“Let’s go to Poppymeadow’s,” Tinker told Pony, and he turned the big gray car toward the gleaming city instead of taking the dark, twisting roads up to the observatory.
“So, you’re an elf with all the bells and whistles?” Esme asked.
Tinker nodded.
“And you wanted this?” Esme said it as if worried that Tinker been transformed against her will, or, worse, she had been desperate to be an elf.
Tinker realized her Hand were all listening intently. She had never considered before how they might feel about Windwolf using the nearly forbidden magic to change her. They must have been in full agreement with his decision or they would have stopped him. It was weird knowing that they had gone so against their principles to allow Windwolf to do the spell. They had all been nameless strangers to her then. She couldn’t even remember who had been with Windwolf the night he took her to the hunting lodge and changed her. It was a testament of how much they trusted Windwolf.
It seemed dangerous to admit she didn’t know what Windwolf had planned. It was her stupidity, not his. And yet she couldn’t lie — not to her Hand. They deserved the truth.
“I still don’t have a full grasp on what Windwolf was offering me,” she said cautiously. “It’s too big. I haven’t lived long enough to understand the limits of a human life to really wrap my brain around being an elf. I know, though, I have forever now to be with people I love.” Pony reached out and took her hand and laced his fingers with hers. “Besides, the bells and whistles are pretty cool.”
“Bells and whistles.” Esme stared out the window at the night-shrouded city. The streetlights overhead spilled light across her again and again as they drove through the dark streets. “The spell that Windwolf used — could it make anyone perfect as the sekasha yet able to use the domana spells?”
All the sekasha laughed at the question. Pony answered for her Hand. “You cannot see the world as black and white and in color at the same time.”
“In theory, though, someone could be godlike?” The light slid through the car and left Esme in shadows.
“We would not allow it,” Pony said. The others were so much in agreement that they didn’t even nod. “That is what the Skin Clan wanted: to be gods in flesh. We did not hunt them down for thousands of years just for someone else to replace them.”
“Sparrow said something about that the night she kept me from escaping the oni,” Tinker said. “She said that the Skin Clan had taken elves from one step above apes to one step below gods. She thought the elves were stagnating. She wanted to go back to the old ways.”
“What a fool,” Pony growled. “The reason we’re tall, fair, and immortal is that, in the beginning, the Skin Clan could only improve their bloodline by breeding with us after they had improved us.” His loathing for how the Skin Clan had genetically screwed over the elves was obvious in his voice. “They couldn’t introduce a weakness into our stock without fear of passing it on to their children. After they became immortal, though, they eventually stopped caring about their bloodline; they only wanted to enhance themselves. They created spells that allowed them to safely manipulate their own DNA. They could experiment with us until they found a desirable trait and then duplicate it in themselves. We would have become as twisted as the oni if we had not killed them all.”
“Sparrow must have seen the oni as a replacement for the Skin Clan,” Tinker said. “I suppose it made sense for her to work with them; she wanted to be made domana caste. I don’t understand, though, why the Stone Clan domana would be working with the oni.”
“Wait, what’s this?” Esme asked. “They’re working with the oni?”
Oops. “I told you that they were being asses,” Tinker grumbled. “We think — but can’t prove — that the Stone Clan lured those children to Pittsburgh and all but handed them over to the oni.”
“That’s — that’s brutal! Why?”
“We don’t know,” Tinker said. “But I’m going to find out.”
17: GIVE ME A BEAT
Oilcan missed the start of the war. He wanted to believe that the tengu had started it, intentionally or not, with a simple show of inhuman speed and strength. More likely, Team Tinker, knowing full well what a scumbag Riki had been, decided that Pittsburghers (meaning humans) weren’t going to be outdone by tengu. Certainly showing superiority by going faster fit the mentality of hoverbiker racers. Team Tinker took over cleaning the third floor and trash started to fly out the window, sans chute, as if fired from a confetti cannon. The tengu picked up the challenge and responded with a massive outpouring of trash from all the windows of the second floor. When Team Tinker realized that the tengu were outdoing them simply because the tengu outnumbered the humans, they must have started to call in reinforcements, because soon half of Pittsburgh descended on the school.
The elves at the enclaves would have had to be blind to miss the activity. While they arrived late, the elves made up for it with millennia-practiced teamwork. They plowed through the front door bearing brooms and mops like spears. They took over the foyer and spread outward in all directions, herding the tengu in front of them.
It was only a matter of time before the tengu collided with the humans and things turned violent. Oilcan had lost any pretense of control shortly after Windwolf dragged him off for the talk. In hopes of cutting the tension, he tried to coax Merry into getting out her olianuni and playing. Her music, he hoped, would remind everyone that they were working to help the kids, not outstrip the other groups.
“Oh, sama, I’ve never played all by myself.” Merry was peering up the foyer staircase where voices were raised in anger. “I–I don’t know. .”
He needed her playing well from the start, not going into a downward spiral from nervousness. He would need to take the lead and let her follow him the best that she could.
Oilcan went out to his pickup and got his Stratocaster and his sixty-watt amp from behind the bench seat. Luckily the gym had been cleared by the tengu and the hardwood floors scrubbed clean by the elves until they gleamed, smelling of lemon polish. If you ignored the bullet holes gouged into the walls, it was a perfect venue. He plugged in his amp, jacked in his guitar, and started into the melody for “America.”
“Sama!” Merry’s eyes went huge and her hands slowly crept up to cover her heart as if she were afraid it would burst out of her chest. “You — you’re an artisan?”
Oilcan laughed. “No, no, I can play well enough to get by. Moser is an artisan. But come on, play with me.”
At that point she couldn’t unpack her instrument fast enough. Looking like a bastard child of a xylophone and steel drum, the olianuni wrapped around Merry with twice the range of a piano but played like a percussion instrument. The low notes rumbled like thunder and the high notes chimed, and it jammed like heaven with his Stratocaster.
It was hard to imagine anyone calling Merry’s playing just adequate. She glowed as she played, her mallets a blur. As she warmed up, she added mad flourishes with her mallets on the upswing and little yips of excitement. He started with the songs he was fairly sure she knew, those he had glimpsed in her hand-scribed songbook. He had been hoping that she could just keep up with him, but she outstripped him. Encouraged, Oilcan launched into songs that Windchime had been most familiar with and thus most likely taught her.