Wood Sprites

by Wen Spencer

  “So it’s safe to cross through?” Louise asked.

  “They made sure there were no strangle vines or steel spinners or anything,” Arisu stated. “There are no oni in the immediate area, either. They wanted to avoid oni encampments until they could connect with Kajo and find out what has happened since the last Shutdown.”

  “They’re waiting for the Unmaker,” one of the male nestlings added. “He’s to arrive soon.”

  Louise’s breath caught in her chest. None of the guards so far looked familiar; they weren’t from the mansion. If Yves brought everyone from Alpine, it could be a virtual army. She closed her eyes, focusing on the future. How can I keep my family and the nestlings safe?

  “We’ll seal the entrance.” Louise pointed back toward the gift shop. Toward danger. Toward disaster. “There’s no other way into these caves.”

  “Doesn’t that mean there’s no other way out?” Jillian slowly asked as if doubting the logic of the move.

  “There’s the pathway to Elfhome.” Louise pointed deeper into the caves and knew it was the right way to go. “Once we seal the entrance, we’ll have time to do whatever we need to succeed.”

  * * *

  While two of the older nestlings worked with Jillian at applying magical and nonmagical first aid to the wounded, Louise put the others to work unloading the luggage mules.

  “Get dressed in something warm first,” she instructed as she found the black hoodies. One of the warehouse employees had written “midget ninja outfits” in marker on the outside of the package. Obviously their employees—soon to be ex-employees—had been mystified by the weird assortment of items the twins had shipped. “You’re all on the verge of hypothermia.”

  She followed her own instructions, putting on one of the hoodies and handing one to Jillian. “Drink some water and eat something.” She pointed at the case of water and boxes of power bars. “Then get one of the backpacks and fill it with as much food and water and camping gear as you can carry.”

  After the luggage mules were quickly unloaded, Louise pointed at the bound elves. “We’ll use the mules to carry the prisoners back to the gift shop.”

  “We could just kill them,” Crow Boy whispered to her.

  “No.” Louise glared at him. “I’m not turning my siblings into killers. It’s bad enough the babies are acting like a bunch of storm troopers. It will take time for me to set up the spell. Take them to the gift shop.”

  Crow Boy bowed slightly to her. “As you wish.”

  Jillian realized that Louise intended to leave her behind. She gave Louise a betrayed look. “I want to go with you.”

  “You can see magic,” Louise stated firmly. “It stands to reason that the greatest concentration of magic will be where the two worlds connect. It has to be hard to spot. If it was easy to find, then all the tourists visiting this cave would be popping over to Elfhome all the time.”

  Jillian huffed at the inarguable logic. She flung her arms about Louise and clung tightly to her for several minutes, taking deep breaths.

  Louise twisted a line from The Great Escape: “I haven’t seen Pittsburgh yet, not from the ground or from the air, and I plan on doing both before the war is over.”

  Jillian snorted and pulled away. “Put a fence in front of these girls . . . and they’ll climb it.” That was the tagline for the movie when it was released.

  “Climb it? We’d run a bulldozer through it!”

  Jillian laughed in surprise. She snapped a salute and sauntered away, whistling the movie’s theme song.

  * * *

  While Crow Boy took the luggage mules on to the gift shop, Louise stopped at the entrance to the Hall of the Mountain King. She eyed the graffiti etched into the stone that might have been left by Esme. Bell was number sixty-seven in the list of the most common surnames in the United States; any number of Bells could have etched a date and an arrow into the wall. Was this really one of Esme’s cryptic clues? When Louise first saw it, she was sure it meant that they were supposed to follow it to Elfhome. Now she was wondering if it meant this was the best place to collapse the passageway.

  Certainly it was a logical spot. The ceiling was at its lowest point. Trying to ignore her doubts and fears, she set up a scry spell. The sandstone formed a solid ceiling for twenty feet before giving way to a thin layer of dirt at the surface far above.

  I’m going to bury us. This could be our grave if I’m wrong.

