Wood Sprites (54 page)

The police officer then eyed Jillian and Louise. He reached out and tugged one of the antenna out of Jillian’s hair. “What exactly are you?”

Jillian raised her arm—covered with a blood-soaked sleeve—to wipe at her eyes. Life lesson number five kicked in: adults will believe the stupidest things when you’re covered in blood. “Those that kidnapped us put those into our hair and then laughed at us and told us that if we took them off, they’d cut off one of our fingers. Please put it back.”

Louise acted out comforting Jillian. “We don’t understand. Why did they do that? What is that? What does it mean?”

Suspicion bled off of the officer’s face as the machine translated their lies.

“I don’t know, sweetheart, but you don’t have to be scared.” Officer Cohen produced an evidence bag and dropped the antenna into it. “We’re not going to let anyone hurt you.” He collected the other three antennae. “Are you elves? From Elfhome?”

Jillian used the time it took the machine to translate out the questions to launch into a series of distraction questions, just to muddle things. “This box that talks? Magic speaker voice thrower? Ham loaf? Pickle questions?”

Crow Boy looked confused as the machine faithfully attempted to put the garbled Elvish into some reasonable English translation.

“This box that talks? Fling voice orator magic? Bread of smoked pork? Questions preserved by anaerobic fermentation in brine?”

Jillian obviously was hoping that if she garbled the replies enough, the policeman would assume any holes in their story were from bad translation and not because they were fabricating almost everything.

The policeman frowned and replayed her answer. A very good sign. “Yes, this is a translator. It translates what I’m saying in English to Elvish.” And then obviously not trusting the machine now, he pointed to his mouth and said “English” and then pointed at the machine. “Elvish.” And then muttered quietly, “I hope.”

The twins waited for the translation, which was perfect.

“Oh! How clever!” Jillian stated.

“Yes, it is wonderful!” Louise cried.

“Please help us!” Jillian cried. “Madly galloping into the night, we transfix. Please help Crow Warrior. His leg is broken! They put us in cages and fed us zombie donkeys. Pickle questions? They stomped on his leg and broke it and they had knives and they were going to cut him up!” Jillian mimed the elves attacking with the butcher knives. “Dirty dog! Train biscuit train! If they find us, they’ll kill everyone and put us back into the cage!”

“You’re safe,” the police officer stated after the machine struggled to translate the mix of good and purposely garbled Elvish.

“They have a hidden army here on Earth!” Louise warned. “The EIA has been infiltrated. The ambassador to China is one of them. Ambassador Feng!”

“Female dog breath yelping,” Jillian added quickly.

“Purple!” Louise stated firmly, nodding.

Crow Boy stared at them as if they’d both grown two heads.

“The ambassador of China?” The policeman latched onto the first clear lead they had given him.

“Purple!” the twins cried in unison.

“He came to the mansion asking for help . . .” Louise started.

Jillian continued, “He needed help because royal marines from his country were coming to arrest him. They found out he’s oni.”

Louise added. “Crown Prince Kiss Butt of the oni told him to run and hide and not come back!”

Jillian held up her right hand and smashed thumb and pointer finger together. “Dokadokadokadoka.”

“Purple,” Louise breathed. “The hidden prince tortured him with magic before telling him to run away. It was scary.”

Jillian nodded. “They put us into a cage, but we managed to escape! They caught us again and broke Crow Warrior’s leg. They said they were going to cut off his feet. But then there was big explosion. Boom! Everything was burning, and we got away.”

They had to wait a long time for the machine to translate and then Officer Cohen to puzzle out the basic gist of their night.

“How did you get here?” Cohen asked.

Good question. Louise frowned at the translator as if it had said something strange. Intermixing babble with actual real information was harder than she’d thought.

“The box that moves on wheels,” Jillian made a motor noise while indicating spinning tires by twirling both pointer fingers in circles.

“Automobile!” Louise provided the term that the elves used for cars.

Jillian clapped with excitement. “Purple! Purple! Automobile! We came in an automobile!”

The police officer looked to Crow Boy.

“Purple,” Crow Boy confirmed faintly. “Automobile.”

The police officer frowned at the machine with frustration. He obviously wanted to ask all sorts of questions, but they had him on the ropes.

“They’re going to kidnap Tinker
domi
. . .” Louise started and faltered.

“She invented hoverbikes.” Jillian launched into an elaborate mime that seemed to involve weaving cloth. “They are full of eels!”

