and from what Kyrie understood, the Great Sky Dragon was several thousands of years old—would have seen generations come and go. What would others' lives be worth to him?

Oh, he could have killed Tom, three months ago—killed him in such a way that even the amazing healing power of dragons would not have reversed. And he'd chosen not to. But how did Kyrie know that it was ever a choice? How could she know that under what must surely be an alien honor code, the Great Sky Dragon hadn't been forbidden from killing Tom then? And how did she know that he didn't mean to make up for it now, by setting a trap in which Tom would be caught and killed?

She looked towards her boyfriend, who was leaning on the counter, chatting animatedly with Rafiel, and again felt a sick lurch in her stomach. In place of the family she'd never known, she had a man who loved her and who was—she believed—one of the best people in the world—dragon shifter or no. And she had friends: Rafiel and Anthony, and a young man named Keith who was, now and again, a part-time waiter at The George.

Kyrie was not willing to give up any member of her chosen family, nor any corner of her domain to shadowy creatures whose life span might be many times as long as hers, but whose moral compass left much to be desired.

"Stay here," she told Conan, as she got up, collecting the carafe. She must talk to Tom and Rafiel and try to figure out what they should do with Conan and what the Great Sky Dragon could be trying to do.

Whatever it was, they would be in as much danger as she would be—perhaps Tom would be in more danger, in fact—and she couldn't make a decision for either of them.

* * *

"Seriously," Rafiel said, speaking in an undertone to Tom's back, as Tom industriously scraped at the grill. "How many of your clients are shifters?"

Tom gave Rafiel a look over his shoulder, half startled. "I told you. You and Old Joe."

"You know better. You know because of the pheromones the... former owners...sprayed this place with it, attract shifters. They attracted you and Kyrie, didn't they? Right off the bus. Unless you have a better explanation as to why you and Kyrie found little Goldport, Colorado so irresistible. They attracted me, which is perhaps more easily explainable, since I'm a policeman and I work the night shift. So, failing a really good twenty-four-hour doughnut shop in town..." He smiled a self-conscious smile, glad Tom was turning around—spatula still in hand—and answered his joke with a chuckle. "You could say an all-night greasy spoon is the closest thing to my natural habitat. But how can you truly believe we're the only ones?"

Tom shrugged. "I don't know, Rafiel. I don't think there are that many of our kind of people, period. There was an orangutan shifter, back in New York. And of course, the Great Sky Dragon and his brood. And there is, of course, Old Joe and you and Kyrie. But that's out of thousands of people, Rafiel. I don't think there are that many of us to gather here. Or anywhere."

"What you mean is that you don't think there are that many of them in the vicinity. But how far does the call of the pheromones extend? How far will it bring shifters, do you know? How many casual travelers, how many students, will stop here and stay? How many of those do you have as regulars, Tom?"

Tom shrugged. He set the spatula down and leaned over the counter, so that they could talk to each other in a whisper and with a modicum of privacy. "I don't know," he said. "You figured out how to smell shifters before either Kyrie or I did. Can't you smell out shifters in the diner, and tell me how many shifters there are here?"

Rafiel shrugged. "Not always. When people wear perfume, or even cologne, sometimes it's hard to tell. When I was in high school—" He stopped abruptly.

"Yes?" Tom asked.

Rafiel shrugged. He'd never told Tom this. He had never told anyone, not even his parents. The incident, secret though it was, had crystalized for him exactly what risk shifters were in, and how their very natures placed them outside the purview of normal legality. Of what other people would see as reality.

Tom was watching him intently and Rafiel sighed and gave in. "When I was in high school, I had a girlfriend. This was around the time I started shifting, but I shifted mostly late at night, and provided I took care not to have dates on full-moon nights, we were okay. She was...she seemed very easygoing and was willing to postpone dates and take my less than convincing excuses. Still, when I graduated I went away to Denver to study law enforcement, and it was either break up or get married and, you know, I couldn't get married. Not and risk her figuring out what I really was. So we broke up. Alice stayed behind and worked...actually at The George. The Athens as it then was. And then when I came back for Christmas..." He shrugged. "Well, you know, being a shifter and all, and the first year at college I had to be in dorms..."

"I always wondered how that worked," Tom said.

"Not well. So I was convinced I wanted to quit school, and I came back home for Christmas, and I was going to tell Dad I couldn't be an officer, after all, which would break his heart. Anyway, when I got here I found out Alice was missing. Had been missing for some days. I shifted. I trailed her...well...her scent. I found her dead. She had been killed because she was a shifter. She was..." He looked up at Tom and saw, reflected in the other man's face, the strange, hollow grief he himself felt. "She was a lion shifter. And her new boyfriend caught her shifting and...you know...killed her. He was scared. I..." He shook his head, trying to free himself of memories of the past and Alice's soft brown eyes. "I never knew it. Even though I was with her, every day, I never smelled the shifter in her. She wore a perfume that had the same sort of undertone, and it got lost in the perfume."

He was quiet a while, unable to find words to continue.

"I'm sorry," Tom said, in a low voice.

Rafiel managed a chuckle. "Well, it was a long time ago. Ten years. But you see, if I could smell shifters that well, I'd have known. I did not."

"And you became a policeman," Tom said, softly.

Rafiel shrugged. "Someone official needs to be looking out for our kind, which is what this is all about. I didn't count on the diner becoming the center of shifters for miles around." He gave Tom a smile he was sure looked sickly.

"And why are you so interested in how many of our regulars might be shifters?" Tom asked.

"Well, I figure the aquarium isn't that far away, and if there was a shifter...well...it might have been one of your regulars who was there, and we might be able to tag him on his specific scent. And then I could question him, you know, without seeming to, and if it turned out to just be someone who went to the aquarium for fun or something..." He drew to a halt slowly. The truth was he didn't want this murder to involve any shifters. He didn't want to have to lie and skulk and go behind his superiors' backs.

Oh, Goldport was a small enough town, and the police department was somewhat informal and friendly. Rafiel was a third generation cop in the same department. He could get away with a lot. But he didn't like to. He was a policeman because he prized the idea of a justice system based on laws. He didn't approve of anyone defiling it. Not even himself.

"Rafiel," Tom said, laughter at the back of his throat, trying to cut through the words. "Are you truly suggesting we go up to all our regulars and smell them? Half of them are college students or warehouse workers who come here after work. You know what they smell like."

"No. I mean...no, I don't think that would work. Perfume and all. But...just keep your nose open, okay?"

Tom nodded and opened his mouth as though he were about to add something, but at that moment Kyrie came up to them. "He says he was sent to protect you, Tom. That the Great Sky Dragon said he tried to warn you and you didn't seem to get it."

* * *

"Why would anyone—particularly anyone ancient and presumably intelligent—send Red Dragon to protect...me?" Tom said.

"He says his name is Conan," Kyrie said, looking at Tom, but with an unfocused expression that indicated her attention was on her thoughts and not on their conversation.

"Conan?" Rafiel asked, before Tom could.

Kyrie turned to him. "His parents liked comic books, he says."

"So it stands to reason he should be the hero to protect me? And protect me from what?" Tom said.

"Are you sure you don't remember what the Great Sky Dragon told you?" Kyrie asked. "Perhaps..."

Tom shook his head. "It was all very confused." Just thinking back on that precise, booming voice in his head made his muscles clench and made him fear he would shift without warning. "I know he said I had violated old and sacred customs. The laws of our kind..." He shook his head, unable to remember.

"Our kind has laws?" Rafiel asked, at the same time that Kyrie said, "That doesn't sound like he wanted to protect you."

"No," Tom said. "It didn't sound that way to me, either, which is why I thought..." He clenched his hands on the counter, digging his nails against the hard formica top and making not an impression. If he'd been in dragon form...he would have dug his nails right through it. But he would not allow himself to change. Not now. Not today. Not again.

He took deep breaths, trying to forget the voice and the sense of urgency, trying to remember only the words and not the fear they'd induced. "I remember his saying something about Ancient Ones, but I wasn't sure what he meant—the laws or some people who were very old."

Kyrie nodded. "Well, we're stuck with Conan the Wonder Dragon over there, unless you can get rid of him in some way."

Tom looked at her. In some way. It occurred to him it would be very simple to get rid of him the dragon way—flames at twenty feet. When they'd fought as dragons before, Tom had ripped off Red Dragon's arm and beaten him over the head with it. But somehow he didn't think that was what Kyrie meant for him to do. And as for himself...well, until proven otherwise, he couldn't really say killing Red Dragon would be in self-defense. The rather pitiful creature, cowering in their smallest booth, warming his hands on a cup of coffee, could be said to be many things, but life-threatening wasn't one of them. Whatever he'd been or done in the past, right now the adjectives that came more readily to mind echoed more of wet or perhaps spineless.

Tom knew better than to discount the creature just because he cringed and hid around the corners. Tom had lived on the streets and seen many a beggar who seemed meek and mild turn suddenly and go on a rampage. But still, the truth remained he was not openly threatening Tom. If Tom killed Conan now, even in what could be considered a fair duel—as fair as it could be when only one of the duelists was in possession of a backbone—then he would forever feel he had murdered a defenseless being. And murdering defenseless beings would mean that Tom was not just a shifter, but an animal. It would make it very hard to look at himself in the mirror. Which would make shaving a challenge.

He shrugged. Aloud, he said, "Well, the Great Sky Dragon sent him to us for a reason."

"As a spy," Kyrie said. "It seems he has orders to report all we do...or at least anything we do that might be dangerous to the Great Sky Dragon. He put it as he can call the Great Sky Dragon and the Great Sky Dragon will come—or at least send help—when needed."

Tom looked at her for a moment, then shook his head slowly. Hadn't she understood the significance of the Great Sky Dragon in Tom's head? "Kyrie, he can reach into my mind with his voice at will."

"No," Kyrie said. "Conan says that you shut your mind to the Great Sky Dragon, and that's why he sent Conan to us as a spy. To keep an eye on us."

"Perhaps," Tom said. "But then again, if there's going to be a spy among us, is it not better that it be a spy we know? We can keep an eye on him, keeping an eye on us."

"That sounds strangely unhealthy," Rafiel said. "Like one of those situations where you end up being your own grandpa."

"Perhaps it does," Tom said. "But the truth is, you know...better the devil we know. And we do know this devil."

"We'll let him stay then?" Kyrie said, doubtfully.

"Better yet," Tom said. "We'll give him a job. That way we can keep an eye on him to make sure he's doing his job and to make sure he's not trying to kill me. All in one."

Kyrie didn't look convinced. "And what if he attacks?"

"Then," Tom said, and graced her with his best, bare-teeth smile, "I attack back. And I'm bigger and faster."

Kyrie sighed, as if conceding a point. "I don't like it," she said.

"I don't either," Tom said, and reached under the counter for an apron to give to Conan at the same time the front doorbell tinkled to let in the tall, thin blond man who usually spent the night in the diner, writing in a succession of cloth-bound journals. They called him the Poet though it was more likely—from the nervous look of him—that he was writing about conspiracy theories. He took his normal table, with his back against the wall. "But we must make the best of a bad situation, and look at it this way, if I get him to serve at tables, you can probably go with Rafiel and be fine. I'll get him a couple of flip-flops from the storage room."

"You're going to make him a waiter?"

"Why not? While protecting me, he might as well hand out some souvlaki," Tom said. Smiling with a reassurance he was far from feeling, he advanced on the small booth. Red Dragon jumped a little when he saw Tom approach, and looked up at Tom with an expression of such abject terror that Tom thought, Oh yes, if the time comes, I can take him. But he hoped it wouldn't be needed. He gave Conan a pair of red flip-flops, explaining, "Health regulations." Then he watched the man put on the apron, while he gave him the speech on waiting tables that had been given to Tom himself, when he'd taken a job as a waiter almost a year ago. "Don't be rude to the customers, no matter what they say; write down the orders, no one's memory is perfect." He took a notebook and pencil from the pocket of the apron and waved it at Conan. "And when you go out to take an order always take the carafe with you and give refills to the people who are having coffee." He glanced at Conan's shrunken arm. "You can put the carafe on the tables without damaging them, at least the new ones. And the old ones, who cares? They're all stained and burned, anyway."

Conan nodded, looking as self-conscious as a kid in new clothes, in strange company, and Tom pointed at the table the Poet had just occupied. "There you go. Take his order. It's probably just coffee, but you never know."

Then he turned to look at Rafiel and Kyrie who were both staring at him with a bemused expression. "What?" he asked in an undertone. "We don't have enough hands on deck today, and if he's going to stick around, he might as well make himself useful." He shrugged. "Besides," he dropped his voice further, "I might as well keep him too busy to think of something creative to do in the way of getting rid of me."

Rafiel shook his head but didn't say anything, and Tom covered up his apprehension with a smile. "Go on. Now Kyrie can go with you for half an hour or so. We won't be leaving the tables unattended."

* * *

Kyrie sat down in Rafiel's car, narrowing her eyes at him. "You won't shift while driving?"

Rafiel gave her a blank, puzzled look. "Why would I do such a stupid thing?" He frowned. "It would end up in an accident."

Kyrie shrugged. She'd rather cut her own tongue out with a blunt knife, than tell him how close she'd come to shifting, herself. "I just thought, you know...since one shifts when stressed..."

He looked away from the windshield past which Kyrie could see no more than a dazzling whiteness of snow, seeming to radiate from the center of the two light cones cast by the headlights. "Why would I be stressed?" he asked. He held the wheel lightly enough to make her want to growl at him—and she was fairly sure that this had nothing to do with an urge to shift.

He put the car in gear and started out of the parking lot, seemingly perfectly sure of where he was going. How he could be sure, Kyrie didn't know. Perhaps he was flying by instruments. She glared at him.

He looked out the windshield again and drove at what seemed to her a disgustingly high speed towards Fairfax. As the silence lengthened between them, he turned. "What?" he said.

Kyrie was so surprised he seemed to be aware of her disapproval that she felt her cheeks flush and started to open her mouth to justify herself. Before she could, he reached over and patted her arm awkwardly. "I grew up here," he said, in a tone that made it almost an apology. "I learned to drive in winter." He shrugged, as he stopped for a light that was no more than a diffuse red glow ahead. "I'm sure you'll get more comfortable with it in time."

The tone was sympathetic and attempting to be friendly but it felt patronizing and she had to bite back a wish to swat his ears and put him in his place. The image that came to her mind was of a paw swatting at his feline ears. She felt her lips twist upwards, and looked out the passenger window—though she could not see anything more than blinding white snow. "So, how do you think shifters are involved in this?" she asked, in as serious a voice as she could muster.

Without looking, she could sense he'd shrugged. Probably some slight rustle of cloth as his shoulders rose and fell. "I don't know. Not as victims."

"So you think they are...?"

She looked back in time to see him shake his head. "I don't know," he said. "We've already found that some shifters feel the urge to kill in their...well...their other form. Perhaps that was it."

"Or perhaps just...you know, shifters that kill, like other people kill."

He gave a startled bark of laughter. "Oh, yes, very sensible. I should have thought of that, of course. I mean, we're shifters, we're not saints. The animal urge is not necessary to explain killing, is it? As I know only too well from police work."

"Well..." Kyrie said.

"No, trust me, it makes sense. Sometimes, with all this, we run the risk of thinking we're completely apart from humanity and different from them, and of course, we're not. We're humans, like all others. Or almost."

"Given a certain tendency to change shapes, yes, exactly," Kyrie said. "Just like all others."

Rafiel slowed down and leaned all the way forward. "I hope this is Ocean Street," he said. "Because I surely can't read that sign."

"So glad to know the superpowers of Colorado natives don't cover everything."

"You should be, otherwise imagine the envy you'd be forced to feel. Everyone would want to be born in Colorado. It would get crowded in the hospitals," Rafiel said. "But what I was saying... perhaps I'm foolish to feel guilty for all shifters, or at least to feel I must protect them from...you know, the majority of people—like I must..." He turned neatly into the parking lot beside a tall cylindrical building with broad rounded windows. "Like I must be the law for our people—those of us who hide amid other people." He looked at her, and for the first time in a long, long time, she detected a look of insecurity about him, as if he were young and not completely confident about what he thought or should be doing. "I guess you think I'm an idiot. I mean, we don't even know how many of us there are, and here I am, trying to keep them safe, as if I knew them personally."

"Not an idiot," she said, immediately, in reaction to his expression more than anything. "You feel a duty to...people like us, I guess." A little gurgle of laughter tore through her throat, surprising her. "Frankly, at first, that was why I helped Tom last year, when he found the body in the parking lot. I wasn't sure if he'd killed anyone or not, but I'd never met anyone else like me—you know, never having had a family. So I figured, he was my responsibility to look after. I'd guess you feel something like that."

"Yeah, but I'd feel better, if I didn't have reason to suspect a lot of our people...I mean, a lot of people like us have...issues controlling themselves."

"Other people do too," she said. And shrugged. "Now, let's go see if I can confirm your supposed shifter-smell. It's unlikely I can help you, since you have a better sense of smell than any of us."

"I just want...second opinion," he said. And got out of the car. On the road, behind them, tires squealed.

* * *

"Hey, can I help you with the waiting on tables?" a voice asked behind Tom, as Tom prepared a stack of burgers on the grill.

It was a well known voice—that of his friend Keith Vorpal, the only one of the non-shifters who knew shifters existed. Keith was a film student with an unshakeable joi de vivre and an absolute certainty that being a shifter was the coolest thing since being a superhero. He'd gotten embroiled in their affairs and taken part in some life-and-death struggles. Though he'd acquitted himself well enough, he was sure shifters got to have more fun than he did. Sometimes he claimed to be a human shifter. He shifted between a human form and a stunningly similar human form.

However that was, Tom felt strangely grateful that Keith, not a shifter, didn't feel either horrified by them, or forced to turn them in as abominations. And the fact that Keith knew the routines of The George, where he worked part-time, seemed like a godsend right now, when Tom had been doing his job and continuously prodding the hapless Conan to do his.

"Keith," he said, turning around. "Keith."

Keith smiled at him. His tumbled blond hair was in disarray, and his glasses fogged, from having come from cold to warmth. He unwound a bright red scarf from around his neck, as he spoke. "So, you need my help?"

"Yeah, all we have is Conan, and it's his first day." Tom said, and hoped against hope that Keith would have no memory of Red Dragon.

"Conan?" Keith said, as he ducked behind the counter, removed scarf and jacket. Tom heard the sound of Keith sliding the time sheet from under the counter and smiled.

"The new employee. Over there."

"Over..." Keith took in breath sharply. "But Tom, he's...that is..."

Tom was afraid Keith would blurt out loud that Red Dragon was just that, and the enemy besides. And since Kyrie had left, a sudden inrush of customers had come in, ten or twenty in all, all sitting at nearby tables, ordering hot chocolate and burgers and whatnot. He reached over and put a hand on the young man's shoulder, to arrest the flow of words. "It's all right, Keith, truly. I'm keeping an eye on him."

"If you're sure..." Keith said, looking confused.

"Yeah, sure about everything but his ability to wait tables. Why don't you go and—" But before he could suggest that Keith should relieve Conan of some tables and give him breathing room, Tom looked up at the booth where he'd left Old Joe. The clothes he'd loaned the old vagrant were still there, but Old Joe was gone. "Shit," Tom said, which made Keith look at him sharply, because Tom rarely swore out loud. "Man the grill, Keith. Just a couple of minutes."

With a suspicion that he knew very well where Old Joe had gone, Tom ducked out from behind the counter and ran down the hallway, just in time to hear the back door creak open, and to see, as he turned the corner, an alligator tail disappearing through the door.

He knew he should have locked it.

* * *

The aquarium looked like a cylindrical grain silo—at least if a silo could be massive, made of glass and concrete and rise ten stories into the air. Once you got inside, there were very few staircases where the public was supposed to walk—from the entrance room, outfitted to look like something from Ten Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, with rusty-looking ship wheels and riveted panels on the walls, to the restaurant on the other end. Instead, it was all gently sloping floors.

"Surveillance system?" Kyrie asked, looking at the blank screens in the entrance room and wondering exactly what to do if there was one. After all, she was here with a policeman. But policemen—she was fairly sure of this—weren't supposed to break into the scenes of crimes, alone or with civilian friends, after everyone else had departed. She wondered how this would play in court, if it ever came to court. And that was supposing, of course, that the killer wasn't a shifter. Because, if he was...

She shivered. She didn't know what to do if the killer was a shifter, and she would bet Rafiel didn't either. You couldn't let a shifter be arrested and end up in a jail, where his secret would inevitably come out. Particularly not if he was the sort of wild, barely contained shifter who would kill without a thought. If you allowed him to be arrested, you might as well confess that you were one too, and let them come for you. Because once the existence of shifters was discovered, then the sort of accommodation, the sort of looking out for each other, covering for each other, that she and Rafiel and Tom all did, would become impossible. People largely failed to see them because they didn't expect them. If one of them were revealed, then all would be.

But what could they do, if a shifter were guilty? How could they prevent him from being arrested? Cover for him, and allow him to go on murdering? Or take justice in their own hands and kill him? Who knew? The last time, they'd killed the murderer, but that had been self-defense, because he'd been trying to murder them. This time, they might have to make a dispassionate decision.

"Nah," Rafiel said. He'd barely looked at the screens. "First thing we asked was if they had a surveillance system. But they didn't. They said that they've never had issues with break-ins or vandalism. Normally the restaurant is open half the night, you know. So there's people around."

He led her past various incredibly unconvincing concrete caves. "You can shift in the bathroom," Rafiel said. "The ladies' room is there," and he pointed at a little artificial stone grotto amid which a small door opened with the universal symbol of the stick figure in a dress and the words shad roe. It was, Kyrie thought, very good that there was a picture, since she failed to know what either Shad or Roe meant. The only thing she could think was that Shad Roe was the Russian relative of Jane Doe.

She ducked into the bathroom—a utilitarian thing, with metal sinks and beat-up beige-painted stalls. Perhaps it was supposed to evoke a ship, she thought, and resisted an impulse to duck into a stall before shifting. There was no point at all. They were alone here, and besides, her panther self would be utterly confused, dealing with claws and a door lock.

"Right," she told hersel. She removed her clothes swiftly. She concentrated. Shifting was hard, but she'd learned to do it volitionally in the last few months. As she felt her body spasm and shudder, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, her eyes going slitted yellow, her features growing into a muzzle, her teeth into fangs.

She looked away from the mirror, as the image it reflected became a big, black-furred cat. It caught at the edge of her sense, the sweet-tangy scent that the human part of Kyrie knew meant a shapeshifter had been here, and recently too.

* * *

Tom ran down the hallway, full speed. He doubted that Old Joe could have run faster than Tom could walk. But the alligator that Old Joe shifted into could. He moved at a frighteningly fast clip, tail swaying. The door slammed shut behind Joe.

Tom hit it a couple of seconds later, the full impact of his body on the cold glass making it swing open. Snow flew into his mouth and stung his eyes, and as he looked around, frantically, all he could see of Old Joe was a trail in the snow, fast becoming covered by the more recent fall.

"Joe?" he said, stumbling along the trail, to where the dumpster stood, surrounded by a brick wall on three sides—presumably to hide from the customers' minds the ultimate fate of their leftovers.

A happy sort of clack-clack sound, not unlike castanets, made him veer sharp left, into the enclosure and almost step on Joe's tail. "There you are," he said, relieved that Old Joe had gone no further. "You really shouldn't wander off like that. You can have warm burgers inside, why are you—"

He froze as he heard a high-pitched animal battle scream and hiss—and almost ran forward, past Old Joe's front paws, to where he could see a little kitten, just inches from Old Joe's happily clacking snout.

It was orange and fluffy and tiny—maybe eight weeks old. Old enough to have open eyes and stand more or less firmly on spindly legs. Tom felt mingled dread and relief. Relief because he'd had other images in his mind, including a helpless baby shifter dragon. Dread, because instead of running, or jumping on the dumpster—if he could jump—the silly little creature stood facing Old Joe, hair fluffed out all on end, blue eyes blazing. As if it thought it could scare away a huge, armored gator. As Tom watched, it emitted another high-pitched battle scream.

Old Joe lunged. Before his teeth could grab the little creature, Tom stooped and picked it up. "No," he told Old Joe. "This is not dinner." He felt the kitten sink all claws into him, even as Old Joe looked up with a look of intense disappointment in his eyes.

Tom absently held the kitten close to him, hoping that the warmth would mollify him. He didn't dare put him down. Even if he had owners—and it was possible he might, and had only wandered in called by the smell of the diner refuse—what kind of owners let a baby this size walk around outside in a snowstorm? Making his voice stern, he yelled at Old Joe, "Shift. Now. Into human form."

The alligator looked up at him with such a sad look that Tom expected it to start crying. A different type of crocodile tears, Tom guessed. He cleared his throat, to avoid showing weakness, and said, "Now. You have no business being out here shifted. You know what kind of trouble Kyrie and I could get into if they found you. Do you want us to get in trouble?"

The alligator shook his head, earnestly.

"Right. Then shift," he said, and averted his eyes from the vagrant's form, as it writhed and twisted, from crocodile to human. "Better," Tom said. "Now stay. Don't you dare shift again or wander off." Aware that the poor creature was naked, he darted inside, grabbed the discarded sweats, and brought them out.

Old Joe put them on, with the expression of a school child obeying an unreasonable taskmaster. He looked resentfully at Tom from under lank clumps of steel-grey hair. "It's tasty. It's been too long since I've eaten an animal."

Tom shuddered. "You're not going to eat this one, either," he said, firmly, holding and sheltering the orange fluffball in his hands. The kitten had started cleaning himself, in affronted dignity, as though to let Tom know he could take care of himself fine, thank you so much.

Old Joe didn't say anything else about it. He gave Tom a half-amused, half-sad look. Though his eyes could be called brown, they had faded as much as the rest of him, so that they looked even more pitiful and washed out. The grey sweat suit—picked up at the thrift store down the street and faded and washed out as it was—looked like a scream of color on the small, short body. As Old Joe stood up, he never straightened to his full five feet or so of height. Instead he stooped forward, bent, and shuffled along.

Tom shifted his hold on the kitten, and held Old Joe's arm, as he led him inside.

"Walk better as a gator," the man said in a raspy voice, tainted with an undefinable accent.

"Undoubtedly," Tom said, maneuvering to open the door, without dropping either of his charges. "But alligators are not native to the Rockies, and if anyone sees you, they'll call animal control. And then what are we supposed to do?"

Old Joe nodded, but Tom wondered how much he understood of his speech. Most of the time Old Joe's hold on reality was thread-thin, no more than a dime's edge worth of awareness. Sometimes, though, when he spoke, Tom glimpsed...he wasn't sure what. Perhaps the man that Old Joe had once been—sharp and incisive, bordering on the acerbic. And sometimes, sometimes, he seemed old and wise and world weary, but very much intelligent and capable of logical thought.

The thing was, you just never knew which Old Joe you had. It could be the wise old man or the crazy old codger. His shifting between an alligator and a human wasn't nearly as confusing as that. At least that you could tell. What went on inside his mind wasn't nearly as obvious.

Tom led him inside and to the booth, and said "Stay," then ducked behind the counter, to ask Keith to get a burger started. He cursed himself, inwardly. He'd given the old man clam chowder, because he'd been thinking he'd be cold, of course. But the thing was, he'd just shifted, so of course he'd gone outside, in search of protein. "Make that a triple," he said.

Keith looked at him, as he threw three patties on the grill. "Hungry?"

"Not for me. Old Joe. Bring it to the table when you're done."

"Sure," Keith said.

Tom went back to the booth, where he'd left Old Joe. He didn't want to leave the old man alone too long, for fear he'd shift and escape outside again. At a guess, Tom imagined the only reason he'd managed to get away unnoticed is that there hadn't been anyone seated close enough to him to see him. But three more tables had gotten filled up since then, and while they were too far away to hear him, they had full view of the table. And Tom had no idea how to convince spectators that all twelve people at those tables had hallucinated a man changing shapes into an alligator.

So instead, he slid into the pockmarked green vinyl seat across from Old Joe, who looked up at him, suddenly, with startlingly focused eyes. "They're here, you know?" he said. "They're in town."

"Who is in town?" Tom asked. Through his mind, like a scrolling list, went the names of everyone that Old Joe might be referring to: the Great Sky Dragon's people; whoever had killed the people at the aquarium; some unspecified group that hated shifters.

"Them," he said, and shrugged. "You know, the Ancient Ones."

And all of a sudden, either dredged from memory or created by his mind on the spot, Tom had a comic book cover in his mind, showing the Greek gods in full array and under them the words "The Ancient Ones."

He sighed. "Right." In the morass of Old Joe's mind, who knew what was true and what wasn't. And now the kitten was asleep on Tom's palm, as Tom shielded him with his other hand, so that Old Joe wouldn't see him and get hungry. "Right."

At that moment, Keith dropped the burger in front of Old Joe, who grabbed it as if he'd been lost in a burgerless desert for centuries. "Sorry," Tom said, in an undertone. "I should have remembered you'd need protein. It was stupid of me. No wonder you changed."

Old Joe shook his head, as emphatically as the alligator had, near the dumpster. "That's not why I changed," he said. "It was the Ancient Ones. I can't take them like this. They might kill me, you know?" His eyes gave Tom an appraising look from under the long grey hair. "You know what they're like."

"Actually," Tom said, "I don't." He wondered if Old Joe was talking about something real or something out of his nightmares.

Old Joe devoured the burger, with its bun and pickles, in fast, ravenous bites, all the more surprising because his teeth appeared to be broken and stained, and possibly moss-covered. How old was he? Tom had heard—and had observed in his own years on the street—how hard a life like that could be on people. When you threw in the alcoholism and drug use that plagued people on the streets, how likely was it that Old Joe was no more than middle-aged? Forty. Maybe fifty.

On the other hand, Old Joe was a shifter. So was Tom. And through five years of sleeping outside and roughing it through horrible winters, and working at the roughest manual labor, and shooting up and smoking and eating any amount of drugs...Tom had never managed to look his age, let alone unnaturally aged. At twenty-one, he looked closer to eighteen, except for the dark shadow of beard on his face. Even with his five o'clock shadow, he still got carded every time he tried to buy a beer. So Old Joe could not have aged all that fast, could he? Not unless he'd come up with some pinnacle of self-destructiveness that Tom had left untouched. And that, Tom found very hard indeed to believe.

But then again, perhaps alligators aged differently from dragons. How was Tom to know? The problem, he thought, as Old Joe demolished the burger, is that he knew so few shifters. Not enough to give him a statistical universe, truly.

He adjusted his hands, trying to remove one, to rub at his forehead, and stopped short when the kitten emitted a vaguely threatening purr and put out a paw to hold Tom's hand in place. He was so much like Kyrie, asleep, on the sofa, putting out a hand to hold Tom back when he tried to walk off, that Tom smiled. A smile that died quickly, when he heard Old Joe say, in an almost singsong voice, "They want to kill you, you know?"

It was all Tom could do, not to look over his shoulder at where Conan was talking to a customer. "Who?" he asked, instead. "The Ancient—"

Old Joe nodded. "You see, they formed"—he wrinkled his forehead—"many years ago." He waved a hand with short, broken, dirty nails. "To punish those who hurt shifters. And to create a law for shifters. And they know about the deaths. At the castle." His voice was raspy, and he looked one way and another as if to make sure he couldn't be overheard.

"Many years ago?"

"Before cars. Or airplanes or...gaslight." His eyes seemed to be looking far away into the past. "Or horses."

"I see."

"I was young, you know? And they said that shifters needed rules and laws to protect them, and to rule themselves, that they needed to defend themselves against the others...the ones who would hunt them. And then they formed a...a group."

"I see. And why do you think this group is after us? Just because so many young shifters died?"

Old Joe shook his head, then shrugged. "He came to me, when I was outside. Dante Dire did. He came to me. He's the...killer for the Ancient Ones, the...how do you call it, when someone kills the condemned for a king? The executioner!" He looked very proud of himself for having come up with the word. "That's what he is. He punishes those who hurt shifters. And he came to me and said that many young and blameless shifters had died, and that it was all your fault, and...yours and...your girl and the policeman. And he wanted to know your names."

"How could he know we did it, and not know our names?"

"He can feel it. Many people can. Well, ancient shifters can."

"And he wanted to know who we were?"

"Yeah. He tried to get me to change," Old Joe squinted. "But I wouldn't. And then, you know, your manager came out, and he went away, but I was hit with a cantaloupe."

Tom tried to think through the confusion of articles, then shook his head. It didn't matter if it was all a dream of Old Joe's. Or rather, of course it did, since dreams couldn't possibly kill them, and real, pissed-off shifters on a rampage could. But...but for now, not knowing to which aspect of Old Joe he was addressing himself, he had to treat the thing as if it were deadly serious. "Is there some way they could figure out who we are? Since you didn't tell him? And why did he come to you?"

"He didn't come to me," Old Joe said, somewhat defensively. "He came to the diner because of the smell that attracts shifters, you know. And then he figured this is where all shifters came. And he recognized me. So he asked. I didn't tell him." He folded his gnarled hands in front of him, on the formica table, looking for all the world like a schoolboy who expects a reward, then looked up and smiled a little. "I wouldn't worry. You're safe. I saw Dante Dire again, just a little later. When your girl and that policeman...what's his name? When they went out, he got in a car and followed them." He patted Tom's hand, reassuringly. "So, you see, you are safe."

Tom didn't feel at all reassured.

* * *

"So...what have we learned, children?" Kyrie said, in a singsong voice, as she dressed herself in the chilly bathroom. "We've learned that shifters piss."

She and Rafiel had gone all over the aquarium. Much to her chagrin, she had confirmed Rafiel's smelling of a shifter around the aquarium and up the stairs to the little observation area over the shark tank, where the smell became far more intense, as though the shifter had lingered there.

But that was all she'd learned. The only thing she could contribute—as she walked out of the ladies' room, to meet the again-human Rafiel, outside his bathroom—marked salmon, according to some bizarre logic where all salmons were male, she guessed—was, "I could smell it strongest in the ladies' room."

"Really?"

"Really. So I'm guessing that shifters piss," she said, with an attempt at a smile.

But Rafiel frowned at her, as though lost in intense thought. "And that it's a female."

Kyrie immediately felt like slapping her forehead. That hadn't even occurred to her. "Or that. Or of course, it comes in after hours and isn't sure whether it's shad roe or salmon. Not that I can blame him...er...her...it there."

This got her a very brief smile. "I'm more worried that it lives here."

"What do you mean...Oh. You mean one of the sharks?"

He nodded. "I tried smelling the covering to the tank at the top, where they open to feed them and to go in and clean, but couldn't smell anything. Hell, the smell through half of this place is faint. But I think I detect a trace of whatever it is they use to clean the aquariums with, and I wonder..."

"But wouldn't they go nuts, staying shifted and in the aquarium the whole time?" Kyrie asked.

Rafiel shrugged. "I have no idea. Truly. You see...sometimes I think that if I lived somewhere in Africa, I'd just walk out one day into the savannah, and become a lion, and never, ever, ever change back."

Kyrie stared at him, shocked. She'd always thought of the three of them, Rafiel was the best adjusted. He had a family who knew what he was and collaborated in hiding him. He had the job he wanted to have, the job he'd dreamed about as a little boy. If anything he'd seemed in danger of being conceited and full of himself, not lost and full of doubt. But as he said those words, she felt as if he'd undressed. His expression had for a moment become innocent and vulnerable, making him look like a confused young man faced with something he couldn't understand nor deny.

"Never mind," he said, and managed a little smile. "It's just sometimes it's so hard being both, you know, living between worlds. I've tried to be human, and I can't—not all the time. And it just occurred to me, if I could just be a lion—be a lion all the time and stop...stop thinking like a human, stop caring about what humans think...it would be easier."

There were many things Kyrie wanted to say. That she understood—though she wasn't sure she did. She relished her rationality too much to let it go in exchange for a promise of simpler thinking. That she felt for him. That she could think of what it all must mean to him. But instead, what came out of her lips, was, "There's always the zoo."

As soon as she heard it, she was afraid he would be offended. And that was a heck of a thing to do to him, anyway. He'd just revealed an inner part of himself—at least she didn't think he was playacting, though with Rafiel, it was sometimes pretty hard to tell—and she'd answered with a joke.

To her surprise, he gurgled with sudden laughter. "Oh, yes...But if I couldn't control the changing even then, it could get a little embarrassing, no? Not to mean dangerous, right there in the feline enclosure."

"Yes," she said. Then changed the subject quickly. "But you think one of the sharks might have done it?"

Rafiel shrugged. "It still doesn't make any sense, does it? I mean, they get fed, as sharks. Why would she...or whatever...feel a need to come out and push humans into the tank?"

"Perhaps she has a taste for human flesh," Kyrie said. "Or perhaps there was someone who saw her shift, and had to be eliminated."

* * *

The refrain in Tom's mind had changed to oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, and he jumped up from the seat. Kyrie and Rafiel were being stalked by someone called the executioner for whatever the Ancient Ones were.

He ducked into the storage room and dialed Kyrie on his cell phone. There was no answer. It rolled over much too fast, in fact. He bit his tongue, thinking. Kyrie never charged her cell phone. Which meant, he had to get to her—somehow.

Oh, maybe Old Joe was dreaming it all up, but this seemed a bit complex, and the man's hesitations about time and place were much too realistic, and unless Old Joe's dreams came in technicolor and surround sound, Tom didn't think it was a dream at all. No. Tom thought that Old Joe was somehow trying to reassure him and claim loyalty points for not having turned him in.

Had he not turned them in? Who knew. Maybe he had. Or maybe he had turned Kyrie and Rafiel in. His primary loyalty seemed to be to Tom, who fed him and looked after him. Everyone else was a distant concern. He might care for Kyrie because Tom did. On the other hand, Kyrie thought that Tom encouraged Old Joe to hang around, and endangered them, and she made no secret of her feelings.

Tom came out of the storage room and dove behind the counter, kitten in hand. "Here," he told Keith, handing over the small, orange fluffball, and ripping off his apron over his head.

"What am I supposed to do with him?" Keith asked, holding the puzzled creature, who was meowing and hissing at having his sleep disturbed. "No matter how much Old Joe wants him, I'm not grilling him."

"No," Tom said. "He's not dinner. Just put him somewhere. I have to go out...uh...for a few minutes. I'll be right back, I swear."

Keith looked closely at the kitten who was wearing the universal kitten expression that means let them come, all together or single file. I have my claws. "How am I supposed to keep him from wandering around? Let me tell you how many health violations—"

"Oh, I'm sure. But if we let him go, Old Joe is likely to eat him. Just tie him up or something. Some sort of a leash."

"A leash? A cat?" Keith asked, in the vaguely horrified voice of someone who's just been instructed to confront a savage creature.

"Well, something," Tom said. "Please? And mind the place. I need to go out. Truly." He looked doubtfully at the kitten trying to claw at Keith. "Give him some food or something. Cats stay where they're fed, right?" And to Keith's look of incredulity, "Look, just try."

Tom had wanted a pet. The closest he'd come to having a pet was having fish. But those were more like animated swimming plants, as far as he was concerned. From the ages of five to ten, he had spent hours dreaming of various pets, from cats to horses. But his parents' lifestyle did not include time for animals. Truth be told, it barely included time for Tom. So he didn't have much idea what one did with pets, beyond a vague idea you told them what to do and they did it. At least, that seemed to be the interaction of owner and dog that he observed at various parks and in various streets. Except perhaps in the matter of bodily functions, dogs pretty much obeyed. It was all go here, come here, and stay. And by and large, the various mutts did. Surely cats couldn't be that much different. He had a lurch of doubt when he realized that save for a very old lady with a hairless cat on a leash, he'd never seen a cat be walked. "Er...just don't let him poop anywhere, okay?"

"Right..." Keith said in that tone of voice that indicated that as soon as Tom left the diner, he was calling the men in white coats to go after him. And Tom thought he very well might, but it didn't matter. He ran down the hallway to the back door, and out in the blinding storm where, more by instinct than by sight, he found the car where Kyrie had parked it. Fishing in his pocket, he found the car keys. He undressed, shivering under the snow and shoved his clothes and shoes into the car trunk, and shut it with a resounding thud, even as he felt his skin bunch and prickle with cold. He hooked the keys to a link in a bracelet that Kyrie had made for him. It was silver, but made of the sort of elastic weave—somewhat like chain mail but not really—that adjusted to his changes in size as he shifted from man to dragon and back again.

A brief thought of Conan came to him, with a sharp stab of annoyance. Don't let Conan see him. Don't let Conan realize he was gone. The last thing he needed, right now, was Conan's intervention, or to have to drag Conan with him on this dangerous expedition. Conan was a complication he didn't need. He wished with all his strength, with everything he could, that the Red Dragon shifter wouldn't realize he was gone until Tom was well away.

And then he forced his body—unwilling and fighting and screaming with pain and begging for more time to recover—into the series of spasmodic coughs and twists that changed the shape of bones and muscles, and made wings grow from the middle of the shoulders.

Wings that spread and flapped, once—twice—powerfully, lifting the dragon aloft in the blinding snow.

* * *

"Nasty way of getting rid of your exes," Rafiel said. And shook his head. "Or of course, perhaps we are completely wrong. The smell wasn't continuous. At least for me, it wasn't. You?"

"No, I couldn't follow it from the bathroom to the shark tank. Also, I thought there was a faint trail in the jellyfish and crab area, and all the way to the seafood restaurant." Which she privately thought was the height of bad taste to have attached to an aquarium, though right now, after shifting, those fishies in the tanks were starting to look startlingly like protein packs with incidental fins. "But it wasn't truly contiguous, and it...well, it didn't feel quite the same to me. I'd say there were two trails. Maybe three."

It was only as she saw the sudden look of alarm cross Rafiel's face, that Kyrie realized this was probably not the right thing to say.

"Three?" he said. "Are you sure?"

She shrugged. "Rafiel," she said, unable to fully keep her impatience out of her voice. "You know very well that you are the best sniffer of us all, when it comes to shifter-scent. I can only tell you what I smell...and it's probably less than you can sniff out."

But he shook his head, and swallowed hard. "No, the problem is that when you said it, it made sense, it clicked. Not one interrupted trail, but three trails. What the hell does that mean? A cabal of shifters, ready to kill people at the aquarium? What are we looking at here? A mob of shifters who have turned on all non-shifters? A shifter religion sacrificing the non-shifters?"

Kyrie shrugged. "Or just, perhaps, three people who happen to be shifters and who walked through the aquarium."

Rafiel grimaced, but nodded. "Oh, perhaps you are right. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but..."

"But our situation encourages paranoia?" she said. "Hiding from the world, unable to reveal what we are. Even in this multi-culti time, when every minority gets a pass simply for being a minority, we will never, ever, get such a pass. Because we are...dangerous?"

Another grimace that might have been an attempt at a smile. "I was going to say that sometimes paranoia is right, however little we like to admit it."

"Uh." Kyrie shrugged. "I would say we have insufficient data to say."

She started walking away from the bathroom area, and out of the monitors and clearly fake, Victorian-looking submarine hardware area, towards the stairs. The stairs were broad and spiral and surrounded by glass—giving them rather the look of an aquarium designed to contain people.

"Come on, Rafiel," she said, staring out at the blizzard's magnificent raging whiteness. She would guess during one of Colorado's many unclouded days, one would have a magnificent view from here of the city of Goldport, such as it was, sprawling at the base of the Rockies. Now you couldn't even see the office tower across the street. It was just white and more white, blowing and swirling as far as the eye could see.

And just as she thought this, she realized she was wrong—because in the middle of the storm, a flash of green and gold showed, at her eye level, three stories up from the ground.

"What the—" Rafiel blurted out from behind her. "Is that—"

And in the next second, Kyrie was sure that that was indeed her errant boyfriend in dragon form, because Tom, all of him, emerged from the storm, as close to the glass as he could fly and not crash into it. His expression looked alarmed as he stared in at them. If alarmed at his proximity to the glass, or with flying in a storm, or something else, it was hard to tell.

There was just a flash of terrified blue eyes, the dragon's mouth open in silent protest. And then...Tom flying away.

"Tell me he didn't just fly here through the storm to check on us?" Rafiel said.

And part of Kyrie wanted to tell him exactly that, except it depended on what Rafiel meant by checking on them. Kyrie was willing to bet that Tom wasn't jealous of their being out, alone, together. She was willing to bet that, because Tom had all but encouraged them to go out, even Tom wasn't that...paranoid as to change his mind so quickly. Besides...besides, if he didn't know he'd won that contest and won it for good, then Kyrie would give up on the whole relationship right now.

But it had looked to Kyrie exactly as though Tom had been checking up on them. Not in jealousy or fear that they were about to betray him, but in confused fear for them...Fear of something happening to them.

Where had he got that idea? And was he right?

* * *

Flying in the snow was far easier to talk about than to do. The part of Tom that remained Tom at the back of the dragon's brain was fairly sure that the dragons—if they'd ever existed except as shifters—could never have been creatures of cold climates.

A string of complaints came from the dragon's body, penetrating Tom's mind. Cold might make him ache less, but cold hurt by itself. And he couldn't see. And the wings got no traction against this air laden with snow, which kept accumulating on their broad and outspread surface, thereby multiplying the cold and the lack of movement.

It felt as though the dragon's wings and his toes would presently freeze so absolutely that they would fall off, like so many enigmatic pieces of flesh raining on urban Goldport. Rain of dragon parts. That would be a new one at least. Forget rains of fish.

And yet, Tom's mind, deep within, like an implacable rider on a restive horse, insisted with all his will power that they must—must—go to Kyrie. They must protect her. And Rafiel too. The big lump might have been Tom's rival at some point. He was still, doubtlessly, a big lump. Also, generally speaking, a pain in the behind, always appearing so relaxed and laid back and comfortable with himself, while Tom most of the time felt that his personality and mind were sort of like one of those statues kindergartners sculpt: made of itty bits and pieces too mishandled to ever cling together properly, and forming no more than a suggestion of a shape, rather than the shape itself. But still, Rafiel was a friend. Pain or not, he would stand—had stood by Tom—when it was down to kill or be killed. And also, Tom suspected, deep within, Rafiel was a more honorable man and a more noble one than he liked to admit even to himself.

Be it how it may, Kyrie was Tom's girlfriend and Rafiel was one of his very few friends. They would not be allowed to stand alone as they faced whatever and whoever that executioner creature might be.

His purpose impelling him, he flew as fast as he could through downtown, sometimes descending to the top level of the high buildings, where the houses and offices formed a sort of sheltered canyon. He wondered if someone would see him, out of a window or a door—or rather if they'd see the suggestion of a dragon flying in the storm. He wondered what cryptozoology rumors would rise from it—like the Lizard Man in Denver, or all those black panthers and black dogs that appeared everywhere.

By the time he reached the aquarium, minutes later, he'd almost convinced himself that Old Joe had dreamed the whole thing. It was all a nightmare conjured from the old shifter's brain and whatever memories remained in that confused amalgam of personality. There would be no one there with Rafiel and Kyrie, and he would be in trouble with Kyrie for having left the diner for no reason at all. He almost looked forward to that monumental scolding, because if Kyrie was scolding him, that would mean that she was all right. And that all his fears were unfounded.

And yet, dipping towards the parking lot of the aquarium, as he approached, to check how many people might be within and if he might have to shift form and hide, before he exposed them all, Tom saw that Rafiel's big, black SUV was not alone there. Parked just across from it—in what might have been, had the lines under the snow been visible, the immediately opposing space—was a low-slung Italian sports car.

Tom-the-dragon blinked at the red car, in confusion. It looked like a dormant beast that would, at any minute, fling up and fly or attack. Definitely attack, judging by the look of the vehicle.

Perhaps it is the car of an aquarium employee, said Tom's more reasonable human mind.

Right. Right, Tom's unreasonable human mind answered. I'm absolutely sure it is. Scientists and fish-feeders often own cars that look like that.

Well, the place has a restaurant, too. Perhaps it's the car of the owner.

To this, even the doubting Thomas within could not have interposed any serious rebuttal. Instead, it settled into a non-verbal response—a prickling at the back of Tom's long dragon neck...a feeling of uneasiness in the pit of his stomach. And it was no use at all his telling himself that he was being silly. He flew around the building and thought he caught a glimpse of Rafiel and Kyrie on the third-floor stairway, but it was not something he could swear to. The glass was thick and curved, and probably designed to ensure the privacy of those within at the expense of the curiosity of those without.

He flew around again, hoping they would come out, because then he could change and warn them. But there was nothing, except a suggestion of movement in a room where the aquariums seemed filled with the spindly forms of crabs. Tom had visited the aquarium with Keith once, a month ago—because one of Keith's would-be girlfriends worked there—and seemed to remember just such a room, right next to the restaurant. He and Keith had joked that the crabs were all probably terminally neurotic and tormented by dreams of drawn butter. But the movement—what seemed like a woman or a small man flitting around a corner was too brief to make sense of.

And yet, he worried. What if the executioner, whoever he was, was already inside, getting ready to ambush Kyrie and Rafiel around the corner of some tank, or push them into the shark tank? What could Tom do from out here?

He decided to land somewhere and shift, then see if he could break into the aquarium. In his misspent years as a transient, he'd often broken into places. Mostly into cars, when he absolutely needed transportation for a short period of time. Sometimes, into garden sheds, carriage houses or garages, in the coldest nights, to get some protection from the weather.

He'd never stolen anything in those break-ins and he'd felt positively virtuous about that, until Kyrie had made him understand the damage he caused, however minimal, still disturbed the lives of innocents.

Still, he had experience breaking into places. Granted, a garden shed was bound to have a flimsier lock than...well, a municipal aquarium, even—or perhaps particularly—a municipal aquarium run by a seafood restaurant chain. But all the same, he should be able to break in. And he should be able to find Kyrie and Rafiel. And warn them. Before they got pushed into the shark tank.

He took a half-circle flight away from the windows, looking for a place to land and shift, where he would be less likely to be seen from nearby buildings. This objective was made only slightly more difficult because he could not see into any of the buildings around, and therefore could not tell if anyone might be looking out of a window, and have enough visibility to survey the parking lot of the aquarium. He kind of doubted it, though.

His memories of the location of the aquarium, gathered during his visit, in sunnier—if briskly cold—weather, was that it sat on a corner, bordering two fairly well-traveled streets—Ocean Street, where the aquarium's postal address was—and Congregation Avenue, which led straight to the convention center in less than a mile. On the other side of those roads were office buildings. The chances of anyone being in one of those buildings, on a snowy evening, were very low. In fact, possibly, nonexistent. He'd just land somewhere.

Down below him, in the parking lot, a car door banged. Somehow, in his mind, a voice echoed—not the Great Sky Dragon's voice, but a voice just as immense, just as overpowering—Hey, Dragon Boy! it said. Come and be killed.

Tom looked down. By the Italian sports car stood a slim, dark-haired man, his head thrown back in defiance. He was naked, but he didn't seem to either realize it or care. He wore his nudity like others wore expensive suits. His head tilted up, he favored Tom with a wide and feral smile. What is it, little one? Afraid of me? I'll take you in fair combat. As fair as it can be when pitting an adult against an infant.

Tom wasn't afraid—at least the dragon Tom had become wasn't afraid. The human, locked within the dragon's mind was not afraid either, or not exactly. He was not afraid of that creature down there, even if he was the vaunted executioner. For all he knew, the man would also change into a dragon, and come after him. And then he might be afraid. And then he might find a reason to kill this creature. But not yet.

And he didn't react to the voice in his head, as he had first reacted to a similar intrusion by the Great Sky Dragon. Finding someone in your mind once—like any other type of event that is supposed to be impossible but isn't—could hurtle anyone into a panic. The human mind was an amazing instrument, though. The second time of someone speaking in his mind didn't make Tom feel as violated, or as scared. It was just a voice. Just a voice in his mind. Nothing more.

He took a slow pass over the parking lot, looking down at the person standing by the car. All too human and weak-looking. If Tom was worried about anything, it was not the possibility this person might kill him. No, it was the fear that he might kill this person.

For years, while Tom was a transient, without friends or a fixed place, one fear had pursued Tom relentlessly: the fear that he would shift and lose self-control, and kill someone. It had been his first fear when he'd shifted into a dragon.

And he'd managed to control it—most of the time. The only people he'd ever killed were shifters who were trying to kill him. And even then, if there had been another way, he'd have used another way to stop them. He didn't think he'd ever eaten anyone—not even in the drug-haze days of his past.

He didn't want to kill anyone now. Not even this creature—whether or not he was the executioner that Old Joe had gone on about. Tom swooped again, around the man, slightly lower, trying to think of what to do.

His instincts told him he should leave now, but if he did he would leave Kyrie and Rafiel unprotected. That he couldn't do. That would negate his coming here to protect them. He had to, at least, warn them.

He swooped down again, closer. There had to be something he could do, without killing the man. Grab him by an arm and throw him away from the aquarium, perhaps. Then, while he took time to return—or while he shifted into a dragon and came after Tom, Tom would have a chance to warn Kyrie and Rafiel.

But as Tom got close, he saw the man was smoking a cigarette, completely impassive, disregarding the huge dragon closing in on him.

Tom could have bit off his head with a single motion. He could have rent it from his body with his claws. But he couldn't do either, not to a defenseless-seeming human.

Instead, he flew by so close the tip of his wing almost touched the man, but he sheared off, sharply, and executed a circle, coming back, still aware that he couldn't kill the man—that his own self-control wouldn't allow it—but hoping, hoping against hope that the man would be scared.

Oh, are we playing a game? a laughing voice asked in his mind. And suddenly Tom had no control over his body. None. He fell from the sky, like a pebble, unable to stop himself.

Hurtling towards the parking lot, Tom saw the man shift. Not into a dragon. The creature who stood in the parking lot hadn't been seen on Earth for millennia uncountable. Tom recognized it, immediately, from its display in Denver's Natural History Museum, though. It was a dire wolf: tall of shoulder, massive of bone, its teeth huge, unwieldy daggers flashing in the light.

And in that moment he regained control of his body, enough control at least, to tumble to an ungraceful semi-stop, skidding on his tail on the frozen ground.

The creature sprang, with a lightness that belied his size. A sharp pain stabbed into Tom's awareness, and his wing was seized and ripped. He turned, claw raised, ready to strike, but the dire wolf had moved, quickly, more quickly than should be possible, and bit hard on Tom's wrist. Only Tom's last-second recoil prevented him from ripping out Tom's throat. The yellow eyes of the monster shone with unholy glee amid grey fur, and Tom would have flown away—maimed wing and blood-dripping paw. But he couldn't. Kyrie and Rafiel were in there. They could be coming out any moment. What would this monster do to them?

* * *

"What the—!" Kyrie said, as she came through the door, and saw Tom being attacked by a creature out of a museum's diorama. For a moment that was all she could think, her mind seemingly frozen on that point—wondering if she was dreaming, if all those visits to the museum had finally affected her sanity, as she told Tom they were bound to. The museum was his favorite haunt, when they took a day off to go to Denver, and sometimes she felt as though she could have drawn every display from memory—including the broken places in the bassilosaurus skeleton.

She heard a soft growl at her side. Rafiel. A look at the policeman showed him, by touch, without even seeming to notice, stripping off his clothes.

And Kyrie, feeling the shift shudder through her, as she stared at the unlikely creature striking at her boyfriend, thought that this creature moved like nothing she'd ever seen. His movement was like a special effect, where the movie editors cut and pasted frames without regard, so that they displaced someone from one place to the other, without moving them the intervening distance. She was sure this was not what was happening, but the effect was rather as though the creature teleported from one place to the next instantly. And it was biting, rounding on Tom, and slashing, rending, always attacking.

Rafiel, already in lion form—tawny and sleek and large, though not half the size of the creature battling Tom—rushed into the battle, his mane snow-flecked. And Kyrie charged, right behind.

It was folly, her human mind said, sheer folly, to rush like this into battle with a creature that seemed supernatural in its movements. But what else could she do?

The creature teleported towards Rafiel—materializing right in front of him, Tom's blood dripping from the huge dagger teeth, a look of unholy amusement in the slitlike yellow eyes. It lunged at Rafiel and it was clear from the movement that it meant to take Rafiel by the throat, or perhaps to bite his neck in two, killing him in one of the few ways a shifter could be killed.

But as the massive-fanged mouth opened, Tom leapt, and bit the creature sharply on the hind quarters, causing it to close its jaws just above Rafiel's neck, barely touching him with its fangs.

And now Tom was raking what seemed to be a badly bleeding paw across the creature's flanks and making a high, insane hiss of challenge.

And Kyrie, who could see that the creature's eyes were—startlingly—more amused than scared, jumped in, her fur ruffled, growling low in the back of her throat.

The creature rounded on her, ignoring Tom's attack on its exposed flank and pinning Rafiel, casually, beneath a massive paw. It sniffed at Kyrie and the slitted yellow eyes looked more unholy and more amused than ever. Hello, pretty kitten girl. It would be a shame to kill you, wouldn't it?

The voice, in her mind, made her jump. She knew it was this creature in front of her, and not the Great Sky Dragon, but she suddenly understood why Tom had reacted as he did to the dragon in his mind. She heard a keen of not quite pain escape the panther's throat and she felt what seemed like a dirty finger rifling quickly through her mind. Interesting mind, Kitten. Better defended than Lion Boy's. The feel of unholy laughter. But not by much.

And then, suddenly, there was a streak of red from above, and a thing that looked much like a falling boulder through the snow resolved itself into Red Dragon, flying in.

It roared something that sounded much like "No," or as close to the word "no" as a dragon's mouth could form. And in the next moment it landed in front of the dire wolf. Kyrie expected the wolf to port away or to attack, but he didn't do either. Instead, he stood in place, looking confused.

Red Dragon let out a stream of flame at the dire wolf, just as Kyrie wondered why Tom hadn't done so. And the dire wolf wasn't there.

What sounded much like "spoilsport," echoed in her mind, and the dire wolf seemed to be quite gone, though they couldn't tell where. Moments later, a sound that seemed disturbingly like human laughter floated from the place where it had retreated.

* * *

For Tom it all went too fast. First, he was fighting a creature that seemed to be everywhere at once. His only hope was to take to the sky, but before he could—his bleeding wing, hurting every time he moved, threw off his balance—the creature struck him again. And again. At both front paws, and back paw.

And slowly it dawned on Tom that if the dire wolf could strike him like this, at will, and wherever it chose, then it could have killed him. That it wasn't killing him should have been a relief, but it wasn't. Because he had a feeling that the creature was playing with him the way cats play with mice.

And then there was Rafiel, who seemed to appear out of nowhere, and Tom wanted to yell at him and Kyrie to run, but the dragon throat didn't work properly and he couldn't give them the warning in a way that they could understand. And the only thing for it was for him to intervene and save Rafiel from the dire wolf, even though it probably would mean Tom would die for it. But he'd come to save Kyrie and Rafiel, and he was going to do it, if it was his last action on Earth.

He launched himself at the dire wolf, biting and scratching where he could reach. And then...

And then the creature sniffed Kyrie—at least it seemed like that to Tom, through the red mist his vision had become—and then...and then there was Conan. Conan had flamed towards the dire wolf, making Tom wonder why he, himself, hadn't. What was wrong with him? He'd sat here and let the creature maul him, with hardly any attempt at defense. Certainly without using his main weapon. Why?

And then the creature fled and there had been a suggestion of mocking laughter in Tom's mind. He stood, under the snow, bleeding, shivering, wondering if the creature was gone for good, or it was waiting for Tom to shift, if it was waiting for Tom to become more vulnerable, if—

"Shift, Tom," Kyrie said. "Now. You can't get in the car as a dragon."

"You left without me—" Conan was saying, clearly already shifted. "You left without me. Do you know what Himself would have done to me if you had died?"

"Shut up, Conan," Kyrie's voice, curt. "Tom, shift now."

And Tom realized Conan and Rafiel and Kyrie were in the car, and that they had clothes, and Kyrie was dressing in the backseat, and he blinked, once, twice, once the human way, up-down, then the dragon way, his nictating eyelids flickering side to side, then the human way again, and he groaned out loud as his body twisted and bent and...shifted.

His muscles were still writhing to proper shape beneath his skin, his scalp tingling as the bones of his skull adjusted, his vision double as his eyes changed, when he flopped into the back seat of the SUV, falling across the scratchy fabric.

Kyrie, mostly dressed, reached across him to shut the car door. As it slapped shut, Rafiel stomped on the gas. The wheels spun a moment, and then they were hurtling out of the parking lot in a guided slide that careened gracefully around a curve and past a—he was sure of it—red light.

"What if he had come back?" Tom asked. "As...as a dire wolf? And killed us while we were human and vulnerable?"

"Was that what that was?" Rafiel asked. Incredibly, he seemed to Tom to be dressing and driving at once, through the blinding white snowstorm. Tom blinked, but the impression remained, as Rafiel put on a sleeve of his shirt, while he held the wheel with the other hand and then presumably steered by the force of his imagination while he used both hands to quickly button his shirt. "A dire wolf?"

"Yes," Tom said, throwing himself back against the seat, and straightening as he felt the pain of open wounds at his back. "Oh, damn, I'm bleeding all over your upholstery."

"Never mind that," Rafiel said. "My uncle has a car detail place. Kyrie, would you look under the seat? There's a first aid kit there, and there should be another pair of pants and a shirt, too, besides the ones Conan got. They'll be long on you, Tom, but it's all I have."

"I left clothes, in the trunk of Kyrie's car."

"Of course. You can change into them there, if you prefer...I just thought..." Rafiel took another corner in a way that appeared to be skating on two tires. "Kyrie? How badly wounded is he?"

Kyrie had turned Tom halfway towards the window. "Gash across the back," she said. "I suppose that's the tissue your wings extrude out of. Looks vicious but it's mostly skin, and the antibiotic cream is stopping the bleeding, I think."

"Should we go to the hospital?" Rafiel asked.

"Not for this, but his hands..."

And Tom, who was aware both his hands stung like mad, but also that he could still use them—he'd checked—growled low in his throat. "No hospital. What are we going to tell them? Animal bite? Leave it alone. You know it will heal fast."

"Dragons heal very fast," Conan said quickly, in the sort of singsong voice that denoted he'd learned this somewhere, by rote.

By touch, almost by instinct, Tom reached into the first aid kit, grabbing cotton wool and hydrogen peroxide and a roll of self-clinging bandages, cleaned away the worst of the wounds and started bandaging his left hand with his right. Kyrie started helping him halfway through, and by the time she'd got his left hand neatly bandaged, and snipped the excess bandage, she said, "He'll do, Rafiel. And it should be all right by tomorrow. Will hurt a bit to use his hands, but..."

"You'll go to the bed-and-breakfast next to the diner," Rafiel said. "What is it called?"

"Spurs and Lace," Kyrie said. "It's not as kinky as it sounds. I think they thought it was an allusion to the Old West."

"Whatever. Tom, I want you to go to Spurs and Lace and go to bed. I'll man the diner for the rest of your shift."

"Like hell you will," Tom said. "Don't be stupid. You can't handle the new stove and grill. And you don't know anything about cooking or serving, either. And that is if Keith hasn't set the place on fire in the last half hour, because he doesn't know much more than you do." He set his jaw, and caught sight of himself in the rear view mirror and realized with a shock that he looked much like his father in a mood. "I'll do the rest of my shift, thank you very much. We'll see if Anthony can come in tomorrow morning, and if not we'll call our backups till someone makes it in. There was that woman—Laura Miller?—who applied last week. We could always give her a chance."

Rafiel seemed confused. He cleared his throat. "But you'll be in pain," he said. "And I..." He cleared his throat again. "I owe you my life."

Tom shrugged. "So, shut up and drive."

"I think," Kyrie said, "you should at least go to Spurs and Lace for a few minutes and shower. At least if they have a room and they should. They usually have rooms during the week. On the weekend they get all booked up with romantic couples or whatever."

Tom sniffed at himself. "All right," he said, realizing he needed to concede on something, and also that fighting a dire wolf had not improved his rather dubious hygiene from this morning.

