“Hello?” one of the girls said.
“Who is this?” Lain asked.
There were two startled squeals on the other side and the connection was broken.
Oh, good God, Esme, what have you done?
2. How the Twins Do Not Meet Director Derek Maynard
With Pittsburgh trapped on Elfhome and one major dragon fight in the downtown section of the city, plate glass was becoming scarce. Thus it took nearly three weeks for Maynard to have all the windows of his office replaced.
He sent his secretary out for coffee and collapsed into his chair. He had hopes that his life was returning to something that resembled order.
That hope, along with two of his new windows, were shattered by the sudden arrival of the Dufae twins. He knew what they were immediately; he learned who they were much later. At that moment, he was too surprised to greet them properly. Tinker always had that effect on him; doubled, it was only more so.
They didn’t seem to notice him as they pushed up goggles and eyed the broken glass sprayed across the wood floor.
“I told you that the building was in the way,” one of them complained. They were inches shorter than Tinker but otherwise twins to her. Same spiky brown hair, dusky skin, and destructive ability.
“Details, details, details,” the other twin cried as she crunched across the glass to peer out the bank of windows on the other side of his office. “There, see, we’ll make it easy with the next jump.”
“I don’t know.” The first girl joined her twin. “I think we’ll just plow into the hillside.”
“We’ll clear it!”
“That’s what you said about this place.” The doubting twin clapped her hand. “Recall!”
They turned and watched the window that they had smashed through with an air of expectation.
Maynard was just about to say something polite but firm when an Easter Island moai statue smashed through the window beside the two broken ones.
“We’re not sure we like this,” the statue complained in a little-boy voice. “It seems a very awkward way of traveling.”
“Well, we can’t move you any other way,” the optimistic twin said.
“If we had a big enough lever…” the pessimistic twin said.
“Jumping!” her sister cried. She clapped her hands. “Shields!”
The other sighed and wrapped her left hand tight around her twin. With her right, she aimed at the top of Mount Washington. “Jump!”
They soared out the window as if on a bungee cord anchored on Mount Washington, twin screams of fear or delight or both. A moment later a puff of smoke and a sudden scattering of birds marked their landing a few feet shy of the hilltop.
“Oh, you’re Director Maynard,” the moai statue said. “Nice to meet yoooou!”
The last word was yelped as the statue shuddered across his wood floor, gouging a massive groove into it. It hit the edge and vaulted into the air to soar after the twins.
Maynard stood staring after them. Oh God. Two more Tinkers.
3. How the Twins Do Not Meet Team Tinker’s Business Manager, Roach.
It was a sign of the times that a trip to Pittsburgh Salvage made Roach wax nostalgic. Yes, refuse and salvage were both perceived to be bottom of the food chain. Garbage in the summer could be insanely offensive to work with. Both businesses, however, gave access to money, materials, and time to do less profitable activities. Because the landfill smelled (and, around some of Tinker’s experiments, was explosive) Team Tinker had spent years hanging out at the salvage yard, plotting world domination.
It was a wonderful time. Yes, Tinker nearly killed them all with her “toys” several times but that was part of the fun. Living on the edge. Never totally sure what was going to explode next.
Roach carefully poked through Tinker’s workshop, telling himself that it was inevitable that the racing would come to an end. People grew up. Got married to people that didn’t understand the addiction. Had kids too young to be at a noisy and often dangerous pit at the racetrack. After the Team Providence mess, Tinker wanted to mass-produce the Deltas, so Team Tinker was losing its advantage as well as its riders. Of the two, the loss of their riders was actually the more damaging. Despite what people thought, it took brains to race. The best riders could calculate the most effective move at any instant.
An odd squealing noise from the back of the salvage yard stopped his reflections. He drifted out of Tinker’s workshop, head cocked. It sounded like kids screaming in fear or delight; you could never tell with kids. There was a weird accompaniment to the screaming, a grinding of metal and a low roar. What the hell was that?
