Othersphere Read online

  I reached the door before Lazar caught up and touched my shoulder. “Hey. Are you okay? I’m sorry if . . .”

  “Don’t be sorry.” I turned back to him as he automatically reached for my coat, helping me into it. Back in the living room Caleb cast a glance at us and then walked away.

  Lazar saw my eyes looking past him and turned in time to see Caleb’s black coat disappearing down the hall. He shook his head.

  “What?” I asked.

  Lazar gave me a melancholy smile. “I still don’t know you as well as he does.”

  “What?” I didn’t quite know what to say to that. So I shook my head dismissively. “Don’t be silly.”

  But it’s true.

  “You should go back to Othersphere, if you want,” Lazar said.

  “I do want,” I said. “But right now we have to get the shifter council to listen to us. They may hate me, but I think I need to be there because I . . .” I swallowed. “I know the most about Othersphere.”

  “And about Orgoli.” He nodded. “Do you want me to come with you to talk to Morfael?”

  “I need a minute,” I said. “I’m sorry. It’s just... a lot right now.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded and tried to smile. For a moment he looked as he must have as a little boy, putting on a brave face. “I’ll go pack.”

  I leaned in and kissed him. I meant it to be a quick kiss, but he took my shoulders in his hands, pulled me close, and kissed me hard and hot. One of his hands slipped down to my lower back, pressing my whole body against his.

  For the first time, I was a little hesitant to kiss him back. I needed space, not touching right now. But I allowed myself to melt into him. Supporting my upper back with his other hand, he bent me over backwards, like a sailor giving his sweetheart one last kiss before he boards his ship.

  “Good-bye,” he said, and released me slowly as I came back to my senses.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said, not sure what I was reassuring him of. I needed to be alone, to have time to think, to understand.

  “Sure.” He backed away, not smiling, his brown eyes big and bright on my face.

  I opened the door and the cold winter air rushed over me like a sigh of relief. I stepped out and pulled the door shut, pausing as the flurry of flakes whispering down from the sky skittered over my cheeks and stuck to my eyelashes.

  It must snow in Othersphere, I thought as I made my way toward the creek. Caleb had called forth a snowy scene once for me when we were in Vegas. It had looked a lot like the woods here in the Spring Mountains, only with taller, older trees and white hares as big as poodles.

  It felt so good to be outside, to breathe fresh air and hear my boots crunching through the snow. I tilted my head back and stuck out my tongue. Darts of cold hit it as snowflakes melted. Then I stopped moving and listened.

  It wasn’t Othersphere, but for a moment I thought I could hear the snowflakes tumbling gently through the air, hear their waltzing dance as a breeze swirled them around. The tree branches creaked softly, the pine needles murmuring from branch to branch.

  Maybe this world had a music to it, too. It was just buried deeper, tougher to find.

  As I walked, a stocky little bird with a bright blue back and rusty vest landed on a branch near my head, a round, reddish-black berry in its beak. I recognized it from my lessons with Morfael as a male Western Bluebird, native to this part of the world.

  “Hello,” I said softly.

  It fixed its bright black eye on me, and then took off toward the creek. I followed, and kept spotting its deep-blue wings fluttering ahead of me. It turned right before hitting the water, and I went with it. Sure enough, thirty yards later, I saw a lean, black-clad figure crouching by a tree. It was Morfael, his bony white hands gently moving aside some snow. He stood up as the bird flew right toward him and landed on top of his carved wooden staff.

  The bird chortled quietly, not moving as I walked up to my teacher. My uncle. At his feet I saw some green stems tipped with yellow.

  “The primroses are about to bloom,” he said. “I know I shouldn’t help them, but I couldn’t resist clearing away some of the snow.”

  “Do you miss Othersphere?” I asked. “Since you can never go back?”

  “At times,” he said. “Each world has its own beauty.”

  “I wish I was there right now.” I looked up at the bluebird, still perched on his staff. “But it scares me, too.”

  Morfael considered me, still as a statue except for his eyes. “You can go back. You are part shadow walker.”

