Wood Sprites - eARC

by Wen Spencer

  “No, no, no,” Louise whispered, scrolling down. How did anyone know that?

  Iggy texted again. “They’re just making wild guesses by saying that you know all that stuff about Elfhome because you’re Princess Tinker’s little sisters. Right? Yeah, you look a lot like her, but that not because you’re related. Right?” And then an hour later. “How did you know that Princess Tinker saved Windwolf?”

  Zahara reported more damage. “Elle says she didn’t do it but her mother had her photographer film the play. He recognized your music. He started a bidding war for the video.”

  Louise groaned. She’d been so stupid. Pressed for time, she’d used all their normal music composing tools that included the digital recreations of the Elfhome instruments. Any claims that they were the creators of the Lemon-Lime videos might have been discounted if it wasn’t for the collaborating evidence of their signature music.

  Zahara had reported more bad news while they were locked in Yves’s magical cage. The Jello Shots had waded into battle, a hundred thousand strong, determined to find out the truth. Like data locusts, they swarmed the school computer, found the student list for the twins’ class, and went after home computers looking for evidence. Unlike the twins’ personal systems, the other students’ were easy prey.

  Louise called up the Jello Shot forum and winced at what their fans had stolen. Everything from the anti-mermaid music video to set designs to costume sketches were mined, shared, compared to existing Lemon-Lime work, and debated in detail. In Giselle’s computer, the Jello Shots found the ultimate proof. While the twins were working on their response to Nigel’s shout-out, they hadn’t noticed Giselle filming them. She sat behind them in class and managed to get a clear shot of Louise animating the first act while Jillian wrote dialogue. Louise always thought that she crawled through the process, but removed by time and place, she realized that she worked at an amazing speed. She pulled up old sets from previous videos, worked camera angles, blocked in characters, did special effects, and fiddled with lighting angles. And then, proving to be a ninjalike stalker, Giselle managed to film them recording the lines in the girls’ restroom.

  “Lemon-Lime is so super amazing awesome cute!” The Jello Shots mostly agreed (there were still hold-outs that didn’t believe the evidence) and then tore into the twins’ life. In the course of an hour, they knew everything that could be known about the girls. The dust explosion in their playhouse. The bomb outside their school. Their connection to the bomber. Their parents’ death. The custody battle.

  The Jello Shots reeled at what they found and poured out their sympathy. To Louise’s alarm, their attention moved from what the twins had done in the past to where they were now. “They’re only nine years old! Has anyone seen them since the play? They weren’t at the funeral! Why didn’t they go? Where are they? Did something happen to them?”

  How did the Jello Shots find out that they weren’t at the funeral? She discovered there was an entire thread of the fans calling the funeral home and grilling the staff as to who attended.

  Louise’s phone vibrated.

  It was Iggy again. “Please let me know you’re okay!”

  Was it really Iggy texting her? Or was Yves using Iggy to find the twins? Was Iggy in danger too? If Yves wasn’t using Iggy, then contacting him directly might make him a target.

  She took out her tablet and found an unsecure network and tapped into it.

  “Who are you calling?” Jillian asked.

  “Iggy. Something’s wrong.”

  He picked up on the first ring with a cautious, “Hello?”

  “Say ‘Who is this’ if there’s someone threatening you.”

  “What?”

  “Is someone looking for us?”

  “Huh? I am. And half the free world. Where are you?”

  Louise considered possible answers. “We’re safe. For now.”

  “You weren’t hurt in the explosion?”

  “Which one?” She winced. People normally don’t have multiple explosions in their lives.

  “The one in Alpine! Your Grandmother’s house blew up! Lemon-Lime Love just broke the news a few minutes ago.”

  Louise groaned. She’d forgotten that they had more than one website of rabid fans.

  Iggy continued, apparently assuming that she knew nothing about the fire. “Neighbors heard an explosion and called 911. They think that there was a gas leak in the kitchen. By the time the fire department got there, though, the whole house had caught on fire. They’re still fighting it.”