“Her father made the gate that the oni created in space.” Louise pointed up at the sky.

“The oni thinks that the apple never falls far from the raccoon.” Jillian stood up, picked up one of the hospital gowns stacked nearby, and tossed it over Louise’s head.

Luckily Louise had realized what Jillian intended to do. She did not startle at being blindfolded. As the world vanished, she was filled with a sense of calm. She knew exactly what to say. “Black wings murdered time and now wait in timeless darkness. The dream crow stirs. She will cry out and the blood of her beloved will answer. The promised time is at hand. Let the flock be gathered and stand strong against those who enslaved them. Providence will provide. His child returns, bringing forth all that is needed for salvation. Impatience will—”

There was a loud outcry as Crow Boy suddenly lunged off the table and landed at her feet. Catching hold of her hands, he gripped them painfully tight. “Jin is alive?”

“No, no, no!” the doctor shouted. “Orderly!”

“Is Jin alive?” Crow Boy cried.

Louise squeezed close her eyes, trying to hold on to the sense of calm knowing. “His prison is about to be broken and he will be set free to fly again. The door is closing, but evil has taken root on Elfhome. All can be lost—”

The blindfold was torn away as Crow Boy was muscled back into his bed, gently but firmly, by two large male orderlies.

“He tore out his IV,” someone cried, and Louise realized that her hands were covered with blood. Louise stared at her bloody fingers. How did this keep happening? Up to today, blood was something that she half-expected after a great deal of planning and debate and risk assessment. It never came as a surprise. Other than Jillian’s, she had never even seen someone else’s blood, and here it was, all over her, again and again.

Jillian started to whimper, a prelude to real crying. Fake crying would have been loud and instant. With her sniffles, the day proved too much for Louise, and she felt hot tears filling her eyes.

“Oookay.” The police officer was shaking his head. “I have not a clue what the hell that was all about.”

“We need to put the boy under,” the doctor murmured as he pressed his hand over the machine’s microphone. “None of our translators are loaded with Elvish. Can you help us explain to the children what’s about to happen?”

* * *

It was stressful to watch them apply the anesthesia and see Crow Boy become totally helpless. Louise hugged Nikola tight, trying to find the inner calm that she’d experienced just moments before. It had been as if she’d stepped out of herself, shedding all fears and worries along the way.

After they wheeled Crow Boy away, she realized that Joy was rummaging through medical supplies, tearing open plastic wrappings to taste the contents. The girls were out, scurrying about in their mice robot bodies.

“What are you doing?”

“Hungry!” Joy cried. “Candy! You promised!”

“Bored,” Chuck Norris said.

“Scared,” the Jawbreakers squeaked.

Nikola pressed up against Louise, nodding silently in agreement with the Jawbreakers.

“We need to feed her now.” Jillian went to the door and peeked out. “They said it would be hours for them to set the leg and him to fully wake up from the anesthesia.”

In other words, if they waited, Joy would only get more uncontrollable.

“I thought I saw some vending machines near the waiting room.” Louise scooped up Joy with one hand and plucked up the mice one at a time with her other, depositing them on her shoulder. “We’re getting something!” she cried as Joy squirmed. “Just be patient.”

They waited until the nurses at the station across the hall were distracted and then slipped out. The other rooms were all dark; the patients asleep. The twins walked quickly through the deserted hallways to the waiting room. There was an entire wall of machines. The first offered hot coffee. The second was water and chilled juice and milk. The third was fruit and veggies.

“Oh God,” Jillian whispered. “Of course a hospital would only have healthy snacks. What about grapes? You like grapes.”

“Feh,” Joy muttered from Louise’s arms. Then she spotted what was in the next machine. “Oooooh!” She leaned far out of Louise’s hold to press her paws against the glass. “Candy!”

Jillian sighed and pointed out the ones they knew the baby dragon liked the most. “Gummy worms? Snickers? Kit Kat? M&Ms?”

Joy gazed up them with pure delight on her face and nodded.

“Which ones?” Jillian asked.

“Candy!”

“I think she wants one of each,” Louise said. “She’s been really good so far. We owe her.”

“All this can’t be good for her.” Nevertheless, Jillian used her phone to buy one of each type of candy. “We’re lousy mothers, you know. Our mom would never give in to us. She’d give us that look and we knew we’d better behave and we would.”

