Wood Sprites

38: Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital

The automatic door opened for them as they helped Crow Boy into the emergency room. He barely seemed aware of what was happening, and it took all their strength to get him out of the low-slung car, upright and moving. There was a woman at the admittance desk intently working at a computer while fielding phone calls. She chewed gum while listening to the other side of the conversation, shaking her head and saying “No. No. No” as she stabbed computer keys. She glanced at them, focused back on her computer screen, and then, with confusion spreading across her face, looked back up. She sat there, jaw dropped, piece of gum showing, as they limped up to her desk. Her name tag read “Martha.”

The woman’s stunned expression gave Louise courage to swallow down her fear and say in Elvish, “Please, we need help. His leg is broken.”

The woman blinked rapidly. “Um, please hold.” She stabbed a button on her phone and leaned back to call, “Gerri! Gerri!”

An older woman appeared, summoned by the shouting. “Oh, that’s new.”

Louise used Elvish to plead for help and then made a show of pointing at Crow Boy’s obviously broken leg.

“They’re elves!” Martha claimed.

Gerri frowned at Crow’s black wings and then at the bug antennae that the twins were wearing. As they hoped, the wings won out for close inspection, which was good because the antennae were just wires attached to bobby pins.

“He’s not an elf.” Gerri didn’t bother to qualify the twins.

“She’s speaking Elvish.” Martha pointed at Louise.

“You understand what she’s saying?”

“I only recognize the one line from The Queen’s Puddin’ Cake. The Lemon-Lime JEL–Lo video. She’s asking for help. I’m not sure what the rest is. His leg looks broken.”

“Do you speak English?” Gerri spoke slowly and loudly. After a moment, she tried Spanish, which was easier to ignore. “Shit. Okay, we need a patient advocate. Also try to find some kind of translator; we’re going to need one.”

Louise half-expected to be told to wait in the waiting room but they were all shepherded into the examination area. It was only when she glanced at Jillian that she realized why: the twins were covered in bruises, soot, dirt, and blood. Celine might have broken Louise’s nose when she slapped her; certainly it had bled for a long time afterwards.

The staff’s focus was on Crow Boy once they determined that the girls weren’t showing any signs of shock. They hooked him up to an IV and monitors. A security guard appeared and swept them with a metal detector and collected the Swiss army knife, to Louise’s dismay.

After several intense minutes, they were left alone as various trauma nurses conferred on the other side of the curtain. They spoke in a fast mix of medical terms and possible legal ramifications. In addition to being children without parental permission for medical treatment, the nurses were debating the wording of the treaty with the elves.

“But we really don’t know if they’re elves or not,” one nurse complained.

Another one answered with, “We have to assume that their baseline might not be normal to humans and work from there.”

In the examining area’s bright light, Louise could also see Crow Boy clearly for the first time. He eyed their surroundings with confusion. He hadn’t been fully conscious throughout the whole discussion of where to go and the drive to the hospital. The IV was working and he was growing aware of where they were. Despite the fact that he was much taller than them, he looked only three or four years older. The idea that he was a ninth-grader triggered a memory, and she realized why he looked so familiar.

“What?” Jillian asked in Elvish. “You just got a ‘Oh my God’ look on your face.”

“We’ve met Crow Boy before,” Louise whispered. “The day after the explosion, he was at the. .” Elvish didn’t have a word for “museum” and she didn’t want to use any English around the hospital staff. “He was at the gift shop with the girls who were going to buy that snow ball.”

“Snow ball?” Jillian clearly wasn’t following.

“The snow thing.” Louise mimed shaking the snow globe. There might have been a word for “globe” in Elvish, but she didn’t know it. “Tianlong Hao.”

“Oh! Yeah! He was there with all the kids.”

They turned to look at him.

“But he didn’t have wings then,” Jillian pointed out.

No, he hadn’t.

“I–I-I remember you now.” Crow Boy spoke in fluent Elvish. He frowned at the twins. “You were with a beautiful black woman and you had your dog with you. I couldn’t figure out how you got the robot past security.”

They both squeaked with surprise.

“But where were your wings?” Jillian asked.

