Ming the Merciless, obviously.
Did that mean that Ming was the Flying Monkeys’ father? There had been a family resemblance between all the males.
“Do you surf?” Iggy asked.
Tristan shook his head. “Apparently Scandinavians are great boaters and ice skaters but as swimmers, we suck. I stuck to skateboarding.”
It was agreed that skateboarding was cool, too, most likely because almost everyone had some experience with it. Even Jillian and Louise had done their share of collecting bruises.
“You don’t look French,” Jillian said in a very Peter tone.
“Ah, yes, the eyes.” Tristan vaguely motioned to his eyes, which had an epicanthic fold. “My family were originally Sami, it’s a small tribe of indigenous people of Scandinavia. We were in France only long enough to pick up a French name. My father moved to New York before I was born.”
Only the very last part sounded like the truth.
“So where do you live?” Iggy asked.
“I’ve got a condo in Queens.”
He had used “I” again. Did that mean he lived there alone? Surely someone who was nine years old didn’t live alone. Or did it mean he wasn’t actually nine?
* * *
Nikola blinked at them when they opened their locker. “We found them.”
“Shh.” Louise petted him. She felt guilty. She hadn’t checked her texts, since Tristan seemed to be watching them like a hawk. “Don’t talk until we say it’s safe.”
He nodded.
With heart hammering in her chest, she and Jillian walked out with Nikola tucked between them.
Tristan was doing a bad job of pretending that he wasn’t waiting for them at the front door. “A nanny-bot?”
“Yes,” Louise growled.
“I guess no one is picking you up, either.” Tristan waved to the line of luxury cars that were picking up the other students.
“We have Tesla.” Louise gripped the leash tightly.
Tristan pressed a hand to his chest. “I feel safer already.”
They attempted to hurry down the street toward the subway station, but he fell into step with them.
“What are you doing?” Louise snapped.
“I’m going home,” Tristan said. “I was afraid I was going to have to go all alone, so I’m glad that I can go with you.”
Louise stopped and faced him. “What?”
“We all live in Astoria.” He smirked. “So I can go home with you. It’s much safer that way.”
They walked to the subway station in tense silence. The twins had the excuse that they were shy, but that would only work for so long. They should find something safe to talk about. Something like school. Or him.
“What do your parents do?” Louise tentatively went down the safest route once they boarded the train and found seats.
“Oh. My mother is a fortune-teller. My father is a king in exile.”
“What?” the twins both asked.
Tristan laughed. “Well, that’s the cool way to put what they do. My mother is a hedge-fund manager. It means she guesses the future and invests in it. She’s very good at it.”
“And your father? The king?” Somehow that rang very true.
“He’s very, very rich, so he really doesn’t do anything at all, except collect people that make him richer and more powerful. People like my mother.”
“What country was your father king of?” Jillian asked.
“Nailau Peshyosa. It’s changed its name since he was forced out. And he wasn’t the king per se. He was Aumvoutui. King is a whole lot cooler sounding.”
Louise leaned down to mess with her shoelaces to hide her face. She recognized the name Nailau Peshyosa. It was ancient Elvish for the Inner Sea or the Mediterranean Sea. Ashfall had been Queen Soulful’s father and the first king of the elves. When he was crowned, the name was changed—over two thousand years ago.
She swallowed hard as she suddenly realized that Tristan looked the same in his photograph that Esme had left for them eighteen years earlier. He’d looked nine years old in the picture and he still looked nine now.
He wasn’t human.
She took a deep breath, fighting to stay calm. He could be lying about his father being a deposed elvish king. But why would he pick such a set of lies? Or had they been able to convince him that they were nothing but normal fifth-graders? Was this some kind of elaborate final test? To see if they reacted to the obscure names that only elves would know?
No matter what he thought they were, the fact remained that he wasn’t human.
Was he an elf?
