Elfhome

16: MORGUE BREAKING AND ENTERING

Lain had given Tinker swabs for taking DNA samples from the kids. They drove back into town with the box in her lap as she argued with Stormsong.

“All we’re going to do is stick these swabs in their mouth and rub them around a little.” Tinker couldn’t see why this was so hard to understand.

“Collecting DNA smacks of spell-working,” Stormsong repeated, using different words. So far she’d found three ways to say it.

“We’re not going to do any spell-working!” Tinker cried. “We need to know what the oni were doing with the kids. The oni could have been designing a plague to wipe out elves, or creating a spell to merge elves into crows like the tengu, or — or — I don’t know, and that’s what scares me. They could have been planning anything.”

“This is a bad idea.” Stormsong found a fourth way to say the same thing. “The first step of spell-working is establishing a baseline.”

Tinker wanted to scream. “Are you getting hit with a big sledgehammer that says ‘duck now or die’ or are you just bitching on general principle?”

Stormsong huffed. “Unlike some people, I don’t need clairvoyance to see trouble coming.”

“The children are Stone Clan.” Pony stepped in to mediate. “It is true that their clan is failing them utterly, but Stormsong is concerned that the Stone Clan will attempt to use anything questionable we do against us.”

Stormsong finally put her objection into a format Tinker could understand. “If the Stone Clan accuses us of spell-working, then the Wyverns will most likely see it in the worst light. They are the best of us because they were most heavily spell-worked.”

“Okay, that’s useful to know,” Tinker said.

“And since Oilcan is acting as the children’s sama,” Stormsong said, “he could be punished for recklessly endangering them.”

“Oh.” Tinker considered pitching the swabs out the window.

“Domi is right,” Pony said. “We need to know why the oni were kidnapping the children and keeping them alive. We will have to use caution in gathering the samples.”

Obviously, it was time to prove that she was the smartest person in Pittsburgh.

Which was how they ended up at the morgue.

Tinker avoided the front door on the theory that the fewer people they talked to, the better. She had Pony park where the ambulances and hearses unloaded the bodies. There was a big button marked PRESS FOR NIGHT ATTENDANT that she ignored. Instead she proceeded to hack the digital lock that required a transmitter key for entrance.

“You have no idea how disturbing it is that you know how to do that,” Stormsong murmured.

Tinker blushed. “People lock themselves out of their cars all the time. Since we operated a tow truck, they expected us to be able to help them.”

“Cars don’t have these types of locks.”

“This is just the end of the natural progression of experimentation once you begin playing with locks.”

Stormsong laughed, and the lock bleeped as it unlocked.

The body-admittance area was all bare cement, easy to hose down. The place smelled like a hospital, only worse, and their footsteps echoed weirdly.

There seemed to be no one there. It was perfect that the place was deserted, but it was also spooky. The actual morgue was through a series of locked doors that she had to hack the security to get open. She left the doors unlocked behind her so they could leave quickly.

The morgue was one giant walk-in freezer. The door opened to the solid smell of decomposing flesh. There were banks after banks of smaller doors to the drawers that held the actual dead people. The cold made Tinker’s skin goose bump over.

What a smart idea: visit the morgue. Who knew it would be so big?

But it made sense. The Pittsburgh area had once had a population in the millions. Considering they were in the middle of a war, the large facility was probably a good thing, too.

She so didn’t want to start opening drawers. There were dead naked strangers inside. Only way it could be worse was if they weren’t strangers. Gods, surely by now Nathan was safely buried.

Tinker scanned the freezer doors. She was really hoping for labels identifying who was where. The drawers were only numbered. Apparently there was a computerized list somewhere. It would be quicker to open and look than find a computer, hack through its security, and then figure out their filing system.

She just hated how icky it was going to be. It did not help that her Hand looked as freaked out as she felt. From what Windwolf told her in the past, elves had very little experience with the dead. Counting her grandfather, she had known more than a dozen people that died of old age. Morgues, funerals, and graveyards were human territory.