“I can dismiss them — if there’s magic. On Earth, we need to pass as human.”

“Were all those other kids tengu, too?”

“Yes, I was escorting them to Pittsburgh. We’ve been sneaking our people to Elfhome where they could live free of the oni. We started within days of the first Startup, before even the oni realized the opportunity that Pittsburgh gave them. Years and years, carefully moving our entire race across three worlds. And then everything came crumbling down this spring. Shiroikage’s spy ferreted out where the yamabushi had hidden the Chosen line.”

Shiroikage was what Crow Boy called Yves. By “spy” did he mean Tristan? The half-elf had said he’d been bird-watching in California before coming to New York. “Clever crows,” Tristan had complained. Had Tristan really been searching for tengu? “In Pasadena?”

“Yes. We thought we could hide the Chosen line among the masses in Los Angeles. I was guarding Keiko and Mickey as they attended school. I managed to get them to safety, but their parents. .” He took a deep breath, as if he were fighting off tears. “You should go. Leave me.”

That was what Tristan was doing? Or did he not know what happened after he found the tengu? He had asked Celine if Yves had captured Shoji; he’d left before the fighting started. Louise wanted to believe that Ming kept the slaughter from the half-elf. That Tristan was innocent by way of ignorance.

The curtain rustled back to admit a tall man in blue scrubs, ending all conversation. According to the ID badge clipped to his shirt pocket, he was Dr. Stefan Harmeling. He had a black Afro cropped short into stubs, dark brown skin, and tattoos tracing up his arms. “Jesús santisimo,” he whispered. He cautiously canted to the side so he could eye Crow Boy’s back. “Wings. Now I’ve seen everything.”

The children jumped slightly when the curtain rustled open again. It was only a nurse joining the doctor in the area.

“It’s okay. No one is going to harm you.” Doctor Harmeling smiled reassuringly and cautiously closed the distance between him and Crow Boy. “Let’s take a look at you and see how badly you’re hurt.”

Crow Boy scowled at him and then focused back on the twins. “Do you have someplace safe to go? You should leave now. Protect yourself.”

Jillian gave Peter Pan’s fearless laugh. “We, at least, have clothes on! You’re going to be naked when they’re done with you.”

And he’d need them to dismiss his wings, but when the hospital staff wasn’t paying close attention.

“They will follow,” Crow Boy said. “They are relentless.”

“First they’re going to have to put out the fire and track down the vehicles. We sent all the vehicles away from the mansion.”

“Well. . actually. . the truck is still there,” Nikola interrupted in Elvish. “It’s quite durable, so we’ve been using it as a battering ram. The rest we drove into the river; so it’s going to take them quite a long time to get them back.”

The doctor swung around to stare down at Nikola. “Jesús santisimo! Elfhome dogs can talk?”

The nurse carefully eyed Nikola. “It’s not a real dog. It’s one of those new very realistic nanny robots.”

“Perfect!” the doctor cried. “If it’s from Earth, it probably can translate for us.”

Louise winced. Nikola had never had to lie before. She wasn’t sure he knew how. He shrank back with a whimper as everyone in the room focused on him.

The doctor crouched down to Nikola’s level. “Hey, boy, do you speak English?”

Nikola whimpered again and looked to the twins and then looked at the doctor and then back to the twins.

“Dog, what’s your name?” the doctor said.

“Konnichiwa.” Nikola slowly stumbled over the Japanese, using his deep male samurai voice. “Boku wa Akita da.”

Strictly speaking, he was an Akita.

The doctor sighed and scrubbed his face. “Okay, we need a translator here as soon as possible and a child advocate. The fibula is fractured and this bruise has a tread pattern on it. Someone stomped on his leg to break it. If I remember my history correctly, the treaty forbids children from being removed from Elfhome, so I’m thinking that someone might be slave-trading them.”

He wasn’t that far from wrong.

Luckily the hospital didn’t have a translation device equipped to handle Elvish. They cycled a dozen human languages past the twins, three of which they were fluent in, but they pretended not to understand. The child advocate arrived and signed release forms so that Crow Boy could be X-rayed and MRI scanned. The test results triggered a phone call to the city zoo to summon a vet.

