Wood Sprites

35: Of Course You Realize This Means War

Another night, another nightmare.

Louise jerked awake, breaking free of the bad dream. She’d gone to sleep feeling safe in the high loft bed, but the nightmare had stripped away all sense of being protected by Esme’s spirit. Panting with fear, Louise touched each of her family members to make sure they were all safely huddled around her. Jillian was curled into a tight ball, her back pressing against Louise. Joy slept tucked between them. Nikola lay carefully beside her so his weight wouldn’t crush them.

Nikola lifted his head as she sat up. “What’s wrong?”

“I had a bad dream. Bad, bad dream!” She hugged him tight, using his solid presence to drive away the horrible visions. Since arriving at the mansion, every night she’d had a nightmare, but this one was the worst. Ming had locked the twins in a birdcage, deep in caves under the mansion. All the babies had been killed when Nikola tried to free the twins. “Promise me you won’t fight. Please, whatever happens, don’t ever try to protect me or Jillian.”

“But — but — but that’s my function.”

“No, that was Tesla’s function, but you’re not Tesla. You’re Nikola and I love you so much and I couldn’t stand to lose you. You have to be made into real babies and get to do everything real people do. You need to laugh and eat and sleep.”

“I don’t know. Sleep doesn’t seem to be very interesting. You just lie there.”

“Please promise me. You’re really just a little fragile egg inside of Tesla. If that egg breaks, you’ll die. Tesla has to protect you.”

“If someone is hurting you. .”

“Jillian and I can get ourselves out of any problem we get into. We’ve been doing it for a long, long time. If someone grabs one or both of us, or locks us up, or even if they seem to hurt us, you can’t do anything to try and save us. Promise me that you won’t.”

“Lou!” he whimpered.

“You have to trust us, Nikola. We can take care of ourselves. You need to trust us to do that.”

“Sometimes I feel so useless.”

“If things go bad, the most useful thing you can do is to just pretend you’re a robot that anyone can order around.”

“Just do nothing while someone is hurting—”

“You’ll be doing something. You’ll be acting. Just like Jillian was Peter Pan in the play. Your character is the robot dog, Tesla, and nothing more.”

He made a soft whimpering noise. Louise suspected that if he were a real little boy, he’d be crying. It was so sad that all he could do was little half vocalizations so it sounded like he was mumbling “Ow. . ow. . ow. . ow.” She was sure that the pain was real, but he had no way to shed tears.

“It’s okay. It’s okay.” She stroked his head. “It was just a dream.”

Only she knew it wasn’t.

How ironic that she’d discovered that she actually had a special magical gift, only to have it scare the shit out of her. This knowing was confusing and horrifying. She could see the future, and it was the stuff of nightmares. Obviously there had to be a way to use her ability to pick a future she wanted; Ming wouldn’t hold Anna so dear if he couldn’t use her gift for his own gain. Louise felt like she was trapped in a maze with dozens of literal “dead” ends.

She’d been keeping her promise to Aunt Kitty, unconsciously waiting for her to pull off some legal miracle so that they could live with her. Louise had been too scared to be honest with herself. Jillian might have spent the last ten days curled up in bed, but Louise truthfully hadn’t been much better. She’d limited herself to spying on the secret elves and being overwhelmed by everything.

The awful truth was that Aunt Kitty wasn’t going to win custody of the twins. She didn’t have the money to win a legal battle against Anna. The only way the girls could live with her was if she took them and ran. To stay hidden, Aunt Kitty would have to abandon her songwriting career, something she’d worked her entire life to create. If they were found, Aunt Kitty could be arrested for kidnapping. The best their aunt could hope for was simply going bankrupt, and the worst was spending the rest of her life in prison.

Her dreams were full of danger. Dark caves. Cages. Dark wings. Fire. Things falling out of the sky. Jillian falling from great heights. Nikola battered and broken and dying.

Only one thing was clear. The moment they tried to flee, Ming would bring to bear all his massive resources to recapture them.

Obviously she had to take away all his assets before they fled.