At least when she cracked open the first drawer, she found herself looking down at a bag-shrouded face and not bare feet. She should probably get gloves on and a mask.

After the first dozen or so times, she kind of got used to unzipping the bag and finding someone dead underneath the heavy plastic.

A systematic search was going to take forever. It took longer than she expected to pull out a drawer, unzip the bag, verify that it wasn’t an elf inside, zip it back up, and get the drawer back into place with the door closed. It was going to take hours, and every minute they spent at the morgue increased the risk of being caught.

Tinker was reconsidering taking the time to hack their computer system when she realized that Pony and Stormsong were in full Shield mode; close enough to her to cover her with their protective spells, hands riding on their swords, their focus toward the front door. “What is it?”

“Someone is coming,” Stormsong said.

“Shit,” Tinker whispered.

Tinker heard footsteps nearing, and a moment later the far door opened. “Hello?” a woman bellowed, and only when she yelped, “Nae, nae, nae! Scarecrow! Call off your dogs!” did Tinker recognize Esme’s voice.

“Hold!” Pony called to the others.

Esme came stomping up the hallway, ignoring the elves now that they had stood down. It was still weird looking at Esme and knowing that she was her mother. Due to a fluke in the hyper-phase gate design, Esme had spent all of Tinker’s life stuck in one moment in time and hadn’t aged. She was still only a few years older than Tinker. Like Lain, Esme was a head taller than Tinker could ever hope to get, boyishly thin, and, judging by the color of her eyelashes, a pale blonde under the purple hair dye. Despite a week of hospital rest, Esme looked haggard. She still wore her torn, bloody, and soot-smudged jumpsuit.

“I keep running into you at the strangest places,” Esme said. “What are you doing here, Scarecrow?”

If Tinker ever heard a stupid question, that was it. Breaking into the morgue was so blatant, it had to be obvious. “I’ve got official business here. What are you doing here?”

“Last I checked,” Esme said, “I’m here because a snarky elf princess landed me in Pittsburgh.”

Tinker shook her finger at Esme in frustration. “I saved your ass.”

“Yes, you did.” Esme scrubbed at her face as if she was exhausted. “I’m sorry; it’s all just hitting me hard. Everything I’ve been working for is over and done, and I’m here, and I’m not going to be stuck out in space, trying to piece together a life on whatever was left of a colony on the other side of the galaxy that’s been hit by a major disaster. I’m stuck on Elfhome — in a city that’s been hit by a major disaster — so there’s sixty thousand humans instead of a few hundred — and there’s oni and tengu and a talking dragon. And last week was eighteen years ago.”

Tinker winced. It hadn’t occurred to her that Esme was facing such a wrenching mental readjustment. The tengu had been taking it all in stride, but they knew about the tengu, oni, and talking dragon going in. When all was said and done, Esme had risked her life to save countless others.

“I don’t want to talk about what I’m doing here,” Tinker admitted reluctantly. “Because it could get me killed.”

“Oh.” Esme’s eyebrows knitted into worry. “Maybe you should just leave. I had a bad dream.”

“You dreamed about domi?” Pony asked, making Tinker realize that they’d been speaking Elvish with a smattering of English.

Esme shook her head. “No. I–I’ve been looking for someone. I had a dream about the place where he used to live. I dreamed of him running through the big empty rooms, laughing in hazy sunlight, and when I woke up in the hospital, it suddenly hit me that I could see him. I never thought I’d actually get to see him, and I just about lost it when I realized I would.”

“Him?” Tinker was feeling slightly betrayed. Esme realized that eighteen years had past and went looking for an old lover? Did she even remember she had left a kid behind?

Esme gave a laugh that edged along mania. “When I checked out of the hospital, I had some vague plan of calling my sister, but I just kept walking and walking. I hiked the whole way to the island. The place is in ruins — no one has lived there for years. The place looks like it was ransacked. There were pencil marks and dates on the wall — a record of him getting taller and taller — and then five years ago, it just stops!”

