Wood Sprites

34: Shutdown

The secret room and all that it promised lifted Jillian’s spirits. For the first time since the play, she almost seemed normal. They spent the day inventorying everything the room held, killing the hours before Shutdown. Some of it was extremely logical, like lockpicks and Swiss army knives, some more eccentric, like sharpened wooden stakes and a mallet.

Jillian held up one of the stakes. “See, we’re not the only ones that see them as vampires.”

“That’s probably from before the first Startup. I’m fairly sure Esme knew they were elves after that.” Maybe.

Joy held out something wrapped in foil. “Candy?”

Louise took it and eyed the item. “No, this is a glow stick. It’s not food. I’m not sure if it’s even any good.” She unwrapped it, snapped it in the middle, and shook it. The chemicals had degraded to the point where the glow stick barely gleamed, but it was enough to impress the baby dragon.

“Ooohhh.” Joy murmured at the glow. “Pretty.”

“It just makes light.” Louise handed it back to her. “It’s not good to eat.”

Joy disappeared into the upper shelves, a faint gleam of green marking her passage.

Louise crouched to check the bottom shelf. There were plastic storage boxes with airtight lids. She opened the first one and found old newspaper clippings. Louise actually had never seen a newspaper before. She spent a few minutes in awe of the feel of the paper and how thin it was. She puzzled over the section of text on one side, talking about two airplanes colliding in midair. Then she flipped over the clipping. Neil Shenske in full spacesuit gazed up her. The headline read “Astronaut Killed in Shooting.” It was the same photograph that Esme had included in the Chinese puzzle box, only that picture had identified him as the King of Denmark. The newspaper gave all the pertinent details. Why had Esme left them the mislabeled photograph and not this article?

Almost as if in answer to her question, she noticed that the words “police have no leads” had been underlined in red.

In Hamlet, the King of Denmark was killed by Claudius, who then married Queen Gertrude and became Hamlet’s stepfather. Esme had labeled Anna’s photo as Queen Gertrude. If the roles continued to pair up, then Ming was the king’s murderer. Esme must have believed that Ming had killed Neil Shenske so he could marry Anna.

Louise flipped through the clippings. They were all on the shooting. Three people had been killed and five more wounded when a lone shooter opened fired at a high school science fair. In an age before cell phones, the person had evaded the handful of surveillance cameras on the school grounds. Witnesses stated that the shooter was tall and slender, but that was the end of the agreement. Follow-up stories spoke of candlelight vigils and angst-filled funerals, but there was never more evidence that led to a killer.

“Joy!” Jillian cried from the other side of the narrow room. “Oh, oh, don’t get that on the paper!”

Louise glanced up and groaned. Empty glow sticks lay on the floor, snapped in two after being activated. There were little gleaming paw prints all over the shelves and walls. Joy perched on Jillian’s shoulder, holding on to her hair while trying to finger-paint on the paper that Jillian was studying.

“No, no, this may be important.” Jillian tried to hold the paper farther away from the baby dragon. “Here, let me find something else.”

“What is it?” Louise quickly tucked away the box of newspaper clippings. Jillian probably would see Neil’s murder as proof that Ming had killed their parents. The possibility still rocked Louise, but like Esme she’d found no evidence. At least not yet. Jillian couldn’t take another hit. Until Louise found something more than a niggling fear, she couldn’t let Jillian know.

“Esme has dozens of maps of caves.” Jillian held up a blank sheet of paper for Joy to finger-paint. “Here, play with this instead. If Esme was just into spelunking, I don’t think she’d have the maps in here. I think they’re important.”

Louise eyed the crowded shelves of the long, tall, secret room. It was going to take them days to dig through it. In a few hours, though, Shutdown would start. “We should go to bed early. We’re going to get up at midnight and try to reach Orville.”

