by Wen Spencer
Wolf wasn't sure if Tommy was telling him the truth, but certainly it would explain how the oni kept control of the half-breeds. He could see ways around the oni enslavement—until he remembered that all the half-oni would have been born and raised in the oni control. A child could be kept ignorant, molded into believing it was helpless.
Tommy stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. The half-oni's ears twitched. Wolf caught an echo of harsh voices. He would have to accept it as real.
"There are oni ahead of us," Tommy whispered. "We can't go this way. I can only cloud their sight and they have noses like dogs."
Wolf nodded, and followed Tommy back to a tunnel they'd passed before. They went through a maze of turns and up a flight of stairs to go through another grate into a basement stacked high with cardboard boxes. The labels indicated that the boxes once held cans of food. Just as Wolf wondered whether they still contained their original contents, Tommy opened a door and the smell of cooking food flooded over them.
Beyond the door was a large kitchen filled with Asians. A low right-angled counter divided the kitchen off from the restaurant's dining room. The long leg into the dining room was a bakery display case filled with buns and breads.
"What are you doing here, Tommy?" one of the cooks, an old man, asked in Mandarin as he took a tray of buns from the oven. "Bringing him here?"
"The oni are in the steam tunnels," Tommy answered in the same tongue.
"Ugh!" the old man grunted. "You'll get us all killed."
Wolf looked at the crowded kitchen. "These are all mixed bloods?"
"No." Tommy wove through the cooks. "These are all humans. That was my great-uncle."
A herd of children galloped into the kitchen from a back room. Some could pass as human—might even be fully human—but mixed in were children with horns and tails. With cries of dismay, in ones and twos, the adults yanked the children out of Wolf's path, leaving only one child standing alone.
The little female looked up at him fearlessly and he knew her. Zi.
"Hi." She cocked her head, puzzled by his presence. She had a cookie in either hand. She held one up to him. "Do you want a cookie?" And when he hesitated, she added, "I didn't drop it or anything."
"Thank you." Wolf took the cookie with his left hand and bowed slightly to her. "That is very nice of you."
"Come on." Tommy caught him by the left wrist, and said in rough Low Elvish, "If oni find you here—they kill everyone."
"What is she doing here?" Wolf resisted being moved. He had demanded that the little female be kept away from people that would poison her against elves.
"No one else would take her. The humans are afraid of the oni and the oni don't give a shit. Look at me, I'm Lord Tomtom's son, and even I don't get a disguise to protect me."
Wolf scanned the kitchen, seeing this time that the children were in the arms of only small-framed, battered women. There were only two males, men made fragile by time. They used Mandarin in their fearful cries, and it was Chinese written on the signs posted around the room. The Skin Clan had used this kind of slavery—transporting women out of their homelands to places they couldn't speak the language and then tied them down with children.
He understood now Tommy's hate. It was the same hate that had fueled the genocide of the Skin Clan.
Tommy suddenly pushed him back against the wall. "Stay still! I don't have my father's talent—I can't mask a moving object from multiple watchers. They will kill everyone if they find you here!" He glanced to his uncle. "Mask the scent!"
The uncle opened the fridge, took out a container, and flung the contents on the grill. An eye-watering reek filled the air. "Onions! Pepper!"
While some of the women quickly herded the children upstairs, others took out knives and attacked onions and bright red peppers. Tommy's focus was on the door. Moments later, it opened, and oni warriors crowded into the restaurant. There were a dozen large, red-haired, horned males. They had war paint on their faces and carried machine guns and swords. They snarled in Oni, wrinkling up their noses against the assault of smell.
The leader was the tallest among them. He set four of the warriors to watch the street and barked orders to the others. Three warriors raided the bakery counter. The rest moved into the kitchen and back rooms. The leader picked out a female, shoved her face down onto one of the tables, tore away her skirt, and forced himself into her with brutal casualness. The woman pressed knuckles into her mouth, stifling whimpers. No one else appeared even to notice, but Tommy locked down hard on Wolf's good arm.
The bakery raiders stuffed their mouths and pockets and then flung the buns to other warriors.
Outside, a deep roar from Malice echoed up the street.
"He sounds hungry." The leader spoke Mandarin so that the humans could understand. "He's probably looking for something to eat."
The warriors bayed with laughter and gestured at the frightened women. "We can feed him one of these fat sluts. That one looks like it has a fat ass."
The leader finished with the woman he was raping and slapped her buttocks. "Yes, a nice fat ass."
Their hunger satisfied, the warriors pelted each other with bread. The leader barked an order. The warriors gathered again at the front of the restaurant. The last one out of the back room, though, was carrying a whimpering, squirming Zi.
"Look what they have." The warrior held the little female out by the back of her shirt.
The leader took her by her throat. He turned and shook the child at the human like rag doll. "What is this doing here?"
"The EIA—" Uncle stuttered. "They imprisoned her crazy mother."
The leader grunted. "If the elves find this here, they'll know that this place belongs to us."
