Against all odds, Arnaldo was nodding. Caleb placed his hand on the small of my back, and a rush of warmth pushed back the wobbly anxiety threatening to take over my body.
“We’re connected,” I said. “The world keeps trying to turn us into enemies: cats versus bears versus wolves and on and on. But in spite of all the hateful things parents say, in spite of centuries of isolation, we keep coming together. One game of tag in the leaves, one night throwing pillows in the cabin, and it’s like we’re all the same tribe, you know?”
London inhaled a quick, sobbing breath. Arnaldo put his arm around her shoulders. She leaned into him, her eyes red, and looked up at me.
“You guys are my family now,” I said. “Siku too, even though he hates my guts at the moment. Families fight, but then they make up. We have to look out for each other. That’s what families do.”
November’s eyes were bright, her jaw tense. “They’ve got guns and aircraft and probably tanks and silver bombs. All we’ve got are fangs and claws.”
“And wings,” said Arnaldo.
“With his claws and wings, Arnaldo brought that helicopter down,” I said. “With all the skills you guys bring to the mix, we can slip in there and get Siku free before they know we’re there.”
“And if they do find us there, then we fight,” said Arnaldo. “Look what happened today. For all their guns and superior numbers, we beat them back. They wanted to take all of us, or to kill us. And we stopped them.”
November eyed him. “You’ve swallowed the Kool-Aid,” she said, but there was no bite to her tone. The temperature in the room was shifting. If I could just tip it a little further . . .
“I know it’s scary . . .” I started to say.
“I’m not scared,” November interrupted sharply.
“I am!” said London.
November let out a reluctant laugh, and the crazy-high level of tension in the room eased a bit. “Well, okay, so I’m a little scared. But it’s not the danger, really. It’s . . .” She screwed up her pointy face, trying to find the right word. “It’s the weirdness of it all.”
“Nobody attacks the Tribunal!” London’s blue eyes blinked rapidly just thinking about it.
“That’s why they’ll never see us coming,” said Caleb.
Arnaldo nodded emphatically. “I think they count on us staying underground. My dad’s always saying the same old thing: The only way to avoid trouble is to trust no one but your own tribe. But how can you avoid trouble when it hunts you down and kidnaps your friends?”
November cleared her throat. “If, and this is strictly hypothetical, if we tried to get Siku out of their compound, how would we do it?”
I glanced at Caleb. He was smiling. “Let’s talk about it,” I said. “Hypothetically.”
CHAPTER 23
A few minutes later, Raynard found us on the floor by Morfael’s couch seated around Caleb’s hastily scrawled map of the Tribunal facility. We jumped to our feet as he walked in and stood there, arms full of groceries.
“You’ve been busy,” he said. “I love what you’ve done with the helicopter.”
An involuntary laugh escaped me. Who knew grumpy Raynard had a bitchy sense of humor? Then his eyes traveled over the back of the couch and saw Morfael lying there. His already thin mouth flattened into a line.
As we gathered around him and babbled about what had happened, Raynard put aside the groceries, knelt down, and took Morfael’s limp, emaciated hand. His head bowed slightly and he bit his lip, but he let us finish.
When we were done, he said, “I wonder if he knew he’d need first aid when he taught it to you.” He lifted his head and managed a watery smile. “I’ll take him to the hospital in Bishop.”
“We’re going to rescue Siku,” I said on impulse. The others startled, but Raynard was the only one we could tell. We’d decided not to call anyone’s parents. The plan was to send e-mails to our families just before we left to get Siku. We’d tell them the basics, just in case things didn’t go the way we planned. “We know where the Tribunal compound is.”
Raynard stood with effort, hoisting up the back of his sagging pants. He didn’t look surprised, or angry. He nodded once, as if that was no more and no less than what he’d expected to hear. “I’ll try to have the mess outside cleaned up by the time you get back,” he said. “Now help me get him into my truck.”
After Raynard and Morfael were gone, we ate a quick breakfast and loaded up the Beemer. Caleb tucked his satchel of goodies down by my feet in the front passenger seat. I saw the pink tip of the stuffed elephant’s trunk sticking out of the side pocket. I asked him what it would become when he called it. He said only that it was a last resort. Before I could ask what that meant, exactly, he went on to say he had maybe two more uses left on the saltshaker that sprinkled out shadow glue. Twigs from the lightning tree were also running low.
Then he went into the boys’ cabin and came out with my back brace.
“Why are you bringing that?” I asked, glad the other kids weren’t there to see it. The shame attached to it hadn’t gone away. The fact that Caleb had the thing filled me with conflicting feelings. He still cared about me in spite of it, but I wished he’d never seen it. “I don’t need it.”
