Wood Sprites

by Wen Spencer

  At least they had a completely tested prototype of the robotic mouse. While the babies were still focused on some newly added racing videos, Louise ordered ten thousand mice from the Indonesia factory. Not that they needed that many; it was the smallest number that the manufacturer would take on rush order.

  “Lou!” Chuck Norris tugged on Louise’s hair to get her attention. “What does this mean?”

  The babies had found a new video. Someone had splintered down the documentary and picked out only the frames of Alexander sucking on the cherry ice pop. They looped the few seconds to prolong the action for two minutes and then ended with her licking her fingers. The title of video was “Why Prince Yardstick loves Tinker.”

  She winced. “I’m not sure, but it probably has to do with sex.”

  “What’s sex?” the babies asked in chorus.

  Louise blushed hotly. “It’s icky stuff that adults do.”

  “What kind of icky stuff?” The babies started into a barrage of questions. “If it’s icky, why do they want to do it? Is it like eating Brussels sprouts?”

  Brussels sprouts? “I don’t want to have to explain it. It’s icky. Don’t ask.”

  The babies were working systematically through the postings. Louise noticed that one post further down was generating thousands of shares per second. It was titled “Announcing Prince Windwolf and Princess Tinker.” She clicked it and discovered someone had used the documentary to do a 3D rendering of Alexander and then paired her with a scale model of Windwolf. The animator had dressed the male elf in a white tuxedo with his long black hair falling loosely over his shoulders. Alexander wore a skin-tight elfin gown of fairy silk in Wind Clan blue. They stood holding hands, looking like two teenagers about to go to the prom. They bowed to the camera and then turned to look into each other’s eyes. Music started and the two started to waltz. During the documentary, Alexander hadn’t gotten down off the truck bed, so she never seemed overly short. But if the render was correct, Louise and Jillian weren’t going to get much taller.

  Louise realized that the animation on the waltz was very good quality. She checked the credits and squeaked with surprise. A real animation studio had created the piece.

  With sudden foreboding, Louise closed the Jello Shots forum and did a general search on the title. There were a hundred pages of hits. Apparently frustrated by the lack of pictures of Alexander and Windwolf together, one of the tabloid new feeds had paid for the animation. “What is a Wood Sprite?” had also become a meme with various odd animals PhotoShopped onto the flat bed, licking the cherry ice pop. Red pandas. Koala bears. Gibson monkeys. And most alarming, one featuring Disney’s version of Tinker Bell. Whimpering, Louise typed in “Princess Alexander Graham Bell” and Alexander’s picture came up complete with a small bio explaining that she was the daughter of Leonardo da Vinci Dufae. The information apparently had been supplied by the EIA Director, Derek Maynard. Unlike all the pictures of Alexander covered in mud, the bio had frames from the documentary. The family resemblance between Alexander and the twins was unmistakable.

  Yves was going to find the photos. Yves was going to see the family resemblance and realize what Esme had done. He was going to know what the twins were.

  * * *

  “We need to go.” Louise told Jillian when she woke her twin. She fought to keep her voice calm and level even though the enormity of what was ahead of them scared her. They still hadn’t figured out how they were going to get away from the mansion without getting caught or where they were going to go or how they were going to stay hidden. “Let’s get packed to leave.”

  “Huh?” Jillian sat up, rubbing at her eyes. “Now? What happened?”

  “The Jello Shots dug up a bunch of videos of Alexander and they’re getting plastered everywhere. Sooner or later, Yves is going to figure everything out. We’ve got to go before he does.”

  Jillian squinted at her, apparently still half-asleep, stepping through the logic. “Videos?”

  “Of Tinker and Oilcan!” Chuck Norris squeaked.

  “Racing!” Red Gingham Jawbreaker cried.

  “But we can’t get to Elfhome now!” Nikola cried. “It’s twenty-five days to Shutdown. We haven’t moved all the money yet . . .”

  “. . . and we don’t have all the mice!” the girls chorused with Nikola.

