Otherkin by Nina Berry Page A

stood up. “Time to get going.”
    It didn’t take long to pack with Mom helping and Caleb chiming in. Before I knew it, Caleb was carrying my suitcase out to the BMW while Mom brought my back brace and a credit card. I had already stuffed my own stash of a hundred and twenty dollars in my backpack.
    “Cash advance just down the street at that ATM,” she said, as I put the credit card away. “That way if they’re tracking my finances, they won’t know where you’re going from there.”
    I nodded, then watched as she put the brace in the BMW’s trunk and slammed it shut. “You think I might need that?”
    She shook her head. “I don’t know why, but I feel like you should have it with you.” She tried to smile. “Maybe it’s the Goddess whispering in my ear. Maybe it’s your crazy mother’s whim.”
    “That’s good enough for me,” I said. “And you’ve got the antidote for Richard.”
    Her mouth widened into a genuinely rueful smile. “How the hell I’m going to explain all this to him, I have no idea. But we’ll be checking into a hotel as soon as he wakes up. You’ve got my new e-mail address, now, right?”
    “Yes, Mom.” I couldn’t stand looking at her, stalling, longing to stay with her, to help her. Better to get it over with and leave now, before I broke down and never left at all.
    “I love you, Desdemona.” Her eyes were wet.
    I hugged her so tight she had to ask me to ease up. “Love you too, Mom,” I said, and strode off to where Caleb and Lazar’s BMW waited.
    Mom watched us drive off, not waving, just looking. I turned to look back at her just before we turned the corner. She was still standing there.

CHAPTER 11
    The night loomed black, thick, and full of weird portent as we drove. To distract me while I sniffed quietly and tried not to think how I was leaving everything I knew behind, Caleb told me where he’d been and the way he’d tracked down the hard drive holding the Tribunal’s camera feed.
    They’d lodged it in a fake utility box, and Caleb had disabled it while a crazy lady in the apartment next door yelled what sounded like Klingon at him out her window. He’d continued to lurk nearby until a white van and two Tribunal guys showed up. Then he’d snuck into the van and watched as they attended to two cameras trained on my house and three on my school. Problem was, Caleb couldn’t get out of the van before they hit the freeway north. He’d been stuck there till they stopped in Valencia for gas. From there he’d hitchhiked back. That’s why he’d been so late. I didn’t ask where he’d acquired his new, fancy-looking cell phone.
    As we got onto a smaller road and wound our way up the Sierra Nevada Mountains, he asked, “Can you dig out that map your mom gave you? Look for Coyote Peaks.”
    I pulled the Thomas Guide for California out of the side pocket and found our location. “We’ve got to tell the people at this school where the Tribunal’s compound is.”
    “Good idea,” he said. “They need to avoid it.”
    “Or fight them,” I said.
    He cast me a surprised look. “Fight them?”
    “Don’t you think the shifters should, you know—clean them out? I mean, that’s what the Tribunal’s doing to us, right? They kill us off or capture us for experiments as soon as they find us. We’d all be better off if they were driven away or . . .”
    “You really want to kill them all off?”
    I swallowed. There’d been enough killing for me tonight. “Or we could, like, just destroy the buildings, force them to relocate, shut them down somehow. We can’t let them stay there. Even if you and I manage to avoid them, they’ll just find some other shifter to capture and do Lord knows what to.”
    “I see what you mean, but I wouldn’t hold my breath expecting Morfael or the shifters to do much,” he said. “The different shifter tribes don’t like each other. They’ve never banded together to do anything except argue in Council. And the individual