Draw One In The Dark(84)

The back door was impossible to close, having splintered in a million pieces. She should have got a solid wood door, after all. And on that thought she got out the phone book, called her bank for her balance, which ran to the middle hundreds. Then she went back to the phone and started calling handymen, finding it somewhat difficult to reconcile her urgency in getting the doors fixed with the price any craftsman would accept for this.



She had just discovered an elderly handyman, who only worked two days a week, who could do both glazing and carpentry, and who thought her situation desperate enough to warrant immediate response when Rafiel came in through the ruined back door.



"Dragons?" he asked her, as she was hanging up the phone.



"No," she said. "As it turned out, beetles. Huge, green and blue and iridescent. If you go to the Natural History Museum in Denver, you'll find that the much tinier versions of the creatures are used as jewelry by some rain forest tribe or other."



He grabbed blindly for one of the overturned chairs, pulled it upright, and collapsed on it, looking at her. She'd put the kitchen table and the other chair up, and that was where she'd been making her calls. "I've just got hold of a handyman, who will be coming by to fix my porch and my two doors. I gave him the dimensions and he says he has some surplus, older doors he removed from a house and I can have them for nothing. Which only means I'll be broke, not in the red. At this rate I do not dare miss work for six months, but I will probably survive the experience."



But Rafiel only looked at her, the golden eyes dull and uncomprehending. "Beetles?" he said.



She nodded. "Very much so."



"So it wasn't a hallucination in the back of the Athens?" he said.



"Did you find a corpse?" Kyrie asked.



He shook his head slowly. "No. But I found . . . I could smell blood. I didn't want to shift to verify it, but I could smell blood. And death. Fresher than . . . two nights ago. So I'm sure you were telling the truth. Only till this moment I had hoped that you had seen it wrong and that it was actually dragons. Do you mean to tell me we have dragons and beetles?"



"It's worse than that. The green powder? I think it has hallucinogenic properties, that it's supposed to make the victim unable to fight. I think that's why I managed to fight them back. I tied a towel over my mouth."



"Ingenious," he said. "I could go back to the Athens tonight in . . . lion form and try to follow the trail of the blood. It's probably fresh enough and because there was no body, I wasn't forced to call out the rest of the force, so the scent won't be diluted." He paused for a moment. "I would have done it then, but I was afraid it would bring too much attention."



He nodded, as if satisfying himself of something. "Then as we were heading for the station, there was the report of a panther. Fortunately it turned out to be a sort of mass hallucination." He cleared his throat. "As you know, these are quite common. Seeing black panthers, I mean. There's whole counties in England afflicted by it."



He looked at her, and reached for her hand, where it rested on the table. "How did you escape them?"



For a moment, for just a moment, Kyrie had a feeling of misgiving. Was it that Rafiel wanted to know how she'd escaped so that he could warn the beetles? But no. The beetles already knew how she had escaped. He wanted to know. It made sense.



"I stabbed one with my umbrella." She nodded toward the umbrella resting a few feet away against the wall in the hallway. "Between the head and back carapaces. And it was immobilized. Which allowed me to jump over it and escape."



"So, the shift to panther was . . ."



"I thought its mate would chase me."



"It probably would have, except for its being daylight and a busy area." He sighed. "I don't like to think creatures like that have such control. They are shifters, they must be. But what kind of insane nature or magic or evolution could have caused such a thing as shifter beetles?"



Kyrie shrugged. "Whatever it was, it created dragons. Which brings me to Tom."



"Ormson? Must you?" Rafiel looked pained and vaguely put out, as if she were insisting on speaking about a distasteful subject.



"Tom Ormson," she said. "I have reason to believe I did him an injustice. If that powder from the beetles causes hallucinations, I think that might have been all he was high on. On top of that, there is his father."



"Ormson has a father?" Rafiel asked.



"Till this moment you assumed he reproduced by fission?"



"No, I mean he has a father around here, a father who is in some way involved in his life?"