Wood Sprites (56 page)
Authors: Wen Spencer
This can’t possibly work,
Louise thought.
“Do you see them?” Jillian was hopping up and down as she tried to peer through the crowds. The new Penn Station might be an airy, light-filled building, but it still contained thousands of people, all intent on their own journies. All of them taller than the twins.
“Are you sure about this?” Crow Boy murmured.
No,
Louise thought. It was a patented crazy plan. There was a full-out manhunt for the mysterious trio of children who had disappeared from Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital. Taking the train was full of hurdles, but so was every other way of getting to Monroeville.
“They’re here.” Nikola’s little-boy voice came over the earbuds that they were all wearing. “Northeast, fifty-seven feet, at a standstill.” There was a pause and a very Chuck Norris-like “Team Mischief move out” followed in the same Welsh lilt. Odd how Tesla now seemed very much like four little people. He felt much more like a tank operated by a crew instead of just one person in a puppy outfit.
“Which way is north?” Jillian hopped up and down more.
“This way.” Crow Boy headed toward the right.
The Amber Alert for the three “elf” children scrolled across the large monitors even as Crow Boy plowed through the crowds. The twins had managed to keep any cameras from recording their pictures, but the alert featured long detailed descriptions. A winged boy with a broken leg, twin brown-haired girls, and a large dog nanny-bot were entirely impossible to forget.
They’d done what they could to change their appearances. They’d found a healing spell for broken bones in the codex and cast it on Crow Boy’s leg. He’d muffled whimpers of pain but refused to let them cancel the spell. Twelve hours later, hurt had etched a dark glower onto his face, but he was walking without a limp. Without wings or the cast, he started out well disguised, but they took the precaution of spiking his hair and bleaching the tips. He looked like an angry porcupine. Even New Yorkers were veering out of his path.
Louise and Jillian were pretending to be boys. Harry P. Johnson and Ron W. Johnson, to be specific; as long as Jillian didn’t slip too far into character and use a British accent, no one should catch the allusion. They were young enough that in T-shirts and jeans they really didn’t need anything more.
Tesla was the most problematic to disguise. Most nanny-bots were smaller dogs, leaving Louise to wonder at her parents’ choice. They had discussed very briefly buying a different nanny-bot and shipping Tesla on ahead. The outcry from everyone killed that idea. In the end, they printed out the invisibility spell and affixed it on a large cardboard box that covered him. The babies had practiced keeping Tesla behind Crow Boy and between the twins as “Team Mischief” moved like a wedge through the hotel suite.
In the busy train station, Crow Boy was having no problem blocking people. The twins, however, needed to throw their arms wide to stop people from tripping over Tesla in his invisibility box.
“Maybe we should split up.” Louise scanned the area for a quiet corner for Tesla to stand. “You and Crow Boy look for—”
“There they are!” Jillian cried.
Amtrak had a rule that children under twelve couldn’t ride unescorted. Crow Boy was old enough to be an unaccompanied minor, but he would still need an adult to check him in with station personnel and undergo an interview apparently designed to keep loose cannons from traveling alone. Since they couldn’t travel alone, the twins had simply found a family to travel with.
Brian and Helen Johnson and their three young children were traveling to Monroeville. They had a nice bland name and came with three chaos generators. As Team Mischief neared the West Thirty-Fourth Street entrance, Louise could hear one of the generators screaming over the roar of the crowd.
The Johnsons were gathered beside a minivan taxi, trying to juggle three children, a car seat, and a heavily loaded luggage mule. The screamer was three-year-old Jayne on a harness and leash. He was stretched to the end of his tether and shrieking.
Helen had the leash in her right hand and was holding onto five-year-old Malcolm, who was attempting to lie down, with her left. She had the infant Alleyne in a sling on her chest.
Neither parent noticed Team Mischief staring, but Alleyne did. The baby raised her hand and waved. Louise twiddled her fingers in a covert reply. This was what the babies would be like if the twins could find some way to have them be born. Nearly hairless, toothless, and grinning happily at dangerous strangers. Louise felt guilty. They’d chosen the Johnsons because it was the second most common surname in the United States. There were two other passengers and a crewmember with the same last name. Even if someone discovered Team Mischief had traveled to Monroeville under the name, it was unlikely they would connect the four to Brian and Helen. Still, Yves and his people were ruthless and relentless.
