Tinker (3 page)

"Here goes everything." She checked one last time to make sure all stray metal bits were clear of the magic's path, and flipped the switch. She checked her database, and winced at the activation word phonetically spelled out. Oh great, one of those ancient Elvish words where you try to swallow your tongue. A footnote gave the translation: Be healed.

The outer ring powered up first and cast a glowing sphere over the rest of the spell. Then the healing spell itself kicked in, the timing cycle ring clicking quickly clockwise as the magic flowed through the spell in a steady rhythm.

Windwolf took five shallow breaths. Then a long, deep breath. Another. And another. He fell into a clean, easy breathing rhythm, color washing into his face.

"Yes! Be healed!" Tinker cried. "I am your magic god! Say Amen to me! Woohoo!" She danced around the room. "Oh yes, I am a god! The one! The only! Tinker!"

Still pleased to giggles, she went to look at Windwolf—really look at him—for the first time in years.

He was beautiful, but then again, he was an elf. They were all beautiful. (And unfortunately all snobs too.) A blue silk ribbon gathered his glossy black hair into a thick, loose ponytail that came nearly to his waist. She tangled her fingers in the curly tips of the ponytail and felt the smooth silkiness of his hair.

Deceptively delicate, his face held just enough strength in it to be masculine. All the fey features: full lips, sharp high cheekbones, perfect nose, pointed ears, almond-shaped eyes, and thick long eyelashes.

She couldn't remember the color of his eyes. They were the first elf eyes she had seen up close, within inches of her own, and they had been so stunningly vivid, she remembered that they left her breathless. But what color? Green? Purple?

She wrapped the lock of black around her finger and rubbed it against her cheek. So soft. It smelled wonderful—a musky spice. She held it to her nose, trying to identify the scent. Mid-sniff, she realized he'd opened his eyes and was looking at her with silent suspicion. His irises were the color of sapphires with the biggest price tags locked in jeweler's cases—the stunning deep blue that neared black.

She gasped with surprise, and then cried as he shifted, "
Naetanyau!
I've got a healing spell jury-rigged on you. If you move, it would be bad. Do you understand?
Kankau?
"

He studied the spell hovering over his chest, the power leads to the siphon, and then the bulky containment unit itself. "I understand," he said finally in English. He looked back at her.

She was still holding the lock of his hair. "Oh, sorry. You smell nice," she said, carefully dropping his hair.

"Who are you?"

He didn't remember her. Not that she was totally surprised—their minutes together, prior to today, could be counted on the fingers of both hands and had been shared with one nasty monster. She had been thirteen then, and still hadn't grown enough of a figure to distinguish her from the boys she played with. It seemed slightly unfair though; her imagination had decided that he stood as some kind of symbol and featured him often in her dreams.

"They call me Tinker." Tooloo had cautioned her against telling people her true name so often that using her nickname became habit. "You're in my scrap yard."

"Your eyes." He carefully lifted his right hand to make an odd gesture over his eyes. "They were different."

She frowned, and then realized what he meant. "Oh, yeah, I had my night goggles on." She fished them out of her pocket, demonstrated how they fit on. "They let me see in the dark."

"Ah." He studied her silently for several minutes. "I would have died."

"You still might. You're badly hurt. It's Shutdown Day, and we're on Earth. I'm afraid if I don't take some drastic actions, you're not going to make it."

"Then drastic actions it must be."

* * *

Tinker was trying to figure out what "drastic" might entail when a squad car screamed up the street and slewed in through the open gate.

The cop was Nathan Czernowski, shotgun in hand. "Tinker? Oilcan? Tink!"

"I'm in here!" she called to him, working the dead bolts. "A pack of warglike things attacked me. I think I got them all, but I wasn't taking a chance."

Nathan crossed the parking lot cautiously, scanning the yard, shotgun at his shoulder. "Someone stopped Cordwater out by the pike and said you were yelling for help over your radio line. There's an ambulance on its way. Are you okay? Where's your cousin?"

"One got my hand." She threw open the door, stepped back to let him in, and then bolted the door shut again. "It hurts like shit, but it's stopped bleeding. Otherwise, I'm fine. Oilcan is out with the wrecker. Sparks, edit the message to the wrecker: 'Oilcan, Nathan's here, the monsters are dead, and I'm fine. If I'm not here when you get home, I'll be at Mercy.'"

