by Wen Spencer
The question was, whose knight in shining armor was he going to be?
He still didn’t know the answer to that question when they reached train tracks and his hidden hoverbike.
* * *
Nor did he know when they rumbled through Pittsburgh. There were gossamers hanging over the faire grounds, unloading hordes of elves in Stone Clan black. Fire Clan red surrounded the field. There was no sign of Wind Clan blue.
What the hell had happened while he was gone?
They threaded their way through the royal forces, drawing stares. Jewel Tear was tucked behind him, pressed tight and arms around him. Spot was balanced in front of him, legs and feet dangling over the handlebar. They found Prince True Flame at a tent, leaning over a table covered with maps.
“Where’s Wolf Who Rules?” Tommy asked. He wanted Windwolf there when Jewel Tear gave the oni position. He wanted the elves to unite and kick oni butt—not each other’s.
Prince True Flame ignored him, staring at Jewel Tear’s shorn hair. “Are you hurt, child?”
“Where is Wolf?” Jewel Tear flipped through the maps on the table. “He should hear what I have to say. And who is arriving?”
“Darkness, Sunder, and Cana Lily.”
The names meant nothing to Tommy, but Jewel Tear’s eyes went wide.
“They sent two Harbingers!” Jewel Tear gasped.
He did know what Harbingers were. They were the seasoned warlords that the elves had used to fight the oni on Earth. There had been a dozen that kicked oni butt back to Onihida while the elves pulled down the pathways between Earth and Elfhome. Tommy could guess which two of the three were the Harbingers. One of these things is not like the others.
“The sekasha demanded that the Stone Clan send veterans,” Prince True Flame said.
“We’ll need them.” Jewel Tear found the map she wanted and traced the train track as it slashed through wilderness. “The oni have strongholds built deep in the wilderness that they access by train.” She marked a point on the train tracks and ran her fingers southward. “The camps are south enough that we wouldn’t see them via gossamer as we come in from Aum Renau. I counted four in all, but there could be more. There were thousands of warriors at each camp—wargs and horrors. They also have another whelping pen.”
Jewel Tear shivered only slightly, but Prince True Flame caught it.
The prince flicked a hand to signal a female Wyvern forward. “My people will see you to the hospice to be cared for.”
Such a polite way of saying that she would be given an abortion.
“There is no need.” Jewel Tear tried to wave off the Wyvern. “I was not raped. They did not have time.”
Only a lifetime serving his brutal father allowed Tommy to keep surprise off his face. If Jewel Tear were truly fertile, they’d done it more than enough times to almost guarantee that she was pregnant. She could have stayed quiet and let their assumptions stand and be rid of any child he’d gotten on her.
“You have been battered and sorely used.” The female warrior chided Jewel Tear like a mother dealing with a cranky child.
Jewel Tear’s gaze turned cold and hard. “Yes, I am sore and tired and dirty and hungry, but there is much I need to explain about the oni force. This one freed me.” She indicated Tommy with a wave of her hand. “While I was being moved from one camp to the whelping pens. We were able to kill all the oni transporting me, but sooner or later they will realize I’ve slipped through their fingers, and they will move. We must act quickly before they can shift again.”
This one? He didn’t even rate a name?
“We cannot attack until the Harbingers have off-loaded all their people and given them a chance to organize themselves. Go, see to your health.”
Jewel Tear warned the female Wyvern off with a look. “I should find what is left of my own household, and they will attend me.”
Prince True Flame gave her a pitying look. “Many of those who survived the attack have left Pittsburgh.”
Jewel Tear flinched as if struck but still managed, “Please, let me go to what little I have left.”
Tommy watched her walk away, flanked by two Hands of Wyverns. He hated that he wanted to hold and comfort her even as she walked away without a glance toward him or a thank-you.
* * *
The hurt of it was such that he drove the whole way back to the warren before he remembered that he’d had Bingo move his family. He pulled to stop in front of the warehouse, feeling as hollow and empty as the building. He had known she didn’t love him, that she was just using him, so really it had all gone the way he’d expected. Somehow, he thought it wouldn’t hurt because he knew how it was going to end.
