by Wen Spencer
Jane played the video a third time. “This is so creepy.” It was so wildly unlikely that she wanted to believe that the events had been staged to match the video but everything had been too completely random. Her argument with Chloe that led to her asking for viewers to call in monster sightings. Nigel wanting to stop at the putt-putt golf course. Her decision to use a flashbang to scare off the bull. No one, not even Nigel, could have guided them into this exact fight.
Add in the fact that they were having this discussion in a janitor’s closet and her life suddenly felt completely surreal.
“The elves say that they have oracles that can accurately see the future,” Nigel said. “We’ve dismissed those claims as native superstitions. Obviously we were wrong.”
Boo had said that the Eyes could see the future and that Kajo had moved all his camps because Pure Radiance had come to the Westernlands. Hide and seek.
“The twins had no proof because they simply ‘saw’ the truth.” Jane handed back the phone. “It means we won’t have evidence to give the elves. We can’t accuse Sparrow.”
Taggart growled softly. “If Lemon-Lime is right, then Sparrow is probably also behind the kidnapping of Windwolf’s bride and foster brother. She stood there on the riverfront and pretended to help lead the search. Most likely she was directing the elves away from the oni camps.”
“Sparrow can’t let Yumiko talk to the other elves,” Jane said. “Wraith Arrow said that the tengu are the spies of the oni. Sparrow can’t be sure what Yumiko knows. One wrong word and the sekasha will kill Sparrow right after they kill Yumiko.”
“We have to free Yumiko before Sparrow arrives,” Taggart said.
Jane dropped her voice to a whisper. “The EIA is not going to let us free their prisoner.”
Hal grinned. “We’re not going to ask them.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jane said.
He grinned wider. “Accidents happen.”
* * *
Jane followed Hal down the hall wishing it wasn’t a good thing they were known for their mayhem. She wasn’t sure how Hal planned to cause an accident but normally he could do it by simply breathing wrong (his excuse for the fire in the WQED’s break room although there was a cake and candles involved). It just felt wrong to let him lead. Normally letting him have free rein led to bad things. They wanted a distraction, not to level the hospital.
Mercy was one of the places where Hal’s super hosting powers worked in inverse. (The WQED station was the other.) Familiarity breeds contempt or fear or something. Everyone that saw Hal, and recognized him, veered to get out of his path.
“Remember, Hal,” Jane whispered. “This is the only hospital on Elfhome. If you get banned or something, we are going to be screwed. And do not burn it down. Pittsburgh needs it.”
“I’m not going to burn it down.” He was, however, nearly bouncing like Tigger with anticipation, which usually meant bad things were about to happen.
“Get ready for anything,” Jane warned the other two, which for some reason only made Taggart grin too. “Nigel, we’re going to try and get footage for the show. This is a member of a third intelligent race. So far as I know, no one’s been able to get a living oni on camera. This is huge news, so of course we’re interested in anything we can learn about the tengu. Also we’ve told Maynard that we’ll kill the namazu and we believe the female might have important information on the number of monsters released into the rivers.”
Nigel nodded.
“We’ll keep the camera and hopefully the focus of the two guards on you while Hal does…what he does best.”
The guards stood at the door, one just inside the room, the other in the hall. They were in full battle gear and covered with dirt and sweat and blood. Jane had her pistol in a kidney holster but she didn’t want to get into a gunfight. The two obviously recognized Hal despite the broken nose and black eyes.
“Mr. Rogers, what are you doing here?” His name badge identified him as T. Talley. He was big man and imposing looking. Unknown to him, the effect was weakened by the fact that his shorter partner went a little bug-eyed (his glasses unfortunately compounded this greatly) and edged away from Hal.
Hal’s reputation was known. Good. Maybe. This could be a two-edged sword.
“This is Nigel Reid, world famous naturalist. He’s here in Elfhome to film—well, everything! The network has asked me to show him the ropes. Smooth the waters, so to speak. And keep him from being eaten. This is Pittsburgh, after all.”
The other, identified as P. Tapper, laughed nervously.
