by Nina Berry
The white-trunked trees thinned out and the wind swept the scent of ozone and rain over us. The blue mist retreated, and the curtain of dark gray cloud that heralded the storm was visible above the treetops ahead.
The dire wolves were in front, with London close behind, staying close to Amaris. Lazar came next, then Caleb, and me, so it was only Caleb and I who first saw the pale, elongated figure step out from behind a tree and beckon to me. She wore a cloak woven from golden scales that glittered in the moonlight over a dress of dark green. Her hair was red striped with black, the long locks writhing in the wind like snakes around her narrow white face.
“Sarangarel, my daughter.” Her voice was dark and husky, like a tiger’s growl made almost human. “Don’t go.”
CHAPTER 11
Caleb stopped dead, staring. I was frozen in place.
My biological mother, Khutulun, strode up to me with long, graceful steps. Her feet were shod in sandals made from bark. She came close, looking up and raising one long-nailed hand to stroke the fur on my cheek. Her touch sent a strange shudder through me.
“You have seen him,” she said. “Now you know why we need you here.”
“Orgoli?” Caleb asked me tightly. “Did you see him here?”
I met his black gaze, and then looked over my shoulder, ears perked for the sound of heavy paws, listening. Caleb frowned, snapping a look backwards as well.
Khutulun eyed Caleb, a small smile on her red lips. “If you wish, your lover may stay here with you.”
Caleb let out a sharp laugh. “Dez, we don’t have a lot of time.”
Khutulun’s smile widened. “Or he may go.” She turned her tip-tilted green eyes to me. “Whatever you wish, my dear.”
I shifted to my human form in a single heartbeat and stood before my biological mother now clad in the soft white thistledown dress that appeared effortlessly when I needed it. I was taller than she, but otherwise I knew we looked much alike in this world. Here at last I was facing her, the one who gave birth to me. Maybe in her face, her words, I would find a clue as to who I was.
Her face broke into a wide, genuine smile. She leaned in to me. Cold lips touched my wet cheek. “My beauty,” she said, then ran a hand over the thistledown clothing that automatically appeared around me. “I see your connection to this world is fully intact again, for the flowers come when you have need of their warmth, just as they always have for the Amba.”
I pulled away. Her breath smelled like blood and carrion. It should have disturbed me more than it did. In the corner of my eye I saw Amaris, London, and Lazar turning around to stare.
“Orgoli is here,” I said to Caleb. “He’s in tiger form and big as a building. You have to get the others away, now.”
He was standing very still, his eyes flicking between Khutulun and me. “What about you?”
“She will stay here.” Khutulun took my face in her hands and turned my head to look at her. “With those who know her best.”
“Do you?” I asked. My whole heart was in the question. “How?”
“I see myself when I look at you,” she said. “I hear my own voice, for I created you. You belong here with those who are like you, where the song of making runs through us all. And the song of death. It’s all one. And I know—you long to be a part of it.”
She was right. The hymn of Othersphere resonated through me. The connection to it, to everything, was intoxicating, yet calming, as if every atom inside me vibrated in harmony with every other atom in the world.
“Dez!” Lazar was running back toward me. “Don’t listen to her!”
Khutulun raised her thin eyebrows at Lazar, unafraid. “Or is that the one you wish to keep with you? I don’t like him.”
“This won’t take long,” I called to him. “Go! Take the others back home.”
“No!” Lazar slowed down but kept coming. “You can’t trust her!”
Caleb glanced at his watch. “We’ve got four minutes, Dez. That’s it.”
“I just need two,” I said.
“Are you insane?” Lazar kept coming. “She’s a creature from another world, an alien!” He was headed right for me, reaching to take my hand. I backed up.
Caleb got between us, grabbing Lazar by the lapels. “Dez is from another world too, brother. If she wants to talk to her biological mother, that’s her decision.”
Lazar shoved Caleb away and backed up a step himself, his face flushing with anger. “You can’t stop me from helping her.”
