I’m doing a bunch of “where things stand” today, and then will post the beginning of AFGM and the beginning of Noah’s Boy (upcoming, July.) Not so much because I feel the need to self promo, (I am very bad at it) but because I’m fighting a sinus thingy (yes, I know, netti pot.  It is being deployed) and my younger son sleeps through his alarm.  WHY he had his alarm go off at 7 am, I don’t know, but he didn’t wake up.  I did.  Twice.

Yes, I know, Heinlein said that waking someone unnecessarily shouldn’t be a capital offense the first time.  But he also said that parents’ dellusions about kids’ good qualities are the only reason we don’t strangle the little darlings in childhood.  He was right, and I haven’t strangled the little (18, six foot three and probably massing close onto 220 lb) misbegotten genius, but I also don’t feel up to any higher-order thinking.  (But Sarah, you say, you’re never up to higher-order thinking.  I say: Shut up wretches.  Higher than this.)

So… where things stand.  I have in my hot little hands a letter from Penguin Putnam saying that I’m getting back the copyrights for all of the musketeer mysteries, A French Polished Murder and No Will But His.

Note that Dipped Stripped and Dead is not included.  They CLAIM it’s selling too much to release, but their “is selling too much” has shifted from “the electronic is selling too much” to “the paperback is selling too much” — neither is selling half what it should be to stay “in print” according to the contract, though, and I think the little darlings are going to get their noses rubbed in this REAL soon.

I didn’t ask for copyright to A Fatal Stain because it came out last year, so I didn’t expect them to give it back.  That’s the NEXT round.

Meanwhile I’ve got copyright papers back for the musketeers — that’s it.  The other two, the papers haven’t been sent to me yet.  (Ain’t it fun?)

On the other side of the soon to be Random Penguin divide (As Random House and Penguin merge — a marriage that couldn’t happen to better entities.  They deserve each other) there’s been nary a peep from Bantam re: my copyrights on the Magical British Empire, even though by their contract, they no longer have them.  I think we’ve entered cease and desist letter, and polite letter to Amazon with the clause, explaining why the electronic versions MUST be taken down.  (They have the right to “finish selling” the paperbacks, and I expect that will go on forever.  It usually does.  Penguin “found boxes” of my first fantasy eight years after it came out.)

Meanwhile The Shakespeare Fantasies on Webscription are non-exclusive with Baen (and expiring soon, to whoever wants to buy them) so I’m adding afterwards and bringing them out on Amazon, as well — probably print and electronic.  (I shall ask Baen if they want omnibuses (eseses) of the other released copyright stuff, when I have it ready.  From talk a while back, I retain a general idea that they do.  We shall see.)

So, what I plan to do — I’m starting with the musketeers because they’re mine, mine, all mine.  And because I still get an email a week asking me for the sixth.

The first one is at Naked Reader Press — e only — and everyone involved, including me, who am, after all, the cover director now, hates that cover.

We picked it because there are NO decent anything with musketeers unless they’re ironical: children, women, dogs, cartoons.

I’ve been trying to draw a scene for the cover — but I was looking at historicals from the big houses on Amazon and they’re all the stylized stuff.  You know, symbolic something against  a background.  I suppose I’ll do one and the other, then ask for votes…

The stylized one would be easier, but it is an historical, and just having a sword or a fleur de lis seems… odd.  Besides, how do you differentiate the books?  Maybe I’ll try the variant of this that is a “portrait” of main character, with faddy background.  Any of you who are bored and wish to go look at historical mystery bestsellers on Amazon, then get back to me, would be highly appreciated, of course.  (Hey, it’s worth a try!  You might be REALLY bored.)

If NRP — probably.  As you know we’ve been having staffing/scheduling problems — can do it, we’ll bring out one of the Musketeers a month, and then around August or so bring out the sixth.  They’ll have to come out e and paper, because I want them in circulation, and I’ll have to track down Sabrina Chase (possibly with a GPS :-P) and ask her about the audible thing for indies.

After/meanwhile, depending on how things go, I’ll have to figure out Bantam, but those books need careful editing to take out the more egregious political correctness (I won’t lie.  Some of it was inserted/made worse via edit, but I was flying under the radar, so some of it is baked in.)

Meanwhile I owe FIVE  shorts to anthologies by May.  After which, my family will starve, all the babies and– The novels?  Right.  I still have novels.

I SWEAR I’ll sign the contracts with Baen and send them back (It’s the post office.  I hate the post office.  Phobia levels) for Through Fire and (if Toni approves the title) Darkship Revenge.

On the indie side, I’m editing (yes, at same time.  Deal) Shadow Gods and Witchfinder and I’m TERRIFIED both of them will turn into series.

Well, Witchfinder will for sure, and I promise to have the honorable — ah! — Jonathan here real soon.

So… you see… I’m somewhat… busy.  Which is why I do deserve kudos for not strangling the teenage menace for waking me up at seven.

However, if I make with the mad (ah!) publishing skills, real soon now, I should be able to at least soften the blow if anything happens to the main income in this house (which unfortunately looks more than half likely.)  And once I get the full thing up, if I continue (ah!) writing like a demon for both indie and trad, I should be able to sort of kinda support us.  With a bit of luck and some income on the side.

No one said it would be easy.  BUT at least it looks possible.

And now, in case you’re really bored, find below the beginning of  A Few Good Men (out now) and Noah’s Boy (I’m assured e-arcs are coming out at webscriptions really-soon-now and the book will be available in July in the usual channels.)

 

The world celebrates great prison breaks.  The French territories still commemorate the day in which the dreaded Bastille burst open before the righteous fury of the peasantry and disgorged into the light of day the innocent, the aggrieved, the tortured and the oppressed.

They forget that every time a prison is opened, it also disgorges, amid the righteous and innocent, the con artists, the rapists, the murderers and the monsters.

Monsters like me.

My name is Lucius Dante Maximilian Keeva, Luce to my friends, though I killed the last one of those fourteen years ago.

I was born the son of Good Man Keeva, one of fifty men who control the immense territory and wealth of Earth between them, and have for the last three hundred years.  As good as a prince.

But for the last fourteen years, my domain had been a cell, six by ten, with a cot attached to the wall, a fresher in the opposite corner that served to have a sort of vibro-wash and clean one’s clothes, and to take care of the other necessities of the body, all in one.  At the foot of my bed there was a dispenser through which a self-opening can of food and a container of drink came through every so often.  I thought it happened three times a day, but I couldn’t swear to it.

I couldn’t see daylight from my cell.  But cans arrived three times for each period they kept my lights turned on, so I considered that a day.  And I kept count by saving one of the cans and scratching it on the side with the lid.  Three hundred and sixty five days made a year with the usual adjustment.  And I had fourteen of those to the day when freedom came, unexpected and terrible.

It wasn’t strictly true that I hadn’t seen another human being in fourteen years, not after a couple of days or so of questioning after arriving here.  Once, in the middle of the second year, I’d got very ill.  Who knows how, unless the food was contaminated. I’d caught an infection that wouldn’t let go and wouldn’t be cured by any of the usual means.  They transferred me to a secure hospital ward for two weeks.  A very secure ward, with robots as caretakers and doctors who saw me only remotely, at least after I regained conscience.  I retained a vague memory of having been touched while only semi-conscious.  Touched by human hands.

But after I became conscious only mechanicals touched me.  Still through the window, made of transparent dimatough – I know, I tried to break it – I could see people coming and going.  Men and women walking around, free, under the sun or the rain.  I remembered them very clearly, each of their expressions, their clothes, their movements.  I’d spent years remembering and making sure I didn’t forget that there were real, live people out there.  Even if I was as good as buried alive.

Twice more I’d been hospitalized, when I’d tried to commit suicide.  And one of those times I’d been attended by humans, while they sewed the open cut on my face, from having got the cot to drop on my head.  I remembered that touch too.  Because down here, in the artificial light or the dark, it was easy to imagine there was nothing else.  Nothing but me, all alone in the world forever.

A world and a monster.  Forever.

Fourteen years after my arrival in Never-Never, I was exercising.  I’d found that just lying around and sleeping made it difficult to sleep and all too easy to stay up all through the time my lights were off, thinking of ghosts.  I’d tried that for three years.  Now I exercised.

I partitioned my day, so that in the morning – or right after the lights went on and I ate the first can of food – I cleaned myself, removed my beard with the cream provided, vibroed my one, faded yellow body suit, thrice replaced, but still much worn and now tight, and put it on, because it gave me the illusion I was still part of the world of living humans, and that someone, somehow, might see me and care how I looked.

Then I sat down and used the gem reader some kind soul had slipped into my cell through the food dispenser almost at the beginning of my captivity.  I used it through gems totaling about five hours, and then the second food ration was dispensed.  And then I exercised.

Back when I was the pampered heir of Olympus Seacity, I’d been provided with exercise machines, and hired trainers.  Turned out you could do just as good a job, or perhaps better, using your body as a counter weight and resistance.  If you had five hours and nothing else to do.

Oh, I used my bed in exercises too.  It used to fold up, but since I’d almost managed to kill myself by getting the bed to fall on my upturned face, they’d fixed it so it was permanently attached to the wall, permanently down, and couldn’t fall.  Not even when a man who must be six seven and close to three hundred pounds – I had no way of weighing or measuring myself – pushed himself up from it by the force of his arms, over and over and over again.

I had my palms spread flat on the bed – at about the level of my pelvis – and was using my arm strength to push down on it and pull myself up, while bending my knees, till my feet left the floor completely for a count of twenty, then down, then up again.  I was on my hundredth rep of the day, counting aloud: fifteen, sixteen, seventeen–

Boom.

Boom is not the way to write it down.  It was like a boom, a crash and a whoosh all in one, deafeningly loud.

I let go and found myself cowering under my bunk, my back flat against the cold, smooth wall, my head bent, my arms around my knees.  Instinctive.  It is instinct to try to make yourself small and unobtrusive.  Not that I was ever either.

My mind ran through what could have caused the boom.

The first thought was that it was impossible.  Had to be.  There was no way – no possible way – that there could be that type of explosion anywhere near me.

The prison which had been my home for so long was called Never-Never because it was the safest, best guarded and most absolutely secure prison in the history of mankind.  It was impossible there had been an explosion there.  And if there were, it would do nothing but drown all the prisoners, because as I remembered from when I’d been transported here in the dark of night, Never-Never was underwater, sealed into the base of a seacity.  Most people didn’t even know it existed.

Yet there were other noises from outside.  Noises I wasn’t used to hearing.  Normal prison noises – cherished as random diversions from an otherwise monotonously ordered day – were distant conversations, too distant to hear the words, and sometimes the sound of muffled footsteps walking by, outside my door.  Sometimes, rarely, there was a scream, perhaps as a new victim was dragged down to this antiseptic isolation.  Unlike prisoners of an older era, we didn’t even have rats as consolation.

Now the screams came one after the other.  There were drumbeats of running feet.  An odd sound scared me, for a moment, until I realized it was laughter.  And then there was… singing?

My mind raced, making my heart race, and not all the will power in the world could bring me out from under my cot.  Until I saw the water.

At first it showed as a filmy sheen under my door.  I blinked at it.  Sweat stung my eyes, and I was sure that it was a mirage.  Although Never-Never was under the ocean, I hadn’t seen water except in my drink dispenser for fourteen years.  The fresher was strictly vibration only.  At a guess, long before I’d been brought here, some clever soul had filled up the waste disposal hole with cans, by keeping five or ten of them, stopped up the space under the door, perhaps with the blanket – then filled the cell with fresher water.

Now the only way to commit suicide by drowning would have been to block the hole, stop up the crevice under the door, then piss enough.  Supposing drink hadn’t been controlled, I didn’t think even I could muster enough desperation for that.

So when the water first came in, it took me moments to believe it – dozens of minutes of my staring in disbelief, while it crept under the door, in increasing quantities, till it lapped at my bare feet, cold and wet.  I put out a finger, dipped it in the water and tasted it.  Saltwater.  There was a hole in the prison.  A hole that let in seawater.  I reacted.

Or rather, my body reacted, which means it did something stupid, as bodies will when you’re not paying attention to them.  I jumped up, cracking my head – hard – on the cot, then bent again and scrambled out from under the cot, on my hands and knees, splashing in what had to be, now, two inches of water.

