by Nina Berry
“Did you guys hear that?” I asked.
The siblings broke apart. Amaris threw her arms around London and buried her face in the silver fur.
“Hear what?” Lazar asked. He was still smiling, so relieved.
“Someone down the hall is speaking English.” I pointed that way, as if the gesture somehow made it more believable. “They asked if we’re from ‘our world.’ ”
“Probably a trap.” Lazar hastily shoved the water bottle and energy bars back into his backpack. “We’ve been too noisy.”
“And stayed too long,” said Caleb. “We have to get back.”
I looked at the dire wolves, ranged behind London. They were alert, but relaxed. Surely they would be more wary if the voice was a trap for us. “What if Amaris isn’t the only one Orgoli kidnapped from our world?”
“Please!” It was a man’s voice. “If you’re there. Please don’t leave us here!”
Everyone turned to look down the hall. They’d heard it this time. London snapped something to her wolves, and the black one issued a low whine.
“Other people from our world?” I asked London.
She gave me a single nod.
“Help us, please!” called the voice.
I gave the others a wild glance and ran down the hall, passing other natural caverns. Some were barred with black roots, others were open, and I realized: We were in a prison.
“Dez!” Lazar hissed after me. “We don’t have time!”
“We’re like you!” The man’s voice echoed against the stone walls. “We’re from Earth. Please let us out!”
Light bobbed behind me, and the thud of Caleb’s boots. He was coming, too. My anxiety loosened a little, knowing he was with me.
I slowed down as I came to a corner and peered down the hall. With the barest light from Caleb’s flashlight, I saw two huge openings facing each other across the hallway about fifty feet down. Each was covered with a net of black roots. The stench of old sweat and urine assaulted my nose.
“You, girl!” The man’s voice rose with a heartrending combination of terror and hope. “Help us!”
Caleb reached my side and the flashlight beam flooded down the hallway.
Through the chinks in the roots the light reflected back from dozens of eyes, outlined dozens of hands clutching, gesturing, and reaching for us.
A female voice shrieked in terror as another babbled in a tongue I didn’t understand.
“It’s one of the Amba!” the same man said in English. I zeroed in on him. He was in the cell to the right, closest to us. A man about six foot four with matted dark hair, brown skin, and flashing dark eyes that took me in with horror, then blinked in surprise at Caleb. And I realized—I didn’t look human anymore.
Caleb must have realized it, too. “We’re from your world,” he said, and took a step down the hall.
The man’s eyes widened. Tears sprang forth to course down his cheeks. He turned to address the dozens of others we could only partly see and shouted something to them I didn’t understand. In the cell opposite, a woman—she was also tall, but redheaded and pale, did the same to the crowd in her cell, but in a very different tongue.
A full-throated roar of delight split the air. I could see fists pumping the air, people jumping and hugging. There must be dozens of them, at least fifty in each huge cell.
“That’s Russian,” Caleb said to me over his shoulder. “They’re speaking Russian in that cell.” He pointed to the left. “Sounds like Hindi or no, Bengali over there.” He pointed to the right.
With that, I knew who they were. Pale, Russian-speaking group on the left. Darker skinned people, one with a clipped Indian accent on the right. Russians and Indians, one of each able to also speak English, all tall, imprisoned here for who knows how long.
“Tiger-shifters,” I said.
Caleb leaned in, eyes widening. “What?”
There wasn’t time to explain it to him, but it all made a weird kind of sense now. We’d seen other once-extinct creatures from Earth here in Othersphere—dinosaurs, giant sloths, dire wolves, and bat-shifters. Now we’d found probably a more recent addition. Tiger-shifters were supposedly gone from our world, wiped out by the Tribunal. Instead, they’d been brought here.
What they were doing in prison cells was anyone’s guess.
Somewhere farther down the hall, past the cells, under the cheers and back-slappings, I heard the growl of a big cat. And quiet, deadly paws coming at a run.
“The Amba are coming!” I yelled to Caleb, and pointed down the hall.
