The taxi pulls away and leaves you standing at the gate with two suitcases and a key that still smells faintly of someone else's house.

The lock sticks on the first try. Catches on the second. The hinges groan loud enough that you assume every neighbor for three blocks heard you arrive, which is impressive given that the closest neighbor appears to be a wall of perfectly manicured hedge.

The driveway is cracked in places. Weeds push through near the garage. Someone let the place go recently, but not for long enough to look abandoned. Just... unattended. Like whoever was supposed to care got distracted and never came back.

You drag your suitcases to the front door.

The key works. The door opens into a wide, cool entryway. Tiled floor. High ceiling. The faint smell of dust and something floral — a candle, maybe. The kind someone lit every evening and then stopped.

The house is quiet.

Not peaceful quiet. Waiting quiet. The kind of quiet that is technically just an absence of sound but feels like something is paying attention.

You spend the first hour walking the rooms.

Living room: enormous couch, a blanket folded over the arm. A remote on the cushion. A glass on the side table with a faint ring at the bottom. The television is off. You do not turn it on.

Kitchen: clean but not sterile. A mango on the counter, almost certainly not fresh anymore. A mug in the drying rack that says

Halcyon

in faded blue letters. Spice cabinet alphabetized. Someone had been particular.

Bedroom — the master, you assume, since the door is closed and the rest of the house smells less lived-in: made bed, curtains half drawn, a pair of sunglasses on the nightstand. Cheap ones. The kind of thing someone wears until they break and then buys again. A small stain on the carpet near the closet. Coffee, maybe.

You do not open the closet. Not yet.

The back of the house is dominated by glass.

Sliding doors look out over a patio, a stretch of green, and — at the far end — a pool.

Not the standard rectangle you expected. Wider. Rounded at one end. The water is still and clear and has none of the sharp chemical bite of chlorine. It holds the late afternoon light like a mirror.

Past the pool, half-hidden by some kind of ornamental tree you cannot name, stands a pool house. Larger than most pool houses. Almost a small bungalow. The door is shut. The windows are dark.

You stand at the glass for a long moment, watching the water move in small concentric rings from nothing.

Then you go back inside to unpack.

By the time you finish carrying bags upstairs and convincing yourself the creaking floors are normal, the sun has dropped low enough to turn the backyard gold.

You are thirsty.

You go to the kitchen for water and end up standing at the sliding glass door again, watching the light move across the pool.

You need to check the pool house. Utilities. Maintenance. Whether something is leaking. Whether something got in there and died. Practical reasons. Reasonable reasons. The kind of reasons that explain why you are pulling the door open and stepping out onto warm tile.

The grass is damp. Your shoes sink slightly.

The pool is closer than it looked from inside. Ten steps. Maybe twelve. The water is so still it does not even reflect properly — it just holds the image of the sky and the trees and your approaching shape like something frozen.

The pool house is thirty feet past that.

You stop at the edge of the pool. Bend down. Touch the water with one hand to check the temperature.

Warm.

Warmer than it should be, given the hour. Almost bath-warm.

Something moves under the surface.

Not debris. Not a leaf.

A shape. Long. Dark. Curving slowly beneath the water about six feet out, suspended at a depth you cannot quite judge.

You pull your hand back.

The shape stops.

For a long, horrible, beautiful moment, nothing happens. The water settles. Your pulse fills your ears. The backyard is silent except for a bird somewhere distant and the faint ticking of a cooling evening.

Then the shape rises.

It does not surface like a person swimming. There is no splash. No sudden break of water. Just a slow, controlled emergence, as if the pool is giving something back.

First: the head.

Human-shaped. Male. Sharp jaw. Red hair plastered flat to a strong skull, water streaming from it in thin threads. Eyes that catch the dying light and throw it back wrong — bright, red, narrow.

Then the shoulders. The chest. Broad, muscled, tanned in a way that says

this person lives outside

.

Below the waist, where a body should keep going, there is no body.

There is a tail. Massive. Maroon, almost black where the light does not hit it. Coiled beneath him in the shallow end, thick as your thigh near the base and tapering away into the deep end where you cannot see where it ends. Scales catch the last of the sun like wet glass.

He is watching you.

His pupils are slits.

His mouth is slightly open, and you can see — barely, only because the light is exactly wrong — the tip of something forked flicker against his lower lip.

He does not blink.

You do not move.

A full ten seconds pass. Maybe more. The bird has gone quiet. The water around him has gone perfectly still again, as if it knows better than to make noise.

Then he speaks. Low. A voice that sounds like it learned the language from someone specific and never bothered with anything else.

he says,

It is not a greeting.

His tail shifts beneath him. A slow, heavy movement that sends a single lazy wave toward the edge where you stand. The water reaches your shoes. Stops at the tile.

He tilts his head. Studies you the way something studies a sound it has not heard before.

he says, quieter.

His eyes narrow further. His tongue flicks out again — quick, forked, tasting the air between you.

he says,