Chased by Monsters

Chased By Monsters

Jane missed how it started.

She went out to set perimeter alarms and came back to find that they were comparing feet.

The children, of course, had crow feet, complete with scales and talons. Little Joey’s scales were black as his spikey hair. Jane’s baby sister, Boo, had white scales to match her pale blond curls, but her feet were otherwise identical to the boy’s. Since neither child had shoes, most likely they had triggered show and tell.

Taggart was holding his camera on his lap, viewfinder tilted up. He was filming the comparison of feet without being obvious. Jane locked down an automatic kneejerk hate of being in front of the camera. If they were going to get the news out to Earth that Pittsburgh needed help against the oni, it was stories like Boo’s that would win over hearts.

Nigel had taken off his boots to show off his prosthetics that looked like pieces of curved metal. The naturalist was discussing feet in his faint Scottish burr. “The heel is essentially a finger pointing backwards. See, the leg comes down and connects to the ankle, which is a pivot joint like the wrist. From there, the foot shifts out in two directions. Forward are the toes and backwards is the heel. This bone is called a calcaneus. Because it has to bear the weight of the entire body, though it’s evolved over time to a large, strong bone.”

Hal was not to be outdone. Hal had his cross-trainers off, and as he unveiled his feet, everyone but Nigel recoiled slightly. “It’s called Brachymetatarsia. It’s a condition in which there are one or more abnormally short metatarsals. I have the most common form, which affects the fourth toe.”

“Oh, that’s weird looking,” Joey whispered, not old enough to realize it was rude, however true it was.

Luckily Hal had thick skin. “In my case, it’s acquired, not congenital.”

“I thought only women developed that,” Nigel said.

Hal shrugged. “It means that I am truly unique and special.”

Taggart was slowly taking off his hiking boots, apparently bullied into joining. “I have hobbit feet. Big and hairy.” And he did. They were epic.

All eyes turned to Jane.

“The kids need baths,” Jane announced to keep from being roped into this odd display.

Taggart tilted his head slightly to indicate she should look at her sister.

Unshed tears shimmered in Boo’s eyes. The whole foot display, then, was for her sake.

Jane sighed and sat down on the edge of her battered coffee table. She pulled off her boots and socks and reluctantly put out her feet for inspection. Five heads bent over her toes to inspect them.

“Uh,” Taggart breathed in surprise. “I didn’t think you were the type to paint your toenails.”

Boo gave a wordless squeal of delight and launched herself into Jane’s arms. “Purple!”

“Yes, purple just for you.” Jane hugged her baby sister tight. Over her mass of white blond curls, she saw Taggart raise an eyebrow in question. “It’s her favorite color.”

In the weeks leading up to Boo’s kidnapping, the little girl had begged and pleaded with Jane to have a full manicure. Jane never knew what had triggered it, but had resisted because she had tried it once when she was eleven and loathed the results. Her right hand had looked like she dipped her fingers into the polish, and in less than a day, she’d picked most of the polish off.

On the morning Boo had gone missing, Jane had bought a bottle of purple nail polish. They’d sat on the tailgate of their family pickup truck and painted all their toenails as her younger brothers slept off a night of trying to kill one another. It had been a quiet moment of ritual girl bonding.

Two hours later, Boo vanished out of their life. Taken. Presumed killed.

Every week after that, for eight years, Jane had painted her toenails the same exact purple.

If Jane had a quarter for every time she’d washed one of her younger siblings, she could invest in an automatic baby washer. With the exception of his feet and the fact he didn’t act like the shampoo was acid, Joey proved to be no different than any of her younger brothers. It was a little unsettling when he used his feet like a second pair of hands; he could even unscrew bottle tops with them.

Boo surprised her by asking for help with washing her hair. It scared Jane what evidence of abuse she would find under Boo’s dirty clothes. Jane silently called herself a coward as she filled the tub with fresh water and added lavender-scented bath salt. Seeing scars would be nothing compared to the pain of wearing them.

It was a relief, though, that Boo had no noticeable scars. Only her birdlike feet marked what damage her kidnappers had done to her. Boo kept them under the surface of the foamy water. Either she was still ashamed of them or it didn’t occur to her that she could use them like hands.

Boo’s hair proved to be just as wild and curly and white as when she was six. It surprised Jane since most of her family had been towheads as children but by fourteen their hair had changed to honey gold.

“He liked my hair pale.” Boo pulled one of the wet locks of hair forward to gaze at sadly. “He did a spell so it would never change color.”

“Who did?”

“Kajo. He did that first. Just the color. He was going to make me an elf next, but then Danni said I was too dangerous of a toy to keep. That he was only keeping me because of some sick mommy obsession and he should get rid of me before I could hurt him.”

Jane felt like someone had just punched her hard in the stomach. “He took you to be a toy?”

Boo shook her head vehemently. “No. I was stupid. I’d seen Kajo with Danni. Her hair was just like mine. I wanted to meet her, so I followed them all the way to a warehouse where they were meeting with Lord Tomtom. He has cat ears and a tail. Even a six-year-old can tell he isn’t human. He was going to kill me, but Kajo stopped him. Kajo liked my hair.”

“Kajo and Lord Tomtom are both oni?”

Boo wrinkled up her nose. “There’s all sorts of oni. There’s the purebloods but there’s not a lot of those in Pittsburgh. Some of the officers are purebloods; they wear face paint to make themselves scarier. And then there’s the lesser bloods who’d been bred with animals. They don’t need face paint to be scary. And then there’s the greater bloods like Kajo and his Eyes. They look almost human.”

“What do you mean by Eyes?”

“They’re women who can see the future.” Boo said. “I think they’re related to Kajo. Danni calls him ‘big brother’ when she’s mad at him.”

The mention of brothers drove all other thoughts out of Jane’s mind with the sudden realization she was going to have to tell her family that she’d found Boo. Jane shuddered a little at the thought of how their five brothers were going to take the news.

How long could she put it off?

Jane threw away the dirty rags that Boo and Joey had been wearing. Luckily she had a massive closet full of kid’s clothes. Her mother and aunts had kept every stitch of clothing that Jane’s generation had outgrown. The price for taking over the family estate was storing all the clothes until the next generation could grow into them. Jane enforced military order on the closet to keep it from being reduced to pure chaos every few months. She standardized on twenty-seven gallon, airtight, stackable, heavy plastic bins. They were labeled and organized by sex and sizes. She pointed Boo toward the handful of girl containers and then pulled down one labeled “Boy’s size 5” for Joey.

When she opened up the bin, Joey gave a cry of joy and snatched up the topmost piece of clothing.

“Ravenclaw!” He held up a black shirt. “That’s my house!”

“It is?” The long-sleeved shirt had a large bird that looked more like an eagle than a raven.

He hugged the shirt to his chest. “At Hogwarts there are four houses: Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Slytherin, and us! Ravenclaw! Our element is air and we’re smart!”

“Oh! Harry Potter!” Her brother Geoffrey had gone through a phase when he was about ten. It was what inspired him to learn magic, which led to his carpentry since ironwood could only be crafted with spells and magically sharp tools. He was the only human in the city that could work with the wood. He shipped his furniture as far away as New York and Los Angeles. The shirt most likely had been his.

Joey nodded enthusiastically. “Riki read to me every night before bed. When we would finish a book, we’d watch the movie.” The smile faded. “We’d just finished Prisoner of Azkaban, but we didn’t get to see the movie.” He held up the shirt. “Can I have it?”

The shirt was in the wrong bin; it was at least three sizes too big. Jane couldn’t say no. It really didn’t matter that the shirt didn’t fit; after what Joey had been through, he deserved any little thing that could make him happy.

“Sure.” She helped him pull the shirt over his head. It came to his knees and his hands were lost in the sleeves.

“There, you look like a true Ravenclaw now.” She rolled up the sleeves until his hands appeared.

“I’m just like Harry,” Joey tented out the shirt so he could study the decal. “The oni killed my parents when I was just a baby. I live with my Aunt Katsumi and Uncle Hiro, but they’re not mean at all. I have three cousins instead of one; Riki, Mickey and Keiko. None of them are like Dudley. Aunty Nori is Mickey’s aunt, not mine, just like Marge Dursley, but she’s not mean either. She always brings presents for all of us and plays Sturdy Birdy with me. We live hidden in among muggles, who don’t know anything about magic or monsters.”

Jane gazed at him, so tiny and helpless. It was starting to hit home that she’d taken a child. Being that he had been chained to the floor inside a cage, it seemed a perfectly justified action. But keeping him was filled with moral ambiguity. Boo said that she was now genetically his sister, and certainly their matching crow feet seemed to support that claim.

You can’t pick your family, Boo reminded Jane, but you still have to do right by them.

For Jane, “do right” was to return Joey to the family that obviously loved him if they were reading nightly to him. The only problem was that it didn’t sound like Joey’s family lived in Pittsburgh. If they did, the people around him would know about magic and monsters. “Do you know where your aunt and uncle live? What is their address?”

“Three eight three five Startouch Drive, Pasadena, California, nine one one oh seven.”

“California?” Jane echoed with dismay.

Joey nodded.

Returning him to his family wasn’t going to happen any time soon. She had no idea how she was going to get him back to Earth. With the EIA infiltrated by oni, she couldn’t use official channels. She knew that there were people that smuggled in illegal immigrants, but for the time being, she could trust no one but family. Jane couldn’t even call Joey’s aunt and uncle. She would have to wait until Shutdown when Pittsburgh returned to Earth to contact them. The poor people. She knew firsthand the grief that they must be going through.

That her family was still going through. Jane sighed, deciding to at least call her mother. She would still be at her café downtown. Jane would have to wait until her mother closed up; otherwise there might be strangers there to overhear the conversation. Actually, Jane realized it would be best to just ask her to come to Hyeholde and not to go into details on the phone.

Said conversation did not go as planned. Her mother was tired and already upset. Jane’s youngest brother, Guy, had been in yet another fight at summer school.

“Mom! Mom! I’ll knock some sense into Guy! Just…please…I need you here. It’s really important.”

“Can’t you come to the house?”

Her mom still lived on their old street. The world’s biggest gossips, Mike and Mitsuko Barker lived in the house next door. The Barkers were the type of people that you could trust with your kids but not your secrets. The standing joke was “Telephone, telegraph, tell a Barker.”

“Mom, my boss saddled me with two new people…”

“Yes, Mitsy Barker was telling me about them. She saw you on the television with Chloe Polanski. Nigel Reid! What’s he like?”

What her mom was really asking was “do you find him sexually attractive?” and “can I start asking about grandchildren?” One would think raising seven children was enough for anyone, but apparently it was the people who had lots of kids that looked forward to a houseful of even more.

For some reason all Jane could think of was Taggart wearing only his pajama bottoms and the arrow of dark hair pointing down to his beltline. And the fact he smelled heavenly at all times.

“Jane?” Which really meant, “You didn’t say ‘no’ like usual.”

“There’s someone I really want you to meet,” Jane said truthfully. “Not Nigel. Someone else. But I’m really tied up here and can’t bring them to the house.”

“Okay.” Her mother’s voice was fully of surprise and curiosity. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’ll stop and pick up something to cook.”

Translation: I’ll properly welcome this mystery man into the family.

“That would be good.” Jane hung up. She leaned her head against the kitchen wall and considered banging it a few times. Why was it easier to deal with the heavily armed oni than her family?

Taggart chose that moment to walk into the kitchen. “Are you okay?”

“Yes.” My mother is coming to pin someone down and force them to propose. And she’s not picky as to who. “No.” Considering the last forty-eight hours, maybe that was the wrong thing to say. “I’m not sure.” Jane didn’t want to explain her mother’s pending siege, so she tackled the other thing that had her unbalanced. “I never thought it would turn out this way. I mean, this is the way I wanted it to. Prayed it would. But I always thought that if we were lucky, the most we’d ever recover was a few gnawed bones that we’d never be totally sure were hers. This? This is too good to be true. I keep thinking I’ll wake up and find out it was a dream.”

Taggart smiled gently at her and leaned in close. “It’s not a dream. You’re awake and she’s in the other room, safe and sound, watching a movie. Harry Potter, I think.”

Chesty stood up, alert but not growling.

“We’re getting visitors.” Jane went to her gun rack and got down her rifle.

Taggart glanced to Chesty. “Trouble?”

“Probably not, but I wasn’t expecting anyone. Stay put.”

Outside she could hear the deep rumble of a big truck coming. As it neared, the timbre grew familiar. It was her brother Alton’s Ford pickup. She swung her rifle onto her back, but stayed hidden from sight while he slowed and turned into her long drive.

When she was sure it was only Alton, she drifted out to meet him. He took note of the rifle on her shoulder. He lifted his rifle out of his gun rack before swinging down out of the cab.

“What’s wrong?” He scanned the woods around Hyeholde. Alton had been as fair as Boo as a child. Since their baby sister had disappeared, he’d grown increasingly dark and scruffy. His honey-blond hair was down to his shoulders, and recently he’d stared to grow a beard.

“Nothing’s wrong,” Jane said. “Just being careful.”

“Ah.” He sounded unconvinced. “So Brandy called me for no reason at all to tell me to hunt you down and sit on you.”

“Like that would work.”

He shrugged. All her brothers were tall and strong but they’d had a lifetime of being whooped by Jane. They were naturally reluctant to get her riled up but pride made them equally reluctant to admit that they were scared of her.

“I got an elk while picking blueberries,” Alton said. “I figured I’d come out and check on you.”

Alton made a living by foraging for fruits and nuts that grew wild now that half the farms in Pittsburgh were abandoned. He sold his finds to the elf enclaves and the handful of restaurants still in business. When it started to snow, he’d switch to hunting big game. It was early in the year for him to bag an elk; the midsummer heat made it difficult to properly age the meat. What he wasn’t saying was that he needed to borrow her garage which been converted out of Hyeholde’s old springhouse.

Jane nodded but added terms. “I want some of the blueberries and meat.”

Alton put out his hand to seal the deal with a fist bump. “Brandy said you’re working with a new crew.” He pitched the last as a question, tilting his head toward the Chased by Monsters production truck. “Is Hal okay? I heard he set himself on fire.”

“He’s fine.” Jane glanced into the back of his pickup. A young red elk bull filled the truck’s bed. The big male was a cousin to the Eastern Elk, which had gone extinct in Pennsylvania in 1877. She hadn’t known that fact until she and Hal had done a Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden episode on a young bull that was terrorizing Observatory Hill. A herd of elk might make a good show for Chased by Monsters. The oni were suppressing information out of Pittsburgh in preparation for a guerilla war with the elves. To build human support for the city, Jane and her crews needed to show the interesting upside of living on Elfhome. Bountiful big game would win the hunters over. “Where did you bag it?”

“Down by Brownsville, almost to the Rim. There’s a mated pair of saurus with little ones or a warg pack or something pushing herds into the South Hills. I could have dropped two or three but I’m not sure where I’d age all the meat. Want me to bag you one?”

She shook her head. “I want to film a herd.”

“Ah, okay.” He circled back to the start of the conversation. “So why does Brandy want me to sit on you?”

There was no avoiding it so she might as jump to the truth like ripping off a bandage. “I found out who took Boo and where they were holding her.”

“What?” he shouted. “What are we doing here? Why haven’t you gone after her? Why didn’t you call us? Why would Brandy want me to sit on you?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Jane was glad that she’d left her brothers out of the rescue mission. “I need you to calm down and promise me…”

“No,” Alton snapped. “I’m going after her, with or without you.”

Jane punched him in the stomach. He clamped down on a cry of pain and took a swing at her but she’d already ducked out of his reach. He really needed to learn to keep his guard up. “Listen to me.”

He unleashed a string of curses as he staggered back, rubbing his stomach.

“And stop swearing; you sound like a whore. I’ve already went after her.”

“Oh, freaking hell, Jane, you could have started with it was another false lead!”

“Shut up and listen. I need you to promise me that you won’t tell a soul about Boo.”

“What?”

“You need to keep your mouth shut. No one can know about Boo and Joey. Promise me.”

“Who the hell is Joey?”

Jane sighed. It would be easier to explain this only once to all of her family but that was a recipe for sheer chaos. “You’ve been listening to the news? Did you hear that besides Earth and Elfhome with the elves, there’s a third parallel universe where the world is Onihida and its people are called oni. There used to be ways to go from universe to universe via caves.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He made a motion that she should jump to her point. “Magic resonance through the rocks, blah blah blah, same effect that transfers Pittsburgh to Elfhome. Wormholes between mirror worlds. Some with magic, some without. Wait? You mean the oni took Boo?”

Jane signaled for him to wait. “The oni and the elves had a war three hundred years ago. It started on Onihida but it spilled onto Earth in China. The oni managed to push a small army through their pathway before the elves pulled down the caves. Part of that force were tengu; humans who had been merged with crows as punishment.”

“The tengu took Boo too? Why? I could see them taking Tinker now that she’s a…”

“Just shut up and listen!” Jane cried. “The tengu had been normal humans. They couldn’t easily find their way back and forth between the two worlds, but they were doing it. Onihida was like the Aladdin’s treasure cave and giant’s castle in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and every fairy tale you ever heard. It was filled with monsters but if you were cunning and brave, there was gold and treasure. Or at least, that’s the legend that lured the tengu to Onihida.”

“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 her 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.”

Taggart laughed. “In other words, who knows if the short version you got is actually based on truth at all?”

“Yeah. The glorified version is that Maynard and Windwolf met in the woods, just the two of them, and became friends. It’s doubtful because Windwolf always has his bodyguards with him and Maynard would have been with his unit. Whatever. The story goes on to say that the viceroy ran into another unit of American soldiers, this one packing more weapons and under the command of someone totally spooked by all the Elfhome weirdness. The officer in charge tried to use force to corral the elves into some kind of holding area. Next thing you know, Windwolf is totally pissed off and nuking the hell out of the Americans. Maynard stripped off his weapons and walked out to talk to Windwolf. Between them, they made peace. When the UN stepped in, Windwolf insisted that Maynard be put in charge of the UN forces and that’s the way it’s been since year one. Basically most people consider Maynard the god of Pittsburgh in terms of what can and can’t be done.”

“Is he trustworthy?” Nigel asked. “With all these moles, can he be counted to be still on the elves’ side?”

“The expansionists think he spends too much time kissing up to Windwolf, but I think they’re missing the point. Maynard knows that we’re stranded on Elfhome ninety-eight percent of the time and there’s an entire world of elves that could wipe us off the map in the twenty-nine days between one Shutdown and the next. He has several thousands of idiots to mess things up and tens of thousands of innocent people to protect from their stupidity. He operates on zero tolerance and that doesn’t make for a lot of friends.”

And it meant that if he knew that Jane had wreaked havoc at Sandcastle to get back Boo, he would…

Jane wasn’t sure what he would do. And it scared her.

The Sandcastle parking lot was crawling with EIA dressed in combat camo and armed with assault weapons. It unsettled Jane to see them. It was one thing to know that Pittsburgh had a small army made up of outsiders; it was another to witness them out in force, knowing that they’d been infiltrated and couldn’t be trusted.

