Authors: Nina Berry
Otherkin (6 page)
CHAPTER 8
Iris nabbed me at the end of the day to get the dirt on what had happened with Jake and who the guy in the bathroom was. I tried to slip away, but she tracked me down and followed me out into the park, lobbing questions.
As we walked, I fudged the truth and said I’d met Caleb, a boy from another school, by the old oak tree and gone out with him to a party. He had cut school today to see me.
“What is it with you and tall, pretty boys all of a sudden?” Iris had a thing for short, fireplug types who excelled in shop. “Overnight you’re this femme fatale.”
“You’d like Caleb,” I said. “He’s handy with tools, fixes cars, stuff like that.”
“He is cute,” she said, staring ahead at the old oak tree. A lean figure in a long black coat stood looking up into its canopy of crooked branches.
He waited as we approached. I hadn’t meant for them to meet, but Iris could be hard to shake off when she had an agenda.
“He-ey.” Iris gave a little wave.
Caleb lifted his hand slowly to wave back. I said, “This is my friend Iris. Iris, this is Caleb.”
“Nice to meet you, Iris.” Caleb gave her one of his quick bows.
Iris looked him up and down, then blurted out, “So are you dating Dez now or what?”
I felt my eyes get huge. Caleb choked a little. “Well, uh . . .”
“And that’s your cue to go, Miss I,” I said, putting my hands on Iris’s shoulders and gently pushing her back toward school. “You’ll miss the bus.”
“Nobody likes to get right to the heart of things.” Iris moved out of my reach. “But I can take a hint. Call me.”
“If I can,” I said. “Later!”
“She’s . . . forthright,” said Caleb as Iris headed back toward school.
“You think?” I shook my head and walked over to the tree. Under its limbs, speckles of sunlight ran over the patches of grass at its roots and decorated the gray bark with bright spots of brown. I ran my hand over the trunk, bumpy as a dragon’s scales.
“You hang out at this tree a lot, don’t you?” Caleb said.
“How’d you know?” I leaned against the tree. It didn’t mind the hardness of my brace. “I used to climb it every day when I was a kid.”
“Because this is a lightning tree.” He bent down to pick up a fallen leaf. “I’ve never seen one before, but my mother told me stories.”
“A what?” I looked up at the tree.
“A lightning tree. There are only a few of them in the world.” He held the leaf up before his eyes, gazing on it almost reverently. “Its shadow form is lightning.”
I moved away from the tree, uneasy. “The tree is made of lightning?”
“Not in this world. Callers think lightning trees are portals to violent thunderstorms in Othersphere. So their leaves, branches, and roots all have shadows made of lightning. It’s there just beyond the veil, crackling and humming.” He looked around. “Watch this.” He broke off a small piece of the fallen leaf, hummed low, then flicked it away. As it fell to the ground, the fragment flared bright as a small sun. The air crackled. My skin prickled as heat from it passed over me. Then it vanished.
Caleb smiled at my astonishment. “In the hands of a caller, it’s a tiny lightning bolt.”
“Wow,” I said, taking in the tree. Its branches zigzagged up toward the sky, waving their leaves in the wind. “This is the coolest tree in the world.”
Caleb squatted down and picked up a few more fallen twigs and dried leaves. “It makes sense that you’d be drawn here. As otherkin, you picked up on it at some level. This is the closest thing to a faery mound you’ll find for hundreds of miles. Oh, of course!” He turned to me, calculations flashing behind his eyes.
“Of course what?”
“This is how the Tribunal found you. The lightning tree.” At my confused look, he stuffed the tree-bits in his pocket and walked over to me. “The Tribunal and the more experienced callers try to keep track of all the places with connections to Othersphere—a sort of map of shadow. The Tribunal spotted the lightning tree and kept a watch on it. They knew otherkin in the area would be drawn to it, and they were hoping to capture someone. That must be how they found you.”
So that’s how Lazar tracked me, how he knew to watch for me in the park the day before. “I’ve lived in this neighborhood all my life,” I said. “Do you think they’ve been keeping an eye on me all that time?”
“Depends on when they found the tree,” he said. “But it’s possible. They’re very patient. Given how deeply the shadow was buried in you, they wouldn’t have been able to know for sure. So they waited to see if anything would ever manifest. And it did.”
I got a chill, thinking about the terrible patience required to wait and observe for so long. “They might still be watching.”
Caleb got very still, then tilted his head up to look into the branches of the tree. “You’re right. I see it.” He grabbed the tree’s trunk and hoisted himself up into the branches.
“What . . . ?” I craned my neck, watching him climb up and around with grace. He paused in front of a knothole, then stuck his hand into it and pulled out a small device.
“Catch.”
I stuck my hands out and caught it. In my palms lay a small box with what looked like a round piece of glass on one side and an antenna.
