“It’s just that I’m pressed for time,” he whispered. “We only have two-month visas.”
Her insides flipped weirdly at the idea and she realized what he meant about losing something making feelings clear. “Oh. Shit.”
He leaned close to her. “I have tried very hard just to like you, but I’ve failed completely. These last few days have been an utter free fall. No parachute. No safety net. With totally, hopelessly in love at the bottom.”
Her insides flipped again, but differently, all fluttery and weird. She wasn’t sure that she liked the feeling. “Sounds painful.”
“Potentially.” He leaned closer so that she could feel the heat of his body nearly touching hers. “You’re the most amazing woman I’ve ever met and I love you and I think this is going to kill me.”
She put her hands up to keep him from leaning closer. This was all too fast. She couldn’t wrap her mind around it enough to come up with anything intelligent to say or do. “What do you mean?”
He laughed bitterly. “It’s taken me years to get here and in a very short while, I’m going to have to leave, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to talk you into coming with me.”
“Like hell!” Jane stomped firmly on that idea.
“Yeah, I figured it was that way. Part of your appeal actually.”
“Really?”
“I’ve been to the most war-torn places on Earth. A lot of times people saw me as a way to escape. I like that you’re happy where you are and comfortable with who you are. That you change anything that you don’t like. You’re a very strong and capable person and I find that amazingly attractive.”
She blushed and looked down at their feet. Every guy she’d dated—mostly in high school before her brothers started to open carry—those were the reasons that guys ran away from her. They’d ask her out because all they knew was she was a tall leggy blonde that brooded quietly in the back row. Once they got to know her, they were scared of her. By her senior year, all the boys drawn to her build kept a safe distance. She’d gone stag to her prom with Brandy and three of their other intimidating female friends.
Taggart wore leather hiking boots. Good quality. Obviously not new but not so worn as to be scruffy, recently cleaned and polished. Stonewashed jeans. Rugged smartwatch. Dark linen shirt, top button undone to show off a dark curl of chest hair, and dog tags on a chain.
Her mother always said that you could learn a lot about a man by his choice of friends, how he treated strangers, and how well he took care of his equipment. With the exception of Hal, Jane hadn’t had much of a chance to apply that advice since high school. She’d known Taggart for five days. He’d been quiet almost to vanishing from her awareness. Often she knew where he was only by his wonderful scent and the heat of his body next to her. There was very little there to judge him by.
Just as quiet was his friendship with Nigel. The other man radiated gentle, warm charm, intelligence and boundless enthusiasm. Taggart rode protective herd on Nigel’s fearless curiosity just as she did with Hal. Nigel accepted it without questioning. They obviously trusted each other and respected each other’s judgment.
They’d risked their lives to save her little sister.
She raised her eyes to look Taggart in the face. He was actually very good-looking in that wild-man way. His black hair had a healthy shine despite needing a trim. His dark eyes look steadily into hers. His thick eyebrows gathered into a slightly worried look. His mouth could be considered very kissable.
“I—” She what? Love was not a word her family used lightly and she barely knew the man. Hell, she wasn’t sure she could even pronounce his first name. “I like you.” Oh, that sounded lame. “I think I more than just like you.” Okay, she was digging a hole here.
Relief flashed over his face, quickly followed by amusement.
“Don’t laugh at me.” She pointed a warning finger at him.
He rubbed his face to cover a grin. “I’m not laughing. I’m happy. It’s actually easier to know that you don’t lightly use the word ‘love.’ If you do use it, you mean it, in a very deep and meaningful way.”
If. Hard enough to decide how she felt without knowing that the clock was ticking on her answer.
* * *
Hell must have frozen over because the dishes were done without the normal water battle. This was her brothers focused on someone other than each other. Normally Jane would pity the fool who managed to get all the Kryskills’ attention but not this time. She needed her family acting as a unit.
