by Nina Berry
“The legends are basically correct,” Morfael said. “There are an infinite number of worlds which exist alongside each other, and the shadow walkers are the only beings who move unhindered between them.”
“So you’ve been to Othersphere,” London said. “You can guide us to find Amaris there.”
As was his habit, Morfael took his time answering. “I have been there,” he said at last. “It is the world that lies closest to your own, which is why when you shift, your shadow forms come from there, and why callers of shadow like Caleb and Lazar can draw objects forth from that world. Because it is so close, it is possible for creatures other than shadow walkers to move between that world and this. But only with great effort.”
“What’s it like?” Arnaldo asked. “Is the sky blue? Can we breathe the atmosphere?”
London looked alarmed. “We’d better, or Amaris is dead already!”
“That world is very similar to this,” Morfael said. His voice was dry, not soothing, but London breathed easier. “With a blue sky and atmosphere you can breathe. It is a world where nature runs rampant and no race has learned to work metal. It is a world without silver, too, which is why Dez is so allergic to that metal, and indeed to all worked metal and technology. Because she is from Othersphere, her vibration interferes with that which is truly alien to her world.”
“Which is why I can’t wear a watch and don’t carry my phone around much,” I said. “But what . . .” I hesitated, fearful of the answer I might get to this question. Still, I was dying to know. “Are the people I come from there? The Amba?”
Morfael’s glittering eyes assessed me, as if deciding how much to say. “The Amba are currently the ruling class in Othersphere,” he said. “Not only are they able to change shape into that world’s version of a tiger, but they have an innate connection to everything in that world—the air, the earth, the plants, which allows them to control some of the weather and terrain. They can ask certain plants to grow into useful or pleasing shapes, or request the earth to crack open and create a new valley. Their tiger forms are bigger, stronger than the tigers that dwell here. Many animals there are larger versions of the ones you find here.”
“So that’s why my wolf form is larger than a real wolf,” London said. “It comes from Othersphere, so it’s bigger.”
Morfael nodded. “And even your wolf form here is smaller than the form you would have if you traveled to Othersphere. When shadow travels through the veil, as your wolf form does, its size and power are diminished.”
“Oh, wow, so in Othersphere I could be an eagle as big as—what?” Arnaldo asked.
“It depends on the individual,” Morfael said. “But your eagle form there would perhaps be one hundred percent larger than it is here.”
Arnaldo raised his straight eyebrows, and his jaw dropped.
“A hundred percent larger!” November exclaimed. “You mean in my rat form, there I could be as big as . . . a German shepherd?”
Morfael considered her calmly. “Very probably, yes.”
“Shit, let’s go now!” She slapped her open hand down on the table. When Morfael glared at the swear word, she smiled, showing all her little teeth. “Sorry. But can you imagine the look on people’s faces if I pranced along the streets of Berkeley looking like that?”
“Could you take us there now?” London asked Morfael. “The sooner we get Amaris out of Othersphere, the better.”
He looked around at all of our expectant faces, and finally said, “I cannot go there with you, no.”
We gaped at him. “But . . . but why not?” I asked.
“In order to bring you through the veil when you were an infant and shield you from shadow until you were sixteen, I had to sever my tie to Othersphere forever and transfer your own connection to that world into the Shadow Blade. If I go back, I will die there.”
I stared at him. He’d never told me exactly what the Shadow Blade was before. It had started off in my life as my back brace. But when I no longer needed the brace, Caleb had pulled forth its shadow form—a knife which cut through anything that had never been alive. “You transferred what into the Shadow Blade?”
Morfael took a deep breath, as if exercising some patience. It was as if he expected me to just know things I had no way of knowing. “I severed your connection to Othersphere when I brought you here in order to let you grow up as a normal humdrum human, and to hide you from those in Othersphere who wished you harm. I had to put those vibrations somewhere. So I formed them into the Blade and attached it to you via shadow.” He looked around at all of us staring at him blankly, trying to work it out. “It’s all quite simple.”
