Harbinger

16: BLACK WILLOW STOMP

Jane Kryskill hated black willows. Hated them with a passion. They scared the piss out of her because she couldn’t hurt them with anything short of dynamite. That they scared her made her angry at the world, which meant she was tempted to shoot anything that crossed her path. Thus she nearly killed Corg Durrack — again — when he suddenly appeared beside her.

“Hey, hey, hey! It’s just me!” Corg had taken hard cover just in case she took another shot at him.

“Didn’t you learn not to do that after the last time?” Jane lowered her pistol. They were near the Rim in an abandoned part of Squirrel Hill. She had Chesty locked in the Chased by Monsters production truck to keep him safe; she knew that meant her back was unprotected. The man should know that between the two facts, Jane would be even more prone to shoot first, ask questions later.

“I thought I was being obvious.” Durrack stuck out his hand to show that he was unarmed.

Jane snorted. It was Durrack’s left hand, not his right. Durrack acted like a Boy Scout, but he looked like a muscle-bound superhero and fought like a Navy SEAL. If he had been anyone else, Jane’s first instinct would have been shoot him anyhow. The mere fact that he’d shown up at their remote location was suspicious. Everyone from Maynard to Yumiko to Taggart, though, had vouched for the man. Besides, his partner, Hannah Briggs, was probably hidden somewhere nearby.

Jane wasn’t sure which government branch the two agents originally worked for. Taggart had said that the pair had saved him and some other journalists in Syria shortly before he quit being a war correspondent. Jane had managed to learn that the two had come to Elfhome on loan to the NSA. They’d been ordered to find, protect, and extract the one technical genius who could build a world gate before the oni could kidnap the person. It was an operation that a typical NSA agent wasn’t prepared for. Durrack and Briggs ham-handed the extraction so badly that they’d been arrested by the EIA and nearly executed by the elves. (To be fair, they hadn’t known that they were after a young girl, let alone that Tinker domi was the Viceroy’s new bride. Bad intelligence can kill a good operative.) By the time the agents had gotten out of that mess, they were stranded on Elfhome with the rest of Pittsburgh. This hadn’t stopped Durrack and Briggs from pursuing truth, justice, and the American way. Time and time again they had thrown themselves into the thick of the heaviest fighting to protect Pittsburgh.

Their paths had crisscrossed all summer. Jane’s team would help the pair deal with Elfhome flora and fauna while trading intelligence on the oni. It was a mutually useful friendship.

Durrack shook his outstretched left hand while still hidden behind his hard cover. “Are we good?”

“Yes, we’re good.” Jane tucked away her pistol.

Interacting with Durrack meant she’d taken her eyes off Hal and Nigel. Hal had taken advantage of the distraction to move closer to the black willow. Grinning hugely, Nigel was scurrying to join Hal. It forced Taggart to shift closer too. The men should be safe as long as they kept out of range of its writhing tentacle-like branches.

It wasn’t the first black willow that the Chased by Monsters crew had encountered. For some insane reason, Tinker had had one on ice at Reinhold’s. It had been before the tengu became her Beholden, so they could only guess at her logic, or lack of it. The tree had broken out and gone on a rampage through the North Side. Jane and her crew had arrived seconds ahead of Prince True Flame. It meant that they got no establishing shots, and had lousy framing, bad lighting, and no direct interaction with the tree. They could only stand back and film the prince reducing the monster to a charred stump. It was safe footage: none of their secrets made it to video. It just hadn’t seemed good enough for their show. Jane had dumped what they had to WQED to use on the evening news and moved on.

If they combined it with what they filmed today, however, there might be enough for a full episode. They just needed to be sure to get enough footage without anyone getting hurt. By “anyone” Jane meant Hal. He knew to keep out of range of its branches, but Hal had the self-preservation instincts of a toddler.

“What are you doing here?” Jane asked without taking her eyes off Hal.

“Maynard sent us to check on this area,” Durrack said. “There were reports of multiple black willows moving thru this neighborhood.”

