by Nina Berry
Caleb smirked at me appreciatively. “Took care of him too, didn’t you?” To my mother, he said, “They wanted to kidnap all of you. They’d keep you and your husband as hostages to make sure Dez would cooperate with them and not try to escape again.”
“Again?” My mother’s voice shook, and she hunkered down suddenly, head drooping, as if overtaken by emotion. “I don’t understand.”
“Okay.” Caleb’s voice smoothed out. “It’s time to show, not tell. Your daughter here is wounded and unable to change back into her human form because she hasn’t learned how. So I’m going to help her. Then we’ll figure out how to get her and your husband some medical assistance.”
“I’m going crazy.” Mom’s voice cracked. I stretched one paw toward her, my heart aching. But she just drew back in fear.
“No, you’re not,” said Caleb. “Watch.”
He shrugged out of his coat and draped it over me, covering me from shoulders to the base of my tail. He grabbed a handful of fur on either side of my head and looked into my eyes. “I’m going to help you push your shadow form back into Othersphere. I don’t know how it’ll feel on your end, but it’ll probably help if you concentrate on making that happen.”
I nodded, wondering how he was going to do it. Wasn’t pushing back shadow something that the Tribunal specialized in? Did callers do that too?
He moved back to stand next to my mother. “Keep your eye on the tiger,” he said. Then he hummed lightly, up and down the scale, as if searching for the right note. His black eyes fixed on me like laser sights. I stared up into them, hoping to hear something that would make me remember my weak human arms, my thumbs, my tiny jaw, my feeble ears, my fur-free skin. They all seemed now as distant as the stars in the sky.
As Caleb hit a midlevel note, his eyes flared gold. My hackles rose. I shuddered, flexing my paws. No fingers there yet, but for a moment I had a visceral memory of what it felt like to make a fist. Mom looked back and forth between us and took a step away.
Caleb slid back to that note, narrowing his eyes in concentration. I shut my eyes, leaning into the sound. I imagined myself human again, fragile, tool-using, able to laugh and speak.
“Return,” said Caleb in that same tone, pointing at me. “Return to Othersphere.”
My fur rippled, as if in a strong wind. I pinned my ears back, willing my tiger self to waft away. The tremor inside me grew, and something reached out from within. A strange pain, like scratching an itch, tore the skin from my bones. I roared. The roar swept upward and became a scream. The pain vanished. And I was a naked human teenager, huddled beneath Caleb’s long black coat.
My mother’s eyes were as round as quarters, her mouth fallen open.
“Mom—” I sat up and gathered the coat around me.
Caleb staggered sideways, shoulders slumping. He put his hand to the wall to steady himself. I stood up, tying the belt of the coat around me, and moved to him. His eyes were blank gold, staring through me. “It’s okay,” I said. “Come sit. Mom, help me get him over to sit on the bed.”
“Desdemona,” Mom said flatly.
“It’s really me, Mom.” I slid Caleb’s unresisting arm around my shoulder and guided him over to the bed.
“Little cub,” said Caleb absently, sitting heavily onto the rumpled sheets. “She is too strong for him to eat her now.”
Goose bumps prickled up my arms at his words. Caleb had babbled like that right after working his magic two other times that I’d seen, and it was all probably nonsense. But then why did it give me the chills?
“I think he gets this way if he overexerts himself doing his . . . thing,” I said to Mom.
Mom dropped the gun and hurtled into me. Her arms wrapped around my waist, squeezing till it hurt. “I’m okay,” I said into the top of her head. “I’m sorry.”
“They shot you!” She turned my back to Caleb and opened the coat to see my wound. Even as she poked at my side, I realized that the pain from the bullet was gone. The skin where the injury should’ve been was smooth and unscarred. All the other cuts and scrapes I’d gotten moving through the broken window were gone as well.
Mom looked as if her head was about to explode. “What happened? Was it all just some horrible hallucination?”