  Louise pressed her hands to her eyes. Was she right? Was this the best action? Jillian was her control; without knowing, her twin operated on logic. The doubt on her twin’s face had been easy to read. They weren’t on Elfhome proper yet and they didn’t understand the delicate forces that created the pathway. Even though she was nearly a quarter-mile from the Dining Hall cave, she could trigger a shift in the entire area and break the connection between the worlds. They had no idea when Yves would arrive; she could wait until they were safely on Elfhome.

  All her instincts, though, were screaming that she had to act. Now. Quickly.

  She dug through the printed-out spells. They had three force strikes printed out. The paper trembled as she held them, trying to decide if she should use them in combination or just take the time to ramp up the power of one.

  Crow Boy returned with empty luggage mules. “I locked all the prisoners in the ostrich truck.”

  “They can’t get out, can they?” Louise asked. “We could.”

  He grinned. “Yes, you could, but I doubt they can. They’re not that clever. I also programmed the truck to take them to the Miami-Dade police department.”

  “Miami?”

  “It will take about a day to get there.”

  Long enough to keep the elves out of their hair but short enough that the elves wouldn’t die from lack of water.

  “I locked down the gift shop,” Crow Boy said. “They will have to break their way in.”

  Louise nodded her understanding. “Okay, head to the pathway.”

  Crow Boy surprised her by hugging her. “Be safe,” he murmured like a blessing.

  Louise considered the printed spells again. The slips of paper represented their only true attack spell. If she used all three, they would be helpless later on—unless of course she and Jillian could cast spells like Queen Soulful Ember. Dufae had stated that setting up a resonance with the Spell Stones was unreliable through the pathway and charted his attempts in the codex. His failure rate was so high that they’d kept to the surefire success of printed spells.

  On Elfhome, things would be different. If they could cast spells like domana, then they wouldn’t need the preprinted spells.

  She closed her eyes and tried for the calm knowing. One or three? Use or keep? Use. Quickly.

  She pulled out a plastic painter’s drop cloth and unfolded it to spread out over the damp floor. She carefully taped the printed spells onto the sheet. There was a railing along the uneven path; she could drape the plastic over the railing to aim the force of the spell at the ceiling. Which would it be: a direct blow or glancing? If she made it too glancing, it wouldn’t shear off enough stone to fill the passage, but the impact of a straight-up blow might not be enough to bring down the roof even with the combined power of all three spells.

  Should she choose a different target for each spell? A series of hits with slightly different vectors might create a large collapse. She sat back and tugged at her hair with both hands. She was overthinking it, wasn’t she? She didn’t have time to debate choices.

  She quickly taped blank paper between the spells and took out a metal ink pen. She desperately hoped that she was as clever as she thought she was. This was so going to suck if the spell didn’t work like she wanted it to. She would need to use all four magic generators, but that much power would quickly char the paper. She would have one shot to bring down the cave ceiling.

  Maybe she should just do one spell at a time—

  “Lou!” Nikola’s voice came out of a brown mouse that crouched by her foot. “A tr
uck just pulled into the parking lot.”

  “What?” She jerked up the pen to keep from misdrawing the timing circle.

  “A box truck. It’s backing up to the gift shop.”

  Her heart started to hammer into overdrive. “Stay calm. You can do this.”

  “Can you?”

  “Yes! I can!” Louise really hoped that she wasn’t lying now.

  “What should I do?”

  “I need to concentrate. Please don’t talk to me.”

  She quickly finished drawing the ramping section and shifted the plastic up onto the railing. There was a distant crashing noise in the direction of the gift shop—glass shattering. She connected the magic generators as fast as she could and then said the trigger word.

  Nothing happened.

  “Oh no!” she cried. “Why isn’t it working?”

  “Lou! Lou! They’re coming! It’s Yves and twenty of the people from the mansion and a dozen people we don’t know! Oh no, another truck just pulled up!”

  She gripped her hair with both hands. What was wrong? The spell hadn’t powered up at all. It meant power wasn’t getting from the generators to the timing ring . . . She cried as she spotted the point where she hadn’t drawn in the full line.