“Multiple?” Jane cursed softly. She had called Duff and had him deploy some of the scouts within the militia to find something Jane could film. He’d gotten back to her at noon, saying Alton had forwarded a report that a black willow had been spotted in Squirrel Hill. (Jane wasn’t sure how Alton got involved. With the additional load of the Harbingers and their households, the enclaves had all the foragers in Pittsburgh scrambling for fish and game. Jane thought that Alton had gone hunting with Boo in tow.) Somewhere along the lines of communication, the fact that there was more than one tree had been lost.

She scanned the neighborhood around her for more black willows. The Rim cut an arcing path through this area. It ran from the Allegheny River in the Northwest to the Monongahela River in the Southeast. To the south was the collection of neighborhoods now known as Oakland, and the downtown triangle. A few blocks west from her current location was the back end of the enclaves. Virgin forest lay just a few blocks north.

In theory, the tree could have come from anywhere beyond the Rim. A walking tree, though, left a wide trail of torn dirt, shattered sidewalk, and downed (and hopefully not live) power lines. As she studied the area, it was clear that the tree had come through the cemetery at Jane’s back. A trail of overturned granite tombstones and statues made it easy to plot the tree’s course. It had smashed its way in a straight line through the graveyard, hit the stone wall at the cemetery edge, and followed the fence out to the street.

In the distance, Jane could see the bobbing foliage of a second black willow. The incoming tree seemed to be on the same course but it either had found something large to eat or had gotten caught up on some obstacle in its path. She had an unknown amount of time before her team would be dealing with two trees at once. Clearly both black willows were from Frick Park. The flesh-eating plants thrived in the marshy ground around Nine Mile Run. Normally black willows avoided the paved city streets and other rocky outcroppings. Why had they left the marsh?

“How many?” Jane asked. “And are they all heading toward Oakland?”

“That’s what we’re trying to determine,” Durrack said. “We have the small problem that on Earth trees don’t walk. We’re kind of out of our element here.”

It was becoming Durrack’s catch phrase as the Earth-raised agents tried to deal with the dangerous Elfhome flora and fauna.

When Jane glanced back at Durrack, he was standing beside her with Hannah Briggs.

Durrack was in blue jeans and a Team Tinker T-shirt stretched tight across his muscled chest; he could have passed as a local. Briggs wore something that resembled a superhero outfit, made from a matte-black fabric that looked sprayed onto her highly toned body. Both had on blue Hal’s Heroes boonie hats.

“Stop doing that!” Jane lowered the pistol that she had raised out of habit.

“I hate that I have to keep asking this question, but how do you kill that?” Durrack had asked the question every time Maynard sent them to check on their filming. (Apparently Maynard didn’t like them blowing up local landmarks, regardless of what the elves said.) Briggs said that the vespers gave Durrack nightmares afterward.

“Dynamite and chickens,” Jane said. She waved toward the crate of large white leghorns that they had managed to buy on short notice. “Unless you have a grenade launcher handy.”

She kind of hoped Durrack did have access to a grenade launcher or something similar. Nigel had made unhappy noises at the idea of using the chickens. She’d ignored him, thinking that there was only one tree to bait. She was clenching down on her own unhappy noises at the idea of having to deal with multiple trees.

Durrack didn’t volunteer a grenade launcher. “Chickens?”

“They’re bait. You kill the chicken, tie on a stick of dynamite, light it up, and throw it into the path of the black willow.”

It was horrible delivery system with a hundred things that could go wrong with it. They couldn’t possibly survive doing it multiple times. Perhaps they should fall back and find another weapon.

“I suppose that’s humane,” Durrack said. “Since you kill the chicken first.”

“You don’t want a frightened chicken with a lit stick of dynamite tied to it running around.” Jane decided not to explain how they had learned this. (Yes, it had been Hal’s idea but she’d been desperate enough to try it. At least it hadn’t been an entire flock of chickens like Hal had first suggested.)

“Why a chicken?” Briggs said.

“They’re easy to get. Rabbits work too,” Jane said. “Anything small and recently dead. It’s either body heat or smell of blood or something. The black willow will eat it, dynamite and all.”