  “I could go back?” I asked, my heartbeat picking up speed. “Now?”

  He shrugged. “It was the others who needed me to open a window for them, and the rope, to ease their transition. You may part the veil and walk through whenever you wish, but with a cost.”

  I didn’t respond at first, thinking. “It’ll be more difficult each time, won’t it?”

  His lips crooked upward. “Yes. Because most of you is genetically tied to Othersphere, leaving there will require more effort each time.”

  “And it wasn’t easy the first time,” I said.

  “Precisely.”

  “Is that where I belong?” I asked. “Am I meant to go back there and just . . . stay?”

  Morfael reached up and gently stroked the bluebird’s back with one long finger. “I have never been one to believe that anything is meant to be.’ ” he said. “But I have no evidence of this, only a feeling. So I tell you not as a teacher, but as your uncle, that I was born between the worlds, that my heritage speaks of constant travel and exploration, of never staying in one world for very long. I did this for most of my life until I came here, with you. I have remained in this world for nearly fifteen years, longer than I’ve ever stayed anywhere, and I have never been so happy.”

  I found that I was smiling. Morfael had never spoken before about his own feelings. It warmed me through and through. “How does someone know where they’ll be happiest?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure you do,” he said, “until you try it.”

  Trust Morfael, and life, not to have any easy answers. “I do know I want the tiger-shifters to be free, to come back here, if that’s what they want. At least they should have the choice.”

  “But?” He arched one colorless eyebrow upward.

  “But we have to warn the shifter council meeting tonight because Ximon called.” And I told him everything we’d learned. “Will you come with us to the meeting? I think you carry a lot of weight with them, even if they are kind of afraid of you.”

  He nodded. “And after that, I will go with you to this facility Orgoli is planning to take over. Opening a permanent door in the veil is a drastic violation of the fabric of both worlds.”

  Relief washed over me knowing he would be there, even as his words filled me with new anxiety. “If he succeeds in making this door, is there any way to close it again?”

  “I won’t know,” he said with a ghost of a smile, “until he tries it.”

  The council meeting was taking place in a lodge off of Pine Creek Road in the Eastern Sierra Mountains, not far from the town of Bishop, where Morfael had briefly been hospitalized a couple of months ago after the Tribunal attacked his first school.

  We were piled into the SUV, jammed in tight together along with our gear as we turned down Pine Creek Road, passing brown desert scrub and the tiny mining community of Rovana. Ahead, the Eastern Sierra escarpment rose abruptly, brownish red near the bottom, transitioning quickly to thick white on the peaks, still thoroughly coated in February snow.

  We wound higher; the road got narrower, and trees green with pine needles sprang up around us. At the narrow turnoff we spotted a large man with his long black hair tied into a ponytail keeping watch from the shadows. He was barrel-chested and wearing only a flannel shirt and jeans in the below freezing weather. Probably a bear-shifter.

  Arnaldo spoke to him, dropping the name of the hawk-shifter Alejandro, member of the local council, and t
he man waved us past. The dirt road led to a snowy meadow turning pink in the last rays of the setting sun. It bordered a thick pine forest and a large building made out of rough-hewn logs. A battered sign in front read: BEAR CREEK SPIRE LODGE. CLOSED FOR WINTER.

  The parking lot was already full of trucks and SUVs, and the shuttered windows on the lower floor leaked a lot of light. Two people at the entrance, a man and a woman, eyed us suspiciously as we piled out. Arnaldo ran up to speak to them. As I stepped out into the crisp air, my crazy hearing caught the sound of applause coming from the lodge and then a familiar voice speaking.

  London’s wolf-shifter ears were almost as sharp as mine. “Is that November talking?” she asked. “This I’ve got to see.”

  We clattered up the wooden steps to the lodge, and the guards waved us through, giving Morfael wary glances, but saying nothing to stop us.

  The reception area just inside was deserted, including the check-in desk and the long tables set with plastic cups, water pitchers, and large plates of half-eaten meat and cheese.

