Wood Sprites

by Wen Spencer

  Jillian growled more curses while making sure that the cat food can was buried deep within the trash. Louise turned on the sink’s faucet and washed Joy with hand soap. By now the baby dragon loved the combination of warm water and attention. She purred like a kitty, rubbing against Louise’s hands.

  Jillian made a small sound of discovery and pulled their old toothbrushes out of the trash. Their mother hadn’t wanted the twins using them just in case the robbers had touched them. “DNA! That’s why the thieves took the toothbrushes: they have Mom and Dad’s DNA on them. With these, Desmarais could prove that we’re her—wait—no—the robbers didn’t take ours. So why did they just take Mom and Dad’s?”

  Louise considered as she wrapped Joy in a clean dishtowel. “It could be that they wanted DNA to confirm Mom and Dad’s identities, in case they were using fake ID.”

  Jillian snorted at the irony. “Pot calling kettle black.” She frowned at the toothbrushes, obviously debating if she should actually put them back in the trash where a dumpster diver could retrieve them. “Maybe that’s why the Flying Monkey is at school then. They didn’t get DNA samples from us. Maybe he’s trying to steal our DNA.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.” Louise started to pace. She thought better in motion. “Why send in an undercover kid when you could do something like put someone in as the substitute school nurse and have her check the fifth grade for lice? They could have had someone follow us on to the train and pull a hair or two out without us noticing. Hell, they could have paid a janitor to clean the floor of our locker; there’s probably lots of our hair with tags intact.”

  “Because they’re not smart enough to think of it?” Jillian shoved the toothbrushes back into the trash.

  “If I could think of three things in one minute, they should have been able to think of something in a shorter period of time than it takes to enroll a kid in a private school like Perelman.”

  “He’s definitely at school because of us! There’s no way it could be anything else; he stuck to us all day. I think he would have followed us into the bathroom if it wouldn’t get him into trouble.”

  “Maybe he’s supposed to kidnap us.”

  “Him?”

  “He’s half-elf; he’s probably a lot stronger than he looks. And he might know jujitsu or judo or something. He’s fifty years old; he’s had time to get a black belt in every martial art there is. He could be super ninja.”

  “There’s two of us!” Jillian said.

  “Three.” Joy proved that she could count.

  “Eight.” Nikola shrank back from the collective stare. “Maybe? Not all of us think we should count Tesla, but if we did, we would be eight.”

  Smart as Louise was, trying to understand how Nikola existed made her brain hurt. “I don’t think he’s going to try to kidnap us. If he was, he could have done it today easily.”

  “Kill us?” Jillian guessed and then shook her head along with Louise. “No, all the same things apply. It doesn’t make sense to send in your kid to do your dirty work. You use someone that can’t be connected back to you.”

  Nikola stared at Jillian. “It bothers us that you know that.”

  “Muhahaha!” Jillian gave an evil laugh and Nikola ducked behind Louise.

  “Jillian!” Louise wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or bad that she sounded like their mother.

  Jillian snickered. “It’s been a standard thriller trope since Hitchcock did Strangers on a Train. Most people are killed by someone that they know, so cops always consider family and friends as their first suspects. Anyone with half a brain knows that. So it stands to reason that the Desmaraises wouldn’t use their kid to do their dirty work.”

  “But if the cops believed he was a really a nine-year-old stranger, would they even think to question him?”

  Jillian’s eyes went wide with fear.

  Nikola tilted his head as if listening to something and then announced, “Mom just got off the train. She’ll be here shortly.”

  The twins yelped in unison.

  “We should tell Mom!” Louise cried as she ran upstairs with Joy. Nikola started to chase after her but then stopped on the stairway landing when he realized that Jillian was staying in the kitchen.

  “Everything? Are you insane?” Jillian shouted as she hurriedly wiped clean the floor and sink. “They won’t believe us. At least for most of it. And the rest? They’re going to kill us for!”

