I’d had a continuing education computer class in Spook School on reading people by the style of their decorating. This room indicated only taste and money. A decorator had set-styled the room and there was nothing in it of the inhabitants. This was a public place, not living quarters. There was probably a great room or family room elsewhere, a room the Tollivers actually lived in.
“Mr. Tolliver, it’s Devin’s bedtime.”
I almost flinched. I hadn’t seen or heard anyone enter. The nanny stood in the cased opening, which I realized had pocket doors that could be closed to separate the room from the rest of the house. The nanny was wearing a deep-grape-purple velour jogging suit and orthopedic shoes. Her skin was less blue today, more gray in shade, an ashy color that I could almost place within normal human parameters. But she wasn’t human. Now that I knew what I was looking for, the air was laced with a trace of the strange metallic and sour scent I recognized as salamander. A bit like a stack of old quarters and a pair of old leather loafers.
“I’m sorry, Connie,” Justin said. “Here. Take Devin to bed.” He transferred the boy’s hand to the nanny, and the little gray woman trotted off, Devin half dragged back up the stairs.
I wondered why Devin was human-colored and the nanny wasn’t. I wondered what I had missed while I was woolgathering.
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Tolliver,” Occam said. “You been mighty kind to let us take up so much of your time and Devin’s.”
“The funerals have been all held off,” Justin blurted out, “until they find or recover Clarisse. The services for Abrams and Clarisse will be held concurrently.” Justin shook his head and ran shaking fingers through his hair, which stayed sticking up in a disheveled mass. His fingernails looked a little blue.
Was Justin human or salamander? Had we messed that up too? Or were the male salamanders better able to fake human? Or maybe he was ill.
“My wife’s services . . . will be handled after the others. A more private ceremony.” He closed his eyes to cover his emotions, which were raw and fractured. He cleared his throat. “What should I do about the security team? Do you think I need to keep them on?”
Occam said, prevaricating, “Security is always important.”
A security team on the grounds was a waste of time when the danger might be inside already. And when the danger could throw flames hot enough to sear a man to the bone. I kept all that to myself.
“I hope you will keep me informed about your progress on the investigations,” Justin Tolliver said, in an obvious dismissal. He walked to the door. We followed. “If I can help in any way, please call.” He extended a card to Occam. He didn’t offer one to me, in unconscious sexism. Or maybe he had forgotten me, sitting so silent on the other sofa.
And then we were outside in the cool night air and, though it wasn’t freezing, I was glad I had worn my coat. Together we made our way to Occam’s fancy car, got in, and drove away.
“I wasn’t listening all the time,” I said. “What did I miss?”
“Not much. The little salamander doesn’t remember anything. And he’s a little snot. Needs a good tanning.”
“You talking about him asking me if I was retarded?” I asked, amusement in my tone. “And you talking about spanking the recently orphaned son of a deceased senator? Corporal punishment? Child abuse?”
“My daddy beat me with a belt, buckle to the skin,” he growled. “I don’t remember much about my life before the cage, but I remember that. And I learned my manners.”
Occam had said he didn’t remember much about his younger human life. Maybe he simply hadn’t been ready to share.
“No,” I said as he pulled out of the neighborhood. “You learned to be afraid of your daddy.”
“Didn’t say I was or wasn’t scared. Said I learned my manners.”
“Mm-hm.”
“You disapprove.”
“Your daddy leave bruises?”
“Every dang time.”
“You think you mighta learned manners without the bruises?”
He made a turn, thinking. Made another turn. “Probably,” he said grudgingly.
“Then he was venting his rage and violence, not teaching you manners.”
Occam thought about that for a while, shifting lanes, his speed inching up. “Werecats fight their sons. It’s the only way to teach them manners. ‘Manners’ in this case means not to eat or bite or harm humans. It’s a bloody lesson.”