“This is so wild!” the vet murmured as the adults all eyed the test results.

Dr. Harmeling shook his head. “I’m not sure what the girls are. Their vitals are fine, so we don’t really have a reason to test them. But he’s definitely not human.”

“Yes, I agree,” the vet said. “His anatomy is very birdlike. His bones are hollow and thin-walled but dense. These masses resemble a crop and gizzard, and these look like the air sacs that play an important part in respiration in birds. These bony hooks on the ribs support the anchorage of the muscles that move the wings. He has three toes in front and one in back, not five facing forward. These are claws on his toes, not nails. It’s just mind-blowing.

“That said,” the vet added, “he’s displaying a lot more understanding of his situation and surroundings than any animal I’ve worked with, and that includes gorillas. I believe he’s equal to human in intelligence. I don’t think he’s an elf, but what do I know about elves?”

“What does anyone know? We’ll just put him down as a black-winged elf.” Dr. Harmeling tapped the MRI of Crow Boy’s leg. “Some bastard deliberately broke this boy’s leg. All these knife cuts on the arm? This is clearly torture.”

“Setting bird bones is similar to a mammal but occasionally it’s harder to keep the thinner bones lined up. We’ll have to take X-rays after the cast is on to make sure nothing shifted after we set it.”

“Think we can give him anything for pain?” Dr. Harmeling asked. “We’ll need to get these leg muscles to relax to line the bones up.”

“There are some things that we use in birds that are also used with humans. What I tend to use with birds is inhalant anesthesia. It’s pretty safe. As you know, it is gotten out of the system by breathing, so you can wake the birds up pretty quickly.”

A police officer arrived armed with a machine translator. Apparently the New York City Police Department had to deal daily with people speaking one of the nearly seven thousand different languages on Earth. He was unruffled at the prospect of interviewing victims in Elvish.

The wings, though, freaked him out.

“He’s definitely half-bird,” Dr. Harmeling stated after he reassured them that the wings were attached via bones and muscles and not just some clever costume. “He’s not from Earth. They seem to be communicating in Elvish. At least, my staff has picked up a handful of words that they recognize from some videos.”

Crow Boy had his face set to an unemotional stare, but the nervous flutter of his wings showed his fear.

“And no one came in with them?” the officer asked.

“They were dropped off by a sports car. We checked the video, but all our cameras went haywire about ten minutes before they showed up. They’re still down.”

The twins had nuked the hospital’s security system while en route so the police couldn’t backtrack them to Yves.

“I’m police officer Jayden Cohen.” The man paused, waiting for the translating machine, which decided “laedin-caste Fire clan royal marine” was as close as it could get to “police officer.” His given name came out as “God will judge priest.” Obviously the translator wasn’t the most sophisticated piece of hardware. “What is your name?”

Crow Boy stared. His face stayed neutral but his quickly tracking eyes betrayed that he was trying to think of a safe answer and failing.

Louise hadn’t considered what they would tell the staff if a translator showed up.

Luckily, Jillian had. “He is Crow Warrior Boy of Wind.” Crow Boy’s eyes widened and he gave Jillian a panicked look, which she ignored. “I’m Sweet Lemon Scent on Wind and this is my twin sister, Flowering Lime Tree Swaying in Wind.”

The police frowned at the machine as it butchered their names to “Child Boy Fighter Crow, Candy Stink Lemon, and Tree Waving Limbs Madly Lime,” and after a moment of thought added “Facilitating Outcrossing.”

The police officer then eyed Jillian and Louise. He reached out and tugged one of the antenna out of Jillian’s hair. “What exactly are you?”

Jillian raised her arm — covered with a blood-soaked sleeve — to wipe at her eyes. Life lesson number five kicked in: adults will believe the stupidest things when you’re covered in blood. “Those that kidnapped us put those into our hair and then laughed at us and told us that if we took them off, they’d cut off one of our fingers. Please put it back.”

Louise acted out comforting Jillian. “We don’t understand. Why did they do that? What is that? What does it mean?”

Suspicion bled off of the officer’s face as the machine translated their lies.

