Otherkin (8 page)
Authors: Nina Berry
Mom exhaled forcefully. I was staring again at the man I’d killed. “Okay, now listen to me, Desdemona. I know you. You’re blaming yourself for all this, but it’s not your fault. Blame the people who attacked us—the Tribunal—and then move on. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Mom,” I said. Her strength and support only made me want to cry more, but I swallowed my tears. There wasn’t time for me to be self-indulgent now. Caleb was right. I was the source of danger. The only way Mom would ever let me go was if she thought it was best for me.
“You have to let me go, Mom,” I said. “I need to learn about myself, how it all works, and more about these men, and about others in the world like me. And it sounds like this school Caleb heard about might be able to give me the tools I need.”
“The leader of the school is Morfael,” Caleb said. “He’s a very old, very powerful caller of shadow. My mother spoke of him with respect. She told me that if anything happened to her, I should seek him out. Dez and I should be safe with him, and we could both learn a lot.”
Mom looked back and forth between us. “You’re very clever, appealing to my maternal instincts.” She got up and paced, then clapped her hands together. “Sounds like Richard and I will be going on a long, much deserved vacation.”
“When will I see you again?” I said, hating how wet and sticky my voice sounded.
“It won’t be long. I’ll create a new e-mail address before you leave and give it to you. Once you get to Marfy . . . Morfael’s school”—she stumbled over the odd name—“you can e-mail me the phone number there, or give me a new e-mail address that you’ve created. And Caleb will tell me all about the location of this place. If we can’t get in touch somehow, in a month, Richard and I will come and find you.”
“Do you think we’ll ever be able to come back here?” I asked. The house was old and a bit of a mess, but it was home.
Mom shook her head. “I’ll have to talk to Richard about it, but we’ll figure out a way to be together.”
This was the right thing, but I hated it.
“Okay,” I said. “What do we do now?”
“We clean up, pack, and leave. Then your mom wakes up Richard.” Caleb held up a vial of yellow liquid, very different from the clear doses of the tranquilizer we’d found along with the syringes. “We found this in the other guy’s backpack. It’s labeled as an antidote to the sedative Richard’s been given. They must’ve brought it along in case one of them accidentally got shot with tranquilizer.”
“Oh, thank goodness.” I hugged Mom. “But what about them?” I pointed to Lazar and the body of the other man. “And the one in my bedroom?”
“We leave them,” said Caleb. “Ximon will send a clean-up party, probably very soon. He’ll take them away, leaving as little trace as he can.”
“I guess it’s best if my daughter goes with you,” Mom said, her voice firm. “But don’t you get her into any more trouble than she’s already in, young man.”
He gave her a regretful smile. “I don’t make promises I can’t keep, Mrs. Grey.”
“Call me Caroline,” she said, then leaned in to me and added, so that only I could hear, “I know you’ll be strong and smart about what you do and who you do it with. I’m trusting you.”
“I hear you, Mom,” I said.
“Okay.” She patted me and stood up. “Time to get going.”
It didn’t take long to pack with Mom helping and Caleb chiming in. Before I knew it, Caleb was carrying my suitcase out to the BMW while Mom brought my back brace and a credit card. I had already stuffed my own stash of a hundred and twenty dollars in my backpack.
“Cash advance just down the street at that ATM,” she said, as I put the credit card away. “That way if they’re tracking my finances, they won’t know where you’re going from there.”
I nodded, then watched as she put the brace in the BMW’s trunk and slammed it shut. “You think I might need that?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know why, but I feel like you should have it with you.” She tried to smile. “Maybe it’s the Goddess whispering in my ear. Maybe it’s your crazy mother’s whim.”
“That’s good enough for me,” I said. “And you’ve got the antidote for Richard.”
Her mouth widened into a genuinely rueful smile. “How the hell I’m going to explain all this to him, I have no idea. But we’ll be checking into a hotel as soon as he wakes up. You’ve got my new e-mail address, now, right?”