And the very worst of it—he missed the feel of her pressed against his back.
“Stupid elf bitch,” Tommy growled.
Spot gave him a sad look, reached up, and petted Tommy on the head.
Tommy sighed and took out his phone. They both needed a bath, something to eat, and sleep. Depending on where Bingo moved their family, they might as well stay here for the night. Bingo had probably texted him. There were a dozen messages on his phone, all from Bingo. The most recent just a desperate “call me.”
His cousin answered his phone with “Shit is flying all over the place. You better have the bitch.”
“I delivered her to True Flame already,” Tommy growled. “What’s happening?”
“Two Stone Clan domana showed up after you left. Forge and Iron Mace. The dumb fucks grabbed Oilcan and disappeared. Tinker’s crazy pissed off—she’s got the tengu tearing the city apart trying to find her cousin. Then, to top it off, she’s taken off without telling anyone where she was going, and Windwolf is out trying to find her.”
He felt completely blindsided. Prince True Flame hadn’t even mentioned the two domana. “Why did they take Oilcan?”
Bingo explained what had happened in Pittsburgh since Tommy left, from the discovery that the cousins were descended from Stone Clan domana to Oilcan being named head of the clan to the arrival of their great-grandfather, who apparently was bent on transforming Oilcan “back” into an elf. “It’s all over the news. Chloe Polanski is having a field day. The humans are pissed to hell at the elves, and the elves look like they’re about to start carving each other up.”
No wonder there weren’t any Wind Clan elves in Oakland as the Stone Clan Harbingers off-loaded. That Prince True Flame had ignored the question of Windwolf’s whereabouts. Was it really the sekasha’s demands that brought the Harbingers to Pittsburgh, or, after egging the Wind Clan into a fight, had the Stone Clan just loaded the deck?
“Stupid-ass shits!” This was not the time that the elves should be jerking each other off. He was aware that Bingo was telling him where he’d moved the warren. It was a good safe place as long as the oni weren’t overrunning the city. If the elves went to war with each other, the oni might just do that.
Tommy cursed. He had just jumped through hoops, risked his life and Spot’s to get Jewel Tear back to Pittsburgh, and the elves were about to render it all useless. Of all the shit-stupid luck . . .
No, this wasn’t bad luck—this was careful planning. If Earth Son was working with the oni, it wasn’t with Lord Tomtom, it was with Kajo. The damn greater blood was a master of twisting everyone and everything. This had all the hallmarks of a Kajo plot.
“Tommy?” Bingo realized that Tommy had gone silent.
“The tengu haven’t found Oilcan yet?”
“Still looking, last I heard. Tinker told them just to find him, not to take him back. Apparently this grandfather of theirs has a lot of clout in the Stone Clan. She doesn’t want to start a war.”
Tinker might not, but Kajo did. If Forge made Oilcan an elf, Tinker would be pissed, but she wouldn’t start a war. Not the girl Tommy knew from the racetrack; she was too smart for that. But he was fairly sure that she would deal out a world of pain on anyone that hurt Oilcan. Kajo only needed to make sure that Oilcan died in his grandfather’s
care.
Unless the tengu realized that Kajo was pulling the strings, they wouldn’t find Oilcan in time. Tommy hurried through the warren to his room, hoping that Bingo had been in too much of a rush to think of everything. He’d learned very young that information was the key to staying alive—gathering it up and then keeping it to yourself. He opened his closet and triggered the latch to his secret storage cubbyhole. Everything was still in place. He pulled out his maps.
Forge was newly arrived in Pittsburgh. The tengu would assume that the domana didn’t know his way around or have access to cars or trucks. They’d be searching Oakland and downtown and maybe beyond the Rim, in the virgin forest. Kajo, though, would make sure that Forge could get to any place easily. A random human that had a truck. An elf that knew how to drive would be bumped into Forge’s path. A tengu? No, not a tengu, not after what Jin did to the last ones that endangered Oilcan. But maybe a half-oni that didn’t know how pissed off Tommy would be if he found out.
