Draw One In The Dark(42)

Suddenly the windows weren't there. Ripped? The screens were ripped from the frames. Glass lay at his feet. And the tip of a green paw came into the room, only it didn't look like a paw, more like a single toe with a claw at the end.



Tom grabbed for the low coffee table in front of the love seat. It was wicker and very unstable, but he struck out with it, hard, at the thing. There was a . . . tooth? fang? coming toward him, and he batted at it with the table. It made a hissing sound, not at all like a dragon sound. And it was dripping. At least Tom didn't think it was a dragon sound. He had no idea what he sounded like when he was shape-shifted.



Keith was kicking something large and green and shimmering.



"Stop," Tom yelled. "You can't kick a dragon. It will blaze you."



Keith looked at him, and Keith's eyes were huge, the pupils so dilated there was almost no iris left. It reminded Tom of something but he couldn't say what.



"Mother ship," Keith said. "The mother ship has landed. They're coming for us. I saw a movie."



"Really," Tom said, reaching out. "You shouldn't kick dragons."



Tom had managed to wrench the wooden leg away from the wicker table, and he had some idea he could stab the dragon with it. But one of the dragons was attacking Keith, while the other was . . . crouching against the glass door. If Tom could attack that one . . .



He started to go for the handle to the patio door, but all of a sudden it wavered and changed, in front of him, and it was the door to the Athens, with all the specials painted on. He pulled at it, but it wouldn't open. So he backed up, and kicked high at it.



The glass shattered with a sound like hail.



The big green body leaning against it shuddered and turned. Toward Tom.



Two toes-with-claws reached for him. A fang probed.



He had time to think, Oh, shit. And then he remembered what Keith's eyes looked like. They looked like his own, in the mirror, back when he was using.





* * *




The morgue of Goldport was in a low-slung, utilitarian-looking brick building. Someone with misconceived ideas of making it look like Southwestern architecture had put two obviously nonfunctional towers in asymmetrical positions atop the tile roof.



Rafiel Trall parked in front of the building, and Kyrie parked beside him. There were a couple of other cars and a couple of white panel vans parked in front. The street was the sort of little-traveled downtown street connecting quiet residential streets to the industrial areas with their warehouses and factories.



Rafiel put sunglasses on as he came out of the car, and Kyrie wondered for a moment if his golden eyes were unusually sensitive to light. It didn't seem like the most practical eye color to have.



He saw her staring and smiled at her, as if he thought she was admiring him. Kyrie looked away quickly. The man clearly had an ego as large as his shifted shape.



But he was quiet as they walked inside the building. Though it was air-conditioned, it didn't have the same feeling of clean cool as the inside of the hotel. Instead, the cold here felt clammy and clinging and there was a barely discernible smell. If Kyrie had been pressed to define it, she would have said that it smelled like her car a day after she'd lost a package of ground turkey in it, last May. It was the stink of spoiled meat, mixed with a faint tinge of urine and feces—what she'd once heard someone call the odor of mortality—but so faint that she couldn't quite be sure it was there.



"Have you ever been to this type of place?" Rafiel asked.



She shook her head.



"Sensitive stomach?" he asked.



She shrugged. She truly didn't know. She remembered the corpse last night and felt a recoiling—not because she'd been on the edge of losing her lunch over it, but because she remembered all too clearly how appetizing the blood had smelled. Appetizing was far worse than sickening. "I don't think so," she said.



And at that he gave her his bright smile, which seemed to beam rays of warmth through the chilly atmosphere. "Well, anyone of our kind has seen dead bodies, right?"



Kyrie blinked, bereft of an ability to answer. Had she seen dead bodies? Only the one yesterday. What was he telling her? She looked at the bright smile, the calm golden eyes, and wondered what hid behind it. Oh, she'd guessed—it wasn't that hard given his history—that Tom might have done things he was sorry for. There was that edging and shying away behind his silences. And a man like him who didn't seem totally devoid of interior life and yet ended up on drugs was clearly running away from something.



But until this moment, Kyrie had allowed herself to believe the something had been a few petty thefts, car joyriding, other things that could well fall under juvenile delinquency. Never . . . never murder. She'd never thought of murder, until Rafiel thought that. And now she wondered if the other shifters really had that much trouble controlling themselves in animal form that killing humans was common and accepted. And if it was, what was she doing here? What was the point of murderers investigating murders? If it was normal for shifters to kill humans, how much should the life of a human be worth it to them? How could Rafiel be a policeman? And how could Rafiel talk of it so calmly?