“Yes, Mom.” I couldn’t stand looking at her, stalling, longing to stay with her, to help her. Better to get it over with and leave now, before I broke down and never left at all.
“I love you, Desdemona.” Her eyes were wet.
I hugged her so tight she had to ask me to ease up. “Love you too, Mom,” I said, and strode off to where Caleb and Lazar’s BMW waited.
Mom watched us drive off, not waving, just looking. I turned to look back at her just before we turned the corner. She was still standing there.
CHAPTER 11
The night loomed black, thick, and full of weird portent as we drove. To distract me while I sniffed quietly and tried not to think how I was leaving everything I knew behind, Caleb told me where he’d been and the way he’d tracked down the hard drive holding the Tribunal’s camera feed.
They’d lodged it in a fake utility box, and Caleb had disabled it while a crazy lady in the apartment next door yelled what sounded like Klingon at him out her window. He’d continued to lurk nearby until a white van and two Tribunal guys showed up. Then he’d snuck into the van and watched as they attended to two cameras trained on my house and three on my school. Problem was, Caleb couldn’t get out of the van before they hit the freeway north. He’d been stuck there till they stopped in Valencia for gas. From there he’d hitchhiked back. That’s why he’d been so late. I didn’t ask where he’d acquired his new, fancy-looking cell phone.
As we got onto a smaller road and wound our way up the Sierra Nevada Mountains, he asked, “Can you dig out that map your mom gave you? Look for Coyote Peaks.”
I pulled the Thomas Guide for California out of the side pocket and found our location. “We’ve got to tell the people at this school where the Tribunal’s compound is.”
“Good idea,” he said. “They need to avoid it.”
“Or fight them,” I said.
He cast me a surprised look. “Fight them?”
“Don’t you think the shifters should, you know—clean them out? I mean, that’s what the Tribunal’s doing to us, right? They kill us off or capture us for experiments as soon as they find us. We’d all be better off if they were driven away or . . .”
“You really want to kill them all off?”
I swallowed. There’d been enough killing for me tonight. “Or we could, like, just destroy the buildings, force them to relocate, shut them down somehow. We can’t let them stay there. Even if you and I manage to avoid them, they’ll just find some other shifter to capture and do Lord knows what to.”
“I see what you mean, but I wouldn’t hold my breath expecting Morfael or the shifters to do much,” he said. “The different shifter tribes don’t like each other. They’ve never banded together to do anything except argue in Council. And the individual tribes are all scattered, hiding from the rest of the world. None of them is strong enough to go against the Tribunal alone.”
“But the Tribunal’s everyone’s enemy, right? Think how much safer we all would be if everyone banded together and got rid of them.”
“You’re talking about going against thousands of years of traditional hatred,” said Caleb.
“But I can’t go home as long as Lazar and all of them are there,” I said. “Me and Mom and Richard, we’ll be on the run for the rest of our lives!”
“Welcome to being otherkin,” he said, shaking his head. “Did you find where we are on the map?”
I was frowning in frustration. I didn’t want to live always having to look over my shoulder. More importantly, I didn’t want the fact that I was a shifter to ruin the lives of my family. I forced myself to look at the map and found Coyote Peaks. “We just keep going on this road,” I said. “Do you know where to go after Coyote Peaks?”
“I think so. Mom made me recite it, like, a hundred times.”
He had mentioned his mother a number of times, but all I knew so far was that she had been a caller, and now she was dead. “How long is it since she . . . since you last saw her?” I asked.
“You mean since she was killed?”
“Killed?”
“The Tribunal murdered her.” The muscle in his jaw tightened.
“I’m so sorry.” I touched his arm briefly.
“Feels like a lifetime ago, and it feels like yesterday.”
“So you have no other family? No brothers or sisters?”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment. His eyes flicked back and forth on the road ahead, his brows drawn together, as if he was trying to keep some dangerous emotion from erupting. “No,” he said at last. His voice was tight. “No one.”
“Sorry,” I said again. “I didn’t mean to pry.”