The next morning a work crew invaded Lain’s old bedroom. Tall, lean, and beautiful, they looked more like movie stars than construction workers. They spoke French to each other loudly, but when they were talking quietly, a word or two of Elvish would slip in. Louise sat against the door of the connecting bathroom, keeping track of the workers’ progress. She had wanted to use a spy camera, but she was afraid the elves would find it as they remodeled the room.

While they worked with the slow, deliberate care of craftsmen, there were several of them, they worked without taking breaks, and the room wasn’t that large. In a day they had sanded down the floor by hand, swept it clean, wiped it down with mineral spirits, applied a dark stain and then several coats of sealer. The next day the secret elves returned to paint. Slowly. Carefully.

She felt like she was in a race against them. When they were finished, Anna would want to move on to Esme’s bedroom. If Ming found the secret room, everything would unravel. The secret elves would search Tesla and find the babies. They would trap Joy. And if the twins lost the rest of their family, Jillian would break so completely, there would be no fixing her.

Before that happened, they had to cripple Ming and flee the mansion. She and the babies studied Desmarais’ sprawling empire, trying to figure out how to wreak the greatest havoc.

It quickly became apparent how dependent Ming was on Anna for his wealth. His oldest surviving company bred champion-quality animals. There had been other companies that had done well and then failed as he refused to change his business plan to cope with changes in technology and cultural ideals. He’d been a plantation owner in Huntsville, Alabama, prior to the Civil War. All that had survived the war was a company that built quality horse coaches, but that died as cars took over. He’d had a large distillery that hadn’t survived Prohibition. Toward the end of the last century, he’d been rich but not impressively so, for as many mouths he had to feed. Immediately after marrying Anna, a series of successful high-risk investments skyrocketed his wealth to a level comparable with that of small countries. Judging by the current financial newsfeeds, Anna continued to make huge gambles with their wealth.

No wonder Ming had banished Tristan from the mansion; billions of dollars were at risk. Tristan had said his mother was a fortune-teller, and Ming didn’t want Anna distracted, so both of the males knew that Anna had a magically enhanced gift. How had Ming found Anna in the first place?

Their paths apparently crossed in Huntsville, where Ming still had an estate, and astronaut Neil Shenske was training at the Marshall Space Flight Center. Anna worked as an investment banker at a small firm. Within weeks of Ming’s meeting her, Neil was dead, and a few months later, besieged by a series of disasters like her house burning down and her car being stolen, Anna married Ming.

Was Esme right? Had Ming killed her father in order to claim Anna’s ability for himself? If he had, he’d been careful not to leave any evidence behind. Esme only had nightmares as proof.

Which raised the question: Why wasn’t Anna plagued by the same dreams as Esme? Did Ming use some kind of magic spell to keep Anna unaware of his more questionable activities?

Proof of his invasion plans of Elfhome was everywhere as long as you understood the shape of his ambitions. Tracking the money, Louise could practically roadmap his activities. He did own a controlling interest in several of the television networks and news agencies, so he could filter information coming from Elfhome. He also owned three of the largest companies legally shipping goods into Pittsburgh. Through holding companies, he controlled dozens of others, creating a vast network of possibly illegal transportation. Two of which were under investigation. One had funded the Earth for Humans bomber Roycroft. The other company had been involved in the June Shutdown shoot-out on Veterans Bridge.

What didn’t make sense was that he was also funneling massive amounts of food, medicine, and weapons to a tiny island in the South China Sea. While Google Maps showed only a sparsely inhabited circle of land, redirected military satellites revealed a beehive of activity. Cargo ships sat at a big dock that nearly dwarfed the island while shipping containers were unloaded via cranes. According to the manifest of one ship pulling away from the dock, it was leaving empty. Material was flowing in but nothing was being shipped out. Where was it all going? Onihida? A quick check confirmed that the island was directly below the hyperphase gate in geostationary orbit. Apparently the same effect that caused Pittsburgh to shift universes to Elfhome also made this island go to Onihida. During Shutdown, everything that had been stockpiled would have been loaded onto boats on Onihida.