They moved out into her barnlike garage that still smelled faintly of elk blood. While Geoffrey readied the block and tackle, Alton lifted up the floorboards to expose Bertha’s hiding place and Marc backed his decommissioned Humvee up to the doors. Jane powered up the Chased by Monsters production van. They might need to seriously edit the video but they should get it, just in case.
“Are you sure?” Taggart asked over his headpiece.
“From what I can tell from imported reality shows, Americans love heavily armed country folk.”
“Och!” Nigel cried as Alton pulled back the canvas covering and revealed the cannon. “You are seriously heavily armed.”
The gun’s barrel alone was over eight feet long. It fired bullets nearly an inch thick at a maximum rate of five hundred rounds per minute. Its effective firing range was nearly two miles. They didn’t have to worry about hitting the monster—what they had to worry about was missing and hitting something else.
“Oh, this is going to be glorious!” Hal cried.
“Forget it, Hal.” Jane logged into her work account to pull down the e-mails from viewers reporting monsters. “This thing is meant to take out armored vehicles and small ships. I’m not letting you strafe downtown by accident.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“You don’t even know what careful looks like.” Jane trusted that her brothers would be able to mount the gun to the Humvee and keep Hal from attempting to test fire it while she was busy. They might resort to tying Hal to a post, but that was fine with her.
Guy slumped into the chair beside her. He’d been doing teenage sullen since their mother declared he was to go home and act like nothing important had happened.
Jane pushed a map toward him. “We need a place that’s totally open, nothing to trap us in. It needs to be along the river and as far from any people as possible. We have to be able to open fire without worrying about stray bullets hitting a house half a mile away.”
Guy grunted, ignoring the map. “Do I really have to go home?”
Brandy’s news about Windwolf’s kidnapped blade brother flashed into Jane’s mind. She would give just about anything to get back Boo, but not Guy. “No.”
“What?” Guy cried. “Really? You’re kidding. Right? You’re not really serious—are you?”
“I don’t want you to go home. I have no idea what Mom was thinking. The oni need Joey to control his people. Without him, they risk losing control of all the tengu. Anyone with half a brain cell would think to go to Mom’s on the off chance that Boo wasn’t eaten by the monster. I don’t want you there all alone. You can stay here until Duff is ready to go.”
“I’m not…” Guy caught himself and ended with a low growl of anger.
“You’re not what?”
He glared at Jane until he realized who he was talking to. He glanced away and lowered his voice. “I’m not Boo. Ever since she disappeared, everyone keeps babying me as if I would vanish too. Duff would do something and it’d be ‘idiot’, and I do the same exact thing and it’d be ‘Oh, be careful! You could be hurt! Stop it. Come here. Be a good little boy.’ But no one would ever say what they really meant, which was ‘you’re next.’ I’m not. Never was.”
“They kidnapped the viceroy’s baby brother last night,” Jane snapped. It had to be tearing Windwolf’s heart out. “A sekasha. One of the holy, kick-ass SEALs of elves with magical shield spells tattooed on his arms, trained every day of his freaking life for a hund
red years, armed to the teeth including a sword that will cut through just about anything. The oni went into a building filled with elves and took Windwolf’s brother right out of his bed. The oni are dangerous people and we just pushed them hard. They’re going to push back.”
“I’m not scared.”
“I’m not asking you to be scared, I’m asking you to be careful. That means not going out alone. Everyone should pair up as much as possible. And when you do go home, stop a block from the house, make sure you’ve got a bullet in the chamber, safety off, and go in with caution.”
He stopped looking sullen and nodded slowly. “Okay. Assume that the house has been breached.”
“Better safe than sorry.” She tapped the map. “Find me a kill zone.”
She was hoping for at least three e-mails from viewers so they could triangulate the direction the monster headed out of Sandcastle. Thousands of messages scrolled across her screen. She was going to need help to filter through the e-mails. Picking up her tablet, she headed into the garage to enlist the others.
