Elfhome

17: GIVE ME A BEAT

Oilcan missed the start of the war. He wanted to believe that the tengu had started it, intentionally or not, with a simple show of inhuman speed and strength. More likely, Team Tinker, knowing full well what a scumbag Riki had been, decided that Pittsburghers (meaning humans) weren’t going to be outdone by tengu. Certainly showing superiority by going faster fit the mentality of hoverbiker racers. Team Tinker took over cleaning the third floor and trash started to fly out the window, sans chute, as if fired from a confetti cannon. The tengu picked up the challenge and responded with a massive outpouring of trash from all the windows of the second floor. When Team Tinker realized that the tengu were outdoing them simply because the tengu outnumbered the humans, they must have started to call in reinforcements, because soon half of Pittsburgh descended on the school.

The elves at the enclaves would have had to be blind to miss the activity. While they arrived late, the elves made up for it with millennia-practiced teamwork. They plowed through the front door bearing brooms and mops like spears. They took over the foyer and spread outward in all directions, herding the tengu in front of them.

It was only a matter of time before the tengu collided with the humans and things turned violent. Oilcan had lost any pretense of control shortly after Windwolf dragged him off for the talk. In hopes of cutting the tension, he tried to coax Merry into getting out her olianuni and playing. Her music, he hoped, would remind everyone that they were working to help the kids, not outstrip the other groups.

“Oh, sama, I’ve never played all by myself.” Merry was peering up the foyer staircase where voices were raised in anger. “I–I don’t know. .”

He needed her playing well from the start, not going into a downward spiral from nervousness. He would need to take the lead and let her follow him the best that she could.

Oilcan went out to his pickup and got his Stratocaster and his sixty-watt amp from behind the bench seat. Luckily the gym had been cleared by the tengu and the hardwood floors scrubbed clean by the elves until they gleamed, smelling of lemon polish. If you ignored the bullet holes gouged into the walls, it was a perfect venue. He plugged in his amp, jacked in his guitar, and started into the melody for “America.”

“Sama!” Merry’s eyes went huge and her hands slowly crept up to cover her heart as if she were afraid it would burst out of her chest. “You — you’re an artisan?”

Oilcan laughed. “No, no, I can play well enough to get by. Moser is an artisan. But come on, play with me.”

At that point she couldn’t unpack her instrument fast enough. Looking like a bastard child of a xylophone and steel drum, the olianuni wrapped around Merry with twice the range of a piano but played like a percussion instrument. The low notes rumbled like thunder and the high notes chimed, and it jammed like heaven with his Stratocaster.

It was hard to imagine anyone calling Merry’s playing just adequate. She glowed as she played, her mallets a blur. As she warmed up, she added mad flourishes with her mallets on the upswing and little yips of excitement. He started with the songs he was fairly sure she knew, those he had glimpsed in her hand-scribed songbook. He had been hoping that she could just keep up with him, but she outstripped him. Encouraged, Oilcan launched into songs that Windchime had been most familiar with and thus most likely taught her.

Almost as if their songs summoned them, the members of Naekanain appeared. Snapdragon showed up with his tribal drums, Moser with his bass guitar, and Briar with a bottle of ouzo, and they really let loose, tearing into the human-elf fusion of music that was uniquely Pittsburgh. As always, Moser’s deep growl of English and bastardized Low Elvish was electrifying against Briar’s angelic High Elvish. As they played, more and more people drifted into the gym to listen.

Oilcan was glad to see that the growing audience was all three races, although they still kept to separate camps. The tengu with their backless tank tops and unruly short black hair perched on the bleachers. Elves, looking ethereal even while leaning on brooms, their glorious long hair braided with ribbons, kept to the back of the room. Humans gathered close to the music, varied as snowflakes: short and tall, thin and wide, ugly and beautiful, white and black and Asian.

“You should have charged a cover for this,” Moser shouted at him as Snapdragon and Merry blasted into an instrumental duet that was more like a duel of speed.