Tinker’s grandfather must have only told Esme that he was calling his grandchild Alexander Graham Bell. Esme was looking for a son. From the sound of it, Esme had gone to the abandoned hotel on Neville Island where Tinker had grown up. After their grandfather died, Oilcan had talked her into moving to McKees Rocks. He moved their grandfather’s books and files to safe storage, leaving behind all their childhood clutter, and boarded shut the hotel.

“There were all the little bits of him scattered around,” Esme said wistfully. “Little toy robots and model airplanes and one hallway that had tiny little handprints all up and down it in blue paint — okay, that was kind of Blair Witch creepy — but it was his hands. And he had the constellations done in glow-in-the-dark paint on his ceiling — just like I had when I was a kid.”

Lain had helped Tinker paint the stars, muttering darkly, “Nature or nurture?”

“He was everywhere and nowhere,” Esme whispered. “And that’s when I really did lose it.”

All of which Tinker could have prevented if she had just told Esme the truth when they were on the Dahe Hao together. “I’m sorry.”

“I cried myself to sleep on his bed.” Esme walked to one of the morgue drawers and pressed her hand to the stainless-steel door. “And then I dreamed where I’d find him.”

“What? Oh, no, no, no.” Tinker moved to stop her, but Esme opened the door and pulled out the drawer. “You don’t need to—”

There was something horribly wrong about the shrouded body inside. The hidden geography was all too short and lacking in landmarks: the peak made by the nose, the valley of the throat, the distant points of the feet. Esme unzipped the bag in one rushed motion, like she was getting it done fast before she chickened out.

It was the male child that the oni had butchered down to eat — a gruesome collection of parts. Laid out like a half-assembled jigsaw puzzle, it was made more horrifying by what was missing.

Esme whimpered and stumbled backward.

Despite coming to the morgue to find the murdered children, Tinker wasn’t prepared for the sight. She could only stare dazed at the butchered male and remember the smell of roasting meat that hung in the air of the whelping pen’s kitchen.

“Domi,” Pony murmured. “Can we do what is needed and cover it up?”

Tinker blinked up at him, confused for a minute as to why they were there. Oh, yes, DNA samples. She fumbled with one of the swabs to unwrap it and then forced herself to rub the clean white tip against the bloody stump of a severed arm.

Only as she closed the cap did she realize Esme was silently weeping.

“Oh, Esme, this isn’t your son,” Tinker said. “This is a male elf child killed by the oni. I was looking for him.”

Esme shook her head. “I dreamed that I’d find him here. I opened the drawer and there he was — newborn like when I left Earth — crying. It’s him.”

Stormsong snorted. “You’ve flung wide open a door that’s not easy to keep closed in the first place. Your blood tie to domi means that her nuenae can easily overlap yours. The more you interact with her, the more her nuenae will transpose yours.”

Esme wasn’t listening. “He’s here!” She walked halfway down the row of doors and opened another drawer, seemingly at random. “And he’s helpless — and flying monkeys are coming for him.”

“Oh gods, I thought we were done with that shit,” Tinker whimpered. Esme had driven her nearly mad by invading Tinker’s dreams, calling for help through the only line of communication available to the astronauts trapped in space. It had been an insane week full of prophetic nightmares. Again and again, Tinker had found herself facing a twisted echo of something she had dreamed. She so didn’t want to go through that again.

Esme unzipped the body bag to reveal the young elf female.

Tinker groaned at the sight of the child. None of the dead humans had been battered into broken bones held together with torn flesh. Tinker’s hand shook as she swabbed the inside of the female’s mouth, trying to ignore that her jaw had been broken so badly that the bones had pierced the skin and half her teeth were missing. Tinker murmured apologies as she plucked a few strands of hair free, just in case.

“What are you doing?” Esme asked.

“I’m trying to figure out why the oni kidnapped these children,” Tinker explained. “Only, establishing DNA baselines is the first step of bioengineering magic — which is highly illegal, even for me.”

“We should hurry,” Pony said. “If someone else is coming.”

“There’s one more,” Tinker told Esme. “A second male. Can you find him, too?”

Esme frowned but nodded. She concentrated for a minute before picking a third drawer on the other side of the room.

