Othersphere

by Nina Berry

  “I need to tell you one thing before I go,” I said.

  “Oh?” His voice was deceptively casual.

  We were approaching the pile of logs and bracken where Orgoli and the objurers had been. I braced myself to see the bodies of the two Lazar had killed, but they were gone. The shifters had been thorough in their cleanup. They had thousands of years of experience in dealing with the aftermath of battles with the Tribunal.

  Caleb stuffed his hands in his pockets. “You don’t have to tell me anything about the two of you, you know.”

  “It’s nothing to do with me,” I said. “You need to know why I started trusting him. It’s about how his mother died.”

  Caleb stood there as I told him everything Lazar had told me back in the Neptune Casino in Vegas—how when he was twelve years old, Lazar had tried to drive his dying mother to the hospital against his father’s orders. How Ximon had dragged Lazar from the car and beaten him, breaking several bones. Ximon had then dragged Lazar’s mother, weak from advanced, untreated breast cancer, over to lie before Lazar, put his own gun in Lazar’s unbroken left hand, aimed the gun at Lazar’s mother, and forced his son to pull the trigger.

  I tried to keep it short and nondramatic. It wasn’t a story that needed any embellishment. As I got near the end, Caleb’s shoulders hunched, as if he was in pain, and he pulled his coat close around his body. When I was done, he looked as if he might be sick. I knew exactly how he felt.

  “Okay,” he said. His face, handsome as a carving by Michelangelo in the moonlight, was pale and quietly murderous. His flexible voice spoke of anger, of sorrow, of understanding.

  “Please don’t tell him I told you,” I said. “He hasn’t even told Amaris because he’s afraid she’ll hate him and blame him for their mother’s death.”

  “I won’t tell her. But she’d know whom to blame,” he said with venom that took my breath away. “I knew Ximon was a monster, but this . . .”

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d think Orgoli was Ximon’s own evil come to life,” I said.

  “To think I almost felt sorry for him the last time we saw him.” He looked back toward the parking lot. “It explains a lot.”

  “I would have told you sooner, but I promised Lazar I wouldn’t tell anyone, ever,” I said. “That promise meant a lot to him, and I wouldn’t have told you now except, well, I might not come back.”

  Caleb turned to look down at me. It was very dark under the trees here, but a spot of moonlight glittered in the depths of his black eyes. “You’ll come back,” he said. There was no doubt in his voice.

  The intensity in his face gave me goose bumps. We’d stopped on the spot where Orgoli had crossed through the veil, standing closer together than we had in a long time.

  “I have an idea about how to cross over,” I said. “I hope it works.”

  “It will,” Caleb said. “Can I help?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m going to try to manifest the window to Othersphere that I feel inside me.”

  He nodded, lifting his brows. “Go for it.”

  I closed my eyes, feeling around for that connection and there it was, inside and behind my heart as always, seething. I tried to picture it as a black window, roiling with energy; then I mentally asked it to step out of my heart and into the world.

  It seemed to move, and then recoiled back to its home, as if reluctant to go anywhere else.

  Caleb was humming, so low it was almost imperceptible. He broke off as I opened my eyes, sighing in exasperation. “It’s your own uncertainty that won’t let it go. But remember how you felt when you were in Othersphere? It was as natural as breathing.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t get myself there,” I said.

  “You will,” he said. “Try it again.”

  I closed my eyes again and leaned into the note coming from Caleb. It reminded me of Othersphere, a tune that wasn’t a tune really, just a part of the bigger musical production going on around us all the time. That was how Othersphere felt, like a dance, a song so complex that it became simple again. This was also simple. Just connect myself to that song.

  I didn’t ask this time. I simply did it, taking hold of that part of me and throwing it out and open. Whatever Caleb was doing made it seem inevitable and natural, just another part of the pattern.