“Fresh out of chickens and rabbits.” Durrack dodged being volunteered for the duty. “I take it that the dynamite doesn’t work all by itself?”

“We’re usually called in when a black willow has hunkered down in someone’s backyard. It gives us a lot less room to move around in.” Jane didn’t mention that there was also structural damage to buildings to consider. “The tree can sense the vibration in the ground from any movement, so it’s usually moving toward you as you try to get into position to hit it. It’s slow moving, but it usually can walk past anything you throw with a long enough fuse to let you stay out of range of its branches. The tree has a reach of nearly a hundred and fifty feet. It can reach over, around, and into anything you try to use as cover.”

Durrack whistled softly. “Getting close enough to toss a stick of dynamite where it will actually damage the tree must be nearly impossible without getting yourself killed.”

“That’s our experience.” It had been a difficult learning curve. “We need to get footage for both Monsters in Our Midst and Chased by Monsters and then we’ll start in on the chickens.”

“Can’t you use the same footage?”

“Two different hosts. We’re still filming Nigel’s show for when Pittsburgh is reconnected with Earth.” While replacing the “lost” footage was their first priority, Jane didn’t want to lose momentum on Chased by Monsters. It was still shy of a full season. The oni couldn’t have known that Tinker was going to crash the orbital gate. Some were still on Earth, telling the humans only God knew what. Sooner or later, Pittsburgh would be reconnected to Earth. Nigel’s show could be important propaganda to counter the oni influence in United States.

Durrack grunted and tugged on the brim of his boonie hat. “Good thinking.”

Hal had awarded the two NSA agents their Hal’s Heroes hats last week, off-camera, as they didn’t want to be filmed. Jane hadn’t expected Durrack and Briggs to actually wear them.

“Are you really that short on hats?” Jane asked.

Durrack looked confused by the question.

“You guys do good work,” Briggs said quietly. “We’re fans.”

The woman turned away before Jane could be sure if the color on her cheeks was a blush or not.

Briggs had the silent-bitch routine perfected but Jane had caught glimpses of a naturally quiet and shy woman underneath the tough exterior. Jane imagined that she would be a lot like Briggs if she’d waded through the war zones that the two agents had worked in.

“Thanks,” Jane said. “Let me check with my sources and see if I can get a lead on the other black willows. We’re almost ready to fire up this tree. If you stick around, we can team up on the rest.”

Durrack and Briggs nodded their agreement to the plan.

“It’s me,” Jane said when Duff answered his phone. “We’ve got a problem. EIA is saying that there’s more than — oh shit! Hal! Hal!”

Hal had produced a sling made out of paracord. She thought she had confiscated and burned it long ago. The idiot must have made a new one. As she shouted at him, he lit the fuse on a piece of dynamite tucked into the sling’s pouch.

“Don’t you dare!” she shouted.

“What’s he doing?” Duff asked.

Hal helicoptered the sling over his head, the fuse leaving a smoke contrail.

This was why she hated black willows. They were dangerous to kill before you added dynamite and Hal into the equation.

“Get back!” she yelled at Taggart and Nigel. “Fire in the hole!”

Hal flung the dynamite. It went wide, smashed thru the front window of a house beside the black willow, and exploded.

“Jesus Christ, Mary, Joseph, and all the carpenters!” Jane swore.

“Did Hal just blow himself up?” Duff asked. “Should I send an ambulance to your location?”

“No!” Jane snapped as she pointed at Hal. “Search him! Make sure he doesn’t have any more dynamite!”

Durrack glanced behind him as if he thought she was talking to someone else. Realizing that she did mean him, he dashed across the street. Jane scanned the now-windowless house with smoke leaking out of it. Did anyone live there? It looked abandoned. The yard hadn’t been mowed in years. The door was a peeling green. There didn’t seem to be any obvious takens. Maybe they got lucky. It was a big, brick house with a driveway on either side of it. Even if it went up in flames, they weren’t going to set the entire neighborhood on fire.

Probably.