  “I can’t stop them, Lou!” Nikola cried.

  “There’s one of the damn Wood Sprites!” Yves shouted as a wave of elves ran toward her, the sounds of their boots thundering in the tight space.

  Louise drew in the missing trace and shouted the trigger word.

  The world roared into darkness. She sensed tons of broken rock dropping down all around her, and she dodged to the side. Rubble thundered down beside her, tearing the bag from her grip and knocking her down. Whimpering with fear, she scrambled on all fours, not even sure in which direction she was blindly heading. She hit some kind of shallow hollow in the wall and tucked herself into it.

  After the deafening roar of falling rock, the silence afterwards was strange and unreal. It was like she had accidently muted the universe. She huddled in her tiny shelter, panting in the dusty air. Was it over? Had it worked? Was the hallway completely blocked? She was too scared to even move.

  Somewhere nearby, there was a deep male grunt and then the scrape of boot on rock.

  Louise pressed her hands to her mouth. Crow Boy had metal fighting spars on his crowlike feet, so it wasn’t him. An elf was on her side of the rockslide! What if there was more than one? What should she do? What could she do?

  Most of her things had been in her backpack. She groped in the darkness, trying to find it. The floor of the cave was covered with a confusion of pebbles and larger stones.

  There was another boot scrape. Louder. Closer.

  She froze, fingers deep in the mix of sand and rocks. Even if she found the bag, what could she do? What spell would get her out of this mess? She didn’t have a box for invisibility, nor would it matter in this utter darkness.

  A small light flared in the dark. The elf stood only six or seven feet from her, a small flashlight in his hand. Louise didn’t dare move, lest her motion betray her. From her low, protected hollow in the wall, Louise could see that the male wore high boots, tailored canvas slacks, and a wool pea coat. A sword and a pistol hung from his hips as though he were a soldier from hundreds of years out of the past. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew that it was Yves.

  The male slowly examined the cave around him. Thick dust hazed the beam of the flashlight as it swept over the broken wall that was the rockslide. Surely he was wondering the same thing Louise was. What had happened to the other elves? Were they trapped under the rubble or were they safely on the other side? Were they digging through even now? Was there a way through? How thick was the blockage? A few feet or several yards? They had been nearly fifty feet from the gift shop.

  The light swung around and pointed down the hall. The floor was strewn with random boulders and a carpet of rubble but was otherwise clear. Something gleamed, reflecting the light, and it caught Yves’ attention. He knelt down and picked it up.

  Louise stifled a gasp. It was a crushed signal repeater. It meant that she was out of range for Tesla. The others wouldn’t know that Yves was on their side of the collapse, armed and dangerous. The babies would have lost control of all the mice from the gift shop to another hundred feet back in the caves. They’d have to move Tesla closer in order to find out what happened to Louise. The babies had asked what they should do and she had shushed them! She should have made sure they told Crow Boy what was happening!

  Would they have sense to move all the mice with Tesla? Would they think to tell Crow Boy before they moved? They were just babies! They wouldn’t know how to fight Yves except by using Tesla’s automated defense programs.

  Yves took something from his coat pocket, stepped back, and pressed it to the wall. Brilliance lit the hallway, blinding Louise. “Ah, there you are, annoying little mouse. Sire wanted you two alive.” He pulled his pistol out of its holster. “But you’re not worth the bother of keeping.”

  “Warning!” Tesla came running down the hall, barking in his deep Japanese-man voice. “Primary target under attack! Response code one!”

  “Nikola!” Louise cried. “You promised!”

  The pistol thundered in the narrow space, horrifyingly loud. Yves fired again and again. Tesla staggered and fell.

  Louise put her hand to her mouth, bent her fingers, and called the Spell Stones. Instantly she felt a deep vibration in her bones as she plugged into potential. She changed her finger position to a force strike.

