“Don’t bark at me like a dog,” I said, ignoring him otherwise.
“I smell something. Something bad.”
“It’s rotting fish.” The egg was heavy, twirling in a circle instead of inching closer. I wriggled another inch out, my foot now buried in the sandy bottom, my pants legs quite wet. But I got a firmer toe grip on the shell and pulled it toward me. Stepped back and pulled it again. “Got it,” I said, easing it closer to shore. I stood on two feet and bent to pick it up.
Something sliced through the water, fast as a fish. I felt it touch my wrist and I jerked away. Splashing the water. I held up my arm. My wrist was bleeding. Three distinct, but not linear slashes.
“What the...?” Occam growled.
The water splashed and swirled. I turned to race from the river.
My feet flew out from under me. My ankles in a vise. I hit bottom on one hip. Was dragged under. Deeper. Into blacker, hotter water. The current caught me as I flailed. Fighting. Pulled deeper. Blacker. Hotter.
Something gripped my wrist, slicing, multiple times at once. Something else caught my short hair. Pain cut at my abdomen. Above me, a three-fingered hand slashed down. I jerked back my head. Claws caught my collarbone. Different sizes of clawed tadpoles.
The need to breathe strangled me. Water burned.Need to breathe. Breathe. Breathe!
Deeper. Hotter.
I pulled my gun. Shoved it hard against one of the things that held me. Squeezed the trigger. Heard athump. Saw nothing.
Suddenly the things let me go. They were just gone, in a frenzied mass. I whirled in the water. Face-to-face with glowing eyes and killer teeth. The fangs reached out and snagged my shirt at the shoulder. Tugged me upward.
Breathe.Breathe. Breathe!I needed to breathe! I swallowed water. More water. Gagged.
I kicked hard. Harder. Desperate for air. Caught in a current that pulled me down. I swallowed more water fightingnotto breathe the water in. The teeth pulled me upward, toward the light.
I broke through.
Coughing. Gagging. Vomiting water.
The fangs broke through beside me. Took my bleeding wrist between them, fangs clasping and meeting on the other side.Occam. Occam had saved me. His sleek spotted body, as supple and graceful on the water as on land, bumped myside as he swam me to shore while I coughed and gagged and spat. When we were knee-deep he let me go and splashed back into the water and under. Where the egg was.
Something long and quick swirled through the water and grabbed for me. I spun in the shallows and scratched it, my fingernails catching it on the... face? Its blood boiled into the water and over my hand. Blue blood. Heated. Bubbling. Metallic and sour. It feltwrongon my hand. Wrong under my nails. Wrong, wrong, so verywrong.
But it wasblood. Bloodlust gripped me. I reached out and the blood spewed over my hand and I... I fed it to the water. Drained it.Knew it. Salamander. Flaming being. Very nearly immortal. Fishy. Scalding. I killed it. Broke it into its composite parts. The cells floated away. Disintegrated. Others of its kind were caught in the bloodlust. I pulled them apart and broke them down, taking as many of them as I could. The rest of the tadpoles took off for deeper water, leaving us safe. The water cooled.
I pulled away and back to the shore.
Occam’s head emerged from the water, his nostril flaps opening and blowing, breathing and closing, and dipping back underwater. Shock zinged through me, followed by relief so intense it made me shiver. He hadn’t noted my killing the salamander tadpoles. My bloodlust had bypassed him. He was batting the egg across the bottom to the sandy beach. I crawled on my hands and feet out of the water and far up the bank against the rock wall. I threw up again, losing all the water I had swallowed. Heaving, losing everything I had eaten in the last hours. Dry heaving when that was gone.
Exhausted, I rolled over and sat where I could see the water. Now heaving breaths. Nothing had ever felt so good. Air. Blessed air. Pea curled up beside me and made worried moans.
I had thought I didn’t need Occam—a man—to do this thing for me—a woman. I needed to listen more and not let my preconceived notions make me do something stupid. I lay on the sand in the sun and breathed.
I was still holding my gun. Guns aren’t designed to shoot in water. Normal bullets aren’t fabricated to fly true through water. Useless underwater except for the one shot, which I had somehow missed. I pulled the holster to me, around my waist. I needed to service it, give it a good cleaning and oiling. I holstered the Glock. Bloody water squirted out of the hard plastic holster. I was bleeding freely from so many places I didn’t know what to put pressure on. And I didn’t care. I breathed. Just breathed.
Occam came out of the water, pawing the egg before him, up onto his clothes, his pants and jacket and shirt that were scattered in a small area. They appeared to be in ruins. Occam had shifted. Faster than I thought possible. That had to have been an agony.
He had tried to stop me. In the way of cats, he had scented danger on the air. He had saved me when the things—the young salamanders—had taken me under. Had tried to drown me. Occam had saved me. Tears spilled down my cheeks.
The spotted leopard trotted across the sand, dripping, splashing, padding, paw to paw, a sleek, killing machine. He fell at my side and dropped his huge head on my lap. Chuffed. His golden eyes met mine. He squirmed his jaw over my thigh, back and forth, scent-marking me. It wasn’t the first time he had done so. And Pea didn’t seem to care. She rolled over and turned her belly to the sun, closing her eyes.
I lifted a hand that now felt as if it weighed a ton. Placed it on his head. His wet hair was silky smooth. My blood flowed over his pelt. He sniffed. Growled. He sat up and held my eyes with his golden ones. Growled again. “I know. I’m still bleedin’,” I said. “Not having werecat healing abilities, there’s not much I can do about it.”
Occam looked surprised, tilted his head, pushed to his feet, and pawed down the shore and around a huge rounded, pitted rock that appeared to have fallen there long ago. He disappeared. “You better not shift and walk back here all nekkid,” I said. And smiled at the image of Occam, the way I imagined he would look, human and naked, stalking along the beach.
He chuffed from around the rocks. And trotted back to me, half carrying, half dragging a small green plant in his fangs. It was an evergreen, with leaves, roots, and all, pulled alive from the ground. It looked like a boxwood shrub, yanked from the dirt, but it wasn’t. I didn’t know what it was. A waterweed or rock-face weed of some kind.