“They paid with labor,” Oilcan shouted back.

“No food?” Moser pouted.

“There is food.” Tinker appeared out of the crowd, carrying a basket fragrant with the scent of meat dumplings. A great deal of food, considering the number of Poppymeadow’s people behind her bearing baskets.

“Coz!” Oilcan bumped shoulders with her in greeting. She bumped him back with a grin. She was dressed down in T-shirt and shorts, looking the most like herself in months. She had her five bodyguards with her, although for some odd reason they all had cat whiskers drawn on their faces.

“You always were my favorite.” Moser swung his guitar onto his back and snatched the basket out of Tinker’s hands.

“What about the next set?” Oilcan cried. While he was glad to see Tinker, her arrival certainly was triggering a shift in the audience. All three groups were moving in, trying to be as close to her as her Hand would allow. He knew that the humans were peeved that the elves had “stolen” their girl. To the elves she was domi and had “singlehandedly” defeated the dragon that even Prince True Flame couldn’t kill. She held the tengu, and judging by the way they looked at her, that mattered a lot to them.

But none of the groups seemed happy about having to share her. Stopping the music would be bad. But it wasn’t like Moser was being paid to perform beyond the food that Tinker had just handed him.

“Sing your cousin that new song you wrote for her,” Moser said.

“You wrote me a song?” Tinker squealed.

“Bastard,” Oilcan snarled at Moser. He hadn’t told Moser that the song was about Tinker, but the words were obviously inspired by her.

Moser backed away with the basket. “You said I butchered the words anyhow!”

“You wrote me a song?” Tinker said. “You never wrote me a song before.”

Oilcan had written lots of songs about Tinker; he’d just never shared them with anyone. The lyrics ranged from angry to loving to overprotective, depending on his mood, and once the moment was passed, the words felt too dangerous. What if Tinker thought he was always that angry with her? How badly would she take (because she would take it badly) the rant against her self-centered obsessive curiosity — especially since the whole thing with Nathan had ended so badly? And gods forbid, someone got the wrong idea about the whole “crawl into my bed, hold me tight, and make me feel all right” that he wrote when he was ten and she was six.

Tinker smacked him. “Don’t you dare say no if you sold it to Moser.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll play it.” He had sold it because it felt safe — mostly because it wasn’t about his relationship with her. He wasn’t sure, though, how she would take it. He led into the melody so Merry had a chance to learn it. “It changes though, watch for it, and — and improvise.”

Merry laughed and nodded, eyes gleaming with her joy, her face glistening with sweat.

It was started as a ballad duet in High Elvish between him and Briar. He sang of the attack and defense sword movements of a sekasha and moved his guitar into rough approximations of the stances. Briar’s counter lines were the domana shield and attack spells; she moved her hands elegantly through the movements that a domi would use to call magic from the clan’s Spell Stones. And then the song changed, dropping into something wilder, untamed, and in Low Elvish, speaking of the shared vow of protection, guarding each other, loving each other. Two people, bound together, each determined to protect the other at all cost.

Tinker was burning red with embarrassment, but she was holding tight to Pony’s and Stormsong’s hands with tears in her eyes. It didn’t seem as if she was going to freak out on him. When they went into the chorus the second time, all the elves joined in on Oilcan’s bass line, a thunder of approval.

He thought of himself as Wind Clan not just because Windwolf loved Tinker, although that was part of it. He thought of himself as Wind Clan because all of the clan had opened their hearts to his cousin and taken her in, and she loved them back. Her sekasha would die for her, and she would die for them, and for that reason Oilcan was Wind Clan.

And maybe that was the key to breaking the tension between the races. The music was only distracting the audience — and only mildly — from their hostility. The songs weren’t trying to unify them. What could he use? What would make them feel as if they were part of the whole? The only thing they had in common was Tinker.