“It’s a camera,” Caleb said, climbing back down to land next to me. He took it from my hand and flicked open its back panel with a fingernail. “Motion sensitive, with a wireless feed. There must be a hard drive nearby that stores the footage until they’re ready to download it.”
He fiddled with something inside the camera while I looked around. “So they know we’re here.”
“Maybe.” He took out a small pocketknife and used it to twist something inside the camera.
He hadn’t had a knife last night. The Tribunal would have taken it. “Where’d you get the knife?” I asked.
“Found it,” he said, not looking up. “They’ll need to check in from their remote location. So if they’re busy right now, they might not have viewed us yet. If we can find the hard drive now, there’s a chance we can keep them from seeing it.”
It was 3:48 p.m. “Okay. But I have to be home in twelve minutes or my mom will call the cops. I’m not even joking.”
“It’s okay, go now.” He leaned against the tree, focused on fiddling with the camera. “I might be able to use this to pinpoint the location of the hard drive. It can’t be far away.”
“Okay.” When would I see him again? “But what about the money I was going to give you?”
He looked up, distracted. His fingers were dirty from the climbing and tinkering with his tools. “Oh, yeah. I’ll call your cell tonight. We’ll figure it out then.”
“Do you have a phone?” I said.
“I’ll find one,” he said, still avoiding my gaze.
I was starting to get the picture. “The same way you found that pocketknife?”
He raised his head and grinned, a spark of mischief lighting his face. “Living on my own has led me to develop a few skills society doesn’t approve of.”
“Okay.” My watch now said 3:52, and home was at least six minutes away. I backed off as he watched, still giving me his smart-ass grin. “So you’ll call me later, right?”
“Stop worrying,” he said, walking toward me till our faces were close. “I’ll find a phone that won’t be missed too much. And I promise I’ll call you. I don’t make promises lightly.” He stepped back from me, and I blinked, as if coming out of a trance. “Now get out of here before your mom throws a fit.”
“Good luck,” I said, then turned and ran for home.
CHAPTER 9
At the hospital, the X-ray technician was grumpy and took three sets of shots before muttering that I could go. I scurried back to the examination room, holding together my too-short backless gown, where Mom and my clothes were waiting.
“Everything go okay?” Mom said, not looking up from her phone.
“She took three sets of X-rays.” I sat on the examining table, leaving the other empty chair for Dr. Mwesi. I hated this bright, shiny little room. The gray examining table was padded, then covered with a strip of paper, freshened for each new victim to climb up on and sit, half naked and cold, until the doctor came to stare at her spine.
Mom looked up. “Do you know why?”
I shrugged, settling in for the usual long wait. But the door burst open a second later, and Dr. Mwesi strode in, gripping my file in one of his large, perfectly manicured hands.
“Hello, Desdemona, Ms. Grey,” he said in his deep, charcoal voice. He didn’t give us a chance to say hello back. “Dez, how has your back been feeling?”
“Well,” I said, taken aback at his abruptness. Usually he shook Mom’s hand and smiled at me. “Today the brace was super uncomfortable, but I’m used to that.”
“More uncomfortable than usual?” At my nod he pursed his lips, then put my file down and beckoned. “Come down off there and let me look at you.”
I hopped down and turned so he could look at my back. Mom had her brows knitted together in concern. She knew something was up too.
“I’m just going to open the back of your gown,” he said, and did so. Mom got up and came around to look too as he grunted in what sounded like surprise.
“What is it?” Mom said. “What’s wrong?”
“Just one moment, Ms. Grey,” Dr. Mwesi said. “Dez, can you bend over and touch your toes for me?”
“Sure.” I reached down for my toes, knowing I’d never actually be able to touch them. The years of wearing the brace had cut down drastically on my flexibility. But as I bent, I kept going down farther and farther. Not only did my fingers touch my toes, but my palms hit the floor.
Dr. Mwesi kept hold of my gown as I bent, making sure it didn’t gap embarrassingly. He ran one hand down my spine briskly, muttering something under his breath.
Mom said, “Her back looks different somehow.”
“Different!” Dr. Mwesi said, his voice booming with atypical emotion. “That is putting it very mildly. Desdemona, please sit down again.”
“Different how?” I straightened and jumped back up on the examining table, chilled now down to my bones. Dr. Mwesi strode over to the computer and typed in a few commands. An X-ray appeared on the oversized monitor. I could see my name in the upper right corner and a date from three months back.
“This is an X-ray of Desdemona’s spine three months ago,” said Dr. Mwesi. He pointed at the twisted arc of my spine. “As you can see, here is the familiar curve we have seen the past two years. Note this bend here and these here. The angles of the curvature have remained constant since she began wearing the brace. So far, the brace has been a success, a success we had every hope of continuing until her growth period ended and we could take her out of the brace for good.”
