Othermoon

by Nina Berry

  “Probably,” I said, leaning over to kiss her forehead. “I love you, Mom.”

  She let go of Richard’s hand to put her own on my cheek, pulling me in close to her. “I love you too,” she said. “And I’m not going to say good-bye. I’m also not going to tell you not to do whatever it is. I know how stubborn you are. But I am going to tell you what I always tell you.”

  I nodded. “Trust yourself.”

  “Exactly.” She pushed my cheek to make me look her right in the eye. “You’re going to make mistakes, Desdemona. Everyone does. But you have to trust yourself to know you’ll make it through them and come out wiser than before.”

  “I will,” I said. Her words made a kind of sense, but I was in too much turmoil to ponder them. “I’ll call Richard in the morning and come see you.”

  “We’ll be home. Aren’t you worried about the Tribunal following you to our new house?” she asked.

  “After tonight, we won’t have to worry about the Tribunal in this area again,” I said. “One way or another.”

  I found everyone outside at the fire pit, wearing thick coats and huddled around a roaring blaze. They were sipping hot cocoa and passing around a Tupperware container full of cold slices of Raynard’s homemade pizza. The air smelled like both fire and snow, even though no flakes were falling and the last rays of afternoon sunlight still filtered through the trees. Everyone sat on the benches around the fire, except for London, who walked around anxiously, breathing on her gloveless fingers.

  As I was about to join them, I heard her say, “She thinks she’s better than us. I am so done with her.”

  “About time.” That was November. “There are plenty of other rabbits in the forest to chase, Wolfie. Available rabbits.”

  “Shut up, ’Ember.”

  I fought the urge to turn and run away. I couldn’t really blame them for talking about me. But if London was moving on, maybe one tiny good thing could come out of this.

  “She knew you guys wouldn’t support her,” Arnaldo said. “I mean, if these plans for the particle collider are real . . .”

  “We should give those plans to the Council,” Siku said.

  “Yeah, let them do the fighting,” said London. “They’re the grown-ups.”

  I pushed the door open and walked out into the sharp air toward them. London glared, her intense aquamarine eyes radiating cold resentment. She’d arrayed her nose rings all in one nostril and painted her fingernails black, her version of war paint. She turned on her heel and walked to the edge of the patio, where the flagstones met brown grass, staring out at the snowy wood with her back to us all.

  Amaris moved a bit closer to Arnaldo to give me enough room on the bench to sit down. I kept my head down and didn’t look at Caleb, who sat on the opposite side of the fire pit, long black coat buttoned up to his throat. The flames licked upwards between us, and the air shimmered.

  “Good news,” Arnaldo said, leaning over to me. “My dad’s been sentenced to probation because he agreed to go into outpatient rehab and anger management classes.”

  “That’s great!” Hope pushed past my sadness and trepidation for a moment, heat from the fire edging back the cold. Arnaldo was looking much happier, and speaking to me as if nothing bad had happened between us. “Did you get that lawyer you talked about?”

  He nodded. “I talked to him on the phone. Apparently, the hawk-shifter on the Council went down and talked to Dad himself. Persuaded him to get help.”

  “The hawk-shifter on the Council went down?” I pictured the man’s guarded face from that recent video conference call, the clever hooded eyes and how he’d stood against me from the start. “Wow. He hates my guts, but I guess he’s smart enough not to let that get in the way of helping someone he represents. Any word on your brothers?”

  “The lawyer thinks I can get custody of them, and we can all live in our old house. There’s some kind of program that will help us out financially for awhile.” His long face brightened. “I am an adult to the humdrums, and they try to keep families together if they can.”

  “That’s wonderful!” I got up and hugged him. I couldn’t help myself.

  He squeezed me back. “Well, we’ll see.”

  “We’re all keeping our paws crossed,” said November.

  “It’ll work out,” said Siku.

  Amaris nodded, and quiet took over as we all stared into the flames. I remained standing, girding myself for what I had to do next.

  “So I need to talk to you guys about the Tribunal,” I said.