“I don’t know, sweetheart, but you don’t have to be scared.” Officer Cohen produced an evidence bag and dropped the antenna into it. “We’re not going to let anyone hurt you.” He collected the other three antennae. “Are you elves? From Elfhome?”

Jillian used the time it took the machine to translate out the questions to launch into a series of distraction questions, just to muddle things. “This box that talks? Magic speaker voice thrower? Ham loaf? Pickle questions?”

Crow Boy looked confused as the machine faithfully attempted to put the garbled Elvish into some reasonable English translation.

“This box that talks? Fling voice orator magic? Bread of smoked pork? Questions preserved by anaerobic fermentation in brine?”

Jillian obviously was hoping that if she garbled the replies enough, the policeman would assume any holes in their story were from bad translation and not because they were fabricating almost everything.

The policeman frowned and replayed her answer. A very good sign. “Yes, this is a translator. It translates what I’m saying in English to Elvish.” And then obviously not trusting the machine now, he pointed to his mouth and said “English” and then pointed at the machine. “Elvish.” And then muttered quietly, “I hope.”

The twins waited for the translation, which was perfect.

“Oh! How clever!” Jillian stated.

“Yes, it is wonderful!” Louise cried.

“Please help us!” Jillian cried. “Madly galloping into the night, we transfix. Please help Crow Warrior. His leg is broken! They put us in cages and fed us zombie donkeys. Pickle questions? They stomped on his leg and broke it and they had knives and they were going to cut him up!” Jillian mimed the elves attacking with the butcher knives. “Dirty dog! Train biscuit train! If they find us, they’ll kill everyone and put us back into the cage!”

“You’re safe,” the police officer stated after the machine struggled to translate the mix of good and purposely garbled Elvish.

“They have a hidden army here on Earth!” Louise warned. “The EIA has been infiltrated. The ambassador to China is one of them. Ambassador Feng!”

“Female dog breath yelping,” Jillian added quickly.

“Purple!” Louise stated firmly, nodding.

Crow Boy stared at them as if they’d both grown two heads.

“The ambassador of China?” The policeman latched onto the first clear lead they had given him.

“Purple!” the twins cried in unison.

“He came to the mansion asking for help. .” Louise started.

Jillian continued, “He needed help because royal marines from his country were coming to arrest him. They found out he’s oni.”

Louise added. “Crown Prince Kiss Butt of the oni told him to run and hide and not come back!”

Jillian held up her right hand and smashed thumb and pointer finger together. “Dokadokadokadoka.”

“Purple,” Louise breathed. “The hidden prince tortured him with magic before telling him to run away. It was scary.”

Jillian nodded. “They put us into a cage, but we managed to escape! They caught us again and broke Crow Warrior’s leg. They said they were going to cut off his feet. But then there was big explosion. Boom! Everything was burning, and we got away.”

They had to wait a long time for the machine to translate and then Officer Cohen to puzzle out the basic gist of their night.

“How did you get here?” Cohen asked.

Good question. Louise frowned at the translator as if it had said something strange. Intermixing babble with actual real information was harder than she’d thought.

“The box that moves on wheels,” Jillian made a motor noise while indicating spinning tires by twirling both pointer fingers in circles.

“Automobile!” Louise provided the term that the elves used for cars.

Jillian clapped with excitement. “Purple! Purple! Automobile! We came in an automobile!”

The police officer looked to Crow Boy.

“Purple,” Crow Boy confirmed faintly. “Automobile.”

The police officer frowned at the machine with frustration. He obviously wanted to ask all sorts of questions, but they had him on the ropes.

“They’re going to kidnap Tinker domi. .” Louise started and faltered.

“She invented hoverbikes.” Jillian launched into an elaborate mime that seemed to involve weaving cloth. “They are full of eels!”

“Her father made the gate that the oni created in space.” Louise pointed up at the sky.

“The oni thinks that the apple never falls far from the raccoon.” Jillian stood up, picked up one of the hospital gowns stacked nearby, and tossed it over Louise’s head.

