Blue jerked in John’s hold.
“I’ll take the child to Wolf Who Rules.” John struggled to keep his brother checked. “I swear I will.”
The sekasha looked down the street to where his people searched for oni. As John hoped, he deemed it easier to let John handle the problem than to abandon his duties. “I will know if you break your vow. I will not be kind.”
“John always keeps his promises,” Blue snapped.
The sekasha smiled. “He has his father’s reactions.”
“What do you mean?” John asked.
“We sekasha—we protect those we love.”
“You shouldn’t have promised.” Blue swung up onto the counter of the old fireman’s kitchen as John opened the fridge and dug through it, looking for a beer. “It means you have to do it.”
“I didn’t want him taking you with him.”
“He couldn’t have done that!” Blue cried.
“He’s a sekasha.” John found an Iron City beer, opened it and drank deeply. He was still shaking from the encounter. In the stainless steel surface of the fridge, he could see the line where the sword blade had pressed against his throat. “They’re allowed to do anything they want. They’re considered too holy to be bound by law made by mortals.”
All his life, John had watched the Wind Clan sekasha prowl the city like lions among lambs. Even other elves watched them with fear. Thus, he’d been terrified when his mother brought a drunk sekasha home. At thirteen, he was just beginning to realize that she wasn’t fully sane and that he couldn’t trust her to keep them safe. John spent the night sure that the warrior would kill her when he sobered.
After Blue Sky was born, their mother grew more and more erratic. The treaty with the elves banned criminals, the insane, and orphans; the elves didn’t want the dregs of humanity littering their world. The same treaty, however, meant Blue Sky couldn’t travel to Earth. Caught between the two rules, John struggled to keep his mother’s insanity hidden until he was eighteen. At that point, John sent his mother to Earth and stayed behind to become Blue’s guardian.
Until today, his greatest fear was that the elves would kill Blue out of hand, deeming his human genetics a stain on their holy bloodline.
Now, he was afraid that even a half-blood like Blue was too holy to be raised by a mere human.
“So, what do we do?” Blue asked.
John sighed and put down his beer. He’d put this off for years. There was one glimmer of hope. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Where are we going?”
“I’m going to see if Tinker can do anything about this.”
Tinker and her cousin, Oilcan, could be called good friends. At one time, when the cousins could still be called children, they played daily with Blue Sky. Eventually they had grown up and grown apart. Still, they had the same interests, traded business, knew the same people, and went to the same parties. Like John and Blue, the cousins were orphans and only had each other. John would like to think it created a bond between them—but he’d learned in the past that when things went horribly wrong in your life, the people you thought you could trust sometimes turned their backs on you.
Luck, courage and a good bit of ingenuity had landed Tinker in a position of power as the wife of the clan head, Wolf Who Rules. If anyone in Pittsburgh could help them, she could.
But the question was—would she?
The elfin enclaves lined where the Rim used to cut through Oakland. Each a block wide and half a mile deep, the high-walled residences acted as both hotels and restaurants. Since everything about the clan head was tabloid fodder, everyone in Pittsburgh knew that Tinker and her new husband were living at the Poppymeadow enclave.
John and Blue Sky passed through three checkpoints on their way to Oakland. Each time they were questioned in depth, searched for weapons, and checked by spell to see if they were oni. It took them two hours to work their way to the enclaves. John parked his pickup, and they walked to the tall garden gate that normally stood open, but they found it shut and locked. He tried knocking.
A slot gate opened and an elf peered out at them.
“Forgiveness,” the elf said. “The dining room is not open.”
“I need to see—” John realized that saying Tinker’s name without her proper title would be considered rude. Elves set store on that kind of thing. He frowned a moment, trying to remember her new title. “Domi. I beg you. May I speak with Tinker domi?”
“Who asks?”
“John Montana,” and then, quickly, he added, “It’s clan business! I’m here to see her as the clan’s domi.”
“Wait here.”
Blue had been kicking pebbles. When the slot shut, he scoffed. “Clan business.”
John smacked him on the back of the head. “Behave.”
“I don’t like you groveling to them.”
“It’s not groveling, it’s fitting in. At the race track, you fit in by acting tough and saying you’ve got the best team. Different place—different set of rules.”
“At the races, we’re all equal. Elves are all about keeping people under your thumb.”
“You sound like half the rednecks of Pittsburgh.”
“I am one, that’s why. My father never cared enough to see how I was doing. I don’t see why we have to do this.”
“Your father didn’t know about you—”
“Because he was a murdering psychopath of a sekasha and our mother was a nutcase.”
John ignored that little rant. “At the races, you know that if anyone on the pit crew didn’t do what I told them, they’d be off the team. Every place has rules—and none of them are better or wrong—they just are.”
There was a rattle of metal on wood—the bar on the gate was being drawn. They were being let in.
“Now be polite and don’t screw this up—or you might be staying here when I go home.”
Blue gave him a terrified look, but was polite as they were frisked for weapons and, once again, checked to see if they were disguised oni.
Tinker was just a year older than Blue—thus John had known her all her life—and yet, when they were escorted into an orchard courtyard, he barely recognized her. Oilcan had told him about the physical transformation. John had guessed that power would probably also change her—but he hadn’t been ready for this.
He had known a coltish girl dressed in dirty hand-me-downs. She enjoyed her solitary junkyard existence because it allowed her to play mad inventor. Famous for her virginity, she unknowingly blew away all would-be suitors with aggressive intelligence, fierce independence, and stunning naivety.
This stranger wore a dress of fairy-silk green that shimmered against her dusky skin. With magic, her eyes and ears—along with her underlying DNA—had been changed from human to elfin. She lay on a blanket in the dappled shade, her head resting on the lap of a young male sekasha. Four more sekasha watched John intently, while pretending polite disinterest. It was difficult to judge the ages of elves, but John thought that all five seemed young, as if Wolf Who Rules tried to match up his wife with guards who were just “teenagers” themselves. Despite the tranquil setting, the three males and two females bristled with weapons. Whereas the Fire Clan sekasha had been redheads, the Wind Clan sekasha were dark-haired and blue-eyed like Blue Sky. Their spell tattoos and scaled chest armor were in the deep blue which identified their clan.
“Domi, wake up,” her pillow murmured. “They are here.”