by Nina Berry
The move forced Caleb to release him, but he followed up with a step and socked a right cross into Lazar’s face.
Lazar’s head whipped to the side, but he didn’t stumble back. A line of blood trickled from his mouth as he turned and smiled at his brother, brown eyes intent. Then, swifter than I could follow, he punched Caleb, one-two with what looked like a left cross and a right uppercut.
Caleb took the first punch full in the face, but he made a swift move with his left arm in time to deflect the uppercut. His black eyes sparked with furious gold, matching the dangerous flicker in Lazar’s, and something savage surged up in me, flooding me with excitement.
I should be stopping this. But I was still thrumming from feverish near-lovemaking in the car. Now the skin that had been rubbing against mine was wrestling more violently with someone just as strong, just as determined. Seeing Caleb, bare chested, his jeans unbuttoned, use everything he had to defend me was darkly thrilling.
Caleb’s fists loosened, his knees bent, pants riding very low on his hips. He slammed the heel of his hand into Lazar’s solar plexus.
Lazar expelled all the air in his lungs with an “Oof!” But he still had enough presence of mind to raise his fists up to guard against the next blow, which I knew from our exercises with Morfael would be aimed right for his throat. If it landed just right, it could kill.
But Amaris shoved herself between them. She screamed, “He’s here because of me! It’s my fault. Don’t hurt him!”
At the last second, Caleb stopped himself from striking and stepped back, breath coming fast, the muscles in his bare back outlined in tension. “You invited him here?”
Amaris opened her mouth to speak, but Lazar interrupted. “I followed her here. I was worried about her.”
“You were worried?” I walked up next to Caleb. “You weren’t worried about her when your father married her off to that disgusting old man against her will. Why would you be worried about her now?”
“He did worry about me then,” Amaris said, more heat in her voice than I’d heard before. “You weren’t there. You don’t know! He begged my father not to make me do it.”
“Well, maybe he should’ve done more than beg,” said Caleb. “I’d kill anyone who tried to hurt you.”
Amaris turned to me, pleading. “I’ve been in touch with Lazar for weeks now, talking things out. He was the one I was on the phone with when that car almost hit us in the street. When the call ended suddenly with me screaming, he got worried.”
“You’ve been reconciling with him?” Caleb stared in disbelief at his sister. “After everything he’s done?”
“You don’t know what it was like being raised the way we were, Caleb,” she said. “It can make you do horrible things, crazy things. He’s still my brother, and we still care about each other.”
“How did he know where to find you?” I said sharply. I was still trying to focus, but I knew one thing. If Lazar knew where the school was, either the Tribunal already knew, or they would know soon. They’d laid waste to our last school, shot Morfael, and kidnapped Siku. We couldn’t let that happen again.
“I turned the GPS on my phone off, like Caleb showed me,” Amaris said. “But Lazar found me anyway.”
“I hacked into her phone, found the nearest tower, and came looking after I heard her scream earlier,” said Lazar, wiping the blood from his mouth. “No one else knows I’m here. I turned off the GPS in my own car and on my phone. No one followed me here, and I parked half a mile away and walked the rest.”
“Then welcome,” said Caleb mockingly, spreading his bruised hands out wide. “Because it looks like you’ll be spending the rest of your very short life here.”
Lazar lifted his chin, a vein throbbing angrily in his temple, but said nothing.
Amaris, flushed with shame and anxiety, looked back and forth between me and Caleb. “He won’t tell them. He promised me. He wants to leave the Tribunal, the same way I did.”
Caleb let out a sharp, derisive laugh. “Did he cross his heart and hope to die? Well, I’m convinced. How about you, Dez?”
“As traps go, it’s pretty obvious,” I said. “I expected better from you, Lazar.”
“They’re not going to believe you.” Amaris turned to her brother. “You have to tell them what you told me.”
“No.” Lazar clenched his jaw. I’d seen Caleb do the same thing a hundred times. “I will not justify myself to them. God knows my heart.”