“No,” I said. Caleb held his head in both hands, elbows leaning on his knees. My glance fell on a small piece of shiny metal lying on the floor in the middle of a red stain, where I had shifted back into human form. I picked it up, and it stung my fingers, a heavy piece of silver that looked like a squished gray raisin. “Look.”
Mom grabbed my hand to get a closer view. “That’s what they shot you with?”
Caleb looked up. The gold was fading from his eyes. “You ejected the bullet when you shifted.”
“Shifted.” My mother sank down next to him, as if her legs couldn’t support her.
“We need to get you out of here,” said Caleb.
“Stop!” Mom held up both hands, her voice quavering and shrill. “Nobody’s going anywhere. What about Richard? What about these men? What the hell is going on?”
Caleb and I exchanged glances. “How about I tell her while you go through the backpack?” he asked. “Maybe there’s something in there that can help Richard.”
“Should we call the cops?” I asked him.
“And explain the marks on these Tribunal guys as what, a grizzly bear attack?”
I nodded and went over and kissed Mom on the cheek. “Listen to Caleb, Mom. He’s going to tell you what’s going on.”
Her lips got very thin, but she nodded. Caleb launched into a down and dirty explanation of Othersphere, shifters, and the Tribunal as I emptied the remaining contents of Lazar’s backpack onto the floor. As Mom hovered over Richard, checking his pulse and asking terse questions, I lined up all the syringes and drugs. Nothing was labeled, and it all looked the same. I also found another magazine of bullets, which didn’t look silver, and one that did, rope, duct tape, and lock picks.
“Nothing here to help,” I said, as Mom pillowed Richard’s head on her lap and clucked her tongue over the story of the Tribunal’s crusade against the otherkin.
“I knew that the world was more fantastic and complicated than it seemed,” she said. “But the Wiccan traditions don’t cover this!”
“Don’t forget to search the other guy,” Caleb said to me, pointing at the other man, lying on the far side of the bed.
He went back to his explanation. I stood and walked closer, steeling myself. The man lay on his stomach, face to the floor, or what was left of his face. A large pool of blood had collected beneath him. The top half of his head still wore the gray ski mask. But most of his throat and lower jaw were gone, bitten off. I glimpsed a broken upper tooth and the white gleam of a neck bone amidst the raw red flesh before I turned away, stomach churning.
I had done this. I had killed a man.
Someone took my hand. I turned to find Mom, her eyes welling. I hadn’t heard her conversation with Caleb stop.
“I always knew you were special,” she said. “My faery child.”
I laughed shakily. “So, you believe us?”
“What else can I believe?” She threw her hands up. “The Goddess knows the world is full of wonderful things. And you are one of them. Now, with my own eyes, I’ve seen past the veil. Short of waking up to find this is all a dream, there’s no other explanation.”
I nodded, but couldn’t help looking again at the body of the man I’d killed.
Mom took my hand again. “You had to,” she said. “You saved us.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said. “I’m the thing that brought this down on us.”
She squeezed my hand hard. “Don’t you ever apologize for who you are,” she said. “I’m very proud of you.”
“Thanks,” I managed to say. “How’s Richard?”
“Sleeping hard, but otherwise okay, I think.” She wiped at the blood on my cheek with her thumb. “Even if we can’t wake him, Caleb says he’ll com
e out of it eventually. You should get dressed. Caleb and I will search the other men for the antidote. Then we need to figure out what to do.”
“Okay.” I looked over at Caleb. He stood, hands thrust into his pants pockets, black hair falling over his eyes. “You’ll look after her?” I said.
“I’ll look after her,” he said. It sounded like a vow.
I headed for the shower. I turned the water to scalding and scrubbed at the blood caked all over me till my skin turned bright pink.
All the cuts and bruises on my body were gone. I stopped scrubbing as a thought hit. The shift had healed me completely. If the shift could heal cuts and bullet wounds, maybe it could heal bones as well. Maybe the shift that happened yesterday, my first, had healed my scoliosis and straightened my back. The doctors had said it was a miracle. Maybe it was actually shadow.