  I opened my eyes as a familiar-smelling breeze brushed my face. There in the air was a door a little over six feet high and about two feet wide which opened into a very different wood than the one we stood in. The trees there weren’t pine, but larger, taller, more worn, with trunks that looked like many trees braided together and nearly square leaves that were almost blue. The temperature was warmer, perhaps sixty degrees. But it was also a moonlit night there. The timing of day and night in Othersphere seemed to correspond to our world, if not the seasons.

  Caleb, smiling, grabbed my hand and raised it into the air. “Desdemona Grey, ladies and gentlemen!”

  I laughed, my pulse racing at his touch and at the prospect of venturing, on my own this time, back to the place where I was born.

  I squeezed his hand. “Thanks,” I said. “You really helped.”

  He shook his head, remembering something, and grabbed it from a long pocket inside his coat—a length of the rope from between the worlds.

  I reached for it, but he pulled it away. “Better if you don’t touch it till you have to, I think. Here.” He stepped in close and wrapped it around my waist several times. I breathed in his familiar stormy scent, stared at his lips and dark eyelashes from a few inches away.

  He tied the rope off and stood there, very close. We were breathing each other’s breath now, heart to heart. Our gazes met. Then his eyes fell to my lips, and I stopped breathing. He took my upper arms in both his hands and pulled me close.

  “Just in case,” he said, one arm sliding around my back, the other encircling my waist. He kissed me with a fierceness that made my knees buckle. My lips opened under his as I pressed against the whole lean line of his body, curving into him, sliding my fingers at last up the back of his neck and into his thick, unruly hair.

  It would have gone on, except that he wrenched his mouth from mine and said, “Go.” He took my shoulders with his hands and pushed me away. “Now. Or I’ll never let you leave again.”

  I took a step back. I was smiling. “I’ll see you soon,” I said, and walked through the window I’d made in the veil.

  CHAPTER 16

  The air breathed happily around me, sighing as it ran over the singing leaves. Small creatures ran flashing under the darkling branches, and stars peeped down from their spheres. My skin exchanged melodies with the breeze; my lungs breathed deep the ballad of moss and wood, of sweet dirt and fresh brook. All were there with me in this time, this place, and I with them.

  I looked back and saw Caleb still standing on the other side of the veil, snow waltzing down on his dark head, wind trilling over his long black coat. The music was there, too, if I just stopped to listen.

  He raised his hand: not a wave, but a hail. I raised my own hand, now with its otherworldly long, tapered fingers, in return. The same connection I felt to the earth and water, to the air and wood here harmonized now softly between the two of us.

  It took only a thought to pull the window back to where it belonged. It vanished from view and lodged once more against my heart. That heart was now housed in a different body. As before, the trip through the veil had transformed me into something taller, more fluid, leaner, and perfectly in tune with all around me. With the window gone, the bond with Caleb had disappeared, too. But I wasn’t alone. Nothing in Othersphere was ever alone.

  I stood in the wood I didn’t recognize. The branches rose thick with their blue-green leaves, leaving open triangular chunks to the night sky. The ground was covered not in grass, but in a yellow-green moss that climbed a foot or two up the twisted tree trunks and over the rocks and roots.

  The scent here was off. Something had walked this way recently. I knelt
and ran my hand over the moss, and its indentations crooned a story of a man with white hair who had been here. Orgoli’s feet, in Ximon’s boots, had stood here and then he had shifted into a great striped beast, a tiger spirit Amba, only as big now as a horse. He could become larger if he wished. I was learning that the size of our Amba body was determined by our emotions and, in some cases, how much blood we had recently drunk. The more powerful the creature we ate, the greater our own power, for a little while at least.

  The great tracks led me over to the braided trunk of a nearby tree, where my pointed fingernails traced four deep scratches running parallel deep into its knotted bark. The tree’s chant told of Orgoli, sharpening his claws there, of him leaping up the trunk, climbing high into its branches to where the breeze ruffled his ears so that he could see the great cliff of the Amba’s mountain palace off in the distance.

