“Don’t be afraid,” she said, in a voice people reserved for infants and the deranged. “We just want to help. We’ll make you all better.”
Something I didn’t understand growled inside me. “Get me out of this cage right now or I’ll rip your lungs out.”
Amaris gasped and scrambled back from me, repulsed. Her fear gave me a strange jolt of satisfaction.
Lazar leaned in close. “You’re helpless,” he said. Something quavered in his voice, and a wave of despair overtook me. “You’re alone. No one knows where you are. No one cares.”
The gloomy pitch of his words enveloped me like a smothering blanket. Loneliness welled up from a bottomless pit inside me. I had a vivid flash of waking from a nightmare as a child, a nightmare where a horrific weight pressed down on me as I ran in circles in the snow, crying for my family. My birth parents had abandoned me, and sure, Mom had adopted me. But maybe I’d been dumped because I hadn’t been good enough. Maybe they were glad I was gone. If they could dump me, Mom could too.
I’m lost. And she’ll never come looking for me.
In the periphery of my sight, I saw Caleb yelling at me. But all I could hear was Lazar. His every syllable dripped truth, and I was bereft.
I took a deep, sobbing breath and tried to curl into a ball. But as always when I tried to bend, the brace jabbed deep into my ribs and hip. The jolt of pain sliced through the weight of Lazar’s words, and I uncurled to see him frowning at me. Caleb’s words filtered through; somehow Lazar was hypnotizing me.
Black rage shredded my despair. This jackass had shot me, put me in a cage, and now he was trying to take my mind from me.
How dare he?
Without thinking I lashed forward between the bars to grab his wrist. As I brushed against the silver it stung my skin, but I didn’t care. I dug my nails into Lazar’s arm and felt them cut deep, drawing blood.
Lazar gasped in pain. Amaris screamed on a twin note a half second later. I jerked Lazar toward me with all my strength. Off balance, he slammed into the cage bars. His forehead knocked against them with a clang. His eyes rolled slightly, concussed.
Amaris shrieked again and grabbed her brother around the shoulders, trying to drag him away from me. I tore at her with my other hand. The skin of her neck scraped beneath my nails, leaving four red stripes.
“Dez, you don’t need to hurt her!” Caleb yelled. “Just get his keys!”
Crying with pain now, Amaris shoved herself back, the neck of her white gown stained crimson. “Help!” she shouted, getting to her feet and running toward the door to the outside. “Help, she’s got Lazar!”
She threw the door open and dashed out. Cool night air poured in. Lazar struggled to loosen my grip. He took a breath to speak, but I heaved again, smashing him against the bars. Blood gushed from his forehead. He moaned and lay still.
The skin on my arms blazing from the silver, I pulled Lazar’s hips closer to the cage to bring his pocket within reach.
“That’s it, Dez!” Caleb shouted from his cage. “Hurry. There’ll be more of them here any second!”
The silver burned my knees through the thin cloth of my dress. Straining against the brace to bend forward, I fished into Lazar’s pocket and pulled out the keys. I felt a surge of triumph, then a plunge of horror. My fingers, holding those keys, brandished three-inch claws, dripping with blood.
I dropped the keys.
“Hurry! Unlock your cage. Get out while you can!” Caleb shook the bars of his own cage, trying to get me to focus.
“My hands,” I said, turning away from him so he couldn’t see the claws. “There’s something wrong with me. I’m . . .”
“A tiger-shifter,” he said. “That’s a good thing. It’s what’s going to get you out of here.”
“Tiger-shifter.” I said the words, but they made no sense. Neither did my razor-sharp claws.
“Listen to me,” said Caleb, and something in the lush intonation of his voice pulled me to take note. I focused on him. His eyes glowed, like obsidian set in gold. I could look at nothing else. “You are strong. You can do this. I call upon you to pick up those keys. Pick them up.”
My inner turmoil receded, and all I wanted to do was obey that voice. I took hold of the keys. “Put the silver key in the lock,” he said in the same luxuriant tone. “That’s right, reach around outside the bars and unlock the cage with the key.”
The power in that voice could not be denied. The biggest key on the ring, shiny with silver, scorched my hands as I singled it out. But the pain didn’t matter. It slipped into the lock and turned with a loud click. The door of the cage snapped open. I was free.
Startled out of my concentration, I looked over at Caleb. The glow faded from his eyes, and they took on an odd, distracted look. His tan face paled to gray as he leaned heavily against the cage bars. “It worked,” he said, his voice thin. “Shouldn’t have, with all the silver. But it did. Something’s different . . .” He shook his head as if to clear it. “Now get out of here. Hurry.”
He slumped to his knees. I pushed open my cage door and crawled out, skin stinging. Somewhere nearby a high-pitched alarm sounded. Beyond it I heard the pounding of running feet.