Elves might be immortal, but they were born infants and needed to grow up first, just a lot slower than humans did. It took elves a hundred years before they could reach the physical maturity of a human eighteen-year-old. It meant at thirty-something they would be like an eight-year-old and at fifty they would be like a nine-year-old. There wasn’t a big difference between eight and nine.
So he was a young elf born approximately fifty years ago. The photograph would have been taken when he was in his thirties. If his father was an exiled “king,” then maybe it was why Esme had used the name Ming the Merciless. Ming was an emperor, which was kind of like a king.
It seemed as if Louise’s life was going to stay strange and impossible to guess.
Louise straightened up to study Tristan. Sunlight and shadows passed over his face as the train carried them toward home. Except for the slight almond shape to his eyes, and the fact that he should be really old, there were no real indications that he was an elf. His ears looked as round as hers.
“What?” He actually seemed leery of her.
“What year were you born in?”
“Same as you.”
Louise shook her head. “It depends if your birthday is in the spring or in the fall.”
He had to do the math. He did it fast, but he had to think. “Twenty-twenty-two.”
Most kids said it two-two or twenty-two.
“Ah, spring birthday.” Because fall birthdays would make him a fourth-grader now. “Are you Water Tiger or Earth Monkey?”
“What?”
“Chinese New Year starts in February. You’re either a Tiger or Monkey.” She lied, since Ox fell before Tiger.
“I—I never paid attention to that,” he stated. “What are you?”
“We are Tigers. We’re lucky and brave, but we can’t pass up a challenge, especially when honor is at stake or when we’re protecting the people we love.”
“Ah, I must be a Monkey then. I was born in January.”
She hadn’t told him on what side of the divide she and Jillian fell. He knew their birthday. She tried not to feel like this was the most frightening thing she had ever stumbled across. Wait—he’d known that they lived in Astoria, too. She wanted to run screaming, but they still had a long way to go. They were only now pulling into Queensboro Plaza.
Luckily some boys got on, loud and smelling of alcohol, and he focused fiercely on them.
* * *
The twins collapsed in the front hall in a quivering heap when they got home.
“I can’t believe this!” Jillian cried. “This is horrible!”
“Why can’t we talk to people?” Nikola whimpered. “Or at least, why can we talk to some people and not others? What’s the point of being able to talk if not to do it?”
Joy somehow escaped Tesla’s storage compartment to bounce on Louise’s stomach. “No! No! Food first! Joy was good. Feed Joy!”
“Okay!” Louise cried. “Okay! Food and talk!”
Since Jillian seemed even more stressed by the events, Louise took charge of Joy’s feeding. They had moved the growing supply of cat food to the back of the drawer of baking supplies since their mother rarely had time to actually bake. Joy bounced impatiently in place, clapping her hands as Louise opened the can.
Nikola stood and watched the process, his size putting him nearly level with the counter. “We don’t understand why Tristan said
he was born in 2022. He wasn’t. Why he would say that? He didn’t even like saying it; he found it very stressful.”
“How can you tell?” Jillian asked.
“His breathing changed and his heartbeat went up.”
“Nom, nom, nom.” Joy shoveled in the cat food, dribbling it everywhere. They’d forgotten the paper towels, so Louise scooped up baby dragon and can and carried them both to the sink.
“Louise!” Jillian cried. “It’s all over the floor now. Nikola, don’t walk in it!”
Nikola looked at his paw and then shook it through the micro-tremor clean cycle.
Louise sighed as Jillian shrieked. How were they going to keep Nikola and Joy hidden from everyone? It was all becoming overwhelming. It was one thing when it was just their parents and the punishment for being discovered the loss of Internet and other privileges. It seemed like a logic puzzle without a solution. They couldn’t go to school without Tesla standing guard. The nactka didn’t need magic to keep the embryos frozen; they had made several test runs with ice prior to robbing the clinic. What the lack of magic would do to Nikola mentally, they were loath to find out. They had discovered by accident that moving the nactka and generator out of the Tesla body, however, made Nikola blind, mute, deaf and paralyzed. Needless to say, none of them wanted to deprive him of his “body.”
