Wood Sprites (58 page)

“You didn’t say anything about ostriches,” Crow Boy said.

In the scramble to implement “Highjack Plan B,” Louise had left finding transportation to the babies. At first glance the box truck, painted fire-engine red, had seemed a bit flashy, but it did match the specifications she’d given them. She’d assumed that the tall, matching red, livestock box on the back was empty.

Crow Boy’s puzzled look after he’d climbed up into the high cab warned her that she was wrong.

“Ostriches?” Louise scrambled up beside him. To her dismay, the back window of the truck afforded a view of eight ostriches. They studied Louise back with large soft brown eyes and thick eyelashes. They were the most beautiful eyes Louise had ever seen. “Oh no!”

“Chuck!” Jillian cried. Louise wasn’t sure how Jillian decided it was Chuck’s fault.

Nikola cringed, but it was Chuck who defended the choice. “You said we needed a self-driven truck with combination locks on cargo pods, fully fueled.”

“Someone is going to notice it’s missing!” Jillian cried.

“They haven’t yet. And we wanted to see the ostriches. We’ve never seen one before! We haven’t seen any animals.”

Louise sighed. The babies didn’t have enough experience to understand cause and effect. It worried Louise, not just because of what they might do, but because of what
she
might miss. She might be smart as a rocket scientist, but she didn’t have twenty years of learning how the world really worked. She was gambling all their lives that she understood things enough to see a way to safety.

“What do we do?” Crow Boy asked.

Louise took a deep breath and swung the door closed. “We need to get moving; we’re running on a time table.”

Nikola pressed his nose to the window and stared in fascination at the ostriches. They stared back, seemingly equally fascinated.

Jillian eyed the ostriches with open suspicion. “What are we going to do with eight ostriches?”

“Play with them?” Nikola suggested.

Louise knew that was impossible, although a tiny part of her wished they could. “If we don’t need the cages, we’ll set the truck back on its original course with the pride.”

“Pride?” Jillian echoed in confusion.

“Groups of ostriches are called prides,” Louise said.

“Like lions?” Jillian said.

One of the Jawbreakers said, “Evidence has been found to show lions in Africa have been kicked in the head by ostriches and had their jaws broken and starved to death.”

Jillian gave Louise a dark look. “We’re in a truck filled with lion killers?”

It didn’t seem nearly as fun when Jillian put it that way.

“Hello!” Joy pressed against the glass to look up at the big birds. “Who’s there?” She tilted her head back and forth. “Oh, no one’s home.”

Jillian snorted.

“That’s not nice,” Louise said. “They’re just not as smart as you.”

* * *

The cavern’s entrance was marked with a low split-rail fence and a giant arrow sitting on a rough stone slab. There had been a barrier with a “closed” sign attached to it, but that had been run over. Louise wished they could have stopped and reconsidered, but they were already committed. Crow Boy had flown ahead, and their first attack was already underway. The truck’s auto-drive put on turn signals, slowed, and gracefully turned into the driveway. Their truck thumped over the fallen barrier. Her heart started to race. She wished she could take Jillian’s hand and hold it tight, but she didn’t want her twin to know how scared she was. Louise gripped her hands together.

The two-mile-long driveway climbed up the steep ridge and crested in a large parking lot. Their two other trucks sat near the low-slung stone and wood-planked visitor center. The ten thousand robotic mice were still pouring endlessly out of the back of the mouse truck. Unlike the prototypes, the factory-built mice were dark brown. There were two people on the ground, twitching, and one running for the visitor center with a thousand mice on his heels.

“Get him!” Louise pointed at the last fleeing elf. “Get him.”

“We’re working on it!” Nikola cried.

“Hooyah!” Chuck Norris cried as the male tumbled to the ground. “Score!”

Three down,
Louise thought,
how many to go?

Crow Boy suddenly appeared in the sky, swooping down onto the fallen elves. For a moment, Louise’s heart stopped, thinking he was going to strike them with the machete they’d bought at Home Depot. When he landed, though, he whipped out a handful of the twenty-four-inch zip ties and used them to hogtie the male.

