“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 humanadults, 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 and 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.
I went back through my bullet point timeline. Devin had never once been on-scene at a shooting, though he had been present when Sonya supposedly died. Devin, the child Soul had saved from fire, was our fire assassin. And I was almost willing to bet money that the nanny could shape-shift into a male, and that she was the shooter.
Occam rumbled, “I need to shift.”
“No,” Soul said, putting command into the word. “You need to be able to fire the AR-15 and take out as many salamanders as possible.”
“Why take them out?” I asked. A flash of bloodlust raced through me.Salamander blood, all that rich blue blood.I swallowed the bloody thoughts down, away, but they were there all the same, eager. I finished, “Especially the juveniles. The tadpoles.”
“They are having aparty,” Soul said, her tone biting, “around thedead bodyof Justin Tolliver, whom they are eating. I accept full responsibility for this raid and the salamander deaths.”
Light burst around her body and was snuffed. Her body wavered from human to something nonhuman and back. A sound like bells ringing in the distance sounded before being abruptly cut off. Then Soul stood there again, wearing her armor, though this time it was in shades of blue camo, not the purple of before. Soul was about to lose control of herarcencielshape. Bells rang again, soft and tinkling. “The human woman we will save,” she said, “if she is truly human and if she lives. But anyone who shifts to lizard will die.” Her words sounded odd, tinkling and chiming, not at all human.
Soul, assistant director of PsyLED, had just condemned sentient beings to death. And then small things came together for me. Soul, who should have been in DC or at Spook School, training new agents, was in Knoxville, on what should have been a relatively simple case. Soul, who nearly shifted when she first heard the wordsalamander. Soul, who was acting out of character. Soul, whose ancestors had fought a war that decimated the salamanders. Genocide.
I said, “Arcencielsand salamanders hate each other, don’t they? You’restillat war with them.”
Soul’s eyes narrowed. “No. The war ended six thousand years ago. The salamanders were wiped out.” Lights illuminated her face and pearled teeth began to grow from her mouth, long and serrated and wicked-looking. “Therecan be no salamanders,” she hissed.