“Paraphrasing Luke won’t help you,” said Caleb. “If you can’t prove what you say, you won’t leave this place alive.”
Lazar drew in a slow, even breath, as if trying to control himself. I could see the bruise where Caleb had hit him darkening his cheekbone. His eyes glittered dangerously. My skin prickled, and I braced myself against the possible power of his voice, ready to shift into tiger form.
Caleb felt it too, Lazar’s explosive energy just underneath the surface. And he, reckless with fury, decided to provoke it. “Fine,” he said, and took a quick, boxer’s step forward.
Lazar saw the attack coming and drove a fist at him.
But Caleb was ready. He faked left in time to draw the punch, then danced right. He grabbed Lazar by the wrist, pushed him around, and shoved his arm up behind his back. Lazar let out a strangled cry of pain; then Caleb pushed him face-first against the wall, wrenching Lazar’s arm up to the breaking point.
Lazar turned his head to the side, cheek smashed against the wall, tendrils of dark blond hair wet with sweat curling over his forehead.
I got in close. “That arm of yours Caleb’s twisting. Isn’t that the same arm Siku broke?”
Lazar exhaled an appreciative laugh. “It just finished healing, actually. Thanks for asking.”
Caleb jammed his knee into the small of Lazar’s back, eliciting a groan from his half-brother. “Give me one good reason not to break it again,” he said.
“Maybe you should tell me what’s really going on,” I said.
Even smushed against the wall and helpless, Lazar took a moment to assess me, as if weighing what was best to do. I flushed as he slid his gaze over me, remembering how he’d found me with Caleb moments ago. Why can’t the world leave us alone so we can be like everyone else?
Lazar stopped pushing back against Caleb, as if he’d come to a decision. He said, “We knew you’d rebuild somewhere. So have we.”
Caleb and I exchanged a glance. “Where?” I asked.
“Make him let me go first,” he said.
I shrugged at Caleb. Your call.
Caleb gave me a look that said I’m going to regret this and released his brother. He took a step back, breath misting in the cold garage, muscles in his bare arms and shoulders defined and glistening with sweat from the fight. “Where?”
Lazar rubbed his wrist. “About an hour from here, north and slightly east.”
Caleb’s black eyes flickered with his thoughts. “Near the nuclear test range?” When I threw him an alarmed glance, he said, “They no longer test bombs there. It’s just a classified bit of desert now.”
Lazar nodded. “Very near there.”
So close to the school.
“Why there?” I asked. Dread made me shiver. Could the Tribunal have somehow acquired a nuclear weapon?
“Tell her, Lazar,” Amaris said, and when he didn’t speak for a moment, she flared with anger. “When you came here, you not only risked yourself, you put the good things I have here at risk too. If you don’t tell them, I will.”
Lazar looked down. Apparently, Amaris could shame him still. “No one will tell me why they picked that spot, but the construction’s nearly finished,” he said. “I didn’t know it existed till we moved there last week. It must have cost them millions. But they’ve built a particle accelerator, a circular collider, underground. Part of it runs right under the nuclear testing range.”
“Particle accelerator?” I’d heard the term before, in my AP physics class. Scientists built huge underground tubes w
here they shot beams of subatomic particles at each other at nearly the speed of light to smash them and see what they were made of.
“Like the one in Switzerland?” asked Caleb.
“Yes, but not that large,” said Lazar. “I’m still trying to figure out why.”
The Tribunal had a history of using technology against the otherkin, but this was far more advanced than anything we’d seen in their old compound, requiring huge amounts of money and expertise. “How did they build that?” I asked. It was difficult to believe.
He shook his head. “I’m not sure. The one thing we excel at is secrecy. Or maybe they bribed or killed anyone who stood in the way. But they must have been working on it for decades.”
“And you have no idea what they’re planning to do with it?” I forced myself to breathe. This was very bad news. Whatever the Tribunal wanted with a particle accelerator, it had to mean a new level of danger for the otherkin.
