Project Elfhome

by Wen Spencer

  “It’s on my call list.” Law turned her hip toward Ellen.

  “Is this your way to get me to feel you up?”

  “Will that work?”

  Ellen slapped her and got Law’s phone out of her front pocket without unnecessary (disappointingly so) groping. (Played for the opposite team: no check.)

  “You calling her?” Law asked. It was her experience that you never got straight answers from crazy people.

  “No, I’m back-tracing her number. The joys of having geeky friends is that they give you wonderful apps. Widget gave me a reverse-number look-up program when she helped me with my bookkeeping software. Oh. Gee.”

  “What?”

  “That’s a payphone in Market Square.”

  Either Crazy Lady didn’t have a phone, or she didn’t want anyone to trace the call back to her. Law suspected it was the latter. “Tricky.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  All the girls that Law helped usually asked—if not with words, with a desperate look—for Law to bail them out of trouble. As soon as the girls were tucked someplace safe, they spilled out their stories. Not all the details—usually they were ashamed of their weaknesses—but at least who the hell they were running from. It was possible that the mystery caller knew something that Snow didn’t. Maybe Snow didn’t even know she was in trouble. (Although the fact that she had dodged all the basic questions seemed to indicate she did.)

  It was possible that Snow didn’t trust Law simply because she was a human. Elves came to Pittsburgh via the train. The station was downtown, surrounded by skyscrapers. The enclaves where most elves lived were at the Rim, uphill nearly three miles. The most likely scenario was that Snow had been grabbed and taken by humans before she had ever gotten to the safety of the enclaves.

  “I need to sell the rest of my fish. I might as well take her out to the Rim; see if she belongs out there.”

  * * *

  It was less than twelve hours to Shutdown and the city hummed with activity. The EIA troops were heading out to the border checkpoints. The Pittsburgh Police were going into Nazi mode and towing anyone that illegally parked. The shops downtown and the Strip District were preparing for a massive horde of trucks to pull up and deliver an entire month’s worth of goods. Families wanting first dibs on rare big-ticket items were drifting in. In every abandoned lot and empty warehouse, food stands like Ellen’s were preparing to feed the incoming masses. Across the street, Gene Thompson had pulled in with his BBQ chicken truck, complete with trailer rigged as a wood-burning fire pit. Gene was splitting hickory with an axe, and smoke already scented the air.

  Law checked her truck just the same as if she’d left it parked on an abandoned, weed-choked lot instead of a city block. She banged on the side panels to frighten out small mammals and heat-seeking snakes. She carefully popped the hood and scanned over the engine to make sure no rats had chewed through hoses or belts. She took a few steps back, knelt and scanned under her pickup, looking for the telltale gleam of eyes or brake fluids on the pavement. She opened the driver’s door and scanned the cabin to make sure there was nothing up in the dash, under the seat, or behind it.

  Snow had been through the routine at Fairywood. She helped look although it wasn’t clear the elf knew what they were searching for. Newly arrived humans always teased Law for her caution but they’d never found themselves suddenly sharing a cab with a two-foot-wide spider while going sixty miles per hour. (Luckily the steel spinner had frightened Brisbane as badly as it scared Law. The spider instantly became a pincushion nailed to the dashboard.)

  Brisbane ignored the precautions and climbed up into the cab with his usual disdain.

  * * *

  Law was not one to give credit to rumors. People liked to talk. Just because they ran out of facts didn’t stop the mouth from flapping. It always amazed her that people who had never set foot in one of the elf enclaves could go on and on about what supposedly went on behind the high stone walls.

  She delivered to the side door that gave access to the motor court, instead of to the front door that led to the public dining areas. Technically, the area was more enclosed than the restaurant part of the enclave. The elves, though, were less careful with the doors and what they said.

  Over time it had become obvious to Law that the enclaves operated as tiny little city-states, allied but fiercely competitive. Each had an orchard within the forbidden center courtyard, extensive raised vegetable beds, greenhouses, chicken coops and small herds of indi. While humans might gossip about how the enclaves were nothing more than thinly disguised brothels, they were, in fact, cutthroat restaurateurs. If Law sold trout to Caraway’s enclave, she would need to sell crayfish to Poppymeadow’s. It played into some odd “you’re one of us” mindset that the elves had. She was “their” supplier only if she gave them exclusive stock.

