Project Elfhome

by Wen Spencer

  * * *

  Baiting a trap should have been simple. Kate had done it a thousand times before, but she hadn’t counted on the size of the wyvern compounding the process. Stormsong maintained that nothing smaller than one of the kuesi would do as bait. There was getting the beast up the steep mountainside, and then trying to control it once it smelled the blood. Luckily she thought to bring her tranq pistol, although the dosage, set for a tiger, was only enough to make the massive beast groggy instead of putting it down completely.

  “Well, you have some uses,” Stormsong said, looking toward the setting sun. “It will not be long. It will come soon.”

  As a byproduct of working too long in the third world, Kate carried a computer attachment to detect incoming planes as standard equipment. She set it up, unsure if it would work on the wyvern. She liked to cover all bases.

  The sun set and the sky slowed deepened into violet and then color leached out to total black. Kate had tucked herself in among the rocks, and as the sky went to dark, tugged on night goggles. She could pick out Stormsong close by, silent, an arrow nocked but not drawn.

  From her computer stick tucked in among the rocks, she heard quiet pinging.

  “It’s coming,” she called to Stormsong.

  She’d made the mistake of setting it up so she couldn’t see the screen, worried only about keeping her hands free. Now, with the gentle chime indicating a closing wyvern, she didn’t want to move out of her niche to check the screen for its direction.

  Then she saw it, and wasn’t about to leave hard cover.

  She hadn’t accounted for how much space the massive creature would take up on the rock ledge. She’d tucked herself into a niche that seemed a safe distance from the kuesi. She scuttled backwards along the overhang as her vision filled up with monster. Stormsong’s drawing had been anatomically correct—a wedge head on a snake neck, wings of membrane like a bat’s, a lizard leg redone on a falcon template—but lacked scale.

  My God, that can’t possibly fly. But it was. Or to be more precise, plummeting—rocketing down out of the night sky toward the kuesi. She planned a shot to the wyvern’s vulnerable eyes; she’d expected them to be wide and round as an owl’s, specialized for night hunting, done on a more massive scale. In the blur coming toward her, she couldn’t see anything remotely looking like an eye.

  The wyvern came out of its dive, wings unfurling with an audible crack, legs swinging forward, hooked talons longer than her arm flaring into overextension. Even drugged, the kuesi saw death and bleated. The cry cut short with the impact of bodies that she felt through the bottom of her feet. The kuesi, that had stood another head taller than her, was suddenly rabbit-small under the wyvern.

  “Oh God, oh God,” she whispered. Was Stormsong insane? Kill that? With what?

  Then like an Earth-born falcon, the wyvern cocked its head back and forth, examining its kill with its eyes. Protected by a ridge of bone, the solid pupil was a beady black target.

  Kate ducked out of her niche, raised her rifle up to her shoulder, and aimed down on the eye. Breathe. Hold it. And she squeezed the trigger.

  Even as the elephant rifle kicked, the wyvern jerked its head around, spotting her movement. The bullet ricocheted off the bone ridge, making the wyvern jerk its head aside.

  Reflex kicked in, and with icy calm, Kate worked the bolt—ejecting the spent round, loading another bullet, locking the action—and took aim. Kill it, before it kills you.

  But she forgot about the massive tail until seconds before it hit her.

  She saw it whipping toward her, knew she couldn’t dodge it, and held position to get off her shot. Kill it, before…

  And then darkness exploded around her, the actual contact lost in a moment of unconsciousness, and then she was aware of being airborne. Falling. Somewhere close by, she could hear her computer, tucked into the cliff face, pinging again.

  Not off the cliff, oh God, not off the cliff. And so the contact with solid land only a moment later actually came as a relief. She managed to tumble across the ground, lessening the impact, torn earth filling her senses.

  She scrambled to her knees, trying to gain her feet, but her right leg was refusing to move. A bus-sized mouth full of teeth was coming at her—rows upon rows of sharp shark-like teeth.

  She was going to die. “God damn it.”

