Harbinger

4: WILLIAM FREAKING PENN

When Tommy Chang had left the half-oni warren to find Jewel Tear, he’d told his cousin Bingo to shift their family to someplace else. He hadn’t been able to give detailed instructions as they were whispering to each other under the gaze of the elves. Tommy thought he could trust his cousin to pick someplace safe and reasonable.

He was wrong.

Tommy had meant someplace in a deserted part of town, big enough to take them all, but easily defended. It needed electricity, running water, sewage, and enough heat that they wouldn’t freeze come winter. Pittsburgh was filled with hundreds of empty warehouses and industrial parks. Any one of them would have worked.

Bingo had moved them into the William freaking Penn Hotel.

Nor was it just their family in the twenty-story hotel. Somehow while Tommy had been tracking down Jewel Tear, saving Oilcan, and finding Tinker, Bingo had taken in three other families made homeless by the fighting on the South Side. It doubled the size of their warren to over a hundred people, but most of them were under the age of twenty.

“We need to get out of this shithole.” Tommy had been woken up by a phone call from Oilcan. He’d promised to drive out to Oakland as soon as he could get dressed. He would need to trust Bingo — again — to move their warren. This time, he was going to give detailed instructions.

“What? Don’t you like your room?” Bingo gazed about Tommy’s suite. It looked like something out of a movie. “It was a real circus getting everyone settled in, what with us having so many little ones. I let Mokoto figure it all out and then me and Babe made sure people went where they were supposed to go. I think Mokoto did a swell job. There are apartments upstairs with two bedrooms and a little mini kitchen. He put my mom, Aunt Amy and Aunt Flo in those so that all the babies could be with them. Some of the rooms have a door connecting it to the room beside it. Motoko put four little ones on one side and then two teens on one other side to be built-in babysitters. He made sure that almost everyone doubled so we only take up two or three floors instead of scattering throughout the hotel. Just you, me, and Mokoto have our own place. Mokoto calls them ‘sweets’ like candy. I think it’s a great room.”

Sweets. Tommy shook his head. They were suites, as in having separate sitting rooms. All the colors in Tommy’s — from the subtle gold-printed wallpaper to the ornate carpet in blends of mute reds to the fancy umber curtains — worked together to say “money.” The bedroom had a massive bed with more pillows than any five people could use piled on it. The sitting room had two matching armchairs and a coffee table of gleaming perfection. Between the two areas was a bathroom that looked too nice to pee in.

“It’s a hotel in the middle of Downtown!” Tommy’s family had shifted all his belongs to his new room. Someone had washed, folded, and neatly put everything away, but Tommy couldn’t figure out how they decided where to put what. He opened the top drawer of the dresser and found it filled with underwear. He had boxers on, so he closed it and tried the next drawer.

“Yeah — it’s a hotel,” Bingo said slowly, his brain obviously overheating as he tried to figure out why Tommy was upset. He became Tommy’s lieutenant by default of birth order and size. He was the biggest and strongest member of their family. He wasn’t, however, very smart. It came as no surprise that he let older and smarter Mokoto deal with the circus of assigning rooms. “This place was being renovated when the first Startup happened. The oni worked some deal Stateside and took it over. Aunt Flo says that the greater bloods lived here the first year or two — all quiet like — before they disappeared into the woodwork.”

Tommy jerked to a stop. “You moved us to a greater blood camp? You said you found someplace safe!”

“It’s safe.” Bingo waved away Tommy’s concern. “The greater bloods abandoned it years ago — not that anyone seemed to notice. We needed someplace big, what with the others losing their places in the train derail—”

Tommy smacked Bingo in the head. “Stupid! The greater bloods burn down the places that they don’t plan to use again! They’ll be back!”

“No, they won’t!” Bingo cried. “They stripped out all the rooms that they were using instead of burning the whole place. The biggest apartment upstairs — the one with three bedrooms — has been gutted. They even took down the wallpaper and ripped out the carpet. Half of the sweet rooms like this one had all the beds and chairs and dressers taken out — which isn’t all bad. The little ones are using them as playrooms. I thought about this hard! I talked to Mokoto and Trixie and even my mom and our aunties. We think that the greater bloods couldn’t burn this place without the wrong people taking notice. It’s a big, historic building in the middle of Downtown, not some house out in the boonies. Presidents of the United States have stayed at this hotel.”