Suddenly a small figure whipped around a stack of wrecked cars and collided with Roach.
“Ow!” the child complained.
Roach blinked down at the girl. He knew her—five or six years ago. It was Tinker. She was the age she’d been when he’d first met her, maybe a little younger. Still human. She didn’t have the pointed elf ears or almond-shaped elf eyes yet.
“Tinker?” he asked. “Is that you?”
“Duh.” The girl sounded like Tinker used to. “Who else would it be?”
Roach knew that Tinker and Oilcan didn’t have any other family. “What the hell happened to you—this time?”
“What does it look like?” She gestured up and down.
Anyone else, he’d be looking for holograph projectors or something. This was Tinker though: weird shit just always seemed to happen with her.
“Are—are you okay?” Stupid thing to ask but he’d just been blown out of the water in terms of logical, reasonable things to say.
He jerked back a step as a second Tinker whipped around the corner and squeaked with surprise.
Tinker One slapped a hand to her face and sighed.
“What are you doing?” Tinker Two cried.
“It’s Roach.” Tinker One pointed at him. “Roach!”
“I know it’s Roach. Unless he’s got an anti-gravity spell in his back pocket or some kind of shrink ray in his truck, we don’t have time for chit-chat.”
Yup, this was an authentic Tinker conversation. Based on experience, Roach figured this would be a good time to start running.
BLUE SKY
Two weeks after Pittsburgh became permanently stranded on Elfhome, the war between the elves and the oni reached John Montana’s gas station. John had been greasing the CV joint of a Honda he had up on the rack when the bell on the pumps chimed, announcing someone had pulled up for gas. He listened for the sound of his little brother’s feet moving across the ceiling above him, but could only hear the rumble of rock music. He ducked out from under the Honda, walked to the old fireman pole that dropped down from their apartment, and yelled, “Hey! We’ve got a customer down here!”
The bell chimed again and again, like someone was jumping on the air hose, making it trigger. Just kids messing with the air hose, John thought, and headed outside, still carrying the grease gun.
He hadn’t been expecting trouble. It had been a summer of hell since war had broken out between the elves and the oni, with humans like John caught in the middle. But with the recent dramatic events, he thought that the elves had won, and the war was over.
Looking at the sea of elves in Fire Clan red massed outside his gas station, John realized that he was mistaken. Most of them were common garden-variety laedin-caste soldiers, but sprinkled among them were the holy sekasha-caste warriors, with spells tattooed down their arms. The elves had been distracted by the chime, playing with the novelty of the air hose like kids. When they noticed him at the garage’s third bay door, though, all play died from their faces, and the eyes they turned toward him were hard and suspicious.
“Oooohhhh, shit.” John felt his stomach tighten into a cold knot. The evening news had covered what had happened in Chinatown just days before, showing the blood-washed sidewalks and the headless dead of the oni flushed out of their hiding spaces. The elves weren’t taking prisoners.
They saw
the grease gun in his hands and they drew their swords.
“It’s not a weapon!” John cried out in low Elvish, dropped the tool, and stepped backwards. “It’s not a weapon!”
“Get on your knees!” one of the sekasha shouted in high tongue.
John raised his hands, holding them out to show they were empty and got down on his knees. This can’t be happening. “It’s not a weapon,” he continued in low Elvish because he was more fluent in it. “I fix automobiles. It’s only a tool for applying oil to the automobiles.”
The sekasha nudged the grease gun with his toe and watched it leak. Satisfied it was harmless, he signaled to the laedin-caste elves to search the garage. “Is there anyone else in the building?”
“My little brother. He’s just a child. Please don’t hurt him.”
“If you’re both human, you have nothing to fear.”
That was the problem—they weren’t.
One of the other sekasha produced a sheet of fine handmade paper, a spell inked onto its surface. John knew what this was. The oni used spells to disguise themselves as humans. The paper held a counterspell to break the illusion. The elves pressed it to John’s forearm, spoke the verb component and a static charge ran over him like low voltage electricity. The hairs on his arms and back lifted and stayed standing.
