"We can't go in there—it would be asking for a fight." Stormsong kept hold of her. "One we cannot win. Wait. Please."
Much as she wanted to protect the strangers, she couldn't bear the thought of sacrificing her sekasha.
Tinker nodded numbly and pulled out of Stormsong's hold. "Let's get closer."
She lost sight of the storefront beyond the wall of backs. This time her sekasha had to clear a path, pushing people aside to make what they thought was a wide enough path for her. Maybe if she was an elephant.
The Wyverns muscled out only one person. They dragged him to a white-haired elf, announcing, "We killed one inside—it tried to run. This one is spell-marked, but it was with an oni."
It was Tommy Chang.
"Kill him," the male domana said.
"No!" Tinker plunged forward, forced her way through the towering Wyverns to Tommy's side. "Don't hurt him!"
The white-haired elf turned and Tinker gasped at the damage done to his face.
"Ah, what honest horror!" the half-blinded elf said. "You must be the child-bride. Not much to you—how did you come out in one piece?"
"Because they underestimated me." Tinker tugged Tommy's arm out of the Wyvern's hold. "Look, he's been tested. He's not oni."
"He might be mixed blood," said the half-blinded elf.
"Who gives a flying fuck?" Tinker snarled in English.
"Domi," Stormsong murmured behind her.
"He's not one of them." Tinker switched back to High Elvish.
"How do you know?" Forest Moss asked. "From what I hear, the tengu fooled you."
She was not going to let them kill someone she knew. She stared at Tommy, trying to remember something that would prove he was what she thought he was—to herself as much as to them. Maddeningly, he said nothing in his own defense, just stood there, wrapped in his bulletproof cool. Didn't he know that no one was swordproof?
True, she'd trusted Riki blindly, but she hadn't known oni existed, and had awarded him the trust she gave all strangers. Her world had been a different place not so long ago.
"I know because—" she started in order to stall them. Because she'd known Tommy half her life. His family had owned a restaurant in Oakland since before Startup. He'd been a driving force organizing the hoverbike racing, and most summers she saw him on a weekly basis. He wasn't a stranger. She wouldn't immediately say he was "good" people. He had a temper and a reputation of being ruthless when it came to business; that didn't make him any more evil than she was. She suspected the elves wouldn't accept those facts as a good argument for his humanity. Riki had proved her judgment was flawed.
What could she say as proof that these elves would accept? They were growing impatient for her answer.
"Because—" And then unexpectedly, Riki provided the answer. "Because when the tengu came looking for me, he didn't know where to find me."
That puzzled them, which was fine, as she needed to cram a lot into this argument to make it sound.
"Two years ago, Tommy bought a custom Delta hoverbike off me. He needed to write a check, and there were the pink slips—forms to show transfer of ownership for tax reasons. I told him my human name, which was Alexander Graham Bell." Which of course had triggered a round of teasing from Tommy, and occasionally afterward, he'd called her "Tinker Bell." "I even told him why I was called that." In truth, she had been trying to stem the teasing with a sympathy play since Tommy's mother had also been murdered. "And that my father was the man who invented the orbital gate. I told him—he didn't tell the oni."
That seemed to buy it for the Wyverns. They released their hold on Tommy.
Magic suddenly flared across her senses, like a gasoline pool catching flame. Tinker spun around but there was nothing to see. Forest Moss made a motion, and she turned to watch him call on the Stone Clan Spell Stones and use the magic to trigger his shields. Around them, the Wyverns and her Hand went alert.
"What was that? Did you feel that?" she asked Forest Moss.
"It was a spell breaking." Forest Moss cocked the fingers of his left hand and brought them to his mouth. "Ssssstada."
The spell Forest Moss triggered was a variation of the ground radar. A long, narrow wedge of power formed from the male elf to the river's edge. He shifted his right hand, and the wedge swept northward through Chinatown. At the heart of Chinatown, he hit an intense writhing of power.
"How odd," Forest Moss said.
"What is that?" Tinker noted that Tommy, being smart, had vanished while they had been distracted.
Forest Moss gave her an odd look. "It's a ley scry. It lets me see recent and active disturbances in the ley lines. I don't know what it was supposed to do, but a spell was just violently altered, and it's now acting as a pump on a fiutana."
"Oh shit. The black willow."
The great doors of the refrigerated warehouse stood open to the summer heat. Magic flowed down over the loading dock in a purple haze of potential. Tinker cautiously pulled the Rolls around, trying to angle the car so they could see into the cave darkness, but the dock was too high, and the door, facing the afternoon eastern sky, was cave dark. Tinker flicked on the headlights, but even the high beams failed to illuminate the interior.
"I want a closer look." Tinker put the Rolls into park. She wished she could leave the engine running, but it would be a mistake with this much free magic in the area.
She got out and the sekasha followed. Magic flooded over her, hot and fast. The heat tossed the chimes on the ley shrine, making them jangle in shrill alarm. A smell like burnt cinnamon mixed with a taste like heated honey. The invisible brilliance hinted at by the shimmering purple made her eyes water.
