Othersphere (14 page)

CHAPTER 9

The air hummed. Rain waltzed around me as lightning flared thirty feet away. The air cracked, punctuated by a blast of pungent ozone. I was drenched in a deep, pulsing melody, which played behind and below the crushed grass at my feet and the warm bluster of wind. The great black bank of fog wove around me like a lullaby.

“Dez?” Lazar squeezed my hand.

I blinked through the torrent. Lazar looked overwhelmed, and worried. Next to him, glowing like a pearl through the whorls of fog, London in her wolf form was bigger than before, her fur coat thicker, her eyes prisms of aquamarine fire. She had dropped the brown rope and Caleb, his coat darker than the vapor around us, was coiling it up, staring at me, smiling slightly.

“I . . .” My voice was different. I felt it moving through the air, connecting and bouncing off of the mist, the grass, and my friends. “Can you feel it?”

“Feel what?” Lazar had to half yell over the howl of the wind.

“Everything. It's working together.” I struggled to find the right words as Lazar's puzzlement and concern deepened the line between his eyebrows. “Like an orchestra, or a choir. This place. It's like a hymn.”

Lazar looked down at London, as if hoping someone else would explain it to him. London cocked her head at me. Caleb's smile widened; then he looked at the swirling storm around us and shook his head in wonder.

It was not my voice, yet as it spoke in my head, my thoughts coincided with it exactly. I looked around at the swirling fog, the pounding rain, the jabs of lightning briefly illuminating the darkness. As I did so, the downpour abated. The gale became a breeze. Fingers of fog withdrew around us.

It was the storm, itself, speaking to me. Singing inside me.

I was home.

“Are you okay?” Lazar moved closer, uneasy, wiping rain from his face. “You're different.”

He was looking up at me. Back in our world, I was tall, taller than most men, but both Lazar and Caleb topped me by a couple of inches. Not any longer. Not here.

I extended my hand. The long freckled fingers were mine, but more slender, with pointed nails like talons. The arms were mine, too, but thinner, paler, more graceful, like the arms of an alien ballerina. My jacket sleeves ended two inches above my wrists.

My pants were also too short, but they hung around my narrow hips. My sneakers felt loose, the socks sagging around my ankles. And the Shadow Blade was gone. That made a weird kind of sense. If it embodied my connection to Othersphere, then I wouldn't need it when I was here. That connection was everywhere inside me now.

“My hair . . .” I grabbed a wet lock of my own hair, plastered down the front of my chest by the rain. It was vibrant orange, brighter than the color back home, and striped with black. My new skin pricked with bumps as a chill ran over me. “I look like her, don't I?”

I saw confirmation in Caleb's eyes. London yipped. Lazar reached up to touch my cheek, and then suddenly pulled his hand away, as if afraid. “Morfael said your form would stay similar, but it's . . . different.”

Caleb took a step in, pulling London with him, so that we could speak more easily over the wind. “Did the rain let up because of you?” he asked me.

“I think so,” I said. “I'm connected to the storm. To everything. It's amazing.”

London sniffed at me suspiciously; then as if she'd confirmed it was really me, she barked and bumped her nose against my leg. Impatience bounced out of her.

“We better get going,” I said, placing my hand on her silver-white head, now higher than my waist.

Caleb was humming. Gold flooded his eyes, and he stopped abruptly, eyebrows arching upward.

“What?” Lazar asked sharply.

Caleb's eyes were still glowing like golden lamps. “It only takes a second here, the barest murmur of sound is magnified incredibly. Try it. Try to find Amaris.”

Lazar intoned a hum of his own, turning in a circle. The volume was low, but I felt the vibration scan over me like a wave. He stopped, swaying slightly. “Wow, you weren't kidding.”

“That way?” Caleb pointed in the direction Lazar was now facing.

His brother nodded in agreement. “Yes. She's that way.”

“That way?” I pointed.

As I gestured, clouds parted. Lightning withdrew. A hundred yards away, sunshine fell in a golden descant through the haze.