* * *
The viewers didn’t just stick to reporting monster sightings. They had questions and they didn’t trust the answers that other sources were giving them. They trusted Hal, so they were turning to Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden for information.
They wanted to know more about the oni and the tengu that kidnapped Tinker. Those that had questions about the river monster wanted to know why Hal was dealing with it instead of the EIA and the police. Displaying a great lack of scientific understanding, several wanted someone (implying Hal, which only boggled Jane more) to contact the hyperphase gate in orbit and have it do a Shutdown so Earth forces could reinforce the EIA.
“Because it’s in another universe,” Jane growled at the tenth such e-mail. “The gate is in orbit around Earth! Different planet, people! How can you live in Pittsburgh and not know the basics? They teach this in grade school!”
“They’re not locals,” Hal said as if he’d been born in Pittsburgh. “They see the moon and it looks the same to them even though it has slightly different craters. The sun comes up and goes down in the same directions, and they lose sight that they’re not in the same universe. To them it’s the same moon, same sun, same stars.”
“The stars are totally different!” Jane cried. She only saw the stars of Earth once or twice a year but she could tell they were in different places. Then again, her father taught her how to find her way home at night, armed only with a knife.
“Most people can’t see the stars on Earth,” Nigel said. “There’s too much light pollution. The children don’t learn the constellations. They can’t tell the difference.”
Reason one thousand why Jane had no interest in moving to Earth. She glanced up to locate Taggart before realizing what she was doing. He stood beside the Hummer, recording her brothers lowering the cannon into place. Unlike Hal, he was as tall as her brothers, but wider in the shoulders, like he’d spent his youth swimming. The memory of him without his shirt flashed through her mind, followed quickly by curiosity of what he looked like without anything on.
Jane looked back down, blushing. Focus, Jane. We’ve got a monster to kill. “Assuming the…the…what are we going to call this river monster?”
“Nessie?” Hal used the name they had stuck on it for lack of another name, before they’d gotten a good look at it.
“Ach, that isnae Nessie.” Nigel’s Scottish had thickened noticeably. He held Alton’s flask; it was filled with her brother’s experiments in making Scotch. It was also proof that Jane was losing control of the situation. If she ever had control.
“Namazu,” Boo and Joey both stated firmly.
“Namazu is a legendary giant catfish, in Japanese myths,” Nigel explained, rolling his r as he lost his BBC accent and the Scottish took over. “Its thrashing is what causes earthquakes. The gods have pinned it under a massive boulder in an attempt to minimize the damage it can cause. The namazu is considered a metamorphic catfish; the accepted image of the creature does not match up to any real species. There are several species of catfish with an electric organ.”
“The monster’s barbels”—Hal put his hands to his mouth and twiddled his fingers—“which is what the whiskers are called, would indicate that the creature might be related to a catfish since there’s only a handful of fish that do have them.”
“Kajo named them namazu,” Boo said firmly. “He made them.”
“Made?” Nigel and Hal asked.
“Them?” Jane and her brothers cried.
“How many did he make?” Jane asked.
Boo shrank back from them. “I don’t know! I only saw him release the last one five years ago. And it wasn’t that big when he did.” She held up her hands and measured out something only about four feet long. “At least, Kajo said it was the last one, so it meant that there were others, right? He said it needed time to grow into something more impressive. Like me. He said that a few years might seem like a long time to me, but in a few decades, I’d start to see the world the way he saw it. That forever was like drifting on an endless sea, everything constantly changing and yet everything stays the same. But after all that, he made me tengu.”
Having admitted that she was no longer human, she curled into a small, sniffing ball.
Duff recovered first. He pulled Boo into his lap. “It’s okay, baby girl, it’s okay. No one is taking you away from us ever again. You’re our baby sister and we love you.”
Over Boo’s head, he gave Jane a look that said: We need to get her help.
Jane had no idea how to get her help and keep her safely hidden at the same time.