My heart beat hard, and my throat was trying to close in panic.  Never-Never was completely under water, even if the entrance was up above the water line, a narrow, well-guarded hole on a seacity floor.  The explosion could not have been at the main entrance or no water would be coming in.  That meant it had to be in an underwater wall, somewhere.

Never-Never had seven levels.  Seven circles of hell.  I was on the sixth down.  If I understood the organization properly, and it was entirely possible I didn’t, this level housed the most dangerous prisoners.  The level below me contained only torture cells.

I’d been taken to them for two days when I’d first come to Never-Never.  I’d never understood what exactly they wanted to know or what they thought torture would accomplish.  Maybe they just liked hearing me scream.

I tried to remember exactly how long it had been from boom to water under my door.  The water was now up to my ankles, and I couldn’t think clearly.  It felt like the explosion had simultaneously taken place several years ago and only a heartbeat away.  But the water was now above my calves, which meant the hole had to be nearby.

Someone would come, I told myself, swallowing, imagining the cell filling with water to the ceiling, drowning me.  They’d come before I was floating lifeless.  They’d never let me commit suicide, and they weren’t about to let me die now.

Yes, I’d tried to commit suicide before, but you need to work yourself up to a certain pitch of despair for that.  I wasn’t there now.  I had a brand new data gem, slipped in yesterday’s otherwise empty mid-day food can.  It claimed to be ancient novels from the twentieth century.  Thirty of them.  I hadn’t even looked at the gem at all.  I’d been saving it, reading my old gems: history and science, music and language, and saving the new one like a rare treat.  New ones came in seldom and irregularly.  I’d gladly forego a meal a day for a gem, but I never got that.  This was the first new gem in three months.  And now I’d die without reading one word of it.

I lurched towards my cot again.  I kept the gem reader – a cheap, tiny unit of the sort you used to be able to buy for a couple of cents anywhere – and the gems in the crevice between bed and wall.  Not exactly hidden.  Either the cell was wired for sound and sight – and it probably was or else how could they stop all my suicide attempts in time? – and they didn’t care I had it, or else it wasn’t and they didn’t know.  No one ever came in to inspect, so no one would find it otherwise.  But I kept it there so it wouldn’t fall and break.  The gems were my only connection to other humans: to their words, their minds, their thoughts.  If I lost them, I would quickly lose whatever grip I retained on reality.

Perhaps I had, I thought, as I grabbed the gems and the reader, and wrapped the whole thing, tightly, in my coverlet.  Perhaps this was all an hallucination.  The coverlet ripped easily but I’d found in the past, when I’d spilled drink on it, that it was completely impermeable.  Like water proof paper.  I was thinking that neither gems nor reader were designed to be exposed to salt water.  And if I broke them, new ones might not be provided.

Though they had to come from someone within the system, they couldn’t be exactly official or else they’d not be sent inside otherwise empty food cans.

I wrapped the whole as tightly as I could, ripping the coverlet and tying it over itself.  The torn strips weren’t sturdy enough to hang oneself with, but they worked for this.  I slipped the packet inside my suit.  The water was now up to my knees.

Splashing, I drew myself up to my cot and stood on it, my hands on the ceiling for balance.  That would keep me safer longer and give someone time to rescue me.

They would come.  They had to come.  After all my clever attempts at killing myself, they weren’t going to let me die like this.

A voice screamed something outside the door.  No, wait, sang.  Then there was…

A flash of sound and light that glared through the hole in my door where the lock used to be.  I blinked.

When I opened my eyes again, the door was open, and above the ripple caused by the door opening, standing on a broom – a little anti-grav wand, forbidden for transportation in all civilized lands – was the most unlikely angel of deliverance I’d ever seen.

 

 

 

Setting All The Captives Free

 

Angels shouldn’t have faces that looked like the result of an industrial accident – perhaps an encounter with a giant cheese grater – one of their shoulders shouldn’t be hunched on itself, and the entire left side of their body shouldn’t droop and sag as though the muscles and bones holding it had been semi-liquified.

They shouldn’t have a only a few straggles of long brown hair that looked like the rest had been plucked by a blind man wielding tweezers.

And – mark me, I’m not an expert on theology, but I’m still fairly sure of this – angels should not, under any circumstances, be singing Women of Syracuse at the top of their lungs while standing on a broom.

Women of Syracuse was a listing of the acts supposedly performed by these willing ladies for varying quantities of money, and, let me tell you, some of them were so inventive that even I found them odd-sounding.  I’m quite sure, for instance, one’s ear is not built for that.

I blinked stupidly.  My savior gave me the sweetest smile I’d ever seen, despite its necessarily lopsided nature.  He waved cheerily and moved on, still standing on the broom even as it sped off.  Of course — I thought — angels could stand on brooms.  They could fly, so if they lost the broom it wouldn’t be a big deal.

And then I realized that the door was open and that the water level was still climbing, slowly, very slowly.

I jumped from my cot, and the water was just below my knees as I half ran, half lurched out.

My rescuer was moving from cell door to cell door, as the women of Syracuse found ever more unlikely things to do to their gentlemen friends.  His burner flashed at intervals.  Yells and strange inhuman-sounding laughs echoed somewhere.

The hallway had grav wells at either end.  As usual, one would be rigged to go up, the other to go down.  Water was pouring in a torrent through the downward one.  And I was going to the upward one.

I ran towards it, then stopped just short of the grav well field.

In my mind, Ben’s voice came, clear as day, That broomer will free the people on this level, but what about the poor bastards in the cells below?  And in my mind, Ben crossed his arms and looked his most stern.

So, Ben has been dead for fourteen years and really shouldn’t be talking to me like that.  But this never seemed to matter to him and anyway, whether he talked to me or not was a matter between myself and him and none of anyone else’s business, right?  What’s a minor insanity between friends?

I can’t, I told him.  See the way that water is pouring?  The anti-grav wells are actually pulling the water downward as fast as possible.  Down there, the water will be up to my neck.  And I’m tall.  If anyone was there, they’ll be dead for sure.  Now or soon enough.

Yeah.  Think about that, he said.  Think about the ‘soon enough’.

And I did, though I didn’t want to.  I remembered being down there, strapped to a chair, or strapped to the wall, while they did unspeakable things to my body with instruments no sane human could even conceive of, much less use.  And then I imagined water pouring in and not being able to escape, not being able to swim, while the water climbed, climbed, climbed.

It’s none of my business, I said.  I am a murderer.  A monster.

In my mind, Ben’s mouth twitched with the beginning of a smile, and his dark eyes wrinkled slightly in amusement.  Now, Luce, he said.

Which just goes to show you the damn bastard didn’t play fair.  He never did.  Even dead fourteen years, dead at my hand for fourteen years, the stubborn cuss insisted on thinking the best of me.  And now, as always, I couldn’t disappoint him.  Death would be easier.

My body didn’t want to want to go to the lower levels.  Bodies aren’t stupid.  They know their business is survival.  I tried to overpower it with my mind, but the body would have won.  Except the mind had Ben on its side and even my body wasn’t able to resist the irresistible force of his belief in my non-existent goodness.

I lurched around, unsteadily, against the shrieks from my body that I should save myself, and ran to the grav well.  I dropped through it, water pouring down with me, soaking my hair and clothes, and hopefully leaving the gem reader dry.  Hopefully.  Because when I was caught, I wanted my damn gems.

And if I just did this, Ben assured me, I wouldn’t have the ghosts of the dumb bastards down here keeping him company in my head.  That was incentive enough.

There were four cells down here.  I remembered that from when they’d dragged me down there to torture.  The nearer one was open – the door hanging on one side and blown on the other.

On the water here up to my chest, someone was floating face down, a middle aged, well dressed man.  I splashed over and turned him face up, then let go.  First, he was Good Man Raine.  Second, there was a burner hole in the middle of his forehead.  The Good Man Raine was dead.  The man who’d first sent Ben and me to jail.  My mind couldn’t process it and neither could Ben’s ghost, who frowned, distractedly but said nothing.

The next cell was still locked and it occurred to me, belatedly, I didn’t have a burner.  He’ll have it, Ben said.  Obviously talking about the corpse.  Remember all the bastards have burners on them at all times for self-defense.

I told him he could search the corpse himself, but he only smiled at me in that irritating way he did when he reminded me he had no more existence than any other figment of my imagination.  All I can say is that my imagination must be against me.

Trotting back against water resistance was not as easy as it seemed, and I had to swim to get a good grip on the late, departed Good Man Raine.  I might never have found the burner in time, if I hadn’t got lucky.  It was strapped under his pant leg, to his all too cold ankle.  I grabbed it and sploshed back to the first cell.

Using a burner under water is always a crap shoot.  You shoot and, if it’s a cheap burner, it won’t even produce a beam.  If it’s a slightly better burner, it will sort of work and shock you right back through the water.  But this must have been one of the solid state ones, equipped with a laser for underwater work, because it beamed, white and hot and true, and burned the lock right out.  And then nothing happened.  The door didn’t spring inward.

The water pressure is holding it, Ben said.  You’ll have to kick it in.

Ghosts have absolutely no sense of reality. Probably comes from not existing.  To kick something under water is about as easy as to kick something in low grav – an experience I remembered from an all-too brief visit to Circum where some areas were kept at half-g.

You had to get a good hold on something.  All I could get was a sort of hold on the door frame.  Fortunately I’d spent the last fourteen years exercising insanely.

I got hold of the frame and kicked at the door with both feet.  It opened enough to let the water flow out some and then it opened fully.

The occupant of this cell was beyond human cares.  He was strapped to a chair, and floating, chair and all.  And if he wasn’t dead, he should be.  I was no more prepared to give him regen for his eyes or to stop the blood spreading in billows in the water around him, than I was to fly.  And if he wasn’t dead, he’d be dead in minutes, one way or another.  He was unconscious, so there was no suffering I must stop as I’d once stopped Ben’s.

I turned and swam back to the next cell where I burned the lock, kicked the door in.  And found myself assaulted by a madman, wrapping his hands around my neck, in what seemed like a creditable attempt at strangling me.

A good slug with the back of the burner would have cold cocked him, but then I’d have to save him.  So, instead, as he scrambled for a good hold on my neck, hampered by my hand in the way, I hauled back and slapped him hard across the face, then took advantage of his confusion to point him towards the upward gravwell.  “That way,” I said.  “Go.”

It was iffy whether he would, but he shook his head, then turned and swam that way.  Leaving me to swim to the last closed cell and repeat the door-opening procedure.

This time I faced a young man, probably twenty-two or so, the age I’d been when they’d brought me here.  Actually, he looked a lot as I had at that age, with smoothly cut hair – though his was brown – and, from what was visible of his sleeve, wearing a high quality suit.  And he was clinging desperately, with an expression of terror in his eyes, to the light fixture directly above where they normally strapped prisoners to the wall.  His head was tilted back to keep his nose above water.

He stared at me as though seeing a vision of perfect horror, which I probably was.  Don’t know.  I had been fourteen years without a mirror.  I pulled myself up so I could talk and said, “Come on!”

And he tilted his head back more and spoke, the words intercut by chattering teeth.  “I can- can’t.  Ca-can’t swim.”

Damn.  Yeah, I could go and leave him here to drown.  He was going to slow me down, and frankly I had to leave fast.  The few inches of air up there would soon be closed off by water, but I couldn’t leave him here to die.  I just couldn’t.  Ben wouldn’t ever let me hear the end of it, and worse, he might acquire a buddy with brown hair and chattering teeth.

I must have expressed myself loudly and profanely.  You spend too much time alone, you forget that there are thoughts that shouldn’t be expressed aloud.  My companion looked even more terrified and tried to shrink from me.

“Don’t be stupid,” I said.  “Try to breathe when your head is above water, because I can’t promise it will always be.”  And I grabbed him by the back of his suit.  Expensive material ought to hold.

Then I took a deep breath, and plunged my own head under for faster speed towing him.  I hadn’t swum at all in more than fourteen years, and certainly hadn’t swum towing someone.  Halfway through the hallway, I surfaced to breathe.  My charge, white as a sheet, seemed to be managing to keep his own head in the air by treading water.  Good.  I plunged under and dragged him again.

All the way to the anti-grav well, which sucked us all the way to the upper floor.