Jane eyed the smoke, trying to decide whether they should call their favorite accidentally reoccurring guest star, the fire marshal. This was one of the many reasons she hated black willows.

Duff took the delegation of tasks to mean that Jane was free to talk. “Hey, I just got off the phone with Mom. She wanted to know if I have a girlfriend.”

“What?” Jane’s mind was on the house — possibly not abandoned — possibly about to burn down. The smoke had gotten thicker.

“She says you need two more girls for the party,” Duff clarified only slightly.

Party? Shit, the wedding party! Jane had totally forgotten about the bridesmaids.

Hal’s yelp of pain dragged her attention back. Durrack had him professionally pinned to the ground. The tree had shifted to the house, lured by the vibration of the explosion. Its branches explored the façade, looking for food.

“Watch the tree! Don’t mess up his face, Durrack! We still have close-ups to shoot!” Jane shouted as she waved her team away from the house. If it did catch fire, hopefully the tree would go up with it. “Well? Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Not currently,” Duff said. “You know that most of the people where I work are either related to us or are — you know — pregnant.” He meant the Bunny household members. “There’s one girl — kind of — but we haven’t actually even hung out, let alone dated. I told Mom to call Marc — he’s the person that gets out and about and talks to people. Well — not talk-talk — the Stone being stonelike.”

Marc’s nickname was “Stone” because he rarely spoke. That and because he was built like a stone wall.

Durrack dragged Hal back to Jane. The tree was still exploring the smoking house; maybe it was picking up a panicked squirrel or raccoon trapped inside. Jane waved to Taggart and Nigel and indicated that they all should follow her back to the production truck to get a chicken and more dynamite. (She wasn’t sure why Hal hadn’t used a chicken but it could be because Nigel didn’t like killing things. Unfortunately, most of their summer had involved killing things. Dangerous things.)

The thought reminded her why she called Duff in the first place.

“EIA is here and says there might be more than one tree. Can you confirm?”

“Yes. Bam-Bam called Alton and said that the oni sicced an unknown number of monsters on Oakland. BW have been deployed.”

BW — or black wing — was this week’s code word for tengu. Who was Bam-Bam? It took Jane a moment to remember Bam-Bam was what the kids at school used to call Lawrie Munroe. Law was legendary for saving girls in trouble, usually using baseball bats and random pieces of lumber instead of something sane, like a handgun. It had earned her the nickname based on the old Flintstones cartoon character. Law wasn’t part of their scout network but she could be trusted to pass on accurate information.

Jane glanced toward the distant, oncoming black willow. It hadn’t gotten any closer but she could see a third tree had appeared behind it.

Black willows reproduced via seeds that found root in swampy areas. In marshes, there would be swarms of saplings that fed in packs like piranha, finding safety in numbers. Once the saplings grew as tall as a man, though, they would spread out, seeking less crowded hunting grounds. All the black willows that she and Hal had ever dealt with had been individual trees that had drifted into yards near streams or swampy areas. It was unheard-of for them to march so far from water in one day.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this, especially with the blackout in Oakland,” Jane said. “Activate all our scouts to do a full city sweep. Let’s check all the backwaters for a buildup of oni forces. The entire eastern front might be a ghost army to keep the elves tied up while the main attack comes from another direction.”

“Will do,” Duff said. “Anything else?”

“Not now,” Jane said. “I’ll let you know how this goes.”

“Yo!” Briggs called to someone.

Jane realized that Yumiko had joined them. The tengu yamabushi wore skinny jeans and a Team Tinker tank top. Was that how the good guys were telling one another apart from the bad guys now — Team Tinker T-shirts? Yumiko folded her massive black wings, panting slightly from her flight.

Briggs greeted Yumiko with a fist bump.

“My people are spread thin, so I called in the guardians of the Dahe Hao.” Yumiko pointed eastward.

The tall, slender spaceship was five miles away as the crow flew. It was a giant black stroke against the gray overcast sky. The tengu considered it holy since it had delivered their leader, Jin Wong, from space via dragon intervention. Said dragon had covered it with spell runes to keep it from collapsing under its own weight.

