“So we go straight in.” Tinker’s stomach was doing flip-flops at the thought, but if they went in fast and hard, the fight would be over quicker. “I’ll lead, and my Hand will take out the gate while I protect them.”
Pony pointed to various areas on the roof. “Put your people here with rifles. Use the cover to stay safe but protect the others as they follow domi in.”
Riki nodded his understanding. The marine commander took it for granted that the domana would lead the assault, but the EIA commando leader looked slightly alarmed that she would be first one into the fight.
“Get into positions,” Tinker ordered, ignoring him. Actions would speak louder than any words.
She spent the next few minutes bracing herself for what was about to follow. She was going to lead a hundred of her people into a fight to the death for the lives of seven children — and it was going to hurt like bitch in more ways than one.
“We’re ready, domi.” Pony took his place slightly behind her and unsheathed his ejae.
Tinker took a deep breath and set up resonance with the Spell Stones and quickly called her shields. Her right arm throbbed with dull, bearable pain. “Okay, let’s do this.”
She walked as quickly as she could straight up to the gate. The EIA commandos might have been dubious, but the oni knew trouble when they saw it coming. They unleashed a thunderstorm of gunfire onto her. At the gate, her Hand slashed through the tall steel door. When it crashed to the ground, the marines charged with a roar up the street, and there was no turning back.
The first part of the complex was a wide roadway with small buildings to either side, which at one time housed security guards and office workers.
“We’ll keep them pinned. Search the side buildings,” Pony ordered the commandos and marines. He sheathed his ejae and unslung the bow from his back and nocked a spell arrow. The rest of the sekasha followed his lead.
The spell arrows screamed away. The sound of their flight triggered the spell inscribed on their shafts. The arrows flashed to laser-intense light and punched through the ranks of oni. Pony led the others slowly forward as they carefully picked out targets for their arrows, trusting Tinker to keep them safe. Tinker gritted her teeth against the pain throbbing in her arm and followed in their wake.
With Tinker pushing her shield forward, the oni had no choice but to retreat. The other fighting units fanned out to search the smaller buildings. Tinker tried to ignore the gunfire behind her to stay focused on maintaining her spells. She hated that she couldn’t protect all her people. Until they found the children, she couldn’t even use her one attack spell.
The narrow street ended at a loading dock with a dozen bays facing the road. All the doors were closed, the oni retreating in through a man-sized side door on the far right.
“Hold here.” Pony stopped short of the loading dock. “Advise me, domi. What would lie behind those large doors?”
“It’s a warehouse,” Tinker said. “All those doors, including the small one, will lead to the same large room. If we hit the leftmost door, we can clear the room left to right.”
Of course, there was the slight matter of getting onto the nearly five-foot-tall loading dock. The stairs were barricaded. It had posed no problem to the tall oni, but she wouldn’t be able to use her hands to climb.
Pony backed up, slinging the bow across his back. “Cloud, assist domi.”
The sekasha charged forward and leapt up onto the loading dock.
“Assist? What do you mean by—” Tinker yelped in surprise as Cloudwalker lifted her up and deposited her onto the loading dock. Somehow she managed to keep her shields up. “Oh for the love of God, I wish people would stop doing that to me.”
“Forgiveness.” Cloudwalker vaulted up beside her.
Her Hand and Thorne Scratch slashed through the bay door like it was tissue paper.
Apparently when you bred for animal size, strength, and brutality, you lost housekeeping somewhere along the way. The football field — sized room looked like someone had backed garbage trucks up to the loading dock and dumped the contents into the warehouse. Oni warriors had a weakness for Twinkies and Milk-bones, judging by the multitude of the empty boxes. There were walkways kicked through the litter. There were odd little semi-cleared areas — containing only filthy blankets, chewed pillows, and worn clothes. Oni of all shapes and sizes were bolting for more fortified positions.
The tengu came winging down and cut through the netting stretched across the street.
“Find anything?” Tinker called to Riki as he landed on the dock.
“No sign of the kids yet.” Riki shifted so he was still protected by her shield and shot at a small oni that was struggling to reposition a tripod-mounted machine gun. “Most of the outbuildings were lightly guarded dog kennels and pigsties.”
“This whole place looks like a pigsty.” Tinker picked her way slowly through the garbage. The pain made it hard to keep her footing while maintaining her shield. She was losing track of the fight around her. “What’s the deal with this mess?”
“This is a sleeping nest.” Riki watched her nervously. “I’ve never seen one this disgusting before.”
“If the kids are tied up somewhere in here, they’ll be difficult to spot,” Tinker said.
“Gods forbid.” Riki fired off more shots. “The only reason they’d be in here is the greater blood had no more use of them.”
The other teams came spilling into the sleeping nest. They spread out, weaving through the litter, looking for oni. Tinker started toward the only visible door on the warehouse’s back wall. A dozen steps forward and she nearly tripped over a small body half hidden in an avalanche of trash.
She recoiled with fear, seeing only a snarling face. Riki shot it twice before either of them realized it was already dead.
“What is it?” Tinker asked. The creature was smaller than any oni she had seen before. It had a piglike snout, sharp tusks, and was covered with coarse hair. It was wearing only a loincloth and a bandolier filled with fat shells for the grenade launcher lying beside it.
“Oni.” Riki reloaded his rifle. “Lesser blood. Very lesser.”
She kicked it for scaring her. “How did this even get to Elfhome? Did the oni put it in a dog crate to get it halfway across Earth and through EIA checkpoints?”
“It was born here.” Riki stripped off the bandolier and picked up the grenade launcher. “This is a whelping pen. The Greater Bloods brought females that could pass as human to Elfhome via Chinese visas. The father of that thing was probably one of the wild boars locked up outside.”
She’d been so focused on getting through the trash while keeping up her shields that she hadn’t thought about why the oni would have animals kenneled in the middle of the city. She shuddered. “For what logical reason would you mate a female to a wild boar?”
Riki passed the piglet’s weapon and ammo to one of his warriors. “These hybrids reach maturity faster than humans. Think of Chiyo. Her pregnancy will run less than two months, not the nine months of a human. Within a decade, her puppies would be ready to breed.”
Tinker flinched at Riki using the word “puppies” for Chiyo’s children, but she’d seen the mating: the warg father had been pure animal. Chiyo already had fox ears and a tail — how human could her offspring possibly be?
“This is why the oni are hiding instead of fighting,” Riki said. “They’re immortal like the elves — they can afford to play the waiting game. The longer they wait, the stronger they become. Within a few decades, they’ll easily outnumber the elves in this area. In thirty or forty years, they could have several million of their kind in Pittsburgh.”