Free Night Shifters by Sarah A. Hoyt Page A

house. Tom had heard his father go on and on about gun control quite often. And he was too young to understand hypocrisy.
    He took a deep breath and managed to push the memory away. To this day he wasn’t sure why his father had ordered him out of the house. He’d shifted back by then. He’d shifted back and grabbed hold of his robe. Which is why he’d ended on the street in his robe and barefoot.
    But he controlled the memories, squeezed a dollop of cream from the tube. Kyrie hadn’t asked again, so he probably hadn’t taken that long to get himself under control. “I was sixteen,” he said. “I never had any warning before. I just . . . Shifted. In the moonlight.”
    In the moonlight, in his room, with its comfortable bed, and all the posters, and the TV, the stereo, the game system. All the things he’d once thought needed to survive. “I was all excited too,” he said. “That first time. I thought it was a cool, superhero thing.”
    She was silent, and he thought she was thinking about what a fool he’d been. He concentrated on what he was doing. Fingers on the wound on her shoulder, lightly, lightly, spreading a thin, shining layer of antibiotic cream.
    “I was fourteen,” she said, speaking as from a great distance. “I thought I was dreaming the first few times. And then I thought I was hallucinating. I thought I had . . . I don’t know. Seizures or something. I used to imagine that my parents were two mental patients who’d had me and had smuggled me out of the madhouse so I could be raised on the outside.”
    He laughed despite himself and she turned to look at him, her expression grave. Not offended, just grave.
    “I don’t think there were any mental hospitals like that in the 1980s,” he said. “Where they kept the children of the patients locked up along with the parents. Were there?”
    Kyrie shook her head and smiled again, a smile fractionally warmer than the ones she gave the customers. “Not in this country, no, I don’t think,” she said. “But I was very young. Just a kid. I thought . . .” She shrugged. “Actually at first I thought someone was putting datura in my food or something.”
    “Datura?” he asked.
    “A hallucinogenic. At least, Agatha Christie has a mystery in which someone is putting it in a man’s shaving cream to make him dream that he’s a werewolf, and I thought—”
    “I read Christie too,” he said. Often her books were the only thing available in safe houses for at-risk youth or whatnot, where he sought temporary refuge. That and the ever-yellowing pile of National Geographic . It was Tom’s considered opinion that National Geographic s were alien artifacts routinely bombarded down onto the Earth. “But isn’t datura something Indian, something . . .”
    “I didn’t tell you I was rational, did I?” Kyrie asked.
    He shook his head and reached for the gauze, cutting it to fit the area on her shoulder, and laying it gently atop the wound.
    “I thought someone was trying to make me think I was crazy. Perhaps my foster parents. They get more for special-needs kids, you know? And then I read up on it, and I decided I was schizophrenic. I couldn’t tell what I did while I was under this condition, so I started hiding. At first I was lucky that no one saw me, and then when I realized what caused it—the full moon, a feeling of anger. Anything. I was damn careful over the next four years. Always slept alone, even if arrangements called for other kids in the room. I’d take a blanket and go sleep in a tree, if needed. It . . . made for interesting times and made me change families even more often. And then I was on my own, and I’ve been careful. Very careful. But I still thought it was all in my mind. Till tonight.”
    Tom shook his head as he started taping the gauze in place. He couldn’t imagine not knowing the shift was true. But perhaps it was different for dragons. He saw the city from above. He saw things happen. And, of course, within a