“Maybe.” Tommy wasn’t sure. His father had been the commander of the lesser bloods; he’d murdered Tommy’s mother and didn’t give a shit if Tommy lived or died. Tommy only knew about the greater bloods from a lifetime of chance remarks. “I don’t have time for this.”

“I figured if the oni could waltz in and out of this hotel without anyone knowing what they were doing, that we could use it too.” Bingo continued to defend his choice.

“Things have changed.” Tommy found the drawer holding his shirts. Were all his shirts black? He dug out his only blue one; if he was going out to Oakland, he wanted to be recognized as one of the good guys. “Downtown is full of royal marines, and what’s left of the EIA knows that we exist.”

“There’s ways in and out so people can’t see us coming and going.” Bingo plowed on in the hotel’s defense. “Besides, I thought we were with the elves now — all part of working with Oilcan.”

“Oilcan isn’t a god,” Tommy went through the other drawers, looking for clean pants. The blue jeans that he’d taken off the night before were covered with dirt and blood. “Oilcan isn’t going to be down here, making sure each new train full of marines know that we’re to be left alone. Even if he was down here, I don’t know if he could stop them if they wanted to screw with us. Being made an elf hasn’t changed him; he’s still a little pacifist squirt.”

“Then why team up with him?” Bingo asked.

“Because I said so!” Tommy didn’t want to go into what Jin had told him about creating peace nor his own emotional journey to come to his decision. None of the drawers had jeans. Where were his jeans? “I need you to go out and find someplace else for us to live. Oilcan called and said they needed me at some kind of war conference.”

“We’re going to fight the oni?” Bingo’s voice was filled with fearful doubt. “With Oilcan calling the shots?”

“When did Team Tinker ever start a fight?” Tommy opened the closet and found his blue jeans hanging up on wooden hangers. He took a pair out and pulled them on.

Bingo worked through being unhappy about being wrong to realizing what it meant for the half-oni. “Never, but Team Tinker always won any fight they got into.”

“Exactly.” Tommy pulled on socks and boots. “I think Tinker and Oilcan just want to pump me for information about my father’s warriors. They’ve already called in the tengu, but my father never trusted them completely.”

“Your father never trusted anyone completely,” Bingo said.

Tommy grunted and opened the door to the hall. Bingo’s eight-year-old little brother, Spot, sat on the floor opposite the door. Spot looked up with silent expectation.

“I’m going to Poppymeadows,” Tommy said to crush any hope that Spot had about going back to Sacred Heart. The day before, Tommy had taken a carload of his younger cousins with him, saying that they needed to socialize more with people outside the half-oni. It had been an excuse to give Tommy the freedom to roam the building, looking for Jewel Tear.

Spot had found a soulmate at Sacred Heart; a cute little elf girl by the name of Baby Duck.

“Poppymeadows is on the other end of the street from Sacred Heart.” Tommy headed down the hall. The hotel put him on edge. It was too nice. Even their old place above their Oakland restaurant hadn’t been this nice. It made him feel like he’d fallen into a movie.

“I need you to find someplace else for us,” Tommy told Bingo as they walked toward the stairwell. The building had elevators but they hadn’t gotten them running yet. On the theory that no one could or would quietly climb seventeen flights to attack them, Mokoto set them up on the top three floors.

“This place is nice,” Bingo whined. “Even at the restaurant we were always on top of each other. One newborn with colic could keep everyone up. All of us grown kids have our own room now so we don’t have to deal with the little ones. No more sharp elbows in the middle of the night. No more waking up in someone else’s pee. No more waiting to piss. There’s a big industrial kitchen in the basement and the bar is still fully stocked.”

“It’s too nice,” Tommy said. “There’s no way we could defend the lobby. The doors are glass and there’s two dozen twenty-foot-tall windows. If someone just set a big enough fire, they could burn us out. There would be no need for them to climb seventeen floors.”

“I’ve set guards on all the entrances.” Bingo said. “We’ve got more teens and adults now.”