"Sure, Boss!"

"Can you wait for the ambulance?" Nathan pushed up his goggles and gazed down at her with dark concerned eyes. "I can take you to the hospital."

"I'm fine, but the—umm—the wargs were chasing down an elf." Normally she was a stickler for accuracy, but lacking a name for the monsters, it seemed easier just to say wargs. "He's in my workshop. They chewed him over good."

"He's still alive?"

"Barely. I jury-rigged up a healing spell, so he's stable."

"You've got a spell running now?" Nathan asked. "During Shutdown? Where's the magic coming from?"

"I'm running off of a power sink that I invented. I siphon magic into it while I'm running the crane."

Nathan grinned. "Only you, Tinker. Is he conscious?"

"He was. I'm not sure about right now."

"Did he tell you his name?" Nathan moved into "just the facts" mode, taking out a PDA and stylus.

"It's Windwolf. You know, the one with the saurus?" She traced a symbol in the air over her forehead. Nathan had been a rookie when he took her to the hospital that day, bleeding and crying.

"The one who marked you?" He noted it into his PDA. "The elves have a word for this."

"Shitty luck."

"It's like karma or something. Entanglement?"

"Entanglement is a quantum theory between photons. The polarization of one entangled photon is always the opposite of the other."

He worked his jaw as he thought. "Yeah. Once they're entangled, they stay that way, right?"

She looked at him, one eyebrow upraised.

"Well there's you, him, me, and a monster."

"Yeah, right." Strange, even after five years and with the monster dogs still fresh in her mind, it was the image of the saurus's mouth and the all-too-many ragged teeth that made her shudder. "Look, this has been pretty cranked. I talked to Tooloo about that symbol that Windwolf put on me. She said that's how elves mark life debts. Tooloo says that if Windwolf dies before I cancel the life debt, then some really nasty things will happen to me." Exactly what would happen changed every time she asked Tooloo about it. Once Tooloo had said that as Windwolf's body decayed, Tinker's would too. Another time, Tooloo had insisted that Tinker would simply vanish. She tried not to believe the old halfie, but she still had nightmares after every conversation.

Nathan looked troubled. "Tooloo is a superstitious fool. I saw the mark. You told me how long Windwolf took making the mark. That wasn't a full spell, whatever it was. It was quick and dirty, and is not going to turn you into a walking zombie five years later. Why would he do that to you, anyhow? You were just a kid."

"He was angry with me. I got in his way while he was trying to kill the saurus and pissed him off. You know what they say about elves."

"What they say and what is true isn't necessarily the same thing. It was nothing."

"It will be nothing. I'm going to save his life. I'm going to cancel the debt. We'll be even."

"Good."

An ambulance came up the street, wailing, and pulled into the yard. Nathan went out to escort the EMT and Tinker swore when she saw who followed Nathan through the front door. "You? Damn, my luck is all bad today."

Jonnie Be Good was an elf wannabe; tall and slender, he wore his blond hair elf-long and had had his ears pointed back in the States. Why anyone would want to be an elf was beyond Tinker. True, the living forever came in handy, but their society sucked; the lower castes seemed practically enslaved by the castes above them, and they were all elegant nose-in-the-air snobs.

Odd, she usually thought of Jonnie Be Good as a good-looking slimewad—apparently after a few minutes' exposure to Windwolf's level of beauty, Jonnie seemed ugly as wood-grain, self-stick wallpaper.

Jonnie smirked and grabbed his crotch. "Oh, bite me."

Add stupid to ugly.
Tinker sidestepped quickly to block Nathan; she didn't want Jonnie squashed before he had a chance to treat Windwolf. "I've got a chewed-up hand, and there's a guy really messed up in my workshop. Don't touch the spell I've got set up—it's keeping him stable."

"I like the shirt," Jonnie murmured, squeezing between her and Nathan instead of going around, and made it an excuse to slide his hand over her bare stomach.

"Watch the hands," Nathan rumbled, continuing his big-brother routine. Between him and Oilcan, it was no wonder she didn't date—not that there was anyone she wanted
to
date. Pittsburgh had a stunning lack of young male humans who weren't buttheads. And while elves were pretty, she had yet to meet one that didn't treat her like a subspecies.

