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Authors: Nina Berry

BOOK: Otherkin
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My mother scrambled away from me, ripping the hood from her head. Her eyes bulged in terror. But I couldn’t worry about that now.
I turned to Lazar. Something thudded into my side. Searing pain slashed down my body. A guttural yowl escaped me. I smelled more blood, my own.
Lazar held a shiny pistol, exactly like the one we’d found in the BMW. Smoke rose from its barrel. He’d shot me with a silver bullet. As he raised the gun to fire again, I saw that he was fast.
But he was human. I was not. Silver or no silver, I was faster.
I lashed out, claws extended. He yelled in pain, and the gun flew out of his hand. Dark blood ran down his fingers.
He stared at me, backing up toward the window. “You will go back,” he said, and I felt the deep harmonic thrum in his voice. “Go back to the demonlands . . .” He raised his arm to point at me, and I realized he was going to send my tiger-self back into shadow.
Pushing back the agony of the bullet the way I had shoved back the pain of the brace for two years, I dug my back legs deep into the carpet and launched myself at him. My head and left shoulder slammed into his torso, and we both flew backward. We crashed through the window behind him, smashing it to pieces. The ground came at me fast. Instinctively I spread my legs out, bending ankle, knee, and shoulder joints as we landed.
Lazar lay beneath me, eyes closed. I smelled more blood oozing from new cuts on his back and legs from the broken window. I butted my nose against him, sniffing. His breath came shallow and fast. He didn’t flinch as I rolled him. He was out cold. I bit gently into his backpack and lifted him as a cat lifts a kitten. He was heavy, but nothing I couldn’t manage.
I paused to look around, ears cocked. A light went on in the neighbor’s bedroom. Better for them to see just a broken window than a tiger with a man in her mouth. I put my forepaws on the windowsill and dragged Lazar back inside. Maybe if we kept the lights off, no one would notice the broken glass. Some of the shards sliced through my fur. None of it hurt like the silver bullet. Fiery bursts of pain spread outward from where it lay in my side, sickening me.
I dropped Lazar onto my mother’s rug and bounded over to Richard’s prone body. When I looked up, she was standing in the doorway. She stared at me with a mixture of fear and wonder.
“What have you done with Desdemona?” she asked, but not as if she expected an answer. She lifted her arm and pointed the shiny gun at me. Her hand shook, and the muzzle of the gun wavered. She must’ve checked my room, seen that I was gone, and grabbed Lazar’s gun.
I needed to tell her who I was, but all I could do was utter a sort of growling whine. She swallowed, and I wondered why she didn’t just shoot. Her eyes flickered down to Richard’s body, lying beneath me. She didn’t want to miss or wound the tiger further, in case that tiger took it out on her husband.
I leaned my head down to Richard and licked his face. Mom inhaled with fear as my tongue rasped over his cheek. Richard’s breath warmed my whiskers. I could hear the blood still pumping through him. He was only unconscious. As I lifted my head, I saw her eyebrows come together in a question. Then I backed away from Richard. She kept the shaky gun trained on me.
I stopped to paw the backpack off of Lazar, not worried if he took a few more scratches. I picked the pack up in my mouth and tossed it toward Mom. She stepped back in shock as it landed at her feet. I turned my back to her, walked to the far corner of the room, and lay down. The bullet in my side throbbed with every breath. Blood oozed down my leg.
Mom stood there for another long moment, the pack at her feet, the gun trained on me. “Goddess help me,” she said, her voice wobbling more than the gun. “There’s a tiger in my house.”
The pain in her eyes made me desperate to speak to her. But I couldn’t. I shut my eyes and thought about my human arms and legs, my long red hair, my green eyes, hoping my coiled tiger form would shed itself to reveal me beneath. But nothing happened. I had no idea how to change back.
Mom was looking down at Richard, tears in her eyes. Then she glared at me. “I need to call for help, but I can’t leave him here with you.”
I nodded my head. It felt unnatural in this body, but I did it.
Mom’s eyes widened. “Did you just nod at me?”
I bobbed my head up and down.
“This is insane,” said Mom. I couldn’t shrug my tiger shoulders, but it was so true. “You attacked those men, but not me, not Richard. And you threw this pack at me. Do . . . do you want me to look inside?”
I nodded again vigorously. “Okay.” Mom wiped her free hand across her eyes and crouched down by the pack. “I’ve gone totally crazy and I’m taking orders from a tiger.”