  The cliff. I followed Orgoli’s trail, climbing up the tree, thanking it silently as I did so, to poke my head above the top of the forest. The moonlight resounded here without the leaves to obscure it. It shimmered through the light wind and filled the trees with life. It wasn’t just the sun that fed the plants here, I realized, but also the moon. They’d learned to turn its silvered light into food and strength.

  From here the treetops ran into the distance like the rooftops of a great city. To my left I could see a distant mountain range, capped with snow as white as cake icing under the moon. To my right, a few miles away, rose a great cliff, gleaming like ivory marble veined with black and purple. I was too far away to see the balcony where we’d stood during our rescue of Amaris. But that had to be the place, for a peak shaped like a slumbering cat presided over it, the ears still pointed up alertly, even in sleep.

  I gripped the branches between my hands and asked.

  What did he do after he climbed up here?

  The tree reverberated with a remembered great roar, one that could be heard for miles. Orgoli had sent out a call to all within the sound of his voice. He would do it several more times on his way home. He was calling in his army.

  I climbed down and shifted with an ease that felt like breathing deep. A great tiger creature once more, I sprinted toward the marble cliff. I had no idea if there would be a way for me to enter the home of the Amba at its base, or even if the tiger-shifters were still there, but that was the last place I’d seen them, so it was where I had to start.

  My great leaping strides ate up the miles, and if I ever doubted which way to go, I bounded up a tree to check my direction. Soon the cliff was visible through the leaves, looming ahead. I came to the river I’d seen winding through the valley when I’d looked down from above, and plunged into the rough–flowing water without hesitation, paddling easily through the rapids to climb up the other bank and shake my coat dry.

  I paused as I got close, taking in great, even lungfuls of fresh night air, and drank from a creek that wound off the river. With every lap of my tongue, I tasted the clean rocks under the water, the algae that lived on those rocks, and the fish that swam between them. Something that glowed blood red swam lazily past me, circling up to another finned fish thing that shimmered indigo. They circled each other in a slow, elegant dance, then merged, their colors shifting with the union to a gleaming royal purple. The resulting creature swam upstream, out of sight.

  I walked over to a tree and rubbed my face against it, marking it instinctively, and then paused as a similar scent reached my nose. Another Amba had been here within the past few hours, one like me, from this world.

  I sniffed around the wide base of the tree, ears cocked for any approaching sound, and found more smells. This was when London’s superior nose would have been useful, but my tiger senses were sharp enough to distinguish three different Amba scents, apart from my own, and six sharper, muskier scents which I recognized as the tiger-shifters. Those scents were slightly older, while the Amba’s were more recent, which meant that six of the tiger-shifters had run through this way, chased by three of the Amba.

  I followed the tiger-shifter tracks, nose to ground, as quickly as I could. The Amba stalked them the whole way. I wasn’t experienced enough to know how old the scents were, but they seemed relatively fresh. As I moved along, the trees were fewer, and the grass grew as high as my head, rustling like taffeta in the breeze as the moonlight brushed fingerlike shadows along the ground.

  I heard a deliberate crackle in the grass and swiveled to face it, fangs bared. Another swish from behind me and I realized—I was surrounded by twelve tiger-shifters. They slunk toward me, stripes like grassy shadows on their backs, snarling. Off in the distance, I now smelled blood and the dead flesh of the Amba that had followed them.

  Ambush.

  I had walked right into it, as the Amba had. The tiger-shifters were smart, and against twelve of them, I probably didn’t stand a chance. I got quiet and stilled my tail. I didn’t quite know how tigers communicated, but somehow I’d understood what the Indian tiger-shifter had “said” to me back in the cells before I left him. So, with a combination of body language and chirps, I did my best to indicate:

  I’m a friend. I’m the one who freed you earlier.

  They seemed to understand, because they hesitated. One snarled an order:

  Go get our leader.

  And a second tiger-shifter turned and ran off into the brush.