“It leaves the Dahe Hao unguarded, but only someone with wings could access the interior.” Yumiko sounded like someone who had made a decision that they hated. “The ship should be fine until I can get backup. It gave me four yamabushi to cover Frick Park.”

“Where’s Alton?” Jane figured from Duff’s various comments that Alton and Yumiko had been together all morning. The entire family had members of the tengu elite keeping an eye on them at all times. By accident or design, Yumiko usually paired up with Alton.

Yumiko gestured toward the south. “He’s in Schenley Park with Xiao Chen, making sure there are no black willows in Panther Hollow.”

Jane didn’t like the idea of Alton out hunting black willows, but as a forager he was well versed in Elfhome’s deadly flora and fauna. Nor was he alone. Xiao Chen was one of the returning tengu astronauts and part of Jin Wong’s most trusted inner circle.

“There are a score of trees moving in our direction,” Yumiko said. “One of our operatives said that a person fitting Kajo’s description used a whistle that started the black willows heading west.”

The name “Kajo” spiked anger and fear through Jane. The oni leader had been the one who kidnapped Boo and kept her alive as his personal plaything. In the end, he’d transformed her into a tengu, changing her down to the DNA level. It would explain why Yumiko and the other yamabushi were handling the search. He was a clever and powerful enemy.

“Jane?” Hal whined. Durrack had him pinned to the side of the production truck. “We really should kill the tree before it gets bored with the house.”

Jane sighed. Hal was right but that would mean letting him play with dynamite again. When PB&G first experimented with killing black willows, they’d determined that Hal was better at throwing than Jane. He’d played lacrosse in college, developing the hand-eye coordination that Jane had never honed. Nigel had demonstrated that he was woefully out of his element. Not that he wasn’t athletic, but cricket “pitching” was more like bowling than baseball, rugby players rarely threw the ball more than a few yards, and Nigel had never played goalie in soccer.

“You have a way of killing trees?” Yumiko asked.

“Dynamite.” Jane glanced at the cage. She had two chickens, giving her the excuse to bring only two sticks of dynamite with them. (She had left the nearly full crate with her cousin, Roach, for safekeeping.) Hal had just used up one.

“I can get more dynamite,” she told Yumiko. “It’s the delivery system that’s a problem. I only have two chickens. I’m not sure where to get more on short notice.”

And she didn’t relish the idea of trying to fling explosive dead chickens at a horde of black willows. There were so many things that could go wrong.

“If you have the dynamite, my people can drop it from above the black willows,” Yumiko said.

It was one of the few times in Jane’s life where the phrase “Praise God” seemed appropriate. The last thing she wanted to do was dodge a swarm of man-eating trees while Hal juggled dynamite.

One of those “only in Pittsburgh” discussions followed as to whether or not they needed to attach chickens to the dynamite being dropped on the mobile trees. (At least, Jane assumed it was a “never on Earth” conversation based by the number of times that Durrack, Briggs, Taggart, or Nigel shook their heads to denote ignorance of the subject.)

Briggs suggested that Yumiko do some test runs. “It’s not like the tree will be shooting at you. As long as you stay out of its reach, you can drop rocks on it until you feel ready for the real thing.”

“What’s your ceiling height?” Taggart asked while keeping the camera trained on the tree.

“I can keep out of its reach,” Yumiko said. “Getting too high would make targeting harder.”

The black willow had found something small and furry inside the house. It dragged out the squealing animal and dropped it into its maw.

Durrack muttered an impressively inventive string of profanities.

Jane shook her head. They weren’t going to be able to use any of the audio after Durrack’s arrival. At least it was easier to edit out audio than white wings in a reflection. “Let’s give it a try with just the dynamite. If it doesn’t work, I’ll track down more chickens.”

Jane confiscated their lighter from Hal and gave it to Yumiko, along with their remaining stick of dynamite. She moved her team behind the truck so they wouldn’t be in blast range if the stick bounced or got swatted in their direction.

As Yumiko made test drops with small rocks, Jane called her cousin.

“How did it go?” Roach said when he answered his phone.

