Othersphere Page 14

  “It’s the metal that’s killing it!” I shouted. “Do it again, London!”

  The wolf darted into the fray to grab the edge of the door as I chopped at coiling tendrils all around her. She dragged the door back and with a mighty twist of her neck, launched it again at the center of the plant. Wherever the metal touched, the grass withered and died, and this time, most of it was around Caleb.

  The entire tree reared back from the metal, shaking the ground beneath us. Caleb shouted with alarm as the great open maw trembled and began to close around his left arm. Branches swung down at the tin door, banging into it, trying to shove it away. Lazar shook bracken off his face and ran to grab it.

  One branch stopped in mid-swing right in front of me. A clump of ruddy leaves at the end of one twig turned my way. Each one sported a single bright unmistakable eye with a sparkling garnet iris, prismed with veins like a leaf.

  I gaped. The dozen or so leaf-eyes scanned me, unblinking. I turned my gaze higher, all the way up the ten-story tree. Every one of its red leaves carried an eye. Half were focused on the tin door Lazar and London were grabbing. The rest were trained on me.

  The nearest branch slapped at my face. I ducked, feeling the sting as the lower leaves smacked into my forehead. Another, larger appendage thrust itself at the door, knocking it twenty feet back, then lunged for London and Lazar. Lazar rolled away, and London tore at a clump of leaves with her teeth, ripping them off the bough.

  There was no audible scream, but the eyes on the red leaves around me squinted. The entire tree shuddered, and the ground trembled. I concentrated on keeping my feet, cutting away at the last few binding strands holding Caleb. He grimaced, kicked his legs free, and stumbled away, trailing vines and blood. The mist clustered around the droplets on the ground and the abrasions on his face. He waved his hands at it, but it was like batting at insects the size of water droplets.

  “Let’s get out of here!” Lazar said, tugging on my sleeve. “This way!”

  Sleeve? I kept hold of the axe and tried to figure out how I had come to be clothed in a soft gown made of what looked like fuzzy white flowers. We all turned and ran after Lazar.

  “What the hell are you wearing?” Caleb asked, jogging alongside me as we wove between more white-trunked trees, careful to avoid any thick clumps of spiky grass. London was outpacing all of us on her four long legs, looking back frequently so Lazar could point her the right way.

  “No idea,” I said, speaking between breaths. “It was on me when I shifted. Oh!” The axe I’d been holding was now a dried tree branch. I kept hold of it. If we needed an axe, Caleb and Lazar might be able to call it forth again.

  “Maybe clothes come with shifting on your home planet,” Caleb said. “So to speak.”

  “I guess.” We broke to go around a tree, giving it a wide berth. I caught a scent of orange blossom. “We need to get out of here fast,” I said. “Now the whole place smells like my block back in Burbank in summer.”

  Lazar had let us catch up to him and overheard me. “It’s like my mother’s perfume.”

  Caleb’s face was grim. “My mother grew orange blossom in our garden in France.”

  He’d told me about that garden during one of our long phone calls last year. He and his mother had managed to spend five whole years in the same place in the south of France when he was a boy, before Tribunal scouts had forced them to move on. He’d liked southern California because it had the same climate, the same smells as those happier days.

  “The forest, or maybe the mist is manipulating us,” I said. “It smelled like bread when you talked about Amaris baking things. It’s like it finds the scent of our memories.”

  “And it fosters good will.” Lazar shot a look at Caleb and said no more. He was right, though. For a few minutes he and Caleb had been laughing together like . . . well, like brothers. And they’d cooperated seamlessly to get London to shift and to make the hut and its tools appear out of shadow.

  Caleb nodded, giving him a considering look. “It probably wanted us to get physically closer to each other, so it could grab us all at once.”

  “Is it the trees?” Lazar asked. We’d slowed down to a brisk walk. London circled around behind us to end up beside Lazar.

  “Maybe the mist.” Caleb looked at the sun dipping below the horizon. The gray-blue haze seemed to thicken between the trees. “You saw how it was drawn to our blood.”

  “A cooperative relationship between the trees, the grass, and the mist,” Lazar said speculatively. “The mist gives off an aroma or pheromone that makes you get lost in happy memories so that the grass can trap you. The scratches from the grass feed the mist.”

