i 2d586356cf1586df (7 page)

"I'm sorry."

She nipped him on the earlobe in rebuke. "No matter who, if they were the right one, you would have wanted this."

"It was graceless." He had given her only a few hours warning of his intention to offer for Tinker. She knew him well enough to know that he would want a monogamous relationship as long as Tinker was willing to give him one.

"When did we start to care about grace? Wasn't that the whole point of leaving court, all the false elegance? I like that we're honest with one another—and I like her—which is not surprising since I like humans."

"She's an elf now," Wolf gently reminded her.

"In the body, but not in the mind. She speaks Low Elvish as if she was born to it, yes, but she doesn't know our ways, Wolf. If you don't have time to teach her, then get her a tutor."

Wolf found himself shaking his head. "No. I don't want a stranger trying to force her into court elegance."

"Are you afraid that she will lose all that makes her endearing to you?"

Only Discord would dare to say that to him—but then—that was another reason he loved her. She would risk annoying him to make him face what needed to be faced. For her, he sighed and considered the possibility.

"No," he said after thinking it through. "Yes, I love her humanity and I'll mourn it if she loses it
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completely, but she is so much more than that."

"Then have someone teach her. She nearly got us all killed today because she couldn't bear to sacrifice me."

He knew better than to argue with Discord on that but was pleased with Tinker's decision. It was Tinker's courage and ability to pull off the impossible that had initially attracted him to her, and he would have been deeply saddened to lose Singing Storm. "I'm trying to find a solution to this. I know she needs to be taught our customs, but I don't want her to necessarily conform."

"I never said anything about conforming." Discord nuzzled into his neck. "Conforming is for chickens."

He laughed into her short blue hair. "That's my Discord." He kissed her and drew away to consider her.

From her hair to her boots, Discord challenged everything elfin. Yet of all his
sekasha
, she was the only one that had grown up at court and had high etiquette literally beaten into her. There was no one more knowledgeable, yet less likely, to force those skills on Tinker.

"What is it that you want of me?" she asked.

"You know me too well." He tugged on her rattail braid. "I want you to keep close to my
domi
and be there when she needs guidance."

"Pony is her First." Discord switched to English, a sign that she wanted to be bluntly truthful. "I'll be stomping all over his toes. I don't want to piss him off. He's one of the few that never said shit to me about being a mutt."

"Pony is not the type to put pride before duty. He loves Tinker, but he knows that he doesn't fully understand her. He hasn't spent enough time in Pittsburgh, away from our people . . ."

"Like me?" It was a point of sadness between them. For decades they had ignored all the little signs that they could not be more than
domou
and beholden. The fact that she would choose Pittsburgh over being with him had made clear that while they were good together, they were not right.

"Like you." Wolf took her hand, kissed it, and moved on. "Humans are still mysterious to him."

She thought for a moment and then returned to Elvish. "As long as it does not anger Storm Horse, I will be there for her."

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4: ON GOSSAMER DEATH

The next morning, shortly after dawn, the oni made their first attack. Wolf heard a muffled roar and then the loud anguished wail of a wounded gossamer. Luckily, his people were already awake and ready.

Only Tinker, having been drugged the night before, still slept.

"Have Poppymeadow lock down the enclave," Wolf told Little Horse. "I'm leaving you just with her guards and Singing Storm. Everyone else with me."

Wolf arrived at the airfield, though too late to scry the direction of the attack. All he could do was watch the gossamer die in the pale morning light. The great living airship wallowed on the ground, its translucent body undulating in pain. The remains of the gondola lay under it, crushed by the massive heaving body.

The clear blood of the gossamer pooled on the ground, scenting the air with the ghost of ancient seas.

"We can't get close enough to heal the wound." The gossamer's navigator was weeping openly. "Even if we could, I doubt we could save her. It's a massive wound, and she's lost too much fluid. My poor baby."

The gossamer let out a long low breathy wail of pain.

"Did you see where it came from?" Wolf wasn't sure what "it" was because none of the crew had seen the attack clearly.

The navigator shook his head. "I felt it hit before I heard anything. She shuddered, and then started to go down, and I jumped clear."

"Here comes another one!" Wraith shouted as he pointed at some type of rocket flashing toward them.

Wolf flung up his widest shield, protecting the crew and
sekasha
surrounding him. "Stay close!"

The rocket struck his wind wall and exploded into a fireball that curved around them, following the edges of his shield. The deflected energy splashed back in a wave of pulverized earth, like a stone thrown into mud.

A piece of metal skimmed overhead and struck the gossamer. The shrapnel smashed the gossamer sideways, blasting through the nerve center of the creature. The airship gave one last agonizing wail and collapsed.

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Wolf shifted carefully to maintain his shield and did a wind scry. The scrying followed the disturbance of the rocket path through the air, making it visible to him. It pointed back to a window a few houses down from the paparazzi's spy perch. The Rim had razed all the buildings between the airfield and the street at the first Startup, so he had an equally clear shot back at the sniper.

Wolf summoned a force strike and flung it along the scry. The power arrowed away, plowing a furrow in a straight line to the human structure. The force strike punched its way through the building, reducing the structure instantly to a cloud of dust and a pile of rubble strewn into the alley behind it.

"Have someone escort the crew to safety," Wolf told his First. "The rest, come with me."

Maintaining his shield forced him to move slowly toward the human buildings, following the rut carved out by the force strike. The dust expanded, shrouding the area as he crossed the no-man's-land of the Rim.

"Keep the winds close," Wraith murmured as they reached the street. "There may be more than one nest."

Wolf nodded his understanding. The
sekasha
activated their shields and moved out of his protection.