She slowed to a crawl, scanning the troops through the chain-link fence.

“What is it?” Taggart asked.

She spotted Maynard among his people. He was easy to pick out, as he was a tall, blond man dressed like an elf. “Just making sure it was actually Maynard that called Dmitri and we weren’t walking into a trap.”

She pulled into the Sandcastle parking lot and parked as far as she could from the troop carriers. The Pittsburgh Coroner’s van sat tucked between the military vehicles, indicating that the EIA had found the males that she’d shot.

One of the things that annoyed expansionists the most about Maynard was he always adopted elfin fashion when Viceroy Windwolf was in Pittsburgh. They thought he should wear a business suit or his dress uniform. Despite the elegant clothes, there was no missing the military stamp on him. His long blond hair might be pulled back into a ponytail by a Wind Clan blue ribbon, but he stood at parade rest.

Because Maynard had asked for Hal, they’d gone in the PB&G production truck. Jane flipped on the remote recording as they locked up the truck. Taggart was carrying PB&G’s ancient camera; Jane’s truck couldn’t handle the CBM’s newer cameras. Jane had her pistol in its kidney holster, but she really didn’t want to have to shoot her way out of any mess. She carried the light reflector as a prop. With Hal in the lead, they all walked across the cracked and weed-choked parking lot to where Maynard waited.

Hal’s superpower was his charisma; like most TV personalities, he refined it to megawatt power to reach through the camera and charm the audience no matter where they were. Face to face, it was kind of like being run over by a train. “Director Maynard!” Hal extended his hand, smiling broadly, beaming at full power. “Hal Rogers of Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden. Glad to meet you.”

Maynard did a slight double take as he shook Hal’s hand. Hal had broken his nose just days before and still had the raccoon mask of two black eyes.

“We were filming a segment on strangle vines.” Hal gingerly touched his nose and theatrically winced in pain. “Got a little too close.”

“I see,” Maynard said.

“My studio manager said that you wanted to see me and my crew.” Hal waved to take in Jane and the others to explain the extra bodies. His tone was mildly curious and unconcerned. We’ve done nothing wrong.

“I want you to tell me what happened here,” Maynard said.

Hal managed to appear only mildly confused while Jane’s heart leapt up her throat. “And I could do this—why?”

“You do have a doctorate in biology, do you not?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do,” Hal beamed with pride. “UC-Davis.” Jane couldn’t tell if the confusion that followed was faked or not. “I don’t understand what that has to do with anything.”

“For reasons I have never understood, the University of Pittsburgh chooses to take its break in the middle of summer instead of the dead of winter.”

“Horace Mann,” Nigel stated. The r of “Horace” was trilled by his Scottish accent.

“What?” Maynard and Jane both asked.

“Horace Mann is why the American schools follow the European standards,” Nigel stated. “In 1843, he toured the schools of Europe and returned to the states to publish a paper on his findings. It was very influential and set many standards that the schools of America follow to this day.”

Jane had no idea why Nigel might know this odd tidbit of information, but she really wished he’d kept his mouth shut as Maynard was now staring at Nigel and Taggart with fierce concentration.

After a minute, Maynard tilted his head slightly and pointed at the naturalist. “You’re Nigel Reid, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am.” Nigel smiled, turning on his hosting superpowers. “Glad to meet you, Director.”

Maynard pointed at Taggart. “And you’re Keaweaheulu Taggart.”

Taggart’s eyebrows went up with surprise. Probably not very many people tried to pronounce his first name and succeeded. “Yes.”

“Nigel is here to film a new series for NBC,” Hal explained. “We’re showing them the ropes.”

“Very gracious of them.” Nigel didn’t sound at all like a man that had nearly been eaten by a dinosaur only twenty-four hours earlier. Only a slight tightness around his eyes gave away the fact he was in pain from his rough handling. “Wonderful people. It’s only been five days and already we’ve seen amazing things.”

Taggart tried for unconcerned and failed. He covered by bringing up the camera to pan over the wreckage of Sandcastle. By the looks of it, the monster must have chased the oni all over the water park as a path of destruction crossed and re-crossed the midway.

Maynard eyed them with surprise. He took out a mini tablet computer and checked something. “Forgiveness, the last few days have been exceedingly…hectic. Yes, my people have Reid and Taggart entering at Shutdown. Good. Good. As I was saying, the University of Pittsburgh is on summer break and I’m scrambling for biology experts. I have something to show you.”

He led them past the coroner’s van to a line of dead bodies stretched out on the ground. The first three had each taken a bullet to the head. They had the gravitational strength of black holes on Jane’s focus. She’d killed these people. All three were big brutish-looking males, but so had been her father. They wore face paint to look fiercer. What kind of souls had the paint hidden? Did they leave behind wives and children?

Taggart put a hand to her shoulder to steady her. She realized that he was telling Maynard that he was a war correspondent and used to dead bodies laid out in a row, but that Jane had never experienced it before.

“I’m afraid it’s going to become a common sight before this comes to an end,” Maynard said.

“They have horns.” Hal seemed unaffected by the dead. Considering his degrees, he probably had experience dissecting human bodies. “If elves were the basis of our fae legends, I wonder if the oni are our demons.”

“The Japanese use the word ‘oni’ to denote ‘ogre’ or ‘demon,’ depending on the translation,” Nigel said.

Pittsburgh’s coroner, Tim Covington, and his staff noticed the camera on Taggart’s shoulder first, blazoned with PB&G’s logo. All activity ground to a halt as they were starstruck by Hal’s presence. There was a moment of boyish silliness as Hal clowned with the men and women wearing rubber gloves and face masks. Jane was happy that it took all attention off her and gave her a chance to recover her balance.

After five minutes, though, she flicked her hand across her throat and Hal used his superpowers to gracefully turn the humans back to work with “I should let you get back to wrapping this all up.”

“My own experts will deal with the gunshot victims.” Maynard indicated the coroner’s staff who were putting the oni that Jane had killed into body bags. “This is why I called you in.” He crossed to a second line of bodies—or, more correctly, random body parts. He pointed down at the upper torso of a male. The body was torn in two, exposing the bottom of the ribcage. The lungs and heart had gone with lower half—most likely down the gullet of the river monster.

“Something went through this area last night. Judging by the bite marks, it’s huge.” Maynard walked forward, pointing to other half-eaten bodies. “And hungry, or maybe travels in a pack. And there’s this.” He stooped to indicate a feathery-looking vinelike pattern marking the chests, arms and legs of the various dead. “Covington says that this is indicative of lightning strikes. Only it didn’t storm last night and there’s no power lines down in the area.”

Jane was counting the dead. Boo had told them that there were fourteen oni guarding over her and Joey. Jane had shot three. If the river monster had killed the rest, then there were no witnesses to their rescue mission. The bits and pieces gathered together, though, seemed too few. Had they escaped or were they eaten whole?

“The elves can throw lightning,” Hal said. “Are you sure that one of them wasn’t the cause of these burns?”

“Only Windwolf can do that and he was with me last night.” Maynard pointed toward the river. “There are tracks of something large.”

“We had asked viewers to phone in sightings of monsters so we could film them.” Jane worked on their alibi as Hal and Nigel examined the tracks. “We were in the South Hills yesterday filming a saurus that Grandma Gertie e-mailed in. It nearly ate Nigel. One of our tips was a sighting of a large river monster. We thought we spotted it from the Fort Pitt Bridge the day after Startup, but when we searched for it the next morning, we couldn’t find any trace of it.”

Maynard gave her a hard look. “You didn’t think to mention this to anyone?”

“Actually we asked both your river patrols and the police to keep an eye out for it.”

He consulted his tablet again and sighed. “Forgiveness. I see that you did. What did you see?”

“Not much,” Jane lied and prayed that the man never saw their footage. “When we saw this thing, we didn’t realize it could leave the river. That’s why we went after the saurus; a dinosaur in the suburbs seemed more dangerous than something confined to the water. This is a game changer; we need to find this thing and stop it.”

And Jane meant every word of it. Because of the jumpfish, no one strayed too close to the riverbank. Downriver of Sandcastle, though, there were thousands of people living just outside of jumpfish range of the water. It was one thing to have this thing rampaging through an abandoned water park in one of the emptiest neighborhoods in Pittsburgh. It was quite another if it came ashore on the North Side or downtown.

With the Pittsburgh Police spread thin and the EIA busy trying to find the kidnapped princess while cleaning house of oni moles, there was no one else able to deal with such a large, dangerous monster.

“We’ll take care of this,” Jane said.

“You sure?” Maynard asked.

“We’ve been solving problems like this for years.” Hal could truthfully claim it, too. “We can handle this.”

Maynard raised his hand to his ear and listened to some report over an earpiece. His eyes narrowed and he glanced toward the parking lot. A lone hoverbike was coming at breakneck speed.

Jane didn’t realize she’d growled with anger until Taggart asked quietly, “Who is that?”

“Wicked Witch of the West on her broom stick,” Hal said.

Jane backhanded Hal with her free hand. “Chloe Polanski.” Maynard knew PB&G’s reputation, but he’d called Dmitri for Hal’s help. He’d only recognized the men who appeared in front of the camera, not Jane who normally stayed behind it. Nor had she introduced herself—she rarely did. Thus he probably didn’t know her father had been a sniper. The three perfect headshots meant nothing to him. Chloe, though, had covered Boo’s kidnapping and gotten to know Jane’s family well. If she saw the bodies…

Jane had to be sure that Chloe was too preoccupied to notice until the oni were safely body-bagged. “Do you mind if we film a public announcement warning people to stay away from the river and to report anything unusual they see?” Jane shifted so that her back was to the dead oni.

Maynard nodded after moment of thought. “Yes, that would probably be a good course of action.”

Jane waved Taggart to aim the camera at Maynard and lifted the reflector. “Hal…”

“Raccoon boy.” Hal pointed at his face.

There wasn’t time for makeup. “Nigel. Highlight the basics: unknown beast wreaks havoc at Sandcastle, multiple dead, size of beast estimated to be quite large, able to move both in the water and out. People are to stay away from the river and report any sightings. Go!”

Nigel hit his mark beside Maynard, squared off with the Director, set his face on “serious” and the moment that Taggart indicated he was rolling, launched into commentary. “This is Nigel Reid, coming to you from Sandcastle Waterpark for NBC. I’m here with Director Maynard of the EIA.”

Nigel glossed quickly over the oni, suggesting only that those dead were killed by the monster. Taggart gave Jane a questioning glance but any discussion would be picked up by the camera’s microphone. Silence was ingrained into the cameraman.

Jane watched out the corner of her eye as Chloe dismounted her hoverbike. Take the bait. Take the bait.

“Director, obviously this is a massive creature.” Nigel managed to guide the director even farther from the coroner’s van by indicating the tracks leading down to the river. “The footprints are nearly two feet wide. We can see the wide, smooth drag mark that is classic for crocodile. This creature appears to be long and low to the ground.”

Maynard took out his tablet and started to take notes. “What else can you tell me about this creature?”

Everything.

Nigel continued on as if they hadn’t actually seen the monster in question. “The largest known crocodile is the saltwater crocodile which can reach up to twenty-two feet and weighs up to four thousand, four hundred pounds. They are aggressive hunters and are considered very dangerous to humans in areas where they are found. The creature that attacked Sandcastle is easily twice the size of the largest known crocodile.”

“Twice?” Maynard echoed with dismay.

“Yes, that’s what these tracks indicate.” Nigel pointed to the large footprints in the dirt. “We’re looking for an animal that is over forty feet in length. It’s most likely a very strong swimmer and able to leave the water at any low point in the river and walk inland for—well—until it decides to turn around.”

Chloe kept coming, laser-targeted on Maynard. She walked past Tim Covington without even glancing at him.

“And the electricity burns?” Maynard checked on Chloe’s progress. He kept his face expressionless but clearly he didn’t like the woman any more than Jane did.

“I would have to say that this creature must be electrogenic, or capable of generating an electric field. Fish that are electrogenic have an electric organ, which is made up of modified nerve or muscle tissue. These flat, disklike cells number in the thousands and they’re stacked, each one of them producing 0.15 volts. So in essence, they’re like little batteries, carrying a charge from the exchange of positive sodium and potassium ions within the animal’s body. The cells individually generate a very small amount but this is multiplied by thousands of cells. A six-foot electric eel can generate six hundred volts; this is comparable to the third rail of a mass transit system.”

“So the Sandcastle monster could be seven times more powerful?”

“Yes, it could be. It’s obviously generating not only more voltage but also more amps, which makes it quite deadly. By the entry burns on these bodies, the electricity appears to be arcing through the air to its victims, much like a bolt of lightning.”

Chloe might have arrived on a hoverbike wearing a helmet, but not a hair of her blond bob was out of place. Jane had no idea how she managed it; the only reason Jane kept her long hair in a ponytail was otherwise it looked like a rat’s nest by the end of the day.

Chloe surprised Jane by waiting until Nigel paused before she started to talk. “What are you idiots doing here?”

“Taping a show.” Jane tried for the intelligence level that Chloe assigned them. Don’t mind us, we’re not running around wiping out enemy camps.

“This is not a backyard or garden.” Chloe waved toward the hole that Hal had blasted into the back of the one building during their last visit. “And someone already beat you to blowing this place up.”

“Giant man-eating fish is what we do.” Jane ignored the bit about blowing things up. Behind Chloe, Covington was zipping up the first body bag. Two more to go. “We’re filming this segment to air during the news. We need to warn viewers to keep on the lookout for the creature.”

“You’re going to stir up mass hysteria when you don’t even know what caused this?” Chloe sneered. “All you have is a set of tracks…”

“And some well-chewed bodies,” Hal muttered in Jane’s shadow. She suspected that the woman frightened Hal by her sheer ruthlessness.

“Only an idiot would believe you could know what type of animal it is from its tracks.”

“My grandfather was a tracker, Ms. Polanski,” Maynard stated quietly. “He could tell everything about an animal—how big it was, how healthy it was, how long ago it had passed through the area and at what speed—just by its tracks.”

Behind Chloe, Covington zipped up the second bag.

“The police and EIA are spread thin still looking for Tinker domi.” Jane shifted to the side to keep the coroner’s activity out of Chloe’s peripheral vision. “Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden has agreed to track down and kill this creature, but we need help. One of your viewers gave us the original tip on this beast. He saw the creature in the river by the I-79 Bridge. Not only do we have to warn people about this thing, but we need all eyes looking for it.”

“And the credit will all go to WQED?” Chloe asked with scorn.

“Ms. Polanski, I require your cooperation in this.” Maynard stated it simply but it was fraught with implications. He was the god of Pittsburgh. Anyone that didn’t play by his rules found themselves exiled back to Earth. “I want this thing dead.”

Chloe gave him a cold, annoyed stare but then looked away with a slight huff of frustration. Thankfully she glanced not toward the last oni dead by bullet but at the hole that Hal had blown through the wall. “Fine. I want an exclusive interview.”

Jane relaxed slightly as Covington zipped up the last body bag for the headshot victims. All the evidence of their involvement was now covered up. Only the half-eaten bodies remained.

Maynard glanced at his watch. “You have five minutes.”

Chloe tapped her eyepiece. “This is Chloe Polanski with Director Maynard at Sandcastle Water Park.” She glanced down at one of the bodies. All that were on display were the monster-dismembered ones. “This appears to be an oni encampment hidden here at Sandcastle. How many warriors did you find here?”

Yes, how many?

Maynard blocked them both. “We haven’t matched up all the body pieces yet to come to an exact number yet. We will be issuing an official report later.”

“Were they all oni?” Chloe asked. When Maynard frowned slightly at the question, she went into more detail. “Were there any humans or elves…or tengu?”

Jane’s heart flipped in her chest. They had fled the scene so quickly that they had no chance to scrub away any sign of Joey and Boo.

“There was no sign that Tinker domi was held here.” Maynard leapt to a different but more obvious end of the questioning. “Tengu” was only linked to “Tinker’s kidnapper” for Maynard and not to “helpless children.”

Chloe wasn’t easily deferred. “So no signs of a prisoner possibly killed along with the oni? Is it possible that anyone being held captive—like Tinker—was eaten by this thing?”

“Tinker domi,” Maynard corrected her firmly. “The elves will not tolerate anyone being so informal with her title.”

Chloe flicked away the comment with her perfectly manicured fingers. “Yes or no?”

“There is no sign that Tinker domi was held here,” Maynard repeated coldly.

Chloe pressed her lips together into a tight, unhappy line but otherwise didn’t let her frustration show. She was being amazingly restrained but this was Maynard, not some poor grieving family who had lost their baby.

The oni in body bags were being loaded into the coroner’s van. Jane controlled a deep sigh of relief.

“Did you take anyone prisoner?” Chloe asked. “Oni or otherwise?”

“No.” Maynard wouldn’t lie about it. Probably. He had a reputation to uphold with the elves. That he would not tell a lie was part of his legend.

“So all you will discuss is this mythical beast?” Chloe asked.

“This is an unexplored continent on Elfhome. Not even the elves know what lives in the rivers.” He glanced at his watch again. “Any other question before you let your viewers know about this new creature?”

Chloe glanced around and eyed the body bags. Jane held her breath.

“I think we should dig around and see if we can turn up some tissue samples to run DNA scans off of,” Nigel said into the silence. “See what this blighter is made of. Surely there’s a lab somewhere in town that can do a rush job for us.”

“Maybe,” Hal said. “Or the elves could magic us something. Bibby-bobby-boo.”

Jane punched Hal in the gut for saying her sister’s name.

Chloe whipped around to stare at them. “What?”

“Nothing,” Hal whimpered.

Nigel continued as if Hal hadn’t slipped. “We can’t assume that this is a solitary creature. Depending on the species of crocodile, they lay anywhere from seven to nearly a hundred eggs. Electric eels can have up to three thousand young hatch from one clutch of eggs. Really it’s a matter of physiology. It would be helpful if we could get some DNA and see which species this monster is most closely related to. Scans would let us know what we’re dealing with.”

Chloe laughed. “Don’t you think we would notice three thousand giant electric crocodiles swimming around the Mon?”

“The hatchlings could be wee things compared to their mother.” Nigel measured out something only inches across. “In the water, if they swim in school, they’d be like piranha. The question is, how quickly can they walk on land?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Chloe tapped her eyepiece. “Reporting one monster is fine—certainly there’s undeniable evidence that something big went through here—theorizing a swarm of tiny man-eating fish walking around on land is too much.”

Jane hated that she secretly agreed with Chloe, at least at a gut level. Pittsburghers had enough on their plate being caught between warring nonhuman forces and their main ally, the EIA, filled with traitors.

“Just make sure you thoroughly warn your viewers about the adult creature,” Maynard ordered. “If anyone is harmed because you’re negligent, I’ll have you escorted back to Earth on the next Shutdown.”

Chloe huffed but nodded her understanding.

Maynard pointed at Jane. He’d figured out who actually was in charge. “Do whatever you need to do to kill this thing.”