  Caleb was nodding. Figuring out the problem had drawn him into talking to Lazar in a civil tone again. It wasn’t friendly or brotherly, but at least it wasn’t hostile. “Then the grass hands the live bodies off to the trees for an evening snack.”

  “And the memory we all shared, that pulled us together, was our love for Amaris.” Lazar leaned over and looked at me. “You noticed something was wrong before we did. Do you think that’s because you’re from here?”

  I shrugged. “Wouldn’t the trees mostly prey on creatures from here? No wonder we didn’t see any animals. The trees eat them all.”

  London whined uneasily.

  “Maybe . . .” Caleb started, hesitated, and then continued. “Maybe you weren’t as affected because you have shadow-walker blood.” He slanted his eyes toward me. “That’s right, isn’t it? If Orgoli is your father, and he’s half-brother to Morfael . . .”

  “Orgoli is half shadow walker, half Amba,” I said. “And Morfael confirmed that Orgoli is my father.” I told them everything that Morfael had said about my biological parents.

  “Having a crazed, child-eating tyrant for a father doesn’t mean I’ll become like him, right?” I asked, only half joking.

  “I’m not qualified to comment,” Lazar said, and didn’t elaborate. I knew he was thinking about his own tyrannical father and history of bloodshed.

  Caleb pursed his lips but said nothing.

  “On the other hand,” Lazar went on, brightening, “Amaris grew up with the same evil dad and she turned out pretty great.”

  “Guess there’s hope for all of us,” I said. “Hey, look!”

  I pointed ahead. The trees thinned out, the grass looked less spiky, and a distant winged creature flapped off into the dusk. It looked like a large black bird, but at such a distance it was hard to tell. And I wasn’t going to take anything for granted in this place again.

  We came to the edge of the Red Wood with relief, and then paused to take in the slow-moving pools of water and hummocks of what looked like dry land covered in slender, papyrus-like plants. Farther on, trees began to appear again, and the land climbed higher to verdant hills in the distance. Clouds on the sunset horizon were turning a violent pink streaked with purple. The sky then lightened to a bright azure, which reflected in the nearly still waters around us like a neon watercolor.

  “That way,” Lazar said, nodding toward the hills.

  “Nothing like a nice evening’s walk through the swamp,” said Caleb, and took a cautious step onto what looked like dry land. We followed in single file, keeping to the high ground, which forced us to wind our way around ponds of brackish water.

  London gave a low whimper and looked up. I followed her gaze to see the faint outline of the winged creature. “I hope that’s a bird.”

  Lazar followed my gaze. “It’s getting closer.”

  The airborne outline was indeed getting bigger, much bigger, and plunging right at us. I shoved at Caleb’s back. He was ahead of me, picking out the driest spots to walk. “Run!”

  “We can’t outrun a flying thing,” he said, even as he jumped quickly from one hillock of land to another. “And the last thing we need is to walk into living quicksand or something.”

  “Too late. Here it comes!” Lazar shouted.

  We all turned, braced, to see a sharp-winged fo
rm swooping toward us. The wingspan, over thirty yards wide, blotted out the sky. The pointed beak was longer than my arm, with a prominent bony ridge jutting upward over the shining red eyes. The rubbery gray skin turned rust-colored at the tail and on all four feet. It was no bird; it had no feathers. The forbidding beak was aimed right at us. It lunged.

  I flung my arm up to protect my head and ducked. A wind from its body whooshed around us as the creature swooped directly overheard, skinny front legs tucked neatly against its body, back legs moving to jut forward, claws extended. Then it slammed into the large pond beside us. The claws latched on to something and the giant wings swatted at the air again. The whole creature, big as a private plane, launched itself toward the sky again, holding something about five-feet long and wriggling in its talons. I caught sight of a humanlike head and flailing arms covered with fish scales. A horrific scream rent the air as the flying creature threw its captive high into the sky. Then the voice was cut off as the beak unhinged to an unnaturally wide angle. The flying thing caught its prey, gulped once, and flew away.

