Othermoon (17 page)

“Horses?” The plural confounded Lazar a little. I should have known better than to
expect a guy raised by religious fanatics to lie well about gambling.

“You can just give me the numbers,” Michael said. “I’m curious. Exactas can bring
in big money. . . .”

He was playing with Lazar now. I ducked under the cubicle between me and them and
lunged forward, tackling Michael at the knees. He dropped to the floor with a squawk.

“He knows!” I said to Lazar in a kind of subdued yell. “Knock him out!”

Lazar, startled by my move, took one long second to realize what was going on. Michael,
clad in Tribunal gray and white, tried to reach into his jacket for what had to be
a gun.

I knocked his hand away and pounded on his solar plexus to wind him, the way Morfael
had shown us in class. But my fist slammed into something much harder than skin and
bone and bounced back up with no impact.

“He’s wearing a vest!” I hissed.

Michael backhanded me in the face, knocking me into the legs of the desk.

Lazar had his gun out, switching grips to hold it by the barrel, and lifted his arm
to hit Michael with the butt.

Michael had no such scruples. In one swift move, he pulled his own pistol from under
his jacket, pointed it at me, and pulled the trigger.

CHAPTER 13

A sound like a tree limb snapping, and something smashed into my chest like a sledgehammer.
I gasped, but my lungs took in nothing.

I caught a glimpse of Lazar’s eyes wide with horror; then he grabbed for Michael’s
gun.

Makes sense,
I thought with an odd sort of detachment.
Michael’s wearing a bulletproof vest, which makes it tough to shoot him back. And
you can’t just go around shooting people in the middle of a casino.

I wasn’t sitting up anymore; I was lying on my side on the floor. I didn’t remember
sliding downward. I put my hand to my chest and felt something sticky, but didn’t
have the strength to pull my hand away to see what it was. I tried inhaling again,
and a tiny thread of air squeaked into my lungs.

Something like the ocean was roaring in my ears, and the struggling forms of Lazar
and Michael were growing fuzzy at the edges.

“Dez!” Through the din came Lazar’s voice, sharp as a razor. Somewhere out there I
could still see his brown leather jacket, wrestling with a man in a gray jacket, whoever
that was. It didn’t really matter. My eyelids were made of lead, and my heart had
been replaced with a stone.

“Dez, you must shift!” Lazar’s voice cut through the woolly fog. “I call upon you
to shift now.
Now
!”

That voice could not be denied. It stirred the dark roiling essence at my core that
had begun to still. Power, blazing with life, rolled through that portal in my soul,
shredding the haze in my mind, pushing the stone from my chest. My hands were not
hands, but huge, velvety, striped paws; my skin was now fur, my teeth fangs.

I rolled to my feet, my long tail knocking aside the desk. The monitor on it crashed
to the floor. The bullet which had pierced my chest dropped to the floor, and I dug
my claws into the patterned carpet, screening out the piercing clang of casino bells,
the bright flashing lights, to zero in on the man in the gray jacket. He was thickset
and strong. He expertly rolled on top of Lazar, one elbow pushing down on Lazar’s
windpipe while pinning his legs to the floor with his knees. Lazar heaved up against
him, to no avail.

Both guns lay useless nearby, a few feet apart. So Lazar at least had dealt with that
part of the problem. I would deal with the rest.

Someone screamed, “Tiger!”

Yes
, I thought, as a general murmur of panic swirled through the room.
Yes
.

And I roared.

The vibration from it made the floor thrum. Michael’s head turned with the suddenness
of a marionette’s on a string. His eyes widened in fright. His terror pleased me,
but it would not save him.

Around us, the sounds of hubbub turned to yells of horror and cries for help. Michael
pushed himself away from Lazar, crabbing backwards on all fours and trying to grab
for a gun. Lazar coughed, still alive.

“I objure you,” Michael intoned, but his voice was too high and filled with dread.
“I forbid you entrance to this world, foul demon! Return! Return to—”

I pounced, leaping over Lazar. One heavy paw to Michael’s chest sent his arms and
legs flying out from under him.

Flat on the carpet, he tried to grab my jaw, my ears, anything. I just swiped his
hands away with my free paw, drawing red lines on his skin. He screamed, “Filth! Demon!”

I sank my teeth into his neck. His blood ran hot and liquid on my tongue. And it was
good
.

It got very quiet. I let Michael’s limp body go and licked my muzzle. Some part of
me knew I would regret this, but right now I savored the blood of my enemy. This one,
at least, would never trouble me again.