“You might.” He set the brace down in the trunk, his dark eyebrows pinching together as he looked down at it.
The brace lay there, like an abandoned half suit of armor. Caleb’s black eyes concentrated on it. “What do you see?” I said.
“It has a potent shadow,” he said. “More so even than the leaves from the lightning tree. I couldn’t see it while you were wearing it. I think whatever kept you from shifting most of your life obscured it too. But now the power just spirals off it.”
The idea that the brace had some weird shadow made a strange kind of sense to me. For years it had had power over me, pushing my body around. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to see its shadow form after all that time spent wrapped around me.
“I haven’t had the guts to call it forth yet,” Caleb was saying. “But we’re heading into a situation where we’ll need all the power we can get.”
I ran my eyes over the curved plastic lines of the brace again, trying to see something extraordinary there. But I couldn’t see past its plastic bones and the pain it had caused.
Caleb slammed the trunk shut and took my hand. “When we have a few minutes alone, I’ll explain everything. About Amaris and . . . Ximon.” He could barely say his father’s name.
“Okay.” I let my hand rest in his. It felt good there, right.
“Every time I think of how you put up with that brace for years, I remember how strong you are. And I marvel at you even more.”
Tears sprang to my eyes but did not fall. He didn’t like me in spite of the brace. The brace actually made him care for me even more.
With November in rat form, the five of us fit into the BMW. She perched on the back dash in a patch of late-afternoon sun and fell asleep.
The Internet directions had said the drive would take almost six hours, but the way Caleb drove, we’d be there in four. We stopped off in Bishop for snacks and waved symbolically at Morfael in the hospital somewhere nearby as we left. With any luck, we’d be able to visit him, with Siku, on our way back.
We hit Barstow after dark, and Caleb insisted we eat, though I wasn’t hungry. A drive-thru provided a greasy dinner. We went over the plan again in the parking lot, mumbling through hamburger buns and holding out tidbits for November to take with her tiny pink paws. She ate nearly half of my burger and most of the fries, even though she was currently one-tenth her usual size. But I didn’t mind. My stomach jittered like it was full of dragonflies, and the food wasn’t helping.
It was then Caleb took me aside to talk. “When Ximon’s wife was pregnant with Lazar, he and my mother had an affair,” Caleb said. “She was only twenty, and after she got pregnant with me, she left him and never told me who my father was. But after she died, he came to me. He brought her love letters to him to prove what he told me. I recognized the handwriting.”
“And she never even hinted that he was your father while you were growing up?” I felt a surge of sympathy. I knew how it felt to grow up with a big hole in your history.
“Never,” he said. “She said my father was dead, a man she’d had a passing relationship with, that I was better off not knowing him. That was it. And when she told me about the Tribunal and mentioned Ximon along with the other clerics in the Tribunal, she seemed to hate him just as much as the others.”
“How did it feel to find out you still had a father?” I couldn’t help wondering, for my own sake as well as Caleb’s. “And that he was, you know, the enemy?”
“Confusing,” he said. “Ximon found me shortly after Mom died, and I was so hurt and weirded out, I ran away. He found me again a few weeks later, and this time he brought Amaris and Lazar, and I found out I had siblings.” He managed a small, ironic laugh. “It was very smart of him, because this time I listened. He told me that he . . . that he loved me.”
“Wow.” We sat in a pool of silence for a moment.
He cleared his throat. “Yeah. I’d always wondered who my dad was, and here was this seemingly nice guy with my brother and sister, telling me they wanted me to come live with them. I’d heard bad things about the Tribunal, of course, but Ximon said he wanted to change all that, to find a way to bring peace between otherkin and the Tribunal. Turns out he meant the peace of the grave. I should’ve known better.”
“But I get it,” I said. “You’d just lost your mother, and here was a new family, one that wanted you.”
He slid his hand over to cover mine. “Yeah, I went to live with them in the compound. Ximon started teaching me how to force a shifter’s animal form back into shadow, how to use a gun, repair an engine, memorize Bible verses, that kind of thing. He was stern and would fly off the handle if I disagreed with him, but he really seemed to want to get to know me. He said I was just like my mother, reckless and rebellious.”
“He probably did want to get to know you. I mean, you are his son.” I paused, then went on. “In his own twisted way, he probably does love you.”
A muscle in his jaw twitched, and his eyes went hard as onyx. “Twisted is the word.”
“Did you get along with Lazar then?”
His lips curled in a rueful half smile. “Lazar hated me from the start. I can’t blame him. Suddenly here’s this brand-new son your father’s paying attention to, and he’s one of the enemy. Then about three months in, Lazar let something slip about tailing an infernal shifter—that’s what he said, and he probably meant you. They’d never used that kind of language around me before, and why tail a shifter unless you’re hunting them? So I broke into the office.”