"Just don't shift in their bathroom," Kyrie said, as she slapped bandages on his back, then handed him a bundle of clothing. "You might as well wear this and take the other clothes to change." And then, quickly, "Tom, why didn't you just call? I mean, you had my cell number, and Rafiel's. I understand you came over to protect us from this—that you knew this...creature was after us, somehow, but...Why not just call?"

Tom shook his head. "Your phone battery was out, Kyrie. You never remember to charge it."

"Oh," Kyrie said.

"All right," Tom said again as he slipped the rather loose, long pants on. "Rafiel, I want you to come with me."

"What? To shower?" Rafiel asked. "I said thank you already—"

"Feeble," Tom said, rating the joke. "No. So I can talk to you about what sent me out there, and what I think that creature is. Without anyone in the diner listening in."

"I should come," Conan said. "I should listen in. I'm supposed to protect you."

All three of them yelled "No" at the same time, leaving it to Tom to explain, "No offense, Conan, but you're not exactly a friend."

"You hired me! And I was sent by Himself, I—"

"Himself is not exactly a friend, either," Tom said. "At least he hasn't proven himself one."

Conan frowned, wrinkles forming on his forehead, as though he were trying to understand a very difficult concept. "You're a dragon," he said. "You belong to him!"

"Beg your pardon? I don't belong to anyone but myself," Tom said, his voice echoing his father's iciest tones. "In case you haven't heard there was this guy called Lincoln who freed the slaves."

"No," Conan shook his head, looking forlorn. "You don't understand. You're a dragon. You belong to Himself. Like...like family."

"Oh, and if you think that's a recommendation or reassuring, I should tell you a bit more about my family," Tom said, grinning impishly. Kyrie smiled at him. "I have never gone out of my way to obey them or to belong to them, either."

Conan opened his mouth, as though to reply, but seemed to realize it would be useless, and frowned slightly, as if he were facing a situation for which no one had prepared him.

"Won't it look weird?" Rafiel asked. "My going in with you, when you're going to get a room and shower?"

"I'm going to get a room for myself and Kyrie, for tonight and tomorrow," Tom said. "Probably three nights, actually. I can't imagine us going home before that. Heck, if we go home before a week, it will be a small miracle. I'll explain in detail what happened to our bathroom. But as for why you're going with me to the room, that's obvious." He raised his bandaged hands. "I was in an accident. We'll let them think it was a car accident. And you want to make sure I'm not going to pass out or anything."

"Oh," Rafiel said.

"And then I can tell you about the dire wolf. If I'm not mistaken, he's the person that Old Joe described as the executioner for the Ancient Ones."

* * *

"What did you mean 'executioner'?" Rafiel asked. He leaned against a heavy carved rosewood table in Tom's rented room at Spurs and Lace.

Kyrie must have been right about the crazy idea behind the name. The suite felt like a mashup of Old West and Old Whorehouse. It was bigger than a room, consisting of a bedroom with a queen-size bed, a sofa dripping in velvet and fringe, a dresser that would take five men and a winch to transport, and a hat rack with three cowboy hats on it, and a small sitting area in a projection that was part of a tower, surrounded by windows. The sitting area was outfitted with two too-precious-for-words carved wood armchairs, whose cushions were tormented by a print featuring cowboy boots and roses in random profusion.

Then there was the bathroom, which had a heavy rosewood table facing it. Above the table hung a gold-leaf-framed mirror and above that, on the flowered-wallpaper wall, a pair of spurs.

Rafiel shut his eyes, because you could go nuts trying to make sense of this stuff, and said, "What could he mean by executioner? And why would anyone want to execute us?"

"I think it was the larvae, you know, the ones who died in the fire. Old Joe says the Ancient Ones can feel...death on that scale. And that they're looking for the culprits."

"The culprits!" Rafiel heard the sound that came out of his throat, derisive like a cat spitting. "What about the shifters who were being murdered before that?"

"I don't know," Tom sounded exhausted. Rafiel heard the water go off, then the shower curtain close. "Perhaps they think that we did those too."

"And who are they?" Rafiel asked, feeling the anger in his voice and knowing he was projecting his fear into anger and throwing it at Tom. "These Ancient Ones," Rafiel said with less force. "It's pretty absurd to be judged by people you don't know and whose rules you can't understand. Who are they? What do they want?"

Tom came out of the bathroom, fully dressed, though it didn't seem like he'd have had time. He was limping, and his foot showed red slashes across it. Rafiel remembered the dire wolf biting at Tom's back paw.

Tom limped to the bed, sat down, and started putting socks on. "They're a group. I think they're a group of shifters who have lived very long lives."

"Oh?" Rafiel said. "What's very long? And should we be looking for a group then, or just one man?" Something tickled at the back of his mind, but he couldn't quite pinpoint it.

Tom shrugged. "I honestly don't know," he said. "Because, you see...Old Joe..." He shrugged again, wincing as he stood tentatively on his wounded foot and looked about for his boot. "Old Joe, you know, is vague. He drifts in and out of reality, and it's hard to tell. He told me that the Ancient Ones were around before horses."

"Before horses evolved? Or before they were domesticated?" Rafiel asked. "Because either way..."

"It's unlikely? Yeah. I know. That's why I said he's unreliable. And he said that this creature, the dire wolf, had come to town, that he was their executioner, but he didn't say that the rest of them hadn't come too. Or how many there were. For all I know, and presuming that this story is true—and the executioner thing seems to be—then, you know, it could be that we're looking for anything between a busload of shifters as old as time, and two or three sixty-year-old shifters." He shrugged. "I couldn't tell you."

But his words had tickled something in Rafiel's mind. Two or three shifters. "At the aquarium," he said, "Kyrie and I caught at least two different scent trails. Maybe three."

"Oh?" Tom tensed, looking up. "Any of them our friend the wolf?"

Rafiel shook his head. "I don't think so," he said. "At least the smell wasn't right. Though all the scents were so faded..." He shrugged.

"You know," Tom said, "that's the other choice. No Ancient Ones, no conspiracy of shifters. Just Old Joe going senile, and one homicidal dire wolf shifter." He'd found his boots, and was putting them on. "Who knows how many of us are homicidal? It was always my fear that I'd go that way." Tom's boots were work boots, probably picked up second- or thirdhand at some time when Tom was doing manual labor. But even looking vaguely like weapons of mayhem, they were part of Tom.

Rafiel had seen Tom turn back into high danger to recover them. Lacing them as tightly as that had to hurt his injured foot, but who was Rafiel to interfere with his friend's masochism?

"Unfortunately," Tom said, "I don't think that's it. I don't think it's just Old Joe and our dire acquaintance. When has our life been that easy?"

* * *

Kyrie shaved broad swathes off the gyro beef roast rotating on its vertical metal spike, and turned her back to the counter and the customers, to eat with the voracious appetite a recent shift brought on.

The diner had become packed, while she was gone—every table filled, even the table at which she'd first seated Conan. A couple was squeezed together into the too-small booth, cooing and billing and holding warm cups. Keith was working the grill like a pro, though Kyrie noted that he sometimes let things go a little too long, and the edges of omelets were often brown as Tom didn't allow them to be, and the bacon seemed full of burnt crunchy bits. And he was clearly late with the orders.

However, to do Keith justice, that last might not be so much his fault as Conan's. The new waiter, newly returned amid the tables of the packed diner looked much like a fly that had hit the window pane once too many times. He was trying to serve everyone clamoring for his attention and seemed completely lost. That he only had one good arm to hold the serving tray didn't help, as his other arm, at best, helped stabilize things, but could not help with the weight, which meant he carried far less per trip out to the tables than she normally did. The orders were piled on the counter. As Keith turned and put another one down and called out, "Table 23," he seemed to realize the futility of it, saying, "Oh, never mind," and putting five or six orders on a tray, he rushed out to distribute the platters, far faster than Conan seemed able to.

"That little rat you guys hired left me alone while you were gone," Keith said. "I don't know where he went but..."

"Don't worry about it," Kyrie said. "He went to help us. We know where he was."

Keith raised his shoulder sulkily, but didn't say anything for a while, till he said sheepishly, "I've kept people quiet," as he returned in what seemed like seconds, to tend to the grill, "by giving them free hot chocolate. I hope that's okay."

"It's fine," Kyrie said.

"Also, of course, there's nothing else open today which helped keep them here."

Kyrie took the point, and having finished a plate of gyro meat, she put the plate with the others collected from tables, and reached under the counter for her apron, intending to go out to clear the backlog as fast as possible. Only her hands, thrust under the counter, met with something like sharp little needles. On her pulling the hands back, the needles withdrew, only to stick her again when she reached out once more, only much less further in than before. "What the—?" she said, reaching out.

"Oh, that's Not Dinner," Keith said, flipping a burger.

"What?" she asked, as she knelt to look in the dark shelf where they kept folded aprons to the left and the time sheets to the right. Golden eyes sparkled back at her, and she looked closer, to make out a little orange ball of fluff making his way very fast to lay possessively atop the time sheets. "It's a kitten."

"Yeah," Keith said. "Not Dinner."

"I don't have the slightest intention of eating him," Kyrie said, upset, as she reached in and managed to retrieve the apron before the avenging claws got her. "You know you can't have your pet here. We're not allowed to have animals, except service animals, on the premises."

"He's not my pet."

Kyrie took a deep breath, deciding everyone had gone mad, and Keith right now was representative of everyone. What on earth could he mean? That the diner was suffering an infestation of cats, like some places had sudden infestations of rats? It didn't bear probing, not now. Grabbing a tray and filling it with orders, and picking up the coffee pot for warmups, she started among the tables, clearing up the backlog.

Many regulars looked happy to see her, and other people just looked happy to get their orders at last. In a few minutes, she had the main of it taken care of and, having directed Conan to start bussing newly emptied tables, returned to fill the dishwasher, restart the coffee, and pursue the interesting matter of a sudden plague of kittens.

Before she could, though, and while she was bent over the dishwasher, filling it with dirty plates, Tom and Rafiel came in, and Tom made an exclamation of distress and touched Kyrie's arm. "Kyrie, where's Old Joe?"

She looked up. "I don't know. Where was he?"

"I left him in booth number five."

"Well, he wasn't here when I came in," she said.

Tom swore under his breath and, at her startled look, said, "Not your fault. He must have gone alligator again. I hope he's not going to go after one of the customers in the parking lot. And I hope we find him, because we need to talk to him."

As he spoke, Tom reached over the grill, as Keith pulled a stack of cooked burgers aside and said, "I made these for you. I figured you'd need them."

"Great thought. Thanks," Tom said, grabbing the burgers and eating one after the other, like a kid with candy. "I'll take over the grill in a moment."

"I gave Not Dinner some milk and a few pieces of hamburger," Keith added.

"Not...oh. The kitten," Tom said. "Good."

Kyrie noted that Tom seemed to know about the kitten. In fact, she would bet the kitten was Tom's. Tom and his strays! Meanwhile, Rafiel had gone out the back door. He returned in a moment, snow glinting in his hair. "He's not out back, Tom. I can't find him. There's no trail I can see."

* * *

Tom took over the grill. "Go attend to the tables," he told Keith. "I'll take care of cooking."

Keith hesitated, and Tom was sure that he was hoping to hear what was going on, but he wanted to talk to Kyrie and he didn't want to leave the tables unattended. "We'll let you in on it," he said. "I promise."

"That's not it," Keith said. "I want to talk to you." He spoke in an undertone, and looked worried. "There's someone..."

"Right," Kyrie said from Tom's side. "I'll go do those two tables that just came in."

"So?" Tom said.

"It's this girl..."

Tom choked on gurgled laughter at the idea that anyone at all would come to him for romantic advice, but he managed to stop and make his features attentive. "Yes?"

"She's...she goes to school with me, and she looks really...I don't know how to put this, but I think she's a shifter. That was why I came by today. If I bring her, can you...sniff her out?"

Tom looked at him, and felt his brow wrinkle into a frown. "Probably," he said. "Rafiel can for sure. Why do you think she's a shifter?"

Keith shrugged. "I can't quite put my finger on it, but she looks tired in the morning, and...you know...she talks a lot about strange animals. She had a book on crypto zoology. It just seems..."

"Does she change clothes a lot?"

"Not that I've noticed, but..." Keith shrugged. "Just a feeling, okay? I've been around you guys enough for that."

"Yeah," Tom said. "Fine." He returned to cooking and, remembering that Rafiel, too, would be having shift-hunger, he grabbed one of the frozen t-bones from the freezer by the grill, and threw it on. His mind was working on the problem he and Rafiel had discussed. The idea of a group or groups of shifters skulking around making decisions about their lives, that they could not possibly anticipate. Did this group have anything to do with the bones in the aquarium? And how could Tom and Kyrie defend themselves from the dire wolf, who seemed capable of teleporting?

They spent the rest of the night watching the door and looking out back around the dumpster, but as far as Tom could tell, both any possible hostiles and the alligator shifter were miles away.

On a normal night there were several lulls, but as the wind howled, fiercer and fiercer outside the diner, rattling gusts of snow against the broad windows and leaving them spattered as if with the spray-snow people used for decorations, customers drifted regularly in and out.

It seemed to Tom, though he didn't look closely at anyone at the tables—kept busy with constant cook orders instead—that some people came in several times during the night. They were probably being kept awake by the wind and the snow, or perhaps the Victorians converted into apartment houses around here weren't exactly airtight and had inadequate heat. Tom remembered staying in many rental rooms and apartments where the temperature, on full-blown heat, never reached above tepid.

The constant stream of orders changed overnight, from burgers to pies and coffee and finally to omelets, eggs and bacon, sausages and hash browns. He felt as if he would never want to smell a cooking egg again in his life, and the pain in his wounded hands—continuously rehurt by his ceaseless work—had gone from a dull throbbing to a barely-keeping-from-screaming burn. He'd sent Kyrie away to rest a couple of hours ago, afraid that if no one else came in to relieve him at the grill he'd have to let Kyrie relieve him, and give her a quick crash course on breakfast dishes on the new stove.

He could have cried with joy when he saw Anthony come in. "It was getting cabin feverish at home," he said, sheepishly. "It's only a one-bedroom apartment. And the wind seems to have died down some, so Cecily fell asleep. You guys can go rest some."

Tom nodded and removed his apron, shoving it under the counter. He was surprised by a sudden feel of pinpricks piercing through his bandages. Looking under the counter, he got a sudden hiss and battle scream from the orange kitten.

He took a quick look over his shoulder at Anthony. He couldn't imagine leaving the kitten behind for Anthony to deal with, so as he grabbed his jacket from under the counter and slipped it on, Tom reached under and grabbed the protesting bundle of kitten and, ignoring the yowls of defiance, slipped it into his pocket.

* * *

Kyrie woke up to someone snoring on top of her. In a moment of unique confusion, she thought Tom must have decided to sleep on the bed after all, and he must be snoring, only the snore was so distant and tiny, that it couldn't be Tom. She wondered, momentarily, as she struggled with what seemed to be several tons of gravel on her eyelids, whether Tom could have shrunk, because she felt a very warm and vibrating body—if a very tiny one—laid across the space between her breasts.

Her mind finally added up that these impressions made no sense, and brought her awake with a sudden jar. Her beginning to rise was met with sharp little needles to the chin and, opening her sleepy eyes, she saw a small orange blur. "Uh?" she said, which seemed the height of eloquence just then. She blinked and saw the sun shining fully across the room and onto the bed, and Tom blissfully asleep mostly on and partly off the sofa next to the bed. He had dark shadows under his eyes, and looked paler than usual. He'd taken his boots and socks off in his sleep, allowing her to see the bandage on his foot, and he was sleeping on his side, probably to avoid hurting his injured back.

Kyrie blinked at the kitten on her breasts. "Hello, Not Dinner," she said in a singsong voice. "Are you one of Tom's strays?"

The kitten purred and licked first one paw, then the other. Kyrie had to admit he was handsome, "In a conceited male feline sort of way." She put her hand out to his tiny head and petted it, feeling the curve of the cranium beneath her fingers. "Mind you, you're much cuter than Rafiel and you can tell him I said that." She cast another look at Tom. She was sure she knew how this story went. Her boyfriend had found the kitten out, somewhere, under the snow. And since he couldn't resist strays, be they human or not, he'd brought it in out of the cold.

She wondered if Tom had thought that cats pooped or that he needed to provide himself with a litter box for the critter. "What are we going to do with him?" she asked. "He adopts the most impractical creatures." But, as Not Dinner purred happily and started a kneading motion at her throat, she couldn't blame Tom. And she hoped Tom liked hapless felines. She happened to know that the bed-and-breakfast allowed pets. There was a big sign in the foyer proclaiming four-pawed guests welcome and Kyrie didn't think it meant shifters. And she was sure the lady, a great cat lover, would find her a litter box for the newest member of the family.

Then she must find someone to fix the bathroom so they could return home. She wondered if one of Rafiel's ubiquitous and very useful relatives happened to be a plumber. If Rafiel found them help within his odd family, it would save explaining what sort of cataclysm had happened in that bathroom. Rafiel could make up whatever he wanted or nothing. His family had to know that there was something very strange about their relative, but none of them seemed to mind covering up for him.

"Right," she said, picking up the kitten, as she slipped out of bed, and dropping him atop the sleeping Tom. "You keep the dragon company while I get decent and go about finding you a litter box."

She fumbled in her suitcase for her robe and slipped it on, before opening the door. And then she saw the headline on the local paper laid outside the door. And shrieked.

* * *

Tom woke up with Kyrie shrieking, and saw Not Dinner rush towards her and the open door. "Kyrie," he said. "Not Dinner."

Kyrie bent down just in time to stop the tiny animated projectile attempting to run out the door, and grab him in her hand, even as she scooped up the paper with her other hand. She closed the door with her foot and returned to Tom. "Look at this," she said, and turned the paper towards him so that he could read the above-the-fold headline.

The Weekly Inquirer—which was a daily paper, a dissonance of nomenclature that bothered no one in Goldport—normally printed city news first page, relegating the national and international news to the middle sections where—it was felt in town—the rest of the world belonged, being far less important than their concerns.

Local news normally consisted of some business moving to town, some business moving out; an event of importance in the life of the mayor; some trial for fraud or embezzlement; a parade; or what Tom referred to as "pretty puppy" news. Today Tom would have expected the big headline to be about the snowstorm. And it was. At least the headline just beneath the title of the paper, in dark blue letters, was "Goldport Slammed by Storm." But above the fold, and in screaming red letters just beneath the newspaper's name was "Strange Animals Seen Around Town." And beneath that "Dragons and Saber-Toothed Tigers and Smoking Squirrels."

"Smoking squirrels?" he said, looking up at Kyrie, whose hand was shaking so much that the newspaper was oscillating before his eyes.

"Whatever. But dragons? Saber-tooth?"

"It wasn't a saber-tooth," Tom said, reasonably. "It was a dire wolf."

"Oh, yes, and I'm sure that the international spotters of extinct animals would care," she said, as she set the kitten on top of him and started reading from the paper. "Last night, amid the howling gusts of the storm—who writes this paper? The Bronte sisters?—a man passing by a building near the aquarium swears he saw in the parking lot a dragon or some other large creature battling it out with what he swears was a saber-toothed tiger. With great presence of mind he snapped a photo with his cell phone." Kyrie stretched the paper towards Tom so he could see an indistinct picture of dark shapes amid white snow. "He took a picture of us." Kyrie said.

If Tom squinted and sort of looked at it sideways, the dark blobs in the snow did look like Kyrie, the dire wolf and himself. In shifted forms. Or perhaps like three sacks of potatoes. "Kyrie, it's completely fuzzy. No one could recognize a dragon in that."

"No, but...if it hadn't been snowing, someone could have gotten a real picture of you and me and the dire wolf."

"All right. I will do my best not to get in fights with homicidal maniacs," he said, and sat up. "At least not when people might get a clear picture of me. Do you have any idea how I should sell this truce to the homicidal maniacs?"

But Kyrie only looked at him with a blank and panicked look. "But they know. Someone knows."

"Kyrie!" Tom said. "How many times do people read this sort of thing, or think they see it, or report it? It doesn't make any difference. Black panthers up in Ohio, I remember reports of that—"

"Yeah, a lot of them when I lived there."

"Oh, really?" he smiled briefly. "Well, I was on the cover of the Inquirer once. I mean, the real one, the tabloid. Someone got me, flying over town, with a telephoto lens. No one believed it of course. Not after half the tabloids spent the nineties reporting on the president's alien baby." He put his hand out to her, and held her wrist. "No one will believe it, Kyrie. That picture doesn't look any better than the countless pictures of the abominable snowman. And if it did, people would say it was Photoshopped. Calm down will you? Everything is fine. And look, about the cat, if you don't want it—"

"No, I always wanted a cat and he seems very nice...in an insufferable male feline way."

"I don't know if he's a male, I just—"

"Oh, he's a male, trust me. I just know." She grinned, and tossed the newspaper down. "Right, I must go and find him a litter box."

By the time she came back, carrying a small plastic box filled with grey granules, Tom was reading the paper, frowning, very puzzled over reports that a giant squirrel—the size of a German shepherd—had been seen in various locations downtown "wearing a beret and smoking cigarettes," he told Kyrie. "I mean, and you're afraid people will believe the thing about the dragon when they finish with this."

Kyrie looked confused. "Are you sure it's not someone like us? I mean...a shifter squirrel?"

"The size of a German shepherd and wearing a beret? What are the chances?"

"Not high," Kyrie said. "But if it's true..."

"If it's true," Tom said, feeling as though he had a bit of ice wedged in his stomach, "then he's gone completely around the bend. Which I suppose would make him an ideal suspect for the aquarium murder."

"And perhaps for whoever unleashed the executioner on us," Kyrie said.

At that moment, the phone rang. And Kyrie sprang towards it. "It's Rafiel," she said.

* * *

Tom raised his eyebrows at Kyrie, as she pushed the button on the speaker and Rafiel's voice filled the room. He sounded nervous...or perhaps hassled was a better term. "Kyrie?"

"And Tom," Kyrie said. "We're on the speaker."

"Oh? Oh. Good. That saves me telling you stuff twice."

"What stuff?" Tom asked.

"Well...this morning, we got a call. At the station. They found..."

"Another arm?" Kyrie asked.

"Yes, but in this case, there was a body attached to it. Badly mauled. Aquarium. We're...processing it."

"Do you need our help?" Tom asked.

"Processing a body?" Rafiel asked, incredulous.

"No. With...anything."

There was a hesitation. Rafiel cleared his throat. "Yeah, but I can't..." His car horn sounded. "Did you see the paper, this morning?"

"The squirrel?"

"And the...you and the dire wolf."

"And?" Tom asked impatiently, waiting—fearing—what would come next but needing to hear it because until he heard, it was always worse than he thought. Until he heard it, he would think he'd been found, he'd been recognized, he'd been...

"And this morning, when we were called in, there were already reporters in the parking lot. From the Weekly Inquirer. They were looking for fur or scales, or who knows what. But they got hold of the murder, right at the beginning. And considering, they seem really interested...you know, the thing is the Weekly Inquirer was bought recently?" He seemed to wait for them to comment and when all that Kyrie and Tom did was exchange a look, he clicked his tongue. "The Weekly Inquirer was bought by Covert Corp."

"Covert what?"

"The corp. thing is sort of misleading. I mean, they are a corporation. But they are a family company. They own several magazines. Crosswords, mystery. But the most important property, the one they started with, is called Unknown. It's a magazine of cryptozoology."

"Crypto what?"

"Animals that aren't supposed to exist, or animals that aren't supposed to be there. Dragons and...that."

"Oh. But if they own many companies...What could it mean for the WI in particular?"

"The patriarch of the clan, Lawrence Stoneman...He's very hands-on, you could say. He seems to keep one of his kids in charge of each place the corp buys. His daughter, Miranda, is in charge of the Weekly Inquirer. And she grew up on cryptozoology. I think their interest in the murder is secondary, frankly, as opposed to what interesting animals they might find lurking around. In other words..." Rafiel hesitated.

"We can none of us afford to be obvious?" Kyrie said.

"With a maniac stalking us, and a second murder at the aquarium—where there are two, maybe three shifters running around?" Tom said.

"Exactly. So, yes, I do want your help, but I do need to be more careful about getting that help than I've been. I'll come in if I can, tonight. Meanwhile, if you must shift, be careful where you do it, and who might see you. More careful than normal, that is."

"Right," Tom said. And sensing Rafiel was about to hang up, he added, "Oh, do you have any relatives who could fix our bathroom?" And in response to a scowl from Kyrie, he added, "Not for free. We'll pay. I'd just like to get someone who can start right away, so we can move back home soon, and who won't ask...awkward questions." This brought up his deep-seated envy of Rafiel, who not only hadn't lost his family over his shifting nature, but whose family stood ranked behind him, solid, bolstering and protecting him.

Tom had been told that Rafiel's parents knew he was a shifter. This explained—or at least Rafiel thought it did—why Rafiel still lived at home. Tom didn't know how many other members of the extended family knew about it, and he was afraid to ask. In a world where the lack of safety of a shifter meant revealing the existence of them all, he didn't want to learn of the possible issues with Rafiel's security. Rafiel's family seemed to have done well enough with the secret so far, and Tom, who had no personal knowledge of how real families behaved, would not judge.

"Oh," Rafiel said. "I see. Yes, we have plumbers in the family, and one of my uncles can probably do the drywalling stuff or tile or whatever." There was a silence that gave the impression he was trying to think things out. "Yeah, it will do very well. It will give me an excuse to come by the diner later this evening. We'll just have to be careful there."

Rafiel disconnected, and Tom limped towards the shower to wash. He and Kyrie needed to eat something, and one of them should probably go in early to relieve Anthony. Normally, they should have had three shifts. They hadn't, mostly because Tom hadn't had time to even think of hiring a third manager, much less one who was practiced in using the complex new stoves. But they couldn't ask Anthony to do a twelve-hour shift, not when he was newly wed, anyway, so Tom would go in early. He grabbed a change of clothes and headed towards the bathroom, Not Dinner happily winding in and out between his ankles. "I wonder if that Laura person who was supposed to come for an interview yesterday will show up today. Do you think they've cleared the roads enough for traffic?"

Kyrie giggled, and as Tom stared, she said, "I'm sorry, but with everything going on, it's so much like you to be worried about the diner, and getting another manager/cook for the diner."

Tom grinned, seeing her point, but shrugged. "Well, Kyrie, look at it this way—if we survive this, then we'll need the diner in good shape, particularly considering the repairs to the bathroom. And if we don't survive, the fact that I was worried about running the diner won't make a bit of difference."

* * *

But Tom found, as he crossed the slush-filled parking lot of The George, that things were not that clear-cut in his mind. It was sort of like telling someone to stop worrying because nothing could be done about a problem. It wasn't in the human mind to stop worrying—to stop looking for the door out of the sealed room; to stop searching for the one true route through the labyrinth. He was sure that if the world were doomed to destruction by asteroid within a day or two, and everyone on Earth were informed of it, at least half of them would go to their graves still frantically looking for an escape from the approaching cosmic collision. In the same way, the sane thing to do, surrounded by problems he couldn't solve, might be to concentrate on the problems he could solve—on the diner, his bathroom, and the fact that his hands—though well enough to go without bandages—still hurt and would probably be sensitive to the heat from the stoves.

That would be the sensible thing to do, and the sane one. Which meant, of course, that his mind insisted on going through everything he couldn't do anything about—the murders at the aquarium; the executioner come to town; whatever the organization might be of old shifters, and beyond that where Old Joe might have gone and whether he was alive.

The weather had done one of those sudden reversals that Tom's almost year of living in Colorado had got him used to—it had gone from several degrees below freezing the day before, and blowing snow and howling wind, to fifty degrees with a very slight breeze which stirred the branches of the icicle-hung trees. All the icicles were dripping, too—from the branches of the trees and the edges of the buildings, a drip drip drip that seemed to be waiting only for a conductor and some rhythm to turn into an animated movie's symphony of thawing and spring.

Only it wasn't spring at all. And tomorrow could very well be freezing again. Or alternately it could be eighties, with everyone wandering around in sandals and T-shirts.

As Tom took a long detour around a melting pool in the middle of the parking lot, he fancied that even the birds on the trees that lined the streets were piping in tones of surprise, as if asking themselves if this was the last of snow or the beginning. He was smiling to himself at the idea of birds driven to Prozac by Colorado weather, but his detour brought him full-face with a poster on the wall of the diner—where it wouldn't have been visible from the back door. That wall was in fact where the storage rooms protruded a little from the otherwise square plan of the building.

The poster was glued at an angle on the whitewashed wall, and it was the sort of poster—printed on cheap paper, in two colors—that normally advertised a dance or a new more or less non-registered nightclub or, alternately, some new band come to town. At first Tom thought it was a new band. It might still be a new band. Only what the words across the top read, in huge bright red type—rodent liberation front. Beneath it was a rant in pseudo-Marxist terms, urging "The downtrodden, the despised who live at the edges of society" to "rise up and take what you want. No more foraging for fallen nuts, no more eating discards. Rise up and take your freedom in your hands. There are more of us than them. Rodents of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your mousetraps."

Tom blinked at the page. It was possible it was all allegorical and meaningful and too symbolic for words. They were, after all, not that far away from CUG—Colorado University at Goldport—and since fully half the students seemed to eat at The George any given day—or more typically night—Tom was aware how the minds worked who might be behind this pamphlet. They were the sort of minds that were convinced coming up with a particularly clever image or metaphor excused not having anything new to say.

Without his knowing he was going to do it, his hand reached out and plucked the paper from the wall. It could be a metaphor, a clever image, a college thing to delude themselves that they were doing something to save the world. But in his gut—in a big, insoluble cold lump at the pit of his stomach—he knew it wasn't. He knew it was...shifter business. Squirrels the size of German shepherds smoking cigarettes. Crazy. But how crazy did the dragon thing sound to other people as well?

He folded the poster and put it in his pocket, and started walking towards the diner. And heard the splish-splosh behind him of someone stepping on ice, then on water, then falling butt-first into the water. And turned to see Red Dragon—no, Conan. He had to get used to calling him Conan—sitting in a puddle of water, looking very surprised.

Surprised was the least of his problems, though, to tell the truth. He didn't look good. Not good at all. His skin was pale enough to look almost the color of Tom's and he had big circles under his eyes, and to make things worse, he was attempting to get up, but not managing to balance himself enough to do so, because of his shortened arm.

"I shouldn't go to him," Tom told himself. "I truly shouldn't go to him. How stupid can I be? One day I'm going to help someone who is going to kill me."

But in his mind was his sixteen-year-old self, alone, on the streets of New York City in a bathrobe and as lost and confused as any kid could ever have been anywhere. And he'd survived only because the gentleman down the street—an orangutan shifter, though his family didn't seem to notice he was one—who sold roasted chestnuts on the street corner, had seen him and taken him in, and given him a jogging suit, and let him stay there a couple of days, till Tom had caught hold of the idea of day labor and had got a fake ID that said he was eighteen and could, therefore, be hired.

And he was closing the distance to Red Dragon and holding him on the side of his weak arm and hauling him up, even as he looked down at what he was wearing—the jogging suit that Kyrie had given him and a pair of those shoes that you slip your feet into, which have an almost completely smooth bottom. No socks. "You need boots," he said. "For this weather. We'll take you to the thrift store tomorrow or something, okay?"

"I have money," Conan Lung said, in the tone of someone protesting charity. "I brought money with me. In a pouch. I could buy new boots."

"Oh? Good for you," Tom said, not sure whether to be amused or saddened and being, after all, wholly skeptical. If he had money, why grab the elastic shoes? They weren't that much better than the flip-flops Tom had given him. "And you have family in Goldport, too, don't you?" he added, remembering that their past adventures seemed to involve Goldport's minuscule Asian minority.

He shook his head. "Tennessee," he said, and wiped his dripping nose to his sleeve, and looked back, at a bottom that was entirely soaked in runoff from melted snow.

"Oh, now, you're just putting me on," Tom said. "And don't worry about the sweatsuit. I have a couple others in the storage room. For...this sort of situation." He decided he didn't want to talk about Old Joe to the Great Sky Dragon people. "I'll get you one. Socks too."

"I'm not putting you on," Conan said. He sounded aggrieved and tired, and just the slightest bit exasperated—though Tom couldn't tell at whom. "Mom and Dad have a restaurant in Knoxville. People don't all come in to New York City anymore when they immigrate. Planes go everywhere."

"I'm sorry," Tom said, holding onto himself with all his will power to prevent himself from giggling at the fact that Conan had completely forgotten to have an accent. Or completely forgotten to have an Asian accent. Now that Tom thought about it, there was just an edge of a southern twang to his voice. It sounded, Tom thought, like something he'd tried very hard to rid himself of. Something that he hadn't quite managed to leave behind him. And quite out of place in a triad member.

"And I do have money. In a pouch. I wear it on a flexible anklet when I shift," Conan added, sullenly, clearly having caught Tom's disbelief.

"All right. You have money. Couldn't you have got yourself decent shoes, then?"

Conan shook his head. "No," he said. "I got them at the Short Drugs down the block, and this was the best they had. It was this or flip-flops."

"You know..." Tom said, leading him towards the back door of the diner and opening it for him. In the hallway, Conan wiped his feet on the mat at the entrance, and duck-walked into the hallway, his cheap shoes squeaking on the concrete. "It might surprise you, but in a list of shoe stores, Short Drugs wouldn't be in the first hundred, being a drugstore and all."

Conan sighed, a sigh half of exasperation, as if Tom were being particularly daft. "I couldn't let you go, could I? I went to Short Drugs because it was just down the block."

And Tom, having closed the door, froze. "Couldn't let me go? As in, you're keeping me prisoner?"

Conan looked back, and now his voice was definitely furious. "No, you fool. I couldn't leave you unprotected." He blushed, hard, whether with embarrassment at proclaiming himself Tom's protector, or with anger, Tom couldn't tell. "What if I left you, and they killed you?"

"Shhhh," Tom said, forcefully, leaning against the wall, finger against lips, concerned most of all with the fact that Conan had yelled, and people might have heard him. "Shhh."

As if on cue, Anthony's worried face peeked around the corner in the hallway. "Tom? Everything all right?"

"Everything is fine," Tom said, talking over Conan's shoulder. "Conan fell in the parking lot. I'm going to grab him some dry clothes, and then I'll come in and you can go home."

"Oh, good," Anthony said. "Because you know Cecily will get worried." He smiled, but still looked somewhat worried, as he looked at Conan. However, he seemed reassured enough that Conan and Tom weren't about to come to fisticuffs.

Tom opened the door to the storage room, and pulled out a sweat suit. "Okay," he said. "You're here to protect me. You've told me this before. But I must ask you—because you never told me—what are you supposed to protect me from...?"

Conan looked back at him. There was naked fear in his eyes, followed by something very much like defeat or humiliation. He took the sweat suit—grey, much washed—that Tom was holding out to him. "I don't know," he said, miserably. "He didn't tell me. Just that they were bad and...very powerful. And very large. And knowledgeable and...shifters."

"And he sent you? To protect me?" Tom asked. And realizing what he'd just said, and that Conan's hand was clenching hard at the end of his atrophied arm, he added, "I'm sorry, but...you're smaller than I in both forms, and with that arm..."

Conan shook his head. "You don't understand. You don't understand, okay?" His voice started rising again in a note of hysteria, and Tom pulled him into the storage room and closed the door after them, because the only other choice was pulling him into the bathroom and that would look funny. The room was piled high with boxes of paper napkins, potato chips and crackers. All the edibles were sealed in plastic or foil and it shouldn't have smelled, but they still did, so that it was a lot like being locked inside a giant box full of stale crackers.

"What don't I understand?"

Conan clutched the sweat suit in his good hand, clenched his other fist, and spoke through his clenched teeth. "Any of it. I was in high school. I was in the drama club and the choir and...and I was in the Latin club, too. And then..." He shook his head. "I shifted. And the next thing I know my parents were calling on...on Him. And he took me away. Because I was a dragon. I belonged to him. I was his to...protect and order. Like...like feudal, you know?" His shoulders sagged, despondently. "I was going to be a Country and Western singer. I was..." He shook his head.

And before Tom could think of what to say—lost in his own forgotten dreams, though he didn't remember ever wanting to be anything so definite and wholesome as a singer—Conan said, "It doesn't matter." He spoke in a flat tone. "You see, my parents didn't know what else to do with me, and...I don't have anywhere else to go. It's all...Well, honor and that. I disgraced the Great...Himself. I...didn't get the Pearl of Heaven for him. So..."

Tom remembered the long torture session that Conan and the others had subjected him to. He'd have felt angry, but he didn't know what had been at the back of it. He was just starting to glimpse what drove those he had assumed were crazed gang members. "So you have to redeem yourself."

He almost added that he didn't feel very reassured by the Great Sky Dragon sending Conan, anyway. But he didn't. He was learning that what came flying out of his mouth might hurt other people, even, possibly, people who didn't deserve to be hurt. And besides, he had a feeling—not quite a rational feeling, not even a thought, more of a prickling at the back of his neck that told him that the Great Sky Dragon's plans weren't as simple as they seemed. Instead, they were folded over themselves, more intricately than a highway map. And what he saw might not be all of it. He just wished he could be sure the rest of it was not against him.

"Well," he said, "I'll leave you to change." And escaped out the door of the storage room, to find Anthony in the hallway, looking at him with a very strange expression.

Tom wasn't sure how much Anthony had overheard, or what had caused him to come and look. But all Anthony said was, "I thought you'd have him change in the bathroom. He's going to get mud on the packs of napkins."

* * *

Kyrie was dozing on the bed. She would have liked to fall fully asleep again, but this seemed to be beyond her ability while a small creature lay down purring, squarely between her breasts, and punished any attempt at moving with sharp little claws at the base of her throat and a sort of soft "mur" that sounded like an admonition.

So she lay there, on the bed, on her back—which was far from her favored sleeping position—with a patch of sun squarely in her eyes. She tried to move her head just a little sideways. The needlelike claws got her at the hollow of her throat. "Mur."

"Yes, yes, I get it. I'm not allowed to move. I get it."

"Mur!"

She opened a cautious eye, in time to see Not Dinner curl up into a ball. But he remained facing her, and one of his eyes opened just a little.

Kyrie would have giggled, but she was fairly sure that this would have brought the claws out again, so she closed her eyes and tried to get back to dozing. Which was not exactly as easy as it might sound, while her mind kept giving her images of Tom fighting the dire wolf. There was something wrong about that creature. Besides the fact that it should have been extinct long before humans walked the Earth. The way it had moved...She shivered, and instinctively lifted a hand to ward off the claws, and the phone rang.

She jumped up and grabbed the bedside phone, but the ringing continued, and she realized what was ringing was her cell phone, and jumped for her purse, which was propped up against the sofa.

The phone showed Rafiel's number. She opened it. "Yeah?"

She remembered, belatedly, that she'd dumped the kitten on the bed and hoped he wasn't hurt. A look at him revealed him angrily licking himself and pointedly ignoring her.

"Kyrie?" Rafiel said. He sounded weird. Detached and breathy as if he had lost his voice and were speaking on echoes alone, unable to put any emotion in his words.

"Yes? What is wrong?"

"Nothing. Everything is fine."

"You sound very odd."

"Oh, got...something in my throat. Look, I don't suppose you can meet me at your house?"

"At my house? Why?" she said. And when he didn't answer immediately she said, "Is it about the bathroom?"

"Exactly," he said. "The bathroom. I've got someone to fix it. If you'll just meet me there..."

"When?"

"Now?"

"No can do. Must de-stink and put clothes on."

"Oh, why bother? We're only going to take them off."

"What?" She actually removed the phone from her ear and looked at the caller ID, to make sure that it was really Rafiel.

"I'm sorry. Bad joke."

"Very bad joke." Rafiel hadn't said something like this since she and Tom had got together. She wondered if he was trying to revive that rivalry, then realized it was probably just his idea of a joke to break the tension. He'd been with her in the SUV, and he hadn't even looked at her in a suggestive manner. "Okay. Give me half an hour," she said, matter-of-factly. And hung up.

* * *

Tom had taken over the grill, and was keeping an eye on Conan as he cooked. He'd found out Conan had camped out on the steps of the bed-and-breakfast all night, which he supposed explained the fumbling way he was moving and how bleary eyed he looked.

The problem, as Tom saw it, was that he could easily get Conan to crash in their house—if their house were operational. But their house was nowhere near operational. And in the bed-and-breakfast, they couldn't exactly offer him the living room floor and Tom didn't feel quite sanguine enough about letting him sleep on the floor of the suite. Inoffensive, he might be, but Tom could hear just the right note of sarcasm in Kyrie's voice if he told her that Conan would be sleeping on their floor. He could tell Conan he could sleep in the storage room, but beyond the fact that this would freak out Anthony, he wondered if Conan would do it.

He'd just settled on offering him the back of one of the diner's vans—in which he and Kyrie did supply runs to the local farmers' markets twice a week in season—and telling him he could park the van in front of the bed-and-breakfast—and look out the window for all Tom cared, when Anthony reappeared from, apparently, making sure Conan hadn't willfully destroyed supplies.

"Everything seems to be fine in the supply room," he said, removing his apron.

"Mmm" Tom said, noncommital, as he turned to shave an order of gyro meat off the hunk slow-roasting.

"Well, you know...he's still a newbie," Anthony said. "So, you never know." He folded his apron and put it under the counter. "Keith left today at around ten, said something about bringing a girl to meet you."

"Yeah. Someone from college." Tom shrugged. "Maybe he wants me to give her a job."

"We do need people," Anthony said. "That Laura woman, whom we were supposed to interview, said she would come by as soon as the snow has melted. Something about not having a four-wheel drive." He shrugged. "So, if you're sure you don't need me anymore..."

"No, I don't. That's cool, you can go."

"Right. I'll come back late in the afternoon, if you need a break. Just call me. And speaking of calling?"

"Yes?"

"Your dad called."

Tom felt every muscle in his body tense. He might be closer to Tom than he had been in Tom's entire life—close enough that he was closing his New York City law practice and uprooting it to Denver. Of course, Denver—three hours away—was the smallest city that he considered "livable." And Tom wouldn't mind it at all, if it weren't for Edward's seeming conviction that, as the largest city—and capital—of Colorado, Denver must be well known to everyone who had lived in the state for any amount of time. Not only that, but it must be within easy reach of anyone wishing to, oh, look up an apartment for their erratic father.

The other thing was, his dad had his home number and his cell phone number. Why was he calling The George during the daytime? He knew very well his son tended to be awake nights and sleep during the day.

"He said that the cable guy is coming to his loft this week, but he can't fly to Denver till next week, and..." Anthony hesitated. "He seemed to want you to go to Denver and wait for the cable guy at his place."

And, though he might try to become closer to his son, Edward remained as self-centered as a gyroscope. "Right," Tom said, ticking up call Dad in his long list of things to do and worry about. "I'll deal. I have to explain to him that even if I could normally have gone to Denver over the week—which I doubt, as shorthanded as we are—there's snow all over and the highways are closed."

Anthony seemed to be unsure whether he should say something, but finally it came hurtling out, "Well, I told him the highways were closed," he said defiantly.

"And?" Tom asked, surprised by the tone.

"He said you should fly," Anthony said. "Does he have any idea how small our airport is or how hard it would be to operate in inclement weather?"

"None," Tom said. "Don't worry about it. He's my dad. I'll deal with it. He's not a bad guy he's just...you know how it is. Lived his whole life in the Northeast." He set the platter of gyro meat, fries and pita bread on the counter and rang the bell to call Conan's attention. And managed, very nearly, not to grit his teeth. There was no way to tell Anthony that no, Tom's father didn't expect his son to take an airplane. He expected his son to fly as a dragon.

Which was how Edward's mind worked. Once having convinced himself that Tom's ability to shift was not dangerous, he'd become determined to use it as much as he could, and to derive usefulness from it as much as possible. Tom had to remind himself it was, in a way, an endearing quirk, a lot like Keith's absolute certainty that being a shifter dragon would be just like being a superhero. And that his father could have absolutely no idea of the troubles besetting Tom at every side.

He pulled over a huge bowl of peeled potatoes—essential ingredient of The George's famous fresh fries, never frozen proudly advertised in marker on the huge plate glass window up front—and started slicing them into sticks on a broad expanse of cutting board, while he watched Conan give warm-ups and draw up bills for a couple of customers. He'd be just fine.

"Anthony," he said, before the young man turned away. "You didn't...see the alligator out back again?"

Anthony blushed. "Oh, geez, about that..." He sighed. "I've been thinking about it, and look, it was pretty late last night, and I think I just imagined things. It must have been the shadows, and the snow blowing, you know? I just got a bit goofy."

Tom shrugged. "Okay, just making sure." He hesitated a second. "And you haven't seen Old Joe, either?"

"What? Oh, the old man...He's probably downtown at the shelter, you know? The city shelter lets people in when it's this cold, even when they wouldn't let them in regular times. You know, no sobriety check or what have you."

"Yeah. He probably is." And maybe he was, though Tom doubted it. He knew—none better—how shifters felt about crowded rooms, where your roommates could start looking like potential snacks, if you got stressed enough. "Don't worry about it. I just thought, since it's this cold..."

"Yeah," Anthony said. "Okay, call me if you need me." He got his jacket from under the counter and put it on, pulling the hood on over his head, till he peered from under a welter of fake fur, like an Eskimo prepared for the arctic.

"Right," Tom said.

And when Conan swung by to drop off orders, Tom grabbed his good arm. "Listen. I was thinking—I know you won't want to sleep in the storage room or whatever because we might go out behind your back. But how about sleeping in the diner van parked in front of the bed-and-breakfast?"

Conan looked startled. "Why?"

"Well, you can't go on sleeping on the steps. You don't look any too awake, just now."

"Oh." Conan sighed. "Look, I have money."

"So you keep telling me."

"If you promise that you won't go anywhere without waking me first...I can rent a room at the bed-and-breakfast."

Tom thought about it. It seemed a little odd to have to notify his jailer that he intended to leave. On the other hand, perhaps Conan was a bodyguard not a jailer. Tom wasn't sure he understood anything anymore. He certainly was sure he didn't understand the Great Sky Dragon. "Well..." he said, after a wait. "Yeah. I suppose I can do that."

"Only you have to make sure you do," Conan said. He shot Tom a resentful look. "When you disappeared yesterday and I had to go find you...If you'd died, you know..." He shook his head. "I was so busy at the tables I didn't see you leave, and let me tell you, Himself wasn't happy."

"How did the Great Sky—"

"Shhh," Conan said.

"How did Himself know?" Tom asked and resisted an impulse to roll his eyes and refer to he who must not be named. "Did you tell him?" It seemed to him the height of stupidity for Conan to confess to have lost track of Tom for any time at all, much less to call the Great Sky Dragon and confess his misdeed.

Conan sighed. "What do you think would have happened if I hadn't told him?" he asked. "They're everywhere. Someone would have told him, sooner or later. And then he'd have killed me for not telling him."

"Killed you?" Tom thought how ridiculous it was to kill someone for such a small offense. Particularly in a creature that claimed to want to protect Tom. He wanted to rebel. He very badly wanted to rebel. But not when Conan would be the one to pay for it. He nodded. "I'll tell you before we go out."

And turned in time to see Rafiel come into the diner.

* * *

Sometime between sixteen and twenty, Kyrie had simplified her getting-ready routine. The makeup that had seemed essential at sixteen had now gone by the wayside. The one fussy bit about her appearance was her hair dyeing and that she did once every three months and touched up once a month, and that was about it.

In the bed-and-breakfast, she didn't even have her shampoo or the shower gel she liked to use. Since the bathroom had been obliterated, and all her products with it, all she had was what Spurs and Lace provided, in an artistic little basket lined with lacy fabric. There were three bottles of shampoo, all seeming to belong to some brand that invested a lot in aroma therapy. Vanilla, mint and—bizarrely—coffee. Preferring her coffee on the inside, Kyrie grabbed the vanilla. There were three bars of soap for her perusal, but a look in the tub revealed that Tom had already started a bar that smelled minty fresh. He had also used up a bottle of shampoo labeled chamomile. She was sure he was missing his Mane and Tail, the worst-named shampoo for a dragon to use since the dawn of time.

The shower proved to have a torrential flow of water, and she washed quickly under it, only slightly hampered by the fact that, two minutes into her shower, Not Dinner screeched from outside the shower "Mur?" and patted tentatively at the shower curtain.

"Er," she said. "I'm fine."

"Yow?"

"No, really. We humans don't mind water. Heck, we like it."

A disbelieving "Nahooo?" answered her and she grinned. "I'm only a kitty part of the time, and I refuse to lick myself for hygiene."

"Mur!"

"Yes, I know, quite terrible of me, isn't it?" She finished rinsing and came out of the shower, drying herself briskly, and rubbing her hair almost completely dry with a towel, before combing it. Judging by the drip-drip-drip sounds from outside the bedroom window and the brilliant sunshine which had disturbed her sleep, the weather had turned some sort of corner. Which was very good, because she didn't think she could go outside with damp hair, otherwise. She had vague visions of doing that and having her hair freeze to her head as a large, unwieldy mass.

While she was home, she should grab a couple of hats for herself and Tom, she thought, as she slid into jeans, a red sweatshirt that was probably originally Tom's, but which she'd claimed by rights of laundress, and had been wearing for the last two months. The man never wore long sleeve shirts, anyway. Just his T-shirts under his black leather jacket.

She put her shoes on and told Not Dinner, "Now, Notty, try to be good. I'll ask the lady to bring you some food, until we can buy you some kitten cans."

"Mur?" he followed her to the door with the dancing step of young, overconfident kittens and seemed terribly disappointed that she wasn't willing to let him follow her outside. An ill-fated last minute rush at the door made her grab him in her hand—where he fit, fairly comfortably, then toss him into the room, as she quickly shut the door.

She asked the proprietress—a large, maternal woman named Louise—to feed the delinquent and informed her that he was a flight risk. It wasn't till she got to the car that she thought she should have asked Louise for a recommendation to a vet. She would need to get Notty his shots, and she should probably have him microchipped, at least if he had wandering paws.

Perhaps she would ask Rafiel, she thought, and smiled absently. He should know everything there was to know about the care of male felines in this town. But her smile died down, as, maneuvering through the mostly-melted streets, she wondered what Rafiel could possibly want. Oh, he'd said that he wanted to meet her at her house. And he'd said it was because of the bathroom...

Or had he said that it was because of the bathroom? Kyrie couldn't remember exactly. She frowned. Was there another reason? He'd sounded so odd over the phone—as if he'd been not so much talking as making modulated breathing sounds. But no... that wasn't right either. It was just as if there were no force of vocalization behind his words. No real sound. He'd said he had something in his throat. Like what? An elephant?

A brief image of Rafiel prowling the zoo and taking a big bite off an elephant amused her. And she smiled at herself, but as she entered her neighborhood, she went back to frowning. Rafiel's car wasn't parked on the street. This was like an itch at the back of her mind, an itch to which her brain responded by coming up with lots of reasons for the absence—his car had broken down, and he was borrowing someone else's; he had parked in the driveway; he was late.

But if Rafiel's car had broken down, he was likely as not to let her know in advance, so she would know the car to look for. It wasn't the sort of thing Rafiel forgot. Rafiel was a policeman. Details were his life. And he never parked in the driveway, which was a minuscule comma beside the tiny dot of the house and had barely enough space for Kyrie's subcompact. When Tom worked later and had to drive the diner's van home, he had to park on the street. And not just because he didn't want to block Kyrie in, but because there was no way to park two cars in the driveway without one of them having half of its back wheels on the street.

And besides, as Kyrie got to the driveway, it was empty and wet from melting ice. She started to pull in, while the back of her scalp bunched up. Something is wrong, an inner voice said. Something is very wrong.

But that inner voice was wrong nine times out of ten. Fact was, Kyrie's inner voice was a paranoid patient, and had to be kept carefully locked up in its rubber room, or else she would never hear a sound that wasn't suspicious, she'd never approach a place that didn't feel eerie, and she would spend her entire life running from shadows. Deliberately, she stopped within sight of her kitchen door, and put the car in park, the wheels slightly turned so that—should the car roll down the driveway—it would rest across the bottom of it, instead of slipping out into the street and potentially running into other cars.

Her foot remained on the brake, her hand resting on the keys, her car idling.

Run.

No. No, she wouldn't run. She had run too many times, after she was out of foster care—after she was on her own. Without family or any close friends, with nothing to anchor her down, she had drifted. Convinced she was hideously insane—with her dreams of turning into a panther, her secret fears of eating people—she had kept everyone at arm's length and ran every time someone got too close, every time anyone seemed hostile. Every time a shadow waved in the wind. But now she had a place, she had a job, she had Tom. She had something that was hers, and she wasn't running.

She pushed the parking brake in, relishing the feel of it under her foot, the slight grind of its going in. Then she reached for her purse, from the floor of the passenger side of the car. Where was Rafiel? This was so much like him, telling her to come to the house, and then not being here when she got here. And immediately, she scolded herself, because no, it wasn't like Rafiel at all. He was arrogant, not careless. If he said he would be somewhere, he would be there. He might act put out because she hadn't rushed to meet him, unwashed and in robe and slippers, but he would be there.

She bit her lip. Okay. All right. So something had happened. Could be anything. He was on a murder investigation. Perhaps someone had called and told him he had to be at the morgue now. This minute. Or perhaps...or perhaps something else had happened. Perhaps he'd had a fender bender. Or something.

A brief image of Rafiel laid out on a hospital bed made her wince. He wouldn't like that. They all tried to stay out of hospitals as much as possible. Besides being a crowded place, with lots of other humans—it would be a mess to shift in—their healing rate would call too much attention.

She reached for her purse, pulled out her phone. She would call him, figure out if anything had happened to him. Help him, if she needed to.

But the phone was dead. Out of batteries. Kyrie caught herself growling under her breath. She could swear she had recharged it last night. Clearly she hadn't.

She resisted an impulse to throw the phone—with force—across the driveway, and instead put it back in her purse and zipped her purse shut forcefully.

Okay, so Rafiel wasn't here, and she couldn't call him. What then?

She could go back. She could go to The George. It was only five minutes away. She could call Rafiel from there.

But what if he showed up as soon as she drove away? What if it was only a small delay, some administrative thing that kept him back? Then he would be there any second, wouldn't he? And when he got there, he wouldn't find her.

But she could call him.

In five minutes. What if by then he had driven away, furious? Oh, he had no right to be furious. He'd called Kyrie out of the blue. He'd told her to be here. There was no reason at all she should have obeyed him. And he'd said—or at least, he'd agreed—this was about her bathroom. Which meant he wouldn't be coming by alone. He would be with his uncle or cousin, or whoever in his vast tree of relatives was a plumber or a tile layer, or a good enough handyman. And that meant he wouldn't leave in five minutes.

But none of these rational arguments amounted to a hill of beans. After all, Rafiel was all male cat in this one thing, that he could act as capricious as he pleased, and make everyone else seem like they were the irrational ones, the ones who were failing him in some horrible way.

Besides, she realized, she had a phone in the house. Oh, they rarely used it, and in fact Tom had suggested they give it up and go all digital. But his father had protested that it was a number where he always knew he could reach them, even when their cell phones were out of a charge or they were out of range. In fact, it seemed that the phone, on the wall of the kitchen, and possessed of a built-in answering machine, mostly existed to take Edward Ormson's messages.

Which didn't mean it couldn't call Rafiel's cell.

Full of new decision, Kyrie got out of the car and slammed the door behind her. The driveway wasn't anywhere near as icy as it had been the night before, which was good. She should probably shovel the walk while she was here. Although most people in Colorado left their snow and ice on the sidewalk and let it merrily accumulate through the cold days, the law, technically, said that they were supposed to shovel within twenty-four hours of a major snowfall. The snow was melting on the sidewalks across the street, but not here, and Kyrie shuddered at the thought of what might happen if the postal carrier slipped and broke a leg on the way to their front door.

She paused at the door to the kitchen, frowning. The door itself was old, much painted, and starting to peel, a layer of red showing beneath the current decaying layer of white paint. It didn't matter, because it was normally covered by a screen door, which had a glass screen, conveniently slid down for winter. Kyrie was sure—as sure as she was of having charged her phone—that Tom had closed that screen door. She remembered him half-skating back through the ice that then covered the driveway to do it. He'd mumbled that otherwise it would probably fold back in the wind and maybe be wrenched off. So, why was the screen door half open now?

Run.

No, nonsense. Probably some weather-defiant Jehovah's Witness had come and opened the screen door to knock. Or perhaps one of their neighbors, worried about the lack of lights in the house had come to check on them. Most of the people in this neighborhood were elderly and retired and took an inordinate interest in Kyrie and Tom because they weren't and perhaps because they reminded them of their grandchildren.

She got her keys from the pocket of her winter coat, and unlocked her door into the kitchen. The house felt empty. It had that cold/empty feel of a house where no one is.

It should feel empty. They'd never given Rafiel a key. They were friends, but normally they met at the diner.

Right. I'll just call the arrogant lion boy, she thought, as she walked the four steps across the kitchen to the phone. But as she picked it up and before she could dial, a smell rose around her.

It was thick, miasmalike, overpowering. Her throat and nose closed. She gagged. It was like...like walking into a closed shed at the zoo, where someone had been housing several hundred wild animals.

And then there was the voice, a voice without vocalization behind it, a voice that seemed to come from the phone and yet not, a voice that seemed curiously devoid of sound, "Welcome, Pretty Kitten."

Gasping and gulping, through the horrible smell, Kyrie turned.

Run.

* * *

"Hey, Rafiel," Tom said, as Rafiel walked up to the counter, "I thought you said you'd come by this evening?"

Rafiel shrugged. "I was going to, but I talked to my cousin Mike, and he said that he could go by this afternoon, and I happened to be in the neighborhood, because I have to...do some interviews." He looked around. "In relation to the case in the aquarium." Shrug. "So I thought I'd drop by and get the house keys from you."

"All right. If you want to come behind the counter, they're in my jacket pocket under there," he said, as he flipped a couple of burgers. And broke two eggs onto the griddle surface of the new stove. He looked over his shoulder and was amused to see Rafiel gingerly lift the pass-through portion of the counter, as though he was afraid it might be spring-loaded or something. He didn't remember if Rafiel had ever been behind the counter, for all he'd offered to man the diner, just yesterday.

"Yeah," he told Rafiel. "Down there. Just under the edge of the counter. You're going to have to look, because there's Conan's stuff under there too, and there's the time sheet boards. At least there isn't a cat today."

"A cat?"

"Uh...Kyrie and I have a cat. I mean, a kitten. He's barely larger than one of the burger buns. Full of himself, though." He heard his own voice become embarrassingly doting, sounding much like the voices of old childless people who dressed their pets in costumes for Halloween and took them out trick or treating. He changed the subject, abruptly, "Hey, why didn't you just go to Kyrie? She's probably awake by now."

"I'm sure she's awake," Rafiel said. "I went by there. The owner—Louise?—said that Kyrie had left to go check on something back home. Yeah, I could have gone by your place, but that was out of my way and this isn't. What?"

The "what" made Tom aware that he was standing there and staring at Rafiel with an idiotic expression on his face. He felt oddly betrayed, and he couldn't have explained to himself why. But the idea of Kyrie going back to their place without telling him made him feel like she had shut him out or something.

Of course, this was very stupid. It wasn't like he and Kyrie lived in each other's pockets, or anything. Sometimes he woke up in the afternoon, and she was gone—gone to the store, or to do laundry or something. Of course, she always left him a note on the table. Of course, that might also be because when she went she took the only vehicle they normally kept at home, and if she wasn't going to be back in time, it meant Tom had to walk to The George.

"Nothing. I just..." Tom said, struggling with the feeling of betrayal, and not knowing what to say. "She didn't tell me she was going to go home, that's all."

"No?" Rafiel said, and frowned slightly, his blond eyebrows meeting up above his oddly golden eyes. "Weird."

"Well, not really," Tom said, almost defensively. "I mean, it's not like I own her, or she needs to tell me where she's going to be, or..."

"No, but you'd think she'd tell you anyway."

Tom thought perhaps Rafiel thought this meant he and Kyrie had had a falling out, and he wasn't really ready to be a rival with Rafiel for Kyrie's affections, again. He said, "Look, I don't think she means to dump me or anything, it's just...I'm guessing she went home because she realized she missed something. We left kind of in a hurry and didn't bring a lot of stuff." Of course, most of that stuff, like their toothbrushes, hairbrushes and most of their toiletries had, presumably, been ground to dust by his shifting in the bathroom.

"Yeah, but you'd think she'd tell you so you could tell her if you needed anything from home, too."

Tom shrugged. "I can walk there, if I do. It's no big deal. I was just surprised, that's all. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong."

"No," Rafiel said. He was still squatting by the space under the counter where they put their jackets and where they stored aprons. He had Tom's jacket in his hands, but he hadn't pulled it out yet. "It's just...very weird? I mean, I have this feeling it's weird. I know that I don't know Kyrie as well as you do, that I don't know the...patterns of your relationship, like you do. But it seems to me she always tells you when she's not going to be where you expect her. How many times have I been here, talking to you—or at home talking to you, for that matter—and you get a phone call from Kyrie saying she's going to the supermarket or the thrift shop, or the bookstore, and do you want anything. Or she tells you if she's going to have the oil changed, and it's going to take a while."

"So maybe she thought it would be very quick and wasn't worth mentioning," Tom said. But he felt it too, the wrongness of it. He just didn't want Rafiel to start thinking along the Kyrie might be available again and I might have a chance lines. "Anyway, my keys should be in there, righthand pocket. Yeah, that's it. My house key is the simplest one. Yeah. The keys for this place are way more complicated." He watched Rafiel remove the house key from the ring, fold the leather jacket carefully and push it back under the counter.

Meanwhile, Tom assembled two Voracious Student specials, with the double cheeseburgers and the egg and enough fries to sink a small ocean liner, and set them on the counter ringing the bell and announcing "Eighteen and ten."

Conan scurried towards the counter. He was getting better, Tom thought. He was also learning to carry the coffee carafe in his weaker hand. Tom had no idea how much longer it would take for the full arm to grow in, and it just now occurred to him that they would need to make some explanation to Anthony. He was thinking experimental treatment. It covered a multitude of sins, and most people didn't enquire any further.

Rafiel straightened up, slipping Tom's key in his pocket, and at that moment Keith came in, more or less towing a young woman. Keith was wearing his normal attire when the temperature went above freezing but not over 80—a CUG T-shirt, this one reading "I'm just a CUG in the college wheel," and jeans, topped by an unzipped hooded jacket in sweatshirt material. The girl with him, on the other hand, was dressed as if she thought she was going on a hunting expedition in the arctic wastelands. She was wearing a sweatshirt, a huge, puffy ski jacket in bright shocking pink, and the sort of fuzzy pink muffler that Tom associated—for reasons known only to his psychiatrist, should he ever acquire one—with Minnie Mouse. The rest of the girl's appearance certainly said mousie, if not necessarily Minnie. She was too skinny, the type of too skinny that the nineteenth century would have associated with consumption and a romantically early death, pale and had colorless white-blond hair that seemed insufficient for her head size and age. It was cut in a page boy just at her ears, but it gave the impression of having trailed off of its own accord and stopped growing due to either lack of energy or effort.

And yet, the way Keith looked at her, Tom saw that he seemed to be attracted to her. Who knew why? It made absolutely no sense to Tom, but then very few pairings did. He supposed his was as much of a surprise to everyone as theirs was to him. After all, what on Earth was a cat doing with a dragon? Or vice versa? And what was a nice girl like Kyrie doing with Tom?

"Hey Keith," he said. "Is this the friend you told me you'd bring by to meet me?"

The girl blushed furiously and Keith smiled. "Yeah, this is Summer Avenir, Tom. I've told her this is the best place in the world to get a burger, besides being my own, personal hangout, which, of course, immediately makes it better."

"Of course," Tom said. "Nice meeting you, Summer. And this is Rafiel. He's a friend."

Keith did a double take at Rafiel. "Taking a real job in your spare time, Officer Trall?"