  Law suspected that the loudest rumormongers were the humans that failed to pick up the cultural subtlety. They made the mistake of trying to peddle one type of goods to all the enclaves and found the door slammed in their faces. Which was fine with Law; it meant more business for her. It also meant she was more aware that she had to walk a tightrope to stay “one of us” with everyone.

  Normally, Caraway’s side gate stood open all day and she could back right into the motor court. The big doors were shut. She backed her Dodge up so its tailgate nearly touched the inward-swinging gate to make unloading easier. Snow sank down in the seat to peer nervously over the back of the bench seat at the enclave. She had only shown curiosity to the rest of the city, so it was a little worrisome that she seemed scared of other elves.

  “Stay,” Law said to Snow and Brisbane. The elves thought porcupine was a delicacy and had tried to buy him for dinner more than once.

  She knocked on the door by the spyhole. The slot slid aside immediately. Brown eyes so dark they might as well be black inspected her and then the slot shut again.

  What the hell? Since when did elves come with dark brown eyes?

  She stood a moment frowning at the gate. She could sell her fish elsewhere but she’d promised to deliver trout to Caraway’s today. If she failed to deliver, she might lose Caraway as a customer forever. She knocked again and called out in Elvish. “Nicadae! Fish! Fresh fish! Very fresh! Very good! You buy!”

  The slot opened again and a more familiar set of vivid blue eyes gazed out.

  “Law!” The owner of this set of eyes cried. “Forgiveness! Wait!”

  And the slot closed again.

  Law glanced at her pickup. Snow’s stormy gray eyes watched her with surprise and dismay. Snow’s blue-black hair and gray eyes should have been a giant clue-by-four whacking Law upside the head. She knew that elves were very much “us” and “them” even household to household. A handful of elves in Pittsburgh didn’t have straight black hair; Ginger Wine was a beautiful auburn. The elves that didn’t, though, tended to wear Wind Clan blue as if to compensate. Snow was dressed in pure white.

  Maybe it was a mistake not leaving the female with Ellen.

  There was a clang of bolts being thrown behind the gate, so Law focused back on the enclave.

  The dark eyes belonged to a sekasha-caste warrior.

  Law yelped in surprise and backed up. Sekasha were impossible to miss. They had spells tattooed on their arms, wore a special breastplate made of scales from wyvern, and carried a magically sharp, katana-style sword. They were said to be holy and were rare as hen’s teeth, usually only showing up in wake of the Viceroy Windwolf. All the elves she’d ever met were scared shitless of the sekasha because the caste was legally allowed to kill anyone who pissed them off.

  Caraway’s majordomo for the restaurant-side of things was a male by the name of Chili Pepper. He was vibrating in place, trying not to get too close to the warrior and still keep her from fleeing. “Law! Law! Forgiveness. Don’t leave!” He did a “come” motion with both hands even as he turned to the sekasha and launched into rapid-fire High Elvish.

  L
aw glanced back at her pickup. Snow had vanished and now only Brisbane peered out the window. The holy warrior stared at the porcupine, head tilted slightly in puzzlement. Law caught the word “trout” and the warrior’s eyes went to the fish coolers and he nodded once.

  Chili Pepper turned back to Law and spoke in Low Elvish. “This is his holiness Galloping Storm Horse on Wind. The viceroy is in residence along with two of his Hands.” His eyes flicked sideways to indicate the warrior beside him. He slipped into English. “Plus one. His English name is Pony, but he speaks very, very little English. The viceroy is here so rarely; there is no need for his people to learn it. Still, we have eleven warriors to feed for the next few days. I need all the water produce that you have.”

  “What?” Was this confuse-Law-with-cryptic-remarks day?

  “Tomorrow is Shutdown and we will be here on Elfhome and you will be on Earth. The holy ones need meat.” Chili Pepper glanced toward the truck. “Are you sure that we cannot have the porcupine?”

