Othermoon (2 page)

“Mom? Did they do something to you? Richard!” I screamed at the car.

Mom gasped. “I feel this way in dreams, sometimes. . . .” Then, as if the texture
would sustain her, she ran her hands up the bumpy bark of the tree, tilting her head
back to stare up into its branches, her eyes glassy.

Then she curled her fingers into the tree, and I saw long, shiny claws cut into the
wood. Thunder boomed deafeningly as lightning flared just a few feet away, knocking
me flat on my back. A smell of ozone cut the air.

But my mother still stood by the tree, looking somehow taller than usual. Her hair,
which should have been brown and limp with rain, looked long and red. Another bolt
of lightning shot up between her feet, illuminating yellow-green eyes that were usually
hazel.

“Mom?” I said, suddenly not sure who stood before me.

“The storm.” It came out of her like a growl. Her voice, normally sweet and slightly
high-pitched, now sounded like she’d spent her life drinking whiskey and smoking cigarettes.
She swiveled her head to me with an odd, unnatural suddenness, like a marionette.
“I came in the midst of the eternal storm that I might speak to you, my daughter.”

“Who . . . ?” I started to say. Richard was getting out of the car. He’d be here any
second. “What’s going on?”

“I can only speak to you briefly here and now.” Lightning stabbed up at the sky all
around her, raising the hairs on my arms, and haloing her head like a crown. Thunder
shook the ground.

Richard came to a pounding halt beside me, one arm up to shield his eyes from the
terrible brightness. “My God, my God, Caroline!”

“Even I, who rule here, may not long endure this tempest,” she said, in that dusky
voice that cut through the crackling and rumbling. “But you must learn who you are.”

My mouth went dry. “Who are you?” It came out as a whisper, a gasp.

A bolt of lightning bigger than the tree itself thrust up from the ground where she
stood. The deafening boom knocked Richard to his knees.

Mom screamed in agony, draining every ounce of blood from my heart. Then she cried
out something as more lightning danced around her, but I couldn’t hear through the
explosions. I caught just a word here or there, like the voice on my malfunctioning
iPod. “Never . . . belong . . . Amba!”

Then the lightning was gone, and the thunder and the claws, leaving nothing but my
tiny, wet mother leaning against an old oak tree in her bathrobe. She crumpled into
the mud and lay still.

CHAPTER 2

According to the doctor in the ER, Mom’s tests showed that she’d had a seizure but
would suffer no long-term effects. Her MRI showed activity in what he called “some
unusual areas” of her brain. We took her home later in the morning armed with pointless
anti-seizure meds and a mandate to keep her hydrated.

Richard and I didn’t say much to each other as we made her comfortable in bed, but
we both knew this wasn’t a case of dehydration or a sudden onset of epilepsy.

It was all my fault. I’d brought her to the lightning tree. Somehow her proximity
to it or to me had triggered something from Othersphere. Something that called me
“my daughter” and used the word “Amba.” Both my teacher Morfael and my enemy Ximon
had used that word when referring to me.

I didn’t allow myself to think too much just yet about who or what had been speaking
through Mom. She had adopted me when I was nearly two years old from a Russian orphanage.
No one knew who my biological parents were, and no tiger-shifters had been heard from
in over twenty years. The remaining otherkin whispered that they’d all been wiped
out by the Tribunal, that I was the last of my kind.

I’d always hoped that wasn’t true, that one day I’d meet more people like me. Now
I didn’t know what to think. Why couldn’t my biological parents have been teenagers
who forgot the condom or folks with too many mouths to feed? People like that wouldn’t
pose a danger to Mom.

Not for the first time, I wished Morfael had a mobile phone. Not only did the mysterious
head of our school look like a ghostly apparition, he behaved like one too. Like Caleb,
he was a caller of shadow, with the power to conjure objects from shadow and force
shifters to take their animal form. But Morfael had other, unexplained abilities,
and a long history of watching over me without ever quite telling me why. He was my
best chance to find out what was going on with Mom. Not that he’d necessarily tell
me, even if I could reach him.

I texted Caleb briefly, then put the phone down. Keeping it near my body might kill
it before I could get an answer. When it chimed mid-morning, my heart leaped, till
I saw it was from Siku, not Caleb.

“Trib visit last night, no casualties,”
his text read.
“You?”

And right after that, one from November: “
Some bastard sneaking around here last night. Nothing’s missing. Weird.”

I seized the phone, fear pulsing with my heartbeat, and typed back.
“Same. No idea why. What about L and A?”

Even as I sent that, another text came in, this time from London.
“Obj snuck into house last night. Mom killed him but others got away. You ok?”

An objurer from the Tribunal in London’s house in Idaho too! I copied them all on
the next text, and included Arnaldo and Caleb.
“I’m ok. Coordinated home invasions on me, N, L, and S. A, please respond. Need to
know why.”

