Othersphere Read online

  As they poured past her, a striped stampede, she pointed over at the big metal door at the top of the staircase. “Do you still have that knife of yours on you . . . somewhere?” She had to shout a bit over the snarls and roars around us. “We can’t bring lock picks with us in rat-form, and that was the only way we could get inside. We need to open the door to let Arnaldo and everyone inside.”

  Even though it wasn’t visible, I did have the Shadow Blade. As always, whenever I shifted to a non-human form, it blended in as part of me, and it reappeared in its scabbard on a belt around my waist whenever I became human again.

  I meowed at her and bounded down the hallway through the mass of striped fur, crossed the thirty yards of open ground in a second, and leaped atop the stair in a single bound. The two rat-shifters there fussing with the locked door handle were short handsome boys with spiky brown hair a lot like November’s. They startled at my arrival, and then grinned, showing all their teeth.

  “You must be Stripes,” one of them said. “I’m Toby, ’Ember’s brother. This is Jules.”

  The other one waved. “Another ’Ember brother.”

  The view up here showed a huge cement room cluttered with metal and pipes curving in a circle below us. Banks of computers lined the walls closest to us. The bank of laser tubes and other circuitry formed a huge semisphere in the center of the room, with the hallway to the Othersphere door down the center. But the walls of the room curved around behind the array of pipes, out of sight. There was more back there I couldn’t see, and the tiger-shifters were following November’s lead that way.

  I shifted to my human form. The rat-shifter brothers took it right in stride. “Nice to meet you,” I said to Toby and Jules. “Where are the other eight of you?” November had ten older brothers, most of them named after months of the year like her. Toby was October, and Jules had to be July.

  “Busy helping the other shifters, probably,” Toby said. “Or stopping for a smoke.”

  “You shift fast, tiger lady,” Jules said. “What’s that?”

  He was pointing to the Shadow Blade, which had appeared on its leather belt around my naked waist. I gripped the haft and calm rushed over me. The itch from the surrounding metal completely disappeared.

  I recognized the feeling now. It was the same centered feeling I had in Othersphere, the knowledge that I was fully integrated into the universe. Even if I didn’t go back to Othersphere, at least I’d still have the Blade here as a reminder.

  I pulled the dagger from its scabbard, revealing its smoky-edged blade. It was as black as the vastness of space without the stars.

  “Whoa,” said Jules again.

  I put the tip of the blade to the metal door, aiming near the lock. Above me, the red light was still blazing, the alarm loud and obnoxious to my ears. I focused my thoughts on it, feeling the “wrongness” of worked metal, and told it, “Shut up!”

  The alarm went silent, and the light went out. There was blessed quiet and minimal light, which suited my tiger-shifter eyes just fine.

  “Whoa!” said Toby.

  I sliced the Blade through the metal door. The amorphous edge firmed up and bit down happily, as if eating the metal. It cut through the steel as if it were paper, right through a large metal bolt and another locking mechanism.

  I pulled the blade out and tugged on the door. It swung open without a sound.

  “Awesome,” said Toby.

  “Let’s go!” Jules scampered through the open door, which led to a cement hallway. Toby followed and I peered after them. The lighting was low here, too, every third fluorescent panel in the ceiling faintly aglow for the night.

  A familiar pair of figures came running around the corner toward us, one blond as a sunny day, and the other dark as the Shadow Blade: Lazar and Caleb. It lifted my heart to see them side by side. Behind them strode Arnaldo, Amaris, London, and her two dire wolves. There were others, too, but not many. Where were the rest of the shifters?

  November’s brothers skidded to a stop and waved at them. “This way! This way!”

  I waved, too. My friends caught sight of me and smiled. But the two brothers’ faces were the most revealing. Each bore the same expression of extreme, almost exhausted relief at seeing me. Caleb waved back, and began shrugging out of his coat immediately. Lazar started to run alongside Caleb. Then, as if remembering things had changed between us, he made himself slow down and let Caleb get ahead of him. There was pain on his face, but something more. My throat tightened as I realized he was looking at his brother with love, and acceptance, and the tiniest bit of pride. As if he’d done something to help Caleb smile at the sight of me.