The well was, of course, slightly dislocated from the well on the next level, so you wouldn’t accidentally go all the way up.  So we stumbled off the well field, sideways, and into the field of the next well, having no more than time to register that the water here was up to our knees.  Then up again, and the water up above our ankles.  Then up again, and the water covered our feet.  I stared at the other grav well at the end of the corridor, ignoring the people swarming around.

There were broomers everywhere, some of them women.  And there were fights going on between broomers and guards and, in a couple of instances, prisoners.  But I just looked at the downward gravwell at the end and determined that no water was falling down through that.  That meant there was no water in the level above.  So the hole had to be on this level, right?  The hole was my chance at escaping. I wasn’t about to try to leave through the main entrance.  I wasn’t that stupid.

A quick look to see where the hole would be, brought an even quicker decision that it would be on the side where there were more broomers and fewer guards.  Stood to reason, since guards were pouring in from above.

I grabbed my charge’s wrist and pulled him in the direction where there were more broomers, and I told him, my voice little more than an exasperated puff – it’s not easy running and towing a full grown man, even if he’s smaller than you, “Come this way, ignore the broomers.”

He hesitated a moment, then followed me. I was coming to terms, as he splashed behind me, with the thought that I’d have to tow the kid behind me no matter how far the surface was.  Couldn’t leave him here.  He seemed about as capable of survival as the drowned baby rat he resembled.  Twenty-one or twenty-two or around there, certainly not as much as twenty-five.  His face was too rounded and soft for that,  and his skin seemed smooth and flawless like a girl’s.  And he could be my son.  Well, he could have been if I’d ever done anything that could have lead to a son.  And I didn’t think so, not even when drunk out of my mind.

But he could have been.  And I was the adult here, which meant he was my responsibility.  What kind of species would we be, if adults didn’t take the responsibility for juveniles?

Your father’s species? Ben said in my mind, which only goes to show you that ghosts don’t get out of breath or tired, no matter if the head that they’re haunting feels as though it would very much like to have a good bout of unconsciousness.

I ran down the hallway towards where I hoped the source of the water was.  First there were ever increasing numbers of broomers, all of whom ignored us.  If I’d had a little more breath, I’d have slugged one and stolen his broom to pull us to the surface.  Except I was fairly sure I owed my freedom to them, and I refused to slug my saviors.  Monster I might be, but there were limits.

Then there were no more broomers, as they were all behind me, and I could see the hole – a jagged tear in the wall of Never-Never, through which water poured.  And one of the mysteries was solved for me, because someone had slapped a man-hole underwater seal on the opening.  Because it wasn’t precisely the same shape as the opening, it allowed water to rush in around the edges.  But it wasn’t the torrent it would have been, had the hole been fully open.  Which explained why even the lower level wasn’t fully filled.

I turned to the kid behind me.  “Take a deep breath.  I don’t know how far down we are, but the broomers came that way, so it can’t be too far.”  I neglected to tell him that the broomers had brooms to tow them down, and therefore would have traveled much faster than any swimmer could.  “I’ll take you to the surface.”

But even as I heard him draw breath, a man came through the membrane, then another.  I jumped back and – this shows you how ghost-bullied I was – stood in front of the young man, as my mind realized that these men in stylish, dark suits, who clipped their brooms to their belts with military precision as they landed on this side of the membrane were not your average broomers.

In fact, they were a paramilitary unit, and only one of those deployed with brooms, so they could target problem spots in no time.

They were almost mythical, only I’d seen them once before.  Scrubbers.  The Good Men’s secret service of last resort.

 

 

 

Out of Hell

            Scrubbers weren’t spies and they weren’t exactly a military force.  What they were was the Good Men’s ultimate weapon in opinion control.  Whenever an incident occurred which might cause public opinion to go out of control, Scrubbers were sent in to deal with it.

Their normal approach was killing everyone and making the bodies disappear.  If you were really, really lucky, you might have some DNA and a few scuffle marks left when they were done.  Theirs was the only avocation in which disposal of dozens of bodies wasn’t rare or incidental but a core part of their mission.

I’d met them before, once.  I’d escaped with my life, barely.  Ben and I might be the only ones of their targets to ever do so.

But Ben and I had ended up in jail.  That led to all the rest.

Now, my blood ran cold, and my entire body seemed to tighten in a knot.  I’d escaped that one time, but this was death.  Death for me, death for the kid I’d rescued, death for the broomers who’d set us free.  Nothing would be found of us.

And then I lost my mind.  Or at least my mind let my body spring free.

I can’t explain my capacity to move really fast, and I’ve never found any reference to this from anyone else, not even in the copious literature and history gems someone had snuck to me in the depths of Never-Never.  For a long time, I’d thought it was illusory, but both in the last incident with the Scrubbers and in the many incidents that Ben and I had been involved in in our first year in a common jail, I’d found that my ability was in fact true and it could be summed up as this: When in danger or great fear, I could sometimes move at a speed above normal humans.  Fast enough above normal humans that I could win against great odds.

There were six men, which was the limits of even my ability, particularly since the front one was drawing a burner, no doubt to cut us down.  And I didn’t want to kill.  I didn’t want any more deaths on my conscience, but I also didn’t want to die.  And I couldn’t let them kill the kid.

I sprang.  Kicking the gun from his hands, I punched him hard enough to shove his nose in, then flung myself sideways towards his burner because it was easier than drawing mine.  I must have moved at a speed that his comrades found hard to perceive, since their burner fire followed me down, but didn’t quite catch up with me.  I heard the kid give a sort of gasp, and hoped it wasn’t loud enough to call attention to him.

And then I was flat on my belly, with the gun in my hand, and cutting down the Scrubbers in a long, continuous scything.  I didn’t even have time to set the controls on the burner and it wasn’t set to heat, but only to the penetration where it works like a blade.  Bodies fell, cut in half.  Which was good, because they were wearing the large oxygen tanks people use when they will take brooms underwater, where the mere oxygen concentrator on the broom won’t be enough.  And if I’d hit them with heat-burn, depending on what the tanks were made of, I’d have either blown us all up or ended up with a lovely rocket effect.  But it poured out blood and guts in plentiful supply.

The kid must have been shocked enough by the sight that he didn’t move.  Which was bad, because the last of the Scrubbers jumped, before the beam reached him, and got behind the kid, his burner to the kid’s temple.  “Surrender your burner or your son gets it.”

And damn it, I didn’t have time to argue genealogy, any more than I had time to set the burner to burn, instead of cut.  So, instead I removed my fingers from the trigger for a moment, aimed it at the man’s head, faster than his eye would be able to follow or – I hoped – his hand react to, and I shot him neatly in the middle of the forehead.

It was the equivalent of running a sharp, lance-long needle, through the middle of his head.  Blood and brains erupted, then poured.  He spasmed once.  Fortunately his hand moved from its position at the kid’s temple, so the shot went straight down the hallway.  Someone screamed down there.

But I was already reacting.  Reacting to the falling Scrubber, reacting to the kid’s turning very pale, and his eyes trying to roll up into his head, as the blood of the scrubber poured over him.  Good thing we were about to go out and into seawater, right?  It would get rid of most of the evidence.

I sprang, pulled the corpse away from the living boy, administered a calculated slap to the kid, and told him, “Buck up.  We don’t have time for nonsense.”

All I can say is that he must have been raised by as strict a man as my father.  His reaction to the slap and the voice of command was to come fully awake immediately, steadying himself.  “You–” he said, his voice unsteady.  “You killed them all.”

“Yeah, kid,” I said.  “I’m a murderer.  Why else do you think I’m in Never-Never?”  As I spoke, I was unhooking the broom from the dead Scrubber’s belt, and cracking the shell over the remote sensing-and-controlling unit, but not over the unit that transmitted the ignore codes.

To explain: every government broom – or military broom – came equipped with a unit that would allow your superiors to call you in, or at least bring the broom in if needed, as well as allow them to tell where you were at all times.  There was another and separate unit – and I only knew this from having taken these brooms apart – that simply broadcast a code which told local authorities to ignore this broom.

Broom riding was illegal in every seacity and every continental territory, but it was routinely used by two sorts of people other than illegal broomers: people escaping flyers that were about to crash, and police or agents of the Good Men.  The first type of broom had a beacon that called for the authorities to help.  The second had a hush-up-ignore code.  This code was generic.  It wouldn’t identify the broom, just let local authorities know that as far as the Good Men were concerned, it would be better for everyone to pretend the broom wasn’t really there.

I left that in place because I’m not stupid, but I crushed the locator and remote with the butt of the burner.  I could do a prettier job, I could.  Given tools.  But I didn’t have tools.  And I wanted the kid out of here and safe.

“Have you ever ridden a broom?” I asked.

He looked at me as if I’d asked him if he’d ever drunk the blood of a newly killed infant.  “No!” Probably outraged at the idea of doing something illegal.

“Do you know how to?” I asked, and then realized how stupid I was being.  Of course he knew how to.  Every kid old enough to drive a flyer – which in most places was around fourteen – was required to learn how to ride a broom, since it might be his only escape from a crash, and his only hope of getting to civilization again, depending on whether he was flying over a wild zone or the sea.

“Uh… I learned… I mean…”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Look, this broom is a little more powerful than the rescue ones.”  I fumbled with the nearest dead Scrubber, and got the mask and the oxygen tank.  I strapped the tank to the kid’s back.  “You can go higher.  And faster.  I don’t know how far you need to go.  I want you to put this on.”  I handed him the mask and goggles.  “And I want you to hold onto the broom for dear life, and aim it up out of the water.  Then stabilize and try to get to the nearest landmass or seacity where you’ll be safe.”

“I have friends in every–”

“Good for you.”  I left him holding the broom and the mask and goggles, and stripped the Scrubber who had held the kid hostage.  He was the only one with an intact suit, since I had cut the others in half.  Damn it.  I had to learn to plan better.  At least the kid wasn’t wearing a prisoner’s uniform.

I was, and I was also barefoot.  Which meant I had to have the suit.  “I don’t have a suit you can use, kid,” I said.  “So just try to land on whatever seacity this is located in, if you truly think that there is someone who will take you in here.”

“We have people in every seacity,” he said.  Right.  From his expensive suit, he was probably a merchant’s whelp, and they did tend to have vast and interlinked families.

“Good,” I said, as I slipped the suit on, zipped, and turned my attention to the other brooms.  The suit fit like a tourniquet and the seams were close to splitting.  The dead Scrubber had been tall and well built but I’d always been outsized and now was even more so.  No matter.  I wasn’t likely to sire any kids anyhow.

I realized the kid was still there, staring at me, as I crushed the locator and control unit on the first broom.  “Why are you still here?” I asked him.  “Scram.  Go.  Make yourself safe.”

He blinked at me, as I grabbed a second broom and beat its locator out of it, then clipped it to my suit.  “What are you waiting for?” I asked him.

“You… saved my life.”

“Oh.  And?”  I hoped he didn’t think this made me responsible for him forever.

“My… my name is John Jefferson.”

“Ah.  Good for you.”  I beat the brain out of the sixth and final broom, clipped all but one of them – besides the one the kid had – to my suit.  Unless things on the outside had changed completely in the last fifteen years, brooms like this, with the chip disabled, were worth their weight in poppy juice, and little less in more complex designer compounds.

The kid hesitated one more second, as I collected burners and clipped them to my belt or slipped them into as many pockets as I could.  Burners, too, made good trade coin, besides being good to keep you alive.

He put the mask and goggles on, slowly, looking at me in appraisal.  Then he lifted his hand, his thumb and forefinger held in a circle, the other fingers up in that moment solving for me the puzzle of what a nice boy like him was doing in a joint like Never-Never.

The gesture was the benediction of the Usaians, a religious sect that seems to have its roots in a mythologizing of the old country that used to occupy much of the North American territories.  I’d learned a lot about that country in the gems my unknown benefactor had provided.

Without giving me time to react, the kid faced the membrane and turned the broom on.  He punched through the membrane with force, allowing a little water in, and left me to wonder if Usaians reproduced by fission.  They seemed to be everywhere if one looked carefully enough.

The entire incident, subduing the Scrubbers and getting the kid out of there couldn’t have taken me more than five minutes.  My muscles ached in the way they did when my super-fast mode had been activated and was starting to subside.  There was a good chance what had confused the kid was that I’d talked too fast also.  Sometimes I wasn’t aware of it.