Jane vetoed using Nigel’s whistle to call the monster to Sandcastle while the EIA were there. She didn’t want to risk the lives of all the men if they lost control of the situation. (Actually the idea that they would have any control with so little planning was laughable, so collateral damage was almost guaranteed.) She wanted a foolproof plan and an empty playing field—and a cannon—before facing the monster again.

She owned a chain-fed auto-cannon—well, technically Bertha belonged to her entire family—but waving it under the EIA’s nose would get her locked up faster than shooting oni.

Much as she wanted to gather up her crew and flee, they still should try to erase any evidence that they left behind.

Maynard refused to allow them to poke around in the water park’s boardwalk restaurants where Boo and Joey had been held. He stated firmly that if the buildings collapsed on them, he didn’t want to waste time digging them back out. His men were already cautiously searching the restaurants for clues to where the oni were holding Tinker. Jane could only hope that her team hadn’t left anything behind that would link them to the attack on the encampment.

It left them with only the camo-net-covered swimming pools to film while discreetly collecting gun casings. The Mon-tsunami wave pool was the closest to the tower where she’d covered their retreat. The oni had created a grating of chicken wire to cover it completely. The water was dark and smelled of river but wasn’t stagnating. The oni were aerating the pool to keep alive whatever lived in it.

“What do you think they have in here?” Hal pulled out his extendable grab stick and poked at the wire. “Jumpfish?”

Jane caught Hal by the collar and hauled him away from the edge. A second later a dozen bodies plastered themselves to the screen covering, tentacles gripping the wire, sharp beaks attempting to find an opening in the grid.

“What the hell?” Jane breathed in surprise. “Are those water fairies?”

“Not quite,” Hal stated calmly. “They seem to be a larger, more aggressive version than any we’ve seen.”

Taggart panned the camera over the pool and then focused on the far end. The oni had dug a ditch that led toward the Monongahela. “I think they planned to release these into the river.”

“Why the hell would they do that?” Jane growled in anger. Water fairies were annoying but they were fairly timid.

“To drive humans out of Pittsburgh,” Nigel said. “The oni have been planning this war for years. The fewer humans in the city to side with the elves, the better. Monsters in the river. Monsters in the woods. Who would want to stay?”

“Those of us who were born here.” Jane looked around. “We’re not leaving here until everything in these pools are dead. We are not letting these things get into the river.”

Nigel nodded reluctantly. “After seeing what the oni did with your sister, there’s no telling what they might have done to these to make the water fairies more deadly. We can’t let them out into the wild. If nothing else, they’d probably replace the original species.”

“How do we do this?” Jane asked.

“Dynamite,” Hal suggested.

“We’re not going to start blowing things up with the EIA still here,” Jane whispered fiercely.

Hal spread his hands. “If they watch the show, they know that’s how we handle a lot of things.”

Taggart snorted with what sounded suspiciously like barely muffled laughter.

Jane pointed a finger at him. “This is not funny.” She switched targets to Hal. “At this time, I don’t want to go reminding the EIA of that.”

“When we were…” Nigel caught himself and dropped his voice to a whisper. “When we were here yesterday, I noticed that there were several carbon dioxide canisters for the drink fountains still sitting about. If we dispense the gas into pool, the water fairies will suffocate. It would be mostly painless, and very quiet.”

“Quiet is good.” She pointed up at the tower behind them. “Let’s go up, do an aerial shot of the park, and pick up casings. Then we’ll see what’s in the other pools.”

The rest of the day was surreal. The Mushroom Pool with the giant bright-colored sprinklers had river shark pups. The Tad Pool had baby jumpfish that flung themselves out of the wading pool like evil rain. Wet Willie’s Water Works was filled with large red, jellylike orbs the size of apples.

“What are those?” Jane asked the naturalists.

“Roe?” Nigel guessed.

“Yes, I think they are eggs.” Hal plucked one out of the pool with his grab stick. “Wonder if they taste like caviar.”

Jane smacked him in the back of the head before he sample it. “Don’t eat things when you don’t know what they are. It could be poisonous.”

“There’s thousands of them.” Taggart knelt to examine them closely with the camera.

“They’re extremely large,” Nigel said. “And freshly laid. The larvae are just developing. After about three days you normally can make out the eyes and the beginnings of the spinal cord.”

“There’s no camouflage netting over this pool.” Hal pointed to the set of monster tracks that led up to the edge of the concrete surrounding the shallow wading pool. “I think the monster laid these last night.”

Nigel eyed the evidence and then nodded. “It was returning to the place it was spawned.”

Jane laughed. The men looked at her with confused surprise. “Karma’s a bitch,” she explained. “It literally bit the oni in the ass. We couldn’t have called the monster here if it wasn’t already returning.”

“If it spawned here, it’s not a natural creature.” Nigel’s burr thickened with his anger. “It’s clearly a beast of war. We cannot let these hatch either. If we drain the water out of this pool and leave off the cover, the heat will kill them.”

And a few gallons of gasoline, just be sure. Jane could tell that it tore at Nigel to destroy life. Hal was much more pragmatic about it. He knew that humans rarely left the tiny pocket of Earth ecosystem that Pittsburgh represented. Beyond the Rim, there were no Earthborn species. They couldn’t compete with their magic-reinforced cousins. If the humans didn’t aggressively protect their ground, the flora and fauna of Elfhome would wipe them from the face of the planet.

“Let’s make sure we document all this before we start.”

The saurus had battered Nigel the day before. It hadn’t done serious damage, but under his clothes, he sported massive bruises and shallow claw marks. The pain was starting to show as they set up to film the roe. The EIA crews were still carefully searching the rubble, looking for the viceroy’s bride. It was a weird kind of torture, wanting them to find something, afraid that they would find the wrong thing.

“This is a nursery of monsters,” Nigel started with his indignant anger carefully controlled. “River shark. Jumpfish. These are large dangerous predators—known man-eaters—in a city fronted on all sides by water. Thirty percent of Pittsburgh lives within a thousand feet of a river. Pittsburghers have spent years trying to reduce the population of river sharks and jumpfish. As we saw the other day, the number of these predators in this area is staggering. The only logical explanation for there to be so many river sharks and jumpfish is that the oni have been restocking them from this hatchery.”

He gestured toward the other pools. “The water fairies here have obviously been genetically engineered into something larger, more aggressive, and perhaps more poisonous. In this pool, there are several hundred eggs, just like this one.” Nigel hefted up the egg held in Hal’s grab stick. “Consider that a salmon can reach to nearly five feet in length and its roe is smaller a pea. Imagine the size of the creature that hatches out of this egg. Such a monster killed and ate an unknown number of oni before laying these eggs. The oni planned to unleash thousands of these massive predators onto an unsuspecting city, unprepared for the onslaught. It represents bio-terrorism at a horrific level.”

In the end, she convinced the men to set the roe on fire using the gasoline in the PB&G spare gas can.

If only all her problems were as easy to solve.

Brandy showed up in a Pittsburgh police squad car as they were stowing their gear. Brandy slammed her door and came storming across the parking lot like the goddess of justice.

Jane figured that she’d better beat Brandy to the punch. “Why did you call Alton and tell him to sit on me? You know how my little brothers are. I had to deal with all five of them last night. They wanted to know why you wanted me sat on. You know if I’d told them, they would have gotten their guns and come here! Do you know what kind of mess that would have been?”

“You didn’t do this?” Brandy pointed toward the flaming egg pool.

“I have a temper but I don’t tear people in half and eat them.” Jane shoved the reflector into the production truck. “The oni were using Sandcastle to breed things like river sharks, and releasing them into the Mon. We think one of their monsters turned on them. Director Maynard called us in as consultants.”

“Oh.” Brandy deflated at the news. And then deflated a little more. “Oh. I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry about what?”

“Your sister! Boo! You thought she might be here.”

Yes, Jane, you should be more upset. Anger was easier than pretending to be disappointed. “No! She’s not here!” Jane remembered then that the EIA was still searching the rubble for clues to Tinker’s location. “They’re checking to see if any survivors are trapped inside the buildings. Any news about Tinker?”

“Nothing good. The viceroy’s ‘blade brother’ disappeared last night.”

“His what?”

Brandy spread her hands to indicate ignorance. “It means adopted brother or foster brother or something like that. The kid is the youngest elf in Pittsburgh; from what I can tell they consider him not much older than your baby brother Guy. He’d been at the hospice; they were testing him to see if he’d been drugged or had a spell cast on him or something. That part really isn’t clear; something about seeing things that weren’t real. What’s clear is he was forcibly taken.”

Jane cursed. Losing Boo had torn her heart out. If Guy had vanished too, it would have killed her. She couldn’t even imagine what Windwolf was going through. The damnable thing is that the humans were reporting on the viceroy’s movements. The oni could easily be moving Tinker from camp to camp, staying one step ahead of the elves.

Jane breathed in deep as she realized that Boo might know where all those camps might be.

Unfortunately Brandy noticed. “What?”

Jane stared at Brandy, fighting to keep dismay off her face. What the hell do I tell her? Jane caught sight of Taggart pretending not to be listening into the conversation. A lie spilled out, seeded in the truth. “My mom has this crazy idea,” she turned slightly and dropped to a whisper. “She thinks that I’m interested in Taggart. So she wants to do a big family dinner tonight and I’d forgotten until just this moment. It’s a ‘welcome to Pittsburgh’ dinner that is really a thinly disguised ‘welcome to the family’ thing.”

The family dinner wasn’t a lie. Her family was going to be gathering at Hyeholde, trying to make up for lost time and sharing the responsibility of protecting Boo and Joey. Jane had to go back to her place to get the cannon. If her brothers found out about the river monster, they’d want to help. The last thing Jane wanted was to have to ride herd on Hal and her brothers at the same time. Since her family would be at Hyeholde when they returned, they were going to have to wait until full dark to unpack the cannon.

Brandy glanced toward Taggart. “Oh, girl, if you don’t want to tap that, let me know.”

Jane opened her mouth and didn’t know what to say except, “Hey!”

“So your mother’s idea isn’t so crazy after all?” Brandy laughed and headed back to her car. “Call me! Let me know how things work out!”

One of PB&G’s early shows dealt with a steel spinner nest at a farm in the South Hills. The appreciative farmer gave Jane two dozen newly hatched banty chicks. Jane had been caught off guard by the gift and simply stuck them in the back of the production truck while she dealt with Brian Scroggins, the fire marshall. (It takes a flamethrower to safely clean out a nest of the giant spiders. Brian eventually agreed with Jane that the farmer should have warned PB&G that he used the remote shed to store wood pallets, used engine oil, and nearly a hundred half-empty cans of spray paint. The damn aerosol cans went off like bottle rockets for an hour.)

By the time she remembered the chicks, they’d imprinted on Chesty. The big elfhound was doing the best he could, but clearly the golf-ball-sized chicks threw him into confusion as they attempted to tuck themselves under their “mother.”

Cuddling wasn’t something her family did. Most acquaintances knew that the Kryskills weren’t the touchy-feely types and kept out of striking range. Joey was as determined as the chicks to tuck himself up against his new family. Every time Joey hopped up onto the lap of one of her brothers, they went wide-eyed with surprise. They understood that Boo would see them brushing Joey off as rejecting her. They knew too that Joey desperately wanted the comfort of knowing he was loved and protected as their “little brother.” It helped that he was a sweet little boy. So her brothers soldiered on despite being clueless how to “mother” the little boy. It would be comical if it weren’t so sad. Alton was doing the best, but then he’d ended up with the chicks too.

Yesterday had been a very impromptu meal of spaghetti heavily supplemented with vegetables raided out of her garden. Today her family came prepared to cook, because that was what Kryskills did to celebrate.

Jane’s mother made her famous fried chicken (but only after Boo and Joey gave her puzzled looks and asked “Chicken is yummy, why wouldn’t we eat it?”). Geoffrey grilled corn on the cob while mixing up jalapeno butter. Marc made baby red potato salad with blue cheese and bacon. Guy tossed a salad of mixed greens and fresh-picked tomatoes with strawberry vinaigrette dressing. Duff made sauerkraut, sharp cheddar cheese and potato pierogies with caramelized onions. Alton used the blueberries that Boo and Joey helped pick for berry-and-cream-cheese turnovers dusted with confectioners’ sugar. In the spirit of “we’re all one big family,” the kids braided friendship bands with leather cord and red silk twine and tied them to everyone’s left wrist.

Jane answered all the “where do you keep” questions, washed pans as they were done being used, and kept Hal out from underfoot. Seriously, the man was like a three-year-old in the big kitchen, wanting to lick bowls and steal bacon. One would think he knew not to get close to her brothers while they wielded knives.

Nigel had the good sense to anchor down one of the barstools at the island. He asked quiet leading questions to keep the conversations going. Taggart used mad ninja-stealth to film the cooking. Their videos were to be Pittsburgh’s voice on Earth; her family’s pain had to be recorded and shared.

It reminded her of the viceroy standing grief-stricken by the river. The oni had kidnapped his bride. And Boo might know where she was being held.

On the pretense that she wanted help setting the great table, Jane got Boo alone in the main dining room. Last night they’d eaten in turns in the kitchen, as Jane’s everyday table only sat her mother and brothers comfortably. Jane’s family had moved on without Boo, unconsciously sizing their lives to six siblings, not seven. Luckily the addition of Joey, Hal, Nigel and Taggart helped keep it from being painfully obvious to Boo.

Jane unlocked the windows and rolled them up to air out the room. A summer thunderstorm was blowing in; the wind was picking up. It caught the sheers and made them dance in the gloaming. She would have to close the windows quickly if it started to rain. “You went blueberry picking with Alton?”

“Berry picking. Berry eating. Tree climbing.” Boo’s voice came from up high.

“It was so nice to go in any direction I wanted.” Boo stood on the railing of the second floor balcony that overlooked the main dining room, arms outstretched to feel the wind. “No one to stop me but me.”

“Like hell! Get down from there! What the hell do you think you’re doing up there?”

“I’ve always liked being high.” Boo walked barefoot quickly along the railing to the bannister, making Jane stutter with fear and anger. “I’m getting down!” And she came sliding down the bannister like she was six again.

Was it a tengu thing to be high? Was Boo afraid that being too much tengulike upset Jane? Well, it did. Jane didn’t want Boo to know it.

“You’re just like your brothers,” Jane focused back on the windows so Boo couldn’t see her face. “Trying to give me a heart attack with Kryskill craziness.”

Boo hugged her from the back, pressing her face against Jane’s shoulder blade. “It’s so hard to be stuck on the ground,” she whispered. “It’s like I’ve been buried alive.”

So it was a tengu thing. Cope with it, Jane, cope with it. Jane took a deep breath. “You need to set a good example for Joey. At least until we can get him back to his aunt and uncle.”

Boo whimpered softly. “We can’t. They’re dead. The oni killed them.”

Jane breathed out a curse. “I thought—the way he talks—”

“He doesn’t know. I haven’t told him. The oni wanted to capture the whole family. With just Joey, they could only make copies of him. If they’d gotten the entire family, they would have taken one or two apart to see how they were put together. I’ve seen Kajo do it with fish at the hatchery; shatter animals down and put them together differently. Make monsters.”

Boo trembled, her voice breaking. “But they killed all of Joey’s family. That’s why they made me tengu. With a copy, they had someone they could sh-sh-sh-shatter…”

“You’re safe!” Jane turned and gathered her into a hug. “I won’t let anyone hurt you. You’re safe!”

Only after the tears were dried, the table wiped free of dust, a trolley of the good dishes and silverware wheeled out and placed on the table did Jane remembered why she’d gotten her sister alone. By then the cooks were finishing up the food and Nigel was bandaging Hal.

Why had the oni taken Tinker? To shatter her down? Jane felt sick at the idea.

“Do you know where any oni camps are?” Jane asked quietly and at the farthest point from the kitchen she could get Boo.

“Not anymore. Danni made Kajo move all the camps because Pure Radiance came to the Westernlands. A deadly game of hide and seek, she called it. All the camps that I knew of were abandoned. The hatchery was the only one of Kajo’s that stayed in place. I don’t know if Lord Tomtom moved his; I never knew where they were in the first place. Kajo and Lord Tomtom never got along.”

Jane breathed out in disappointment. At least she didn’t have to decide what to do if Boo did know where Tinker was being held.

The food cooked, they sat down to eat. Hal tried to start before blessing and both Jane and her mother slapped him. It was a wonder he’d survived her family for so many years.

It was all good and happy until the last crumb of the blueberry turnovers. Family tradition said that the youngest three had to clear the dishes, generally because they’d been spared from having a cook a dish. Guy bussed the table with the ease of a trained waiter. Boo scrambled to keep up, wanting to help but without the years of experience. Joey carried a plate at a time into the kitchen with exaggerated care. Everyone else leaned back from the table and drank equal parts of fresh milk and strong Assam tea. (After years of being smacked, Hal stopped asking for coffee after meals. Nigel and Taggart seemed to relish the tea as much as her brothers.)

With deceptive calm, her mother lifted up her cup and said, “Mitsy Barker called me this afternoon. She said Nigel was on the noon news. Something about a giant river monster?”

The table went silent and her family all stared at Jane.

Telephone, telegraph, tell a Barker.

To be fair, Jane had to expect someone to tell her family after warning the entire city. She was really hoping, though, it would be after she killed it. She wanted it to be like rescuing Boo; the Kryskill family circus wouldn’t know what Jane was planning until after all the shooting was over.

Jane spread her hands. “We’re filming dangerous stuff that lives in the backyard like we always do. It’s kind of like a saurus that lives in the river. It’s not like river sharks because it doesn’t stay in the water. You could call it a jumpfish with legs.”

“You’re going after the namazu?” Boo cried with obvious horror.

Jane inwardly cringed. She’d forgotten that Boo probably knew exactly what they were hunting. Nor could she smack her baby sister to keep her quiet. She tried glaring at her instead.

“The what?” Alton asked.

“The namazu!” the two kids cried.

“The god fish!” Joey stood on his toes and held his arms wide as possible.

“It is a very big, crocodilelike fish thing!” Jane stated loudly to override the kids. “Hal and I have been dealing with shit like this for years.”

Which was a mistake as her brothers all turned to Hal. While Hal could host-dazzle Maynard, he was intimidated by her family. “It is a smidge larger than our typical fare.” He turned to her and saw her face. “I-I-I have all confidence that Jane can handle this. Given a big enough gun and a hunting stand and the monster call.”

Chaos erupted. Her brothers’ main focus started with “You’re taking Bertha?” After Boo informed the table that “It can throw lightning,” their concern forked to include the dangers of hunting the monster alone. (Her brothers did not count Hal because they’d helped teach him how to shoot. There was a reason Hal liked dynamite to solve problems.) Jane tried to squash the idea that the Kryskill Family Circus would join her on the filming. It was bad enough that they would be creating video evidence of the illegal firearms that her family owned; she didn’t need her brothers on film too.

Her mother’s loud whistle cut through the conversation.

Jane, her brothers and Hal snapped to standing attention. After a heartbeat of silence, Nigel and Taggart also stood up, looking slightly bewildered.

