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owner of the park. They were arguing—or perhaps just talking—in very loud voices.
    “The workers?” Rafiel asked.
    “Any of them. The workers come because they’re hired, and these people hire them because they couldn’t afford minimum wage much less all the deductions and things.” He frowned. “The minimum wage law and the benefits and things, it’s all very pretty on paper, but it’s like legislating the weather, man; it does no good. All it does is make you think everything is fine until reality bites you some place or other.”
    Rafiel nodded and said, “So none of them went where the smell goes,” he said. “Which means…Shit. There is definitely another shifter at large, isn’t there?”
    Cordova hesitated. He lifted his hand, then let it fall. He looked over his shoulder and all around, to make sure he was suitably isolated and that no one could hear him. Then he sighed. “Man, I don’t want to tell you this. You look like you have troubles enough.”
    “What?”
    “After…in the fight, you know…I had a pretty good grip on this dude, and I was biting and then…”
    “And then?”
    “He shifted and slipped out of my grasp,” Jason said. “He just became this skinny, young dude, maybe fourteen or fifteen…” He hesitated while Rafiel gave vent to a string of profanity.
    Jason Cordova just nodded, as though Rafiel had made an observation worth noting, then said, “Yeah, but…that’s not the worst of it. I grant you I was shifted myself, and I don’t remember what happened really clearly, but from the way he looked and how…well…I don’t think he’s all there. And I’m almost sure he’s not, you know…normal. His eyes, you know. They were more feral as human than in animal form.”

Chapter 3
    Tom turned in bed, almost but not quite fully awake. He felt Kyrie stir, waking up.
    Being in the same bed with someone was still an odd feeling. For so many years, Tom had been afraid of sleeping near any other human—scared of changing shapes in his sleep and killing his companion by morning.
    But he and Kyrie had shared this house for over a year, and this bed for five months now, and even Kyrie had started to talk about it as “our bed” instead of “my bed.” So the feeling was odd, but good. Married feeling, Tom thought. Not that marriage was for the likes of them. Not really. They couldn’t have kids. Kids might inherit their shape-shifting. And if one of them did something horrible, it was better not to have a spouse who would have to live it down.
    He sighed and let go of what couldn’t be, and instead opened his eyes just a little: enough to see that Kyrie had thrown off the covers and was asleep on her stomach, in a tiny T-shirt and tinier shorts, her exposed arms and legs long and golden in the sunlight.
    While negotiating a loan for the new fryer, the bank officer had demanded to know what Kyrie’s race or background was. He’d thrown out in succession, as guesses, Greek, Italian, Spanish and Native American. The man, a precisely speaking worker at some city bureaucracy or other, had seemed personally offended that Kyrie had refused to admit to one or another background. He’d pointed out all the benefits that the diner Kyrie co-owned with Tom could get from being minority owned. Loans and other benefits were apparently theirs for the taking with much easier terms than the bank could otherwise offer.
    But even if Kyrie had wanted to claim the benefits—she didn’t, suspecting the too-easy gift—she would have been hard-pressed to guess at her origins. Her personal history, what she knew of it, started on a Christmas night twenty-two years ago, when the churchgoers coming out of midnight mass at a Catholic church in Charlotte, North Carolina, had found a baby girl asleep in a bassinet. After that there had been a never-ending train of foster families, one of whom had been named Smith, which surname had been joined to the given names she’d got from the person