I ran to the door of Caleb’s cage and fumbled with the keys. “What are you doing?” he said, looking as if he were about to pass out. “There’s no time. Get out of here now!”
“Shut up. I’ll be damned if I leave anyone in a cage.” I tried first one key, then another, my hands shaking. Shouting voices neared.
“You’re sweet. I bet you save puppies on death row, but just get out.” Caleb rubbed his face and stared past me, as if seeing a ghost.
“Yeah, puppies,” I muttered, ignoring the jolt his words gave me. He must be out of his head a little. That thing he’d done with his voice to help me had somehow drained him. I skipped what looked like a car key to try the only remaining possibility. That key slipped into the lock and turned.
I opened his cage and was next to Caleb in a heartbeat. The running feet would be here any second. How were we going to get past them?
“Maybe it was the moon,” he said vacantly. “The moon’s almost full.”
I grabbed him under the arm and hauled up with a strength that surprised me. “Babble all you want, but you’re coming with me.” He stumbled to his feet, and we made it out of the cage to hide behind the half-open door to the outside.
A sliver of moonlight fell across the planes of his face. He took a deep breath and straightened to his full height, even taller than I was. His color returned as he gave me an appreciative half smile. “Thanks.”
Lazar moaned, pulling himself up to sit against the bars of my cage, wiping the blood from his eyes. His white outfit was splotched with scarlet.
I did that.
My hands shook, and I saw that the claws were gone. My hands, still covered with blood, were my hands again.
Footsteps neared. I held up three fingers to show Caleb that I heard three coming our way. He nodded, saw my fingers trembling, and put his hand over mine. The warmth from his skin brought a rush of heat to my cheeks. His black eyes smiled into mine, and hope surged through me. We might make it. Our fingers laced together as we shrank back against the wall and the first armed guard cautiously entered. I barely had time to register that I was holding hands with a boy, an intense, gorgeous boy. I’d never done that before.
Lazar moaned again, his eyelids fluttering.
“Reverend!” exclaimed a guard, running through the door to Lazar. “He’s hurt!” he shouted over his shoulder. The second guard rushed in after him as the third approached more slowly. We’d been lucky. Lazar’s distress had caused two out of three to pass by without spotting us. Now we just had to dart past the third, and we’d be outside.
I glanced up at Caleb. He laid one hand on the door, stared at it as if looking through it, and hummed, almost imperceptibly. Something sparked in his black eyes, and he grinned. As the third guard edged into the warehouse, just two feet from us, Caleb held up one finger, telling me to wait. His other hand gripped mine hard, and we got ready to run.
As the guard cleared the edge of the door, we hauled it back and jetted past him. Caleb pushed me before him, and I darted into a blast of cool, dry air to see a large full moon vibrating with light on the horizon. Caleb stepped into a glowing pool of moonlight and spun, his long black coat fanning out behind him.
The guard had his rifle at his shoulder, aimed at us, about to shoot.
His shadow long and black before him, Caleb stretched out his hand and said, in a voice sonorous as a symphony, “I call on you, come out of shadow!”
The man aimed right at him, just ten feet away, and pulled the trigger. Or he tried. A swirl of darkness roiled out from Caleb’s hand and enveloped the gun. The guard stood aghast, now holding a long, smooth staff of wood. The rifle was gone.
The guard stood there, stupefied.
The warmth of Caleb’s fingers tangled with mine again, and we ran.
CHAPTER 3
We dashed across a small parking lot carved out of the desert landscape. Behind us lay the warehouse and other buildings. Before us sat four cars and a large white van. The guard at the warehouse door threw down Caleb’s stick and yelled, “They’re over here! The parking lot!”
Caleb headed straight for a large white BMW. “Give me the keys.”
I was still clutching Lazar’s keychain, its edges digging into my sweaty palms. “Here!” I handed it over.
He released my hand so he could riffle through the keys as we ran behind the BMW, putting its steel bulk between us and the guards in the warehouse.
“How do you know it’s this car?” I said through uneven breaths.
“I’m a knowledgeable person.” He pressed a button on the fob attached to the key ring, and the lights of the Beemer flashed. The locks ka-chunked open.
There was a loud sound by the warehouse. I caught a whiff of sulfur and warm iron. Caleb grabbed my arm and jerked me down behind the BMW as something whizzed over my head. “Silver bullets, probably,” he said, then held out the keys. “Can you drive?”
They were actually shooting at us. The sound had been a gun going off. “Kind of, why?” A bullet pinged into the side of the car. It rocked slightly.
“Just do it. We’re running out of time!”
“Fine!” I grabbed the keys.
Caleb opened the passenger side door. “Get in!”
I crawled awkwardly into the car. The brace bit into my right breast and upper thighs. I clambered over the passenger seat to the driver’s side. Caleb followed, keeping low.
