by Wen Spencer
Yes, as of this moment, that’s the new plan, I’m not lying.
Chloe’s smile faded several notches. “The coroner and his staff are currently swamped with the oni dead from yesterday. They’ve set up a mass grave beyond the Rim. I doubt if you can get the bodies officially released tonight.”
That would explain why the morgue was so empty.
“I don’t need to have them officially released.” Tinker waved that aside; she was domi after all. “I just need someone that can burn the bodies. Tonight.”
Get rid of the evidence. Good plan. Who would know about cremation? Lain would.
Lain answered on the first ring with worry in her voice. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll have to get back to you on that.” It was not a good sign that apparently both Esme and Lain were seeing bad things in store for Tinker. “When you had my grandfather cremated, who did you call?”
“McDermott’s in McKees Rocks.” Lain didn’t ask why; she simply supplied the phone number. Did she already know or did she just stop asking awkward questions when Tinker descended on her with weirdness? “When you see my sister, bring her to me.”
Tinker sighed.
“Ladybug.” Lain used the “you will obey” tone.
“Okay, I will.”
Chloe’s smile vanished completely as Tinker dialed McDermott’s. “You—you can’t just take them.”
“Yes, I can. The coroner’s office has no jurisdiction over elves—dead or alive.” A man picked up the line, identifying himself as Allen McDermott. “Yes, this is Tinker ze domi, head of the Wind Clan. Can you come to the morgue? I have three bodies that need to be cremated.”
Tinker hung up before the annoying questions on authorizations could start.
Chloe reached into her suit pocket and pulled out her eyepiece. “This is a clear abuse of power. You can’t just walk—”
Chloe froze, her eyes going wide as Esme suddenly stepped out of the shadows with a gun leveled at the reporter.
“I don’t know who you are, although you look very familiar . . .” Esme trailed off, cocking her head.
“You’ve probably seen me on television.” Chloe held up her eyepiece as explanation. “Pittsburgh only has three TV stations.”
“Put it away,” Esme growled. “And stay away from my kid.”
“You have a child?” Chloe paled.
“Alexander Graham Bell is my—”
“Daughter,” Tinker said to cut off any confusion, since she was fairly sure Chloe—if not all of Pittsburgh—knew her real name by now.
“Daughter?” Esme glanced sharply at Tinker.
“You’re Captain Shenske’s daughter?” Chloe gave Tinker a horrified look.
“Yes, I’m her daughter.” Tinker stayed focused on Chloe, not wanting to see how her mother took the news. Why, though, was it so upsetting to Chloe? It wasn’t like she was suddenly getting a daughter dumped in her lap.
“Fine. I’ll stay away from her.” Chloe backed out the door.
Tinker really wanted to bolt out of the room on Chloe’s heels instead of turning around and facing Esme.
She made Lain lie to me. She drove me nearly insane.
With that smoldering anger stoked back to a flame, Tinker turned back to Esme.
Esme was giving her a befuddled look, as if Tinker’s words had sunk in but hadn’t made any sense. “Wait! What?”
“I’m Alexander Graham Bell.” Tinker pointed to herself. “I’m your daughter.”
“Scarecrow?” Esme said faintly.
“Daughter,” Tinker said. “As in: not a boy.”
Esme shook her head. “But—but—you’re an elf!”
“Well, that’s a little more complicated to explain,” Tinker allowed.
* * *
Explanation had to wait, though, as city officials descended on them, responding to anonymous phone calls about “someone stealing bodies from the morgue.” Chloe must have started calling in strike forces before she even left the building. The police showed up first, followed by the deputy mayor and three city council members for reasons that Tinker couldn’t fathom except maybe that they were pigheaded enough to argue with Tinker. Someone made the mistake of contacting Maynard, who was out with Prince True Flame, which led to the Wyverns getting involved.
The sudden incoming wave of red made Tinker’s heart hammer in her chest. If the Wyverns found the DNA swipes, things could go ugly quickly. She casually swung her messenger bag with the swipes back behind her so it was hidden from view.
“I will deal with them, domi,” Pony murmured.
