Othermoon (18 page)

The bruises on his face looked like purple fingerprints against his pale skin. For
a moment I couldn’t speak. In the space of a few minutes, something had changed, not
just between us, but in how I saw the world.

I squeezed his arm, then withdrew my hand, jamming it into the square pocket of my
robe. “You’re the one who’s changed,” I said. “Because you’re here. It’ll be different
now.”

A door squeaked down the hall and several sets of footsteps started cautiously toward
us. I hastily shoved my feet into the terry slippers. Lazar walked up to the doorway
just as a security guard peeked around the corner. He visibly relaxed when he caught
sight of us.

“You kids better get out of here,” he said. “There’s a frigging tiger on the loose.”

“A what?” Lazar’s supple voice was convincingly taken aback.

“I’m not kidding.” He motioned us toward him. “You need to go down the hall, into
the casino and outside, now.” I walked up behind Lazar as the guard gestured the way
we’d come. “It’s clear that way, through that door, back into the casino. Go!”

“Thanks,” I said, and we slipped past him to scurry down the hall and through the
door, and back into the smoke and flashing lights.

After our talk in the laundry room, the Sports Book area felt like an alien land.
It was completely empty and oddly silent.

“This way!” shouted another guard, motioning us toward the lobby area. “Out, quick!”

We hustled, but slowed down a little as we passed Michael’s prone form, lying in a
pool of congealing blood. His throat was gone.

I’d done that. I reached blindly toward Lazar as the security guard continued to urge
us on. Lazar took my hand and pulled me away.

Then we were out into the cold desert air, being directed by a cop toward the street,
where a crowd of gamblers had gathered, cigarettes ablaze, shaking their heads, each
coming up with something bigger than the next to compare to the tiger. I dropped Lazar’s
hand, folding my arms against the cold.

“Here.” He handed me the envelope with the maps in it, took off his leather jacket,
and draped it around my shoulders, rubbing them with his warm hands. We stood there
like that for a moment on the sidewalk, lost.

“Hey, um,” Lazar said, his face flushing. “Please don’t tell anyone about all of that.
I couldn’t stand it if Amaris ever found out.”

“Okay,” I said. “But I think she would understand.”

“Maybe someday,” he said.

An SUV pulled up to us, and I realized with a start that Amaris was driving, coming
to get me exactly where we’d planned. Sitting next to her in the passenger seat, his
face set in hard lines, sat Caleb.

CHAPTER 14

Lazar stepped away from me hastily as Caleb opened the car door and got out of the
SUV. He left the door open, one hand on top of it, and looked at us, his face like
granite.

His eyes on me made me realize just how disheveled Lazar and I both looked. Lazar
was bruised and rumpled, the scratches from my claws on his shoulder now oozing blood.
I was severely underdressed in nothing but a robe and another boy’s jacket.

“Get in the car,” Caleb said to me. I’d never heard his voice so flat, so unreadable.

I took the jacket off and shoved it into Lazar’s hands. “Lazar brought me the plans
to the Tribunal’s new complex,” I said. My voice was as shaky as I felt.

“I guess that makes everything okay then,” Caleb said, again so flatly that I almost
didn’t recognize the sarcasm.

Lazar didn’t put his jacket on, just gripped it tightly “Don’t blame Desdemona. I
made her promise not to tell you about this meeting.”

Caleb regarded him, contempt in the slant of his dark brows and the set of his mouth.
“So now you’re lying for her. How touching.”

“I’m not lying,” said Lazar, his tone so convincing that I almost believed him.

Caleb shook his head slightly, eyes narrowing. “Dez makes her own decisions.”

My heart contracted. How well Caleb knew me.

“It’s my fault,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“I heard you sneaking out and followed you,” he said. “You’ve been acting strange.
I had no idea you’d be holding hands with
him
.”

I bit my lip. I’d promised Lazar I wouldn’t tell anyone how his mother had died, and
I would keep that promise, even if might be exactly what Caleb needed to hear in order
to understand.

“We weren’t holding hands.” Although we had been, a few minutes ago.
But that was innocent!
“Lazar wants to help us, Caleb.”

“So you trust him completely now?” Gold glinted dangerously in Caleb’s normally black
eyes. “But you didn’t trust me enough to tell me about this meeting?”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

“Get in the car,” said Caleb, and slid back into the SUV’s passenger seat, slamming
the door.

Lazar’s face wore a rueful look. “I seem to have gotten you into trouble.”

“No,” I said. “I did that all by myself.” I took a deep breath, and couldn’t help
glancing over at Caleb. He was staring straight ahead. Next to him, Amaris motioned
at me nervously to get inside the car. “Call me or Amaris as soon as you’re safely
back inside the compound. We’ll need to strike soon, before your father gets suspicious.”

“Good-bye until then,” Lazar said, shooting a glance at Caleb too, then giving me
a reassuring smile. “And good luck.”

