Wolf Who Rules

Chapter 17: A Murder Of Crows

“Stop squirming or I might drop you.” Riki growled through teeth gritted with the effort to carry Tinker aloft.

She glanced down and went still in shock of being dangled mid-air forty feet up and climbing. “Shouldn’t we be going down?”

“Down is good for you — very bad for me.”

“Damn it, Riki, my people need me. Put me down!” Tinker found herself gripping his arms so he couldn’t just drop her.

“There’s so many things wrong with that statement that I don’t have breath to explain it all.”

Movement at the window she’d smashed out of caught her eye and with relief she saw Cloudwalker pointing up at her. Moments later Pony and the others joined him at the opening.

“Oh, thank gods.” Tinker breathed.

Riki rose above the roofline. The crown of the black willow bristled in the street beyond. Its booming footsteps echoed up from the canyon of buildings. She felt a great surge of magic and a massive fireball suddenly engulfed the tree. Whoa! Apparently Prince True Flame had arrived. No wonder the tengu didn’t want to land.

Riki dipped down behind the next building, out of sight of her Hand. Black smoke billowed behind them. He flew straight west — as the saying went — as the crow flies, faster than a man could run despite being weighed down by her. When he reached the Ohio River, he turned and followed its course.

Where the hell was he taking her? It occurred to her that he couldn’t have been just passing by and caught her by luck.

“You planned this! You knew if you screwed with my spell, I’d come to fix it.”

“Would you believe this had nothing to do with you?”

“No.”

“Believe it not, the world does not revolve around Tinker the Great.”

How far could Riki fly? Could he keep up his speed, or had that been a sprint? And what did he want with her?

She tried to form a plan to escape. Riki, though, wouldn’t underestimate her — he knew her too well. Of all the people in Pittsburgh, he could match wits with her. Her first thought was to force him to drop her into the river. The large dark form of a river shark swimming under the water, following their passage, killed that plan. They followed the Ohio around its gentle bends, and Pittsburgh vanished behind the swell of the surrounding hills. Once the city was out of sight, Riki climbed the steep hill that once was Bellevue and crossed the Rim. There he dove into the ironwoods. The forest canopy rushed toward them, seeming to her a solid wall of green. Riki though flicked through openings she hadn’t seen, darting through slender upper branches to finally land on a thick bough, close to the massive trunk.

The moment they landed, Tinker twisted in his hold and swung at him hard as she could, aiming for his beak-like nose.

“God damn it!” He caught her hand and twisted her arm painfully up behind her back. He leaned his weight against her, pinning her to the trunk. “Just hold still!”

Cheek pressed to the rough gray bark, Tinker saw for the first time how far up the tree they stood — the forest floor lay a hundred feet below. Normally she didn’t mind heights — only normally she wasn’t this high up with an enemy spy. She felt stopped struggling, fear trying to climb up out of her stomach. She swallowed down on it — she had to keep her head.

Riki grabbed her right wrist, and then catching hold of her left, bound both hands behind her with a thin plastic strap. Once she was bound helpless, he turned her around. He wore war paint — streaks of black under his vivid blue eyes and shock of black hair. His shirt was cut on the same loose lines of the muscle shirt he wore often during her captivity by the oni, but of glossy black scale armor. On his feet, with their odd bird-like toes, he wore silver tips that looked razor-sharp.

“What do you want?” She was pleased she didn’t sound as scared as she was.

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Somehow I don’t believe you.” She wriggled slightly to indicate her tied wrists. It made her teeter alarmingly on the branch, so she carefully scrunched down until she straddled the thick limb. There, perfectly safe. Ha!

Riki watched her with a cocked head. “There’s no shame in being afraid of heights. Most people are.”

She stared at him with shock. That was exactly what he said in her dream — wasn’t it? She glanced downward and felt déjà vu; they’d been up high in her nightmare.

“What do you want?” she asked. “Are you going to turn me over to the oni again?”

