Project Elfhome

by Wen Spencer

  “So, we still don’t know.”

  “We were reviewing the video, trying to guess.” Which meant everyone was in production with him and had seen the live feed from her camera. Juergen was probably included because of the windmill/pickup truck angle. The entire office had seen her rescue Hal with the chainsaw.

  Jane cursed slightly as the hot burn threatened to climb higher.

  “You did a good job, Jane.” Dmitri flung the newspaper onto another desk as they passed. “Tinker invented hoverbikes that use magic to fly when she was twelve…”

  “Thirteen,” someone corrected him.

  “Twelve! Thirteen! Who cares? The point is that she’s a little mad scientist and the viceroy just gave her complete control of the city because he’s in love.”

  Dmitri opened the door and gestured that she was to go in. He’d successfully distracted her enough that she’d forgotten about the “network surprise” until she was five steps into the office. There were two strangers sitting on his leather couch. Empty cups waited on the coffee table, explaining why he’d stolen all the coffee from the break room.

  “I found the coffee, and your new producer.” Dmitri shut the door firmly behind him.

  “What?” Jane whispered fiercely. She had assumed that the “network surprise” was in the way of a memo, warning of a film crew’s arrival during the following Shutdown. She didn’t think that they were already in Pittsburgh.

  The two men were polar opposites. One was a middle-aged Peter Pan, a schoolboy that never grew up, fair-haired, wiry build, and all grins. The other was a brooding wild man of dark hair and beefcake. Host and cameraman, probably in that order.

  “This is Nigel Reid and…Taggart.” Dmitri frowned as he realized that he didn’t have a first name to stick on wild man. “They arrived late last night during Shutdown. Apparently they had visa problems at the border and were delayed. Almost didn’t make it.”

  “Came across just before midnight, minutes to spare, like Cinderella.” Nigel had a slight Scottish burr to his baritone voice. He beamed with the charisma that the camera loved but was pure hell to contain. People like him were sure that if they could just talk long enough, they could persuade anyone into anything. And normally, they were right.

  “Apparently our news stories to the network preempted their attention as we didn’t hear about your arrival until this morning.” Dmitri found a stray cup, inspected it to see if it was clean, and then poured coffee for Jane.

  Taggart was obviously the behind-the-camera guy, from his unkempt black mane to heavy five o’clock shadow. His black muscle shirt, worn blue jeans and hiking boots indicated he expected to hit Pittsburgh running and be out filming shortly after arrival yesterday, not holding down a chair in an office today. “We were warned that last Shutdown the viceroy had been attacked and was missing and that we might be walking into a war zone.”

  Jane snorted at the ancient news.

  “It’s complicated,” Dmitri temporized. “Things are a lot more edgy here but so far, we’re not at war with the elves, and we want to keep it that way.” He indicated the spare guest chair, meaning he wanted Jane to sit. “This is Jane Kryskill, the producer of our top show, Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden.”

  “Backyard and garden?” Taggart leaned back, body language full of defensiveness that made lie to the vague query in his voice. Hopefully he didn’t play poker with that many tells. “Nigel and I do award-winning nature documentaries all over the world. We’ve been a team for six years. I’d rather not add a third wheel to our machine.”

  Jane started to protest that the most dangerous places on Earth wouldn’t prepare a crew for Elfhome and then caught herself. If they turned her down, she was free. She spread her hands in a “what can I say” motion to Dmitri. “I’d be a third wheel.”

  Dmitri gave her a stern look. “They’re yours, keep them out of trouble.”

  “Excuse me,” Taggart started. “I thought I made it clear…”

  “No, let me make it clear. You’re going to be driving around with a great big truck that says you are our responsibility. The elves might not speak English but that NBC logo is fairly universal. If you screw up, every human in this building becomes a target. You’ve been dumped in my lap without any warning, so you will play by my rules, or so help me God, I’ll have the EIA lock you up until the next Shutdown and boot you back to Earth with no chance for a visa approved ever again, understand?”

