Project Elfhome

by Wen Spencer

  “What does this have to do with Boo?”

  “Do you want hit again?”

  “No!” He backed away from her, hands up. “I just don’t see where you’re going with this fairy-tale stuff.”

  “It matters. Trust me.”

  “Fine. Can we string up my elk while you tell me ‘once upon a time’ bullshit?”

  * * *

  Hyeholde been built by hand by Jane’s great-grandparents in 1930s stones and timbers salvaged from a big old barn. The sprawling house looked like a castle and the old springhouse had been built to match. Thus it had been built with two-foot-thick foundation stones and a vaulted ceiling that could double as a hayloft. Most of the year it was a perfect place to hang deer and boar to age. The heat of mid-July, though, meant that Alton would need to break the elk down to something that could fit into a walk-in cooler.

  While they used his truck’s hoist and a pulley anchored to one of the roof joists to lift the half-ton beast, Jane explained who Joey Shoji was.

  “So this guy Joey…”

  “He’s six, Alton. He’s a little boy, not a guy.”

  This made her younger brother look even more confused. “So this little boy is like a prince of the tengu.”

  “More or less. His uncle Jin is the Chosen One.” Jane was a little unclear what all that entailed beyond making Jin something like the pope, only more so. “If his uncle dies, then Joey or one of his cousins will become the next Chosen One. Apparently selection isn’t as simple as oldest inherits; it sounds like a roll of the dice. One in four it’s Joey. Maybe one in five.” The oni had used magic to transform Boo into a tengu; specifically they’d made her part of the Chosen bloodline by using Joey as a blueprint. The boy seemed sure that made Boo a valid candidate.

  “Okay.” Alton meant he was still completely lost but didn’t want to admit it. “But why can’t I tell anyone this shit? Why the hell would I even want to? And what does this have to do with Boo?”

  “Promise me that you’ll keep your mouth shut. You can’t even tell our cousins. Just us can know.”

  “Know what?”

  “I found Boo, and I killed people to get her back.”

  He worked his mouth, too stunned to form a coherent word, then finally forced out, “What? You? Where?”

  “Promise me. You know what will happen to me if I’m arrested? I’ll get sent to Earth and locked up.” Maybe even executed, but she didn’t want to put that on him. Once he got over the shock he’d fall into “oldest male syndrome.” He’d alternate between being pissed off that she didn’t call him and feeling guilty that he wasn’t the one that found Boo.

  “Fucking hell, of course I’ll keep my mouth shut. You really killed someone? Where did you find her? Where is she now?”

  “In my living room, watching a movie.”

  He pointed wordlessly toward the house.

  She nodded.

  Without a sound, he ran to find their baby sister.

  One down, four more to go.

  * * *

  Jane reluctantly called her younger brothers, saying that she was holding an emergency family meeting. She thought she knew the shape that the evening would take. As they arrived at her house, they all surprised her by their reactions. She never realized that they had been hiding their true selves.

  Alton never cried. He’d been stoic through their father’s funeral and the weeks after Boo’s disappearance. Over the years, he’d been increasingly distant, disappearing into the wilderness for days on end. Jane knew he’d be happy to see Boo, but she didn’t expect him to bawl like a baby until Jane took him awkwardly in her arms and comforted him.

  Geoffrey always seemed so confident and sure of himself. He’d taught himself furniture-making and started a business specializing in beds and tables made from ironwood. Yet he stood in the dimness of the foyer, smelling of sawdust and bruised green, too shy to approach Boo.

  “She won’t know me.” Still Geoffrey couldn’t take his eyes from their baby sister. “I was never home when she was little. I always stayed late at school, working in the wood shop.”

  Jane caught him by the wrist and pulled him to Boo’s side. He sank to his knees and whispered, “Do you remember me?”

  Boo flung arms around his neck and hugged him tight. “Of course I do. You used to make me toys and leave them on my pillow. Betsy the cow. Billy the goat.”

  “I was making you a barn to put them in.” Geoffrey’s voice broke. “I never got to give it to you.”

