Othermoon

by Nina Berry

  He drew back, suddenly on high alert, like a cobra hooded and rearing up against a threat. “What do you know about my mother?” he asked.

  I tried to make my voice neutral. “Amaris told us why she died, that your father refused to let her get humdrum medical care. That must’ve been awful.”

  “Amaris was only ten,” he said, not relaxing. “She knows what she was told.”

  “So your mother didn’t have breast cancer?”

  “No, she had cancer all right,” he said. “She was in agony for months from it. Every now and then he’d allow her some morphine, but only after Amaris or I would beg him for it. He thought it was a waste of money.” He let out a sharp bitter laugh. “I tried to sneak her to the hospital one night, all by myself. She could still walk a little ways, so I managed to get her into one of the cars. I even managed to drive it a bit, even though I hadn’t learned to drive yet.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Twelve.” The harshness left his voice, and his eyes lost focus as he remembered. “He must’ve heard the engine starting, because he came out of the building, yelling for me to stop. I tried to gun the engine, but in our old compound he’d had spikes implanted in the driveway to prevent people from driving away in the middle of the night, and our front tires blew out. I’ll never forget sitting there in the car, listening to his footsteps crunching on the gravel as he walked up to the car. I thought he’d kill me.”

  “But he didn’t,” I said.

  “No.” His voice was cold. “No, he didn’t kill me. He opened my car door and dragged me out of the car and beat me. He broke my nose, a couple of ribs, a few other things. My head was spinning, and I couldn’t stand up anymore, so he gave up on me and went over to the passenger side of the car and dragged my mother out.”

  I was frozen in place. I thought I knew how bad Lazar’s life had been. I knew nothing.

  “She was wearing a nightgown and my father’s own robe. I’d stolen it from his closet to keep her warm. She had these clogs on her feet, easy to slip into and out of, and I remember how they slid off her feet because she was too weak to walk. First the left, then the right shoe scraped off as he dragged her by the hair and threw her down in front of me. I thought he was going to start hitting her too, but instead he pulled his pistol out of his belt.”

  My heart skipped a beat. Oh, no, oh, no.

  “He made me sit up to do it,” Lazar said. He was very calm as he spoke, like he was telling a story. “He handed me the gun, but my right wrist was fractured, so he put the gun in my left hand and got behind me, his hand over mine. He said, ‘You’re right, son. Your mother’s in too much pain. It’s better this way. Let God’s will be done.’ ”

  Lazar’s face was blank, even as he stared right into my eyes. “So we pulled the trigger, my father and I. We had to pull it twice because my hands were shaking. . . .”

  I put my hand on his arm. He was trembling.

  “It was my fault she didn’t die right way,” he said. “After that night my hands never shook when I shot a gun. I had killed my mother—what did it matter if I shot Caleb’s mother, or anyone else? And if I kept doing what Father wanted, at least for that day he’d still trust me, still love me. I never disobeyed my father, not once.” His eyes lost their distant look and met mine. “Not till I met you. You changed everything.”

  The bruises on his face looked like purple fingerprints against his pale skin. For a moment I couldn’t speak. In the space of a few minutes, something had changed, not just between us, but in how I saw the world.

  I squeezed his arm, then withdrew my hand, jamming it into the square pocket of my robe. “You’re the one who’s changed,” I said. “Because you’re here. It’ll be different now.”

  A door squeaked down the hall and several sets of footsteps started cautiously toward us. I hastily shoved my feet into the terry slippers. Lazar walked up to the doorway just as a security guard peeked around the corner. He visibly relaxed when he caught sight of us.

  “You kids better get out of here,” he said. “There’s a frigging tiger on the loose.”

  “A what?” Lazar’s supple voice was convincingly taken aback.

  “I’m not kidding.” He motioned us toward him. “You need to go down the hall, into the casino and outside, now.” I walked up behind Lazar as the guard gestured the way we’d come. “It’s clear that way, through that door, back into the casino. Go!”

  “Thanks,” I said, and we slipped past him to scurry down the hall and through the door, and back into the smoke and flashing lights.