The stairwell obviously had only been meant to be used in an emergency. It was a bare echoing place. Tommy found it comforting after the richness of the hallway.

“We made nice with the elves,” Bingo said as he followed Tommy down the steps. “Sooner or later, they will leave us alone — won’t they? Why can’t we have a nice place like this?”

“Because we can’t afford it. I don’t know where the power is coming from…”

“It was on when we got here.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. The greater bloods had some kind of system in place. Either it was on some kind of automated payment plan, or one of them was writing a check every month, or they have some kind of illegal tap. It doesn’t matter which, we can’t count on it continuing even another day. Tomorrow the power company might find the tap or the bank might stop the payments because we’re cut off from Earth or the elves cut off the head of whoever was paying the bills. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to pay for the power and we don’t have that kind of money. More importantly, we certainly won’t be able to heat a building this size come winter. At that point it becomes twenty floors of frozen pipes.”

A herd of children between the ages of six and twelve burst through the door — all in their underwear — to charge down the steps ahead of him. They’d picked up more adults and teens with the addition of the other households but they’d also doubled the number of little kids. There were more than two dozen children heading downstairs, laughing and shouting.

“Where the hell are they going in their underwear?” Tommy asked.

“They’re probably going swimming,” Bingo said.

“There’s a pool?”

“Yeah, brand new, never been used, in the basement. Like I said, they were in the middle of renovations when the first Startup hit. The sixth floor is totally gutted down to studs. It looks like it had been office space and they planned on converting back to hotel — ow!”

Tommy had smacked Bingo to shut him up. “You put water in the pool?”

“I didn’t. Some of the teens did it. Filled it up. Got the chemicals into it — bleach — whatever — to make it safe to swim in.”

Tommy growled. He was “head of the half-oni” because he was the oldest and meanest. He liked to think he was the absolute ruler — it was best that the elves thought so too — but he knew that his aunts could dig in their heels and make his life hell. It was going to be hard to lever his family out of this building if his aunts took a liking to it. “Find someplace else. Fast. It should be anyplace but Downtown: there’s too many new elves moving through this area. It should be big enough for all of us but we need to be able to keep it heated through the winter even if the oni take out the electrical grid. Think wood stoves and fireplaces.”

Bingo whimpered his disappointment.

“And do something about the elevators!” Tommy said. “The little ones aren’t going to be able to do twenty floors of stairs and they’ll crash wherever they run out of steam. We’ll be losing kids all over the building.”

“Okay, Tommy.” Bingo detoured off to go check on the elevators.

The stairs had opened to the massive lobby, which had been cave dark the night before. Morning sunlight poured through the tall windows, reflecting on the crystals of the unlit chandeliers. Someone was sitting at a grand piano at the edge of the dust-filled shaft of light, playing a melody that Tommy didn’t recognize. For a minute he thought a stranger had wandered in off the street. Then the musician lifted their head and Tommy saw it was Bingo’s younger brother, Babe.

“Hey.” Babe nodded and went back to playing.

“Hey, Tommy!” Mokoto sprawled on a couch behind Babe.

The two were the brawn and brains of the night crew.

Babe was six-foot-three of pure muscle with a baby face. It surprised Tommy that the big man knew how to play piano, but that was like Babe. Fierce on the outside, sensitive on the inside.

Short and slim, most people needed a second look to be sure that Mokoto was a male. His sultry makeup didn’t help — the smoldering eye shadow and deep red lipstick read as female. He had on a pink midrift shirt and a black miniskirt so low on his hips it was surprising it didn’t fall off. Tommy was never sure if Mokoto consciously posed sexily, or it was some weird uncontrollable habit. The man always managed to look like a female porn star, complete with a “come hither” look.

“Why are you two still up?” Tommy asked.

“We walked the Lee sisters back to their warren,” Mokoto answered for the two of them. “Some of the regulars have stopped showing up. You know how it is; someone disappears and you don’t know if they decided to find someplace safer or something decided that Liberty Avenue is a good hunting ground.”

“Are we missing anyone?” Tommy had been out of touch for days chasing after missing elves and not-yet-elves and elves-that-used-to-be-humans.