Luckily Louise had realized what Jillian intended to do. She did not startle at being blindfolded. As the world vanished, she was filled with a sense of calm. She knew exactly what to say. “Black wings murdered time and now wait in timeless darkness. The dream crow stirs. She will cry out and the blood of her beloved will answer. The promised time is at hand. Let the flock be gathered and stand strong against those who enslaved them. Providence will provide. His child returns, bringing forth all that is needed for salvation. Impatience will—”

There was a loud outcry as Crow Boy suddenly lunged off the table and landed at her feet. Catching hold of her hands, he gripped them painfully tight. “Jin is alive?”

“No, no, no!” the doctor shouted. “Orderly!”

“Is Jin alive?” Crow Boy cried.

Louise squeezed close her eyes, trying to hold on to the sense of calm knowing. “His prison is about to be broken and he will be set free to fly again. The door is closing, but evil has taken root on Elfhome. All can be lost—”

The blindfold was torn away as Crow Boy was muscled back into his bed, gently but firmly, by two large male orderlies.

“He tore out his IV,” someone cried, and Louise realized that her hands were covered with blood. Louise stared at her bloody fingers. How did this keep happening? Up to today, blood was something that she half-expected after a great deal of planning and debate and risk assessment. It never came as a surprise. Other than Jillian’s, she had never even seen someone else’s blood, and here it was, all over her, again and again.

Jillian started to whimper, a prelude to real crying. Fake crying would have been loud and instant. With her sniffles, the day proved too much for Louise, and she felt hot tears filling her eyes.

“Oookay.” The police officer was shaking his head. “I have not a clue what the hell that was all about.”

“We need to put the boy under,” the doctor murmured as he pressed his hand over the machine’s microphone. “None of our translators are loaded with Elvish. Can you help us explain to the children what’s about to happen?”

It was stressful to watch them apply the anesthesia and see Crow Boy become totally helpless. Louise hugged Nikola tight, trying to find the inner calm that she’d experienced just moments before. It had been as if she’d stepped out of herself, shedding all fears and worries along the way.

After they wheeled Crow Boy away, she realized that Joy was rummaging through medical supplies, tearing open plastic wrappings to taste the contents. The girls were out, scurrying about in their mice robot bodies.

“What are you doing?”

“Hungry!” Joy cried. “Candy! You promised!”

“Bored,” Chuck Norris said.

“Scared,” the Jawbreakers squeaked.

Nikola pressed up against Louise, nodding silently in agreement with the Jawbreakers.

“We need to feed her now.” Jillian went to the door and peeked out. “They said it would be hours for them to set the leg and him to fully wake up from the anesthesia.”

In other words, if they waited, Joy would only get more uncontrollable.

“I thought I saw some vending machines near the waiting room.” Louise scooped up Joy with one hand and plucked up the mice one at a time with her other, depositing them on her shoulder. “We’re getting something!” she cried as Joy squirmed. “Just be patient.”

They waited until the nurses at the station across the hall were distracted and then slipped out. The other rooms were all dark; the patients asleep. The twins walked quickly through the deserted hallways to the waiting room. There was an entire wall of machines. The first offered hot coffee. The second was water and chilled juice and milk. The third was fruit and veggies.

“Oh God,” Jillian whispered. “Of course a hospital would only have healthy snacks. What about grapes? You like grapes.”

“Feh,” Joy muttered from Louise’s arms. Then she spotted what was in the next machine. “Oooooh!” She leaned far out of Louise’s hold to press her paws against the glass. “Candy!”

Jillian sighed and pointed out the ones they knew the baby dragon liked the most. “Gummy worms? Snickers? Kit Kat? M&Ms?”

Joy gazed up them with pure delight on her face and nodded.

“Which ones?” Jillian asked.

“Candy!”

“I think she wants one of each,” Louise said. “She’s been really good so far. We owe her.”

“All this can’t be good for her.” Nevertheless, Jillian used her phone to buy one of each type of candy. “We’re lousy mothers, you know. Our mom would never give in to us. She’d give us that look and we knew we’d better behave and we would.”

Louise felt a sudden floodwater of sorrow rise up. “I know.”

“What are we going to do about the babies?” Jillian whispered. “Joy is good at taking care of herself, but what are we going to do with real babies?”

