She shook her head as if I had misunderstood her request.
“And the situation with the case isn’t really that bad,” I said. “We knew all along that it was either homegrown terrorism, familial infighting, or business. So now we’ve narrowed it down to family. Pyro against pyro. We just need to figure out how many of the Tollivers are pyros, what kind of pyros, and then which pyros have done the attacking and why. And if the attacking is a para-war.”
“Right. That’s all. And then we have to decide what todoabout the pyros. The current legal system can’t deal with a pyro. If the senator or a member of his family is a pyro, what happens to his career? What will the public think about it? What happens in Congress and to the bills the senator has in place when it all comes to light?”
Lainie was right. A pyro wasn’t a witch, to be jailed by her own kind in a null room. Not a vampire to be chained in his sire’s basement or destroyed by a vampire killer. Not an insane werewolf or agwyllgito be killed on sight or sent to the Montana Bighorn Pack for training. A pyro was a totally new paranormal creature that could set a courtroom on fire. Explode a courtroom. That could use fire to kill. “Oh,” I said, sounding lame.
“Until today there were three kinds of paras.” She lifted a finger with each class: “A mutation of basic human stock like you, the Welshgwyllgidevil dogs, and witches; vampires and were-creatures who start human and are infected and then can pass along the trait to their offspring; andarcencielsand whatever the fangheads’ Misericords are.” She dropped her hand. “And now we have this thing. It doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere. We don’t know what it is. And Soul’s really worried. She hasn’t said a word since Devin shot fire at you.”
Lainie extended a hand again and I took it, letting her pull me to my feet. I said, “I have to go to the locker room and shower and... ummm... clip my leaves.”
“Good plan. I have kiddie guard duty. See you in a bit.”
She left me alone and I went in search of my gear bags. I hid in the locker room, shaving my legs and clipping my leaves and studying my face in the mirror. My eyes were greener, a leafy spring green with flecks of evergreen. My pupils were larger, or maybe that was just a temporary adaptation to the low light. I hadn’t turned on all the switches when I entered. My hair was longer. Brighter. A richer nut-brown with reddish tresses. Was I becoming a plant? I smiled at my reflection and it smiled back, so that part was still good. It was long after two a.m. and I should have been exhausted, but I felt pretty decent considering my severaldays with poor sleep and nearly getting burned to death. I repacked my gear bags and went in search of information. First up, and most important, were my plants. Someone had placed the live ones on my desk. Ten dead, two sick, eight still thriving. I placed all ten in my window box and bolstered them with a little love. Once they were okay, I headed for the conference and break rooms.
•••
Devin was on the couch in the break room, sleeping the sleep of the spelled. Someone had pried up the blistered flooring and pulled the table over the bare underflooring. A chair had been removed. I could still smell the stink of fire over the fumes of vinegar that had been used to clean up the mess. I was glad I had been out for that one.
Soul tapped on the wall at the door behind me. “Are you well, Ingram?”
I shoved my hands in my pockets and turned to her. “Well enough.”
“This child’s nanny and child protective services just drove up. I had Jones set all internal cameras to record every moment.” Jones was JoJo. I tilted my head to show I understood. “I want you watching the transfer with Jones and Dyson.” Dyson was Tandy. Soul was doing everything by the book, her face utterly expressionless. I figured Clementine was active.
“Are the cats still catty?”
“Yes, though they have calmed down greatly and seem to have sorted out their burgeoning dominance issues.”
I didn’t ask how that had turned out. “You know Jo has to be going on twenty-plus hours with no sleep.”
Soul narrowed her eyes at me and let a silence build between us, probably at my temerity to speak to the assistant director in such a manner. I might have sounded just a bit judgmental. I probably should have apologized, but I didn’t. I had been stared down by a group of shotgun-armed churchmen in a righteous religious fury. A peeved light dragon was nothing by comparison. “I do,” she said at last. “I’ll see she gets a full twenty-four off starting in the morning.”
“Thank you.”
Soul studied me as if I were a specimen under a microscope. Again, no problem. I just stared back. “Hmmm,” she said and went to the stairwell to greet the nanny and the social worker. I slipped into the conference room, which was lightless, the overhead screens dark, and shut the door. I leaned over Jo’s shoulder. Tandy was sitting close to her so they could share screen views. Their positions had nothing to do with the romance between them. Uh-huh.
We watched as the two women followed Soul up the stairs, the social worker in the middle of the short column. She was a frizzy-haired woman wearing a frowzy sweater, a scarf that had to be twenty feet long wrapped around her neck in rolls, and comfortable snow boots. She was easily identified by the official name tag and the overlarge purse she carried. The nanny was an odd duck. She wore an ugly orange-brown pantsuit, a color never intended for her gray hair, which she wore slicked back, to expose a sun-damaged forehead and cheeks marked with light and dark pigmentation, especially dark beneath her eyes and spotted on her cheeks.
“Is it the screen or the lighting or the clothing or is she sick?” Tandy asked softly.
“Maybe the clothing?” I said, doubtfully.
“No. I think she’s... gray,” Jo said. “My aunt looked like that when she was about to die from COPD. Just that color gray when her lungs filled up, just before she passed. Black woman with lung troubles wearing orange clothes is not a good look.”
“You think she’s African-American?” I asked.
“She sure ain’t European,” Jo said, exasperated.
On camera, the three women moved from the stairwell camera into the hallway camera. The volume was turned down on the security equipment to keep the visitors from hearing a delayed conversation and know they were being videoed, but we could tell they were introducing themselves to one another. The nanny didn’t shake hands, just nodded to Soul, who said a few words and led the social worker down the hall toward the break room. The nanny followed andthen stopped in the hallway. She lifted her head and sniffed, nose in the air, her head bobbing like a ferret’s.
She raced into my office cubicle.
“What the—?” Jo said, changing camera angles quickly. The odd woman was standing, hunched over, in front of my plants and she... stuck her hands into the pots.
I whirled to go stop her, but Tandy grabbed my wrist. “No,” he said.
“But she’stouching my plants!”
