Just as suddenly as it started, it was over. The sekasha had the disguised oni pinned and bound. They used a spell to reveal the oni’s true appearance.
“It is not her blood, cousin.” Rainlily rocked Merry as the little female clung sobbing to her.
Oilcan breathed out relief. When Thorne slashed through the driver’s door, he realized, she had cut the driver in half, spraying the inside of the van with his blood. The smell hung thick in the hot air.
“Where are the other children?” Thorne kicked the oni that been holding Merry. “Where did you take them? Are they still alive?”
Oilcan repeated the question in English, and then tried the little Mandarin that he knew. The oni gazed up at him blankly. “I don’t think they speak anything but Oni.”
Judging by the looks on the faces of the sekasha, none of them spoke Oni.
“I’ll call Jin.” Tinker rubbed her arm, grimacing in pain. “The tengu will be able to talk to them.”
Tinker’s Rolls-Royce sat abandoned twenty feet down Liberty Avenue, all doors open and engine still running. As Tinker climbed into the Rolls to find her cell phone, Thorne staggered to the low planter in the center of the street and sat down. Blood streamed down Thorne’s arm from a slice in her shoulder.
Oilcan got the first-aid kit from his truck and bound the wound. “You’ll have to have the hospice staff look at this.”
“After we find the children,” Thorne said.
Oilcan nodded and then hugged her carefully. “Thank you. I couldn’t have stopped them. They would have just driven away with Merry, and I wouldn’t have been able to do anything to save her.”
She hugged him tightly, burying her face into his shoulder. There was something desperate in her hold, like he was the only safe handhold in a flood. She breathed deep, with only the dampness of his shirt to tell him that she was crying.
“Idiot,” she growled after several minutes. “You don’t have shields. You don’t have a weapon. Next time, just stay out of my way and let me deal with it.”
He opened his mouth to say that he sincerely hoped there wouldn’t be a next time, but then, that would mean there would be no reason for her to stay close. “Okay, next time I’ll stay out of your way.”
6: WHELPING PENS
Tinker expected Jin to come with bodyguards. He was, after all, the tengu’s spiritual leader. He came alone, apparently trusting her to keep him safe. He glided down out of the summer sky on great black wings. With one easy backstroke, a muffled clap of glossy feathers, he landed on the far side of the train station’s parking lot. He stood there, bare-chested and panting, letting the sekasha grow used to his presence. His wings were solid illusions, called into existence by the spell tattooed on his back, real down to their vanes and quills and hooks. He dismissed them with a word, making them vanish back to the nothingness from which they came.
Tinker really had to figure out how they worked.
Jin had a white button-down shirt tied to his waist that he pulled on, buttoned, and tucked into his blue jeans like a priest donning his vestments. When he crossed the parking lot, he seemed nothing more than an Asian man out for a summer walk. He wasn’t even wearing fighting spurs on his birdlike feet; he wore a pair of tennis shoes. The only things that marked him as the spiritual leader of all the tengu was the air of calmness that he seemed to radiate and the dragon birthmark of the Chosen faintly showing under the fine linen of his shirt.
“Thank you for coming,” Tinker said as he bowed to her.
“You needed me, of course I would come.” Even though she had greeted him in English, he’d answered in fluent Elvish. “You’re our domi. It is our duty to serve as it yours to protect.”
It was weird having elf pledges coming out of a tengu’s mouth, but the tengu were safe only because they were her Beholden.
Jin tilted his head and then stepped closer to hug her. “Are you all right, domi?”
“No.” She had nearly lost Oilcan. If she had been a minute longer reaching the train station. If Oilcan hadn’t called her. If Thorne hadn’t been there to protect Oilcan. It had been so very, very close. “I’d say ‘give me time,’ but we don’t have it.”
“Was he hurt?” Jin asked after Tinker explained how Oilcan had discovered that Stone Clan children were arriving in Pittsburgh and being kidnapped at the train station by oni.
“He got a couple of impressive bruises. I had him take Merry to the hospice; she’d been fairly roughed up by the oni.” It had taken Tinker twenty minutes of bullying to get Oilcan to agree to stay at the hospice and wait for Tinker to find the children. After seeing Oilcan nearly killed, Tinker wanted him a safe distance from the fighting. He agreed only after Tinker had ruthlessly pointed out that the hospice staff were all Wind Clan elves and might not treat Merry without Oilcan there to force the healers into it.
As soon as he left, though, Thorne Scratch started to restlessly pace like a big cat in a cage. Sekasha apparently were calmer when they had someone to protect.
“It’s unlikely the children are still alive,” Jin said. “Lord Tomtom was very careful with you because he needed you well and functioning. Obviously the oni wanted the children for some reason, but still, they’re rarely careful with their prisoners.”
Tinker shivered and nodded. She had seen how the oni tortured their own; she didn’t want to think of the horrors that the missing children were suffering.
Jin crouched down beside the first oni prisoner and spoke at length in the coarse oni language.
After several minutes, Thorne Scratch growled with impatience. “What are you telling him? Your life story?”
“No.” Jin shook his head. “He knows he’s going to die. He knows that the elves don’t take oni prisoners. He also knows that the elves are too noble to torture prisoners.”
“I’ll show him noble,” Thorne growled.
“You don’t have enough experience in inflicting pain to impress him,” Jin said gently. “I’ve reminded him that we tengu have lived as slaves to the oni for a thousand years. We had every excruciating torture that our masters know inflicted on us. We tengu are known to be clever and quick to learn. I have reminded him that we tengu have a bone to pick, so to speak.”
The memory of sharp knives and white bone flashed through Tinker’s mind. She wrapped her arms tight around herself. “Gods, Jin, I know what oni do—”
“So does he,” Jin said. “You would give him a quick, clean death. It would be merciful compared being turned over to those who hold a thousand years of misery against his kind.” He spoke again to the oni, and this time the oni glanced at the other tied-up oni and started to talk. Jin listened intently, nodding.
“They were told to come to the train station every day, that there would be elves traveling alone. They were to grab them quietly and take them to a warren on the North Side. Humans think that it’s a dog kennel. There’s a greater blood called Yutakajodo who wanted them for a project.”
“Dog kennel? Shit, I know where that is.” Tinker even knew people who had bought dogs from the kennel. Big ugly mutt dogs. She thought of Chiyo and the warg and shuddered. “What project?”