Khutulun viewed them, amused. She leaned into me, her voice low. “Look how they fight over you, Sarangarel. Many more will fight for your love before you are done.”
“I don’t like it when they fight,” I said.
Khutulun smiled. “Oh, I think you do. I know I did in my day.”
I ignored her, yelling at Caleb and Lazar, “Stop it! You need to get out of here!”
“But you like to fight yourself,” Khutulun said. “You’ve tasted the power that victory brings.” She raised delicate eyebrows, a knowing smile on her lips. “No longer can anyone keep you away from me, from yourself.”
“Morfael told me that you wanted me back sooner,” I said. “But it would not have been safe for me to come back then.”
Her smile faded. “So your uncle would have you believe. I would never have endangered you.”
“Morfael’s a good man,” Lazar said loudly past Caleb. “Don’t let her turn you against him.”
“Let her talk to the woman,” Caleb said. He was still blocking Lazar from coming any closer.
Lazar looked at him like he was the idiot. “She’s vulnerable here! Do you want her to stay?”
“It doesn’t matter what I want,” Caleb said. “And it doesn’t matter what you want.”
Khutulun sighed, as if they were boring her. “Neither one is worthy of you,” she said. “After you’ve defeated your father, you will find one who is.”
I looked down at her. She smiled. Her incisors were longer than a human’s would be, like fangs. I put my tongue against my own teeth. They were the same. She was right. I’d felt it the moment I came through the window. This was the home a part of me had been longing for.
“The power you have here is far greater than anything to be had across the veil,” she said. “We are at war. We need you.”
“We need you, too, Dez!” Lazar said, trying to move closer again, and coming up against Caleb like a wall. Lazar’s fury finally turned on his brother. “Let me talk to her!” And he swung his fist.
Caleb ducked. “Not exactly the time or place for that shit.”
London barked. Behind her, the storm clouds swirled forward around her, Amaris, and the dire wolves. Drops of rain hit my face, and lightning stabbed up from the ground right between the brothers, sending them both reeling back. It was as if the storm had read my mind, keeping them from fighting. Then I remembered how the storm had spoken inside my mind. Maybe I could do the same.
“Dez!” Lazar called. “You know that... thing doesn’t want you for yourself. She needs you to help her get what she wants.”
Khutulun dismissed him with a gesture. “Don’t let petty squabbles waste your time. Your true family, your true purpose is here. You are here.”
I could feel the blood singing in my veins when I was here, and that song connected to everything around me. Here I spoke to storm and water and fellow Amba. There was nothing like that connection back home.
I looked over at Caleb and Lazar, circling each other warily as the rain beat down, brothers who could never truly be brothers. There was nothing like them in Othersphere.
I should stay.
But the tiger-shifters. They didn’t belong here. “Did Orgoli bring the tiger-shifters here through the veil?” I asked Khutulun.
“Yes, shortly before you were born.” Khutulun gestured with one hand and the wind changed. Somehow the rain started bending around her, leaving us both dry. “The Amba have always tried to save the creatures about to die off in your world. Ma
ny shifters, as well as animals and plants have been brought through the veil. This is how we learned to speak like you, and how we know you are not like those genocidal humans.”
“That’s why all these extinct species live on here,” I said. “You were trying to save them.”
She shrugged her narrow, elegant shoulders. “It started off as an amusement, I think, millennia ago, but eventually it became a duty. Even as the bright, worked metal of your world encroached on ours wherever the veil was thin, destroying our own species, it allowed us to bring through a few who were about to die out there. Lately, there have been too many to save—humans are ruthless. But at least with our control over the weather, the water, the plants—well, most of the plants.” Here she threw a rueful glance at the Red Wood. “We can find for each species a place where it will not be extinguished.”
So that explained the giant sloths, the flying dinosaurs, the bat-shifters. There were probably many others. For hundreds of millions of years, the Amba of Othersphere had been preserving creatures our world thought long gone. Even Orgoli had continued the tradition. “Then why did he put the tiger-shifters in prison?”