"Nah. Just came by to talk to Tom," Rafiel said, looking embarrassed at being caught behind the counter as though he were an employee. "I'll be going now. Nice to meet you, Summer. Watch out for Keith. He's a troublemaker."

Tom caught Keith's questioning look at him, and frowned. Perhaps it was that he was behind this counter and cooking, with the scent of fresh fries, hamburgers, melting cheese and toasting bread in his nose. Perhaps through all this, it was too much to expect that Tom could smell another shifter. But though he could smell Rafiel faintly—the metallic scent associated with shifters coming through a mask of Axe cologne—there was no other hint of a shifter-scent. At least not close enough for him to track.

As Conan ducked behind the counter, to grab the coffee pot, Tom could smell him too, his scent a little sharper than Rafiel's and not overlaid with anything but soap and water. But, as far as he could tell, there was no other shifter-scent at all.

He would have to ask Keith why he thought this girl might be a shifter.

* * *

Kyrie couldn't breathe. Her chest ached and her throat stung and she couldn't breathe. It was all she managed to do not to claw at her own neck in frantic attempts to somehow force herself to get air in, through the miasma that surrounded her. It made no sense, because she knew she was breathing—somehow, she was still breathing, otherwise she would have passed out long since. But at the same time, the stink around her was so prevalent that she felt sure she couldn't be breathing. She just couldn't.

The smell surrounded her, intrusive, offensive. It seemed to her that she was not only inhaling it, but that it was coming through her ears and her pores as well. Pinning her down.

Where are you trying to go, Kitten Girl? Do you think I'd hurt a pretty thing like you?

Kyrie turned around. She wasn't sure why, but she felt as if the thoughts were coming from behind her, as she tried to get to the kitchen door—and somehow couldn't because the stink held her back, held her in place.

As she turned, she saw she was right. He stood in the shadows of the door from the hallway, just off the kitchen, and he seemed to be wearing a shimmery silver turtleneck and tailored black pants. He held a cigarette in his hand.

"We don't..." Kyrie said, slowly, because speaking hurt, thinking hurt, assembling thoughts into words seemed a labor worthy of Hercules. "We don't smoke. In the house. We don't approve of smoking. In the house."

She realized how ridiculous she sounded, as she was barely able to breathe and wondering what this...creature was and what powers he had over her. They'd determined in the parking lot that it could somehow reach into their minds and touch them. It could change what they were thinking. It was clear even to Kyrie's befuddled mind that it could also cause her to smell what she was smelling. There was no other way anything—human or animal—could smell that strongly, and the creature was or appeared to be in human form, standing in the demi-shadows of her hallway, smoking.

Kyrie hadn't been able to really look at him before—not in the parking lot at night, and under snow. But now she observed him. Was she seeing who he was, or who he appeared to be? And in either case, what could she deduce about him?

He was short for a male. Maybe an inch taller than Tom—she would guess him at five eight or thereabouts, and well built—that much was obvious from his huge shoulders, his muscular arms, his whole posture. The silvery turtleneck shimmered over muscle definition that would have made a gym bunny cry. This was not surprising. In Kyrie's experience most male shifters were built. Something about the animal form and the posture they assumed in their animal form made them exercise as humans normally didn't. In fact, what was strange was people like Conan who seemed to have not one functional muscle in their wiry, stringy shapes.

Beyond that, he was gold-skinned—a tone that Kyrie thought of as vaguely Mediterranean. Anthony's color. Could be anything from the southern regions, from Europe to the Americas. His hair was black, lank, and just a little long in front, falling in smooth bangs over his forehead, though the back seemed perfectly molded to the contours of a well-shaped head.

Other than that there was not much unusual about him—his nose was sharply aquiline, but not remarkably so. His forehead was high, but didn't give the impression of a receding hairline. His lips were broad and seemed sensuous, particularly now when they distended in a come-hither smile. But none of it would have made the man stand out on a crowded street.

None of it but the eyes. His eyes were gold. More gold than Rafiel's, which fell in the outer limits of brown. This creature's eyes were gold to the point of having an almost metallic shimmer to them. And like metal they were cold, unfeeling, blank. A blankness somehow lit from behind, like the screen of an old-fashioned computer.

The result was a look of perfect madness, the look of someone who had gone beyond normal human thoughts, normal human processes. Perhaps beyond thoughts at all.

He grinned at her as though he were a famished wolf and she a particularly tasty morsel of steak. Which might be an analogy much too close for Kyrie's comfort. She backed up, slowly, fighting against the smell, which seemed to hold her in place, to prevent her from moving, to drain her of all energy. It wasn't real, she told herself.

But she still couldn't reason her way to turning around and unlocking the door and running out onto the driveway. And perhaps that was not as irrational as it seemed to be. She didn't want to turn her back on the thing smiling seductively at her. The idea of turning her back on him, made her think of his being on her suddenly, biting into her, savaging her.

She backed against the door, without taking her eyes off him. If she was going to die, she would die with her eyes open. She would face her death without flinching.

Back against the door, she took a deep breath and told herself she was not smelling anything. Nothing at all. It was a smell of the mind, as she fancied Shakespeare might have said. Something that didn't exist. The air in her kitchen would be as untainted as it was when she came in. Cold and clammy, with a hint of disused space, and perhaps the ghost of cookies past, but nothing else.

"What do you want?" she asked the man smiling at her from the shadows. "What do you want from me?"

And the moment she asked, she recoiled, because it seemed to her like inviting the vampire into your home. This gave the creature a chance to say that he wanted her to die. And then, somehow to make it so.

But he laughed, a full-throated and very masculine laughter that she might have found pleasant under different circumstances. He emerged from the hallway and grinned at her. The light from the kitchen window behind her fell fully on his face. It should have made him look less unpleasant or more human. But all it did was gild the planes and features so that he looked like the antique funeral mask of an ancient and cruel emperor. The kind that would have ordered hundreds of thousands of people killed at his funeral rites.

"I just want to know you better," he spoke. It was, she realized with a shock, the first time she heard his voice. Before, he hadn't deigned to speak in audible words, but had tried to reach into her mind. She wondered if this meant that she'd scored a point. She very much doubted it.

Fighting against the smell that surrounded her, fighting against the suggestion that she was a small, frail, young thing at the mercy of this ruthless primeval evil—something she was sure he would like her to believe—she made her voice cutting and as sarcastic as if she were talking to Tom and Rafiel. "The normal way to get to know a woman is to go somewhere she is and introduce yourself. Some of the more polite people might ask her for coffee."

His laughter jangled, pleasant and cultured, but with something just slightly off-key behind it. It was, Kyrie thought, like when you heard thunder overhead, and the glassware in your cupboards tinkled in tune with it. A false note, a strange intrusion in what she was sure he wanted to be a perfectly polished image. She tried to keep this knowledge from her eyes, though, and must have succeeded, because he bent upon her an expression of great amusement—as though she were a particularly clever pet or a favored pupil.

Bending at the waist, hands on his thighs, the red glow of his cigarette end turned outward, he said, "Dante Dire at your service."

"Cute," she said, keeping her voice sarcastic.

"Nothing comes of denying what you are, Kitten. It is better to embrace it."

"I am not 'Kitten.' And I don't care to embrace anything." Said primly and with her back to the door and her lips taut.

"Really?" His insane eyes danced with merriment. "Don't you now? Oh, don't worry about it, I'm not going to eat you." He took a pull of his cigarette. "And if I did, you'd enjoy it." Again the mad dance of his insane eyes, followed by, "What do you think I am? Why do you think I'd want to hurt you?"

Because you broke into my house. Kyrie thought. Because you are using a smell that can only be supernatural to keep me cowed. Because you talked in my mind. Because you attacked and wounded my boyfriend. Because you speak to me as if I were not an adult.

She kept these thoughts up front, while behind them she ran others. She thought that if he was using his mind power on her, if he'd used some trick of pretending to be Rafiel—she was sure of it now—to lure her, it must mean he didn't want to or couldn't face all of them together. She didn't know why, since he had seemed to do pretty well with it in the parking lot of the aquarium. But it was clear he didn't like it, and didn't care to repeat it. And that was fine. Absolutely fine. But there was more. The fact that he was keeping the smell on her, and feeling that the smell was suffocating her, must mean he was afraid of her thinking clearly, of her thinking what she must do.

The thought sneaked behind her mind, afraid to be seen by whatever mind-scan capacities he had, that she should turn around and open the door. But...no. She couldn't do it, even if she tried. Simply couldn't.

"You have nothing to fear from me," Dire said. "I don't know what you were told about me, but you can think of me as a private investigator. I'm here to find out what is killing our people."

Kyrie made a sound at the back of her throat. "Our people?" she asked. "I am not a dire wolf."

He made a dismissive gesture with his cigarette. "Shifters."

Behind it all her thoughts went on. So she couldn't turn her back on him. It would be just too creepy. Which left her with no other choice...or perhaps...Like a glimmer, at the back of her mind, came the idea that she could move towards Dire, instead of away from him. Move towards Dire, but maneuver so the little folding table and chairs that she and Tom used for their meals would always be between them, and her back too close to the kitchen counter and stove to allow him to teleport behind her. She was sure that there were some rules to this teleportation thing, if teleportation it was and not just an ability to make people forget they'd seen him move through the intervening space. She was sure even if he could instantly magic himself across the room, he couldn't do it when there was a good chance he would end up with a table, a chair, or a fridge embedded in his toned-and-tanned body.

She took a step towards him, and saw his eyes widen in shock, and the stench vacillated for a moment, allowing her to take a breath of the cold, untainted air of the kitchen. The stench returned, of course, but she knew now more than ever that it was fake. Another step, and it seemed to her that a flicker of something moved behind his eyes, as if he, himself, had been on the verge of taking a hasty step back. She sidestepped, then sidled rapidly around the table.

"Why are you afraid of me?" he asked, his voice trembling slightly. "If you're not a traitor to our people, you have no reason to fear me."

Ah! "What is a traitor to our people?" she asked, her voice cutting and slow, though she felt it coming from a shaking brittle place inside her. "I've never had any people. The only one I've ever belonged to is Tom."

"The dragon boy?" the creature asked, and there was real anger behind the words. "He's less than nothing. A larva. Not even a young one. Ignorant. Weak."

Kyrie read something in that, an echoing, resounding jealousy. Jealousy of Tom? Or jealousy, simply, that they had a relationship? What in this creature's past made him so angry at her?

"Tom is the only other shifter who ever took my side. Who ever cared for me."

"All of us care for you," the creature said. "It is the duty of shifter to look after shifter. You should always be loyal to your kin. Your people."

"I have no kin," Kyrie said. "I was adopted."

And before the creature could answer the flip response, she'd managed to reach her objective—the phone hanging on the wall of the kitchen. They should have a mobile phone, she thought. It had never seemed important before, and this phone had been practically free at the thrift shop, but if they had a mobile one...

The phone cold in her hand, she pushed the automatic dialing button to get the diner. She saw the creature lunge towards the phone, finger extended, to disconnect her. But if he was afraid to stop her calling for help, that meant help was possible.

With her free hand, she grabbed one of the chairs, and threw it, as hard as she could, at the creature, then, grabbing the other chair, used it to keep him away from the phone, in a move reminiscent of lion tamers at the zoo.

"Put the phone down," the creature said, his voice sounding like sweet reason. "Put the phone down. I only want to talk to you. If you're not a murderer, I won't hurt you."

Oh, sure you won't. And what's a murderer to you, buddy? she thought; at the same time her mind flooded with sheer relief at hearing Tom's voice answer the phone, brightly, "The George, your downtown dining option twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, how may I help you?"

"Tom," she yelled. "Tom. I'm home. And there's a creature. The dire wolf. Help."

She let the phone dangle before she heard Tom's response. From the other side of the table came growls and fury, as the creature, seemingly giving in to an uncontrollable impulse, shifted into his animal form.

Kyrie grabbed the chair and huddled in a corner holding it—legs out—like a defensive shield. Shifting would earn her nothing but the loss of her clear mind. She might not be able to defend herself this way, but she had to try. And she had to hope she would still be alive when Tom arrived.

* * *

Rafiel saw Tom reach for the phone and because Tom had just blocked his obvious path out from behind the counter—not on purpose, Rafiel was sure, but simply by reaching for the phone—Rafiel started going around his friend, to edge behind him and reach over to open the portion of the counter that allowed egress.

He heard Tom give his cheery signature-line response to the phone and rolled his eyes. As if anyone actually would consider a greasy spoon their choice for dining downtown, no matter how many times Tom repeated it. He found Kyrie's "The George" answer far more palatable.

Touching Tom's shoulder with his fingertips, Rafiel expected to cause the other man to step away, however briefly. But instead, Tom stood, frozen. Rafiel became aware that the voice coming teensy and distant through the old-fashioned phone was Kyrie's and that Kyrie sounded hysterical. He didn't remember Kyrie ever sounding hysterical, not even when she thought she was seeing Tom die before her eyes.

The fingers he had prodded Tom's shoulder with, in a very masculine keeping of distance in a friendship type of gesture, now became a full hand laid on Tom's shoulder. "What's wrong?" he asked, as he realized that Tom had gone frighteningly pale, and that his throat was working, his Adam's apple moving up and down, as if he were trying to speak through a great lump in the way.

But when Tom spoke, it wasn't to answer Rafiel. Instead, it was a raw scream, that seemed to have been torn out. "Kyrie!"

People at the nearby tables turned to look, and Conan looked up from a bill he was totaling up. Keith and his girlfriend, too, looked towards Tom, alarmed.

"What—?" Keith said.

But Tom spoke to Rafiel, apparently having totally forgotten that shifter business was secret, or that they might be in as much danger from being overheard as they would be from no matter which arcane shifter might be threatening them or, for that matter, murdering people at the aquarium.

"It's Kyrie," he said, and swallowed. "It's the...creature from the aquarium. He...I must go. I must go to her."

And as he spoke, he tore from around his head the red bandana which he usually wore, pirate-style, while cooking, and he pulled his apron off.

"Tom," Rafiel said, in warning tones, afraid that his friend would decide to shift, right there in the diner. But Tom, clearly, wasn't that completely lost to reason. He ducked under the pass-through in the counter, and ran towards the hallway.

"Keith, take the grill, please," Tom called over his shoulder, thereby proving that he wasn't completely lost to reason at all, or perhaps that his devotion to the diner outweighed everything else, even his love for Kyrie.

Rafiel didn't stand around to see if Keith took over the grill and stoves. Instead, he ducked under the pass-through on his own, and ran down the hallway after Tom. "Let me go," he said, as Tom, in what seemed to be a blind rush, struggled with the back door. "Let me go. I can go. I can defend her."

"No," Tom said, with a sound like a hiccup. "No."

"You don't think I would fight for her?"

Tom had managed to unlock the door and now pulled it open and walked out into the parking lot, and, after looking around—Rafiel hoped he was making sure that no one was coming or going close enough to see him—ducked behind the dumpster, where he would be invisible from nearby Pride Street.

He started undressing, rapidly, rolling his clothes in a bundle. "Stay," he told Rafiel. "Give Keith a hand. I'm sorry if I was too loud in there. She's in trouble. It's not that I don't think you'd fight for her. But flying is faster."

And like that, Tom kicked his boots aside, dropped his pants and underwear in a bundle, pulled off his shirt and writhed and twisted, coughing, once, twice, three times, as his body changed shapes and textures, the smooth skin becoming green scales, the head elongating...

Before Rafiel could blink twice, Tom was lifting off, flying across the clear skies of Goldport towards his own neighborhood.

A curse sounded from the door of the diner. "He swore he'd tell me." There was a sound of ripping clothes. And then a red dragon rose, also, following Tom across the skies.

This was folly, Rafiel thought, particularly while journalists obsessed with cryptozoology were already suspicious of the existence of dragons in town. But it didn't seem to matter, not just now. Nothing mattered, except Kyrie.

Rafiel wanted more than anything to go and save her. He understood Tom's impulse completely. His body strained to be in the sky, speeding towards her, ready to help in any way he could. But Rafiel couldn't fly and Tom had asked him to stay here and, Rafiel realized, with Conan gone, following Tom, and Keith at the grill, there would be no one to wait tables.

There weren't many people inside, but Rafiel was willing to bet there were more people than Keith could handle on his own, while cooking. Right. He ran his hand backward through his mane of unruly blond hair, aware, as he did it, that he would be making his hair stand on end and look more lionlike than ever. Right. Sometimes your duty requires you to be a hero, and sometimes it requires you to wait tables.

He turned to do just that and opened the door to The George. As he stepped into the cool shadows of the hallway, he saw a woman's figure retreating rapidly, ahead of him.

"May I help you?" he asked.

She turned around. It was Keith's blond friend, with her much-too-thick jacket and that look she had of having been dropped headfirst into a fish tank and still not being able to tell the piranhas from the goldfish. "I was...looking for the bathroom," she said.

It might very well be. Well—it could be, at least. If she was as confused as she looked, she might have walked all the way to the end of the hallway somehow managing to go by two bathrooms marked with the international icons for stick-figure man and stick-figure woman wearing triangle skirt without noticing them. He would even be willing to understand this confusion if the bathrooms had been marked salmon and shad roe, but since they seemed to be marked restroom it made the confusion less likely.

On the other hand, perhaps she was a shifter. If that was the truth, she might have understood more of the conversation than she'd seemed to, and she might have been in search of further confirmation.

And yet, she still didn't smell like a shifter to Rafiel. He'd keep a very close eye on her, even as he helped Keith sling the hash or at least the burgers, and prayed with as much faith as he could possibly muster that Kyrie would be all right.

She might not be his—she would never be his—but he was not willing to face a world from which she was gone.

* * *

To shift or not to shift. Tom—as a dragon—landed on the driveway, just behind the car. He'd been thinking—as far as he'd been thinking at all—that he wouldn't shift. The dragon was a far more impressive foe than Tom, with all of his 5'6", no matter how strong, no matter how muscular.

But he couldn't even get close to the door as a dragon, let alone enter through the back or front door and go to Kyrie's rescue. A quick look to the house next door, where an elderly couple lived, reminded him too that the longer he stayed here in dragon form, the more likely someone would see him and report him. A vision of journalists with snapping cameras had taken hold of his brain and he was struggling to shift back to human form, as—behind him—he heard a dragon land.

Already in human form, Tom looked back, startled, to see a red dragon on the driveway. Conan. And Tom hadn't called him. But Tom didn't have time to discuss it with Conan, or even to worry about what the Asian dragon might do. Instead, he must go to Kyrie, if Kyrie was still alive, if Kyrie could still be saved. And he didn't even want to consider the possibility of anything else. He plunged through the kitchen door, into a scene of chaos and a gagging animal smell.

"Tom," Kyrie said. She was on the floor, with a chair held as a shield. Across from her, biting and growling and lunging at the chair was the dire wolf, his fur on end, his eyes mad, saliva dripping from his daggerlike teeth.

He can take me in one bite, Tom thought. He can behead me with a single bite. I'm going to die. But I can't become a dragon here. I can't. It would destroy the room and kill Kyrie, and he'd just port elsewhere.

Blindly, he reached for the rack of utensils that Kyrie had put on the wall, next to the stove. He rarely cooked at home—both he and Kyrie normally ate at the diner, or else brought home food from the diner. However, Tom was taking cooking courses and on the rare occasions when he did cook at home, he felt the need for semi-decent implements. So Kyrie had tacked up to the wall one of those things with leather pockets normally used in workshops to keep hammers and whatnot. And over the last couple of months, they'd been buying good implements: chopping knives, spatulas, a meat-tenderizing hammer.

Tom saw the dire wolf turn towards him, and he knew he had only seconds, and he knew that he couldn't turn his back on the creature. So he reached with his right hand and grabbed the first handle he could. What he got was a polished, sealed-wood handle, and, from the heft, the meat-tenderizing hammer, with a weighted hammer on one side and a hatchet on the other. Too short to keep the wolf's jaws from closing on his head. He reached again, and brought out...an immense skewer. It was Kyrie's latest acquisition, and Tom wasn't absolutely sure what she meant him to use it for. It wasn't a classical skewer as such, but it had a skewer in the center and then four, smaller, metal prongs, on the bottom. Kyrie had said something about a TV commercial for it that mentioned roasting a chicken in a standing position. Since Tom couldn't imagine why anyone would want to do what sounded like a convoluted form of medieval torture—at least if the chicken were still alive—he'd thanked her effusively and set the skewer in the wall pocket, determined to forget it.

Now he realized it was a formidable weapon. He turned to the dire wolf, holding the hammer-ax in one hand, and the skewer in the other, and opened his mouth to say something pithy and challenging on the lines of make my day. And the smell enveloped him. It was like the smell of a hundred cats in heat; the smell of a thousand unwashed, wet dogs. It filled his mouth, his nostrils, his every pore. It made it impossible for him to think, impossible for him to move.

"Look out," Kyrie yelled and, rising from her defensive position, hit the dire wolf hard across the back of the head with what remained of her portable chair.

Tom felt the teeth clamp on his leg, and screamed, inhaling more of the smell. He knew what he should be doing. He should be attacking the creature, making him back up, allowing Kyrie to go behind him, allowing them both to escape, with Tom guarding the retreat, towards the car and away.

But no matter how much he thought of it, as the feral mad eyes faced Tom's, as the creature growled and snarled and salivated, all Tom could think was that he couldn't move. That the stench enveloping him was somehow preventing his movement.

"Tom, damn it," Kyrie said, her voice high and hysterical. "Do something. We're going to die."

And at that moment...there was a voice. It was the voice that Tom had heard in the shower before, the voice of the Great Sky Dragon. It echoed in his mind, filling up all of his senses, so that it was visible sound and scented words, and seemed to touch him all over, as if in an enveloping blanket.

Mine, the voice said. Mine. Under my protection.

Like that—with those words—the horrible gagging smell was gone from Tom's nostrils, from Tom's mind. The feel of the Great Sky Dragon's words still echoing in him—seeming to make his very teeth vibrate—Tom stepped forward, and brought the skewer in hard on the creature's eye, thinking only that if he destroyed the brain it might be the same as beheading. But the dire wolf had jumped backward just in time. The tip of the skewer cut a deep gash down the side of his face, while the ax, which Tom had managed to swing as a follow through, cut across his left ear.

The creature screamed. Blood spurted. And through it all, his voice, less powerful than the Great Sky Dragon's but also echoing inside Tom's head and not outside, as voices were supposed to, sounded, He must pay. He must pay. And he's not yours. He's not Asian. You can't claim him.

The stench came back, less overpowering, but back, nonetheless. But only for a second. The Great Sky Dragon's voice sounded again, and clearly he was a creature with a very simple philosophy. Mine, he yelled. Mine. I've claimed him.

The stench vanished. The dire wolf growled. Tom swung forward, skewer and ax swinging. Making a space behind him. "Go, Kyrie, go," he said. "The car, now."

She got up and lurched, behind him, towards the door, while he moved to block the dire wolf from getting to her. The creature wasn't teleporting or giving the impression of teleporting. Whatever it was that the Great Sky Dragon's voice caused, it seemed to cause the dire wolf to become unable to create what, for lack of better words, one must call supernatural effects.

"Come," Kyrie yelled, as she opened the door, and ran full tilt outside. "Come."

"I will," Tom said, kicking the door fully open with his foot, and backing into the open door, still holding the skewer and the ax.

The dire wolf made a jump—a clumsy jump—towards him. There was no Great Sky Dragon voice, but Tom swung at him, hard with the ax, and cut him across the nose.

Kyrie honked the horn, and now Tom turned, thinking it was the most stupid thing he could do, but also that he ran much faster that way. The passenger door of the car was open, and he more threw himself at the opening than ran into it.

His head on Kyrie's shoulder, he reached to close the door, even as she started the car and backed out of the driveway. The dire wolf came running out of the kitchen and chased them. Kyrie turned abruptly, hitting the wolf with the back left wheel and saying, under her breath, "Sorry, it wasn't intentional."

Tom took a deep breath, two. He straightened, and buckled his seat belt. "To whom are you apologizing?"

"You. Him. I don't know. I didn't mean to run him over. Did I run him over?"

Tom looked back at what looked very much like a bleeding dire wolf still chasing them. "I don't think so. Can you go faster?"

She pressed the gas down, taking these little residential back streets at speeds normally reserved for the highway, and breathing deeply, deeply, as if recovering from shock.

It took Tom a moment to realize that it wasn't breathing, it was sobs. "Kyrie," he said, aghast. He'd never seen her cry. He'd never heard her cry before. Not like this.

"I can't help it," she said. "Reaction." She turned again, seemingly blindly. "I thought I was going to die. And then I thought you were going to die and I..."

"I thought you were going to die," a voice said from the back. Conan's voice. He popped from the back seat like a deranged jack-in-the- box, and Kyrie slammed on the brakes hard, stopping them suddenly in the middle of a tree-lined street. "I thought you were going to die. You screamed. So I called Himself. I told him I couldn't go in, but I thought the enemy was in there. And then...he aimed for your mind and the enemy's mind."

"What the hell?" Kyrie said. And it was all that Tom could do not to turn around and plant his fist in the middle of Conan's smug-looking face.

Instead, he turned around and said, "What are you doing? What do you think you were doing, hiding back there?"

Conan's expression shifted, from smug to sullen. "I wasn't hiding from you," he said, in the tone that a kid might use to say it wasn't him who drew on the wall. "I was hiding from the dire wolf."

"Oh, that makes it ever so much better," Kyrie said. "Not."

"Just go," Conan said. "He's going to come for us."

"I don't think so," Tom said, looking behind them. "He's not back there, and besides, he knows where we're going to go, doesn't he?"

"Does he?" Conan asked.

"The diner," Kyrie said. And then, softly, "Hopefully, he's not so brazen as to come and attack us in the diner, in the parking lot, in front of everyone."

"Hopefully," Tom said. "Or we'll be dead. I mean, it's not like we can, realistically, stop showing up at the diner."

"No," Kyrie said. She started the car again, going more slowly. "But perhaps once he calms down, he won't be as dangerous? I mean, I get a feeling we pushed him over the edge, and he didn't very well know what he was doing."

"We pushed him over the edge?" Tom said. "We? What were you doing at the house, anyway? And without telling me. If Rafiel hadn't told me—"

"You should have asked Rafiel what I was doing at the house," Kyrie said. She drove with jagged movements that caused the car to lurch one way then the other. "He called me and told me to meet him there. Something about one of his relatives repairing the house. And then he wasn't there."

"He called you?" Tom asked. He remembered Rafiel coming into the diner, his confusion at not finding Kyrie in the bed-and-breakfast. He didn't even want to think that Rafiel might be working with the dire wolf. If Rafiel was...If Rafiel had betrayed them...

"He called me on my cell phone. Told me to meet him at the house ASAP. I thought it was a little weird, but he said he had everything ready to go right then, so I showered and went."

Tom groaned. Either Rafiel was mind-manipulated, or Rafiel had defected to—for lack of better words—the dark side. Either way, it could not be good. "But..." he said. "But..." And swallowed hard.

"The only weird thing," Kyrie said, "is that his words seemed to have...oh, I don't know how to put it...no sound. No vocalization."

Tom found his forehead wrinkling in worry before he could think that he was worried. That didn't feel right. Kyrie's purse was at his feet, as it normally was when she was driving. He bent down and picked it up. "May I get your cell phone?" he asked. He didn't like to reach into her purse without an invitation.

"Sure," she said, as she turned onto Pride Street. Five minutes from The George.

He reached into the little pocket on the front lining where she normally kept her phone. He picked it up. "He called you on this cell phone?" he said. It wouldn't turn on, there was no battery. So, he grabbed his cell phone from his pocket, and swapped the batteries. Then he turned the phone on and looked through calls received.

"Yeah."

"When?"

"This morning, almost right after you left, I think. I was lying in a patch of sun and unable to sleep, and then the phone rang."

Tom looked up and down through the list of numbers. The latest call the phone showed was three days before. He took a deep breath, and waited till she pulled in the parking lot of The George to speak. He wasn't sure what telling her while she was driving would do.

"Kyrie," he said. "There's no record of any such call."

* * *

"What?" Kyrie asked. She pushed the parking brake down with her foot, as she reached blindly for her cell phone. "Let me see that."

She pulled the cell phone from Tom's nerveless hands, and went to the menu and calls received, and paged, frantically, up and down the list.

She realized she was shaking violently, and she put the phone down on the seat, very slowly, then very slowly lowered her head towards the wheel, until she rested her forehead on it.

"You mean the whole call..." she said, at last. "You mean, he just reached into my mind." For some reason the thought made her physically ill. Reaching into her head to trick her seemed like the worst violation possible. "How could he? How?"

"I don't know. I think he has some sort of mind power," Tom said, hesitantly. He laid his palm gently on her shoulder, as if he were afraid of touching her. But when she didn't protest, he enveloped her in his arms and pulled her to him. "I'm sorry, Kyrie. I think this is worse than anything we faced before."

For a moment, it comforted her, that he held her like that, tightly, against his body. He was still naked—she was quite sure he had forgotten that—and his skin smelled of the hotel's soap overlaid with sweat from fear and fight. It was not unpleasant. His hair was loose—as it always was after he shifted back and forth. He kept a package of hair ties in the glove compartment of the car, in a kitchen drawer at home, and in one of the supply rooms in the diner. His hair brushed her face, softly, like silk.

And for a moment—for just a moment, as her breath calmed down—this felt good and protective and healing. She had a sense that she belonged to him—that she was his, that Tom was somehow entitled to hold her like this and that he—as scattered and lost as he'd been most of his life—he was somehow protecting her. As he'd protected her, or tried to, in that kitchen.

But slowly the thought intruded that he was just looking after her because he looked after everyone—Old Joe, Conan, Not Dinner, and even Keith and Anthony to an extent. Tom seemed to think it was his duty, his necessary place in life, to go through it helping everyone and everything. And this made his arms around her, his soothing voice, the hand now gently stroking her hair and cheek, utterly meaningless.

She shrank back, laughing a little, disguising her embarrassment at having been, momentarily, emotionally naked. "You must put clothes on," she said. "What if someone looks in the car and sees me sitting here with two naked guys?"

"I don't have clothes," Conan said from the back seat, his voice dull and seemingly trying to be distant, as if he were apologizing for being present during their embrace. He hardly needed to.

Tom pulled back. He took a deep breath, as if he needed to control himself, and she didn't look down to see if he needed to control himself in that sense. It wouldn't help to know he'd been embracing her out of automatic pity but that lust had mixed in. She wanted to know he had held her for other reasons—she wasn't even sure what reasons she wanted it to be. Perhaps because he felt so incomplete without her, that he had to hold her and protect her to be able to hold and protect himself. She wanted him to think of them as a unit, she thought. As belonging. And perhaps that was, ultimately, her greatest foolishness, that she so desperately wanted to belong with someone. Not to. She had no fancy to be owned or restricted in that way. For much too long, growing up, she had belonged to the state of North Carolina—had been in effect the child of the state—that she did not want to belong to anyone. But she wanted to belong with someone, to be part of a group. Not at the mercy of passing bureaucrats and their whims, but able to contribute and be taken into account by a group.

She'd thought she was part of that. Even days ago, if you had asked her, she'd have said that she and Tom and Rafiel were just that sort of group. A you and me against the world group.

But now the dire wolf could get in her mind and force her own friendship for Rafiel to betray her. And Tom was determined to protect the world and its surroundings. "There's clothes under the seat," she told Conan. "Get some for Tom too. We stuff them there, when we go shopping. We buy extra stuff, I wash it and stuff it down there. From the thrift shop, so they're clean but worn."

"Worn is fine," Conan said, as he passed, over Kyrie's shoulder, a grey pair of sweat pants and a red sweat shirt to Tom.

"I think you should go shower," Kyrie said. "Both of you. I'll go inside"—she made a head gesture towards the diner—"and hold the fort, while you guys make yourselves decent."

Tom frowned a little but then nodded. "If he comes in the diner—" he said.

"I'll call, okay? I don't think he's going to do much in front of every customer at the tables, truly."

"You don't know that," Tom said. "He could reach in and touch your mind. Like he did before. We don't know how many minds he can touch. He could make everyone in the diner ignore him, as he kills you or dismembers you."

"I'll call you. I'll call you as soon as he comes," she said, almost frantically, wanting to go back to the diner, which right now represented routine and normalcy, and to be allowed to go on with life, to forget that someone out there—someone who didn't wish them well—had the power to reach into her mind and make her hear and think things that had never happened.

* * *

"I don't know what the owner is going to think, of my keeping going to the bedroom with different guys and coming out in new clothes," Tom said, under his breath, but Conan only gave him this unfocused, uncomprehending look, as if he were talking about some different planet, or something so strange that Conan's mind couldn't begin to understand it.

Tom was fairly sure this was not true. After all, the man had grown up in Tennessee, no matter how strange his parents' culture might have been. He'd watched the same shows, read the same newspapers—generally speaking—and listened to the same music—well, perhaps more country and western—that Tom listened to.

And yet, he genuinely seemed to have no idea why Tom going to his rented room to shower with different guys accompanying him might make the owner of the bed-and-breakfast a little uncomfortable.

"She's going to think I'm running a business," Tom added, under his breath. But it was all pointless: his worrying and Conan's—had to be deliberate—lack of comprehension. They met no one as they walked along the oak-floored hallways of the bed-and-breakfast. The room, when Tom opened it, was as Kyrie must have left it—with the bed coverings thrown half back, and her hair brush thrown on top of the clothes.

Almost by instinct—he certainly had not had time to get used to this—before Tom opened the door fully, he opened it a crack and put his hand in the opening, as if to catch a baseball. Seconds later a furry warm ball hit it, and clung to his wrist with sharp little needle claws. Tom laughed, as he brought the creature up and held him against his chest. "Hello, Not Dinner. Foiled again." Then he opened the door fully, allowing Conan into the room, and closing it and locking it afterwards. "You can shower first," he said. And realized that Conan was barefoot. "Did you leave your shoes...?"

"Somewhere in the parking lot," Conan said, sullenly.

"I left mine in the diner, near the entrance," Tom said, looking down at his toes. "Well...I didn't even realize I was barefoot till now. We get used to this stuff."

"Yeah," Conan said, and went into the shower, to emerge, just seconds after, wearing the same clothes but looking far cleaner, his odd crest of hair standing up. Tom realized in losing his left arm, Conan had lost the red dragon tattoo he'd once had upon his left hand. He wondered if the new one would grow in with the same tattoo. No, it couldn't. That would require something uncomfortably like magic. Then would Conan have to go and tattoo the same image on the back of his hand?

Putting Not Dinner down on the bed, where he proceeded to attack some dust mites floating on a ray of light, Tom got up, wondering what part of Conan's belonging to the dragon triad was volitional, and what part was enforced. He remembered his saying that his parents had more or less turned him over to the Great Sky Dragon because he was a dragon and therefore belonged to him. Belonged. What a very strange word to use.

And Tom knew he should be furious with Conan for allowing the Great Sky Dragon to aim for Tom's mind once more. But he'd aimed for the dire wolf's mind. And Tom had no delusions. He knew that if the Great Sky Dragon hadn't spoken in his mind, the chance was good that he'd now be dead. Dire wanted to kill him. And he couldn't defend himself against Dire. That much was clear.

Tom turned the water on high and hot, and opened a new soap from the little basket of toiletries. Stupid as it was, he, who had for so long washed himself with soap from dispensers and with a combination of wet and dry paper towels at an endless succession of public restrooms throughout the land, felt an almost physical repulsion at the thought of using the same soap Conan had used. The soap Kyrie used, sure. No problem there. She was his, he was hers, in all but the legal marriage sense. He couldn't imagine life without Kyrie and he very much hoped she could not imagine life without him.

But the idea that Conan had used that soap and that there were sloughed-off, Conan skin cells in it made his flesh crawl. Which was stupid, he thought, as he washed himself almost vengefully, under water so hot that it made his skin sting. Conan looked clean enough, and he seemed to be a nice guy.

And then Tom realized it was the thought of the intimacy of belonging. Families used the same bathroom, the same soap. He wasn't ready to admit Conan into his family—if he would ever be. Conan belonged to the Great Sky Dragon—that creature that had now made free of Tom's mind, twice, without a welcome mat.

While the thought that the Great Sky Dragon could make free of his mind didn't fill him with the same horror that having her mind manipulated by the dire wolf seemed to fill Kyrie—understandably, because all the Great Sky Dragon had done was talk in his mind, not manipulate him into believing things that weren't true. Also, arguably, because the Great Sky Dragon, at least at this very moment, didn't seem to feel like killing Tom—it made him feel uncomfortable and used.

He'd brought his underwear, jeans, a T-shirt and socks into the bathroom with him. He'd packed—as he always did—a half-dozen rubber flip-flops, bought at the end of summer. He'd wear those till he could get back to his boots. He could lend a pair to Conan, as well. They wouldn't be much worse than his stupid elastic shoes. He dressed in the bathroom and emerged into the bedroom, with words on his lips which summed up the whole issue he had with this situation: "I don't belong to the Great Sky Dragon," he said, defiantly, saying the words aloud—even though he knew it would bother Conan.

Conan had been playing with Not Dinner—or at least submitting mutely to having his sleeve climbed, and his hair and ear played with. He looked up, startled, and frowned at Tom, "You have to," he said. "You're a dragon."

"I'm not a dragon like you," Tom said forcefully, almost viciously. "In case you haven't realized, we don't look at all alike. As dragons. My body type is completely different. I am like one of those dragons that Vikings used to carve in the front of their ships. Perhaps there was once some organization I belonged to, like you belong to the Great Sky Dragon. But I don't belong to him. Or to you."

He felt vaguely guilty saying this, as if he were proclaiming the superiority of Nordic dragons over Asian dragons. In truth, he didn't feel like that at all. He was sure the Asian dragons were far more adept at surviving, for one. Look at how they had an organization that looked after them. And look at how their legends had managed to convince people that they were good and righteous—while all the European dragons had managed to do was simultaneously convince people that they were dangerous and that they slept on massive hoards of gold. Thereby creating perfect conditions for people to hate them and to steal from them—to take their valuables and proclaim themselves heros in doing this.

He wondered if the hoard and treasures were true, and then thought that if shifters really lived as long as Old Joe claimed—as long as the Great Sky Dragon appeared to have been alive—then it could very well be true. If you looked at the panorama of your life as covering hundreds or thousands of years, then everyone got to live in interesting times. Every long-lived shifter's life could cover wars and revolutions and endless upheavals. And gold often saw you through all of those. So why not hoard?

"It doesn't matter," Conan said. "It doesn't matter if you are an Asian dragon or not. You are a dragon. You're a child of the...of the G...of Himself."

Tom frowned at him. That was what he had wanted to fend off, he realized. Not the fact that the triad dragons were Asian—he really couldn't care less about that. What he wanted to fend off, more than anything, was Conan's—and seemingly the Great Sky Dragon's—belief that Tom belonged to him from birth. That Tom had no choice in this matter.

Tom had never been good at obeying. His inability to obey his parents, his teachers, his counselors or his advisors had made his—and probably his parents'—lives living hell long before he had turned into a dragon and been kicked out of the house. He always felt like, should someone tell him to go one way, he must immediately go the other. It was something deep within himself, something he was aware of but didn't feel he could change without becoming someone else—without dying, in a way.

And now this organization he didn't like or trust, this organization that was involved in criminal activities, and whose code of honor was as quirky as that of any mafia throughout history, wanted to claim him. He shrugged, as if to throw back their imagined weight from his shoulders, and picked up a hair tie from the packet he'd left on top of the dresser. Confining his still-damp hair into a ponytail, he said, jerkily, "I am not his child. And even if I were, that wouldn't mean I was his. That I belonged to him."

Yet Conan had allowed himself to be mutely handed over to this organization by his dutiful parents. Tom thought it was better—and more humane—to force your kid out on the street at gunpoint, as his father had done, than to hand him over to the designs and whims of a supernatural creature who probably would care nothing for him.

He saw Conan's small despondent shrug, which seemed to signify he couldn't do anything about either Tom's belonging to the Great Sky Dragon or Tom's stubbornness, and Tom said, "I am my own."

And in the next moment wondered how that could be true, when the Great Sky Dragon had the ability to enter his mind and make him hear his thoughts.

* * *

Rafiel kept his eye on Keith's friend as he moved around the tables taking orders. He'd never really had a job as a waiter, but he had helped Alice sometimes when she worked at this same diner, back when it was The Athens. It was amazing how it came back to him and, except for the fact that Tom's menu was far more elaborate than that of the old Athens, and that he wasn't really desperate to get tips to supplement his income, it was just like being back in time.

His gestures came back, too—the broad wipe at the table before taking orders—the scribbling of orders on his pad, the carrying of the trays, one-handed and perfectly balanced.

As he approached the table where a new customer had just sat, he did a double take. The customer had pulled her—fake-fur fringed—hood back from her face, and was unbuttoning her black, knee-length knit outer coat. Underneath it, it was Lei, from the aquarium, with her long, sleek black hair, her exotic features, and her very shapely body, highlighted by a miniskirt and tight sweater. At least, Rafiel thought, as he ran his gaze over her legs—purely out of concern, of course—she was wearing thigh-high leather boots. He still didn't understand how anyone could, voluntarily, wear a miniskirt in this weather, but then again he couldn't really understand how anyone could voluntarily wear any skirt in cold weather. He'd consider it a peculiarity of the female brain—like inability to feel your legs from the thigh down—were it not for all those proud Scots and their kilts.

"Hello," he told Lei, smiling at her, and giving the table a quick wipe. "How may I help you?"

She was staring at him, openmouthed, just like he had grown a second head, or possibly stood on his head, and it took him a moment to realize in what capacity she had met him, and what she must think of him. A brief, lunatic impulse commanded him to tell her that he was his own underachieving twin, but this he conquered, forcefully. Instead he told her, "I'm just giving some friends a hand for an hour or so. I haven't changed jobs."

Lei turned very red, as though she'd been thinking exactly that, then grinned. "Oh well," she said. "I had been thinking that the police in Goldport must pay very poorly if their officers moonlight in diners."

"Nah. I'm friends with the owners and they had to go out for a little bit." Please let it be only a little bit. He gave her his best dimpled smile, which had made weaker women melt. "So, what will you have?"

"Just...a hot chocolate," she said, looking at the menu then folding it and returning it to its holder on the edge of the table. "I was just walking by and I felt like coming in." She shrugged. "I guess the aquarium being closed, and my not having to go to work left me with this great need for human company or something."

Rafiel's curiosity peaked at the mention of her having had an impulse to enter the diner. But a deep breath brought him no whiff of shifter-scent. Only the smell of washed female flesh and some perfume that was deep and spicy and hot, and probably cost upward of his salary per ounce and likely sold under some name like Dagger or Treason or something of the sort. And then, after all, people did sometimes feel an impulse to just go in somewhere without being shifters or smelling the specialized pheromones that infused the diner. He shrugged. "Right. I'll bring it to you, right away."

He went back, and drew the hot chocolate, and got a baleful look from Keith. "Do you have any idea how long Tom is going to be? People are ordering souvlaki, and I'm sure he keeps some pre-made, somewhere, but I can't seem to find it."

"No clue," Rafiel said, as he added a dollop of whipped cream atop the cup of rich, dark hot chocolate. "Sorry. But they should be back soon. They said it was only for a few minutes."

"Right," Keith said, but in a tone that implied he didn't believe it. He lowered a basket of fries into the oil, causing a whoosh that seemed deliberate and, somehow, irritated. "You know, I wasn't intending on having to work. I just came in to introduce Summer to you guys, and now here I am, working."

"I know," Rafiel said, trying to be patient. Sometimes it was hard to remember that Keith was younger than all of them. And sometimes it was much too easy. "I know. I'm sure they didn't mean to go out either. Quite sure."

Keith made a sound under his breath. It could probably be translated as "harumph." Rafiel couldn't answer that in any way, so he turned his back, and took Lei her hot chocolate, which she received with a wide smile, as if he had just fetched her fire from the mountain.

"I don't suppose you can sit and talk?" she said.

He looked around, and at the moment there wasn't any customer clamoring for his attention, so he shrugged. "Not sit," he said. "But I suppose I could talk a little. It isn't as though I'm going to get fired. It's just if I stand, at least anyone who needs something knows whose attention to get."

"Oh," she said. And "Yes."

He smiled. "So, what do you need to talk about?" He wondered about her brittle frailty and once more it seemed to him as though she were trying to make a play for his attention—whether his romantic attention or his friendship, he couldn't tell.

All other things being equal, he would have discouraged her. It was often easier to get rid of prospective romantic interest before the first date than after. It saved the girl some hurt feelings and him some of that fury to which hell could not compare.

However, Lei was involved—by working in the aquarium, if nothing else—in the case with the sharks. And Rafiel was never sure when a romantic come-on was just that, or an attempt by an otherwise awkward bystander to tell him something about a case in progress.

"It's not so much that I need to talk," she said, and looked down at her hands, one on either side of the hot chocolate cup. They were nice hands, the nails clean of any polish or shine, but carefully clipped and filed into neat ovals. "I just...I was wondering how long till the aquarium is allowed to open again, because, you know, the thing is that...Well, I know I'm only an intern of sorts, and I'm there to study as much as to work, but you know, they pay me, and I count on that payment to help make my tuition at CUG."

She looked up at him, intently, pleadingly almost. Her eyes were black, which was something Rafiel had never seen. You always heard talk of black eyes, but you never saw them. Instead, you saw eyes that were deep, dark brown, or something like that, but never that pure black, unreflective.

"We are working as fast as we can," Rafiel said. Except, of course, when he wasn't, like right now, when he was waiting tables, while he should have been visiting people who'd been around the aquarium a week or so before the first human remains were found—around when they'd calculated the first victim had fallen or been thrown into the shark tank. And selling his superiors on the need to do that would be interesting enough—though no one was likely to ask him for a very close accounting of his time for a week or so—because after all it would seem more logical to investigate who had keys to the aquarium, and who might have gone there since it had been closed to the public and in the middle of a snowstorm.

The second corpse—or the bits of it the sharks hadn't eaten—had shown up in an aquarium closed to the public. The suspects should, obviously, be the employees or—if his superiors ever found out that Rafiel had abstracted a key—Rafiel himself.

Only, having found out how easy it was to steal a key, Rafiel could argue—was arguing, with himself, just as he would with his superiors should they call him on it—that other people might have done so. And given his privileged knowledge that there were shifters and that two, maybe three of them, had been to the aquarium around the time of the first crime, he thought it made perfect sense to find out if one of those might have stolen the keys, as he had, and had copies made, and if the crimes were, somehow, being committed as part of a shifter imperative, driven by the animal half of some poor slob with less self-control than Rafiel himself had.

"The police are pursuing enquiries?" Lei said, ironically.

"Well, as a matter of fact the police are," Rafiel said and sighed. "You know"—he wiped at the table in what was more a nervous gesture than anything else—"it's amazing how often those words are true and how often they define most of what I do in my work. We pursue enquiries. We go from place to place and ask questions." He smiled. "All those TV series with heroic detectives who can flourish a gun and threaten a suspect just in the nick of time, or who have the ability to magically assemble pieces of evidence given by some amazing new scientific machine for analyzing skin cells, or whatever, do my job a great disservice. Most of what we do is just...patient, slow work. I'm sorry it's affecting your job. I'm sure it affected the job of the poor slob who got killed, also."

"Yes, of course," she said, looking guilty as people had a tendency to when they complained about a murder disrupting their lives and somehow managed to ignore that it had ended someone else's life. "It's just..." she shrugged. "Of course I'm very sorry for the man. The TV says he was an out-of-town salesman, or something, but you know, I still need to work and I need a paycheck."

"We will solve the murders as fast as we can," Rafiel said. "Trust me, I don't want some lunatic at large, pushing people into shark tanks."

She looked up at him and her curiously opaque black eyes managed to project an impression of innocence and confusion. "Are you sure that is what happened? I mean, couldn't people just have fallen in? Or...or jumped in, even?"

"Oh, sure," he heard himself say. "The first one, maybe. But this one? With the aquarium closed? Are you honestly suggesting that someone took it into his head to steal keys to the aquarium and go in to commit suicide by shark? What kind of person does that? Given how cold it was, it would have made more sense for him to stay outside and let himself die from hypothermia. Alternately, to jump from a very high building. But jump into a tank full of creatures with sharp teeth? Who views that as an easy way out?"

"Well, not easy, perhaps, but quick," she said, hesitantly. "Or perhaps they just were drunk, and dropped into the tank? Who knows?"

"Who knows indeed?" he said, thinking that it was very clear that Ms. Lei Lani knew less than nothing. "Do you often have drunken visitors who take the trouble of copying keys and come in after hours?"

She opened her mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. A blush suffused her cheeks. "I don't know why you keep talking about people stealing keys," she said. "It's not needed, you know. When the restaurant company took over the aquarium, they never bothered to change the locks. They're the same we had when the aquarium belonged to the city and was so poor we had fewer fish than your average pet store—or at least that's what I've heard. I wasn't here, back then. But they never changed the locks and some of the..." She blushed darker, a very interesting effect on her tanned cheeks. The more he talked to her, the less he was confident identifying her as a native Hawaiian, and the more it seemed to him she was probably Mediterranean or generic white, who just happened to have dark hair and a generally broad face. "You know, some of the guys who work there, like, some of the ones who clean the aquariums, talk about how easy it is to pick the lock, and about breaking into the aquarium and bringing dates there. I don't know if it's true or if they just talk about it to...to tweak me. But I know when we clean that observation area just over the shark tank, we often find..." She looked away from him, past him, at the front window and the sparse traffic out there on Fairfax. "We often find used condoms in the planters."

Rafiel raised his eyebrows. "Interesting," he said, while trying to sound, in fact, perfectly disinterested. Not that he was. She might simply be repeating salacious tales her male co-workers told each other. Most of the people who worked at the aquarium were high school or college age, and Rafiel knew better than to put any stock in the stories told by males in that age group. On the other hand, they might very well be true. And if true, they would open a whole other front of investigation into these crimes.

At that moment, he heard Keith say, "Oh, thank God, Kyrie, you're here," and looked up to see Kyrie duck behind the counter, looking like she had been crying but noticeably in one piece.

"Excuse me a moment," he said. "I'll go see if they still need me or if I can go back to my real job."

* * *

Kyrie saw Tom's clothes and boots at the back entrance to the diner, just under the overhang that prevented them from getting dripped on by the gutters filled with melted runoff. She picked them up, carrying them in with her. In her mind, she could see Tom shuffling out of them, hurrying to her rescue. She'd seen him do this before, and knew that he always kicked off his boots before he shifted.

He was lucky, she thought, that no one had stolen his boots yet, as likely as he was to leave them in all possible—and some distinctly impossible—locations around town. But the thought that he had been in a hurry to come to her rescue remained, as she stepped into the warm atmosphere of the diner, perfumed with the homey scent of fries and redolent of basil, fennel and mint.

Before they'd taken over, there had been an underlying bad smell to the diner, as though the old grease was never completely cleaned from the various surfaces. As they'd found in their grand cleanup and repainting before reopening under their management, this was by and large true. But now all that you could smell in the diner was the clean aroma of well prepared food. Tom was as fanatic about hygiene as he was about helping people who just didn't seem able to make it on their own. People and animals, she thought, as she remembered Not Dinner. Not that she resented Not Dinner. As someone who had long ago accepted it would be neither safe nor sane for her to have children, a pet might be as close as she came to motherhood.

She put Tom's boots on the lower shelf of the space behind the counter, the shelf into which all of them shoved either uncomfortable or too-heavy shoes on occasion—as well as purses, or bags of purchases. She smiled at Keith's enthusiastic and somewhat shaky salutation, and wondered if Keith had been worried about her, or even knew why Tom had left.

Grabbing an apron from beneath the counter, she said, "Tom will be in in just a second, and then you can go."

"Good," Keith said, sounding even more relieved. "You know, I was supposed to bring Summer here, and introduce her to you guys, and then take her out for a movie, or something. I was not supposed to bring her here, duck behind the counter, and leave her all alone. I don't even know where she's gone now." He cast a panicked glance around the tables—of which only five were occupied, and none of them except the one table with the dark-haired woman who was talking to Rafiel, showing anyone even remotely in Keith's age range.

"What does she look like?" Kyrie asked.

"Blond. Wearing a pink coat."

"Maybe she got bored and went for a walk," she said. Privately, she was thinking that if the girl got bored that quickly and went for a walk instead of, say, sitting at the counter and talking to Keith while he worked, she might not in fact be very interested. But she didn't say anything aloud.

She didn't remember being Keith's emotional age. Chronologically, they weren't that far apart. They were both, roughly college age—but Kyrie couldn't remember a time when she had felt so incapable of standing on her own two feet that she needed the props of a group, or of a friendship, or even of a boyfriend. In fact, until very recently, she had none of those. However, Keith clearly needed friends or a girlfriend or something and even in the months she'd known him, she had seen him assume that people liked him or even loved him on very scant evidence. It would be cruel to disabuse him of it.

Instead, she said as tentatively as she dared, "So this was a date?"

He shrugged. "Something like it. I mean, I told her I wanted her to meet some of my friends, but the idea was that I was going to take her to the morning showing of Monsters of the Deep at the Imax at the museum, and then we were...you know, going for coffee or something."

Ah, yes, Keith, take the girl to the Nature Museum Imax, why don't you? Dazzle and seduce her. She'll never know what hit her, Kyrie thought. After all, who was she to judge the mating rituals of others. It wasn't like she had a great deal of experience with mating or dating. And Keith, being a confirmed geek, was probably following the right tactic in looking for a girl who could share his obsessions. "Sorry to leave you stuck here," she said. "Maybe she's just outside looking at shop windows or something."

"Maybe," he said, sullenly. "But it's not even that. If Rafiel hadn't offered to help, I don't know how I would have managed both the tables and the cooking."

"Well," Kyrie said. She looked up to see that Rafiel was indeed wearing the red apron of The George, and smiled despite herself. What would the police force think of its officer moonlighting in this way? "I'm glad he stayed, then."

At that moment, Rafiel excused himself and sailed towards her across the diner, notebook in hand, a smile on his all-too-handsome face. "So glad you're here and okay," he said, in an undertone that couldn't be heard by anyone but Keith. "Are the two guys okay, too?"

"Yeah. They're showering," Kyrie said. "They'll be here any moment, or at least Tom will." And then, rapidly, "Rafiel, Tom says you didn't call me and ask me to meet you at my place?"

"Huh?" Rafiel said. "No, I didn't. I went by the bed-and-breakfast to get the key and when you weren't there, I came here to get Tom's. That's it."

She had known it before, but hearing it now, made her heart sink. Hearing that Rafiel had never called, confirming absolutely that it must have been the dire wolf playing mind games brought on a slight shake, and caused her to reach for the counter for support. She must also have gone pale, because Rafiel said, "What's wrong?"

She told him, rapidly, in just slightly above a whisper. When she finished, she realized that Keith too was staring at her. "You're saying this thing was in your mind? That it made you think things had happened?"

Kyrie nodded.

"Wow," Keith said. "That's like some supervillain. Much worse than the last time." He sounded vaguely fascinated and excited about it.

"You know, Keith," Rafiel started. "This is not—"

"I know, I know, it's not a game or a play. It's the true thing, and it's true for all of you. But the idea...It's just cool. So, how are you guys going to defeat him?"

"I don't know," Kyrie said, as she looked over Rafiel's shoulder towards the door, where the bell tinkled indicating someone had come in. Her heart skipped a beat, and it seemed to her that her breath caught in her throat.

The man who had come in was not wearing a silvery turtleneck or black pants. He was rather more elaborately dressed, in an impeccably cut pair of grey trousers and a button-down silver shirt mostly covered by a blazer that must be made of the finest fabric available and fashioned by master tailors. But he was undeniably the same creature who had just fought it out with her and Tom in their kitchen.

"But he has just come in."

* * *

Kyrie stared at the dire wolf—Mr. Dire—in his neat attire, as he made his way between the tables, straight at her. Tom's fears came back to haunt her.

What if Dire reached into her thoughts and made her follow him somewhere he could kill her? What if he reached into the minds of the ten or so people in the diner and made them not see or not remember anything as he dragged her off, or even savaged her right here?

She remembered Tom hitting him repeatedly with the meat-tenderizing ax and the skewer, but Dire showed no sign at all of having been cut, or hurt in any way. His skin looked smooth, flawless, with only the shadow of beard marring its otherwise golden complexion. Had he been cut? Had that been an illusion? Or was this the illusion?

The counter had a series of bar stools on the far end, away from the grill and stove. These were rarely used during the day, though they were often occupied at night by single males who came in for their dinner, or by people who couldn't find room at the tables and booths. At this time, just before the dinner rush, they were all empty—a line of chrome and vinyl stools, fixed in a silent row.

Dante Dire flowed into one of these, straddling it. He smiled at Kyrie, revealing perfectly shaped and perfectly human teeth. She shook herself, realizing that she had been expecting him to reveal the saberlike teeth of his other form. "Could I have a coffee, miss?" he asked, just loud enough for his voice to carry to where she and Keith and Rafiel huddled.

"Don't do it," Rafiel whispered. "I'll take care of it."

But Dire smiled mockingly, and looked straight at Kyrie as he said, "Come on. It's not like I'm going to eat you."

It wasn't as though he was going to eat her, Kyrie thought. He kept telling her that, and perhaps he meant it, or perhaps it was one of those things where people keep denying their deepest thoughts. In either case, what did it matter?

Either he had no intention of killing her—and it seemed to her, now, on cold reflection, that given the time it had taken Tom to come and rescue her, he could easily have finished her before the cavalry arrived—and therefore was merely toying with them, or perhaps giving her some warning of what his true powers were, or he in fact intended to kill her, and had just fallen in the rather bad habit of playing with his food. This last speculation went well with the insanity behind his eyes, and with the resemblance that he seemed to show to some of the crazier Roman emperors, those who thought they were gods and treated all life around them with the suitable disdain of immortals for mere mortal, ephemeral creatures.

So, he either could spirit her away from here, or kill her right here, without suffering any consequences, or he couldn't. In either case, it seemed to her it didn't make any difference to let Rafiel serve him. No difference, that is, except to make him despise her by thinking her a coward. And whether he intended to kill her or not, having him think worse of her would probably make it easier for him to treat her badly.

"No, I'll take care of it," she told Rafiel, as she poured a coffee, grabbed a bowl of creamers and a handful of sugars from beside the coffee maker, and set it on the counter beside Dire.

This—or the fact that despite herself her hand trembled as she set the coffee before him—seemed to amuse him. "Thank you," he told her. "I take my coffee black."

She nodded to him and started to walk away, but he said, "Stay!"

The voice was authoritative enough that she stopped walking and turned around.

"Stay," he repeated. "I think it's time I talked to you and explained what is going on."

"You don't need to," she said, her voice hollow. "You don't have to." She wasn't sure she wanted to know what Dante Dire thought was going on—at any rate she had a feeling his narrative would be highly colored and personal, and not factual or dispassionate.

"I want to," he said. "Look, it's like this..." He paused and took a sip of his coffee and his eyes focused to the side and behind her. Kyrie knew, without turning to look, that he was looking at Rafiel and Keith who had, doubtless, abandoned the lit stove and all other duties to come and stand beside her, as if their mere presence could protect her against this ancient and powerful creature. She had to repress an impulse to giggle, as well as an impulse to turn around and shake her head at them for being ridiculous. Instead, she looked at Dire, her eyebrows raised.

Dire looked from one to the other of the men, then back again at her. "Tell the ephemeral one to leave," he said. "This is shifter business. Not his. I want to talk but only to those who might understand it."

Kyrie froze. She heard Keith draw breath, and she knew he was getting ready to make some protest. She was almost relieved when it was Rafiel who spoke: "He's our friend. He has saved our lives in the past. There is no reason for us to banish him from any conversation. We trust him. He's one of us."

Dante Dire looked up. The gaze which he bent upon Rafiel was so coldly calculating that Kyrie felt as if she were frozen by proximity. "He is not one of us," Dire said, letting his eyes drift just enough to indicate he was surveying Keith disdainfully. "He can never be one of us. Nor can he ever truly understand us. Those of his kind who pretend to understand or like our kind, are only waiting to slip the dagger in."

Kyrie opened her mouth, in turn, to speak, but Dire looked at her. "You are young," he said. "The young make mistakes. I am not young and I am not going to suffer for your mistakes."

"But—" Rafiel said.

"We don't really want to hear what you have to say," Kyrie said, finding her voice. "We don't know that you'd tell us the truth. So far you've attacked us, nothing more. We don't see why we should trust you now."

He looked at her, eyes half closed. Slowly, slowly, his lip twitched upwards on the right side, as though she was a particularly clever child saying some interesting nonsense. "I have not attacked you," he said, didactically. "I have tested you. And having tested you, I've decided you are worthy of being told the truth. There are many of our kind," he said. "A great many more born than ever survive to their twentieth birthday let alone their hundredth. Some are killed by their own stupidity and others...find ways to die. Few find comrades worthy of them, or fight, as they should, for other shifters and themselves. Those that do are interesting. Interesting enough to deserve to be told...some things they should know."

"I don't really care if you find us interesting," Kyrie said, thinking that, on the contrary, she cared a great deal. She could feel his interest in them being exactly the same as the interest of a kid in the bugs he burns with a magnifying glass. And she didn't like it. But she would be damned if she was going to let him see the cold pit of fear in her stomach. "And I don't know what you have to say that we might want to hear."

He toyed with one of the bright pink packages of sweetener that she had left by his side on the counter. He had incongruously large hands, which looked calloused, as if he normally engaged in repetitive manual labor. Agile fingers with slightly enlarged knuckles. Did shifters get arthritis in their old age? And what had he meant about fewer shifters living to be a hundred? How old was Dire, after all? Oh, he changed into a prehistoric, long-extinct animal, but that might not give any indication of how old he himself might be. After all, Tom changed into a mythological being. And it wasn't as though Tom was mythological. Though he often could seem highly improbable.

"You want to hear what I have to say," Dire said. "Because otherwise you'll die from not knowing it. Already, you've broken the rules of our species. You can plead ignorance, and given enough good will, we might listen to you. But you have to show good will. You have to show a willingness to listen."

"So our special circumstances can be taken into consideration?" Rafiel said, ironically. "By a benevolent judge?"

This time Dire's look at him was amused. "Something like that," he said. "You should understand my point. I'm a policeman of sorts myself. And he"—he pointed a long, square-tipped finger at Keith—"is outside my jurisdiction."

"Well, if what you have to tell us is essential to our survival, then shouldn't we wait for Tom to hear it?" Rafiel said, challengingly. And, bringing up Tom before she could, made Kyrie feel guilty that she hadn't done it first.

But Dire shook his head, and shrugged, dismissively. "The dragons look after themselves," he said. "He's a shifter, but not my problem. The old daddy dragon has made it clear that your friend is one of his fair-haired boys and that I can't touch him no way no how, so why bother? He's protected or not, and if anyone does spank him, it will be his own kind. This is what I meant when I said there are things you must learn, before you get in worse trouble. There is nothing—nothing I can do to him, without precipitating a war between dragons and other shifters, the likes of which hasn't been seen on this Earth for thousands of years. I have no wish to see another one of those. The record of the last one still echoes through the legends of the ephemerals. Another one might very well destroy their puny civilization." He grinned suddenly, disarmingly. "And their civilization makes our lives much too comfortable to be allowed to vanish without a trace."

"Uh," Rafiel said, as though trying to figure out what to say.

"Fine, I'll go," Keith flung. "Being ephemeral and all, I'd better make sure that the stove doesn't catch fire. All I have to say is that Tom had better come in and look after it, as I'll still be close enough that I might, accidentally, catch wind of this highly forbidden knowledge, and we can't have that, can we?"

Kyrie wanted to turn around and apologize to Keith, but she also wanted to know what Dire had to say. She was starting to suspect that, biased or not, it would be informative. There did seem to be way too much that they didn't, in fact, know. Like how long their kind lived. Or the story of their relations with the rest of the human race. And it was becoming clear to her, more so than it had been when they'd last tangled with the dragon triad, that there was more to shifters than little groups of them struggling to survive, or loners like Old Joe.

