Othermoon (13 page)

“Good thinking.” I gave her hands a squeeze. “Look at me. I’m thinking about those
adorable fennec foxes with those amazing huge ears and that creamy fluffy coat. .
. .”

London nodded, then let go of my hands. She shut her eyes, but I could see her irises
moving behind the lids, as if searching. “I think I can see the fox, way up ahead,”
she said. “So small . . .”

“So beautiful,” I said. “So perfect.”

London let out a small, appreciative laugh. “Flattery . . . works.”

Then with a strange warp of the air, she was gone. At my feet sat a creamy tan doglike
creature only a foot high, with a sharp, pointed noise, liquid brown eyes, and enormous
ears, open wide like wings on either side of its narrow head.

“Oh, my God, you’re adorable!” November squealed, scuttling up to London’s new form.
“You better be careful with this form, London, or every bored housewife in suburbia
will want to adopt you!”

The fennec fox lifted its lip in a snarl and gave a tiny growl. I fought back a smile.

November reached out, as if she couldn’t help herself, about to pet London on the
head. London ducked and ran toward the hole in the rock. Siku shuffled back just in
time to give her room to leap up into the hole. She turned to look at us and yipped,
as if to say “Hurry up!”

“Guess that’s my cue,” said Arnaldo. “The smallest bird of prey I know of is the spot-winged
falconet that lives in South America. They eat mostly insects, I think.” He made a
face.

“Still a bird of prey,” I said. “Still a falcon.”

“Still able to fly,” November said, envy creeping into her voice. “That must be really
fun.”

Arnaldo smiled at her. “It is. I’ll take you up one day if you want.”

“I want,” she said. “Now get your fine, feathery ass through that tunnel.” She looked
back at the watching raccoon and fox. “Go on through, boneheads. Arnaldo’s going to
need to fly and you’re in the way.”

The raccoon made a gesture that looked remarkably like he was flipping her off, but
then he turned around and disappeared into the tunnel. The fox stuck out its small
pink tongue, then followed after him.

“Here goes nothing,” said Arnaldo, and closed his eyes.

“Fly,” said November, then started to chant. “Fly, fly, fly, fly . . .”

A smile spread over Arnaldo’s narrow face; then in a heartbeat, he was gone, and a
flutter of wings shot up into the sky, wheeled, then swooped around November’s head.

We both cheered. “Woo-hoo!” The falconet’s brown wings were beautiful, spotted with
a dramatic pattern of white visible even as he fluttered and danced in the air around
us.

“Looks like this form’s more maneuverable,” I said. “Better for tight indoor spaces
maybe?”

“Just hurry up and go!” November said. “I’m tired and it’s almost time for breakfast.
You coming, Stripes?”

And she shifted into her rat form, clambering up the rock wall to follow the falconet
through the hole.

Now it was my turn. It had seemed so easy when I thought of it. But now, alone here
with my friends waiting on the other side, it seemed impossible. I was a tiger, right?
A tiger and a girl.

Then I remembered how it had felt, sitting on that bookshelf in the form of a domestic
cat. I’d had a tortoiseshell coat, and Caleb had stroked my back till I purred. Purring
had felt wonderful, and it was something tigers didn’t do. It would be pretty great
to be able to purr again. I looked down into that roiling realm of darkness inside
me that led to Othersphere and found it larger, crazier, more filled with promise
than it had ever seemed before.

Morfael had planned this well. I slipped into the small form of a tortoiseshell cat
and leaped easily up into the tunnel in the rock. My whiskers reached out, assessing
the narrow space around me, feeling the currents of air created by the movements of
my friends up ahead. My ears pricked, hearing the skitter of November’s claws and
the beat of Arnaldo’s wings.

Then I was out, the light of the nearly full moon shining down on a carpet of white.
London shook her huge fox ears, and shifted abruptly into her usual form, a rangy
silver wolf with eyes like shiny arctic pools. The rest of us stayed as we were, following
the twine only a few dozen yards farther to find it wound us back to exactly where
we’d started.

Morfael was waiting. He smiled down at us, eyes crinkling. “I am proud of you,” he
said.

