Draw One In The Dark(15)

Sweeping the crumbs of glass from the seat, he smashed the key holder, reached down to the floor, and grabbed a screwdriver he'd noticed there while Kyrie was driving him. "Remembered you had this here," he said, turning to see her bewildered expression as her car started. And then, "Get in. I'll pay for the damage. Just get in."



Was it his imagination, or had he seen the shadow of a wing in the window above?



He reached across to unlock the passenger door, as she jumped in.



She fumbled with the seat belt as he tore out of the parking lot in a screech of rubber. Sweat was dripping from his forehead into his eyes. He was sure he was sitting on a chunk of glass. It had been years since he'd driven and he found the turns odd and difficult. The car his father had given him as a sixteenth-birthday gift handled much better than this. Good thing there was almost no traffic on the roads at this time.



He tore around the corner of Fairfax, turning into a narrower street and hoping he was only imagining the noise of wings above. He tried to choose tree-lined streets, knowing well enough that it was harder to see into them from above. The vision of dragons seemed to focus naturally on moving things. In a street of trees, shaken by the wind, in which shadows shifted and shook, it would be harder to see them.



Some of these streets were narrow enough—and the trees above them well over a hundred years old—that it made it impossible to see the streets at all, except as a green canopy. He took one street, then another, then yet another, tearing down quiet residential streets like a madman and probably causing the families snug in their brick ranches to wonder what was happening out there.



They passed two people walking, male and female, he tall and she much shorter, leaning into him. Shorts, T-shirts, a swirling white skirt, a vision of normalcy and a relationship that he couldn't aspire too, and Tom bit his lip and thumped the side of the wheel with his hand, bringing a startled glance from Kyrie.



He'd gone a good ten minutes and was starting to think they'd lost their pursuers, when he thought of Kyrie. He turned to her, wanting to explain he really would pay and that she should not—



Her dark eyes gazed into his, unwavering. "How many cars have you stolen?" she asked.

* * *



The way he'd hot-wired the car, quickly—she swore it had taken him less than a few seconds—had chilled Kyrie to the bone.



She supposed she should have known someone with a drug problem, working minimum-wage jobs had to supplement with crime, but all of a sudden she realized he was more dangerous—more out of control than she'd thought.



More out of control than the other dragons?



And yet, after he'd driven like a madman for a while, he looked at her with a devastatingly scared expression in his pale face. Despite chiseled features and the now all-too-obvious dark shadow of unshaven beard, he managed to look about five and worried he'd be put in time-out.



"How many cars have you stolen?" she asked, before she knew she was going to say it.



His expression closed. She would not be able to describe it any other way. The eager, almost childish panic vanished, leaving in its place a dark, unreadable glare, his eyebrows low over his dark blue eyes. He turned away, looking forward, and shrugged, a calculated shrug from his broad shoulders. One quarter inch up, one quarter inch down.



"I used to go joy riding," he said. "When I was a kid. I got bored." And when she didn't answer that, he added. "Look, I've told you. I'll pay you for the damage." And again, at her continued silence. "I couldn't let us be caught. If they'd caught us, they'd have killed us."



At this, he stopped. He stopped long enough for her to gather her thoughts. She felt so tired that if she weren't in pain, she would have fallen asleep. But she hurt. Her shoulder felt as if it had been dislocated in the fight. There was a slash across her torso that she prayed wouldn't need stitches, and a broad swath of her buttock felt scraped, as though it had rubbed hard against a scaly hide. Which it probably had, though she didn't remember.



"Who are they?" she finally asked. "Why are they after you?"



"They're a Chinese triad," he said. "They're members of a . . . crime syndicate. Asian."



"Admirably described," she said, and heard the hint of sarcasm in her own voice, and was surprised she still had the strength for it. "But what do they want with you?"



He hesitated. For just a moment he glanced at her, and the scared little boy was back, with wide-open eyes, and slightly parted lips.



He looked back at the road in time to take them, tightly, around a corner, tires squealing, car tilting. "They think I stole something from them," he said, with the defensive tone of a child explaining it really, really, really wasn't him who put the clamp on the cat's tail.