Nigel clasped his hands together and beamed at the men. “So good to meet you. We hear all about the EIA on Earth. Lone peacekeepers deep in the virgin ironwood forest. Hal is right; we want to know everything about Elfhome. Would you be up to an interview on what it’s like to be posted on Elfhome?”
“What?” Talley cried.
“Now?” Tapper asked.
“Well, after we’ve had a peek at your prisoner. It’s extraordinary that we’ve made contact with yet another intelligent race. Millions of years of just humans and now a plethora of other beings.”
“Yes…what?” Talley obviously wasn’t keeping up.
Jane glanced past the two into the room. It was one of the private hospital rooms looking out over the Mon River. They were on the top floor, two flights up from the window where Hal had filmed the male tengu kidnapping Tinker. Yumiko lay in her bed with a dozen tubes and wires connected to her body. She seemed unconscious. She was a tall, lean, small-breasted female with only a blanket to keep her decent. There was a bloodstained bandage on her left thigh. From where they stood in the doorway, the only indication that she wasn’t human was the tips of her black crow feet.
Jane’s heart dropped to see that Yumiko was shackled to the bed. She’d known there were strict government rules about using restraints in hospitals that meant patients were rarely bound by straps to their beds. (Yes, Hal was the reason she knew this. No, Mercy would not make an exception for Hal, no matter how much both she and the nuns thought it was a good idea.) Police-applied shackles, however, neatly bypassed those rules. She’d hoped that since the EIA brought the female unconscious to the hospital that they wouldn’t have restrained her. Apparently they were taking no chances with their prisoner.
Jane had thought she could fireman-carry Yumiko out of the hospital, depending on how hurt the female was. Between the elevators and their special parking spot, it wouldn’t have been too difficult. Jane knew that the railing on the beds could be partially dismantled. (Hal took things apart when bored.) It took time, though, to unscrew all the posts. (And to screw them back together.) They were going to have to steal the entire bed. This was not going to be easy.
“I’m—I’m not sure if we can allow…” Talley was trying to wedge into the narrative flow that Nigel was directing more to the camera than to him. He was trying to lock a steely gaze on Nigel but the camera kept distracting him.
Nigel wasn’t giving him the opportunity to derail him. “…wounded tengu was brought to Mercy Hospital and treated. Sergeant Talley, were you the one that rescued her from the trapped rubble?”
The EIA officer leaped for the opening. “Private Tapper and I were part of the team that was sifting through the rubble at Sandcastle.”
“We saw you there this afternoon!” Tapper added. “We heard you’re going after the monster that ate all those oni.”
Talley continued, steamrolling forward now that he found a safe subject. “The subject was pinned via a pipe through her thigh. We cut the pipe above and below her and brought her here to Mercy for it to be removed. This brought down the building on us.”
“And surgeons removed the pipe?” Nigel asked.
Oh, God, please let it have been removed already!
“Yes. They were all freaked out by her though; she’s half-bird.”
The conversation jerked to a halt as they all stared at the unconscious female.
“Brilliant!”
Nigel stated. “I notice, though, she has no wings. Didn’t the male that kidnapped Tinker domi have very large wings? They were quite remarkable. I was hoping that I’d have a chance to see them in person.”
“Yeah.” Talley drawled out the word. “She didn’t have wings. We’re hoping to ask Sparrow when she gets here.”
Tapper had been nodding and shaking his head along with Talley’s responses. The blue EIA helmet was making him look like a bobblehead toy. “Her insides definitely are all bird.”
Nigel had been gradually moving them closer to the bed. It was unhurried, baby steps through the door, into the room, and then drifting nearer and nearer to their objective. Sergeant Talley drifted with them while the fearful Private Tapper (who obviously knew Hal better) stayed at the door. Jane ignored Hal, trusting him to do something, hopefully soon. Looking at him would only draw the guards’ attention to him. She was starting to secretly writhe inside with anticipation and fear. “Trust” was not a word she used lightly and usually never in connection with Hal except in some sarcastic meaning of the word. The only thing she actually trusted Hal to do was hit his mark, keep track of the camera, and maintain an informative and coherent monologue, even while being eaten alive.
