Project Elfhome

by Wen Spencer

  Eighty-seven acres of possible hiding spaces.

  “What monster do we track today?” Hal said as he paused at the decision point. Go into the gift shop? The park offices? Head for the buildings closer to the river or go on to the boardwalk? “Indeed, that is the question: what is out there?”

  Hal pointed out at the open river on the other side of the mushroom pool. Hopefully he could keep attention away from what Jane was doing. “The other day we spotted a creature never seen before in Pittsburgh, a massive river reptile generating a storm of electrical discharge. It had been described by one of our viewers as a Loch Ness monster.”

  While Hal gestured and info-dumped about the river monster, Jane leaned the reflector against the wall and pulled out a Ziploc baggie. The first things that had gone into their new freezer were several pieces of Boo’s clothing to be used by scent dogs. They’d used most that first summer, but she’d found one still buried at the bottom. One last chance to find her baby sister.

  “A long-standing theory has been that the Loch Ness is a plesiosauria, which is a marine reptile that first appeared during the early Jurassic period and is thought to be now extinct. These massive predators reached lengths of forty to fifty feet in length. What we witnessed the other night, though, seems to classify the Pittsburgh Nessie as a type of electric eel.”

  She pressed the cloth to Chesty’s nose. “Seek. Seek.”

  Chesty whuffed in the scent. Dropping his head, he started to track.

  “Electric eels get their names because they can generate up to six hundred volts of electricity.” Hal managed to make his stroll forward, matching Chesty’s progress, seem totally natural without losing track of the information he was presenting. “This powerful amount of voltage is five times the normal output of a household outlet. Those, however, are Earth’s electric eels. The largest of these only reach about seven feet in length. How much voltage could a creature that is fifty feet long generate? The possibilities are staggering!”

  Chesty headed to the boardwalk that once was lined with food stands with names that made it clear what they sold: Potato Patch, Uncle Tony’s Pizza, Philly, Healthy Hut. The eateries had steel grates rolled down to cover their storefronts. Chesty passed the rows of locker rentals and went still at the first steel grate cover. Jane knelt beside the grate and gave it an experimental tug. It rose up an inch on well-oiled tracks. There was a large room beyond, dimly lit by celestial windows.

  “We’re going in.” Jane lifted the grate two feet. Chesty crawled under and she wriggled in after him and let the door close behind her.

  At one time, the place had been a café. Chesty beelined through overturned tables and broken chairs to the swinging doors into the kitchen full of large stainless steel appliances.

  There was a startled squeak and someone ducked around one of the counters. The move, however, had backed them into a corner. They stared at Jane and Chesty with eyes wide, hair a wild tangled bloom of unruly white-blond curls.

  “Boo!”

  “Jane!” Boo skittered away from her outstretched hand, ducking through the shelving under the counter. “Go away!”

  “Boo, I’m here to take you home!”

  “They’ll kill you if they find you here!”

  “Who?” Because now that Jane found her baby sister, she wanted to know whom she was going to kill.

  “Lord Tomtom’s warriors.”

  “Who?”

  “You have to go!”

  “Carla Marie Kryskill, come here now!”

  “Jane!” It was the little girl whine she remembered so well. “I can’t leave Joey! He’s my responsibility.”

  “Fine, we’ll take Joey too.” Who the hell is Joey? Jane couldn’t remember ever hearing of a missing “Joey.” Maybe it wasn’t another kid.

  “They have him in a spell so he can’t be found and he’s chained.”

  “We’ll get him out. Where is he?”

  Boo stared at her for a long moment as if staring into her soul. After eight years, did Boo still have the ability to trust anyone?

  “I promise,” Jane whispered. “We will not leave without the both of you. Okay? Semper Fi. Leave no man behind.”

  Boo’s eyes filled with tears and she gave a tiny nod.

  “Take me to Joey.”

