Othermoon (28 page)

A tiny thrill passed through me. Even after all this, Caleb knew me better than anyone,
and he must care just a little if he was offering advice.

“Good idea,” I said, my voice thick, forcing myself not to say
good-bye.
“Thanks.”

I turned and ran down the steps, not missing one, even in the dark.

Caleb was right. As Othersphere pressed in on me from all sides, I reached toward
it. All the sadness I felt about Caleb, the confusion over what Ximon had said, they
only increased the propulsive surge inside me.

I shifted, clothing shredding across my new shoulders. As I inhaled with larger lungs,
I could feel that my tiger form was bigger than it had been before, stronger, faster,
senses even keener. I dug my claws into the concrete, piercing it as easily as cloth.
I whipped my tail, bumping it into the cool metal of the accelerator tube. My fur
rippled, irritated from the steel so close.

I held completely still, ears cocked. Above, my friends climbed the stairs, their
footsteps light but audible to me. Soon they would clash with the three other sets
of footsteps coming down toward them.

Up behind the observation window, Ximon’s voice called out, “I don’t care why, just
get that backup generator going!”

A fist smacked into flesh, followed by a painful grunt. He must be taking his frustration
out on his subordinates. My whiskers caught a stir of air. Far ahead, around the curve
of the tunnel, someone was coming toward me.

I dipped my head, calling upon the link to Othersphere at my heart, and then sent
it flaring outward. I roared, and the vast set of heavy pipes around me rattled like
teacups in their saucers. Metal hissed and sluggishly began to sag, like warm rubber.

I sprang forward, running down the asphalt trail next to the accelerator and sending
out waves of rippling destructive force toward everything man-made in my wake. It
felt so good. I’d once tried to rip my back brace apart with my bare hands and failed
utterly. Now, here where Othersphere was close, I could do so much more.

I didn’t go at my full speed, keeping my ears cocked for sounds up ahead, whiskers
fanned out like peacock feathers to catch the slightest change in air pressure. The
path curved as I traced the circumference of the accelerator. As I rounded one section,
feeling the metal next to me melting like butter in the sun, three lights winked ahead.

A beam illuminated my stripes, and a shout went up: objurers, armed with flashlights.
My first flash of destructive power must not have touched them.

A shot rang out. A bullet pinged into the tubing.

I growled, and hurled the force of Othersphere forward like a dark blanket. The face
of one man, only ten yards ahead, was briefly illuminated, his eyes widening with
fear as they traveled up my huge frame to find my narrowed yellow eyes. Then his light
went out.

He screamed and tried to fire at the place where I had been. But his gun was blackened
dross. Then I was on him. My paws were bigger than his head. I dug claws into his
shoulder and side, and sank my teeth into his flesh, cutting through the sinews of
his throat, splitting his spine. Blood gushed out, coating my tongue with coppery
saltiness. I gulped it down and felt the power within me renewed. Dropping him like
a doll, I looked up to see another man holding a rifle with a flashlight strapped
to its barrel, aiming at me.

I snuffed out his light and leaped upon him.

Light hit my eyes and something whistled past my ears. I ducked, releasing the limp
objurer, as a third man aimed yet another silver rifle at me. If he hit me with silver
bullets, this could be the end. I hoped I’d destroyed enough of the accelerator to
render it useless forever. I could die knowing I’d accomplished that, at least.

Then a fourth man, dressed in a long black coat, stepped out of the shadows and punched
him in the face.

The objurer reeled back. Caleb jerked the rifle out of his hands, pointed it at him,
and fired. Blood splattered against the wall, and the man slumped, eyes rolling back.

Caleb wrenched the flashlight off the rifle barrel and ran the light over me. His
wet dark hair clung to his temples, his chest rising and falling rapidly from what
must have been a dead run. His eyes in the reflected light were bright gold, assessing
me clinically. “Damn, you’re
bigger
. Amazing. Othersphere effects, I bet. You’re uninjured? Good.”

