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 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 a party,” Soul said, her tone biting, “around the dead body of 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 her arcenciel shape. 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 word salamander. Soul, who was acting out of character. Soul, whose ancestors had fought a war that decimated the salamanders. Genocide.
I said, “Arcenciels and salamanders hate each other, don’t they? You’re still at 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. “There can be no salamanders,” she hissed.
“But there are salamanders,” I said. And then I understood. Soul’s worldview had just changed, like what would happen to the members of God’s Cloud of Glory Church when life was found on other planets. Soul had been taught that her ancestors had wiped out the salamanders and yet, here they were in her own backyard and she hadn’t even recognized what they were. “That makes this case personal to you. When it’s personal you have to withdraw. PsyLED regulation . . . I don’t remember which one, but it’s a regulation.”
“I will not withdraw.” Her body began to lose its human contours, drifting and wavering.
“Senior Special Agent LaFleur,” I said, wondering if I was in danger of having my head bitten off by the assistant director of PsyLED. It was probably not very smart, but I went on. “I formally request that Soul be removed from command position and sent back from the front lines.”
“You dare,” she snarled.
“Tomorrow is the first day of the full moon,” I said, holding my ground. “Are arcenciels moon-called?”
Soul reared back, her body glowing, elongating, shifting to her native light dragon form. Wings spread to either side. Her face was terrible.
“Problems,” Rick said over the comms system.
“I noticed,” I said. I was holding my service weapon on the assistant director of PsyLED. Though it was likely that she could bite me in two before I could squeeze the trigger. Occam was trying to shift, or struggling to not shift, stumbling into the shadows, probably pulled into the change by magics in the air and the nearness of the full moon. I was alone with Soul in a tizzy and salamanders riled. “I really noticed.”
“They must have heard you or seen the light show,” Rick said. “Baby salamanders are crawling out of the pool and heading your way. The ground is smoking behind them. Soul. You are formally relieved of command. Probationary Special Agent Nell Ingram, you are now in charge of Mission Salamander.”
“Oh. Oh. Dagnabbit,” I cursed.
Soul shot into the sky, bellowing a challenge.
From the pool, flames surged.
The dead trees above us, offering us scant shelter, burst into fire. I ducked away. Soul whirled and dove. Light blared out, blinding. Her dragon wove itself in the space between trees. Occam was on the ground, also shifting. Over the comms, Rick was growling, rumbling.
Things occurred to me in overlapping images of understanding. We were about to have a bloodbath. Soul and the cats were losing whatever humanity they possessed. JoJo was getting all this on film from the RVAC overhead. The werecats were catty and contagious. And I was now officially, though nominally, in charge—nominally because the chance of anyone listening to me and following my orders was pretty much nil. I was on my own.
Fir trees, dead and dying, exploded in fire, purple-tipped orange flames licking and leaping from tree to tree. Heat blasted over me. I ducked and ran. Wrapped an arm around my head, racing back toward the road, my flesh scorching. The wooden siding on the guesthouse burst into flame. Slender slick forms sped from the pools, crawling like racing snakes. I lunged between the remaining trees as they flared into flashfire. Fire devils whirled into the air. Wind leaped high, roaring with the flame tornadoes. JoJo was shouting in my earbuds, but I couldn’t hear the words over the howl of the fire.
From the sides of the property, the woods awoke.
Fire. Fire. Fire. Fear. Fear. Fire. Fire. Fire, they whispered. The winter-dormant trees and grasses that had survived the salamanders came aware. Their old enemy was among them. Fire, the destroyer, attacking. Fear raced through the earth.
A naked Justin Tolliver—Devin—trailed after the young salamanders. I caught a glimpse as he raced through flames and wasn’t burned. Where his bare feet touched the ground, new flames shot up. He was hunting me. I dashed around the front of the house. The cool air shut off the extraordinary heat and noise, though cold air whistled past me, feeding the fire. Overhead, I saw a flash of light, but when I looked up, Soul was gone. She reappeared, and dove at the pool area, blasting light. JoJo was yelling about fire departments and Tandy and getting my white ass back to the truck. I peeked out from the brick wall.
