He was right. All my life I’d wanted to know more about my heritage, but now that I was here, I longed to be with my mother and Richard, back in the days before any of this had happened. I didn’t want to camp out in some dark woods with people who turned into carnivorous animals and a guy who spoke and looked like someone out of
The Lord of the Rings.
When I’d wondered about my biological parents, I never thought they’d be shifters or Ambas, or whatever the hell he’d said.
“That’s true,” I said. “I don’t want to be here. But I came anyway, partly because I need somewhere safe, but also because I need to find people like me. I have to accept what’s happening or I’ll go crazy. And we share a common enemy. If we don’t help each other out, they’ll kill us all, one by one.”
Something sparked in Morfael’s pale gaze that reminded me of the gold glow Caleb’s eyes took on when he used his power. “You shall be tried.” He tapped his staff on the ground and something shuddered through the earth, like a noise too low to hear. The ground beside him yawned, making a black hole in the soil, ringed with rocks like jagged teeth.
“Come,” said Morfael, jabbing his staff toward the maw in the dirt. It was less than three feet high, descending sharply into darkness. Behind us, the wolf and bear closed in. To get back to the car we’d have to move past them.
Caleb let go of my hand, moved to the hole, and got onto all fours. “I’ll go in front,” he said. “Follow me.” He crawled headfirst into the cave.
“Good thing I’m not claustrophobic,” I said, getting down on my hands and knees. I looked at Morfael. His thin lips twitched in the specter of a smile. But was he happy in a “you go, girl” way or in an “oh, good, my earth monster will have a nice breakfast” way?
Darkness swallowed me. The dirt was cold and moist beneath my hands. I could still feel and hear Caleb shuffling along in front of me. The rich, loamy smell of earth enveloped us. After moving in a few feet I risked a glance back. There was no break in the blackness, no slice of starry sky or last sight of the Beemer. We were trapped.
CHAPTER 12
The dark pressed against my eyes, as oppressive as a bright light. I usually liked small spaces, but anxiety washed over me when I wondered what weird things Morfael had planted ahead.
“The cave closed up behind us.” My voice sounded oddly muffled.
“Surprise,” said Caleb. His voice also seemed distant, but his sarcastic tone comforted me.
“It’s opening up ahead,” he said, and I felt his movement change. His hand took my elbow and pulled me up as the space around me expanded. I stood, pressing against his lean, warm frame. His arm slid around my waist. I started to pull away, a reflex. But then as his fingers moved over my hip I remembered that I no longer wore the brace. Instead of being hard and unyielding, my body felt smooth, pliant.
“Hey,” he said softly, his breath tickling my ear. “It’s pretty cozy in here. You think Morfael did this so we could make out?”
I laughed, stomach fluttering. “So that’s his nefarious plan.”
His arms tightened around me. His lips pressed against my temple, sliding down to my cheek. A furnace ignited inside me, every inch of me aflame and aware of his skin, his hands, his mouth. So this was what it was like, to have someone desire you, to want nothing more than to keep touching forever.
Something flickered in the corner of my eye, like a reflection on water.
“What’s that?” he said, straightening. His voice sounded thick, reluctant. “Maybe I’m just seeing things.”
“No,” I said, also unwilling but remembering where we were. “I saw it too.”
Something flickered again, and this time I saw a form silhouetted against the light. Then it vanished.
“We’d better take a look,” he said, cupping his hand around my cheek before loosening his hold on me.
“Yeah.” I moved around him to see better, straining against the dark. “How freaky is this?”
“At least we’re together,” he said.
I tried to reach for his hand but couldn’t find it in the darkness.
The faint whoosh of running water hit my ears. “I hear a stream or something,” I said, walking a couple of steps closer to the sound.
“No, it’s wind.” His voice was distant again. “Over here.”
“I swear it’s water,” I said. The sound deepened. “Over here.”
He didn’t reply. I turned around but found only blackness. “Caleb?”
No response. My heart skipped several beats. I swatted the air where he had just stood. “Caleb? Where are you?”
I called out his name as my outstretched fingers hit a wall of dirt. I kept my hand there as I walked around, only to come back to the flickering of light on water and splashing in the distance. Caleb was gone.
“Morfael, you bastard.” The sound of my own voice heartened me. “I was just about to get my first kiss covered in dirt in a mystical cavern.”
