Shift happens, p.16
Shift Happens, page 16
A blue glow lit up the top of the rock, making Angela pause. "Lily?" It felt as if she whispered, but a sparkling reptilian head poked over the side.
"Angela!"
Back when she'd been human, Angela had found Lily's shifted form pleasing with its glitter and oversized eyes. Seen through the gaze of a salamander, Lily was just amazing. Her magic blazed in the night, a beacon that Angela couldn't believe hadn't been visible miles away. Lily's baby raced in the womb, strong threads of magic running through it as well.
Angela backed into the water. "Lily, you can't be here. You have to go." She couldn't trust herself around that much magic, and she would swim away from shore until she dropped dead from exhaustion and blew a hole in the ocean before she hurt the girl.
"Angela, wait!" The blue glow abruptly quenched, Lily having apparently decided she could climb on the rocks more easily in her human form. She swung down and jumped to the flattest part, skidding a little on the wet stone. "Please don't go."
Angela stayed in the water, head pressed down, nostrils just barely above the waves. She needed to leave, to keep Lily safe, but the need to be around humans, ones she had known before, held her in place. "How did you get here? Who brought you?" She wouldn't allow herself to hurt Lily, but she'd destroy whoever had been stupid enough to let a pregnant teenager kayak on the ocean at night to go visit a salamander.
"That would be me," Benson's voice came from just beyond the ledge at the top of the rock. "Except I didn't exactly bring her. I followed. It was the only way I could keep her from going alone."
"The credit card company called him when I reserved the kayak. They thought I stole his card."
Benson cleared his throat.
"I guess I sort of did," Lily added.
Angela stared at the girl. Somehow the idea of Lily using a stolen credit card shocked her more than any of the other events of the previous month. A ripple of saltwater crested over her back, soothing the buildup of magic on her skin. "Lily, you have to go. It's not safe to be around me." She watched the fetus shift, and couldn't stop herself from reaching out with a tendril of magic to caress the fragile form. It responded by pushing back, and then shifting again.
Lily ignored her and moved forward, then sat on a rock, feet dangling in the water. She was wearing cut-off jeans and a t-shirt that Angela recognized as one of her own. The shirt hung down to the girl's thighs. Over it all, she wore a foam life jacket and a helmet. "You would never hurt me. You didn't even really hurt that guy from your office that's always staring at my boobs when you ate his magic."
It took Angela a few seconds to realize Lily was talking about Caleb, and then she had to back up into the water so she could completely submerge and allow the water to carry her rage away. She should have killed Caleb when she had a chance. Legally she could have done so without any repercussions since she had just shifted for the first time. Now it was too late. She'd never be able to get near him.
When she came back up, Benson had joined Lily on the rock. The water near her rock had heated to a temperature that would kill anything nearby, so she forced herself to climb out all the way and curl up on dry ground. If the salamander began to take over, she'd just have to head out into the water again.
"Why are you here? And why in the middle of the night?"
Lily pulled her feet out of the water and turned to face her, the girl's face lit by the moonlight and wisps of flames from the salamander skin. "I didn't think I could get past the Coast Guard during the day." She shrugged and then shifted, her larger form almost knocking Benson into the water. "And I wasn't sure I could swim like this."
"But you could have gotten lost and ended up in the middle of the ocean. I can't believe you would do something so crazy."
Lily and Benson looked at each other, then back to her. "Uh, Angela," Lily said, then shifted back to her human form, "your magic is like a bat signal. It's pretty much soaked into the rock. Even when you were out swimming around, we could always see this spot. There's no way I could have gotten lost unless there's another salamander out here."
Benson spoke up. "It's been nearly four hundred years since the last salamander was seen, so I think that's unlikely."
Lily shifted forms again, her skin glittering in the moonlight. "You have to come back with us. We need you."
Rock cracked under Angela's claws and she moved her feet to loosen the muscles. "Even if I could shift… they wouldn't let me anywhere near a city. And I can't shift."
"Why not?" Lily spoke with the innocence of a child who shifted whenever she needed something she couldn't reach.
"Because I'm too full of magic. I can't get rid of it any time soon." She rested her head on the rocks, scratching an itchy spot on her chin. "Maybe in another thirty or forty years." Or fifty if she lost control around another boat of idiots and absorbed even more.
When Lily shifted again, Benson gave her a look and stood up. "What if we could help you with that?"
Angela closed her eyes, trying to stop hope from slipping through a crack in the wall protecting her. "What's the point? At least this way, I don't have to worry about what I'm going to eat or where I'm going to live. If I could go back, what then? A cabin in the woods? How would I live?"
"I know you didn't have a chance to turn in your application for the captain's job, but I don't think they've closed the position yet." Benson hopped forward as saltwater surged up toward him. "Or you could go back to your old job if you didn't want to sit in the office. Or my group would be more than happy to hire you to train MPD officers in less coercive methods of maintaining the shifter population."
Chartreuse and aqua flames rippled over her body, lighting up the rock face. "Don't. I'm a f—" She turned her head to look at Lily. "—freaking salamander. Nobody in their right mind would let me anywhere near a city. I could lose my temper and kill everyone."