  After our talk in the laundry room, the Sports Book area felt like an alien land. It was completely empty and oddly silent.

  “This way!” shouted another guard, motioning us toward the lobby area. “Out, quick!”

  We hustled, but slowed down a little as we passed Michael’s prone form, lying in a pool of congealing blood. His throat was gone.

  I’d done that. I reached blindly toward Lazar as the security guard continued to urge us on. Lazar took my hand and pulled me away.

  Then we were out into the cold desert air, being directed by a cop toward the street, where a crowd of gamblers had gathered, cigarettes ablaze, shaking their heads, each coming up with something bigger than the next to compare to the tiger. I dropped Lazar’s hand, folding my arms against the cold.

  “Here.” He handed me the envelope with the maps in it, took off his leather jacket, and draped it around my shoulders, rubbing them with his warm hands. We stood there like that for a moment on the sidewalk, lost.

  “Hey, um,” Lazar said, his face flushing. “Please don’t tell anyone about all of that. I couldn’t stand it if Amaris ever found out.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But I think she would understand.”

  “Maybe someday,” he said.

  An SUV pulled up to us, and I realized with a start that Amaris was driving, coming to get me exactly where we’d planned. Sitting next to her in the passenger seat, his face set in hard lines, sat Caleb.

  CHAPTER 14

  Lazar stepped away from me hastily as Caleb opened the car door and got out of the SUV. He left the door open, one hand on top of it, and looked at us, his face like granite.

  His eyes on me made me realize just how disheveled Lazar and I both looked. Lazar was bruised and rumpled, the scratches from my claws on his shoulder now oozing blood. I was severely underdressed in nothing but a robe and another boy’s jacket.

  “Get in the car,” Caleb said to me. I’d never heard his voice so flat, so unreadable.

  I took the jacket off and shoved it into Lazar’s hands. “Lazar brought me the plans to the Tribunal’s new complex,” I said. My voice was as shaky as I felt.

  “I guess that makes everything okay then,” Caleb said, again so flatly that I almost didn’t recognize the sarcasm.

  Lazar didn’t put his jacket on, just gripped it tightly “Don’t blame Desdemona. I made her promise not to tell you about this meeting.”

  Caleb regarded him, contempt in the slant of his dark brows and the set of his mouth. “So now you’re lying for her. How touching.”

  “I’m not lying,” said Lazar, his tone so convincing that I almost believed him.

  Caleb shook his head slightly, eyes narrowing. “Dez makes her own decisions.”

  My heart contracted. How well Caleb knew me.

  “It’s my fault,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I heard you sneaking out and followed you,” he said. “You’ve been acting strange. I had no idea you’d be holding hands with him.”

  I bit my lip. I’d promised Lazar I wouldn’t tell anyone how his mother had died, and I would keep that promise, even if might be exactly what Caleb needed to hear in order to understand.

  “We weren’t holding hands.” Although we had been, a few minutes ago. But that was innocent! “Lazar wants to help us, Caleb.”

  “So you trust him completely now?” Gold glinted dangerously in Caleb’s normally bl
ack eyes. “But you didn’t trust me enough to tell me about this meeting?”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

  “Get in the car,” said Caleb, and slid back into the SUV’s passenger seat, slamming the door.

  Lazar’s face wore a rueful look. “I seem to have gotten you into trouble.”

  “No,” I said. “I did that all by myself.” I took a deep breath, and couldn’t help glancing over at Caleb. He was staring straight ahead. Next to him, Amaris motioned at me nervously to get inside the car. “Call me or Amaris as soon as you’re safely back inside the compound. We’ll need to strike soon, before your father gets suspicious.”

  “Good-bye until then,” Lazar said, shooting a glance at Caleb too, then giving me a reassuring smile. “And good luck.”

  He turned and walked away. I forced myself to stop staring after him and climbed into the backseat of the SUV. Amaris took off too fast, making the tires squeal.

  “Sorry,” she muttered, looking at me in the rearview mirror. “You okay?”

