Night Shifters by Sarah A. Hoyt Read Free Book Online Page A

didn’t dare reach for the strength of the talisman to allow himself to shift. No. The dragons would sense that.
    Instead, setting Kyrie down carefully, he willed himself to shift. He thought himself human, and shivered, as his body spasmed in painful change.
    He was naked. Naked, sitting on the warm asphalt of the parking lot, next to Kyrie’s car and a panther. No. Next to Kyrie. In the next minute, she also shifted, and appeared as a naked, bloodied young woman, lying on the pavement next to him.
    “The car,” he rasped at her, his voice hesitant, difficult, like a long-neglected instrument. “We must leave. Soon. They will pursue.”
    She looked at him with confused, tired eyes. Her chin was scratched, and there was too much blood on her everywhere. He wondered how much of it was hers. Did they need to go to the hospital? They healed very quickly. At least Tom did. But what if these wounds were too serious? How could they go to the hospital? How could they explain anything?
    “I don’t have keys,” she said, and patted her hips as though looking for keys in pockets that were no longer there.
    Tom nodded. He got up, feeling about a hundred years old after two shifts in such a short time. His legs hurt, as did his arms, and his whole body felt as though someone had belabored him with sticks.
    But he was human now and he could think. He remembered.
    One eye on the window of his apartment, wondering how long he had, he said, “I’m sorry. I’ll pay.” Then he grabbed one of the stones on the flower bed nearby—a stone-bed, to tell the truth, since he’d never seen flowers there. He smashed the window with the stone, reached in, unlocked the door.
    Sweeping the crumbs of glass from the seat, he smashed the key holder, reached down to the floor, and grabbed a screwdriver he’d noticed there while Kyrie was driving him. “Remembered you had this here,” he said, turning to see her bewildered expression as her car started. And then, “Get in. I’ll pay for the damage. Just get in.”
    Was it his imagination, or had he seen the shadow of a wing in the window above?
    He reached across to unlock the passenger door, as she jumped in.
    She fumbled with the seat belt as he tore out of the parking lot in a screech of rubber. Sweat was dripping from his forehead into his eyes. He was sure he was sitting on a chunk of glass. It had been years since he’d driven and he found the turns odd and difficult. The car his father had given him as a sixteenth-birthday gift handled much better than this. Good thing there was almost no traffic on the roads at this time.
    He tore around the corner of Fairfax, turning into a narrower street and hoping he was only imagining the noise of wings above. He tried to choose tree-lined streets, knowing well enough that it was harder to see into them from above. The vision of dragons seemed to focus naturally on moving things. In a street of trees, shaken by the wind, in which shadows shifted and shook, it would be harder to see them.
    Some of these streets were narrow enough—and the trees above them well over a hundred years old—that it made it impossible to see the streets at all, except as a green canopy. He took one street, then another, then yet another, tearing down quiet residential streets like a madman and probably causing the families snug in their brick ranches to wonder what was happening out there.
    They passed two people walking, male and female, he tall and she much shorter, leaning into him. Shorts, T-shirts, a swirling white skirt, a vision of normalcy and a relationship that he couldn’t aspire too, and Tom bit his lip and thumped the side of the wheel with his hand, bringing a startled glance from Kyrie.
    He’d gone a good ten minutes and was starting to think they’d lost their pursuers, when he thought of Kyrie. He turned to her, wanting to explain he really would pay and that she should not—
    Her dark eyes gazed into his, unwavering. “How many cars have you