“Fire in the hole!” Hal yelled as Yumiko dropped the lit stick.

It was a perfect hit. The stick landed inside the tree’s open maw. There was a deep thud, like a big bass drum being hit. With a long splintering crack, the black willow’s trunk split open and gravity took over, tearing the smoking pieces apart.

Jane took a deep breath, feeling like a massive load had been lifted off her. Clearly the tengu could safely deal with the black willows, freeing her team from the task.

“One down,” Jane reported. “I need the rest of the dynamite.”

“The entire crate?” Roach said with clear reservation in his voice.

“There’s a wave of black willows coming toward Oakland. We’re going to need a lot of dynamite to stop them.”

“I’ll be right there.” Roach hung up after getting her location.

Yumiko landed beside Jane.

“Great job,” Briggs said.

Yumiko and Briggs fist bumped.

Jane realized that she had two women she trusted right under her nose. Yes, she had had reservations about them when she first met them, but they had risked their lives to protect her family more than once in the last two months. “Could the two of you be in my wedding? Please?”

“Yes!” Briggs eyes lit up with joy that was quickly hidden away. “Sure. I’m free.”

“Me?” Yumiko said. “I thought the police officer was your maid of honor.”

“We’re making it bigger.” Jane winced as she realized that she should have talked with Taggart but he’d seemed fine with whatever her mother decided. He only wanted to get married. “My brothers are going to be part of the wedding party. I need more women to balance out the numbers.”

“So, Alton and the others?” Yumiko asked. “All cleaned up? In a tux?”

Jane nodded.

“Okay,” Yumiko said. “It might be fun.”

Like a circus, Jane almost said, but she didn’t want to scare off her volunteers.

“The dynamite is on its way.” Jane took out her phone to call her mother with the “good” news. “Until then, I’m going to need your dress sizes.”

The entire summer had been an insane series of deadly events, starting in July when the oni’s secret war had boiled to the surface. Jane had had to constantly juggle information to keep all the little parts of her life from knowing about the whole. WQED had no idea that she and her team had triggered the destruction of the oni encampment at Sandcastle Water Park, days before open warfare had broken out. They didn’t know about Boo being rescued or how she had been transformed into a tengu of the Chosen bloodline. Nor did the station know that Jane’s team had purposely gone to Mercy Hospital to rescue Yumiko, and that setting fire to her EIA guard hadn’t been an accident but a planned distraction. WQED knew that it was her film crew that shot up downtown and blew up parts of the Carnegie Museum. Both gunfights triggered meetings with Dmitri but became “we will not talk about these events” at the station when the EIA hadn’t pressed charges. The station didn’t “know” that Jane’s team was using Monsters in Our Midst to organize a human resistance army — although Dmitri probably suspected.

Likewise, Jane had kept the NSA agents — and with them the EIA — at arm’s length. It was quite possible that they knew nothing about Boo or Sandcastle. She had to assume that they knew about the fight that ended at the stadium and the museum shoot-out, as the EIA had been present during both. If they didn’t know about the Resistance, they weren’t much in terms of intelligence operatives. But up to this moment, she hadn’t taken them into her confidence.

If the oni were on the move, it was time to get everyone on the same page.

“We’re not sure what Kajo is planning.” Yumiko had been bringing the agents up to speed as Jane relayed the dress sizes to her mother. “He always works with layers of deception. Smoke and mirrors. It’s how he has stayed hidden for so many years.”

“You said these Eyes can magically see things.” Durrack twiddled his fingers in front of his eyes as if X-rays were shooting out of his sockets. “Even without them, Kajo has to know the main elven force is closing on his encampments. You would think that he would want to be commanding their withdrawal or ambush or pincer movement — whatever he has planned.”

Yumiko nervously tapped out a cigarette, nodding. “Our operative reports seeing two people matching the description that we gave them of Kajo. It is quite possible neither of them were the real Kajo.”

“How experienced is your operative?” Durrack asked. “Can they tell one oni from another?”