  Maybe he had.

  That was why Lazar had broken up with me. To atone for killing Caleb’s mother, he’d given Caleb his heart’s desire. Me.

  Unshed tears pooled in my eyes. Caleb ran up, holding his coat to throw it around my shoulders with a flourish like a cloak. He wrapped it around me, and then enfolded me tightly in his arms. I could hear his quick, steady heartbeat, and I buried my face in the curve of his neck, inhaling his thunderstorm scent. No wonder I loved him. He smelled like the air around the Lightning Tree and the eternal storm in its shadow.

  He pulled back, hands warm and strong on my shoulders, and caught my eyes with his dark gaze. His smile checked and faded. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  I shook my head, smiling and wiping my eyes as I put first one arm, then the other through the sleeves of his coat. “I’ll tell you later.”

  The ground heaved upwards beneath our feet, causing the metal staircase to creak alarmingly, and all the machinery in the room to sway and bounce. I caught hold of the wall with one hand and Caleb with the other to stay upright. Thirty feet over our heads, the blank white ceiling cracked from one corner to the other.

  “Hope he can’t keep that up too long,” Caleb said. “Or he’ll bring the roof down on all of us.”

  The rest of my friends had caught up, panting a little from running. I smiled at Lazar, and then quickly looked away, happy to see everyone else looking well. “So good to see you all.”

  “Welcome back, Dezzy!” Amaris shouted. She and London were holding hands, looking adorable.

  “Glad to see you,” Lazar said quietly. His eyes on me were warm but cautious.

  Caleb was looking past me at the tiger-shifters. “I see you brought back some friends.” His hand surreptitiously rubbed my back in tiny circles. “Well done.”

  “Where’s your army?” I asked. I was trying not to lean into him too obviously here in front of Lazar, before anything could or would be explained to the others. But being here, next to Caleb, I felt a huge wave of relief breaking over me. I wanted to do nothing more than rest in his arms, tell him everything. But that would have to wait, assuming we survived the rest of the night.

  “The other shifters are busy incapacitating the humdrum guards and all that,” London said. “The place is on a pretty strong lockdown, so it hasn’t been easy. Once it was clear, we ran ahead to see if Orgoli had opened the door yet.”

  “He has,” I said. “But November and her friends shooed back the animals that crossed over. And I told the rest to go home. That seems to be what they’re doing, so he should be alone.”

  “Still won’t be easy,” Caleb said. “Where is he?”

  “He’s around the back of the laser machinery there, destroying it.”

  “Why doesn’t he just, you know”—London wiggled her fingers toward the bank of lasers—“call forth some shadow and send it all back to Othersphere.”

  Lazar hummed as she spoke, squinting down at the laser bank. “It doesn’t have a shadow in Othersphere,” he said. “We got lucky with the helicopter tonight. The higher tech something is, the less likely it’ll be attached to anything in Othersphere. And this laser’s about as high tech as this world gets.”

  “If we can’t get the lasers going again, we’ll never be able to close the doorway,” said Arnaldo. “We figured out that Orgoli would nee
d something powerful from Othersphere to use as a focus for the lasers. Morfael thinks he has a focus we can use to shut the door again, but the lasers need to be working. If you can stop him, maybe we can reprogram it.”

  “A focus for the lasers . . .” I was thinking hard. A lot of what Arnaldo said usually went right over my head, but something about his statement clicked now. “November found what looked like shards of Orgoli’s staff right in front of the doorway. Could that have been his focus?”

  “That must be it!” Arnaldo’s eyes lit up, but then his face fell. “What the hell do we have as powerful as that to reverse it?”

  Light footsteps padded down the hallway, accompanied by a well-known tapping sound. Morfael’s gaunt figure, wrapped in black, glided down the hallway toward us. He was holding his own wooden staff out, hitting the floor lightly in front of him as he came. I waved. He lifted a bony white hand in greeting.

  Arnaldo was staring at Morfael’s staff. “No way. We can’t ask him to give that up.”