“I went and listened to the report myself,” her mother said calmly into her cup of tea. “I know how big you believe this thing to be. You will need Bertha but you’re not taking her out by yourself. She’s a family resource. You’ll need to mount her on a vehicle and brace the vehicle against recoil. You’ll need someone to drive that vehicle and someone who is a better shot than Hal as your backup.”

Her mother took a long sip of tea; chaos returned. Jane said nothing. There would be no arguing with her mother. Besides, she was completely right. They’d need to take the Chased by Monsters production truck with Taggart filming. Hal was as good a driver as he was at shooting, which was to say only adequate. Nigel was still moving gingerly from being almost eaten by the saurus just the day before and was unfamiliar with the area. Someone from her family would have to drive the gun platform.

Her brothers were all stating loudly why they should be the ones to accompany Jane. Alton was playing the “oldest son” angle. Geoffrey was the most mechanically minded, thus able to deal with any problems with the chain-fed cannon. Marc stated that he was a cop, and thus the one able to get her around police detection. He was also the best driver among them. (Also his decommissioned EIA Humvee was already modified to be a gun platform. It was the most logical vehicle to use.) Duff was the best shot of her brothers (though Jane beat him three out of five shoot-offs.) Guy pointed out that as a minor, if they did get caught, he’d get into the least amount of trouble; besides, he just had summer school while everyone else worked.

Her mother sipped and listened, her eyes narrowing slightly as she considered the arguments. As she lowered her cup, the Kryskill boys all went silent. Her empty teacup chimed loudly onto the china saucer. “Marc and Geoffrey, you will back up your sister.” She raised her voice over the wordless outcry from the other three brothers. “Alton, you’ll be responsible for the safety of Boo and Joey. Duff, since you’ll be the only one at the bakery tomorrow morning, you’ll be the communication hub. Set up code words before you leave tonight. All calls are to go to Duff to coordinate activities and use the code words he provides. Guy, you can stay one hour and then head home and play the stereo loud enough to make your ears bleed.”

“What?” Guy cried.

Their mom clarified. “Stick to your usual Sunday schedule.” Their mother checked her phone and stood. “Tonight is bingo night at the fire hall. I’ll have to hurry or people will notice that I came in late. The oni have to consider the possibility that Boo and Joey escaped in the chaos last night. The most reasonable thing for Boo to do is to contact her family. The oni might be watching us to see if there’s any change in our schedules that would indicate that she’s returned. Last night we had the excuse that Jane had guests to feed, one of which had been attacked by a saurus. Tonight we have to return to our regular routines. Go do what you normally do. Not a word to anyone, not even your cousins. Is that understood?”

“Yes, ma’am!” the Kryskill’s siblings answered.

Guy gave Joey a nudge and the little boy cried out, “Yes, ma’am!”

“Keep your eyes open, your heads down, and your guns close,” their mother said.

“Yes, ma’am!”

“Make your father proud.” Their mother flicked her hand to indicate that they were free to start. “Dismissed.”

“Who or what is Bertha?” Taggart asked quietly after her mother had kissed and hugged everyone including him and Nigel goodbye. (Normally her mother didn’t take to strangers so quickly but they had returned Boo to her family. She didn’t usually kiss or hug either, but she wanted an excuse to linger on Boo, cuddle Joey again, and size up Taggart for son-in-law material.)

Jane’s brothers were starting their traditional dishwashing activities, which meant the dishes and kitchen would be spotless and her brothers would be sopping wet. (In the winter, this usually required a traditional clothes-washing activity afterwards.) Jane had pulled Taggart aside to keep his camera from being damaged when the water volleys started.

“Do you know what a M242 is?” Jane asked. Most people wouldn’t but he was a war correspondent.

Taggart stared at her. Obviously he knew the gun. “Why does your family have a chain-fed auto-cannon?”

“I’ll take you to the museum sometime to see the wyvern they have mounted. It could carry off the saurus we killed the other day. Dragons are supposed to be bigger. My dad didn’t like surprises. Bertha was his answer for any surprises that cropped up.”

“And we do have a big surprise to deal with,” Hal murmured, as he brushed between them, clearing a path for Joey who was still carrying dishes from the dining room to the kitchen. Hal was surprisingly good with kids, having done a year of children’s science programming. (Apparently he focused too much on blowing things up and setting things on fire for the comfort of PBS lawyers.) Hal added in “Mine” before disappearing into the kitchen.

“Yes.” Jane didn’t like the idea of pulling Bertha out of her hiding place but she wanted something that would definitely kill the high-voltage, massive jawed beast before it had a chance to close on her team.

Taggart glanced after Hal, eyes narrowing slightly. He caught Jane by the arm and pulled her into the quiet of the entry hall.

She guessed what he wanted. “No, I don’t know where my dad got Bertha. It was before Geoffrey was born…”

“No, that’s not what I wanted to know,” Taggart said quietly. “Are you in love with Hal?”

“What?” Jane cried. “No!”

“He’s in love with you.”

She wondered why Taggart would think that and then remembered the video from Hal’s “phone call” from Mercy Hospital where he thanked her profusely. At the end Hal had stated that he loved Jane. “He was drugged. He gets loopy and says shit that he doesn’t mean.”

“Oh, he meant that. You can’t spend a day locked in the car with the man and not know that he’s afraid of losing you.”

“Afraid of losing his producer. I’ve been the only person that can work with him without getting maimed. That includes filming on Earth too; he once set a PA on fire.”

Taggart scrubbed at his face, laughing. “I almost pity the man. Look, I learned through several painful experiences, that when I start liking a woman, the first thing I need to find out is if she’s already in love with someone else. There’s nothing worse than falling head over heels for someone, and then have them go ‘I’m sorry but I’ve realized that he’s the love of my life.’ Losing something makes it suddenly clear that it’s very important to you. So, step one, clear the playing field. Quickly. While there’s still a chance to back out without the desire to go drown myself in a metric ton of whiskey.”

They stared at each other in silence a moment.

“Are you?” Taggart asked.

“Am I what?”

“In love with Hal?” Taggart cried.

“No!”

“Are you sure? Think about it.”

“Are you hitting on me?”

“Maybe.”

“It seems like a stupid way to go about it. Don’t you normally ask if the girl likes you first? Just because I’m not in love with Hal doesn’t mean I like you.”

He nodded slowly, hunching his shoulders. “Can you qualify ‘not like?’ Is that in ‘I’m not attracted to you’ or ‘I hate your guts’ or whatever?”

Jane blushed and looked away. “I didn’t say that I didn’t like you. It just seems like an ass-backwards way of going about things.”

“It’s just that I’m pressed for time,” he whispered. “We only have two-month visas.”

Her insides flipped weirdly at the idea and she realized what he meant about losing something making feelings clear. “Oh. Shit.”

He leaned close to her. “I have tried very hard just to like you, but I’ve failed completely. These last few days have been an utter free fall. No parachute. No safety net. With totally, hopelessly in love at the bottom.”

Her insides flipped again, but differently, all fluttery and weird. She wasn’t sure that she liked the feeling. “Sounds painful.”

“Potentially.” He leaned closer so that she could feel the heat of his body nearly touching hers. “You’re the most amazing woman I’ve ever met and I love you and I think this is going to kill me.”

She put her hands up to keep him from leaning closer. This was all too fast. She couldn’t wrap her mind around it enough to come up with anything intelligent to say or do. “What do you mean?”

He laughed bitterly. “It’s taken me years to get here and in a very short while, I’m going to have to leave, and I don’t think I’m going to be able to talk you into coming with me.”

“Like hell!” Jane stomped firmly on that idea.

“Yeah, I figured it was that way. Part of your appeal actually.”

“Really?”

“I’ve been to the most war-torn places on Earth. A lot of times people saw me as a way to escape. I like that you’re happy where you are and comfortable with who you are. That you change anything that you don’t like. You’re a very strong and capable person and I find that amazingly attractive.”

She blushed and looked down at their feet. Every guy she’d dated—mostly in high school before her brothers started to open carry—those were the reasons that guys ran away from her. They’d ask her out because all they knew was she was a tall leggy blonde that brooded quietly in the back row. Once they got to know her, they were scared of her. By her senior year, all the boys drawn to her build kept a safe distance. She’d gone stag to her prom with Brandy and three of their other intimidating female friends.

Taggart wore leather hiking boots. Good quality. Obviously not new but not so worn as to be scruffy, recently cleaned and polished. Stonewashed jeans. Rugged smartwatch. Dark linen shirt, top button undone to show off a dark curl of chest hair, and dog tags on a chain.

Her mother always said that you could learn a lot about a man by his choice of friends, how he treated strangers, and how well he took care of his equipment. With the exception of Hal, Jane hadn’t had much of a chance to apply that advice since high school. She’d known Taggart for five days. He’d been quiet almost to vanishing from her awareness. Often she knew where he was only by his wonderful scent and the heat of his body next to her. There was very little there to judge him by.

Just as quiet was his friendship with Nigel. The other man radiated gentle, warm charm, intelligence and boundless enthusiasm. Taggart rode protective herd on Nigel’s fearless curiosity just as she did with Hal. Nigel accepted it without questioning. They obviously trusted each other and respected each other’s judgment.

They’d risked their lives to save her little sister.

She raised her eyes to look Taggart in the face. He was actually very good-looking in that wild-man way. His black hair had a healthy shine despite needing a trim. His dark eyes look steadily into hers. His thick eyebrows gathered into a slightly worried look. His mouth could be considered very kissable.

“I—” She what? Love was not a word her family used lightly and she barely knew the man. Hell, she wasn’t sure she could even pronounce his first name. “I like you.” Oh, that sounded lame. “I think I more than just like you.” Okay, she was digging a hole here.

Relief flashed over his face, quickly followed by amusement.

“Don’t laugh at me.” She pointed a warning finger at him.

He rubbed his face to cover a grin. “I’m not laughing. I’m happy. It’s actually easier to know that you don’t lightly use the word ‘love.’ If you do use it, you mean it, in a very deep and meaningful way.”

If. Hard enough to decide how she felt without knowing that the clock was ticking on her answer.

Hell must have frozen over because the dishes were done without the normal water battle. This was her brothers focused on someone other than each other. Normally Jane would pity the fool who managed to get all the Kryskills’ attention but not this time. She needed her family acting as a unit.

They moved out into her barnlike garage that still smelled faintly of elk blood. While Geoffrey readied the block and tackle, Alton lifted up the floorboards to expose Bertha’s hiding place and Marc backed his decommissioned Humvee up to the doors. Jane powered up the Chased by Monsters production van. They might need to seriously edit the video but they should get it, just in case.

“Are you sure?” Taggart asked over his headpiece.

“From what I can tell from imported reality shows, Americans love heavily armed country folk.”

“Och!” Nigel cried as Alton pulled back the canvas covering and revealed the cannon. “You are seriously heavily armed.”

The gun’s barrel alone was over eight feet long. It fired bullets nearly an inch thick at a maximum rate of five hundred rounds per minute. Its effective firing range was nearly two miles. They didn’t have to worry about hitting the monster—what they had to worry about was missing and hitting something else.

“Oh, this is going to be glorious!” Hal cried.

“Forget it, Hal.” Jane logged into her work account to pull down the e-mails from viewers reporting monsters. “This thing is meant to take out armored vehicles and small ships. I’m not letting you strafe downtown by accident.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“You don’t even know what careful looks like.” Jane trusted that her brothers would be able to mount the gun to the Humvee and keep Hal from attempting to test fire it while she was busy. They might resort to tying Hal to a post, but that was fine with her.

Guy slumped into the chair beside her. He’d been doing teenage sullen since their mother declared he was to go home and act like nothing important had happened.

Jane pushed a map toward him. “We need a place that’s totally open, nothing to trap us in. It needs to be along the river and as far from any people as possible. We have to be able to open fire without worrying about stray bullets hitting a house half a mile away.”

Guy grunted, ignoring the map. “Do I really have to go home?”

Brandy’s news about Windwolf’s kidnapped blade brother flashed into Jane’s mind. She would give just about anything to get back Boo, but not Guy. “No.”

“What?” Guy cried. “Really? You’re kidding. Right? You’re not really serious—are you?”

“I don’t want you to go home. I have no idea what Mom was thinking. The oni need Joey to control his people. Without him, they risk losing control of all the tengu. Anyone with half a brain cell would think to go to Mom’s on the off chance that Boo wasn’t eaten by the monster. I don’t want you there all alone. You can stay here until Duff is ready to go.”

“I’m not…” Guy caught himself and ended with a low growl of anger.

“You’re not what?”

He glared at Jane until he realized who he was talking to. He glanced away and lowered his voice. “I’m not Boo. Ever since she disappeared, everyone keeps babying me as if I would vanish too. Duff would do something and it’d be ‘idiot’, and I do the same exact thing and it’d be ‘Oh, be careful! You could be hurt! Stop it. Come here. Be a good little boy.’ But no one would ever say what they really meant, which was ‘you’re next.’ I’m not. Never was.”

“They kidnapped the viceroy’s baby brother last night,” Jane snapped. It had to be tearing Windwolf’s heart out. “A sekasha. One of the holy, kick-ass SEALs of elves with magical shield spells tattooed on his arms, trained every day of his freaking life for a hundred years, armed to the teeth including a sword that will cut through just about anything. The oni went into a building filled with elves and took Windwolf’s brother right out of his bed. The oni are dangerous people and we just pushed them hard. They’re going to push back.”

“I’m not scared.”

“I’m not asking you to be scared, I’m asking you to be careful. That means not going out alone. Everyone should pair up as much as possible. And when you do go home, stop a block from the house, make sure you’ve got a bullet in the chamber, safety off, and go in with caution.”

He stopped looking sullen and nodded slowly. “Okay. Assume that the house has been breached.”

“Better safe than sorry.” She tapped the map. “Find me a kill zone.”

She was hoping for at least three e-mails from viewers so they could triangulate the direction the monster headed out of Sandcastle. Thousands of messages scrolled across her screen. She was going to need help to filter through the e-mails. Picking up her tablet, she headed into the garage to enlist the others.

The viewers didn’t just stick to reporting monster sightings. They had questions and they didn’t trust the answers that other sources were giving them. They trusted Hal, so they were turning to Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden for information.

They wanted to know more about the oni and the tengu that kidnapped Tinker. Those that had questions about the river monster wanted to know why Hal was dealing with it instead of the EIA and the police. Displaying a great lack of scientific understanding, several wanted someone (implying Hal, which only boggled Jane more) to contact the hyperphase gate in orbit and have it do a Shutdown so Earth forces could reinforce the EIA.

“Because it’s in another universe,” Jane growled at the tenth such e-mail. “The gate is in orbit around Earth! Different planet, people! How can you live in Pittsburgh and not know the basics? They teach this in grade school!”

“They’re not locals,” Hal said as if he’d been born in Pittsburgh. “They see the moon and it looks the same to them even though it has slightly different craters. The sun comes up and goes down in the same directions, and they lose sight that they’re not in the same universe. To them it’s the same moon, same sun, same stars.”

“The stars are totally different!” Jane cried. She only saw the stars of Earth once or twice a year but she could tell they were in different places. Then again, her father taught her how to find her way home at night, armed only with a knife.

“Most people can’t see the stars on Earth,” Nigel said. “There’s too much light pollution. The children don’t learn the constellations. They can’t tell the difference.”

Reason one thousand why Jane had no interest in moving to Earth. She glanced up to locate Taggart before realizing what she was doing. He stood beside the Hummer, recording her brothers lowering the cannon into place. Unlike Hal, he was as tall as her brothers, but wider in the shoulders, like he’d spent his youth swimming. The memory of him without his shirt flashed through her mind, followed quickly by curiosity of what he looked like without anything on.

Jane looked back down, blushing. Focus, Jane. We’ve got a monster to kill. “Assuming the…the…what are we going to call this river monster?”

“Nessie?” Hal used the name they had stuck on it for lack of another name, before they’d gotten a good look at it.

“Ach, that isnae Nessie.” Nigel’s Scottish had thickened noticeably. He held Alton’s flask; it was filled with her brother’s experiments in making Scotch. It was also proof that Jane was losing control of the situation. If she ever had control.

“Namazu,” Boo and Joey both stated firmly.

“Namazu is a legendary giant catfish, in Japanese myths,” Nigel explained, rolling his r as he lost his BBC accent and the Scottish took over. “Its thrashing is what causes earthquakes. The gods have pinned it under a massive boulder in an attempt to minimize the damage it can cause. The namazu is considered a metamorphic catfish; the accepted image of the creature does not match up to any real species. There are several species of catfish with an electric organ.”

“The monster’s barbels”—Hal put his hands to his mouth and twiddled his fingers—“which is what the whiskers are called, would indicate that the creature might be related to a catfish since there’s only a handful of fish that do have them.”

“Kajo named them namazu,” Boo said firmly. “He made them.”

“Made?” Nigel and Hal asked.

“Them?” Jane and her brothers cried.

“How many did he make?” Jane asked.

Boo shrank back from them. “I don’t know! I only saw him release the last one five years ago. And it wasn’t that big when he did.” She held up her hands and measured out something only about four feet long. “At least, Kajo said it was the last one, so it meant that there were others, right? He said it needed time to grow into something more impressive. Like me. He said that a few years might seem like a long time to me, but in a few decades, I’d start to see the world the way he saw it. That forever was like drifting on an endless sea, everything constantly changing and yet everything stays the same. But after all that, he made me tengu.”

Having admitted that she was no longer human, she curled into a small, sniffing ball.

Duff recovered first. He pulled Boo into his lap. “It’s okay, baby girl, it’s okay. No one is taking you away from us ever again. You’re our baby sister and we love you.”

Over Boo’s head, he gave Jane a look that said: We need to get her help.

Jane had no idea how to get her help and keep her safely hidden at the same time.

“The roe indicates that there’s at least two,” Nigel’s pointed out. “Normally a male catfish is the one that makes the nest and invites the female in. After she lays the eggs, he drives her out and guards the nest himself.”

Nigel took another swig from the flask and started to pass it on to Hal.

Jane intercepted the flask. For this planning stage, she wanted her two experts functional. Hal would not stop at tipsy with Scotch, even if it was stuff as bad as Alton’s homebrew. Beer he could handle, but not the hard liquor.

Luckily, Hal was caught up in the excitement of the upcoming hunt and didn’t notice. “That would explain all the half-eaten oni! The carnage makes more sense with two predators going on a feeding frenzy instead of just one.”

Nigel nodded in agreement. “The great white shark are believed to only need seventy to a hundred pounds of meat every two weeks. All those torn-apart buggers was much more than one beastie could reasonably down in a sitting, even at forty feet long.”

Jane realized that her brothers were staring in surprise at the naturists.

“What exactly happened at Sandcastle?” Marc asked.

They showed her brothers the video from the day before. It was surprisingly viewable even as Taggart ran for his life, dragging the namazu away from Hal and the children. It had been stupidly brave of him.

She had worried that her brothers would cheer the oni dying but they were better than that. They flinched every time one died.