No one answered. Nothing to do then but move toward the sound of water and see what came next. Rounding a corner, I squinted into a splash of light and found myself alongside a river, green with white firs and walnut trees. Red beams of dawn arrowed between the trunks. Behind me lay a sheer rock wall, and no sign of where I’d come from. Nice trick. I would have loved this place, so peaceful, so untouched by man and machine, if it hadn’t felt like a trap.
“Caleb?” I moved closer to the water. A sheer drop plummeted down to a rushing stream at least thirty feet across. It curved sharply to either side, pinning me up against the wall of rock. To get anywhere, I would have to cross the stream.
I paced down the riverbank. The water looked swift, cold, and deep. I was a strong swimmer, but no way could I safely get across. A fallen tree lay across the stream close to where it ran into and under the wall of stone. The trunk spanned the river, resting on opposite banks like a weathered footbridge.
Would it hold my weight? Rubbing my chilled hands together, I bent over and leaned onto it. It didn’t bend or sway.
I stepped cautiously up onto the tree and inched out. The ground dropped beneath me, replaced by gray water. I tried not to look down. One foot stepped slowly in front of the other, my sneaker treads gripping the wood. I was almost halfway across when I forgot and looked down. I laughed and swore. The plunge down into the water looked ridiculously high from here.
“Desdemona!”
I turned my head and nearly fell. Bending my knees, I grabbed the log, regaining my balance. Behind me, her short dark hair tousled by the morning breeze, stood my mother.
“Sorry, honey,” she said, her eyes widening with fear. “Please be careful!”
“Mom? How did you get here?” She looked as solid as the log I stood on.
“Richard and I followed you.” She beckoned. “Come back this way. I’m here to take you with us.”
I looked around the forest, waiting for the punch line. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Desdemona.” Her voice cut at me with a mother’s concern. “It’s far too dangerous for me to explain while you balance like that. Come here, and I’ll tell you everything on the way back.”
“But there’s no way out back there . . .” I trailed off as I saw a jagged opening in the rock wall behind her. It hadn’t been there before, had it? “I can’t turn around, Mom.”
“Of course you can. I’ll help. See?” She moved over to her end of the log and stepped on top of it, reaching her hand out. “Just take my hand.”
She smiled, and warming reassurance rushed over me. Everything was going to be all right now. I didn’t have to leave my home and my family and go off to live in the woods with crazy people who thought they were animals. I was just a normal girl, heading back home to live a normal life.
I inched back toward her. She edged out a little, and the log rolled slightly. I bent over to clutch it, struggling for balance. “No! Don’t! You’re going to knock me off.”
Bending felt wrong.
Oh, right, no back brace
. Feeling normal whirled away like dandelion fluff on a day when the Santa Ana winds blew.
“You won’t fall if you come back,” Mom said, leaning out to me. Her hand was pretty close. If I took a step toward her, I’d probably be able to grab it. “You’ll be safe, I promise.”
I wanted to believe her. But she’d said exactly the wrong thing. “You can’t promise me that,” I said. “No one can.” I stood up slowly and began walking very carefully toward the other bank.
“You’ll never make it that way!” She jumped off the log onto her side of the bank. Her leap rocked the tree trunk violently back and forth. I spread my arms wide, trying to sway with it.
I risked a glance at her. Her eyebrows were drawn in a terrible frown. “You’re going to fall,” she said.
“Then I fall,” I said.
And I did.
The splash into the freezing water took my breath away. If this was all some kind of dream or hallucination, it sure didn’t feel like it. I kept my mouth and eyes shut and kicked off my shoes. Water roiled around me. I reached up and tried to find air.
My face broke the surface and I sucked in a huge grateful breath. The current was bearing me rapidly downstream. The banks of the river whipped past. I thudded into something hard, a submerged rock. Pain stabbed through my thigh, but the water swept me on. It hurt to kick now, and the cold invaded my skin, penetrating to the muscles. Moving my arms took effort. I tried to push myself across the current to the bank, but the relentless flow beat me back to the center.
I gasped, and water trickled into my lungs.
Oh, God, I’m going to drown.
My arms and legs felt like lead.
I have to shift.
As a tiger I would have the power to get to the riverbank. The process of shifting should heal my injured leg and keep the hypothermia at bay.
But I’d never shifted of my own accord, and I’d been unable to shift back to human form, even when my mother, my real mother, had a gun on me. Despair leeched more vigor from my muscles.
What a stupid way to die.