  “I say, I don’t think there’s any need to…” Nigel started to bring his charisma to bear.

  Dmitri stabbed a finger at him. “Shut up! The only thing I want to hear from you is ‘yes, sir’ and ‘thank you, sir.’ From now on, Jane is not just your producer, she is your god. You will not go anywhere or do anything without her knowledge and you will do what she tells you to. If you even try to fight with me over this, I will have you locked up until you realize that this is Pittsburgh, and you can’t do anything you damn well please.”

  There was a knock at the door and Michelle Baker leaned in. “Jane, Hal is calling you.” When Jane started to take out her phone, Michelle shook her head. “He’s got your camera and he’s broadcasting live.”

  “Oh, shit!” Jane leapt to her feet.

  “Jane!” Dmitri snapped to keep her from bolting. “They’re yours.” He pointed at the two men. “Keep them out of trouble.”

  She cursed and went. Maddeningly, they followed. At least Nigel had the intelligence to wait until they were in the hall to ask in a very quiet voice, “Would he really have us locked up?”

  “In a heartbeat,” Jane said. She considered telling them about what had happened to the last person who hadn’t taken Dmitri seriously. Then she realized that if they were locked up, they’d no longer be her responsibility.

  * * *

  Hal’s mark of bruises had darkened to solid black purple from ear to ear. They hadn’t cleaned the sap out of his fine blond hair, thus it stood up in wild spikes. He looked totally demented, making a great first impression on the two New Yorkers.

  “What the hell, Hal!” Jane cried over the link. “How did you get my camera?”

  “I told Johnnie Be Good the code to the truck’s locker.”

  Johnnie Be Good was the slimeball of an EMT who had responded to the 911 call. She didn’t trust him near her drinks at parties and she didn’t trust him not to be stealing things off her truck.

  “Hal! Damn it! Not again! Don’t tell people that shit! You know what we have to do to change the fricking codes!” Actually it wasn’t that hard, but she made up stuff so he wouldn’t do exactly this. She continued while e-mailing a change order to Juergen. “And on top of everything, I’m going to have to come to the hospital and get the camera so no one steals it. You got me out of bed at 4:00 a.m. this morning, Hal. I want to go home, feed Chesty, and go to sleep! It’s been a shitty, shitty day.”

  “They said I could leave if you came and picked me up.” He dropped his voice to a whisper and pulled the camera closer. His pupils were little pinpoints. “The angry penguins scare me.”

  Jane pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to ward off a headache. “They’ve given you pain medicine, haven’t they?”

  “My state of medication does not make them any less scary. Tiny, angry little birds.”

  He was talking about the ancient catholic nuns of Mercy Hospital. They were one of the few things on the planet that actually frightened Hal. She suspected he would be even more cavalier about getting hurt if there was a hospital other than Mercy to go to in Pittsburgh.

  “Please, please, please, please, please, please,” Hal whimpered. “You’ve got the Fortress of Solitude. All those empty beds! Please!”

  “Fine. You can stay at my place. I’ll come get you.” She slapped down her hand, cutting the feed.

  The two men were staring at the display with surprise and amusement.

  “Who was that unfortunate fellow?” Nigel asked.

  “That’s the host of Pittsburgh Backyard and Ga
rden, Hal Rogers. We had a rough shoot this morning.”

  Taggart was clearly confused by the answer. Obviously he thought PB&G was a simple landscape show.

  Nigel raised a finger in question. “Speaking of beds, where are we staying?”

  * * *

  The two men trailed Jane to Ginnilee Berger’s desk which was alarmingly clean, as in not only was the desktop cleared of every yellow post-it note, all the pictures of England and peaches-and-cream-complexion people were missing from the cubicle walls.

  Jane caught hold of Louis Robinson, the station engineer. “Was Ginnilee fired?”

  “No, she’s on pregnancy leave. Has been for a month.”

  “She was pregnant?”

  Louis stared at her a moment and then said, “Vespers.”

  She shuddered as unwanted memories tried to surface. “What?”