Yumiko had all the normal contraptions connected to her: blood pressure cuff, IV drip, heart monitor, oxygen nose line and a finger clamp. Most of them would trigger alarms the moment they were disconnected. If the monitors were simply turned off, then the alarms wouldn’t sound. There remained, though, the problem that all the tubes and wires tied the bed into place. Without stripping off all the miscellaneous medical equipment, they wouldn’t be able to move the bed more than a few feet.
How to do this without getting caught?
Luckily Nigel had drifted to the foot of the bed and focused Talley’s attention on Yumiko’s crow feet by flicking the sheet to one side, uncovering them fully. Taggart shifted, blocking the officer’s view of Jane.
“Brilliant!” Nigel cried. “Her foot is anisodactyly!”
“Hey, hey, don’t…” Talley cried. “What?”
“Anisodactyly. It means she has three digits pointing forward and one back. It’s the most common of bird feet among passerine, or perching birds. And she has scales, just like a bird. They’re made of keratin; it’s the same material as hair and fingernails in humans and scales in snakes. In a bird, it also forms beaks and claws. This form of scaling is cancella. It’s really just a thickening and hardening of the skin to form a protective coating.”
With everyone’s attention firmly on the foot of the bed, Jane clicked off the blood pressure monitor, the oxygen monitor, and some other weird thing that had never been connected up to Hal all the times he’d been in the hospital. She slipped the IV bag off the stand and laid it beside the female’s head.
Out in the hall—finally—there was a startled yelp of pain and fear from Private Tapper.
“Stop, drop and roll!” Hal shouted. “Stop, drop and roll!”
Oh, God, he’d set the private on fire.
There was another scream, louder, and the fire alarm went off.
That was her cue to kick into high gear. She leaned over to pull the nose tube off the tengu.
Yumiko caught her arm and stared at Jane’s left hand.
“Sparrow is coming.” Jane tried to tug her arm free.
Yumiko’s gaze lifted to Jane’s face. Her eyes were the same electric blue as Joey’s. She frowned up at Jane.
“Shit, please tell me you understand English,” Jane whispered and then realized two important things. The first was that the IV needle had already been removed from the back of the female’s hand. The second was that the tengu was no longer shackled. “How the hell…”
The tenor of the screaming changed out in the hall as Private Tapper was blasted past the doorway by the high-pressure spray of a fire hose.
“Turn it off!” Sergeant Talley shouted, trying to swim upstream to reach Hal. “He’s not on fire anymore! Turn it off!”
“What?” Hal shouted back.
“What’s going on here?” A female shouted in Elvish. “Where is the tengu spy? Why are you playing with water?”
Sparrow had arrived.
“Jane, watch out!” Taggart shouted.
Yumiko had produced a scalpel from the folds of the sheet and stabbed at Jane’s hand. The blade sliced down her forearm. A foot-long thin line of blood welled up along the cut.
“Oh, shit!” Jane caught Yumiko’s hand holding the scalpel while trying to jerk free her arm. She realized that Taggart was about to put down his camera to help her. “Keep filming.”
“You’re bleeding!” He stated the obvious.
“Yes, I know.” Jane normally could easily beat any woman and most men at arm wrestling. The skinny female was stronger than she looked. “Give. Me. That. Scalpel.”
Yumiko head butted Jane full in the face.
Jane staggered back, tasting blood. She was, however, free of the tengu. She kept backpedaling, putting distance between her and the blade. Taggart caught hold of her and pulled her even further back.
Yumiko moved with inhuman speed and strength, vaulting from the hospital bed. She rolled across the floor and came to a halt beside the overbed table. The female stood, sweeping up the table, and flung it at the window. The glass shattered.
“We’re on the top floor!” Jane cried as Yumiko leapt to the sill of the broken window. For a moment, the female paused there, glancing back at Jane. She seemed unconcerned that she was dressed only in a bandage about her thigh and a black tattoo across her back. Nor that she teetered sixty feet up from the sidewalk.
