Harbinger

23: A SNAKE IN THE GRASS

The spaceship made Tristan’s older brother laugh and laugh. Lucien sat, laughing, on the roof of the two-story stone piers that once anchored the Washington Bridge over Turtle Creek. He’d perched on the stone’s edge, kicking his feet like a child.

“Oh, you should have seen it,” Lucien said. “Even Danni was blindsided. I tell you, Esme’s changeling daughter is a hoot. Before the spaceship, this entire valley was ice-cold blue soup. The weirdest freaking thing I’ve ever seen. I have no idea how she did it, but that stupid cat was toast. I’m glad Father made the decision to trust him with the changeling because I’d be totally screwed by now.”

While Tristan could pass as a very tall nine-year-old and be enrolled into fifth grade, his brother looked like he could be as old as thirteen or fourteen. Lucien was growing up faster than Tristan; it seemed like his brother had inherited more of their mother’s genes. The irony was that they hadn’t seen each other for over twenty years. It had been a joyful reunion in July. As the days stretched on, though, Tristan realized that Lucien was keeping him at arm’s length and isolated in his deep forest camp. He was starting to worry something was drastically wrong.

What did this mean? Bringing him to the site of a major failure for their side to laugh like the children that they were?

“They said she opened a gate to Onihida,” Tristan said, repeating the rumors around camp. “You could see our troops gathered on the other side — half a million strong — waiting for the chance to cross through it. It would have been an instant victory for us.”

“Danni said it would fail but she wasn’t sure how.” Lucien waved at the spaceship. “Not even the Eyes could see this coming! Danni said it would get that damn cat out of my hair, so I let it run its course.”

“Didn’t we need Lord Tomtom?”

“Father might think we did but Danni said he was getting to be a liability. Certainly it’s his mistakes that we’ve been tripping over all summer, starting with that stupid gunfight on Veterans Bridge. He was sloppy and ambitious. He had no sense of delicacy. It’s because of him we lost all advantage of surprise. It was best to let the stupid cat get burned on the fire that is Esme’s changeling daughter. Oh, she burns so hot.”

Tristan turned back to the spaceship standing tail down in the valley below. There were glyphs of draconic magic scrawled up its side. He guessed that the spell inscribed on the hull was what was keeping the mile-long ship from collapsing under the weight of gravity and wind shear. Written in giant Chinese letters was the name of the spaceship. Dahe Hao. He’d watched it jump out of Earth’s orbit eighteen years ago. He was sure that he’d never see it again. He was sure that his older half sister was dead. “It’s Esme’s ship.”

“Yeah,” Lucien laughed. “It’s so like her, coming out of nowhere to kick Father in the nuts as hard as she can.”

“She’s alive?”

“Yes. She’s at Lain’s. She looks the same as when she left. It’s like she’s half-elf too. Dufae had left a booby trap in his design. All the ships that went through the gate were trapped in time until his daughter ripped it out of the sky.”

“How did she…” Tristan paused, mind boggled to the point that he couldn’t even form a question.

“Make the valley blue soup? Rip the gate out of the sky? Find her mother? Teleport her here?” Lucien laughed and flung himself backward to lie staring up at the gray sky threatening to rain. He’d abandoned his oni robes for this exploration of the bridge and was wearing blue jeans and a dark gray hoodie. For the first time since Tristan arrived, Lucien seemed like the boy that he was. It almost seemed like they were back on Earth again, just normal kids, out exploring the woods around their father’s estate. “Only the gods know! I certainly don’t. I’ve given up trying to guess because even the Eyes can’t see her next weird wiggle. She’s like her mother that way. Who would have guessed that Esme would suddenly want to be a spaceship captain? She was all angst and steampunk when she lived at the mansion.”

Tristan thought of his two nine-year-old nieces now living in their mother’s bedroom. He felt guilty that he’d left them there — unknowing, unprotected. They were far too clever not to realize something was off about everyone at his father’s estate. Would they realize that all the servants were ancient elves, camping on the edge of a pinprick gateway between the worlds?

“They say that Esme made more than this changeling.” His brother said it as fact but it was a question, as if he guessed Tristan’s thoughts. They had some of their mother’s intuition, just not enough to please their father.