She heard Keith retreat towards the stove, as Dire said, "Now, I'm one of the oldest shifters currently alive—"

* * *

Tom came in, followed by Conan, and surveyed the diner with a dispassionate look. Only a dozen people, in all, and all of them eating. "I think table six and eight could use coffee warm-ups," he told Conan, and instinctively looked around for Kyrie, because Kyrie was usually very good with refilling people's coffee and it wasn't like her to ignore the need for warm-ups. He found her and Rafiel behind the counter, at the point they were furthest from the customers at the table. Facing them was...He felt his mouth fall open, and the dragon struggle within, attempting to make him shift into his bigger, more aggressive form.

He'd come here, as they'd feared he'd come. He'd come here and tried to...He didn't even know what Dire was trying to do, but he was talking to Rafiel and Kyrie, and it seemed to Tom that if this creature was talking to Rafiel and Kyrie, then it must have them under some kind of mind control, because it was impossible that his friends had taken such complete leave of their senses as to listen to him like that. Wasn't it? Shouldn't it be?

He ducked rapidly under the counter, to the other side, and started towards them, but Keith grabbed his arm. "No use, old friend," he said. "That's a conference for non-dragon shifters only. I'm excluded because the bastard says I'm ephemeral, whatever that means. And you're excluded because you're the Great Sky Dragon's pet and the old bastard doesn't want to start a war. Is this the creature who fought you, outside the aquarium? He didn't seem so afraid of causing a war then."

"No," Tom said. "He didn't."

Conan, who had ducked behind the counter also, and was putting his apron on, said, "But then he didn't know Himself was protecting you personally."

Tom bit his tongue, so as not to tell Conan what Himself could do with his personal protection. He suspected if he were to name the exact unlikely anatomical feat he would like to see the Great Sky Dragon perform, it would only cause poor Conan to become speechless. Possibly forever. He couldn't even say the creature's name. How could he possibly hope to resist him? So, instead, he said, "And?" to Keith, instead of to Conan.

Keith shrugged. "He's apparently issuing some sort of warning to them about my kind and your kind, or whatever. He says he's a policeman, so perhaps he thinks he's Rafiel's colleague."

It was clear to Tom that Keith was offended at being kept out of the conference and he wanted to tell him that this was a fraternity he should count himself greatly lucky to be excluded from—that it was better to be excluded than to be claimed by old, amoral creatures. And he was sure if he said it, it would have no more effect than to have told his young, bereft self that it was better to be kicked out of the house with exactly a bathrobe to his name than to be handed over to a criminal, or at best an extra-legal organization by doting and dutiful parents.

So instead he turned, to rummage under the counter. He found his boots there, and wondered whether Rafiel or Kyrie had taken care of that. He put them on, laced them, then put his apron on. Conan was already among the tables, giving warm-ups and taking other orders, or drawing tickets. But he kept looking over his shoulder at Tom, as if afraid Tom was about to do something stupid.

And Tom, who felt a great roil of anger boiling at the pit of his stomach, looked at the three people talking. Talking, as if this were a perfectly normal social occasion, talking as though the dire wolf hadn't tried to kill them just moments before. In the shower, he'd washed and disinfected a wound, halfway up his calf, caused by the monster's teeth. He was sane enough to realize that the creature could have hurt him much worse. It could have bitten his head off. It could have dismembered them all. It could have closed its teeth on his calf, and now Tom would presumably be growing a new foot, just like Conan was growing a new arm, just like...But this wasn't rational. This wasn't even sane. He looked at that creature—who showed no sign of their pitched battle—talking to Kyrie, and he wanted to grab another meat-tenderizing hammer and a fresh skewer and renew the wounds he was sure he had made on that impassive, inhuman face.

* * *

"I was born a long time ago," Dire said. He looked at Kyrie first, but then up at Rafiel, as though making sure that he, too, was following the story. "It's hard to say exactly when, because, you know, in those days the calendar was different and more"—he flashed a humorless grin—"regional. Limited. The birthday of the god, or the such and such year of the city." Something like a shadow passed across his eyes, as if the visible reflection of all the passing years. "I can tell you it was before Rome. Probably before Rome was founded, certainly before it was heard of in our neck of woods, which was somewhere in the North of Africa—I think. Geography was arbitrary too, and your city, your people, your land, were the only people, the only lands, in the middle of the ocean, where true humans lived."

Rafiel tried to imagine that type of society. He could not. Or rather, he could all too well, but it came from his reading, from movies, someone else's imagination grafted on his own, and he was sure nothing like the real thing. He very much doubted that these people had ever been noble savages, or that such a thing as noble savages existed. On the other hand, he also doubted it was quite as hellish as other movies and books had shown it. In his experience, people were mostly people.

Dire's gaze changed, as though he'd read Rafiel's mind, and so perhaps he had. "I don't know how many shifters there were in the world at that time, but it's been my experience a lot more of us are born than ever survive to reach even human maturity. As I said before, most succumb to the animal desires, when they first change. And then others are the victims of other people's fear, then as now. Now perhaps less, because we are told that shifters don't exist. Back then, they believed we were evil spirits, or the revenge of prey upon their hunters, or other curses, but no one doubted that we existed.

"I was lucky enough to be born in a small village, where my shifting was viewed not as evil, but as a sign of favor from the gods. I was made their priest, and asked to intercede for my people with the wolf gods." He shrugged and again there was that feeling of a dark shadow crossing his eyes, implying to Rafiel that something more had happened.

It would be much like Rafiel saying, "I knew this girl named Alice, and then she died." In the spaces between the words lay all the heartbreak. He found himself feeling an odd tug of empathy towards this man, this creature, who had just declared himself older than time, and he wondered how much of it was true, and how much projected by the mind powers of their foe.

He steeled himself, crossing his arms on his chest, trying to present less of a sympathetic facade, and therefore invite less interference in his thought processes. Kyrie looked impassive, as if she were listening to a story that had nothing to do with any of them.

"It was fine while it lasted, but my people didn't last that long. We were conquered. I think, in retrospect, our first conquerors were Egyptian." He shrugged. "Hard to tell, and I certainly couldn't place it by dynasties. Then there were...others." Again the shadow. "And what is a power greatly appreciated in a shaman of the people, is not a quality appreciated in a slave. I shifted. I killed. I ran. I shifted again.

"Through most of history, shifters were neither appreciated nor protected." He showed his teeth in something between menace and grin. "But the truth of it, in the end, is that we scare ephemerals. Our greater powers terrify them. But until we group together there is not much we can do, and we certainly can't exert revenge. Over time...we formed such a group. Many of us, most over a thousand years old by the time we met, got together. We formed...something like a council of peoples. The council of the Ancient Ones. And we made rules and laws, to defend ourselves. There are many more of them than there are of us, and no matter how long we live, we lack the sheer numbers. So...we made rules. One of them is that it is illegal for anyone—even shifters—to kill great numbers of other shifters. Particularly young ones, who cannot have learned to defend or control themselves yet.

"And it is, of course, illegal for ephemerals to go after shifters in any way. These laws are ours." He tapped on his chest. "Our people's. We do not recognize anyone else's right to supersede them or to impose their rules on us."

Rafiel asked. He had to. The memory of those fragments at the bottom of the tank was with him—the idea that his people were causing deaths, causing people to be killed. Shifters like him were killing normal humans. None of Dire's carefully codified laws had anything to do with that. "Can shifters kill...other humans?"

Dire laughed, a short, barking sound. "What should we care, then? If our kind kills the ephemerals? Their lives are so short anyway, what should we care if they are shortened a little further. No one will notice and there are too many of them to feel the loss of a few, anyway."

Rafiel saw Kyrie wrap her arms around herself as she heard this, as if a sudden breeze had made her cold, and he said, "And what if the crimes lead the ephemerals, as you call them, to find us, and to go after us? What if the crimes lead to the discovery of the rest of us in their midst? And they turn on us? In these circumstances, you must agree, the security of one of us is the security of all."

"Is it?" Dire asked. "I thought that was why you were a policeman, Lion Boy. Yes, I have investigated all of you—and I thought you were a policeman so that you could keep yourself and your friends safe."

"It's not exactly like that," Rafiel said, and then hesitated, feeling it might not be safe for him to tell the dire wolf that he felt obligated to defend the lives of normal humans as well—that he'd become a policeman because he believed in protecting every innocent from senseless killing.

But before he could say any more, Kyrie spoke up, "You said there was a feud with the dragons? Or a war?"

* * *

Kyrie knew Rafiel too well. She knew this dire wolf, this creature talking to them with every appearance of urbane civility, would lose his civility, his compassion, his clearness of mind and word, the minute he thought that one of them wasn't in full agreement with him. She also knew Rafiel's deep-down pride in being a policeman and in his duties and responsibilities to those he served.

He was the third in a family of cops. His grandfather had been a beat cop. His father had been a detective in the Serious Crimes Unit. So was Rafiel. That was the type of tradition that left its mark on the soul and mind. Rafiel hadn't chosen to be a policeman. Rather, he was a policeman, who had simply felt he had to join the force.

And his loyalty to his family—whom Kyrie realized Dante Dire would call mere ephemerals—wouldn't allow Rafiel to stay quiet while their lives were deemed expendable by this ancient being who had never met them—and who clearly had no understanding for nor appreciation of normal humans.

She'd heard Rafiel hesitate, and she expected the barrage that would follow. And after that, she knew, it would take axes and skewers again, or worse. She interrupted, blindly, with a question about dragons, which pulled Dante's observant gaze from Rafiel's face, to look at her.

All of a sudden he looked older than he was, and tired. "It was a long time ago," he said. "At first...when we formed, dragons were part of our numbers. There were a good number of dragon shifters—in the Norse lands, and in Wales, in Ireland, and all over. And some of them formed part of our council, became Ancient Ones with us.

"I thought your boy dragon was descended from one of these lines—from these great tribes of dragons that lived all over the globe. I thought..." He shrugged. "That he was a young one like any other. That he didn't matter."

"And he matters?" Rafiel blurted behind her, still half-bellicose, but at least not openly antagonizing Dante Dire.

Dante shrugged. "Their daddy dragon seems to think he does, even though he doesn't look a thing like his spawn. If he has decided to claim dragon boy, who am I to dispute it? We had a war with them, once, before human history was recorded. Our emissaries ran into his, into his kingdom as he called it. Yes, I see by your eyes that you doubt it, but yes, it was the same being, the same creature. And under him, organized, were the same people—well, some, of course. Some have died, and been replaced. I gather, like the Ancient Ones, he doesn't put much value on anyone until they've proven themselves, only in his case they can't prove themselves until they are over a hundred years old or so. Till then, he counts them as meaning little and being worthless, and he plays his games with them like a child with toys."

"So, is this a game?" Kyrie asked. "That he's playing? With Tom?"

"I don't know," Dire said. He hesitated. "That could be all it is. Your friend could interest him, purely, as a toy, something amusing to play with and to see what he does. Or he could interest him for...other reasons. It is not mine to judge. Except that it is clear he's keeping an eye on him through that younger dragon." He pointed towards Conan.

* * *

Tom had been on slow boil, anyway, looking at Kyrie sitting there, as if it were normal to talk like a civilized human being with that ancient horror who had been in her mind, who had manipulated her, who had, in fact, violated her thoughts in a far worse way than a violation of her body would have been. He wanted to do something. Like hurl cooking implements at the dire wolf shifter's head. Or perhaps beat him repeatedly with something solid—like, say, the counter top. Or perhaps simply request that he leave the diner.

He crossed and uncrossed his arms, looking towards him—without appearing to—listening to the things he was saying and studiously ignoring Keith's attempts at making Tom take over the stove so that Keith could beg off.

And then he heard the dire wolf say that Conan—hapless, helpless Conan—was not only, as he'd told Tom, an inadequate bodyguard, sent to protect Tom from the Ancient Ones, but he was, also, somehow, a spy. Or perhaps a listening device. He couldn't stay quiet. He took two steps forward. He put his hand on Kyrie's shoulder, to warn her that he was going to speak, and then he said, "What do you mean he's keeping watch over me? Conan? Yeah, we know Conan is a spy. What of it?"

"Oh, he's more than a spy," Dire said, amused. "He can do things."

Tom frowned. "What can Conan do?"

He saw that Conan, having approached the counter to drop off an order, was standing there, with the order slip in his hand, staring dumbly at Tom and then at the dire wolf, and then back at Tom again.

The dire wolf shifted his attention to Tom and inclined his head slightly, in what might be an attempt at a courteous greeting. Then he looked at Conan and something very much like a contemptuous smile played upon his lips. "Him? I imagine he can't do much. In and of himself. I gather he was recently wounded and those limbs take their sweet time to grow in, when you're that young." His eyes twinkled with malicious amusement. "Who wounded him? You?"

Tom nodded.

"Yes, that would suit the daddy dragon's sense of humor, to send him to guard you, after that. And no, I don't expect he would be any good at it. Certainly no good at all, against someone like me. But unless I'm very wrong, the daddy dragon already has more able forces stationed nearby. He would have sent this creature because he looks helpless and inoffensive, and you, if the thing with the alligator shifter is any indication, have a tendency to take in birds with wounded wings, do you not? So he figured you'd take him in."

"And?" Tom asked, his voice tense as a bowstring, as he shot a look at Conan, who looked ready to drop the order slip on the counter and run screaming into the night. He felt nausea again, the old sense of revulsion at the idea that the Great Sky Dragon knew him; understood him; was playing him.

The dire wolf shrugged and seemed altogether too pleased with what he was about to say. "You see, as you age, you acquire other powers. What a lot of people would call psychic powers, I guess. The ability to enter minds, and to make them think things, or to activate their thoughts..."

"Yes, yes, we've gathered that," Kyrie said, mouth suddenly dry.

"I suppose you have," the dire wolf said, and smirked. "But the thing is, you see, that we can also use other, younger shifters, particularly those with whom we have a connection of some sort, as long-distance hearing devices. My guess is that this young one has sworn fealty to the Father of All Dragons, and the Father of All Dragons has, therefore, reached into his mind and made him into his very own listening device. He is listening to us now," the dire wolf bowed courteously in Conan's direction. "I don't know what his game is with you, but I am telling him now that I am staying out of it, and that no harm will come to you through me. None at all. You are his."

Good, the word in the voice Tom had heard before echoed through his head, and suddenly he wondered if that had been what that first touch of the voice, while he was in the shower, had been. An attempt at getting him to admit fealty or subservience to the Great Sky Dragon. Doubtless, that would allow the old dragon to put a spy device directly in Tom's head itself, and not have to bother with Conan. Tom had a strange, sudden feeling that if he had accepted that, Conan wouldn't be alive. He had only crawled back, just in time, to have his boss find himself in need of a pitiful, inoffensive-looking creature. That was the only reason that Conan had been spared.

"Not good," Tom said, making his voice just loud enough to sound forceful, without speaking to the whole diner. "I don't know why the Great Sky Dragon thinks he speaks for me, but he does not. I am not his to either condemn or protect or play games with. You came here to judge me and my friends, and my friends are the only group I owe any loyalty to. If you are going to condemn any of them, Kyrie, Rafiel or Keith, then I demand you condemn me as well," he said. "We are all one. What we did, we did as a group."

He expected...oh, he didn't know. Outrage from the Great Sky Dragon. And possibly something more from the dire wolf—rage maybe. Tom could deal with rage right about now, even if he didn't want to have a shifter fight in the diner.

This was not a game. He was not a pawn. And neither was anyone else, here. The sheer denuding of the humanity of everyone, shifter and not, that these old shifters seemed to do, so casually, made Tom want to hit someone. "We are not toys," he said.

There was nothing from the Great Sky Dragon. Not a single word echoed through Tom's mind, and Tom had a moment of strange relief, when he thought he'd set himself free and that the Great Sky Dragon had, somehow, set him adrift. But then the dire wolf threw his head back and laughed so loudly, that a few people turned to look at him.

He brought himself under control with what looked like an effort, reached for a napkin and wiped tears of laughter down his face. "Very funny. Very brave and gallant. No wonder the lady appreciates you, Dragon Boy. You say those things as if you really believed in them. But you know better and I know better. Your elder has claimed you, and in light of your elder's claim, I know you're his, and therefore I am keeping my hands off you. It is not part of my mandate to get people into a war, or to cause trouble for any other ancient shifters. So, I regret to inform you, but you're his, and his you'll remain."

"And what do you intend to do about the rest of us?" Rafiel said. "While there were deaths, as you and the others have felt, they were in self-defense. And as for the young ones who died, it was an accident."

There was a baring of teeth. "I am investigating," he said, slowly. "You know what they say about police work. Most of it is boring and painstakingly slow. I'm going over reports of the case in the local paper. I am looking at the site. I'm making my own determinations." He stood up. From his pocket, he removed the amount of money for the coffee, and carefully laid it on the counter. "I will try to keep shifters from being hurt," he said.

And then he was gone, gliding towards the door, or perhaps teleporting towards it, with a grace so quick and irrevocable that they couldn't have stopped him had they tried.

Tom, on the tip of whose tongue it had been to ask exactly what had happened to the alligator shifter, exactly what this monster might have done to the old friend—the old dependent—that Tom was in the habit of feeding and looking after, was forced to be quiet.

Forced to be quiet, standing there at the counter, looking at his hands slowly clenching into fists. He wanted to scream, or pound the counter. He wanted to shift. And what, with one thing and another, he hadn't taken the time to eat any protein. He hadn't done anything to recover from his last shift. And it didn't seem to matter. He could feel his hands trying to elongate into claws. He could see his fingernails growing.

He stumbled, like one drunk or blind, towards the back door, and outside, stepped into the cold air of the parking lot, suddenly startled that darkness had fallen and that it was snowing again—a steady snowfall, with large flakes. The surprising coldness of the air stopped his fury—or at least acted like a slap in the face, making him take long breaths, and pace a little, stomping his feet, trying to calm down.

He wasn't going to shift. He wasn't going to. As he passed the stove, Keith had called out to him that he needed to go. Tom couldn't leave Keith stuck with this. And while he could, possibly, call Anthony in, if it was snowing again Anthony might be reluctant to come.

He stomped his feet again. There were no windows looking over the parking lot, and the only light came from the two street lamps, which shone, in a spiral of light as though the light were a fracture in the glass of the night, a crack through which something human shone.

There was nothing, Tom thought, blankly. Only the beast and the night. They resent humans for their light, for their bringing light into the night hours. For their science, for their thought. They resent us. I am human. I might be something else as well, but I'm not one of those. I'm not like them. I am not owned. I don't care if I was born of them. I don't care what unnameable offenses they think they suffered at the hands of those they call ephemerals.

He stomped his feet again, and walked out to the parking lot, then back again, the snow falling on his head and, he hoped, cooling it. Shifters are dangerous. Any humans who tried to defend themselves against my kind probably had good reason to. We are dangerous. It's not like we are a harmless and persecuted minority. Oh, there are plenty of those in the world, and the crimes imagined against them are numberless. But no one has to imagine crimes against shifters. No one needs to create grand conspiracy theories to think we control the world or the markets, or even the arts. No. Our crimes are obvious and brutal.

He put his arms around himself, as he realized he was out without a jacket and that the bitter snow-laden wind was cutting through his sweat shirt to freeze the beaded sweat of anger on his body. I have met less than twenty adult shifters in my life and half of those were murderers. I cannot, I will not, believe it is wrong for people like Keith to suspect us of intending ill to the rest of them. Clearly this Dire creature intends plenty of ill to normal humans. Clearly. And the others...He shook his head.

"Tom?" Kyrie's voice said, hesitant, from the doorway of the diner. "Tom?"

* * *

Rafiel knew a thundercloud when he saw one. He knew that Tom was leaving to deal with anger. He'd been around Tom enough to recognize the signs—as well as the signs that the man was fighting hard not to shift in front of all his customers.

Rafiel could also understand, from the tightening of Kyrie's jaw and the way she looked as if she'd like to bite something in two, as she watched Tom head out the back door, that there might be a storm brewing there.

Had he been an uninterested observer, he might very well have stayed around and convinced both of his friends to act like civilized, mature human beings. He might point out to Kyrie that killing Tom might seem like a really good idea, except that if she should succeed she would spend days not eating and moping about wishing she had him back—and that miracles rarely happened twice. He might point out to Tom that if he wanted a woman with an actual spine he had to allow her to think with her own mind, even if at times her actions seemed strange or ill-advised to him.

But Rafiel wasn't an uninterested observer, and inserting himself into his friends' possible argument seemed to him the worst possible way to bring about a reconciliation. They were all too aware—as he was—that he'd wanted Kyrie for himself. So he would leave them alone and hope they cooled off.

As for Rafiel, he must go interview the people who had signed the guest book at the aquarium the week before the first bones were found. It was probably a quixotic endeavor and a foolish one, to try to find the shifters by following up on the people who had been at the aquarium at one time or another. Surely, it was stupid. He wouldn't have signed that visitors' book, so why should anyone else? Particularly anyone else who was a shifter, who had something to hide and who didn't want to be confronted with the evidence of where he'd been and what he'd been up to.

He wasn't supposed to conduct interviews this late, but then, it was just on five o'clock, the early darkness an artifact of the season, the proximity to the mountains and the impending snowstorm. And these interviews were not, strictly speaking, procedure. In fact, he still wasn't absolutely sure how to justify them to his superiors.

While in his car, heading for the first address listed in the guest book, he dialed his partner at the station. "McKnight?" he said.

"Yeah? Where have you been? We have—"

"Later. I'm following an idea of my own. I was just wondering if you'd do me a favor, and check on the aquarium again. Did anyone do a thorough sweep of that platform above the shark tank?"

"We looked at dirt and prints on the railing and that, yeah," McKnight said. "Well, except the railing seemed to have been cleaned up, but we looked at the floor and all, for all the good it did us. The thing is, you know, it couldn't be just accidental falling in. There's normally a cover there, and it's quite sturdy enough to withstand the weight of an adult falling in. It's only removed to allow the cleaners to get in the tank. At this point, frankly, we're wondering if it's not so much murders as a body disposal system. The coroner hasn't looked at the body yet, so I can't tell you if our boy drowned or was otherwise killed. We might not be able to find out, anyway. Among the things not present seem to be his lungs."

"Yeah," Rafiel said, mostly to stem the flow of words. McKnight was new, and Rafiel was supposed to train him. An endeavor only slightly impaired by the fact that McKnight had just come out of college, with a degree in law enforcement. He was, therefore, to his own personal satisfaction, the highest authority possible on how to solve murders. Rafiel's own training and years of experience were dwarfed by McKnight's learning of the latest techniques, the latest research, the latest ways to go about it.

Which in the end boiled down to McKnight's opinions, nothing else. "This is something different," Rafiel said. "I talked to one of the aquarium employees." Let McKnight think that he had in fact spent the entire day in pursuit of that all-important interview. And let McKnight not guess that he'd been doing double duty as waiter at The George. Though given that he'd interviewed Lei while there, Rafiel thought he could convincingly—if falsely—make a case for having spent his day hiding, in disguise, while he waited for Lei to come in. "And she said not only were the door locks easy to open, but that male aquarium employees were in the habit of bringing dates there. She said that often there were used prophylactics in the planters around that small platform. I don't suppose those have been swept for clues."

McKnight was silent for a moment, which had to count as a miracle in several religions, Rafiel thought. When he came back, it was with less than his normal, self-assured verve. "I don't know about that," he said sullenly. "That platform is actually fairly broad, and the planters are pretty far away from the place where the vic fell or was pushed into the aquarium. So, there's no telling what people might or might not have looked at, that far away."

Rafiel, who had become skilled in the doublespeak employed by McKnight and other young hires, knew what that meant. What it meant, simply put, was that McKnight had been the one in charge of looking all around the area for clues and had decided—from his naturally superior knowledge—that there was no point in looking through the planters. That they were too far away from the area of the crime and that he was, therefore, safe in ignoring them. "I would appreciate it if you'd go over with someone and do a thorough looking over at that area. I don't need to tell you the possibilities it opens, including that of a romantic spat."

"Uh...both the vics were male."

"Yes, indeed," Rafiel said, tartly. "And of course, we only know of the male employees using the area as a love nest. However, my information was given to me by a female, and she might not have wished to implicate female employees, don't you think?" He didn't even wish to go into other possibilities with McKnight. "Just go and see what there is to find and how easy the area might be to get into after the place is locked down." And when one hasn't taken the trouble to procure copies of the keys, of course. "I will talk to you again in the morning."

Before he could hang up, McKnight's voice came through, high, upset, "Now? You want me to go now?"

"No time like the present, and you know how it is in these investigations. It might all be hanging on some little fact."

"But...but the weather channel says it's going to snow," McKnight said. "They say it's going to snow a lot. Another big blizzard headed our way in fact. I don't want to go out there in a blizzard."

"Well, then," Rafiel said, reasonably. "I would go out there now, before the snow becomes a blizzard."

From the other end of the phone there was something very much like an inarticulate exclamation of protest that, should it be more closely listened to, might translate into a profanity.

Rafiel chose not to listen to it any closer. Instead, deliberately, he pressed the off button of his phone, and turned his attention to navigating the maze of small neighborhoods, the opposite side of Fairfax from the one Tom and Kyrie lived on.

The neighborhoods weren't very different, though. In the early twentieth century, they might have been colonized by Irishmen or Poles, instead of the Greeks that had colonized the area north of them. Yet the houses all looked very much alike. Less brick here, and more the sort of elaborate, architecturally detailed Victorian houses that looked like mansions shrunk down to pint size. These houses often had three floors, but the floors would each contain no more than one room and a landing for the stair leading to the next floor.

They had, at one time, housed the laborers—many of them highly skilled—imported from Europe to build the elaborate mansions of the gold rush millionaires. The men and women enticed over to work for the newly rich had stayed and built their own dollhouse version of the boss's manor. And when the gold had evaporated and the silver lost its value they had stayed behind and added far more solid wealth to Colorado than mere metal could ever bring it.

Now in the beginning of the twenty-first century, the houses were mostly occupied by another kind of skilled laborer. While the neighborhood where Tom and Kyrie rented had never decayed appreciably, it had also never been exactly rehabilitated. Instead, the original Greek settlers had stayed, and the power of family and community supervision had kept the area, as the saying went, poor but honest. And now, when the younger generations were more likely to go to Denver to study, and then out of the state to work, it was mostly the realm of retirees, with no life and immaculate lawns.

The neighborhoods on the other side of Fairfax had been more ethnically diverse, and when the wealth of gold had rushed away from Goldport, there had been nothing there to keep people behind—no family, no weight of tradition. So instead they had moved on, restless, probably to Denver, where there were still mansions to build and money to be made.

In their absence, and with Colorado University right there, a few blocks away, another type of person had moved in. In the sixties, that type of person had often lived fifteen to a two-bedroom Victorian, and grown weed in the basement and generally destroyed the neighborhoods.

And then, recently, the sort of people who liked to buy destroyed properties and improve on them had moved in. Intellectuals, artists, a good number of childless couples with nothing but time on their hands to work on the houses. The houses looked pretty and almost newly built, though after coming across two of them painted in purple and accented with pink, Rafiel wished that these people had never heard the term painted lady or that they might have procured a translation of the term good taste before engaging in wanton remodeling.

He consulted his planner, and found that all three of the people he meant to see lived in this crisscrossing of pathways, shaded by century-old trees. The first one was on Meadoway, and he turned sharply onto it, admiring the faux-Victorian street light fixtures, and wondering if they were paid for by the neighborhood association or if anyone in the area had friends in city hall.

The first house he was looking for turned out to be one of the smaller ones—a two-floor Victorian with steeply descending eaves and a sort of look of being a Swiss chalet treasonously transported to the middle of Goldport, painted a weak aqua accented with green, and still feeling a little shell-shocked about the whole thing.

When Rafiel rang the doorbell, he was answered by a man who looked as if he could be cast, with no effort at makeup, as a hobbit in Lord of the Rings. Well, a rather tall hobbit, since he was about Rafiel's own height. But he had the hair perfectly right, and he was smoking a pipe. He was not wearing shoes, and Rafiel had to keep himself from looking down to see whether his toes were covered in curly hair, as Tolkien had insisted Bilbo Baggins' toes were. Instead, he focused on the amiable face, whose wrinkles showed it to be somewhat past middle age.

The man didn't smell like a shifter, and he'd seen nothing at the aquarium, and was shocked, shocked—as it turned out by the reports of cryptozoological discoveries in the parking lot of the aquarium and not by the deaths within. Before Rafiel could escape him, he had to be told that the man was a retired used- and rare-book seller, and to be given—he never understand why or how—a lecture on American horror writers of the nineteenth century and the value of their various first editions.

He escaped, gritting his teeth, to follow the winding Meadoway to Mine Street, where the next person lived who'd left both name and address at the aquarium at the time when it was probable the first man had gone for a totally unprotected swim with the sharks. This one was a bigger house, or at least taller, and instead of looking like a Swiss chalet, it looked exactly like a Southern antebellum mansion as it might have looked if Sherman had found himself in convenient possession of a shrinking ray.

The people who lived in it were obviously aware of the resemblance, as they'd painted the house aristocratic white, and had two rocking chairs on the diminutive porch.

Rafiel rang the doorbell twice, but no one answered, even though he could see the blue glow of a television through the windows of the darkened front room. He had visions of people dead in front of a TV screen, but he knew how unlikely that was. Far more likely that they had the sound turned way up and were far too interested in their program to listen to his ringing, or, after a while, knocking on their door. Or it was entirely possible they'd gone out for a burger or something they thought they needed to weather the coming snowstorm, and had left the TV on. People did that.

Before giving up, he sniffed around the door. It was unlikely he would be able to smell a subtle and old shifter smell without shifting, himself. But then again, this was not the aquarium, where shifters might or might not have passed. And even there, he'd picked up the original scent while in his human form and had only needed to shift to pinpoint its location.

In this case, if shifters lived here, it should be much easier. But his sniffing around the house, and around the driveway failed to raise even a vague suspicion of shifter-scent.

So, chances are that it's not here, he thought, and headed for the number three on his list, which was only a couple of blocks down at Skippingstone Way.

The house was yellow and narrow, set on a handkerchief-sized lawn bordered by what, to judge from the pathetic, upward-thrust branches, must be lovely bushes in the spring and summer.

But Rafiel didn't pay much attention to the details, because as he parked his SUV and got out, he got a strong whiff of shifter smell. And the smell only increased as he opened the garden gate and walked up to the porch.

On the porch, a woman stood crying by a pretentious reproduction Victorian mailbox. And she smelled unmistakably of shifter.

* * *

Kyrie thought he looked cold. Cold and lonely, with his arms wrapped around himself, standing in the snowstorm. She would have thought he would have come inside, into the warmth. She would have thought he would have come to where they were. And then she thought perhaps he was stopping himself from shifting, and that was all.

But when he turned around to face her, his features bore none of the strange distortions that presaged shifts. His eyes were their normal shape, as was his nose, and his face wasn't even slightly elongated as it seemed to get when he was about to change into a dragon. His teeth, bared, as they chattered against each other, retained their normal human bluntness. But he was pale, and his eyes were veiled—as though they were covered with the nictitating eyelids he grew in dragon form.

He seemed to be glaring at her. "What?" he asked, and his voice was edged with anger, and shimmered with sharp barbs. The signs to stay away were clear, but Kyrie couldn't leave him here, alone and furious.

"I...is there anything I can do to...help?" Kyrie asked.

"Oh, don't worry," he flung. "I'm not going to shift."

"I didn't think you were going to," she said, trying to keep her voice low and even, because she knew—she knew damn well—that in this mood Tom was like a small child, easily annoyed, easily angered by things he thought she had said, even when she couldn't be further from thinking it. "I just wanted to know why you were out here, alone and...and why you look so angry?"

"Why? Why I look so angry?" he asked. "What do you mean I look so angry? I'm being claimed. I'm being owned. By a creature so old we can't even guess at his motives. By a crime boss, Kyrie! And he...he uses people as instruments. He used Conan as a spy camera. And he probably can reach into Conan's mind all the time."

"I know. I realize how it feels, but..."

"But you sit there," Tom said. "And you talk to that creature, that...that dire wolf, even as he's going on about how he doesn't know what the Great Sky Dragon wants with me. He's talking about how ephemerals and shifters are different, and how our only loyalty is to shifters, and you are there, listening to him!"

"What did you expect me to do?" she asked. "Did you expect me to attack him? In the diner? Besides, he was giving us information we needed."

"Information!" His tone made it sound like the word should be a swear word. "Information! How do you know there is a word of truth in what he said?"

"Does it matter? Clearly there's some truth. I mean, I know it's tainted, that it's from his point of view. But, is it to some extent still true? Does it still have some contact with reality? Is it...is it going to work for us or against us?"

He was running his fingers through his hair, pulling it out of the bind that kept it in place at the back, scattering around wildly—making it look like a particularly energetic cat had been playing with his hair. "So is it?"

"I don't know," Kyrie said. She again managed to bring her voice down, to control her volume of speech. She knew he wasn't angry at her as such, truly she knew it, no matter how angry he might sound or how much it might seem to her like he was furious at her or perhaps—ridiculously—jealous of Dire. No, she mustn't sound like that. She must be calm and collected so that he would perhaps calm down. "But I know there is nothing we can do."

"Nothing we can do?" he said. "What do you mean nothing we can do? There has to be something we can do—there has to be a way to be free of all of this, hasn't there?" His eyes were wild, almost unfocused.

When Tom had first been hired by The George's erstwhile owner, he'd been addicted to drugs. Heroine, mostly, from what she understood of his stories. The drugs had been a misguided attempt to self-treat the shifting, to prevent himself from changing into a dragon whenever his emotions got control of him. Now, if Kyrie didn't know better, she'd think he was using again. There was a wildness to him, barely restrained and very much full of anger and something else, something seemingly uncontrollable. His blue eyes blazed with it as he said, "Why should I belong to someone? Belong as in be owned? Like a possession? A...thing? And only because I was born the way I am? Don't you understand, Kyrie, don't you see how wrong it is?"

Kyrie knew how wrong it was. She also understood, with startling clarity, at a glance, how different her background and Tom's were. He'd been left alone, to more or less raise himself. He might have been as unwanted as she was, as ignored, as disposable to those who were responsible for his existence. But unlike hers, his unsupervised childhood and barely supervised teenage years had been free of the control of strangers. His father might not have known or cared enough to control Tom and to make him follow rules, or even laws. But at least he'd not appointed revolving strangers to have power over Tom's life and determine what he could or couldn't do or say or wear to school.

A ward of the state since she was a few hours old, Kyrie had been passed from one controlling authority to another—foster families, social workers and the sometimes ironically named children advocates, all had passed her from person to person and there was nothing she could do except obey. She tried to convey this to Tom. "You think you're alone in this?" she said. "You think that it's because you're a shifter that strangers have a say over you? I was abandoned by my parents when I was just hours old," she said. "And from then on, I belonged to the state. Which in truth meant that I belonged to whomever the state appointed to look after a group of children. Strangers all, but they could determine everything, including what shots I got, and to what school I went. They could move me around to another foster family, uproot me from the neighborhood, leave me at the mercy of strangers."

He opened his mouth, but didn't answer. Instead, his mouth stayed open, then he closed it, with a snap. He put out a hand, and seemed like he would touch her face with his fingertips, only he let his hand fall before he could do it. "But that doesn't make it better, Kyrie," he finally said, his voice softer, but still seeming to simmer with outrage. "That doesn't make it any better. Yes, your upbringing was horrible, but that is supposed to be over. We're supposed to be our own people, now. We're supposed to be starting over. There shouldn't be anyone who can do this to us." His hand made a gesture in midair, which she supposed symbolized the control that the ancient shifters might have over them. "There shouldn't be anyone who can mess with our minds, our lives, what we are, this way."

Kyrie shrugged. "I didn't say my upbringing was horrible." And then caught herself saying it and thought how strange it was, because by various definitions, it had, indeed, been horrible. "I said that it w—" She shrugged. "It wasn't right. But then neither was yours. Just in very different ways. What I said is that I know this game. There is no point, when people think they own you, in just beating against it like...like a trapped bird ripping itself to shreds on the wire of the cage. When people think they own you, the only way you can get away with being yourself, the only way you can keep them off balance enough that they don't actually control you, is to play them one against the other. I think," she rubbed her forehead, as she thought of it. "I think we should do that. I think we should play the Ancient Ones against the dragons, the dragons against the Ancient Ones. I think we should go with the ones who demand least from us and—"

But Tom was shaking his head, making his black, curly hair fly about, like the ends of a whip. "No," he said. "No. We can't. We won't. Any concession we make to these people is like trading away a bit of ourselves and of who we are. Kyrie! Can't you see that they're evil? Can't you see them for what they are?"

"I can see they are very powerful," she said, hearing her voice toneless, and keeping it toneless, because otherwise she too would start yelling and next thing you knew, there would be people gathering to watch their argument. The only reason they hadn't gathered already, as far as she could see, was that it was snowing so hard, and they were in the back parking lot, while most people in The George were gathered up front, near the front entrance. "I can see they have mental and other powers that we lack. I can see too, that having lived so long, they have...they can call on contacts, on experience, on people they know. We can't do anything against that, either. So the only chance we have of defeating them, or even of holding them at arms' length, is to play them one against the other."

He shook his head. "There has to be another way. There has to." His hands were curling in fists. He looked at her, again unfocused. His face was contracted, as if in a spasm of pain. "I can't..." He shook his head. "They're not good, Kyrie. As people or as shifters. They're not good. We can't let them dictate to us. Ever."

"I'm not saying we should let them dictate to us." And now impatience crept into her voice. "I'm saying that we should use one to combat the other."

"No." He pressed his lips together, in narrow-lipped disapproval. "No."

"Then what are we to do?"

He faced her for a moment. His hands went at his hair again, pulling it back, but in fact snagging it in great handfuls, so that it hung in fantastical disarray around his face, making him look like an extra in a commercial picturing a society with no combs. "I'll figure out something," he said.

And with that the infuriating man started walking away. Kyrie ran after him, slipped on the ice and ended up having to clutch his shoulder to stay upright.

As he turned to look back at her, she said, "You can't go out there like that. Not in a T-shirt. Not...like that."

"Yes. Yes, I can," he said. His voice was absolutely flat, now, all emotion gone. "Yes I can. I need to cool off, Kyrie. Don't worry. I'll be back and I'll think of something."

She wanted to scream and shake him till his teeth fell out. It wasn't that she didn't love him. She was as conscious of loving him as she was that he was one of the more infuriating creatures alive—and possibly more infuriating than most dead ones too. Tom had a way of making her want to scream and stomp her foot. Sometimes, she almost understood his father who—trying to justify himself to her at one point—had told her that Tom had brought his disowning on himself, not by changing into a dragon, but because changing into a dragon was the last in a long line of disappointments and infuriating resistence to all normal behavior. His father hadn't disowned Tom because he was a dragon, but because he knew how out of control the human part of Tom was, and that, in a dragon, was terrifying.

But then she realized what Tom was saying. He needed to cool off. He needed to control himself. Which was the other side of the coin, that Tom's father had never seen or never been willing to see. Tom had an almost fanatical need for self-control. The things he'd done that seemed most out of control had more often than not been done to try to get control of himself. It might not be the best survival strategy in the world, but it was his, and who was Kyrie to try and change it? And what good would it do her to try?

Anything else she might tell him—put a coat on, take care of yourself, remember cars slide on ice and could kill you, remember you too might slip on ice—all of it would sound like she was trying to be his mother, and she didn't think maternal authority would go over any better than paternal.

She stepped back and away from him. She shook her head. She turned and walked towards the diner. At the door, she was almost run down by a wild-eyed Conan headed the other way—but she was done with trying to talk sense into dragons for the night, and she wasn't about to even try with this one. She might as well teach table manners to Not Dinner.

Instead, she went into the diner to meet with a sullen Keith protesting that he had to go, that truly he'd never meant to work today.

"Right, right," Kyrie said. "I'll call Anthony in." She wished Tom would give some thought to mundane considerations like the diner and who was cooking for the night, but that would probably be too much to ask for when he was convinced he could find a way for them to win, singlehanded, against the ancient shifters.

She snorted.

She wished him luck.

* * *

Rafiel walked up to stand beside the woman, who was so absorbed reading something printed on cheap, yellowish paper, that she didn't notice even when he stood right behind her, reading over her shoulder.

The pamphlet was the same he'd seen on a couple of phone poles around the diner. Pseudo Marxist exhortation for the rise of the masses by something that called itself the Rodent Liberation Front. He cleared his throat, causing the woman to jump and turn around.

She was much shorter than he was—all of maybe five-two—and had what was probably a whole lot of mousy-brown hair, which had been enhanced by a wash or a dye or something to have brilliant gold streaks. For something that elaborately dyed, it had not been styled at all, just caught back into a braid that was coming apart at the edges. It made her look curiously inoffensive and childlike. The look was completed by a dark brown overcoat, the neck surrounded with fluffy brown fake fur. She wore white socks and Mary Janes. The visitors' book at the aquarium identified her as a fifth-grade science teacher at Stainless Elementary, just around the corner.

She couldn't have been much larger than her students. And how exactly could she hide the fact that she was a shifter from them?

That was the strongest question on his mind, as she smelled, undeniably, unmistakably, like a shifter. How could she hide it? And why was she crying?

He cleared his throat, and she looked up to see that he was looking at her, looming over her in fact. She let out a squeaky scream and looked up at him in complete alarm. Meanwhile, Rafiel went through and discarded many ways to start the conversation. He thought of asking her if she changed, or if she sometimes felt positively like an animal, or...a hundred other, quick-flashing and just as quickly discarded ideas.

The problem with all of them was that he couldn't really say any of them to a stranger. Not even to a stranger who, by smell alone, identified herself as one of his kind. He couldn't tell her he was one of her kind, either. It was one thing to question her, and another, quite different one, to let her hold his security in her hands. Particularly as she looked at him out of brown, tear-rimmed eyes.

"Officer Rafiel Trall, ma'am," he said, instead, as politely correct as he could be. "From the Goldport Police Department."

She squeaked again and put her hand in front of her face. Unfortunately this was the hand holding the Rodent Liberation Front pamphlet, and as it trembled in front of her face, it did nothing to make it easier for Rafiel not to mention that she smelled of shifter. But, objectively, he didn't need to reveal to her that he knew. Not even vaguely. What he needed to do was somehow determine when she'd been in the aquarium and what she'd done. If she'd been there with a large group of children, it was highly unlikely she'd either taken the time to dump an unsuspecting adult male into the tank or to steal the keys of the aquarium so she could come back and do it later. And he could check on her movements during the visit by talking to whoever had been there with her. If these things hadn't changed since his school days, every field trip, even every visit to the park, was facilitated not only by the teacher in charge, but by two or three aides and by a number of mothers who, apparently, lacked enough chaos in their lives and must, therefore, pursue it in these groups.

"I'm sorry if this is not a good time," he told the terrified eyes shimmering with tears. "But this is a very routine enquiry. You signed the book at the aquarium on the thirteenth?"

She blinked, as if this were not what she expected at all, and slowly lowered her hand. It was her turn to clear her throat, because, if he guessed right, she couldn't have spoken otherwise. "Yes, yes," she said. "I took my science class to the aquarium. We're studying environmental biology and the pollution of water courses, and how that affects endangered species of fish." Her voice was pipingly small, but he suspected that's how she normally talked.

"How many children would there be in the class?" Rafiel asked, fascinated by her recital of facts seeming calm enough, even as her eyes looked terrified.

She cleared her throat again. "Oh...there were two classes together, actually. I...I have them at different periods, you know. So it was forty children. Well, at least not exactly children, they're fifth graders, and they get very upset if we call them children, as they should, since they are, after all, almost teens."

"I see," he said. And he did in fact see that this woman probably lived in fear of her students, most of whom would be her height or probably taller than her. She would do anything rather than upset them or offend them. He wondered how effective that was, as a teaching discipline. He consulted his notebook for her name, which was...he squinted at it. Marina Gigio. "So, how many other adults were there to help supervise the...er...teens, Ms. Gigio?"

"Ms. Braeburn," she said. "And Ms. Hickey. They're teacher aides. And then there were five mothers, but I'd have to look at my paperwork to tell you their names. They vary, you know, with each field trip."

"I see," Rafiel said again. He did. That made eight adults to forty kids, leaving it on average to each adult to look after five of the kids. Only he doubted very much it worked that way. For one, the mother volunteers, from what he remembered from his own childhood, were far more interested in their own children's safety and behavior than in any other of the kids'. That was probably worse now, since political correctness and a certain paranoia amid parents would have taken its toll. No sane mother would dare scold or even caution another's child. At the end of that lay lawsuits or worse.

So, in fact, five of the adults would be looking after five or at the most—supposing there were a few siblings between the two classes—seven or eight kids. The rest would be left to the teachers and teacher's aides. And the rest, being fifth graders, would be a definite handful. At that age—Rafiel had cousins—they were still capable of most of the idiocy associated with very small children, but to it they had added the creative mischief of teenagers, from stupid pranks to holding hands or kissing when someone wasn't looking. And the world being what it was these days, holding hands or kissing could also lead to lawsuits.

The woman would have had her hands full. Rafiel nodded to her. "Did you see anything suspicious? Anything that...well...do you remember the shark area, and the point where you can climb stairs to a sort of platform and look down at the shark area?"

She nodded. "I've...I've read about it in the paper. Their finding remains there. Thinking that I let all the young people hang on the railing and look down, and they were all playing, you know—nothing vicious—but shoving each other and saying 'tonight you sleep with the fishes'...I couldn't have imagined how unstable it was. If I'd known, I'd never have let them up on it. When I think of what might have happened." She shuddered, or rather trembled, a trembling flutter that made Rafiel think of something he couldn't quite name.

"Well, I understand no one knew it was that unstable," he said. He didn't want to tell her that the area was perfectly stable, but that the safety cover of the tank had been removed. As far as he knew—and he would admit he hadn't looked at the paper much beyond the cryptozoological report on the front page—the newspaper was still reporting both findings of bodies at the aquarium as accidents or at the very worst mysterious deaths. "So you didn't see anyone else there? I mean, besides the group you took in?"

She shook her head. "No. Just the childr—young people. You know how it is when a school group goes to this type of place. The other visitors tend to get out of the way."

"Oh, yes," he said.

"Very considerate of most people, really," she said. "Giving the children a chance to learn."

"Yes," he said, firmly, not wishing to encourage her delusions or provoke a flow of stranger explanations. Instead, he said, "I was just wondering...if you saw anything else suspicious?"

"No," she said, with unusual firmness. She darted a look—he'd swear it—at the pamphlet she'd received in the mail, then looked up again. "Definitely not."

If she wasn't lying, then Rafiel would present his shifter form to the nearest vet for neutering. He frowned. He didn't want to do it, but something welled up in him—the meaning of her last name, the look of her flutter, and something else...a feeling.

He cast about for something he could claim ambiguously had been a guess at what she might have seen, should it fail to hit its mark. "Mouse, right?" he said at last.

She shriek-squeaked, and her hand darted for the door handle.

But Rafiel's hand was there first, holding onto the door handle, speaking in his best soothing, smooth voice, "It's all right, Ms. Gigio. It's all right. This is not about you. I just wanted to tell you I knew, and that it's all right."

But she turned, backing against the door, her back protected by it, and bared little teeth at him. "How do you know? How did you know?"

He didn't answer. He wasn't going to bare his throat that explicitly to her. He wasn't going to tell her in so many words. But he allowed his eyebrows to rise in an expression that was unmistakably guess.

"Oh," she said. She dropped the letter and covered her mouth with her hand. "Oh." And then, with something sparking at the back of her eyes. "Are there many of us, then? Around?"

He shrugged. "I know a few. I don't think there're many, no." He had no idea, of course, of how many Ancient Ones there might be. "Less than one percent of the population. Perhaps much less."

"Oh," she said again. "All...all the same thing?"

It took him a moment to realize what she was saying, then he shook his head slowly. "Not at all. In fact, I don't know of any two of the same mammals." The closest being himself and Kyrie, for all the good it did them. And Alice had been like him. "There's...there seems to be a gamut of shapes, from the most common to the extinct or even mythological."

"Oh," she said again, and let out air, as though deflating, though fortunately she didn't decrease in size as she did it. "I got this letter in the mail. I thought..."

"I know," Rafiel said. "I've seen those around the college. I thought they were a student prank."

"I did too," she said. "See them. I saw them outside The George this morning. I often go there for the pesto omelet."

And for the pheromones, Rafiel thought, but didn't say anything. Let her think that her actions were rational and consciously controlled. They needed all the illusions they could hold onto.

"But I thought it was a student prank too," she said.

"It might still be," Rafiel said, though he didn't for a minute believe it. "You know your last name means mouse in Italian. And it's possible."

"Yes, it is," she said, brightening up. It looked like a sudden weight had gone off her. "I mean, it's actually probable. How else would they know? Or...Or..." She seemed to run out of objections to the idea someone else might know. Rafiel thought this was also an exceptionally bad time to let her know that some shifters could smell out other shifters.

Instead, he just inclined his head, and said, "Will you tell me, then, what you saw at the aquarium? I realize it must have been something you didn't want to talk about to just anyone, perhaps something shapeshifter related?"

She looked up and managed to give the impression she was making complex calculations at the back of her mind. "Well..." she said. "Well..." And shrugged. "It's just something that could be shifters. I didn't want you to think I was crazy, that is, before I knew...you know...that...that you'd understand."

"I understand," he said. "What did you see?"

"It was in the aquarium area, when it changes over to the restaurant area, you know? It's always really hard to control the ki—young people there, because they always want to stay and eat at the restaurant, no matter how many times you tell them it's an expensive, sit-down place and they wouldn't really be pleased if a bunch of young people—who tend to be rowdier than grown-ups—took over their tables, and, you know..." She seemed to realize she was running on and finished lamely, "all that. So I was very busy talking to all of them, and Ms. Braeburn was actually standing by the entrance to the restaurant, herding them past, as it were, to make sure they didn't try to duck inside, and then I saw..."

She shook her head. "You know that area has all the huge tanks with the weird stuff? Squids and octopuses, and that huge crab tank, where there's a lens on the bottom, and you can crawl under the bottom and look up?"

He nodded. He hadn't paid that much attention to that area, but he vaguely remembered everything she mentioned.

"Oh, this is going to sound like I'm crazy," she said, and put her hands on either side of her face, as if to keep herself from blushing. It didn't work. A blush showed on her cheeks, on either side of her fingers. It made her, weirdly, very attractive, and Rafiel had to remind himself that when cats played with mice, the result was normally not pleasant.

"I swear, just as we managed to get the kids out of the area, a little naked man came out from under that area—you know, the area where you can crawl to look up and see the crabs and things, as if you were inside the aquarium. He looked Asian—I'd think Japanese. Or at least he looked like the Japanese in movies. And he looked very old. His hair was all white and he was almost bent in double. And...well, he was naked, so I looked more attentively." She seemed to realize how that might sound and gasped slightly, before saying, all in a rush, "I mean, I mean, because I'm familiar...because I know when you shift suddenly you often find yourself, you know, naked. So I looked, because he didn't look like a streaker or a flasher or any of that kind of person, so I thought, I thought...how odd, and maybe he was a shifter. Only it wasn't a real thought, I mean, with words or anything, just an impulse to look more closely at him and see, you know...what was wrong."

Rafiel refused to tread in the minefield of innuendo that surrounded that statement. Instead, he said, "And then?"

"Oh, that's the craziest part of all, and I've spent a lot of time wondering if I'd gone around the bend, you know? But this is the thing...he winked at me, when he saw me looking. Just winked with all the calm in the world. And then he...climbed the tank. He wasn't very big. Shorter than I. And you know the tanks are open at the top, right? So he climbed the tank and he...dropped into it. And then...I couldn't see him anymore."

"Do you mean he disappeared?"

She shook her head. "No, I don't think so. It's just as he splashed in, there was all this turmoil and then...there were just crabs and anemones there. Nothing out of the ordinary." She looked apologetic. "I hadn't counted the inhabitants of the tank before he dropped in."

"No one would have asked you to," he said, reassuringly.

"I confess," she said. "When I first heard of the bones and the arm found in the tank, I thought it might be a shark shifter, and that he hadn't changed in time...?"

Rafiel hadn't thought of that, and that was a horrible idea, though it would certainly explain the moved-aside cover. And it wasn't like it was completely crazy. After all, sharks ate each other, too. And the remains being as sparse as they were, and having been in the water, how could he be sure the victims weren't shifters? But three shark shifters? All meeting the same fate? Unlikely.

"Thank you for your help, Ms. Gigio," he said. And then, because he felt he owed her something, he added, "I don't expect you'll have any more trouble with those pamphlets, but if you do, give me a call." He handed her one of his business cards. "I'll do what I can."

"Oh, thank you," she said, holding the card close to her chest. "That's so kind of you."

He didn't know what to answer to that, so he merely said, "Good evening, ma'am." And started towards the stairs. At which point, curiosity overtook him. There was something he had never fully understood about shifting. Oh, sure, Tom and Kyrie could go on and on about genes and about crossover from other species—borrowed genes or something like that—and about all this sort of pseudoscientific stuff, but what Rafiel wanted to know was what happened to the law of conservation of mass and energy when one shifted.

After all, Tom was easily five times his normal size when he shifted. Oh, sure, Tom was a muscular guy, but if you took his mass and distributed it across the bulk of the dragon, the dragon would be lighter than a cloud. Rafiel himself knew he was considerably heavier as a lion than as a man, though the lion was also much larger.

How would those differences in size play themselves over creatures that were much further from human at either end of the scale? What would a mouse shifter look like? Or a crab shifter, for that matter? He kept thinking of the report of the squirrel the size of a German shepherd. That would make finding shifters at the aquarium far easier.

"So...how big are you?" he asked. "When you shift?"

She blinked, and blushed, as if he'd asked her a very intimate question. "About..." she said. "Oh, normal size, you know? For a mouse."

And then, as if she'd broached the inadmissible, she opened her door and darted inside, leaving Rafiel rooted to the spot, thinking, Cat and mouse. Bad idea.

* * *

Tom was all too conscious of having been stubborn, and strange, and that he'd probably annoyed Kyrie—or at least deserved to annoy her. He felt guilty about walking away from their discussion, but he didn't know what else he could tell her, and he was very much afraid he would change into a dragon, right there in the parking lot.

He wrapped his arms around himself, shoving his hands under his arms to keep them warm, as he walked. He relished the sound of his boots against the snow. One of the good things about them was that they had such great traction. He also relished the fact that his hands and arms felt so cold they seemed to burn. Snow was settling all over him. One of the homeless who walked along Fairfax summer and winter was huddled in the recessed doorway of the realtors down the street.

He gave Tom an odd look from under disheveled bangs. "Whoa there, pal," he said. "You won't last long like that. They give coats for free down at St. Agnes. Got me this one." He patted his huge, multipocketed safari jacket. "Really warm."

Tom nodded, but walked on, without even slowing down. Wouldn't last long? How long could he last? How long did things like him live? And what happened to them when they went beyond the limits of normal human life? What did it do to you to live long enough to see all the normal people around you die? And their children, their grandchildren, everyone you could care for? Would it mean that you would come to think of them as ephemerals? As things? Creatures who didn't matter?

If that was true, then Tom didn't want to be a shifter. He didn't want to live to lose touch with everyone he knew—to see Keith's grandchildren get old and grey, and Anthony's great grandchildren die out. To lose all meaningful contact with people.

He stomped his feet, trying to find an outlet for his anger. He didn't want to be owned, he didn't want to owe anything to the Great Sky Dragon. Much less did he want to owe anything to the dire wolf, who had already proven that he had no respect for anyone, not even other, younger shifters—not even older shifters, if Old Joe was any indication.

And Old Joe was something else, working at Tom's mind. Where was he? Where could he have gone? It would be like Old Joe—Tom nurtured no illusions about his charity case—to have disappeared completely at the first sign of a threat. It would be like him...but it wouldn't be like him to go more than twenty-four hours without turning into an alligator and coming back to raid the diner dumpster. Particularly in this sort of cold weather when his shifter metabolism would be demanding protein.

Tom backtracked to where the homeless man sat. "Hey," he said.

The man looked back up at him. "Ah, you decided to come back for the coat? But I can't give you the coat, or I'll freeze, see." His speech was more articulate than Tom was used to from the people who would stay in doorways even when the weather turned bitterly cold. The main reason to not go to one of the free shelters was, normally, that they demanded sobriety and this person could not swear to it. "Go to St. Agnes. They will look after you."

"No, no," Tom said, his teeth chattering. "What I want to know is, have you heard of someone called Old Joe?"

"What? The gator?" the man said blinking.

It was Tom's turn to blink and then, in a sudden rush to seem innocent, "Gator?"

"Oh, he says he turns into a gator," he said. "We call him Gator, see?"

"Er...have you seen him?"

"Not since yesterday, I think." He shook his head. "He said he was heading out to the aquarium. Don't make no sense to me. The aquarium is closed."

"Er...yes, thank you." Tom said, as he started walking the other way again.

"St. Agnes," the homeless man screamed after him. "They'll fix you."

Tom nodded. He walked very fast away from the newly-gentrified area of Fairfax, the area where, since his arrival a year ago, the place had become clean, and all the street lamps worked, and where the businesses were bookstores and movie rental stores, restaurants and clothes stores.

As he walked, the stores changed slowly to "antique" shops, thrift shops, used bookshops, used CD shops, and then another two blocks down, it was down to new age stores, churches advertising free hot meals, and then a bit further on, to where the buildings on either side of the street were warehouses, most of them empty and shuttered against intruders.

Here, in the silence of the surroundings, Tom became aware of a strange sound—like an echo behind him. Feet crunching on snow, almost in perfect rhythm with his. He turned around. Sure enough, following him, at about a half-block distance, was Conan. Keeping him protected, Tom thought. Keeping an eye on him, more the like. A little, sentient spy camera, watching his every move.

"Go away," he yelled, turning around. "I don't need you."

Conan stopped. He looked up. He too had his arms wrapped around himself, only one of his arms was rather shorter than the other, and it made him look even more pitiful. "But..." he said. "But..." And that was it. His lip trembled.

Tom had spent the last few months taking in every sad sack who stopped by the diner. But this was too much, to expect him to take on a sad sack who also happened to be not just a spy but an instrument used by the Great Sky Dragon. "Don't try it, Conan. You heard. You are a spy device for the old bastard. I don't want him around."

Conan opened his hands. "You don't understand," he said. "I don't have a choice. I was told to follow you, to not let anything happen to you."

"Did you know?" Tom asked. "Before you heard it from the..." He came closer, so he could talk to Conan. "From the dire wolf?"

Conan shook his head. He looked miserable. He must have rushed out, because not only hadn't he bothered to put his jacket on, he was still wearing his George apron. "No. He said I was to protect you. I remember being very confused about how I was to do that, considering that, you know...you were stronger than I...but he said..." He shrugged. "I'd just dragged myself back, you know, to...well, to the restaurant on the outskirts of town, where..."

Tom nodded. Where the point of contact with the triad was. He got that much.

"I expected him to kill me," Conan said. "He punishes failure horribly. I've seen him kill other people for failing."

"But you went back, anyway?" Tom asked. He couldn't understand it. "In your place, I'd have been putting as many miles between me and as many triads as possible as fast as possible."

Conan shook his head. "It's not that easy. First, they are everywhere, truly. When you least expect it, in some small town, some out of way place, you'll meet one of them. And then there's... when you first join? I knew they put a tracker in you. I didn't know he could...you know...see through my eyes or anything. But I knew he could tell where I was. And if I didn't come back, he would send someone for me. And then he would make it really unpleasant."

More unpleasant than death? Tom thought, but was afraid to ask. "So you went back."

"After months, I went back," Conan hung his head.

"I was wondering...I mean..." He shook his head. "I was almost dead but I came back in a few days, but you..."

Conan's eyes were huge. "I was caught in the burning building," he said. "Everyone else died. I must have managed to drag myself out before my brain..." He shook his head. "I don't even remember the first month."

"Oh."

"The arm..." he shrugged, "is the least of it. I understand bone is hard to grow. They told me...in another three months or so it should be normal."

"Oh," Tom said again, and thought that if Conan imagined this made him feel more charitable towards the Great Sky Dragon, he was a fool. All right, Tom might have been guilty of ripping out his arm and burning him, but it had been in self-defense. While the Great Sky Dragon was the one who had sent him after Tom.

"When he sent us out first, he had told us to kill you. Find the Pearl of Heaven, kill the thief. And then all of a sudden, when I came back, he wanted you alive. He wanted you protected." He shrugged. "I don't understand any of it, but I knew it was my chance to...to be accepted again. I didn't know he could see through my eyes until today. I thought I had to call him. I called him when you flew away." He sounded miserable. "When you went back to your house because of the dire wolf..."

Tom didn't understand it either, but of one thing he was sure. "I want you to go back, now, Conan, all right?"

Conan blinked at him, in complete confusion. "But I have to..."

"I want you to go back to the diner, and don't worry about me. Nothing is going to happen to me. Look, it's like this—if you stay here, I'm going to change and flame you. You can't flame me, because you're supposed to protect me, not kill me. If I flame you," Tom kept his voice steady, though he was, in fact, very sure he could never flame the hapless and helpless Conan, "you won't be able to follow me, anyway—and at best you'll have to come back as you did."

"No!"

"The Great Sky Dragon can't blame you for going back."

Conan opened his mouth to protest.

"No, look, I'm not going to get in any type of trouble. I just want to walk around for a while, until I calm down. Nothing will happen to me. I promise. And I won't let you come with me, anyway."

Conan opened his mouth again. "Don't you understand?" he asked, his voice vibrating and taut with despair. "If you want to flame me, do it. But I can't go back. Himself doesn't tolerate failure and I'm not very valuable to him. Not like you."

In Tom's mind an odd idea formed. If he was valuable to the Great Sky Dragon, then there was only one thing he could use to threaten the creature. "If you don't go back," he said, "I will kill myself. I'll throw myself from an underpass or fling myself under an eighteen-wheeler. I think if I destroy the brain, I won't come back. And I'd rather be dead than owned."

Conan started and looked up at Tom, as if trying to gauge how serious the threat was.

Tom looked back with desperate resolution. He would rather kill himself. Particularly if he was going to live millennia. A human lifetime of obeying someone was bad enough. An eternity would be hell on Earth. And then when he'd found out that the Great Sky Dragon could use his people—literally—as instruments...That was the worst of all. Tom could not face that. He let his revulsion show on his face, too.

Conan looked panicked, but nodded. He held his hands open on either side of his body, palms towards Tom, in instinctive appeasement. "All right," he said. "I'll go. I'll go."

And he turned around and started down the street. Tom hesitated. Did this mean the Great Sky Dragon was going to leave Tom alone? Or that he had someone else watching Tom?

Tom shrugged. It didn't matter. He continued down Fairfax, now solidly in the office neighborhood, all closed, of course, in the storm. Hands in his pockets, he walked on, under the falling snow. He was shivering, but that didn't matter.

What he wanted to know—what he very much needed to find out—is how he could rid himself from all the creatures who wanted to claim ownership of him, and make his life his own once more. He, who had never obeyed father nor mother, nanny or teacher, would not now turn his life over to more than half mad, dangerous old beings who played under no moral rules he could understand.

From deep within his jeans pocket, his phone rang.

* * *

Tom stepped off the road onto a space on the grounds of the aquarium, on the other side of the parking lot. In summer this was a pleasant-enough space with a little bridge over a carefully directed, and probably entirely artificial, small stream, trees, flowers, benches. Right then it was a winter wonderland, with icicles dripping off the trees and slippery ice underfoot.

Tom fished in his jeans pocket, thinking it was Kyrie, and answered the phone, his half-frozen fingers fumbling with the buttons.

"Tom?"

"Dad?"

"Oh, good. I have been delayed at the airport again. Something about flights to Denver being cancelled. Look, I really need you to go there, and to wait in the loft for the cable guy."