He launched into “Godzilla of Pittsburgh.” It was strictly instrumental, and its reference to Tinker was obscure. The crowd, though, seemed to recognize her sweeping nature in the music. He thought about all the other songs he’d ever written for Tinker. Like the Godzilla song, they were obscure by their intimate nature. The people that really knew Tinker would recognize her, but this crowd didn’t know the real person — they only knew Tinker via secondhand stories.

What songs would suggest Tinker? Songs about hoverbike racing were obvious, since she had all but invented the sport.

He had just launched into the lyrical “Sky Diving” that he wrote about doing the jumps at Chang’s racetrack when he realized that Tinker was doing guerrilla-style face-painting attacks on the audience. He watched with confused amusement as she zigzagged about the gym, grabbing random people, pulling them down to her five-foot level, and, lightning quick, drawing cat whiskers on their faces. She pounced on elves, tengu, and human alike — seemingly at random — but after a dozen or so ambushes, he realized that she was cycling through the races, keeping even the number of painted per race. The oddest thing was that she seemed to be purposely ignoring anyone that was paying attention to her and only ambushing those focused on the music. The result was a growing mass of confused decorated people in her wake, gingerly touching their faces, unsure what Tinker had just done to them.

What was she up to?

The crowd, at least, had stopped snarling at each other and was moving with the music. They were seeing Tinker in the song, taking the massive ramps into the jumps, soaring through the air, and free-falling back to earth. Moser joined him, mouth full but hands free, whiskers drawn on his face, for the instrumental bridge. They were tearing down the last stretch when Merry gave a loud meep of surprise. Oilcan glanced behind him to see that Tinker had whiskered a very startled Merry. A wall of sekasha kept the rest of the audience from seeing whatever Tinker had done to the little female.

“Fields of Summer.” He shouted the next song in the set to Moser and then sidled up to Tinker. “What’s with the whiskers, Tink?”

“Prestidigitation.” Tinker waved her left hand in a showy flourish — and sketched whiskers on him quickly with her right. “There, you’re one of us now.”

Oilcan laughed despite the slight alarm that went through him. What was she distracting people from while she drew whiskers on them? As Wind Clan domi, she should have been able to command this crowd to do just about anything. It probably wasn’t something they should discuss in shouts in front of a crowd.

“Fields of Summer” wasn’t holding the whole audience. The humans were getting the reference to the ultimate casual in parties: a big empty field, a campfire, and an acoustic guitar for music. The elves and the tengu were drifting away, unfamiliar with the Pittsburgh tradition. Near the door there was a shove that turned into an angry staring match between the fringe of the tengu flock and some incoming laedin-enclave guards.

Oilcan scanned the audience, found Riki at the edge nearest Tinker, watching her with a slight frown. He caught Riki’s attention by playing the jarring notes of the song he had only ever shared with the tengu. Mother’s blood on my toes. .

Riki’s head whipped around, and he gave Oilcan a look of surprise and — oddly enough — hurt. Had it mattered that much that Oilcan had confided with him? That they shared that kind of pain? Oilcan jerked his head toward the brewing fight, and Riki followed his gaze and then nodded.

“What’s that?” Moser asked of the melody. “A new song?”

Oilcan shook his head. There was no way he’d play the sorrowful song publicly, especially with the audience on the edge like it was. He needed a song though, one to tie this whole crowd together. An idea of a song went through his head, and he started to fumble through a melody.

Moser quirked up an eyebrow but followed his lead. His frustration with the crowd fed into the tune. Couldn’t they just see that despite everything, they were all one people? At the very core, they had to have the same drive as his kids. Pittsburgh wasn’t a sane and simple place to live. You had to have a deep need to live here. The melody was defiant and angry, and the words, when they came, were furious.

“Blood on the pavement, blood on the blade, blood flows through common veins.” The words poured from somewhere deep inside of him, like they were being torn from his gut. “Three worlds bridged by a single span, steel that climbs from earth to sky. Freedom to create, freedom to fly — one world, one people, one kind. We are Pittsburgh.”

When he hit the chorus the second time, they all sang with him.