“No, none of ours. All the heads and fingers and toes accounted for. It’s all been the Undefended. You know how it is. They always show up in the early spring, like cherry blossoms. Beautiful. Smelling amazing. Oh so delicate. Then the summer winds come and they drift away. One by one.”

Tommy nodded. The Undefended were all off-worlders. Some came to Elfhome on student visas to attend the University of Pittsburgh and then dropped out of school. The rest were illegals, slipping through the cracks that the oni made in the border to get their own people in and out.

The Undefended were easy to spot. They wore fashion trends that wouldn’t hit Pittsburgh for another year or two. They did exotic things with their hair like dye it odd colors or shave their heads into patterns. They carried fancy smartphones that they had a habit of pulling out and staring at as if they were getting messages from God. They talked louder, with odd slang sprinkled into their conversation. Most of them walked faster than a normal Pittsburgher would. And as Mokoto pointed out, they smelled like flowers. It was as if they blasted all trace of humanity off their skin and replaced it with perfume.

While the Undefended ran in small herds, using their numbers as a defense, everyone in Pittsburgh knew that they had no real protection. They were without family and sometimes friends. They couldn’t go to the police because they would be deported. They couldn’t even use their real names: the list of expired visas was a matter of public record. It made them an easy target.

Any whore working Liberty Avenue, though, could be mistaken as Undefended. It sounded like Tommy might have to hurt someone hard.

Tommy didn’t like being a pimp; it made him feel like his father. He made anyone who forced him into the role of protector regret it. “All of them recent?”

Mokoto looked oddly pained by the question. “They disappeared while we were moving the warren.”

Babe stopped playing the piano to join the conversation. “I think the Lee family should move in with us. There’s just the four sisters and the two baby brothers that can’t pass as human.”

Tommy sighed. What was six more people after a hundred? “Let them know I would like them in our warren.” Wherever that ended up being. “We might want to put the night crew on hold until we find out why whores are disappearing.”

“Sure thing,” Babe said.

Motoko glanced at the back of Babe’s head, pouting that his opinion wasn’t consulted. It was a measure of how uneasy he felt that he shrugged in the end and said, “Yeah, sure. It would be safer for the girls.”

“We’ll talk,” Tommy said to soothe Mokoto’s pride. Babe might be the muscle but Mokoto was the scary one of the two.

As Tommy headed toward the door, he realized that Spot was following him.

“I’m not going to Sacred Heart.” Tommy repeated slower and louder. Since Spot rarely talked, he was never sure how much the boy understood.

Spot reached out, took his hand, and looked up at him. His father had been a brute doglike thing. Spot had inherited his father’s looks but Aunt Vera’s sweetness. He stared up at Tommy with sad puppy-dog eyes.

“No,” Tommy said.

Spot considered and then quietly said, “Please.”

Tommy growled softly. Normally he wouldn’t give in to begging but Spot had walked alone into an oni camp for him. He owed the boy. “Fine. I’ll drop you there. Oilcan is not going to be there, so find Baby Duck and stay with her. Don’t let her out of your sight.”

Tommy rode his hoverbike out to Oakland with Spot perched on behind him. The boy was beaming with joy, ears flapping in the wind. Tommy still wasn’t sure, though, that dropping Spot at the enclave by himself was a good idea.

He was less sure when he reached Sacred Heart.

There were dozens of strange elves at the enclave all dressed in Stone Clan black. They were attempting to maneuver a gossamer into place over the three-story brick building. Tengu flitted about on massive black wings, catching mooring ropes that were being dropped from the gondola.

There was a small knot of humans gathered around a Roach Refuse dumpster hauler. Tommy recognized that most of them were part of Team Tinker, so he pulled into their midst. They weren’t “friends” but at least they were known quantity: Tommy had watched most of the team grow up from kids to adult. Tinker invented the hoverbike. Roach invented hoverbike racing. Tommy created a place for the races to be held.

“Tommy,” Roach lifted his hand in greeting. He had his little brother, Andy, and two of his massive elfhounds with him. The man paused, head cocked, as he looked past Tommy at Spot.

“This is Bingo’s little brother,” Tommy said to make clear how the boy was related to him. “Spot.”

Roach blinked, obviously still thrown off-balance.

