"Officer Rafiel Trall, ma'am," he said, instead, as politely correct as he could be. "From the Goldport Police Department."
She squeaked again and put her hand in front of her face. Unfortunately this was the hand holding the Rodent Liberation Front pamphlet, and as it trembled in front of her face, it did nothing to make it easier for Rafiel not to mention that she smelled of shifter. But, objectively, he didn't need to reveal to her that he knew. Not even vaguely. What he needed to do was somehow determine when she'd been in the aquarium and what she'd done. If she'd been there with a large group of children, it was highly unlikely she'd either taken the time to dump an unsuspecting adult male into the tank or to steal the keys of the aquarium so she could come back and do it later. And he could check on her movements during the visit by talking to whoever had been there with her. If these things hadn't changed since his school days, every field trip, even every visit to the park, was facilitated not only by the teacher in charge, but by two or three aides and by a number of mothers who, apparently, lacked enough chaos in their lives and must, therefore, pursue it in these groups.
"I'm sorry if this is not a good time," he told the terrified eyes shimmering with tears. "But this is a very routine enquiry. You signed the book at the aquarium on the thirteenth?"
She blinked, as if this were not what she expected at all, and slowly lowered her hand. It was her turn to clear her throat, because, if he guessed right, she couldn't have spoken otherwise. "Yes, yes," she said. "I took my science class to the aquarium. We're studying environmental biology and the pollution of water courses, and how that affects endangered species of fish." Her voice was pipingly small, but he suspected that's how she normally talked.
"How many children would there be in the class?" Rafiel asked, fascinated by her recital of facts seeming calm enough, even as her eyes looked terrified.
She cleared her throat again. "Oh . . . there were two classes together, actually. I . . . I have them at different periods, you know. So it was forty children. Well, at least not exactly children, they're fifth graders, and they get very upset if we call them children, as they should, since they are, after all, almost teens."
"I see," he said. And he did in fact see that this woman probably lived in fear of her students, most of whom would be her height or probably taller than her. She would do anything rather than upset them or offend them. He wondered how effective that was, as a teaching discipline. He consulted his notebook for her name, which was . . . he squinted at it. Marina Gigio. "So, how many other adults were there to help supervise the . . . er . . . teens, Ms. Gigio?"
"Ms. Braeburn," she said. "And Ms. Hickey. They're teacher aides. And then there were five mothers, but I'd have to look at my paperwork to tell you their names. They vary, you know, with each field trip."
"I see," Rafiel said again. He did. That made eight adults to forty kids, leaving it on average to each adult to look after five of the kids. Only he doubted very much it worked that way. For one, the mother volunteers, from what he remembered from his own childhood, were far more interested in their own children's safety and behavior than in any other of the kids'. That was probably worse now, since political correctness and a certain paranoia amid parents would have taken its toll. No sane mother would dare scold or even caution another's child. At the end of that lay lawsuits or worse.
So, in fact, five of the adults would be looking after five or at the most—supposing there were a few siblings between the two classes—seven or eight kids. The rest would be left to the teachers and teacher's aides. And the rest, being fifth graders, would be a definite handful. At that age—Rafiel had cousins—they were still capable of most of the idiocy associated with very small children, but to it they had added the creative mischief of teenagers, from stupid pranks to holding hands or kissing when someone wasn't looking. And the world being what it was these days, holding hands or kissing could also lead to lawsuits.
The woman would have had her hands full. Rafiel nodded to her. "Did you see anything suspicious? Anything that . . . well . . . do you remember the shark area, and the point where you can climb stairs to a sort of platform and look down at the shark area?"
She nodded. "I've . . . I've read about it in the paper. Their finding remains there. Thinking that I let all the young people hang on the railing and look down, and they were all playing, you know—nothing vicious—but shoving each other and saying 'tonight you sleep with the fishes' . . . I couldn't have imagined how unstable it was. If I'd known, I'd never have let them up on it. When I think of what might have happened." She shuddered, or rather trembled, a trembling flutter that made Rafiel think of something he couldn't quite name.
"Well, I understand no one knew it was that unstable," he said. He didn't want to tell her that the area was perfectly stable, but that the safety cover of the tank had been removed. As far as he knew—and he would admit he hadn't looked at the paper much beyond the cryptozoological report on the front page—the newspaper was still reporting both findings of bodies at the aquarium as accidents or at the very worst mysterious deaths. "So you didn't see anyone else there? I mean, besides the group you took in?"
She shook her head. "No. Just the childr—young people. You know how it is when a school group goes to this type of place. The other visitors tend to get out of the way."
"Oh, yes," he said.
"Very considerate of most people, really," she said. "Giving the children a chance to learn."
"Yes," he said, firmly, not wishing to encourage her delusions or provoke a flow of stranger explanations. Instead, he said, "I was just wondering . . . if you saw anything else suspicious?"
"No," she said, with unusual firmness. She darted a look—he'd swear it—at the pamphlet she'd received in the mail, then looked up again. "Definitely not."
If she wasn't lying, then Rafiel would present his shifter form to the nearest vet for neutering. He frowned. He didn't want to do it, but something welled up in him—the meaning of her last name, the look of her flutter, and something else . . . a feeling.