“Not yet,” Lazar said, then held up a quelling hand as I opened my mouth to protest. “I was going to try and find out and then meet with Amaris tomorrow night. But she wouldn’t agree to anything without talking to you.”
Amaris nodded. “That’s what he and I were arguing about on the phone when the car nearly ran us over.”
“So you could still try to get that information,” I said to Lazar. “For us.”
Caleb shot me a look, dark eyes flashing. “You can’t let him go.”
“I don’t know,” I said in what I hoped was a calming tone. “But this is a whole new level of threat. We have to consider it.”
“Consider allying ourselves with someone who drugged you and kidnapped you?” His voice grew louder with anger. “You want to make a deal with the piece of scum who killed my mother? No!” He swiped his hand in a chopping motion. “He cannot leave here.”
“It is risky,” I said, looking at Lazar. “What kind of guarantee do we have that you won’t just tell your father where we are? That would get you a lot of brownie points with him.”
Lazar’s lips were pressed together hard, like he wasn’t happy with what he was about to say. “I’m done currying favor with my father. He’s . . . he’s asked too much of me, and I see now it will never stop. I want out. That’s your guarantee. I need—” He stopped, reluctant to go on.
“He’s got no money,” Amaris said. Lazar exhaled in frustration, clearly not happy she was telling us this. “Our father controls every penny and doles it out as needed. Lazar’s got nowhere to go, and if he ran, they’d track him down for sure.”
Now it began to make sense. “You need our help,” I said.
His lips tightened. “And you need mine!” He slammed his open hand on the wall next to him, then gave one sharp shake of his head and paced away in agitation, only to walk back a second later. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice taut.
“It’s hard to ask for help,” I said. “Especially from people you’ve hurt.”
He looked away. “Yes.”
“It takes a lot of nerve,” said Caleb. “Unless it’s all a long con to infiltrate our ranks.”
Reflected in Lazar’s golden brown irises, I could see the curve of the white SUV where Caleb and I had almost made love. “I don’t expect you to let me come stay here with you,” he said. “I’m not a complete fool. But even a hundred dollars would help me disappear. Then you’d never hear from me again.”
I had more than that in my own bank account, waiting to use for a college education that, at this rate, would likely never come. “What would we get for our money?” I asked.
Caleb let out a wordless exclamation of protest, stilling only when I sent him an imploring look. Why couldn’t he see the opportunity here? It was risky, but with someone on the inside of the Tribunal, we’d be two steps ahead of Ximon, instead of five steps behind.
The tiny, painful spark of hope reappeared in Lazar’s face. “They’ve only let me see a small part of the complex around the accelerator so far. But with a little luck and some hacking, I could get you a map of the entire complex. And maybe find out why it was built. . . .”
“It might start to make up for your past,” I said.
He nodded. I studied the line of his throat, the tension in his shoulders, measured the blinking of his eyelids, and the set of his sensual mouth, so like Caleb’s. He looked completely sincere. Even the fact that it had taken Amaris to explain his need for money made sense. Lazar was very proud, raised by Ximon to think of himself as special, holy. His father was a bishop in their twisted idea of religion, a man they believed was connected directly to God. To have that illusion stripped away . . . I couldn’t imagine how angry and confused it had made Lazar. To come to his worst enemies for money must be beyond humbling.
“Some things can never be forgiven,” said Caleb. “Never mended.”
I looked over at Amaris. “We freed your sister from the Tribunal. What if we could do that for Lazar, and maybe other objurers too? You know Lazar better than we do, Amaris. What do you think?”
Amaris gazed back at me with wide brown eyes, the twin of Lazar’s, but crinkled a bit at the corners with a smile. Her lips lifted up too, hopeful. “I believe him,” she said. “And if you don’t trust him completely, you can trust me, and trust that he would never do anything more to harm me. He would never tell our father where this school is because he knows it would endanger me and end our relationship.”
“I say he’s working for his own selfish ends,” said Caleb. “To get away scot-free from a life as an assassin for a deranged cult.”