I finished, got dressed, and hurried down the hall to tell them my theory. Caleb looked up from a pile of equipment and listened intently. “That makes sense,” he said. “I’m no expert on scoliosis, but shifters don’t get cancer, and if they get a cold or an infection, all they have to do is shift, and they’re fine. So when you shifted, you healed your back.”
“But then,” I said, thinking hard, “shifters must live for a long time, like, over a hundred years or something.”
“They can live for hundreds of years, actually, unless they’re killed outright,” he said.
“Hundreds of years?” It was my turn to sit down on the bed, my knees weak. My mother got up and sat next to me, putting a comforting hand on my knee.
“Every mother wants her child to live a long life free of sickness and pain,” said Mom. “Another dream of mine you can make come true.”
Tears stood in my eyes. It was all too much. “But what are we going to do? They’ll keep coming after us.”
Caleb sat back and looked at us both very sternly. “Dez must come with me to a school for otherkin up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It’s small and very secret, and we’ll be safe there.”
“A school?” I turned to Mom.
“Your parents will be safer with you gone,” said Caleb.
“No,” said my mother. “I can’t let her go, not now. Not when she needs me most.”
My chest felt tight. It had all been my fault. If I hadn’t been here, Mom and Richard would never have had to go through this. If I’d stayed in that orphanage in Russia, everyone would be a lot safer.
“You can’t go with us to the school, Mrs. Grey,” Caleb said. “If they sense anyone who isn’t otherkin approaching, they’ll vanish. You and your husband will need to go somewhere for a while. Otherwise the Tribunal will try to kidnap you again so they’ll have a hold over Dez.”
Mom exhaled forcefully. I was staring again at the man I’d killed. “Okay, now listen to me, Desdemona. I know you. You’re blaming yourself for all this, but it’s not your fault. Blame the people who attacked us—the Tribunal—and then move on. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Mom,” I said. Her strength and support only made me want to cry more, but I swallowed my tears. There wasn’t time for me to be self-indulgent now. Caleb was right. I was the source of danger. The only way Mom would ever let me go was if she thought it was best for me.
“You have to let me go, Mom,” I said. “I need to learn about myself, how it all works, and more about these men, and about others in the world like me. And it sounds like this school Caleb heard about might be able to give me the tools I need.”
“The leader of the school is Morfael,” Caleb said. “He’s a very old, very powerful caller of shadow. My mother spoke of him with respect. She told me that if anything happened to her, I should seek him out. Dez and I should be safe with him, and we could both learn a lot.”
Mom looked back and forth between us. “You’re very clever, appealing to my maternal instincts.” She got up and paced, then clapped her hands together. “Sounds like Richard and I will be going on a long, much deserved vacation.”
“When will I see you again?” I said, hating how wet and sticky my voice sounded.
“It won’t be long. I’ll create a new e-mail address before you leave and give it to you. Once you get to Marfy . . . Morfael’s school”—she stumbled over the odd name—“you can e-mail me the phone number there, or give me a new e-mail address that you’ve created. And Caleb will tell me all about the location of this place. If we can’t get in touch somehow, in a month, Richard and I will come and find you.”
“Do you think we’ll ever be able to come back here?” I asked. The house was old and a bit of a mess, but it was home.
Mom shook her head. “I’ll have to talk to Richard about it, but we’ll figure out a way to be together.”
This was the right thing, but I hated it.
“Okay,” I said. “What do we do now?”
“We clean up, pack, and leave. Then your mom wakes up Richard.” Caleb held up a vial of yellow liquid, very different from the clear doses of the tranquilizer we’d found along with the syringes. “We found this in the other guy’s backpack. It’s labeled as an antidote to the sedative Richard’s been given. They must’ve brought it along in case one of them accidentally got shot with tranquilizer.”
“Oh, thank goodness.” I hugged Mom. “But what about them?” I pointed to Lazar and the body of the other man. “And the one in my bedroom?”
“We leave them,” said Caleb. “Ximon will send a clean-up party, probably very soon. He’ll take them away, leaving as little trace as he can.”