“The namazu is big but fairly slow when you compare it to a saurus or a warg,” Jane listed out the river monster’s strengths. “What makes it dangerous is the electricity. We first spotted it on Fort Pitts Bridge Outbound. You know how high that is? The discharge was arcing to the point where it almost reached us. I don’t think we can do a second-story shoot as we would for a saurus. We’re going to have to treat it more like a pack of wargs on steroids.” The magical cold of the warg’s breath made houses fragile boxes to trap anyone inside. Killing wargs normally required a running fight. “The vehicles should be safe from the electricity.”

“Assuming you can get just one at a time,” Alton muttered darkly. He had the most experience dealing with Elfhome wildlife. “It doesn’t seem to be able to turn in a tight area. See, it backed up there instead of twisting around. You might be able to use that to your advantage.”

“You left eleven oni alive.” Marc took out his phone. “I’m going to see if anyone on the force knows what the EIA found. If the guards aren’t all dead, you might have to deal with them at the same time.”

“Don’t ask too many direct questions,” Jane warned. “The oni have moles in the EIA. They probably also have some in the police department.”

Marc snorted and gave her a bemused look. Right. He was the one known as “Stone” by most people. He walked out into the night, saying to the person that answered, “What do you know?” After that, there was no more from his end of the conversation except occasional grunts.

“Because of Bertha’s range and rate of fire, the only ‘safe’ place to film this will be in the passenger seat.” Jane tapped the back of the Humvee. “We can mount some smaller cameras for more coverage; they’ll be insurance on getting something on film. Everything is going to be fairly choppy as soon as Bertha opens up.”

“Annnnd I’ll be where?” Disappointment filled Hal’s face as he realized that he wasn’t going to be driving or shooting.

“You and Nigel will be in the production trucks. We’ll have the mobile antenna up for both of them and cameras feeding to both, just in case we end up out of range of the Chased by Monsters truck.”

“Jane!” Hal whined.

“If we have ammo left over, I’ll take you out to the quarry and you can play with Bertha while we get additional footage to pad the episode. I’m expecting that most we get won’t be useable.”

“How much ammo do we have?” Taggart asked.

“Hopefully enough,” Jane didn’t want Hal to know the exact number because she planned to limit him to a few hundred shots. “She fires five hundred shots a minute, which is a good thing and a bad thing. We have to be sure we have the namazu in the crosshairs when we open up or we’ll chew through everything before we kill her.”

By “we” she meant herself. She just didn’t want to have to fight every male within hearing about it.

Marc returned to the garage, his face set, which usually meant he was unsettled by what he learned.

“Well?” Jane asked.

He leaned close and whispered, “The EIA just found someone alive in the rubble. She’s hurt. They’re taking her to Mercy.”

“Her?” Jane whispered. Boo hadn’t mentioned that any of the oni were female. Not that it mattered, but Jane had gotten the impression it was a strictly males guarding the two children.

Marc lowered his voice even more. “They think she’s tengu.”

“Oh, shit.” All of the guards were oni because Joey was being kept hidden from the tengu. Kajo couldn’t trust his hold on Joey’s people if there was any chance that they could free him. The only reason that a tengu would be at the hatchery was because she’d been attempting to find and rescue Joey. The boy had at least two aunts and a female cousin prior to the attack on the house in California. Boo had said that they were killed but it was possible that one had escaped, and thus good as dead for Kajo’s needs. Was this one of them?

It was easy to think of Joey as their new baby brother. He was a sweet little kid that desperately wanted to be safe and loved. An adult who was “extended family” was something else. Jane had some cousins she wouldn’t trust any further than she could throw them. (Her mom’s side of the family reflected a sense of law and order, but her father’s side showed their moonshiner background.)

If Joey was now Boo’s brother, and by that tedious blood link, their new baby brother, what did it make his cousins? No one would blame them for ignoring that implausible connection—except Boo, who’d suffered too much already.

Then again, the enemy of your enemy is your friend.

If the oni only controlled the tengu through their hold on Joey’s family, couldn’t Jane use the same leverage to get Tinker and Windwolf’s baby brother back?

But there was the small matter that the female would be under heavy guard with the elves probably quickly closing in to take custody of her.

“Alton, stay with the kids.” Jane pointed at her oldest brother. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do, but she didn’t have time to sit and think. She needed to act now if ever. “Marc and Geoffrey, finish with Bertha. Duff and Guy, go through the sightings and find me a kill zone.” She would need the Chased by Monsters team for an excuse to get access to the tengu. “Nigel, Taggart.” And then because if she left Hal, he’d get into trouble, her garage possibly could be destroyed, and he’d end the night tied in a chair, she pointed at Hal. “Come.”

It was a forty-minute trip to Mercy Hospital. By the time Jane parked in their special reserved parking space—Hal’s slot of shame—they had a plan. A simple plan. Alarmingly simple. Claiming that they were seeking medical attention for Nigel’s saurus wounds, they’d enter Emergency and start to ask lots of questions on the guise that they were gathering material for a show. Technically they wouldn’t even be lying.

Once they determined where the tengu was located, it should be just a matter of pushing their way in for “an interview.” After that, they’d be purely winging it.

The last part of “the plan” had her stomach doing somersaults. Her family had been put right. She wanted to salvage Joey’s and save Windwolf’s, but it put Boo into jeopardy. How were they to know if they could trust this tengu female? Why would she believe anything that Jane had to say?

Dr. Nan was on duty. The petite blond doctor knew them too well. She laughed as she caught sight of Jane. “What did Hal do this time? Ah, he’s at least upright this time.” She snapped on a pair of latex gloves. “Come here, my pretty.”

“No, no, no, no, not me. Him!” Hal hid behind Jane.

Dr. Nan clapped her gloved hands together. “Fresh blood!”

“Nigel Reid, this is Dr. Nan Nuessle.” Jane waved to the naturalist. “Yesterday, he was roughed up by a saurus. He’s not feeling good.”

“Yesterday? Oh, good lord, you people!” Nan pointed at Nigel. “You, on the gurney. Show me where it hurts.”

Nigel gingerly peeled off his shirt. “We cleaned the wounds and applied antibiotics and plasters.”

“Plasters?” Dr. Nan looked a little alarmed.

“Bandages,” Jane clarified, having been through this exact discussion the day before. It was the difference between American English and British English.

“Oh, I see.” Dr. Nan ripped off the bandages, making everyone wince. She was wonderful with children; she just didn’t suffer fools, which meant Hal. Poor Nigel was suffering from association. “Oh, no. You call this clean? Saurus are meat eaters. They have nasty stuff living under their claws, which they embed deep into any wound. Salmonella. Botulism. Leptospirosis.” She started to assemble supplies on a stainless steel tray beside the bed. To a nurse, she said, “I’m going to need two grams of Ceftriaxone.”

“Two grams?” everyone echoed. Experience had taught Jane that shots were usually given in milligrams.

“These wounds are inflamed. Infection has already set in. You can’t pussyfoot around once these babies get started. You got to slam the door shut on them hard.”

Having Nigel treated was supposed to be a pretense. That he was seriously at risk made Jane feel guilty. She should have made sure he was fine last night, or this morning, before heading to Sandcastle. She had noticed him slowing down. She should have checked him earlier.

“Do you mind if we film this?” Nigel explained that he was in Pittsburgh for his show, Chased by Monsters, hence the reason he’d been attacked by the saurus. “The show name is misleading. Ouch. We really want to focus on what it’s like to live on Elfhome. Ow. Your experience in emergency medicine must be extraordinary. People like myself attacked by exotic plants and animals. Treating elves and oni.”

“Elves are verboten!” Dr. Nan ruthlessly scrubbed at the long, inflamed scratches while she talked. “They go to the hospices out beyond the Rim. Even human adults and children react differently to drugs. There’s no way we could safely treat elves.”

“Oni?” Hal asked. “Have you treated any of them?”

“Oh, you just missed that circus. We got a tengu in this evening along with half a dozen EIA grunts. They were digging her out when the building collapsed on all of them.”

“Were any of them badly hurt?” Nigel asked.

“Various broken limbs, concussions, cuts and bruises. I think two of the grunts are still on their feet and pulling guard duty. I tossed the tengu to the surgeons; let them figure out what to do with her. I do not do birds.”

Which meant that Dr. Nan probably didn’t know where in the hospital the tengu was now. Security, though, would know where a prisoner was located.

The guard on duty was new to Mercy Hospital. His boyish face made him look impossibly young despite a sparse beard, probably grown in the attempt to appear older. Jane nearly felt bad unleashing Hal on him as Dr. Nan finished cleaning and bandaging Nigel.

“You’re Hal Rogers!” the guard cried.

Hal beamed with happiness at being recognized. “So a fan of the show?”

“Am I ever!” The guard patted his pockets until he came up with a little pad of sticky notes and a click pen. “Can I have your autograph?”

“Sure!” Hal took the paper and pen. “Who do I make it to?”

“Jade Tinnerman. It’s spelt like it sounds. T. I. N. N. E. R. Man.”

“Jade?” Hal said.

Tinnerman gave an embarrassed smile. “My mom was saved by an elf at Startup, so she named me after him.”

“So you’re a real Pittsburgher: born and bred!” Hal had a practiced signature that included a little cartoon likeness of himself in a pith helmet and safari jacket. When he had a chance, like now, to take his time giving out his autograph, he went big.

“This close to being an half-elf.” Tinnerman held up his thumb and forefinger nearly pressed together. “But then my mom met my dad and I got stuck being only human.”

“Oh cruel fate,” Hal cried.

Jane kicked Hal to get him to hurry up.

Hal edged away from Jane. “I heard that the EIA brought a wounded tengu in tonight. Did you see her?”

“Oh yeah, that was freaky.” Tinnerman held up his hands, curling his fingers into claws. “She had big chicken feet! And she was wearing these, these, things—they were like Freddy Krueger’s gloves but for her feet or something. She had on blue jeans and in her pockets were car keys, a driver’s license, and a pack of Marlboro 100s. And get this, the license says she’s from California.”

It took all of Jane’s control not to ask if she was from Pasadena.

After a patient’s clothes were taken off, their personal effects went to security. (Unless there was a spouse in attendance, or in Hal’s case, Jane.) Jane wasn’t sure what security normally did with the items, but it was possible that Tinnerman still had access to them.

Luckily, Hal realized that too. “Are you sure it’s a real license? When I was a freshman in college in California, the big thing was fake ID. The drinking age is twenty-one. There you are, in college, everyone drinking around you, and you can’t buy beer until you’re almost ready to graduate.”

Pittsburgh conformed to European legal drinking ages instead of those of the United States, a reflection of the EIA influence over the local laws. At a private residence, there was no minimum age, and sixteen-year-olds could buy beer and wine.

“Get out!” Tinnerman cried in disbelief. “You have to be twenty-one to buy beer?”

Hal spread his hands in a “what are you going to do” gesture. “Right. Beer?”

“That’s unreal,” Tinnerman said.

“So this tengu’s ID might have been fake,” Hal said. “If you want, I could look at it and tell you if it’s real or not.”

Tinnerman looked uncertain.

Hal pressed the boy. “Once the EIA gets ahold of it, they’re not going to tell us anything. They’re keeping us in the dark for most of this oni thing. We were at Sandcastle this morning because the oni have been releasing monsters into the rivers. Lots of them. And the EIA is too busy looking for Tinker domi to deal with them, so they called us in. Pittsburgh has a right to know what’s really going on. We can tell them.”

The young guard nodded slowly, glancing around to see if anyone was listening. “Yeah, you’re right. Let me grab it.”

“Make sure you show the camera,” Jane whispered while the boy fetched the ID.

Hal nodded, still focused on the guard.

Tinnerman returned and furtively showed Hal the ID. “Does it look real?”

Hal didn’t grab it from the boy. “At first glance, yes. But not everything is what it appears. Rub your finger over the signature. With a real one, you should feel the letters because they’ve been raised.”

Tinnerman’s eyes went wide. “You’re right!”

“Also there’s an outline of a brown bear when you shine a line from behind it.” Hal produced a small flashlight and twiddled his fingers for Tinnerman to hand him the ID. Hal shifted slightly so Taggart could film the card and pressed the light to the back of the card. The dotted outline of a grizzly appeared on the right hand side. “Yup, there. See.”

Tinnerman whistled and took out his wallet to find his Pittsburgh’s driver’s license. “Do we do anything that fancy?”

“That’s nothing. Watch this.” Hal flipped the flashlight over. “It looks like her picture is on here twice, right? But actually it’s on the card three times. The third only visible under ultraviolet light.”

Jane read the name on the card as Hal demonstrated the hidden photo. It claimed that the pictured woman with black hair was Yumiko Sessai. Jane hadn’t thought to ask Joey if the rest of his family shared his last name of Shoji. His cousin’s aunt, though, definitely wouldn’t have his name. Yumiko looked like she could be related but she also looked like she could be related to most of the people in Japan. Her address was Pasadena. It wasn’t Startouch drive, it was Ranch Top Road.

Jane poked Hal to move on. Quickly. There were at least two EIA guards on duty. If PB&G was going to “interview” Yumiko, they’d better do it before more guards could arrive.

“So where is this tengu?” Hal asked.

“She’s up on the top floor, right hand corner. It’s the room furthest from the nurse’s station, just in case trouble breaks out.” It would be the room that Mercy Hospital routinely put Hal in, most likely for the very same reason, only two floors up. Usually the rooms around Hal were empty. Mercy was the only hospital in Pittsburgh but anyone that could put off surgery went Stateside to get it done. “Although I can’t see what trouble could break out since the tengu is still unconscious and Sparrow will be here to collect her before she wakes up.”

“Sparrow? The viceroy’s secretary?” Hal asked.

Tinnerman nodded. “Yeah, the grunts told me that they’d called Maynard and he was with Sparrow down in the South Hills, nearly to the Rim by Brownsville. She’s on her way. They wanted to be sure I knew it so I could keep an eye out for her and make sure she got to the top floor when she arrived.” He straightened proudly. “I’m fluent in Elvish. I got straight A’s in high school. Busted my butt and got rank three translator qualifications.”

Hal made appreciative noises, as it was fairly impressive. Rank four required a Master’s degree; it also was the minimum level for official EIA translator positions. It meant that most Pittsburghers couldn’t get a job with the EIA despite conversing in Elvish their entire lives.

Nigel came down the hall, walking gingerly as he rebuttoned his linen shirt, but otherwise beaming with delight as normal. Hal caught sight of him and did a quick wrap-up, thanking Tinnerman for his help.

“This way.” Jane started them toward the correct bank of elevators to get up to the patients’ rooms. “Since the EIA had a building dropped on them, we only have to get past two guards who have had a very shitty day.” And it was about to get worse. Jane tried not to feel guilty. “If Sparrow shows up while we’re talking to Yumiko, let me do the talking.” Hal’s Elvish sucked. “I’ll let her know that Yumiko might know where Tinker domi is being held. If we can get Yumiko to trust us…”

Jane yelped with surprise as Nigel suddenly dragged her and Hal sideways into a janitor’s closet. “What the hell?” She whispered because the man probably had a good reason for cramming them into a five-foot-wide space.

“Jane, there’s something I haven’t told you that you need to know.” Nigel turned on the closet light, dragged Taggart into the closet too and shut the door.

“What?” Jane fought with a rag mop trying to fall into her face. “Seriously, what are we doing in here?”

“Turn the camera off,” Nigel told Taggart. “This cannot be recorded. It is a matter of life or death.”

Taggart looked mystified but hit the power button his camera. “Okay. It’s off. What’s this about?”

“Sparrow was the one that arranged to have Windwolf killed,” Nigel said quietly.

“What?” Jane cried.

Nigel held up his hands to quiet her. “Sparrow conspired with the oni to have the viceroy killed. If she had succeeded, she would have been in control of Pittsburgh until the queen decided who would rule in his place. Since these are elves, that could have been longer than any of us could imagine. It would have handed complete control of the city to the oni.”

“Shit!” Jane hissed.

Taggart was looking lost and confused. “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

Nigel sighed. “Because I’m protecting the ones that told me. Also there’s no proof to those allegations, but I believe them to be true.”

“Who told you?” Taggart growled.

“No one can know this,” Nigel said. “It must never be repeated, particularly on camera. It must remain a secret to our deaths.”

“You know you can trust me,” Taggart said.

“I met the wee lasses who are Lemon-Lime,” Nigel said. “Och, they are clever little ones but they’re in over their heads. They trusted me with their lives; I cannae betray them.”

It took a moment for Jane to remember that Lemon-Lime was the name of the film company that gave Nigel the monster call. “How little is little? College age? High school?”

“They are not that much older than Joey. Eight. Nine.” He measured off a child that would only come to slightly above Jane’s hip. “Twins. At first I couldn’t believe them; Lemon-Lime videos are extensively researched and the humor is cunning, albeit often juvenile. It didn’t seem possible for such wee lasses to produce them. But then they explained the gossamer call. They weren’t repeating information that they barely grasped. They’d taken the barest of clues and created a device that uses magic—a power not found on Earth—to control beasts that live on another world. But by doing so, they had stumbled across a horrific secret. They trusted me with their lives by telling me what they’d found out.”

Jane had six younger siblings; she didn’t completely trust anything coming out of a child’s mouth. “Two nine-year-olds uncovered a conspiracy between an elf and the oni while on Earth?”

“They did a video of Windwolf being saved by a human man and woman, although the details…Oh! Oh! Oh my!”

Jane glanced around the tiny closet to see what was triggering Nigel’s wide-eyed look of surprise. “What?”

“They released this last month, immediately after Windwolf’s attack and disappearance hit the news. It was assumed that Lemon-Lime had some inside knowledge.” He pulled out his phone, and played a video. It was animated but accurately showed the attack on Windwolf by Foo dogs. And then it got weird. Windwolf was chased onto Grandma Gertie’s putt-putt golf course, menaced by a bull, attacked by a saurus, saved by Jane and Hal then taken to the Neighborhood of Make Believe.

“What…what…what…” Jane sputtered. She grabbed his phone and played it again. In the video, Jane was wearing something that looked like a Valkyrie costume but they’d nailed Hal from his pith helmet and safari jacket. “This is what happened to us! The events are out of order. We ate at the studio the night before, but this was yesterday morning! Bull. Flashbang. Saurus. Rifle.”

“I think we should consider anything they told me to be deadly accurate,” Nigel said.

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.”

“That’s—that’s a stretch.” Taggart rolled down his shirtsleeves and buttoned his cuffs.

“Why else would she take it?” Jane tossed the linens again.

“It doesn’t make sense that she’d take it once she had a good look at it. If she hadn’t taken it, you wouldn’t be worried now.”

Taggart had a point: she wouldn’t be aware of the bracelet’s importance if Yumiko hadn’t taken it. With his sleeves buttoned, his bracelet was hidden, as were Nigel’s and Hal’s. Since she was wearing a tank top, hers had been the only one visible. She realized why the tengu female had taken the bracelet.

“Yumiko took it so Sparrow wouldn’t see it. Sparrow is an oni double agent; she probably could guess that the bracelet meant that we have Joey. She probably would have shot us all.”

