It was not a spring to attack nor a cowering in fear. Either of those she could have accepted as normal for the beast. It was a vague, startled jump. A familiar, startled jump.
Like coming on Tom around the corner of the hallway leading to the bathroom and meeting him coming out of it. Tom jumped that way, startled, not quite scared, and she always thought he'd been shooting up in there—must have been shooting up in there.
Now the same guilty jump from the dragon, and the massive head swung down to her prone body, to look at her with huge, startled blue eyes. Tom's eyes.
* * *
Kyrie. His human mind identified her a second before his reptilian self, startled, scared, surprised, would have opened his mouth and let out with a jet of flame.
His mouth opened, he just managed to control the flame. He tried to shape her name, but the reptilian throat didn't lend itself to it.
Tom felt his nictitating eyelids blink, sideways, before his normal eyelids, the eyelids he was used to, blinked up and down.
She stood up, slowly, shivering. She was honey-colored all over. Both sets of his eyelids blinked again. He'd always thought that she had a tan. No lines. And her breasts were much fuller than they looked beneath the uniform and apron—heavy, rounded forms miraculously, perfectly horizontal in defiance of gravity.
He realized he was staring and looked up to see her looking into his eyes, horrified. He tried to shape an apology but what came out was a semigrowling hiss.
"Tom," she said, her voice raspy and hoarse, her eyes frightened and . . . pitying? "Tom, you killed someone."
Killed? He was sure he hadn't. He stopped on a breath, then tasted in his mouth the metallic and—to his dragon senses—bright and delicious symphony of flavors that was blood.
Blood? Human blood?
The shock of it seemed to wake him. He looked down to see a corpse between his paws. His paws were smeared with blood. The corpse was a bundle, indistinct, neither male nor female, neither young nor old. It smelled dead. Freshly dead.
Had he run someone down? Killed him? Had he?
He tried to remember and he couldn't. The dragon . . .
He took his hand to his forehead, felt the clamminess of blood on his skin, and realized he was human again. Human, smeared with blood, standing by a corpse.
And Kyrie had seen him kill someone.
"No," he said, not sure to whom he spoke. "Oh, please, no."
* * *
Tom's voice was low at the best of times. Now it came out growly and raspy, like gravel dragging around on a river bottom. His transformation, much faster than hers, had been so fast that she'd hardly seen it.
He stood by the corpse. Broad shoulders, small waist, muscular legs, powerful arms. A body that, except for his being all of five-six, and for the track marks on his arms, could have graced the cover of bodybuilding magazines. Only his muscles weren't developed to the grotesque level the field demanded.
And above it all was a face that managed to make him look like a frightened little boy.
His hair had come loose from the rubber band he used to confine it in a ponytail. Loose, it just touched his arms, in a rumple of irregular curls. His skin was pale, very pale all over. Not exactly vampire white. More like aged ivory, even and smooth. And his eyes were a deep, dark, and yet somehow brilliant blue.
They now opened in total horror, as he stared at her and rasped, "I didn't. Kill."
Her first reaction was to snap out that of course he had. She'd seen him by the corpse, his muzzle stained by blood. Then she remembered she'd almost lapped the blood herself. Lapped. And she'd known what it was before shifting too.
She shuddered, and remembered what the blood smelled like to the jungle cat. The beast, as she'd learned to call it years ago, when she'd first turned into it. Or hallucinated turning into it, as she'd convinced herself had happened over time. That theory might have to be discarded now, unless she was hallucinating Tom's shifting, too.
"I don't remember chasing," he said. "Killing."
A look down at the corpse told her nothing, save that it had been mauled. But wouldn't Tom . . . the dragon have mauled it anyway? Whether he'd killed it or not?
Tom was looking down, horrified, trembling. Shock. He was in shock. If she left him here, he would stay like that. Till they were caught.
She reached for his arm. His skin felt skin cold, clammy to the touch. Was it being the dragon? Or being naked in the night? Or the shock? She had to do something about the shock. No. She had to do something, period.
"Come," she said. "Come."
He obeyed. Like a child, he allowed her to pull him all the way to the back door of the diner.
She stooped to pick up her clothes, trying not to get blood on them.