Project Elfhome

by Wen Spencer

  “It was,” Jin said slowly and his wings rustled. “All of it has been used. To make children. Many children.”

  “Six of them?” Tinker said, just to be sure.

  Jin paused before saying, “As far as I know.”

  She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do with the information. “Two more and we would have had a baseball team.”

  “Domi,” Pony murmured. “Since both you and your cousin can tap the Stone Clan Spell Stones, we need to know where these children are located.”

  Tinker wasn’t sure if he meant “we” as in her and her Hand or the sekasha-caste whose job was to keep tabs on the domana-caste. It made it suddenly clear why Jin was there, in the middle of the night, to report the news. She’d been thinking that this could have been handled by a phone call in the morning. To the elves, her siblings were potential walking weapons.

  Jin was waiting for her to ask. His people were safe only because he’d promised to be her loyal servant. She was learning that everyone else understood that meant waiting for her to realize what the hell was going on and give the appropriate order.

  “Where exactly are these…Wait. Did you say children?”

  “Technically two are children, and the other four are about to be newborns. They are at Haven.”

  The tengu village was someplace deep in the virgin forest, in a location secret even to her. The adults kept travel from Pittsburgh to where their children were hidden to the minimum, so many of the tengu that Tinker knew had an alternate home within the city. Jin had apparently returned home to discover he’d been invaded by an army of little Dufaes.

  “That is not all,” Jin added.

  “This gets worse?” Tinker cried.

  “In a manner of speaking—possibly. There is a third dragon in Pittsburgh.”

  Okay, a dragon was not a phone call in the morning.

  “Malice-size?” She spread her hands wide as possible to indicate the massive dragon that Jin helped her kill a few weeks earlier. “Or Impatience?”

  Jin put his hands together so that they nearly touched. “Her name is Joy. She has claimed all your siblings as her Chosen. We cannot do anything with the children without her approval. She is very protective.”

  Tinker snorted. “How protective can a pocket-size dragon get?”

  “Very. She can and will summon help. We would be facing both Impatience and Providence in any attempts to go against her wishes.”

  Dragon tag-team fighting. Okay, that was a very scary thought. Impatience nearly killed Tinker and her Hand when they first met. He was fifteen feet of pure muscle, a mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth, and magical shields all backed with a genius that intimidated even her. Providence was dead and not-dead in a way that made her brain hurt. He was the guardian spirit of the tengu and they worshipped him as a god. It meant that in addition to fighting something that can’t be “killed” it would push the tengu’s loyalty to her to a breaking point. The elves considered the tengu a valuable ally because of Jin’s alliance with Tinker. Otherwise, they would wipe the tengu out—adults and children alike.

  What Joy wants, Joy gets. Check. Assuming what Little Miss Pocket Dragon wanted was within reason.

  Gracie Wong had been married to Tinker’s father and loved him deeply. There was little wonder that she would want to adopt…

  “Wait—about to be newborn?”

  “Yes, in about eighteen days.” Jin’s wings rustled loudly. “We think. Give or take a few days. Forgiveness, domi.” He murmured the command to dispel his wings and they vanished from his back. The dining room suddenly seemed a lot less crowded.

  “So there are two kids and a mega-pregnant woman about to pop? Or are we talking four women who are all pregnant? What the hell? Is someone on Earth giving out Dufae kids like lottery tickets?”

  “It’s—” Jin paused for a minute, obviously trying to find a safe, sane explanation. Considering Tinker’s summer to date, there might not be one. Single-handedly, she’d managed to accidently change her species, rip a hole in the fabric of reality, kidnap a major US city, fall off the planet, crash a spaceship into Turtle Creek, kill a dragon…

  Tinker was sure there was more but she was losing track of the weirdness. Not a good sign.

  “It’s—it’s complicated,” Jin finally understated. “Maybe I should back up.” He paused again for several minutes, mouth open, eyes flicking back and forth as he tried to find a safe place to start. “There are two girls, Louise and Jillian Mayer. They are twins, and very much like you.”

  What did that mean? Short? Dark skin? Genius? Snarky? All of the above?

  “Their father worked at the clinic where Leo’s sperm was stored. Esme used it to fertilize a dozen or so of her eggs. Some number was used to create you and the rest were put into storage. Nine years ago, Mr. Mayer took some of the frozen embryos and implanted them into his wife. They raised your sisters as their natural-born children, and I gather they were very good parents.”

  “Were? Are they dead?”