  With a deep guttural howl, a streak of light flashed through the air, lightning-white in intensity. The light struck the wyvern in the side of the neck, sliced through the armored skin and punched through the other side of the huge neck.

  What the hell? Kate didn’t waste time trying to figure it out. If she lived, she’d investigate closer. If the wyvern was dead, the news hadn’t reached its brain yet. It came on.

  She rolled to the side, whimpering in pain from her right leg. There was her rifle. The wyvern hadn’t turned, and its forward motion began to look like floundering. She could still hear the pinging from her computer, though. The second one was coming.

  The tumble hadn’t damaged her rifle. It had been fired at some point since she last remembered holding it. She worked the bolt, reloading, and looked up.

  Stormsong stood on an outcropping of rock, arrow nocked and bow drawn, sighting down on the wyvern on the ground. What was the little idiot doing? The elf released the string, and the arrow flashed toward the wyvern. Immediately the arrow howled, and light flared around it, growing in size and intensity as it leaped the span. The second arrow struck the wyvern in the back of the skull, blasting the news of its death straight into the brain this time. The wyvern collapsed into an ungainly tangle of giant limbs.

  Magic arrows. The damn bitch had magic arrows.

  And the damn bitch was going to get nailed from behind. The second wyvern was in a silent dive—aimed at the elf outlined against the stars. The wyvern on the ground probably was the male, because the one in the air was much bigger.

  “Stormsong! Move!” Kate shouted, bringing her rifle to her shoulder.

  The female wyvern was still in its power dive, wings folded close to its body, mouth closed, its tiny eyes invisible—a great expanse of bulletproof armor. Kate held her breath, waiting for an opening.

  And the chance came, as it swung its legs forward, wings spreading to brake its dive. The vulnerable joints of the wings opened up. She squeezed the trigger, and the rifle kicked hard on her shoulder. The bullet struck the joint, jerking the wyvern sidewise, and then its wing folded back at an impossible angle. The wyvern screamed and came tumbling out of the air. It struck the side of the cliff below them in an earth-shaking impact.

  Curling in pain on the ground, Kate reloaded the rifle’s magazine. Oh, God, please, let there only be two.

  Silence filled the night. Stormsong stood on her rocky lookout, staring down at the ruined mass of the female. Finally she crossed the ledge to Kate.

  “I think my leg is broken.” Kate didn’t want to whimper, not in front of her.

  Stormsong dropped down to her knees and then prostrated herself fully on the ground. “Forgiveness.”

  “Huh?”

  “I have treated you poorly since your arrival, you who have come so far to help us. I believed myself to be superior of all humans and yet found that I was only merely equal. I let it irritate me, and in spite, treated you rudely.”

  It was as if Stormsong held up a mirror to her soul. Kate suddenly saw her own arrogance and irritation reflected in the elf. This is what was driving me nuts, Kate realized, I saw how I acted with all other natives. I didn’t like what it showed of myself.

  “I wasn’t at my best either,” Kate muttered, dismayed by the revelation.

  “We elves say ‘see the beast in yourself and kill it.’ I have slain my beast.”

  Kill the beast, before it kills you.

  “Ah,” Kate said, and meant every word, “how very wise of you.”

  DRABBLE

  Storm Winds

  I had been in Pittsburgh, as the humans say, for a coon’s age, when
I first saw her. We elves say “nae hae” but what we’re both saying is “we’re too shit lazy to figure it out.” I think it was a month before everything went to hell and back, so it means that she would have been seventeen.

  I had been to the hoverbike races before, had seen her race before, and even knew her name—how couldn’t I as the crowd chanted it when she won? But usually she was just a roar of engine, a blur of motion, and a small figure muscling a flying piece of steel through impossible maneuvers.

  This time I was down by the pits. I was debating on moving. This close and the bikes flashed by in a heartbeat, and vanished around the bend. And yet, part of my talent was whispering to me, “stay here, stay here, this is important.” So I lingered, wondering what could possibly be important in this loud, pulsing celebration of human recklessness?