Taking samples from the second male was even more emotionally wrenching. His face was relatively undamaged, and he reminded Tinker of Oilcan. Suddenly she couldn’t bear to be in the room, wearing the gloves and the mask, breathing in the omnipresent reek of rotting flesh. She fled out of the room, blinking back tears, desperately tearing at the gloves with latex-encased fingers.

Pony wordlessly caught her hands with his and pulled the gloves free and then held her until the need to scream and throw things passed.

“They shouldn’t be here,” Tinker growled. The children had been innocent and trusting and had forever ahead of them; they shouldn’t be locked in these little boxes, surrounded by death.

“No, they should not. They be should be given up to the sky so their souls can be free of their bodies.”

“What do you mean? How do we give them up to the sky?”

“They should be cremated as soon as possible. To be trapped in a dead body is torment to the soul.”

Tinker remembered then that most elf ghost stories started with someone dying and not being properly cremated. “How — how do I make this happen? Who takes care of these things?”

“Normally their clan.” Pony reluctantly added, “But none of the Stone Clan would know how.”

“Are you sure about that?” Tinker muttered.

“I did not know that you locked your dead into steel drawers,” Pony admitted unhappily. “I would have not known how to find this place even if I had known that was your custom.”

Tinker wanted to argue that any of the elves could ask Maynard for directions, but Pony had a point. The Stone Clan might have assumed that the children’s bodies had been automatically cremated by the humans once they’d been recovered from the whelping pens.

“Someone is coming.” Stormsong moved between Tinker and the door.

“It’s the flying monkeys,” Esme whispered and wisely moved back, giving the sekasha lots of room to move.

Tinker doubted very much it was literally flying monkeys. Riki had been the last person associated with that imagery. He had saved her life two or three times during the week of insane dreams. He had also kidnapped her twice. Tinker hid away the swabs in the messenger bag, freeing up her spell-casting hand.

She listened closely but could hear nothing. The sekasha, though, shifted as they tracked someone moving through the otherwise empty building.

Pony signed a question in blade talk.

Stormsong lifted up one finger then indicated that the sole invader was just beyond the last door. They stood tense for a long silence and then the doorknob slowly turned and the door creaked opened.

TV reporter Chloe Polanski stood in the doorway, eyes narrowing as she took in Tinker and the sekasha. She was in a flawless black pantsuit belted with a wide swatch of alligator leather. After a moment of calculating study, her predatory smile slid into place. “You’re so much easier to catch now, Vicereine. What are you doing here so late at night?”

Oh gods, could it get any worse? By tomorrow, everyone in Pittsburgh could know that Tinker was taking DNA samples.

Pony drew his ejae, his face set to a cold warrior death mask. Taking their cue from her First, the others drew their swords.

Yes, it could get worse. Tinker couldn’t lie in front of the sekasha. If she told Chloe about the DNA scans, her Hand would probably kill the reporter to keep her from spreading the information. Time to dance on the razor-sharp edge of truth.

“Several children of the Stone Clan were killed by oni.” Tinker frantically signed hold in blade talk. “Their bodies were brought here by mistake. Well, not really a mistake, but elves see storing the dead like this as a torture to the soul. I need to find someone that can cremate the children so their souls are released from their bodies — tonight, if possible.”

Yes, as of this moment, that’s the new plan, I’m not lying.

Chloe’s smile faded several notches. “The coroner and his staff are currently swamped with the oni dead from yesterday. They’ve set up a mass grave beyond the Rim. I doubt if you can get the bodies officially released tonight.”

That would explain why the morgue was so empty.

“I don’t need to have them officially released.” Tinker waved that aside; she was domi after all. “I just need someone that can burn the bodies. Tonight.”

Get rid of the evidence. Good plan. Who would know about cremation? Lain would.

Lain answered on the first ring with worry in her voice. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll have to get back to you on that.” It was not a good sign that apparently both Esme and Lain were seeing bad things in store for Tinker. “When you had my grandfather cremated, who did you call?”