  “I don’t know. Somehow, I’m not clear how it happened, your grandmother gained custody of them.”

  “Mine? I don’t have a grandmother. A grandfather. Two, if you count Forge, but he’s more like a great-great-great-something.” She’d made peace with her elf ancestor that afternoon though he was still on probation with her for what he’d done to Oilcan. Forge was going to be ecstatic at the news that he had six more grandkids. If they were orphans, he’d probably want custody of them. She wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing. Certainly, it would make the sekasha happy if the babies were with a domana, but her siblings were still human. And she would prefer that they stay that way. No more of this changing species without warning.

  “Esme’s mother,” Jin stated. When she looked at him confused, he expanded with, “Esme’s mother is your grandmother.”

  “Oh! She’s still alive?” Tinker tried to remember if Lain ever even talked about her family. Lain talked about Esme in terms of “my sister, the astronaut” but never anything else. Wait, there had been something recently about an Empire of Evil and Flying Monkeys. That didn’t sound good.

  “I—I’m not sure,” Jin said. “I didn’t actually talk to the twins; they were asleep and apparently very emotionally fragile after everything they’ve been through. I thought you should be told immediately. I didn’t want to blindside you with any of this.”

  “This didn’t count as being blindsided?” Tinker asked.

  “This is still just us—and Joy—and the other dragons. I believe that the Stone Clan might want to claim the children. And there is Esme to be considered. I owe your mother a great deal; without her intervention none of this could be possible. You would not have been born. Everyone on my ship would have been lost. My people would still be enslaved. Biologically, the children are Esme’s offspring. She did, however, abandon her genetic material when she left Earth. The children were carried by other women. Nor is Esme in a situation where she could take on the responsibility of raising six children, four of which are newborn.”

  “Yyyyeeeah.” Tinker wasn’t even sure where Esme was living since Tinker crashed her mother’s spaceship into Turtle Creek. She knew Esme had spent several days in the hospital. Tinker had last seen Esme when they’d dropped her at Lain’s. No, wait, the sisters had come together to Poppymeadow’s—later—sometime. Tinker had totally lost track of time. It had been a super-condensed-weird summer and wasn’t officially over yet.

  Esme and six kids in Lain’s house? With all those deadly plants? Hell, Tinker had spent the first two years of her life on a leash at Lain’s to keep her out of the reach of the various man-eating plants. And there was a reason she’d not moved in with Lain when her grandfather died. Lain was the type of person that loved kids as long as she could send them home. Tinker had lived with Lain the month it took her grandfather to fetch Oilcan from Boston. Life slowly degraded into a battle of wills that only stopped before they reached open warfare because her
grandfather returned.

  Esme had been distraught when she thought her “son” had been killed. She’d been overjoyed when she found out that Tinker was her real child. “But Esme is capable of committing to crazy, impossible plans. She might want to try.”

  “Domi,” Pony murmured, “by our laws, a child belongs foremost to its mother, but then to its clan. Who exactly qualifies as the children’s mother might be debated, since what your mother has done has never been tried among our people. It means that Stone Clan has the strongest claim, lacking a birth mother. Sunder is currently head of Stone Clan in the Westernlands.”

  Tinker growled in frustration. “We stopped being Stone Clan ages ago. I have always considered myself as Wind Clan.”

  “It was your right as an adult to choose a clan, but children are not considered mature enough to decide this.”

  That was the same line of bullshit that Iron Mace used to justify what was done to Oilcan, despite the fact that her cousin was twenty-two. Forge had promised never to betray any of his grandchildren, so he might be the lesser of evils in this—if he could be trusted.

  Tinker hadn’t met Sunder yet; the three new Stone Clan domana had arrived while she was out playing hide-and-seek with Chloe Polanski. With a name like Sunder, though, he probably wasn’t a pushover.

  “But the children are only the tip of the iceberg,” Jin said.

  “Oh, good gods! What else? You didn’t even talk with them!”

  “They have been in Haven since you disappeared. I was focused on finding you and supporting Wolf Who Rules. It is our policy to maintain no communication between Haven and Pittsburgh, lest it would give away Haven’s location. They arrived, however, with one of the yamabushi…”

  “A what?”

  “Forgiveness.” Jin pinched the bridge of his nose. “I forgot you do not know the term. There is so much that we should share with you about ourselves, but there never seems to be time.”