They had the second generator but its battery pack needed to be charged during the day while they were at school. They could make another battery pack—actually they should, just so they had a spare—but they couldn’t finish it and have it fully charged by tomorrow morning. The twins weren’t sure what would happen if they separated Joy from the generator for any length of time. The baby dragon refused to cooperate in any experiments. It was possible that the lack of magic would kill her, so they didn’t force her. Also a plan of leaving Joy home alone had “bad idea” written all over it.
So they were stuck with the foursome: Nikola and Tesla, Joy and the generator.
With Flying Monkey Five in their classroom, taking all four to school seemed like a recipe for disaster.
“Please listen to us.” Nikola pressed up against Louise. “We’ve waited all day to speak with you. Please let us talk!”
“Okay, we’re listening.”
Nikola opened his mouth and then stood there a moment. Finally he admitted in a quiet little voice, “We don’t know where to start.”
“What is Tristan’s real name? It’s not Flying Monkey Five. No one names their kid that.”
“We’re not sure. When he was born, he was given the name of Tristan Jacques Desmarais, but if we understand names correctly, that’s his real name. Maybe. His father’s name is listed as Edmond Desmarais and that’s not his father’s real name, so Desmarais can’t be his real-real name. Right?”
“Wait. Desmarais? He’s Anna Desmarais’ son?”
He nodded. “Here. We’ll show you.” He looked toward the new kitchen television, and it clicked on. A sepia photograph of Ming the Merciless scowled down at them. “This is the earliest photo I could find of Ming. At that time he was known as Pruet Lalumiere. It is dated April 16, 1853.”
“Ming is an elf?” Jillian cried in surprise as Nikola flashed more photos of Ming on the screen. “Whoa, slower, we can’t see that fast!”
“Sorry.” Nikola slowed down to a few seconds per photo. Nearly too fast to follow except that they were all of Ming, unsmiling, in old-fashioned clothes. After the first one or two photos, which seemed to be portraits, the following pictures were candid shots where Ming barely seemed to realize he was being photographed. Horses were replaced by Model T Fords and then color slowly leached in. The time between the photos grew longer, as if he became more and more cautious of having his picture taken. As an elf stuck on Earth, he most likely didn’t want proof that he was immortal just lying around.
“I think Ming is an elf king exiled from Elfhome,” Louise said. “I think that Tristan was telling the truth about his father. He just didn’t expect us to take him seriously.”
“Weird. Why would he do that?”
“Tristan is an elf.” Louise pointed out what she’d realized on the train to support that. “And elves don’t lie.”
“It’s socially frowned upon,” Jillian grumbled. “It doesn’t mean they can’t. It’s just extremely dishonorable to lie.”
“If we were normal kids, we wouldn’t have believed what he said, so it’s fairly safe to tell us the truth.”
“But if he thinks we’re normal kids, why is he at our school?”
“I don’t know.” The obvious answer was that Anna Desmarais had sent him there. But why?
“I could only find four photographs of Crown Prince Kiss Butt. His name is listed as Yves Desmarais.” Nikola flashed through the pictures on fast-forward.
Yves? As in the man who’d ordered Alexander kidnapped and Windwolf killed? If Ming was the exiled ruler of the elves, then that would make sense. The crown prince had met with his father’s still-loyal subjects to pass on orders. As viceroy, Windwolf represented Queen Soulful Ember’s presence in Pittsburgh. Not only would Windwolf report any troop movements, he had the power to reduce them to slag. If the twins’ research was correct, then there weren’t any other domana-caste elves in Pittsburgh.
“Wait!” Jillian cried. “Back up to the second photo!” The picture showed a collection of people, all unaware of the camera as they stared at something horrific. Only Yves seemed unaffected by whatever they were looking at. Jillian pointed at a woman with both hands covering her mouth. “That’s Esme!”
Nikola tilted his head as he chased info down on the Internet. “Yes, that’s Esme Shenske. Anna Desmarais is her mother.”
“What?” Jillian and Louise both shouted.