Devin was striding toward me. He threw out his hands. Fire, orange and soot-dark, shot at me. A spotted leopard leaped in front of the fire.
“Occam!” I shouted. “No!”
The fireball hit him.
The werecat screamed. Fell.
Fury leaped inside me. Leaves burst from my fingertips.
From the trees, Rick LaFleur, in black leopard form, hurtled, dropped down, landing just behind the pyro. He leaped and hit the salamander with front and back feet. They went down, landing hard. Rick bit down on Devin’s neck and he shook the creature like prey.
Blue blood splattered. The thing on the earth rolled, knocking Rick away. Blasted Rick with fire. The werecat screamed and fell, silent.
Knowingly or not, he had given me salamander blood. A great deal of the blue blood. Bloodlust merged with the fury. Needing.
I dropped and shoved my hands into the earth. Breaking nails, digging deep. I caught the droplets of blue blood as they landed. My gift. My curse. I caught the blood and caught the creature it came from. It wasn’t human. Its blood was wrong. But I hungered. I wanted.
The craving for that strange metallic blood roared up in me like the wildfire that consumed the wood. The soil sucked at the blood, the awareness of the trees awakening, turning to the fire but seeking me, ready, impatient. A quiver of power zapped through the trees across the road and through me. I claimed the land with the strange blue blood. The forest was awake and full of fury, seething with need, with blood-hunger, the strange sour metallic blood of the pyro creature. The salamander was mine.
This was my magic, my dark power. To take the life of anyone who bled onto land I claimed as my own. My gift—to feed that life to the woods. The trees pulsed through me. The heat of the fire scorched me as it rounded the corner of the house. Evil air that breathed and burned and killed. Killed Occam. Killed Rick. Killed Occam! I screamed in fury and grief.
I called to the blue blood on the earth, pulling on it, on the life it represented, drawing the burning life force to me, gathering it as if fire webbed between my fingers, buried that life in the dirt. I felt Devin writhing on the ground, his life force disentangling from his body, shuddering through the ground. My magic caught it, pulling it to me and across my flesh, an embrace, a vow, and a threat, burning and scorching and killing.
I shoved Devin’s life away from me, deep underground, dismantling it as I worked, ripping, tearing. The process was slow and purposeful as I fed him to the earth, my mind focused. Aboveground, I burned. The pain my body was experiencing, I ignored. I was on fire, but I couldn’t care. I pulled other salamanders to me, breaking them, bleeding the adults and the tadpoles into the earth. Pulling each body to pieces, each bone and muscle and tendon. Undoing each cell. The life force, alien, strange, fed the land. The flames in the dark slid below me, scratching at me as they went, screaming deep into the dark beneath. Feeding them deeper.
My awareness spread out, to the trees and grasses and shrubs all around. I claimed them, feeding the creatures of fire into them, awakening them, giving them life. What was left of the blue-blooded things, I pushed all deep. Deep. Into the magma I had called to the surface by accident. The salamanders screamed, reached back. They fought. All of them in a single concerted assault. But the magma and the earth wanted the heat that was salamander. Salamanders. All of them. All that rich, strong, potent blue blood and alien life. I fed them to the earth. I fed them to avenge Occam. To avenge his death. I fed and fed. And I learned how feeding truly worked. It was a gift of myself, as much as a sacrifice of blood.
When the salamanders were gone, I reached back to Soulwood and found the walled-off prison that hid and protected Brother Ephraim. I fashioned a blue spear out of the remaining life force of the salamanders and I thrust it into the cell that hid and protected and imprisoned Ephraim. Pointed and sharp, edged and spiked, like a two-edged sword, it slid through the cell wall. The Bible verse came back at me as I pulled back and rammed the pointed edge again into the protective wall. For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.
