Gentleman Takes a Chance (24 page)

Dante Dire flowed into one of these, straddling it. He smiled at Kyrie, revealing perfectly shaped and perfectly human teeth. She shook herself, realizing that she had been expecting him to reveal the saberlike teeth of his other form. "Could I have a coffee, miss?" he asked, just loud enough for his voice to carry to where she and Keith and Rafiel huddled.

"Don't do it," Rafiel whispered. "I'll take care of it."

But Dire smiled mockingly, and looked straight at Kyrie as he said, "Come on. It's not like I'm going to eat you."

It wasn't as though he was going to eat her, Kyrie thought. He kept telling her that, and perhaps he meant it, or perhaps it was one of those things where people keep denying their deepest thoughts. In either case, what did it matter?

Either he had no intention of killing her—and it seemed to her, now, on cold reflection, that given the time it had taken Tom to come and rescue her, he could easily have finished her before the cavalry arrived—and therefore was merely toying with them, or perhaps giving her some warning of what his true powers were, or he in fact intended to kill her, and had just fallen in the rather bad habit of playing with his food. This last speculation went well with the insanity behind his eyes, and with the resemblance that he seemed to show to some of the crazier Roman emperors, those who thought they were gods and treated all life around them with the suitable disdain of immortals for mere mortal, ephemeral creatures.

So, he either could spirit her away from here, or kill her right here, without suffering any consequences, or he couldn't. In either case, it seemed to her it didn't make any difference to let Rafiel serve him. No difference, that is, except to make him despise her by thinking her a coward. And whether he intended to kill her or not, having him think worse of her would probably make it easier for him to treat her badly.

"No, I'll take care of it," she told Rafiel, as she poured a coffee, grabbed a bowl of creamers and a handful of sugars from beside the coffee maker, and set it on the counter beside Dire.

This—or the fact that despite herself her hand trembled as she set the coffee before him—seemed to amuse him. "Thank you," he told her. "I take my coffee black."

She nodded to him and started to walk away, but he said, "Stay!"

The voice was authoritative enough that she stopped walking and turned around.

"Stay," he repeated. "I think it's time I talked to you and explained what is going on."

"You don't need to," she said, her voice hollow. "You don't have to." She wasn't sure she wanted to know what Dante Dire thought was going on—at any rate she had a feeling his narrative would be highly colored and personal, and not factual or dispassionate.

"I want to," he said. "Look, it's like this . . ." He paused and took a sip of his coffee and his eyes focused to the side and behind her. Kyrie knew, without turning to look, that he was looking at Rafiel and Keith who had, doubtless, abandoned the lit stove and all other duties to come and stand beside her, as if their mere presence could protect her against this ancient and powerful creature. She had to repress an impulse to giggle, as well as an impulse to turn around and shake her head at them for being ridiculous. Instead, she looked at Dire, her eyebrows raised.

Dire looked from one to the other of the men, then back again at her. "Tell the ephemeral one to leave," he said. "This is shifter business. Not his. I want to talk but only to those who might understand it."

Kyrie froze. She heard Keith draw breath, and she knew he was getting ready to make some protest. She was almost relieved when it was Rafiel who spoke: "He's our friend. He has saved our lives in the past. There is no reason for us to banish him from any conversation. We trust him. He's one of us."

Dante Dire looked up. The gaze which he bent upon Rafiel was so coldly calculating that Kyrie felt as if she were frozen by proximity. "He is not one of us," Dire said, letting his eyes drift just enough to indicate he was surveying Keith disdainfully. "He can never be one of us. Nor can he ever truly understand us. Those of his kind who pretend to understand or like our kind, are only waiting to slip the dagger in."

Kyrie opened her mouth, in turn, to speak, but Dire looked at her. "You are young," he said. "The young make mistakes. I am not young and I am not going to suffer for your mistakes."

"But—" Rafiel said.

"We don't really want to hear what you have to say," Kyrie said, finding her voice. "We don't know that you'd tell us the truth. So far you've attacked us, nothing more. We don't see why we should trust you now."