  Yves shouted in alarm and swung the pistol toward her. She shouted the spell command and pointed at him even as the muzzle flared. The light vanished. The world thundered noise. Something struck Louise and knocked her from her feet.

  Yves had shot her! She lay in the sudden silent dark. She could smell the blood. Her left arm hurt like her humerus was broken. She could feel something hot and sticky tricking down her arm, and she was fairly sure it was blood. Her blood.

  Think! Think! She might faint from shock and blood loss; everything already felt a little swimmy in her head. She had to get this right. She needed light to stop the bleeding, but if Yves were still conscious, then it would allow him to shoot her again.

  “Lou?” Nikola’s voice came out of the darkness, banishing all thought.

  “Nikola!” She sat up, and the swimmy feeling got stronger. Yves’ flashlight lay a few feet away, pointing to Tesla’s front paws. One paw raked the air in an endless sideways run.

  “Louise?” Nikola called. “Lou!”

  Louise managed to stand and stagger to the flashlight and pick it up.

  A bullet had caught Tesla in the head, shattering his right eye and clipping off his ear. The fur had been torn away, exposing metal and circuitry.

  “Oh, babies!” Louise sobbed as fear tore through her.

  “Something is wrong. We don’t feel right. We’re scared.”

  “It’s okay. I’m here.” Her hands didn’t want to work right. She fumbled with the flashlight and the catches of Tesla’s storage compartment while blood ran down her fingers.

  There was a fine line etched in frost across the surface of the nactka.

  “Oh no!” Louise gasped. A bullet had scratched the magical device. The spell holding the embryos in stasis had failed. The frozen nitrogen that they were stored in was leaking out, and once it was gone, they’d die. She had to keep it cold. How could she do that?

  She ran the narrow beam of the flashlight through the dusty air. A solid wall of fallen rocks blocked the way back to the gift shop and any possible freezers in that direction. Nor would any standard freezer be cold enough. The embryos needed to stay far below what even a commercial-grade freezer could produce. There was a reason that the clinic kept the material in special tanks.

  There had been the one freezing spell in the codex. They’d experimented with it, but it created a big block of immobile ice. When the information on the nactka came to light, they had abandon
ed the spell.

  Louise searched through her pockets. Had she tucked the pen into her pants? Yes. And two sheets of spare paper. And the plastic bag from the hoodies. She drew out the spell, leaving bloody fingerprints on the paper. “I need to take you out of Tesla.”

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Tesla is too damaged to move,” she lied as the world blurred at the edges. She couldn’t bring herself to tell them that they would die if she couldn’t save them. She didn’t want their last minutes to be in terror of what was about to happen. If she failed, she wanted their deaths to be quick and painless. “Try to go to sleep. When you wake up—When you wake up—you’ll be real. I promise.”

  Time was lost in a haze. She remembered only vaguely being woken up, carried about in the dark, buried under blankets, forced to drink countless cups of what seemed to be giblet gravy, and Jillian clinging to her, sobbing. She had long odd dreams about Mary Poppins and a horde of tengu chimney sweeps and giant penguins doing tap-dance routines. Later she was lucid enough to understand the others had done what little they could to keep her from dying from massive blood loss. Sitting up had the alarming tendency to make everything go swimmy and occasionally dark. At first her left arm felt like it was on fire, but later it was only annoyingly itchy. Worse than the fainting was the fear plain on her twin’s face. It reminded Louise that she had left much undone before losing consciousness.

  Louise tried to list them out to Jillian. “I don’t know how much of the cave I blocked . . .”

  Jillian pointed at a nearby patch of brightness. “We’re on Elfhome. Joy collapsed the pathway days ago. We’re safe.”

  Louise sat up. “The babies!”

  “Joy moved them!” Jillian pushed her back down. “I don’t know how. I don’t know when. But she did. She’s got them in something that seems just like your spell, but I don’t recognize any of the glyphs. It’s huge, but it works. Crow Boy says it’s dragon magic. I’m trying to get her to teach it to me, but you know how she is—a senile grandmother on a sugar rush.”