  “Amaris already told us about Lazar,” November said, her breath frosting as she spoke.

  “I figured the sooner they knew what was going on, the better,” Amaris said.

  “And maybe better we hear it from Amaris,” said Siku. “Since most of us are pretty angry with you.”

  Leave it to Siku to say out loud exactly what everyone was thinking.

  “Why’d you go rogue, Stripes?” November hunched close to Siku’s warm bulk. “What are we, stale gumdrops?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t blame you for being mad. But you all hate Lazar so much, I didn’t think you’d go along with what I wanted to do unless I got the plans from him and proved we could trust him.”

  “Still no guarantee of that,” Caleb said shortly, his face a blank behind the fire.

  “Well, he’s going to meet us and help us get into the accelerator tonight,” I said. “He’s willing to trust a bunch of people who hate him. If he makes one wrong move, you can jump on him. And then you can all tell me how wrong I was.”

  “How wrong we both are. Except we’re not,” said Amaris.

  I flashed her a grateful look. “Also, I found out tonight that after his plan is successful, Ximon plans to have all of the extra laborers and scientists working there killed, to keep them quiet. He told Lazar he would have to murder them all in their sleep.”

  “Whoa,” said Arnaldo.

  “That’s messed up,” said Siku.

  “So that’s why he needs our help so desperately!” Amaris stood up. “I had no idea.” She sat back down, shaking her head. Caleb put his hand on her arm, and she looked at him. “How can such a man be our father?”

  “So Lazar’s telling Dez secrets he doesn’t even tell Amaris, hunh?” November made a tsking noise. “You’d better watch your back, Caleb.”

  Caleb didn’t answer, but his eyes shot over to me, then settled back to stare at the fire.

  “What, exactly, is Ximon planning to do with this accelerator?” Arnaldo asked. “And how does this tie into their taking DNA from all of us?”

  “If you don’t know, how the heck are we morons going to figure that out?” said November.

  Now was the time to tell them. I just hoped I could convey how much danger the otherkin were facing. “Lazar found out a few things and just met me at the hospital to let me know,” I said. “The Tribunal scientists think they can cut off access to Othersphere, all over the world.”

  Everyone stirred as I said this, exchanging disturbed glances. I went on. “He’s not exactly sure how it works, or how our DNA ties into it. But the collider will be online tomorrow. The scientists meet at seven-thirty a.m., so we have to stop it before then. Then we download everything we can and destroy the files.”

  “Holy shit!” said November.

  Siku took a bite of pizza, chewing thoughtfully. “How can they do that? Stop us all from shifting?”

  “And Caleb from calling forth from shadow, and me from healing.” Amaris’s voice was laced with anger. “Not that I can heal anymore, but that’s still none of their business!”

  “That can’t be right,” said November. “Because they’d stop their own ability to push our animal forms back to Othersphere too!”

  “We wouldn’t have any animal forms,” I said. “Don’t you see? All of us would be humdrums, so the Tribunal’s objurers won’t need to have special powers. They will finally have achieved their ultimate objective and rid the world of
otherkin. The report talked about forcing us all to walk the earth ‘as our Maker intended.’ They won’t have to fight us anymore, because to them we’ll stop being demons.”

  Amaris was nodding. “Exactly. To my father, this is merciful.”

  November snorted. “Merciful, my ass.”

  “Yeah,” said London. “It’ll make it easier for him to kill us all, you mean.”

  Arnaldo frowned in concentration, as if doing calculus in his head. “Einstein called it ‘spooky action at a distance’ when quantum particles interact across vast distances with seemingly no connection. So the Tribunal’s theory must be that we’re connected to Othersphere via quantum teleportation. That makes sense. But I don’t see how the particle collider could cut off that connection. Unless they’ve discovered the exact nature of dark matter. . . .”

  “Spooky action at a distance?” November’s thin eyebrows climbed upward. “Sounds like a horror movie shot with the camera too far away.”

