“So we clean up the mess at Sandcastle,” Duff stated.
And all five of her brothers started to ready themselves.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Jane shouted. “Not tonight.”
“Why not?” Duff whined.
Jane didn’t say, “Because we left a very big monster stomping around Sandcastle. Something new. Something freaky.” That wouldn’t slow her brothers down. Instead she said, “Because we need to make sure Boo and Joey are safe here at Hyeholde first.”
The kitchen screen door squeaked open and their mother whistled sharply.
“Besides, if we don’t eat as a family tonight, Mom will skin us all alive.”
It was the first time that WQED’s station manager Dmitri woke Jane up. He was fairly hands-off with his top show; he only called if they’d set something on fire or accidently shot someone. She stared at her phone screen and then cautiously answered with her normal, “Hm?”
“I just got off the phone with Maynard. He wants PB&G at Sandcastle.”
“Maynard? Us? At Sandcastle?”
“Yes, I believe those are all the salient points,” Dmitri said and hung up.
Jane was completely and totally awake out of sheer adrenaline.
What would the Director of the EIA want with them? If it were merely because they had wreaked havoc on Sandcastle while rescuing Boo and Joey, Maynard would want both TV crews, because they had gone in the Chased by Monsters truck.
“What is Maynard like?” Taggart asked as they drove to Sandcastle.
Alton had taken Boo and Joey out berry picking with Guy as backup. Since Alton could go weeks without seeing another human, the kids would be safe with him. It was agreed that her mother and other three brothers would go about business as usual.
It meant that the Chased by Monsters crew could come with her and Hal to Sandcastle. Jane hadn’t been able to dissuade them. Since their last visit to the water park made it clear that what worked best was for Taggart to operate the camera while Jane laid down suppressive fire, it was hard to argue. Hal pointed out that if Maynard were laying some kind of trap for them, it would be very unlikely he’d call the station manager and arrange the meeting.
Which circled back to why Maynard wanted to see them. Dmitri probably had hung up on her simply because he didn’t know and something else was demanding his time, something with questions he could answer. Or in a moment of distraction, he forgot he wasn’t talking to one of his investigative reporters whose job was to find out what the story was without guidance.
“I’ve never met Maynard.” Jane glanced in the rearview mirror at Hal in the backseat.
“I only met him once.” Hal put up his hands as if he expected her to hit him. “And that didn’t end well.”
“I told you not to take animals to a black tie event,” Jane snapped.
“It what we naturalists do.” Hal pressed a hand to his chest to include himself in the rarefied group. Nigel’s influence on him; Hal had never called himself a naturalist before. He had, though, the degrees to support the claim. “People expect it. Besides, it wasn’t an animal per se. It was a plant. And I had it on a leash.”
“It was a black willow seedling!” Jane cried. “It tried to eat the mayor!”
“He shouldn’t have knelt down like that,” Hal said calmly.
Jane glanced to Taggart for support.
He gave her a look of sympathy. “Been there. Done that. Banned from the Today show.”
“I still say she had peanuts or something up her skirt,” Nigel murmured from the backseat.
They were so screwed.
Jane sighed. What did she know about Maynard? “The EIA has around five thousand employees in Pittsburgh. It’s a United Nations agency, so English isn’t always their first language. Only a couple hundred are combat; they man the checkpoints and patrol the Rim. The rest are all pencil pushers. There’s over four hundred ‘delegates’ alone representing the nations of Earth since the bigger countries have more than one. It means one tenth of the city’s population are outsiders who have power to kick anyone—even people that were born here—off the planet. And it pisses off most people.”
“Yes, outside police forces tend to do that.” Taggart had been a war correspondent; he had probably been to UN-policed areas on Earth.
“Elves are easy to live with. They’re good neighbors. I think because most of the ones here in Pittsburgh are excited about living with humans. They’re young for elves, open minded and interested in our culture, and yet stay mostly on their side of the fence. The only elves you find living within the city are ones who have close relationships with a human, usually of the opposite sex.”
“Only because ninety-five percent of the Pittsburghers are straight,” Hal murmured from the backseat. “Elves are more bisexual than papayas.”
“Papayas?” Jane cried. “What the hell does that mean?”
“We’d like to meet some elves,” Nigel said. “Everyone on Earth is wildly curious about the elves but there’s so little information on them.”
Jane nodded to indicate that they could work on it. It made sense that the oni would block information on the elves to keep humans from sympathizing with the elves once full war broke out.
“I might have met Maynard,” Hal said. “But Jane really knows him better than me, since she was born in Pittsburgh.”
Jane snorted. “That’s not really the same.” The man was a legend in Pittsburgh; legends were fairy tales told to children that rarely reflected the truth. “We’re taught the story of how Maynard became the director in school along with the story of Paul Revere’s ride and Paul Bunyan and his blue ox. It gave us a really messed up idea of what is real. I honestly thought there was a breed of giant blue cows on Earth.”
Taggart laughed.
“Think Pocahontas and John Smith without the sex,” Hal said.
“Hal!” Jane made a cutting motion over her throat. She knew from experience Hal could maintain TV host commentary even while sedated. He wasn’t coherent while drugged but he could keep talking through most insanity without missing a beat. “You threw the ball into my court, let me talk.”
“Sorry.” Hal didn’t sound at all contrite.
Jane decided to stick to the grade school version. “You wouldn’t know by looking at him but Maynard’s maternal grandfather was a full-blooded Native American. Maynard is one-quarter Iroquois. He spent half his childhood on a reservation in upstate New York.”
“Which makes him Pocahontas in this story,” Hal murmured.
“Hal!” She reached into the back to prove she could hit him if he didn’t shut up. “His father was from a long line of military, so as a teenager, he went to West Point. After graduating, he’d been a second lieutenant assigned to a unit that was supposed to be deployed to the Middle East. A few days before they shipped out, the Chinese activated the orbital gate for the first time for a battery of tests. Maynard was with the first troops to arrive, a few hours after the Pennsylvania State Police set up a perimeter.”
“The rest of the story is like Paul Revere’s ride. All we were ever told in school was lanterns in the bell tower, and Paul yelling ‘the British are coming.’ If you read military history, though, Paul didn’t shout anything because it was a covert mission. Every place he warned dispatched riders to spread the word. Halfway through the night, he and another man, Sam Prescott, were stopped before they reached Lexington. Prescott, who had been out sexing up a lady friend before he got dragged into the craziness, escaped and he was the actual person to reach Concord. The main reason Revere is famous was because of Longfellow’s poem that credited him with what really was a forty-man effort.”