I hesitated for a second considering whether to shout to the broomers and warn them more Scrubbers might come, then realized I was being an idiot.  Chances were that the authorities would give Scrubbers a little time to clean up a problem this size.  A glance down the hall told me broomers were now going up the anti-grav well to the next level, a lot of prisoners with them.

Strength to their burner arm, Ben said in my head, and for once he was only echoing what I thought.

I put on the mask and the goggles, grabbed one of the brooms, activated it, and punched through the membrane into freezing ocean water.

Buy A Few Good Men

Noah’s Boy is a different series.  The first book I did for Baen was Draw One In the Dark, the first one of this series, which has been re-released by Baen in e-format and (I understand) is going to be re-released in print. This had the worst cover I’ve ever got.  Yes, I know the reasons.  Since they had to do with the then-publisher being so ill he died, no I’m not bitching.  Toni gave me a new cover for the paperback, but it was too little too late and it sank like a stone.  Gentleman Takes A Chance, the second book, did a little better.  Then the space operas sort of buoyed those first ones up.

In my opinion Draw One In The Dark is the “First decent book I wrote.”  What amazed me going back to do Noah’s Boy after four years was how immature and clumsy the first books seemed.  I guess that’s a good thing… (right?)

Anyway, without further ado, here is the beginning of Noah’s Boy which (I think) you can read without reading the other books. (I’ll let the fans weigh in on that.)  Needless to say the version I have isn’t copyedited, etc.

 

 

 

Noah’s Boy

Sarah A. Hoyt

© Sarah A. Hoyt 2013

 

Chapter 1

 

The sun was setting in a splendor of red and gold over the Rocky Mountains, glistening like a fire over the remaining snow on the mountain tops when the young woman drove into Goldport in a brand new red pickup truck.

No one watching would have been particularly struck by her or by the pick- up truck.

Nestled against the peaks of the Rockies, Goldport had once been a settlement of miners and frontiersmen and it was now a city of students and computer technicians, with a Victorian core forming the center of a town that was gentrifying and growing, acquiring a few spectacular glass-fronted high-rises and a vibrant art and tourism scene.

In that environment, a college-age woman driving a four wheel vehicle was the most common of sights.  That she was Asian or partly Asian would startle no one since Goldport was host to a vibrant Asian community.  And no one would have thought anything was particularly strange when she parked outside a low slung building atop of which a neon sign blinked the words Three Luck Dragon.

Someone might have thought it a little odd, though, when she entered the shiny red lacquered door  and a hand reached out to the window and turned the Open sign to Closed, right at the beginning of the dinner hour.

* * *

Beatrice Bao Ryu, better known to her friends as Bea Ryu, didn’t find it funny, when they closed the restaurant as she came in.  She found it distinctly unsettling.  But she managed a small smile, striking a pose of nonchalance as she said, “I don’t actually intend to shift and start a battle with Himself in here, you know?”  Her warm Georgia accent drawled out onto what seemed for a moment to be the uncomprehending server – a skinny young man with Asian features.  But he bowed to her, looking scared.  “No,” he said.  His accent less obvious but no more Asian.  But he didn’t flip the sign to Open again.  Instead, he led her to a door next to the one marked “restrooms” and  knocked politely, then said something in rapid-fire Chinese.

Bea didn’t understand it.  Her maternal grandmother was Chinese, but her maternal grandfather was tall, blond and of Germanic ancestry.  As for Bea’s father, he was the great-grandson of Japanese immigrants to the United States.  Bea’s parents spoke English and their daughter had never learned either Chinese or Japanese till college, where she’d taken two years of Japanese – which meant she could catch the occasional word and say almost nothing.

A curt Chinese word answered from inside the mysterious door.  The server opened the door and remained bowed while Bea walked into the room.

If she’d thought about it, and she’d never done so in so many words, she’d have expected the place to be a sort of throne room, perhaps with some ancient gilded chair in the center.

That would have fit with what she’d read in the letters in her father’s desk drawer.

Whatever this criminal organization was, it dressed its leader in very pretty words: “Himself”, “Revered One.”  “Ancient One.”  It seemed to denote silk and gold and the sort of culture that required both.

Instead, the room she entered was small – only big enough to contain a desk-like table and two chairs, one on either side of it.  It might have been an interrogation cell, except that the person on the other side of the table had a vast metal bowl in front of him into which he was shelling peas.  With a pile of unshelled peas to the right of the bowl, and a pile of shells to the left, the sleeves of his white button-down rolled up to his elbows, and his hands working busily at the homely task, the man could have been any of a hundred middle-aged Chinese employees at a hundred different Chinese restaurants.

Bea cleared her throat.  “I’m sorry,” she said.  “I think I’ve come to the wrong room.  You see, I was came to talk to The Ancient–”

The man looked up and Bea took a step back and caught her breath, not scared exactly but startled, because his eyes were older than the middle-aged face.  They were older than any face.  Looking out of barely creased features, they appeared old as time and twice as deep, as though he’d existed through the uncounted ages of mankind and kept track of every slip, every error humans had made on the way to civilization.

“Oh,” Bea said.

The man said three brief words in Chinese and then his eyes widened, as though in shock.  He closed his eyes a moment.  “You don’t speak Chinese.”  It wasn’t a question.  He raised an eyebrow.  “Japanese, then?”

She cleared her throat.  “I–  No.  You see, I took a year in college, but—”

He shrugged, dismissing the matter.  “It’s of little importance,” he said.  “Our people have spoken many tongues, throughout the centuries.  What we speak doesn’t matter, except for comfort and a sense of heritage.”  His own English was almost unaccented, save for a faint hint of something British and very high bred.  “What I need from you requires no great linguistic competency.”

Bea swallowed hard.  She’d rehearsed this, all the long drive from Atlanta, and the nights in motel rooms, but somehow, suddenly it seemed very hard to say the words she’d planned.  It was the look of immense age in the man’s eyes, she thought.  But she swallowed again and said, her voice sounding strangely wavering in her own ears, “I don’t care what you require from me.  I came to tell you to leave my parents alone–  To leave dad’s business alone.”

The man looked up and frowned a little.  His hands resumed his work of shelling peas.  “Your parents,” he said at last.  “Finally saw the light and sent you over.  Now they have nothing more to fear from my people.”

She shook her head.  “My parents did not send me over.  Not that it matters.  I have no intention of doing whatever you want me to do.  And why you think—”

“Sit down,” the man said, gently.

Bea shook her head.  Those soft words had sounded like an order, but she had no intention of obeying.  In fact, despite all her best intentions and everything she’d decided to tell this creature about himself and his criminal organization, face to face with him, she found the best she could do was disobey.  Just – disobey and hold on to her rebellion with every fiber in her being, even as she felt him trying to bend her to his will.

He raised his eyebrows at her.  “Surely,” he said.  “Your parents have told you what you owe me.”

“No,” she said.  “Owe you?  I don’t even know who you are except someone who has been messing with dad’s business.”

“Truly?  Then you don’t know we’re an organization of dragon shape shifters?”

“Sure,” she said.  “I know that.  But the only reason I even knew you existed and that you wanted something with me was that I overheard mom and dad talking.  I found out you were the reason dad’s office got vandalized and about the calls to his clients.  The reason dad has had so much trouble keeping afloat as a veterinarian.  And that to make it stop you wanted me to come and…  And do something.  I wasn’t sure what.”

“I see.  Well, you came.  That’s what matters.”

“I came to tell you it must stop.”

The man looked up at her and smiled.  “Ah.  Spirit will serve you well, but do sit down.  I have a long explanation to make, and I despise having to look up to do it.”

She hesitated, but the truth was she wanted to know why anyone, even a criminal organization of shifters would require her presence urgently enough to interfere with her father’s business to get it.

She knew she was attractive.  She had a mirror.  She knew that the combination of her varied heritage had resulted in an oval face, large green eyes, and a pleasant combination of other features, all of which became even more striking with her long, glossy black hair.  Since about the age of sixteen, she’d become used to looks of admiration from the male half of the species.

But the truth was too that she had no illusions about the full extent of her beauty.  She was pretty and striking, but not so out of the normal leagues in attractiveness that dreams of modeling had ever occurred to her.  The campus of the college where she studied art could count at least a hundred women more beautiful than her.

None of her other characteristics were any further out of the ordinary.  She was smart and talented, but was not going to set the world on fire with either her intellect or even with her art talent.  She hoped, someday, to make a good living in commercial art and design, but that was about it.  So why would this criminal organization want her that badly?

She knew it had something to do with her turning into a dragon, but it was just now and then.  Occasionally.  Truly, hardly ever, since she’d turned twenty and learned to control herself.

“So?” Bea asked.  “Why is it so important that I come here?  And why do you think I should obey you?  Or that I owe you anything?”

The man smiled.  It was a surprisingly engaging smile.  It seemed to her as he narrowed his eyes that a sense of amusement touched them too.  “I think,” he said, softly.  “That I’m about to shock you very much.  However, I trust you’ll let me explain my motives before dismissing them.”

She swallowed, wondering what he meant by that.

“Forget what I said about owing me.  That was…  You see, where I come from, it is assumed you owe your ancestors unusual respect, and I’m the ancestor of most of the dragon shifters alive today.”

“That is hardly likely,” she said.  “I know all my grandparents, and I—”

“I am not your grandfather.  Not even your great grandfather.  It’s much… older than that.  Thousands of years.   How many, I’m afraid I’ve lost track.

“But that’s imposs—”

“Please, Miss Ryu.”  He paused, his hands holding a pea pod over the bowl, looking at her.  Then he said, “Hear me out.”

It wasn’t a command – or it shouldn’t have been, spoken in that voice as soft as crackling flame.  But she stopped and listened.

His nail ripped the pea pod apart and his finger swept down the green envelope, trickling glistening little globes into the bowl.  “I have…  that is…  I don’t suppose your parents told you that I am your ancestor in—” He seemed to be counting in his head.  “Your mother’s mother’s side and your father’s mother’s side.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.  “My father is Japanese and you—”

“Oh.”  He dropped another spent pea pod on the growing pile and made a gesture, either dismissing that restaurant or the entire world.  “This is an identity of convenience,” he said.  “I told you my people predate most such things.  Dragons—Dragons belong to the whole world, even if our type is mostly of Asia.  There are other types—”

He resumed shelling peas, now very fast, as he spoke.  “It is the immutable rule of our people that the Great Sky Dragon must be a descendant of the previous Great Sky Dragon in the male line.  Unbroken male line.  And that he must be a Dragon shifter. We don’t know why but that’s how… that’s how it works.”  Peas tinkled into the metal bowl like falling rain.  A green smell filled the room.  “That was me, the many times grandson of the Great Sky Dragon, growing up on the banks of the Yalu River at a time when—”  He shrugged.  “It doesn’t matter, except to say that in my very long life, and sometimes I forget how many thousands of years it is, exactly, I’ve had wives, concubines and lovers, but—”  He looked up and smiled at her.  “There is no reason to blush.  In a life as long as mine, well, there will be friendship and love, and, occasionally, less honorable associations.  But what I meant to say is that of all my connections with human and shifter, many daughters were born.  My line is threaded through dragon kind, Ryus and Lungs and many other family names are honorably descended from me.  But in that time, only one son was ever born to me.”  He looked up again, and amusement pulled at the corner of his mouth.  “He was not born of a normal marriage.  It was more… a treaty and a ritual pairing.  Years ago, there was a … another dragon tribe.  Near the frozen… ah… I believe what is now called Scandinavia.  Their ruler was a woman, a female.  She was called the Queen of The West, as I was the King of the East.  We made a treaty, to keep our people from fighting each other, and..  There was a symbolic marriage.  Which resulted in a son, who was not a shifter.  I thought our blood didn’t work together, that we’d never have children who were shifters from that line, so I ignored it.

“Until someone stole the Pearl of Heaven and I found that while I could touch his mind, I could not control him as I could other dragon shifters.  And it wasn’t just because he had dragon-blood from the tribe of the west, for I could sense he had my blood too.  I had people trace back through his ancestry and found that he was descended from that long ago forgotten son.  And he is my only male descendant on the unbroken male line, the only one with a power close to my own.  The only one who can carry my burden.  The one who will carry my burden.”

A fleeting poor bastard crossed Bea’s mind, but she did her best to look attentive and blank.

“His name is Tom Ormson and he is…” The man she was now sure was The Great Sky Dragon shrugged.  “Very young.  I think in his early twenties.  He lives here in town and owns a diner, the George.”