That was what I needed. Something that would divide Ephraim’s soul and spirit and joints and marrow. I hadn’t prayed to God very often, not since I’d killed the first man on Soulwood. Not really. Not with need. But now . . . Now I was avenger and death come calling, and I refashioned the spear into a sword of light and heat. I shouted to the heavens, “Death to Ephraim for the evils of his heart! I claim him for the earth! Death! Death! Until nothing is left for heaven or hell!”
Ephraim gathered the scarlet and black energies into himself. The snakelike power whipped and whirled and began to form a point, a weapon.
The blade of vengeance sliced back and forth through the walls of Brother Ephraim’s prison. I stabbed and cut and ripped into the cavern. Into his snake-energies. Ephraim tried to resist, tried to pull power from the earth, from the church and the tree that shared my genetics. But the sword of vengeance was faster and hotter. Heated by the earth and by the magma that was mine to call. And I sliced into the foul old man’s soul, cutting, cutting, dissolving each sliver of life into separate components—individual thoughts, needs, hopes, memories—and fed them to the heart of the world. This time I didn’t stop too soon. This time I gave myself as I tore and cut and ripped and fed, fed, fed Brother Ephraim to the land until there was nothing left.
Then I tore apart the cavern he had made for his life force. Dismantled the walls, the emptiness, the death he had surrounded himself with. And I cut through the tendrils he had once again sent down into the church land. To the vampire tree. I sliced and destroyed the vine-like coils and shoots of himself that he had sent into the tree. Not hurting the tree itself, but destroying the roots and vines where Ephraim’s life had touched it, had shaped it. He had taken over the tree, turning it into a death tree. He had done this and I hadn’t noted it, hadn’t understood.
When nothing was left of Ephraim or his prison or his control of the vampire tree, I turned my attention back to the land where my burned body lay.
Entwining my energies with the roots and trees nearby, I fed them. Pulled their energies in, replacing the death of the land around me with life. Soulwood stretched out and joined in the battle against the fire, sending groundwater up toward the surface, engulfing the roots, protecting them. The warmth and love and joy of my land entwined with my own soul. Together we communicated goodness and health and strength to the trees all around me, bringing the burned land and all that still contained a spark of life to fecund, flourishing, abundant health.
Life, green and full of all good things, burst forth.
Feeding it, I claimed the land.
I felt it when roots grew into and from my body and plunged deep. I felt it when they rose again and burst through the crust of dead grass and sprouted new trees. Felt it when the trees sprouted leaves out of season. Felt them grow tall and strong. Grass and vines and flowering plants followed. The land came alive. It pulled me into it. It enfolded me. And the pain of burning I hadn’t even noticed vanished. I leafed out. I grew.
Yes, I whispered to the land, to the trees. Grow. Live.
Much, much later, after the full moon had waxed and waned, I felt the vibrations of footsteps, footsteps I had once known. And . . . ahhh. Soul. Soul, in human form, walked across the new leaves and grasses growing atop the crisped and charred land to me. I felt her kneel beside me. Felt her touch on my side. But I couldn’t come back to her. I was part of the earth now. I was part of this land. Here there was no fear or grief. No worry or pain. Here I would stay. I felt Soul move away.
Sun fell upon me. Rain watered me. Moon rose and fell, waxed and waned and waxed again. Birds perched on me. My forest grew. My trees grew. Grasses and shrubs and deer and rabbits. Foxes. A family of bear. I was alive. I was the land and it was me. Soulwood was part of us and roots thrust deep. The land was alive with me.
Moons later, when the days had grown longer and the earth had warmed with spring, I again felt Soul return, this time not alone. There were others with her, tromping on the earth, between the saplings and mature trees that were my land. There were humans and were-creatures and a witch and they gathered about me. And . . . there was a creature like me.
Some part of my understanding woke. I understood what Soul had done. She had brought with her the sentient creatures that my former self knew. There were two in animal form, one which belonged to me, which I had claimed. Rick LaFleur. That was what this one was called. Black were-leopard. He had died. But he had died on land I claimed. And I had . . . I had given the land a great portion of the salamanders’ life force, but I had kept something back. With it, with the help of Soulwood, he had been healed.
