Otherkin

by Nina Berry

  I whirled. Caleb stood there, looking somehow more solid, more real, than anything else in school. The girl in the yellow sweater saw him in the mirror and squealed.

  “I could ask you the same thing,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  Yellow sweater girl didn’t wait to dry her hands, but ran past Caleb, glaring at us both. The door thumped closed behind her. We were alone.

  “Where have you been?” I asked. “I came outside this morning as soon as I could, but I didn’t see you anywhere nearby.”

  “I saw your lights go on and thought I’d better get out of the area in case the police had been called or your parents came out looking for the scalawag who hijacked you.”

  The door from the hallway opened, and a girl walked in. She stopped dead at the sight of Caleb, then swiveled on her heel and walked right back out again. He turned back to me, his mouth twisting in a smirk.

  “Scalawag indeed,” I said.

  But he was staring at me now from under his black eyebrows, like I was a puzzle with some pieces missing. “Where’s the shadow?” he said.

  “What?”

  He moved up to me and took my right hand in both of his, never taking his eyes from mine. I stared back, confused. He hands were slightly rough, but strong and warm. His touch sent a flutter through me. “Last night the shadow was coming off of you in streams. Now, I can’t see it at all.”

  My heart leapt. “Does that mean I’m normal again?”

  He shook his head and hummed low in his throat, pressing my hand between his. The vibration moved through me, as if I were the body of the guitar and he were strumming the strings. At first that was all. Then something deep inside me stirred.

  I heard myself gasp. My hand curled inside his. The thrumming continued, pushing at me, relentless. The core of me trembled, began to awaken. Something dark in my heart reached out, filled my veins, extended its claws . . .

  “There it is,” he said, his voice uneven. He cleared his throat. “I found it, but it’s buried deeper than any shadow I’ve ever known.”

  Our faces were inches apart, his breath hot on my skin. The purring inside me took on a different tone as I fell into his night-black eyes. I felt paralyzed, yet so alive, electric. His gaze fell to my lips as he dipped his head toward mine.

  “No!” I pulled away and turned to lean my hands on the sink to steady myself. God, he’d almost pressed up against me, against the brace. “That’s enough. I can’t . . .”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment. I looked up to see him in the mirror, standing behind me. He looked unnerved and slightly flushed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, pushing his hands into his pockets. “Something about you . . .” He shook his head and turned away so I couldn’t see his face. “I lost track of what was going on there.”

  My own reflection looked wrong somehow. I leaned in to look at myself and inhaled sharply. My eyes were even rounder and now startlingly gold instead of the usual green.

  “My eyes. They’re . . . tiger eyes.” I brought my hands up to touch my eyelids. The lashes looked longer, thicker, blacker. Caleb’s warm scent lingered on my palms. I turned, breathing in, and a hundred different smells passed into me. Acrid cleaning agents mixed with old makeup, mold, and urine. And then there was Caleb. Even more than before, I caught his scent, like the woods just before a thunderstorm. I could have been placed on the other side of the room, blindfolded, and known for certain that he stood there.

  I heard Caleb’s shirt slide across his skin as he turned to look at me. Water dripped behind the second toilet, and out in the hall, footsteps hurried and disappeared as another door squeaked open and bumped shut. Classes must have started. I’d be late to competitive art.

  And I’d nearly been kissed.

  “That explains why I couldn’t see the shadow in you. And why you didn’t shift before yesterday. Somehow, the shadow in you has been suppressed.” Caleb lifted one dark eyebrow sardonically, and my heart did a little flip. “I seem to have brought it out.”

  “How could it be suppressed?” The new smells and sounds retreated as this sank in. My eyes were shifting in the mirror, getting greener, smaller, more human. My thoughts remained a crazy jumble: Caleb’s lips moving toward mine, the purring in my chest. My skin was about to jump off my body—or was that normally how shifters felt?

  “I don’t know.” His eyes ran up and down me as if they couldn’t help themselves. “You’re full of surprises.”