Louise felt a sudden floodwater of sorrow rise up. “I know.”

“What are we going to do about the babies?” Jillian whispered. “Joy is good at taking care of herself, but what are we going to do with real babies?”

Louise steeled herself against wanting to cry. “I don’t know. We don’t have any way for the babies to be born yet, so let’s not worry about it now.”

“When they’re born, we’ll work hard and be the best mothers ever.”

“How can you be our mothers when you’re our sisters?” the babies asked.

“Oh!” Jillian used one of their parents’ distraction tricks. “We’re going to have to get new phones.”

Louise gasped as she realized that they would need phones to purchase everything from Joy’s candy to new clothes. (They hadn’t been stripped down like Crow Boy, but their clothes were blood-soaked and reeked of smoke.) Ming would be able to track every purchase and chart their movements through the city via their old phones.

“We can order replacement phones and pick them up at an automated kiosk.” It would mean severing ties with everyone they knew as they changed phone numbers. Should they call their Aunt Kitty and warn her? Her last text had her on a plane heading back to California; she needed to keep working if she had any hope of gaining custody.

Louise took out her phone and turned it on to check for recent text messages from Aunt Kitty. There were five hundred and six new texts. The last dozen all from their classmates.

Louise had gotten a handful of texts after their parents were killed. Their friends had wanted to know if they were okay. She hadn’t answered any of them. She didn’t know how, because the true and obvious response was “no.” After a few days, the incoming texts trickled to nothing.

Why had she gotten over five hundred since this morning? As she stared at her phone, it vibrated with a new text.

It was the middle of the night. Why would anyone be texting this late?

The text was “Where are you?” from Iggy. The one before was from him, too. “Are you okay?” And before that was “Call me!”

A quick scroll downward showed that all five hundred were from her classmates.

What in the world had happened?

She scrolled down and found the first text.

It was from Elle Pondwater, and all in capital letters. “OMG! OMG! I DIDN’T DO IT! I SWEAR!”

Oh, this did not bode well
.

The next one was from Iggy. “Someone leaked your names to the press. The world knows you’re Lemon-Lime.”

“Oh no,” Louise whispered.

Zahara pointed the finger at Elle with: “That witch sold your pictures to the tabloids!”

And then another from Elle. “That horrible photographer from my party figured out who you were! He’s sold the picture of you two made up as elves!” And then a minute later, a second text. “YOU’RE PRINCESS TINKER’S SISTERS?” Followed by a series of “?” and “!” marks.

“No, no, no,” Louise whispered, scrolling down. How did anyone know that?

Iggy texted again. “They’re just making wild guesses by saying that you know all that stuff about Elfhome because you’re Princess Tinker’s little sisters. Right? Yeah, you look a lot like her, but that’s not because you’re related. Right?” And then an hour later. “How did you know that Princess Tinker saved Windwolf?”

Zahara reported more damage. “Elle says she didn’t do it, but her mother had her photographer film the play. He recognized your music. He started a bidding war for the video.”

Louise groaned. She’d been so stupid. Pressed for time, she’d used all their normal music-composing tools that included the digital recreations of the Elfhome instruments. Any claims that they were the creators of the Lemon-Lime videos might have been discounted if not for the corroborating evidence of their signature music.

Zahara had reported more bad news while they were locked in Yves’ magical cage. The Jello Shots had waded into battle, a hundred thousand strong, determined to find out the truth. Like data locusts, they’d swarmed the school computer, found the student list for the twins’ class, and gone after home computers looking for evidence. Unlike the twins’ personal systems, the other students’ were easy prey.

Louise called up the Jello Shot forum and winced at what their fans had stolen. Everything from the anti-mermaid music video to set designs to costume sketches were mined, shared, compared to existing Lemon-Lime work, and debated in detail. In Giselle’s computer, the Jello Shots had found the ultimate proof. While the twins were working on their response to Nigel’s shout-out, they hadn’t noticed Giselle filming them. She sat behind them in class and managed to get a clear shot of Louise animating the first act while Jillian wrote dialogue. Louise always thought that she crawled through the process, but removed by time and place, she realized that she worked at an amazing speed. She pulled up old sets from previous videos, worked camera angles, blocked in characters, did special effects, and fiddled with lighting angles. And then, proving to be a ninjalike stalker, Giselle managed to film them recording the lines in the girls’ restroom.