Caleb just stared down the dark road ahead of us. In that silence I thought how I might never see my house in Burbank ever again, that Mom’s and Richard’s lives were in complete upheaval. I was headed into a forest filled with people who could change into hungry animals, taught by a powerful wizard type who could manipulate the very shape and matter of things.
And I had killed a man. I’d crunched his bones and swallowed his blood, and I hadn’t even blinked when I did it. That was the heritage my mysterious biological parents had given me. Maybe it was better to never know them. It might’ve been better if I’d just put up with the damned brace for a bit longer and never shifted into a tiger. But then I’d never have met Caleb.
Caleb craned his neck, staring down the road ahead. “Okay, we’re getting close. Expect a lot of suspicion. It’s how they are with everyone, let alone an abandoned tiger. They won’t like me much either.”
That surprised me. “Why?”
“Callers don’t like to hang out with other callers,” he said. “It gets competitive. So I hope Morfael remembers my mother fondly. The shifters won’t like me either because they hate anyone who might be able to control their shifting ability. Morfael’s school is the only one of its kind I’ve ever heard of.”
“But you said we’d be safe there.” Trepidation jittered up and down my spine.
“Safe from the Tribunal,” he said.
That didn’t comfort me much.
We wound up a two-lane road into the mountains. Trees encroached, blacker than the night, and a thousand stars pocked the sky above. We passed a sign that said COYOTE PEAKS.
Then Caleb drove past a smaller dirt road, barely as wide as the Beemer. “That was it, I think,” he said, and turned the car around. We hadn’t seen another vehicle in half an hour.
The tires crunched over a large tree branch. Leaves scraped against the windows as foliage focused the headlights down to a narrow beam. A faint glow above us signaled that dawn was not far off.
“We have a habit of driving together at sunrise,” I said.
“I can think of lots of better ways for a boy and a girl to spend the night together.” He glanced at me from under his brows. Then he looked back at the road, leaving me breathless.
Shoving down the riot of feelings inside me, I squinted into the darkness. A wall of trees put a stop to the road, with no sign of a cabin or path. “It’s like the road just . . . ends.”
Caleb put the car in park and turned off the ignition. We peered at the silent woods around us. “What now?”
“I don’t know.” He put the keys in his pocket. “Mom said to just follow the road and find the camp there. But I don’t see any camp.”
“It’s probably not far . . .” I began to open my door, but he put a hand on arm, pulling me back inside.
“Wait. If the camp’s nearby, they’ll know we’re here.”
“Oh.” Approaching the secret camp of a hunted group could be dangerous. Out in the dark, bears and wolves probably lurked, waiting to tear us to pieces. “I wonder if this car smells like silver or the Tribunal or anything.”
“It’d be better if you shifted,” he said. “If a tiger got out of this car, they’d know we’re otherkin.”
“Shift here, now?” I pulled as far away from him as I could to my side of the car. “I’d fill up the whole car, break the windows or something.”
“Not if you got in the backseat,” he said, sounding very reasonable. “I could help you out of your clothes first so you don’t tear anything.”
I swiveled my gaze to him, raising my eyebrows. His face was carefully blank. “Oh, you’ll help me get naked, will you? How thoughtful. And then what? I don’t know how to shift, remember? Or will you find some way to piss me off and push me to change . . . some very teenage boy in a backseat with a naked girl kind of way?”
He laughed. “It was just a thought.”
“Scalawag,” I said. “How about we roll down the windows and shout for Morfael, saying that your mother sent us? He knew her, right?”
“I think so,” he said, leaning toward me. “But can we take that chance?” I could smell his scent, like an oncoming storm, and feel the heat emanating from his skin. Up close his eyes were pools blacker than the fir trees against the night sky.
I wanted him to put his strong hands on my shoulders and pull me into him, even though there might be wild animals outside waiting to kill us. Or maybe that thought made me want him even more. I’d killed a man that night, and barely escaped capture myself. Life could vanish in an instant. I moved toward him the barest distance. Our lips almost touched.