So someplace impossible to find, controlled by the Stone Clan, and that had enough magic to power a transformation spell.
He found his map of magic springs within a hundred miles. The oni built camps on top of a handful of the strongest and used cloaking spells to hide them. The Stone Clan had been given a huge chunk of land to the south of Pittsburgh, just beyond the Rim. Last week the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had published a map showing how the land was divided up. Forest Moss didn’t have the resources to develop his land, nor had Jewel Tear. Earth Son—Kajo’s little puppet—could have started clearing land. And yes, not far from the Rim, in Earth Son’s parcel, was a very strong magical spring.
“I’m going here.” He showed Spot the map. “Right here where I marked this. Take this to Bingo. Tell him to have these other springs checked out. I think I’m right, but I’m not sure. We need to find Oilcan and protect him. Kajo is after him.”
40: CHILDHOOD’S END
The Rim had grown up and over Neville Island. The ironwood saplings of her childhood were now tall enough to choke out the Earth brush trees. Esfatiki, touch-me-nots, skunkweed, and jagger bushes had replaced the lawn down to the riverbank. There was no sign of the groundhogs that had plagued her grandfather’s attempts at a garden; Elfhome’s flora and fauna had done what her grandfather couldn’t. All the nearby houses—abandoned since the first Startup—had collapsed under the weight of thick wild grape vines.
It’d been three years since Tinker last visited the hotel where she grew up. She expected after the sprawling luxury of Poppymeadow’s that it would seem smaller and seedier, but it seemed just as large and imposing and rundown as ever. She had heard through Team Tinker that paparazzi had pried the plywood off the first-floor doors and windows to photograph the princess’ birthplace. Judging by the footprints in the dust, though, Esme was the only person who’d recently visited the grand old hotel.
Just to be sure, she let the small army she’d brought with her sweep into the building. There was no telling if she’d managed to jump ahead of her shadow or not with this move.
A loud splash made her jerk around and count heads. One, two, three, four . . . and Blue Sky pulling Baby Duck away from the river’s edge.
“Stay away from the banks!” Tinker called. This was why she really shouldn’t be in charge of the kids—she sucked at taking care of helpless things. She didn’t have much choice in the matter. “The jump fish are really bad in this area.”
“Your grandfather raised two children here?” Thorne Scratch sounded like all the people who didn’t know her grandfather well. He had an unfounded reputation for being insane. There was method to his madness: they’d been far from any prying eyes on Neville Island.
“The jump-fish population was a lot lower when we were little. Every Shutdown thinned them down until Earth constructed a fish dam to keep them in Pittsburgh waters.” Since Thorne was looking unconvinced, Tinker added, “He’d throw out sticks of dynamite once a week, just to be sure.”
Maybe part of her problem with being a parent was she’d had such bad examples as role models. The dead father. The mother trapped in time. The mad-scientist grandfather.
She was halfway through the lobby when she realized she’d lost her Shields. She glanced back to the wide front doors. Stormsong and Pony were still outside, standing under the portico, gazing raptly at the lintel.
“What is it?” She called back.
“Hay Bell Ringing in Wind?” Pony read the glyphs printed there.
“My grandfather went by the name of Timothy Bell. Timothy is a type of grass commonly used for hay.”
“He claimed to be Wind Clan?” Stormsong asked.
“Oh, no, I did that, not him.” Tinker went back to the faded blue door to gaze up at the Elvish painted above it. She’d done a good job for only being six and balanced on a ladder. “He was angry with me for doing it and was going to paint it out until I told him it was because our family was too small. It was just before Oilcan came to live with us. We’d gotten the news that his mother had been killed. I started to have nightmares about something happening to my grandfather and being left alone. I wanted to be part of something bigger.”
Pony hugged her as Stormsong kissed her temple. “You are now.”
