Othermoon (15 page)

London perked up. “Tomorrow?”

Caleb hugged me. “I knew it!”

“Wow, so he’s not kicking you out?” November sucked on a chicken bone thoughtfully.

“I knew he wouldn’t,” Siku said.

I cleared my throat to help my voice sound casual. I thought I knew the answer to
the question I was about to ask, but I wasn’t a hundred percent sure, especially when
it came to Arnaldo. “So if the Council tells everyone’s parents to pull their kids
out of school tomorrow, what happens?”

“The Council’s a bunch of fatheads,” said Siku. “I like it here.”

“I don’t think my parents will care much what the Council says,” November said. “We
rats are more broad-minded.”

“Maybe our parents can’t come get us.” London let her knife drop with a clank onto
her plate. “What about the Council? They could force us out.”

“Do they know the school’s location?” I asked.

“No,” said Caleb with a small smile. “Amaris and I will stay. Right, ’Mar?”

“Of course,” she said. “This is our home now.”

November grinned, showing all her little pointed teeth. “So they can take their order
to leave and shove it.”

“Would you disobey your mother to stay?” Siku asked London. He was tearing apart an
orange with his large but very dexterous hands.

She thought hard. “I guess maybe I would. You guys and Dez have been way more supportive
than my damn family ever was. Mom can scream at me all she wants—from Idaho.”

Arnaldo hadn’t said anything. He’d looked around as everyone spoke.

November leaned over and stuck her nose in his face. “What about you, Arnaldo?” she
asked.

“The hawk-shifter on the Council sent me a message,” he said quietly. “He’s helping
me get a lawyer, so maybe I can get custody of my brothers.”

I blinked, a smile beginning to form. Siku leaned over and pounded him on the shoulder.

November stole a grape from his plate and popped it in her mouth. “That would be awesome.”

“So I guess I’m the head of my family now,” Arnaldo continued. His eyes met mine,
and they weren’t warm, but they weren’t hostile either. “And if I want to stay here
until my brothers are ready to come home with me, or have them come here to stay with
me, then that’s what will happen.”

November grabbed a fistful of grapes and threw them up in the air, like confetti.
“Hooray!”

Even London was smiling as the grapes bounced down. I sat back in my chair, relief
flooding over me.

“So the Council and our parents don’t know where we are,” Siku said. “But Lazar does.”

“Kind of ass-backwards.” November stole a slice of his orange.

“He’s the key to our fight against the Tribunal this time,” I said.

“So let’s say he actually gives us the plans to this accelerator thingie instead of
betraying us all,” said November as she sucked the orange slice. “What then?”

“We should just kill them all,” said London. “First we get the plans from Lazar, then
we kill him to make sure he stays quiet.” She put a hand out toward me as I opened
my mouth to protest. “Then we burn down wherever they are, and we hunt down all the
other Tribunal compounds and do the same. Sorry, Amaris and Caleb. I know Lazar’s
your brother, and your father’s involved and all that, but it’s the only way we can
be sure.”

“Sure of what?” I said. “That we’re a bunch of murderers?”

“Sure of our safety,” said Caleb. “Sure of your safety and your mom’s and Richard’s.”
He turned to London. “I agree with you.”

“If we kill them all, then we’ve proven they were right about us,” I said. “We’d be
monsters.”

“So you know what’s right and wrong better than the rest of us, I guess,” said London.
“We have our own opinions, you know. We’re not all just your servants.”

“I never said you were!” I said, standing up. “But I won’t be a party to slaughter.
These are human beings we’re talking about. And if we can become friends with Amaris,
maybe . . .”

“We’ll just hold hands with the Tribunal and sing ‘Kumbaya’?” November asked. “Puh-lease.”

“Amaris is different from the others,” Siku said.

“Exactly.” November nodded. “The Tribunal and the otherkin have been enemies since
time began, Stripes. I know tigers are strong swimmers, but you’re paddling against
the current on this one.”

“Never stopped me before,” I said. “Good night.”

I turned and headed down the steps toward our sleeping quarters, wishing for once
I had my own room where I could be alone for a few hours, and not have to justify
and explain everything I did and said.

I recognized Caleb’s firm footsteps catching up to me. I paused at the bottom of the
stairs as he came down. “I’m sorry,” he said.

I avoided him, turning to move down the hall to the girls’ room. He pushed past me
and made me stop, tilting my chin up to force me to look at him.

