Othersphere (15 page)

“I've got a silver knife in my boot,” Lazar said. The plants bowed slightly as he tried to bend over to his shoe. “I can't reach it.”

“Check the shadows!” Caleb said, and then began to hum. Lazar joined him. I winced back as a thorn as big as an antler stabbed at my eye. My adrenaline surged. I broke out in a sweat. “Hurry up!” Being constrained like this was deeply disturbing. If I didn't get out soon, I might start flailing and tugging, which would only draw more blood. I forced myself to take deep breaths and craned my neck to avoid being blinded.

The vines squeezed me tighter on one side. I shuffled my feet to stay upright, fearful of falling into a thorny bed. Through the teeming mass of olive and jade stalks I saw the white tree trunk get closer. “It's drawing us to the tree!” I shouted.

“Barbed wire, darn it.” Lazar's mild swear word spoke volumes. “In our world this thorny stuff is barbed wire. The tree is a post.”

“No point in drawing forth that shadow,” I said. “Ow! Damn it!” The thorns pressed in, drawing more blood, getting close to tendons, muscles, and bone. I could shift into my tiger form to heal the cuts, and that form was stronger. But it was also bigger. If I got even a little bit larger, the thorns would be driven in deeper. The one poised in front of my face was long enough to kill me instantly if it went through my eye or my neck. Why hadn't it stabbed me yet?

The smooth white tree trunk in front of me trembled. An ominous crack gashed the surface.

“What the f—” Caleb was cut off as our captor jerked us closer.

The fissure in the bark split, revealing a gnarled maw dripping with cherry red sap. The vines were pulling us inexorably toward it. I struggled to believe it even as it happened.

Lazar leaned back, trying to stop our movement. “Just when I thought this place couldn't get any weirder.”

“I always wondered what it was like to be digested alive,” Caleb muttered.

“Maybe we can cut our way out once we're in there.” I tried to sound hopeful, but it came out desperate.

Lazar was humming again. He broke off. “There's a hut! With tools! On the other side of the veil in our world, just ten yards to my right! I think I see an axe.”

“Ten yards too far,” I said, wincing as more thorns stabbed into me, forcing me to limp six inches closer to the slavering cavity ahead. Caleb's arm was half inside it already.

“No, Dez!” Caleb twisted around despite the thorns, exhaling with the pain of it. I could see his black eyes flecked with gold through the twisting greenery. A streak of sluggish blood ran down his cheek. The mist was thickening around it. “You might be able to get out of this,” he said. “If you shift into a cat.”

“Of course!” Hope surged through me. As a tiger I was too big, but as a cat, I just might be small enough to slip out. I'd only made that shift twice before, but there was no time like the present to try again. “London, you should do it, too,” I said. “Turn into that little fennec fox like you did before.”

London yowled mournfully, not sounding very positive.

“We can help her!” Lazar said. “Right, Caleb?”

“Yes, yes, good idea!” Caleb gritted his teeth, straining away from the yawning wooden jaws beside him.

“We'll do it at the same time, London, okay? So they don't have time to react and grab us again.” London barked sharply. “Great. On three.”

“Ready, Lazar?” Caleb asked.

In response, Lazar let loose a baying note I'd never heard before. It pierced and wavered like a deeper version of the wolf's howl London had wailed earlier.

Caleb sent out a note to join his, forming a chord, and then pitched it higher, thinner, as if it was coming from an animal much smaller than a wolf.

Lazar mimicked him. I watched carefully as much as I could through the writhing plants. Lazar's gold-and-brown irises were locked onto Caleb's black-and-gold ones. The brothers were interweaving their tones into an eerie song with a story I could feel under my skin. It was the story of a wolf who asked the moon a favor. And to save her life, the moon granted her wish—to become a fox.

Do their voices tell stories back in our world, too?
I was sensing things in Othersphere I'd never known existed before.

The song seemed to be reaching a crescendo. I focused myself on how it felt to be small, how I'd once fit on a bookshelf in my cat form, how Caleb had run his hand over my head and made me purr with happiness. I found that place inside myself easily. Othersphere made it feel completely natural. I could be the world's smallest cat in a heartbeat.