“Different situation,” I said. “If a human child is rude, no one dies. If that human child takes a few dozen reminders to be taught a lesson, then the parent learns a little patience. Werecats are completely animal when they first shift. Their human is buried under the were-brain. If werecats don’t learn manners, and accidentally spread the were-taint by infecting a human, they get killed by a grindylow. What an adult cat does to teach them not to kill is different from teaching a human manners. Was your daddy a werecat?”
“No.”
“Your mama?”
“No. You really wanna do this now, Nell, sugar?” he demanded.
“Yes.”
Occam squinted into the distance. “I don’t remember much. Stuff is still coming back to me in bits and pieces.” His voice softened. “I was bit the day after I turned ten. My daddy was a minister in a hellfire-and-damnation church and when I came home from playing in a gulch with friends, with tooth marks from a big-cat, he locked me in a cage. The full moon came. I shifted.”
Were-creatures hadn’t been out of the closet then. His daddy had known what had happened to his son. Somehow. Or guessed. Or just took a chance on myths being real. “What happened after?”
“I woke up partially, found myself in a cage. Couldn’t shift back because somebody had put a silver-threaded mat in the cage with me. But the silver didn’t stop me from remembering, slowly, that I was human. It took me twenty years to get free and I did. Shifted back and found the nearest police station, telling them I had been hit on the head and had no memory. Got lucky and had a chance to go to school. Graduated from Texas Christian University with a degree in ranch management. I survived.”
“Your mama and daddy?” I whispered, my hands clenching on each other.
“Dead. Died in a car accident five years after I went ‘missing.’”
“You think your daddy sold you?”
“I know he did. I remember.”
“When were you going to tell me this?”
“When you finally admitted that you were in love with me.”
I flushed. In love . . . I had no idea what that even meant except from reading a rare romance book and living the skewed life of a God’s Cloud wife, neither of which was probably normal. “Ummm.” I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to say or do now.
“I didn’t want no pity getting in the way of us . . . becoming whatever we’re becoming.”
“I don’t pity you, Occam,” I whispered.
“Damn good thing.”
I fought a smile.
Occam said, “So. Back to our original subject. You’re saying you’re against spanking?”
I thought about a child reaching to touch a hot stove. A child ignoring a parent’s caution and running for a swift-moving river. A child scaring a horse or a mother pig even after being told of a danger. Worse, and more of an issue when it came to abuse, an older child, one old enough to know better, deliberately hurting another, younger child. Was there a difference between a swat and a beating? Was there ever a time to hit a child, even one growing up evil? Was Brother Ephraim beaten when he was a child? Most likely. It hadn’t helped him a lick. If I hadn’t been whupped, would I have grown up mean and evil? Probably not. “Lots of the church folk beat their young’uns. But ninety-nine point nine times out of a hundred, a whuppin’ isn’t necessary. It’s the adult’s emotional problem, not the kid needing a beating.”
“I’ll concede that. Are we having a philosophical discussion about corporal punishment in child-rearing, Nell, sugar?”
I ducked my head and looked out the window. We didn’t talk again until we were in HQ, and giving Rick and Soul our impressions of the Tolliver household. It didn’t take long. I finished my part with the words, “I’m worried that things are about to go to hell in a handbasket at the Tollivers’.”
Rick put his head down, studying his hands on the table-top, thinking. “I hate to send you back out, but I want Unit Eighteen on the grounds tonight,” Rick said. “With the private security and the feds gone, it’s the perfect time for an attack. Also the perfect time for us to look around.”
“We don’t have a warrant,” I said.
“We also haven’t received a call from Tolliver relieving us of responsibility for the welfare and protection of the family. And I don’t listen to third-party claims—like those of ALT Security.”
“Occam and me aren’t exactly a third party.”
“No. You’re not,” Rick said. “And you told me you were worried about the salamanders and what was going on there.”
“Sneaky,” Occam said. “I like it.”