The banks of the stream raced past me, blurring into a streak of brown and green. Anger pulsed through me at the injustice and waste of it all. That pulse felt like the fury that had pushed me to save my mother a few hours ago.
I put my head down into the water and curled into a ball, nurturing that determination and rage. It connected to something that burned at my core, black and infinite. I imagined breathing on the flames there, pouring all my thoughts, all my energy into that center. Like a stab of lightning, that nucleus flared outward, radiating out of every limb, out of my eyes, ears, and mouth. I flung out my arms and legs. Wet cloth shredded around me, then washed away. I flexed my powerful back legs and felt the rocky river bottom beneath my paws. With a mighty push, I moved like a striped submarine through the current toward the shore, paddling with my forepaws.
Water weighed down my whiskers and my tail, but where its cold had nearly frozen me stiff before, I now only felt a slight chill. I gulped down some water and tasted the cool moss and wet stone it had rolled over. The riverbank no longer looked so steep. My paws hit bottom without reaching. I leapt, feeling the power in my muscles, and landed on dry grass.
I shook myself. The twisting began at my head and traveled all the way down to the tip of my tail. Water drops flew from my fur, thudding into the bushes and leaves around me. It felt so good to stretch and shake and move. I was alive and whole, strong and lithe.
I looked up to see Morfael not ten feet away in his long black robes, clutching his pale staff with its twisting figures. I held still, waiting.
“You are welcome, Amba,” he said, his voice as clear and cold as the river water. “Come.”
He turned and moved deeper into the woods. Even with my ears cocked, I could barely hear his footfalls. Then I followed him into the trees, more silent than he.
CHAPTER 13
I awoke sometime later on a narrow bed. Someone had covered me with a rough blanket. I could feel that I was human again and fully dressed except for my coat. My hair was dry and not as ratty as it should have been. Looking around, I saw that I lay on the bottom of one of two bunk beds in a snug wooden cabin. The room was large enough for the beds and a small kitchen against one wall, with a mini fridge, sink, and some counter space. A jute rug covered most of the floor. I spotted two doors and decided the bigger one led outside while the other led to another room.
The sound of running water behind the narrower door confirmed this. It opened to reveal a petite girl about my age wearing scuffed brown cords, boots, and a long sleeve T-shirt in pink with the words “Anderson’s Pawn and Loan” printed across it. She hummed under her breath, then looked up, as if she’d felt my gaze. Her small eyes were dark brown, the same color as her short hair, which stuck out at odd angles. Her alert face was pointed, sharp.
“Awake, I see,” she said. She smiled, revealing her upper and lower teeth. “About time. You cats sleep the day away given the chance.”
So she knew I was a tiger-shifter. That disoriented me, but it didn’t seem to faze her. “How long have I been asleep?” I asked.
“Twelve hours or so, since Morfael carried you in just after dawn. I’m November, by the way.” She smiled again but didn’t come forward to shake hands. “What’s your name?”
“Desdemona,” I said, sitting up. “Dez for short. I’ve heard of girls named April, May, and June, but never November.”
“Eleventh month,” she said. “I’m the eleventh child.” As my eyes widened, she nodded. “And the other ten are all brothers. Can you imagine?” She moved toward the mini fridge. “You don’t look Chinese. Or Indian.”
“I was born in Russia,” I said. “Raised here.” She was getting a lot of information out of me fast. I decided to turn the tables. “Where are you from?”
She pulled a sandwich out of the fridge and unwrapped it. “My dad has a business in Oakland.”
“Anderson’s Pawn and Loan?”
“Exactly.” She took a couple of small bites from the sandwich. Something about the way she held it in both hands made me realize what she was.
“You’re a rat,” I said. It sounded weird or even insulting to my ears, but she nodded and kept eating.
“Pretty sharp for a cat,” she said. “But your kind used to hunt our kind, didn’t they?”
“They did?” She had been keeping herself as far from me as possible. She didn’t appear afraid, but she also wasn’t coming closer.
“Siku heard you grew up not knowing you were otherkin,” she said. “Is that true?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Who’s Siku? That’s an interesting name too.”
“He’s the bear-shifter in the boy’s cabin, from Alaska,” she said. “Bears, cats, and raptors are usually indigenous. So Arnaldo lives in Arizona, but he’s descended from the Aztecs or something. Siku’s Inuit, I think. Grizzly bears are native to America and so is Siku, if you see what I’m saying.”
