There could be nothing odd in his apartment. The only reason his hand trembled was because of his being so tired. And the corpse and everything.
He slid the key in and turned it.
* * *
In the moment before Tom opened the door Kyrie had a wild surge of panic. She wanted to tell him to wait, but she couldn't speak. And she didn't know why he should wait. She just had a feeling—added up from rustling, from sounds she could not possibly have heard, from an odd smell, from a weird tingle up her spine—that something was wrong, very wrong.
Perhaps Tom was going to drag her into his apartment and— And what? Imagination failed her. She had seen him in that bathroom, so slow and confused he didn't even seem to know how to wipe away blood from himself. She had seen him standing there, helpless. She could hardly believe he would now turn around and rape her.
On the other hand, didn't they sacrifice virgins to dragons in the Middle Ages? She almost smiled at the thought of Tom as virgin-despoiler. The way he looked, he'd have trouble beating away the ones who threw themselves at him. Kyrie managed to calm herself completely, when Tom reached in and turned on the light.
The light revealed an unprepossessing living room, with the type of dark brown carpet that landlords slapped down when they didn't expect to rent to the upper echelons of society. But the rest . . .
The furniture, what there was of it—splinters of bookcase, remnants of couches with ugly brown polyester covering—seemed to have been piled up in the middle of the room as if someone had been getting ready to light a bonfire. And the window—the huge picture window opposite—was broken. A thousand splinters littered the carpet. Books and pieces of books fluttered all over.
Tom made a sound of distress and stepped into the room, and Kyrie stepped in behind him. He knelt by a pile of something on the carpet, and Kyrie focused on it, noticing shreds of denim, and what might or might once have been a white T-shirt. And over it all, a torn purple rag, with the Athens logo. The Athens sent the aprons home with the employees to get laundered at employee expense.
That meant that Tom had been ready to go to work when . . . The tingle in her spine grew stronger and the feeling that something was wrong, very wrong overwhelmed her. It was like a scream both soundless and so loud that it took over her whole thought, overcame her whole mind, reverberated from her whole being.
"Tom," she said, putting a hand on his shoulder. "Tom, we'd best—"
She never had time to finish. Someone or something, moving soundlessly behind them, had closed the door.
Kyrie heard the bolt slide home and turned, skin prickling, hair standing on end, to stare openmouthed at three men who stood between them and the door.
Men was dignifying them with a name they didn't quite deserve. They were boys, maybe nineteen or twenty, just at the edge of manhood. Oriental, dressed all in black, they clearly had watched one too many ninja movies. The middle one wore exquisitely groomed, slightly too long hair, the bangs arranged so they fell to perfection and didn't move. He must have spent a fortune on product.
The ones on either side were not so stylishly groomed, but one sported a tattoo of a Chinese letter in the middle of his forehead, while the other had a tattoo of a red dragon on the back of each hand—those clearly visible and he was clenching his fists and holding them up in a gesture more reminiscent of boxing than karate.
The far one shouted something, and Kyrie grabbed hold of Tom's arm, and shoved him behind her. He'd gone wooden puppet again.
The pretty boy in the middle laughed and said something—Kyrie presumed in Chinese—to his friend. Then added in English, "He only speaks English." But when he turned to Tom all traces of laughter had vanished from his expression, as he said, "You know what we want. You foiled the first fool who came looking, but, you see, we returned for you. Now give it to us, and we might not kill you or your pretty girlfriend."
Pretty girlfriend? Kyrie registered as if from a long way away that they were talking about her. Truth was, very few people ever had called her pretty. She was too . . . striking, and proud to be called that. Also at some level people must always have sensed what she was, because since she'd turned fifteen and the panther had made its first appearance, few men had made taunting comments in her presence. Hell, few men even addressed her in any way.
But if there was an instinct for self-protection, this trio was lacking it. The little one with the two dragons on the backs of his hands started laughing.
At least, he threw his head back and Kyrie thought he was laughing, a high-pitched, hysterical laughter. And then she realized what the laughter really was as his outlines blurred and he started to shift. Wings, and curving neck. All of it in lovely tones of red and gold, like all those Chinese paintings. But the features—which in paintings had always made Kyrie think of a naughty cat—looked malevolent. He hissed, between lips wholly unprepared for speech, "Give us the pearl."