  My whole face flushed. I’d worked so hard at being invisible for so long, I wasn’t used to being looked at that way. “Maybe I’m doing it myself,” I said. “Pushing it back subconsciously.”

  “You’re pushing something back.” He seemed to tear his gaze away from me, looking a little lost.

  The late bell blared.

  Oh, thank God. An excuse to bolt. “I’m late,” I said.

  “Late for what?”

  “Uh, my next class?”

  “Oh, right. Humdrum education. Just meet me after school,” he said, his voice catching.

  I moved to the bathroom door, head down. “I’ve got a doctor’s appointment at four thirty,” I said. “But I can still get you the money.”

  “Doctor’s appointment?” Alarm took over his voice. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just a checkup on my progress with the brace. I’ll get a spine X-ray, hear the same old lectures, no big deal.”

  “Okay.” He put a hand on the door to the hall, took a breath, and gathered his thoughts. “Look, I don’t care about the money,” he said. “I just need to see you again. Make sure you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, willing it to be true and looking up into his eyes firmly.

  He opened the door to the hall for me. “Meet you outside after school?”

  I nodded and darted past him, careful not to touch. The halls were empty. “Meet me at the oak tree in the park next door,” I said. “You can’t miss it.”

  His smile flickered with relief. Then he bowed at the waist, like a courtier. I shook my head, laughed, and ran to class. I’d never been late before. But a lot had changed since yesterday.

  CHAPTER 8

  Iris nabbed me at the end of the day to get the dirt on what had happened with Jake and who the guy in the bathroom was. I tried to slip away, but she tracked me down and followed me out into the park, lobbing questions.

  As we walked, I fudged the truth and said I’d met Caleb, a boy from another school, by the old oak tree and gone out with him to a party. He had cut school today to see me.

  “What is it with you and tall, pretty boys all of a sudden?” Iris had a thing for short, fireplug types who excelled in shop. “Overnight you’re this femme fatale.”

  “You’d like Caleb,” I said. “He’s handy with tools, fixes cars, stuff like that.”

  “He is cute,” she said, staring ahead at the old oak tree. A lean figure in a long black coat stood looking up into its canopy of crooked branches.

  He waited as we approached. I hadn’t meant for them to meet, but Iris could be hard to shake off when she had an agenda.

  “He-ey.” Iris gave a little wave.

  Caleb lifted his hand slowly to wave back. I said, “This is my friend Iris. Iris, this is Caleb.”

  “Nice to meet you, Iris.” Caleb gave her one of his quick bows.

  Iris looked him up and down, then blurted out, “So are you dating Dez now or what?”

  I felt my eyes get huge. Caleb choked a little. “Well, uh . . .”

  “And that’s your cue to go, Miss I,” I said, putting my hands on Iris’s shoulders and gently pushing her back toward school. “You’ll miss the bus.”

  “Nobody likes to get right to the heart of things.” Iris moved out of my reach. “But I can take a hint. Call me.”

  “If I can,” I said. “Later!”

  “She’s . . . forthright,” said Caleb as Iris headed back toward school.

  “You think?” I shook my he
ad and walked over to the tree. Under its limbs, speckles of sunlight ran over the patches of grass at its roots and decorated the gray bark with bright spots of brown. I ran my hand over the trunk, bumpy as a dragon’s scales.

  “You hang out at this tree a lot, don’t you?” Caleb said.

  “How’d you know?” I leaned against the tree. It didn’t mind the hardness of my brace. “I used to climb it every day when I was a kid.”

  “Because this is a lightning tree.” He bent down to pick up a fallen leaf. “I’ve never seen one before, but my mother told me stories.”

  “A what?” I looked up at the tree.

  “A lightning tree. There are only a few of them in the world.” He held the leaf up before his eyes, gazing on it almost reverently. “Its shadow form is lightning.”

  I moved away from the tree, uneasy. “The tree is made of lightning?”

  “Not in this world. Callers think lightning trees are portals to violent thunderstorms in Othersphere. So their leaves, branches, and roots all have shadows made of lightning. It’s there just beyond the veil, crackling and humming.” He looked around. “Watch this.” He broke off a small piece of the fallen leaf, hummed low, then flicked it away. As it fell to the ground, the fragment flared bright as a small sun. The air crackled. My skin prickled as heat from it passed over me. Then it vanished.