Louise steeled herself against wanting to cry. “I don’t know. We don’t have any way for the babies to be born yet, so let’s not worry about it now.”

“When they’re born, we’ll work hard and be the best mothers ever.”

“How can you be our mothers when you’re our sisters?” the babies asked.

“Oh!” Jillian used one of their parents’ distraction tricks. “We’re going to have to get new phones.”

Louise gasped as she realized that they would need phones to purchase everything from Joy’s candy to new clothes. (They hadn’t been stripped down like Crow Boy, but their clothes were blood-soaked and reeked of smoke.) Ming would be able to track every purchase and chart their movements through the city via their old phones.

“We can order replacement phones and pick them up at an automated kiosk.” It would mean severing ties with everyone they knew as they changed phone numbers. Should they call their Aunt Kitty and warn her? Her last text had her on a plane heading back to California; she needed to keep working if she had any hope of gaining custody.

Louise took out her phone and turned it on to check for recent text messages from Aunt Kitty. There were five hundred and six new texts. The last dozen all from their classmates.

Louise had gotten a handful of texts after their parents were killed. Their friends had wanted to know if they were okay. She hadn’t answered any of them. She didn’t know how, because the true and obvious response was “no.” After a few days, the incoming texts trickled to nothing.

Why had she gotten over five hundred since this morning? As she stared at her phone, it vibrated with a new text.

It was the middle of the night. Why would anyone be texting this late?

The text was “Where are you?” from Iggy. The one before was from him, too. “Are you okay?” And before that was “Call me!”

A quick scroll downward showed that all five hundred were from her classmates.

What in the world had happened?

She scrolled down and found the first text.

It was from Elle Pondwater, and all in capital letters. “OMG! OMG! I DIDN’T DO IT! I SWEAR!”

Oh, this did not bode well.

The next one was from Iggy. “Someone leaked your names to the press. The world knows you’re Lemon-Lime.”

“Oh no,” Louise whispered.

Zahara pointed the finger at Elle with: “That witch sold your pictures to the tabloids!”

And then another from Elle. “That horrible photographer from my party figured out who you were! He’s sold the picture of you two made up as elves!” And then a minute later, a second text. “YOU’RE PRINCESS TINKER’S SISTERS?” Followed by a series of “?” and “!” marks.

“No, no, no,” Louise whispered, scrolling down. How did anyone know that?

Iggy texted again. “They’re just making wild guesses by saying that you know all that stuff about Elfhome because you’re Princess Tinker’s little sisters. Right? Yeah, you look a lot like her, but that’s not because you’re related. Right?” And then an hour later. “How did you know that Princess Tinker saved Windwolf?”

Zahara reported more damage. “Elle says she didn’t do it, but her mother had her photographer film the play. He recognized your music. He started a bidding war for the video.”

Louise groaned. She’d been so stupid. Pressed for time, she’d used all their normal music-composing tools that included the digital recreations of the Elfhome instruments. Any claims that they were the creators of the Lemon-Lime videos might have been discounted if not for the corroborating evidence of their signature music.

Zahara had reported more bad news while they were locked in Yves’ magical cage. The Jello Shots had waded into battle, a hundred thousand strong, determined to find out the truth. Like data locusts, they’d swarmed the school computer, found the student list for the twins’ class, and gone after home computers looking for evidence. Unlike the twins’ personal systems, the other students’ were easy prey.

Louise called up the Jello Shot forum and winced at what their fans had stolen. Everything from the anti-mermaid music video to set designs to costume sketches were mined, shared, compared to existing Lemon-Lime work, and debated in detail. In Giselle’s computer, the Jello Shots had found the ultimate proof. While the twins were working on their response to Nigel’s shout-out, they hadn’t noticed Giselle filming them. She sat behind them in class and managed to get a clear shot of Louise animating the first act while Jillian wrote dialogue. Louise always thought that she crawled through the process, but removed by time and place, she realized that she worked at an amazing speed. She pulled up old sets from previous videos, worked camera angles, blocked in characters, did special effects, and fiddled with lighting angles. And then, proving to be a ninjalike stalker, Giselle managed to film them recording the lines in the girls’ restroom.