He looked at her, eyes half closed. Slowly, slowly, his lip twitched upwards on the right side, as though she was a particularly clever child saying some interesting nonsense. "I have not attacked you," he said, didactically. "I have tested you. And having tested you, I've decided you are worthy of being told the truth. There are many of our kind," he said. "A great many more born than ever survive to their twentieth birthday let alone their hundredth. Some are killed by their own stupidity and others . . . find ways to die. Few find comrades worthy of them, or fight, as they should, for other shifters and themselves. Those that do are interesting. Interesting enough to deserve to be told . . . some things they should know."

"I don't really care if you find us interesting," Kyrie said, thinking that, on the contrary, she cared a great deal. She could feel his interest in them being exactly the same as the interest of a kid in the bugs he burns with a magnifying glass. And she didn't like it. But she would be damned if she was going to let him see the cold pit of fear in her stomach. "And I don't know what you have to say that we might want to hear."

He toyed with one of the bright pink packages of sweetener that she had left by his side on the counter. He had incongruously large hands, which looked calloused, as if he normally engaged in repetitive manual labor. Agile fingers with slightly enlarged knuckles. Did shifters get arthritis in their old age? And what had he meant about fewer shifters living to be a hundred? How old was Dire, after all? Oh, he changed into a prehistoric, long-extinct animal, but that might not give any indication of how old he himself might be. After all, Tom changed into a mythological being. And it wasn't as though Tom was mythological. Though he often could seem highly improbable.

"You want to hear what I have to say," Dire said. "Because otherwise you'll die from not knowing it. Already, you've broken the rules of our species. You can plead ignorance, and given enough good will, we might listen to you. But you have to show good will. You have to show a willingness to listen."

"So our special circumstances can be taken into consideration?" Rafiel said, ironically. "By a benevolent judge?"

This time Dire's look at him was amused. "Something like that," he said. "You should understand my point. I'm a policeman of sorts myself. And he"—he pointed a long, square-tipped finger at Keith—"is outside my jurisdiction."

"Well, if what you have to tell us is essential to our survival, then shouldn't we wait for Tom to hear it?" Rafiel said, challengingly. And, bringing up Tom before she could, made Kyrie feel guilty that she hadn't done it first.

But Dire shook his head, and shrugged, dismissively. "The dragons look after themselves," he said. "He's a shifter, but not my problem. The old daddy dragon has made it clear that your friend is one of his fair-haired boys and that I can't touch him no way no how, so why bother? He's protected or not, and if anyone does spank him, it will be his own kind. This is what I meant when I said there are things you must learn, before you get in worse trouble. There is nothing—nothing I can do to him, without precipitating a war between dragons and other shifters, the likes of which hasn't been seen on this Earth for thousands of years. I have no wish to see another one of those. The record of the last one still echoes through the legends of the ephemerals. Another one might very well destroy their puny civilization." He grinned suddenly, disarmingly. "And their civilization makes our lives much too comfortable to be allowed to vanish without a trace."

"Uh," Rafiel said, as though trying to figure out what to say.

"Fine, I'll go," Keith flung. "Being ephemeral and all, I'd better make sure that the stove doesn't catch fire. All I have to say is that Tom had better come in and look after it, as I'll still be close enough that I might, accidentally, catch wind of this highly forbidden knowledge, and we can't have that, can we?"

Kyrie wanted to turn around and apologize to Keith, but she also wanted to know what Dire had to say. She was starting to suspect that, biased or not, it would be informative. There did seem to be way too much that they didn't, in fact, know. Like how long their kind lived. Or the story of their relations with the rest of the human race. And it was becoming clear to her, more so than it had been when they'd last tangled with the dragon triad, that there was more to shifters than little groups of them struggling to survive, or loners like Old Joe.

She heard Keith retreat towards the stove, as Dire said, "Now, I'm one of the oldest shifters currently alive—"

Tom came in, followed by Conan, and surveyed the diner with a dispassionate look. Only a dozen people, in all, and all of them eating. "I think table six and eight could use coffee warm-ups," he told Conan, and instinctively looked around for Kyrie, because Kyrie was usually very good with refilling people's coffee and it wasn't like her to ignore the need for warm-ups. He found her and Rafiel behind the counter, at the point they were furthest from the customers at the table. Facing them was . . . He felt his mouth fall open, and the dragon struggle within, attempting to make him shift into his bigger, more aggressive form.

