"How convenient. Tomtom wants you back. Make no mistake, you're too dangerous for me to let wander back to Windwolf. One false move, and I will kill you."
"You've already lost, Sparrow. I'm the pivot. I've made my choice. There's nothing anyone can do about it."
"You're still thinking like a human," Sparrow tsked. "I've got the rest of time to figure out another way of doing this. The beauty of all this is that I only lose if you live to tell Windwolf what I've done."
Guessing what was coming next, Tinker threw herself sideways, but still Sparrow's bullet smashed into her side, knocking her off her feet in a violent half turn. Pony was suddenly there, catching Tinker before she fell against the stone. He shouted something and Tinker felt magic surge up, rushing like hot floodwaters. The blueness of his magical shields flared around them.
Sparrow's gun thundered again and again, the muzzle spitting flame and smoke.
Tinker felt the bullets strike Pony's shields—expending energy into the system with a hard kick that transmitted through the spell and Pony's body to her—and then ricochet harmlessly away.
When Sparrow hit the end of her clip, Pony drew his oni sword—the steel blade disrupting his shields—and thrust the sword deep into Sparrow's chest. "Die, you traitorous bitch," he growled and shoved it on through her.
Sparrow had cried out when the sword first penetrated her. She looked surprised at the blade buried in her own body, and then concerned as she tried to gasp for breath that wouldn't come. Sparrow slumped backwards against the tent wall even as Pony yanked the sword back out of her chest, her eyes going unfocused. The canvas cradled Sparrow gently, bowing under her falling weight so she slid elegantly downward, leaving a smear of blood on the white canvas.
Tinker stared at the dead elf. She thought she'd be happy to see Sparrow dead, but she could feel no joy in the killing. Maybe she hadn't hated the female as much as she thought.
"Tinker domi! Where did she hit you?"
"In the side." Tinker realized she was holding her side. She lifted up her hand and found it covered with blood. "Oh shit."
Pony sat her back on the stones, activated a light sphere, and examined the wound. "It is not bad. The bullet merely grazed you. I feared the worst; I thought she had killed you."
"I'm still alive and kicking."
"We must stop the bleeding. Then we must get out of here." He took his hands away as if he expected her to topple without his support. When he saw she could actually sit by herself, he went to fetch the abandoned first-aid kit.
"Sparrow came up the left road," Tinker told him when he'd returned. "She probably left the Rolls somewhere close by."
Pony sprayed the wound with a cool antibiotic and then pressed three large artificial skin patches into place. "You need a healing spell."
The kit was human-made, so there would be no spells in it. She was surprised he knew how to use the skin patches, but she supposed that knowing all sorts of first aid would be handy in a bodyguard.
"That looks good," Tinker lied. "Let's go."
Pony raided Sparrow's body for weapons, coming away with a pistol, two clips, a light bow, a quiver of white fletched spell arrows, and a sword and dagger of ironwood, which would allow him to keep his shields up. He left the oni sword where it lay, covered with Sparrow's blood.
Tinker felt light-headed and odd as Pony guided her to the road, saying, "We need to get to the enclaves or the hospice."
The road cut a narrow path through the forest, only twelve feet or so wide. It went straight down to a gorge; wooden scaffolding provided a temporary footbridge across while stone buttresses indicated that the future bridge would be built on an impressive scale. On the other side of the bridge were the enclaves and human civilization gleaming just beyond.
Pony, however, pulled her to a halt, and drew his sword. The shadows moved all around them, and oni warriors merged out of the darkness.
"Oh, fuck," Tinker whispered.
Magic surged in around them as Pony activated his shields, a scant comfort in the face of so many guns pointed their way. How much could the spell stop? Five bullets? Ten?
"I have played lightly with you." Tomtom's voice came out of the night, and he shifted into view directly in front of them, flanked by two of his largest warriors. Gone were the kimono and any pretense of being anything but a large dangerous animal. Spell tattoos covered his skin, starting at his collarbone and flowing downward over muscled thighs and calves. He wore only a loincloth of black silk hung on a diagonal cut from right hip to left shin and a sword belt. Like Chiyo, he had a tail to match the inhuman ears; it flickered behind him in agitation. "My claws are out." He lifted his left hand to show that indeed his claws were extended, showing off three inches of needle-sharp points. "One false step, and I'll content myself with whatever the tengu can do to salvage your work. This is not your battle, female—you are truly human under that skin. You owe them no alliance. My people are crowded and starving while the elves greedily hoard this vast wilderness. We only want what they do not use."