My heart swelled, and I was very glad to be in cat form. Cats and tigers did not have
eyes that welled up with tears when they got a rare piece of praise from Morfael.

“Only the wise and the strong can see themselves as other than they have always been,
yet remain true to themselves,” he said. “You have proven yourselves strong and wise
this night. Now go back to bed. You may sleep an extra hour.”

 

The others got to sleep an extra hour. Raynard roused me at the usual time so that
I could clean up and meet Caleb outside the computer room for the Council meeting.

His heavy gaze sent a dark thrill slithering under my skin, for a moment overwhelming
the Council-based anxiety in my stomach. “Didn’t sleep enough, did you?” he asked.

I tried to ignore the heat threatening to take me over and threw him a pretend glare.
“How can you tell?”

His mouth turned down appreciatively, lifting one hand to twist a lock of my hair
between his fingers. “Because you look delicious when you’re all rumpled.”

So he’d been thinking about us being together, just as I had. I leaned into him, and
he seemed to be leaning into me, when Morfael’s staff tapped a little louder than
usual on the nearby steps. We turned to find him surveying us with frosty eyes.

Caleb coughed slightly to cover up a laugh. “Just giving Dez a pep talk before the
Council meeting,” he said.

That made Morfael’s nearly invisible eyebrows lift.

“He’s good for my morale,” I chimed in. “I want him with me during the call.”

Morfael did not respond for a long few seconds, and then said, “Only if he promises
not to speak a word.” Caleb opened his mouth to promise, and Morfael rounded on him.
“Not a word.”

Caleb shut his mouth and nodded.

“Very well,” said Morfael.

It took him a few seconds to set up the video conference call on the large monitor
in the computer room. His long pointy fingers tapped the keys with the speed and sureness
of a Silicon Valley nerd.

“Has Amaris been giving him lessons?” I whispered to Caleb.

He smirked, but laid a finger against his lips, reminding me that he’d promised not
to speak.

We stood in front of the camera as Morfael adjusted it. I kept transferring my weight
from one foot to the other, tapping my fingers against my thighs, feeling like I was
about to burst out of my skin. These Council members had way more power over my life
than I liked.

If they kicked me out of school and Morfael didn’t make me go, the Council could make
life very difficult not only for us, but for the kids who stayed here and their families.

If I did leave, it’d be just me, Mom, and Richard on the run from the Tribunal, and
any hope of infiltrating Ximon’s new compound would vanish. Caleb and I would be physically
a lot farther apart most of the time. Would he leave Morfael and Amaris to go on the
run with me? How could any of that work?

The monitor blinked, and five faces appeared, sectioned off each in its own area,
with one additional square showing me my own blank, wide-eyed face. I tried not to
look at myself much, knowing it would make me self-conscious. I had brushed my hair,
but my unruly red mane had a mind of its own.

It had been over a month since I’d last seen the Council, but that experience had
been so odd, so full of import, each face was branded in my memory. This time I didn’t
need Caleb to tell me who everyone was.

The lady lynx, half-smiling at me through her camera, had the same bushy, tufted gray
hair and red-brown skin. She was wearing a green flannel shirt this time instead of
a blue one, but she looked just as outdoorsy and ageless as before. Shifters could
live for hundreds of years, and I suddenly wondered how old she was. Had she been
living here when the first explorers from the East wandered into the western part
of the United States?

Anyone of them could be that old—the gruff wolf with his crazy red eyebrows, or the
hawk with his piercing hooded gaze, or the bear with white skunklike streaks in her
long dark hair. They all looked like they’d been that way forever. Only the rat, with
her black hair in a messy up-do and traces of cherry-colored gloss on her lips, looked
like she might still be maturing, still figuring out the world. The others seemed
as immovable as mountains.

Morfael tapped his staff five times on the floor, one time for every shifter tribe
still in existence. He bowed his head, and the five council members did the same.
I watched them, trying to gauge how they might feel, until the rat-shifter peeked
up from under her brows and gave me a playful frown. I hurriedly bowed my head.

“Welcome to this special meeting of the Western Regional North American Council, Morfael,”
said the lynx-shifter.

“Greetings, Chief of the Council, Lady Lynx,” said Morfael in a dry formal tone, exactly
as he had at my first Council meeting.