“McDermott’s in McKees Rocks.” Lain didn’t ask why; she simply supplied the phone number. Did she already know or did she just stop asking awkward questions when Tinker descended on her with weirdness? “When you see my sister, bring her to me.”

Tinker sighed.

“Ladybug.” Lain used the “you will obey” tone.

“Okay, I will.”

Chloe’s smile vanished completely as Tinker dialed McDermott’s. “You — you can’t just take them.”

“Yes, I can. The coroner’s office has no jurisdiction over elves — dead or alive.” A man picked up the line, identifying himself as Allen McDermott. “Yes, this is Tinker ze domi, head of the Wind Clan. Can you come to the morgue? I have three bodies that need to be cremated.”

Tinker hung up before the annoying questions on authorizations could start.

Chloe reached into her suit pocket and pulled out her eyepiece. “This is a clear abuse of power. You can’t just walk—”

Chloe froze, her eyes going wide as Esme suddenly stepped out of the shadows with a gun leveled at the reporter.

“I don’t know who you are, although you look very familiar. .” Esme trailed off, cocking her head.

“You’ve probably seen me on television.” Chloe held up her eyepiece as explanation. “Pittsburgh only has three TV stations.”

“Put it away,” Esme growled. “And stay away from my kid.”

“You have a child?” Chloe paled.

“Alexander Graham Bell is my—”

“Daughter,” Tinker said to cut off any confusion, since she was fairly sure Chloe — if not all of Pittsburgh — knew her real name by now.

“Daughter?” Esme glanced sharply at Tinker.

“You’re Captain Shenske’s daughter?” Chloe gave Tinker a horrified look.

“Yes, I’m her daughter.” Tinker stayed focused on Chloe, not wanting to see how her mother took the news. Why, though, was it so upsetting to Chloe? It wasn’t like she was suddenly getting a daughter dumped in her lap.

“Fine. I’ll stay away from her.” Chloe backed out the door.

Tinker really wanted to bolt out of the room on Chloe’s heels instead of turning around and facing Esme.

She made Lain lie to me. She drove me nearly insane.

With that smoldering anger stoked back to a flame, Tinker turned back to Esme.

Esme was giving her a befuddled look, as if Tinker’s words had sunk in but hadn’t made any sense. “Wait! What?”

“I’m Alexander Graham Bell.” Tinker pointed to herself. “I’m your daughter.”

“Scarecrow?” Esme said faintly.

“Daughter,” Tinker said. “As in: not a boy.”

Esme shook her head. “But — but — you’re an elf!”

“Well, that’s a little more complicated to explain,” Tinker allowed.

Explanation had to wait, though, as city officials descended on them, responding to anonymous phone calls about “someone stealing bodies from the morgue.” Chloe must have started calling in strike forces before she even left the building. The police showed up first, followed by the deputy mayor and three city council members for reasons that Tinker couldn’t fathom except maybe that they were pigheaded enough to argue with Tinker. Someone made the mistake of contacting Maynard, who was out with Prince True Flame, which led to the Wyverns getting involved.

The sudden incoming wave of red made Tinker’s heart hammer in her chest. If the Wyverns found the DNA swipes, things could go ugly quickly. She casually swung her messenger bag with the swipes back behind her so it was hidden from view.

“I will deal with them, domi,” Pony murmured.

That was what she was afraid of: he would only tell them the truth. Her fear must have shown on her face as he gave her a slight smile.

“Don’t worry,” he whispered. “You have taught me that truth is a weapon to wield carefully.”

She had? That made her feel weirdly guilty. Pony embodied a hundred years of perfection: corrupted by her in one hectic summer. She nodded, trusting him.

Signing to Cloudwalker to take his place as Shield, Pony intercepted the incoming Wyverns. Their conversation was in machine-gun High Elvish, rattling out faster than Tinker could follow. She focused on keeping the undertaker from McDermott’s from leaving empty-handed.

