by Nina Berry
Then the lightning was gone, and the thunder and the claws, leaving nothing but my tiny, wet mother leaning against an old oak tree in her bathrobe. She crumpled into the mud and lay still.
CHAPTER 2
According to the doctor in the ER, Mom’s tests showed that she’d had a seizure but would suffer no long-term effects. Her MRI showed activity in what he called “some unusual areas” of her brain. We took her home later in the morning armed with pointless anti-seizure meds and a mandate to keep her hydrated.
Richard and I didn’t say much to each other as we made her comfortable in bed, but we both knew this wasn’t a case of dehydration or a sudden onset of epilepsy.
It was all my fault. I’d brought her to the lightning tree. Somehow her proximity to it or to me had triggered something from Othersphere. Something that called me “my daughter” and used the word “Amba.” Both my teacher Morfael and my enemy Ximon had used that word when referring to me.
I didn’t allow myself to think too much just yet about who or what had been speaking through Mom. She had adopted me when I was nearly two years old from a Russian orphanage. No one knew who my biological parents were, and no tiger-shifters had been heard from in over twenty years. The remaining otherkin whispered that they’d all been wiped out by the Tribunal, that I was the last of my kind.
I’d always hoped that wasn’t true, that one day I’d meet more people like me. Now I didn’t know what to think. Why couldn’t my biological parents have been teenagers who forgot the condom or folks with too many mouths to feed? People like that wouldn’t pose a danger to Mom.
Not for the first time, I wished Morfael had a mobile phone. Not only did the mysterious head of our school look like a ghostly apparition, he behaved like one too. Like Caleb, he was a caller of shadow, with the power to conjure objects from shadow and force shifters to take their animal form. But Morfael had other, unexplained abilities, and a long history of watching over me without ever quite telling me why. He was my best chance to find out what was going on with Mom. Not that he’d necessarily tell me, even if I could reach him.
I texted Caleb briefly, then put the phone down. Keeping it near my body might kill it before I could get an answer. When it chimed mid-morning, my heart leaped, till I saw it was from Siku, not Caleb.
“Trib visit last night, no casualties,” his text read. “You?”
And right after that, one from November: “Some bastard sneaking around here last night. Nothing’s missing. Weird.”
I seized the phone, fear pulsing with my heartbeat, and typed back. “Same. No idea why. What about L and A?”
Even as I sent that, another text came in, this time from London. “Obj snuck into house last night. Mom killed him but others got away. You ok?”
An objurer from the Tribunal in London’s house in Idaho too! I copied them all on the next text, and included Arnaldo and Caleb. “I’m ok. Coordinated home invasions on me, N, L, and S. A, please respond. Need to know why.”
I got up from where I’d been sitting next to Mom’s bed to pace. More texts came in from Siku, November, and London. All three invading objurers had rummaged around our bathrooms, but they’d left nothing behind and had appeared to take nothing. No one’s aspirin or water appeared to have been spiked, no traps laid, no cameras planted.
Caleb finally texted back that they’d seen no Tribunal activity in or around Morfael’s new school. So for now that appeared to be safe. He sent me a personal text, “Making sure—you okay?”
I texted back: ”Ok, but not great. Will call soon.” No way I could tell him about Lazar or Mom via text. We’d have to talk on the landline later. Strange events were piling up too fast.
An hour went by. Mom woke up, asked for water, and didn’t remember anything after seeing me shift back to human last night. Richard had postponed the move till tomorrow to give her a little more time to recover. But he didn’t want to wait longer than that. The sooner we were off the Tribunal’s radar, the better.
And Arnaldo never responded. His family lived in a very remote part of Arizona, so his cell reception might be bad. Also, his father hated everyone who wasn’t a bird-shifter, so he might’ve taken Arnaldo’s phone away at the first text, or forbidden Arnaldo to respond.
Or Arnaldo and his whole family could be dead or kidnapped.
That was something else I couldn’t think about right now. Events were rolling along quickly, and I wanted, needed, to make a plan. The Tribunal was up to something awful, no doubt. If we were quick and smart, we could get ahead of them. For too long the otherkin had allowed their enemies to take the initiative.
