Now, in the dark of night, it was silent and ill lit. As she pulled into the parking lot, Tom asked, "It was one of us, wasn't it?"
"Pardon?" she said. She knew what he meant. She knew all too well. He was asking if the lion was like them. If the lion too had a human form and one not so human. But Kyrie had managed until very recently to convince herself she only had one form and that everything else was hallucination. Mental illness.
Now this whole thing felt like mental illness. She parked the car, turned the engine off.
"You know . . ." Tom said. His blue eyes were earnest, and he plucked at her sleeve like a little kid seeking reassurance. "You know, a shape-shifter. Like us."
She shrugged. "Seems unlikely it escaped from a zoo," she said. "Someone would have given the alarm, wouldn't they?"
Tom nodded, as if considering this. "What . . . what did it want?"
Kyrie shrugged. She wanted to say he wanted everything but all she had to go on was the smell. And she didn't wish to discuss her response to the smell with Tom.
"Do you think it killed the . . . person?"
Did you? Kyrie thought, but only shrugged. How did you ask someone who looked as bewildered and shocked as Tom if he'd committed murder? And was she really feeling sorry for Tom? Must be going soft in the head.
Tom got out of the car, patted down where the pockets would be in normal pants, and Kyrie realized he wouldn't have keys.
But he turned around and said, "Thank you for driving me," and pushed the door as if to close it.
"Wait, do you have keys?"
He shrugged. "The neighbor usually keeps them," he said. "For me. I keep his."
His? For some reason it had never occurred to Kyrie that someone like Tom could entrust his key—or anything else—to a male. If she'd thought of his social life outside work at all, she imagined a never-ending succession of sweet things across his mattress. But now she realized she was probably wrong. It was unlikely there was anyone on his mattress. He had come from a homeless shelter. And he was a dragon.
"Keith keeps my key and I keep his. . . . So if we lose it while we're out," Tom said, an edge of impatience in his voice. "He's a college student. They lose their keys." He hesitated a minute. "Gets stinking drunk too." He said it as if he, himself, never took any mind-altering substances.
And out of nowhere, an altruistic impulse, or perhaps the thought that he'd saved her—from what?—with the lion in the parking lot, made her get out. "I'll come with you," she said. "To make sure you get in okay."
She had a feeling, a strange feeling something was wrong. Wrong with this parking lot, with this entire area. There was a feeling of being watched and not in a friendly manner, but she wasn't sure by whom, or how. Any other day, any other time, she would have shrugged it off. But now . . . Well . . . perhaps she was picking up smell or something. Something was definitely wrong.
She got out of the car, unsteady on her legs, glad that the moonlight was hidden by the shadows of the buildings. The pressure of the full moonlight was all she needed now. At the same time, she felt as if the buildings themselves were looming shapes waiting to jump her.
It wasn't possible, was it? For the buildings to be shifters? With a human form? What was this? How many people did it afflict? And why was she afraid?
She wasn't sure of anything anymore. Sweat trickled down her back and her legs felt like water while she followed Tom to the steps outside the door of the nearest building.
* * *
"Keith might not be home," Tom said, pressing the button. Actually, it was damn bloody sure that Keith Vorpal would not be home. Keith was a film student at Goldport College and somewhat of a ladies' man. One or the other tended to keep him out of the house on warm summer nights. He always assumed Tom had the same sort of life and only seemed somewhat amused that Tom managed to come home naked so often. He took Tom's mutters of "some good beer" or a "glass too many" and asked no questions. Which in itself would be worrisome, except that Keith's own life was such a mess of perils and odd adventures that he probably took it for granted everyone else's life was that crazy. And no worse.
Their arrangement with the keys rested on a vague hope that one of them might be home when the other needed a key. So far it had worked out, more or less. But there was always the chance . . .
Tom rang again. A buzz he recognized as Keith's voice came through the loudspeaker. He couldn't actually understand what Keith said, but he could guess. "It's Tom, man," Tom said. "Lost my key, somehow . . ."