SEVENTEEN
It was just after two a.m. We were wearing night-gear camo unis in shades of gray with PsyLED in huge white letters across the back. The unis were combined with high-tech bullet- and stab-resistant personal armor and dark field boots. I wore a low-light monocle lens on one eye. Occam had cat eyes that could see in the dark. We both had vest cams running and comms headsets. An RVAC was giving us flyover protection and eyes in the sky. We were carrying our service weapons just in case.
T. Laine was off duty, getting some rest. JoJo was in the passenger seat of PsyLED’s old panel van, all her electronics fired up and running. Tandy was belted in behind her, looking sick from the excitement he was surely picking up. Rick had been driving, but now he slid open the doors and we stepped from the van, watching as we slid into the shadows, Occam more graceful and silent, me uncoordinated and noisy by comparison, shuffling in the fall leaves behind him. We walked from shadow to shadow down the road and entered the property. I heard the van door shut, Rick now safely inside with the others.
Back at HQ, Soul was watching the whole thing on the big screens. Having the assistant director observing was difficult. If the probie screwed up, I might be out of a job. Worse, if I screwed up, people might die.
Someone had lit a bonfire in the backyard, near the pools, and smoke blew on the uncertain river wind. Shadows and light danced through the night as we circled the house to approach on the river side. We stopped in the protection of a dead spruce, hearing splashing and grunts and soft laughter, the sounds advertising that people were there. Someone was swimming in the heated pools.
I touched my communications gear. “Ingram here. RVAC?”
“Coming in now. Stay put. I see you,” JoJo said.
“Copy,” I said.
“We have a swim party,” Rick said. “Looks like humans and salamanders in their natural forms. Mostly eel-looking things, some three feet, like our egg at HQ, some five feet, some longer. In physiology and morphology, they match our dissected egg salamander. What?” Rick’s voice moved away from the mic. “What? Soul? What the—” His voice returned to the mic. “Soul is incoming from HQ,” he said, irritated. “Looks like there will be three of you.”
“Copy,” I said again, trying to control my breathing. Ops training said that whenever our side moved away from agreed-upon strategy and tactics, without that action forced by provocation from the enemy, it indicated things were about to go south. Fast. I checked my weapon and fingered the extra mags through the ammo pockets in my camo pants.
“Meanwhile,” Rick said, “the water of the pools is steaming and it looks like boil bubbles in places.”
I remembered the heated river water. If pyros could heat moving water, then maybe they could bring contained water to a boil.
Soul appeared beside Occam and he whirled, spitting like a cat. Soul had covered miles in ten seconds flat. At HQ, she had been dressed in gauzy skirts. Now she was wearing field armor in what looked like shades of purple. Soul, the shape-shifting, style-conscious light dragon reporting for duty, sir. I didn’t say it, but she might have known what I was thinking because she cast me a suspicious glare. I smiled sweetly, an easy thing for a former churchwoman to do. We were taught to smile through most anything.
Soul said, “According to the RVAC, we have salamanders, at least a dozen tadpoles, four adult fire lizards, two human adults, and two human children, who appear to be Justin Tolliver’s children. Our strategic goal just changed from ‘protect the Tollivers’ to ‘rescue the humans.’ Who happen to be Justin Tolliver, his kids, and one of the staff.”
“Moving in,” Occam said, and he jogged like a big-cat closer to the house. Soul and I followed. “Something’s wrong with Justin,” Occam said, inching even closer beneath the trees. His cat vision was better than my human vision. Soul’s vision must be too, as she hissed softly.
“I smell death on the air,” Occam said. He raced away, along the perimeter, to the back of the property. I followed and we came up behind the guesthouse, the three-bedroom house behind the pools. We stood under cover of the stand of firs, where we could see the entire backyard. I was breathing deeply. Occam looked fresh as a snoozing cat. Soul appeared to our left. I tried not to jump or to look at her.