At first, every attempt to dial through to their cousin resulted in “All circuits are busy, please try again later.” At six in the morning, the phone clicked and Orville’s voice mail picked up on the first ring. “Hi, I’m not on Earth with the rest of Pittsburgh. I got permission from the EIA to ride out Shutdown at one of the enclaves. I got this feeling Tinker might come back from Aum Renau, find everyone had gone to Earth without her and just freak. You know the drill; I’ll be back after Startup.”

Louise stared at her phone. “What is Alexander doing at Aum Renau?”

“Where is Aum Renau?” Nikola asked.

“It’s Windwolf’s palace on the Palisades.” Louise pointed east out of habit. She winced as she remembered the Desmarais mansion was very near to the cliffs. “Aum Renau is hundreds of miles from Pittsburgh. But the only humans that are allowed beyond the city limits are a handful of biologists and the railroad employees.”

The railroad didn’t lead the entire way to the Elfhome equivalent of the Hudson River but instead stopped at an elf settlement roughly in the same location as Philadelphia. There the cargo was off-loaded to ships that would travel downriver to the Delaware Bay and across the Western Ocean to the Easternlands. Humans only knew of the palace by name; no one had ever actually visited it. How did Alexander even get to Aum Renau?

Nikola tilted his head back and forth as he searched out data. “Oh, she’s married Windwolf.”

“What?” both the twins cried.

Nikola read the news story aloud. “Derek Maynard, director of the EIA, has issued a statement saying that Tinker has agreed to become the viceroy’s domi. She should now be considered his wife and vicereine of the Westernlands. She is now the joint head of the Wind Clan in Pittsburgh.”

“You’re kidding!” Jillian cried.

Nikola shrank back, ears dropping. “No. Windwolf had been summoned to Aum Renau to meet with Queen Soulful Ember. His gossamer returned with a Hand of Wyverns for Tinker; the queen wanted to meet the new vicereine.”

Windwolf was alive and safe at his palace? And married to Alexander?

“How did that happen?” Jillian voiced the exact confusion that Louise was feeling. “When did it happen? Obviously during the last thirty days — but — but — huh?”

“We’re looking!” Nikola cried.

Louise couldn’t get her newsreader to acknowledge any updates beyond “Viceroy Lives!” The news flooded out of Pittsburgh from three television stations and one newspaper. Affiliate networks would vet the hours and hours of video and choose what to release, if anything. The twins had found that much of what came out of Pittsburgh was quickly buried in film vaults. They’d assumed in the past it was because they were the only ones interested in Elfhome. But the popularity of their videos could only mean that humans were hungry for information on elves.

Anna had been at the NBC gala like a ruling queen. Did the secret elves have a stranglehold on the news media? Were they vetting all the information to keep the humans in the dark about what was going on in Pittsburgh? It was one thing to keep their activities hidden from sixty thousand humans with limited resources, and another to blind several billion. Even if only one percent of the Earth’s population was obsessed with Elfhome, it would equal millions of people analyzing all information flowing out of Pittsburgh.

A filter was slowly releasing stories onto the Associated Press site in chronological order. The day after last Startup, Windwolf had been reported wounded but recovering quickly at the elf hospice. EIA was detaining two people, at the time unnamed, for questioning. Growling with frustration, she circumvented the filter to see what was sitting in the buffer.

Within days of the attack, Pittsburgh was fully aware that there was a hostile force at work on Elfhome. They quickly learned even more than what the twins knew.

“A third mirror planet!” Jillian gasped as she hit the news at nearly the same time as Louise.

“Onihida. World of the oni,” Louise murmured to let her twin know that they were on the same page. Onihida lay in a parallel universe to the two known worlds, mirroring the landmasses of Earth and Elfhome. Its inhabitants were close enough to human that they could live undetected by anyone. As she read, hurt started to burn deep inside of her. The elves had known about the third world for centuries; they’d simply never told the humans. “The elves not only already knew about Onihida, they’d had a war with the oni. How could they not tell us?”