  “I don’t think you’ll have to ask,” I said.

  An explosion of horrible snarls and snappings erupted behind us.

  Three tiger-shifters flew over the top of the half-sphere of machinery in the center of the room, bloody, legs flailing, and squalling in pain. They landed with painful thumps on the hard floor below us. All three stirred, still alive, and I knew they could shift soon to heal.

  “Let’s go!” Caleb shouted.

  I put one hand on the stair’s railing and vaulted over it, dropping twenty feet to land easily on the floor below. Thank you, cat-shifter strength and dexterity.

  Caleb, Lazar, and Arnaldo ran full speed down the stairs, followed by London and her dire wolves, with Amaris nearest the back, waiting to see if her healing abilities would be needed.

  I didn’t wait, but tore off Caleb’s coat, tossing it to him even as I shifted. I was tiger once more, and I chirped a request to the tiger-shifters in this part of the room to go up the stairs and help the other shifters deal with guards and humdrums—in a nonlethal fashion. The room was getting crowded, and if Orgoli’s earthquake brought the building down, I didn’t want every tiger-shifter now on earth to be killed. Something good had to come of this.

  The tiger-shifters swarmed up the stairs we’d just come down, snarling promises to do as I’d asked, and I sprinted around the corner of the laser machinery, ears cocked to hear anything useful.

  As I ran through the curving hallway behind the lasers, I heard painful meows and felt a low rumble in my chest. Orgoli’s growl. There was also a faint, human whimpering, a more erratic heartbeat than the tiger-shifters’. Who could be in there with them? Maybe it was one of the rat-shifters somehow unable to shift into rat form.

  The hallway opened up to a large room a hundred feet square lined with computers and equipment. Some of them were sparking and gouged, smoking. But it was Orgoli who filled the room. He wasn’t mountain peak–sized here, but still he was five times as big as I was. He looked a veritable dragon of a tiger, over twenty feet high and sixty feet long. His coat was bloody orange-red, slashed with stripes so black they reflected no light. His fierce head was spattered with blood, and strips of flesh hung from his teeth.

  At his feet lay the Bengal tiger, my friend, his abdomen torn open, eyes eternally open. Sadness and rage overtook me as his body shifted for the last time, back to human. As Siku’s had done.

  A weak, very human whimpering came from a huddled form wedged tightly in a corner under a shelf of hard drives. It was Ximon, arms wrapped around his knees, rocking ever so slightly back and forth. His gray shirt and pants were ragged and dirty, his body wasted away. His white hair was patchy, and his once glittering, intelligent eyes were dull with fear and confusion. He stared right at me, that mindless whimper issuing from the back of his throat.

  After using Ximon’s body to step through the veil and escape back at the lodge, Orgoli must have stepped back through the veil here at the NIF, still inside it. He’d used Ximon’s fingers to set up the lasers, to fire them, and open the doorway. But in stepping back through the door to his home world, he’d shed Ximon like a skin, and left him here while he gathered his army, romping back to the NIF in tiger form while Ximon cowered in the smallest cubbyhole he could find.

  How dare you? I snarled at Orgoli. Tiger to tiger, communication was easy. This is our world, not yours.

  It will be mine soon, little cub, he replied, his huge tongue scraping some of the red from his whiskers. For too long your world has drawn power from mine while we sheltered your outcasts.

  Are you saying our world draws power from yours? I was incredulous. But you created that unnatural hole in the veil. You are the violator.

  You began it hundreds of years ago, he answered. It wasn’t enough to draw your healing and your animal forms from us, but you had to invent technology that bled through the veil. Your bombs have wilted forests all over my world. This ugly place has begun to choke the life out of the great ocean. If it were just your own oceans, your own creatures, your own moon which you destroyed, I would not waste my time with you. But your world is too connected to ours. I must destroy your technology, and the brains behind it, or my world will continue to slowly die.

  I remembered the dead seashore I’d seen as we approached the doorway and the blighted section of the swamp we’d spotted as we crossed it. Orgoli was telling the truth. Othersphere had taken our threatened species and given them homes safe from human slaughter and incursion. In return, our human technology was slowly eating its way through the veil, killing off their pristine ecosystems.