Joy rebounded through my heart. I butted my head against him, and his look of focus
and ferocity morphed into a reluctant smile. “It didn’t make sense for you to do this
alone,” he said. “The otherkin need you alive.”

My happiness contracted, but only slightly. So he was here for the greater good, not
because he loved me.
Or so he says.
Hope fluttered inside me, like a baby bird that still didn’t quite know how to fly.
I didn’t know if I should encourage the feeling or not.

Caleb turned the beam of light to the accelerator tubing, and I finally saw my handiwork.
What had once been shiny and perfectly cylindrical was now a molten, blackened mass,
oozing like a dying slug as far back as the curve of the tunnel allowed us to see.
Could all that be because of me? For a moment, even I was awed.

He shined the light up ahead, where the unblemished tube continued on. “Maybe another
three quarters of a mile to go. Shall we?”

I roared in delight.
Caleb and I are working together again!

He winced at the volume of my excitement, cast me a joking look of reproof, then clicked
off the light, dropped the rifle, and put his hand lightly on my shoulder. “Let’s
go.”

So we ran, side by side, through the tunnel. With Caleb there, my energy was boundless.
It boiled up and sent the metal before us melting and popping like molten lava. It
felt like no time at all before we were back where we started, still in darkness.
The entire accelerator lay in ruins around us.

No sounds came from the window where Ximon had been. He must have left to try to muster
his people. Caleb and I found our way to the stairs and began the long climb up. Caleb
still seemed as invigorated by the thinness of the veil as I. We panted as we ascended,
but our pace didn’t flag.

Near the top of the stairs, we came across three bodies lying draped over the railing
or head down on the stairs.

A quick sniff confirmed for me they were none of our friends. As Caleb ran his hands
over one of them, I mewed in a way I hoped was reassuring.

“Not them, eh?” he said, getting my meaning immediately. “Good.”

We traced our steps back to the place where we’d seen the door down into the garage.
I was about to continue up the steps to the complex, but Caleb paused.

“Wait,” he said. I heard his hand land on the door to the garage. “Let’s grab one
of the trucks and drive it up. Assuming I can hot-wire it. We’d get to the surface
a lot faster, maybe be able to join everyone. Do you think any of them will start?”

Remembering how I’d gotten machines to turn back on during my lesson with Morfael,
I trilled back at him encouragingly. If we made it to the surface in a truck and our
friends weren’t there, we could go back down into the complex faster than if we climbed
up on foot.

“Here we go.” He pushed the door open, feeling his way to the stairs down into the
garage. I could tell from the absence of other sounds that no objurers lurked there.

I reached out, feeling with my mind for a light, and released it. Illumination flooded
the wide-open area of the garage.

“Woo-hoo!” Caleb jumped down the stairs three at a time, coat sailing out behind him.

I bounded from the top of the stair right to the bottom, beating him down. I lashed
my tail at him and crouched as if ready to pounce.

“No fair!” he said, his tone playful. “Oh, wait!” He began to take off his coat. “Did
you want to . . . ?”

I shook my head. I didn’t want to shift back to human yet. Being a tiger felt too
wonderful, especially this close to Othersphere. And something about being in tiger
form made it easier for Caleb to be with me. I couldn’t let that go. Not yet.

“Okay. Then we’ll need a slightly larger vehicle.” His liquid eyes lit upon a large
pickup truck. “We can bring it back for Raynard! Let’s go.”

Pulling his coat over his fist, he smashed it into the driver’s side window of the
truck. The glass flew. He opened the door, got inside, and reached under the dash
for the wires to get it started.

I leaped into the bed of the truck. It rocked like a boat in a storm, and I mentally
released the truck’s engine from the dark binding of Othersphere.

The engine roared to life. Caleb turned and pounded triumphantly on the back window
of the cab at me. I put my paw up to the glass, and roared. He gunned the motor, and
we took off.

