by Wen Spencer
"Jin!" Esme shouted, struggling to keep the airship aloft and reach for the oni pilot at the same time. "I can't reach her!"
Jin shouted; his words resonated against Tinker's senses with magic.
The oni pilot clawed at the edge of cockpit, trying to pull himself up. He grasped the windshield wiper and started to pull himself up.
The wiper snapped and he fell—and Tinker with him.
Tinker screamed and Esme, staring down at her, cried out in dismay.
Then someone caught Tinker's wrist, and she was jerked hard in both directions.
"Let go of him!" Keiko cried, flapping madly. "I can't catch you both; we'll all fall."
"No! No! No!" the pilot wailed, dangling upside down by Tinker's grip on his leg. But she wasn't strong enough to hold his weight by one hand. He slipped out of her hold and plunged downward again. The clouds had slid away and moonlight gleamed silver on the pavement below. The pilot dwindled to doll size but still hit the road with a loud carrying thud, a sudden burst of wet on the grey pavement.
"Shit, shit, shit!" Keiko cried as they continued to slowly fall. "You're still too heavy."
Xiao Chen swooped down and tried to intercept them.
Keiko hissed in anger, bringing up her razor-sheathed feet. "She's charmed by the Chosen's blood. She's not to be hurt!"
"You heard her," Riki glided in. "She's charmed by my line!"
"It's only Xiao—" Tinker yelped as Keiko suddenly passed her to Riki in a mid-air fling.
"I got you," Riki said it as if this was supposed to be comforting. "Keiko!"
The tengu female was heading for the airship. "I was called! He's here! He called!"
"Keiko!" Riki shouted, chasing after the teenager. "Wait! Damn it, Tinker, who is on that dreadnaught?"
"Your uncle Jin."
"That's not possi—" Riki gasped as they swept back in through the shattered windshield and he saw Jin. "Uncle Jin?"
Jin reached out and pulled Tinker out of Riki's hold. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine." Tinker fought the need to cling to Riki, or Jin. I'm safe inside. I'm safe inside.
"What the hell is going on? Where did you come from?" Riki gazed in stunned amazement at the tengu, elves, and humans.
"We got her. She's safe." Durrack had found the speaker tubes to the gun turret and engine rooms. Cloudwalker and Keiko were holding the door that boomed with the oni's attempts to break it down. "Tinker, your cousin says that Malice has Windwolf pinned down in Oakland. If you don't want to be a widow, we better get going."
It took Tinker a second to realize that Durrack had received the last part via his earbud radio and not the speakertube.
"What?" Riki cried. "You're taking on Malice? Are you nuts?"
"I've got a plan." Tinker wondered if that sounded remotely reassuring. She couldn't stop trembling. Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. "Do we have the guns?" she asked.
"The Storms are holding the guns." Durrack meant Storm Horse and Stormsong.
Tinker hugged herself, panting, trying to remember said plan. She was missing something important. "Oilcan? Wait? Where's Impatience? I don't want to take him out with this spell—he'll revert to a wild animal and kill anyone near him."
"He's in the cathedral with your cousin," Durrack said.
"Okay, I really don't want Impatience in the spell range then." Tinker thought a moment. "Tell Oilcan to put distance between him and Impatience—just to be on the safe side. Esme, let's do a strafing run on Malice."
"And NASA thought it covered all possible flight simulations." Esme banked the ship hard back toward the city.
Clouds continued to clear, and the city resolved out of the darkness. Their shadow ran on ahead of them. Esme climbed out of the river valley, and crested over the Hill District to the flat plain of Oakland.
"Where is Malice?" Tinker asked Durrack.
"See that dark cloud?" Durrack pointed at a billow of darkness that looked like smoke. "That's him."
"Oh, good, he's at least a half mile from the cathedral." Tinker started to unload her bag, setting up for the spell. "Let's get his attention. Esme, get ready to run. Pony, can you hear me?"
"Yes, domi."
"Shoot Malice with one of the cannons. He's going to come fast, so get ready with the other cannon. Fire the second cannon when my spell takes your shield down."
"Yes, domi," Pony said.
Esme had edged sideways so that they hung over Fifth Avenue where it spilled down the hill toward the flood plain of Uptown. The cannon thundered, deafening at close range. The shell whistled away. It hit the edge of the miasma and the black deepened. Something stirred in the darkness. Massive eyes gleamed at the heart of the cloud and then Malice uncoiled and lifted from the ground.
"Here he comes!" Tinker cried.
Esme scuttled the airship backward, roaring out over Uptown, keeping the cannons pointed toward the onrushing dragon. "Come on, come on."
Suddenly Malice dove into the ground.
"Where the fuck did he go?" Esme cried.
"He's phased!" Durrack shouted. "He can move through solid objects!"
