Going to his home, at any rate, gave him the chance to check and see how they’d got Kyrie, and whether they’d hurt her. Because if they hurt her, then ruthless might not begin to describe his behavior.
*
Kyrie wished she knew whether it was near dinnertime, and if they had any intention of feeding her, because if they were to bring her dinner and come in at an inconvenient time …
But after sitting there in the dark a while, she decided it was nonsense, anyway. If they came in and caught her while she was loosening the board, there was a good chance no one would notice. Even if they brought a flashlight or something, it was likely the light wouldn’t be very strong. And if they came in after she’d loosened the board … she’d just leave.
The thing about keys and key holders—her key holder being a heavy, flat, steel rectangle with Kyrie engraved on it—was that they could make really handy levers. Particularly when you had as many keys as she had, between the keys to the various supply vans, her car, the diner, and the home keys, plus that old key she carried around, from her very first apartment, as a souvenir and a guarantee that she could survive on her own.
She could afford to bend or break a couple of keys and still pry the board off the window. Besides, as far as she had felt with her fingers, the board was not exactly very well fastened. If you wanted to fasten the board in a way that would be difficult to remove, you’d use screws in the corners, and her captors had not.
Perhaps they had never thought to use a bunch of keys as a tool, and therefore thought they were tossing her in there without any tools, in the dark, and therefore assumed she could never figure a way out.
Kyrie worked a long time, doggedly. To her relief, there was no knock at the door, nothing that foretold dinner. Sometimes she could hear steps above her, which confirmed the idea that she had guards, or people moving above her.
The nails came out of the first corner, and Kyrie felt them. They were really long nails, but had been run into stucco, which is the sort of material that lets go, once you’ve pulled enough. Armed with this knowledge, she now knew to pry them a little loose, then pull at the corner of the board with her fingers. The process was considerably faster after that, though it made the tips of her fingers hurt.
Under the board, as she expected, there was glass. Kyrie felt it, cool against the fingers. It let light into her cell, too, which revealed itself as small but not particularly squalid. She noted the lack of a bathroom and wondered whether that meant they didn’t intend to keep her long, or whether they were just stupid. She wouldn’t bet against the second.
Outside, she could see ground level, and her idea that she was in the suburbs vanished. For one, the area immediately outside the window was all pebbles, then concrete. More importantly, she could see the reflected light of garish neon. And, with the wood out, and the window it had hidden consisting of a poorly insulated frame and thin glass, she could hear traffic nearby and, periodically, the sound of car radios that indicated considerable traffic stopped at a light.
Goldport wasn’t that large a town. It had once been a mining town, left almost abandoned in the silver bust. Then the tech boom had come in, and a few firms had moved to town. And then CUG had opened, and its research facilities had brought in another batch of well-educated residents. So Goldport was a small town that, in summer, had a halved population, except for the influx of tourists, while during the school year it swelled with college students.
The only place that had that sort of sustained traffic was downtown. This meant she couldn’t be very far from either The George or her place.
Right. By the scant light, she looked at the wood frame. She could break the window, of course, but there was simply no way, absent a glass cutter, to make window breaking noiseless. Kyrie might risk it when the traffic was at its loudest, but she doubted even the most obnoxious hip-hop beat sounded like breaking glass. She could also wait for the inevitable ambulance wail or police siren. But those weren’t regularly spaced. That meant she could be waiting a long time, and if during that time someone came to bring her dinner … or something … and noticed the wood was off the window …
Kyrie bit her lower lip, thinking. The frame of the window looked like something from the mid-twentieth century, two parts, with the glass in some sort of recessed groove, and then with the interior frame nailed over it. It wasn’t designed to open, and the frame might very well be held together mostly by paint.
She could probably use one of the slimmer keys to pry the frame away, then dislodge the glass. She shrugged to herself. It was, at least, worth a try.
She inserted the key for one of the cargo vans that belonged to The George—a slim, pointy, Ford key—into the side of the frame where she could feel the breeze coming through. It went in easily, and the wiggling of the key produced a groan of wood and nails, and a considerable loosening.
