The moment he saw her, he calmed down. His eyes were trained on her and he was as ignorant of our presence as Kelsey. She seemed as transfixed by the white tiger as he was of her. Slowly, she reached out her hand and touched his forehead. I gave Ana a meaningful glance but she just shook her head and mouthed, “Not yet.”
I heard Kelsey gasp as he licked her fingers. She thanked him for not eating her and sat down to read him a poem. I rolled my eyes. Some things never changed. If any two people were meant for each other, it was the two of them. The fact that I even had that thought startled me. Do I really feel that way? Was Kelsey meant to be with him even from the beginning?
Despite my general dislike for poetry, I found myself caught up in the poem about cats. I liked that one. It served to fix the tiny rift in her character I’d allowed to rankle me over the past hour. Kelsey was young. She didn’t yet know who we were or what we’d been through. I couldn’t blame her for being fascinated by a tiger, even one who was in captivity.
As I listened to her read and talk with Ren, I realized two things. The first was that she and Ren were always destined to be together. The second was that it was time to let her go. To let Kelsey be free to live the life she had chosen for herself.
The moment she whispered, “I wish you were free,” I could almost feel the magic thrumming through the barn. It circulated through me as much as it did through her and Ren. The power of the goddess and her tiger rose, golden light lifting up and away from both me and Ana, and after a brief nudge from Ana, it settled on the two people standing by the cage. Ren and Kelsey responded to it. Whether they could see us or just our power, I wasn’t sure, but they could definitely see something.
The truth stones that hung on our necks gleamed, and we saw the white light of Ren’s and Kelsey’s auras become golden and bright as the sun. Kelsey fell back against a hay bale as she gasped and lifted her fingers to her mouth and Ren, snarling, scrambled to the back of his cage. Approaching my brother, I let myself become visible and used the Damon Amulet to give him back the ability to transform to man, albeit for only twenty-four short minutes a day.
When we left them, they had no memory of us or of what had happened. As far as they knew, the only magic was in a girl touching a tiger. We headed back to the forest.
“What’s next?” I asked.
“The Cave of Kanheri,” she mumbled after perusing Kadam’s list. “We have to create it.”
“Create it?” I echoed incredulously. “I’m not sure what it’s supposed to look like.”
“Since I am entirely unfamiliar with it, I will have to rely on your expertise.”
I rubbed a hand over the back of my neck, thinking, and then snapped my fingers. “I have an idea. We’ll have to be sneaky though.”
She willingly stepped into my arms so I could channel the power of the amulet, and I took her back to my home in India. Moonlight filtered through the wide windows as we snuck down to Kadam’s office. He snored softly in his room nearby. Using my tiger night vision, I perused his files and finally found what I was looking for—digital images of the Cave of Kanheri. Kelsey had taken them when she was there.
Turning, I bumped into a vase full of peacock feathers and knocked it over. Anamika shushed me, and I heard the thump of Kadam getting out of bed and the tick of tiger claws on the tiles in the kitchen. Clutching the files to my chest, I pulled Ana close and we disappeared, leaving behind the fallen vase.
Back at our home, we carefully perused the images.
“The monolith looks easy enough to fashion,” Ana said.
“There were traps,” I explained. “Thankfully, Kadam kept copious notes.”
“These sound dangerous,” Ana said.
“They were,” I mumbled, distracted by what I was reading. “Kelsey almost died.” I pointed to a note made by Kadam. “The cave is ancient,” I said. “We’ll have to figure out the approximate year. Also, there were carvings on the walls.”
“If she almost died, we will have to stay and guide them,” Ana said. “We cannot risk letting them go through it alone.”
I glanced up. “Yeah. Okay. We can do that.”
“But what if we aren’t meant to?”
Shrugging, I said, “Does it matter? Kadam said we were in charge of this. He was purposely vague.”
“I suppose,” she said. After a moment, she thrust a paper at me. “What do we do about this?” she asked.
My breath stopped as she held out a very clear photo of the Rajaram royal family seal. I took the photo and studied it. It was even more obvious to me now that the thing I’d abandoned carving would one day become the family heirloom in the picture.
“Yes, that might be a problem.”
“You don’t have it?”
“Not exactly. I haven’t…uh…finished it yet.”
“Finished it? What do you mean?”
I gave her the abbreviated version of the truth stone carvings I’d done. She knew they came from the egg, but I hadn’t yet found a way to share the origins of my family seal with her.
She said, “I see no reason why this should stop us. You’ll have plenty of years to finish the stone and you know what it’s supposed to look like. Surely, you can fashion a secret entrance to the cave based on its shape.”
“I suppose I could,” I said.
“Then let’s get going.”
With the power of the Damon Amulet, it took a surprisingly short time to fashion the cave. We went back to the time when Kadam estimated it had been discovered and created the entire underground structure using the earth piece of the amulet. We had photos and rubbings of the monolith, and Ana took great pride in creating that while I set up the various booby traps.
We opted not to do much to the surface leading down into the cave. Kadam had said that Buddhist monks would settle there sometime in the third century A.D. We did, however, create a mark that fit the seal and fashioned it to open the doorway into the cave when pressed and twisted. To disguise it, Ana used her power to recreate all the glyphs from the picture Kelsey had taken. Neither of us could read it, and we weren’t even sure it was an actual language, but there it would remain as the centuries passed.
We opted to create the bugs when Kelsey and Ren entered, otherwise, we were liable to have either a cave full of bugs or a bunch of petrified, extinct insects. When we fashioned the door where the monolith would be, I told Ana about the handprint that allowed Kelsey access and the henna drawing. Ana paced for a time, puzzling out how to make it work.
“How did he create a magical henna print?” Ana asked.
“I’m not sure. Maybe the power to open the door comes from the lightning power of the fire amulet,” I said, then thought differently. “No. That’s not possible. Kells didn’t get that piece of the amulet until later.”
“Can we not simply do the same thing we did with our own home?” she asked. “Create a lock that will open when she touches it?”
“But that only answers to the two of us.”
Musing, Ana said, “We saw how the power of the goddess and her tiger enveloped the two of them at the circus. Perhaps the door will respond to that.”
“I suppose we can try it. If it doesn’t work, we’ll do something else to let her in.”
Ana touched her hand to the stone wall near the door and I pressed mine on top of hers. A silvery light bloomed beneath her palm. When we lifted our hands away, a glowing print remained.
When we were confident that we’d recreated the cave in the right way, we sped through time until we arrived at the exact moment Kelsey and Ren entered the cave. The Rajaram seal hung around Kelsey’s neck, so even though it didn’t technically exist for me yet, I knew I would one day finish this immensely important object.