I dipped my head again. She shook her head in disbelief as she unzipped the backpack and reached in. “Drugs.” She pulled out a bottle and peered at the label. “Some kind of tranquilizer, and syringes!” She pulled out a syringe in a tube. “Is this what they put in Richard? What they wanted to do to me?”
I nodded, very low and emphatically.
“But why?” she said. “And where did you come from? Where’s my daughter?”
Bam, bam, bam!
A fierce pounding on our front door echoed through the house. Mom startled to her feet, forgetting to point the gun at me.
“Dez!” It was Caleb’s voice, shouting at the front door. My heart jumped; my ears pricked. He was all right. And he had come back to me. “Desdemona, it’s Caleb, let me in!”
“Caleb?” said Mom. “Desdemona’s Caleb? What is he doing here?” She raised her voice. “Call the cops! Get an ambulance! We’ve been attacked, and there’s a dangerous animal in here with wounded men!”
“Mrs. Grey?” Caleb’s voice came down in volume, but was no less urgent. “Mrs. Grey, let me in. I can help you. I can explain everything. Don’t worry about the tiger, she won’t hurt you.”
“How did he know . . .” She looked at me in astonishment, then yelled louder. “How did you know about the tiger?”
“I told you, I can explain everything.” Something moved in the lock on the front door. Caleb’s voice became smooth and soothing as a velvet blanket. “Dez showed me where you hide the front door key, so I’m going to let myself in. I’m a friend, don’t worry.”
Mom took a deep, calming breath. “Okay, but move slowly. I’ve got a gun on the tiger, but it’s already wounded and I don’t know what it’ll do.”
“Wounded?” The front door burst open, and I heard feet moving swiftly toward us. Before I could see him, I heard the unique beat of Caleb’s heart, the determined pattern of his footfalls. Maybe I would live through this night after all.
CHAPTER 10
Caleb stood in the doorway of my parents’ wrecked bedroom. I’d never seen anything more wonderful. His black eyes took me in. I got to all fours slowly, torrents of agony rippling down my side from the silver bullet still lodged there.
As I moved, my mother aimed the gun at me again, glancing back at Caleb a few feet behind her. “Be careful. It’s wounded, and it killed one of those men.”
But Caleb’s eyes didn’t waver from me. An awestruck smile lit his face. “Magnificent,” he said, walking toward me. “My God, Dez, I should have known you’d be this glorious.”
His voice warmed me. But my mother shot him a look you’d give a crazy man. “Don’t get any closer! I might have to shoot it.”
“It’s all right,” he said, eyes fixed on me. “She saved you, didn’t you, Dez?”
“Stop calling it that!” Mom’s voice hit an edge of hysteria. I couldn’t blame her.
“No,” Caleb said, in the most reasonable voice in the world. “No, because you see, this is your daughter. This tiger is Desdemona.”
Mom frowned, incredulous, as Caleb edged toward me, reaching out his hand. I walked to him, my head as high as his chest. He flinched backward involuntarily, eyes wide, as I got close. I knew then how terrifying I must look if even he could not contain his fear.
I sat and bowed my head, to show him he had no cause for alarm.
“I’m sorry, it’s just . . . instinct,” he said, and knelt in front of me.
I let out something like a meow. Caleb leaned in and rested his forehead against mine. We breathed each other’s breath. Calm flooded over me. We would get through this together.
My mother cleared her throat. “Is this
your
tiger?”
Caleb laughed, tracing one of the stripes on my left front paw with his finger. “Tigers don’t belong to anyone,” he said. “But this is your daughter. She has a special gift, and we need to get her back to her human form so we can help her.” To me, he added, “You’re wounded. Let me see.”
As my mother shook her head and mouthed “No,” I lowered myself with a groan to lie down on my unwounded side. Caleb examined the oozing hole in my flank.
“Looks like the bullet is still inside her,” he said, looking up at my mom. “Is that the gun that shot her?”
She looked blankly at the gun in her hand. “Yes. But I didn’t do it. He did.” She pointed at Lazar, still lying unconscious on the floor. “And they shot some kind of tranquilizer into my husband. There’s another man in gray in Desdemona’s room, but he’s out cold.”
Caleb smirked at me appreciatively. “Took care of him too, didn’t you?” To my mother, he said, “They wanted to kidnap all of you. They’d keep you and your husband as hostages to make sure Dez would cooperate with them and not try to escape again.”
“Again?” My mother’s voice shook, and she hunkered down suddenly, head drooping, as if overtaken by emotion. “I don’t understand.”