Nikola cringed away. “Anna Desmarais is Esme Shenske’s mother.”
“Oh my God, she’s our grandmother?” Jillian and Louise both cried.
Nikola gave a complete report. “Anna Cohan married Neil Shenske and had two daughters, Lain and Esme. Eight months after Neil was killed, she married Edmond Desmarais and had two sons, Lucien and Tristan.”
“Flying Monkeys Four and Five.” Louise ticked them off on her fingers. “Crown Prince Kiss Butt—Yves—was child one. Lain and Esme are two and three. Their little half brothers were four and five.”
“Oh geez, we’ve been going nuts trying to figure this out, and it’s been her family all along.” Jillian gave a scream and waved her hands over her head. “What the hell? Why didn’t she just put their names on the photos?”
“Because Edmond Desmarais isn’t Ming’s real name any more than Ming is.” Louise paced as her stomach churned. “We know Tristan is the baby of the family, and Esme left eighteen years ago. She might have assumed he would grow up. If we hadn’t recognized him from his photo, we certainly wouldn’t be able to identify him by the name he gave us. The obviously fake name of Flying Monkey Five forced us to do an extensive search.”
Jillian growled. “I still say it was a stupid way of warning us! Her way didn’t do any good at all. He’s in our class! He followed us home! He knows where we live now.”
“He knew before he got on the train,” Louise said. “Remember? He knew we were going to Astoria. And he knows what our birthday is.”
Jillian eyes went wide. “Really?”
Louise bit her bottom lip while trying to remember everything their mother ever told them about Anna Desmarais. In the light of this new information, things looked strangely different. “Oh. Oh. Oh shit.”
“What?”
“Anna kept going on and on about Mom stealing something from her. She tore Mom’s offices apart trying to find what Mom took from her. What Mom stole was us! Anna knows, and she wants us back.”
“How could she know?” Jillian cried. “We erased all the records.”
Louise squinted as she watched Joy stuff handfuls of smelly cat food into her mouth. It was like a jigsaw puzzle. They’d been missing pieces and hadn’t been able to put anything to
gether. Now they had lots of pieces, but it didn’t make sense. Were they still missing too much? They had erased all the information connecting Esme to all her children: Alexander, themselves, and Nikola. They hadn’t been able to remove Esme’s billing records without raising certain data flags in the system. So anyone checking could see that Esme had been a customer, and that she’d been paying for storage for eighteen years, but there wouldn’t be information on any of the genetic material she’d deposited. Their parents were never billed, not for the twins’ embryos or Nikola’s, so there wouldn’t be any records of what was taken. The company could have done a manual inventory, but their father would have mentioned that. What had the twins missed? And how did this fit with Yves wanting Alexander, Dufae’s box, and Joy?
Joy finished eating by sticking her whole head into the can and licking it clean. They’d learned that they couldn’t stop this ritual. Joy added a new twist by flinging the empty can over her shoulder. It bounced off the upper cabinet and, either by luck or design, landed in the trashcan.
“Joy! You broke the cabinet!” Jillian pointed to a section of bare wood in the frame.
“No, that’s a bullet hole from the robbers that—” Louise gasped as she realized what they’d missed. “We didn’t erase all the records! Mom and Dad would have copied everything they could get their hands on about our donors. Family history of illnesses. Genetic disorders. They would have records here at the house.”
“And the robbers took everything.” Jillian swore. “That bitch! Anna Desmarais wasn’t burying the hatchet by giving Mom those gala tickets, she was making sure we were all out of the house so she could have our home robbed!”
Louise nodded slowly as she double-checked her twin’s logic. “If she hadn’t insisted that Mom and Dad bring us along, they might have hired a babysitter to come to the house. Any random day, someone could be home sick or waiting for a delivery or have a doctor’s appointment. The only way she could be sure no one was home was to make a big stink about how she was being noble by giving Mom enough tickets for the whole family. Once she knew we were at the gala, she kept Mom busy so we couldn’t leave.”