  Jane expected Marc’s reunion to be equally quiet. He was so taciturn and solemn that his nickname in school had been Stone. Much to the family’s dismay, but no one’s real surprise, he’d turned down a football scholarship on Earth to enroll in the police academy. A cop’s “just the facts” façade seemed to suit him well. Marc burst into laughter, though, and couldn’t stop. He swung Boo in circles and tossed her up into the air like she was still six. “Our baby girl! Our Boo!” he kept shouting and whooping.

  Duff brought fresh cannolis from the bakery he worked at during summer vacation, which Jane expected. Normally the family clown, instead of laughing and joking loudly like he normally would, he was quiet and gentle. Later, he took Jane aside and insisted that they take Boo to a shrink to a deal with all the trauma of being kidnapped and held prisoner. “We have to make sure we do the right thing by her. We screwed up bad once. We got to get this right. We have to do everything to make sure she can put this behind her and have the life she should have had.”

  Sixteen-year-old Guy roared up on his hoverbike. He’d been going through a teenage rebellion phase and had been surly for the last few months. He listened to Jane’s story of rescuing Boo and Joey with quiet concentration. He hugged Boo with the same adult focus, the angry teen temporarily banished.

  Her mother arrived and chased them out of the house in order to be alone with her baby. Jane suspected that her mother planned to find out how badly Boo had been abused and if she needed medical treatment. It was a discussion that her older brothers shouldn’t hear and Jane couldn’t bear.

  * * *

  They had retreated to the garage on the pretense of helping Alton skin the elk. Only Duff was actually helping. While the two of them sharpened their knives on whetstones, the rest of them sat watching with beer in hand. Hal, Taggart and Nigel had retreated upstairs for their turn at the bath and to deal with their various war wounds.

  “We need to go to Sandcastle!” As the youngest, Guy tended to talk loudest. He was compensating for a lifetime of no one paying attention to what he said. “We need to go now.”

  “No.” Jane had been afraid that once her brothers heard the full story they’d want to go take revenge on the oni. She had confessed to shooting Boo’s kidnappers so that they would have no one to attack.

  “We need to get rid of the evidence,” Guy continued. “Your fingerprints are on the casings and it would be easy to match the bullets to your rifle if the police do ballistics.”

  Marc grunted in agreement.

  Jane jerked around to stare at Marc in surprise. “You’re agreeing with him? What kind of cop are you going to be?”

  Marc pointed in the general direction of Sandcastle with his beer bottle. “This isn’t Tom, Dick and Harry getting overzealous about defending their marijuana crop. They’re not even slimeball pedophiles that grabbed two kids off the street. This was a heavily armed, well-trained, carefully hidden terrorist encampment. The EIA have linked the oni to that gunfight on Veterans Bridge in June. They carjacked a minivan and the driver is still missing. They threw a VW off the bridge, killing the passenger. And they jigged a load of C-4 to blow in the middle of a traffic jam that they caused. They’ve brought a war to us. Far as I’m concerned, Sandcastle was a combat zone. It’s even more righteous than any of Dad’s kills in Afghanistan, because this is our city.”

  Their father had been a sniper for the Marines. He’d taught Jane how to shoot before he’d died. After that, she’d taken his place and taught h
er brothers.

  “That’s right!” Guy shouted. “The elves and the oni are at war. We don’t have to worry about anyone finding out. Right?”

  Marc shook his head. “From what I can tell, the mayor is mandating a true neutral stance. Killing an oni—at the moment—is being treated just like killing an elf.”

  “What the fuck?” Guy cried. “Why?”

  “Because there’s a shitload of Pittsburghers who hate the EIA and the elves, in that order,” Marc said. “They see Pittsburgh as American soil, not United Nations. They hate all the treaty-based laws against immigration and expansion. They want a land rush like what happened with the Louisiana Purchase or the opening of Oregon. Screw the native population. Because Elfhome is a mirror of Earth, we know where to find matching deposits of silver in Nevada, gold in the Yukon and all the oil in Texas. The expansionists are pissed that they’re here on Elfhome and yet still as dirt poor as they were on Earth.”