Right. But she couldn’t trust that the builders of this place hadn’t been stupid enough to put the groove that held the glass on the interior frame. Who knew? Perhaps they had mounted the whole thing as one piece. That meant by prying at the frame, she risked having the glass fall and shatter, which would be noise enough to bring her captors to check. Unless, of course, they were deaf.
Thoughtfully, Kyrie pushed her bed towards the window, as tight to the wall as it could be, and then, just in case, took the blankets and bunched them in a heavy roll between wall and bed, so if the glass fell, it was likely to make less noise.
Then, to ensure that the chance of the glass falling was smaller, she worked at the frame from the top.
To some extent, this was easier than removing the board. Doing so broke the key to the van, and then the key to the other van, but that was because she had to work through tighter portions, and the dried paint keeping the frame together was harder to break. But it finally gave.
She’d been right, she thought, sweaty and shaking, as she gently pulled the frame off from the top. Someone had been dumb enough to set the glass in the interior portion. So she had to pull it down, gently, gently, till it was horizontal, like a picture frame with the glass resting in it.
She stood a few minutes, taking deep breaths, holding the frame and the glass in it.
Then she stepped down from the bed and set frame and glass on the floor.
She climbed back on the bed, and put her head and shoulders through the opening. There was enough room to pull herself through, though it was tight. Outside, as she’d expected, was a pebble bed with an ancient, weathered statue of a frog seeming to indicate that sometime, perhaps long ago, someone had cared enough to decorate the area.
Kyrie worked her arms through, so she could put her hands against the external wall and work her body out. Above her, she could see a lighted window, and hear the noise of people talking and—from the sound of it—some sort of computer game.
When she was up to her hips outside the room, a shadow fell on the window above. For a moment, Kyrie had a glimpse of a young man, around college age, with a can of some beverage in one hand, and she froze, hoping he wouldn’t open the window and that he wouldn’t look out.
Turning her head, she saw, to her right, a neon sign with a stereotypical cartoon Indian chief, the headdress blinking in garish green and blue, and a hand lighting and blinking to seem to wave up and down. Beneath it the words, only partly illuminated, in yellow, but still legible, read Tomahawk Motel.
As he turned back away and towards the inside, she pushed harder with her hands, to pull herself out.
This was a mistake. Something in the frame of the window caught at her dress and gave a groan like a spirit caught in eternal torment.
From inside, loudly, came a swear word followed by, “What was that?”
And Kyrie shoved for all she was worth and pulled free from the window, feeling the pocket of her dress tearing, and not caring. At the back of her mind, she quickly realized that if she ran towards the road she would be more likely to be caught. She could hear a door open on the other si
de of the motel cabin in whose basement she’d been captive. They’d come here, they’d see—
She was already running, hunched over, towards a dark area, past other cabins, out, and down, away from the road.
Although she’d never been here, she knew the area from driving past. Down there was a creek and an area full of brush and trees. She ran towards it, and crawled under the first clump of bushes she came through. She half expected to find condoms and needles under there, but clearly the people who frequented the Tomahawk were not the type to commune with nature by the creek.
She heard shouts and calls, and finally a couple of cars starting up. She wondered if those were her captors going in search of her, or thinking they were doing so, going towards the road, towards The George.
The George was south of here, two cross-streets away. Her house was the other way from this little wooded area, past a small maze of neighborhood streets. Which way did they think she’d be more likely to go?
She took deep breaths and tried to decide what to do.
*
It was when they got to his car, in the parking lot of Riverside, that Rafiel realized he was an idiot. Okay, so he probably had good indications before, including the fact that he was falling for a woman about whom he knew precious little, other than that she was an art student and could shift into a dragon.
He also knew that she had talked back to the Great Sky Dragon, that she wasn’t put off by danger—in fact she’d volunteered to come into greater danger in order to help Tom—and that she viewed his relationship with his parents as he viewed it, which, now that he thought about it, was damn rare.