“The meter is still running on the taxi.” Helen pointed a key fob at the car seat and it unfolded into a stroller.
“I know!” Brian snapped. “I think the doorman did something to the luggage mule when he put it in. I can’t get it to move.”
“Did you flip the thingy?” Helen mimed flipping something with one finger while still holding onto Jayne’s leash.
Brian glanced at her, eyebrow cocked. “What thingy?”
“The thingy! The thingy! Oh, Jayne, please!” This was with a slight tug on the leash of the screaming three-year-old. “The thingy that locks the wheels!”
The luggage mule whined and stepped out of the taxi hatch and lowered its wheels. Brian trotted to the front and thumbed the release pad that had been flashing red. All the doors thumped shut and the taxi rolled away.
Claiming Alleyne, Brian put the infant into the stroller. As the family hurried away, Alleyne leaned out to watch Team Mischief follow slowly.
The Johnsons weren’t frequent travelers; they needed to stop at the check-in kiosk to pick up tap cards. Afterwards they took the escalators down to the tracks where the train waited. The engines were idling with a deep, throbbing growl.
“Look! Look! It’s a train!” Brian cried for the boys’ sake.
The family ground to a halt in a spasm of train love. Team Mischief veered out of the path of people coming down the escalator, and the twins’ party killed time consulting Jillian’s tablet about things that arguably were more interesting to tweens than the big engine at the head of the line of cars.
“No, no, Malcolm, don’t put that into your mouth. It was on the ground.” Helen pinned Jayne’s leash to the ground so she could use both hands to keep the five-year-old from eating his discovery.
“Nine hours,” Brian murmured with mild reproach.
“I’m not flying to an area that has a city popping in and out of existence,” Helen sang in the manner adults used when not wanting to frighten children overhearing them. “I want to keep my feet on the ground. Besides, the boys will love the chance to ride on a real train!”
The last sentence was addressed more directly to the boys, who leapt up and down and cried, “Yay, trains!”
After a few minutes, Helen steered the boys to the steps with, “Let’s go see what’s inside the coaches!”
There was a conductor waiting with a reader. Brian fumbled through the cards, accidently feeding one through twice before getting the four tapped correctly into the reader. (The baby apparently rode for free.) They did a small circus act to get the three children and the stroller up the steps. As a closing act, the luggage mule picked up two dropped toys and then negotiated the steep stairs with surprising grace. While everyone was suitably distracted, Team Mischief slid into position. Normally the twins would use a phone app instead of tap cards, but they wanted to match themselves to the Johnsons.
The conductor noticed them standing waiting with tap cards in hand. He glanced past the children, obviously looking for accompanying adults. “Where’s your parents?”
“They just got on.” Louise pointed up the steps where the Johnson family had just vanished out of sight.
“Mom and Dad said we could do our own cards and luggage since they had the babies to take care of.” Jillian turned slightly to show that she had a full backpack as well as a large rolling carry-on. It worked as an excuse as to why “their parents” weren’t expecting “the older kids” to help juggle babies and luggage.
“We take the N train every day to school.” Louise made a show of shifting her backpack as if it was nearly too heavy for her to carry.
“You just checked our parents in.” Crow Boy glared at the man. “Brian and Helen Johnson.” He pointed at the reader in the conductor’s hand. “Can’t you call their names up on your machine?”
The conductor tapped on his console, checked their names against the Johnson family, and then nodded, “Ah, I see. Okay, you can go.”
The real Johnsons were mid-coach, still settling into a row of seats, two on either side of the aisle. Team Mischief claimed the next row. Crow Boy lifted the twins’ luggage into overheads as Tesla took the window seat on the left. Jillian and Louise took the seats on the right.
It had worked. They were on their way to Monroeville. They had nine hours of relative safety. Louise didn’t even want to think of what lay beyond them.
* * *
“Where are your parents?” Helen Johnson asked when she passed them the second time on her way to the bathroom with one of the boys.