“So this—” I pulled the Blade out of its scabbard and felt its reassurance rush through me like a sweet ocean breeze. “This is what connects me to Othersphere now.”
“Without it, you would be like any other shifter,” he said. “And before you ask me why I didn’t just destroy it and make you like the rest of the otherkin—such a thing is not my decision to make.”
I sheathed the Blade, nodding. Morfael wasn’t much on sharing information, but he also let me make my own decisions. And as someone who had been adopted, I’d always longed to know more about my birth parents, about the world I came from. A little over a month ago I’d learned I was born in Othersphere. The last thing I wanted was to sever that connection now. I wanted to understand it better, and if possible to go there. I’d glimpsed my birth mother three times now. Perhaps if I got to know her, and her world better, I’d know myself better, too.
“So you’re saying ties to Othersphere can be severed,” Caleb said.
Lazar was also looking very interested in the answer. They were callers of shadow, though Lazar had been raised by the Tribunal to refer to himself as an objurer. The skills were the same—to conjure forth a person or object’s “shadow”—whatever they were connected to in Othersphere. Only a few people had that connection—the shifters, each with their preferred animal form. Objects had a more random shadow form; I’d seen Caleb pull a whole range of white marble mountains out of a small red desert rock once. The effort had made him pass out. Since then, he’d learned a lot about how to control and conserve his power. Callers could also push shadow forms back to Othersphere, as Ximon had started to do when I was hanging by my tiger claws from his helicopter. It made for uneasy relations between most callers and shifters.
“So you cut yourself off from Othersphere’s vibration?” Lazar asked Morfael.
Morfael gave him a small nod. “Shadow walkers attune themselves to the worlds they visit. The vibration becomes a part of them. To shield Dez while I was here, I had to sever my own connection to that world forever. If I walked through the veil between this world and Othersphere, I would cease to exist.”
“You wouldn’t be much use to us that way,” I said, smiling at him.
“What about that rope Ximon wrapped around Amaris?” Caleb asked. “It seemed to vibrate on both our world and Othersphere’s frequency.”
“It is twine made of the stuff between worlds.” Morfael’s voice was dry, making his extraordinary words sound normal. “It, like me, can move between worlds, and no doubt eased Amaris’s transition into Othersphere.”
“Otherwise, she would have bounced off the window between the worlds, like I did,” Caleb said. “I figured it was something like that.”
“But you could open a window and we could go through,” London said to Morfael. “Sounds like Dez doesn’t need any help to get there, but the rest of us need something like that rope Ximon wrapped around Amaris.”
“I could open a window to Othersphere under the right conditions,” Morfael answered. “With twine between the worlds, the rest of you could travel through. After that, finding her would be up to you.” He tapped his staff once on the ground for emphasis.
“But then what?” Caleb held both hands with the palms up. “How do we know where to find her? Ximon could be hiding her anywhere.”
“This is Amaris we�
�re talking about,” I said. “We can’t just leave her there.”
“Of course not,” Lazar said. “Which means we have to find Ximon and make him tell us where she is.”
“And see if he’s got more of that rope stuff we can use,” Caleb chimed in. For once he and Lazar seemed to be on the same page.
And having any kind of plan always made me feel better. “So we have to track down Ximon,” I said.
Next to me, Lazar moved uneasily. He interlaced his fingers and gripped till the knuckles were white. “I might be able to help with that.”
I pulled away from him a little to look him in the eye. “You know where Ximon is?”
Lazar looked down at his hands. “I can’t say for sure. But I know all the safe houses we have in the area. . . .”
“What?” Caleb rose to his feet, concussion forgotten as his fists clenched. “You’ve known where the Tribunal has their safe houses all this time, and it only just now occurred to you to tell us?”
Lazar flinched a little, but looked Caleb right in the eye. “Ximon knows I know about these places,” he said. “It’s unlikely he’ll spend time at any of them. But it could be somewhere to start.”