  Brighter light filtered through the closed double doors to the left, along with November’s voice.

  “If a rat-shifter like me can hang out with Siku’s family of bears, if Siku and I could fight alongside a wolf, an eagle, and a fricking tiger-shifter . . .” she was saying as we headed for the doors.

  Arnaldo pushed the doors open as we entered a large room filled with people on folding chairs, all circled around a worn podium, where November was standing without a microphone, still speaking. “. . . then why can’t all shifters of all tribes come together just once to destroy the enemy that wants to destroy us?”

  Applause broke out, but not everyone was clapping.

  At our entrance, heads turned. Next to Arnaldo, London was striding with her three dire wolves trotting around her, then me and Caleb, Amaris, Morfael, and Lazar shepherding Luis and Cordero. We’d agreed in the car to let Arnaldo get the council’s attention, and then for London to tell everyone about our trip to Othersphere and the threat Orgoli presented. As the “purest” shifter who had actually been to Othersphere, London would be considered the most trustworthy and legitimate among those of us who had been there. She’d protested a little at first at taking on such an important role, but with encouragement from us all, particularly Amaris and the unspoken pack support of her dire wolves, she’d finally said yes.

  As callers and Tribunal-connected people, Morfael, Caleb, Lazar, and Amaris would be considered less trustworthy by a crowd of shifters, and so agreed to remain more in the background unless they were needed. I, as a pseudo-shifter, would hover somewhere in between.

  There had to be over a hundred people in the rough-hewn ballroom, some standing along the walls or sitting in the aisles, and most of them seemed to be holding out phones, tablets, or laptops so that friends and family back home could watch and listen in as well.

  “It’s the tiger-shifter!” a woman exclaimed nearby.

  “Those aren’t wolf-shifters,” someone else whispered as the dire wolves passed.

  People on the far side of the room started to stand up to see what the fuss was about, and November frowned, looking around for the disturbance, until her shining brown eyes landed on us.

  “Holy shit!” she said, which caused a ripple of laughter and more heads to turn.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” London said, projecting her voice almost too loudly in her nervousness. “But we’ve got news all of you should hear.”

  “Not all of these people were invited here,” November said. “And not all of them are shifters.”

  “We’re all otherkin,” Arnaldo said. “One way or another.”

  A woman with short gray tufted hair in a big blue flannel shirt and jeans stood up from her chair next to the podium, and I recognized her as Jonata, the lynx-shifter who represented the big cat tribe in the local council meetings. “Desdemona? It’s good to see you. We were just about to hold a vote.”

  “Before that, we need to tell you about an impending attack,” I said.

  “Attack?” a man asked from the crowd.

  “From the Tribunal?” someone else said.

  Arnaldo and London had reached the podium. “Kind of from the Tribunal,” Arnaldo said.

  “But kind of not,” said London.

  “Let us explain,” I said, moving up near the dire wolves, who stood around London like a furry phalanx.

  “You don’t have any right to speak here,” November said. “You’re not even really a shifter.”

  “That’s funny,” I said. “You were just talking about working alongside a tiger-shifter. Did you meet another one somewhere I haven’t heard about?”

  “Let them talk,” said a man with a piercing voice, seated next to Jonata. I recognized his hooded eyes and long face. It was Alejandro, the hawk-shifter from the local council who’d helped Arnaldo gain custody of his brothers while their father was in rehab.

  “Agreed,” said the small woman next to him, pinning up her slippery black hair. She smiled at me, and I smiled back in recognition. It was the rat-shifter from the local council, who along with Jonata and Alejandro and a few other bear and raptor-shifters, had fought beside us in the desert outside Ximon’s particle accelerator, where Siku had died. “These are the young people who engineered the Tribunal’s great defeat near Mercury, Nevada,” the rat-shifter continued. “And who burned down their compound in the Mojave desert before that. I think they’ve earned the right to speak.”

