Othermoon (4 page)

A large shadow cut across our faces, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

“London said it would look better if I came in first.” It was Siku, his booming voice
low. “Who we running from?”

“Little old lady,” I said. “White sweater, earpiece, following us.”

“Little old lady . . .” Siku looked over his shoulder at the plastic sheet. “At least
we can outrun her.”

“Probably,” I said. “But there has to be more of them than just her. How’s it coming,
’Ember?”

November’s sharp face was screwed up with concentration as she jiggled the pick in
the lock. “Almost there. Maybe I should’ve raked this baby, but that’s risky, and
I didn’t want to . . . Ha!”

The lock turned, and we all heard the deadbolt slide back. “Wait for London,” I said.
“In case it’s alarmed.”

“I’m here, I’m here.” London jogged up. “She’s talking to some dude in a white blazer
now.”

November let out an annoyed whoosh of breath. “Even in Vegas these creeps wear white.
Don’t they know that doesn’t make them the good guys?” She yanked open the door, and
looked up at Siku. “After you.”

He grabbed her bag and palmed the door, pushing it farther open. A cement hallway
stretched right and left, lit by bare bulbs. “No. Me last.”

“I’m not shy about going first,” said London, slipping under Siku’s arm and into the
hallway.

“Go, go,” I said, shoving November. At least no audible alarm had gone off.

November scooted into the hall, turning right after London, just as the plastic sheet
behind us trembled and wafted aside to reveal the little old lady. Her rhinestone-speckled
sweater glinted, her heavily mascaraed eyes narrowed right at us.

Siku didn’t wait, stomping through the door.

Caleb squeezed my hand. I felt a familiar lift in my chest as he pulled me through
the door. “Just like old times,” I said.

A wry grin lit his face as a heavy-shouldered man in a white blazer with a bulge beneath
it loomed behind the old woman. The man reached under his coat as I slammed the door
shut and rammed the bolt home.

CHAPTER 4

Caleb and I ran hand in hand after our friends, our footsteps echoing down the cinderblock
hallway. Yellow-green lightbulbs lit the way. My backpack bounced painfully on my
shoulders, but my spirits were high. I was on the run with Caleb again, only now we
were a team in company with friends. Nothing could stop us.

London skidded to a stop up ahead in front of a door with a push-bar handle and threw
us a look. “Here?”

“Sure!” Caleb shouted to her.

London shoved the door open. November reached her, and looked back at Caleb. “You
have no idea where it goes, do you?”

“No, but neither does the Tribunal.”

“Fair enough.” She slipped through the door past London, and we heard her voice echo
back. “Stairs. Up or down?”

“Not up,” I said between breaths as we came pounding up behind Siku. “Upstairs will
be nothing but long hallways of locked hotel rooms.”

“Down we go,” said November. And down she went.

As London and Siku followed, I cast a glance down the long hall. The door we’d come
through was shuddering, as if from blows. “I think we pissed them off,” I said.

We sped down the metal stairs, as silently as they allowed. Ten stairs down and turn,
then ten more and turn. We did that four times before we found London stock-still
on a landing with her ear pressed against a door marked LL1. Caleb and I looked at
each other and mouthed at the same time: “Lower Lobby One.”

“Footsteps out there. Lots,” she said.

“Go anyway,” I said. “This is a busy hotel. Most people won’t care what we’re doing.
Look for a sign to the parking garage.”

She yanked the door open, and we stepped out into another hallway, much like the first,
only this one had people in it. Two men in white gave me pause until I realized they
were kitchen staff, hustling a wheeled cart with a half-eaten lobster, an empty champagne
bottle, and crumb-covered plates in one direction. Farther down the hall, three women
wearing white tutus and swan-feathered headdresses were walking away from us, spooning
yogurt into their mouths and chattering.

“Kitchens must be that way.” Caleb pointed in the direction the men were going with
the cart.

“Theater dressing rooms that way.” I pointed toward the vanishing ladies in the tutus.

“I hear they’ve got a cool magic show at this hotel,” said November. “I vote we go
in the theater direction.”

We all drew back as a man in enormous green shoes, purple fright wig, and a big red
nose clomped past us chewing on a drumstick. His bare arms rippled with smooth muscle,
and his red shirt was covered in orange pompoms that helped hide a built-in harness
circling his waist.

“Acrobat clowns?” Siku whispered.

“Welcome to Vegas,” said Caleb.