“I think so,” I said, working it out. “Tigers live in India and Siberia, so tiger-shifters are all Indian or Russian or Chinese in their human form. Lions are African, like that.”
“You learn fast.” She had finished her sandwich and began licking her fingers. “You’re kind of an anomaly, you know. Shifters keep close track of their kids as a rule. There are so few of us, each one is precious, blah blah blah. We try not to kill shifters from other tribes now, much as everybody hates each other. The Tribunal’s picking us off quickly enough as it is.”
I was still working out what I’d just learned. “But your last name is Anderson,” I said. “That doesn’t sound very Native American.”
“Oh, rats and wolves get around,” she said. “Particularly the rats. The European division of the Tribunal had a bug up their butts about wolves for a few hundred years, calling them werewolves and so on. A few wolf-shifters are still there, but a lot of them ran off to America, Asia, Australia. So here in America you’ve got both Native American wolf-shifters and European types.”
“What about the rats?”
She ran her hands under the faucet, then dipped her head to catch the water stream in her mouth for a quick drink. “Washing cups is a pain,” she said, drying her hands and face. “We rats are not as territorial as the predators, and we pump out the kids faster.” She waggled her eyebrows. “So we keep spreading out, finding new spots to live. My family’s originally from Sweden, but we came over a hundred and fifty years ago, been in Oakland for a few decades. We don’t mind cities the way you fangy types do.”
It made a kind of sense. Rats flourished on every continent, in all sorts of environments. “Why don’t the different tribes get along?” I said. “Bears don’t eat eagles. Cats don’t eat wolves, generally.”
“You’re all predators, competing for the same resources,” she said. “Out in nature you don’t see panthers and bears being buddies, helping each other out. The Shifter Councils formed only because the Tribunal presented a common threat, and they only convene if they have to.”
“The Shifter Council?” So much to learn.
She cocked her head. “You really were raised by humdrums, weren’t you? Siku thinks Morfael should kick you out, even argued with him.” She shook her head. “Bears aren’t very brainy either. He should’ve known the old man would give him the smackdown.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Rats are the brainy ones.”
“Yep, and the friendliest.” She hoisted herself up to sit on the counter. “Everyone else is muscle.”
“I get it,” I said. “You don’t want to get eaten, so you need to be smart, friendly, and manipulative.”
Her lips twisted in an appreciative smirk. “Like I said, pretty smart for a cat.”
My stomach rumbled with hunger. “Any idea where my stuff is?”
“Under the bed,” she said. “Siku refused to carry your bags in, so Arnaldo had to shift into human form and do it. He’s not crazy about you either.”
“Well, I’m crazy about him,” I said. She barked a short laugh. I reached under the bed and pulled out my suitcase. My coat lay on top. “And Arnaldo is . . . ?”
“Eagle-shifter and resident geek.” November opened a cupboard, took a lollipop out of a bag of sweets, and unwrapped it. “This is his second time at Fur and Feather School, and everybody knows it’s a disgrace not to graduate in one year. But he sucks at shifting back to human, and if you get less than a gibbous moon grade average, you have to come back and get labeled a complete loser.”
It took me a second to figure out what she was saying. “You get graded in phases of the moon?”
She frowned at me, like I’d asked the dumbest question yet, then smiled. “Oh, right, you humdrums get letter grades or something stupid like that, don’t you? Yeah, we get graded so that our parents can see if we’re progressing. I don’t know if Arnaldo’ll graduate this year, again. Can you imagine failing out twice? He’ll never be leader of his tribe and might never find a mate. London’s doing pretty badly too. She’s a wolf-shifter. Her real name’s Laurentia, but we all call her London. She hates it.”
“Why London?” I shook off the blankets and swung my legs over the edge of the bed.
“You don’t know that song? ‘Werewolves of London’?” She hopped down and did a couple of improvised dance steps, humming.
I blinked at her. She rolled her eyes. “Wolf-shifters hate being called werewolves.”
“And here I thought I was escaping the politics of high school.” I stood up and rolled onto my tiptoes, stretching my hands toward the rough ceiling. It felt so good to let my rib cage expand and to arch my back. How had I put up with the brace for two whole years?
She stuck the lollipop in her mouth and smiled around it. “Otherkin politics are worse.”
“So the school has a bear, a wolf, a bird, and a rat,” I said. “No cat?”
She shook her head. “No cat-shifters old enough to attend this year. Not till you came along. Morfael only takes one shifter from each North American tribe per year, so each tribe sends whichever kid is doing the worst, figuring they need his help the most.”