CHAPTER 23

We wound our way upward by the twin beams of the headlights, which meant some of the
power around us was working again. It worked well enough to lift a metal door for
us when we hit the sensor. As we drove past where we’d first entered the complex,
I saw four slumped bodies dressed in white near the table with the playing cards.
We’d left one there, and one at the top in the desert. So three of them were new.

Which meant that some or all of our friends had made it that far on their way out
of the complex. Impatience beat on me as the truck curved up the drive to reveal a
square of starry sky above. The rush of cool fresh air was a blessing.
They must be okay, all of them
. Or I would never forgive myself.

Caleb slowed as we approached the exit. The objurer London had killed still lay to
one side, but there was no way to know what else had happened up here. Some kind of
animal noises and shouts came from not far away. Caleb stopped the truck just below
ground level.

I jumped out and padded up beside the truck to peer over the edge.

The light of the full moon blazed down onto the desert, casting a hard black shadow
from the observation tower. The shallow pool of water nearby reflected the silver
beams like a mirror. Everything was shockingly sharp to my eyes, as if I’d suddenly
put on glasses after years of quasi-blindness. The nearness of Othersphere heightened
everything.

Something scuffled far behind me. I turned and crept out farther to look. Then in
the distance: a ferocious bark and whine.
London.
A furry brown mountain moved into view, chasing something two-legged in white.
Siku.

Caleb raised his eyebrows inquiringly at me, and I nodded. Then I sprang back into
the bed of the truck. The tires spun, and Caleb peeled out, swerving in the direction
I’d been gazing in.

I put my front paws up on the roof of the cab, wind ruffling my ears, to get a better
look as we thumped over hillocks and small cacti. From here, I could see Siku turning
from the prone body of an objurer next to a truck, which acted as a shield between
him and seven other armed objurers.

Amaris was peeking around the back of the truck, taking shots at the men in white,
pinning them down. I didn’t see Arnaldo or November, but London was limping near three
prone figures in white. She weaved slightly, like she was drunk, and then fell over.
My stomach clenched. Was she drugged or something much worse?

“Shit!” I heard Caleb say inside the truck. He floored it as one of the objurers fired
three shots at Amaris. Another person in white, a woman, ran toward London.

Nearby, two objurers were moving in, using the truck and a large cactus as cover,
to surround Amaris. They had holstered their regular pistols and pulled out tranquilizer
guns. Ximon’s orders must be to capture her alive. The other three people in white
were moving around the end of the truck, two of them firing darts at Siku. The small
lump on his back had to be November. The other one was firing real bullets at Lazar.

But they hit nothing, distracted by a winged streak of feathers falling out of the
sky. With an earsplitting screech, Arnaldo grabbed the silver gun in his talons and
flew away. In the moonlight I tracked him as he zoomed back up, leaving an objurer
with a bloody, empty hand.

“You get the one on London!” Caleb shouted, swerving to avoid a clump of saguaro.
“I got the ones on Amaris.”

As our truck approached the prone wolf, the female objurer near London turned, hearing
our engines. She raised her tranquilizer gun as I launched myself into the air, using
the truck’s momentum and my own power to leap over thirty yards. She gaped at me,
firing almost as a reflex, and her dart whizzed past my ear. I cannoned into her so
hard the impact sent us both rolling like tumbleweeds.

I got to my feet to see Caleb speeding the truck right at the two men stalking Amaris.
They veered in different directions to avoid getting run over, but one of them was
not fast enough. The truck rammed him, hurtling him thirty feet to lie broken on the
ground. Caleb swerved to track down the other one.

My objurer had rolled to her side, blood pouring down her face, and fumbled with trembling
hands at her gun. I gathered up the darkness inside me and growled at her.

Up here, the veil was slightly thicker. I could feel it. And the well of power inside
me that could destroy technology without a touch was drying up. But the gun in the
objurer’s hand blackened and warped. She dropped it as if it burned her. The silver
cross around her neck sizzled. She screamed, tore it off, and threw it away from her.