“No. When you killed Lord Tomtom, we Tengu managed to break free of the oni.”

“I gave that up. You melted the witch, so I got out of my no-compete contract.”

This was seriously weird.

“Riki, who is the wizard of oz?”

“Huh?”

“I had a dream and you were in it.”

“And you and you and you too,” Riki quoted the movie.

“Oh good, at least you know the source. In my dream, I was trying to get to the wizard of Oz.”

“Ooookay, and I thought I was deep in left field. Oh this is sad.”

“Do have any idea who he might be?”

“The wizard?” Riki pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket, tapped out a cigarette, lit it and took a deep drag. “Hmmm, in the movie the wizard was the traveling performer that Dorothy met when she ran away from home. Chances are then, he’s someone you’ve met but don’t recognize now.”

Taking another drag, Riki vented the smoke out of his nose in twin columns as he thought. “His nature is changing; some perceive him as great and powerful, others see him as foolish, but he’s the only character that fully understood both Kansas and Oz. Most likely, you’re looking for someone with great knowledge, but his intelligence is disguised somehow.” Riki gazed off into the forest, eyes unfocused, thinking. “Like Dorothy, he’s a traveler between worlds, just as lost…”

Riki’s eyes snapped back in focus. “Impatience. He’s your wizard.”

“Who?”

“Impatience. The dragon that you fought at Turtle Creek.”

She tried to fit the name of “Impatience” with the countless jagged teeth and massive snaky body.

“See, intelligence disguised.” Riki waved his cigarette, reminding her of the astronomer post docs when they went into lecture mode. “Legends say that a dragon has a body and a spirit, and you can encounter the one without the other. Usually in the old stories, the dragons send their spirits out to cross great distances — but while they’re doing it, it’s a very unwise thing to approach them. The lights are on, but no one’s home.”

“Running on autopilot?”

“Let’s just say that there’s more than one story about someone getting their head bitten off while a dragon’s spirit is absent.”

She remembered with great clarity the sense of intelligence filling the dragon’s eyes — its surprise at having a hand clamped into its mouth. “So you’re saying the dragon was unconscious at the time he attacked me.”

“Probably.”

That would certainly explain how she managed to walk away with nothing more than a sore hand. “So where is this dragon now?”

“Even if I knew that, I wouldn’t tell you. I want Impatience for the tengu. That’s what I was doing at Reinholds. The oni had set a trap for it, using the fountain as a lure.”

“The oni?”

“Impatience was one of two dragons the oni had waiting on Onihida for the invasion. The other is Malice, who is much bigger. Somehow Impatience managed to slip the oni’s hold on him and escape.”

“So, on top of the royal troops and the oni, we have an unaligned dragon running loose in Pittsburgh.”

“Well, a party is only fun if you invite lots of interesting people.”

She stuck her tongue out at him. “How do you plan to find Impatience?”

“I don’t know. You apparently have to follow the yellow brick road.”

In her dream, though, the road ended with the tree. This was going to drive her mad. In the silence between them, she heard a slight noise from Riki’s hip pocket. He frowned, slipped out a cell phone and answered it with a cautious, “Hello?”

As he listened, his look changed to worry. “You’re where? Jesus Christ what are you doing there? Oh fuck. Yes I said that, what do you expect me to say? No — don’t — don’t…” Riki sighed. “Put your cousin on. No, no, not Joey! Keiko.” Riki waited a moment until the phone could be traded off on the other side of the conversation. “Yeah, I’m here. What’s going on?”

Riki listened for several minutes, grimacing as if what he heard pained him. “I’ll be there in a few minutes. Hang tight.” Riki tucked away his phone. “Change of plans.”

“You’re letting me go?”

“Sorry,” he actually managed to look it. “I’ll never have this chance again. I can’t throw it away.” He pulled out a silk scarf and tied it over her eyes. “I don’t want you to know where we’re going.” He took firm hold of her and jerked her off her feet. “This time, don’t wriggle so much.”