He and the rest of the band were all panting and dripping sweat and glowing with joy. It was like they had had a long session of really good sex. The humans in the crowd started to call for an encore, but Oilcan’s body felt rubbery with the effort to stay standing.

Tinker appeared out of the crowd, bouncing like a mad thing. She couldn’t possibly know how cute she looked, because she would have stopped otherwise. She bound up, claimed the microphone, and shouted, “We are Pittsburgh! We are one people!”

The crowd roared, loving her.

“When you see the whiskers on your face and the faces around you, remember! You’re not human, elf, or tengu — you’re a Pittsburgher! You’re one of us!”

They roared again.

“Thank you for all the help you’ve given my cousin. Now go home.”

The crowd laughed and went.

Despite his obvious exhaustion, Moser was still dancing. “This song is mine!” He had unplugged his electric guitar so there was no music to draw the crowd back but he could still strum through the chords of the new song. “I call dibs on it.”

Oilcan laughed. “If you can remember the words.”

Moser laughed and pulled out his cell phone. “I saw the gears grinding and knew what was coming. I recorded it.”

Oilcan high-fived Moser. “Let me hear.”

Tinker made a negative sound and gave Moser a little push. “You start that and you’ll be up all night. Go home, let the boy rest.”

“I’ll write up the score!” Moser promised as Briar grabbed his arm and hauled him out of the gym.

And suddenly it was all over. He had a massive house, five kids, and no idea if he even had a bed for the night. For all he knew, the upstairs was still filled with trash. He sat down on the floor and then went ahead and sprawled out on the smooth wood.

Tinker went off to make sure everyone actually left. She came back a few minutes later and nudged him with her toe. “I’m pretty sure this is a gym, not a bedroom.”

“They’re right about you being a genius.” Oilcan wished he could just sleep there on the gym floor. He had to find out, though, if the kids had someplace to sleep and if they had gotten some of the food that had circulated. Maybe he should pack up the kids and go back to his condo for the night. Then he remembered the indi, the chicks, and the puppy. He climbed back to his feet with a groan.

She poked him in the stomach. “You going to be okay?”

He laughed. He had no idea how to answer that truthfully. All day he had the sense of sinking in over his head until he couldn’t even see the surface.

“You know — no matter what — we’re always going to be family.” Tinker leaned her forehead against his shoulder. “You need something and it’s mine to give, it’s yours.”

He knew it to his core, but it was what he needed to hear. “I’ll be fine.”

Only after Tinker had left did Oilcan realize that he had no idea where his kids were. Even Merry had packed up her instrument and disappeared after the music ended; most likely scared off by the sekasha’s presence. The electricity was on in the school, but with the exception of the high fixtures of the gym, most of the light bulbs had been smashed. Trying not to panic, he got a flashlight from his pickup and headed up to the third floor that he had deemed “the family rooms.” His footsteps echoed through the dark, empty building.

He checked the classroom at the top of the stairs first. It was disappointingly cluttered. Apparently Team Tinker hadn’t finished cleaning the third floor. He started to turn away, when he recognized the smell of burnt popcorn. He turned back and panned the flashlight over the room. His microwave sat on its stand just inside the door. Beyond it was his overstuffed recliner and his nightstand.

It wasn’t litter in the classroom — it was the furniture from his condo! Someone had moved him lock, stock, and barrel. There were little towers of cans from his pantry, stacks of his ancient DVDs and CDs and Blue-ray disks, and heaps of clothes still on hangers from his closet. Everything he owned had been carried up and dropped at the first clear place on the floor. His belongings created island chains in the moonlight. His mattress canted against the far wall beside the windows.

“Sama?” Cattail Reeds came down the hall, carrying a spell light in one hand and a basket in the other. “Forgiveness, I didn’t have time to fix up your room.”

“Cattail! Where are the others?”

“Everyone else is asleep.” She yawned, waving the spell light back down the hallway toward the other classrooms.