  “What?” Nikola cried.

  “Jilly!” Louise ran back down the steps to where Nikola crouched on the landing in fear. “They’re not going to kill us.” A shiver of fear went through her as she realized that their parents would never believe that Nikola was alive and real. They might not “kill” the twins, but they might do something awful to the frozen embryos stored within Tesla. “Come on. It’s going to be all right. We won’t let anything happen to you. Okay?”

  * * *

  They ignored two calls from their mother to come help with dinner while they argued in heated whispers. When they heard their father arrive fifteen minutes later, they had reached a tentative agreement as to what to say and who should say it. They crept downstairs only to find their parents in the middle of their own whispered discussion.

  Their mother hissed a curse word and growled softly, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “No, due diligence starts next week.”

  “This is beyond insane.”

  “It’s a holding company that they own. It could be just coincidence.”

  “Yeah, right.” Their mother slammed shut the refrigerator door and yelled, “Girls!”

  “We’re here,” Jillian answered for them as they’d agreed.

  Their mother’s visible anger vanished when she saw their faces. “What did you do?” she asked warily.

  “We know who robbed us and why,” Jillian said.

  “What?”

  “After we blew up our playhouse and found out where we came from, we got curious and went through your computer and found the names of our genetic donors.”

  “Their names? On our computers?”

  Jillian nodded and lied. “It was on some documents listing out their racial and religious and medicals records. White. Jewish. Which of their parents were still alive. Hereditary diseases. That kind of information.”

  “I—I—I didn’t think we ever got their names.”

  “It was there,” Jillian insisted. “And we copied their names and started to look up information on them. We just wanted to know if we had any older brothers or sisters.”

  Their mother covered her face with her hands, which meant she didn’t want them to know what she was feeling.

  Louise ignored the plan and jumped to the point. “Our eggs were from a woman named Esme Shenske. She’s Anna Desmarais’ daughter.”

  Jillian frowned at Louise going off-script. It forced her to jump ahead without all their quickly plotted arguments as to why they were right without incriminating themselves more. “That’s why we were robbed. Anna Desmarais is trying to find proof that we’re her granddaughters.”

  Louise braced herself for her parents’ outburst. They stood silent for a moment and then looked at each other.

  “Just coincidence?” Their mother finally broke the silence.

  Their father spread his hands helplessly. “It is damning.”

  “What is just coincidence?” Louise asked.

  Their parents exchanged a look.

  “I don’t think—We don’t know—It’s just going to scare them,” their father stuttered.

  Their mother shook her head. “It’s better that they hear it from us first.”

  Their father sighed and nodded. “Desmarais is buying my company.”

  Louise swallowed down on the fear that jumped up inside her. They’d erased all the information tracing back to them. More importantly, everything that connected Nikola to Esme. At least, everything that was online and easily searched. If the company used offline backup storage of data, then the twins
hadn’t gotten everything. Normally no one would have realized that there was a difference between online and offline databases, so the data would be safe. But if Desmarais was buying the company, they could do a more detailed search than anyone normally could.

  “Now it could be just coincidence that they’re buying my company,” their father continued. “They own lots of companies. It’s mind-boggling how many they own. Edmond Desmarais is a very, very rich man.”

  “They’ve given over three hundred million dollars to charities in New York City over the years,” their mother said.

  How much of that was to the Museum of Natural History? If they’d given millions of dollars to the museum, it would explain why Yves Desmarais was walking around it as if he owned the place.

  Their father nodded as if this proved something. “And it doesn’t mean that they had anything to do with the robbery. We have no proof, so we can’t go around saying that they did.”

  The Flying Monkey at their school was proof that the Desmaraises were closing in on the twins, but Louise and Jillian had agreed not to mention him. Anything related to elves and baby dragons and magic was too dangerous to Nikola to bring to their parents’ attention.

  “They took your toothbrushes because they wanted samples of your DNA!” Louise clung to the only proof they had to offer.