"Oh, you've got to be shitting me!" Esme flung the airship forward and they raced up Fifth Avenue, into the heart of Oakland.
"Where are you going?" Tinker cried.
"You said run." Esme put all power into forward motion, tilting the airship to fit down the narrow space of Fifth Avenue. They lost something—hopefully not vital—as they took out one of the red lights over the street.
"Not this way!" Tinker cried, pointing at the towering cathedral that stood over Oakland, where Oilcan was with Impatience.
"It had to be this way!" Esme snapped.
Tinker looked behind them. Malice rose out of the ground where they would have been if they had continued toward Uptown. "Okay, this is good."
"He'll come after us," Esme said. "Trust me. When you run, it's like you put out a sign that says 'free lunch.' It's an easy way to make even the smartest ones get stupid."
Perhaps she was right; Malice was giving chase, coiling through the air like a snake in water. Esme banked around the curve of the Hill, nearly clipping the tops of houses.
"It's like trying to drag race in a Volkswagen," Esme complained.
Tinker had been watching the cathedral dwindle behind them. She realized now that they were heading into Downtown, the most densely populated area in Pittsburgh.
"No, not this way either!" Tinker pointed away from the city. "I don't want to open fire in the middle of the city!"
"I don't either," Esme said as they skimmed across the Veterans Bridge and ducked into the forest of skyscrapers. "But we need time for me to get turned around and face him."
They wove through the tall buildings, the gleam of the cockpit reflecting in the glass walls as they streaked by.
"Okay, keep going west." Tinker pointed out west just in case Esme didn't know. "After you get out of the city, try to get Malice south of us, up against Mount Washington. It's a blank slate. We can open fire on him there."
Esme suddenly squeaked in surprise and banked hard to the right. A moment later Malice came through a skyscraper and fire jetted out of his mouth. The night went bright with the flame, the light reflecting off the canyon of glass around them.
"Oh shit!" Esme banked again, somehow dodging both the flame and the PPG tower. She clipped the side of the Fifth Avenue Place. "Oh shit—we lost our front right props." She fought the ship to keep it from careening out of control. "No one said anything about him breathing fire!"
"He's a dragon," Jin said. "That's what they do!"
"We've got a fire up here!" one of the tengu shouted from the front engine room.
"We're running out of city," Durrack warned.
"I know, I know, I know." Tinker was loath to open fire in the city, but if Malice took the airship down, they'd lose the guns and then they'd all die. Point Park was going to have to do. "Get ready, people!"
Esme wrenched the airship about as they roared o
ver the empty expanse of the park. Malice flew at them. Tinker watched him come, spell in hand, waiting for him to get clear of the city.
When he cleared the highway dividing the city from the park, she cast the spell.
The coldness flashed over her. The wings vanished from the tengu's backs. Cloudwalker's shield winked out. The miasma of Malice's shield vanished and he fell, twisting madly as he plunged out of the sky. The cannon roared. The shell caught him in the left eye, blasting his head backward.
"I'm losing it!" Esme shouted as the dreadnaught slid sideways toward the massive Fort Pitt Bridge. "We're going down!"
Tinker called for her shields and nothing happened. The ambient magic in the area hadn't recovered from the flux spell yet. "Oh shit."
And then they hit the bridge.
Wolf braced himself for the worst. He had trusted that Tinker would somehow kill the dragon, but he was afraid she had leapt one too many times into the void. As he hurried toward the downed dreadnaught, his fears only deepened. The airship had struck the first span of the twin-decked bridge and then crashed into the Monongahela River. The crumpled wreckage lay half in and half out of the water. Human emergency crews gathered on the shore and on the water, trucks and boats with bright flashing lights.
Wolf pushed through the tightest knot of people to find Little Egret lying unconscious on the pavement. A pair of soaked tengu were giving the young sekasha CPR. As he watched, Little Egret coughed and sputtered weakly back to life. Oilcan had told him that the astronaut tengu were helping Tinker kill the dragon. He assumed that these two were part of that crew.
"Where's Tinker?" Wolf asked the two tengu.
"We were in the aft engine room." The tengu female indicated the submerged section of the dreadnaught and then made a vague motion at the part smashed up against the bridge. "She was in the cockpit."
He left a healer from the hospice with Little Egret and moved on, working his way around the airship. One section was still burning, and the humans were frantically trying to douse the flames. Wolf caught snatches of their conversations that focused on the live ammo still on board the ship.
There was a body under a white sheet. He paused to draw aside the sheet. A male tengu, badly burned.
Little Horse, Discord, and Briggs were on the other side of the wreckage. They worked with the Pittsburgh fire fighters and more tengu, hacking at the splintered wood hull.
"Domi was on the bridge with Cloudwalker." Little Horse hacked at a section of the hull with his ejae. "Rainlily took in too much smoke, but she got out without being burned. Two of the tengu with her were not so lucky. You were hurt?"