“That makes sense,” Taggart agreed slowly. “I think the only reason Sparrow didn’t shoot us was because you were obviously hurt.”

Jane glanced about the empty hospital room. “We should head back home and talk to Joey. We need to know who Yumiko is. If we can trust her.”

“What the hell happened to you?” Geoffrey cried when Jane walked back into her garage an hour later. Since both Nigel and Hal were soaked from head to toe, she didn’t bother hiding her bandaged arm.

Her brothers must have finished installing Bertha on the Humvee as a canvas tarp had been draped over it. They’d raided the toy bins in the storage room for plastic dinosaurs and matchbox trucks. The reptiles dwarfed the vehicles; unfortunately it probably was the correct scale.

“Hal was Hal,” Jane temporized, getting a “hey” of indignation from Hal. “What are you doing?”

“Tactics,” Marc said without embarrassment while Duff and Guy distanced themselves from the toys. Joey was hanging on Alton’s back like a monkey.

Jane held up her phone with the downloaded capture of Yumiko Sessai’s driver’s license on it. She didn’t want any of her family seeing Yumiko attacking her. “Joey, do you know this person?”

“That’s Yumiko!” Joey cried.

“Is she related to you?” Jane asked.

Joey shook his head. “She’s a yamabushi.”

“She’s a what?” Jane asked.

“Yamabushi!” Joey cried. “They’re the seven loyal servants of Wong Jin who were given magical powers by our guardian spirit, Providence, so they could protect his daughter.”

“They’re like super ninjas that guard the Chosen bloodline,” Boo translated, and then gave a condensed version of everything she knew about them. “There were five living in the house behind the Shojis’. The two places shared backyards, so they acted like one big home. The yamabushi all used the name Sessai and pretended to be Mom and Dad and kids. One was around my age. His name was Haruka.”

Joey nodded enthusiastically; he didn’t realize the significance of the past tense. “He goes to school with Mickey and Keiko. Yumiko goes to Caltech with Riki.”

“And these?” Jane held up Alton’s wrist to show off his since hers was gone. “What are they?”

Joey leaned over Alton’s shoulder and probably would have fallen if Alton hadn’t tightened his grip. “The charms? They’re for protection.”

“What kind of protection?” Jane said.

“Against tengu!” Joey said. “It tells tengu not to hurt you because you’re under the protection of the Chosen line.”

Boo caught Jane’s hand to inspect her wrist. “What happened to yours? You didn’t throw it away, did you?”

“No. I gave it to Yumiko.” Jane wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or bad. If all of Joey’s family was dead, the yamabushi most likely saw herself as his next of kin. Jane didn’t see it that way; it seemed too much like giving him to the first stranger who thought they had a right to him. It might become a custody battle fought at night with guns.

There was a chance that Yumiko might also want Boo since she was now genetically part of the Chosen bloodline. No way in hell.

Jane didn’t want to discuss the possibilities with her brothers. They might be tempted to shoot Yumiko on sight. Jane wanted to give the female the benefit of the doubt. The enemy of Jane’s enemy was her friend—at least until they need to be coldcocked, tied up and handed back to the EIA for questioning.

Jane tucked away the phone as she turned the facts over in her mind. If Yumiko was a bodyguard, then it explained Yumiko’s actions. The female had been at Sandcastle searching for Joey. Captured, she’d been playing dead, waiting for a chance to escape. Jane showed up wearing the bracelet. To protect Joey, Yumiko would need to erase all trace of him, which meant taking the bracelet.

“Where is Yumiko?” Joey asked.

“I don’t know,” Jane said truthfully. “She disappeared before we could talk to her.”

“Intonjutsu!” Joey cried.

“What?” Jane asked.

“That’s the ninja skill of disappearing,” Nigel murmured. “The yamabushi were a sect of warrior monks that live in temples deep in the mountains. The Japanese believe that the tengu are protective, yet dangerous, mountain spirits. They are often depicted in the distinctive robes of the yamabushi monks.”

Joey was nodding along with this. “When the Chosen was brought to Earth, his servants hid him among the yamabushi. They took the name to honor the monks.”

“The oni don’t know that the yamabushi exist,” Boo added. “The tengu managed to keep the Chosen bloodline hidden on Onihida. Only after they came to Earth did the oni find out about the Chosen.”

“Are you sure?” Jane asked.

Boo gave her an annoyed look. “Kajo had a fight with Lord Tomtom about it. Tomtom didn’t believe there were yamabushi. He said that it was a myth to frighten the other lesser bloods; to keep them from trying to prey upon the tengu. He thought that any tengu that was particularly fierce encouraged people to think they’re yamabushi to boost their reputation.”

If half the oni command doubted Yumiko’s existence, then the female could have the other members of Joey’s family safely hidden someplace. Somehow they had to have a long conversation with Yumiko.

First things first: the namazu.

Her brothers had raided more than just the toy box. They’d also managed to round up a half-dozen wooden sawhorse barricades and Team Tinker’s headsets.

Jane eyed the equipment with dismay. They would be spread across three vehicles with Duff fielding monster sightings from viewers, monitoring police activity, and coordinating the running fight. They needed seven linked headsets. Because the PB&G equipment was so old, her set of four weren’t compatible with the four that the Chased by Monsters crew had brought with them. She’d told her brothers to solve the problem; she didn’t expect this. “You didn’t tell our cousins about Boo or Sandcastle or anything?”

“I bribed Andy with cannoli and beer,” Duff stated. “He didn’t even think to ask.”

That sounded like their youngest Roach cousin. His older brother was the business manager of Team Tinker. He would have held out for the piece of whatever action the Kryskill boys were gearing up for.

The headsets were custom made by Tinker herself. They used voice-activated microphones to create a full-duplex tac net and had more bells and whistles than God. There were ten in all, so there were more than enough for their needs.

Duff was scared that he pissed her off. “They don’t use an open channel like the production truck’s headsets. We’ll still use code words—because yes, the oni could be monitoring the phone systems—but this is going to be much more secure. Plus I can patch in anyone with a cell phone, so if I need to, I could even call Alton or Mom at any point and link them in.”

“Don’t you dare call Mom!” Jane wanted to stay in control. Last thing she needed was her mom wading in and taking over. “I don’t care what happens, you do not call Mom.”

Duff nodded his understanding.

“Do we have a kill zone?” Jane asked.

“Hays Woods,” all her brothers answered.

“Here.” Duff picked up his tablet and flicked through some satellite pictures. “These images are really old but Pittsburgh hasn’t changed much in terms of roads and such. This is Hays Woods. It’s about seven hundred acres of forest on a steep hillside.”

Alton pointed out narrow dirt road meandering through the woods. “There’s lots of walking trails through it that’ve been widened so that foragers like me can get trucks in and out. Between the river and South Hills, the woods are isolated from the Rim, so they’re mostly Earth flora and fauna and are fairly safe. I hunt squirrels, deer, and fish. Some people cut hickory for smoking meat.”

“Oak for carpentry,” Geoffrey stated to prove he knew the woods as well. “There’s some cherry too.”

“Good. Good.” Jane headed off a flare-up of sibling rivalry. She studied the map. The woods occupied a steep bend in the Mon River with Hazelwood across the water. The trees would hem in monsters, but the width of the trail would also make turning difficult. They needed to stay out of range of the monster’s electricity attack. If they called in more than one monster, they could be trapped between the two with nowhere to run. As long as they fired downhill toward the river or east toward Sandcastle, it would be unlikely they hit anything important. Downtown, however, was within the gun’s four-mile range to the west.

“Viewer tips get us any sightings?” Jane asked.

“There were two from the Hot Metal Bridge.” Duff swept a finger down river, around the bend, to the first bridge across the Monongahela. The historic landmark used to carry crucibles of molten steel from the blast furnaces on the south bank to the rolling mills on the north bank. Originally a railroad bridge, it had been converted just prior to the first Startup. It was one of the bridges that linked the heavily populated South Side to downtown and Oakland.

“Shit,” Jane breathed. “Do we know the range of the monster call?”

“Not really,” Nigel confessed. “I was told that it might be up to a mei since it uses magic, but there’s no way to confirm that. So far, we’ve been practically on top of the monster when we used it. We were lucky that we’ve hit on the ‘come here’ command.”

“There’s a very steep dirt road here off of East Carson,” Alton pointed out. “It was a power line right-of-way for the electric company but it’s been expanded so you don’t need to drive all the way around to Glass Run to access the walking trails.”

“There’s also this path off of Becks Run Road,” Geoffrey added.

Jane shook her head. “We would have to drag the monsters under this railroad bridge. If they damaged the bridge, the connection to the East Coast would be cut short of the city proper. That could be critical if this goes to full out warfare.”

Jane hated everything about this fight. That they didn’t know how many monsters were in the river. That she needed to involve her brothers. That they were the only ones who could call the monsters out of the river. Short of handing over the monster call to the compromised EIA, no one else was as heavily armed as her family. “We’re doing a running fight. We’ll use the monster call here East Carson. Once we have incoming, we’ll head up this dirt road into the woods. We’ll pull the first one to this clearing and open fire. Lather, rinse, repeat.”

She ran her finger down East Carson. South Side Flats was about a square mile of flood plains beside the Mon River. Because of the steep hillsides that edged the river, East Carson had very few side streets beyond the flats. “If we set up the barriers here just after South Thirty-Third Street and here at Becks Run Road, and then here where it ends at Eight-Eighty-Five, then we can have two or three miles to ourselves to work with.”

Jane wished they could take advantage of the night cover but she didn’t want to fight blind. “We’ll head out at four-thirty. The production trucks will find hard cover at the top of this hill. The Humvee will set up the barriers, make sure the area is clear of bystanders, and do a dry run of shifting from East Carson to the walking trails.”

“What about me?” Hal had been studying the map intently. “How am I going to see anything with so many trees in the way?”

Jane smacked him. “You’re to stay behind hard cover in case we accidently fire in your direction.”

Alton zoomed in on the map to find a small side street. “There’s a vacant private school here. It’s all brick, so it would provide lots of cover for the production trucks. The walking trails edge the property, so the cameras will be in range.”

“I won’t be able to find that,” Hal stated firmly. “We’ve never filmed in that area. There are no backyards and gardens. It’s all abandoned and, knowing Pittsburgh, there were never street signs, even before the first Startup.”

Nigel eyed the maze of side streets they would need to take from Becks Run to the school. “Och, neither could I, not in the dark without GPS.”

Jane considered not filming the hunt.

If she just left Hal, Nigel and Taggart at Hyeholde…

No. That wouldn’t work. She’d have to lock them into the basement or something. If it had been just Hal, it would be fairly simple to just pick him up and carry him squirming and kicking to the bathroom and handcuff him to the sink. (She’d done it before when she decided his drinking needed serious intervention. The bathroom gave him access to water and a toilet.) She had four bathrooms (Hyeholde was a restaurant after all), but she only had one pair of handcuffs. It would be a mistake to underestimate any of the men. They were all intelligent and used to getting themselves out of all sorts of odd trouble. (Mostly because they also seemed to have the same level of common sense—which was to say very little.) Taggart and Nigel were wild cards; there was no telling what they might know. They could be black belts in martial arts and have Houdini-level escape skills. Locking them up could be tricky. If one got free, he’d free the other two.

Earth needed to see what the oni were doing in Pittsburgh. They had to see the forty-foot walking electric catfish to believe it. If she was going to put her little brothers at risk, she’d better reap the maximum gain out of it.

“I know Hays Woods,” Guy said. “I’ve gone with Alton a bunch of times. I can guide them.”

Jane scanned her brothers. Alton was going to keep Boo and Joey out of the mess. Geoffrey and Marc were going to be in the Humvee with her. Duff was handling communication; with three vehicles in motion, they were going to need someone outside the action as backup to keep things clear. Nor did Duff know the area any better than Hal and Nigel.

“Come on!” Guy cried. “I can do this! I won’t be in any danger if I stick with the production trucks.”

If Guy was with the production truck, he could keep Hal in check. Without someone babysitting Hal, there was a strong possibly that Hal would try to see the fight somehow. Typical Hal stupidity would follow.

If it was anyone but her baby brother…

But that was the source of all of Guy’s rebellion. No one was letting him be anything but the baby while he knew full well that all his older brothers had been treated as adults long before they turned eighteen. It was part and parcel of being allowed to handle a gun.

“Fine,” she said. “I want you take your rifle with you.”

“Yes!” Guy went bouncing off to do a victory lap around the Humvee, arms upraised.

Her four other brothers glared at her.

“Someone has to sit on Hal,” she explained the most obvious point. Understanding dawned on their faces. Taggart looked amused by it.

“Hey!” Hal cried.

Guy leapt at Hal and grabbed him in a chokehold, proving he’d grown taller than Hal sometime in the last month. “Consider him sat on!”

“Let’s get some sleep and head out at four-thirty.” Jane ignored the fact dragging her brothers into this fight meant she was going to have monster-sized nightmares.

At a little after five in the morning, with sunrise still an hour away, they rolled into South Side Flats. Most of the windows in the row houses and three-story apartment buildings were dark. Graveyard shift hadn’t ended and dayshift workers weren’t awake yet. Jane prayed silently that the hunt went fast and they could kill whatever was out there quickly and quietly. She hated that all but one of her brothers was in harm’s way.

Marc drove the Humvee in the front. They’d covered Bertha with a heavy tarp but anyone with two brain cells could tell what was underneath. While Marc stopped to set up the police barricades, complete with flashing warning lights, Guy and Nigel continued on down East Carson in the production trucks.

“Can’t I at least drive?” Hal complained yet again over the channel.

“No!” Jane, Duff, Geoffrey, and Guy all snapped.

Jane continued with reasons why. “Chaser One knows where he’s going and he’s a better driver than you.” And it will be easier for Guy to ignore Hal from behind the wheel than on the passenger side. “He can’t babysit the incoming feed and make sure all the backup cameras are online. You have to do that. We’re only going to be able to do this once.” Hopefully. “You’ll let us know if any of the cameras go out and we’ll do what we can to fix them.” As long as Bertha is operating, since our lives will ride on keeping the cannon firing. “And I told him that he can punch you if you don’t listen to him.”

“Jane!” Hal knew that her brother only lightly smacked him when they thought he needed to be hit. “Punching” was a whole different ball game.

“Chaser Two, you already have a broken nose,” Jane ruthlessly pointed out. “Another hit to the face means nothing.”

“Jane!” Hal pleaded that she not be so cold to him.

“I’m trusting you with my baby brother. Don’t you dare screw up! And stick to the code words—stop using names.”

“Jane—ow!” Hal cried.

“Just checking my reach.” Guy hated “baby” and probably felt the need to prove he could keep Hal in line.

After that, silence came from the PB&G production truck.

Beyond the wide flats of South Side, there ran only a narrow ledge at the foot of the steep hills that edged the river. The bank was thick scrub trees and the old cracked pavement of the Heritage Trail. Jumpfish made the old walking path too dangerous to use since it lay only feet from the water and well within the big fishes’ range. On the other side of the road were the railroad tracks that headed straight east to the coastal elf settlements.

Pre-dawn started to lighten the sky to fragile gray. Mist hazed the Monongahela. The river lay nearly a thousand feet wide at this stretch, dark water hiding all sorts of evils. In the 1950s, a B-25 bomber had crashed into this section of the river. Fifty feet of airplane with a wingspan of seventy feet, swallowed up by water, never to be found. How many monsters were hidden in the waters?

They stopped to put up the barrier at Becks Run Road and continued downriver to erect the last blockade.

Her hand brushed against Taggart’s. She glanced down at the seat between them. If she shifted slightly, she could take hold of his. If she did, would he see it as her committing? She huffed out. Commit to what? Hand holding? Not like they’re going to be making out in the back of the Humvee with her little brothers in the front. It was a stupid time to even be thinking about it.

If they killed the monsters, would Maynard repay them by extending Taggart’s visa? Would a few extra months actually make any difference? Two months. Two years. Sooner or later the visa would run out and he’d be gone. Unless of course they got married.

She glanced at Taggart. He studied the misty river through his camera lens. A giddy warmth and painful shyness surged through her, making her want to take his hand and at the same time edge away from him like he was a dangerous thing.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she whispered. “Thinking of that? Now?”

“Hm?” Taggart looked toward her.

“Nothing,” Jane whispered. She covered her microphone and whispered a half-lie. “Just nervous. Hal and I deal with this kind of shit all the time but we always know what we’re fighting. How many. And we don’t get other people involved.”

He took her hand and held it in silent comfort. He said no platitudes; he knew her fears were well grounded. His hand was warm and comforting.

“Keeper, this is Chaser One and Two,” Guy reported, using the code words that Duff came up with. Joey and Boo had helped. “We’re in position. Waiting on the Seeker.”

“Do you have hard cover?” Duff asked before Jane could.

The tone of Guy’s voice indicated he was giving a teenage roll of eyes at the stupidity of the question. “Yes, there’s a large cinderblock garage in the back. We’ve got full cover.”

“Set up and check the feeds on the cameras…” Duff read from “the plan.”

“I know what we’re supposed to do,” Guy snapped.

Duff skipped over what was written to add, “and keep an eye out for normal shit like steel spinners and wargs.”

“I know,” Guy growled.

God as her witness, she had to be insane to get her brothers involved in this.

They hit the end of East Carson. Jane gave Taggart’s hand a squeeze and left his comforting presence to set out the last barricade. Luckily since this was the abandoned part of town, it was unlikely any real police would stumble across their fake roadblock.

The world was pale and still and silent. The sun hadn’t risen and the birds hadn’t started their morning serenades. The only noise was the Humvee’s motor and the dark gurgle of the river.

“Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh shit!” Duff cried over the headsets.

“What is it?” Jane started to run for the Humvee. Her heart climbing into her throat. Had something happened to Alton?

“They’re in the city!” Duff cried. “They’re on Liberty Avenue! There’s two—maybe three. Bo is yelling for help. One of them overturned Bowman’s car and he’s pinned!”

Bo Pedersen was married to their cousin Patty.

“Damn it!” Jane climbed onto the Humvee and stripped the tarp off the cannon. “Change of plan! We’re intercepting them in the city! Move!”

“You sure?” Geoffrey asked even as Marc punched the gas pedal. The Humvee leapt forward. “We’re going to be seen.”

“Yes!” Jane snapped. “Liberty Avenue is nearly the heart of downtown. If you’ve ever had to chase a flock of damn turkeys all over downtown, one thing you learn is that unless you can fly, you can’t get from the river’s edge to Liberty Avenue. There’s a damn maze of jersey barriers, bridge abutments and retaining walls in the way. For more than one namazu to show up in the middle of downtown, they’re being led through the maze. The damn oni have a monster call just like we do and they’re using the namazu to terrorize the city.”

“Seeker?” Guy cried over the com. “What’s our orders?”

“Move to Mount Washington and find hard cover. Do not come into downtown!” And because he wouldn’t listen to that, she lied. “I want those trucks safe! We need them intact.”

“Okay.” Guy sounded like he’d swallowed her lie. “We’re rolling!”