  Caleb smiled at my astonishment. “In the hands of a caller, it’s a tiny lightning bolt.”

  “Wow,” I said, taking in the tree. Its branches zigzagged up toward the sky, waving their leaves in the wind. “This is the coolest tree in the world.”

  Caleb squatted down and picked up a few more fallen twigs and dried leaves. “It makes sense that you’d be drawn here. As otherkin, you picked up on it at some level. This is the closest thing to a faery mound you’ll find for hundreds of miles. Oh, of course!” He turned to me, calculations flashing behind his eyes.

  “Of course what?”

  “This is how the Tribunal found you. The lightning tree.” At my confused look, he stuffed the tree-bits in his pocket and walked over to me. “The Tribunal and the more experienced callers try to keep track of all the places with connections to Othersphere—a sort of map of shadow. The Tribunal spotted the lightning tree and kept a watch on it. They knew otherkin in the area would be drawn to it, and they were hoping to capture someone. That must be how they found you.”

  So that’s how Lazar tracked me, how he knew to watch for me in the park the day before. “I’ve lived in this neighborhood all my life,” I said. “Do you think they’ve been keeping an eye on me all that time?”

  “Depends on when they found the tree,” he said. “But it’s possible. They’re very patient. Given how deeply the shadow was buried in you, they wouldn’t have been able to know for sure. So they waited to see if anything would ever manifest. And it did.”

  I got a chill, thinking about the terrible patience required to wait and observe for so long. “They might still be watching.”

  Caleb got very still, then tilted his head up to look into the branches of the tree. “You’re right. I see it.” He grabbed the tree’s trunk and hoisted himself up into the branches.

  “What . . . ?” I craned my neck, watching him climb up and around with grace. He paused in front of a knothole, then stuck his hand into it and pulled out a small device.

  “Catch.”

  I stuck my hands out and caught it. In my palms lay a small box with what looked like a round piece of glass on one side and an antenna.

  “It’s a camera,” Caleb said, climbing back down to land next to me. He took it from my hand and flicked open its back panel with a fingernail. “Motion sensitive, with a wireless feed. There must be a hard drive nearby that stores the footage until they’re ready to download it.”

  He fiddled with something inside the camera while I looked around. “So they know we’re here.”

  “Maybe.” He took out a small pocketknife and used it to twist something inside the camera.

  He hadn’t had a knife last night. The Tribunal would have taken it. “Where’d you get the knife?” I asked.

  “Found it,” he said, not looking up. “They’ll need to check in from their remote location. So if they’re busy right now, they might not have viewed us yet. If we can find the hard drive now, there’s a chance we can keep them from seeing it.”

  It was 3:48 p.m. “Okay. But I have to be home in twelve minutes or my mom will call the cops. I’m not even joking.”

  “It’s okay, go now.” He leaned against the tree, focused on fiddling with the camera. “I might be able to use this to pinpoint the location of the hard drive. It can’t be far away.”

  “Okay.” When would I see him again? “But what about the money I was going to give you?”

  He looked up, distracted. His fingers were dirty from the climbing and tinkering with his tools. “Oh, yeah. I’ll call your cell tonight. We’ll figure it out then.”

  “Do you have a phone?” I said.

  “I’ll find one,” he said, still avoiding my gaze.

  I was starting to get the picture. “The same way you found that pocketknife?”

  He raised his head and grinned, a spark of mischief lighting his face. “Living on my own has led me to develop a few skills society doesn’t approve of.”

  “Okay.” My watch now said 3:52, and home was at least six minutes away. I backed off as he watched, still giving me his smart-ass grin. “So you’ll call me later, right?”

  “Stop worrying,” he said, walking toward me till our faces were close. “I’ll find a phone that won’t be missed too much. And I promise I’ll call you. I don’t make promises lightly.” He stepped back from me, and I blinked, as if coming out of a trance. “Now get out of here before your mom throws a fit.”