He turned and walked away. I forced myself to stop staring after him and climbed into
the backseat of the SUV. Amaris took off too fast, making the tires squeal.

“Sorry,” she muttered, looking at me in the rearview mirror. “You okay?”

“I am now,” I said. “That objurer shot me, but Lazar used his voice just in time to
help me shift and heal.”

In the seat in front of me, Caleb’s shoulders stiffened, but he didn’t turn around.
Amaris said, “Michael shot you? Where?”

“In the chest,” I said. “I’d be dead if it wasn’t for Lazar.”

“You wouldn’t even have been there if it wasn’t for Lazar,” Caleb said, still not
looking back at me. “Turn here,” he said to Amaris, pointing toward an open parking
lot. She slowed down with an awkward tap on the brakes and turned right.

“What happened to Michael?” Amaris asked.

“He’s dead,” I said, a hard lump in my throat. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she said. “I mean, I wouldn’t wish him dead, but he was a jerk and he
shot you.”

She stopped the SUV behind a familiar red pickup truck. As Caleb opened his door,
I said, “You hot-wired Raynard’s truck?”

He didn’t answer, just got out of the car.

“I’ll follow you back,” Amaris said to him, leaning over to try to catch his eye.

He simply slammed the door.

“I’ll see you there,” I told her, opening my own door. “I should go with Caleb.”

“You sure?” She looked over her shoulder at me.

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”

 

Caleb didn’t say a word to me the first fifteen minutes we were alone in the car together.
Anger emanated from him in waves. But finally, I couldn’t stand the silence anymore.

“I had to give him a chance, without the rest of you threatening him with death,”
I said. “All our lives depend on it.”

He didn’t reply for a long moment, and then said: “Since when has anyone been able
to ever stop you from doing anything?”

“You told me you wanted to kill him. All of you!” I stared at his shuttered face as
the lights from passing cars skimmed over it. “That would not have been a good way
to begin the meeting.”

He shook his head. “You should’ve told me, Dez.”

I didn’t reply. Maybe he was right. But I remembered all too vividly how he’d shouted
at me that Lazar deserved to die.

He was drumming his fingers on the steering wheel as he stared down the nearly empty
lanes of the freeway. The land around us was becoming wilder as we drove, the buildings
few and far between as the utterly black silhouette of the mountains drew near, blotting
out some of the stars in the sky. “You avoided telling me that Lazar stole your hairbrush
for as long as you could,” he said. “If we hadn’t run into him in Vegas, would you
ever have told me about that?”

“I hadn’t seen you in weeks!” I said. “We barely had a chance to say hello before
the Tribunal showed up. There was no time.”

“There are phones,” he said. “And e-mail.”

“Okay,” I said. “I could’ve told you about it right away, that’s true. But can you
blame me? When you saw him, you almost killed him. And when we talked out by the fire
pit, and later with the group—your hatred for him was so immense, I couldn’t see any
way around it.”

“When did you arrange this little meeting?” he asked. “Did you know about it even
then?”

“No!” God, this was frustrating. Couldn’t he see how his attitude would have ruined
everything? “He contacted Amaris via computer tonight, and she told me. It was my
decision not to tell the rest of you. I figured that we’d given her a chance. So tonight
I gave him a chance to prove himself. So far, so good.”

“You’re giving him a chance,” he said. “But you wouldn’t take a chance on me and tell
me what you were doing.”

Damn.
He was guilting me good. But he hadn’t seen the murderous look on his own face. And
he didn’t know what Lazar had been through. Right now, I wasn’t even sure he’d care.

“The same way you didn’t trust me enough to tell me at first that Ximon is your father?”
I shot him a look, and he inhaled sharply. He’d kept his relationship to the Tribunal
secret from everyone, including me, until Ximon and his helicopter attacked Morfael’s
school and took Siku prisoner. “And when I did find out, from Ximon, not you, I still
trusted you, because I understood the pressure you were under. You were afraid we’d
all turn on you. But we didn’t.
I
didn’t.”

“That was different!” His voice rose, and I knew I’d hit a nerve. “You and I weren’t
. . . we weren’t
us
, then. And my keeping that from you didn’t endanger anyone but me.”

“I’m not endangering people; I’m helping to save them!” This was agony. Why couldn’t
he see?

“You’re playing with people’s lives,” he said. “You met with one of the otherkin’s
worst enemies, and not only did you not tell me, you didn’t tell Morfael, or any of
our friends.”

The whole world sagged around me. “They all hate him too,” I said. “There’s so much
riding on the information he has. And I figured if he gave us the plans to the Tribunal’s
new compound, it would prove to everyone that he’s being honest.”

“So we have to trust that you know best,” he said, “even though you don’t trust us.”