His eyebrows came together in a puzzled frown and he turned. The beam of his light skimmed past a huge, striped, four-legged form as it slid around a corner a hundred feet down the hall and shot toward us like an arrow. Behind it there were more.
“Run!” I screamed.
The tiger-shifters in the cells shrieked en masse a half-second later.
Caleb zoomed past me, taking the light with him. “Come on, Dez!” he shouted. “There’s no time.”
As the light faded away, I saw the hands reaching through the bars, taut, outstretched in terrible desperation. Voices called to me to let them out, to set them free.
Forty feet farther on four tigers, bigger than horses, flew toward me, fangs bared, ears back.
I shifted.
It took no more than a single pulse of my heart here in Othersphere. One moment I was an elongated version of my girl self, the next I was tiger-incarnate.
I had never felt such might, had never controlled my every muscle, every whisker with such ease. Coiled within me was all the potency of the earth beneath my feet, of the air within my lungs, of the great living moon outside. I was a nation, a symphony. And nothing in this world or the next would stop me.
In a single bound I was at the entrance to the cells. The people inside drew back, squawking with fear. The Amba were pouring down the hallway like water unleashed from a dam, two seconds away.
I touched the roots guarding the cell on the right with one paw, and on the left with my tail, snarling a command. They parted for me. I had time to see the astonished faces in the prison cells, time to find the flashing dark eyes of the man who had first called out to me. I nodded to him.
He smiled, and the air around him parted like a curtain. He was a tiger now, too, a Bengal tiger smaller than I or the Amba ahead, but unafraid and ready to fight.
The other tiger-shifters saw and followed suit in both cells. They spilled free like a striped, roaring river. It was an army of tiger-shifters.
The first Amba leaped, fangs bared, right for my throat. I swerved and whomped him in the head with one paw. His neck cracked under my blow, and he fell with a hard thump to the floor.
The next Amba grabbed me with one clawed paw and aimed her canines at my neck. I got my back legs up between us and raked her down the abdomen. She howled, and I sank my teeth into her warm fur. She struggled and kicked, stronger than anyone I’d ever fought before, but I wrestled her onto her back and bore down until the air left her lungs. She lay utterly still.
I looked up, blood dripping from my muzzle, and roared. Arrayed around me like a brood of kittens were the shifters in tiger form, snarling.
The remaining Amba backpedaled, trying to slow their charge, but the one in front couldn’t help barreling into the sea of tiger-shifters. They set upon him like hounds on a fox. He reared up, yowling, and flung them off, but others leapt to replace them, and still more were frothing and snapping around the other Amba.
“Dez! We have to go!”
I looked over my shoulder to see Lazar holding Caleb’s flashlight, standing where the hallway turned. He’d gone a little pale, and his eyes were as big as the moon as he stared at the mob of tigers.
I chuffed at him, licking blood from my whiskers. It tasted sharper, stronger than the blood in our world. It fed a longing inside me I hadn’t known was there. I wanted more.
“The window closes in less than two hours!” he shouted over the snarls and roa
rs.
The window. I’d forgotten about Morfael, Ximon, and the concerns of that world. The caterwauling and wrestling going on down the hallway pulled at my attention.
“Dez . . .” Lazar’s voice cut through everything. He was blatantly using all his skill as a caller to grab me. I slid my eyes over to him. He put his hands out, palms up. “We won’t make it without you.”
The tiger-shifters were swarming the Amba, but the Amba were fighting back fiercely, flinging the shifters aside or shoving them back into the cells. This fight could go either way.
A wolf’s howl pierced the sounds of cats’ fighting. London was calling me, too. I looked around and found the Bengal tiger I knew, the one who had been the Indian man. He slid down a wall after being thrown aside by one of the Amba and shook his head. All around me shifters were swiftly changing to their human form to heal, and then back into tiger form to fight, as if they’d been preparing for this moment for a long time.
“Dez!” Lazar’s voice spoke to me of my home, of my mother, of how it felt when he held me close in my frail girl form, of the hungers I felt then. “I need you.”