  “The point is that they think they’ve figured it out,” I said. “And they’re going to try to do it tomorrow. They might be wrong—I don’t know. But we can’t let them try. If they’re right, everything we’ve fought for, everything we are, changes completely.”

  Caleb stood up, his face set in challenge. “So you want the seven of us to just walk into the Tribunal’s armed, top-secret facility and destroy miles of high-tech equipment stored hundreds of feet underground.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

  “We have the plans to the facility and a man on the inside,” I said. “Lazar.”

  Caleb uttered a short, derisive laugh and then said no more.

  “But why does it have to be us?” Siku licked his fingers clean, and then held his large hands out toward the fire. “We should tell the Council and let them do it.”

  November was nodding. “Imagine how cool a whole army of bear-shifters would be. They’d take care of the stupid Tribunal in a hurry.”

  Before I could argue, a voice drifted in from farther away.

  “The Council will never believe us.”

  We all turned to London, still standing at the edge of the flagstones of the patio, almost in the forest. Between the curtains of her two-tone hair, her cheeks were spotted pink from the cold. She looked pissed off, and her voice was thick with reluctance, as if she spoke against her own better judgment. “The Council already told Morfael to kick Dez out of school. If we go to them now with a plan of hers based on information from Lazar, a member of the Tribunal, they’ll banish all of us and tell our parents to lock us up and swallow the keys.”

  She walked toward us, blue eyes glowing. “Well, tough shit. I won’t become a humdrum. If we tell the Council now, we’ll never get a chance to stop Ximon.” Her voice got louder, more resolved. “I’m a wolf-shifter, and no one’s going to take that away from me.”

  Siku grunted thoughtfully. Next to him, November stirred. “But you were the angriest of all of us.”

  “Yeah, I’m pissed that Dez didn’t tell us what she was doing,” London said. “I’m going to be pissed off for awhile. But this isn’t about her.” She took a deep breath and exhaled it in a cloud into the frosty air. “They don’t get to decide who I am. Nobody does that but me.”

  “Amen,” said Amaris, and her voice reminded me of Lazar’s in prayer.

  Everyone turned and looked at me. With London’s pronouncement, something had clicked into place. I closed my eyes for a moment in a tiny wordless prayer of thanks of my own. A silent, crushing weight I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge lifted and I could breathe again. My friends had come through for me again. Now a jittery anticipation was taking me over. We were going to do this, and soon.

  I opened my eyes. “Okay,” I said. “We need to leave here by ten o’clock tonight, so we can drive there, do some reconnaissance of the area, and take out the guard they have in a watchtower and two others directly outside the entrance by one a.m. Lazar gave us the code and will meet us inside at that time. From there, we find a scientist and use him or her to get past the hand scanners and into the main computer room.”

  “Dibs on the guard in the watchtower,” said Arnaldo, grinning.

  “Everyone should study the plans we got from Lazar,” I said. “I’ll make some copies.”

  “What if they catch him before we get there?” Amaris said, her voice tight. “He risked a lot meeting you at the hospital. What if they see him sneaking back in?”

  “They could be expecting us.” Caleb stood up, unnervingly tall and forbidding in his long black coat with the wind ruffling his unruly dark hair. The flames sparked in the depths of his eyes.

  “We still have to go,” said London.

  “If he’s not waiting for us behind the first locked door, we’ll know something has gone terribly wrong,” I said. “Be ready to adjust the plan.”

  “But how will we get past all the high-tech locks if he can’t walk us through?” Amaris shook her head. “November’s good at picking locks with keys, but these are different. We need Lazar.”

  I shot a knowing look at Caleb to find him looking right back at me. Recognition flashed between us. The Shadow Blade could cut through any metal. Unless the locks were made of wood, we could get through them. Then, as if we both remembered the state of things between us at exactly the same moment, we looked away.

  “We do need Lazar,” I said. “But if worse comes to worst, I can get us through the locks. Oh, and one other thing.”

  They were all getting to their feet or moving toward the door back into the school. But I had to tell them now. One more secret would break us, and that would not only ruin my plan, it would break my heart.

