Othermoon

by Nina Berry

  I got slowly out of the truck as Amaris pulled up in the SUV behind us. “Whose car is that?” she asked, slamming her door and walking toward us.

  I just trudged toward the front door.

  Everyone was in the living room as we walked in. My mother and Richard were seated in a window nook holding hands, pillows all around them, with Morfael standing by. Plump, scruffy-bearded Raynard was creaking back and forth in the rocking chair. Arnaldo, Siku, and November were piled on the couch, while London paced in front of them like a wolf outside a henhouse.

  As we entered, heads turned, and the anxiety in the room snapped. They surged forward all at once, talking.

  “Where the hell have you been?” London shouted, her eyes like blue bullets in her scared white face.

  Arnaldo sagged with relief where he sat on the couch as November pounded Siku on the shoulder and said, “Told you they were up to something.” Raynard stopped rocking, and shook his head at us.

  Only Morfael’s expression didn’t change. After assessing us, his pale eyes took in everyone else’s reaction, as if it was no more and no less than he’d expected.

  My mother pushed in front of everyone, her tiny body burrowing past Siku’s bulk and London’s betrayed stare. Her brown hair was ruffled, as if she’d spent the last hour running her hands through it, and her hazel eyes were bright with relief even as the corners crinkled downward in anger.

  She lifted her hands, grabbed my head on both sides, and pulled it down to kiss my forehead. “I’m thanking the Goddess you’re all right,” she said, sparing a glance for Caleb and Amaris. “All of you. And now I’m going to be angry with you for worrying us like this!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling the way I had as a child when Mom found me up on the roof, about to leap to the nearest tree. “Nobody was supposed to know.”

  “Unfortunately for you I have to pee three times a night,” said November. “When I got up, I saw you and Amaris were gone.”

  “We thought you’d been kidnapped!” London said, her voice savage with disappointment. “We thought you were dead.”

  “Then you’d think you’d be happier to see us,” said Caleb dryly.

  “What are you up to?” Arnaldo stood up from the couch. “There were no signs of violence or forced entry, so I figured you were out��”

  “Causing trouble,” November interrupted. “Please tell me you were causing trouble.”

  “Oh, there was trouble,” I said. “Amaris and I went to meet Lazar.”

  An eruption of noise, protests, incredulity followed. I waited for it to die down slightly, and pushed on. “He met us in Vegas and gave us the plans to the Tribunal’s new facility.”

  Amaris held up the envelope, the paper slightly spattered with blood. “Every room, every air duct, every entrance. It’s all here.”

  “You met Lazar?” London’s voice was filled with loathing. “Without telling us?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I am sorry I worried you, but not sorry I met him.”

  “I would have helped you,” said London. “But I guess you didn’t need me.” She spun and paced away from me. Arnaldo got up and took the envelope from Amaris.

  Siku stood there, considering, and then said, “You should have told us.”

  “No shit!” London spat out, then caught a look from my mother and muttered, “Sorry.”

  “It wasn’t your best decision, honey,” my mother said, her hands on her hips. “I mean, just you three meeting Lazar secretly? What if he’d brought a whole army with him?”

  “It was actually just me and Dez,” said Amaris. “Caleb saw us leaving earlier and followed us.”

  “Well, that’s even dumber, then,” said November. “It’s amazing you’re not all dead.”

  “Lazar would never hurt Amaris,” I said. “I’ve told you he needs our help.”

  London threw up her hands. “This just gets better and better!”

  Mom grabbed my chin and tilted it down so that I had to meet her eyes. “Dez, I know you’re a compassionate girl, and that you want to think the best of people, but you’ve told me about this boy Lazar, and he doesn’t sound any more trustworthy than his father.”

  “Exactly,” Caleb said in a low voice that only carried as far as me and Mom.

  I jerked my face out of her hand, but Mom was not to be deterred. “What if he’d captured you? Not only would you be dead or worse, but he might have been able to make you tell them where this school is, where your friends are, where Richard and I live.”