Roach’s little brother, Andy was a simpler man. “We’ve got a puppy named Spot.” He came to pet Spot’s head as if the boy was a dog. “He’s a good boy!”

Tommy curled his fist, controlling the urge to punch the teenager. It might be better for Andy to see Spot as a dog instead of a human being as Andy wouldn’t hurt a dog.

Roach squinted, “So Bingo and him aren’t…are?”

“Our mothers are human.” Tommy didn’t want to be having this conversation but it had to take place sooner or later if Spot and the others were going to be free to leave the warren. “Our mothers weren’t given a choice in cooperating with the oni. We’ve thrown in with Oilcan — now that he’s an elf. My family — all of it — are Oilcan’s Beholden.”

Tommy hated the word but it was a needed shield for Spot — especially if Tommy was going to be leaving the boy alone at the enclave. Maybe he shouldn’t. Maybe he should just take Spot with him.

“This has been a weird summer.” Roach indicated the tall stranger beside him. “We’re helping out my cousin.”

His cousin looked like an elf. Tall. Powerfully built. Long blond hair. Decked out in elf-made clothes. He had large bandage on his left temple and a vivid bruise on his cheek.

“Geoffrey Kryskill.” Roach’s cousin offered his name along with his hand. “I’ve heard how you went out and found Jewel Tear and then saved Oilcan’s life. Good work.”

It was a firm shake with a steady look that said, “I respect you.” It was an odd, unfamiliar feeling, although not completely hateful. The question was: how the hell did Kryskill know when Roach was looking startled at the news? Tommy would have expected Team Tinker to be up to date on the latest news regarding their best riders.

“Geoffrey owns Gryffin Doors,” Roach motioned to two big slabs of ironwood on the back of his truck. “Oilcan paid Geoff to do front and back gates for his enclave. Oilcan needed something out of wood because of…” Roach waved his hand toward the stone walls enclosing the enclave. The walls weren’t there when lesser bloods disguised as humans squatted in the building. “…magic or whatever that his Grandpa Forge is doing.”

“The enclaves have a defensive barrier much like the sekasha personal shields,” Geoffrey said. “Forge is building the walls with the spells between the layers of stone. I’m going to hang out after we get the gates up and see what I can learn.”

Ironwood needed spells and magically sharpened tools to work with. Some of the true-blood oni were carpenters who knew how to do it but Tommy hadn’t realized that any of the humans had learned the trick. It meant that Geoffrey was trusted by the elves, which would explain the clothes and the long hair.

Blue Sky Montana came roaring up on a hoverbike. He slid to a stop beside Tommy’s bike. Spot brightened and waved to the half-elf.

“Hey, Spot!” Blue Sky bounded off his bike. He picked the smaller boy up and swung him around, making Spot laugh.

Blue Sky might ride for Team Big Sky but Team Tinker welcomed him as if he was their rider. There was full minute as the various people greeted the half-elf.

There was a younger brother to Geoffrey by the name of Guy, who seemed to be around Blue Sky’s and Andy’s age. The three seemed to be fast friends. Thus it wasn’t surprising that the boy knew Geoffrey too.

“What happened?” Blue Sky pointed to the bandage on Geoffrey’s temple.

“Oh, some idiots showed up at my place. They’d heard that I knew some magic. For some insane reason, they thought if I just put my mind to it, I could make a gate for them.”

“A gate?” Blue Sky pointed at the massive piece of wood on Roach’s truck and then spread his arms to indicate something bigger. “Or a gate?”

Geoffrey waved toward the sky where the orbital hyperphase gate used to be. “A world gate, only on the ground. I told them that I only know a handful of spells related to working with wood. That didn’t seem to register. They seemed like they weren’t going to take no for an answer. One of them tried to coldcock me.”

“Are you okay?” Blue Sky asked.

Geoffrey waved off the concern. “Yeah, I’m fine. He punched like a five-year-old. My sister hits harder. He had a ring on, though, and did a number on my face. My mom is pissed. We’ve got a wedding next weekend and I’m still going to be healing.”

“Who were they?” Tommy asked. “Disguised oni?”