I jammed the key in the ignition. The car roared to life. Three more shots rang out, and bullets thumped into the side of the car.
He slammed the door. I shoved the car into gear and stomped on the gas. We took off toward the dirt road at the end of the parking lot. I peered into the rearview mirror as another bullet hit the rear bumper. One guard had his gun trained on us. Another was running toward the other cars. The third had an arm around Lazar, who stumbled to the doorway just in time to see us take off in his car. Then we curved away. They shrank into a distant pool of light. The night swallowed us.
“Holy crap,” I said. My ears still rang from the gunshots. A slick sheen of sweat coated my skin.
Caleb let out a free, ringing laugh. “We’re out! I can’t believe it. You got us out.” He grabbed my right hand off the steering wheel and gave it a loud kiss. I blushed all the way down my neck and forced myself to keep my eyes on the road. “Did you know that once you save somebody’s life, they’re yours forever?”
“Well, you saved mine too, so I guess we belong to each other,” I said, then realized how that sounded and pulled my hand out of his. “You can thank me by telling me what the hell just happened.”
“Deal,” he said, twisting to look behind us. “Damn.”
I checked the mirror. Two faint lights moved down the road behind us. Headlights. “They’re coming after us.”
“Figures,” he said. “We have to get off this road right now.”
I looked out at the tumbleweeds, cacti, and rocks as they slid past us. “You want to drive over that? We’ll get a flat or something. Besides, he’ll see the headlights.”
“First thing we do, we turn off the headlights.” He reached across me and clicked the lights off. I gripped the wheel tightly as we barreled down the road. For a moment, the world around us went black, then the desert floor opened up to me again, almost as clear under the moon as during the day.
“Go faster,” he said.
I accelerated, squinting out at the faint track of road. “The moonlight’s too strong. He’ll spot us whether we’re on the road or not.”
“The moonlight works for us,” he said. “And he doesn’t have your eyesight in the dark. No one does.” He glanced over at me, a smirk around his mouth. It took me a moment to realize what he was saying. “That’s why I wanted you to drive.”
“And that means what exactly?”
“You’re a cat-shifter. That means that all your life your eyesight at night has been ten times better than a human’s. Your hearing’s even better, and your reflexes are ridiculous. You’ve never known anything else, so you think it’s normal, that everyone sees and hears and moves like you do. Believe me, they don’t. And when you shift, your senses will be even better. You can see the road just fine without the headlights, right?”
I nodded.
“Well I can’t,” he said. “Time to get off the road. Don’t step on the brakes or they’ll see the brake lights.”
“I don’t know. It’s not safe off the road. We’ll crash into a cactus or . . .”
“Too late!”
He grabbed the wheel and turned it to the left. I almost hit the brakes, but remembered in time. I took my foot off the gas and shouted, “Okay, okay, give me the wheel!”
He let go. The car bounced into the untrammeled desert.
We careened over small tufted plants and hillocks where unsuspecting snakes and lizards probably slept in their burrows.
Sorry to disturb you like this, guys.
I kept my foot off the gas, and we slowed down, silent now except for the bumping and creaking of the BMW.
He pressed a button to roll down his window. “I need to open yours too,” he said, leaning over me to press another button. My window buzzed down.
“Why?” The cool air rushed over me, smelling of dust and cactus sap. Moonlight spilled through the open window, falling across my left arm. Gooseflesh crawled up my skin.
“Shhh,” he said, then hummed a deep, thrumming note.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Calling out to shadow, looking for something out there that can help us. Don’t stop, keep going slowly.”
I hit the gas gently to keep us moving forward as he hummed once more. The hair on the back of my neck stood up as the sound moved over me. I wanted to ask more, but I could tell from the set of his brows that he was concentrating hard.
“There.” He turned his head to the right, peering into the dark. “What’s over there?”
I glanced in that direction. “There’s a pile of rocks that looks like a tired whale,” I said. “It’s pretty big.”
“I see it,” he said. “A bushed beluga. Get us behind it.”
“Okay.” I looked in the rearview mirror and zeroed in on the headlights of the pursuing car, far away but still behind us. I steered behind the rocks. They hid us completely from the other car.
“Perfect.” He flashed a grin and squeezed my arm approvingly. “Now try to stop without hitting the brakes.”
The black bulk of the rocks loomed to our right. I downshifted. We rolled to a stop, and the airy silence of the night floated in the open windows.
I caught the faint rumble of the other car’s engine in the distance. “They’re coming closer,” I said. “If they see where we left the road they might find us. Can you hear them?”
“No, but I trust your ears.” He opened the car door to get out. I followed suit.
Caleb walked past the long shadow of the rocks to stand in the moonlight and stare at them. The whole pile stood only a few inches taller than he, dominated by the huge whale boulder on top of a series of smaller rocks. It didn’t look very stable. “Showtime,” he said, then sang out an intense note that rumbled deep in his chest. It grew in volume and force, dominating the air around us, for about a minute.