London yipped and trotted off through the path the storm had made. Lazar, Caleb, and I followed more slowly, walking side by side.

“Handy having you here,” Lazar said.

“Good to be of some use,” I said. It was a little weird to see the world from this new height. Moving felt easier, more fluid, and my newly translucent skin was reaching out to the molecules around it, feeling every change in the air, breathing in the rain and the half-gray light.

“We should be able to find the portal the same way.” Caleb looked over his shoulder.

Behind us, a window cut from the fog revealed the unkempt lawn and rainy gray light of Burbank in a thunderstorm. It looked like a painting—pale and foreign. Within that frame, a mighty tone breeched the softness of the veil. It came from a figure thin as grass, white as marble draped in black.

The storm knew him, too. I lifted my hand. He raised his own, and a farewell danced between us.

A few steps on we came out of the storm, shaking the rain from our faces, to find ourselves at the edge of a meadow. Behind lay the endless bank of roiling clouds. Ahead was a forest of slender, white-trunked trees with crimson and green leaves that shimmered in the rich yellow light. The sun hovered just above the horizon to our right. I wondered if that was west. Perhaps the sun set in a different direction every night here, or perhaps the days were thirty hours long.

A warm breeze, laden with moisture, came at our backs and rustled the leaves. Each of them whispered in a distinct way, as if all conversing at once. I caught a name, chanted in a language I should not have understood, borne on the fluted air.

“The Red Wood,” I said.

My friends angled questions my way. They were all looking a little damp and shell-shocked.

I shrugged. “That's what it calls itself.”

“Okay then.” Caleb hummed briefly, and then pointed into the wood. “That way.”

London bounded off. The grass was shorter here, but hardy. Around the ivory tree trunks it clustered into thickets teethed with long emerald thorns. We followed the enormous wolf through a blue evening mist that smelled faintly like . . .

“Fur,” Caleb said. “Why does this place smell like the fake fur on a stuffed animal you just won at a carnival?”

“I was thinking carpet,” Lazar said. “When you're a kid and your sister gets mad at you and rubs your face in the carpet.”

“Trixie,” I said. “The wonderful old cat we had when I was little. She smelled so sweet and powdery. I used to bury my face in her neck and huff her like a drug.”

London barked, her eyes bright, tail wagging, and I knew she was remembering something, too, something the scent of the Red Wood had brought back.

“Speaking of cats, it's a bit odd that we haven't seen any animal life in this forest.” I looked around. All the trees were the same—at least three stories tall with smooth milky bark and branches thick with leaves of scarlet and jade. Back in our world, it might've been called the Christmas Wood. The only other living things seemed to be the spiky grass, which crowded the bases of the trees like sentinels. “Any scent of any creatures, London?”

The wolf lifted her nose to breathe deep, and then shook her head once, in awkward simulation of the human gesture.

“The air here reminds me of Amaris. She was stronger than she looked,” Lazar said, a smile spreading over his face. “And she could be sneaky. If I did something that made her mad, she'd wait till I was doing my homework on the floor, creep up behind me, grab the hair on the back of my head and rub my nose in the rug.” He laughed. “Good lord, it burned!”

Caleb let out a small laugh. “She could be surprising, couldn't she? Once, when you and Ximon were away, we sneaked off to a carnival in Barstow, back when I was living on the Tribunal compound,” Caleb said.

“You did?” Lazar slid his smile over toward Caleb in surprise. “That was sneaky of both of you.”

“That's when we . . .” Caleb hesitated, then continued. “We started to plan how we were going to get away from there. After Ximon told her she'd have to marry that man.”

“That horrible old man.” The smile dropped from Lazar's face. “I knew it was wrong, but I couldn't believe our father would . . .” He broke off, staring down at the sodden leaves of red on the grass beneath his boots like a bloody green carpet. “Anyway. I'm glad you were there.”

Caleb turned his head to glance at his brother and shoved his hands into his pockets. “Me, too. I won a purple turtle for her at the carnival ring toss that night, and she named it Penelope the Purple Turtle and rubbed it against my face. . . .” His voice trailed away. His black eyes were staring off into the blue-gray mist, remembering.