“The coroner would tell you — if he were here — that he doesn’t have any jurisdiction over elves — alive or dead.” Tinker stood firm on her strongest argument, then pushed on to points she wasn’t as sure about. “I’m the Vicereine of the Westernlands.” At least that’s what people kept telling her. “That means I do have jurisdiction over all elves — not just the Wind Clan.” As far as she could tell, that’s what it meant. She was going with that until someone told her otherwise. “These children have suffered enough. It’s time they are decently put to rest.”

“The elves have their laws,” the councilwoman said. “And we have our own laws and procedures. We’re tired of having your people walk all over our rules. This is still our city.”

Her people? Had they forgotten she was a Pittsburgh-born human until Mid-Summer’s Eve? And this wasn’t about who owned the city but basic decency. “Do you have any kids?”

“Yes, a little boy.”

“If your boy died outside the city, on Elfhome, you’ll be happy with letting the elves do whatever they want to his dead body? Let it lay out where the animals could eat him? Stuff and mount him?”

The woman gasped with outrage. “They wouldn’t dare—”

“That’s what you’re doing to their children! Locking those kids up in boxes is an abomination on the level of having your boy taxidermied.”

“Waiting until tomorrow morning will not make any differ—”

Tinker hadn’t noticed that the Wyverns had left the room until they came sweeping back in from the morgue. They projected extremely pissed off, which was good, because they were talking High Elvish full tilt; she suspected none of the humans were following. Unfortunately, they were aiming their conversation at her.

“Forgiveness, I don’t understand.” Tinker looked to Pony for help.

“They demand that you have the children given to the sky immediately.”

Tinker turned to the humans, who thankfully spoke enough Elvish to understand Pony. “Okay, are you going to do what I asked or do you want to tell the Wyverns that they need to wait until tomorrow?”

Luckily none of them were totally stupid as well as pigheaded.

Remembering her promise to Lain, Tinker dragged Esme along on the impromptu procession to the funeral home. Her mother hadn’t said anything during the entire three-ring circus; she only watched Tinker in unnerving silence. The silent treatment continued even once they were safely isolated in the Rolls-Royce. Tinker figured that Esme was angry that Tinker hadn’t explained their connection the first time they met.

“You’re the one that popped me in the easy-bake oven and skipped town,” Tinker grumbled, slumping down in the front seat between Pony and Stormsong. “If anyone has the right to be pissed off, it’s me.”

Esme sighed in the backseat. “I knew that the oni would kill every last human in Pittsburgh if Leonardo Dufae didn’t have an heir to his genius, a brilliance that could close the door that he opened. So I found your grandfather and talked him into using Leo’s sperm to make — to make you. And I knew that I needed to save Jin Wong, so I had to jump through the gate.”

Anyone else probably would have just tried talking Lain into leaving Pittsburgh. Lain, though, needed Elfhome like she needed air. Esme couldn’t simply move her sister to the safety of Earth; she needed to make Pittsburgh safe. The route she took seemed insane, but it was hard to argue with the proven success of it.

Still, Tinker tried. “So you just handed over an egg and took off? Didn’t you even bother to find out your baby’s gender?”

In the rearview mirror, Tinker saw Esme flinched as if struck. “No, it wasn’t like that. At first, yes, you were just Leo’s heir, but then I started to realize that I might not survive the crash, and, if I did, I wasn’t ever returning to Earth. You would be all that was left of me after I was gone. You stopped being Leo’s child to me. You became mine. You became precious to me.”

“No, you thought you had a son. I’m in no way precious to you.”

“Yes, you are.” Esme leaned forward over the seat to pinch Tinker’s cheek. “And you’re so much cuter than I ever imagined.”

“Oh, gee, don’t do that.”

Stormsong caught Esme’s hand and twisted it hard enough to get a yelp of pain. “I don’t care who you are, you will respect domi.”

“Okay!” Esme sat back, rubbing her hand. “Now, exactly how did you end up an elf princess?”

Tinker started with saving Windwolf’s life during Shutdown just before Mid-Summer’s Eve and everything that followed. Well — not everything—she’d been embarrassingly clueless through many points. Just because Esme was her mother didn’t give her rights to a full confession. Tinker got detoured back to the first time she saved Windwolf — the day Blue Sky’s father died — when she made an offhand mention about the magical tie she had thought existed between her and Windwolf.

