Authors: Wen Spencer
They had the second generator but its battery pack needed to be charged during the day while they were at school. They could make another battery pack—actually they should, just so they had a spare—but they couldn’t finish it and have it fully charged by tomorrow morning. The twins weren’t sure what would happen if they separated Joy from the generator for any length of time. The baby dragon refused to cooperate in any experiments. It was possible that the lack of magic would kill her, so they didn’t force her. Also a plan of leaving Joy home alone had “bad idea” written all over it.
So they were stuck with the foursome: Nikola and Tesla, Joy and the generator.
With Flying Monkey Five in their classroom, taking all four to school seemed like a recipe for disaster.
“Please listen to us.” Nikola pressed up against Louise. “We’ve waited all day to speak with you. Please let us talk!”
“Okay, we’re listening.”
Nikola opened his mouth and then stood there a moment. Finally he admitted in a quiet little voice, “We don’t know where to start.”
“What is Tristan’s real name? It’s not Flying Monkey Five. No one names their kid that.”
“We’re not sure. When he was born, he was given the name of Tristan Jacques Desmarais, but if we understand names correctly, that’s his real name. Maybe. His father’s name is listed as Edmond Desmarais and that’s not his father’s real name, so Desmarais can’t be his real-real name. Right?”
“Wait. Desmarais? He’s
Anna
Desmarais’ son?”
He nodded. “Here. We’ll show you.” He looked toward the new kitchen television, and it clicked on. A sepia photograph of Ming the Merciless scowled down at them. “This is the earliest photo I could find of Ming. At that time he was known as Pruet Lalumiere. It is dated April 16, 1853.”
“Ming is an elf?” Jillian cried in surprise as Nikola flashed more photos of Ming on the screen. “Whoa, slower, we can’t see that fast!”
“Sorry.” Nikola slowed down to a few seconds per photo. Nearly too fast to follow except that they were all of Ming, unsmiling, in old-fashioned clothes. After the first one or two photos, which seemed to be portraits, the following pictures were candid shots where Ming barely seemed to realize he was being photographed. Horses were replaced by Model T Fords and then color slowly leached in. The time between the photos grew longer, as if he became more and more cautious of having his picture taken. As an elf stuck on Earth, he most likely didn’t want proof that he was immortal just lying around.
“I think Ming is an elf king exiled from Elfhome,” Louise said. “I think that Tristan was telling the truth about his father. He just didn’t expect us to take him seriously.”
“Weird. Why would he do that?”
“Tristan is an elf.” Louise pointed out what she’d realized on the train to support that. “And elves don’t lie.”
“It’s socially frowned upon,” Jillian grumbled. “It doesn’t mean they can’t. It’s just extremely dishonorable to lie.”
“If we were normal kids, we wouldn’t have believed what he said, so it’s fairly safe to tell us the truth.”
“But if he thinks we’re normal kids, why is he at our school?”
“I don’t know.” The obvious answer was that Anna Desmarais had sent him there. But why?
“I could only find four photographs of Crown Prince Kiss Butt. His name is listed as Yves Desmarais.” Nikola flashed through the pictures on fast-forward.
Yves? As in the man who’d ordered Alexander kidnapped and Windwolf killed? If Ming was the exiled ruler of the elves, then that would make sense. The crown prince had met with his father’s still-loyal subjects to pass on orders. As viceroy, Windwolf represented Queen Soulful Ember’s presence in Pittsburgh. Not only would Windwolf report any troop movements, he had the power to reduce them to slag. If the twins’ research was correct, then there weren’t any other
domana
-caste elves in Pittsburgh.
“Wait!” Jillian cried. “Back up to the second photo!” The picture showed a collection of people, all unaware of the camera as they stared at something horrific. Only Yves seemed unaffected by whatever they were looking at. Jillian pointed at a woman with both hands covering her mouth. “That’s Esme!”
Nikola tilted his head as he chased info down on the Internet. “Yes, that’s Esme Shenske. Anna Desmarais is her mother.”
“What?” Jillian and Louise both shouted.
Nikola cringed away. “Anna Desmarais is Esme Shenske’s mother.”
“Oh my God, she’s our grandmother?” Jillian and Louise both cried.