“Pull over by Crow Boy,” Louise instructed. They’d specified a locking cargo section on the truck so they could hold and transport prisoners if they needed to. If the tengu children weren’t here, they might have to question prisoners at length.

The truck stopped next to the fallen elves. The twins scrambled down out of the cab.

“Nikola, you stay with Tesla; keep him out of danger.” Louise took three of the white mice from her pocket and placed them on the ground. “Girls, you three control the brown mice, but keep them close. If they get out of range of Tesla, their own AI will take over and we might not get them back.”

Each mouse had a seek-and-neutralize program that would have them taser any humanoid object that wasn’t wearing a “friend” transponder. Their programming also allowed them to be linked into large groups acting as one unit. With the babies herding them, the mice would actually end up in the caverns instead of wandering the neighboring woods, tasering hapless hikers.

“Roger!” Chuck snapped. “Team Mischief, go!”

“Jillian, unload the luggage mules.” Louise pointed Jillian toward the truck that had the rest of their gear. Away from the elves. Away from the violence. Jillian nodded, trying to look anywhere but at the bound males.

Only once Jillian was out of earshot did Louise ask quietly, “Are there any other elves in the area?”

Crow Boy shook his head. “The one outbuilding is an equipment shed and the other is a picnic shelter. There’s no one in either one. If there’s more elves, they’re inside the caverns.”

“Any sign of the nestlings?”

Hurt flashed across his face. He took something out of his pocket and held it out to her. It was a small plushie of a black bird. “This is Lai Yee’s. It was on the ground in the equipment shed, but it could have simply fallen out of a truck.”

It only meant that the little girl had been moved in a vehicle that then came to the caverns. Lai Yee, though, might have been taken out of the truck someplace else.

“We’ll find them,” Louise promised.

While he hogtied and gagged the other fallen elves, Louise sorted through the spells they’d preprinted. They’d made copies of every spell that might be useful, from shields to detection to healing ones like the ones they’d cast on Crow Boy. She found the scry spell and laid it on the warm asphalt of the parking lot. Taking out four magic generators, she connected them to the spell via the power leads. With the increased power input, the scry spell would reach further.

With a word, she activated the spell. With the extra power, a massive dome gleamed to life over the paper. The parking lot flared on the surface, a brilliant dot of confusion as the spell attempted to highlight all the living objects from the ostriches down to the twins. The gift shop was a tangle of metal, rending the building unreadable to the spell. The magic poured down through the caves, though, painting the deep maze hidden under the rolling hills around them. With the parking lot to mark the scale, the sheer size of the cave system was intimidating.

“There they are!” Jillian cried, pointing not at the spell but to a point somewhere to the right.

“What?” Louise couldn’t see anything.

Jillian dashed over to study the spell. “There! See!” She pointed to a bright knot within the largest cavern space. “That’s them.”

“How can you tell?” Louise peered closely at the point. There seemed too many motes of light shifting around to be just the children; if it was the nestlings, then they had several guards.

Jillian gave her a startled look. “They feel like Crow Boy.” She said it as if Louise should understand. “We all felt different when you triggered the spell. The ostriches. Us. Crow Boy. The elves. Even Tesla. What’s down there felt mostly like Crow Boy.”

Louise compared the gleaming three-dimensional maze to the map they’d downloaded from the caverns’ website. The paper-based version of the caves failed to indicate the slope; the deepest point was easily hundreds of feet underground. She estimated that the nestlings were nearly a hundred feet deep. “Mostly?”

Jillian considered the mysterious feeling. Slowly, she shrank inward and whispered, “There’s a bunch of elves with them.”

Louise steeled herself against the fear that went through her. They had the upper hand; the elves couldn’t possibly guess the nature of their attack. “Find the signal repeaters; we’ll need them first.”