"I'm not going back with you. I'm not going to betray them."
"Submit now, and I will show mercy."
"I've seen your mercy with Chiyo." She was surprised that he was even bothering to talk to her. By oni mentality, she needed to be punished, something she was highly resistant to submitting to. There was no way she'd agree—so why wasn't he just ordering an attack? She glanced to the right at Pony, sword ready, his shields gleaming softly blue like an aura around him.
Of course. Pony's shields sucked down large amounts of ambient magic. On a ley line, he could maintain them indefinitely. Where they stood now, though, it was only a matter of time before the shields drained the area and failed. Tomtom was stalling.
"I gave the kitsune a choice of punishments," Tomtom was saying. "Drop your weapons, surrender yourself, and I will go lightly on you too."
Screw this. Tinker leveled her Uzi, flicked off the safety, and emptied the machine gun at Tomtom. Even as she pulled the trigger, though, the oni lord flicked up his left palm, growling out a spell, and the tattoos along his left arm flared and a haze appeared between them. The bullets spat out of the muzzle of the machine gun, struck the magic barrier, making it flare and, weirdly enough, gleam brighter. She actually felt it sparking up levels with each bullet hit. The bullets didn't pass through, nor ricochet, but instead dropped to the ground, inert. Damn, somehow the oni shield translated the kinetic energy of bullet back into the spell, fueling it.
Too late she thought to spray the warriors to either side of Tomtom; she'd already run through the clip and now worked the trigger to be rewarded only with a series of clicks.
Tomtom pointed at Pony and uttered a word, and then indicated Tinker, and gave a longer command. Tinker didn't need to know Oni to know what he'd said. Kill him, take her alive.
"No!" she shouted as the oni warriors surged forward, some with swords and others with hands outreached.
She tried to reload the Uzi only to have clip and gun wrenched from her hands, and then her arms held and she was lifted off the ground. She screamed wordlessly this time, kicking at the oni holding her, and her legs were caught. Hoisted upwards by the four oni, she saw Pony, shields blazing blue, desperately fending off eight oni warriors with sword and knife.
He was never going to be able to hold them off. They were going to kill him.
"No! No!" she cried, trying to wriggle free of the warriors' hold, but it was like being held by steel bands.
With a deep roaring sound—like an oncoming train—the wind suddenly blasted across the bridge and up the road, pouring over them, strangely hot. Her skin seemed to crawl as all her hair stood on end. She recognized the massive influx of active magic, but there was more—something like static electricity—that rode piggyback upon the magic. Judging by the startled outcries around her, the oni felt it too.
"To me! To me!" Pony shouted and went down to his knees, crossing sword and dagger over his head.
 
; "Pony!" she screamed as he dropped his guard.
With blinding whiteness, lightning struck.
She'd never been this close to lightning before. It split the air with a deafening crack, and the boom of thunder was instantaneous in a wave of heat and pressure that vibrated clear through her bones. It was there, and then not there, but its brilliance remained burned into her sight. The bolt had splintered, forking all around Pony, striking the eight oni attacking him. The warriors flew backward to land dead—blackened and smoking from the lightning.
It seemed an impossible miracle, and then she realized the truth.
Windwolf had arrived, summoning the magic of the Wind Clan spell stones to call down lightning.
Pony came off the ground now, blades flashing, and launched himself at the oni holding Tinker. Tinker struggled harder to get free, cursing at her captors. Tomtom shouted in Oni, pointing toward the bridge, correctly identifying which of the three elves was the most dangerous. Another lightning bolt hit close at hand, striking into a knot of oni warriors attempting to attack Pony from the rear.