“Which is it, brother?” Lazar asked. “Am I trying to trick you for the benefit of the Tribunal or so I can get away ‘scot-free’ as you say? It can’t be both.”
“Selfish reasons are trustworthy reasons,” I said. “Lazar, if you want to get away from the Tribunal, we’ll consider helping you—after you prove yourself and bring us those plans. I’ll give you the money to start a new life myself.”
“Dez!” Caleb was choking on his rage and disapproval. “How can you do this?”
“He’s not lying,” I said. “And this particle accelerator is a threat like we’ve never faced before, technology on an unprecedented scale being used against us, to destroy everyone we know and love. To stop that, I’d make a deal with the devil himself.”
He moved up to me, lowering his voice into his own very intimate nonwhisper that always set my heart racing. Close in like this, I could smell his warm skin, and a vivid memory of his hands on my body sent a hot flush over my face. Had that really only been a few minutes ago?
“I know you want to save him. You want to save everyone. But you’re putting everyone in danger,” he said. “All of our friends in there, Morfael, Raynard . . .”
I took his hands in mine and leaned my forehead against his, as he had with me once when I was in tiger form. “They’re already in worse danger than a simple Tribunal attack on the school,” I said. “I get why you hate him. But this is bigger than our grievances from the past. It’s worth the risk. I need you to trust me.”
We breathed each other’s breath for a moment, eyes locked across a space of only a few inches, and for a moment we were one again. “Okay,” he said. “For now. We let him go and bring the plans back. But if he takes one wrong step . . .” He lifted his head and raised his voice so Lazar could hear. “If he makes one move I don’t like, we end this thing.”
He didn’t say and Lazar dies, but the implication was there.
“Did you hear that, Lazar?” I asked. “One foot wrong, and you’re done.”
Lazar’s face had closed down again as he watched us, like curtains drawn over a window. His slightly tip-tilted eyes were cool and calculating. He knew his life was on the line. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “I want those plans in two days.” He opened his mouth to protest, but I held up a hand. “If Amaris doesn’t get a call from you within forty-eight hours, the deal is off, and you can expect a visit from us. I want
the GPS coordinates of the entrance to the accelerator now.”
“Very well,” said Lazar, and Amaris scrambled to get a notepad. “Thank you.”
“I still don’t trust you,” I said. “You still have a lot to prove. If I get one whiff of anyone else coming with you when we meet, if I hear any objurers breathing within ten miles of here, I’ll rip your throat out and be happy to leave the rest of you for the vultures.”
He let loose an unexpected laugh, the tension in his shoulders easing. “God help me. Why do I find your threats comforting?”
“Because threats are all we grew up with,” said Amaris. “It takes awhile to get used to kindness.”
The smile fell from Lazar’s face. “I’m glad they’re kind to you. You look well.”
“I am,” she said. “But you’d better not mess this up, Lazar.”
“I won’t get another chance.” He smiled at her ruefully, then took her pad and pen and wrote down a set of numbers. “Here.” He sketched a series of lines underneath the numbers, holding the paper out for us to see. “Here’s the town of Mercury, just off 95, right on the edge of the federal lands of the Nevada test site. To get to us, turn here”—he made an X on the map—“after you pass the Mercury exit. It’s tough to see, but it’s a tiny track on the right, after two intertwined saguaro cacti. They actually form an X. Then you dip into a valley, and the entrance is here.” He made another X, then looked up at Caleb. “But it’s hidden.”
Caleb nodded. “In shadow.”
“Exactly. The illusion we conjure holds for days unless we disturb it. But there’s also a ventilation shaft here.” He made another X. “That’s how I got out tonight, and how I’ll get back in. It’s not hidden, but only one, very fit person can get through it at a time. It leads down into a communal bathroom. But I’ll get you the complete plans to the place. Soon.” He met my eye.
I kept hold of his gaze, trying to see every angle. “Why now?” I said. “What’s Ximon done to push you out now?”