“You should’ve told us you knew this stuff the first day you came to live with us,” November said, tossing the empty bag of chips on the coffee table with a flick of her hand. “And you know it.”
“There could be otherkin living right nearby, in danger from the objurers in those safe houses!” Caleb took two steps toward Lazar. “I always said you couldn’t be trusted.”
Lazar got to his feet, his body taut. “If I’d told you before, you would’ve told your shifter council, and they would have slaughtered all the objurers, and their families, living in those places.”
“Families who would happily slaughter our families, given the chance!” London stalked over to stand next to Caleb.
“There are children living there!” Lazar’s voice reverberated with something that filled me with shame. London flinched and looked a little abashed. “Shifters aren’t the only ones with kids. And I wasn’t about to have more innocent blood on my hands—or on yours.”
London was almost hanging her head. November and Arnaldo looked embarrassed, and I felt mortified, though I wasn’t sure what I’d done.
Only Caleb did not look guilty. His mouth twisted into a knowing smirk, his black eyes cold as space. “Your vocal tricks don’t work on me, brother.” His own voice dripped contempt, cutting through the emotions I was feeling like a cauterizing knife.
Lazar clapped a hand over his mouth. His voice, like any caller’s, was a potent weapon to manipulate both shadow and emotion. “Oh, God help me,” he said through his fingers. “I didn’t mean to manipulate anyone. I just wanted you to feel the same way I do about the kids. . . .”
“Bullshit!” Caleb lunged in a blur of black, grabbed his brother by the lapels and threw him backwards onto the couch. “You’re a liar and a killer!”
Lazar fell back onto the cushions, rolled over to get right back on his feet. Caleb moved to follow up, to grab him again.
I got in the way. “Stop it!”
Caleb backed off a step, still coiled and ready to strike. “For all you know, he’s been lying to you the whole time, using his voice to control all of you!”
“All of us?” Arnaldo had gotten up and was standing a few feet away. “Even Morfael?”
London snorted in agreement with Arnaldo. “So, what—we’ve become idiots in your absence?”
Caleb exhaled in exasperation and turned to pace away from me, away from all of us.
“You haven’t been around much lately, Caleb honey,” November said coolly. “No calls, no e-mails, no texts, except to your sis, I guess. It’s like you broke up with all of us when you broke up with Dez. No matter what we’ve been through.” Her voice broke a little as she finished.
Caleb’s shoulders slumped. He turned to her. “I’m sorry, ’Ember. I really am. I’ve thought about you a lot. But when Siku died, I just . . . I couldn’t be here.”
“You ran away because a girl didn’t do what you wanted her to,” November said, no mercy in her voice. “And you didn’t like the competition. It was all about you: your hurt feelings, your breakup. Well, what about us? Not just me, but the group, everyone—us?” She dusted the crumbs off her hands, and got to her feet, radiating tragic fury. “I know you were on your own a lot before you got to Morfael’s school, but when you came here you made us all think you cared. We faced things together we never could have survived alone. We were more than friends; we were a team.” Her eyes reddened, but she didn’t flinch, didn’t look away. “But I guess nothing lasts forever.”
Caleb swallowed, and for once had no reply. For the first time I realized that our breakup had affected everyone around us. I wasn’t much better than Caleb, too caught up in my own pain to see it in others.
“Fighting isn’t going to bring Amaris back,” London said into the quiet.
“I’ll tell you where the safe houses are,” Lazar said. “But I doubt Ximon’s in any of them.”
“Then we go to the nearest one and force whoever’s there to tell us where he is.” London’s voice was matter of fact.
A droning buzz slashed through her final words. I jumped before realizing it was the alert that someone was calling us via Skype. Lazar had set it up so we would hear it in all the common rooms. The living room had a monitor now, too. Raynard, the school handyman and Morfael’s boyfriend, had helped him install it three weeks before. My mother had called me that way recently.
