Free Night Shifters by Sarah A. Hoyt

got soft and distant. “I wouldn’t know. They left me at the entrance of a church in Charlotte, North Carolina, when I was just a few hours old. I was found by parishioners coming out of the midnight services on Christmas night. There were headlines all over the papers, about it. But I never knew . . .” She shrugged again. “I was raised by foster families.”
    And perhaps that explained why she held herself under such tight control? Tom wouldn’t know. He knew about as much about foster care as he knew about happy family life. A couple of his acquaintances of convenience, while he had been on the streets, had been foster children. They’d told him hair-raising stories about the system. But did it mean that every one was like that? Or only the ones who’d gone seriously to the bad?
    He taped the bandages in place over the puncture. “Blood poisoning will make a visible circle, it will start just above the wound, and it will be a red circle that will slowly move upwards if it’s not treated. If you see a circle on your arm, you must go to the doctor, immediately.”
    “Am I to assume personal experience speaks here?” Kyrie asked.
    He managed a smile. “My best friend and I.” He hadn’t thought of Joe in years. Wondered where he was now. What he was doing. “We had these plastic swords, but you know, they were disappointing because they really couldn’t cause enough damage. We could bang on each other all day long with them, they were too light and definitely not sharp. So we improved them by sticking nails in the tip. Rusty nails.” He saw her wince. “Yeah. Lucky for us my mom caught the infection in time. Even then I was on antibiotics forever. Now that I think about it, lucky we were both lousy swordsmen, too. We never managed to kill each other, though we tried for a whole day.”
    He pulled her sleeve down, and started to gather the stuff.
    “No,” she said. “I want you to look at my back. It feels abraded.” As she spoke, she loosened her robe, and edged it down at the back—to reveal a shoulder that had been stripped bare of skin.
    “It’s more than abraded,” Tom said. And because the sight of the robe sliding over the raw flesh of her shoulder made him cringe, he added, “Let me,” and pulled the robe down slowly, at the back. In the process, the front fell too, revealing one of her breasts almost to the nipple. Golden skin the color of honey, and it looked velvet soft. His fingers wanted to stray that way, wanted to feel . . .
    He concentrated on her back, kneeling so that her back was all he saw. He found the end of the skinned portion where her shoulder blade ended. “This looks awful. How?”
    “I think it was a paw swipe,” she said. “The claws missed me, but the scales got me.”
    “Ah,” Tom said. He had never thought he was that lethal in his dragon form, and to be honest, he wasn’t sure he was. He didn’t know how much he looked like the Chinese dragons. He was aware the tail was different, the paws more massive, but he’d never looked at himself in a mirror while shifted. Or if he had, he hadn’t managed to remember it.
    He got the antibiotic cream and started applying it in a thin layer to Kyrie’s back, trying to touch so lightly that he wouldn’t hurt her. She didn’t seem to flinch from the touch, so he must be succeeding. There had been a time he wanted to be a doctor. Before . . . all of this.
    “When did you shift for the first time?” Kyrie asked.
    Tom’s hand trembled immediately, as the memories flooded him. Flying over the city. Not the first time, but one of the first. Seeing everything. Then coming home. Breaking the bedroom window. It was devilishly hard to work the paws when you weren’t even sure what was happening to you. And then his father. His father, with the gun, ordering him out.
    Hell, he didn’t even know his father had a gun until then. Until that moment, had anyone asked, he’d have said his father wouldn’t have a gun in the