“Can we talk about it?” he said. “You’re acting so strange.”

“I’m acting strange?” I jerked my chin from his touch, feeling a rollercoaster mixture
of flattery and irritation that he’d noticed. “I’m not the one talking about mass
murder.”

“We’ve all had to kill at one point or another, to save ourselves,” he said. “It’s
never easy, and it shouldn’t be, but if it helps save otherkin in the future . . .”

“Yes, I’ve killed,” I said. I wish I hadn’t but I had. “But there’s a big difference
between self-defense against an imminent threat and cold-blooded killing against a
hypothetical threat.”

“Hypothetical?” He pulled back a few inches. “The Tribunal’s not a hypothetical threat
and you know it.”

“All I know,” I said, my voice coming out low and heated, “is that I won’t make a
plan to kill hundreds of people in cold blood. I’ll do anything I have to do to find
another way. Good night.” I pushed past him and shut the door behind me without looking
back.

CHAPTER 12

The girls’ room was quiet after dinner. We all pretended to do our homework in silence
for awhile. I couldn’t concentrate on the book I was reading about how the art and
religion of Ancient Egypt, with its many animal-headed gods, had been inspired by
its original ruling family of shifters. How could Caleb and I be in such different
places when it came to Lazar?

“Hey—” Amaris had just walked in from the hallway. She came over to me, holding an
open book, and sat down on my bed. “I’ve got a question about this history of the
horse-shifters.”

I sat up, scooching next to her. “Yeah, I read that last term.”

She pointed her finger at some text I recognized about how the early horse-shifters
had given rise to the legends of centaurs, and said in a very low tone, “I’m talking
to Lazar on the computer.”

I darted a surprised look at her, then looked around the room. Both London and November
were as far away from my bed as they could be, heads down over books, with no sign
they’d heard her. “Okay,” I said in a normal tone. “Let me show you on the computer.”

As we left the room, I looked over my shoulder. Neither November or London had stirred.

We moved quietly down the hall. No noise filtered out of the boys’ room, so maybe
they were doing the sullen silence thing too. Once in the computer room, I shut and
locked the door as Amaris pressed a few keys, and Lazar’s face, shadowed with bruises
and tinted blue in the light of his monitor, appeared.

I sat down next to Amaris so we could both be seen on the computer’s camera. “Hi.
We need to be quick. Everything okay?”

“Everything is good,” he said, a relieved smile breaking over his face. “I’ve got
the plans. I can’t e-mail or send them to you without risking them finding out. What
do you want to do?”

“We’ll meet you tonight and get them from you in person,” I said. “Amaris, can you
get on that computer? Find somewhere near Vegas we can all get to, some hotel or something,
and we’ll meet there at, say, one a.m.”

Amaris nodded, sliding her chair over in front of another computer to search.

Lazar cocked his head, his usually sunny hair almost greenish in the strange computer
light. “Why can’t I just bring them to the school?”

“It can’t be here in case you’re followed.” I didn’t want him to know the others were
prepared to kill him.

His eyes flicked to the image on his monitor, searching what had to be my face. “You
still don’t trust me.”

“You’ve got a long way to go to earn that,” I said. “You better show up alone.”

He nodded. “And you? Will Caleb be there?”

I shot a look at Amaris, whose eyes were wide with apprehension. “Who comes with me
is none of your business,” I said.

“Found a place, I think,” said Amaris, scooting back over to look into the camera
on my monitor. “The Naiad Hotel and Casino, on the north side of Vegas.” She rattled
off the address and Lazar scribbled it down. “There’s a bowling alley inside. We’ll
meet you at the entrance.”

“One a.m.,” I said. “We’ll meet you there.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, his voice tinged slightly with admiration. “See you then.”

The monitor went blank. Amaris tapped a few keys to make sure the connection was gone,
and then turned to me.

“
We
will meet him?” she asked.

“Just you and I,” I said. “For now. We’ll need to sneak out around midnight—quietly.”

 

The Naiad Hotel and Casino had a neon sign over the entrance with its name picked
out in an Old West font in gold, surrounded by glowing turquoise curlicues that were
probably an attempt at evoking ocean waves. A woman with a glittering green fish tail
presided, her hair the same blaring gold. Her seashell bra was a frightening blood
red.

It was 1:05
A.M.
Amaris and I had successfully snuck out of the school, but were running a few minutes
late. Outside the Naiad, pedestrians loitered while a man in a toga carrying a trident
stood at the door greeting visitors wearing hoodies and board shorts.