“No. At least, I don’t think so. They sounded like they were from Stateside. I pulled a gun, which they weren’t expecting, scared them off. I was bleeding like a stuck pig, so Rebecca stayed with me instead of going after them.”

“Rebecca?” Roach asked.

“That’s me!” a young tengu girl chirped, waving her hand. “Rebecca Brotman.”

Tommy eyed the girl, who looked all of eighteen. Her effortlessly fashionable-looking clothes, the cut of her hair, and the fact that her purple fingernail polish matched her lipstick shade indicated that she was a new arrival to Elfhome. He hadn’t dealt much with the tengu but he knew enough to recognize what his father failed to: Rebecca was one of the special scary tengu warriors — the yamabushi—carefully disguised to be a normal American from Stateside where the most Asian thing about her was her eyes.

The money question was: Why was the yamabushi babysitting Geoffrey Kryskill?

Then Jewel Tear drifted into their midst and all questions vanished out of Tommy’s brain.

Tinker had blasted Ginger Wine’s enclave into smoldering bits. One of her flame strikes had taken out all of Jewel Tear’s gowns made in the Easternlands. Her household fled Pittsburgh, apparently considering Jewel Tear “as good as dead.” They took with them all that they had brought to Pittsburgh, apparently considering it jointly owned and theirs by being survivors of the oni attack.

Tommy had rescued Jewel Tear from the oni, but when he delivered her to Prince True Flame, she learned that she had nothing but virgin forest left to her name. The Wind Clan enclaves were overflowing with the incoming Harbingers. They directed her to Sacred Heart, which had been standing empty. She picked out a room on the top floor, settled in, and waited for Oilcan’s return. Tommy wasn’t sure what terms the two had agreed on. One of Oilcan’s kids had made clothes for Jewel Tear to replace her lost wardrobe. Today, she wore a yellow sundress that made the most of her dark skin, long legs, and full breasts. The thin straps made Tommy want to slide them down off her shoulders.

The female was made of steel. She barely glanced at Tommy or Spot, focusing instead on Blue Sky. One would never know by looking at her that, in the privacy of her room, she was like a cat in heat. “Are these the gates that we are waiting on?”

While she talked, Jewel Tear petted Spot on the head in a seemingly absentminded manner. The boy leaned into the attention the way Tommy wished he could. One of the Stone Clan sekasha, though, was standing nearby with “on duty” attention on the domana female. Jewel Tear had made it clear that it would be dangerous to be anything but cold to each other in public.

Tommy struggled not to stare at her. He pretended to be looking at Spot who leaned into her softness. During her capture, the oni had caught hold of Jewel Tear’s braid and trapped her even as they killed her people. After Tommy rescued her, in a fit of grief and rage she had hacked off her long dark-brown hair. The haphazard haircut, the countless small cuts, and the dark bruises that covered her body had given her a broken, manic look. Someone had neatened her butchered locks since Tommy had seen her last; she sported a cute pixie haircut that looked intentional. The bruises were fading to shades of yellow. She looked less broken and that made him happy.

“Are you going to be helping?” Blue Sky asked Jewel Tear.

“Yes, Forge has been gracious enough to accept my help,” she told Blue Sky and the group at large. Tommy liked to think that the information, though, was for his ears. “I’ve studied defense building as I would need it for anything I built here in the Westernlands, but I’ve had no chance to put it into practice.”

“I need to go,” Tommy said to Jewel Tear and anyone else who might be within hearing range. He focused on Blue Sky. “Spot wants to stay and play with Baby Duck. Can you make sure that he finds her safely in all this confusion?”

“She’s in the dining room, clearing tables,” Jewel Tear said.

“Come on!” Blue Sky caught Spot by the wrist and dragged him off. “Barley was going to try out a recipe for crepes for breakfast! Let’s see if any are left.”

“Crepes?” Guy and Andy both echoed and followed the younger boys.

Jewel Tear drifted closer as she turned and watched the boys go. All around them, the moment for discussion had passed and people surged to new positions, focusing in the next step in their project. In that confusion, she brushed Tommy’s hand with her fingertips. “We’ll make sure that everyone here knows that Spot is not to be harmed.”

And then she was gone, letting the chaos seemingly shift them apart.