He cast about for something he could claim ambiguously had been a guess at what she might have seen, should it fail to hit its mark. "Mouse, right?" he said at last.
She shriek-squeaked, and her hand darted for the door handle.
But Rafiel's hand was there first, holding onto the door handle, speaking in his best soothing, smooth voice, "It's all right, Ms. Gigio. It's all right. This is not about you. I just wanted to tell you I knew, and that it's all right."
But she turned, backing against the door, her back protected by it, and bared little teeth at him. "How do you know? How did you know?"
He didn't answer. He wasn't going to bare his throat that explicitly to her. He wasn't going to tell her in so many words. But he allowed his eyebrows to rise in an expression that was unmistakably guess.
"Oh," she said. She dropped the letter and covered her mouth with her hand. "Oh." And then, with something sparking at the back of her eyes. "Are there many of us, then? Around?"
He shrugged. "I know a few. I don't think there're many, no." He had no idea, of course, of how many Ancient Ones there might be. "Less than one percent of the population. Perhaps much less."
"Oh," she said again. "All . . . all the same thing?"
It took him a moment to realize what she was saying, then he shook his head slowly. "Not at all. In fact, I don't know of any two of the same mammals." The closest being himself and Kyrie, for all the good it did them. And Alice had been like him. "There's . . . there seems to be a gamut of shapes, from the most common to the extinct or even mythological."
"Oh," she said again, and let out air, as though deflating, though fortunately she didn't decrease in size as she did it. "I got this letter in the mail. I thought . . ."
"I know," Rafiel said. "I've seen those around the college. I thought they were a student prank."
"I did too," she said. "See them. I saw them outside The George this morning. I often go there for the pest
o omelet."
And for the pheromones, Rafiel thought, but didn't say anything. Let her think that her actions were rational and consciously controlled. They needed all the illusions they could hold onto.
"But I thought it was a student prank too," she said.
"It might still be," Rafiel said, though he didn't for a minute believe it. "You know your last name means mouse in Italian. And it's possible."
"Yes, it is," she said, brightening up. It looked like a sudden weight had gone off her. "I mean, it's actually probable. How else would they know? Or . . . Or . . ." She seemed to run out of objections to the idea someone else might know. Rafiel thought this was also an exceptionally bad time to let her know that some shifters could smell out other shifters.
Instead, he just inclined his head, and said, "Will you tell me, then, what you saw at the aquarium? I realize it must have been something you didn't want to talk about to just anyone, perhaps something shapeshifter related?"
She looked up and managed to give the impression she was making complex calculations at the back of her mind. "Well . . ." she said. "Well . . ." And shrugged. "It's just something that could be shifters. I didn't want you to think I was crazy, that is, before I knew . . . you know . . . that . . . that you'd understand."
"I understand," he said. "What did you see?"
"It was in the aquarium area, when it changes over to the restaurant area, you know? It's always really hard to control the ki—young people there, because they always want to stay and eat at the restaurant, no matter how many times you tell them it's an expensive, sit-down place and they wouldn't really be pleased if a bunch of young people—who tend to be rowdier than grown-ups—took over their tables, and, you know . . ." She seemed to realize she was running on and finished lamely, "all that. So I was very busy talking to all of them, and Ms. Braeburn was actually standing by the entrance to the restaurant, herding them past, as it were, to make sure they didn't try to duck inside, and then I saw . . ."
She shook her head. "You know that area has all the huge tanks with the weird stuff? Squids and octopuses, and that huge crab tank, where there's a lens on the bottom, and you can crawl under the bottom and look up?"
He nodded. He hadn't paid that much attention to that area, but he vaguely remembered everything she mentioned.
"Oh, this is going to sound like I'm crazy," she said, and put her hands on either side of her face, as if to keep herself from blushing. It didn't work. A blush showed on her cheeks, on either side of her fingers. It made her, weirdly, very attractive, and Rafiel had to remind himself that when cats played with mice, the result was normally not pleasant.
"I swear, just as we managed to get the kids out of the area, a little naked man came out from under that area—you know, the area where you can crawl to look up and see the crabs and things, as if you were inside the aquarium. He looked Asian—I'd think Japanese. Or at least he looked like the Japanese in movies. And he looked very old. His hair was all white and he was almost bent in double. And . . . well, he was naked, so I looked more attentively." She seemed to realize how that might sound and gasped slightly, before saying, all in a rush, "I mean, I mean, because I'm familiar . . . because I know when you shift suddenly you often find yourself, you know, naked. So I looked, because he didn't look like a streaker or a flasher or any of that kind of person, so I thought, I thought . . . how odd, and maybe he was a shifter. Only it wasn't a real thought, I mean, with words or anything, just an impulse to look more closely at him and see, you know . . . what was wrong."
Rafiel refused to tread in the minefield of innuendo that surrounded that statement. Instead, he said, "And then?"
"Oh, that's the craziest part of all, and I've spent a lot of time wondering if I'd gone around the bend, you know? But this is the thing . . . he winked at me, when he saw me looking. Just winked with all the calm in the world. And then he . . . climbed the tank. He wasn't very big. Shorter than I. And you know the tanks are open at the top, right? So he climbed the tank and he . . . dropped into it. And then . . . I couldn't see him anymore."