She felt him leap, knew that he left the safety of the tree, and nearly screamed at the knowledge. His wings rustled out, caught the air, and they swooped upwards.

Fifteen or twenty minutes later, Riki dove down and wove through light and shadows to land again. Numb from dangling, her legs folded under her. Riki lowered her down to a prone position and then knelt behind her, panting with exertion.

Their landing site seemed too flat to be a tree branch but it swayed slightly with the rustling of the wind.

“Damn it, Riki, where are we?”

Riki tugged down her blindfold. She lay just inside the door of a tiny cabin; only eight-foot square, it would have been claustrophobic if it actually contained furniture.

“We’re at a cote,” he panted. “Emergency shelter.”

The cabin seemed to be made of scrap lumber. The one small round window letting in light held glass, and the high ceiling bristled with nails, indicating that the roof was shingled, so the cabin was weatherproofed.

“Stay put.” He stepped past her to pull something off a set of shelves on the back wall. “There’s no safe way down to ground. I’ll be back.”

Cabin, hell, it was a tree house. Under any other circumstance, she would have been entranced with the notion.

Riki took a deep breath and stepped backwards out the door, spreading his black wings.

“Stay,” he repeated and flapped away.

Not trusting his word, she struggled to her feet and went to the door. The view straight down made her step backwards quickly. It was a place strictly for birds. If her hands weren’t bound behind her back, she could get to the massive branch just outside the door, but there was nowhere to go from there. The tree was too wide, and the lowest branch too far from the ground to allow climbing down. She could see nothing but virgin forest through both the door and window, not even a glimpse of sun or river to give a clue which direction they flown.

The cote was cunningly made. A brace along the back wall provided the one anchor point so the stress of the shifting tree could not tear the room apart. The front of cabin rested on a beam yoked over side branches. A loft bed nearly doubled the floor space. A generous overhang meant the front door could hang open even during a rain shower to let in light without the weather. The outside of the cabin had been painted gray and black in a pattern that mimicked ironwood bark.

She kicked shut the door but the latch was too high for her to shift with her hands bound.

The shelves on the back wall were stocked with survival gear: warm clothing and blankets in plastic bags, extra plastic bags, rolls of duct tape, a serious first aid kit, ammo for guns, flashlights, two box knives, waterproof matches, bottled spring water, a water purifier kit, a small cooler filled with power bars and military rations, and even a roll of toilet paper. Judging by the shape of the bag, Riki had taken a set of clothes with him.

She fumbled with one of the box knives, blindly sawing at the plastic strap binding her wrists. The blade kept slipping, nicking her wrists, before she finally managed to cut through. She bandaged her wrists, looking at what she had to work with. A rope ladder from strips of blanket, reinforced with the duct tape? Or perhaps she should just try to jump Riki and take his cell phone. No, he’d gone to meet someone, so he could return with others.

As if the thought summoned the tengu, Riki kicked the door open. She snatched up the box knife and spun around to face Riki as he dropped in through the doorway. He wasn’t alone. He had a child with him — a little boy in an oversized black hooded sweatshirt.

“Riki!” She started toward him, angry at the tengu, and afraid for the boy.

Riki looked up, saw the knife in her hand, and his face went cold. She had always suspected that the tengu treated her with kid gloves. Suddenly, it was if a stranger was looking at her, one who would hurt her if she took another step forward.

She stopped, and reached out with her empty hand. “Don’t hurt him.”

Still tight in Riki’s hold, the boy glanced over his shoulder at her, and blinked in surprise. He had the tengu’s coarse straight black hair, electric blue eyes and sharp features — though his nose wasn’t so nearly beak-like as Riki’s. “Oh, hello,” the tengu boy said with no fear in his voice. “I’m Joey. Joey Shoji. Who are you?”