  Guy sputtered with teenage rage. “The mayor is siding with the oni because he’d lose the expansionist vote?”

  Marc made a rude noise at the idea. “He’s afraid there’ll be riots in the street just when the elves are already pissed the hell off. It would be one thing if the EIA was at full strength, but they’ve discovered that more than a quarter of their force are actually oni moles. The EIA is so busy housecleaning that it would be just the eighty of us cops dealing with several thousand idiots.”

  “The expansionists would really back the oni if push came to shove?” Taggart asked as he walked into the garage. He jerked to a stop, hands up, as six pistols were leveled at him. “Sorry. It’s just me.”

  “Make more noise when you walk up.” Jane tucked her pistol back into her kidney holster. “No, they wouldn’t back the oni, but they wouldn’t back the elves either. A lot of people say that the elves are dogs in the manger. They’re not developing the planet’s resources, but they refuse to let humans claim land outside of Pittsburgh city limits.”

  “It’s their planet,” Taggart pointed out. “It isn’t right that they lose control of their home world because we can outnumber them.”

  “We were born here,” Duff growled. “We have friends with kids. How many generations until it’s ours too? Never?”

  “None of that matters,” Alton said. “What matters is keeping Jane and Boo safe.”

  “And Joey,” Marc added firmly before Jane could. “We’re not letting anyone screw with a six-year-old boy, regardless of his race or species.”

  “And Joey.” Alton and Geoffrey both nodded in agreement.

  “So we clean up the mess at Sandcastle,” Duff stated.

  And all five of her brothers started to ready themselves.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Jane shouted. “Not tonight.”

  “Why not?” Duff whined.

  Jane didn’t say, “Because we left a very big monster stomping around Sandcastle. Something new. Something freaky.” That wouldn’t slow her brothers down. Instead she said, “Because we need to make sure Boo and Joey are safe here at Hyeholde first.”

  The kitchen screen door squeaked open and their mother whistled sharply.

  “Besides, if we don’t eat as a family tonight, Mom will skin us all alive.”

  * * *

  It was the first time that WQED’s station manager Dmitri woke Jane up. He was fairly hands-off with his top show; he only called if they’d set something on fire or accidently shot someone. She stared at her phone screen and then cautiously answered with her normal, “Hm?”

  “I just got off the phone with Maynard. He wants PB&G at Sandcastle.”

  “Maynard? Us? At Sandcastle?”

  “Yes, I believe those are all the salient points,” Dmitri said and hung up.

  Jane was completely and totally awake out of sheer adrenaline.

  What would the Director of the EIA want with them? If it were merely because they had wreaked havoc on Sandcastle while rescuing Boo and Joey, Maynard would want both TV crews, because they had gone in the Chased by Monsters truck.

  * * *

  “What is Maynard like?” Taggart asked as they drove to Sandcastle.

  Alton had taken Boo and Joey out berry picking with Guy as backup. Since Alton could go weeks without seeing another human, the kids would be safe with him. It was agreed that her mother and other three brothers would go about business as usual.

  It meant that the Chased by Monsters crew could come with her and Hal to Sandcastle. Jane hadn’t been able to dissuade them. Since their last visit to the water park made it clear that what worked best was for Taggart to operate the camera while Jane laid down suppressive fire, it was hard to argue. Hal pointed out that if Maynard were laying some kind of trap for them, it would be very unlikely he’d call the station manager and arrange the meeting.

  Which circled back to why Maynard wanted to see them. Dmitri probably had hung up on her simply because he didn’t know and something else was demanding his time, something with questions he could answer. Or in a moment of distraction, he forgot he wasn’t talking to one of his investigative reporters whose job was to find out what the story was without guidance.

  “I’ve never met Maynard.” Jane glanced in the rearview mirror at Hal in the backseat.

  “I only met him once.” Hal put up his hands as if he expected her to hit him. “And that didn’t end well.”

  “I told you not to take animals to a black tie event,” Jane snapped.