“It happened so fast that my memories are blurred and disjointed. Everyone was running and screaming. There was a big tri-axle Mack dump truck sitting at the edge of the faire ground, and I scooted under it. The saurus pinned Lightning Strikes to the ground beside the truck and was tearing him in half.” Tinker shuddered at the memory. “I don’t know what I was thinking — I was thirteen and about ninety pounds dripping wet — but I tried to kill it with a tire iron. Not my best plan.”

“You saved Wolf,” Pony murmured. “He was unconscious next to Lightning Strikes.”

“I didn’t see him at the time.” Tinker laughed. “All my attention was taken up by a pissed-off saurus trying to dig me out from under the dump truck. When I did finally see Windwolf, I thought he was mad at me. His first words to me were ‘Fool, it would have killed you.’ It wasn’t a very romantic first meeting.”

“And this magical tie?” Esme asked.

They were crossing the McKees Rocks bridge, so Tinker made a long story shorter. “That’s just something Tooloo made up. She’s an elf that has a small farm at the end of this street.” Tinker pointed in the direction of Tooloo’s.

“I know Tooloo,” Esme said.

Tinker supposed that shouldn’t surprise her, but it did. Lain and Tooloo seemed to have a weird unspoken agreement that they would keep to their respective neighborhoods as much as possible. She had assumed that Esme would know only the places that Lain frequented. “Tooloo taught me everything I know about elves, but I’m finding out that she was lying about half of it. The whole ‘magical tie’ was a way to keep me away from Windwolf.”

“She was trying to keep you safe,” Esme said. “She knew what kind of danger lay in store for you.”

“How the hell would she know?” Tinker snapped. “Did you tell everyone but me who I really was?”

Esme shook her head. “Tooloo is the one that taught me how to control my dreams.”

It was totally unfair that at that moment they arrived at McDermott’s and Tinker had to go back to being ringmaster. Much as she wanted to grill Esme on Tooloo, she had to focus on the cremation.

McDermott’s was a big Victorian mansion full of dead stillness and memories Tinker thought were long forgotten. Once inside, she remembered the floor plan, the big rooms with stuffed chairs lining the walls and the painful smell of roses and age.

McDermott had endless forms he wanted signed guaranteeing he’d get paid and not arrested by the EIA. He also insisted she tour a room filled with coffins of oak and steel, making it sound like the law required a coffin for cremation. Considering the elves’ reaction to the drawers at the morgue — their horror at the idea of “locking the bodies in steel boxes”—the coffins were probably a bad idea. She managed to frighten McDermott into admitting that the coffins were optional and that cardboard boxes were acceptable. She talked him into forgoing even the boxes with assurances that no one would press charges. All the details, though, made her realize how much Lain had quietly taken care of when Tinker’s grandfather had died.

Start to finish, the cremations would take a good part of the night. Even though McDerrmott’s had four furnaces (a number that slightly boggled her mind,) it would take more than two hours to render the bodies to ash, and then several hours more for the ashes to cool enough to be safely handled. She stayed only long enough to see the bodies safely loaded into the furnaces and talked the Wyverns into standing guard the rest of the night. Tinker wanted to stay in motion so Chloe’s strike forces couldn’t corner her again. She didn’t need witnesses while getting the DNA from the living children — although she wasn’t sure how she was going to do that without raising questions.

Back in the Rolls-Royce, Esme proved she had used the time that Tinker had been distracted to piece together the logical end to Tinker’s story. “So, you and Windwolf fell in love and he used magic to change you into an elf?”

“That’s the basic gist of it.” Tinker was glad she didn’t have to go into details.

Esme cocked her head. “What I don’t get is why you would be in trouble if you’d been caught at the morgue.”

“Collecting DNA smacks of spell-working,” Tinker quoted Stormsong.

“So, why is it illegal for you do something that simple when Windwolf is going around doing wholesale transformation?”