“Who the hell . . . ?” Arnaldo asked, as the buzzer whined again. “Anyone expecting a call from their parents?”
We were all shaking our heads. Arnaldo walked over to the living room monitor, perched on a side table.
“It could be my mom,” I said. “I hope everything’s okay. . . .”
“Hello?” Arnaldo had picked up the call. A muffled male voice spoke, but the speakers were turned away from the rest of us. Arnaldo shook his head, looking up at us. “He says it’s Ximon.”
“What?”
“No way!”
Everyone stirred, exchanging looks. Arnaldo leaned in closer to the speakers as the voice kept talking. Arnaldo listened, and then pressed a button to mute the voice, his dark eyes wide with disbelief. “He wants to talk to you, Dez.”
CHAPTER 3
I didn’t want to talk to Ximon alone. “Can we put him on the big monitor?” I asked Arnaldo. “So we all can see him.”
“Sure, yeah.” Arnaldo effectively put the call on hold.
Lazar was already up, turning on the fifty-five-inch monitor he’d recently installed on the big blank wall in the living room. We weren’t allowed to watch TV or recreational movies, but it served well when Morfael screened a documentary for a class, or when all five of the shifter council called, usually to castigate me.
Arnaldo pressed two keys, and Ximon appeared, larger than life, on the big monitor. He blinked. The room he sat in was very dark. A light from somewhere higher up, as if at the top of a staircase, caught only the glittering corner of his left eye and the sagging flesh of his cheek. His shoulders, cast in silhouette, were slumped. It was hard to see him clearly, but he didn’t look like the strong, wild, confident man I’d just seen whisk Amaris off to Othersphere.
“Ximon,” I said, taking my seat again next to Lazar on the couch. “To what do I owe this honor?”
“I need your help,” came the familiar voice, strong as always, but carrying a new tremor. It sounded like fear, or weakness, or age.
“That’s not a very funny joke,” I said.
He moved closer to the monitor. I caught sight of his upper lip. It was trembling. “Desdemona, I beg you—hear me out.”
I stared at the half-dark monitor. What the hell was Ximon up to? “Why?”
“Because I am under attack,” he said. “And I won’t survive without you.”
My friends were all staring at him with identical
blank looks of incredulity. “What a shame,” I said. “I’d wish you good luck, but you’d know I was lying.”
“The attack on me is the reason my daughter was taken away tonight.” His powerful voice was thick, as if with emotion, perhaps with tears. But Ximon was a powerful caller of shadow, a master with his voice, who could control someone with a single word.
“You’re not making any sense,” I said. “You are the one who took her away tonight.”
He breathed heavily. His body shuddered, as if in pain. “Allow me to explain and there’s a chance we can get her back.”
“ ‘We’ can get her back?” My voice shot high with disbelief. “What game are you playing?”
“It’s no game.” He cast a glance over his shoulder. For a moment we could clearly see his profile, still classically handsome, but adorned now with drooping jowls, his lips thin with anxiety. “I don’t have much time. He could come back any second.”
“He—who?” I frowned over at my friends. November was rolling her eyes.
“You won’t believe me, I know,” he said. “But you will believe that I thought for a long time before placing this call. The fact that I have reached out to you indicates the level of my desperation. My . . . my God has abandoned me.”
“About time,” London whispered.
His overacting was getting on my nerves. “How did you get this number?” I asked.
“What does that matter now?” A touch of impatience crept into his voice, and he sounded much more like the Ximon I knew. “I tracked all of Lazar’s calls to you last month. I knew you would be foolish enough to keep the same number.”
“Point for Ximon,” Arnaldo muttered.
I made a throat-cutting motion to Arnaldo, who put the call on hold. The screen froze. “He’s using his voice to trick us into thinking he’s stressed out, right?” I asked, looking at Caleb and Lazar.
Lazar shook his head, but it was Caleb who spoke. “He’s not using any vocal tricks that I can detect. But he’s so good at it, I might not be able to tell.”