"We—uh? What about Tom?"
"Well, he's not as bad as I expected," Rafiel said. "Not nearly. But he is . . . ah . . . Tom has issues."
Kyrie nodded. "Yes, but—" She didn't want to discuss Tom nor Tom's issues, nor could she imagine what Tom had to do with any of this. Tom's personality had nothing to do with the predicament they were in.
Sure, it would have been helpful if he could have managed to avoid tangling with the triad dragons. But that was, surely, just a fraction of his problems. The beetles loomed much larger in Kyrie's mind, perhaps because she had experienced them up close and personal. And Tom was not a werebeetle. Of that she was sure.
"No. I just . . ." Rafiel looked flustered, which was a new one for him. "I just am going to say this once and be done, okay? I can't help notice that he's attracted to you, and I think I've seen you . . . I mean, you give the impression of being attracted to him too, sometimes."
"I don't think I am," she said. "It's just that we've been working together for a while and I think I've misjudged him horribly, and I feel guilty about that. So I've been nice to him, but I don't think—"
"Good," Rafiel said. "I mean, really. Tom is not a bad person, but I think he's been through a lot in his life, and I think it makes him . . . well . . . I think he's sometimes not as well-adjusted as he would like to be. And I wouldn't want to wish that on you."
He put his hand across the table, on top of hers. Kyrie withdrew her hand, slowly, not wanting it to seem like a rejection. If she was reading this right, Rafiel had just tried to clear the field of his rival in a most underhanded way, something she thought only women did. Perhaps because she'd seen it between women and girls in her middle and high school years.
Fortunately, she wasn't sure she was interested in either of these men—or in any men. She'd seen too much of marriage and relationships through her time in foster care to think that she would ever take any relationship for granted or view it as a given. On top of that the kinks the shifters' natures would put into any relationship just about had her deciding to remain celibate the rest of her life. The knife-in-the-back approach to friendship and love certainly didn't incline her toward Rafiel.
"Tom thinks that Frank and his girlfriend might be the beetles," Kyrie said, rapidly, before Rafiel could resume his wholly inappropriate talk.
"Frank and his girlfriend?" Rafiel asked. "Why?"
Kyrie told him. She told him about the woman who ordered pie every night and who said that Frank and his girlfriend had held hands a month back, and about the poet and the whole eyes meeting across a crowded room thing.
Rafiel frowned. "Don't you think it's all a bit in the air?" he asked. "I mean, they're just a middle-aged couple, and perhaps they're not so good on the relationship and getting along with each other front. Perhaps they aren't very good at connecting with each other?"
"But . . ." Kyrie said, and seized on the one thing she was sure of. "But his girlfriend first met him around a month ago." And then, with desperate recollection. "And, you know, he had a Band-aid on his neck the day after I speared the beetle."
Rafiel sighed. "He and how many guys in Goldport? Think. Perhaps he cut himself shaving."
"At the back of his neck?"
"Well, okay, so he scratched himself. Or had a pimple that blew up. It happens. Don't you think if he'd been stuck with an umbrella, even in another shape, it would require more than a Band-aid?"
"Not necessarily," Kyrie said. "We heal fast."
"I still say this is all in the air," Rafiel said. He sipped at his coffee as if he were angry at it. "You have no proof. There are probably dozen of couples—hundreds—with weird relationships, who started a month ago, and where one of them had some sort of injury on the neck that day."
"I doubt hundreds," Kyrie said. "And besides, you know, there is the fact that she has a very convenient burial ground."
"What?"
"The castle. She bought the castle. You've seen the grounds. She could bury a hundred people there in shallow graves and be fairly assured they wouldn't be found. That's pretty hard in urban Goldport."
"Not really," Rafiel said. "You know, people have backyard lawns."
Kyrie snorted with laughter before she could stop herself. "I suppose you could fit one corpse in my backyard lawn. Two if you put them very close together."
Rafiel was jiggling his leg rapidly up and down. "Yeah, but some people have bigger lawns." He frowned, bringing his brows together. "What do you want me to do about it, anyway? Do you want me to burst into the Athens and arrest them because they hold hands and don't talk?"