I stared at the X-ray. I’d been looking at versions of it since I was fourteen, dreading the news that one of the curves had gotten worse, terrified to hear that I’d have to have surgery to place an iron rod in my spine. That fear had kept me faithfully wearing the brace twenty-three hours a day for two years.
Dr. Mwesi hit a key, and the X-ray changed. Again my name appeared in the upper right, with today’s date underneath. “This is the X-ray of Desdemona’s spine today. I didn’t believe it myself until I examined her just now.”
I stared at the image. The vertebrae there lay straight as the spine of a book. The curvature we’d been tracking for years had vanished.
“I have never seen a spine this straight in my twenty years of practice,” Dr. Mwesi said. “We all have some curvature. Most of the time it isn’t dangerous. When it is, like Dez’s, we do our best to catch it while the individual is still growing to prevent it from getting worse. But no one has a spine this straight. No one but Desdemona, apparently.”
“That’s me?” I said.
“I cannot believe I’m saying this,” Dr. Mwesi said, blinking at me. “But this is you. I never would have believed it if I hadn’t examined you myself. But the scoliosis is completely gone.”
Astonishment filled me.
It’s got to be a trick, or a mistake.
I felt for the edge of the examining table for support.
It’s got to be a trick, or a mistake.
I felt for the edge of the examining table for support.
Mom sat down hard in her chair. “But that just doesn’t happen.”
“No, it doesn’t,” he said. “At least, not until now. I’d like to take some photographs of Desdemona’s back and have my colleague Dr. Jessup come in and examine her as well, if that’s all right with you both. We need a second and perhaps a third opinion on this situation, and it needs to be monitored very closely.”
“That’s why the brace felt so awful today,” I said faintly. “Since last night it felt wrong.”
Dr. Mwesi nodded. “It doesn’t fit you anymore. We’ll need to make a thorough list of all your recent activities and probably do some more tests. This is—this is most unexpected.”
For the next hour a parade of doctors came in and looked at my spine. They poked at my muscles, prodded my vertebrae, took blood, urine, and several more X-rays. Dr. Mwesi finally sent us home with the brace in hand, telling me I wouldn’t need it for now. He worried that my muscles would be too weak from years in the brace to support my newly straight spine and arranged for a generic elastic support for me to wear whenever I wasn’t sleeping. The nurse would be calling to set up physical therapy sessions to build up the strength in my back to prevent a possible relapse.
But my back didn’t feel feeble. Without the brace I felt light as a feather. In the car on the way home, Mom and I sat in silence as her favorite opera played on the radio.
I twisted to look at the backseat. There sat the brace, leaning to one side, lonely as a skeleton. And here I sat, wearing only a soft elastic band around my waist, able to twist. I ran one hand down my side and rested it on my stomach, something I hadn’t done in two years. My big dress draped over my flat belly and the points of my hip bones. They looked unfamiliar, as if my body belonged to someone else. This body had no sharp edges, strange bumps, or squared-off shapes. I was soft, slender, strong.
“How do you feel?” Mom said.
“Weird,” I said.
“It is pretty strange.” We headed down Kenneth Street toward home. She looked in the rearview mirror at the brace. “I’m afraid to get rid of it.”
“I know. What if I relapse or something?” I said. “It happened so fast. Let’s wait a little while. Do you think it would burn?”
“Probably melt, if we could make a fire big enough.” She smiled. “How about next month we have a big, poisonous plastic bonfire at the beach?”
I laughed. “We could roast marshmallows over it and die.”
“Best Christmas plans ever,” she said.
“Mom?”
“Yes, honey.” We turned into the driveway.
I plucked at the fabric over my torso. “Do you think maybe I could get some dresses that have waists?”
“Of course!” She turned the key, then patted my knee. “We’ll go shopping this weekend. You’ll need new jeans, new skirts. I think I’ve got a dress that’s too long for me that would look good on you. Come on, let’s go see.”
The afternoon passed with no thought of homework as we raided Mom’s closet and dug deep into mine, looking for clothes that would flatter my waist, tiny thanks to years of being squeezed by the brace. When Richard came home, I greeted him wearing Mom’s green wrap dress. At the good news, he danced me around the living room, his hand lightly on my waist. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt anything other than plastic there.
It wasn’t until after dinner that I remembered that Caleb was supposed to call me. I double-checked my cell phone and tried to pay attention to my biology homework. But the words swam before my eyes. My mind kept zooming back to how I’d left him by the tree to hunt down the Tribunal’s hard drive all by himself. Had they caught up with him? Maybe he’d tried to steal a phone and been caught by the police.
I volunteered to take the trash out. I rolled the bins out to the curb, then walked a block up and down Kenneth Street, looking for the white BMW.