Then London texted in all caps: “JUST FIGURED OUT—THEY TOOK MY HAIRBRUSH! WTF??”
I stood there for a moment, not quite believing it, but knowing, somehow, exactly what it meant. Then I pelted into my bathroom and slid open the side drawer where I kept a comb and a hairbrush.
The comb lay there. The hairbrush was gone. The drawer was otherwise empty. Everything was packed up for the move. But under the comb I spotted something white. I opened the drawer farther and pulled out a small, folded piece of paper. Goosebumps pricked on my skin as I slowly unfolded it.
The handwriting was so like Caleb’s it took my breath for a moment. But the lines were slanted the opposite way, to the left, and the pressure was darker, as if he’d pressed the pen very hard into the paper. It said only, “I’m sorry. Maybe someday you can forgive me. For everything.”
The last two words were crammed into the corner, as if they’d been added later. No signature. But I knew who had left it. An uneasy mixture of anger and pity flooded through me. Lazar had taken my hairbrush and DNA on orders from the Tribunal.
Then he had apologized.
Grabbing my phone, I blasted a text to everyone except Arnaldo, in case his father had taken his phone: “My brush gone too. They want our DNA. Can everyone meet in Las Vegas tomorrow? First we get Arnaldo, then we get answers.”
A flurry of responses pinged in. Siku and November’s toothbrushes were gone, sealing my conviction that the Tribunal had been after things that held our DNA. No way to know why yet, but Ximon’s old compound had held a laboratory, and files filled with scientific jargon. We’d burned them all, but there were other compounds, other labs, other experiments.
If the objurers had succeeded in taking something from Arnaldo’s home too, that would mean they had DNA from all five tribes of otherkin, and from each shifter member of the group that had raided Ximon’s compound. Caleb had been there too, but the Tribunal held a special hatred for shifters. Callers like Caleb were essentially identical to the Tribunal’s objurers, and thus not considered demonic, only misguided. And Caleb was Ximon’s son. That was half his DNA right there.
I was planning to drive to Vegas the next day with Mom and Richard. I didn’t know exactly where Morfael’s new school was yet, but it was close enough for Caleb to meet us there. My friends all agreed to convene at the entrance of the Luxor Hotel. Caleb said the crowds would be useful if we needed to lose anyone who might be following. And we couldn’t meet at the apartment Mom and Richard had taken. The fewer people who knew where that was, the better. So the Luxor it was. From there we could head to Arnaldo’s, a few hours south.
By nightfall, Mom felt well enough to get up and share Thai takeout. I told them I needed to meet my friends and go to Arizona, and they didn’t like that at all. I tried explaining how Arnaldo might be in danger from the Tribunal, but that only made things worse.
“You want to walk into a trap and probably get killed?” Mom said. Anger made her cheeks flush. She looked healthier than she had all day. “I won’t allow it.”
“Arnaldo’s like family to me,” I said. “All my friends from Morfael’s school are. You know that. I told you how Ximon, Lazar, and their Tribunal troops attacked us at the school and kidnapped Siku.”
“You all risked your lives to save him,” she said. “I know, honey. I know how much you love them.”
“Th
en you’ve got to see why—”
“Your mother just got out of the hospital,” Richard said. “She needs you.”
“That’s the thing,” I said, my voice dropping low. “I think Mom might be safer not just away from the lightning tree, but away from . . . me.”
That drained all of the color from Mom’s face, and then I really did feel guilty. She sat down heavily. “None of this is your fault, Desdemona,” she said.
“We don’t know what happened to you, Mom,” I said. “Until we do, maybe we should keep you away from anything or anyone connected to Othersphere. Including me.”
Mom opened her mouth to protest, but Richard put his hand on her shoulder and said, “She could be right, Caroline.”
Mom looked back and forth between my face and Richard’s, then dropped her head and sighed. “I still don’t think it’s you. But okay. You just have to promise me you’ll look carefully for any signs of a trap.”
“I promise,” I said.