I got up from where I’d been sitting next to Mom’s bed to pace. More texts came in
from Siku, November, and London. All three invading objurers had rummaged around our
bathrooms, but they’d left nothing behind and had appeared to take nothing. No one’s
aspirin or water appeared to have been spiked, no traps laid, no cameras planted.

Caleb finally texted back that they’d seen no Tribunal activity in or around Morfael’s
new school. So for now that appeared to be safe. He sent me a personal text,
“Making sure—you okay?”

I texted back:
”Ok, but not great. Will call soon.”
No way I could tell him about Lazar or Mom via text. We’d have to talk on the landline
later. Strange events were piling up too fast.

An hour went by. Mom woke up, asked for water, and didn’t remember anything after
seeing me shift back to human last night. Richard had postponed the move till tomorrow
to give her a little more time to recover. But he didn’t want to wait longer than
that. The sooner we were off the Tribunal’s radar, the better.

And Arnaldo never responded. His family lived in a very remote part of Arizona, so
his cell reception might be bad. Also, his father hated everyone who wasn’t a bird-shifter,
so he might’ve taken Arnaldo’s phone away at the first text, or forbidden Arnaldo
to respond.

Or Arnaldo and his whole family could be dead or kidnapped.

That was something else I couldn’t think about right now. Events were rolling along
quickly, and I wanted,
needed,
to make a plan. The Tribunal was up to something awful, no doubt. If we were quick
and smart, we could get ahead of them. For too long the otherkin had allowed their
enemies to take the initiative.

Then London texted in all caps:
“JUST FIGURED OUT—THEY TOOK MY HAIRBRUSH! WTF??”

I stood there for a moment, not quite believing it, but knowing, somehow, exactly
what it meant. Then I pelted into my bathroom and slid open the side drawer where
I kept a comb and a hairbrush.

The comb lay there. The hairbrush was gone. The drawer was otherwise empty. Everything
was packed up for the move. But under the comb I spotted something white. I opened
the drawer farther and pulled out a small, folded piece of paper. Goosebumps pricked
on my skin as I slowly unfolded it.

The handwriting was so like Caleb’s it took my breath for a moment. But the lines
were slanted the opposite way, to the left, and the pressure was darker, as if he’d
pressed the pen very hard into the paper. It said only, “I’m sorry. Maybe someday
you can forgive me. For everything.”

The last two words were crammed into the corner, as if they’d been added later. No
signature. But I knew who had left it. An uneasy mixture of anger and pity flooded
through me. Lazar had taken my hairbrush and DNA on orders from the Tribunal.

Then he had apologized.

Grabbing my phone, I blasted a text to everyone except Arnaldo, in case his father
had taken his phone: “
My brush gone too. They want our DNA. Can everyone meet in Las Vegas tomorrow? First
we get Arnaldo, then we get answers.”

A flurry of responses pinged in. Siku and November’s toothbrushes were gone, sealing
my conviction that the Tribunal had been after things that held our DNA. No way to
know why yet, but Ximon’s old compound had held a laboratory, and files filled with
scientific jargon. We’d burned them all, but there were other compounds, other labs,
other experiments.

If the objurers had succeeded in taking something from Arnaldo’s home too, that would
mean they had DNA from all five tribes of otherkin, and from each shifter member of
the group that had raided Ximon’s compound. Caleb had been there too, but the Tribunal
held a special hatred for shifters. Callers like Caleb were essentially identical
to the Tribunal’s objurers, and thus not considered demonic, only misguided. And Caleb
was Ximon’s son. That was half his DNA right there.

 

I was planning to drive to Vegas the next day with Mom and Richard. I didn’t know
exactly where Morfael’s new school was yet, but it was close enough for Caleb to meet
us there. My friends all agreed to convene at the entrance of the Luxor Hotel. Caleb
said the crowds would be useful if we needed to lose anyone who might be following.
And we couldn’t meet at the apartment Mom and Richard had taken. The fewer people
who knew where that was, the better. So the Luxor it was. From there we could head
to Arnaldo’s, a few hours south.

By nightfall, Mom felt well enough to get up and share Thai takeout. I told them I
needed to meet my friends and go to Arizona, and they didn’t like that at all. I tried
explaining how Arnaldo might be in danger from the Tribunal, but that only made things
worse.

“You want to walk into a trap and probably get killed?” Mom said. Anger made her cheeks
flush. She looked healthier than she had all day. “I won’t allow it.”

“Arnaldo’s like family to me,” I said. “All my friends from Morfael’s school are.
You know that. I told you how Ximon, Lazar, and their Tribunal troops attacked us
at the school and kidnapped Siku.”

“You all risked your lives to save him,” she said. “I know, honey. I know how much
you love them.”

“Then you’ve got to see why—”

“Your mother just got out of the hospital,” Richard said. “She needs you.”