"Angela, you saved hundreds, or maybe thousands of people and a huge chunk of the city a couple of weeks ago." Benson picked his way across the rock to come closer to her.
Angela blew out a breath, turning her head so the heated air blew against the wall of rocks instead of anywhere near either of the humans. A clump of dried seaweed crumbled, smoke drifting up to the sky. "So they'll throw me a parade after they run me out of town."
"Would you at least be willing to try? I have three trucks of obsidian on hold."
Angela closed her eyes. The urge to return to the life she'd carved out before this disaster almost overwhelmed her, but it wouldn't be the same. It couldn't be.
Even if the city didn't ban her, people would avoid her. She'd spent her entire career helping shifters deal with the fallout. She knew better than anyone what would happen. Those who didn't outright abandon her would still whisper about her when they thought she couldn't hear. I certainly wouldn't trust her with anything important. Sure, she seems stable now, but you never know when she's going to explode. In some ways it would be the same thing she'd faced throughout her professional career, except this time there would be a good reason for it. The hissing of steam got louder as she thought about it, and she knew she couldn't even blame all of the anger on her salamander side. The reaction to decades of being treated as “less than” refused to be buried again. The salamander flared in joy at the thought of going there right now and obliterating the entire MPD building.
Benson shifted on the rock. "I also wanted to come out here to apologize."
Angela cracked an eyelid open. "For keeping me from killing everyone?"
Benson made a little snorting noise at the back of his throat. "No." He paused. "You were right. About Casey."
She let her eye close again, but all her attention stayed on him.
Benson continued, his voice pitched for her ears alone. "I checked in the MPD database, and he's there."
Angela's first reaction was to warn him that unauthorized database queries could get him fired. Then she thought about why Casey would be in the database. "He made it back to human again?" All those years, they'd assumed Casey had been stuck living as a coyote.
"He found someone else to help him that night." Benson's voice was rueful. "I was so busy blaming you, it never occurred to me that there were other people he might have gone to. They got him shifted back, and then his parents helped him move out of the state. Found someone to keep spelling him, got a job, got married, had a kid."
When Benson paused, Angela took over. "Except then he shifted again." It had to be what happened, or Casey wouldn't be in the database.
"And bit his daughter in the face," Benson said. "I saw the pictures. After surgery it wasn't too bad, but she'll have that scar her entire life. His wife found out it wasn't the first time he'd shifted, and divorced him. She ended up with full custody of their daughter. I should never have asked you to help him."
Angela tried to make her body relax. "I could have at least made sure he was in a secure place before I tried to call MPD." She thought back to that night. "We really were young and stupid then."
"Yet somehow lived to tell the tale." Benson tapped his palms on his thighs and his voice went back to normal. "In other news, Vicky told me to tell you that she wants you to meet someone."
Angela opened her eyes. "Really?"
He nodded. "There was something about a triple latte. Hopefully that means something to you."
The salamander couldn't smile, but Angela felt part of her heart warm.
While Angela was still thinking about that, Lily jumped off the rock in her human form and scrambled between the boulders until she was crouched right next to the salamander's head. Angela froze, not even daring to breathe in case the exhaled air burned the girl. She couldn't even back out into the water with Lily blocking the path.
"I need you to come back," Lily pleaded, her voice just barely above a whisper. "I'm going to need someone to help me with the baby, and everyone else is afraid of her already."
Angela looked at her, really looked at her, seeing not just the resilient and amazing child, but the scared young woman.
Carefully, very, very, carefully, Angela took a breath. "Where's the obsidian?"
Lily jumped up and clapped. "Yay yay yay!" Shifting back to her other form, she jumped to another rock and did the oddest victory dance Angela had ever seen.
After Angela had escorted the kayaks back to the beach and returned to her now-empty rock, she felt a glowing ember of hope for the first time since she'd left the stadium.
23
That bit of hope lasted until she climbed onto the beach two mornings later to find a pile of obsidian she could wrap her body around twice. Benson got out of his rental car and came down to greet her by himself. He was still wearing a dress shirt and tie, but had his slacks rolled up to reveal bare feet.
"It's not going to be enough," she said as he picked his way across the loose sand and kelp.
"Probably not," he agreed easily. "I've got more on the way. I thought we might have a better idea of how much you'll need after today."
Angela used the tip of one claw to separate out a small boulder the size of a cat, the largest solid piece of obsidian she'd ever seen. "If this goes wrong, it's going to act like a grenade." Swinging her head around to face him, she felt the seductive call of his magic like a drug. "You should go sit in the car." If he moved farther away she would be less likely to gulp his magic if something upset her. "Please."
"Fine. But I'm only doing this so you can stop worrying."
Ignoring the apparent ease with which he'd seen through her motives, she contemplated the rock under her toe while listening to Benson walk back to the nearly empty parking lot. She'd guided more than a few clients through depositing magical energy into obsidian, but she'd never needed to do so herself. Added to that, the salamander's command of magic was…different. Instead of the ribbons of energy she had spent her career manipulating, the salamander's magic cascaded through her.