  And then my talent cried “now” and two bikes came flying around the corner. She was down low, hugging the curve, cutting off the leader. She would have made it, but he caught sight of her and dropped down, nearly on top of her. And my heart must have known, even then, even before the rest of me, because it leaped up to my throat. And my hand, guided by my heart, went to my sword. If she had died at that moment, so would have the man that killed her—and what a fucking mess that would have been to explain.

  But she sensed him, and slammed into a desperate sideways slide to avoid him. His drive missed her body, but caught her front chain, and the two bikes became a tornado of machines and bodies. The crowd screamed and surged backwards, trying to escape the oncoming wreckage, and I lost sight of her for a moment. Then I spotted her, climbing to her feet on the other side of the track.

  “Don’t go out onto the track!” She caught a member of another team’s pit crew that was about to dart out to check on the other driver. “Get a caution flag up! Call for a caution!”

  The pack of bikes came around the corner at that moment and roared through, drowning out whatever commands she was shouting, but I could see her both keeping check on those who would wander out into the race, and organizing clearing the wreckage when the all clear came.

  I watched her, wondering why I had my hand on my sword, why I was ready to leap to her defense. My talent is so sporadic that I didn’t even realize yet that she was female. I thought she was a boy and wondered at my fickle heart. Wolf Who Rules was my only love—but what was this odd niggling feeling I had that he’d just lost his place?

  The other driver surfaced, helmet already off, shouting out obscenities in English. She turned and shouted back in language just as human, just as foul. He made a rude gesture, and she launched herself toward him—only to be plucked out of the air by a very tall man.

  That moved me out onto the track. No one could touch her like that—certainly not that man.

  “Let me at the bastard, Nathan!” She didn’t even seem to be aware that she was being restrained except that it was keeping from her inflicting pain on the other driver. With a curse, she tore off her helmet and flung it at the other driver.

  And knowledge pierced through me—there and gone—like an arrow passing through my body. She was to be the one I love above all the rest—the one I would die for.

  I stumbled to a halt, stunned and confused. Her brown hair was hacked short, making it easy to see in a glance that she was human. She was small, Stone Clan dark, and howling curse words in English. Her nose was bloody. She was caked with mud. And she was human—which meant she would be dead of old age in a blink of eye.

  How could I ever look to her? For all of being a mutt, I was still sekasha, by blood and by sword, and only a domana-caste elf could hold one like me.

  My erratic talent—having shot certainty through me—fell quiet.

  “Holy one,” someone called me back to myself. A human was bowing before me. He spoke fluent high tongue, a rarity, and he wore a pit crew shirt from the Team Tinker. Over his heart, the word Oilcan was stitched in as his name. “I am sorry, holy one, but you must leave the course. The race is about to begin again.”

  I blinked at the man, realizing that he looked like her male twin.

  “Who is he?”

  He glanced over his shoulder to verify I meant her. “The small angry one? She is my cousin, Tinker.”

  So I learned the name but I did not learn the means that our fate was to be connected for months to come.

  BARE SNOW FALLING ON FAIRYWOOD

  Law had just hooked a three-foot waewaeli when her phone started to ring. She ignored it as she fought the twenty-pound fish. “Not now, not now, go to voice mail!” Only a half-dozen people had her phone number and at the moment, she didn’t want to talk to any of them. It stopped ringing for a minute, only to start again. And again. And again.

  “Who the frigging hell?” She’d lost too many phones trying to cradle them on her shoulder and reel in a fish. She would need at least one hand free to answer the phone. Finally she locked the reel and jerked her phone out of her breast pocket.

  “What?” she cried as her rod bent as the big fish fought the line.

  “Who is this?” a female voice asked.

  “Law!” she shouted. “Law Munroe.” At least that was the name she was using most recently. The joy of having a mother who had been married ten times meant that even close family friends weren’t sure what your real, real name was. “Who is this?”

  “Oh, good. You’ll be a perfect match. Go to Fairywood and find snow.”