With a rustle of wings, two slightly older tengu children crowded the doorway. Wearing blue jeans and torn t-shirts, they would have seemed like human children except for the way they clung to the sides of the doorway with bird-like feet, fanning the air with black wings. The girl looked thirteen and sported the black war paint and sharp spurs that Riki wore. The boy was younger — eleven? Ten? Both had Riki’s dark wild hair and sharp features.

“Hey, what’s a girl during here?” The boy asked in English and hopped into the cote.

The girl scowled and remained hovering at the door. “She’s an elf — the fairy princess.”

“What’s an elf?” Joey asked.

“She’s still a girl elf, Keiko,” The boy insisted.

“What’s an elf?” Joey asked again.

“It means I have pointed ears.” Tinker tapped on her left ear. She used it as a distraction to put the knife on the shelves as causally as she could. The two younger kids studied her ear, but Riki and Keiko’s eyes followed the knife.

The coldness left Riki’s face, but he still watched her carefully. “This is Mickey and Keiko.” He released the littlest one. “And Joey. They’re my younger cousins.”

“Should we really be telling her our names?” Keiko asked. “What’s she doing here?”

Joey pulled off the adult-sized sweatshirt he was drowning in. Underneath he had a ragged t-shirt like the other two — the back torn open to reveal the elaborate spell tattooed from shoulder to waistline, in black. “Look, look, I have wings too!”

He spoke a word, and magic poured through the tracings, making them shimmer like fresh ink. The air hazed around him, and the wings unfolded out of the distortion, at first holographic in appearance, ghosts of crow wings hovering behind him, fully extended. Then they solidified into reality, skin and bone merged into his musculature of his back, glistening black feathers, all correctly proportioned for his thin, child’s body.

“Wow,” Tinker said. “Those are cool.”

Keiko hopped into the cote to catch hold of Joey and pulled him away from Tinker, giving her a dark distrusting look.

Riki said something in the oni harsh tongue that made the younger tengu look at Tinker with surprise.

“Her?” Keiko cried. “No way!”

Riki shrugged, making his wings rustle. “She’s the one that killed Lord Tomtom. The dragon went to her. I have to check.”

“Wait,” Tinker said. “This all about the tattoo you think the dragon put on me?”

“Yes.” Riki nodded.

“Are you nuts?” Tinker said.

“No, just desperate. Please, take off your dress.”

“Oh you have to be kidding.” Tinker took a step back and realized how crowded the tiny cabin had just gotten with tengu wings. “I am not taking off my dress in front of all of you.”

Riki touched Joey’s shoulder. “Wings, Joey. Keiko and Mickey, you too.”

The boys spoke spell commands and their wings vanished. Riki picked them up, one at a time, and swung them up to the loft bed. They sat on the edge, dangling down their three-toed feet until Riki said, “Nyh, nyh, all the way up. Quiet little birds.”

Keiko crossed her arms, flared out her wings, and leveled a hostile look at Riki. “I’m a warrior.”

Riki glared at the tengu girl until the girl added something in oni. “A witness? Yes, I guess you’re right.”

“Yeah, I’m supposed to act as if that’s better?” Tinker asked.

“Take off your shirt, let me look at you, and if you don’t have the mark, I’ll let you go.”

Tinker scoffed. “Yeah, sure.”

“I promise,” Riki said.

Like that was worth anything.

“Don’t be such a chicken shit!” Keiko said.

Riki slapped the tengu girl on the back of the head. “Hey, you’re not helping. Would you want to take off your clothes in front of strangers?”

Keiko blushed and stuck out her tongue at her cousin.

Riki returned his attention to Tinker. “Come on. Just do it quick and it’d be over.”

“I don’t have any mark.”

Riki’s face went neutral, if all emotion drained out, leaving only resolve.

Tinker considered if she wanted her dress forcibly taken off. There wasn’t any running away, and while Keiko was young, the tengu girl was as tall as she was. Probably if Tinker trying calling the winds she’d end up in a wrestling match before she got the spell off. “Fine. I’ll take it off.”

She struggled out of her dress, and as she feared, bra had to go.

