Kyrie wanted to go look, but people were waiting for their food, so she set about getting the pie and the olives and the rice pudding—all of it preprepared—from the refrigerator behind the counter. Next to it, Frank was peeling and cutting potatoes for the Athens's famous "fresh made fries, never frozen," which were also advertised on the facade, somewhere.
While she worked, some of the regulars came in. A tall blond man who carried a journal in which he wrote obsessively every night between midnight and four in the morning. And a heavyset, dark-haired woman who came in for a pastry on her way to her job at one of the warehouses.
Kyrie looked again at the clock. Half an hour, and still no Tom. She took the newcomers' orders.
On one of her trips behind the counter, for the carafe of coffee, she told Frank, "Tom is late."
But Frank only shrugged and grunted, which was pretty odd behavior for the guy who had brought Tom in out of nowhere, hired him with no work history while Tom was, admittedly, living in the homeless shelter down the street.
As Kyrie returned the carafe to its rest, after the round of warm-ups, she heard the scream. It was a lone scream, at first, startled and cut short. It too came from the parking lot at the back.
She told herself it was nothing to do with her. There were all sorts of people out there at night. Goldport didn't exactly have a large population of homeless, but it had some, and some of them were crazy enough to scream for no reason.
Swallowing hard, she told herself it meant nothing, absolutely nothing. It was just a sound, one of the random sounds of night in the city. It wasn't anything to worry about. It—
The scream echoed again, intense, frightened, a wail of distress in the night. Looking around her, Kyrie could tell no one else had heard it. Or at least, if Frank's shoulders were a little tenser than normal, as he dropped fries into a huge vat of oil, it was the tenseness of expectation, as if he were listening for Tom.
It wasn't the look of someone who'd heard a death scream. In fact, the only person who might have heard it was the blond guy who had stopped writing on his journal and was staring up, into mid-air. But Kyrie was not about to ask a man who wrote half the night what exactly he had heard or hadn't. Besides the guy—nicknamed "The Poet" by the diner staff—always gave the impression of being on edge and ready to lose all self-control, from the tips of his long, nervous fingers to the ends of his tennis shoes.
And yet . . .
And yet she couldn't pretend nothing had happened. She knew she had heard the scream. With that type of scream, someone or something was in trouble bad. Back there. In the parking lot. At this time of night most of the clientele of the Athens came in on foot, from the nearby apartment complexes or from the college dorms just a couple of blocks away. It could be hours before anyone went out to the parking lot.
Kyrie didn't want to go out there, either. But she could not ignore it. She had the crazy feeling that whatever was happening out there involved Tom, and, what the heck, she might not like the man, but neither did she want him dead.
She gave a last round of warm-ups, looked toward the counter where Frank was still seemingly absorbed in his frying, and edged out toward the hallway that led to the back.
It curved past the bathrooms, so if Frank saw her, he would think she was going to the bathroom. She was not sure why she didn't want him to know she was going to the parking lot. Except that—as she got to the glass door at the back—when she saw the parking lot bathed in the moonlight, she thought that something might happen out there, something . . . Something she didn't want her employer to know about her.
Not that it could happen. There was nothing that could happen, she thought, as she turned the key. Nothing had happened in months. She wasn't sure what she thought had happened back then hadn't all been a dream.
The key hadn't been turned in some time and it stuck, but finally the resistence gave way, and she opened the door, and plunged into the burning moonlight.
Feeling of jungle, need for undergrowth and vegetation, her heart beating madly in her eardrums, and she was holding it together, barely holding it together, hoping . . .
She jumped out onto the parking lot and called out, "Tom—"
Something not quite a roar answered her. She stopped.
And then the smell hit her. Fresh blood. Spilled blood. She trembled and tried to stop. Tried to think.
But her nose scented blood and her mouth filled with saliva, and her hands curved and her nails grew. Somehow, with clumsy claws, she unbuttoned her uniform. She never knew how. As the last piece of clothing fell to the ground, she felt a spasm contort her whole body.