  Which was why Iggy was frantically texting them.

  “Yeah. We blew it up before we left.”

  “What?” Iggy shouted.

  “Our grandmother is married to a very evil family. She got sick and went to the hospital and her stepson locked us up in the basement. In a cage. And he had a boy locked up in the next room. So we blew up the house and ran away. He’s probably looking for us, so it’s not safe for us to tell anyone where we are.”

  There was a long silence from the other end and then Iggy said, “You’re totally serious. You’re not making that up?”

  “Completely totally serious.”

  “Louise, your grandmother died today.”

  Louise felt tears burning in her eyes. She rubbed them away, surprised that she actually hadn’t seen the news coming. Yves wouldn’t have dared to lock them up without being sure that there was no chance of Anna ever finding out.

  “Everyone is saying how you don’t have any family left,” Iggy said. “You don’t have any place to go, do you? Come to my house. You’ll be safe here.”

  “No. No, we won’t.” There was no way Louise was going to be responsible for getting Iggy or his protective sisters hurt. It would kill her to bring harm down on the close-knit family. “If the Jello Shots can find all our friends, so can Desmarais.”

  “Just come to our house and my mom and dad will find a place you’ll be safe.”

  “We have family. Princess Tinker is our older sister.”

  “She is? I thought the tabloids were just making that up.”

  “No, they’re not making it up. She’s our sister.” Not that Alexander knew it. There were Orville and Lain, who were also complete strangers. Louise shivered at the knowledge that they were putting all their hope on people that they would barely recognize in person, who didn’t even know they existed. “We’re going to Elfhome. Windwolf will protect us there.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Louise closed her eyes tight and took a deep breath. And another. She sought that mysterious calm of knowing. Would Windwolf protect them? “The shards of the fallen have slipped from our fingers. With Joy, the darkness will strike at the heart of the wolf’s greatest strength and his greatest weakness. The wolf must gather the children to him. From oldest to unborn, Brilliance must hold the door.”

  “Huh?”

  She opened her eyes. “It means he’ll protect us. He has to. He has no choice. He needs us if his world is going to survive.”

  39: WALDORF ASTORIA

  They were deep in planning their next move when Crow Boy hobbled out of his bedroom and stared out the penthouse window in confusion. The sun was setting over New Jersey, and the canyons between the tall buildings were filling with darkness. He had discovered the blue jeans shorts and crutches but had ignored the T-shirt. The only sign of his wings was the mysterious complex spell tattooed onto his back.

  “Where are we?” he asked without turning.

  “Midtown East.” Louise pointed toward the kitchen. “We ordered Thai takeout for dinner. There’s shrimp pad thai and chicken satay and vegan fried rice.” The last because they weren’t sure he could eat shrimp, and chicken felt a little cannibalistic. There had been all the makings of banana splits, but Joy had gorged herself on them. The baby dragon was asleep in the twins’ bedroom, sprawled on the unmade king-size bed.

  Crow Boy turned awkwardly on his crutches, eyeing the lush luxury of the sprawling sitting room. It was done all in
soft blue, butter cream, and highlights of gold; a grown-up version of a fairytale castle. According to the literature, kings and queens, movie stars, and dozens of presidents had stayed in the suite.

  Crow Boy startled slightly when he got to them and registered the change in their appearance. Jillian had wanted to bleach their hair blonde, but it turned out that the dye turned Jillian’s hair carrot-orange. (Louise told her that it was a bad idea.) Jillian waved it off, saying they looked less like twins this way. They dyed Louise’s hair jet-black and got her a pair of cosplay glasses. They were dressed in mismatched baggy T-shirts and pants, hoping that they would read as “male” to a casual observer. Louise secretly thought they’d only achieved looking like Harry Potter and Ron Weasley.

  Crow Boy gestured at the cityscape outside the window. “Midtown East as in Manhattan?” Getting a nod, he waved his hand to take in the richly appointed room. “And we’re where?”