  Next to the rat-shifter I saw the wolf and bear council members look at each other, frowning, but they didn’t object. They were probably curious to hear what we had to say before they shot it down. The rest of the audience, roughly equally male and female, murmured and moved restlessly in their chairs.

  “The majority of the council agrees to let these people speak,” said Jonata, moving a few feet away from the podium. “Ms. Anderson?” She leaned in toward November, who hadn’t budged from where she stood. “Please allow your friends the podium.”

  “Friends!” muttered November, but she shuffled to the side.

  “Yep,” London said in a low voice only those of us near the podium could hear. “We’re your friends whether you like it or not.”

  Arnaldo moved up to the podium, pointing to a spot on the floor to indicate where his younger brothers should take a seat. Lazar ushered them over there and sat down next to them. Amaris followed suit. Caleb stood off to the side, leaning against a wall along with a bunch of very tall, broad-shouldered people who were probably bear-shifters.

  “Fellow shifters and guests,” Arnaldo said. “We’ve uncovered a new kind of threat, one that comes not just from the Tribunal, but from Othersphere itself.”

  The murmuring in the room ascended to a rumble. London moved to take Arnaldo’s place. Her knuckles gripping the sides of the podium were white, but her voice was strong and more assured with every word. “We were just there, in Othersphere. We’ve seen the threat. We know it’s real.”

  “What are those?” asked a man seated nearest the head wolf-shifter. “They’re not like any wolves any of us have seen, and we know wolves!”

  Sharp laughter and shouts of “Yeah!” came from the group around him. They must be the wolf-shifters, one of the most distrustful tribes because they’d always been specially targeted and visible, often mistakenly labeled werewolves. They were another good reason to make London our main advocate. If we could win over the wolf tribe, we’d win everyone.

  “These are dire wolves,” London said, placing her hand on top of the head of the black dire wolf seated on his haunches next to her. “A species that lived here in America about ten thousand years ago. They followed me back from Othersphere.”

  Growls of disbelief reverberated off the walls.

  “Bullshit!” shouted the wolf-shifter leader. His thick reddish hair stood nearly on end, his sideburns bristling. “They’re some new kind of dog the humdrums have bred so they can pretend to be ordering wolves around.” />
  “They look a lot like the drawings of dire wolves in the Tar Pits Museum,” a woman’s voice said from the wolf crowd.

  Arguments broke out all over the room, loud enough to pull Jonata back to her feet and slam down the wooden gavel sitting on the podium. “Quiet!” she shouted.

  The noise lowered to a buzz. “We have voted to let them speak.” She turned to London. “Tell your story, Laurentia.”

  I’d almost forgotten that London’s given name was a long Latin mouthful that translated into “wolf.” London nodded to Jonata gratefully, caught Amaris’s encouraging eye, and then said, “It began when a girl from our school was kidnapped. This is Amaris, and she’s the daughter of Ximon, the notorious Tribunal Bishop you all know and hate.”

  “You brought a Tribunal member here?” The wolf-shifter council leader stood up, incredulous. “Traitor!”

  Someone else called out “traitor!” too and others started to argue with them. The group of wolf-shifters was a roiling sea of confusion and anger. I wondered if any of them were London’s estranged family.

  London watched them, breathing hard, and then her ice-blue eyes narrowed in a look I’d seen in her wolf form just before she attacked.

  “Let me speak!” she barked.

  As if on cue, all three of her dire wolves threw their heads back and howled.

  The wolf-shifter crowd went silent as a windless night, every eye wide and staring as the three great wolves sang a keening, haunting cry of wild nights hunting under the moon, of pack and cub, of loss and birth. My skin pricked with gooseflesh at the melancholy, sacred sound.

  London placed her hand on the head of the black dire wolf, and all three let their yowls trail off. Every person in the room sat still and quiet.

  “As I was saying,” London continued. Her voice was still strong, but there was a tiny smile at the corners of her mouth. “Amaris left the Tribunal, along with her brother Lazar, because they wished to escape their father’s abuse, and to learn the ways of the otherkin. Then Amaris was kidnapped by Ximon, or so we thought . . .”