  “I know.” Louise waved them all to be calm, even though fear skittered about inside her. “Everything can go as planned—just someplace else—not here—as far away from here as possible.”

  The babies rapid-fired questions in excited squeaks. “Where are we going? How are we going to get there? Can we make the mini-hoverbikes first? We can use the magic generators. Oh, we’ll need to make more generators to make one for each of us. We’re taking the mice, too, aren’t we? What are we taking with us?”

  “Holy hell!” Jillian cried. “Where did the mice come from?”

  Louise let the babies explain in a confusing four-part narrative. She could only think of all the things tucked into the back of the walk-in closet. Their favorite Christmas ornaments. The family tree that had hung over the fireplace in living room. Their mom’s wedding rings. Everything so precious that it hurt to look at them. Too painful for Jillian to even deal with. Were they going to have to abandon it all?

  If we can rob a museum without getting caught, we can sneak back later and get our stuff.

  Even as she tried to comfort herself, she knew it wasn’t true. The future that was hurtling toward them was dark and full of pain, and there would be no coming back.

  “We have to leave today,” Louise made herself say while trying to think of what they had to take. Other than the babies and Joy, what did they really need? Their tablets and phones and the flash drive of the codex. Louise found her backpack and set it down in the middle of the floor.

  They had money. Lots of money. In theory they could buy anything they needed. In truth, kids normally didn’t buy anything alone. Not real food like frozen vegetables and raw fish. Not real clothes like underwear and jeans. Children always followed behind their parents who pushed carts in supermarkets. They were supposed to stand quietly behind the adult paying the cashier at department stores. And children never checked into hotels alone.

  We’ll figure it out, Louise thought firmly to hold back the fear. They probably should take a change of clothes until they worked out basic life necessities. One shirt, a pair of jeans, and a single set of clean underwear, however, took up most of her backpack. They probably should take all of their socks and underwear, not just one set. Louise raided their underwear drawer and struggled to pack it all into the space remaining in her backpack. Nothing else would fit, even if they desperately needed it. Should she take the blue jeans out?

  Panic surged up through Louise, like a shout that wanted to be let out. She covered her mouth, trying to keep it all in. How much could someone take before they broke?

  “We may not have to wait,” Jillian said.

  Louise stared at her for a minute. She’d lost track of what they were talking about. She’d never said anything about waiting, had she? “What?”

  “We might not have to wait for Shutdown to get to Pittsburgh.” Jillian ducked into the secret room. Her muffled voice came through the open door. “Remember that in the codex, Dufae talked about the pathways between Elfhome and Earth.”

  “Yes, but after his wife died, he tried to take his son back to Elfhome and all the pathways had been deliberately destroyed. He didn’t find one that was still intact.”

  “In Europe he couldn’t find one intact!” Jillian came back out carrying an armful of papers that she spilled out onto the card table. “Dufae died in 1791. Windwolf was the first elf to land on the Westernlands in 1910. In the 1700s, North America was still largely unexplored. Even if Windwolf had access to the maps created by the humans, most of the cave systems wouldn’t have been marked. There are only a few thousand elves in the Westernlands even now, so they couldn’t have checked out all the cave systems.
”

  The papers were dozens of cave maps. Some of them were real geological surveys and others were brochures by tour companies that owned the cavern. Jillian sorted through the papers. The babies climbed up the table’s wooden legs and complicated the process by trying to study the maps themselves.

  “Ming married Anna before the first Startup,” Jillian said. “If he was relying on the pathways in Europe to get to Elfhome, and they were destroyed, he would have had to search out a new way.”

  Louise followed her logic. “Which is why Esme was collecting the maps.”

  “Collected them and kept them hidden. If she just had some weird love of caves, they’d be on her bookcases, not stashed in the secret room.”

  Louise looked down at the dozens of maps. “If there’s this many choices, then he was still looking. He didn’t find a way.”

  Jillian whimpered slightly, shrinking with disappointment. She looked as if she was in danger of collapsing back to the stranger that had huddled in the bed the last few weeks. “That’s true.”

