Othermoon (21 page)

“Mmm,” Richard said through his coffee cup. “I think the fluids are working.”

“Here.” Lazar’s brown boots clicked over the tile as he walked over and handed me
the flowers.

“Thanks.” I set them down on the table next to Mom’s bed.

“They’re cheerful,” Richard said. “Thank you.”

Lazar nodded, keeping very still and looking down uncomfortably.

“Okay, so I just need to have a quick word with Lazar,” I said. It sounded clumsy
even to my ears. “I’ll be right outside in the hallway if she wakes up or anything.”

Richard nodded, sipping his coffee, and Lazar and I slipped out into the hallway and
then to a small alcove a few feet down, where two semi-padded chairs sat under a not-terrible
painting of the desert beneath a full moon.

“God, hospitals make everything weird.” I plopped down in my chair. “Here, hold this.”

He obediently took my cup of coffee as I used both hands to dig open the container
of hummus and tear apart the bread.

“Did Amaris try to heal your mother?” he said, sitting down in the other chair.

“No,” I said through a mouthful of pita, then chewed and swallowed. “She hasn’t been
able to heal anyone, not even herself. Would you like some?” I offered a piece of
bread.

He held up a hand as if to say “no, thanks.” “I think I was the last one she healed,”
he said.

“Oh, right,” I said. “From when I knocked you out that time in my house.”

“Yes.” He looked down at the cup of coffee, hands clenched around it. “When I tried
to kidnap your mother and that nice man in there and shot you. I’m glad he didn’t
recognize me from that night. I always wondered why you let me and the others live.”

I dipped a triangle of pita into the hummus. “Well, I did kill that one guy, and I’m
sorry about that, but he was a threat at the time. After I knocked you unconscious,
I wasn’t going to rip your throat out unnecessarily. That’s murder, not self-defense.”

He nodded and finally met my eye. “I’m grateful. I woke up surprised to be alive.
Mercy from a shifter was not what I was brought up to expect,” he said. “But then
you’re never what I expect.”

“That was only the second time I ever shifted,” I said. “I had no idea what I was
doing.”

“I’ll never forget the sight of you, this huge tiger, pure vengeance and fury. It
was the most frightening thing I’ve ever seen.”

I smiled over my pita bread. “Scared you, hunh?”

“Maybe a little.” He held out the cup. “Coffee?”

“Thanks.” I took it from him. My spirits were picking up. Maybe it was the food, or
knowing that a plan to foil Ximon still might come together. “So. Amaris said you
found out what the accelerator was built for.”

“Yes, and it’s even worse than I thought,” he said. “I was able to read part of a
hard copy file in my father’s office. I didn’t have time for all of it, but you were
right. They have big plans for it. They think, somehow, they can use it to cut off
all connection to Othersphere.”

I frowned, trying to get my mind around that. “That makes no sense. Do you mean, they’re
going to cut themselves off from Othersphere?”

“Not just themselves—everyone.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small
notebook. “I wrote down what I read as soon as I could after, so I wouldn’t forget.
The file said something like, ‘If experiments go as we predict, we will sever all
connection between Othersphere and our world forever. Without access to this hellish
place, the fiends who call themselves otherkin will never again be able to change
into their demonic forms, and the so-called callers of shadow will no longer conjure
forth other devils and unnatural objects. Everyone will be forced, in God’s mercy,
to walk the earth as our Maker intended.’ Sorry.” He looked up. “That’s how our scientists
tend to phrase things.”

I still wasn’t quite grasping this. It was too big, too impossible. “So they don’t
intend to just reverse the effects on the veil in their area,” I said. “They think
they can cut us all off—everywhere?”

“Exactly.” Lazar flipped a page in the notebook. “I saw the phrase ‘chain reaction’
in there, and a lot of stuff I didn’t understand about dark matter and interaction
of particles between universes.”

Dread clawed over my skin.