  “You and Hal were off doing that show on vespers when we had the party for her. Yeah, she was like five months pregnant and planned to have the baby here so it would have Pittsburgh citizenship, but her ultrasound came back showing that the baby was breech. She had to go home; Mercy won’t handle high-risk pregnancies for people with visas.”

  “Home? To England?”

  “Yes. England. She’ll be back—if she can work out a visa for the baby. She’s hoping for joint citizenship, England and Pittsburgh, but it’s unlikely.”

  “But who is doing her job until she gets back?”

  “The intern.”

  “Where’s the intern?”

  “I think he went home too; it’s summer break at the University.”

  “So who is doing the housing?”

  Louis shrugged and backed away. “Not me.”

  Nigel looked slightly confused and concerned but Taggart immediately grasped the situation.

  “So we don’t have any place to stay?” Taggart asked. “Network said you would handle our accommodations.”

  “We would have if we’d had more than,” she checked her watch, “fifteen minutes’ warning that Network didn’t do shit about preparing for your trip. Just to be clear, that includes not letting us know last Shutdown to prepare for you showing up yesterday.”

  Nigel jumped in to prevent a fight. “We tried checking into a hotel last night after we crossed the border.”

  “No luck, huh? Welcome to Pittsburgh. Strange thing about disappearing to another planet for a month at a time; really kills the tourist trade.” What few hotels remained were booked solid in the summer months.

  “We’ve just spent the last,” Taggart paused to count back hours, “seventy-four hours in our truck, sitting in traffic, taking turns sleeping, pissing into a bottle. Three days.”

  She’d heard that getting across the border was hell on Shutdown. At least it wasn’t winter. Taggart certainly looked like he’d slept in his clothes for three days. Nigel must have had a splash bath in the men’s room and put on clean clothes.

  “Doesn’t the University and the EIA have people that stay just for the month?” Taggart asked with desperation in his voice. The man probably just wanted to fall over and sleep in a real bed.

  “They have dorms,” Jane said. She wondered if their morning of positive karma with the EIA could allow her dumping the two onto them.

  “We can stay with you!” Nigel cried with the delight of a nine-year-old being told they were having a sleepover. “Your raccoon fellow says you have lots of beds. We’re going to be working together. It would be so convenient!”

  Taggart merely watched, knowing the persuasive powers of a TV host. He couldn’t keep the smirk out of his chocolate-colored eyes. She really needed to get him into a high-stakes poker game.

  “I have a really big dog,” Jane said.

  “Oh, I love dogs!” Nigel said with all sincerity. “And dogs love Taggart. It’s his special talent.”

  Which apparently annoyed Taggart to all end, judging by the wince.

  Housing was plentiful in Pittsburgh but not necessarily safe. They could pick any empty house and squat. Finding a safe place before nightfall would be tricky. She knew better than anyone what could be hiding in an abandoned space. The memory of vespers pushed into her mind and she shivered again.

  “Okay, fine, but only for one night. Tomorrow we find you someplace to live.”

  * * *

  She’d missed their production truck earlier because Juergen had it in the garage on some pretense so he could climb all over it and drool. Taggart had state-of-the-art cameras to go with it. Everything from battery life to resolution was all a hundred times greater than her camera. It put her ancient truck and ten-year-old gear to shame. Sheer jealousy made her want to kick the truck or something. She could see why, though, Dmitri assumed that they’d be driving the network vehicle all over Pittsburgh: her truck was too old to support their cameras.

  The thing had a giant-sized logo of their affiliated network painted on its side as well as Chased by Monsters, which apparently was the name of their show.

  “Award-winning nature documentaries?” Jane pointed to the show’s sharp-toothed logo.

  “It wasn’t our first choice of names.” Taggart obviously hated it.

  Nigel, however, was a half-full kind of person. “The name isn’t important, it’s what we film that is. It is kind of catchy.”

  Jane didn’t want to agree. She hated this sense of being railroaded into babysitting. It opened old wounds. She was going to have nightmares tonight for sure. “I have supplies in my truck that need to be moved to my SUV.”

