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The black willow stretched out its hundreds of whipping branches to scrabble at her shield. Tinker forced herself to scan the room again, and ignore the massive creature trying to reach her.

"The roof! It's only plywood and rubber. See if you can cut through."

The tree found the gap between the top of the tall doorway and her shield. The thin branches pushed through the space, caught hold of the doorjamb, and started to pull.

"Oh, shit!" Tinker cried. "If it makes the door larger, I'm not going to be able to hold it! It's coming in!"

There was a pulse of magic from Forest Moss, instantly defining the Stone Clan elf with Wyverns out by the Rolls, and themselves, pinned inside by the black willow.

"Forest Moss!" Tinker shouted. "Get it off us!"

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The concrete walls buckled under the strain, tearing free to leave sawtooth openings, exposing twisted and snapped rebar. The branches flung the debris against the back wall of the warehouse like mad shovels.

"Forest Moss, get it—"

And suddenly the branches wrapped around her, cocooning her shield in living wicker, and lifted her off the ground.

"
Domi!
" Pony shouted.

The black willow heaved her up. Its branches creaked as it tried to crush her shields down.

Oh please hold! Oh please hold!

A dark orifice opened in the crook where its main limbs branched from it's massive trunk. As the tree tried to stuff her into the fleshy maw, she realized what the opening was.

They have mouths! I wonder if Lain knows that. Oh shit, it's trying to eat me!

Luckily the diameter of her shielding was larger than its mouth. It was trying to fit a golf ball into a beer bottle. She held still and silent, afraid to disrupt her shields. Smell of burnt cinnamon and honey filled her senses, and her vision blurred—the tree fading slightly—even as it repeatedly jammed her up against its mouth.

It has some kind of hallucinogen—that's how we missed it
, she thought.

And then the tree flung her through the wall.

The street beyond was a flicker of brightness, and then she plowed through a confusion of small, dim, dusty rooms of an abandoned office building beyond. She felt Forest Moss track her through the building. His power flashed ahead of her, surged through the next building in her flight path, and locked down on all the load-bearing supports.

The white-haired shit was going to pull the building down on her! She'd be buried alive—shields or not!

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Dropping her shields, she made a desperate grab for a battered steel desk as she flew over it. She missed the edge and left five contrails across its dusty top. A floor to ceiling window stood beyond the desk. She smashed through the window into open sky.

I'm going to die.

And then Riki caught her, wrapping strong arms around her, and labored upward in a loud rustle of black wings.

"Riki!" She clung to the tengu, heart thudding like a motor about to shake itself apart. Yeah, yeah, she was still pissed at him. She'd let him know that—after he put her down safely.

17: A MURDER OF CROWS

"Stop squirming or I might drop you," Riki growled through teeth gritted with the effort of carrying Tinker aloft.

She glanced down and went still in shock at being dangled midair forty feet up and climbing. "Shouldn't we be going down?"

"Down is good for you—very bad for me."

"Damn it, Riki, my people need me. Put me down!" Tinker found herself gripping his arms so he couldn't just drop her.

"There are so many things wrong with that statement that I don't have breath to explain it all."

Movement at the window she'd smashed out of caught her eye, and with relief she saw Cloudwalker pointing up at her. Moments later Pony and the others joined him at the opening.

"Oh, thank gods," Tinker breathed.

Riki rose above the roofline. The crown of the black willow bristled in the street beyond. Its booming footsteps echoed up from the canyon of buildings. She felt a great surge of magic and a massive fireball suddenly engulfed the tree. Whoa! Apparently Prince True Flame had arrived. No wonder the tengu
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didn't want to land.

Riki dipped down behind the next building, out of sight of her Hand. Black smoke billowed behind them.

He flew straight west—as the saying went, as the crow flies—faster than a man could run despite being weighed down by her. When he reached the Ohio River, he turned and followed its course.

Where the hell was he taking her? It occurred to her that he couldn't have been just passing by and caught her by luck.

"You planned this! You knew if you screwed with my spell, I'd come to fix it."

"Would you believe this had nothing to do with you?"

"No."

"Believe it not, the world does not revolve around Tinker the Great."

How far could Riki fly? Could he keep up this speed, or had that been a sprint? And what did he want with her?

She tried to form a plan to escape. Riki, though, wouldn't underestimate her—he knew her too well. Of all the people in Pittsburgh, he could match wits with her. Her first thought was to force him to drop her into the river. The large dark form of a river shark swimming under the water, following their passage, killed that plan. They followed the Ohio around its gentle bends, and Pittsburgh vanished behind the swell of the surrounding hills. Once the city was out of sight, Riki climbed the steep hill that once was Bellevue and crossed the Rim. There he dove into the ironwoods. The forest canopy rushed toward them, seeming to her a solid wall of green. Riki, though, flicked through openings she hadn't seen, darting through slender upper branches to finally land on a thick bough, close to the massive trunk.

The moment they landed, Tinker twisted in his hold and swung at him hard as she could, aiming for his beaklike nose.

"God damn it!" He caught her hand and twisted her arm painfully up behind her back. He leaned his weight against her, pinning her to the trunk. "Just hold still!"

Cheek pressed to the rough gray bark, Tinker saw for the first time how far up the tree they stood—the forest floor lay a hundred feet below. Normally she didn't mind heights—only normally she wasn't this high up with an enemy spy. She stopped struggling, fear trying to climb up out of her stomach. She swallowed down on it—she had to keep her head.

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Riki grabbed her right wrist, caught hold of her left, and bound both hands behind her with a thin plastic strap. Once she was bound helpless, he turned her around. He wore war paint—streaks of black under his vivid blue eyes and shock of black hair. His shirt was cut on the same loose lines as the muscle shirt he wore often during her captivity by the oni, made of glossy black scale armor. On his feet, with their odd birdlike toes, he wore silver tips that looked razor-sharp.

