Authors: Nina Berry

Otherkin (29 page)

BOOK: Otherkin

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I nodded. “I have no idea why he was here. And he seemed kind of . . . I don’t know. Different.”

Mom’s eyelids fluttered more rapidly. She looked pale, even considering the greenish light of the street lamp. “Are you okay?” I asked.

“I . . . something’s wrong,” she managed to say, staggering a few steps to lean against the lightning tree. Then she clutched her stomach with both hands and doubled over.

“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 as 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 to the midst of the eternal storm that I might speak to you.”

“Who . . . ?” Over by the car, 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 haloed 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.

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ISBN: 978-0-7582-8002-2