There was movement behind me, and I whirled, snarling, muscles tensed to spring. But
it was Lazar, up on his hands and knees.

He froze. I could hear the quickened beat of his heart, the uneven pulse of blood
through his veins, his terrified, shallow breathing.

“By God!” He swallowed hard. I could only imagine how I looked, crouched over a dead
man, ears back, my striped muzzle awash with crimson. “That’s really you. Dez.” He
said my name as if he couldn’t quite believe it. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“It’s over there!” Someone was shouting. “Get it!”

“I’m not going anywhere near it,” a man’s voice declared in no uncertain terms.

An indignant voice: “You’re the security guard.”

“All I’ve got is a pistol. Did you see how huge that thing is? Get everyone out and
I’ll call animal control. It must’ve escaped from one of those stupid shows on the
Strip.”

Lazar started getting out of his jacket. “Here. It won’t cover you completely, but
. . .”

There wasn’t time to shift. I shook my head at him. As always, it felt bizarre to
make such a human gesture in my tiger form, but I had no other way to communicate.
Lazar looked puzzled as I picked the manila envelope up gently with my mouth. Then
I lashed out one paw and clawed his shoulder.

“Ow! Hey, what . . .” He jumped back from me in alarm. “What are you . . . ?”

His voice trailed off as I moved away from Michael’s body and pointed my nose at a
side door marked EXIT.

“It really is you in there, isn’t it?” He shook his head. “You just look so . . .
so much like a tiger.”

I curled my upper lip in a half snarl and loosed a low growl.
I am a tiger.

“Don’t worry about the security cameras,” he said, forcing his voice back to something
like normal. “We’ll be off the grid soon enough, and whoever watches this footage
will be in therapy for years. No one will believe it or ever be able to connect it
to us. You go first.”

I shook my head again and walked behind where he was sitting on the floor. He didn’t
move as I got closer, but I could hear his breathing speed up again, his body tense,
as I put my forehead against his back and shoved.

He jetted up and forward two steps, and then looked back at me, a light of understanding
in his eyes. “Got it,” he said. Then he sprinted for the exit, at full speed, as if
a tiger was after him.

And I was.

He shoved open the exit door just steps ahead of me. If anyone was watching, it would
look like he was fleeing from me, not accompanying me. The door slammed behind us
as we pounded into a blank cement hallway that smelled like urine and chlorine.

Thirty feet down the hall, a woman in a rumpled uniform pushing a wheeled laundry
basket pointed at me, screeched like a dying bird, and fled, her clogs clomping.

Lazar laughed and nodded. “I know how she feels.”

I bounded past him, toward the laundry basket. He followed, taking long strides. “Oh,
look.” He pointed through a nearby doorway just as I smelled hot detergent and heard
the rumble of clothes in a dryer. The hotel’s laundry room was brightly lit and going
at full steam at this late hour, getting towels and sheets ready the next day.

“Clothes for you,” he said, reading my mind. “But I bet there’s a camera in there,
to keep employees from stealing. . . .” He startled and pulled away as I used the
edge of the envelope in my mouth to scratch at his hand.

He hesitated, then gingerly reached out and took the envelope from me. “This is the
strangest day of my life.”

But I was already in the room, scanning its upper corners. Sure enough, a cheap camera
beamed its little red light on me. I sprang upward, using the wall like a tree trunk,
and swiped it with one paw. The camera fell to the floor and shattered. No more little
red light.

Lazar walked in. “That’s going to look very interesting when they run the footage
later. But who knows why tigers do what they do?” He saw me sniffing at a pile of
white towels and folded sheets. “No, here, try this.”

He held up a cheap terry-cloth robe, the kind hotels provided for their guests. Enough
to cover you up when you got out of the shower, but not thick and soft enough to tempt
you to steal it.

“And look.” He fished a pair of slightly stringy terry-cloth slippers out of a laundry
basket. “Is this what they call fashionable out here in the world?”

He threw the slippers down, facing me, on the floor, and then held the robe out, as
if waiting for a swimsuit model to step into it.

I made a kind of growling
whoof
sound, something between a snarl and a roar.

He took a step back, going a little pale. I didn’t want to just shift to human right
in front of him. I wasn’t ashamed of my body, but Lazar wasn’t exactly a trusted friend
I felt comfortable with when I was naked. In fact, quite the opposite.

“Don’t you think it’s better if you shift?” He swallowed, trying to sound reasonable,
but I could see the uneasiness in his eyes as he stared at the tiger in front of him.
“And I promise I won’t look.” He closed his eyes, still holding the robe.