“Okay, London,” I said. “One, two, three.”

Like a diver slicing through the surface of the water, I dove into my cat form. It rushed over me and down I went, under the grasping tendrils of the vines, slipping past the cruel prickles and barbs dripping with my own blood.

My paws were tiny now, narrower than the blades of the grass, speckled in swirls of orange, white, and black fur. Above me, the feelers that had held me were flailing, searching. Two feet away, a tiny fennec fox gathered itself, pale fur easily visible amidst the seething greenery. It swiveled ears as wide as coffee cups at me and yipped.

I meowed and angled my sinuous body around a particularly large thorn, poking my head past a grasping tentacle, and slithered through the fluctuating gaps in the living net that had held my human-ish form.

The fox followed, ears now tucked tight to her head, black nose narrow enough to find the cracks between the blades, tiny paws dancing past floundering emerald antennae.

Our escape was a kind of song, too. I felt the rhythm of it, a flurry of tiny notes in counterpoint to the menacing fugue all around.

Then I slinked between the last lattice of shrubbery and was free. London popped out beside me and shook her enormous ears. We skittered farther away from the seething hedgerow now looming so high, and she woofed. We couldn't see the boys, but they could hear us.

“Are you free?” Lazar's voice cut through the vegetation. I let out a hard meow, trying to make it sound like “yes” as London barked, louder this time.

“Okay, Caleb, ready?”

“We're going to call forth whatever we can from the hut,” Caleb said. “Get anything you find quick as you can because—arrh!”

His voice broke off in a growl of anger and pain. I trilled a question, pacing, trying to see his black coat, something, but even the white trunk of the huge tree was invisible to us now.

“Like I said.” Caleb's voice was more strained, but determined.
Thank the Moon.
“Be quick. Go, Lazar!”

Lazar intoned another note, different from the wolf and fox howls, happier, more workmanlike. Caleb's voice joined his, describing in notes a tin hut, padlock rusted and useless, abandoned and unused on someone's land, with tools hanging from rusty nails inside.

I felt more than heard the pop of something coming through shadow. The fox's ears swiveled in that same direction, and we took off. The hut was there, exactly as the boys' notes had described it, leaning to one side, door hanging open. I ran right in, London beside me, and shifted instantly to human. On the wall, a large, slightly rusty axe was hanging from a hook. A saw with broken teeth hung next to it.

I grabbed the axe as London ran yipping around my feet. Perhaps she wasn't able to shift. “Stay back!” I shouted, and raising the axe, I rushed right at the teeming foliage now nearly two stories high at the base of the white tree.

I brought the axe down with all my might. The blade didn't look very sharp, but it bit into the stalks of undergrowth with a satisfying
thunk
. The grass tore beneath it, oozing cherry red, and then turned black. More dramatically, the entire bank of greenery recoiled, fanning out as if afraid of the axe head.

I swung the axe down again, ripping away stems and thorns. The stalks nearby reacted more like a crowd of people than a plant, heaving away from me, desperate to escape.

I heard growling and the padding of feet behind me, and I knew London had shifted back into wolf form and was coming, dragging something. I chopped downward again as a silver streak, big as a pony, lifted a large, flat, rectangular object in her mouth and flung it at the rippling hedgerow.

The object clanged, vibrating, into the main body of the plant. It was the entire broken front door of the hut, made of corrugated, rusted tin.

The plants beneath the door wilted and blackened before our eyes. Lazar, his right leg now mostly free, was pulling his way out. Caleb's black shape was still deeply embedded in squirming green, half in the quivering hole in the tree, half out.

“It's the metal that's killing it!” I shouted. “Do it again, London!”

The wolf darted into the fray to grab the edge of the door as I chopped at coiling tendrils all around her. She dragged the door back and with a mighty twist of her neck, launched it again at the center of the plant. Wherever the metal touched, the grass withered and died, and this time, most of it was around Caleb.