“It gets worse,” he said. “The accelerator will be online tomorrow. I have access
to the scientists’ schedule, and they’re set to gather in the main computer room at
seven-thirty a.m.” He looked up from his notebook, his lean face drawn. He’d probably
had even less sleep than me. “If you can’t make it tonight, I could try to take the
accelerator off-line myself. I’m not exactly sure how to do that, but I’m pretty good
with a gun.” His look was grim.

I thought about it. “That’s a generous offer. Not to sound coldhearted, but if you
failed, and they caught you, we’d never get another chance to take them by surprise.
Assuming nothing else happens with my mom, I’m going to gather our group to come in
tonight.”

“Generals need to be a bit coldhearted.” He tore a page from the notebook. “Here’s
the code to get you in the front door. There’s a guard in the watchtower able to see
anything within three hundred yards of approach, and two guards outside the front
entrance.”

“When’s their first shift change of the night?” I asked.

He cocked his head, as if surprised at the question. “Six p.m. The shift after that
starts at two a.m.”

I looked up at the ceiling, calculating. “Then we should try to get there around one
in the morning or so, just before shift change when they are most tired and most eager
to get to bed, and when everyone else is dead asleep. Once we get inside the front
door, where do we go?”

He was looking at me, impressed. But it was just the way I thought about things. “I’m
starting to see why my father’s so worried about you. I’ll meet you in the foyer,
because you’ll have to pass a hand scan to get anywhere interesting after that, so
you’ll need me. Where will you want to go?”

“We need to download as much information as we can, then destroy their files and all
relevant equipment, including the accelerator itself,” I said.

“So nothing too ambitious.” Lazar grinned at me.

I couldn’t help smiling back, shoving away the dismay his news had brought to concentrate
on what I could do about it. Taking action always made me feel better, even if the
action brought its own risks. Anything was better than sitting passively by and anticipating
the worst. I’d done that for years, hoping the brace would prevent spinal surgery,
unable to do anything but wait.
To hell with waiting.

There was nothing I could do to help Mom, or to make Caleb trust me again. But I could
do my damnedest to stop Ximon’s plan. If he succeeded, I’d never again be a tiger,
never again feel the power of shadow pulsing through me.
Never see your biological mother again . . .
Was that a good thing or a bad thing? I wished I knew.

“Can you get us into the main computer room that controls the accelerator?” I asked.
“And into the accelerator itself?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t have access. But I can access the scientists’ bedrooms, and
the scientists.”

He was thinking ahead too. Good. “This just might work,” I said.

“There are over thirty armed objurers in the compound other than myself and my father,”
Lazar said. “As well as four scientists. It won’t be easy.”

“What happened?” I asked. At his puzzled look, I went on. “Something made you realize
you had to leave. I know you were talking on the phone with Amaris, that seeing her
having a life outside made you think that was possible for you too. But there was
something else, wasn’t there?”

“My father.” He looked down at the scuffed floor between his feet, elbows on his knees,
then leaned back, eyelids clamped shut, as if trying to block something out.

“Did he hurt you somehow?”

He shook his head. “No, worse than that.” He opened his eyes. They were like dark
saucers, staring off into space. Whatever he was seeing in his mind’s eye wasn’t pretty.
“He told me that after the experiments are done, assuming they’re successful, the
Tribunal will let go of the workers and scientists who built the accelerator, since
they won’t be needed anymore. But he was afraid that once they got out in the world,
they might reveal where they’d been, and what they’d done, and who had led them. So
he told me they would be my responsibility. It would be up to me to release them .
. . to God.”

“All of them?” I put my food down, no longer hungry. “He wants you to kill all of
them?”

He nodded. “That’s over a dozen people, Dez. Father would give me the signal, and
then I was supposed to shoot them as they slept.”

“My God,” I said.

“He said that would be the most humane way to do it—so they didn’t feel any fear or
pain. That’s my father’s version of mercy.” Lazar’s tone was lacerating in its bitterness.
“A bullet in the head while you sleep.”

“Did you consider maybe telling them about your father’s plan?” I asked gently. “It
might stop the accelerator from going online at all. They might even sabotage it for
you.”

“They’d never believe me,” he said. “I thought about it a lot. But they only respect
me because I’m Ximon’s son. He’s their pathway to God, and if I spoke against him,
they’d tear me to pieces.”