Two of the oni holding her decided to face Pony rather than die keeping her captive—and a hard kick into the face of the third left her dangling in one warrior's hold. There was a knife in his belt; she yanked it free and stabbed him in the stomach with it. The blade slid in to the hilt with stunning ease, and blood poured hot over her hand. The oni howled and punched her in the face.
Darkness washed in, and when it retreated Pony had her over his shoulder and was running for the bridge.
Had they won?
The crack of rifles and whine of bullets verified that no, they hadn't.
Lightning struck—and as it flashed all vision to white—Pony stumbled and fell. It seemed as if he'd tripped over something. He started to fall to the left, which would have smashed Tinker under him. He dropped his sword, tucked her close, and rolled in mid-air to hit his right shoulder first. They tumbled through the mud of the road, Pony taking the brunt of the damage, as he protected her with his own body. They stopped when Pony slammed against the stone abutment at the end of the bridge.
As Pony lay unmoving, Tinker glanced back toward the pursuing oni.
She had one glimpse of Tomtom standing approximately where Pony had stumbled, a vicious grin on his face, before the oni lord stepped back into the shadows, completely vanishing from sight. She flashed to his first appearance on the road, he and his guard suddenly appearing as if teleporting. How was he doing it? Was he actually teleporting? Was he going invisible? Or like Chiyo, was he projecting what he wanted them to see into their minds?
Maybe the reason Chiyo had been so sure she could become a noble was because Tomtom had the same talents.
"Tinker?"
Windwolf still had his great sword sheathed, and he moved down the bridge in a stylistic stalk, like dancing in slow motion. She could feel the power he had gathered around him, the wind thrumming in his hold. He wore black leather pants, and a white silk shirt that blazed in the moonlight like a target. His long black hair was unbound, and it flowed out on the wind.
Of the sekasha, there was no sign. He was all alone.
"Is Pony alive?" His voice was quiet but loud, like a whisper over a microphone.
Pony was breathing, so Tinker said, "He's unconscious."
"Get him up," Windwolf commanded. "Get him to the other end of the bridge. The others are coming."
Tinker glanced down at the still unmoving Pony, a foot taller and easily fifty pounds heavier than her. How the hell did she move him? And where was Tomtom? What could the oni lord do—especially if he could throw illusions into Windwolf's mind?
Pony had dropped his sword, but he had other weapons on him. The guns were useless; the bullets would only feed energy into Tomtom's shield—assuming that wasn't an illusion. The knives placed her too near the much larger and better-trained oni. That left Sparrow's light bow and spell arrows. The arrows were all fletched white, which meant the same spell was marked onto the shaft and activated by the sound of the arrows' flight.
As Tomtom surely planned, Windwolf moved to the end of the bridge to cover her and Pony. He spoke a word, shifting his right hand with fingers cocked in stiff positions, and his shield extended out to cover the full end of the bridge.
"Go! Leave Pony if you have to." Windwolf commanded as the oni opened fire from the cover of the trees. The bullets deflected off his shield, but Tomtom could walk through it.
She didn't spend the last three weeks protecting Pony to leave him now, not even to save Windwolf. Tinker nocked an arrow—and looked for the factors of 73931. She could keep Chiyo from reading her mind by doing math, but that hadn't kept Chiyo from deluding her. She'd foiled Chiyo by noticing something that the kitsune had forgotten to disguise. Surely if Tomtom had two people to affect, there would be something he'd overlook, but what? The darkness itself would erase most of his errors. She lifted the bow, drew back the arrow, and tried to find a target.
"Tinker, what are you doing?" Windwolf growled.
"Trust me."
I can outthink him. I know I can.
Tomtom could fool her eyes. The gunfire covered his footsteps. What would he miss? His shadow? His smell?
Then it came to her—Tomtom would never think of hiding magic from a domana, since he couldn't feel magic himself—and she focused on the active magic in the area. There, passing through Windwolf's shields and nearly on him, was Tomtom's own shield spell.
She guessed the location of Tomtom's heart and loosed the arrow. As the arrow leapt from her bow, its whistling passage through the wind activated the spell written down its shaft; the kinetic energy of its physical form was transmuted into coherent light—a bolt of pure energy. There was a faint ripple as it passed through Tomtom's shield spell—apparently designed only for solid projectiles. Then it lanced its way through the oni lord, and he appeared with a gurgling scream. He was only six feet from Windwolf, sword upraised and ready to strike—with a neat hole burned through the right side of his chest.