  “The penthouse suite at the Waldorf Astoria.” Jillian took the freshly printed magic generator out of the industrial 3D printer. It was proving to be ten times faster than the printer at school.

  “Also known as the Elvish embassy.” Louise double-checked the fake ID she was working on. One would think the state’s computer system would be more secure.

  “How did we get here?” He obviously remembered nothing of his kidnapping despite the fact he’d been conscious enough to dismiss his great black wings.

  “Garage truck,” Jillian explained. “No one really ever pays close attention to them. It picked us up at the hospital and dropped us at the Waldorf Astoria’s loading dock.”

  Louise picked up the narrative of their escape. “We hacked the hotel’s computers in June to open up a meeting room so we could talk privately with Nigel Reid. So all we really needed to do was to use the back door we left to fabricate a wealthy but mostly absent parent who managed to pick up a card key without anyone remembering actually checking him in. As long as the credit card clears, the hotel doesn’t really care.”

  “At ten thousand dollars a night, they really, really don’t care,” Jillian said. “They’ve been trotting up packages from the front desk and leaving them by the door without a single question asked.”

  Crow Boy’s blue eyes had widened at the cost of the room. “How are you paying for it?”

  “Stolen money.” Jillian waved her new phone over her head. “Money is the one thing we have lots of.”

  “Oh, you should step back a little.” Louise motioned him to back up.

  He did and a moment later the babies raced into the sitting room in their little mini-hovercarts. Chuck Norris was still in the lead; she was quite fearless compared to the other three. They popped up to the end table and again to the back of the couch and along the gilded wood at speeds that they’d clocked at thirty mile per hour. At the other end, the babies bounced down to the end table, to the seat of the wing chair, and then to the floor.

  Crow Boy glanced again around the suite and then frowned at the marbled foyer where they had set up a scale-model mock-up of the quarantine zone complete with ten-foot-tall chain-link fence. “Am I really awake?”

  “Asks the Crow Boy.” At some point, Jillian had decided “Crow Boy” was more fitting than “Crow Warrior” for a name for him.

  “Yes, life currently is this odd.” Louise realized that they really should discuss basics. “What’s your name? We can’t keep calling you Crow Boy.”

  “Crow Boy is fine,” he said. “I don’t like my real name.”

  “Which is?” Jillian asked ruthlessly.

  “Haruka Sessai.”

  “What’s so horrible about that?” Louise asked.

  “Haruka is a girl’s name. It means Spring Flower.”

  “What do your friends call you?” Jillian asked.

  He blushed and looked away as he murmured, “Daffodil.”

  Jillian burst into laughing. Louise snorted as she tried to keep from laughing.

  “What happened with my wings?” he asked.

  “You made them go away after we woke you up the first time,” Louise explained.

  He’d kept falling asleep as they escaped, so it wasn’t surprising that he didn’t have a clear memory.

  “But—” He turned to look out the window again. “This is Earth. There’s only pockets of magic and certainly none in Manhattan.”

  “Step back!” Louise motioned him backwards again.

  The babies lapped through the room. Nikola and Chuck Norris were tied. Green Jawbreaker had the lead on her sister, Red Jawbreaker.

  “We really need to come up with better names for the girls,” Jillian murmured quietly.

  Louise nodded. “We have generators that produce magic. We’re mass producing them.”

  “We’re going to fly into Pittsburgh next Shutdown.” Jillian glanced toward the foyer. “Was that four laps?”

  Louise paused to count. “Yes.”

  Jillian picked up the checkered flag and waited for the racers to return.

  “I need to get to Monroeville,” Crow Boy said. “As soon as possible. Before Shutdown.”

  “That’s the plan,” Jillian said.

  “Why?” Louise asked.