  Originally built as a row of isolated shotgun-style buildings, Boo’s captors had cut doors between the restaurants and built up walls until the structures were one big maze. In a dim back room, they found a little black-haired boy, chained by one foot, inside a gleaming hologram-like spell. Jane stared at shimmering lines of power that wove from the floor to a matching design in the ceiling, creating a cage out of nothing.

  She knew nothing about spells except they were much like lamps—they needed a power supply and a continuous loop to function correctly. In theory, breaking the circuit turned off the spell. She tapped the bar quickly. It felt as cold and hard as steel but it looked no more solid than light beamed through smoke.

  “What’s going on?” The little boy sounded very American. He looked like a kindergartener. “Who are you?”

  “This is Jane.” Boo reached through the bars to lace fingers with him. “She came! She’s here to save us. Both of us.”

  Jane dug frantically through her backpack. “Taggart, I found them. I’m going to kick the beehive to get them free. Get ready to move fast.”

  “Okay.” Taggart answered steadily.

  She took out the bolt cutter and laid it aside where she could find it quickly. Once she started, they’d probably only have minutes to get to safety. She found the foam package of whack-a-moles. They’d developed the little explosives to force vespers out of their holes so they could be filmed. They worked on the same principle as a nail gun, driving a spike straight down into hard packed ground. She’d never tried them on concrete; hopefully they wouldn’t explode like a pipe bomb instead.

  “Here.” She passed the light reflector into the cage. “Hold this up like a shield. Boo, get behind that counter.”

  She used clay to create a seal between the explosives’ barrel and the concrete over the spell etchings.

  “Fire in the hole!” The explosion was deafening in the small room. Thankfully, though, the bars of the cage vanished.

  “Jane! Incoming!” Taggart shouted. The grate rattled up back at the café’s entrance. There was the loud whistle of the monster call. As the grate clattered down and gunfire broke out, there was a distant roar of the river monster.

  Swearing, Jane snatched up the bolt cutter and scrambled quickly to Joey. The chain was stupidly short, only a few inches between a loop on the floor and the shackle around his ankle. The metal cuff had chafed him raw and bleeding. She’d thought that there was something horribly wrong with his foot until she realized that it wasn’t deformed. He had a bird’s foot. Instead of a human foot with five little toes, he had a bird’s with four scale-covered talons. Three long talons faced forward. A shortened fourth splayed out in place of a heel. Not as long as a true crow’s foot, but long enough to allow him to grip a branch solidly with his foot.

  Jane gasped as the image of Tinker’s kidnapping played out in her mind’s eye. The boy was a tengu. Boo had been taken by oni? The oni had been in Pittsburgh all these years? How many of the missing children—thought dead of jumpfish and strangle vines just like Boo—had the oni taken?

  “Jane! They’re coming!” Boo tugged at her arm. “Just go away. They won’t hurt us; they need us alive. They want the call for the tengu flock! They need the blood of the Chosen to take control of the flock.”

  Jane’s breath caught in her chest as she saw for the first time Boo’s feet. The ghost-white scales of her talons that matched her pale hair. Jane looked up into Boo’s face. Her baby sister’s face. Her baby sister’s blue eyes.

  “What did they do to you?” Jane cried.

  Hurt filled Boo’s face. “Just go away!”

  “We’re all going, now shut up.” Jane cut through the chain.

>   “Jane?” Hal shouted over whistle blast and gunfire.

  “Over here!” Jane started to unload her backpack of weapons.

  A minute later, Taggart found them. “That door won’t hold for long. Do you have any weapons?”

  Jane laughed, checking the magazine and handing him a pistol. “Two of my grandfathers were Marines. The third was a moonshiner. The other was a part of the local mafia. Do the math.”

  “You’ve got guns. Lots of guns.”

  “My family all but bleeds bullets.” Jane took out two more pistols. She held the little twenty-two out to Boo. “You remember how to use these?”

  “Don’t point it at anyone you don’t want to kill.” Boo took the gun. “Which is a lot of people right now. Aim down the barrel, hold your breath, squeeze.”