"Be careful." She blinked away tears. "The magic is all around us."
"Even we can see that." Stormsong's shields outlined her in hard, blue radiance. "Your shields, domi."
Yeah, now would be a good time for that.
Tinker set up a resonance with the spell stones and then triggered her shield spell. Once the winds were wrapped around her, she waded up the steps, making sure that she didn't disturb the spell by gesturing.
The padlock had been cut off with a bolt cutter. Her spell hadn't failed; someone had broken in and sabotaged it.
Violet sparkled and shifted in the black of the warehouse, casting patterns of shadows and near light. Tinker couldn't see anything that looked like the black willow. Stormsong tried the lights, but the switch had no effect.
"The flood would have popped the lightbulbs." There was no way Tinker was going in there blind. "Do we have a light?"
"Yes." Pony took out a spell light, closed his left hand tight around the glass orb, and activated it. He played a thin beam of searchlight intensity over the room.
They had left the black willow tied down on pallets. The restraints now lay in tatters. Splinters of wood marked the pallets' destruction. The forklift sat upended like a child's toy. Dead leaves rode convection currents, dancing across the cement floor with a thin, dry skittering noise.
"Where is it?" Tinker whispered.
"I don't see it." Pony's eyes swept the room again.
"Neither do I." Tinker glanced back to the street. Where was Forest Moss? That ground radar thing would come in handy just about now. "Let's turn off the compressor and at least stop this flood."
They moved through the warehouse to the back room. The small windowless room was empty of trees, with only the purring compressor to wreak havoc. A crowbar lay across the metal tracings of her spell, encircled with charring. Odd distortions wavered around the compressor.
Cursing, she started for the breaker box.
"Domi, no!" Stormsong caught her shoulder and stilled her. "Stay here at the door. Let Cloudwalker do it."
"The willow isn't in here." Tinker nevertheless stayed at the door as Stormsong asked while Cloudwalker crossed to the breaker box and cut the power to the compressor. "See, no dan—"
Her only warning was the ominous rustle of leaves, and then the forklift struck her s
hield from behind. She yelped, spinning around to see the forklift rebound back across the warehouse.
"Shields!" Stormsong shouted.
Tinker had let her shields drop in her surprise. She fumbled through the resonance setup as Pony's narrow light played off the suddenly close wizened "face" of the black willow. They had to have walked straight past it, somehow blind to it. It filled the warehouse now, blocking them from the door. It lifted a root-foot and replanted it with a booming sound that shook the floor. Its branches rattled as it blindly felt the confines of the room. A dozen of it's arms encountered the upended forklift, scooped it up again, and flung it at her.
Tinker snapped through the shield spell, already wincing, as the forklift sailed toward her. At the last second the winds wrapped tight around her and the forklift struck the distortion's edge.
"Shit!" Tinker swore as the forklift bounced back across the warehouse to wedge itself sidewises in the far door. "There's no other door, right?"
"No, domi," Pony said.
Tinker wasn't sure whether to be amazed or annoyed that Pony sounded so calm, as if she could pull doorways out of her butt. "Oh damn, oh damn, oh damn. Okay, I know I'm smarter than this tree."
The black willow lifted another root-foot and shook the world as it planted it back down, a few yards closer to them, instantly pulverizing the cement floor, digging roots down into the building's footing.
"But I have some doubts," Tinker admitted, "that brains are going to win over brawn this time."
What did she have to work with? She scanned the room of bare concrete block as the willow stomped ponderously closer. Crowbar. Boom! Compressor. Five sekasha. Five ejae. Boom! Circuit breaker box.
"Stormsong, what do you know about electricity?" Tinker asked the most tech-savvy of her Hand.
"Nothing useful," Stormsong said.
Boom!
"Nothing?" Tinker squeaked.
"It lives in a box in the wall." Stormsong detailed what she knew. "It goes away if you don't pay for it."
Boom!
Right—nothing useful. Scratch having Stormsong rig an electrical weapon. Just as well, good chance they'd just electrocute themselves.
The black willow stretched out its hundreds of whipping branches to scrabble at her shield. Tinker forced herself to scan the room again, and ignore the massive creature trying to reach her.
"The roof! It's only plywood and rubber. See if you can cut through."
The tree found the gap between the top of the tall doorway and her shield. The thin branches pushed through the space, caught hold of the doorjamb, and started to pull.
"Oh, shit!" Tinker cried. "If it makes the door larger, I'm not going to be able to hold it! It's coming in!"
There was a pulse of magic from Forest Moss, instantly defining the Stone Clan elf with Wyverns out by the Rolls, and themselves, pinned inside by the black willow.
"Forest Moss!" Tinker shouted. "Get it off us!"
The concrete walls buckled under the strain, tearing free to leave sawtooth openings, exposing twisted and snapped rebar. The branches flung the debris against the back wall of the warehouse like mad shovels.