“The kitchens will be close to some kind of delivery dock or place where trucks drop
off supplies,” said London. “We could slip out of the building that way.”

“Plus, kitchens usually have cupcakes and pastries in them,” said Siku.

“We will need a snack for the road. . . .” November was being persuaded.

“No doubt we can get out of the building via the kitchens,” I said. “But that’s the
obvious way to go.”

“The Tribunal will probably send someone to that delivery area to watch for us,” Caleb
finished my thought. “If they haven’t already.”

“To the theater!” November scuttled off down the hallway, Siku in tow. “I want a tutu!”

“I want big green shoes,” said Siku.

As we hustled after them, I noticed Caleb scanning the ceiling. “Cameras?” I said.

He shrugged. “It’s Vegas. They’re everywhere.”

“You think the Tribunal might’ve hacked into them?”

“Lazar’s almost as good with a computer as he is with a rifle,” Caleb said, his voice
thickening with anger as he said his half-brother’s name. “It’s possible.”

“You think Lazar’s here?” I hadn’t had a chance yet to tell Caleb that it had been
Lazar who stole my DNA, or about his useless apology.

“I hope so,” Caleb said. “Because this time he won’t get away alive.”

We were passing the women in the tutus. As Caleb spoke, one of them swiveled her head
to stare at him with eyes painted like elaborate black-and-silver wings.

“Ssh,” I said. “I know you’re angry, but this isn’t the time to talk about this, let
alone confront Lazar or anyone. . . .”

“He killed my mother, Dez,” Caleb said. He lowered his voice, but that only made it
darker, more deadly. “How would you feel if he killed yours?”

That shut me up. I squeezed his arm and let it go. I’d always been able to tell Caleb
everything, and once we were on the road and out of immediate danger, that’s what
I’d do. Now was not the time for a confrontation.

We rounded a corner and went through a double door, where the population of tutus
increased, and several curvy women dressed like showgirls crossed with Mary Poppins
adjusted their hats. We passed a black coffin engraved with silver swirls, a human-sized
glass cage half filled with water, and another woman with enormous breasts bursting
out of the her low-cut Victorian wedding gown, which had been cut away in front to
show off her elaborate ivory garters.

But no one told us to stop. Maybe it was the way we hurried, as if we were late to
get ready for a performance. Or maybe no one gave a damn.

The space around us opened up into a poorly lit jungle of cables and pulleys. Something
hummed, and the four-by-four-foot patch of ceiling a few feet away from me lowered
down to reveal an empty electric chair. Above it, another four-by-four-foot slab rapidly
closed off the hole, and I realized that we were below the actual stage.

“Do you think there’s a show going on above us right now?” London asked.

“Probably rehearsal,” said Caleb.

We followed a narrow river of clowns, sexy nannies, and dark-shirted stage crew walking
along the wall to avoid the cables. I glanced back at the electric chair and spotted
a flash of white behind it. Someone else from the kitchen?

Caleb was staring at the electric chair too. He caught my questioning glance. “It
has a powerful shadow,” he said. “I think people really died in it. What’s that?”
He stopped dead, eyes fixed on something near the chair.

A man in a top hat and tails smacked right into him, cursed, and went around. Caleb
muttered an apology, scanned the chair again, then turned and moved on.

I searched the shadows near the chair, letting him go ahead. Something flickered,
like a dark mirror reflecting gold. Probably some weird stage magic item.

I moved to catch up with the others, who had continued threading their way past men
in peacock feathers and a woman wearing a bright red body stocking.

“Desdemona,” came a whisper. “Wait.” I felt the voice’s vibration down to my toes,
and I turned, like an automaton.

I scanned the cables and random furniture that filled the dark space beyond. The weird
mirrorlike thing behind the electric chair was gone, but closer to me stood a red,
wooden horizontal cabinet on a table with strange sliding doors on its sides. It took
me a moment to realize it was one of those boxes magicians used to saw ladies in half.
The small doors could slide aside to reveal the arms and legs of the person inside.

Lazar stepped out from behind it, wearing his usual white turtleneck and jeans, his
thick butterscotch hair tousled. “I need to speak with you for just a second,” he
said.

“You used your voice on me!” Objurers of the Tribunal and callers like Caleb were
trained to use their voices to persuade shifters like me to do things. Lazar’s father,
Ximon, was so skilled at it that he could get almost anyone, otherkin or human, to
do his bidding.

“Only a little,” Lazar said. “I wanted to—”

His voice broke off, eyebrows shooting up, as a figure in a long black coat ran past
me and cannoned into him. They fell to the floor together, legs thrashing.