Her first attempt to feed the magic into the stone merely swirled it around and back into herself. She tried again and watched the magic move in the other direction. Flames traveled along her spine as she vented her frustration. Pushing the magic around was hard enough. Aiming at the obsidian was like heaving a bowling ball at a basketball hoop from the other side of the court.
The hum of an airplane carried through the air making her cast a baleful gaze at the sky. Even if she ever figured out how to dump energy into the stones, she'd never be able to finish before they were selling tickets to gawk at her. The thump of her tail in the sand made the pile of rocks shift, smaller pieces raining down like gravel. Even the smallest pebble would have been enough to rescue any of her clients in the past, but she knew in her bones the entire pile would not be nearly enough.
Her toe began to tingle.
Angela looked down at the offending digit. Everything looked the same, from the razor-sharp tip of her black claw to the pale scales that covered the skin beyond, but something was different. When she lifted her toe to look at it the tingling stopped, but the obsidian boulder hummed just the slightest bit.
So. The obsidian had pulled in magic without her help. Not much, of course. Barely more than the ambient energy on the beach, but at least it was a start. She put her toe back on the obsidian, ignored the tingling, and stared at it. Nothing seemed to be happening as far as she could tell.
It occurred to Angela that she might owe apologies to some of her clients over the years for assuming the process was easy. When she tried to push more magic into the obsidian, the tingling in her toe stopped. Dropping her head down to the ground Angela stared across the sand to where Benson waited in his rental car. The wail of a slide guitar drifted across the distance, and all at once she felt a longing for her human body.
Perhaps she could make a cave out of the obsidian and let it leach the magic from her. Over the next decade or two.
The music cut off, the car door opened, and Benson got out. He'd crossed half the distance between them when he spoke. "What's wrong?"
She didn't bother to lift her head. "It's not working."
"Why not? Did I get the wrong thing?"
Angela looked over at the pile of rocks. "I don't think so. I've just never needed to do this before. It's harder than I thought it would be."
Benson picked his way over the last few feet slowly, avoiding the sharp stones that had fallen from the pile. He pulled out his phone and tapped at it. "Hang on, I'll see if I can find something."
Irritation washed through her, and flames erupted over her whole body. "You're going to become an instant internet expert? I used to teach people how to do this as part of my job." Even when she was the most powerful magical creature in the world, men with no experience still assumed they were more competent than she was.
"Angela." Benson's voice carried over the sound of sand melting and bubbling beneath her. "There are a lot of alternate techniques for power creatures. It's not part of the standard curriculum because dragons and salamanders are so rare."
As quickly as her anger had flared up, it snuffed out again. She'd heard about that, decades ago, back when she'd been a new agent. Belatedly, she remembered that Benson was a friend. He'd never tried to explain anything she hadn't asked him to in the past. She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the waves. When she was ready, she opened her eyes and looked at Benson. A crackling of glass from the cooling sand accompanied the shift of her head. "What does it say?”
He was seated cross-legged on the sand, entirely too close for her comfort. One excessive breath of frustration in the wrong direction and she would singe his eyebrows. "The highlights are basically that you're too powerful to push magic into the stone. You need to let the stone absorb it." He looked from his phone to her, and she thought she saw his lips twitch. "There's a whole paragraph that Heldig the Elder recited to the dragon Gunthor to allow him to charge the bones of a weakened artifact, but it's basically one long description of a woman's body. Very 'male gazey', I think your book group would term it." He scrolled down. "Full of raspberries languishing on the vine for want of the farmer's hand, and flowers ripe for plucking."
The laughter of a salamander was a fiery cough.
Benson put his phone on his knee where he could read the screen. "Let's try it this way. Close your eyes and I'll run you through this relaxation exercise, and then I'll make something up."
"Am I a guinea pig or a salamander?" she groused, but closed her eyes again, feeling the calming ocean breeze over her skin and the pull of the moon beyond the horizon.
"You are a shallow vessel. Oh wait, a hollow vessel," Benson said. "Hang on, I need to increase the font size." He coughed and started again, his voice soothing. "With every breath you inhale peace and exhale tension. Inhale peace. Exhale tension."
Angela matched her breathing to his words.
"Your limbs are relaxing, peace flowing through you, starting from the tip of your nose, down your neck, and through your legs." He paused. "And your tail too."
Angela cracked one lid open. Benson shrugged then waved a hand at her to close her eyes again.
"You can feel the obsidian beneath your foot. Even though it feels like stone, it's really a power sponge with nooks and crannies ready to hold everything, like a good English muffin holds butter."
Resisting the urge to open her eyes again, Angela let her tail stretch out into the surf. "You should probably keep your day job."
"I skipped breakfast," he responded, before smoothing his voice out again. "Just by touching your foot, the obsidian is going to start inflating, pulling power from you like it is sucking helium out of a balloon."
A cough of laughter overtook her. "Is it butter or helium?"
"Power is all things to all people," he intoned. "Fine, if you want the original version, feel the rock opening itself to you, creamy skin leading to a deep dark well of feminine secrets, pulling your essence from your—"
