Tinker held her cold fury close as they drove back to the train station in the Rolls, the smell of the pits clinging to her dress. She stalked into the building, wishing for the thousandth time that day that she could fling tanks around with a word and a gesture.
The handful of elves that ran the station came to a halt of the sight of her and the sekasha.
“Which one did my cousin talk to?” Tinker growled.
“This one.” Thorne Scratch pointed out one of the male Wind Clan elves.
The male flinched back as Tinker bore down on him.
“You saw children get off the train and you did nothing to help them?” Tinker asked.
“Domi, they were not of my clan.” He said it as if it were a reasonable answer.
“They were children! You knew they were children—didn’t you?”
“Yes, domi,” the male said quietly, apparently still missing the point.
“You know that we’re at war with the oni. That the oni will kill and torture anyone they find unprotected.”
The light finally went on; it lit up a sign that read She’s Angry About Something. He started to look worried. “Yes, domi.”
“And you just let them go?”
If she weren’t so angry it would almost funny to watch him realize that telling the truth was going to screw him over, and yet, as an elf, he was unable to lie. “Domi—I—I—I did not care what happened to them.”
The last person that gotten her this angry, she’d beaten with a crowbar. She clenched her hands tight on the desire to beat the elf to a pulp. “Get out.”
“Domi?” The male glanced at the various doors, unsure which direction she wanted him to go.
“Go home, pack your bags, and get out of Pittsburgh,” Tinker snapped. “I won’t have you in the Westernlands. I don’t want your kind—so blind in your petty hate that you bring down poison on a child that you don’t even know.”
“Domi! Please. My household is here.”
“I don’t care!” She thrust her hand in the direction of the whelping pens and the ironwood forest beyond it. “Be glad that I don’t stake you out in the forest for whatever finds you! Be glad I don’t let you be raped by the oni, beaten senseless, and then eaten! Be glad that I have more morals than you!”
The elf had gone completely ashen. “Yes, domi.”
“Get out! Now!” Tinker shouted.
He bowed and fled.
She turned toward the other Wind Clan elves that were standing, listening, mouths open. “If anyone allows harm to come to another child—be it human or Stone Clan or tengu—I don’t care what it is—if anyone allows harm to come to another child, I’ll see them gone!”
She was still shaking in anger as she stormed out of the train station. It wasn’t until she reached the Rolls that she realized that she just assumed she had the power to kick an elf out of Westernlands.
“I can do that—can’t I?” she asked Pony. “I can tell him to go?”
“Yes, domi, you can, and considering we are at war with the oni, it was wise that you made an example of him.”
7: LULLABY OF STONE
Oilcan heard the wailing first. It was a thin, horrible sound. He followed it back through the hospice to where a Wyvern stood staring at a small quivering heap of filthy rags on the floor. It took him a minute to realize that the thing was an elf crying hysterically.
“Why isn’t he being taken care of?” Oilcan asked the Wyvern.
“The hospice staff is busy with the others,” the royal sekasha said. “This male is not badly hurt.”
The Wyvern used the male gender that indicated a child. Was this Rustle of Leaves? Or was it another child, and the musician was one of the ones that died? Either way, the child would stay hysterical until cleaned, fed, and comforted. The Wyvern stood looking at the child, dismayed but seemingly helpless.
“There’s a bathing room in the other wing,” Oilcan said.
The Wyvern gave him the closest thing to a “deer in the headlights” look he’d ever seen on a sekasha. Apparently childcare was not part of the warrior’s training.
“Can you take responsibility for him?” the sekasha asked.
Saying “yes” might mean something beyond just bathing the child. Oilcan glanced to Merry, who was clinging to the doorframe as if it were the only thing that kept her from bolting. This is what could have happened to her—or worse—if Oilcan hadn’t spotted her at the train station and taken her into his protection.
What was one more kid? He did have another spare bedroom in his condo.
“Yes,” Oilcan said. “I can.”
The sekasha bowed slightly but then asked doubtfully, “Will you be able to carry him?”
Oilcan checked an automatic “Yes” to consider. He’d have to get the double halfway across the hospice, through several sets of doors. The double was smaller than him, but not by much. “Could you please carry him to the bathing room?”
The child started to keen louder the moment the sekasha lifted him up. The sekasha stoically ignored the wailing and followed Oilcan down the hall.
At the start of the summer, the hospice had been a strange, unknown place. Oilcan had barely known where it even lay beyond the enclaves. Since delivering a wounded Windwolf to the hospice just before Mid-Summer’s Eve, Oilcan had been back many times, visiting Tinker as she recovered from one mishap after another. By now, he knew the hospice well. The bathing room was huge, tiled in soothing shades of blue. There were hand showers to scrub off dirt before climbing—already clean—into a soaking tub large enough to fit a football team.
The sekasha settled the double onto the floor and backed off.
“Hush, hush.” Oilcan carefully stripped the remains of clothes ripped into shreds and soaked with dirt, blood, urine, and feces. Under the filthy rags were massive bruises and dirt-crusted wounds. The oni had cropped the double’s hair so short there were nicks from the knife they’d used. Excrement had been ground into the stubble as added insult. The boy’s nose been broken, and both his eyes were swollen shut. Blood leaked from his nose as he cried.