“Yes?” Bea said.

“I’d like you to marry him.”

For a while, Bea was speechless.  She’d heard of arranged marriages, of course, particularly in Asia, but her parents were American and thoroughly modern, and they would no more think of contracting a marriage for her, than they would think of binding her feet. When she found her voice, she said, “And he’s agreed to this?”

“Oh, no.  He doesn’t even know about it.”  A frown pulled at the old dragon’s mouth.  “In fact, I think he has plans of marrying a panther shifter.  He’s living with her.  Completely unsuitable, of course.  Her people are not our people.”

“But you think he’ll agree?” Bea asked.

“I think he’ll tell me to go to hell,” the old dragon said, and looked up with a faint smile.  “And so will his girlfriend.  She’s feisty enough, and she has no fear of me.”

“But… you want me to marry him?  You said you can’t make him do what you wish, so…”

“No.  You’ll have to find how to make him do what I wish.”

Bea stood up.  Her legs were trembling.  She couldn’t let her father lose the business he’d worked for all his life, but neither could she agree to this.  The elderly man-dragon wanted her to seduce a total stranger one who was in a serious relationship.  No.  There were limits to what she was willing to do, even for her beloved father.  They’d get tired of trying to force his hand eventually.  They’d leave them alone.  Bea couldn’t sell herself for life for the sake of her father.  That was prostitution and slavery, combined.

Standing, she glared down at the Great Sky Dragon.  She could feel power rolling off him, though she could not have explained what type of power or how she felt it.

“I’m sorry,” she said.  “You’ve got the wrong person.  I’m sure there’s someone else you can call on, who will be willing to do it.  I don’t want to trick a man who is in love with someone else into marrying me.  I don’t want an arranged marriage.”

There was a long silence.  “I’ll let myself out,” Bea said.

“Stay!”  It wasn’t so much an order as a sudden plea.  She’d turned to leave the room and now turned again.  The Great Sky Dragon was looking up at her, and his eyes held an expression she’d have thought impossible: raw, undiluted fear.

“Don’t you understand?” the Great Sky Dragon said, his voice low.  “Do you think this is something I’d want, throwing an untrained girl at a stubborn boy and hoping for the best?  Compared to me you’re nothing but babies.  I thought he could have his panther girl and be happy, and when it dissolved in a century or two, then I could guide him towards a marriage that will produce dragons.

“But there is a trial coming and I’m not sure I can–  If I’m not here, he’ll need to be married to one of our own, recognizably our own.  He doesn’t look like our kind.  My people will rebel at his orders.  And it will need to be known that he will have dragon children, to rule after him.  In the battle ahead, there might not be thousands of years to spawn.”

Bea didn’t realize she’d sat down, but her trembling legs were about to not let her stand up anymore.  “Why would he be giving orders?”

“My grandfather told me of the dragons-beyond-the-stars who could—who would one day attack the Earth.”  The Great Sky Dragon shrugged.  “I always thought it was a legend, nothing more.  But–  Lately I’ve had signs that it is not.  There is a great power out there, encircling, trying to remove me, trying to…”  He frowned.  “I think trying to attack my people.  I’ve lived very long, and death doesn’t scare me, but—”

“But?”

“But when I go all my power, and the destiny of my people will fall on the head of Tom Ormson, a stranger, raised outside our traditions.”  He held up a hand to keep her from interrupting.  “Oh, I know, you also have not been taught our traditions, but everyone knows your parents, both of them, are descended from my first-born daughter.  They will fall in line.  And you can help your husband through the trial to come by winning for him the respect of our people.”

 

 

 

Chapter 2

Riverside Park, at the edge of Goldport, was a thrill whose time had passed.  Competing with the various flags, gardens and other franchised, national attractions which specialized in rides based on the latest technology, its main advantage was being cheap and therefore it appealed mostly to the young, the recent immigrants and the impecunious.

Slumbering quietly at the edge of a small lake – the River in the name being one of those mysteries no one could explain – it displayed a flashy entrance tower dated from the orientalist period of the nineteenth century when pseudo arabesques had been in vogue.  It appeared quite nice at night, when bright little lights outlined its contours making it look like something out of a fairytale and  when no one could see its flaking paint and the parts that were boarded up.

Its vast central pavilion, which once had hosted shows by all the big bands and dancing by all the fashionable local couples, now housed bumper cars.  The hippodrome that had seen horse races back in the middle of the twentieth century had long since closed.  Its sun-bleached carcass, encircled in a tall wall that stood, as incongruous and forlorn as the bones of a long-dead dinosaur, was posted all over with signs warning visitors off exploring its dark interior.

Not that many visitors were interested.  Most came for the corny spider rides, the colorful dragon roller coaster, and the not very horrible house of horrors.  A few aficionados and romantic souls came for the wooden roller coaster or the turn of the – twentieth – century merry- go-round.

But right then, early May, the only people in the park were there to work.  Teams of men fanned out up slope and down path, cutting down the knee high grass and calling to each other in Spanish.

Jason Cordova straightened up, as the mower he’d been pushing choked on the knee high weeds.  Man, the least they could do is get some riding mowers.  Rent them or something.  And if not, then with grass like this, we should be using scythes.

Despite the relatively mild weather, sweat glued his t-shirt to his body and his jeans felt like they had insects climbing up inside them.  He knew it was probably his imagination, but he still had to suppress an urge to scratch and an even stronger urge to take off his jeans and shake them.

He listened to the chatter around him and frowned.  It’s like they went to the day labor office and picked everyone with a Spanish name.  Which was probably exactly what they’d done.  And it wasn’t that Jason didn’t speak Spanish.  He did.  He’d studied it in college.  For all the good it was doing him in the current economy.

A shout that he couldn’t quite understand but that seemed to mean he should be getting back to work made him say, “Yeah, yeah,” as he started pulling the cord to restart the mower.  But the motor only sputtered, and then he realized the shout hadn’t been at him.

Instead, his coworkers were shouting to each other and running towards an area where  tall grass remained.  Oh, what the hell, Jason thought, as he ambled in that direction, wondering exactly what they’d found there.  A credit card?  Someone’s illegal weed patch?  Or, judging by the trend of the conversations he’d heard before, and what seemed to really interest all his co-workers, perhaps there was a girl there who’d somehow lost all her clothes?

Before he got to the center of the excitement, he saw two of the guys running away, their face more green than olive, and another one throwing up into a recently mowed patch.

Jason jogged forward the next few steps.  And froze.  Laying on the trampled tall grass was one his co-workers.  He was small, probably Mexican.  What remained of his white t-shirt was torn and covered in red-black blood.  The lower half of his body was unrecognizable – his stomach torn open, the guts spilling.  It looked like something had eaten a good portion of the man’s insides.

Jason would never know quite how it happened, but he found himself throwing up, too, right beside the tall grass.  But as he straightened, wiping his mouth to the back of his leather gloves, he realized there were a lot fewer men around.  Like… none.  Though he could see one or two in the distance, jumping the fence, and another desperately swimming across the lake.

Oh, good God, he thought, as he called aloud, “Stay, don’t go.  We must report this to the police.”  Which he realized was exactly the wrong thing to say, as they ran even faster.

A trail of moving grass near at hand called his attention, and he rushed there, determined not to face the police alone.  “Stop,” he said.  But then realized it wasn’t one of his co-workers he was looking at.  It wasn’t any human.  It had to be the largest feral dog he’d ever seen.  Well… feral something.  Immense, beastly, its maw stained with blood, it looked like what happens to big bad wolves who die and don’t go to heaven.

Jason felt his body clench and twist.  His mouth contorting, he made an effort to speak, as he managed to pull off his jeans and t-shirt before they got shredded.  “Nice doggie,” he said.

***

Rafiel felt like he was going stark, raving mad.

Okay, so no murder investigation – or in this case, what seemed to be the investigation of death by misadventure – was ever a good thing.  Ever.

Goldport wasn’t exactly a crime capital, but as one of four senior investigators in its serious crimes unit, Rafiel saw his share of seamy underside: thefts, break ins, the occasional drunken Saturday night mutual shoot out, and the share of drug traffic that couldn’t be avoided anywhere in these days. They even had murders – quite a few recently.

But on this particular Friday afternoon, he’d been finishing his paperwork, and giving some thought to the girl his parents had arranged for him to go out with that night.  His parents – heck, his entire family – were anxious to see him matched up.  Nearing thirty and living in your parents’ house was not how the story should go.  Particularly not when you were a successful police officer.  But Rafiel’s parents should know better.

They knew that their son shifted into a lion at the drop of a hat, or sometimes even without any hats dropping.  They knew he lived in fear of hurting someone while shifted, and also that normal people, who didn’t change shapes, wouldn’t understand that he remained throughout more than half human: that in either form he tried to do the best he could and serve justice.

What did they think would happen if a woman came home to find her husband – or fiancé – had changed into a giant jungle cat?  Did they think she would take it as an inconvenient but endearing thing.  Oh, well, he’s a lion shifter, but at least he makes good coffee?

He could only imagine his parents’ desire for grandchildren had overwhelmed their common sense.  Leaving him with the task of taking this “daughter of old friends” on a first date, being polite and nice but cold, so she wouldn’t feel too disappointed when he never called again.

Some days he wished he didn’t know there were female shifters in the world, people with whom, theoretically, he could share both sides of his nature.  He also wished he were unaware that Kyrie Smith, one of his two best friends, shifted into a panther.  Some days he wished he could help thinking that he and Kyrie could have made a go of it, if the other one of his best friends hadn’t been around.  But Tom Ormson had been around.  And though he was quite unsuitable for Kyrie as a shifter – shifting into dragon – he was very compatible with Kyrie as a human.

Rafiel had had doubts about that, in the beginning, but once those two had got together, they’d stopped being individuals and become a whole that was bigger than the sums of its parts: they’d become Tomandkyrie, a composite creature more competent than either of them was separately, and so inseparable, that he might as well try to come between Siamese twins.

What made things worse, was that Rafiel wasn’t even sure he would have a chance with Kyrie if something happened to Tom.  He had a feeling that a Rafielandkyrie creature would not be nearly as good as Tomandkyrie, and might in fact fail to gel at all.  And besides, he liked Tom, the scruffy, scaly bastard that he was and he’d die ensuring nothing bad happened to Tom, if needed.  The two of them had fought together enough, been through enough danger to develop a brother-at-arms camaraderie, stronger than any romance.

No.  What Rafiel really needed to do was find a girl he could love and who wouldn’t mind his shifting.  And the last requirement cut down the population of eligibles to a negligible number, most of whom would live too far away for him to ever meet.

He’d been contemplating that when his afternoon had got worse, with the phone call about the man found mauled at the amusement park.

Riverside Amusement Park, where, even at the height of the season, if one dropped a virus that selected for non-native-Spanish speakers, no one would catch it, had had some sort of death by misadventure and the police was called to investigate.

It had been hard to understand what the heck was going on, because the person calling it in kept lapsing into something that Rafiel suspected was Greek.  But Rafiel had caught stuff about a mountain lion and Mexicans and  – this was emphatic – definitely not the owner’s fault.

Now he stood in the middle of Riverside, while a medic, who’d accompanied the police, patched up one of the workers: the only one remaining.  Well, the only live one remaining.

Not far from them, in the long grass, a forensic team went over the victim: Hispanic, late twenties and dead.  Very dead.   According to the forensic team several feet of intestine – and various other internal organs – were missing.

They hadn’t found the mountain lion, yet.  But that wasn’t the worst news.  The guy who’d been mauled and was being patched up, said it wasn’t a mountain lion but more like a dog, but even that he wasn’t sure of.  He said it was a weird animal.

And Rafiel could smell shifter.  It was a smell he’d decided only shifters could smell, metallic, with a salty tang, and unmistakable once you first smelled it.  And it was all over the place.

“So, it was a dog?” he asked the guy who sat on the chipped cement bench by the closed spider ride – the big black apparatus with its cup-like seats frozen and vaguely threatening in the afternoon light.

The guy’s name was Jason Cordova, not withstanding which, he spoke English perfectly and without the slightest hint of an accent.  His only Spanish words came flying out as as the emergency medic bandaged his arm and shoulder, which had been mauled by something.  Something with sharp teeth.    His white t-shirt, smeared in blood, lay on the bench by his side.