Tinker sighed. “Technically, it isn’t illegal. The problem is political maneuvering shit. The Stone Clan are being asses.”

Esme nodded as if that made perfect sense.

Pony hadn’t asked where they were going when they left the funeral home, proof of his nervousness around the Wyverns. He stopped the car at the end of the McKees Rocks Bridge — a good, safe two miles from the Wyverns — to wait for Tinker to choose a direction.

Take the three swabs and Esme to Lain? Track down the other children with Esme still in tow? Surely the less people involved, the better, but the whole deadly trinity of Esme, Lain, and Tooloo could derail Tinker when time was against her. Not Lain’s then — and she needed a cover story for tracking down the children and sticking things in their mouths.

“Let’s go to Poppymeadow’s,” Tinker told Pony, and he turned the big gray car toward the gleaming city instead of taking the dark, twisting roads up to the observatory.

“So, you’re an elf with all the bells and whistles?” Esme asked.

Tinker nodded.

“And you wanted this?” Esme said it as if worried that Tinker been transformed against her will, or, worse, she had been desperate to be an elf.

Tinker realized her Hand were all listening intently. She had never considered before how they might feel about Windwolf using the nearly forbidden magic to change her. They must have been in full agreement with his decision or they would have stopped him. It was weird knowing that they had gone so against their principles to allow Windwolf to do the spell. They had all been nameless strangers to her then. She couldn’t even remember who had been with Windwolf the night he took her to the hunting lodge and changed her. It was a testament of how much they trusted Windwolf.

It seemed dangerous to admit she didn’t know what Windwolf had planned. It was her stupidity, not his. And yet she couldn’t lie — not to her Hand. They deserved the truth.

“I still don’t have a full grasp on what Windwolf was offering me,” she said cautiously. “It’s too big. I haven’t lived long enough to understand the limits of a human life to really wrap my brain around being an elf. I know, though, I have forever now to be with people I love.” Pony reached out and took her hand and laced his fingers with hers. “Besides, the bells and whistles are pretty cool.”

“Bells and whistles.” Esme stared out the window at the night-shrouded city. The streetlights overhead spilled light across her again and again as they drove through the dark streets. “The spell that Windwolf used — could it make anyone perfect as the sekasha yet able to use the domana spells?”

All the sekasha laughed at the question. Pony answered for her Hand. “You cannot see the world as black and white and in color at the same time.”

“In theory, though, someone could be godlike?” The light slid through the car and left Esme in shadows.

“We would not allow it,” Pony said. The others were so much in agreement that they didn’t even nod. “That is what the Skin Clan wanted: to be gods in flesh. We did not hunt them down for thousands of years just for someone else to replace them.”

“Sparrow said something about that the night she kept me from escaping the oni,” Tinker said. “She said that the Skin Clan had taken elves from one step above apes to one step below gods. She thought the elves were stagnating. She wanted to go back to the old ways.”

“What a fool,” Pony growled. “The reason we’re tall, fair, and immortal is that, in the beginning, the Skin Clan could only improve their bloodline by breeding with us after they had improved us.” His loathing for how the Skin Clan had genetically screwed over the elves was obvious in his voice. “They couldn’t introduce a weakness into our stock without fear of passing it on to their children. After they became immortal, though, they eventually stopped caring about their bloodline; they only wanted to enhance themselves. They created spells that allowed them to safely manipulate their own DNA. They could experiment with us until they found a desirable trait and then duplicate it in themselves. We would have become as twisted as the oni if we had not killed them all.”

“Sparrow must have seen the oni as a replacement for the Skin Clan,” Tinker said. “I suppose it made sense for her to work with them; she wanted to be made domana caste. I don’t understand, though, why the Stone Clan domana would be working with the oni.”

“Wait, what’s this?” Esme asked. “They’re working with the oni?”

Oops. “I told you that they were being asses,” Tinker grumbled. “We think — but can’t prove — that the Stone Clan lured those children to Pittsburgh and all but handed them over to the oni.”

“That’s — that’s brutal! Why?”

“We don’t know,” Tinker said. “But I’m going to find out.”