"Dad!" Tom turned around, to look at the frozen river. He had a feeling he'd heard something move or slither down there. It couldn't be water. That would be frozen. So what could it be?

"No. You see, I wouldn't ask if it were just because I want to watch TV, but in the beginning, at least, I'm going to be working from home, and I need the cable connection for the internet."

"Dad, I can't get to Denver," Tom said, drily, keeping his teeth from knocking together by an effort of will.

"Why not? How long would it take you to fly there? It's only a three-hour drive away. Flying couldn't be more than twenty minutes."

"Flying in the current blizzard would probably take about three hours," Tom said. He felt suddenly very tired. "And besides...look, I just can't."

"You know, I don't ask you to do this stuff every day," Edward Ormson said, in an aggrieved tone, from the other end of the connection. "It's just that this is really important to me, and I thought...Well, I thought our relationship was better these days."

Their relationship was better these days. Tom was very conscious that no matter what bad parents his parents might have been, he had been a truly horrible son, himself. And he owed his father for The George. "If I could at all, I would, Dad. It's just that I'm in the middle of a big mess just now."

"A mess? What type of a mess? Anything legal?"

His father was a corporate lawyer, and clearly, just now, a hammer in search of a nail.

"No," Tom said. "Look, it's just...not something I feel comfortable discussing on the phone."

"Did you eat someone?"

Tom dropped the phone. It went tumbling down over the brick parapet of the bridge and hit the river below with a hard thud. Under the bridge, there was that sound as if something had moved or slithered. It was so faint, that Tom couldn't be sure it had happened or if his half-frozen ears were giving him back impossible phantom sounds.

* * *

Rafiel got in his truck thinking that while the woman was a shifter, and seemed apparently harmless, yet he couldn't get involved with her. For one, the moment she found out he was a lion shifter...He shook his head. Cat and dragon might be one thing—and he still wasn't sure how that would play out in the end—but cat and mouse would be insane. It would require that he lose his marbles completely.

He got his cell phone from his pocket and dialed McKnight's cell phone. "Hey, Dick," he said, using McKnight's diminutive in an attempt to forestall more protests.

The answer from the other side of the phone had almost as much of a squeak as that of Ms. Gigio's, "Yes?"

"So...have you done the platform?" he asked.

"Yeah, yeah. We...I brought a team over." He spoke with such haste, such obviously tumbling guilt, that it was obvious to Rafiel that he had found something.

"What did you find?"

"We...uh...I found...that is...Michelle and I found a couple of used condoms, tied up, in the planters. We will have them processed and...and get back to you with the results."

"Thanks, McKnight. Do," Rafiel said, keeping the amusement, but not the forcefulness out of his voice.

He hesitated for a moment, starting the car away from Ms. Gigio's home. Where would he go now? He was dying to know what was happening with those condoms. Well...at least Lei had told the truth about that. Maybe.

Getting the phone again, he said, "Dick, can you give me the address of all of the aquarium's male employees? Female, too, while you're at it."

McKnight could. Or at least he could after much hemming and hawing and getting hold of the aquarium records from someone. He cleared his throat, nervously, and in a reedy voice gave Rafiel three male names—John Wagner, Carl Hoster and Jeremy Fry—and three female names—Suzanne Albert, Lillian Moore, Katlyn Jones—and addresses, all within a mile of the aquarium in the area where old Victorians had been converted into apartments, amid a lot of other, mostly cinder-block apartments, of fifties vintage. It mostly housed college students. And they were all close enough to the diner too.

Rafiel was feeling uneasy enough about Tom and Kyrie and whatever their little spat might have devolved into. Some part of him told him that, interested party or not, suspicious or not, he should have stayed around and refereed their argument. They were both younger than him, and both of them had far less experience of relationships.

Not that I can tell them a lot about relationships, Rafiel thought. After all, I am the master of the love them and leave them.

"Rafiel?"

He'd forgotten he'd left the cell phone on, and now looked at it in puzzlement, thereby putting his brakes on a little too late for the red light ahead. He hit a patch of ice as he braked and slid through the intersection to the glorious accompaniment of the horns of cars which swerved to avoid him. Good thing I'm a policeman, he thought as he took a deep breath, made sure he wasn't about to shift—his nails looked the same size, and there was nothing golden or furry about his hands—and said, "Yeah, McKnight?"

"Are you going to go talk to these people?" McKnight asked.

"That's the idea," Rafiel said.

"In this weather?"

"Well, all the more chance to find them at home, right?" Rafiel said, and hung up before McKnight would actively and loudly worry about his life or his safety or something.

Then he pressed one of his preset dials, and rang up The George.

* * *

Kyrie started worrying about Tom almost as soon as he left the parking lot. It wasn't that she was angry at him—or not exactly. A part of her understood that he couldn't bear to be controlled by someone else, much less someone who legally and morally should have no power over him.

Another part of her wanted to tell him to grow up already and that adults knew they couldn't have life all their own way, that they couldn't forever hold at bay the unpleasant parts of reality and those they would rather not deal with. But that part of her, she told herself, was firmly under control. Yes, she was sure that Tom was overreacting. But at the same time he was just as sure that she was underreacting, enduring the interference of the dire wolf in her affairs with excessive placidity and total lack of protest.

Which, she thought, was not really true. She could very easily—and happily, for that matter—allow herself to scream and rant. For all the good it would do.

But she would not allow herself to scream and rant at Tom. Because that would do no good. She was sure he'd gone off to cool off and that he too was trying to hold his temper in check. And she couldn't fault him. She preferred he did that than he shifted and took it out on all those nearby.

Keith was looking intently at her. "Is Anthony coming in?"

"In a few minutes," Kyrie said, keeping her voice calm. In her mind, she was imagining Tom walking blindly into the storm. She wished he had taken his jacket.

"I can't stay, Kyrie. I have to get home," Keith said. "I have no idea what happened to Summer. She must think I'm crazy. I bring her here for a coffee, and the next thing you know, I'm cooking."

"Yeah," Kyrie said. "Anthony is on his way. " He'd sounded frankly relieved to be called in. Kyrie wondered what exactly his wife had been doing to make him so happy to hear from her. But Anthony solved it himself as he came in. "It's crazy just sitting in the house, watching reruns of Friends," he said. "I mean, it's a studio, and it's just snowing outside. And then Cecily is worried about...you know...the storm and whether the roof is going to cave in. Like...we're on the third floor down from the top of the building. If the roof caves in on us, we're in a world of trouble." He looked sheepish for a moment, as he divested himself of his jacket and put on his apron and the hat he wore while he was cooking—which was, granted, not as stylish as Tom's bandana, but served the same purpose of keeping hair out of the food. "She's not...I mean, I don't want you to think she's crazy or something. It's just she's not used to going through these blizzards. I guess for people who didn't grow up in Colorado it must look much worse than it is."

"Yeah, it does," Kyrie said. And still, in her mind, she saw Tom walking through the storm. How could he survive it? Could he survive it? She heard Dire saying that most of the young shifters died through their own stupidity and she gritted her teeth and pretended that everything was fine, and got orders, and put them on the carousel of spikes on the counter, for Anthony.

More people came in. Probably people who weren't all that familiar with Colorado, Kyrie thought, and who found it easier to weather the storm in here than alone in whatever tiny apartments they lived in. She kept a smile on her face, and worked as efficiently as she knew how, while Anthony turned out the meals in record time.

She didn't know how long it had been, when she heard the back door open. She set down the tray and the carafe of coffee on the counter, and ran down the hallway. "Tom," she started, with some idea of finishing the sentence with "Tom, I was so worried."

But instead of Tom, it was Conan, coming in. He was a vague shade between blue and lavender. His teeth beat a mad rhythm. His hair was so covered in snow that he might as well have been wearing a powdered wig.

"Where is Tom?" Kyrie asked.

Conan looked up at her, in mute misery. That look made thoughts run through her mind, thoughts she didn't like at all. There had been a fight and the Great Sky Dragon had killed Tom. After all, she remembered, the creature held it his right to discipline those he deemed to belong to him. Or else...or else, Tom had been run over. Or simply collapsed and frozen by the side of the road. "What. Happened. To. Tom?" she asked, her voice slow and controlled, even as she told herself that she would not shift. She would never shift. Not in the diner. Shifting wouldn't help anything. Conan already looked halfway between frozen and terrified.

He shook his head. "He is fine," he said, though the words weren't really easy to understand through his chattering teeth. "He's...he was fine when I left him."

And then, nerveless, as though his legs had turned to rubber under him and his body wasn't all that much more solid, Conan sank to his behind just inside the door of the diner. "He made me leave," he said. "He told me to leave. He made me leave. What if something happens to him?"

"Tom made you leave?"

A headshake. "No. Himself. He told me to leave. Tom said...he said he'd kill himself if I stayed with him, and the Grea—Himself said he meant it."

"Nothing will happen to Tom," Kyrie said. And bit her lip thinking that unfortunately she was growing as weary of the interference of elder shifters as Tom himself was. "It's all right. Come on." She helped him get up—or rather more or less pulled him up, by his arms, by main strength. "Come on. I'll get you coffee or something. You're frozen."

"He's out there, like that," Conan said. "In a T-shirt. What if something happens to him?"

"Tom is a big boy," Kyrie said. "He'll take care of himself. He used to live on the streets. It's not like he's a child whom we must look after."

She was telling herself that more than she was telling it to Conan. And she was so convincing that she almost believed it. At least for the next two hours, she managed to keep herself from freaking out thinking of Tom out there alone and what might happen to him.

It wasn't like the city was safe. There were the Ancient Ones, and whatever was throwing people to the sharks, and the Rodent Liberation Front and the triad. In fact, it was an interesting time to be a shifter in Goldport.

She was very close to losing all self-control, shifting, and loping about in the storm, trying to smell Tom out, when the phone rang.

"Hello," she said. "The George."

"Kyrie. It's Rafiel. Is Tom okay?"

And then, before she could control it, before she could remember that Tom was an adult and should be treated as such, all her anxiety came pouring out of her, "I hope so. But, Rafiel, he walked west on Fairfax two and a half hours ago and he hasn't come back."

"Uh. Does he have his phone with him?"

"Yes. Well...maybe. He should have it. But he isn't answering." An hour ago, in a moment of weakness, she'd tried to call three or four times. And another half a dozen times since.

"I see. You two fight?"

"No. Not really. He is just...he's mad at the...you know..."

"Yeah. I imagine." There was a pause, as if Rafiel were trying to think through things. "West on Fairfax?"

"Yeah."

"I see. I tell you what, I'll drive down the road a while and see if I can find him. What was he wearing?"

"What he was wearing when you last saw him. Jeans and a black T-shirt." She felt she needed to defend him against stupidity, even though Rafiel hadn't even paused in a significant manner. "He said he needed to cool off."

"Oh, yes. And I'm sure he has," Rafiel said. "Don't worry, okay? I'll see if I can find him."

* * *

Rafiel tried to call a couple of times. No answer. Stubborn dragon, he told himself, about his friend, with something between annoyance and admiration. That Tom wasn't answering Kyrie might or might not make sense. She didn't seem to think they had argued, but Rafiel's experience of women—his mother, aunts and girl cousins included—told him that just because a woman thought that, it didn't mean the man she had emphatically not argued with thought the same.

He drove slowly down Fairfax seeing no movement, let alone movement by someone in jeans and a black T-shirt. Tom had black hair. He should have stood out like a sore thumb.

Unless, of course, he's passed out by the side of the road and covered in a mound of snow, in which case he is pretty much white. Rafiel felt a tightening in his stomach at the thought. How long could a dragon survive hypothermia? In either form? Oh, okay, so they were hard to kill, but was freezing one of the ways they could be killed? He didn't know. And it wasn't as if he was going to go in search of Dante Dire to ask him.

Dante Dire presented the other problem. Because Kyrie hadn't said anything about looking for two people, one following the other, he presumed that Conan hadn't gone with Tom. That meant Tom was out there without his human security cam. What if the bad guys had found him first? While Rafiel had got the idea that Dante Dire was cringingly afraid of the Great Sky Dragon, he didn't get the feeling that he was even vaguely impaired by moral considerations or feelings that he should not kill. Particularly—he suspected—no feelings that he should not kill dragons.

As stupid as it was that Dante Dire, sent to investigate the death of shifters, would end up killing shifters to get them out of his way, Rafiel suspected that this was a nobody picks on my little brother but me matter. After all, the Great Sky Dragon, supposed protector of all dragons, had killed at least one of their members in Goldport. The police had processed the body and Rafiel was sure he had been bitten in two in the parking lot of the Chinese restaurant. And the Great Sky Dragon had damn well near killed Tom, too, for all his new interest in protecting him.

Rafiel had now gone all the way to the west end of Fairfax. He turned around and started driving the other way, slowly. A movement from a doorway called his attention. It looked khaki, not black, but considering everything, perhaps with the snow it just looked that way.

Hopeful, he pulled up to the curb, stopped the car, jiggled a little in his seat, just to make sure at least one of his wheels wasn't on solid ice, parked and set the parking brake. "Hey there," he called to the indistinct, blurred form in the doorway.

The form stirred. Almost immediately, Rafiel realized it couldn't be Tom. This was someone older with white hair, probably taller and bulkier than Tom, though that was hard to tell, as he was huddled in the doorway with one of those Mylar space blankets over most of his body save for his shoulders and head. The flash of khaki was from the shoulders, covered in some sort of jacket. He looked at Rafiel from bleary eyes half hidden under unkempt bangs.

"Uh..." Rafiel said, jiggling his keys in his pocket. "Do you want a ride to a shelter?"

The eyes widened. "No shelter," he said, with something very akin to fear. He shook his head and rustled the corner of his shiny silver coverings. "I got my blanket."

"Oh. All right," Rafiel said. The man didn't seem drunk, but he seemed as averse to going into a shelter as, say, Tom or Kyrie or himself would have been. Rafiel sniffed the air, smelling nothing, but he wasn't sure he would have smelled anything as cold as it was. He would swear his ability to smell had frozen with his nose. Perhaps, he thought, he should come back and smell the man later. And, as the inanity of the thought struck, he snorted. Yeah, because he really needed to find another charity case for Tom. Old Joe wasn't enough. "Hey," he said, on impulse. "Did you see a guy go by here? About yea tall, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt? Black hair about shoulder long or a little longer?" How was it possible that he was suddenly so unsure of Tom's hair length? He almost sighed in exasperation at himself. Yes, Kyrie was far more interesting to look at, but he should have noticed his best male friend's hair length.

"I told him he needed a jacket," the old transient man said and nodded.

"Uh. You did? Good call."

"Yeah, he was going that way," the man said, pointing west. "If you are looking for him, going that way"—he pointed east, the direction Rafiel was now headed—"won't help."

"Right, but see, I went miles on Fairfax and I didn't—"

"He was looking for Old Joe," the derelict said. "Him that thinks he can be a gator? I told him last I heard Old Joe was headed for the aquarium. I don't know what he meant to do at the aquarium, though."

The aquarium, yeah, that would be like Tom. Let cryptozoology zanies take over the local paper. Let them get pictures of creatures that shouldn't possibly exist fighting it out in the parking lot of the aquarium. Tom, who shifted into one of the creatures, would immediately feel honor bound to go the aquarium. Why didn't I think of it before? "Thanks," he told the old man. "I'll...get you a coffee or something."

The man smiled, revealing very brown teeth. "Why, that would be very nice of you."

Back in the car, Rafiel turned around. The aquarium. What are the odds?

But it was a few minutes' drive there, at the most, and it wasn't as though he didn't have excuses he could give for being on the grounds. He turned onto Ocean Street and started driving slowly around the parking lot. And caught a flash of a black T-shirt—or mostly black, as it seemed mottled in white—as the person wearing it stepped off the garden path and disappeared from view.

Yeah, Tom, Rafiel thought, with a mix of concern and annoyance. Because who else would think that late in the evening, in the middle of a snowstorm, is a good time to go explore the garden of the aquarium?

Still, he wasn't at all sure and couldn't do more than hope that it was indeed Tom, as he parked on the street and jumped out. He ran across the garden, ice and—presumably—frozen grass crackling under his feet. "Tom," he yelled. "Tom."

And then he hit a patch of ice, and his feet went out from under him.

* * *

Tom heard Rafiel's voice. He'd walked down the slope towards the river, and he'd looked every place possible his phone might have hit the ice. But it was dark, he didn't have a flashlight and—as far as he could tell—his phone would now be covered by snow, and a lump amid the other lumps resting on the riverbed. While it might be possible to distinguish it from rocks and twigs by its shape, every minute that passed was making it more indistinct, and Tom had no idea how long he'd been looking. He didn't wear a watch—something Kyrie told him was silly. Normally he could rely on the clock on the wall of The George.

And now, between being cold and the snow falling all around muffling sound, he didn't know if five minutes had gone by, or an hour. Or more. Sometimes, the phone rang, but even that didn't make it any easier to find, because it seemed that, just as he had isolated an area the sound might be coming from, the ringing stopped again.

All of this was worsened by the fact that he had to look for the phone from the bank. He didn't think the river was frozen enough to support him. And while the "river" was probably no more than two feet deep, at most, Tom didn't want to get his feet and legs wet. He was cold enough.

On the other hand, he also didn't want to lose his phone. Not to mention that by now his father probably thought that he had eaten someone—instead of just having been startled while his fingers were half frozen. He didn't think, even if his father thought so, that he would feel obligated to call the police and report, but you never knew. For most of his life, Edward Ormson had been a fairly amoral—if not immoral—corporate lawyer. He'd encountered ethics and a sense of responsibility late in life. Like any midlife crisis, it could cause some very strange effects. He might suddenly feel an irresistible obligation to report imaginary crimes.

That's it, Tom thought. I'll go back to The George and call him from there. He climbed up from the bank of the river to the path, at least six feet above. Like all such canals, artificial or not, in Colorado, the bed for the little river was deep enough to accommodate a ten-times swollen volume in sudden flash floods.

Though, like the legendary Colorado blizzards, it was something he hadn't experienced for himself, he'd heard of summers when sudden snowstorms up in the mountains sent water thundering down the canyons below, to cause untold damage. So the design of every waterworks in Colorado accounted for those.

He struggled all the way to the road level, and looked towards Fairfax. And then thought that it had taken him probably a good hour to walk here, and that added to the point where he had effectively hung up on his father meant that Edward was probably concocting scarier and scarier stories to tell himself. Right.

Sighing, he started down to the riverbed again. He'd look just one more time. Then there was Rafiel's voice from the garden up there. Definitely Rafiel's. And followed by a thud that indicated the idiot had just taken a header in the snow.

Tom cursed softly under his breath, and started climbing back up the steep bank. He wanted his phone. Badly. But considering the sounds he'd heard from under the bridge, he wasn't absolutely convinced there wasn't something or someone hiding there. Not so long ago, there had been a case in Denver of homeless men being found beheaded. Tom didn't remember—since at the time he didn't live in Colorado and all he had seen of the affair was the TV news that happened to be playing at a soup kitchen—whether the case had ever been resolved, or if there was still someone in Colorado, perhaps in the smaller towns now, whose hobby it was to kill males foolish enough to be out and unsheltered—and unobserved—in this sort of weather. So it probably wouldn't hurt, before he went down towards the river and made himself invisible to anyone driving by, for him to have backup.

Having made it all the way to the path beside the river, Tom looked in the direction the thud had come from. Rafiel had gotten up, and was dusting off his knees.

"Are you okay?" Tom said.

"I'm fine," Rafiel said, and glared at him. "You?"

"I'm great," Tom said. "I just dropped my phone. Down on the river." He paused a second. "Right after my father asked me if I'd eaten someone."

"Oh," Rafiel said. He looked uneasy. Had his parents ever asked him if he'd eaten someone? No. Never mind that. Probably not. Though Tom had yet to meet Rafiel's mom, Rafiel had brought his dad over for lunch at The George a couple of times.

An older, sturdier version of Rafiel, his hair white and giving less the impression of a leonine mane than his son's wild hair, Mr. Trall had impressed Tom as eminently sane. And eminently sane parents didn't leap to the conclusion their sons went around eating people, not even when the sons happened to have another, more carnivorous form. Which didn't help Tom at all, because his father wasn't sane.

Rafiel was fishing in the pocket of his jacket. "Here, why don't you call him on my phone?"

"Oh," Tom said, surprised the idea hadn't occurred to him, though considering how much ice he felt on top of his head, his brain was probably frozen solid. And not being a silicon-based life-form, this didn't help his thought processes at all. He took the phone and started dialing his father's number, all under what he couldn't help feeling was Rafiel's stern scrutiny.

"Hello? Dad?" Tom said, as the phone was answered on the other side.

"Tom. Oh. Good. I was...er...I've been worried."

Tom tried to grit his teeth, which was pretty hard, as they insisted on chattering together. "No, Dad, I didn't eat anyone."

"Oh." Pause. "Well, I didn't think you had. I was just...er... worried."

Please, don't let him have gone to the police, Tom thought, as he watched Rafiel turn on his heel and head back towards the truck. Tom had a vague moment of panic at the thought that Rafiel was just going to drive back. Well, at least he'd left him with the phone. But the slog back to The George seemed suddenly like too much of an effort to make. Tom was very cold and very tired, and maybe he should just lie down here and—

"So what sort of trouble are you in?" Edward Ormson asked, over the phone. "I notice you're using someone else's phone. Isn't that your policeman friend? Tom! You've been arrested."

Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn! His youthful antics had included several arrests, for vandalism, for joyriding, for possession. His father had bailed him out countless times. But did this justify—five years later—his father assuming he'd been arrested, just because he was using a policeman's phone? Well, okay, yeah, it probably kind of does, he thought.

"I'll get someone to come post bail as soon as—"

"I wasn't arrested, Dad. It's...hard to explain over the phone. Do you remember the pearl?" He raised his eyebrows and had trouble concentrating on the flow of conversation, as Rafiel was making his way back, a bundle of fabric swinging from one hand.

"You didn't steal it again?"

"No, I didn't steal anything. Ow." The last sound was because Rafiel was roughly and very matter of factly putting a hooded sweat shirt over Tom's head and dressing him in it without so much as by your leave. It involved pulling Tom's hands through the sleeves, as if he'd been a child or a mental patient. "Ow, all right. I can dress myself, Rafiel."

"What?" Edward asked.

"Nothing. Rafiel has decided I'm not properly attired for the weather and is making me put on a hoodie." He glared at Rafiel.

"Seems sensible to me, if what I'm seeing on the weather channel is any indication," Edward said. "So, you were saying about this pearl."

"Not the pearl. The...owner of the pearl. He seems to think I belong to him. Because of who I am, you know?"

"Because you're my son and I worked for him?"

Sheesh. His dad could be surprisingly dense. "No, Dad. No. Because I am...you know, like him and his relatives."

"Oh. What is he doing? We could file a—"

"Father." Despite his annoyance Tom almost laughed. At least his father was trying to help. Which was, all things considered, not bad. "I am sure he wouldn't be the least intimidated by a legal order of some sort. He eats lawyers for breakfast. Probably literally."

Rafiel pulled the hood up over Tom's head. Tom said into the phone, "Look, I have to go. I'll call you from The George when I get there."

Right now the diner, with its warmth and warm coffee and food seemed to Tom like a vision of lost paradise. He hung up and gave Rafiel the phone. And then he noticed that Rafiel had a flashlight in his hand. One of the larger ones of the type people said the police often used as a weapon in a pinch. Tom stepped back. But Rafiel said, "Come on. Let's go look for your phone one last time."

"Kyrie will be worried," Tom said.

"Just a minute. We'll look for your phone and if we don't see it, with the flashlight, then we go back. And, you know, Kyrie is probably not that worried. She knows I'm looking for you."

Tom bit his tongue to avoid saying that of course that would calm down anyone's anxiety, because who could ever doubt that once Rafiel was on the case everything would turn out for the best? But considering that Rafiel had found him, and gone out of his way to try to help him, his sarcasm would be misplaced. "All right," he said.

* * *

Seeing Tom subdued always frightened Rafiel a little. He'd been through law enforcement courses. He knew Tom's type.

Tom was the kind of person who usually had to be dragged away from whatever incident had just happened, still kicking and screaming and throwing a fit. The sort of person who could never get a traffic ticket without adding resisting arrest to the charges. The sort of person, in fact, who wasn't subdued unless he were very sick or very scared. Since Tom didn't look either, Rafiel had to assume freezing did something to shifter dragons.

Reptiles. Cold blood. Can't they die if they get cold enough? He didn't want to think about it, and besides, he'd given Tom a hoodie. Granted, it was Rafiel's size, and therefore a bit long on Tom, but that was good as it would go over Tom's hands.

Rafiel started towards the river, and then started, slowly, down the slope. His knee still hurt from banging it on the path when he had fallen and he had no intention of taking another header.

"Here," Tom said, stepping up beside him and offering him a hand. "My boots are sturdier than yours."

Rafiel took Tom's hand for support, half afraid that the very cold-feeling fingers would snap off under the grasp of his hand. He was sure—more than sure—that a normal person would have hypothermia from this adventure. But it always came back to...they weren't normal, were they?

They made it all the way to the bottom, where the frozen river glistened two steps from them. Unfortunately, it only glistened in the spots not covered up by snow. The rest was an amorphous, lumpy mess. He turned his flashlight on, and pointed it at the river and at that moment, Tom's phone rang. This helped Rafiel pinpoint the roughly rectangular snow-covered lump. "There," he said, nailing the shape with the beam of his flashlight. "Right there. Can you get it?"

Tom looked out speculatively. "I don't know if the ice will hold up. But if the ice breaks under me and I wet my feet, it's okay, because you'll give me a ride back to the diner, right?"

"Right," Rafiel said. Had the idiot thought that Rafiel was going to just come out, then leave him to freeze out here? "If parts of your body start breaking off from the cold I'm fairly sure Kyrie would kill me," he said, and grinned sheepishly at his friend. "So, yeah, I'll give you a ride back, you idiot."

Tom nodded and edged cautiously on top of the frozen river, with the sort of duck-footed waddle of someone trying to neither slip nor skate on the surface. In the middle of the river, he picked up the phone, then, as he was straightening, dropped it again.

"Would you stop that?" Rafiel asked impatiently. "The idea is to get back into the car and back to The George. Not to stand here and play find the phone."

But Tom shook his head, and bent, and picked up the phone again. He walked back close enough that he could whisper and Rafiel would hear him. "There's something in the tunnel under the little bridge, Rafiel. I saw a tail disappear that way."

A tail. Great. Rafiel was going to assume that, no matter how much Rafiel might want it to be otherwise, Tom didn't mean he had seen the friendly, furry, potentially wagging tail of a kitten or puppy. "Uh...a tail?"

"Reptilian. Dragging."

Rafiel frowned in the direction of the bridge and the shadows under it. It seemed to him, as he concentrated, that he did hear something very like a rustle from under there. But...a tail? "Perhaps the Great Sky Dragon sent one of your cousins to look after you."

"They're not my cousins."

"Whatever," Rafiel said, feeling an absurd pleasure, as if he'd scored a point. "They think they are."

"I'm hardly responsible for people's delusions."

How could someone like Tom, who didn't so much get in trouble as carry it into the lives of everyone around him, sound so much like a New England dowager?

"Yeah, but anyway, maybe he sent one of his underlings to look in on you?"

Tom shook his head. "Well, he did. Conan. But I sent him back his merry way. Or not merry." Tom frowned. "Besides," he whispered, "the tail looked like an alligator's."

"An alli—" Rafiel resisted an urge to smack his own forehead, and, shortly thereafter, an urge to smack Tom—hard—with the flashlight. "You mean Old Joe? The homeless guy said he told you he was at the aquarium."

"Yeah," Tom said. "I figure he's hiding out here, in alligator form."

"Is that why you're whispering? Look, what do you want with Old Joe, anyway? So he's hiding here, as an alligator. Perhaps we should leave him alone?"

Tom shook his head, which was par for the course. Of course he didn't think they should leave Old Joe alone, because that would be the life-preserving, not-getting-into-worse-trouble solution.

"Okay," Rafiel said. "So what do you want to do?"

"I figure he knows something," Tom whispered back. "And I want to find out what it is."

"Uh...what he knows is probably the best places to sleep when a storm threatens, and, Tom, you aren't even that with it. You ought to be indoors." And watched. By a nursemaid. Or a psychiatrist.

Tom shook his head again. Snow and ice flew from his dark hair. He frowned at Rafiel. He'd become alarmingly pale in the cold, so that he looked like he was wearing white pancake make-up, from which his lips—a vague shade of blue—the tip of his nose—a lovely violet—his dark eyebrows and his blue eyes emerged looking vaguely unnatural in all their chromatic glory. "Look, he knows something. And it's something that might help us. He knows about the Ancient Ones."

"Okay, even supposing he knows," Rafiel said impatiently, "what do you propose to do about this? And why are we whispering? If he didn't hear the cell phone ring, and doesn't know we're here, then he's way too addled to help us."

"That's not it," Tom said. "I don't want him to know we're about to go after him."

"We are? Into a sewer tunnel? After an alligator?"

"I don't think it's a sewer," Tom said, looking into the shadows under the bridge. "At least, I don't think the city would have an open sewer through a recreation area. I mean, I'm well aware that they're all crazy, but all the same, there's a difference between crazy and loony."

Not from where I'm standing, buddy. Aloud, Rafiel said, "Look at it this way—that connects to a drainage pipe somewhere. And that drainage pipe is connected, somewhere, to the Goldport sewers. You have heard of people flushing baby crocodiles, right?"

Tom made a sound of profound exasperation. "Yes, in New York City. Some science fiction writer or another wrote a very unpleasant story about it. But it's an urban legend, you know. No pet stores have sold crocodiles, that I remember. So it mustn't be legal anymore."

"Doesn't matter," Rafiel said, pragmatically. "It was legal back in the fifties. And crocodiles live forever."

"And migrate from New York City to Goldport, Colorado?" Tom shook his head. "Rafiel! Next thing you know, you're going to tell me we'll find Denver's lizard man from Cheeseman Park under there. Come on. Just come here, shine your flashlight under there. I promise I won't make you actually go under there and look amid all the dangerous animals."

He gave Rafiel one of his more irritating smiles.

"Oh, all right," Rafiel said, grudgingly.

* * *

For all that Tom had cajoled Rafiel into shining his light under the bridge, he was somewhat scared of what it might uncover. What if Rafiel was correct, and it would show a bunch of dragons under there, all of them spying on Tom?

Choking back a laugh at the absurd image, Tom told himself he was getting worse than his father. Any moment now, he'd start asking himself if he'd eaten people.

Rafiel slip-skated to stand beside Tom, closer to the center of the river, and shone his flashlight searchingly into the space beneath the little arched bridge.

It was cozier under there than Tom expected—or at least, there was none of the trash he'd come to expect in that sort of place. He'd slept in that sort of place, sometimes, and it seemed never to be empty of a few rusting cans, a couple of unidentifiable, shredded cardboard boxes and perhaps the rotting body of a road-kill racoon. But under this bridge, it looked pretty clean. A couple of branches and some leaves, and other than that, just the clean shine of ice.

"Fine," Tom said. "I guess there isn't—"

But at that moment he heard the clack-clack-clack of alligator teeth that seemed to be Old Joe's way of laughing. It was faint and muffled, but definitely there. Tom grabbed Rafiel's wrist and aimed the flashlight at the place the sound had come from. There in the dark, Old Joe was squeezed under the place where the bridge came down to meet the bank and where it was, therefore, almost impossible to see.

Tom heard himself make a sound that was much like that of a steam train stopping. "Come out," he said, peremptorily. "Come out now."

He didn't know what he expected. Old Joe had obeyed him in the past, but in the past he'd caught Old Joe raiding The George's dumpster, and therefore he was, technically, trespassing on Tom's property. This time, Tom half-expected him to turn tail and run very fast, which, Tom understood, could be very fast indeed for an alligator.

Old Joe must have thought it too. For a moment there was a rebellious light in the tiny eyes, in the reflection of the flashlight. Rafiel must have thought of worse things, because he tried to pull the flashlight away from Tom and started to say, "Enough. You know—"

But Tom said, in his best voice of command, "Don't you dare. Don't you even think about it. I thought you were dead. I've been worried sick for days. Now, you'll come out here, shift, and explain yourself."

Old Joe slithered forward, swinging his tail from side to side. Rafiel must have been still pretty unsure about what the creature meant to do, because he took a step backwards. But Tom stood his ground and Old Joe gave him a sheepish look, as if sorry that he had tried to scare him, or perhaps simply sorry that he hadn't managed to scare him.

He shifted, right there on the snow, and stayed sitting down on his butt on the ice, his hands around his knees. Rafiel made a sound and said, "I have clothes. In my car."

Old Joe gave him an indulgent, almost amused look, the sort of look grown-ups give cute little children. "No need," he said. "I will shift again, after you're gone." He looked up at Tom. "And now, what do you want? Why did you think I was dead?"

"Because of the dire wolf," Tom said. "You said he had talked to you and you clearly knew him, so I thought..." He felt as though he'd lost some of his capacity to command and his righteous indignation too, now that Old Joe was treating him as if he had been silly and alarmist.

Old Joe shrugged. "Yes. Dire is a bad person," he said. "He and his council of ancients, always dictating the way in which people are supposed to live, the way in which shifter people are supposed to be people, and whom we should respect and whom we shouldn't." He shook his head. "He's a very bad person." He looked up at Tom, intently. "You stay away from him."

"I have every intention of staying away from him," Tom said, hearing his own voice sound sullen, like an annoyed little boy's.

"You stay away from her, too."

"Her?" Tom said, with some strange notion that Rafiel had paid Old Joe to warn him against Kyrie.

"The girl that came to the aquarium, in the car," Old Joe said. "Just a little while ago."

Rafiel cleared his throat. "I know he spends more on his hair product than most third world nations produce in one year, but that wasn't a girl. It was my subordinate, McKnight. Though he might have had a girl with him," he said, vaguely remembering something about Michelle, one of the part-timers.

"No. Not the police people!" Old Joe looked aggrieved, like they were both very dense. "The other woman. She came by, after the police left, with a guy. She left without the guy."

"You mean..." Rafiel took a step towards the aquarium, but Tom held his wrist. He couldn't say anything. He wasn't about to cast aspersions on what Old Joe was saying right in front of Old Joe, but he held Rafiel's wrist and said, "Wait."

Then to Old Joe, he said, "And you haven't seen Dire again? He hasn't talked to you again? Tried to find out things about us?"

That embarrassed look that he suspected meant Old Joe was lying, flitted across the alligator's face again. "Well," he said. "He came and he did ask me some questions. Like, what had happened at the castle, and all, but he..." He shrugged. "I didn't tell him anything that could hurt you. I swear I didn't. And then I ran away so I didn't have to tell him anything else." He looked at Tom, a look much like a glare from under his fringe of hair. "That's all I know. Can I go now?" And without waiting for permission, he shifted, and ran—in alligator form—back under the bridge, in a clacking of teeth, much like a fugitive snicker.

"We've got to go to the aquarium," Rafiel said.

Which meant, Tom thought, that he wasn't thinking at all. How was he going to get in? And if he did, how was he going to justify going into the aquarium to look for a body just now? Tom was fairly sure his friend hadn't thought this through.

"Wait. Let's go to your car and discuss this first," he told Rafiel.

"But—"

"Wait."

* * *

In the car, Rafiel turned on the gas to start warming up the motor, so they could have heat soon.

"Rafiel, you can't go in there," Tom said. "You just can't."

"What do you mean, I can't?" Rafiel said. He reached for his phone, ready to call McKnight and ask him to come and process the scene.

"I meant, you can't." Tom looked very grave and slightly sad, which was very odd. If Rafiel didn't know him better, if Rafiel weren't sure this was one dragon who didn't go about pushing people into aquariums...

"Why not?" he asked belligerently, while behind his rational mind, there ran thoughts he wouldn't even acknowledge, much less express, such as that dragons were aquatic creatures and that, as aquatic creatures, they might have some craving or other relating to water and pushing people in it. "You know it's my duty. I'm a policeman. If there's a body in there—"

"If," Tom said. "But beyond that, Rafiel, how are you going to tell them you heard about it? Who are you going to say informed you? And how are you going to say you got in?"

Rafiel tapped his fingers on the seat beside him. "But...time is of the essence," he said. "If there is a corpse, the more complete it is, the better the picture we will get. I mean, with the other ones, we don't even know if they were already dead when they were dumped in. And if we're dealing with shifters..."

"Yes. Of course. Perhaps an anonymous phone call? From one of the phone booths remaining, at a convenience store not on Fairfax?" Tom said. "One of the ones in the less busy areas? You can park at the back, or even farther away than that, and I can call and tell the police that there is a corpse in the aquarium. But it has to be to the central station. And I can't be identified."

"Yeah," Rafiel said, thinking. "So long as you don't stay on the line. They'll try to keep you on the line, so that they can get to you. You must not do that. Say your piece and run, and we'll get out of there fast." As he spoke, he thought of the convenience store to go to, on Fer de Lance Street. Between the local pioneer museum and a high school, the place was guaranteed to be deserted today.

He started off, headed that way, by the shortest route possible. "Well, at least what Old Joe says," Rafiel said, "sort of narrows it down to a female employee of the aquarium. I had a list of names of male employees to interview, but now..."

"No," Tom said, seriously. His features were set in such a way that they seemed to be carved, and a muscle played on the side of his face, giving the impression that he was about to have a nervous breakdown or something. "No, don't be so sure. What you're not thinking about, Rafiel, is that...well...Old Joe is not the best of witnesses, you know? He often..." He shrugged.

"He often what? Drinks? Does drugs?"

Tom shook his head, emphatically. "No. Nothing like that. At least, not that I know, and I think I'd have been able to tell. No. But he sometimes seems to be...not quite anchored to reality, if you know what I mean?"

Rafiel quirked an eyebrow. Sometimes he wondered how anchored to reality they all were. Considering what they were, and what they could do, it would be a wonder if they didn't sometimes feel unmoored and adrift. "Okay," he said.

He pulled up behind the store, on Fer de Lance. Actually behind and on the other side of the street, so that no one associated him with the phone call. There wasn't anyone around, in any case. The high school was closed, as was the pioneer museum. The rest of the block had the sort of empty feel that areas of town had that aren't flourishing. Like the last houses that had stood there had just been bulldozed, and they hadn't come up with anything else to replace them. The vacant lots didn't even have trees or proper plants. Just a sort of scrubby grass, now completely covered by snow.

"What are you doing?" he said, realizing Tom was throwing himself over the front seat and towards the back.

Tom, now fully in the back seat, gave him a grin. "Getting out on the driver's side," he said. "It's towards the school, and that's firmly closed, so no one will see me."

He had the hood firmly pulled over his head, and started to open the door, then stopped. "Do you have a quarter? Because I can't use a credit card on this. It would be way too obvious."

Rafiel grabbed a quarter from the drink holder, where he normally kept parking-meter fodder. He flipped it at Tom, who grabbed it out of the air. Good to know he was getting the feeling in his hands back.

He watched Tom get out of the car, very quickly, cross the high school campus semidiagonally, so that any witness would say he came out of the school. Sometimes—he thought, as he watched Tom cross the street and run, hell-bent for leather, towards the convenience store, so fast that he wasn't any more than a brief dark blur amid the snow—it was easy to believe the things Tom told him about his teenage years. Casual juvenile delinquence would impart that sort of knowledge. How to trick the police, 101.

In less time than seemed possible, for what he needed to do, Tom was back, coming into the car through the back door and saying, "Drive, drive, drive."

Rafiel drove. "Who answered?"

"I think just the receptionist or dispatcher, or whatever. She told me she would transfer me to someone else, but I hung up." He grinned at Rafiel, a feral grin, and leaned forward on the seat. "I grabbed the phone with my sleeve. And I wiped the coin before putting it in."

Rafiel sighed. "Probably overkill," he said. "We are not exactly the most advanced scientific police in the world." He took a bunch of turns, very fast, not so much seeking to be physically far away from the convenience store, as seeking to be in a place no one would associate with the convenience store. In no time at all, it seemed, he was driving through an upscale neighborhood of the type that used to be a suburb in the days when the main form of commuting was the trolley car. Eight blocks or so, in a direct shot from downtown Goldport, this neighborhood was all shaded, set-back, two- and three-floor houses, which managed to look much like Christmas cards under the snow. "As long as they don't catch you in the act of putting the coin in, or dialing them up, that's pretty much it. Oh, if it's anyone but McKnight, they'll exert due diligence, too, by going to the clerk and asking if they saw someone call."

"Unlikely," Tom said. "I was at the back of the store the whole time. Unless he can see through brick walls..."

"Yes," Rafiel said, and then, because the way that Tom was leaning forward over the seats was starting to give him visions of suddenly hitting a tree and ending up with Tom splattered all over his dashboard, "You know, we have laws about seat belts, in this state. As a policeman—"

Tom didn't answer. He just leaned back and buckled the seat belt. Then he made a sudden startled sound. "Kyrie," he said. "I haven't called Kyrie."

* * *

Kyrie was bargaining with fate. She was working, steadily, as if nothing had happened, but behind her smile, her ready quips at the customers, she was bargaining with fate.

She had started from the point of view that if Tom were to walk in, right then, she would only tell him how worried she'd been. She wouldn't make a big deal at all out of it. But since then, as the minutes passed and she heard neither from him nor from Rafiel, she'd started bargaining.

Okay, okay, if Tom walks in right now, she told herself, I'll just smile and tell him how glad I am that he's alive. Aware that she'd actually paused to listen for the sound of the back door opening up, she let out a hiss of frustration at herself. It wasn't sane, and it wasn't rational, but the thing was that she'd been expecting Tom to come in in response to her silent concession. She sighed at her own stupidity, and looked at the wall. Okay, he'd been gone more than two hours. What if he was frozen by the side of the road?

She could call Rafiel. She should call Rafiel. But what if Rafiel hadn't found him, yet? Or worse, what if Rafiel had found him? And he wasn't alive? In that case, the longer she took to find out about it, the better, right?

No. No. She was being stupid. It was unlikely he'd be dead, and if he was ill or severely hypothermic, of course she wanted to know. Needed to know. She set down the latest batch of orders and nudged Conan, who was getting much better at tending tables, but who, despite lots of coffee, looked like death warmed over.

"Take over my tables for a little while, okay?" she asked.

He nodded. His gaze turned to her, said what he could not say in full voice. And it was something that Kyrie simply didn't want to hear. What if he's dead? What if I left him and then the Ancient Ones killed him?

Kyrie shook her head at him, slightly, denying her own misgivings as well as his. And then she stepped behind the counter and reached for the phone on the wall, trying to figure out how she could ask Rafiel questions without either giving away the shifter thing, or alarming Anthony, who was looking at her curiously. She was sure he had decided that she and Tom had had a spat. He was giving her that look of concern and gentle enquiry friends give you when they don't want to stick themselves in the middle of your marital disputes.

She took a deep breath. She could just ask Rafiel how it was going.

The phone rang, so suddenly and loudly that it made her jump. She fumbled for it, almost dropped it, managed to get it to her ear and say, "Hello?"

"Is that how you answer the phone for a business?" Tom's gently teasing voice was such a relief to hear that Kyrie felt her knees go weak, and tears sting behind her eyes.

"Idiot," she said.

"Um...that's also not the approved..." Tom said. She could see him grin as he spoke. And then, as though realizing he could only push his luck so far, he said, "Look, everything is okay. Sorry to take so long to call back, but we found Old Joe—"

"Old Joe?" Nothing could be further from her mind than the transient alligator shifter. She saw Anthony give her an odd look. Clearly that had also not figured in his speculation.

"Yeah. I'll explain when I get back. Look, it might be easier...if you can leave Anthony and Conan in charge and join us in the room at the bed-and-breakfast?" He chuckled softly. "I'd like to add girls to the repertoire of odd visitors I shower with."

"Idiot," she said again, very softly.

"Yes, I am. Conan made it back okay, right?"

"Yeah. Conan is fine. He's getting better at waiting tables, too." Again, Kyrie was conscious of Anthony's baffled look at her. She did her best to brazen it out, as she asked, "So you met Rafiel?" At least she assumed so, unless he had now taken to using the royal we.

"Yeah. He'll be coming back with me. We're going by a doughnut place first, though, apparently."

"What?"

"I don't know," Tom said. Kyrie could hear another voice in the background, that she had to assume was Rafiel talking. "He says they have a tracker in his car, and if he doesn't go by a doughnut place at least once a week they kick him out of the force."

"Ha ha," Kyrie said.

"Yeah, I told him it was lame, too, but at least he's making an effort at making fun of himself. A few more years and he should be human. Hey. Stop hitting me. Police brutality. So, do you think you can make it to the room? In about fifteen minutes?"

"I'll manage," Kyrie said.

"All right. And, listen...I'm an idiot. Sorry if I worried you."

She tried to deny that he worried her at all, but her mouth refused to form quite that big a lie. "It's okay," she said, instead, because she had bargained with fate, and she'd promised not to kill him, not to maim him even slightly, and finally that she wasn't even going to yell at him. "It's okay."

* * *

Tom thought the place must have been a Dunkin' Doughnuts in a previous life, but it had now become—according to the sign hastily painted on a facade in which the Dunkin' Doughnuts name was still readable from the too-white shadow of the letters that used to cover it—good morning doughnuts.

The whole place had the sort of look of someone in limited circumstances and hiding out under a false name to avoid embarrassing the family. On the door, a hand-lettered sign read cash only please, which gave the impression that the people running it were planning to escape to South America at any moment, taking their ill-gotten gains with them.

But inside, it was surprisingly cozy, with aged but well-scrubbed formica tables, around which gathered bevies of retirees and housewives. This was clearly a gathering spot for a working-class neighborhood.

Behind the counter, a Chinese family made Tom tense, before he scolded himself that race had nothing to do with it. Yes, most dragon shifters might be Asian. But he clearly wasn't. And the dire wolf was just as bad as the Great Sky Dragon's triad. Perhaps worse, as at least it could be claimed that the Great Sky Dragon tried to protect all dragon shifters—while the dire wolf seemed to have very few loyalties but to himself. Tom wondered if Dire was representative of the Ancient Ones at all. Perhaps he'd just chosen to claim the role. There was no telling.

Rafiel was clearly known here. He ordered a dozen doughtnuts, rapidly choosing the flavors, and grinning at Tom's bewildered expression. "I told you. We're required to visit these places. At least once a week."

Tom shook his head, smiling a little.

"Do you want coffee?" Rafiel asked. And when Tom nodded yes, he proceeded to order three. "I owe one to a guy in a doorway on Fairfax. He told me where to find you."

"The guy in a khaki jacket?" Tom asked.

"Yeah. He didn't seem to want to go to a shelter at any cost, and he had one of those Mylar blankets." Rafiel shrugged. "I wondered..." But never said what he wondered as he handed the bills over to the lady behind the counter.

Later in the truck, Tom said, "I wondered too. But he didn't smell of shifter."

"I know," Rafiel said. "Though to be honest, as cold as I was, I don't think I could smell anything."

"That's possible," Tom said. He bit his lip. "But I think I or you would have smelled something...even just a hint."

Rafiel nodded. He put a hand into the doughnut box, nudging it open in a way that bespoke long practice. He wedged a doughnut in his mouth, as he shifted into gear with his free hand. Then, with the doughnut still in his mouth, he backed out of the parking lot of the doughnut shop and onto the road.

"Why a dozen doughnuts?" Tom asked. "Seriously. Don't tell me they'd kick you out of the force. Why a dozen doughnuts?"

Rafiel took a bite of his doughnut, dipped into the box again for a napkin and wedged the napkin-wrapped doughnut into the cup holder on the dashboard, all while driving with one hand, in a way that Tom had to admit, given the snow and what looked to him no more visibility than about a palm beyond the windshield, seemed a bit cavalier.

"Energy," he said. "I think I'm going to have a long night of it. I don't think I can go and interview the male employees now, of course. But if Old Joe was right, and if there really was a body at the aquarium, I should get a call any minute now. And that usually means a few hours securing the scene, sweeping for evidence and all that. It's not a five-minute job."

"Right," Tom said.

"But first," Rafiel said, in all seriousness, "we must take the coffee to Khaki Guy, whom we'll do our best to sniff out, if he is a shifter. And then we must meet Kyrie. There's a meeting I'm not looking forward to."

"Why?" Tom said, surprised.

"Because I didn't call her as soon as I found you." He grinned wider and added, with every appearance of enjoying the thought, "She's going to rip my balls off and beat me with them."

* * *

Kyrie was glad they arrived at the room almost exactly fifteen minutes later. She had just the time to pick up Not Dinner, who, being a cat, and faced with a surfeit of stuffed furniture and other comfortable sleeping surfaces, had chosen to fall asleep in the bathtub. But he'd woken up when she first came into the bathroom, and scrabbled up her petting arm, until she held him under her chin and petted him, while he purred ecstatically.

She'd managed to get to the bed, with him trying to climb into her shirt, under the neckline, and install himself on her left shoulder, when she heard the key in the lock, and then Tom came in.

He still looked like nothing on earth, with his hair floating around him, in a wild dark cloud. He was wearing a hoodie she'd never seen on him, and which must be Rafiel's, since it was dark grey and said "Policemen Do It More Forcefully" across the chest. He was also carrying a doughnut and a cup of coffee. And he stood, just inside the door, grinning sheepishly at her, while Rafiel came in, behind him, and closed the door.

The weird thing, she thought, was that Rafiel looked scared, while Tom didn't. Tom looked more embarrassed, as if he'd done something horribly stupid. Which, of course, in a way, he had.

"Sorry," he said. "I still can't understand how you could take it so calmly." A blush climbed his cheeks. "But I guess you're more grown-up than I am. You've always been."

And she, who only a couple hours before was thinking exactly the same, shook her head. "No. I don't think it's a matter of being more or less grown-up. Truly. I think we're just...very different people." And then, for fear he'd interpret this as breaking up with him when, in fact, over the last hour or so she'd come to the conclusion she couldn't live without him, even if she tried, she added, "And that's okay. I mean, we're supposed to be. It would be very weird to fall in love with yourself, wouldn't it?"

Tom looked slyly at Rafiel and for just a moment, Kyrie thought he was going to say that Rafiel managed it fine. But instead, he shrugged a little, and that, Kyrie thought might in fact be a function of growing up. He'd learned not to bait the policeman.

"So...you said you needed to talk to me? Tell me...something?"

Tom nodded. "At least right now," he said, "I don't need to shower." And smiled. "I keep thinking I'm going to catch one of those horrible diseases you catch from washing too much. A fungus or something, because I destroyed the normal balance of the skin."

He walked to the vanity, and grabbed his hairbrush and started vigorously brushing his hair back, tying it neatly again, in his normal ponytail. While he did so, he talked. He told her of walking out—of thinking about a lot of things, though he wouldn't specify what those things were—of hearing that Old Joe might be at the aquarium and of wandering there. Then he told her about the phone, and how his father had thought he'd eaten someone.

Kyrie had to clench her hands into fists at this point, and make an effort not to speak out loud. Because she who never had parents, at least had an idea of what parents were supposed to be. And what they weren't. And she was fairly sure they weren't supposed to be like Edward Ormson. Oh, surely, his son was a strange creature. An enigma that they couldn't quite solve. But he should know Tom enough to know he wouldn't—couldn't—murder anyone. Much less eat him or her. Yes, she knew that Tom claimed to always be afraid of that also. Which was silly. Perhaps she knew him better than he knew himself, but she was quite aware that he would never do anything like that.

Thinking this she met his eyes in the mirror and they smiled at each other. He stepped back, slowly, to sit by her side on the bed, and hold her hand. "I shouldn't have gone away," he said. "Yes, I needed to cool off. But I needed to be with you as well. As is, I made you worry needlessly. Is...is Conan all right?"

"Very worried about you," Kyrie said. "He kept thinking the Ancient Ones might get you, and then the Great Sky Dragon might come for him."

Tom smiled, this time ruefully, and squeezed her hand a little. "I figured it was something like that."

"Okay, my story now," Rafiel said. He had sat backwards on the vanity chair, facing them, his arms around its middle, his chin resting atop of it. Despite his obvious grown-up proportions, the width of his shoulders, the glint of a five o'clock shadow in a tawny color that matched his leonine mane, he looked much like a truant boy. He told them, clearly, and doing the expressions and the voices of both himself and his interlocutors about his three interviews with aquarium visitors. "The thing," he said, "is that she told me there was another shifter, in the aquarium. She thought he was one of the spider crabs." He sighed. "So maybe that was the other shifter we smelled." He explained about his earlier interview with Ms. Gigio.

"Do you think she's the woman that Old Joe was warning you about?" Kyrie asked. "I mean..."

"I don't even know if Old Joe hallucinated the whole thing," Tom said. "Until there is proof to the contrary, I'd like to withhold opinion as to whom he was talking about."

Kyrie nodded. Rafiel looked up and shrugged a little. "She doesn't smell like a shifter. If she's only a crazy person who is pushing people into the shark tank...then she's not my problem."

"Rafiel!" Kyrie said, before she realized that she was going to say it, a note of indignation in her voice. "I can't believe you'd say that. What do you mean she's not your problem? You sound like...Dire...with all his talk about how ephemerals don't matter, how only shifters do."

Rafiel shook his head, even if a slight amount of color appeared over his high cheekbones. "You misunderstand me," he said. "That's not what I meant at all. Only that it won't require anything special from me—just police work, which I would do for any other case. It's not my problem as a shifter; I don't have to skulk and lie and find a way to make it all come out right. Only...only make sure that we find the culprit and she has a proper trial. Or he, if it's not Lei, but it's still not a shifter. It's the shifter angle that has me worried. Right now, the more I hear and the more I probe into this, the more I get worried that there is a shifter angle—it could be anyone, from Dante Dire, to this unknown spider crab shifter to..." He shook his head. "I don't think it could be Ms. Gigio. But it could definitely be the Rodent Liberation Front, whoever they are. Any rodent shifters crazy enough to try Marxist theory must be ready for everything."

"And crazy enough for anything," Tom said ruefully.

At that moment, Rafiel's phone rang. He picked it up and answered. From their side, the conversation bordered on cryptic. Rafiel said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. I'll be there." And hung up, and got up to go.

"They found a corpse?" Tom asked, his body as taut as a bowstring, his tension seemingly communicating itself to Kyrie via the hand he held.

Rafiel nodded. "Yes. He's...He was almost not eaten at all—they'd...the sharks had just started on him, and they fished him out. Well...I don't know about not eaten at all." He looked a bit green and swallowed, as if the images his words evoked were getting to him, as well. "But he still has a face and lungs. And...well...they figure that they will be able to identify him, and look for signs that he was pushed into the tank while still alive. Or not."

Kyrie nodded.

"Glad I got the doughnuts," Rafiel told Tom. "It's going to be a long night. I'll call you guys or come by when I'm off."

And, with Kyrie holding tightly onto Notty, to prevent the orange fuzzball making a dash for the door, Kyrie and Tom stood up, to say goodbye to Rafiel, as he opened the door to leave.

And stopped, staring at the newspaper outside the door. It was one of the many peculiarities of the Weekly Inquirer that it was usually delivered late on the night of the day it was dated, sometime between eleven and midnight. Probably because it had started as a weekly paper, and there was less emphasis on the news being up to the minute, than on it being wittily or interestingly reported.

Only this time, none of them looked to see whether the news was properly reported. Instead, the three of them stared aghast at the headline, in screaming red, marching across the top of the front page: Local Diner Haunted by Dragons. Beneath it was a picture far clearer than any that zoological papers and magazines had ever boasted. It showed Tom and Conan both flying in dragon form. Tom was somewhat more distant—and therefore a little more blurred—but Conan was in the full glare of a very good electronic camera that had captured every scale and every fold of his skin in all its glory, as well as his mouth, open, the fangs parted, as if to roar.

"Wha—" Kyrie said in shock.

Rafiel swore under his breath. And then Notty took off, running down the carpeted hall. And Tom took off after it.

* * *

Tom caught the cat just short of the stairs. It required throwing himself headlong, his hand extended as if for the great baseball catch. What he caught was a tiny handful of spitting fury, that he held very firmly, while bringing it up to his chest, and standing up. He registered, distantly, that he'd just hit his knee hard, and that the wood beneath the carpet had far less give than he expected.

Holding Not Dinner, he limped back to the bedroom. Rafiel was still standing, holding the paper. "I have to go," he said, in a little, squeaky voice.

"But how..." Kyrie said.

Rafiel blushed. "I should have told you."

"What should you have told us?" Tom asked. "You saw someone take that picture?"

"Well...not quite that...But that Summer girl that Keith brought in? Right after you and Conan took off—" He turned to Kyrie. "This was when they were trying to rescue you, you know. Anyway, right after they took off, Keith's girlfriend was right there, at the back door, and I thought it was very weird. She said she'd got lost looking for the bathroom, but you know, it's not like it's all that hard to find, or like it's not properly marked, and right there..." He frowned. "I remember at the time thinking that something was wrong, and even more so when she disappeared right after. But then Dante Dire came in, and it just made me forget all that stuff."

"Yeah," Kyrie said. "I think he has that effect."

And Tom had to admit he did. "I'm sure," he said, feeling like his voice was constricted, "that it is all a matter of priorities. I mean, the dire wolf could kill us. What is the worst this woman could do? Make me move on?" He shrugged, attempting to look completely unaffected by this. "How bad would that be? I've moved so much, from town to town, and...all over." But he didn't want to move, and his heart was breaking over even the possibility of doing so. He didn't want to go anywhere. Let alone that he had Kyrie and a home, even if it was just a rented house, and apparently, now, a kitten.

He didn't want to leave the diner behind. It was the first time in his life that he felt invested in a place. He owned The George—half of it. It was his. He had shaped it already and would shape it more, make it something uniquely his, his own diner.

"I don't think it will come to that," Rafiel said. He stepped inside the door and flung the paper towards the bed. "At most, we'll say it's a good Photoshop job. I mean, Tom, who is going to believe in dragons? Seriously? If they'd caught me or Kyrie, it might be worse..." He shrugged. "Let's just take care that this doesn't happen again, okay?"

* * *

But how to make sure it didn't happen again was something completely different, Kyrie thought, as they got back into the diner, and Tom got the report from Anthony on what was prepared and what not. He tried to send Anthony home because it was best if Anthony went back and slept and came back in the morning, to relieve them when they would definitely need to rest, supposing there would be any rest that day.

They had barely got into the swing of their shift when Tom's phone rang, and he pulled it from his pocket. "It's Rafiel again," he said. And then, asking a puzzled Anthony to cover for them another five minutes, he pulled Kyrie with him into the storage area and put Rafiel on speaker.

"Hi," Rafiel said, between munching that indicated he was doing justice to the doughnuts he'd bought. "Look, I just came out to the car, with the excuse that I needed a doughnut."

"News on the body?" Kyrie asked.

"Well...yeah, kind of. But...the thing is..." He cleared his throat. "I got a phone call, from our medical examiner who was examining the...er...prophylactics they found in the planters."

Kyrie rolled her eyes. "You can say condoms, Rafiel. I know the word." An impish grin. "I've heard it a time or two."

A sound very much like a raspberry from the other end of the phone. "The medical examiner called it prophylactics. Of course, he also called the stuff inside genetic material, which he says exactly matches that of the first two vics."

"What, both of them?" Tom asked, sounding absolutely shocked.

"Well...no, one each. And no, there is no indication...I mean...the condoms were definitely used for...er...heterosexual sex. I mean...there were vaginal...secretions..." He paused in what seemed to Tom like an excess of embarrassment, like he had suddenly choked on it and couldn't go on. Tom grinned and waited, and eventually, after a noisy throat clearing, Rafiel came back on. "So it would seem that the male employees are not in fact a problem...though I can tell you, one of them, who apparently lives nearby and who dropped by to see if we needed him to show us or tell us anything, is definitely a shifter. His name is John Wagner. College student. Nice guy. Body builder. Works here part-time. I don't know what his shifted form is, but he...well...I'm fairly sure he doesn't have vaginal secretions."

"Unless his shifted form is as a woman," Tom said, wryly.

"Uh...I don't think so. You know, the other thing, the other part of the exam...of the..."

"Condoms," Kyrie said.

"Yeah. The other part of it is that it showed...well...The medical examiner thought this was from salve or cream, possibly a traditional medicinal one and that it should be easy to trace because of the exotic ingredient, but I'm not so sure. You see, there were...other cells on the sample. On the outside...They appear to be...Sharkskin cells. The examiner also thinks, possibly, because that was the shark tank, it might be someone who handles the sharks on a regular basis, although I don't even want to think what he imagines the handlers do with the sharks to get the cells in that particular region of their bodies."

Kyrie shrugged. "I bet you he thinks it's poor hygiene. And it might be."

"Oh, yes," Rafiel said. "It might be. On the other hand..."

"On the other hand, it could be something completely different," Kyrie said.

"Like someone who turns into a shark and back," Tom said. Because there was the very definite feel that the shift was never as complete as it seemed in either direction. More than once, Tom had shaken out his boots to find dragon scales inside them, even though he'd never worn them while a dragon and usually stepped well away from them before he shifted. And sometimes, when he washed his hair in the shower, one or two green and gold scales fell out.

"Yeah," Rafiel said. "That's what I'm very much afraid it is."

"In which case," Tom said, listening to Rafiel munch, "it's not so much a matter of maliciously pushing her—we'll assume her, since Old Joe said so—victims into the tank. It's more like your buying your doughnuts. A little snack to see her through the night."

The munching stopped. "Ew. Not like my doughnuts."

"Well, of course not," Tom hastened to say. "Unless you eat cannibal doughnuts." And then seized with sudden inspiration, "You know, Kyrie, we could do those next year for Halloween. Fill them with raspberry, or something, and put names on them...you know, like Joe or Mike, and call them cannibal doughnuts."

"Sure, we could," Kyrie said. "If our objective were to totally gross out and drive away our clientele. Besides, we can't do doughnuts properly. Not without a dedicated fryer."

"Maybe there will be enough money by the fall to buy another fryer," Tom said.

"Uh," Rafiel interrupted, "before you guys start arguing domestic arrangements, the other thing is, that I tried to find Old Joe, because, you know, since he was right about the last corpse—by the way, the name was Joseph Buckley; he was a software salesman—I thought he might be able to give me details and pinpoint who the woman might be he was talking about. But I can't find him anywhere."

Tom sighed. "He's very, very good at hiding. I think he's been doing it for centuries. If he's right about having been alive since before horses..."

"Yeah. Probably. Anyway...I can't figure out where he's gone, so if you hear something let me know."

And then he hung up, leaving them in the storage room, staring at each other.

"I wonder if John Wagner is a member of the Rodent Liberation Front," Tom said, biting the corner of his lip, in the way he did when he was thinking of something unpleasant. "I think he's one of our regulars. I remember the description, and also processing credit card bills for John Wagner."

Kyrie nodded. "Yeah, he is. He usually comes in for breakfast on Wednesday. And he's very fond of sweet bread, you know, Hawaiian bread. He always asks for a toast of that. Something about growing up in Hawaii."

"Interesting."

"Why interesting?" Kyrie asked.

"Because...if I remember correctly—and mind you, this is me remembering some cheap book or other that I read at some shelter for runaway teens, years ago—but if I remember correctly, Hawaii is the only place that has legends of shark shifters." He frowned. "Well, the Japanese might too. But Japanese shifter legends are very difficult to understand. I mean...they're not Western in structure. So even though I was very interested in all stories about shapeshifters, I don't think I remember any Japanese ones."

Kyrie nodded, but she felt her forehead wrinkle. "You know..." she said. "I...I don't know. I can't understand why I never smelled John Wagner. I mean, I serve him every week. You'd think I'd have sniffed him out."

Tom frowned. "Rafiel and I were talking about that, because of sniffing out Khaki Guy, you know. Both of us tried and neither of us could get a scent, but really...it's so cold, and then, the thing is...I've been homeless, but I washed. At least once a day. He clearly doesn't. There were smells, you know, of food and stuff, which I'm sure he's dropped on his clothes. And there was a smell of tobacco, too, and it was really hard to make out his smell amid all those, much less in the cold. So we don't know if he's a shifter, or just paranoid about shelters and closed-in situations. Which lots of people are, for reasons that have nothing to do with being shifters."