“Then, in a way, we’ll be doing some of them a favor by going in,” I said. “Though,
they’ll probably never know it.”

“That’s another reason I had to get you to believe me,” he said.

I hesitated, then said: “But still, people you know and care about . . . your father,
they could get hurt.”

“I know.” He folded his hands together, thinking. “Sometimes I hope Father does get
hurt. Then I think about what you said to me, that night you rescued your bear-shifter
friend and took Amaris away. Do you remember what you said?”

I shrugged. “Just—that you could come with us, I think. I meant it.”

“You also said: ‘You don’t have to follow your father. You can be your own man, a
better man.’ ” With a sudden, restless move, he got to his feet and paced to the far
wall and back. “It didn’t sink in right away. I was too confused, I guess. But after
a few days without Amaris, I realized that she’d gotten what she always wanted—a way
out. I knew my mother would be happy she’d gotten away from marriage to that awful
man, and then I thought . . .” He stopped, swallowing hard as his eyes got very bright.

I put down the food and my coffee. “Your mother loved you too, Lazar. She would have
wanted you to be happy too.”

He inhaled deeply, steadying himself. “Until then, I didn’t think I deserved it. And
now, seeing your mom here . . . sorry, but seeing her being so well tended, I can’t
help wondering what life would have been like if we’d gotten my mother the help she
needed.” His voice caught as he stuffed down another surge of emotion. “She might
have lived.”

Before I knew it, I was standing in front of him, taking his hands in both of mine,
gripping them tightly. “You were a child in the hands of a madman,” I said. “Forgive
yourself. And remember that you don’t have to be like him. Now that you’re older,
you can fight him, stop him.”

“Or die trying,” he said, his voice very low. His fingers, a bit cold in the over-air-conditioned
hospital, curled around mine.

“What a touching scene.”

It was Caleb’s voice, silky and insidious.

I dropped Lazar’s hands, a cold sweat forming suddenly between my shoulder blades.
Caleb stood not ten feet away, leaning one shoulder comfortably against the beige
wall, as if he’d been there, watching us, forever. His black eyes were narrowed at
me in a venomous look I’d only ever seen when he was dealing with Lazar. He must have
overheard everything these last few minutes. He had seen me take Lazar’s hands.

“Caleb . . .” I started to say.

He sauntered forward, ignoring me, coming to stand before his brother. “So glad to
see you’re mending fences, bro. When’s my turn to get the ‘forgive me’ speech?
”

Lazar didn’t back away as Caleb approached, the bare emotion in his eyes now replaced
with a watchful glint. For a moment, the two half-brothers stood face-to-face, the
same height and build, the same carved cheekbones and expressive lips, light and dark,
but so alike.

“A month ago you were trying to kill us,” Caleb went on. His voice, normally so low
and soothing, now cut like a knife. “And now you want to help us. Tell me, Lazar.
Why are we so lucky?”

Lazar took a moment to respond, as if trying to keep his reaction under control. “I’m
the lucky one,” he said. “I have a chance to start to make up for some of the things
I’ve done.”

“Don’t con a conman.” Caleb leaned into him, their faces close. “This is a trap and
you know it.”

Lazar didn’t flinch. “Dez knows the risks,” he said. “All I know is that I don’t want
to live this way anymore.”

“No,” said Caleb. “That’s not the only reason you’re doing this. I know you too well.
And men have done stranger things to try to impress a girl.”

“Oh, come on,” I said.

But both of them were ignoring me now. Lazar raised his eyebrows. “Which one is it,
bro
? Am I laying a trap for the otherkin or trying to steal your girl?”

Caleb’s dark eyes were derisive. “Why not both? One will make you Daddy’s favorite,
and the other will give you the illusion you’re a man.”

Lazar’s fists clenched, and his chin went down, a sign he was ready to fight. Caleb,
too, was coiled like a panther about to spring. I was starting to get angry—at both
of them. The last thing we needed was for them to start another brawl, right outside
my mother’s hospital room.