“The devil!” She pushed herself away from me, face pale. “You’re the devil himself.”

Herself,
I thought. But I settled for a derisive tiger snort. From the angle of her left arm,
it looked like her collarbone was broken. She was no longer a threat. I looked for
Caleb and saw him drive down the other fleeing objurer. He braked and downshifted
just enough to bump the man hard. He fell with an audible snap. Caleb had to haul
on the wheel to avoid running over him.

Closer to the Tribunal’s empty truck, Lazar had gotten one of the objurers in a headlock,
using the man’s body as a shield between him and the other two.

Meanwhile, Siku, with November on top of him, moved with his surprising speed around
the truck to come up behind the other men. One turned and fired. The dart buried itself
into Siku’s front leg. The other objurer ran.

That saved his life, for Siku let loose a bellow of rage and lashed out at the man
who had shot him. His long claws hit the man near the neck and tore his head off with
a heavy spurt of dark blood.

I ran over to where London lay. One sniff told me she was unconscious but not dead.
Thank the Moon.
A dart had speared her shoulder. Her jaws were covered in blood, but from the odor,
I knew it was not her own. But her front paws were bloody from dozens of cactus quills.
Reverting to her human form would cure those wounds and push the needles from her
body, but she was out cold and unable to shift.

Caleb.
He could send her wolf form back to Othersphere. He was turning the truck in a wide
circle, bringing it back toward the objurer who had fled Siku. Lazar had knocked out
the man he’d had in the headlock and dropped him to the ground.

In the distance, I heard other engines, at least four large ones, coming from the
entrance to the accelerator. The Tribunal was coming, in force.
We have to get out of here.

There were other noises too, coming from a different direction, that didn’t make sense
to me.
No time to worry about that now.

Amaris came running up, holstering her gun, to kneel beside London. “Is she . . .
?”

I shook my head as she felt for a pulse. Tension drained from her as she found it,
and she buried her face in the wolf’s fur. She’d been even more worried than I had
been.

I mewed.
No time for that!
She sat up and wiped angrily at the tears running through the desert dust on her
face. “She needs to shift. Her paws are shredded. Or maybe we can get her into the
truck. . . .”

I uttered a short, negative growl.

“What? Oh!” She saw what I was looking at—four sets of very bright headlights coming
our way. I had no idea how we were going to get out of this.

Lazar yelled from where he was taking ammunition off the objurer bodies, “Four trucks
full of men coming any second now!”

Off in the distance Caleb’s truck knocked the running objurer to the ground.

I butted Amaris with my head, then nosed London’s bloody paws.

“She stumbled into the cactus because she was saving me from those three.” Amaris
pointed back at the three bodies I’d first seen as we drove up. “It’s my fault.”

I sniffed London’s paws again, and then pushed my nose up against Amaris’s hands.

Amaris’s eyes lit with understanding, then despair. “Heal her? No, I can’t, I . .
.”

She looked up at the headlights approaching. Caleb and Lazar were still far away.
Siku was galloping toward us, but it would be nearly impossible for him or for me
to carry London away with our claws and teeth without hurting her even more.

Amaris looked at me, her jaw set. Her dark eyes turned steely. I’d seen a similar
look on Caleb’s face many times. “I have to do this,” she said. “I love her, you know.”

I nodded, and took a step back. Amaris closed her eyes and held her hands out, palms
up. She grew very still. Her face took on a look of utter peace, as if all the love
in her heart had poured outward.

The headlights of Ximon’s trucks were fanning out into a semicircle, hoping to pin
us against their empty truck. I placed my long, striped form between Amaris and London
and the nearest truck, now fifty yards away.

Amaris gasped, and her eyes flew open. Instead of warm brown, they glittered silver,
bright as the full moon rising over us. Her skin took on a sheen, then a glow. Light
trickled from the ends of her hair and streamed from the tips of her fingers. She
looked like a creature made of moonlight. The wave of power echoing inside me told
me that she had accessed something very powerful in Othersphere.