“Caleb—!”

Everyone was looking at us.

“Who the hell is
that
?” a woman said.

Caleb reared back and punched Lazar in the face. Lazar’s head smacked against the
floor. But he didn’t try to hit back. He stopped struggling, shook his head slightly,
and blinked up at his half-brother. His sun-browned cheekbones were smeared with dirt,
the skin around one eye now red and starting to swell.

“Fight back!” Caleb shoved Lazar’s shoulders with both hands, then got up, giving
Lazar room to stand too. “Get up and fight!”

Lazar pushed himself up to sit and pressed one hand against the back of his head.
His mouth twisted in a pained grimace even as he let out a breath of a laugh. “Frustrating,
isn’t it?”

“Oh, it’s that bastard,” said Siku. He, November, and London had come back to stand
behind me, so that we stood in a semicircle around Lazar, pinning him up against the
red cabinet.

“You should let Caleb rough you up every time you go out,” November said, her voice
biting. “It’s an improvement.”

Lazar rolled his eyes, but he did not reply.

Caleb kicked at one of Lazar’s boots. “We could just kill you right here,” he said.
“I don’t see any backup.”

“I didn’t bring any,” Lazar said. “No one else knows you’re in this part of the hotel.”

“Lies,” said London.

“Hey, you kids!” A large man in jeans and a black T-shirt over by the wall pointed
at us. “Get away from those cables! I’m going to call security.”

“Come on,” I said. “He’s not worth the time it would take. Delaying us here is probably
exactly what he wants.”

“No,” said Lazar, looking up at me directly. “I just wanted to be sure you got my
message.”

Caleb’s brow wrinkled as he shot me a look. “What message?”

“I was going to tell you,” I said. “Lazar was the one who broke into my house and
took my hairbrush. He left me a note, apologizing.”

“Like that makes a difference?” London said.

Again Lazar looked like he was suppressing a comment. Caleb leaned over, grabbed his
brother by the front of his dirty white shirt, and lifted him bodily to his feet.
“You broke into Dez’s house?”

Lazar looked him in the eye. His mouth, so like Caleb’s own, widened into an infuriating
grin. “Yep. And I have to tell you, she was wearing a whole lot less than she’s wearing
now.”

My face got hot. Caleb tensed, then let go of Lazar and struck him with a quick, hard
one-two, a cross and an uppercut. The sound of his fists slamming into flesh was sickening.
Lazar’s head snapped back from the force. He back-heeled into the furniture behind
him, and went down.

But he wasn’t out. Propping himself up on one elbow, he felt his jaw with the other
hand and cocked one eyebrow up at Caleb.

“Coward,” Caleb said, and turned, pushing past Siku as if he couldn’t stand to be
there another moment.

Siku spat on the ground at Lazar’s feet; then he lumbered off too.

“But . . .” November frowned at Lazar. “We can’t just let him go. . . . ”

“Come on.” London grabbed a fistful of her sleeve and tugged, and they walked away.

I began to follow, but Lazar spoke. “I meant what I wrote.” His voice was rough. I
stopped to look back at him. “Please tell Amaris I’m sorry.”

I met his deep brown eyes and saw real emotion there, actual sorrow and regret. “Why?”
I said. “What changed?”

When he spoke, his voice was almost too quiet to hear. “Back at our desert compound,
you asked me to come with you. Back then I couldn’t even imagine such a thing. I thought
you were crazy. But it planted a seed. I keep wondering what life would be like somewhere
. . . else. A life that wasn’t all about hate.”

Lazar’s father, Ximon, was an abusive fanatic, and he’d shaped Lazar since birth to
be the same. I was lucky. I couldn’t even imagine such a brutal upbringing, and how
it would warp someone.

“Who do you want to be, Lazar?” I said. “You’re too old to keeping blaming your father.
I hear what you’re saying, but words are empty. If you want to be a better person,
do what a better person would do.”

He regarded me again for a long moment, his jaw muscles clenching. I knew I should
go, that Caleb was waiting. But I stood there.

“I haven’t told them where you all are,” he said. “And I won’t. But they’ll have someone
watching every parking lot exit, every outside door. Be careful.”

“I will.” I started to go, then turned back, and said, “You be careful too.”

His eyes got wide, and it looked like he was about to say something, but I spun away
and ran after my friends. Somehow the spark of hope in his eyes was more difficult
to bear than the pain.