Anger stirred inside me. “I was raised by an outsider, so I have a different perspective.
You’ve said so yourself! I didn’t inherit the generations of fear and hatred like
the rest of you. I knew how you’d all react. You would’ve done everything in your
power to keep me away from him. So I had to do it without you.” I leaned toward him,
intent. “This isn’t about you or me or the kids at school, Caleb. The stakes are too
big. That particle accelerator is powerful technology, and it’s got to be part of
some grand plan to kill off every shifter on the planet. That’s more important than
who trusts who.”

“So it’s up to you to save everyone, including Lazar,” he said. “That sounds like
some martyr bullshit to me.”

“Maybe,” I said, flushing. “Or maybe I have to do it because you’re too caught up
in your own bullshit!”

He threw me a hard look. “Maybe you’re the one caught up. Lazar had his hands on you
when we pulled up.”

“What? No, he—!” I broke off, remembering how Lazar had rubbed my shoulders out there
in the cold. “He was just trying to help me keep warm.”

His lip curled in scorn. “Every boy has used that excuse to touch every girl since
the world began.”

My jaw dropped. “You’re
jealous
? Are you crazy?”

His hands clenched the steering wheel hard. “You hid a call between the two of you
and lied about meeting him tonight! How do I know there weren’t other calls, other
meetings?”

“Because there weren’t.” It sounded lame, even to my ears. “It’s just not like that
between us.”

“For you, maybe,” he said. “But I know Lazar.”

“I don’t think you do,” I said, with heat. “I bet I know him now better than you do.”

“Oh, yeah?” His eyebrows shot up challengingly. “Like what? What don’t I know?”

I said nothing for a minute, then: “He’s just someone who needs help, and who can
help us in return. For him I’m nothing more than a way out of hell. That’s all.”

He shook his head. “I saw the look on his face as we drove up. You’re way more than
his ticket out.”

I almost broke my promise to Lazar then. I opened my mouth to tell Caleb everything
I’d learned. The tension between us came from his undying hatred and my keeping secrets.
If I told this secret, would it mitigate his hatred for Lazar? Would he be able to
see his brother as a human being? I couldn’t be sure. So I closed my mouth and sat
back in my seat. Lazar’s secret was too intimate, too awful for me to betray without
permission.

I tried to keep my voice calm, saying, “It was a rough night. But you need to trust
me.”

“After all the lies?” He pounded the steering wheel once with both open hands. “How?”

I’d never felt this way before—burning with fury and pain at the same time. I looked
out the window and we rode the rest of the way in silence. I fought not to cry, not
to scream at him, not to beg for his forgiveness, though I still didn’t think I needed
it. More than anything I wanted to feel his arms around me, hear his voice whisper
reassuring words, feel his heart beat against mine. But I didn’t see a way for that
to happen, maybe ever again.

 

When we pulled up to the school garage it was nearly four a.m., and my head vibrated
with a dozen fuzzy spiders that webbed up my thoughts. Caleb sat up straighter as
the headlights swept across a car in the driveway that hadn’t been there before. It
took me a second to recognize it.

“That’s your parents’ car,” Caleb said.

“Oh, no.” The words came out of me without thinking. The car was empty. So they’d
gone inside. The horrible buzzing in my head grew hotter and louder. If Mom and Richard
were here, that meant everyone at the school was up, that they knew Amaris and I had
left.
God, they must be worried.

“Someone probably woke up and found we were gone,” Caleb said. “Then Morfael called
your parents.”

“Shit.” I turned to him. “So you didn’t tell them?”

His face was still hard and closed as he shook his head slightly. “I didn’t want to
worry anyone.”

I got slowly out of the truck as Amaris pulled up in the SUV behind us. “Whose car
is that?” she asked, slamming her door and walking toward us.

I just trudged toward the front door.

 

Everyone was in the living room as we walked in. My mother and Richard were seated
in a window nook holding hands, pillows all around them, with Morfael standing by.
Plump, scruffy-bearded Raynard was creaking back and forth in the rocking chair. Arnaldo,
Siku, and November were piled on the couch, while London paced in front of them like
a wolf outside a henhouse.

As we entered, heads turned, and the anxiety in the room snapped. They surged forward
all at once, talking.

“Where the hell have you been?” London shouted, her eyes like blue bullets in her
scared white face.

Arnaldo sagged with relief where he sat on the couch as November pounded Siku on the
shoulder and said, “Told you they were up to something.” Raynard stopped rocking,
and shook his head at us.

Only Morfael’s expression didn’t change. After assessing us, his pale eyes took in
everyone else’s reaction, as if it was no more and no less than he’d expected.

My mother pushed in front of everyone, her tiny body burrowing past Siku’s bulk and
London’s betrayed stare. Her brown hair was ruffled, as if she’d spent the last hour
running her hands through it, and her hazel eyes were bright with relief even as the
corners crinkled downward in anger.

She lifted her hands, grabbed my head on both sides, and pulled it down to kiss my
forehead. “I’m thanking the Goddess you’re all right,” she said, sparing a glance
for Caleb and Amaris. “All of you. And now I’m going to be angry with you for worrying
us like this!”