Tristan struggled to keep his tone factual. “After the first implantation was successful, Esme had the remaining genetic material frozen. An employee of the lab noticed that the material had been abandoned and stole it. He and his wife had twins.” Tristan felt another guilty twist. He couldn’t be sure if his father had a hand in the death of the girls’ parents but it felt too unlikely to be a coincidence. He knew what it was like to be torn away from your mother at a young age. He wouldn’t wish it on anyone — and yet, the twins were now orphans trapped at his father’s estate. “Father seems unsatisfied with them. I think it’s because they remind him of Esme and how hard she fought him. He has our people looking to see if there was more material in storage. Something he can mold into a more useful tool.”

“Twins?” Lucien sounded genuinely surprised. Had Father told Lucien nothing? “Oh, the horror! Two more like this changeling? I’m glad they’re on Earth and not here.”

“With the gate gone, there’s no way Father can have them brought to Elfhome now.” Tristan was glad that they were on Earth with his mother, but still he wasn’t completely sure that they were safe.

Yves had been left on Earth to oversee their efforts there. Their older brother had always made it clear that Lucien and Tristan were beneath his notice. They were half-elves and would only live a few hundred years. Maybe. Or they might live for thousands of years. No one was sure. Yves still saw his younger half brothers as disposable tools. What would Yves do to the twins? Would he see them as a valuable commodity or a dangerous nuisance?

“There’s always a way.” Lucien said that as if he knew something Tristan had never been told. “Yves is long overdue but Father expects big brother any time now.”

With the orbital gate gone, there should be no way for Yves to get to Elfhome. Lucien made it sound like it was only a matter of time.

Tristan wasn’t sure what their father planned for him. He hadn’t seen his father since he’d been sent away from the mansion in the middle of the night. They had crossed during the July Shutdown in separate vehicles. His father hadn’t summoned him during the last two months; it almost seemed like he’d forgotten about Tristan. It did not bode well.

“Don’t worry,” Lucien said. “I’ve made myself indispensable here. I’ll keep you safe until you can establish your own worth. You found the tengu Chosen bloodline. You figured out how to find the box that Unbounded Brilliance stole hundreds of years ago. Even if Father can’t see the value of that, don’t worry, little brother. You’re one of the two things I plan to claim for myself once Pittsburgh has fallen.”

“Two? What’s the other?”

Lucien blushed and sat up. “There’s a girl I want. I found her one day, down in the Strip District. She’s like an angel. I had to put her aside until the fighting was over. Danni said that she was too dangerous to keep. Danni was right, she has a very audacious family — but I want her. If I am the ying — the darkness — then she is my yang. My light. Once we bring the elves to their knees, I want you to help me recapture her.”

Tristan nodded even as he inwardly winced at the word “recapture.” It was not a word one should use regarding a beloved. It was weird to think of his brother even having a lover. Tristan was too young physically to consider taking one. His body wasn’t showing any of the signs of puberty. There was also the problem that as a half-elf, he aged much slower than any of the humans he’d ever known.

“Will you make her an elf?” Tristan said. “So she can stay young as you?”

His brother waved aside the concern. “I made her immortal when I made her a tengu. Transforming her was a way to keep Danni from fiddling with her. The Eyes are tricky to work with. They can see what you’re about to do unless you’re very…indirect. It makes them infuriatingly independent. Chloe would not be dead if she hadn’t been so sure she could dance rings around the changeling. I’d warned her to be careful but she was too confident of her own skills. Danni would have killed my Boo if I hadn’t made Boo irreplaceable as part of the Chosen bloodline.” His brother grinned. “Danni and the others always underestimate me. They forget I’m of Clarity’s bloodline too.”

Lucien had all the tengu in his camp killed shortly after Tristan arrived. He’d known that he was going to lose all leverage with the Flock even before Joey Shoji had been rescued.

“If you made her tengu,” Tristan said, “where is she now?”

Lucien waved lazily as if this wasn’t important. “I’m not sure. I dare not ask the Eyes to fetch her, lest they take it upon themselves to kill her. Joey Shoji is back with his people — he was spotted at Poppymeadows when the tengu summoned their dead guardian spirit. Boo wasn’t with the other Chosen. She might be at the tengu base, wherever they have that hidden. Or she might have gone back to her family. I don’t trust my normal spies. They’re too bloodthirsty to fetch someone you love. I need your skills and finesse.”

Someone you love. That must be nice. Tristan was glad but a little jealous that Lucien wasn’t alone like him. “I’ll find her for you.”

“Good lad!” His brother bounded to his feet.

Somewhere nearby, something exploded. Birds rose up from the forest like a startled cloud.

“So much for our distraction,” Lucien said. “The tengu got their hands on some explosives. The black willows will be sitting ducks for an aerial assault. We need to go before the ship’s guards return.”