Windwolf shouted, lifted his arm straight out, fingers splayed. The wind slammed Tomtom backwards thirty feet. Windwolf growled a spell to summon another bolt of lightning, moving his hands in interweaving circles, his fingers flicking through complex patterns. The brilliance struck Tomtom as the oni lord started to rise.
He didn't get up again.
There was a sweep of headlights on the far side of the bridge, and the sekasha spilled out of two of the Rolls and charged across the bridge.
Windwolf flinging lightning bolts, the arrival of the sekasha, and their own lord dead made the oni flee into the forest. The sekasha met no resistance as they passed beyond Windwolf's protection. Only when the sekasha had set up a line of defense did Windwolf loose his hold on the magic, letting it drain away.
He triggered a light orb as he walked to her, bathing them in light. People surrounded them, but he seemed to be the only one in focus.
"You're alive! My most wonderful, clever, little savage!" He lightly traced her face. She'd never seen him smile so widely. He blinked away a threat of tears, and glanced toward the waiting sekasha. "I must go and fight, but I will be back."
"Kiss me at least once," she complained.
"If I start, I will not be able to stop."
"Bullshit." She grabbed hold of his collar and pulled him down to her level.
He hadn't been exaggerating. Someone had to catch the light orb—he let it fall in order to crush her to him—and she had to finally push him breathlessly away after the third "dame zae, the oni" from the sekasha.
"Go," she said. "Deal with oni. Come back to me."
He kissed her fingertips and reluctantly left to chase after oni. Tinker slumped down beside Pony, quite willing to let them fight without her.
"Domi?" Pony croaked.
"Oh good." She took his hand. "You're awake."
"Yes." He frowned as she checked his attempt to get up. "Is it over? Did we win?"
"Yes, we've wo
n."
Hospice elves arrived, first-aid kits in hand. "Domi, are you hurt?"
"No, no, see to him first," Tinker lied, motioning to Pony.
There were, however, more than enough healers to treat them both. One inked a healing spell onto her side and triggered it while the rest dealt with Pony. In the desperate fight, he'd been hit more times than she realized. As the healers stabilized him, enclave elves moved into the forest to deal with the oni dead.
Sparrow's body was found and carried to the enclaves, along with news of her betrayal. Apparently in an effort to keep searchers from the Turtle Creek area, the female had planted evidence in the South Hills: articles of Tinker's clothing, items from Tinker's pockets, Pony's beads, scraps of paper with Tinker's handwriting. Windwolf and his forces had been at the farthest point in Pittsburgh from Tinker when she escaped, but the reports of gunfire at the construction site had brought Windwolf literally flying back, out ahead of his bodyguard, to save her.
The fighting had now moved far off, heading back toward Turtle Creek; Tinker could track it from the sound of gunfire and the occasional bright strokes of lightning.
That is so cool. "I'm really going to have to learn how to do that."
Or did she? Now that she was once again still, she could feel the feedback, definitely stronger. According to the models she ran, the orbital gate would soon shake itself to pieces, permanently returning Pittsburgh to Earth.
Which world did she want to be in?
Earth? With Oilcan, Lain, all the neat gadgets, the Internet, colleges full of like-minded people, and the possibility of returning to Elfhome anytime she decided to build a gate back?
Or Elfhome? With Windwolf and Pony, but no humans or techno toys, and the grim possibility that even if she could find the supplies, she might be denied the permission to build a gate back to Earth?
On the surface, all logic seemed to say that she should get up and walk into Pittsburgh proper before Shutdown. Go back to Earth.
But it wasn't that simple. In truth, she'd never been to Earth. Every Shutdown, she'd clung to her scrap yard and waited for Startup. She disliked the dirty air, the noise, the confusion, and the crush of people that Shutdown brought to Pittsburgh. Oilcan—who knew her best—predicted she'd hate Earth for those very reasons. It was a foreign other place she always resisted visiting.