Jillian snorted in disgust. “Because they didn’t know if they could trust us — and they couldn’t. Ming and Yves and Ambassador Feng: they’re hiding here on Earth, pretending to be humans. They’ve been fooling everyone for hundreds of years.”

“I don’t understand.” Nikola cocked one eyebrow and ear to show his confusion. “Is Edmond Desmarais an elf or an oni?”

Louise and Jillian exchanged a glance.

“Elf,” Louise said after some thought. “Feng had said something about pathways between the worlds being closed. I thought at the time that he meant Elfhome and Earth, but there must have been a way to Onihida, too. When Desmarais — Ming — whatever his name really is — was emperor, the elves traveled between all three planets. What I saw at the museum was a meeting between the three factions of elves. They’d lost contact with each other when the pathways were closed. The people on Onihida don’t fully see Ming as their ruler anymore, but they want to go home to Elfhome and regain what they lost. For that, they need to work with the elves in exile on Earth and the elves like Sparrow, who are secretly loyal to Ming.”

“Then the oni are elves?” Nikola cocked his other eyebrow and ear in confusion.

“I think oni were the people living on Onihida before the elves arrived.” Louise shivered, remembering how Sparrow talked about creating an army of monsters. “The secret elves are using them as weapons.”

“Queen Soulful Ember is probably at Aum Renau because of the ‘oni’ attack on Windwolf.” Jillian used her fingers to denote the assumed identity of the attackers.

“Ming and his people have had thousands of years to breed armies of monsters. There may not be any real oni left on Onihida.” Jillian eyes went wide as her own statement dawned fully on her. “Oh my God, we could meet Queen Soulful Ember. That would be so cool. And Sword Strike!”

Hopefully no one had ever shown the queen the Lemon-Lime videos. Soulful Ember didn’t have a sense of humor — at least not the way they always wrote her.

Louise was torn between joy and dismay to discover that because it was Shutdown, Ming did not eat breakfast with them as usual. She was happy that he wasn’t there, quietly radiating scientific interest toward her and Jillian. Nattie the cook had been persuaded to scramble the eggs and toast plain white bread and provide a small dish of Welch’s grape jelly. It meant, however, that Ming could be planning horrible things for Windwolf and Alexander.

“We’re going out,” Anna stated as the dishes were being cleared, signaling the end of breakfast.

“Where to?” They shrank away from her, earning a sad, unhappy look.

“We need to buy new furniture for the bedrooms. I could just buy whatever I thought would suit you, but I thought you would like a say in the matter.”

Jillian pouted and leaned against Louise.

“We like Esme’s bedroom — our bedroom just the way it is,” Louise said for them both.

Anna pressed her lips together and took a deep breath, as if there were dozens of things she was leaving unsaid.

Louise could feel the unspoken words rise up, looming over them, threatening to do harm. If they balked too much, Anna would plow through their protests. Louise understood now why she’d felt that they were so much alike when she first saw Anna at the gala; the twins had apparently inherited the trait from her. “Can we — can we just do Lain’s bedroom — the other room — first?” Louise picked her way cautiously through the landmines of silent arguments. “We can stay in the one room while the work is done.”

Jillian shot her a look of dismay, but Anna sighed again and nodded.

“Come along.” Anna held out her hand.

Nikola bumped into Louise’s other side and looked pleadingly up at her. Despite the danger of bringing him to Ming’s notice, they had deemed it safer for the babies to come with them instead of being in the room while the maids cleaned. Louise hated the idea of leaving him in a house full of dangerous people as they traveled miles and miles away.

“Can Tesla come?” Louise patted Nikola on the head so Anna knew who she meant since they had never introduced him to her before.

Anna gave a startled laugh. “Nikola Tesla?” The question made Louise flinch in fear. “Esme loved Tesla; he was her favorite scientist. She also had a toy dog named after him. She just loved it to pieces.”

“Oh!” Louise looked down to cover her alarm. Had Esme known about the babies? Was that who Esme had seen in her dreams? Or was it just a weird coincidence that Esme had named a dog the same name?