  “I am now,” I said. “That objurer shot me, but Lazar used his voice just in time to help me shift and heal.”

  In the seat in front of me, Caleb’s shoulders stiffened, but he didn’t turn around. Amaris said, “Michael shot you? Where?”

  “In the chest,” I said. “I’d be dead if it wasn’t for Lazar.”

  “You wouldn’t even have been there if it wasn’t for Lazar,” Caleb said, still not looking back at me. “Turn here,” he said to Amaris, pointing toward an open parking lot. She slowed down with an awkward tap on the brakes and turned right.

  “What happened to Michael?” Amaris asked.

  “He’s dead,” I said, a hard lump in my throat. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” she said. “I mean, I wouldn’t wish him dead, but he was a jerk and he shot you.”

  She stopped the SUV behind a familiar red pickup truck. As Caleb opened his door, I said, “You hot-wired Raynard’s truck?”

  He didn’t answer, just got out of the car.

  “I’ll follow you back,” Amaris said to him, leaning over to try to catch his eye.

  He simply slammed the door.

  “I’ll see you there,” I told her, opening my own door. “I should go with Caleb.”

  “You sure?” She looked over her shoulder at me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Caleb didn’t say a word to me the first fifteen minutes we were alone in the car together. Anger emanated from him in waves. But finally, I couldn’t stand the silence anymore.

  “I had to give him a chance, without the rest of you threatening him with death,” I said. “All our lives depend on it.”

  He didn’t reply for a long moment, and then said: “Since when has anyone been able to ever stop you from doing anything?”

  “You told me you wanted to kill him. All of you!” I stared at his shuttered face as the lights from passing cars skimmed over it. “That would not have been a good way to begin the meeting.”

  He shook his head. “You should’ve told me, Dez.”

  I didn’t reply. Maybe he was right. But I remembered all too vividly how he’d shouted at me that Lazar deserved to die.

  He was drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as he stared down the nearly empty lanes of the freeway. The land around us was becoming wilder as we drove, the buildings few and far between as the utterly black silhouette of the mountains drew near, blotting out some of the stars in the sky. “You avoided telling me that Lazar stole your hairbrush for as long as you could,” he said. “If we hadn’t run into him in Vegas, would you ever have told me about that?”

  “I hadn’t seen you in weeks!” I said. “We barely had a chance to say hello before the Tribunal showed up. There was no time.”

  “There are phones,” he said. “And e-mail.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I could’ve told you about it right away, that’s true. But can you blame me? When you saw him, you almost killed him. And when we talked out by the fire pit, and later with the group—your hatred for him was so immense, I couldn’t see any way around it.”

  “When did you arrange this little meeting?” he asked. “Did you know about it even then?”

  “No!” God, this was frustrating. Couldn’t he see how his attitude would have ruined everything? “He contacted Amaris via computer tonight, and she told me. It was my decision not to tell the rest of you. I figured that we’d given her a chance. So tonight I gave him a chance to prove himself. So far, so good.”

  “You’re giving him a chance,” he said. “But you wouldn’t take a chance on me and tell me what you were doing.”

  Damn. He was guilting me good. But he hadn’t seen the murderous look on his own face. And he didn’t know what Lazar had been through. Right now, I wasn’t even sure he’d care.

  “The same way you didn’t trust me enough to tell me at first that Ximon is your father?” I shot him a look, and he inhaled sharply. He’d kept his relationship to the Tribunal secret from everyone, including me, until Ximon and his helicopter attacked Morfael’s school and took Siku prisoner. “And when I did find out, from Ximon, not you, I still trusted you, because I understood the pressure you were under. You were afraid we’d all turn on you. But we didn’t. I didn’t.”

  “That was different!” His voice rose, and I knew I’d hit a nerve. “You and I weren’t . . . we weren’t us, then. And my keeping that from you didn’t endanger anyone but me.”

  “I’m not endangering people; I’m helping to save them!” This was agony. Why couldn’t he see?

