Night Shifters by Sarah A. Hoyt

families of shifters. Perhaps the only reason she’d never known about it was because she was adopted and she didn’t know her own birth family. “Shifters have their own gods?”
    Tom shrugged. “I think he was a Chinese divinity. Or one of their sacred animals, or something.”
    “Did you get involved with them because you . . . shift? Into a dragon? Is your family . . . does your family shift?”
    Tom shook his head. “My father doesn’t . . . No.”
    “Then how did you get involved with the triad?”
    He looked confused, then shrugged—not a precise shrug. “I don’t know,” he said. He seemed on the verge of saying something, but shook his head, as if to his own thoughts. “My father—” He stopped dead, as though something in him had halted not just the words but the train of thought as well.
    They were driving down a narrow, tree-bordered street. Ahead of them loomed the dark expanse of the Castle—officially known as Chateau D’Aubigerne, a castle imported from the Loire, stone by stone, by a man enriched in the gold rush. It now stood smack dab in the center of Goldport, abandoned and empty, surrounded by gardens gone to seed and an eight-foot-high iron fence like massed spears. Now and then there was talk of someone buying it, restoring it, and making it into a hotel, a mall, a resort, or just a monument for tourists to gawk at. But all those projects seemed nonstarters, perhaps because the Castle was well away from all the hotels and convention centers, in a street of tiny, workmen’s brick ranches, with cars on blocks and broken plastic toys in the front yards.
    Tom slowed down till he was going a normal speed and said, “Where can I take you?”
    “Beg your pardon?”
    He grinned at her, a fugitive grin that transformed his features and gave her a startling glimpse of what might lurk underneath the troubled young man’s aggression—humor? Joy? “Where can I drop you off? Where do you live?” He smiled at her, a less naughty smile this time, more that of a patient adult facing a stupid child. “You can’t go to work like that, can you?”
    She shook her head, panicked. Gee. Frank was going to be mad. She might already have lost her job. A surge of anger at Tom came up, but then vanished again. Someone had once told Kyrie that if you lost a job making less than ten dollars an hour you could find another one within the day. In her experience this was true. And besides, it wasn’t like Tom had asked her for help.
    She’d just jumped in and helped him. Hell, she thought she’d learned not to do that years ago.
    “My place,” she said. “It’s down the next street. Turn right. Third house on the left.”
    “House?”
    “Rental. It’s smaller than an apartment, really. I just . . . I don’t like people around.”
    He nodded and maneuvered through the turn and up to her house, at a speed that could only be considered sedate after his early high jinks.
    The house was tiny—eight hundred square feet and one bedroom, but it had a driveway—a narrow strip of concrete that led right up to the back door and from which a narrow walking path led to the front door. This late at night—or early in the morning—all of Kyrie’s neighbors would be asleep and she was grateful for that.
    As Tom pulled up to the back door, she had only two steps to go, stark naked. And she always left the key under a rock in the nearby flower bed. She hated to be locked out of her house and didn’t know anyone in town she could trust with a key. It was one of the side effects of moving around so much.
    As she started to open the door, she looked at Tom. He was sitting behind the wheel, the engine still going, looking forward. The car was hers, but she could hardly tell him to leave it and run off naked into the night. On the other hand—where was he going to go even with the car?
    She had to invite him in. She didn’t really want to, but she saw nothing else she could do. Nothing else a decent human being