That was what she was afraid of: he would only tell them the truth. Her fear must have shown on her face as he gave her a slight smile.
“Don’t worry,” he whispered. “You have taught me that truth is a weapon to wield carefully.”
She had? That made her feel weirdly guilty. Pony embodied a hundred years of perfection: corrupted by her in one hectic summer. She nodded, trusting him.
Signing to Cloudwalker to take his place as Shield, Pony intercepted the incoming Wyverns. Their conversation was in machine-gun High Elvish, rattling out faster than Tinker could follow. She focused on keeping the undertaker from McDermott’s from leaving empty-handed.
“The coroner would tell you—if he were here—that he doesn’t have any jurisdiction over elves—alive or dead.” Tinker stood firm on her strongest argument, then pushed on to points she wasn’t as sure about. “I’m the Vicereine of the Westernlands.” At least that’s what people kept telling her. “That means I do have jurisdiction over all elves—not just the Wind Clan.” As far as she could tell, that’s what it meant. She was going with that until someone told her otherwise. “These children have suffered enough. It’s time they are decently put to rest.”
“The elves have their laws,” the councilwoman said. “And we have our own laws and procedures. We’re tired of having your people walk all over our rules. This is still our city.”
Her people? Had they forgotten she was a Pittsburgh-born human until Mid-Summer’s Eve? And this wasn’t about who owned the city but basic decency. “Do you have any kids?”
“Yes, a little boy.”
“If your boy died outside the city, on Elfhome, you’ll be happy with letting the elves do whatever they want to his dead body? Let it lay out where the animals could eat him? Stuff and mount him?”
The woman gasped with outrage. “They wouldn’t dare—”
“That’s what you’re doing to their children! Locking those kids up in boxes is an abomination on the level of having your boy taxidermied.”
“Waiting until tomorrow morning will not make any differ—”
Tinker hadn’t noticed that the Wyverns had left the room until they came sweeping back in from the morgue. They projected extremely pissed off, which was good, because they were talking High Elvish full tilt; she suspected none of the humans were following. Unfortunately, they were aiming their conversation at her.
“Forgiveness, I don’t understand.” Tinker looked to Pony for help.
“They demand that you have the children given to the sky immediately.”
Tinker turned to the humans, who thankfully spoke enough Elvish to understand Pony. “Okay, are you going to do what I asked or do you want to tell the Wyverns that they need to wait until tomorrow?”
Luckily none of them were totally stupid as well as pigheaded.
* * *
Remembering her promise to Lain, Tinker dragged Esme along on the impromptu procession to the funeral home. Her mother hadn’t said anything during the entire three-ring circus; she only watched Tinker in unnerving silence. The silent treatment continued even once they were safely isolated in the Rolls-Royce. Tinker figured that Esme was angry that Tinker hadn’t explained their connection the first time they met.
“You’re the one that popped me in the easy-bake oven and skipped town,” Tinker grumbled, slumping down in the front seat between Pony and Stormsong. “If anyone has the right
to be pissed off, it’s me.”
Esme sighed in the backseat. “I knew that the oni would kill every last human in Pittsburgh if Leonardo Dufae didn’t have an heir to his genius, a brilliance that could close the door that he opened. So I found your grandfather and talked him into using Leo’s sperm to make—to make you. And I knew that I needed to save Jin Wong, so I had to jump through the gate.”
Anyone else probably would have just tried talking Lain into leaving Pittsburgh. Lain, though, needed Elfhome like she needed air. Esme couldn’t simply move her sister to the safety of Earth; she needed to make Pittsburgh safe. The route she took seemed insane, but it was hard to argue with the proven success of it.
Still, Tinker tried. “So you just handed over an egg and took off? Didn’t you even bother to find out your baby’s gender?”
In the rearview mirror, Tinker saw Esme flinched as if struck. “No, it wasn’t like that. At first, yes, you were just Leo’s heir, but then I started to realize that I might not survive the crash, and, if I did, I wasn’t ever returning to Earth. You would be all that was left of me after I was gone. You stopped being Leo’s child to me. You became mine. You became precious to me.”
“No, you thought you had a son. I’m in no way precious to you.”