Rick draped himself across my body. Purring. His claws extruded and pressed into the wood that I had become. He milked the wood, claws in and out, pricking me as a woodpecker might, though there were no insects within me.
Occam pressed beside him. Occam had died as well, and I had shared the land with him. I had claimed him as I had claimed the trees. He was mine. He laid his cat across my roots and he shifted into his other form. His human form. He was different, disfigured, scarred from the salamanders’ fire. I had not been able to save him from all the damage.
T. Laine, moon witch. Soul herself. Tandy, empath, whose thoughts were clear to me. He missed me. He wanted my old self back. JoJo, who was human and silent and perhaps . . . appalled at my new form.
And Mud, sister of my mother’s body. She was like me. She was part of the land.
Mud placed her hand upon my form and said, “Nell, come back. I’m callin’ you’un back.” She pressed her fingernails into the wood that had once been my shoulder and said, “Come back. Come back now.” She shoved Rick out of the way and pressed herself onto the wooden shape that was all that was left of the human I had never been.
Mud’s strength. Her life. Her greenness reached out to me. Her life force was strong and dancing, the way buttercups danced in a summer wind. The way tree limbs beat against the sky in a spring storm. And she watered my wood.
“You’un need to come back,” she wailed. “You’un need to teach me. And you’un got to deal with the vampire tree. It’s growing to your’n land. It’s lookin’ for you’un, putting up sprouts everywhere, between the church’s gate and the cliff to Soulwood. If’n you don’t come back, Sam’s gonna set something he calls C-4 on the tree and explode it. Or poison the land to stop it. But I don’t want it to die. It’s special, or it can be, if’n you’un’ll finish what you started.” Softer, she said, “I need you, Nellie. I’m scared. And I’m alone. And I’m afeared they’s gonna give me away, no matter what I do.” Wetness fell upon my bark and my bare wood. She watered me. She watered my wood.
Tears. Mud was crying. For me. For herself.
Daddy had been sick. Daddy had been failing and growing close to death. Daddy might be dead . . . If he was gone, then no one stood between the churchmen and Mud. They would force her . . . force her to marry one of them.
I tore my arm, with its roots, out of the earth and reached around. Clasped Mud’s body to me. With my other hand, I reached up and tore my jaw free of the roots that bound me to the earth. “Cut me free,” I said, the words grinding as sand on stone. “Cut me free of the land. Take me to Soulwood.”
I felt the blade cutting me free, hacking me from the earth, tearing me out of the soil. The air felt strange on my roots and limbs, and my bark shivered and ached as I was moved. And then I was resting on Soulwood, on the land behind my house. I dug my fingers into the earth and slept. Days passed.
But every day there were the humans and a predator cat, talking, talking, talking, making me listen. Making me care for them, for the things they had to say. And every day, more of my bark slipped from me, fewer leaves grew upon me. And I stood from the earth and walked upon my land.
The humans and a predator cat came and went and fed my mouser cats and brought me food and water. I woke and I ate and I drank. I listened to the noises of the humans as they spoke and told me tales. With them and alone, I walked around Soulwood, silent, touching my trees, knowing the earth. I slept in the woods, sinking deep, communing with the resting power beneath the ground.
And finally, one day I looked at the predator cat and I said, “Occam?” He chuffed and shifted to human and held me in his arms. He was scarred, missing part of his hand, most of his roots. Not roots. His hair. I closed my eyes and wrapped my limbs about him, sad that he was still so damaged.
Three weeks after I was cut from the earth, I woke in my bed. The sheets felt strange beneath me. The mouser cats felt strange beside me. The house was too enclosed, too empty, and too full. I crawled out of bed and pulled on clothes. My sister Mud slept on the couch. I didn’t understand why, but she was safe so it didn’t really matter. When the sun rose I was sitting on the front porch, my face to the east and the pale dawn sun. And I realized that I was nearly human again. Or could be, if I chose.