Bending at the waist was alien after two years in the brace, and suddenly I felt vulnerable, unarmored, without it. And I remembered my mother, telling me how much she trusted me. How she knew I wouldn’t lose my head during these difficult times.
“Yes,” I said, and pulled away, my head spinning. “We’ll take that chance.”
He breathed deep, looking as if he wasn’t sure where our conversation had been going. “All right,” he said. “But my way’s better.”
“Ready?” I said, not looking at him.
“Here goes.” He turned the car key to give the windows power, and then inched the driver’s window down.
I reached across him to turn out the headlights. My arm grazed his chest, and tension strained between us. I clicked and pulled back. The forest was plunged into darkness. “A shifter wouldn’t need light,” I said.
He nodded, then yelled out the window. “Morfael!” His voice echoed between the trees. “We were sent by Elisa Elazar, caller of shadow.”
Outside, nothing stirred. My eyes adjusted to the dark, and I saw nothing but trees and the lightening sky. “Maybe waiting in the car isn’t the right thing to do, etiquette-wise,” I said. “It makes it look like we don’t trust them.”
“We don’t.” Caleb rolled the window down further. “Morfael, we are friends! Elisa Elazar sent us to learn from you.”
Again, only silence came back to us. “Oh, the hell with this,” I said, and got out of the car.
“Dez, wait!” Caleb grabbed for me, missed, then scrambled out of his side.
I slammed my car door, filled with a sudden desire to get this over with, one way or another. The night had been too long and full of uncertainty. For a moment, I listened. The forest was too quiet.
“I know you’re there,” I said in a normal tone of voice. “We really need your help.”
I walked to the front of the car. Caleb joined me, turning his back to mine, so that we faced in opposite directions out into the forest, ready.
Silent as nightfall, a man moved out of the trees only twenty feet away. Gaunt as a starving man, he stood well over six feet, clad all in black, his bony hand resting on the head of a long wooden staff. I couldn’t see the shapes carved on it, but they seemed to writhe beneath his grip. His long hair lay limp and white against his skull, his eyes, so light a blue as to be almost translucent, took us in. Goose bumps prickled my skin from head to toe. Here was power. It swirled out of him, coiled and unpredictable as a tornado.
A huge winged form arced down from the sky to land on a tree branch above the man’s head. A bald eagle over four feet tall gripped the limb with talons as long as my hand, its yellow eyes focused on me.
Then I saw the others. A wolf the size of a Great Dane, eyes glowing in the dawn light, hackles raised, crouched on the other side of the car. On the other side of Caleb, a mountain of a bear stood on his hind legs, then shook the ground as he thudded his forepaws to the earth. His thick brown fur glistened with dew.
“You are not welcome, caller of shadow,” said the gaunt man. His voice reverberated within the walls of my chest. He turned his strange light eyes to me. “You are not welcome, Amba.”
I didn’t know that word, but I felt as if I should. He aimed it at me like an arrow.
“We mean you no harm,” I said. “And we have nowhere else to go.”
He didn’t answer. Somewhere high in the trees, a lark began to sing a song to the rising sun. The bear shifted his weight, scraping his huge black claws against the dirt, as if eager to use them on us. No one else moved.
Caleb cleared his throat. “My mother, Elisa Elazar, told me I could find shelter with you here. Dez did not know until yesterday that she’s a shifter. We ask your help.”
“I know who you are,” said the man, who had to be Morfael. “Your mother was almost as reckless. Danger follows you. You come here only to escape. You may not stay.”
“Please.” My voice broke as a terrible desperation filled me. “It’s true we’re running away, but we’re trying to run to the right place. And I’ve got information that’ll help you fight the Tribunal.”
The bear snorted. Every muscle in me tensed. If he lunged at us, we’d never get into the car in time. Morfael’s pale eyes assessed me without expression. His thin frame, white hair, and pointed cheekbones gave him an unearthly appearance, like something out of a twisted fairy tale.
“Your heart is not here,” he said. “You will learn nothing.”
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