“Did someone bring your beds?” He hated calling them beds, as they were just mattresses and sheets.

“Tinker ze domi had them brought from the small place.” Cattail had whiskers drawn on her face. He hadn’t seen any of the kids in the gym beyond Merry, but Tinker had obviously found them. “She brought food, too.”

It was intimidating how much Tinker could get done while acting silly. She had fed his kids and made sure they had someplace to sleep. “Oh, good. How clean are your rooms?”

“That is why we didn’t get your room straightened out.” She touched the whiskers on her face. “The Wind Clan was helping us clean our rooms. Ze domi made sure they were very kind to us. She said that we should think of ourselves as Pittsburghers first, not Wind Clan or Stone Clan.”

Oilcan had forgotten to ask Tinker about the true motive behind the whiskers. By Cattail’s tone, the concept of “one people” obviously puzzled her, despite having benefitted from it. Sooner or later, he needed to talk to the kids about being sponsored by the Wind Clan or going on alone as Stone Clan. Not now, though; not in the middle of the night when they were both dead on their feet.

“We saved this for you.” Cattail held up the basket that smelled of something warm and savory.

“Thank you.” He accepted it with guilt twisting in his stomach. He should have been the one making sure that the kids had food, not the other way around.

“Do you need help righting your room?” Cattail asked.

“No, go to bed. I’m going to eat and then go to sleep. We can do it tomorrow.”

He thought about the day as he cleared space for his mattress. The kids had amazed him with their strength. Just hours after being rescued from horrible torture, they had knitted themselves into a family, taking care of each other and working toward a better future. He knew it was in part, though, because they thought they had found a safe haven.

He could remember after his mother had died. It was months before his grandfather knew what happened and could come get him. He was shuffled between foster homes, not knowing what was going to happen to him. By the time he reached Pittsburgh, he was a fearful mess. Only after Tinker had convinced him that she wouldn’t let anyone take him away could he get through the night without crying. Whatever courage he had during the day drained away with the light.

The kids wouldn’t be doing so well if they realized how tentative their situation really was. He flipped down his mattress and sprawled onto it. The biggest problem was that he knew how tentative it was. It wasn’t even that he was human, but that he was only one person. He was anchor rider for Team Tinker, and both he and Tinker had been lucky not to be hurt in the smashups that occurred at the races. The city was at war, and the oni could attack any place, any time. One stray bullet and where would the kids be?

A hand on his shoulder woke him.

Oilcan opened his eyes to darkness, unsure of where he was. Moonlight streamed through too large a window. The bed felt too low but definitely wasn’t one of his friends’ couches.

“You left all the doors unlocked.” Thorne Scratch’s rough voice came out of the dark.

“Um, okay.” He sat up in bed, remembering then he’d moved into the school down the street from the enclaves. Worried about the kids, he hadn’t thought about locking down for the night. “I’ll lock them.”

“I already have.” She sat on his couch to pull off her boots. He was still sleep clouded enough that he didn’t realize what she intended until she stood and slid down her leather pants.

She was staying the night.

That afternoon, when he pulled to a stop in front of the school, she had walked away without saying good-bye or if she would be back. He’d figured last night had been a thing born of alcohol and too much pain to bear alone. A momentary lapse of reason not to be repeated.

Perhaps from her perspective, one afternoon apart wasn’t enough time separated to warrant a good-bye. Last night, in his apartment, seemed a lifetime ago for him. Since she was hundreds of years old, though, maybe the day had passed in the blink of an eye.

Which made this — what? A continuation of last night? Or was this more than a one-night stand on an epic scale? Could it ever be more than that since he was just human? Did it matter? Honestly, he wanted her there in his arms, strong and fierce and painfully vulnerable.

The sex had all the slow glide of lovemaking, and afterward she pressed a tear-damp cheek to his shoulder as they lay wrapped together.

“He never understood,” she whispered mysteriously. “But you do.”

He was afraid that if he asked what she meant, she’d realize that she was mistaken.