“Help with shifting?”
“Shifting, otherkin history, all the basics of how to get by in this crazy world. You’ll see. It’s not exactly an honor to attend this school, but it’s better than never learning how to shift properly.”
“Did you see when Morfael brought me in?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, muffled around her sucker.
“Was I in human form?”
“Morfael’s strong for a skinny-ass caller, but I don’t think he could’ve carried a tiger,” she said. “You’re big enough as it is.”
“Was I, like, wet? And undressed?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Nope.”
That was weird. Had Morfael dried me off and dressed me in the woods? Or maybe . . . a light went on. Maybe the events at the river hadn’t happened, except in my head. “I guess I passed the test,” I said.
“You’re still here, aren’t you?” She spread her arms wide.
“Did you see the guy who came with me, Caleb?”
“The evil eye-candy? Yeah. He’s in the boy’s cabin. You can imagine how excited Siku is about that.”
“Caleb’s only semi-evil,” I said.
“But one hundred percent candy?” Her lips curved around the lollipop stick.
“What’s Siku got against him?”
She shrugged. “Everybody hates callers. Morfael’s tolerable because he helps us, but most callers are manipulative bastards who get off on forcing us to shift. They lie at the drop of a hat.”
“So do you,” said another voice. A lanky girl with a stony face stood framed in the front doorway. Her long hair was dyed black, showing light blond at the roots. It lay flat and stark against her lightly tan skin. Two silver nose rings curled around her nostrils. Her sky-blue eyes slid like laser beams over me and took in November sucking her lolly. She didn’t look impressed. “Dinner in five.” She turned around and left. The door thumped closed behind her.
“And now you’ve met London. Isn’t she charming?” November pulled a sweatshirt off the counter and slipped it over her head.
“Is that attitude a wolf thing?” I said, grabbing my coat.
“Nah, just a London thing. Can you believe the fake nose rings? Such a poser.”
“How do you know they are fake?”
“Because I see her shift three times a day.” When I looked blank, she rolled her eyes. “Shifting heals everything—tattoos, piercing holes, scars where losers like London like to cut themselves just to feel alive. Only thing you can change is your hair, since it’s not living tissue. She’d be covered with tats of skulls and other clichés and punctured like a pincushion if she could. But she has to settle for a bad dye job and fake piercings.”
“Must be frustrating, not to be able to express herself the way she wants.” I put on my coat.
November smirked. “Self-hatred’s a bitch, and so is she. Nice coat. But better not wear it during exercises or it’ll rip when you shift.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said. “Do we have classes at night or something?”
“We have them whenever Morfael feels like it.” Her eyes flicked to the door, then back to me. I stood between her and the exit.
Am I really that scary?
I felt about as frightening as a sleepy toddler. How long would she stand there if I didn’t move?
“After you.” I gestured toward the door.
She narrowed her eyes and smiled, as if in on some secret joke. “Don’t play with your food.”
I stared at her. Wow. These people really thought I might eat them. “I couldn’t even cut up a frog in biology,” I said. “Don’t worry about me.”
“Uh-huh.” She didn’t relax, but waved her hand at the door. “Just go already.”
I suppressed an urge to lunge at her just to see what she would do. Instead I walked to the door and opened it.
Fresh forest air filled my lungs. The sky had darkened to indigo, although streaks of reddish purple still painted the fat clouds above me. The cabin stood in a cleared area surrounded by trees. An identical cabin faced the one I was in, about thirty yards away. Both cabins looked rough but sturdy, built to last, not to impress.
To the left lay a larger, weirder wooden structure built against the face of a sheer granite cliff. It looked like something out of a bedtime story. The curved roof met the walls at a precarious angle and had mistletoe and mock orange growing out of it. The door was more of a trapezoid than a square. The heavy logs around it looked more like living trunks of black oaks than lumber, sprouting out of the roof with a vigorous burst of leaves. I half expected a cloud of fairies the size of dragonflies to flutter out of the triangular windows.
It’s been grown, not built.
A hulking boy with straight dark hair loose down to his waist lumbered up to its door, then turned to stare at me. His thick brows lowered over deep-set eyes. His cheekbones were high and sharp. Given his huge size, he had to be the bear-shifter, Siku.
Not sure what else to do, I raised my hand. His expression didn’t change. Then he opened the crooked door and went inside.