  “Good girl.”

  There was a roar, this time sounding far too close, and the whole building shook as if hit by a freight train.

  “Where’s the back door?” When Boo only stared at her in horror, Jane groaned. “Please tell me there’s back door.”

  Boo shook her head. “They’re nailed shut. That’s the only door in.”

  “Shit! Shit! Shit!” Jane scanned the room. What should they do? She realized that there were too few of them. “Where’s Hal?”

  There was a sudden explosion from the hallway beyond the cage room.

  “I’ve made us a door!” Hal called.

  “Hal! Damn it, how many times have I told you to warn people before you blow things up?”

  They went out the hole that Hal had blown through the back wall. A back service alley ran the length of the boardwalk, lined with boarded-up loading docks. Electricity was crawling over the building like a lightning storm had been anchored to the storefront. They ran toward the truck that seemed a million miles away.

  Jane realized that the whistling was growing quieter. She nearly stumbled as she looked over her shoulder and realized that Taggart was running in the opposite direction, still blowing the whistle and leading the river monster away. A muffled roar came from inside the building and screams of something that could have been human.

  “Idiot!” The park was a maze of deep waterways to anyone who didn’t know the area. Once he was beyond the corner of the building, he’d be out of sight. Nor was there any guarantee that there weren’t oni coming around the other way to cut them off.

  “Hal, get Chesty and the kids to the truck.”

  “What?”

  “Truck! Go!” Jane shouted and pointed. “Chesty, follow!”

  She headed for the stairs that one time led to the top of the Dragon’s Den ride. “Taggart, you idiot, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Giving you a chance to get to the truck and into it without a horde of monsters on top of you. Five people and one large dog and only three doors.”

  He had a point.

  The river monster came crashing out of the building into the back service alley. It looked like a weird cross between a catfish and a crocodile. Its mouth was a snout filled with teeth with long whiskers on either side. It had four stubby legs and a long whiptail. Electricity snarled and leaped from it to every nearby object.

  Taggart whistled and the thing turned and crawled at stunning speed after him.

  “Don’t go left at the end of the buildings, Taggart. Swing right!” Jane ran up the steps keeping track of both Hal and Taggart as they both ran in opposite directions. “And stop blowing that stupid whistle. It turned already. Let it go chomp on someone else!”

  Taggart’s laugh came across the channel.

  When Jane reached the second floor deck, she saw that a big male was running to block off Hal. She lined him up and only thought about how they’d taken her sister. Twisted her sister’s body against her will until she wasn’t even human anymore. She killed him like she’d kill any other monster trying to stop Hal.

  She turned and picked off a male coming out of the building, carrying a rifle. A third that she hadn’t seen took a shot at her from the boardwalk’s roof. The bullet whined past her. She didn’t miss with her return fire.

  “Jane, we’re at the truck,” Hal reported.

  “Get out to the street and head toward the mall to pick us up. And be careful, Nessie might be out there with us.”

  One of the oni, however, cooperated nicely in drawing the monster’s attention. She scrambled over the wall to the city street to join up with Taggart just as Nigel drove up.

  “That was stupid,” she said as she scrambled into the backseat with Chesty, Boo and Joey.

  “Yeah, a little.” Taggart squeezed into the back from the other side. “I spent three years as a war correspondent. My nightmares are all about sitting and watching people die and doing nothing. I don’t think I could stay sane if I’d stood and watched you die.”

  “Mine,” Hal muttered darkly.

  Whatever she might have said was cut short as Boo snatched up Helga from the dashboard.

  “Look, Joey!” Boo cried. “I told you someone would find Sergeant Helga Teufel Hunden and Jane would come for us.”

  “Why didn’t you just go home with Grandma Gertie?” Jane asked.

  “I told you!” Boo pulled the little boy into her lap. “Joey’s my responsibility. I couldn’t leave him. Big sisters take care of their little brothers.”

