Draw One In The Dark(39)

Kyrie nodded. The rules of this group to which she belonged despite herself were revealing themselves as complex. If they must be hidden—and they must, because revealing one of them would mean revealing all of them—then, surely, surely, they would have to police their own. Like other secretive communities of what had at the time been considered not quite humans all through history, they would have to take care of their own. Slaves, immigrants, serfs—all had policed themselves, to avoid notice from the outside, as far back as there had been humans in the world.



One way or another. She wondered what that meant. She could understand it to mean nicely or by force. And she wondered if Rafiel Trall understood it.



And looked up to find his intelligent golden eyes trained on her. "You know that means we might have to . . . take care of it on our own," he said. "I . . . never met any of us till a couple of years ago, and I never thought about it. The possibilities of someone going bad, doing something terrible and how the normals would never be able to take care of it and we'd have to step in. I never thought about it. I thought there might be a half a dozen of us in the world . . ."



Kyrie shook her head. "Tom has seen a dozen or so over five years. Not counting the dragon triad, where he thinks there could be hundreds. I think there's more than half a dozen. I wonder . . ."



"Yes?"



"I wonder how long this has been going on and why no one seems to know about it."



"I don't know," Rafiel said. "When my parents found out, they tried to research. They found legends and stories, poems and songs. And Mom, who reads a lot of scientific stuff, thinks there might be such a thing as . . . migratory genes. People attaching the genes from other species. Going partway there, as it were. But I'll be damned if that explains mythological species, too. Like dragons. Wonder if there are sphinxes and sea serpents, as well." He shook his head. "There seem to be a lot of legends about . . . people like us, until magic stopped being believed and science stepped in. I think we'll have to admit that we are not . . . things of the rational universe. I'm sure Thomas Ormson's shift violates the rules of conservation of matter and energy." He frowned, then suddenly grinned, a boyish grin. "Good thing that's not the sort of law I have to enforce."



Kyrie nodded. Men and their puns. "I've thought the same. But if we exist, if we exist anyway, how come no one has found out? How come one of us hasn't slipped spectacularly in a public place yet, and been found out?"



"Who says we haven't?" Rafiel said. "Have you ever heard of cryptozoology?"



"Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster?" she asked, unearthing the word from a long-ago spree on the Internet looking up strange stuff.



Rafiel started to shake his head then shrugged and nodded. "For all I know, they're of ours too, yes," he said. "But more than that. Giant panthers in England, the lizard man of Denver, the thylacine in Australia that keeps being seen, years after it's supposedly extinct. And giant tigers and giant black dogs. All of those. And perhaps," he sighed, "Bigfoot and Nessie too." He looked at her. "They're all seen. They're all found. It's just that they're impossible, see. And the human mind is very good at erasing everything that is not possible. I . . . My mother says that the human mind is an engine designed to order reality." He paused and frowned. "You have to meet Mom to understand. But if she's right, then our minds are also designed to reject anything that introduces disorder, anything that goes against the grain."



"Our," she said, before she knew where her mind was headed. "You said the human mind and referred to it as 'our.' You think our minds are human."



"Do you think they aren't?" Rafiel asked. "Why?"



Kyrie shrugged. "Up until last night I thought I was perfectly human," she said. "I had no idea that I shifted shapes. I thought all that was an hallucination. Today I don't know what I think."



Something to the way that Rafiel's expression changed, and to his gaze shifting to a point behind her, made her turn. The server approached to drop off the bill. Rafiel glanced at it and handed it, with a card, back to the server.



"Look, when I went to bed yesterday—well, today at sunrise—we didn't have an ID on the victim yet. I'm scheduled to go and attend the autopsy today."



"Why?"



"Why the autopsy? Because we don't know exactly what killed the man. Our pathologist says the wounds look odd."



"No, why would they have you attend it? I've seen this in cop shows on TV, but I don't understand whey they need a policeman, who's not an expert in anatomy or anything of the sort to be there."