  “You’re playing with people’s lives,” he said. “You met with one of the otherkin’s worst enemies, and not only did you not tell me, you didn’t tell Morfael, or any of our friends.”

  The whole world sagged around me. “They all hate him too,” I said. “There’s so much riding on the information he has. And I figured if he gave us the plans to the Tribunal’s new compound, it would prove to everyone that he’s being honest.”

  “So we have to trust that you know best,” he said, “even though you don’t trust us.”

  Anger stirred inside me. “I was raised by an outsider, so I have a different perspective. You’ve said so yourself! I didn’t inherit the generations of fear and hatred like the rest of you. I knew how you’d all react. You would’ve done everything in your power to keep me away from him. So I had to do it without you.” I leaned toward him, intent. “This isn’t about you or me or the kids at school, Caleb. The stakes are too big. That particle accelerator is powerful technology, and it’s got to be part of some grand plan to kill off every shifter on the planet. That’s more important than who trusts who.”

  “So it’s up to you to save everyone, including Lazar,” he said. “That sounds like some martyr bullshit to me.”

  “Maybe,” I said, flushing. “Or maybe I have to do it because you’re too caught up in your own bullshit!”

  He threw me a hard look. “Maybe you’re the one caught up. Lazar had his hands on you when we pulled up.”

  “What? No, he—!” I broke off, remembering how Lazar had rubbed my shoulders out there in the cold. “He was just trying to help me keep warm.”

  His lip curled in scorn. “Every boy has used that excuse to touch every girl since the world began.”

  My jaw dropped. “You’re jealous? Are you crazy?”

  His hands clenched the steering wheel hard. “You hid a call between the two of you and lied about meeting him tonight! How do I know there weren’t other calls, other meetings?”

  “Because there weren’t.” It sounded lame, even to my ears. “It’s just not like that between us.”

  “For you, maybe,” he said. “But I know Lazar.”

  “I don’t think you do,” I said, with heat. “I bet I know him now better than you do.”

  “Oh, yeah?” His eyebrows shot up challengingly. “Like what? What don’t I know?”

  I said nothing for a minute, then: “He
’s just someone who needs help, and who can help us in return. For him I’m nothing more than a way out of hell. That’s all.”

  He shook his head. “I saw the look on his face as we drove up. You’re way more than his ticket out.”

  I almost broke my promise to Lazar then. I opened my mouth to tell Caleb everything I’d learned. The tension between us came from his undying hatred and my keeping secrets. If I told this secret, would it mitigate his hatred for Lazar? Would he be able to see his brother as a human being? I couldn’t be sure. So I closed my mouth and sat back in my seat. Lazar’s secret was too intimate, too awful for me to betray without permission.

  I tried to keep my voice calm, saying, “It was a rough night. But you need to trust me.”

  “After all the lies?” He pounded the steering wheel once with both open hands. “How?”

  I’d never felt this way before—burning with fury and pain at the same time. I looked out the window and we rode the rest of the way in silence. I fought not to cry, not to scream at him, not to beg for his forgiveness, though I still didn’t think I needed it. More than anything I wanted to feel his arms around me, hear his voice whisper reassuring words, feel his heart beat against mine. But I didn’t see a way for that to happen, maybe ever again.

  When we pulled up to the school garage it was nearly four a.m., and my head vibrated with a dozen fuzzy spiders that webbed up my thoughts. Caleb sat up straighter as the headlights swept across a car in the driveway that hadn’t been there before. It took me a second to recognize it.

  “That’s your parents’ car,” Caleb said.

  “Oh, no.” The words came out of me without thinking. The car was empty. So they’d gone inside. The horrible buzzing in my head grew hotter and louder. If Mom and Richard were here, that meant everyone at the school was up, that they knew Amaris and I had left. God, they must be worried.

  “Someone probably woke up and found we were gone,” Caleb said. “Then Morfael called your parents.”

  “Shit.” I turned to him. “So you didn’t tell them?”

  His face was still hard and closed as he shook his head slightly. “I didn’t want to worry anyone.”