  “Honey, you don’t know that.” Their father patted Louise on the head like she was still three.

  Louise breathed out instead of screaming. “Why else would anyone steal toothbrushes?”

  “That is damning, but it’s still not proof.” Their mother took four plates out of the dish cabinet and handed them to Louise. “Dinner is ready. We’re eating.”

  Dinner was frozen lasagna, green beans, and a tossed salad. Simple. Inexpensive. Louise wondered what the Flying Monkey was having for dinner. Lobster? Steak? Were the Desmaraises making small talk of murder and kidnapping as they ate on fine china with real silverware instead of stainless steel? What were they planning? Why was Tristan at their school?

  * * *

  That night, Louise dreamed of the babies. They were playing in mud with nothing much more on than underwear. Brown hair and walnut skin and eyes full of mischief. They looked like peas in a pod, but she knew only one was a boy and three were girls. They had a string that they were making into one giant cat’s cradle. With their tiny little hands, they plucked at the strands, deftly changing the pattern.

  “What are you doing?” Louise knelt beside the little boy that had to be Nikola, wondering what were the names of the three little girls.

  “We were bored.” Nikola snuggled into her arms, puppy warm and soft, smelling of baby powder. “So we’re looking to see what we can find.”

  The string shimmered between his fingers, and she realized it was fiber optics that they were weaving.

  “Oh, you have to be careful. People can notice what you’re doing.”

  “We’re being careful,” one of the little girls said. It was the same tone and cadence Jillian would have used a few years ago. Full of confidence, not always correct in her assessment of her abilities. “See.” The little girl held up a gleaming web run through her fingers. “This is Flying Monkey Five.”

  When Louise peered at it, it was as if she were watching footage from a web camera. Tristan sat on a big leather couch that made him look all of six years old. He apparently was multitasking, with a tablet balanced on his bare knees and a headset linking him to a bigger screen that held the camera. The soft flickering glow of the television showed he was in a small ultramodern apartment furnished in stark, lean lines. A Power Rangers water bottle and a box of Chinese takeout sat on the coffee table in front of him. He blew a raspberry while considering the information displayed on the big screen. Then, shaking his head, he started to type, muttering, “If it was going to be easy, someone else could do it.”

  “There he goes again,” another girl cried. “Dig. Dig. Dig. What is he looking for?”

  “You’re spying on him?” Louise cried. “No, no, he’s dangerous!”

  “We know!” they said in unison, although some said it with exasperation and others with fear.

  “We want to help,” Nikola added. “We can do this.”

  “We’ll be careful,” the girls promised in unison.

  The babies started to sing then. “Half a pound of tuppenny rice, half a pound of treacle. That’s the way the money goes, Pop! goes the weasel. Every night I get home, the monkey’s on the table, take a stick and knock it off, Pop! goes the weasel.”

  “No, no, don’t knock him off the table. That will make him mad.”

  Louise woke up. By the clock on the nightstand between her bed and Jillian’s, it was 4:26 a.m. She peered at it sleepily while she marveled at how vivid the dream had been. The alarm was set for 5:00 so they could feed Joy before her parents woke up. Should she even try to get to sleep again? The play was on next Wednesday and she hadn’t worked on it much, what with Joy, Nikola, and everything taking up her attention. She could spend the half hour making sure she was ready.

  She sat up, stretching.

  Nikola padded out of the darkness to snuggle into her arms. Unlike her dream, he felt of unyielding metal bones and hydraulic muscles, but at least his fur was the same warm softness. “Don’t worry, it’s just a song. We don’t really knock him off the table.”

  She gasped. “You know what I dreamed?”

  “Yes.” Nikola seemed to think it was perfectly natural for joint dreams. He pressed closer. “It was nice that you could come and visit us.”

  “Do the others have names?”

  “We’re discussing possibilities. We think Nikola Tesla Dufae is awesome. We all want great names, but we’re in disagreement as to what is cool.”