Ming’s people had created an army of monsters on Onihida to invade Elfhome, but they were going to be armed with weapons from Earth. While the domana-caste could go toe-to-toe with tanks, they were few and far between. Most elves had nothing more sophisticated than bows and arrows. What elves survived the slaughter, Ming was going to enslave.

So how could Louise throw this operation into mayhem? What she really wanted to do was bomb it out of existence. She eyed the port with its growing stockpile. Ironically, bombs were currently being off-loaded. Specifically, ammo for a shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapon. A fire would work well enough, if she could cause one big enough. What did she have to work with? Four ships, all with diesel engines, mostly controlled by computers. Several container cranes that appeared about fifteen stories tall — also computer controlled. An entire shipyard filled with chemicals and fuel. She should be able to create a small disaster that would lead to something bigger.

Technically, she’d only promised Aunt Kitty that they would try to be good. Aunt Kitty had tacked on the “don’t blow anything up” afterwards, so that really didn’t count. And “be good” was subjective. Stopping an invasion was being good — wasn’t it?

Louise focused on one of the ships that had a ridiculous amount of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. What was Ming going to do with that much? The volume nearly guaranteed that the blast would reach munitions. How to ignite it? She ran through the manifest to see what else was on the ship. At the center of the ship was a shipping container filled with potassium. She had no idea what idiots would ship potassium on a boat when the material exploded on contact with water. But there it was, all but gift-wrapped. She merely had to release the shipping container while it was nine stories up. Gravity and the ocean would take care of the rest.

She felt like a stage manager again as she reached out and took hold of the various computers on the other side of the world. The curtain was about to rise on a new act. Cue the war drums. Bring up the lights. Set the actors into motion.

Annoyingly, she lost control of the distant computers immediately after the first explosion. She took it as a good sign, but it was annoying that she couldn’t be sure that the entire daisy chain of explosions would actually reach the munitions.

Hopefully it would draw Ming’s attention and resources to the other side of the planet. It was a big flashy disaster to draw his attention from the more quiet attacks that she had planned. Now to start the more local damage.

She did a quick search and found a Canadian website that worked with governments of certain countries to set up shell corporations. She wanted the companies she used to be as legal as possible to make it harder for Ming to take back his money, just in case he ever managed to track it all down. For a small fee for each transaction, the Canadian legal firm created dozens of shell companies scattered around the world. Another small fee, and she had a matching number of perfectly legal Singapore bank accounts, owned by the companies in such privacy-minded countries as Belize and Malta. It took her less than a half hour. It was a lot easier to set up bank accounts when you weren’t concerned about breaking the law. If she were caught, being taken away from her guardian would be the least of her worries.

The offshore accounts set up, she turned her attention to the massive sprawl of Ming’s holdings. He kept them isolated from each other to make it harder for anyone to realize the extent of his wealth. Hopefully, it would also make it harder for Ming to realize someone was systematically cleaning them all out. Still, once he noticed, every transfer increased the likelihood of him intercepting her. How long before the explosion distracted him?

In the next room, the painters finished up painting. During the last two days, Louise had come to recognize individual voices. The workers’ supervisor was a female that Anna believed to be named Cosette, but whom the other elves called Dovetail. As Louise listened, Dovetail announced that she would install the lighting, but she wanted to wait on hanging curtains and moving in the furniture. Louise breathed out in relief; another day of work before Dovetail could call the room finished.

The workers gathered up their painting equipment and trooped out. Dovetail remained to install the lights. Her footsteps echoed in the empty, high-ceilinged room. She sang as she worked. The song seemed to be Low Elvish, full of puns that Louise suspected were sexual in nature.

Dovetail suddenly stopped in mid-word. “Oh! Husepavua! I’m so sorry! I wasn’t thinking.”

Husepavua? Was Sparrow here?

“Finish what you’re doing,” a familiar male voice answered in French.

Louise smothered a gasp as she recognized Yves. The twins hadn’t officially met the male. According to Anna, he had been away on business since they had arrived. When had he returned?

Dovetail’s sigh of relief echoed loudly in the empty bedroom. “Yes, husepavua.”