“He’s too big, Louise,” Anna continued. “He’ll take up too much room in the car.”

“He can sit on the floor!” Louise stepped forward to take Anna’s hand. It was an old woman’s hand, veins a vivid blue under the pale, tight dry skin. It was like their Grandma Mayer’s hands, but she had been all sweetness and forgetfulness and prone to sudden naps. She would hold their nut-brown hands in hers and try to guess which twin they were. Anna had always gotten their names right.

Tristan had said his mother was a fortune-teller. Did Anna see the future just like Esme? How had Esme kept her mother from knowing everything? Anna hadn’t known anything until Esme came to see her, and then she had the dreams of the cabbage patch. Had Esme avoided her mother because contact exposed each one’s secrets to the other?

Louise stared at her hand caught tight in Anna’s. If that were true, then every moment with her was dangerous. But jerking her hand free might seem as insulting as a slap to the face. She forced herself to squeeze Anna’s hand tighter. “Please?”

Anna sighed. “Oh, all right. You can bring your toy.”

They rode in the limo to a furniture store in Manhattan, two different male drivers than last time but both unmistakably elves. Where did Ming keep them all hidden? Was there a separate house stuffed to the rafters with them? Nikola had his nose pressed against the window, staring in fascination at the parts of the city he’d never seen before. Jillian hunched over her phone, answering his silent questions.

The salesman at the furniture store caught sight of the limo and was waiting at the door with badly hidden excitement. He didn’t glance at Jillian or Louise, staying locked on to Anna as if laser-guided. “How can I help you, madame?”

“I need bedroom sets for my granddaughters.” Anna waved toward the twins. “You do sell furniture for children?”

He deflated and eyed the girls for the first time. Obviously children’s beds didn’t fetch as big a commission as adult furniture. “Yes. We do. An entire floor of it. Let me show you!”

He led them to an elevator, and they went up to the topmost floor. The first large room was a vast sea of cribs and toddler beds. The room beyond was devoted to furniture fit for princesses. Most of it was pink. Even the white-painted pieces were accented with ribbons and bows of pink. There was a Hello Kitty set and a coach straight out of Cinderella.

“Gag me,” Jillian muttered darkly.

“We don’t like pink,” Louise stated. “Do you have anything less girly-girl?”

The salesman looked to Anna.

Anna considered Louise and Jillian as if with X-ray eyes. “Do you have anything more exotic?”

“Exotic? Y-y-yes!” The word started as an automatic statement as the salesman thought frantically and then became a solid confirmation as he thought of something appropriate. “In our adult bedroom section. We just got it in this morning.”

Anna flicked her hand, indicating that he should show the way.

They went back downstairs, through a room so crowded with leather sofas that the air was thick with the scent of cured hides. Jillian gasped when they came around the corner to the first bedroom set. It looked like a room lifted out of an Elvish home. All the pieces were intricately carved from ironwood and stained the color of dark honey, bringing out the luminescent gold grain. The canopied bed was draped in white fairy silk that looked magical even under the showroom spotlights. The lamps on the marble-topped nightstands looked like gnarled branches holding small round LED bulbs like elf shines. The price tag discreetly displayed on the end table gave a staggering amount for the set and noted “special order” with no estimate of delivery time. It was totally and utterly perfect.

“All the pieces are solid ironwood and are nearly unbreakable despite their delicate appearance. It’s handcrafted on Elfhome using spells and magically sharp tools. It’s one of a kind and unique on this world.”

“Oh, Grandma,” Jillian breathed, only partially faking her enchantment. “Can we have this one?”

Anna obviously melted, just as Jillian had intended. “Of course you can.”

Louise bumped Jillian slightly. The logical tactic would have been to only vaguely like the furniture and extend out the shopping for as many days as possible.

“Our floor will need to be redone,” Jillian pointed out. “This hardwood has been stained black. The white flokati rug is just stunning against it.”