“We’re not using this site, then?” Tristan asked.

“It doesn’t suit our needs anymore. There was a strong fiutana in this valley but it is gone. Either the changeling drained it dry when she turned this area into blue soup or the spell that Impatience put on the spaceship is redirecting the magic to the point that this area matches normal levels of magic. Either way, even if our casting circle survived everything that the changeling did to this valley, the spaceship is now sitting on top of it.”

They climbed down the ladder inside the stone pier to the bridge deck. There a host of true blood oni waited. Just before stepping outside, Lucien said “Masks.”

Lucien pulled his on — a scowling red black lacquer demon’s face with horns and fangs. It was a fierce façade that covered his child face. It was a grim reminder that his brother had been fighting on Elfhome for over two decades. Tristan’s mask was a hand-me-down with a deep scratch where some enemy had gotten too close to his brother.

“Lord Kajo.” The true bloods bowed in greeting to Lucien. “What is your will?”

“We’re shifting to the second camp. Bring the weapon. If the fiutana is intact, we’ll set it off there.”

Malice had raided the second camp after the spell-worked dragon temporarily slipped out of their control. The dragon had smashed open half of the cabins like piñatas, and feasted on the oni inside. There were scattered bones everywhere, cracking under foot like dried branches. The cloaking spell had been blasted from their crude spell stone, evidence that the elves had followed close behind Malice. It was depressing proof that they were backed into a corner, fighting for their lives.

Things had been so different before the first Startup, so many years ago. Elfhome was this impossibly distant fairyland and they were the exiled rightful rulers. Life is so much cheerier when you’re the long-lost prince of a mythical empire; when your “possibly fatal disease” was “a ruse designed to disguise your immortality.”

Just when Tristan started to doubt it — thinking it was like Santa Claus but something you told dying children — Pittsburgh vanished. In its place had been a forest of ironwoods just like his father’s stories. He was an elf. He was a prince.

He would live forever.

His euphoria lasted for three days until he realized that the people he loved most were pure human.

Those who would be with him for the rest of his life were his father and his brothers. He’d spent decades trying to win their love and trust. He’d done so many questionable things for his father — things he didn’t allow himself to ponder deeply. One more distasteful thing — this time to secure Lucien’s love — and then, hopefully, it would be the end of it. They would have won the war and there would be others better suited to be tools than himself.

“Here.” Lucien handed a leather messenger bag to Tristan. He was speaking in English, something his troops didn’t understand, so he wanted Tristan’s activities to be secret. “I’ll see if the casting circle is intact. I want you to focus on this.”

Tristan nodded. He took shelter in one of the undamaged cabins. The camp had housed a small unit of elite true blood warriors. They were the more civilized oni. Their buildings were vaguely Tudor-style in appearance, with thatched roofs, magic-hewed ironwood timbers, and walls of wattle and daub that had been whitewashed with lime. The floors were covered with mats of woven reeds, much like the Japanese tatami. Tristan had lived in rougher buildings while pursuing his father’s work on Earth. It was ironic that his father’s people who had lived in New York for decades now considered these houses too rough to live in. The troops who survived Malice’s attack had stripped the building of food, weapons, and bedding. They had left behind only a long plank table and a set of benches. Something smelled faintly like cat urine — perhaps the daub. In the privacy of the cabin, though, Tristan could remove the demon mask without Lucien’s troops seeing him.

He could hear that Lucien was ordering his less trusted people away from the buildings on the pretense of setting up a secure perimeter. It meant that the casting circle was intact and Lucien wanted the freedom to inscribe the spell without a mask.

Tristan made sure the table was dry and shifted one of the benches into the sunlight streaming through a set of arrow slits. He sat down, slid up his mask, and opened the leather messenger bag to see what had Lucien handed him.

Lucien had given Tristan information to use in finding his beloved: Carla Marie “Boo” Kryskill.

Their ancient father didn’t trust human technology, not so much because he thought it was temperamental, but because it was transitory. During their father’s life on Earth, the language of the educated had changed from Greek to Latin to English. He’d lived through the rise and fall of printed newspapers. He’d recently lamented that even handwriting was falling out of use. He’d urged his sons not to get dependent on anything more complex than a pen and paper. It had been advice that Tristan ignored on Earth. He saw no point of not using all the human tools available to accomplish the impossible tasks that his father gave him. Lucien walked a fine line between the two.