“That’s the thing,” I said, my voice dropping low. “I think Mom might be safer not
just away from the lightning tree, but away from . . . me.”

That drained all of the color from Mom’s face, and then I really did feel guilty.
She sat down heavily. “None of this is your fault, Desdemona,” she said.

“We don’t know what happened to you, Mom,” I said. “Until we do, maybe we should keep
you away from anything or anyone connected to Othersphere. Including me.”

Mom opened her mouth to protest, but Richard put his hand on her shoulder and said,
“She could be right, Caroline.”

Mom looked back and forth between my face and Richard’s, then dropped her head and
sighed. “I still don’t think it’s you. But okay. You just have to promise me you’ll
look carefully for any signs of a trap.”

“I promise,” I said.

After that, we ate, sitting on boxes, not saying much. Richard had told Mom what he’d
seen and heard at the lightning tree. I was braced for sadness or anger at the suggestion
that someone from my biological family was behind it all. But she simply nodded.

I’d always known I was adopted, but only a couple months ago I learned the strange
story of how I’d been found by Morfael in a ring of dead trees in Siberia. He’d engineered
for my mother to adopt me, after finding no tiger-shifters to take me in.

Before that, Mom and I hadn’t talked much about who my biological parents might be.
She’d made it clear that she’d chosen me, that she loved me. And that should have
been enough for me. She was the best mother anyone could hope for. And when I was
ten, Richard had come along to marry her and be a kind of friend/stepfather. I lacked
for nothing in my family.

“Desdemona,” Mom finally said, putting down her pad thai. “I have to ask. When you
were at his school, did Morfael ever talk about anything like what happened last night?”

I shook my head. “Not like that. That was crazy. I mean, he sent me and Caleb underground
once, and made me think you were there when you weren’t, but . . .” I trailed off
as they both frowned at me. “But that was all in my head. Probably.”

“So, yes. This type of thing has happened before,” said Mom.

“But nobody got hurt at Morfael’s,” I said. “That was an illusion. Last night—I think
. . .” I swallowed, afraid to say what I thought, then said it anyway. “I think that
was someone from Othersphere coming through. Like what happened to Caleb at Ximon’s
compound. He got tired, overwhelmed, and something from the other side of the veil
started to manifest itself through him.”

“But you stopped it,” my mother said. I’d told them most of what had happened during
the raid. But I hadn’t told them exactly how I’d saved Caleb. That was too personal.
Even now, I was blushing, and Mom was squinting at me suspiciously.

“Yeah,” I said. “I stopped it.”

“That thing mentioned a ‘tempest,’ ” Richard said.

I put down my own plate, not hungry anymore. “That tree is rare. Caleb called it a
lightning tree. It’s connected to the world next to ours, to Othersphere, but it has
a different form there, a shadow form. Over in Othersphere there’s no tree, but a
huge, permanent storm of lightning and thunder. So what we saw was that shadow form
bleeding through the veil between the worlds.”

“That thing said it ruled there, wherever it’s from. It called you ‘daughter.’ ”

“I know, I heard it.” It came out snappish. I took a deep breath. “Sorry. It’s just...
I don’t know what that means. The lightning tree is a connection to Othersphere, so
maybe someone used it to talk to me through Mom?”

“I’ve been having dreams,” Mom said flatly, like she was making a sudden confession.
“I haven’t told you because I thought they were just dreams. It made sense that my
subconscious would be tussling with everything we’ve learned in the last few months.”

“But now you think they might be more.” Richard put his hand on her arm.

She half-smiled at him. “My intuitive husband. In the dream, I feel something deep
inside me, like a whirlpool. A churning. It makes me anxious, because it feels so
wrong, so alien. . . .”

Goosebumps rose on my chilled skin. That’s how I’d felt about my own connection to
Othersphere at first. The world on the other side of the veil was utterly unknown
and scary. The Tribunal thought our connection to it made us demons or fiends. After
what I’d seen that night at the Tribunal compound, I could understand that. Even though
my own shadow form, and those of my fellow otherkin, was anything but evil.

“I hear a voice in the dream,” Mom continued, “low and husky, telling me to just let
go, to let it come, this thing that’s trying to get out of me. Then the voice says,
‘I have a message of importance.’ Over and over again, the same words. ‘I have a message
of importance.’ So I reach into myself, here”—Mom pressed her hand against her sternum—“to
try and pull it out of me, this thing, this message, but when I look down to see what
it is, what I’ve pulled out—it’s my own heart.”

She inhaled sharply at the memory. Her distress brought tears to my eyes. Richard,
in that gentle way he had, sidled over and took her in his arms. She leaned into him,
patting his chest. I could see that she wanted to burrow into him, to escape what
she was feeling, but she didn’t, so that I wouldn’t be too frightened.