“Brace yourself for bad Greek mythology and inconsistent ocean imagery,” I said to
Amaris as she drove the SUV into the parking garage.

“I’m not sure I’d know the difference,” she said as she took a parking ticket from
the automatic dispenser. “We weren’t allowed to learn the mythology of any other cultures.
Morfael put some basic texts on my to-read list, but he said I should read the actual
history first.”

She was dressed in dark jeans, a long-sleeved black T-shirt, and a waterproof jacket
lined with fleece, her thick blond hair pushed back from her face with an elastic
headband. I had on a similar ensemble, trying to keep as low a profile as possible
while we were out.

“Okay,” I said, as she threw the car into park. “We’re supposed to meet him near the
entrance to the bowling alley, right? You know more members of the Tribunal than I
do, so keep scanning the area, in case you see any familiar faces. Also keep your
eyes peeled for anyone with an earpiece, or who seems overly interested in you or
me or Lazar. Just in case he was followed.”

“Got it,” she said. She looked a little paler than usual.

“I’ll go up and talk to Lazar, with you nearby, in earshot, maybe twenty feet away.
If we stay apart, we’re less likely to be spotted.”

“That’s if Lazar double-crosses us,” she said. “Which he won’t. But okay.”

“We hope for the best and plan for the worst,” I said, remembering my mother saying
something like that to me the day my scoliosis had first been detected. Six months
later the worst happened, and they fitted me for the brace. Thanks to my mom, I’d
been as ready as anyone could be to deal with it, and I’d worn it faithfully until
my first shift to tiger form miraculously cured the curvature. Dealing with that had
taught me a lot about being patient, about enduring pain, and how you couldn’t always
see on the outside what was going on inside a person.

“You’ve been through way worse than this,” I said to Amaris. “Remember how brave you’ve
been so far—facing down your dad, jumping from that plane while it was moving. We’re
just meeting your brother here. This is nothing compared to that.”

She nodded with determination, psyching herself into it. “And if something goes wrong,
I run to the car, and drive it to the front entrance to wait for you.”

“I’ll call or text you if we’re separated and the plan changes,” I said, holding up
November’s phone. I’d “borrowed” it on my way out. Fresh from those lessons with Morfael,
I hoped I could keep from destroying it. If worse came to worst, I’d get November
a new phone. But it was one more thing they’d all need to forgive me for after the
night was done.

She nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.”

As we pushed through the door into the back of the casino, a cloud of smoke enveloped
us, followed by the incessant dinging of slot machine bells and the recorded clanking
of falling coins.

I forced myself to breathe, even though the air choked me, and led Amaris past a man
in a cowboy hat getting a fistful of cash from an ATM and a bent woman who was at
least seventy years old screeching at an imperious one-armed bandit that had just
swallowed her last quarter.

We passed an entrance to “Billy’s Steakhouse” and moved through a glass door to the
hotel reception area. Amaris coughed a little at the redoubled thickness of smoke.
My tongue tasted like ash. Amaris cast a nervous glance toward the reception desk
and hunched her shoulders.

“Just act confident,” I said to her, striding across the lobby as if I knew where
I was going. “A lot of people come and go in hotels, so they have no reason to think
we don’t belong.”

I angled left, moving past another bar, and found a sign pointing farther left that
said MOVIE THEATERS, BOWLING ALLEY, OCTOPUS’S GARDEN ICE CREAM PARLOR—THIS WAY.

The way was paved with craps tables, banks of slot machines, and a rickety roulette
wheel surrounded by men in trucker hats wearing rock band T-shirts and women in jackets
that easily shed their sequins.

Amaris, who had not come into the Luxor with Caleb, kept swiveling her head around,
looking at everything. I leaned in to her, but she put her hand on my arm and said,
“I know, keep an eye out for suspicious people. I’m trying. There’s just so much noise,
so many lights.”

She was right. The place reeked of acrid smoke and sickly sweet alcohol. Lights of
gold, blue, green, and red flashed and skittered from symbols on the slots. Under
the clanging from the machines and the shouts of the dealers, people cursed under
their breath or grunted with joy.

Behind it all, under the perspiration and perfume and carpet glue, lay the grimy odor
of money. Dollar bills always smelled filthy to me—not the sweet earthy aroma of soil,
but like the sweat of a thousand hands and the dust of a thousand cash register drawers
had soaked into every crease of the inky paper. That’s what Vegas stank like to me,
and I hated it.