  “No!” Law sang and forced a laugh because the sekasha was right there, listening, maybe understanding. “I have trout! Lots of meat!”

  She opened up the nearest cooler, which turned out to be the one with crayfish. The crustaceans raised up their large spiny claws in the sudden daylight.

  Chili Pepper shook his head. “Those are tasty but they don’t have lots of meat.”

  She lifted the lid on the next cooler. This one had trout on ice. “I have several coolers of the fish. The crayfish—” She didn’t want to tell him that she had promised them to Poppymeadow. “You are right. Very little meat.”

  Storm Horse apparently had never seen crayfish before. He leaned forward to poke a finger at the mini-lobsters.

  “They pinch,” Law warned and then realized that the elf might not understand. “He knows that they pinch, doesn’t he?”

  Chili Pepper had his hand pressed to his lips, obviously struggling with what to say himself. “I don’t know,” he finally murmured into his fingers. “He just made his majority in March.”

  It wasn’t like the crayfish could actually hurt the warrior.

  Snow in hiding. Holy warrior tempting fate. Time to hurry things up and leave.

  Law charged the elves more. She reasoned it was a slight surcharge for dealing with the cultural hurdles. Her life would be easier if she didn’t have to catch several different species of fish just because the elves had issues. The elves never haggled. Perhaps because haggling required you to lie about how much you want something and the quality of the item. At the same time, she never tried to really gouge the elves so that they wouldn’t balk at her asking price.

  Her heavily insulated plastic marine coolers were special-ordered from Earth and top of the line. The elves used wicker baskets. She used an antique scale when working with the elves, made in the 1800s. (She was never sure if they didn’t understand her digital scale or thought it was inaccurate.) The first step, though, was to establish that the ancient device was calibrated correctly and that yes, five pounds was five pounds. Chili Pepper used an abacus with cinnabar beads that he flicked up and down. With a hundred fifty quarts of fish, it was tedious. She felt bad that she’d trapped Snow in the front seat of her pickup the entire time. At least with the constant flow of elves carrying off baskets of fish, the sekasha was politely shooed away so everyone could work.

  If anyone in Pittsburgh knew all the elf politics and skullduggery, though, it was going to be Chili Pepper.

  “I found an elf out in the middle of nowhere.” Law waved toward the front of her pickup. “She doesn’t speak English.”

  “Yes, I saw.” Chili Pepper didn’t even look up from his abacus. “I heard about her. Thank you for taking the child in.”

  Law had saved enough kittens to know what he was actually saying was “No, I don’t want it.” Not that Snow was a kitten, but obviously the act of finding her someplace safe was going to be the same process. “Who is she?”

  Chili Pepper clicked his tongue, which was how elves shrugged. “A mutt. Her name is something like—” He paused to think. “Ground Bare in Winter as Snow Falls in Wind. Or something ill-omened like that. You humans would call her—umm—Dead Winter or Barren Ground or Bare Snow. Her father was Water Clan and she was raised in his household. Her twice-cursed mother supposedly was Wind Clan; not that you can tell.”

  The attitude at least explained why Bare Snow was hiding in the pickup.

  “Twice-cursed?” Law knew that the elves could do real magic but she was a little hazy on what all they could do with it.

  “Maybe thrice-cursed. To be stupid enough to leave your clan for a male. To have the idiocy to agree to give birth to a mutt that no one would want.” Chili Pepper glanced at the sekasha. “At least, not with a name like that. And then managing to get killed, leaving said child at the mercy of another clan. They tossed her out, of course. A child belongs with its mother’s people.”

  Chili Pepper had called Bare Snow “child” three times. Law knew she was a bad judge of elf ages, but she had thought that the female—nearly as tall as Law and better endowed—was an adult.

  “How old is she?” Law asked.

  Another click of the tongue to indicate that Chili Pepper didn’t know. “She’s still in her doubles from what I heard.” He glanced to the cab just as Bare Snow peeked over the back of the seat. The female ducked down again. “You humans would say she’s a teenager or a fresh man.” He meant the first-year university students. The freshmen arrived in Pittsburgh eager to see real elves and made themselves pests at the enclaves. The older students knew better. “She’s a little younger than Galloping Storm Horse. Maybe ninety-five. I doubt younger than ninety.”