After that, we ate, sitting on boxes, not saying much. Richard had told Mom what he’d seen and heard at the lightning tree. I was braced for sadness or anger at the suggestion that someone from my biological family was behind it all. But she simply nodded.
I’d always known I was adopted, but only a couple months ago I learned the strange story of how I’d been found by Morfael in a ring of dead trees in Siberia. He’d engineered for my mother to adopt me, after finding no tiger-shifters to take me in.
Before that, Mom and I hadn’t talked much about who my biological parents might be. She’d made it clear that she’d chosen me, that she loved me. And that should have been enough for me. She was the best mother anyone could hope for. And when I was ten, Richard had come along to marry her and be a kind of friend/stepfather. I lacked for nothing in my family.
Then why do I sometimes wake up feeling a huge hole in my heart? Why when I’m in tiger form do I feel part of . . . something else? Maybe all shifters feel that way.
“Desdemona,” Mom finally said, putting down her pad thai. “I have to ask. When you were at his school, did Morfael ever talk about anything like what happened last night?”
I shook my head. “Not like that. That was crazy. I mean, he sent me and Caleb underground once, and made me think you were there when you weren’t, but . . .” I trailed off as they both frowned at me. “But that was all in my head. Probably.”
“So, yes. This type of thing has happened before,” said Mom.
“But nobody got hurt at Morfael’s,” I said. “That was an illusion. Last night—I think . . .” I swallowed, afraid to say what I thought, then said it anyway. “I think that was someone from Othersphere coming through. Like what happened to Caleb at Ximon’s compound. He got tired, overwhelmed, and something from the other side of the veil started to manifest itself through him.”
“But you stopped it,” my mother said. I’d told them most of what had happened during the raid. But I hadn’t told them exactly how I’d saved Caleb. That was too personal. Even now, I was blushing, and Mom was squinting at me suspiciously.
“Yeah,” I said. “I stopped it.”
“That thing mentioned a ‘tempest,’ ” Richard said.
I put down my own plate, not hungry anymore. “That tree is rare. Caleb called it a lightning tree. It’s connected to the world next to ours, to Othersphere, but it has a different form there, a shadow form. Over in Othersphere there’s no tree, but a huge, permanent storm of lightning and thunder. So what we saw was that shadow form bleeding through the veil between the worlds.”
“That thing said it ruled there, wherever it’s from. It called you ‘daughter.’ ”
“I know, I heard it.” It came out snappish. I took a deep breath. “Sorry. It’s just... I don’t know what that means. The lightning tree is a connection to Othersphere, so maybe someone used it to talk to me through Mom?”
“I’ve been having dreams,” Mom said flatly, like she was making a sudden confession. “I haven’t told you because I thought they were just dreams. It made sense that my subconscious would be tussling with everything we’ve learned in the last few months.”
“But now you think they might be more.” Richard put his hand on her arm.
She half-smiled at him. “My intuitive husband. In the dream, I feel something deep inside me, like a whirlpool. A churning. It makes me anxious, because it feels so wrong, so alien. . . .”
Goosebumps rose on my chilled skin. That’s how I’d felt about my own connection to Othersphere at first. The world on the other side of the veil was utterly unknown and scary. The Tribunal thought our connection to it made us demons or fiends. After what I’d seen that night at the Tribunal compound, I could understand that. Even though my own shadow form, and those of my fellow otherkin, was anything but evil.
“I hear a voice in the dream,” Mom continued, “low and husky, telling me to just let go, to let it come, this thing that’s trying to get out of me. Then the voice says, ‘I have a message of importance.’ Over and over again, the same words. ‘I have a message of importance.’ So I reach into myself, here”—Mom pressed her hand against her sternum—“to try and pull it out of me, this thing, this message, but when I look down to see what it is, what I’ve pulled out—it’s my own heart.”
She inhaled sharply at the memory. Her distress brought tears to my eyes. Richard, in that gentle way he had, sidled over and took her in his arms. She leaned into him, patting his chest. I could see that she wanted to burrow into him, to escape what she was feeling, but she didn’t, so that I wouldn’t be too frightened.