“It would be over her heart, wouldn’t it?” Keiko looked as uncomfortable with Tinker’s nudity as Tinker felt.

“It should.” Riki took Tinker’s hands and examined her arms carefully, even to the point of undoing the bandages and peering under them. It wasn’t as bad as Tinker feared. She realized it was the kids’ presence; she trusted Riki not to do anything with them there — watching. Hopefully she was right.

“Okay,” Riki finally said. “You can get dressed.”

“Does she have it? Does she have it?” Mickey called from the loft.

“No.” Riki glanced down at Keiko. “Can you make it to the near cote without stopping? It’s going to be dark and we’ll need to move quietly and fast.”

Keiko screwed up her face, torn between saying yes and admitting the truth. Finally she hunched her shoulders, looked away, and said, “No.”

Riki tousled the girl’s short black hair. “It’s better that you tell the truth now. I’ll take Joey and then come back to guide you two. Rest up.”

“What about her?” Keiko asked, and then added quietly. “You promised her.”

If it wasn’t her freedom they were talking about, it would have been funny to see Riki realize how screwed he was. He could start to ferry the kids back home, but it would leave her alone with at least two of them. Taking her home meant all three kids would be alone for a much longer time — perhaps a very long time if he ran into trouble with the elves. He looked her in sudden panic.

She sighed and waved her hand. “Take care of them first.”

“Promise me that you won’t hurt them.”

She scoffed. “Who is going to protect me from them?”

A wry smile came and went. “I’m trusting you two to behave. Understand?”

“Yes, Riki,” Mickey said.

Keiko nodded, watching Tinker.

“Joey?” Riki motioned to the littlest tengu and the boy flung himself out of the loft into Riki’s arms. “Ooomph! Settle down, you little monster. Here, sweatshirt on first.” Riki knelt and pulled the sweatshirt onto the boy. “Remember, once we leave, no talking. Quiet little birds.”

Joey mimed locking his mouth and throwing away the key.

“Good boy,” Riki picked up the child and gave them a worried look. “Remember there are oni in the woods. Keep it down and no lights.”

“Quiet little birds.” Mickey said.

Riki wavered at the door, Joey clinging to his neck. “Tinker — I love them much as you love Oilcan. Everything I’ve done has been for them. Please — just — just wait for me to get back.”

The tengu kids took the loft bed and Tinker settled by the door, her back to the wall so she could keep an eye on them. Keiko continued to stare at her. Mickey swung his legs. Dusk fell on the forest and darkness crawled into the cabin.

“How far does Riki have to go?”

Mickey started to say something but Keiko poked him.

“We’re not allowed to say.”

“What are you doing so far away anyhow?”

“Joey just got his wings.” Mickey said. “We were on his first long flight and got cut off by a troop of oni moving through the area. We tried to go around them and got lost. When we hit the city’s edge, Keiko said we should call Riki. I’m the one that remembered the number.”

“Then all you would do was cry.” Keiko said.

Mickey pulled up his legs, curling into himself.

Keiko gave him a look of remorse and then swung down. She rummaged through the shelves and then handed up a bottle of water and a power bar to her younger cousin. “Here. You can have the last chocolate one.”

Keiko put a second bottle and bar up beside Mickey. Wordlessly, she left an offering of food and water for Tinker down on the floor, carefully staying outside of Tinker’s reach, and then swung back to the loft.

Tinker hadn’t had a power bar as an elf — she expected something tasteless. She was surprised how good it tasted. “Oh, these are yummy.”

Mickey nodded in agreement, instantly happy by Keiko’s offering. “I didn’t think elves could speak English.”

Keiko pinched Mickey.

“Ow! What?”

“Don’t display how ignorant you are. She was a human until the viceroy turned her into an elf a few months ago.”

Mickey looked at Tinker, recognition dawning on him. “Oh, she’s the Dufae girl?”

“Yes.” Keiko said.

Fear filled Mickey’s face.

“Why are you scared of me?” Tinker asked.