I let out a short laugh. “Ximon should’ve known you couldn’t be fooled for long.”
“He kept thinking he could control me,” he said. “The way he controls everyone else on the compound. And for a while he did.”
He was looking tentative again. Admitting that was hard for him. I said, “What did you find in the office?”
“My mother’s file,” he said, and his voice got grim. “They keep huge files on everyone. They’ll have a fat one on you in there. They’d been tracking our movements for years. They killed her. On Ximon’s direct order.”
“Oh, my God.”
When he spoke again it was in a soft, dangerous tone that made me shiver. “She left me in a safehouse in Santa Fe to get some groceries. When she didn’t come back, I went looking for her, only to see her body being loaded into an ambulance. She’d been shot. I couldn’t even claim her body for fear whoever killed her would find me. But Ximon knew where I was, and he didn’t want me dead. It was all there in her file, so carefully recorded: Lazar shot her with a sniper rifle from two hundred yards away. He’s a hell of a good shot.”
“Lazar!” My stomach clenched as I flashed on him standing in my bedroom window, firing at me with the tranquilizer gun.
“So I took one of the guns Ximon had given me for target practice and I tried to shoot Lazar,” said Caleb, his voice flat. “At the last minute, Amaris got between us, and I missed him.”
I held his hands tightly. “He is her brother too.”
“Later she said she didn’t want me to become a murderer.” He looked down at my hand. “Then I tried to go after Ximon, but there were too many of his men with him. They put me in a cage in the warehouse. Then they brought in this unconscious redhead in a hospital gown and put her in the cage next to mine.”
I squeezed his hand. “That’s why you had that black eye.”
“You saved my life when you shifted and got us out of there,” he said. “I wanted to tell you everything, but I needed you to trust me. There’s no way you would have ever done that if you knew Ximon was my father. I wouldn’t blame you if you never trusted me again.”
The only answer was to hug him. He exhaled slowly, his head buried in the crook of my neck.
“You’re a good brother,” I said. “To try to save Amaris from a father like that.”
I pulled back from the hug, and he leaned one shoulder against the wall behind him. “Ximon set her wedding date for next week, and she got really scared and called me.”
“Her wedding?”
He nodded. “His name is Enoch, and she hates him. He’s Ximon’s age and he’s already tried to . . .” His face darkened.
“We’ll get her out of there along with Siku,” I said. “We have to. We’ll tell the others soon. After your performance today, they’ll understand.”
I turned to go back and rejoin the others, but he stayed where he was, leaning against the graffiti-covered back wall of the Burger King.
“One more thing,” he said. He was staring at the ground, hands in his pockets. “I did lie to you when I said that Morfael didn’t test me before we entered the school.”
I knew it.
“You were acting so weird that day. Why lie? I told you what happened to me in the cave.”
“I lied because
you
were my test.” His eyes flicked up to mine, dark and full of heat.
“Me?”
He didn’t look away. “You know how when you have a dream about someone, a very intimate dream, it changes how you feel about them? I mean, it’s like you’ve been with them, if only in your mind, and it’s so . . . powerful, you never look at them the same way again.”
My throat was dry. “Yeah.”
“After we got separated in that cave, I walked into this meadow in the moonlight. And you were there, waiting for me.”
My heart beat so fast, I thought it might jump from my chest.
“You told me to come to you, and I did. You were naked and so lovely.” His eyes were still on me. It had only been a hallucination,
a dream
. But the way he was looking at me, it almost felt real to me too. I was torn between an almost unbearable thrill and hot-faced shame.
“Then I heard Amaris’s voice, screaming for help. I didn’t want to leave you. You were so tempting, so . . .” He cleared his throat. “But I had to choose. And my sister needed my help. So I tore myself away from you and ran toward Amaris. Next thing I knew, I woke up in the boys’ cabin at the school.”
Caleb had dreamed about me naked?! Okay, it was just a dream but . . .
Holy shit!
I forced myself to breathe and found I couldn’t look him in the eye. I’d never thought of anyone seeing me that way before. “Okay,” I said, my voice shaky.
“The test, all of it, scared me senseless.”
“So you
are
scared of me,” I said, remembering our talk just before our first kiss.
“Not of you.” He stood away from the wall and stepped toward me. “But maybe scared of my feelings for you.”
I knew exactly how he felt, because I was feeling it right that second. But after all the years of fearing that even the slightest touch from a boy would scare him off, I didn’t know how to deal with this, the exact opposite situation. It was terrifying.