  Law had grown up knowing that elves were immortal but it was kind of mind-boggling to suddenly realize that someone nearly four times older than she was could still be considered a child.

  “I don’t know why she came to Pittsburgh,” he stated. “We wouldn’t have been able to take her in, not with the viceroy staying with us. I heard about her making the rounds and thought I might bring it to Wolf Who Rules’ attention. It isn’t right to have a child wandering around in this wilderness alone. Before I could, though, she’d been turned down by everyone else and had disappeared.”

  “The other enclaves wouldn’t let her a room?”

  Chili Pepper stared at Law in confusion. “Let?”

  “Rent. Stay. Sleep.”

  “Oh! No. She wanted to join their household. It’s a totally different thing than staying for a short period. No one wants someone from Water Clan. I have no idea why she came all this way without some guarantee that someone would take her.”

  They’d unloaded both the trout and the seasi. It totaled up to two hundred and eighty-one pounds of fish. Hopefully the sekasha loved fish because they were going to be eating a lot of it. Chili Pepper lifted the lid to the crayfish and considered them. “Will you bring more, early Startup?”

  “Yes! Certainly!” Law cried, wanting to keep her promise to Poppymeadow. As it was, she was going to disappoint Ginger Wine.

  Chili Pepper closed the lid. He considered the front of the pickup. “My lord had business out at the aeroport.” He meant the airport that was nearly an hour away. “I do not know when he will return. Will you keep her safe?” In other words: I still don’t want the kitten, don’t you dare leave her here.

  “Of course.”

  “And I can’t have the porcupine?”

  “No!”

  * * *

  Law sold the crayfish to Poppymeadow. Much to her relief, she remembered that she had four giant snapping turtles tucked way in the back, confined to makeshift cages made out of milk crates and chicken wire. Those she sold to Ginger Wine to keep her promise of “water produce,” as the elves called seafood.

  Bare Snow stayed hidden in the pickup, watching, learning God-knows-what since most of Law’s dealing was a mishmash of English and Elvish.

  Traffic was starting to grow heavy as the people re
turning to Earth rushed through the last-minute errands. She fought her way into Hershel’s Exxon on Forbes Avenue, Oakland’s only gas station.

  During a normal, non-Shutdown day, only two of the pumps were usually in use at the same time. There was a waiting line for all twelve pumps. A frat boy in a Smart car tried to dart in and take the pump she’d been waiting for. She laid on her horn and edged her prehistoric Dodge forward until her grill protector filled his back window.

  “Hoi!” She leaned out the window to shout at him. “If you want to use that car to get out of Pittsburgh, you better move it! Your little thing won’t even scratch my grill!”

  His frat brother beat on his shoulder going, “Dude, what are you doing? The locals are insane! Let him use the pump first!”

  They retreated to the other side of the station. Law made sure everything on her truck was locked down and then went inside to pay. It was the other drawback of Oakland. Everywhere else in town, you could pump first. Oakland had too many transients for Hershel’s to risk not getting cash up front.

  Bare Snow had followed her into the store and was now picking up things randomly and eyeing them closely. All the male eyes were on her. The baby-doll dress showed off as much as it covered up—especially when the female bent at the hip to take things off the bottom shelf. Much as Law appreciated the view, she was going to have to get something longer for the female. (Law had shirts longer than Bare Snow’s dress.)

  Pat Hershel was working the register. “You’ve got another stray, Law? An elf this time?”

  “Yup.”

  “Don’t go forgetting you’re just a girl yourself.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “One of these times you’re going to bite off more than you can chew. You should be more careful.”

  Law clenched her jaw against the first dozen things that came to mind. Pat meant well but she was like most people—they only helped people when it was easy and convenient. As soon as things got messy—usually when the girl was on the verge of drowning in her trouble—they’d back off and let nature take its course. Which was fine and good for them, but why did they always feel like they had to warn her off too? Why were people more concerned about status quo than actually helping?