The morning sun was just starting to peer over the hills as they roared toward the skyscrapers of downtown. The very tips of the PPG glass castle gleamed brightly while the rest of the city was full of shadows.

Jane was up in the gunner’s stand, growling out curses. They couldn’t sit by and let the damn things wipe out the remaining police force. Bertha, though, would chew the hell out of downtown if they open fired at street level. Almost every building had big glass storefronts. If they missed the monster, the bullet could plow through blocks before hitting stone.

Whoever called the namazu into the city had the advantage; they knew the real commands that the monsters were bred to obey. Jane’s crew wouldn’t be able to drag the namazu out of the city unless they were the only ones commanding the creatures.

“Keeper?” Jane cupped her mic to cut down the howl of the wind. “Somewhere downtown is an oni with a monster call just like ours. I need eyes on him!”

“Okay. Okay. How do I find him? Shit! Shit! Shit! Seeker, can I bring in outside help?”

“Yes! Do anything you need!”

The communication line went silent for a few minutes until a stranger’s voice suddenly joined.

“I’m patched into…” A young female voice paused to yawn deeply, “the cameras downtown. Explain again what I’m looking for.”

Duff explained quickly and quietly. “Someone downtown at this minute with a whistle that they’re blowing.”

“You woke me up to find a flutist?” the unknown girl asked sleepily.

“It’s more like a bosun whistle,” Jane snapped. “Find it!”

“Who is that?” the female asked the question that Jane wanted to ask.

Duff kept to protocol. “You don’t need to know now. I’ll explain later. Lives are on the…”

“Holy crapola!” the girl shouted. “What the heck are those things?”

Well, the girl had just proved she had the ability to access downtown’s cameras.

“The oni with the whistle is controlling them,” Jane stated as calmly as she could while wondering who the hell this girl was. “Find him!”

“Okay,” the girl said before the words totally sunk in. “Wait! An oni? What does an oni look like?”

“It’s five-freaking-thirty in the morning!” Jane shouted. “He’s going to be the only person downtown blowing a freaking whistle!”

“Working!” the girl cried. “Working! Jimmy Crickets, those things are—whoa! Oh no, oh no, it’s trying to eat a cop!”

“Where?” Jane, Marc, and Duff all cried.

The girl made all sorts of sputtering noises and then cried, “Market Square! Market Square. We got to do something, D—”

“No names!” Duff shouted to drown out the stranger. “No names! This is an unsecure line! I’m Keeper. You’re Beater One.”

“Keeper!” Jane snapped.

Duff understood the unasked question. “She’s the newest bunny, Seeker!”

The bakery that Duff worked at employed illegal immigrants who all took rabbit names for some unknown reason. Babs Bunny. Clover. What was the new one? Widget No Problemo. (Jane could not understand how this was a rabbit name but the girl was nevertheless one of the bunnies.) It meant that the girl couldn’t go to the police or the EIA without endangering herself.

There were more squeaks from the bunny that boded ill for Bo Pederson. They were still on the wrong side of the river, a mile away from Market Square. Jane couldn’t help but remember that the last time she saw Bowman, he had announced Patty was pregnant. Guy had grown up with no memory of his father. It left a hole that even four older brothers couldn’t fill. “Marc?”

“Got the pedal nailed to the floor.” His voice was tense. He was the one that knew Bowman the best.

They reached Smithfield Street Bridge and turned hard without slowing. The tires screamed in protest and the Humvee leaned.

“Don’t roll us!” Jane leaned into the turn to counterbalance Bertha’s weight.

“Working on it,” Marc stated calmly.

In theory the bridge had two lanes of traffic inbound and outbound. Jersey barriers and high curbs, though, limited the inbound to one lane at the turn. They overshot it, ending up in the outbound lanes as they headed into the city.

“Wrong side,” Geoffrey murmured to their little brother. “Get over.”

“Not going to happen,” Marc replied. “Not at this speed.”

They whipped past the first arch of steel girders that marked the start of the center lenticular trusses. Beyond that point, there was no way to cross back to the correct lanes.

“Forbes Avenue has only three lanes,” Geoffrey warned.

“Well aware of that,” Marc said.

“Let the man drive!” Jane shouted. This was another reason why she didn’t want to get her brothers involved. Her brothers might be afraid of her, and they might do what she told them, but they’d fight with her and among themselves at every decision point. She had Hal trained to jump when she said jump. Her brothers might decide to override her at the worst possible moment. “Make sure we’re locked and loaded!”

“We can’t fire Bertha in the city!” Marc shouted, confirming her fear that her brothers wouldn’t listen to her.

“The hell we can’t!” Jane shouted back. “We’re not going to let these things eat Bowman! I’ve seen what they do to people!”

“There’s going to be responding police and paramedics!” Marc shouted. “We’ll hit them with friendly fire!”

She was normally the one urging caution to her younger brothers; of all the times for them to suddenly grow up! “We’ll be careful! Keeper, find me another kill zone! One-mile radius!”

“What? What? What?” Widget cried in confusion and then must have spotted the Humvee incoming on the city’s many cameras. “Oh! That’s the cavalry? Oh, that rocks! You’ve got four targets in Market Square and two more on their way up the other end of Forbes Avenue.”

Six total?

Jane cursed and covered her mic. “Marc, take us through Market Square so we can save Bowman’s ass, and then head out of town. The plan is to pull them out of the city if we can.” She let go of her mic. “Beater One! Get eyes on the oni with the whistle!”

“I’m looking!” Widget cried.

They hit the end of the bridge and flashed into the city proper with towering buildings lining the street. They tore down Smithfield Street. Marc slowed for the sharp turn onto Forbes Avenue. The roar of the namazu came echoing up the artificial canyon. The namazu’s discharge flickered like a Tesla coil within the still-dark street, reflecting off all the big glass storefronts.

Ahead was the full city-block-wide Market Square, bisected by Forbes Avenue and Market Street. It was a mix of brick and cobblestones and patches of grass. A dozen lampposts that looked like old-fashioned gas lamps still gleamed in the pre-dawn darkness. A clutter of trees, parking meters, trash cans, and café tables combined to make the kill zone a navigation hell. Lining the left hand side of the square were the half-dozen slick, black glass castles that been the Pittsburgh Plate Glass headquarters and now housed the EIA offices.

This was going to be a running of the bulls through a china store.

“Seeker, we’re in position!” Guy reported from across the river on Mount Washington. “We have hard cover and we’ve got eyes on you. We confirm that there are six targets. I repeat: six.”

The EIA was not going to be happy with them.

The piercing trill of the monster call echoed up the street. Somewhere ahead was also the oni commanding the namazu. A deafening roar of answering monsters washed over them in reply to the whistle. A moment later, a squad car went flipping past where Forbes Avenue opened into the square.

“Bowman!” Marc cried.

A namazu appeared at the intersection, blocking their way. Marc stomped on the brakes and they went skidding forward, several tons of metal about to meet several tons of angry electric fish.

Jane opened fire.

The big gun thundered as it shook in her hold, spitting out bullets faster than the eye could follow. The bullets slammed into the namazu, knocking it sideways as blood misted from the rapid-fire projectiles tearing it open. She strafed left, down the namazu’s body, away from the squad car.

Marc veered hard to the right, gunning the Humvee. They shot past the nose of the namazu. It lunged at Jane in the gunner’s seat. She poured bullets into its open mouth.

“Hold on!” Marc shouted.

They swerved the other way at whiplash speed. There was a wall of scales and arcing electricity and a flash of teeth.

Widget was making all sorts of yips and yelps over the com channel. “Nonononono! Yes. Yes! Watch out!”

Geoffrey blew their monster call but the namazu seemed to pay no attention to him. “Come here” apparently didn’t work when practically standing on the creature. Either that or the oni’s commands took precedence over Geoffrey’s.

“Find the oni with the whistle!” Jane fought to control the gun. The great glass castle of PPG was shattering under the hail of bullets that had missed the monster. She prayed that Widget was right about no one being in the line of fire. What direction was Bo? She risked a glance over her shoulder.

The squad car had landed upside down. Roof crumbled, Pedersen was trapped inside. A namazu lumbered toward the car, guided either by hunger or the oni with the monster call. Jane couldn’t risk opening fire on the beast; the chance of hitting Pedersen was too high.

“Seeker!” Duff shouted over the thunder of the bullets. “The only kill zone within a mile is inside the stadium! Three Rivers Stadium is the kill zone! Do you copy?”

“I copy on the kill zone!” Jane shouted. “Three Rivers Stadium. Find me the damn oni!”

“He’s on top of the PPG building!” Widget said. “Not the big one. Number Two. The little one all by itself on Market Square! I don’t think you can see him though! He ducked back behind one of the little pointy things on the roof.”

Jane would blast the glass castle into shards but it could kill any innocent bystanders in the apartment buildings beyond it.

“I can see him!” Guy announced from Mount Washington. “I have a clear shot straight down Market Street.”

No! Not Guy! She didn’t want her baby brother to kill someone. He was only sixteen.

“Take the shot!” Marc shouted. “They’re going to kill Bowman!”

Jane gave a wordless shout in dismay and protest.

“Damn it, I missed!” Guy cried. “He’s ducked down. I can’t see him.”

There was a sudden fury of black wings overhead and a scream as someone plunged from the rooftop of the nearest glass castle.

“She threw him off the roof!” Guy cried while Widget had been reduced to an endless stream of “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God…”

“I have a shot of the tengu.” Guy’s voice cracked and he sounded younger than sixteen. “What should I do?”

“Hold fire!” It might be Yumiko. Jane prayed that it was Yumiko and that the female was helping them.

The shrill notes of the whistle cut through everything. The namazu stopped, lifted their heads, and then started to move away from the overturned squad car.

“What is she doing?” Geoffrey reloaded.

“She’s leading them away,” Jane said. “Keeper, ETA on paramedics for Pedersen?”

“Three minutes,” Duff reported.

“Get ahead of the namazu. We’ll take them to the stadium and open up on them.”

Yumiko must have heard Jane shouting out the kill zone because the tengu headed toward Stanwix Street, which was the most direct route to the stadium. Marc raced across the Roberto Clemente Bridge as the yamabushi called the monsters up the on-ramp of the bigger Fort Duquesne Bridge.

“Oh! Oh!” Widget cried over the com from wherever she was. “Guys! Guys! I don’t know if this is good or bad but we’re getting company. It’s the EIA; a whole platoon of them. They’re coming out of the Liberty Tunnel right now.”

It meant that if the EIA had any clue what was going on downtown that they’d be on the Humvee’s tail in a matter of minutes.

“What’s the plan?” Marc asked.

“Do we have a plan?” Geoffrey asked.

“We get the door open to the stadium,” Jane said. “Get the monsters inside and then shoot the hell out of them.”

“That sounds like a plan.” Geoffrey said.

“Then we look for nests,” Hal added.

“Nests?” Jane asked.

“I want to try some of that roe.” In typical television host fashion, he was using as many words possible to explain something simple. “Cautiously, of course, but I’m curious as to what it tastes like. It looks much more like salmon roe than sturgeon caviar.”

“What nests?” Jane shouted.

Nigel explained clearer. “If the oni are anywhere near intelligent, they made the namazu at least fifty percent female. There should be two more nests at minimum.”

“We will deal with that later,” Jane growled. Hopefully. If they weren’t in jail. The fact there were nests, though, gave her an idea. “Chaser Two, call Maynard.”

“Me?” Hal’s tone was clear that he didn’t think it was a good idea. “Maynard?”

“Yes, you! Tell him that we’re doing what he asked and killing the monsters. Be charming. Tell him about the nest at Sandcastle and tell him that we need to be free to look for more.”

“But I want to watch you—ow!” Hal gave a cry of pain even as Jane shouted, “Now!” Guy must have hit Hal again. “I’m making the call. See. The phone is ringing!”

“Take off your headset!” Guy snapped and Hal disappeared out of the conversation.

Marc hit the end of the Clemente Bridge, turned hard onto General Robinson Street and flew down it. Three Rivers Stadium loomed straight ahead, a great concrete donut on the North Shore. It been scheduled to be torn down months before the first Startup to make way for two stadiums dedicated to football and baseball. Since all the professional sport teams had fled the city, it had sat abandoned for years. If Yumiko actually got the namazu onto the vast playing field, it would be like shooting fish in a bucket. Giant electric fish.

Only Jane had no clue how they were going to get the namazu into the stadium.

“Keeper, is there an entrance large enough for the targets inside?”

“I-I-I have no idea. Beater One?”

“If it’s a normal stadium, it should,” Widget babbled. “Back in the States, they have these monster truck rallies at stadiums all the time. I don’t understand the concept but people like them. And if they can drive jacked up pickup trucks into the stadiums, there has to a monster-size entrance somewhere. The question is: where. Where? Where? There! It’s in the back, opposite of the River Front Entrance.”

Yumiko was darting in and out of sight as she led the monsters out of downtown. Jane could barely keep track of her despite the massive black wingspan. The tengu needed to stay aloft, away from the arcing electricity from the namazu, while keeping hidden from any snipers. Yumiko used what little cover the Fort Duquesne Bridge afforded as the five remaining monsters lumbered across the top deck. It was only a thousand feet but the on-ramp and off-ramp easily doubled the distance.

From Jane’s position, it certainly looked like they were all hurtling toward the same point, but it was difficult to be sure. She wanted to believe that Yumiko had realized that they were on the same side. It would be dangerous to assume that they were now trusted allies. The tengu woman could be leading Jane into a trap.

Widget was right about the vehicle entrance. There was a massive steel garage door protecting a tunnel that would have allowed a tractor-trailer to drive onto the playing field. Jane wasted a dozen bullets to shoot it into shreds. Marc smashed into the weakened barrier. The door caved and they drove down the short corridor to a second door. They downed that one. Beyond it was the weed-choked playing field.

Jane swiveled in the gunner’s chair, aiming back down the tunnel. She could see across the river to the first floor of Gateway towers. No. She couldn’t simply open fire while the namazu were bottlenecked in the tunnel.

“Do we have time to film a pass of the stadium?” Taggart broke his silence.

“Chaser One, how close are the targets?” Jane asked.

“You’ve got two minutes, tops,” Guy reported from Mount Washington. “We’ve lost sight of you.”

“Understood.”

They plowed through the tall weeds to the fifty-yard line. Taggart scrambled out of the Humvee and did a quick pan of the silent, abandoned stadium. The empty seats. The shadows heavy on the eastern end of the field. The slice of sunlight just touching the top lip of the western Rim. They sat in the silence and let him film despite the fact that their instincts were screaming for them to run. They needed film clips like this one to tie together all the confusing action pieces to make an understandable narrative. Taggart understood what would convey the desperation of their situation more than Jane, just as Earth-born Widget knew the general layout of stadiums when Duff did not.

“Backup camera three is out,” Nigel reported.

“I’ll check it after I reload.” Geoffrey shifted the big ammo cases around and fed a new chain up into the gun.

Jane kept aimed at the tunnel, heart thudding at the knowledge that they were unarmed until Geoffrey finished reloading.

“Seeker!” Guy cried from his advantage point. “You’ve got incoming!”

“Let’s go,” Jane said.

Taggart slid back into the Humvee.

Outside the stadium, there was the trill of the monster call. Yumiko flashed overhead; a rustle of black wings and then nothing. From some hiding space within the stadium itself, she blew the call again. The five namazu roared in answer, the noise echoing up the entrance tunnel.

“Get us room to maneuver,” Jane said.

Marc grunted. There wasn’t going to be a lot of spare area once the playing field was filled up with giant monsters throwing lightning.

The namazu lumbered down the tunnel faster than she expected. Electricity crawled along the seats near the entrance, flashing brilliance in the still pale morning sunlight. It startled a flock of pigeons that winged upwards. One vanished in a sudden puff of feathers.

Jane held her fire; she didn’t want to block the tunnel with a dead body.

The beasts rushed toward the Humvee, spreading out as they came down the field.

Jane opened fire. She focused on the far right, creating an escape path. The monster flailed under the rain of bullets. “Come on, die! Die!”

She couldn’t tell if it was completely dead but she switched to the second monster. “Move!” She shouted over the thunder of the cannon.

Marc sped toward the opening she made even as the left-most monster closed on the goal end. The other two split up, moving to cut them off even as the third gave chase.

“Left,” Geoffrey muttered as they raced directly at one. “Left! Leftleftleftleft.”

“Shut up!” Marc jerked the wheel right.

They dodged the namazu’s head and Jane strafed down its flank as they passed the long body. The other lunged at them. It slammed into the Humvee, making it tip. Electricity arced and crackled around them.

“Don’t roll us!” Jane fought gravity.

“Kill it then!” Marc shouted.

It snapped at Marc, smashing his window.

She opened fire without thinking of anything but her little brother. The recoil tipped them the rest of the way over. The Humvee hit hard on its side. They plowed through the deep weeds.

“Jane!” Geoffrey slapped her safety belt buckle and jerked her out of the gunner’s seat.

“Oh, damn, Bertha!” Jane cried.

“Forget Bertha!” Geoffrey shouted.

“Fire in the hole!” Marc shouted.

They covered their ears and ducked their heads.

There was a roar of noise as a flashbang went off.

Taggart cried out in surprise.

Jane’s heart flipped. Oh God, if he was stunned and blinded the monsters were going to kill him. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Taggart called. “I just forgot your family owns stock in that company.”

The Humvee lurched as the blinded namazu slammed against it. They were grounded; they had to get out before its electricity could strike them.

“Go!” Jane shouted.

They scrambled out of the Humvee. She must have killed the namazu that tipped the Humvee. It wasn’t moving. The remaining beast was reeling from the flashbang.

“Get to the upper levels.” She led the way across the field toward the high wall surrounding the field. Of course both her brothers wanted to cover their retreat. “Move it!”

The namazu roared. It came crashing through the weeds toward them. She hit the wall first and scrambled over it. All instincts were screaming for her to stop and make sure the others got to safety. The hard truth was that her best chance of protecting them was to kill the monster.

She turned, swinging her rifle off her back and up to her shoulder. It was heart-stoppingly close to Marc and Taggart. Losing something makes it suddenly clear that it’s very important to you.

“Don’t think of that now,” she whispered. She sighted on the namazu’s small beady eyes, held her breath, and pulled the trigger.

The crack of the rifle was weirdly comforting. The beast staggered and then slowly crumbled.

The silence was surreal.

“Okay,” she said to fill the silence. “That’s a wrap.”

The EIA officer in charge was a big, square-jawed idiot from Eastern Europe. His nametag identified him as Lieutenant Juhan Kukk. He spoke with a heavy accent and lapsed into his own language when addressing his men. He quickly proved that in addition to being a newcomer to Pittsburgh he was both racist and sexist. He ignored Jane because she was a woman and Taggart because he wasn’t white enough. He focused all questions and demands at Geoffrey. Jane really wanted to punch him but kept her fists close to her side.

At least the idiot didn’t try to take Taggart’s camera. He did take all their weapons and had Marc handcuffed after failing to stare down her younger brother.