“John, who was playing with the…” His half-brother, Blue Sky, came sliding down the old fireman pole, landing in the center of the chaos. He stood only chest-high among the armored elves, thankfully looking younger than he was. He glanced around at the strangers, unafraid, until he saw John on his knees in front of the sword-wielding sekasha. “John!”
“I’m not hurt!” John cried. “Everything is—no, no, no, no!”
Blue had launched himself at the sekasha, shouting, “Get away from him!”
John surged up, reaching for Blue, but an elf caught him by the back of the head, jerked him back to his knees, and pressed a sword blade against his windpipe.
“Don’t move!” the elf behind him snapped.
The sekasha dodged Blue and tried to sweep out the boy’s legs. His brother back-flipped over the sweeping foot. Without even turning, or looking, the sekasha slashed backwards with his sword.
“No!” John screamed and fought the hold on him. “He’s a child! A child!”
The sword hit Blue Sky in the head, smashing him to the ground. John shouted out in wordless dismay.
“Hush!” the sekasha commanded, sheathing his sword. “I used the back of my blade. He’s only stunned.”
The sekasha held out his hand for another spell paper and placed it against Blue’s arm. He activated it and a distortion of air flowed over Blue and vanished. The boy groaned as the sekasha turned him, carefully, gently, to examine him.
His gaze was suspicious when he looked back at John, but he signaled to the others to free him. John didn’t bother to stand, just scrambled on his hands and knees to Blue and made sure that his little brother wasn’t hurt. As a testament to the sekasha’s skill with his sword, there was only a slight bruise on Blue’s forehead, and his eyes weren’t dilated. The boy glared at the sekasha, so John locked him in a hold.
The Fire Clan sekasha grunted. It was hard to tell if he was amused by Blue’s glare or annoyed by it. “What are you doing with this child? Where are his parents?”
“We share a mother,” John said. “She is sick. She went back to Earth. His father is dead.”
“Who was his father?” The sekasha asked.
The one thing you didn’t do was lie to elves. As much as John wanted to say that he didn’t know, it would be worse to be caught in a lie. “Lightning Strikes Wind.”
Unfortunately, the warrior recognized the name. “He was one of the Wind Clan sekasha?”
John nodded.
“He is—fourteen?” The sekasha tried to guess Blue’s age.
“I’m seventeen,” Blue answered for himself. It was a sore spot for him, because he’d been mistaken for as young as ten.
“Shhhh,” John hushed him.
“You don’t feed him right; he’s too small.” The sekasha stood and walked about the bay, studying the old fire hall that John used as a garage, from the fire pole that Blue had slid down to the gas pumps outside. He stomped on the air hose, making it chime again.
Blue was shaking with fury in his hold. John, however, was terrified that the worst could just be starting.
“Wolf Who Rules,” the sekasha named the head of the Wind Clan. “Does he know about the child?”
“No.” John had lived in terror of this day. He didn’t know how the sekasha would react to their holy bloodline being mixed with human. Even if they didn’t kill Blue Sky outright, there remained the chance they would take him from John.
The laedin-caste warrior appeared to sketch a bow to the sekasha. “The building seems clear, holy one.”
“Clear!” the sekasha shouted.
Profound silence filled the garage as the elves went still, waiting. John had heard that the Stone Clan, newly arrived to Pittsburgh, was using spells to find oni hidden within the walls of buildings and secret tunnels underground.
“Clear,” someone outside shouted. The elves relaxed.
The sekasha signaled for the others to move to the next building down. “If he was not sekasha-caste, I would not care what you do with him. My duty here is clear. He is of the holy blood. His clan must be told. This is no way one such as he should live.”
Blue jerked in John’s hold.
“I’ll take the child to Wolf Who Rules.” John struggled to keep his brother checked. “I swear I will.”