  “Holy crap,” I said. My knees were shaking. I put a hand on London’s furry back to steady myself.

  Caleb lifted one hand to shield his eyes, watching the creature get smaller against the brilliant, darkening blue of the sky. “I think we just saw a pterodactyl eat a merman.”

  “Tero—what?” Lazar stared at him. “How can you know what that was?”

  “Well, it actually looked more like Quetzalcoatlus, given the size,” Caleb said. “That’s the biggest flying creature ever known to exist in our world.”

  Lazar shook his head. “You mean, like a dinosaur? Ximon wouldn’t allow us to learn about them.”

  “Ximon should come visit,” I said. “He might rethink a few things.”

  Caleb was still staring after the creature. “It went extinct millions of years ago. What’s it doing here?”

  “Parallel evolution maybe,” I said. “In this world it got to live.”

  “Maybe.” Caleb recommenced picking his way through the swamp. London hopped ahead of him, using her nose to sniff out where the ground was firmest, and our pace picked up.

  We came across a strange section of the swamp where the water dried up and the plants disappeared. The ground was nothing but grayish dirt and a few rocks, uneven and dusty. It spread hundreds of yards to the left and right, and about two hundred yards across. It was easier to traverse than the swampland, but it made me uneasy. The air smelled foul. The undercurrent of song that always thrummed beneath my skin here died away.

  “Someone forgot the fertilizer,” Lazar said, kicking a rock. “Oh, wow, hey.”

  He knelt down and I walked over to see him brush gray dirt off of something brownish-white and hard. As the dust fell away, I saw it was the brow of a small skull, with two deep eye sockets staring up at us. It could have been human except it was too small, even for a child.

  “Maybe it’s a graveyard,” Caleb said, gazing down at the skull over my shoulder.

  London whimpered.

  Lazar brushed the dirt back over the bones and replaced the rock he’d kicked at. “In that case, let’s get through it as fast as we can.”

  Soon enough the swamp re-emerged around us. We saw a lot of movement in the cloudy water around us and were sometimes startled by sudden scampering in the weeds, but it wasn’t until the land started to get dryer that we saw other large creatures.

  The sky had darkened to cobalt by then, but the horizon to our left was aglow somehow, which gave us just enough light to stumble onward without falling into treacherous mud or a bottomless sinkhole. We were tired, muddy, and covered with dried bloody scratches, so we stopped for a drink of water and a handful of trail mix while London scouted ahead. Caleb’s scratches were the deepest, still oozing, and I insisted he break out the antibiotic ointment and some gauze.

  I helped him place a bandage on the deep puncture at the back of his neck, pulling down the collar of his coat and shirt to reveal the bloody skin along his upper spine. He didn’t wince as I applied the antibiotic, but I saw the muscles along his neck tense up, felt the shudder.

  “Almost cut your spine,” I said. With the blood wiped clean, I could smell Caleb’s unique, airy scent again, like the forest back home after it had been washed by rain. The heat and scent drifting up from the back of his neck was different here. Not warmer, but somehow more potent, filtering through the air, reminding my fingers and lips how it was to be pressed up against his skin, to feel it slide beneath my own.

  Caleb’s head turned slightly, showing his strong profile. He breathed deeply, and for a moment I thought he was going to turn completely around to face me, bury his face in my neck, as if he too were remembering what it was to be close.

  “Guess he was lucky,” Lazar said. Pulled out of reverie, I turned my head and saw him standing by uneasily, fists clenched. “Lucky that thing didn’t kill him.” He jerked his gaze away from us and walked off, water bottle dangling forgotten in one hand.

  Had he felt or seen what I was thinking somehow? I didn’t see how it was possible, but then our last time alone together hadn’t ended well.

  “Here.” I handed the leftover gauze to Caleb.

  He took it from me slowly, eyes darting back and forth between me and his brother. But he said nothing.

  I grabbed my own water bottle, took a swig and went over to Lazar. “You okay?”

  “Nothing I can’t clean up myself,” he said.

  “That’s not what I meant,” I said, and put a hand on his arm.