“Black and gray?” Yves snorted. “They’re just like their mother; she was a moody little bitch. It’s ironic that Sire felt that he couldn’t safely lock Esme up and use her as a brood mare. Yet she turned around and made herself one.”

“Do you think there are more than these two?”

“Assuredly,” Yves said. “Finding them is the problem. Damn these monkeys with their mechanical idiocy. Every twenty years, they’re changing how the world works. Just as you’re starting to understand how to run their machines, they change everything. Nothing new works with anything old.”

Dovetail made a sound of disgust. “I know. Every fifty years I’ve had to completely redo all the damn lighting because they’ve changed the lightbulbs again. You can’t get one of these to save your soul.” She apparently held up the old bulb. There had been an antique crystal chandler hanging in Lain’s bedroom with large flame-shaped bulbs. “What is it you need, husepavua?”

“I need you to supervise uncrating our prize.”

“Ha! I heard about your adventure! So we’re going to take it apart here? I thought you’d ship it to Elfhome with the others.”

“I don’t want the others to know I have it. They’ve been saying that the beast doesn’t exist. I’m not sure if they were being naïve or deceitful.”

“Or just plain stupid.”

“Possibly. Still, you’re right. This is not the best of places for spell-working, so I need your expertise.”

“Understood.”

Footsteps echoed, moving away.

“Husepavua?” Dovetail called before Yves left the room. “Will we follow Sire soon?”

Follow? Follow Ming where? The twins hadn’t seen Ming since before Shutdown. Had he return to Elfhome without any fanfare?

“What are a few months to the thousands of years that we’ve waited?” Yves said.

“I’m so sick of this world,” Dovetail whispered fiercely. “I’ll be glad when we can go home. Reclaim all that was taken from us. I hate huddling around little pools of magic, praying that it will be enough to sustain us. I hate the monkeys with their stupid hidebound mores that keep changing according to some illogical male whim. Don’t bathe together. Don’t go out without a veil. Don’t go out without your breast covered up like it’s something indecent instead of a simple mammary gland. Don’t sleep with the slaves! Don’t own slaves. Treat everyone equally. They’re imbeciles.”

“Oui, oui.” Yves laughed in agreement. “We will follow soon. The monkeys found us that damned box with the loaded nactka. Sire now has everything in hand that he needs to crush the rebel slaves underfoot. We will continue to funnel weapons to Pittsburgh for as long as we can and then destroy the gate. A year or two at most.”

“Tomorrow would not be soon enough.”

Yves snickered at Dovetail’s impatience. “Patience. We want the first blow to be crippling.”

Jillian was in character. Louise wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or bad. Her twin had found an Air Force officer’s peaked cap, a baseball and glove. She strutted around the card table, tossing up the ball and catching it. She had placed an enlisted man’s garrison cap on Nikola’s head; judging by the beat of his thumping tail, this made him one happy puppy. Even Joy had a little paper hat that she was currently taste-testing.

“Private Dufae!” Jillian flung the baseball so it hit the floor, bounced off the side of the desk, and rebounded to her glove. “Cue The Great Escape theme song.”

“Aye, aye, sir!” Nikola saluted, paw cocked up to his ear. The trumpet and drum military music started to play on Jillian’s tablet.

“Now to break out from Stalag Luft Drei, we face the following difficulties.” Jillian used a broad Midwest accent that gave a nod toward Missouri.

Nikola cocked his head. “Stalag Luft Drei?”

“Prison for Air Force Three,” Louise translated the German and then explained. “She means here. Just go with it.”

Louise decided that Jillian being in character was a good thing. She was patterning after Steve McQueen as Hilts, the most defiant of the Allied prisoners. Unfortunately, Hilts was recaptured in the movie.

“The Stalag is isolated deep in the German province of Lower Silesia.” Jillian nodded to the card table and flung the baseball again. The ball thud-thunked as it hit the floor at an angle and rebounded off the side of the vanity. It smacked back into the glove.

Blueprints covered the card table. The title block identified them as the original plans for the mansion as it was built in 1905. As Louise had suspected, several outbuildings that served as servants’ quarters flanked the mansion, hidden from view. The detached garage had originally been a large carriage house. Further out was a stable for the estate’s horses. Someone had noted that the stable had been converted to a dormitory in 1930s. “Where did you get these?”