"Obviously," Kyrie said. "But John Wagner washes. I'm sure of it. He usually looks squeaky clean."

"Yes, but then when does he come in? Early early morning, right, before six a.m.? Before we quit. And I bet you he works days. So at six a.m. or before that, he's freshly washed, and probably has deodorant and aftershave on. Mix that with the smells of the diner—from fries to eggs and bacon—and you'd need to be looking for the smell of shifter to identify him. Or any other shifter."

"Yeah," Kyrie said. She nodded. "Well, I'm going to be looking for it, from now on. In just about everyone. Rodent Liberation Front and Ancient Ones and triads!" she said in a tone of great exasperation.

"Oh, my," Tom said, and smiled apologetically.

* * *

The aquarium was probably noisier than when it was open to the public, Rafiel thought, as he stood back, watching the frantic activity around him. People were snapping shots of the tank area and McKnight, with remarkable efficiency, probably born of the fact that Rafiel was frowning vaguely in his direction, was directing three people—three of Goldport's part-time officers, more used to breaking up drunken brawls among students than to doing crime scene processing—in combing through everything around there, including the planters by the side of shark tank.

And Rafiel, having quietly gotten away from the thick of things, had managed to sidle up to John Wagner, who was leaning against the far wall, under the plaque that explained the sharks' habits—unpleasant—and habitats—more extensive than Rafiel was comfortable thinking about.

He was a young guy, light-haired. Probably in his twenties, and he looked like he devoted serious time to body building. His file, as well as the brief conversation that Rafiel had had with him, indicated that Wagner was in college. Rafiel wondered what he majored in. Perhaps physical education or sports medicine?

Rafiel leaned beside him, casually. He noted that the man gave him a brief, amused, sidelong glance, and he returned a friendly smile. "So," he said, trying desperately to sound as if he was just making casual conversation, "you work out?"

The amused glance took him in again, and a lip curled ironically on the side. "A bit," the young man said. "Now and then."

And then Rafiel decided to go for broke, with the type of question that, should his interlocutor refuse to understand it or to respond, could be passed off as a joke of some sort—and which would certainly sound like a joke to anyone overhearing it. "In human form?" He had figured that Wagner's was the shifter-smell all around the shark area.

If he expected Wagner to be discomposed, he missed his mark. The smile only became a little broader, and he said, "Sure. The other one isn't really conducive to it. Unless I wanted to work on my ear muscles. And then there's all the drool."

"What?" Rafiel asked, unable to help himself. He cast a quick glance at the other people in the room, who were all surrounding something and taking pictures of it.

Wagner cackled, in unbecoming satisfaction. He muttered something under his breath that sounded disturbingly like "dumb ass," then added, "If you can smell me, what makes you think I can't smell you?"

"Oh," Rafiel said, now totally out of his depth. "Oh." He turned around to look at Wagner fully. The young man was grinning at him.

"Do you...do you know many of your...of our kind?" Rafiel asked. He'd never before interviewed anyone fully aware of what he himself was.

Wagner shrugged. "A couple. A friend back home, and then one more in college."

"Oh. What...are they?"

"Uh?"

"What forms do they take?" Rafiel said, his eye still on his subordinates and colleagues to make sure no one approached to hear this very strange conversation.

"Oh. My friend, Keith Kawamoto, back home was a bear. Which was very weird in Hawaii. Oh, sure, we had lots of fun roaming the beach late at night in our shifted forms. And he used to hang out in the Aiea Loop Trail. Weird-ass reports to everyone who would listen—and a lot of people who wouldn't—by the tourists. But who is going to believe tourists talking about a bear and a dog walking along the beach at low tide? Or a bear just hanging out? There was some enquiry once, to see if a circus that was passing through had lost a trained bear, but that was about it."

"And then here?"

Shrug. "There's a guy in the dorms who turns into a unicorn. Weird-ass thing to turn into, and of course no one believes it even if they see him. Sometimes we get reports of a white horse hanging about, is about it. It's assumed to be a prank." He shrugged. "After I smelled him out, we became pretty good friends. I keep telling him he's a unicorn so he can go in search of virgins, but he doesn't look like he'll ever have the courage, if you know what I mean." He waggled his eyebrows. "Engineering student and a bit of a dumb ass, but a nice guy."

His matter-of-fact approach to the situation and the way he seemed to have co-opted Rafiel as a buddy, whether Rafiel wanted to be one or not, were disconcerting enough that it took Rafiel a moment to collect himself. "So...you don't...I mean...I've had reports from...from another shifter...of a spider-crab shifter here in the aquarium. So I take it that's not true. I mean..."

"What? Because I didn't include him in my count? Nah, I didn't count him because I don't really know him. I know of him, but I don't know him. I think everyone in the aquarium—well, everyone who works here after-hours—has seen him. Weird-ass old Japanese guy, you know, all wrinkly and stuff. He looks like the Japanese guys in those reports they used to do where they found some old World War II soldier, who had been defending the same island in the Pacific for fifty years, ready to expel anyone who tried to land, only no one ever did."

"Uh..." Rafiel said. "So, you've talked to him?"

Wagner shook his head. "Nah. He doesn't talk to anyone. I don't even know if he speaks English, or if he was brought here in crab form." He shrugged. "I know he's been here for about ten years. It must be weird, you know, to have a form where if you shift you have to be near or in water. I don't know what I'd do if that were my problem. I mean, you can't always control when you shift."

Rafiel nodded. He couldn't imagine it either.

"So no one has talked to him?"

"Not that I know. Of course, the other people don't know he's a shifter. Anyone who is not expecting it, and who sees a little old man climb the side of an aquarium and plop inside, and disappear, thinks they're just seeing things, you know. So they talk about him as a ghost. If you go on-line, this aquarium is in Colorado's list of most haunted places. Just because of the old Japanese man. And they've made up all sorts of weird-ass shit about him. You know, that he was eaten by sharks here or some shit like that." He shrugged. "But as far as I know he's never talked to anyone. He just sits there and watches."

"I see," Rafiel said, wondering whether he was being lied to, and if so why. Professional disinformation, he thought. You always wonder if they're lying to you. And if they are, why. "So...did you smell him? The crab shifter? Is that why you know he's not a ghost?"

John Wagner looked startled. "You can't smell them. Not the water ones. Keith Kawamoto says he knows a dolphin one, and he said that, too. They don't smell like the rest of us. Why should they? Their signals will go over water, not air—"

"But—" Rafiel said. "How do you—"

"I've seen him shift. Watched him. I know what that looks like. Don't you?"

"Yeah...but...he doesn't smell? Of shifter?"

John Wagner shook his head. "And that's what worries me, you know? There could be others, in here." He gestured broadly at the tanks all around. "We'd never know. So...how could I find them if I can't smell them?"

"And do you have any idea?" Rafiel asked.

"Oh, sure," Wagner said. "You know, how when you shift you're always dying for a protein snack?"

Rafiel thought of Tom stuffing down pepperoni and cold cuts once, in a convenience store in the middle of Arizona. He thought of himself, dropping into the diner for bacon and eggs in the middle of the night, after a shift. He thought of sharks..."You mean?" he said, his voice sounding thick and queasy to his own ears. "You mean the sharks?"

John Wagner nodded. "Oh, yes," he said. "The sharks. And you know..." He shrugged. "Ah, hell. You grow up with legends about this stuff, you know? In Hawaii it's the beautiful girl who goes swimming with you at night and becomes a shark." He frowned slightly. "One of my college profs said it was a gynophobic fantasy like the vagina dentata. Dumb ass."

Rafiel, not sure he got the point, cleared his throat. "A girl," he said, "who turns into a shark. A girl from Hawaii? Like Lei Lani?"

Wagner shrugged. "Eh. Don't quote me on that. I have nothing against Lei. She's okay by me. Pretty easy on the eye too. Besides, I'm not too sure she's from Hawaii."

"What do you mean you're not too sure? I thought she was interning here, from the aquarium there or something?"

"Heard something like that too. 'Course, I didn't look at her resume or anything, you know. But..."

"But?"

"But I, well...At the end of the day I told her, you know, Eh tita, pau hana?"

"You told her tit what?" Rafiel asked, flabbergasted.

"Exactly. And she said just that. And she thought I was getting fresh or something..." He frowned. "And no Hawaiian girl would. That phrase is...eh...so, strong sister, quitting time? Tita is...a strong woman. When a Hawaiian tita comes after you, you run. Very strong personality. But she didn't get that at all. And anyone from Hawaii would know." He paused. "And she didn't know tako is a squid. And..." He shook his head. "She's just not right."

* * *

Kyrie saw him hanging around, outside the door. Dire. He was wearing a dark suit, and he was smoking, outside, pacing between the door and the side of the enclosure, where the diner had been expanded over what, in pictures from the thirties, had once been a covered porch.

She wondered if he was pacing out there because he, thanks to the latest Colorado laws, couldn't smoke inside. Or if he was pacing out there because he didn't want to come in.

She followed his movements with her gaze—watching the dark silhouette, the trail of red cigarette end. He looked nervous in his pacing, she thought as she wiped down a just-vacated table. Or perhaps he looked like a predator about to pounce. She'd gone to the zoo once, when she was about five, with the family she was staying with at the time. She remembered they had the tigers in altogether too-flimsy-looking enclosures. And she remembered a particularly large tiger pacing like that, while staring at her, as if she were next on his list of minimum daily requirement. Fifty pounds of skinny little girl. That was what Dante Dire's movement reminded her of, and she could feel his gaze almost burn through the window at her.

She looked over, as she took the tray back. Tom was cooking, his back turned. She was fairly sure he hadn't seen Dire. If he had, he'd say something.

And there was tension in each of Tom's muscles, in each of his movements. She wondered what he was thinking about. The murders? The newspaper article? The problems with Dante Dire? Or the semi-eternal, nearly all-powerful dragon who claimed ownership and full control of Tom, simply because Tom had been born with the ability to shift into a dragon.

She watched Tom flip a burger, and then he turned around to look at her. He raised an eyebrow, enquiringly. "Yes?"

"Nothing," she said, blushing a little, and disguising it by setting down the tray and ducking behind the counter to set the carafe back in its place so it could refill. "Nothing. I was just thinking that...as bad as things are, I don't want to lose this. I don't want to let this go. This is...what...us...our place. The George. It's..." She looked at him and was met with what looked like incomprehension, and blushed again. "It's the only home I've ever had," she said.

He looked blank a moment longer, and she realized, suddenly, that it wasn't incomprehension. It was Tom controlling his expressions and his emotions. Perhaps he thought she'd seen his naked emotions too often? Perhaps he thought she had come to his rescue once too often? Perhaps...

Or perhaps this was beyond thought and feeling. Perhaps it was just what men did. They didn't melt into tears at every turn. They didn't want women to feel they had to hold their hands and protect them. Kyrie saw it with sudden, distinct clarity. Oh, perhaps, in this age of the sensitive male, it was an ideal honored most often in the breach, but Kyrie could see it. From the earliest times of mankind, men had protected women, right? Women had been weaker, or at least more vulnerable while pregnant. It was a physical thing. For women, security and reproductive success had depended on having someone big and strong to protect them. But that meant that women often had to hold the someone big and strong together emotionally. And it meant that the someone big and strong didn't want to appear emotional to a prospective mate.

Tom swallowed. He managed to look perfectly impassive, but unbent a little as he said, "I know. I know. Me too. I don't want to lose this. But I keep thinking, and I don't know what to do. I can't...Kyrie, I can't ask the Great...I can't ask the creature to protect us. And I don't care if that's what he thought he was doing when he sent Conan to us. If we accept...if we ask his help...I'll never be able to call my own soul my own." He frowned and spoke, urgently, in what was little more than a whisper. "It would be the same as admitting I belong to him. If I'm his to protect, I'm his to order around."

"Yeah," Kyrie said. "Yeah. We'll think of something." She was thinking of something. She was thinking that if anything was going to be done about Dire, she would have to do it, and that she wasn't going to be able to tell Tom about it.

Oh, she could get angry about it. She could talk about stupid male pride. But what would it accomplish? She could see that he couldn't ask for help in this, not without bartering his—for lack of a better word—soul in the bargain. She wasn't even sure it was a male thing, but she was sure the male thing complicated it. Tom had to feel that he could defend home and woman. That much was obvious. He could not trade down on it.

"I'm going to take a break," she said. "For a moment. Conan has the tables and there's not that much."

"Okay," Tom said, and turned back towards the stove. Which, by itself, was a mark of his being worried, concerned, not thinking straight. Because, normally, he would have glanced back to make sure that Conan did have the tables and that the work wasn't overwhelming him. Kyrie didn't think it was. Maybe when Conan was starting, but this was his third night. His third night. Seemed like a month, at least.

She went by Conan on the way out, asked him to cover her tables. At the very least, she thought, she had to go out there and get rid of Dire before Tom saw him. Tom was tense enough already and not much could be gained from making him even more nervous.

She slipped out the front door, and only as the cold air outside hit her, did she think that Dire could kill her, out here, and perhaps make sure no one could see. But then again, she thought, that was one of those things she couldn't control, wasn't it? If he was going to kill her and mind-control people not to see her—as he would have to on a public street which, even in this snow day, had traffic, albeit foot traffic—then he could do it in the diner too. Or in her house. Or at the bed-and-breakfast. There was no safe place.

And if there was no safe place, there was no reason to be especially afraid of any place. She took a deep breath and looked up. Straight into Dire's eyes.

He smiled at her, a slow, welcome smile, and took a drag of his cigarette. "Hello, Kitten," he said, very softly, as though he were an older man, flirting with a younger girl in a cheesy movie from the seventies.

Kyrie felt a finger of unease crawl, coldly, up her spine. But he only smiled at her, a broader smile at what must have been her momentary, pinched look.

"You shouldn't be here," she said. "I mean, outside here. It will make our customers nervous to see someone roaming around outside, I mean..." She faltered. She couldn't explain why it would make the customers nervous. There was something, of course, to his step, to his look, that indicated he was on the prowl, that he was dangerous. But would normal people know that? Or did she see it, because she feared it?

"I'm not going to eat your customers, Kitten," he said, amused. He glanced at the diner then across the street, at the other, closed buildings. Down the block and across the street, white Christmas lights swung forlornly from the front of the hastily closed used bookstore. They normally turned them off when they left for the day, but they'd forgotten.

For some reason, those swaying lights were one of the saddest images Kyrie had ever seen. Dire lingered on them, then looked back at her. "To quote Bette Davis," he said, and smiled a little. "What a dump." He threw his cigarette on the ground and stepped on it. "What's a girl like you doing in a joint like this?"

She tightened her lips, mentally willing Tom not to look outside. She maneuvered, slightly, so that they were in the blind spot between the door to The George and the side enclosure. "In case you haven't noticed," she said, "I own the dump. Or at least half of it."

"Ah, yes, the diner named after the dragon slayer. Your boytoy has a weird sense of humor, doesn't he?" He looked at Kyrie. "Was he bragging that he kills other shifters? Was he actually proud of this?"

Kyrie thought of the painting of St. George and the dragon that Tom had hung over the back corner booth on the day they'd taken possession of The George. She remembered his words, "Because we have to be both the beast and the slayer."

She knew what Dire's opinions on this would be, and she'd be damned if she was going to give Tom up to some sort of insane punishment. She shrugged. "He has an odd sense of humor," she said.

"Ah. I see. Loyal." Dire said, and frowned slightly. "But I have a problem, you see? I was given a mission. As I told you and your friends, I'm sort of like a policeman, except the law I operate by is only the law of our own people. We don't"—he looked around with distaste—"recognize ephemeral law. But our law is nonetheless enforceable for applying only to us, and I'm the one sent to enforce it." He grinned, suddenly. "In other words, Kitten, I must find someone who is guilty. And I must deliver him to them. I was thinking your boyfriend might serve. But Daddy Dragon would get upset, and he can be a total bastard when he's pissed. So it would be better if it were that nice policeman."

"The—" Kyrie felt anger rise in her, and tried to keep it down. Getting furious at someone much more powerful than her wouldn't solve anything and it certainly wouldn't help anything. "What do you mean deliver him to them?"

"As the guilty one, you know?" Dire said, clearly unaware of the storm of emotions she was feeling. "I must find the guilty party, but they are not here, and they'll never know if it's the real guilty party, if you know what I mean. I could tell them it was." He shrugged. "So, your boyfriend or the policeman?"

"What?" she asked. And then the anger grabbed her. She glared at the ancient—and amoral—creature. "I don't think so. Not Tom. You wouldn't dare. Not Rafiel. Not even Conan. No. None of them is guilty. Not one. No."

"Well," he said, completely unconcerned by the rising tone of her voice. "It would be easier if it's not the dragons. Though if I told the Ancient Ones that it's the dragon boy, your boyfriend, they couldn't do anything, anyway, and..." He shrugged. "He might have to run away, true, because some of our members are less than sane and might want to strike anyway. But I would never. There's the daddy dragon. There's a treaty of sorts between our kinds. And I'm not stupid."

He shook his head. "No, I'm not stupid at all. I'm fine with telling them it was him, but he'd have to run, and if they came here and got you by accident...well...that would be a waste, wouldn't it?"

His gaze traveled lazily up and down her figure. "Wouldn't it? So, how about this? We work together. We pick a likely guilty party. Or a fall guy. It's all the same to me. I've asked enough, and I've gone to the site, and what I think happened is that these shifters were killing other shifters to serve their purposes." He shrugged. "This happens, right? It's one of the ways in which our kind can be very stupid. And why not everyone lives to be a full adult shifter. But then...then you came on the scene. And you played heroes. Okay. You're allowed to be heroes, I suppose. And they were preying on shifters. But then you killed a lot of innocent young ones. I'm not sure how it happened. Self-defense, or perhaps accidentally. I'm not going to ask. I'm just going to tell you that death on that order of magnitude requires a culprit, and I'll have to find one."

"Not here you don't have to find one," Kyrie said, sternly. She felt very angry. In fact she felt as though she could throw lightning bolts out of her eyes, she was so mad. "We already have the Great Sky Dragon to deal with. We have some reporter taking pictures of our shifted forms. We have the Rodent Liberation—"

"What?" Dante asked, his eyes very intent.

"Rodent Liberation Front. They—"

"No. The reporter part."

"Oh." Kyrie shrugged. "Front page of the Weekly Inquirer this morning."

He glared at her. "You let a reporter photograph you shifting?"

"No," she said. "We didn't let...she came to the diner, she—" Kyrie stopped short of saying that Keith had brought her. She didn't even know why, but her tongue just stopped short of it, as though a red light had gone on in her mind. "We found she'd taken pictures of Tom shifted. And Conan too." She paused and tried to bite her tongue, but it wouldn't stay still. "They were going to my rescue when you...were threatening me."

Dante Dire glared at her. He threw his head back. "I can't believe," he said, "that you thought you needed their help. I can't believe they are so foolish as to allow themselves to be photographed. And I can't believe that dragons—dragons!—would shift where they could be seen. This is all a big muddle, and I will end up having to sort it out."

Kyrie, who felt weirdly grateful he had at least moved on from demanding that she choose a sacrificial victim for him to turn in to the Ancient Ones, started telling him not only didn't he have to sort it out, but this had nothing to do with him. "I don't think you—"

"Kyrie?" Tom had opened the door of the diner and stood looking at her and Dire. He nodded to Dire, as if he were a casual acquaintance and not an ancient horror who could destroy them all. "I wonder if you could come back from break," he said.

"Yes. Yes, of course," Kyrie said, walking away from Dire and practically scurrying towards the open door. "Of course."

She followed Tom in, and half expected to hear Dire come in behind them, but instead she heard something like a soft chuckle behind her. She didn't turn. She didn't look.

She followed Tom all the way past the areas of the counter that customers sat at. All the way to the cooking area, at the other end.

He smiled a little at her, as he turned to put a few burgers on the grill.

"Look, I didn't want to talk to him, but I thought—"

"That you didn't trust him out there, lurking, scaring our customers," Tom said. He smiled over his shoulder. "I got that. I was worried too."

"Yeah. He...was saying more of the same. That he needed to...to throw someone to the Ancient Ones."

"Or to the wolves," Tom said.

"Metaphorically," Kyrie said. "Look, it's just..."

"I know. I just went to rescue you. I wasn't sure you would get rid of him otherwise."

"Thank you," she said. And wondered if Tom had seen the dire wolf before she had, if he'd made plans...This wasn't the time to ask him. "Maybe you should go and get some sleep. I could get Anthony in early. And that would get you here for...for a little while longer than I am...You know...so we...so the diner is not without us."

The look he gave her over his shoulder was worried, this time. "Perhaps that would be better, yes," he said.

And she knew that he had understood what she couldn't explain. That she felt responsible for the customers in the diner. That a lot more of them than John Wagner and the mouse-teacher might be shifters. And that Dire might very well decide on one of them as a scapegoat. And she couldn't live with it.

* * *

Rafiel parked behind the diner, and pulled out his cell phone. "Yeah, McKnight?" as soon as McKnight answered.

"Yeah?" McKnight answered, cautiously.

"Two things. Look up any records for John Wagner and also...I don't know how you can do this, but..." He reasoned quickly that, of course, Dante Dire might have used another name. But he couldn't fly, so he presumably had to use some means of transport—airplanes. Even if private. And he would rent places. And while he could use another name, it was Rafiel's guess that most people didn't change all that often. Most shifters, either. They got comfy with a name and kept it, he guessed. "Check up on Dante Dire," he said. "Particularly anything having to do with Hawaii, and also when he might have come to town. Any place in Colorado he might have been."

"Dante...?"

"Dante Dire," Rafiel spelled it.

"Who...?"

"Just someone who's been around a lot, and I wonder..." He had a moment of fear. What if McKnight stumbled on something that—He stopped. That what? Tipped him to the fact that there were shapeshifters? Not likely. Rafiel suspected that for the average person it would take having their noses rubbed in it. In fact, they would have tumbled on to what was happening long ago if it weren't so. "He's just suspicious," he said. "Nothing definite, so don't break any laws, but check up on him, okay?"

There was a sound from the other side that might have been assent, and Rafiel said, "Right. I'll call back." And hung up. He cut his ignition and got out of the truck. Halfway through stepping down, he saw something through the snow.

He would never be able to swear to what it was. A dog, a bear, something rounding the building, or just—perhaps—a shadow. But he thought Dire, and having thought it, he followed the suspicious shadow around the building to the front.

And stopped, because in front of the building, leaning against the lamppost was the blond girl from the newspaper. There was something odd about her, but he couldn't put his finger on it, and he said, "I beg your pardon, you—"

And then it hit him. His human nose, not as sharp as his lion nose, was nonetheless acute enough to catch the smell of blood—the smell of death. Closer, closer, he saw that the girl was pale, dead—her eyes staring unseeing straight ahead. But she'd been propped up against the lamppost, and her clothes had been put back on. And she couldn't have been dead very long, because there was a steady drip-drip-drip of blood down the front of her clothes, from beneath her ski jacket.

For a moment he stood horrified, but his mind was working, behind it all. Dire. He was sure Dire was involved. Oh, he couldn't have done it now. No way that could have happened. But he had to be involved—somehow.

In his mind it all added up. Dante had killed the girl earlier, then...Then led him here. Like a gigantic joke. A joke perpetrated by an unfeeling, uncaring, ancient creature.

Like the shark murders—it would be just Dire's idea of a joke, to set it up, somehow, so that he could push into the tank guys who had been dallying with one of the female employees. The first time they'd seen him was around the aquarium. Perhaps he had a way in all along. Why shouldn't he? Rafiel had managed to get keys easily enough. And it would amuse some thing like Dire to create the impression of a shark shifter and see how they reacted.

With numbed fingers, Rafiel had—somehow—retrieved his phone from inside his jacket. He hit the redial button, staring at the corpse of the blond girl. "McKnight. Send the meat wagon and...and come along. There's been a...death. In front of The George. And get someone to check the visitor book at the aquarium. Find out if Dante Dire was there...anytime in the last month."

* * *

Tom woke up with the phone ringing, and a panicked Notty digging needle-sharp claws into his underarm, where he'd been nestling.

"Ow," he said, grabbing the furry body blindly in his right hand, then looking for the phone on the bedside table with his left. One of the good things of this split sleeping schedule was that he got the bed when Kyrie wasn't here. And her pillow still smelled like her, too.

"Yeah," he said, turning on the phone, and fully expecting it to be Kyrie telling him about some emergency at the diner. Before he heard any sound from the other side of the phone, he'd already covered the possibles in his mind. She might have run out of paper napkins. Or it could be the beef. Did he order more beef? Perhaps it was the dishwasher flaking again. They needed to buy a new one soon. "Yeah?"

"Oh, damn," Rafiel's voice. "Damn, damn, damn."

Tom sat up, setting Notty down beside him on the bed. "What?" His relations with Rafiel had been less than cordial at one point, but even back then, Rafiel had never called him for the purpose of cursing at him.

"Tom?" Rafiel said, as if surprised to hear him.

"You called me."

There was a silence on the other side, a silence during which Rafiel seemed to be taking several deep breaths. "Oh, shit, Tom, we're in so much trouble."

"What happened?" Tom said, jumping out of the bed and looking around for his clothes. He'd showered before going to bed, so he could probably skip it this time. Truth be told he had a shower problem—he enjoyed so much being able to shower when he pleased that he had a lot of showers even when not shifting back and forth. Unfortunately they did not have support groups for the hygiene-dependent. "Rafiel, what happened?" he repeated when no answer came.

"We found...a corpse," Rafiel's voice was distant, like he was holding the phone away from his mouth, or perhaps speaking in a tiny voice. "Just outside the diner. I'm calling you while McKnight is talking to Kyrie."

"Outside the diner!" Tom said. "In the parking lot again?"

"No, corner of Pride and Fairfax. By the lamppost. She was... propped up. Leaning against the post..."

"She?" Tom's mind went immediately to the woman whom Rafiel had found, the woman who was a mouse shifter.

"The...Summer Avenir. The reporter for the paper? The one that Keith talked to or brought in?"

"The one that published dragon pictures?"

"Yeah, we're going to have to talk to Conan. And the...whoever the triad members are in this area."

"She was killed by a dragon?" Tom asked.

"Well, she was killed by something with really big teeth," Rafiel said, in the tone of a man who has come to his rope's end and still has quite a bit to climb. "And then she was propped up. This is putting a damper on our normal story of attacks by wild animals, you know? It's clear"—he took a deep breath—"very clear it was one of us." He lowered his voice. "I can smell shifter all over the scene, still. I thought I'd seen Dire before, but... I don't know."

Tom moaned and dropped onto the bed, to put his socks on. His feet and in fact all his wounds from the encounter with the dire wolf were completely healed and the very faint scars would soon vanish. "We must make sure he stops."

"Who?" Rafiel said.

"Dire."

"Uh...yeah. I'd say that's a given. The question is how."

"I don't know," Tom said.

"You could"—Rafiel cleared his throat—"talk to the Great Sky Dragon."

Tom stopped, his hand on his sock, his mouth on the verge of uttering an absolute no. Instead, he took a deep breath. "You must see we can't, Rafiel. You must see we can't."

"Why not? If they are rival organizations, both ancient, why can't you talk to the Great Sky Dragon and make him deal with Dire? I mean, I know that Dire said he had a non-aggression pact with the triad, but it doesn't seem to me as if that pact is much good. How could it be? Otherwise he wouldn't have gone through all that trouble to make sure the triad knew he didn't intend to kill you."

Tom heard himself make a sound that was half annoyance and half anger. "I still can't ask for their help, Rafiel. If we ask for the help of a criminal organization, how can we, in the future, hold ourselves able to stop them? If we ask for the help of an organization that deals in drugs, that kills, that basically seems to view other humans—what did Dire call them?—ephemerals, as mere cattle to be milked, then how can we hope to stand for justice among our kind? Or anywhere?"

There was a long silence. Tom had the impression that Rafiel was running several arguments through his own head and discarding them just as fast as he thought them up. Finally he made a sound somewhere between a huff and a sigh. "Tom, we can't be so pure as the driven snow. I understand what you're saying. And standing for justice is very well—don't get me wrong. I'm as fond of graphic novels as Keith is. And justice and truth and all that, but Tom...I'm afraid he's going to kill one of us. I don't even know, you know...if he might not have set up the aquarium murders. He's...cunning, and he has an...odd sense of humor. Look at how he conned Kyrie into going to the house. At any point he could turn and decide to hold one of us—or all of us—responsible for those deaths and just kill us." Pause. "You know, it's quite likely it was him who killed this woman, without so much as a thought."

"Well, she did publish pictures of dragons in the newspaper," Tom said.

"But it could have been Photoshop. I mean, even if she had caught you mid-shifting, do you think that it couldn't be Photoshop? No one will take it seriously. Look at all the pictures of the alien that the tabloids keep following up on and publish. Do you believe he exists?"

"No," Tom said. "And no, I don't think anyone paid undue attention to the pictures. But they are pictures of our kind and... well...Dire is very old. At least assuming it was him. Though, frankly, the Great Sky Dragon is very old too, and I don't think any of his younger subordinates would have dared point out to him that times have changed."

"No," Rafiel said. "I'm sure they wouldn't. So...they killed this young woman. Without a thought. Because she was...an ephemeral."

"No, because she was an ephemeral they thought was threatening shifters." Tom found his mind going down the dangerous path that he knew these people's minds must take every time. He said matter of factly, "Think of it from their perspective, how it must have been throughout history. The discovery of a shifter would lead to a hunt for others. Death was always the end. Of course they would kill anyone that was a remote threat."

"Of course? You sound as if you approve."

"No. Understanding is not approving. There is a qualitative difference." He felt suddenly very tired. "You know, when I was on the streets, they had all these programs where you were supposed to mingle with the other runaways and empathize and understand them. Sometimes that's what you had to do for a meal. And the counselors always seemed to think that if you understood someone, you'd like them...and you know? It's not true. Sometimes the more you talk to a teenage habitual liar and drug pusher, the less you like them. But...but I do understand how they got to be the way they are. And at the same time..." He took a deep breath. "I understand how we could go that way. From the best of motives. Protecting ourselves and our friends. I understand how we could start deciding that...killing the occasional ephemeral meant nothing. Or even that we should kill a few every now and then, out of the blue, to keep the other ones in fear. I understand them, Rafiel. And it scares me. That's another reason not to ask for the Great Sky Dragon's help. That, and I'd like to continue being able to call my soul my own."

Rafiel huffed again and when he answered he was peevish. "Very well," he said, in a tone that implied it wasn't very well at all. "But I hope you know what to do, because this can't go on. With the deaths at the aquarium—and by the way, the latest one, Joe Buckley, had water in his lungs, so it wasn't a body disposal, it was murder by shark—and now some mysterious animal going around town killing people, not to mention what my colleagues are convinced is some madman who just propped up the body afterwards..." This time the sound was just a sigh. "I don't know how to cover up all of this, Tom. I just don't. And I'm an officer of the law. The killings must stop. And I think there's more than an even chance that it's all Dire. I'm...following up on it, but I really think there's a good chance he came to town before, you know, when they felt the deaths, and he set all this up. And we must stop him."

"I understand," Tom said and he did, and in this case he could even empathize. "I'll think of something. Look, I'll come down and help you talk to Conan, okay?"

After Rafiel hung up, Tom started tying his boots, a task made more complex by the fact that Notty was trying to help. "I'd better think of something, eh, Notty?" he said, as he petted the little round kitten head. "Or we are in deep, deep trouble."

Notty looked up at him with guileless intensely blue eyes that seemed to say he had every confidence in Tom's ability to make it all right. Tom wished he did too.

* * *

Every shifter could be a target, Kyrie thought. And even as she was thinking this, she had to put up with being interviewed by a young man with sparse red-blond hair and the slightly bulging blue eyes that always give the impression their possessor is desperately looking for a fairytale to believe in. He, somehow, seemed absolutely convinced that Kyrie must have a wild animal stashed somewhere, and must have deployed it to kill this woman journalist.

If only you knew, Kyrie thought, but just looked placidly at the man. "No," she said, in a firm voice, while she kept an eye on Conan who was dealing with the tables. She stood with her back to the counter. On the other side of it, Anthony was cooking orders. He'd been interviewed, but his interview had been very brief, since he hadn't left the stove since he'd come in at about four in the morning. And no, he hadn't seen any dead woman against the lamppost, though, frankly, if she'd been propped up and looked natural, he might not have noticed. After all, he'd been running in, and he'd been working what very much amounted to double shifts because of the weather and their being shorthanded. And now he had to go back to the stove before it went up in flames; did Officer McKnight mind?

Officer McKnight could not persist against Anthony's push to get back to work, and therefore he was now absolutely determined to make life difficult for Kyrie. Kyrie looked up and resisted an urge to smile. She wondered if she was supposed to cry into the table-wiping rag she was holding and confess that yes, she'd done it all.

She decided against it on principle. The man looked like he'd had his sense of humor surgically removed at birth and he might very well take her at her word. Instead, aloud, she said, with increasing firmness, "No, I was not mad at her for publishing the dragon pictures. Why should I be?"

"Well..." McKnight said, and looked at her with those bulging eyes, making her think he was going to dart an improbably long tongue out and catch a fly or something. "The thing is Ms....Smith, you and your...partner, Mr. Ormson own this diner half and half, right."

"Right," Kyrie said, wishing if he was going to pronounce Smith that way he would add "if that is indeed your real name."

"And this woman published pictures of dragons in the paper and said she'd seen them at the back door of your diner. Now... wouldn't you think people might be afraid to come here? That it might ruin your business?"

"What?" Kyrie asked, completely puzzled. "Are you truly asking me if I think that people are afraid of dragons? Are you afraid of dragons, Officer?"

"Well...that's neither here nor there, is it? I mean, I know that dragons are imaginary and I..." He shrugged. "But this is not about what I believe. Don't you think that people out there on the street might think that there are really dragons and that they might get attacked, if they come here?"

Kyrie shook her head. "No. In fact, considering all the recent movies and stories with good dragons, I think that if they were to believe dragons existed—and frankly I don't think even a lot of our college student clientele believes any such thing—they would be thrilled. If anything, that picture in the paper might bring us droves of customers." She realized as she said it that this was true, though certainly that was not how she and the others had first thought of it.

McKnight clearly hadn't thought of it that way either. He said, "But—" and then repeated "But, but," like it was the sound his brain gave off while sputtering and trying to start. "But you have to understand," he finally said. "Not everyone might have felt that way. And what if they were scared and stopped coming here. Wouldn't you have hated that reporter? Wouldn't you have thought of doing...something to her?"

"Something?" Kyrie said. She frowned. "What exactly are you suggesting? That I roamed the streets looking for a wild animal, whom I then convinced to chomp on this journalist, when she was conveniently just outside our door?" She glared. "Because a death by wild animal attack will, of course, hurt our business far less than rumors of dragons."

"Well, no, but you might...you might not have thought of that, as you were, you know..."

"Looking for a wild animal to kill her? Tell me, was it a mountain lion or a bear? And how did I keep it from killing me? My extrasensory powers?"

McKnight looked confused. Or rather, he looked more confused than normal. "But...but...if you had..."

"And what if I had grown wings and flown?" she asked. Which I can't do. Though my boyfriend can. "Do I have to answer hypothetical questions on that too?" She glared at him. "Given an ability to find wild animals disposed to kill inconvenient journalists at the drop of a hat, and supposing I had the superpowers to prevent them killing me, I still wouldn't have killed the journalist."

"Oh? Why not?"

"Because she was a person. A human being. And she'd done me no noticeable harm. Do you often kill people because they're annoying or sensationalist, Officer?"

"Me? Well, no, of course..." He seemed to finally realize he wasn't going to win this argument no matter how hard he tried. "Right," he said. "Right. Thank you, Ms. Smith. I will...I will go and ask your customers if they've seen anything."

Yes. Do, why don't you? Because that won't affect business at all, she thought irritably, as she ducked behind the counter, and found Anthony's gaze trained on her, half amusement, half awe.

"What?" she said.

"I think you have a bit of policeman caught between your teeth," he said.

"What?"

"Metaphorically speaking. I think that's what Tom calls biting off someone's head and beating them to death with it."

"Well," Kyrie said, deflated, as she got the carafe from the coffee maker and put the latest round of prepared orders on a tray to take out. Conan had been half handling all the orders, but she was fairly sure the breakfast crowd would prefer their eggs before they got all cold and rubbery. "He's dim."

"Yeah. I wonder why Rafiel didn't ask us the questions himself."

"Dunno. Dealing with some administrative stuff, I guess," Kyrie said, and started towards the tables, carrying the tray. She smiled and joked with her regulars. But her mind wasn't in it.

No, her mind was carefully processing the input of her nose. How many shifters were there in the diner? They knew for a fact that the diner had been soaked—some years ago—in pheromones designed to attract shifters. It had called her all the way from the bus station, in response to something—she wasn't sure what. For all she knew it had called her all the way from Cleveland where her last job had been. How many more people did it call? And what were their forms?

She didn't think they were implicated in the death of the journalist, Summer Avenir. She didn't think so, but you never knew. After all, the Ancient Ones weren't the only ones who could lose their heads when faced with something like pictures of shifters on the front page of their local paper and just outside their favorite diner. While Kyrie and Tom had no wish to associate wild animal attacks with their diner, some customer who just wanted to stop a threat might have more direct views of how to do so.

She saw Tom and Rafiel come in through the back door, poor Tom looking very pale and cranky, which made perfect sense, since he'd slept all of two and a half or three hours at most.

At the moment she saw them, she was standing by the front door and away from most of the occupied tables. She stood her ground, ostensibly waiting for them to go by her, so she could move freely.

But as they came close enough, she asked Rafiel in a whisper, "The teeth that killed the woman...They weren't alligator teeth, were they?"

* * *

Rafiel had a headache. No, it wasn't a headache as such because headaches were natural occurrences that came and went without much provocation. This headache was like a living thing, compounded half of pain, half of fear and mostly of anger. It sat on his brain, seeming to squeeze all rationality out of it.

He wanted to be mad at Tom for refusing to even consider calling the Great Sky Dragon and the triad to their aid. What was he doing? Did he think they could play heroes all by themselves? Who were they against this ancient shifter group that permeated all nations and was a law unto itself. If the group decided whom to kill and whom to let live, to whom could they speak out against it? How could they when they were part of it too?

To some extent Dire was right when he told Rafiel and Kyrie that in the ancient times there had been many deaths, that in those days shifters were viewed as dangerous, as things to be eliminated.

But then again, weren't they dangerous? So many of them seemed to have a lust for killing and a total disregard for those outside their group.

Rafiel stood in the brightly lit parking lot and squinted against the light, and watched Tom walk from the inn, around the thawing slabs of ice in the parking lot. The sun was out, things were melting. Probably only to freeze again this night, but for now, ice was in retreat.

Rafiel squinted at Tom and thought to himself that if shifters were known, and if they were known for what they were, those creatures that Dire called ephemerals would be more than justified in exterminating them all, root and branch, the guilty with the innocent. But then...but then he and Tom and Kyrie were innocent.

And if we want to remain so, we'd best find a way to control those among our kind who aren't—those who are a danger to the society we live in. From there it followed that Tom had been right. They could not call on the Great Sky Dragon. They couldn't call on any of the old, corrupt organizations that looked down on the society amid which they lived and from which they derived the benefits of civilization. No. It must be us. Me and you and me against the ancient shifter world. And Keith too, if he's willing.

The ridiculous thought of the four of them facing down the Ancient Ones, much less the Ancient Ones, the triad and whatever was killing people at the aquarium—if it wasn't Dire or the crab shifter—made his head throb all the worse. The Rodent Liberation Front might be more their speed.

Tom, who always looked like heck when he was tired, now looked tired and grumpy and ill-awakened, with shadows under his eyes, and the sort of expression that suggested he was about to face a firing squad by the early dawn light.

He stomped across the parking lot towards Rafiel and greeted him with a grunt. They walked across the parking lot together, presumably, Rafiel thought, to talk to Conan. What Tom expected to get from Conan, if not the help of Conan's patron, was beyond him.

And then, as they got into the diner, and went close by Kyrie, he found his arm grabbed and Kyrie asked, "The teeth that killed the woman...They weren't alligator teeth, were they?"

Tom snorted behind Rafiel and said, with certainty. "It wasn't Old Joe."

But Kyrie was looking at Rafiel with those bright eyes of hers, that inquisitive all-attentive gaze she so rarely turned towards him. "Was it, Rafiel?"

He shook his head slowly. "Not so far as the examiner on the scene thought. He said bear or dog"—he shrugged—"only much, much bigger teeth. I could imagine, by a stretch of the imagination, its being a dragon, but not an alligator, no."

While he talked to Kyrie, Tom had gone behind both of them and into the glassed-in annex, where Conan was cleaning a table. Tom cheerfully helped him put the menus and condiment bottles back. Then he grabbed the wrist on Conan's good arm. Rafiel had no idea what he said to the man. Tom spoke in too low a voice to be heard. But Rafiel saw Conan pale, and then Tom shook his head and said something else, and Conan looked at him half in fear, but seemed calmer and nodded.

Rafiel wished he could hear it, but doubtless, through this headache, he wouldn't make any sense of it, in any case. Aloud he told Kyrie, "Looks like you'll have to take over all the waitressing. I think we're talking to Conan." He watched Tom take Conan to the table nearest the window—the one where the two sets of glassed-in walls met, and fortuitously the corner nearest the lamppost around which the dead woman had been wrapped.

"I won't sit people near there," Kyrie said, and turned to meet a couple who had just entered. Which left Rafiel with nothing to do but go talk to Conan.

Conan was sitting across from Tom, and as Rafiel approached, Tom got up. Before Rafiel was fully settled, Tom came back with three cups of coffee, a bowl full of the little packaged creamers, and a container of sugars. Conan hesitated and looked almost guilty taking the coffee. Or perhaps he just looked guilty. He looked guilty most of the time, a sort of cringing general-purpose guilt that made Rafiel's headache worse.

Tom looked at Rafiel as though expecting him to start the questioning, and Rafiel sighed. "The dead woman, out there?" he said.

"Yes. You asked me earlier," Conan said. "I didn't see anything."

"Really?" Rafiel asked, with withering sarcasm. "Were you waiting on people in this annex, then? Was there no one seated here?"

"Oh. Well, of course people were seated here. But...but it's dark out there. I didn't see anything." And then, as if with sudden inspiration. "Kyrie attended to people here too, and don't you think she would have spoken up if she'd seen something?"

Tom jerked forward, and Rafiel, fairly sure that he was going to come to Kyrie's defense, perhaps in a violent way, put a hand forward to stop him. "I'm sure she would have," he said. "I also know that these...creatures, whatever they might have been, from whichever side, have defenses that we can't begin to fathom. I'm fairly sure that Dire doesn't actually teleport, for instance. And if he can fake a phone call and make Kyrie actually hear my voice as if it came from her cell phone..." He shrugged. "It's possible they made themselves invisible.

"But you, Conan, aren't just one of us, one of the young shifters, are you?"

This brought him a wide-eyed glance from Conan, not an admission of guilt, not even, Rafiel thought, with an inward groan, an admission that Rafiel had somehow penetrated a deception. No. All that fish-eyed glare was pure shock, combined almost for sure with a calculation on Rafiel's mental health or lack thereof. "Of course I'm one of you," he said, in outraged protest. "What else would I be? I am twenty-three years old, and I was born in Tennessee. Knoxville. Mom and Dad own the Good Fortune Restaurant there. I was president of the Latin club in high school. Check it out. I'm in the yearbook."

"That's not what I meant," Rafiel said. Though I worded it vaguely enough to catch something else, should it be there. "What I mean is that the Great Sky Dragon sent you here to protect Tom. He has a link to your mind. Surely he wouldn't be fooled by whatever mind tricks Dire might be using. Surely, he would see whatever was happening. Did you not see anything? Sense his alarm in some way?" Mind tricks. What if he convinces the victims of shark to just jump IN to the aquarium? Surely he can do it. Damn. How can one check that? Prove that? He probably doesn't even need to be there. Look what he did with Kyrie's phone.

Conan shook his head. He looked miserable and on the edge of sniffling like a lost child. "I never...I didn't see anything. But...but before, when he spoke through me? I didn't see anything either. I wasn't...aware that he was doing anything."

Rafiel took a deep breath and drank a sip of hot, black coffee to fortify himself. "And could you have done it, Conan?"

This time he got the wide eyes and a look of almost panic. First Conan shook his head, then he opened his mouth. He looked like he was about to scream or run, but he did neither. Instead, he put his head in his good hand, and Rafiel fully expected him to show a tear-streaked face when he looked up. It wasn't. His face was perfectly dry, though his eyes looked reddened.

"Look, do you think I haven't asked myself this?" he asked. And, as though driven out of his voice by stress, the pseudo-Asian accent was gone, replaced by just the faintest hint of a Southern twang. "Ever since she was discovered I've asked myself this. He spoke through my mind. Could he also...do other things through my mind? I don't know. I don't know." He shook his head. "I don't know if he could have had me change and attack the girl. I think not, because if he could have, then when we were hunting Tom"—he looked at Tom—"why would he not do the same? Why would he leave us to our own devices?" He shrugged. "On the other hand, I think, why would he not have put a listening thing in our heads then as he did now, so he could advise us when we ran into trouble?" He shrugged again. "I don't know. I just don't know."

"Perhaps he didn't think it was worth it for just me," Tom said. "After all, I was just a young shifter, right? While here he knows he's up against the executioner sent by the Ancient Ones, right? So it would be more important. And he would send you, of course."

Conan started to shake his head, then shrugged again. "You might have been only a young one, but he was... By the end of it, we were all in full hunt for you. Though to be honest..." he looked pensive, "he only ever sent the young ones of us, never the old, experienced ones. Why, I don't know, just as I don't know why he wants you protected now." He looked suddenly embarrassed. "Only I'm kind of glad he does, because you're a nice guy and I don't want to be ordered to attack you."

"Would you, if he ordered you?" Tom asked.

Conan looked at Tom. And Rafiel felt as though he was seeing several thoughts flicker through Conan's mind. No. And then yes and then...Conan shrugged. "I'd like to think I wouldn't," he said, opening his hands on the tabletop, as if to show the absence of weapons. "But the thing is, if he ordered me, and I didn't obey, then I would be left..." He sighed. "With the absolute certainty of my own death. I belong to him. He's in my mind. Still, the prospect of waking up with myself, day after day, year after year, after killing someone who has become a friend..." He made a face. "Death might be preferable. On the other hand"—disarming smile—"I think I've proven I'm a coward and very attached to life. So...I don't know. The Great Sky Dragon would tell me to tell you that no, of course I wouldn't kill you, but I'm telling you the truth."

He seemed inordinately proud of it, and Rafiel who could feel the same gears turn in Tom's head that were turning in his—what does he mean he doesn't know, and this is not a free man—said, "It's always good to tell the truth. So, you don't know if you killed this woman or not?"

"I don't think I did," Conan said. "The thing was, see, we were fairly busy all night. Yes, there was a lull around four, but it wasn't a lull in the restaurant. It was just that no more people were arriving, not that the ones that were already here were leaving. A bunch of people came in and sat from three to five or so, just...here. Ordering more stuff, you know? So Kyrie and I were both very busy, all that time. I think Kyrie would have noticed if I'd left my tables unattended for any of that time. She would have asked me. You know she keeps an eye on me all the time. And I asked her...I asked her right after I heard. Just a quick question. And she said I'd been here all the time, helping with the tables."

"So it's improbable it was you," Rafiel said. "I presume that you don't have a way to cast the same sort of mind-invisibility thing that Dire does?"

"Not that I've ever heard of. And I've never heard of any of the senior dragons doing it...not even Himself. He usually appears in perfectly normal, reasonable ways."

"Except flying, yes," Rafiel said. "So you know of no reason why the Great Sky Dragon would want this woman dead? Wouldn't seeing dragons, one of them you, on the cover of the Weekly Inquirer unnerve him or enrage him?"

Conan shook his head. "I'm sure it wouldn't," he said.

"Why?" Rafiel asked.

"Because if it had I would have heard from him, or from one of the other ones, in the town, you know? Someone would have come to me and told me..." He seemed to run out of words or perhaps of imagination as to what they'd tell him.

"That you'd been a very naughty dragon?" Tom asked, seeming suddenly amused.

Conan nodded once. "That. I'm sure they would have. And he didn't. Which means he wasn't mad about the picture. Wasn't mad about showing myself. He is not..." A sudden lopsided smile. "I know it's playing into a stereotype a little, and perhaps it is wrong, but you know we Asians are supposed to be good with technology? Well...Himself is. He really is. He's very, very good with it. And he would have thought what I thought. That the dragons could be a Photoshop job, and that no one living in the world today would think they were real, unless they were shifters or already knew shifters themselves."

"But then...that leaves... Wait. What if she had gone after those you call senior dragons? I assume there are some of those here in town?"

Conan nodded once. "The Three Luck Dragon Restaurant where we..."

"Where I almost got killed?" Tom asked.

Conan's eyes opened wide. "You did? Was it there? I heard about it through the organization after I...came back. But I didn't know it had been done there, right at the center of our operations." Then to Rafiel: "That's where we met in the parking lot."

"And I assume the owner is one of you," Rafiel asked, and seeing the expression on Conan's face, hastened to add, "You don't have to answer that."

"She might have gone there," Conan said. "Yes. And harassed someone. But the thing is..." He shrugged again, an expressive, eloquent shrug that was almost a word in itself, a word that combined lack of knowledge with ability to acquire any. "The thing is that I don't think Himself would do it this way. For some reason he wants you protected." He gave Tom a look. "To be honest, it might be simply because you impressed him. Or Kyrie did. And because he is afraid that the Ancient Ones will take you out without his protection. I don't know. You don't ask that sort of question. But, anyway, if he wants to protect you, the last thing, the very last thing he would do was to come here, to leave the dead woman this close to your diner, and therefore call attention to you, right? He'd never do that. He's not stupid."

Rafiel didn't think the Great Sky Dragon was stupid at all. And even through his headache, he had to concede Conan's logic. He didn't see the Great Sky Dragon leaving a corpse that close to Tom, not if he wanted to protect him, at any rate.

His headache was worse. "Damn," he said. "That means it was probably Dire."

Conan nodded, sagely.

"Which means we need to figure out a way to deal with him."

"Deal with him?" Conan said. "You can't. Not alone. That's why Himself sent me, so that..."

Rafiel looked at Tom. Tom shook his head at him, but said nothing.

"Right," Rafiel said. "I think I'll take my headache and go see if I can come up with any new ideas."

Tom smiled at him, suddenly. "Where are you going to take your headache?"

"I don't know," Rafiel said. He had a savage need to be mad at someone and to be rude to someone, and he didn't want to do it here, and he didn't want to be mad at Tom. "I don't know. Maybe I'll drive in circles for a while till I think of somewhere to go."

The quizzical half-amused look he got back didn't really help his mood or sense of humor any. Nor did hearing Tom tell Conan—clearly, in answer to a question he didn't hear, "No, I don't want you to help. I don't want the Great Sky Dragon involved in this. It's between me and my friends. If the Great Sky Dragon gets involved I'll make sure to die. And then all his work and meddling will be for nothing."

* * *

Kyrie was worried and she didn't like to be worried. Or rather, she tried to minimize the time she spent being worried, tried to minimize the time she devoted to feeling stress. She much preferred, by far, to work on solutions than to turn over in her mind things that couldn't be helped.

But she was sure that it had been Dire who'd killed that poor woman. She remembered her own words to him—in haste and rage, and mostly wanting to get rid of him—about the reporter and the paper. Oh, she should have known better than to say that sort of thing to a psychopath, but she didn't feel guilty. Not exactly.

She had simply not been brought up with the idea that whatever she might say to someone might cause that person to go off and take it into his head to kill someone else. Though she'd grown up in foster homes, and some of her foster siblings had been less than stable, she'd never met with that level of volatility. Now she had. And she'd take it under advisement in the future. It had perhaps been stupid of her to speak of the poor girl. But Kyrie hadn't intended her death, and nothing could be served by castigating herself over crimes she hadn't meant to commit.

And yet, she felt a nettle of guilt and a nettle of worry, as she went about, waiting on tables. She would swear she smelled at least two shifters, perhaps more, though it was hard to tell through the smell of bacon and eggs and fresh-grilled pancakes.

However, when she stopped by the Poet—who had come in unusually late, and was clearly staying for breakfast—she could smell him—she was sure of it—the sharp tang of shifter around him.

She stopped long enough to refill his cup, and she could feel the smell rising from him, and then she noticed something else. What he had written on his notebook, in tiny, obsessively-neat block print, was "A modest proposal for a rodent revolution."

Rodents, Kyrie thought, moving away as he looked at her, and before he could realize she'd read over his shoulder. A Rodent Liberation Front. She wondered how real that was. It had seemed to—pardoning the pun—ferret out that school teacher rodent. Perhaps it had spies?

She shivered at the idea of an army of rodents spying on people. It reminded her of the movie Ratatouille, which she'd thought Tom would like, because, even though it was an animation for children, it was about a rat learning to be a chef. And since Tom had started culinary classes and was invested, heart and soul, in cooking the best he could for The George, Kyrie had thought this would be the perfect movie. Only the scene of the rats, flowing like a furry tide to take over the restaurant and do everything in it at night, had made Tom jump up and say, "Turn it off." Kyrie herself had felt pretty uncomfortable, too, though perhaps not as much as Tom, who'd said that all he could think was of a similar tide of rats taking over The George. The juxtaposition in his mind of rats and cooking surfaces just seemed to drive him crazy.

And yet...wouldn't such a furry tide of rats—such a group of shifters—have power? Shouldn't she be able to get help from them? She knew Tom didn't want to ask for help from the Great Sky Dragon. She understood it, even. But this was a diner customer.

The thought lasted all the walk back behind the counter, to replace the spent carafe and take up the filled one. Tom was behind the counter also taking over from Anthony and listening to Anthony's instructions on what was cooking and at what stage.

"I'll be back by six, right?" Anthony said. "Is that early enough for you? Because, you know, these double shifts are killing me, though Cecily says we could use the money because she wants a large screen TV. Where she plans to put the large screen TV in our apartment, I don't know, though doubtless I'll find out."

"You'll find out she wants to move to a bigger one," Tom said, in an amused tone, and Kyrie was surprised and admiring at once, that he could keep this calm and joke with Anthony like that, with everything that was hanging over their heads.

Anthony shrugged. "Ain't that the truth. But she's worth it. She's a great cook. Her steak is almost as good as yours. And I'm sorry, Tom, you're a good-looking man, but Cecily is much prettier."

Tom chuckled at that, and Anthony, putting his jacket on, ducked out of the counter and off towards the hallway. And Kyrie turned to Tom and said, "What about the RLF?"

Tom blinked at her. "Beg your pardon?"

"What about the Rodent Liberation Front?" Kyrie said. "What if we asked their help?"

"You're joking, right?"

"Well, they are a group of shifters, and they seem to be..." She looked up to see Tom's lips tremble. "Well, all right, the idea of an army of rats is somewhat creepy."

"Creepy isn't the half of it, and what I fear is not an army of rats," Tom said, "it is an army of rats, mice, gerbils, squirrels and guinea pigs."

"But...surely they could...do things?"

"Like what, nibble people to death?" Tom asked. Then shrugging, "Oh, I grant you they could probably be very useful in spying and that sort of thing, but..." He shook his head. "I don't know, Kyrie. All these organizations seem to come with their own, for lack of a better word, agenda: their own assumptions about who's in and who's out. I'd prefer to just be human."

Kyrie had to giggle at that. "Ah. Well. So would I, but we're not."

Tom shook his head. He frowned. "No. But perhaps we must be? I mean, I'm not going to deny, I can't deny, that I'm also something else, but we live in a society of humans and our parents...well...at least mine," he had the grace to blush, as if just remembering that she had no clue who or what her parents were, "are human. We owe humanity something...Even if we owe our kind something too." He looked annoyed, as though he'd just noticed that his tongue had got him hopelessly tangled. "Look, if I saw someone go after a...a mouse shifter, simply for being a mouse shifter and because the difference scared them, of course I would defend him or her. We owe each other that. But..."

"But if you found a mouse shifter nibbling on human babies at night and counting it as not mattering because he thought himself superior and more human than them...You'd eat the bastard?" Kyrie asked.

Tom flashed a smile. "Kill. Despite my dad's imagination, I do try very hard not to be a cannibal."

Kyrie chuckled. She could no more imagine Tom being a cannibal than she could imagine him being a mass murderer. Shifter or not, she knew her boyfriend held himself to a very stern standard. And would not, could not deviate. Not and remain himself. Which meant he couldn't ask for help. And that she would have to be the guarantor to the Great Sky Dragon that Tom wouldn't kill himself. She thought she could do that, if she had asked for help—and not him. If it were her debt.

A couple came in, and Kyrie went to seat them at a table by the window and take their order. The problem, when it came right down to it, was that Kyrie was also not absolutely sure that Tom could kill Dire even presuming he found a way to defeat his mind powers, no matter how much he thought Dire was dangerous to humans. She knew Tom. She thought Tom's own scruples would stop him. He would only kill when cornered. He would kill to protect his friends. But, given Dire's abilities, when Tom found himself cornered it might be too late.

Dire might not kill Tom. Kyrie wasn't sure how the truce of the Ancient Ones with the dragons would hold given an attack on a dragon. But she knew that he would hurt Tom. And wreak havoc on the rest of them.

And she saw no way out of it, she thought, as she set the two orders for French toast on the counter. They had to get rid of Dire, but Tom wouldn't let her ask for the help of anyone who might defeat the creature.

* * *

Rafiel didn't drive in circles. He drove through streets where people were making their cautious way to work—some of them for the first time in three days. It was slow going, and very broken progress, as he had to stop often to avoid ramming into the car in front of him, or else slow down for groups of schoolchildren slipping, sliding and giggling across an ice-patch on the crosswalk.

He stopped by a friendly doughnut shop—not his normal one—and grabbed two crullers and a tall cup of coffee, before retreating to the car parked in front of the shop, sparing just one grateful thought to his shifter metabolism that—thank heavens—allowed him to eat as much as he pleased of what he pleased.

The shop was in a neighborhood of small, remodeled townhouses and apartments. It had either been there since the middle of the twentieth century or someone had gone through a whole lot of trouble to make sure it looked as though it had. Though it had no tables, the interior had that green-formica and chrome look of the Fifties, and the sign over the shop blinked in pink and green neon good doughnuts. Which they were, or at least the crullers were—soft and moist. And the coffee was just as it should be, black as a murderer's soul, hot as hell and strong enough to peel paint—or stomach lining.

Rafiel's phone rang. He saw McKnight's cell number and took the phone to his ear with a "Yeah?"

"That guy you had me check on?"

"Dante Dire?"

"Yeah, I left a couple of the part-timers dealing with the data stuff. They didn't want to see the body."

"Yeah." Smart part-timers.

"Well, we didn't find signs that he was in the aquarium, but... well, his movements are kind of hard to check. He's all over. But he...well, he's been in Colorado for a couple of months. Also..."

"Also?"

"He made a killing in the stock market. Several times. He's either an amazing gambler, or he is crooked as hell."

Or he can read minds, Rafiel thought and shivered. "Thanks, McKnight."

Rafiel drank and ate in his car and considered his options.

He was about five blocks away from the aquarium. In the bewildering way towns in the west had of turning from residential to commercial and back again, this neighborhood became all offices as soon as you crossed under the expressway to the west. And then the aquarium was right there. He should go back to the aquarium. Oh, it was only one of the cases on his plate right now, but it was—arguably—the one he could actually do something about.

Whatever Tom and Kyrie had to say, he couldn't figure out how he could do anything about the dire wolf. And he certainly couldn't do anything about Conan and the Great Sky Dragon. He felt sorry for Conan, poor bastard, but that was about it. He didn't know where, if at all, the alligator fit in all this, and he'd be damned if he understood, even mildly, what was going on with a shifter crab. But whatever was going on at the aquarium he had to solve. There had to be a female involved, which seemed to rule out the old Japanese shifter. Unless, of course, the Japanese shifter disapproved of immoral behavior in his aquarium. Who knew? Morals had changed a lot, hadn't they even in the last couple decades, let alone from whatever old era this shifter came from? And then there was always Dire. Dire's casual disregard for life. And even if they didn't find a trail showing he'd been in town, he might have been. And he might have mind-controlled those victims into jumping in the tank. To...make their life difficult? Keep them on their toes while he investigated their other alleged misdeeds?

His motives were almost impossible to fathom, except that it was pretty sure they weren't good. He seemed to take relish in casual emotional torture.

Or it could be a female at the aquarium.

He became aware that someone was knocking enthusiastically on the passenger side window, and looked away from pink and green neon to see Lei Lani's face surrounded by fluffy grey fake fur on a red ski jacket hood. She tapped the window again, and smiled.

Hello, suspect number...well, many.

He reached for the control on his door handle with a sugary hand and lowered the window. She smiled at him. "Officer Trall," she said. "I just came in for a coffee, and I saw you parked here. Nothing wrong in the doughnut shop, is there?"

He shook his head. "No. Just having breakfast. I'm afraid I was up all night and was starting to flag. But I am about to head back to the aquarium, to look at a few things."

"Oh, good. May I go to the aquarium now? I won't come near the crime scene. I know you guys have it all taped up and everything. I just want to go to the office and pick up some reports on shark health that I've been looking at which are urgent." Suddenly, her happy expression dimmed. "Well...if we don't end up having to kill half of them because we need to recover parts of people, and have the others shipped to parts unknown. I mean, who's going to come and look at our sharks, if they know they've eaten people?"

Rafiel shrugged. A tingle ran up and down his neck. His dad, now retired from the Goldport force had first told him about these feelings. The sense that something was wrong.

There was something to Lei Lani, to her talk, that made him suspect she knew something.

He doubted she could be the shark shifter, if there was one, because how did she convince her victims to go swimming in there? She didn't look strong enough to push men over. Unless she got them to lean over the tank somehow.

But she knew something, and she was trying to get him not to notice.

"Lots of people will come, probably," he said. "People do." He reassured her. "Why do you think they like sharks? Because they're fascinating marine creatures? No. Because they eat people. And this is their best chance at seeing them confined and safe, you know..."

She looked at him a moment, with huge, incredulous eyes, then blinked. "Perhaps. I guess being a shark expert, I have a soft spot for them. I don't think of them as...man-eaters."

And right there, Rafiel decided he needed to talk to Ms. Lani. Everyone thought of sharks as predators! And being, as they were, on semi-informal terms right now, it would probably be easier. But he'd like to reconcile what he'd heard from John Wagner about her with her comment that the male employees often had sex by the shark tank, and that, again, with the fact that the condoms found had vaginal secretions.

"Why don't you hop in?" he said. "If you're going to the aquarium, I might as well give you a ride." And because he had no intention of letting her go near the aquarium alone.

"Oh, thank you," she said, suddenly acting shy. "I could walk, you know? It's only a few blocks." She gestured vaguely across the way. "I live just over there. Normally I walk."

"Judging from the pedestrians I saw on the way here," Rafiel said, "there's quite a bit of ice on the sidewalks. I might as well give you a ride."

She got in, gingerly, and put her coffee cup on the dashboard as she sat down and buckled herself in, before picking the cup up again. "Thank you, really."

Rafiel backed out of the parking space and into the flow of traffic, while his passenger remained absolutely quiet. It wasn't till they were a block away that she said, still in that oddly shy tone, "So, I suppose I shouldn't ask you if you have made any progress? You said you don't discuss your investigations."

He answered with a shrug. "Well," he said, "we have made some progress. As you told us, there were some condoms discarded in the planters by the water." He watched carefully for her reactions, while seeming to ignore her.

