Since he'd left home, he'd done his best not to be caught. He tried to visualize being in jail, and needing to shift. Or shifting without meaning to. He imagined turning into a dragon in confines where privacy didn't exist. He couldn't be arrested. He wouldn't be. He would kill himself first.
Kyrie looked at the ID, then at the man.
"May I come in?" the man asked. "I have a few questions to ask you. Just a few minutes of your time."
Silently, Kyrie opened the door, and the man came in. He didn't look surprised at all at seeing Tom, whom he greeted with a nod. But then why should he look surprised? He couldn't know that Kyrie didn't have a boyfriend, could he?
Tom willed himself to relax, to show no fear. Fear would make the man suspicious and would make him look harder for something that had triggered that reaction.
"Look, this is just a quick visit," the policeman said. "A quick question. You work at the Athens on Fairfax, right?"
Kyrie nodded.
"Mr. Frank Skathari, your boss, said you had left about midnight?"
Had it been midnight? Tom wondered. It seemed like an eternity to his tired body, his dizzy mind. He saw Kyrie nod and wondered if she had any more idea of the time than he did.
"You didn't see any large animal in the parking lot?"
"An . . . animal?" she asked.
"There was a corpse . . . I'm sorry. You might not have noticed," he said. "It was behind some vans. But there was a corpse, and it looked like it died by accident. An attack by some creature with large teeth. We're thinking like a Komodo dragon or something."
Dragon. Tom felt as if the word were directed at him. The policeman looked at him as he spoke. Or at least, his face turned in Tom's direction. It was hard to see what the man was looking at, exactly, with those sunglasses on. "People bring these pets from abroad," he was saying, as Tom focused on him again. "And let them loose. It could be dangerous. I just wanted to know if you'd seen something."
"No," Kyrie said, and sounded amazingly convincing. "I saw nothing strange. I was just concerned with Tom . . ." She made a head gesture toward him. "With getting Tom his medicine."
"Medicine?" the policeman asked, as if this were the clue that would unravel the whole case.
"Migraine," Tom said. It was the first thing to cross his mind. His father, he remembered, had migraines. "Migraine medicine."
"Oh," the policeman said. "I see." He sounded alarmingly as if he did. He looked at one of them and then the other. "So, you won't be able to help me."
"I'm afraid not," Kyrie said.
"That," he said, "is too bad. I was hoping you'd have coffee with me tomorrow." He looked at his watch and nodded. "Well, later today—and discuss if you might have heard something suspicious or . . . found something. Perhaps in the bathroom of the diner. We haven't looked there, yet, you know?"
Tom heard the sound of a train, inside his ears, complete with whistles and growing thuds. He felt as if he would pass out. The bathroom. The damn man had looked in the bathroom and . . . seen the towels. And he going to use it to blackmail Kyrie? Blackmail Kyrie into what? What had Tom got Kyrie into?
He felt a spasm come over his whole body, and knew he was going to shift. And he didn't have the strength nor the will power to stop it.
Kyrie gasped. He managed to see her through a fog of preshift trembling, and realized she wasn't looking at him, but at the door she had just closed.
Then she turned around and something—something about him, about the way he looked, made her eyes grow huge and panicky. "No," she said. "No, you idiot. Don't shift."
Her hand grabbed firmly at his arm, and it felt warm and human and real.
* * *
Kyrie turned from closing the door on the policeman's smiling face, and saw Tom . . . She couldn't describe it. He was Tom, undeniably Tom, human and bipedal, but there was something very wrong about his shape. His arms were too long, the wrist and quite a bit of green-shaded flesh protruding from the end of the sleeve. His hands were stretched out, too, his fingers elongated and the space between them strangely membranous. And his face, beneath the huge, puzzled blue eyes, looked like it was doing its best to grow a snout.
"No, no, you idiot," she said. "Don't shift. No. Calm down."
He stood on one foot, then the other, his features blank and stupid. His face already half-dragon and unable to show human emotions. His mouth opened, but what came out was half hiss, half growl.
She slapped him. She slapped him hard. "No," she said. "No."