  “That would never happen,” I said, my voice rising. “We were ready.”

  “So ready that you got shot in the chest,” said Caleb.

  “What?!” Mom’s hands dropped. Her face, already creased with weariness, crumpled further. “Lazar shot you?”

  “Not Lazar,” I said. “An objurer who followed him. But I’m fine! I shifted and healed. That objurer isn’t going to tell anyone anything.”

  “You killed him?” Her eyes dimmed with sadness. “Oh, God, Dez, what are you becoming?”

  Stung, I pulled away from her. “What do you know about it?”

  “I know you, honey.” She was shaking her head, tears in her eyes, and put her hand on my arm. “I know you want to do what’s right. You’re also incredibly stubborn and determined once you get an idea in your head. But you can’t just go off and risk your life and everyone else’s because you believe a boy can change.”

  Her disappointment was worse than anything, worse even than Caleb’s anger. I shook her hand off. “He has changed,” I said. “You’ve never even met him!”

  “I know you better than anyone—” she started to say.

  “No, you don’t,” I said, choking back threatening tears. No way I would give her or anyone else here the satisfaction of seeing me cry. “You don’t know anything. You didn’t even know I wasn’t human! You just pretended everything was fine while all my life I had no idea who I was or where I came from. Even when I got the brace, you told me everything would be fine. Except I wasn’t fine! Every single moment I wore that thing was torture.”

  Mom shook her head, as if she didn’t want to believe me. “You never said anything. You never asked me about your origins. I just wanted to help you be strong. I didn’t know you felt this way.”

  “You should have,” I said. “Maybe it’s because you’re not really my mother.”

  Mom’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. Bright spots of red burned in her cheeks, as if I’d struck her.

  Someone laid a warm hand on my arm. Caleb. “Dez . . .” he said.

  “No, no!” I pulled away from him. “You don’t trust me either. None of you do! And you’re wrong, you’re wrong!”

  Mom was clutching her stomach, backing away from me and shaking her head. Something inside me was glad to see how I’d hurt her. That would teach her to doubt me when I was right.

  An odd choking sound came from her, and she doubled over. My own stomach lurched as I realized that was exactly what she’d done that night by the lightning tree.

  Richard was on his feet, every fiber alert as he recognized the signs too. “Caroline?” He moved toward her.

  “Goddess help me,” she said through clenched teeth. “The dream. It’s like the dream.” She jerked upwards, throwing her head back in pain. The air around her bent, like heat waves over a desert mirage. Then she was tall, taller than I was. Her skin glowed from the inside, like a lantern when the wick is lit.

  “What the hell . . . ?” London backed away from her. The other kids were poised to move, whether to flee or help I couldn’t tell.

  “It’s happening!” Richard said, stopping in his tracks as Mom writhed, gleaming brighter now. “Dez, it’s happening again!”

  “Get away from her,” Morfael’s voice cut through the confusion in my head, and we all took three steps back from my mother, leaving her alone, towering over us all and blazing with internal light, in the middle of the straw-strewn floor. “Arnaldo, Laurentia, November,
Siku, and Amaris—go downstairs. Now.”

  London whipped to the stairs instantly, with Siku, Amaris, and Arnaldo moving more slowly, but following. November hesitated, till Siku lumbered back over, grabbed her arm, and hauled her with him.

  Caleb took a step away, and then found me with his eyes. “I can go,” he said. “If that’s what you want.”

  “No!” I choked out. “Please stay.”

  “Caleb, I will need you,” Morfael said in a voice that brooked no argument. “Come.”

  Caleb gave me a quick, encouraging nod. Then, allowing Mom a wide berth, he made his way to Morfael’s side.

  The transformation going on in my mother was strangely silent this time. Without the lightning and thunder, it was all the more eerie to see her change, standing as if in a spotlight, her short brown hair growing long and red, her limbs lengthening as the hem of her dress rose, and the seams at her shoulders ripped to reveal luminous skin. It was like a shift in slow motion, only Mom wasn’t a shifter, and the alternate form wasn’t animal, but something very close to human.