Jason was dark enough to be some variety of Hispanic, though most of it, Rafiel thought, would be due to his working outside in the sun.  He wore his hair short, with the tips dyed white-blond, and he looked at Rafiel and shook his head then tried to shrug, which brought about another outbreak of Spanish, in which the word Madre featured prominently.  “It looked like a dog,” he said, at last, looking at Rafiel out of narrowed eyes, though they seemed to be narrowed more in pain than in suspicion.  “But it didn’t fight like any dog.  And it didn’t bite like any dog.”  He shook his head.  “I was lucky I had my hunting knife, because the day labor office is in a bad area and– Anyway, I must have cut it halfway to pieces before it let me go.  And its jaws were like… steel clamps.”

“I’ve never seen a bite like this,” the medic who’d come with the ambulance Rafiel had called, and who was probably a male nurse said.  He blinked grey eyes behind coke-bottle glasses.  “And I’ve treated all sorts of injuries, even people mauled by mountain lions.”  He looked at Jason.  “You’re very lucky to be alive.”

“Yeah, I feel lucky,” he said, in the tone that implied he didn’t.  “I’m unemployed, divorced, crashing on a friend’s sofa, and, on good months, making enough to pay for my own food and fuel, and now I’m going to have to pay for the ambulance someone called.  It’s not like the park has insurance.”

The medic grinned, and started to put his stuff away in a little bag.  “Nah, the park will pay.  It’s not like they want you to go to hospital and have to show papers.  I’ve sent the ambulance back anyway, so it’s just my time.”  He stopped.  “And I suppose you do have papers.”

“Sure I have them.  I was born in California, so I have a birth certificate,” Jason said, sounding vaguely amused.  “I suspect I was the only one.  I mean of the workers.  But I didn’t tell the owners.  They can’t pay minimum wage or do all the paperwork stuff, and if I’d told them I wanted that, they’d never have hired me.”

“Yeah, I won’t tell them.  You keep a watch on that.  I disinfected as much as I could, but there might be something left in there.  It’s a deep wound.  If you notice a ring of red form and start to expand, get yourself to emergency and fast.  Oh, and…”

But Rafiel was no longer listening.  Instead, he was smelling the air around him.  It didn’t much matter to him – or not exactly – whether the creature was a dog or a mountain lion, or some mutant, undefined creature.

What mattered – and this was very important – was that he could smell shifter in the area, all around.  There was a sweet-metallic tangy scent that he knew all too well.  He smelled it everyday in his own clothes, and rising from his own body.  And he smelled it from Kyrie and Tom and the dozen or so shifters who frequented the George – the diner Kyrie and Tom owned together.

The thing was that the scent lingered in areas where shifters had been.  Sometimes for hours.  It had been so strong around the dead man, that Rafiel was sure he’d been a shifter himself.  But was the killer a shifter or not?

It made all the difference.  As Rafiel stood here, away from the scene, he could hear the forensic team discussing their findings in the blood-spattered area with long grass, where the body had lain.

If the killer was just a wild animal on the loose, then Rafiel could let them figure it out in their own way.  There would be the routine of a police investigation, the normal adding up of evidence till you could take the case to trial and corner whoever was responsible for the animal being loose: police, park or perhaps the owner of the animal.  Then whoever was responsible would be fined or given community service, or something.

In that case, throughout all of it, Rafiel would be just be Officer Trall, a professional and well trained police officer.

But if the killer had been a shifter in his shifted form, it all changed.  Because a shifter who killed once, rarely stopped killing unless he were caught.  And it wasn’t as though Rafiel could bring the apparatus of the law to bear on him.  You couldn’t really tell a judge “this isn’t a dog, it’s a werewolf.”

Well, you could.  But then they put in a nice resting place, medicated to the eyeballs.  And, given that Rafiel himself was a shifter lion, heaven only knew what the meds would do to his shifting.  He might become a lion and eat a few nurses not-in-a-good-way.  He took a long whiff of the air.  There was the smell from the dead body, the smell around it, and another smell.

“Hey, something wrong?  You allergic to something?” the medic asked.

And Rafiel became aware that he’d been sniffing for all he was worth, as though he expected to find his way with his nose.  Which he probably could.  In fact, he would swear the smell came from back there, from the path to the parking lot, past the closed up hippodrome.

“Ragweed,” he said, automatically.  It had the advantage of being true, not that it mattered.  “So, could you write me just an informal report on the wounds?  In case I have to take this to trial.”

“You can’t take an animal to trial,” the medic said.  Then grinned sheepishly.  “Though I suppose you could take his owner.  And maybe you should. But I bet you it doesn’t have one.  I bet you it’s one of those wild animals that seem to show up further and further into town every year.   Like that Komodo dragon that went around eating people, what was it?  Two years ago?  And did you hear about the bear who went through the trash dumpster behind the alcohol and tobacco kiosk on Fifteenth?  He then ran through bar row, looking in dumpsters.  When they tried to catch him, he ran through ten backyards and across five streets, before being struck by a car as he ambled across the road in front of Conifer Park.  And I bet you that they treated him and freed him, too, probably not too far from town.  Ready to do the same again next year.  A miracle he didn’t kill someone.”

Rafiel made a perfunctory nod and said, “Nothing we can do, eh?  It’s the way it is.  But I still need that report.”

“Right.  I’ll write up something.  It won’t be Shakespeare.”

“No problem.  Shakespeare didn’t really report on medical conditions and it wouldn’t do us any good to be told the wound is not as wide as a church door.”  Rafiel said.  The intensity of the smell was driving him insane.  It was separating itself into strands, too: the dead body, or the area around it, and a trail leading to the hippodrome and another…

He should – to follow proper procedure – go over to where the forensic team was working and see if there was anything else they needed.  Instead, Rafiel frowned as Jason put on his blood spattered but intact t-shirt over his badly mauled body. The shifter smell hit Rafiel full in the face, and he stared, his mouth half open.

The medic was walking away, far enough along the path that he wouldn’t hear anything that Rafiel or Jason said.  And Jason had just turned a puzzled and slightly weary face to Rafiel.

“Hunting knife, uh?” Rafiel said.  “I don’t suppose you want to show it to me?”

Jason blinked.  A dark tide of red flooded behind his tanned skin.  “I must have dropped it,” he said.  “Somewhere in the grass, I guess,” and with a shrug.  “Maybe your team will find it.”

Rafiel sighed.  He dropped to sitting in the clear space of bench beside Jason.  “I’d think you were the killer, you know, and that those wounds were received from whatever that poor bastard,” a head inclination towards the crime scene, “turned into, except that they say he’s been dead since probably really early morning, before you came to work.  They think he was one of he guys they hired yesterday, and he decided to bunk here for the night.  And your wounds are fresh.  So it’s clear there’s yet a third shifter around – or maybe a second, if that’s his smell around the corpse – and that you got those wounds in a fight with him.  But don’t go telling me about a hunting knife.  You might have cut the shifter up pretty bad but it was all teeth and claws, wasn’t it?”

Silence went on so long, that if Rafiel couldn’t smell the scent of shifter coming from Cordova, made stronger by exertion, and mixed with his blood, he would have thought he was imagining it.

But then Cordova spoke, his voice very tired.  “I see.  The police know.”

“Eh.  This policeman knows,” Rafiel said, inhaling for all he was worth, intent to the shift in adrenaline that would signal that the man was about to attack.  Or shift and attack.  It never came.  There weren’t even any great movements.  Rafiel extended his legs in front of him, doing his best to appear at ease

Turning, he found that Cordova was staring at him, studying him.  “What… do you change into?” the man asked at last.

“Lion, you?”

“Bear.”  And to what must have been sudden comprehension in Rafiel’s face, “Hey, I’m broke, and I guess I like liquor?  I don’t know.  I don’t remember much when I’m already tipsy and then become… you know…  That hike from the forest preserve about killed me too.  Just happy we heal fast.  And that the person who found me thought I’d got drunk and undressed while drunk, and got me clothes and food.”

“I have a cell phone,” Rafiel said.  “Strapped to my thigh with one of those plastic coil things.  Stays in place even when I shift.  That way, if I end up too far from where my clothes are, I can always call friends.”

“Smart that,” Cordova said, and looked down at his feet.  “Only you have to have friends who know, and I don’t have those.  Even my wife didn’t know.  She thought I kept disappearing and was having an affair, and when I didn’t want to talk to her about it, she said I was emotionally unavailable.”  He shrugged.

They sat side by side a little while, then Cordova said, “But that guy, the dead one, I don’t think he was shifter.  I think the shifter smell is from the killer.  It’s really strong around all that area, and it goes that way.”  He pointed the same way Rafiel had been smelling it.

“Could it be one of the other workers?” Rafiel asked.  “Were did they go?”

A grin answered him.  “It’s as I told you before,” he said.  “They ran so fast, they’re probably halfway to Mexico by now.”

“Yeah, but what path did they take out of the park, do you remember?”

This got him a very odd look, as it should have, because Jason was not stupid.  Clearly, from his diction, his vocabulary, the man was smart and well educated.  He stood up on visibly shaky legs.  “Three of them went that way.  And a bunch ran that way.  And then a few ran that way.”

He pointed in three directions, in which the park ended in a fence, bordering a little used road.  Which made sense if you were an illegal worker trying to run away.

“Not that way?” Rafiel asked, pointing in the direction of the path to the parking lot.

Jason shook his head.  “Nah.  None of them had cars, you know?  The owners picked us up in a truck.”  He hesitated a moment.  “Say, you’re not going to try to catch them or…?”

“I’m not INS,” he said.  “And if I caught them, there would only be a mess and they’d end up on the streets again.”

“It’s just,” Jason said, gesturing with his head towards the ticket house where a motley group of people clustered who looked Greek and who seemed to be the extended family of the owner of the park.  They were arguing – or perhaps just talking – in very loud voices.  “That I don’t think they have much choice.”

“The workers?”

“Any of them.  The workers come because they’re hired, and these people hire them because they couldn’t afford minimum wage much less all the deductions and things.”  He frowned.  “The minimum wage law and the benefits and things, it’s all very pretty on paper, but it’s like legislating the weather, man, it does no good.  All it does is make you think everything is fine until reality bites you some place or other.”

Rafiel nodded thinking that Jason was definitely over-educated, but just said, “So none of them went where the smell goes,” he said.  “Which means…  Shit.  There is another shifter at large.”

Cordova hesitated.  He lifted his hand, then let it fall.  He looked over his shoulder and all around, to make sure he was suitably isolated and that no one could hear him.  Then he sighed.  “Man, I don’t want to tell you this.  You look like you have troubles enough.”

“What?”

“After… in the fight, you know…  I had a pretty good grip on this dude, and I was biting and then…”

“And then?”

“He shifted and slipped out of my grasp,” Jason said.  “He just became this skinny, young dude, maybe fourteen or fifteen…”  He hesitated while Rafiel gave vent to a string of profanity, from which – his having grown up in Colorado and having Spanish-speaking friends, the word “Madre” was not entirely absent.

Jason Cordova just nodded at it, as though Rafiel had made an observation worth noting, then said, “Yeah, but… that’s not the worst of it.  I grant you I was shifted myself, and I don’t remember what happened really clearly, but from the way he looked and how… well… I don’t think he’s all there.  And I’m almost sure he’s not, you know… normal.  His eyes, you know. They were more feral as human than in animal form.”

 

 

Chapter 3

Tom turned in bed, almost but not quite fully awake.  He felt Kyrie stir, waking up.

Being in the same bed with someone was still an odd feeling.  For so many years, Tom had been afraid of sleeping near any other human – scared of changing shapes in his sleep and killing his companion by morning.

But he and Kyrie had shared this house for over a year, and this bed for five months, now, and even Kyrie had started to talk about it as “our bed” instead of “my bed.”  So the feeling was odd, but good.  Married feeling, Tom thought.  Not that marriage was for the likes of them.  Not really.  They couldn’t have kids.  Kids might inherit their shape shifting.  And if one of them did something horrible, it was better not to have a spouse who would have to live it down.