Nikola gave a complete report. “Anna Cohan married Neil Shenske and had two daughters, Lain and Esme. Eight months after Neil was killed, she married Edmond Desmarais and had two sons, Lucien and Tristan.”
“Flying Monkeys Four and Five.” Louise ticked them off on her fingers. “Crown Prince Kiss Butt—Yves—was child one. Lain and Esme are two and three. Their little half brothers were four and five.”
“Oh geez, we’ve been going nuts trying to figure this out, and it’s been her family all along.” Jillian gave a scream and waved her hands over her head. “What the hell? Why didn’t she just put their names on the photos?”
“Because Edmond Desmarais isn’t Ming’s real name any more than Ming is.” Louise paced as her stomach churned. “We know Tristan is the baby of the family, and Esme left eighteen years ago. She might have assumed he would grow up. If we hadn’t recognized him from his photo, we certainly wouldn’t be able to identify him by the name he gave us. The obviously fake name of Flying Monkey Five forced us to do an extensive search.”
Jillian growled. “I still say it was a stupid way of warning us! Her way didn’t do any good at all. He’s in our class! He followed us home! He knows where we live now.”
“He knew before he got on the train,” Louise said. “Remember? He knew we were going to Astoria. And he knows what our birthday is.”
Jillian eyes went wide. “Really?”
Louise bit her bottom lip while trying to remember everything their mother ever told them about Anna Desmarais. In the light of this new information, things looked strangely different. “Oh. Oh. Oh shit.”
“What?”
“Anna kept going on and on about Mom stealing something from her. She tore Mom’s offices apart trying to find what Mom took from her. What Mom stole was us! Anna knows, and she wants us back.”
“How could she know?” Jillian cried. “We erased all the records.”
Louise squinted as she watched Joy stuff handfuls of smelly cat food into her mouth. It was like a jigsaw puzzle. They’d been missing pieces and hadn’t been able to put anything together. Now they had lots of pieces, but it didn’t make sense. Were they still missing too much? They had erased all the information connecting Esme to all her children: Alexander, themselves, and Nikola. They hadn’t been able to remove Esme’s billing records without raising certain data flags in the system. So anyone checking could see that Esme had been a customer, and that she’d been paying for storage for eighteen years, but there wouldn’t be information on any of the genetic material she’d deposited. Their parents were never billed, not for the twins’ embryos or Nikola’s, so there wouldn’t be any records of what was taken. The company could have done a manual inventory, but their father would have mentioned that. What had the twins missed? And how did this fit with Yves wanting Alexander, Dufae’s box, and Joy?
Joy finished eating by sticking her whole head into the can and licking it clean. They’d learned that they couldn’t stop this ritual. Joy added a new twist by flinging the empty can over her shoulder. It bounced off the upper cabinet and, either by luck or design, landed in the trashcan.
“Joy! You broke the cabinet!” Jillian pointed to a section of bare wood in the frame.
“No, that’s a bullet hole from the robbers that—” Louise gasped as she realized what they’d missed. “We didn’t erase all the records! Mom and Dad would have copied everything they could get their hands on about our donors. Family history of illnesses. Genetic disorders. They would have records here at the house.”
“And the robbers took everything.” Jillian swore. “That bitch! Anna Desmarais wasn’t burying the hatchet by giving Mom those gala tickets, she was making sure we were all out of the house so she could have our home robbed!”
Louise nodded slowly as she double-checked her twin’s logic. “If she hadn’t insisted that Mom and Dad bring us along, they might have hired a babysitter to come to the house. Any random day, someone could be home sick or waiting for a delivery or have a doctor’s appointment. The only way she could be sure no one was home was to make a big stink about how she was being noble by giving Mom enough tickets for the whole family. Once she knew we were at the gala, she kept Mom busy so we couldn’t leave.”
Jillian growled more curses while making sure that the cat food can was buried deep within the trash. Louise turned on the sink’s faucet and washed Joy with hand soap. By now the baby dragon loved the combination of warm water and attention. She purred like a kitty, rubbing against Louise’s hands.
Jillian made a small sound of discovery and pulled their old toothbrushes out of the trash. Their mother hadn’t wanted the twins using them just in case the robbers had touched them. “DNA! That’s why the thieves took the toothbrushes: they have Mom and Dad’s DNA on them. With these, Desmarais could prove that we’re her—wait—no—the robbers didn’t take ours. So why did they just take Mom and Dad’s?”