  The radiance inside her subsided a bit, like a light on a dimmer switch, and she lifted her head. Her eyes were wide, gold-green, and unfamiliar, but fixed right on me. She smiled, but it wasn’t my mother’s smile. The teeth were too white, too sharp, the skin too smooth and ageless.

  When she spoke, the smoky voice was not her own. “I found you again,” she said. “My lost little cub.”

  CHAPTER 15

  “Mom?” I couldn’t help saying it, even though I knew she wasn’t there.

  “Sarangarel,” she said, holding her hand out to me. The nails were long and pointed.

  “What does that mean?” I looked over at Morfael. His moonstone eyes glittered, his spindly fingers gripping his staff so hard the knuckles were pink.

  “You look well,” said the thing that used to be my mother. She took two steps toward me, moving with an inhuman grace, taller than me by at least six inches, hair drifting around her shoulders like a live thing. Any remnant of my own small mother was gone; the woman before me looked a lot like . . . me. I didn’t want to think how close the resemblance was. “You are beautiful, my child. I’m sorry it has taken me so long to find you.”

  “So long?” I felt very stupid all of a sudden. “I don’t know you.”

  “The shadow is pouring off her,” Caleb said. His eyes were narrowed, as if facing into a very bright light. “This is not a Tribunal trick.”

  “Your boy is clever,” said the mom creature, bending a smile on Caleb that reminded me of how November smiled at her lunch. Her luminous eyes turned to Morfael, radiating something far more dangerous. “I trusted you, shadow walker.”

  Caleb stared at Morfael as if seeing him for the first time.

  Morfael appeared unmoved. “You may not stay here,” he said. “Go.”

  “You are the worst of all,” she said, her voice rising to shake the furniture. “Your betrayal will be punished!”

  “You leave my mother alone!” I said, my own voice escalating to match hers. “This isn’t right!”

  “Not right to see and speak to my own, my only?” In a flash she was calm; her eyes were bright and full of such alien fondness that I recoiled. “You must know that I have longed to see you. As much as I know you wished to see me. You must not fear me. Everyone else shall.” Her gaze swept the room, taking in Caleb, Morfael, Richard, and Raynard before returning to smile at me. “But not you.”

  Richard took a step toward her, facing the woman who had been his wife. “Whoever you are,” he said, “go back to where you came from.”

  She didn’t even look at him. “I will find a way to bring you back to where you belong,” she said to me. “That day is coming.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “And I won’t allow you to use my mother like this.”

  Caleb hummed a low note, then slid it up the scale to settle on one harsh tone.

  “Yes,” said Morfael.

  “Your mother?” The redheaded woman looked down at her own hands, and then nodded. “Of course. Your relationship makes this possible, for that is something she and I share. And I am grateful to her.”

  The hair on the back of my neck was standing straight up, goose bumps prickling my skin. It was what I’d suspected all along. I’d known it somewhere inside myself, but still I resisted. “Are you saying . . . What are you saying?”

  She beamed at me, and my heart contorted, for her eyes, although the wrong shape and color, held the same expression my mother’s did when she said she loved me. “I think you know.”

  Morfael sounded a note near to Caleb’s, but oddly dissonant. The intonation rounded through their throats, spreading out to every corner, and took over the room. The sound’s weight descended on me, and I had to clench my fists against it or be crushed.

  The woman in my mother’s body pivoted smoothly to face them, muscles gathered as if to spring. “No,” she said. “I won’t go! Not yet!”

  “You have to,” I said, teeth gritted against the unholy resonance. Any minute it might blow me away. “I don’t want you, whoever you are.”

  “But you do!” Her tone was pleading, even as her eyes narrowed against the vibration from the callers of shadow. “For no one in this world understands you as I do. Inside you there has always been something missing, something stolen away. I can give it back to you, make you whole.”

  Is this my fault? Did it happen because I said those awful things to Mom?

  “I didn’t do this!” I said. “I don’t want this!”