"Forest Moss, get it—"
And suddenly the branches wrapped around her, cocooning her shield in living wicker, and lifted her off the ground.
"Domi!" Pony shouted.
The black willow heaved her up. Its branches creaked as it tried to crush her shields down.
Oh please hold! Oh please hold!
A dark orifice opened in the crook where its main limbs branched from it's massive trunk. As the tree tried to stuff her into the fleshy maw, she realized what the opening was.
They have mouths! I wonder if Lain knows that. Oh shit, it's trying to eat me!
Luckily the diameter of her shielding was larger than its mouth. It was trying to fit a golf ball into a beer bottle. She held still and silent, afraid to disrupt her shields. Smell of burnt cinnamon and honey filled her senses, and her vision blurred—the tree fading slightly—even as it repeatedly jammed her up against its mouth.
It has some kind of hallucinogen—that's how we missed it, she thought.
And then the tree flung her through the wall.
The street beyond was a flicker of brightness, and then she plowed through a confusion of small, dim, dusty rooms of an abandoned office building beyond. She felt Forest Moss track her through the building. His power flashed ahead of her, surged through the next building in her flight path, and locked down on all the load-bearing supports.
The white-haired shit was going to pull the building down on her! She'd be buried alive—shields or not!
Dropping her shields, she made a desperate grab for a battered steel desk as she flew over it. She missed the edge and left five contrails across its dusty top. A floor to ceiling window stood beyond the desk. She smashed through the window into open sky.
I'm going to die.
And then Riki caught her, wrapping strong arms around her, and labored upward in a loud rustle of black wings.
"Riki!" She clung to the tengu, heart thudding like a motor about to shake itself apart. Yeah, yeah, she was still pissed at him. She'd let him know that—after he put her down safely.
17: A MURDER OF CROWS
"Stop squirming or I might drop you," Riki growled through teeth gritted with the effort of carrying Tinker aloft.
She glanced down and went still in shock at being dangled midair forty feet up and climbing. "Shouldn't we be going down?"
"Down is good for you—very bad for me."
"Damn it, Riki, my people need me. Put me down!" Tinker found herself gripping his arms so he couldn't just drop her.
"There are so many things wrong with that statement that I don't have breath to explain it all."
Movement at the window she'd smashed out of caught her eye, and with relief she saw Cloudwalker pointing up at her. Moments later Pony and the others joined him at the opening.
"Oh, thank gods," Tinker breathed.
Riki rose above the roofline. The crown of the black willow bristled in the street beyond. Its booming footsteps echoed up from the canyon of buildings. She felt a great surge of magic and a massive fireball suddenly engulfed the tree. Whoa! Apparently Prince True Flame had arrived. No wonder the tengu didn't want to land.
Riki dipped down behind the next building, out of sight of her Hand. Black smoke billowed behind them. He flew straight west—as the saying went, as the crow flies—faster than a man could run despite being weighed down by her. When he reached the Ohio River, he turned and followed its course.
Where the hell was he taking her? It occurred to her that he couldn't have been just passing by and caught her by luck.
"You planned this! You knew if you screwed with my spell, I'd come to fix it."
"Would you believe this had nothing to do with you?"
"No."
"Believe it not, the world does not revolve around Tinker the Great."
How far could Riki fly? Could he keep up this speed, or had that been a sprint? And what did he want with her?
She tried to form a plan to escape. Riki, though, wouldn't underestimate her—he knew her too well. Of all the people in Pittsburgh, he could match wits with her. Her first thought was to force him to drop her into the river. The large dark form of a river shark swimming under the water, following their passage, killed that plan. They followed the Ohio around its gentle bends, and Pittsburgh vanished behind the swell of the surrounding hills. Once the city was out of sight, Riki climbed the steep hill that once was Bellevue and crossed the Rim. There he dove into the ironwoods. The forest canopy rushed toward them, seeming to her a solid wall of green. Riki, though, flicked through openings she hadn't seen, darting through slender upper branches to finally land on a thick bough, close to the massive trunk.
The moment they landed, Tinker twisted in his hold and swung at him hard as she could, aiming for his beaklike nose.
"God damn it!" He caught her hand and twisted h
er arm painfully up behind her back. He leaned his weight against her, pinning her to the trunk. "Just hold still!"
Cheek pressed to the rough gray bark, Tinker saw for the first time how far up the tree they stood—the forest floor lay a hundred feet below. Normally she didn't mind heights—only normally she wasn't this high up with an enemy spy. She stopped struggling, fear trying to climb up out of her stomach. She swallowed down on it—she had to keep her head.
Riki grabbed her right wrist, caught hold of her left, and bound both hands behind her with a thin plastic strap. Once she was bound helpless, he turned her around. He wore war paint—streaks of black under his vivid blue eyes and shock of black hair. His shirt was cut on the same loose lines as the muscle shirt he wore often during her captivity by the oni, made of glossy black scale armor. On his feet, with their odd birdlike toes, he wore silver tips that looked razor-sharp.