Like a flowering plant, a morning glory trying to bloom, new leaves and some kind of odd, tight blooms were all over me, trying to open. I ripped the flowers away and watched them disintegrate into ash and vanish into the land below me. I sat on the porch swing, unsettled and despondent as the sun rose, before I went back inside and sat on the couch, where Mud directed me, to sit and to think. To decide what I needed to do. I hadn’t gotten very far in my plans, beyond some amorphous ideas and visual images. Words were still hard.
I was still sitting on my couch, a blanket over my knees and cats prowling across the furniture. Mud had been banging around in the kitchen for two hours now. The scent of fresh bread was warm on the air. And I felt a car pulling slowly up the hill to Soulwood. No. Not a car. A van. Familiar. This was the first time I had felt and understood sensations that I once took for granted. Unit Eighteen was on the way up. I looked out the front window, wondering what this might mean.
Birds were fighting in the oaks out front. Deer were pawing and eating the grass in the lower part of the yard. Squirrels were picking out nesting sites. The ground in the three acres of yard was warming, the grasses and herbs reaching for the surface and the pallid heat of the sun; the cold temps were gone. Spring had arrived.
And people were coming up my hill. I thought it might be okay for them to come.
Inside, the woodstove had heated the house. The dust that had accumulated while I worked the case was gone. The dishes were washed and put away. The house was neat as a pin. I felt a small measure of pleasure at being able to remember that saying, one of Mama’s, though I’d never understood how a pin might be considered neat.
I had been home for weeks, Mud staying with me, taking care of me. I had no idea why Mud had been allowed to stay with me for so long. She assured me that T. Laine had handled it and Mama and Daddy hadn’t seen me, which was a good thing, as I had changed a lot.
Mud had been busy with more than housecleaning. She had caught up the winter chores in the garden and it felt hopeful and ready for spring. She had also scraped much of the bark off of me, down to the skin below it. Had hacked my roots away. Clipped and cut my leaves. Except for the pale white blooms this morning, and the leaves I sprouted here and there when I slept, I looked almost human again, though my joints were still dark brown with bark-like flesh on elbows, knees, feet, and knuckles. But that was fading, softening, vanishing as Mud rubbed them down with my winter emollient every morning and evening. Overall, my skin was browner. Not tanned, but nut-brown all over, though paler skin was visible at my underarms and in blotches on my torso. My eyes were the glittering green of spring leaves and emeralds. My hair was rougher, curlier, redder and browner in streaks. Most mornings when I woke, it reached the middle of my back and wild curls sprang out around my hairline like rootlets or vines about to burst into leaf. Mud kept the plant parts clipped and I hadn’t told her about the flowers this morning, thinking—hoping—they were just an anomaly.
I believed that in a week or so I would look and sound human to the casual observer. I’d look human, but I was different.
For the last week, as she groomed me like a topiary animal, I had begun to talk with Mud, to understand her words. To remember my human life. My pasts, all of them. My youth. My family. My marriage. Unit Eighteen. And with each memory that returned, Mud and I celebrated. Today, Mud had invited people over. That was why the van was climbing the hill. Company was coming. Ahhh . . . I remembered.
I felt the car stop. Felt people, sentient beings, get out and walk to the porch. Rick. T. Laine. Tandy. JoJo. Not Occam. I didn’t know how I felt about that. Rick knocked on my door.
“They’re here,” Mud sang out, racing in from cleaning the bathroom, which often meant carrying leaf trimmings to the yard. I smiled at the thought. She sped to the front of the house and threw the door open. Let them in. Chattered at them. I studied their faces, which were carefully neutral and noncommittal. JoJo’s head was wrapped in twisted vines—no, they were braids—adorned with beads that sparkled like sun on water. She wore green and black, the color of leaves and dark wood. I liked it. T. Laine was wearing black pants and a thin jacket with a white shirt. She had cut her foliage—her hair. Tandy was wearing browns. Good tree colors. Rick was wearing the same colors as T. Laine, even in his foliage, which was white and black in ribbons of color. It didn’t mean anything that they were dressed alike. And Rick’s leaves— No. His hair. His hair had new white streaks in it. Accomplishment shot through me at the thoughts.