“The less we talk about my operative, the better.” Yumiko twiddled her fingers in front of her face, copying Durrack’s mime. “Kajo’s eyes.”

That explained why Duff had used Law’s nickname on the phone.

With the rumble of a big engine, Roach turned onto the street in one of his big dumpster hauler trucks. He pulled to a stop behind the production truck. He sat a moment, studying Jane and the strangers around her, assessing her body language before getting out.

“Hey,” he called. He locked his truck after getting out. There was an unasked question posed in the tilt of his head.

“This is my cousin.” Jane started introductions for the more dangerous side of the equation. Roach was the smartest and most charismatic person in her entire family. Considering his older brother was a popular deejay for KDKA radio, that was saying a lot. It was unlikely Roach would do anything to get himself shot, but she wanted it clear that no matter what happened, he was off-limits to being hurt. “You can trust him completely.”

For reasons that Jane never understood, her aunt had named her middle son after her husband without sticking a Junior on the backend. She’d made things worse by giving him the middle name of Angus. Roach started out as “Billy.” Around eleven, he tried to use the more adult “Bill,” which resulted in a lot of “Big Bill or Little Bill?” confusion. Sometime in high school, he decided just to only use his last name. It was a testament to his salesmanship that he’d gotten even his brothers to agree to this. “Everyone just calls him Roach. He’s Team Tinker’s business manager and he handles the Hal’s Heroes merchandising.”

Jane let the others introduce themselves because she wasn’t sure how they wanted to be known. They nodded at the name; their lives had interwoven with Tinker enough to recognize someone she trusted implicitly.

Briggs, being secretly shy, let Durrack do most of the talking.

Durrack was built like a pro wrestler but could be surprisingly charming. He claimed to be “working with Maynard” without mentioning EIA or NSA. He handed Roach a business card that gave contact info, including an office whose street address put it in the EIA building downtown.

Yumiko simply said, “Yumiko Sessai.”

“Is it dead?” Roach pointed toward the shattered the black willow that Hal, Nigel, and Taggart were cautiously filming.

“It’s like a Christmas tree after you cut it down,” Hal called. “It’s not quite alive but it’s not completely dead.”

“I would not advise getting close to it,” Nigel said even as he was cautiously edging closer to it to get some wrap-up shots.

“I brought the dynamite.” Roach pointed toward his locked truck. “What did you mean by ‘a wave’ of black willows?”

Jane pointed out the oncoming trees and caught Roach up to speed the best she could without mentioning Lawrie Munroe.

“How sure are we that this is the work of Kajo?” Durrack looped the conversation back to where they were before Roach showed up.

Yumiko explained how Kajo had always worn a mask anytime he interacted with the tengu. “Kajo has killed everyone that might have seen him unmasked. All we have is this.”

The female took out her phone to show Durrack a picture of a red scowling demon face.

Jane studied the photo instead of staring at Yumiko as she tried to remember who knew what. Was Yumiko keeping info from the NSA to protect Boo? It wasn’t like the female had to admit where the information came from. Her family had told Yumiko that Boo was a prisoner of Kajo for years — hadn’t they? Maybe? Maybe not?

“What about Jin Wong’s nephew?” Jane said cautiously. Did Durrack and Briggs know about Joey? Roach didn’t. “The one that Kajo was using?”

Was that vague enough? Most people only knew about Riki, although the NSA might know about Riki’s other young cousins, Keiko and Mickey.

Yumiko shook her head. “We already asked him. He never saw Kajo without the mask.”

Then Boo was the only person who could identify Kajo.

Briggs caught the dismay on Jane’s face. “What?”

This was not how she wanted to break the news to Roach. The good guys, though, all needed to get onto the same page. Monsters in Our Midst was an information gathering and dispersal tool so that everyone who stood against the oni knew what they were fighting. If the oni were making their move soon, she couldn’t worry about her cousin’s feelings.

“I can get a description of Kajo,” Jane said. “He kidnapped my baby sister, Boo, when she was six. He kept her as his personal plaything for eight years.”

“Wait,” Roach said. “What?”