  Nikola’s use of pronouns was now frighteningly clear. Louise had slipped into the idea that he was only one person, but in truth there were four little people trapped inside one very limited shell. Four lives that were dependent on her and Jillian. And even if they found someone who was willing to act as surrogate mother, there was a chance that only one or two of them would be born.

  She hugged Nikola tightly. She had thought that if they got the embryos stored someplace safe, she and Jillian would have years to plan. Now she wanted to find a way to make them real as quickly as possible.

  Nikola tilted his head as if listening to something distant. “Oh, my, that can’t be good.”

  “What?”

  “The monkey just looked up ‘how to build a bomb.’”

  Tristan waited for them at the train station. Except for one yawn, there was no evidence he’d been up late, endlessly digging through the Internet. The twins tried to act surprised and not annoyed at all by his presence; they’d suspected he might be waiting for them. Their plan was to tag-team him so they could take turns reading over his search history.

  “So, does your family have plans for next Friday?” Jillian started her distraction run. Louise slid on her gaming goggles so Tristan couldn’t see what she was accessing. He’d started the night by hacking into the school’s computers and pulling up student records. No surprise there. But he’d also tapped the records of all the employees too. Odder yet, he’d done detailed background checks on a weird selection of them. Mr. Howe. Miss Hamilton. Those made sense. Miss Gray. Less sense. Teachers whose names she didn’t recognize. No sense at all.

  “Next Friday?” Tristan seemed completely confused.

  So was Louise. She went back and checked which student records he’d pulled. He had only looked at seniors and juniors. He’d ignored the fifth-graders completely.

  “Next Friday is the Fourth of July!” Jillian said. “It’s why we’re having the play on Wednesday instead of Friday. Everyone who goes on vacation leaves early Thursday so the school made the last day on the second.”

  Actually they were supposed to get out of school the second week of June. By law, the school had to hold classes for a hundred and eighty days. A broken water pipe in the fall, a b
lizzard in February, and then the bombing had pushed the last day into July.

  The babies said Tristan had been researching bomb-making.

  Earth for Humans said that the bomber Vance Roycroft had gone rogue from their organization and claimed that he’d built a terrorist network totally separate from them. Police had confirmed that they found evidence that he hadn’t worked alone but so far hadn’t released any information on the other bombers.

  To find a bomber, someone would need to know the basics of bomb-making. Tristan obviously thought that Roycroft’s accomplice was a teacher or one of the older students. But why did Tristan think someone at Perelman was a terrorist? Pure location? Or did he know something more? And why had Ming sent Tristan alone to Perelman to find the bomber?

  “The Fourth! Oh, yeah, I forgot. Jet lag and everything.” Tristan yawned again, this time wider. “It’s still the middle of the night for me.”

  “The fireworks are a big deal around here,” Jillian babbled, hopefully intending to work around to something more interesting. “We go to our Aunt Kitty’s place in Hoboken; she has a balcony overlooking the Hudson River. We have chicken and corn on the cob and apple pie.”

  “How cliché,” Tristan said.

  “Not cliché, traditional.” Jillian kicked the platform, obviously wanting to kick him. “The chicken is Jamaican jerk, not southern fried, and we have black beans, rice and peas, and ginger beer.”

  “You don’t look Jamaican,” he teased, because he knew exactly what they were, at least as far as their mother’s side. Did Anna know who their father had been?

  “Our grandmother was,” Jillian stated. “And she was a very wise woman. She always said that family meant what you made it to mean.”

  The train squealed into the station. Louise pushed up her goggles and focused on following Jillian on to the train. All the cars were crowded, and they had to huddle together around Tesla.

  Louise’s phone vibrated. She checked it, careful to keep the screen angled away from Tristan.

  “We want to see the fireworks!” the text read. “Take us with you!”

  She glanced down and Nikola gazed up her, face surprisingly hopeful for it being robotic. His tail thumped against her leg.