“You’re safe now. You’re safe.” Oilcan felt so helpless. What could he possibly do to make things right? The poor thing had merely walked out of the train station and into a nightmare.
. . . his mother lay so still on the kitchen floor, his father slowly crumbled down, arms outstretched, wailing in denial of what he’d done . . .
There were things that nothing could make right. They stayed hidden as black holes inside of you. You went on the best you could, pretending everything was fine.
“Gold is the light that scythes the hay, dusk softens the edge of day.” Oilcan crooned softly the Elvish song his mother used to sing to him. “Lavender and lilly sweeten the sky, nightingale warbles a lullaby.”
The little male leaned against him and went silent. Singing softly, Oilcan worked at washing away the filth. A river of muddy water ran from the child to the drain. It was difficult to keep singing and scrub. He was aware that the Wyvern had left and felt weirdly abandoned.
Merry came to sit beside him and sing. “Quicksilver shadows pierce the dark, starflash fireflies blaze and spark. Moonbeams soothe the fractured night. Sleep and dream, close your eyes.”
So they sang and washed the double. When the water finally ran clean, Oilcan lifted the male into the soaking tub. Merry surprised him by suddenly stripping down and climbing into the tub, too. He supposed that the point of a swimming pool–sized tub was joint bathing, but he hadn’t totally considered the implication.
Once in, Merry turned pleading eyes on him. “Sama?”
Oilcan sighed. In for a penny, in for a pound. Since much of the double’s filth had rubbed off on him, he could use a bath. He stripped down, sluiced the dirt off, and climbed in.
8: ON THE NOSE
There were a million things that needed Tommy’s attention if the races were to happen. He worked out how much of the seed money had to go to operating expenses and how much c
ould be risked in betting. He would need to pay wages, stock the food concessions, and put aside tax money. True, he’d double his amount with the admission fees, but the money had to be spent up front first. Lastly, some cash had to be spent immediately so that various families didn’t starve before race day. The entrance fees more than covered the purse money for the winners, so that money didn’t need to be held in reserve. He set the starting odds, downloaded the spreadsheet to his datapad, and made sure his cousins’ phones all worked.
“Remember, your cap is five hundred.” Tommy paced the room. “Anything above that, call me first. We have to watch our bottom line closely on this one, so call in after every bet. The elves are jumpy; keep your guns out of sight. Watch your back. Remember that the oni are still out there loose.”
“Danny. Yoyo. Zippo. Quinn.” He tapped the chests of the teenagers as he passed them. “You’re to guard the warren. If the elves know where we are, the oni might too. They might raid us for food, money, and sex. Call Bingo if you see anyone suspicious. He’ll be stationed closest to the warren. If you’re raided, don’t give them any reason to kill you.
“This is just like before—only this time, we’re doing it for ourselves.”
* * *
All day his phone rang, giving Tommy a constant barometer of Pittsburgh to be entered into his spreadsheets. True, there were some names he recognized as die-hard gamblers. They carefully weighed the odds, dispassionate in their choices. The rest of the city, however, bet with their hearts.
The elves bet on Blue Sky without exception. They believed the holy sekasha-caste were perfection made flesh, and having seen the half-elf race, Tommy wasn’t sure if he’d quibble with that.
The human population splintered into a multitude of factions. The younger crowd that thought of Elfhome as their world bet on Team Tinker or Team Big Sky. John’s team had the most recent wins, their custom-modified Delta hoverbike, and their “perfect” rider. Team Tinker was still a strong contender even though Oilcan wasn’t as aggressive a rider as Tinker used to be. Team Tinker had the experience and the only other Delta. While the team was all humans, Tinker had been magically transformed into an elf and was now married to Windwolf, which tainted the team through association.
The older humans didn’t bet on either of the top two teams. They saw Pittsburgh as still a city of Earth and men. They supported the underdogs. Then under that, came bets on teams connected to certain political ideology, or someone just had a lucky feeling for, but those were usually only to place, not to win.
He was out at the racetrack when he realized that his phone had stopped ringing. He took it out and checked on the signal strength. “Trixie, is your phone working?” he asked the half-oni in charge of the food concessions.
She took hers out and glanced at it. “Huh, no signal.”
He went up to the track office and picked up the landline. It was dead, too.
Trixie had followed him. “What do you think it is?”
“The oni might be attacking town.” He swore. “Last thing we need is to have the elves slap martial law back on.”
“Well, we’ll be eating hotdogs for the next two weeks.”
He picked up the microphone to the racetrack’s PA system. “I’m heading into town. Do we need anything out here?”
There was a call from somewhere near the concession booths.
“What was that?” Trixie’s hearing was as human as her ears appeared.
“Toilet paper.” Tommy tied his bandana back into place and headed out to his hoverbike.
* * *
“I’ve been trying to call you.” Babe held out a list of bets.
“All the phones are down.” Tommy entered the information into his spreadsheet. Babe had only taken four bets, one at the five hundred dollar cap for Team Providence to win. It was a fairly new team made up of tengu, having only run a half-dozen races and never even placed. None of Tommy’s information suggested that they could pull a win off. They were such a long shot that the large bet required an immediate adjustment to the odds. “Shit, what a hell of a time for the phones to go down.”
