Draw One In The Dark(19)

But before she spoke, she realized that there would be many people—perhaps most people—who would do that. She'd met them often enough, growing up. The families who took foster children but didn't want them associating with their real children; the children at school who shunned you because you lived in a less than savory part of town; the teachers who assumed you were dumb and hopeless because you didn't live with your blood family.



Had she done the same with Tom, in shunning him because of his appearance? His drug habit? But no. She'd been justified in that. Those were things he could and should control. However, this trouble . . . Well, perhaps he'd brought it on himself. Perhaps at the root of it all was a drug deal gone bad, or the theft of something valuable.



She couldn't imagine anyone stealing anything valuable from a triad composed of dragon shape-shifters. She would have to assume Tom was brasher, and perhaps braver, than she. But she didn't know him well enough to rule it out, either.



And again, she had had plenty of experience with his type: the alcoholic foster parents, the doping foster brothers. You gave them chance and chance and chance, and they never improved, never got any better. They just told you more and more lies and got bolder and bolder.



She didn't know what to say and she couldn't guess in which category Tom would fall. So, instead, she stuck to the need at hand. That had always seen her through. When in trouble, stick to the need at hand.



"I need you to help me bandage my arm and disinfect my back," she said. And not sure why his eyes grew so wide at this request, added, "Please?"



He nodded and shrugged. "Of course," he said. His eyes remained wide, as if he were either very surprised or very skeptical. "Where do you keep the first-aid supplies?"

* * *



"They're in the bathroom," Kyrie told him. "Behind the mirror."



Tom headed that way. It was a relief to have something to do—to have something to think of. He'd been sitting there, feeling miserable, drinking his coffee, wondering what was the best way to leave.



The bathroom was still full of steam—but the smell was indefinably different there. Not just the soap and shampoo he'd used also, but something else . . . Something he could neither define nor explain. It smelled like Kyrie. That was all he could say. It was a familiar smell and he realized he'd smelled it around her even under the layers of odors at the Athens. A hint of cinnamon, an edge of burnt sugar. Only not really, but that was what the smells made him think of. Like . . . What the kitchen smelled like when Mrs. Lopez had been making pastries.



He opened the medicine cabinet and collected bandages, antibiotic cream, small scissors, bandages, hydrogen peroxide, and cotton wool. It was the best-stocked home cabinet he'd ever seen. Other than his own. Shape-shifters. You came home cut, scraped, you weren't even sure how.



And Kyrie was one of them. Just like him.



That he was attracted to her didn't make it any easier. He'd been attracted to her from the first moment he'd seen her—giving him the jaundiced once-over when Frank introduced them. But his attraction to women had come to nothing these last five years, ever since he'd found out he was a shape-shifter.



There were too many things to be afraid of—shifting in front of her, for instance. Hurting her while he was shape-shifted. And then the whole thing with the drugs, with which he'd tried—unsuccessfully—to control his shifts. It made him associate with too many shady characters for him to want any girl he even liked involved with. And then, of course, the . . . He shifted his mind forcefully away from even thinking of the object. That. And the triad. This without even thinking of nightmare scenarios: pregnancy. A baby who was born shifted.



And now in one night he'd managed to visit all but the last of these scenarios. He'd shifted in front of Kyrie. He'd probably hurt someone else in front of her. And he'd landed her in the thick of his trouble with the triad. Damn. And all this when he'd just found out she was a shape-shifter too. She was one like him.



Oh, she was not the only one he'd met, in his five years of wandering around, homeless and rootless. But she was the first one he'd talked to, the first one he'd had anything to do with. The only female . . . Up to tonight, he would have sworn that only males shifted shape.



And what good did it do him that she too was a shape-shifter—that she would understand him?



Absolutely none. First, he had blown it so far with her that if his hopes were a substance they would be scraping them off the floor and ceiling for months. And second—and second there was the triad.



Tom had been attracted to Kyrie before tonight. Now he liked her. He liked her a lot. He might very well be on his way to falling in love with her. If he had the slightest idea what love was and how one fell in it, he would be able to say for sure. But here the thing was—he cared about her. He cared a lot. An awful lot. He didn't want her dead. As he was bound to be, soon enough, now that the triad had got really serious about finding him.