  “It what we naturalists do.” Hal pressed a hand to his chest to include himself in the rarefied group. Nigel’s influence on him; Hal had never called himself a naturalist before. He had, though, the degrees to support the claim. “People expect it. Besides, it wasn’t an animal per se. It was a plant. And I had it on a leash.”

  “It was a black willow seedling!” Jane cried. “It tried to eat the mayor!”

  “He shouldn’t have knelt down like that,” Hal said calmly.

  Jane glanced to Taggart for support.

  He gave her a look of sympathy. “Been there. Done that. Banned from the Today show.”

  “I still say she had peanuts or something up her skirt,” Nigel murmured from the backseat.

  They were so screwed.

  Jane sighed. What did she know about Maynard? “The EIA has around five thousand employees in Pittsburgh. It’s a United Nations agency, so English isn’t always their first language. Only a couple hundred are combat; they man the checkpoints and patrol the Rim. The rest are all pencil pushers. There’s over four hundred ‘delegates’ alone representing the nations of Earth since the bigger countries have more than one. It means one tenth of the city’s population are outsiders who have power to kick anyone—even people that were born here—off the planet. And it pisses off most people.”

  “Yes, outside police forces tend to do that.” Taggart had been a war correspondent; he had probably been to UN-policed areas on Earth.

  “Elves are easy to live with. They’re good neighbors. I think because most of the ones here in Pittsburgh are excited about living with humans. They’re young for elves, open minded and interested in our culture, and yet stay mostly on their side of the fence. The only elves you find living within the city are ones who have close relationships with a human, usually of the opposite sex.”

  “Only because ninety-five percent of the Pittsburghers are straight,” Hal murmured from the backseat. “Elves are more bisexual than papayas.”

  “Papayas?” Jane cried. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “We’d like to meet some elves,” Nigel said. “Everyone on Earth is wildly curious about the elves but there’s so little information on them.”

  Jane nodded to indicate that they could work on it. It made sense that the oni would block information on the elves to keep humans from sympathizing with the elves once full war broke out.

  “I might have met Maynard,” Hal said. “But Jane really knows him better than me, since she was born in Pittsburgh.”

  Jane snorted. “That
’s not really the same.” The man was a legend in Pittsburgh; legends were fairy tales told to children that rarely reflected the truth. “We’re taught the story of how Maynard became the director in school along with the story of Paul Revere’s ride and Paul Bunyan and his blue ox. It gave us a really messed up idea of what is real. I honestly thought there was a breed of giant blue cows on Earth.”

  Taggart laughed.

  “Think Pocahontas and John Smith without the sex,” Hal said.

  “Hal!” Jane made a cutting motion over her throat. She knew from experience Hal could maintain TV host commentary even while sedated. He wasn’t coherent while drugged but he could keep talking through most insanity without missing a beat. “You threw the ball into my court, let me talk.”

  “Sorry.” Hal didn’t sound at all contrite.

  Jane decided to stick to the grade school version. “You wouldn’t know by looking at him but Maynard’s maternal grandfather was a full-blooded Native American. Maynard is one-quarter Iroquois. He spent half his childhood on a reservation in upstate New York.”

  “Which makes him Pocahontas in this story,” Hal murmured.

  “Hal!” She reached into the back to prove she could hit him if he didn’t shut up. “His father was from a long line of military, so as a teenager, he went to West Point. After graduating, he’d been a second lieutenant assigned to a unit that was supposed to be deployed to the Middle East. A few days before they shipped out, the Chinese activated the orbital gate for the first time for a battery of tests. Maynard was with the first troops to arrive, a few hours after the Pennsylvania State Police set up a perimeter.”

  “The rest of the story is like Paul Revere’s ride. All we were ever told in school was lanterns in the bell tower, and Paul yelling ‘the British are coming.’ If you read military history, though, Paul didn’t shout anything because it was a covert mission. Every place he warned dispatched riders to spread the word. Halfway through the night, he and another man, Sam Prescott, were stopped before they reached Lexington. Prescott, who had been out sexing up a lady friend before he got dragged into the craziness, escaped and he was the actual person to reach Concord. The main reason Revere is famous was because of Longfellow’s poem that credited him with what really was a forty-man effort.”