Louise had been focused on ordering supplies for the rescue mission. Beside her Jillian was working with the babies to find out where Yves might be holding the tengu children. Assuming that they found and saved the nestlings, they would still need to figure out how to reunite the children with their families. Crow Boy had never been to the tengu village; he couldn’t give them clear directions beyond “someplace north of the city, flying to the point of near exhaustion.” There were safe resting sites—“cotes,” he called them—but they were tree houses high above the ground, and none of the tengu children would be able to fly. They would be blindly stumbling through an endless virgin forest. Except for one horrible trip to Vermont, the twins had never been outside the New York metropolitan area. Central Park was the limit of their exposure to “nature.”
“Where’s your parents?” Helen Johnson repeated. “You’re not alone, are you?”
Totally blindsided by the question, Louise blinked at the woman. Louise had never thought a stranger would actually talk to them on the train. The woman must not be a true New Yorker. Crow Boy was curled up in the aisle seat opposite to Louise, sound asleep. A side effect of the healing spell they had used on him seemed to be exhaustion. To a casual observer, the twins were alone.
“We couldn’t find seats all together as a family.” Jillian had a lie prepared. “Mom and our little sister are in the next car.”
“We’ve got our older brother.” Louise pointed at Crow Boy.
Helen eyed the tengu boy with the spiked hair with suspicion. Her five-year-old whimpered and tugged on her hand. “It’s wonderful when older siblings take care of their little brothers and sisters.” And she let herself be dragged away.
After that the twins took turns getting up every couple of hours to “check in with their mother.” But otherwise the trip on the train went without a hitch.
During the first Startup, Monroeville had been one finger of urban sprawl extending along I-376 to where the artery led out of the heart of Pittsburgh to connect up with the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Businesses extended only a block or two from the main roads and few buildings were taller than one story. Its largest claim to fame up to that point had been a 1978 horror movie filmed in its shopping mall.
Reporters during the first Startup repeated that point often when a mated pair of sauruses went on a rampage in the parking lot. The twins had studied the hours of videos taken from that time, and Louise thought she would be able to recognize landmarks. Over the years, though, Monroeville had grown as a gateway to Elfhome, taking over neighboring towns as it expanded. The road edged with low-slung businesses was gone. In its place were dozens of thirty-story skyscrapers and skeletons of even taller buildings still under construction.
Their hotel was one of the newer buildings, and the presidential suite proved to be a penthouse apartment. From the living room, they could see for miles. The hotel had been built with views of the Rim in mind; it stood on the last hilltop before the quarantine zone. Even in the deepening shadows of twilight, it was easy to spot the curving line where Monroeville stopped and the Rim started. It arched from horizon to horizon, sweeping close to the hotel as it passed.
Louise peered downward and spotted the tall border fence just a block away, edging a 7-Eleven parking lot. She was surprised that Monroeville pressed up so tight against it. In all the news reports she’d ever seen, the video showed the fence bordered by desolate fields. Beyond it lay a mile of burned sterile land, a no-man’s-land to isolate Elfhome flora and fauna and make it easy for the EIA border guard to spot illegal immigrants. Far in the distance, the tall ironwood trees rose as a solid, unbroken wall.
“So close,” Jillian whispered with forehead and hands pressed to the glass.
They had less than a week to rescue the tengu children, and then the forest beyond the fence would be swapped for Pittsburgh. If Team Mischief hadn’t succeeded by then, the fight would be moved to Elfhome as the secret elves transported the nestlings across the border. Yves would have thousands of oni warriors at his command. Last anyone heard, Windwolf had been hundreds of miles away at Aum Renau. And one by one, the tengu children would be murdered.
Louise turned away from the window, trying to focus. They’d spent the nine hours on the train verifying that the children weren’t in the safe house anymore, nor at any of the other safe houses that Crow Boy knew that his people used while seeking the freedom of Pittsburgh. Logic suggested that Yves would have kept the children close to the quarantine zone, but it was nearly a hundred and sixty miles in circumference.
Less than a week and hundreds of square miles.
“Pft, nuts!” Joy muttered from the minibar, and a can went flying across the hotel room. “Oh! Candy!”
The cans of nuts landed beside the babies, who were ransacking the luggage, looking for the mini-hovercarts. Nikola was operating Tesla to move the heavy things and the girls were in the mice, darting here and there, squeaking excitedly. Like the Johnsons’ children, eventually they’d found their first train ride unbearably long and boring. Taking their cues from the real children, the babies had repeatedly asked how much longer the trip would be and fought with each other. At least the Team Mischief babies did not vomit, poop, pee, or scream—something that the Johnson kids did with alarming frequency. The three children had been an education on how difficult parenting really was. After five hours, Louise had been really wishing the Johnsons had off switches.