  “But your reasoning is sound.” Louise rushed to repair the damage. “It proves that the pathways are natural formations and that the elves didn’t destroy the ones in the Westernlands. Ming has been seeking a pathway, so he believes it’s there, but he doesn’t really know how to find it.”

  “How could it be so hard? He found this place.” Jillian gasped. “Wait! This place has magic, so it’s linked to Elfhome. Maybe this is like stately Wayne Manor with bat caves all under it.”

  “There are caves!” Chuck Norris stated firmly.

  “But there aren’t any bats,” Nikola added with some uncertainty.

  “Not that we noticed!” the Jawbreakers finished.

  “When were you in caves?” both twins shouted.

  The babies cringed.

  “Two days after we arrived,” Nikola volunteered.

  “It was boring watching you sleep!” Chuck Norris cried. “So we went exploring!”

  “We didn’t get into any trouble!” Green Jawbreaker stated.

  “You never said that we couldn’t,” Red Jawbreaker stated.

  “And why do we have to do what you tell us?” Chuck Norris asked. “Don’t we get to vote? We outnumber you!”

  “Yeah!” her two sisters cried.

  “No, you don’t get a vote!” Jillian shouted, throwing her hands up in the air. “Don’t ever leave the bedroom again without us!”

  “Unless it’s important—like the mansion is on fire.” Louise earned an annoyed look from her twin. She was more worried, though, about the future than the past. The damage was already done. She couldn’t figure out how the babies even got Tesla out of the bed without them noticing. They always slept with the bed in the raised position.

  “We didn’t actually leave,” Nikola said.

  His sisters nodded. “We didn’t.”

  “You said you left,” Jillian growled.

  “We did, but we didn’t,” they cried.

  “Oh, that’s perfectly clear,” Jillian grumbled.

  “Tesla didn’t leave the room, but we did.” Nikola attempted to clarify. “We just didn’t have any bodies.”

  “Huh?” Jillian looked utterly confused.

  “Oh.” Louise realized what Nikola meant. It was like when she dreamed of the babies. They existed somehow separate of Tesla as well as integrated with him. If they could enter her dreams, then moving through the house like ghosts wasn’t completely impossible, just very weird. “I understand.”

  “You do?” Jillian cried. “I don’t.”

  “The babies dream-walked,” Louise said.

  Nikola nodded vigorously and then pointed toward Louise’s feet. “Joy showed us how.”

  Joy was pulling the clean underwear from Louise’s backpack and tossing them over her shoulder. She had cans of freeze-dried blueberry cheesecake stacked beside her. She looked up, wide-eyed with surprise at being the center of attention.

  “Joy!” Louise cried. Their underwear was scattered all across the bedroom floor.

  “Must take yummies!” Joy shoved the cans into the emptied bag. “Not stupid panties.”

  “No, junk food is the one thing we can get easily!” Louise gathered up the underwear.

  “Wait!” Jillian shouted. “Dream-walked? What the hell does that mean?”

  “Shhh!” Louise bent down, trying to unload enough of the cans to fit the clothes back into the bag. “The secret elves might hear.”

  “What does it mean?” Jillian whispered fiercely.

  “They astral-projected. That’s how the babies are talking to us through Tesla. It’s their spirits. Their souls.” Louise sighed at the disbelieving look Jillian was giving her. “They’re sitting on top of a magic generator. And they’re elves. Maybe all elves can dream-walk.”

  Joy made a raspberry and jerked the can out of Louise’s hand. “Not elf. Dragon, silly!”

  “What?” both twins cried.

  “Joy says that we’re related to two dragons: Brilliance and Clarity. That’s why we can dream-walk.”

  Surely that couldn’t be right. Still, Dufae’s Elvish name had been Unbounded Brilliance. There were certainly lots of myths about dragons having children that were very humanlike. Louise struggled not to get distracted by the possibility. “So there are caves under the mansion?”

  Nikola nodded. “Caves, but we didn’t notice any bats.”