  I sat down, trying to look as harmless as possible. The tiger-shifters exchanged glances and questioning rumbles. In the distance, I heard a roar, and a familiar tiger bounded through the grass. By his stripe pattern I recognized him as the Bengal tiger-shifter I’d sort of befriended back in the prison cells.

  His honey-colored eyes got wide at the sight of me. I bowed my head, flipping the tip of my tail nonchalantly in greeting.

  He relaxed, and around him the others did, too. He chuffed, whiskers fanning forward, and I understood him to be greeting me as a friend, as someone welcome to the group.

  I stood up slowly and made a similar greeting, looking around and also trying to ask him:

  Where are the others?

  Maybe it was the connection I felt to all things in Othersphere, or maybe it was that tigers really did talk to each other with roars and tail twitches. Or maybe it was a little of both, but he answered me very clearly.

  Thirty of us are free, thanks to you. The rest of those left alive were locked back up in the cells. We do not have the power to open them up.

  I roared joyfully.

  I do.

  He roared back, just as jubilant. The other tigers did the same, and the night trembled under the barrage of our cries.

  I chuffed and turned my ears to the cliff that still loomed nearby.

  If you take me there, I will free them now. I can also take you home, back through the veil, if you wish.

  The Bengal tiger’s whiskers retracted, hugging his striped muzzle, his ears flattening in surprise.

  But you are from this place. How can that be?

  I chirped and tilted my head.

  A long story. But your world is now my home. And Orgoli is planning to take his battle there, to dominate that world as he dominates this. So I cannot promise you life there will be any better.

  The Bengal shook his ears.

  Free us all, and we will make sure he flees our world in terror, or dies.

  He looked around at the others, and they were stamping, chuffing, growling their approval.

  I bowed my head once again, but my tail lashed.

  Lead the way.

  The Bengal bowed in return, and then chirped to one of the others.

  Bring everyone to the Climbing Tree. Now.

  That tiger-shifter sprinted off into the grass, and the Bengal came up alongside me, smaller than I was, but sinewy and strong.

  Come.

  He took off running toward the cliff. The others poured after him. I followed, keeping up easily, one stride of mine matching every two of theirs, galloping at a steady pace as the dark-veined cliff towered closer. As we re
ached the bottom of it, I saw what he must have meant by the Climbing Tree. A wiry tree hugged close to the wall of the cliff, mounting higher and higher until it became more of a thick vine, spiraling upward as far as my neck could crane back to see.

  The Bengal glanced at me.

  It is far. They may be waiting at the top to attack.

  I nodded. I didn’t want any more of them to die, if possible. And as both an Amba and Orgoli’s daughter, I might be able to put a stop to the fighting.

  If you will allow, I will go first.

  Tigers don’t smirk, but he waved his tail appreciatively, and gestured upward.

  After you.

  At first the climb was easy. I thought of all the lessons in climbing up and down Morfael had forced me into, and I was grateful. The tree’s branches were thin, but they were solid and spread out both horizontally as well as vertically. I could feel the tree’s ancient song coming up through the pads in my paws, and I thanked it for allowing me to dig my claws into its tough bark, for bearing my weight and all those coming after me.

  After about a hundred feet, the branches turned into one thick creeping stem, which warbled a peculiar refrain as it wound ever higher. My body adjusted to the harsher tune, but after climbing for another thousand yards straight up, with no end in sight, my shoulders were aching.

  The wind teased the creeper, buffeting my fur and causing the vine to sway. I tightened my grip and while I waited for it to move a little less, I dared to look down.

  My stomach dropped, and my fear shouted out at top volume. The vine’s song seemed to catch that refrain and echoed it back. My fear increased. The vine was feeding it. I dug in tighter, hunching closer to the sheer wall, and forced myself to growl a soft, contrasting deep note. The plant I clung to resumed its wandering jingle and my heartbeat slowed.

  The forested valley lay over a hundred stories below me, spread out like a black and silver map under the luminous moon. Directly under me, the tiger-shifters were strung down the vine like striped flowers. Some were panting with effort, straining as they climbed, muscles trembling.