  The lean muscles in his bicep tightened under my touch; then he pulled away. “He’s the lucky one,” Lazar said, his voice low so that only I could hear. “He didn’t have to grow up with Ximon as a role model. He had a mother who didn’t cater to a madman. And he met you first.”

  “Technically, you met me first,” I said. “Remember? You shot me through my bedroom window with two tranquilizer darts.”

  He let out a reluctant laugh. “Lucky me.” He glanced up at me, eyes widening as he took in, once again, my altered appearance.

  “Are you still mad at me?” I asked.

  “Not mad,” he said. “Not really. It’s funny. When I first came to stay at the school, I was hoping Caleb and I could mend things between us. Then he left, and I started hoping instead that you and I . . .” He trailed off, staring at the weird, white light in one corner of the sky. “Now he’s back. I don’t know what to hope for.”

  “I just hope the three of us don’t hate each other forever.”

  “I could never hate you,” he said. His gaze, a warm, soft brown, traveled over my face. Then he laughed a little, and shook his head. “I can’t wait to get back to our world, if only because there you’ll look like the Dez I lo—” He broke off. “I care for.”

  My heart sped up to a sprint, and my face got hot.

  He almost said he loved you.

  But he hadn’t been able to get the words out. I was almost . . . glad he hadn’t. Because I didn’t know what I’d say back.

  “It’s still me even though I look a little different.” I leaned over to look at my own reflection in the still water of the swamp. There was just enough light for me to see how strangely elongated I had become—so tall, unnaturally thin, with inhumanly huge green eyes that slanted up at the tips, and a swooping pointed nose that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Tinker Bell. My red hair, striped with black, floated around me like a storm. The look was new, and weird if I thought about it, but it felt right here. “Just like it’s still me when I’m a tiger.”

  “The Dez I know is there,” he said, still gazing at me. “But something else is, too. Something I don’t recognize.”

  A low growl from London pulled our attention to where she was standing on slightly higher ground. Caleb was shrugging into his battered coat, pacing fast to join her. I ran up the hill behind him, then stopped and crouched down as I caught sight of a group of what might have been elephants moving beneath the
low trees on the edge of the swamp.

  “Mammoths?” I asked Caleb, my voice low. Over a dozen of the creatures were grazing less than a hundred yards away. “Oh, wait, no trunks.”

  “Exactly,” he said. Although as big as elephants from our world, these creatures had dusty brown and yellow fur, and shorter snouts. They walked with a strange, rolling gate on the outsides of their feet with hugely muscled bodies wider at the hips than the shoulders.

  Then one reared back on its hind legs, using its broad tail for support, and raked the leaves off a tree with black, knifelike claws, shoving them into its mouth. Several smaller ones, probably babies, tussled with each, rolling under the belly of an adult, who just kept eating.

  “If those aren’t Megatheriums,” Caleb said, “I’ll buy Ximon a cherry pie.”

  “More dinosaurs?” Lazar asked, creeping up to join us. London sat next to him as he put a hand on her shoulder. “They look like huge hamsters.”

  “Giant ground sloths,” Caleb said. “Mammals. I think they lived on our earth until about ten thousand years ago. I saw a skeleton in the Natural History Museum in London a couple of years ago.”

  “Herbivores, thank God,” I said. “They’ve got skeletons like that in the Tar Pits Museum in L.A., too.”

  “It’s like whatever went extinct in our world kept on living in this one,” Caleb said.

  “Humans are pretty good at wiping out other species,” I said. “And each other.”

  “Yeah, but dinosaurs and mammals that lived millions of years apart in our world living here next to each other? Still doesn’t make sense.” He glanced at his watch. “We don’t have much longer before we have to turn around if we’re going to get back to Morfael.”

  “Better get going, then.” Lazar turned and looked up the hill spread out before us in the twilight. The short grass gave way to shrubbery and trees as it climbed higher. Lazar hummed, and then smiled. “She’s not far now. That way.”

  We hiked rapidly up the hill, fortified by the snacks and the knowledge that Amaris was close. London, as usual, was in front, sniffing the ground and loping tirelessly. Even as the sky to our right darkened from indigo to black, the left side took on an ethereal glow, picking out the silver tips of London’s thick fur and burnishing Lazar’s blond hair to gold.