Khutulun’s thin eyebrows drew together in a delicate frown. “Orgoli has been recruiting shifters to his cause. He thought they would be loyal and mighty because they are much like Amba. But a few moons ago, the tiger soldiers from your world rebelled against his tyranny. He killed many, and then threw the rest in his dungeons, hoping they would rethink their stance. But they are stubborn.” She brightened. “They would follow you! As will the Amba who currently follow Orgoli. They will switch allegiance to you easily, for Orgoli is cruel and much hated.”
“So that mountain is the home of the Amba,” I said. “Where he kept the tiger-shifters imprisoned.”
She nodded. The green irises of her eyes were like fractured stained glass of a hundred different shades from emerald to olive. They took on a faraway look. “Our home was beautiful once. He has made of it a charnel house.” She focused on me. “With your help, that will change. Everything will change.”
London barked. I glanced over, barely able to see her through the encroaching storm. She barked again, clear and short. A warning.
“Kept the tiger shifters imprisoned?” Khutulun asked with sudden attention to my earlier words. “Why did you say ‘kept’ as if they are no longer?”
I paid her no mind. I heard it now. I felt it in the ground. Huge feet were galloping this way.
“Orgoli’s coming!” I shouted.
London sent me one laser-blue look, then turned and ran into the storm, herding Amaris and the dire wolves in front of her. With her nose and ears, they would probably find the window, even in the fog.
“Go!” I shouted at Caleb and Lazar. “Get them through the window! I’ll watch your backs.”
“No!” Lazar shouted, pushing past Caleb finally to grab my hands. The rain had turned his golden hair dark. “You’re coming with me.”
That’s how he was. Always catching me when I fell, always looking out for me. But he was wrong this time. “Lazar,” I said, sliding my hands away from his. “You need to let me do this.”
Caleb, his dark eyelashes spiked from the wet, raindrops falling from his lips and black sleeves, leaned in and took his brother cautiously by the elbow. “Come on, man,” he said. “Dez can look after herself.”
Lazar jerked his arm free, turning on Caleb. “You don’t want her to stay here any more than I do!”
Caleb’s black eyes flicked over to me, their corners edged with something both sad and slightly amused. “Yeah. But what does Dez want?”
I couldn’t help smiling back.
Lazar saw the smile. He caught our shared look, innocent though it was. His fists clenched, he roared out in frustration and punched his brother right in the face.
Caleb, caught off guard, reeled back.
“Oh, my God!” I shouted, as Caleb regained his footing and put his fists up. “Will you ever stop?”
The ground shook. Nearby, trees thudded and crashed, wood cracking, leaves rustling as loud as the thunder. Their lidless eyes were staring not at us, but toward the center of the forest. Something immense was running through the Red Wood as if it were a grassy meadow.
I saw Orgoli as a ripple of movement. Black striped orange fur a blur over the red and green leaves. He neared. The wind from the storm battered the forest more fiercely, hammering down rain and hail upon him.
I am with you.
The storm. I felt its thoughts like a melody in my head.
“You must decide,” Khutulun said.
For a moment I thought she meant I had to decide between the brothers. But then, with one blink of her huge green eyes, she was gone. In her place towered a tiger as tall as a mammoth, but longer, leaner, crueler.
She lashed her tail, knocking a tree sideways, and growled at Orgoli’s approach.
“You’re coming home with me!” shouted Lazar, a desperate look in his eye. He bent low and grabbed my knees, his shoulder at my hips, beginning to lift me over his shoulder like a sack of laundry.
“No!” Caleb reached to stop him, even as I shoved at Lazar’s shoulders with all my strength, twisting away.
The nearest white-trunked tree creaked like an old door and then toppled over as a tiger over ten stories tall swatted it aside. His whiskers were the size of logs, his ears big enough for three to walk inside abreast. With an ear-shaking blast he roared at Khutulun.
Lazar teetered backwards at the sight, releasing me. I regained my feet and gave him a shove toward the center of the storm. He staggered and half fell into Caleb, who caught him.