He sighed and let go of what couldn’t be, and instead opened his eyes just a little: enough to see that Kyrie had thrown off the covers and was asleep on her stomach, in a tiny t-shirt and tinier shorts, her exposed arms and legs long and golden in the sunlight

While negotiating a loan for the new fryer, the bank officer had demanded to know what Kyrie’s race or background was.  He’d thrown out in succession, as guesses: Greek, Italian, Spanish and Native American.  The man, a well-educated worker at some city bureaucracy or other, had seemed personally offended that Kyrie had refused to admit to one or another background.  He’d pointed out all the benefits that the diner Kyrie co-owned with Tom could get from being minority owned.  Loans and things were apparently theirs for the taking with much easier terms than the bank could otherwise offer.

But even if Kyrie had wanted to claim the benefits – she didn’t, suspecting the too-easy gift  – she would have been hard pressed to guess at her origins.  Her personal history, that she knew of, started on a Christmas night twenty two years ago, when the church goers coming out of midnight mass at a Catholic church in Charlotte, NC, had found a baby girl asleep in a bassinet.  After that there had been a never ending of foster families, one of whom had been named Smith, which surname had been joined to the given names she’d got from the person who’d discovered her that Christmas eve: Kyrie Grace Smith.

God’s Grace.  To Tom she’d been all that and more, the one person to whom his actions and his well being mattered.  Sometimes he thought she kept him sane, and strong and, in the end, human… even when he shape shifted into a dragon.

His hand reached out, as though of its own accord and ran along her smooth, golden thigh.

Kyrie mumbled something against the pillow, then turned her head, throwing back the curtain of her brown hair – the fringe dyed to resemble a tapestry in Earth tones –  and blinking foggily at him.

“Hello sunshine,” he said, half ironically, because he knew that she, like him, was not a morning person.  Or maybe not an afternoon person, because they usually went to bed at around seven in the morning, and woke up at around four or five to start work at the diner they co-owned in time to take the later part of the dinner shift at six.

She growled at him, and gave him a dirty look, more in mock exasperation than in reality.  Then she reached out a hand and patted at his shoulder, as if not sure it was really there. Reassured, she mumbled between clenched teeth, “Time?”

He turned his head to look at the alarm clock on his bedside table, in reality a little bookshelf they’d bought at the thrift shop to serve the duty.  “Four,” he said.

She sighed, a deep sigh and turned on her side to face him.  “I suppose,” she said.  “We have to get up.”  And leaned towards him for a kiss, he didn’t at all grudge.  He never understood complaints of morning breath.

“We could take a few minutes,” he said hopefully.

She kissed him again, and he tried to turn on his side.  Tried to, because as he started to turn, several sharp points inserted themselves into his calves and something gave a good impression of a demonic scream.  “Ah,” he yelled.  “Not-dinner.”  The utterance would have seemed cryptic to anyone who didn’t know them, but not to any of the clients of their diner, or even their neighbors, who were used to the unusual name of their orange tabby tomcat.

More out of habit than thought, Tom returned his legs to the position they’d been in, and after a while the pain of claws on his calves waned.  “I don’t think,” he said.  “Not-dinner approves of the program.”

“So?” Kyrie said.  “Let him not approve.  I will–”

She started to rise, when one of their cell phones rang.  Kyrie’s. Had to be because the tone, playing muffled and distant from somewhere in the house was She only comes out at night.

“Shit,” Kyrie said, slipping out of bed, and opening the door of the bedroom, before dashing off into the house in search of the phone.

Fortunately, Tom thought, the house wasn’t very big, so it wasn’t like she could look in a lot of places.  He sat up, leaned down and, carefully, removed Not-Dinner from his legs.  The cat bristled and yowled, but let him do it.

Just as Tom set his feet on the floor, Kyrie’s phone switched off, and his own – I need a hero – started ringing.

It was somewhere in the room.  He was almost sure of it.  He stumbled to the armchair in the corner, which was in fact never used as a chair, but as a repository of clothes worn once but not dirty enough to wash yet.  He picked up the jeans he’d worn the night before, and patted at both pockets, then his black leather jacket and patted those pockets, before he woke enough to realize the sound was in fact coming from behind the chair.

He’d bent over the back of the chair, and was trying to reach his phone on the floor, aware that Kyrie had come back and stood at the door to the room, when his phone stopped ringing and the house phone started.

There was only one house phone, and it was attached to the wall in the kitchen.  The house was small enough that the coiled cord could extend to almost the whole place.

Tom straightened and turned and ran out of the room, across the living room and down the hall to the kitchen, two steps behind Kyrie.

Someone was desperately trying to reach them.  He and Kyrie owned a greasy spoon, the George, on Fairfax, together.  The fryer had probably exploded, killing their cook and splattering several employees and diners.  The damage charges alone would put them out of business and–

But his nightmarish scenario was interrupted by Kyrie who’d picked up the phone and listened attentively for a few seconds, then covered the mouth piece, and looked up – her eyes solemn.  “It’s Rafiel,” she said, naming their best friend, one of Goldport’s finest.  “He says there’s been a death at the amusement park.”

“And?”

“He thinks it’s a shifter.  From the look of the things wild shifter.”

“Wild?”

“You know, feral?  One who has no clue he shouldn’t kill or eat humans.”

Tom rubbed his hand down his face and groaned.  In some ways the law suit and being put out of business was a less scary scenario.

 

***

“What does he mean feral, I wonder” Tom said, as he got behind the wheel.  They’d showered very fast and at the same time, which was a triumph of love over solid geometry, since the shower in the house they rented was maybe comfortable for one skinny person, and okay for two people if they were both very slim and close friends.  Kyrie and Tom were, for those purposes, very good friends.  But it was a trial to get out of the shower without wasting time in anything but showering.

Now, they were in the car, their hair still wet, Kyrie giving directions from the text message that Rafiel had left her.  “He couldn’t believe we don’t know where Riverside is,” she said.

“He grew up here.  And besides, I hear he has a life that includes days off and vacations,” Tom said, not resentfully.  “He doesn’t work at a diner.  But what does he mean feral?  Did he tell you?”

“He thought there might be some impairment,” Kyrie said.  “Some form of mental issue, in addition to the shifting.”

“How would he know that?”

“He said the witness thought the human form looked more… feral and desperate than the shifted form.”

“Oh,” Tom said, and, as he headed towards the highway.  “Witness?”

“Apparently.  To both the animal and the shift to human.  I didn’t ask, because Rafiel was in a flap, but that’s what I gathered.”

“Joyous,” Tom said, and tried not to think too much about what that might mean.  Sooner or later shifters would be outed, but perhaps they could avoid making it today?  Or not.  And asking Kyrie for more details would only cause her to worry more, which wasn’t fair.  Her entire conversation with Rafiel had lasted maybe two minutes.  She didn’t know any more.

They’d have to wait till they got to the amusement park, and then they’d know.

Tom resisted the impulse to close his eyes and pray, mostly because he couldn’t really drive with his eyes closed, but also because he’d never been very good at the praying thing.  Once, in the worst possible circumstances, he was fairly sure his prayers had been answered.  He didn’t have the nerve to bother whoever was up there again, just now.  It didn’t seem right.  He should be able to deal with most things without bothering God about it.

They left the highway in the least fashionable end of town and wound their way amid narrow streets with houses as small as theirs, but less well kept.  Kids played in some yards, and sullen teenagers stood around street corners.

The park was at the end of that neighborhood, where a larger street bordered it.  There was a bodega, and then, with surprising suddenness, a six foot tall dilapidated white wall, in desperate need of a good white washing, with the letters Riverside Amusement Park, painted on it in reddish brown.

At one end, a tower of vaguely oriental design presided over what was clearly an entrance, and a sign painted on splintered wood said “Parking lot” with an arrow pointing west.

It was a parking lot, if you wanted to call it that, or just a really large expanse of sandy beaten dirt, hard as concrete, with no lines or demarcations.

Not that lines were needed just now, since the only  cars there were three police cars, Rafiel’s SUV and another white SUV.  Tom applied the parking brake and got out after Kyrie.

She stood in the middle of the parking lot, sniffing.

He got out after her and took a deep breath.  “Shifter,” he said.  It wasn’t a question.

“Like the whole area has been drenched in it,” she said.  “Makes me wonder if the owner is a shifter.”

“Could be.  In which case we’ve probably seen him at the George for coffee and eggs.”  He tried for a smile, but kind of missed it.  Their diner, the George, had been drenched in shifter pheromones before the two of them had bought it.  The pheromones – that had been designed to bring shifters to it, in service of a rather deranged shifter’s mating needs, apparently could influence shifters as far as a hundred or more miles away, without the person influenced ever being aware of it.  But of course, once it brought them there, it didn’t make them go in, and it certainly couldn’t make them become a regular of the diner, even if lots of shifters did.  He pointed. “The smell gets stronger this way.”

She nodded, but her face pinched.  “There’s blood,” she said.

He wondered if he could really see, behind her very human eyes the shadow of the panther – the animal she became when she shifted.  He  wasn’t sure at all.  After all, Kyrie wasn’t starting to shift, nor making any efforts towards shifting.  There was just, in the expression of her eyes something that reminded Tom of the panther.  The interested look of the animal scenting blood.

He reached out a hand for her, grabbed at her hand, which felt cold and dry in his.  She gave a little laugh.  “I wasn’t going to shift,” she said.

“No,” he said, and it was as much reassurance to her as to him.  For years, neither of them had had much control over when and how they shifted.  In his case, his past was full of stupid attempts to control the shifting, that often had made things worse.  There had been his addiction to heroine, because heroine was a central nervous system depressant.  And there had been his stealing of the artifact known as The Pearl Of Heaven from a triad of Chinese dragon shifters.

That episode had left Goldport strewn with bodies that Rafiel had had to work very hard to attribute to an escaped Komodo dragon.  And it had almost left Tom for dead too.

But strangely the thing that seemed to work best for control was his relationship with Kyrie.  The same could be said for her.  Tom couldn’t remember the last time they’d accidentally shifted.  Well, not after the thing six months ago when that association of really bad shifters, who called themselves the Old Ones had come to town.  But that, he thought, was hardly accidental.  They’d had to shift.   And fight for their lives.

As they followed the smells, her hand in his, up a small path towards the hippodrome, they could see wood had been stripped from the boarded up entrance, and they noted splats of blood on the sand of the path.  Broad stripes, as though something had bled profusely while running.

They stopped steps from the entrance, hesitating, and while Tom wondered how to ask Kyrie to wait while he went in to see what the creature that had left the blood drops might be, Rafiel came out of the ruined door.  Which was good, because Kyrie was likely as not to insist on going in, too.

“Is it in there?” Kyrie asked, before Rafiel could speak.

As Rafiel nodded, someone else came up behind him, and Tom took a step back, ready to go into a defensive crouch, or even to change if it should become needed, because the person was a complete stranger: short, powerfully built, with olive skin and short-cut hair with the tips frosted in blond.

Rafiel followed Tom’s look and said, “Oh, this is Jason.  Jason Cordova.  He’s the witness I was talking about.”

The man stepped forward, his hand extended.  “Hi.”  A small hesitation.  “I’m a bear.”

Kyrie reacted before Tom, stepping forward and shaking Jason’s hand.  “Kyrie.  Kyrie Smith.  I’m a panther.”

Tom, feeling Cordova’s gaze on him, extended his own hand.  “Tom Ormson.  Dragon.”

Cordova’s eyebrows went up.  “You– What?  Dragons don’t exist.”

Rafiel shook his head.  “He does.  As do some serious bad dragon triad dudes.  Remember the komodo dragon thing?  Yeah.”  He waved a hand.  “Meddle you not in the affairs of dragons for thou art crunchy and good with ketchup and all that.  Though in Tom’s case, he’d demand some fancy sauce,” it was a mark of Rafiel’s preoccupation that he didn’t even smile at his own joke, but instead turned to Tom, his eyes looking haunted.  “It’s bad,” he said.  “Really bad.  Whatever it is, I think it’s been living in the ruined hippodrome.  I have to call my team, there are other… remains there.  Mostly rabbits and foxes, but a couple of people too.”

“People?” Kyrie said, and her voice squeaked.  “Wouldn’t someone have reported it?”

“Lady,” Jason said.  “From the clothes and stuff, they were homeless and possibly illegals.  No one would know.”

 

 

 

Chapter 4

“So this is what I suggest we do,” Rafiel said.  “I suggest we go in, two by two, and look around and see if we can find this creature.