Wolf held up his spell-covered hand, careful not to flex. "Just this but it's healing." Wolf glanced over at a row of dead bodies covered with sheets. "How many tengu did you take with you?"
"Those are oni." Discord was favoring the leg bitten by the dragon earlier in the week. "Most we killed taking the dreadnaught."
Blood on the pavement showed that there had been fighting after the crash too.
A cry went up and people were lifted free of the wreckage. A tengu male and female, both young, faces painted for war. They were battered but alive.
"Were they with you or against you?" Wolf asked.
"They caught domi when she was knocked from the dreadnaught," Little Horse said.
"Domi promised that all tengu would be under her protection," Discord added.
"All?" Wolf indicated that the war-painted tengu were not to be harmed. "How many does that include?"
Discord shrugged and then gave a wry smile. "I do not think domi bothered to find out."
More survivors were lifted out. Durrack, a woman, and another pair of tengu, these from the spaceship.
"I can see shielding!" Little Horse cried. "Cloudwalker has his shield up!"
"He and domi should be the only ones left," Discord said.
They cut carefully through the shattered wood and broken instruments to the young sekasha. Despite his shield, he'd been knocked unconscious. He still protected Tinker, however, in his loose hold. Wraith leaned into the hole they had cut and whispered to Tinker the word to deactivate Cloudwalker's shields, which needed to be spoken close to the sekasha's heart. It felt like eternity before the hurt and dazed Tinker understood what was wanted of her and the shimmering blue of the shields vanished.
The healers from the hospice cast spells to make sure they could be safely moved, then the two were lifted carefully out of the womb of twisted wreckage. Only then could Wolf hold Tinker in his arms and reassure himself that she had emerged once again safely out of the void. She seemed so small and fragile without her normal vibrant personality.
"Oh, thank gods, I was so worried about you," she murmured as if it had been him in the airship. "The others?"
"Your Hand is safe." He spared her the news of the dead tengu.
She cried in dismay at the extent of the damage to the airship. "Oh, I crashed True Flame's dreadnaught! He's going to be angry."
"He will not care. It is a thing. All things wear out—just usually not in such a spectacular fashion."
Tinker groaned.
"Do not worry, beloved. He will only be concerned that you and yours are safe and that the dragon is dead."
Tinker whimpered against his shoulder. "Windwolf, I've made the tengu mine."
"So I've heard."
"Please, don't hurt them. I promised them that they will be safe."
"They are safe."
"You won't hurt them?"
"I will protect them for you." He kissed her carefully. "Rest."
True Flame and the Stone Clan were arriving, so he reluctantly, gave Tinker over to the healers and the protection of her beholden.
True Flame stopped on the edge of the roadway where he could see the dead dragon, the crashed dreadnaught, and in the distance, like an exclamation mark in the weak morning sky, the towering spaceship.
"You were right, Wolf."
"I was?"
"She's surprisingly destructive for one so small. I am starting to see why you love her so—she is the right size for you."
"Yes, she is."
A shout caught his attention. Little Horse and Wraith Arrow were holding the Stone Clan sekasha back from the tengu.
"What's going on here?" True Flame stalked down to the river's edge.
"These tengu are still alive." Earth Son stood behind his First, Thorne Scratch. He pointed at the battered and soaked tengu who had given Little Egret CPR.
"Yes," Wolf noticed that the Wyverns were watching. A whispered discussion was being passed through their ranks. "And they are staying that way. My domi has taken the tengu as beholden."
"They are oni," Earth Son snapped. "We must eliminate the monsters before they can breed to dangerous numbers."
"The tengu and the half-oni are no different than the elves," Wolf pitched his argument to True Flame and the silent sekasha. "We were created by the Skin Clan, as they were created by the oni. They are turning on the oni as we turned on the Skin Clan. Yes, the oni are as evil as the Skin Clan—but we merely need to look at ourselves to know that good can come from evil."
"Tengu flock together." Forest Moss drifted into the conversation, his tone light, as if he was discussing clouds. Wolf could not tell how the mad one felt on the issue. "Their loyalty to one another will supersede any claim that they make to you. If you act against one of their brethren, they will turn on you."
"Tinker ze domi holds all the tengu," the astronaut tengu named Jin said.
True Flame looked at Jin. "All? How many are all?"
The war-painted male stepped forward, apparently speaking for the Elfhome-based tengu. "We don't have a full count. It has been too dangerous to count, lest the oni ever found out what we were doing."
"Which was?" Wolf asked.
"We hoped to be free here on Elfhome," Riki said. "So in the last twenty-eight years, all of the tengu of Earth and Onihida have come to Elfhome."
"All?" True Flame gl
anced over the ten living tengu. "Are we speaking hundreds? Thousands? Millions?"