Maybe he wasn’t totally stupid for starting to think he’d like to spend his whole life with Bea. Fine. But he was totally stupid for not having remembered that his car keys had been lost more than a day ago in that disastrous change into a lion.
Bea didn’t make him feel any better either, when she said, “But why didn’t you have it attached to your leg, with the phone?”
Rafiel sighed. “Normally,” he said, “I just call my parents, or Tom, for the spare set of keys.”
He’d called Tom first, but got no answer at home, and when he called the diner, he was told that Tom had left with Conan Lung and Old Joe. That sounded like official business, and weird official business at that, so he’d not called Tom’s cell phone. The way things were, he might get Tom mid-transformation, or perhaps mid-conference with some triad guys, and Rafiel had a strong feeling that there was nothing worse for the image of a great leader than stopping in the middle of a conversation about the possible invasion of the world to go take a friend his car keys. He tried Kyrie’s phone and no one answered.
He could call his parents, but he’d asked his mother if he could bring a friend for dinner, and maybe to stay a couple of days, and had barely escaped embarrassing questions which Bea would overhear. If he called again …
Then he thought of his colleagues in the police. He’d got his mom to call him in sick yesterday, and of course they wouldn’t have his particular key, but it was a little known fact that there were a limited number of vehicle keys, per make, and that the police had copies of most of those. They had to, because when a car was discovered by the side of the road exuding a strange smell, not causing more damage than strictly needed was important, just in case it turned out to be a crime scene.
Rafiel wasn’t absolutely sure that all police departments throughout the land did this. He thought perhaps the fancier and better equipped ones, in the bigger cities, had expert lockpickers or something, who could get into anything. But Goldport had exactly four officers in its serious crimes unit, and so they collected each variety of key that came into their hand.
He called the station and got Cas Wolfe.
“Yeah?” Cas said, followed by “I thought you were sick,” when Rafiel explained his predicament. There was always a feeling of amusement when Cas talked about Rafiel missing work, and there was often great amusement when Cas noted that Rafiel had changed clothes in the middle of the day. The conceit around the police station seemed to be that Rafiel had a complex love life of the sort that involved changing clothes several times a day and, possibly, climbing out of windows just ahead of enraged husbands.
At least, Rafiel assumed that’s what they thought, and Cas Wolfe and his cousin Nick, the newest addition to the serious crimes unit, were absolutely the worst. They had been raised as brothers, and acted like brothers a lot, and they were at least half Greek, or possibly all Greek, which brought with it a culture of machismo and an idea—Rafiel supposed—that all men were supposed to be philanderers. The fact that Cas was, so far as Rafiel could tell, absolutely faithful to his girlfriend, and that Nick was absolutely faithful to his boyfriend, didn’t stop them from imagining that other men lived the lives of roving Casanovas. Sometimes the looks they traded when Rafiel returned to the station having changed clothes because of an unfortunate shifting accident, were just about as much as Rafiel could take without blowing up.
Cas’ voice had that suggestion of amusement behind it that often infuriated Rafiel.
“Actually I was in an accident and got a bit bruised,” Rafiel said, figuring that the scrapes that still showed on his face might make it clear. “But I’m better.”
“You were in an accident but not your car?”
Was that skepticism in Cas’ voice? He was junior to Rafiel in the department, and he really wasn’t supposed to be checking Rafiel’s movements. “Tom’s car,” Rafiel said drily.
“Oh, yeah. I see. And you lost your keys when you went to emergency?”
“I didn’t go to the ER,” Rafiel said. Cas wasn’t supposed to be checking on his movements, but all the same, it wasn’t out of consideration that he might, at some point, be at the emergency room and ask … Even though calling in a sick day when you weren’t sick—and Rafiel had been sick—wasn’t that serious, there was no point undermining the confidence of his colleagues in the department. “I have no idea what I did with the keys. Look, if you don’t want to help …”
“Nah,” Cas still sounded more amused than suspicious. “Nick and I were just about to leave and go grab some pizza. Our respectives are out shopping for Dyce’s wedding dress again, so we’re just the two of us this evening.” Dyce was Cas’ fiancée and their wedding was any day now. “We’ll come out. Which car is this? Your Explorer? I’ll grab the keys.”