“At the request of my wolf-shifter colleague, we will dispense with further formalities
and get down to business,” she said. “First, I’m sorry to report that my colleague
in the Asian Council has no information that can help us trace Desdemona’s family.
No one there has been in touch with a tiger-shifter in over two decades, and they
have no reports of an abandoned tiger-shifter child. I’m sorry, Desdemona. I had hoped
to have news for you.”

“Thank you for trying,” I said. It wasn’t surprising, but still it hurt to hear that
even at the highest levels, no one knew who my biological parents were. And yet I
almost felt something like relief too. It was like I didn’t know what to feel.

The lynx said, “We’ve all heard there was some excitement at your school earlier this
winter, and that you have now reconvened in a new location. I hope the transition
is going smoothly.”

“Excitement!” The wolf said, in something like a bark. “You call Tribunal attacks
on school grounds, helicopters crashing, and the burning of a Tribunal compound ‘excitement’?
How about disaster?”

“And I hear you’re now harboring a member of the Tribunal,” said the hawk.

“Amaris has changed her allegiance,” said Morfael. “I am satisfied.”

“She’s the daughter of the Tribunal Bishop Ximon, our most avid enemy,” said the bear,
her brow furrowed.

“Amaris suffered more at the hands of her father than any of you ever have,” I said,
unable to keep still. Caleb moved closer to me supportively. “Morfael knows she’d
do anything to help us against him.”

“Do not assume you know how much others have suffered,” said the lynx, startling me
a bit with her chastising tone. She’d been my biggest proponent before. “Bishop Ximon
is directly responsible for the deaths of many, long before you came on the scene.”

“I’m sorry,” I muttered. She was right. There was no way for me to know who had suffered
and how. But they had no idea of the hell Ximon had put Amaris through.

“If this reckless child isn’t prevented from provoking him, Ximon will be responsible
for many more deaths,” said the hawk.

“Provoking him?” The lynx frowned at her monitor. For a moment, I could see the predatorlike
focus in her round dark eyes. “As you may recall, it has always been Ximon who’s provoked
violence and disruption. He ordered the kidnapping of Miss Grey before she even knew
she was a shifter. And he ordered the attack on Morfael’s school without provocation—an
attack on children from each of our tribes.”

“Miss Grey is a tiger, so her kidnapping is no concern of the wolves,” said the wolf
in his gruff voice. “And if she hadn’t been at the school, Ximon’s attack never would
have happened.”

“Yes,” the hawk said, steepling his long fingers in front of him. “If others in the
Council had voted differently last time, Miss Grey would not have stayed at the school,
and that attack would never have happened.”

“So now the Council is to blame?” The rat-shifter adjusted a loose lock of her shiny
black hair. “Who else besides Ximon would you like to condemn, bird?”

“It is a little like criticizing a rich man for having a nice house when it gets robbed,
rather than the thief who broke in,” said the bear. “One of my tribe was kidnapped
in that raid on the school. He might not have been restored to his family if Miss
Grey and the other students hadn’t rescued him.”

“Not to mention that the Tribunal compound was destroyed, and Ximon forced to flee
and regroup,” said the lynx. “Miss Grey and her friends achieved more in that rescue
than any other shifters in the last two hundred years.”

“Only because we all worked together,” I said. “Think how much more we could achieve
if every member of every shifter tribe cooperated like that.”

The rat nodded, looking thoughtful, but the wolf snorted derisively. “The result of
this so-called cooperation is that the homes of many of the students in the school
were raided the other night by the Tribunal. Laurentia’s mother killed one intruder,
but another got away.”

I had to think for a minute when she used London’s true name. None of us called her
Laurentia anymore.

“We need to rid ourselves of this girl, the one who started all of this,” said the
hawk. “Who knows what fresh scheme Ximon is planning?”

“That’s exactly what we need to find out!” I said. “Together, children from each of
your tribes, along with Caleb and Morfael, stopped an entire Tribunal force intent
on capturing or killing all of us. Arnaldo Perez, in his eagle form, brought down
their helicopter single-handed. If we can do that, think how much more you adults
could do if you just
tried
.”