* * *
What was scary was that some little part of her always suspected she would retreat to the island for some desperate battle. She had left so much behind; telling everyone and herself that the grief was too fresh. On the third floor, behind a spell-locked door disguised as a bookcase, was her old server room. Oilcan had carefully mothballed it for her. Everything hummed to life as she flicked on her various computers and coaxed them to once again to talk to one another.
Her poor abandoned AI, Pixel, greeted her once she typed in all her passwords. “Hi, Tinker Bell.”
Was there a time she actually thought that was cute? “Do a systems check on all perimeter monitors.”
“Okay, Tinker Bell.”
She rooted through a box of headsets until she found one that she’d insulated for magic-work. It took her a while longer to get it to ride comfortably on her elf-pointed ears. She settled the headset in place just as Pixel reported back on various motion detectors and cameras she had scattered across the island. Despite years of neglect, over half were working. Since she had gone nuts on monitors, the overlap was enough to cover the island.
“Show me all moving objects.”
Pixel displayed the sekasha, the laedin, the children, a feral cat, and the ragged remains of a checkered flag waving in the wind.
“Mark all current moving objects as nonthreatening and ignore.”
“Okay, Tinker Bell.”
She sighed out. She didn’t want to spend time changing her user name.
“Go to code red.”
“Code Red initiated, Tinker Bell. No unidentified targets found.”
Good. That meant Neville Island was as deserted as she’d hoped. If she blew the island off the face of the planet, only the guilty would get caught in the crossfire.
* * *
Tinker took it as a good sign that Stormsong had to ask, “What exactly are we doing?”
Tinker finished pouring the treacle into the 55-gallon plastic barrel filled with ammonium nitrate. She waited until Stormsong duct-taped the lid shut before asking, “Can’t you tell?”
“No,” Stormsong growled. “That’s why I asked.”
“Good.” Tinker adhered a spell printed out onto circuit paper onto the top of the sealed barrel. She was working with one broken arm, her clueless Hand, and a small army of laedin-caste warriors who were mostly technologically inept. Even with Blue Sky helping (and warned not to explain anything), things were going hellishly slow. She had no idea how much time she had. A few minutes or forever? It depended on if her plan worked or not. So far: maybe.
Her only barometer was annoyed but mystified. “So, what are we doing?” Stormsong asked again.
“I’ll explain later.”
Tinker worked a
t ignoring the guilt at keeping her Hand clueless. Red Knife had told her that she was well armed and to apply the rules. Well, she was, perhaps more than he’d intended. If Prince True Flame said that she couldn’t track down the Stone Clan, then she would have to force them to come to her. Once she started to consider how to make them find her, she realized that was the answer to everything.
Providence had said she would have to fight her own shadow. The key, she hoped, was to keep her shadow in the dark.
41: SOUTHERN RIM
Tommy filled his hoverbike’s tank again and roared through the city flat out, as the crow flew. Down paved streets. Through backyards and parking lots. Up and down Pittsburgh’s countless steep hills. Across scores of creek beds. The sun was setting, throwing long shadows over the city.
His mind kept going back to Jewel Tear walking away. If he had played it different, would have it ended better? There was a niggling little voice that said he should have talked to her about beholding, but no, once he went over all reasons again, he’d been right not to. He would never completely trust anyone outside of family, but if he understood how they thought, he could at least work with them. Windwolf and Jewel Tear were about as understandable as space aliens. Tinker had always been impossible to guess—her brilliance took her careening all over the map.
Oilcan, though . . .
Tommy had watched Oilcan grow up on the racetrack. Even at sixteen, he’d been quiet, serious, and responsible. Tinker was the brains and the media darling, but Oilcan had been the one that kept everything going smoothly on the team. Listening to the songs that Oilcan had written, it was obvious that the man understood the weird collision of humans and elf culture that made Pittsburgh. The city was going to need people like him and Tinker to keep things from exploding, as the elves got more and more insistent that the humans conform. They didn’t get that most of the humans in Pittsburgh were in the city because they didn’t want to conform. It was people that liked living on the edge that stayed, everyone that wanted safe and familiar had fled to Earth the first chance they got.