"Oh?" she said, and raised an eyebrow. "I told you, I heard the guys at the aquarium talk, and that John Wagner? He's the worst. He has this...imaginary friend or whatever that he calls 'the drool'—you know, like it's a part of him, or a mobile, sentient weapon. If people displease him, he'll say 'fear the drool, I am basset,' and everyone laughs and all, and you know, he talks about how he used to own a basset and how much they drooled. But...it feels creepy somehow. And he keeps saying things like 'I'd never say anything impolite. Now the drool, he's a brazen bastard.' Like...like he's schizophrenic or something."

Rafiel was so horrified by the vision the words conjured, of the ebullient John Wagner turning into—of all things—a basset hound, that he could barely trust himself to speak. While silence lengthened, he caught himself thinking, But...he can't be a shifter basset, can he? I mean I can imagine dog shifters, but would they be a particular breed?

His limited knowledge of dog fancy told him that the current breeds favored as pets in the U.S. must all be of fairly recent creation. Recent, at least in evolutionary terms. And surely, surely, being relatively recent they couldn't have gotten enmeshed with human genes, could they? It seemed to him all the shifters he'd seen so far changed shapes into species and breeds that had been very long on the Earth. Some longer than humans. But then again, they had no idea how the shifting mechanism worked. Was it truly genetic? Or was there some other mechanism at work? Rafiel was hesitant to say it was magic, but then, wasn't magic just a name for a process no one understood yet? And after all, as far as they knew, dragons had never even existed.

"I'm sorry," Lei said, sounding distant, and somehow worried. "I didn't mean to cast aspersions on John. I mean, he's a nice guy and all. A little...extroverted, you'd call it, and he makes some jokes that could border on sexual harassment, but I'm sure he means well."

Oh, I wouldn't be sure of any such thing, Rafiel thought. Much as he'd liked the guy—and he realized with surprise that he had liked the guy, which was odd, considering that John Wagner appeared to consider him a dumb ass—he was quite sure it was part of Wagner's fundamental approach to the world to put the cat among the pigeons as much as humanly possible.

Which was why Rafiel was loathe to think of what he'd said about Lei as meaning anything at all. For all he knew, Lei had simply made that sort of prissy comment about John Wagner being sexist, and John had it in for her. Oh, not consciously. He didn't seem like the sort of guy who—fully aware of what he was doing—would be either vengeful or petty. But he might very well view casting doubt on her credentials and sending the police to look into her background as just a bit of fun and mischief. "No," he said, speaking to Lei. "That isn't it, you know. I didn't think you were particularly paranoid about John Wagner. I met him while we were processing the scene. He said he dropped by to see if we needed any help." Which, of course, was also the typical behavior of mass murderers, as Rafiel well knew. "He seems like a nice guy. Ebullient. But...but he didn't threaten me with the drool."

He was rewarded with a ladylike giggle and a small headshake. "I'm sure he only does that to his friends or people he works with and knows. I'm wondering if it was him...I mean, by the pool."

"No," Rafiel said decisively. "It couldn't be any of the men at the aquarium."

"Why not?" she asked. "I mean, did you—?"

"DNA test them? No. The semen in the condoms belonged to the last two victims, so you see, it couldn't be—"

"But, Officer!" she said and seemed within a breath of pointing out to him that they, after all, lived in the twenty-first century.

"No," he said, cutting her off. "You see, the outside of the condom had vaginal secretions." Now she looked surprised, staring at him. "And something else. Our analyst says that the outside of the condom also had minute fragments of sharkskin."

"Shark?" she asked, now looking truly surprised. "How do they know it's shark and not some other fish? I mean, I know there are preparations"—she blushed—"people use, to facilitate sex or heighten pleasure or..."

"No," Rafiel said. Curiouser and curiouser. What does she know that requires this much enthusiasm to hide? "This was shark. There is something in sharkskin called denticles. Our examiner says that they were on the outside of this condom. And please, don't ask me how. I wouldn't begin to be able to explain it." Which was true, he thought. Not because I can't begin to explain, but because I wouldn't. If these shark particles are like the bits of hair and fluff I find on my bed after a shifted night, or the scales that Tom is forever shaking out of his stuff, then it would indicate that the shark itself is a shifter. Herself, presumably, given the vaginal secretions. But how would a small woman get her victim in before she shifted?

"Uh," Lei said. She unzipped her ski jacket to reveal that underneath she wore a semitransparent white blouse. Not semitransparent in a way that would necessarily look racy or provocative, but just as though a nice business blouse had been made out of too thin a material and therefore allowed a vague translucence to let forth the golden hues of her skin, the whiter tones of her bra, and a pinkish spot in the middle, between her breasts which was probably one of those rosettes with which bra manufacturers adorned bras, for reasons Rafiel—who usually concerned himself far more with the removal of their product than its purchase—couldn't understand. He glanced sideways and into her black eyes, as she said, "I think it is possible, isn't it, that they could have..." She shifted uncomfortably in the seat. "You know...put stuff on the condom to throw people off?"

Rafiel shrugged. He wasn't going to laugh the hypothesis off. Mostly because once you got shifters involved in a crime scene, the improbable was not only, often enough, possible, but it was, strangely, often the most likely solution. After all, if you started with the impossibility of someone changing shapes into an animal, then wouldn't it follow that every other impossibility would be true? My disbelief was suspended from the neck until dead, he thought. But still, he spoke as if he were a normal policeman, and as if he didn't very well know that all this involved shifters. "If that were the case," he said, "wouldn't it have made much more sense to have tossed the condoms away, out of the vicinity of the aquarium? And which of the...stuff, do you suggest they put on the condom? The vaginal secretions or the sharkskin?"

She seemed surprised, and squirmed some more, as he pulled into a parking spot at the aquarium—which was still closed to visitors and whose parking lot therefore remained empty. "I...I guess both?" she said, at last, hesitantly.

"Um...okay. I could grant you both, at least if there were no woman involved..." He neglected to say that unless it was manual sex there would have been other traces. "Throwing in vaginal secretions might change our perception of the crime. But why the sharkskin? They can't have meant to throw suspicion on a shark. Unless," he said, as an idea occurred to him, "some woman at the aquarium is a craftswoman specializing in sword and knife handles made of sharkskin. They do those, don't they? I don't remember what they call it...Oh, yes, I do. Shagreen, isn't it?"

She shook her head. "I don't know," she said. "There are so many ways in which humans exploit the beautiful creatures." And then, as though catching sight of his shocked expression, she added, "Well, they are, you know, truly. Though my professor at college said that the natural historian always identifies with their subjects. Or at least, there is no other way to account for otherwise rational beings suddenly becoming misty-eyed over monitor lizards."

It might be true. "So, you went to college in Hawaii?" Or perhaps her lover was a were shark and she fed him...who knew? Perhaps all that stuff about John Wagner was because they were accomplices?

"University of Hawaii," she said. "Easiest thing, you know...I mean...it was my native state."

"You were born there?"

She laughed lightly. "Born and raised. I don't know when my first ancestors came to the isle. But since I'm a bit of a mix, I guess they all came at various times, over the course of history."

"Well..." he said, wondering if he too would get tagged with sexual harassment. "It's a very pleasant mix." There was something wrong here, something off to Lei's approaching him like this. What game was she playing? In these circumstances Rafiel often found it useful to give someone enough rope.

She seemed startled and blushed. "Thank you."

"Go and deal with your paperwork, or whatever you're going to do," Rafiel said. "I have to look at some things here on the grounds." The "some things" mostly applied to Old Joe. But he didn't want to tell her that. He doubted he could get much of rational value out of Old Joe. If anyone could do that, it would be Tom, and Tom was, alas, not around just now. But Rafiel was hoping to get...something. "I'll come and see if you're ready afterwards."

He was sure Lei was up to something too. It would be easier to play along till he found what it was. He could check on old Joe, then drop in on Lei, suddenly. Perhaps he would catch her kissing a shark or something. He repressed a chuckle at the idea.

First, he hoped Old Joe could give him some inkling of whether Dire was likely to be afraid of anyone. And second, some idea of whether Old Joe knew the crab shifter at the aquarium. For neither of those conversations did he wish to have the curvaceous Lei around, particularly since Old Joe was probably going to be in his shifted form.

He knew his colleagues on the force had locked and sealed the shark chamber the night before after it became obvious that they were in fact dealing with murder. She wouldn't have the key to that, surely. McKnight was supposed to come in with the employees later on and supervise them while they fed the sharks and the other fish, so that no fish in those rooms would starve. But he didn't see anything wrong with letting Lei go and do whatever paperwork she needed to do. At least not if he could drop in on her unannounced.

He watched her go towards the aquarium and only as he saw her go in, did it occur to him that she'd never told him she had a key. Did she have a key? Surely interns wouldn't. Or did someone come to open the restaurant or aquarium at a designated time? Well, he'd find out. If she couldn't get in, she couldn't do much.

Getting out of the car, he ambled down to the stream. But it was flowing now, the water gurgling amid the remaining ice floes. Rafiel thought he saw what might have been a pair of alligator eyes and the snout of an alligator peeking from beneath the water, but he couldn't really tell.

"Come on," he said, speaking to the still air and wondering if he'd gone nuts. Surely anyone who heard him would think he had. "Come on, now, Old Joe? I need to talk to you. Tom's safety might be at stake."

Was that swishing sound an alligator's tail churning the stream? Or was it just the normal gurgling of the water augmented by his hopes?

He waited. But no snout broke the water, no alligator came towards him. No, it would not be this simple, Rafiel thought. No one was about to hand him the solution. He'd have to figure it out himself.

* * *

Kyrie waited till there was a lull early in the afternoon, when the diner was almost empty. Tom busied himself with those things he did when his cooking expertise was not needed—scrubbing the cooking surfaces, marinating meat, bringing out frozen dough and setting bread to rise. The bread was one of the few things Tom didn't make himself, from scratch. The woman, Laura, who had applied here some days ago, had offered baking skills, which, of course, would be a great help. Kyrie hoped she would show up for an interview as soon as the weather permitted it. For one, with the addition of Conan and the seeming disappearance of the unreliable waitress Beth, she was now the only woman on staff. For another, she wasn't sure how much longer Keith would want to continue working for them.

He had only ever been a part-time employee, because of his studies, but since he'd discovered Summer had taken pictures of Tom and Conan, he hadn't been back at all. Kyrie didn't know if he was upset with them, or if it had just finally been borne upon him how difficult and dangerous their position was. Probably both. She would have left them and herself far behind, by now, if she could. At least...she couldn't leave Tom. Any more than she could walk away from herself. But she would have left their shifter condition far behind.

As she walked towards the annex, she found herself daydreaming of a life in which neither she nor Tom were shifters. How peaceful the days would be and how devoid of unusual events.

Of course, she knew in her heart of hearts that the daydream was great foolishness. Because, if Tom hadn't been a shifter, he'd be living somewhere in New York City. Or perhaps he would have been sent to those Ivy League colleges where the wildest behavior is excused if the family pays enough. At any rate, he would never have crossed paths with her.

And besides, things were the way they were, so she must do what she must do. She felt a twinge of fear at the idea of exactly what she must do. Tom would disapprove. In fact, Tom would be very, very upset. If he ever found out. She didn't want to keep secrets from him. But sometimes people had to be kept in the dark for their own good. And in this case, Tom had to be kept in the dark for the continued ability to call his soul his own.

She approached Conan as he finished wiping a table, and spoke in an undertone, her ears listening for any sounds of approaching footsteps, which might be Tom coming to check on them. "Conan, do you have a way to contact the representatives of the dragon triad, here in town?"

She'd obviously been so careful that Conan himself had not heard her approach. He dropped the tray he'd been holding, and bent to retrieve it, his gaze fixed on her, his eyes big as saucers.

Seeing him open his mouth, and very much fearing how much noise he might make, she put her finger in front of her lips. He nodded and it seemed to her he looked a little pale, but when he straightened up, he whispered back, "Well, you know that Himself can take over my mind and...and listen in, but..."

"I don't mean like that," she said. "I mean, do you have a phone number to call or something? I presume that I could still approach them outside the Three Luck Dragon?" she asked.

"Inside," he said. "The owner. Yes."

"Then would you call whatever number you need to call and tell them I come in peace, but I want to talk to their leader?"

Conan gave her a long and analyzing stare, before giving her a very curt nod. "When?"

"After Tom goes back to the bed-and-breakfast to sleep," she said, "which I figure will be around six, because that's when Anthony will come in again."

"Oh," Conan said and then, "you haven't slept at all yourself."

Kyrie shrugged. "No. I can go twenty-four hours without sleeping. It just makes me more susceptible to shifting, but..."

He nodded. "I assume you...have a plan? And that you want our—the dragons' help with it?"

"Yes. Well...I want their help. I don't have a plan yet, but I'm sure one will emerge. Only, I must find out if they can help me, and then I must do what I can...I mean...I'm sure we can't fight this fight alone. And Tom won't ask for help." She saw him nod. "And Tom must never know of this."

Conan shrugged. "He won't learn it from me," he said. "Of course, the other dragons have their own...approach to honesty and promises."

"Meaning you can't promise me anything?" Kyrie asked, with alarm but not really surprised. She'd already once met the Great Sky Dragon's idea of morality. She wasn't sure he cared even for shifters that weren't his own kind.

After Anthony had come in, and Tom had gone back to the bed-and-breakfast to sleep, she went outside and—with trembling fingers—dialed the number Conan had given her. A heavily accented woman's voice answered, "Three Luck Dragon! How may I help you?"

Momentarily mute, Kyrie wondered if there was a polite way to say, May I speak to the boss dragon? Instead, she cleared her throat and said, "May I speak to the proprietor?"

The woman rattled something off, very fast, that appeared to be some Cantonese dialect, and Kyrie said, "Conan Lung told me to call. He said that the owner of the restaurant would speak to me."

There was a long silence, followed by the sound of cutlery and a rattle of plates and a voice saying something in an Asian language. Kyrie took a deep breath. Her thumb moved towards the disconnect button on the phone.

"Hello," a male voice said. It was a resonant voice, with almost no trace of an accent.

Caught off guard, Kyrie cleared her throat, nervously and said "Am I speaking to the owner of Three Luck Dragon?"

"Speaking," the voice said.

"Oh. Oh. Good. I wanted to talk about...about the owner of the diner...The George."

For a terribly long moment, while the speaker on the other side was silent, she thought he was going to ask "Who?"

But instead, when he spoke, he said, "The young dragon? The one whom Himself..."

"Yes." Kyrie hastened, not wanting to know if the man was about to say "the one whom Himself almost killed" or "the one whom Himself is protecting." That she didn't know which one the man was about to say betrayed her ambivalence about this being and about the step she was taking.

Was she doing the right thing? Or was she about to betray Tom's trust in her for nothing?

"I assume," the man said from the other side, his voice even more impersonal, colder, as though he were a receptionist talking to a stranger about some abstract transaction. "I assume that you do not wish to speak of this over the phone?"

Kyrie did not wish. No matter that Anthony was busy at the grill. No matter that she could go outside and attempt to talk from there. What she had to say was bound to make more than a few clients or passersby get curious. And then there was the fact that Summer might have friends or relatives coming around to see her place of death. There was already a clutter of flowers around the base of the pole, and one pink teddy bear clutching a heart. Summer's friends were bound to be journalists. Considering the paper was obsessed with cryptozoology, how would they react to hearing Kyrie talk of dragons. "It would be better if I may speak in person," she said. She remembered the parking lot, and the Great Sky Dragon in it. And all the other dragons around. Had this man—dragon—been there too? There was a great deal she'd rather do than see one of these dragons again. All else aside, they were a criminal organization and one populated by shifters, who could destroy her and Tom several times over. But she didn't have any choice. She'd run out of all choices.

"Come to the restaurant," the man said. "I'll be here. Ask for Mr. Lung."

Mr. Lung? Was he related to Conan?

* * *

Rafiel opened the door to the aquarium. It had been unlocked. The smell of fish and bleach—combined—hit his nostrils as well as damp air that seemed hot compared to the frosty air outside. He stepped into the shadows, lengthened since all the lights in the aquarium were off. He almost called out to Lei, except he remembered the offices were far enough around the corner that he was sure she couldn't hear him. He walked past the sealed door to the shark room, up a short flight of service stairs, now the only way to get past the shark room, to where the light of the floor-to-ceiling windows made the room with the anemones and crabs much brighter than the one belowstairs. He walked past the aquariums, looking curiously at the spider crab one. He wished he could tell that one of the giant, long-legged crabs—some of them looking as weathered and beaten as though they'd escaped from the mother of all clarified butter dishes—was a shifter. They all had moss growing on them. He squinted, reasoning that a shifter crab would have less moss, wouldn't it? Surely the moss sloughed off when the crabs shifted to human then back? Surely...But all of them seemed to have an even covering of the green stuff, and Rafiel started wondering if John Wagner had hallucinated it all. Perhaps for his own amusement. The man seemed to have a very odd sense of humor.

Normally he could have cut through the shark room to the office area, but now he had to make it across the silent restaurant, and then down another set of stairs, to the back.

As he got to the bottom floor, he saw light shining out of the office and called out, "Ms. Lani?"

She stuck her head out of the office, for just a moment. "I'll be ready in just a moment, Officer Trall."

"Oh. All right," he said. Now what are you up to?

"You may come in." Her voice sounded vaguely amused.

He ambled out of the hallway and into the cramped offices he had visited and searched before. On the wall, on a pegboard were the keys he had stolen and gotten copied, as well as several other sets of keys, which he assumed were to either other areas of the aquarium—areas he'd found no need to explore—or to the utility parts of the aquarium. At least he assumed that electrical circuits and such would be locked behind panels and couldn't be accessed by just anyone.

Other than that, the office consisted of a very long, narrow room, which might have, in some previous incarnation, been a hallway. It had no windows, and only two rows of desks, six on each side against the walls. While Lei Lani rummaged through the desk nearest the door, Rafiel walked up and down the rows of desks, to the small fridge set against the narrow far wall, and the coffee maker on top of the fridge. The coffee maker had coffee in it, and, inside, some blue mold over a residue sludge that might very well be sentient in itself, or perhaps even a shifter.

Rafiel eyed it dubiously. He was well aware, no matter how much he pretended not to be, that Tom and Kyrie thought there was something wrong with him, since he still lived with his parents, and he was the first to admit that perhaps he had leaned on parental protection too long. Until he'd met Kyrie and Tom, he had never seen other shifters manage for themselves, without normal people to cover up for them. But whatever his staying with his parents might betray about his character, it did not betray a lingering, overlong adolescence. To the contrary. Rafiel kept his area of the house neat, and had even acquired the reputation of a neat freak at the police station. If this coffee machine, or anything like it, were in the station, he'd be taking it out, rinsing it, washing it, then giving all his subordinates a lecture on keeping foodstuffs around as they molded. With a rueful smile, he thought that McKnight and the others must think he was a pure bundle of joy.

To distract himself from the machine, he turned his attention to the desks, once more. Above them were corkboards, with the usual family pictures and the like, showing that most people who worked here were pretty ordinary. One of the corkboards was ornamented with groups of young men standing around drinking beer and an inordinate number of pictures of a simpering blond in different bikinis. Rafiel presumed it was a young man's desk and, in fact, looking at the various groups in the pictures on the wall, quickly narrowed down the user of the desk to a tall, disheveled blond who looked like a football player. He was the youth who appeared in every picture and Rafiel had a vague memory of seeing him among the other employees the police had cursorily interviewed. Judging from the attention given to beer and girls amid the man's favorite memories, it wasn't hard to imagine him bringing girlfriends to the shark area to impress them. But then, the pictures were all of the same girl, and she didn't look like she'd be that much into sharp-toothed creatures.

Next to that desk was another one, whose remarkably neat and empty corkboard showed only two pictures. One had a soulful-eyed, sad-looking basset. The other, which was clearly a bought postcard, showed a donkey about to cross a busy highway and said, in yellow letters across the top "dumb ass." Rafiel thought the desk might as well be labeled as John Wagner's, and resisted a momentary impulse to look through the drawers. He truly had no reason to suspect John Wagner of anything, no matter how much he had—and he undoubtedly had—upset Lei. At least, judging from her comments on him. But then, Rafiel thought, those two would rub the other one the wrong way, wouldn't they? Lei Lani with her careful image, her nice clothes and manners, and John Wagner who seemed to believe his job was to repeatedly poke the universe in the eye.

He moved on to the next desk, and perked up because it was so obviously a woman's. Or perhaps he was letting his assumptions show, but he truly could not imagine any man, no matter his sexual orientation, adorning a desk with a collection of pretty kitten mugs, and owning a notepad in pink ornamented with butterflies. Besides, the collection of smiling kids in various stages of tooth loss and toothiness on the corkboard seemed to clinch the matter. They were all the same kids, he guessed, at different stages of growth. Or at least, the entire horde were redheaded and blue-eyed and had disturbingly vacuous expressions. "I guess she has what? Eight children?" he asked, more to distract himself from the contemplation of such a thing than to talk.

"What?" Lei said, the rustling of papers momentarily stopped.

"I said your...colleague seems to have eight children?"

She looked across and smiled. "Suzanne isn't married," she said, and, as though realizing that really didn't mean much in context, added, "She doesn't have any children. Those are her nephews and nieces."

"Oh," Rafiel said, embarrassed. He stepped across the other way, to look at the desk next to Lei's, which had pictures of what appeared to be bodybuilders on the corkboard, a note saying "Call me" and the number, and a collection of pink notebooks on the desk. He had just resolutely decided he wasn't going to say anything, much less ask it, when he noticed that Lei was staring intently at him, and blushing slightly.

He raised his eyebrows at her. It wasn't as if he could ask her why she was staring at him, of course, but raising eyebrows was surely allowed. She sighed and colored deeper, and looked down at her hands, which were resting on a pile of papers, from which protruded a couple of plastic baggies.

"Look," she said, "I was...curious...you know...after what you told me about what you found on the outside of the...of the preservatives."

"Yes?"

"Well...I looked in Lillian's desk...and...well..." She reached over and slid open the drawer in the middle of the desk.

Rafiel looked down at a welter of pencils and pens, a forlorn nest of paper clips, a confusion of rubber bands. Lei seemed to lose patience with him. She reached down and picked up a tube of something and put it on top of the desk.

Rafiel looked closer. "Petroleum jelly?" he said.

"Well..." Lei said. "You know, it's used for...you know... sex..."

"Yes, I know," Rafiel said. And, he imagined, for a dozen other things. He had a vague idea that it was also used for some sorts of closures that must resist water, like, say, wetsuits, which he knew were used when divers went in to clean the tanks.

"But that's not what...what made me...I mean...why I think I should tell you," Lei said. "It's this." She showed him some grey adherences to the slightly greasy outside of the tube. "I thought...it might be sharkskin." And then, looking up at his face, she looked like she was trying very hard not to give a sigh of exasperation. "We use petroleum jelly around the...you know...around the aquariums, on seals and valves and such, and I thought, she might have got sharkskin on it. We collect the skin for samples and such, you know, and that she...you know...then used it for...for other things."

Rafiel shrugged. He took the tube and reached for the end of one of the baggies under Lei's pile of papers. It came out from under the papers, scattering grey flakes as it was pulled away. It was full of what looked like white and grey dandruff.

"Oh," Lei said. And then. "Not that." She pulled the baggie away and put it on her desk. "Those are some samples I meant to send to the lab, for sharkskin diseases. Of course, now I don't know if our sharks..." She shrugged and looked pained.

"I need a plastic baggie, if I'm going to send this to analysis," Rafiel said. "And I must put a label on it, then seal it. And you must be willing to say I didn't tamper with it." Though of course, that didn't mean Lei Lani hadn't tampered with it, Rafiel thought but didn't say. Her finding this in the desk seemed very odd, and oddly convenient.

She primly got him a plastic baggie from her own desk, where she had a pile of them folded together. "We use them for samples," she said, as she handed him one.

"Curiously," he said, "we do too." Sealing the bag, he wrote on it with a marker from the desk drawer, saying what he had found and where. This would never hold up in a court of law, of course. There were so many ways in which it might have been tampered with. But at this point Rafiel was not operating on the assumption the matter would ever come to a court of law. Instead, he thought, this would end up in the court of Rafiel and it was for himself that he must collect evidence. And he wondered how stupid Ms. Lani thought he was.

* * *

Kyrie parked in front of the restaurant and got out of her car, shivering at the sight of the facade, at its cheery sign saying three luck dragon above another sign that proclaimed for your health, we don't use msg in our cooking.

Kyrie pulled her coat tighter around herself. She had very bad memories of this parking lot. Without meaning to, she looked toward the sky, afraid of a flapping of large wings, the sudden appearance of the Great Sky Dragon in all his golden and green glory. But the skies were empty and a sound somewhere between throat-clearing and a cough made her turn to look.

In the slightly open door of the restaurant, stood a middle-aged Asian gentleman, with impeccably cut salt-and-pepper hair and a big white apron. She took a deep breath. Three steps brought her close to him, and she had a moment of surprise, at noticing that he was wearing a shirt and tie under his apron.

"Ms. Smith?" he said, extending his hand.

She hesitated only fractionally before she shook it. It felt slightly cool to the touch. Not abnormally so. It was the same way Tom's skin usually felt, as if he'd been holding a glass with a cold drink all the time. Maybe it was something about the metabolism of dragon shifters, though Kyrie would bet the dragons were not actually cold-blooded.

The man held the door open to her. "Please come in."

He led her past the counter, manned by a small lady who was watching TV and doing accounts at the same time, then past the dining room where only three people sat at tables, and into a door that led into busy, noisy kitchen. Before she had more than a moment to recoil from the sound of pans banged together, the clash of plates, the way people yelled at each other across the room, she felt Mr. Lung's cool hand on her elbow, and saw him pointing at yet another, narrower door.

She went through it to find herself in a very small room. There was only one table, long and narrow, covered in an immaculate white tablecloth. Three chairs, one on either of the longer sides of the table, and one at the end. At one corner of the table, the tablecloth had been pulled back, to reveal a cutting-board surface. That area was covered in cabbage and there was a cleaver amid it. On the other side sat a pile of papers that looked like account books, but which Kyrie could not presume to decipher, given they were written in Chinese ideograms.

Mr. Lung smiled and waved her to one of the chairs on the long side of the table, then sat himself on the facing one and took up the cleaver. "I hope you don't mind," he said, "if I work while we talk? I find it helps me concentrate. Also, we are a family operation. I don't cook, but I help with the preparation for the cooking. And then I take off the apron and serve at tables." Judging from his smile, one would think this was a pleasant social chat.

"You...know my name..." Kyrie said.

"Of course," he said, equably. "We met before. I mean, I've seen you. And I knew who you were. I was not...in my human form."

Kyrie thought of the assembly of dragons, of the Great Sky Dragon and of Tom—as she then thought—getting killed. She felt as if her throat would close.

Mr. Lung seemed to notice her discomfort. He set the cleaver down again, amid the chopped cabbage, gently, as if he were afraid the blade might scare her. "I know what it must have seemed like to you," he said. He joined his hands and rested them on the edge of the table, but kept his spotless shirt sleeves away from the cabbage. "But even then, I knew..." He shrugged. "He doesn't tell us much. He doesn't need to. He's like...the father of the family, and the father doesn't owe explanations to anyone, does he?" He smiled suddenly. "Well, now your attitudes here are different, but where I grew up the father could do as he pleased and didn't need to tell wife or children anything." For a moment it seemed to Kyrie as though he glanced across endless distances at a time she couldn't even imagine. "But we don't question him, and I haven't. I do have my suspicions, but I'm not so foolish as to share them, and besides, I might be quite wrong. But I can tell you he didn't mean to seriously punish the young dragon. If he had..." Mr. Lung shrugged.

He picked up the cleaver again, and resumed chopping cabbage. "If he had, you wouldn't be worried for the young dragon now, because he would be dead. Himself can be quite ruthless when he chooses. I don't think he has it in him to mind what other people feel or think." He shrugged again. "But he treated the young dragon very gently, particularly for someone who had just led him on a chase and defied him the way—what is his name? Mr. Ormson?—had."

Kyrie heard herself sniffle skeptically. "He had given people orders to kill him before."

Mr. Lung narrowed his eyes at her. "This is where I can't give you more detailed explanations, Ms. Smith. Partly, because they are only my conjectures. But I think...I think Himself found out something about Mr. Ormson when he met him in the flesh. And that's when he decided he could not kill him."

"Found out what?"

Mr. Lung shrugged. "I can't tell you that. All I can say is that the dragon triad looks after its own."

"But he's not...an Asian dragon."

"Sometimes the differences are smaller than you think," Mr. Lung said. "And not everything is as black and white as it appears. For now..." He chopped cabbage with a will. "Let's establish that it matters to Himself—in fact, it's important to him—that nothing should happen to the young dragon. So, anything I can do to help you with this..."

"He'll never join you, you know?" Kyrie felt forced to warn. "He just can't. He would...he will never give anyone that sort of authority over him."

Mr. Lung nodded. "I talked to his father," he said, as if he were admitting to a distasteful encounter. "I know all about Mr. Ormson's hatred of authority. All I can say is that he's very young."

Kyrie opened her mouth and almost said it wasn't the authority, it was the feeling of belonging absolutely to someone, and the fact that the triad was, after all, a criminal organization. But she realized in time that nothing could be gained from antagonizing the people she needed to help her, and almost smiled. It would be such a Tom thing to do, after all. Perhaps Tom was contagious. Instead, she closed her mouth. And when she opened it again, it was to say, "There's a dire wolf shifter in town."

"Ah, the executioner. We've...heard." The nimble fingers plied the cleaver impossibly fast, chopping exact, neat strips of cabbage. "We have...a pact with the Ancient Ones."

"I know. I don't know if Dante Dire intends to violate it," she said. And watched his eyebrows go up, as the cleaver stopped.

"What do you mean 'violate it'?" For just a moment, Mr. Lung's urbane mask seemed to slip. He set his mouth into what would have been a grin, except that it displayed far more of his small, sharp teeth than any natural grin could display. "He wouldn't dare."

Kyrie could swear she saw an extra pair of nictitating eyelids close, then open from the side, but she knew it couldn't be true. She looked away from him, hastily. "I don't know," she said. "I know the following: he's a sadist. He's not as much in control of himself as he thinks he is. He seems to have decided he likes me, or at least is not willing to hurt me, for now. And he's looking for a scapegoat for the deaths that brought him here."

"He should be more concerned," the dragon said, "with the other deaths. The ones that originally got you involved."

"Yes," Kyrie said. "But he doesn't seem concerned with searching out the true culprits or investigating anything. He wants to protect himself, and get out of here with his...reputation undiminished." Mentally she added to herself that at least she hoped he wanted to get out of there. The idea that he had a thing for her and that he might stick around to make himself agreeable to her was driving her insane. In the long list of suitors she'd rejected, Dante Dire was something she'd never met. Something she didn't need.

She started telling the dragon about her encounters with Dire and more, about what she sensed and feared from the creature. When she was done, Mr. Lung swept the cabbage into a mound, and looked at her over it. "So, you fear he might inadvertently kill the young dragon? While baiting him?" He looked skeptical. "We are not that frail, Ms. Smith. Nor that easy to kill."

"No," she said. "That is not what I fear at all. What I fear..." She shook her head. "You know Tom, such as he is." She smiled a little. "Hatred of authority and all, he insists on looking after those he thinks he's obliged to protect. To...to keep them from harm. As such, he's...well...he doesn't want me hurt. And he doesn't want Rafiel hurt, nor Keith, nor anyone in the diner. That girl reporter getting killed just outside the diner scared him. He thinks it's up to him to save us all. And I'm very afraid he's about to do something stupid."

Mr. Lung was quiet a long time. When he spoke, it was in measured tones. "I would say he will do something stupid. That sense that he must do something he's completely unprepared to do...I've seen it before. He will get hurt."

"Yes," Kyrie said, feeling a great wave of relief at being understood. "That's what I thought. He will get hurt."

"No," Mr. Lung said, with great decision, his face setting suddenly in sharp lines and angles. "No. Himself would not want him hurt. I will do what it takes. What is your plan?"

* * *

"Right," Rafiel said over the phone as he drove away from the doughnut shop where he had dropped off Lei Lani. "And I want you to check the backgrounds of the aquarium employees," and to McKnight's protests answered, "No, nothing special, okay? Just basically their resume. But check with the places where they're supposed to have studied and all."

"You...suspect one of them is an impostor?" McKnight asked.

"I don't know what I suspect," Rafiel said. "I just want to check it out."

"Oh," McKnight said. "Now?"

"Now would be good," Rafiel said, as sternly as he could. "Call me as soon as you have anything."

He hung up before McKnight could formulate an answer, and set a course towards the laboratory to drop off the petroleum jelly. He was fairly sure the petroleum jelly would have sharkskin in it. He was also fairly sure that the skin had come from the scrapings in that baggie Lei had on her desk. It had taken all of Rafiel's self-control—plus some—to avoid giving away how obvious all this was. Except that he could feel a theory assembling, like an itch at the back of his brain. If he had to bet, he would bet that Lei Lani was the shark shifter. And he would bet she took her dates to the aquarium and then...made a snack out of them.

The problem was, even if it proved that she hadn't gone to the University of Hawaii, even if it could be proven that she wasn't who she said she was...how could he be sure she was a shark shifter? And even if he were sure she was a shark shifter, how could he be sure that she was committing these heinous crimes? Or that she was committing them on purpose? Or that she knew what she was doing?

In a normal crime, you knew. And if you didn't know—if you weren't absolutely sure that the criminal knew right from wrong, or that he was in full possession of his faculties, you had the courts. Rafiel's job was supposed to be to provide a case to the courts. Not constituting himself judge, jury and executioner. That would make him no better than Dire.

No...he needed to go and talk to someone. He looked at the clock on the dashboard. Middle of the day. Normally both Kyrie and Tom would be at home and awake. He wasn't sure how the strange schedule was affecting things. He also knew they wouldn't be home. Rafiel had left their key with his father, who said his uncle would have the bathroom repaired in the next two or three days. But for now, Kyrie and Tom would be at the bed-and-breakfast. Or at least one of them would be. Almost for sure.

Rafiel parked in the back of The George. A quick look inside revealed Anthony at the grill, which meant Tom at least was off. The tables seemed to be attended to by Conan and Keith. That meant...maybe both Tom and Kyrie were off.

Turning away from The George, Rafiel crossed the parking lot, went up the broad stone steps flanked by sickly-looking stone lions—or perhaps dogs—and up to the front door of the bed-and-breakfast. The sign on the door said do come in, and Rafiel did. In response to a light tinkle from the bell affixed to the back of the front door, the kindly-looking, middle-aged proprietress came from the back of the house, wearing a frilly apron and smelling vaguely of vanilla.

"Hi," Rafiel said. "I'm here to see my friends, Mr. Ormson and Ms. Smith?" And don't I sound like I have a truly interesting social life, the way I keep visiting Tom and Kyrie in their room. He felt himself blush but smiled at the woman.

"Oh, sure. Just a moment," she said, heading to the antique mahogany desk in the middle of the room. "I'll just give them a ring to make sure they are decent and want to see you." Her smile somehow managed to soften the implication that he was an interloper or trying to disturb their privacy under false pretenses. She pressed some buttons, put the phone to her ear. "Mind you, I think only Mr. Ormson is in. Ms. Smith—" She stopped abruptly and her voice changed to the mad cheerfulness that people reserve for barely awakened males and slightly dangerous dogs, "Oh, hi, Mr. Ormson! Your friend, Mr.—" a pleading look at Rafiel.

"Trall."

"Mr. Trall is here. He would like to see you. Is it okay if I send him up?"

A series of rasps answered her and she said, "All righty, then. I'll send him up." And then, in her normal voice, to Rafiel. "He says to go on up. You know where the room is, I presume?"

"Oh, yes. I've been there before," Rafiel said. Not that it would surprise anyone at the station to hear this. They would think that, at one stroke—so to put it—both my aloofness to my dates and my odd changes of clothes midday are explained. The idea amused him, but it still made him blush, which he was fairly sure made him look very guilty.

He more or less ran up the stairs, all the way to the top floor, where he knocked lightly on Tom's door. There was the sound of steps approaching the door, and then a disheveled, unshaven Tom, in his underwear—and had Kyrie bought him jockey shorts with little dragons on them? Either that or Tom's sense of humor was worse than Rafiel had anticipated—holding a flailing kitten in one hand, opened the door.

"Hi," Rafiel said, walking in. "Sorry to disturb you. I can see I woke you."

" 'Sokay," Tom mumbled, followed by something that might have been "Never mind." He closed the door and set the orange furball gently on the floor. " 'Scuse me a moment?"

Rafiel nodded and Tom ducked into the bathroom and closed the door. Rafiel heard flushing and the shower running, then splashing of water. In what seemed like less than three minutes—spent mostly in pulling Not Dinner off Rafiel's pants, which he seemed to believe were the climbing part of a jungle gym—Tom opened the door again and emerged, wrapped in a white robe, with his hair in a towel.

"Nice turban," Rafiel said.

Tom glowered in response. He had shaving things out on the marble-topped vanity. A spray-on shaving cream can, and one of those razors that seemed to come with an ever-increasing number of blades. Even so, it all looked very Tom-like and unnecessarily difficult to Rafiel who, knowing Tom, was only surprised he didn't shave with a straight razor and use a brush to apply lather to his face. "I use an electric razor," he blurted out.

Tom, in the process of swathing his face in shaving cream, so that he looked like a turbaned Santa Claus, gave Rafiel a questioning look, then shrugged. "You're light-haired," he said, speaking in a weirdly stilted manner, almost not moving his lips—probably to avoid getting shaving cream in his mouth. He rinsed his hands. "To get my beard properly shaved, I need to grind the electric razor into my skin, and then I end up with burns. Besides," he shrugged, "when I started shaving, I was homeless. They have hand razors in those little kits shelters give away as charity. Electric razors not so much."

The idea that Tom had been homeless for years seemed insane, Rafiel thought, as Tom shaved a strip of cream off his face, rinsed the razor and looked at him. He had unearthly blue eyes, very intense in color. They looked like nothing so much as the blue on the type of pioneer enamelware often sold at touristy shops. It was disturbing to find himself under scrutiny by those sharp, bright eyes.

"Talk," Tom said.

"Hey, I'm supposed to say that," Rafiel said. "I'm the policeman."

He sat down on the one loveseat from which he had an unimpeded view of the bathroom. Tom, who had shaved another strip of cream and beard, shrugged. "If you didn't have something to talk about you wouldn't be here waking me."

"Well," Rafiel said. "I do need to talk to someone and you and Kyrie"—he shrugged—"are practically the only friends I have. At least the only friends I have that I'm not related to. And that I can...you know...be frank with."

"Right."

"But it's not like I know anything. It's more like I need to figure things out." Not Dinner, having ascended the heights of Rafiel's lap, was climbing under Rafiel's shirt. "What's he—?"

"Notty does that," Tom said, in a resigned tone. "Crawl under your clothes, I mean. He's a baby. Cold."

"I suppose," Rafiel said, though frankly, if he was going to have a feline getting in his clothes, he'd much rather—by far—it were Kyrie. "All right. Well, these are my suspicions." He proceeded to lay out the case against Lei Lani, such as he could make it out. Her half-truths, her exaggerations. As he was talking, the phone rang.

"Boss?" McKnight's voice.

"Yes?"

"That woman, Lei Lani?"

"Yes?"

"She doesn't seem to have graduated from the University of Hawaii. The aquarium there never heard of her, either."

"I see," Rafiel said. "Do a full records search, would you?" he said and hung up before McKnight could protest. He related the knowledge to Tom, who raised his eyebrows.

"But the fact she didn't attend the University of Hawaii," Tom said, as the blade went swish-swish across his face, rinse-rinse under the faucet, and then swish against his face again, "doesn't mean that she is a shark shifter."

"No," Rafiel said. "And that's what's making me uncomfortable. Look...I wish I could smell her out, but I can't. John Wagner says that aquatic shifters have pheromones you can only detect in water, which makes sense, of course, except that it makes it really hard to figure out who they are."

"Yeah," Tom said, rinsing the razor and setting it aside and then rinsing his face and drying it. He removed the towel from his hair, and started brushing the hair out vigorously. "The thing is—"

"The thing is that she might just have been taking boyfriends there, and when her boyfriends were found dead in the aquarium, she panicked and decided to put the guilt on someone else. It's entirely possible," he said, "that someone else is a shifter—shark or otherwise, and responsible for getting the victims in the tank once Ms. Lani is done with them. For all I know, the Japanese spider crab shifter—if there really is one—shoves people in the tank because he disapproves of fornication in the aquarium."

"Wouldn't the Japanese spider crab have done that before?" Tom said. "I mean, from what you said, he's been at the aquarium for years, right?"

"But we don't know that Ms. Lani or someone like her has been having fun at the aquarium for that long," Rafiel said. "This could be a response to something perceived as a new wave of immorality."

"I guess," Tom said nodding. "Which, of course, leaves us up a creek without a paddle, because we can't prove that Lei Lani is a shifter. And even if we could, how could we prove that she's the one getting them in the shark tank?" He crossed the room to where his tote bag was open on the floor, and retrieved underwear, jeans and a red T-shirt, then retreated with them all to the bathroom, closing the door till the barest crack remained open to allow the sound through. "I mean, the victims are dead. They can't exactly tell us what went on."

"The problem," Rafiel said, as Notty climbed the rest of the way inside his shirt and installed himself on his shoulder, under his shirt, his little orange fuzzy head protruding from Rafiel's collar and making a sound reminiscent of a badly tuned diesel engine, "is that if shifters weren't a secret, and I could tell my medical examiner what to look for, I'm sure they could find traces of whatever happened, maybe enough to tell us if we're looking for a crab shifter, a shark shifter or none of the above."

"Unless your medical examiner is a shifter himself," Tom said, emerging from the bathroom, and tying his hair back. "I wouldn't recommend it. If you're lucky, he'll recommend a psychiatric evaluation. If you're not, he might believe you"

Rafiel sighed. "I know. But we still have to figure out something."

"Yes," Tom said. "Yes, we do." He turned around to face Rafiel and smiled a little. "Nice second head, by the way."

Rafiel petted Notty's head protruding from his shirt. "Yeah, I think it will make me a veritable chick magnet."

"Not advisable. Notty would eat the chicks."

"Probably. But you know two heads..."

"Think better than one. Yes. Which reminds me...Could you...I mean, you have the keys to the aquarium, right? I mean, that's how you took Kyrie there before?"

Rafiel nodded.

"Well, then I think I might have an idea. We'll need to go by my house but I think there's something we can do"

* * *

Kyrie's head was whirling. Mr. Lung had believed her, when she said that Tom would not kill himself, provided it wasn't his independence that had been compromised. And he'd told her to let Conan Lung—whom he assured her was no relation, except in the way that all dragon shifters were supposed to be descended from the very first dragon—in on whatever the plan was. He promised that so long as Conan was with them, or where he could see them if they got in trouble, help would be instantaneous. So now, the question was—how to trap Dire?

And did she want to entrap him? Did she truly want to kill him? Despite everything that she'd told the owner of the Three Luck Dragon, she felt squeamish at the thought. After all, he hadn't tried to kill her. If that was what he wanted to do, he would have done it long ago. He'd pursued her, and tried to scare her and hurt her, but he had not actually sought to kill her.

Should she kill someone who wasn't trying to kill her? To say that he was a sadist—which, of course, he was—and was trying to terrorize her and hurt her just didn't seem enough reason to kill him. As she drove into the parking lot of The George and noted Rafiel's car parked where he normally parked when he was visiting, she sighed. It stretched the definition of self-defense to kill someone merely because they were psychopaths.

Oh, she was quite sure that Dire had killed plenty of people in his time. Well...she was almost sure he had killed Summer, the journalist. But horrible as that crime was, it was almost sure that he had done it to protect them. To keep them secret. Yes, of course it could be argued that by keeping their secret, he kept his own. But he could just as easily have killed them, and he hadn't. She opened the door of the car and got out onto the cool parking lot almost deserted in the after-lunch lull.

"Hello, Kitten Girl," a familiar voice said.

She spun around to see Dante Dire—in human aspect, wearing a well-tailored black suit, standing just steps from her. Her stomach knotted. Her heart sped up. She tasted bile at the back of her throat. He could read thoughts. Had he been reading her thoughts the last few minutes?

If so, he seemed in a strangely good mood. "I want you to know I've solved all our problems," he said, grinning at her. "I want you to know you don't have to worry anymore."

Our problems? What can he mean?

He laughed at what was, doubtlessly, her very confused expression. "Ah, I see you don't know. Well...it's like this. You know I came here to decide on who had killed a great deal of young ones, right? I was to do preliminary investigations, and then tell the council what I had found and wait for their decision. They'd probably send three or four more to verify my conclusions, and you know..." He put his hand in his pocket and made a sound of jingling, probably with change. "The truth is if they probed the problem, they would find that it was of course you and your friends...If it were just your friends, I wouldn't mind denouncing them. I don't know why the daddy dragon has an interest in Dragon Boy, but I'm sure—Dragon Boy not being one of his own nestlings, see?—that if push came to shove, he would let Dragon Boy go. And I could fulfill my mission and go back to my normal life."

As he spoke he approached her, and somehow his voice became lower and more seductive. "And let me tell you, my normal life is the sort of life anyone would dream of. I have my own private plane. I have bank accounts in every country. I've lived long enough to allow me to accumulate more money than I know what to do with. When I arrive somewhere, even if I arrive naked," he flashed her a smile, "I can always be properly attired and in a brand-new car within an hour."

He came very close, until his face was almost touching hers, and his voice descended till it was just a purr. "You can share that life with me, Kitten Girl. I can show you the world and everything beyond. Come on. You were made for better things than this dinky little diner."

Kyrie knew that he was doing something to her mind, even as he spoke, in that low seductive voice. She could feel her mind not so much changing as being changed for her. All of a sudden, as if she were looking through Dante Dire's eyes, the diner did look small and dinky—almost decayed, in fact, though they'd remodeled it extensively when they'd taken over three months ago.

Why do I want to do this? Is this really what I want to do with my life, serve hash and soup to students and people who are making barely more than minimum wage? Is this really how I want to spend every day? All of a sudden the place where she had at last felt she belonged seemed tacky—a squat of concrete, a glare of neon. And Tom, who was like the other half of her heart, seemed like a boring young man with curiously foreshortened ambition. All he wanted to do was take cooking classes and spend his life incrementally improving food and service at The George until it was the best diner in Colorado. In his free time, he did accounts or researched recipes. The most exciting thing they'd done in the last three months was take a weekend off and go to Denver to visit the Titanic exhibit at the Natural History Museum. Truth be told, Tom was a very boring man. And her life with him would be a very boring life.

In her mind's eye the years with Tom stretched endlessly, never too flush with money and forever living on the outside of all fashionable or even exotic entertainment. Nothing would ever happen, nothing ever break the routine.

"That's it," Dire said, softly, his face so close she could feel his warm breath on her skin. "That's exactly it. He'll kill you with boredom, Kitten Girl. He'll be the death of you.

"Or...you could come with me," he said. Through her mind there flashed, in succession, images of her in various designer clothes, images of her on a Mediterranean beach. Images of her eating in fine restaurants and taking airplanes. By Dire's side. And in her mind, for whatever reason, she was madly in love with Dire.

Kyrie didn't love Dire. In fact, she couldn't imagine being in love with any psychopath. She shook her head. "You're in my mind," she said, speaking through her clenched teeth, against the waves of love and attraction washing through her brain. "And you weren't invited."

He chuckled softly, in amusement. She raised her knee and hit him between the legs. Hard. The images vanished from her head. Before he could recover, before he could shift, before he could climb into her mind again, she ran, like mad, into the diner. She knew it wouldn't afford her much protection—or at least she thought it wouldn't—but she didn't care. She wanted away from that cold, dark mind.

She ran into the diner through the back door, and ran down the hallway into the diner itself. Anthony, who was peeling potatoes, turned around to give her a very puzzled look.

"I'm sorry," Kyrie said, ducking behind the counter. "I thought you'd need me. That I was away too long."

"No, you're fine. As you see, we don't have that many tables occupied."

"Yeah, I see," Kyrie said, as she put the apron on.

"Oh, Keith came in," Anthony said. "He says he can use the cash."

"Oh good," Kyrie said.

Anthony chopped the potatoes into sticks. "Well, with him here, rush hour wasn't really a problem. And Conan is getting better, despite that arm."

"Yeah. He's fairly smart," Kyrie said. Anthony said something about Conan singing really well, too, but Kyrie wasn't thinking of that. She was thinking of Dire, out in the parking lot. She didn't want to kill him. Not if she could help it. But she wasn't sure she could.

* * *

In Rafiel's car, Tom called Kyrie on the cell phone. Or rather he called The George, but it was she who answered, as he expected.

"Hi, Kyrie," he said.

She seemed faintly surprised and oddly suspicious. "Who is this?"

Had he slept such irregular hours that he still had sleep-voice? He didn't think so, but he cleared his throat all the same and said, "Me," with, he realized afterwards, the kind of confidence only a boyfriend would have in being recognized from such a syllable.

It seemed to work. Or at least she said, "Oh. I didn't expect you to be awake." She took a deep breath. "You know, he has impersonated Rafiel before..."

Tom took a look at Rafiel who was driving while tapping his fingers on the steering wheel in rhythm with some very strange song about never growing old. "Yeah. But only over the phone."

"We are talking over the phone!" Kyrie said, as if he'd taken leave of his senses.

"Oh...you mean..." Tom took a deep breath. "Well, I'm not going to ask you to go anywhere or anything, just wanted to know if Anthony is okay staying till six or so? Because it will be till then before I come back."

"All right," Kyrie said. "A long shift but...he's been pulling those."

It seemed very strange to Tom that she didn't ask him why or where he was going, or even what he was intending to do. It wasn't that Kyrie was overly inquisitive or determined to have him live in her pocket. It wasn't even that she demanded to know where he was at all times. But when he called to tell her he was going to be late for something, she asked why. Normal human curiosity. He thought of what Kyrie had said about Dire. "He has impersonated Rafiel before." But surely Dire wouldn't say that about himself if he was impersonating Kyrie. Besides, Tom remembered the description Kyrie had given of how Rafiel sounded over the phone—all breath, no voice...Kyrie didn't sound that way. And, on yet the other paw, Kyrie sounded exactly like she did when she was harassed and shorthanded.

"I'm sorry if I am putting you in a bind," he said. He'd discovered nine-tenths of a good relationship was preemptive apologizing even if you didn't know—sometimes he would say particularly if you didn't know—what you had done wrong. He'd found that his social skills, blunted by looking out only for himself for much too long, sometimes missed fine points of the effects his actions might have on Kyrie.

"You're not," Kyrie said. "I'll manage. Anthony was planning on staying at least that long, and Keith has come in. We're okay."

"Oh. I'm just...I'm with Rafiel. I'm helping him run an errand."

"All right. Call if you're going to be later than six. Or I'll worry."

"Right," Tom said, and hung up.

Rafiel, pulling into the parking lot of the aquarium, gave Tom a quizzical glance. Perhaps it was just Tom's expression—there was more amusement than there should have been. "She upset about you staying out late?"

Tom did his best to glare at Rafiel. He was fairly sure this was wasted effort. All his efforts to glare at the policeman before—glare him into silence; glare him into being sensible—had met with chuckles. This time was no exception. Tom shook his head. "If you're going to tell me 'better me than you,' even I am not stupid enough to buy that."

"Uh...no, dude. I'd rather it were me, but I didn't know she kept the shackles quite that tight."

"She doesn't." Tom frowned. He tried to think of how to explain what had disturbed him about the call. While he thought, Rafiel drove around the aquarium to the back, the overflow parking lot. They were all empty, but Tom imagined that the front parking lot, visible from Ocean and Congregation, was not the best choice for stealthy work. And they must be stealthy. Or at least not stupidly obvious. "It's..." He tried to figure out how to explain it. "It's more that she didn't seem her normal self."

"Oh?" Rafiel said, and for once there was no smirk behind his expression. "Do you think something is wrong?"

"It's quite possible," Tom said. "But she's at the diner, so..."

"So she's either safe, or there's nothing you can do to make her so."

"Yeah," Tom said. He didn't like it, but it was the truth. "If it's something that can happen in front of a whole bunch of people, my being there won't stop it."

They got out of the car and Rafiel led them to a side door, where, after trying a variety of keys, he found one that clicked the door open. Rafiel was carrying the cardboard box they'd gotten from Tom and Kyrie's house. It contained a surveillance system that Tom had been meaning to install around the diner.

"I must need to get my head examined," Rafiel said, as they stepped into the warmer, dark interior of the aquarium. "This is so many levels of illegal."

"Stealthy," Tom said. "Many levels of stealthy. We must make it stealthy. I mean...we can't solve this in the open. I mean, if you wanted to, what could you tell your assistant, what's his name? McQueen?"

"McKnight." Rafiel said with an odd sort of groan.

"What are you going to tell McKnight? That you smelled something funny while you were a lion? They'd have you committed. So...we have to do things...in creative ways."

"Right," Rafiel said. He gave the impression of speaking through clenched teeth. "Creative. Right."

Rafiel took them past banks of gurgling aquariums filled with fish. "Who feeds the fishies?" Tom asked. "Or do they eat each other or something?" He squinted at the label on the nearest tank, which said piranhas. The sound track of some nature program he must have watched, and forgotten, in childhood, ran through his head. Something about piranhas skeletonizing a cow in a matter of minutes. Tom had never been able to understand what a cow would be doing in the water, and he very much hoped that no one at the aquarium dropped a mooing heifer into the tank.

Rafiel waved a hand dismissively. "People can come in and feed them," he said. "That's not an issue. We only sealed the room with the sharks, but I understand it's open and McKnight comes in, when needed for personnel to clean the tank and feed the sharks, then he seals the room again." He looked over his shoulder. "At least that's the plan. I don't think it's happened yet."

He stopped outside a sealed door, and took out something very much like an exacto knife, with which he pulled—deftly—the police seal off the door and the handle. "I'm going to hell," he said under his breath.

"Well," Tom said. "If you're a believer, you know, it's a good question whether our kind has normal souls or if—"

"Tom, that isn't helpful."

"Well, I'm not a believer, myself, but it's a fascinating idea. Are we judged by the divinity of humans, or by some...you know, animal god?"

Rafiel pulled the door open. "Not right now it isn't a fascinating idea. I'm facing the problem of living with my guilt about breaking police regulations. I don't even want to think of anything else."

They were in the big dim room that Tom had heard described several times, but never seen till now. Walls and ceilings had been sculpted to look like the inside of a cave, stalactites and stalagmites delineating paths. Though, Tom thought, it was expecting rather too much of suspension of disbelief to think that the stalagmites had formed benches by natural processes. And the speckled-cement stairs with their metal railings, leading up to an observation platform—probably nine by nine feet wide—also with metal railings and planters with curiously plastic-looking flowers, just about killed that natural structure feel.

Rafiel went up to the platform and looked around nervously. He looked as if he expected doom to fall at any moment. Like...he thought his superiors would be psychically warned or something. And Tom, who'd been a juvenile delinquent and delighted in breaking rules long before he'd known he was a shifter, could only smile at him.

"It's not funny," Rafiel said. "I could be fired if anyone finds out about this." He clutched the grey box of surveillance equipment against his chest, as though it were a shield of righteousness. "Good lord, I could be arrested."

Tom didn't realize he was about to cackle till the sound bubbled out of his lips despite his best efforts. "Sorry, sorry," he said, to Rafiel's glare. "It's just I was thinking...we could be killed. We could be discovered as shifters—and ultimately killed—and you're worrying about being arrested. I mean...if they came for you, what's to stop you taking off in lion form?"

"What? Other than losing my identity, my family, everything I've worked for?"

Tom sobered up. He too could leave. At any moment, he could just go. It was easy. Take to the wing, and forget Kyrie and The George, and Keith and Rafiel and Anthony and Notty. No. What good was it to save yourself by losing everything that was important to you?

"Exactly," Rafiel said, softly, having read Tom's expressions without need for words. He shrugged. "But your point is taken too. In the maze of dangers we face, risking being arrested is not so very bad. And then I doubt we will be arrested, or even found out. At least with a bit of luck." He looked above himself, then around at the walls of the fake cave. "But we forgot something, Tom. Neither of us is an electrician. How are we going to put these up?" He waved the package containing two cameras and a mess of electrical stuff.

Tom grinned. "Well...you know..."

"Oh, don't tell me you used to wire cameras in people's houses while you were homeless. There are things I don't want to know."

This time Tom's gurgle of laughter poured out, without his ability to control it. "No. But when we had The George remodeled, the electrician didn't have an assistant. Nice man, but...you know, semi-retired. Did it cheap. One of Anthony's acquaintances."

"And?"

"Well, he needed help. Holding this, twisting that. Third hand kind of stuff. And I didn't have anything better to do. I was recovering from...near death. And he liked to talk...Seventies, you know, and no one wants to listen to him most of the time."

"So he taught you electrical stuff?"

"A bit. Jackleg stuff," Tom said. He brought out the little set of tools he'd slipped into the pocket of his jacket earlier, and grinned as Rafiel looked surprised. Just now and then he liked to upstage Mr. Unflappable Trall and be better prepared. He looked up and pointed to a light. "I think we'll tap that light," he said. "It's close enough to the stalactite and the plastic plants, that we can sort of run the wire behind and no one will know."

Rafiel looked at the light in turn. "Any idea how you'll reach it?"

"Oh, sure," Tom said. "I stand on the railing."

"Uh...I see. And if you fall?"

"I won't," Tom said.

"Really?"

"No. Because you're going to hold my ankles."

* * *

Rafiel looked up at Tom, who'd propped himself up, with a foot on either of the intersecting metal railings. He looked doubtfully down at the railings, which he wasn't even sure should be able to support that weight, then up again at Tom, who was fiddling with the light cover, and doing something underneath. After a while, Tom trailed a wire down, and pulled it, so it followed, kind of behind one of the cement stalactites that dropped down from the ceiling and around the edge of the railing.

"How much wire do you have?" Rafiel said.

"Enough," Tom said. "Right. I'm going to jump down now."

"Not while I'm holding you," Rafiel said, and stepped back.

Tom's feet wobbled on the railing, he started tilting forward. Rafiel reached up. Grabbed his wrist. Pulled. Something at the back of his mind said it was better for them to fall on the platform than on the tank. They toppled to the floor. Rafiel hit his elbow and his head, and gathered himself up. "Are you all right?" he asked Tom who had fallen in a heap, and was pale and shivering.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah. Only..." He shook his head and scrambled to his knees and, on his knees, across the platform, to the planter, the box was tilted up against. Fishing in the box, he brought out the camera, which was about the diameter of a dime, and about as thick. He stuck it to one of the planters, well hidden in the foliage, the wire behind it. Then, as he seemed to make sure that the camera lens was unobstructed, he said, "When I was little, we had goldfish. At least, I wanted a pet, but you know, we lived in a condo. No place for pets, really, so my dad got me a bowl with goldfish. He also started calling them Schroedinger fish, because—well, I wasn't very interested and it wasn't in my room—it was in this passage between my room and the walk-in closet, and I didn't always remember to feed them. So Dad said every time we checked on them, it was not sure if they were alive or dead till we actually saw them. I remember this one time I forgot to feed them for like"—he narrowed his eyes with thought—"five days? When I came back to feed them, they all congregated in one spot, you know, clearly waiting for food.

"The sharks looked like that," he said and, for the first time, looked up to meet Rafiel's gaze. "Just like that. As if they were pet fish, used to being fed by people, you know?"

Rafiel sighed. "I'd say they are. I just wish we knew by whom."

"Well..." Tom said, and gestured towards the camera. "That will tell us, right?"

"Yeah," Rafiel said. "If they come in, of course. I mean, what with...you know..." He shrugged. "The room is sealed. Or will be again, once we leave. If it's a casual thing, if she just brings her boyfriends in, and someone...like the crab shifter, doesn't like it..."

"But if it's not," Tom said, "then we'll get it. The camera is motion-activated and it connects to my laptop, which is at the bed-and-breakfast. It will sound an alarm..." He gave an impish smile. "At least as soon as I install the program."

"Right," Rafiel said, but the idea didn't please him. There had to be another way around it, some other way to make things work. He didn't like the idea of just sitting down and waiting for some poor sap to be thrown in the shark tank. Not the least of which, because the poor sap would then be doomed. "So, why did you think you needed a surveillance system for The George?"

Tom stood up and dusted off the knees of his pants, as if this would fix the dust all over his clothes from having fallen headlong onto the observation platform. "I thought, you know, with the stuff that was happening at the back before...murder and all..." He shrugged. "I thought if a bunch of shifters were coming to the place, called by pheromones, we'd do as well to have early warning and proof if any of them had...control issues."

Rafiel, raising his eyebrows, reasoned that his friend trusted other shifters about as much as he did. They climbed down the stairs. Rafiel opened the door to the shark room, waited till Tom went by, then sealed the door again, initialing it once more, and putting in the date and time on the destroyed seal. "I'm going to hell." This time Tom didn't seem disposed to argue.

They walked quietly side by side along the deserted hallways, past the concrete trunk filled with plaster coins and Rafiel wondered if even very small children were fooled by it. He didn't remember ever being small enough to fall for that kind of fakery.

And then he wondered what they were going to do with the camera. While it had seemed like a good idea to set the camera in place, he now wondered how sane it was. Tom had been all enthusiastic about it, but it was probably just his happiness at getting to wire something. "Hey," he said, softly. "The other camera? Where do you intend to put it?"

Tom looked surprised. "Nowhere, really, I don't—"

He shut up abruptly, and Rafiel realized he had heard a sound, just before Tom stopped talking. Something like a soft footstep to their right. They were at the top of the stairs that led down to the aquarium with crabs and to the restaurant. For a second, he thought that it would be the crab shifter, emerging from his aquarium. Perhaps they could interrogate him.

But the person who came walking out of the shadows was Dante Dire—lank hair falling over his dark eyes, and his dark eyes sparkling with fury. "What are you doing here?" he asked.

Rafiel drew himself up and tried to hide the quiver of fear that ran through him on seeing the creature. Because he was not a fool, he remembered—all too well—that this creature could reach into his mind and change his thoughts; the idea paralyzed him. He could have endured any form or amount of physical torture, but the idea that someone—something—could change what he thought and how he felt...that he could not stand. "It would be better to ask what you are doing here," he said, keeping his voice steady. He was aware of Tom's having done something—he didn't know what. But Tom had been behind him as they walked, still in the shadows, Rafiel presumed, and now when Tom stepped forward there was nothing in his hands. He'd put the camera box down somewhere. And immediately Rafiel made himself stop thinking about the camera, and think only that they were there to gather evidence against the murderer who'd been throwing people into the shark tank. He put that thought in front, as it were, and hid all the rest—even his fear—behind it.

Dire's face hardened. "You have no business," he said, "trying to entrap innocent shifters."

"Innocent," Tom said, calling attention away from Rafiel—and presumably his thoughts. Rafiel felt as though something had been pressing against his thoughts, and the pressure now lifted, leaving him free to think clearly for a change. "Why do you think we're trying to entrap any shifters, innocent or otherwise?"

Dante Dire straightened up and stared, right over Rafiel's shoulder, at Tom. "Ah! You think I'm stupid and don't read the paper? I do. And the paper says there have been murders in this place. And then, and then, I see you here, skulking, looking for clues. His mind," he pointed at Rafiel, "makes it clear enough he's looking for clues against someone he thinks is a shifter." He crossed his arms on his chest. "It's you or me, pretty Kitten Boy. We're going to have this out now. The way I told it to the girl, I need to kill someone who can plausibly be accused of having killed the young shifters. You will do as well as any."

Rafiel felt as though his heart had skipped in his chest. He felt fear surging through his veins, demanding loudly that he shift. "I have to investigate," he said. "I have to. It's my job."

"Bah. A job paid for ephemerals. A job in which you obey ephemerals. A job"—he spat out the word as if it were poison—"where you demean your nature for money. Money is easy, Kitten Boy, when you live almost forever. As you'd already have figured out, if you were made of stronger stuff. But you're not, and now you'll die for it." He glared at Rafiel. "Are you going to shift, or do I kill you as you are?"