The contents of the messenger bag reflected Lucien’s balanced approach. There was a thick folder of paper and an iPad. Tristan flipped quickly through the folder. It contained newspaper clippings about the Kryskill family and an odd collection of handwritten notes. Tristan ignored the paper in favor of the tablet. The iPad had hundreds of photographs and videos.

Lucien had kidnapped Boo when the girl was in first grade. Her white-blond hair reminded Tristan of their half sisters, the Eyes, when they were little. They had been sweet children, once upon a time. Boo’s hair started to darken to gold as the girl grew older but suddenly returned to its pure white state. Tristan suspected that Lucien had done something to “fix” her hair. It would have needed a deft touch, as spell-working on a child was a delicate procedure.

Lucien liked dressing Boo in white gowns for a look that was filled with ethereal innocence. He must have had the dresses all handsewn for her out of delicate, gauze-like fabrics. He liked to crown her with little bright flowers woven into rings, usually out of blue and yellow. There was always one red note in her outfits, like a splotch of blood on the pure white. It was a disturbing detail, which could not be unseen once Tristan had noticed it.

In the earliest videos, the girl had looked at the camera with wide-eyed fear. The look softened over the years to something that could be sweetness. After Lucien transformed the girl into a tengu female, though, she glared at the lens in rage.

“You have a mountain to climb there, brother, if you want to win that heart.”

Beyond Lucien’s home movies, there were a lot of other videos to weed through — a majority of them were local TV shows and news broadcasts, most from eight years ago. Tristan skipped them, suddenly aware he’d spent over an hour watching the videos. There didn’t seem to be anything else saved on the iPad. He reluctantly opened the thick folder. As he sorted through the paper within it, he wondered about his brother’s motivation.

Lucien had tweaked Boo’s hair color when she was eight or nine. He allowed the girl to age to sexual maturity before making her immortal. Boo had the tengu crow feet, but had retained her pure white coloring. Lucien had gotten very good at transformational spellcasting. What Lucien had done to the girl had been a mix of fetish and need. Where did one stop and the other begin? When Tristan captured Boo, would Lucien leave her as a tengu or did he plan to quietly make her an elf later?

Did Lucien plan to make himself pure elf?

Lucien was maturing faster than Tristan, despite the fact that Tristan had spent the last two decades on magic-poor Earth instead of Elfhome. It seemed to indicate that while Lucien would be extremely long lived, chances were good that he would not be immortal. If Lucien could so easily change his beloved from human to tengu, going from half-elf to full elf would be a minor tweak in comparison. Knowing his brother, Lucien probably planned to “fix” both of them once they reached full maturity.

Did Tristan want to be full elf? He gained no benefits from being half-human. His humanity, though, was all he had left of his mother. She had been past her prime when he was born. He’d known for years that any visit with her might be the last one. He hadn’t wanted to come to Elfhome, afraid that she might die alone while all her remaining children were stuck on another planet.

He pushed aside the morbid thoughts and the ache that they caused within his heart.

He’d divided the papers into several piles. The largest was an unruly mass of old newspaper clippings. Boo’s disappearance had been headline news. The search for her had taken up full pages, and then, as time went by, several columns, and finally just small paragraphs.

“These are useless,” Tristan muttered as he set them aside. The clippings were ancient history. He’d only resort to them if he hit an utter dead end.

Here was a surprise. Lucien had communicated with Chloe via email. He’d asked simply, “Where is she?” It was a safe enough question, the vagueness itself a code. Chloe had printed out the email and wrote her reply by hand, a dutiful daughter to a technophobe father.

“Little Taipan,” Chloe had written in her beautiful, well-practiced script, “taking a doll and turning it inside out renders it invisible. There’s a hole in its heart where you used to reside. Eyes that were turned inward look out beyond itself. The landscape it considers is alien to me. By your hand, I am unable to help.”

Taipan was Earth’s deadliest snake. It was at once a riff on Lucien’s oni name and an insult as it underscored Lucien’s connection to Earth as half-human. “Little” was a sneer at how short the brothers were compared to their younger sisters. Chloe — and perhaps the others — hadn’t realized that their height and apparent age were proof that Father had done something to the girls to make them more human than their older brothers.

That was Chloe for you. Poor, dead, snarky Chloe.

His father’s servants had tried to explain the abilities of a trained seer. They were going by what they knew from several thousand years before when his father had an entire stable of well-groomed intanyai seyosa. They were hampered by the fact that none of them had the capability to see the future, so it was much like blind people trying to explain moonlight. According to them, a seer’s ability worked strongest with someone who was closely associated with them. It was the reason his father married his mother instead of just working with her as a business partner.