The hotel room door opened and Crow Boy came in carrying bags of takeout.
“The house is empty.” His voice was wooden. He set the bags on the suite’s dinette table. “Empty and clean.”
Louise breathed out in mixed relief. They’d tapped spy satellites on the train, pinpointed the safe house, and examined it remotely by every means they could think of. Crow Boy had insisted on going and checking it alone. The twins agreed because the only thing they couldn’t discount were the children being dead inside.
He collapsed into one of the chairs. “I feel so useless.”
“We’ll find them.” She opened the bags. “Indian?” There had been a Chinese restaurant just on the corner.
“I don’t know who I can trust.” He laid his head on the table. “Not everyone who is Chinese is an oni, but the human-looking oni are all traveling with Chinese visas. The oni need to have people close to both sides of the quarantine zones to get their people in and out unseen. The EIA have weeded out the moles in their agency, but there are plenty of others on Earth. We need to be careful not to be seen.”
She nodded, her stomach flipping at the thought of being captured again. Yves had been careless once, mostly because Feng had been there, distracting him. Yves wouldn’t underestimate the twins again. This time he’d know all about the babies and Joy.
Her hands trembled slightly as she opened up the containers of palak paneer, vegetable korma, chicken tikka masala, samosa, and naan bread.
Crow Boy reached out and took her hand; his was large and calloused compared to hers. “You only need to find them. I’ll deal with the guard.” For a moment he seemed like an adult man, and then the moment was gone, and he was an exhausted, battered fourteen-year-old boy with the world on his shoulders.
“I told you: no charging in.” She smacked him on the top of his head. “We’re smarter than Yves. He’ll never see us coming.”
Crow Boy’s shoulders shook with silent laughter.
“Promise!” Louise smacked him again.
“I will do anything you ask of me, but I won’t let you put yourself in danger. If it comes to a fight, you must let me do what I’ve been trained to do. Alone.”
At the mansion, he had taken on half a dozen adults by himself. He taken out two and held his own for several minutes against four. Those he was fighting had been worried enough to call for help.
“Are you like some kind of super ninja warrior?” Louise asked.
“Yes.”
“Really?”
His shoulders shook again with silent laughter. “It is a long story of love and honor and loyalty, but the simple answer is yes.”
“Oh, come on!” Louise cried. “I know you’re tired, but we need to know everything we can about what’s going on. If we’d known what was going on right after our first visit to the museum, we could have stopped—stopped everything. As it was, we didn’t even get a message to our sister warning her or Windwolf.”
He laughed tiredly. “Geez, where do I even start?” He sighed and was silent for a little while. “My people were human once. We lived in what is now China during the time of the Warring States, over two thousand years ago. The first Wong Jin was a wise sage who had fallen out of favor with the Flame Emperor. He and his seven loyal and brave servants became bandits, kind of like Robin Hood and his merry men, if Robin Hood had a secret cave hideout that led to another world. Over time, they gathered hundreds of poor people to them in a remote mountain village on Onihida. Then one day—” He laughed. “You have to understand, we love to tell stories about Wong Jin. It gives us hope that someday—if we’re clever—we’ll outsmart our enemies and find freedom.”
“One day—” Louise prompted him.
“One day Wong Jin and his servants were out on one of their many adventures—which mostly involved stealing something and then escaping in a clever way—when they discovered Elfhome. And there, basically on the doorstep to that world, was Providence. Most men would have been frightened—and certainly Wong Jin’s men wanted to flee the dragon—but Wong Jin saw that Providence was an intelligent creature and so engaged him in conversation.
“The dragons had put Elfhome under edict. By the laws of his people, Providence could not travel to Elfhome, but he’d lost his daughter on that world. Fearing the worst, he pleaded with Wong Jin to find his child and bring her to him. He promised to reward Wong Jin richly if he succeeded. Wong Jin accepted the challenge. Providence marked Wong Jin so his daughter would know that Wong Jin was his Chosen. To make a long, long story short, Wong Jin carefully made his way through the elves’ defenses to find where Providence’s child had been entrapped. Only he arrived too late. The elves had already shattered the child to pieces.”