“Esme.” Jillian gestured toward the secret room as if their genetic donor was hidden within it, handing out secret documentation like the French Resistance. “As we can see, the estate is mindboggling large for this close to New York City. Ming must have bought the land from Native Americans with glass beads, as there’s no evidence that it ever changed hands on the county records.” Jillian pointed to a satellite map on her tablet. It showed a paved walking trail through a public park. “We’ll need at least fifteen minutes to get from this bedroom to this trail.” She slid her finger several inches down the winding path line to the park’s parking lot and then across a busy street to a small collection of buildings. “This small strip mall is the nearest public building. I figure it would take us an hour to walk there. We could arguably call a taxi to pick us up there and take us into town. It’s ten miles as the crow flies to the nearest train station, River Edge, but that’s up and down fairly steep hillsides and across the Hackensack River. We’ll have to stick to the sidewalk, and that adds another four to five miles to our hike.”

So half a day to walk to the nearest train station since Louise didn’t think she could walk fifteen miles without breaks. They would need to cover the distance before the secret elves noticed that they were gone. If the twins left immediately after breakfast, however, they would just be reaching the train station at lunchtime, which they normally ate with Anna. They’d be missed, and the elves would probably check all logical points of transportation. Leaving after lunch created the same scenario, only dinner being the trigger. If they left in the evening, they might miss the last train. Two little girls out in the middle of the night would draw instant attention. Even the hour’s walk to get a taxi was full of danger. This would all be so much easier if they were just adults!

They probably would have to figure out alternate transportation. Something clever and unexpected. In prison movies they used laundry trucks, but the secret elves washed their own linens. Louise started a checklist of things they would need. It seemed massively overwhelming, but at least Jillian wasn’t huddled in bed, crying.

“I’ve devised four exit routes from this room to the sidewalk, depending on time of day.” Jillian poured out M&Ms onto the blueprint. “In the mornings, Nattie is in the kitchen along with Celine. Ming and Anna are in their suites in the east wing.” She slid red M&Ms to mark the locations of the adults. “And the rest are scattered among the outbuildings.” She placed four green M&Ms in the west wing. “And we’re here.”

She flicked a 3D-rendered model to Louise’s tablet. “These are the four exits. That door.” She pointed at the hallway door. “The bathroom into Lain’s bedroom and then out into the hallway again. I’ve discovered that Esme actually hinged the plywood over the real windows.” She pointed at the false wall of the secret room. “There’s climbing equipment that we can—”

“Candy!” Joy abandoned nibbling on the paper hat to frantically snatch up the M&Ms. “Nom, nom, nom!”

“Joy!” Jillian cried. “That’s mine! I was saving those!”

Escape planning was paused while Jillian and Joy frantically ate the candy until both looked like chipmunks with stuffed cheeks.

“What’s the other ways out?” Louise asked once the M&Ms were gone.

“Mmm.” Jillian pointed at Joy while chewing. The baby dragon pulled the paper hat onto her head and saluted. “Mmmhm.” Jillian swallowed. “She’s phased at least twice her mass through the false wall. I’m not sure of her limit. We could experiment.”

“Let’s keep that as Backup Plan B or maybe even C or D.” Louise gazed at the blueprint, feeling uneasy. If they could wait the twenty-seven days to the next Shutdown, fleeing to Pittsburgh would be simple. But she knew they couldn’t wait that long. They had to go soon. “Who the hell came up with the stupid idea of having Shutdown once a month? Why not days on Elfhome and nights on Earth, or something sane like that?”

Nikola took it as a serious question. He tilted his head as he announced, “That was actually one suggested schedule, but the elves rejected it. They proposed that Pittsburgh would visit Elfhome only once a year. Pittsburghers advocated that the city would go through Startup and Shutdown once a month, staying on Elfhome for forty-eight hours every thirty days. The UN chose the current schedule as a compromise.”

Compromise? The UN must be using some new definition of the word where neither party got anything they wanted.