What Chloe must have meant was that by making Boo a tengu, Lucien had utterly changed how Boo saw the world. It wiped clean all the connections Chloe had with Boo through Lucien. The other Eyes would be equally hampered.

The date on the email caught Tristan’s eye. It was shortly after Tristan arrived on Elfhome with their father. That explained much. Lucien had lost his beloved just as he’d gone from the voice of god to their father’s second oldest son. While Lucien was still the main war commander, he could no longer move troops without answering to a higher authority. Since today was the first time Tristan had heard tell of Boo, Lucien must have removed all mentions of her from the official reports. Tristan could guess why — their father would consider Lucien’s fixation on the girl as a threat to their success. The Eyes had, hence the entire reason Lucien had needed to transform Boo into a tengu of the Chosen bloodline.

Tristan flipped through the handwritten notes in Lucien’s sloppy schoolboy writing. Judging by the condition of the paper they were written on, most of them seemed to have been made years ago, as if Lucien realized early on that he couldn’t keep Boo a prisoner for eternity. Perhaps he’d planned to give her more freedom after he was sure that she would freely return to him. He had summaries of every member of Boo’s extended family. Grandparents. Parents. Siblings. Aunts. Uncles. Cousins. As Tristan scanned the notes, he couldn’t help but shake his head. Lucien couldn’t have found a worse set of people to steal a baby girl from. The Kryskills were a large, well-connected, heavily armed family with a colorful history on both sides of the law.

Lucien had set up methods to remotely monitor the Kryskill family. He had tracked them compulsively over years; he had even had someone attending their church and playing bingo every week for eight years. Immediately after Boo’s disappearance from the fish hatchery in July, the family showed no real deviations from their normal pattern. Boo’s mother, Amanda Kryskill, owned a coffee shop downtown. She worked long hours on weekdays, opening at the crack of dawn and closing at six. It made it easy to keep tabs on her. Their people who worked as moles in the EIA would stop for coffee several times a day in July — until Maynard arrested most of their spies in his organization. The only recent change in Amanda’s routine had been an increase of phone use during work hours and marathon cookie baking sessions with her sisters every weekend.

Boo’s oldest brother, Alton, foraged for fish, game, and produce to sell to the enclaves. He was the hardest to keep track of. He still officially lived at home with his mother but camped out in the South Hills during the warmer months. Lucien had only monitored Alton via a true blood oni squatting in an abandoned Catholic high school across the street from the enclaves. Reports showed that Alton made all his deliveries — until the Wyverns ferreted out all the disguised oni in Oakland, ending reports on Alton.

According to Lucien’s notes, the furniture-maker brother, Geoffrey, had claimed a stately Victorian mansion near his mother’s house but didn’t seem to actually live there. Since last year, he had been keeping odd hours, often working late at his workshop, sometimes falling asleep at his desk, sometimes driving to an artists’ commune in the Strip District to sleep there. His change of pattern seemed to be due to his success at selling his furniture to a high-end showroom on Earth.

The police officer brother, Marc, had been at roll call without fail all through July, August, and into September. The baker brother, Duff, had clocked into work every weekday before the crack of dawn. The teenager brother, Guy, had gotten into trouble at summer school as normal until the end of July, and then spent most of August hanging out with his cousins and brothers.

The older sister, Jane, worked on a television gardening show that seemed to routinely set buildings and people on fire. The notes on the various episodes across eight years made the host sound like an arsonist — several employees, the station’s break room, a score of shooting sites, and various homeowners had fallen victim to the man. There been two noteworthy incidents in July. The first had been on Startup when he set himself on fire and landed in Mercy Hospital, allowing him to film Tinker’s kidnapping.

The second arson victim had been an EIA private guarding a female tengu who had been found trapped within the ruins of the fish hatchery. The female obviously had been searching for Joey Shoji and the boy had obviously been found by the tengu at some point, but not that day. Lucien’s people in the EIA had reported that the television crew had been attempting to get an interview with the prisoner, and while the fire helped to distract the guards, the prisoner had escaped under her own power.

Another elegant note written by Chloe, this time replying to a more direct email asking “Is there a connection between the hatchery and the television show?” Chloe was less poetic this time, reporting that she personally witnessed Maynard calling Jane’s crew in as biology experts and giving them the job of killing the namazu. Chloe was sure that it was mere chance that put Jane at Sandcastle. Chloe had a deadly flaw, though, of underestimating her enemy. The resources that the Kryskills had mustered to kill the adult namazu and the zeal that they put into finding every last egg highlighted how dangerous they could be. Had Chloe been wrong?