“Yes, you are.” Esme leaned forward over the seat to pinch Tinker’s cheek. “And you’re so much cuter than I ever imagined.”
“Oh, gee, don’t do that.”
Stormsong caught Esme’s hand and twisted it hard enough to get a yelp of pain. “I don’t care who you are, you will respect domi.”
“Okay!” Esme sat back, rubbing her hand. “Now, exactly how did you end up an elf princess?”
* * *
Tinker started with saving Windwolf’s life during Shutdown just before Mid-Summer’s Eve and everything that followed. Well—not everything—she’d been embarrassingly clueless through many points. Just because Esme was her mother didn’t give her rights to a full confession. Tinker got detoured back to the first time she saved Windwolf—the day Blue Sky’s father died—when she made an offhand mention about the magical tie she had thought existed between her and Windwolf.
“It happened so fast that my memories are blurred and disjointed. Everyone was running and screaming. There was a big tri-axle Mack dump truck sitting at the edge of the faire ground, and I scooted under it. The saurus pinned Lightning Strikes to the ground beside the truck and was tearing him in half.” Tinker shuddered at the memory. “I don’t know what I was thinking—I was thirteen and about ninety pounds dripping wet—but I tried to kill it with a tire iron. Not my best plan.”
“You saved Wolf,” Pony murmured. “He was unconscious next to Lightning Strikes.”
“I didn’t see him at the time.” Tinker laughed. “All my attention was taken up by a pissed-off saurus trying to dig me out from under the dump truck. When I did finally see Windwolf, I thought he was mad at me. His first words to me were ‘Fool, it would have killed you.’ It wasn’t a very romantic first meeting.”
“And this magical tie?” Esme asked.
They were crossing the McKees Rocks bridge, so Tinker made a long story shorter. “That’s just something Tooloo made up. She’s an elf that has a small farm at the end of this street.” Tinker pointed in the direction of Tooloo’s.
“I know Tooloo,” Esme said.
Tinker supposed that shouldn’t surprise her, but it did. Lain and Tooloo seemed to have a weird unspoken agreement that they would keep to their respective neighborhoods as much as possible. She had assumed that Esme would know only the places that Lain frequented. “Tooloo taught me everything I know about elves, but I’m finding out that she was lying about half of it. The whole ‘magical tie’ was a way to keep me away from Windwolf.”
“She was trying to keep you safe,” Esme said. “She knew what kind of danger lay in store for you.”
“How the hell would she know?” Tinker snapped. “Did you tell everyone but me who I really was?”
Esme shook her head. “Tooloo is the one that taught me how to control my dreams.”
* * *
It was totally unfair that at that moment they arrived at McDermott’s and Tinker had to go back to being ringmaster. Much as she wanted to grill Esme on Tooloo, she had to focus on the cremation.
McDermott’s was a big Victorian mansion full of dead stillness and memories Tinker thought were long forgotten. Once inside, she remembered the floor plan, the big rooms with stuffed chairs lining the walls and the painful smell of roses and age.
McDermott had endless forms he wanted signed guaranteeing he’d get paid and not arrested by the EIA. He also insisted she tour a room filled with coffins of oak and steel, making it sound like the law required a coffin for cremation. Considering the elves’ reaction to the drawers at the morgue—their horror at the idea of “locking the bodies in steel boxes”—the coffins were probably a bad idea. She managed to frighten McDermott into admitting that the coffins were optional and that cardboard boxes were acceptable. She talked him into forgoing even the boxes with assurances that no one would press charges. All the details, though, made her realize how much Lain had quietly taken care of when Tinker’s grandfather had died.
Start to finish, the cremations would take a good part of the night. Even though McDerrmott’s had four furnaces (a number that slightly boggled her mind,) it would take more than two hours to render the bodies to ash, and then several hours more for the ashes to cool enough to be safely handled. She stayed only long enough to see the bodies safely loaded into the furnaces and talked the Wyverns into standing guard the rest of the night. Tinker wanted to stay in motion so Chloe’s strike forces couldn’t corner her again. She didn’t need witnesses while getting the DNA from the living children—although she wasn’t sure how she was going to do that without raising questions.