Rafiel hung up and met Bea’s curious eyes. “It’s just my coworkers,” he said.
Her eyebrows arched, and he realized he was blushing. “They have written this entire life for me, you know, where I’m some guy who sleeps around a lot and keeps losing his clothes. I still don’t understand how sleeping around a lot would cause me to lose my clothes, but never mind. They get juvenile, and wink at each other about it.”
“Oh my,” Bea said, but there was a tremor of a smile at the corner of her lips.
“Yeah,” he said, and thinking of it belatedly, “I’m afraid they might get juvenile when they see I’m with a woman, too, but—”
“Eh. I’m a college student. Juvenile doesn’t scare me.”
“My colleagues can be far more juvenile than college students.”
Bea smiled and turned off the engine. “I guess we’ll wait a while.”
“Yeah,” Rafiel said. His mind was working. He wondered what exactly might have happened with the investigation of the remains found in the hippodrome while they were at the cabin, and what his colleagues might have made of it. He’d have to ask Cas. He knew the culprit was the feral shifter, but other people wouldn’t know that. The problem with the shifter cases was that Rafiel always had to run double books, so to put it—what was really happening and what he could afford to share with the public, even that part of the public who were law enforcement officers.
He didn’t even know what he could do about the feral teen shifter. It was one thing to execute his private brand of justice on murderous adult shifters who had killed other shifters and other h
umans in full knowledge of what they were doing—with full intent and malice—but to go after a kid, particularly a shifter kid who might not know he was doing anything bad, seemed wrong. And yet he couldn’t be allowed to run free, could he? The kid would just kill more people, and more shifters, and eat them, all unaware that he was doing evil.
In a society in which shifters were known—Rafiel snorted at the idea—the kid would simply be confined and not allowed to be destructive, but allowed to live, because it really wasn’t his fault.
Rafiel remembered what he had seen in those eyes, the perfect lack of awareness not just of having broken any rules, but that there were any rules, or anything he should hold to. Rafiel couldn’t think of it without shuddering. To destroy a kid for being that way was like taking a feral kitten and killing it for soiling the rug.
He put his head back and groaned.
“What is wrong?” Bea asked.
He looked at her, and slowly explained, leaving many of the details out, his dilemma. She blinked at him. “But why do you have to decide?” she asked. “I mean, why is it your responsibility?”
“Because I’m a policeman. And I’m a shifter. I have a duty to both the police and shifters. I have to keep people from knowing that there are shifters, lest, you know, horrible things happen to our kind. And I have to keep the law. I mean, I swore to protect innocent. I can’t just say ‘Well, never mind,’ when the criminal turns out to be my kind.”
Bea pursed her lips, then stretched them. She shook her head and sighed. “It doesn’t seem right,” she said. “The responsibility shouldn’t rest on your shoulders.”
“If you think I’m taking power I shouldn’t be taking, I’d rather—”
“No, I don’t think you view it as power at all,” she said. “You view it as a chore. Which is good. But the thing is that there are no controls. Suppose the one shifter in the police force was power hungry and saw this as an opportunity to amass power? To start a group of shifters who’d terrorize the city, or—”
Rafiel suddenly felt very tired. “I know,” he said. “I’ve thought about it. I’ve wondered what it would be like if another one of us joined the force, and then I realized it could either be helpful or very, very bad. Long ago, I figured someone in a position of power, who was inclined to build an army, is what resulted in things like the triads and the other organizations we’ve got trouble with. So I don’t complain too much about the trouble, I don’t complain too much about how much work it is for me. I just wish there was someone to help decide what to do with this particular kid. That’s supposing I can catch him—”
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