The entire tree reared back from the metal, shaking the ground beneath us. Caleb shouted with alarm as the great open maw trembled and began to close around his left arm. Branches swung down at the tin door, banging into it, trying to shove it away. Lazar shook bracken off his face and ran to grab it.

One branch stopped in mid-swing right in front of me. A clump of ruddy leaves at the end of one twig turned my way. Each one sported a single bright unmistakable eye with a sparkling garnet iris, prismed with veins like a leaf.

I gaped. The dozen or so leaf-eyes scanned me, unblinking. I turned my gaze higher, all the way up the ten-story tree. Every one of its red leaves carried an eye. Half were focused on the tin door Lazar and London were grabbing. The rest were trained on me.

The nearest branch slapped at my face. I ducked, feeling the sting as the lower leaves smacked into my forehead. Another, larger appendage thrust itself at the door, knocking it twenty feet back, then lunged for London and Lazar. Lazar rolled away, and London tore at a clump of leaves with her teeth, ripping them off the bough.

There was no audible scream, but the eyes on the red leaves around me squinted. The entire tree shuddered, and the ground trembled. I concentrated on keeping my feet, cutting away at the last few binding strands holding Caleb. He grimaced, kicked his legs free, and stumbled away, trailing vines and blood. The mist clustered around the droplets on the ground and the abrasions on his face. He waved his hands at it, but it was like batting at insects the size of water droplets.

“Let's get out of here!” Lazar said, tugging on my sleeve. “This way!”

Sleeve? I kept hold of the axe and tried to figure out how I had come to be clothed in a soft gown made of what looked like fuzzy white flowers. We all turned and ran after Lazar.

“What the hell are you wearing?” Caleb asked, jogging alongside me as we wove between more white-trunked trees, careful to avoid any thick clumps of spiky grass. London was outpacing all of us on her four long legs, looking back frequently so Lazar could point her the right way.

“No idea,” I said, speaking between breaths. “It was on me when I shifted. Oh!” The axe I'd been holding was now a dried tree branch. I kept hold of it. If we needed an axe, Caleb and Lazar might be able to call it forth again.

“Maybe clothes come with shifting on your home planet,” Caleb said. “So to speak.”

“I guess.” We broke to go around a tree, giving it a wide berth. I caught a scent of orange blossom. “We need to get out of here fast,” I said. “Now the whole place smells like my block back in Burbank in summer.”

Lazar had let us catch up to him and overheard me. “It's like my mother's perfume.”

Caleb's face was grim. “My mother grew orange blossom in our garden in France.”

He'd told me about that garden during one of our long phone calls last year. He and his mother had managed to spend five whole years in the same place in the south of France when he was a boy, before Tribunal scouts had forced them to move on. He'd liked southern California because it had the same climate, the same smells as those happier days.

“The forest, or maybe the mist is manipulating us,” I said. “It smelled like bread when you talked about Amaris baking things. It's like it finds the scent of our memories.”

“And it fosters good will.” Lazar shot a look at Caleb and said no more. He was right, though. For a few minutes he and Caleb had been laughing together like . . . well, like brothers. And they'd cooperated seamlessly to get London to shift and to make the hut and its tools appear out of shadow.

Caleb nodded, giving him a considering look. “It probably wanted us to get physically closer to each other, so it could grab us all at once.”

“Is it the trees?” Lazar asked. We'd slowed down to a brisk walk. London circled around behind us to end up beside Lazar.

“Maybe the mist.” Caleb looked at the sun dipping below the horizon. The gray-blue haze seemed to thicken between the trees. “You saw how it was drawn to our blood.”

“A cooperative relationship between the trees, the grass, and the mist,” Lazar said speculatively. “The mist gives off an aroma or pheromone that makes you get lost in happy memories so that the grass can trap you. The scratches from the grass feed the mist.”

Caleb was nodding. Figuring out the problem had drawn him into talking to Lazar in a civil tone again. It wasn't friendly or brotherly, but at least it wasn't hostile. “Then the grass hands the live bodies off to the trees for an evening snack.”