She spoke a word and leapt out into the sky. Massive wings appeared on her back out of thin air. The wings swept downward with a loud rustle of black feathers, checking her fall.
For a moment, she hung in the sky, a huge black bird eclipsing the sun.
And then she was gone.
“What the hell? Where did she go?” Jane cried.
“Who cares? You’re bleeding.” Taggart put down his camera and focused on staunching the blood.
Sparrow came through the door like a storm trooper, an assault rifle leveled and ready to shoot. “Where is she?”
“She went out the window.” Jane waved her free hand.
The elf glanced at the broken glass and then pointed the rifle at Jane. “You let her go?”
Jane gripped Taggart’s arm to keep him from shifting in front of her. “No! She’d picked the locks on her shackles and escaped. We came to question her about the river monster that killed all the oni at Sandcastle. Director Maynard asked for our help killing it.”
“She had a knife,” Taggart growled in passable Elvish. “She stabbed Jane.”
“What did the tengu tell you?” Sparrow asked.
“Nothing,” Jane said. “I don’t think she understood English.”
A slight tightening around Sparrow’s eyes made Jane think that Sparrow knew that the tengu was fluent in English and thought Jane was lying. Yumiko did have a California driver’s license, which would indicate that she probably knew enough English to pass a test.
Jane had learned that the best way to stop an attack was to put the person on the defensive. “Do your people know anything about this monster? We’ve never heard of anything like it. Is it native to Elfhome? Do you have it in the Easternlands?”
“Why would I know anything about an oni spellworking?” Sparrow stalked out of the room.
Because she knew that the oni used spells to create the monster.
With Sparrow gone, Taggart turned his attention back to her wound.
“I’m fine,” Jane said.
“I know you’re fine. I also know it’s easier to do this with two hands instead of just one.”
Jane breathed out her annoyance. He was right. “Okay.”
“Let’s wash it first.” He unbuttoned his shirt cuffs and rolled up his sleeves. He was wearing a quietly elegant, state-of-the-art smartwatch. In Pittsburgh they didn’
t do much more than tell time, but most newly arrived people wore them out of habit. The friendship band that Boo and Joey made looped across the watchband.
Jane frowned at the bracelet and then her wrist. Hers was gone. “Damn.” She crossed to the bed and picked through the linens.
“What are you looking for?” Taggart ask.
Jane crouched down and scanned the floor under the bed. “It’s gone. Damn it! Did she take it?”
“Take what?”
“The bracelet that Boo and Joey made.” Jane tossed the sheets again. She was leaving bloody fingerprints on the white linen. “I had it on in the truck. It’s gone now.”
“Let’s bandage your cut before you lose more blood, and then check the video.”
The cut proved to be shallow and only alarming because it ran the whole length of her forearm. Taggart washed it with an antiseptic, applied antibiotic ointment, placed gauze over it and then wrapped her arm with tape.
Taggart had kept the camera trained on Nigel up to the last minute. Then as Hal started his distraction, Taggart had caught the flash of the blade sweeping upwards. He’d jerked the camera toward Jane, following the scalpel even as he called warning. Despite the suddenness of the attack, he’d caught the blade’s path on film. The braided bracelet had been on Jane’s wrist and then, as a line of blood marked the scalpel’s passage, it was not. The twisted leather cord dropped onto the white sheet and, a moment later, was snatched up by the tengu.
“She wanted the bracelet,” Taggart said.
Jane caught Taggart’s wrist and examined the bracelet closely for the first time. She’d only glanced at it when Boo had tied one to her wrist; she’d been too busy getting ready for dinner to actually study it. Taggart’s looked identical, with three strands of cording, two of which were leather and one red silk. She’d thought the bracelets crudely made because there was no symmetry to the knots and braiding. She remembered now a documentary she’d seen once where the Incas had an entire language of knotted cords. “Yumiko looked at my hand first. I thought she was disoriented, but she wasn’t. I bet these are some kind of secret tengu message. She saw it and knew that Joey had made it. She took it as proof.”