  “Good luck,” I said, then turned and ran for home.

  CHAPTER 9

  At the hospital, the X-ray technician was grumpy and took three sets of shots before muttering that I could go. I scurried back to the examination room, holding together my too-short backless gown, where Mom and my clothes were waiting.

  “Everything go okay?” Mom said, not looking up from her phone.

  “She took three sets of X-rays.” I sat on the examining table, leaving the other empty chair for Dr. Mwesi. I hated this bright, shiny little room. The gray examining table was padded, then covered with a strip of paper, freshened for each new victim to climb up on and sit, half naked and cold, until the doctor came to stare at her spine.

  Mom looked up. “Do you know why?”

  I shrugged, settling in for the usual long wait. But the door burst open a second later, and Dr. Mwesi strode in, gripping my file in one of his large, perfectly manicured hands.

  “Hello, Desdemona, Ms. Grey,” he said in his deep, charcoal voice. He didn’t give us a chance to say hello back. “Dez, how has your back been feeling?”

  “Well,” I said, taken aback at his abruptness. Usually he shook Mom’s hand and smiled at me. “Today the brace was super uncomfortable, but I’m used to that.”

  “More uncomfortable than usual?” At my nod he pursed his lips, then put my file down and beckoned. “Come down off there and let me look at you.”

  I hopped down and turned so he could look at my back. Mom had her brows knitted together in concern. She knew something was up too.

  “I’m just going to open the back of your gown,” he said, and did so. Mom got up and came around to look too as he grunted in what sounded like surprise.

  “What is it?” Mom said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Just one moment, Ms. Grey,” Dr. Mwesi said. “Dez, can you bend over and touch your toes for me?”

  “Sure.” I reached down for my toes, knowing I’d never actually be able to touch them. The years of wearing the brace had cut down drastically on my flexibility. But as I bent, I kept going down farther and farther. Not only did my fingers touch my toes, but my palms hit the floor.

  Dr. Mwesi kept hold of my gow
n as I bent, making sure it didn’t gap embarrassingly. He ran one hand down my spine briskly, muttering something under his breath.

  Mom said, “Her back looks different somehow.”

  “Different!” Dr. Mwesi said, his voice booming with atypical emotion. “That is putting it very mildly. Desdemona, please sit down again.”

  “Different how?” I straightened and jumped back up on the examining table, chilled now down to my bones. Dr. Mwesi strode over to the computer and typed in a few commands. An X-ray appeared on the oversized monitor. I could see my name in the upper right corner and a date from three months back.

  “This is an X-ray of Desdemona’s spine three months ago,” said Dr. Mwesi. He pointed at the twisted arc of my spine. “As you can see, here is the familiar curve we have seen the past two years. Note this bend here and these here. The angles of the curvature have remained constant since she began wearing the brace. So far, the brace has been a success, a success we had every hope of continuing until her growth period ended and we could take her out of the brace for good.”

  I stared at the X-ray. I’d been looking at versions of it since I was fourteen, dreading the news that one of the curves had gotten worse, terrified to hear that I’d have to have surgery to place an iron rod in my spine. That fear had kept me faithfully wearing the brace twenty-three hours a day for two years.

  Dr. Mwesi hit a key, and the X-ray changed. Again my name appeared in the upper right, with today’s date underneath. “This is the X-ray of Desdemona’s spine today. I didn’t believe it myself until I examined her just now.”

  I stared at the image. The vertebrae there lay straight as the spine of a book. The curvature we’d been tracking for years had vanished.

  “I have never seen a spine this straight in my twenty years of practice,” Dr. Mwesi said. “We all have some curvature. Most of the time it isn’t dangerous. When it is, like Dez’s, we do our best to catch it while the individual is still growing to prevent it from getting worse. But no one has a spine this straight. No one but Desdemona, apparently.”

  “That’s me?” I said.

  “I cannot believe I’m saying this,” Dr. Mwesi said, blinking at me. “But this is you. I never would have believed it if I hadn’t examined you myself. But the scoliosis is completely gone.”