Anna frowned slightly. “Louise, what do you think?”

“I love the bed,” Louise said with all honesty. The more changes they could demand to Lain’s room, the longer they could delay moving into it. “And I love this rug!” She bent down to run her hand over the thick shag. It was like petting a sheep. “It’s so soft and warm. And I really like how everything looks on the dark wood.”

“The black seems too depressive to me,” Anna said.

“Please!” Jillian cried.

Anna didn’t seem swayed by Jillian’s cuteness on the color. She was probably thinking of Esme and all the black-painted furniture.

Louise sought to appeal to Anna’s intelligence. “The floor needs to be assertive to counterbalance the size of the bed. If the two are too close in tone, they’ll clash, and if they match, they’ll wash each other out.”

Anna’s eyebrows went up in surprise, and then she smiled. “All right. At least the rug will cover most of the black. I’ll want the largest one you stock.”

Louise waited uneasily as the salesman wrote up the order.

“This is a custom piece,” the salesman explained. “We got the display in a few hours ago, straight from Elfhome. You’re the first ones to see it. We expect it to be popular with the upcoming royal wedding.” He paused in the middle of filling out the order form. “You did hear the news this morning? About the wedding?”

“No,” Anne said in a tone that stated firmly that she didn’t care.

Jillian, however, fed him a line to keep him going. “What royal wedding?”

“Prince Windwolf is alive, and he’s getting married. Total The Queen’s Salvage.”

“Pardon?” Anna said coldly.

“L-lemon-Lime?” he stuttered. “Videos? Pop culture? A human girl saved the viceroy and they’ve fallen in love. Her name is Tinker, and she’s a hoverbike racer! There haven’t been any pictures of her yet; everyone expects her to look like the video, but what are the odds?”

Zero. Louise had stolen the heroine in the videos from her dream of Nigel; she was Valkyrie-tall, blond and seemingly able to produce guns from thin air. At least Louise had the comfort of knowing that Nigel would find a heavily armed ally on Elfhome.

Louise tried to push the conversation past the videos. “How long will it take to get our order in? Today? Next Shutdown?”

“We phoned the manufacturer as soon as we heard about the news this morning. People always go gaga over royal weddings; every woman in the city has fantasized about Prince Windwolf at least once. It’s a small furniture company, but they assured us that they could have another set ready in two months.”

Jillian ducked her head to hide her grin. Louise felt her stomach drop. Two months for anyone else, but Anna had the family trait of plowing through everything in her way to get what she wanted. She wanted to get them out of Esme’s bedroom as quickly as possible. She wasn’t going to let anything slow her down.

“I’ll take the display model then,” Anna stated firmly.

The salesman visibly jerked to a full halt. “What?”

“I came to this store to buy quality furniture, not wait for two months for a knockoff copy.”

“This furniture is handmade on Elfhome.”

“It’s made in Pittsburgh by a human, whom you called on the phone. You implied that it’s made by elves. ‘Spells and magically sharp tools.’ I have no way of knowing if the set that the human is capable of creating in two months is anywhere near this level of quality.”

“I–I-I never said that elves. .” The salesman flailed as Anna plowed through him.

“We want this set,” Anna said firmly. “Now. I would suggest you don’t offer anything else or I’ll have my lawyers draw up a bait-and-switch lawsuit.”

The salesman blinked at her for a minute and a half, gears spinning wildly as he considered all the ramifications. Without a sample, he couldn’t sell more sets, but there was a chance that no one else would be willing to pay for such expensive furniture. Or that another salesperson might close the future sales. His eyes went to the confirmation of payment from Anna’s bank. The amount could have bought their house in Astoria. He winced, obviously thinking of the commission he would lose if Anna backed out of the sale.

Anna relented and sweetened the deal. “Deliver it within the week and we’ll take a second identical set.”

“Identical?” the salesman’s voice broke. “Okay. How does tomorrow sound?”