The house had been two stories tall. It made a large hill of rubble, capped by the broken rooftop. If there were any survivors, they'd have to be dug out.

Maynard emerged out of the dust, followed by a score or more of his people in EIA uniforms. All of the EIA were spell-marked, verifying that they were human.

"Wolf Who Rules." Maynard bowed and signaled his people toward the rubble.

"Maynard." Wolf nudged his shield slightly so it wrapped Maynard in his protection.

"What happened?" Maynard eyed the rubble as his people started to sift through it.

Wolf indicated the dead airship with his eyes; maintaining his shields limited his ability to motion with his hands. "Someone fired on what is mine. I returned fire."

Maynard glanced at the distortion around them. "How long can you keep up your shields?"

"There is no reason for concern." The Wind Clan's spell stones rested on a powerful
fiutana
that
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provided unlimited magic. "My gossamer is dead, but my crew is safe. For that I am thankful."

A call came from the EIA digging through the rubble. Most of the roof had been shifted off. In the debris of the second floor was a female huddled under a sturdy table. She appeared human, as small and dark as Wolf's
domi
. Old bruises, like purple and yellow flowers, marked her face and arms; someone beat her on regular occasions.

She gazed at Wolf with fear. "Don't let them have me! We're like cockroaches to them! Razing this neighborhood is just the start of them stomping us out!"

The human workers moved reluctantly aside to let the
sekasha
claim her. Wraith took out his leatherbound spell case, slipped out a
biatau,
and pressed it to the female's arm.

She whimpered and one of the watching EIA said, "It doesn't hurt. We've all had it done to us."

The simple spell inscribed onto the paper of the
biatau
was merely the first of the spells that the EIA had been subjected to, but it was the quickest and easiest to use as a first screening process. The oni had relied on an optical disguise spell that let them appear human; the
biatau
, when activated, would shatter the illusion and allow their true form to show.

Wraith spoke the verbal command and the spell activated. There was, however, no change to the woman's appearance.

Maynard sighed deeply, as if he saw all the dangerous complications that the woman presented. "She's human."

"Unfortunately." Wolf motioned that the EIA should take her prisoner.

"Here's another one," Bladebite called.

The second person was a large male, badly hurt. Wraith took out another
biatau
with the same spell and used it on the male. There was a ripple of distortion and the male's features shifted slightly to a more feral looking face with short horns protruding from his forehead.

"Oni." Wraith growled out the word.

"He's badly hurt," Maynard said. "The prison has a medical ward. We can take him there."

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Wraith jerked the oni up onto his knees.

"Wolf," Maynard said quickly and quietly. "We have protocols on how prisoners are to be treated. The Geneva Convention states that the wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for."

"We do not accede," Wolf said, "to your Geneva Convention."

In one clean motion, Wraith unsheathed his sword and beheaded the oni.

The woman shrieked and tried to launch herself toward the dead body.

"Wolf, you can't do this!" Maynard growled.

"It has been done," Wolf said.

Maynard shook his head. "The treaty, which the elves signed, states that you will adhere to the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners."

"For human prisoners," Wolf said. "We will not take oni prisoners."

Maynard frowned. "That is the only option you're entertaining? A massacre of all the oni?"

"They breed like mice," Wolf said. "We do not fight for today, or this year, or even this century, but for this millennium—and to do so, we must be ruthless. If we leave a hundred alive, in a few years they will be several thousand in number, and in a thousand years, millions. We can not allow them to live, or they will crowd us out of our own home."

"You can't let the elves do this!" the woman wailed. "If we don't stop the elves, they'll turn on us next."

"It's their world." Maynard leveled his gaze and words at his watching men, aiming his words at them alone. "Not ours."

"It was their world!" the woman shouted. "We're stuck here now, so it's ours too."

There was a flaw in Maynard's logic. The old arguments that Maynard could have used to counter her were useless now. Her railing, unfortunately, could lead the humans to dangerous ground, so Wolf interceded.

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"We are willing to share with humans. We do not wish to share with oni. A full contingent of royal troops is on its way to Pittsburgh. When they arrive here, their goal will be to find and kill every oni that ever set foot on Elfhome. My people have committed genocide before and have full plans to do it again. I strongly caution you not to put the human race between the royal troops and our enemy."

Whatever impact his words had, however, were lost when the woman suddenly looked past Wolf and shrieked. Wolf turned to see what she was focused on. One of the EIA workers had a small squirming creature in his arms. As the man neared, Wolf realized that the creature was a child, species so far undetermined, but human looking, perhaps four years old.

Wolf sighed. He had hoped it wouldn't come to this; that he would only have to deal with adult oni.

Certainly among all of the elves, there were no children. In fact, he was fairly sure that—not counting his
domi'
s unusual status—Little Horse was the youngest elf in Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, when one could breed like mice, one did.

The name tag of the EIA worker holding the child read "U. D. Akavia."

"The child needs to be tested, Akavia," Wolf said.

Akavia's brown eyes went wide; he hadn't considered that the child was anything but what it appeared to be.

"No!" the woman sympathizer cried. "Don't give those monsters my baby!"

Akavia glanced to the woman and then down at the child whimpering in his arms. "She's just a little girl."

"We need to know if she is human or oni." Wolf tried to pose the statement in a nonthreatening way.

"She can't hurt anyone." Akavia covered the girl's small head with a protective hand. His eyes went past Wolf to the
sekasha
behind him.

Of course the human saw only the child, not the female that would be an adult in a decade, nor the army she could produce in the years to come. In truth, even to Wolf, she looked small and helpless.