  Jane recognized her father’s ghost even though he had been dead before Boo could talk. She’d imprinted him into her little sister without meaning to, but this was all kinds of wrong. “Boo, he’s not your little brother.” The boy wasn’t even human.

  “Yes, he is!” Boo tightened her arms around Joey and glared at her with cold hard eyes. Her father’s eyes. “You always said that you can’t pick your family but still had to do right by them. The oni made us brother and sister. I’m Joey’s big sister and I won’t let anything bad happen to him.”

  From within Boo’s protective hold, Joey blinked up at Jane. He looked only five or six but he’d been chained and caged like an animal. The only real difference that she could see between him and any of her brothers at his age was that like Nigel, he’d been born with odd feet. This might be all kinds of wrong, but it wasn’t this little boy’s fault. She nodded. “Okay. If he’s your little brother, then he’s mine too.”

  A quiver of Boo’s bottom lip was all the warning Jane got before she had her arms full of bawling little girl with poor Joey squashed between them like a teddy bear. Boo cried as if she’d had her heart torn out.

  “Hey, hey, big girls don’t cry,” Jane said, because any moment she was going to lose it. If she started, she wouldn’t be able to stop, and she knew from experience that her tears would burn like liquid fire. “It’s okay. You’re safe!”

  “I was so afraid!” Boo wailed. “I prayed and prayed that you’d come for me, but I thought—I thought when you saw what they did—I thought—you’d say that we weren’t s-s-s-sisters anymore!” She had been so scared that she could barely even say it.

  “You are my baby sister.” Jane held her tight. “Nothing anyone could do to you, no magic, nothing, could change that. You will always be my baby sister.”

  Once Jane got Boo and their new little brother safe, she was going to war. Not with her rifle, although she dearly wanted to, but with her camera. The oni obviously were gearing up for guerrilla warfare because they couldn’t stand against the joint forces of humans and elves. The news blackout was their doing; keeping the two allies from uniting. She wasn’t going to stand back and let them get away with it. She wasn’t going to let them turn her city into a war zone. She was going to find out their every secret and broadcast it across two worlds. They were about to learn the meaning of “no better friend, no worse enemy.”

  CHASED BY MONSTERS

  Jane missed how it started.

  She went out to set perimeter alarms and came back to find that they were comparing feet.

  The children, of course, had crow feet, complete with scales and talons. Little Joey’s scales were blac
k as his spikey hair. Jane’s baby sister, Boo, had white scales to match her pale blond curls, but her feet were otherwise identical to the boy’s. Since neither child had shoes, most likely they had triggered show and tell.

  Taggart was holding his camera on his lap, viewfinder tilted up. He was filming the comparison of feet without being obvious. Jane locked down an automatic kneejerk hate of being in front of the camera. If they were going to get the news out to Earth that Pittsburgh needed help against the oni, it was stories like Boo’s that would win over hearts.

  Nigel had taken off his boots to show off his prosthetics that looked like pieces of curved metal. The naturalist was discussing feet in his faint Scottish burr. “The heel is essentially a finger pointing backwards. See, the leg comes down and connects to the ankle, which is a pivot joint like the wrist. From there, the foot shifts out in two directions. Forward are the toes and backwards is the heel. This bone is called a calcaneus. Because it has to bear the weight of the entire body, though it’s evolved over time to a large, strong bone.”

  Hal was not to be outdone. Hal had his cross-trainers off, and as he unveiled his feet, everyone but Nigel recoiled slightly. “It’s called Brachymetatarsia. It’s a condition in which there are one or more abnormally short metatarsals. I have the most common form, which affects the fourth toe.”

  “Oh, that’s weird looking,” Joey whispered, not old enough to realize it was rude, however true it was.

  Luckily Hal had thick skin. “In my case, it’s acquired, not congenital.”

  “I thought only women developed that,” Nigel said.

  Hal shrugged. “It means that I am truly unique and special.”