Wood Sprites (46 page)

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.