The Bengal tiger’s honey-colored eyes found mine. He saw Lazar, and he saw me, and then he jerked his head, chuffed, and lashed his tail. I read his meaning clear as a book. In tiger form we spoke the same language. Go, and thank you. We will make sure they do not follow.
With one last look back at the skirmish, I sprang over the few tigers between me and Lazar and padded after him down the hallway. I was all at sea, leaving behind the tiger-shifters. And I didn’t like the way Lazar had stared at me, as if I wasn’t myself. As if he didn’t know me.
“Wow,” I heard Amaris say. “Dez?”
“Wow, indeed,” Caleb’s face as he gazed at me had an appreciative little smile that made me think maybe I was myself. “Let’s go. We’ll need to hurry.”
They all ran ahead of me, back the way we’d come, but as we came to the terrace and the open air, a strange rumble shook the ground and a small avalanche of dark rocks tumbled down the face of the cliff above us.
“Keep going!” Caleb shouted.
The dire wolves led the way back into the narrower passage, with London, Amaris, Caleb, and Lazar close behind.
But I stopped. A horrible, unnatural thought flashed through my mind, and I pushed my gaze up the rattling cliff, up to the peak that was shaped like an enormous sleeping cat.
The mountain shuddered. The giant stone cat’s tail twitched.
That’s a mountain. It can’t be alive.
I stood frozen, not wanting to believe it even as horror beyond horror overtook me.
The cat was no longer asleep. It stirred, and boulders crumbled away at its sides. The falling debris cascaded down in a landslide as the creature stretched, arching its back.
The moonlight ran along its flanks, illuminating ruddy fur and dark black stripes, touched with white around the paws and throat.
I knew who it was then. Stone and tiger. This world and our world. A nightmare brought to life.
Orgoli. In a tiger form larger than an aircraft carrier. His great head cocked to one side with fluid grace that should have been absurd in a thing so huge. The tail, thick as a redwood, lashed like a whip. The great eyes, glowing like silvered lakes in the moonlight, searched the peaks around it, ears the size of satellite dishes ready to receive any sound.
He hadn’t seen me yet. I forced my legs to function and slunk back into the shadows on the terrace, literally shrinking in size as I tried to take in how huge he was, how I couldn’t let him see me, how I had to get my friends to safety.
Now.
I vanished back into the mountain tunnels, sprinting after the group. I caught them easily, and unable to speak to them in my tiger form, and nipped at their heels to make them run.
We made our way without stopping through the stalagmite caves and the narrow passages, emerging into the full night of the forest. If we were lucky, Orgoli would waste time searching inside the mountain for us, or perhaps even be stalled by the battle going on between his former prisoners and his guards.
If he found us, we wouldn’t stand a chance.
The tiger-shifters deserved a chance to escape, too. I’d released them only to send them into pitched battle and then abandon them. Would any of them survive? My heart ached as we jogged downhill, ignoring the strange songs and flickering light filtering through the trees.
I remembered the fierce joy on the face of the Indian man just before he shifted into his tiger form, and the respect with which he’d addressed me before I left. He, at least, would rather go down fighting. But I couldn’t help feeling that I’d found the last tiger-shifters only to lead them into final extinction.
The trees lay behind us as we raced down the grassy slope toward the swamp. London barked at the dire wolves, and they pulled ahead, scouting for dry land much more quickly and accurately than we could. As we skirted a drowsy group of giant ground sloths, the same ones we’d seen earlier, and headed into the mire, I looked back.
The bog lay quiet under the pulsing moon. The faint thump of drums and flutes floated faintly toward the sky. Tiny purple and green lights rose from the waters around us and danced like fireflies. One buzzed past me, looking more like a diminutive person with dragonfly wings and a feral grin than a fly. Or maybe it was a trick of the markings.
“Beautiful creatures,” Amaris said as one flew past her face. “I wonder if sightings of them are what lead to stories of faeries in our world.”
She kept jogging along, staring at the turquoise light flitting just ahead of her, hypnotized. It circled in closer.