Jane ignored the question; she trusted Roach to catch up without her having to explain everything. That said, though, there was very little she knew about the oni male. “I’ve avoided asking her questions about the time she was with him. We all avoid talking about it. There’s nothing we can do to change the past. Nothing we can do to make things better for her — except kill him. I already planned to do that if I have the chance. As much as I want Kajo dead, I don’t want one of my little brothers to be the one that pulls the trigger. I’ve already got blood on my hands; a little more won’t make much difference to me.”

Yumiko made a face as she realized that she’d missed the obvious. “Joey said that she’d been brought to Sandcastle the same time he was. I didn’t consider that she might have been moved from someplace else. I should have realized that she was editing what she told Joey so he would be less frightened, especially since she didn’t tell him that his aunt and uncle had been murdered. Kajo kept her hidden but we knew he had a concubine; our people caught glimpses of her. They called her the White Bride of Death because if anyone that saw more than a glimpse of her, Kajo would kill them.”

The word “concubine” put a dagger through Jane’s heart. Roach breathed out a curse.

“You need to talk to her,” Briggs said. “You don’t just walk away from something like that and be alright. You need to get her medical treatment.”

Jane shook her head. “Pittsburgh doesn’t have shrinks. We checked. Being officially diagnosed as mentally unbalanced got you exported, so nobody dared to go to a doctor, even if they desperately needed one. All the psychologists left within the first two years of the treaty being signed.”

“Some of our people are therapists,” Yumiko said. “Our centuries of enslavement left deep scars. Many of them are quite fresh.”

Jane winced as guilt lanced through her. It felt like she’d just found Boo a few days ago but it had been nearly two months. Two insane months of fighting a secret war. This was a set of cards that she couldn’t play close to her chest anymore. They might have lost valuable time in not bringing the tengu into the loop.

With the crate of dynamite, the tengu could deal with the black willows. The real threat was Kajo. Law had two possible suspects but no way to determine if either person was the real oni commander.

“I’ll talk to Boo about Kajo; I’ll try to get a description out of her. Gently. Roach, can you give the dynamite to Yumiko?”

Roach nodded, looking somewhat shell-shocked.

“You’re not giving her all our dynamite?” Hal cried. “We need it for…emergencies.”

Jane wanted to say no but Hal had gotten them out of a tight jam at the museum with a stick. “Roach, how many sticks are left in the crate?”

“Forty,” Roach said.

Yumiko said there was a score of black willows heading to Oakland. The tengu might need more than one stick to destroy a tree.

“Hold back ten sticks,” Jane said.

Roach nodded. “I want to see Boo.”

“I’ll have to call Duff,” Jane said. “I’m not sure who has babysitting duty today. I thought it was Alton.”

“Not Guy or Geoffrey.” Roach jerked his thumb in the direction of Oakland. “They’re both at Oilcan’s installing the security gate that Geoffrey made. That’s why I have the dumpster hauler. The gate didn’t fit on either Guy’s or Geoffrey’s pickups so they called me and I called Team Tinker to help move it since it weighs a ton.”

Her mother was at her café downtown. Duff was at the bakery. Alton was in Schenley Park, looking for black willows. She doubted that Alton would drag Boo through that.

“Boo is probably with Marc, then,” Jane said.

Roach nodded and kept nodding, obviously mentally checking boxes for seeing Boo. “I need to swap trucks. This dumpster loader stands out too much. People might wonder. I should change clothes too; I didn’t take a shower this morning. Maybe I should grab donuts or something…?”

Swapping vehicles was a smart idea. The Chased by Monsters production truck was the gaudiest thing in Pittsburgh. She should swap back to her SUV. “If you tell Andy about Boo…”

“God, no, not yet,” Roach said. “I’ll have to figure out some way to keep him from blurting it out without thinking.”

“That was one of the reasons we didn’t tell your family,” Jane admitted.

“Andy might be Andy,” Roach and Jane said at the same time.

“He and Guy went off to help Oilcan move something anyhow,” Roach said.

Jane continued. “We need to backtrack to WQED for my SUV. We’ll meet you at Marc’s.”