Louise considered as she wrapped Joy in a clean dishtowel. “It could be that they wanted DNA to confirm Mom and Dad’s identities, in case they were using fake ID.”
Jillian snorted at the irony. “Pot calling kettle black.” She frowned at the toothbrushes, obviously debating if she should actually put them back in the trash where a dumpster diver could retrieve them. “Maybe that’s why the Flying Monkey is at school then. They didn’t get DNA samples from us. Maybe he’s trying to steal our DNA.”
“That doesn’t make sense.” Louise started to pace. She thought better in motion. “Why send in an undercover kid when you could do something like put someone in as the substitute school nurse and have her check the fifth grade for lice? They could have had someone follow us on to the train and pull a hair or two out without us noticing. Hell, they could have paid a janitor to clean the floor of our locker; there’s probably lots of our hair with tags intact.”
“Because they’re not smart enough to think of it?” Jillian shoved the toothbrushes back into the trash.
“If I could think of three things in one minute, they should have been able to think of
something
in a shorter period of time than it takes to enroll a kid in a private school like Perelman.”
“He’s definitely at school because of us! There’s no way it could be anything else; he stuck to us all day. I think he would have followed us into the bathroom if it wouldn’t get him into trouble.”
“Maybe he’s supposed to kidnap us.”
“Him?”
“He’s half-elf; he’s probably a lot stronger than he looks. And he might know jujitsu or judo or something. He’s fifty years old; he’s had time to get a black belt in every martial art there is. He could be super ninja.”
“There’s two of us!” Jillian said.
“Three.” Joy proved that she could count.
“Eight.” Nikola shrank back from the collective stare. “Maybe? Not all of us think we should count Tesla, but if we did, we would be eight.”
Smart as Louise was, trying to understand how Nikola existed made her brain hurt. “I don’t think he’s going to try to kidnap us. If he was, he could have done it today easily.”
“Kill us?” Jillian guessed and then shook her head along with Louise. “No, all the same things apply. It doesn’t make sense to send in your kid to do your dirty work. You use someone that can’t be connected back to you.”
Nikola stared at Jillian. “It bothers us that you know that.”
“Muhahaha!” Jillian gave an evil laugh and Nikola ducked behind Louise.
“Jillian!” Louise wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or bad that she sounded like their mother.
Jillian snickered. “It’s been a standard thriller trope since Hitchcock did
Strangers on a Train
. Most people are killed by someone that they know, so cops always consider family and friends as their first suspects. Anyone with half a brain knows that. So it stands to reason that the Desmaraises wouldn’t use their kid to do their dirty work.”
“But if the cops believed he was a really a nine-year-old stranger, would they even think to question him?”
Jillian’s eyes went wide with fear.
Nikola tilted his head as if listening to something and then announced, “Mom just got off the train. She’ll be here shortly.”
The twins yelped in unison.
“We should tell Mom!” Louise cried as she ran upstairs with Joy. Nikola started to chase after her but then stopped on the stairway landing when he realized that Jillian was staying in the kitchen.
“Everything? Are you insane?” Jillian shouted as she hurriedly wiped clean the floor and sink. “They won’t believe us. At least for most of it. And the rest? They’re going to kill us for!”
“What?” Nikola cried.
“Jilly!” Louise ran back down the steps to where Nikola crouched on the landing in fear. “They’re not going to kill us.” A shiver of fear went through her as she realized that their parents would never believe that Nikola was alive and real. They might not “kill” the twins, but they might do something awful to the frozen embryos stored within Tesla. “Come on. It’s going to be all right. We won’t let anything happen to you. Okay?”
* * *
They ignored two calls from their mother to come help with dinner while they argued in heated whispers. When they heard their father arrive fifteen minutes later, they had reached a tentative agreement as to what to say and who should say it. They crept downstairs only to find their parents in the middle of their own whispered discussion.
Their mother hissed a curse word and growled softly, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“No, due diligence starts next week.”
“This is beyond insane.”
“It’s a holding company that they own. It could be just coincidence.”
“Yeah, right.” Their mother slammed shut the refrigerator door and yelled, “Girls!”