“Five!” Darius corrected from the couch where he was hunched over his phone. “Hi, Dr. Martin.”
“I had TWO!” Gil crowed. Then he was back to the races down the long hallways with the other kids.
Clarice trailed after Bruno into the kitchen. He introduced her to Chloe, who was talking sternly to the fuzzy baby penguin who was now splashing in the puddles that had melted from someone’s snowy boots, and Addison, who was cradling an infant. Clarice desperately wanted a peek and a cuddle, but wasn’t sure it would be welcome if she asked. Was she theonlyhuman here? She wondered what they all were.
A big Black man was taking another pizza out of theoven. That was Roderick, Addison’s husband; Clarice knew him as a local plumber who sometimes did odd jobs for Veronica. “Hot!” he warned. A little red-haired girl folded her arms at him. “Not hot,” she scoffed. “Not hot at all.”
“Well don’t touch, okay Lucy?”
She looked like she might protest, but Gil hollered from the hallway, “WE’RE PLAYING HIDE AND SEEK!” and she turned to join the play.
“WAIT FOR GABBY!” a little brown-skinned girl wailed, falling down onto four legs as a wolf pup to follow. Clarice tried not to stare at her transformation.
“This pizza is adult-temperature right now, you want a slice?” Roderick’s gaze was appraising, but not unfriendly.
Clarice came shyly forward. “Two, please. If there’s enough.”
“Plenty. You?”
“Yes, please,” Bruno said. “I’llstartwith two. I skipped lunch and nearly froze to death several hours ago and that apparently works up an appetite.”
Clarice had forgotten that her wrists had red marks around them from the zip-ties until she saw them when she reached out her hands to take a plate from Roderick.
“You didn’t tell me you’d gotten hurt!” Bruno said accusingly.
“It wasn’t like I was the one dying of hypothermia,” Clarice said, tucking her sleeves back down. “You had a lot going on.”
“What happened at Tiny Paws?” Bruno asked, after wolfing down his first slice.
Roderick gave Clarice an appraising glance, then looked back at Bruno. “They were expecting to have the element of surprise, but they were the ones that got the shock. The kids had all been bussed out before they gotthere, and instead of story time, they busted in on a few armed agents and a collection of pissed off shifter parents.”
“I would have liked to have seen that,” Bruno said, sounding surprisingly bloodthirsty. No wonder, since it washis kidthey were coming to kidnap.
“Olivia was the real star of the show,” a man named Ian pointed out proudly. No one bothered to explain why, as if they all knew and didn’twantClarice to know. She tried not to feel left out.
“Thought those goons were going to piss themselves,” Roderick chortled. “’Scuse my language.” He had an arm around Addison and was smiling down at their baby.
Olivia, a curvy Latina woman in a T-shirt that said “O Mg” as periodic elements looked quite satisfied. “I’m not happy I had to do it, but oh man, was it worth the look on their faces.”
“No one wanted a bunch of bodies to explain,” Juliette said chidingly, “or it could have gone quite badly. They got cocky, thinking they could get in and right out, and we got lucky. I wish we’d been able to detain them, but we just didn’t have the numbers or the sit-rep to make it happen without?—”
A fresh faced girl with dark hair tripped in and asked politely for a piece of pizza with a charming lisp.
“We’ll talk more,” Roderick promised. “After the kids are down.”
Getting kids down sounded fine in premise, but reality was a whole different ballgame. They laid out a romp room with pads and air mattresses and blankets until it was one lumpy swamp of cartoon characters and princesses between the couches, each kid with their own designated space, more carefully negotiated than any land dispute Clarice had ever researched. Clarice took one look insideand backed carefully away to let the parents take turns tucking in, reciting silly rhymes, and kissing foreheads before taking the obstacle course back out to the hall.
Clarice helped clean up in the kitchen, but couldn’t resist ducking out to watch Bruno cover Gil with an Iron Man sleeping bag and scrunch the pillow under his head. They were near enough to the door that Clarice could hear Gil quietly ask, “Is everything okay, Daddy?”
“Everything is just fine, kiddo.”
“Where are your glasses?”
“I lost them in a swimming pool,” Bruno said.
Gil gave a shout of laughter. “THAT’S FUNNY!”
“Quiet now, we’re going to sleep.”