  Morfael’s voice shaded a semitone lower in a vibration so profoundly irritating, so very wrong, it took everything I had not to run, not to scream. The redheaded woman’s face convulsed in pain. One long-nailed hand clutched her stomach, and for a moment, she looked much shorter, her hair brown, her eyes hazel. Hope rose in me. Mom was somewhere in there.... I hadn’t banished her.

  “You’re hurting my mother,” I said. “You let her go.”

  She lifted her head, her skin white and stretched with agony, the tendons in her neck straining against the force of the din around her. Her eyes were pools of yellow-green, sparking for a moment like the bolts from the lightning tree. “I love you, my own little cub,” she said. “I never stopped. But I will do as you ask. We will meet again. Look for me, where the veil is thin. I will find you. . . .”

  Like a trick of the light, the air around her buckled. She collapsed as if all her bones had vanished. The horrible sound coming from Morfael and Caleb cut off, as if a “stop” button had been pressed.

  A foggy weakness clouded my vision, and I staggered and fell back against the wall. Richard lunged toward my mother, who lay where she’d fallen, now a sickly version of her true self. Morfael and Raynard helped him get her off the floor and onto the couch while Caleb came over, picked me up as if I weighed nothing, and carried me to the cushioned window seat. I didn’t want to lie down, but when I tried to remain sitting, blackness closed in. I woke up to find Caleb adjusting the pillow under my head, his anxious face frowning down at me.

  “Wow,” I said, my voice coming out thinner than normal. “That was some crazy noise you made.”

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “Did I faint?” When he nodded, I managed a grin. “Fainting sucks.”

  “Your mom’s okay. Right, Raynard?”

  I turned my head to see Raynard checking Mom’s pulse while Richard kissed her forehead. “Whatever had her is gone,” Raynard said. “But it would be better if this didn’t happen to her again.”

  “Raynard,” I said. “Master of understatement.”

  “She will heal with rest,” said Morfael, walking over to look down at me. “As will you.”

  “What was that sound?” I asked. “It was like eight hundred fingernails on a chalkboard.”

  “Banishment tone,” said Caleb. “You need more than one caller to do it. It’s supposed to be so horrific to denizens of Othersphere that they leave this w
orld and never return.”

  “It’s pretty sickening for the rest of us too,” I said. “But it got rid of her, so thank you.”

  Caleb and Morfael exchanged a look, but said nothing.

  “It wasn’t sickening for me,” Richard said, straightening up to look at me. “It was loud, but to me it sounded kind of reassuring.”

  A wind blew through me. “But . . .” I shivered and looked up at all of them as Caleb drew a blanket over me.

  “The sound is unbearable only to those who come from Othersphere,” said Morfael. “We refined it to have its greatest effect on her, but you were also affected.”

  “I . . .” The world got blurry, and I realized my eyes were filling with tears. “I’m from Othersphere? ”All the recent events circled in on me like a hovering vulture finally coming to land on a kill. That mom-creature had said she loved me, that I was her lost little cub. She looked just like me, and she was from Othersphere, which meant . . .

  “In 1908, a meteor or comet exploded over Tunguska, Siberia, killing trees for hundreds of miles around and ripping a hole in the veil between worlds,” said Morfael. “Fifteen years ago, that is where I found you.”

  I lay there, not speaking. Caleb sat down and took my hand. “So whoever that was just now is probably somehow related to you.”

  “My mother,” I said, though my lips felt numb. It felt horribly true as I said the words. “That was my biological mother.”

  Caleb took a deep breath. “Maybe.”

  “You saw her!” I half sat up, but the room began spinning, so I fell back down. “You heard what she said.” I stared up at Morfael. “She knew you!”

  “She thinks I should have sent you back to her,” Morfael said. “She is wrong.”

  “But . . . but why would she think that?” The questions were crowding my mind, too many to choose from. “Who are you?”

  “They know of me in many worlds,” he said. “I am not of them, but I may walk between them. I am a shadow walker.”

  Caleb nodded. “You are not from here.”