They said hellos, to which I said nothing. They sat. They stared at me as if waiting for me to speak, but I had nothing to say.
Mud had made tea and coffee and now placed a bread plate on the coffee table along with a jar of my homemade jelly. On the plate was a loaf of bread she had made herself and sliced. A stack of plates and forks were nearby. I remembered that Leah had traded a townie for the plates when she was first married to John. She had been proud of the barter and told me about it every time we used them.
Mud went to the kitchen and my eyes followed her. She brought back a cup of coffee and gave it to Rick as if she was his personal servant. Repeated the trip and gave Tandy a cup. But she offered nothing to the women. Church training. I hated it. I felt a spark of disgust and fury, though it fizzled and disappeared. Fury and disgust were human emotions. I hadn’t felt them in a long time.
Rick started talking. “We’re here to debrief. You know what I’m saying?”
A debrief was a summation. I remembered. Mostly. Though it seemed a long time in the past. I nodded again, silent. The front door opened and Soul walked in. She hadn’t been in the van. Soul was a light dragon, an arcenciel. She had flown. I remembered that too and felt a momentary satisfaction that the memory was still inside me somewhere. She took a seat in the rocking chair, watching me, her gray clothing floating with her movements.
Abruptly, Soul said, “The flames at the home of Senator Tolliver were abnormally hot. Yet they went out all by themselves after you dropped into the earth. The fire department did its job, but the houses and the fir trees were mostly smoking ruins by the time they got there. Smoking. Not flaming.”
I continued to stare at her. She had the most amazing eyes, black with faint tints of purple and green and blue that caught the light at odd moments.
T. Laine said, “The body in the limo, the one that should have been Sonya? You remember?”
I nodded once, remembering.
“It hadn’t been cremated. The FBI held it at the morgue pending further testing. It was fully human and turned out to be the body of a missing local woman. Mother of three. PhD in nursing. She had been drugged and placed in the limo to burn to death in Sonya’s place. They murdered her to carry on their bloodlines and the transfer of real property.”
JoJo said, “We captured four salamanders: the female who had played the part of Sonya, the nanny, and two other females who were hiding inside the smoking walls of the house. We also caught four baby salamanders who had stayed in the pool and not attacked you. The others disappeared, presumed burned in the fire.”
I tilted my head, not disagreeing. I had killed all the ones I could find.
Soul said, “We put them in the null room. Then we transported them to PsyLED, where they died. The null room stripped them of their magic. It was . . . tragic.” Her tone said otherwise.
I frowned. Or thought I did. I wasn’t sure. Soul had wanted all the salamanders dead. So had I, and I had finished the battle for her. I had fed dozens to the land. I had murdered even those not yet guilty of a crime. Even so, the human law would call it self-defense if they ever thought to try me for a crime. But . . . all the salamanders were killers. They poisoned the earth and the trees and the land. They killed the plants that I loved, that I was here to protect. PsyLED’s job was to police paranormals who couldn’t be kept in check by any other means. And that too, I had done. And perhaps Soul had done by placing the salamanders in a null room. Again ending her war.
Tandy said, “Once we knew what to look for, the explanation was all there in the family’s financial papers. Jefferson/Healy/Devin wanted the family money back in his hands and under the control of him and his bloodline—his mates and progeny. All the shootings and fires were about money and the transfer of property out of the hands of humans and into the hands of the salamanders. They had been living below the human law enforcement radar for decades. They took each other’s places as needed for the last two centuries.”
Rick said, “We still don’t know if the nanny was actually trying to kill Abrams.”
“Worst shot in the history of serial killers,” JoJo said. They made a noise. It was laughter.