“Amaris!” Lazar shouted in alarm from over by the truck. He began running toward her.
“What . . . !”

I growled a warning at him. He slowed, bewildered.

Caleb’s truck rumbled between us and the oncoming vehicles. A pop, then something
pinged into the truck.
Bullets.
I remembered the sound from the first night I’d met Caleb. The Tribunal had fired
at us then too, as we’d stolen Lazar’s BMW to get us to safety.

Amaris was smiling. The white radiance made her look like an angel or some benevolent
alien. She ran a hand lovingly over London’s furry head, then down her shoulder to
touch her front paws. Wherever the silver light touched, the wounds disappeared. The
cactus spines were pushed out by the healing flesh. She leaned over and whispered
into the wolf’s ear. “Wake up.”

London lifted her head, ears erect, then scrambled to her feet, wagging her tail furiously.
In the light coming from Amaris, her fur sparkled silver.

Amaris’s smile widened. “Hey, beautiful.”

London’s wild blue eyes took her in, shining like a star; then she barked joyously
and licked her face. Amaris laughed.

“We’re surrounded!”

It was Caleb’s voice. Siku, November, and Lazar had run up closer as one of the four
trucks circled around behind us. Caleb’s truck sort of shielded us from two of the
vehicles, but there were headlights aimed at us from the four corners of the compass.

The light from Amaris dimmed. She blinked, wavered, and then shook her head as if
about to pass out. London dipped her head under Amaris’s arm to act as a support.

I knew how Amaris felt. I, too, was growing weary. I’d drawn on my own reserves time
and again to destroy the technology ranged against us. And given the slightly thicker
texture of the veil aboveground, I didn’t have near enough power to stop the trucks,
douse their lights, or melt all the guns pointing at us. But I couldn’t despair yet.
We’ll find another way.

“Get in the truck!” Lazar pointed toward Caleb’s truck.

It was our only chance. He was right. But there were too many of the enemy. I could
see the same thought on everyone’s face. Not all of us would get away.

“Surrender and you might live,” came an amplified voice we all recognized. Ximon.
I could see his snowy white head and broad shoulders climbing out of the cab of the
truck to the east; he stood on the running board. He wasn’t using a megaphone or mic.
His voice only sounded as if he were.

Lazar was helping Amaris to her feet. She could walk, but kept one hand on London’s
back and the other arm around Lazar’s neck for support.

Siku turned his back to us, facing out toward the truck to the south, and bared his
teeth. November huddled on top of him, using his shoulder blades for cover. A growl
rolled out of my throat, echoed by a snarl from London. Beyond Siku, four figures
in white poured out of the truck, lining up to aim rifles at us. If there were four
in each truck, that was sixteen objurers, plus Ximon, to deal with.

Caleb moved from his truck toward us as Amaris stumbled forward. A bullet hit the
ground at Caleb’s feet, and he stopped dead.

“Don’t move,” said Ximon. His tone was the most reasonable in the world, and I felt
a lethargy weighing down my limbs. Lazar, London, and Amaris came to a stumbling halt.

“In fact,” Ximon said, “why don’t you lie down? You’re so very tired.”

I curled my tail around my body, bending my knees to lie down. I could see the others
doing the same.

“You’ve fought so well, so bravely. Lay your burden down now. Rest.”

I sat, stretching my forelimbs out luxuriously.
Just a little nap
. Near his stolen truck, Caleb wavered, eyes fluttering as if about to fall asleep
on his feet.

“Rest, and know that you are safe. . . .” The voice was so soothing. It was my father’s
voice, a voice I had never known. He had found me at last, and he would protect me.
“You are safe with—
Aah!
”

The soothing tones broke off. An explosive cry pierced the calm. I snapped alert as
an eagle dived from the sky to rake its talons across Ximon’s throat. He fell, and
others rushed to help him.

Arnaldo?
I got to my feet. Caleb straightened, and London urged Amaris again toward the truck.