He'd come here, as they'd feared he'd come. He'd come here and tried to . . . He didn't even know what Dire was trying to do, but he was talking to Rafiel and Kyrie, and it seemed to Tom that if this creature was talking to Rafiel and Kyrie, then it must have them under some kind of mind control, because it was impossible that his friends had taken such complete leave of their senses as to listen to him like that. Wasn't it? Shouldn't it be?

He ducked rapidly under the counter, to the other side, and started towards them, but Keith grabbed his arm. "No use, old friend," he said. "That's a conference for non-dragon shifters only. I'm excluded because the bastard says I'm ephemeral, whatever that means. And you're excluded because you're the Great Sky Dragon's pet and the old bastard doesn't want to start a war. Is this the creature who fought you, outside the aquarium? He didn't seem so afraid of causing a war then."

"No," Tom said. "He didn't."

Conan, who had ducked behind the counter also, and was putting his apron on, said, "But then he didn't know Himself was protecting you personally."

Tom bit his tongue, so as not to tell Conan what Himself could do with his personal protection. He suspected if he were to name the exact unlikely anatomical feat he would like to see the Great Sky Dragon perform, it would only cause poor Conan to become speechless. Possibly forever. He couldn't even say the creature's name. How could he possibly hope to resist him? So, instead, he said, "And?" to Keith, instead of to Conan.

Keith shrugged. "He's apparently issuing some sort of warning to them about my kind and your kind, or whatever. He says he's a policeman, so perhaps he thinks he's Rafiel's colleague."

It was clear to Tom that Keith was offended at being kept out of the conference and he wanted to tell him that this was a fraternity he should count himself greatly lucky to be excluded from—that it was better to be excluded than to be claimed by old, amoral creatures. And he was sure if he said it, it would have no more effect than to have told his young, bereft self that it was better to be kicked out of the house with exactly a bathrobe to his name than to be handed over to a criminal, or at best an extra-legal organization by doting and dutiful parents.

So instead he turned, to rummage under the counter. He found his boots there, and wondered whether Rafiel or Kyrie had taken care of that. He put them on, laced them, then put his apron on. Conan was already among the tables, giving warm-ups and taking other orders, or drawing tickets. But he kept looking over his shoulder at Tom, as if afraid Tom was about to do something stupid.

And Tom, who felt a great roil of anger boiling at the pit of his stomach, looked at the three people talking. Talking, as if this were a perfectly normal social occasion, talking as though the dire wolf hadn't tried to kill them just moments before. In the shower, he'd washed and disinfected a wound, halfway up his calf, caused by the monster's teeth. He was sane enough to realize that the creature could have hurt him much worse. It could have bitten his head off. It could have dismembered them all. It could have closed its teeth on his calf, and now Tom would presumably be growing a new foot, just like Conan was growing a new arm, just like . . . But this wasn't rational. This wasn't even sane. He looked at that creature—who showed no sign of their pitched battle—talking to Kyrie, and he wanted to grab another meat-tenderizing hammer and a fresh skewer and renew the wounds he was sure he had made on that impassive, inhuman face.

"I was born a long time ago," Dire said. He looked at Kyrie first, but then up at Rafiel, as though making sure that he, too, was following the story. "It's hard to say exactly when, because, you know, in those days the calendar was different and more"—he flashed a humorless grin—"regional. Limited. The birthday of the god, or the such and such year of the city." Something like a shadow passed across his eyes, as if the visible reflection of all the passing years. "I can tell you it was before Rome. Probably before Rome was founded, certainly before it was heard of in our neck of woods, which was somewhere in the North of Africa—I think. Geography was arbitrary too, and your city, your people, your land, were the only people, the only lands, in the middle of the ocean, where true humans lived."

Rafiel tried to imagine that type of society. He could not. Or rather, he could all too well, but it came from his reading, from movies, someone else's imagination grafted on his own, and he was sure nothing like the real thing. He very much doubted that these people had ever been noble savages, or that such a thing as noble savages existed. On the other hand, he also doubted it was quite as hellish as other movies and books had shown it. In his experience, people were mostly people.