Charlaine Harris - Day Shift

It was lucky that he’d put the question with so much gentleness. Joe saw that Quinn’s face tightened and so did his shoulders, the signs of an irritated man.

“I’m sure you don’t know this,” said Quinn with equally good manners, “but a young weretiger is prized for his fighting ability. When I was the boy’s age, I was in the pits, obliged to fight and kill, to clear a family debt.” Without warning, he pulled off his T-shirt and rose, turning to show them the scars crisscrossing his back. There were plenty on the front, too.

“Oh,” said Fiji, deeply distressed. “That’s horrible. I’m glad you survived it.”

The big man shrugged and put his shirt back on. “It’s done. But more than anything else, I don’t want the supes to start imagining Diederik as pit fodder, now that he’s got his growth.”

“They could get him away from you?” Joe said.

“If I were dead.”

“So for now he’ll stay here in Midnight,” Joe said.

“Yes. Maybe a few months, maybe a year will see him strong enough, past the dangerous part. If he can make a name for himself doing something else, it won’t be easy to abduct him, force him. He will find a job he can do.”

Joe and Fiji looked at each other. “With the Rev?” she said finally. “You’ve been in the Rev’s house?”

“Yes,” Quinn said steadily. “I’ve seen it’s barren. I was going to ask if there was somewhere else he could stay, though the Rev would be responsible for educating Diederik in the ways of the tiger and instructing him in our history. Of course, I would pay his room and board and other expenses. I understand that you… Fiji… have been buying him clothes, and I want to pay you back for that. I thank you for your generosity.”

“ De nada, ” she said, smiling. “If you want to, sure, but I did it to keep him decent and smiling. Kids got to have clothes and lots of food.”

“Do you two have any ideas about who would host him?” Quinn looked from one to the other.

“I guess I could clean out my second bedroom. It’s pretty crammed with stuff,” Fiji said doubtfully.

“You’ve been great for Diederik, and he loves your cooking,” Quinn said. He smiled again. “I can see why, after eating this bread. But you’re also pretty and young, and sharing a house with an adolescent boy at such close quarters… well, it might not be ideal.”

Fiji turned red. “Okay,” she said.

“We have visitors,” Joe said regretfully. “So our guest room gets some use.” Chuy kept in touch with his human descendants, though they didn’t know his true nature, of course. Joe did not chide Chuy for the elaborate fictions he fed them about their kinship. Chuy seemed to need the contact.

“That leaves Manfred or Bobo,” Fiji said. “They’re both good men.”

Quinn stood. “I’ll go talk to them after I shower. I owe both of you for your kindness to my son.”

Mr. Snuggly raised his head and said, “Good-bye, big man.”

Quinn seemed taken aback. “Well… good-bye, little brother.” He shook his head and left.

“Joe, do you think this can work?”

“I hope so,” Joe said. “This town seems to have adopted a child.”

As he walked back to his apartment, looking forward to his shower, he was still thinking about the hard life Quinn had had, and the loss of the female Tijgerin.

Diederik was motherless, and his greatly accelerated growth rate had deprived him of a childhood. Yet the boy had always impressed Joe as being cheerful and willing and intelligent. For a moment, Joe almost resented Chuy’s odd attachment to humans that made Diederik’s boarding with them very unlikely. It would have been nice to have someone young around the place. He smiled to himself. It hadn’t escaped his notice that Quinn had automatically assumed that Diederik would be attracted to a woman rather than a man. Well, he was probably right. Joe hadn’t gotten any vibe that said otherwise, though a boy so young sometimes didn’t know his own nature.

Joe wondered if Diederik’s mother, Tijgerin, had really been the last female weretiger.

If so, Diederik was the end of the line. If he couldn’t find another female, weretigers were extinct. For most of his life, Quinn must have assumed that he was the last one, and now he had a son. Joe hoped that Diederik would be even luckier and find a mate who lived.

The death of the woman the night before did not overly trouble Joe. It was done now. Past mending. He was not going to lament over it or ask God to smite Diederik.

And that was one reason he was in Midnight.

By the time lunch rolled around, there was a small crowd gathered in Home Cookin. Olivia was indulging herself with an open-faced roast beef sandwich. She cut the pieces very small and chewed them deliberately. Her fellow Midnighters were gathered around the table, and she smiled at them all. The action of the night before had left her feeling pleasantly relaxed. Aside from the absent weretigers and Teacher, perpetually on duty at Gas N Go, everyone else was there, though Madonna and Grady were in the kitchen and Dillon was at football practice.

Manfred came in later than the others, looking flushed and excited. Since he was normally the palest person in town (except, of course, for Lemuel), this was a notable occurrence.

“What’s up?” asked Chuy, who was holding Rasta on his lap. Rasta had had a bad time of it the night before. The chuffing sound of the tigers had made him shiver and shake and whine. Long after the silence had fallen, Joe and Chuy had let the little dog in the bed between them, a behavior usually only indulged during thunderstorms.

Manfred paused to tentatively pat Olivia on the shoulder, something he’d never done before. (If he’d known why Lewis and Bertha had turned up at his door last night, he might not have.)

“I just stopped by the hotel to check on Mamie and Tommy and Suzie,” Manfred said to the table in general. “Also, I wanted to see if Shorty had heard from his grandson. I found them all packed up and ready to go.”

“What?” Olivia looked at him sharply, trying to believe this was some weird joke. “What did Lenore Whitefield say?”

“She said that places had opened up for all of them in Safe Harbor, that really fancy assisted-living place in Davy. They’ll each have their own rooms with a little kitchen space, a television, a queen bed, and a La-Z-Boy. I’m quoting.”

Everyone digested that for a minute.

“How’d they feel about it?” Olivia was almost angry.

“They said there was sure to be more going on in Davy. The residents there have dance lessons and bowling nights and yoga classes.”

“So they were willing to go?” Olivia could hardly believe it.

“Yes, even after we took them to lunch at Cracker Barrel, they were willing to go,” Manfred said, laughing. “But they want us to come and visit, and they said you’d promised to take them to the library, Olivia.”

“I’m going to do exactly that,” she said.

“And they weren’t suspicious about it all being paid for?” Chuy said.

“I guess if you’ve been living in a roach motel in Las Vegas, you’re ready to accept whatever good comes your way,” Manfred said.

“What about the regular guests? The contract workers at Magic Portal?” Bobo asked. One of them had come into Midnight Pawn the previous Saturday and tried to bargain with Bobo over an old tray. He’d been embarrassingly persistent.

“They’re still in residence, as Lenore put it,” Manfred said. “I asked her if more old people would be coming in, and she said that was out of her authority, or something like that. But the hotel’s going to stay open.”

“Very strange,” Chuy said, scratching Rasta’s head. “Two staff, plus the cook, for two guests.”