Back in the Rolls-Royce, Esme proved she had used the time that Tinker had been distracted to piece together the logical end to Tinker’s story. “So, you and Windwolf fell in love and he used magic to change you into an elf?”
“That’s the basic gist of it.” Tinker was glad she didn’t have to go into details.
Esme cocked her head. “What I don’t get is why you would be in trouble if you’d been caught at the morgue.”
“Collecting DNA smacks of spell-working,” Tinker quoted Stormsong.
“So, why is it illegal for you do something that simple when Windwolf is going around doing wholesale transformation?”
Tinker sighed. “Technically, it isn’t illegal. The problem is political maneuvering shit. The Stone Clan are being asses.”
Esme nodded as if that made perfect sense.
Pony hadn’t asked where they were going when they left the funeral home, proof of his nervousness around the Wyverns. He stopped the car at the end of the McKees Rocks Bridge—a good, safe two miles from the Wyverns—to wait for Tinker to choose a direction.
Take the three swabs and Esme to Lain? Track down the other children with Esme still in tow? Surely the less people involved, the better, but the whole deadly trinity of Esme, Lain, and Tooloo could derail Tinker when time was against her. Not Lain’s then—and she needed a cover story for tracking down the children and sticking things in their mouths.
“Let’s go to Poppymeadow’s,” Tinker told Pony, and he turned the big gray car toward the gleaming city instead of taking the dark, twisting roads up to the observatory.
“So, you’re an elf with all the bells and whistles?” Esme asked.
Tinker nodded.
“And you wanted this?” Esme said it as if worried that Tinker been transformed against her will, or, worse, she had been desperate to be an elf.
Tinker realized her Hand were all listening intently. She had never considered before how they might feel about Windwolf using the nearly forbidden magic to change her. They must have been in full agreement with his decision or they would have stopped him. It was weird knowing that they had gone so against their princ
iples to allow Windwolf to do the spell. They had all been nameless strangers to her then. She couldn’t even remember who had been with Windwolf the night he took her to the hunting lodge and changed her. It was a testament of how much they trusted Windwolf.
It seemed dangerous to admit she didn’t know what Windwolf had planned. It was her stupidity, not his. And yet she couldn’t lie—not to her Hand. They deserved the truth.
“I still don’t have a full grasp on what Windwolf was offering me,” she said cautiously. “It’s too big. I haven’t lived long enough to understand the limits of a human life to really wrap my brain around being an elf. I know, though, I have forever now to be with people I love.” Pony reached out and took her hand and laced his fingers with hers. “Besides, the bells and whistles are pretty cool.”
“Bells and whistles.” Esme stared out the window at the night-shrouded city. The streetlights overhead spilled light across her again and again as they drove through the dark streets. “The spell that Windwolf used—could it make anyone perfect as the sekasha yet able to use the domana spells?”
All the sekasha laughed at the question. Pony answered for her Hand. “You cannot see the world as black and white and in color at the same time.”
“In theory, though, someone could be godlike?” The light slid through the car and left Esme in shadows.
“We would not allow it,” Pony said. The others were so much in agreement that they didn’t even nod. “That is what the Skin Clan wanted: to be gods in flesh. We did not hunt them down for thousands of years just for someone else to replace them.”
“Sparrow said something about that the night she kept me from escaping the oni,” Tinker said. “She said that the Skin Clan had taken elves from one step above apes to one step below gods. She thought the elves were stagnating. She wanted to go back to the old ways.”
“What a fool,” Pony growled. “The reason we’re tall, fair, and immortal is that, in the beginning, the Skin Clan could only improve their bloodline by breeding with us after they had improved us.” His loathing for how the Skin Clan had genetically screwed over the elves was obvious in his voice. “They couldn’t introduce a weakness into our stock without fear of passing it on to their children. After they became immortal, though, they eventually stopped caring about their bloodline; they only wanted to enhance themselves. They created spells that allowed them to safely manipulate their own DNA. They could experiment with us until they found a desirable trait and then duplicate it in themselves. We would have become as twisted as the oni if we had not killed them all.”