  Tinker laughed tiredly. “Yes, I know. Story of my life lately.” She needed a crash course on everything from the proper etiquette of “formal” meetings between clans to elf reproduction cycles. (The talk of babies reminded her that she wasn’t using birth control and earlier conversations on the subject boiled down to “don’t worry about that now.” She really should find out why she didn’t have to.)

  “The yamabushi are what we call the blood guard of the Chosen One. They are descendants of Wong Jin’s loyal servants who—” He caught himself with a grimace. “It’s a very long story and most of it is not important right now. They arrived at Haven with a young male tengu by the name of Haruka Sessai. He’s been trained since birth to gather information. He gave me a brief but concise report. I wanted to bring him but the girls wake often from nightmares and find his presence comforting. They trust him and Joy tolerates him, so he is keeping guard over them.”

  Tinker made a motion for Jin to move on to the important details. “What important details?”

  “Your ancestor, Forge’s son, Unbounded Brilliance, died in France during the revolution. Apparently, when he fled Elfhome, he had with him a spell-locked box, which we believe he’d stolen from Iron Mace, hence the reason that the warlord came to Pittsburgh. Iron Mace wanted to know if your family knew what was in the box. When Unbounded Brilliance was beheaded in France, his infant son was taken to America, but the box was lost.”

  It felt painfully wrong for something that happened over two hundred years ago to still be important, but Iron Mace had tried to kill Oilcan because of this box. “The only thing my family knows about it is some song.” Oilcan had sung it to her while telling her about his kidnapping. “Knock, knock, open the box…”

  Jin nodded. “The box was found in France and flown to New York. It was at the American Museum of Natural History. It was part of a traveling exhibit that the humans put together of objects elves lost on Earth.”

  Stormsong gasped.

  “What?” Tinker asked.

  “I’ve seen it. I was—oh—oh—oh sweet light—I’ve seen one of your sisters.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell me?”

  “You were still human and we had not yet met. I didn’t recognize her at the time. She was just a little human child, one of millions in New York City.”

  “How do you know it was my sister?”

  “She was there at the museum, inside an invisible paper box.”

  Was this “confound domi” night? “A what?”

  Stormsong spread her hands. “I’m not sure how she managed it, but she was using a spell to be invisible so she could move through the museum unseen.”

  That did sound like something Tinker would do. Knowing that Dufae’s box was at the museum, it was easy to guess why the twins were running around invisible. “Was” obviously was the key word in this story; the box wasn’t at the museum anymore. The only question was who ended up with it.

  “What were you doing there?” Tinker didn’t think the elves ever went to Earth.

  “I was with Sparrow. It was a diplomatic mission. She had taken half of Wolf’s First Hand because they had been to Earth long ago, before the war with the oni. Since I speak English, I was included—or at least, that was the reason Sparrow gave for taking me. It’s obvious now that she took the people most likely able to counter the attack on Wolf. When we returned, Pony met us at the train station with news that Wolf was missing and Hawk Scream was dead. The bitch ran us in circles all day until you brought him to the hospice.”

  Sparrow had been dead only a matter of days since it had been discovered that she was a traitor and had plotted the assassination attempt.

  “And the box?” Jin asked.

  Stormsong shook her head. “It didn’t come with us.”

  “The humans believe that Sparrow claimed it,” Jin said. “It was removed from the museum after you left.”

  “What was in the box?” Tinker asked.

  “There were twelve magical devices inside.” Jin took out what looked like a Fabergé egg done on a bowling-ball-size scale. “This is the one that your sisters took from the box. They could not take the other eleven that day and when they realized how important the contents were, it was too late. The box was gone.”

  “What is it?”

  “It is a storage device. What is important was what was stored inside. Joy was in this one.”

  “Miss Pocket Dragon?”

  “We do not know what are in the other eleven devices but we know that your ancestor referred to them as ‘fully loaded.’ It seems likely that there are eleven more little dragons inside the others.”

  Yes, twelve baby dragons and six siblings warranted an immediate visit in the middle of the night. And perhaps more house insurance.

  “Where did Iron Mace get twelve baby dragons?” Tinker asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jin said. “I will try to get the information from Joy. She—She—I’m told that she is quite difficult to work with. You should be aware that the spell that the greater blood used to transform my people—all of my people in a single transformation—was done using Providence’s body. It was a test run of an even greater spell that they had developed that required his soul as well as his body. It is why he asked us to kill him.”

  “Oh.” Tinker felt like someone had punched her. Eleven possible world-changing spells all locked into one deadly box.