“I guess it’s best if my daughter goes with you,” Mom said, her voice firm. “But don’t you get her into any more trouble than she’s already in, young man.”
He gave her a regretful smile. “I don’t make promises I can’t keep, Mrs. Grey.”
“Call me Caroline,” she said, then leaned in to me and added, so that only I could hear, “I know you’ll be strong and smart about what you do and who you do it with. I’m trusting you.”
“I hear you, Mom,” I said.
“Okay.” She patted me and stood up. “Time to get going.”
It didn’t take long to pack with Mom helping and Caleb chiming in. Before I knew it, Caleb was carrying my suitcase out to the BMW while Mom brought my back brace and a credit card. I had already stuffed my own stash of a hundred and twenty dollars in my backpack.
“Cash advance just down the street at that ATM,” she said, as I put the credit card away. “That way if they’re tracking my finances, they won’t know where you’re going from there.”
I nodded, then watched as she put the brace in the BMW’s trunk and slammed it shut. “You think I might need that?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know why, but I feel like you should have it with you.” She tried to smile. “Maybe it’s the Goddess whispering in my ear. Maybe it’s your crazy mother’s whim.”
“That’s good enough for me,” I said. “And you’ve got the antidote for Richard.”
Her mouth widened into a genuinely rueful smile. “How the hell I’m going to explain all this to him, I have no idea. But we’ll be checking into a hotel as soon as he wakes up. You’ve got my new e-mail address, now, right?”
“Yes, Mom.” I couldn’t stand looking at her, stalling, longing to stay with her, to help her. Better to get it over with and leave now, before I broke down and never left at all.
“I love you, Desdemona.” Her eyes were wet.
I hugged her so tight she had to ask me to ease up. “Love you too, Mom,” I said, and strode off to where Caleb and Lazar’s BMW waited.
Mom watched us drive off, not waving, just looking. I turned to look back at her just before we turned the corner. She was still standing there.
CHAPTER 11
The night loomed black, thick, and full of weird portent as we drove. To distract me while I sniffed quietly and tried not to think how I was leaving everything I knew behind, Caleb told me where he’d been and the way he’d tracked down the hard drive holding the Tribunal’s
camera feed.
They’d lodged it in a fake utility box, and Caleb had disabled it while a crazy lady in the apartment next door yelled what sounded like Klingon at him out her window. He’d continued to lurk nearby until a white van and two Tribunal guys showed up. Then he’d snuck into the van and watched as they attended to two cameras trained on my house and three on my school. Problem was, Caleb couldn’t get out of the van before they hit the freeway north. He’d been stuck there till they stopped in Valencia for gas. From there he’d hitchhiked back. That’s why he’d been so late. I didn’t ask where he’d acquired his new, fancy-looking cell phone.
As we got onto a smaller road and wound our way up the Sierra Nevada Mountains, he asked, “Can you dig out that map your mom gave you? Look for Coyote Peaks.”
I pulled the Thomas Guide for California out of the side pocket and found our location. “We’ve got to tell the people at this school where the Tribunal’s compound is.”
“Good idea,” he said. “They need to avoid it.”
“Or fight them,” I said.
He cast me a surprised look. “Fight them?”
“Don’t you think the shifters should, you know—clean them out? I mean, that’s what the Tribunal’s doing to us, right? They kill us off or capture us for experiments as soon as they find us. We’d all be better off if they were driven away or . . .”
“You really want to kill them all off?”
I swallowed. There’d been enough killing for me tonight. “Or we could, like, just destroy the buildings, force them to relocate, shut them down somehow. We can’t let them stay there. Even if you and I manage to avoid them, they’ll just find some other shifter to capture and do Lord knows what to.”
“I see what you mean, but I wouldn’t hold my breath expecting Morfael or the shifters to do much,” he said. “The different shifter tribes don’t like each other. They’ve never banded together to do anything except argue in Council. And the individual tribes are all scattered, hiding from the rest of the world. None of them is strong enough to go against the Tribunal alone.”