“Okay,” Tom said.  He was frowning at Rafiel, his blue eyes hard.  He hadn’t tied his waist-long black hair as he normally did, and it was drying and being blown into a mess by the wind. He’d also forgotten to shave.  The combination of the unkempt long hair, and the shadow of beard against Tom’s naturally pale skin made Tom look like some seriously dangerous man, out on a spree.  At least he wasn’t wearing the black leather jacket, Rafiel thought.  If he were, some of the rookie officers who didn’t know him might arrest him on sight.

Tom frowned more intently.  “I’ll bite,” he said.  “We’re going to go in and look for this guy who has already killed two people, and who is a shifter.  And what do we do when we find him?  Go argh and die?”

“He didn’t kill me,” Jason Cordova said.  “Though he messed up my shoulder something awful.  I think he’s some sort of pre-historic dog.”

“Pre-historic,” Tom said and in his tone Rafiel could hear the unspoken question, Is this another of the ancient shifters come to town to mess with us?

Rafiel shrugged his ignorance in the matter.  “My idea,” he said, enunciating carefully and trying to make himself sound official and in control.  “Is that there would be two of us and maybe he would be too scared to shift.”

“Yeah, because being scared never causes anyone to shift,” Tom said, at the same time Kyrie said, “But fear normally makes you shift.”

Rafiel sighed.  “We have to do something, okay?  We can’t leave here and leave a bad shifter on the loose.  I mean, if it really were just some dog or something, we could hope maybe it would be afraid of people and not come out, or not, you know, confront humans.  But if it’s a shifter… and if it is a feral shifter, who can tell what it will do?”

Tom didn’t answer, just pulled back his hair with both hands and gave a huff of exasperation.  Kyrie bit her lip.

“Look,” Jason said, then seemed to realize he’d spoken up in front of a bunch of people who’d clearly dealt with this sort of thing before, and visibly hesitated.  Then sighed.  “Look, guys, maybe if we approach it all of us together.  I mean, there’s only so much it can do, right?  What is it going to do against four?”

“Sometime,” Tom said.  “Remind me to tell you about this creature who was a dire wolf and who–”

“Yeah, but this is not quite that bad,” Rafiel said.  “I don’t think Dante Dare would have been living in an abandoned hippodrome, okay?  I don’t think this guy is that smart.”  He cleared his throat.  He could feel sweat run down his back, under the Hawaiian shirt, and he wondered if he’d already got late enough to get out of his date with the excuse of police work.  He had to look at all the silver linings he could.

* * *

Tom put his arm around Kyrie’s waist, as Rafiel hesitated.  “I should,” he said.  “Go call my people before I show it to you, but there were rustlings and things, and I’m afraid…”  He bit at his lip.  “I’m afraid that it is still around there somewhere.  So I’ll have to risk contaminating the crime scene.”

“Crime scene?” Jason said, and snorted.  “The newest of those human remains must be at least a month old, maybe more.”

“Still a crime scene,” Rafiel said.  His inner struggle was visible in his tense face, the frown that pulled his eyebrows together.  Tom was accustomed to it by now.  He was aware that Rafiel must forever fight between his duty as a police officer and his attempts at keeping shifters and their kind secure.  He understood it too.  He didn’t like it.  He didn’t have to like it.  It was as much part of Rafiel as the policeman’s mane of blond hair, consistent in both human and lion form.

He waited until Rafiel – who looked almost terminally relaxed in his surfer t-shirt and khaki pants if you didn’t look at his face – finished the interior debate that Tom knew made him more tightly wound than a year-long-clock, and said, “The thing is, well… as long as you guys don’t touch anything.  You could have been with us when we first went in there to explore after all.”  And when they didn’t protest, he seemed to give up on being saved from himself and adhering religiously to his policeman’s duty, and said, “Well, come then.”

And they went into the boarded up hippodrome, squeezing past the broken boards at the entrance.

***

There was no way to be an honest copper and a shifter, Rafiel thought, not for the first time.  Back when he’d first found out he could shift, while in college for law enforcement, he’d almost given up on the idea of going into the force.

But then he’d figured out his first girlfriend’s murder, a crime that involved shifters, and which would have gone unsolved without his intervention.  And he’d found his vocation for law enforcement again, because, if not him, who would enforce law to shifters?  And who would protect them, both from detection and from each other?

He’d been walking that narrow, knife’s edge path between duty and duty ever since.  But he didn’t have to like it.

He heard Jason’s boots crunch behind him, and Tom and Kyrie walk behind that, as he led them past the collapsed seats, among waist high grass.  His nose kept track of the three shifters behind him, and traced the other scent around here, winding through the grass, trying to be aware if a new, fresher shifter scent joined it, giving away the location of the killer.

Cordova was another problem.  Well, not a problem.  The poor bastard couldn’t help turning into a bear, any more than Rafiel or Kyrie or Tom could help their shape changes.  But they’d have to figure out something for him.  What he’d said, about not knowing anyone else who knew he could shift…  Rafiel had never been that alone.  His parents had figured out his secret early on, and had never been scared or repulsed by it.  Rafiel knew, though, that Tom and Kyrie had each spent many years alone with that secret, trying to survive in a world that would kill them or worse should they find out.  And he had enough empathy to figure out how terrible that must be.

The thing was, every shifter, by the nature of shifting, was, after a while less than sane.  What kind of crazy was Cordova?

His particular form of insanity, just now, seemed to be to behave about as sane as a brick and twice as unconcerned, as he gave Kyrie and Tom a running narration, as he walked around patches of high grass and carefully avoided stepping on needles and human waste, “We came this way, you know, following the scent.  And just here, it’s going to get really bad.”

It did, and Rafiel was ready for it this time.  It wasn’t bad in the sense of really intense shifter scent, but of the shifter scent being overpowered by the sweet, sickly smell of decay.

***

Tom put his arm around Kyrie, as they advanced, behind Rafiel, into the ruined place.  If  he were forced to admit the truth, though he hoped he wouldn’t be, he would have said it was as much for his comfort as hers. He didn’t know if Kyrie was in need of comfort, but he was.

Coming here, and looking at human remains killed by a shifter reminded him of his own days of living wild, of his own fears of what he might have done in the almost blank hours when he surrendered to the animal.  Even now, there were portions of that time that were a blankness and a forgetting, and that he hoped remained so, at least if their revelations involved dead people.

They crossed a musty passageway, composed of rotting boards and the remains of what looked like a ticket booth, and across a short gravel path and into chaos.

It looked like the ruins of Pompeii, only not nearly that neat.  If the place had been encased in lava, there wouldn’t be a riotous growth of vegetation.  People wouldn’t have dumped trash in there.  And teens wouldn’t have got in there, who knew how, to do who knew what.  Though some of the what was answered easily enough by the discarded condoms and the syringes and needles embedded in the grass.

Tom pulled Kyrie back before she stepped on an exposed needle.  He pointed it to her, hoping it would make her more careful, but neither of them spoke.  They could smell it now, more intensely than before.  They shouldn’t startle whatever was there.

Past a pile of broken wood and rusted metal, which must once have been bleachers or seats, around a pile of sand that looked like someone had dumped it there so they didn’t have to cart it back after a construction project.  Then into the tall grass and…

The smell changed, and enveloped Tom.  It wasn’t shifter smell, anymore, but the smell of decay.  It was so strong and so offensive that he thought they’d stumbled on another body.  But what lay in the tall grass were the remains of several rabbits and what might have been a fox.  The fox looked like the most recent.  It was partially eaten, partly rotting in the warmth of the Colorado spring.

The smell of decay was so strong it made them lose the scent.  Tom hesitated, but then as Rafiel started to follow a path of beaten down grass, Tom followed, still holding Kyrie around the waist, as though he could protect her from all evil that way.  After all, Rafiel was trained.  They weren’t.  And Kyrie shouldn’t have to face horrors.

He saw the teenager before he knew what he was seeing.  For a moment, for just a moment, he didn’t seem so much like a human being, but like a Rorschach stain against the grass – a collection of dried grass and stones and blood-stained sand.  But then Tom blinked, and saw that it was human, and a teen.  A young man on the verge of manhood, with overlong, lank, and probably very dirty blond hair, completely naked, his body stained and battered in a way that indicated naked was his normal state.

There were slashes across his middle.  The blood they’d been following.  And then the smell of shifter hit Tom’s nose.

Rafiel had stopped, dead, in front of them, between them and the boy.  “A victim?” Tom asked, in a whisper.

Rafiel shook his head.  “The victim cut at him.  Bear claws.”

“The–”

Tom didn’t know if the boy understood them or if something else triggered his alarm.  His eyes widened, his barely-human face lengthened.  He coughed once, then writhed.

“He’s shifting,” Kyrie said, and sprang forward, but Tom grabbed her, pulled her back.  “We don’t know into what.  This is not time to– ”

And then he realized that Rafiel too was writhing and twisting violently.

As the boy changed into… something low-slung and heavy jawed, and took off running, past them, out of the hippodrome, Rafiel was only seconds behind – a slick, golden lion, leaving a pile of tattered cloth behind him.

Kyrie and Tom followed, running, but by the time they got to the parking lot, the two animal-shape shifters had jumped the fence at the back and were running along the little access dirt road.

Kyrie started to pull her t-shirt up, and Tom realized she meant to shift.  “No, Kyrie.  We can’t have a parade of felines and a dragon run around Goldport in daylight.”

She hesitated for a minute, pushed her lip out and looked like she’d argue, then pulled her shirt back down, opened the car and slid into the passenger side.  He slid into the driver’s side, amazed she’d chosen to let him drive.  As though knowing what he was thinking, she said, “You’re better for crazy driving.”

He grinned, but didn’t say anything.  In his long distant past, before he’d even been legal for driving, he had made his upper-class parents insane by stealing cars to go joyriding in.  He knew Kyrie disapproved of his past, but from her even mentioning it, she might be coming to terms with it.  Perhaps… perhaps this would last, after all.

He turned the ignition on, shifted, pushed the gas down and took off, out of the parking lot in a squeal of tires, and sharply right into the little country road.  He saw the dog-like creature and the lion run around a curve and accelerated after them.

But by the time he got there, they’d turned and were running among the high grass on the road side.  He couldn’t follow them in Kyrie’s compact.  If they had an SUV…

“There are neighborhoods that way,” Kyrie said.  “Past the fields.”

“Yeah,” Tom said.

“I hope no one will see them.”

“I hope they won’t attack anyone.”  And in Tom’s mind was some innocent kid, or even someone’s pet, coming out of his home, to find that … thing in the yard.  To be devoured.  He remembered the half eaten rabbits and foxes.  They weren’t dealing with a civilized shifter.  Nor with a sane one.

Tom coughed, then coughed again, and felt his body trying to writhe, to twist to expand into the dragon shape.  He coughed again, and reached for the hem of his t-shirt, from long habit, to pull it off before he ripped it in shifting.

Kyrie’s hand grabbed at a wrist that ached with that bone-deep pain of a body part trying to elongate and change shape.

“No,” her voice penetrated through the fog in his senses, the whistling blood in his ears, the drum-like thudding of his heart, and the rush of need to do something, to help.  “Rafiel,” he said, and the sound came out oddly sibilant

“Yes, but no,” Kyrie said.  “What you told me holds, and– It won’t do you any good.  Truly.  When people like me are seen or photographed, they can explain intrusions of the wild into the world of humans by mutual encroachment, but a dragon?  What would that be?  Encroachment from a fairytale?”

She was right.  Tom knew she was right.  He blinked eyes already endowed with nictating eyelids, and took a deep, deep breath, which seemed to bring back his rationality.  As it was, he should be grateful that Kyrie hadn’t taken off.  She’d obeyed him.  She’d controlled herself, and now he needed to control himself too. This relationship thing involved mutual control and accepting… accepting someone else’s opinions for what he should do. Tom took deep breaths and imagined the air as a cooling force, pouring in on his heated temper, his sense of urgency.  He forced his half shifted body back to normal, and as his mind cleared realized no worse damage had been done than popping the button of his jeans.

“If he doesn’t call or come back,” he said.  “After nightfall I’ll need to shift and fly a patrol over the area.  If he gets in trouble, maybe I can pull him out of it.”

“Rafiel is a big boy,” Kyrie said.  “I’m sure he can figure out how to beat a skinny, famished homeless shifter and get back home in time for dinner.  I just wonder where that kid came from.  And why he attacked a human.”

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