Louise thought of Joy and the eleven baby dragons all still inside Dufae’s chest. She and Jillian had been so focused on saving their siblings that they hadn’t stopped to consider where the baby dragons had came from. Dufae had known that the
nactka
were “loaded,” but had he understood that meant that each one had an intelligent creature locked inside?
“What did Wong Jin do?” Louise asked.
“He was about to return with bits and pieces of the daughter when he discovered that the elves had also created a hybrid, a dragon-elf child. Assuming that Providence wanted anything related to his daughter, Wong Jin stole the child and carried her back to Onihida. Somewhere along the way, things got complicated.”
“Complicated?”
“They fell in love.” Crow Boy said this like a typical boy; that love was weird and possibly icky. “By the time they reached Onihida, Wong Jin did not want to hand her over to Providence, nor did she want to leave Wong Jin. While his men were fearful of Providence, they pledged that they would protect her with their lives.”
“So Wong Jin brought to Providence all the shattered pieces of his child, including the female dragon-elf. He reminded Providence that he had promised Wong Jin a rich reward. For his prize, Wong Jin wanted the female, and only her. They braced themselves for a fight, but Providence knew that this would happen; it was why he picked Wong Jin to be his Chosen. He gave his blessing to their marriage and promised to watch over their people as their guardian. And to Wong Jin’s seven loyal servants, Providence gave magical powers so that they could guard his daughter.”
“So Wong Jin became your king and you’re one of the knights?”
“When you give thieves magical powers you don’t get knights in shining armor, you get super ninjas.”
“Wait, if you were humans, where did all the crow stuff come from?” Jillian joined them at the table. She picked up one of the samosas and started to eat it.
“For hundreds of years, life was good. The land was rich, our neighbors were distant, and we had our guardian, Providence. We had all that we needed, and Earth became a place of legend for us. But then about a thousand years ago, the oni came to our valley and captured Providence. Dragons have a dual existence. Their minds and their bodies can exist separately. His spirit came to our dream crow and begged for us to kill his body. If the oni intended just to kill Providence, it would be one thing, for it would have freed his soul. What they intended, though, was to shatter him down and remake him into a weapon of war. It would have been worse than what the elves had done to his daughter. He could not allow it.”
“But—but—why kill him? Why not save him?”
“What he asked was for the blood guard to sacrifice themselves. The oni had Providence in a magical trap. The blood guard would need to fight to his side. There would be no time to free him, only time enough to strike a killing blow before they would be overwhelmed. They were a thousand against an army. It was a slaughter on both sides. The Chosen One and all of the blood guard that fought that day died. But our people succeeded at what Providence had asked; we killed him, freeing his soul.”
“A thousand lives for one?” Jillian cried. “That was a win?”
“If the oni had kept control of his soul, the damage would have been worse. They had caught other dragons and shattered them and experimented. They wanted Providence to craft what would be basically a global living spell. It could reach for thousands of miles, affect millions of people, guided by his soul. It would be like an intelligent nuclear bomb, programmed to seek and destroy, and having no will of its own to resist its orders. As it was, they gathered my people together and experimented with just his body. They locked the survivors within one massive cage and cast one spell. Everyone was transformed; merged with crows that—that . . .” He trailed off, his eyes widening slightly, and then he blushed and looked down. “You don’t need to hear all the gross parts. One spell and we were forever changed as a race. Providence shielded us from the worst that could have happened. Because of him, we still function as humans. Mostly. We have bird feet and we lay eggs. But we couldn’t fly. We didn’t have wings at first. Providence provided the spell for our wings.”
Dufae’s chest had contained twelve “loaded”
nactka
. The twins exchanged glances and shivered. Dufae had opened the box and instantly known that he had to flee with it to Earth where it was harmless, lest it fall into the wrong hands. According to Yves, Ming had it now on Elfhome.
“The dragons had tried to isolate Onihida. Keep the evil that had taken root from spreading. But they missed one pathway. The oni guessed of its existence, but they couldn’t find it. Somehow they tricked the elves into finding it. As the oni started to flood their people through it to China, we got out the newborn Chosen One and all of the blood-guard children that survived our enslavement. We fled to Japan and took refuge in a mountainous temple with a sect of warrior monks known as the
yamabushi
.”