"Do you mean he disappeared?"
She shook her head. "No, I don't think so. It's just as he splashed in, there was all this turmoil and then . . . there were just crabs and anemones there. Nothing out of the ordinary." She looked apologetic. "I hadn't counted the inhabitants of the tank before he dropped in."
"No one would have asked you to," he said, reassuringly.
"I confess," she said. "When I first heard of the bones and the arm found in the tank, I thought it might be a shark shifter, and that he hadn't changed in time . . . ?"
Rafiel hadn't thought of that, and that was a horrible idea, though it would certainly explain the moved-aside cover. And it wasn't like it was completely crazy. After all, sharks ate each other, too. And the remains being as sparse as they were, and having been in the water, how could he be sure the victims weren't shifters? But three shark shifters? All meeting the same fate? Unlikely.
"Thank you for your help, Ms. Gigio," he said. And then, because he felt he owed her something, he added, "I don't expect you'll have any more trouble with those pamphlets, but if you do, give me a call." He handed her one of his business cards. "I'll do what I can."
"Oh, thank you," she said, holding the card close to her chest. "That's so kind of you."
He didn't know what to answer to that, so he merely said, "Good evening, ma'am." And started towards the stairs. At which point, curiosity overtook him. There was something he had never fully understood about shifting. Oh, sure, Tom and Kyrie could go on and on about genes and about crossover from other species—borrowed genes or something like that—and about all this sort of pseudoscientific stuff, but what Rafiel wanted to know was what happened to the law of conservation of mass and energy when one shifted.
After all, Tom was easily five times his normal size when he shifted. Oh, sure, Tom was a muscular guy, but if you took his mass and distributed it across the bulk of the dragon, the dragon would be lighter than a cloud. Rafiel himself knew he was considerably heavier as a lion than as a man, though the lion was also much larger.
How would those differences in size play themselves over creatures that were much further from human at either end of the scale? What would a mouse shifter look like? Or a crab shifter, for that matter? He kept thinking of the report of the squirrel the size of a German shepherd. That would make finding shifters at the aquarium far easier.
"So . . . how big are you?" he asked. "When you shift?"
She blinked, and blushed, as if he'd asked her a very intimate question. "About . . ." she said. "Oh, normal size, you know? For a mouse."
And then, as if she'd broached the inadmissible, she opened her door and darted inside, leaving Rafiel rooted to the spot, thinking, Cat and mouse. Bad idea.
* * *
Tom was all too conscious of having been stubborn, and strange, and that he'd probably annoyed Kyrie—or at least deserved to annoy her. He felt guilty about walking away from their discussion, but he didn't know what else he could tell her, and he was very much afraid he would change into a dragon, right there in the parking lot.
He wrapped his arms around himself, shoving his hands under his arms to keep them warm, as he walked. He relished the sound of his boots against the snow. One of the good things about them was that they had such great traction. He also relished the fact that his hands and arms felt so cold they seemed to burn. Snow was settling all over him. One of the homeless who walked along Fairfax summer and winter was huddled in the recessed doorway of the realtors down the street.
He gave Tom an odd look from under disheveled bangs. "Whoa there, pal," he said. "You won't last long like that. They give coats for free down at St. Agnes. Got me this one." He patted his huge, multipocketed safari jacket. "Really warm."
Tom nodded, but walked on, without even slowing down. Wouldn't last long? How long could he last? How long did things like him live? And what happened to them when they went beyond the limit
s of normal human life? What did it do to you to live long enough to see all the normal people around you die? And their children, their grandchildren, everyone you could care for? Would it mean that you would come to think of them as ephemerals? As things? Creatures who didn't matter?
If that was true, then Tom didn't want to be a shifter. He didn't want to live to lose touch with everyone he knew—to see Keith's grandchildren get old and grey, and Anthony's great grandchildren die out. To lose all meaningful contact with people.
He stomped his feet, trying to find an outlet for his anger. He didn't want to be owned, he didn't want to owe anything to the Great Sky Dragon. Much less did he want to owe anything to the dire wolf, who had already proven that he had no respect for anyone, not even other, younger shifters—not even older shifters, if Old Joe was any indication.
And Old Joe was something else, working at Tom's mind. Where was he? Where could he have gone? It would be like Old Joe—Tom nurtured no illusions about his charity case—to have disappeared completely at the first sign of a threat. It would be like him . . . but it wouldn't be like him to go more than twenty-four hours without turning into an alligator and coming back to raid the diner dumpster. Particularly in this sort of cold weather when his shifter metabolism would be demanding protein.
Tom backtracked to where the homeless man sat. "Hey," he said.
The man looked back up at him. "Ah, you decided to come back for the coat? But I can't give you the coat, or I'll freeze, see." His speech was more articulate than Tom was used to from the people who would stay in doorways even when the weather turned bitterly cold. The main reason to not go to one of the free shelters was, normally, that they demanded sobriety and this person could not swear to it. "Go to St. Agnes. They will look after you."
Gentleman Takes a Chance Page 22