Nathan glowered at Jonnie until the paramedic had disappeared into her workshop. "I'll take a look around. Make sure the wargs are all dead."

"That shotgun will only piss them off," she said, and pulled the dent-mender magnet off the wall. "Here, take this."

* * *

Because she spent most of her time at the scrap yard, either working or tinkering, she had her laundry machines hooked up in the small, second bedroom. She kept her clean clothes split roughly in half between her loft and a dresser in her workshop. She was annoyed, but not surprised, to find Jonnie pawing through her panties when she walked in.

He had the balls to act like nothing was wrong. He held up a pair of black silk panties. "Very nice."

She snatched it back and stuffed it into the open drawer, trying to pretend her face wasn't burning. "Do you mind?"

"Not at all." He grinned lazily, gazing at her groin. "Wouldn't mind seeing them on, either. Or off."

"Dream on."

"Let me see your hand." For a few minutes he managed to be professional, undoing her bandaging, washing out the wound with peroxide, applying an antibiotic, and rebandaging it. "It's too deep for artificial flesh. You're going to want to go to the hospital with this. You could take nerve damage if it heals wrong, and there's a good chance it can go septic."

"Okay." She mentally took back some of the things she had been thinking of him, until he got up and made motions of packing. Slowly, though, as if he wanted her to notice. "Aren't you going to do something about Windwolf?"

He stopped and shrugged. "Mercy won't take him. According to the peace treaty, elves are to be taken to the hospice beyond the Rim. The elves don't want us messing around with them. Nothing says I have to treat him."

At one time Pittsburgh was home to dozens of world-class hospitals. Amazing what being transported to an alien world can do to health care. Mercy was the only hospital left open, doing only emergency work. Apparently, only
human
emergency work. All elective surgery took place on Earth. There were other hospitals, beyond the Rim, but Tinker neither knew where they were, nor wanted to be stuck at one when Startup hit.

"It's Shutdown Day. The hospice is on Elfhome."

"So? He's stable; wait it out."

"I don't know if I have enough magic to last twenty-four hours. I want him patched up."

"Well, I could be persuaded to treat him."

She clenched her jaw on a few choice names. She'd let him know what she thought of him after Windwolf was patched up. "What do you want?"

"Your name appears on a very short list of women who have never put out."

She clenched her fists. "So, what of it?"

"Well, there's money riding on who gets the first dip in your pool."

"I can pay you anything that's riding on the bet." She sneered.

"Oh, the prestige is more important than the money, although the money has a good bit to do with it. And then there's the thrill of conquest, going where no man has gone before."

"Yeah, right, with Nathan Czernowski poking around outside, and Windwolf bleeding to death in here, you think I'm going to let you do me?"

"Your word is good for me. I do the elf, and later I come back, and do you."

Some sounds, she decided, are fated to be huge no matter how quiet they are. The sound of Windwolf's knife coming out of its sheath was only a whisper of silver on leather, and yet it rang out in the room like a shout. She supposed Jonnie's eyes bugging wide and his sudden frozen attention to the blade pressed to his groin helped to make the noise seem louder.

"You do her," Windwolf whispered, "and you will never do another woman."

"It was a joke." Jonnie swallowed hard.

"Get out," Windwolf commanded.

Tinker glared at Windwolf as Jonnie scuttled out. Why did Windwolf have to wake up now? "Great. That was the only man in the tristate area who could help you."

"I would rather die than stain my honor in that way."

"Your honor? What the hell does it have to do with your honor? It was my decision to make, not yours. I would have been the one to screw him."

"And you think this would not reflect on my honor?"

"Look, I didn't really even have to sleep with him. I could have
lied
to him, got him to treat you, and then backed out later. No one would blame me. He's a complete slimewad."

"Would you really break your word of honor?"

"We'll never know."

He caught her hand. "Would you?"

How could he be so close to death and still be so strong? She finally gave up trying to get free and answered him, anger making her truthful. She considered her honor much more valuable than her virginity, which was a temporary thing to start with. "No." But that didn't mean she couldn't think rings around Jonnie Be Good any day; tricking him without lying would have been easy, probably would even have been fun.