"What do you want?" She was pleased she didn't sound as scared as she was.

"I'm not going to hurt you."

"Somehow I don't believe you." She wriggled slightly to indicate her tied wrists. It made her teeter alarmingly on the branch, so she carefully scrunched down until she straddled the thick limb. There, perfectly safe. Ha!

Riki watched her with a cocked head. "There's no shame in being afraid of heights. Most people are."

She stared at him with shock. That was exactly what he said in her dream—wasn't it? She glanced downward and felt déjà vu; they'd been up high in her nightmare.

"What do you want?" she asked. "Are you going to turn me over to the oni again?"

"No. When you killed Lord Tomtom, we tengu managed to break free of the oni."

"I gave that up. You melted the witch, so I got out of my no-compete contract."

This was seriously weird.

"Riki, who is the wizard of Oz?"

"Huh?"

"I had a dream and you were in it."

"And you and you and you too," Riki quoted the movie.

"Oh good, at least you know the source. In my dream, I was trying to get to the wizard of Oz."

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"Oookay, and I thought I was deep in left field. Oh this is sad."

"Do have any idea who he might be?"

"The wizard?" Riki pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket, tapped out a cigarette, lit it, and took a deep drag. "Hmmm, in the movie the wizard was the traveling performer that Dorothy met when she ran away from home. Chances are, then, he's someone you've met but don't recognize now."

Taking another drag, Riki vented the smoke out of his nose in twin columns as he thought. "His nature is changing; some perceive him as great and powerful, others see him as foolish, but he's the only character that fully understood both Kansas and Oz. Most likely, you're looking for someone with great knowledge, but his intelligence is disguised somehow." Riki gazed off into the forest, eyes unfocused, thinking. "Like Dorothy, he's a traveler between worlds, just as lost . . ."

Riki's eyes snapped back in focus. "Impatience. He's your wizard."

"Who?"

"Impatience. The dragon that you fought at Turtle Creek."

She tried to fit the name of "Impatience" with the countless jagged teeth and massive snaky body.

"See, intelligence disguised." Riki waved his cigarette, reminding her of the astronomer postdocs when they went into lecture mode. "Legends say that a dragon has a body and a spirit, and you can encounter the one without the other. Usually in the old stories, the dragons send their spirits out to cross great distances—but while they're doing it, it's a very unwise thing to approach their bodies. The lights are on, but no one's home."

"Running on autopilot?"

"Let's just say that there's more than one story about someone getting their head bitten off while a dragon's spirit is absent."

She remembered the impression that intelligence filled the dragon's eyes—its surprise at having a hand clamped into its mouth. "So you're saying the dragon was unconscious at the time he attacked me."

"Probably."

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That would certainly explain how she'd managed to walk away with nothing more than a sore hand. "So where is this dragon now?"

"Even if I knew that, I wouldn't tell you. I want Impatience for the tengu. That's what I was doing at Reinholds. The oni had set a trap for it, using the fountain as a lure."

"The oni?"

"Impatience was one of two dragons the oni had waiting on Onihida for the invasion. The other is Malice, who is much bigger. Somehow Impatience managed to slip the oni's hold on him and escape."

"So, on top of the royal troops and the oni, we have an unaligned dragon running loose in Pittsburgh."

"Well, a party is only fun if you invite lots of interesting people."

She stuck her tongue out at him. "How do you plan to find Impatience?"

"I don't know.
You
apparently have to follow the yellow brick road."

In her dream, though, the road ended with the tree. This was going to drive her mad. In the silence between them, she heard a slight noise from Riki's hip pocket. He frowned, slipped out a cell phone, and answered it with a cautious, "Hello?"

As he listened, his caution changed to worry. "You're where? Jesus Christ, what are you doing there?

Oh fuck. Yes I said that, what do you expect me to say? No—don't—don't . . ." Riki sighed. "Put your cousin on. No, no, not Joey! Keiko." Riki waited a moment until the phone could be traded off on the other side of the conversation. "Yeah, I'm here. What's going on?"

Riki listened for several minutes, grimacing as if what he heard pained him. "I'll be there in a few minutes.

Hang tight." Riki tucked away his phone. "Change of plans."

"You're letting me go?"

"Sorry." He actually managed to look it. "I'll never have this chance again. I can't throw it away." He pulled out a silk scarf and tied it over her eyes. "I don't want you to know where we're going." He took firm hold of her and jerked her off her feet. "This time, don't wriggle so much."

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She felt him leap, knew that he'd left the safety of the tree, and nearly screamed at the knowledge. His wings rustled out, caught the air, and they swooped upward.

Fifteen or twenty minutes later, Riki dove down and wove through light and shadows to land again.

Numb from dangling, her legs folded under her. Riki lowered her down to a prone position and then knelt behind her, panting with exertion.

Their landing site seemed too flat to be a tree branch but it swayed slightly with the rustling of the wind.

"Damn it, Riki, where are we?"

Riki tugged down her blindfold. She lay just inside the door of a tiny cabin; only eight-foot square, it would have been claustrophobic if it had actually contained furniture.

"We're at a cote," he panted. "Emergency shelter."

The cabin seemed to be made of scrap lumber. The one small round window letting in light held glass, and the high ceiling bristled with nails, indicating that the roof was shingled, so the cabin was weatherproofed.

"Stay put." He stepped past her to pull something off a set of shelves on the back wall. "There's no safe way down to the ground. I'll be back."

Cabin, hell, it was a tree house. Under any other circumstance, she would have been entranced with the notion.

Riki took a deep breath and stepped backward out the door, spreading his black wings.