"We'll move her." Uncle held out his arms but moved no closer to the warriors.
Without word or warning the oni leader broke Zi's neck.
Everyone had told Wolf about the oni savageness—but he hadn't comprehended it fully until too late. He gasped out in shock as the oni leader dropped the child's limp body onto the floor.
"Malice is coming. Throw this out onto the street for him to eat."
Wolf breathed in and anger burned through him like fire. Nothing mattered but to see these monsters dead. He jerked his arm free of Tommy, summoned a force strike and slammed it into the back of the oni leader. The front of the restaurant exploded out as the strike drove the oni male across the street. He made a bloody star on the far building. The warriors scrambled for cover, pulling out their machine guns.
"Hold still, you stupid elf fuck!" Tommy growled.
Wolf braced himself as he flicked through a fire burst. The oni bullets chewed through the other side of the restaurant. Apparently between Wolf's sudden attack and Tommy clouding their minds, the oni were disoriented as to where Wolf was really standing. The fire burst went off, igniting three of the oni into columns of flame.
Wolf slammed a force strike at the last oni. A second bloody star joined the first.
"What the fuck was that?" Tommy screamed. "She was dead! This does nothing but make you feel better! All those women and children are now dead because you had to be a hero!"
Someone as young as the half-oni couldn't understand that to be immortal was to have forever to regret. Wolf knew if he had let the oni walk away unpunished, he would not be able to live with himself. But Tommy was right. He had brought danger down on the rest—the human mothers and half-oni children.
"I'll see that they're safe until this is done."
"Yeah, that will make the kids safe! Until you kill them for no other reason than their mothers were raped by the wrong species."
"I give you my word—they will not be harmed."
Tommy caught himself from saying anything else, and stood, fists balled, panting.
"Windwolf?" Oilcan murmured in Wolf's ear. "If you're the one that just took out the Changs' restaurant, Malice is coming your way."
Wolf glanced out into the street where the oni still burned like m
assive candles. "Malice is coming. Get the others. We need to move to someplace safe."
Tommy's cat ears flicked. "Oh fuck. He is coming." Tommy went off to gather the women and children.
Wolf gazed again the wreckage he was leaving behind. Tinker was rubbing off on him.
22: END OF THE RAINBOW
Briggs drove while the rest of them sat in the back. Tinker had grabbed a flex screen from the ship and now spread it out on the floor. Downloading the dreadnaught's layout and defenses, they planned the assault.
"The dreadnaught's biggest weakness is that it wasn't built with an aerial attack in mind. It's like a turtle, with lots of service hatches down in through its shell. Also it tends to be blind in the butt. I was going to fix that with a turret on top."
"Prince True Flame said that it was useless for fighting the dragon because it couldn't defend against from attacks from above," Pony said.
"That's true," Tinker said. "So we're going to have to kill Malice before he has a chance to close."
"Oh, fun," Esme muttered.
"But the airship is vulnerable to the tengu," Tinker said. "I think if we fly up behind it, we can approach it unseen—but it leaves a very choppy wake."
"We can handle it, domi." Jin waved off the worry.
Domi. That drove her commitment to them home and left her a little breathless. I'm responsible for them—and I'm taking them straight into danger. But what recourse did she have? Just as the elves were not about to let the oni live, the oni couldn't leave any of the elves alive either.
"We need three things." Tinker forced herself to focus on the plan and not how badly it might end. "We need to keep the ship in the air, pick where it goes, and fire the cannons. So, that means we need to secure the fore and aft engine compartments, the cannon turrets, and the bridge."
Pony gazed at the plan for a moment, and then pointed to the access hatch nearest to the rear, which opened to the aft engine compartment. "We'll enter here. Once we've secured it, we'll break into teams. These tengu are good with machines—yes?" Getting a nod from Tinker, Pony continued. "There are three doors to this area including the hatch, so Little Egret and four tengu will stay."
Jin assigned Xiao Chen and three of the other tengu to the aft team.
"The rest of us will then move to the fore engine compartment and take it." Pony traced a route across the top of the airship to the forwardmost service hatch. "Four doors open to this area, but we'll control what's beyond these two doors. Rainlily and four of the tengu will hold this position. We split here. Domi and Cloudwalker will take the bridge with Esme, Jin, and Durrack—which should be lightly manned and will have only one door not controlled by us. Stormsong and Briggs will come with me. We'll take the main cannon turret—which will be heavily manned."
Tinker explained how she planned to kill Malice. "Now when this spell goes off, you're going to lose your shields and it might take a minute or two before a normal level of magic is restored," she warned her Hand. "Your beads should be protected from the spell effects, so if you save the power in them, you can recast your shields immediately."
The sekasha nodded, indicating that they understood.
Durrack pressed his hand to his ear and listened to it intently. "Okay. Understand." He knocked on the partition to the driver's cabin. "Briggs? Where are we?"
"Nearly to McKees Rocks Bridge," Briggs answered.