Orgoli’s eyes were seas of molten gold. They followed Caleb and Lazar’s movements almost lazily, barely acknowledging Khutulun. It was they who had stopped him before, back on Cherry Drive.
Then, almost too fast to follow, one of his giant paws lashed out at them.
In that moment I shifted, jumping to land between Orgoli and the boys. His paw hit me instead of them, like a truck going full speed. Pain knifed through me; ribs cracked. I slammed into Khutulun, knocking her prone.
I’d been expecting that. I shifted back to human. Health, power, complete oneness with my body suffused every corner of me and seemed to pass beyond the boundaries of my skin, rippling out through the world. I bounded to my feet, exhilarated.
“Hey!”
Orgoli’s head swiveled toward me, the ears, now dripping with rain, cupped in my direction. Caleb had gotten Lazar to his feet. They were running deeper into the storm. Lazar cast one last look back at me before the clouds swallowed him up.
They might make it out. That thought would once have comforted me, but now everything had narrowed down to this world, this moment: to Orgoli, to battle, and the strength of the storm all around.
The great cat Khutulun stood up behind me. I felt no change in her even, rapid breaths, so she was uninjured. But she was shrinking away from Orgoli. She was afraid.
So was I. My mouth was dry. The rain washed down my face, wetting my lips. But the fear was only one small part of this moment, and it fed my anger, my desire to dominate and overcome this giant before me.
“Sorry to distract you from taking over another world by invading this one,” I shouted. The storm all around us beat itself against Orgoli’s thickly furred, impervious hide. “Would you like me to stay?”
The monstrous tiger curled one lip in a snarl, revealing fangs as long as I was, and rumbled out a growl that shook the earth. My heart rumbled, too. I flexed my fingers, knowing soon they would bear great claws, claws that would sink deep into Orgoli’s skin.
“Thinking about swallowing me whole?” I asked, throwing my arms out wide, internally sending out a plea to the air, the rain, and the very molecules around me for help. I knew without a doubt that the storm would hear me, for we were one. “Go ahead!”
The great head lowered; the vast muzzle opened. I looked up into the immense maw as it descended on me, hot breath like a slaug
hterhouse bearing down.
You will not touch her.
With a pulse like the beating of a great heart, an immense shaft of lightning clouted Orgoli across his black nose. His yowl nearly split my ears. He reared back, shaking his head, paws batting at his face.
I shifted to tiger form in that moment. The electricity in the air set my fur on end and jolted me with its vitality. I leaped for Orgoli’s throat. It didn’t matter that I was one-quarter his size. My teeth were sharp, and I hungered. My claws sank through his fur and into the skin with gratifying ease. I could smell the power inside him. I wanted it, and it would be mine. My fangs sank into his flesh, whiskers guiding me to find a vein.
Hot blood like no other touched my tongue. The richness of it, the liquid force within it smacked of omnipotence. The world teetered around me as I savaged his throat, shaking my head, fighting for more.
Orgoli thrashed, whacking Khutulun again. She flew a hundred feet back. She would have slammed into a tree, but she shifted in mid-air into something with wings and flew raggedly away.
Wings?
Yes, yes. It all made sense now. One day I would have wings, too. If I drank deeply here I could do that—and more. I nearly laughed at Khutulun’s retreat. She was a fool not to be here with me, feasting. But I didn’t need her. The potency of Orgoli’s blood was all I needed. I bit him again.
He howled horrifically and swiped at me. The blow slammed into me like a falling building, knocking the air from my lungs and tearing me off of him. I soared through the mist, into the heart of the storm.
I landed hard. My back snapped, and everything below my waist went numb.
It didn’t matter. I licked my muzzle, wanting every drop. I could still flex my front claws, and they could still rend and find me more blood. I would immerse myself in that power and lose myself there.
“Dez!”
I looked up from licking my bloody paws, ears flicking back with irritation.
“Dez! You’ve got to shift!”
Through the swirling mist and rain I saw a peaceful night scene as big as life, like a painting someone had propped up in the middle of the storm for my amusement. It depicted a quiet suburban park at night, still wet after a rain.