“Your dream could be related to what happened,” said Richard. “But what was the message of importance? We couldn’t hear much over the storm.”
“No,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure, whatever the message was, it was meant for me.”
CHAPTER 3
The marble-floored, slant-ceilinged lobby of the Luxor hotel was choked with cigarette smoke and bad copies of monumental pharaoh statues. It smelled of dirty metal, alcohol, and menthol. Off in the casino portion, where teenagers were technically not allowed, waitresses in see-through linen skirts set free drinks down next to glassy-eyed gamblers.
So much noise. It bounced off all the metal and plastic around me as I paced near the hind end of a sandstone sphinx close to the banks of one-armed bandits. I tried to ignore the clicking of glasses, the clanging of slot machines with fake tumblers falling into place, the tick-tick of heels on marble, the ching-ching of the simulated sound of quarters falling into metal trays. Occasionally, a buzzer would low like an ox as a lucky winner yelled out in victory.
I was itchy and on high alert. I hated Vegas, with its asphalt and dust and desperation. The metal in the machines set the nerves in my skin on high alert. Plus, Mom, Richard, and I had been followed as we left Burbank in the moving van. It had taken us seven hours to get here instead of five because we had to be sure we lost them.
But it was even more than that. Any second now I’d see Caleb for the first time in weeks. Soon I would touch him, feel his strong hands on me, bury my nose in the crook of his neck to smell his fresh thunderstorm scent and hear the steady, reassuring beat of his heart. I wasn’t shaking visibly, but inside me something was thrumming like a violin with a bow running over its strings.
A squeal broke through the rattles and bells. A squeal I recognized. I adjusted my heavy backpack, made sure no security guards were watching, and headed deeper into the forbidden den of slot machines. I kept my head low so the ceiling cameras wouldn’t see I was underage, angled past an elderly woman with perfectly coiffed white hair compulsively hitting the button on a one-eyed bandit, and found November bouncing up and down next to Siku as their slot machine shot out a ticket.
She looked miniscule next to Siku’s broad-shouldered form, her short brown hair spiking up as if in surprise. Her tight skinny jeans were tucked into short boots with soft soles that I knew from experience made no sound when she walked. She wore a bright red “Anders
on’s Pawn & Loan” T-shirt under a sleek black leather jacket that hugged her waist, looking eleven times hipper than Siku, who sported his usual wrinkled brown flannel shirt. He was even taller than when I’d seen him last. His shoulders had to be at least a yard wide, narrowing down to hips that barely held up his baggy jeans. His small suitcase sat next to them, November’s enormous bag towering over it.
November’s squinty eyes lit up as they fell on me. “Stripes! Look, we won!” She threw her thin arms around me, her face burrowing into my chest, where she delivered a raspberry.
“Yeah, but how much have you spent?” I hugged her back as well as I could given the height difference, then lifted my head to accept Siku’s dry kiss on my cheek.
“More than this.” He held up the tickets of their winnings. “We’ll stop now.”
“But you can’t win if you don’t spend!” November let go of me to tug on his free arm.
“Actually, you’re not supposed to gamble if you’re under twenty-one,” I said.
Siku dropped his gaze down to November’s, one eyebrow lifting, and she deflated. “Okay, okay. You can’t win much at the slots anyway. We should try roulette. Siku looks at least twenty-five!” She bounced up and down like a six-year-old.
Siku lifted his eyes from her jitterbugging to me. “Two full-size Snickers and two Cokes,” he said.
November shoved him indignantly. “Don’t explain me!”
He ignored her, not budging. “Have you seen the others yet?”
“No.” I gazed around the lobby, hoping to hear or see either London or Caleb, but mostly Caleb. “Were you followed here?”
“Didn’t see anyone,” said Siku.
“But we went around the block a few times and all that jazz to be sure before we let the cab drop us off here,” November said. “Just like you said, boss lady.”
“I’m not the . . .” I shook my head. No point in arguing over nicknames with November. She called us whatever her mood dictated. “My parents and I had to shake a tail on the way here. So the Tribunal might know which town we’re in.”