My eyes tracked the speakers, but I still had no desire to say anything. I just listened and thought. Mud poured me a cup of super-sweet lemon ginger tea, which I had developed a deep desire for, though it didn’t taste exactly the way it had before. I accepted the cup and sipped, instantly soothed by the tart sweetness. No one spoke. I realized that I really needed to say something; most anything would do. I thought back over the days of the case, and one thing seemed important. Occam hadn’t come. Occam wasn’t here. But I couldn’t say that. I said instead, “Did you bring Krispy Kremes?”
Tandy laughed, his odd reddish brown eyes on me, the sound of his laughter relieved and excited and joyful. JoJo put a hand on his arm and he quieted. None of that made sense to me.
Rick looked down and I realized he might be upset. Part of me wanted to water his roots and I smiled at the urge. Tandy smiled with me.
JoJo took up the narrative again. “The raid on the DNAKeys compound didn’t reveal what we thought or feared. There were vamps and witches and weres there, just like we thought, living and working on the campus. That’s what they called it. The campus.”
Rick glowered and said, “They were on-site by choice. The were-creatures were hoping that someone at DNAKeys would find a cure for were-taint, and the researchers claim to have been making some progress on it.”
“Prions cause were-taint. Prions can’t be killed,” I said at last. “Not by fire, heat, radiation, freezing. They never, ever die.”
Bitterly, Rick said, “No, they can’t be killed. The claims were false.”
JoJo pulled at her earrings, a nervous tic, one I remembered. She said, “The witches were on contract. The vamps were there on contract too, to provide blood as needed for experiments on diseases that cause bleeding—coagulation diseases, from the new form of Ebola to platelet problems to one called DIC. Don’t ask me what it stands for. It’s a bunch of syllables.”
“Disseminated intravascular coagulation,” T. Laine added. “And that part of the claims was true. They found some new treatments that are amazing.” I remembered that Lainie had a lot of degrees and partial degrees and her breadth of knowledge had made her attractive to PsyLED.
With that thought, all sorts of memories, full and partials, came back to me, piles of images and smells and sounds, landing on me like a kaleidoscopic avalanche. My lips stretched into a smile and Tandy rose, crossed the room, and sat beside me on the couch. He put his head on my shoulder, which felt peculiar and comfortable all at once. “She’s remembering,” he said. I was pretty sure Tandy was watering me. Like Mud had watered me in the woods. No. He was crying on my shoulder. That was it.
I lifted a hand and patted his shoulder. I said, “You stopped eating. You lost weight.”
“I’ve been worried about you turning into a cord of firewood,” he said, his voice shaking. “I’ve been worried that Occam wouldn’t heal from his scars. It’s hard to eat when I’m worried.”
That was interesting. “Mud, make Tandy some of this tea”—I lifted the mug—“and fix him a jelly sandwich.”
Mud stood, heading for the kitchen, saying, “Okay. Can I hold a gun on him if he tells me he ain’t hungry?”
“Yes,” I said.
“No,” Rick said to Mud. “You are way too much like your sister for my comfort level.”
“Thank you,” Mud said.
“Occam?” I asked. “He’s . . .”
“Scarred,” Rick said, something odd in his voice. “PsyLED sent him to Gabon, twice now, to a colony of were-leopards to heal.” I said nothing and Rick added, so very gently, “He came back from the first visit to make sure we moved you safely from your . . . your rooted state to Soulwood. Then he had to go back.”
“Oh,” I said, my fingers picking at my skirt. I wondered if he’d ever come back here. To have dinner with me. But I didn’t ask.
My sister ended up fixing them all jelly and bread and making them eat it, though not at the end of a gun. My baby sister was quite forceful, all without the need for weapons. I liked her. And I had things I needed to do for her. If I could remember what they were.
The members of Unit Eighteen stayed for an hour, talking. Memories opened like the blooms of flowers and what might have been feelings began to unfurl inside me as they talked and shared and ate Mud’s bread. It was pleasant. Confusing but valuable. The memories were settling inside me. Enough for me to know that Occam’s not being here made me very sad. I remembered the disfigurement and the scars. Perhaps I hadn’t healed him well enough after all.