  That required a careful introduction of Chesty. He was too well-mannered to growl at them but he gave the men a look that let them know he would cheerfully tear their faces off if Jane asked him to.

  Nigel clapped his hands together in sheer joy. “An elfhound! Oh, how wonderful. They’re on our list.”

  “This is Chesty. Don’t move while I’m getting him used to you.”

  “Chesty? As in Lieutenant General Chesty Puller?” Taggart got points for seeming unfazed by having something the size of a bear sniff him over. Even the most avid dog lovers were unnerved by Chesty’s size.

  “Yeah. My dad was a Marine.” He had been a scout sniper to be exact, but she’d found men to be unnerved by the fact. Actually, almost everything in Jane’s life unsettled strangers.

  Nigel obviously was restraining himself from a petting orgy. “He’s a beautiful animal. How old is he?”

  “He’s seven. The elves say that he’ll live to be about a hundred, but he’s full grown.” She took Nigel’s hand and let Chesty know he was to suffer the touch. “Just because he knows you, doesn’t mean he trusts you. You have to earn his trust.”

  “Like his owner’s?” Taggart asked.

  “I doubt you’ll be here long enough for either one of us,” she told them bluntly, but for some reason, it only made Taggart grin.

  * * *

  Much to Chesty and Taggart’s dismay, she had the cameraman ride with her and Nigel follow in their truck. She had to keep them separated if she was going to keep them from running off and trying to film without her. From what she’d been able to observe, Taggart was the practical details person of the team.

  Taggart put his back to the passenger door; either to keep an eye on Chesty in the backseat or to make sure Nigel was staying behind them. Both denoted a cautious outlook, which Jane approved of. It would make her job easier if Taggart was used to keeping Nigel in check.

  “We’ll see about getting you a place to live tomorrow,” Jane said. “Any house that’s unoccupied is free to anyone who is willing to take care of it. Its July, you won’t have to worry about heating. The station can pull some strings to get you water and power. We watch each other’s backs here.” Hence the entire show this morning. They do a favor for EIA, and somewhere down the road, they could reasonably call in a return favor. “We’re not going to let you screw things up and then drive away next Shutdown. We have to live here.”

  “Fine,” Taggart growled as if it cost him to agree. �
��But it would be helpful to be caught up to speed. ‘It’s complicated’ is bullshit.”

  It took her a moment to track back through the morning to find Dmitri’s explanation of the current political situation in Pittsburgh. Okay, admittedly it was fairly sketchy.

  “Okay, I’ll catch you up but you’ll have to be patient because it isn’t simple.”

  She waited until he nodded in agreement before starting. She wanted to start laying ground rules of asking for cooperation and getting it. “Earth and Elfhome are parallel universes, mirror reflections with minor differences, the main one is that Elfhome has magic. Geographically they’re identical. Recently the elves admitted that they could travel from Elfhome to Earth via a pathway through large cave systems.”

  “Yeah, we’ve always suspected something like that. All the legends we have of fae living under the hills.”

  “Lying is considered a major crime by elves, but not answering the question is an art form that they carefully cultivate.”

  “And apparently it rubs off,” Taggart complained.

  Jane ignored him. She’d scripted enough “how-to” bits that she knew that the key to understanding something complex required starting at the important facts that might seem basic but on which all understanding pivoted. “What magic does to the equation is that it superloads the DNA of all the native species. Basically everything on Elfhome could beat the snot out of its Earth cousin. We’re genetically close enough to elves that we can interbreed, but they’re taller, stronger and immortal. Chesty here will live almost twenty times longer than any Earth breed of his size.”

  “Do you mind starting with something I don’t know? Like if the viceroy is dead or alive? And why he went missing?”

  Jane plowed on with her explanation. “There’s a third parallel universe, with yet another mirror world, named Onihida, and it has magic. Its people are the oni.”

  He didn’t startle as much as she expected and his next question explained why. “Whose theory is this?”