  “I need to free the nestlings.” He saw their confusion. “Nestlings are children without tattoos. They can’t fly. You saw me with them at that museum. Since the Shoji household was raided, we pushed ahead getting all our flock to Elfhome. My group of nestlings were the last. Since they can’t fly, we needed to take them across in a shipping container instead of just flying in at night. We were supposed to cross into Pittsburgh in June but those idiots had that gunfight on Veterans Bridge with the police. Inbound traffic stopped before we managed to cross the border.”

  Louise gasped. She never considered what his imprisonment meant beyond him. “Oh no, they didn’t get to Pittsburgh?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t know what to do. Most of our people had gone ahead, so there was no one to call for help. There were rumors that the Veterans Bridge was damaged and that the road would be closed next Shutdown, so I took them to a safe house in Monroeville. Three days ago…” He glanced toward the setting sun. “Maybe four—I’ve lost track of time—Shiroikage hit the house with a full squad of oni.”

  Shiroikage was what he called Yves. It didn’t sound Elvish either, so Louise doubted it was Yves real name. It was becoming clearer and clearer why Esme hadn’t used the names she knew her step-family by.

  Crow Boy fell silent, right hand tight in a fist, eyes closed as if in pain. “Shiroikage must have found us days earlier and planned the attack, knowing we wouldn’t move until Shutdown. They had flash bangs and nets and dart guns.” He shook his head. “The worst part of being in that cage was knowing that Shiroikage has those kids and I’m the only one that can do anything. The only one that knows. I have to get back to Monroeville and save them before the oni takes them to Elfhome and uses them.”

  Louise wasn’t sure she wanted to know what “uses them” meant. The words filled her with unease. “What will Yves do to them?”

  “I heard him discussing their plans after they captured me. The greater bloods suspect what we’ve been doing, so they’ve developed a new spell. Since they captured the Chosen line, Yutakajodo has been experimenting on how we exist as a flock. It’s a magical power that Providence gave to us, not the greater blood that transformed us to half-crow. Yutakajodo has discovered that—” He closed his eyes tightly in pain. “That at the moment of death, a child’s soul calls to the flock. He’s developed a spell to trace the direction. It’s not a fine-tuned spell; they’ll have to kill all the children to triangulate the position of our village. And once they do, the hundreds of children already there won’t be strong enough to flee. Their parents won’t abandon them. It will be a slaughter.”

  Louise couldn’t help but remember the kindergartener Lai Yee Zhao; how gentle and kind Crow Boy had been with the little girl. The two girls in the gift shop; one was about to loan all her money to the o
ther girl to pay for the snow globe. The children had been quiet, well-behaved, and graceful.

  It had been horrible to know that the oni planned to kill Windwolf, but he was never within touching distance of the twins. To have heard the children’s excited conversation, to brush against them in the crowded gift shop, to step into the place they stood and buy the toy that they treasured. To have them that real, and then to know that each and every one of them was about to be killed…

  The babies came flying in from the foyer and Jillian waved them over the finish line. It required a photo finish. Nikola won by the literal nose, having leaned far out over the front of his hovercart. Chuck Norris was a sore loser and launched herself at her brother, squeaking furiously.

  “No fighting!” Louise plucked up Chuck Norris. So small. So fragile. It seemed unthinkable to risk the babies—but with the lives of other children in the balance, what real choice did they have? “We don’t have time for this. We need to change the plan.”

  “We do?” Jillian and the babies all cried.

  “Yes, we need to find the tengu children and figure out how to save them.”

  The babies surprised her by all cheering. “It will be like the Great Escape!” they cried in chorus and then started to whistle the theme song.

  Jillian sighed at the babies who obviously didn’t understand the danger. “Are you sure they didn’t take the kids across the last Shutdown?”

  “ Shiroikage tried to take all of us across the border, but the EIA had realized that they had been infiltrated and weeded out all the oni in its ranks. What with the gunfight delaying shipments from the Shutdown before and the change in the guard, Shiroikage had acted too late. He thought he could use his influence to jump the cue, and luckily he couldn’t.”

  “So they’re in Monroeville, at least until the cue starts to form at the border.”