“We know what Riki had to do to you.” Mickey whispered. “How he had to turn you over to the oni.”

“Riki didn’t want to us to come to Elfhome,” Keiko said. “He said that either the elves would find us, or the oni would. Better stay on Earth where we were at least free. But the oni came to our house and took Joey hostage. Riki sent us on ahead to be with our aunt, but he stayed to work for the oni — to try and get Joey back.”

“He never told me about you.”

“If he told you, then the kitsune would know, and then the oni would know. He couldn’t tell you the truth about anything — or he’d put us in danger.”

“You hate the tengu now — don’t you?” Mickey whispered.

A few days ago, Tinker probably would have said yes. She knew that when she found the MP3 player, she’d been angry enough to beat Riki to a pulp again. Now, with the dead in Chinatown, and the children looking at her in fear, she couldn’t hate all the innocent strangers. “No.”

Keiko scoffed, disbelieving. “I’d never forgive anyone that did that to me.”

“I saw what Lord Tomtom did to those that failed him — and it scared the living shit out of me.” She shuddered with the memory of the torture; the flash of bright blades and white of bone stripped clean of flesh. “I was willing to do almost anything to keep the knives away from me.”

“So you forgive Riki?”

There was something about the darkness that demanded honesty. “I’m still angry at him. But I was with the oni for nearly a month — I can understand why he did it and don’t think I can hate him for it. He took my shit and never complained, and when he could, he protected me.”

There was a sudden roar outside and a hoverbike — lift engines at full — popped up and landed on the massive branch outside the door. Its headlight flooded the room with stark white blinding light.

Tinker stood and called magic, wrapping the wind around her.

“Tinker domi!” Stormsong’s voice came out of the light.

“Stormsong?” Tinker squinted into the glare.

The headlight snapped off. Stormsong sat on a custom delta Tinker had done for a charity auction last year. Somehow Stormsong had managed to land and balance on the branch — it was going to take work to get it down in one piece. In her right hand the sekasha held a shotgun resting across the handlebars and trained at the cabin door.

“How the hell did you find me?” Tinker asked.

“I closed my eyes and went where I was needed.” Stormsong glanced beyond Tinker to the kids. “They’re tengu.”

Tinker realized that her being safe meant the kids were now in danger. “I promised that they wouldn’t be hurt.”

“That was a silly thing to do,” Stormsong said.

“They’re just kids.” Tinker moved to protect them with her shield.

“Kids grow up,” Stormsong said.

Tinker shook her head. “I can’t let you hurt them. I promised.”

“Yes, Tinker ze domi.” Stormsong said in High Tongue.

Tinker released the winds. The kids huddle against the back corner of the loft bed.

“We won’t hurt you,” she told them, “but I need to leave.”

“Hey,” Keiko called. She pulled off a necklace and scrambled forward to dangle it out to Tinker. “Take this. It will protect you.”

“From what?”

“Tengu.”

Tinker looped the necklace over her neck and picked her way out onto the branch. “How the hell did you get a hoverbike the whole way up here? I know the lift engine can’t do a hundred feet straight up — or down.”

“Flying blind.” Stormsong uncocked her shotgun and holstered it. “Hang tight to me — this is going to be tricky. And you might want to close your eyes.”

Tinker clung tight to Stormsong, trying to let her trust of the bodyguard override her knowledge of the hoverbike’s limitations. Stormsong didn’t even turn on bike’s headlight, just raced the bike’s engine and then tipped them over the edge. A squeak of fear leapt up Tinker’s throat — followed by her heart — as they nose-dived. They hit a lower branch that cracked under the lift drive and suddenly they were corkscrewing madly. She gripped Stormsong tight. She felt more than saw the blur off tree trunks and branches as they kissed off them. Seconds later they straightened out and roared through the darkness — Pony on a second hoverbike waiting on the ground running along side of them.

“Thank you,” Stormsong called back.

“What for? You rescued me.”

“Yes, but you trusted me to do my job.”