No way he can keep this up much longer.
But Caleb continued the note, then stretched out his arm, pointing at the small hill of stone. His black eyes glinted with gold, and all the power of the night seemed to fold itself around him like a cloak. Speak-singing on that same note, he intoned, “I call you forth from shadow.”
A dark, churning fog shot from his hand toward the pile, where it encircled a small rock at the base. The rock seemed to shake itself, like a dog waking up from a nap. For a moment it looked like it overlapped the other rocks, as if the world had been double exposed. Then it rooted itself into the earth and shot up toward the stars.
I stumbled back, tripped over a tuft of desert grass, and fell flat on my butt onto something prickly. Above me now loomed a rocky mountain ridge over ten stories high, stretching left and right in a jagged line of unbroken stone for what had to be miles. It shone pure white and shiny as marble, alien, cold, and beautiful in the flat, red-brown landscape. My mind was blank, my mouth dry. I shut it and tried to swallow.
I heard a thud and looked to find Caleb lying on the ground on his back. I got to my feet and ran as he struggled to sit up, his face deathly pale and drawn. He startled as I leaned over him, his eyes wild.
“Tell Her Majesty I’m sorry,” he said. “But it won’t be gone for long.”
“You’re babbling,” I said. “Is that what you do after you do this—whatever it is you do?”
“They quarried the stone for the Queen’s summer palace here, you know,” he said. “That’s what it told me.”
I glanced up at the smooth white stone, suitable for palace building. Maybe it wasn’t babble. “The stone told you that?”
He nodded.
I hunkered down to look him in the eye because I couldn’t bend at the waist. “Let me know if it tells you this week’s lottery numbers.”
He chortled, shut his eyes, and leaned his head back, as if basking in the moonlight. The silvery radiance bathed his long black eyelashes and ran down his strong neck. “Thank the moon,” he said. “It saved our lives.”
I couldn’t stop staring down at him. In the clean white light he looked like a statue by Michelangelo, all smooth skin over lean muscles and wild hair. Then he opened his eyes. They were pure black and clear of distraction. He sat up. “All right, my canny co-conspirator. Let’s get out of here.”
“Excellent plan, my able accomplice,” I said, standing up and taking his hand so I could pull him to his feet. “Let’s find a gas station. I’m starving.”
Caleb was too out of it to talk for about an hour. After the GPS led us to another dirt road and pointed the way, he ripped out the system’s wires, saying the Tribunal also used it as a tracking device for the car. Then he fell into a deep sleep, head thrown back against the headrest.
We were out in the Mojave Desert of Southern California, not far from the 15 freeway. As Caleb slept I turned west toward Barstow, back in the direction of Burbank.
“You startled me back there, you know,” he said after a while, lifting his head and rubbing his eyes. “You move so quietly.”
“My friend Iris hates it when I come up behind her in the halls at school,” I said. “She never hears me, and then she jumps ten feet in the air when I say hi.”
He let out a weary laugh. “Just don’t tell her you’re a highly evolved predator. It might make her nervous.”
“Yeah, about that,” I said. “Start with this Tribunal. They kidnapped us. They’re chasing us. Why?”
He glanced over at me, his black eyes serious. “Their order was created nearly two thousand years ago to wipe people like you and me from the face of the earth. They call us witches, demonspawn, creatures of the devil. They exist to sever all connection between this world and the shadow world. If things keep going the way they are, they’ll probably succeed.”
“So Lazar shot me because I . . . shifted.” I still had a hard time with that word, that concept.
He nodded, brow furrowed. “The question is, how did he know who you were? How did he know where to find you and when you’d shift? That was the first time for you, right?”
I ignored the sudden pounding of my heart and pushed away the heated image Caleb’s words conjured. Something about him made my mind go to all the wrong places. “Um, yeah. And an older man with white hair was there with him when he did it. He called him son.”
“That’s Ximon, Lazar and Amaris’s father.” His voice held a note of steely anger. “Ximon with an X. He’s the lead asshole for the Tribunal in this part of the world.”
“How do you know so much about them?” I said. “You know all their names, what they do. You knew this was Lazar’s car and exactly how to disable the tracking device on it.”
“Know thy enemy,” he said. “Your kind and mine have not always been friendly, but we’ve shared the same adversary for the last two thousand years. If you’d been raised like other shifters, you’d know all of this. And I’ve been keeping an eye on Ximon’s group for a while now.”
“So you’re not a shifter.” I said. “You make other things shift.”
He gave me an appreciative glance and nodded. “Exactly, smart girl.”
“Okay,” I said, settling into my seat. The white line down the center of the 15 freeway ran for what seemed forever before me, and stretched out into the darkness behind. “Tell me everything. From the beginning.”