"The dreadnaught is here." Durrack tapped the map just downriver of Neville's Island, and then ran a finger up the Ohio River toward Pittsburgh. "They're following the river."
"If we're carrying others, we won't be able to climb fast," Jin said. "We should start high, like at the edge of a cliff or on top of a building."
"They'll come over the bridge," Pony pointed to the bridge. "We can wait on the supports. The bridge will give us cover, and then the tengu can take us aloft."
"That will work," Jin said.
Nearly a mile and a half long, the McKees Rocks Bridge stretched across the wide, flat Ohio River valley in a complex string of structures—more a chain of bridges than one single bridge. The part that actually sat above the river was a seven hundred feet long trussed-arch bridge. On each side of the elegant steel curve were two massive stone pylons. They hid the truck in the shadows of the western pylon.
The cloudy night was on their side—it cloaked them in darkness.
"I hear it." Jin put out a hand to Tinker. "I'll take you up."
The other eight tengu paired off with the humans and elves.
It was a short spring up to the arching steel. They crouched down, tucking themselves in the crossbeams.
The roar of the dreadnaught grew louder.
"There! See it?" Jin whispered.
Twin searchlights appeared in the distance, slashing downwards; the cockpit was a pale gleam between them. The dreadnaught moved up the broad valley, keeping between the hills that flanked the Ohio River. The searchlights played back and forth in a narrow arc, directly in front of the airship.
Durrack glanced upriver toward the darkened city and then back to the oncoming dreadnaught. "They're probably following the river because it's the most recognizable landmark they can see with the power out."
"Lucky for us," Jin said. "They're going slow so they don't hit anything. That will make it easier for us to get to it."
In the dark, the true size of the dreadnaught was lost. It was a wedge of darkness behind the searchlights' brilliance. They crouched in the bridge's shadows as the gleaming spots moved across the shimmer of the water, encountered the bridge, and played up and over the network of steel struts. Tinker held still, heart hammering, trying not to think about the machine gun cannons. Her luck on this kind of thing had been so bad lately.
The cockpit slid overhead, and the belly of the dreadnaught followed, the air throbbing. Ushi with Pony leapt upward, the rustle of his black wings spreading lost under the rumble of the dreadnaught's engines. As he took his first downstroke, Xiao Chen with Stormsong vaulted after him. Niu and Zan rose together. Tinker lost sight of them in the dreadnaught's eclipse.
Jin took hold of Tinker and murmured, "Hang on." And then they were airborne.
Amazingly, in some strange heart-stopping manner, winging upward was fun. In her flights with Riki, she had been so concerned about their end destination that she never noticed the thrill of flying. Did it say something about her that as long as she knew where they were going, she could enjoy the ride?
Jin landed them between Ushi and Xiao Chen.
"I think I envy you," Stormsong murmured to Xiao Chen.
Tinker smothered a laugh, and whispered. "Yeah, once you get used to it, it's fairly cool."
"It's wood!" Jin whispered, running his hand over the hull's surface.
"Of course," Tinker whispered. "These are elves."
Her Hand activated their shields. Pony asked a question with blade talk. Getting a nod from the others, he opened the hatch and the sekasha dropped down into the dim engine room.
She had never seen the elves really fighting before. Not a full Hand against hordes, unconcerned for her protection because she was safe behind her own shield. She hadn't expected it to be so beautiful. Their swordplay became a fluid dance, the oni seeming like paper cutouts instead of real opponents. The dreadnaught, though, was buzzing like a kicked beehive, and they had spread themselves thin.
On the bridge, Tinker used her shield to back the oni warriors away from the door. Cloudwalker slipped around her on the right and Durrack went left.
"Don't shoot any of the instruments!" Tinker had her pistol out, but was afraid to fire. She rarely hit what she aimed at and all the controls were vital to their success.
"I—don't—miss." Durrack picked his shots with deliberation. "Someone get the pilot before he crashes us!"
Two warriors blocked Tinker.
"Esme, the pilot." Jin spun on one heel and kicked one of the warriors out of Tinker's path. Tinker edged sideways, covering Esme as her mother scrambled into the low co
ckpit.
The ship banked hard to the left, rushing toward the hills that lined the valley, Esme struggled with the oni pilot.
"Tinker!" Esme cried. "We need to lift! Pull up on the collective."
Dropping her shield, Tinker scrambled into the cockpit and grabbed hold of the collective control stick and pulled up. The engines roared louder and they started to climb.
"Tinker!" Jin shouted warning, and she ducked instinctively.
Bullets sprayed the windshield just over her head. A dozen bullet holes reduced the Plexiglas to a haze of cracked glass.
The oni pilot kicked Tinker backward. She hit the cracked windshield; it held for a moment then gave way. She screamed, flailing, and caught hold of the pilot's leg as she fell. Her weight jerked him half out the cockpit. He grabbed the edge of the cockpit before he fell the whole way out. They dangled far above the last mile of I-279 before it ended at the Rim, the oni pilot holding onto the airship and Tinker onto his leg.