  There’s got to be some way both worlds can survive, I told Orgoli.

  This world will survive, he said. But your precious humans will not.

  It’s too late, Orgoli, I told him. Your army has fled. You cannot defeat this whole world without them. You’re alone.

  So. He lashed his tail, molten eyes slits of heat on me. Then it is time for me to eat you at last, little cub. Your blood will make me strong enough to destroy all your friends, the shifters, and my brother, too. One way or another, my world and I will have revenge.

  I didn’t wait for him to finish. My friends were coming down the hallway, and I was the distraction. I slinked to one side, as if about to run away. As Orgoli dodged to one side to stop my retreat, the fake-out gave a clear view of his throat, and I sprang. He lifted a paw to bat me away, a millisecond too late.

  I dug my claws into his fur and skin. The heady smell of power streamed up through his skin as I sank my teeth into his throat.

  He roared, choking, and shook his head, trying to dislodge me. I knew I wouldn’t have long, so I bit deeper, feeling the sinews and muscles taut beneath my jaws, seeking his jugular. A gush of hot blood spurted into my mouth and down my throat. I gulped and guzzled. As I did, my body grew, my muscles flexed with new strength, enabling me to chomp down even more ferociously on Orgoli’s throat.

  Life sang through me with the blood, and ecstasy took me. My body lengthened until my back feet touched the ground. In seconds I’d grown to twice my original size, big enough to torque my spine and use my paws for leverage. I shoved at Orgoli, wrestling, trying to get him onto his side. If he was down, then perhaps I could finish him. Finish him and drink him all.

  Somewhere out there in the periphery of my vision, Lazar and Arnaldo were running up to the smoking computers and setting up a laptop. The dire wolves leapt fearlessly onto Orgoli’s back, biting at the thick fur near his spine, unable to get a hold. London shifted to her wolf form.

  November nearly stumbled over Ximon huddled in his corner, and she recoiled in horror. “Lazar!” she called out. “It’s your horrible father!”

  I needed to get Orgoli out of the area so that Lazar and Arnaldo could set up the laser and close the doorway. He swatted at me, but I pushed myself away and raced down the hallway, back to the main room.

  Giant paws padded after me. I glanced back as I rounded the corner in front of the laser array, and
saw that not only was I larger, but Orgoli had shrunk a little during our fight. But he still towered over me, reaching one paw out like a cat batting at a mouse. I sidestepped the blow and scampered down the short hallway toward the open door to Othersphere.

  The gathered animal army which had clustered there was gone. Instead, hunkered down behind low gray dunes, thirty feet back from the door lurked ten or twelve Amba. They had come as they’d promised, and were all in tiger form, tails low to stay hidden, but with the ends twitching in anticipation, their eyes narrowed with the focus of the hunt.

  They’d asked me to give them Orgoli in a weakened state. If I ran through the doorway I could only hope he’d follow. I was nearly there, five feet from the threshold, when Orgoli hurtled forward and grabbed me by the shoulders with front paws bigger than mattresses.

  He latched on, claws knifing through my skin, and pulled me into him, his great head lowering, fangs stabbing for my throat.

  I would not survive the bite. His teeth were like swords, his muzzle big as an oncoming train. I struggled with my last ounces of strength, bringing my back legs up to kick and rake, seeking purchase on his arms, his belly, anything, to draw blood, to disable or maim.

  But Orgoli calmly used one back paw to step down on my two back legs and laid his great belly and chest right down on top of me, driving all the air from my lungs. I was pinned, suffocating, unable even to cry out. With one paw he daggered his claws deep into the bone of my shoulder blade, and with the other he deliberately severed a tendon in my left front leg. Red streaks of agony blurred my vision. I was going to die, and with my blood inside him, Orgoli would grow strong again.

  The great teeth neared as I pushed, shoved, wiggled, trying to fend them off. Events lurched forward in distorted chunks as time slowed.

  A beloved voice was calling my name.