“Ow!” She slapped at her face as a turquoise light landed there. Her hand came away smeared with glowing blue light and blood. The creature, one wing damaged, hissed at her and fluttered away. “It tried to scoop out my eye!” There was a jagged cut near her eyebrow.
A yellow glow and a pink one glided right up to the black dire wolf. He snapped at them, allowing a red one to come at him from another angle. He jerked his head away, but the red light had latched on to his eye. He whined, slapping at it with a paw, until the white wolf bit down, crushing the red light in its teeth. There was a tiny, terrifying screech. Then the white wolf was licking glowing red liquid from its lips with satisfaction.
We avoided the floating lights after that, swatting and swearing if they came anywhere near. Amaris wanted to take a breather and use her healing ability to tend to the dire wolf’s eye, Lazar’s punctured arm, and all the scratches on Caleb, but none of them would stop.
I had deep gashes in my shoulders and neck from my fight with the Amba, but the brief taste of their blood had been more than enough to refresh and strengthen me. I had to slow my pace to keep behind the others to make sure we weren’t being followed. I felt as if I could run forever. If there hadn’t been too many of us, I would have thrown everyone on my back and galloped them to Morfael in half the time.
In a small dark corner of my tiger brain, I wanted to taste more of the Amba blood. If I had more, I might be able to grow even larger, run faster. Kill Orgoli. I wanted him dead, but I also understood him.
That’s why he ate his children. Their blood, the blood of any Amba, made him stronger, made him able to become far bigger than anyone else. That’s why he now ruled over the Amba, and over Othersphere.
What if I killed Orgoli somehow? It didn’t seem possible, given his enormous size and strength. But if I managed it, if I ate the one who’d eaten so many himself... how powerful would I become? How much better would this world be without him? How much safer would the world back home be?
You’re no better than Orgoli.
But thinking it wasn’t the same as doing it.
Right?
We crossed the swamp with only a few scares—toothy creatures snapping at our heels from the water, and one dark swoopy thing brushing our heads with its wings before it disappeared—and entered the Red Wood. The leaves nearest us rustled, as if stirred by ou
r presence. The rustle spread outward from there like ripples in a pond, spreading the word that we were back. Was it a warning to the other trees, or was it like ringing the dinner bell? As we walked, the red leaves tilted and turned, keeping their never-blinking eyes upon us.
To make sure she kept her distance from the thorny grass and white-trunked trees, Lazar gave Amaris a brief recital of the attack we’d faced.
She was touched that we’d all bonded over her. “I know it was just a trick of the mist or whatever,” she said. “But when we get home, I’m making you all the biggest Bundt cake our world has ever seen.”
“As long as you don’t make it in Othersphere,” Caleb said. “Where it might turn into a cake with a genius IQ and pointy teeth.”
The air did start to smell like a wood fire on a beach at night once we fully entered the wood. Amaris started joking with Lazar about the time they’d tried to get Ximon to roast marshmallows with them over a bonfire at their compound in the desert. When Lazar slowed down and began to fondly reminiscence, Caleb snapped: “Ximon was probably burning books in that fire, too. Now speed up.”
Lazar’s face shut down, and he accelerated his pace, batting at the mist that wanted to gather around the bandages on his punctured arm. They were seeping blood, and he was looking a bit pale. We needed to get him, and everyone, home fast.
London saw me looking over my shoulder a couple of times and made an inquiring yelp. I was still in tiger form, unable to explain, so I just shook my head. But she started looking back, too.
A distant crack of thunder split through the deadened silence of the wood, and we all lifted our heads. We couldn’t see the eternal storm yet, but I couldn’t help feeling that it was calling out, reassuring us that there wasn’t far to go.
“Good thing,” Caleb said, looking up from his watch. “Just five minutes till Morfael has to close the window.”
“We’d better run,” Lazar said. “Come on!”
The humans broke into a jog, with the wolves and me keeping up easily. Even though I’d gotten smaller after seeing Orgoli on the mountain top, my tiger form remained bigger than ever before. The dire wolves’ heads barely reached my abdomen. I could take one stride for every four of theirs.