And not all the forces in the hell he claimed awaited him could have kept Rafiel from shifting.

* * *

Tom felt as if he'd frozen in place. He'd thrown the box with the remaining camera behind some plastic bushes at the edge. He hoped he'd managed it before Dire saw it. He must have managed it, because Dire hadn't said anything about the box, just challenged their right to be there and announced that he was planning to kill Rafiel.

Stunned at the idea, Tom started to speak, but nothing came out of his mouth. It seemed to him that this was a duel. At least Dire had challenged Rafiel to a duel, challenged him to shift. If the intent were only to kill Rafiel, why not kill him as a human, without bothering with the lion form?

Except, of course, that Dire was a sadist. And the lion would, of course, provide him with a better fight, he thought, as lion and dire wolf stood facing each other, in this incongruous setting—tanks bubbled on either side, fish swam looking incuriously onto the scene. And Tom retreated until his back was against the concrete wall, while his brain worked feverishly.

His first thought—that Dire was doing this to gratify his sadistic impulses—was confirmed when, instead of going for the jugular, the huge prehistoric beast jumped at Rafiel and grabbed him by the scruff, much as a mother cat grabbing a baby. Only, it then lifted him off the ground and shook him, and threw him, sending him sprawling against one of the tanks.

For a moment, Tom, heart thumping at his throat, thought that Rafiel was already dead—that the dire wolf had broken his neck with that shake and toss. He heard something like a hiss come out of his mouth, and he realized what was about to happen. As he pulled off his shirt and dropped his pants—barely ahead of the process already twisting his limbs and covering his skin in green scales—he thought that he didn't want to fight the dire wolf. As ill-matched as Rafiel was against Dire, Tom was no better. He remembered the fight in the parking lot. He remembered that the dire wolf had almost killed him then. Why should now be any different?

But Rafiel was the closest thing he had to a best friend. If Tom stood by and watched the dire wolf finish Rafiel off in order to blame him for the deaths of hundreds of newborn shifters, just a few months ago, Tom would never be able to live with himself. Nor—he thought, ruefully, as his body contorted, in painful acrobatics, bending and twisting in a way it wasn't meant to, and as wings extruded from his back—would Kyrie want to live with him.

Dire was concentrating on Rafiel and hadn't seemed to notice Tom's shift, yet. Dire had swung the lion again, this time against the piranha tank. Tom flung himself into the fight, blindly. In the tight confines of the aquarium building, flying was no advantage, but he flung himself, aided by his wings, at the dire wolf and bit deep into what he could grab, which happened to be an ear, while letting out an ear-splitting hiss-roar that translated all his anger and frustration at this unreasonable ancient creature.

The dire wolf looked shocked—he turned a bloodied muzzle towards Tom, his eyes opened to their utmost in complete surprise. And Tom, instinct-driven, slashed his paw across the face, claws raking the eyes. Blood spurted. The dire wolf screamed. And the part of Tom that remained very much human was aware that this was a momentary advantage. The creature would recover. Eventually it would regrow its eyes. Until then, it might very well be able to look through their eyes. He couldn't allow it time to recover.

Leaping across the room, he grabbed Rafiel by the scruff even as Rafiel, dizzy and battle-mad tried to grab at him. But grabbing the scruff seemed to paralyze him, and Tom—fairly sure that in normal circumstances he'd have a hard time lifting Rafiel and trying to hold as gently as possible so he didn't wound Rafiel more—ran down the stairs with his friend held between his teeth.

Down the stairs and at a run through the aquarium—was that a Japanese man hiding in the shadows? and had he winked at Tom?—and turning sharply left, down a narrow corridor between tanks and...

Tom hit the exterior door with his full body weight. As he hit, he thought Dire might have locked it, but the door was already opening, letting them out into the cold air, where Tom dropped Rafiel and concentrated on changing. The dragon argued that Rafiel would make a really good protein snack, but Tom forced his limbs to shift, decontort. Before he could fully form words, he said, "Now, Rafiel, shift." The words came out half roar, half hiss, with only the barest vocalization behind them. And then Tom's eyes cleared and he realized Rafiel was already human, trying to walk to the car on a leg that bent the wrong way.

"Your keys?" Tom said.

Rafiel looked at him, his eyes full of pain, but reached for a bracelet at his wrist—metal but of the sort of links that stretched, so that it stayed with him through his shifts. He pulled the key and handed it to Tom, who opened the car, climbed in, and flung the passenger door open, just in time for Rafiel to climb in. He saw Dire's car parked next to them.

"Drive, drive, drive," Rafiel said. And Tom was driving, as fast as he knew how, down the still-half-iced streets, breathing deeply, telling himself that residual panic didn't justify shifting, that he would not—could not—shift. He tasted Rafiel's blood in his mouth, from the wounds the dire wolf had made at the back of Rafiel's neck, and it didn't help him keep control. Not at all.

It was a while—and Tom had no clue where he was, having driven more or less blindly—before Rafiel said, softly, "Thank you."

"What?" Tom asked, hearing his own voice ill-humored and combative. "Why?"

"Well...you...saved my life."

"As opposed to just letting you die? What do you think I am?"

"Brave. I know that creature scares the living daylights out of me. I don't know if I'd be able to make myself intervene in a fight between him and you."

"Don't worry about it," Tom said, hoping his dismissive tone would stop the conversation. He'd never learned to take compliments, and he wasn't ready for gratitude for doing what he had to do—what was clearly required of him as a human being. He just wanted to get back to the bed-and-breakfast and have a shower and—

"Damn," he said.

"What?"

"I left my boots in the aquarium."

* * *

Rafiel laughed. It was weak laughter. Not so much amusement, as a reflex of relief. He remembered Tom, once, running naked down the street, save for his all-prized jacket and his boots.

"It's not funny," Tom said.

"Yes, it is. You have an unnatural attachment to those boots."

"They're mine, and I like them," Tom said. Still driving like a maniac, he turned to glower at Rafiel. "I haven't had many things in my life that I could hold onto, you know? Things that were mine, I mean."

"Yes, but why in the name of all that's holy would the things you want to hold onto be items of apparel when you are a shifter?" Rafiel asked, smiling.

Tom shrugged. "It was all I had before settling down. All I had were the clothes on my back."

"Right. Well, it's unlikely the creature knows how attached you are to your boots, so you'll probably be safe," he said. "Meaning he won't piss in them. And if he does, I'll buy you new boots."

"Thank you. I like the ones I have."

"Unnatural," Rafiel said. "But I'm not going back to get them. Not even for you, my friend."

"Ah, look, the dire wolf will probably be gone and besides we can't leave them behind. Someone will go to the aquarium. Someone will know we broke in."

Rafiel looked at him, disbelieving. "You have to be joking."

"No, I'm not. It's my boots, and they'll figure out they're mine, and next thing you know, they'll be talking about my pushing people into the shark tank or something."

Rafiel groaned, seeing what he meant. "Oh okay, fine. But if the car is still there, I'm not going in. I'm just not. And I suspect we left blood all over the floor and isn't that enough to show I was there? What do the boots matter? I'll just have to try to divert any investigation that—"

"Rafiel, you were shifted. They'll find lion's blood." He gave Rafiel a sideways look. "On the other hand, unless I'm wrong, you also left your cell phone and your clothes and your official identification there. So you'll have to have a really good story to explain having been in there..."

"I could tell them I lost them this morning, when I was there with Lei."

"What? And your clothes? Shredded as if you'd burst out of them?"

Rafiel groaned and heard himself swearing softly. "Fine, we'll go back. I'm trying to figure out how the day could get any worse."

Which was a stupid thing to say, he realized, as he heard the siren behind him, and saw the flashing lights in the rear view mirror. "Don't worry," he told Tom, as Tom smashed his foot on the gas. "I'm a policeman."

"What, naked, in the car, with another man, in public? How much authority will you have, Officer Trall?"

"They...uh." Naked in public was the problem. They'd bring him up on an indecency charge so fast. He looked back. "We could get dressed."

"Fast enough? Before he comes up to the window?"

It might have been possible if they were being followed by a police car. The cop would have had to park way behind them, and then approach them carefully. But Rafiel could see that there was a motorcycle cop in hot pursuit. "We can't outrun it. He probably already has my license plate and—"

"Right," Tom said. "There's only one thing to do. But afterwards, you have to get me a burger. No. A dozen of them."

"Sure thing," Rafiel said, not absolutely sure what Tom meant to do and not caring either. "I have money under the seat, with the clothes. We don't even have to wait till we get my wallet." At this point, anything Tom could do to get them out of this fix was worth it.

"Right." Tom said. "But you have to drive. Can you drive?"

"Sure. I'll use my left foot."

Tom pulled over and stopped. Something to the way he clenched the wheel, the way his nails seemed to elongate slowly, the way his bone structure appeared to change, made Rafiel want to scream, Don't shift in my car. But when Tom was already this much on edge, all the scream would do was cause him to shift immediately. He bit his tongue and held his breath.

Tom rolled down the window, then grasped the handle. His voice all hissy and slurpy, as if his dental structure had already shifted, he said, "The moment I get out, drive. Just drive straight. I'll catch up."

"Tom...don't—" He was going to tell him not to eat the man, but didn't have time.

There was a voice from the open window. "Sir, you were doing...What—"

Tom opened the door and leapt out, while shifting—so that the effect was rather like a kernel of corn popping—bursting and exploding into a massive, much larger form, as it escaped the confines of its skin.

There was a strangled scream from the policeman, and Rafiel switched seats and closed the door and drove straight ahead. He was on Fairfax, he realized. The world's longest, straight thoroughfare. It was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as such. He hoped it was long enough to allow Rafiel to still be on it whenever Tom caught up.

"Don't eat him," Rafiel yelled and rolled up the window, as he drove. He didn't know if Tom had heard him.

* * *

Perhaps ten blocks ahead, as Rafiel entered a definitely seedy area of abandoned warehouses and graffitied overpasses, he saw a shadow fall over the car. A shadow such as if a really large dragon body had flown overhead. And then, in front of a warehouse, Tom stood, extending his thumb in the universal gesture of the hitchhiker.

Rafiel stopped and unlocked the door. As Tom got in, he looked for signs of blood around his mouth or something. Trying to keep it light, he said, "You know, hitchhiking naked is a felony. And we don't even go into what eating a policeman might be. The force disapproves of it."

Tom stopped, in the middle of buckling his seatbelt. "I didn't eat him," he said. "He started screaming for mercy as soon as I was fully out of the car. I just flew away after that. I figure there's no way he's going to tell anyone what happened, and your license plate will never be mentioned."

"You sure?" Rafiel said.

"I'm sure. If I'd eaten him, you wouldn't look so tasty right about now."

Rafiel wasn't absolutely sure whether Tom was joking, but then again, he also wasn't willing to tempt fate. "Clothes are under the seat. We should put something on before we go to a drive-through," he said.

"And afterwards?" Tom said.

"Afterwards," Rafiel said, "we go get your damn boots."

* * *

When they got to the aquarium, Lei Lani was just ahead of them, opening the door on the restaurant side. Rafiel tried to remember whether they might have left it unlocked—whether they might—perhaps—have left via that entrance. He couldn't remember. Clearly, being concussed and dangling from a berserker dragon's jaws did something to the memory. But it didn't matter, he thought. After all, Dire might have left the door open, too.

She was in the process of opening the door as they came up behind her—wearing tracksuits and looking rather disheveled and, in Rafiel's case, limping, but seeming much more respectable than they'd been before. Tom, who had inhaled five burgers in the ten blocks here, even had a little color and seemed reasonably human. At least, Rafiel hoped so, because if he had looked tasty to Tom, then Lei must look positively tender.

Still, she turned and looked at them, seeming puzzled. "Oh, Officer Trall..." she said. "I...didn't expect to see you. I realized there was another report that I left behind."

Or perhaps another colleague to try to implicate. Or, Rafiel thought, not quite sure why, but catching something shifty about her eyes, a look of discomfort. Or perhaps you've decided it's too late to cover things up, and so are going to leave without a forwarding address.

He was fairly sure this last wasn't true. Not unless McKnight had been so clumsy in his prodding that she now knew, or suspected, that the police had found the lies about her background. McKnight? Incompetent? What are the odds? he thought, sarcastically, and barely suppressed a groan. A look at Tom revealed an expression so full of distress and a gaze desperately attempting to make several speeches, that Rafiel almost groaned again.

He wished he could mind-talk to Tom and inform him that, yes, yes, he had realized they needed to retrieve their things before Lei Lani found them. Meanwhile he would have to hope she didn't notice they were wearing identical stretch-shoes.

She didn't seem to. When he said, "I forgot my wallet," she merely gave him a wry look and said, "You seem to do that a lot."

Rafiel shrugged. "I drop it," he said. "I need bigger pockets or a briefcase or something. But then, if I had a briefcase, I'd probably leave it behind."

She smiled and didn't comment on that, and turned right, to go to the office. Rafiel turned the other way, towards the piranha room, his heart accelerating. The dire wolf would be there, right there, ready to jump out at him.

But the room was quiet and empty, except for the gurgling of the tanks and the sound the piranhas made swimming back and forth. Tom's clothes and boots were where he had left them, by the tank. Rafiel's were quite shredded, so he transferred his wallet and ID and cell phone from the shreds, then bundled them up.

He looked up to see Tom standing, holding his own clothes and the box for the cameras. "Here," he told Tom, thrusting his bloodied, shredded clothes at him. "Take this to the car, okay?"

He got raised eyebrows in response.

"I'm going to go ask Lei Lani for a date," Rafiel said.

"What?" Tom's voice came out louder than the half whisper in which they'd been speaking, like a small outburst of sudden indignation. "Excuse me?"

"Shhh." Rafiel said, gesturing down with his hand. "It's not what you think," he said, in a whisper.

"Isn't it? This is a heck of a time to work on your social life, Rafiel," Tom said, but he lowered his voice to a whisper as well.

"It's not my social life," Rafiel said. "It's...you know how..." He concentrated on listening for the slightest sound. His hearing was more acute than normal human, but he heard nothing. Not close enough for Lei Lani to hear. And yet, he didn't feel comfortable. He sighed. "Come to the car."

Tom shrugged and followed him to the car. Rafiel threw his shredded clothes in the back. Tom sat on the passenger side and started changing. Rafiel, his gaze sweeping the parking lot to make sure they were quite alone, explained. "I've been worried," he said. "About the camera and how all this was going to work."

Tom frowned at him. "Duh. Whoever it is brings a date there, and then the computer sounds the alarm, and then—duh—we catch her. Or him."

"No," Rafiel said, very patiently. He loved Tom like the brother he'd never had. Truly, he did. But elaborate plans were not the man's main strength. His greatest act of heroism had been on the spur of the moment. Most of what Tom did seemed to be on the spur of the moment. "Yeah, we will have footage of whatever happens. It's even possible we'll know who it is, and what they're doing. If they're shifters, we could go and kill them in cold blood, and stop the deaths. Of course, then we'll have Dire on our tails, but that's something else again. But...Tom, the poor sap who is brought here will die. There is no way we can get to him in time."

"Oh," Tom said. "Unless we're expecting it?"

"How can we be expecting it, if it's a stranger?" he said. "By the time the camera beeps, they'll already be in the aquarium. There is nothing we can do. Except collect the remains."

Tom frowned. "Damn. I hadn't thought that through. I don't think it's going to be that easy to sit there, waiting, you know, while...some poor sap...Damn, Rafiel, I don't even think I can do it. I mean, I know he'd probably die anyway, whether this is part of our trap or not. But I don't want to be...I'd feel like an accomplice."

"No, it wouldn't work," Rafiel said. "Which is why I'm going in there and ask Lei Lani for a date."

Tom frowned at him. "Because you think she's the murderer?"

Rafiel shrugged. "Not exactly. But I think there is a good chance she might be. I think it's quite possible she's a shark shifter. Which might or might not mean anything. I've also found she's never attended the University of Hawaii, at least not under this name." He shrugged. "All of it might have other, innocent explanations, and if this were a normal investigation, where I could share my suspicions with my colleagues, it wouldn't be the time for a desperate gamble. But it isn't a casual investigation—it's a life-and-death one. And...other people will die. Plus, Dire seems to have settled on me as the sacrificial victim for him to execute."

"Dire will just be furious," Tom said, "if we go after Lani and she's a shifter."

"I think Dire is furious now. There is one thing I know we can't do, Tom, and that's face Dire, the triads and the aquarium murderer all at the same time. For the last week I've walked on eggshells, afraid one or the other of those are about to give us away. I can't go on like that. Let's start taking the enemies down one at a time. The aquarium murderer, at least until further notice, is not more powerful than us, so let's take that one on first. Then we'll figure out some way to get Dire. And then the triads..." He shrugged. "Perhaps they'll just go away."

"Fat chance," Tom said.

Rafiel shrugged again. "One at a time. So, I'm going in and asking Ms. Lani out."

"But...like that?" Tom asked. "You are all bruised, have two big gashes on the back of your neck, and you probably broke your ankle."

Rafiel shrugged. "So, I tell her I got in a fight in the course of duty. You know there is little that a woman loves better than a hero."

Tom stared at him for a long time, then sighed and shook his head. "The worst part, Mr. Hero, is that you'll probably pull it off."

Rafiel gave him a feline grin. "Of course I will."

* * *

Kyrie looked from one to the other of the men, her mouth half open, as though all the words had escaped her and weren't coming back. Rafiel looked like he'd been put into an industrial threshing machine. His forehead was scratched, his arm showed blood through the shirt. He was walking as if he had—at the very least—a seriously bruised ankle.

Tom looked hungry. In fact, despite the fact that he'd announced to her, up front, that he'd already eaten, and even though his story made it clear he'd had something like ten hamburgers, he looked starved, and sniffed the air as if trying to inhale calories through sniffing in stray particles of cooking meat.

And yet, both of them looked as happy, as full of themselves as boys who had pulled off a really good prank. It had to be one of those male things, because she couldn't begin to imagine what was going through their minds. "And you went back?" she said. "For the boots and the ID?"

"And the clothes," Rafiel said, enthusiastically. "My clothes. Well, the shreds of them."

"I see," Kyrie said.

"It wasn't a big deal," Tom said, as his head swivelled to follow a gyro platter carried by Keith. "Dire wasn't there when we went back."

Yes, of course, that made it all right, Kyrie thought, as she sighed and despaired of explaining to these overgrown boys that, after all, Dante Dire had the power of messing with their minds. He might have made it seem that there was no one there. He might have jumped them from a dark corner. He might still be waiting to—She couldn't say any of it, certainly not in the diner, although the three of them were occupying the corner booth, under the picture of the dragon slayer, and there were no other occupied booths in this part of the diner.

Keith stopped by and dropped a plate entirely filled with gyro shavings and souvlaki in front of Tom, who looked up at him, surprised, "How did you know?"

Keith shrugged. "Meat-seeking behavior," he said. "I've come to know it." He looked from Rafiel to Tom. "What have you two been doing with yourselves?" he asked. And then paused, and bent over towards the table, his hands on the formica. "It isn't about Summer Avenir, right? I mean...is there some big fight going on that you guys haven't told me about?"

Kyrie sighed and shifted further into the booth. "Come. You can hear about it."

But Keith shook his head, and looked around at the tables. "Nah. Conan went to take a nap, he said, and that would leave the tables unattended."

Kyrie frowned. This sudden reluctance to run away with the shifter circus was not like Keith at all. A look at the young man showed her dark circles around his eyes and a general impression of being less than healthy. "Huh," she said.

"It's nothing, okay?" Keith said. He shrugged. "It's just that, you know, you guys always said that being a shifter was no picnic, that there was stuff...but you know, for me, it was all about fighting and...well, it was like being a superhero."

"Yeah, so you told us," Tom said.

"Only, then...Summer turned out to be the granddaughter of the newspaper owner, and to have been after cryptozoology stuff, and she endangered you and got herself killed...and now I know it's not..."—he looked at them, intently—"I assume it wasn't one of you. I wouldn't have come back if I thought it had been one of you."

"No," Kyrie said, shocked. "No. It's...one of the people we're fighting."

"People!" Keith said. "Somehow, no, I don't think it's people."

Kyrie felt shocked as if she'd been punched. "What about us?"

Keith sighed. "I want to say of course you're people..." he said. "I want to say it...but..." He looked away. "It would help if Tom didn't look like he could happily take a chunk out of a passing diner."

Tom, finger-deep in gyro meat, looked up. "Hey!"

"No...I know you're not like that," Keith said. "And of course you can trust me, and all. But...these...creatures, like the ones we fought against before...It's not like a computer game, and it's not like a comic, and it's not like being superheroes."

"We never said..."

"I know you didn't. But I'm an idiot, okay...and I thought..." He shrugged. "I thought a whole lot of stupid things. But it's not fun anymore. It's serious. And the things you guys fight, they're really serious too. I take it the...creature you're fighting is the one who was in here the other day talking about how I was just a transitive or something and—"

"Ephemeral," Tom said. "Because you live less than we do, and he—"

"Yeah. I got the gist. Anyway...I take it that's the big bad, and I wish you luck and all, but I want no part of it. I..." He took a deep breath. "I might as well tell you that I've applied for a scholarship to do the last two years of college abroad, in Italy. I was accepted. I'll be leaving at the end of the month. That's my two-weeks' notice."

They all looked at him, stunned. Oh, Kyrie understood what he was saying. In fact, they'd been the first to tell him that it wasn't fun, it wasn't like being a superhero, it wasn't anything of the kind. But Keith had been, in a way, the one normal human admitted to their fraternity, the one they could trust.

The one, Kyrie thought, who reassures us that we're still human.

"Sure," Tom said, sounding deflated. "Sure. I just...tell me the exact date and I'll make sure you have your check a couple of days in advance so that you can cash it before you fly, okay?"

Keith looked startled. Had he forgotten that Tom tried to take care of people no matter what? "Okay," he said, as he walked away.

And he couldn't be that mad at them, Kyrie thought, at least not consciously, because having seen Rafiel eye Tom's food jealously, he brought him a plate of meat as well, and silverware for both of them. "Anthony thinks you have a tapeworm," he said, walking away. "Both of you."

"You know," Rafiel said, "Dante Dire would say we need to kill Keith, to ensure our own safety."

Kyrie shook her head, feeling vaguely impatient. Dire could say whatever he wanted. Keith could say whatever he wanted for that matter. She could understand Dire's point about how hard it was to consider as people and as equals, people who didn't consider you human. But she was sure of something and that was that Dire was far more dangerous to Keith than Keith ever could be to any of them. The other thing was that Kyrie was fairly sure people were just...people. It was just that shifters had so many more means of causing harm than people who didn't at the drop of a hat grow claws and fangs. "You still didn't tell me," she said with a trace of impatience, "what you were doing at the aquarium today?"

"Oh," Tom shrugged and looked sheepish, managing to look much like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. "We were installing a camera."

"Installing a what?"

"A camera. In that platform area where, clearly, there's been screwing going on."

"Why?" Kyrie asked. The idea was unfathomable. "So you guys could have your very own private porn channel? Isn't it kind of gruesome? I mean considering..."

"No," Tom said. "It's for an alarm. I've already installed the software in my laptop. You and I are going to keep watch on it. By turns. It beeps, you see...when someone moves in front of the camera and activates it."

"We're going to keep watch on it by turns?" Kyrie asked. "And what exactly do we do about The George, Tom? You still need to cook, and without Keith, or with Keith on reduced hours, I still need to wait tables. What do we do about that?"

The minute she said it, Tom's face fell, and she felt as though she were the most horrible woman alive. "Look, I can see where it's important, but..."

* * *

Rafiel cleared his throat. "You're right, Kyrie," he said. "That's why I have a plan. We couldn't just wait, see?"

Tom nodded. "So, Rafiel came up with something. Rafiel says, and he's right that we'd start with the weakest enemy and move on towards the strongest, because, you know, we can't fight all of them at the same time."

"No," Kyrie said. "But I don't think this will help us fight at all."

"No, it will," Rafiel said. "I think that the Lani chick likes me. Oh, I don't mean she's in love with me or anything," he answered Tom's knowing smile. "That's not it at all. But the thing is, she has sort of come on to me and hinted since she first met me. If she's the aquarium killer, and if she is a shark shifter, perhaps I look tasty."

"Officer Mignon," Tom mumbled.

"Something like that. But in any case"—Rafiel shrugged—"she has tried to, you know, hint that she would be okay going out more than once. And in fact, you know, she came up to my car outside the doughnut shop, when I didn't even know she knew my car...so...I think, particularly if she's guilty and is worried about it—but even if she isn't guilty and her boyfriends just keep taking headers into the shark tank through no fault of her own..." He stopped and looked lost.

Kyrie said, "No." Tom made some indeterminate sound.

"No, really," Rafiel said. "I've gone on dates with women before. Truly. Some people don't seem to think I'm that horrible."

"I didn't mean that," Kyrie said. "It's more, I'd prefer you don't run that risk."

Rafiel looked towards Tom who was eating, oblivious to them. So he assumed Tom wasn't jealous. Which was good, because he didn't think Kyrie meant it in any other way than as a caring friend. "How much more of a risk is doing nothing?" Rafiel asked. "I almost died today, and I wasn't doing anything I thought was dangerous, except maybe to my moral health."

"Well, you were trying to solve the aquarium murders," Kyrie said. "And if anything, this is more likely to bring Dire on you, since he said that you should not investigate these murders."

"Yeah," Rafiel admitted. "But you see...that only makes it obligatory that I do something. How am I going to live with myself, knowing that I stopped an investigation because someone who doesn't consider humans as such told me to stop? How can I go on? And besides, Kyrie—"

"And besides, Kyrie," Tom said. "Even if we don't do anything at all, Dire will end up killing us. Or at least, he will kill one of us so he can blame all of the deaths on that one person and skip off back to his affairs, his reputation as executioner untarnished. He doesn't care whom he blames. After what I did to him," Tom's voice became rueful as he said this, "it's very probable that the pact with the dragons won't even hold him back anymore."

"So we'll do something about the aquarium murders," Rafiel said. "And then we'll figure out some way to get Dire. Because we have to. It's him or us."

"And through all of this," Tom said, "we'll try to keep Conan safe. Frankly, we shouldn't even let him know what we intend to do. Conan shouldn't cross the street by himself, much less get involved in intrigue and conspiracy."

"So," Rafiel said, "I asked Lei Lani out tonight. And she said yes."

The expression of complete surprise on Kyrie's face was totally worth it.

* * *

Kyrie bit her tongue hard. Listening to Rafiel's plan, she realized that it made the perfect trap for Dire. She couldn't imagine how the two men kept imagining they would be allowed to deal with each of the threats in turn—without more than one of them imposing themselves upon their notice at the same time.

It was clear, to her, at least. Dire had been watching them. Dire had been watching the aquarium. Dire knew they wanted to catch and punish the aquarium killer. They were not going to be allowed to do it without interference. It would never happen.

And they couldn't simply go after Dire in cold blood, anyway. If they went after Dire in any way that couldn't be construed as self-defense, and if they went to the triads for help, the only thing that would happen would be that the Ancient Ones would accuse the dragons of murder, and a war would break out. Mr. Lung had warned Kyrie against that.

So the best thing was to get Dire to come after them. Which the aquarium trap seemed like the perfect setup for.

But that meant that Kyrie had to arrange the night shift, somehow, so Conan could be free, without Tom knowing. First, she thought, she would go to the bed-and-breakfast and talk to Conan. And then, if he could perhaps pretend to be sick...then Kyrie would have an excuse to ask Keith to work.

"If you guys get in the car," Rafiel said, "and wait in it, perhaps a block from the aquarium, then you can get me in time. Not that I should need help. I mean...I've fought other shifters before, but...I'd prefer to have backup."

"Of course," Tom said. "But not in our car. In the supply van."

Kyrie saw Rafiel give Tom a surprised look and Tom sighed, long-suffering. "You can see into the car. But the old supply van, the one without the George logo, we can sit in the back—well, we can sit in the back once I throw in a couple of cushions—and no one will see us. Or even know we're there. Just an anonymous van parked by the side of the road."

"Oh," Rafiel said. "Right. That will work."

* * *

Kyrie knocked at the door to Conan's room, which was in the bottom floor, just off the entrance. There was a sound of shuffling, from inside, and then Conan's voice, "Yes?"

"It's Kyrie," she whispered. She'd left Tom taking care of her tables, with the excuse that she had to go take a shower to wake up, since she hadn't slept in...much too long.

Conan opened the door, and looked at her, somewhat surprised. "Kyrie?"

"I need to talk to you. May I come in?"

"Yeah, sure." He threw the door open into a room that was about a quarter the size of theirs—just a little bigger than the destroyed bathroom at home. It had a daybed against one wall, a small dresser and a desk opposite. At the end of it the door opened into a tiny bathroom, where she could just see the glass door of a stand-up shower, with what looked like a pair of underwear drying draped over it.

Without meaning to, she looked down. Conan was wearing pants—or rather shorts and a baggy white T-shirt. "Is anything wrong?" he asked her.

"Yes and no," she said. She closed the door, then leaned against the desk while he slumped on his bed, and looked at her. And she explained. She explained everything. What had happened, what the plan was.

* * *

"But, Kyrie, I can't," he said. He put his hands on his head, grabbing a handful of his straight black hair on either side. "I can't do that. He told me he'd kill himself, and the Great Sky Dragon said he meant it."

"He would kill himself," Kyrie said. "If he had to be...beholden to the Great Sky Dragon, yes. But don't you see in this case he doesn't have to? Even if he finds out I asked for help, I'll be the one he's mad at, you see. I'll be the one who is indebted to the triads. He's not."

Conan looked at her, blinking, and it took her a moment to realize he was fighting back tears. "I'm not sure he's not right, Kyrie," he said, pitifully. "If I had any choice, now—which I don't—I'd choose not to belong to the Great Sky Dragon, too." And seeing Kyrie flinch, he must have realized what she'd thought, because he smiled. "I don't know if he's still listening to me, no. He might be. Or he might have turned off when Tom told him he wouldn't allow me to follow him around." A small frown. "I don't think so, though, or Mr. Lung would have told you that you needed to do something else to get his attention, than just have me around. He didn't, so I guess...Himself is watching. And he now knows I'd prefer not to belong to him, which is fine. I would. If he didn't know that before..." Conan shrugged. "I don't think he cares. I'm not important like Tom and I never had a choice."

Kyrie sighed. In her mind only one thing mattered right now. She didn't want to appear callous towards Conan. She even liked Conan in a way, though he was definitely one of the strays that Tom was so prone to picking up. But she didn't have time or patience, just now, to discuss his philosophy of life. "Does this mean you won't help?" she asked.

"No," Conan said. "It doesn't. I'll help, of course. It's not like I have a choice, you know. I have to help. Or die. And I'm not ready to die."

* * *

"I was going to suggest you take my car, because—"

Conan shook his head. He looked very sad. "If I know how my people work, I expect there will be a car brought to me in the next hour, a car that Tom won't identify. And just tell Tom I have a cough and decided not to work because I might be contagious. The only thing I want to know..." He paused.

"Yes?"

"Is what they intend to use me as, other than possibly bait. It's not that I mind. It can't be much worse than all the other things I've had to do. I just wish I had more of an inkling of what will happen than 'Conan will watch, and then we'll intervene.' " He looked very tired. "Doesn't matter. I'm sure better minds than mine will handle it."

Kyrie was caught between a desire to bitch-slap him and a desire to free him from his vassalage.

* * *

Kyrie hoped that Dante Dire had the place under surveillance of some sort. She had to—simply had to—arrange for him to follow them that night. She wasn't quite sure how to do it, except, of course, by managing to pretend that the last thing she wanted was for him to follow them.

There was a good chance she wouldn't need to do anything to get him to follow them. She suspected he had gone after Tom and Rafiel after seeing them leave the bed-and-breakfast. If that was the case, any of them going near the aquarium was likely to cause Dire to follow. She just wished she could be sure. She also wished she could be sure that Tom hadn't blinded him for a few weeks. Because if Tom had, then it was going to be very hard to entrap him.

While Tom was busy at the grill and Keith was keeping up with the tables, in the brief post-dinner lull, and before Anthony came in to spell Tom, she took the time to go outside, into the parking lot, looking for Dire's car.

Instead, she found Dire himself, standing outside the back door, smoking. His dark eyes, she noted, looked fine.

He grinned at her, as if he knew what she was looking at. In the next few words, he proved he did. "Well, Kitten," he said, "you and your boyfriend are very rude." He shrugged. "Not that I resent it from you. I like my women with a bit of spirit."

"I am not your woman," Kyrie said.

He grinned again, flashing white between taut lips. "Oh yes," he said. "I know that. But you know, shifters' lives are long and all that might yet change. Your boyfriend is too dumb to know what's good for him, so he's not likely to make old bones."

"I think my boyfriend is perfectly fine," she said, snappishly. And meaning the snap, too, because Dire annoyed her—besides putting a chill up her spine—and because she thought he would expect her to react this way.

Dire shrugged. He took a pull on his cigarette, making the tip glow bright. "I'm sure you do. You're both very young. Young as ephemerals. But he doesn't understand that, when needed, one must sacrifice a friend...or two." His gaze on her was speculative, and she felt as though she were being considered as a "sacrifice."

"And have you sacrificed many friends?" she asked, wrapping her arms around herself.

If she expected him to flinch or look guilty, she would have been sorely disappointed. He threw his head back and laughed. "One or two...dozen. But I'm still here, aren't I?"

"Yes," Kyrie said, and judging the time to be right, added, "In fact, I wish you weren't here so much. What are you doing here, all the time? Are you following us?" Mentally, she projected the feeling/idea that tonight of all nights she didn't want him around.

She watched his eyes quicken, but nothing more in his gaze gave away that he'd caught on to something. His voice was quite disinterested and amused as he said, "I find you entertaining."

* * *

Tom felt awkward and stupid. Which, he supposed, in many ways he was. At least when the many ways involved human interaction. He felt very strange taking time off and getting into the supply van with Kyrie. Kyrie drove till they were outside the aquarium, about the time that Rafiel would be starting his date. It was unlikely, of course, that Lei Lani would be dragging Rafiel to the aquarium at the beginning of the date—even if Rafiel was right in his suspicions. Even if she intended to drag him there later.

But they didn't want to be too far away to intervene if she did take him there. The time was quite likely to be too short, then. And the idea was not to have Rafiel get himself killed. For one, even if they got the woman immediately afterwards, the police tended to get religious when one of them got killed. They would leave no stone unturned. And when it came to murders committed by shifters, Tom would very much like to let mossy stones lie. And for another...Tom liked the lion bastard. Life wouldn't be nearly as much fun without a friend in the police, he thought. Why, they might not get pulled into whichever murder was going on, on the vaguest suspicion that a shifter might be involved.

So, they'd taken the laptop—still quiescent—and driven to a block from the aquarium, where they'd parked on a darkened side street. The van smelled of old cabbage and—strangely, since Tom didn't remember carrying any in it—stale crackers. It had only two seats, since the back was normally filled with crates and boxes of supplies for the diner. In summer and fall, he and Kyrie had taken the van to the farmers' market early every morning, when Anthony came in to relieve them. They'd got better deals, and better produce too. Though Tom had probably gone overboard on the apricots, which was why they had about a hundred jars of jam in the cold room at The George. Which would come in really handy the minute he learned to make homemade bread.

But because he and Kyrie rarely got to go out alone, because he didn't want them to sit in the front seats and be obvious, and because he was a fool, he'd made sure the van was clean and he'd brought a blanket to spread on the metallic floor that had long since lost its carpet, if it had ever had one.

He'd also brought two very large throw pillows from their room.

It was only when Kyrie had looked at the blanket and the pillows, and turned an inquisitive glance towards him, that he realized how it might look. "What?" he said. "What? I thought it would be more comfortable than the bare floor and all, while we wait."

She had smiled just a little, an odd, Mona Lisa smile. "I'm sure it will be," she had said all soft and breezily.

And now they were parked on a side street, less than a block from the aquarium. It was a narrow street and at this point pretty much deserted, with what looked like an empty—with broken windows—house on one side, and a park on the other. They left the front seats and went to the back, where they sat primly on the pillows across from each other, and they put the laptop up, its back against the front seats. The laptop had been a gift from Tom's father and, until now, he'd never used it for anything more exciting than doing the accounting for The George.

But the laptop wasn't being exciting either. A blank screen with a field of stars streaming past—his screen saver—stared back at them. Tom looked at it, then looked at Kyrie. The laptop was supposed to beep if it caught anything, and just now, Tom was disposed to let the laptop do its thing and not give it undue attention. Because, after all, if you couldn't trust your laptop, what could you trust?

Instead he looked over at Kyrie. He was dating the only woman in the world who could look like a goddess in worn jeans and a utilitarian brown sweat shirt. The brown brought out the olive tones in her skin, and went seamlessly with the layer-dyed hair which was her only concession to vanity. Well, she had one other, but he wasn't sure whether that was due to vanity or to her belief that this was her good-luck charm, much like his boots were his—but she was wearing her red feather earring, dangling from her ear, jewel-bright against her dark hair. It seemed to highlight her dark-red lips, which were jewellike enough even without the benefit of lipstick.

He longed to trace with his hands the outline of her breasts under the sweat shirt. His lips ached for her lips. It had been...a week, maybe more, since he had so much as hugged her. And he wondered if she now thought he was a perfect idiot, since he'd shifted in the bathroom. He wondered if he'd ruined her respect for him, and if now it would be only a matter of time before she told him they couldn't go on like this.

"I'm an idiot," he said. And as she turned to look at him, he went on, honestly. "If I had half a lick of sense, when I knew I'd be spending at least an hour, and probably more in a van with the most beautiful woman in the world, I'd have had the good sense to bring champagne and chocolates, or something."

"We couldn't have champagne," she said. "We can't afford to be tipsy."

"Apple cider then," he said. "Something to make you feel as special as just being near you makes me feel."

For a moment he thought he'd upset her. Her mouth opened in an "Oh." and her eyes widened, as though surprised. And then, unaccountably, she was in his arms, her body warm against his. He frantically searched for her lips and found them, kissing her desperately, as if he could only draw breath through her mouth. "Kyrie," he said. "Oh, Kyrie."

* * *

Halfway through dinner, Rafiel found himself hoping that Lei Lani wasn't the murderer, whether or not she was a shifter. And he wanted her to be a shifter. He really did. Because then she would understand him—and he could maybe even marry her.

He didn't know what it was exactly, and he'd have been hard pressed to say, but he felt happy in her presence. Very happy. Almost on the edge of drunk.

Tuscany Bay, the fashionable restaurant to which he'd decided to take her, despite the nonsensical name, turned out to be a very decent Italian place, with dancing and a jazz band that played softly melodic sounds. And being around Lei seemed to erase Rafiel's pains, so that, after a dinner of grilled salmon, he could stand on his bruised ankle, and lead her in a heartfelt—and possibly slightly obscene—slow dance.

They danced one song, two, and Rafiel was conscious that most people in the place were staring at them, and he was sure—absolutely sure—that everyone of them was envying him. Lei was wearing a simple—almost severe—black and white dress, and the cutest little fedora tilted sideways on her head. Beneath it, her hair was loose, brushed till glossy and dark as sin.

After the second song, she said, "I think we should go out. You know, for a walk."

And he was fine with that. He'd have gone anywhere with her. At the door, when they picked up their coats from the coat check, the coat check lady whispered to Lei, "Don't let him drive," and Rafiel could not understand why. Did she think he was drunk? How could he be? He had drunk iced tea all evening.

But it didn't matter. As they walked outside, the cold air did feel invigorating. Lei put her arm in his. Above the skies had cleared and a million stars seemed to sparkle in the deep black velvet of the night.

He was a little surprised when they got to the aquarium and she opened the door. There was something about the aquarium. Something he was supposed to remember. But he had no idea what. And he was sure it couldn't be very important. After all, he was lucky. He had Lei Lani, right there.

* * *

Tom had just said, "Oh, I'm such an idiot," against the soft depths of Kyrie's tapestry-dyed hair, when the alarm sounded. For a moment, for just a moment, he thought it was ringing inside his head. Reminding him there was a reason he didn't usually allow himself to lose control, that he might at any moment lose control of himself and shift, which would work about as well in the van as it had in the bathroom.

He tried to tell the alarm to stuff it, but it continued to ring, quite oblivious to his opinions, and it dawned on Tom that it was the sound from the laptop at about the same time that Kyrie pulled away and said, "Damn, the laptop."

"Yeah," Tom said. "Yeah." It wasn't the most coherent response in the world, but it was the one he had, and he was going to stick to it.

Kyrie touched the button that made the screen saver stop scrolling by and brought the transmission from the camera to them in vivid, bold color. Tom remembered, irrelevantly, his father going on about how he'd picked that laptop because of the wonderful movie screen. All the same it took him a moment to figure out what he was looking at.

"Oh, good lord," Kyrie said. "Is he crazy or stupid?"

And then Tom realized he was looking at Rafiel and Lei Lani, without clothes, in what used to euphemistically be called a moment of passion. He jumped to the front seat and out. He had gone five steps before he realized that Kyrie hadn't been as fast. And it took him only two seconds to see a dire wolf round on him, from outside. It was growling in a low tone, and of course there were no words in its growl. But Tom would swear it was saying "Payback time, Dragon Boy."

* * *

Kyrie removed her earring, and then her clothes and leapt from the van even as she shifted. As a panther, she interposed herself between Dire and Tom. She growled, a fierce, loud growl that meant that he wouldn't be allowed to touch Tom, and she willed Tom to go past her. Willed it with all her mind.

* * *

There was Dire, standing in front of them, blocking the access to the aquarium. How long before Lei Lani took it into her head to drown Rafiel? They'd been naked and...um...Tom had no idea how long it was supposed to last. Movies had given him a range of times from a couple of minutes to hours, and he had no idea which one was closer to the truth.

But he knew, or at least he suspected that when the fun and games were done, it would be the final swim for Rafiel, a swim from which he would not return.

He could tell from the way Kyrie—in panther form, her fur velvet-dark—interposed herself between him and Dire, that she meant for him to go past. But how could he go past when Kyrie's life was at risk? He remembered what Dire could do. And he wasn't willing to see him treat Kyrie as he'd treated Rafiel.

Oh, Dire might want Kyrie, or at least he might think so. But did he want her more than he wanted to fulfill his duty and return, once more victorious, to his cosmopolitan lifestyle? And Kyrie would make as good a sacrifice to Dire's lifestyle as Rafiel.

Tom realized his body had made the decision for him because while he thought, he had stripped bare and untied his boots. He now stepped out of his boots, and spoke, in his slurpy almost-dragon voice, "Attack me, you prehistoric horror. Or can you only defeat girls?"

And then he shifted.

* * *

Damn the man, Kyrie thought, a passenger in the back of the panther's mind, even as Dire lunged at her and tossed her aside, while he rounded on Tom.

Kyrie landed heavily on a scruffy front lawn, and tried to get up. And couldn't. At first she thought she must be paralyzed, and then she realized Tom wasn't moving either. After issuing his challenge and leaping, he'd landed heavily, as if he couldn't control his paws, and now was half lying on the street, while Dire circled around him, growling, with every appearance of enjoyment.

He was going to kill Tom, she realized. He was in their minds. He was controlling them. And he was going to kill Tom. And then probably kill her.

Don't be silly, Kitten Girl, his voice said in her mind, with a suggestion of indecent laughter. That would be a waste.

She wanted to get up. She tried with all her mind and heart to get up. But she couldn't. She couldn't move.

And then, from above, came the flap of wings.

* * *

Tom heard the flap of wings. His eyes—about the only part of him not paralyzed—turned upward in time to see huge wings, descending. He wanted to protest, to say no. He hadn't asked for help. Even there, at death's door, he hadn't asked for help.

Let Dire kill him, but at least he would die free, and not owe his life to a criminal dragon.

Laughter filled his mind, and then a voice he remembered all too well. Commendable, it said. Or perhaps crazy. Never mind. Go now. You are free. Go take care of your friend.

And suddenly Tom could move, and he could see Kyrie move too. She was leaping towards the aquarium ahead of him. So she'd heard the golden bastard in her mind as well. And the golden bastard was interposing himself between Tom and Kyrie and Dire. The dire wolf screamed a sound of pure fury and Tom, who hadn't wanted the Great Sky Dragon's help, nonetheless hoped the Great Sky Dragon was doing to Dire what he did to them, and rifling through his mind, and using it. He hoped so, as he lurched, as fast as he could towards the aquarium.

* * *

Kyrie hit the aquarium door first, full lope, and rebounded back, shocked. Locked. The door was locked. The cat in whose mind Kyrie was couldn't understand it, even as Kyrie forced it to try to turn the knob. Until she felt a dragon claw rest, gently, on her shoulder, moving her aside.

The cat felt threatened and wanted to fight, but Kyrie was in control and she forced the body to step aside. And felt it recoil in terror and put belly to the ground and growl softly, as the dragon faced the door and opened his massive jaws, and let loose a stream of white-hot flame.

The door cracked. The outer lining of metal melted and ran. The inside layer of wood charred. The door fell inward, and Kyrie forced the great cat to leap in, over the smoldering door, and down a hallway, to where a door stood open with a seal ripped in two, and Kyrie lunged up the hallway, and loped up the stairs to the platform, in time to see...Rafiel, in human form, leaning over the railing and getting a push, and falling, falling headlong into the shark tank.

He made a sound of panic as he fell, and his shape blurred and changed. It was the lion that hit the water with a loud splash. The cover of the tank, removed, stood to the side.

A woman laughed, and turned to Kyrie. "I see. Why don't you join your boyfriend?"

Tom wanted to scream "No," but what came out of the dragon's mouth was a long, incoherent growl, as he rushed in, past Kyrie and almost past the woman on the platform.

The thought in his mind was that he must go and rescue Rafiel. He must. But he had a moment to think that if the woman stayed where she was, she might find a way to push Kyrie in. And he couldn't allow that, so he did what seemed all too logical to the dragon, and grabbed at the woman, pulling her in with him, as he plunged in after Rafiel.

The sharks hadn't started on Rafiel, who was trying to swim, his lion body quite adept at swimming, but not so much at reaching up to the edge of the tank lid and climbing out. He growled softly, whenever he tried and failed. And he looked—the human in Tom's dragon mind thought—very much like a drowned cat.

He thought all this as he plunged in, hitting the water with a great splash and going down-down-down, drawing a deep breath scented with what seemed like intoxicating perfume, and realizing he was breathing under water.

He came up beneath Rafiel, lifting him, pushing him up with his own body, till the lion's paws touched the edge of the opening, and then the dragon gave the lion a little shove, pushing him out.

And he felt a shark—skin rough as sandpaper—touch his back paw. Something from a nature program about sharks turning, or circling or something before biting crossed the dragon's mind, and the dragon did what came instinctively. It snapped downward and it bit at the shark. Hard. The shark flopped. Blood poured out. Other sharks rushed in.

Feeding frenzy, Tom's human mind thought and pushed, with all its might, at the dragon's body, impelling it, mind over matter, to the opening, its wings unfurling, half jumping, half flying out of the tank.

On the way he picked up the lion, who had been cowering on the edge of the tank where the covering rested, and lifted him all the way to the platform.

And before he could shift and talk or look around for Kyrie, he heard an unholy growl.

* * *

Dante Dire, Kyrie thought. And—through the panther's mind, confused, blurred—went the thought that he'd escaped the Great Sky Dragon. Somehow. She would hate to imagine how.

And then she was plunging after him, madly. She felt him bite her, attack her, too ravening to care who she was, too maddened with rage to care whether he could just mind-control her instead.

From the shadows a dragon emerged. No. Two dragons. One of them red and with a foreshortened arm. And a very wet lion. They all fell on Dire, and Kyrie couldn't honestly say who was attacking what, except that Dire seemed to be everywhere at once, his teeth biting and his claws scraping, but never enough to get hold of them.

And then he seemed to regain control. Suddenly, the horrible smell she remembered from her kitchen when he'd attacked her there, surrounded them. And into their minds poured Dire's voice, If you are done now, I can kill you.

But at the same moment, two other voices sounded. "I don't think so," said a tremulous voice and, looking over, Kyrie was surprised to see Old Joe standing, for once, very straight. Next to him was an old Japanese gentleman, looking faintly amused.

You! Dire said. You. You're weak. You can never face me.

"We're not weak," the Japanese gentleman said. His accent was, clearly, the real thing, but not that incomprehensible. "We are free. We would have nothing to do with your council and your rules. We told you before it was wrong to separate yourself from humanity."

"We told you it would come to no good," Old Joe said, his voice clearer and more firm than it had ever been, at least that Kyrie had heard it.

"No good, uh?" Dire had shifted. He was human, looking at them with scornfully curled lip. "I am the executioner. Even the Daddy Dragon couldn't face me. He cares too much for his whelp to use his form too long. He was afraid I would hurt the body he was borrowing." He grinned. "And I won. Because I don't care for anything but myself. Come," he said, and shifted, in a single, fluid movement. Come now, we'll see who is stronger.

It all happened too fast. There were suddenly an alligator and a giant spider crab. And they shifted, and the crab was stabbing at the dire wolf, while the alligator seemed to be everywhere at once, biting and slicing. The dire wolf's teeth closed on hard carapace and armored back. The alligator's teeth clack-clacked in what sounded like laughter.

There was a howl, a growl of pent-up fury, and suddenly the dire wolf was not there.

* * *

"He will come back," Tom said softly. And Kyrie realized he had shifted, and so had she, and they were both naked, hugging on the top step of the platform.

Before she could answer, a dripping-wet Rafiel walked around the shark tank, below them, and halfway up the stairs. "I'll be damned if I can explain all the trace on the scene now," he said, ruefully. "They're going to find scales, and blood of at least three different animals. But," he said, "I don't think that the murders will go on." He looked incredibly tired and somehow defeated, even as he announced good news. "She...shifted as she died. They will find human remains in the tank this time. Female."

Tom, pulling Kyrie against him, shuddered. And Kyrie said, "Why did you let things get that advanced?"

"I don't know. It could be some form of pheromones," he said. "Or else, she put something in my drink." He looked up, his golden eyes very sad. "I know that it was all delusion. I know she just wanted a snack. But for a moment, it was like being a kid again, back when I was in love with Alice." He shrugged and sat on the bottom step of the platform, and leaned against the railing. "I guess time never winds backwards."

And Kyrie who remembered something from the fight, looked to the other side of the steps, where Conan sat, looking just as dejected as Rafiel. "Conan," she said, "what was it Dire said, about the Great Sky Dragon borrowing your form?"

Conan shook. He looked up at her, seeming drained and pale. "He...he didn't...I mean, he can't be everywhere at once, but just like he can listen through his underlings...he can make us take his form. With all of his powers. Only if he does it for long, we die."

Kyrie blinked at him. "He made you take his form?"

"Just...just for a moment. Then he realized I couldn't stand it..."

"And he realized he cared for you?" Tom said, skeptically.

Conan shook his head. "No. He realized he cared for you. And he thought..." He sighed. "He thought you wouldn't forgive him if he killed me. Even when...even if it was to kill Dire. So he...let me go. He told me...in my mind, that I was now yours. That I'm to do what you tell me."

Tom coughed. "Mine?" Something like a choked laughter escaped him. "No offense, Conan, you're a nice guy. But the only person I ever wanted to be mine was Kyrie, and it wasn't in that sense. If he gave you to me, I give you to yourself. You're yours."

"I was afraid of that," Conan said, dolefully.

"Afraid," Kyrie said.

Conan shrugged. "Yes. I don't know how...not to belong to someone. I've taken orders from someone since before I was an adult. I'm not used to being my own person."

"Try it," she said, not without sympathy. "You can get used to it. And you still belong to us. Just as a friend, not a...possession."

"Truly?" he asked. "And I can...still work at The George?"

Kyrie felt Tom tremble with silent laughter. "If you want to. But I thought you were going to sing for your supper."

Conan blushed. "Maybe someday. But for now, I'm just glad to have a job."

"And on that, gentlemen and lady," Tom said, "I'm starving, and I think we should go to The George for some food. Because, you know it and I know it, that the old bastard is going to come back and try to kill us and right now another shift might kill me."

"Maybe he won't try to kill us," Old Joe said. He was standing alone. The crab shifter was nowhere to be seen. "Maybe he's afraid now?"

"I very much doubt it," Tom said, drily. But he added, "And Joe? Thank you. You saved our lives, I think."

Old Joe shrugged, but blushed and said, "You do what you have to."

"Yeah," Tom said. "At any rate, let's go eat something. What about your friend? Does he want to come?"

"Who? He? No. He never does. He doesn't feel very comfortable as a human, anymore. All he wants is his aquarium and to watch life go by."

* * *

Two weeks later, Tom woke up from sleep in his back porch, at his and Kyrie's house, looking up at the ceiling some past occupier had painted a deep pink. The bathroom had been repaired. The house was silent. Kyrie's breathing wasn't audible from her bedroom, and neither was what he was sure must be Notty's quite industrial-sized purr.

He wasn't sure what had wakened him, but Dire was on his mind. He hadn't seen Dire or heard from him for two weeks, and he wanted Old Joe to be right. He wanted it to be that Dire had gone away forever.

And just as he thought this he heard the voice in his mind. Hey, Dragon Boy, come and be killed! With the words came a flash—the view of Dire, in his animal form, waiting, down the street from Tom, in a little park, where pine trees covered in snow stood silent guard over a gazebo and stone boulders. In summer, the park was frequented by everyone in the neighborhood. But in winter no one ever went there, and the little lake in the middle was iced over—though not enough for anyone to skate on it.

It was the perfect place, Tom thought, for a duel. A shifter duel. But he was thousands of years younger than Dire. And he knew he couldn't fight the mind powers.

Or did he? There was something Dire had said, about how the Great Sky Dragon himself had been defeated because he cared too much for his subordinate. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps the way to fight with the mind, the way the Ancient Ones did, came from not caring.

Yes. It does, Dante Dire said in his mind. It comes from us having seen the generations unfold and caring for nothing. You love life, that's your weakness. While we love only death, even our own, if it comes to that.

And something in Tom's mind beat against the words. Denied them. He didn't care if they were true. He would not accept them. That was no way to live.

He got up, undressed silently. On his way out the door, he opened Kyrie's door a crack—enough to see her sleeping, under the moonlight, on her side, her face supported on her arm. Notty was nestled in her hair, purring. They looked peaceful. Domestic.

And Tom went out, into the cold dark night.

On his front porch, after closing the door carefully behind himself, he shifted.

* * *

He flew into the park. Dante waited for him, shifted, in the deepest dark, near where the trees clustered, just by the lakeside.

So good of you to come and die, he said. And Tom could feel him casting cold binds of domination and power over his mind. Nets of cold control.

But Tom held on to what he knew was true. To what he loved. The image of Kyrie and Notty, sleeping in the moonlight. The George, shining like a neon jewel through the snow. Anthony at the grill. Conan tending tables. The images burned within him like warm fires. Like home fires, calling to his heart.

Mine, mine, mine, he said, and while he caught Dire trying to hold on to these images, to threaten them, to tell Tom they were weaknesses, he couldn't hold them.

Tom's love for his family, his friends, his diner, shone through, warming his soul, and Dire's cold thoughts slipped off. He had only hatred and barrenness to offer. And those were never very strong weapons.

After that, it was easy. The dragon, after all, could fly. The dire wolf couldn't. He looked almost small, in the dark, amid the trees and the snow.

The vicious teeth tried to rend Tom's wing, as Tom approached, but Tom flipped over, suddenly, and bit the dire wolf's neck. Hard.

Tom grabbed it by the neck and shook it, as Dire started to shift, under his jaws—guessing Tom would have more trouble killing a human than an animal. A pitiful human fist hit the dragon's scales. A forlorn human scream echoed. Again and again, Dire tried to cast his cold uncaring spell upon Tom's mind—Tom pressed harder.

He tasted blood, and recoiled from it, but forced his jaws to close. The taste made him gag, but he persisted. Bone crunched. Dire's head and body fell, two separate parts.

It was truth that Dire loved death and pain—or causing them. But Tom loved life. And while Tom lived he would keep those he loved safe. Which meant Dire must die.

Afterwards, Tom took the head, and the body, and swam with them, deep into the cold, dark lake—after breaking the ice covering on it. He found that there were caves, on either side of the lake, leading quite deep under the city, perhaps to what had once been mines and were now flooded. He put the head and the body in separate tunnels, and blocked the entrance with large stones. He didn't want either ever found.

And then, half frozen, he swam back, and walked home.

After a shower, after rinsing his mouth with mouthwash, again and again, and again, Tom put his robe on and went to the kitchen, where he put paid to two packages of sandwich ham while the dozen eggs they had just bought boiled enough to not be repulsive.

When the craving for protein abated, still feeling chilled, Tom opened the door to Kyrie's room and called, softly, "Kyrie?"

She opened her eyes, and Notty's head shot up. "Yes?"

"Do you mind if I sleep here? Just sleep? I mean...I just... want to be with you."

Kyrie sat up in bed. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing. I'm just...I'm very cold."

"Are you coming down with something?"

"I don't think so. I'm just...I just need company."

She shifted to one side of the double bed, taking Notty with her, leaving him space. Tom climbed in, and curled up on the mattress, looking at Kyrie and Notty, who was now parading back and forth between the two of them and purring, the contented purr of a cat with two body servants.

"Kyrie," Tom said, wanting to talk, wanting to explain this feeling that wasn't regret or guilt, but had shades of both. He'd taken a life. He'd killed someone who'd lived thousands of years. He'd had to do it. None of them would be safe till he was dead. So why was it that this thing he'd done made him feel so cut off from the rest of humanity?

He moved fractionally towards Kyrie. "Listen," he said.

Notty jumped up, back arched and hissed towards Tom. His pose was so possessive of Kyrie that Tom laughed aloud. "Yes, yes, your girl cat, Notty. I'll behave."

He petted the ruffled kitten till Kyrie said, softly, "What is it?"

He looked at her. Her eyes were half closed. He smiled. The talk would wait. Tonight was not the night to try to explain what he'd done or how he felt. He wanted more than anything to hold Kyrie, to love her. But tonight was not the night for that, either.

Let the night close itself upon its horror. Let wonders unfold another time. "Nothing," he said quietly.

He petted Notty till he passed from wakefulness into a dream where he was holding Kyrie in the midst of a field of snow. And it was very warm.

* * *

When they got into The George, in the evening, they found Conan and Anthony sitting at the back booth, in front of what looked like a veritable mound of bread. Sitting across from them was a young woman with brown hair, hazel eyes and a blade of a nose. She looked towards them and extended a hand and spoke, in a pleasant contralto, "Hi. I'm Laura Miller. You must think I'm the most unreliable person alive, but I simply couldn't come in before. I had to take care of some family matters...But I'm here now, and I'm free to interview for the job, if you still want to consider me. And I brought some samples of my baking with me."

"Consider her," Anthony said. He picked a roll from the confusion of bread. "She makes this Italian bread...My mom would weep, I tell you."

Tom, grinning, turned towards her. "Well, as you can see, I have to consider you. And we were taking care of family matters, too. I have no idea how to interview you, just now, my mind is still in a whirl. So...is there anything you want to tell me?"

The woman blinked at him, then looked toward Kyrie, then, perhaps having decided that if they were crazy they weren't, at least, unpleasant, rattled off quickly, "I can do gourmet cooking, but really, I don't like it as much as a variety of good plain cooking. I truly do need to bake, though. Cookies, biscuits, breads, muffins, scones, pies, fancy pastries, whatever. I like making breads and pies and biscuits and muffins most of all, though. Cornbread's fun to make, both Northern and Southern. So's gingerbread. With or without rum sauce. Fresh pitas are like a miracle, puffing themselves up like little balloons. Stews and soups and prep cooking are satisfying, too. But not as good as baking. But I can get the bucket of scrams ready for morning rush, and get the onions and peppers for morning and lunch rush, and chop the salad, and mix up the tsatsiki.

"I can do a lot of prep cooking. I can do quantity cooking. I can run an industrial dishwasher. But I really love baking. Just don't ask me to do gourmet dinners where everything needs to be perfectly plated. My idea of decorative plating is to put the juice with the cherries and onions over the pork loin rather than beside it. And maybe to have carrots and green beans by the pork loin instead of potatoes and corn. But fancy plating with everything all pointing in perfect directions and swirled sauces? It all tastes the same in the mouth, anyway. And unless it's someone's birthday, I don't frost cakes fancy. Just tasty. I like to do one-offs, but that's why I don't like fancy frosting every day. Special should be special. And pies are either lattice, pierced, open, or have a couple of shapes out with tart cutters. If The George wants Martha Stewart, you can hire her. But I do use my grandma's pie crust recipe. And she won blue ribbons." She stopped, giving the impression that she'd run out of breath.

And Kyrie looked at Tom and found him looking at her. And she wondered how the woman would do with shifters and madness, but, hell, Anthony seemed to do well enough even while being totally clueless. And frankly, the list of breads was enough to make her want to drool.

She winked at Tom. He winked back and they said at the same time, "You're hired."

Just at that moment, she thought she smelled a vague shifter's scent beneath the smell of all the baking. Was their new employee a shifter?

But Tom was saying, "We'll discuss terms, okay? But we're flexible, since one of the really important qualities I wanted was someone who could bake." He'd somehow got hold of a little curlicue of a roll sprinkled with what looked like cheese, and was eating it, merrily. "And you certainly can do that."

Laura smiled, and at that moment the bell behind the front door tinkled. Edward Ormson, whom Kyrie always thought looked like an older and better-dressed version of Tom, came in. He was pulling a flight bag, and looked up at the group of them with a quizzical smile. "Oh, good," he said, to no one in particular. He looked at Tom, "I assume everything is well and you still haven't eaten anyone?"

Did Laura's eyes widen just a little? Kyrie couldn't tell, and Tom was laughing. "No, Dad. I haven't. And yeah, everything is fine."

"First day they opened the passes, so first day I could get here. I will go and check in at the hotel later, but I thought I'd come and see how you were doing, and make sure everything was okay."

* * *

Tom felt...oddly amused and tender. His father had driven here, as soon as the snow stopped for two days and the mountain passes opened, to make sure everything was okay. He could have called. He could have asked someone else to check on them. But no. Edward Ormson, who hated making himself uncomfortable, had driven a mountain road that would still have patches of ice and which was probably crowded with long-delayed travelers, to come here and check on his son.

They'd all come a long way.

But Tom still had no idea whatsoever how to express his affection for his father. So he did the only thing he knew how to do. He stepped behind the counter, and took off his jacket, putting it on the shelf under there. Then he put on his apron and his bandana, and said, "Okay, Dad. I'll make you dinner before you go to your hotel. What would you like?"

His dad grinned. "Noah's boy."

"We don't eat people," Tom said. "I thought we'd established that."

"No, no. See, you have all the diner slang in the menu, so I went and studied it, on-line. 'Noah's boy' is ham. You know. Ham. In the Bible."

Kyrie giggled, and Tom gave her an indulgent smile. "Um...I don't think we have that in the menu, but sure. I'll make it. One Noah's boy, coming up. And then I'll discuss your pay and hours, Laura."

A look over his shoulder showed him that Laura was made of uncommonly resilient stuff. She was smiling a little and had sat down at the booth.

The front door tinkled, to let in the dinner rush hour, and Kyrie put her apron on, ready to go attend to the tables.

The Poet came in and sat at his table, with his notebook. Tom wondered if the Poet truly was a member of the Rodent Liberation Front, and, if so, if he was the squirrel that shifted to the size of a German shepherd and smoked cigarettes. Anything was possible, he guessed. But he hoped the Rodent Liberation Front would be still now for a while, and let them have at least a little peace.

Kyrie was still behind the counter. Before going back out, she touched his shoulder with her warm hand. It wasn't even a public display of affection. But it was enough.

And The George's neon signs shone softly, while a fresh snowfall started—big, fluffy flakes, blanketing Goldport in quietness and cold.

THE END