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“Good,” Marla said, relieved. “I just wanted to make sure you understood the
difference.” Just as she now had a better understanding of what had happened to him.
The shock of seeing his lover die had knocked something loose in B’s head. It happened
that way sometimes—when old worlds fell apart, new worlds opened up. But in B’s
case, it was possible that something more profound had happened. It wasn’t just his
perception that had changed. The way he affected the world changed. Now where
Bradley Bowman went, wonders and terrors followed. Maybe.
And if “maybe” turned into “definitely,” Marla was sure she could come up with some
use for those powers.
They walked the rest of the way in silence, past houses crowded shoulder to shoulder,
with tiny lawns and neat fences, until they reached a commercial district. “There,” B
said, and pointed to a sign that read “East Bay Vivarium.”
“Ah,” Marla said. “I see.”
They went into a spacious, cluttered store. Glass terrariums on metal shelves lined the
dark walls, and the sound of bubbling humidifiers registered faintly in Marla’s hearing.
B led them around several freestanding shelves, past tanks full of turtles, lazy snakes,
huge scorpions, and lizards.
“God, this is like Langford’s lab,” Rondeau said. “Creepy-crawlies everywhere. Is this
some kind of zoo annex?”
“It’s a pet store,” Marla said. She peered into a large tank inhabited by half a dozen
water dragons, leaping from artificial tree branches to the walls of the tank and back
again. Another held a huge iguana, the size of a small dog, resting on a rock, its tongue
flicking slowly in and out. She moved on to an open-topped tank filled with water and
rocks. Tiny pinkish lizards with slick skin sat on the rocks, staring up at her. Another
tank held small frogs. Not like the one in her bag—these were green, with bulging eyes,
and toes with round suckers on the ends, and they clung to a branch in the tank. Still,
she supposed they’d come to the right place.
Rondeau wandered off to look at ball pythons, and Marla went in search of B. She
found him at the counter in the back, talking to the clerk, a stocky man in his twenties,
with close-cropped dark hair and what Marla guessed was a semipermanent scowl.
“Marla, this is Ray,” B said, and the clerk nodded to her. He wore a navy blue bowling
shirt with the name “Butch” embroidered in curving white script over the right breast.
“I was just saying, I don’t know much about frogs,” Ray said. “Snakes are more my
thing. But if you show me what you’ve got, I’ll see what I can do.”
Marla glanced at B, who nodded. “Ray’s good people,” he said.
She nodded. She couldn’t see the harm in letting an ordinary see the frog. Opening the
side flap of her bag, she removed the plastic bag, unrolling it so the little yellow frog
was visible, but still covered in a thin layer of clear plastic. “I wouldn’t recommend
touching it,” Marla said. “I don’t know much, but I know it’s poison.”