  “What?” Law cried. “It’s in the middle of freaking June! Midsummer’s eve is in less than a week! There’s no snow!”

  “Fairywood. F. A. I. R. Y. Wood. It’s next to Windgap. Just out of the Rocks—if there was still a bridge. Lots of urban prairie. You need to find snow. Collect snow up and get someplace safe. All hell is going to break loose regardless but let’s not give anyone a nice little goat, shall we?”

  The connection went dead and her line snapped.

  “Who? What? Hello?” She glared at her phone. Not only had she lost the fish but she lost her streamer fly, too. A Clouser deep minnow. She handmade her flies, so she wasn’t out money, just time. She needed one more fish before her ice chests were full and she could visit her customers. If she didn’t land another big fish, she’d have to short someone because she could only put off deliveries for so long.

  “I thought there was some kind of rule against crazy people on Elfhome!” Grumble as she might, her experiences with her family confirmed it was only diagnosed crazy people who had been deported back to Earth. All the unknown crazies were free to terrorize their relatives and random people. At least with strangers, she could ignore the phone call. “Not my circus. Not my monkeys.”

  She was standing knee-deep in Chartiers Creek in Carnegie. It was about six miles from where the stream met the Ohio River. She took another fly from her hat and tied it to her line. She’d dropped coolers alongside Campbells Run and Chartiers Creek every few hundred feet. Parking at the end of Glass Street before dawn, she’d walked back to Campbells Run. In the last hour, she’d worked her way down to where the smaller stream joined the larger one, slowly making her way back to her truck. She had her biggest coolers full of trout and crayfish from traps on other streams, but she enjoyed angling for the waewaeli. Summer was her favorite time to be a professional forager since she could devote much of her time to the sport of fishing. The dry hot months meant that the Chartiers was shallow enough to wade. She was too far upstream to worry about river sharks and jumpfish; they needed at least four feet of water to navigate a channel. The undergrowth lining the creek screened the ruins of the abandoned neighborhood. The play of water and singing birds masked out any distant noise of civilization. It was her and the fish, one on one, just the way she liked it.

  Until her phone rang again. Same mystery number.

  She sighed and answered, “What?”

  “I forgot to tell you: look for the white door.”

  “Not a red door and paint it black?”

  “Oh God no, black would make everything worse. The
re won’t be time to paint it. Just take it with you when you leave.”

  She knew it was useless to argue about the lack of snow in June. Crazy people didn’t listen to logic. Her parents had at least taught her that. “Okay, I’ll take the door with me when I find snow.”

  “Good.” And the mystery Crazy Lady hung up again.

  Law spotted a big shadow in the next deep pool. She played out line until she could feel the rod load, then cast.

  The morning light was still fragile with dawn, the sun not fully climbed above the hills. It was amazing that anyone was awake enough to be calling her. The woman didn’t even seem to know whom she had reached. Had she just randomly punched numbers until someone actually picked up the phone?

  She’d just landed the big waewaeli when the phone rang again. Same Crazy Lady. Law sighed and answered. “Yes?”

  “You only have a few hours to save her. You have to go today.”

  “Her? Her who?”

  “Snow! They’re going to kill her if you don’t get her to safety.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ! Why didn’t you tell me that Snow was a person? That changes everything!”

  “What did you think? It’s June!”

  Lawry considered just dropping her phone into the water. No. She knew from experience that didn’t really help in the long run. “Who is going to kill her?”

  “Do you blame the maker of the gun or the person that pulls the trigger?”

  “The person who pulls the trigger.”

  “Then you would be wrong.” And the woman hung up again.

  Law waded downstream, replaying all the conversations over in her head. She’d leapt to the assumption that Snow was the name of a person but thinking back, the crazy lady hadn’t actually confirmed that. It could be a white dog or cat. And for “where” all she knew was Fairywood—wherever that was—and look for a white door. She had all the fish she needed for her customers and a little time before she needed to deliver them. She could see if she could find Snow.