  Jillian disappeared back into the secret room, mumbling about billionaires with secret identities and their propensity for secret lairs. She returned with a fat roll of papers nearly four feet long, and unrolled to be nearly four feet wide. Esme had provided them—somehow—with a copy of the blueprints of the mansion. Judging by the frayed edges marked on the copies as jagged lines, they were scans of the original as-built prints. “Ming has to know the caves are there. I’m sure he picked this place because of the magic.” Jillian flipped through the pages until she hit the last one that showed an entire warren of rough-shaped rooms under the mansion. According to the title block, the cave systems had been labeled as sub-basement. “Holy bat caves!”

  “No bats!” the babies all squeaked.

  Louise studied the maze. It seemed too easy to be true. Surely they couldn’t just slip through the mansion’s cellars and come out on Elfhome. The magic, though, was coming from somewhere. Dufae had written about leakage from his world to Earth. If there were a pathway, surely Ming would claim it for himself and keep it well hidden from the eyes of mankind.

  As she studied the blueprint, though, nothing seemed to suggest that there was a pathway to another world. “There’s no way to get a car or even a horse down into the caves easily.” She pointed out what seemed to be the only staircase into the area through the mansion’s large walk-in pantry. “According to this, the mansion was built in 1890. It was another twenty years before Windwolf came to the Westernlands, and he might have settled anywhere on the East Coast, or even gone to—whatever they call South America. Ming wouldn’t have had to hide moving people and supplies to Elfhome from Earth, because there weren’t any elves to see.”

  Jillian pouted and reached for her ball and glove. “But if we could get to Elfhome here in Hudson Valley, we would be at Aum Renau.”

  “Windwolf probably picked this area for the same reason Ming chose it. First thing Dufae did was find places on Earth opposite massive pools of magic so he could cast spells with what leaked across. On Elfhome, right here, there’s probably the strongest source of magic on the continent.”

  Which reminded Louise that they should take some of their most portable spell-casting supplies. It looped her back to the realization that they would have to abandon everything left of their parents.

  An hour later, everything came crashing down on them.

  There was a knock after someone tried the door and found it locked.

  “Hide!” Louise whispered to the babies, waving the mice to take cover. She could feel the danger looming outside the door. They had run out o
f time. The mice darted under the furniture.

  What should I do? A dozen possibilities flashed through Louise’s mind, followed by dozens of possible outcomes, some horrifying. She glanced frantically around the room. Between the babies and Joy “helping,” the twins had barely started with packing. Jillian had insisted that they scan the cave maps and the mansion’s blueprints before returning them to the secret room. It meant that everything that Louise didn’t want the elves to see was sitting out, waiting to be packed.

  Tesla stood up; the babies had fled out of the mice robots to inhabit him again.

  “Sit!” Louise hissed as one possibility became terrifyingly probable. “Do not fight! You promised!”

  “Why do we have to listen to you?” Chuck Norris Pink grumbled in Nikola’s Christopher Robin lilt, but this time Louise recognized the true speaker.

  “We won’t fight,” Nikola stated and Tesla sat. “Because we promised.”

  “But we don’t like it,” one or both of the Jawbreakers complained.

  The person knocked again. Louder. Impatient.

  Joy wasn’t anywhere in sight. Hopefully she was inside Tesla or the secret room. There was no more time left to look for her. Louise snatched up items blindly from the “to pack” pile and started to shove them into her pockets. No, they were going to check her pockets. She pulled up her left pant leg and slid what would fit into her socks. At least their tablets had secure passwords; there was no way to take them with them and keep them hidden. The babies, though, were vulnerable inside of Tesla’s storage compartment.

  There was a murmur of voices beyond the door and soon someone was going to be breaking down the door if they didn’t unlock it. Louise rushed across the room, turned the lock and flung open the door.

  Louise had expected Anna. It was Celine, gazing down at Louise with dark suspicion. Behind her was a small herd of the male drivers who doubled as bodyguards. Louise managed a look of surprise on her face even as she realized that the fact Anna wasn’t there meant real danger for the twins. There were too many adults for the children to put up a fight and have any hope of winning.