Worse, Sparrow appeared with sekasha in tow. With elves in attendance, Jane didn’t dare lie but the one person she didn’t want to tell the truth to was Sparrow. Not with the steely-eyed sekasha at her back.

Elves weren’t gender-biased. The female elf knew Jane was the one to deal with. The focus was unnerving. The knowledge that Sparrow could order the sekasha to kill them fluttered fear through Jane. It was one thing to subject her younger brothers to the slow grind of the human legal system, another to expose them to the elves’ swift justice.

“Where did you get this?” Sparrow held up the gossamer call.

The question was in English but Jane answered in Elvish, hoping that any oddity of her story would be discounted as a lack of fluency. Jane cluttered up the story, hiding the truth with other truths. “There was an oni calling the monsters into the city with a whistle. He was making them attack Bowman—the police officer—he’s married to our cousin. The daughter of our mother’s aunt. They’re going to have a baby. The oni was on the roof of the PPG building. My people shot at him, trying to stop him before the monsters killed our cousin’s husband. He fell from the roof.”

She stopped there, leaving it to seem as if they’d gotten the oni’s whistle.

If Sparrow had given the oni the gossamer call, she would realize that Nigel’s instrument didn’t match the oni’s. She wouldn’t be able to prove it without exposing herself. It was a dangerous game of bluff poker.

Sparrow studied her with maddening calm. The female was like some snow queen, dressed in a tight frosty-blue fairy-silk gown and blond hair braided with ribbons and flowers. What was going on behind that beautiful exterior? This female had tried to murder Windwolf and most likely had been behind Tinker’s kidnapping. Yet she stood unconcerned among the deadly sekasha. She had to be very good at this game.

Sparrow flicked a hand to indicate Bertha. The EIA had righted the Humvee. The cannon looked undamaged. “Where did you get this weapon?”

“My father left it to his children. I do not know where he got it. He was afraid that a wyvern or a dragon might attack the city while Wolf Who Rules was not nearby.”

Kukk’s bigotry meant he wasn’t happy that the elves had taken over the conversation. “It doesn’t matter how they got it, it’s illegal. The treaty states that individuals can’t import heavy weaponry onto Elfhome.”

“I didn’t import it,” Jane stated calmly as she could.

Kukk plowed on with the charges. “It’s against city ordinances to fire weapons within a hundred and fifty yards of any residential structures. Our downtown headquarters looks like Swiss cheese. There’s a dead man—who may or may not be oni—splattered on the sidewalk.”

If this idiot got her brothers killed, Jane would make sure he was dead before she went down. “What does it matter if he was an oni or a human or an elf? He was calling the monsters into Market Square. What other reason would he be on the rooftop of that building before dawn?”

“Why were you there?” Sparrow countered.

“We’d promised Director Maynard to kill the monsters. When we heard the report that our cousin’s husband was pinned, we rushed to save him.”

Sparrow pulled out more damning evidence. “You were at the hospital when the oni prisoner escaped.”

The sekasha’s eyes narrowed dangerously. Jane realized that the conversation served no purpose except to sway the holy warriors into acting. If that was the game that Sparrow wanted to play, then Jane could too. In fact, as a TV show producer, she could play it very well. This was, after all, media propaganda.

“Like we told Director Maynard, one of our people had been wounded by a saurus two days ago. His wounds became infected and we took him to be treated. The staff there told us about the tengu. The people of Earth have no idea what the elves are fighting. The only pictures of oni are dead ones. If the people of Earth are to help the elves protect their world, then they have to know what the elves are fighting. An interview with a human turned into a crow, her body twisted by magic, would have been compelling evidence against the oni. She’d stolen a scalpel and gotten free of her restraints before we arrived.”

“Hal Rogers set one of my men on fire,” Kukk complained.

“Hal set himself on fire earlier this week,” Jane pointed out. “He’s accident-prone. I normally don’t allow Hal access to anything that can start a fire because of it. Your man provided Hal the flammable materials. We put him out. He was relatively unharmed.”

“Relatively?” Kukk growled.

“It was an accident which Private Tapper was equally responsible for.” Jane came as close to lying as she dared. She was sure, though, that Hal couldn’t have started the fire without a lighter from the private. “We promised Director Maynard to hunt down and kill the monster. We’ve killed six. There might be more.” Sparrow’s face tightened and Jane knew that was the right track to take. “There was a nest with several hundred eggs at Sandcastle. We’re fairly sure there are two more nests. There could be as many as four more. Those need to be located and destroyed.”

“You have broken the treaty…” Sparrow started.

“If these humans were born in Pittsburgh,” the leader of the sekasha stated quietly, “then they have not broken the treaty.”

“I am the husepavua, Dark Harvest,” Sparrow said.

“And I’m Second of First Hand.” Dark Harvest cut her short. “We are at war. My decision stands. She and her younger brothers were born here. They are ‘natives’ of Elfhome. As such, they are allowed any weapon needed to defend their home.”

“That section refers only to the rights of elves,” Kukk said.

“If you believe that, then you have misunderstood the wording,” Dark Harvest said.

Jane gasped as she realized that traitorous Sparrow had most likely had a hand in translating the treaty into human law. Of course the oni would want the humans only lightly armed.

“Let them go,” Dark Harvest commanded.

“They broke multiple human laws,” Kukk stated.

“Idiotic laws.” Dark Harvest waved away Kukk’s objections. “Monsters do not cooperate and stay outside of the limit you stated. They had no choice. You will not punish them for this. Take off the restraints.”

They fled the North Side. After a stop at Market Square to film the dead namazu there, they headed to Mount Washington to meet up with the production trucks. Jane was glad that Marc was driving; her mind was in a whirlwind. What did she really know about anything? What did the treaty really say—at least as far as the elves were concerned? How many Pittsburghers were actually oni? How many nasty surprises like the namazu did the oni have scattered in the abandoned corners of the city? She wasn’t even sure of things like how Maynard ended up as director of the EIA, which left the question of his loyalties dangerously unclear.

One thing was clear: the elves considered themselves to be at war and most of the humans in Pittsburgh didn’t realize it.

Taggart startled her by taking her hand. Apparently once you breached the hand-holding threshold, the door was always open for more. It felt good though in all the confusion to have something solid to cling to. He and Nigel were good people. She couldn’t have gotten Boo back or killed the namazu without them. Yet in less than sixty days, she was going to lose Taggart.

Unless she solved his visa problems.

“Marry me,” Jane whispered.

“What?” Taggart’s eyes went wide.

“If you marry me, you don’t need a visa to stay on Elfhome.”

His eyes went dark and sober. “If you don’t love me…”

“I think I do.” She squeezed his hand tightly. “It might take me a while to be sure, but we don’t have that time. I trust you. You’re a good man. I think you’re hands-down the sexiest guy I’ve ever laid eyes on. And you didn’t run screaming from my family. I think given time, I will come to love you more than anything in the universe. I’m willing to take the risk that it won’t work out if you are.”

He stared at her open-mouthed for a full minute.

“Well?” Jane wondered if maybe she should have waited until they weren’t covered in namazu blood and reeking of gun smoke.

He kissed her. He was just the right height so that they interlocked perfectly. Under the wonderfully soft fabric of his silk shirt, he was warm hard muscle. He kissed even better than he smelled, which was amazing.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Jane said.

Her mother was going to be ecstatic. Her brothers probably would be relieved that she wasn’t marrying Hal. (They liked Hal but had no respect for the man.)

Hal.

She knew him as well as she knew her brothers. She had, however, no idea how he was going to react to the news. Would it be best to tell him immediately or wait—like until the day of the wedding—or maybe a few weeks afterwards?

On second thought, she was fairly sure he was going to lose it. Taggart was right; Hal loved her. Maybe if he hadn’t caught himself on fire the first day they met, things might have gone differently with them. Putting a man out immediately slotted him into the “younger brother” category, despite the fact he was ten years older than her. She didn’t want to think of herself as the shallow type of woman that only liked macho-looking men, but the fact that Hal came to shoulder-level on her had always led to embarrassing face-plant moments.

Marrying Taggart only solved half the problem. What were they going to do about Nigel’s visa? He was very good-looking in his own right and a sweet-natured, intelligent man. Did she know anyone desperate to get married?

Brandy? No, the police officer only wanted a sexual partner, not a husband.

Until they found someone for Nigel, they had to assume that they only had fifty-some days to film the first season of Chased by Monsters. They needed to find any hidden namazu nests, make sure that the rivers were free of the monsters, and do the paperwork for Taggart to become an official Pittsburgher via marriage.

God, her mother was going to want a real wedding: church, priest, white dress, and a big reception afterward with a table full of several hundred cookies. Her family would want to start baking as soon as possible. They were going to want to use her ovens. Hyeholde was about to become overrun by every relative that could be drafted into the effort.

Maybe she shouldn’t tell her family either.

Her mother would kill her if Jane went behind her back.

She was still wrestling with logistics when they pulled into Hyeholde’s long driveway.

First step obviously was to find the hidden nests, since they had no idea how long the eggs took to hatch. Second was to fill out the paperwork to keep Taggart in Pittsburgh. Third was to find a woman for Nigel—assuming that the man was straight. The realization of how little she knew about the Chased by Monsters team scared her slightly now that she was planning to marry one of them.

She forced herself to put all thoughts aside. The price of living out in the middle of nowhere was to be vigilant to danger. They’d left the house empty for hours; she needed to be sure that nothing deadly had wandered into the area.

The morning had her so ramped up that Hyeholde felt like the abandoned and forgotten corner of Pittsburgh that it was. She stood in the driveway, rifle in hand, listening carefully to the wind move through the trees.

Jane eyed the forest that pressed close to the yard. Were the woods too quiet? Or had the morning just ratcheted up her paranoia to new heights? “Stay on watch. I’m checking the house.”

Her front door was still locked, none of the windows were broken, and nothing seemed to be stirring within the house. The back door and both side doors were barred as well as locked. She couldn’t shake the feeling, though, that someone had been in the house.

She looped back to the trucks.

Her brothers were all standing guard with rifles. Hal was up in Bertha’s gunner seat, pretending to fire the big gun, complete with sound effects. “Pew! Pewpewpewpewpew!”

“Bertha doesn’t go ‘pew,’ ” Guy complained. “Star Wars lasers go ‘pew.’ Bertha goes ‘Powpowpowpowpow!’ ”

“More like ‘Boomboomboomboom,’ ” Geoffrey stated.

Should she tell Hal that she was marrying Taggart before or after letting him shoot the cannon? If she told him beforehand, he would probably demand more shots. They didn’t have ammo to waste.

Taggart stood silently to one side, camera on his shoulder, letting her decide when to spill the news.

Alton’s pickup came rumbling up the driveway.

Guy reached up and yanked Hal out of the gunner’s seat. “You don’t point guns at people you don’t want to kill.” Apparently Guy considered himself still on the job of sitting on Hal.

“Hail, the victorious heroes!” Boo called, leaning out the window, waving.

“Hoi!” Jane called back.

Joey launched himself at her as soon as she opened the door. “You were on the radio!”

“We were?” Jane let herself be hugged tight and kissed on the cheek by the little boy.

“Sean saw it all.” Alton climbed down from his truck. Their cousin Sean Roach was the late-night DJ at KDKA radio. He must have been pulling an all-nighter to be at the station so insanely early in the morning. From the studios in the Gateway Center skyscraper, Sean would have had a front row seat to the Market Square action. “Sean bumped the morning show programming so he could do play-by-play. He knew it was you; he recognized Bertha. He was doing damage control. He kept saying things like ‘the unknown heroes have saved the pinned and helpless police officer!’ Speaking of which: Bowman is at Mercy with a concussion and minor lacerations.”

Jane laughed with relief, kissed Joey on the forehead, and handed him off to Marc. “EIA wasn’t happy but the sekasha made them let us go. I think we need to seriously go over the peace treaty and find out what it really says.”

“We need to find the nests,” Nigel stated firmly.

We need to plan a wedding. We need to get a girl for Nigel. We need to break the news—gently—to Hal.

Joey squealed and giggled as Marc tossed him up in the air. “Higher!”

Marc complied, throwing him higher and higher, making him shriek with laughter.

“Whoa! Don’t put him into orbit!” Alton snagged Joey out of the air. “Come on, we got to make our fresh dough and mozzarella cheese for the pizza.”

“Pizza!” Joey cried. “Yay!”

Taggart gave her a questioning glance. He clearly was wondering when she wanted to break the news.

Geoffrey misunderstood the look. “We survived! Now, we cook!”

Taggart grinned. “I like this tradition.”

While her brothers started dinner, Jane covertly scanned the laws concerning marriage and immigration. The proof of identification didn’t fall on Taggart but on her. She had to provide a Pittsburgh birth certificate and proof of continued residency. Otherwise it was fairly simple. File for license. A blood test for God-knows-what. Pick out a date. Tell her family.

Alton had fresh milk from Grandma Gertie’s Dairy. The process of transforming it into fresh mozzarella fascinated Joey. Geoffrey worked on turning tomatoes from Jane’s garden into sauce. Marc made dough.

Guy scoured her pantry and refrigerator for possible toppings. “How do you live this way? There’s barely anything in here! What do you eat?”

Jane smacked him instead of answering. She enjoyed cooking but it felt like too much effort to cook just for herself. She ate with family on Sundays, and on Fridays with her friends. The rest of the week was hit or miss. She crossed the kitchen to help him locate suitable toppings. “Kalamata olives. Anchovies. Chorizo. Done. Go pick some spinach and fresh basil.”

Chesty stood up with a deep growl, looking toward the front door. A moment later the doorbell rang.

“Hyeholde has a doorbell?” Guy asked in surprise. No one ever used it.

“I didn’t hear a car,” Marc stated.

The doorbell rang again.

Jane pointed at her brothers. “Stay.” She motioned Chesty to follow her out into the foyer. Who the hell was at her front door? She put her right hand back so she could quickly pull her pistol and cautiously cracked the door open.

Yumiko stood on the doorstep. She wore a loose, black tank top and capris. Her crow feet were bare. There was no sign of her massive wings. “We need to talk.”

“Yes, we do.” Jane agreed without opening the door wider.

“You have Joey Shoji.”

“Yes. I consider him family. I won’t allow him to be harmed in any way; that includes being used as a figurehead by a religious fanatic.”

Yumiko snorted. The edges of her lips might have twitched with a smile. “He seems happy here.”

“You’ve been watching.”

“We couldn’t risk Joey being hurt.”

We? As in Yumiko wasn’t alone? The truth or a bluff?

“Joey doesn’t know what happened to his family after he was taken,” Jane said.

Yumiko’s eyes narrowed. “And?”

Was she being clueless or cautious? Jane realized that if the oni hadn’t succeeded in capturing all of Joey’s family, then Yumiko wouldn’t want to leak their location.

“I don’t know who survived.” Jane caught herself from adding that she didn’t care. “My father died when I was twelve. I can’t imagine losing your entire family. Joey’s a little boy. He needs people, lots of people that care about him, to help him over this. If it’s just you here to pick him up—then—no, you can’t have him.”

Yumiko studied her in silence for several minutes. Jane really hoped that they weren’t going to start shooting at each other. Yumiko stepped back and waved at the treetops. There was a rustling and then two small figures winged down out of the trees.

It was a tengu girl, probably only fourteen years old, and a boy around ten.

The girl hid behind war paint and a fierce glare. The boy hid behind Yumiko.

“We’re here for Joey,” the girl announced. “You better give him to us.”

“This is Keiko Shoji.” Yumiko nudged the boy and gave him a comforting smile. “And Mickey.”

Joey’s cousins. Not what Jane expected but they certainly looked like Joey.

“We’re making pizza. Do you want to join us? It would be easier on Joey.”

“Pizza!” Mickey cried, full of eagerness.

Keiko gave Jane a teenage look of disgust that said she couldn’t believe that Jane had stooped so low. Yumiko obviously was looking for a trap.

There was a slight noise behind Jane. Yumiko reacted instantly, pulling Keiko behind her and reaching for her pistol.

“Stop it!” Boo shouted.

Yumiko went unnaturally still. It was as if Boo’s words had turned her to stone. Then slowly the tengu woman cocked her head in puzzlement. “Who are you? You’re one of the Chosen.”

“This is my baby sister,” Jane said. “We have lots to talk about.”

Joey’s reunion with his cousins was at first joyous and then heartbreaking as they explained to the little boy that his aunt and uncle had been killed. He cried uncontrollably until he took refuge in Boo’s arms. Boo rocked him, hugging him close and singing “Skyfall” just like their mother would have. “Let the sky fall, when it crumbles, we will stand tall, face it all, together, at skyfall.”

“Any of the Chosen bloodline can command an individual tengu. The Chosen One—Jin Wong—can command the entire Flock. For centuries, we’ve kept the existence of the Chosen One and the yamabushi secret from the oni. We’d thought that the raid on the Shoji house had been nothing more than the oni rounding up tengu that had slipped from their grasp. They’d staged similar attacks on other houses. That they changed your sister means that we were wrong. Riki had been cooperating with them while I searched for Joey.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “He’s had to do some horrible things to keep up the impression that he’s cooperating with them.”

Like kidnapping the viceroy’s bride and brother?

Riki was the cousin that nightly read the Harry Potter books to Joey. Jane had assumed that he’d been killed. She understood being willing to do anything and everything to get a family member back. Hopefully now that Joey was safe, the tengu would listen to reason. “I want to free Tinker and Windwolf’s blade brother.”

“Riki doesn’t think that’s wise. He’s learned that Pure Radiance foretold Tinker being the lynchpin to stopping the oni. The greater bloods think they understand dreaming; they believe this means they can use her to do the opposite. Kajo’s Eyes are strong but they’re young, untrained and overly confident. They think they have outmaneuvered Pure Radiance. What they don’t realize is that Pure Radiance rarely makes her prophecies known nor has she ever left court since she ended the Clan Wars. She obviously wanted the Eyes to act on her prophecy.”

“Pure Radiance set Tinker up?”

“Yes. She’s played to the Eyes’ weakness; they have human lifespans. They are very good at the short game; they can easily keep one step ahead of someone who thinks day to day. Pure Radiance is Vision’s daughter, the oldest of the intanyei seyosa. A decade is a child’s game to her. She can plot out a century, guiding full civilizations toward an outcome that she wants. I think she’s giving the Eyes enough rope to hang themselves.”

“And Tinker is just an expendable tool?”

“Possibly to Pure Radiance. Not to us. We are attempting to keep her safe.”

It was a politically safe, wise thing for Yumiko to claim but not necessarily the truth. “Attempting” indicated that the tengu were far from in control of the outcome. If they were, half the Shoji family wouldn’t have been butchered.

“The oni will come looking for Boo.” Yumiko detoured the conversation to something closer to home.

“I am not leaving my family.” There was a tremble of fear in Boo’s voice.

“We can keep her hidden.” Alton said.

Unless we have a big-ass Kryskill wedding.

“If you come with us, we’ll be able to give you wings,” Keiko said.

Boo gave her a look of utter want and glanced to each of her siblings. “I’ve lived without wings for fourteen years. I can live another year or two without them.”