Louise cancelled the spell. The heat of the spell had singed the paper slightly. As she disconnected the power leads, the brittle and browned sections crumbled. She whispered a curse; they had a limited number of printouts for each spell.

“Joy, no!” Jillian cried.

Louise turned to see Joy fling open the cage door on the livestock carrier.

“Cage bad!” Joy cried. “Be free!”

The big birds spilled out and headed toward the twins.

The ostriches suddenly seemed a lot bigger as they headed toward her. Dealing with the small heads on the slender necks was much different from being surrounded by tall muscular legs and wicked-looking feet. The big bodies were at shoulder height to the twins while the birds looked down at them from another foot up.

“Eep!” Jillian backed up until she was pressed against Louise’s right side.

“They are friendly, right?” Nikola pressed against Louise’s left side.

“Probably.” Louise wished she felt surer of that. She moved in front of Tesla. The ostriches were probably hand-raised and gentle with humans, but there was no telling how they’d react to the robotic dog. “I think they probably imprinted on the people that raised them. They’re looking for their ‘mother,’ and we’re the only humans in sight.”

“Or they might kick us to death,” Jillian grumbled. “We shouldn’t have taken them in the first place.”

“We’re sorry!” Nikola cried. “We didn’t think Joy would let them out!”

“It’s okay.” Louise hadn’t factored ostriches into her attack plans. They didn’t have time, though, to mess around with the giant birds. Crow Boy brushed past the big birds to shove the first hogtied elf into the livestock cage. “Let’s just ignore them, and hopefully they’ll wonder off to graze. Make sure Joy stays out of sight of them though: they’re omnivores. They will eat small lizards.”

“At this point in time,” Jillian growled, “I’d be happy to feed her to them.”

Louise didn’t agree with the sentiment but was glad that Jillian sounded more angry than scared. “We need to move quickly. If the elves call for reinforcements, we’ll be caught between two groups.” She took the case that Jillian handed her. “Chuck, start the mice toward the gift shop. Nikola, keep Tesla with me.”

The visitor center for the caverns was perched on the first ridge of the Allegheny Mountains. Louise had only been vaguely aware of that fact when they’d climbed the driveway. As she headed toward the gift shop, the reality of the landscape hit Louise hard. They were a thousand feet or more above the rest of southwestern Pennsylvania. The land rolled out to the horizon, fifty or sixty miles in the clear morning sunlight. The ironwood forest transplanted from Elfhome loomed far in the distance, the curving edge of the Rim and the quarantine zone encircling it. As the crow flies, it looked miles away. Ten? Twenty? Louise couldn’t judge. When they crossed over to Elfhome, the rolling farmland would be replaced by virgin forest. No roads. No bridges. Man-eating plants, spiders the size of lapdogs, wolves the size of ponies, and a distant cousin to the T. rex.

“Don’t think about it,” she whispered to herself. “All that will do is scare you. You’ve got to be the strong one.”

She forced herself to focus on the gift-shop entrance. Glass double doors, just like pictures on the Internet. Unlocked.

“Nikola, keep Tesla at the door with me. Girls, take in the mice and get me a feed of what’s inside the gift shop. Take down anyone inside, but don’t move down into the caves.”

“Roger!” the three white mice beside her right foot squeaked.

Louise cracked the right door wide enough for the mice to pour through it. Once the flood was past, she let the door close and pulled out her phone. The screen flickered dozens of confusing images. “Just pick one.” The image fixated on a closeup of a trilobite fossil. “No, of the whole room beyond the door!”

“It’s two hundred and fifty million years old!” Nikola said with awe.

The view changed to the dim interior of the gift shop. Light streamed in through windows on the far side of the long room. The contrast between the dark foreground and brilliant background made it difficult to see what was in the room, but there didn’t appear to be anyone inside.

Where were all the elves? She had counted forty-three individuals between those at the mansion and the others scattered worldwide. They had to be the tip of the iceberg, as she suspected the far-flung operations had more than one elf running each.