My throat ached a little. Caleb had lost his mother not long before that, his only family up till then. How much it must have meant then to find his long-lost siblings, for one of them, at least, to show that she loved him.

London whined and shoved her wet nose between Caleb's arm and his body, forcing him to take his hand out of his pocket. He ran his fingers through the soft silver fur behind her ears. “You're remembering something about her, too, aren't you, London?” he asked, stopping to meet the wolf's aquamarine eyes.

London pointed her black nose at the sky and let loose a high piercing howl. I'd heard her do it before, but here, as the sunlight faded and the blue mist rose around us, the melancholy moan brought tears to my eyes.

It stopped Lazar in his tracks. He and Caleb, so sensitive to vibration, stared at her, mesmerized. The keening descended down a bleak scale. At the final heart-ripping note, Lazar moved over to her.

London lowered her head, doleful eyes like lamps in the deepening twilight. Lazar reached out and scratched the ruff of fur at her neck.

“We'll find her,” he said.

“Guys, we really should keep going,” I said. The three of them were standing next to a particularly large tree, sharing a nice moment, yes. But the moment was dragging on. The forest had gotten very quiet, except for our voices.

“We should make her bake more for us when we get her back to the school,” Lazar was saying. “She's okay at making dinner, but there's this Bundt cake she does . . .”

“Guys?” I walked over to them, my footsteps dampened by the soaked leaves. On each fallen red leaf I noted a lovely black outline, a swoop that looked like a closed eye, the eyelashes brushing a red cheek.

“I remember the shortbread cookies most,” Caleb said with a grin at Lazar. “She'd roll them in powdered sugar.”

I patted London's head. All this talk of baking must be playing with my head because the air around us now smelled like fresh bread. “We all love Amaris, I know. So let's not stop looking for her.”

“Oh, wow, the shortbread! With the pecans?” Lazar shook his head in wonder. “I ate, like, three hundred of those at one sitting once. I nearly exploded.”

The huge white tree next to us was even larger than I'd thought. Or . . . was it getting bigger? I blinked. The spiny grass around it stretched farther than I remembered, encircling us.

“Something's wrong,” I said. “The wood . . .”

“But you would've died happy,” Caleb said to Lazar, as if I hadn't spoken. His voice was so happy, carefree. He was smiling and leaning into Lazar as if he'd never hated him, never wanted him dead. “Who's got the next birthday? We'll beg her to make a cake for us.”

“There is something wrong here.” I put a hand on Caleb's shoulder to make him pay attention.

He blinked at me. “You like cake, silly.”

“No, the trees, the grass . . .” I turned and grabbed the front of Lazar's jacket. He lifted his eyebrows in mild surprise.

Tendrils of grass had reached delicately over his shoulders, tickling his chin. He brushed them away casually. I looked down. The barbed plants had intertwined over our feet. I could barely see my own shoes.

A shiny thorn, as long as my finger, reached for Caleb's neck. He jerked away, but couldn't go far, hedged in by the white tree on one side and a growing cage of spiny grass.

“What the hell?” He looked around, as if seeing the encroaching plants for the first time.

“It's moving. It's all around us!” Lazar yelled, tugging against the binding green ropes now wound around his arms and legs. A thorn drew a long bloody scratch down his neck. “How do we get out of it?”

“A chainsaw?” I proposed, ridiculously. The light around us dimmed as tentacles of green reached over our heads, blotting out the sky. The four of us were clustered close now, hugged together by insidious arms of undergrowth. I tried not to struggle, but barbs were drawing red lines on my exposed arms and wrists, puncturing my clothes.

It was hard to even see the others now, though they were inches away. The plants were entwined around us from every angle, a living screen. If we didn't do something soon, we'd all die of blood loss, trapped here. Unless being ensnared was just the beginning.

London made a pained yipping noise. The thorn-covered grass was making her paws bleed. The blue mist puddled there, as if drawn by the blood.