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

stolen?” she asked.

    The way he’d hot-wired the car, quickly—she swore it had taken him less than a few seconds—had chilled Kyrie to the bone.
    She supposed she should have known someone with a drug problem, working minimum-wage jobs had to supplement with crime, but all of a sudden she realized he was more dangerous—more out of control than she’d thought.
    More out of control than the other dragons?
    And yet, after he’d driven like a madman for a while, he looked at her with a devastatingly scared expression in his pale face. Despite chiseled features and the now all-too-obvious dark shadow of unshaven beard, he managed to look about five and worried he’d be put in time-out.
    “How many cars have you stolen?” she asked, before she knew she was going to say it.
    His expression closed. She would not be able to describe it any other way. The eager, almost childish panic vanished, leaving in its place a dark, unreadable glare, his eyebrows low over his dark blue eyes. He turned away, looking forward, and shrugged, a calculated shrug from his broad shoulders. One quarter inch up, one quarter inch down.
    “I used to go joy riding,” he said. “When I was a kid. I got bored.” And when she didn’t answer that, he added. “Look, I’ve told you. I’ll pay you for the damage.” And again, at her continued silence. “I couldn’t let us be caught. If they’d caught us, they’d have killed us.”
    At this, he stopped. He stopped long enough for her to gather her thoughts. She felt so tired that if she weren’t in pain, she would have fallen asleep. But she hurt. Her shoulder felt as if it had been dislocated in the fight. There was a slash across her torso that she prayed wouldn’t need stitches, and a broad swath of her buttock felt scraped, as though it had rubbed hard against a scaly hide. Which it probably had, though she didn’t remember.
    “Who are they?” she finally asked. “Why are they after you?”
    “They’re a Chinese triad,” he said. “They’re members of a . . . crime syndicate. Asian.”
    “Admirably described,” she said, and heard the hint of sarcasm in her own voice, and was surprised she still had the strength for it. “But what do they want with you?”
    He hesitated. For just a moment he glanced at her, and the scared little boy was back, with wide-open eyes, and slightly parted lips.
    He looked back at the road in time to take them, tightly, around a corner, tires squealing, car tilting. “They think I stole something from them,” he said, with the defensive tone of a child explaining it really, really, really wasn’t him who put the clamp on the cat’s tail.
    Something. Kyrie was not so naive that she didn’t know Chinese crime syndicates—like most crime syndicates—dealt mostly in various drugs. “A drug deal gone bad?” she asked.
    He had the nerve to tighten his lips, and shake his head. “I don’t deal drugs,” he said.
    Whee. There was one form of criminality he didn’t stoop to. Who would have thunk it? “So . . .”
    “I didn’t steal it, okay?” he said. “I didn’t steal anything. They think I did, and they’re trying to get it back.”
    “Sounds ugly,” she said. Somehow she felt he was lying but also not lying. There was an edge to his tone as if he weren’t quite so sure how he’d got himself into this type of situation.
    “It is,” he said. “They’ve been after me for months.” He shrugged. “Only they’ve just figured out my name, I think. Now they can follow me, wherever I live. They’re shifters. Dragons.”
    “I gathered.”
    “They worship the Great Sky Dragon. . . .”
    “Uh?” She had never heard of any shifter divinity. But then again, she’d never heard of any other shifters. All of a sudden, vertiginously, as though standing at the edge of a precipice and seeing a whole world open before her, she wondered if there was a whole culture, a whole society she didn’t know about. Some place she belonged, whole