Kyrie put her back against the hallway wall, as a cloud of green powder came from the living room side, too.
She prepared to sell her life dearly.
* * *
Tom woke up choking. A taste of blood in his mouth, and his nose felt wholly obstructed. He coughed, and it seemed to help, clearing both mouth and nose. But he was thirsty and he was still lying, twisted, on the floor of the old service station. And his mouth was still gagged.
"Are you going to talk or not?" Crest Dragon asked. He stood directly in front of Tom, hands on hips. "Are you going to tell us where you hid it, or will we have to hurt you again?"
Tom blinked. He opened his mouth, and screamed, because that was all he could do. With a gag in his mouth, it was very hard to tell the idiots he had a gag in his mouth.
Two Dragons screamed something menacing in Chinese in response to his scream, and struck a pseudo-karate position he had probably learned from movies. He came running toward Tom and Tom closed his eyes, fairly sure they were going to hit his nose again.
But before Two Dragons got to him, someone yelled. Other Dragon? Tom opened one eye. It was indeed Other Dragon. The one with the Chinese character tattooed on his forehead. He spoke rapidly, pointing at Tom. And he had one arm in front of Two Dragons, who looked confused. Crest Dragon looked vexed. He turned toward Two Dragons. "You didn't remove the gag? I told you to remove the gag," he said, in rapid English, and threw a punch at Two Dragons who avoided it by ducking under it.
He didn't tell Crest Dragon, obviously the head of this outfit, that he too could easily have seen that Tom was gagged. Instead, he untied the gag at the back of Tom's head, his fingers scraping at Tom's scalp and tangling in Tom's hair as he did it.
As the gag fell away, Tom opened and closed his mouth, hoping his jaw wasn't dislocated. It hurt as if it were, but that was probably only the result of having his mouth open like that for hours.
"Now," Crest Dragon said, and smiled, graciously, looking much like some sort of society hostess. "Now, will you tell us where you hid it?"
Tom judged his chances. What he needed most—what he wanted more than anything—beyond the inner dragon's wish to tear these goons apart and use them as a protein source, was water. Liquid.
He looked at Crest Dragon and, in a voice he didn't need to make any raspier, he managed, "Thirsty. Very. Thirsty."
Crest Dragon looked disgusted, and for just a moment Tom thought they were going to resume beating him. He turned around to the other two.
"You know they said we shouldn't hurt him to where he couldn't talk," Other Dragon said. "You know he has to be thirsty."
How long had it been since he'd been thrown here? It seemed like forever. And he hadn't drunk anything before. Tom closed his eyes, as his captors' argument progressed into whatever form of Chinese they talked, Mandarin or Cantonese or whatever.
Other Dragon had said they shouldn't hurt him to the point where he couldn't talk. Tom had realized, sometime in the last few days, that stealing the Pearl of Heaven had been a grievous mistake. Oh, he remembered it from when he was a kid, in his father's house. He remembered some old Chinese guy showing it to Edward Ormson at his home office.
Hidden around the corner, the then very young Tom had seen the Pearl and felt it. He'd felt the radiance of it penetrating to the core of his being. Since he'd later come to realize that it was a . . . cultic object of dragon shifters, he supposed that the fact that it resonated with him, even then, must mean he'd already been a dragon. It wasn't a late-caught affliction, but something he'd had all his life and only became active in adolescence.
Years later, he'd felt the call of the Pearl and he'd slithered, among those other dragons, so different from himself, to a meeting, where he'd seen the Great Sky Dragon. And the Pearl. He hadn't understood almost anything of the meeting. But he'd seen the guy who had the Pearl shift back into his normal form. And he'd followed him to an unassuming little restaurant. Where he'd stolen the Pearl.
Oh, the reasons he'd stolen it seemed valid at the time. He'd thought since this was used by shifters, since it gave forth a feeling of safety and calm, it must be something that helped control shifts. And perhaps it was. At least, since he'd had it, Tom had been able to stop his drug-taking. Gradually, but he'd stopped it. And the withdrawal effects he'd expected from heroin—all the horrible vomiting and cramps he'd heard about—had never materialized. Or not to any degree worth talking about. It hadn't been much more than a stomach flu. So perhaps the Pearl had helped.
Only then the triad had picked up the scent, and Tom had found that unless the Pearl were kept submerged in water, every dragon within miles of it could follow it.