  “You probably already suspect this after seeing what was happening to my mom last night,” I said. “Or maybe Raynard or Caleb already told you.”

  I took a deep breath to steady myself and saw, from the corner of my eye, Caleb bow his head. He knew what I was about to say.

  “Tell us what?” asked Arnaldo. “Your mom was channeling something weird, that’s for sure.”

  “The thing that came through her was definitely from Othersphere,” I said. My lips were trembling. I could really use Caleb’s steady arm around me now. “And I’m pretty sure that thing was, or, I guess, she is, my biological mother.”

  Arnaldo gulped audibly, and Siku let out a sharp but understated “Hunh!” Amaris’s hand flew up to cover her mouth, and November blinked hard a few times. Caleb looked at the snow-scuffed flagstones at his feet, his face thoughtful.

  Strangely, it was London who was nodding to herself as her eyes scanned me up and down, as if everything suddenly made sense. “That explains a lot.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But it doesn’t change anything, not really.”

  “That means that you’re from Othersphere,” Arnaldo said, voice full of wonder. “Wow.”

  “I think so,” I said. “Yeah. Turns out I’m even weirder than I felt back in high school.”

  Siku looked at me, eyes filled with a reckoning. “If you’re from Othersphere, what happens to you if the Tribunal’s plan works?”

  Caleb looked up from the ground at him, suddenly alert. “You mean, if they actually do shut us off from shadow?” He turned to me. “Would that trap you here? Or would it . . . ?”

  “Send me back there forever.” I finished his sentence, as I had a million times before. Only this one sent a bone-deep chill through me. “What do you think, Arnaldo?”

  “Nobody’s ever come across the veil and stayed so long before. Nobody we know of anyway,” he said. “There’s no way to know what will happen.”

  “So we don’t let it happen,” said London. “It’s simple.”

  I smiled at her. I couldn’t help it.

  Her frown dissipated, but she fought to keep a remnant of it in place. “I’m not saying that for your sake,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “But thanks anyway.”

  “There are those legends of shadow walkers,” November said. “Hey
, Dez, you’re a shadow walker!”

  “Not exactly . . .” I said, again looking over at Caleb automatically. This time he didn’t return the look.

  “She’s like the Loch Ness Monster,” Siku was saying, a slow grin breaking across his face.

  “And Bigfoot,” said November. “And UFOs!”

  “No. Arnaldo’s the Unidentified Flying Object,” said Siku. “Because he flies.”

  November put her hands on her hips, staring up at him. “Oh, clever. That means you’re the closest thing we’ve got to Bigfoot.”

  Siku crossed his eyes and held his arms out in front of himself, stiff like a zombie. “I am the Yeti!” He stiff-walked toward her, a low abominable snowman growl coming from his chest.

  She giggled and ran around the fire pit. He chased her, still doing his best Frankenstein’s monster imitation, and then followed her inside.

  “That went better than the last time we found out something new about you,” said Arnaldo. He patted me on the arm and headed inside too.

  Amaris fell in next to London. “What’s that mean?”

  London opened the door for her. “Oh, one day last term Dez turned into a cat instead of a tiger, and we all flipped out. Especially me. . . .”

  The door clunked shut behind them. Caleb and I stood there without speaking, not looking at each other. The last rays of sunlight played across his wind-tossed hair, etching shadows under his cheekbones, and my whole being ached because I was with him but could not touch him.

  “You got what you wanted,” he said, his tone neutral. “But you usually do.”

  His night-black eyes were stormy with sparks of gold. A feather touch of cold hit my cheek, and white flakes filled the air.

  “I didn’t want this,” I said, my hand tracing the distance between us.

  He looked away, and then up at the cloudy sky, blinking into the snowfall. “You’re lucky. The moon will be full.”

  “I know,” I said. “It rises at midnight, just before we meet Lazar.”

  “Of course. You already thought of that.” A reluctant smile bent his lips. “I should have known.”

  I caught his eye. “Are we going to be able to do this thing tonight, together?”