Oilcan always had that quiet power of command. Even when Tinker was princess of the track, he kept order in her wake. He had never reached out, took hold of the weapon, and gone to war before. Now that he had, the power crowned him.
Tommy could see the news of Oilcan’s fight with Iron Mace move through the Wind Clan elves. They stared at the black-mirror parking lot and then looked across the river at the hole blasted into the side of the lock. Iron Mace had been a Stone Clan warlord during the clan wars. He had been one of their enemies’ best. And Oilcan faced him down and killed him. The elves bowed low to Oilcan, awe and respect clear on their faces.
Obviously, Tommy’s part in the day’s win was being ignored because he wasn’t “one of us.” The elves were still looking at him with open suspicion. It was starting to really piss him off. He drifted into the shadows of a rusting Tilt-A-Whirl carnival ride as the elves did the messy work of cleaning up dead oni. He was thinking it was time to disappear when Oilcan showed up with two wicker baskets of mauzouan.
“Dumpling?” Oilcan held out one of the wicker baskets. He took the full glare of Tommy’s anger without flinching. “You saved my life today. I can at least make sure you get some of the free food that’s showing up.”
Tommy’s stomach reminded him that he hadn’t a decent meal for days. He jerked the basket out of Oilcan’s hand and stuffed one into his mouth. “Elves don’t use enough ginger.”
“I used to think that.” Oilcan waved his hand to take in his elf-pointed ears and elf-screwed-up taste buds. “Royally ticked off that beer is going to taste like piss from now on.”
Tommy laughed and settled on the railing that encircled the Tilt-A-Whirl. Oilcan tucked himself into a rusting car of the carnival ride. They ate in companionable silence. When he was done with the dumplings, Oilcan licked clean his fingers and produced a flask from his back pocket.
Oilcan tasted the contents tentatively and raised eyebrows at the result. “It’s good, but it’s not beer.” Oilcan held out the flask to Tommy. “Ouzo?”
What Tommy needed was a cigarette, but he settled for the sweet hard kick of the liquor.
“Thanks for everything.” Oilcan took the flask back and winced through another taste test. “The elves are all impressed, but I couldn’t have done any of it without you. You did more than save my life. You — you helped me be strong enough to do what I had to do.” Oilcan studied the river from the shadows, sorrow filling his eyes.
The kid had never killed anyone before, and everyone is acting like he’s a big hero for it.
Tommy laughed bitterly, shaking his head. “You do what you have to do because the other person is more than willing to rip your throat out if you don’t. Doesn’t make you a monster. It makes you a survivor.”
“I went through this with beer.” Oilcan sipped again. “One beer doesn’t make you a drunk. One killing doesn’t make you a murderer — just doesn’t have the same truth.”
“He picked the game, not you.”
A half-dozen laedin soldiers spotted Tommy in the shadows and closed on him, hands on weapons. This “not one of them” was really getting to be a pain.
“What are you doing here, oni spawn?” the tallest of them asked.
Oilcan leaned out of the Tilt-A-Whirl car and chased the elves off with a look and a quiet “He’s with me.”
Tommy knew true words when he heard them. “Yeah, I’m with you.”
Oilcan tilted his head, catching that there was more to the words. “You are?”
“It took me a while to figure out, but I need to make the world I want to live in. It’s going to be more than just stopping the oni. The elves are locked into this stupid mental straightjacket of us versus them.”
“Stone Clan versus Wind Clan.”
“Any of them. It’s one clan against all the rest. I know how that works — or I should say, how badly that works. ‘Them’ is always everyone else that isn’t us, when it really isn’t, and doesn’t need to be.” If he hadn’t turned to Team Big Sky when Kajo used the tengu against him, he would have lost everything. Up to that day, John Montana, Blue Sky, and Oilcan had been “them” despite years of working with them.
“I’m really sick of all this us against them,” Oilcan growled. Tommy realized it was because the cousins never saw the world that way. It explained why they had gone to extraordinary lengths to save Windwolf when Lord Tomtom had tried to assassinate him. Why Oilcan had helped Tommy even though he knew Tommy was half-oni. And why Oilcan took in the young elf female and turned the city upside down looking for the others.
By concerning themselves with everyone, Tinker and Oilcan had managed to keep the city strong enough to defend itself against the likes of Kajo. They raised people up to their standards and made them part of that strength. It was their code of chivalry. Be compassionate. Be honorable. Be good.
“I realize I can’t hide in my little corner and hope that it all works out to my liking. I need to sit at the table where decisions are being made and make myself heard and fight for the world I want.”
Oilcan grinned. “Good. Pittsburgh needs you. It needs places where everyone can come together as a whole instead of sticking to their own little neighborhood, isolated by the rivers and hills and their culture. We need places where we can meet each other as just common everyday people.”
Tommy hadn’t even considered the racetrack to be anything more than a way to make money. Put that way, it made sense why Jin had asked him to drop his ban. The tengu wanted access to the common meeting grounds. It was important that they weren’t the monsters hiding in the woods. And he would drop the ban; he didn’t want Kajo controlling him. Besides, it gave him a better leverage on the tengu if he gave them access to his businesses.
“What I hate about this Beholden bullshit is the word. Beholden.” Tommy spat his disgust. “Too much like ‘owned.’”
And “I want to be your knight in shining armor” would sound like he was hitting on Oilcan.
“Yeah,” Oilcan said. “It should be more like ‘team,’ like at the racetrack. The guy on the hoverbike is worthless without a good crew in the pit. And a good pit crew doesn’t stand a chance without a good rider.”
Put that way, it was easy to say, “I want to be on your team.”
“Mine?”
“Team Oilcan.”
Oilcan backed up, waving him off. “Team Tinker is the only team I have.”
“The elves made you a team captain, like it or not. They gave you the power to be a force at the table.”
“There’s Tinker.”
“No offense, but your cousin is like a boy scout on crack. Squeaky clean, trying to do a month’s worth of good deeds in one day, and bouncing off the walls at the speed of light.”
Oilcan grinned. “Yeah, that’s her.”
“You and I are a lot alike.”
“Ah, secretly you’re a bohemian artist?”
“We both watched the one thing we loved most in the world get beaten to death in front of us. I know how it makes you feel weak and helpless. And you swear to yourself that you’d eat broken glass before ever going through that again. But the one thing you won’t let yourself do is become your father.”
Oilcan winced and looked away. “It’s that obvious?”
“I’ve seen you with your cousin, and I recognized all the signs,” Tommy said. “I understand you. I trust you. I want to be on your team.”
“I don’t know what the hell I would do with a team.”
“We would make peace and live in it.”
Oilcan studied the river and the distant lock. He took another swallow of ouzo and passed the flask to Tommy. “Okay, let’s team up.”