“Okay.” Caleb’s voice smoothed out. “It’s time to show, not tell. Your daughter here is wounded and unable to change back into her human form because she hasn’t learned how. So I’m going to help her. Then we’ll figure out how to get her and your husband some medical assistance.”
“I’m going crazy.” Mom’s voice cracked. I stretched one paw toward her, my heart aching. But she just drew back in fear.
“No, you’re not,” said Caleb. “Watch.”
He shrugged out of his coat and draped it over me, covering me from shoulders to the base of my tail. He grabbed a handful of fur on either side of my head and looked into my eyes. “I’m going to help you push your shadow form back into Othersphere. I don’t know how it’ll feel on your end, but it’ll probably help if you concentrate on making that happen.”
I nodded, wondering how he was going to do it. Wasn’t pushing back shadow something that the Tribunal specialized in? Did callers do that too?
He moved back to stand next to my mother. “Keep your eye on the tiger,” he said. Then he hummed lightly, up and down the scale, as if searching for the right note. His black eyes fixed on me like laser sights. I stared up into them, hoping to hear something that would make me remember my weak human arms, my thumbs, my tiny jaw, my feeble ears, my fur-free skin. They all seemed now as distant as the stars in the sky.
As Caleb hit a midlevel note, his eyes flared gold. My hackles rose. I shuddered, flexing my paws. No fingers there yet, but for a moment I had a visceral memory of what it felt like to make a fist. Mom looked back and forth between us and took a step away.
Caleb slid back to that note, narrowing his eyes in concentration. I shut my eyes, leaning into the sound. I imagined myself human again, fragile, tool-using, able to laugh and speak.
“Return,” said Caleb in that same tone, pointing at me. “Return to Othersphere.”
My fur rippled, as if in a strong wind. I pinned my ears back, willing my tiger self to waft away. The tremor inside me grew, and something reached out from within. A strange pain, like scratching an itch, tore the skin from my bones. I roared. The roar swept upward and became a scream. The pain vanished. And I was a naked human teenager, huddled beneath Caleb’s long black coat.
My mother’s eyes were as round as quarters, her mouth fallen open.
“Mom—” I sat up and gathered the coat around me.
Caleb staggered sideways, shoulders slumping. He put his hand to the wall to steady himself. I stood up, tying the belt of the coat around me, and moved to him. His eyes were blank gold, staring through me. “It’s okay,” I said. “Come sit. Mom, help me get him over to sit on the bed.”
“Desdemona,” Mom said flatly.
“It’s really me, Mom.” I slid Caleb’s unresisting arm around my shoulder and guided him over to the bed.
“Little cub,” said Caleb absently, sitting heavily onto the rumpled sheets. “She is too strong for him to eat her now.”
Goose bumps prickled up my arms at his words. Caleb had babbled like that right after working his magic two other times that I’d seen, and it was all probably nonsense. But then why did it give me the chills?
“I think he gets this way if he overexerts himself doing his . . . thing,” I said to Mom.
Mom dropped the gun and hurtled into me. Her arms wrapped around my waist, squeezing till it hurt. “I’m okay,” I said into the top of her head. “I’m sorry.”
“They shot you!” She turned my back to Caleb and opened the coat to see my wound. Even as she poked at my side, I realized that the pain from the bullet was gone. The skin where the injury should’ve been was smooth and unscarred. All the other cuts and scrapes I’d gotten moving through the broken window were gone as well.
Mom looked as if her head was about to explode. “What happened? Was it all just some horrible hallucination?”
“No,” I said. Caleb held his head in both hands, elbows leaning on his knees. My glance fell on a small piece of shiny metal lying on the floor in the middle of a red stain, where I had shifted back into human form. I picked it up, and it stung my fingers, a heavy piece of silver that looked like a squished gray raisin. “Look.”
Mom grabbed my hand to get a closer view. “That’s what they shot you with?”
Caleb looked up. The gold was fading from his eyes. “You ejected the bullet when you shifted.”
“Shifted.” My mother sank down next to him, as if her legs couldn’t support her.
“We need to get you out of here,” said Caleb.
“Stop!” Mom held up both hands, her voice quavering and shrill. “Nobody’s going anywhere. What about Richard? What about these men?
What the hell is going on?
”
Caleb and I exchanged glances. “How about I tell her while you go through the backpack?” he asked. “Maybe there’s something in there that can help Richard.”
“Should we call the cops?” I asked him.
“And explain the marks on these Tribunal guys as what, a grizzly bear attack?”
I nodded and went over and kissed Mom on the cheek. “Listen to Caleb, Mom. He’s going to tell you what’s going on.”