“Lemon-Lime is so super amazing awesome cute!” The Jello Shots mostly agreed (there were still hold-outs that didn’t believe the evidence), and then tore into the twins’ life. In the course of an hour, they knew everything that could be known about the girls. The dust explosion in their playhouse. The bomb outside their school. Their connection to the bomber. Their parents’ death. The custody battle.

The Jello Shots reeled at what they found and poured out their sympathy. To Louise’s alarm, their attention moved from what the twins had done in the past to where they were now. “They’re only nine years old! Has anyone seen them since the play? They weren’t at the funeral! Why didn’t they go? Where are they? Did something happen to them?”

How did the Jello Shots find out that they weren’t at the funeral? She discovered there was an entire thread of the fans calling the funeral home and grilling the staff as to who attended.

Louise’s phone vibrated.

It was Iggy texting again: “Please let me know you’re okay!”

Was it really Iggy texting her? Or was Yves using Iggy to find the twins? Was Iggy in danger, too? If Yves wasn’t using Iggy, then contacting him directly might make him a target.

She took out her tablet and found an unsecured network and tapped into it.

“Who are you calling?” Jillian asked.

“Iggy. Something’s wrong.”

He picked up on the first ring with a cautious, “Hello?”

“Say ‘Who is this’ if there’s someone threatening you.”

“What?”

“Is someone looking for us?”

“Huh? I am. And half the free world. Where are you?”

Louise considered possible answers. “We’re safe. For now.”

“You weren’t hurt in the explosion?”

“Which one?” She winced. People normally didn’t have multiple explosions in their lives.

“The one in Alpine! Your grandmother’s house blew up! Lemon-Lime Love just broke the news a few minutes ago.”

Louise groaned. She’d forgotten that they had more than one website of rabid fans.

Iggy continued, apparently assuming that she knew nothing about the fire. “Neighbors heard an explosion and called 911. They think that there was a gas leak in the kitchen. By the time the fire department got there, though, the whole house had caught on fire. They’re still fighting it.”

Which was why Iggy was frantically texting them.

“Yeah. We blew it up before we left.”

“What?” Iggy shouted.

“Our grandmother is married to a very evil family. She got sick and went to the hospital and her stepson locked us up in the basement. In a cage. And he had a boy locked up in the next room. So we blew up the house and ran away. He’s probably looking for us, so it’s not safe for us to tell anyone where we are.”

There was a long silence from the other end, and then Iggy said, “You’re totally serious. You’re not making that up?”

“Completely totally serious.”

“Louise, your grandmother died today.”

Louise felt tears burning in her eyes. She rubbed them away, surprised that she actually hadn’t seen the news coming. Yves wouldn’t have dared to lock them up without being sure that there was no chance of Anna ever finding out.

“Everyone is saying how you don’t have any family left,” Iggy said. “You don’t have any place to go, do you? Come to my house. You’ll be safe here.”

“No. No, we won’t.” There was no way Louise was going to be responsible for getting Iggy or his protective sisters hurt. It would kill her to bring harm down on the close-knit family. “If the Jello Shots can find all our friends, so can Desmarais.”

“Just come to our house and my mom and dad will find a place you’ll be safe.”

“We have family. Princess Tinker is our older sister.”

“She is? I thought the tabloids were just making that up.”

“No, they’re not making it up. She’s our sister.” Not that Alexander knew it. There were Orville and Lain, who were also complete strangers. Louise shivered at the knowledge that they were putting all their hope on people that they would barely recognize in person, who didn’t even know they existed. “We’re going to Elfhome. Windwolf will protect us there.”

“Are you sure?”

Louise closed her eyes tight and took a deep breath. And another. She sought that mysterious calm of knowing. Would Windwolf protect them? “The shards of the fallen have slipped from our fingers. With Joy, the darkness will strike at the heart of the wolf’s greatest strength and his greatest weakness. The wolf must gather the children to him. From oldest to unborn, Brilliance must hold the door.”

“Huh?”

She opened her eyes. “It means he’ll protect us. He has to. He has no choice. He needs us if his world is going to survive.”