Lucien’s reports slowly fragmented after that point as their father shifted resources and the EIA dug out their moles. What Lucien did have seemed to indicate that the family hadn’t changed their behavior. The only deviation from normal could be explained by an upcoming wedding. Lucien’s people had intercepted a wedding invitation addressed to a woman named Cesia Cwiklinski. Jane Kryskill was getting married to a man with the unlikely name of Keaweaheulu Ka’ihikapu Taggart.

“How did you pronounce that?” Tristan muttered. “What ethnic group is that? Wait a minute. I know him.”

Tristan dug out his own tablet to check his records. Keaweaheulu Taggart was the cameraman for the world-famous naturalist Nigel Reid. The two men had been at the NBC mid-summer gala in New York City. While Tristan had no verification of it, the twins most likely met Nigel there. (Tristan hadn’t been able to attend since his mother was there.) The event was set up to bring wealthy fans together with their favorite NBC stars. Considering his mother’s plans for the evening, it was possible that Nigel might have been unwitting bait to guarantee that she got her way.

Still, it seemed fishy to Tristan that Taggart had been at the gala and now here, on a totally different world, getting married to Boo’s sister. Tristan didn’t trust coincidences; he’d set up too many for him to believe that pure chance dictated people’s movements. “People without motivation sit at home, watching television. Everyone else has ulterior motives.”

As he reviewed his notes on Taggart, he couldn’t see any real connection between the twins and the man. Yes, the twins’ silly videos had triggered a huge interest in Elfhome, too large to be ignored by the American television networks. Chased by Monsters was given the greenlight, though by a network that had no idea who the twins were. Someone managed to bypass his father’s gatekeepers and gotten Taggart’s and Reid’s visa applications approved. His mother had invited the Mayers to the gala in order to get the entire family out of their house so it could be searched. Tristan knew that the twins were huge fans of the naturalist even though Tristan had tried to ignore their personal interests. He had been assigned to protect them, not be their friend.

It had been hard. The twins had reminded him of Esme. The way that they laughed. The set of their mouths when they were angry. The way they took life head-on. The way they plowed through adults. Even the weird little cat noise that they made when they sneezed was like Esme. Everything about them made him mourn his lost sister.

He knew that their father would see the twins as disposable tools.

He also knew how much it hurt his mother to have lost all her children. Tristan hadn’t been able to give his mother flowers that last time he went to see her, but he’d been able to give her two granddaughters.

He was wasting time thinking about the twins; there was nothing he could do now. They were on Earth and their older sister, the changeling, had trapped him on Elfhome. His mother would be able to keep the twins safe until they could fend for themselves. Judging by their older sister, that wouldn’t take long.

He should be thinking about Boo. Within hours, their main attack would start. He needed a plan of action. He opened a new folder on his own tablet and started to photograph Lucien’s handwritten notes on the Kryskills. If Tristan was going to be chasing after the girl, he couldn’t carry the incriminating newspaper clippings with him, nor the unsecure iPad filled with damning video.

Chloe had dismissed the fact that Jane Kryskill had been at Sandcastle hours after Boo and Joey Shoji vanished. Tristan didn’t believe in coincidence. That Jane interacted with the female tengu searching for Joey was too much for him to overlook.

Tristan’s best bet was to infiltrate the family. Normally this would be difficult but once the main attack started, the city would be filled with chaos. He could show up, pretend to be separated from his own family, and stay close. The Kryskills probably would be touching base with one another as they were currently scattered through the city. At some point, someone would probably mention Boo if she had rejoined her family.

Lucien wouldn’t have told Boo about his family on Earth, so she wouldn’t know about Tristan, Yves, or their father. Boo might have warned her family about “teenage Kajo” but couldn’t have warned them about an even younger brother.

Tristan considered making contact with Boo’s youngest male cousin, Andy Roach. Lucien’s notes indicated that the boy was known to be naïve, trusting, and the worst person to keep a secret. There was a possibility, though, that the Kryskills hadn’t trusted the boy with the truth.

Boo’s mother was another possible entry into the family. She was downtown at the coffee shop, making her easy to find. A mother who lost one of her children would probably have a weak spot for a child in distress. It would be tricky to put together a solid backstory on such short notice, but he’d dealt with worse conditions.