I had guessed wrong. The smoke didn’t come from a bonfire. The pool area was lit by three fire pits, each blazing with dry wood, sparks rising on the wind like living sprites in the smoke. The concrete and tiles were wet with water, and winglike arcs of splashing water and small waves lapped over the sides of all three pools continuously. The pools were full of dark bodies, leaping like dolphins, swimming fast. Salamanders for certain, so many of them; most were small, but five, or maybe seven, were bigger, ten feet long. Squealing, blowing, and making sounds like reed instruments. I had a moment to wonder how they got the tadpoles up from the river, and then that thought wilted away.
“Do you mean Justin Tolliver is dead?” I clarified quietly to Occam, speaking into the mic, studying the man on a lounge chair beside the largest pool with all my senses. He was only some thirty feet away, reclining, stretched out, but he wasn’t moving. His head was lolled back. I bent and put a fingertip on the earth, but my senses were obscured by the smoke, the tadpoles, and the concrete between him and the ground.
“Dead,” Occam growled.
My heart ached as I asked the next question. “What about Justin’s children?”
“Dead,” Occam growled lower, the sound a vibration of fury in his chest. “The human woman there”—he pointed—“is alive, but only barely.”
The heir to the entire Tolliver fortune was on a lounge chair beside Justin. Devin, the eleven-year-old boy, was swathed in a towel, staring at his uncle with wide eyes. His expression was one I couldn’t decipher in the flickering illumination, but maybe revulsion or intense excitement. To either side stood humanoid-shaped salamanders, including the ashy-skinned nanny, who stood closest to the child, facing us. She was naked, with her human face on a slope-shouldered body, her odd skin slick and blue in the wavering light, spotted with phosphorescent starbursts in gray fading to purple. She had no breasts or other external indications of genitalia, her abdomen pale and smooth. Her eyes were a bright, iridescent, phosphorescent blue. Except for her face, she might have been any of the other full-sized salamanders because they all had the same blue skin and spots and sloped shoulders.
Occam whispered, “I see something else, there.” He pointed into the darkness.
Rick said over comms, “Another adult salamander. He’s wearing the uniform of ALT Security.”
“Peter Simon,” I said. “The security guy who was at the Holloways’ house.”
“They replaced him,” Soul hissed. “They ate him an
d made his body their own.”
Devin slowly reached out a hand to his uncle. The humanoid salamanders to either side didn’t stop him. Devin took his uncle’s hand and cried out, a childish sound of agony, and I almost raced up to save him, but Soul put a hand on my shoulder. Her grip was strong, bruising, holding me in place.
She murmured, “The RVAC is getting all this on infrared and according to it, Justin is already dead and cold. We have no one to save.”
Devin’s face changed. Shifted. It grew older. His skin darkened to a gray-brown, golden blotches emerging. His limbs grew longer. Developed joints where humans had none. His skin purpled, blued, and then went golden. And finally the color faded to Caucasian pale. A five-o’clock shadow grew on Devin’s face, now his uncle’s face. There were now two Justin Tollivers. The new one lifted his uncle’s hand and put the fingers into his mouth. Bit down with a crunch I could hear even over the sounds of water splashing. Justin didn’t react, and I knew he was well and truly dead. When Devin pulled the hand away, his uncle’s fingers were gone and Devin—Justin, now—chewed them up with a crunch of bone.
I had secretly thought Devin a child pyro sociopath. Instead he was really a fully grown, older salamander. As we watched, he changed shape again and became his missing grandfather, Charles Healy, the one who had escaped from the prison, eleven years ago, when Devin was born. Was Devin really Healy, hiding in the form of a child he had killed? And then Devin shifted back to Justin. The face and form settled and firmed. Simon slid to the ground nearby, watching, his own form wavering into indistinct features and blued skin.
One of the women at Devin’s side shifted into Clarisse, Devin’s mother, and shook herself like a dog as her form settled. Another leaned down, sat, and curled up in his lap. Her face altered and she became Sonya, who supposedly died in the fire. Sonya, who was Devin’s aunt. I realized that the creature who had lived for years as Devin had a life and a culture far beyond anything I could imagine, and it appeared that he had been taken as mate to a harem.