Her lips got very thin, but she nodded. Caleb launched into a down and dirty explanation of Othersphere, shifters, and the Tribunal as I emptied the remaining contents of Lazar’s backpack onto the floor. As Mom hovered over Richard, checking his pulse and asking terse questions, I lined up all the syringes and drugs. Nothing was labeled, and it all looked the same. I also found another magazine of bullets, which didn’t look silver, and one that did, rope, duct tape, and lock picks.
“Nothing here to help,” I said, as Mom pillowed Richard’s head on her lap and clucked her tongue over the story of the Tribunal’s crusade against the otherkin.
“I knew that the world was more fantastic and complicated than it seemed,” she said. “But the Wiccan traditions don’t cover this!”
“Don’t forget to search the other guy,” Caleb said to me, pointing at the other man, lying on the far side of the bed.
He went back to his explanation. I stood and walked closer, steeling myself. The man lay on his stomach, face to the floor, or what was left of his face. A large pool of blood had collected beneath him. The top half of his head still wore the gray ski mask. But most of his throat and lower jaw were gone, bitten off. I glimpsed a broken upper tooth and the white gleam of a neck bone amidst the raw red flesh before I turned away, stomach churning.
I had done this. I had killed a man.
Someone took my hand. I turned to find Mom, her eyes welling. I hadn’t heard her conversation with Caleb stop.
“I always knew you were special,” she said. “My faery child.”
I laughed shakily. “So, you believe us?”
“What else can I believe?” She threw her hands up. “The Goddess knows the world is full of wonderful things. And you are one of them. Now, with my own eyes, I’ve seen past the veil. Short of waking up to find this is all a dream, there’s no other explanation.”
I nodded, but couldn’t help looking again at the body of the man I’d killed.
Mom took my hand again. “You had to,” she said. “You saved us.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said. “I’m the thing that brought this down on us.”
She squeezed my hand hard. “Don’t you ever apologize for who you are,” she said. “I’m very proud of you.”
“Thanks,” I managed to say. “How’s Richard?”
“Sleeping hard, but otherwise okay, I think.” She wiped at the blood on my cheek with her thumb. “Even if we can’t wake him, Caleb says he’ll come out of it eventually. You should get dressed. Caleb and I will search the other men for the antidote. Then we need to figure out what to do.”
“Okay.” I looked over at Caleb. He stood, hands thrust into his pants pockets, black hair falling over his eyes. “You’ll look after her?” I said.
“I’ll look after her,” he said. It sounded like a vow.
I headed for the shower. I turned the water to scalding and scrubbed at the blood caked all over me till my skin turned bright pink.
All the cuts and bruises on my body were gone. I stopped scrubbing as a thought hit. The shift had healed me completely. If the shift could heal cuts and bullet wounds, maybe it could heal bones as well. Maybe the shift that happened yesterday, my first, had healed my scoliosis and straightened my back. The doctors had said it was a miracle. Maybe it was actually shadow.
I finished, got dressed, and hurried down the hall to tell them my theory. Caleb looked up from a pile of equipment and listened intently. “That makes sense,” he said. “I’m no expert on scoliosis, but shifters don’t get cancer, and if they get a cold or an infection, all they have to do is shift, and they’re fine. So when you shifted, you healed your back.”
“But then,” I said, thinking hard, “shifters must live for a long time, like, over a hundred years or something.”
“They can live for hundreds of years, actually, unless they’re killed outright,” he said.
“Hundreds of years?” It was my turn to sit down on the bed, my knees weak. My mother got up and sat next to me, putting a comforting hand on my knee.
“Every mother wants her child to live a long life free of sickness and pain,” said Mom. “Another dream of mine you can make come true.”
Tears stood in my eyes. It was all too much. “But what are we going to do? They’ll keep coming after us.”
Caleb sat back and looked at us both very sternly. “Dez must come with me to a school for otherkin up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It’s small and very secret, and we’ll be safe there.”
“A school?” I turned to Mom.
“Your parents will be safer with you gone,” said Caleb.
“No,” said my mother. “I can’t let her go, not now. Not when she needs me most.”
My chest felt tight. It had all been my fault. If I hadn’t been here, Mom and Richard would never have had to go through this. If I’d stayed in that orphanage in Russia, everyone would be a lot safer.
“You can’t go with us to the school, Mrs. Grey,” Caleb said. “If they sense anyone who isn’t otherkin approaching, they’ll vanish. You and your husband will need to go somewhere for a while. Otherwise the Tribunal will try to kidnap you again so they’ll have a hold over Dez.”

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