The stars looked cold and lost in the vast sky above me. I stared up at them and tried to summon the feeling I’d had in the school bathroom that afternoon, to tap into the creature that lay hidden inside me. I imagined my senses coming alive again, my hearing sharpening, my nose able to distinguish the smallest odor.
I inhaled deeply and caught the scent of warm pavement cooling in the night air, the sharper tang of the cypresses, the exhaust of a car as it rolled by. But it was nothing like I’d sensed earlier that day. My ears caught the rustle of the wind in the trees, the bark of a dog down the street, my own heartbeat. But they didn’t sound any different from any other night of my life.
I scanned up and down the street again, saw a skunk walk unhurriedly across the road, watched a neighbor draw his curtains, and the faint light of the not-yet-risen moon rim the edge of the hills. The night was beautiful. A longing to venture out into it, to make it my own, stole over me.
By eleven o’clock I wished Mom and Richard a good night and forced myself to lie down in my bed. After a minute I got up and stared out the window. It was my first night in two years sleeping without the brace, now shoved into the back of my closet. I should be rolling around in the blankets, enjoying the feel of the soft mattress beneath me, able now to lie on my stomach and not just my back. But I couldn’t enjoy it. I picked up a book. Enough streetlight spilled through my window to allow me to read
No Exit
for English class without turning my lamp on. I’d often read late into the night this way, so that my mother didn’t see the light under my door. Did other kids read like this? Or had it been my tiger night vision at work all those years?
No Exit
for English class without turning my lamp on. I’d often read late into the night this way, so that my mother didn’t see the light under my door. Did other kids read like this? Or had it been my tiger night vision at work all those years?
I must have dozed off at some point, because I woke up and looked at the clock. 3:18 a.m. I stretched and noticed the window screen fluttering.
Then I saw the figure at the foot of my bed pointing a rifle at my heart.
I gasped, electrified by fear. Then I rolled. Something whooshed past my shoulder and thunked into the mattress. I fell to the floor on my back. The figure, all in gray with a ski mask over his face, aimed at me again. I spun to my feet, faster than I thought possible. Another missile punched into the floor. It was a dart, just like the one they’d used to kidnap me the first time.
“Demonspawn,” said the intruder.
My mother’s scream echoed down the hall. My whole body vibrated as something thumped hard against the floor next door. My parents’ room. Behind the tiny mouth hole of the ski mask, the man was smiling.
He pumped the long gun to prime another dart. I dove at him low, catching him at the knees. He stumbled back, arms flailing, and crashed into my dresser. I grabbed the butt of the gun and wrenched it from him. He scrambled away from me as I aimed it at his chest.
“You can’t escape,” he said.
“
I
was just about to say that,” I said, and pulled the trigger.
I
was just about to say that,” I said, and pulled the trigger.
He grunted as the barb stabbed into his stomach. So much for my aim. He pulled it out, but his eyes were already closing, and he slumped to the floor. I eyeballed the gun. No more darts. I flung it at the man’s head and missed.
My mother shrieked again from the other room. I leapt over to my nightstand and grabbed my phone, dialing 911. The phone beeped. The display read “Call Failed.” My phones were always mysteriously breaking, so I redialed frantically, but got the same message. Had they knocked out the cell tower?
I threw down the phone and hurtled out of my room. Over my rapid breathing I heard a struggle in my parents’ bedroom, my mother’s third cry suddenly cut off.
I crouched at the closed door to their room. A man whispered, “Hold her still, you fool!”
I pushed the door open. In a second I took it in: Richard lay unmoving on the floor, the sharp smell from the tranquilizer darts coming from his neck; a blur of two men fought with my mother, her head covered in a black hood. Her arms flailed at them, her legs kicking wildly. One man turned his head as I entered. Behind the gray ski mask I recognized his brown eyes—Lazar.
White heat poured down my spine, fueled by a furnace in my heart. Something ripped across my shoulders and down my arms. I fell onto all fours and shook off the shreds of my pajamas. Power coursed through me, flexing the great muscles in my hind legs, forepaws, and jaw. My claws dug into the carpet as my whiskers fanned out, assessing the currents of the air in the room. What had been blurry and dark before now came into crystal-sharp focus. I could smell the hot blood near the skin at their necks. Nothing would stop me from sinking my teeth into them.
I leapt as Lazar’s eyes widened. He shouted “Shifter!” He let go of my mother to spin out of my way.
The other man holding her was not as fast. I landed almost on top of him, grabbing his shoulders with both front paws. He screamed as I dug my claws in. The screaming stopped as I sank my teeth into his throat. The blood ran hot and sharp over my tongue. I let him go and he flopped to the ground like a rag doll. A syringe rolled out of his lifeless hand. It smelled like Richard’s neck.
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