The sekasha looked down the street to where his people searched for oni. As John hoped, he deemed it easier to let John handle the problem than to abandon his duties. “I will know if you break your vow. I will not be kind.”
“John always keeps his promises,” Blue snapped.
The sekasha smiled. “He has his father’s reactions.”
“What do you mean?” John asked.
“We sekasha—we protect those we love.”
* * *
“You shouldn’t have promised.” Blue swung up onto the counter of the old fireman’s kitchen as John opened the fridge and dug through it, looking for a beer. “It means you have to do it.”
“I didn’t want him taking you with him.”
“He couldn’t have done that!” Blue cried.
“He’s a sekasha.” John found an Iron City beer, opened it and drank deeply. He was still shaking from the encounter. In the stainless steel surface of the fridge, he could see the line where the sword blade had pressed against his throat. “They’re allowed to do anything they want. They’re considered too holy to be bound by law made by mortals.”
All his life, John had watched the Wind Clan sekasha prowl the city like lions among lambs. Even other elves watched them with fear. Thus, he’d been terrified when his mother brought a drunk sekasha home. At thirteen, he was just beginning to realize that she wasn’t fully sane and that he couldn’t trust her to keep them safe. John spent the night sure that the warrior would kill her when he sobered.
After Blue Sky was born, their mother grew more and more erratic. The treaty with the elves banned criminals, the insane, and orphans; the elves didn’t want the dregs of humanity littering their world. The same treaty, however, meant Blue Sky couldn’t travel to Earth. Caught between the two rules, John struggled to keep his mother’s insanity hidden until he was eighteen. At that point, John sent his mother to Earth and stayed behind to become Blue’s guardian.
Until today, his greatest fear was that the elves would kill Blue out of hand, deeming his human genetics a stain on their holy bloodline.
Now, he was afraid that even a half-blood like Blue was too holy to be raised by a mere human.
“So, what do we do?” Blue asked.
John sighed and put down his beer. He’d put this off for years. There was one glimmer of hope. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Where ar
e we going?”
“I’m going to see if Tinker can do anything about this.”
Tinker and her cousin, Oilcan, could be called good friends. At one time, when the cousins could still be called children, they played daily with Blue Sky. Eventually they had grown up and grown apart. Still, they had the same interests, traded business, knew the same people, and went to the same parties. Like John and Blue, the cousins were orphans and only had each other. John would like to think it created a bond between them—but he’d learned in the past that when things went horribly wrong in your life, the people you thought you could trust sometimes turned their backs on you.
Luck, courage and a good bit of ingenuity had landed Tinker in a position of power as the wife of the clan head, Wolf Who Rules. If anyone in Pittsburgh could help them, she could.
But the question was—would she?
* * *
The elfin enclaves lined where the Rim used to cut through Oakland. Each a block wide and half a mile deep, the high-walled residences acted as both hotels and restaurants. Since everything about the clan head was tabloid fodder, everyone in Pittsburgh knew that Tinker and her new husband were living at the Poppymeadow enclave.
John and Blue Sky passed through three checkpoints on their way to Oakland. Each time they were questioned in depth, searched for weapons, and checked by spell to see if they were oni. It took them two hours to work their way to the enclaves. John parked his pickup, and they walked to the tall garden gate that normally stood open, but they found it shut and locked. He tried knocking.
A slot gate opened and an elf peered out at them.
“Forgiveness,” the elf said. “The dining room is not open.”
“I need to see—” John realized that saying Tinker’s name without her proper title would be considered rude. Elves set store on that kind of thing. He frowned a moment, trying to remember her new title. “Domi. I beg you. May I speak with Tinker domi?”
“Who asks?”
“John Montana,” and then, quickly, he added, “It’s clan business! I’m here to see her as the clan’s domi.”
“Wait here.”
Blue had been kicking pebbles. When the slot shut, he scoffed. “Clan business.”