When I didn’t move, he peeked under his eyelids and lowered the robe, his face shadowed
with remorse. “I know I’ve given you reason to distrust me,” he said. “I didn’t mean
what I said, about you being like my father. You’re quite the opposite. At least in
your human form.”

I thought about Amaris’s story of how her mother had died, and I chuffed at him, the
loud, purring noise thrumming in my throat. He frowned, then nodded and stood back
up, lifting the robe high so that I couldn’t see his face, and he couldn’t see me.
I turned my back and shifted, reaching back toward the robe.

Lazar guided my arms into the sleeves. I glanced back, expecting to see a knowing
sneer, but his eyes were squeezed shut. So he really was being a gentleman about this.
His fingers brushed my bare shoulder for a moment, but he pulled away quickly and
didn’t touch me again.

My face got very hot. Another reason I loved my tiger form. In it, I never wanted
to blush and never could. Human form was more complicated. I pulled the edges of the
terry-cloth together and used the thin belt to close the robe up good and tight as
I turned around.

The bruises forming on Lazar’s face were standing out more harshly, his cheeks slightly
flushed with red. “What I meant to say is that you and my father are both leaders.
But that’s where the resemblance ends,” he said. “He only respects strength and cruelty
and devotion to the cause, and if you can’t offer him one of those things, you’re
no use to him.”

“Is that what happened with your mother?” I asked.

He drew back, suddenly on high alert, like a cobra hooded and rearing up against a
threat. “What do you know about my mother?” he asked.

I tried to make my voice neutral. “Amaris told us why she died, that your father refused
to let her get humdrum medical care. That must’ve been awful.”

“Amaris was only ten,” he said, not relaxing. “She knows what she was told.”

“So your mother didn’t have breast cancer?”

“No, she had cancer all right,” he said. “She was in agony for months from it. Every
now and then he’d allow her some morphine, but only after Amaris or I would beg him
for it. He thought it was a waste of money.” He let out a sharp bitter laugh. “I tried
to sneak her to the hospital one night, all by myself. She could still walk a little
ways, so I managed to get her into one of the cars. I even managed to drive it a bit,
even though I hadn’t learned to drive yet.”

“How old were you?”

“Twelve.” The harshness left his voice, and his eyes lost focus as he remembered.
“He must’ve heard the engine starting, because he came out of the building, yelling
for me to stop. I tried to gun the engine, but in our old compound he’d had spikes
implanted in the driveway to prevent people from driving away in the middle of the
night, and our front tires blew out. I’ll never forget sitting there in the car, listening
to his footsteps crunching on the gravel as he walked up to the car. I thought he’d
kill me.”

“But he didn’t,” I said.

“No.” His voice was cold. “No, he didn’t kill me. He opened my car door and dragged
me out of the car and beat me. He broke my nose, a couple of ribs, a few other things.
My head was spinning, and I couldn’t stand up anymore, so he gave up on me and went
over to the passenger side of the car and dragged my mother out.”

I was frozen in place. I thought I knew how bad Lazar’s life had been. I knew nothing.

“She was wearing a nightgown and my father’s own robe. I’d stolen it from his closet
to keep her warm. She had these clogs on her feet, easy to slip into and out of, and
I remember how they slid off her feet because she was too weak to walk. First the
left, then the right shoe scraped off as he dragged her by the hair and threw her
down in front of me. I thought he was going to start hitting her too, but instead
he pulled his pistol out of his belt.”

My heart skipped a beat.
Oh, no, oh, no.

“He made me sit up to do it,” Lazar said. He was very calm as he spoke, like he was
telling a story. “He handed me the gun, but my right wrist was fractured, so he put
the gun in my left hand and got behind me, his hand over mine. He said, ‘You’re right,
son. Your mother’s in too much pain. It’s better this way. Let God’s will be done.’
”

Lazar’s face was blank, even as he stared right into my eyes. “So we pulled the trigger,
my father and I. We had to pull it twice because my hands were shaking. . . .”

I put my hand on his arm. He was trembling.

“It was my fault she didn’t die right way,” he said. “After that night my hands never
shook when I shot a gun. I had killed my mother—what did it matter if I shot Caleb’s
mother, or anyone else? And if I kept doing what Father wanted, at least for that
day he’d still trust me, still love me. I never disobeyed my father, not once.” His
eyes lost their distant look and met mine. “Not till I met you. You changed everything.”