He didn’t recognize the name: Kenji Toshihiko. Most the Japanese in town, though, were part of the tengu. “I don’t like this taking bets blind. Spread the word: I’m closing the books.”
Doug had a five hundred bet for Team Providence. And Syn, too. Tommy swore and ran numbers right there. If all of his cousins had taken bets at their cap, locking in the same long-shot odds, and Team Providence won, then he and his family were going to be royally screwed. Not only did it take out all the money they’d set aside to cover the bets, it would also eat up all the money that the race would bring in with admissions.
He checked his phone. It was still dead.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” Tommy punched Syn in fury.
“We’ll just call the bets off.” Syn scrambled out of the way of a kick.
“We can’t!” Tommy shouted. “The fucking anal elves and their frigging honor! A bet is a promise to them! If we welshed on the bets, they’d be all over our asses because they know we’re half-oni!”
“Someone is suckering us!”
“Don’t you think that I know that? I’m going to fucking find them and kill them. Spread the word. No more bets!”
* * *
Whoever planned the strike against them had done it with great precision. It had only taken an hour to close down the books, but the damage had already been done. Twenty bets, all at cap, all made within minutes of the phones going dead. Ten thousand dollars, with a payoff of half a million dollars.
“The bets are to win,” Bingo pointed out as they gathered at the warren.
“Because to show and place gave lower odds,” Tommy snapped.
“How the hell do they expect Team Providence to win?” Bingo said. “Team Big Sky was creaming everyone before the elves locked the city down. And there’s Team Tinker and Team Banzai and Team Eh?”
Tommy had talked to all the teams. They assured him that they were all racing. Some of them might have been lying, in on the scam, but not Team Tinker or Team Big Sky. They were tied too closely to the honorable elves to cheat, and they were the favorites to win. “Whoever the hell they are, they’ve got something else planned, then. They’re going to cheat somehow. We’ve got to find out how.”
9: THORNE SCRATCH
Oilcan had washed four battered souls, seen that they were dressed in simple gowns, fed, drugged, and put to bed. He was trying to determine his obligations to them when Thorne Scratch found him.
“Take the children and go home,” she said.
Her command was fairly clear, but still he said, “I don’t understand.”
“The children cannot stay here. Take them and go.”
“Why can’t they stay? Is the staff trying to throw them out? Tinker won’t allow—”
“The Wind Clan is not the problem,” Thorne said. “Forest Moss has learned of the children. He will be here shortly to claim them. He cannot be allowed to take them. Take the children and go.”
He sat down mostly because his knees suddenly didn’t want to support him. “I—I don’t know—all of them?”
Thorne went to her knees in front of him and caught his hands tightly. “Please. He is mad. If the oni did not drive him mad with their torture, then nearly three hundred years of isolation has. He is desperate for physical contact. The prince has given Forest Moss only male Wyverns to guard him, and he has pressed his suit on them. None of Ginger Wine’s staff will be in a room with him with good cause—his actions are as close to rape as they can come and not be worthy of charges. Within an hour of Earth Son’s death, he tried to corner even me. These children cannot be given over to him, not after what they’ve been through.”
“Can’t we just tell him no?”
“He’s domana. If he comes prepared for a fight, then only Wolf Who Rules and Prince True Flame could stop him. The viceroy has no grounds to deny Forest Moss access to the children, since they a
re Stone Clan and the prince would sacrifice them to keep the peace.”
What the hell was he going to do with five children, four of which had just been dragged through hell? But she was right—he couldn’t give them to Forest Moss. They were more than a head count to him now. They were the emotionally fragile Fields of Barley, little Baby Duck, who no longer knew her real name and nervously quacked, Rustle of Leaves, who only cared that Merry hadn’t been captured despite the fact the oni shattered the young musician’s left arm, and stoic Cattail Reeds. Oilcan knew their names and faces, had seen the breadth and width of their strengths and weaknesses. Even Fields of Barley, once he stopped crying, had shown incredible resiliency, but none of them would be able to deal with an adult male demanding intimacy from them.
“Okay. I’ll take them home.” It was a big city. It was unlikely Forest Moss would be able to find him—but the elf did have magic. “How long do I need to keep the kids hidden from Forest Moss?”
“Once they wake and have the situation explained to them, they can choose what to do. If they decide to stay with you, they’ll be safe from him. The Wyverns will not allow a holding to be broken by an outsider.”
“Even if I’m human?”
“A precedent must be set and protected if humans are to be part of our society.”
Knowing that she wasn’t lying to him didn’t help; he also knew that people often deceived themselves into believing they were telling the truth.
* * *
Moving the children was surreal. They had been dosed with saijin, so all but Merry were asleep beyond waking. The staff lined the back of his pickup truck with mattresses and then tucked the sleeping children in like a litter of kittens. Thorne rode in the back to his condo and then helped him move both children and mattresses into the spare bedrooms. While he knew that he was doing it for the good of the children, it felt horribly wrong to snatch them out of the hospice and take them unawares to his home.