I almost didn’t recognize Lazar. I noted the back of a tall, broad-shouldered blond
guy wearing a leather jacket and jeans standing by the door to Caliban’s Bowling Lanes
and caught myself admiring how his jeans fit. Then with a jolt, I pulled my gaze back
up to the shining head of hair. It was cropped to show the clean tan back of his neck
as he bent his head down to look at something in his hands.

He turned, scanning the room, and I realized this was the first time I’d seen him
wearing anything other than white. Before, he’d always had the look of an arrogant,
avenging angel, the kind of masculine beauty the Renaissance painters tried to capture.
But in that faded blue T-shirt and brown leather jacket, he could have been the most
popular boy in high school—the class president or the captain of the football team.

Only the concerned crease between his eyebrows and almost military stance of readiness
gave him away as something quite different.
He’ll have a gun under the jacket, even if he’s sincere about helping us.

“There he is,” I said to Amaris, nodding toward her brother.

Her eyes landed on him. “Oh.” Her eyes got very bright, almost happy. “He kept his
word. I guess I should stay here while you talk to him, right? That’s what we agreed.”

I regarded her for a moment. She attempted to smile and looked past me, her lips pressed
together as if keeping something profound in check.

“Go.” I patted her shoulder. “Go say hello to him. It’ll give me a chance to be sure
he’s alone.”

“You sure?”At my nod: “Okay, thanks!” Her smile became genuine, and she bounded around
me toward Lazar.

I inspected the crowd, staying back behind a cluster of craps players. No one seemed
to be paying her, him, or me the slightest attention. That was good.

Lazar noticed Amaris approaching, and his whole face opened up for a moment in happy
surprise.

Amaris saw it, and she lit up with a sudden grin. She threw her arms around his neck
in a hug. He laughed, wrapping his arms around her waist, and I saw that in one hand
he held a manila envelope, unlabeled. Had he brought the plans for the Tribunal facility,
like he’d promised?

Amaris broke the hug, still beaming, and then turned to examine the room, probably
looking for me. She gestured, as if saying, “I need to go keep a lookout now.”

He leaned in to kiss her cheek with a sudden, surprising tenderness.

She got very still, biting her lip.

He spoke, and the words looked a lot like “I’m sorry,” and then “I love you,” and
I had to look away, knowing I was observing something incredibly intimate.

When I looked back, Amaris was heading toward me, a little breathless from anxiety
mixed with happiness. “I told him I’m keeping a lookout. See anything suspicious?”

“Nothing so far.” She nodded, and I walked toward Lazar, who stood looking right at
me, his face now unreadable.

“That was clever, having my sister come see me first,” he said as I got close. The
familiar, arrogant sneer I remembered from when we raided his father’s compound was
marring his face. “You got to observe me with my guard down. Maybe it’ll help you
see through all my lies.”

I stopped in front of him, trying to stand in a relaxed way, to make it look like
we were friends just hanging out between frames. Through the entrance to the bowling
alley came the small thunder of pins being knocked down.

“I
am
an ingenious bitch,” I said.

He withdrew a little, blinking incredulously. Like Amaris, he’d been raised not to
swear, so I got cheap satisfaction out of shocking him. I continued: “So ingenious
that I don’t need your sister’s help to know when you’re lying. Are those the plans
to the new Tribunal complex?”

The sneer faded slightly as he narrowed his eyes at me, assessing. “I keep my promises,”
he said and handed the manila envelope over.

It was oddly close to something Caleb had once said, about how he didn’t often make
promises, because when he did, he kept them.

“You didn’t bring my beloved brother with you?” He looked down at me, brown eyes sparkling
with gold, just the way Caleb’s black eyes did. “Or should I say ‘your beloved’?”

“You really shouldn’t say anything about that at all,” I said, keeping my voice calm
even as my face turned red. “I’d hate to have to kill and eat you in front of all
these grandparents.”

He studied me a moment. Was that the faint trace of a smile on his face? “I will obey
you fully and keep my covenant.”

It took me a moment to translate his archaic language. “Were you followed?”

He shook his head. “And I hacked the GPS in my car again.”

“Okay.” I opened the envelope and allowed its contents to slide into my hand. On top
I saw a map of Western Nevada, one part of it marked with a small X. It lay about
an hour’s drive north of Morfael’s school, out of the mountains, and into the desert,
perilously close to the air force base closed off to the public.