If the UN “arbitrarily” set the cycle of Pittsburgh being stranded for a whole month, then it meant Ming really chose the timing. If Louise had to guess, he wanted to drive away the two million humans living in the metropolitan area. It was one thing to live in a city that occasionally visited another world, and quite another to be stuck there three hundred and fifty-three days out of the year. With one manipulation of the treaty terms, Ming made it so the humans fled Pittsburgh, leaving the city short of skilled manpower. People chosen by Ming could then be positioned on Elfhome.

For a moment, the scale of what was against them overwhelmed Louise. So much stood against them. Ming and all his people here at the mansion. His people in the EIA. The oni hidden among the humans. Elves like Sparrow. She wanted to reach out and take Jillian’s hand, but she knew that her twin wouldn’t be able to take her leaning on her. Not yet. Jillian was getting her feet under her, but she couldn’t be strong for Louise. In the very same way, Louise knew that she couldn’t go to Anna and tell her all the things she suspected of Ming. Esme, no doubt, had tried. When her mother wouldn’t listen, Esme had painted all her furniture black, built her secret lair, and woven complex plans.

“In my dream, he found you when you were much too young. Too small. Too helpless.”

Louise clung to memory. Esme knew that they would be caught and had left a secret hoard of weapons. They weren’t completely alone. If they could get to Elfhome, then they would have Alexander and Windwolf.

“They’ll finish the work on Lain’s bedroom tomorrow.” Louise circled back to the real threat. “All they really have to do is put up curtains and move in furniture.”

“How does it look?” Jillian asked.

Louise threw up her hands. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.”

“I want to see.” Jillian headed for the bathroom that connected the two bedrooms.

“Why?”

“It’s like a movie set that we had built.” Jillian opened the door and gasped. “Oh, Lou, it’s going to be beautiful.”

She walked to the center of Lain’s bedroom and spun slowly, arms outstretched.

The floor was now a deep warm black and the walls were a rich creamy gray. Dovetail had hung a new chandelier that was a wonderful cascade of silver branches and crystals.

“It’s going to be done,” Louise grumbled. “When they finish, Anna will want to redo Esme’s room. If they start tearing out everything, they’ll find the secret room.”

Louise had had uneasy dreams all week of Esme frantically giving orders as workers dismantled her spaceship around her. While Louise believed that the nightmare had actually been her own fear that Esme’s bedroom would be torn apart, she felt more and more sure that something horrible had happened to Esme in the cold darkness of space. While Louise still couldn’t think of Esme as “mother,” she’d begun to think of her as something like an aunt or a much older sister. It made her sad to think that Esme might have died painfully years before they were even born.

The question remained, though, why. What was Esme trying to do, arranging for children to be born and then leaving Earth? Whatever Esme had been attempting, it had been important enough that Esme had been willing to die trying to succeed. Had she succeeded or failed? Certainly lives had been at stake. Maybe even worlds.

But they didn’t have the luxury to worry about worlds right now. They had to protect the babies and Joy.

“We won’t let them remodel.” Jillian sounded like her normal self for once. “We’ll tell Anna that if she changes the bedroom, we’ll lose the only thing we have of Esme.”

It might work. It was probably why Anna hadn’t changed the room in the first place. But if Ming had already left for Elfhome, how soon would he want Anna and the twins to join him? How much time did they really have? It felt like a very short time.

The bugging software that Louise had on the mansion’s phone indicated an incoming call. Since she’d set it up, there hadn’t been any calls, which made her think she’d bugged an inactive line. After careful checking, though, she’d discovered that the secret elves avoided most lines of communication. It put the meeting at the museum in a new light: the secret elves didn’t call someone when they wanted to talk.

She tapped an icon so they could listen to the rare conversation. Rapid-fire High Elvish spilled out of her tablet. She only recognized a handful of English words thrown in, referencing technology that elves normally didn’t have access to. Cargo ship. Overhead crane. Ammo. Someone had the unfortunate job of telling Yves about the fire in the South China Sea. The news was not being taken well. There was a thunderous noise and then silence.

“I think we got their attention,” Louise said. “Let’s take everything they have while they’re trying to put out that fire.”