“The roe indicates that there’s at least two,” Nigel’s pointed out. “Normally a male catfish is the one that makes the nest and invites the female in. After she lays the eggs, he drives her out and guards the nest himself.”
Nigel took another swig from the flask and started to pass it on to Hal.
Jane intercepted the flask. For this planning stage, she wanted her two experts functional. Hal would not stop at tipsy with Scotch, even if it was stuff as bad as Alton’s homebrew. Beer he could handle, but not the hard liquor.
Luckily, Hal was caught up in the excitement of the upcoming hunt and didn’t notice. “That would explain all the half-eaten oni! The carnage makes more sense with two predators going on a feeding frenzy instead of just one.”
Nigel nodded in agreement. “The great white shark are believed to only need seventy to a hundred pounds of meat every two weeks. All those torn-apart buggers was much more than one beastie could reasonably down in a sitting, even at forty feet long.”
Jane realized that her brothers were staring in surprise at the naturists.
“What exactly happened at Sandcastle?” Marc asked.
* * *
They showed her brothers the video from the day before. It was surprisingly viewable even as Taggart ran for his life, dragging the namazu away from Hal and the children. It had been stupidly brave of him.
She had worried that her brothers would cheer the oni dying but they were better than that. They flinched every time one died.
“The namazu is big but fairly slow when you compare it to a saurus or a warg,” Jane listed out the river monster’s strengths. “What makes it dangerous is the electricity. We first spotted it on Fort Pitts Bridge Outbound. You know how high that is? The discharge was arcing to the point where it almost reached us. I don’t think we can do a second-story shoot as we would for a saurus. We’re going to have to treat it more like a pack of wargs on steroids.” The magical cold of the warg’s breath made houses fragile boxes to trap anyone inside. Killing wargs normally required a running fight. “The vehicles should be safe from the electricity.”
“Assuming you can get just one at a time,” Alton muttered darkly. He had the most experience dealing with Elfhome wildlife. “It doesn’t seem to be able to turn in a tight area. See, it backed up there instead of twisting around. You might be able to use th
at to your advantage.”
“You left eleven oni alive.” Marc took out his phone. “I’m going to see if anyone on the force knows what the EIA found. If the guards aren’t all dead, you might have to deal with them at the same time.”
“Don’t ask too many direct questions,” Jane warned. “The oni have moles in the EIA. They probably also have some in the police department.”
Marc snorted and gave her a bemused look. Right. He was the one known as “Stone” by most people. He walked out into the night, saying to the person that answered, “What do you know?” After that, there was no more from his end of the conversation except occasional grunts.
“Because of Bertha’s range and rate of fire, the only ‘safe’ place to film this will be in the passenger seat.” Jane tapped the back of the Humvee. “We can mount some smaller cameras for more coverage; they’ll be insurance on getting something on film. Everything is going to be fairly choppy as soon as Bertha opens up.”
“Annnnd I’ll be where?” Disappointment filled Hal’s face as he realized that he wasn’t going to be driving or shooting.
“You and Nigel will be in the production trucks. We’ll have the mobile antenna up for both of them and cameras feeding to both, just in case we end up out of range of the Chased by Monsters truck.”
“Jane!” Hal whined.
“If we have ammo left over, I’ll take you out to the quarry and you can play with Bertha while we get additional footage to pad the episode. I’m expecting that most we get won’t be useable.”
“How much ammo do we have?” Taggart asked.
“Hopefully enough,” Jane didn’t want Hal to know the exact number because she planned to limit him to a few hundred shots. “She fires five hundred shots a minute, which is a good thing and a bad thing. We have to be sure we have the namazu in the crosshairs when we open up or we’ll chew through everything before we kill her.”
By “we” she meant herself. She just didn’t want to have to fight every male within hearing about it.
Marc returned to the garage, his face set, which usually meant he was unsettled by what he learned.