“You’re the one that popped me in the easy-bake oven and skipped town,” Tinker grumbled, slumping down in the front seat between Pony and Stormsong. “If anyone has the right to be pissed off, it’s me.”
Esme sighed in the backseat. “I knew that the oni would kill every last human in Pittsburgh if Leonardo Dufae didn’t have an heir to his genius, a brilliance that could close the door that he opened. So I found your grandfather and talked him into using Leo’s sperm to make — to make you. And I knew that I needed to save Jin Wong, so I had to jump through the gate.”
Anyone else probably would have just tried talking Lain into leaving Pittsburgh. Lain, though, needed Elfhome like she needed air. Esme couldn’t simply move her sister to the safety of Earth; she needed to make Pittsburgh safe. The route she took seemed insane, but it was hard to argue with the proven success of it.
Still, Tinker tried. “So you just handed over an egg and took off? Didn’t you even bother to find out your baby’s gender?”
In the rearview mirror, Tinker saw Esme flinched as if struck. “No, it wasn’t like that. At first, yes, you were just Leo’s heir, but then I started to realize that I might not survive the crash, and, if I did, I wasn’t ever returning to Earth. You would be all that was left of me after I was gone. You stopped being Leo’s child to me. You became mine. You became precious to me.”
“No, you thought you had a son. I’m in no way precious to you.”
“Yes, you are.” Esme leaned forward over the seat to pinch Tinker’s cheek. “And you’re so much cuter than I ever imagined.”
“Oh, gee, don’t do that.”
Stormsong caught Esme’s hand and twisted it hard enough to get a yelp of pain. “I don’t care who you are, you will respect domi.”
“Okay!” Esme sat back, rubbing her hand. “Now, exactly how did you end up an elf princess?”
Tinker started with saving Windwolf’s life during Shutdown just before Mid-Summer’s Eve and everything that followed. Well — not everything—she’d been embarrassingly clueless through many points. Just because Esme was her mother didn’t give her rights to a full confession. Tinker got detoured back to the first time she saved Windwolf — the day Blue Sky’s father died — when she made an offhand mention about the magical tie she had thought existed between her and Windwolf.
“It happened so fast that my memories are blurred and disjointed. Everyone was running and screaming. There was a big tri-axle Mack dump truck sitting at the edge of the faire ground, and I scooted under it. The saurus pinned Lightning Strikes to the ground beside the truck and was tearing him in half.” Tinker shuddered at the memory. “I don’t know what I was thinking — I was thirteen and about ninety pounds dripping wet — but I tried to kill it with a tire iron. Not my best plan.”
“You saved Wolf,” Pony murmured. “He was unconscious next to Lightning Strikes.”
“I didn’t see him at the time.” Tinker laughed. “All my attention was taken up by a pissed-off saurus trying to dig me out from under the dump truck. When I did finally see Windwolf, I thought he was mad at me. His first words to me were ‘Fool, it would have killed you.’ It wasn’t a very romantic first meeting.”
“And this magical tie?” Esme asked.
They were crossing the McKees Rocks bridge, so Tinker made a long story shorter. “That’s just something Tooloo made up. She’s an elf that has a small farm at the end of this street.” Tinker pointed in the direction of Tooloo’s.
“I know Tooloo,” Esme said.
Tinker supposed that shouldn’t surprise her, but it did. Lain and Tooloo seemed to have a weird unspoken agreement that they would keep to their respective neighborhoods as much as possible. She had assumed that Esme would know only the places that Lain frequented. “Tooloo taught me everything I know about elves, but I’m finding out that she was lying about half of it. The whole ‘magical tie’ was a way to keep me away from Windwolf.”
“She was trying to keep you safe,” Esme said. “She knew what kind of danger lay in store for you.”
“How the hell would she know?” Tinker snapped. “Did you tell everyone but me who I really was?”
Esme shook her head. “Tooloo is the one that taught me how to control my dreams.”
It was totally unfair that at that moment they arrived at McDermott’s and Tinker had to go back to being ringmaster. Much as she wanted to grill Esme on Tooloo, she had to focus on the cremation.
McDermott’s was a big Victorian mansion full of dead stillness and memories Tinker thought were long forgotten. Once inside, she remembered the floor plan, the big rooms with stuffed chairs lining the walls and the painful smell of roses and age.
McDermott had endless forms he wanted signed guaranteeing he’d get paid and not arrested by the EIA. He also insisted she tour a room filled with coffins of oak and steel, making it sound like the law required a coffin for cremation. Considering the elves’ reaction to the drawers at the morgue — their horror at the idea of “locking the bodies in steel boxes”—the coffins were probably a bad idea. She managed to frighten McDermott into admitting that the coffins were optional and that cardboard boxes were acceptable. She talked him into forgoing even the boxes with assurances that no one would press charges. All the details, though, made her realize how much Lain had quietly taken care of when Tinker’s grandfather had died.
Start to finish, the cremations would take a good part of the night. Even though McDerrmott’s had four furnaces (a number that slightly boggled her mind,) it would take more than two hours to render the bodies to ash, and then several hours more for the ashes to cool enough to be safely handled. She stayed only long enough to see the bodies safely loaded into the furnaces and talked the Wyverns into standing guard the rest of the night. Tinker wanted to stay in motion so Chloe’s strike forces couldn’t corner her again. She didn’t need witnesses while getting the DNA from the living children — although she wasn’t sure how she was going to do that without raising questions.
Back in the Rolls-Royce, Esme proved she had used the time that Tinker had been distracted to piece together the logical end to Tinker’s story. “So, you and Windwolf fell in love and he used magic to change you into an elf?”
“That’s the basic gist of it.” Tinker was glad she didn’t have to go into details.
Esme cocked her head. “What I don’t get is why you would be in trouble if you’d been caught at the morgue.”
“Collecting DNA smacks of spell-working,” Tinker quoted Stormsong.
“So, why is it illegal for you do something that simple when Windwolf is going around doing wholesale transformation?”
Tinker sighed. “Technically, it isn’t illegal. The problem is political maneuvering shit. The Stone Clan are being asses.”
Esme nodded as if that made perfect sense.
Pony hadn’t asked where they were going when they left the funeral home, proof of his nervousness around the Wyverns. He stopped the car at the end of the McKees Rocks Bridge — a good, safe two miles from the Wyverns — to wait for Tinker to choose a direction.
Take the three swabs and Esme to Lain? Track down the other children with Esme still in tow? Surely the less people involved, the better, but the whole deadly trinity of Esme, Lain, and Tooloo could derail Tinker when time was against her. Not Lain’s then — and she needed a cover story for tracking down the children and sticking things in their mouths.